PART TWO

Trevor was lying on his back in the bedroom, coming down from his last high. He wasn't even sure why he kept taking the drugs – they had stopped blotting out Michael's face a long time ago, and even made it stronger and clearer in his mind. He turned his face sideways on the pillow, his eyes coming to rest on the photograph of his brother. He was a small boy with a tentative smile, but dead behind the eyes.

It was dark. The lights were out but the blinds were open. The moon looked small, as if it were moving away from the Earth, fleeing the scene of so much horror and degradation. Trevor stared up from the bed, out of the window, and wished that he was up there, on the surface of the moon. He often imagined himself as an astronaut, skulking on a moon rock and leaving the world behind. Taking off his helmet and finding that he could breathe. He would sit there, looking up at the stars, and be glad that he was finally alone. Nobody could touch him there, on the hard grey surface of a fossil planet, and he was unable to touch anyone else.

What was that boy's name again? Oh, yes, Derek. The young man who'd fled in the night. What had he been saying about getting someone younger? Thoughts swarmed like stinking flies; Trevor's head was filled with them. He felt them climbing across the inside of his skull, felt the horrible vibration of their buzzing wings. As if he, too, were dead behind the eyes: nothing there but rot, dry and black and loveless.

Blinking, Trevor sat up on the bed and glanced across the room. He was naked. His flaccid cock lay against his thigh, useless and unwanted: a short-range weapon whose ammunition had long ago been spent.

He looked at his jeans, cast aside on the floor by the wardrobe. He'd been drunk last night, but wasn't there a vague memory of taking the boy's number – taking Derek's number – when they'd first met in that horrible club? He recalled a scribbled sequence of digits on a skinned beer mat, which he had then thrust into his back pocket. They had both known that the number would not be required, that the night would end with them leaving the club together. But certain social customs must still be maintained, rituals needed to be carried out and small gods appeased.

Trevor was sweating. His naked torso shone when he glanced down at it. The drugs. They always caused his body to react in this way, raising his core temperature. Any drug: booze, dope, speed, heroin. They all did the same thing to his system, turning up the heat, burning out the badness…

He swung his legs off the mattress and stumbled across the room, his bare feet dragging in discarded clothing and magazines. Bending down, he picked up his jeans and fumbled through the pockets. He found the beer mat right where he'd suspected it would be, in the left rear pocket. The soggy cardboard had curled at the edges, and spilled alcohol had caused the numerals to smudge, but the number was still legible. Still useable.

Trevor glanced at the clock on his nightstand. It was still early: just after 9 pm. No self-respecting night owl would be asleep at this hour. In fact, Derek would probably be at home preparing to go out on the prowl, preening himself to present his wares to the night.

"But I like you. You seem nice. I was wondering if we could meet up again. This evening, perhaps. I could take you somewhere. Somewhere decent. Somewhere expensive."

"Well, well, well…" How obvious. How predictable. The promise of a pricey meal and everything changed, the edges suddenly smoothed out. "That does sound nice. By way of an apology, you mean?"

"Fuck me. That would be great, but I doubt you'd be able to reserve a table for an hour's time. They have a six-month waiting list. As a minimum." There was a hint of desperation in his voice. High-class restaurants, expensive tastes – these were things to which the boy aspired, part of a world he desperately wanted to infiltrate. Sometimes people were so easy to read.

"I have a table there whenever I want. I once did the owner a favour. He's a friend of mine." Trevor was smiling. He thought the boy could probably hear it in his voice, but he didn't care. He had snared his prey.

Yes. Hunter and hunted. That was how the world worked – this world, at least. He could barely remember how the other world functioned, the one he'd been able to glimpse through the hot glare of theatre lights as he strutted across the stage. Night after night after night. Speaking to the dead. Flirting with the departed.

"I'll see you there in an hour. The table will be in my name. I'll tell them to expect you, Derek." He ended the call, his thumb sliding over the hang-up button. There was no need for any more: this was already a done deal.

Trevor felt much better now. He knew what he wanted, and Derek knew too. They had avoided the issue, letting it stand there between them like a dusty stage upon which wonders would be unveiled. It was part of the act, just another line of the script. They would eat and drink, and possibly even kiss, and then they would discuss the real reason for Trevor's call.

He remembered the boy's voice before he had left last night, his words hanging in the air like birds of prey: I can get you someone younger, if that's what you need.

What he needed… what did he need? That was the big question, wasn't it? It always had been. What exactly did Trevor desire? An interesting word, desire: so strong, so meaningful, so full of potential. He looked at the pillow, at the old photograph. He picked up the photograph and held it to his face. He kissed it. His lips stuck briefly to the image before pulling away.

"Oh, Michael. I need you. Of course I do. I always did. I needed you in a way that you didn't want, couldn't handle. You were everything to me… everything."

The room went darker, just a fraction but enough for him to realise that he was no longer alone – if he ever had been. His gift was slowly returning. That bastard Thomas Usher had stolen it from him, taken it and shattered it like an empty bottle, but now it was on the rise. He could feel the presence of others. Their breath filled the air beside his face, their bodies jostled for position in whatever room he entered. They were waiting for him to come back to them, forming an orderly queue for the time when they could speak to him again.

The dead always had so much to talk about. They were lonely, most of them, and they craved company. He had been a good listener, back in the day, and the dead never forgot one who listened. They respected him in a way that the living never had.

His gaze drifted to the full-length mirror. It was an antique, something he'd picked up when the money was good and the bookings were flying in. It was said to be haunted; a famous mirror with a story to tell. But he had not seen anything odd or strange in the mirror until last night, when things had turned sour with the boy, Derek. The hand. That cold, wet hand. It had been reaching out to him, drawing him in… or at least trying to.

He walked over to the mirror. The surface was no longer reflective. It had begun to fog over in the early hours of the morning and continued that way throughout the day. He could no longer see himself in its smooth, flat surface: all he could see was grey, like a slab of mist cut from the world and set on a stand in his bedroom.

A drum began to beat, slowly, rhythmically, like an ancient tribal summoning. The sound only existed inside his head; he knew that. But still, it was sad and beautiful and haunting: a haunting sound from a haunted mirror heard by a haunted man. He blinked back tears. He thought about Michael, and how Michael had hated Trevor's attentions, had been so scared of him. But Trevor had been unable to stop himself; he was not strong enough to resist.

So he had acted upon his compulsions, not even thinking about the hurt he was creating, the damage he was causing. His little brother had been physically weak, and unable to fight back. Trevor had told himself that it was just an expression of his love, a way of making things special between them, but deep down inside he knew that he was lying to himself, lying to his brother, lying to them all.

The truth was something he could never quite reach – even the truth about himself, about who he really was and what he was able to do. All those years performing, faking it for an audience, and the bitter truth was that he had been gifted all along. He had always been able to hear the dead speak, but it was easier to ignore them and put on an act, give the people what they wanted rather than what the dead needed them to know.

The pale hand appeared again, pressed against the other side of the glass. Up close, Trevor could see that it was cut, ragged, the skin was peeling away from the bone. It seemed human, but there was something not quite right about the way it looked. Like an imperfect imitation; the battered hand of a ruined mannequin.

"Yes, that's it. That's right. I'm here for you." Trevor could feel a power in the room, a force that was coming to him from beyond the mirror. It was his old gift returned, but also something new, something different. Before, whatever he had been able to do had originated from deep within him, at his core, but this… this was from somewhere else, an external point towards which he was being drawn.

The hand clenched into a fist. Knucklebones popped through the pallid flesh. They were sharp, white, more like teeth than bones. The fist began to writhe against the glass, smearing it with strange clear ichors – the thing's blood?

Slowly, by inches, a pale orb appeared through the thick mist, like a weird vessel breaking the surface of a still, grey sea. It was spherical, or perhaps oval. It took several seconds for Trevor to realise that what he was seeing was the top of a head pushing through the grizzled gloom. A large bald head.

Once it cleared the veil of grey, he began to make out the cuts and slashes in the skin, the small hollows in the skull. It was the top of a head: the pate of some strange being heaving into view, and then pressing oddly against the glass.

Thankfully, the head did not twist and enable the being to look up, into the room. It remained in the same position, pushed up tight against the glass.

Another fist rose and slammed silently into the glass. The figure was certainly humanoid, even if it was a shell, a disguise (and just what had prompted that thought?).

A shell. Yes, that was it… Trevor realised that he was looking at a husk, a man-shaped suit containing something else. The tattered flesh, the bloodless pallor. The malleable bones. It all added up to a costume.

The head was now moving across the glass, the bones pressed flat. It looked like some kind of dance, a manoeuvre choreographed from the movements seen in bad dreams, and Trevor was fascinated and repulsed in equal measures. How could bones be this soft? How could those fists make no sound against the other side of the mirror?

The drumming. He had been so distracted by this vision that he had forgotten all about the drumming sound. It had increased in volume, threatening to spill from his head and out into the room. It was the soundtrack of the strange creature, the song of its arrival. The beat of its birth. The thing was dancing in rhythm, moving to the beat, and Trevor was drawn to its perverse motion.

Then, like sweets being snatched from the clutching hands of a child, the figure pulled back from the glass. The fog closed in, filling the space where it had been. The drumming stopped.

"Come back to me!" Trevor fell to his knees and placed his own forehead against the glass. It was cold, like ice. His own skull felt soft, as if it might cave in with the pressure.

For a moment – a fleeting moment that felt like a snippet of dream – he was sure that he heard laughter. But then it was gone, not even an echo remaining. Not even a vibration left in the air. Gone. Gone.

TWELVE