Chapter 75

DARK PLACES

The elevator clanked. It went down, hurtling through the shaft. Spencer had never known it to travel so quickly. He stood in the corner, leaning back in an effort to stay on his feet. He was shaking. His skin felt as if it were peeling away from his bones. It was like one of those films you saw of pilots exposed to G-force.

What the fuck is happening? he thought.

Hallam held on to the girl. She looked terrified. He looked calm. He’d gone really weird in the past few hours. He’d always been a victim. Bullies picked on him. Everyone picked on him. But since he’d broken into Spencer’s flat and got involved with Jack, he seemed to have an aura around him.

It made you shiver, being near him. The atmosphere around the bloke was dank. He’d killed Candice, Danny Daley’s little sister. After that, the Barrowmore Estate had gone mental. Protesters took to the streets. The Old Bill got slagged off. Some old fella got beaten up because he was a little bit too close to the kids’ playground, and the mums clocked him as a pedo.

Fucking nuts, thought Spencer.

And now it was getting even nuttier.

“What the fuck are we doing with fucking Roy Hanbury’s granddaughter?” he asked.

“She’s a seer,” said Hallam, arm snaked around the girls throat.

She whimpered. She cried. She had tried to kick and bite, but Hallam just stared ahead as if nothing was happening. He never blinked. He never grimaced.

Weird, thought Spencer. Way too weird.

“Where the fuck are we going, man?” said Spencer.

“We might be going to hell.”

“You what?”

“Hell. Ain’t that exciting, Spencer? Hell.”

“Hell ain’t exciting.”

The elevator kept descending. The numbers on the display were just strange symbols by now. They flickered like mad, but they made no sense to Spencer. They’d gone way past Ground, and he never realized there was anything below that level.

“Didn’t he show you?” said Hallam. “Didn’t he show you all the secret places? All the arteries of Barrowmore? Where its blood flows? Where you find its life force?”

Jack had dragged him to all kinds of dark, grotty hovels in the hours after he’d killed the Sharpleys and Lethal Ellis. He vaguely remembered them. But it had been like being high. Everything was hazy. He’d been sick and groggy.

They had been places Spencer had never seen. Some of them appeared to be on the same floor as his flat. Dingy coves holed out of the bricks. Alleyways so narrow you had to squeeze through sideways. Pits filled with bodies, some of them alive and in agony. Altar-rooms displaying skulls and crucifixes. Desecrated churches attended by ghosts. Abandoned slaughterhouses exhibiting corpses that hung on hooks.

They had even visited an attic above his mum’s flat. Only there was no attic above his mum’s flat—just another apartment. But Spencer had been inside the non-existent loft and watched his mother through a pinhole in her ceiling while she had sex with a horned man whose lower body was that of a goat.

A fucking goat.

He had been sick then. He had moaned, puke dribbling down his chin.

The next thing he knew, Jack had dragged him to another terrible place, another gut-wrenching scene.

It was a nightmare. Or a drug trip. It had to have been. No way was it real. No way would his mother do that. She was God squad. Big time God squad.

A fucking goat. Fucking bones. Fucking corpses on hooks. Fucking ghosts. Fucking . . . hell.

“My mum’d never do that with a fucking goat,” he remembered groaning.

But Jack, he was sure, had whispered in his ear, saying, “She would, Spencer—and she’d do worse.”

The elevator was now screeching as it sped down the shaft. It started to shudder, knocking from side to side.

Spencer stretched out his arms to steady himself. His gaze skimmed around the narrow container. Claustrophobia panicked him. His chest tightened. His gaze fell on Hallam. The man looked calm. His eyes glittered. Jasmine Hanbury sagged in his clutches.

The elevator clunked. It stopped dead. Spencer jerked. His neck whiplashed.

“Where are we, for fuck’s sake?” he said.

“The world was made with dark places in it,” said Hallam. “Places we can’t see. Places we don’t know about, but we feel them sometimes. We feel them cold on our skin, we feel them in our bellies. Places where evil hides. That’s where were going, Spencer—one of those places.”

The girl whimpered.

“Ain’t she lovely,” said Hallam.

“You’re sick.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Hallam Buck would never have said that in the past. He would scuttle by, scared and nervous. The kids would pester him. They would harass him. They would throw stones at him.

Not anymore.

Hallam had found his place in the world.

“Christ, look at that,” said Spencer.

Fog slithered under the elevator door, which then slid open. The mist curled inside. It felt really cold. The smell turned Spencer’s stomach.

With the doors open now, he narrowed his eyes and stared into the darkness.

What is this place? Underground parking lot? Cellar or something?

The fog filled the elevator. Jasmine cried. Hallam gasped. Spencer whined. A dark shape came out of the blackness and stood on the elevator’s threshold. A white face slowly appeared. It smiled. It showed yellow teeth.

Jack.

His long, white fingers beckoned them out of the lift, and then, seeing Jasmine, he said, “A little seer, ready for ripping.”