The Bureau of Them Read online

  Glynn wouldn't be there. She had to remember that.

  Katy dropped the owl into her pocket and crossed the road. Traffic was thin as she headed towards the children's playground and into the car park which surrounded the tower blocks, which were known locally as The Flats. With The Flats due for demolition and most of the residents having already moved out, the weave of buildings formed a ghost town. She peered up the long stretch of the nearest block. Graffiti tags decorated concrete, red paint running down the block; to look like blood she supposed (as if the area was bleeding), with a devil-like man melting within said blood. By her rough calculations, and despite the impossibility of it, the artist had left their mark between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors. The shade of red, the painful drip of paint, reminded Katy of Glynn's artwork. The small devil-like man made her think of Glynn's bus sketches (as she liked to call them). He'd sketch a passenger's image and dissatisfied with his attempt, he'd crumple the paper and litter the bus with it. Sometimes, Katy thought Glynn's subjects creased and folded beneath the weight of his fingers as if they knew he was dissatisfied with their image.

  She'd worried he'd grow tired of her image. She'd worried about so much, silly things, when instead she should have concentrated on wrapping her arms around him, on kissing him, on cherishing every smile. She missed his smile. Her chest pained. She hadn't felt this degree of grief in months and now she was back to day one and the words, 'Glynn is dead'. Glynn is dead.

  Distracted by the art, Katy's hip slammed into a supermarket trolley, which rolled back and forth in the car park as though searching for something lost. Its wheels screeched against concrete. The twenty-three stories of each of The Flats cast long shadows, ghosts stretching across tarmac. Their shadows ended at a broken fruit machine someone had abandoned in a parking space.

  On Boaler Street, the metal boards covering the doors of the old cinema creaked back. They bent at an unnatural angle as if wanting to rip free of the cinema and reveal the ruin inside.

  The Cosy Cinema had closed in the late 1960s, the ghost sign above its door all that remained to indicate the building's original purpose. Weeds sprouted from its roof, from the cracks in its walls, trailed down red-black bricks. In the distance, a car engine backfired and its sudden noise caused Katy to note that the streets were empty and silent. There were no other pedestrians, no traffic, not even a pigeon to coo against the anomaly, as if she were alone in the world. Metal creaking broke the silence as things smashed within the cinema; sounded as if the upper balcony had crashed into the auditorium. Brick dust puffed from the open doorway. Spooked, Katy hurried on.

  Too many ghosts this day.

  Back home, she stood in the vestibule with her back to the front door, hand clasping the stolen owl, her breath the only sound. She ached to hear movement within the house, for Glynn to call out to her. She hated the silent rooms. Dropping her keys beside the phone, Katy picked up a doodle Glynn had sketched onto the phone pad-a heart erupting from a tiny man. He loves you. She traced the outline of the heart. If she crumpled the doodle in her fist, would someone somewhere fold in on himself? She'd often thought there was magic within Glynn's drawings, that he owned a piece of those he drew. He'd drawn her so many times, too many times, thrown sketches of her in the bin and torn her face in half. Only when things were bad and mostly they were good. She'd never crumpled beneath the weight of his fingers. She'd always smoothed out his frustrations. A knock at the front door startled her.

  Spooked, Katy pressed her hand to her chest, caught her breath and opened the front door. There was no one there. She stepped into the street and found it empty. Perhaps her neighbour, Mrs Jenkins, had seen her rush home and worried something was wrong; most people worried about her these days. Katy closed the door, fingers resting a moment on wood ready to open it if someone knocked again. When no one did, she turned back to the telephone and phoned her friend, Steph.

  "Do you think we ever truly end?" Katy asked.

  "Glynn's dead, Katy."

  "Oh, I know. It's just sometimes I think I see ghosts."

  Steph sighed. Steph had done a lot of sighing in the last thirteen months as if Katy's grief was a weight on her chest. Katy dug into her pocket and curled her fingers around the metallic owl. Perhaps some people were so full of life they found a way to come back, forming a new life however thin the fabric of it. Boys with a ready smile and quick wit didn't rot to nothing.

  "What if he didn't die?"

  Of course, she knew he had. Even if she had seen Glynn earlier, however preposterous the thought, he had been a ghost and not a living man. She'd stood over his coffin, had touched his frozen skin.

  "It wasn't him, Kate. You didn't see him."

  The metallic owl flapped its wings within Katy's fist. She pulled it from her pocket. The owl danced on her palm proving life could exist in unexpected places.

  "It wasn't him," Steph repeated.

  Glynn had filled every room he entered. You'd hear his laugh before he arrived. People like Glynn didn't just stop. Again, someone knocked at the door and this time the letterbox flapped up. Katy stooped to glare at the snooper but there appeared to be no one there. The letterbox held up by the wind or its own will.

  "Katy, it wasn't him."

  Third time's a charm.

  "I know," Katy said, a sob punctuating her words.

  FOUR

  From his perch on the roof of the forgotten cinema, Yarker Ryland peered at the girl who weaved between the ghosts of The Flats. When she approached the cinema, he swooped, dropping onto the metal grating that covered the door and bounced on it to catch her attention. She jerked at the sound but he didn't feel like a jerk for scaring her. It was his role in…death, he supposed. Inside the cinema the dead screeched, hollered, and tore apart chairs and dusty concession stands as if doing so would tear away the fabric of their remembered lives. It pained to have the weight of life surround you. They deserved to destroy things.

  The girl rushed on, slipped around a corner and thought she hid from them but they had her interest now. Once seen you had to chase after your dead.

  He'd chased after his dead until he'd found his death on the roof of an abandoned office building. The living don't realise that the dead don't give a shit about the living. Why should they? Why should he? His belly was hollow with the want for food and a good half-pint of beer. Did that girl care he couldn't have those things? Of course she didn't. You're dead, she'd say, and food is for the living.

  "We still count," Yarker said. His voice carried only as stink in the wind. Like bad eggs, he'd heard a man once say when Yarker had screamed into his face. "We will not be forgotten."

  Why did the living think it was okay to forget the dead? Persuading those in mourning to look to the future and erase the past, as if the dead were chalk on a blackboard that a quick swipe with a duster could obliterate. Yarker bounced several times on the metal grating until it thwacked up and launched him into the dark of the cinema. He fell onto his back, looking at the ceiling where spiders busied themselves constructing webs on top of webs undisturbed by the cinema's ghostly patrons. He wondered if there were spider ghosts who systematically trawled dark corners to destroy forgotten webs. He'd once eaten a web when walking to work. It had stretched from hedge to lamppost and he'd walked straight through it with his stupid mouth open. He'd eat a web now if he could. He'd eat anything to stave off this hunger. Offering the cinema a plaster-shattering moan, Yarker jumped up.

  He wished he'd chased after the girl and swirled around her with his arms flapping; he wished he'd made her see him. Instead, he danced about Peter, the man who walked with the dead. Peter balanced on a cinema seat, flinching whenever debris flew too close to his breakable head. However, for Yarker, rushing in circles about Peter didn't have the same effect as it would over someone who couldn't see him. Peter looked bored and tired, perhaps hungry. He'd watched Peter steal scraps from kitchen cupboards and litter bins, holding his mouth under a running tap to wet his parched t
hroat. Yarker raced across the cinema. Hurtling over broken chairs and fallen masonry, he launched himself at the wall, jumping up and grabbing a fist full of spider web and spider. He raced back to Peter and began to swirl bits of web about the boy.

  Peter looked as petrified as his cobwebbed girlfriend who sat in reception back at the office.

  "You can't escape," Yarker said, and Peter neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement. "You belong to us. You may as well be dead."

  Peter balled his hands and drummed them against his thighs. The anger within him could bring down the world whether he was dead or not.

  Yarker pressed his lips to Peter's ear and said, "We will break you."

  Yarker skipped up the stairs to the stage, posed in front of the cinema screen and shouted, "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr Kubrick."

  FIVE

  Katy woke to the feel of Glynn's arms wrapped about her, but as she moved to snuggle against him, Glynn evaporated, washed away by sunlight. Katy blinked several times. On the bedside table, the metallic owl's lazy eyelids drooped; weighted by missed sleep as if the owl had watched over her while she slept. Katy sat up, drawing the duvet around her and slipping back to sit in the hollow where Glynn used to sleep. She'd left the owl on the mantelpiece along with her keys.

  The owl winked.

  Katy threw her pillow at the toy bird, knocking it onto the carpet. Now she couldn't see it and that was somehow worse than having the thing watch her. She rubbed her eyes, feeling irrational and no wonder after the previous day's events. The mattress creaked beneath her. Katy leaned over the side of the bed to find the owl. It sat beside the pillow, blinking at her, perhaps a twitch of a smile to its beak.

  Okay, now she was losing her mind. It was just an inanimate object. It didn't have personality or intent. She'd take it back to the tramp and forget about it. Or was that an excuse, a flimsy reason to return to the building? The alarm clock buzzed. Since Glynn's death, she always awoke before the alarm clock sounded. She slammed her hand on it. She couldn't go into work today, too much Glynn swirling about her mind. She had to know that yesterday was an illusion. No, she couldn't go in. She picked up the owl. Its wings vibrated against her palm-just an inanimate object in a world full of fancy.

  #

  On her way out the house, Katy tore the doodle from the phone pad and scribbled 'I Love You, Glynn' in red ink beneath the little man with the enormous heart. What harm to carry a piece of Glynn with her? A breadcrumb to lure him back. In her jeans pocket, the owl knocked against her hip. Katy's heart fluttered in time with its wings, sanity drowned in her stomach acid and nerves rose as butterflies in her chest.

  Outside The Flats, the shopping trolley continued to roll back and forth. The discarded fruit machine had gained a friend-an old jukebox that vomited broken vinyl. Her world looked the same, if a little dirtier at the edges.

  There were no free seats on the bus into town, but although people jostled against her and rucksacks whacked the back of her head and her shoulders, she barely noticed them. She looked through the bus window where she saw shadows of life passing. At the final stop, Katy joined the tide of disembarking passengers. Before turning the corner onto The Strand, Katy drew in a breath. She couldn't decide if she wanted to find Glynn there or not or what she could do about it if she saw Glynn again. The wind encouraged her on, pushing her around the corner, rushing her to the doorway where the tramp sat with his box of things.

  When she reached the building, the wind stilled and the traffic faded to a distant roar. The world reduced to what the building may conceal. She pulled the metallic owl from her pocket. It buzzed against her fingertips. Felt now as if it belonged to her and not to the tramp.

  "I forgot to ask your name yesterday," Katy said.

  He didn't offer it.

  "I seem to have this," she said, holding out the owl.

  "So you do."

  "I don't know how I came to take it. I apologise. Here," Katy said, but he didn't take the owl. "I don't want it."

  "It's not about what you want, Katy."

  "How do you know my name?"

  "You told me. Yesterday. I'm Amos, although that may be a lie. Names are powerful things, Katy, but I am happy to give you something to call me by if it makes things easier for you. Oh, and you might want to stand aside."

  "What?"

  The wind punched Katy in her lower back, pushing her towards the door. Amos gathered his box of things, unperturbed by the sudden gust. The owl fought against her grip but when she let go, eager to drop it, the owl clung to her palm, its claws caught under her engagement ring. The wind rushed about her, occupied now by a hum of voices offering indistinct words. Somewhere within their chant, she heard her name. Katy spun around. The ghosts headed towards the building, passing around the stilled traffic. Glynn stepped onto the pavement behind a man in a dark grey suit; the man who had watched her from the central reservation the day before. He looked at her now, this man, looked at and pretended to look through. There was no pretence in Glynn's vacant stare.

  Amos grabbed her arm, pulling her out of the ghost's path. "Stand aside or be forever buried with them."

  "He's here," she said, before the wind stole her voice. Here.

  The man in the grey suit nodded to her, "Pleasure to make your acquaintance, I'm Yarker Ryland. Won't you please join us inside for a dusty cup of dried-up tea?"

  Despite Amos' grip relaxing about her wrist, Katy didn't step forward. Instead, she shrunk back against the building. Ghosts didn't make conversation with the living. Yarker shrugged and withdrew a key from his pocket and opened the door. The key as ornate as the one Katy had used to open the door the previous day. Then, he stood aside to allow the other ghosts to file into the building. Katy leaned forward, watching as each ghost faded from grey to black within the dark hollow of the doorway. She couldn't allow Glynn to enter and disappear. She reached out. Her fingertips brushed his and didn't pass through; warm fingers, solid, and not at all ghost-like. He drifted away. Amos proved a belt at her waist, pulling her back from the doorway and from Glynn. Glynn disappeared inside the building.

  Katy scratched at Amos's fingers until he let go. There was only one ghost left, one ghost and the man named Yarker. She feared that once they entered the door would close and that would be that. What had Amos said yesterday? You have to wait for them to return and open the door for you. Well they'd returned and it was open. The remaining ghost shambled by Katy. He moved discordant with the rest, his ghostly pallor more washed-out than grey. His clothes dishevelled rather than starched. He wore no shoes and only one sock-a yellow and green striped sock to stand out against the grey. More important, he turned and regarded her.

  "If you're sure," he said, holding out his hand.

  She grabbed his hand. His skin was cold while Glynn's had been warm, his fingers trembled where Glynn's had been steady. She'd never been less sure of anything. He led her into the building and no one objected. She entered the dark and found herself blind; the only light a green exit sign at the far end of the room. The door closed behind her. It took a good few minutes for the dark to settle to gloom and offer indistinct forms and all the time, her breaths grew more panicked. She kept her ground though, aware the door should be within a few steps. As light began to form in the square of window, Katy fumbled for the handle; attempted to turn it.

  The door didn't open. Trapped.

  Fluorescent lights flickered on, offering a dull grey light. Katy turned to face the ghosts.

  SIX

  Isobel knew if she was alive and Peter dead she wouldn't play the fool and a) walk into a building full of ghosts and b) bring a boy with her. With her eyes permanently open (never any respite to blink), Isobel noted the way the living woman's shoulder brushed Peter's and how her hand gripped his. Perhaps he thought to make Isobel jealous. If she could work her vocal cords, she'd scream, 'You do know I'm dead.'

  Realising his mistake, Peter let go of the girl's hand and drifted to Isobel's desk. She hat
ed how he stared at her, how he reached out and traced her face. She hated the feel of his fingers. She hated how her skin no longer reacted to his touch. Better if he left her to crumble to nothing. Better he allowed her mind to become a jumble of nonsense with no sense of anything for that may be the only death to be found here.

  Peter obscured her view of the living woman and Isobel couldn't lean to the side and look around him. After several minutes, she forgot she was Isobel at all. It took Peter's touch to reawaken her. She'd slap him away if she could.

  Don't want to remember…. Don't want to remember… Don't want to remember .

  There are worse things than being dead. Such as a) remembering you're dead and b) having the living breathing all over you. Peter shifted to the right and now Isobel saw the living woman again. The living woman shuddered. Isobel wished the woman shuddered because of her. If only she could move and give them all a show.

  SEVEN

  A woman sat behind the reception desk, her hair a bouffant of cobwebs. To Katy, the woman looked like a mannequin. Skin drawn taut over bone, blue veins visible beneath skin, startling against the layer of grey. The bouffant woman didn't look like a ghost; none of them did. The man who'd led Katy into the building stood in front of the reception desk, his hand hovering an inch above the receptionist's hand, as though he thought she would disintegrate at his touch. Before Katy could investigate if the receptionist was real or plastic, the ghost who had opened the door, Yarker Ryland, danced before her. Yarker grabbed Katy's hand and twirled her on the spot. Twirled and twirled and twirled her until she fell, knocking her hip against the side of the reception desk. Then, with a bow, he spun into an open-plan office to her left.