The Sleeping Dead Read online

  “Your dad will be there?”

  Donna peered at him, leaning forward in the chair. “That is okay, isn’t it? He said he’s desperate to meet you.”

  Your dad died, Jackson thought. Your dad died before we met.

  “I told him all about us. I know it’s scary, but he’s fine. If you want scary, you should meet Auntie Joan. When I was eight, we stayed with her for a week and I broke a china cup and I swear whenever I go over to visit she still scolds me for it.”

  Donna took a sip from the coffee. Jackson smiled. “You’ve got a lump of froth on your nose.”

  “Have I?” She reached up to brush it away.

  Jackson looked down at the cup, the white mountain of steamed milk was untouched. A wave of confusion rolled over him. He hesitated before he spoke, unsure why the idea of asking a question frightened him.

  “How long have you been waiting for me?” Jackson asked. He watched Donna’s face for a reaction, not entirely sure what he was expecting to find.

  She laughed. “Oh, forever. At least it’s seemed like that. Where were you?”

  “I was…” But where there should have been a memory, there was only a gray mist, as if someone had taken a scalpel and excised a tiny portion of his brain. He tried to think, to force himself to remember, but the action only caused a nauseating feeling in his stomach and a sharp stab of pain in the side of his temple. He thought of what Donna had said earlier. “I was at an interview?” A question, not a statement.

  “Yes. How did it go?”

  The woman seated at the table next to them stared at Jackson. He wanted to tell her to mind her own business. She wore a gray business suit with a smudge of ketchup on her lapel.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” Donna asked.

  He nodded and took a sip from his cup of tea. It was cold. He didn’t remember ordering it.

  Donna reached across the table to take his hand.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  Her skin was cold. Jackson stared down at the back of her hand. Blue veins ran across her flesh, like icy rivers through a mountain range.

  “Don’t you want to meet my father? Is that it?”

  “He’s dead!” Jackson shouted.

  The conversations in Café Reynauld stopped. Now it was not just the strange woman at the next table who was staring at him, everyone was looking across. The waiter behind the counter froze with a cup held in midair.

  “He’s dead,” Jackson said again. The words sounded weak.

  “She’s dead.”

  15

  “It doesn’t mean she’s dead.”

  He stared past Susan, across the empty café. Most of the floor had been cleared and, at the back of the room, tables and chairs had been stacked into a makeshift barrier.

  There was blood on the floor. Not a lot, not even enough to suggest that someone had died, but there was blood on the floor and the furniture had been gathered into a barrier and Donna was not sitting at the table waiting for him to return from his interview.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Susan tried again. Jackson nodded. Of course that was true.

  “She probably got caught in traffic and turned back. I’ll bet she’s waiting at home, desperate to hear that you’re okay.” There was a thin, strung-out note in Susan’s voice that suggested to Jackson that she needed to believe this alternative reality almost as much as he did.

  “Maybe.”

  He walked across the café. It felt strange to see the bare wood, as if the furniture had been pulled away to create a dance floor. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the aching gap in the middle of the floor. The gap that made it impossible to pretend that everything was okay.

  He stopped a couple of feet short of the wall. The magazine rack had been pulled from its fixings. The wall bore the telltale marks—four holes where the screws had been. They looked like well-organized bullet holes.

  Donna should have been sitting here. Jackson stopped and looked down at the ground, as if he expected to find a note lying on the floor for him. There were faint indentations where the table and chairs had scratched back and forth over the wooden floor.

  “She’s gone.” He lifted his head to make the pronouncement.

  “No. She’s just not here. We can keep looking.”

  Of course we can keep looking, but we’ll never find her. Because she’s gone. The idea came to Jackson with perfect clarity. Donna had been sitting here with her drink and watching the world pass by outside. She had her back to the wall, as she always did, so that she could look over the room. And then something had happened. The same something that caused Malcolm Laine to beat his brains out against the glass and John Fairls to rip at his arteries with a pair of scissors. The same something that had caused Jackie and Angie to decide that the best option was to find a way out, and that anyone sensible would feel the same.

  “Why?” Jackson asked. He thought that soon there would be no one around to care about what had happened.

  Maybe it was for the best. It wasn’t like things were getting any better. The job at MedWay Associates had been just another half-step up a crappy career ladder that would take him exactly nowhere. Could he honestly say it made any difference? Any of it? Could he honestly say that if he lay down on the floor here and just…

  He took a deep breath and tasted dry, stale air in his throat. His eyes were stinging and he wiped away a nonexistent tear with the back of his hand.

  If he just lay down here and died, would it make a difference? Would anyone care?

  He laughed. A harsh bark of a sound. Not so much would anyone care, would anyone even notice? He could lie down on the floor, cheek against the smooth wood. He could draw in the smell of dust and floor polish and coffee and he could close his eyes and…

  Sleep. That was it. That was all it was. Just a long sleep.

  There was something incredibly attractive about the idea. About the nothingness of death. No more pain or disappointment. No need to worry about what might or might not happen. He didn’t know if there was anything after death, and Jackson was surprised to discover that he didn’t really care. What came next didn’t really matter, he wasn’t running toward a better existence, he was running away from the madness of his current one.

  “Stick or twist?”

  “What?” Susan asked. She was sitting on the floor beside him. He didn’t know when that had happened.

  “It’s one of those decisions you keep having to make. Like when you play cards and you can either stick or twist. And then when your time comes around again, you have to make the decision again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jackson laughed. “No, I don’t either. But then I never did. I always thought someone was going to come along and explain it to me. Everything. Why we’re here. What we’re supposed to do with our lives. Why it matters. I don’t think that’s going to happen now.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  He looked out through the windows. He couldn’t see the sky from where he was sitting—just the row of shops on the other side of the street. The quality of light filtering through the front of Café Reynauld had subtly altered. It was gray. It seemed to lay a thin blanket of dust on every surface it touched.

  To die, Jackson thought, idly tapping his teeth with the tips of his fingers. Would it be so terrible to die? He felt Susan’s arm pressing against his and realized they had both been quiet for what must have been five minutes now. Staring out of the café windows and wrapped in their own thoughts. He would have given everything at that moment, everything—even getting Donna back—just to know what Susan was thinking. But he was too afraid to ask.

  If he could just lie down where he was sitting and never wake up again, he would do it. If dying was that easy, he would embrace it. The realization felt like a revelation. Life changing. Life ending.

  He breathed out.

  And breathed in.

  And breathed out.

  And breathed in.

&nb
sp; Each time now it was a conscious decision. Each time he felt he had the option to simply stop. Jackson knew it wasn’t as easy as that, he knew that on one level his body would conspire against him and even if he could hold his breath long enough, if he could override the natural urge to keep on breathing, at some point he would slip into unconsciousness and then his body would simply pick up again and drag him back into life.

  “Do you want to die?”

  He didn’t know who asked the question—whether it was his or Susan’s. He listened, waiting for a response, curious what the answer would be, who it would come from.

  Was this what it felt like to take drugs? Everything felt disassociated; happening to someone else. There was no euphoria. No bliss. No ecstasy. There was just…this, a drab sense of nothingness. A sense that the party was over and everyone else had already left.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The voice came from his right. He took the words one by one and pinned them together like a small child building a Lego tower, and when it was constructed, he nodded to himself as if this feat was worthy of praise.

  “Why?”

  A long pause, long enough for Jackson to think that Susan wasn’t interested in replying.

  “Because,” Susan said.

  Jackson waited for more, afraid that there would be no more, that this was the extent of her explanation.

  “Because I’m not ready to give up yet.”

  He looked at her. She glanced back.

  It would have to be enough. For now. For him. They would continue because Susan wasn’t ready to give up.

  16

  After walking for ten minutes, they fell into silence. Jackson stole brief glances across at Susan. Her features were set in the same granite expression she had carried since they left the café.

  They headed out of town. Walking in the center of the road; winding between abandoned cars with their doors wide open.

  “Where is everyone?” Susan asked.

  Jackson couldn’t answer. None of it made any sense. Up ahead he saw another one of them—Susan had started calling them the sleeping dead. An old man slouched back against the side of a house, eyes closed, hands clasped tightly together in prayer. Just like the others, there was no sign of what had killed him. It looked as if he had simply decided to give up.

  There was something about the sleeping dead that Jackson found more disconcerting than the suicides. At least he could understand the suicides. He knew what it felt like to need to destroy himself—the gray patches when the voices swarmed over his thoughts. But the sleeping dead added another layer of mystery.

  He tried to turn Susan away from the old man but she had already seen him. They were only twenty paces away from him now.

  Jackson stared at the man as they drew level with him. He tried not to. He stared into the distance where the traffic lights bravely flashed from red to amber and onto green, and then back again, directing a nonexistent flow of traffic. He focused on the sequence as if it were completely alien to him. He watched the lights. And then he found himself gazing back down at the old man.

  His eyes were open, staring directly in front of him. He held a crucifix between his hands. It was easier to believe he was simply sitting there, praying. But Jackson had been fooled by the earlier sleeping dead and each time he had reached down to check for a pulse, he had felt cold skin beneath his fingertips.

  Jackson stopped, his feet anchored to the pavement. “I can’t do it.”

  “What?” Susan asked. For a moment she carried on walking, drifting away from him, and then she too stopped and looked back at him. “What can’t you do?”

  The image bloomed fully formed in his mind. Donna sitting in Café Reynauld with her eyes open, staring into nothing. It wasn’t true, he understood that, it couldn’t be true, and yet there was an honesty to the vision that he couldn’t deny.

  “I can’t abandon Donna.”

  He didn’t look at Susan as he spoke. He didn’t want to see what she thought of him. Instead he stared into the open, sightless eyes of the dead man and he battled against the voices that were starting to whisper inside him: This was Donna. This was Donna because he had not been with her when the tsunami had struck and washed everyone away. Maybe if he had been beside her instead of stuck in a room on the eighth floor of a tower block, he would have been able to protect her.

  Susan had not spoken. Jackson stared at the dead man, and wondered what Susan was thinking, why she was silent. At times she didn’t speak with passion but with a dreadful need, as if she was frightened of discovering that there was really nothing carrying her forward.

  “What do you want to do?”

  Just for a moment Jackson was sure it was the dead man who spoke; his soft voice almost a whisper.

  “I need to find her.” He realized he was replying to the dead man.

  Jackson took out his mobile phone to try Donna’s number again. He weighed the handset in his palm. The last few times he had tried, he had got a signal—no more messages that the network was busy—but although the phone rang at the other end, there was no answer from Donna. Calling the emergency services had resulted in a similar response.

  He sent a text, because the idea of imagining Donna lying somewhere with her mobile buzzing beside her cooling corpse was too difficult to bear. The image churned his stomach and dragged a fever-sweat across his brow.

  The message was simple: CALL ME. In this new world there was no need for further explanation. If Donna was still able to receive the message, she would understand.

  “Do you want to go back to the café?”

  “She’s not there,” Jackson snapped. “Why would I want to do that?”

  The dead man stared impassively into the distance and let the anger slip over him. Nothing mattered anymore. That was the truth about death—once you found it, nothing else mattered.

  He felt Susan’s warm hand on his arm. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to go home.” His voice broke on the last word. He knew he sounded like a small child.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, and raised a hand to wipe his eyes clear, rubbing his knuckles deep into his sockets. If Donna is alive, that’s where she’ll be.

  17

  Along the footpath there was a line of people sitting on the pavement. The sleeping dead. Hundreds of them. As if they had come out from the surrounding shops and houses to sit down on the ground. An honor guard of the dead.

  “I can’t do it,” Susan said.

  He heard the tremble in her voice. She was close to breaking. He looked at the line of dead bodies and understood completely. Walking past each one took a terrible toll upon his soul. To walk past them all… Jackson glared at them, as if they were responsible for this, as if all of this was their fault.

  “Please don’t make me do it,” Susan whimpered. “Please. I don’t think…”

  Jackson looked along the line of bodies. He thought about walking out into the middle of the road. Perhaps they could find a route through the cars. But then he imagined walking too close to one vehicle and a hand reaching out to pull him inside.

  He turned to check on Susan. “Are you sure?”

  She wailed. A high, keening sound. For a moment Jackson thought that the line of the dead would pick up the terrible lament and echo it back at him. He actually saw one open his mouth, dry tendons creaking and snapping, his eyes rolled back in his head to show only the creamy white. But when Jackson looked again, the corpse was still, the eyes closed.

  “Don’t you hear them?”

  Jackson paused and tilted his head to listen. He was conscious how much quieter the world had become, and so quickly. There was no longer any road noise, no cars screaming past, no airplanes overhead.

  The thought stopped him—no airplanes. He didn’t want to think about it, he couldn’t afford to think about it because the image was too clear in his mind of the moment the pilots decided they had the right to make suicidal decisions for ever
yone on board.

  Voices? No, he couldn’t hear voices. Not now. He tried to think back to the last time he had seen someone other than Susan, someone alive that was. It had to be Angie and Jackie in the stairwell of The Pinnacle.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Susan asked. The words caught in her throat and Jackson wasn’t sure at first if she was about to laugh or cry, but then he looked at her and any doubt fled.

  “Not out there. In here.” She stubbed her finger against the side of her head. “In here,” she repeated, and seemed to try and burrow her finger into her skull.

  Her eyes were wide, her face a frightening mess of pale white skin patched with red flashes. She was sweating.

  “They keep hammering at me. They keep saying there’s no reason to carry on. Why bother to carry on when everyone else is dead? Do you know, Jackson? Do you have an answer to that?”

  “Because we have to.”

  “It’s not good enough,” Susan said. “I keep telling them that. I try arguing with them and then I realize that the only person I’m trying to convince is myself. I’m trying to tell me that I have to keep going, and even I don’t believe it anymore.”

  “What’s the alternative? Give up?” Jackson heard the tremble in his own voice. There was a quality to the question that frightened him. He wondered what he could say if Susan answered: Yes, give up. Just sit down among all these others and accept what has happened.

  He felt heat at the back of his neck, as if his body was fighting a fever. That’s what this was—these voices, this urge, this need to give up. It was a fever, a disease. He couldn’t fight it, not forever. It was in his bones, anchored to every cell in his body.

  “Help me,” Susan said.

  He shook his head and laughed at the idea that he could help anyone. What had he ever done to warrant that trust?

  “Can you hear anyone?” Susan screamed at him. For a moment she reared up. Don’t kill me. The thought came from nowhere and surprised him twice over—because he wasn’t sure why he was afraid of Susan, and he hadn’t believed there was any part of him that still wanted to live.