Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [47]
A hundred yards from the end, the ceiling lights gave out completely. I could still see where I was going, by the threadbare moonlight that seeped through the cracked window in the external wall. Something was rising in my throat, and the hairs on my scalp were shifting uneasily. I heard a small sound, and turned to look in the open doorway I was passing. There was nothing to see, but I thought the shadows moved. Heart thumping, I took a step into the apartment.
A small boy was crouching in the darkness, eyes wide and frightened. He was reasonably well dressed, not a runaway. Someone had combed his hair that morning, and made sure he put on clean clothes: But on the other hand he shouldn’t have been out so late.
“Don’t hurt me,” he said, breathlessly.
“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t hurt people.” He looked at me carefully for a while, then relaxed a little. The room was inky with blues and black, and the boy looked like a collusion of shadows topped by a small and intelligent face. “What are you doing here?”
“I come to sit, sometimes. It’s like a dare. Why are you here?”
“I used to live down the end,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
The boy stared. “Why? It’s really spooky.”
“It wasn’t then.” My eyes dropped, as I considered the idea that what had used to be my neighborhood was now the subject of dares and whispers. I made the effort to smile. “So you guys come down here, to prove you’re not scared?”
“No,” he said, “Just me. My dad…” He trailed off for a moment. “My dad thinks men should be brave. He doesn’t think I’m brave enough because boys keep beating me up at school.”
“Does he know you come down here?” The boy shook his head, and I smiled. “Don’t tell him. Keep it a secret, and that way you’ll always know something about yourself that he doesn’t And if he doesn’t know everything about you, then he can’t always be right, can he?”
The boy took a while to work this out, then smiled back.
“It’s really haunted, you know,” he said, with enthusiasm. “When more people used to live here, a couple of years ago, sometimes they said they saw a little person walking in the corridor. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Yes,” I said, the back of my neck going cold.
“And there’s someone else who comes here sometimes. I don’t know who he is. I hide. A man, not as tall as you, I’ve seen him twice. He just goes down to the end and stands there for a while. Then he leaves again.” Suddenly, in the manner of small boys, he was on his feet and moving. “I’ve got to go.”
He jumped over to me and stuck his hand out. I shook it, bemused. Then he was gone, running out into the corridor and disappearing into the sound of small feet padding into the distance. By the time I’d stepped out of the apartment, he was round a corner and out of sight.
I went to the window at the end, my heart beating regularly and slowly. I looked at the door on my left. It was closed. Either side of it were the only two window boxes left on the floor. The plants, whose names I’d been told countless times but never learned, were long dead, rotted away to nothing beneath the soil, dried to dust above. I reached out and touched the door near the lock, where the wood was splintered and still looked fresh, with no weather to blunt its message. Then I turned the handle and pushed it open.
The apartment was dark, darker than the one I had just been in. On my right was the kitchen. I felt for the switch on the wall and flicked it, but of course it didn’t do anything. In the light that came through the small square window at