LGBTQ+ HORROR MONTH: BLACK GLASS BY JAMES BENNETT

 
Jude found the camera in the burnt room, the box somehow untouched by flame.
This was a month after Nathan’s funeral and it was the first time that Jude had ventured into the spare bedroom of their Holloway flat. Cars hissed by the window and rain against the glass, but the room hoarded silence in its heart.
And shadows, both within and without.
The police and the landlord were hours gone, their respective reports and rants faded into half-remembered echoes. There was only Jude, his breaths and the room. And the box in his hands, which he’d carefully lifted down from the top of the charred and skeletal wardrobe. Shaking ash off his cheeks – some of it stuck there by tears – Jude wrinkled his nose at the smoky stench, wondering at the box, trembling between his hands.
It’s too soon for this. Much too soon…
He pushed grief away, focusing on his discovery. Smooth and black, the box was more than untouched. It looked new. The wall and the floor behind him had managed to escape the fire when his boyfriend (dead boyfriend. He pushed that away too) had torched the room, so there was that, but this side of the space was fucked. A dark, crumbling corner rising up to what he could only think of as baroque brown streaks curling across the ceiling. The intact box was a miracle, surely. A horrible one, but a miracle all the same.
Jude sat down on the edge of the bed with the weight of the knowledge, his backside breaking the crust of the scorched blankets.
When he opened the box, he saw the camera inside. It was an 80s model, he thought, a Polaroid Instant. Practically vintage these days. Tacky. He traced the distinctive rainbow stripe slashed down the front under the lens, culminating in the supercolor logo.
A rainbow. A bloody rainbow. He felt vaguely mocked. A chunky looking pack of film rested next to the device. Otherwise, the box was empty. Frowning, because why would Nathan even have this? Why hadn’t the police noticed it? And already thinking that the camera might be evidence from Nathan’s last case, he lifted the camera out.
He dropped it on the bed at once, ash puffing up. His fingers rose to his face, sticky and red. Blood? Jude was on his feet, standing stiff on the blackened floorboards with no effort or will, snapping to attention with his hand held out before him.
Blood. There was no question.
It was wet. How could the blood be wet after a month or longer on top of the wardrobe? The chill tapping against the window seemed to climb up his spine.
Someone must’ve put it there. But who?
A small clicking sound drew his attention beyond his stained fingers. He’d accidentally pressed a button. The camera was whirring, pushing out a picture, a square white tongue that seemed to scream surprise!  
Jude stood there, frozen, for the full five minutes it took for the picture to develop.
He was no expert. He didn’t question why the film hadn’t shrivelled up in the heat or why the camera batteries weren’t dead. Not at the time, anyway. Those riddles lay buried under the moment, the untouched box and the blood. He just stood and watched the white square turning grey, the shapes and colours starting to emerge.
It was a picture of Nathan, he could already tell.
Nathan and somebody else. A man.
Jude stood and watched.
Nathan had kept a secret.
 
We are all of us walking through the ashes of Eden.
That’s what the vicar had said, commencing his eulogy at Nathan’s funeral. Jude had thought the sentiment a little tactless, considering the circumstances. Nathan’s family were all gathered and weeping, a sad line of little black hats and coats huddled before the open casket.
There had been a few uniformed members of the Force. Jude had only recognised Mark, Nathan’s ex-partner, who’d acknowledged him with a small, sorrowful tip of his cap. Jude sat several rows back by a pillar in the Shacklewell church, a pale and forlorn stranger. He’d never met the family. The family didn’t know about his five-year relationship with Nathan or about the flat they’d shared in Holloway. The family didn’t know that Jude existed.
There were a couple of reasons for that, which Nathan and Jude had fought over on occasion, the chief of them being Nathan’s career. Despite the changing times and the relaxed outlook of the city, Nathan saw his sexuality as irrelevant to his job. Cops and queers. They don’t mix well, Jude, he’d once said. Jude remembered the excuse like a bruise on his mind. Then there was religion, the good old family Bible, which thumped down on men sleeping with men, the dusty pages turning so fast that they raised a storm, blasting away love and liberty and lives...
My Dad thinks it’s unnatural.
My Mum would never speak to me again.
I couldn’t face my brothers.
Yes. Jude remembered all of those too. So the two of them had lived half in the shadows, out to their small circle of friends, utterly in to Nathan’s work colleagues and relatives, with Mark the trusted exception. As a result, there had never been a Facebook relationship status update. No family visits at Christmas. And no condolences at funerals.
Sat by the pillar, Jude had never felt more invisible. Never more alone.
Nathan lay in the coffin and the cord that had tied their love to the world had snapped, casting Jude adrift, cementing his obscurity. When the family had had their fill of grief and shuffled out of the church to the shiny black cars waiting to take them off to the wake – which Jude wouldn’t be attending – he went to the casket and looked down at his lover for the last time.
Incredible that Nathan’s chest, so full of laughter, could be so silent. So still. Incredible that his eyes would stay forever closed. Incredible that his hands, having explored Jude’s body time and again, could look so useless and pale.
Incredible that he’d wear his uniform until it was dust.
37 was no age at all.
Ashes, Jude thought.
 
A month later, Jude was still sleeping in the bedroom where Nathan had shot himself. While the tragedy bit at his heart like piranhas, he wasn’t yet ready to let go of the memories, the ghosts. And he’d plucked a dirty sheet and pillow cases from the laundry basket and slept on them. Ghosts had a smell, after all. Cologne. Soap. Sweat. The police had cleaned up, of course, the blood and the fragments of skull, mopping up the speckles of brain that had splattered across the wall and the floor.
Jude could only think about it in remote, matter-of-fact terms. That was his armour. All he had left. But the police hadn’t removed the camera.
Why?
Cloth hung over the bedroom mirror, black and collecting dust. Jude’s mother – God rest her soul – was a lapsed Jew at best, but her only son still honoured her traditions and a covered glass was one of them. When we sit shiva, she’d said, we do not look at ourselves. A mirror is the opposite of life. His mother had told him this twice, once when he was twelve and his grandfather died and the second time six years ago when Dad had passed away. He’d only really understood it when Nathan… went… and it felt like the right thing to do.
It also served a deeper purpose. Jude didn’t want to look at himself. He didn’t want to see the mess of his hair, the frost touching his temples, turning him from thirty to fifty overnight. He didn’t want to see his eyes, or the shadows under them, the stain of a thousand tears.
Most of all, he didn’t want to see himself alone.
We watched ourselves in that mirror, didn’t we? When we were very much alive.
Friends told him that he should move. Go stay with them, or if he preferred, in a hotel. Why stay in the flat with all the memories? Jude knew that they meant the bedroom and the burnt room next door. He didn’t need to tell them that he was staying put precisely for the memories. The echoes of laughter. The evenings locked together on the couch. The stupid rows in the kitchen. And all the things they had done in the room in question.
The most natural thing in the world, surely.
But the camera. The picture.
The man.
Nathan and the stranger could’ve been anywhere. The background was dark, the faces close up. A bar somewhere? Jude would know that drunken smile anywhere, Nathan off duty and playing the clown. The stranger looked younger. Smiling too, but in a different way. Watchful was Jude’s impression. His features were thin. Delicate even. A fringe, glossy as a crow’s wing, was swept across his brow. His eyes were dark too, stitching his looks together. Good looks, at that.
A pang of jealousy stabbed through Jude’s grief, coupled with the nausea of not knowing. When was the picture taken? Why did Nathan look so damn happy?
Who the fuck was this guy?
Jude reached for the camera on the bedside table, forgetting about the blood. He held it up before him, lens facing, the same way he imagined the stranger had held it up in the bar, before Nathan’s and his own smiling faces.
Say cheese.
Then the flash went off and Jude blinked, giving a little cry. He didn’t think he’d pressed anything. The camera clunked down on the table as he shrank back on the bed, shocked and shrivelled and hating himself for it, an instant of overlapping emotions.
There was a whirr in the lamp lit room. The camera was pushing out another picture, a token of his mistake. Jude didn’t want to look at it. He ignored the protruding white square, another mirror for him to avoid. Drawing a breath, he glared at the lens, feeling betrayed.
That lens, so much like an eye.
Watchful.
Only then did he realise his hands were dry. No blood smeared his fingers or palms and he couldn’t see any on the camera either. Had it dried up in the time he’d retreated in here from the burnt room? How had the blood stayed wet in the box? How the fuck was that even possible?
‘You imagined it. That’s how.’
His voice sounded strange in the room. Small, with no one to answer it.
Post traumatic stress, his doctor whispered in his ear.
Jude hadn’t planned on falling asleep. His tears were an anchor, carrying him down.
 
The next morning, the had-to-know thing made him pick up the phone and call Mark.
‘Detective Styles.’
‘Mark, it’s me. Sorry to call you at work, I just...’
Have to know.
‘Hang on. Let me pull over.’
The sound of London traffic filtered through the phone in the hall, the tinny business of a world that Jude had hardly set foot in since the funeral. He cursed the delay. The delay gave him time to think twice about his question. He curled the phone cord in his hands, his knuckles white by the time that Mark came back to him.
‘Jude? What’s up? Are you OK?’
‘You know I’m.... It’s not...easy...’
‘Shit. What a stupid thing to say. I’m so -’
It was now or never. Before Mark could finish his apology, Jude forced out the words.
‘Mark, what were you and Nathan working on before he died?’
 
Later, as the sun set on Holloway, Jude sat in the kitchen and considered. The photograph of Nathan and the stranger flicked between his hands, dealing out questions, doubts. Fears. Now and then, Jude glanced at a different picture, the one of Nathan and him hung on the wall under the clock. The two of them on an Amalfi beach, their bare arms wrapped around each other, the Italian sky in Nathan’s eyes.
Young love.
The clock above it seemed like a judgment, measuring out the moments of a stolen future. Jude kept glancing at the picture because he felt jealous of the one in his hands. It was reassurance, of sorts. He’d been loved, once. He knew that.
Didn’t he?
There had been several sound reasons why Mark couldn’t tell him about the case. First and foremost, it was police business. Confidential. Despite everything, Jude was a civvie who worked in a bookshop, not that Mark had put it that way. He didn’t have to. Secondly, the case wasn’t pretty, Mark said that much. Did Jude really want the gory details? At this time? Now?
And by the way, are you sleeping OK? (i.e. Are you taking your pills?) You sound kind of… strange.
‘Strange,’ Jude told the empty kitchen.
He’d tried his best not to cry on the phone. Mark had noticed anyway.
Mark said they’d meet for coffee on Friday, if Jude was up to it. Mark, he knew, was caving in.
And Jude had to know. That was the thing.
A distraction, possibly. And the doctor had said he should look for distractions. Even if Jude knew full well that the doctor hadn’t meant this.
Sat at the kitchen table, he wiped his eyes, flicking the photo. When he looked at it again, the picture appeared to be degrading in his hand. Heat damage? Imagination? What?
Half of the picture had turned black, a blurred smudge obscuring Nathan’s face.
Strange.
Only the stranger was smiling up at him.
 
That night, in the bedroom, the mirror shrouded, Jude shook out his pills, swallowed and slept as fitfully as ever. The bed was an ocean now, stretching to an infinite horizon. Once, he’d swum here in safety and sweat, with his buoy. His boy. Now he was flotsam, bobbing on the waves. The water was cold, the depths treacherous. The pills kept him afloat, just about.
In the morning, the camera on the bedside table was gone.
Sort of.
 
‘I don’t even know what this is,’ Jude told Mark over coffee in the steamy little cafe off Camden Road. He hadn’t wanted to go too far. ‘It wasn’t there this...’ He changed tack, stirring his spoon in his mug and deciding to simply tell the truth, come what may. ‘It isn’t the same camera I found in the burnt room.’
Mark, sitting opposite in a plain grey suit, looked up at this. He’d been inspecting the camera in his hands, its bulky, brown accordion length terminating in the big brass lens. He’d pushed a few buttons with no obvious results. Ran his fingers over the wooden housing, still glossy after x amount of years, and peered through the viewer at the greasy floor tiles.
His curiosity faded at Jude’s admission, a frown creasing his brow.
‘So...you found two cameras?’
‘No. I found the Polaroid Instant, set it on my bedside table, and this morning, I found this – whatever it is – in its place.’
‘It’s a bellows camera,’ Mark said. ‘Popular in the early twentieth century, but falling out of use after the Second World War. Don’t ask me how I know that. Also, that doesn’t make any sense.’
 Jude couldn’t think of anything to say to this. He took a sip of coffee.
‘I didn’t know you were an antiques expert.’
Mark shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t say expert.’ He shifted in his seat, as if his suit had become a little uncomfortable. ‘I picked up a few things when we... Look, it’s to do with the case, all right? I could lose my job just for talking to you. Shit, I could go to jail.’
‘I understand,’ Jude said. And he did. He didn’t care though.
‘It’s highly unlikely that someone broke into your flat while you were sleeping and replaced a Polaroid camera with this one, Jude.’
‘Did I say that?’
Mark stared at him for a moment. He looked as if he was about to say something, some inscrutable thought sliding behind his face, like a shadow over a mirror. Jude wanted to ask him what? What is that look? But then Mark was speaking again.
‘Look, I don’t mean to pry. I just want to know if -’
‘You want to know if I’m taking my pills,’ Jude finished for him. ‘Or not taking them. Or maybe taking them too much. Yes?’
Mark was squirming now. His cheeks were turning red.
‘The camera could be evidence, that’s all I’m saying. Withheld evidence, at that. I should probably turn it in at the station.’
‘You’re not taking the camera,’ Jude said. Silently, he thanked himself for not telling Mark about the blood. The imagined blood.
‘What happened. It was a shock to us all. Nathan seemed so...’ Happy. Healthy. Sane. Jude could’ve easily filled in the blanks for his friend. ‘It’ll take time, Jude. You have to give yourself time.’
‘I don’t want time.’ I want answers! Jude wanted to scream in Mark’s face, without caring what the other patrons of the café thought or what it might mean for their friendship. He took a breath. ‘I want to know what Nathan was working on.’
Mark held his gaze for as long as he seemed able. Then he reached into his jacket and retrieved a folded envelope. With a sigh, he pushed the envelope and the camera back across the table.
‘You won’t thank me,’ he said. ‘And you won’t mention this meeting either.’
Jude nodded. Sighed.
Understood.
 
Jude walked for a while. He walked into the afternoon, grey inside and out. It was raining, but the weather didn’t bother him. Wet haired, he pushed through a sea of umbrellas on Holloway Road, safe in the knowledge that no one would notice if he was crying or not. For a while, he stood looking in the window of the furniture shop, remembering when he’d stood here with Nathan, hand in hand and bickering over a wardrobe, of all things. All that back and forth, both of them secretly, yet obviously, delighted at the technicalities of moving in together, at what had eventually amounted to a taste compromise and later, a charred heap of firewood.
Ashes.
Jude went into the pub for a drink. The Big Red was a memorial now, a black tomb with leather seats, foaming pumps and a jukebox. He sipped his beer with the ghosts sat all around him, the whisper of remembered rock music, booze-soaked kisses and slurred innuendos. The beer was practically tasteless, the place filling up with the post-lunch crowd, and Jude didn’t stay long.  
The ghosts followed him home, singing.
 
Jude read the police file in the living room, while nursing a cup of tea.
Mark had printed the salient details from his office computer, presenting a rough outline of the case. There were no photos of the crime scene, which, as Jude read, was a fact he felt both grateful for and frustrated by. As he read, he gripped the sheaf of paper with whitening knuckles, his breaths shallow, an ache behind his eyes like an approaching storm front. Half an hour later, he came up for air, the papers creased, his tea and his skin stone cold.
There’d been a triple murder at the Dusty Gloves, a vintage clothing, antiques and glass shop on Brick Lane. That was about six weeks ago, just before... Nathan’s funeral. The proprietor, one Joseph Brown, a man with no priors, no history of mental health, marital or debt problems, had got up early one Sunday morning and presumably gone downstairs into the shop. He’d returned to his bedroom – again, presumably – to rouse his slumbering wife.
The kids in the room next door couldn’t have heard her screams (if there were any) while Joseph sawed her face off with a stainless steel bayonet, borrowed from his wares. Apparently, the kids were still sleeping when Joseph paid a visit to their room. Sylvia, the nine year old, he strangled with catgut, plucked, the evidence suggested, from an old mandolin that had once held pride of place in the shop’s window display. Joseph Brown then smashed his son’s skull in with a Chinese ornamental box, an ivory treasure dating back two hundred years. Charlie, the son, hadn’t made it past six.
For an encore, Joseph must’ve gone back downstairs. He soaked a worn Persian rug in petrol, wrapped it around his naked body and set it alight with a highly collectible Art Deco cigarette lighter.
The report described the scene in the briefest of detail. Perfunctory, even. So much remained supposition. The flames had raged for half an hour until the fire brigade arrived. Smoke had billowed out of the shop for the rest of the morning, neighbours and passersby standing and gawping at the building’s ruined shell. All the mirrors that hung on the walls inside had melted or cracked, the glass black.
Some antiques, the report read, had stayed miraculously untouched.
 
Jude put the camera in the burnt room. He didn’t want the thing near him. Standing there in the acrid space, the chiaroscuro of smoke staining the walls, the blistered furniture and the streaked floor, he puzzled over the murders. Or rather, he puzzled over the effect they had had on Nathan. No one had said as much, but he wondered if there might be another report, a psychological evaluation drawn up by the police, with Nathan’s subsequent actions picked apart in neatly typed lines.
Mentally disturbed. Emotionally unbalanced. At risk.
Jude could only think in the terms provided by his doctor, from the Tuesday night when he’d come home late from the bookstore and found himself shivering in the kitchen five minutes later, police and fire fighters milling about the flat. A neighbour had reported the sound of gunshot, the smell of smoke and the alarm. Someone had prised the doctor’s number from Jude’s wet and trembling lips and he’d overheard the man when he arrived, snapping at an officer in the hall. He’s in shock, for Christ’s sake. Traumatised. All the terms fit Jude like a glove, but had they fit Nathan? Really?
‘He was in love,’ Jude said, and tried to ignore the doubt he heard in his voice.
As it stood, it wasn’t much of a case. Tragic, yes, gruesome, yes, but pretty much open and shut. The only question left hanging was the why of it all. But it happened. Jude had watched enough TV and read enough papers to know that. People lost it. People killed their families and friends. Seemingly upright, decent people just… snapped.
Nathan had snapped.
Have I?
Jude regarded the bellows camera on the scorched chest of drawers. The camera regarded him, a blank black eye. If the camera hadn’t previously been a Polaroid, then how come a Polaroid photo is still in the kitchen? How can you explain that? He cast his mind back a month, to the days before...before... trying to recall any change in Nathan’s mood, some unnoticed trajectory, a descent into despair. Madness.
No. Nothing. Nathan had laughed like he’d always laughed. He’d joked around. Bought shopping, cooked and chatted. As usual, he’d left his work where it belonged. At work. He hadn’t mentioned the murders. They’d still fucked, and with a fury that belied any suspicion of cheating, or so Jude wanted to believe.
But Nathan had taken something from the antiques shop, hadn’t he? One of the items untouched by the fire. A relic, of sorts. A camera, surely. He’d taken the camera to a bar somewhere and knocked back a few drinks with the dark haired stranger, immortalising the moment. Then he’d brought the camera home, put the damn thing in here on top of the wardrobe. There was no way of telling when he’d started the fire. A few days later? Straight away? Nathan had heaped his clothes on the floorboards, doused them with oil and set them alight. He’d gone into the bedroom, sat naked on the end of the bed, pulled out a gun that no one had known he owned and stuck the barrel into his mouth.
Jude wiped his face, wiped off the memory of kisses and death, his fingers coming away wet. All of this was so much guesswork. It wasn’t doing him any good. Breath shuddered from his lungs, the acceptance that he’d never know. Chasing after shadows was pointless. Nathan had been the detective and Nathan was gone. No amount of answers would ever bring him back.
Jude closed the door on the burnt room.
The camera watched him leave.
 
In the bedroom, the shrouded mirror stopped him in his tracks. Maybe it was time to end this stubborn, drawn out tradition. This shiva. Maybe he should tell his doctor that he was still in shock, hallucinating. That the pills weren’t helping. He went to pull the cloth from the mirror, but he found that his fingers wouldn’t obey him. It was too easy to imagine the glass under it, black like the ones he’d read about in the antiques shop, his reflection warped, smoky and dark.
Ashen. An ashen version of himself; didn’t he feel that frail? Like one more sob could shake him apart, reduce him to a pile of nothing on the floorboards.
‘You’re losing it.’
Jude thought that this was true, but he still didn’t tug the cloth from the mirror. And when he slept, he dreamt about it too. He dreamt that he’d somehow climbed into the glass, a modern, mournful Alice. Each step was a mirror too, he found, a spiral reflecting him as he descended, each footfall prompting a click and a flash. His soul repeatedly captured. Trapped.
Someone waited at the bottom of the mirror. A dark haired stranger with a smile. He knew this with the dread logic of dreams. He continued downwards. Drawn. Helpless.
You shouldn’t keep strangers in mirrors waiting.
 
Jude woke with a start. The taste of pills, metallic, sour, slowly dragged him back to the here and now. Blurry eyed, he looked at the walls, the half-light falling through the blinds. He made out the white square of the photograph, face down on the bedside table. The selfie he’d taken when the camera went off. He’d forgotten all about it. Or rather, he didn’t want to remember. If there was a Polaroid camera in here and a bellows camera in the burnt room, then that was something he didn’t find safe to think about.
Nestling under the duvet, curled around his own warmth (only your own now), he sought sanctuary in half-sleep. Let the day start without him.
Sometime later, he woke up again when an arm slipped around his waist.
 
Jude sat at the kitchen table, spooning cereal into his mouth. He couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph, the one he’d left in here before. The one of Nathan and the stranger. Both of them were gone now, their faces rubbed out by the stain that had spread across the film, a dark smudge. A veil. The photograph had degraded completely.
Jude wasn’t sure that was possible. He wasn’t up on the science and his dreams were making everything hazy, doubtful. Even the clock on the wall struck him as untrustworthy. The picture of Nathan and him on the beach, a barefaced lie. The happiness in the frame, frozen forever. The time since moving on, a river sweeping him into questions and tears, phantoms and loss. Into ash.
An arm had snaked around his hip, a hand resting lightly on his stomach. He’d felt it, the arm hairs tickling his skin, the cool weight of a palm. The breath on the back of his neck, steady and warm. Legs drawn up behind him, the heat between them nudging his buttocks, seeking that soft and perfect place.
Rigid, a wail behind his lips, Jude had turned. But as soon as he did so, the weight, the presence, was gone. He found the bed empty. Emptier than a grave. He’d sat up in the tangled sheets, breathing hard and sweating. Alone. The shrouded mirror on the wall was a mirror on the wall, that’s all. If the mirror knew anything at all, it wouldn’t exactly tell him.
Fuck. Nathan. Where are you?
What a strange thought.
He’d come in here for breakfast, deciding that tonight he’d sleep on the couch. His friends were right; he shouldn’t be here at all. He was high on pills. Drunk on memories. Losing it.
How could you leave me here on my own?
All the same, curiosity, the plain old had-to-know, took him back into the burnt room.
Then he called Mark.
 
‘Detective Styles.’
The phone cord was taut in Jude’s hands, his words shuddering out of him, wet bullets of air.
‘Mark! Thank God. I had to speak to… someone. Anyone. I think I’m having some kind of breakdown. I don’t know if it’s the pills or being here, but I’m not thinking straight. I’m not seeing straight. I went into the burnt room – the spare room – and the camera isn’t there anymore, you know? The camera is gone. Both of them. The cameras. They aren’t there anymore. They aren’t fucking there. Instead, there’s an… an easel. A fucking easel, set up in the middle of the room. And there’s a canvas on it. A canvas with a sketch – charcoal or something, I’m not sure.’ Ash. You know that it’s ash. ‘I know how it… how it sounds, but you have to come over. Can you come over? I need you to come over, Mark. There’s a canvas and someone’s drawn a picture.’ He caught his breath, choking back a sob. ‘I think... it’s hard to tell because it’s so faint, but... I think it’s a picture of me.’
London traffic filtered through the receiver. A car horn. Music. Someone shouting on the street. Jude waited for Mark to process what he’d said, already regretting his delivery, grasping the weight of what he’d confessed to. Madness. An episode at best. He might as well have said, ‘Come and lock me up, please. Lock me up and throw away the key’.
But Mark would understand, wouldn’t he? Mark would help. Mark would help because Jude had placed the look that he’d given him in the cafe. He’d guessed the words that Mark couldn’t say. It wasn’t simply worry, oh no. There was attraction there. Mark thought Jude should give himself time and get over Nathan, get over what had happened, because maybe, just maybe, Mark thought that there was a chance for him. Yes?
Jude waited for Mark to speak. He braced himself for scorn. For accusation. For concern. Panic, even.
The seconds filled up the distance between them, whispering down the line.
Then Mark said, ‘Who the hell is this? How did you get this number?’
 
Jude didn’t drink much. He did that day. He started in the Big Red, a walk down memory lane that soon became a wobble. But he didn’t want to sit among the ghosts. He wanted to get out, get away. Be the no one and nothing that was filling him up like an empty glass, the void flooding into his life.
As night fell, he found himself in Soho. Adrift in neon, in smoke. He cruised the bars on Compton Street, pressing among the sea of eyes, the subtle and not-so-subtle hands that frisked his jeans as he ordered another drink. He spoke to some guys. Forgot what he was saying the minute the words were out of his mouth. Alcohol soothed him, closing over his head. He kissed a stranger in a corner, rubbing each other under the table. The sea heaved and they parted, without grief, without loss. He was no one. He was numb and it meant nothing. Nothing. The night took on a staccato beat. A camera shutter, flashing on random scenes.
In a nightclub bathroom, a silhouette holding a spoon to his nose.
‘I called nine times. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know me.’
On the dance floor, no one hearing him over the beat.
‘He’d forgotten who I was. Or pretended to forget. Why?’
On the street outside, staggering into an alley with another stranger, a guy he kept calling Nathan and who was in too much of a hurry to correct him. Kisses up against rubbish bins. Flesh in his mouth, hot and hard. Sweat. Salt. And then he was alone again.
‘I’m not here anymore. Mark didn’t forget me at all. I’m not here.’
Jude was sick in the road. Violently. A taxi driver shouted at him. Drunks laughed. He couldn’t remember how he got home. The night flickered past like a flipbook, a mental zoetrope, strobing. The strangers becoming one. Then, a young man with a delicate face, watching him. Watching in a burnt room. His pale brow. His fringe like a crow’s wing.
I know you. Was that the stranger or himself? I do.
Grey light was filtering through the blinds when Jude fell into his bed, curling into his own stink (always your own now, yeah). Before he fell asleep, he wondered, vaguely, how long it would take to saw somebody’s face off. He wondered what kind of sound it would make. And why no one would scream.
 
He woke up at midday, whole and untouched. Burnt, somehow, on the inside. Through raw eyes – had he been crying in his sleep? – he put the jigsaw of the now back together by marking the familiar details of the room.
The crumpled sheets. The shrouded mirror. The Polaroid on the bedside table.
The once-Eden.
Head aching, Jude reached out and picked up the photograph. The had-to-know controlled his fingers. He screwed up his eyes, resisting. Then he opened them in surrender.
He sat up slowly, the residue of booze in his veins curdling into something sharp and cold.
‘No,’ he told the empty room.
It was him in the picture all right. His face, wet and wasted, was staring back at him. His surprise when the camera had gone off, frozen in the light of the flash. Say cheese. The film was already degrading, a smudge bleeding across the little square, obscuring the background, the colours and the edges of the room, turning the image into a blur. Into…
Ash.
Jude could make out the stranger, sitting next to him on the bed. His finely boned features. His dark shining eyes. His curious, patient smile.
In the picture, the stranger had his arm around Jude’s shoulders.
 
Something got in, didn’t it? Someone...
Jude was in the burnt room. His feet had led him there, springing his body from the bed and shuffling him down the hall. Were his movements of his own volition? He wasn’t sure. The air in the flat felt thick, stale, like stagnant water. As if his tears had filled every room, eventually bubbling up to the ceiling, and now he swam through them, his hair tangled, his limbs slow.
Something got in and Nathan... Nathan tried to stop it.    
Jude felt the distance between himself and his thoughts. His guesses. His doubts. His fears had topped out, overloading his senses. The pills had failed to dam the flood. He went washing into the burnt room like flotsam.
The easel and the sketch were gone – or rather, something had replaced them. When he saw the little mirror on top of the chest of drawers, he let out a sigh, realising he’d been expecting it. The mirror looked like it was made of ivory, an elegant thing, animals of some description carved into the handle. Victorian? Jude had no idea. He could only stand there and wonder about it, the relics of people’s lives, commonplace at the time, but rendered valuable with age. Antiques that poured in and out of London’s shops, a river of bric-a-brac, their stories embellished, made up or forgotten, translated into worth or the lack of it.   
Nathan had brought something home from the Dusty Gloves shop on Brick Lane. In his confusion, Jude hung onto this one certainty, this one secret, without knowing what it meant.
Something got in.
Something hungry.
The mirror lay face down on the chest of drawers. When Jude picked it up, the handle cold in his grip, he turned it around to stare at his reflection.
But there was no reflection. The glass was black. Covered in ash.
The shadows in the room gathered around him. The glass was bleeding in his vision; his watering eyes blending the charred wardrobe, the scorched curtains and the smoke-stained walls.
Jude was going to smash the thing. This intruder in his life. Smash it into a thousand pieces. He’d succeed where Nathan had failed.
The had-to-know lifted his hand from his side. Jude drew a finger through the ash on the glass. Across the cold black oval.
 His guts clenched as if he’d been punched. He wasn’t looking at himself, but through. Out. The clean stripe of glass revealed a room beyond, framed by an ivory eye. Impossible. The absurd perspective wheeled in Jude’s skull, the mirror trembling in his grip. Through the sliver of window, he made out a stranger sitting on the end of a bed.
His bed. In the room next door.
The stranger, dark haired, dark eyed, smiled. He looked calmer now. His patience rewarded.
Jude staggered back, the mirror clanking down on the chest of drawers. He turned to run, but there was nowhere to run. Only shadows.
Lost and alone, he closed his eyes.
Come. Grief has made you ripe.
Was that him or the stranger?
Jude let the glass close over his head.
 
©James Bennett