Jack of Ravens

3

‘I tell you, there’s no point being nice to me — I’m not going to sleep with you.’ Laura DuSantiago was enjoying the hypnotic lights and the way the bass made her stomach tumble. She’d had four vodka and Red Bulls and was letting the music take control.

‘I’m not asking you to sleep with me. Just take these.’ Rourke opened his hand to reveal two tabs of E.

Laura took them and went to pop them in her mouth. Then, for the first time ever, she decided to save them for later. Rourke looked disappointed. ‘It won’t work,’ she said to him with a frosty smile.

Before he could reply, Laura took the opportunity to dive into a swirl of dancers and dodged through them into one of the numerous tiny rooms that formed a complex around the vast central space of the abandoned warehouse where the rave was taking place.

The ironic thing was that she’d slept with many people like Rourke before, often for much less than a couple of tabs. There was something about Rourke that always put her off, however desperate she was. But she still took his drugs, and he always had plenty of them on him to keep her happy in her never-ending quest to get caned and forget the life she had inflicted on herself. All day frying burgers; barely enough cash to keep a roof over her head. Free drugs were a godsend.

They also helped her forget the many irritating dreams she’d been having recently and the odd feeling of being out of sorts, as if she was just a visitor in her own life.

She ducked through one room after another, knowing Rourke would not be far behind. He was annoying like that, always around, and if not for the drugs she would definitely have told him to stay away.

One room was filled with a group of people tripping. Laura swore at them and picked her way across the bodies to the next room where a couple were having sex. The room after that was a bare concrete shell with smashed beer bottles in one corner and an area where somebody had once lit a small fire. On the far wall was a piece of jarring graffiti: Look out for the spiders. She’d seen something like it a couple of times across town recently. The Army of the Ten Billion Spiders, one of them had read. She guessed it was a guerrilla publicity campaign for some new band, but she’d never seen any flyers for them performing.

The familiar tread of boots came from the room behind — Rourke en route to entreat her to take her Es like a good girl. It wasn’t in Laura’s nature to do what she was told, even if it was something she wanted to do. She slipped out of a side door into the night.

A small yard area was scattered with lumps of broken concrete. Beyond it was a sagging chain-link fence and then the comforting darkness of a wooded area where she could lose herself.

Before she could take another step, she heard a strange sound, like wires whipping in the wind. The door through which she had just passed was now covered with a dense wall of ivy and bramble. Someone was pressing against it — Rourke, probably — but the greenery held it fast.

In her confusion she realised her fingers were tingling peculiarly; the skin around the tips was puckered as though they had been too long in water. They gradually grew smooth before her eyes.

You did this, a voice told her, and though it made no sense, some part of her believed it was true.

She jogged towards the tree line, turning to look back when she reached the fence. The vegetation was still covering the door, but from her new perspective she could see the bramble curling upwards in the shape of the number 5, too well defined to be random.

Laura was mesmerised by the figure. In the depths of her, something shifted and answered the call.