An exclusive excerpt from Empty Flesh

 by MV Clark

No Ghosts at the Brothel

I rolled on to my back, waiting for the numbness of sleep to dissolve. The springs of the sofa squealed as I shifted, but apart from that there was silence.

A flat powdery light coated the room and the air was cold. I squinted at the window, a long narrow casement with no curtain. The sky was laced with soft, falling specks and there was a rim of white on the ledge. Snow. I hoped it wouldn’t hold back business. Bad weather did affect men’s behaviour, how much exactly was hard to say.

Maiding took up most of my time but I also saw customers. Maid work covered my board and lodging and the tricks provided the cash. It all went in the bank - my goal was to set up a charity to help women leave prostitution. Women who weren’t in control and needed help. Women like my mum. I wasn’t one of these women myself, of course. I knew what I was doing.

I looked around the room. I was in the girls’ lounge, which was where we went on our breaks, as supposed to the men’s lounge where we sat with the tricks. Its importance to the business was clear from its decor. The faux-leather couch and armchair, both ripped and disgorging stuffing, came from the dump. The TV was a relic from the 1990s, with a massive jutting backside. On the walls, along a decorative border the height of a small child, traipsed elephants in blue hats. Nobody cared about the girl’s lounge.

It had been about two weeks ago that I’d begun sleeping down here. Before that I’d slept in the attic room. It was high and remote, too dingy to take tricks to, so I’d had it all to myself. It had been nice for a while, but nothing lasts forever, does it.

I was itching to pull out my phone and google the Splits, but there wasn’t time - it was already 11am and Sash, the madam, would be here soon. I had to finish the cleaning before she arrived.  

After making a mug of coffee, I wandered through the apartment, checking what needed to be done. The Japanese room was a mess. I pulled the sheets of the bed and shoved them into a 90 degree wash.

Once I was done I sat down with my phone and typed “Splits news” into the search box. This was a new compulsion of mine, maybe even an obsession. I tried to do it no more than once a day, in the morning when my mood was at its best, because the Splits was such a grim subject. But I usually did it before I went to bed as well.

*

Only a week ago I had barely thought about the Splits. Why would I? It was a horrendous thing which turned people into flesh-eating corpses. What is more, we’d got pretty good at containing it - the worst was over, there were hardly any cases these days.

So what changed? To explain that I would have to go much further back, to the day I started at the brothel.

From the moment I moved in I got a bit of a charge off the place. It felt to me like one of those locations where the wall between the past and the present has worn thin. I sensed a blurring of time, a sadness in the walls, a shimmering presence of previous inhabitants. I was glad of this too - it was a way to escape into my imagination. Deep down that’s all I thought it was. A flight of fancy. I believed in the paranormal but I knew real supernatural phenomena were incredibly unusual.  

I assumed the old-fashioned look of the apartment had partly inspired me. Certain parts - a corner of the ceiling where the botanical coving met in a neat right angle, the fern by the fireplace with its sunflower tiles - gave me the feeling they were still in the era of some Victorian queen as far as they were concerned. 

But the light was weird too, it seemed to come from another universe. The sun was almost too lovely as it lowered in the sky, flooding the kitchen and the men’s lounge with a torrent of gold. The blaze cleansed the brothel of all its seediness, even the men’s lounge. For that short hour it was possible to feel part of a beautiful world.

I should also explain about Cassie. We met at a bar job a couple of years ago and I considered her one of my best friends. I followed her into sex work and then here. She actually got me the job I have now. When I started we saw each other almost every day and we were closer than ever. So they were good, those first few weeks at the brothel.

But things don’t last, do they. The haunted feeling in the brothel became less enchanting, a bit more real. Also Cassie began to go mad. 

*

The atmosphere had probably been building up for a while without me noticing. But one morning – I was still in the attic at this point - I woke up in a sweat of fear. It was just me in the building because nobody else stayed overnight, and yet I was not alone. It’s hard to explain. Something had come out of the ceilings and floors and was keeping me company. I couldn’t see it directly, only out of the corner of my eye. A thickening in the air, which drifted to the floor as if settling down to watch me. When I turned to look, of course, it disappeared. When I went downstairs it followed me, in the form of a breeze that could not be explained by open windows or the weather.  

Did this begin before or after Cassie broke the chair? I can’t remember. Maybe it was the same day. Sash didn’t dare get rid of her. She just waited for her to quit and eventually she did, which gave me mixed feelings. It was a relief, but how sad that our friendship had come to this.

I did wonder if Cassie’s craziness, the stress of it all, was making me imagine the invisible presence at Leopold Avenue. There was our argument about slow-burn Splits – she being obsessed with the Splits long before I was. There was the time she ranted about getting old. It was the most depressing thing I’d ever heard from someone who was only thirty and looked about twenty. When I disagreed with her she belted me. 

I remember hoping that the weird atmosphere would go when she left. I had stopped being her friend by then, I’d switched my loyalties to Sash, who was light relief by comparison. 

But things only got worse. This meaty, orangey perfume started to come and go in the attic room. It wasn’t like cooking, it wasn’t nice.  I began to sleep badly, waking up in the middle of the night like an old woman.

 And then the nightmares began. First, there was a reoccurring dream about infected. Not Splits infected, some other, fictional kind. It began with me living somewhere completely bulletproof, alongside other survivors. A basement with only one way in perhaps, or an underground bunker built to keep out the dead. I would have a feeling of safety so deep and comforting it was like being wrapped in a warm blanket. One day, one dream, I decided to go out for supplies. The scene was straight out of Shaun of the Dead - a deserted corner shop on a leafy crossroads. I took the usual precautions, packing a weapon, scanning the terrain, listening for distant moaning. But in actual fact that afternoon there were no zombies. It was midsummer and the heat must have driven them underground. When I went into the shop I found what I was looking for immediately, which was significant because the longer you had to spend looking the more dangerous it got. On the way back I paused with my face turned to the sun. Like Thumbelina married to the mole, I’d not been outside for a long time. The heat and light beat down generously.  Skin, hair, heart - every part of me expanded with pleasure. After a while I began to feel sleepy. I returned to the bunker in a good mood. As I let myself in I thought that I would drop off the supplies and then go to my cabin to take a nap. No-one would grudge me that after such a successful expedition. I was walking towards the kitchen to put away the supplies when I heard a sound. It came from behind, a wincing scrape of metal on concrete. The entrance. I turned back to see a tall, emaciated man standing just inside the heavy metal doors. His skull bulged thoughtfully. There were more behind him, and there was nothing between me and them. I’d forgotten to close the door. It was as if I’d thought my happiness would close it for me. The undead stared at me with implacable eyes, somewhere between insect and machine, then began to move. Our safety had been an illusion. We were going to drown in danger. It was my stupid fault.

After about ten days that dream stopped, its work done perhaps. But the next night I started to have sleep paralysis. I awoke to a silent, dark, but not still bedroom. Something was behind the wall next to where I lay. It was moving restlessly, snaking back and forth, looking for a way through. There was no sound, nothing to see, I just… knew. I felt it, in my gut. It seemed to like playing games - if I raised my head it stopped, but if I dropped back down it started again.

One evening, the light in the room began to sputter, then died. I changed the bulb but the same thing happened. I got through the night with a candle, which also went out a lot, but could at least be relit. The next morning I told Sash, who said it was dangerous. She locked the attic and moved me to the girl’s lounge. That was fine with me. My first sleep on the dumpster sofa was long and dreamless.

*

It didn’t last long. I soon realised that my friend in the attic - the thing twisting behind the wall - had found a way through into the rest of the building. I didn’t know what had happened to the earlier presence, the one that had watched me and blown the air around. Perhaps they had merged. Or perhaps they were the same entity in a different mood. What followed me now was depressing. It didn’t twist or snake but it filled me with a sickening sadness.

I began to miss Cassie, to wish I’d done things differently on the day she finally left. Far from removing the cause of the disturbance, I seemed to have lost my lucky charm. 

By last week I was desperate. I’d had no sleep and I felt on edge the whole time. I finally did the obvious thing and searched on the internet. I asked ‘how do you know your house is haunted?’ and ‘can ghosts follow you around your house?’ and ‘‘what do dreams about infected mean?’

The first page of results was full of the word  Shadowism. It was something to do with the Splits, which I didn’t think was relevant, but it was also something to do with ghosts, so I had a look.

 And I had the shock of my life. Shadowism was the belief that people infected with the Splits are ripped apart in a truly horrible way. Their mind leaves their body but then stay mysteriously alive - like a mirror image of their body staying alive without a mind. That’s how most people think about the Splits, including the government. Just these empty decomposing bodies shambling around, trying to eat the living. Only a handful of people can sense the disembodied minds and they are outcasts. 

Quickly, blindingly, the meaning of everything I’d been going through recently became clear. There was a disembodied mind in the brothel. It was trying to contact to me. Because I was one of those rare people who was receptive. I was one of those outcasts.

If this was right, the full implications were terrifying. There would have to be an infected body nearby. 

I told Sash, who wearily showed me around the entire building - the crannies, the nooks, the alcoves, not that I didn’t know them all already. She took me back to the attic.

“Be my guest,” she said, unlocking the door to the loft space. 

The light didn’t work. It was dark, cold and silent, and so crammed with junk that there was barely room to step inside. I shook my head. The infected wasn’t in the brothel. 

Still, it must be close. It seemed unlikely it would be in the shop under the brothel, but what about the flats on the other side? When I went out I’d peer up at their windows, imagining puppets living there for some reason. I never saw anything. 

So I went back to the internet. It quickly became an obsession, searching for good information about the Splits. It excited me. I became worse than Cassie.

*

There was about ten minutes to go until until Sash arrived. I tapped my finger impatiently on the screen as the news app opened. Nothing at the top, as usual. I scrolled and found one little story tucked away at the bottom of the feed. There had been an outbreak in China. It had spread in a new way, droplets carried by the wind. A whole town had gone down with it.

I lifted my head. Officially, the disease spread only through bites. It made you wonder about all the other things they said it couldn’t do. Couldn’t come and go, couldn’t be cured, couldn’t be slow-burn. Didn’t have anything to do with ghosts.

The phone rang. It was a man calling himself Brian. He wanted to come at midday which didn’t give me long to get ready. 

I had just got dressed and was about to do my makeup when I heard a key in the door. Sash, bringing a waft of freezing air with her. She was a tiny woman with small but expertly made-up eyes, thin lips and long honey-blonde hair. She wore a turquoise cocoon coat and orange Nikes, which she would soon exchange for heels.  She put her tote bag on the table and began rummaging in it.

“How are you,” she said. She had a sweet, placating voice. 

“Alright, how are you?”

She signed and dropped her hands deep in the bag. “You know. Couldn’t sleep. Worrying about all of this.” She lifted on hand and waved it around the kitchen. She always acted as if the place was on the brink of bankruptcy, no matter what the reality. 

I nodded. “We’re doing okay. I’ve already got a customer booked. He’s coming in twenty minutes, I need to get ready.”

“A regular?” She liked to keep track of our clients’ attachments to us, such as they were.

“No, never heard of him before. Gave the name Brian.”

Sash frowned. “Sounds familiar. He didn’t ask for me, then?”

I shook my head. I wished Sash wouldn’t insist on working but it was all part of her anxiety about the finances. Men had to be constantly coming or the whole thing would go under.

When Brian arrived, shaking snow of his feet, he looked good. He was in his fifties, tall, with a full head of hair and a slight tan. He was dressed in an expensive-looking suit. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses behind which his eyes were slightly magnified, and sympathetic. He was not a million miles away from Carey Grant in North by Northwest. I can handle being Eva Marie Saint, I thought to myself. 

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Hazel.”

He stared at me with eyes that were suddenly flat and fishlike, and in which I could see only a fathomless solitude. 

He wanted the jacuzzi room so we went there. He was in a hurry for the sex,  almost desperate, as if he would die without it. He made that broad, fake show of enjoyment tricks often make which has nothing to do with me, or even with sex. They’re trying to convince themselves that fake intimacy is as good as the real thing. Mostly I let it wash over me. But sometimes I tried to do something kind, like giving the trick a genuine smile, or putting on a believable show of enjoyment. 

Brian’s performance was different. It was aimed at me, Hazel. He wanted to see how far he could push it, this overblown depiction of male sexual pleasure before I flinched. Quite a long way. I’m not a sensitive flower, more like a pine cone, otherwise I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in this line of work. I didn’t know if showing disgust - even though I wasn’t disgusted - would make him get worse or better. So I tried to hedge it, gagging one minute, composing myself the next. Towards the end he slapped me about and choked me. All the while his eyes were boring into me. He was the worst kind of trick. He wanted to fuck my mind. They all did, to some extent, but this was extreme.

I knew exactly what was going on. Menacing me pacified something in his head, some idea or memory that terrorised him.  But the knowledge wasn’t much help.

When he was gone Sash shouted up. I came down with one hand over my mouth and another on my neck. “He was angry,” I said lightly, in the surprised, humorous tone one might use to say someone was in a hurry.

She looked at me blankly. “Make some tea, would you?”

I stood by the kettle, waiting as it gave out little escalating coughs, weighing up what I wanted to say to her versus what I actually could say. The scale was wildly unbalanced. Sash was a practical woman.

I put two mugs down on the table and rubbed my throat. “I’m having that feeling again.”

“That ghosty-spooky feeling,” she said, getting out her phone.

“Don’t you ever feel it? Like there’s something here?”

“I always feel there’s something here,” Sash laughed. “Lots of fantastic fucking, lots of happy men and rich girls.”

I winced at her turn of phrase. It was as bad as the thing itself. The way it manipulated reality.

The door to the apartment crashed open. “Hello boys and girls,” boomed a voice with a Mancunian twang.

Lilly, the second girl on the shift, had entered. Physically tall and powerful, with a sports bag slung over her broad shoulders, she seemed to take up all the space in the kitchen. You would never guess that she was only seventeen. Not unless you talked to her. She wore a waist chain which she fingered with long fake fingernails, saying it was her lucky charm. One of these days she’d meet a rich punter and settle down. She’d been in care up North and she’d run away after twelve men abused her in just one year. She’d found a precarious kind of safety in London - she had her own place near the Ferry Lane filter beds. When she could be bothered to turn up, she rode here on a bicycle. She didn’t have much choice though. I couldn’t see any other way she’d earn such good money. 

I went off to do some more housework. As I emptied the dishwasher I reflected how futile it was trying to share the way I saw the world with other people. The last time I’d had a proper conversation with anyone was with Cassie. She’d been open to my supernatural intuitions. She hadn’t laughed at them or shut me down. She’d been so lovely, until she wasn’t.

A few more clients came and went. The weather improved, the snow melting as if it had never been there.

Soon it was five in the afternoon, time to make a hot meal. Later, after we’d all worked up an appetite but before the pubs closed, I’d put out snacks. The kind of thing your mum gives you after school. Kitkats, Penguin bars, Oreos, PomBears, Hula Hoops. Whatever was left over would come out again the next day. 

The food was one of Sash’s better employment practices and she provided a generous budget. She never touched it herself, of course. I think she was probably anorexic and had a thing about seeing other people eat. 

I microwaved some frozen meals. Cassie had been very sniffy about these but I liked them, and Lilly always wolfed them down, as did the random girls Sash got in from time to time after Cassie left. 

When the food was ready we gathered in the kitchen. Sash started talking about some American woman she’d seen on the internet who said prostitutes don’t sell sex.

“I mean… what the fuck? We’re not selling widgets here.”

Widgets was something Sash’s generation mentioned from time to time. I had no idea what they were. “What does she think she is selling then?” I asked. 

“A wellbeing service. Like therapy.”

Lilly snorted. “What, we’re shrinks?”

“I see what she means,” I said. “They’re not just bodies, the punters. If only they were. We take in horrendous great shafts of their minds. That’s the hardest part of the job if you ask me.”

“Maybe you should charge a premium,” snapped Sash.

I dipped my fork listlessly in my food, wishing I hadn’t spoken. Then I felt angry. I leaned across the table and hissed: “There’s a ghost here. And I’m going to find out who it belongs to. I’m going to lay it to rest.”

She looked at me in surprise. Then she sniggered, as if she’d never heard anything so ridiculous. “It’ll certainly get laid here,” she said.