Everything You Need: Short Stories by Michael Marshall Smith Read Free Book Online

then made the note disappear. Both men were in a position to clearly see that neither of his hands moved at all. The note simply vanished into thin air.
    ‘Fuck,’ one of them said, despite himself.
    ‘Did you see that?’ Spike asked. ‘Did you really, really see it?’
    ‘We saw it, you freak,’ Amaze Me said.
    ‘Good,’ Spike said, and then, with sudden grace, he turned both his hands palm out and wiped one gently down across the eyes of each man, at the same time, as if closing the eyes of sitting corpses.
    Amaze Me’s mouth dropped open, as he realized that he couldn’t see. That, though his eyes were open and staring, he was wholly blind.
    The other man lurched to his feet, flailing around with his fists. ‘What have you done?’ he shouted. ‘I can’t fucking see. I can’t fucking see anything !’
    Amaze Men was blinking frantically now, rubbing his eyes with his fists, craning his head around, trying to do anything that might make a difference.
    ‘Stop it,’ he said, to Spike. ‘Turn it off. Look, I’m sorry, all right? But turn it off.’
    ‘Can’t,’ Spike said. ‘The big problem with life, I’ve come to see, is there’s never any going back.’
    ‘Please,’ the man said. ‘I’m sorry.’
    He looked afraid but not afraid enough, and Spike decided he might as well go for broke. A lot of people were watching now.
    He held both his hands to chest height, and then quickly snapped them into fists.
    There were four quiet but irrevocable little popping sounds as two pairs of eyeballs burst, spurting glops of viscous liquid, and blood, out onto the table.
    Spike turned and walked quickly out of the pub, to the sound of a lot of people screaming.
    He wasn’t entirely surprised to see the black cat sitting waiting on the opposite side of the street. This time, when it ran off, he was in a position to follow.

     
    H e lost sight of the cat at the bottom end of Soho, but it didn’t matter. He knew where he was going next, and he hoped he knew what the appearance of the cat had meant. It hadn’t crossed his path, after all.
    As he ran into the alley he held up his hand and un-vanished the five-pound note. Found money was always an appropriate offering, and now he’d finally shown he wasn’t safe to be left languishing here. Maybe that’d been his error all along, he hoped. Maybe he’d been trying too hard to fit in, to keep his head down, to pretend to be like everyone else in this hellhole. What better way to punish him for leaving his own land than to strand him here? Surely what he’d just done proved that they had to do something else instead, to let him come home?
    His heart was beating hard as he approached the end of the alleyway, money held out.
    Then it gave a harsh double-thud.
    The door was gone.
    He blinked at the space in the wall where it had been for night after night after night, utterly confused, wondering if he’d somehow come down the wrong street.
    But no, there was the old, ragged poster for a gay dance night at a venue that he knew had recently been torn down. And there, where he’d left it wedged into a crack in the brickwork, was the ten-pence coin from Friday night. And there was a faint smear of what he knew to be his own dried blood, from when he’d rested his face against the door. No door there now, though. Just wall.
    Was there still a handle on the other side? Over where the air was sweet and fresh and the blades of grass sang songs every morning? Where the food did not make you feel sick, but whole? Where his kind went about their business and lived their endless lives, only slipping over into this hollow world when the King or Queen commanded it, to make little interventions into people’s lives, keeping the universe spinning and the spheres aligned?
    ‘There are other doors,’ a voice said.
    Spike turned to see that a figure now stood at the entrance of the alleyway. Tall but stooped, with long, shaggy hair and beard and a big, hooked nose.
    The man