Another ripple in the protoplasm spun her and doubled her up, and now Denny was looking down at her own body. Or rather, at where it used to be. Fragments of bone and flesh were falling away. Nerves trailed through the dark tissue, tracing the shape of a body now dissolved, consumed. She could not escape the Soul Eater. What little remained of her would be trapped here, serving the inhuman purposes of a colossal beast.
“No!”
Denny sat up in darkness, reached out to feel her arms, legs, then her face. As sleep receded, she recognized the bedroom of her small rental apartment in central London. The time by the clock radio was 3:35 am. She sighed. She was due at the Romola Foundation for more tests and questions at nine, sharp. This was the second time in one night where she had been awoken by a dream of the Phantom Dimension. The first one had been a lot worse.
Maybe the third will be cute and cuddly. Hell, I need to pee anyways.
On the way back to bed, she made a quick diversion across the living room to look out of the window. Despite the freezing winter night, London was busy. Groups of people, mostly young, were apparently staggering home from nightclubs. The famous black taxis plied a busy trade. As she looked down at the street, a young woman in a short, sequined dress fell out of a cab, and on hands and knees puked in the gutter.
“In my day, we waited until we got home, young lady,” Denny murmured.
Raising her eyes, she could just make out the St. Paul's on the other side of the river, the dome of the cathedral floodlit. Denny recalled a famous picture of the beautiful building in wartime, St. Paul's surrounded by fires, indomitable in the face of human evil.
Hope wasn't misplaced then. Good did triumph. Imperfectly, but still it triumphed.
After she got back into bed, another image came to Denny, this one a hybrid of history and nightmare. Behind St. Paul's loomed a Soul Eater, a moving mountain easily larger than the cathedral. Though she tried to dispel the vision, her tired mind returned to it every time she closed her eyes.
The flowing mass surrounded the ancient building, smashing down its walls like a mudslide wrecking a fragile log cabin. The dome cracked, fell into the foul mass, and the living tide of darkness flowed on, its body studded with thousands of faces. Vast, caricatures of human faces, each one frozen in a scream of fear and torment.
Denny sat up, groped for the remote, and turned on the TV. Channel hopping past news, sports, and the porn that her employers had apparently decided she might need. There were plenty of dramas about serial killers, mostly men stalking women in dark apartment buildings.
Eventually Denny found an old movie station that was halfway through showing an old black and white British film she had never heard of, 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire'. She was about to flick past it when she realized that it was about journalists. Becoming interested, she found that it was the first disaster movie she had seen with reporters like herself as heroes, as opposed to shallow idiots who ask scientists dumb questions and cause mass panic.
Denny stayed with it. A character gave a helpful recap, explaining that nuclear testing had knocked the Earth off its axis. The resulting change in temperature was destroying civilizations. The superpowers were now planning to detonate H-bombs at both Poles in the hope of correcting the problem before everyone got baked in a literal sense. And an old-school newspaper editor decided that he needed to prepare two front pages. The camera zoomed in on headlines.
EARTH SAVED. EARTH DOOMED.
At last, she thought. A bit of harmless escapism.
***
Sallie Murray took a deep breath and carried the breakfast tray into the dining room. Outside the windows of the farmhouse, large, fluffy snowflakes were falling onto the frozen mud of the yard. It was a bleak time of year, a time when Sallie struggled with the recurring depression she insisted on calling 'the winter blues'. She forced a smile as she placed steaming bowls of porridge in front of her children, Zoe and Ben, and her husband Jon.
“Snowing again,” she said, sitting down. “Looks like it might lie, Jon.”
Her husband grunted, dug into his porridge.
“Still, no chance school will be closed over a little sprinkling like that,” she went on, turning to Ben. “Is there, darling?”
The boy looked at her for a moment, then down at his breakfast. His sister looked out at the snow, then turned to Sallie.
“No, mummy,” Zoe said. “Everything will be fine.”
Not for the first time, a chill went through Sallie at her daughter's words, followed by a pang of intense guilt.
Why do I feel like this? How can I suddenly stop loving my own children? What kind of god-awful mother am I?
The weird revulsion she felt for Ben and Zoe had crept up in her over the last few weeks. It was hard for Sallie to pin down any event that had triggered the change. In fact, lately, the children had been better behaved than ever before. And they had done their homework and chores on time, without being nagged. They seemed indifferent to the television, watching it if she put it on, going to bed as soon as she told them to.
The only real problem, so far as she could tell, was a deterioration in their handwriting. They were both producing straggly, printed letters that did not much resemble their earlier, better efforts.
Hardly cause for alarm, she told herself for the hundredth time. Kids today spend so much time on tablets and laptops that handwriting is like some weird, old-fashioned skill.
Her train of thought was interrupted by her phone. A neighbor was inquiring about their dog, a wayward collie that kept escaping to the Murray farm. Zoe and Ben always made a huge fuss over the dog, ignoring instructions not to feed it tidbits.
“No, Jackie, I'm sorry,” Sallie said, “we haven't seen Fenton. Have we, kids?”
She waited for the children to respond, but they continued to scoop up spoonfuls of porridge.
“Answer your mother,” growled Jon.
“No, we haven't seen the dog,” Ben said, without looking up.
“Sorry, Jackie, the kids say he's not been round, but we'll keep an eye out for him. Yes, I know, it is pretty bad, but I'm sure he'll have more sense than to stay out in weather like this. Gotta go, bye!”
After breakfast, Sallie gave out lunches to the husband and kids, and saw them off at the door. Jon went first, unsmiling, delivering his usual peck on the cheek, only grunting as she asked when he might be back. The children's kisses felt just as perfunctory. She stood musing unhappily as she watched them set off across the farmyard towards the main road.
“Just a minute!” she shouted, giving way to a sudden impulse. “I'll get my coat and see you to the bus-stop.”
It's just a harmless little experiment, she thought, as she rushed back inside to grab her coat. Not a mad thing to do. Not mad at all.
Ben and Zoe were waiting at the farm gate, showing no sign of impatience or annoyance. As soon as she caught up with them, they recommenced their walk, Ben on one side of Sallie, Zoe on the other. The snow was falling more swiftly now, the flakes so dense that she could barely make out the early morning traffic passing a quarter mile ahead.
Please, please be normal, she thought. Please react the way I know my kids would react to their mother seeing them off in front of their schoolmates.
The children stopped abruptly, each one turning to look up at her.
“Mummy, please don't come with us to the bus-stop,” Zoe pleaded. “We're not babies.”
“Yeah, mum, it'll be dead embarrassing in front of the other guys,” Ben added. “Not cool.”
Sallie laughed, trying to sound casual.
“Of course, silly me,” she said, taking a pace back. “I just worry about you when … when the weather's bad, you know.”
“We know how you feel,” said Zoe, matter-of-factly. “But there's nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about, mother,” said Ben. “Nothing at all.”
Then, without another word, the children turned and walked on. Zoe's tiny figure vanished i
nto the blizzard first, then Ben's. Sallie stood looking after them, only vaguely aware of the icy flakes settling on her face, starting to clot her hair with moisture. Only the sudden scream of a siren out of the storm brought her back to awareness of her surroundings. Red and blue lights flashed briefly in the swirling whiteness, then vanished.
Sallie turned, and set off back to the farmhouse at a run. Suddenly she felt the full force of the cold, its chill cutting through her coat and jogging pants, reaching up through her old runners to numb her feet. The farmhouse loomed into view, and she began to anticipate the warm glow from the old kitchen range.
Then she heard the whimpering. It was barely audible through the blustering wind and the sound of her shoes on the frozen track. The noise seemed to be coming from the old pig-pens to her left. Sallie paused, beating herself with her arms to generate some warmth, then walked over to the fence. The plaintive sound was a little louder now. Sallie climbed through the fence and picked her way through the deepening snow, to the derelict pens.
At first, she thought it was a heap of discarded clothing, an asymmetric splash of red and black on the pervasive whiteness. Then it moved, and Sallie put a hand to her mouth to stifle a scream. She knelt in the bloody snow, wanting to reach out and somehow repair the poor creature. But too much of the ravaged body had been ripped away, scattered. Fenton, the silly dog who kept running away from home because he loved kids, died the moment she looked into his eyes.
***
Trains were running on the Thames line, but they were not stopping at Hobs Lane.
“She caused problems for one of the fluffers,” said Davenport as he led the way onto the platform.
Jim Davison looked at the security man, raised an eyebrow in amusement.
“Is that the title of your sex tape?” he asked, with feigned innocence.
Davenport replied with a single-fingered gesture, then pointed towards the mouth of the tunnel at the end of the platform.
“Fluffers,” he said, “as you should know, mate, are machines that clean all the fluff from the rails. Used to be done by hand. Bloody awful job. Now every underground rail system has clever little robots that do a sweep in the early hours.”
“They have to clean the tracks daily?” Davison asked. “Why? Rat droppings?”
Davenport gestured at the tunnel.
“People are a lot dirtier than rats. Hundreds of miles of tunnels, millions of people moving every day. That's a lot of skin cells, hair, general detritus best not thought about.”
Jim thought about it, regardless. He felt a chill at the thought of so much random organic matter being shot along the Tube’s tunnels, by the pressurized waves of speeding trains.
“So,” he said to Davenport, “these machines scrub the crud from the tracks?”
The other man nodded.
“And when they encounter some organic matter that's too big to move …”
Rather than complete the sentence, the security man strode forward towards the yellow and black tape that marked the police cordon. That morning, Davenport and Jim had been issued with Home Office passes for the first time. Forster, the head of security, had put it succinctly.
“Shit has hit the fan, and we've been drafted. Official security contractors to the department. Homeland security sub-division.”
Jim, who had served with Special Forces, said nothing. He knew from bitter experience how messy chains of command and territorial struggles could get. He thanked a young, female police officer who lifted the tape so they could duck under it. Then a senior officer was explaining just what was waiting to be bagged up at the end of the platform.
“Young woman, maybe mid-twenties to early thirties,” said the detective. “Badly smashed up, not much left of her face. However, the preliminary examination suggests that she wasn't hit by a train. The medical examiner thinks she was strangled first, then the body was stripped, and only then was it mutilated. Face destroyed, and fingerprints removed simply by snipping off the fingertips.”
Davenport nodded, looking slightly bored.
Just another day at the office, thought Jim. When we treat this stuff as routine maybe we're already halfway to hell.
“Any idea what kind of weapon was used?” Davenport asked.
“Our guy's not sure,” said the officer, with a slight emphasis on the 'our'.
Resents sharing information with us, Jim thought. But he's not sure how unhelpful he could safely be. Good.
“Well, how about a bladed weapon, like a machete?” Jim suggested.
“See for yourself,” replied the officer. “Looks like a disturbed individual with a knife to me. No ID, naturally, but we're running DNA. That will take a few days. Of course, if she's not on the Home Office system …”
They all knew what that meant. A Jane Doe in a city of nine million legitimate residents, maybe a million more tourists and other travelers, plus uncounted illegal migrants. London was a global hub where unusual and often inexplicable deaths occurred frequently. The police inspector half-turned, indicated the body lying half-concealed by a canvas screen. The Romola Foundation team stepped forward, but Jim stopped short of squatting next to the corpse as Davenport did.
I've seen wounds like these before, he thought. Malpas Abbey. Only then they were inflicted on living bodies. Why change the MO now?
“Yeah, we've seen enough, thanks.”
Davenport stood up, and Jim saw his face was pale, and heard his breathing, fast and shallow. The other man began to speak, then a Tube train approached with a rumble like thunder, blasted through the narrow confines of the platform. The wave of hot air with the tang of electric ozone made Jim blink, rub his eyes. When he opened them, the body was being manhandled into an opaque plastic bag.
What a bloody awful way for any life to end, Jim thought. Regardless of who or what is responsible.
“Might not be them at all,” Davenport muttered as they ducked under the cordon. “There are so many sick bastards in this town. Human monsters.”
“Let's hope so,” Jim concurred.
Maybe not this time, he thought. But the Interlopers must figure it out at some point. The swarming, anonymous life of a modern city makes it their kind of place.
***
In a white room, Denny sat in a chair that reminded her of visits to the orthodontist. Her head was strapped into position, electrodes on her skull. In front of her face, a series of pictures appeared on a screen. She had been told that in a room along the corridor one of the survivors of the Phantom Dimension was in a similar position. The difference was that the 'target' person's screen was showing a kind of psychedelic pattern designed to relax their mind and make it receptive. The idea was to determine if some kind of telepathic link existed between those who had been captives of the Soul Eater.
The images that changed at intervals of ten seconds were usually mundane, but sometimes baffling. Close-ups of nondescript machine parts or pictures of bizarre modern art would appear after a series that went dog, tree, child, automobile. Denny did as she was told, trying to mentally transmit the picture into the ether. But despite her best efforts to co-operate, the Soul Eater is what kept appearing in her mind. The creature of a nightmare that she knew was all too real, albeit in another world.
Eventually, Denny grew tired and was about to ask for a break. She looked up at the closed-circuit TV camera that stared unblinkingly down at her from a corner of the room, and gave a weary smile. But before she could speak, the door opened and the foundation's lead scientist hurried in.
“You're doing well,” said Doctor Zoffany. “But I think that's enough for one morning.”
Zoffany began unstrapping Denny's head and removing the delicate monitoring gear, all the while keeping up a stream of inane, comforting chatter. The chief scientist had an almost maternal manner that Denny had sometimes found irritating, but not today. Days earlier, Zoffany had noticed the dark patches under Denny's eyes, and suggested some kind of medication.
The in-house medi
cal team could prescribe mild sedatives, Zoffany pointed out. Denny had turned the offer down, having seen too many people in her profession use prescription meds as a crutch. She was starting to regret that refusal now.
“I wonder if–” she began, but was interrupted when a white-coated technician entered.
“How is he?” Zoffany asked.
The newcomer looked pointedly at Denny, then back at her superior.
“Let's not keep secrets from our own operatives,” said Zoffany, pointedly.
The technician reddened slightly.
“Sorry, Doctor,” she said. “It's just that the subject has had … well, a bit of a melt-down. We've put him under sedation.”
“What was the problem?” Denny demanded, feeling sure she knew the answer already.
“Apparently,” the technician said slowly, looking from Denny to her boss, “the only images he got were of that – thing. The Class Two creature in the PD. Nothing else.”
“Crap.”
Denny felt a pang of guilt as Zoffany dismissed her underling with a request for a full report by noon.
“Not your fault,” the scientist went on, reaching out to give Denny a brief hug. “I think we've proven that whatever psychic capacity was developed in you is linked to that entity.”
Denny nodded, and bit her lip. Then a thought struck her.
“She said Class Two – what does that mean?”
Zoffany gave a wan smile, picked up an old-style clipboard and started to tick boxes.
“You may have noticed that science is about classifying things, whether we understand them or not. Interlopers are Class One beings – we know they're intelligent, though we've never given one an IQ test. The Soul Eaters, and those other beings, the Black Stars, are Class Two – intelligence of animal level, at the very least. Perhaps as smart as whales or dolphins, or as dumb as sea urchins.”
Denny made a noncommittal noise.
Nightmare Revelation Page 2