by Clark, Simon
Get out, Joe. Leave the car. Walk away.
The voice rambled away in my head. For a minute or two I didn’t know why. A chunk of my memory had been wiped.
At last I realized I was in one piece but stuck. The car’s doors were jammed tight.
I gave the windscreen a shove – just a gentle one – and it popped out in one piece.
After what seemed like ten minutes I winkled myself out and slid forward down the bonnet and dropped on my backside to the ground.
I closed my eyes, not thinking, just listening to the Beatles going on about a long and winding road taking them somewhere or other. I’d been on a long and winding road myself. Going somewhere. Where? God only knew.
Then the shadow fell on me.
In that precise second I remembered. My eyes cracked open and I yelled.
‘You’ve made a right bloody mess of this lot, old mate. Heh, heh, heh …’
The face floating over me possessed a chin covered in grey stubble; a pair of boozer’s eyes squinted at me, watery pink and bulging enough just to look odd.
I yanked myself to my feet. I ached from head to bloody foot. The tramp held out a two litre bottle of cider.
‘’Ere. ’Ave a wet. Tha’ looks as if tha’ needs one, heh, heh.’
I looked at it. The bottle neck glistened with the tramp’s spit.
Shaking, I grabbed at it and drank. Christ, that cider was so sweet and cold and just plain wet. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life.
‘’Ere! ’Ere! I meant a swallow, not the whole bloody lot. Giz it back! Oi … Thieving git, I’ll leather thee bloody … Oh? Ta. God bless you son, God bless you.’
Shoving a tenner into his hands I walked away from the wreckage of my car. I drained the bottle in about ten seconds flat.
Then I stood and scoured the horizon. I was hunting that blurred column of air that would tell me where the shadow would be.
Straight away, I found it.
Doncaster’s not a city so it doesn’t have a cathedral. To compensate they built a ruddy great church with a big square tower sprouting out of the middle. The stone it’s built of gleamed milky-white in the late afternoon sunshine. Pretty as a postcard.
As I watched I felt the premonition come sneaking through me as slowly and purposeful as a monk in brothel-creepers.
Yeah …
The shadow fell across it.
Doncaster’s church no longer had a tower – or roof come to that. As a column of white dust rose like a power station plume I turned and walked toward the town centre.
The shadow thing was gradually pulling itself into this world. That smoky look was gone, leaving an increasingly solid shape. And I knew then it was thinking; that thing had a mind. And, worse, I was somehow linked to it. One: it followed me. Slowly at first. Then faster. Two: in Sheffield, and just now in Doncaster, it anticipated where I’d be.
So it read my mind?
How the hell do I know?
Was time like a curtain to it? Just ease back the fabric and take a little peep?
I didn’t have any answers – only a boatload of questions.
At least by that time I was thinking a bit more clearly. Instead of running round like a headless chicken, I tried to get a clearer view of the thing that had ripped into my life with as much subtlety as a battleship.
I circled round a block of shops and back to the market hall, where I could see it towering above the market stalls. It didn’t move a millimetre. Just a haze pillar that cast this tremendous shadow across half the town.
There I watched it for the best part of fifteen minutes. And during this time, although I couldn’t see Doncaster’s smashed church I could hear the sirens. And I could imagine the vicar, white-faced and boggle-eyed, hurrying through the graveyard wringing his hands and frantically wondering just what the hell he could tell his bishop. Does a church carry building insurance against acts of God?
Odd thoughts. They swam through my head like delinquent guppies as I watched the shadow thing hover over the town.
It was hypnotic. Although I couldn’t see its features, I felt as if we were face to face. And although I could see no eyes, I felt deep down the thing watched – no, more than that – the thing scrutinized me. You know something, the more I looked the more it was like when you look at the moon. After a while, your imagination tries to make sense of those dark patches in that silver disc. Look long enough and your imagination pulls those patches into eyes and a mouth and a nose, and before you realize it you’re looking at that sad man in the moon.
So there we were. Two gunslingers in a Wild West town. Streets deserted. Face to face. Fingers itchy above the butts of our six-shooters.
Tense.
Ready.
Waiting.
Just waiting for someone to yell: Draw!
But nobody shouted.
All I could do was watch as that thing inched its way into the reality of a town called Doncaster, South Yorkshire.
A hundred metres high; a pillar of spite and destruction that … the thought was appalling … that needed me. Somehow.
Like watching the moon, as I stood in the street, three hundred metres from the bastard, my mind began hammering together those bits of blurred shape and shadow. And it was building something potent. Something that scared you down to the bone.
It wasn’t just a case of seeing its physical appearance – you know, two arms, two legs, a head.
No. Somehow I began to know its character. What it felt.
When I think of it now, I think of something superior, intelligent – ferociously intelligent at that – so intelligent that if you put it on a scale of one to a hundred, you’re scraping round the four mark and that thing’s topping ninety-nine point nine. I imagine it working year in, year out, like a medieval monk in a cell; it’s working on a job that needs its ultimate concentration, precision; a job that demands its absolute devotion. Now someone had interrupted it with a trivial errand.
Angry?
Christ, the bugger was pissed!
* * *
Bang!
It jumped. A shadow rocket. Shooting up, up. Then down, hitting the ground like a fifty-ton battering ram.
That snapped me out of it like a bucket of water. I ran
– and ran smack into a concrete lamppost. My face caught the worst of it. A tooth in my bottom jaw snapped inward, pain stabbed through to the back of my neck. It hurt like buggery. I just stood shaking my head and spitting blood and white crumbs of tooth enamel onto the pavement.
The shadow would get me now.
I was certain of that. The pain had knocked my vision for six. I didn’t even know which way to run.
For seconds I ground away at my eyes with my fists, just waiting for the hammer to fall.
What’s it like to be crushed like a nice fat bluebottle between a window pane and a thumb?
I’d soon find out.
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes.
It never did come.
No bone-shattering crack from above. No Joe Slatter reduced to strawberry jam on the pavement.
My eyes cleared and I looked up.
It reared up from the road between the market hall and a row of shops.
The shadow had turned … well, it looked odd.
That’s all. Odd. Peculiar.
Nothing much. Just a bit hazier. Sort of frayed round the edges. A smoky chunk of it, a small one, dropped away from it and drifted away over the rooftops, with a haphazard rolling motion.
Much more important than that. Before it had a look of absolute certainty. You know, the hunter that chased its prey. Now I had the image of an old man who had been certain he needed to go to town. Only when he got there he wasn’t so sure what he really wanted.
A minute – that’s all it lasted. Then the edges hardened up. Literally, it was pulling itself together, driving itself back into focus.
Time to go, Joe. Beat the feet, Joe.
Again, I ran.
&nb
sp; In those days I was fit, with muscles like a cruiserweight boxer. So I could run and run without tiring. So that’s what I did. Through the town centre streets. With it all as normal as the grit beneath your feet: Woolies, British Home Stores, shops, pubs, cafés flicking by; no-one there; nothing but the thump of my feet against the paving slabs echoing down the streets.
At last my brain, bit by bit, began to loosen up, even pulling up the odd idea.
Odd idea is the only word for it.
Idea number one: stand and fight the thing?
Shit … What with – a comb and a cashpoint card? Even if it could make contact, a guided missile wouldn’t dent the bastard.
Idea number two: run away?
Where to? Barnsley? Manchester? Cornwall? The dark side of the bloody moon?
I’d tried to run. FACT: It could follow me anywhere. FACT: It could go as fast as I could. FACT: It could even get there before I did. More than that. It could be there before even I knew where I was headed.
I dodged a solitary bus and cut through the Colonnades shopping centre and out into Printing Office Street near the Methodist church.
Idea number three: hide?
That was it! Hide. If I dug in deep. Somewhere it couldn’t find me. Somewhere even if it did find me it could never prise me out.
I rounded the corner onto the High Street as three fire engines hot-arsed by, sirens shrieking.
On my left was a big old stone pile known as the Mansion House. I once knew someone who’d worked there. She’d told me it was basically the local town hall. Riveting facts, eh? But she also told me it had deep, deep cellars. And that during the war those had been the Air Wardens’ HQ. Now if it was strong enough to withstand thousand-pound Nazi bombs, it should be strong enough keep old Mr Shadow at bay.
Getting in was easy. Of course, Sunday, it was locked and deserted, but there’s a way into the cellars down either of two flights of stone steps that run from street level to a timber door that looked as if it’d kept the winter gales at bay since Cromwell was a lad.
On either side of the door were windows. One held no glass and was covered with a loose wire mesh. Two kicks from my size elevens and I was in there.
I saw they used the place as a dump for festering old files and bits of old furniture that had defeated even the hardest arsed Council official.
I found the light switches and took a look round the cellars. There were four or five connecting vaulted rooms built out of solid brick. And beneath the ceilings the roof had been further reinforced by solid baulks of timber, corrugated iron sheeting, steel girders and tubular steel supports. Credit where credit’s due, those old engineers had done a bloody good job.
It could take a nuke and still come back for more.
I’d found my rat hole.
I waited.
And waited.
Perhaps the bastard had slung his hook?
* * *
Later. I began to think of my wrecked car, my busted tooth. This mess was going to cost me an arm and a leg.
I even saw myself being interviewed by some tasty bint for BBC news.
‘And what did you do, Mr Slatter, when this thing that’s laid half of Yorkshire to waste, attacked you?’
‘I ran and I ran and I ran.’
That didn’t sound an attractive admission.
Look, I don’t run from trouble. Not even when I knew I didn’t stand a chance in hell in winning. It’s not the Joe Slatter way.
No. I should be getting even.
Everything has a weakness. Stare a lion in the eye and it’s supposed to back down. Divers can turn an attacking shark by punching it in the sensitive area on top of its snout. That Greek warrior, whatever they called him. They said he was indestructible. But someone planted a poison arrow in his foot and saw that sod off.
The shadow man had his weak spot.
Where?
What would you have done?
Call in the Air Force? Dr Quatermass? Rambo?
No. There was no-one to lead the bloody cavalry over the hill to the rescue this time.
You’re on your own, old son, I told myself as I paced the cellars. You are well and truly on your own.
From cellar to cellar, thoughtfully kicking at boxes, dusty old books; I racked my brains for an answer.
That bastard was big.
Well, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Some hope.
Another thought struck me, enough to pull me up dead.
It wanted something. Why not just give it? Then it might just sod off back were it came from.
And what did it want, Joe?
Me.
It seemed like that. It had followed me across half of friggin’ Yorkshire.
So. Just walk out. Say, ‘Hey! Looking for someone? Well, here I am.’
Then wait for the hammer to fall.
Who was I kidding? I’m no Jesus Christ; no dope-eyed saint just itching to be martyred. No, not bloody likely. I’m Joe Slatter. Life? Loved it, bloody loved it. I wasn’t going to chuck it away for anyone.
Then it came.
At first I didn’t hear it. I only felt a vibration. It buzzed through the surrounding earth, through the brick wall and then into the cellar.
Mr Shadow had found me.
I stood in the centre of the vaulted room in the middle of junked straight-back chairs and old ballot boxes, and I looked up at the ceiling, expecting any moment that thing would crack it open to let the sunlight come flooding in.
There were no windows in that part of the cellar, so I could see nothing. I could only stand there, waiting, with my imagination kicking into overdrive, picturing this thing trying to beat its way in to me, ripping through walls, smashing windows, punching through three-hundred-year-old timber floors like plasterboard.
The obvious way out would be the way I came in. Through the window, onto the stone steps, up onto the street. With it preoccupied cracking its way into the building it might not notice me making a run for it.
I crossed into the other cellar and looked out of the window. All it showed me were the steps, the stairwell wall. When I twisted my head through the window and looked up I could see a slice of sky and the iron railings at street level.
The noise … And it was one hell of a racket. It didn’t seem to be the sound of breaking buildings. A grating, crunching sound. Then it clicked. It wasn’t attacking the Mansion House. No, it was going hell-for-leather at the road.
As I looked up at the bit of sky I saw one of those big steel rubbish skips, the kind they hoist onto the backs of trucks, go whirling through the air at roof level. It vanished. Then came a crunch. The skip, battered, dented, rose again, spilling soil and ballast all over the road.
It was using the skip as a shovel or scoop to crack through the crust of the road, the asphalt, hardcore and stuff, then dig through the soil beneath.
I scrambled back through to the biggest vaulted room and squatted, a hunched, tensed ball of muscle and nerve.
What now? Wait for the bastard to tunnel in? Or run?
Within three minutes the noise had stopped. Quiet. All I could hear was the roaring in my ears, my blood squirting through the veins in my head, pumped by an adrenalin-powered heart.
I risked taking another look. But only made it into the middle chamber. Something was creeping under the big wood door at the end where the steps led up to the street.
Water. And it was no trickle. It bubbled through, running across the brick floor in a steady stream.
That roaring had not been in my ears.
Oh, that bastard was clever. There was no doubt about that. It had cut through the road to find a water main, and then deliberately snapped it open.
By the time I’d run this through my head, the water was up to my ankles; by the time I’d decided to find a way out it was swirling round my knees. A bubbling tide, the colour of drinking chocolate, mixed with mud; pieces of timber and old books knocked against my legs as I ploughed through it. And it was b
loody cold.
So, the bastard didn’t want to dig me out. It would flood me out.
God knows how many gallons a minute poured into that cellar. It wouldn’t need a genius to tell me in five minutes I’d be swimming.
And in six I’d be drowning.
There had to be some other way out.
I began to hunt for a door. But within seconds the cellar lights blew with a brittle crack. Dark took on new meaning down there. This was the total absence of light.
I stumbled into one room and immediately found a flight of stone steps. At last, I thought, I’m out of here. I ran up the steps only to crack my head against the ceiling. Feeling with my hands rammed the naked truth down my throat. At some time the way upstairs had been bricked off.
These were the stairs to nowhere. I went back the way I’d come.
Now the water bubbled up around my shoulders; so cold you could hardly breath, and all full of planks and chairs and empty bottles and any old shit down there ramming into you so you could hardly walk.
My feet kicked against something underwater. Holding my breath I went down to touch it.
A step.
Another step.
Three, four, five steps – all going up. I followed them, my head breaking the surface at number eight. About a dozen in all, they led up out of the water to two wooden doors.
One had a small metal grill through which daylight shone. The other, plain and with no handles, had to lead into the building. By touch I fumbled round until I found something solid which I could use to hammer at the door.
My hands found a fire extinguisher, the old-fashioned kind welded together out of cast iron.
That door didn’t know what hit it. Ten years of body building at that factory paid off. I was through the door in four minutes flat, sending a tidal wave of water and muck into the building, over expensive carpets, swirling away antique tables.
I just staggered out, looking like a half-drowned rat, into this stately home type of place with crystal chandeliers and portraits of dead Mayors and Duchesses.
One second later the water, me, one of us, triggered the alarm. With sirens rattling the windows I yanked one open and dumped myself into a side street.