by M. T Hill
‘Shepherd—’
His name reverberates. The fumes are overwhelming. His headtorch flickers. A hot sting at his neck. A thick, searing pain through the rubber of his darts. Shep lashes out, falls backwards, catches an elbow on a structural joint of the shelving and brings a ream of slimy cardboard across his body. A length of warm, squirming rope lashes his face.
‘Shep!’
Distantly, the walls distorting, Shep swears he sees it. It, this anti-thing, takes form as white and yellow, then black. The segments of a hornet’s thorax, bald and hollow like the dead bird’s, spasming like the beetle he crushed on the road. A single compound eye, with Shep’s drawn face reflected in countless cells.
Mass against the wall, suffocating, Shep is rooted there as the sound builds to a frenzy. He grips his face, fixates on the leaking bird through his fingers. He’s desperate for the reveal, for this to be an illusion. A fresh and awesome light breaks in the corridor, too bright to withstand. He shields his eyes, and a shape unlike any other sears his mind, imprinting on him a complex, lacy silhouette that deepens into a reticulated structure, like a giant metal hive. His knees give way. Shep drops to his knees on the wet floor and holds his ears as the sound resolves to a word:
‘Sepsis.’
Shep screams, and screams. He only stops when a set of fingers wrap his forearm.
‘You filthy little bastard.’
Shep uncovers his ears. He tries to see.
It’s a man.
A man whose own headtorch renders his face a skull.
And the man says, ‘That your dirtbike up there, is it?’
The Journalist
Freya likes to compose her analogue notes in the fake-leather planners her father collected at conferences in the years before he retired. Wherever Freya is in the house, there’ll be one of these planners nearby, filling up with thoughts, malformed feature pitches, sentence fragments, or the odd line of fiction she admires.
Sitting on her bed, late again, Freya works in a planner debossed with ENGLAND’S YEAR OF REGROWTH, and the logo of a corporate services firm. At the top of the page she’s written Stephen, underlined as a title, with alcohol under that. The rest of the page is blank.
When the bungalow’s central heating clicks off, she gets under the covers and holds the empty page to her face. Stephen… alcohol… what? What’s her lead? Or, what was his trigger? She flicks back through the planner, hoping some kind of clue might be in her previous notes, a line hiding between sedimentary layers. She often rifles through her planners like this, but tonight it’s a craving – a nagging sense that she’s lost an important word or fact. And all the while she’s absorbed by the idea of there being a lie, a cover-up, even if the editor’s dismissal lingers: there’s nothing in it; she’s reaching because she’s desperate; Stephen’s family just don’t want to accept his death.
Freya goes on staring at the page. Being tired doesn’t help, and her untidy shorthand makes it worse. There’s definitely a use-by date to her notes. Over time these symbols shed their meaning, bleed together, and sometimes she wonders if she’s written them at all.
Still. The past doesn’t help. And she can only go deeper if there’s a thread to pull.
Stephen. Alcohol. Climbing. Urbex.
This is the first time our Ste’s shut up since I’ve known him.
Suddenly spiked with adrenaline, Freya grabs her tablet and quickly syncs its bookmarks with her father’s Mac. She loads up the urbex boards she found in her first dredge.
Had Stephen used these forums? Or was he a lurker? It must be worth a shot. From what she understands of the scene – not to mention Stephen’s interest in photography – it isn’t far-fetched to assume he was involved. Urbex might be antisocial, lonely by necessity, but it seems social in its competition, its camaraderie. Going by Stephen’s friends’ public posts, Toby’s words, he was surely too enthusiastic, too gregarious, to stay on the fringes.
She only has to find him.
Across each forum, Freya runs a series of searches with keywords targeting funerals and wakes. This serves up several RIP threads, and her screen fills steadily with emojis and memes that crash against the inadequate language of grief.
Then a snag. Alongside blocks on search engine spiders, the forums limit non-members to only a small amount of trawling, which is doubly frustrating when the tools are skittish. Luckily, Freya’s years skimming streams for juicy stories count for something. Soon she’s lined up recent RIP threads from five forums, each serving as a eulogy to a recently lost member. Most link off to photo galleries as well.
Stephen’s remembrance thread is there in the eighth tab, hosted on the UK’s ‘second biggest urbex report site’. Consider it professional serendipity. In Stephen’s thread there are pictures of the church service she’d attended, plus an extra set from his burial, after which they had planted a remembrance tree above his casket. The thread is titled: Windscale’s last problem: in memory of Ste Parsons.
And there it is. Stephen’s username.
‘Windscale,’ Freya whispers.
Whatever she owes to diligence – Stephen’s popularity and the forum’s size must have made for good odds – the satisfaction is heady, and she rolls through the thread slightly breathless. Standard stuff – support, grief, memories. But a lead.
New window. User search. Exact word.
Windscale.
Stephen’s mission reports spring onto the screen – over a hundred in total. Like his public posts, they’re sharply written, scrupulous, well formatted. As Freya reads them, she gives Stephen’s written voice his brother’s accent, and quickly comes to recognise an approach. Stephen broke into disused factories to shoot decrepit machinery. His pictures, unlike his terse prose, are heavily processed – and their cumulative effect is dizzying. Blacks and browns and golds, struts and gears and holes. Taken together, his reports form an essay on decay, a nod to his own finiteness, a lament for lost industry. Here was a man who knew his obsessions.
Stephen’s reports do offer some range, though. Wide-angle shots of fractured landscapes. Close-ups of weeds. Abandoned vehicles from the Second World War. A sleeping barn owl, so close by that Stephen hadn’t been able to resist putting a hand in shot for perspective. What looks like an abandoned sewage works. A set of dire warnings tied to the perimeter fence of a royal property, and then a shot of the hole he cut in the fence.
Only one report sticks out as truly different. The screen actually stutters as she scrolls down to it, and does so again when she edges back up. The post has no title or caption, except for a block of Unicode squares under a picture of what looks like a bird’s nest. This could mean the text has been pasted in from a foreign language set, or written in characters the browser doesn’t support. But this doesn’t wash – her tablet is new, and has happily loaded emojis elsewhere on the site.
Under this post, the comments range from exclamatory – ‘WTF is this, windscale?’ – to impressed – ‘crossposting to cursed_urbex’. One commenter hints at a minor conspiracy by suggesting Stephen’s account has been hacked, and to look out for posts like it on other forums.
Freya reaches the last of the comments. Stephen had replied-all with a single winky face and closed the thread.
She doesn’t know what to make of it. The picture is off-style, like it was taken in a hurry, and not with a good camera. Maybe it was just a nest, and his flash had oversaturated the image, and he didn’t have time to take any more. But there are colour gradients in the nest material – and Freya’s heard enough from the picture editors to know that blown highlights will erase details.
She copies and pastes the block of Unicode squares into her writing app to see if swapping fonts will reveal an answer. No luck. She pastes the whole entry into the forum’s search box, looking for reposts, but nothing comes of that either. She reverse-searches the picture for similar images across the web, again without joy. Maybe it’s encrypted. Or maybe it’s deliberately abstruse, and Stephen wanted t
his reaction. She checks the image name – 0000001.jpg – and its metadata, which has been stripped. Lastly, she tries to save the image to her desktop, so she can open it in a photo-editing app, zoom in a little. Unknown error.
Freya yawns. One in the morning. She screenshots Stephen’s profile page and goes for a glass of water. There, at the sink, watching threads of silvery rain crawl down the window, her outline blending with the leylandii outside, she feels sick with exhilaration.
Sleep can wait.
Back in her room, back on her tablet, she picks through Stephen’s work once more, the pages and pages of his reports. She enjoys them as she had in the hours before – wonderment, fascination, intrigue. But there’s nothing to hint at why he’d posted such a weird picture – and still nothing to suggest what had made him start drinking.
In her planner she writes: anomalous.
Come two in the morning. Freya’s reached the last of Stephen’s reports – the earliest post. It’s basically an intro – the sites he liked, the grades he climbed – with a full-body portrait. It must’ve been taken a while ago: he’s softer round the edges than in his most recent shots. More interesting, though, is the way he has an arm slung round a woman’s shoulders, hers around his waist. Their faces are pixelated, but it’s telling that they don’t mind being so close to each other. From the colour-studded walls in the background, and the way their tops are dark with sweat, they must be standing in a climbing centre. Big Walls, Manchester, at a guess. That’s where friends from Stephen’s wider network want to hold a memorial.
‘Who are you, then?’ Freya asks the screen.
The photo caption reads, Me and my partner in crime.
Freya wrinkles her nose. Just a phrase? Just a friend? Or was it more? She tabs to Stephen’s RIP thread and goes through every message, looking for signs of a relationship, a deeper trust, a more keenly felt pain. Her reasoning being, if you don’t mind someone else’s sweat on you, you’re close. And if you’re close, if you share a hobby like climbing, then surely you’ll be compelled to say something on your partner’s passing. Accidentally reveal, however carefully you do it, your connection.
There are contenders in that thread – a lot of single kisses, a lot of hearts, countless admiring compliments. But she knows when she’s found it. A single line with no punctuation or caps. Unassuming, actually – not a post she’d have picked up by scanning. Definitely a comment she’d missed on her first pass. And her heart jumps.
you lost our bet
* * *
In Freya’s bones, in her full throat, she believes this came from the woman in Stephen’s picture. And if Freya’s own feelings about her ex are anything to go by, she knows this woman is still out there, with a stake in Stephen’s life.
Freya scribbles down the phrase in her planner.
‘You lost our bet,’ Freya repeats. The sentence already indelible. She clicks the woman’s username – freighter.
This is it. Goosebumps. There, buried in freighter’s profile, is a repost of Stephen’s nest photo. And beneath it some text:
It drags into its wake proximal asteroids. It bends the also travelling light. A galaxy in span, this journey, under the banner of mitosis and promulgation. The doubling of its image. The path for its replicants is decided, for the extremities of worlds are essential. The health of the inheritors is sought by those with the same journey ahead and all of that fortitude to muster. Carry it for us.
Freya reads the paragraph again and again. Its strange language and syntax give it the feel of an extract, or a poor translation. It causes a prickling that runs deeper than tiredness.
She scrolls to the space below it. Comments closed.
‘Okay,’ Freya says, skin electric blue by the tablet screen.
This woman – this is how she gets in.
The Steeplejack
The man pulls Shep from an old Land Rover and marches him towards a building with a collapsing pitch roof. Shep, hazed and foul-smelling, cable-tied at the wrists, is back from survival mode: drained and cold and desperate. Searching the road for markers, for anything familiar. They’re on the fringes of a town. Over there a row of pebble-dashed terraces, a bus stop blinking adverts. He desperately hopes it’s Whitehaven.
Inside, the building smells of wool and burnt candles. Childish drawings tacked to the walls. A community centre? A nursery? A Scout hut? Shep limps through with syrupy limbs, a thick head. It’s worse than a hangover, this, because it feels like it might never end. His visible breath is his only grounding. What did he see back there?
The woman behind a desk in the corner of the room seems unfazed to see them. ‘Early doors,’ she says, tapping her watch. ‘What you in for?’
‘Breaking and entering,’ the man says. Not local police, it turns out, but a freelance security ranger. Going by his military-spec equipment, the IR goggles, he’s a reservist as well. The kind of person who enjoys the hunt more than the pay. There’s every chance he’d followed Shep from the trailhead. That, or Shep’s hacked nav wasn’t as impenetrable as the grafter had promised.
‘This a copshop?’ Shep asks the clerk.
‘Neighbourhood Watch,’ she tells him.
Limited powers, but bad enough. Fingers crossed they don’t scan his jaw, or keep up their subscription to the national database.
‘Are the police coming?’ Shep asks.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ the clerk says. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Shep.’
‘Shep what?’
‘Shepherd. Like Madonna.’
A patient smile. ‘Age?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
The clerk pulls a face. ‘You’re younger than that, Shepherd. Where do you live?’
‘Near Manchester.’
‘Specifically.’
He gives his mother’s old address in Wythenshawe.
‘Long way from home, aren’t you?’
Shep squeezes his eyes shut. The fog won’t lift. The intricate structure he saw down in the bunker is burned right in. The smell of the corridor. The sound of his name. The scale of the place had warped, like it had swollen around him.
‘Came up for a night,’ Shep says. ‘Where’s my bike? Helmet?’
‘Confiscated,’ the ranger says.
The clerk glances over Shep’s shoulder. She shrugs sadly. ‘Been caught like this before, haven’t you?’
‘No,’ Shep says. But of course he has. Skateboarding on public furniture, tagging a local government building, halfway up a pylon with a camera on his forehead—
‘What do you do for a living, Shepherd?’ the clerk asks.
‘Trainee steeplejack.’
‘And what’s one of those when it’s at home?’
‘A labourer who climbs stuff.’
‘Like steeples?’
‘Like anything high that needs fixing.’
The clerk shoots the ranger a weary look. ‘How high?’
Shep shrugs. ‘Few hundred feet? Depends.’
‘Aren’t you scared of heights?’
‘No,’ he says, and nods at the clerk’s hands. ‘I’m scared of desks.’
The ranger gives Shep a rough shove. ‘Right now you should be scared of blacklisting,’ he says. ‘Cocky little shit.’
Shep turns to him. The ranger snarls.
‘Try blacklisting someone you’ve watched squatting over a bucket since he was a green,’ Shep says. And with it comes a pang for Gunny, and the job he’s probably lost. When you’re up on a rig, perfect sky, your crew is all you have. You take your power naps under the cathead, you work and eat together, you smoke and drink together, you piss and shit together. It’s all shared – the cold-bitten hands, the weeping sores, the cigarettes cupped away from the wind. ‘We’re family,’ Shep adds. ‘No blacklists.’
The clerk finishes scribbling in her pad. ‘Do you want to call someone?’
‘Lost my mobile,’ Shep tells her. ‘And I’m no good at remembering numbers.’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s a brief you’ll need,’ the ranger says. ‘Our client will press charges, trust me.’
Shep doesn’t turn around this time. He blinks. ‘What charges?’
‘Aggravated trespass. Burglary. Desecration.’
‘Desecration? Burglary? What you on about?’
‘I saw what you did to that badger, you little pervert. I found the wrap on your army bag. Souvenir, eh? One to show your cyber-pals?’
Shep’s guts shift. If the ranger knows about the message boards, he has Shep’s motive down pat, and this could be the last time he gets away with it. The minimum term is harsh to set examples. No ifs or buts.
‘You weren’t down that old bunker out there, were you?’ the clerk asks.
‘The very one,’ the ranger says.
‘Christ almighty.’ The clerk shakes her head. ‘What are you kids even doing down there?’
Shep can’t answer. What does she mean by that? Kids? There were no other reports – he’d checked and rechecked the boards to make sure. There wasn’t even much posted from the wider region in the last few months. There’d been nothing to say Shep wasn’t the first to try his luck – there was no graffiti – and the idea of being second makes him queasy. He didn’t go through all that for leftovers.
‘When?’ Shep asks.
She looks at the ranger. ‘Few months ago, wasn’t it? Pair of them. That good-looking couple.’
‘Really?’ Shep says.
‘You heard,’ the ranger says. ‘And they weren’t stupid enough to bring a bloody trail bike with them, either. Who’re you working for?’
‘Working for?’ A flickering bulb behind the clerk starts to fluster him. ‘No one.’
‘My arse,’ the ranger says.
‘I swear,’ Shep says. ‘I was just out riding. I needed a wazz.’
The ranger sniffs, indignant. ‘Riders don’t dress up like special forces. They don’t mutilate wildlife, either. Telling you, mate – they’re going to lob the book at you.’