by Lou Morgan
“And what about Mum?” Mia asked, appearing at the bottom of the stairs. Everything about her looked dull and hollow. “What am I supposed to tell her?”
“Where is she?” Noah replied. “She working?”
“When isn’t she? She’s in Nottingham visiting a couple of suppliers. She’ll be home on Friday.”
“So don’t tell her anything. Don’t speak to her. In fact, try not to speak to anyone. The fewer people who know about this, the better.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Christ, no. For a start, my mother’s a nurse – how exactly do you think she’d take the news that I’d popped a load of unlicensed pills I’d got online? What if someone else found out and thought she knew about it? What if she lost her job? We’re broke enough as it is – not like all of you.”
“You know what you’re asking us to do, don’t you? You’re asking us to lie to everyone. You’re asking me to pretend I don’t know that Dom is out there in the water. You’re asking us to pretend that everything’s going to be OK when it’s not…”
“It might be, Mia. It might still be OK.”
“Not for Dom, it won’t. And not for me, or Mum.”
“Then just think how much worse it would be for her if the same thing happened to you, too.”
Mia recoiled, blinking at Noah through bloodshot eyes. “Was that a threat?”
“Come off it.”
“It sounded like a threat to me.” She looped her arm through Tigs’s and they stood side by side, staring at the others in the room. Still silent, Juliet moved closer to them, and suddenly the group was split, with Mia, Tigs and Juliet facing Noah and Grey – with Izzy frozen between them.
“I guess I don’t need to point out that you’re the one who got us into this.” Noah jabbed a finger towards Tigs, who shook her head.
“Well, obviously. I held you down and poured the pills down your throat, didn’t I?”
“You might as well have…”
“Seriously? You know why you took them, just as well as the rest of us do. You even tried to get more. Admit it. You wanted to win.”
“From where I’m standing right now, this doesn’t look like winning.” Grey snarled at them both, taking a swing at a pile of magazines stacked on the table. Everyone watched as the pile slumped sideways. It probably wasn’t quite the dramatic gesture Grey had been hoping for, but maybe it was better that way.
Izzy couldn’t take it any more. She was so tired. Everything ached. Her mouth felt like it was full of cotton wool and a sharp, sparkling pain that had settled behind her eyes was threatening to turn into a proper headache. She pinched the bridge of her nose, hoping it would help, but all that happened was her already-tired eyes started to water. It was all too much, and she could barely hold back her yell of frustration. Noah was sniping at Tigs. Mia was angry, Grey was angry. Juliet was a mess and…
Everything became very clear again in an instant, as Izzy’s gaze locked on to the open front door behind Mia and Tigs, and the empty space where Juliet had been standing a moment before.
“Guys…? Where did Juliet go?”
It had got surprisingly late. Outside, the sky was darkening to a velvety blue. Mia slammed the door behind them. “Where would she go?”
“I don’t know.” Izzy already had her phone in her hand and was dialling Juliet’s number. It rang once, then cut out as they passed behind the shadow of Lauderdale Tower and the signal vanished. “Stupid phone…” She swore at it and tried again, but it stubbornly refused to connect. By now, they were on the walkway over the middle of the lake again – and every single one of them was completely fixed on not looking over their shoulder towards the waterfall. It wasn’t that Dom was suddenly any less important. It was simply that there wasn’t much any of them could do to help him. There would be time for Dom. It just wasn’t now.
“Come on!” Grey was ahead, hurrying them on. “How long ago did she leave? Did anyone see her? Noah? Iz?”
“I didn’t. I wasn’t looking. It must have been when Grey knocked the magazines over. We were all watching him, weren’t we? I mean, after everything I said about sticking together I wasn’t exactly expecting her to just … run off!” Noah sounded slightly out of breath. He was clearly struggling against exhaustion. Izzy knew how that felt – every step was like trying to run through syrup. Forty-eight hours suddenly seemed like a very long time.
They reached the end of the bridge, and ahead of them the long curving walkway swept around the back of the Barbican Centre. Izzy eyed it, thinking of the phantom footsteps she’d heard there. Had that been yesterday or today? And the lift – the horrible, horrible lift. Was that only this morning? It seemed so much longer ago than that. Everything was distorting, twisting – just like the faces on that poster. Knowing it was all in her head should make her feel better, she knew that, but somehow, it didn’t. Somehow, it made her feel worse. Because no matter where she went or what she did, there was no escape. Nowhere to run or to hide. The horror went with her.
Forty-eight hours suddenly seemed like a very, very long time indeed.
They ran down the ramp from the bridge to the entrance level of the Barbican Centre, barging through groups of theatregoers there for the evening show.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry…” Grey muttered as they shouldered their way through the crowd and out of the doors on to the lakeside terrace. The globe-shaped lighting cast strange shadows on the paving and on the concrete walls of the Centre, and as they ground to a halt to catch their breath and to look around, Izzy could have sworn she saw one of the shadows move.
“Have you got her yet?” Tigs peered over Izzy’s shoulder at her phone.
“Not yet…” She dialled again and, this time, the phone rang. “Call Kara. Juliet might have gone to her place…”
“I’m not calling Kara,” Tigs snorted.
Mia shook her head. “Now, Tigs? You’re going to be like this now? God. I’ll call her. We need to find Juliet…” She tailed off, and took out her own phone.
“Before it’s too late.” Noah finished the sentence for her and hopped on to one of the outdoor tables nearby, picking his way between a couple of empty beer bottles and wine glasses as he scanned the terrace for any sign of Juliet. “I don’t think she’s here.”
On the other end of Izzy’s phone line, there was a muffled scrabbling sound, and then a quiet, “Hello?”
“Juliet!” Izzy stuck her hand in the air and flapped it to get the others’ attention. They crowded around her – all except for Mia, who was speaking quickly into her own phone. She must have got hold of Kara. “Jools, where are you? We’re coming to get you.”
“I can’t. I just … can’t. I’m sorry, OK? I can’t pretend and I can’t lie about it. I have to tell someone. I have to. Dom. He’s… I’m sorry… But my parents. Maybe they can help…” She was out of breath, and in the background Izzy could hear car horns, a siren.
A moment later, the same siren passed somewhere nearby.
“Jools, where are you? It’s not safe.”
“I’m sorry…” Juliet whispered again, and the line went dead.
Izzy stared at her phone, then looked at the others. “She hung up.”
Noah jumped down from the table. “We have to find her. Did she say where she was?”
“No, but she’s not far. She’s on the street. That siren that just went along the road? It went past her first.”
Grey cut in. “It was an ambulance, wasn’t it?” He frowned. “She’s in Smithfield. She’s heading for Bart’s.”
“The hospital?”
“Her parents, remember?”
Izzy went cold. Juliet’s mum and dad were both doctors at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, right around the corner.
She was going to tell them everything.
“There’s only two ways she could have gone – either down Long Lane, or down Carthusian Street,” said Grey, as they hurried up a flight of steps towards the nearest exit from the Barbican’s w
alls. “If we split into two groups and each take one of those, we should meet at Smithfield Market and be able to catch her before she makes it to the main entrance of Bart’s.”
In her mind, Izzy could picture Juliet making her way down one of those two roads, pushing through crowds of commuters heading to the Tube station, past the pubs and the sandwich shops – now closed for the day, their blinds pulled down – towards the Victorian hulk of Smithfield meat market, squatting in the centre of the district. By now, the market would be starting to come to life, the refrigerated lorries all beginning to arrive as the butchers’ stalls opened up ready for another night of trading. It had surprised Izzy, when they had first moved to the Barbican, that the market only opened at night.
Walking through it one day, she’d asked Grey why, and he had laughed. “Vampires, innit?” he’d said with a shrug. The truth was that, like most of the big London markets, it opened at night so all the restaurants could get their supplies for the next day’s meals, but for a while, the sound of the lorries arriving through the night had made her smile to herself.
They decided that Mia and Noah would go ahead on Long Lane, which ran straight from the Barbican to the entrance to Bart’s Hospital. Izzy, Grey and Tigs would head down Carthusian Street, running parallel to Long Lane. On the way, Tigs would collect Kara from her building just around the corner, and the two of them would separate off and check the back of Charterhouse Square, with its private garden, just to be sure, and then hang back in case Juliet changed her mind and backtracked. There was no way they could miss her.
“Nobody’s on their own, everybody stays safe,” said Noah.
“You really do think there’s someone after us, don’t you?” Mia said quietly, rubbing her fingers along the hem of her top.
“I don’t know what to think.” Noah shrugged. “But better safe than sorry, right?”
They crossed the busy main road below the wall marking one of the Barbican’s boundaries and stopped outside the Tube station. Izzy watched as Noah and Mia disappeared round the corner and down Long Lane, then turned to follow Tigs and Grey in the opposite direction, up the road towards Carthusian Street. Had Juliet come this way? What was she thinking? What if Dom had been right? What if Noah was right? What if there really was someone watching them … following them?
And worse, what if Juliet really did tell her parents about the pills? What then?
The world spun around her and suddenly she couldn’t see Grey or Tigs. They had been there a second ago, right by the postbox. But everything seemed to have skipped ahead. Again, it was like she was watching a film that glitched. She had blinked, and everything had shifted forward.
“Oh, no…”
The streetlight overhead flickered, then fizzled out with a smell of smoke.
“It’s not real. It’s not real.”
But it felt real. The shiver that ran down her spine felt real. The hairs standing up on her arms felt real. The prickling along her scalp, beneath her hair – that felt real, too. The cool of the wall that she backed herself into? Real. The interesting smell coming from the guy in the battered green parka and filthy jeans who just brushed past her to get to the cash machine? Very real.
Maybe that was the trick? If you knew it wasn’t real, it wasn’t so bad. Maybe you could stop it. Maybe that was the way…
The man in the parka stopped dead. And then slowly, so slowly, he began to turn towards her, almost like he was on a turntable. His feet didn’t move, and neither did his legs or his head. He just revolved until he was facing her. Dirty blond hair fell across his face, hiding it, and the way it was all matted together, it couldn’t have been washed in months.
Izzy squeezed her eyes shut. “Don’t look. Not real. Don’t look. Not real…” she whispered to herself over and over again. Sure enough, nothing happened. Nobody seemed to notice. No one stopped to say anything to her. Everything was normal. She was just a girl standing at the side of the street, leaning against the stone front of a bank. Maybe she was waiting for a bus. With her eyes shut.
It was all in her head. And if it was all in her head, she could make it go away. It was her head, wasn’t it? And if it was her head, that made it her story. Her rules.
She took a deep breath. She had to open her eyes; had to catch up with the others. Maybe Grey was already coming back for her.
She opened one eye, keeping her gaze firmly fixed on a lump of chewing gum beside her foot. It was fine. The world was fine. It was all in her head.
She opened the other eye and looked up.
He was waiting.
As she raised her head, the man in the parka was in her face – barely a finger-length from her. He leaned close, stretching his neck further than anyone should have been able to. He reeked of decay, of something old and rotten, and when he opened his mouth, his teeth were blackened stumps that made her think of logs left after a fire. His hair still hung over his face, but as he leaned in and let out a shriek that grated along her bones, it blew back and away from his face.
He had no eyes.
There were only bloody sockets where his eyes should have been, and as he shrieked and she screamed, he raised his hand almost to her face. His fingers and nails were twisted like claws, and Izzy couldn’t tell where the nail ended and the finger began. She could almost feel them brush against her – nails sharp as knives, and flesh unpleasantly soft and wet against her skin – when he snapped his arm back. His lower jaw twisted into something that could have been a grin, and then he dug his nails deep into the flesh of his forehead. Dark, sticky liquid oozed out as he began to tear off his own face in front of her.
She couldn’t scream any more. Couldn’t even move. All she could do was watch as flesh peeled away from bone, as black blood bubbled up around his fingertips and dripped down the stranger’s, the … thing’s face. It couldn’t be a man. What kind of man could do that?
Ribbons of skin flopped wetly around her feet, and still he tore and still he made that awful sound. And she was sure that somehow, from behind his missing eyes, he was watching her. Watching her fear. Watching her and enjoying it…
“Izzy!”
She heard her name, and jerked her head sideways. The world skipped again, jumped back into step.
“You’re OK. You’re OK.” Grey had his hand on her arm.
The stranger was gone.
There was no blood on the pavement, no strips of flesh and skin. Just a pinkish-grey sucker of chewing gum.
He wasn’t real.
She knew he wasn’t real, even as Grey pulled her away from the wall and put an arm around her and she felt her whole body trembling with fright against him.
He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He couldn’t have been real. Couldn’t have been.
If she kept telling herself that, maybe after a while she would start to believe it.
Chapter Twelve
“Are we going to have a problem?” Grey asked, pulling away from her gently.
“No, I’m fine. I am. It was just…” Izzy stared up into his eyes. “It was so real.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“No!” It came out as a shout. “No, I just want to forget it,” she said, more softly.
“I didn’t mean it to make you feel better,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, I want to know what’s coming.”
“You’ve not seen anything yet?”
“Maybe. I think… I mean… How would I know if I had? Dom didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference…”
“Oh, you’d know,” Izzy said, her voice grim.
Tigs was standing on the corner, waiting for them. “Are you done with your little drama, then?” she asked, but she looked uncomfortable and she kept shifting her feet as though there was something on the ground she was trying to avoid. Izzy looked her up and down and, despite herself, she smiled.
“It’s started, hasn’t it?”
“Huh?” Tigs blinked at her and for a second, Izzy saw underneath the us
ual Tigs façade. She looked exhausted and, more than that, she looked scared. Her eyes looked like they had been forced wide open and held that way with pins, and her whole body was tense.
“You’ve seen something.”
“Rats,” Tigs said with a shudder. “There were rats. Not, like, normal rats. Not like that at all. They had … teeth, and … eyes … and … everyone was staring but nobody … nobody…” She gulped. “They were everywhere. And they were… They were…” She shivered, unable to finish even part of the story. A little voice at the back of Izzy’s head said that Tigs had no idea how lucky she was only to be seeing rats. Even if they did have teeth and eyes. Especially if they had teeth and eyes, come to think of it, because surely rats without either of those would be worse?
“There’s no rats,” Grey said, although he glanced around on the pavement, just to be sure. “And we’ve got to go.”
Right on cue, Tigs’s phone beeped and the softer, scared Tigs disappeared. The old Tigs was back. “Kara.” She glared at the message on her screen. “She’s waiting. Like it’s not bad enough that we’re probably all going to die. I have to die with Kara.”
“Jesus, Tigs. Of all the things to be freaked by. What’s your problem with her now? Especially if she helps keep you alive?” Grey asked over his shoulder. He was already striding ahead down Carthusian Street.
“Nothing,” Tigs snapped back, but Grey didn’t seem to hear.
“You’re not OK, are you? Not really,” Izzy said gently, and Tigs’s shoulders slumped.
“No. I’m not.” She stopped walking and looked at Izzy, who realized that Tigs’s eyes were full of tears. “I’m so sorry, Izzy. I’m sorry about the pills. I didn’t know. You have to believe me…”
“Of course I do.”
“They were supposed to help. They were supposed to help all of us – Kara, too. So we could be sure nobody had to leave and we could all stay together. I had no idea… And Dom … and…” She looked like she was about to break down. “I didn’t know. I didn’t. I didn’t.”