Sleepless

by Lou Morgan

  “Hey! Can you move away from the door please?” Someone was banging on the door – and with a rush of air into her lungs, Izzy found herself alone again. It – she, the hallucination, whatever it was – had vanished, and Izzy was left leaning heavily on the glass door with one hand. On the other side, the fuzzy outline of a woman wearing the Barbican Centre staff uniform shifted on the spot. Izzy dropped her hand and stepped back. The door swung open and the woman stepped briskly through it, carrying a roll of rubbish bags. She glared at Izzy.

  “Sorry,” Izzy panted. “Asthma.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said the woman, clearly not buying it. She elbowed Izzy out of the way and started rattling one of the rubbish bins around. Izzy took the opportunity to slip out of the bathroom and back into the Centre itself. The bottom level was still deserted, although now the sound of whistled show tunes drifted out of the ladies’ toilets. There was still no sign of Grey, either waiting outside or on the stairs. She wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad, but she knew she didn’t want to trust him again just yet. Not until she was sure. Holding the handrail tightly, Izzy slowly pulled herself up the first flight of stairs. It was harder now. The wave of panic she’d felt in the bathroom had left her shaky and washed-out. Weak. She caught herself thinking that all she needed was a nap. Just an hour or so, and everything would be all right.

  Everything looks better after a good night’s sleep…

  “Not going to happen,” she told herself through gritted teeth.

  Another cleaner on the floor above glanced up at her as she started on the second flight of stairs. He grinned. One of his front teeth was missing.

  “Long night, love?” he called to her, cackling.

  “You have no idea,” she muttered. He carried on laughing as she made her way up to the ground floor of the Centre. After a quick glance around to check for … well, anything, she went straight to the coffee stall in the middle and bought a bottle of water to wash the feeling of rot out of her mouth. It might all have been in her head but the taste of those long, cold fingers lingered just the same. As she swallowed the last of it, she caught sight of a familiar figure above her on one of the galleried walkways of the Centre’s upper floors, looking down.

  Grey.

  Without thinking, she darted sideways behind a pillar. If he moved a little further along the walkway, he would be able to see her, but hopefully she would at least see him first. And in the meantime, she would just have to decide what she was going to do. As she stood there, trying to decide whether to call to him or hide, her phone beeped. Surprised, she rummaged it out of her pocket – she’d obviously found the one spot of reception in the Centre – at least, it was strong enough for a couple of messages to get through. There was a voicemail waiting on her phone.

  It was Tigs, and although Izzy could only make out a few words, she could hear the panic in Tigs’s voice. “Please … up … phone … bad … what to do … are you? Please? Please, Izzy … me back.”

  Izzy listened to the whole message again, but she still couldn’t make it out. As she hung up, there was another beep – a text. It was Tigs again, with just one word.

  Help.

  Risking a quick peep round the pillar, she could make out the back of Grey’s head. He was looking the other way now, down to the far side of the Centre’s ground floor. If she was quick, and if he didn’t turn round, she should be able to get to the doors and out on to the lakeside. From there, all she had to do was go up the long flight of steps outside the Centre, cross the podium and she would be back where they’d been earlier – before Grey had flipped out, right in front of Shakespeare Tower. She reread the message on her phone, and looked back up at Grey on the walkway.

  She would have to risk it.

  Seeing him lean over the safety railing and peer down into the Centre, she took her chance, darting out from behind the pillar and towards the door. She had just made it through, and it was swinging shut behind her, when she heard him shout, “Izzy! Wait!”

  She didn’t wait, but she also knew that he would be expecting her to take the stairs. And, being Grey, he would catch her before she got anywhere near Shakespeare. She wasn’t prepared to take that much of a risk.

  Instead of taking the steps, she peeled away to the left, towards the lakeside entrance to the garden, and then turned sharply right underneath the steps. A gloomy doorway in the wall directly below the staircase opened into one of the underground car parks. It wasn’t one she knew well. She’d only been down there once, soon after she’d moved to the Barbican, and that time she’d got hopelessly lost and had to backtrack all the way to the door. She was sure, though, that there was a residents’ door to the bottom level of Shakespeare somewhere on the far side. All she had to do was find it, and then she’d be in.

  She sidestepped a puddle of something dark that could have been water or could have been oil, and picked her way between parked cars, piles of rubbish sorted and left by the cleaners for recycling, and a shopping trolley with a notice tied to it, written in neat cursive script – Please don’t remove me. Somewhere nearby, there was a machine-hum – a power transformer or one of the motors for the Defoe House lifts directly above. Very far off, there were traffic sounds coming from the Beech Street tunnel that cut through the Barbican at street level, below the podium. Someone laughed and a phone rang – most likely somebody on the stairs up from the lakeside. Fumbling for her keys, Izzy headed deeper.

  It got darker further in. The distances between the overhead lights got longer and the bulbs not as bright. There were fewer cars, too, and the ones parked here had a distinct air of neglect. Some of them were buried beneath car covers. Others had a thick layer of dust on their bonnets and windscreens. One, something old and vintage-looking, had a front tyre that was so flat it had pooled around the base of the wheel. Even the mechanical whirring sound had stopped here. There was nothing but thick, dust-covered grey silence.

  The closest bulb in the ceiling flickered ominously. “Oh, of course you would,” Izzy sighed at it. “Because I’m in a creepy and deserted car park all alone and nobody knows I’m here. Of course you’d start bloody flickering.”

  The light stopped flickering.

  Izzy peered at it. “That told you, didn’t it?”

  Something moved on the floor, just at the edge of her line of sight. She felt her pulse quicken, felt her throat tighten with the surge of panic.

  It was a mouse, scurrying from one shadow to the next. Not even a rat – just a mouse.

  That was all it took. Izzy was so tired, so tense, so everything, that a small grey mouse could set her well on the way to a heart attack. “Mouse won’t hurt you, Iz,” she told herself, half expecting it to stop, turn round and growl at her. But it didn’t. Instead, it disappeared under a pile of cardboard where it continued to make little scuffling, scratching sounds.

  As the mouse crept away, she found herself starting to giggle – completely unexpectedly, just the way she’d felt the urge to laugh when they had found Juliet. It wasn’t a normal sort of laugh, there was nothing happy about it. It was the kind of laugh that comes when everything is spinning out of control, when the horror and fear and the flat-out exhaustion are just too much to bear and all there is to do is either laugh, or scream until your voice gives out. Izzy knew that if she gave in this time, if she started to laugh, she might not be able to stop. Ever. She took a couple of deep breaths, in and out, to feel like she was in control again.

  The fact that she was suddenly holding what appeared to be a rusty metal bar in her right hand, which had most definitely not been there a minute ago, and which she most certainly didn’t remember picking up… That was probably a bad sign.

  The bar fell to the floor with a loud clang as she let it go. Her hands felt sticky with rust and they smelled of wet metal. No cuts. No grazes or anything unexpected – not on her. There had been nobody else… Had there?

  Where had the bar come from?

  She needed to get to Tigs. But what if
…?

  It would only take a minute or two. She needed to know.

  She doubled back through the car park, retracing her steps. It wasn’t hard – she could see her footprints in the dust and grit that had settled on the floor. There was only one set, and she would recognize the patterns left by the soles of her canvas trainers anywhere. The footsteps went in a straight line from where she had ended up, as far back as the car with the flat tyre. And then they did something unexpected. They looped around the back of the car.

  “That’s not right…”

  But it was right. Izzy’s footprints went to the back of the car and then headed off across the car park in a completely different direction.

  “That’s definitely not right. I didn’t come in that way.” With a lump in her throat and something that felt like a fist wedged in her stomach, she tracked her path back across the car park. The dust wasn’t as thick in this section, and the cars looked like they were actually used here, but it wasn’t difficult to see where she’d been. All she had to do was follow the trail of broken glass.

  The headlights of every car around her had been smashed. The glass littered the ground around her, glittering under the lights.

  …broken glass that crunched under her feet…

  “Oh, no.”

  The first thought that went through her head was, How long have I been down here? The second was a voice, almost forgotten.

  You shouldn’t be here, dearie…

  It was that thought that really made her move. Spinning around to get her bearings, she ran for the far side of the car park. There had to be a door up to Shakespeare somewhere. How long had she been down here? She wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like there’d been time to check her watch before she’d come in, she’d been in too much of a hurry. It could have been fifteen minutes; it could have been more or it could have been less. Either way, Tigs had needed her help.

  She slid to a dead halt. The text from Tigs. It would be timestamped. Frantically, she dug out her phone. The screen glowed brightly in the dimly lit car park, the message still there in its little box. Izzy looked at the clock on the phone. She looked at the message in horror.

  “An hour?”

  That wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t. What had she been doing in a car park for an hour?

  Besides the obvious…

  The door to the lower level of Shakespeare Tower gave her the answer to that question when she finally found it. Like all the other doors to Barbican blocks, it was formed of a heavy, blue-painted metal frame around two panes of thick shatterproof glass. In this case, someone had done their best to smash the glass. Cobwebby cracks spread out across both panes where something hard had been swung at them with force. Something like, say, a metal bar. The same metal bar looked like it had been put to work on the lock as well – the barrel was smashed to pieces but the door stayed stubbornly locked.

  There was no way Izzy was getting that door open. She’d already made sure of that.

  “Why would I smash the lock?” she asked the empty car park. The palm of her right hand had started to throb, and rubbing it with her other thumb, she could feel blisters already forming beneath the skin. “I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.”

  If there was no way up to Shakespeare, she could either turn right round and go back outside to the steps – perhaps even call Tigs from out there. Or she could try and find another door, up to Defoe House. It would at least take her up to the podium level, directly across from the bottom of Shakespeare, and that was better than nothing. As for Grey, by now he must have given up. Maybe he was back to normal. Maybe he’d gone to look for Tigs. Maybe he’d been able to help.

  Or maybe…

  “A lot can happen in an hour. What if you’re the only one left?” she asked herself. “What then?”

  There was one way to find out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The lock to the Defoe House staircase worked just fine, and the door banged shut behind her as Izzy stepped into the stairwell. It was cold – surprisingly so, given how warm it was outside. But at least it was better lit than the car park. Apart from a small cork noticeboard beside the door out to the car park (covered in notes about piano lessons and not leaving recycling around the car park and encouraging mice, which was clearly being ignored by everyone) and the stairs themselves, there was nothing else to see. The sound of the door slamming echoed up and down the empty space.

  As she set her foot on the first step, a wave of tiredness crashed over Izzy. Everything shimmered, sliding sideways and spinning away from her. She slipped, missing the step and falling. Her forehead caught the end of the metal handrail as she fell and connected hard. She hit the ground and curled into a tight ball, clutching her pounding head and trying not to lose her tenuous grip on her self-control.

  “Get up, Izzy,” she whispered. For once, she listened. Groaning, she shook her head to clear it and pulled herself back to her feet. The handrail, the metal banisters and the edges of the steps were all edged with fuzzy white stars that shifted as she blinked at them. The handrail suckered to her palms as she clung to it and tried to haul herself up the steps to the podium. Flakes of blue paint stuck to her skin.

  Halfway up the stairs, she heard the hinges of the door behind her squeak, but there was no reassuring bang of the heavy door closing. There were no footsteps, no sounds of life or movement, but Izzy had just about stopped trusting what her senses told her. It didn’t seem to mean a whole lot any more. She willed her sore limbs to move faster.

  She had made it as far as the first landing when the shadow fell across the wall ahead of her. It was vaguely human-shaped, but even allowing for the angle of the lighting, there was no way anyone could have actually called it human. Its arms hung down to its knees and ended with grotesquely long, clawed fingers. Its head was slightly too large for its shoulders and it ducked its neck from side to side as it climbed the stairs behind her. She waited for it to do something – to lunge at her or to grab at her feet, but it simply stood there. It didn’t try to come any closer or even to overtake her. It looked as though it was waiting for something. Izzy stopped climbing.

  There was only one shadow – the twisted thing with the clawed hands.

  So where was hers?

  A stabbing pain behind her forehead made her flinch.

  The monstrous shadow flinched.

  Slowly, she raised a hand to rub at the spot that hurt.

  The shadow raised its own horrible hand towards its face.

  Not taking her eyes off it for one second, she stretched out her arms on either side of her. The shadow did the same thing, and gradually it shrank and shaped itself back around her.

  Shaking, she lifted a hand and waved at the wall.

  The shadow waved back.

  The shadow was hers.

  That smell. The smell like something rotting. The smell and that taste – the one that had lingered in her mouth after she’d seen herself in the bathroom. She’d come across it before, it was familiar.

  It was the pills.

  The same smell. The same taste.

  And now there was no turning back.

  With a burst of energy, she ran up the rest of the stairs and burst out of the door on to the podium level. A warm breeze caught her hair and blew it back from her face. Across from her was the entrance to Shakespeare Tower – she could see the door and the porter at his desk in the lobby. She realized she was standing in almost exactly the same spot she had been in with Grey earlier, right before he’d seen the figure lurking at the end of the walkway beside the bottom of Shakespeare. The same walkway she was looking at right now, and where someone was standing in the shadows. She took a step back. He took a step forward.

  Grey.

  Izzy couldn’t tell whether he was back to normal again, but he was there. He was alive. Surely that could only be a good thing. He spotted her and was about to wave to her; he began to raise his arm when something made him look sharply up towards the top of the tower. Izz
y, still beneath the overhang of the first floor of Defoe House, couldn’t see what had caught his attention. She went to take a step forward again, but he waved back at her with both arms, and there was something desperate about it. He was warning her. Warning her about what?

  The body hit the paving in front of her a heartbeat later.

  It was the sound that bothered Izzy the most. Not the blood, nor the cracks that suddenly appeared in the pavement a few metres ahead of her. It wasn’t the fragments of bone or even the pieces of what might have been a limb, only moments before, now blurred into a red mess. It was the sound it made as it landed – a wet, sucking, crunching noise, both solid and uncomfortably liquid, and surprisingly loud.

  She was fairly sure her brain wouldn’t have come up with a sound like that on its own, which meant this was more than just another hallucination.

  This was real.

  The porter jumped up from behind his desk and ran to the door. Izzy could see him frozen there, and she wondered whether he wasn’t letting go of the door because he wanted to hold it open or because he wanted it to prop him up. Across the podium, she could see Grey’s mouth opening and closing, but either no sound was coming out or she had lost the ability to hear it. Neither would have surprised her, because there was a body in front of her and it was spread over an area no human body should ever be.