by Stephen Laws
“What am I doing in an office block?” asked Barbara. “I was . . .”
“Driving, yes. You told us. Where do you live, Barbara?”
“Number 10, Browning Place . . . in Fernley.”
“Fernley, Newcastle?” asked Cardiff.
“Of course, Newcastle. Where else? Where am I?”
“You’re in Newcastle, don’t worry.”
“Where’s John? What have you done with John?”
“We haven’t seen John, Barbara. We don’t know where he is. You say you live in Browning Place?”
“Yes, I told you. Look, who are you people? Please tell me what’s going on. I don’t understand.”
“You know you’re not telling me the truth, Barbara,” said Cardiff, shining the torch in her direction now that Jimmy Devlin’s torches arrangement was lighting up the basement like the stage of some avant-garde theatre. “No one lives in Browning Place anymore. The last few houses there are derelict and due for demolition. The Council’s rehoused everyone who lived in that street.”
“I am not lying! Who are you people? What have you done with John?”
And then, purely on impulse, Cardiff heard himself ask a crazy question, but a question that was no crazier than the situation he’d found himself in of late, with people who vanished into and out of walls, the hideous death of four people, three of them his own men and a stalking monstrosity from the pages of a horror comic out there somewhere in the night . . . not to mention cars that just fell out of the sky.
“Barbara, what day did you vanish?”
“God . . .” She rubbed her face in a kind of fury now; a fury which she controlled, and through gritted teeth, said: “Saturday. It was Saturday 15th March.” And now she could see the puzzlement on everyone’s face.
“March?” asked Cardiff.
“Why? What’s wrong with that? What-month is it now?”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
“But it can’t be . . .”
“You’ve been gone nine months.”
“Longer than that, I think,” said Jimmy Devlin. He was kneeling beside her now, looking into tear-stained eyes that reflected ice-blue in the torch light.
“What do you mean?” asked Rohmer, now taking an interest in the proceedings.
“The thing about nightmares,” replied Jimmy, “is that you’ve got to go with the flow. When everything around you is just plain bloody crazy, you’ve got to look for the crazy answers.”
“What are you talking about, Jimmy?” echoed Cardiff.
“Are those new clothes you’re wearing, Barbara?”
“New? Yes, they’re brand new, but . . .”
“They’re fab, aren’t they? I like the green jade necklace.”
“Please, what are you all talking like this for? It all sounds mad, like . . .”
“Like a nightmare,” said Jimmy. “Yeah, I know. You say you were out driving with your brother?”
“Yes, yes, yes! Why does everyone keep asking me these stupid questions?!”
“Was it a brand-new Ford Zodiac?”
“Yes. So you do know where John is?”
“What year is it, Barbara?” asked Jimmy.
“Tell me what you’ve done with John? Where is he?”
“What year, Barbara?”
“What the hell is the matter with you all?” Barbara’s eyes were blazing with anger now, an ice-cold fire reflecting back. “I know what this is. We crashed . . . and I’ve been ill, or I’ve lost my memory or something. And you all think I’m mad, don’t you? You think I’m off my rocker! So you’re . . . you’re bloody well testing me!” Barbara gathered herself, climbing to her feet again, slapping away Jimmy’s proffered hand. Tears were brimming in her eyes again. There were dark streaks down her cheeks.
Something about that look stabbed into Jimmy’s heart, and he didn’t know why. Jimmy Devlin, professional cynic—stabbed in the heart by the honesty that flashed in this girl’s rebellion against authority. He saw that honesty and within it somehow, a total lack of the cynicism that had marred his own life. He felt the power in that pure anger when she shouted at him:
“Don’t you know what year it is?”
And then, the nightmare seemed to take further bizarre shape again, when she swallowed down hard on the choking hoarseness in her voice, and she forced herself to control that anger when she spoke again: “It’s 1964. Saturday, March 15th, 1964.”
The resulting silence disturbed her even more. She looked from face to face in the darkness, faces that seemed to belong to hideous inquisitors, with the torch beams casting harsh angular shadows from below into their upturned faces.
In a quiet, gentle, but troubled voice, Cardiff said, “You’ve been gone for twenty-six years, Barbara.”
“That thing outside . . .” said Duvall.
“It’s her brother,” said Rohmer. “I don’t know how . . . but it’s her brother.”
“What do you mean . . . twenty-six years?!” shouted Barbara in that pure blaze of anger.
“You see now,” said Rohmer. “She can’t be human, Cardiff. Not after what she’s been through. We can’t wait down here, wait for her to change into . . . something. You’ve got to kill her. Kill her now.”
“Please,” said Barbara, now sounding weary and in shock: “I don’t know what’s going on. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t . . .”
“Shut up, Rohmer!” snapped Jimmy. “No one’s going to hurt you, Barbara. Don’t worry, I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Shoot her, Cardiff. Shoot her. I’ll clear your actions with Central Office, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Shut up! She’s as human as you and me.”
“When this is over, Cardiff,” said Rohmer in a low, threatening voice. “When we’re relieved . . . even if she doesn’t turn, she’ll still be taken by our people. They’ll examine her . . . and dispose of her. It’s standard procedure.”
Gilbert finally stood back from the portable machine on the floor. It was emitting a barely audible, low-frequency hum. “That’s it,” he said. “The effects will be nullified as long as it operates. Do you think . . . Rohmer, do you think the Main Team will relieve us, do you think they’ll . . . ?”
“You know the answer to that better than I do,” replied Rohmer. “This is a Secondary Darkfall. They’ll wait it out and they’ll also be keeping Cardiff ‘s people away. So must we. That’s always been the intention, so make sure your equipment is blocking and recording efficiently.” Rohmer squatted down on the floor, resting his arms over his thighs. “May as well get comfortable. I believe you’ll be using that gun sooner than you think.”
“Maybe I’ll just take it from you,” said Duvall.
“And maybe you’d like a bullet in the leg,” replied Jimmy. “Self-defence, of course.”
“Keep your eye on him, Jimmy,” said Cardiff. “Hey, what do you know? I’m on the side of Law and Order,” Jimmy chipped.
“You’ll be doing time again for this, Devlin,” said Duvall. “Just wait and see.”
“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “Let’s.”
Cardiff turned back to the girl.
“It’s alright, Barbara. It’s okay. Believe me . . . nobody’s going to hurt you. But you have to answer my questions. Now, you were out driving with your brother and you drove into some kind of storm. Remember? Where was that? Where were you?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “We were driving on the main road out of Fernley, I think . . .”
“It’s important, Barbara. Try to remember.”
“This can’t be real. It can’t be happening to me. It’s I964. It must be, it can’t be all that time later . . .”
“Where, Barbara? On the main road out of Fernley?”
“Yes . . . yes . . . I remember we passed the pub . . .”
“The Jolly Miller?”
“Yes, that’s the pub.”
“And you were travelling on that road in March 1964?”
“Ye
s, yes, yes . . .”
“That’s it, then. That’s what happened.”
“What?” said Rohmer. “What happened?”
“This girl and her brother were driving on a stretch of road that doesn’t exist anymore. I know my patch well enough. That section of the road, past the pub she’s just mentioned, was rerouted fifteen years ago.”
“So?”
“So they were driving right through here! That’s where the road was. The area has been developed since. This office block we’re in didn’t exist then. The road just came straight through. They drove into a Darkfall storm. Right on this spot. Remember what you said, Rohmer? Darkfalls occur regularly on or near the same locality. This wasn’t the first Darkfall. There was another—on March 15th, 1964. And this girl and her brother drove straight into it.”
“Yes, I think I understand,” said Gilbert. “The site of the office block is a blackspot, as Rohmer told you earlier. There is a theory that certain spots . . . throughout the world . . . develop what is termed a ‘vile vortex’, where phenomena can occur. The Darkfall storm . . . the vortex it creates . . . is a more localised variation of the same phenomenon. This is not the first or perhaps even the second time a Darkfall may have occurred here. It may have happened on several occasions over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.”
“But I can’t ever remember a storm like this one ever having occurred in this area before,” said Cardiff.
“There has been an escalation of recorded Darkfalls in the past decade,” continued Gilbert. “But it may be the case that . . . oh my God!”
Something was scraping against the boarded-up windows.
They turned to look, up at the hastily nailed boards that had replaced the shattered windows. The sound came again; a long, rasping, scratching sound, as if someone out there was dragging something sharp across the wood. It stopped . . . and now there was only the sound of the rain hissing on those boards, and the almost inaudible hum of Gilbert’s machine.
Jimmy pulled the girl away with him, moving back from the outside wall, and the boards; four feet above them at ground level.
“It might just be . . .” began Gilbert again.
And then something slammed hard against one of the boards. Nails screeched and popped, and the board juddered away at the bottom as something outside slammed against the wood. The basement was filled with the hoarse and ragged sound of monstrous breathing. Rainwater began to gush into the basement from around the fractured board.
As one, they shrank away from the far wall, watching rainwater trickling through the cracks in the boards and spattering on the basement floor. That rainwater began to splash over the lenses of two of the torches that Jimmy had placed on the floor, creating a dancing and hellish kaleidoscope of light in the basement.
“What is it?” asked the girl in a weary voice. “What’s . . . ?”
“Quiet!” hissed Cardiff.
The wind gusted outside and rattled the loosened boards. Rainwater flurried and troughed through the cracks.
“It’s a dream,” said Barbara. “That’s what it is. Just a bad dream . . .”
“Will you be quiet!” Jimmy pushed her further back, as they all continued to watch the boarded windows with breath held tight. In the centre of the room, Gilbert’s machine continued to emit its low, barely audible hum.
Thunder and lightning cracked and roared outside like some electric avalanche—and following immediately upon it came the enraged roaring of Something from Hell. A hideously powerful blow on one of the boards sent it splintered and whirling into the basement. Rain and wind gusted through the gap as the dimly glistening form of some horrifying, ravaged shape lashed out from the pavement above and beyond them. Another board exploded screeching inwards. The thing’s bellowing was drowned by a further thunder crack as Rohmer yelled . . .
“Get out! Get out and don’t touch the walls!”
. . . and he shoved a petrified Gilbert ahead of him towards the stairs. The question of who had ownership of guns was now forgotten as Gilbert blundered to the basement stairs, closely followed by Rohmer and Duvall. Cardiff pushed Jimmy and the girl called Barbara after them, turning back to look at the ragged aperture through which the storm was venting its fury. Lightning flashed again as the monstrous shape outside seemed to launch itself head first and downwards in a mad and frenzied lunge at the aperture. Another board shattered apart and fell inwards in shards. And in that flare and roar of lightning, Cardiff saw a hideous face straining to look directly at him as huge and ravaged claws that had once been hands thrashed inwards on the brick face of the basement, seeking purchase.
That face was not the blank face that Cardiff had expected.
It was much, much worse.
It was the same burned face that he had seen behind the wheel of that exploded car in the office-block forecourt. It was the same hideously charred and blackened visage, with its one burst eye still cloying within its ravaged socket like an egg yolk. But this face was bigger; swollen and bigger still than the horror in the car.
And this face was hideously alive.
Its one rolling, swollen eye was fixed on Cardiff even as the thing thrashed with blackened, elongated and monstrously deadly arms at the brickwork, trying to heave itself through the aperture and into the basement. Rainwater gushed around that “face” as it opened jaws that yawned with the ferocious, rasping hatred of some monstrous insect. The dirty water surged with its spume of saliva, and when it roared again it roared with the fury of the storm. Cardiff knew that it wanted them.
Faced with this monstrous apparition, Cardiff did not freeze in his tracks even as the others clattered up the basement stairs towards the ground floor. Instead, he stepped towards the thing as the others retreated. ,
“Cardiff!” shouted Jimmy from somewhere behind him. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
Cardiff stood his ground and saw in one split-second the faces of Lisa and Jamie—and the man without a face who had mown them down. He saw the hideous face of the huge thrashing thing before him, superimposed on that blank mask, and knew that it was the face he had been looking for since the death of his wife and son.
He had been looking for the Face of Death.
Now, he had found it. He could walk right up and ask it the question that burned within him. Face to face, he could ask it: Why?
But this hellish, monstrous Face of Death was also the face of an Abominable Idiot. And Cardiff knew at last that even if he could ask the question, it could never provide him with an answer.
“Cardiff . . . Come on!” yelled Jimmy again.
“You’re nothing . . .” Cardiff said to the thing.
He raised the Browning automatic as if he was at target practice, levelled the sight at the thing’s one remaining monstrous yellow eye—and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the shot was drowned by the deafening screech and roar of the thing as its eye blew apart in a shattering viscous whirl of fluid and tissue. Claws braced on the wall beneath it, the thing strained upwards, rolling its dripping head in agony—and something that had been lying tight beneath it on the pavement slid from under its ravaged body and into the basement. Soaked and tattered, crimson and black, it flopped arm-over-leg to the floor like some discarded overcoat or the eviscerated pelt of some large animal, with only the head intact.
And when Cardiff looked at the upside-down dead eyes of that head as they reflected in the torchlight, when he saw the teeth set in a clenched and hideous grin . . . he recognised the face immediately.
It was Pearce.
He had been skinned.
The thing bellowed and lowered its head again, rain-water-spume-blood-oil running from its jaws. And even though its last eye was gone, Cardiff knew instinctively that it could still see him. The horror of Pearce’s fate and the appalling impossibility of this thing wedged in the window frame stung Cardiff into action again. He swung the gun up again, fired wildly at that thrashing form and turned back to the staircase. All exc
ept Jimmy seemed to have reached the corridor above. He was standing on the landing at the top, face white. As Cardiff scrambled up the stairs he saw Jimmy raise and fire his own gun at the thing. He had never held a gun before, had certainly never fired one. The recoil was unexpected and he staggered backwards as Cardiff reached him, not knowing whether he had hit it or not.
The screeching and thrashing was behind him now as they bundled out into the corridor, and Cardiff turned to slam the door shut.
As he turned back to the eerie blue-blackness of the strip lights in the corridor, Cardiff heard a thick grunt and the slap of someone falling heavily to the tiled floor. He whirled from the door, heart still pumping madly from his encounter in the basement.
Duvall had hit Jimmy in the stomach. He was crouched on the floor, gagging. Hugging his torso with one hand, his other gloved hand was braced on the floor in the knowledge of what had happened to Frye. Duvall was holding the gun now as he looked down at him, breathing heavily. There was an unmistakable smile of satisfaction on his face, even in the dark, as he fingered the swollen bruise on his forehead. Now, Rohmer stepped towards Cardiff holding out his hands and smiling.
“Give me back the gun,” he said tightly.
Down in the basement, something roared. But Cardiff could not tell whether it was the storm or the thing jammed in the window aperture, free at last.
“You stupid bastard,” said Cardiff. “You don’t give up, do you?”
“Give me the gun or Duvall will shoot the girl.”
Duvall raised the gun slowly towards her.
“He’ll shoot her whether I give you it or not,” replied Cardiff. “So I think I’ll just keep the gun. When he shoots her, you get a bullet as well.”
Barbara was standing apart from them again, fists held tight at her lap. She was biting her lip and looking at the ceiling, as if willing herself awake. Gilbert was fidgeting with his gloves again, looking at the basement door as Jimmy rolled to his knees and tried to keep from retching.
“That thing down there,” said Gilbert urgently. “Look, Rohmer, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get away from here now while we can. While it’s in the basement.”