by Stephen Laws
Oh Christ, not this! Cardiff whirled to Gilbert. “The sound! It’ll kill us!”
“No . . . no . . .” Gilbert winced through gritted teeth. “Not above ground. The acoustic effect will transfer underground.”
The detonation faded away to a muted roar.
“See? See?” said Gilbert as if eager to please.
Cardiff shook his head, rubbing at his ears. He looked up to see that Barbara was leaning against one of the hessian screens. He lunged forward and plucked her hand away from the screen.
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t . . .”
And then he turned back to Gilbert.
“That was a Darkfall strike, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, so we mustn’t . . .”
“Touch anything?”
Gilbert saw what he meant immediately. Barbara had been in flesh contact with the screen, but had not been absorbed. He shook his head.
“She’s immune. She’s a Returner. So she’s immune to that effect now. She’s been through that process once, and it seems that she’ll stay immune to further absorption. We’ve had experience of this before.”
Duvall was at the double-doors leading to the secondary staircase. He pulled one of the doors open. Somehow, lashing wind and rain was gusting through that opened door . . . and Duvall was slamming it shut hard again, turning back to Cardiff and snapping: “You stupid bastard! You’ve got us trapped in here!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” snapped Cardiff in return, and pushed past him to the double-doors. Jimmy was at his side now, and they both looked through the glazed front of the doors. Immediately, they could see what had happened.
The Darkfall strike had destroyed the second staircase.
Somewhere above, lightning had impacted on the building and an upper section of the staircase had collapsed in upon itself. A great avalanche of steel and concrete had crashed downwards into the shaft which had been the stairwell; gathering bulk, weight and destructive momentum from floor to floor as it collapsed. Beyond the double-doors lay only a compacted cave-in of concrete slabs and twisted metal, with not enough space for even a small dog to squeeze through. Storm water was running amidst the compacted mangle of that destruction.
“We’re trapped up here!” snapped Duvall again.
Beyond the windows, the electrical web of lightning had now vanished. The swirling rain and snow whirled continually against the buffeted glass.
“Alright . . . alright . . .” said Duvall, complacently now, as if he could sort out their problems rationally. “It’s time to stop pissing about. And the first thing we do, is get rid of that!” He raised his gun, pointed it directly at Barbara and, before they could react . . . pulled the trigger.
The hammer fell on an empty chamber.
Duvall had used his last shell on the thing downstairs without realising.
“You dirty . . .” And Jimmy had grabbed up a nearby typist’s chair from behind the screen and raised it with both hands like some huge club, ready to smash it across Duvall’s face. Recovering from his surprise, Duvall was ready to throw himself at Jimmy.
“Leave it!” shouted Cardiff, raising his own gun in their direction. “Both of you! We’ve more to worry about.”
“Well, just keep an eye on it,” said Duvall, without taking his eyes off Jimmy, and meaning Barbara. “When it ‘turns’, you just be ready with that gun.” Jimmy lowered the chair to the floor as Duvall fingered the dark bruise on his forehead. “And when we’re out of this, Devlin, you and I have something to settle.”
Jimmy laughed, a sound without humour. “You sound just like a policeman.”
“Quiet!” hissed Gilbert.’ His face was a mask of alarm and he was looking back to the office door and the cabinet which was pushed up against it. “I heard it. I’m sure I heard it . . .”
The whirlwind raged at the window . .. but although they strained to listen, they could hear nothing from the corridor beyond.
“More furniture against the door,” whispered Gilbert. “We have to pile more against the door. Stop it from getting in . . .”
“No,” said Cardiff, noting with rising anger that Rohmer was just standing and watching him with that smile on his face again. “Don’t make any noise that might attract it.”‘
Jimmy skipped back towards the door and the filing cabinet.
“Jimmy . . .” began Cardiff in alarm and warning. Jimmy waved a hand back at him to be silent, and then he had reached the office door, crouching down low. Carefully, he straightened and looked out through the fluted glass in the upper part of the door. Crouching again, he moved to the other side of the cabinet and repeated the same manoeuvre, craning his head to look out. Then, keeping low, he skipped back to them again.
“No sign of it. No sounds. Maybe it didn’t follow us up here.”
Thunder shuddered the building again, this time like the sounds of a faraway avalanche. The rumbling resolved into the hissing of rain and the howling of the wind. The hissing of the rain was beginning to sound like whispered voices now; like a multitude of whispering voices in the darkness.
“Maybe it’s dead,” said Gilbert. “That’s happened before, Rohmer. Sometimes they just sicken and die. Like the one you spent so much time talking to. You remember that thing, don’t you, Rohmer?”‘
“Oh yes,” said Rohmer, again with that mysterious look on his face. “I remember.”
The hissing of the rain was somehow louder, somehow more different in tone . . . and somehow much more like the whispering of a multitude of voices than before. Cardiff turned back to Rohmer, and remembered again that feeling he was sure they’d shared when they’d first encountered each other. He remembered that strong question-mark of recognition: Is it you? Perhaps now was the right time to ask Rohmer just what the hell he really was, just what the hell was really going on . . . ?
And then the hissing, whispering of the rain seemed to fill the office . . . and from that whispering, came a voice.
“Cardiffffff . . .”
It was a whispered voice that spoke his name.
“Oh my God,” said Gilbert, looking around.
“Cardiff, for the love of God, get me out of here. Pleasssse . .
Other whispered voices joined the plea. But this time, the voices were not in the distress of agony that had been heard in the reception area. This time the voices were mournful, rather than agonised. They were afraid and they were lost. Hundreds of voices whispered from the walls, the ceiling and the floors. They were the voices of lost souls, all taking their lead from the one voice that had spoken Cardiff’s name. And that same voice continued to beg for his help.
“Don’t leave me here, Cardiff. I don’t know what’s happening. But I can’t bear it. Please, for God’s sake.”
“Evans,” said Cardiff in an awed voice, as the whispering multitudes took up his name as a kind of saviour’s anthem. Those voices sounded like some dreadful surf breaking on a lost and faraway shore.
“I remember them,” said Barbara. “From another dream. I think I was somehow with them once. Oh, God. Please help them if you can, Mr Cardiff.”
“I can’t help them,” said Cardiff. “I wish to God I could. But I can’t. All we can do now is help ourselves.”
Evans’ lone voice drifted away, sinking beneath that whispering sea of voices. Those voices merged with the hissing of the rain again . . . and were silent.
“So what do we do?” asked Jimmy, looking back at the cabinet where it was wedged tight at the office door.
“We keep quiet and wait,” said Cardiff. “Keep out of sight . . . and wait.”
Part Three
The Darkfall
“I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”
St Luke, 10:18
.
ONE
A great weariness had suddenly settled upon it.
The great thunder which had propelled it towards their hiding place below ground had somehow ebbed. They had fought back, and it had felt the sti
ng of their fight which had only served to make its hunger and hideous needs greater. The small pain which had been inflicted upon it had only served somehow to make it stronger. It had smelt their flight, trying to escape from their hiding place and into the night. Consumed by that monstrous need, it had entered their hiding-place at last.
Possessed by that hunger, it had still sensed that there was something different about the female. It knew that she had not been there before, and that she had somehow appeared amongst them from nowhere. It knew that she was different. There was something of kinship about her that registered on a purely instinctive level, and in a way that the thing could not interpret.
It shook away these confusing feelings about the female. They had escaped from it again, but not for long.
It had freed itself from the stairwell and could smell them, not far above it and within easy reach. It had begun to ascend the stairs . . . and then the weariness had overcome it. Even the power of the storm, with which it shared a kinship also, could not assuage the hunger. A vital part of the thing seemed to be ebbing away. And as it slumped to the stairs, it realised at last that the girl was also somehow connected with the storm. The images in its head were confusing and seemed to hasten the dying feeling inside. It gave in to the weariness.
Somewhere beyond, the thing that had been Farley Peters—still locked in the corridor wall—gibbered and scrabbled with monstrous hunger. The thing turned wearily to listen, swamped by inertia and the need to sleep.
TWO
“. . . sleep,” said Barbara. “Maybe it’s gone to sleep.”
They were crouching and sitting behind the hessian screens in the typing-pool. Everyone was making sure that they were not in flesh contact with any of the furniture, walls or floor. But Barbara was sitting on the carpeted floor, both hands braced before her.
“What?” asked Cardiff.
“I don’t know. I just thought maybe that it . . .” She ran a hand through her hair and then took the jade necklace in her hand and began to rub her fingers over it, as if it was a magic charm that could somehow protect her. She shook her head. “It was nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Could she know what it’s thinking?” asked Rohmer. “We’ve had telepathic contacts before in sympathetic Returners.”
“Perhaps,” replied Gilbert. “They’re brother and sister. They’ve both been through the same transmogrification.”
“Wait . . .” said Barbara. “What are you saying?”
“That thing downstairs,” said Duvall tightly. “It’s your brother.”
Barbara raised her hands to her temples and began to massage. When she spoke again, it was in a quiet, sensible voice: “I know this is a dream. I know I can come through it. But just like dreams, some parts are crazy. They don’t make sense. So I’ll squeeze those parts out . . . squeeze them out until all of this is over.” She looked up again when Jimmy put a hand on her shoulder.
“That’s the way to do it,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’ll soon be over.”
“I think I know what happened to the girl and her brother,” said Gilbert. “I’ve been thinking about how the constituent parts of the two people and the car could be transmogrified and reassembled—if Cardiff’s surmise is correct, that is.”
“And?” said Rohmer.
“It’s just a theory, of course.”
“Spit it out.”
“They drove into a Darkfall storm in the middle of a road. I believe that there was a lightning strike on the car. The Darkfall energy could have been attracted by the car battery. As a result, the inert and living organisms were disassembled and scattered into the ether. Those atoms were randomly distributed in the environment. Now that another Darkfall has occurred, that energy has resulted in random reassembly.”
“The car battery?” said Jimmy.
“Yes, it’s the simplest form of a voltaic cell: a plate of copper and a plate of zinc immersed in a dilute solution of sulphuric acid. A current flows from the copper to the zinc when wires are connected between the plates. The difference in the electrical properties of the metals provides the force that drives such a current.”
“Yeah,” said Jimmy dryly, still looking at the office door. “Like I said . . . a car battery.”
“The energy generated within a Darkfall would be attracted to that kind of interaction, no matter how small. This must have happened. Thunderclouds are already highly charged with electricity. And an ordinary lightning flash is simply the breaking down of the insulating properties of air which discharges a momentary electric current to those clouds. A Darkfall strike is . . . how shall I say it? . . . a much more powerful, more voracious kind of strike. It affects the properties of animate and inanimate material, resulting in fusion. Such a strike would be immediately attracted to the operation of the car battery. The same thing would have happened in the Bermuda triangle disappearances, don’t you see? In those cases where not only people, but the actual aeroplanes, boats or ships themselves actually disappeared from the face of the earth. They were . . . disassembled. And then disappeared in the ether.”
“My head’s hurting,” said Jimmy. “Too many words, man. Too many words.”
Thunder boomed again. Pain stabbed into their ears, and this time they kept their hands there until the secondary cracking of thunder had come and gone. The window panes rattled furiously, and spidery fingers of crepitating electricity twitched and danced over the glass once more; again creating the illusion that the entire office block was somehow enmeshed in some monstrous spider’s web. Swirling snowclouds and rain strengthened the illusion that there was no outside world anymore, and that they had all been transported to some frozen Hell.
In silence, they watched the office door and the cabinet.
The snow and the rain and the flickering of spidery lightning made bizarre, dancing shadows.
Rohmer, who had become so silent, looked at the storm-driven snow and the living electricity which buffeted the window nearest to him. He looked out into the Darkfall.
And he remembered.
THREE
It was the first time that Rohmer’s Unit had managed to keep a Returner in captivity for analysis and experimentation. Rohmer did not count Eleanor Parkins from the Fernley House incident. She had been destroyed before they could get her out of the police cell. The other Units, he knew, had only had one apiece. And even though the same scientists were involved in that experimentation, Rohmer could not resist a kind of immature pride in the fact that his unit had more than the others. ‘
The first Returner had been non-vocal. Not surprising in that it no longer possessed vocal cords. X-ray analysis had revealed a complex throat-tract of asbestos fibre, a gullet composed mainly of industrial plastic and a stomach cavity with a basis of fibrillated copper. And yet somehow the thing was still able to consume and digest the normal fats and proteins, converting them to energy, in a complex manner which they had never really been able to explain. Examination had also revealed several hooded eyes in the head, torso and arms; all connected by a massive circuitry of unexplainable nerves and sinew which, although with no brain to relay messages still saw them, still swivelled and watched them move about the room as they examined it. Those eyes were made of coloured glass. And just how the hybrid could function without a discernible brain also remained a mystery. The thing had died, and for its death they could also find no reason . . . no more than they could find a reason for how it was able to live in the first place.
The second Returner had killed two men, and had also been destroyed in the process before full analysis could commence.
But the third had been different.
Because the third had been one of their own.
A Darkfall storm had descended on a factory in Leeds four years earlier. It could have been worse; since the first strike had occurred at 9.30 p.m. after the main factory work-hours, and only a skeleton-crew shift had been in operation at that time. Twenty-three people had vanished from the face of the earth. And a team ha
d been sent in as normal for initial investigation, only to retreat almost immediately when their equipment had registered the fact that this was a Secondary Darkfall.
But Charles Bissell did not return from the factory. An associate of Gilbert, he had insisted on moving in with the team, even though his presence was not necessary, for first-hand examination. And when the roster was called on evacuation, he was missing.
They had waited for the Darkfall to blow itself out, which it did in spectacular fashion. One entire section of the factory had collapsed before the storm had finally dissipated. The team had moved back in again, carefully sifting and analysing.
Bissell’s body had been found lying on a pile of rubbish, face down.
But he had not survived the Darkfall. He had been absorbed in some fashion . . . and then Returned. And when the first person to find him had turned him over, presuming him dead, he had bitten a chunk out of that person’s thigh. The finder had almost died, and Bissell had been restrained and returned to the Unit for full examination. The missing twenty-three persons .had remained missing . . . so far. But there were life readings in the walls, floors and turbine-generators within the factory itself.
Bissell’s own molecular composition, including the clothes he had been wearing, had proved just as chaotic as expected. They assumed that he had been absorbed by machinery of some kind; since his own individual chromosomatic make-up was principally metallic.
Strait-jacketed to restrain his flailing and deadly limbs, Bissell had been returned to the Institute for examination and analysis. Although still recognisably human in shape, and with a skin covering of normal human skin, X-ray analysis had revealed a new and scientifically impossible internal network of industrial steel and plastics. A complex combination of aluminium, steel and copper had replaced his skeletal structure, making him too heavy to stand alone, lest his skin should rip open under the strain. A specially constructed harness had been devised for him in one of the clinically white rooms where analysis was conducted. Externally, Bissell appeared normal, with little sign of metamorphosis—except for his eyes. They had no irises and were a glinting, ebony black.