by Stephen Laws
But that burst of uncontrolled anger had assuaged the pain in Duvall’s head and neck, had given him back that cool and grim purpose. Barbara looked up as she dragged Jimmy to one side, and saw Duvall stoop to pick up the broken neck of the whisky bottle that she had dropped. The Darkfall lightning scratched and flickered with its spider legs at the nearby window . . . and Duvall kicked savagely at Barbara’s head, spinning her away from Jimmy. That new and unfair pain gave her a new savage thirst for proper revenge. Stunned but ineffectual, she yelled in righteous rage and tried to pull herself to her feet, wanting nothing else but to throw herself at Duvall as . . .
. . . Duvall took Jimmy by the throat again, and drew back his other hand with the broken bottle.
Darkfall thunder exploded in the office block.
Duvall was jerked away from Jimmy, spinning on his heels so that he was facing the office door again. There was a look of stupid surprise on his face, and Barbara followed his gaze, uncomprehending.
Cardiff was standing at the office door, gun raised in Duvall’s direction.
And Barbara looked back at Duvall to see the slowly spreading dark stain between his shoulder blades. Sobbing, she seized Jimmy roughly again and began to drag him away, towards the office door. Duvall watched her, still with that stupid expression on his face. He staggered, as if drunk, and watched as Cardiff stepped forwards, still holding the gun before him. Cardiff was clutching at his shirtfront with the other hand. There was blood on his hand and shredded shirt.
And then it seemed that Duvall understood at last that he had been shot. Screaming like an animal, he raised the broken glass in his hand and charged drunkenly towards Cardiff.
Cardiff pulled the trigger again, and there was another thunderclap in the office.
The impact of the bullet hurled Duvall backwards, passing clean through his chest and puncturing the window behind him. He reeled, but kept his feet. The broken whisky-bottle neck fell to the carpet and he clutched at his chest, as if in imitation of Cardiff. His face screwed up in agony, and from behind him there was a hiss of escaping air through the bullet hole in the window.
Cracks spread from the bullet hole across the window, like frozen lightning.
And then the window exploded outwards behind Duvall into the Darkfall. Screaming, Duvall was sucked backwards out of the window in a cloud of broken glass and was instantly gone.
Hell erupted into the office block. The storm wind of the Darkfall blasted through the shattered window with a howling roar; rain and snow gushed into the office. Thin, blue-white tentacles of fire stabbed from ceiling to floor, from desk to hessian screen. The living, crackling lightning stabbed at the overhead strip lights and the office was suddenly filled with a hail of exploding, flying glass. A glass partition in the typing pool imploded with a shattering roar. Spider legs of electricity hissed and danced over the computer terminals. One by one, the glass screens exploded.
“Come on!” yelled Cardiff, and seized one of Jimmy’s arms, dragging him to his feet. Barbara dragged at the other arm, and they staggered to the office door as the Darkfall lightning continued to destroy the interior of the office. They literally fell against the door. It swung open and they staggered into the corridor, away from that scene of Hell in the office.
But for Barbara, the nightmare was not over. Because now Cardiff was hauling them through the staircase door and back on to the first-floor landing. And the sounds of Hell were still there. From somewhere below, in the stairwell where Barbara knew that Cardiff must have died, were the nightmare sounds of bellowing and screeching and thrashing shadows.
“Come on!” yelled Cardiff again, dragging them both up the next flight of stairs.
“What’s happening?” shouted Barbara, still clinging to a dazed Jimmy. “You’re dead. You must be dead. What’s . . . ?”
From below came the agonised and hideous sounds of someone being torn apart.
“No time,” snapped Cardiff grimly. He clutched at his chest again, and now Barbara could see that the shirt was shredded and that blood was running freely from deep gashes in Cardiff’s chest. “If we want to live . . . we climb!”
They began to ascend the staircase, holding Jimmy between them.
NINE
Gilbert had watched the violence in the office, frozen in fear and unable to prevent any of it. When Cardiff had come back from the dead, he had shrunk away back down the hessian-screen corridor towards Rohmer. And when Cardiff had shot Duvall, he had turned in helpless horror to where Rohmer sat, hands spread wide in appeal.
But Rohmer just sat and watched, his face a blank mask.
And then Cardiff had shot Duvall again, the window had blown out taking Duvall with it . . . and the nightmare of Darkfall had been admitted to the office. Crying out in terror, Gilbert had watched the snaking electric-blue lightning as it invaded the office, spreading destruction. He had covered his face from flying glass and watched the two men and the Returner escape through the office doors. And when the lightning had forked inwards through the window and shattered the typing-pool window, Gilbert had turned back to Rohmer in helpless appeal. Rohmer was still sitting on the edge of the desk, his hair and coat whipping in the hellish stormwinds which had been admitted. Only now he was smiling as he looked around him at the chaos.
Furious now in his terror and at Rohmer’s unconcern, Gilbert had struck out at him.
Rohmer seized his wrist and with apparent ease, twisted. Gilbert sank to his knees in pain, beating at Rohmer’s vice-clamp grip. Now on his knees on the office floor, with Rohmer sitting above him smiling into the storm, Gilbert had begun to weep. Glass exploded all around them. Lightning jabbed and sparked against the walls. And when Gilbert looked up at him again through blurred vision, he could see that Rohmer was talking, although he could hear no words.
“Don’t worry,” Rohmer was saying. “Don’t worry. We’re in the presence. We won’t be harmed.”
Gilbert shrieked when the strip light directly above them exploded, and sparks rained down on their heads.
TEN
Jimmy had pulled himself together again when they reached the third landing. He pulled away from them both long enough to wipe blood from his face and to lean on the stair-rail, sucking in deep breaths. His throat still felt constricted after Duvall’s blow. Down below, in the darkness of the stairwell, the bellowing and thrashing had ceased. But something down there was breathing, and the susurrant echoes of that breathing drifted up to them.
“Come on, Jimmy,” hissed Cardiff. “We can’t wait. We’ve got to climb.”
At last, it was registering with Jimmy that Cardiff was not dead, not torn to pieces by the thing down there.
“What . . . ?” he began, and Cardiff impatiently shook his head.
“Never mind that now. Just climb!”
Down below, they could hear the sounds of the thing shambling on the staircase. It was coming up after them again.
“Climb!” hissed Cardiff again, and they started up the stairs once more.
And as they climbed, Cardiff replayed the nightmare down below.
The thing had him.
It was dragging him towards it through the stair-rails, its claws fastened in his flesh. And Cardiff knew, truly, that he didn’t want to die after all. He had twisted in that grip, tried to bring the gun round to bear on that monstrous maw. But his arm was twisted, and now he could feel the thing’s putrid breath in his face. Down below on the staircase, the thing that had been Farley Peters was trying to crawl up the steps towards him. It was making a mewling sound.
And Cardiff knew, as the thing pulled him sharply back against the metal stair-rails with an echoing clatter, that the thing had double-backed to the sounds from the service corridor, had torn the still-imprisoned Farley Peters from the wall. It had dragged him back to the stairwell, had gutted and fed from him to regain its strength.
Bellowing, the thing was trying to reach over the stair-rail with its other encrusted, decomposing claw. It snatched at
Cardiff and he tried to twist away from it, pain like fire stabbing into his chest where the thing had him gripped with the other claw.
Peters was at his legs now, holding in his own transformed innards with one hand, and clutching at Cardiff’s leg with the other. Cardiff could feel hot breath on his leg, and knew that the Peters thing wanted to bite him.
The thing beyond the stair-rail slashed downwards at Cardiff again and caught his sleeve. It began to lift him over the stair-rail.
And then Peters sank his own hideously transformed jaws into the thing’s arm as it lifted Cardiff.
The Shape bellowed and twisted, with Peters’ mouth still firmly clamped on its monstrous arm. Something with the consistency of cement began to splatter from Peters’ ripped torso, but still he clung on to it in the renewed savagery of his hunger. The thing dropped Cardiff back on to the steps, and now the grip was gone from his chest.
Cardiff threw himself backwards against the staircase wall, as the thing from the stairwell lunged backwards into the darkness, taking the flapping and gutted body of Peters with it, still fastened to its arm. Cardiff fired blindly into the roaring, shrieking mass as he began to scramble back up the stairs.
Breath sobbing in his throat, hand clutched to the deep slashes in his bleeding chest, Cardiff saw the monstrous shadow of the thing smashing Peters rapidly liquefying body against the stairwell wall, as if it was beating a carpet.
He had turned then, and scrabbled upwards to the door.
And now they were climbing fast, and Barbara was saying: “Oh God, I can feel it again! It tricked me! It knew that I could sense it, just as it can sense me.”
They reached the next landing and swung themselves around it, clambering up the next set of stairs.
“It laid a trap for us, Mr Cardiff. It deliberately switched off its mind to me, to make me think that it had died.”
Cardiff looked over the stair-rail, and saw a monstrous shadow reach the first-floor landing. The shadow was turning on that landing, moving up the next set of stairs after them. Down below, whatever was left of Farley Peters was smeared on the wall.
“How many floors?” gasped Jimmy. ‘
“Fourteen,” said Cardiff through gritted teeth as they continued to climb.
“Christ. ‘And then what?”
“Just climb, Jimmy. lt’s coming.”
ELEVEN
Gilbert screwed his eyes shut, waiting for the other windows to explode out into the Darkfall, dragging both Rohmer and himself into those hellish, spinning whirlwinds. Rohmer was still talking to himself, still keeping that vice-clamp grip on Gilbert’s wrist. But that pain was the least of his worries.
Another strip light exploded in the roaring maelstrom, showering them with glass. But Rohmer continued talking, undisturbed.
Gales of snow and rainwater drenched them, but still Rohmer laughed softly to himself.
Gilbert waited for the lightning strike that would finally find them, and began to babble a hopeless prayer.
And then the crackling explosions and shattering of glass ceased. The wind and the rain and the snow still howled and blasted through the ragged aperture where the window had blown out, but the electricity and lightning seemed to have gone. Gilbert kept his eyes screwed shut, waiting for it to return.
When it did not, he opened his eyes again, looking up through squinted vision at Rohmer, sitting above him and silent at last. And with a smile on his face to show how enormously pleased he was. Gilbert looked around, the rain and the wind freezing his face, whipping at his hair. The lightning had vanished, even though the storm still continued to ravage the office interior. He tried to pull free of Rohmer’s grasp, but could not.
Rohmer looked down at him, smiled, and began to talk again; continuing the one-sided conversation that Gilbert had been unable to hear so far.
“‘All the unmeasured ether flames with light.’ Alexander Pope’s words, Gilbert. Extending from the moon to the ends of the universe, the fabric of the stars. And the key to interweaving realms and planes of being: will, spirit, the soul . . . the divine.”
Rohmer looked to the storm blasting through the blown-out window.
“Fire, air, water and earth. And electricity in the ether, Rohmer. The energiser that interpenetrates the physical world and shows us the higher aspects of reality . . .”
“Rohmer!” Gilbert cried into the storm wind. “What the hell is the matter with you? We can’t stay here and . . .”
“He wouldn’t speak to you, Gilbert,” continued Rohmer, still staring at the shattered window as if willing the lightning to return. “But Bissell spoke to me. He gave me the answers.”
“Bissell? But what . . . ?”
“You were too blinkered to see. Too narrow-minded not to suspect.”
“For God’s sake, Rohmer!”
“The Darkfall is more than a physical manifestation,” continued Rohmer. There was somehow a smell of sulphur in the air now and Rohmer’s eyes seemed to be glittering in triumph. He took a pill from his pocket, and popped it into his mouth. He smiled.
“It’s a spiritual manifestation!”
The smile was gone again, and Rohmer glowered down at Gilbert. Now the scientist had final confirmation that Rohmer—the hard, forceful, determined and organised Rohmer—had lost his mind.
“Listen to me, Gilbert. As a scientist, you and your kind have been completely unaware of what your tampering with the physical world, with electricity, has done. It’s always been a Dark Force, and you’ve only succeeded in harnessing a minuscule aspect of it. Without realising it, your nuclear scientists are black alchemists. Once, it was the quest to transmute lead into gold. Now, it’s transmitting uranium into even denser matter—lead and plutonium. Substances not found in nature. Transmogrified substance!”
“Rohmer. Please. You’re not making any sense. We’ve got to . . .”
“I’ve got to make you understand. The first atomic bomb. Where was it exploded?”
“Rohmer, please . . .”
Rohmer twisted Gilbert’s wrist hard, making him cry out in pain.
“God, Rohmer!”
“Where?”
“Alamagordo!”
“That’s right. And do you know what happened then? No? Let me enlighten you. The planet Saturn crossed the heavens at exactly the point that Pluto had been discovered. Did you know that? Pluto . . . the God of Hades. Did you know that the planet Saturn is associated with lead? And the hydrogen bomb. Where was . . . ?”
“Rohmer, let me go!”
“Where?”
“Bikini!”
“That’s right. And on the instant that it happened, Uranus—the electrical disruptor—crossed the same point in the sky. A new force was created and released on earth, just when those planets, when those vast disruptors were aligned. The real force that is electricity has a name, Gilbert. What we think of in simple terms as electricity is related to the creative forces in the universe in ways that we cannot imagine. The Chinese think it’s ‘Chi’. But its real name . . . is Ahriman. The ancients called it the God of the Underworld. Intelligent, objective, calculating, cold. The polar opposite of the Devil . . . but nevertheless, the Devil.”
Lightning flickered outside in the storm once more, drawing Rohmer’s attention.
“Don’t get me wrong, Gilbert. Not the Devil we know. Not an entity. But a force. And a force that isn’t remotely interested in us as people . . . as individuals. It’s one of the principal forces at the core of the universe, perhaps not the main force, but something that can give us immediate enlightenment if we . . .”
Rohmer laughed with wild enthusiasm.
“. . . flick the right switch!”
His laughter died away, and he continued: “I’ve been privileged to learn, Gilbert. I knew that Bissell had the answers that I really wanted. And when I gave him what he wanted, he gave me what I wanted. Gilbert, Gilbert. You and your kind have got it all wrong. All wrong! The universe is a spiritual construction, not solely a phys
ical construction. And do you know why the Darkfall effect is truly happening? Truly?” Rohmer twisted hard again at Gilbert’s wrist, eliciting another cry of pain. “It’s the pettiness, the frustrations, the greed, the evils that men do—big and small. It’s cruelty, murder and rape. It’s child abuse, paedophilia. Genocide. Torture. War. All of it eating away at the spiritual fabric of existence for thousands upon thousands of years. Now that fabric of our existence is coming apart under the psychic emissions of a billion, billion spiritual ‘cancers’. Now, the force that is truly Ahriman—the Darkfall—can break through with increasing frequency until everything—everything—ceases to exist as we know it.”
Gilbert was silent now, staring hard at Rohmer. The man was mad—but there was finally a bizarre logic to what he was saying.
Beyond the windows, the night exploded.
For an instant, the plate glass all around them flared blue-white, the building shook as the pain of a Darkfall strike stabbed into their ears again. For Gilbert, it was agony . . . but for Rohmer, the sound produced ecstasy. He jumped to his feet, still holding on to Gilbert’s wrist, as a second strike hit the building. Cracks zig-zagged from floor to ceiling, chunks of plaster fell in spattering clouds from the walls and three more windows exploded inwards. Minute shards of glass slashed across Rohmer’s ecstatic face. Thin threads of blood glittered on his forehead and cheeks.
“Vitalism!” shouted Rohmer into the storm, taking a step towards one of the exploded windows, still holding Gilbert’s wrist and dragging him off balance as he moved. “The Great Chain of Being! Even Plato was closer to the truth than you and yours, Gilbert. Don’t you see? The earth itself is alive. Everything lives! Even the inert, if it’s infused with Darkfall. But we’re special, Gilbert. Very, very special. Because as humans, only we are instinctively aware of the spiritual essence of the universe. Only we look for self-transcendence.”
Lightning flared and flickered beyond the shattered windows and Rohmer took another step forwards, as if he wanted to join it. Gilbert was dragged with him, and twisted to rise as Rohmer wiped streaks of blood from his face. Rohmer turned and looked down at him.