Road Kill

by Hanna Jameson

  Eli pulled over so we could look at one of them half-submerged in the Hudson, decommissioned.

  But we were wedded to the car; I wasn’t going anywhere without one, so we took the half-hour drive instead.

  I found that’s what I’d come to expect from following Eli now, having all my least favourite aspects of humanity thrown into my face. But he spared me the ferry, thank fuck.

  ‘Was that you?’ was the first thing Eli asked me when we were standing side by side staring at the monstrosity. ‘The day you left me in the motel. Did you kill Cam?’

  ‘What? No. Look, it happened only yesterday.’

  ‘No, that’s when they found him. Was it you?’

  ‘No.’

  He stared.

  ‘Eli, no. What do you think this is, some conspiracy?’ I laughed, and stopped abruptly when it seemed too much.

  ‘It just seems… out of character.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since you knew him. Maybe he changed.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he murmured.

  ‘Anyway, that thing you sent me about this place,’ I said, with caution, ‘about the missing kids and this place we’re going. Are you suggesting that Trent might have something to do with them?’

  ‘No,’ he said, giving the same answer as Melissa. ‘It was too long ago. It’s just something that may have attracted him, that’s all.’

  ‘And how did you get a hunch that he was in the area?’

  ‘I asked around.’

  ‘You… asked around.’

  ‘Yeah, while you were taking your long weekend I started asking about Satanic hotspots in Staten Island. When I got here I asked a few of the locals, reporters, and every answer came back to this place. Willowbrook. So I sent you that documentary so you could get up to speed.’

  I tried to eyeball him but he was watching the decommissioned ferry. He must have spoken to Melissa; it was the only explanation. How else would he know?

  ‘Well, to be more accurate,’ he suddenly added, ‘there are rumours of cults meeting in the ruins of this place. Apparently people say they hold Black Mass there and offer sacrifices, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And the reporters you spoke to, they told you about the experiments and the fucked-up stuff that used to go on?’

  ‘Yeah, the entire institution was the subject of an exposé in the seventies when a journalist managed to get inside. Kids were being injected with TB, fed each other’s faeces, left crawling around in the dark with no supervision because of understaffing or whatever. So no wonder the site attracts fucking mental cases now.’

  ‘Did any of the reporters recognize Trent?’

  ‘No, but a local police officer thought he did. He said he stopped and searched someone for acting suspiciously a couple of months ago, but didn’t take him in as he thought it would be a waste of a cell. The guy didn’t have any drugs on him but he was muttering a lot of shit about the devil and being possessed.’

  ‘OK. OK, so Trent might still be around.’

  ‘Trent would have no other reason to be in Staten Island if it weren’t for the Willowbrook thing. It just seems to fit.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d have come here to… carry on teaching or…’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be getting another teaching job after being fired twice, even if it is in this shithole.’ He paused. ‘The officer told me there’s loads of homeless people living in the tunnels under the woods. There’s a whole community of them, just living down there in the dark like rats, and the council leave them to it. Can you imagine?’

  He sounded way too happy at the prospect.

  ‘No, not really.’

  America was fucked, I realized. As a Western country we had failed. We were a social experiment that had gone horribly wrong, that had driven half of its subjects insane and forced them underground, and had turned the other half into hedonistic psychopaths.

  Even to look at, everyone here was an extreme compared to the stubborn mediocrity of people in England. People were either emaciated to the point of shadows or had turned themselves into trudging, listless tanks.

  ‘Did you speak to anyone else about this?’ I asked.

  No reply.

  ‘Did you speak to Melissa?’

  If it was possible, he gave me even less of a reply. An icy gust of wind rushed in from the water and the shell of the boat seemed to groan.

  ‘Look. I just wanna know.’

  ‘He’ll be there,’ Eli said.

  ‘And you’re so certain of that, how?’

  ‘I just know. He’ll be there.’

  He got back in the car.

  I followed suit, and we travelled in relative silence for the rest of the drive.

  In fact, all he said before we reached the hotel was, ‘I’m looking forward to coming back to London with you now. I didn’t think I would but, with more consideration, it’ll be like seeing an old friend.’

  I was too busy judging the squalor of these houses to pay him much attention.

  ‘Christ, if I had to live here I think I’d kill myself,’ I said at one point.

  And Eli nodded.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  In some areas around Willowbrook Institution the trees had collapsed, sagging under the atmosphere. Branches and withered vines, blackened and mottled with disease, snaked along the ground and climbed buildings.

  Eli slipped through the closely knit trees with the ease of a jungle cat. He didn’t seem fazed by the place. On the contrary, he seemed, like he was arriving home.

  I followed, wishing I’d stayed in the protective cocoon of the vehicle, feeling spiked foliage scrape my ankles and snag on my clothes. I wondered if anything here was poisonous. Everything looked ill. Plant something in the ground here and it’d grow up deformed.

  Eli bounded up to the laundry and industrial building.

  ‘Do you know where the tunnel entrances are?’ I asked, uneasy about disturbing the silence.

  ‘No.’ He glanced back at me. ‘But then, I’ve never lived here.’

  ‘You suggesting we ask someone?’

  We both looked around. The place was deserted.

  ‘You’d think one of the homeless who live here would know.’

  Even compared to Skid Row, the idea of sleeping here horrified me. Though maybe it was harder to be scared of places like this when you knew that monsters didn’t really exist; when most people looked at you and thought you were the monster. The people who claimed they’d been chased out of the woods by screaming wraiths had probably just come across a person trying to sleep, a person more terrified on a daily basis than they could understand.

  Eli pushed aside branches, averting his face as the tendrils swiped across his cheeks, and climbed through a cavernous window.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We’re not going to find anything out there, are we?’

  I looked at my smart, dust-covered shoes. I had a gun. This wasn’t the UK, I thought. I have a fucking gun and I won’t be chastised for using it. It was, perhaps, the only thing as a country we were doing right.

  ‘OK, wait.’

  I pushed aside the same branch and followed Eli. As I jumped to the floor I was sprung back up and lost my footing. The ground was carpeted with coils of wire; old mattress springs and fuck knows what.

  ‘This is the laundry building?’ I checked.

  Eli was observing some graffiti; nothing Satanic, mostly just racist.

  ‘I don’t know,‘ he murmured. ‘I don’t know much about this place. Maybe we should split up?’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Fuck, no! You know all horror movies start with splitting up. It’s the fucking worst idea ever.’

  ‘This isn’t a horror movie.’ He looked back at me and smiled, the web of branches across the window casting a veil across his features. ‘You’re scared?’

  I took the bait. ‘Fine. We’ll split up. You have a signal?’

  We both checked our phones and I at least had four bars.

  �
��Well, if I end up getting chased through the catacombs by the fucking Slender Man I know you’ll have my back, eh. How long do you think it’ll take to get any emergency services out here?’

  He didn’t seem bothered. Maybe he just had no imagination.

  ‘I’ll meet you back here in half an hour,’ he said, and walked through a hole in the wall to our left.

  I’d never explored abandoned buildings as a child. There hadn’t been many near us. Even the boarded-up places in the suburbs never interested me. I waited outside while my friends ran from room to room, graffitiing, setting things on fire, committing acts of random destruction as boys are wont to do.

  It was a lack of interest, I told myself, but it ran deeper than that. Maybe it was because I believed in hell, was able to believe in things you couldn’t see, that I felt an almost paralysing fear when faced with an alien enclosed space.

  It was OK for other people. For them, the only monsters they could imagine were human.

  There was a torch on my phone, I reminded myself as I stuck my head out into the corridor.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ I sang to myself under my breath, to lighten the atmosphere.

  Not far from me I could hear Eli walking, scuffing, kicking things out of his way.

  It was dark, but I could see that the walls were practically rainbow-spattered. It should have been cheery but it wasn’t.

  Had Trent Byrne walked down this corridor? Had he put out his arms and maybe trailed his fingers along the plaster?

  I held out my hands and tentatively touched the walls.

  Light poured in from the holes in the ceiling, down through the third and second floors and the exposed piping, reminiscent of the design I had in my own club.

  ‘Ron!’

  I went for my gun before I registered that the voice was Eli’s, and the word was my name.

  ‘Fuck,’ I spat, beads of sweat dotting my forehead. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

  ‘Come and look at this!’

  I returned to where we’d climbed in and followed Eli’s call. I tripped and kicked out as wire coiled around my ankles like sentient plants.

  Eli was in the next room, crouched by a broken wheelchair and shining his phone at the wall.

  ‘That’s fucking creepy,’ I said, eyeing the wheelchair.

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant.’ He beckoned. ‘Look at this.’

  On the wall, on the verge of being lost but not completely illegible, was an eight-pointed star.

  ‘There’s a few of them,’ he said, shining the phone-torch up the wall and across the doorframe.

  ‘Could be coincidence.’ I shrugged. ‘Not as if eight-pointed stars aren’t a thing most kids get into doodling.’

  ‘Pentagrams maybe, but not eight-pointed stars. They wouldn’t be what most people would scribble if you asked them to draw a star.’

  I wanted to explain it away. ‘But it’s just… So many people come through here. It’s unlikely.’

  Eli stood up, shaking his head. ‘No, we’re close.’

  ‘He’s probably gone now.’

  ‘But we’re close. We’re closing in, Ron.’ He clapped me on the shoulder as he left the room. ‘We’re closing in!’

  I stood there watching him go, then went back to my corridor. There wasn’t much here but drawings and rubble, but I stopped as I reached a shallow staircase leading down. I could go and get Eli, but that would have looked pathetic.

  My children would do it with no fear. I knew them. They’d always been braver than me. They refused to believe in God for a start, which I minded less from a theological perspective and more because it must be terrifying for them. The idea of believing in nothing; a full stop, darkness, chaos, coincidence, the idea that we were just deluded barely progressive organisms that had lucked out by developing on the right piece of rock flying through space, surrounded by billions upon billions of other rocks, balls of gas, surrounded by nothing, no consciousness, just speeding towards an end with no point…

  I looked down the stairs.

  Was there no point?

  I switched on my torch and descended.

  The basement rooms. Now these motherfuckers were dark. The claustrophobia made it hard to catch my breath. I walked from room to room, shining my thin beam across old chairs and rusted bedframes.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck…’

  After watching the documentary that Eli had sent me I kept expecting the light to hit some hind legs, the stunted feral limbs of malnourished children.

  ‘Trent,’ I called, as if he were a wayward cat. ‘Trent! Here, Trent! Here, Trent, my boy…’

  My beam fell across an old gurney, with the restraints still hanging off…

  A face…

  ‘Fuck!’

  I dropped my phone and the beam flew across the room, plunging me into black.

  Scuttling.

  I scrabbled towards the light. My gun was forgotten, I just wanted vision. In the dark all I could see was the face. There had been a face.

  I thought I was going to throw up.

  Finding my phone, I shone it upwards, to the doorways and staircase.

  Nothing.

  I took out my gun.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I shouted, sounding more dangerous than I felt.

  Of course there was no reply.

  The better part of my brain, the part not flatlining with fear, was already telling me there had been nothing there.

  But I knew there had been.

  There were footsteps on the stairs and I held out my gun, saw my shaking arm and felt disgusted. It was as if my dad was here. I was fine, but now my arm was shaking. I was an unsteady, hyperventilating fucking limb.

  ‘Ron? You all right?’

  It was Eli.

  I lowered my gun and all evidence of the shaking arm disappeared.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  ‘I heard you shouting. Thought you had found someone.’ He appeared in the doorway with his own beam of light, more powerful than mine. ‘Or someone had found you?’

  ‘I thought I saw something. It was nothing.’

  It wasn’t nothing. I could still hear that movement across the floor.

  We’re closing in, I thought, turning the gurney behind me and giving it a kick. We’re closing in.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Daisy

  As I said earlier, this isn’t a film. I didn’t look up and see Noel waving from across a river. But sometimes a hunch is a hunch.

  His absence weighed upon the Underground with more gravity than usual. At other times when he hadn’t been there, by definition I just imagined him elsewhere, probably drunk. This time I came into the dressing rooms and asked Gail, ‘Is Noel upstairs?’

  She shook her head.

  I sent him a text straight away, saying, Where u at boi?

  ‘Did he say where he was going to be?’ I asked.

  Gail paused, hands to her hair. ‘No.’

  ‘Has he been in at all?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘Gail, just like focus on me, yeah? On my face, yeah?’

  She stopped fiddling with her hair slides and frowned at me.

  ‘Has. Noel. Been. In?’

  ‘No, what’s your problem?’

  ‘Fuck’s sake.’ I looked at my phone again and turned. ‘I’m gonna be late.’

  ‘Hey, what? We can’t open without you!’

  ‘How long have you worked here, Gail?’ I gestured around us at some of the other girls. ‘You can organize this shower for a bit, right? No offence, guys.’

  I left through the staff door, already calling a taxi. As the call connected I spotted one across the street, cut it off and tried to get through to Noel instead. He wasn’t answering and hadn’t acknowledged my text.

  I was panicking, and maybe that was enough of a warning.

  I gave the driver Noel’s address in Marylebone and tried to call him again.

  ‘Fuck, Noel, just answer.’

  I texted Ron
nie, asking him to text Noel. He’d be more likely to respond to Ronnie. But it was still going to be too late.

  This isn’t a film. No one arrives in the nick of time because there would be traffic or a delay on the Victoria line. Or you’d miss the premonition altogether because you’d be buying lunch, and you might feel a creeping panic or anxiety in your gut but then you felt like this all the time because this was London and you’d been taking so many drugs that your body chemistry was essentially fucked…

  I called Noel again.

  The taxi driver eyed me in the overhead mirror but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Noel, if you get this can you just send a text or something? You don’t have to come in but can you let me know you’re all right?’

  What if he wasn’t at home? The thought hit me as his building came into view. I wouldn’t know where else to start.

  I got out of the taxi without paying.

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘In a minute,’ I yelled. ‘I’ll pay you in a minute!’

  He might have been with Caroline, I thought, as I ran up to the doors and hammered on all the buzzers.

  The entrance hummed and opened itself.

  I powered upstairs.

  He wasn’t with Caroline, I knew.

  I reached his front door, banged on it and shouted, ‘Noel! Open the door!’

  No movement from inside.

  ‘Noel, I fucking swear I’ll—’

  The door opened and Noel was staring at me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I…’ I hadn’t realized I was shaking, red-faced, out of breath. ‘You’re here.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You’re not at work.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘And you came here to tell me that?’

  There was something odd about him. I looked him up and down and pushed past into his flat. It stank in here, a real man smell. Women never managed to pollute a space with their degeneration like this. When women degenerated they still managed to be fragrant.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He glared, still standing by the door. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You seem weird.’

  ‘I seem weird? Daisy, go back to work.’