Shiftling

by Savile, Steven

  I had come here expecting this to be about the thing we had found in the tunnel, but he’d never have called that thing “him.”

  There was only one “him” he could be talking about.

  6

  1985

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  I had no idea what was really living down there, but Scotty was so sure. He kept insisting we had to go down there and deal with it. I couldn’t think in terms of killing it. I mean, I was all for leaving it down there to die if it wasn’t fed. A kind of passive murder at best. No dirty hands. I was still awake when the sun rose. I knew there was no point in trying to fall asleep then. It would be better to get up and do whatever Scotty wanted us to do rather than lie there worrying about it. Everything I could imagine had to be worse, didn’t it?

  * * *

  Scotty was already waiting for me when I started down the street.

  We hadn’t arranged a time or place and yet there we were. I was humming Prince Charming. It had been on the radio when I woke up and it wouldn’t get out of my head. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Right, I guess he was never a fourteen-year-old boy asking a fourteen-year-old girl out. Ridicule was everything to be scared of normally. Just not today. Today I had plenty of other stuff to be scared of. I carried a metal bar Dad had used to break up the ground when he put some fence posts up last month. Scotty had his older brother’s air rifle.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Don’t you think we should get some of the others?”

  Scotty shook his head. “Nah, better if it’s just the two of us,” he said, like he was sure. “They wouldn’t understand. Besides, the more of us that go down there, the less room there will be to operate. This way, just the two of us, we just go down, do what we have to do, and we never mention it to anyone. Agreed?”

  I’m not sure why I went along with it, there’s no single good reason for it, that’s for sure, especially as there was a chance we could get in trouble down there. If no one knew where we were, how would anyone know where to look if we went missing?

  But Scotty was prepared. He had a gun, a rope and a flashlight.

  We didn’t need the rope to get down there in the end.

  When Scotty opened the grille, we realized there were a series of iron rungs set into the shaft like a ladder.

  Scotty shone the torch down first, to make sure the rungs ran all the way to the bottom, and when he was sure there was a bottom, dropped the rope down ahead of us.

  There was no sign of movement down there; no scratching or scurrying in the darkness, so we went down one rung at a time.

  Rust flaked from the old ladder, digging into my hand as I descended.

  I reached the bottom and moved away from the ladder so Scotty could climb down.

  Old bones crunched under my feet.

  Dead cats.

  My heart raced. I wanted to scrabble back up those iron handholds as fast as I could and climb back out through the small oblong of light—which seemed so far above my head now it wasn’t funny, but Scotty insisted we push on and I couldn’t say no, because ridicule was something to be scared of.

  It only took a few steps for us to disappear into darkness. We left that shaft of light behind and everything was black. Just like that.

  Scotty pointed his flashlight ahead of us.

  It speared into the darkness, revealing more bones, and a soggy mulch of leaves and then, beyond that a series of lights fixed at the top of the tunnel. We had to crouch slightly to walk along. Every footstep sounded so loud, echoing in the cramped tunnel. There was no sign of how we could switch the lights on, or if they even worked. I mean, why would they? Surely no one was paying the electricity bill for the old mine still?

  More than once I glanced back for reassurance that the patch of light in the ceiling was still pointing the way out. The farther we ventured from it, the less reassuring it became. I could hear water dripping in the distance. It sounded incredibly loud—loud enough to fill the entire tunnel with its reverberations.

  We were going to have to rely on the flashlight to lead our way.

  I listened, trying to hear beyond the water, to hear whatever was waiting down here.

  Nothing.

  When the tunnel turned to take us farther beneath the Batters, the light from the shaft finally disappeared.

  Now we really were on our own.

  In a heartbeat it became harder to breathe. I didn’t know if it was because the air was becoming stale or if it was down to my own panic. My mind raced. Who was the last person to breathe this air? How long had it been since anyone had? I wanted to get this over with. I wanted to get out of there. I took a tighter grip on the steel bar. I was so caught up with my own fear I almost failed to notice Scotty had stopped in his tracks.

  “What is it?” I whispered, moving up close behind him. We couldn’t stand side by side.

  He said nothing.

  He didn’t need to.

  He played the light ahead of us.

  The tunnel opened out into a larger space.

  I had assumed it would lead to mine workings; some long-abandoned machine or maybe a dead end where a shaft had collapsed in on itself.

  I was wrong.

  It was hard to be sure what the place had been used for; it was brick-lined and great lintels stretched across the stone ceiling to support it.

  The flashlight revealed electric cables like swags of Christmas tinsel running around the room.

  Electric bulbs hung dull and dusty in their sockets.

  Scotty followed the cables with the flashlight until it played upon an array of switches and dials. It looked like something out of Blake’s 7. I wanted to go and fiddle with the dials. Maybe we could throw some real light onto the place, but we couldn’t afford to let ourselves get distracted.

  And because of that, it seemed to call to us.

  There was no sign of any creature large or small lurking in the shadows. And from what I could see, no trace of its presence on the floor.

  I was beginning to think Scotty was full of shit, not that I would have ever said so aloud.

  “What do you think this place was?”

  “Pumping station, maybe,” Scotty said. “To pump water out of the workings deeper down. Or maybe it used to pump air down there. I bet Old Man Harrison would know.”

  The very mention of his name sent a shiver up my spine as though someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of my shirt.

  I had tried to forget about what Scotty might or might not have seen inside Old Man Harrison’s house, mainly because there was only room for one set of worries inside my head, and right now they were all about what we were going to find down there in the tunnels. But just mentioning Harrison’s name welcomed a whole new—old—set of worries back into my mind.

  Scotty kept the light focussed on a big iron-banded door that stood open in the corner.

  It was the only way out of the room.

  If what we were looking for was down here—and if it was at this end of the tunnel—then it had to be through that door. That was a lot of ifs. If it wasn’t, it meant that we’d turned the wrong way when we had come through the grille and down the airshaft. Or it didn’t exist at all and Scotty was playing silly buggers trying to scare me to death.

  It was working.

  And it became a whole lot more effective when I heard something moving toward us.

  Scotty dropped the torch as he tried to take hold of the air rifle and pointed it in the direction of the doorway. Something darker than the blackness swelled within the doorway, writhing and lashing wildly; then it burst through the door and shadows swelled all around the room because Scotty kicked the flashlight as he scrambled instinctively away from the thing.

  He fired at it.

  The sound of the gunshot was so much louder than I’d ever thought it could be.

  There was a howl of pain right after the initial boom, but it didn’t stop the creature—I couldn’t tell you what it was, wha
t it looked like, because I couldn’t focus on it in the darkness, it was just a thing—taking hold of Scotty and hurling him toward the far wall. He slammed into it and slumped to the ground. The air rifle hit the wall. I lurched back, bringing my foot down on the head of the flashlight and plunging the room into darkness.

  I screamed then.

  I swung the metal bar wildly, lashing out at the darkness again and again. I couldn’t see anything. But that didn’t stop me. I slashed and hacked and slashed again, whipping myself into a desperate frenzy, and then felt the sudden shocking jar all the way along my arm as it struck something. Flesh and bone? I don’t know. I didn’t stop swinging to find out. I just kept swinging and swinging, battering the damned thing over and over, feeling each shocking impact all the way through my body, and I was screaming as I hit the thing. Screaming and screaming. Howling. Roaring. And inside all that noise, yelling, “Die! Die! Die!” until the thing lay wet with blood and lifeless on top of Scotty.

  I dropped the pipe and pulled him free.

  Neither of us said a word. Neither of us wanted to look at what that thing had been. It was dead. We’d done what we came here to do. Now all we wanted to do was get the hell out of that place, breathe fresh air, and pretend we’d never opened the grille and gone into the horrible dark world beneath the Batters.

  Scotty grabbed my arm and we stumbled back the way we’d come. The tunnel felt so incredibly claustrophobic now, and all I could smell was blood.

  It felt like it took forever before we found our way back into the tunnel again without the flashlight to guide us. We edged a few inches unsteadily forward, groping out blindly, thinking we were in space only to hit a wall, thinking we were following the line of a wall only to stumble into space and almost go sprawling. But eventually we saw the beacon of light in the ceiling calling us to safety.

  Battered and bloody, we reached the surface.

  It was only when we were back up on the Batters, hands on knees, gasping panicked breaths, we realized we’d left Scotty’s brother’s air rifle down there, along with my dad’s pipe and the broken flashlight, but neither of us intended to return to recover that stuff. We were never going down there again. And we were never going to talk about what had happened down there. Not ever.

  We locked the grille and Scotty hurled the key into the Batters.

  I prayed no one would ever find it again.

  7

  Present Day

  “Why don’t you tell us about your meeting with Mr. Nichols?” The detective said, leaning forward, elbows on the table between us. The tape was whirring in the background. I could smell the harsh ammoniac of disinfectant in the interrogation room. It couldn’t cover up the smell of vomit.

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said, not quite honestly. There was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and then there was this. “I wasn’t going to stay long, but we got chatting. Old times. Better days. You know how it is. Back to the glory days of our youth, computer games, the funfair on the Batters, dancing to Madness and Aha and trying to be oh so cool when we both fancied the same girls at school. You know, that language of youth. We both spoke it. We had a shared history. We had in-jokes only we knew. Stuff that only made sense to us.”

  “Indeed. So, what were you chatting about?”

  “Like I said, nothing much. We did talk about a few of the old gang; people I’d lost touch with after moving away, that kind of thing.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  I shrugged. The problem with a lie is the more detail you try to add the harder it is to maintain it. Cracks start to show. “God. Names. Loads of them, everyone from school. I’d forgotten half of them and was struggling to remember them even when Scotty described them to me. I guess some people don’t make a big impression, others do. You can’t legislate for the effect someone has on your soul, right? Like Rachel…I’d never forget her. Never, ever. First kiss,” I said, when he looked at me.

  He referred to a notebook for a moment, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He looked up from the notebook to his colleague, a rather striking woman, the kind you’d really want to be your first kiss if you could actually pick and choose such things. You’d probably want her to be your last too, if it came to that. “According to staff at the hospital, Mr. Nichols had barely spoken a word before your visit?”

  “If you say so.”

  “For days, according to doctors and orderlies, the only thing he would say was your name. Now, you’re telling me you turn up and you can’t stop him chatting about the good old days?”

  “It is what it is,” I said.

  “And what it is, is a little strange, don’t you think? I mean after not seeing him for all those years?”

  “He didn’t seem very happy even when we were talking, if that helps? I guess he thought they were happier times, for him at least.”

  “But not for you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “It wasn’t a happier time for you then? That seems to be the implication.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You said that they were happier times, for him at least. I take it that means they weren’t happier for you?”

  “There are two kinds of people in the world, Detective: those that shine at school, and can genuinely say they were the best days of their lives, when they were the golden child and everything they touched turned to, well, gold. Then there are others who weren’t so blessed. They were awkward when it came to sports. They weren’t the teacher’s pet. They didn’t quite fit into their own skin, never mind school life, and they had to grow into who they were. I’m one of those. I’ve managed to do a lot of things in my life since then. A lot of good things that have made me what I am now. So yes, what were better days for him weren’t the best days of my life. But I’m not unhappy with how it turned out. Life’s pretty good right now.”

  The detective held my gaze but said nothing.

  The silence said more than any question, but I wasn’t going to fall into that trap. I knew he wanted me to talk. It was basic psychology. Leave me to fill in the silences. I would answer their questions, but I wasn’t about to volunteer anything.

  “These people from his golden days that you talked about, did they happen to include Simon Morrissey?”

  I felt like someone had kicked me in the nuts. It was as simple and as effective as that. One name was all it took and I was snatched back to that night.

  The last night we’d all been together.

  If there was a single night of my life that could possibly have blocked out what we had seen in the tunnel—what we had done to try to make the world a safer place—it was that night. But because the two events had come so close together they had become part of the same memory, blurring together.

  That was the night Spider disappeared.

  8

  1985

  I hadn’t wanted to go back to the fair.

  Scotty had insisted we carry on as normal. He’d been adamant we behave like nothing had ever happened. It was almost pathological. If we pretended nothing had happened, then maybe nothing had happened.

  What it came down to was if we’d decided not to go after all the work the gang had put in, people would be pissed off, which would mean they’d start hassling us about it, and for now we just wanted the world to forgot about us.

  And the best way for that to happen was for everyone to see us doing exactly what they expected us to be doing.

  Nothing more, nothing less.

  And that meant having fun, hitting the rides, eating sticky toffee and candy floss and trying to chat up girls who wouldn’t look twice at us.

  That didn’t mean I could pretend to be enthusiastic about it, no matter how much I tried, it was all just going through the motions, faking the emotions.

  Anyone who knew me would have been able to tell something wasn’t right.

  The other guys were mumbling about something or other as we made our way over the
hill and skirted the rough ground alongside the Batters, but Scotty and I walked in silence.

  I kept slowing down. I couldn’t help it. I dragged my feet. I kicked stones. I just wanted to walk a little separately. I didn’t want to draw comments from the others, not if I didn’t have an answer for them, and I didn’t have a lot of answers so the odds were I wouldn’t. We just stuck together, like a new dynamic was developing between us. We were a group within the group.

  “You can’t be serious?” someone in the crowd said.

  I had no idea who it was, and I was trying hard not to look in the direction of the waste ground knowing what lay in the tunnels a few feet beneath it.

  “You’d better bloody believe it,” said Spider. His voice was unmistakable among the other voices.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Scotty showed no sign of having heard me. He was lost in his own thoughts.

  Spider heard me though. He was quick to say, “Nothing,” sheepishly.

  “The idiot’s got a stunt planned,” Ferret said.

  “Oh, has he now? So, what’s the plan, Stan?”

  “Secret,” said Spider, shaking his head. He was grinning. “It’ll be more effective if you don’t know what’s coming. Believe me.”

  It certainly proved to be more effective, but it also took away any chance of me or Scotty stopping him.

  If he’d told us, then maybe he might not have died that night.

  * * *

  Few of us were big fans of the Big Wheel, but we decided that as we had more than enough cash to splash on every ride, then we had to go on every ride. It was a matter of principle. We’d do it together. One for all and all for one.