Memories of the last time I’d been down here flooded my brain, blurring with the here and now as the thing’s face twisted, the bones beneath it grinding as they began to break and reknit, remembering Spider.
Spider.
Spider, who had come down here trying to escape from Old Man Harrison and had run from one monster into the arms of another.
Spider, who had been beaten to death not by the fall from the big wheel but from the metal bar in my hands, and been left down here to rot because we were too frightened to question what had happened on the wheel and just wanted to remember it as being anything other than our fault.
Spider, my friend.
I knew how it had happened now. The creature had come aboveground and walked with us across the common wearing Spider’s face. It had climbed the wheel and fallen…but when it hit the ground, it hadn’t been Spider, it had been someone else, some other victim, and it had just walked away. It had been playing with us, taunting us because we thought we’d walked into its lair and killed it like a pair of heroes.
Well, I wasn’t playing.
This was ending here, now.
Another howl of pain filled the low space as I wrenched the axe head free from its shoulder.
Layers of dust that had been undisturbed for years fell from the ceiling.
The thing with so many faces thrashed about, eyes blazing with fear and hate in the bright beam of the flashlight.
I swung again, trying to take its head clean off its shoulders, but it moved so quickly, closing the gap between us so the flat of the shaft cracked off its shoulder instead of the blade into its neck.
It was on me, slashing, its nails full of coal and god knows what else scratched down the side of my face, tearing open three flaps of skin. I could feel the blood on my cheek. I tried to bring the axe up to defend myself, to fend it off, but it was too close. I could taste its foul breath as saliva dripped from its mouth onto my face. It tasted of coal.
And then Gazza was on its back trying to pull it off me.
He saved my life.
No question about it.
If he hadn’t thrown himself at the thing, it would have torn my throat out with its blackened teeth.
The pair of them went sprawling in the dust and the dirt. The flashlight went spinning out of Gazza’s hand, throwing mad shadows against the walls.
I scrambled back to my feet, raising the axe, but I couldn’t take a swing, not with Gazza under the thing.
And he was so damned terrified of it he was clinging on for dear life.
“Let go!” I yelled, but I don’t think he understood me. My words echoed around the cellar. We were both screaming. The creature was shrieking in pain from the axe wound in its shoulder. The light was still spinning, shadows writhing and twisting. My head reeled.
I didn’t know what to do. You think it’s going to be so easy. Just give yourself over to the violence. But it wasn’t like that. Gazza clung to the thing and I just stood there staring as its face changed again, like some grotesque plasticine Morph.
I could have sworn it was my father looking up at me.
He was dead and had been for a long time.
Had he known? Had he come down looking for the creature all those years ago?
And then it opened its mouth and I saw inside the thing. I don’t know what it was. A black seam of coal? Isn’t that what we all are in some regard or other? Carbon-based life forms? Was this thing just like me in more ways than the surface, having stolen my face and worn it for a while? And then I wondered how many other times it had ventured aboveground since I’d tried to kill it, wearing my face for the world. What had it done? What had it made me do? And something inside snapped. I didn’t care that Gazza was under it. I swung, slamming the axe into the middle of its face.
I wrenched the axe head free and slammed it down again, splitting its head wide open, and pulled the blade free again. This time the thing lolled sideways, head—or part of it—falling awkwardly on its shoulder. There was no blood. There was soot. Only soot. The stuff wept out of him.
“MOVE!” I yelled again. Gazza didn’t need telling twice. He pushed the creature away as I swung again, taking the thing’s outstretched arm clean off.
And then I started swinging wildly, not caring what I hit so long as the axe buried into something.
I swung and swung and swung, panting, blind with sweat and soot in my eyes, and I swung again, each time slamming the axe into the thing as it struggled to hold on to a face.
It chose Spider’s.
The sight of him staring up at me, stuff weeping out of him, was enough to break what little resolve I had left.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill him twice.
I dropped the axe.
It didn’t matter. It was too late for the thing anyway.
I stood over it like some vengeful slayer, watching its death throes.
After a minute it lay still.
I kicked it with my foot.
It didn’t move.
I had to be sure it was dead. I couldn’t walk out of here unless I was certain.
I bent down to retrieve the axe, then hacked at it until there was nothing remotely recognizable about the thing’s face, and even then I didn’t stop hacking until I’d taken its head off its shoulders and I fell back exhausted and covered in soot and coal dust.
I was on my knees.
Shaking.
“Shit,” Gazza said from the doorway. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I looked across at him. He shone the flashlight through the door. I could see the shadow on the floor. I knew what it meant. I didn’t want to go through the door. I really didn’t want to go through the door. I knew what was on the other side.
I crawled across to the open door.
I didn’t want to look but couldn’t stop myself.
The first thing I saw was the second slipper on the floor.
Then I saw his bare feet.
I looked up.
Scotty hung from one of the old beams supporting the roof of the mine workings.
The monster had claimed another victim.
“Help me get him down,” Gazza said. “We can’t let them find him like this.”
It took us a few minutes. I held our friend around the waist while Gazza tried to undo the belt wrapped around the beam and Scotty’s neck. He was crying as he did it, making it almost impossible for him to see what he was doing, but eventually Scotty fell into my arms.
“We can’t leave him here,” I said. “Not with that thing.” I looked over my shoulder. The creature hadn’t moved. There was no coming back for it, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t leaving him with it.
I didn’t tell him what I had in mind. I don’t think he would have been able to cope with it.
“We need to burn this place to the ground. No one is getting down here again.”
He nodded. There were petrol cans against one wall along with all of the other junk. Gazza doused the creature’s remains and the stairs and splashed stuff against the walls and floor; then we carried Scotty up between us.
He stood at the top of the stairs and tossed a match down into the darkness.
There was a soft crump as it landed, and we closed the door as the cellar started to burn.
We needed Scotty’s suicide to look like a suicide…but not here. We couldn’t leave him hanging here.
23
Present Day
“Okay, I think we’re about done.”
“You don’t understand. It’s all my fault.” He looked at me indulgently across the table. “I did it. I killed Spider.”
“Guilt’s a terrible thing, but the fact is your friend Simon was still alive that night when you went on the second trip to the fair. We’ve got eyewitness reports filed with the officers on duty. So if you were guilty of anything, it’s helping him run away, but, that’s impossible because you were on the ride at the time. So you see, we’re left with pieces of the puzzle and we can only put them together o
ne way.
“He found his way into the tunnels after the fall. Maybe he intended to hide out there until trouble at home blew over, but he didn’t know quite how badly he had injured himself in the fall. Maybe it was internal bleeding? The coroner’s report says death is consistent with injuries sustained during the fall. That’s one unassailable fact.” I tried to interrupt him, but he was having none of it. “Now, the only other question is if he wasn’t already dead, then someone hid his body down there. And that couldn’t have been you either.”
“But the gun. You found the gun down in the tunnels with his bones. Like I said.”
“Yes, we did. But the thing is, all that confirms is that you found a way into the tunnels and went on a monster hunt with your friend Scotty. He was the one who was obsessed with the tunnels. And when you come back, he is the one who commits suicide by lying down in front of the goods train last night. I think that tells us all we need to know, don’t you? We’ve got Simon Morrissey’s accomplice right there. A guilty mind. He’s carried it all this time, it’s chipped away at him, he’s withdrawn more and more, unable to cope with what happened back then—what he did—and believe me, I’m sure Harrison was the real monster you allude to, even if you don’t realize it yourself. You turn him into a monster of the scary-story variety because it’s how your young mind processed it. But there are no monsters. Only men.
“The fact that Nichols bought that old house and lived in it every day, that was nothing more than a punishment for not fighting back. He was in mourning for his childhood. I won’t say it’s classic behavior, but like you said, something in him changed when he went in that place.
“The sad truth is there are some adults who are predators. It frightens me to think how long Harrison’s hold lasted over Nichols, and how much he must have suffered over the years with no one to turn to. So it’s understandable that he wanted to see you one last time, to unburden himself before ending it. You were friends back then. You deserved to know the truth. Maybe he thought only you could understand, or maybe he wanted to forgive you for not helping him back then when he needed it? So it was a reckoning. A settling of accounts. Maybe he wanted to tell you what Harrison did to him. There are all sorts of conversations you could have had. Maybe he wanted to confess to being Simon Morrissey’s accomplice? Warn you that we’d found his body? Or hell, maybe he told you how he killed Simon with Harrison? Because that’s possible. It’s possible Harrison had been grooming him. That’s how this works, isn’t it? So how do you untangle the twisted relationship of abuser and abused they had? But one thing I am certain of, you didn’t kill Simon Morrissey.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t make him believe in monsters. He had the monster he wanted.
The things we had gone through in those tunnels would stay with us for the rest of our lives.
I had faced my demons though, and admitted my sins, so maybe now I could have the future I wanted? I didn’t have to live in fear of the Batters any longer.
There was nothing else to say.
The detective killed the tape.
“You’re free to go.”
I checked my watch as I walked back to my car and realized just how long I had been in there.
It was still a few hours before closing time.
I hoped I would still be welcome.
About the Author
Steven Savile has written books for popular TV shows including Dr Who, Torchwood, Primeval, and Stargate, is the brain behind the story of Battlefield 3, the multimillion selling computer game from DICE/EA, and has adapted the cult 2000AD character Slainé into a series of novels as well as writing the novel Dark Waters, telling the story of the nameless hero from the RISEN 2 computer game.
He has written novels about global terrorism, King Arthur, and Victorian Gentleman Knights over the last few years. His novel Silver was listed as the 26th bestselling ebook of 2011 in the UK by The Bookseller. He has won the International Media Writers Award and been Runner-Up in the British Fantasy Award.
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