by Tim Weaver
‘Well, I better be go–’
‘Mat,’ she said. ‘With one tee.’
I turned to look at her. ‘Sorry?’
‘I knew I’d remember it eventually.’ She smiled. ‘Alex’s friend from the church. His name was Mat.’
Before I went to sleep, I opened the case file containing the printouts Cary had given me and took out the DVD. I sat down, dropped it into the disc tray and pressed ‘Play’.
Taken with a hand-held video camera, the recording was shaky and disorientating to start with, but became steadier. The film began with some shots of the fields surrounding the crash site and the area the car had landed in. There was a dark, scarred trail left on the field. The grass was scorched. Something from the car – perhaps the exhaust box – was embedded in the mud. I was hoping whoever had taken the film might zoom in, but they didn’t.
Instead it cut to where the car had come off the road. There was petrol left on the tarmac. Smashed glass. The light wasn’t particularly good, and when I glanced at the timecode in the corner, I could see why. 17.42. Evening.
The film cut to the car itself.
The roof had collapsed. One door had come off, and the boot had disappeared, pushed into the back of the car. The engine was up inside the dashboard on the right-hand side. As the camera panned from left to right, I could see bits of windscreen glinting in the grass. The
The film cut to a spot about twenty feet away. Scattered in the grass was debris that had been thrown free of the car: a burnt mobile phone; a shoe; a wallet, the tan leather charred. The wallet was open. Some of the contents had spilled out. Part of a blackened and melted driver’s licence, Alex’s face on it, sat in the grass.
Then the film finished.
I ejected the DVD and spread some of the paperwork out in front of me. The investigators were fairly certain the crash had been caused by Alex’s being drunk. There were some fuzzy photographs on one of the printouts, including a shot of the tyre marks on the road, and one of the lorry Alex’s car had hit. The lorry driver had escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. In his statement he said another car had overtaken Alex’s and then, about ten seconds later, the Toyota had drifted across to the wrong side of the road. A third photograph showed the Toyota from head on. The right side had sustained more damage than the left. It explained why, in the film, the engine seemed further back inside the car on the right. I skimmed through the crime scene analysis, and found a technician’s diagram of the crash trajectory.
I moved on to the post-mortem. Like Cary had said, the age of the Toyota meant there was no airbag,
A couple more pictures were loose in the Manila folder, showing Alex’s body. It was a horrific sight. His hands had been burnt down to the skeleton; his feet and lower legs too. His face, from the brow down to his jaw, was also just bone, and there was a huge crack in his skull, all the way down one side of his cheek, where his face had hit the wheel on impact. I turned back to the file. It got worse the more I read. His body had been pulverized: bones smashed, skin burnt away. Everything broken beyond repair. It was obvious from the damage sustained that he had died before the car caught fire.
Except, according to Mary, he hadn’t died at all.
The Corner of the Room
The first thing he could hear was the wind, distantly at first, and then louder as he became more aware of it. He opened his eyes. The room was spinning gently, the walls bending as he moved his head across the pillow.
Am I dead?
He groaned and rolled on to his side. Slowly, everything started to shift back into focus: the right angles of the walls; the dusty shaft of moonlight; the lightbulb moving gently in the breeze coming through the top window.
It was cold. He sat up and pulled a blanket around him. It brushed against the floor, sending dirt and dust scattering into the darkness. When he moved again, the mattress pinged beneath him. A sharp pain coursed through his chest. He placed a hand against his ribs and pressed with his fingers. Beneath his T-shirt, he could feel bandages, running from his breastplate down to his waist.
Click.
A noise from the far corner of the room. A pillar poked out from the wall, a cupboard beside that. Everywhere else was dark.
‘Hello?’
His voice sounded quiet and childlike. Scared. He cleared his throat. It felt like fingers were tearing at his windpipe.
And now he could smell something too.
He felt a pulse in his chest, like a bubble bursting. The first scent of nausea rose in his throat. He covered his mouth, and moved back across the bed, trying to get away from the smell. Opposite him, lit by a square of moonlight, he spotted a metal bucket. The rim was speckled with puke. Next to that was a bottle of disinfectant. But it wasn’t that he could smell.
It was something else.
Click.
The noise again. He peered into the darkness in the corner of the room. Nothing. No sound, no sign of movement. Shifting position again, he moved right up against the wall, where the two corners joined, and brought his knees up to his chest. His heart squeezed beneath his ribs. His chest tightened.
‘Who’s there?’
He pulled the blanket tighter around him, and sat there in silence. Staring into the darkness until, finally, sleep took him.
*
He’s standing outside a church, peering in through a window. Mat is sitting at a desk, a Bible open in his lap. Across the other side of the room, a door is ajar. He looks from Mat to the door, and feels like he wants to be there. Standing in that doorway.
And then, suddenly, he is.
He places a hand on the door and pushes at it. Slowly, it creaks open. Mat turns in his chair, an arm resting on the back, intrigued to see who has entered.
Then his face drops.
‘Dear God,’ he says gently. He gets to his feet, stumbling, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. ‘I thought… Where have you been?’
‘Hiding.’
Mat stops. Frowns. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve done something… really bad.’
He opened his eyes. A blinding circular light was above him. He tried to cover his face, but when he went to move his hands, they caught on something. Suddenly he felt the binds on his arms, digging into the skin, securing him to the chair beneath.
He turned his head.
Beyond the light, the room was dark, but immediately beside him he could make out a medical gurney, metal instruments on top. Next to that was a heart monitor. Behind, obscured by the darkness, was a silhouette, watching him from the shadows.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
The silhouette didn’t reply. Didn’t even move.
‘What’s going on?’
He tried moving his legs. Nothing. Tried again. Still nothing. In his head, it felt like they were thrashing around. But, further up his body – where he still had feeling – he knew they weren’t moving. They were paralysed.
He looked to the silhouette again.
‘Why can’t I feel my legs?’
Still no reply.
He felt tears well in his eyes.
‘What are you doing to me?’
A hand touched his stomach. He started, and turned his head the other way. Standing next to him was a huge man – tall and powerful, dressed in black. He had a white apron on, and a surgical face mask. He lowered it.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’
‘You’re standing on a precipice. Did you know that?’
‘What?’
‘You’re standing on the edge of opportunity, and you don’t even know it. You will know it, though. You will come to know opportunity in the coming days, to understand the sacrifice we’ve made for you. But first we need to take care of some things.’
‘Please, I don’t know wha–’
‘I’ll see you on the other side.’
A woman came forward in his place, dressed in a white coat and wearing a surgical mask, a blue medi
cal cap tied around her dark hair. A bloodstained apron squeezed her short, plump frame. She leaned into him. There were blood spatters on the mask too.
‘Please…’
The woman placed a hand over his eyes, over his face. Then she slid something into his mouth. A huge, metal object – like a clamp. It clicked. He tried to speak, tried to scream, but the clamp had locked his mouth open. All he could do was gurgle.
He watched her.
Please.
From somewhere, a quiet metallic buzz. His eyes flicked left and right, trying to see where the noise was coming from. It got louder.
What are you doing? he tried to say, but it was just another gurgle. He swallowed. Watched her. Saw her fiddling with something, and listened as the buzz got louder. Then, from her side, she brought up a dental drill, its point spinning.
He looked from her to the drill.
Oh God, no.
And then he blacked out.
He woke. Everything was quiet. It was the middle of the night, when the shadows in the room were at their Freezing cold. He pulled the blanket right up to his neck and turned on his pillow, facing the ceiling.
His mouth throbbed.
He ran a tongue along his gums, where his teeth had once been. All that was there now were tiny threads of flesh, spilling out of the cavities. They’d taken them without asking, like they were taking everything else.
Click.
The noise again. The same noise, every night, all night, coming from the corner of the room. He slowly sat up, and looked into the darkness.
He’d got up and examined the corner of the room in the daylight, when the sun poured in from the top window. There was nothing there. Just the cupboard and the space behind it, a narrow two- or three-foot gap. In the dead of the night, when the silence was oppressive, it was easy to see things and hear things that weren’t there. Darkness messed with you like that. But he’d seen it for himself: there was nothing there.
Click.
He continued looking into the shadows – facing them down. Then, pulling the blanket around him, he got to his feet and took a step towards the corner of the room.
He stopped.
Out of the darkness and into the moonlight came a cockroach, its legs pattering against the floor, its body clicking as it moved. He watched it come to the bed then turn slightly, heading deeper into the room
A cockroach.
He smiled, slumped back on to the bed. Breathed a sigh of relief. Deep down, he knew no one could be watching him from the corner of the room. Not for all this time. Not all night. No one would do that, would even want to do that. The mind could play tricks on you. It could make you doubt yourself; it bent reality and reason and, at your weakest, you started to question what you knew to be true.
It had only ever been a cockroach.
He brought his arms out from under the blanket and wiped the sweat from his face. Wind came in through the top window. He lay there, letting the cool air fall against his skin. And, as he closed his eyes, he could – very distantly – hear the sea.
‘Cockroach.’
His eyes flicked open.
What the fuck was that?
‘I see you, cockroach.’
He scrambled back across the bed, towards the wall. Brought his knees up to his chest. From the darkness came a second cockroach, forming out of the shadows, following the path of the first one. It started to arc left, towards the light on the other side of the door.
‘Don’t run, cockroach.’
Slowly, the hand started to become an arm, and the arm a body, until a man emerged from the gloom, a plastic mask on his face.
It was the mask of a devil.
A smell came with the man as he looked up from the depths of the night, blinking inside the eyeholes. The mouth slit was wide and long, moulded into a permanent leer, and inside it the man smiled, his tongue emerging from between his lips.
‘Oh God.’ A trembling voice from the bed.
The man in the mask moved his tongue along the hard edges of the mouth slit. It was big and bloated, red and glistening, like a corpse floating in a black ocean.
And, at the very tip, it was cut unevenly down the middle.
The devil had a forked tongue.
From the bed, he felt his heart stop, his chest shrink, his body give way beneath him.
The man in the mask blinked again, inhaled through two tiny pinpricks in the mask’s nose, and slowly rose to his feet.
‘I wonder what you taste like…cockroach.’
The address that Cary had given me for the Calvary Project was a block of flats called Eagle Heights, about a quarter of a mile east of Brixton Road. On the way over, my phone started ringing, but by the time I’d scooped it up off the back seat I’d missed the call. I slotted the phone in the hands-free and went to my voice messages. It was Cary.
‘Uh, I’ve thought about…’ He paused, sounding different now: less officious than the last time we’d talked. ‘Just give me a call when you get the chance. I’m in this morning until ten, and then after lunch I’m here until four.’
I looked at the clock: 8.43. I tried calling him, but the sergeant said he wasn’t around. Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I tried again, and the same desk sergeant said he still wasn’t around. I left a message just as Eagle Heights emerged from behind a bank of oak trees.
It was featureless and grey. The concrete walls were marked all the way down, as if the building was rotting from the inside. It was twenty-five storeys high, and flanked by two even bigger blocks of flats on the other side of a ringed fence. At the front entrance, there was a board with Eagle Heights written on it. Someone had spray-painted Welcome to hell underneath.
Inside, there were mailboxes on my left, most with nothing in. I checked the slot for number 227: empty. To my right, stairs wound up and around. As I started to climb, a huge metal cage came into view, an air-conditioning unit inside. The higher I climbed, the worse the place started to smell.
The door to the second floor hung off its hinges and the glass had cracked. I pulled it open. Background noise came through from the flats: the buzz of a TV, a woman shouting, the dull thud of a baseline. There were fifteen doors on either side, all painted the same shade of muddy brown. Flat 227 was right at the end.
I knocked twice and waited.
A council notice was nailed to the door. It was almost four years old, and warned people not to enter due to health and safety violations. Some of the sticker had peeled away and the bits that remained were faded.
I knocked again, harder this time.
Further down the corridor, two flats along on the opposite side, I heard the sound of a door opening. Someone peered through the crack, their eyes darting backwards and forwards.
It was a man’s voice.
‘The guy who lives here,’ I said. ‘You know him?’
‘Nah.’
‘You seen him around?’
‘What are you, a copper?’
‘No.’
‘Social services?’
‘No.’
I knocked again on the door.
‘You ain’t gonna find nothin’, mate.’
‘How come?’
‘There ain’t no one there.’
I looked at him. ‘Since when?’
‘Since for ever.’
‘No one lives here?’
‘Nope.’
‘You sure?’
‘Am I sure? You can read English, can’t you?’
‘Only if the words aren’t more than three letters.’ I glanced at the council notice. ‘So, the council cleared out the last tenants?’
‘Last tenants? I been in this shithole twenty years. Ain’t no one lived in that flat since the floor gave in. Hole the size of Tower Bridge in there.’ He opened the door a little more. It was a white guy. Unshaven. Old. ‘No one gives a shit about us here, so ain’t no one been round to fix it. Must’ve been five years since it went.’
‘No one’s lived here for five ye
ars?’
‘Nope.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes the council come
I started along the corridor towards him. As I got closer he pushed the door shut. I passed his flat, walked out to the landing area, and stood away from the door, out of sight. Then I waited. A couple of minutes passed. Once he was definitely back in his hole, I moved into the corridor and returned to the flat, taking my pocket knife out on the way.
Slipping the blade into the crack between door and frame, I gently started to jemmy it open. The door was damp and warped. There was a curve about two-thirds of the way up. As I worked the blade, I felt some give. I removed some broken slivers of wood and started opening up a hole. Through it some of the interior was brightened by the light from the corridor. Inside it was stark. No carpets. No furniture. No paint on the walls.
More wood started to break, and the further down the door frame I got, the easier it came away. I tried the handle. The door moved in the frame. I glanced along the corridor, then gently used my shoulder to apply some pressure. Sliding the blade back in, this time at the lock, I wriggled it around and pressed again at the door. The wood was incredibly soft, bending against my weight. Finally, it clicked open.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
There were no curtains at the windows, only rectangular sheets of black plastic. Small blocks of light escaped around the edges and on to opposite walls. A kitchen counter was to my left. The room smelt damp
I hunted for a light switch and found one a little way along the wall. When I flicked it on, nothing happened. I walked across to the windows, flipped the blade and slashed through the plastic. Morning poured into the room in thick cubes of dust-filled light.
The flat was like a skeleton: every piece of furniture had been removed. There were Coke bottles and empty crisp packets on the kitchen counter. In a small rubbish bin there was an apple core and two sweet wrappers. I picked up one of the crisp packets and turned it over. The expiry date was six months away.