by Nick Gifford
~
He could hear gulls, mewing in the distance. People laughing. He could smell the fresh briny smell of the sea.
He opened his eyes, saw sand and shingle in close-up. He was lying face down on the beach.
Had he escaped? Had he broken free from Alternity? He tried to think what it was that he had done that might have been the key to his escape. He had run until his legs would carry him no farther. Was it simply that he had recognised that running would get him nowhere, that he could stop fleeing and stay in one place?
He should have known it would never be as simple as that.
He turned onto his sideHe and, gradually, his eyes focused on a pale object a short distance from his face.
Embedded in the beach was a human skull.
A jagged crack ran upwards from its left eye socket, and crawling all over the thing were hundreds of those small brown sand flies that usually rise up in clouds from dried seaweed along the tideline.
Horrified, he looked more closely at the sand and shingle: scattered throughout were small white fragments of bone, broken vertebrae, lost teeth.
Slowly, he swung his gaze out to sea. Dark storm clouds hung over deep red waves. It was the sea of his dreams, the sea of blood. Debris floated in the bay, dismembered body parts – hands, legs, torsos, heads even – and flocks of gulls soared and swooped, feasting on the carnage, their white plumage stained a gruesome, sticky crimson.
He twisted away and threw up on the beach.
He struggled to control his breathing, he had to calm down. For this was no longer a dream, he was actually here...
A few acrid traces of vomit burned at the back of his throat and nose with every breath.
He made himself look around again. He had to get out of here, but how do you wake yourself from a dream that has entirely swallowed you up?
For a few seconds he watched the figure of an old derelict – a man of sixty or more, wrapped up in numerous layers of filthy brown rags – shuffling along the tideline, turning over the jetsam with the open toe of one of his boots. Matt wondered what he was hoping to find.
His senses were becoming numbed to all the horrors that he was seeing, he realised. Even when the tramp squatted to extract something from a dark tangled mass, Matt didn’t look away. Even when the tramp raised his trophy to his mouth and bit into it.
Only when the old man wiped at his mouth with one foul sleeve and turned to stare at him, did Matt rise and turn away. The man’s eyes were deeply bloodshot, and there was an intense humanity about his look that reached out to Matt, breaking through his barriers.
Matt climbed the concrete steps to the Promenade and was surprised to see how many holidaymakers were here, despite the deep gloom of the weather. He stopped himself, suddenly frightened at how easy it was to accept this grim distortion as reality: a world of holidays and football and school and work, a world where nothing was really any different.
The people were dressed in a strange assortment of clothing, as if they had all taken part in a lucky dip at some monstrous jumble sale. Striped blazers, frilly summer frocks with parasols, mismatched items of school uniform, pin-striped trousers with torn tee-shirts, patchwork waistcoats, wide-brimmed straw hats, long leather coats, high boots, fur caps.
Couples strolled arm in arm, their faces pale and hollowed out, as if they were being eaten away from within. Emaciated dogs tottered along after grotesquely overweight owners. Tiny children, covered only in dark red ‘mud’ from the beach, chased each other through the crowds, while yet others gathered around an ice-cream vendor’s stall.
And all the time, as Matt walked along the Prom, eyes followed him, tracking his progress. Even the children stopped what they were doing to stare.
He headed for one of the paths that led up the grass slope towards Bay Road, grateful to be leaving the crowds behind.
At the top, he looked back down the cliff: hundreds of pale faces were tipped up towards him and beyond them, the deep red bay spread out towards the horizon.
Occasional cars steered crooked courses along the road, their grim-faced drivers leaning forward to stare at the road ahead, gripping the steering wheels with white-knuckled intensity.
He headed along to where the road forked, then crossed over to the white stone memorial. He would have walked straight past but something made him pause. He looked more closely at the memorial: on each of its six sides there should have been a list of names of the town’s men lost in the wars, but there were none, just a blank white panel.
He hurried on. He didn’t understand why, but something about those missing names chilled him deeply.
~
The house looked just the same as ever: tall, slightly dishevelled, the small patch of front garden looking neat and ordered as a result of the girls’ attention.
Vince’s car was up on blocks in the parking bay, and thin legs poked out from underneath.
“Vince?” said Matt, cautiously. He swallowed, and added, “What are you doing, Vince? Why did you make me come here? How do I get out?”
The legs twisted, and a body rolled out from under the car. Vince propped himself on one elbow and stared up at Matt, his white face smeared with oil. Only...
His eyes were reddened and his lips were dry and cracked. His hair hung in black, greasy strands.
He opened his mouth and a half-strangled croak emerged.
He started to get to his feet and Matt backed away. This wasn’t Vince: it was a cruel distortion of him. And it was holding a long-bladed screwdriver – gripping it as if it were a dagger.
With a strangled wail, the Vince-creature lurched towards him.
Matt darted into the house.
It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Nothing looked different. He peered out through the distorted glass of the front door. As far as he could see, Vince had returned to his car. He started to calm down. He had to think his situation through. He had to work out how to get out of here. There had to be a way!
The alternative was too awful to consider.
The living room door was ajar, and Matt suddenly became aware of a sound: the revving of engines. Kirsty was playing her motor racing game.
He pushed the door open and saw her small head over the sofa. He entered the room, and sat at the end of the sofa. She didn’t even look up, she was too intent on the game.
She didn’t look any different to normal.
“Kirsty,” he said. “We have to talk again. I have to get out of here.”
She ignored him.
Eventually, the race was over and she glanced sideways at him then. “Poor cousin Matthew,” she said. “You should never have trusted Vince. Tina doesn’t trust him. She says he’s not nice.”
“How do I get out of here?”
She looked confused. He had to remind himself that she was only seven.
“Out of this place,” he explained. “How do I get back to the real world?”
She shook her head. “This seems very real to me,” she said uncertainly. “Tina said you were strange – I think I understand why now.”
He went through to the kitchen, but it was empty. A hover mower whined nasally from the back garden. He went across to the window.
It was a peaceful summer scene. Uncle Mike was mowing a patch of the lawn, over and over again, as if he was stuck in a private time warp. Carol was clipping a hedge into a rippling, distorted shape that Matt didn’t quite recognise and wasn’t quite sure that he wanted to recognise.
He pushed the back door and stepped outside, suddenly aware of the eyes turning on him.
“I...” He stopped, unsure what he had been about to say.
Carol smiled, which was not particularly reassuring. “Matthew,” she said. “How nice to see you. Look, Mike, Tina: we have a visitor.”
Tina? He hadn’t seen Tina.
He started to turn, then stopped. She was coming round the corner of the house, carrying a hose-pipe.
She smiled, and raised the hose
. With a deft twist of the hand, she turned the hose on and directed it at Matt.
A bright red spray emerged, covering him in an instant.
He gasped and turned away, but his mouth was full of the sharp taste of blood.
He stumbled and fell – he had forgotten that there was a step down to the lawn.
On his knees, he looked up. He raised his hands in front of his face as Tina advanced with her hose.
Too late, he became aware of the insistent clack-clack-clack of Carol’s hedge shears approaching. She lunged at him, and he felt cold, hard steel striking the back of his head.
He tumbled away, rolling, twisting, trying to get his bearings.
When he had stopped moving he found himself lying on his back. He looked up, and all he could see was a dark silhouette against the sky, and then the whirring blades as his uncle’s mower descended.
~
Intense, metal taste of blood. A booming pain filling his body. He was alive.
Had he found the way out?
He opened his eyes. He was lying on the beach again, further down, where the sand was packed hard, stained a dark, wet pink by the bloody surf.
Suddenly, he understood the memorial, the missing lists of names. What did death mean in this place? Nothing.
He pushed himself to his knees and peered around. Nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed.
The old tramp was a short distance away. Watching him. Smiling softly. This close, he looked older than he had before.
“You’re looking lost, boy,” said the tramp. “You don’t want to be looking lost here, boy. You don’t want to be losing your grip.”
Matt stared at him. The voice that had filled his head earlier, when he had been struggling through the brick-walled maze... guiding him.
“You?” he said. “Gramps, is that really you?”
The tramp chuckled. In a single movement, he turned and dropped to the beach so that he was sitting, watching Matt. He shook his head, still smiling.
“But you’re one of us, aren’t you? A Wareden.” From an earlier generation: a guardian of the Way.
The tramp was still shaking his head. Finally, he said, “Don’t you see, boy? I’m you. Every time you dream of this place you leave a part of you behind. I’m you, boy. I’m you when you’ve been here long enough to realise there’s no way out, that this is all there is. I’m just an old tramp, boy, and this is my home.”
Matt stared at him in horror, unable to believe, unable not to believe. “You mean... You mean there’s really no way out of here? No escape from Alternity?”
The tramp shook his head, sadness in his eyes. “Nobody gets out of here,” he said. “If there was a way out, then Alternity would spill over into the real world, swamping it, destroying it. And you know what happens when it spills out, don’t you, boy? Eh?”
Matt thought. “The graves,” he said slowly. “The vicar described it as ‘a madness’, ‘a night of horrific violence’. 1898 – it must have broken out then.”
The tramp nodded. “All it takes is a moment of weakness, a bridge between the two realms. All the time Alternity is reaching out to people out there: people who might cause the Way to be opened. And then it bursts out, boy – the power, the madness. Just think about it: all the trapped, tormented souls in Alternity bursting out. They take over the living and use their bodies to their own twisted ends.
“But there are too many, boy. Far too many escaping souls – all breaking out, all fighting with each other to possess the living... they drive people out of their own heads.”
“Is that what happened? In 1898? I’ve seen the graves, the six families...”
“Possessed by Alternity, or killed by those who were possessed. Thank God it was stopped in time.”
“How?”
“The Way. Your great-grandfather didn’t really understand his responsibilities. He didn’t understand the dangers and he experimented... He opened the Way and Alternity spilled out. He invited it, I think. At first, anyway. He wrote in his diary that he thought it was a force for good. He came to his senses quickly and he managed to close the Way. With the bridge between the two realms closed, the madness spread out and the dark powers weakened. Six families – it could easily have been more.”
He spread his hands and gestured at the warped world around them. “All this,” he went on. “All this is made out of all that is foul and corrupt in human nature. You’ve only seen a tiny fraction of it: multiply that by a thousand, a million, and you still wouldn’t be able to grasp how much evil our kind is capable of. And just you think what it would be like if this vile power was set loose in your reality...”
The tramp was staring at Matt, a twisted, bitter smile on his face. “A madness indeed – but really it’s far more than a madness. It’s violent and evil, a force that destroys everything in its way. Give it a chance and it will spread out from the ruptured Way like a dark cancer across the countryside.”
He leaned forward now, his knuckles pressing into the reddened sand. “There’s no way out, boy. We’re sealed in here good and proper and that’s the way it should be. No, the real art for us is to stay here...”
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t really Alternity,” said the tramp. “This is Alternity’s dream of itself – a kind of limbo, an inbetween world built up from your own mind and from the minds of everyone who dreams of this place. Alternity itself is a realm of pure energy, seething forces and powers that are impossible for us to conceive of – we just don’t have the language, or the concepts. It’s a welter of primeval forces, where there’s no ‘you’ any more. It’s the chaos from which the universe was formed. And it’s the chaos into which the world will ultimately return if it is ever allowed to seep out.
“If you lose a grip on this limbo dreamworld then all that remains is Alternity. That’s your choice, boy: this macabre dream, or annihilation in Alternity. They’re all you have left.”
Matt was shaking his head. He couldn’t believe that there was no way back. He couldn’t believe that this was it.
The tramp was watching him closely. “You’ll believe it,” he told Matt. “One day, you’ll come round on the beach and you’ll believe it. Just like me!” He gave a short, loud laugh, then heaved himself to his feet and resumed his gruesome search of the tideline.
~
He had an idea: a single sliver of hope to cling on to. It was all he had.
It was about four miles to Crooked Elms, but he had nothing better to do with what passed for time in this perverted realm. He walked at a steady pace, concentrating hard to make sure he was on the right road.
Eventually he came to the roundabout on the edge of town. He stepped into the road, determined not to look too closely at what the crows were picking at in the gutter.
There was a sudden brain-shaking blast of a horn – he looked up and instantly threw himself back onto the verge. The gust of air from the passing lorry spun him like a windmill and he sprawled in the dirt. He watched as the lorry mounted the roundabout and went straight across, leaving twin tracks of ploughed up dirt in its wake.
Moments later, the lorry had gone.
He cursed himself. He had to pay attention. Concentrate.
Gathering his breath, he looked carefully before crossing. For the rest of his long walk, he clambered up the verge at the first sound of traffic. He was too tired to make this walk again, he knew.
Copperas Wood formed a dark fringe across the field to his right. Not far to go now. He kept going until he came to a gate at the end of a rough track. He could go down here and cut through the woods, he knew. It would bring him out into the field behind Gramps’ paddock.
He looked at the dark shadows beneath the trees.
He shook his head, turned away. He would take his chances with the road.
A short time later he was passing the first houses of Crooked Elms. Pale faces crowded together at every window, staring out, following his progress. Clawed hands scraped at the gla
ss in frustration, longing.
They wanted him. He knew that at any second they might rush out at him and he forced himself not to think what they might do. Forced himself not to think of Uncle Mike’s lawnmower descending on him...
But why were they waiting?
He quickened his pace.
He reached the crossroads and turned right. Seconds later he was walking into the semicircular driveway.
He looked up at the house, puzzled.
It didn’t feel right. There was something missing.
He went up to the front door. It was locked. He peered inside: everything looked familiar, but somehow it was different.
He followed the path around the side of the house until he came to the back door. He took a brick and smashed a pane of glass, then reached in, groped around until he found the key and then unlocked the door.
He went straight to the basement. He knew what was missing now: his grandparents’ house felt just like anywhere else. There was nothing special about it. The place was dead.
The basement. A long, low-ceilinged room lit by a single, bare light bulb. He didn’t feel dizzy, he didn’t feel as if consciousness would slip away at any moment. His feet didn’t drag, didn’t feel as if they were encased in concrete.
“Never the doors of the righteous be breached.
“The minds of the pure are our shield,
“Protect us from evil, protect us from fear,
“Shine light where the shadow concealed.”
It wasn’t going to work. He tried again. He tried shuffling the words, but where before it was as if the poem had rearranged itself, now it stubbornly refused to find a new form.
The magic had gone. This Way was dead in Alternity.
His only hope had let him down.
He sank to the floor in desolation.
Now he knew why the villagers had let him pass: no need to hurry as he was going nowhere.
He was trapped. He really was trapped.
14 The Bridge
The headstones crowded together in silent ranks. A motley assortment of older lichen-crusted slabs, tilted and smoothed with age, were interspersed with a few clean, sharp-edged, marble headstones.