by Dave Watson
Chapter 46
There hadn’t been a sound.
Grace had turned his back to Ally Marshall for only a couple of seconds, and he’d vanished as if into thin air.
A very real fear now gripped Stephen Grace, and he drew the baton from his equipment belt. This didn’t make him feel any safer in the slightest.
“Ally?” he called.
No answer. He hadn’t, in truth, expected one.
He very slowly moved back towards the two patrol cars on the driveway, noting the crunch, crunch, crunch his boots made on those little polished pebbles underfoot. Unless Ally had leapt, from a standing position, to the edge of the wide driveway and landed on the grass verge, which was a good three meters away on either side from where he’d been standing, all in complete silence, there was no way he could conceivably have moved from his spot without Grace hearing him.
He checked both cars anyway. Both empty of course. Under them. Nothing. He checked the embankment on the each side of the road leading up to the house. Nothing.
Grace once more stood by his patrol car, for the first time in almost forty years of police work, at a complete and utter loss as to what to do next. And scared shitless.
“What’s your first duty?” he asked himself quietly.
While the mystifying disappearance of two of his officers, and the inability to raise Annie at the station or Davie Leish and Andy Cummings at the Densmore house was inexplicable, he still had a duty to protect the public, and he’d come here to the Delaney place in response to an emergency call. His first duty was to protect the populace of the town.
Fortified somewhat now that he’d shaken off his indecisiveness, Grace boldly moved towards the front door of the Delaney villa again, the driveway stones crunch, crunch, crunching loudly under his determined strides.
A soft, fluttering noise made him look up.
Falling from the sky was an assortment of objects. The fluttering sound came from one of these items, which billowed out on the air, revealing itself to be a white short sleeved shirt.
All around Grace, items of clothing fell to the earth, landing on the ground around him making their own little crunches as they hit the driveway. A black boot, a police issue equipment belt, a handheld radio, a police constables hat, another black boot, a single black sock, closely followed by another sock, this one a different colour. Finally, a pair of white y fronts with bright red lettering proclaiming 'LOVE GOD' emblazoned over the seat landed at his feet.
Grace could only stand there, stunned by the bizarre event and looking around at the assortment of clothing and police equipment that had inexplicably fallen from the sky.
With a heavy wet flop, a large pale object like a deflated balloon landed in front of him, joining the collection of garments and gear strewn on the ground around him.
“What the holy fuck…” he whispered.
A tremendous crash of rending metal and smashing glass suddenly erupted from behind Grace with shocking, brutal force, causing his to spin round in fright and fall backwards. He landed on his arse atop the strange balloon like thing that had just a second ago landed in front of him.
He became aware of a few things simultaneously. The first was that the front end of Kenny Young’s patrol car was destroyed; a weird red mannequin, that had apparently also plummeted from the heavens, was draped across the ruined bonnet in a bed of shattered windshield glass.
The second thing he realised was that the deflated balloonish object in which he’d inelegantly planted his backside was wet and warm.
He dumbly lifted a hand to his face and saw that it had turned bright red, like he’d dipped it in a can of paint without realising it. Grace quickly pushed himself to his feet, backing away from the weird bloody pile on the ground. That’s when he noticed the hair on it. And the tattoo.
A stylised gecko, drawn in an Inca or Mayan style, he could never remember which. Ally Marshall had had that etched on his upper left arm last year and took great pride in showing it off round the station.
He whirled around again, once more facing the pulverised patrol car and the glistening red tailors dummy that now adorned the smashed front end, like the worlds most grotesque hood ornament.
It was breathing.
With very slow steps on very stiff legs, Stephen Grace approached the skinned human being that had fallen from the sky and wrote off the vehicle.
Will the insurance cover this? He thought crazily.
The eyes, shockingly white in the raw red flesh of the face (what face?) stared at him intently with a surprised look.
Of course he looks surprised. He doesn’t have eyebrows. Or eyelids for that matter, Grace thought.
“Saaaaaaaj… Saaaaaj…” Ally Marshall pleaded, his words distorted due to the lack of lips on his peeled head and one raw arm reaching out to his superior.
Grace’s legs went, and he sat down for the second time that morning on the Delaney’s crunchy driveway.
Then something else dropped out of the sky and landed before him. This was not however human. Nor was it a pair of odd socks.
It stood a good nine feet tall. Partly skeletal, partly insectoid, partly arachnid, and wholly alien. A shifting mass of glowing orbs, fangs, claws, tattered wings and waving tentacles.
Still sat down on the driveway, Grace couldn’t look at it. The very sight of the thing offended him. He could feel something wanting to give way in his head and realised it was his own sanity. He groped desperately in his psyche for something solid to cling to, something recognisable and safe that might save him from losing his hold on reality, which with the arrival of this impossible thing, had just performed a slippery, twisting backflip.
He bowed his head, averting his eyes from the ungodly monster, and found himself looking between his legs at those little furrows that had been dragged into the stones covering the driveway. He suddenly had an idea about how those marks had been made, and on the heels of this thought, realised that the application of logic was perhaps his best defence when the world went insane. It was something to hold on to. Something he knew.
“Fingers,” he said aloud. “Someone was dragged along the ground and their fingers made those marks. I’ll bet there’s a fingernail in amongst the stones there somewhere. And that other big mark over by the door, where the wee stones are coated with slime; that’ll have been made by some sort of tentacle, eh? That’s what grabbed the poor bastard.”
The abhorrent thing before him let out a weird hissing, stuttering series of clicks and whoops that he somehow understood to be mocking laughter, and Stephen Grace suddenly wasn’t afraid anymore.
He was angry.
“What’s your first duty?” he asked himself again.
He remembered that day in the backstreets of Edinburgh. How he’d momentarily been paralysed by fear, but reminded of his primary duty, had overcome it and waded into the affray, taking punishment, but protecting human lives. He remembered the exultation he’d experienced once he was in amongst the massive brawl; the heat of battle, the huge surge of adrenaline born of a potent mix of fear and wild excitement, so pure that he hadn’t even felt that knife biting into his thigh.
He looked at his hand and saw he was still gripping his baton.
Pushing himself to his feet once more, he raised his eyes and faced the thing that had brought chaos and death to his town that morning.
“Fuckin’ ‘mon then, ya big cunt,” he snarled.
Sergeant Stephen Grace waded in.
Chapter 47
Back in school, in the biology lab, there’d been a glass case mounted on the wall which displayed a collection of insects that had been pinned to a felt covered board. There’d been a small magnifying glass attached by a string to the side of the display case with which students could get a close up view of the unfortunate bugs, and I’d always been a bit creeped out at the sight of the insect’s faces when viewed at close quarters.
As I lay on the ground that morning, pinned to the ground through my own should
er, I felt real empathy for those insects.
I was once again waiting to die. To all intents and purposes, dead already, just as dead as those desiccated moths and wasps in that dusty display case. I also was being scrutinised; examined just like an interesting insect. To the thing that held me there, that’s exactly what I was. I could hear it inside my head, through the pain.
What are you? it whispered to me silently.
Some sort of link had been established between it and me, perhaps because a part of its essence was physically impaling me to the ground. I could feel its contempt, its puzzlement, its gloating satisfaction at having me at its mercy. I was also aware of its ability to split its consciousness and physical self, and I understood that while it held me here, another part of it was elsewhere.
Being subjected to its thoughts in this strange way was nauseating to my very soul, and forever tainted me. Through our physical and psychic connection, it showed me what it did to Ally Marshall. I saw it lift him silently into the air while Sergeant Grace’s back was turned, and with horrifying, unnatural speed and efficiency, flay him alive before dropping him, his clothes and his discarded skin back to Earth. I saw what it had done to all the others that morning. What it had done to my brother. To my dad.
What are you? It asked again inside my head.
It twisted the disembodied talon that pinned me down, bringing a fresh blast of agony searing through my body, but it wouldn’t let me scream.
I don’t know how the experience of briefly being one with it didn’t drive me permanently mad. Being essentially an extension of this thing was something impossible to accurately describe in any language known to man, because it was an experience not of this plane of existence. Its thoughts were my thoughts, its memories my memories, and though much of it was beyond human understanding, I understood that it was a harvester of souls. It had a quota to meet, and it was particularly interested in me, though it didn’t know, or care, why. It was a mere soldier, mindlessly and unquestioningly carrying out its orders in the name of some other.
Through my agony, I thought I could perhaps find some answers in this thing's mind if I had courage enough to look. As I expected to die anyway, I thought, fuck it.
Without thinking about how it would be accomplished, and just doing it, I mentally pushed at the things invading thoughts, and incredibly felt it reel back in alarm. My mental touch was as repulsive to this being as it’s was to me, and I understood that it felt a moment of real fear. Fear of me.
Its hold on me, both physical and mental wavered for a second before it pushed back at me with mind and claw. The flare of pain rocked me, but through the fear and torment, I felt a slow, bright anger begin to build.
I pushed back with my mind again, harder and more focussed than before, eliciting a satisfying mental scream from the foul entity. In that flash of time, like a split second long frame of lunatic film when I was the one invading its thoughts, there was a name. The name of its master. The one who’d sent it to my world to kill and harvest.
Ozay.
I felt its fear again for a moment, but when it came, its retaliation was brutal in this psychic battle of wills; blasting through my consciousness like a black locomotive and I almost passed out from the force of this vicious mental invasion. It delved deep into my thoughts and memories, and found the dream like encounters with Cairnsey and Sam.
Why, human? it hissed at me. Why do you commune with the dead? What are you?
It gave another savage twist of the bony talon, keeping up both its mental and physical assault.
Through the pain, my anger flared brightly again. The sense of the strange other that intermittently shared my body was strong.
Fuck you! I mentally screamed back at it. I’m Phillip Densmore! I play centre midfield for Ballantrae Juniors! I support Glasgow Rangers! I love to listen to stoner rock! I loved my dad and hated my brother! Fuck you! Sam Anderson, Josh Cairns and Dean Griffiths were my best mates and they’re IN HERE!
I pictured Sam the previous night, placing his hand on my chest.
We’re in here, Phil, he’d said to me. I pictured my heart, beating strong in my chest with hatred for this thing that violated me.
I felt a raging heat build in my chest, emanating from where Sam had placed his hand. Without knowing what I was doing, I used my right hand to reach across my chest toward the breast pocket of my shirt.
The thing above me suddenly sprouted another clawed appendage from its dark roiling mass. A huge scorpion like barb, jointed like a skeletal finger and wickedly tipped, reared back above my face.
Aware of its thoughts, I knew the creature now meant to kill me. Its curiosity of me was now outweighed by doubt and fear. The wicked, bony stinger started to descend towards my eyes.
My fingers closed around an object in my shirt pocket, and with an enraged scream, I drew it out and slashed it through the air above me, simultaneously feeling the inner fury in my chest explode in a great purging wave.
There was a brilliant, blinding white flash, and in my mind I heard the thing scream in agony.
The stinger shattered mere millimetres from my face, as did the black talon pinning me to the ground. Both dissolved in burning grains that blew away on the air.
I looked and saw that my right fist, clutched tightly around the object I’d pulled from my pocket, glowed with a flashing blue and white aura, and I instinctively struck out again at the shimmering black haze that still hovered above me.
There was another great flash of pale blue light accompanied by the pungent scent of burning ozone, and the twisting entity abruptly vanished in a puff of glowing atoms.
I was suddenly on my feet, aflame with an intense righteous fury.
During my mental congress with the thing, I’d been aware of it standing in front of Sergeant Grace on the Delaney’s driveway.
Before I knew I was going to do it, I was bursting through the undergrowth, a guttural snarl in my throat and burning for vengeance.
Chapter 48
As Stephen Grace ran roaring like a berserker at the thing standing in the Delaney’s driveway, he didn’t expect to live much longer, but he was determined to at least get a few good digs in at the hellish creature before he went.
In a flood of adrenaline that rushed through him, Grace’s heightened senses took in every minute detail of the scene, and he experienced everything in highly defined, slow motion clarity.
Although it happened faster than the blinking of an eye, he clearly perceived the grotesque thick tendril which ended in a foot long serrated blade bursting from the monster’s body and whipping towards him. He knew he couldn’t avoid the deadly appendage which would surely cut him in half, and he closed his eyes, not expecting to open them again. He pictured his late wife’s face in his mind, wanting her smile to be the last thing he saw, and he smiled.
There was an unmistakable screech of pain from the creature, instantly followed by a hard impact across his chest. Grace was spun by the force of the blow, and he pirouetted off the side of the driveway, landing in a heap in the shallow embankment. He opened his eyes and saw the thing staggering backwards, seemingly in distress, howling and thrashing its multitude of bladed, clawed and pincered limbs in the air.
He looked down at himself and found that his clothing had been slashed neatly across his upper torso. His protective knife proof vest had also been parted as if cut with a laser. Quickly feeling inside his ripped shirt, he found a long but shallow laceration that ran diagonally from his left shoulder down to his sternum. There was some blood, but not enough to signify a mortal wound.
Looking back at the thing on the driveway above him, he saw the creature start towards him again, bellowing and hissing in rage.
Somehow, the creature had been distracted at the very instant he should have been cut in two, and had only landed a glancing strike. Grace knew he wouldn’t be so lucky a second time.
Knowing now the blinding speed with which the monstrous creature attacked, he understood
that he was ridiculously outmatched, and his hopes of getting in a few good digs withered. He knew that its next assault would snuff him out like a bloody candle, but regardless, he wearily climbed out of the embankment and raised his baton again.
“You couldn't finish your fuckin’ dinner, ya big poof,” he taunted the advancing nightmare.
Faster than he could register, another thick tentacle shot out and was wrapped with crushing force around his neck before he could draw another breath. His air was instantly cut off and he was lifted off his feet, then slowly drawn towards the entity, thrashing like a fish on a hook.
It dangled Grace a few feet above the ground, watching as his kicking legs desperately tried to find purchase in thin air. It brought him closer, and he saw a horizontal fissure suddenly tear open in the monster’s bristling, bony torso with a crunching liquid noise. The grotesque hole in the creature’s body twisted into a mutated mouth, sprouting needle like teeth that dripped black liquid. Fighting vainly for air and desperately flailing with his baton at the cable thick tentacle that gripped his neck, Grace watched as this new orifice widened and pushed out from the central mass, morphing into an elongated, wolfish snout. Small worm like things waved obscenely inside this horrific new feature, writhing between the dripping fangs and beckoning him closer. He was now inches away from the demon. His vision seemed to come from the end of a long black tunnel that grew increasingly thin as his oxygen starved brain screamed for air that wouldn’t come. The monster’s shriek of victory filled his ears, and as the blackness closed over his sight, he could feel and smell the rotten carrion stink of its breath as his head was pulled into its gaping maw. Grace felt those repugnant internal worms squirm into his ears and nostrils…
There was a sudden crack-flash of noise and light that penetrated the darkness blanketing his vision. The irresistible pressure around Grace’s throat was suddenly gone, and he felt himself falling, landing heavily on his back.