by Simon Clark
The past with all the dark gravity of a dead star drew her back through time. Her parents had moved here to the city when she was fourteen. It wasn’t a smooth transition. She seemed unable to find her feet at the new school. The other girls gave her heat on her backwoods accent, her clothes, her clunky black shoes and, most damning of all, the spectacles she wore. Maybe kids are more forgiving now. But if you wore spectacles as a young teen then, my God, you might as well have had a dirty great fish head growing out of your forehead. Her schoolwork suffered; to avoid taunts she skipped lessons; got grounded; her parents lost patience with her. Life sucked. Three years later she was out of school in the great big shining world with no qualifications.
And with a coincidence she should have relished, she found herself working in the same supermarket where Vorliss Security Systems now installed a state-of-the-art CCTV system as part of a major store refit. Then, plain old Jackie Burton worked in a refrigerated room packing raw meat with chicken grit crunching beneath her feet and that cloying smell of carcass rotting in her nostrils. She might have wrapped raw animal flesh in Clingfilm until her dying day if she hadn’t married TV repairman Dave Vorliss. To pay for summer vacations he moonlighted, setting up simple CCTV systems for homeowners so they could see who the hell it was ringing their doorbell late at night simply by hitting a button on their TV remote. Then came one of those life-changing moments. Jackie happened to hear that a local market gardener was going down the tube because so many people were helping themselves to his produce. Jackie offered to install a CCTV system out in his fields on the understanding he only paid a fee when his profits returned. Rather than the three obsolete video cameras lashed to trees, maybe the signs: WARNING – CCTV PROTECTED: WE ALWAYS PROSECUTE. 38 CONVICTIONS THIS YEAR were the most potent deterrent (along with the fictitious claim of thirty-eight convictions). People stopped eating the man’s strawberries for free, Jackie and Dave got paid and Vorliss Security was born.
As if Fate must balance good and bad luck in your own personal ledger, so bad fortune followed. Dave drowned in a water-skiing accident eighteen months later. Water-skiing? Hell, if the security business hadn’t earned so much cash he’d never have indulged in such a bourgeois pastime in the first place. Ying balanced yang; summer followed winter, both by season and in her heart, because then came wonderful luck. Jackie found she was pregnant by Dave.
Eight months after she’d buried him Caitlin was born. Jackie didn’t believe she could love another human being more. Above hands that bunched into marshmallow fists was a face that became a lens that drew the whole world back into beautiful focus again. And yet fate wouldn’t allow everything to be perfect. When she tried to breast-feed Caitlin there was no milk flow. She wasn’t dry; far from it, but for some reason she was expressing blood. Doctors ‘uhmed’ then concluded it was ‘just one of those things’. Maybe it was. Anyway, Caitlin prospered on dried baby milk. She was perfectly healthy. Yet when Caitlin had her yearly eye tests Jackie would be physically sick with anxiety. Don’t let her have to wear glasses; please God, make her eyes perfect. Jackie prayed her own daughter wouldn’t have to endure the ordeal of teens spent in glasses. She needn’t have worried. Her daughter’s eyesight was perfect; as was her figure. She swept effortlessly from healthy childhood into being a beautiful blonde teenager who drove boys nuts.
With new responsibility came a new determination. Jackie didn’t sell the business; instead she won more ambitious contracts. Within a few years she fell in love with one of her employees, Ben Morris, a slightly built electronics engineer who had the knack of marrying closed circuit cameras to elaborate computer systems. His digital imaging meant that when you got the ‘do you recognize this man?’ on ‘most wanted’ programmes you weren’t presented with a figure made entirely out of smoke rings that his own mother wouldn’t recognize. Criminals got caught.
Of course, such a relationship was tricky; the firm’s dozen employees now regarded Ben with a degree of suspicion. In the world of ‘Us And Them’ he’d definitely managed to slip away to the ‘Them’ camp. But he was popular enough to make it all work. Better still, Caitlin took to her new stepdad.
Jackie woke to the sound of shouting. She found she was still on the sofa. The cocktail with its ice melted and now fizz-less tonic sat on the table beside her. The faraway shouting rose in pitch.
She’d awoken with that ‘monkeys in my mouth taste’, as her mother put it when sleeping out of synch in daytime. Even so, it wasn’t far off midnight. Rubbing her neck she went to the window to look out into the night. Lights blazed through the orange grove. Someone was taking a midnight swim. If it was those damn kids from down the street again … She swung open the window. Instantly, hot summer air rolled back the cool atmosphere of the room. The heat filled her lungs like hot soup, making it hard to breathe.
Two figures splashed wildly. With the window open their shouts sounded loud and excited. Jackie angled her head to find a clear view through the trees. Now she could see the block of turquoise radiance that was the pool. Caitlin and Ben swam races with one another; they were laughing like crazy; spray cascaded in pearly drops.
Both swam neck-and-neck for the deep end. Jackie watched the horse’s head rear up behind them. It followed them with an undulating motion that once more smoothly morphed into something cobra-like. Jackie’s eyes driven by pure terror seized on the image of the thing swelling up from the water. For a moment she saw it in impossible close up. There was that rippling mane that wavered between purple and black. Two blazing eyes. A muscular neck engorged with veins worming their way through a mass of post-mortem darkness. It sped after the two in the water, eyes locked on them, a mouth forming beneath two flaring nostrils.
Jackie didn’t even know she could move with such speed. Full consciousness only caught up with her as she raced barefoot down through the orange grove, her robe fluttering behind her. She heard herself screaming over and over: ‘Get out of the pool. For God’s sake – get out!’
The horse’s head, a fulminating thing of purpling veins that shifted, writhed and bunched like a pailful of eels lifted high out of the water ready to strike at its prey.
At her cry the two turned, but not before the huge, dark head slipped under the water to become a torpedo-like shadow.
‘Don’t you touch them! Leave them alone!’
Both Caitlin and Ben spun round in the water, shocked by the ferocity of her voice.
‘Get out of the water. Now!’
‘We’re only having a swim, Mom.’
‘Get out!’
It must have been something in her mother’s tone. Caitlin looked downright scared. She swam for the side in three strokes and climbed out to stand there dripping beneath the electric lights.
Ben seemed more reluctant to leave the water, choosing instead the steps at the corner. Meanwhile, Jackie neared the pool’s edge with all the trepidation of someone approaching an open tomb. Looking down, she saw a shadow race along the bottom to disappear into the far end, leaving a churning wake; water bubbled there like piranha milling round a hunk of flesh. A moment later she realized it was nothing more than the outflow from the filtration system.
At last she turned to Caitlin who stood there, that scared expression on her face. She’d crossed her arms across her naked breasts; a sodden garment hung from one hand.
‘It’s my bikini top,’ she said in a small voice. ‘There’s something wrong with the catch. It came off in the water.’
All three set off early in Jackie’s car. Even though only a little after seven the sun blazed down, raising heat phantoms that rippled the tarmac.
‘Whatever happens,’ Jackie said, ‘we’ve got to make sure the system is working properly today. Pull this one off and we get the contract for the whole supermarket chain.’
Ben smiled at her. ‘And what will it feel like to be a millionaire?’
She didn’t smile back. ‘It will feel safe, that’s what it will feel like.’
‘Are you sure
you need me?’ Caitlin asked from the back seat. ‘I said I might go into town with Sue and Bethany this afternoon.’
‘It’s all hands on deck, Caitlin. We need you to do a full walk through today.’
She pulled a face. ‘Great.’
Ben explained: ‘There are still some blind spots. For this brief we need one hundred per cent coverage.’ He smiled. ‘Even the toilets. It’s surprising where the truly determined can hide stolen goodies.’
Ben kept up the determined smile and chatted about inconsequentialities. He pointed out a woman swilling dirt from the sidewalk outside a café. ‘There’s Rose.’ He waved. ‘Hi, Rose!’
Yeah, Rose Spencer. We were at school together. The words sped with dark force through Jackie’s mind. She dumped my homework essay into the lavatory bowl. On my fifteenth birthday she kicked my knee so hard it still aches when a north wind blows. Yes, I know you, Rose Spencer.
‘Whoa, slow down, Jackie. We haven’t got a plane to catch.’ Ben still wore the tooth-revealing smile. In the rear-view mirror Jackie saw her daughter bite that full bottom lip of hers. That, now, was a guilt thing. She remembered the awkward walk back from the pool last night with Caitlin’s high nervous voice saying, ‘I don’t know how my bikini came off … it’s got a faulty catch … it never did fit properly anyway….’
The security guard met them at the staff entrance. ‘’Morning, Mrs Vorliss. All the workmen are out, we’re just waiting for the air-conditioner engineer to finish his—’
‘Everyone must be out of the store before we begin, you do realize that?’
‘I do, Mrs Vorliss. But they’ve got problems. The ruddy thing keeps—’
Jackie drove to a parking bay before he’d finished speaking. She climbed out of the car into a searing heat that took her breath away.
The security guard called across. ‘The door-locking systems are a bitch as well,’ he emphasized bitch as he looked at her. ‘Once you’re in the store, the doors will lock automatically. You’ll be in there three hours minimum.’
Ben said, ‘We might need to come out to the car for more equipment.’
‘Then take everything you need now,’ the security guard replied. ‘I repeat: the doors will lock on auto. There’s no way I’m monkeying around with that locking system again doing manual overrides – our guys spent all night getting that thing to run smooth.’
Ben grinned. ‘You’ll let us out if there’s a fire?’
‘Pray that there isn’t. That thing is a bitch.’
‘Dear God.’ Ben rubbed his bare arms. ‘That guy wasn’t joking when he said the air-conditioning was screwed. Watch out for polar bears you two.’
They’d piled all the gear they needed into the staff lobby. Now the doors had been locked behind them with the security guard flipping them a salute through a tiny barred window; a gesture that he managed to make somehow offensive. Within seconds of the door closing chilled air rolled down at them like an Arctic cold front. They walked to the security pod, grunting with discomfort, their exhaled breaths turning into balls of white vapour. Jackie felt her skin run to gooseflesh.
‘Hell.’ Ben blew into his cupped hands. ‘This’ll freeze the ketchup in the bottles. What on earth’s gone wrong with the air-conditioning?’
‘It’s better than yesterday, anyway.’ Caitlin pouted. ‘It was boiling down here.’
‘Air-conditioning’s not our problem,’ Jackie told them. ‘We’re going to make sure our system’s fully operational. We’ll start with cameras thirty-two through to thirty-six in the main grocery warehouse. And we need to check those concealed microphones again. We’ve got some dead areas.’
Caitlin sighed, bored already. ‘I’ll go stand by those rubber door things. You call over the PA when you want me to start walking.’
‘Walk faster today.’
‘Yes, Mother.’ Shall I hop on one foot, Mother? Shall I sing for my supper, too?
‘Ben, you walk the aisle route, starting from the customer entrance right through to the main exit.’
‘I thought I was going to run through the camera check with you in the pod?’
‘I can do that myself. This way’s quicker.’
‘Ay, ay, boss.’
Jackie walked quickly along the deserted aisles. Cans of food gleamed dully in the reduced lighting, a million dead eyes watching her pass, while the cereal packets bearing cartoon clown faces grinned their monstrous fixed grins. Her breath came in frosty white puffs and in the distance she could hear Ben whistling. A moment later she sat at the console, her eyes flicking across the six screens in front of her. Two screens held diamond-sharp head and torso shots of Caitlin and Ben where infrared sensors had locked mobile cams onto their body heat. The other screens revealed empty supermarket aisles, running in perfectly straight canyons. There was something unearthly about the place now. Its bone-white walls encased this block of silent, chilled air in a dead embrace. Empty of shoppers, it had become some backwater of a ghost town. Seconds ran by. A pain started in the depths of her head like the tolling of a bell. Her hand hovered above the mic as she fought to hold back the moment of revelation that had been threatening to bloom inside her mind all night.
… honest, Mom, the bikini top came off by accident …
Ben stood there, his skin surrounded by a ghostly aura; an effect of the low-light camera lens; his face expressionless. Caitlin, however, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
Jackie pressed the PA talk-button. For a moment she didn’t speak, content to let the sound of her breathing spread in a pulsing rasp through the cold body of the supermarket. Caitlin rubbed her arm anxiously.
At last: ‘All right, Caitlin? Ben? Start walking …’
She watched the screens. Her daughter and her lover moved out of one screen into the next, swelling, grossly magnified, revealing every individual eyebrow hair, or tiny acne scar. She noticed Ben had a cold sore forming on his bottom lip. Caitlin had dark rings beneath her make-up from one late night too many. Their eyes were glittery … unreal somehow.
‘Walk to the left of the aisle, Ben,’ she instructed. ‘As close as you can.’
Cold currents of air ran down Jackie’s back like bone fingertips.
‘Caitlin. Walk to the back of the warehouse.’
Caitlin scowled at the camera directly above her. At this angle there was something waif-like about the face. ‘Mom …’ The voice came thinly from one of the concealed mics in the warehouse. ‘Mom. There are no lights at the back of the warehouse. I can’t see a thing.’
‘I want you to do this for me, Caitlin.’
‘Mom, it’s pitch black down there.’
‘Caitlin, I need to test the nightscope lens.’
‘I’ll fall over something and break my bloody neck.’
‘You won’t. Put your hand out to your left; guide yourself using those crates. I’ll tell you if I see anything on the floor that might trip you.’
‘Be sure you do.’
‘I will.’ The I will rolled like the voice of Jehovah through the tomb-cold air of the supermarket.
The TV screens were unblinking eyes. They gave Jackie unnaturally clear vision. She saw a rat dart toward her daughter’s sandalled feet. Sharp rat teeth crunch through that golden skin. Caitlin screaming, clawing at the unseen creature that bites her exposed legs in the darkness….
Jackie sensed a detachment. Air-conditioning fans murmured with the voices of lost spirits.
The rat scuttled beneath Caitlin’s foot, then disappeared beneath the crates. Caitlin froze; she’d felt the flick of the rat-tail against her ankle.
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing, Caitlin. Keep walking.’
‘But I can’t see a thing, Mom … I’m….’ The stuttering tug of her breath sounded loud over the speaker. ‘I’m frightened, Mom. I want to come out.’
‘Trust me.’
‘Jackie? Anything the matter?’ Ben’s voice sounded over the speaker, too. He’d only caught Jackie’s half
of the conversation but looked uneasy. ‘Jackie, you can hear me, can’t you?’
She saw his face loom to fill screen one.
‘Don’t worry everyone.’ Jackie’s amplified voice rolled through lonely aisles. ‘It will be over soon.’
Ben started speaking. ‘Jackie, I think we should—’
‘Caitlin. Ben. Keep walking. Only stop when I tell you to stop.’
They began to move quickly. We want this done. We want out! Their wide eyes said it all.
Screen six suddenly revealed the car-park. Outside, the sun blazed on cars. The security guard sat in the shade alongside the air-conditioning engineer. They were drinking cold orangeade. They could have been on the far side of the moon for all they could do to influence, or prevent, coming events.
Jackie heard the sound of her own respiration go out into that cold void and haunt it there. The dark whisper of her inhale-exhale unsettled Caitlin and Ben. They looked up, eyes darting, as if they heard nightmare creatures whirling around their heads.