“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” an American called from the crowd. “Either go or stay. Just make up your freakin’ minds. Some of us want to enjoy the show.”
Scott whirled to face the general direction of the speaker. “Fuck you, yank.”
“Scott!” Kerri glared at him. “What’s gotten into you?”
Wobbling, Scott stalked for the exit. “Reason, at last. Don’t follow me. I want to be alone.”
Certain that if he risked looking behind he would fall over and not get up again, Scott stared ahead. Teeth clenched to keep his guts on the inside, he pushed through the doors of the theatre. Intense sunlight slashed into his eyes. Blinded, he lurched for the gutter and caught himself on a streetlamp. Holding on for dear life, he squinted through watering eyes, searching for a taxi. The traffic was heavy but moved at a steady pace. Horns honked and drivers shouted at each other. Motorcycles buzzed in and out of the lines of cars. People hurried by on the footpath.
A white taxi appeared in the traffic. Scott leaned forward, arm outstretched to signal the driver. The car began to ease over to him.
Something dark moved beside Scott and he jerked away, stumbling onto the road. The taxi screeched to a stop mere inches from him. Spinning, Scott looked for the prick who’d tried to hit him. Several locals had stopped to watch him standing in the middle of the road. None looked malicious, just curious and alarmed.
“Hey!” The taxi driver leaned out of his window. “You got a death wish? Get in or get off the road.”
A few more people had stopped to watch. The sun cast their shadows onto the wall of the tiny, run down theatre, creating a many headed, bulbous creature. As Scott watched, the shadow moved upward, moulded into a new shape by the angles of the walls and awnings. It crawled from the mass of darkness, long arms reaching up and out toward him.
Cold snapped through Scott’s guts. What the fuck was this? He had food poisoning. It was affecting his head. He wasn’t seeing this. A shadow was not hauling itself off the surface on which it was cast, it was not reaching across the gulf between them and reaching for him. It was not. Was not!
The shadow touched his head.
Scott threw himself backwards, away from its cold, hungry touch. He slammed into a car, rolling along its side as it continued driving on. Darting behind it, he barely missed a collision with another car. With his field of vision narrowing to the opposite side of the street, he scrambled between the slowed traffic, barely aware of the horns and verbal abuse in both English and Indonesian following him.
He made it to the footpath, latched onto another pole for support and spun to see what the shadow was doing.
It wasn’t there. At least, not as it had become — alive and hungry. It was just as it should be: a hazy impression of the objects that blocked the light. There was nothing unusual, nothing scary.
Heart racing so fast he couldn’t feel individual beats, Scott leaned over and tried to catch his breath. “Oh fuck, I think I’m having a heart attack.”
It would round off the day perfectly: watching Kerri slowly leave him for Ramelan, food poisoning and a fucking heart attack. This wasn’t right. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him.
After several minutes of deep breathing, and scowling at any do-gooders who got too close, Scott managed to get his heart under control. Even the nausea eased. The day, winding down into evening, was still blasted hot and sweat made his shirt cling to his skin. Getting his bearings, he guessed at which direction the hotel lay and set out on foot, keeping an eye out for a taxi.
Towering over the surrounding buildings, the Wisma 46 skyscraper was his guiding point. Their hotel was south of it, with a view of the concrete and glass construction. Ramelan had dragged them almost to the harbour in order to find the dingiest, smelliest theatre he could. It would be a long walk if he had to go all the way on foot, but he was certain he’d find another taxi before too long.
The sun sank as he walked. Shadows stretched across the footpath. Streetlamps and sign posts striped the streets, bars on a prison window — bars that moved as if alive.
Scott blinked and focused on them again. They writhed under more influence than the shifting surface they fell across. One curled back toward the footpath, snaked toward Scott’s feet.
“What the fuck?” He jumped out of its path.
Another shadow whipped backwards and struck. It hit with an icy punch. Scott reeled amidst the other pedestrians. They shoved back, swore at him and stepped with casual arrogance on and over the shifting shadows. Buffeted through the crowd, Scott fell into the opening of a narrow side street. No sunlight reached the ground here at this time of the afternoon. It was dark and muggy, shrouded in shadows.
A chill rippled down Scott’s spine. Encased in grey, he clambered back to his feet.
Blackness crawled along the wall. Hand shaped, it scuttled toward Scott. He raced away, fleeing further into the alley. It reared off the wall and galloped after him, silent and cold.
From behind a dumpster, another dark shadow came. It slinked across the dirty ground, flowing over rubble and boxes and broken bottles, tendrils reaching ahead of its bulk, eager for him.
Scott hurdled it, coming down on its rear edge. His Bunkers absorbed the impact but didn’t stop the shadow from flipping up and curling around his shoe. Shouting incoherently, Scott shoved, pulled and pushed until his foot came out of the leather Bunker. Staggering away, he watched dumbly as the shadow consumed his very expensive shoe.
The two shadows merged into one large mass. It pulled up off the ground, rearing over him, blocking out what light there was.
“Fuck you,” he screamed, all too aware of the hysteria bubbling through his voice.
He turned and ran, his shoe-less foot unerringly finding each and every puddle of stagnant, putrid water. Light bloomed at the end of the alley. He raced for it, wanting nothing more than to stand in the brutally hot sun of Indonesia, sweat himself into dehydration and never see another shadow again for as long as he lived.
Scott barrelled out of the alley into an only slightly wider street. A bajaj swerved around him, both driver and passenger rocking back and forth. The motorised rickshaw rumbled on, trailing curses from the driver. But all Scott cared for was the narrow river of sunlight coursing down the centre of the street. He drowned himself in the light, soaked up the heat.
Careful to remain in the light, Scott followed the street. He didn’t know where it would take him and, at this moment, didn’t care. He just wanted to keep out of the shadows, stay warm and pretend he wasn’t going insane.
The street widened and Scott recognised the flea market where he, Kerri and Ramelan had spent the morning. Kerri had gotten her sarong and Ramelan had coaxed them into sampling food Scott couldn’t pronounce the names of, let alone recognise the ingredients. His stomach squirmed: it was food poisoning. That bastard had made him ingest some exotic toxin that was fucking with his brain, making him hallucinate.
The market was over for the day. The vendors had gathered up their ‘native artwork’ and moved on. Striped awnings that had provided cherished shelter from the sun in the morning now harboured dark shadows. Black shapes moved in the depths of the shade.
“It’s not real. It’s just a hallucination.”
Still, Scott’s feet moved faster and faster until he was running down the middle of the street. There was no traffic beyond a few bajaj. A smattering of late vendors watched him with mild curiosity.
He followed the street, vaguely aware that he was not heading toward his hotel. He was as far from it as he could be and still be in this crazy, stinking hot, overcrowded city. The buildings on either side reduced in size and quality as he ran. Brick became scarce as a building material, replaced by weathered wood, corrugated iron and tin. Even though the height of the buildings dropped, his path of light narrowed as the sun continued its downward spiral. The shadows crept closer.
The street came to an abrupt end in an arching, narrow bridge. Scott slowed to a st
agger and climbed its gentle curve. The sharp tang of salt water hit his nose. He’d reached the water, a small harbour surrounded by ramshackle slums and filled with battered fishing boats. Children played on the far side of the bridge, stopping their game to look at him with wide, dark eyes. An old man half buried by a net called them away.
Gasping for breath, Scott leaned on the railing, head hanging over the murky brown water. A weak swathe of sunlight washed over him and the water, but the shadow of the bridge held the dark hints of his pursuer — whatever it was.
Pressure intensified in his chest, twisting and turning. Heat sparked between his lungs, behind his sternum. It seared through his chest and spread out into his limbs.
“Scott!” Kerri raced up the bridge, slammed into him, almost knocked him over. “Oh my God, I thought I’d never find you. What the hell are you doing here? What’s going on?” She sobbed into his aching chest.
It was starting to get hard to pull air into his lungs. He’d had heartburn before but it had never, ever, felt like this before. This was like a true fire burning inside.
Kerri pulled back, put a hand to his cheek. “You’re burning up. How did you get a fever so fast?”
Ramelan jogged up. “It must be food poisoning.” He hardly looked out of breath, though he did seem concerned.
Scott tried to push away from Kerri, but couldn’t get free of her hold. Everything turned into a bright blur, a dancing, flickering landscape of orange light. Kerri and Ramelan were dark blurs on the edges of his vision.
“Scott? Scott, can you hear me?”
Kerri’s voice was an arrhythmic counterpoint to the tympanic beat of blood through his veins. It was if the dalang of the shadow play had set up inside his head and pounded out the bass beat on his skull.
“Ramelan, what if he’s having an anaphylactic reaction to something?”
Scott opened his mouth to tell them it wasn’t an allergy. It was something else, something inside that burned. But nothing came out of his mouth.
“Sit here. Ramelan’s gone to get some help. Scott? Please say something. Can you hear me?”
Scott nodded and she sobbed with relief, pressing her ice cold face against his cheek. He wanted to push her away; he would melt her if she stayed too close. Yet, like his mouth, his arms would not work. He wondered if he still had arms or had they burned to ash and cinders? All he could see was the frantic wavering of the orange light.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Where had that come from? It sounded — it felt — as if it had come from inside him.
Darkness grew on the edge of his flame coloured world. A shadow bulged and grew and unfolded itself. A tall, slender figure with an elongated neck, forward thrust head with an exaggerated nose.
The shadow puppet clambered across his vision, beckoning to something behind it. Chanting rose as a dull throb. A voice sounded, hollow and empty.
“Come,” it said. “See what you have done.”
Another shadow appeared on the edge of his flickering flame, more recognisable. A man of normal features, he strode across the stage that was Scott’s world, arms manipulated by rods held by some unseen puppeteer. He gathered objects to himself as he walked — a big car, a house far too large for one person, a boat that sat idle in the canal by his too big house. Other shadows came to him — countless, nameless girls, drawn by the big things he owned, that he took so much pride in. On and on he walked, the accumulated junk of his life building up around his legs, holding him in one place while he believed he was moving.
The first puppet returned, skittering over the piles of possessions. “And what is the worth of this?”
From the deep shadows around the man’s legs the puppet pulled a new shape of darkness. It tumbled from the heap and stood. A woman separate from the girls.
“What am I worth?” Kerri’s voice demanded.
“You are worth more than all this.” The man attempted to reach the woman, but was hampered by the gathered detritus of his life, the things he thought so precious, so important. His legs were trapped and he couldn’t break free.
“And what is the worth of this?”
Again, the shadow puppet pulled something from the pile. It too tumbled down and stood. Another woman who danced on her rods to music only she could hear, a woman who dressed far too gaudily for someone her age and who laughed too loud. A woman who told anyone who would listen that she and her son lived in a caravan, moving from caravan park to caravan park whenever the fancy took her, or whenever she couldn’t pay the rent any longer. A woman who sang off tune at the top of her voice in public, who danced with her son’s classmates and told them about her last orgasm. A woman who spent the rent money on cheap booze and picked fights with the neighbours.
“What is the worth of this?” the hollow voice asked again.
The man floundered in his pile of wealth, his unseen puppeteer losing control of the rods that directed his actions. He flailed about and fell, his shadow melding with those of the big things he’d bought with his life. They consumed him and darkness enfolded Scott. The flame that he was faded and he became the shadow.
A shape moved in the shadows. Darker than the rest, it defined itself in movement — a thin neck and long nose.
“Will you apologise?”
“For what? I have done nothing wrong.”
“You have denied her the right to be your mother.”
“No. She’s the one who denied herself that. She wasn’t a mother, she was a child who refused to grow up, a drunk who wasted her life instead of making something of herself.”
“Like you made something of yourself. Are you happy with your house and boat and expensive clothes? Do they help you forget where you came from?”
“Yes, they help me forget. They’re very good at helping me forget.”
“Will you apologise?”
“To her? Never.”
The puppet bowed its strange head and vanished.
“Scott?”
“Kerri.”
Kerri sobbed. “Oh my God, you scared me so much. What happened? I thought you were going to die. Scott, what happened?”
Relieved that he could again talk, Scott said, “I don’t know.”
A cool hand brushed his forehead and cheeks. “Your fever’s going down. I don’t understand. You must have had a reaction to something.”
“I think I’m better now.”
Yet even as he spoke, Scott’s feet became numb. He tried to wriggle his toes, but they wouldn’t move. He could feel them as a weight on the ends of his legs, but they wouldn’t respond. Then the numbness moved up his calves.
“Something’s wrong,” he muttered, swinging his legs. It was hard. It suddenly felt as if his legs weighed a tonne.
“What’s wrong now?”
There was panic in Kerri’s voice, matching the rising fear in Scott. It bubbled through him a split second faster than the rapidly growing numbness. The strange sensation hit his knees and crawled so fast up his thighs he couldn’t comprehend it. Then his guts froze and his hands.
“Kerri.” He didn’t care that his voice cracked with terror.
“Scott!”
He faced her, eyes wide, mouth gaping. It reached his heart, stopped it. For a moment more he was aware of the solidity rushing up his neck and into his face. The abrupt weight of his body rocked him forward. Kerri reached for him, but he fell too fast, hit the water and sank.
****
contaminator
Rebecca Lloyd
There’s a fine balance to be struck between consideration and self-preservation in the vast underground complexes deep beneath London. The fast moving crowd practises a knowing blindness; looking without seeing, touching without feeling, and by this crude but long established etiquette it supposes to disperse into daylight again unharmed.
On Friday nights in particular, the crowd does not tolerate a slowing of the pace. It does not care about the beggar woman and her wan-faced child, the musician who cannot play, or the b
ewildered foreigner. It aims only to reach the surface undisturbed by peculiar incidents.
The fear of accidental burial is never far away; the heavy air is sharp with slivers of anxiety. When a warm gritty wind signals the coming of a train, we scramble rudely forward and pack ourselves intimately into the carriages rather than linger down there in the tunnels longer than we have to. We pretend composure; only the smallest signs of agitation appear when someone, done with the harshness of life, jumps onto the track and halts our train in a black tunnel. In those stationary moments women pick at their ringed fingers, men clear their throats, and somebody sneezes and reminds us of disease.
****
For some months I have tried to find my way back into the surging blindness of the people I move with every morning and evening, but Monument’s clinical white tunnels and grey floors flecked with yellow, unnerve me. I am in the crowd, but not part of it; I falter and stare, and no longer move with the flow. At the base of a great metal escalator the crowd divides, one half pushing onwards for the Northern Line and a sweaty journey beneath the old plague pits, the other takes me with it to Docklands Railway where trains go quickly towards East London through a sooty wormhole.
There are old underground stations beneath London that have never been renovated - Oval, Baker Street, Borough - sombre halls heavy with tiny ceramic tiles in black, oily green and brown, more fitting places to have encountered the woman who filled me with fear than at Monument.
Each time I descend, I am alert in my hunt for her, each evening I hesitate for a second at the place she stood. I’m glad of the swiftness of the Docklands train and the lightening of mood as we reach our own territory along weed-strewn tracks, orange with rust. The allotments at Cable Street are busy now, the black poisoned soil turned over, the first seeds in. The clouds above St George’s Church are suicide grey with pearly rims, and along the river beyond Wapping, the sun slides like a new plate into the Thames.
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