He lifted his head up, distracted by the humming of the fridge, the vibrations pushed along the floor against his feet. He recalled a news report that had been sent around the office sometime before the attack about a fridge of the same model, an ‘autoreplacer’. The sensor – a single red line – watched all activity, and if a listed key-item was removed for more than three hours then another was sent. If a barcode was within eight hours of expiring, another was sent. If waste gas was detected, the source was identified and another was sent. In the news feature the fridge was ordering vast amounts of food, multiple repeat orders of the same few items, which piled up initially on the doorstep but eventually circled all the way around the house. The automated deliveries continued, the signal reiterating its command again and again, the new food wasting in the heat and rain. No-one had reported anything, and the security services ultimately came only because the account had run into debt, no longer able to pay for the food which was still arriving even as security broke down the door. She was lying on the tiled kitchen floor and had been dead six days. The official explanation was a flaw in the scope of the sensors; the fridge had picked up traces of waste gas from the body and read this as a signal to order more food, to replace the thing that had begun to rot. The story had drawn grim laughter – the company was humiliated; there had been terminations – but he kept thinking of the stuck signal, the repeat command to order more food. Shel said it was like one of those dogs that sits whining by its owner after they’d slipped and died, as if willing them to wake up. But he saw it differently; his understanding was that the mechanism was trying to replace the person. It picked up broken-down foods in the body’s waste gas and ordered fresh examples. Because the rot remained, it ordered new material desperately, urgently, excessively. He’d been haunted by the idea that the mechanism was building up, around the outside of the house, a large store of the foods that had been inside the body, as if eventually, after a certain threshold had been reached, the person would collect herself again, stand up and only then, after the rot had gone, would the signal go silent.
A sharp pain in his scalp distracted him, breaking his concentration, and the memory tumbled away. He fidgeted, pressed his finger to his scalp. The wound felt warm to the touch, and he remembered the doctor’s caution about infection. Perhaps he should put some ice on it, take some of the heat away. He pushed himself up from the table and entered the vestibule, heading for the freezer. The wall connecting the two doors was darkened by the spread of mould. Walking past it, he felt a new, bright pain on his scalp. He cried out, put his hand to his head. He instinctively stepped back out of the vestibule and the pain subsided. When he stepped in again, it flared up. He stood at a safe distance in the doorway and looked around at the mould, noticing for the first time how bad it had got. He was surprised the doctor had said nothing. The walls were covered, ribbed with dark folds. It almost resembled a neocortex, he thought, morbidly, the unpacked surface of a brain.
XVI
Jane asked if she could speak with me. Alice was off camp; I was using the last of the daylight, taking my things out of the tent, attempting to dry them, sorting them – clothes, documents, equipment – into a kind of order. It was a losing battle. I tried it day after day but there was never enough time, the darkness and rain coming suddenly over my shoulder. It was infuriating, distracting me; no room inside, no light outside.
‘Still trying to unpack, I see,’ Jane said. I turned and she was carrying something. She looked different, walking cautiously, uncertain. She was worried about something. I stood up. ‘Will you tell me what you think of this?’ she said, thrusting the recording device at me, as if eager to be rid of it.
At first, I heard what I expected to. A branch falling close to the recorder, leaves rustling, sporadic calls from the troop a distance away. Further calls, the first alarm barks. They got louder, no longer just one individual seeking a response. It became a chorus, more urgent than the earlier calls. Suddenly it stopped.
‘What did you think,’ Jane said, ‘of the footsteps?’
They came towards the end. The first notable thing was that they were loud. The pace suggested two legs. I became embarrassed. ‘Well, that’s me, I think,’ I said, trying to hide my face. ‘I must have got up in the night.’
‘Must have?’
‘Well, I mean, I did. To use the toilet.’
‘You walked that way? The latrine’s the other side. At 04.35? That’s the time stamp.’
‘Well, I didn’t go to the latrine, as such, Jane, I was practically sleeping, I don’t remember exactly. I just wanted to get outside the camp. I was … sick again. In the night. Obviously I shouldn’t have walked past the recorder. I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sure this is you? I don’t think it’s you. Listen.’ She played the recording back again. She paused it. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve isolated the footsteps. They’re louder, they suggest more pressure than yours. You’re, what, five seven? Listen to the gap between each footfall – it’s not consistent with your stride.’
‘Maybe I was just walking oddly. Like I said, I wasn’t feeling myself.’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘No,’ she said quietly, as if hopelessly. ‘You’re not listening. It’s something else.’
XVII
He was jolted, snapped awake. His head thudded and a dull pain throbbed in his neck. There was something wet over the pillow. He reached for his neck and flinched as he touched the open wound. Pressing it with one hand, he found the light switch with the other, briefly blinding himself by the illumination. When the bright white spots had settled in his vision, he saw the blood seeping through his hands. He climbed out of the bed and went into the small adjacent bathroom. Hesitantly, he stripped off his T-shirt and looked into the mirror. His neck was bloodied and three long narrow scratches were dug into his chest. He wiped and padded his neck with paper and, after managing to stem the flow, made out a new pair of short scratches, almost like punctures. Opening the mirror door he found dressing and a bandage. He noticed his nails were clean – the blood and broken skin must have washed off in the sink. He leaned back and held his head. He was destroying himself. He should have listened to the doctor, continued on the medication. It had seemed wrong, turning away from consciousness in the night, when the memories were strongest. He’d thought he’d be safe from open wounds, cutting his nails back until they bled, but it hadn’t been enough. He had continued, blindly, tearing through.
He turned off the light, and as he stepped into the corridor, a capsule and a glass of water in his hands, he heard the firm, unmistakable sound of a door closing.
At first he assumed it was a car door, somebody waiting outside. Perhaps the sound carried differently in the fog, especially so in the night, in silence; the vehicle could have been hundreds of metres away, by the farm. He listened for an engine, footsteps, voices. Perhaps it was the doctor arriving with some new crucial information and, with no other means of contacting him, coming directly to the house. Had something happened to Shel? Was it Catherine? Was it a representative from Shel’s work coming to bring him news?
He retreated to the bedroom and laid the glass and capsule down on the side table. He saw his hands shaking, the hair rising on his arms. He breathed slowly and carefully, whispering that everything would be okay, pleading for everything to be okay. Whatever happened, let her be okay.
He heard the same sound again, a soft thud, only closer this time, as if inside the house. He turned off the lamp, covering himself under darkness. He knew, now, that this wasn’t a vehicle. He must have forgotten to lock the door. Perhaps the doctor had not closed it properly, and now it was swinging, hitting off the frame.
He waited by the bedroom door in the dark. He didn’t want to go down, didn’t want to see. His eyes turned to the sedative capsule and the glass of water. He could sleep, let it all drift away, wake in the morning, wait as usual for the doctor and for the pattern of the past two weeks to resume and repeat
.
The next sound confirmed that it wasn’t the wind. Though he knew it was familiar, knew he’d heard it countless times before, he struggled to place it. A loud, prolonged screeching, like something being dragged. His heart thumped; the room grew colder. It was the table, downstairs. Someone had pulled out a chair at the table.
He panicked, tried to settle himself, tried to think. Though his instinct was to stay, he knew he couldn’t hide there, trapped if the intruder ascended. He had no option but to go downstairs. He had to confront this, whatever it was. He looked around the dark room, hunting for something, anything, that he could carry as a weapon. But the room was bare. He took a steadying breath and crept towards the landing. At the top of the stairs he smelled the familiar iron odour from the walls. He strained his neck, trying to see down into the kitchen. He froze. A single chair was pulled out. A figure occupied the seat, facing the wall. Slouched, arms on the table, calm, oblivious to his own presence on the stairs.
He didn’t want to alert the intruder. He pressed gently onto the banisters, and slowly, agonisingly, he began to descend, making his way silently down the wooden steps. He kept his head lowered, watching his feet, moving deliberately, avoiding sight of the table and the guest. His mouth remained closed; he focused on his breath.
Reaching the last step, he looked up. The table was before him, the chair pulled out. A sense of movement around him, a rush, a sudden shift, a change in the atmosphere. The seat was empty, the door was closed. He wheeled around, trying to locate the figure, but whoever it was, whatever it was, was gone. He slammed the bolt across the front door, locking it securely, and he let out a shaky breath. He went around the table, inspecting each of the chairs. He went through the corridor and checked the bathroom. He looked out the window on to the driveway. He couldn’t see anything in the fog. Had he dreamed it? Had he not been fully awake when he came downstairs? He knew he should stay in the safety of the house, but he needed certainty. He took a torch from the kitchen and put his coat on and laced his boots. He took the key, opened the door and, for the first time in over two weeks, stepped outside. The raw cold startled him. The fog was visible in shafts of moonlight cutting through the darkness. The conviction, still, that someone was there, that someone had been inside and that they remained close to him, concealed in the fog. He recalled Shel’s warning on the drive to the airport, saying everything is different in the fog – speed, sound, distance, it’s all distorted; everything is unreliable. You can’t trust your senses, she said, you have to be careful. She told him he was going faster than he realised; the scene outside only appeared to be unchanging. He heard her again – you can’t trust your senses, John.
Whoever was there, whoever had been inside the house, could emerge without warning, appear instantly out of the vapour. The construction site again, the whirring sound, the air rushing, the blind impact of something shattering coming out of the sky. He listened for external breath, looked for unnatural shadows. He inched forward, shone his light, swept it in an arc. The driveway; the car; the trees ahead; the beginning of the fields, insubstantial through the fog. He approached the car, tried the door; it opened. He stood a moment holding the door, feeling the unfamiliarity of his own car after all this time. He considered the space inside, the two front seats. He leaned in. Blood on the passenger side, on the headrest and on the seat cushion. He shone the light further; no blood on the driver’s seat. Nothing in the back. He was about to shut off the torch and return inside when he noticed an object beneath the passenger seat, something reflective, glimmering as the torch passed over it. He searched again with the light, caught it, reached in and gathered up his phone. It was smeared in blood. Smudges of a fingerprint over the screen. He must have tried to call at the site. He had been awake at the site; he had tried to find help. It didn’t make sense. What had happened immediately after the attack? Who had taken him? The screen was cracked, but he pressed the power switch and was surprised to see blue light bursting out, sending its own beam, lighting a channel through the fog.
XVIII
None of us heard the buzzing at the time. It might have been a drone, probably one of the security drones that had gone off track. It was sometimes hard to appreciate the real volume of the recording, after you’d tuned into it and started to adjust the settings on the device. But this seemed louder, faster than a drone, and later in the day, walking through the forest, I thought it was closer to that of a light aircraft.
It came at the beginning of the night’s recording. Alice suggested it was internal, a mechanical fault, but after several checks we couldn’t attribute it for certain. It began as a wide fluttering noise, becoming louder, closer, as if travelling at great speed, and seemed to come from different points, each driving towards a centre. There was an odd high-pitched whistling, wavering around the point of audibility. I thought of the doctor again – a simple association from the first real thing the recording reminded me of, the low flight of a light aircraft. The doctor stranded, continuously unaccounted for within the airport zone. The conflicting simultaneous messages claiming his presence in disparate locations. The insistence of various staff, who, as far as I could tell, absolutely and vehemently believed what they were saying, that he had landed, he had returned, he had never been there.
*
Somebody had left food out. One of us had not been circumspect in cleaning. That must be what had happened; someone must be to blame. They had to be. Alice stormed back to her tent, Jane sat vacantly on the ground, I went over the prints again, marked on the small clearing in front of our tents. Look at it, analyse it, what is it, what does it indicate. I squatted and put my face against the mud. Cloven hoofs, toes two and three large, pressing firmly into the mud, with the flanked claws, one and four, skimming the surface, suggesting either a boar or another unknown animal moving at speed, its ankle joints giving way, flanked claws descending and skimming as a light impression. Despite the large number of prints there was a pattern, clearly tracing the movement of a single animal. Prints from the fore limbs were larger and heavier than the hind. This suggested that the animal was accelerating. But how, in the dense, thick vegetation all around us? Where was it going? The tracks overlapped, printing over each other, as if the animal had got stuck, going round and round in the same space. I imagined it moving quickly, in a storm, imagined its enclosed, limited galloping, its too much purpose taking it nowhere.
How could we not have heard? What had brought it here? The night’s audio recorded several alarm calls in the troop and we were a little unnerved at the coincidence. The prints were not produced by anything that should have scared them. It wasn’t feline; it wasn’t something that could get up in the trees. It must have been dazed, scared by the same thing, possibly, that had terrified the troop.
There were silent episodes of sheet lightning, white electric charges that began to hurt my jaw. It was easier not to speak. I wrote a lot. We were yet to find any further signs of a real threat, either on the ground or on the animals’ bodies. When I couldn’t sleep, I imagined the animals were warning of something imminent, something which hadn’t come yet but they could sense around them in the forest. And I tried to imagine what this thing could be.
XIX
He didn’t sleep, he locked the doors, he kept the lights off. He didn’t understand it: the doctor had assured him he had checked the car for the phone. It wasn’t possible he could have missed it. Why would he lie? Did the doctor somehow not want him to recover and to leave the house? He remained as still as possible, alert to any sound, listening for the slightest tremor in the air. He removed his phone slowly from his pocket, carrying the soft blue glow in both hands. His fingers stumbled on the keypad. The numbers were loose and fluid, and when he went to key in one number he pressed several others as well. An error message appeared, telling him he had entered the wrong code and that his identity could not be verified. He waited for the shaking to subside, the excess energy to slip from his hands, then the combination to come back, th
e keys he’d pressed a million times.
The blue glow of the phone had an odd chemical appearance, as if marking a volatile substance. Feeling the pulse of information moving through his fingers, he thought of how tantalisingly close everything was: contact again, the wider world, Shel returning, their ongoing life together. Open the phone, check on messages from Shel, contact work, request updates from the agent on construction of the house. But even being this close, he was still so far away. Even were he to remember his code, he could see the empty signal bar at the top of the screen. He still couldn’t call anyone. He couldn’t drive anywhere. He was bereft. He realised, as if for the first time, the extent of his isolation.
He woke slumped on the table, the stitching in his head infected, the pain constant. There was a dim light settling through the kitchen; the stillness felt unnatural, artificial, as if poised and on the point of collapse. He imagined the effect of several people concealed in the house, stilled, controlling their breath, waiting to emerge. Would he hear them? Would he know for sure? He got up slowly, unsteady while the pain radiated from his scalp. He felt the wound on his chest and removed the bandage from his neck. He examined each room methodically, ensuring nothing else had been disturbed. He powered on his phone again, trying not to think, to rely on reflex action in his fingers, but still the pass code wouldn’t come. He laughed humourlessly; he had retained the information to set the washing machine, but not this.
Gathering Evidence Page 15