A Graveyard Visible

by Steve Conoboy

  KEEP ON AHEAD

  Caleb doesn’t want to keep on anything. He moves into the next chamber; more columns (graves) in here. Seven either side, with seven behind each of those.

  Does he hear a thin dragging sound?

  ‘CAY-LEB!’

  ON ON ON

  He’s jogging again. Really really doesn’t want to be down here a single second longer. That dragging body-part sound, muffled, like it’s inside something. He’s passed it; leaving it behind. Let whatever it is (dead thing, it’s a dead thing) scrape about all it wants as long as it’s behind him. Far behind.

  ON KEEP ON

  Building to a run because the boys will be catching up, they won’t slow for scrapes or fear.

  ‘YOU’RE LOST.’

  ‘STUPID LOST FRIEND.’

  ‘NO ONE WILL EVER FIND YOU.’

  ‘WE WILL, CAY-LEB, WE WILL.’

  Caleb almost screams. They’re hard to pinpoint amidst echoes and running, but they sound like they’re entering the first chamber.

  He is screwed.

  LEFT RIGHT LEFT

  He takes these turns, running hard, running from ghosts, running from the graves that surround him. His feet-slaps are teeth-grindingly loud in the flat silence of underground. Trackable. Findable. Thundering past so many columns, so many graves, so many dead. Weaving one way then the next. Deep in the maze, far past lost.

  No one knows he’s here. No one living has a clue where he is.

  STOP STOP STOP

  That can’t be right.

  STOP NOW NOW and the words turn the thick hot red of fresh blood and the chamber around him turns bloody too and he’s in the fat veins of the terrible creature that heaves under the ever-growing graveyard, and that’s what stops him. His heart is about to pop.

  HIDE BEHIND COLUMN

  ‘That won’t help!’ he whispers. ‘They’ll find me straight away!’

  NOT FROM THEM

  A thud. Someone (thing) falling. Tripping over. Or tumbling out of something. Out of one of the columns.

  He hears it gasp. Caleb creeps into the corner of the chamber, steps light, breathing stopped.

  ‘CAY-LEB.’

  The boys haven’t stopped to hide in a corner. ‘I can’t stay here. They’re coming. Eight? Eight?’

  The ball only says this: WAIT RIGHT HERE.

  115

  Heavy thumping. Someone wants an answer and isn’t going away until they get one. THUMP THUMP THUMP. THUMP THUMP THUMP. Granddad stands within reach of the handle, watching his front door rattle. He knows who’s on the other side. It can only be one man. The bastard can’t wait. THUMP THUMP THUMP. THUMP THUMP THUMP. A beastly heartbeat, irregular, caught up in anger and panic.

  ‘I hate you,’ whispers Granddad.

  The banging stops.

  Granddad steps lightly to one side. Snakes of light crackle between the knobbles of his fingers. He’s tired, but he’s not yet out of tricks.

  Pressure pulls from outside. He plants his heels. CRUMP the door is sucked away; the welcome mat shoots out with it, and shoes, and umbrellas, and coats and hat stand.

  Crosswell takes a single stride in.

  The blast from the light-whips blows Crosswell sideways down the hallway, knocking him senseless. Before he can recover, before he can find his feet, Granddad flicks both wrists and shrills an ululating note, wrapping the whips around Crosswell’s limbs, binding him. The old man’s chest heaves and rasps from the effort.

  Granddad peers out where once there was a door, expecting to see more of the Crosswell clan. Chunks of wood are scattered all over the garden. There’s nothing else but gravestones. ‘You came here alone? I knew you were arrogant, but I didn’t think you were stupid as well.’ A pain zips up and down his left arm, pinches at his side. He sags a little, forces himself to stand upright before Crosswell can look at him.

  He can’t, however, completely wipe the grimace off his face.

  116

  Beams slash around the street, searching. Neuman has stopped bellowing the boy’s name. The silence is worse. It indicates total concentration, a single-minded determination to find prey.

  Morgan gives Misha a nudge. ‘We’re out of here. Soon as I tell you, we run and don’t stop.’

  ‘I don’t belong to you,’ snaps Misha. ‘You can do what you want.’ Misha edges away along the fence, heading for the road. Morgan catches her.

  ‘Do you want to die?’

  ‘What do you care?’ Swoosh go the lights. Swoosh, swoosh over their heads. ‘Two weeks ago you and Crosswell were saying how much easier your lives would be if I was dead. So I’m doing you a favour, aren’t I?’ She yanks away from Morgan’s grip.

  ‘Oh screw you, you little brat. Why am I even bothering? You can—’ The fence shatters as Neuman piles through it, slamming into Morgan and knocking her to the ground, belly-flopping down on top of her. She’s face-down in grass, and trying to wiggle loose. Without thinking Misha steps forward to help. Neuman’s head snaps round, that head with those twin torches in.

  She sees

  the world beneath her own, the scorched truth within this street, the burnt-out shells of houses, and the monsters waiting inside them. They’re all looking at her, blue fire slavering from their eyes, mouths wide and hungry. Beneath each of them, six feet under, lie piles of the dead, bodies sagging like empty sacks, steaming energy. Between the carcasses of houses, far off in the distance but coming, steadily coming, march an army of revenants, all eyes aglow: raveners, destroyers. And Neuman, pinning Morgan, a taloned overlord of the Underworld, a metallic fog pouring from its skin, reaching down to press on her chest, press, press, push through, and those hands push right on in, sink into the cavity within her ribs, cupping her rabbit-pulsing heart and squeeeeeeeeeeze.

  Misha falls to her jellied knees, gasping. The world snaps back to normal, and normal now is Neuman hunched over Morgan’s jerking body, torches blazing directly into her head. Misha turns away from the melting eye sockets, tells her legs to behave, she has to move, she has to go far from here.

  But she needs to find Caleb first. This street is full of revenants; they might already have him; he might already be one of them. If he is, that will be a shame, and she will need to find Eight and run.

  She scrambles away from Neuman, from dying Morgan and her cooked eyeballs (the smell, oh the smell), runs around the back of the cul-de-sac to Caleb’s garage, climbs up faster than she can, feet slip-sliding on brickwork, hurry, hurry, imagining hands snatching at her heels. Her nerve-endings flutter. On the garage roof, nothing behind her climbing up. Neuman is still dealing with Morgan. Silly old cow.

  Silly dead old cow.

  Caleb’s bedroom window is shut.

  She tries it anyway. Shut, but not locked. Misha prises it open and slips into his bedroom. No boy, and a brief glance around reveals no Eight. That’s to be expected. Eight will be with Caleb, wherever that might be (if he’s not dead like that silly old cow).

  ‘Shut up,’ she tells herself, but it doesn’t dispel the idea, doesn’t make it definitely wrong. He better not be dead. She wants her ball back.

  He better not be dead.

  They sat there, together on the floor as he read from his Gramps’s journal. She had listened to it all, but she’d been thinking too, thinking and feeling. So close, arms touching. So close to another person. This boy with a dead mother (father too) and little to make him feel part of the world. Sitting there beside the boy outside of the world, she’d believed that she could talk to him, tell him things. Misha had thought that perhaps he would understand, and she recalls the rush that hope gave her. All at once this fired through her head, a hot pulse along the lines of communication, a telegram after a life alone on an island, a text after years of no signal. So close to telling him what Granddad was up to and why she knew he was wrong and why she always resisted the old man. So close.

  Then they were interrupted, and there was running, and Vic Sweet dead, and Caleb showed that he could be j
ust as dumb as everyone.

  Why did he have to go and steal Eight?

  She hates him!

  Over goes the mattress as she shouts her wordless hate and frustration. She hates him! Smash goes his keyboard off the wall. She hates him! Games console meets floor in a plume of plastic splinters. She hates how much she loves him!

  She’s completely trashed his room. Poster pieces flutter. Fluff has prolapsed from the pillows. A crack has stabbed across the TV screen. Gouges in the plaster. How long was she raging? And how loud?

  Beams sweep across the windowpane. This is how criminals feel when the police helicopter pins them down.

  Out of his bedroom, onto the landing, checking inside each room as she goes. A bathroom. A separate toilet. A grown-up bedroom. A spare room for storage. No Calebs, no Eights.

  Down the stairs, down-down quick. An empty ground floor toilet. Living room and dining room where there has been a major struggle. Broken chair, flipped table, battered sofa, broken mirror. It’s almost as big a mess as the one she’s left upstairs.

  Where is that stupid lying boy?

  The kitchen has also been a battleground. The fridge is open, its shelves tumbled. A cupboard door off the hinges. Plates smashed across the drainer. A man standing on the back step, staring at her. ‘Cay-leb.’ It’s not said with love; it’s a craving, a hunger. ‘Cay-leb!’ She runs. The boy’s not here, and she doesn’t want to be either.

  Neuman stepping out of the front room, lights sweeping before her. Lashes a crinkled hand out at her. She drops, slides, kicks Neuman in the shins. The legs buckle and Neuman collapses and those lightbeams swing down and blare into her eyes

  and she sees

  right into Neuman’s head, to the brain inside a cracked skull, and there are storms raging, forks of lightning crackling within cloud-bundles, and past this she sees not a ceiling but the remains of a roof, rotten beams barely hanging together, and beyond this lies a roiling blue-grey sky, storms raging, forks of lightning crackling within cloud-bundles, the clashes of a brain inside a broken skull and

  Neuman’s forehead bashes into the bridge of her nose, and a hot spike of pain accompanies the crunching noise as the bone snaps, and she’s agony-blind. She raises a hand to the bloody injury. Smashes an elbow across Neuman’s face before she is pinned under the revenant’s weight. Neuman falls to her right, and Misha wants to curl in a ball around the searing pain of her nose.

  She screams as a hand pulls her up by the hair, strands popping out of her scalp.

  ‘Where’s my boy?’ bellows Caleb’s father in her ear, and through her tears she can blurry-see the tatters of his scorched face and the teeth that can still bite, and he’s lifting her higher, higher until her feet are off the floor and it feels as if all her hair is about to rip out of her head in one lump, and Neuman throws herself into Caleb’s father. They crash into the wall. Misha falls to the floor. To hands and knees, scrambling away. The battling revenants tumble over the top of her, almost flattening her, but she doesn’t stop, she goes goes goes because this is a place gone very bad and she shouldn’t have come here, not even for Eight, not even for the boy.

  At the front door. Eyes streaming. Face burning. It’s not opening, handle’s not moving. She screams loud enough to strain her throat. Dead things are fighting behind her and she can’t get out! A key on a hook by the door. She snatches at it with sausage fingers. Neuman’s beams are slashing around the hallway, and there’s shuddering, everything’s shuddering as a low pulsation throbs her bones, a tone that lifts through the octaves, an off-key squail that thickens the air like flat mud, and she feels it pressing on her skin, the air, the fat air is pressing on her, pressing hard like palms on her flesh and

  her fingers

  are really

  struggling to

  move

  to turn the goddamn key, the key that she doesn’t have the strength to turn.

  The lock clicks.

  She hauls the door open.

  A thump in the back throws her out onto the doorstep. Arms out to protect her face, paving slabs coming up to meet her. Skin tears from her elbows. A ball of Neuman and Caleb’s dad rolls out after her, and they bring that noise, that rib-squeezing, energy-draining, chest-puncture of a racket, and Misha crawls on blood-burning elbows and knees, because she just can’t get up, the pressure is everywhere, that noise doesn’t pause for anything, not breath or fist

  and then it does stop, with a wet splash, and the pressure’s gone, and Misha’s back on her feet and she can run, and she does, not daring to look back at whatever mess she’s leaving behind. There’s more to see. Once-alive people, scorch-eyed, marching out into the street, towards her.

  Bad, bad place.

  Run, run, run.

  117

  Slither, splat.

  The sound ties knots in Caleb’s intestines. A dead thing, slid from its grave, crumpled in the dirt. And listen to the susurrations as it shumples up the roughness of wall, and shuffle-feet drag.

  Eight’s light has gone out. No messages, no taunts, no instructions, true or false. Caleb is alone, trapped with the dead.

  And the boys have gone quiet. No shouts, no taunts, true or false. Perhaps they heard the slither-splat, and perhaps they don’t like it either.

  He hates it. His guts hate it. He wants to scream because the primal part of him says that if he screams then help will come, but what’s left of his rational self knows that a single noise will be the end of him.

  Ssshhh slide. Ssshhh slide. Feet that struggle to walk properly, coming his way.

  Can it see in the dark?

  He can’t see a damn thing. His eyes are bulging against the blackness. He edges around the corner of the column (grave), ajangle with every whispering brush of his skin or clothes, each scrape of his heel over some tiny pebble. Whispers and scrapes. Any of these will kill him.

  Ssshhh slide. Ssshhh slide. It’s heard him. Or smelled him. Or

  doesn’t matter why, it’s coming, and he slips further away from the corner, and every last inch of his skin is screaming, sure that a long, long arm is stretching out in the dark, stretching towards him, to

  touch.

  He can’t see one inch in front of his face, can’t see where he’s going, where escape might be, he can’t, he can’t.

  A tiny blip on Eight’s screen. So small, fractional light. So small he almost misses it. Caleb lifts the ball up close to read the miniscule message: I LEAD YOU.

  One bright loud thought in Caleb’s mind: Get Me Out.

  FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS

  Okay, Okay. Tell Me, Tell Me.

  FIVE STEPS FORWARD

  DO IT QUICK

  Caleb’s lungs are rushing, a flood of air. He treads light, one, two, three, four, five.

  ROUND CORNER LEFT

  NOW STAY STILL

  His legs are crying out to run! Get far from the monsters! Eight’s words vanish again. Caleb’s back in the black. The dead thing is peering down the short corridor he’s just stepped out of. No sound. It’s deciding. Choosing. Keep going or turn back.

  If it finds me, thinks Caleb, what will it do?

  Tiniest letters yet. PULL YOU APART.

  FACE IN CAVITY

  SUCK OUT SOUL

  A hungry noise. Shuffling forward. Coming after him.

  TURN YOURSELF LEFT

  STOP STOP STOP

  FORWARD TWENTY PACES

  Caleb obeys, and he counts the paces fast, and he’s making more noises now but he’s totally focused on the instructions. He trusts Eight completely.

  TAKE NEXT RIGHT

  RUN THIRTY PACES

  And Caleb runs. In pitch black, he runs. Not a half-jog or fearful stumble. Headlong into hard nothing. He could run face-first into a wall now. Or now.

  Thirty paces. Stop.

  TURN LEFT STOP

  FORTY PACES RUN

  118

  Chest burning, she has to stop, can’t run another step. There are streets between her and Caleb�
��s horror house, five minutes full-tilt running between her and scorched Morgan. All those revenants, those ex-people. No one left alive. Each fixated on her, the only living thing in the street.

  Only Vic Sweet’s ever been that scary. Only his hunger was worse.

  That’s all over because Vic Sweet’s dead, dead like those people. People she didn’t know, and who were probably as bad as everyone else, so why should she care about them? It was people like them who let Vic Sweet do what he did. They deserve it; that’s what she’s always said. Hands on knees, hauling down air, Misha’s exhausted and wishes she could delay all this for one more night – and that, out of nowhere, brings a genuine laugh. Granddad is the one for delays. Granddad is the scared one, not Misha, not ever Misha. Her blood’s rushing, but don’t confuse that with being scared.

  She’s frightened, though. The self-pep talks are failing. All her certainty that this has to happen, that this is what must be, trembles under the sweep of light beams and scorched eyes. She wants to live. She wants all the bastards of the world taken down. She just doesn’t want it to happen to her, doesn’t want to be Morgan with the cooked eyeballs and burnt-out soul.

  Where else would a Caleb go?

  She starts jogging again, to his grandfather’s house.

  119

  A gurgle splatters from Vic’s crusted throat. He’s seen her, finally. Follows.

  120

  No matter how large a breath he takes they all seem thin, too meagre for his aching lungs. His eyes are wider than they’ve ever been, even though he can’t see a damn thing. Sweat pastes his skin, the eight-ball slippy in his shaky hands. Tiny flashes of the tunnel are all he’s given as the endless instructions spit from Eight. TURN this way and RUN that much and WAIT here and RUN now NOW NOW NOW then

  STOP RIGHT HERE.

  Caleb does, hot feet sliding in dust, waits for the next direction, the next number of paces to take him away from the shuffling corpses and the dead boys sweeping after. But this final direction is different: UP IS OUT. The message flashes three times, large then larger, split seconds of light that briefly expose the dead end he’s reached.