by Simon Clark
CHAPTER 10
1
Saturday morning. The Station Hotel restaurant.
Bernice looked across the table at Dr David Leppington as he ate breakfast. They’d bumped into each other on the hotel landing so it had seemed perfectly natural that they should share the same breakfast table. There were no other guests so they had the run of the restaurant. A teenage girl served the food. Electra had already left for a morning in Whitby.
Bernice picked at her grapefruit, then went straight on to the toast. She watched, almost admiringly, as David launched himself wholeheartedly into a cooked breakfast of bacon, eggs, black pudding, mushrooms and fried tomato.
‘You know,’ he said, smiling at her in a way that made her tingle. ‘Wasn’t it bizarre last night? When the wind blew open the door?’
She nodded. ‘It was as if the whole storm had come rushing into the kitchen.’ She had felt far more than that. The scene last night of the four of them in the kitchen had electrified her. She was tempted to tell David of her experience. Already she had begun to trust him. But he’ll probably think I’m mad if I begin claiming it had all happened before and somehow we’d all been in the same room together in the past.
But what David said next surprised her. ‘The funny thing is,’ he said, heartily forking egg into his mouth, ‘I had the strangest sense of…of deja vu. You know, the I’ve-been-here-before kind of feeling?’
She stared at him. He smiled. ‘Perhaps it sounds a bit eccentric. It’s just that…’ He shrugged, the smile still on his lips. ‘It’s just that when I saw the three of you standing there it was just…’ He shrugged again, as if the words wouldn’t come easily. ‘I could have sworn we’d all been in that room together sometime in the past.’
Bernice said in a low voice, ‘Perhaps we have.’
‘I think I would have remembered a colourful character like Jack Black, wouldn’t you?’
Bernice shuddered. ‘I think you would. I don’t like the look of him at all.’
‘Strange choice for cellarman. How long has he worked here?’
‘When you saw him? All of ten minutes.’
She saw David raise his eyes in surprise as he cut a fried tomato in two. ‘Electra hired him just like that?’
‘Just like that,’ Bernice said with feeling. ‘I don’t know what made her do that. God knows what he’ll get up to once her back’s turned.’ She wanted to return to the subject of the sense of deja vu David had experienced, but she realized the subject had moved on and he was chatting about his plans for the day that involved visiting an old uncle who lived up in the hills outside town. She had thought of suggesting she show him round the town. Then, in a rush of enthusiasm that seemed almost brazen, she’d decided to ask him to lunch at the Chinese restaurant. But the more he talked the more it seemed the day would be absorbed by the duty call on a family he’d not seen since childhood. Maybe tomorrow, she thought.
He said, ‘My old uncle lives at a place called The Mill House. Do you know it?’
Pretend you do, Bernice, offer to stroll there with him. Tell him about the videotape and the night visitor that paces outside your room. Instead she found herself saying, ‘No, I’m only just starting to get my bearings in the town.’
‘Well, I should be able to find it. My father sent me instructions before I left. He says it’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the centre of town.’
‘You might be best taking a taxi. It’s looking like rain.’
‘No,’ he smiled warmly. ‘I’m going to grit my teeth and walk. The exercise will do me good, and —’ He looked down at his empty plate. ‘I need to burn off these calories.’
Go on, Bernice, ask him to dinner tonight. He won’t bite…
He pulled a timetable from his pocket. ‘If I get my family visit out of the way, I might go into Whitby. I hear the views from the clifftop graveyard are legendary.’
Damn, you’ve missed the boat. Bernice, you idiot.
He poured himself a coffee from the jug. ‘Want a top-up?’
‘Please, yes. Thanks.’ Suddenly she felt as awkward as a child in the company of a strange adult.
He hesitated for a moment as if something was on his mind. ‘You know,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Just going back to when we were all in the kitchen last night. When I held that bowl of mashed potato in my hand, and I saw you all standing there, I had this bizarre urge to turn the bowl upside down and put it on my head. Isn’t that just a mad impulse? Could you imagine me standing there with an inverted stainless-steel serving bowl on my head with mashed potato in my hair?’
He smiled and she laughed politely, but she realized the experience had, inexplicably, had a deep effect on him. Suddenly, she again wanted to tell him about the videotape. But in a serious way, not this polite edging round a subject that was troubling them both. And she wanted to talk about the man in the video; she desperately needed to get this off her chest. Perhaps David could help her find out what had happened to the man.
David continued, ‘Perhaps that wine of Electra’s went straight to my head.’
OK, Bernice: go for it. ‘David. This might sound strange. But I found a videotape in the hotel. I can’t…’
She noticed David was not listening now, but looking over her shoulder at something behind her.
She glanced back. Jack Black — all tattoos and scars and oozing menace — had just walked in. He carried a plateful of fried potatoes and bacon. Without even acknowledging the two other people’s existence he sat at the opposite side of the restaurant and began eating in a way that was nothing less than ferocious.
David smiled and switched his attention back to her. ‘Sorry, you were saying?’
The moment was well and truly gone. The air of intimacy where secrets could be revealed had vanished. Blown away as violently as those red serviettes the night before.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, hearing the return of the polite, almost formal
note in her voice. ‘They certainly don’t stint on breakfasts here, do they?’ she said as David helped himself from a plate piled with toast.
‘They don’t. Normally, I have a bowl of cornflakes and that’s it. Or if I’m feeling particularly energetic on a weekend I’ll make myself a sausage sandwich.’ He smiled. ‘Now, if I can walk all this off I’ll have an appetite for dinner.’ He paused as if suddenly struck by a thought. ‘I heard food at the Magpie restaurant in Whitby is pretty extraordinary. If you’re not doing anything tomorrow night, Bernice, would you like to come with me?’
2
Shit. The bacon tasted like shit. He shovelled more into his mouth. The hotel looked like shit. The town was shit.
But he’d pull on this old tit of a town until it was dry.
Car radios, TVs, videos, computers — they were milk in the tit and he’d pull on it until there was nothing left, then he’d move on.
The only thing that pleased him was the name he’d given himself. Jack Black. Jack Black. He liked its rhythm. Yeah, a dark rhythm it had. Jack Black. Jack Black.
Go up to some old freak in the street and say, ‘I’m Jack Black.’ Then wap! Wap!
Punch their friggin’ teeth out.
Yippee — aye — ey.
He doused the bacon with ketchup.
Blood-red it was, and thick. Just like blood from an old man’s head. He grinned and shovelled the ketchup-reddened bacon into his mouth. Sometimes he would imagine he stood on a rock to talk to a load of people who watched him with love and respect. He’d tell these imaginary disciples incidents about his past.
‘Once I swallowed a mouse. Yeah. A live one. With eyes like two little black beads, a pink tail, legs no thicker than match-sticks. I held its body between my finger and thumb. I pushed it into my mouth nose first.
‘It’s little legs were kicking and it were screaming —’
“Leppington! Leppington! Leppington!”’
No, was it shit.
It was just squealing.
‘Anyway, I pushed
it down my throat and swallowed it.
‘I could feel those legs scurrying like mad.
‘It’s body was twitching and fluttering and struggling inside my stomach.
‘I could feel it inside of me. I could even feel its heart-beat in my guts. It was still moving ten minutes later.’
His congregation, gathered before him, would look up in awe, mouths hanging open.
Cool.
…That’s settled then. I’ll tell David all about it. I must trust someone. Watching that stupid video will eat me up; it s poison; its…
The shit was coming out of the head of the twat with blue fingernails. She was sitting with the other guy from last night, drinking coffee.
…I wonder if Mike is alive. Did he die in the basement? Lovely eyes…
Jack Black started on the fried discs of potato. They were so hot they’d have had anyone else rushing for a glass of cold water. He didn’t feel it.
The mouse must have bitten the inside of his intestine. He didn’t feel that, either.
Vaguely, he was aware the two on the other side of the restaurant were talking about some old shit. Words didn’t matter. He knew they were both frightened of him.
Good thing, too.
He was Mr Bad.
The scar on the side of his head tingled. An idea was surfacing inside his head; it was shooting up from the depths of his mind like some kind of torpedo or something.
It was one of those sudden insights that sometimes blasted through into his consciousness as if they’d been fired in there by the Almighty. It must have been memories of eating the mouse.
(How it wriggled and tickled inside of me.)
The tingling along the scar intensified. Suddenly he thought: This town’s swallowed those two people like I swallowed the mouse. Only they don’t know it yet. The mouse had gone down twitching and struggling and heart going da-da-da-da-da, eighteen to the dozen, maybe it was thinking it would still have a chance to survive. Only as soon as it went down into my throat it had gone beyond the point of no return. Those two are just like the mouse. The town’s swallowed them; they’ve gone beyond the point of no return. Only they don’t know a shit thing about it. They don’t know they’ve just entered a long black tunnel that they might never come out of. They don’t know nothing.
They couldn’t see what he saw when he looked out of the window. He saw lightning flickering over the horizon; only this was lightning like you’d never seen before. This was black lightning; it sent great pulses of darkness across the town, like the flickering shadow of death itself. No, they didn’t know — they didn’t know fuck.
But they’d find out soon enough.
He was sure of that.
He swallowed a cup of hot milk in one go, lit a cigarette, then started on the toast, folding a whole slice before pushing it into his mouth.
Soon he’d go find the four guys he’d slapped into submission yesterday. He needed to educate them some more before he began work on the town.
There’d be videos, TVs, hi-fis, power tools from garages and…and something else.
He paused in his munching.
Something else he had to do whilst he was here. Something that needed to be done. His skin tingled, reinforcing the idea.
Yeah, shit. He had to do something else while he was here. Something more than robbing a few TVs and videos.
But for the life of him he couldn’t think what it was.
It was like he’d forgotten something really important.
Maybe it was to do with the black lightning throbbing across the hills? He’d seen nothing like that before.
He shrugged and returned to his breakfast.
It would come to him soon enough.
3
David Leppington left the hotel. He was surprised to find the big smile he’d suddenly sprouted after breakfast hadn’t gone yet. And he was singing to himself under his breath.
My God, he thought, as he fastened his coat, you know why you feel so good, Doc?
No, tell me, Doc.
You’ve only just gone and pulled, my old son. She’s agreed to go out for a meal with you, tonight. You handsome old devil, you.
The smile broadened as he walked along the street with its trickle of Saturday-morning shoppers. Come on, David, he told himself, you’re not a sixteen-year-old who’s just copped a quick grope with a girl behind the greenhouse. You’re a civilized man of almost thirty; you’re going out for a meal with another human being. That’s all there is to it.
He paused and checked the piece of paper on which his father had jotted directions to his uncle’s house. He’d just passed Cardigan Street on his right. The bridge that took Main Street across the River Lepping was dead ahead. After that he took a left onto Hangingbirch Lane that would wind uphill, taking him out of town to The Mill House. He supposed he’d visited his uncle’s house as a child but, for the life of him, he couldn’t bring it to mind.
Even though he’d spent the first six years of his life here in Leppington nothing looked particularly familiar. Oh, there was a shop doorway here or an iron railing there topped with something like iron acorns that stuck some chords, but on the whole it was as if he’d never been here before.
Outside a Georgian town house he suddenly stopped. A flight of just three stone steps led up to the front door straight from the street. There, just outside the door, he saw an iron boot-scrape. The thing looked like a cast-iron boomerang lying on its back and welded to two vertical iron bars that were set in a stone block.
A voice rang with a luminous clarity inside his head: ‘David, will you come down from there? You’ll fall. Now…hold my hand; we’re late for your Uncle George’s as it is.’
The voice was his mother’s. Suddenly he had a vivid snatch of memory of him climbing up onto the bootscrape and balancing there, arms outstretched. He’d been making fighter-plane sounds at the top of his six-year-old voice. In his hand had been a little die-cast jet fighter. The grey paint had been scraped off, he’d played with it so often (mainly chucking it off the garage roof, he recalled, smiling to himself). The plane, denuded of paint, had shone silver in the morning sunshine.
His smile broadened. Perhaps with enough stimuli like this his memory would loosen up.
As he started to walk uphill, the memory surged back vividly. Yes, he’d jumped off from the bootscrape, lost his balance, fallen to his knees. The plane had shot out of his hand to land in the gutter.
In a second, he’d jumped up and run to retrieve his precious toy.
It had landed on…on? Yes, the grating of a drain at the edge of the road.
He looked down. There it was. A big old-fashioned cast-iron grate where the surface water ran through when it rained. In fact, it was pretty much like the grating he’d seen yesterday when the man had lost his fingers to some old drainage pump. (Well, he reasoned, it had to be something like a drainage pump; surely the man couldn’t have put his hand knowingly down into the drain to have his fingers bitten off, could he?)
The memories came back with a kind of pungent strength that sent a tingling across his skin.
He clearly remembered all those years ago when he’d retrieved the toy plane from the top of the grate. (Phew! That was a close one, Davy, nearly lost your Lockheed Starfighter and Captain Buck there.) But as he’d looked down into the grate he’d seen a strange sight.
He remembered laughing and turning to his mother; she’d stood holding out her hand to take his. Now he clearly remembered asking his mother this question: ‘Mum, why is the drain full of white balls?’
‘Full of what, David?’
‘The drain’s full of white soccer balls.’
With a sudden vividness he recalled it all as he looked down into the black iron grate that, now anyway, held nothing but darkness.
White soccer balls. He’d seen dozens of them moving through that same darkness below the iron grille.
A sudden shuddering took him by surprise. It felt as if he’d suddenly dipped a bare toe in
an Arctic sea. He shivered again. A violent shivering that made him catch his breath.
My God, it had been full of white balls flowing steadily from right to left.
But all those white balls? How did they get down into the drain?
Uneasily, he looked down into the drain, half-anticipating that same flood of white balls flowing beneath his feet again.
He thought of the workman yesterday crying that something was eating his fingers.
He recalled twenty-odd years ago pointing excitedly down through the grating into the drain and shouting, ‘Mum, mum. Where’s all them balls come from? Where did they all come from? Mum!’
His mother had advanced across the pavement. A frown creasing her forehead.
‘Mum? Why is there all them white balls down there?’
She’d stooped. Then grabbed his hand.
‘I told you, David. We’re late for Uncle George’s party. Now come on.’
‘Mum…the balls. Where’ve they come from? Mum…’
She’d never looked; instead, she’d dragged him away up the lane.
He found himself, a twenty-nine-year-old man, staring down into the darkness, his teeth clamped together, his fists bunched.
Where did all those white balls come from?
If they were balls.
What could they be? he asked himself. What else could they be?
He shivered. Beneath his clothes a bead of sweat trickled down his chest. He shivered again. Then, with almost a physical effort, he wrenched his gaze away from the pit of darkness descending into the earth beneath his feet.
He suddenly realized that looking down into the drain was scaring him. Why? For Godsakes why should a common or garden street-drain scare him?
All those white balls. Filing by below. That’s why.
With a strange shudder that ran to the pit of his stomach he turned and walked quickly up the street.
The memories were returning.
And they were all black.
Like crows darkly flapping towards a battlefield to feed on the dead.