by Mauro, Laura
Alessa went into the windowless bathroom and turned on the light. The low buzz of the extractor fan kicked in like a faraway plane taking off. She shucked off the rest of her clothes, catching sight of the too-prominent swell of her stomach in the mirror as she leaned over to turn on the shower, the slight sag of her heavy breasts. Once upon a time, not so long ago, she’d hated that reflection, disgusted with the softness of her body. An ex-boyfriend’s offhanded comment had become a full-blown complex; by the time that boyfriend had packed his bags she’d grown too afraid of her own unclothed body to find another. In the wake of the bomb - bruised and trembling, the great, ugly scar adjacent to her thigh bone still pink and prominent – she’d realised just how ridiculous her perception had been.
Her phone buzzed. She scooped it up from the corner of the sink, peering through the fast-gathering steam at the message:
Cant u give it 1 more try? I bet u never even gave it a chance! U have 2 be willin 2 let ppl help u.
Yeah, yeah, thought Alessa, rolling her eyes. Well, she was letting people help her, though perhaps it wasn’t quite what Shannon was alluding to. But sitting around sharing sob stories wasn’t the kind of help she needed. What she needed was answers.
What she needed was to know she wasn’t going insane.
FIVE
S he woke the next morning to a text from Shannon and an email from Tom. Bleary-eyed, she tackled the text first:
Gene Kelly marathon on Sky 2nite. Come rnd? Ill gt snax in x x
She sat up. It had been a while since she’d last slept that deeply, undisturbed by the strange dreams that had been plaguing her since the bomb. Her limbs felt heavy, a little sore from having been stuck in the same position she’d fallen asleep in. It took her a moment to decipher the tiny text of Tom’s email:
Hey Alessa,
Glad you emailed. I really don’t know how much help I can be but I’ll do whatever I can. Meet for coffee or something? There’s a place called Coffee Minute opposite the shopping centre that’s pretty easy for me to get to – nothing fancy but it’ll give us somewhere relatively private to talk. I’m free this evening if that’s any good to you?
Tom
As Alessa fired back an email confirming the meeting, she realised she felt no spark of excitement at the prospect of tying up this loose end. All this time she had fixated on the man in the tunnel; he had been the centrepiece to all of her nightmares, the one constant in every flashback. And how strange that now, standing on the precipice of a fresh lead, she should find her interest suddenly waning.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care anymore. She knew that with certainty. The mystery of his disappearance still gnawed at her with that same lunatic intensity, her illogical need for an irrelevant answer no more likely to soothe her trauma than a plaster would heal a bullet-hole. But there was a fresh layer of noise inside her head now, a fear she could substantiate even less: the shadow-things in the periphery of her vision, edging ever closer, and the spectre of her own insanity brought sharply into focus by these bizarre apparitions.
And of course, there was Casey, and her mad theories, as compelling as they were utterly divorced from reality. Casey, who listened to her and believed her, and who had suddenly become the closest thing she had to a friend.
Alessa peeled herself out of bed, letting the month-old bedsheets lay in a heap. The queasy smell of stale pizza crust and old grease hit her as she entered the living room, the boxes lying empty on the coffee table. When she sat on the sofa, the faint odour of Golden Virginia tobacco drifted up from the fabric.
She opened the windows a crack and replied to Shannon: Much as I’d love to indulge your love of dead actors, I’m out this evening x
The reply was almost instantaneous:
Wooo is this a date or sth? gimme details
She rolled her eyes. Shannon was insistent that Alessa couldn’t possibly be happy single and ought to ‘put herself out there’ – an appallingly meat-market turn of phrase. It wasn’t that Alessa never felt lonely, but watching Shannon negotiate a painful and complicated divorce the previous year had left her less than enthusiastic about entering into that kind of commitment. Her sister was not best placed to be dishing out relationship advice.
No date. Someone I met at the support group. We’re going out for coffee and trauma talk.
Shannon replied: @ least tell me hes fit
She knew enough about her sister’s taste in men to determine that Tom was exactly her type. Alessa responded: not my type. Tall pretty boy w/ bambi eyes. You’d like him though.
There was a minute’s pause before the reply:
Can I come 2?
*
B y the time Alessa left the flat it was already growing dark again; her existence had become accidentally crepuscular, flitting from darkness to darkness as if quietly allergic to the sun. The lights in the stairwell were defective, flickering like flashbulbs and casting long shadows on the opposite wall.
The car park smelled of day-old fried chicken, fox piss, and petrol leaking from a derelict Ford Focus which, judging by the rusted wheel-arches and total absence of headlights, had not functioned for quite some time. Alessa stuck close to the streetlamps, aware of the way her shadow shifted and warped; her limbs appeared elongated and strangely languid, like an alien. Like a Shade, she thought, rolling the word around in her mind.
Coffee Minute was a little way north of the shopping centre, which meant navigating the dimly-lit labyrinth of underpasses beneath the roundabout. Alessa had always felt relatively safe down there in the daytime, but the lights would frequently splutter and die without warning. At the intersection between two tunnels, a homeless man wearing a threadbare blue beanie lay wrapped in a sleeping bag; a tuft of squirrel-grey beard peeked out. A carpet of cardboard was spread out beneath him, warped at the edges with damp. She fished in her pockets for spare change and came up empty.
Alessa deliberately avoided the station, choosing to walk on the opposite side of the road. A fractured spine of red plastic fencing formed an untidy ring around an excavation which, to Alessa’s memory, had been there for well over a year, uninterrupted and unworked on. So much of the area was heavily under development now. Her mother had complained recently that she barely recognised Elephant and Castle anymore, what with all the new-build flats springing up like weeds, and the demolition of the old housing estates.
Gentrification was a slow but persistent process; the Elephant seemed to resisting quite admirably, but it was a losing battle. The expensive new-builds came with coffee shops built in, and a rash of boutiques and delis seemed to be sprouting like fungus all over the place. But for every artisan sandwich bar that appeared, three more chicken shops followed, annexing the newcomer with landfill quantities of empty cardboard containers and meat-stripped bones in the gutter. Regeneration would not happen here without a fight.
She hadn’t even known there was a coffee shop here, but there it was, all black sign and gold lettering, peering out from the shadow of a towering residential block. Two shops down, a grubby red-and-white sign for Perfect Fried Chicken glowed reassuringly in the gloom.
A blast of warm air enveloped her as she stepped inside. The coffee shop was not quite full but a low wall of chatter presided, a pleasant hum of indistinct noise. She scanned the shop for Tom’s ponytail. She sighted him somewhere near the back and lifted her hand in tentative greeting, sidling around marshmallowy leather sofas. He smiled when she slid into the chair opposite. It was the kind of disarming, lopsided smile that, under different circumstances, she might have found charming.
“I’m really glad you could make it,” he said. There was a half-finished cappuccino on the table before him, and next to it a tall, steaming latte in a glass mug. She assumed he’d ordered it for her. Lattes were generally a safe bet if you didn’t know someone’s coffee preference. “I’m sorry for running off like that yesterday. My boss is really understanding but the work doesn’t do itself.”
“What do you do?�
��
“I’m an accountant.”
Alessa whistled through her teeth. “I’m sorry.”
That disarming smile again. If Shannon were here she’d have melted a thousand times over by now. He had big, calm eyes, so dark they seemed to lack colour entirely. “You’d miss us if we disappeared,” he said. “All that paperwork you’d have to do. What about you? What exciting career choice did you make?”
“I was a teaching assistant,” she said. “At a primary school.”
“Sounds wild,” Tom said.
“I was let go from my last job,” she admitted. She raised her fingertips to the glass, letting the heat of it warm her skin. “I’m reapplying to the agency but it might be hard finding work, what with all the…” she almost said hallucinations but caught herself in time. “…well, you know,” she finished, waving a dismissive hand.
“You can talk about it,” he said, lowering his voice. “About the things you see. I know all about it.”
A sudden chill crept beneath her skin. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Best not be drinking my latte,” came Casey’s voice from over her shoulder. “I’ve cut bitches for less.” She turned, saw Casey approaching from the other side of the shop. She was bundled up despite the warmth of the shop, a white woolen scarf wrapped loose around her throat. She slipped into the seat beside Tom, offering Alessa a brief flash of a smile. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Coffee’s a diuretic, innit? I’d have wet myself if I’d waited for you to get here.”
“What are you…” her eyes flickered between Tom and Casey, between her grey, flinty eyes and Tom’s darker, prettier features. Neither seemed troubled by the other’s presence. It was as if they’d arranged the whole thing between them.
“We met at the trauma group,” Casey said. “Tom was the only one who didn’t think I was completely mental. Mostly because he’s seen the Shades too.”
Alessa forced herself to remain neutral. “Have you?”
“I’m the reason she calls them Shades in the first place,” Tom said, stirring brown sugar into his cappuccino. Whorls of dark coffee cut through the thick foam. “Homer’s Odyssey. Bit nerdy, but it’s better than ‘lamprey bastards’.”
“Because of the teeth,” Casey said, solemn.
“Casey did an artist’s impression for me once” Tom said, hushed, as if it were confidential information. “She’s right. It’s creepy as hell.”
“You’ve never seen the teeth?” Alessa asked.
Casey looked at him expectantly, tilting her head. “I only saw them once,” Tom said, after a moment. “I thought I was concussed, if I’m honest. It was shortly after that man went down the tunnel to get help. You’d already been evacuated by then – you were hurt worse than some of us. When I was waiting for them to come and get me, I looked down into the tunnel and they were there. Three of them. They were a long way down. I remember just staring at them – I could barely make them out, except for the eyes. Like thin men crouching in the dark. They were just staring, you know, not even doing anything. And I started to freak out…not even because of what I was seeing, but because it felt like my head was about to explode. I could smell blood and soot and burnt hair, and I could hear everything. Every footstep.” He fiddled compulsively with a packet of sugar, fingers worrying at the edges. “Every scream.”
“Do you think they followed him down there?”
Had they been attracted so quickly to the scene of the accident? The thought of those spindly creatures - their long, malformed limbs, stalking the man quietly through the black of the tunnel - sent a prickle of gooseflesh up Alessa’s arms.
“Who knows?” Casey licked a thin layer of milk foam from her lips, tongue small and kittenlike. “Did you ever check to see if he was listed as being unaccounted for?”
“I recall him saying he’d only recently arrived in the country,” Tom said. “Probably nobody ever reported him missing. I didn’t see anything about it in the news afterwards.”
“Could be that he saw them following him. It’d shit anybody up. Maybe he got out fine, he’s just too scared to leave the house.”
“I doubt it,” Alessa said. She was aware of the proximity of the other tables, how easily their conversation might carry. How crazy they’d sound if it did.
“Why?” Casey said, quirking a lazy eyebrow. “Almost happened to you, didn’t it?”
She couldn’t answer that.
“Anyway,” Casey said, straightening up in her seat. “You’re probably thinking ‘why the bloody hell is this nutter even here?’ And I’ll tell you. Better still, I’ll show you.” She patted at the pockets of her jacket, pulling out a yellow plastic lighter. When she stood up, she was only a little taller than Tom. She patted him on the shoulder. “I need a smoke first, though. Shall we, Mr Kallemdjian?”
“Sure.” Tom scooted out from his chair, unfolding to his full height, awkwardly hunched and heronlike. Beside him, Casey was almost laughably tiny. And yet Casey, utterly insubstantial even in her oversized khaki jacket and loose jeans, was a study in confidence against the odds; tiny doll-limbs, face sharp as a knife-edge.
“Where are we going?” Alessa asked, swallowing down her other objections: what are you doing here, did you plan this, can I trust you?
“To see what we can see,” Casey said. “Don’t worry, this isn’t some kind of weird double con. We’re not going to jump you and goat-tie you up in an alley somewhere. Trust me, okay? You’re going to want to see this.”
They spilled out of Coffee Minute in a glut of bodies. Despite the onward march of spring, the air was still sharp and chilly; Alessa tucked her hands into the armpits of her parka, breathing white in the dark as Casey led them up Walworth Road, past the Vietnamese supermarket, shutters adorned with graffiti; tags layered upon tags until they were barely distinguishable from one another. Casey smoked in silence, puffing grey plumes out between thin lips, leading the procession with Tom close behind her. They exchanged idle chatter with the easy informality of old friends, though they couldn’t have known one another long. Alessa noted the way Tom’s eyes fixed intently on Casey’s face, drinking in the hard symmetry of her features. Jesus, she thought, but what does he see in her?
She was taken aback by her own spite and quickly ducked her head, hiding the hot flush of shame that crept up her neck. It was none of her damn business anyway; they were both adults. She lagged behind, wanting to trust them but maintaining a comfortable distance. Just in case, she told herself.
The roar of rush-hour traffic from the main road had subsided to a low, steady hum, growing fainter as they walked down Rodney Place and round, out onto Heygate Street, where the stream of cars was more intermittent, and the darkness more profound. The air smelled wet and lush, an abundance of damp leaves overhead from the towering plane trees lining the road – the sole remnants of the ‘Urban Forest’ which, to Alessa, had always seemed little more than just a clot of overlarge trees in dire need of a trim.
“Here,” Casey said, and indicated a loose patch of wire tucked away behind the jut of a brick wall. She held it aside while Tom and Alessa wriggled through. Yellow signs proclaimed the presence of guard dogs, but the building site looked entirely deserted to Alessa’s eyes; all activity was concentrated on the farthest end, near the railway bridge, where the bare bones of a new apartment block stood, stark and skeletal in the bright floodlights.
They were swallowed by the darkness, skirting huge piles of rubble hidden beneath great black tarpaulins; Alessa thought they resembled the bodies of dead giants. Loose chunks of brick rolled beneath her feet. Her head rolled with them, pulsing as if with some terrible pressure. This was madness. Why was she following two near-strangers onto a building site this late in the evening? Trespassing in this quiet, isolated place, where they might do anything to her, and nobody would know?
Alessa shut her eyes, drew in a deep breath; the air tasted of damp, mildewed stone. The faint scent of fried electrics filtered up, the crisp pork-c
rackling smell of burnt human flesh. Somewhere in the distance, someone was screaming. This isn’t real, she told herself, swallowing down a thick, sour wave of nausea. Nobody’s screaming. Nobody’s burning. Open your eyes.
She did. There was only Casey, looking at her quizzically. “You all right?” she asked.
"Why are we here?" Alessa’s voice seemed to carry a long way in the quiet. Remnants of a central green peeked up through the shattered concrete, long fronds of grass whispering against her jeans.
“I’ve seen them here,” Casey said. “Two nights running, lurking around the rubble.”
Alessa frowned. "If they gravitate towards the Underground like you said before, what's drawing them to the Heygate?"
"All kinds of history in these bricks,” Casey said. "Decades’ worth. They were supposed to knock this estate down ages ago, you know. And it’s been held back over and over. They're almost there but they're holding back on these last couple of structures for some weird reason. The latest excuse is asbestos. But you can feel it, can’t you? Soon as the sun goes down, this place clears out. You think that’s coincidental?”
“Casey,” Tom said, a little wearily. “They haven’t delayed the demolition because of the bloody Shades.”
“Not as far as they know, no.” Casey seemed unflustered, her conviction unbent. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Maybe they justify it in their heads some other way. Just like you blamed what happened to you in the tunnel on a concussion.” She looked faintly triumphant, as if her logic could not possibly be contested. And why not? Maybe there was a deliberate pall cast across this place. A low-key dread emanating like radio waves from one singular point.
It was only Tom’s mildly puzzled expression that made Alessa realise she’d said the last part out loud.
Casey nodded, head bobbing frantically. “You can feel something’s wrong, but you don’t know why. There are a lot of places like that in this city, and nobody ever connects it to anything supernatural. It’s just…a certain vibe, that this is not a good place. And it’s them, you know. They get inside your head. Amplify all of your worst thoughts. Make you feel like you’re going insane.”