by Mauro, Laura
There came the hiss of approaching footsteps, strange and shuffling. Alessa turned. Casey walked straight past her, blindly unaware of her presence; she passed by the man’s shrivelled body without so much as a glance, head held high. Beyond her, the light had grown stronger. She moved towards it as if drawn, stride unhurried but purposeful.
Alessa’s ankle ached miserably as she ran to Casey. “Where are you going?” she asked. Casey’s face was pale in the light, lending her a strange, translucent beauty. She did not stop walking even as she spoke.
“It wasn’t as if I meant it to happen,” she said, voice slow and thoughtful. “That’s what you have to understand. But after a while you just...you can’t cope any more. Nobody else sees them but you. You think you’re going nuts. And then I found Tom, and you. Especially you. I thought everything would be different. Do you know how it feels, to finally realise that you’re not the only one? It's like finding out God is real. It felt like I'd been alone for such a long time, Alessa. That's the only reason I did what I did. It was desperation. I thought I could get rid of them. I didn't mean to hurt anybody, I swear on my mother's grave, nobody was meant to die. I timed it wrong, that's all." A small smile turned her thin mouth upwards. "And it didn’t even work, that’s the kicker. But it brought us together. I'll always be grateful for that. You saved me, in a way. You made me realise I wasn't insane.”
"What did you do? What are you talking about?”
Casey didn't reply. It was as though Alessa wasn't really there, as though none of it really was. She just kept walking, smiling, face upturned to the light. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she said, a little dreamily. "Like sunshine. Sunshine in a tunnel, how weird is that?"
Alessa looked down at the light. Just a pale yellow glow in the distance, not like sunshine at all. Not like a torch beam, either. There was a certainty in her heart - though she could neither explain nor justify it - that the man who had helped her off the train, who had disappeared into the tunnel and ended up here, somehow, had followed that same light to his death. That, like Casey, he’d seen in that light something that wasn’t really there. That they had found a way inside his head.
She stopped walking and ducked into a crouch, unzipping Casey’s backpack. Inside, a tubular object sat upon a small ocean of glass bottles, duct-taped into a solid, heavy mass. The stink of diesel rose, heavy and obscene. She touched the plastic tube with the tip of her finger. A length of pipe. A length of pipe and a cluster of glass bottles, stinking like a petrol station forecourt. And then she saw the curve of something silver nestled in the front pocket of the bag – a cheap, flip-front mobile phone – and she realised what it was. She’d heard the phrase in news reports, after the neo-Nazi bombings in Brick Lane and Bradford the previous year. But this was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on anything like it.
How the hell would Casey know how to make a pipe bomb?
The slither-shuffle of newly-awoken Shades was louder now, increasing in volume as they shook off their torpor. It would only be a matter of time before they came for her and Casey. She had to act fast. Alessa fished the mobile phone from the bag pocket and slipped it into her own. When she looked up, Casey was a few metres ahead, still moving in that slow, ponderous fashion.
Alessa got up. Every inch of her body ached now, from the deepest layers of bone to the tips of her hair. She desperately wanted to curl up and sleep for a week. Maybe she would, once she was out of here. The stairwell back up to the surface was within sprinting distance. She could still make it down there, if she was fast enough. The pull of self-preservation was a peculiar gravity inside of her, compelling her to run for it, but she couldn’t. Not without Casey.
“Casey.” One hand grasped the other woman’s shoulder. She stopped without resistance, turning wide, glassy eyes up to Alessa. “I found the bomb. I think I have the detonator too. We have to go now.”
“It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet. I got it wrong before, but I did better this time. The fire will make all the difference.” She frowned. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, it’s really important to me that you understand that, Alessa. Do you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Five years.” She smiled vaguely, but there was a strange sadness about the curve of her mouth, as if remembering something bittersweet. Her shoulder was horribly slack beneath Alessa's grasp. “It took me five years to find someone like you. And look at us now. I didn’t mean to use you, but it worked out for the best, didn’t it? Draw them to your fear. Get them all in one place. Boom. Gone forever, all of them.”
Five years.
It hit her then: the enormity of Casey’s confession, like a train hurtling towards her.
I swear on my mother’s grave, nobody was meant to die.
Alessa stepped back, reeling. Casey just kept on smiling that wistful smile. Somehow, that made everything so much worse. Five years. The London Bridge bombings. That was what had driven Casey to desperation. Five years of being stalked ceaselessly by the Shades, believing – as Alessa had – that nobody but her could see them.
“It was you.” Alessa’s mouth felt numb, her lips struggling to form words. “The bomb. Elephant and Castle. That was you. You set it off. You killed those people.” She swallowed. There was a lump in her throat, hard as a stone. “You almost killed me.”
“It was a late train,” Casey said. She seemed troubled by Alessa's reaction, confused, somehow. "I thought it'd be empty. Everyone was supposed to be off the train, but I timed it all wrong. It was an honest mistake..."
An honest mistake that killed four people and injured dozens more, Alessa thought, but the words wouldn't come. She felt paralysed, just as she had been on that train, with the smell of blood and charred flesh thick in her nostrils. For a long moment she was back there, alone and afraid amidst a sea of churned upholstery and inert bodies, heart beating jackhammer fast. She breathed deep and shut her eyes, and when she opened them again it was not bodies she saw but motion, swift and sudden; a seething mass of Shades forming a thick carpet around their feet. Eyes like pennies, bright and malevolent. They swirled and coalesced, each impossible to differentiate from the other. And ahead of them, pulsating in the dark, a glut of Shades so dense they seemed liquid, a thick and viscous mass of them blocking the tunnel like an embolism.
“This time there’ll be fire,” Casey murmured.
Alessa stumbled back on clumsy feet, putting a few yards of distance between her and them. She reached a hand out, but whatever Casey thought she could see had her full, rapt attention. The Shades may as well have not been there at all. Casey looked through them, past them, hands outstretched in joyous greeting. In the distance, the glow of their eyes seemed to form a singular point of light, small and bright like the beam of a torch.
Alessa wondered what Casey saw instead.
Casey ambled blindly onwards, unaware or unconcerned. Alessa knew she had only one chance to stop her. She also knew she had very little time in which to set the bomb and get the hell out of here. The Shades were numerous, multiplying before her eyes. They kept their distance for now, but she knew they would tear her apart the way they did Tom, and she would be powerless to stop them. She stood frozen for a second, adrenaline like cold fire in her veins; her legs wanted desperately to move, her muscles taut to snapping, and her mind screamed at her to just fucking go but despite everything, despite Casey's confession and the wrongs she'd visited upon her she was still human. Utterly selfish and falling spectacularly apart at the seams, but human all the same.
She checked for the phone. Her heart leapt with relief at the shape of it in the pocket her jeans. She would not look back, she told herself, sighting the lumpen shape of the rucksack a short distance ahead. She would run for the exit, take the stairs a few at a time and, when she was in the open, she would blow this tunnel up and destroy everything. The Shades. The woman who'd invited them into her life in the first damn place. And then, finally, she would be free.
She’d never understood Casey better than in that moment.
Alessa switched on the old phone. The screen flickered into life, displaying an alarm clock symbol in the top corner. A message flashed up on the screen: Alarm set for 4 minutes. She realised, with some panic, that she’d activated a countdown. She turned, ready to flee, but a small voice came from behind her.
"Look at us both. You’re sick and I’m mad and we’re chasing shadows underground. Is this how you thought we’d end up?" Suddenly, Casey sounded mournful, and very young. “Do you think that we’d have been friends, if things had been different? Real friends, I mean?"
Alessa turned. The other woman was a pale ghost, backlit and delicate. The Shades were on her, around her, writhing and coiling around her thin limbs, forming a slack noose around her throat. Tasting her madness, so rich and exquisite they seemed to have forgotten all about Alessa’s fear. Casey seemed utterly unaware that anything at all was amiss, that she was clothed in Shades from head to toe. That was the worst thing, Alessa thought, as her throat constricted sharply with sudden, surprising grief, her nose stinging with tears. Even now, Casey still thought it was just the two of them. That they'd be together at the end of it all. And she couldn't hate her, not with her madness on stark display: a ribcage stripped of the flesh and exposed, pulled apart. What stood there was an empty cavity. She wondered, briefly, what Casey had been like before all of this. Whether she had ever been a normal person.
"Maybe," Alessa said. The phone felt hot in her hand, a constant reminder. She had to go now or it would be too late. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”
Casey's shoulders slumped with what might have been relief. "That's good," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper. "I'll do better next time. I promise. I’ll make up for everything." The Shades rose up behind her then, moving swift and fluid, belying their vast collective bulk, and Alessa ran; feet pounding the concrete, lungs burning, head aching like a festering wound. Her eyes were filmed with tears. She ran hard and fast, focusing on the sound of her shoes slapping against the ground. Beneath it came the sharp, brittle sound of bones shattering and she knew, as sure as she knew that she would not regret triggering that timer, that Casey's struggle would soon be over.
She did not remember clearing the stairs, though as she stood at the top, glancing momentarily down into the silent abyss her calves burned, and her breath came in small, sharp hitches, she knew she would never move that quickly ever again.
Alessa reached both hands to push open the fire door and let loose a cry of frustration as it refused to budge, once, twice, finally giving way on the third shove. Alessa tumbled out into the open, landing heavily against the fence. It shuddered noisily beneath her weight, and she cringed against the wall, holding her breath until she was certain nobody would come looking. The air smelled of petrol fumes and damp brickwork and, faintly, of hot food from the nearby restaurant. For the first time in days her stomach growled at the scent of it, and she was disgusted with herself.
The phone was inexplicably heavy in her pocket, as though it were made of stone. She fished it out, staring at the small silver shape in her palm. The screen was blank. The fire door was ajar, the space inside a featureless sliver of black. She had heard no explosion, felt no vibration as she cleared the stairs. Had it been four minutes? Was there any guarantee it would destroy everything down there? There could be multiple nests, all across the city, hiding in tunnels. All the tunnels nobody knew about, stretching below London like veins deep beneath the skin. The longer she stared at the device in her hand, the more futile everything seemed. Casey’s plan was short sighted, borne of fear and based on so many assumptions that there were a hundred ways it could fail.
But she had to believe. Because it was all she had left, and because a paper-thin plan was better than no plan at all. Because the very possibility of any kind of closure at all revolved around Casey’s stupid fucking bomb.
Slowly, she got to her feet. Her legs wobbled beneath her but somehow she managed. The street beyond the hoarding was dark and quiet. Somehow, she found the energy to push the fire door shut and scramble clumsily back over the fence, hauling herself up with weak, aching arms. Her feet scrabbled helplessly at the wet wood. She landed heavily on the other side, sprawled on hands and feet. Passing cars drove on in blissful ignorance. A small cluster of people walked by on the opposite side of the road, talking in loud voices and gesturing at something Alessa couldn’t make out. If they’d noticed her, they hadn’t batted an eyelid. It was late. She was probably drunk.
She stood there for a moment, breathing hard, willing herself to stay upright for just a little bit longer. When she finally found the courage to look back – sending out a whispered little prayer, trite and useless: I wish things had been different too – she thought she could feel the ground beneath her tremble, just a little bit.
The world carried on, oblivious.
Alessa closed her fingers around the phone and set out in the direction of home. When she passed the hoarding - head down, breathing white in the evening chill – she did not look up at the door. Hot tears streamed freely down her cheeks, dripping salt into her open mouth. She walked on, beneath the railway bridge, out into the shadow of the Heygate building site, and for the first time in what felt like forever, she was not afraid of the dark.
Acknowledgements
I could probably fill up another novella’s worth of pages with all the people I want to thank, but at the risk of prattling on (and possibly forgetting someone important) I’ll try to keep it short & sweet.
First and foremost, a big thank you to Johnny Mains, without whom this novella would not exist at all.
To Rosanne Rabinowitz, Joanna Horrocks, Gary Couzens (my constant First Reader) and Ray Cluley, for reading this in its various iterations and making it a better story. (Thanks also to Ray for the wonderful cover quote, for which I am humbly grateful). And thank you to Jim McLeod for supporting this book over on Ginger Nuts of Horror.
Thanks always to my lovely, supportive husband Rob, who never complains when I disappear off into the Black Hole of Authordom (and to the makers of Overwatch, for ensuring his continued entertainment). And to my large, chaotic and lovely family, who have always encouraged my writing - from those very first poems right up until today - and who would probably have had every right to tell me to go play with Barbies instead like a normal kid.
To Heidi Squire and Elizabeth James, my English teachers at Bacon’s College, who seemed to think I had it in me, and won’t be in the least bit surprised to learn that Laura Mould grew up to write horror stories.
And thanks to my friends inside & outside of the writing world, including (but not limited to) Sarah Patten, Violet & Rosie Casselden, the Funcon crew (who send me beautiful postcards & put up admirably with my ability to speak at length about total rubbish), those I’ve had the privilege of meeting & chatting with at Fantasycon and those I hope to meet at future events – I’ll be here all day if I name you all individually! You all know who you are, and you’re all brilliant. Thanks as well to my Twitter friends for all the conversation and support, even when I’m being insufferable. Writing is a lonely business and it’s infinitely improved by cultivating friendships with those who understand what it’s like to spend most of your time conversing with the fictional people inside your head.
And last but definitely not least, thanks to Ross Warren and Anthony Watson for taking a chance on this novella, and to Peter Frain for the brilliant cover art.