‘James,’ Waites said, handing over the car keys, ‘you drive. I’ll sit in the back with our friend here.’
The brothers didn’t argue. They lifted, pulled and shoved the headmaster into the vehicle, trying to manoeuvre him into something resembling a sitting position, then got in themselves; Waites was as close to his door and as far from the unconscious man as possible. He knew that thing was still alive and kicking inside the man’s body, and he was already panicking at the idea of what would happen if it managed to ‘jump ship’ again.
James started the engine, flicking the front and rear windscreen wipers on. Sean buckled up his seat belt and looked in the rear-view mirror. He could only see Waites’s profile, but it was enough to tell that he was very anxious and uncomfortable. Titus’s head was lolling back on the seat, his mouth wide open behind the mesh of the face guard. Sean imagined the black slug shooting out and oozing through the mesh, shredding itself then somehow miraculously re-forming and darting towards the back of his head. How much contact with the thing did you need before it killed you? he wondered. Did you merely have to touch it, or did it have to be inside you? And how long before it was able to regain control of the headmaster’s body? If it did so while they were in the car it could be disastrous. As James reversed the car out of its space, Sean tried not to dwell on such things.
The car sent wave after wave of water across the car park as they moved towards the road. Unsurprisingly there were no other vehicles: everyone was either at home or waiting out the weather somewhere or helping others get out of harm’s way. This time James took the back road to the study centre, hoping that the water wouldn’t be too high.
‘So what do you know of this Sally?’ Waites asked, trying to take his mind off his fellow passenger. ‘What did you say she did at the centre?’
‘Well, I’m not really sure,’ James said, peering ahead into the rain and darkness. ‘I know she helped Dr Morrow quite a bit so she must be into marine life, but she kept snakes and things too. Perhaps we’ll find out when we get there.’
‘Well, whatever it was they were doing, Morrow used his last few moments on this earth to point us to it. Hopefully we can rid ourselves of this… thing before it does any more damage. Jesus… how the hell are we going to explain the mess at the school?’
Neither James nor Sean could think of a reply.
‘I don’t know,’ Sean said after a while. ‘But they’ll realize it was an infection of some kind. I mean, it doesn’t exactly look like murder.’
‘No.’ Waites looked out of the window, wishing it was light again, but knowing there were many hours of darkness still to come.
‘God, it feels like this is the end, you know? Everything’s happening at once,’ James said as he slowed down for a bend in the road. It was unlikely there would be other traffic around, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The rain blocked out any other sound, and as the car made its way along the waterlogged country lanes, the occupants could almost imagine they were alone in the world.
‘Nearly there now,’ James said, turning to Sean after what felt like an eternity.
Sean was peering out at the road ahead too – what he could see of it at least. He hadn’t looked behind for a couple of minutes now, but when he happened to glance in the mirror again, what he saw made him cry out.
The headmaster’s body was still sitting slumped, his head lolling backwards and moving slowly from side to side, but his eyes were now open.
Sean’s cry caused James to lose concentration for a second, the car swerving across the road. ‘What is it?’ he asked, still straining to see the road ahead.
‘He’s awake!’ Sean said, eyes glued to the mirror as Titus slowly lifted his head.
‘Oh, shit,’ Waites said. ‘Move it, James!’
‘We’re nearly there, just round—’
But it was too late. With an unearthly groan, Titus raised his hands towards Waites’s neck. The teacher was surprised by the headmaster’s unnatural strength. The man was panting in his face now, and Waites expected to see something wriggle from his mouth and try to fight its way through the face guard.
‘Here it is,’ James shouted desperately. He swerved off the main road a little faster than he should have and started down the winding drive towards the lake and the study centre. The car rose and dipped over the bumps and potholes, throwing the occupants around.
‘Oh God,’ Sean heard Waites mutter behind him. ‘I can see it.’
Waites started screaming and struggling with Titus, desperately trying to keep their mouths apart to stop the creature from switching host. James was also panicking, glancing in the mirror, then looking over his shoulder. It was Sean who noticed first that the car was moving dangerously close to the edge of the road, which was raised above the fields on either side. Sean cried out as James turned the wheel hard to the right, but it was too late.
The vehicle left the road, veered onto its side, the wheels churning the mud and sending it flying up behind them, then flipped over, rolling twice before settling back on its wheels with a loud, metallic moan.
CHAPTER 23
Sean’s head was pounding. He’d half expected to pass out – that was what people did when they were in a car accident, but apart from being thrown about and bruising his shoulder, he was fine. But his head was pounding from the whiplash. It was like he’d been standing next to a loudspeaker on maximum volume for an hour. He felt like crying, the pain was so bad. He turned to his brother, who was just sitting there, his hands back on the wheel, staring through the windscreen in shock.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, I think so. Must have hit my head on something though. I feel all right… Jesus, this car must have been made before airbags were invented. We were lucky.’
A back door opened and Sean heard Waites scrambling out. He and James got out too and the three of them congregated behind the vehicle. The car was a wreck. Three windows had shattered, one rear wheel had been crushed by the weight of the chassis, a headlight was missing, parts of the frame had buckled and there was a large dent in the roof. The one functioning headlight illuminated the area around them, though the interior of the vehicle was still in darkness. Sean thought he could see Titus, sitting bolt upright again, facing straight ahead. He looked at Waites.
‘Did it… ?’
‘What? Get me? No, of course not.’ Waites wiped water from his face and spat, not taking his eyes off the car.
James glanced at him uncertainly.
‘What? I’m telling you, it didn’t get me. Look, the face guard is still on, you can see.’
‘So what do we do now?’ James asked, still testing his limbs to see if anything had been injured.
‘We need to get him into the centre. How far is it?’
‘It’s just down there,’ James said, pointing along the road.
‘OK then. I’ll have to knock him out. We’ll drag him… Once we get him inside—’
He was interrupted by the sound of a car door opening. Sean wasn’t sure how much of the water in his eyes was rain and how much was tears from the pain, but through it all he could just make out the door swinging lazily open; first one foot emerged, then the other, very gingerly. It reminded him of his grandfather – though this man was barely fifty years old. Titus reached behind his head and deftly undid the straps of the face guard before anyone could stop him. He threw the mask down and smiled. His eyes were the worst thing of all. They were wide and staring.
‘Well, well. What a fix we’ve got ourselves in.’
‘Shit…’ Waites murmured.
‘What now?’ James whispered, though his words were lost in the rain.
‘Why don’t we go into the centre?’ Titus said; he looked like a zombie. ‘We’re all terribly wet. Wouldn’t want to catch something. Hmm?’
Sean and James exchanged incredulous glances. This was already a situation none of them knew how to handle, but now Titus, or rather the thing inside him, was talking quite normally
. They didn’t take their eyes off the man as he looked around.
‘This is familiar,’ he said, taking a step forward. The others all took a step back. Noticing this, the headmaster chuckled. ‘Oh come on, there’s no need to fear me. We can all be friends. Besides, there’s three of you and only one of me. I’m not stupid enough to try anything.’
‘You’d better not,’ Waites said, reminding himself that he was talking to the creature, not the headmaster. ‘If we have to kill Titus to get to you, we will.’
‘Kill Titus?’ The creature smiled again and mulled things over. ‘You’re really prepared to kill this innocent man? How cold. Although, to be honest, he is already dead: destroying his body will make little difference to him now. As for killing me, well… I’m only trying to survive. Isn’t that what we’re all doing?’
‘We don’t normally murder innocent people to do it.’
‘Survival doesn’t discriminate. You do what you have to do. I can’t help it, it’s something I have no control over. I don’t deliberately kill. I have no wish to harm anybody.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Waites said.
‘Me neither,’ Sean said. ‘What do you want?’
‘What do I want?’ Titus repeated, as though genuinely considering the question. ‘What do I want… ?’ He was staring at the ground now, but after a few seconds he looked back up at them, smiled, then roared and charged at them, his hands outstretched, grasping for them, murder once more in his eyes.
This time Waites was ready for him. At the last moment he stepped to one side and put out his right foot. The headmaster had no time to avoid it; he flew forward into the mud. Waites rushed across, turned him over and punched him hard in the face. The headmaster was out cold again. Waites undid and pulled off his tie.
‘What are you doing?’ Sean asked.
‘Might be a bit more effective than that face guard.’ The teacher wound the tie round the headmaster’s mouth twice, securing it behind his head in a double knot. ‘There, that should keep the little bastard in there. Come on, guys, help me get him up.’
They lifted the headmaster, this time with Waites taking one arm, both brothers the other, and dragged him along, his feet making two troughs in the mud. They struggled up the hill and onto the pitted road, where they stopped briefly to catch their breath. James looked back at the car: he hadn’t locked it, but no one was going to be able to drive it away.
Sean glanced at the tie covering the headmaster’s mouth and wondered if it was strong enough to prevent the parasite escaping. They dragged their captive towards the study centre, its lights just visible through the darkness. Sean kept looking at the gag – it seemed to bulge outwards every now and then, but perhaps it was just his imagination.
At the car park they stopped for another breather. Although there were three of them, the headmaster was a large man, and his clothes were heavy with water and mud. When they’d got their breath back, they picked him up again, dragging him into the reception, where a film of water covered the linoleum floor. They dumped Titus on one of the benches, closed the front door and stood there, panting.
‘OK,’ Waites said. ‘Let’s go to Sally’s office, James, and try not to drop him… We don’t want him waking up.’
CHAPTER 24
When they lifted the headmaster again, Sean could see that the tie round his mouth was sodden with something dark that wasn’t water. It could have been blood, or slime from the creature, but either way it was a bad sign.
James pointed the way along a corridor, past a lecture theatre and two laboratories. Titus’s feet scraped along the floor as they pulled him along, a mud slick forming behind him like a snail trail. Sean glanced into the labs as they went by, wondering what would have been going on there on a normal day. A day very different to this one. At the end of the corridor, James indicated a doorway on the right that led to the offices.
‘That’s it over there,’ James said, pointing to a door with a poster of a cartoon Loch Ness monster on it. ‘I’ll see if it’s unlocked.’ He went over and twisted the door handle, relieved to find it open. He went in and switched the light on. The room was tidy and clean; there were empty drink cans in the bin, post-it notes with handwritten messages stuck to a computer monitor, and a bowl of fruit, still fresh, on one desk. They dragged Titus inside and dumped him in one corner.
‘Sean, you keep an eye on him – tell us if he wakes up or moves. James and I will look for something that might help us,’ Waites said.
‘OK,’ Sean replied, though he wasn’t entirely happy with the arrangement. He sat down on a chair and kept his eyes on the headmaster, while he heard papers being shuffled around behind him. He didn’t think he’d seen anything as sad, pathetic or disturbing as the man slumped awkwardly in the corner. For the first time he felt genuinely sorry for him. Although strict, Titus had been well-respected, and certainly didn’t deserve anything like this. But, like the others, he would soon be dead, nothing but a bleeding mess. When this was all over, when the floods had gone, when the creature had hopefully been destroyed, his family would have to face up to their loss. There would be tears, questions, outrage, but at least he hoped they would be spared seeing him like this. Doing and saying things that were beyond his control. Sean was close to tears himself now. The man before him was dying and there was nothing anyone could do about it. What an undignified end for such a dignified man.
‘Shit,’ Waites said, throwing random papers to the floor. ‘I don’t know if this is any good or not. It’s just reports and surveys… How are we meant to know if we’ve found something?’ He looked at James, who couldn’t think of anything encouraging to say in reply. He too was sifting through sheets of handwritten and printed notes, looking for a key word or phrase that might be significant. What were they expecting though – an answer written in big bold red letters somewhere, emphasized with a few exclamation marks? It could take hours to go through all Sally Cooper’s papers, and then there was her computer. She was bound to have a password-protected user account. The more Waites thought about it, the more Morrow’s dying message seemed too vague, too cryptic. If he knew he had seconds left to communicate something, why write something so… unhelpful?
‘Maybe we should try Morrow’s office,’ James said. ‘It’s next door.’
‘All right. You stay here, Sean. Don’t take your eyes off him,’ Waites said, pointing at Titus. ‘And shout if he wakes up.’
‘OK.’
Sean watched them leave the office, and almost immediately felt ten times more vulnerable. The man’s hands weren’t even tied behind his back. He’d already proved that he could move fast if he had to. What if he had already regained consciousness, and was just waiting for the right moment to attack? Sean shuddered and wheeled his chair away from the inert figure in the corner.
James knew Morrow’s office well; his notes were written in a notebook that was kept in his top desk drawer. Morrow only used his computer to access the internet and send and receive emails. When he needed to make notes he always wrote them by hand. James took out the book and flicked through to the most recent entry. Disappointingly, it was four days old and mentioned nothing of the specimen he’d found, which was odd, because James remembered seeing the man writing in a similar book after examining the strange creature. If he’d been writing in a different book, where was it?
‘No good?’ Waites asked.
‘No. It’s the wrong one. He definitely made notes about that thing though.’
‘Did you ever see it?’
‘The specimen? Yeah, but I just thought it was some kind of fish or slug. I couldn’t understand why he was so excited about it. He didn’t really talk about it to anyone else. Holland must have found out somehow though… He was a nutcase. I think it got to him first.’
‘So where’s this missing notebook then?’
‘It could be in his room.’ Seeing Waites’s quizzical expression James added: ‘His bedroom, I mean. Morrow sometimes stayed here when he was
working late. A few of the other scientists have rooms here too.’
‘All right, we’d better go check it out. Let’s just make sure Sean’s OK first though.’
They returned to the next-door office, where Titus still lay unmoving. His skin seemed to have broken out in more sores in the brief time they’d been away.
‘Any problems?’ Waites asked Sean.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘He’s still unconscious… I think.’
‘We need to go upstairs to see if Morrow left his notes up there. Are you going to be OK for a few more minutes?’ Waites could tell from the panicked glance towards the body that he wasn’t.
‘Yeah, but I want his hands and feet tied,’ Sean insisted.
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Waites could now see a black liquid oozing through the gag. It made him feel ill. ‘Just need something to tie him up with…’
They all looked around the room.
‘The blinds,’ James said, pointing at the windows. Waites nodded, walked over and started tugging on the long cord, eventually pulling the whole blind down before removing the cord.
‘This will have to do. I’ll tie it round his hands and feet in one go.’ Waites carefully turned the headmaster over, trying to avoid the weeping sores that covered his skin as he did so. He ran the cord round the man’s ankles a couple of times, pulled it tight, then used the remainder to bind his wrists, knotting it securely. When he’d finished, he rolled Titus onto his side. He wondered how difficult it was for him to breathe with the tie round his mouth and whatever gunk had collected inside. But there was no way he was removing the gag – he couldn’t risk letting that thing out.
‘Right. That should do it. Don’t take your eyes off him, Sean, and for God’s sake don’t go near him. We’ll be as quick as we can, but if you have any trouble, shout as loud as you can.’
‘What if I need to find you?’ Sean was looking more and more uncomfortable with the situation.
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