by Bill Hussey
‘My room,’ Jack said. ‘My bedroom when I was a boy.’
And there was the toy box, harnessed with straps and chains and a sturdy padlock. The lid rattled. A clawed hand reached through the gap and tore at the bonds. Jack took another key from his pocket and knelt before the box.
‘Please,’ Nathaniel cried, catching his sleeve. ‘Don’t let them out.’
‘I must. Go sit on the bed.’
His fingers shook and he found it difficult to slide the key into the lock. Finally, it clicked home. This was surely madness … He remembered Dawn’s words:
They saved your life. On the Death Bank.
It was over quickly: the snap release of the lock, his hands tearing off the straps and chains, throwing back the lid …
They were running. Dawn registered the pain in her ankle, but stayed focused on the dim figure of Asher Brody. The drive was falling away beneath their feet, and there was now a river, maybe six feet deep, tumbling and gouging out its path on both sides of the causeway.
They reached the gate. It was lying against her car, at a forty degree angle. The body of it pivoted on the narrow drive. On either side, two feet of the gate’s span was suspended over the broken channels of the river. The frame was too heavy to lift. They would have to climb. She sent Jamie first, stepping on the base to steady it, while he clambered up the irregular ladder of latticework. Brody, positioned beneath the gate, grasped the sharp metal tracery. Despite the loss of blood from his arm, Jamie managed to scamper over the frame and onto the roof of the wrecked Range Rover.
‘Fast now!’ Brody shouted. ‘The ground’s giving way!’
She put her foot on the first artificial rung. Her heart skipped. The base of the gate ratcheted further into the earth. The three mourning figures squealed against the roof of the car. She looked ahead and saw that, if the gate subsided another foot, it would slip off the Range Rover, crushing Brody beneath.
‘I can’t risk it!’ she called, ‘It’ll fall.’
‘Do it,’ Brody bellowed. ‘Just fucking do it!’
She grasped the rung above, then the next. Halfway across, her ankle lodged in a whorl of metal. She looked down and it was only then that she noticed the figure crumpled into a foetal ball beneath the gate. Anne Malahyde, eyes glazed, stared up at her. The rope hung loose about the dead woman’s neck. Again, Dawn felt a stab of sorrow. Her head swam.
‘Come on!’ Brody roared.
Dawn grunted against the pain, gripped the tender skin and tore her foot free. The effort sapped the last of her energy and she fell sideways. She heard Jamie’s frightened cry and the gruff exhortations of Brody that she should ‘Get the hell up.’ Beneath her, inching closer as the gate rolled, the foaming swirl of water.
She pulled herself back to the middle of the gate. It see-sawed with her and the frame juddered downwards again. She ignored the sudden give, dragging herself up and over the final few feet of sharp metal. Her legs were raw and bleeding when she reached Jamie. Together, they scrambled to the ground.
As Brody released the frame and ducked from under it, the gate slid off the car roof. It hit the ground and that section of the driveway crumbled on impact. A terrible composite sound – the cracking of many bones and the liquid splatter of flesh – echoed down the avenue as Anne Malahyde’s body was crushed beneath a tonne of iron. Water gushed into the new channel. The river was complete.
The great black body of Mendicant’s gate sunk below the churning waters. The rope around Anne Malahyde’s neck pulled taut. Her body, now an almost featureless pulp, was dragged over the tongue of the causeway and consumed by the swell.
The river started eating away at the rest of the drive. Its erosion was swift and the waters were still rising. As Brody hollered and waved them to Garret’s car, Dawn’s Range Rover pitched forward. A huge spray sprang up and moments later the rest of the car toppled into the water.
There was no room to turn round, so Brody threw the car into reverse. The engine gave an asthmatic gasp and puttered out. Cursing, he tried again, gunning the accelerator. The car grunted, whirred and died. The river had now reached to within a foot of the front tyres.
‘We’ll have to run,’ Dawn shouted.
Brody nodded and they jumped out. Within seconds, they heard the rumble of Garret’s car joining the Range Rover.
The going was tough, their feet forever slipping on the wet ground. At one point the earth was torn out from under Brody. The old man reeled for a moment before Jamie caught his arm and pulled him back. They were within two hundred feet of the opening when they heard the pounding rush behind them.
‘Run,’ Brody wheezed. ‘Landslide.’
Dawn could feel the spray sting her legs. She pictured it gaining momentum, dirty white horses cresting at their backs, ready to grind them into the bed of the forest.
A curtain of rain thundered at the end of the row of wych elms. It darkened suddenly. They saw the rough shape of a car. The smoke from its exhaust swelled down the avenue to meet them. They shot through the mouth of trees, groped, found the doors already open, and piled in. The car rocked against the onslaught. The windows broke. Before they had time to brush the glass from their faces, the car jerked forward. Dawn was vaguely aware that they were speeding through the village. There were other vehicles joining the exodus, but the angry protest of horns was almost drowned by the storm.
She checked Jamie over. The gash was deep, but not life threatening.
‘Geraldine,’ Brody gasped, ‘good God. It must be fate.’
‘Or good timing,’ said the woman driving the car. ‘I saw you drive in there twenty minutes ago. Thought you were cutting it fine.’
Dawn was surprised at how the wind had picked up. Sheltered by the older trees and deafened by the water, they had neither felt nor heard the gale. But it was strong, howling from rooftop to rooftop, throwing tiles to the ground in its wake. A power line had smashed through the roof of the post office. The wires sparked and struggled like harpooned eels. Garbage from toppled dustbins twisted in little cyclones. All around, there was the sound of breaking slate and glass.
Her mind focused on Jack as she stared out of the window. There was a man lying on the Green. He was pinioned beneath uprooted fencing, a spear of wood piercing his side. The water had risen to his chest. He clutched at the ankles of friends and neighbours. They kicked him away and clambered over him to reach their cars. He was abandoned.
‘Stop the car!’ Dawn screamed.
‘No,’ Geraldine said. ‘You can’t help him. It’s the last gasp of this place and it will have its pound of flesh. Am I right, Father?’
Brody said nothing. The car sped on, snaking between obstacles until it reached the outskirts of the village. They hit the rise leading out of Crow Haven and left the water behind. Brody turned back. A faint whisper passed his lips. It sounded to Dawn like Crows.
A runnel of black fluid slipped over the lip of the box and pooled on the floor. Almost at once, sets of eyes, teeth, nails, clots of hair and a tiny, gasping mouth took form. They were coming.
Jack shot a glance at the bed. Nathaniel sat there, twisted and malformed, yet a child still, and desperately frightened.
‘They won’t hurt you,’ Jack said, ‘I won’t let them.’
There was a shift on the surface of the pool. Four rudely formed arms, each ending in crabbed, three fingered hands, broke through. Between them they held up a dripping ball of dark matter, about the size of a large pumpkin. For a moment the ball remained spherical. Then it folded inwards. A head was shaped while the fold twisted into a torso, not much thicker than an umbilical cord. The thing remained limbless while its face defined: a pouting mouth and a single, blinking eye.
Jack was shocked as this semblance of a mutated foetus began to speak. They had never spoken before.
‘If we do this, you will keep your promise?’
‘Yes. I wouldn’t be able to stop you, would I?’ Jack said.
‘You know that we cannot retu
rn. The rift is long closed to us. We must abide here. We must find a new home. The externals of this world cannot support us.’
‘I know.’
The eye bored into Jack. The rich, slurping voice made him shudder.
‘You have never understood our intent. Our only desire was to please our host. We showed you wonderful things; gave you powerful gifts, and to you they were a curse. We have tried to understand your morality, Jack. Have you ever tried to understand ours? It was you who called to us through the rift. It was you who failed to shape the gifts we proffered. And we have tried to keep you safe, not only in our own interests, but because you saved us as we stumbled from the void. Your mother …’
‘Don’t speak of her,’ Jack murmured.
‘We cannot understand … It was our gift; she was hurting you. But we will not speak of it. Your enemy draws closer. We have felt him near us before, when he re-shaped the dreaming. He sensed our power then, but did not know our nature. You hid us well. But he grows now from the weakened form of that child. If you are to give us our freedom, it must be done soon. We will not be able to resist him, should he overthrow your mind and draw us back. We would not care to serve him.’
‘You are free,’ Jack said. He stepped away from the door. ‘End it.’
The creature nodded. Its features melted away. With a slippery gracefulness, the limbs sank back into the body, which in turn formed itself into a ball. Supporting fingers flexed and gripped and the columnar arms bore the orb down into the black pool. Before the surface settled, the mouth reformed.
‘You thought you were alone, Jack Trent. We were always with you.’
They crept towards the door. The replica of the door that his mother had retreated to as they tore the life out of her: Jack, you must fight them … Keep them from the world. He was sending them back to the world now. In these final moments, he was breaking his promise.
They slipped beneath the door.
‘No. You can’t let them out. Don’t you know what they’ll do?’
It was Nathaniel, but his voice had grown deeper. A grey tinge streaked through his skin. Jack watched the last thread of darkness slither away. Then he went to the changing child. Nathaniel cringed against the bedpost. His hands pawed at his face. Jack pulled the twisted fingers away.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said. ‘It’ll be over soon.’
Nathaniel shuddered against him.
‘Someone’s coming,’ he said. ‘Someone cruel … He whispers to me. He wants me to let him in. He says I’m just a memory. He does bad things. He is like my master and yet … Oh, God … I know that he is me. He is what I will become, because I am a memory …’
‘You are as you should have been,’ Jack whispered. ‘You must not let him in. Stay with me. We’ll be together. In the darkness.’
While he spoke, Jack could feel them racing down the twilit corridors of his mind. They tore through stone and blasted open doors that segmented his thoughts and memories. He found the sudden disorder unsettling. He tried to remember his father’s name and found that it was lost in the debris. Finally, they reached the weakest and, paradoxically, the strongest point of his mind construct. This was the place where discipline broke down and a quiet chaos of emotion ruled. It was a corridor but, unlike the others, there was not that air of cold bureaucracy about it. The light was softer here; a sweeter, freer air.
The corridor came to a dead end. The wall was papered over with a photographic enlargement. It was a replica of the souvenir he had of their summer picnic. A time when he had felt freedom … love … She had moved just as the shutter closed, so the image was blurry, motion trails flying from her hair.
They tore through it and he felt his bedrock crumble. Who was she? The woman in the photograph …
As they shattered his mind, so he felt the needle pierce his eye. He could see a spidering flare of pain coat his brain, but it seemed so far off as to be inconsequential. They were fulfilling their promise. Slipping over his body.
Consuming him.
‘It’s cold,’ Nathaniel said.
It was colder. And it was growing darker. The corners of the room were gathering shadows. Jack could hear the tap of the hornbeam at the window. Beyond, the garden had been smothered by the night. Soon the door was only an outline. Then a smear of colour. Then it was gone. As the rest of the room was covered in the rolling darkness, Jack held the crippled child tight.
‘He wants to come in,’ Nathaniel said. ‘He’s crying. He says you want to kill me.’
‘Don’t listen. Keep him out just a little longer.’
The boy’s head slumped against his chest. Jack felt the last of his body being filmed over. Soon…
‘I’m afraid of the dark,’ Nathaniel whispered. ‘My master used to tell me that if the Devil caught you in the darkest darkness, then your soul was lost. I can only see the bed now… Jack, have I done bad things?’
‘No. Not anymore.’
Half the bed was gone. They sat on an island in a growing void. But it was peaceful here, and Jack was grateful to the nothingness that awaited them. The darkness crept steady fingers across the patchwork. It touched Jack’s legs. He had the dimmest sensation of his body being torn apart. Then, from below, they heard a whispered sound.
The opening bars of Mister Sandman…
‘What is it?’ Nathaniel asked, his voice unafraid.
‘It’s my Dad,’ Jack said, smiling. ‘Playing music downstairs. But I think he’s happy…’
The nothingness rolled over them, like night over lonely tundra. But they were not lonely. They held onto each other. It drew a steady veil over their faces, until only their eyes remained, shining yet against the darkness.
‘Her name was Dawn.’
And then they were gone.
Epilogue
In the valley, the rush of boiling river was abating. The moon had lost its fire and glinted on the silt-filmed surface of the water. A few of the taller houses and the church spire stood out as islands, but little else of the drowned village was visible. Of the forest, there were only intermittent patches of older trees, bowed over like the buttress ribs of a demolished cathedral.
The emergency services were arriving on the scene. Brody stayed with Dawn and Jamie while their wounds were tended. Then he walked up the rise to join his flock. On the hill above the village, bewildered Crow Havenites huddled together. A few were occupied in searching for family members among the crowd, but there were bodies enough floating on the surface below to account for the missing. Most just stood, surveying the devastation of their homes. Brody knew that an unspoken hope passed between them. A hope so fragile that they dared not give expression to it, for fear that it might crumble under brutish words. Was it possible? Were they free? He came amongst them and they did not seem surprised to see him.
‘The crows,’ he said.
The birds circled in an unbroken black thread. Beneath them was a raised area of land, a barrow perhaps, bordered by a strangely uniform circle of trees. They were timeworn, monolithic oaks, arranged as if they were a convocation of mystic standing stones. It was the place where the forebears of these people burned Elspeth Stamp almost four centuries ago. And the place where Jack Trent had ventured to meet Elijah Mendicant. Brody’s heart beat, slow and heavy. Had Mendicant’s last cruelty sickened the Darkness? Were these the shifting wastes that the witch had prophesied?
A clear night sky, dusted with stars, domed the ruined village. Only over the clearing did a troubled arc of cloud persist. The hollow at its centre was no longer the source of a thundering downpour, but its kinetic mass crackled with streaks of light. It was too isolated to be a thundercloud, and after the flashes, there was no rending crack. It seemed to be waiting.
A string of piercing shrieks broke out. The eyes of the people on the ridge turned to the crows, but to Brody, the cries had not sounded like the caws of a bird. It had seemed like a clarion call of victory. At the sound, one of the crows broke away from the rest
. Brody could see it struggling to turn its body into a downward swoop, but however it twisted, it was tugged inexorably upwards. Then, as one, its fellows joined it. They rose up in a wave, like a swarm of locusts. Spinning wildly as they ascended, the first bird was soon swallowed between the teeth of the cloud. Moments later, the entire flock was devoured.
There was a low rumble. The lights shivered on the skin of the cloud and died. Then it simply dissolved, and only the stars and moon looked over the remains of Crow Haven.
‘Dawn? Where the fuck are you? Do you know what’s happened? I tried calling you last night. Did you have any idea that Jack …?’
‘My father died last night. Heart attack. We were at the hospital.’
‘Oh, fuck.’
She heard Jarski draw a deep, exasperated breath.
‘Look, I’m sorry. How’s the boy? You’ve got a boy, haven’t you?’
‘Yes. He’s shaken up … He was here alone when …’
‘Christ. Okay, you need some time. Okay. Shit. Have you seen the news?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fucking vultures. I still can’t figure out how he got out of the station … Did … err, did you have any inkling, about what he was really like?’
‘Look, Sir. Jack and I … I always thought he was odd. Not that this sort of thing ever crossed my mind. But, yes. With hindsight I suppose it makes sense. About as much sense as these things ever make. I think he was disturbed. Maybe Mescher was right. Maybe Jack only caught Arthur Greylampton because they were birds of a feather. It’s possible he saw his opportunity with the Malahyde disappearance.’
‘Yes. Makes sense. I still can’t believe it,’ Jarski groaned. ‘Okay, he was a freak, but this? Anyway, I hate to ask, Dawn, but when might you be back?’
‘I need a few days. I’ll be back next week.’
‘Great. Fine,’ said Jarski, with evident relief. ‘The fucking press are going ape shit …’
Dawn replaced the receiver. Please, God, let that be her final betrayal.
She stared down at the empty space of carpet. An hour ago, an ambulance had come and taken her father away. Jamie was sleeping upstairs. The house ached with silence. She was alone with her thoughts. For the first time in years, she cried freely.