She whispered into his ear, ‘For safe keeping, dear.’
Mr. Cray heard her footsteps retreat and fade, heard the shuffle of demon feet and heard their giggles, but he did not make a sound.
Mary walked out of the room and down the corridor that brought the east wing back to the main staircase. The flickering aura around Mary intensified, so that her shadow seemed alight and small flares of electricity leaped from her to singe and ignite the fabric of the walls and floor.
As she passed a heavy, plush, red velvet curtain, a tongue of pure energy shot from her back like a solar flare and immediately the draped material burst into flame. Mary stepped onto the staircase with energy bristling from her form in white-blue explosions that caused the wood of the rails and spindles to catch fire. These small eruptions spat flame onto the staircase itself and it seemed that Mary dragged a bright orange train behind her now.
Mary began to burn. Descending the staircase like an elemental goddess her clothes incinerated and fell from her body. Her hair became a golden sunset of reds, oranges and blues and her skin liquefied in the intense heat. She reached the bottom of the staircase and sank to the floor in a scattering of ash, bone, and chunks of oily, bubbling flesh. The fire burned on through the night as Eve slept and the inmates screamed, and it continued to burn until morning.
Chapter Four
2036. February
Underneath the bandages, charred and broiled skin knitted and healed. Scar tissue formed and rippled the once smooth and flawless surfaces, but at least the bone would be covered once more. Searing pain bit and blistered across the expanses of burnt flesh. The woman’s senses were maddened by the angry protestations of cooked skin as she relived the agony of roasting and scorching in the flames.
Even though time had now placed long, tortuous months between the event and the present, the woman still experienced the swift glide of flame across her skin as the protective Kevlar clothing disintegrated and her arms and legs were exposed to the blaze. Screams rang out in her head, forcing tears from her eyes, as she recalled the noise of crashing timber bouncing off stretched, twisting metal and the wrenching sound that mimicked children’s cries through the heat. But the ticking of the clock drowned out everything, all audible distractions, all visual stimuli, and the hypnotic rhythm of the intravenous drip, the bleep of monitors. It flooded the woman’s mind with its encapsulating, methodical drumming. Time.
Alex Douglas’ eyes opened and she looked at the clock on the wall. She had been so afraid of time. She had not been allowed enough of the precious thing with her parents and feared the same fate with her own child. The black fingers crawled around the face of the clock like spider’s legs, clinging to each number momentarily before moving on to the next. Weaving a web of time.
Alex watched the fingers move. As they crawled inexhaustibly round the face they seemed to slow their pace until moving in slow motion. Alex narrowed her eyes as the fingers began to stick to the red numbers, then melt and merge into them. The numbers wept from the face and streamed like tears of blood and Alex thought of this as time bleeding away, slipping down from the clock, and running down the walls. It was like the ebbing of her life. And now only the bare, white clock face remained. Then this too began to distort, as if it was a reflection shimmering on a silver pond. But as the warping of the image increased and became more violent, Alex realized it was immense heat that was influencing it.
The clock began to bend, split, and then burst into flames, spitting fragments of plastic and metal at Alex’s bed. Alex lay immobile, watching the blaze develop, creeping along the wall in every direction like a growth of vines, searching for something to consume, something that would feed its appetite. Alex finally roused from her stupor and removed the intravenous tube from her arm and the monitors from her skin, before struggling from the bed. Her once blistered arms and legs were still swathed in gauze bandages and the pain of mobility bit into her nerve endings as she bore her own weight. Although she had already completed hours of rehabilitation physiotherapy, she winced and gave a cry at the sensation. Her feet slid across the smooth floor as if attached to it, each effort of movement tormenting her raw and grafted limbs, like cut after cut from the knife of an invisible assailant.
She reached the door and shot a frightened look over her shoulder towards the wall where the clock had been. The plaster had peeled away to reveal brickwork, flapping away from the epicenter of the blaze like ripped skin. Fingers of flame pulled themselves across the floor towards Alex and she pulled at the door handle again and again, weeping and screaming. The flames edged closer, scurrying across the ceiling like orange insects and agilely climbed the curtains. Alex yelled for help, feeling the heat prickle at her back, remembering the fever of feelings from the blaze in which she was consumed months before. Her scalp began to tingle as the skin began to expand and the floor became warm beneath her feet. Her eyes watered and began to close.
‘Help! Get me out of here, open this fucking door, help!’ she beseeched, but the door remained firmly closed.
Alex turned and faced the flames. The room was totally engulfed now, but the wall of fire had formed a perfect line in front of her. It was as if she stood behind a sheet of glass and the flames licked and stroked the surface but did not pass through it.
Alex felt the heat disintegrate her eyelashes as they curled away from her eyes and the nails on her bare feet began to darken, but the flames did not advance. She stared into them, almost face to face, and the interplay of red, orange, blue, and yellow stared back, studying, waiting. Then, with Alex still leaning hard against it, the door fell outwards and crashed to the floor of the corridor outside. Alex was dazed and the pain in the backs of her arms and legs screamed as if the flesh was splitting and the bones were falling out. She felt nausea wash over her and her consciousness teetered on a high ledge, threatening to jump.
***
Alex turned to look at the corridor and it was gone. She was back in the blazing factory, back to where she had been burned months earlier. She still wore her hospital garments and still lay on the broken door, but she was back in that hell. Alex closed her eyes and heard the radio exchanges. Heard her own voice screaming commands to her crew, getting them out of the building after everyone had been accounted for, when nothing more could be done to stem the fire.
Then Alex saw herself emerging from the factory roll-calling her crew. One missing. Anthony. But he had responded that he was leaving, he was near the exit and moving away from the blaze. Then the awful realization that he had been trapped, then her heading back into the factory, back into the heart of the fire. Hands restrained her. Voices pleaded, shouted, but she broke free and crashed into the inferno. Walls of heat pushed against her and groups of flame ambushed her, but she made it to where she had last seen Anthony. A fallen beam lay across his back, his face buried in the floor and he was not breathing. Alex pulled the debris away from his body, throwing the beam aside even though it was probably one and half times her body weight.
A body landed heavily, directly alongside her. It was clothed in the firefighter uniform she had worn and Alex realized she was seeing her own body, burnt, broken, and sacrificed to the flames. Then she was dragging Anthony’s lifeless body back towards where she had entered the building. She felt her face protection dissolve, felt her jacket and trousers bursting into flame and sensed the stripping of her flesh as it scorched and melted, liquefying and running from her bone. Then she was falling, coughing blood and plastic, her throat being welded shut.
***
Alex opened her eyes back in the present, and as she did so she saw movement; a shape existing within the flames.
She tried to push herself up. ‘Anthony?’
The shape began to emerge from the fire, walking slowly, purposefully but unhurriedly and it was not Anthony. It was a giant of a man, dressed in black and carrying a suitcase. He was incredibly thin, almost skeletal, and his face was old and wicked, lit by splashes of orange and red that fel
l across it, as the fire raged on all sides. He was nearer now and bending to look into her face. His breath was foul and his eyes dead. He smiled and it was as if Death were regarding Alex and tasting her agony. Then he inhaled deeply, filling his being with the smoke and heat emanating from Alex’s body.
He spoke and it was the sound of despair, edged with hunger, taunting, ‘Alexandra.’
He reached down in one fluid movement and grasped her round the waist. He lifted her easily and carried her like a second suitcase, entering the room that Alex had escaped from. Alex was laid back on her bed, searching the room in panic, looking for the flames or at least evidence of their passing. She found nothing. For a second she imagined them hiding beneath the bed or behind the curtains like mischievous children, ready to spring out on her at any moment, but they had gone and everything was intact and undamaged.
Alex tried to rise and gasped, ‘Anthony! We need to get Anthony out!’
But the Tall Man leaned close again and his skin looked worn and thin as he spoke.
‘Too late for that, Alex. No use weeping for the dead, they don’t weep for you, child. Time now to fulfill your destiny. Looking back will only end in tripping over the future. Look up child, always up,’ he said prophetically, brushing two bony, talon fingers over her eyelids.
And although sleep was the last refuge Alex wanted to hide in, she did sleep and did not wake again until October.
Chapter Five
2036. October, Saturday. Dawn
Robert Douglas walked to his car, the morning was grey, and a few icy drops of rain had already begun dusting the valley. As he approached, the car’s sensors clicked in recognition and the door unlocked. He got into the car and grasped the steering wheel, waiting the few seconds it took for the engine to drone into life.
Robert bent forward and peered at the sky, at the low, laden clouds, and he directed, ‘Auto drive.’
The car’s computer confirmed his name and the command and the accelerator, brake, and clutch pedals retracted into the floor of the vehicle. The computer then began mapping surroundings, factoring in road and weather conditions, and Robert steered the car out of the small town of Babel. He then joined the main road that led through the Cambrian Mountains. Five minutes later he glanced in his wing mirror and saw the signpost for Babel retreating. He left the cozy, picturesque village behind and made his way to the asylum. Babel was the closest that civilization crept to the asylum and Robert had purchased the cottage there as a base for himself, his wife and child.
Babel was a small, sleepy town, famous for its spas in the nineteenth century when it became a fashionable destination for Victorian society. Now it enjoyed its old age snuggled in a valley, forgotten by the world. The only frequent and dependable visitor now was the bitter wind that hurried across the gorges and ravines on the high ground and over the desolate moorland. Robert steered his car round the serpentine road and watched the mountains begin to paint silhouettes against the sky as dusk approached lazily. Each new turn in the road presented Robert with a panoramic masterpiece of color and detail: conifer and spruce plantations, Atlantic oak, willow, and alder reflected in small silver lakes, the views accompanied by the flow of rivers, streams, and waterfalls.
Occasionally a village or abandoned mine appeared, but in the main this remote area, that helped form the backbone of Wales, was dominated by the wilderness. As Robert increased the distance between Babel and himself, so the feeling of isolation increased proportionately. It seemed to slip down from the hills like the shadow of a cloud, crawling towards Robert, and he was relieved when the imposing lines of the asylum reared above the trees in front of him. Daniel Douglas, Robert’s great, great uncle constructed the Douglas Institute one hundred and sixty six years ago. The institute was built to house, study and treat mentally ill patients and its establishment at the time was a visionary concept. However, it was devastated by fire in 1922.
The fire had claimed the life of Daniel’s wife Eve and several members of the institute’s staff and inmates. Although much of the structure had remained intact during the blaze, the building was left deserted through generations until 1980, when Robert’s grandfather attempted to restore the asylum. Robert greatly admired his grandfather and when he had died the previous year, at the age of ninety-one, Robert had been as grief-stricken as when his own father had passed away, ten years earlier.
A month before he died, Robert’s grandfather had told him, ‘When I inherited the Douglas Institute from my father, your great grandfather, I was also given this key,’ and he had handed the brass design to Robert. ‘My father was a brilliant man and when he was younger he stayed with his uncle, Daniel Douglas, at the asylum during many summers. Daniel had a son, Frank, and he was my father’s cousin and friend. My father told me many stories of those summers and of how later Frank had died at the battle of Paschendale in 1917.’
‘My grandfather said that after the death of her son, Daniel’s wife Eve lost her mind, and that Daniel himself became a recluse. He would spend days on end locked away conducting research on the inmates, until the fire in 1922. The fire killed Eve but Daniel’s body was never recovered and his brother, my grandfather, became heir to the building. He left it empty, too consumed with grief to face it. Then my father inherited it in 1980, but was an old man by then and the institute was again left empty. When I took charge of the building I had great plans for the place. I was going to restore it to the grandeur it once enjoyed and still deserved. But my business was too demanding. I made a fortune at the expense of time with the people I loved. I was a stranger to your father and I regret that bitterly. But I have been given a chance to put things right now, Robert. I am leaving you the Douglas Institute and my wealth.’
Robert made an attempt to interject but his grandfather raised a thin arm. The man may have been emaciated through age but he still commanded respect and deference, as he had when he headed a company decades earlier.
‘Hear me out, Robert,’ he continued. ‘Daniel would have wanted it this way. You see things have come full circle. You, like Daniel, are a doctor, both dealing with abnormalities and maladies of the mind. And if you have a will to restore the place, you can afford to do so. After all, I have no one else to leave the money to now, no wife, and no children. Then Daniel and Eve’s dream would be realized. You could then develop your own research facility; be your own man Robert!’
Robert sank back into his chair and sighed, ‘Grandfather, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Then say, “thank you Grandfather,” and pour me a whiskey,’ said the old man.
Robert obliged and then sat studying the ornate key his grandfather had given him.
The old man smiled ruefully. ‘You do realize that isn’t the actual key to the front door, don’t you?’
Frank looked confused so his grandfather enlightened, ‘I don’t actually keep that in my pocket! That will be taken care of in the event of my demise! No, that key is for a door inside the institute.’
‘Inside?’ quizzed Robert.
‘Yes, inside. But I don’t know which room. I tried them all many years ago, as did my father, I imagine, but it fits none of them.’
‘Then why…?’ began Robert.
But his grandfather finished the sentence for him, ‘Then why give you that key?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Robert.
‘Because it is my duty to do so. The original will made by Daniel Douglas insisted on each heir to the institute having the key,’ replied his grandfather.
‘Does the will specify which door the key fits though?’ asked Robert.
‘No. Only that the key be passed on and I have now fulfilled that obligation. Upon my death the institute is yours, along with the money I have accrued during my lifetime.’
‘Grandfather, you will never die, I can promise you that!’ said Robert.
‘Yes, but you are a doctor of physiology, Robert, so you are not qualified to make that prognosis are you?’ chuckled his grandfather. ‘But stil
l, I will drink to that sentiment!’
He raised his glass and for a second Robert thought he detected a weakness in his smile and a brief trace of fear clouding his eyes.
His grandfather died one month later. Robert wept at the funeral, feeling he had lost the final link to his past. His father had passed away ten years ago and his mother four years later due to cancer. So, at the age of thirty-six, Robert suddenly found himself a very wealthy man. But he was acutely aware that all he really had in the world was his wife Alex and their young boy, Jake. And although that was more than enough, he still felt isolated somehow. As usual, it was Alex that put everything into perspective for him. She pointed out that the Douglas Institute was his tangible connection to the past and that he could honor his grandfather’s memory by doing something wonderful with it.
Robert smiled at the thought of Alex. After his grandfather’s death, Robert and Alex decided to have the institute renovated and had sold their own house. When the private quarters of the institute were re-built, they would all live there. Although still remote, the connections to Babel were much more established nowadays. Alex had transferred to the Fire Station that served Babel whilst Jake, at four years old, had been accepted into the local school.
Alex had only recently returned to work after nearly eight months recovering from injuries that she had sustained fighting the blaze in the disused factory complex. The physical scars had been repaired as far as they could be, with rehabilitation and grafts to her arms and legs. But the mental scars were still livid. Alex’s friend and colleague, Anthony, had died in the inferno and Alex had unjustly blamed herself for not being there for him.
Robert had wrestled with the decision to resign from his job as a psychologist initially. Leaving it behind to site manage the institute’s restoration seemed frivolous and irresponsible. But his grandfather’s words and the prospect of a fresh start for Alex had made the decision easy in the final analysis. And four months later, days after Robert’s thirty-sixth birthday and weeks before Alex’s thirty-fifth, Robert had instructed the construction company to begin work on the Douglas Institute.
Spawn of Man Page 4