by Walker, Luke
From the floor of the lift, the gloom shifted, moving like a widening puddle of oil. It crept over the floor towards the doors, the few remaining in the building bashed through before sunset. They parted and the dark reached for the first of the steps.
By the time it made it to the second floor, it had risen into a shape approximating something human, in that it had legs.
On reaching the fourth floor landing, it also had arms. And opening hands. And claws.
Outside the double doors for the sixth floor where Rod quietly asked Dao about the date of his son’s death, a motionless outline stood, hunched, listening with its head cocked and its arms the length of its deformed body, dangling by where its knees would have grown if it had any.
A harsh cold surrounded the form and brought the stink of the blackened flesh with it. That smell pressed on the doors, but did not pass them. It wanted the men and women beyond to talk and wonder and fear. Let them do so without knowing it listened. It was enough the lonely man’s breath of nothing and nowhere had blown across the floor, heard and felt by them all despite his weak and pointless lies. Let him pretend. Let him not think of what breathed to him from his dead past and from the faraway corners of his life.
Let him call it nothing. That was its name after all.
Outside the double doors, the crooked thing smiled and the fires all around it were turned frigid by its glee.
Chapter Eighteen
“We need to get out of here, Kel.”
Kelly froze. While the meeting room was dark for the most part, enough light from the moon streamed in to reveal the surfaces of the three rectangular desks, the silent computer screens, and Alex’s face, pretty as always but now stern and set. She stood back from her end of the desk, arms folded over her breasts and enough visible of her face for Kelly to feel the old anger resurfacing.
Goddamn it. Why does she look at me like she’s Mum?
“How the hell do we do that?” Kelly pointed to the night, pressing cold fingers on the windows. “There’s nothing out. We’d be lucky to see more than two feet in front of us.”
What she didn’t want to say was there was no way she’d head out to the stairs and the quiet landings when she couldn’t see what might be coming to meet her. Or not quite as a horrific but still bad enough—what voices might scream out of thin air as they’d screamed at Rod down on the ground floor.
“I don’t give a shit,” Alex said in a rapid hiss. “My girls are out there and I’m stuck in here like I’m insane or something. I can’t just stay here like nothing’s happened.”
“What the fuck can you do?” Kelly moved closer to her sister, smelling Alex’s sweat and fear. Or maybe she’d smelled her own. By now, they all reeked of old perspiration and panic. Maybe they should bottle it and sell it. Eau De Shit Yourself.
Keeping calm suddenly felt like it was an alien concept. Too much mad stuff had happened in the short time since she’d crashed to the floor near the ground floor lift. Too much shit that couldn’t be explained. And don’t forget being forced to spend more time with Alex than she had in a year.
A year tonight, right? I’m surprised she hasn’t picked up on that.
Kelly shoved a wall up in her mind, aware that if she let herself go down that path, there was no way of knowing what might happen.
“There’s some knives in the kitchen drawers.” Amazingly, Alex sounded in control. “Plates. I’ll break them and use the pieces as blades if I have to. But you have to help me, Kel.”
She grasped Kelly’s wrists and pulled her close.
“I don’t think that lot will want me to go. Especially Rod. He’ll say it’s too dangerous—”
“Because it is, Alex.”
Alex dropped Kelly’s arms. While the light was poor, enough ghostly white illumination falling through the window reached them for Kelly to see the disappointment on her sister’s face.
“Forget it,” Alex said. “Stupid me.” She tried to smile but the corners of her mouth fell. “Stupid me thinking you’d do something for someone else.”
“That’s not fair,” Kelly cried.
“Yeah.” Alex grabbed the end of the desk and yanked it hard. “It is.”
Two of the monitors fell to the carpet, one screen striking the corner as it fell. Plastic snapped, a vicious, ugly sound.
Grunting with the effort, Alex dragged the table towards the door leading back to the staff area. “You going to help me with this?”
Hot tears sitting at the corners of her eyes, Kelly took her place at the other end of the table, reaching for it and reaching for any hold, no matter how weak, she could get on her spinning emotions. Again, she was a child admonished by a parent for not being good enough; again, she was a spiteful, spoiled kid refusing to see her flaws.
Her fumbling hands found the table.
Kelly.
Her name coming from behind, a sly, secret whisper.
Kelly turned.
Her focus found the windows, floor to ceiling, overlooking the strange and empty night.
Except it wasn’t empty.
A naked man floated in the air, his mouth forming her name and his penis stabbing at the glass.
Chapter Nineteen
Midnight.
Rod slid his sleeve back down and pocketed his phone. Although the light from the screen wasn’t much, he wished he could keep it going all through the long, slow minutes of his watch. Better not, though. His battery was about half done. No sense using it all up on a piddly bit of light.
In his other hand, he held one of the three kitchen knives Alex had grabbed from a drawer after that horrible few minutes of Kelly crying and then maintaining she thought she’d seen something outside. Unconsciously, the memory of the girl’s clear terror made Rod tighten his hold on the knife. At the same time, he pulled his meaty legs up and held his knees.
How she screamed! My God. Like she’d never stop. And then to say it was just down to a quick bit of movement, like a bat or a bird… bloody hell. She must have thought they were idiots.
She’ll tell when she wants to.
True, but in the meantime, any little bit of information might help them. Thinking that, Rod smiled. If that was true, why hadn’t he shared his little story about Martin Williams? Why had he described the monster as an old family friend and left it at that? Ditto the moment before he lobbed that chair through the window; the image on the computer screen, there and gone in seconds and plenty long enough to stay imprinted on his mind and heart, now.
Simple, really. Because anything else was unthinkable. And maybe Kelly had something similar going on. Maybe they all did.
Rod hugged himself tighter in a small attempt to fight off the chilly air. Although the coats they’d borrowed (he couldn’t think of their use in any more permanent terms) were a help, any spring warmth from April or May belonged to the far future. The ache in his infrequently used muscles didn’t help, either. While they’d warmed up lugging furniture about, sitting still for an hour meant the cold had had plenty of time to worm its way through the coat and lay fingers on his exposed skin.
A small whispering sounded from the seats. The soft noise of a coat moving on a chair. Either Simon or Dao—Rod’s eyes weren’t good enough in the almost total black to be sure—eased off one of the sofas and crept across the carpet. He used the wall as a guide, fingertips trailing over it until he reached the space close to the main double doors, now blocked by three large desks, an armchair, and boxes of files they’d taken from a storage cupboard. Rod sat near the makeshift barricade, watching the man approach, and it was only when five or six feet separated them that he named the figure as Dao.
The younger man crouched. “Rod?” he muttered.
“You okay?”
Dao rested against the wall, shoulder almost touching Rod’s. He splayed his legs and kept his hands in his lap. The large pair of scissors Dao took from a desk drawer jutted from his groin.
“Not really. Can’t sleep,” he whispered.
“You should try, mate. Get some rest before your watch.”
Dao shrugged and his adopted coat rustled on the wall. “It doesn’t matter. We need to be aware of everything, don’t we?”
“I suppose.”
Surprised, Dao found he could relax more beside Rod than he had on the sofa. He’d take relaxed over staring at the ceiling, hoping the suggestions of moving shapes above were simply down to his eyes playing tricks on him. Or just his imagination.
“You think we should try the doors again after dawn?” Dao asked.
Rod kept his voice at the same whisper as Dao’s. “I don’t think we have a choice. Do you?”
“Not if we want to get out of here.”
Dao considered his next words carefully before realising there was no way of raising his point without being point blank.
“What happens if we go down there and we see the same thing you did? The same burned people? What if nothing shouts at us like it did when you were down there?”
At first, Rod gave no reply, and Dao could only wonder what horrific thing had yelled those awful, shitty things while the people with their scorched skin and faces crowded around the entrance. While he’d been going through his own, personal nightmare, while the others had theirs ten floors below, he’d heard enough to picture it and to be turned cold by the mental images.
Eventually, Rod spoke, voice still no louder than a hiss. “I honestly have no idea, mate. All I can tell you is we can’t stay here. We cannot. I don’t know whether we’re all having hallucinations or if things are real. Right now, I care more about getting out than I do what’s going on.”
Dao nodded, understanding the man’s thinking.
“I care more about finding out if my son is really here than I do anything else,” he said.
“Don’t blame you. Got three myself. All grown-up now, of course, but if I thought any one of them was here and in danger… ” In the dark, Rod’s voice shook just a little. “I’d tear this building apart to find them.” His hand found Dao’s and gave a brief squeeze. “You don’t have to worry about that. No reason your boy would be here, is there? Your wife wouldn’t have brought him here and not told you, would she? No reason for that.”
“No,” Dao whispered. “No reason.”
“There you go. It’s this place. It’s… ” Rod fell silent. Dao waited. There was nothing else to do.
“I’ve been thinking,” Rod continued. “Not much else I can do sitting here on my tod. It’s this place. I think there’s something wrong with it. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not into all the spooky, horror-film stuff. Not for me, son. But I do like a bit of science-fiction, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“A bit of alien cultures and that. A bit of other worlds out there in space and how they relate to us. I’ve been thinking and maybe we’re in something like that. Maybe we’re not where we’re supposed to be.” He paused again, although only for a second. Dao had a feeling there was no chance Rod would come out with his theory in daylight, or if the others were awake. “Maybe this is about different dimensions. Maybe we’re in one and everyone else, our families and friends and all the people who should be here right now, are back in the one we know. Maybe we got pulled into another place and what we’re hearing and seeing is them trying to find us.”
Although Rod had clearly finished his thought, it felt to Dao that the man trailed off slightly, as if there was something about the thought didn’t quite work for him.
“You think so?” Dao asked. “I mean, yeah, maybe in a film. But this is real life. I can’t deal with that in real life.”
Rod shifted position. “I don’t know. Just an idea that probably doesn’t make sense. All I can tell you is what you’re hearing and what the girls saw might be outside this and we need to get out of it, too.”
“Rod?”
“Yes?”
He had to ask. It had to be now in the quiet.
“Who did you see? I heard what Alex said about the stairs and her dad. Who was it for you?”
Rod’s reply was calm and gentle. Even so, Dao heard the implacable firmness living below its surface. There was no argument here.
“Not now, son. In the morning.”
“Okay.”
He thought Rod might stand and leave, their little conversation over. Instead, Rod voiced another thought.
“I tell you what. Downstairs. The people we saw. Whatever all that was, I don’t know, but maybe it was a good thing.”
“How do you work that one out?”
“Because you were up here; we were down there and you and us were both in the shit. We needed to run. So did you.”
The same thought had been needling Dao at the back of his mind for the last few hours. He’d successfully managed to focus on anything else, instead of picking at the implications of what might have happened if Rod, Simon and the sisters had made it out, leaving him alone with whatever the hell else lived in this building. Before Dao had chance of stopping it, the thought led to another.
Had they all been forced together? Was it fate or chance or something else that had sent Rod and the others running back up the stairs to re-join him?
My son; the girls’ dad and whoever Rod saw. We’re all scared of something. We’re all here with those fears and we’re all pushed together. What is going on here?
But they weren’t all with their fears. Not all of them.
“What about Simon?” Dao whispered. “Why doesn’t he see anything?”
“I honestly have no clue. He’s not lying. I know that much. Maybe he’s not scared of anything.”
“Everybody is scared of something.”
Rod’s laugh was almost too soft to be heard. “Yes. You could say that. Maybe he just doesn’t have any imagination.”
Dao didn’t think that was the case, but kept quiet. Rod shifted position again, readying himself to stand, and Dao asked a final question.
“Do you think it went off? The bomb?”
Rod was still. Dao listened to the man breathe and tried not to picture any part of Greenham Place outside their little corner of nothingness. No dark, silent stairs; no moonlight shining on the floor of the foyer; no silent offices with their empty chairs and blank computer screens.
“I think something wants us to believe it has. I saw… I haven’t mentioned it. Seemed like a bad idea.”
“Saw what?”
“On a computer screen. Earlier. When I was by myself. When I… chucked that chair through the window.” All at once, Rod sounded like an old man. “I hit one of the computers. It came on and the screen, it was outside. The sky. The air. Burning. Flames everywhere. It was like looking right into the sun and the flames were coming straight for me. The window behind me, they were coming for that. Something wants us to think that bomb went off and we’re burned, but I don’t believe it did. Not here.”
Dao reached and grabbed hold of Rod’s shin. “What wants us to think that, Rod?”
“I don’t know. There’s something wrong here. Maybe it’s the building. Maybe it wants us to believe we’re dead and this is… well, Hell for want of a better word, but I can’t believe that.”
“Why not?”
In the dark, Rod smiled for the first time in hours. It felt good on his face even if nothing else came close to good. “Because I don’t think we’d be this scared if we were dead.”
The two men sat in companionable hush for long minutes while the night held fast to the windows of Greenham Place and stuck to the pavements of Willington’s roads like tar. No traffic lights winked from red to green; no taxis took the late roads away from the city centre, while out in Willington’s suburbs, the houses and tidy gardens were a black secret.
“We might not be dead,” Dao said abruptly, and Rod jerked. He’d been close to nodding off. He licked the stale taste from his teeth, alert again despite the ache filling his body. Dao put a faint emphasis on his first word; seconds passed before Rod’s mind registered it.
&nbs
p; “We?” he echoed. Dao nodded.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, Rod. I don’t, but if my boy is here, if… ” Dao shivered. “If Huan is here, too, then he’s a ghost. He’s dead. I know that. He’s been dead for two years. I know that,” he said again as if Rod had argued. “I know it like I know all I can do is try to bring it into everything else in my life. The guilt, though. That’s something else and maybe that’s why his ghost is here.”
“Guilt?” Rod said carefully. Inside, he walked the long fields of his childhood home, the farm his parents had owned since they were in their twenties. He saw the acres of land and he smelled the nasty but still comforting aroma of cowshit.
“We were in a park. The boys were on a climbing frame.” Dao could have been detailing the plot of a film that had bored him. “I was on my phone, right next to the frame. Right next to it.” He made a fist and struck his leg. “Huan fell and I was on my phone.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah.” Dao sighed. There was no relief in verbalising the thoughts that stung and bit any time they wanted to, no comfort in telling a stranger what haunted him, and would continue to haunt him every minute of every day for the rest of his life. “It was.”
Rod gave Dao’s hand a rough squeeze. “We’ll be fine if we stick together. Just keep your eyes open and wake Alex in two hours.”
He moved away.
“Rod?” Dao said. He heard Rod turn back.
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Rod let out a soft laugh. “I’m not, son. Good night.”
Rod’s slow, careful movement through the gloom of the corridor took a few moments. Dao focused on the sound of the man’s footsteps, then the creak of the leather chair as he sat in it. After that, all Dao heard was gentle breathing and a few weak snores.