by Walker, Luke
Chapter Twenty
Time passed as if weighted down. A single minute seemed to take at least three times as long as normal to tick by. Dao placed his scissors beside his leg. He held his mobile, resisting the urge to illuminate the screen and dispel the dark. He’d taken a quick look at the time when he rose. Barely half an hour had passed since then, making it not quite twenty to one. Dawn—if it came—was long, silent hours away. All he had to do was remain focused and rational for another two hours, then he could wake Alex to take over.
One of the women let out a moan in their sleep. Dao peered down the corridor, able to make out the suggestion of a sofa, upon which Simon slept. The other sofa where the sisters slumbered was a grey box, the white of the moonlight falling a good ten feet from it and turning the black into a murky soup.
Whoever had moaned was now silent. Dao waited another minute. He was reasonably sure Kelly had made the noise and wondered what she dreamed of. Maybe the reason why the sisters didn’t get along. He’d picked up on that early on. Not that it had been hard to miss. They weren’t close; something had got in the way of any natural and happy sibling relationship. Maybe that swam in Kelly’s dreams now.
Satisfied she wasn’t about to wake up shrieking, Dao turned back to the door.
His own shriek remained locked in his mouth.
The walls, door, and corridor beyond had vanished. As had the makeshift barrier to keep out any visions or ghosts. In their place, white stretched back into featureless miles. It was like looking down into a massive hole in the earth and seeing not mud or rock or layers but a nothing-space. Dao’s stomach turned and dizziness raced behind his eyes. He managed to blink, pupils shielded from the dazzling white for a tiny second.
The void was no longer empty. Where the door should have opened onto the corridor, Yang stood on nothing. The boy’s arms were outstretched; his head hung towards his little chest, and Dao tried to block the word crucifixion from forming in his head. He failed.
Yang. Oh God, my Yang.
Yang lifted his head. His eyes, exhausted and almost lifeless, found his father’s. His mouth trembled as it creaked opened.
DADDY.
The shout blasted into Dao’s skull, not as words but as an impact. He rocked back on his knees, managing to stay upright through simple luck rather than intent. He tried to say Yang’s name even as he tried to rise. Neither action would work. It was as if he had been glued to the floor.
Yang began to scream. He didn’t draw a breath or pause; he screamed in one non-stop, terrible sound. Around him, a dark mass darted through the white, never stopping and never slowing enough for Dao to get a decent look at it. All he took in was a hunched, squirming thing, no taller than a couple of feet, no wider than a small child. It flew like a mad fly, dancing around Yang’s head, then his waist, then feet, before shooting up to the boy’s face while Yang’s noise rang out at the same horrendous pitch and volume. With a ghastly ripping sound, the skin of Yang’s forehead peeled back, exposing red meat. The shredding spread down to his cheeks, then chin and lips. Skin flew away, sucked backwards into the emptiness. Within seconds, the skin of the boy’s neck, chest and belly came loose, shredding like paper even as he shrieked for his daddy to stop it, to help him. Blood rained, staining the white. Yang’s arms waved madly, spraying more blood. Skin, muscle and sinew tore loose, leaving bone smeared with red. The destruction raced down to his groin, his thighs and knees, turning his lower half into a slaughterhouse. Long strips of skin broke free from his shins, ripping loose, then his feet and tiny toes did the same. The bloody flesh hung in thin lines and tiny pieces, droplets falling from each section. Yang’s head had become a denuded skull and still the boy screamed. Still, the capering shape raced through the white, and its hands were claws, hands tearing through Yang and the black formed a face for a tiny breath of time, a child’s face, the mouth open in rage and burning hate.
Dao was upright. Without moving, he stood. There was no time to wonder at the change. He threw himself forward, flying for a second.
He hit the door with a thud and collapsed to the floor. The space and his tortured son were nowhere. Neither was Huan’s spirit or the terrible things it had done to his brother.
Dao closed his eyes, tears leaking from the corners. He wept without making a sound, palm over his mouth, his own hot breath baking his palm.
Rod had been right and wrong. Wrong about being in another dimension and right about something being off here.
They were in Hell.
Dao opened his eyes and cried soundlessly in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-One
Underneath the three coats he’d taken from the staffroom, Simon shifted position. Bending his legs made the coats rustle, the sound seemingly louder in the middle of the night. He froze, breathing through his nose, listening. None of the others stirred. He straightened a leg and stared into the dark. It felt as if hours had passed since night fell and they’d begun their series of watches at Rod’s suggestion. Simon had gone for the idea in a big way, wishing he’d thought of it. Not much of a surprise he hadn’t. Ideas were in short supply now. All he had was a big nothing.
Same as ever.
Simon stifled a snort. Whether or not any of the others were faking their sleep as he was, he had no idea, but didn’t want to risk waking them. Better to look into the dark and wish for more moonlight to break through the thin blinds in the next office. Enough came to turn the section of wall at the foot of his sofa into a faint grey, revealing the outline of the sofa the girls lay upon. Beyond that, Rod could be anywhere. His chair was invisible in the dark. Simon had listened to the faint murmurs of conversation between the big Welshman and Dao, catching almost none of it and unsure if he actually wanted to. Whatever was going on in Greenham Place, they wouldn’t work it out while they were scared shitless and hiding in an office overnight. He’d lain still while they talked, giving no sign he was awake when Rod crept into the seating area and took the chair Dao had vacated. Now, all Simon had were his thoughts and the soft whisper of Rod’s breath. Not to forget the possibility of cold eyes watching him as he pretended to sleep, watching from any of the office’s corners. The girls’ dad, whoever was after Rod, whatever Kelly saw out the window. Dao’s son.
Except none of them could be here and, even if they were, why the fuck could he not see them?
Because you’ve got nothing to offer them so nothing to be afraid of.
Was that it? The others had their fears here; that was pretty obvious. Did nothing scare him so nothing could… what? Haunt him like the others were being haunted?
Simon stared straight up and imagined something crawling over the ceiling, something looking down at him as he looked up at it. Some horrible thing up there just beyond the dark, tensing its muscles to launch from the ceiling and land on his face and chest.
Come on, then.
Nothing happened.
Nothing’s up there. All you’ve got here is you, two men and two women. This place is empty.
For him, yes. For the others, no.
Empty. What a word. What a horrible, shitty word. And a shame it covered more or less everything in his life. Job, his flat, his potential, his past. Empty. Maybe he should have told the others about it all earlier or maybe they would have just thought him a total dick with too much time on his hands.
And that was exactly it. Too much empty time in his flat that looked exactly the same as it did in the morning when he returned home each night. The same few cushions in the same places on the sofa; the same bit of washing up beside the sink; the same half tube of loo roll next to the toilet. Not just his flat, of course. The weekdays of work, colleagues, doing his job with almost no thought even when it involved trekking halfway across the country to some town he’d never heard of to sell a company he didn’t care about. Then the dead weekends of TV, going to the cinema alone, getting a pizza and resisting the urge to go online and check out people from his past. No point. Anything he’d known before moving fr
om a nothing and nowhere village in Northamptonshire to Oxford was long gone. All the photos of little kids’ birthday parties and married couples’ cats wouldn’t bring his past back. And what if it did? What good was the nothing of his past to him? About as much good as his nothing future. Thirty-nine and staring at a great big hole of all the dead years ahead. It made no difference if the company relocated from Oxford to Willington and ended up that much closer to London. He’d bring the same nothing to another city, and the weekends of sitting in the cinema by himself and then channel-hopping would begin anew.
Dead present. Dead future. And hey, while we’re at it, a dead past. Yep. Dead days of a childhood long gone. Even when he finally had a home after those long, lonely months of care, even when his Aunt Rachel welcomed him into her house and told the six-year-old Simon he didn’t have to be scared or worry about his mum anymore, a small insect of doubt bored its way into his secret heart. While he knew that six-year-old boy was long gone, as was any chance of his drunken mother hurting him, Simon also knew that insect remained. It was the reason he couldn’t make friends, the reason he lived to work and kept anything else far away where it couldn’t get in.
Would they get all that if I told them, or would they think I was a giant wanker? Dao’s got his son and he’s scared shitless for him. Rod’s got the same fear about whoever that guy is and the girls have got some issues going on. Kelly’s got a secret and Alex knows it, even though she doesn’t know what the deal is. So they’ve got all that and would they give a toss about your life, about keeping everyone out like you’re so fucking mysterious and troubled when you’re actually just a boring twat with a job you don’t care about and no life outside it? You really think whatever you’re scared of matches a man who’s scared for his kid? Or for a woman who’s seeing her dad walking around a deserted building when she knows he’s in a coma? You think you’re close to that fear? Bollocks.
The thought held no vehemence or even much energy. It seemed he’d lost the ability to shout at himself, and maybe that was okay. Maybe he could let go of wishing he was a kid again, welcomed into a new home by an aunt, instead of a man trapped outside the world of what mattered to everyone else.
Simon turned onto his side, almost dislodging the coats as he moved. He righted them and gazed at the spot near the doors where Dao kept the second watch of the night. If the man was awake, he made no sound. Dao’s turn now; Kelly’s next. When she went to the little patch of carpet by their barrier, Simon would have two hours’ kip before his own watch began. Not that sleep felt like it was anywhere nearby. Not with a head full of the past and an empty today; not with the possibility they were all dead, burned into nothing by some mad bastard’s nuclear attack just as those nutcases from Korea had done in Los Angeles last summer. 6/13. The day that made 9/11 and 7/7 look like practice. The day that led its slow, inexorable way to today, when the Brothers of Jeong-ui apparently wanted to turn London into a crater but had to settle for a city whose only claim to the world stage was an American airforce base not too distant. They had to make do with blowing a few hundred odd thousand people off the face of the Earth and now here he was with four others, and those four others were being haunted by their personal nightmares while he saw nothing, felt nothing, was nothing.
Jesus. That’s a bedtime story.
The forced humour to his quick thought didn’t help. As mental as considering the idea was, he had to see it as a possibility. If they were dead, it explained where everyone else had gone. The bomb had detonated, turning Willington into a blinding flash of a new sun and he was as dead as the girls and Dao and Rod.
They were dead and this building was Hell for the others and emptiness for him.
Are you sure it’s not Hell for you, too?
In answer, he heard the faint murmur of the lifeless wind again. It blew from the direction of the double doors, brushed over the floor beside the sofa and rose to make the thinning strands of his hair shake.
Simon closed his eyes. In seconds, the breath became a breeze, steady and flowing from his head to his chest and playing over the coats. Still, he kept his eyes closed. The draft grew into a gust, then a full wind hammering at him. It blasted into his ears, smothered his nose and mouth with its stink, and it wasn’t a wind anymore; it was a breath, an exhalation of something long-dead. The stench set up home in his nostrils, blocked from his lungs only by his refusal to inhale. His chest became a fire. He grabbed his thighs, digging his nails into his skin, fighting pain with pain. Still, the wind thundered over his body, a centuries-old gasp blown out of a massive throat, a tunnel stretching from his feet all the way down through the formless black to the mouth of whatever had exhaled its last lungful at him all those long years ago. And all he had to do to see its face was drop through that tunnel and race down, down, down and take forever to reach the nothing he had in his past, present and most definitely his future.
There one second, gone the next. The wind left him as if it had never been. Simon opened his eyes and let his breath out as quietly as possible. His heart thudded all over his ribs and in his ears. He focused on the steady pounding and stared towards the ceiling.
There was nothing else to do in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For the fifth or sixth time, Kelly directed her shrill thought at the doors.
Go away. Just go away and leave us alone.
Scratching in the dark; scratching on the doors.
The first noise had come a few minutes ago, the faint sound as quiet as a cat’s paw lightly tapping for entrance. Back to the wall and legs bent so she could hug them, Kelly froze. Enough time passed for her to convince herself the sound either hadn’t existed or was only something in the wall or floors settling. But then, another secret hiss, faint but unmistakable from the landing where nothing walked.
Scratch.
Across the floor where the others dozed in their thin sleep, someone stirred but didn’t wake. Someone else—probably Rod—let out a gentle fart.
Scratch again on the doors, loud enough to make Kelly squeak. Surely the others would wake; surely they’d hear that. A moment passed with Kelly left in thick silence and the sensation, the certainty, that whatever scratched on the doors was listening to her listening for it. It was playing with her.
Fuck you. Fuck you. You’re not here. We are and we’re together so fuck you.
Together? That was a joke. She knew just one of these people and wouldn’t have had much to do with the rest outside this mental place. The guys were all right in their own ways, but their lives were not part of hers, and chances were they’d say the same about her, so pretending they were together—as if that created some kind of magic spell to ward off terror in the night—was crap.
The scratch came again, but now more of a scrape of metal on wood; some thick chunk of pipework eating into a rotting piece of tree and tearing through it so it could stab its way out the other side. And that’s what was coming right now; someone wielding a pipe, the end sawn off into a jagged edge so it was able to hammer into the doors, splinter them and knock into their pitiful barrier, knock all the furniture aside before it found the tender skin of her face and tore it into shreds.
Kelly attempted to kick herself away from the door even as she tried to yell for Alex to wake up. Neither action worked. She swallowed a particular scent, something warm and pleasant: the distinctive aroma of aftershave.
Oh my God. No. No fucking way.
In memory, she saw his face coming closer to hers, mouth opening while her own mouth was filled with the sour taste of all the drinks she’d downed over the last few hours; that and the fresh cold of a night in late October while the throb of the music in the club they were outside beat through the bricks and the ground into her feet and up her legs to her crotch, her secret throb that made her open her mouth and inhale the smell of his vodka shots and the layers of his aftershave.
No. You are not here. No way are you here.
She heard a tiny breath; her name wh
ispered by a man who could not be in the building. A man who could not have been naked and floating outside a window God knows how many feet above the ground.
Send him away, Kelly thought incoherently. If there was sense to be made from it, she didn’t give a shit. You can send him away. Just think you stupid bitch fucking THINK THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE FUCKING THINK OF SOMEONE ELSE—
Memory took her back to hours earlier, when they’d run from the burned people congregating on the pavement and pressing the ruins of their faces against the glass doors; run from them and the awful thing yelling at Rod.
Alex’s dad on the stairs, a little man made smaller by his injuries and bandages and the dangling strands falling from his oxygen mask. Kelly saw him while a squat, inhuman shape pressed its fingers against the doors and relished the girl’s terror. She saw Desmond Sinclair gazing back at her with his still, calm face; eyes warm and friendly. He was a decent man, memory said. One of the world’s good guys, and while they shared no blood, he loved her as if she were his own daughter. He formed part of her extended family and made that family a safe place where her own dad had once been Desmond’s close friend—before he’d become so far gone into his dementia, he had no idea who Desmond was. He loved her as he loved Alex and he would keep her safe from the thing outside that wanted to come in, to come in and sink its mouth over hers.
The old man’s face altered almost imperceptibly. He remained on the stairs a few floors below while the late afternoon light coated his skin and dressings with equal warmth. He remained motionless and he remained human, but something terrible darkened his eyes, and Kelly named it in a heartbeat.
Disappointment.
No, please. I didn’t mean it. It was a mistake. I fucked up, okay? Everyone has and I’m sorry for it. I’m so sorry.
Kelly left her memory but couldn’t shake off the image of Desmond’s disappointment. She sat against the wall, as she had done for at least half an hour, and quiet sat with her. Whatever skulked in the corridor beyond the office no longer scratched for entry. It seemed her brief but horrible vision, or whatever the hell had happened, was over. Convincing herself nothing had actually gone on was surprisingly easy, due mostly to the mind defending itself in the simplest way: denial. Known horrors that made sense—crime, violence, accidents—could be incorporated into sense and logic. Even the awful possibility the terrorists had managed to set their bomb off out in the fields and empty roads near the airforce base could be taken in, as long as she didn’t try to think of the devastation and death that would come from it. The idea or the tiny possibility of a man out on the landing, wanting to break through to their hiding-place, couldn’t be true because it threw up the potential for this hell to get much worse.