by Walker, Luke
Sitting beside Dao seemed to be the only option. Dao had slumped down a few seconds after it became clear their joint shoving on the fire exit bar would do no good, dropping without a sound. He hadn’t spoken in long minutes.
The men and women faced one another, nobody speaking. Simon placed his knife beside his knees and studied the floor instead of looking at the door blocking their escape. Better to do that than think about there being no way out of this place. Better to do that than think of their walk through this corridor and its quiet pregnant with threat leading to a great big anti-climax.
Another gentle laugh brushed his ear, the sound as bleak as the voice back in the cash office that turned his body into a fading bag of skin and bones.
Go away. Leave us alone.
It chuckled; a secret joke shared between him and it.
No. It’s not just for me. It’s here for all of us.
If the thing laughed at him again, he didn’t hear it.
“We have to go back,” Dao said to nobody in particular.
“Why?” Kelly replied. “What’s the point?”
“So we just sit here and do nothing?” he said, and Kelly had nothing to say to that.
Story of my life, Simon thought. At once, a burst of anger hit him. No. That was not fair. While he had no friends and no life outside his job, he was good at what he did. He could plan and organise, sort and do. The managers back at work didn’t like him; he knew that and hadn’t really cared in years. He was good at expanding the company because he knew what to say in work-life. It was only in real life that he failed miserably. He’d been sent to Willington to sell the company. All he had to do was apply his work skills to this.
“Up,” he said and stood. Nobody else moved. “Come on. Get up. We’re moving.”
“Where?” Alex asked.
“Wherever we can.” He smiled and, wonder of wonders, it actually felt real. “We move and we don’t stop until we find a way out that actually works. One that isn’t this.” He rapped on the fire exit. “Think about it. Whatever’s happening here… supernatural or what, this is still a solid building. Glass, brick. It’s physical, yeah? We can affect it. Rod did when he broke that window and, even if something was messing with his head to make him think he killed someone, he still smashed the glass. We do the same if we have to. Okay, we can’t do it to these windows.” He jumped, reaching for the high glass. The tips of his fingers managed to stretch a good foot or more below the windows. “We do it on the first floor instead of the fifth. We can break and smash whatever we want because this is real.” Grinning and feeling as close to good as he could manage, Simon rapped his knuckles on the floor.
“You’re full of shit,” Kelly said, and a little of Simon’s determination faltered. “There’s no way out of here and nothing to get out to. It’s nothing outside.” She lowered her voice to a dull whisper. “Nothing out there.”
With a soft grunt, Alex rose. “We’re not helping ourselves by not moving.” She eyed the men, but not her sister. For Alex, Kelly was no longer completely there because…because…
Because she couldn’t think about that. She didn’t dare. The fear of what it meant to do so was much too great. Almost as much as the terror of not knowing if her kids were safe somewhere out in the world beyond this hateful building.
“Simon’s right. We move and we don’t stop.”
Wordlessly, Dao reached towards Kelly. She eyed it as if not quite sure what it was before grasping his skinny fingers and rising.
“Back down here.” Simon pointed to the curve of the corridor. “Side by side, yeah? We keep together.” The next few words were a struggle. Reaching out to Dao, Alex and Kelly was a human thing, a thing that mattered. Not his job or the fake smiles and handshakes for deals and agreements that he didn’t give two shits about. This was as human as it got. Life and death right here.
“I know I’m not seeing everything you’re seeing. I know whatever fucked up thing is here, it’s not for me like it is for you, and I don’t know why. All I think is we’re here together so we stay together and we get out together. All right?”
Red flamed in his cheeks. He stared at the wall between the sisters’ heads, not daring to meet their eyes or Dao’s at his side.
“All right?” he whispered.
“All I want is to get back to my girls.” Alex pushed herself off the wall and began walking back the way they’d come to the sealed exit. Dao watched her go for a moment, then, knowing Simon needed something, he whispered to him.
“She’s just scared.”
“You’re scared,” Simon muttered, not caring if Alex heard him.
“Yeah. I am. Come on.”
Simon in between Dao and Kelly, they followed Alex. They’d barely managed ten steps before she glanced back.
“What is it?” Dao asked, peering past her.
“I hear something.”
Nameless dread spread over Simon’s back, turning him cold. A quick look at Kelly and Dao said they felt the same. She was beginning to back away, turning her body towards the fire exit.
“Wait,” Simon whispered. “I—”
The smell hit his nose before the cool wind found his skin. While the reek of the phantom air had never been pleasant, whether in his imagination or blowing out of nowhere, this was a stink of rotten flesh. This was a huge pile of bodies, their skin sliding off bones, falling into a puddle of liquefying flesh, and all of it clinging to the teeth and gullet of a monster.
Blocking her nose and mouth, Alex retreated, joining the others.
“What is that?” she cried, voice made nasal by her hand.
Behind the others, Kelly ran for the fire exit. She knew on all rational levels that it wouldn’t open, but still forced herself to try. She hammered at the solid metal, not feeling the pain in her hands from each blow. Her hair flapped madly around her head. The wind gusted with a savage roar, and the corridor formed a tunnel for it. Bent double, Dao tried to walk. He failed and skidded backwards, one arm catching Alex in the chest. She reached for the wall, fingertips finding it briefly before she had to pull her arms in simply to keep her balance. The gale stormed down the corridor; the reek choking them, and their cries lost to each other.
Kelly smacked into the fire exit. The metal bar crunched against her lower back, making her cry out. She inhaled a deep lungful of the terrible smell and choked on it. Tears squirted and, in her blurred vision, she thought she saw the shapes of two men advancing with the steady wail of the wind, one man taller than the other, the other dressed in a hospital gown and the tall man well-built and totally naked.
Kelly screamed.
Alex collided with her sister, forcing Kelly against the bar again and sending bright bolts of agony radiating throughout her body. Reaching without thought, Dao and Simon found one another, and both men slipped over the floor towards the women, the wind propelling them gleefully and the stench coating their skin and hair.
The four spread over the fire exit, all crying out, fingers splayed and nobody able to get a hold on another. Their backs pressed against the bar as their hands had minutes before, and the bar slid inwards, and the wind was a storm on their wide open mouths.
A click that was utterly lost below the shrieking voices and the massive howl of the gales.
The fire exit flew open.
They fell, not backwards, but down. They fell into a tunnel miles long where the only light came from torches in the distance, and the stink of mould and moss choked the air. And while Simon fell, all he saw was the face of a young woman made older by years of sickness, the woman trying to smile as he fell into the mouth of a monster.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Up on Ten, the pure yellow of the sun shone on the floor and expensive sofas lining the walls of the corridor. The door to the office of a Mr Alan Letts remained closed. The crack in the wood from the crash while Dao could do nothing but watch remained a twisted line running from top to bottom. If anything existed in the office, it was a silent, co
ntemplating force.
Beyond Mr Alan Letts’s door, the corridor took in the entrances to the meeting rooms and the executive management’s offices. All remained firmly closed because nothing lived beyond them. The creature making its way through the tenth floor paid them no attention. Its business was further along, past the junction and at the end of the corridor where the lone door to the roof stood.
It paused at the junction, watching, waiting.
Any thermometer would have registered an abrupt change in the temperature, a rapid lowering to winter-like conditions while the sun’s light flowed in and reached almost every inch of the floor. Any person up there would have retreated quickly from the biting cold, but no flesh lived on the tenth floor. Nothing walked.
The creature moved an inch forward.
At once, the door leading to the roof flew open, crashing into the wall with a hollow bang. A shape emerged. While it had no human-like body, it did have a face. One of many. It opened its mouth. Smiled.
A glacial blast barrelled down the corridor. The creature who’d come from the terror and confusion of the fire exit and the reek blown towards the men and women took the Arctic air.
Then, in a mad howl of rage, she gave it back.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Striking the rock-hard floor and sliding over it sent Kelly back to the day before. She was flying, shoved by a massive pulse at her back, and now she’d landed; she’d stand, see that all the lights were off, and she’d think something was very wrong before a door opened and a big Welshman would introduce himself as Rod Moore. And then everything would turn into a nightmare.
But that had already happened.
She pushed herself along a few inches before finding the strength to stand. Upright, Kelly had a dim, aching wish she hadn’t bothered. At least still on the ground, she could believe the obvious hadn’t happened.
They were back in the main reception of Greenham Place, everything so much the same as earlier, they might not have walked away. She stood between two pillars, facing the entrance. Alex, Simon and Dao were in front, all in various stages of rising, looking around. Kelly’s own disbelief was reflected in their faces. Her need to scream, too.
Cradling her throbbing elbow, Kelly looked behind, half-expecting to see the fire exit jutting open. Instead, the lift was at their back. The doors were firmly closed.
It had spat them out. It had swallowed them from the fire exit and spat them out like they were bits of fatty meat. She staggered from it, eager to put as much distance between herself and the innocuous metal of the doors.
“No,” she whispered. It couldn’t be true. Could not. If it was, they might as well sit on the floor, wait for their second night in Greenham Place, wait for whatever lived here to grow tired of its snide games and crush them into dirt. If wherever they went brought them back here, then there was no point in believing they could escape and definitely no point in actually trying to get out.
The woman, her exhausted mind whispered. Who was the woman?
Kelly stopped, memory coming in fast. She’d seen a woman, only for a second, before the fire exit opened. A skinny woman, obviously ill, formed out of the storm firing down on them. Who the hell was she?
Pressing on his ribs, Simon stared past Kelly to the lift. Except he wasn’t seeing the lift.
“Who was she?” Kelly’s question came out of the same nowhere that must have formed the skinny woman. A nowhere of stinking air and dead hope.
Simon flinched. “Who?”
“The woman.” Kelly advanced on him, body still aching from the crash to the floor. “I saw her.”
“So did I,” Dao said. “A woman. She looked ill.”
“Shut up.” Simon turned to the front. It looked exactly the same. Nothing moved out there. Nothing lived. They faced a sketch of a town.
Wanting to look anywhere else, Kelly met her sister’s gaze. Alex gave a quick nod but said nothing. Silence, dark and throbbing, spun out. It seemed Simon would keep quiet while they waited and the reception was as it’d been in the horrible moments after Rod’s disappearance.
“My mother,” Simon said abruptly. “It was my mother.”
“Hey, congratulations.” Kelly had never heard Alex’s voice sound so ugly, so savage. “You see the same shit we do. Lucky you. Now we’re definitely all in this together.”
With that, Alex sat at the reception desk, head in hands. She might have been crying. Kelly didn’t know. She didn’t know a thing.
Knives.
Shit. Their little weapons were nowhere in sight. Whatever shoved them from the fire exit and out of the lift had kept hold of their knives. All they had to defend themselves now were their fists.
Dao drew closer to Simon. “Why are you seeing your mother, Simon?”
“Shut up,” Simon replied without much strength.
“No. Talk to us. Why are—”
“I said shut up.” Simon threw a blind punch at Dao and struck him in the shoulder, more by luck than aim. Dao staggered and took the blow without fighting back or moving aside.
Weeping a little, Simon crossed to the doors and windows at the building’s front. “Let us out,” he whispered. The words were barely audible to himself, let alone the others. Kelly caught the sound but not the sentence. She moved a little closer to him, eyes on the road outside.
“See anyone, Kel?” Alex called. “See anyone I know?”
“No.” Kelly fought off waves of anger and guilt. “It’s not my fault, Alex. What’s happening, it’s not my fault.”
Alex let out a laugh that sounded more like a bark. “I’m not blaming you for this, Kel.”
If there was more to be said, Alex held it inside, and Kelly didn’t have the courage to take their argument further. She stood as close to Simon as she dared, keeping five steps between them. He splayed his fingers over the warm glass, still crying. Watching them, Dao banished the disappointment that their attempt to get through the fire exit had been pointless and pictured the woman’s face in the corridor while the wind hammered at them and the fire exit began to give way. The image had been in front for no more than a few seconds, his focus had been trying to keep upright and not choke on the stink of the gusting air. Even so, he’d got a decent look at her. Again, he saw the strained skin, the jutting cheekbones, not from lucky good looks but from illness. The woman was diseased. The sickness had turned her pale skin the colour of dirty paint, made her long hair thin and straggly, and ate into the body below her clothes. Cancer? Something worse?
“My mother. It was her and it wasn’t. Like she was… different but the same.” The sigh Simon let out made his chest tremble. “Like she was just to the edge of the person she was. That make sense?”
“No,” Alex muttered, and Dao gave Simon a quick nod, encouraging him.
“She died when I was five. She drank herself to death. Literally. Her liver was nothing by the end. My aunt adopted me on my sixth birthday. Thirty-three years ago, today. In case you were wondering.”
He pulled away from the windows and faced Dao, then glanced at Alex who remained on the desk. “That’s who was in the corridor. Fucked if I know why. That’s who we saw.”
“She was that wind and… ” Alex fell silent, the rest of her sentence uncomfortably clear. And the stink.
“No.” Simon shook his head. “I don’t think so, anyway. She was there after it. That wind, that fucking stench… that’s something else.”
Alex emerged from the other side of the desk, and when she spoke, she was Alex again. No mocking; no savage anger. She was the woman Kelly knew and loved in her own troubled way.
“Why would your mother be here, Simon? My dad or whatever’s pretending to be him, it wants to hurt me. Same with Dao. But your mum didn’t hurt you. Not now.”
He wept again, decades of tender wounds making their languid way to the surface and stabbing him every step of the way.
“I don’t know.” He sniffed, the sound loud in the quiet. “She had a problem. A big one
that she couldn’t beat. I found out when I was twenty she’d been… abused. Her dad. She drank. She drank herself to death.” The hurt he’d kept at arm’s length for more than thirty years was more than close; it was his skin and bones. He’d become that agony and it was glad to have taken over his heart and mind. “She… made me… she made me do things.”
There. It was out, exposed to the others, exposed to whatever shitty thing walked the corridors of Greenham Place. He’d named the worst thing in the world.
“Jesus Christ,” Alex whispered. Any anger and frustration she’d forced herself to feel as a distraction from her terror collapsed into so much ash.
“I haven’t seen her here like you’ve seen your dad.” Simon looked at Dao, eyes wet. “Or your boy, Dao.”
Simon took a shaking breath. Dao walked to him, arms open. Simon stared at the other man, a small, sad part of him wondering when someone had last done this for him. Years, maybe.
Letting go of the thought, Simon embraced Dao in a rough hug.
“We’ll get out of this,” Dao whispered.
“Yeah.”
They let go of one another, both feeling a little awkward. Simon sniggered.
“Going to offer to buy me a drink?” he asked.
Dao smiled. “Maybe later.”
He walked to the doors, standing in the same spot Simon had a moment before. “Two options. Just like before,” he said, looking at the others. Kelly rested her forehead on the glass. “Either we try again to find something that smashes this.” Dao tapped the doors without looking from Simon and Alex. “Or we go up one floor, smash a window and jump. Maybe break an ankle or a leg or… ”He shrugged. “At this point, I don’t care about a broken bone.”
Alex nodded, eager to believe and agree. There had to be a way out; all they needed to do was find it. So the fire exit plan hadn’t worked. So what? What Simon said back in the corridor about Greenham Place being a physical place with its windows and doors made sense. They just needed to find the right door.