Ascent

by Walker, Luke

  “Up,” Simon whispered. A terrible sense of fatalism descended on him, as if he stood on the top of a tall building, peering over the edge, full of the mad desire to jump. With a laugh threatening to bubble over, he realised that image was pretty much the truth of their situation.

  Simon’s hand shook in hers. “Go,” he said. “I’m right behind you.”

  For the first time in what felt like hours, Kelly dropped the man’s hand, then grasped the rungs. She pulled herself up, expecting the roof to smack into the top of her skull at any second. Below, Simon grabbed the frozen metal of the ladder and clambered up two rungs. The skin of his palms and fingers stuck to the ladder for a second, stinging as he pulled free. Kelly ascended a little further and froze when a voice with no humanity oozed through the inky darkness.

  I’m here for you.

  Voices, tones, inflections all living together and turning the four words into something no more human than a dog’s bark.

  Coming for you.

  Inside the shrieking mess of her head, Kelly named the speakers. Carl. Her mother. And Alex. The three joined to judge her for her mistakes and to punish her for her stupidity and selfishness. They’d reach an arm formed of two women and one man, of snapped bones and flesh eaten by cancer and pulsing with well-tended muscles; they’d reach for her and yank her off the ladder and they’d throw her into the mouth of the nightmare thing that called Greenham Place its home. That was Greenham Place. And down there, she’d be chewed into an eternity of pain just like Dao, Alex and Rod.

  “Move,” Simon whispered.

  The first blow on the door in a few moments crashed through the little room. In the moment after its echo faded, Kelly registered the new sound of bending metal. Two realisations smashed down at the same time: the door was buckling, and the thing outside was simply playing with them. The door was nothing to it. Their fear was everything. Their fear was its meal.

  “Move,” Simon roared.

  Hand off the rung; hand lifted; hand on the next rung, moving without thought as she had on the stairs before—

  Kelly cut the thought off, the memory of her mother’s shadow and the pouring blood belonging in a life outside the room. Up: that was all that mattered, not the stink of blood or the feet shuffling closer and the voice of three people turned into a single tone, calling for her to stop, stop, stop—

  Kelly’s head hit the hatch. The thud sent a lightning bolt of hurt through her skull, then down. Ignoring it, she shoved a hand up, hit metal and pushed.

  The hatch didn’t give at all.

  “Go,” Simon hissed.

  “I can’t. It doesn’t open.”

  Kelly pushed as hard as she could. The hatch could have been welded closed. A terrified sob escaped her mouth; she couldn’t keep it inside.

  “What is it?” Simon whispered.

  “It’s locked.”

  One more sneaky step, one more soft mutter in the dark. And the thing outside coming closer, taking its time because it knew they were trapped and the door would explode whenever the fuck the thing wanted it to, and its giant mouth would tear a hole in the wall and maybe they’d have a moment to see it fully before its teeth closed over them and all would go black. If they were lucky.

  “Use the fucking lighter!” Simon yelled.

  Kelly flicked it and shoved the dancing flame towards the hatch. It turned the metal into a faded grey and sent shadows across the ceiling. Maybe one of those shadows looked like a bundle of twitching arms; she didn’t want to know for sure. Kelly ran the light over the hatch, seeing nothing but a flat surface, nothing to get hold of or push or pull and—

  There.

  Three simple bolts shoved across the hatch, locking it. A mad laugh bubbled to the surface. Kelly swallowed it a second before it emerged. If she laughed now, she might never stop.

  We’ve gone through all this shit and the only things stopping us from the roof were these fucking locks, she thought tiredly. And wasn’t that just perfect for this place? The final joke from Greenham Place on them. The final nasty joke.

  Kelly thumbed the first bolt. It slid free, grating as it moved.

  At her feet, Simon shrieked.

  Kelly looked down.

  A hand had emerged from the gloom. Black and white skin lived together, the colours squirming over one another instead of turning the forearm grey. The skinny bone of an old man’s wrist met the thick muscles of a younger man’s well-tended muscles. As more of the arm came into view, Kelly saw the elbow, black and obviously female, turn over to reveal a scant bicep and then a woman’s shoulder.

  Her mother, Alex’s dad, and Carl all together, all one obscene body here for her. And when the light from above reached the thing’s joined faces, her head would explode and all this horror would be finished.

  NO I WON’T SEE IT I WON’T I WON’T.

  Yelling, Simon punched into the gloom, and then pulled back. The arm become something inhuman rose. Fingers twisted and shoved at Simon’s face. He howled as nails tore his skin.

  “Open it, Kelly. Open the fucking hatch.”

  The arm, its fingers splattered with gore, closed in on his face again. Roaring, Simon threw another punch. The arm pulled away into the dark.

  Her soaking fingers almost useless, Kelly fumbled with the next bolt, missed her grip and reached again. Simon cried her name. She shrieked a noise completely removed from speech and smacked the second bolt across.

  You screw up this last one and you’re both dead.

  Fingers belonging to someone else, Kelly shoved a thumb on the bolt and pushed. It slid free without a sound.

  Crying, Kelly hammered a fist at the hatch. With shocking ease, it flew up, revealing an utterly smooth sky of unmarked blue.

  Kelly lurched upwards, trying to yell for Simon to follow her, to not look back. She shot free of the hatch, hit a small ledge and tipped herself over it. For a few seconds, up became down, down collapsed to the sides; then she struck rock hard ground, scraping skin from her forearms, grazing her forehead on cold gravel.

  Still on the ladder, and doing all he could not to think about the fire burning through his cheek, Simon kicked out with all his fading strength. The toe of his shoe caught the face of the grinning demon, mashing its lips over teeth and breaking one free. The thing spat it to the floor and reached again. Howling, Simon threw a punch as hard as he could. His fist sank into a hot surface and plunged deeper. In a millisecond, he realised what had happened and his repulsion was a white explosion in the centre of his head.

  He’d punched into the thing’s face and his hand was inside its head.

  Simon yanked his gore-splattered hand free as the horror twisted and bit down. Teeth like rocks snapped on the middle knuckle of Simon’s index finger. Bone and skin shredded with terrible ease, and his hand was a detonation. All the fire in the world lived at the end of his arm.

  There were no shrieks. He didn’t have the breath for them. Yanking his hand back as the stump of his finger squirted blood and his insides capered and gibbered at the awful, sickening feel of being inside the thing’s head, Simon whirled back to the ladder.

  The monster came for him.

  On the far side of the little room, a shape flew from the door. Simon caught the briefest image of a woman shooting over the floor, her mouth open in a scream of pure fury. The shape collided with the abomination that had bitten his finger off and tried to tear his face away as the door to the corridor flew open. Simon understood that he’d been right when he told Kelly this wasn’t his mother’s ghost. This thing only wore his mother’s face. It took her shape but Nicola Law was not here. She rotted in the ground while something from outside the world dressed in her shape as the horror from below the building wore whatever shamed and hurt them.

  The thoughts sped by, sensations more than words because there was no time for a reaction. The woman had been keeping the door jammed. Without her, he was exposed to the mouth in the smoke and dust of the ruined building. And that smoke was stream
ing straight for him. And the mouth in the smoke was opening for him.

  Holding his ruined hand to his chest and tasting the blood streaming from his cheek, Simon lunged upwards to the sweet blue of the sky.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  He emerged as if being born.

  Kelly grabbed Simon under his arms and yanked. He tipped, momentum speeding his movement. His legs kicked at the murky light inside the hatchway before he tipped with Kelly and sent them both down.

  A hand pulled at the top of the ladder. In the clear daylight, the awful mashup of skin colours and differing muscle tone came straight from a bad dream. Three bodies turned into one; three people come to punish her for everything she had got wrong in her entire life.

  They raced for the hatch together. They found the lid and swung it as the black air reached the opening.

  Metal crushed the dancing fingers, snapping a couple from the hand. The broken digits fell to the roof, blood pattering down with them. Red smeared the edge of the hatch, staining the metal. From inside the small room, pounding fists struck the other side of the hatch. Kelly backed away as Simon shoved the outside bolts into place, then fell against her. He sobbed as the agony in his finger and face bellowed at him.

  “Oh, Jesus, Simon.” Kelly reached for him. He pulled back, shaking his head as the pounding struck the hatch. The fire in his head and hand vanished. Even the racket coming from below was shut away, trapped with his suffering on the other side of the world. Side by side, they saw the sky and roofs of high buildings, all quiet in the morning sun.

  Willington spread in all directions. Streets grew to roads; the roads marched towards a parkway. Acres of smooth green surrounded the grey parkway, and pockets of woodland dotted the fields. Above, the blue reached down to the horizon, meeting land in the far distance. And two suns filled the ceiling of the world.

  Hanging over the cathedral, the white-yellow ball of the sun shone, impossible to look at for more than a second. Straight ahead and high over where the fields made their way towards the surrounding countryside, a second sun glared its white light.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Kelly wanted to cry. She couldn’t. “The explosion. The bomb. We’re dead and that’s why.”

  She pointed to the second sun, expecting a billion degrees of heat to turn them to ash at any moment. Nothing but the silent, cool air came.

  “We’re not dead,” Simon replied.

  In reply, a storm of blows hit the hatch and the damage done to Simon’s face and finger returned, the pain beyond savage. The lid shook, the bolt holding for the moment. Simon listened to the shouts below the attack on the hatch. The woman’s voice, telling him his mother was so sorry, telling him she knew she’d been a monster.

  Inside, grief and rage yelled at him and he shut them down, too exhausted and in too much pain to fight anymore.

  “You need to run for that.”

  While his ruined finger continued to spit blood down his shirt, he nodded towards the burning white light of the explosion.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  She stared at him as if he’d abruptly started speaking a foreign language. Except there was no time to think. All they had was time to do.

  “That.” He pointed to the light, sitting like a fat king over its land. “Listen to me. We’re not dead. We never were and this place can fuck off.”

  Another savage roar and what might have been a mocking laugh came back. Somewhere close by, windows exploded. Simon heard shards of glass tinkle as they rained to the floor or cut the air on their long journey down to the street. Another explosion sent chunks of brick flying from the sides of Greenham Place. The roof pitched, threatening to spill them, threatening to cave in and drop them down, down, down into the mouth of the beast.

  Drop them as if they were falling down a slope.

  “Run for it, Kelly. It’s fine. You go.”

  “What?”

  “I can stop it. We can’t burn it but I can stop it. You run for that light. It’s the way out of here. It always was. It’s the fire. It’s the explosion, but it’s the way out.” He was babbling and couldn’t stop. No time to consider words or reason. Only time to get her away from the roars coming closer and closer with every second.

  “It’s a door. It’s the way out. You have to get to it,” he yelled.

  “How? Fly?”

  Kelly. We want to see you. We have to talk about Alex and what you did.

  Simon refused to turn at the ugly shout that came from a man he’d never met.

  “You have to jump,” Simon said.

  She stared at him and he tried to smile. He failed.

  “You jump for it,” he muttered.

  “We jump,” she replied and he shook his head. Again, the wounded eye and finger lived far away—if only for a few seconds. In that relief, he was able to think beyond everything that hurt.

  “No. All this, it’s not really here. I don’t think we are. Not really. Everything’s stopped, right? Everything’s waiting. So whether that’s a bomb about to go off or a way out, it’ll start everything when it either goes off or closes. And you need to be inside it when it does.”

  The banging on the hatch increased in fury and volume. While the ladder below it was only big enough for one person at a time to come up, it didn’t change a thing. God knows how many fists were hammering on it in the dark.

  Kelly. We’re going to kill you. We’re going to take you with us, take you to your mother so you can see what’s happened to her. You can see what the cancer has done to her. What it’s always doing to her.

  “Fuck you,” she whispered, and pulled Simon by the shoulder. He shook her loose.

  “Listen to me. You run for it and you jump. I’ll deal with this place.”

  “No, Simon—”

  “Just take a run for it and jump. I can make this go away.” Simon began to cry and his voice wavered like a child’s. “It’s nothing, right? And that’s what I’ve got. Nothing. I’ll give it my nothing.”

  He shoved her. She backed up, feet kicking through the pebbles. They faced the awful light burning in the blue. It was half the distance it had been, a winking white, an opening door with something on the other side impossible to make out. More light, maybe. Blinding light.

  Kelly spun around to Simon. He was already nearing the hatch, smart shoes kicking through the pebbles coating the surface of the roof, the hem of his suit jacket flying from his sides.

  “Simon.”

  He didn’t look back. “Oh, Jesus. I don’t want to die.”

  The banging reached a crescendo and a metallic clang rang out. The hatch was open.

  Simon’s yell was mad, full of tears.

  “I’ve got nothing and that’s just fine.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Simon collapsed beside the hatch, pebbles digging into his palms and wrists. A hand found pipework. He pulled himself up and turned to see Kelly, clearly torn between running and coming for him. He tried to wave at her, to signal she should leg it. Doing so was out of the question. All he could do was bleed and try to stop crying while the barrage of raging voices yelled from the room below, calling him a cunt, a waste of life, and a failure to every single person he’d known. And once they got out to the roof, they’d tear him into pieces.

  You there? he asked the air.

  If the creature dressed and shaped as his mother was close, it remained silent. Maybe it’d never been there and this whole plan was a disaster.

  No. No. Fucking no a million times.

  “No,” Simon whispered, managing a trembling smile.

  The fury of the attack on the hatch increased massively. It was like being in the middle of a gunfight, and that was okay because it meant the things below couldn’t smash through his protection.

  “Simon,” Kelly screamed, from either ten or a hundred feet away. The sweat dripping into his eyes made it impossible to tell.

  “Go,” he muttered, and readied himself for what was coming.

  “Not
hing’s coming,” he said, managing an honest, real laugh for the first time in maybe weeks.

  Torn in two by her choice, Kelly stood with her body at the edge of the roof and her face turned back towards Simon. Slouched on the floor of the roof, bleeding from a dozen places, he looked almost dead.

  The man’s body jerked and before his head fell against his chest, Kelly saw him smiling.

  Go. He is with me. I will keep him safe.

  Kelly caught the faint outline of an image—something or someone bent double over the hatch, body pressing against it, face turned towards her, and the mouth a perfect display of strain. Nothing human belonged to that face. She was looking at something that dwarfed humanity.

  It sent a wordless command—GO—and there was no possible argument Kelly could give. It would be like arguing against—

  run child run for your life

  Legs pumping, arms tucked against her sides. It seemed to Kelly she ran through water and it seemed to Simon he looked through it. Things slowed enough for him to take in the bracing air, the discomfort of the cold vent at his back and the light in the sky growing brighter, turning into a single star glowing in the morning sky.

  He drew breath and let his words fly. “I’ve got nothing and that’s just fine.”

  On all sides, pressure pushed at the air. There was no need to try to see whatever was causing the pressure. It didn’t matter. Whether he looked or not, he wouldn’t be able to see them, because he had nothing and nothing was what he would give to the building. A big nothing.

  Simon smiled.

  The roof at his splayed feet dropped away, stone, brick and glass falling inwards. It formed a slide that dropped into a massive tunnel. The now familiar stink of air from all the way down blew up into his face.

  Still smiling, Simon inhaled. The stench filled his nose and mouth. He took another breath.

  Above and on both sides, the pressure increased. It was like being inside a bubble, secure from the outside world while dozens of hands punched and hammered at the layer between him and them. Hands raging because they couldn’t get to him.