“The man disrespected my home, my wives and my customs! Now it seems he has also robbed me of this most important possession! I want his house searched and I want him arrested!” ranted the sheikh.
Laya’s head turned at the sound of a familiar voice. That sounds like Rachel. She lifted part of her veil, in order to see more clearly. It was Rachel. She had come out of a side room and was talking to a young man. Laya watched as Rachel shook his hand and, smiling, walked out through the revolving doors onto the street, clutching a folder.
Laya glanced back at the young man. There’s something oddly familiar… She felt her eyes being drawn towards him as surely as if fishing hooks had been lodged in them, and his very presence was reeling them in. He stood there, concentrating on the door to the street. Then he absent-mindedly scratched his side, as if bitten by something. His eyes turned to meet hers, unswerving, as if he had always been aware that she had been looking at him. There they both remained, locked in each other’s sight as the seconds thudded by.
Then he smiled, revealing rows of pin-sharp teeth crowding his mouth. It was like a shark’s mouth. Laya could clearly see them from across the room. Like a toothy vortex, they drew her into a blackness far emptier than the vacuum of space and more dreadful than dread itself.
Each tooth became a step. A flight of winding steps.
A spiral staircase of bone. The steps were cold. Laya knew the steps were cold because her bare feet were upon them. She looked down and realised that she was completely naked, but was untroubled by it. Taking a deep breath, she thought that she could smell blood. There was just enough light to perceive a narrow space, and as her eyes adjusted, she began to make out a circular wall around her of skinless, gristly pink and red flesh, interlaced with bone. Laya sensed that she was standing within the tower of a castle. A castle of flesh and bone.
She looked back to see the bone steps curve around the inner wall and out of sight above her, towards an unknown source of grey light. Turning, she looked down at the steps, curving to her right, into the shadows beneath her. She began to descend, away from the light, one hesitant step at a time. A thought entered her mind: something about castles; a fact that she had read as a child, about spiral staircases in old castles. They always spiral upwards in a clockwise direction. She remembered it was something to do with making it difficult for an invader to wield his sword while climbing the stairs, because his right arm, usually being the sword arm, would be hindered by the interior curve of the wall. The defender, coming down the stairs to fight the invader, would have the advantage because his sword arm would most likely be next to the curve of the outside wall, giving him room to swing. It then occurred to her that this staircase descended clockwise. These steps are wrong… They are supposed to descend anticlockwise. This is all wrong.
As Laya descended, she wondered how long she had been there. Perhaps just a moment, a year, a lifetime. The coldness of the steps on her feet sucked the very essence of who she was out of her. The darkness increased with each tentative footfall, and a disturbed, uncomfortable feeling began to weigh her down. She became aware of the smell of putrefying meat, becoming more intense as she advanced further into the depths of the fortress of flesh. She wondered why she hadn’t climbed upwards, towards the light, then realised it was because she could feel that something below was drawing her closer, silently calling to her.
The darkness continued to envelop her, until it was absolute. Her eyes may as well have been gouged from her skull for all the use they were. Unable to see in the pitch blackness, she instinctively reached out a hand for support, and felt the cold, wet, rotting meat of the outer wall. Snatching her hand back in revulsion, she hesitated before continuing her descent, one careful step at a time.
Finally, the steps seemed to come to an end. Blind and suspicious of her own senses, she carefully edged forward, her numbed feet cautiously feeling around the continuously flat surface. Her arms outstretched, she advanced a half step, then another. She took a full step forward, then another, and immediately became aware of a presence. She could not see it, or hear it, but every cell in her body screamed at her that it was there.
Laya knew it was in front of her, and she knew what it was going to feel like before she had touched it. Her hands reached out and made contact with something. It felt like the gnarly, wet bark of a tree trunk, but instead of curving around in the familiar way a tree would, this was more like a wall. Her senses knew immediately that it was vast; a thousand miles high and a thousand miles wide, neither truly alive nor dead, and yet infinitely powerful and abysmal.
As she blindly felt around the bark wall, a sudden, terrible realisation hit her that it was moving around her, closing in. Panic swept over her, as it became apparent that she was completely surrounded, as if being trapped at the bottom of the deepest and darkest well. She started to struggle as the wall continued to contract, but it was too late; it completely enveloped her, leaving her unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to scream.
As the diabolical bark gradually began to press into her body, tear her flesh and break her bones, she wondered if she was being digested. She was not entirely sure. The only thing she was certain of was that there was no way out. She had no sense of how long she had been engulfed by the presence, and as she wished for the simple luxury of being able to feel her own tears upon her face, she found herself on a plateau of endless despair and hopelessness.
Eternal
Sulphurous
Agonising
As she started to feel her soul being peeled from her dying body, she perceived a sudden jolt, a tear, a rip, a gash forming, as the police station began to reassemble. The shock of being sledgehammered back to her senses was almost too much to bear. It was followed by a brief, sinking sensation that reminded her of how air turbulence felt on an aircraft. Finally, the banality of the front counter room of the police station settled around her.
Shaking and sweating, she gazed upon the creature. It winked at her.
Continuing with his tirade, Sheikh Mohammed looked around to check on his wives. “If it costs to investigate this, then so be it, name your price and I am sure…” He saw Laya, her hands clasped tightly together in her gloves, sweat marks lightly spotting the outside of her niqab, with her head turned at a ninety-degree angle, clearly enthralled by something across the room. His gaze followed her line of vision to rest upon a young man – a very handsome young man, with perfect white teeth. He was smiling broadly at his wife, and then he winked at her. The audacity! His rage exploded. “Laya!”
Laya jumped out of her skin, as if awoken from a trance. She stared, wide-eyed, back at her husband. The sheikh scowled at her then turned back to the counter. “You have all my details. I want this Andy Horton arrested and my bust returned, or I will ensure a diplomatic incident will follow with the leaders of your government.”
Striding away from the counter, robes flapping, the sheikh signalled with a flip of his hand that the four women should follow. They responded immediately, in single file, shuffling silently after him until they reached his limousine outside.
A muscular Saudi Arabian man, in robes and a headdress, bowed and opened the front passenger door to the sheikh, who immediately climbed in. He then opened up the back doors, allowing the wives to silently shuffle into place on the sumptuous leather seats. Once they were all settled, the chauffeur drove off.
As the car purred gently out of the police station car park, Laya stared out of the window. Still in shock, she felt the bile rising in her throat. Moments ago, as she had followed her husband out of the police station, she had glanced back to see if she could catch a glimpse of the creature, just one more time, but it was gone.
As the limo turned out of the main street, she saw the ghosts of about twenty Orthodox Jewish men, dressed head to toe in black, much like herself. They were gathered together in a group, praying and chanting. As the car drove past, one of the men loo
ked up. He was older, with a thick, grey beard, and wearing – like many of the others – a large beaver hat and a long, black coat. She also noticed that he wore old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses.
Laya turned away and looked at her hands, which were still shaking.
The sheikh spoke without turning around to address the car’s occupants. “Insha’allah, let this be an end to all this nonsense and vexation that has been felt in my house.”
There was no reply from the robed figures in the back seat. The first three had remained silent because they had nothing in particular to say. The fourth remained silent because she knew that her husband was as wrong about this situation as anyone could possibly be.
The troubles had only just begun.
Seeing Things Page 30