The Darkest Corners

by Barry Hutchison

  I looked down at the card. It was a sombre-looking thing with “My Deepest Sympathies” printed across the top. Below that was a picture of a snow-covered church, not unlike the one he’d been taken from.

  Hadn’t been taken from. Hadn’t.

  It was a sympathy card for relatives of people who had died. Billy’s sense of humour was no better in real life than it was in my dreams, apparently.

  Inside, in messy handwriting, was a short message. I totally saved your ass. You’re doing my homework for the rest of your life. Get well soon, dweeb, and then Billy’s scrawled signature at the bottom.

  ‘That was nice of him,’ I said, handing the card back.

  ‘Hmm,’ Mum said, unconvinced. ‘But as you can see, nothing bad’s happened to him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Shame, that,’ and we both laughed.

  I wanted to freeze-frame the moment. Me and Mum sitting there laughing, like everything was right with the world. All too soon, though, it came to an end.

  ‘Right, I better go phone your nan and let her know the good news.’ She bent over me and kissed my forehead. ‘I won’t be long. You want anything?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and I really and truly didn’t. I didn’t want anything, didn’t need anything. It was over. The nightmare was over.

  Mum kissed me again, said a garbled goodbye, then left through the same door the doctors had, promising to be back in no time at all.

  The door closed and I was left alone. I could hear the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, the normal sounds of a hospital at work. Normal. That was a word I didn’t think would ever enter my head again.

  I relaxed into the pillow. The top end of the bed was raised at a slight angle, and as my head sank down, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so comfortable. The pain in my head was little more than a niggle.

  My eyes closed. I lay still, enjoying the feeling of serenity that had begun to fill me. I didn’t have to run any more, hide any more, fight any more. I didn’t have to be scared, or be strong, or be anything but a kid.

  And then the door opened and spoiled everything.

  ‘That was quick,’ I said, opening my eyes, but it wasn’t my mum stepping into the room. It was a girl dressed in black, with skin the colour of milky chocolate and boots that looked custom-built for kicking.

  She looked around the room before fixing her gaze on me. ‘Hey, kiddo,’ said Ameena. ‘You miss me?’

  My body went tense, bringing the pain back to my head.

  ‘You just going to lie there with your mouth hanging open?’ Ameena asked. ‘Or are you going to say something?’

  I just lay there with my mouth hanging open. Ameena closed the door behind her, then came to the side of my bed. ‘You might want to pull yourself together there,’ she told me. ‘We might not have much time.’

  ‘You’re not real.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Well, not in the conventional sense,’ she admitted. She gestured at the room around her. ‘But then neither is this.’

  ‘I dreamed you,’ I said. ‘I dreamed you. You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘If he finds out I’ve snuck in to see you, he’ll kill me.’

  ‘Who? Who’ll kill you?’

  ‘Guess,’ she said. Then added, ‘Your dad,’ before I had the chance. ‘The handsome and dashing Doctor Feder.’ She put her hand to the side of her mouth and spoke in a mock-whisper. ‘Who isn’t really a doctor, by the way.’

  I could feel my heart racing. The lines on one of the monitor screens peaked like a mountain range and a red light began to blink on and off.

  ‘You’re not real,’ I said again. ‘I dreamed you.’

  ‘No, listen to me,’ she said, her voice low, her face serious. ‘The other stuff, the imaginary friends, the Darkest Corners. That stuff’s real. All of it. This. This here now. This is the dream. This is what isn’t real.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said, and the red light on the heart monitor blinked faster. ‘This is a trick, or a… I don’t know… a hallucination or something.’

  I rolled away from her and tumbled out of bed. The wires attached to my chest tore free and all three machines began to shriek in complaint. Ameena flicked the power switch at the wall, silencing them.

  ‘Calm down, kiddo, or you’ll get us both killed.’

  I moved round the bed and shoved past Ameena on my way to the door.

  ‘Get away,’ I spat. ‘You’re not real. None of that stuff was real. I want my mum. I’m going to get my mum.’

  ‘Your mum’s dead.’

  I stopped at the door. ‘Your mum’s dead,’ Ameena said again. ‘Your dad killed her.’

  ‘She’s not dead,’ I growled. ‘I saw her.’

  ‘You think you saw her. He convinced you into seeing her, like he convinced you into seeing all of this.’

  ‘No!’ I cried, and I pushed through the door and out into the corridor. I stopped when I got there. I could still hear the hospital sounds bustling around me, but the corridor itself was empty.

  And I mean empty. The floor was bare wood, the walls a glossy white. The corridor was nothing more than a short, narrow hallway with a door at each end and an opening that led on to an equally featureless stairway.

  All those old feelings of panic and dread began to bubble furiously in my gut. I carried on towards the opposite door just as Ameena came through the one behind me.

  The door opened on to a hospital day room. There were a few tatty armchairs and a mismatched couch in one half of the room, with a boxy old TV set squashed into the corner.

  Three men and one woman sat on the chairs, reading magazines, doing crosswords, or just dozing gently in their dressing gowns. None of them looked up as I stumbled in.

  The other half of the room was as blank as the hallway outside. There was a single window on the otherwise featureless wall, the blinds pulled half closed. I could see a darkening evening sky between the slats, but nothing more.

  Some random pieces of medical equipment stood in the bare half of the room. A blood-pressure monitor. Some sort of ECG machine. One of those things they use to shock stopped hearts back into action. A defibrillator, that was it.

  ‘What is this? What’s going on?’ I demanded. Still no one in the day room looked my way.

  ‘He convinced you that you were in hospital. Your mind started filling in the details,’ Ameena said. ‘But then it stopped.’

  ‘Details? What do you mean details?’

  ‘This,’ she said, gesturing around us. ‘The whole thing. The whole hospital. It’s not real.’ She frowned. ‘Well, no, that’s not true. It is real now. But it wasn’t back then.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Back when?’

  ‘Back then. Back before you created it.’ She paused a moment to let that sink in.

  ‘Created it?’

  ‘You still don’t get it, do you, kiddo?’ she said. ‘You still don’t understand what you’re capable of. The stuff Doc Mortis stuck in your neck – that needle – it was designed to make you open to suggestion.’

  My hand went to my neck. Was there an ache there? I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Your dad doesn’t usually need that sort of thing. He can be pretty damned persuasive all on his own. But you were too stubborn, so he had to drug you first.’

  ‘Drug me…? I don’t… No, none of this is happening.’

  ‘He convinced you it was all a dream. Convinced you that you were actually safe in hospital, and that none of the rest of it had really happened.’ She smiled sadly. ‘And, man, I bet you wanted to believe that, kiddo. I bet your mind raced to believe it, to picture it, to imagine it was all true. But your mind isn’t like anyone else’s. You wanted it to be real and so it became real. The hospital. Your mum. All of it. You created your own little safe haven. Your own happy ending.’

  My mouth was dry. ‘No,’ I croaked. ‘No, that’s not true.’

  ‘Sorry, kiddo, but it is. Every word of it.�
�� Ameena looked down at the floor, considering her next few words carefully. ‘He needed you to use your abilities. He needed one more big push to bring the barrier down and let the Darkest Corners in. He couldn’t force you to do it, so he tricked you instead.’ She cleared her throat gently. ‘We tricked you instead. We tricked you into opening the door.’

  ‘There is no door,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘There is no Darkest Corners.’

  She pointed in the direction of the window. ‘Take a look.’

  I followed her finger, but didn’t move. Not at first, anyway. Then, ignoring the pain in my grinding knee, I took a small, tentative step towards the window. Ameena gave me a nod of encouragement when I turned to look at her, and then I was there, standing before the blinds. I took a deep breath. I pulled the string to open the slats all the way. And then I looked, and the blood in my veins turned to ice.

  What had I expected to see? I wasn’t sure. An empty street. One or two late-night wanderers, maybe.

  But not this. Never this.

  There were hundreds of them. Thousands. They scuttled and scurried through the darkness, swarming over the village like an infection; relentless and unstoppable.

  I leaned closer to the window and looked down at the front of the hospital. One of the larger creatures was tearing through the fence, its claws slicing through the wrought-iron bars as if they were cardboard. My breath fogged the glass and the monster vanished behind a cloud of condensation. By the time the pane cleared the thing would be inside the hospital. It would be up the stairs in moments. Everyone in here was as good as dead.

  The distant thunder of gunfire ricocheted from somewhere near the village centre. A scream followed – short and sharp, then suddenly silenced. There were no more gunshots after that, just the triumphant roar of something sickening and grotesque.

  I heard Ameena take a step closer behind me. I didn’t need to look at her reflection in the window to know how terrified she was. The crack in her voice said it all.

  ‘It’s the same everywhere,’ she whispered.

  I nodded, slowly. ‘The town as well?’

  She hesitated long enough for me to realise what she meant. I turned away from the devastation outside. ‘Wait… You really mean everywhere, don’t you?’

  Her only reply was a single nod of the head.

  ‘Liar!’ I snapped. It couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be happening.

  She stooped and picked up the TV remote from the day-room coffee table. It shook in her hand as she held it out to me.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  Hesitantly, I took the remote. ‘What channel?’

  She glanced at the ceiling, steadying her voice. ‘Any of them.’

  The old television set gave a faint clunk as I switched it on. In a few seconds, an all-too-familiar scene appeared.

  Hundreds of the creatures. Cars and buildings ablaze. People screaming. People running. People dying.

  Hell on Earth.

  ‘That’s New York,’ she said.

  Click. Another channel, but the footage was almost identical.

  ‘London.’

  Click.

  ‘I’m… I’m not sure. Somewhere in Japan. Tokyo, maybe?’

  It could have been Tokyo, but then again it could have been anywhere. I clicked through half a dozen more channels, but the images were always the same.

  ‘It happened,’ I gasped. ‘It actually happened.’

  I turned back to the window and gazed out. The clouds above the next town were tinged with orange and red. It was already burning. They were destroying everything, just like he’d told me they would.

  This was it.

  The world was ending.

  Armageddon.

  And it was all my fault.

  I watched for a few more seconds before the horror of it all became too much. I turned away from the window. Ameena hadn’t moved, and nor had any of the people in the chairs. They continued their reading and their puzzle-solving and their dozing like they were off in some different world that wasn’t in any way connected to this one. I envied them that.

  ‘I did this,’ I muttered as the truth began to sink in. ‘Everything out there. The world. People dying. I did this.’

  Ameena nodded. ‘Yep, you did,’ she said. I shot her a wounded look, but she didn’t flinch from it. ‘The question is, what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Do? What can I do? I can’t stop that. No one can stop that.’

  ‘You’ve got special abilities that no one else has.’

  ‘Not any more!’ I cried. ‘Don’t you get it? This is the Darkest Corners now. I’m powerless in the Darkest Corners. That’s why the hospital isn’t finished, because the barrier came down while I was still creating it. Don’t you see? It’s over. It’s too late to stop anything. I’m a kid. I’m just a kid.’

  She chewed her lip. ‘But you’re going to try, right?’

  ‘Try what, Ameena? Try what?’ I demanded. ‘What can I try against all that? And… and why are you even here, anyway? You work for him, remember? You’re on his side, not mine. You made that very clear. You should be out there celebrating with the rest of them. With your own kind.’

  That hurt her. Her eyes widened a little and the corners of her mouth tugged down just a fraction. She spoke, and when she did, it was in a voice on the brink of cracking.

  ‘I didn’t want this,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want any of this.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ I said, turning my back on her. ‘You’ve been working towards it from the start. How many times did you try to get me to use my powers? How many times did you actually convince me, or trick me, or find some way to force me into doing it?’

  I spun back to face her, suddenly furious. ‘I’m wrong, what I said; this isn’t my fault. It’s your fault. Yours. If it hadn’t been for you none of this would be happening. If it hadn’t been for you, everyone would still be alive!’

  There was a crash from the stairs, and the grunt of something big and angry. The thing I’d seen outside was on its way up. The monsters were coming to finish me off, but I couldn’t summon the energy to care.

  Ameena glanced to the door, then back to me. ‘Want me to close it?’

  I shrugged. Maybe this was for the best. Maybe this was the way it should end. At least then it would end, one way or another.

  ‘He tricked me too, you know?’ Ameena said. The echo of the creature’s grunts bounced further into the day room. ‘He told me he wanted to save the good ones. The kids, like me, who were stuck over there with the rest of them. He said he wanted to take us all out of there.’

  ‘And what about when it all started?’ I snapped. ‘When you saw what he was doing? To me. To Marion. To my mum and everyone else. You still stuck with him. You still helped him!’

  Ameena nodded quickly. ‘He gets into your head. He can twist the way you think, the way you feel. It’s like he can rewire your brain. Mr Mumbles didn’t want to kill you. Not at first. Not until your dad persuaded him.’

  The sounds of the thing on the stairs were louder than ever, so loud I almost expected it to come leaping through the open door, claws flashing, teeth bared.

  ‘So what?’ I asked. ‘You’re saying he was controlling you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I mean, not really. He just told me everything we were doing was for the best, and he made me believe it.’ Her voice cracked and a tear ran down her cheek. ‘Every bad thing he did to you, to everyone you cared about, he made me believe it was the right thing to do and… and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  I clenched my jaw. I should hate her. I wanted to hate her. But Mr Mumbles himself had warned me my dad could get into your head and make you do things you didn’t want to. He was a manipulator, and maybe I wasn’t the only one he’d been manipulating this entire time.

  ‘Close the door.’

  Ameena wiped her sleeve across her cheek. She pushed the door closed just as a monstrous shape reached the top of the stairs. There was a loud BAN
G as it hammered against the wood.

  ‘It’ll break through,’ she warned, jamming her foot and one shoulder against the wood. ‘We don’t have long.’

  ‘I don’t need long.’

  I hurried over to the defibrillator and studied the controls. There was a switch marked ON. That bit was simple enough. I pressed it and a little green light illuminated inside the button.

  There was a dial marked CURRENT. Again, straightforward enough. I cranked it up to full, then carefully removed the shock pads. One was marked STERNUM, the other marked APEX. The sternum was round the chest area, I knew, but what the apex was I had no idea. Still, I didn’t suppose it mattered.

  There was a button on the back of one of the pads. The word CHARGE was printed on it. I pressed it and the machine began to emit a high-pitched whine.

  I wheeled it into position across from the door. Being careful not to touch them together, I gripped both pads and held them by my side. The wires attaching them to the machine were coiled like old-style telephone cables, which meant I’d have plenty of room to manoeuvre.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Open the door.’

  The monster on the other side thumped hard against it. Ameena stared at me in disbelief. ‘Open it? Are you nuts?’

  I shrugged. ‘We’ll find out in a minute.’ I readied myself. ‘Do it. Now. And stay out of sight.’

  Ameena yanked open the door just as the brute hurled itself again. It came charging through, its long arms swinging, a serpent-like tongue flicking across its bulging eyeballs.

  It ran straight for me, grunting and snorting through its snout of a nose. I dodged as it made its final lunge, brought up both pads and clamped them down on to the monster’s head.

  There was a sound like a camera flash going off. I felt a jolt travel the length of my arms. The creature’s whole body went rigid for a moment, then it clattered against the wall, bounced off and fell to the floor.

  We watched it for a few moments, hoping it wouldn’t get back up. After a while, I nudged it with my bare foot. It didn’t react, and I realised it was quite probably dead.

  ‘I think you’re supposed to say “Clear” before you use those things,’ Ameena said.