“No!”
Lisa jerked awake, hands held palms-out before her as if she were trying to hold back the unstoppable force that had wrecked the car and turned her husband into little more than a lump of raw meat. Her heart pumped at double time and a wave of nausea swept over her. The graphic details of the dream were still shockingly vivid in her mind, so much so that she found herself rubbing her face with her hands, trying to wipe David’s blood from her skin.
It was only when she felt a breeze caress her hair with cool fingers that she became aware that she was out in the open. She lowered her hands from her face and looked around in confusion. With sleep having relinquished its hold, the world around her now had the chance to manifest itself. Her eyes saw daylight even as her mind registered the fact that she was sitting upright on damp, springy ground. Lisa touched grass that had been sprinkled with dew.
With some difficulty, knees protesting, she climbed to her feet and looked round. Golden fields stretched away endlessly no matter which way she looked. The sun was high in the sky, the air so hot it almost took her breath away.
But the question was, where was she?
Resisting the temptation to go charging off in a direction chosen at random, which she knew she would most likely regret later, she made herself stay put and take stock. She probed her head carefully with her fingertips, searching for evidence that she had been hurt, evidence that she eventually had to admit she could not find. Maybe she had been ill, or drunk.
Whatever, she was starting to panic.
She closed her eyes, listened out for the sound of traffic, anything that would give her the slightest indication of which way she should start walking. But there was nothing, save for the soft whispering of the breeze through the long grass around her. Even the birds seemed to have forgotten their songs.
What was the last thing she remembered?
The dream. That awful nightmare. It hadn’t happened like that. Or rather it had, but only up to the point where David remarked on how quiet the roads were that day. That was when the lorry had sideswiped them. Lisa remembered nothing of it. In fact it was only months later when she read the coroner’s report – she’d insisted on reading it, having been too ill to attend the inquest – that she found out exactly what had happened. There was nothing she could have possibly done to avoid or prevent the collision. So why, in the dream, had her own subconscious twisted and embellished the truth, so that in that warped version she had been to blame?
The King of all the dead will have what is his.
David had said that, in the dream. But she knew she had heard the exact same expression before, and more than once. What it meant, though, was another matter. Lisa had no idea who the King of all the dead was. And she was sure she did not want to find out, either.
The King of all the dead will have what is his.
The exact same words, only this time it was Alison and not David that she heard uttering them. Lisa frowned as a picture flashed across her mind’s eye. It was an image of Alison, holding a baby. There was something wrong with them, but the image was gone before she could quite grasp what.
A sudden chill passed through her.
Was it her imagination, or had the sky darkened ever so slightly?
Another pictured appeared in her head. A small boy crawling along a corridor, leaving behind a trail of what looked like blood and innards, which glistened wetly as they reflected the overhead lights. Lisa gasped at the sheer awfulness of it.
Suddenly it was as if a mental dam burst and a whole torrent of images swept over her with relentless and overpowering ferocity. Each inspired a memory, so many that she could make no sense of them all. But they quickly fell into place and a pattern emerged and Lisa clapped her hands to her head and dropped to her knees, moaning deep in her throat, as she was made to relive everything that she had been put through. When she saw what happened to Alison and, worst of all, what her sister had become, she started to cry and could not stop, even when the final image filtered through, that of Alison lunging at her, fist swinging, in the doorway of the church.
How long she remained there, on her knees and weeping, she had no idea.
Eventually the tears subsided. Lisa wiped her eyes and drew down one deep, ragged breath after another until the moment of heartbreak had passed, leaving her, if not exactly whole, then at least able to function again.
She stood on unsteady legs, rubbing the side of her head thoughtfully.
Grass rustled under her feet as she turned slowly around. No matter which way she looked, there was nothing but the endless expanse of the field, no trees or hedges to break the monotony of the view. Lisa chewed on a fingernail, trying not to listen to the idea that that had insinuated itself into her brain. But she could not hold out against it for long, even though the implications terrified her. It was now quite clear that she was no longer in the world she knew. Did that mean she was dead? Possibly. Alison had struck her with enough force that it may well have been a killer blow. If that was the case, then life after death was nothing at all like she’d been expecting.
It wasn’t as if she had thought about it too often or too deeply. Inside she had always held on to her childhood self’s belief in the afterlife. Even when, as an adult, that belief had diminished, she still reasoned, whenever she thought about it, that there must be more to life than just your three-score-and-ten. After all, what was the point of living if everything you had become, everything you had achieved, was simply wiped away like chalk off a blackboard, the moment that life slipped away?
The breeze picked up, icy now. Lisa shuddered and rubbed her arms. Glancing overhead she saw that the sky really had darkened. What had been the sun just a few heartbeats earlier was now the moon, gleaming like a cold and malevolent eye. The grass was filled with rustling and Lisa felt the urge to run, imagining that the sound was made not by the wind but by the passage of the dead, converging on her.
She began to shake. No, her idea of the afterlife had been nothing like this. True, she had never really believed in pearly gates and choirs of angels. But neither had she expected to find herself alone in an endless field, haunted by a sense of impending doom. She spun on her heels, frantically looking around her, dreading the moment when her eyes picked out the slow movements of grey-white figures across the field towards her. There was nothing close by, thank God. But, peering anxiously into the darkness, she could make out something in the distance, something immense, blacker than the night that surrounded it and boiling like the smoke from a forest fire. It rapidly filled the sky, eerily silent, and Lisa knew, simply knew, it was bearing down on her. Without further hesitation, remembering the shadowy cloud that had engulfed Alison, she turned away from it and started to run.
The thud of her feet on the hard ground beneath the grass and the agonised rasps of her breathing were the only sounds that she could hear. She could see nothing save darkness ahead. No matter how much she wanted to, she did not dare look back to see if the black cloud was catching up with her. There was nothing she could do to stop it even if it were indeed right behind her; nothing except run. Her calves and thighs soon felt like they were on fire, while her lungs were already well alight. Mind sidetracked by blind terror, Lisa had no idea how long she’d maintained that breakneck pace. She knew only that she could not keep it up for much longer.
Without warning she burst out of the darkness into dazzling sunlight.
Confusion defeated fear and she stumbled to a halt.
The field was gone. Lisa found herself standing on a road that stretched out ahead of her, as far as the distant horizon. The land was as flat as the road was straight; an endless expanse of impossibly featureless green. The sky was deep blue, untouched by clouds. And while the light was bright and warm, the sun was nowhere to be seen.
Gulping down air, each desperate breath feeling like a knife being turned in her chest, Li
sa slowly turned around, almost flinching in anticipation as she imagined the dark cloud looming over her. But there was nothing. The road ran on, just as straight and just as long, through the same never-ending expanse of characterless green.
The only difference was, now that she was facing this direction, Lisa could see the Peugeot, or rather what was left of it. It was slightly too far away for her to read the registration plate clearly. But there was no doubt in her mind that it was their car, hers and David’s, the very same Peugeot 406 that she had been driving that fateful October morning. Despite being mangled almost beyond recognition, its nearside little more than a crumpled tangle of metal, it was as familiar to her as her own home.
Its windscreen was missing but there were no fragments of glass on the road around it. Nor was there any trace of the chunks of metal and interior fittings that had been torn away when the lorry ploughed into it. To Lisa’s eyes, it was as if some unknown force had picked up what was left of the car and, leaving the detritus behind, transplanted it here, quite literally in the middle of nowhere.
The sunless light was strong, so strong that it dazzled her as the sheered edges of metal caught it and threw it at her face. Lisa raised one hand to shield her eyes and squinted into the glare. As she drew closer to the car, she could make out a dark figure slumped in the passenger seat.
“David?” she whispered, not wanting to look yet powerless to look away. Her feet still moved without her acquiescence, as if the car were a magnet drawing her in.
Lisa reached out one hand as soon as it was close enough to touch and pressed it to the concertinaed bonnet, partly to steady herself and partly because she could not quite believe it was really there. But the metal felt real, and hot against her skin.
She made her way around the driver’s side door, round to the boot and back down the nearside, touching what remained of the Peugeot every now and then, for all the world like a potential buyer at a car lot. When she came alongside the passenger door she halted. The last thing, absolutely the last thing, she wanted to do right then was crouch and peer in. Yet that was exactly what she did; her body seemed to have an agenda all of its own. Unable to resist, mentally bracing herself for the sight of her husband’s crushed body, she looked through the glassless window.
Then she turned away quickly, falling helplessly to her knees. She dragged a trembling hand across her mouth as if that would somehow wipe away the memory of what she had seen. It had been only a fleeting glance, but that was more than enough.
The ravaged corpse was only vaguely recognisable as human. Its clothes had been all but stripped away, leaving behind dark-stained rags and exposing a stew of shattered bone and pulverised flesh, turned black and deep crimson. The entire upper body had been pushed out of shape, so that the left shoulder had been rammed up higher than the head, which lolled forward, facing the floor. What she could see of it was a misshapen mess of brain and skull and hair, fused together by blood, which had sprayed through the car interior, leaving dark spatters everywhere.
Despite still feeling deeply nauseous, Lisa found herself possessed by a strong urge to look again, as if there was a masochistic part of herself the existence of which she had not previously suspected but which she was nevertheless compelled to obey.
This time, she tried to tell herself, it would be nowhere near as bad.
Because this time she knew what to expect.
She squatted again at the side of the window, but not looking in, staring across at the endless expanse of green at the roadside while she steeled herself for the sight that awaited her. When she felt ready, she turned her head and looked at the body.
Which lifted and turned its ruined head to look straight back at her.
Lisa screamed and stumbled backwards, then twisted round and scurried along the road on all fours until she was well away from the car, then sat cross-legged and hugged herself tightly, feeling she had to do that to hold herself together.
This was no afterlife.
As real as it felt, this was a nightmare. It had to be. How else to explain what she had just seen?
The body in the car was not all that remained of David.
It was all that remained of her. Lisa had recognised her own features, even though one side of her face had been virtually obliterated.
But she had been driving that morning. It had been David, not she, who had been killed in the passenger seat, dead before the car had come to rest. Just like the twisted replaying of the accident in her nightmare, in which she had been at fault, so this version distorted the facts to leave her the victim. Quite apart from getting that wrong, it also omitted one detail. If she was in the car, then where was David?
“Looking for you,” a familiar voice said from behind.
Lisa dared not move, hardly dared to breathe. The last time she’d seen Alison, her sister had tried to kill her. Had killed her, for all she knew.
“Face the truth, Lise.”
“But this isn’t the truth!” Lisa pushed herself off the ground, at the same time turning to face her sister. When she caught sight of her, Lisa gasped. There was no sign of the Alison she’d expected to see, the torn-apart Alison whose body had been stitched together by insects. Now she was whole again, every inch as fit and beautiful as she had been the last time Lisa had seen her alive.
“Alison?” she said weakly, as if she could not trust her own eyes.
“It’s me, Lise.”
She even had on the exact same clothes she’d been wearing when they set out on their walk.
“Me, just as I should be. And that –” she added, nodding her head towards the car, “is how you should be.”
She took a tentative step towards Lisa, who edged from her.
“Get away from me,” Lisa said. “I don’t know who or what the fuck you are, but you’re not my sister. My sister wouldn’t lie to me like that.” Her eyes were drawn to the body in the passenger seat. It was motionless, the head once more slumped out of sight. “She loved me too much to torture me like this.”
Lisa turned her back on Alison, determined not to cry, and made to walk away, only to freeze in her tracks when a shadow fell over her, a shadow far longer than anything human could cast. Simultaneously, a freezing wind sprung up out of nowhere. The skin on the back of her neck prickled and goosebumps erupted along her arms. Fearfully, she looked slowly over her shoulder.
Alison was no longer alone.
All around her, streaking out from her, was a cloud so dark that it seemed to pull in the light from the rest of the world. It heaved and roiled, twisting and turning in on itself, over and over with such dizzying speed that Lisa felt nauseous looking at it. Flashes of white like lightning held her entranced, a rabbit trapped by the fast-moving glow of headlights. Her mind struggled to make sense of what her eyes saw, but it was so immense and so fantastical that it simply defied understanding. Yet it commanded her in a voice that was less than a whisper and more than a shout. Lisa felt her body drawn towards it. Her feet took one faltering step after another towards that seething mass and, try as she might, she could not make them stop.
And at the cloud’s black heart, arms moving slowly like a conductor, Alison seemed to be the orchestrator of the spell that held Lisa in its grip.
“You have to stop running. You must come with me now,” she said softly, or seemed to say. Lisa heard the words, though she did not see her sister’s mouth move.
Nearing the monstrous cloud she could see that the flashes of white deep within it were not lightning but bodies, human and animal alike, and so many of them that it was beyond comprehension. They seemed intact, when surely they should have been torn apart by the maelstrom that held them. Drawing closer still, Lisa realised that they were not merely trapped within the cloud; the cloud was entirely composed of corpses. They moved with such incredible speed, twisting and whirling, there one second
, gone the next, that Lisa could not make out individual features. She caught only fleeting glimpses of limbs, torsos and heads, each spinning out of, then back into, the depths of the darkness before she could get a proper fix on them.
Interspersed with the human bodies were smaller forms that she guessed must be animals or birds. Or maybe, she thought, children.
And the scariest part, the part that really drove home the point that she was dead and being put through hell, was that the skyscraper-tall mass of furious activity did not make a sound. Lisa could hear the wind sing mournfully through the twisted metal of the car wreck. Was this cloud, this swarm of millions of dead things, really the King of all the dead? Or was it merely an illusion, a lie just like everything else that she had seen since she had arrived here?
“You cannot outrun the King of all the dead,” Alison said.
Her voice broke the spell that held Lisa captive. She raced away along the endless road, sick and tired of running. If this was hell then maybe she had been damned to spend eternity fleeing one grim horror after another.
Across the green to her right Lisa caught sight of a long stretch of woodland. It had certainly not been there before but she veered from the road towards it, in the hope of finding shelter. She had to believe she could make it. If she lacked the faith in herself to believe that, there was no point going on. Everything she had gone through, her fight to survive since Alison had been struck down, would have been for nothing.
Darkness suddenly embraced her.
Lisa automatically closed her eyes, almost feeling the cloud engulf her. Then she caught her elbow a glancing but painful blow. Her eyes opened and, heartened that she could still feel pain in this place, she saw that she had left the sunless light behind for the shadowy realm of the woods. Her pace slowed to a jog but she did not dare stop even long enough to catch her breath. While it was hard not to feel safer here, she knew from bitter personal experience that the forest was no place of sanctuary. The black cloud, the King of all the dead, whatever the fuck it was, could reach in to reduce her to a mangled bloody mess in the space of a heartbeat.
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