There was a short pause, and Steven was about to leave when the policeman spoke again. All this time he hadn't sat up or shifted, barely moved other than to turn his head in Steven's direction.
"Funny thing, Tom, isn't it?"
"What is?" Steven pulled his head back a little, wary.
"I could swear I've seen you before, not long ago." Steven could see the peaked cap shaking slightly, as if the policeman were laughing at him. "I find that happens more and more these passing days."
"I don't think you have." Steven wanted to leave.
"I'm not entirely certain." The policeman paused again. "Faces all seem to bleed together, don't you think? Faces on phones, on screens, on emails and photos and video clips. You start forgetting we've got them on the fronts of our heads."
"Maybe." Steven hovered, nearly falling off the edge of the kerb. The wind wasn't giving an inch, but he had a nasty feeling the police would make things difficult for you if you tried to walk away from them.
There was something long and thin sitting in the back seat of the car. Steven couldn't make out any other features.
"Makes our job easier and harder," said the policeman. "Everyone's got public and private faces, and sometimes you can't tell the difference." He was starting to sound a little older, and Steven pictured a grey-haired man with a long-lined face, nearing retirement.
"It's not that big a change, man," he said, leaning on the car door. "People have always gossiped."
"Did they record it in the past?" The man was sounding less like a police officer every minute. "Did they carve their rumours in clay, or scribe them on parchments? Your kind of gossip has a new permanence, Tom, and your life will follow you around for years where once it might have faded."
"Maybe," Steven said, feeling uncomfortable, "but who's going to care? There's too many people doing the same." It was too late for this kind of conversation, too cold, and the uncomfortable feelings from outside Jessica's were coming back to him.
"Makes little difference to me." The police officer laughed, a noise that sounded as though it had been dredged up. "Out a little late to be calling on friends, aren't you?"
"I work late," Steven said, thrown by the change in topic. He swore at himself for telling the policeman anything more – that was how they worked, coaxing information out of you.
"Play late too, I'll warrant."
Steven was sure that last word had been deliberate.
"Better get yourself home," said the man in the shadows, "before I think of any more questions to ask you."
Steven gave Hazel's house one last glance. No sign of life, and he wondered how long the police car had been sat outside it. Didn't the police normally come in pairs?
"Goodnight, man," he said, and watched the window roll up.
Steven's own house was equally dark when he reached it, and the living room turned out to contain an empty sofa and Tom's abandoned laptop. Steven checked his housemate's room on the off chance Tom had broken the habits of a lifetime and actually gone to bed, then sent him a message: "Hey man, why didn't you invite me?"
He left the living room light on, trying to make the place feel less empty. It flickered again, and Steven remembered what Tom had said earlier about patterns. Nothing was working properly any more – not his friends, his job, or even the electrics.
Sod the lot of them. He headed upstairs.
The stair carpet was loose in a couple of places, and though Steven normally stepped over them without thinking he was tired beyond memory tonight, and nearly fell. Serve them all right if he did fall, break his neck. Pretty picture he'd make all twisted up at the bottom of the stairs.
Steven reached the landing, and a gust of cold air roared down the passage. Someone had left a window open, and he grumbled along to the bathroom to shut it. The bathroom light wasn't working properly either – it came on, but too dim to be of any use, serving only to show the mould crusting around the edges of the tiles.
Steven brushed his teeth and squinted in the mirror. The light had made his face an unhealthy yellow, and his head ached. He splashed cold water on his forehead, drank some out of his cupped hands. The wind was scratching at the windowpanes, trying to force its way back in, and Steven shut the bathroom door as well on his way out.
Tom hadn't answered.
There wasn't anything left to be awake for. Steven headed to his own room, kicked his shoes off and left them by the door. His light at least was working properly, and he drew the curtains and tried to shut the night and weather out as completely as possible.
Undressing seemed too much like work. Steven slumped backwards on his bed and lay on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling. The light was getting in his eyes – it swung bare-bulbed from the ceiling, never shaded since they'd moved in – but he didn't fancy lying in the dark. Images from the day before kept popping into his head, unsorted memories swirling like water round a plughole. That man with the flapping hat was at the centre of them, his wire-thin hands and long pointed feet.
He'd never sleep with his brain whirring away like this. Steven made himself stare at the ceiling, count the cracks in the plaster and the shadows in the corners of the room. His back itched, and he shifted uncomfortably on the blanket. There was something lumpy underneath the covers, digging into his neck and shoulder blades.
Steven sat up, and spots danced in front of his eyes. He'd been nearer sleep than he'd thought. Groaning, he pulled the covers back and found the offending object – his pyjamas from the morning, crumpled into a warm ball.
With the bed open, it seemed easier to climb inside and pull the blankets back over. Steven was immediately too warm in his jeans, and struggled out of them without lifting the blankets, pushing them to the bottom of the bed. They poked discontentedly against the soles of his feet, but he was too bone-tired to do anything more about them.
That light. It filled the world up, crept under his eyelids every time he tried to close them. Steven began to wish he'd turned it off after all, but doing that would mean getting up a second time, and his limbs were already settling into the kind of comfortable torpor that meant real sleep. Sleep would fix everything.
His stomach gurgled. He hadn't eaten all evening, and there was an acid taste in his mouth. Steven rolled on his side and tried to block it out, block out light and memories and people and focus on sleep just sleep, quiet and darkness and warm safe sheets.
It was no good. He kept coming right to the edge of dropping off, but every time he did that light would pull him back again.
Muttering swearwords into his pillow, Steven arched his back, stretched his legs, and laboriously prised himself back upright. The light switch was over by the door, impossibly far away.
It was freezing in the bedroom compared to being under the covers, and his feet complained as soon as they hit the carpet. Steven shivered and stood up, and nearly lost his balance. His head was swimming, and the spots in his eyes were back with reinforcements.
He took a step forward, wobbling. Acid rolled over his tongue, and Steven spat it onto the carpet. Didn't matter.
His vision was still hazy, but the light switch was dead centre. A target. Steven took another step, a third, and his feet tried to go in opposite directions. He leaned on the edge of the bed to steady himself, feeling like he wanted to be sick. This couldn't just be tiredness.
The spots before his eyes were brighter, and they hurt. Steven sat down on the end of the bed and waited for the room to stay still. He must be sick, and that meant he needed to be back in bed and he would be as soon as that stupid light was sorted out.
Back on his feet. Step forward. Steven lifted his front leg again and this time he did fall, seeing the floor come towards him in slow motion. His arms windmilled and he managed to stagger against the wall, sliding down the wallpaper until he sat in a miserable pile on the carpet.
The switch was just above him, a little way to the side. Out of reach from down here. The acid was back in his mouth and Steven coughed, retched, wished he c
ould pass out right here despite the cold.
Teeth gritted he gathered his legs under him and powered upwards, managing to land one hand on the light switch and press and – yes – the room finally went dark.
Steven sat back down on the carpet, wrapping his arms around his knees. He found himself starting to shiver, and remembered he was only protected by t-shirt and pants. He couldn't stay out here.
No point trying to walk. Steven crawled across the carpet and felt his way onto the bed, jack-knifing himself over the lip and back onto the mattress. He took hold of the blankets with trembling fingers and buried himself.
The bed had cooled down, and he curled into a ball, trying to preserve what little heat he had left. The room still seemed to be moving even now he was lying down, and Steven felt something warm trickling down the side of his face. He ran his fingers over his ear and found it sticky and damp.
The light was still on.
Had he turned it off, or had he fallen asleep for a few moments and confused himself? Steven was sure he remembered getting up to the switch but there it was, undeniable, the naked bulb burning like a new sun.
This time he'd make sure of it. Steven heaved himself back upright, hissing pain between his teeth, and felt for the carpet with his bare toes.
The switch was only a few steps away, a second across the room, but the gulf between him and it seemed like years. He could swear his bedroom had become a hallway, stretched itself behind his back.
One step, one stumble. Cold wall on his hands. There. He scrabbled sideways, found the switch, plunged the room into freezing darkness.
Back to the bed. Steven fell onto it with full force, banging his knee on the side of the frame. He lay face-down, nuzzling into the pillow, and searched for the edge of the blankets with his hands.
There was red in front of his eyes, spotting the cotton surface. Something wet was against his cheek. Steven pulled himself up a little and saw a drip fall from the side of his head, soaking into the pillow. He was bleeding and his ear stung and the back of his throat was raw.
He shouldn't be able to see the pillow or the colours.
The light was on.
Steven bit the pillow, feeling the unpleasant dryness of it against his tongue. He was awake. He had always been awake. Kicking to find purchase on the mattress, he rolled painfully over and sat back up, squinting at the stark-lit room.
At first glance, everything looked the way it should. He could see his chair with clothes hung haphazardly over the back, the half-open wardrobe, the shelves full of old CDs and empty cardboard boxes. Nothing seemed out of place, except for the light.
There was a bulge at the foot of his bed where he remembered leaving his jeans under the blankets. Steven stared at it, feeling his head swim, the back of his tongue burn.
Now that he looked again, the bedclothes were bulging too sharply to just be the jeans, no matter how screwed up they were. There had to be something else under there, if not under the blankets then at the foot of the bed itself, breaking the neat line that should be formed by the base of the mattress.
He looked a third time, and it wasn't a lump in the blanket but something standing behind it, so indistinct as to confuse him the moment before. It wasn't part of the bed at all and stood about half a foot higher than the mattress did. Steven squinted, but no matter how he focused he couldn't work out what he was looking at – it remained an anomaly, a blankness in the otherwise-familiar landscape of his room.
Whatever the shape was it was moving, shifting slightly around the edges. Steven scrabbled his way upright, feeling the wall at his back, and found his breath coming hard and fast. The blankets had tangled around his legs and he didn't feel confident of his feet enough to rise, but he wanted to stay as far from the shape as possible.
It was completely black. He could begin to make out some things about it now, a hunch and a splaying of limbs. The blood was still trickling down his face, and Steven was filled with the idea that he would die here, trapped in the corner of his own bed. His body wouldn't obey him but he could move his head and neck, and he rocked himself frantically from side to side.
A shadow. That's what was stood at the foot of his bed, a shadow, but somehow cast on air instead of solid surface. It was bent over as if kneeling on the floor, and despite its utter lack of features Steven knew it was looking at him.
But if it was a shadow –
– then where –
– where was the thing that cast it?
The light wasn't in the middle of the ceiling but towards the window, almost behind the bed, and that meant anything casting a shadow where that shadow was had to be stood right beside –
Steven felt a whisper of air against his ear.
A breath.
He tried to –
Nine
Tom had lost most of the night before. He remembered meeting Donald and Lynette in Blackjacks and the awkward silences that followed, but after that there were only scattered moments left to him – a ring of shots set out on the table like landing marks, Lynette's face when he tried to hug her, Patrick cornering them and rambling on about strange men following him home.
Now it was morning. His face was stuck to the cover of his laptop, which turned out to have been acting as a pillow. The curtains were wide open, and the room stank of old food and bad air. Tom climbed off the sofa, rubbing his eyes, and opened the window.
He checked his phone to find Steven's whiny text from last night, and a message from Lynette telling him never to speak to her again, even in company. Tom deleted them both, sniggering.
Checking upstairs, he could see Steven's door was shut tight. Better to let the idiot sleep his misery off.
The landing light wasn't working – when Tom flicked the switch it stayed dark, bulb dead. He headed back down to find something to drink. His tongue had gone sticky, and there was a gaping void in his midriff. Water didn't do anything to fix it, so he opened the fridge and was confronted by empty packets and stale fruit.
Nothing left to eat. He'd have to go out, and Tom's stomach crawled at the prospect.
His phone cried, and Tom found an anonymous message saying "my light won't go off." Weird. He was used to sending rather than receiving them, but it was probably someone having a laugh.
Wrapping himself in yesterday's hoody, Tom headed out the front door, aiming for the newsagents. The front garden was in a right mess, as if someone had been trying to kick it to pieces. Tom cast his mind back over last night again, but couldn't remember if that someone might have been him. He looked at the footprints in the mud, trying to work out if they matched his trainers.
They didn't. Most of the footprints were so blurred they could have been Tom's or anyone's, but the pair outside the front window were sharp and clear, and didn't even look like human feet. They were half as long again as Tom's own shoes, and tapered to points at the tip.
Tom spent some seconds staring at the prints, then dug out his phone and tried to remember how to take pictures with it. Click. They could just be some animal, but the paranoid side of his brain was already going into overdrive, putting together lighting faults and weird behaviour with these prints and getting –
– it had to be. An encounter. Actual evidence.
A photo wasn't enough. He needed to protect the prints until he could work out a way to make a cast of them. Tom forgot any idea of breakfast and headed back inside the house, brain buzzing with adrenalin. He got the spare blanket off the sofa and weighed it down around the edge with stones, sheltering the trampled flowerbed from any further weather.
That done, he headed back in and booted his laptop up, keeping one eye on the front window in case anyone tried to come into the garden. Tom was a little bit tempted to keep this to himself but that was against the rules – the only way any of them could fight back was by sharing information. One mind was vulnerable, but the many – they were an army. Truth-seekers.
He hunted out the phone cable, eventually finding it stuck behi
nd the cushions, and started to upload the picture. While it processed and converted, Tom checked on his various friends and acquaintances. They wouldn't know the significance, of course, but one of the idiots in this town might have experienced something last night.
Amy still hadn't updated her blog. Tom sent her an anonymous of his own almost by reflex, saying "2 scared 2 cum back online? hahahaha"
He liked to screw up the text that way, make sure no-one guessed it was him.
The photo was up now, and Tom posted it for his networks to see, asking if anyone had seen the same marks before. In the meantime, he had research to do.
Amy took some seconds to remember where she was. The bed beneath her had an unfamiliar give and feel to it, and the only light in the room was a dull square on the wall that might once have been a window. She could hear soft breathing coming from somewhere on the floor, and Amy's skin crawled. She sat bolt upright, gathering the bedding about herself, and saw the long-haired shape propped up in the far corner.
Memories piled into her head like snowflakes.
Her own coat was covering her, because Amy hadn't been able to persuade Jessica to take any of the proper bedding off the window. Jessica had clung to the floor as if it were related to her, and Amy had wound up taking the vacant bed herself once her friend curled up and started snoring.
She checked her phone, and it was after nine already. If she was going to call Cordelia it needed to be soon.
She had one missed call, from work. Hands suddenly sweaty, Amy rang back, and heard Peter's voice after a couple of rings.
"Are you alive, Miss Nash?" he asked. "I tried checking earlier and you did not answer. I was soon going to call the hospital, but here you are."
"I'm okay," Amy croaked, finding she didn't need to change her voice. "I'm really sorry but I'm still ill. I think I'll be able to come in tomorrow?"
"Here is hoping." Peter Urbas sounded less sympathetic than yesterday. "I wish you a speedy recovery, but I must get back to the shop, especially now we are so short-handed."
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