Michael grimaced. The tension in his stomach mounted, and he felt acidic burning rising up his throat. Stress. He knew the signs well.
"It's probably nothing," he said, though his tone was not as reassuring as he'd hoped. "Just means we'll have to go through Glenda, that's all. Let’s hope she remembers how to use the radio."
He turned back toward the car, only about thirty feet away yet almost obscured by the gathering fog.
Before he could take a step toward it, a noise stopped him dead. A noise that froze his muscles and turned his blood to ice.
Somewhere, somewhere very close, a man was screaming.
*
It was 10am by the time Rachel reached her parent's house, the exertions of the walk and heaving the suitcase through the streets leaving an uncomfortable sheen of sweat under her coat that only made her colder as the freezing morning air hit it.
She had only seen a couple of people on the way, shuffling through the streets, huddled in heavy coats that looked warm and made her envious. She thought it odd that the town was so quiet – ordinarily you could rely on bumping into small groups of people nattering on street corners, curious as to who was out and about that day – but the cold and the fog had apparently proven uninviting to all but the hardiest souls.
Rachel was grateful for that. The worst part of having to walk home from the station was the thought that she would encounter familiar faces, most of whom would no doubt greet her with a big plastic smile and probing questions about just why she had returned. She had been spared that, at least, though she knew the escape was only temporary. The questions would come.
If anything the fog was getting heavier as morning meandered toward midday. Standing at the gate to her parent's driveway, Rachel couldn't remember ever seeing it so thick. From where she stood, the house was a barely discernible mass; a suggestion of a presence. Something to do with global warming, she supposed. The news had been full of odd weather phenomena over the past year, and one way or another the explanation was always the same: we are driving too much and recycling too little.
Rachel couldn't argue with that, but it certainly seemed a little odd to suggest that global warming was suddenly responsible for a year of earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis, and even one day during which six inches of snow had fallen on the north of England despite June being only a few days around the corner. It was as if the planet had suddenly decided that it had had enough of mankind, and was doing its level best to make life hell for humans.
She pushed open the gate and stepped past her father's van. At least he had been true to his word and taken a day off work, even if he hadn't remembered to come and pick his only daughter up at the station. As she headed for the door, she paid no attention to the little post that her mother occasionally tied Sniffer to when she deemed his behaviour unacceptable.
Didn't see the cord hanging limply from it, the end frayed as though it had been chewed through.
Reaching the front door, Rachel rang the doorbell, figuring that it would be quicker than rooting through her handbag to find her keys, and relishing the look of surprise on the face of whoever answered, no doubt expecting to be greeted by the postman rather than her.
The bell chimed through the house and was met with silence. After a few seconds Rachel depressed the button again and frowned. This didn't seem right. A shiver ran through her again. Suddenly, something about the house; the town; the impenetrable fog, just didn't seem right. She had the unnerving feeling that something was watching her and all of a sudden, standing with her back to the street, she felt exposed and vulnerable.
Why aren't they answering?
Her mother was quite likely to be out, making her morning rounds, her keen appetite for any and every morsel of gossip in the town as insatiable as ever, but if Dad was not at work – and he clearly wasn't – he would definitely be in the house. His role as the town's pre-eminent (only) baker was draining, and he often worked twelve-hour days. When he wasn't rolling out dough next to red-hot ovens, he was slumped on the couch, feet propped on the low coffee table, dozing his way through hours of Sky Sports News.
Feeling uneasy, Rachel quickly slung her handbag off her shoulder, unzipped it and located her keys. For a brief moment she wondered if her key would work; if for some reason the locks had been changed, and almost laughed in relief when the key slid into the lock easily and the door swung open.
Inside, the house was silent and still.
Rachel stepped inside, shutting the door behind her softly. She realised, as the door closed with a snick that she had been unconsciously trying to make no noise, as though something might hear her approaching.
She stood for a moment, frozen, listening. Nothing. What on earth was making her so damn jumpy?
“You're being ridiculous, Rachel,” she suddenly said aloud. “Hello? Anyone home? Cold offspring here in need of a hot cuppa!”
There was no response. Rachel filled her lungs with air and hollered. “Mum? Dad?”
For some reason she could not quite identify, Rachel felt overpowering reluctance to venture further into the house. Fantastic scenarios played out in her mind, images of finding her parents murdered, or tied up and gagged in the bedroom, a masked intruder holding a blade to their throats. After a moment, she shook her head irritably. This is St. Davids, she told herself, not London. That sort of thing does not happen here.
Still she found herself rooted to the spot. Lifting her phone from her pocket, she turned on the display and navigated to her text messages, hoping to spot one that she had missed. Something from her father, telling her that she'd have to let herself in.
There was nothing. Just a message received a couple of hours earlier from her brother Jason, informing her that he would arrive a little while after her, and that he was looking forward to seeing Mum's face when she heard that Rachel was jobless and homeless. Punctuated by a smiley face. Bastard.
Just seeing the message brought a slight grin to her lips, and restored some semblance of normality to the morning. Suddenly Rachel felt silly, and a little ashamed to find herself so unnerved by nothing. Her parents were probably at the store picking up a few last-minute items for her visit. They loved to stock up on her old favourites whenever she returned home for a weekend, invariably buying enough food to sustain a small army, as though they were somehow concerned that she forgot to eat when she returned to live her own life.
My old life, now, Rachel thought sadly.
She shrugged off her coat, finding the house as cold as the streets had been. The heating had not been turned on. Maybe they had forgotten that she was coming home today after all. She grinned, thinking of the look on their faces when they returned home to find her waiting for them. Mum, in particular, would be mortified at the oversight.
The house was small, and with a typically mundane layout: two front rooms – a small living room now dominated by her father's prized possession: a gigantic flat screen television.
Opposite that room, on the other side of the entrance hallway, an equally sized room that for a while her mother had tried in vain to turn into a dining room (until she finally gave up the losing battle against eating in front of the TV) but which was now little more than a storage room.
At the back of the house, a large kitchen. This was Mum's territory. Dad baked for a living, and wanted nothing to do with ovens or ingredients when he was at home, and that was just the way Mum liked it. The kitchen was her kingdom, and she ruled it with an iron fist. Spotlessly clean. A place for everything and everything in its place.
Rachel peeked into the living room as she passed, just in case Dad was to be found fast asleep on the sofa. Empty. The door to her right was open, but she only gave the dining room a cursory glance. As expected, it too was empty, unless you counted the boxes of ornaments and old electrical equipment that her parents stored there, unable or unwilling to consign them to history and the rubbish dump.
Access to the kitchen was through an open-plan archway at the end of the
entrance hall, directly opposite the front door. Rachel stepped to it, her only thought now: to get the kettle boiling and get some tea, a warm mug to clasp in her painfully frozen fingers. As she reached the arch, the reason for the temperature in the house became clear: the back door stood ajar.
Rachel's brow furrowed. Her parents were surely not out in town after all. No way would her mother leave the house and forget to lock up the door to her beloved kitchen.
The reason for the mysteriously empty house was suddenly clear, and ordinary enough to make Rachel's cheeks burn with embarrassment at her earlier feelings of panic: Dad was in the shed. Of course.
Rachel stepped past the island counter in the middle of the kitchen and leaned out of the back door, shivering as the temperature outside chilled her even further.
The garden was about thirty feet long and fairly narrow. The far left corner held a small shed.
“Dad!” Rachel yelled. “You want some tea? I'm boiling the kettle!”
No answer. The door to the shed was shut. He probably couldn't hear her.
Rachel turned around to grab the kettle.
And screamed.
The island in the middle of the kitchen had hidden it from her view, the thing which turned her world upside down. The thing that brought the panic back, a great wave of it making her heart hammer against her ribs.
The blood.
*
The scream hit Michael like an infection, winding round his intestines and squeezing, making his already frayed nerves howl.
The noise was terrible. High pitched, it sounded almost inhuman; an animal shriek. Michael clenched his fingers, digging his nails into his palm, struggling to resist the overwhelming urge to clap his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut.
The scream seemed to go on forever, rising in pitch, seemingly bouncing off the fog and multiplying until it was the world, filling his head, enveloping him in rolling, crashing terror.
It was the kind of noise that Michael imagined men had made hundreds of years before, in the days when battles were fought up close and personal, and the death of your enemy was a warm liquid that spilled over your hands. A noise that might have been designed to instil terror.
Carl staggered backward in surprise, and pressed his palms to his ears, his expression a cocktail of pain and mortal fear.
Michael persisted. The noise was human, or at least had been human when it started. What could drive a man to unleash such a noise he did not know nor did he want to speculate, but he had to know where it came from.
Close by, that was for certain. Given the volume almost certainly within fifty yards.
Danger close by. But in which direction?
Michael craned his neck left and right, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.
The scream wound down as though powered by failing batteries, and the resulting silence roared in Michael's ears. The effect was somehow even more insidious, even more unsettling, in a way he couldn't quite identify.
Carl uncovered his ears and stared at Michael, eyes wide. When he spoke his voice was a whisper, almost reverent.
"What the hell was that?"
Michael shook his head wordlessly. For the moment the more important question was where the hideous noise had come from. He cocked his head, listening intently.
The reason for his increasing unease hit him like the absence of pain.
A few years earlier Michael had wrenched his back, slipping a disc in the process. He hadn't been doing anything in particular, bending down to pick up a dropped pen. Just one of those times when the human body rebels, reminding its owner to pay a little more attention.
The pain: excruciating; all-encompassing, had been his travelling companion for a couple of weeks, riding roughly on his every action. It had taken mere minutes to acclimatise to the fact that the pain was now the dominant force in his life, so constant were its nagging reminders.
And then one morning Michael had woken up, left his bed, made some coffee and had breakfast, and was halfway through a shower when suddenly he realised that the pain had departed. All that time spent focusing on something only to find that one day it had slipped out of the back door, unnoticed.
The silence was like that. It crept around his consciousness for a while before realisation dawned. There was no noise. Nothing at all. At the very least the scream should have startled every bird in a radius of half a mile, sending them flapping away into the skies.
But there was nothing. Just the scream, and then the absence. Even the howling wind seemed to have held its breath. The effect was unsettling.
The fog, off which the noise seemed to have bounced and echoed, made it impossible to guess where the scream had come from.
Michael saw Carl open his mouth to speak and raised a hand to hush him, his ears straining to catch any sound.
He suddenly had the unshakeable feeling that somewhere, out there in the trees, wreathed in a blanket of thick fog, something else was listening just as intently, waiting for him to make a sound that would give away his position.
His skin crawled, and for a moment he felt his throat constrict in terror, certain that the painful thudding of his heart must be ringing out into the grey morning like the beat of a kick drum.
Michael held himself frozen for what felt like an age, before reason returned. He had to do something, had to flush out whatever was out there in the woods.
He motioned again to Carl, raising a hand in the universal gesture that said 'wait' and bent down, silently snatching up a pebble from the ground at his feet. It was small, barely weighing anything in his hand, and for a moment he doubted that, when thrown, it would make any sort of noise at all.
Yet if there was something out there, something listening for any sound, something waiting...
Michael's need to do something – anything – took over, and he launched the pebble into the fog to the left of the Café, well away from the tiny car park.
The world kicked back into life as though recovering from a power cut.
The pebble landed with a whimper; a barely audible thud, and suddenly something was crashing through the fog and trees to their left, seemingly oblivious to the branches and undergrowth, tearing toward the noise.
The shape burst from the trees, perhaps thirty feet in front of Carl and Michael, just close enough to make out in the fog. Michael squinted, trying to make out anything beyond the rough silhouette.
It was a man of average size. Alone. Yet there was something unusual about the figure, something awkward about its movements that seemed more animal than human.
The figure paused in roughly the location that Michael had tossed the pebble, head whipping back and forth violently, swinging left and right like a radar dish. Whoever it was, it was quickly apparent that the shape in the fog had not seen the two men standing to its right.
Michael raised a hand again to warn Carl to remain silent.
A beat too late.
"Christ!" Carl cried, his voice choked, "It's Craig Haycock."
Michael felt his stomach drop.
Things happened quickly then.
The silhouette's head whipped in the direction of Carl’s voice, and with lightning speed the figure sprinted toward them. Michael had an instant to take in the man's features, his mind recoiling in horror. Haycock's chest was drenched, black with blood, but his face...
Long ragged tears ripped down the man's face, starting at the hairline, ending at the jaw. Tears made by fingernails.
He's ripped his own fucking eyes out.
"The car!" Michael cried, turning and sprinting toward the parking area.
He heard Carl's feet pounding behind him, and the crashing, chaotic footfalls of the eyeless, bloodied man. Getting closer.
Michael reached the car first, yanking open the passenger door and diving inside, his hip landing painfully on the handbrake. Even as the pain blossomed he heard the scream, a gurgling yelp of pure terror, and knew his partner hadn't made it.
Michael turned t
o see Carl stagger to one knee, Craig Haycock hanging from his neck, teeth buried into the big man's shoulder, blood washing over the smaller man's jaw.
For a moment Michael felt like he was watching one of those incredible BBC nature documentaries; watching in slow motion as some fierce creature, all teeth and claws, brought down its much larger prey through force of will and relentless animal aggression.
Carl tried to haul himself back to his feet, took another half step, unable to shake the smaller figure away, and then went down hard, his face smashing into the gravel.
Michael slammed the door shut and brought his elbow down on the lock. Outside, Carl moaned, low and bubbling, then fell silent. The silence made Michael's skin crawl almost as much as had the feeble, gurgling cry. He clasped his hands to his temples in horror, shaking his head, hoping to wake from the nightmare.
Outside, he saw Haycock leap to his feet – again that rapid, unnatural motion – his head swinging back and forth and blood oozing down his chin, searching for a sign of where the other part of his meal had gone. Michael felt his mind veering close to breaking point and clapped a hand over his mouth, suddenly afraid that he would not be able to keep himself from screaming.
Wide-eyed, Michael watched as Haycock began to prowl around, searching. Blind, yet terrible and dangerous, stalking about like a caged beast. He was maybe fifteen feet away from the car.
Only a matter of time...
Michael thought about the radio, but knew it was useless. Glenda would provide no help whatsoever, and he did not fancy his chances of surviving long if he had to wait there for backup to arrive. Coming from Haverfordwest, the best case scenario was half an hour. Too long.
Filled with remorse, his eyes welling up with burning tears at the thought of abandoning his partner, Michael took the only decision he had available to him.
Get away. Get help.
Michael reached into his pocket and felt a fresh surge of terror.
Carl had the keys.
Panic Page 5