by Mark Roberts
‘It’s probably some student prank,’ said Eddie as they hurried onto White’s corridor. Silence from each door they passed. They came to the end of the corridor and from behind White’s door heard an erratic rhythm.
Eddie turned the dimmer switch up and George raised the flap on the observation panel.
‘Oh my Jesus!’ said George as Eddie opened the door. ‘Call for help, Eddie.’
As Eddie took out his phone, George hurried inside White’s room.
On the floor, in the space between the bed and the table, White lay on his back, his limbs thrashing, sweat pouring from him and his open mouth rimmed with thick white foam.
‘Adrian White, it’s George Green, on-duty nurse.’ George dropped to his knees and stuck his fingers inside White’s mouth. The airway was clear of obstacles and he could hear White’s laboured breathing. The nurse found a pulse banging in White’s wrist. ‘You’re having a seizure.’
He placed his hands under White’s head and looked at Eddie’s back, the phone at his ear. He could hear his voice but not the words.
‘Who’s coming, Eddie?’
‘Dr Campbell.’
‘Go find Danny and Tim and get them here before anyone else arrives or we’ll be on a disciplinary for breaching safety protocol.’
George looked at White’s head, his raven-black hair soaked with sweat. As he watched White, he was shocked at the wave of tenderness that washed through him. He looked at White’s face. For a moment, George was reminded of the first boy he’d had a crush on. ‘Adrian. You’re perfectly safe.’
‘You’re not!’
George looked up to Eddie’s voice.
Eddie’s eyes welled with joyful tears and he gazed down at White with the devotion of a pilgrim. George looked at White and saw death in his cold gaze.
‘Shouldn’t have gone in on your own, mate,’ said Eddie. With a swish of his hand, he shut the door.
In a fraction of a moment, five strong fingers grasped the top of George’s skull and slammed him face first into the floor. The weight of Adrian White’s entire body pinned him to the floor.
Stars danced in the blackness inside his head. Shifting zigzags rubbed out the details of his peripheral vision and he felt the remorseless pressure of a large hand around his throat.
Wetness filled George’s ear as White’s tongue probed the cavity.
He lifted George’s face from the floor, pulled his head back high.
George shut his eyes and felt his smashed face crashing towards the ground.
81
00.40 am
53.40 62 68 n, –2. 95 71 78 w
The Bear’s Paw pub overlooked the Liverpool city skyline. It was in the lee of the pub’s exterior back wall that Clay signed her name on three forms and took the Glock 17 pistol from its rectangular case. The sergeant in charge of the police weapons store had waited for her there with the gun and the paperwork.
‘The magazine’s loaded with ten rounds,’ he said.
She could tell this from the weight of the pistol in her hand. She found herself hoping that when – if – she came out of the tunnel again, the Glock 17 would still weigh the same.
‘Eve!’
Clay turned to the sound of Gina Riley’s voice, coming towards her in the company of a small, middle-aged woman, her shape hidden behind a thick coat, a woollen scarf wrapped around her head.
As they came closer, Clay slipped the gun into her coat pocket.
‘This is Shirley Wright, Eve. She’s from the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels.’
‘Thank you for coming out at this hour and for making it here so quickly,’ said Clay.
‘Is someone down there?’ asked Shirley.
‘We think so, Shirley. We had a tip-off from... one of the students.’ Clay pointed at the modern apartment block overlooking the pub and the small metal manhole cover nearby. Uniformed officers guarded the entrance and across the road the order to stay indoors was issued to the occupants of a row of Georgian terraced houses.
‘There’s an awful lot of coppers round here...’
‘Shirley, I don’t mean to be rude, but I haven’t got a moment to spare. If I get into the tunnel through that covered shaft, how many ways out are there?’
‘I don’t know. We’re finding new entrances and exits all the time.’
‘Suppose I wanted to get out quickly. Where are the nearest bolt holes?’
Shirley pointed. ‘There are several potential exits. Grove Street. Mason Street. Smithdown Lane. Elm Grove. One hundred to two hundred metres from here.’
Clay reached inside her coat pocket and unfolded a map of the Williamson Tunnels. She pointed at an irregular quadrilateral of linked-up tunnels beneath their feet, its shape all too similar to that of the interlinked corpses of Hanif Patel and, his mother and daughter.
‘What do I watch out for down there?’ asked Clay.
‘It’ll be very wet down there. The floor will be slippery. It was used as a communal dump for the best part of two hundred years. A lot of debris has been cleared but there’s still all kinds that hasn’t been cleared. How are you in the dark?’
‘I’m used to it,’ said Clay.
‘There are sets of winding stairs, some old stone, some modern metal. They’ll take you down to the fourth level.’
‘How far down?’
‘Eleven metres. You’ll be on the corner there.’ She pointed to the map at the bottom left corner of the irregular quadrilateral.
‘Thank you.’
Clay walked towards the manhole cover.
Hendricks and Stone raised it in a single lift.
Clay didn’t look at either of them but instead stared down into the subterranean darkness. She turned and stepped onto the top rung of the ladder, pointed her torch into the black pit.
‘Keep the lid off,’ said Clay, beginning her descent. ‘Listen out. If you hear screaming, get down there as quickly as you can.’
82
00.44 am
Clay reached the bottom of the final metal staircase. Apart from the light of the torch in her hand, she was in complete darkness.
She turned and, torch in hand, explored the curved ceiling and straight wet sandstone walls of the tunnel.
Drip drip.
She listened to the double drip of water falling from the ceiling.
Drip drip.
Click click, she thought.
The wet clicking of their mouths mimicked by the action of water underground.
She walked forward, grasping her pistol and flicking the beam of her torch from the ground to the space ahead of her. The light picked out the entrances to smaller tunnels on either side of her.
She stopped and listened. The acoustics made the dripping water echo. There was no sign of life. Her heart banged against her chest and the blood pumped inside her ears.
She carried on, glancing over her shoulder at the shadows pressing down on her back. She considered calling out to the Red Cloud but dismissed the idea.
The place smelled of sulphur, of wet sandstone and stale air, and it made the end of her nose sore.
As she trod further into the darkness, adrenaline made her hearing sharper.
Drip drip. Drip drip. There was more than one source. Behind her. Ahead of her. And a sound of soft scratching low down, far away.
She stopped and turned off her torch to maximise her sense of hearing.
In the dark, she was seized by the sense that she was slowly turning upside down. She pressed her feet down hard on the sandstone ground and the sensation sharpened. It was as if the whole tunnel was turning, as if gravity was the only thing that stopped her being tossed around the walls, the ground, the arch of the roof. The turning stopped and Clay felt as if she was hanging upside down. She listened.
Three or four sets of dripping water now, all at different speeds.
And something was coming at her. It travelled along the ground, grinding against the stone as it came nearer and nearer.
She g
ripped her pistol and turned her light on. She was standing upright, feet on the ground, on the spot where she had turned off her torch. What, she wondered, sick at the thought, if the torch hadn’t come on?
Torchlight caught the edge of something spinning towards her through the darkness. It slipped away from her light and, in the micro beat she’d glimpsed it, she couldn’t tell if it was a dead or living thing.
Heat blossomed on her skin.
It was near her feet.
The blood drained to her internal organs, a cold river poured down her spine and her head felt light.
She dragged the beam to her right and saw an old china plate spinning on the ground, falling down in decreasing circles before finally tottering to a dead halt.
Clay poked her light in the direction from which the plate may have come, but there was nothing there. A cold breeze blew in from behind her and when it touched her neck she felt sweat prickling her back.
Something inside her head felt disconnected. Clay paused, questioned herself, realised that all sense of time had deserted her. She didn’t know how long she’d been down in the tunnel.
To her right, at head height, something was coming for her through the fabric of the wall.
She swivelled the torch and picked out a side tunnel, a square of darkness filling with the noise of a body travelling at speed through the sandstone.
A black rat jumped from the hole into her path, inches from her feet. It looked up at her, its eyes like beads of black blood. She pointed her gun at it. Her ribs tightened. Her lungs and heart felt like they were being compressed into one tight, meaty ball. She looked into the rat’s eyes and saw the eyes of the crow, feeding and watching her from the garden of her home.
Just above the hem of her trousers, a small sharp weight. She turned slowly and saw a grey rat with its front paws resting on her lower left leg. It sniffed her, its nose and whiskers twitching, its little yellow teeth sharp and poised.
She kicked the rat with her right foot, but it hung on tighter, biting into the fabric of her trouser leg. Setting her pistol down, she seized the rodent by the knotty gristle of its tail, tore it away from her leg with a sweep of her arm and smashed its body against the tunnel wall. The light in its visible eye went out and a fine spray of blood hit her cheek.
The rat’s body fell from her hand and she raked the floor with her torch, looking for the pistol.
It wasn’t in the place where she’d put it down.
Panic mounted inside her. An invisible hand clawed her throat as she searched for it. She stumbled slightly. Her toe connected with the body of the pistol and sent it skating across the wet ground, away into the darkness.
She stopped and listened, heard her weapon clatter into a small chasm and drop down into a tunnel below her, even deeper in the earth.
She took the deepest breath she could, held onto it, released it slowly.
Dozens of leaks now dripped into the tunnel and within the chaotic counter-rhythms she briefly heard the wet clicking of human tongues. The dripping continued but the clicking stopped.
From around a corner, seductive pools of yellow light oozed into the darkness. She wondered if fear was making her see things. She turned off her torch to test her senses.
The light was real and rhymed with the candlelight in the Drakes’ loft.
Clay counted her steps as she marched further into the tunnel. She focused on the corner. Her mind became strangely composed, the events of the past minute dissolving with each pace she took. She turned the corner.
Just enough light to make out the shapes of two girls and a woman.
In candlelight, Anais Drake stood over her daughters. Faith and Coral were kneeling. Anais held a metal bar over Coral’s head and was poised to strike.
‘One more second,’ said Anais, ‘and you’d have been one second too late.’
83
1.01 am
Coral Drake’s head was upright, but her eyes were downcast.
Faith’s glassy eyes connected with Clay. The child looked blank, as if she’d left her mind behind in another place. Clay wondered if the version of Faith she’d met at her home on the morning after the Red Cloud had slaughtered the Patels would ever return.
Anais lowered the metal bar.
‘One second?’ said Clay, attracting Coral’s attention. ‘I arrived in the second I chose to arrive in.’
Something stirred inside Coral as the light danced on her eyes, but Clay couldn’t tell if it was defiance or relief at having been pulled back from the point of death.
‘Where’s Maisy?’
‘Where we left her,’ said Anais.
Clay looked at Coral and back at Faith, to Coral and Faith, a pendulum that skipped Anais.
‘You’ve been deceived, Eve. And that’s what’s going to make this so complicated.’
‘Who’s deceived me?’ Still she didn’t look at Anais, just focused on Coral and Faith.
‘Everyone you’ve ever known. Except us. We would never do that to the real you.’
‘Faith and Coral have deceived me. They told me a boy called Jon Pearson stole a mobile phone.’
‘They weren’t speaking to the real you, they were addressing the reality of what you’ve become after the lie you’ve been tricked into living. Their words were part of a wider way of guiding you back to the truth, back to what you truly are.’
‘Why are you kneeling, Coral? Why don’t you get up?’
‘I’m kneeling before you.’
‘Stand up, both of you.’
Coral and Faith obeyed and, in the flickering light and shifting shadows, Anais and her daughters looked like they had just risen from the dead, their dark coats like shrouds.
‘Do you know who you are, Eve?’ asked Anais.
‘Yes.’
‘Who are you?’
‘The Matriarch.’ Clay’s voice echoed and she challenged the mother with a look of contempt. ‘Eve Clay is the daughter of the one who reigns in darkness. What is Adrian White to you?’
‘The prophet sent to guide us in rescuing you from the bottomless well you’ve fallen into, so that you can fulfil the purpose of your life.’
‘And what is the purpose of my life?’ asked Clay.
‘This is the complication. Look at you. You were meant for greatness. But look at what you’ve become. You don’t even understand why the things that have happened these past three days and nights have happened.’
‘What have I become?’
‘You came here to battle with us. Us, your saviours. You want to catch us and punish us for what we did for you because your whole life has been corrupted into a living lie,’ said Anais.
‘How are you my saviours?’
‘Everything we have done has been to save you.’
‘The murder of families in their own homes was done to save me?’
‘We’d do anything to get your attention, Eve. And that’s what we did. We took what you have become and we used it to help save you, to guide you to what you are. We wove ourselves into the fabric of what passes for your life and made you chase after us. But you weren’t just chasing after us, Eve, were you? Think about it...’
She heard little Adie’s voice inside her head, words that made her brain feel like it was turning to liquid and spurting from her ears.
‘I am only part human. You are talking to and you are talking about the part of me that is human. Tell me about the part that is not human.’
‘You know so much, yet you understand so little. You can read the writing of the prophet. You have spoken with Adie. You have seen the altar in the sanctum. And yet, you are lost.’
‘Tell me about the part of me that is not human.’
Above her head, in the space above the tunnel’s arched ceiling, the sound of footsteps. Clay wondered if she was imagining it, but the sound was clear. It felt like electrical waves were coursing to the extremities of her body.
‘Tell me about the part of me that is not human.’
‘Not here. Drop your torch, drop the part of you that rejects the darkness, as a tiny gesture of faith, faith in we who have so much absolute faith in what you must become. Drop your torch.’
She tossed it around the corner, a marker for anyone who might come looking for her corpse. She pointed at the candles. ‘You too have rejected the darkness.’
With a single, practised breath each, Coral and Faith stooped and blew out the candles.
‘No. They were for your benefit. For the corrupted you.’
Smoke curled in the darkness.
‘This is what we accept. This is what we see. This is what you truly are.’
Clay felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘Reach out and do the same,’ said Coral.
Clay stretched her hand out and rested it on Faith’s shoulder.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to ask you to perform another act of faith, a bigger one, a better one. One that will show us that you are prepared to join us and fulfil yourself. If you can’t do that, we will kill you. Walk.’
Clay stepped forwards in complete blindness, her hand sitting firmly on Faith’s tiny shoulder.
‘Keep moving as one flesh,’ said Anais, ahead of Faith. ‘When you have performed the act of faith, we will know that you can never go back to your old life, to the hideous lie. When you perform the act of faith, I will tell you everything about the part of you that is not human.’
Above her head, above the sound of their own echoing footsteps, Clay heard the footsteps above the arch. This is what it must be like in hell, she thought. Walking deeper into darkness with the sound of yourself around you and, above, the sound of other lost souls performing the same eternal punishment.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Going. Going. Going...’
But when the echo of her voice died, there was only one response.
Footsteps.
84
1.15 am
Gina Riley stared down at the entrance to the dark hole that Eve Clay had descended into and was unable to take her eyes off it. To look away would feel like an act of betrayal and cowardice.