The Silence

by Tim Lebbon

  He glanced at the book, sighed, flicked on the TV and started surfing the channels, sound muted.

  It had been two long days, working on the new house. Or mansion, more like. The client was a racehorse owner, sixty years old, rich, and readying to retire. A nice guy with lots of interesting stories, he inevitably kept Huw behind for an hour longer than each meeting really needed to be. But Huw really didn’t mind. Max would sometimes pull a bottle of wine from his briefcase, and they’d had more than one boozy late afternoon on the building site that would soon become his luxury home.

  Max was paying Huw’s company almost a million pounds to build the house, so he guessed Max was entitled to own just a little bit of his soul.

  He sighed and reached for the tea. Moving seemed to agitate the air and bring another waft of ammonia. The clock said almost six, his meal was booked for seven, and there was sod all on the box. Maybe he should go for a run. It was a long time since he’d even got as far as slipping on his trainers. There was always a reason not to run, and today that was tiredness. His limbs ached. If motivation was there it was buried deep, and not coming out to play.

  Huw thought of the woman who’d registered him, her welcoming smile, and wondered whether that blouse button had been left open on purpose.

  Kelly sometimes jibed him a little about his frequent spells away from the family home near the town of Usk, in Monmouthshire. They were rarely more than three nights; still, she prodded and poked, never quite serious but, he thought, never completely joking either. She’d ask whether he had his hooker booked for the night, or whether he had a regular fuck buddy in whichever town he was staying in. Huw would go along with it, never taking things too far, and then he’d hug her and say she was the only one for him. And truth was, he completely meant it. After twenty years of marriage, the two of them still loved each other, differently from before but just as deeply. He knew of other guys working away who’d had flings—a regular shag, casual visits, or just a one-off screw in their hotel room with someone they’d met that night and whose second name they’d never know. But that had never been for him. Huw was a family man, and his family always made him look forward to returning home.

  He took a swig of tea and wished he hadn’t.

  Maybe he’d run a bath, relax with a book. Mind made up, he reached for the TV remote, but before turning it off he flipped through a few more channels, a casual habit he’d picked up from Kelly.

  An image caught his eye.

  Several people were gathered around an apparatus of some sort, two of them working hard to turn a handle while a third seemed to be tinkering with a control mechanism. The camera must have been handheld because it was jumpy and uneven. In the background were several tents, lights strung between them, shadowy people dashing back and forth. They were somewhere wild—trees, a starry sky, gnarly terrain.

  It was the looks on their faces that grabbed his attention.

  They were scared.

  “New movie trailer,” Huw muttered. He talked to himself quite a bit, and usually didn’t even notice. But this time he did notice, because he wasn’t quite sure. If this was a trailer, it was incredibly realistic. And graphic.

  The people kept turning the handle, and it was only as Huw saw something glistening and red rising out of the ground that he realised the sound was still muted.

  He hit the sound button and winced as a soul-shattering scream tore through the room.

  “Shit!” Heart pounding, Huw chuckled at how easily he’d been scared. He leaned across the bed and grabbed his mobile phone, glancing quickly at it to check the time. Almost six-fifteen.

  No way they should ever be showing anything like this before the watershed.

  * * *

  I loved spaghetti bolognese. Mum made it from scratch, and it came out differently every time. She enjoyed experimenting. She always said that a recipe was just a guide.

  Parmesan cheese, though. That was always in it.

  Jude sat across the table, and Mum was on my left. She was a graceful woman, someone who wore her middle age with dignity rather than trying to see it away with expensive make-up, hair dye, or denial. I sometimes told her that the grey at her temples—spreading now, from streaks to splashes—made her look somehow super-heroic. Mum laughed at that, and Jude had called her Superchef.

  “Is that all I am to you?” she’d asked him.

  “Yep,” he’d replied. “Where’s pudding?” Well, he was only ten.

  Otis sat with his head on my leg, looking up with sad feed-me eyes. If Dad were here, he’d send Otis to his bed while we ate. He didn’t like the dog begging, but I didn’t mind. Otis always knew when the man of the house was away.

  “Where’s Nan?” I asked. My grandmother was staying for a couple of weeks, and she always ate dinner with us.

  “Having a lie down,” Mum said. “Do you have homework?”

  She was the only person who I found it easy to lip-read. With Dad I had to really concentrate, and with most of my friends I usually only picked up one word in three. Weird.

  “Well, yeah, geography. But that isn’t due in till next week.”

  “You should still do some tonight.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Jude nudged me under the table, his usual sign that he wanted to say something abusive. I glared at him.

  “You smell,” he mouthed. I picked that up well enough.

  “Jude,” our mum said, a soft warning.

  We tucked into the meal. Jude snatched at the loaf of garlic bread in the middle of the table, and I was quick enough to grab some back. It tasted great. My friend Lucy hated when I’d had garlic, and I always made a point to sit closer to her on the bus to school the next day, breathing out of the corner of my mouth. Childish, but it made me laugh. Lots of stuff made me laugh. I was a happy girl, and some people—mostly ignorant, more often than not arseholes—found that difficult to understand.

  A boy once took the piss out of me at school, calling me names he thought I couldn’t see—mong, spazz—and pulling faces behind my back that my friends only told me about later. He was known for being a dickhead, but now he was being a dickhead to me. I’d confronted him and gave him an earful, concentrating hard to make sure those harsh words I used so rarely were well formed, sharp-edged, cutting. Then I’d turned away before he had a chance to respond, so he was left shouting at my back, and I flipped him the bird over my shoulder. The smiles around me had mirrored my own.

  Sometimes, not hearing had its benefits.

  Jude dropped some food, and Otis ducked beneath the table to lick it up. Jude shouted, making a big drama of being knocked off his chair. Mum scowled and said something to him that I didn’t catch. I just carried on eating, looking down at my plate.

  When we’d finished, knives and forks together, Mum dished up a small bowl of ice cream for each of us. I glanced across at Jude to find him staring at me expectantly. Grabbing my attention, he started signing in what I always thought of as the Andrews family dialect, a form of sign language expanded and adapted from what we’d all learned after the accident. My parents had been great with signing, but Jude—barely six years old at the time—had picked it up amazingly quickly, and it was the two of us who’d started coming up with our own altered version. Mum and Dad simply had to follow.

  “Want to play Twenty Questions?” he asked.

  I shrugged, but my brother could tell that I was keen.

  “Okay, you two,” Mum said. “I’ll clear the table this time. Keep it clean!”

  I laughed, and Otis pointed his nose to the ceiling and howled along with us. I remembered what that sounded like—not too loud, a sort of ululating song that was filled with mischief and joy—and apart from my family’s voices, it was the sound I missed the most. I tickled Otis under the chin as Jude asked the first question.

  I won three points to two, but agreed when Jude asked, “Best of seven?” And of course, I let him win. He knew that, and perhaps that was why he celebrated so much more ent
husiastically. We ended up rubbing knuckles into each other’s scalps while Otis jumped around, nudging us with his nose and barking. Mum came in to tell us off, but I averted my eyes. I got in one more good ear-tweak before catching Mum’s eye and stern gaze. I blinked, smiled, shrugged.

  That might have been the last time Jude and I fought together playfully. Like many great milestones it passed without us noticing. Later, I’d reflect upon that meal as the last good time, ever.

  I ran upstairs to my room and the terrible, noisy future.

  * * *

  I loved horror films. Dad had started showing me some of his favourites—The Thing, Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Shining. I liked them, and liked watching them with Dad even more; he enjoyed sharing the films with me. But when he’d told me there were certain movies I wasn’t quite ready to see, I had of course sought them out. Hostel, Saw, and all manner of tie-them-down-and-cut-them-up torture movies, I’d watched them with a feeling of sick interest, but little more. They didn’t really scare me. Sometimes they disgusted me. I thought they were shock films rather than horror films, and had decided that it was much easier to shock than to unsettle or terrify.

  When I walked back into my bedroom, I thought perhaps I’d left one of those movies running on the DVD player. But within seconds I knew that wasn’t the case.

  This was real.

  However realistic the films I watched were supposed to be, I always knew they were made up. It formed a block in my mind, a horror-sink that I was not really aware of until I saw real pain. Some scenes on the late evening news upset me, and I didn’t watch the more extreme stuff my friends watched online: beheadings, car crashes, real-life deaths and murders—I knew that they’d be too much.

  Besides, buried memories of the accident often surfaced at the most unexpected of times.

  It took me a few moments to really register what I was seeing. Something red and meaty hung from a rope, swinging gently as if only just touched. Beyond, a couple of spreads of tent material slumped low to the ground, and on one of them a shape thrashed and lashed out, limbs moving rapidly. It looked like a wind-up toy that had been overwound.

  I blinked and sat on my bed. That’s the place I was watching earlier. The cave was now out of sight, and the camera was still and steady, as if it had been set on a tripod. The lights slung between tent uprights were swinging, agitated, throwing frantic shadows.

  I blinked again, as if to reset. Kept my eyes shut for longer than usual, thinking, What is it that I’m seeing?

  When I looked again, somebody dashed from the cover of trees and tried to get into one of the large tents. Something—a shape in the air, a blot on the screen, perhaps even a ghosted image—followed them across the clearing. When it touched them, they went down.

  My heart was racing, pounding painfully in my chest. I leaned in closer to the screen, but the person was a long way off, hidden in flickering shadows, and moving close merely made their image appear even more pixelated. They seemed to be fighting. Their face was no longer white.

  It was red.

  If this had been a horror film, I would have laughed at the effects. I couldn’t see what was happening. Everything was confused. The thrashing shapes were merely squirming now, as if winding down. The meat continued to swing.

  Something parted from the object hanging from the rope—the object that was, I now had to acknowledge, the remains of one of the cavers. It clung there for a while, a hazy image almost seeming to sprout from the sickening mass of red. Then it spread what looked like leathery wings and flitted quickly out of the picture.

  “Mum,” I said softly. I didn’t like this at all. It was too real.

  The subtitles were still switched on, but there was no one left to speak.

  * * *

  “Fucking hell, fucking hell,” Huw muttered. He was cold. Chills tingled his skin, settling across his damp back, armpits, balls. Whatever this was, it was bloody effective. He hit the remote again and frowned. Discovery Channel. Surely they’d never agree to something like this? It was a science channel. A serious channel. It was November, and Hallowe’en was two weeks ago. “Fucking hell.”

  Several shapes shot up from the bottom of the picture, spiralling and veering off into the trees like large, frightened birds. He turned up the volume until the digital readout on the TV read one hundred, a loud hum filling the room. Something rustled, the sound ending quickly. Something else ran, pounding steps in the distance that ended as quickly as they’d begun.

  More creatures—birds, he assumed, although there was something off about that description—flickered across the screen, one of them hitting one of the upright tents and seeming to disappear inside.

  It was the pauses that convinced him this was real. There were periods of frantic movement, mostly off-screen but audible, and those occasional flickers of life on screen. But it was the quieter times between these events—long moments when there was the gentle swish of leaves in a breeze, the electrical grumble of the TV on full volume, flies and insects buzzing into the camera and making random patterns in that unknown forest clearing—that gave it the true sense of reality.

  That, and the thing on the rope. It reminded him of a lure, a bloody red chunk of meat slung on a rope ready to act as bait. But it wore the shredded remains of clothing.

  “Gotta be a movie.” He spoke aloud to break the dreadful silence, and as if to comfort himself.

  Someone sobbed. The sound was so unexpected that Huw jumped, looking around the piss-stinking hotel room for whoever had sneaked in while he wasn’t looking.

  “I think… they came from there,” the voice said. It was low and scared, but definitely a woman’s voice. “I think—”

  Several shapes burst into movement on the screen. It was as if they’d been hanging, sitting, or floating utterly motionless, invisible in the picture because they were as still as everything else. But when they moved, and the woman screamed, Huw had a second to truly see them.

  Like birds, but pale. Leathery wings. Teeth.

  The picture suddenly changed, spinning, blurring, and then more screaming, loud and piercing, filling the room, so loud that Huw wanted to turn the TV off. But he couldn’t not see.

  The camera fell onto its side, filling most of the picture with long grass. Then something dropped onto the camera, squirming and shuddering as the screaming grew higher, even louder.

  The picture blinked to blackness. The sudden silence was shocking.

  Huw, breathing heavily, snapped up the remote control, lowered the volume, and switched immediately to the news channel.

  “—seeking a majority Conservative government for the next term, and he reiterated his commitment to make Britain a land of opportunity. The opposition leader launched a tirade against the Prime Minister, suggesting that his policies…”

  He muted the volume and watched the news presenter delivering familiar, comfortable news. Nothing horrific, nothing filled with blood and screaming. Politicians baiting each other, business leaders casting warnings, celebrities entering rehab. He giggled. “Fucking hell.” He’d really scared himself there. Stupid.

  He thought once more of running a bath, but it had lost its allure.

  * * *

  “Mum!” I was running downstairs, still full from dinner and vaguely queasy at the thought of what I’d been watching. I’d left the TV on, the scene still playing out, but didn’t want to watch it any more. Not alone. “Mum!”

  Otis sauntered from the living room to the bottom of the staircase. I scratched his head as I pushed past him. Mum and Lynne—my grandmother insisted on us using her first name, and it had long-since stopped being weird—were in the living room, both looking at the doorway as I entered. They smiled, but it was strained. I wasn’t sure why. The television in there was off, and it looked like they’d simply been chatting and drinking tea.

  “Hi, Lynne,” I said, smiling.

  Lynne returned the smile. She was a tall, thin woman, what Dad called prim and p
roper, and her poise often revealed where Mum’s natural grace had come from. But now she just looked weak and tired.

  “What is it?” Mum signed.

  “Something on TV. On the Discovery Channel. It was horrible, people were being killed and… I don’t know, there was blood. In a cave.” I shrugged, not really knowing what else to say. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at the big flatscreen TV on the living-room wall, as if its darkness would be revealed as the image of the cave’s interior. I might be looking at them right now, I thought, immediately troubled at where that idea had come from.

  “Watching another horror film?” Lynne asked. I had to frown and ask her to repeat herself, and Lynne tried to sign the words.

  “No, no, this was on live, Discovery Channel. They don’t show horror films. It was…” I picked up the TV remote and switched it on, scanning across channels. Nothing. “I did see it.”

  “Shouldn’t you have been doing your geography homework?” my mum asked.

  Lynne waved her hand to get my attention, then asked, “What’s the capital of Norway?”

  “Oslo,” I said. “But geography’s a lot more than just that, Nan.”

  Lynne mock-scowled at the use of that term, and I looked at the TV again. The Discovery Channel showed a holding screen of a mountain landscape, with a message along the bottom reading, Sorry for the break in signal, normal service will be resumed soon.

  “Normal service,” I said, thinking of the bloody, swinging thing.

  “Come on,” Mum signed. “You can help me—”

  “Mum!” Jude shouted, rushing into the room. “I was on my iPod… messaged me… thing on now… the news…!”

  I only picked up half of what he said, but he fired the last word at me again in sign language. Our Andrews family signing—teeth bared, hands clawed, eyes rolled back.

  “Monsters.”