Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  And then the kitchen door was open.

  Aunt Sheila was there, standing beside the gas cooker and looking at him as if she could hardly understand his rude entrance. She was holding a pan of boiling milk in one hand, and even from here Gordon could see the blue glow of the gas ring on the cooker. Overhead, the ceiling shuddered and another cloud of plaster dust cascaded around her in a talcum-powder shroud. She brushed at it with a ridiculously calm gesture, as if there were a bothersome fly somewhere around her head, and now he knew for sure that this must all be a dream. Why else did she seem so unconcerned? When the ceiling gave another crack, just like the sound in Gordon’s room, he suddenly remembered that his own bedroom was directly above the kitchen. If the ceiling had come down, then it must mean that the kitchen ceiling was also in danger of collapsing. The roaring sound was suddenly louder and nearer, and with a brittle snap the kitchen window suddenly crazed into a jagged glass cobweb. The sound of it seemed to bring the dream into focus a little more clearly, make the danger more real than it ever had been until this moment. Gordon braced himself in the doorway and tried to yell at his aunt that they should get out of the house straight away, that something very bad was happening.

  “Gordon?” admonished his aunt, putting the pan carefully back on to the gas ring even though the entire kitchen was now shaking so much that she had to brace one hand on the wall beside her. Gordon struggled to yell her name, but still could find no words. In a moment he would emerge from this bad dream and everything would be okay.

  And then the ceiling came down on top of his aunt with a deafening roar.

  Something slammed into him at the same moment, throwing him backwards through the door frame and into the passage. Instinctively he covered his head and face with his forearms as he hit the carpeted floor. The impact jerked the breath out of his lungs and whiplashed his neck. Somehow the violent blow had loosened his jaws.

  “Aunt SHEILA!”

  The two words were ejected with his breath; a cry of terror. Gasping for air, moaning in pain, Gordon scrabbled away from the doorway as rubble began to fall towards him. On his feet again, pain and fear seemed to be one enveloping spasm as he clutched at the splintered stair rail and tried to wave the gushing clouds of plaster and concrete dust from his vision.

  “Aunt…”

  The dust choked him. Coughing and gagging, he became aware that the thunderous roar was now somehow muted. Could it be that the rattling vibrations he could feel beneath his feet and in his grip on the staircase were fading? Yes, even now, the shattering roar had become the distant rumbling of a passing thunderstorm, the vibrations now no more than might be caused by a vehicle passing on the street outside. But the passage was still filled with the whirling dust storm as Gordon began to stumble back over the littered carpet to the kitchen doorway.

  “Aunt…Sheila! Are you…”

  Gordon refused to recognise the last moment, the look of bemusement on his aunt’s face as her figure was suddenly obliterated by a tumbling mass of plaster and concrete. He stumbled on the debris underfoot, called her name again…and this time fell forward, clawing at the rubble that now filled the passage. The dust cloud swept past him and began to subside. Gordon could hardly believe what he was looking at, less than three feet from his nose.

  The kitchen doorway was filled with compacted, shattered rubble; from floor to ceiling, in a great wedge of devastated masonry. It had spilled out perhaps six feet into the passage, and he realised now that if he had not been thrown clear he would most certainly have been buried; crushed to death beneath the accumulated devastation that had been the roof, his bedroom floor and the kitchen ceiling.

  Gordon clawed at the unyielding wall before him. He tried to call his aunt’s name once more, but his voice had locked. There was a wild fluttering feeling in his throat, as if every last moment of his daily grief and anger and fear had suddenly come down upon him with this avalanche of masonry. Gordon clawed again, breaking his nails, bloodying his fingers. She was still alive in there, trapped on the other side perhaps. But he was never going to reach her from here. Pushing himself away from the rubble, he twisted back along the corridor to the front door. He tried to yell: “I’m coming. Hold on, I’m coming!” But nothing would come out of his mouth. When he tore open the door and hurtled out into the front garden, he was aware that something wasn’t right out there. There were changes. Frightening changes. Somehow the garden had been ploughed; great chunks of soil and grass had been churned up in the centre of his aunt’s treasured lawn. The garden wall wasn’t there any more. Burglar alarms were sounding from all over the council estate. A great cloud of dust was billowing on his left. But Gordon refused to look at these things, barely took them in as he hurtled around the side of the house towards the back garden. His aunt would probably be out there by now, staggering around to meet him. Gordon grabbed at the brickwork in his flight, swung around…

  …and fell over the pile of rubble that had once been the back wall of the house. He sobbed as pain stabbed in his knees, scrambled back to his feet and swayed there, looking at the devastation.

  Rooted in shock, he couldn’t take in what he was looking at.

  It was as if some giant knife had cut through the middle of the house. He could see a cross-section of the property, open to the air. He could see the loft, and below that his own bedroom, from which he had fled not a minute ago. There was his bed, the headphones still lying on the quilt. It rested on the last remaining section of floor, somehow looking like a bed in a doll’s house. Below the flooring, the upper wall of the kitchen, and then…only rubble. The entire upper half of the house had come down in a sloping avalanche on top of the kitchen, the rubble spilling out across the back garden. The kitchen simply didn’t exist any more. And no one could be alive under that devastation.

  Gordon made no conscious decision. The next moment he was scrambling forward over the rubble; clawing at the bricks, throwing handfuls of debris over his head and behind him.

  “Aunt Sheila!”

  He had no idea how long he had been clawing at the debris, was uncaring about the blood that streamed from his ragged fingertips, before he realised that he must be standing on top of his aunt’s body. Still sobbing, Gordon staggered back from the heap of masonry and collapsed to his knees on the one bare patch of grass in the back garden that hadn’t been covered with masonry. Now, as well as the banshee wailing of all the burglar alarms, Gordon became aware of the other sounds; sounds that until now had been drowned out by his own sobbing.

  The sounds of other people somewhere out there. Wailing and crying.

  Climbing to his feet, dazed, Gordon stumbled over the rubble and around the side of the house to the street. Smoke was billowing from around a corner, and the dust cloud seemed to fill the sky all around him. But he could see no sign of those others who were also giving vent to their grief. When he reached the front of the house, he became aware of the rain on his face and arms. He looked up, but the dust cloud blotted out the sky. As he moved on down the fractured garden path, he could see where the rain was coming from. A gaping fissure had appeared in the main road. Somewhere below, the water main had burst and a geyser of water was rising in a fountain from the crevasse. Pavements on either side of the road had been uprooted and shattered, now glistening in the falling rain.

  Gordon leaned against the garden gate and let the water fall on him.

  Someone would come.

  The devastated street remained empty. There were only the swirling dust clouds, the smoke and the hissing of the fractured water main. And somewhere out there the sounds of multiple, distant voices; weeping and calling out the names of the dead and dying.

  Someone would come and make things right.

  Someone…

  Chapter Five

  The Journal of Jay O’Connor:

  Damon, Wayne and the Crying Kid

  I wasn’t buried.

  But that didn’t stop the terror being any less real. The second shuddering, the
second rumbling and crashing in this black hell-hole, I was later to discover had been a second tremor. I lay there, face down, hands over my head, and I think I began to pray or something. When I heard the voices, I thought maybe my prayers had been answered.

  The ragged light was gone again; everything was pitch black once more. But the voices were definitely there. When I listened more closely, I realised that they weren’t angels sent to pull me out of this place. They weren’t firemen or rescuers shouting encouragement. These were the voices of people who were just as terrified as I was. There were two, maybe three of them; weeping and wailing, and one of them crying for her mother.

  I crawled over the rubble, half expecting the stuff to shift again under me and slide me back into another watery shit-pit. The smell was still bad, but let’s face it, that was the least of my problems. I didn’t know in which direction I was heading. Up, I think. But I couldn’t make any sense of anything down there. Suddenly I heard one of the invisible snuffling voices say:

  “Listen! Someone’s coming.”

  “Oh, thank Christ!” said another. “We’re over HERE!”

  The third voice just kept snuffling and weeping.

  “Don’t!” hissed the first voice. “Don’t shout, or you’ll bring the roof down.”

  “Get us out of here!” The second person didn’t seem to care whether the roof came down or not. “Please, HELP US!”

  “Where are you…?” I seemed to have reached the top of the mound I was on. There was still no light, but the voices seemed very close now, down on the other side.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you…”

  “Don’t thank me for anything,” I groaned. “I’m not here to save you. I’m stuck down here as well.”

  “Don’t joke. I mean, whoever you are, don’t fucking…”

  “Where are you?”

  “Where are you?”

  I clambered over this new ragged barrier of broken masonry and some of it began to slide down the other side. That’s when the third person began to scream at the top of her voice. Maybe she thought that the movement of the rubble was the roof coming down again, after all. The two others began to yell at her, too. Suddenly, the whole of this cramped, underground no-place was filled with screaming. The sound was too much and, yes, I knew that it might make the place fall apart on top of us, but I couldn’t help screaming at them to shut up. We all went mad in there for a while.

  I slid down the other side, and suddenly someone was clawing at my legs, grabbing at me, as if just getting some kind of grip on me would make everything all right again. I couldn’t tell whether they were the hands of a man or a woman. I slapped them away. When I came to rest, there was just the blackness and the sobbing, panting sounds of four people in despair.

  “You’re not a fireman or a policeman,” said a dull, flat voice at last.

  “No.”

  “You haven’t come to rescue us, to get us out of here?”

  “No.”

  “Oh God, we’re all going to die.” The girl began to weep again.

  “What happened?” asked the first voice. “Do you know what happened?”

  I thought back, and everything seemed crystal clear at last. The toilet cubicles. Stafford. The writing on the wall. Everything coming together, focused, as if I were looking down through a magnifying glass and seeing myself pounding all my anger out into the wall. How could I tell them that I had destroyed the school?

  “It was an earthquake, wasn’t it?” said the second voice.

  “We don’t have earthquakes in this country,” said the first.

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Since we can’t even see each other down here, we may as well know who the hell we’re talking to.”

  “Damon. Damon Briggs.”

  “Wayne Shaughnessy.”

  I waited for the girl to stop weeping, or one of the others to tell me her name.

  “Who’s the girl?” I asked at last.

  The other two laughed. It was a desperate sound.

  “Hear that, Paulie?” said the voice called Wayne. “He thinks you’re a girl.”

  “Well, he can bugger off, then, can’t he?” said the weeping voice.

  “His name’s Paul,” said Damon. “He’s only twelve.”

  “I’m Jay O’Connor…”

  “We’re going to die,” said Paul, and began to weep again. “We’re never going to get out of this place.”

  “We’re not going to die,” I said. “Is anybody badly hurt…?”

  “You didn’t see what I saw,” said Paul in his quavery voice. “If you did, you’d know.”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked.

  “We were outside, in the school yard,” began Damon. “When it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “The ground. It began to…well, it began to shake. Not shake, exactly. More like…”

  “More like it just wasn’t solid any more,” continued Wayne. “Like when you’re trying to walk over a trampoline. Everyone just stopped and looked. All the kids in the school yard. Like they were painted into a fucking picture or something. Things got, like, blurred. Everything was shaking, and everything was blurry. The windows in the school building started to crack and fall out. That’s when people started to scream and run. Christ, I saw Jenny Rogers and Philippa standing by the main glass doors when they fell out on top of them. Jesus, there was blood…”

  “And then I thought I saw the main roof cave in,” Damon went on. “I don’t know if that’s what happened. That’s what it sounded like. There was this big roaring sound, like the sea or something.

  “The school bell, the one in the tower. That started to clang like hell, and I thought maybe someone was ringing it for a…well, for a danger signal or something. But then I looked up at the tower, and I saw the whole thing…the tower, I mean…the whole thing just, like, fall apart. Didn’t topple over or nothing, the way you see it on the telly. It just sort of went to pieces. That big fucking bell clanging all the way down.

  “Wayne grabbed my arm then and pulled me to the…”

  “Side entrance. The fire exit. But…”

  “I started screaming at him not to be stupid, we had to get away from the building if everything was collapsing, not run into it, but then…”

  “The school yard,” said Paul in his racked voice. Each word was like a sob. “It…just…cracked open. Pulled apart. Like an earthquake. Big crack. Right…in the middle. It pulled open and kept opening and all the kids were running, but it just got bigger and wider and I could see the tarmac stuff all crumbling and falling into this great big hole and they were running but they couldn’t get away and they…they…fell!” He started to sob then; crying for his mother. The other two rounded on him; not because they were any braver than he was; maybe because they felt if he kept it up they were going to start bawling as well. Truth to tell, I was pretty close to blubbing myself.

  “Shut up, Paulie! You great big fucking baby!”

  “You pathetic little shit! Stop it, or I’ll kick the living…”

  “Leave him alone!” I snapped. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”

  “But which way?” moaned Damon. “We can’t see a thing down here.”

  I began clawing at the rubble in front of me. I didn’t know which way to go, but we couldn’t stay down there. I’d seen light before, so there must be a way out somewhere. We were in another “dip” between piles of rubble. I began to climb the pile on the far side, moving by touch. It was firmer, and didn’t slide underneath me like before. At the top, I could feel air on my face and see a thin, ragged crack of light; just like before. Dim and hazy, but light nonetheless. The sight gave me extra energy. There was a rattling slide of rubble as I heaved myself over the rim and began to slide down on the other side. Behind me, the others were frantically following. They couldn’t have tried to get out earlier, or they would have seen that light before I arrived. I kept my eyes locked on the light, and the next thing I kn
ew I was falling into stinking water again. Terror took over once more. Was I going to be trapped in another rubble-filled pit? The water came up to my waist, but there was solid ground beneath me—and the next moment I catapulted myself out of it, clawing towards the hazy light; yelling back to the others, warning them about the water. Things became a little hazy after that. I remember scrambling through the broken bricks, tearing them away and letting more of the grey light into that stinking place. There was blood on my hands, I remember that. I must have shredded my fingertips as I clawed out of the rubble. There was another rumbling sound, but by then I wasn’t even thinking about what might happen if my frenzy brought the “roof” down. I could hear animal noises. Maybe it was the kids somewhere behind me, trying to catch up. Maybe it was me.

  Fresh air on my face. Cool and clean.

  A space hardly big enough for my head to go through.

  But now I was pushing on through it, my shoulders widening the gap, my legs kicking and thrashing behind me as I squirmed out and up. I could hear the others right behind me. It didn’t matter if I broke my arms and legs getting through the hole. I had found a way out. That was all that mattered.

  For a while, I didn’t have the strength to look around me. I just scrabbled away from the ragged hole, across the mound of rubble; leaving a space for the others to follow. Dust swirled all around me, making me gag and cough. I sat with my head in my hands, clearing my lungs as the dust began to settle.

  The first thing that hit me was the quiet.

  No sounds of crying or people calling out for help.

  No wailing sirens from fire engines or ambulances or police cars.

  Just the sounds of me hawking and spitting and getting my breathing under control.

  When the dust had cleared, I looked up.

  I can still hardly believe what I saw when I looked around.

  Chapter Six

  Annie and Lisa

  In the three years since Femmes Hardware started in business, there had only been three telephone calls from would-be customers assuming that it was a leather-fetish fashion company for lesbian bikers. More often than not, most of Annie and Lisa’s customers were local, or visited after word-of-mouth recommendation. The potential novelty value of two women in their early to mid-forties opening a hardware shop in the middle of town had long since worn off.