Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  We reached the trees, but didn’t dare go near them. We could see now that the reason they were standing at such strange angles was that most of them were right on the cliff-edge, some on the verge of falling over altogether. So we skirted around to the nearest houses. We stood there at the gates and fences of the first street’s back gardens, and started shouting; just to see if there was anyone in there, maybe hiding and waiting. None of us wanted to go in and see.

  Everything was wrong here. The quiet. The fact that there was no one else around. As if everyone had run away. After a while, I was so pissed off with myself for being scared that I marched up to one of the doors and knocked hard. There was no answer. It felt ridiculous. The whole of Edmonville falling apart, and here’s me knocking on a door just as polite as can be. The door was open, and when I pushed inside I could see that the upstairs floor had come down, blocking the passageway with rubble. When I looked back, it seemed that the others had also managed to pull themselves together. Wayne, Damon and Gordon began checking all the other houses, knocking on doors and pushing their way in when the doors were open.

  We tried the telephones, switched on radios, televisions.

  None of the electrical appliances was working. When I found a battery radio, all I could get right across the bands was a continuous crackling of static. No one was broadcasting out there.

  Some of the houses were wrecked, some of them relatively untouched. One of them that I went into was so untouched that it looked just like one of those stories I’d read as a kid. You know, like that ship: The Mary Celeste. There was a meal on the table for four people. Tea still in cups, pots and pans in the kitchen full of dried pasta. I wasn’t in that kitchen long. In fact, I was out of there in double-quick time. You see, the far wall had fallen out, just as neatly as if some builder had come and taken it away brick by brick, just a small patch of plaster dust on the tiled floor, and beyond that missing wall…nothing. Just that empty greyness beyond, which meant that this house, maybe the whole terrace, was balanced right on the edge of the chasm and could go over at any time, just like the church and the bus. When I got back outside, I realised just by looking at the faces of the others that they’d had similar experiences, had all seen that just being in this row of terraced houses was dangerous. And when no one spoke, I knew that they’d not found anyone in there.

  We kept away from the houses as we walked after that. But we kept calling out in the hope that someone might be in them. Christ knew what we expected. Even if we did find other survivors, did we expect that they were somehow going to wave a magic wand and make everything all right again? Maybe we’d stumble across a copper who’d give us directions, tell us where to go and what to do.

  Past the trees and that row of houses was an open area. Beyond the ragged cliff-edge, we could see other crags and peaks of stone with ruined houses and buildings perched on them. We didn’t go near the edge; just shouted over from where we were. I guess the nearest crag was about a hundred yards, the furthest perhaps a quarter-mile. Beyond the last one, nothing but the blank greyness which you couldn’t look at for too long in case it did your head in.

  We walked, and shouted, but there were no replies. I tried to bring up a mental picture of what this part of the town looked like before the disaster; tried to remember what the area was like out there, where the crags and peaks were. What parts of the town had fallen into the pit? Which parts were left? I was having a hard job. Crazy, isn’t it? I must have spent most of my life here, and yet I couldn’t bring to mind exactly what the place looked like. I’d played football with school-friends on streets that had disappeared for ever; had delivered newspapers on streets that no longer existed. But I couldn’t bring the memories of those places back. We rounded a pile of rubble that had once been some kind of civic building and saw a street that suddenly disappeared over the edge. It was bizarre. Houses on either side showed no sign of damage. And then the street suddenly ended, sliced away, the cracked tarmac forming the cliff-edge. A street to nowhere.

  When we finally found a ruined street that I remembered, we came across the first of many dead bodies. A car had been crushed by falling masonry, the windscreen was shattered and splashed red. The driver—a woman—was hanging out of the car door, her blue-patterned dress dyed a different colour now. And when Damon saw what had happened to her face and head, he threw up there and then. I told the others not to look, but how could we not? We followed the line of the cliff-edge as far as we were able, trudging through ruined streets, past shattered buildings and stores. We saw people lying on the cracked tarmac and on the pavements, killed by falling rubble. Kids dead in prams. Bodies that had been smashed and cut up. Arms and legs lying about. Dried, black-red stains. Cars overturned or on their sides. Some still neatly parked and untouched. A garage which had caught fire and burned itself out. I’d known a kid who worked there. But I didn’t go over to look inside the smoking ruins. I could see through the main entrance that there was still a car on a hydraulic lift over the maintenance pit. It had been burned out in the fire. I didn’t suppose that the car owner was going to make a complaint.

  In Jackson Street there was a deep crack in the middle of the road, right where the white line had been. Neat trick. We didn’t cross over to look down. We just kept on going, following the cliff-edge and hoping with each step of the way that maybe we’d hear an ambulance siren or something; see people waving to us, showing us the way to safety. But there were no sounds, no living people, no offers of help.

  We were alone here, stranded on this rock with the dead.

  The real world had gone, and had been replaced by something very like Hell.

  We’d just rounded what was left of Wady Street when the kid with the guitar started to act peculiar. He hadn’t said more than four or five words since we’d first met, and I guessed that it was the shock of everything. Sometimes, as we walked, I’d catch him looking at me with this really serious expression on his face, as if he wanted to tell me something important. But every time I looked, he looked away. Anyway, most of Wady Street was just a ruin, with rubble covering it and only a small path between the ruins on either side to walk through. It looked like those wartime photographs you see. There wasn’t any colour now. It was like the whole place was black and white. There’d been no sign of the sun; just that big, blank grey sky.

  Suddenly, Gordon began to make this moaning sound. I was in the lead, picking my way through the rubble and with the cliff-edge perhaps fifty feet away on our right. Gordon was right behind me, and I turned to see what was wrong. His face looked white and wild. His mouth was shut, but I could see the muscles in his cheeks moving, could see his Adam’s apple going up and down; just like a ventriloquist or something. I started to ask him what was wrong…and he looked at me with staring eyes. Right then I felt that he wanted to speak, maybe even yell something out loud…but he just couldn’t. Instead, he shoved past me and began to clamber and scramble over the rubble.

  “What’s the matter with him?” yelled Wayne.

  I shouted Gordon’s name, but he didn’t turn back. He just kept going. A hundred yards or so over the rubble, he half clambered, half fell over a shattered garden wall and ran across the littered grass towards an end-of-terrace house. Half of the house had collapsed. You could see right inside the rooms from top floor to ground floor, like a cross-section of the place. By the time I’d reached the garden wall, Gordon was doing the next crazy thing.

  He had scrambled halfway up the pile of shattered concrete and house bricks that lay against the side of this half-house and was tearing at the mound; throwing bricks over his shoulder, like he was trying to burrow his way inside. I stood there, watching him, as Wayne and Damon passed. They kept on moving ahead, picking their way over the rubble.

  “Leave him,” said Damon. “He’s cracked.”

  I just looked at them.

  “Gordon!” I shouted. “Come on. We’ve got to keep moving. Find a way off.”

  The guitar on his back was
bouncing and jostling as he clawed frenziedly at the pile.

  “Leave him,” said Wayne.

  Instead, I climbed over the broken wall and walked towards the pile of rubble. Gordon couldn’t hear me. Clouds of concrete and plaster dust were swirling around him in his desperation to get into the pile. I didn’t look back at the other two, but I knew that they’d stopped to watch. I kept calling Gordon’s name. But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear me. Finally, climbing up behind him, I grabbed his shoulder.

  The reaction nearly sent me catapulting backwards.

  Gordon whirled. He looked as if he’d gone mad. His eyes were wide and bloodshot from the dust. His hair had turned grey with it. His teeth were clenched, but he was breathing heavily. He crouched there, glaring at me.

  “All right!” I snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Gordon screwed his eyes shut with effort. Strangled noises were coming out of his mouth.

  “My…my…my…”

  Now he was almost weeping with effort. And that’s when I understood. He was trying to speak, but couldn’t. It wasn’t shock. This was something else. Maybe the kid had a stammer, and the shock had made everything worse.

  “All right,” I said. “Take it easy, Gordon. Tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “My…my…”

  His face was turning purple with exertion.

  “AUNT!” he yelled right into my face. “She’s here! Buried here!”

  Whirling away from me again, he began to claw at the rubble once more. I stumbled back down the pile. So this was where he’d lived? And someone close to him hadn’t been able to get out. I dodged a salvo of bricks and shattered window frame, thrown over his shoulder.

  “Gordon, there’s not much point.”

  If anyone was under there, no way were they coming out of it alive. He either didn’t hear me, or chose to ignore my voice. Whatever, I slithered to the bottom of the rubble mound and watched him continue to pull bricks and wood and chunks of concrete away. Wayne and Damon were sitting on the shattered garden wall.

  “Come and help,” I called to them hopelessly.

  “He’s not the only one!” cried Damon, voice breaking. “I lost…my folks…everything. The street’s just not there any more.”

  “Okay,” I called to Gordon. “I’ll help you. For a while. But listen…LISTEN!”

  Gordon stopped, but didn’t turn to look at me. Never mind, he was listening.

  “Even if someone came to help us,” I went on, “which it seems they’re not…it would take us days to clear this away. Now if she’s…your aunt, yeah?…well, if she’s down there, she won’t be alive. You must know that.”

  Gordon began tearing angrily at the rubble again.

  “Okay, okay!” I snapped. “I’ll help. But listen. After a while, we’ve got to move on. Right?”

  Gordon didn’t answer, but this time when he started again, so did I. Together we slid great chunks of broken masonry and bricks and plasterboard away. I could see that there was blood on his fingers where his fingernails had cracked. I choked and coughed in the dust.

  It was impossible.

  I’d guessed that, after a while, he would appreciate how impossible it was going to be. But he just kept going, even when I slumped back and realised that we were never going to find anyone down there. Maybe it was best for his peace of mind that we didn’t find what was left of his aunt beneath that huge mound. I sat back, choking, and looked at his face. It was blank. No way was he going to give up until he’d burrowed his way to the bottom. And nothing I could say would make him change his mind.

  “Okay,” I said at last. “You do what you have to do. But we’ve got to go on. Find a way off, and find out what’s happened to everyone.”

  Gordon just kept on, pulling away the bricks and the plasterboard.

  “If we find a way, someone will come back for you.”

  I slithered to the bottom and began making my way along the ruins of Wady Street. I didn’t look back, but within a couple of minutes I could hear Wayne and Damon right behind me.

  At the end of the street there used to be a job centre. It was gone now. The place where it used to stand was about fifty feet out from the cliff-edge. There was a crag of rock behind it, still with part of the centre’s carpark on it, a jumble of bushes and a street sign showing that there was a dead end just beyond.

  “No kidding,” I said aloud, and continued to follow the ragged cliff-edge as it swept around in front of me and off to the left, taking the line of what used to be…I think…Jefferson Avenue. The cliff-edge was made up of ragged tarmac now, bordered by a bent and twisted traffic barrier. It looked like the thing had been rammed continually, part of it twisting up into the air, like a miniature rollercoaster rail. There were more of those crazy crags and peaks beyond the edge. Some of them a couple of hundred yards square, with houses and buildings in various stages of collapse on them. Others with flattened, rough areas with nothing but rubble on the top. One of them was about twenty feet square. The grass there was neatly trimmed and cut, and there was a garden outhouse—still intact and sitting nice and neat as you please right in the middle of it. Sweeping down on all sides around it, this gigantic crag of rock stretching all the way down into a darkness that I didn’t want to look at for long. It was just too much for the eyes. I seemed to be drawn to the cliff-edge, and I had this bloody strange feeling that if I got too close, something would make me step over the edge. Then I’d just keep falling and falling into that blackness. For ever. It made me dizzy just thinking about those depths. I shook it off and kept moving.

  There were more bodies. Stuff I don’t want to talk about. I heard Damon moaning at one stage, but he was quiet pretty soon after that.

  An hour later, Wayne suddenly shouted.

  “Look!”

  The shock of his voice nearly made me jump out of my skin. When I looked at him, I saw him pointing ahead. Before I could register what he’d seen, both he and Wayne ran past me; far too close to the cliff-edge for my comfort.

  “They’ve found us!” yelled Damon. “They’ve come for us.”

  “Thank Christ,” I said, and felt this great tiredness come over me.

  I sank to my knees and felt all the bad stuff draining away.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Devastation

  “Something’s wrong,” said Lisa.

  The boy held her hand as they walked, staring up at the blank grey sky. All around them, beyond the cliff-edge on their left, was the awesome drop into the void and the surreal stone peaks and crags that had once been Edmonville.

  “You don’t say,” said Annie with a sour expression. “The world’s fallen apart, we’re stranded and it looks like everyone’s dead or gone. That’s wrong, all right.”

  “No, I mean with her. That woman, Candy.”

  Alex and Candy were up ahead, leading the way, and out of earshot.

  “You mean apart from the fact that she hates her husband’s guts?”

  “She knows something…they both know something. Maybe about what’s happened, or how it’s happened. But I can tell, and it’s tearing them both apart.”

  Up ahead, Alex said: “I don’t know, Candy. I just don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “There must be a way off here.” For the moment, Candy had forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to call her that. “We can’t just be…stranded…like this. It’s not…it’s just not real.”

  “Someone will come. Even if we are cut off. The whole world can’t be…” The word dead caught in his throat and would not come out.

  “We’ve got to tell them,” continued Candy after a while.

  Alex didn’t have to ask what she was talking about. He couldn’t get rid of the images from the previous night. The man in the off-licence store, with the wooden shard in his eye. The exploding black wave that had crashed down the street after them.

  “It didn’t happen,” he said. “It couldn’t have happened.”

>   “What the hell are you talking about? We were both there. We both saw him.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it…” Alex looked quickly over his shoulder, afraid lest those behind should overhear what he was saying. “Maybe it wasn’t an earth tremor, or a ’quake, or whatever. Maybe it was something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an air attack. A bomb, or something like that. Maybe someone somewhere pushed the button at last.”

  “That might explain what’s happened, but not the man or that…that…black…” Candy couldn’t find the words to describe the black torrent that had pursued them.

  “Maybe it was more than just a bomb. Maybe there was some kind of gas attack. Chemical weapons. That fog barrier, the clouds that were all around us last night. That could have been chemical, couldn’t it? I reckon that’s the answer. It didn’t kill us, but it killed all the others.”

  “But Alex,” said Candy. “That man…”

  “The gas! Don’t you see? Maybe it made us hallucinate. See things that weren’t there.”

  “That black…black wave. Alex, that was what killed all those people back there in the community centre.”

  “I don’t know about that part. About the people dying. There was…an explosion, wasn’t there? That’s what did it. A black tidal wave in the middle of the street? Think about it, Candy. How could that happen? Where did it go? It just vanished. That was because it wasn’t there. We imagined it was there. Just like the gas made us imagine the man in the store.”

  “But could we both see and hear the same thing?”

  “It must be that. Can’t you see? Nothing else makes sense.”

  Candy began to nod her head vigorously. It was the only thing that added up. “Maybe…maybe none of this is happening.” When Alex looked across, her eyes were feverish. “Maybe it’s just the gas, the chemicals. Maybe we’ll wake up in a minute…”

  Alex opened his mouth to say that she was hoping for too much. But he forced himself to be silent. Maybe if he prayed hard enough, it would all be a dream.