Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  Eventually, it seemed like the light was starting to fade. Things were darker now, but when I looked up and around, it was weird. There was just this huge grey blanket all around us; no sign of the sun, or the moon or stars. Night wasn’t falling so much as the blank greyness all around us was deepening. This is difficult to describe, but there was something about it that didn’t seem…well…right. It was going to be our second night stuck here and I knew that the others were feeling the way I did. We didn’t like this idea of the darkness closing in. We needed light.

  When the debris for the beacon was about four feet high and thirty feet wide, we decided that we had enough. Annie and Lisa brought four bright red plastic containers back from the mini-mart, full of barbecue fuel. The boy was clutching a box of matches, but his eyes were still far away. I reckoned he was never coming back. Secretly, I think I envied him. By now, that overall greyness had become so dark that we could barely see each other.

  “Have you noticed?” said Annie, after the barbecue fuel had been poured all over the broken wood and she had taken the box of matches from the boy. I looked at her, realised that the question hadn’t been addressed to us all but to Lisa, who just looked at her as she fumbled with the matches, trying to strike one. Everyone else was standing well back. I don’t think anyone else heard her. “Have you?” They’d obviously started some conversation earlier and I’d just caught the back end.

  Lisa shook her head.

  “No animals,” said Annie simply. “No cats, or dogs…or birds in the sky.”

  The next moment she had struck the match and tossed it on to the pile of wood.

  The pile whumped into life so quickly that it took everyone by surprise, sending a cloud of billowing flame into the air. Everyone staggered back as the fireball rolled and rose into the dark grey. Our shadows leaped gigantically as the entire bonfire erupted before us. That first explosion of fire made me think about the way the community centre had blown apart and all those poor sods had been burned alive. I didn’t look at the others as the first fireball rolled up into the dark greyness, and the pile of wood began to crackle and roar with flame. I didn’t want to see my feelings reflected on their faces. More importantly, I didn’t want to start thinking about what Alex and Candy had said about the black tidal wave that had chased them down the street and what it all meant. What we were doing with the bonfire was the sensible thing, the only thing to do. And I didn’t want to give any kind of head-room to stuff like nerve gas attacks or the possibility that we’d been stranded and ignored; that the authorities just didn’t want to know that there was anyone still alive here. Or, worse still, that if we drew attention to ourselves, someone with their finger still on the button might just decide to finish the job they’d started and blow us all to pieces.

  Smoke began to rise, straight up into the darkness. That’s when I noticed. There was no wind. Never had been any wind these past couple of days, just this stillness.

  “Better get more wood if we want to keep the fire going,” said Alex. “No point in starting a fire if we let it go out.”

  “Right,” I said. “Wayne and Damon, you can help me.” I pointed off behind them, towards the mini-mart. As we walked over there, looking at our long shadows ahead of us, I got to thinking about what Lisa had just said to Annie. No cats, or dogs…or birds in the sky. I don’t know why it spooked me, but it did. It spooked me so much that I thought I could see the shadows of people up ahead in the darkness, shambling towards us from the direction of the mini-mart. But I guessed that it was only our own shadows, somehow being “doubled” by the fire against our backs. Then Damon said: “Look!”

  They weren’t shadows. They were people.

  At first, I refused to believe it. After having my hopes built up so much last time when we thought we were going to be rescued, only to discover that it was Alex and the others coming around to meet us. I wasn’t going to allow myself to believe straight away that, at last, someone had found us.

  Both Damon and Wayne looked back at me as I drew level, as if they wanted me to confirm that they weren’t seeing things. I strode straight ahead past them as the shadows became more solid. Yes, thank God. Someone had come to rescue us.

  But the growing smile on my face was soon wiped away.

  These weren’t rescuers.

  They were survivors, just like us.

  I could tell by the way they were walking. There was a whole line of them moving towards us, and most of them were staggering and shambling. Just like they’d pulled themselves out of the ruins. I turned to look back at Wayne and Damon. They were starting to get excited, believing that rescue had come.

  “Hold it!” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t build up your hopes.”

  I turned back. Yes, I understood now. These survivors had been hiding in the ruins, probably too terrified to show themselves. Maybe they’d even heard us calling when we’d made our search, but were too traumatised or terrified to reply. Now they’d seen the fire, and had emerged thinking that we were the rescuers.

  “Well, where were you all when we wanted to know?” I called to them as they shambled to meet us.

  No one answered. The shadowy figures just came on, most of them with their heads down. Now I could see that most of their clothes were ragged and torn. They were all in pretty bad shape.

  “Hel-lo! Anybody know what’s happening here?”

  One guy was wearing what had once been a white shirt. It was ragged and stained red down the front.

  “Anybody know how we’re going to get out of here?”

  There was something wrong here.

  “Anyone got a tongue?”

  Other shapes were emerging from the darkness, and when I turned to look I could see that there was a whole circle of staggering people, as if they were hemming us in. I could see the face of the man with the stained red shirt, and how that shirt had become stained.

  The man didn’t have a face.

  It was a black-red mass of bloodied muscle and gleaming white bone where the skull beneath was exposed. The woman who staggered next to him had only one arm and perhaps her legs were broken, which would explain why she had difficulty walking.

  “They’re dead,” someone said. “They’re all dead.”

  I realised that it was me who’d spoken.

  I heard Wayne begin moaning behind me, then the sounds of running feet as Damon turned and dashed back to the others.

  A young girl, maybe seven or eight years old, was crawling over the grass. Her legs had been crushed, her long red hair trailing behind from her torn scalp.

  An old man, weaving like a drunk, his face as white as a skull, holding one hand clamped to the open wound which had once been his stomach, keeping his innards from spilling out as he came on towards us.

  There were dozens of them, all forming that moving cordon; and when I looked around I could see that they were hemming us in, the moving line of terrible figures getting tighter, shambling together shoulder to shoulder as they closed in.

  For a moment, I couldn’t move.

  It was as if my brain just refused to accept what I was seeing.

  A man in a leather jacket and with one eye hanging down from its socket on to his cheek raised a hand towards me, beckoning. It seemed to break me out of the nightmare. I turned and ran, grabbing Wayne’s arm as I passed. He too seemed frozen in shock, his mouth open, his face white. I dragged him after me and we raced back to the fire.

  I shouted something to the others about getting out of there, and couldn’t understand why they all had their backs to me, staring off into the darkness in the opposite direction. As I staggered to a halt, I realised what was happening. They were staring at other figures, who were staggering towards us from the opposite direction, and when I looked around I could see that the cordon was all around us now, all around the bonfire and closing in.

  Candy was kneeling on the grass, both hands clamped to her mouth. Lisa, Annie and the boy remained in a tight huddle, watching as the figur
es staggered nearer and nearer. Gordon was holding his guitar like it was a gun or something. Alex was walking in a small circle, not knowing what to do.

  “It’s the gas!” yelled Alex. “We’re hallucinating. This isn’t real. It’s not happening.”

  “They are real!” screamed Wayne, eyes popping. “They ARE!”

  Part of me desperately wanted to believe Alex. After everything we’d all been through these past couple of days, when nothing made any sense at all, it was the nearest thing to an answer. But there was another part of me that couldn’t believe it. We were here, with a fire roaring behind us and the dead closing in on all sides.

  “I want to wake up,” moaned Candy, still kneeling. “Alex, I want to wake up and I want them all to go away.”

  “God,” said Alex, not hearing her. “They’re going to push us back into the fire.”

  Candy began to weep hysterically.

  I suddenly became fully aware of the heat on my back, turned quickly to see that we were only six feet or so from the flames.

  And then the shambling line of corpses, shoulder to shoulder on all sides, suddenly stopped. They were still thirty feet away, right on the periphery where the light from the bonfire faded into darkness, but with every detail of their horrifying injuries still visible. Some of those bodies were…things…that couldn’t possibly be standing. The injuries were so severe that they’d ceased to look remotely human. But there they all were, standing and waiting.

  And then one of the dead things cocked its head to one side, and spoke.

  “Lisa?”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Lisa.

  “It’s not him,” said Annie, hugging both her and the boy closer. “It can’t be your husband.”

  “Still with the dyke bitch, Lisa?” It was a man in a torn business suit. His hair was covered in plaster dust, his face white as marble and with deep, hollowed eye sockets. Blood had flowed from his mouth at one stage, drying in a dark patch over his lower jaw. “I see you’ve found yourself another little boy. I wouldn’t let you keep your own. So you stole someone else’s. Isn’t that right, bitch-dyke?”

  “It is him, Annie. For God’s sake, look at him!”

  Off to the left came another voice from the darkness, too far out of the light cast from the bonfire to distinguish, but the silhouette looked like a woman. There seemed to be the silhouette of a man next to her, with his arm around her shoulder.

  “The child is mine,” said the woman. “I’m his mother, and you can’t have him. You took him away, when he should have stayed with us.”

  “You had no right,” said the man. “You should have left him in the car. We fell down into Hell, and we’re burning there. It’s not right that he isn’t with us. He should be burning too.”

  Suddenly the boy began to scream, the sound of his parents’ voice breaking him out of his shocked and dazed existence. Lisa clung to his arm, and when the boy fell, clawing at her, Lisa fell too. Annie helped to restrain him as his cries rang out in the night. When the crying stopped and the boy collapsed sobbing into Lisa’s embrace, another voice came from one of the things off to the right. A middle-aged man with a bloodstained face, wearing a bloodied apron.

  “Hello, Candy,” said the dead man. “Remember me? You looted my off-licence. You killed Ricky. And no, you’re not hallucinating, Alex. The facts won’t go away simply because you want them to go away. I know. We know. You both murdered your son.”

  “Go AWAY!” screamed Candy, rising unsteadily to her feet. “You’re not real! GO AWAY!”

  The dead man laughed and was silent, as the taunting was taken up by another figure who took a step forward on the fringes of the light. It was a woman in her sixties, grey hair tied in a bun. Of all the people who formed that hellish cordon, she seemed to be the least damaged of all. Her face was white, but there was no way of telling if there were eyes in her sockets. She held up one beckoning hand.

  “Gordon?”

  I saw Gordon flinch and freeze, gripping his guitar tight.

  “Come on home now.”

  Gordon moaned, lowering and shaking his head. Was this his aunt?

  “I’ve got some milky coffee on the stove and it’ll be boiling dry if we don’t get home soon.”

  “’Way!” shouted Gordon. “G’way!”

  The woman laughed then. It sounded hellish—like she was an animal or something. There was a man behind her, just a silhouette. But when she’d finished laughing, it was as if his turn had come to say something. He stepped to one side of her and although, like the others, he was keeping out of the direct light from the bonfire, there was no mistaking him.

  It was Stafford, my old headmaster.

  “Still making trouble, O’Connor? See what your hate’s done to the school—to the whole TOWN! Don’t you know that you’re responsible for all this? It’s all down to YOU, boy! You’ve turned Edmonville into Hell!”

  And I knew then that Stafford couldn’t possibly be standing there.

  Angrily, I turned back to the fire and found a wooden spar sticking out of the flames. I grabbed it, yanking it out in a shower of sparks. Whirling the burning spar over my head…I flung it hard towards Stafford with an angry yell. It flew end over end like a giant Catherine-wheel, hitting the ground a dozen feet or so in front of him and Gordon’s aunt, sending up another shower of sparks on impact.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  The figures on either side of Stafford and the old woman shrank back into the shadows, away from the burning torch. But the head teacher and the aunt suddenly seemed mesmerised by the nearness of the flames and the sparks. While the woman stood rigid, arms held out at her sides and staring down at the burning wood, Stafford sank to his knees and began to moan. He raised his hands slowly to his face and, with the moaning growing louder by the instant, we all watched in horror as his body began to vibrate. It seemed as if he were having some kind of fit. Did dead people have fits? Now his head was jerking violently and it was as if I could feel a vibration in the ground beneath my feet. The woman began to judder beside him, her face a white mask. Stafford’s mouth stretched wide. Too wide. It just kept opening and opening. I winced when I heard his jawbone suddenly crack. Something inside him was coming out, through the gaping black hole that had once been a mouth but which now seemed to have replaced his entire face. His body was jerking and twitching like a puppet on strings; and then we heard the noise. Like a faraway wind, gusting towards us. Like a hurricane on the way. Suddenly, with a cracking roar, a torrent of black water erupted like a geyser from Stafford’s mouth. It seemed to hang there in the air above and around him, defying gravity, like a great black cloud. A squirming, undulating black mass, glinting like oil or tar. The twisting mass hit the ground at the same time as Stafford’s evacuated and truly dead body slumped lifelessly forward. Suddenly there was another black liquid blur as the same stuff exploded around the woman’s head, just as if someone had put a bullet into the back of her skull from short range. Another black torrent exploded from under her skirt as she fell. The black stuff from both bodies didn’t move or behave like anything liquid I’d ever seen in my life. It twisted and moved like it had a life of its own. None of it splashed. Both gushing explosions of it suddenly flooded together in one great mass, and we all watched as it pooled there like tar on the grass. And then it slid away into the darkness, streaming away across the park like a glinting black river, away from the light. And as it moved, the black river was making a hellish sound. It was shrieking as if the fire had forced it out of the bodies and it was in great pain. But there was something else about the sound—it was as if there were more than one voice making the noise. It was as if a crowd of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were all in agony. Mumbling and moaning in pain, then shrieking and screaming and hissing as the glinting black mass surged away from us. I couldn’t make it out in the darkness, but I was convinced that the black liquid—oil, or tar, whatever—was heading back to the edge of the chasm. There was no doubt that it was
the same stuff that Alex said had chased Candy and himself; the same thing that I had seen exploding into the community centre.

  “They don’t like the fire,” I heard Annie say. Suddenly she was standing right next to me, also yanking a piece of burning wood out of the flames. I helped her, and when a chunk of timber came free, she ran forward with it, hurling it underarm towards the line of figures on our right. I could see the shadows shrinking back into the night as the firebrand fell among them. Now it was Gordon’s turn. With a burning chair leg in one hand and what looked like a chunk of blazing carpet in the other, he dashed forward, precious guitar still slung on his back, throwing both his brands into the night.

  By the time Alex had done the same with a smouldering bed headboard, the dead people, and whatever had been animating their mutilated bodies, had vanished back into the darkness.

  We stood there, breathing heavily, looking at the burning debris we’d scattered across the playing field. I took a turn around the bonfire, to see if any of the things were behind us. But they’d all gone.

  “The fire,” said Annie again, at last. “Whatever they are, whatever it is—they or it can’t stand the fire.”

  “But how long is this bonfire going to last?” asked Lisa.

  “It’d better last us the entire night,” I said. “Or those things will be back.”

  “Will it be all right in the morning, Alex?” moaned Candy. “Will we all wake up?”

  I looked back at the fire and prayed that it would last through the night.

  Then I looked at the others, all peering into the darkness. Silently watching and waiting. It came to me then. Were we the only ones left alive in the world?

  When would this nightmare be ended?

  I could hardly have guessed then what lay ahead of us.

  Book Two

  The Vorla

  Prologue

  A Year and a Day Later