Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  The sun doesn’t rise here. It just gets lighter.

  Ever since I got here, I’ve been crouching in this electricals store, dictating into this machine. Haven’t checked whether I’ve been using the “Pause” button properly, so God knows whether half of what I’ve been talking about has been recorded. What the hell. Does it matter? I only know that I had to stay awake while it was dark, watching and waiting for any sign that the Black Stuff had found me at last. Don’t want to think about those poor bastards who tried to stop my car. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

  So—I’ve kept talking. And now I’ve replaced the batteries.

  When the darkness became grey, I could feel sleep catching up on me, even after everything that’s happened since we became Special Guests of The Caffneys. I never believed I could sleep again. Absolute exhaustion, I suppose. Suddenly, I lost three hours. Not much, but enough to keep me alert. I could do with something to eat, but that’s not the most important thing at the moment. I’ve got to circle around and find my way back to the petrol plant, got to keep telling myself that the others are still somehow alive.

  I’ve just checked the shotgun for the hundredth time. As if a second shell might suddenly reappear in there by magic. One shell left. No good against the Black Stuff, but it might deter any other scavengers still left alive on this city-crag. I hope I don’t have to use it that way, because I’m keeping it for one of the Caffneys.

  Just hope I can get back where I’m going before dark comes again.

  It knows I’m still here somewhere, and it won’t give up until it’s found me.

  If I believed in God, I’d pray.

  But I don’t think He lives in this neighbourhood.

  The streets look clear. I’m going to head off on foot, work my way through the abandoned buildings and the ruins. There are plenty of vehicles scattered about on the streets, and it might be that some of them are still in working order. But I daren’t risk using one for fear of being heard in this silent city.

  Never mind the engine sound, Jay. The Black Stuff can smell your scent. It’s the scent of fear.

  Yeah…? Well, I’ll try not to think about that then, won’t I?

  Christ, I hurt all over. Maybe not surprising after everything that’s happened. Better hurting than dead, Jay. Just keep telling yourself that. Stiff as hell, crouched down here among the televisions and the videos all night. And would you believe it? Not a thing worth watching on any of the channels. Hah-bloody-hah.

  Time to move.

  And this could be the last time I’ll be recording anything.

  In which case: Thanks for listening, whoever you are.

  Good luck, Jay.

  There’s no one else here to slap me on the back.

  So I’ll do it myself.

  Here goes…

  Chapter One

  The Ordeal of Juliet DeLore

  “Come out of there, Juliet! Come out, you bitch. Or I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

  Juliet leaned hard against the desk which she had shoved hard up against the storeroom door. There was a lock in the door, but no chance to look around in here for the key (if there was a key). The door began to judder and shake again as he put his weight against it from the other side. One of the files that she had thrown on to the desk to give it extra weight fell to the floor and split, scattering papers. She gritted her teeth and kept her weight against it. She’d been on a slimming diet recently and lost seven pounds. She wished to God that she’d put weight on instead.

  “Juliet! I’m warning you! Open this door or I’ll…”

  “Go to hell, you creep!”

  “Juliet!”

  This time when he threw himself against the door there was a muffled cry of pain.

  “Good!” she yelled through the door. “I hope you’ve broken your shoulder, you mad bastard!”

  “You…you…”

  There was silence from the other side then. Juliet tried to control the involuntary noise she was making in her throat. It sounded like whimpering, and she knew that he would be able to hear it, and would take enjoyment from it. There was blood on her forehead, and she wiped away a smear when it trickled into her eye.

  What was he going to do now? He was too quiet, and she didn’t like it.

  Quickly, she looked around the storeroom again. It was about thirty feet square. There were filing cabinets of some kind along one of the cinder-block walls. On the other side, shelves containing cardboard boxes. No way of telling what was inside them, or whether there might be anything in there that could help her. At the far end of the room was a single window. The glass had shattered inwards and lay glittering on the floor. If she screamed again, would it help? Would anyone hear? That would have to wait; she could hardly find the energy to breathe at the moment. She needed something else to place against the door. The desk was heavy, but would it stop him from getting in if she took her own weight away from it?

  The nearest filing cabinet was about four feet away. If she left the table and hurried, she might be able to drag it over and shove it against the door. He’d never get in then. But what the hell was he doing even as she thought about it?

  “Trevor?” she asked at last, when she could find the breath.

  There was no answer.

  “Trevor?”

  Still no answer.

  She began to tremble then, and grew angry with herself. This was no time to be coming on with the weak female act. If she was going to get out of this alive, she had to think quickly. What if she just ran to the window and climbed out? It couldn’t be that much of a drop to the ground. She tried to work out where the storeroom was in relation to the supermarket entrance. She had come in through the main doors, had walked to the back before she’d found an assistant, and then when she’d asked for Trevor Blake, she’d been directed to the stairs leading up to a kind of semi-second floor, with the manager’s office and the storeroom. That should only be about twenty or thirty feet from the ground if she dropped from this window. Yes, that was the way. Someone must see or hear her, and it was worth the risk of dropping that far just to get out of this place and away from this madman. She looked back at the door. Ten seconds to get to the window, another ten to climb out. It couldn’t be any longer than that, could it? Maybe she’d be lucky.

  Lucky? Pardon me if I say “Ha, ha”.

  Still trying to summon up the courage to move, Juliet thought back to how the nightmare had all begun.

  Juliet DeLore was twenty-four years old with long blond hair and a face that could have belonged to a model. But she believed her considerable good looks to be a curse, rather than of any benefit. On four separate occasions, she had fallen for the wrong man; each of them only interested in her as an “acquisition”, required just to hang on their arms and look good at parties. She had been hurt badly each time; had sworn on each occasion that she’d never fall for the wrong man again. After her fourth relationship had fallen apart, she’d come to the conclusion that all the clichés were right. She had finally decided that all men were interested in her only for one thing. But somehow she’d still managed to fall for Trevor Blake. Just how she had come to be attached to him she had no real idea. He’d reacted so well when she had turned down his first advances at the nightclub. She’d been there as usual with a bunch of friends. He’d been there with two friends of his own. On that first meeting, he’d shown that he was interested but hadn’t been pushy which, for Juliet, was always a good sign. Every Friday night he was there; still persevering, but not coming on too strong. Could it be that she’d finally found someone she could trust, who wanted to know her and not just get his leg over?

  The storeroom window seemed to be shrinking; seemed to be getting further away. Juliet quietly rose to a kneeling position, still with both hands braced at the desk-edge. She winced when one knee popped, convinced that he must have heard it.

  Come on, Juliet. Count to three and make a dash for it before he…

  Suddenly the glass panel at the top o
f the door shattered inwards, spraying her with glass. Juliet screamed, but kept both hands braced against the desk, turning her face away as glass shards fell around her. When she looked up, she could see what he’d done. He’d found a crowbar or something, and was using it to break the window. Now he was yelling obscenities at her, and when she looked up she could see that he must be standing on something to have got up so high. Did he think that he could squeeze through the window? An arm snaked through the aperture, clawing at the woodwork. Screaming again, Juliet jumped up on to the desk and grabbed his arm, yanking it down hard on the ragged glass still in the frame. When he screamed in pain as the glass cut into his flesh, so did she, and she kept on screaming as she gripped his arm good and hard, pulling down with all her weight. He twisted then, and the crowbar lashed through the window, hitting her on the cheekbone. Instinctively, she grabbed for it. Hanging on to the crowbar and his arm, Juliet fell from the desk. Beyond, he yelled in pain again as the crowbar was torn from his grasp and Juliet fell heavily to the floor. Raging, Trevor pulled his arm from the jagged glass and fell from his perch with a thump. Juliet scrabbled back to the desk, sobbing with fear and effort, throwing herself back against it to keep the door closed, suddenly realising that she had the crowbar tightly clenched in one hand. Unintentionally, he’d given her a weapon.

  “I’ve…I’ve…got it now, you bastard. The crowbar.”

  “You filthy, stinking bitch! Do you know what you’ve done to my arm?”

  “That’s nothing to what I will do if you stick your head back in here again.”

  There was a strangled sound of pure frustration from beyond the door, and then silence. Juliet struggled to keep calm, to control her breathing. The terror threatened to overwhelm her. It seemed as if there was some kind of animal on the other side of the door, not the man she’d met in the nightclub; the man with whom she thought she’d finally found happiness.

  “Mr. Right…” she said aloud, and fought to keep the tears back.

  Trevor was thirty years old, medium height, with the same colour blond hair as her own, leading to jokes about the possibilities of having been made for each other. There was a scar on his right temple, which she’d laughingly called a “neat designer” scar. He said he’d got it playing rugby. He was single. When she told him that she had been working for a travel agency these past two years, he told her that he did business abroad a lot; maybe she could fix him up with some air travel?

  They’d gone out for a meal, and he still hadn’t come on strong. But she’d been charmed by his style and by his wit. The next time they’d met, they’d slept together. It had been after another meeting at the nightclub, and they’d left early. Afterwards, they’d gone back to Juliet’s place, since Trevor shared a flat with a friend who had other friends staying over.

  At last, she seemed to have found Mr. Right.

  But Mr. Right didn’t telephone the following week, and wasn’t at the nightclub on the following Friday. And was Juliet just imagining this, or did Trevor’s friends seem to be leering at her over the tops of their glasses?

  “You can’t stay in there for ever,” said Trevor at last. His voice was cold and measured. It was so close that he might even be here in the storeroom with her. It turned her blood to ice water.

  “The police will be here any second,” countered Juliet. “And the fire services. When they get here, I’m going to tell them what you did. Do you hear me, Trevor? I’ll tell them.”

  “You bitch!”

  “So the safest thing you can do is run. As far away from here as you can.”

  “No one’s coming, Juliet.”

  In answer, she banged the crowbar on the floor.

  “I swear to Christ, you so much as poke your head round that door, and I’m going to smash it.”

  Trevor laughed then. It was an unhealthy, dark sound.

  There was silence again, and Juliet remembered the knock on the door the previous Saturday morning. There had been a woman standing there, with a two-year-old boy. It was Trevor’s wife and son. Before the woman had a chance to explain, Juliet had promised that she’d never see him again. Trevor, it transpired, was manager of Greenhaugh’s Supermarket in Edmonville; this wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  Juliet strained to listen, but there were no further sounds from the door. When she looked up at the shattered window, there was no movement there either. She weighed the crowbar in her hand and looked across to the window. If she was going to do it, now was the time. She rose again, backing off from the desk bit by bit, keeping one hand on the edge and her eyes fastened on the broken window. When a piece of broken glass crunched underfoot, she winced and halted, raising the crowbar high and waiting. There was still no sound, no sign of movement. Carefully sidestepping the glass on the floor as much as possible, Juliet headed for the window again, not taking her eyes from the door, ready to dash back. The journey seemed to take hours. At the halfway point, she paused.

  Now or never.

  Even if the drop was higher than she thought, it was still worth the risk compared to staying here with him. Quickly now, she lunged to the window and began to climb out.

  But what she saw out there made her reel back into the storeroom, gasping for breath.

  Because the world beyond the window had simply ceased to exist.

  The shattered window looked out across a vast space. Climbing out there would be like climbing out of a cable car’s window. Vertigo made her head spin as she clutched at the sill, now dropping to her knees and with the after-image of the great, yawning gulf still imprinted on her retinas. Unable to comprehend, Juliet rose again slowly, gingerly approaching the window and carefully looking out once more.

  The world tilted again, and she moaned when she realised that she wasn’t seeing things. Directly across from her, perhaps three or four hundred feet away, was a ragged cliff-edge. There were broken trees there, some of them hanging over the edge by their roots. And there were ruined houses too; some of them right on the edge itself, sliced in half and with the upstairs and downstairs rooms plainly visible, like some kind of sectioned drawing. Beneath, a massive and striated cliff-face of rock and clay, dropping away into utter darkness. The sight defied logic, but no matter how hard Juliet stared it would not go away, would not suddenly begin to make sense. On her immediate left, the supermarket wall curved away into grey space. On her right, the same; except that perhaps a hundred feet away she could see the beginnings of another cliff-edge on her side and piles of rubble from a collapsed wall. It seemed as if the supermarket was also perched right on the edge of another cliff and that a canyon really had opened up directly beneath her.

  “The tremor…”

  Juliet hadn’t expected anyone else to be in the manager’s office when she mounted the small flight of stairs. When she’d seen the sign, “Trevor Blake”, she’d just rammed the door open hard and stepped inside. Trevor was sitting on the far side of a desk, wearing a white manager’s jacket with the supermarket logo emblazoned on the top pocket. Opposite him was a small man in a business suit. Spectacles were balanced on the edge of his nose, hair parted sparsely over a balding pate. On his lap was an open briefcase full of papers. He turned to goggle as Juliet strode into the room, slamming the door behind her. But she didn’t even notice him. Her eyes were fixed on Trevor. She was disappointed that he didn’t look more surprised. His face was blank, and somehow more bloodless than she’d remembered. His lips were set in a tight line. Those lips had kissed her face in the darkness not two weeks ago.

  “Hello, lover boy,” she said simply.

  The man in the business suit goggled again, as if the remark had been addressed to him.

  “Juliet,” said Trevor. His blank voice matched his blank face.

  “Seems to me one of us has been telling fibs. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Perhaps you could wait downstairs,” said Trevor. “Until we’ve finished here.”

  Now Juliet’s anger was starting to flare. This wasn’t
going the way she’d anticipated. Trevor was staring at the man now, ignoring her, when he was supposed to be jumping up from his seat in shock and trying to usher her out of the place. At which stage she could really let fly, and make the scene that she wanted the whole supermarket to witness. But no. Trevor was remaining blank, not responding.

  “You bastard.” Juliet turned to the little man. “Did you know that the manager of this supermarket was a bastard?”

  “Listen,” stuttered the man, hastily closing the briefcase. “Miss, I’m not sure what’s happening here, but we’re in the middle of a very important meeting…”

  “I’m sure it can wait for a few minutes while Mr. Blake hears what I have to say.”

  “This isn’t the time, Juliet,” said Trevor.

  “Oh, but I think it is.”

  Trevor placed both hands on the table in front of him and began to rise, slowly. As he did, he seemed to be trembling. But to Juliet’s ever-mounting anger, he was still not looking at her, or responding to her the way she expected and wanted. He was still staring at the man. And now she could see the blank face cracking; could see the ferocious anger inside him as it came to the surface. But the anger was not directed at her. Trevor was still staring at the man.

  “This is the man,” shouted Juliet, stabbing a finger at Trevor, “who…”

  And then the desk began to judder and vibrate.

  The large window behind Trevor, which overlooked the supermarket aisles below, began to rattle. Overhead, the strip light began to sway from side to side. There was a rumbling now, like the sound of an underground train. Somewhere beyond, there was a crash of glass—and screaming. Over Trevor’s shoulder, down below in the supermarket aisles, Juliet could see shoppers running. She saw a trolley spill over, saw an old lady go headlong into a pile of tins, scattering them everywhere. A man seemed to shoulder-charge one of the shelving units, toppling it over.

  “Oh my God…” began the small man in the business suit, leaping to his feet, the briefcase clattering to the floor.