by Tim Lebbon
“No,” Andy said, turning to look back over his shoulder at the way they’d been going. The road headed out of the village as usual, disappearing around a bend that led eventually up the small hill into the woods. He pedalled off again, aware that Stig was not following. He did not blink, but kept his eyes on the road ahead of him and the trees and shrubs forming the hedge, knowing from instant to instant just how that view was going to change—
And then he was cycling towards Stig and the cottage. He had not blinked, he was certain. And he’d felt nothing; no sense of being stopped and turned around. He had simply reversed direction instantaneously with no sense of movement.
Then he saw Stig’s face. His friend’s mouth was actually hanging open, his whole face slack, pure disbelief and shock made flesh. It was so funny that Andy almost laughed. Almost.
“How did you do that?” Stig asked.
“I didn’t do anything.” Andy pulled up next to the stunned boy and looked at him, staring into Stig’s eyes. He was amazed to find something there he didn’t like: mistrust. “Hey … I didn’t do anything! One second I was going that way, the next, this.”
“But I didn’t blink. You just turned around without me even seeing it.”
Andy shook his head. “This is a nightmare.”
Maybe.
“I’ll try,” Stig said.
“No!”
“What the hell are you all of a sudden, my big brother?” Stig pedalled away.
Andy turned to watch over his shoulder, careful not to blink, concentrating on every lift and fall of Stig’s feet, every sway of his arse as he powered along the road, and he was just about to call his friend back when he realised that he was returning anyway.
He had not seen him turn, change direction or stop pedalling. Faster than a blink – faster than a moment between moments – Stig was on his way back.
“Something’s happening,” Stig said. “Something weird, something bad, I want to go home. I need my mum and dad, Andy. I want to go home.” The threatened tears came then, and Andy began crying as well. He pretended it was in sympathy with his friend, but deep inside he knew the real truth: that he was more scared than he had ever thought possible, and there was a voice whispering in his head that he’d never heard before.
Nightmare, it kept saying.
Yes, maybe.
Nightmare
Her own terrible nightmare reminds her of one of the last ones she took away.
The man was young and proud, and he’d been approaching her home for weeks. Each time he came nearer and she pretended not to see, but she knew that he would come all the way when he was ready, and she left him to his own pace. No need to rush him. And in truth, she had no desire to bring on another excursion into somebody else’s nightmare.
So she tended her chickens and goat and vegetable garden – contrary to some of the idle village gossip, the animals were there merely for her to eat – and watched day by day as he approached. For the last couple of days he made no pretence at hiding, and his doubt manifested as abuse towards her.
“I don’t need you!” he spat, standing at the edge of her garden.
“Then why have you been standing there for over an hour? You’ll root soon, if you’re not careful. I already have enough vegetables to tend.”
“You’re comparing me to a vegetable?”
“No,” Mengezah said, unable to ever miss a chance at ridiculing the villagers’ paranoia over her, “man-meat doesn’t taste as good.” She chuckled as she carried a basket of weed to a heap at the corner of her patch.
She’d taken a quick look at the man when she spoke, using the opportunity to examine him. She saw straight away that he was terrified and in awe of her – and he didn’t believe some of the more scurrilous rumours about her witchery – and that’s why he was offering abusing. Fear came out as proud bluster. It so often did.
More than anything, he’d looked tired. They all did, always, by the time they reached her, but this one’s eyes were … distant. They held power because they seemed to stare from so far away.
For a few hours that night Mengezah considered turning him away when he finally came to her.
But the next day he made the full journey, and sat by her side, and gratefully accepted her hand on his shoulder as he gushed out his nightmare, laying himself bare for her inspection, probably telling her more in an hour than he’d said to his wife in a year.
“She thinks I’m mad,” he said. “She thinks I’m possessed, and she’s even considered taking me to the church—“
“No,” Mengezah said. “You’re not mad, or possessed, and that will merely make it worse. “But …” She trailed off, let go of his shoulder. His muscles there were so tightly bunched that she thought they would explode into violence at any moment, voluntary or not.
“Can you help?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
She gave him a dose of the foul-tasting relaxant and touched his head, and she was instantly nowhere. She tried to scream but could not. She could see everything surrounding her but knew that it was forever beyond her reach. The joy of release in the man’s eyes as he scrambled from her house gave her no satisfaction. Neither did the knowledge that she would sleep and absorb this nightmare, swallow it instead of allowing it to swallow her.
She stayed that way for a long time before waking up. That was one of the worst.
But nothing compared to this. Her own personal phantasm outstrips that one a million times, because it is so much older … and much more real. During those occasions when she can think and feel, less and less frequent as time goes on, her whole world is a sense of cloying claustrophobia more pressing than death. She feels as though she is contained in a mass of solid stone, hiding in a pocket at its core while a million miles in any direction consists merely of rock, its gravity crushing her and tearing her apart simultaneously, no chance of escape, nothing there other than her. Utter confinement. Nobody and nothing to ask for help.
Mengezah wishes she can sigh. She craves the darkness of limbo, the certainty of death. But something keeps her from both.
Something she does not quite understand, but which she thinks of as unfinished business.
Four
As they pedalled quickly past Station Road they glanced at the buildings, afraid of what they would see yet finding it impossible not to look.
They saw only a normal summer day, baking white paint on the old buildings heat-haze shimmering the windows. The air above the building seemed to vibrate too, perhaps from whatever was still happening at its rear.
How far away? thought Andy, and he pedalled harder and faster. Sweat pointed salty fingers into his eyes, trying to blind him. He took one hand from the handle-bars and wiped his arm across his face, but seeing clearer did not make matters any better. He was still cycling through his village that had suddenly taken on an atmosphere of danger and dread. He felt like crying; it was as if the person he trusted the most had suddenly turned on him, threatening him with fates he could barely understand, let alone face.
“Slow down!” Stig panted behind him.
Andy heard his friend’s loose chain rattling on its cogs as he struggled to keep up. He eased down slightly and Stig drew level with him at the village shop.
Mr Howards was standing outside, hands on hips, staring along the road that lead to the town square. “Hey boys,” he said as they passed by, “lots of commotion down there. What’s up? Fire, or something?”
“Something,” Andy hissed as he pedalled by, thinking of drowning and screams and floating men.
Stig said nothing.
Andy heard Mr Howards mumbling to himself and instantly felt guilty for his own lack of manners. But there was no going back now. Going back would be to move closer to the station buildings, closer to whatever had turned them around, not further away. And further away was much, much better.
Going home was better still. That’s where Andy wanted to be right now, and he was pleased as hell that Stig liv
ed so close by. Pleased and grateful and suddenly, for no apparent reason, he was full of an intense joy and an enthusiasm for the day which could not be explained by anything he had seen or felt so far. What he had seen was gruesome; and all he felt now was fear.
Nevertheless the feeling held, a rapturous eruption of optimism that set him standing on his pedals and yelling at the sky.
“Yeeeaahhh!” he yelled. “Stig, yeahhhh!”
“What?” They were free-wheeling down the incline towards the small clutch of houses where they lived, and every second took them further away from the strangeness they’d been forced to face. “Andy, what’re you on about?”
Andy ignored his friend, pretending that the breeze whipping past his ears had stolen the words away. Perhaps it had. Perhaps Stig had said something more, but Andy simply stood on his pedals and leaned forward, teeth bared, eyes squinting almost shut against the heat, revelling in the speed and subtle dangers.
And fear?
Nightmare, a voice said, laying cadences Andy did not understand across his thoughts and quenching his excitement like a bucket of water dousing a candle. He slumped back into the saddle and let the bike coast.
Someone had ruined it for him, he thought. But then he realised how foolish that idea was. They’d seen that lost man up in the air, after all, and someone had drowned in the church, drowned! This was no time to be anything other than terrified.
Still … for a moment there he’d felt … involved. As if he was the very centre of things.
“Have to see my mum,” Stig said, drawing into the lead and steering left into his driveway. “Need to see her, Andy. Need to tell her about …” He braked and looked over his shoulder as Andy drifted to a stop by the roadside. “Catch you later?”
Andy nodded. “You bet. This’ll be all sorted out by then and we can pile down the square and tell everyone what we saw. Hey, maybe Rachel will be there! You tell her I saw the murderers, right, when we looked in the church? You tell her … she’ll believe it then, if I say it she’ll think I’m trying to impress her.”
“You are.”
Andy glanced skyward. “’Course I am, but she mustn’t know that otherwise it won’t work! Don’t you know anything about girls?”
Stig shrugged and smiled. “More than you, wanker.” It was a standing joke between the two of them … neither had ever had a real girlfriend.
“What about boys?” Andy said, playing their old game, realising even as he spoke just how weird it seemed trying to sound normal after what they’d seen.
Stig merely stared at him for a few seconds, and Andy could see the memory of the floating man reflected in his gaze. “I need to see my mum,” Stig said. “I’ll give you a buzz later.” Then he dropped his bike and ran around to the rear of the bungalow.
Andy watched his friend’s sunburned back as he went, then he cycled the two hundred yards further to his own house. On the way he muttered one word over and over again: “Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.” He said it twenty times before he reached his driveway. He and Stig used the word to describe something vaguely bad, like missing the last bus into town before their film started at the cinema.
Now, though, its connotations were all too real. “Nightmare,” Andy said, and it sounded chill, felt like a dark weight in his mind. A weight waiting to shed its skin and reveal the truth beneath the dressing.
Nightmare
She was on her way home when she sensed something going wrong.
Rachel had been swimming with Mandy and Becky, and Mandy’s mum had driven them back to the village. She’d offered to take Rachel home, but the girl had politely declined. It was a nice day for a walk, she loved the village, she would make her own way. Besides, Mandy had started getting on her nerves with all her whispered comments about boys’ dicks and how she couldn’t believe the other girls had never even seen one, all the while smiling at her mother in the rearview mirror and acting all sweetness and light. It was unfair on Mandy’s mum, Rachel thought. Nasty. And really, when it came right down to it, Rachel felt jealous and insecure in Mandy’s presence.
She thought Andy might show her his dick, if she asked. But she was far too scared for that.
Andy. She wondered where he was today. Probably off somewhere with that awful fat freak Stig, doing whatever it was boys did on hot summer days when night seemed a lifetime away. In the woods building dams, maybe. Hunting rabbits with Stig’s dad’s ferret and whippet. Climbing trees at the end of the cricket field and swinging from rope swings.
Sometimes Rachel wished she could join them – especially if Andy was there, because she liked him – but she was just a girl, and girls went swimming and horse riding, they never hung around with boys getting grubby in the fields and orchards, oh no, that just wasn’t done ...
Well bollocks to that, she thought, giggling as she imagined her mum’s reaction to that word. She’d get home quickly now, change and go out looking for Andy. Ask around the village. Someone must have seen him.
An ambulance approached from the direction of the village square. Its siren and light were off, but the driver steered with purpose, and the passenger – paramedic, Rachel knew, like on Casualty – sat staring straight ahead. Neither of them glanced at her as they drove by, as if she wasn’t there at all. She stared after the ambulance and wondered just who was in there, feeling that twinge of fear she’d started experiencing more and more over the past few months: maybe it was her mum or dad. Because a year ago Becky’s dad had died, and Rachel’s first reaction had been an instinctive and shaming at least my parents are still alive. Such selfishness had driven her into deep musings on her own and her family’s mortality, and every time she heard a siren or saw an ambulance or a fire engine she thought the worst.
She decided to take a short-cut home.
The footpath led between two cottages, an unsurfaced mud trail that was all but impassable in the winter, but which now was baked dry and cracked in the heat. Plants grew in profusion along its shadowed length, barely trodden down because so few people came this way. It connected the road to the stream and the path that followed it, and as there was access to this path at several other points, this was a route that effectively led from nowhere to nowhere. Cats, dogs and kids were the only ones to bother with it, and sometimes not even them.
Plant stems tickled Rachel’s bare legs, a hidden clumps of nettles stung her shin and set her cursing and searching for dock leaves. As she passed a house on the left the path fell into shadow, and the ground became spongy and moist. She was staring down as she walked, looking out for dock leaves and dog shit, dodging another clot of nettles that seemed to settle out across the path as she approached. One of them touched her knee and she swore again, breaking into a clumsy trot that took her quickly down to the stream.
In the winter it would be full, a gushing torrent that was rumoured to have swept away unwary drunks in the past. The fact that it was drunks that came up with these closing-time fables only gave them a hazier tinge, but come morning they were passed on and eventually they found their place in village mythology. Now, in the height of a long hot summer, the stream was barely a trickle. Weeds had taken the opportunity the take roots in its fertile bed, and now it was more a stream of greenery than anything else, with a sad trickle of water visible here and there when the sun found its occasional way through the green canopy overhanging the gully. Trees lined the garden boundaries, hiding them from the footpath and providing some sort of privacy, throwing the stream into almost constant shadow. Some of them had grown and enveloped the wire fences bounding the gardens, giving them the appearance of having been garrotted. Yet still they lived, thrived, their roots nudging under the stream and drinking of it winter and summer, spring and autumn. However hot the summers were – and this was the hottest in years – the plants and trees flourished.
Today, Rachel could hear something above the whisper of the reduced waters. It was another whisper altogether, a humming, a secret noise uttered by so many people t
hat it became a background murmur to the afternoon. Rachel stopped and cocked her head, looking along the path towards where it emerged into the village square. There were a couple of corners to turn before then where the stream snaked around rocky outcrops in the land, several garden gates to pass by, most of them overgrown or nailed shut by their owners who wanted no access onto a little-used, sometimes dark and dangerous public footway. Dangerous only because it was unlit, Rachel knew. In the dark, with no stars or moon to guide them, it was only the warning gurgle of the stream that prevented a stroller from falling in.
She shook her head as if to dislodge the sound. It could have been someone humming to themselves around the next corner, or a field full of chattering people a mile away. Perhaps there was a fete she didn’t know about. Maybe the local church hall club was meeting to sell their home-made jams and cakes.
She was hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, and her legs stung where the nettles had touched. She wished she was back in the pool.
As Rachel rounded the next corner the sound seemed to shift. It didn’t move, exactly, or grow louder or change pitch, but something about it changed. She stopped and a shiver brought goosebumps out on her arms. Yet she was still hot. Sweat beaded her top lip, and her back felt cold. That was how the sound had altered.
It had become unsettling.
Engines in the square, she thought, engines and voices, something’s happened and the square is full of people. Maybe Andy was there.
She ran. And then something else changed – another subtle shift in things, nothing obvious, but strong enough for one or all of her senses to alert her to it – and she looked down at the stream.
It had changed direction. She stopped, backed away a little, retraced her steps so that she could see past a huge spread of Japanese knotweed that had taken root. And the stream was flowing the opposite way. Uphill, she thought, but she glanced back the way she had come and began to wonder. It didn’t look uphill, not from here at least, although that was how she always remembered it to be.