by Tim Lebbon
Birds?
Something else?
A shower of crumbled brick pattered onto his face as he stared up. He cried out and darted forward, running from beneath the bridge and blinking the grit from his eyes, spitting it from his mouth, rubbing it from his hair. It felt warm, as if it was actually the shed skin of some hot-blooded creature. He ran farther than he needed to in order to clear the bridge. No one asked him what was wrong, because they had all run with him.
“Not going back through there,” Andy said. “No way.”
“I can hear them in the square!” Stig said, his own eagerness to leave the bridge behind him apparent in his voice.
Andy looked back. There was nothing there. Nothing. Blank dank air beneath the old arch, that was all. He heard a rumble in the distance and started walking quickly towards the square, the others following. He didn’t want to wait and see what the train shook loose from beneath the bridge.
He remembered a time when he was young, barely past toddler-age. There had been a huge spider lurking in their bungalow just outside the bathroom door. It had a fat black body with long, spindly legs, and every now and then it would scurry quickly into a slightly different position on the wall. Andy was sure it was on guard, changing positions to make sure it got a full field of view. He was also certain that it could see him. He’d been too afraid to go anywhere near the spider and had peed in the garden several times that day, always darting back in to see if the monster was still there, watching from a distance but always, always watching.
Then, after one of his visits behind the bushes at the bottom of the garden, he had returned to find the spider gone. That was when Andy learned one of his first lessons in fear: that sometimes, things unseen are far more frightening than out in the open. The spider was still in the house but he had no idea where.
He spent that night shouting and crying, huddled between his parents, sure that if he slept the spider would find him, take vengeance upon him for spying by crawling into his mouth and laying eggs in his brain.
He forgot about the spider by bedtime the next day. Other more pressing matters took priority in his little kid’s head, like how much ice cream he could eat in one sitting, or when his friend Stig would stop peeing himself with a big grin on his chubby face.
Even now, Andy was not entirely sure that it had happened. The memories had taken on the tint of an old dream: clear and rich and precise, yet slightly skewed, as if they contained some small details which just could not have happened, not in real life.
He glanced back once more as the train approached, but there was nothing to see beneath the old brick arch. And already the dust that had fallen on his face felt like a dream.
“There’s a police car,” his mum said as they drew level with the post office.
Stig’s mother was breathing heavily, and not only because they had taken a fast walk in the hot sun. She kept uncomfortably close to Andy’s mum, their bare arms brushing with each step, and her fingers seemed to be grasping for his mother’s hand like the legs of a frantic spider.
Andy wondered whether his mate’s mum even knew what she was doing. Then he looked at his own mum’s face and saw that she probably didn’t even notice. Her gaze was … distant. And she was staring at the church as if the thick stone walls could cool the fever of the past few minutes, its insides as cold as ever, age hanging around the rafters along with the mice and bats and spiders.
“That’s the copper we saw earlier,” Stig said, nudging Andy to get his attention. “Look, the one who wouldn’t believe us about … you know, that guy.”
Of course Andy knew, but he did not want to think about it. “Yeah, maybe he’ll listen now our mums are here.”
They stopped just past the post office. There were still two police cars in the square and one of the white vans, although both ambulances had gone, and a few villagers milled around dead-heading their hanging baskets or just blatantly staring. The men in white boiler-suits must be inside the church now, Andy thought, doing their tests and taking photographs of the bodies. Father Norman was standing at the top of the steps leading into the church yard, chatting with one policeman while another wandered between the graves, his shirt showing pink where sweat hugged it to his skin. The policeman seemed to be overly interested in the headstones. Or perhaps he was just searching for clues.
“Mum, we should talk to that one there,” Andy said, pointing out the policeman who’d dismissed their story in front of Mrs Bright. He was sitting on the bonnet of his car sucking at a carton of orange juice. “He didn’t believe us before, but now you’re here…”
“Believe you about what?”
“The guy behind station, of course!”
Andy’s mum smiled at him, and for a terrible moment Andy saw so much more behind that smile. He’d watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers recently, the one with Mr Spock in it, and it had terrified the solid shit out of him. It was the faces of those who’d been reborn that did it, their blank expressions and the meagre flicker of life in their eyes … and their total, unutterable peace with what they had become.
For a second, his mum was one of them.
But the smile fell from her face when she looked back at the church – not at Father Norman, or the policemen, or the ambulance that came screeching back into the square at that exact moment – but up at the church itself.
And yet again Andy wondered just what she’d been searching for in her wardrobe.
“We can’t get out,” the ambulance driver said as he jumped from the cab. The second ambulance pulled up beside the first, engine idling, heat haze turning the windscreen liquid.
The policeman talking to Father Norman glanced around. “You were supposed to get those bodies out of here,” he said quietly, glancing at the villagers milling around the edge of the square.
“But we can’t get out!” the driver said, and he was not whispering. His overalls were askew, buttons opened, and he was sweating and shaking as he leaned against a car. “We almost reached the main road, then we were coming back into the village.”
“So what did you forget?”
“Huh?”
“Why come back? What did you forget to pick up, you want an ice cream or something?”
The driver looked at the policeman as if he’d suddenly turned green and sprouted horns. “What are you …? You don’t understand, we were turned around. We tried five times, both of us, and we can’t get out. There’s something … a mirror, or something...” The driver looked down at the road, frowning, trying to find a truth hidden in the heat-bubbled pitch. Either that, or solace.
Andy noticed Rachel’s mother at the far side of the square, moving from one person to the next, her face a mask of concern, tears pointing eyeliner-fingers at the ground.
Rachel …?
“What’s he on about?” the policeman called to the ambulance, but the second paramedic remained in the cab and seemed not to hear.
That was when the policeman in the church yard began to scream.
Andy had heard his mother scream like that, but only once and only for a second. They’d been having a bar-b-que and she’d picked up a burning coal. No reason, no explanation, she’d thought it was a sausage, she said … and for a second it had melted into her skin. Her scream had been total, pure agony, unsullied by conscious thought.
Rachel’s mum moved closer, looked over, saw Andy. She tried to smile but it seemed to hurt her face. It certainly hurt him to see it.
The policeman’s scream went on, and on, and on.
“What’s happening?” Andy heard someone shout, and he realised it was himself. Stig was clasping onto his mother in terror, the embrace apparently going both ways. Andy’s mum put her hand on his shoulder and stepped back, trying to take him with her. But Rachel’s mother, Mrs Francis, was coming for him now.
Rachel, she mouthed, but Andy could not hear her above the screaming man.
The man was standing in the churchyard, his arms pointing Heavenward, sucking in br
eath after breath to feed the scream. The graveyard was raised from the square, so Andy couldn’t be certain of what was happening … but it appeared that the man was sinking.
Sinking into the graveyard.
Screaming.
And surely those grey things Andy saw waving and clawing at the man’s legs were nothing more than shadows thrown there by the tree beside the church?
He looked closer, trying to see past the scream – it was so loud and pain-filled that it seemed to dull every sense but hearing – but the shapes he’d seen had vanished. Still the man went down, and now someone was trying to help him, rescue him from whatever it was that had him in its grasp.
“Have you seen Rachel?” Mrs Francis called out.
Andy shook his head.
The woman seemed to crumple before him, but the sight of the sinking man was more gripping. Father Norman had a hold of him under the armpits, but still the man sank, the vicar slowly bending down behind him.
“Rachel!” the woman said, clawing tears from her eyes. “She’s gone, I know she’s gone.”
Andy moved to the woman’s side without taking his eyes from the scene in the churchyard. The man was still screaming and the square was still stunned into stillness, but somehow Rachel’s mother’s tears began to sound worse. They sounded more real.
“It’s my nightmare come true,” the woman groaned, letting Andy put his arm around her shoulder and leaning into him. “She’s gone.”
“Mrs Francis, where is she?”
The woman looked at him, all tears and snot and with a face so broken by dread that began to sting Andy’s eyes. “You like my daughter, don’t you?”
He should deny it, he knew, because liking girls was embarrassing. But right then he felt so adult holding onto crying woman
(while something terrible happened in the churchyard, while someone was dying in there, being hauled into the ground by shadow-shapes that he’d seen but could see no more)
that he simply smiled and nodded.
“She likes you too, son,” Mrs Francis said, and then her tears came afresh.
The screaming had ceased. While Andy had been talking with the crying woman, whatever was happening up amongst the graves had ended. Father Norman stood with his arms dangling loosely by his sides, looking down at the ground at his feet, sweat dripping from his face and muddying the turned earth.
The square was silent now, silent but charged, throbbing with a restrained energy, a potential for more screaming and chaos. Andy felt the hairs on his neck and arms sticking up, his scalp tightening and tingling. He gently released Rachel’s mother and took a step forward, but movement felt all wrong. He glanced around at the other villagers and saw that they were all watching him. It was as if everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move.
Anything will just push it over the edge, now, Andy thought, any one little thing, like another man in the air or another shrinking thing in the ditch. Someone in the graveyard, being dragged under …
Anything will push it over the edge.
He looked back at his mum, his friend Stig and his mother, and he was shamefully pleased that they looked as terrified as he felt.
A sound finally brought the square back to life. A distant rumbling at first, approaching quickly and expanding out to echo from the church spire, the row of houses by the stream, the old slaughterhouse. Heads turned, knots of people grew in several places as folks gathered together for comfort.
“It’s the army,” Stig said. For some reason his idea did not seem as ridiculous as it first sounded.
Martial law, Andy thought ….
But it was not the army that ran into the square from the road by the slaughterhouse. It was a man, running wildly, eyes wide and foam speckling his lips in sympathy with the dozen horses chasing him. No, not horses … unicorns. And their horns were blood-red.
They pelted after the man, every one of them pure white, nostrils and eyes wide, pelts steaming, muscles rippling, manes flying …. And yet they gained very slowly, as if they could be seen here but were actually running somewhere else, their pounding hooves striking some other earth.
The chase had been a long one. The man was exhausted. He ignored everyone and everything as he staggered through the square, leading the sprinting unicorns around the edge of the corner of the church and out of sight. The rumble of hooves vanished very quickly, but they could still hear the tired slap, slap, slap of the man’s shoes hitting the road as he ran towards the railway bridge.
When they caught him, Andy thought, the trampling would be very slow.
“Mum,” he said, because he could think of nothing else.
“Rachel!” Mrs Francis cried.
Andy’s mum grabbed his arm. “Home!” she said.
“But Mum—“
“We’re going home!”
That was it. And although Mrs Francis stood alone now, crying and shrinking as grief took her, Andy knew that it was the right place to be. Home was always safe, a haven from the unknown and the threatening, a place where his parents would protect him.
“Dad’s in work,” Andy said, and he saw the look in his mother’s eyes. I hope he can make it home, that look said, and Andy realised instantly and very clearly that his mother believed him.
And more shockingly, she had believed him all along.
They took the long walk home.
Nightmare
Rachel was lost. She had stumbled into a place she had never been to or seen and now she could not find her way out. Several times she turned back and retraced her steps, but when she rounded corners she had just come around, everything was different again.
The whole village was changing. The only thing that remained the same was her.
Tears burned her eyes and dried rapidly in the baking sun. She didn’t stop moving because that would give her time to think. The smells and sounds were different too, she realised, and even the air felt somehow rougher, thicker, oozing disquiet and planting it inside her with every breath she took.
And she was breathing hard. The running and the fear brought out pearls of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She thought that if she kept breathing this heavily it would drown out the humming sound, the nearby whispering or the distant shouting, that had not let up for one second.
Not one second. It was a background to this place, a theme tune to her distress, thrumming inside her skull and shaking her eardrums so consistently that she wondered if she was imagining it. Maybe she had water in her ear from her swim.
She paused, put her head to one side and tapped her ear with the palm of her hand. Each tap changed the pitch of the hum, turning it into a voice trying so hard to communicate – a cry for help past a gag, or a threat past a laugh – so she stopped.
“I’m lost,” she said, and she thought: yes, lost in a place I know so well. No … not lost, missing. And Mum will be worried by now, she’ll ring Dad in work and he’s worry too, and I just have to find my way to the square! She looked around as she ran, searching for a landmark or building or tree that she recognised.
Nothing.
Nothing but strange alleys and unknown paths that led nowhere, overgrown gardens which had lost their fences, windows containing misty and distorted glass, as if it had been there for five hundred years, doors hanging closed—a lways closed—in frames with rusted hinges and old cast-iron handles, thatched roofs shedding a layer of sick straw across the ground, a pond standing silent and stagnant in the middle of a small courtyard, a dead duck floating tail-up on its surface, stomach bloated and distended by the heat….
And suddenly Rachel knew what she had to do. She would ask someone where she was.
She slowed from a run to a walk, looked around and decided which house to approach. She’d strayed onto another footpath, this one following the line of a shallow gully, and to her right a low, wide house backed onto the path. Its garden was overgrown and crawling with a wild weed, bright green shoots wrapping themselves around every other plant and
strangling it brown. She wondered who in the village was lazy or ill or old enough to have let their garden get into such a state.
The humming continued, a constant background noise like birdsong or the purr of distant traffic … except that now, thinking about it, she realised that she could hear no traffic at all. Not even the rumble of lorries riding the main road into town.
She approached the back door, thinking to knock and wait for a reply and trying not to imagine who would answer.
Who or what, she thought, trying to banish the idea instantly because it was straight out of a trashy horror movie. But wouldn’t the trashiest movie be the scariest if it was real?
She’d be polite, even through her fear. They’d see that she was upset and had been crying—
(Who or what?)
—and maybe invite her in while they phoned her mum and asked her to drive over and collect her daughter.
She looked up. No telephone wires.
Underground, she thought.
(Who or what?)
She moved to a window instead. She had to push through a clutch of plants along the wall of the cottage, barely holding in a scream when something small and hairy brushed past her leg and scurried away beneath the foliage. The window was grimy, the glass distorted by time, and she had to lean close and shield her eyes with her hands before she could see.
A barely furnished room. Dark walls, the floor tiled with stone flags, a table in the corner supporting a candelabra and an empty glass bowl. And in the seat at the end of the table, a corpse.
A corpse that moved its head to see who was watching.
The humming grew louder as Rachel fell away from the window. Her feet tangled in the undergrowth and she fell over backwards, holding out her hands to ward off the ground and feeling thorns pierce her palms and wrists. Maybe the jarring knocked her head, or perhaps the humming really did change in pitch for an instant, a change that took it much closer to laughter than anything else. Either way, Rachel did not want to see that thing again.
That person with no mouth or eyes or nose, throat muscles tensing and bending as it tried to speak or scream, sitting at the table and waiting for nothing.