Until She Sleeps

by Tim Lebbon

  “Right,” Andy said, looking down at the book clasped in his folded arms. “Right.”

  And he told her.

  This is a nightmare, but not yours or mine. It’s an old one, and one of many. My ancestor was a witch, a white witch, she helped people and maybe she wasn’t really a witch at all, maybe she was just the first psychiatrist. Whatever, she took bad dreams out of people and somehow swallowed them up herself.

  “I believe you,” Rachel said when he paused. They both heard a wet grinding sound as the trees started to pull away from each other.

  Something’s happened. The dreams she took are out, they’re … stalking the village. And they’re catching.

  “I knew it was real, but couldn’t be,” Rachel said. One of the confining trees peeled back, bending from root to head as if grasped by an invisible hand and hauled, twisted, until it snapped. The sound was like a cannon-shot, and Rachel cowered down as low as she could to avoid the spike-ridden, moist mouth the tree’s trunk had turned into.

  Stig and my father, and lots of others … they’ve gone, somewhere … and there are dead people in the village, Rachel. And my mother knew about it all along, knew what was in our past, but she said she didn’t believe it. I think she did, really. I think she did, but she was too scared, too grown up to let herself accept it as the truth. She kept Mengezah’s book – she’s the dead witch – and I’ve got it here with me now.

  “I believe you, Andy.” The trees parted enough for Rachel to scramble out, grasp Andy’s hand and let him haul her across a tangle of roots to safety. They kept holding hands even as they stood together, panting, staring into each other’s faces. The sky, it appeared, was brightening. “What’s in the book?”

  “Here,” Andy said, handing the book to the girl he had rescued. He could see just how beautiful she was now and he realised, in a very adult way, how drop-dead gorgeous she’d be in a few year’s time.

  Rachel took the book and opened it gently, flipping through the pages. Andy could see a look of wonder on her face as the thick paper whispered at the air, and he was glad. It meant that she knew what she held in her hands.

  “It’s difficult to read,” she said. “What’s this? Hounded by fire dogs. What’s that? What are they?”

  Andy shrugged, the description sending a shiver down his spine and into his balls ... one of several strange feelings down there right now. “Hopefully something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “My mum?” she asked, suddenly a frightened little girl again.

  Andy wondered how she saw him. A scared teenaged boy? A rescuer? A hero?

  “I saw her a while back in the square and she was alright then. Worried about you.”

  “Mum…” Rachel said, lost for a moment. Then she looked back at Andy. “So what do we do?” She glanced over his shoulder towards the edge of the orchard. “You came that way? Is the square that way?”

  “Are you sorry?” he asked again, thinking he knew what he meant but suddenly discovering a terrible vagueness to his thoughts. Could it really, truly be this simple?

  “For what?”

  “For what your family did to Mengezah. She tried to help them, and she failed, and they had her bricked into the church crypt. Alive. Asleep. Are you sorry?”

  Rachel looked around, scared, tears glittering like diamonds in her eyes and on her cheeks. “Andy ... how can I be sorry for something I didn’t do?”

  “It’s important!” he shouted, and instantly regretted it. It was important. He couldn’t mess this up; even if it wasn’t the way to solve things it was a start, a statement, and he just did not want to mess it up. It was important.

  She wasn’t frightened by him, though. She didn’t step back or turn to run. He guessed she’d seen far, far worse things today. “I saw people with no faces,” she said, confirming his suspicions. “Will it make them go? Will it help them if I say I’m sorry?”

  Andy shrugged. “It might.”

  “Well of course I’m sorry then.”

  Nothing changed. The trees had pulled back and the skies were brightening, but the woods were still unknown and the windfalls stank meaty in their rot. Andy had not been expecting an instant flip back to how things had been – even his thirteen-year-old mind, relatively untainted by cynicism and fresh with naiveté – knew that this was not how things ever were. But surely something must happen now?

  Unless he’d got it all wrong.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Which way?”

  “I don’t think it matters, really.” He turned his back on the girl and started out the way he had come, searching above and through the trees for any sign of a landmark he’d recognise. He paused, turned back, smiled. Rachel was following him. She was scared and as confused as he, he could see that, and she was concerned for her mother. And, even though she had said sorry but not thank you, he knew how grateful she was.

  “Why were you calling my name?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d be the most likely person to rescue me,” she said simply, and she slipped her hand into his.

  Together they walked from the strange orchard and out into the unknown streets and courtyards.

  Sweet Dream

  I’m sorry, she hears and feels, and things begin to change.

  Forgiven by the kin of those she tried to help, Mengezah draws away from the limbo she inhabits. The drain on her mind and memory ceases. The nightmares no longer leak to the world but are slowly drawn back inside. She never meant to let them go but they were surprised out of her, exposed and sucked away by the promise of light and the certainty of the coveted death to come. Now she holds them to herself once more, even tighter than she did before, because she knows that she is the only one who truly has nothing to fear from them.

  She cannot drown or be crushed, she cannot burn or be trampled, she will not remain in time because time has no meaning here. Space and distance do not concern her, neither do enemies from the past. She holds on – tight – until she feels the change she has been awaiting so long.

  Her own dreadful nightmare starts to draw away, expanding like an explosion of gas, opening up like a flower revealing its soft insides. She would smile and shout if she had a mouth, but she is more than content knowing that her half-death is nearing an end.

  She holds her nightmares in and awaits final release.

  She waits to rest in peace.

  Thirteen

  “Look,” Rachel said. “The sky.” They looked up and saw clouds appear out of the even blankness of the dark blue sky. It was brightening and lightening, the clouds giving depth instead of weight, and Andy smiled. He suddenly wanted to run home and see his dad, but they are not back in the village quite yet. He thought they would be soon – he could smell the occasional waft of apples on the air, proper apples – and when they were, he prayed that normality would have found a home there once more.

  Whatever normal was.

  “What’s normal?” he asked.

  “Well, the trees don’t look so weird anymore.”

  “No,” Andy said, “ I mean in general. You know? What’s normal?”

  “You’re still weird, however.” She was still holding his hand, and she gave a slight, reassuring squeeze.

  “Do you think we’ll know normal when we’re a bit older?” They walked in silence for a moment, and Andy started to notice scraps of landscape that looked familiar. A stretch of wall here, a tree there, and in the distance he could hear a stream. He only hoped it was flowing the proper way.

  “I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “I think adults make up ‘normal’ as an excuse for not being kids any more.”

  Andy thought about that as they walked. It made him sad.

  It was only as they both saw the stream, felt an overwhelming relief that it was flowing the right way, started off on the path that led down into the square and realised that the village was their village again, that Andy realised he’d left the book back in the orchard. Rachel has been looking at it and the
next thing he remembered was seeing it on the ground, already seeming to rot into the earth. At the time it had seemed only right.

  “I hope I never see that again,” he said. Rachel murmured her agreement, but Andy wondered if she really knew what he meant. In a way, he hoped Mengezah had taken it back.

  They heard a noise as they approached the final corner which hopefully led into the square. It sounded like a drill, its tone changing constantly as it buried itself into concrete marred by air pockets. For a second Andy thought that they’d arrive back in the square to see two workmen labouring in the churchyard, carrying out the jobs which Father Norman had assigned them, and that everything would be as it should have been. They might see his dad drive by on the way home from work, or perhaps Stig would be waiting on his bike, itching to go up to the woods with Andy for one last ride before twilight settled over the landscape.

  But then he thought of what Rachel had said about ‘normal’, and they rounded the corner and saw the screaming woman.

  Her voice was high-pitched and loud, and she seemed to scream without drawing breath. Andy saw why and felt sick. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear, and the red dress she wore was once yellow, and blood bubbled at her throat and misted the air before her. Her cheeks and forehead were very pale. Her eyes were showing their whites.

  “Ohmygod!” Rachel gasped. “Andy, Andy, oh my God!”

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing her arm and trying to steer her towards the church. There was one more thing he thought he should do. It came from nowhere, this idea, a final act that felt only right. He didn’t know if it would have any more effect, or whether it could undo more of what had already been done … but it felt like a way of showing the honesty in everything that had been said, by Rachel as well as himself. Mengezah was family, after all.

  “Mum!” Rachel said, and for one awful moment Andy thought the dying woman was her mother. But Rachel slipped from his grasp, ran around the corner and back out of the square, glancing back once more at the bleeding woman and once more at him, the expression on her face exactly the same both times.

  “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said, wondering what for.

  The woman reached the grass verge where he and Stig had sat eating melted chocolate earlier that day. She dropped to her knees so quickly that Andy heard one of them pop, then she keeled forward and landed face down on the dried grass. The screaming stopped and she was still.

  Elsewhere in the village, as if the end of the screaming was a signal, more shouting began. Someone cried far away, a high pitched wail as they found a dead loved-one or something worse. Someone else was nattering nearby, trying to talk sense into the senseless, perhaps …which made Andy think of his father.

  Was he still in the car in their driveway?

  Was he still alive?

  “I hope so,” Andy said as he ran for the church. He filled up, a lump rose in his throat as he thought of his dad building him a set of cricket stumps, taking him for a bike ride in the woods, still recommending kid’s books to him even though he’d read The Rats by James Herbert more than a year ago now. All good memories, ones he cherished and would cherish forever, whatever the end of this day may bring. “I hope so.”

  The church door was open, blocked only by some hastily arranged police tape. ‘Do Not Enter - Dead Witch’ Andy thought, laughing nervously. He wondered where the policemen and ambulance men were now that they were really needed, but there would be time for that later. He ducked under the tape and entered the dark church. It was cool inside.

  The sun, dipping low in the west now, shone through one of the stained glass window, flooding the pews with colour. Andy was astounded. His mother was religious, so she claimed, but she had never brought Andy in here. He was amazed that he’d spent his whole life in the village, but the only time he’d ever seen inside the church was this morning, standing in Stig’s entwined hands and trying to see whether there were any bodies or orgies.

  There weren’t, not now. He was alone in here with the splash of colour from the window and Jesus staring sadly down at him. Andy wondered if Jesus would object to what he was about to do, but he found that he did not care.

  The door beside the altar led down into the crypt. There were lights strung along the small tunnel that led to the stone wall. The centre of the wall had been knocked out by the workmen, and the lights were still lit up. Tools were discarded across the floor, and it didn’t take long for Andy to smash out a few more stones, being careful to loosen them and then pull them out with the pick. He didn’t want them to drop inside in case they fell on whatever was in there.

  He’d always wondered what a grave would smell like. He and Stig would talk about digging up one of the older graves, the ones that nobody tended anymore, just to see what was inside. He’d imagine a skeletal frame with skin dried on like old leather, hair long and flowing where it had continued growing for a few months or years after burial, broken nails and scratches on the inside of the coffin lid where the unfortunate had been buried alive, bony fingers dripping in family jewellery … and he guessed he watched too many films.

  The smell down here was one of age, but not rot. Dampness, mould, an earthy aroma like freshly turned soil, not unpleasant but rich. It had been a long time.

  He prepared to enter the hole, stood back and took deep breaths, but he really didn’t need to. He was not scared. He was about to enter the tomb underneath a church where a witch had been bricked in alive three centuries ago and where her nightmares had lain in wait for that long for release … and he was not scared. She’s family, he thought, but it wasn’t even that. Maybe he’d seen too much today and was in a state of shock. Or perhaps it was simply that doing the right thing offered some sort of protection.

  He wormed through the hole and stood to one side to allow light to shine in. He saw her then, Mengezah, a bundle of rags and bones huddled in the corner of the small space, her skull hugged down against her chest as if she’d covered her head with her arms, not wanting to be seen should discovery ever come. Her hair was long. Her bones were rough, chewed in places. There was no evidence of a pointed hat or a broomstick.

  He picked her up and she was very light.

  Andy found a quiet corner of the churchyard to bury his ancestor in. He used the dead workmen’s tools to dig a hole, his palms blistered, he began to sweat and he lost track of time. All his concerns left him for that hour – his fears for his father and Stig, Rachel and her mother, the rest of the village – and he simply swung the pick, moved earth, swung, shifted, hauling out rocks the size of his fist and scraping away the dried, crumbling mud with his bare hands. It was not a proper grave by any stretch of the imagination, but then Mengezah had been gone for a long time, and the hole he needed was small.

  “I’ll always remember you,” he said as he patted the last clod of turf back down over her remains. He thought of her book and wondered where it was now. He tried to disguise her resting place, hoping with all his heart that they would leave her alone. He sought some words but could think of nothing to say.

  As twilight fell and Andy walked home, he heard the first sirens in the distance. A background song to the concerto of loss that played the village into night.

  Andy learned a lot that year.

  He learned that sometimes it’s the kids who are the hardy ones. Stig wandered back into the village three months after Andy had buried Mengezah, coming down from the woods, walking home and asking his mum for some cheese on toast. He wore the same shorts and trainers, and his bare torso was goosebumped in the autumn cool. His parents – convinced that he was lost, certain that someone had taken him away and killed him – screamed and shouted until he hugged them, told them that he was alright, just tired and hungry. It had been, he said, a long walk.

  Andy saw him a couple of days later. Stig came over, knocked at the front door, stared Andy in the eye and said: “One day I’ll tell you.” Then he shoved past Andy and started flicking through his new comic books, catching up. Andy
took that trust as one of the greatest signs of friendship, and he honoured it.

  Andy’s father surfaced from his trance, barely, and he spent most of the rest of that year staring off into space. “I’ve seen forever,” he would say. He would or could not elaborate, and Andy and his mother simply accepted the condition, hoping, praying that he would improve. Perhaps one day he would. Maybe, Andy thought, his dad was like this because somewhere inside he was busy trying to redefine normal.

  He learned also that relationships do not always go entirely as planned or desired. Rachel’s mother thanked him profusely for finding her daughter. Rachel did her best to avoid him. He would never hold her hand again.

  Most of all, he came to realise that nightmares never really go away. The villagers shared haunted looks now, avoiding questions from the press about that long hot Wednesday. Sixteen bodies had been found scattered around the village, and eighteen more people had disappeared never to be seen again. A house had gone too, and one of the ambulances. The pub had been burned to the ground and a train had been derailed, two of its carriages inexplicably pointing in the opposite direction to travel. The curious came, money was offered, and still the villagers did not tell their stories. Children talked about all sorts of weirdness, but the adults, those who could not accept that weirdness so easily, remained quiet. That summer, the children were in charge.

  Sometimes, Andy thought he saw Bully Bradfield waiting for him in the distance.

  He supposed that in a way, nightmares were needed. He guessed that as he grew up, and as adult concerns changed or wiped out his childish sense of wonder, the nightmares would help define his norm.

  He hoped that his memory was long.

  Other Titles

  from Generation Next Publications

  MOSTLY HUMAN

  by William Meikle, Steven Savile,

  Scott Nicholson & Steve Lockley

  The English Lake District is a haven of tranquility, a place for hill walkers, mountain climbers and those in search of solitude. But when the rains arrive it becomes a desolate landscape where malevolence rises up from the depths and death is not far behind. It has struck before and this time it has to be stopped.