She looked a few years younger than Shaun perhaps, in her late twenties, and tiny. Short enough to come up to the bottom of my neck, which isn’t normally my preference. As she looked up at me, offering the glass, I looked in her brown eyes and took in all of her beautiful, high cheekboned face, framed by a mess of long, light brown hair, and found myself caught for a second. I was speechless. Maybe it was the booze, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. She was beautiful. However, I wasn’t gone enough, or drunk enough, to miss the slight creasing of her forehead as I stared for a moment too long, and made a comedic show of shaking myself ‘awake’.
“Sorry, I was miles away there! As soon as you mentioned food, my brain just went, you know, ‘Mmm … food!’” I laughed, unconvincingly, and took the glass, but it seemed good enough for her; her expression relaxed and a more genuine sounding laugh of her own escaped her lips.
“I’m not surprised, I can smell the booze on you … but if anyone’s got an excuse after what’s happened to your poor flat, it’s you. Really sorry to hear about that,” she said, with genuine sympathy in her expression as she reached out her arm and rubbed my shoulder. I actually felt myself respond slightly to that, and told my body to keep it together.
“Ah, all the important stuff is still here with me,” gesturing in the direction of the bag I’d left in the other room, “And it might have even been worth it, who knows? Got some decent early shots of the statue thing, and some close-ups other people weren’t around to see—”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence, as Shaun was already out of his seat.
“You’re kidding!” he said, moving closer, “Where? On your camera? Have you got it with you?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, heading back to the other room and actually feeling slightly annoyed, in my drunken state. I just wanted to drink my water and eat. Couldn’t this wait? I staggered over to my bag and fished out the camera, then swayed back to the kitchen and handed it to Shaun. “Knock yourself out, buddy.” I turned to his wife, wishing he’d refer to her by name so I could find out what the fuck it actually was. “Sure it’s okay to help myself?”
“Of course, of course,” she said, but she was only half-paying attention, already moving to Shaun’s side to get a closer look at the shots on my camera. All I cared about was picking my glass up from where I’d left it, and rummaging around to grab whatever savoury grub I could find. If seeing my pictures was going to help repay my bed and board, then all the better. As they oohed and ahhed over the close-up images—even though there were no doubt countless more online for them to look at by now—I gave up on the cupboards and went to rummage in the fridge. Straightaway my eye fell on a packet of cheap, budget brand sausages. They would do perfectly.
“Okay to have these?” I asked, straightening up, sausages in hand. Shaun’s wife barely looked around.
“Mmm? Oh, yeah. Go for it,” she said, waving her hand, and went back to perusing the camera photos. The pan and oil were already out on the side, so I turned on the stove, my mouth already beginning to water. Normally, when I’ve been drinking, I forget all about eating, but right then I was ravenous. At that moment, as I put the pan on the heat, a number of odd things happened all at once.
From behind me, I heard Shaun quietly mutter “Whoa,” under his breath, and the murmuring they’d both been producing as they looked at the photos suddenly stopped. I didn’t look around straightaway, but when Shaun’s wife spoke again, what she said made me mildly curious enough to turn and check.
“Yeah … yeah, oh, definitely, yeah … you too, yeah?” she said to Shaun, and put the camera down on the table with her left hand, taking Shaun’s in her right. She sat on one of the dining chairs, looking into his face as he nodded and closed his eyes. He began to breathe heavily and slowly, swaying slightly on the spot as he did so, and grimacing gently like a man trying not to vomit. She gripped his hand tighter, trying to comfort him, but screwed up her own eyes in pain as she put her left hand to her temple, moaning slightly.
“Jesus,” she said through slightly gritted teeth, “I’m sick of this shit already!” I started to ask if everything was okay, when I became suddenly aware of my left hand gripping the handle of the pan unnaturally tightly. Confused, I tried to relax it, and couldn’t, as my right fist also curled into a ball and began to shake, and my stomach tensed as hard as it possibly could. This was when I realised everything in my body was suddenly contracting, and hard, and my jaw locked painfully as I suddenly sprayed spittle from my mouth. I yanked the pan backwards off the stove, oil and sausages spilling out onto the floor as my legs jerked and I crashed to earth along with the contents of the pan. I lay on the tiles and convulsed, head pounding, unable to take a breath as I stared wide-eyed at the base of the kitchen cabinets, too stunned to panic. I heard Shaun and Laura—I remembered then, of all moments, that her name was Laura—overcome their sudden discomfort and rush over to me, heard them saying my name and asking me what had happened, felt them kneeling down and trying to hold me still, heard Shaun telling Laura to grab a wooden spoon for some reason.
Externally, I was all chaos, but strangely, inside, the stunned feeling gave way to a sensation of calm. It was possibly the single strangest sensation of my entire life, up to that point at least. I could feel my body’s spasms and the way my teeth ground against each other, could feel the way my knuckles pushed up, against, and into my face as my feet rattled against the vinyl tiles; yet at the same time, it was as if I was only aware of them as if they were happening to someone else, and that they were of no consequence. It was like I suddenly had more important things to think about, and that sense of purpose was so all-encompassing that it made me feel like I’d found my place in the universe. In that moment I was comforted entirely by knowing that all I had to do was wait. I know, it sounds insane, doesn’t it? The droolings of a hippy shaman. But that’s the only way I can describe it.
Here it comes, my body seemed to say, and it was right; an image began to emerge in my mind. The only way I can explain it would be to ask you to imagine letting someone else imagine for you. I don’t know. That’s the closest to it. But anyway, there it was, someone’s face appearing before my mind’s eye. A blur of a face, at least, but a face nonetheless.
A man’s face, I was certain. You might think I would be going crazy with confusion at this point, confronted with the insanity of an unknown visage appearing in my head, but not then. All I felt was calm, calm enough to consider the image before me. A blonde-haired man, thin in the face, but the image wasn’t clear enough to determine his age. I tried to focus, but I was suddenly distracted by the feeling of Shaun trying to shove a wooden spoon between my jaws. They were trying to stop me swallowing my tongue.
Abruptly, the image disappeared and my body relaxed. The sense of total mental calm was instantly replaced with a strong sense of the absurd, as I found myself on the floor of a relative stranger’s kitchen with him and his wife trying to jam a cooking utensil into my mouth.
They realised I’d stopped fitting, and relaxed themselves, pulling away the spoon and slowly lowering my head to the floor. I lay there, and stared up at Shaun and Laura, who were breathing heavily. They looked at each other, and nodded at the same time.
“Gone again,” he said, and Laura nodded once more. They looked back down at me as I lay there, blinking and suddenly feeling very tired.
“Can you stand?” Shaun said, and I nodded, holding out my hand. He helped me up into one of the dining chairs, and then sat down himself, as did Laura. There was a moment of quiet aftershock, and Shaun slowly took a deep breath and blew air out of his cheeks.
“That’s twice,” he said, looking at the floor. He picked up the glass of water that I’d previously left on the table, leant his head back and drained it. No one spoke, and the only sound was the drone of the small TV in the background. My head was full of questions for them, but at that moment, the only question I wanted an answer to was the one that no one could answer; what the flying
fuck was the face I’d seen in my head all about? I wish I had the words to explain the sensation of seeing it, and as someone who writes for a living, the fact that I don’t would, once upon a time, have embarrassed me beyond measure. Nowadays … pride is not much of an issue. But the one thing I knew beyond any measure was that it was not a hallucination. It had been too … artificial, is the only way I can describe it.
It suddenly occurred to me that, although Shaun and Laura’s response had clearly not been as intense as mine, we had all experienced physical symptoms as a result of something, and all at once. Looking at them as they were—Laura holding her head and Shaun still breathing heavily, relishing the feeling of his now-settled stomach—there was no doubt about it. More importantly, as I remembered what they’d just said, they’d obviously experienced something like this before.
“What …” I started, then broke off to swallow as my throat was now very dry. I inhaled through my nose, resettling myself, and continued. “What the fuck was that?” It was Laura who responded first, without looking up.
“Look who’s talking,” she said, though her tone sounded as though she was smiling. “You didn’t see us throwing sausages all over the room.” Shaun snorted out a brief laugh on the other side of the table, and then winced and put his arms around his stomach.
“Fair point,” I said, smiling myself, and leant back in my chair a little, trying to get more comfortable. “But … have you two had already had this, or something? You seemed to say so. And we all just freaked out at the same time, without any kind of stimulus whatsoever. That’s not normal. When did this happen to you last?” Laura lifted her head up, and I could see instantly that she still wasn’t one hundred percent; her previously radiant skin had turned more pale, and the edges of her eyelids were slightly reddened.
“Shaun?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, “Must have been about, when … what do you reckon?” Shaun didn’t say anything, and instead simply shrugged and gently shook his head, looking at her. He then continued to stare back at Laura, still silent, as if waiting for her to continue. It was a little odd, to be honest, but I didn’t have time to ponder this as Laura was already talking again.
“So … when?” she asked him again, cocking her head to one side, an edge creeping into her voice. “Your opinion, please?” Shaun widened his eyes slightly and raised his hands more theatrically.
“I don’t know, do I? What do you think?” he said, chuckling slightly, amused and not seeing his wife’s mild annoyance. I suddenly got the feeling this kind of exchange was nothing new; easygoing Shaun not realising that a ‘whatever you say’ response was not what was being asked for, and then taking the repeated question as one of his wife’s ‘little quirks’. I wish I’d found a way to explain all this to him, later, to say where he was getting it all wrong. But it didn’t work out that way.
Laura’s mouth turned up in a half smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and now it was her turn to shake her head slightly. She looked at her husband for a moment, taking him in, a gesture that was far more telling than she probably realised. Perhaps she wouldn’t have exposed it so openly with a stranger there were it not for the recent physical attack that she’d just experienced. Either way, it became suddenly and surprisingly clear from this one exchange that this was a couple with problems that had yet to be discussed. I kept my mouth shut, and waited for one of them to speak.
Laura looked away from Shaun and down at the table before continuing.
“I’d say probably around six tonight. I was in here, and Shaun hadn’t been in long, sitting in the living room in front of the TV. I was on the phone at the time—”
“Wait, you were on the phone at six?” I asked, interrupting. “You had signal? How the hell did you have—”
“Landlines,” Laura said, interrupting me right back. “Some of us still use them, you know. Anyway, I was talking to my sister about the usual crap, people at work, etcetera, and then the world just suddenly seemed to slant sideways and my head instantly started just killing, as bad as the worst headache I ever had. She even asked what was wrong on the other end of the line, as I guess she must have heard me moan or something, and then the line went dead. I had to sit down straightaway, and that’s when I heard the thump in the living room.”
“You collapsed, Shaun?” I asked, intrigued. He shook his head.
“No, no,” he said, in his usual, breezy manner, “I actually just came over so sick that I had to lie down, but I was sitting in the armchair and I suddenly just needed to lie flat so badly that I slid out of the chair and onto the floor. I was there for about a minute or two, nauseous as all hell. It was awful.”
“I asked if everything was okay,” continued Laura, “but my head was screaming so much that I couldn’t raise my voice. It was just nuts. When I tried to stand up to go through, it was even worse. So I just waited for it to pass,” she finished, looking at me almost sheepishly. With good reason, I thought, but didn’t say so.
“And then, about a minute or two later, it just stopped,” said Shaun, shrugging again, “And I came through here to find Laura crying, and telling me about her head. It was just fucking weird. We thought there was a gas leak or something.” We sat in silence for a second, and then I remembered something Laura had said.
“You were on the phone to your sister? Did you speak to her after you got cut off?” I asked Laura.
“No, but she rang back a couple of minutes later to ask if everything was okay, and I said yeah, I’d just had a hot flush. Seemed stupid to worry her,” said Laura, shrugging slightly herself now.
“No, I mean as in, did she tell you if she’d had any strange sensations herself once the line went dead?” I asked, leaning forward.
“No,” answered Laura, shaking her head again, and looking slightly confused. “I mean … I never thought to ask, either. Why?”
I found myself reluctant to explain my thinking for some reason; whether it was because it was just a theory at this point, and probably a bit of a leap of logic, or whether it was because it was yet another fantastical idea to get one’s head around on a day filled with enough of them to last a lifetime. Whatever the thinking, I didn’t yet want to say to Laura and Shaun that I thought whilst they were getting headaches and nausea on the other side of town—around 6:00 p.m.—I was inexplicably being rendered unconscious on an overpass on the ring road at the same time.
It also seemed to make sense in terms of the severity of the attacks. They were having severe but manageable symptoms the first time, whilst I was knocked out cold, and the second time they were having more of pretty much the same whilst I was having a full-body seizure. Why could come later. The thing needed right now was confirmation.
“Do me a favour, will you?” I asked, ignoring the question for now. “Text your sister and ask if she had anything funny happen when she was on the phone to you earlier?”
“Why would she?” asked Laura, but she was already getting up and crossing to the other kitchen worktop where her phone lay. “It was obviously something here that’s setting us off. I mean, it got you, too.”
“Maybe,” I replied, “but I’d just like to check, anyway. Sorry about the mess, by the way,” I said, gesturing to the oil and sausages on the floor. I took a breath, and stood up. “I’ll clean it up. It’s all right, it’s all right,” I added quickly to Shaun, who was starting to protest, “I’m fine, don’t worry. Plus this place looks pretty clean, and those sausages should still be fine after a good frying. I’m still starving.” Shaun chuckled at this, and ran his hands through his hair, pulling a ‘What a day!’ face. I was glad of it. The levity of my remarks was purely for their benefit, and for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on, I was beginning to get a real sinking feeling in my stomach. This was something to do with the Stone Man, and I didn’t think it was good. I was almost certain they hadn’t seen the face that I’d seen, either; they would have said so to each other, I thought, and I wasn’t going to mention my own vision to them. I thought t
hat whatever was happening, the difference in our physical symptoms showed that we were experiencing it on a different level. Basically, I didn’t want to sound nuts.
But wasn’t this whole day absolutely insane, crazy beyond all recorded human experience? We’d seen a seemingly living statue start to walk and lay waste to a good portion of a town, a miraculous moving object that was impervious to missile attacks and apparently capable of anchoring its own selective and variable points of gravity. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t freaking out more after seeing visions in my head, and experiencing simultaneous physical reactions with relative strangers; this day had battered both my and their sense of normality so much that we were more accepting of the bizarre. Even so … there’s only one thing people hear when you talk about seeing visions in your head, and it starts with L and ends in oonybin. It was a step too far, at least for now. I grabbed some kitchen roll and began to wipe up the oil, picking up the scattered sausages and putting them back in the pan on the floor. That much was sincere, at least; I was still going to cook the goddamn sausages.
“It’s just an idea I’ve had, that’s all,” I said, as I got to work. “Let’s just see what she says, and then I’ll have a better idea. You two might be right, anyway. It might be something in the house.”
“Really, really bloody weird though,” said Shaun, scratching his cheek. “It was a bit odd before, but you freaking out on the floor like that … man. You all right now, babe?” he asked Laura, who nodded without looking up, concentrating on her phone.
“Mm, fine,” she said. Shaun gave me a conspiratorial nod; all sorted. He had no idea, and again, it was such a shame—he was a good guy, Shaun, and anyone who met him could see it—but it wasn’t my place to say anything, nor did I have the tools to fix such things. And besides, I thought to myself at the time, it’s nothing that isn’t fixable. He’d learn. He’d have to eventually. So I dismissed it, and smiled back, picking up the pan and putting it back on the stove.
The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller Page 7