by Peter Laws
‘Then let’s go.’ He started dragging the altar away from the door. God, it was flimsy.
When the door was clear he went to grab the handle.
‘Wait.’ Kissell stared at the door. They all did. ‘What if they’re all up here already?’
Nupa waved her coffee pot in the air. ‘Then we whack the fuckers’ heads in with a Java.’
He pulled the handle down, gripped the pole.
His entire head was a heartbeat.
When he opened the door, the corridor was empty. It did look different, though. At first, he couldn’t figure out why exactly, until they crept along the carpet. It was the pictures on the walls. The ones Perry had accidentally knocked down earlier. They’d all been replaced, upside down. Even the pictures that hadn’t fallen before were also flipped.
Odd that such a thing would chill him so much, but it did, as they hurried past them. All those empty fishing boats hanging from the sky. Those tall trees, sprouting downwards from green clouds. It made him think of Menham, and a primary school where he’d once stood. Where a music teacher lay dead, without a throat, and all the children’s pictures of animals walking had also been turned completely on their heads.
When he finally reached the door to the stairwell, Matt pressed an ear against the cold wood. He heard nothing, and pushed it gently with his shoulder, poised to thrust his pole directly into whatever might come running, but nothing did. He stepped inside and waved them all through, letting them go up to the next floor. He stayed put, so he could keep an eye on the staircase heading down, bracing himself for shadows, or a flurry of many footsteps, heading up. Was that the wind moaning down there? Or was that the entire, tumbling horde of them, following Simon Perry? Storybook images of the Pied Piper flashed in his mind, stirring up his old, childhood terror of that tale.
He stared into the inky dark staircase below, watching for glowing eyes to start appearing, then with a shiver he tore himself away and followed them up the staircase to the top floor. The Reed’s almost pyramid-like design meant that the highest point of the building was little more than a concrete box. There were no more corridors up here, no windows. The only thing other than the wall was a red metal door that said the word roof on it. The one he’d found locked yesterday.
He reached for the entry pad and a low moan, as heartfelt as any the possessed could make, rolled out of him. He didn’t bother turning to Nupa for the code because the box wasn’t glowing and was crooked close up. He tapped it and the whole panel dropped off in a spring of wires.
Nupa’s jaw fell with a click, and Matt saw something in her eye he didn’t like. The hot, hard throb of panic.
‘No, no, no …’ she said.
‘Nupa. Calm down.’ He pushed on the door as hard as he could, then he nodded them all over and they tried together. So much for group effort. Turned out, they were Team Pathetic. It simply wouldn’t budge. He even risked the noise by kicking it, hard. It stayed solid.
‘He did this … I know it.’ Claire glared at the broken keypad. ‘Selfish bastard.’
Nupa, her stunning hair now slicked with sweat and blood spray, started shoving at the door, pressing at it with her splayed hands, heaving her hip into it, until her arms shook.
Matt put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s useless.’
She turned back towards him, opened her mouth to speak … and screamed instead.
He spun round and looked down the staircase at the small visible segment of the next floor down.
Two bare feet were standing on the carpet below.
Nupa immediately fell backwards against the roof door. The rest of them had the good sense to stay still. He thought the feet had hair at first, but it was actually dry blood, and though they couldn’t see above the knee, he knew it was Abby. He wondered if that blood was from Ethan or from the word she’d been carving into her stomach. Or who knows, maybe she’d killed a whole bunch of people tonight – and they were next.
They all just stood there, one collective held breath.
Seconds passed. A minute even.
He felt a sudden movement next to him, then Kissell pressed his lips against Matt’s ear, and pushed in a panicked whisper. And no amount of Matt’s finger against his lips to shush him would work. ‘This is how they stood, earlier on …’ Kissell hissed. ‘Before their eyeballs turned white. Before they started to levitate.’
Matt went to shush him, but then one of the feet suddenly moved.
Claire yelped. Nupa yelped. Kissell started to frantically cross himself.
It wasn’t a zombie slide, or a Frankenstein Monster stomp. Just a careful turn towards the door they’d just come through down there. The one that led to the chapel. He saw the side of her ankles, just as he heard the metal hinges creak open. Then the bare feet dragged away and were gone.
The door closed with a dull click, and she vanished, somehow oblivious to them.
Everybody’s breath finally spilt out for freedom. Only Nupa’s brought something with it. She pressed her head against the wall and vomited.
CHAPTER SIXTY
‘I think that was Abby,’ Matt said.
Claire blinked. ‘The one who passed all your tests?’
‘Not every—’
Abby’s muffled screams suddenly boomed from somewhere in the corridor downstairs. Then they heard glass shattering. It sounded like a windowpane.
‘She must be in the chapel,’ Kissell said. ‘All those crosses.’
Nupa finally looked up from the stinking floor and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m going down before she comes back.’
‘But Perry’s down there,’ Matt said.
‘And all the others too.’ Claire nodded. ‘We should stick together.’
‘I don’t care, I’m making a break for my car.’ Nupa started down. ‘So if you really want to stick together, then you’ll have to follow me.’
Matt looked back at the roof door and the useless keypad hanging open. He sighed and followed her down.
They crept down step by step, eyes always on the door where Abby was still wailing. When he reached the bottom step, the first thing he did was repurpose his beloved lamp pole. He slid it through the handle of the stairwell door and wedged it against the frame. Not unsnappable by any stretch, but something to slow her down.
Just as he turned, Abby roared in agony, calling out a name, which confused him at first. What on earth was Tuan? His brain quickly remembered. The kid he’d met in the TV studio make-up room. Her little boy. To hear her scream her own son’s name with such panic and pity was heart-wrenching. But for that terrible shout to be threaded with hatred and venom too was truly frightening. The type of sound you just had to retreat from.
Nupa wasn’t thinking straight. When she reached the next floor down, she pushed through the door that led to his accommodation corridor. He rushed to her, to tell her to slow down, but something stopped her in her tracks anyway. When he reached her shoulder, he saw it too.
The lights were off on his corridor, but there was enough spilling from the stairwell to pick out shapes at the far end. Hunched in the shadows were two figures. One was collapsed in a heap by a wall and the other was nearby, crouching on his haunches, gnawing at his own wrist with a sickening rapidity.
He recognised them both: the collapsed one was a recently added client. He didn’t know his name, but he’d seen him dancing the Macarena earlier in the after-party downstairs. And the other, the one eating his own hand, was Pavel Basa, who had gone missing earlier. His pyjamas looked streaked with mud and his bare feet were gashed and scraped by twigs. He’d been out in the woods, no doubt about it. And now he was back.
Was Pavel crouching like that because he’d killed people tonight, or was he as innocent as anybody else and just traumatised by the horror of it all? Matt had no idea, but it didn’t matter much anyway. Nupa pushed her hand against the door and started to shove it shut. ‘No frickin’ way are we running into that fruit loop.’
> Kissell shot his hand at the door and kept it from closing.
Nupe glared at him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘They need help … I should pray.’ He started rummaging in his trouser pocket. There was a secret flap, which was barely visible. He pulled out his buzzer and blatantly started fixing it into his palm.
Nupa threw her hands up. ‘Leave them!’
‘No, this might work.’ His face was a crumple of pain as he pushed through.
‘Wait,’ Matt said. ‘The police are almost—’
‘I will not leave them in the dark … look at them.’
Matt stared down the corridor, at Pavel crouching, just as Kissell started walking into the darkness, raising his hands in prayer.
‘Come back.’ Matt reached out to grab him, but Kissell slipped through his fingers.
‘Love will set you free, my friend. Let me pray.’
Pavel slowly looked up and Matt thought he was about to smile at Kissell, but the lips peeled back from his teeth much further than would be normal, and a terrible sound came sizzling out of the hole. ‘… she was alone, liar man … but she’s not alone now …’ The voice dissolved into filthy laughter.
Nupa shoved the door closed. It clicked loudly as it shut. ‘Screw him, let’s go.’
‘We can’t just leave him.’ Matt tried to drag the door back open. Claire helped him shove Nupa to the side, and when he did, he pulled the door back. Matt could not control the shudder when he saw. Kissell was already dead on the floor, glasses off, neck wrong, his doll eyes dripping his last ever tear. Pavel was crouched over him tapping Kissell’s nose. It looked like a chimpanzee with a rubber toy. When Matt saw the growing bulge pushing up the crotch of Pavel’s pyjama bottoms, he couldn’t do anything else but turn away.
‘He’s dead.’
Claire and Nupa span and just barrelled down the staircase to the ground floor, where the double doors to the lobby waited in the gloom. Matt slammed the door and ran down too, catching up with Nupa and grabbing her arm. ‘Dammit, Nupa. Slow down. Think.’
‘Get off me, get off!’ She dug her nails into his hand and dragged herself from him. She fell into a tumbling run, straight through the lobby doors. They both swung open, and though the place thankfully looked empty, Nupa still froze in the doorway.
‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Cockroaches.’
He saw the small black shapes crawling over the sofas, dripping from the curtains, and some even flying through the air in strange arcs and tumbles. They were leaves from the trees outside. Black, brown and dry, they had blown in through the now broken windows.
‘Nupa. Wait!’
She was running towards the lift, her hand thrust deep into her jeans pocket so she could fish out her car keys. A simple plan, really. Head down in the lift, get to the parking lot outside. Drive off into the sunset and maybe get therapy. Then win an award for the world’s most shocking TV show.
She reached for the lift button.
He wasn’t really sure what it was that made him so certain Nupa should stop. Intuition, superstition, it was hard to tell. But he and Claire shouted her name just as she jabbed the lift button repeatedly. Then the innocuous chime pinged its greeting, and Nupa, with the slip of a hopeful smile on her face, turned back to them. Panic stepped aside for a brief moment and she was the same, strong woman again. Sanity came through. She called out, ‘Come on, guys. The crew car is as fast as fu—’
The lift doors, thick and mirrored, split into a long black line from top to bottom. And there he was, instantly. So close to the opening slit that his face must have been pressed against it the whole time. Reverend Perry didn’t even wait for the doors to fully open. He just seemed to spill out, shoulders heaving through the doors. His clerical collar hung open at his neck. Once he stepped out, he locked both feet into place, like he needed the ballast. He lifted his arm that held something long and sharp.
Nupa was still looking back at Matt and Claire.
Matt’s mouth went to shout, Noooo. One of those slow-mo roars you hear in bad movies, but as soon as it happened, Matt’s lungs were pumped with instant cement, and so it was impossible to fuel any word, ever again.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Nupa’s face burst into a look of surprise that was almost comical. The type of look you’d pull to a friend, when a stranger farted in a lift. He saw her eyebrows shoot up and her mouth formed an ‘oooo’. It was the perfect cue for the comedy slide whistle. But then Claire let her own shriek come out, as she watched. It flushed itself out from between her bared teeth, long and harsh. When she stopped screaming, the entire world plunged into a much quieter, yet infinitely more gut-wrenching sound.
It was like a cruel god might be on the decks up there in heaven, having fun with the sound mix on earth. Dropping everything else away and sliding up his favourite faders, one at a time. The loudest of which sounded like the coffee machine in the corner, starting up again, spurting out decaf into the empty space where Nupa had taken the glass pot, earlier. Even now, Matt saw that pot falling from Nupa’s fingers. Yet no matter how much Matt’s self-protective brain insisted he was hearing coffee spurting, he knew it wasn’t coffee spurting. That sound was Perry, repeatedly and methodically jabbing the blade into her back.
Claire dropped to the floor with screams of horror and incomprehension at what her husband was doing, right in front of her. Matt saw her fingers scramble up her own cheeks, eyes shut so tight that there were now shrivelled lines where her eyes used to be. Her face had aged by decades in a single second.
Matt was aware that he was running at Perry, before he even realised it was possible to move. He bounded across the lobby floor, yelling at Perry to ssssstopppppp. Matt reached out his hands as he ran. The type of move folks do on the motorway, when a truck is barrelling down on them. Matt’s voice was the engine roar. ‘Let. Her. Go!’
To Matt’s surprise, Perry complied with the request. He put his hand against her shoulder and pushed her hard. Nupa slid off the blade, staggering forwards, arms flailing and eyes rolling up. Matt’s kneecaps cracked with fire as he dropped to the floor to catch her. She collapsed completely onto him.
They both landed in a white-hot, gasping heap, and as his hands touched her back nausea made the room spin. He felt the hideous, rhythmic press of warm fluid gushing through his fingers.
Matt let out a loud, involuntary wail. Who cared if it brought all the other monsters running? She ended up draped across his lap and so he quickly grabbed a cushion. Anything to press against her back, which now looked like the hideous surface of an alien planet, with craters erupting. Pressure. That’s what blood needed, wasn’t it? Lots and lots of pressure.
He grabbed a nearby cushion, just as he heard her guzzle whatever air was left of her. He could smell that perfume of hers even now, but it was being rapidly overwhelmed by the sickening metallic odour of her blood. He noticed that Nupa’s heartbeat, that had only just been pounding against his knee, wasn’t pounding any more.
His hands were trembling, as he looked up.
Perry was standing there, staring at his hand in pure horror. Whether it was guilt or simple shock didn’t matter much, because that almost human look in his face didn’t last anywhere near as long as it should have. After that initial, gaping despair, he just blinked himself into reality, or perhaps, unreality. Perry held the knife with the tail of his shirt, and started to wipe the blade and handle against the back of a wingback armchair. Rubbing any part he may have accidentally touched with his fingers.
Claire had curled up into a silent, shivering ball.
The blade clean, Perry took a drunken sidestep, then he reached a flailing hand out. His trembling, wet fingers found the back of a moulded plastic chair. He dragged it into place and dropped into it, panting. He started mumbling … ‘Why did you do it … why?’ His voice kept catching with emotion. Then he looked up. ‘Why did you do it, Matt?’
‘What?’
‘You should’ve left that box alone.’
He started rocking back and forth on the chair. ‘Yep. Yep, that’s it. You should’ve let me take that box in my car, and I could have burnt it in the woods. That would have been the end of it … but you all brought it here, and you broke it open and you saw …’ Perry cast his eyes to Nupa on the floor. He gripped his stomach in a sudden cramp. ‘You left me no choice … that poor woman.’
Matt spoke, eyes hooded. ‘So what … are you going to kill us all, are you? You’re going to let us all die here tonight, just so we don’t tell the world what you did to that ridiculous box? That’s why you wanted Kissell alone before, isn’t it? So you could kill him, before he could say the tape wasn’t his?’
‘You shouldn’t have broken it open …’
Matt stared at him. ‘How could you do this?’
‘Hey. If you have to blame anybody, then blame Justine …’ He looked over to the Claire ball on the floor. ‘She started it, love. The affair, I mean. But I broke it off after a while. I swear I did. But she was going to tell. She was going to tell the church … tell you … tell my parents …’ He visibly shuddered at that last part, and he shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t let me end it. She wanted to keep on sinning. And Tom was already starting to hate her so much … so he helped the sinning stop, that’s all.’
‘And killing Justine wasn’t a sin?’ Matt said.
‘I didn’t do that, though.’
‘You drove him to it …’
‘Did I?’ When he said that, there was a chilling sense of bafflement to his voice. As if he really didn’t know the answer to the question he’d just been asked. ‘Was it really me who made that tape and put it in the box? Or was it something else making me do it? Was it really me at the doorbell?’
‘That was you?’ Claire’s unsteady voice came out as a thin whimper.
He nodded. ‘Sometimes Tom had doubts he was possessed. But when I showed him that video, he knew the truth. And so did you.’
‘The truth?’