by Richard Amos
Needaline! Needaline!
The moon came out, released from its cloudy prison and giving some much needed lunar light. The sea was just as angry, the wind freezing. And there was a pier, just as there was in Bournemouth.
I had no choice but to walk on.
After some feet I stopped. Nestled together beneath a small cliff behind the wall was a cluster of four houses—abandoned beachfront homes with verandas and small driveways, boarded up, one with its roof sunken in. It was a sad sight. A narrow road like a gray river ran between them and the sand. It vanished in a bend to the right past the last house, disappearing behind the wall of rock.
A weird haze fell over me. My feet were moving, but almost separate entities. When the haze lifted, I was standing on the tiny road, staring at one of the houses, as if expecting them to vanish.
A large, dark-skinned man was leaning against a garden fence. “Hi.”
I stuck my hand on the gun. “Hello.”
“You looking to buy one of these?”
I didn’t like the look on his face. It was almost as if he recognized me.
“No.”
“I wouldn’t bother. Be too much work.”
“They look it.”
He was wearing a backpack.
“Much better property farther away from the beach.”
I was no expert in reading people, but I could hold my own. There was something in his amber eyes that didn’t sit right. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew who he was looking at. Was he working for that murdering prick?
“Name’s Greg,” he said. “Greg Stone.” He offered a hand.
I didn’t take it. I went to move and he maneuvred into my path. “Wait …”
He went to touch me as I moved again. I smacked his hand away. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” I pulled out the gun.
He held up his hands. “Whoa, sorry! Be cool, mate!”
“Who are you?” My arm trembled, my finger resting on the trigger. I’d never fired a gun in my life.
“Put the gun down, Jake.”
The weapon rattled in my grasp. I needed both hands to keep it steady.
“How the hell do you know my name?”
“Please, you have to come with me.”
“No way.”
“You have to.” He took a step forward.
“Stay the fuck where you are!” I had to get out of here. “What is this, huh? What fucking game is this? You’re working for him! You’ve done something to me, drugged me, made me think I’m somewhere I’m not! Whatever you’re doing, it’s not stopping me!” Fury blazed. “He won’t stop me.” So much rage. “Neither will you.”
I fired a shot. It went wide, but this man called Greg hit the ground.
Movement from up the road. “Greg? What the fuck?”
It was a woman shouting.
“Jake, please,” Greg said. “Easy with that thing.”
The shot had gone wide, hitting the rocky wall.
“Easy,” he said again, slowly getting to his feet.
“Fuck you!” I took off down the beach as the woman called out again.
The moonlight died and the wind picked up, howling as if a switch had been flipped to start it up.
The sky lit up with lightning and a violent clap of thunder followed.
Pain in my chest …
The rain fell hard in sudden drenching sheets.
What was that pain?
There was another violent clap of thunder. The horizon lit up violet with lightning. My upper chest flared with burning pain. The sensation travelled down and exploded into a sickly burst of pain in my stomach, like being kicked straight in the gut with a pair of steel toe-capped boots. Winded, I clasped my belly, bending over to catch my breath.
What the actual hell?
I’d almost caught my breath when my body was crippled by another violent burst of pain.
“Fuck!”
The pain spread, migrating to every part of me. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. This was dying, this had to be death. It pulsed in white, hot bursts; bad, worse, bad, even worse, bad, worse, until I fell onto my face, rolling onto my back, writhing on the sand, my screams devoured by the explosion of thunder, howling wind, battering rain, and the raging waves of the sea.
“Jake!”
It was Greg.
Something was in my throat, like hundreds of tiny spiders clambering up my esophagus. I wanted to be sick, but couldn’t with the way out for the vomit being blocked up. Shit! I was choking, clogged up with tiny arachnids. The scuttling legs became slivering things, slugs, and then became one, the texture of an oozing jelly, the sensation slick, like a thick stream of congealed phlegm working its way out. My mouth was forced wide open. Something spilled out of me. I looked down to see black liquid pouring over my sodden coat. It was leaking from my eyes, my nose and ears! I could feel it! Bloody hell, could I feel it. There was no space to breathe, to make a sound.
Stop! My mind screamed.
“Oh, my God!” the woman cried.
As if heeding my silent plea, the black liquid stopped. It started to rise in the air in a silent, rippling mass above me. My brain was malfunctioning, not knowing how the hell to process all of this. A black river hovered above me, giving gravity the two-finger salute.
Wake up, you dick! Wake up!
The pain was fading. This was no dream, but the land of the awake, and I was fully in it.
Despite the easing of the pain, my body was a quivering mass I had no control over.
I couldn’t see Greg or the woman, but I could just make out some sort of reassurances that were zero help.
I wanted them to get the hell away. This had something to do with them!
The liquid morphed into smoke and it was just like the sea cave all over again. It lowered toward me, as if it were watching me. I could feel the pressure of its regard like two huge eyes had pinned me to the spot, as if the smoke was alive.
“Fu—”
The black smoke shimmered and erupted into white light, then green, then yellow, then red and blue. It changed over and over again, rippling into each color until rain started to pour from it. The multi-colored rain drenched me, the droplets sliding across my skin as they made contact, moving over my body as tiny slugs, entering me the way they had come; eyes, mouth, and ears, burrowing into the pores of my skin too. The cloud shrank as the rain fell. The pain returned like a thousand fiery needles traversing my blood stream.
Within minutes, it was over.
The cloud had dissipated.
“Jake …” Greg said.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything for the rain that flooded my eyeballs.
“It’s okay,” he added. “We’ve got—”
A new wave of horror ripped through, my limbs flailing.
The last thing I heard was the woman shout, “He’s having a seizure!”
Chapter 6
The world alternated between blurry and dark, my lids too heavy to keep open.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
That sound…
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Funny smell …
When my eyes finally opened, the world slowly came into focus as they adjusted to bright light. I was in bed by a window in a room I didn’t recognize. The storm had stopped. There was something in my arm. I touched a needle. It stung a little. Saline drip. To my left was a half-drawn curtain and half a bed exposed a few feet away from mine. The beeping was a heart monitor. I was linked up to it with pads stuck to my chest.
I was in hospital.
That black stuff, the rainbow cloud …
I sat up in the bed and pulled off the blanket. I was still in my dark jeans, but was bare-chested and barefoot. There was only sand on my jeans, no trace of that stuff that had rained down on me.
Had to be a drug thing. Either I’d fallen off the wagon, or was at some weird hallucinating stage in the cleaning up process. No pamphlets on this one to help me.
But I didn
’t feel as if I’d partaken in anything again. In fact, I knew I hadn’t. All of what had happened had happened. There was no denying it. This wasn’t me getting jacked up again. Though I was still lost in the woods, not ready for real life, I wasn’t putting shit in my body. Anyway, I felt so good, full of energy, not an ache anywhere. All of that pain on the beach was gone. It was the best I’d felt in my life! I touched my forehead. The wound was … gone.
I looked around at what I could see. There was no one, only me and the beeping machine. Even in the dead of night, there would be a snore, even the shuffle of a nurse’s footsteps. The bed beside mine looked empty.
Greg. That was his voice I’d heard back on the beach. He must have brought me here. What the hell was that bloke up to?
“Hello?”
I spotted my pendant lying on top of the white bedside cabinet. I reached for it and slipped it on, a flutter of relief in my belly. Couldn’t be losing that.
I pulled out the drip and removed the pad and wire that monitored my heartbeat, causing the machine to flat line, the noise like a bellow into the blanket of silence that surrounded me. Someone would come rushing in at the noise it made.
No one came.
“Greg?”
Nothing.
My bare feet made contact with the cold floor. There was no sign of my jumper or shoes. Didn’t matter. All I had to see was a nurse, another person, to root me in sanity.
I opened the curtain. The next door bed was empty, the sheets ruffled. The other five, however, were occupied. Two men, one little girl and an elderly woman, all asleep, all wired up. Their monitors were beeping.
I waited some more for a nurse, anyone. Someone had to come. Someone always came. My ears were wide open to detect movement.
No one came.
My skin was bumpy with gooseflesh. How could a hospital be this way? There were always sounds and happenings, even in the faint distance. It was Saturday night. More noise was a requisite, surely.
I cracked my knuckles and inspected the sleepers. They looked awful, all ashen, their chests barely moving, only the beeps from the heart machines showing any signs of life within the almost-corpses.
I couldn’t look anymore, especially at the child. It was fucked up. Whatever had happened to put them in this state, it was bad. The same old thing, probably, some damned accident. At least I was up and about. I didn’t know what to do or say. A prayer? I didn’t pray. Faith wasn’t for me, not after all the things I’d seen in my life. Words and belief did not provide a pillow of comfort to rest my messed up head upon. All I had was my sympathies. I hated that word. I hated the sorry bit too, the ‘is there anything I can do?’ stuff. People meant well, but there was nothing they could do, nor understand. What was there to understand about bad shit? It was bad shit and it wrecked everything. End of. Done. Life as you knew it over. Here’s the candle, now throw it in the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” I said. There really wasn’t anything else to say.
I headed into the corridor, expecting to see the little girl’s parents, some relatives, finally hear life within these sterile, white walls.
No one was outside. The waiting chairs were empty, the corridor deathly silent.
This wasn’t bloody right.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Is anyone here? Nurse? Er, doctor?”
Nothing.
The green sign above my head indicated A&E reception was straight ahead, through a set of double doors. So, I went that way, my steps slow on the cold floor, my heart going crazy. I hated the anticipation in each step, waiting for someone to jump out on me, like the kind that comes with watching a horror movie with the lights down and the volume up.
The smell of hospitals was the worst, all clinical and screaming death.
I came to the doors. Dreading what waited beyond, telling myself I was being stupid. I pushed them open.
“Greg?” My voice was a squeak.
Two feet away was Greg, on the floor, with a woman’s head resting on top of his chest. He was just like the others back on the ward, asleep but looking very much dead. The woman, with cropped blue hair and an alabaster face, was asleep too.
“Greg?”
I crouched down, checking for a pulse, but stopped when more people caught my eye. I’d been so focused on Greg and the woman that I hadn’t paid much attention. Some were sitting on the chairs of the waiting area, and some were lying on the floor like these two. They were all in the same state of being possibly dead.
“What the bloody hell?”
I looked down at Greg again, checking his wrist once more. A pulse and, I noticed, the very small rise and fall of his chest—the woman too. There was something strange about the color of his lips. I leaned in closer to get a better—
A phone rang on the reception desk, and I shot to my feet, heart almost exploding out of my chest.
“Shitting hell!”
The man slumped there didn’t move to pick the phone up. It went on and on and on in its shrill cry for attention.
Composure recovered, I was back down to Greg, getting closer to see what was wrong with his lips. There was orange there, a faint lip gloss. Wasn’t really his color. The woman next to him had deep red lipstick, but there it was too, sitting on the surface of those jammy lips.
I examined the other people at random. A middle-aged man with a bandage on his head, a poorly little boy with skin the color of a red sweet in his mother’s arms—all orange-lipped, all asleep.
Would have been great to stand and wait for the jig to be up, that my imagination was doing the crazy on me. But this was real—as real as the damned shiver going down my spine. Though I wanted so badly to wake up in my bed, my own bed and not the hotel one, this shit was happening.
I cracked my knuckles, not knowing what to do, resisting the urge to lift my fingers to my mouth and get nibbling.
“Is anyone awake?” My voice trembled, filling me with buckets of terrible uncertainty.
I resisted the urge to scream and shout, to shake these people out of their stasis. My frustration was coming to the surface, and there was someone who was gonna take the brunt of it.
I gave Greg a back-handed slap across the face. “Oi! Wake up, dick head. You need to wake up so you can tell me why you’re stalking me.” I slapped him again. “Wake up!” This was getting way too creepy.
“You need to wake up! Please, Michael! Please!”
I recoiled and stumbled back at the flash of memory.
“The weapon has come.”
I spun round to the sound of the whisper behind me. The lights in the waiting area flickered.
“Hello?” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“No place to run, no place to hide.”
The whisper was cold, crackly, almost white noise.
“Hello?” There was no sign of the whisperer.
I jerked as cold licked at my bare chest, senses screaming at me to run. But my feet held firm.
“I will be a hero. I will be a lord.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I’m telling you now.” I broke off to clap my trembling hands together. “I’m telling you—”
Movement in the periphery of my vision had me spinning round.
Then I saw the whisperer.
At first I thought it was a dog, a bloody huge one, but it was much bigger and nothing like any dog I’d ever seen. It was the shape of an unnaturally distorted hyena, covered in dirty, ashy fur, all clumpy and matted. Its eyes were a sickly yellow, blazing with intelligence. Two rows of odd-shaped fangs were bared with a forked tongue dangling between them. It was light on its four twisted legs as it moved ever closer.
Shit.
“I will be the one to extinguish its flame,” it said in that white noise, whispery tone, but its jaws didn’t move.
I took a couple of small steps back. “What the hell is going on?”
If only I could convince myself this was a nightmare. But I could smell the sulfu
r coming from the creature.
“The weapon is new. The weapon is weak.”
Was it calling me a weapon?
It stood on its hind legs, exposing a skinless, glaringly red rib cage. It transformed before my eyes, morphing from a four-legged thing to a stronger, more powerful two-legged thing. It growled, the sound laced with blood and pain.
I was frozen to the spot, even though every part of me was itching to run away. The thing was advancing quickly, packing a pair of hands that sported some deadly sharp talons.
Running would be really good right now.
“Come to me.” The thing gestured. “Let me end your pain.”
Pain. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as the saying goes. It put an end to my paralysis. I broke into a run, cutting across the waiting area, bursting through another set of doors into another corridor.
“Shit!” I yelled as I slammed into something hard, tumbling backward to the ground.
It was another one of those hyena things.
“This isn’t happening!” I scrambled backward across the floor, putting distance between me and the creature before getting to my feet.
The second creature rose onto its hind legs just as the first entered the corridor behind me.
“It is weak,” the second creature hissed. “Master was right.”
“And I will be the hero,” the first said.
The second creature hissed aggressively. “I will!”
“Do not interfere,” the first said. “This is my destiny. I will be bathed in glory.” It turned its attention to me, cocking its ugly head.
The second creature growled. “Your destiny is to serve.”
“I think not.”
“You will not have the glory I am destined to have.”
“Fool!”
I was frozen again, stunned in the middle of the argument between the two crazy nightmare creatures, things that I knew were not of this world. I wanted to faint. A nice blackout was just what was needed to take me away from all of the unbelievable craziness. With no such luck forthcoming, there was only one other option. Escape. I could feel those yellow eyes on me despite the two creatures arguing, their jaws always impossibly still. But being frozen to the spot, no matter how terrified I was, didn’t factor into my plans of staying alive long enough to get my unfinished business with the white eye guy wrapped up.