Marlow

by Andy Briggs

  Marlow sat back on the threadbare sofa, not caring that she was still wet. Life wasn’t fair; she couldn’t even see her children in her dreams and had a difficult time recalling their faces even now.

  Why was it she only remembered the bad things so clearly?

  Dan looked around his hotel room. It was quite large with a double bed, an en suite bathroom, a small uncomfortable sofa, a coffee table, a TV and kettle, which was already on the boil. He was impressed that the Travel Stop was so well appointed considering most people only ever spent one night in it.

  His parents had fled the house almost straight after Marlow had departed. The hotel was a twenty minutes ride away, and on arriving, his Mum and Grandpa had left him there alone and returned to fix up their home the best they could.

  Dan was still shaking after witnessing the destruction around his house, but didn’t understand how he could be responsible for it. He upturned his backpack, spilling the contents on the bed, containing anything he could hastily grab: some crumpled comics, a book about ninjas, his mobile phone, an extra big coffee mug, and a semi-melted chocolate bar.

  Suspicious as to why the weird woman had been called in to help, he had discreetly hidden the mobile amongst the clutter of his bedroom. He wanted to see for himself what these monsters looked like.

  His mother had given him several energy drinks, none of which he touched as their taste was beginning to make him feel nauseous. The last time he’d drank three, one-after-the-other, he’d hallucinated for hours that mice with capes and masks were running around his house acting as superheroes. Right now, the shock at the wreckage back home was more than enough to keep him awake.

  How could being asleep do all that damage? He couldn’t seriously believe the story about the monsters. Still, he’d read ghost stories about people plagued by poltergeist, and for a couple of years he had suspected that’s what was causing the disturbances in his bedroom. They were just minor things: things knocked over, windows and doors cracked opened from the inside, drawers left ajar, their contents strewn across the floor. It had been worrying, but nothing to concern his Mum or Grandpa about. They were much more concerned with his narcolepsy. He had often complained about it, but it was only when he had been riding his bike and fell asleep at the handlebars, thus sleep-peddling across a busy traffic junction, that they decided enough was enough and sought professional medical help.

  That had been a waste of time. He’ d been wired to machines and had had his brainwaves analysed. He tried numerous tablets, experimental drugs, vitamin shots, aromatherapy, stringent exercise - nothing had worked. The doctors had declared that he would finally grow out of it - which was their way of saying ‘we’re drawing a blank, so don’t ask us anymore!’

  Dan made himself a double strength coffee, just in case, then sat down cross-legged on the bed and opened his mobile’s video app. He put the pillows behind his back, including the extra ones he had found stashed in the wardrobe, and got comfortable.

  He pressed play on the video. On the screen the familiar image of his bedroom appeared as he adjusted the camera and darted to his bed. Dan scrubbed through the footage until he saw Marlow enter the room and sit just out of view.

  He gripped his hot coffee with both hands and watched the tiny screen intently...

  Marlow awoke to a different noise. For once the phone was silent, which was no surprise because she had yanked it from the wall during the night. The first thing she saw was the full wine bottle on the table – and felt a tremor of pride that she had resisted touching it. However, the two other empty bottles that rolled from her legs as she sat up proved that her willpower hadn’t been so strong after all. She scratched her head - then stopped. There was that noise again. It was coming from the front door.

  With a wheeze, Marlow pulled herself from the sofa and slowly crossed to the door. She couldn’t remember the last time anybody had knocked on it. Hesitating, she cranked it open a couple of inches. Boris Glass stared at her with puffy red eyes.

  “Oh, no...” Marlow turned away, a silent offer for Boris to enter the apartment. “How d’you find me?”

  “I work for the Council. I pulled every string I could to track you down, since your phone isn’t working.”

  “Yeah, it does that sometimes.”

  Marlow crossed to the open-plan kitchen and wrestled with the tarnished tap to pour herself a pint of water into an unwashed glass. She drank it in one go, wincing from the grim taste.

  “I did everything I could last night,” Marlow said, immediately on the defensive. “You’re not getting a penny back.”

  “Dan–”

  “Dan is weird, I grant you,” Marlow regretted her choice of words but it was out there now.

  “But–”

  “Conduits can bring them things through twice a week, three, tops. And that was a very unusual case. A little girl, bad breath, awful taste in music - but anyway, it can’t happen after the Infiltrator’s been killed. So your boy hosted a new Infiltrator. That’s pretty far from normal. Two nightmares and a daymare in two days? I don’t know what to say. There’s not much I can do about that.”

  “You’re the only one who can handle this kind of thing!”

  “I’m sure there are others.” She knew that was a lie, or at least if there were they didn’t advertise their services and her father had never spoken of them. “Not that they will be as good as me,” she added, just in case.

  “Miss Cornelius...”

  “Call me Marlow. Nobody calls me Miss. And Cornelius I don’t like the sound of.” It reminded her of her father and the further she could get away from that connection, the better.

  “We have a very big problem.”

  “Yeah we do. You want a refund and I won’t be issuing it. Sorry.”

  “Dan has gone missing!”

  “Then problem solved.” The words had come out before the implications of what Boris was saying had chance to weigh in. “Wait, missing?”

  Marlow pushed her scrappy fringe from her eyes to get a better look at Boris. Her first assumption that he was tired was only half true. Boris wore the look of a man on the edge of his sanity.

  “Yes. Missing. We need your help.”

  Marlow looked around the Travel Stop hotel room, searching for clues. Aside from a stack of pillows, the bed hadn’t been slept in. She tried the window; it was locked from the inside. An over-sized coffee mug sat next to the TV, the contents only half finished.

  Boris stood at the door, not daring to enter.

  “Bryony has stayed at the house, just in case he turns up there.”

  Marlow could see no tell-tale signs of Infiltrator action: no trails of dried slime, no claw marks, no pulverised furniture and absolutely no blood.

  “There’s no evidence here that They got him.”

  “Then where is he?”

  Marlow’s hangover rattled when Boris spoke loudly. She gestured that he should lower his volume a tad.

  “Infiltrators don’t take people. They eat people, sure. Kill them without a second thought, absolutely - but abduct them? Nah.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Your grandson is a Conduit. For them, that’s a very rare thing to have access to, and in Dan’s case it looks like he is some kind of Super-Conduit between worlds. There’s no way they would have harmed such a precious resource.”

  Boris looked around the room with increasing despair.

  A glint from under the sofa caught Marlow’s attention. She stooped to investigate, sliding out a cracked screen mobile phone that had almost vanished under it. She picked it up, thumbing the power button. Dead.

  “That’s his!” gasped Boris, snatching it from her hand.

  Marlow suspected what had happened. He wouldn’t be the first kid to tried to record what went on in the dead of night. She sighed deeply and was surprised to feel a pang of sorrow. She didn’t know with whom she was sympathising with more: Boris or Dan.

  “Dan hasn’t been taken. He ran away.”r />
  “No. He would never leave it behind. They must have taken him!”

  “When you charge this up, look at the videos. I bet that’s what Dan did. He recorded our last encounter.”

  Boris’s jaw worked silently for a moment. When he spoke again his voice was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. “You must find him for us. Please.” The last word was a physical effort.

  Marlow felt a swell of emotions she usually slayed with alcohol. This case was getting much too personal for her tastes.

  “I can’t do that, you need to tell the cops.”

  “Tell them what?” hissed Boris. “That my Grandson has run away because monsters came out of his nightmares and destroyed our house? Do you really think they will believe me? His mother and I will be carted off to prison or the asylum!” He was getting increasingly hysterical.

  Every instinct told Marlow to walk away. A runaway was a police problem, not hers. The golden rule, or one of them, was never get involved with a customer. She would just have to block dark thoughts of Dan’s fate from her mind and move on with her own life. Devoured by monsters was just one of those curve balls light threw at you.

  Instead, she took the phone from Boris hand and stared at it for a long moment. Then she nodded and was shocked to find herself saying: “OK. I’ll find him for ya.”

  Chapter Five

  The most surprising thing, Dan thought, was that the word 'impossible' had faded from his vocabulary, to be replaced with the more mundane 'how?', 'why?' and 'huh?'.

  After settling into the hotel room, he'd watched the video recording four times, during each playback his shaking finger scrubbed the footage back to the moment Marlow had been hurled through the door and the monster chased her. No, not chase, 'flowed after her’ was a better description. The beast moved as if it had been swimming and the shadows were nothing more than deep ocean waters.

  Never once did Dan question the validity of the footage. He knew computer graphics could create the most amazing special effects, but he also knew this was no setup. Marlow hadn't created the footage and sneaked it onto his phone. What he was watching was the real deal. He accepted that without question.

  Then he must have fallen asleep as he stared at a still image of a particularly frightening shot of the creature's slavering jaw, the glass-like slender teeth catching what little light was in the room. He couldn’t be sure how long he’d slept, he suspected seconds. But when he awoke the room had been trashed and the screen on his phone shattered. That’s when his instinct to flee kicked in. Even if he was trying to run from himself.

  With his heart thumping, he had tidied the room as best he could and bolted.

  Marlow’s explanation of his freaky power replayed through his mind. Of course he hadn't believed her. Only when his Grandpa wheeled him to the Travel Stop had he begun to wonder if there were any grains of truth in the crazy woman's words. His Grandpa had left with an odd look on his face; a cross between fear and an apology, and had whispered: “It's not my fault,” before he left. To Dan that proved beyond a doubt that his Grandpa and Mother were genuinely frightened; frightened of him. Too fearful to have the freak stay any longer under their roof. Dan now saw that dropping him in the Travel Stop was the only solution they had to get rid of him.

  But that wouldn't stop the nightmares. Dan no longer had doubts that he was on his own. He was solely responsible for the manifestations and staying here, in a full hotel, simply put more people at risk when he slept.

  And he slept a lot.

  He disappeared into the night with only his backpack and a few hastily gathered chocolate bars and packets of crisps from the hotel lobby’s vending machine, using every last coin he possessed. He'd ran without any regard notion of a destination, just the absolute belief that everybody in the Travel Stop, not to mention his family, would be better off if he was gone.

  The hotel was on the outskirts of the town near a sprawling industrial park of newly built glass and stone buildings that housed trendy design companies, a couple of eco businesses, one of which made wind farm turbines, and other nameless companies that meant nothing to Dan. The only thing he knew with certainty was that the road he was treading led to a large roundabout and was marked by the last petrol station for several miles. The branching roads lead to dark A-roads that cut through the surrounding countryside, and the motorway leading to the rest of the world.

  He supposed that if he didn't have a destination in mind then none of them could be the wrong direction. He hoisted his backpack further onto his shoulders, suppressed a tearful choke at the thought of never seeing his family again, and marched purposefully towards the roundabout.

  Five minutes later, Dan tumbled down a ditch, rolling end-over-end through sharp brambles - and crumpled to a halt, completely fast asleep.

  Ravi Kafforan studied the textbook, filled with complex engineering equations, but under his keen gaze they unravelled into tensions and strains denoting the load a hypothetical bridge could handle. In his last year of his engineering degree, it was a discipline that suited him perfectly. He liked things to fit into neat boxes and had a passion for logic and order, after all, his lecturers had drilled into him that ‘numbers are what makes the world go around.’

  He glanced up as the petrol pump control panel binged for attention. There was a rough looking skinhead on pump six who had the hose inserted into his pimped up boy-racer car and was drumming his fingers impatiently on the roof while glaring at Ravi through the thick glass. He said something to the two other brutish occupants in the car and sniggered.

  Ravi double-checked the surveillance camera was recording the forecourt and had digitally logged the licence plate, a precaution against drivers who decide to fill up and go without paying. Satisfied, he activated the pump and the skinhead started filling his car.

  The night shift always brought potential danger, it seemed the scum of the earth always emerged when the light fell, but Ravi needed the job. After the year and a half he'd been doing the twilight shifts he had grown quite adept at reading people - and the skinhead looked like trouble. Probably not the type to try and rob him, but certainly the right breed of moron to take pleasure in verbally abusing him. He checked the main door was locked, which meant the skinhead would be forced to pay over the night counter, served him right for choosing to dress like a creep.

  Ravi focused on the problem in his book. His fingers rattled across the buttons on his phone's scientific calculator App as he worked out the problem. He was so immersed in the equation that he jumped when a fist hammered against the bulletproof cashier's window. He looked up to see the skinhead pounding the glass. At first he assumed the expression on his face was the usual look of stupidity, anger and hatred - then he realised the skinhead was terrified of something. What that something was, Ravi couldn't see because the entire forecourt was bathed in darkness. The canopy lights were on, but they were smothered as if a thick black fog was sucking up the illumination. He could only just make out the skinhead's car - and the occupants who were falling over each other in their desperation to clamber from the passenger door.

  Ravi watched in astonishment as the vehicle rocked as it was hammered into from the side. Even through the thick glass he could hear the thugs inside wailing. The Skinhead stopped pounding on the glass and turned to follow Ravi's horrified gaze.

  Black tentacles, the size of oak trees ruptured from the darkness and coiled around the vehicle. The two passengers almost made it out before the car was lifted into the air at such an angle that they fell back inside - the door slamming shut, trapping them. The powerful snaking limbs hoisted the car into the darkness.

  Ravi winced when the sound of rendering metal echoed across the forecourt and the car came slamming down with such force it rolled into the petrol pumps, crushing the thin metal cases and severing the feeder pipes inside. Clear fluid flooded across the forecourt.

  But Ravi's brain wasn't concerned with the pooling fuel, his eyes were fixed on the car as it continued rolling
, thrown by some immense force. The roof had been peeled back like a sardine can. Bitten back, Ravi corrected himself when he noticed that the serrated metal looked as if a shark had taken a mouthful. There was no sign of the occupants.

  The Skinhead looked pleadingly back at Ravi. Ravi reached for the door release - but he was too late. Like a whip, a black coil shot around the Skinhead's waist and yanked him backward into the pitch black.

  Ravi backpedalled away from the window like a startled rabbit. His senses kicked in and he became aware of the sickly smell of petrol fumes as the fuel bubbled up in a fountain from the petrol tanks buried below.

  The darkness pressed against the glass like a fog bank, causing his view of the forecourt to rapidly fade like the end shot of a movie. He pressed further into the shop and then ran for the far door, which was the only appropriate place he could think of: the restroom.

  With shaking hands Ravi slammed the door shut and locked it. Then he sat on the toilet seat and prayed that he was dreaming.

  Once Marlow's brain had caught up with her mouth she had tried to backpedal from agreeing to help find Dan, after all, locating missing people was not her forte. However, Boris refused to listen and profusely kept thanking her.

  To save face, Marlow suggested Boris first go to the police and report Dan missing. Boris had railed against the idea.

  “They'll think we are terrible parents!” gushed Boris. “He'll be taken from his mother and placed into care. Is that what you want?” Marlow didn't want anything except the problem to go away. Boris had continued laying the guilt. “And then they'll get a psychologist to analyse him. What do you think a shrink would do if he heard such nonsensical tales of living nightmares? The boy would be locked away in a padded room and studied for the rest of his life. We can't allow that to happen!”

  After minutes of agonising guilt, Marlow held up her hand to shut him up. “OK, enough! I hear you, but in that case we should talk about my fee.”