by Chris Ward
Jun had gone west. Jennie grabbed her bag and jumped into the front seat. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ she said, ‘but can you follow that grey scooter?’ She pointed at Jun, who had almost made it through the abandoned cars to a clearer section beyond.
The driver turned towards her, and flashed a smile that failed to hide the sadness in his eyes. He lifted a bottle of Jim Beam from a drink holder on the dashboard and took a swallow. ‘That your boyfriend up there?’
Jennie nodded. ‘Yes. He’s gone crazy.’
‘Another woman?’
‘Something like that.’ Jennie couldn’t help but smile. ‘I need to kick his ass.’
The driver started to laugh. ‘Well, let’s go get him then.’ He pumped the accelerator and steered out into the sparse traffic. He took one more swig of the whisky then held it out towards her. ‘Here. But save me some.’
As she took it off him, a boom sounded in the distance.
‘What’s happening?’ she said.
The driver sighed. ‘Things are changing,’ he said. ‘Nothing good lasts for long, does it?’
#
Jorge didn’t read newspapers or watch the TV. He only knew what he saw on the streets and what he heard from snippets of passing conversation.
Barcelona was dying.
A hundred years of simmering tension had boiled over in one day, and now people were taking to the streets to fight or protest, ransack and destroy. Jorge knew a dozen tunnels where he could hide through any fighting, but he wasn’t worried about himself.
It was Nozomi, the girl who reminded him so much of his new friend Jennie, the one who had punched him and rejected him. He wanted to help her, make sure she was safe. He would take her to Jennie, and beg for Jennie to take them both away from the city. Staying here would only bring trouble.
Nozomi had come from the darkness beneath the sewage outlet bridge. There were tunnels down there that led right across the city.
He spotted a tourist shop near an outlying church which was in the process of closing up and pilfered a torch from a stand outside, then headed for the sewer tunnel. He hoped he had time, that he could find Nozomi and get them both to Jennie before Jennie left. Jennie would help them, he was sure of it.
The sewer was dank and smelled bad. Jorge tied a rag over his nose as he crept into the darkness, searching with the torchlight for signs of passage, footprints in the slime, scrapes on the walls, even small markers or arrows to show the way.
It was clear within a few turns that the girl wasn’t the only one who used these tunnels. There were deep score lines on the walls that could only have come from something metallic, as if someone had been moving heavy equipment along these underground routes. As he followed the marks further into the dark, the sense of foreboding grew. The urge to turn back was almost overwhelming.
He had been creeping through the tunnels for about ten minutes when he heard something approaching.
He was on a long, straight tunnel and wouldn’t make it back to the last turn before he was seen. He looked around him and ducked into a tiny alcove that led up to a drain grate far above. There were a set of metal steps fixed to the wall so Jorge climbed up on to the bottom rung, his curiosity preventing him from climbing any higher. He stuffed the torch into his pocket and waited, ready to rush up the steps towards the grate if the thing came after him.
It was past him in a rush of scuttling limbs, like some kind of spider moving quickly, but in the instant it passed through the patch of light cast by the grate above him he saw pale human flesh and a round shape framed by scraggly hair.
A woman, moving on all fours like a spider.
Jorge squeezed his eyes shut. His heart was hammering, his hands shaking. He waited a few seconds for the worst of the terror to subside, then slipped back down into the tunnel.
The sound of the moving woman-thing was receding the way he had come. His curiosity overflowing, burying his fear like a bulb planted for spring, Jorge crept back down the tunnel in pursuit, careful to pause every few seconds to listen to its passage up ahead, fearful of it stopping to hide and ambush him.
And then he was turning a corner to see the white legs of a woman climbing out of the end of the sewer tunnel.
In the cold sunlight the skin was pale, bloodless. Dead.
Jorge glanced back the way he had come and then again towards the entrance of the tunnel, where the woman had just gone. He wanted to help Nozomi, but a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt. A bloom of childlike curiosity filled him from the inside out, and he found himself scrambling after the woman, desperate to catch up with her before she disappeared.
For one thing he wasn’t quite sure what he had seen, and for another he wanted to make sure that what he had seen had been a mistake, that he hadn’t seen the animated corpse of a dead woman scuttling along a sewer tunnel like a giant spider.
If the sunlight couldn’t disperse the nightmare, Jorge thought he might just jump into the sewer and let the sludge do it instead.
28
In the shadow of the tower
‘You want to see me again, don’t you? Just do this one last thing for me and we can be together. I promise. Remember the meadow?’
#
He remembered. Akane, ten years old, pulling him along by the hand into the overgrown rice field that his father’s neighbour had left fallow that year, through springy grass that sent butterflies dancing up into the air and flickers of golden sunlight that dazzled Jun as it swayed in the light early summer breeze.
‘I have something to tell you, Jun Matsumoto.’
She’d promised the same thing a dozen times, yet whenever they’d found themselves alone away from their other friends she had slapped a hand over her mouth and given a brisk shake of the head.
‘Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. You’ll have to wait for another day.’
This time though, as Akane pulled him down into the grass in the shade of a tree that overhung one corner of the field, the brightness in her eyes made him suddenly hopeful. She had an assured, confident look on her face, her mouth turned upwards in a resolute smile.
‘It’s time, Jun,’ she said, giving him a sudden solemn look that made him nervous. ‘I’ve been needing to tell you this for some time.’
‘What?’ he blurted, only for her to slap a hand over his mouth. Her palm smelt of lavender, probably from her favourite doll, which was actually a bathroom air-freshener Akane had adopted.
‘Don’t be so needy, Jun Matsumoto,’ she said. ‘It’s not attractive.’
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled through her hand.
‘That’s better. You’re forgiven.’ She pulled her hand away, then sat plucking strands of grass and breaking them into little bits for a few minutes, as if daring him to ask again.
He was just wondering whether a well-timed sigh might jog her memory, when she suddenly tossed the piece of grass she was working on away and turned to face him.
‘I’ve decided that I want to be with you forever,’ she said, as assuredly as though she was picking a dress out of a catalogue.
Jun couldn’t help but blush. He wanted to say that it was gross to say something like that, but all he said was, ‘Uh, thanks.’
‘Forever,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget.’
‘I, um, won’t,’ he said.
For a moment he thought she might reach out and hold his hand, but then she suddenly jumped to her feet and raced off across the field. ‘Catch me!’ she screamed back as the grass parted around her.
He didn’t manage to catch her. There eventually came a time when he thought he had, but it wasn’t so.
Meadows and real life were two different things.
#
The car driver told her his name was Sergio. His family was from Valencia, but the city was a sea of lazy beachcombers and bar fiends, so he had left for the high life in the north. Now with the unrest in the city and rumours that the Spanish government was going to deploy the army, a move that would likely bring civil wa
r, the south sounded a lot better again.
‘Europe’s breaking up,’ he told her, shaking his head. One piece at a time. First Britain, now us. Who’s next?’
Jennie wasn’t sure what to say, so she just said nothing.
Jun’s scooter took a sudden left turn and the car was blocked for a couple of minutes behind a logjam of cars trying to get out of the side street. Jennie punched the dashboard in frustration, but after they finally made the turn she saw Jun’s scooter lying on its side a couple of hundred metres further ahead.
An overturned car blocked the road just in front of them. ‘You can let me out here,’ Jennie told Sergio. ‘Thanks, and good luck.’
Sergio looked for a second like he might offer to help, then he nodded and gave her a wide grin. ‘Peaceful life,’ he said. ‘If you can find it.’
Then the car was gone, leaving Jennie standing alone in the dusty street.
As she ran around the overturned car towards the scooter, she saw a hillock rising up beyond the nearest row of houses with a small tower on top. A Catalan flag fluttered in the breeze from the tower’s battlements. A path led up towards it, and Jun stood near the bottom, leaning over as something came hurrying down the steps towards him.
Jennie wanted to think it was a woman, but it moved in strange jerky movements like a puppet missing the strings. It looked like a woman, with a lithe, athletic figure and straight black hair parted precisely down the centre of her scalp to leave a pencil straight white line, but the way the head cocked from side to side like the pendulum on a Grandfather clock and the funny jerks of her elbows as she moved—scuttle, scuttle, scuttle—made Jennie think of creepy things, dark things, things that lived under rocks and in the top corners of closets.
One hand lifted and began a rhythmic waving motion—back, forth, back, forth—and Jun jerked upright, standing stock still as if entranced.
‘Jun!’ Jennie screamed, but he didn’t turn around. The woman was closing in on him, and all Jennie could feel was dread. There was no way for her to get to him in time, he was too far away. ‘Jun!’ she screamed again, feeling useless, helpless, a failure.
#
‘Turn left and then follow the road towards the hill.’
Jun felt his hands following the instructions in his head without his command, as if he was a radio controlled car. He wanted to fight it, to turn away, but it was too strong. He jerked the scooter left into a quiet street, past a group of men arguing outside a café. The road angled slightly uphill towards a short, dumpy stone tower sitting on a little hillock, visible between dusty two-storey townhouses.
‘Go up to the tower. I’ll be waiting there.’
Jun pulled the scooter to a stop and climbed off, letting it fall to the curb, the engine still running. The street was empty, a metal gate in front of the steps up to the tower on the hillock creaking as it swayed in the breeze. There was no sign of Akane, and Jun hesitated, for a moment struck by a feeling of clarity, that he shouldn’t be here, that he should be somewhere else.
‘Do you remember that other time, Jun? Remember that first time we kissed? We were twelve. It was beautiful, remember? I told you I never wanted to let you go, and that we’d be together forever. You remember, don’t you, Jun?’
He started to smile at the memory, then frowned, pausing with his hand on the gate.
What memory?
His first kiss had been with a girl called Saki Koike, when he was fifteen. After his high school band had played a show in a live house near Chiba station he had taken her to Freshness Burger and afterwards she had let him feel up her tits down a back alley between two rows of snack bars. He’d never done anything with Akane until the day before she died.
‘That never happened….’
‘Jun, don’t you remember? It was so sweet….’
He felt a sudden pain behind his left eye as if someone had shoved an ice cube in there and was shifting it around, the cold and the angular corners sending shockwaves through his skull.
‘JUN!’ a voice screamed. ‘DON’T DOUBT ME! I LOVE YOU!’
He leaned on the gate for support and staggered through it as it swung open, looking up just as a figure appeared from the shadows on the east side of the tower. A hand lifted in a wave.
Akane.
‘Goddamn it, you’re not real,’ he gasped, at the same time as the magnetic draw he had felt before seemed to pull him forwards. She was up there—dead—the love of his life—dead— waving to him—dead—she was….
‘I held you in my arms as you died,’ he muttered, his throat dry. ‘I said goodbye to you. You can’t come back to life. It’s not possible.’
‘Remember that time, Jun?’
She was coming down the path to meet him. And the closer he got, the more he found himself numbed by that slowly waving hand.
‘The flag, Jun. At the tower top. I need you to torch it. Let’s start a war, Jun. Let’s have some fun and games.’
‘Fuck … you.’
He was fading. As she got closer he found himself smiling, the cracks in the porcelain-like, dead skin of her face beaming the sunlight of his past on to him, and he remembered the meadow, the meadow, the meadow—what meadow?—as her hand waved back and forth in greeting and he heard himself saying ‘Which flag? Of course I will, tell me how, let’s start a fire and warm ourselves in its love—’
Then something flashed silver as it swung through the air and cleaved her waving arm clean off.
#
The woman-thing was keeping to the shadows as if afraid of daylight, moving insect-like in sudden blurs of movement too fast for Jorge’s eyes to follow. He managed to keep her in sight only because she was so keen to avoid being seen; ducking into alcoves and covering her face with a shawl whenever another person appeared on the street, then scuttling quickly up to her next hiding place a few houses further along.
She seemed to be following no particular route other than one sticking to the quieter parts of the city suburbs, slowly meandering up and down some of the shadier, tighter streets, ducking from one shadow to the next. When she reached a square with a dustbowl of a park in its centre, she suddenly bolted from the shadows and ran arrow straight across the park like a computer-programmed homing missile. Jorge, hiding in a doorway a few feet behind, went hurrying after, feeling with every step like an old truck in pursuit of a sports car.
Yet when he reached the far corner, sure he would have lost her, he saw the woman-thing crouched in a shadowy nook beside some overflowing black dustbins, like a broken doll left out for the trash.
For an hour or more he trailed her, until she finally came to a hill with a stumpy tower on top. The woman thing climbed a steep set of steps to the castle, then sat down in the shadows.
The tower stood lonely on its cone of dry grass, unapproachable without being seen. Jorge sat down by the wall to wait, peering through a space in the stones where it had partially collapsed.
The woman-thing had squeezed herself into a nook in the tower’s base, her legs pulled up, her head slumped forward. A passer-by might think she was just an ordinary girl sleeping in the warm sun unless they looked too close. She looked so normal from where Jorge was crouched that he began to wonder what he was doing, why he was wasting time when his intention had been to find Nozomi and get her to Jennie. The desire to give up his fruitless pursuit and return to the tunnels in search of Nozomi was itching at him like a fresh mosquito bite, swelling and smarting until he could no longer ignore it.
He stood up to leave, just as the woman-thing climbed down from her seat and disappeared around the side of the tower.
Jorge scrambled over the wall and raced up the grass, puffing great gasps of air as the hill steepened just before the peak. He reached the top and bolted around the side, just as the woman-thing’s head disappeared down a path on the opposite slope.
A thin Asian guy stood by a gate at the bottom of the path, watching the woman-thing moving down towards him, one hand swaying back and forth. Jorge saw
the man’s body straighten and stiffen, his head swaying in time to the woman’s slow wave. Jorge had seen several hypnotism shows on Las Ramblas and this looked no different. The man was caught in the woman’s trap like a fly in a spider’s web.
Almost as if hypnotised himself, Jorge took a few steps forward, his own head lolling from side to side. It was so serene, so peaceful—
He stumbled as something caught his foot. A little metal hook was poking out of the grass, a piece of rope looped through it. The knee-high fence cordoned off a section of the hillside from pedestrians to allow newly laid grass to take hold.
‘Jun!’
Jorge looked up. Jennie’s voice had come from somewhere down on the road beyond the gate. The man had turned his head slightly, aware of the voice, but unable to take his eyes off the woman-thing’s hypnotic pendulum of a hand. Then, as the cry came again, more urgent this time, Jorge knew what he had to do.
He pulled the metal fence post out of the ground, marvelling at the spike end, sharpened to more easily penetrate the dry, rocky earth. He hefted it in his hands like a club and took off down through the grass, angling across the hillside towards the woman moving down the path. A rabbit hole or divot would have upended him, maybe left him impaled on the fence post for his efforts, but he was lucky. He lifted it over his head like a knight’s broadsword as he reached them, and with a rasping war cry brought it crashing down on the woman-thing’s arm.
#
Akane wailed like some kind of broken siren as her arm snapped off at the elbow and went tumbling through the grass. Her serenely beautiful face contorted into a snarling scowl, the skin on her cheeks cracking open. She twisted towards her attacker and cuffed him to the ground with her other hand.
‘Jun, follow me. We have to burn the flag. You love me, don’t you?’
If Akane was in that twisted, mutilated face, it was easy to forget. Jun turned away, squatting down, not wanting to look. Someone was sprawled on the grass—a little boy—and someone else was running up behind him, shouting his name.