|
|
by Simon Bleaken
I AWOKE ON cold concrete to the shadows and silence of a frosty, star lit alleyway. Rows of derelict buildings flanked me, boarded up windows and doors that offered no clue to my location. These were homes and businesses no longer, merely crumbling shells filled with dust and fading memories, clad in scrawls of cryptic graffiti. Around me, broken glass sparkled like frozen tears.
I staggered to my feet like some old drunk, sickly, disoriented, pressing a hand against my pulsing temple until the world settled and my eyes focused.
Nothing was familiar.
A quick check of my duty belt revealed my radio was missing. So was my baton, handcuffs, flashlight and CS spray. Hell, even my watch was gone, and my uniform was filthy, torn and streaked with dirt. I didn’t know how any of that had happened.
Everything was fragmented, like a reflection in a shattered mirror. My last clear memories were of climbing into the car alongside my partner, but that was back at the start of our patrol. At first, everything had been normal, a routine sweep around the park and red light districts, checking all the usual haunts for those who tried to stay off our radar, and then the memories just ended.
‘Geoff?’ I realised I had no idea where my partner was, either.
I looked around helplessly, squinting into unyielding blackness, only to catch a glimpse of my reflection in a surviving window pane. My face was pale, like some disembodied spectre in the gloom. There was a bruise beneath my right eye, a cut to my lip, and the collar of my shirt had a long smear of blood on it.
Then my heart lurched as a second face appeared beside mine.
It took me a moment to realize it was somebody on the other side of the glass.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty, eyes wide and lips curled back in terror. His face was smudged with grime, his body shaking as he gulped down anxious breaths. The outline of his skull was visible beneath his gaunt, malnourished skin. He wore a filthy red sweater, worn through at the elbows and frayed into tattered threads around the wrists, and a pair of old jeans that looked held together by dirt. He was speaking, or trying to, but no sound reached me.
‘It’s all right,’ I assured him. ‘I’m a police officer.’
He pressed a shaking hand against the glass, his eyes locking onto mine for a moment before he turned and darted out of sight.
‘Hey, wait!’
I felt compelled to help him, though I couldn’t say why. I think perhaps for that one fleeting second he was the only thing that felt vaguely familiar, though I had no recollection of ever having seen him before. There was a narrow gap where one of the window boards had been kicked inwards. I wriggled through, against procedure and common sense, mindful of the broken glass in the edges of the frame.
In the deeper darkness, I squinted to make sense of the space until my eyes adjusted. It felt colder here, the balmy night of the alleyway shifting into a strange autumnal chill, and there was a curiously stale quality to the air.
Moving through an open doorway and down a short corridor, I emerged atop a flight of narrow concrete steps that stretched down twenty feet into some kind of long gloomy store room, complete with heavy rows of rotting shelves and three sagging desks. There was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, the flickering yellow light it cast was noxious and sickly. I pressed a hand over my mouth as I started down. The whole place reeked of dampness and mould as if it had been shut up and rotting for decades.
I stopped after just a few steps, suddenly overcome by a sharp sense of crippling terror that churned my stomach, turned my legs to jelly, and set my nerves screaming. I was no stranger to hostile situations; in my line of work it was a nightly reality. But this place crawled under my skin, and raised the hairs on my neck and arms in a way that felt utterly alien. There was a numinous yet somehow palpable fear that seemed to exude from those walls and the steps beneath my feet. It coiled in my gut like a greasy serpent. On top of that, the air felt heavy and suffocating.
I don’t know why I kept going. That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot. I think it was only because the man in the red sweater had seemed so oddly—and maddeningly—familiar. I needed answers, and this was the only way he could have gone.
I was halfway down those steps, my heart racing, when I realised there was somebody slumped in a grimy office chair ten feet below me. They were facing away from me towards a battered set of towering metal doors that were thick with rust.
‘Hello?’ I called again.
The dim obscuring flicker of the horrible yellow bulb lay between me and the figure, so it wasn’t until I neared the last step that I could make anything out clearly. Only then did the lighting give up its secrets: the blood pooling at the feet of the individual, the ragged white shirt with black epaulettes. Then, I noticed the stab vest he was wearing, just like mine.
It was Geoff.
I ran to him, fighting back a sickened panic.
He was alive, barely, but not conscious. His skin was yellow and puffy, lips drawn back from his teeth. Strings of drool oozed from between his locked jaws. His chest rose and fell shallowly with a laboured wheeze, but when I waved a hand in front of his face those glassy eyes didn’t move. Blood was pooling around his left foot from a deep laceration in his side that had slashed through his stab vest. It didn’t look like a knife wound, though, but something more savage and less clean.
‘Geoff?’ I checked his belt, but his radio was missing too. ‘I’ll get help,’ I promised, not even sure he could hear me.
‘You can’t. I know you won’t remember, but you can’t,’ a voice with an American accent said from behind me.
I span around to find the young man in the filthy sweater standing a few feet away. He was trying to shrink into the shadows in the far corner, his face a mask of anguish. He looked so lost, so terrified, but all the same, fury surged within me.
‘Did you do this?’
He shook his head. ‘He died for you. He just hasn’t been collected yet.’
‘He’s not dead,’ I barked.
He flinched. ‘They’ll hear.’
‘Who?’ I demanded. ‘Who else is down here?’
He pressed his back against the wall, his eyes wide. He was shaking. At the sight of his terror my anger ebbed. It was obvious he hadn’t done this.
‘We have to be quiet.’ He shot a fearful glance at the doors. ‘They’ll kill us.’
I held out my hands and lowered my voice. ‘Okay. Listen, what’s your name?’
‘Lee.’
‘Right, now listen to me, Lee, we need to get help. And, you need to tell me what happened here.’
‘You won’t get out. Not this time.’
‘Is that a threat?’
There was a low metallic rumbling and the tall metal doors started to shake, as if somebody was pounding their fists on the other side.
‘Who’s out there?’ I called.
‘No—don’t!’ Lee warned, a look of deepening terror spreading over his face, but it was too late.
In response to my words, the assault on the door grew louder and more savage. It sounded as if an angry mob were now hammering against it, all punching and kicking against the metal as they tried to force their way inside. The tarnished handles also rattled furiously, and the metal panels groaned as they bent inwards.
‘What the hell–?’
Lee gave a choked gasp and dropped to the floor, crawling into the shadows under one of the ancient shelves. ‘Hide!’
‘But, what...’
‘Just do it!’
The doors burst inwards, buckling and twisting as if some intense pressure had slammed into them and ripped them from their hinges. I threw myself to the floor and, like Lee, scrabbled underneath a heavy shelf on the opposite wall. I was larger than he was, only just able to squeeze beneath. I curled up in the darkness as best I could.
When I looked back out, I saw something moving in the fractured heart of that shadowed space. I had expected a furious mob to come pouring in, but instead, only a single figure stood in the doorway. It wasn’t a man though, wasn’t even human. It was black against the shadows, and it shifted rather than walked; a splintered, fragmented outline, almost as if its body were a churning mass of jagged shards.
I held my breath as it drew closer, a silent predator slipping past the buckled doors, its approach otherwise undetectable. I felt an unaccountable sense of heart wrenching despair sweep through me as it entered the room, as though its presence was drawing all the warmth, hope and life out of me.
It moved towards Geoff, and I knew that I should do something. But the hollow desolation that ran through me seemed to suck all the energy and will from my limbs. I lay curled in the shadows on that cold, damp floor, watching as it reached out with shifting shards that were not quite arms and clamped them to either side of Geoff’s head.
My partner bucked and spasmed as if he’d received an electric shock. A low soft moan burst from his lips, and his hands clamped on the arms of the chair, the knuckles white and bloodless. His eyes bulged as his flesh went from pale to grey, as if the last of his vitality were being leached from his physical form. His lips withered, his cheeks sinking inwards beneath those glassy eyes, and his whole body seemed to be collapsing in on itself.
The thing that held him was motionless now, yet still the thousands of shards comprising its form continued to shift and move across it.
‘Now–hurry!’ Lee scrambled from his hiding place and darted through the open doorway, gesturing for me to follow.
For a moment I could only stare.
‘Quickly! Before it finishes!’ he urged.
That broke whatever paralysis held my limbs and I fled after him, my head spinning and blind panic guiding my feet. In the darkness of the cold passageway beyond I almost lost sight of Lee. Then I spotted his filthy red sweater as he turned a corner up ahead, momentarily spotlighted by another flickering light. I followed him as if he were a lifeline in that insane place.
But, instead of guiding me to safety, we descended deeper into a maze of maddening impossibilities. We plunged through claustrophobic hallways and down clanging metal staircases before emerging into a wide moonlit room with filthy windows and heaped piles of discarded furniture. Lee had paused here to catch his breath, and I half fell half leaned against the wall as my confusion and horror caught up with me.
Geoff was dead.
The realization brought a sickening burst of guilt. I had abandoned him; let that creature suck the life out of him. I hadn’t even tried to stop it.
I sat heavily on one of the desks, dimly aware that Lee was watching me now, probably guessing the maelstrom of thoughts and emotions churning in my skull and cramping my stomach.
I wiped trembling, sweating hands on my legs, trying to steady myself.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, almost a plea. ‘What the hell was that thing back there?’
‘There was nothing you could have done,’ he said quietly.
I felt sick to my stomach, nauseous shame rising like bile in my throat. ‘What was it?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. There are a few of them in here. I don’t know how many. You learn to sense when they’re near. Sometimes they make this clicking, like claws on stone. But they also bring despair, crippling waves of it, as if all the suffering and anguish of the lives they’ve swallowed travel with them. Best I can tell they’re like broken collections of forgotten dreams given life.’
‘What? What does that even mean?’
‘They’re kind of like starved vampires. They drain everything from inside you, all the hope and experiences, all the memories and knowledge, all the love and goodness. They’re the ones that will hunt you, anyway. But, they aren’t the only things in here.’
‘What other kind of things are there?’ I asked, my throat dry,
‘Monsters, mostly,’ he sighed. ‘Things that just don’t belong anywhere else.’
For a moment I just stared at him. Nothing in my training or experience had prepared me for this; not any of the armed thugs, drug dealers, drunken or abusive domestic incidents, or terror threats I had faced. Those things were expected, anticipated almost, even if you hoped you’d never have to deal with them. But silent monsters made of despair and shadow? How could anyone be ready to face something that shouldn’t have been possible?
‘I don’t think it followed us,’ Lee sighed. ‘We can rest here; for a while, anyway.’
I walked to the window, needing some air. It was sealed shut. I pressed my forehead against the grimy glass. It took me a second to realize what was wrong, but when I did, I blinked in surprise at the sight of large ships berthed in a dock, with cranes and forklifts busily unloading cargo down below.
‘We were nowhere near the docks,’ I whispered.
‘We are now. I don’t recognize that city, though.’
‘It’s London, obviously.’
‘Is it? I’ve never been there,’ he shrugged.
‘We’re in London, right now.’
He gave me an appraising glance. ‘Guess that explains your accent and that weird cop uniform. Look, you might have started in London, but this place isn’t just in any one location. It’s sort of everywhere, all at once. It’s like we’ve managed to slip down behind the sofa cushions of the world.’
‘You need to start making some sense.’
‘Look,’ he said, a note of irritation creeping in, ‘I already told you all this last time. You both got trapped, like everyone else in this place. Geoff gave his life for you. That’s how you got out. That’s the only way out. Someone has to pay for you to leave.’
‘I don’t remember any of that.’
‘They say this place keeps itself hidden, that it steals our memories of it when we escape, though I often wondered how anyone could know that. But, they must be right, or why else would you go and crawl right back in here after you only just got out?’
‘I got out?’
‘Yes. You were supposed to try and get help. You don’t remember any of it though.’
‘I crawled in here through a broken window. That means there are ways in and out.’
‘You’ll never find it again. Trust me.’
I shook my head defiantly. ‘There are all these windows right here. We can smash them and climb out. There’s bound to be a fire escape…’
‘The glass won’t break. It never does. I’ve even seen guys shooting at it. There’s only one way out. It costs a life.’
‘How can you know any of this?’
He sighed and I wondered how many times he had told the same story to disbelieving strangers. ‘Like I said before, I ran into a guy once, down in one of the old tunnels. He said his name was Albert. He looked about my age, but all skin and bones, you know, like one of those famine victims on TV? He told me he’d been here since 1911. He reckoned the only way out was for a willing soul to die for you. He never said how he knew that, but he said he’d seen others who got out; though fewer and fewer as time went on.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said stubbornly. ‘It’s just glass.’
‘Oh, and that creature back there, was that all bullshit too?’ Lee glared. ‘Go right ahead. You won’t believe me ‘til you’ve tried. Nobody ever does.’
I was determined to prove him wrong. If I could do that, I could make the world make sense again. But, Lee was right. Although the glass looked old and thin, nothing I threw at it so much as chipped or cracked it. I even tried kicking the panes out, stopping only when I almost broke toes in the process.
‘See?’ Lee folded his arms.
‘You’d better tell me everything you know,’ I said at last, swallowing my pride. ‘Everything I’ve forgotten, anyway.’
‘Not now. We’ve made too much noise here,’ he warned. ‘We’d better keep moving. They’re probably coming.’
We left the office and found ourselves at a crossroads of narrow hallways that looked like they belonged to some ancient hospital. I waited as he carefully checked left and right, and then decided on going straight ahead.
‘You know the way?’
‘There really isn’t one. But if you stay away from the darker places, you’re usually okay.’
‘Is this all it is, endless corridors and derelict rooms?’
‘It keeps changing, shifting. None of it is ever in the same place twice. There are old train stations, tenements, hotel lobbies, alleyways and tunnels. You name it, and it’s in here. It goes on and on, but it’s all dingy and run down. There’s even a massive stairwell somewhere that goes down for miles. It’s as if every forgotten or abandoned place exists here; forgotten people, too. All those who fell through the cracks of the world we came from.’
We emerged at the top of a large metal ladder and carefully made our way down, descending through the thick, miasmal air into the shifting shadows of that oppressive place. Here, in this forgotten realm where everything was old and decaying, where sounds seemed flat and hollow, where the senses were muted and where the spark of vitality had been leached from all things, we moved with all the substance of a memory. I thought about what Lee had told me, about the withered man who’d been in here since 1911, and as reality sank in, the dusty kiss of eternity pressed close. Were we doomed to slowly fade away like a photograph left in the sunlight until we were too old and weak to evade the things stalking these echoing halls?
I peered into the dark openings of grimy tunnels that flanked us as we pressed on, trying to keep my mind from my thoughts and fears. ‘Wish I had my flashlight.’
‘Keep what’s yours real close to you in here,’ Lee cautioned. ‘This place will find a way to take it from you otherwise.’
I thought of my missing equipment and my fragmented memories. Were they all in here too, somewhere?
‘Is there any food?’
‘I loot the dead when I find them. They sometimes still have things they brought in with them—food, clothes. You’ve got to be quick though; this place soon takes what’s left. There are plenty of bugs and crawlies though. Guess they wandered in like we did, then found a way to breed. At least something is thriving.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Feels like forever sometimes.’
I thought of Karen, who would be sleeping right now, waiting for me to come home. The thought that I might never see her again, hold her, talk to her… I pushed it from my mind. ‘So, what do we do now?’
‘Keep moving. Quietly.’
And so we did.
I quickly learned what Lee had meant about us being in an ever changing maze. One section led randomly into the next with no flow of form or function between them. There were endless warrens of concrete utility tunnels branching off in every direction; grimy store rooms filled with rotting boxes and wide sheets of cobweb; a dizzying maze of crumbling atriums, and even ancient offices whose desks still had old fashioned typewriters sitting amidst a sea of dust and detritus. Some rooms were so dark that we had to feel our way carefully and blindly, and others were lit by flickering electric lights caked with grime or occasionally by moonlight streaming in through ancient windows that gave tormenting glimpses of the outside world.
Hours slid slowly into days, and those days meandered off into a haze. It very quickly became apparent to me how meaningless life was in this strange prison. Aside from whispered conversation when it seemed safe enough, there was little else to break the long stretches of time. We spent the next week or so walking aimlessly through a randomly changing landscape of crumbling rooms and musty staircases, creeping like mice afraid of attracting the attention of a stalking cat. Occasionally, we saw other people too—as filthy and as dishevelled as we must have appeared—but only ever quick flashes as they ducked away into the shadows, fleeing from us as though we were as dangerous as the inhuman things that hunted us.
‘Nobody trusts anyone,’ Lee whispered. ‘Too many people just take what they need down here.’
‘Doesn’t sound too different to the outside world,’ I sighed. ‘I guess that means you took a chance on us, back before I forgot everything. Thanks for that.’
‘Yeah, I’m still trying to decide if that was a mistake,’ he remarked. ‘Come on. We’d best keep going.’
We were always hungry, and food was scarce. We slept where and when we could, usually curled up hidden under some ancient and collapsing furniture. There was no way to know exactly how much time had passed, or if it was day or night. With no washing or toilet facilities I soon felt itchy, unclean, and decidedly ripe, but Lee assured me I’d stop noticing or caring in time.
The curious thing was that my beard and fingernails hadn’t grown since I had arrived.
‘Maybe we’re dead?’ I suggested, giving voice to a fear that had been whispering in my head for a few days now.
‘Pretty shitty afterlife, if so,’ Lee sighed. ‘It’s more like our bodies are on hold here, cut off from the normal flow of the world out there.’ He caught the look on my face. ‘Listen, if you’re looking for this place to make any kind of sense, don’t. It has its own rules.’
We stopped that night next to a wide bank of windows. I promised to take the first watch to let Lee get some sleep, but my curiosity got the better of me. I set to work cleaning a spot on the windows so I could look out. The dirt was so thick it took ten minutes of polishing and scraping before I could see anything. My heart lurched at the sight of a city beyond the glass, the dim lights of cars in the distance, and again I was seized by a mad compulsion to try smashing those windows. Instead, I pressed my back to the glass, the view too painful to look at any more, and slipped my wedding ring from my finger, turning it slowly in my hands.
‘I knew the risks when I married you, Neil,’ Karen’s voice echoed in my memories. ‘I thought I was okay with it.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘You’re not the one who has to sit home wondering if you’re coming back, or lie awake at night trying to sleep, wondering if this is the night the phone rings, or I get a knock at the door.’
‘I know it was difficult at first. I thought you’d got used to it?’
‘I never have. I said what you wanted to hear because I know how much you love the job. But it’s tough. Most people go to work and only worry about missing the bus or a deadline for a report. I sit here and wonder if I’ll be a widow by thirty.’
‘It’s not…’
‘That bad? Why do you wear that stab vest every night, then?’
‘You know I’m careful.’
‘I know, but sometimes bad things happen anyway. You just have to switch on the news these days and there’s something terrible happening. I can’t lose you.’
‘You won’t. I promise.’
My shoulders shook as I struggled to hold back the tears that now cut a clean path through my dusty face. I curled my fingers into my palms until I felt the skin break, squeezing my fists as tightly as I could, drawing a strange strength from the pain. It reminded me that I was alive, and as long as I still drew breath, I could keep fighting to get back to Karen and the world on the other side of that maddeningly impregnable barrier. When I opened my eyes again Lee was watching me. I felt a sudden wave of shame at having been caught crying.
‘Piss off,’ I snarled.
‘Listen, I get it,’ he whispered.
I bit my tongue, wanting him to go away. I breathed a sigh of relief when he moved across the room and began watching the hallway.
We set off the next day in an awkward silence after several sleepless hours. Lee took the lead and I slouched along behind like a tightly coiled spring of fury and grief, desperately needing some outlet to vent my frustrations, but having none to hand. I wasn’t stupid enough to take my rage out on Lee, or to risk making too much noise by trying to find some old furniture to smash, so I brooded quietly, trying to push painful memories out of my head, and finding it full of nothing else. I was so preoccupied with trying to escape the ghosts of memories that it took me a moment to realize Lee had stopped halfway down a set of wide concrete steps that opened out into the next room.
‘Floor’s flooded,’ he warned.
I peered over his shoulder. The room was vast with a ceiling that stretched thirty or forty feet overhead. The floor was lost beneath a pool of foul smelling stagnant water, but the surrounding walls were covered in rotting shelving that ran high up along the walls. Rusting filing cabinets rose like strange islands beneath them and lying atop a cluster of these was a young girl, dressed in a ragged school uniform with a small satchel at her side. She couldn’t have been more than twelve, her dark hair tied in a ponytail. It looked to me like she had been climbing the top of the shelving to navigate the room and had fallen, breaking her neck.
‘Jesus,’ I sighed.
‘She might have food in her bag,’ he suggested, creeping down the steps to the edge of the water.
I looked at him in horrified disgust. ‘You want to steal from a dead child?’
‘You want to starve?’
As revolting as the prospect was, I knew he was right. The rotten shelving was a death trap, and I knew there was no way it would take my weight. The flooded patch of floor looked shallow enough so I took off my shoes, rolled up my trouser legs and decided to risk wading.
Lee grabbed my arm as I edged past him. ‘No. Not through the water.’
I shrugged him off. ‘It’s the safest way. That shelving won’t hold us.’
The foul water numbed my feet with a greasy chill as I stepped into it. It stank like decaying flesh, and a series of large bubbles burst the surface as I started wading, stirring up whatever thick sediment lay below. The bottom of the pool was uneven and several times my foot sank deeper than I expected, often going higher than my knees. I cupped my hand over my mouth, fighting back a dry heave.
‘Come back!’ Lee hissed.
I ignored him. I was almost halfway, and already my stomach was aching with the hope that there might be food in that satchel.
‘There’s something under the water!’
I froze at that warning, and my heart lurched as I spotted the grey outline of something large and serpent-like gliding just beneath the surface a little way ahead.
I sucked in a sharp intake of breath as it swam past me, less than a foot away, sending gentle ripples across the surface. Cautiously, I took slow steps back. My pulse was racing. One more step brought me just a few feet from the edge where Lee waited.
Without warning my leg plunged into the foul liquid up to my thigh. I lost my balance, crashing sideways into the pool and going fully under.
I broke the surface quickly, coughing and blinking.
But the thing in the water was faster.
Something slimy and muscular coiled around my neck and torso, dragging me under again. I thrashed wildly in a blind panic, my fingers clawing at the leathery unseen thing slowly constricting like a noose around my throat. White spots erupted behind my eyes and my lungs burned for air.
Not like this! Not like this, please!
My frantic hands dug into the scales of the serpent, clawing desperately. I felt its jaws clamp onto my arm, two bone daggers slicing through my shirt and puncturing my flesh.
I grabbed at it in a wild frenzy, my fingers gouging into what felt like eyes.
For a moment it coiled even more tightly about me and I knew the last of my air was leaving my burning lungs.
Then, one of those eyes burst beneath my fingers like a ripe grape and it released me.
I thrust my head above the surface, frantically trying to gulp down air and cough out water at the same time.
The serpent slithered away under the surface, thrashing and coiling.
Lee plunged in beside me and grabbed my arm, hauling me to the edge of the pool.
‘Shit!’ he cursed, as we scrambled onto the concrete steps, soaked, shivering and terrified. ‘I told you not to go in there!’
I fought to get my breath back, unable to argue. Those fangs had shredded my sleeve just below the shoulder, leaving two deep puncture wounds. I touched the skin around them with a wince.
‘Fix it up later,’ he growled sourly, ‘too much noise.’
We hurried through half a dozen rooms and countless twisting hallways, choosing intersections blindly, constantly listening for sounds of pursuit. Our soaked bodies were numb and frozen, but we didn’t dare stop. The normally silent hallways echoed with sounds of strange clicking, like claws against stone. They weren’t upon us yet, but we knew they were closer than we liked.
After what felt like hours of scurrying through shadows, we found ourselves in an old hospital ward, strewn with yellowed patient notes and overturned rotting mattresses. The sounds of pursuit had abated about half an hour earlier, so we agreed to rest. We started a small fire in a metal waste bin, huddling around it in the hopes of getting warm and dry.
My arm was getting worse. The wound wept a yellow fluid and the skin around it was purple and puffy.
‘Is that infected?’
‘Poisoned, I think. I need a hospital. A real one.’
‘This dump is as close as you’re getting. Get some sleep.’
I shivered and hugged my wounded arm close to my chest. My heart was racing and my head was swimming. ‘Maybe there are some old supplies here, that…’
‘You still don’t get it, do you? Everything here’s dead. Rotten. There are no supplies. There’s nothing. The only stuff that’s any good is what folk bring in with them, and that doesn’t last long here.’
Lee insisted I get first sleep that night. I think he was as worried as I was about the poison in my arm. I lay there, unable to sleep, watching him pace anxiously. All I could think about was home, and the wife I might never see again. I could feel the poison spreading, like fire coursing through my veins. I was certain that sleep was going to elude me, but the next thing I knew was Lee shaking me awake.
‘Your turn to keep watch.’
I felt a sudden burst of panic as I realized the swelling had spread down into my hand and up into my shoulder. ‘It’s getting worse,’ I rasped through a throat that felt full of broken glass.
‘I got some water left, if…’
‘I need to get to a hospital.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘I mean it, this is serious! I have to get out!’
He understood then. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas. I’m not dying for you. I want to get out too.’
‘I have a wife,’ I pleaded.
‘You should have thought of her before you crawled back in here, then.’
‘I came to help you!’
‘If you really want to help me, give yourself to those things so I can get out. Look at you. You’re screwed. No sense us both dying.’
In that second I hated him. Was it selfish to expect a man to die for you, and was it wrong to hate him for wanting to live when you yourself desired only the same thing? In that moment something gave way within me. The longing for home and the woman I loved had become a secret obsession, and I realized how much I had come to resent Lee. He had nobody who missed him, no relatives or loved ones who were wondering where he was. He only wanted to get home to carry on with his lonely life. In that instant, with the poison spreading through my veins, the weight of the torment finally became too much for me. If Lee wasn’t going to offer me a way home, then I was going to take it from him.
Something in my expression must have given the game away, for he tried to step away as I lunged for him.
We fell backwards against a rotting table, crashing to the floor in a cloud of dust. He punched and squirmed as I locked my hands around his throat, finally succeeding in driving a knee up between my legs. I gasped with the sudden pain and he wriggled from my grasp. I tackled him back to the ground, fighting past his flailing fists and kneeling on his legs to pin him down. It was easier than I expected, even with the agony in my arm. He was so malnourished he simply lacked the strength to fend me off.
From the corridor just outside we heard a skittering sound.
The door to the room trembled, and then shook.
‘I’m sorry!’ I sobbed. I locked my hands around his throat and squeezed. He tried to claw at my face but I twisted my head away.
His eyes were wide and bulging, and his lips were moving, but only a garbled wheeze escaped them. It sounded like he was trying to say ‘please’, and tears stung my eyes as guilt raced through me. But the panic was stronger. The shadows were coming, and I needed to get home, whatever the cost.
His face contorted as my fingers tightened, turning red, and then to a bloodless blue hue as his body bucked furiously. He almost threw me off twice, but I dug my knees in and gripped as hard as I could.
His hands pawed ineffectually at my face and chest, but there was no fight left in him. He grabbed my shirt with what little strength remained, scattering buttons across the floor. Then his hands just let go and slipped down. His body thrashed twice more and then fell still. His eyes were frozen open. I couldn’t bear to look into them. I crawled away from him, tears pouring down my face and my whole body trembling. I knew I was a traitor to everything I believed in.
The door to the room burst open and a horribly familiar figure stepped inside. The jagged form turned as if surveying the scene, the broken shards that comprised the body churning around the central mass like orbiting debris. I crawled into the shadows, trying to make myself as small and insignificant as possible. As the figure stood over Lee’s corpse and clamped the ends of its jagged hands to either side of the dead man’s head, the lingering traces of Lee’s essence were drawn up into the slender body of the inhuman presence.
I didn’t stop to watch. Instead, I ran from the room, half crazed, screaming: ‘He died for me! Do you hear? He died for me! Let me go!’
But as I staggered down that long, empty hallway, I saw no doorways or windows to allow me to escape, nothing but more shadows and darkly desolate rooms. And, it was in one of those rooms, far from the terrible sounds of those horrible monsters, that I collapsed in a heap and let the shame and grief pour out of me.
I am alone, lost amid these echoing eternities of emptiness, and silent hallways of stale entropy.
What I did... what I became... sickens me.
I am no longer the same man that I was in the world outside. I had a sense of morality once, a belief that I was making the world safer. This place has taken both, just as it swallowed my equipment and just as it swallowed Geoff and Lee. In here, I am nothing, merely a ghost looking out on a world that I will never again be a part of.
Sometimes I merely stand, whenever I find one of those rare windows that allow a view of our world. I pray for a glimpse of London, my heart aches for home and the wonderful woman left behind there.
How long has it been? How long since she held me in her arms and I kissed those soft lips and looked into her beautiful brown eyes? She must think me dead by now. It hurts so badly sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from screaming. But I’ve seen what patrols the halls in this strange place, and I know not to make too much noise.
The poison still infects my body. My whole face has gone numb, and I can barely open my mouth now. My limbs are getting heavy, and I no longer move as quickly as before. On top of all that, I am always hungry, and that has become a more maddening pain than the poison coursing in my veins.
Lee warned me that this place takes everything if you let it.
Soon it will take me too.
But, I haven’t lost all hope, not yet.
You see, I found that room again—the one with the dead girl. It was just a random fluke, really, but this time I got hold of her satchel. There wasn’t any food in it, but there was something better: paper and a pen.
So, I spent the last few hours writing down my story—this story, as best as I can recall, and I’ve put Karen’s name and address at the top of it. It is my confession—my sins, failings and crimes laid bare. It is my absolution too; at least, I hope so. Even if not, even if she can’t forgive what I became here, at the very least she will know what happened to me.
I hope that makes it easier for her. Not knowing, that would be worse, right?
All I have to do is get it to her now.
I know I can get it outside if I can just find a window with the right city in time, and maybe then, maybe someone will find it and get it to her.
That’s my hope, the only one I have left. That’s my miracle. Surely I’m owed that.
But I know at the very least I can get my story outside into the world once more.
I’m giving my life for it.
|
|
|
| |
|
