‘NO!’ The force behind the word was enough to make Marko flinch. ‘It wasn’t a dream.’
‘Whatever you say, mate.’
‘It started with the dust,’ Fisher panted. ‘Then the walls fell … only they changed when they fell … they were wet. Look, if you don’t believe me. Can’t you see the dust on the pillow? Look! There’s more on the blanket.’
‘Dust? Yeah. It’s an old house, Fisher. Dust’s everywhere.’
‘But when the walls came down on me, everything became swollen, like … you know, like it was deformed. The light up there was pressed against my chest. I could even see the manufacturer’s mark on the metal collar of the light bulb. It’s made by a company I haven’t heard of before. Axxlyte. That’s what’s stamped on the light bulb. Axxlyte.’
‘Fisher, look, why don’t—’
‘Marko. Get up here.’ Fisher slapped the mattress with his hand. The movement was panicky. ‘Marko. Stand here and tell me what it says on the light bulb.’
Marko looked as if he’d argue against it but with a shrug changed his mind. Barefooted, he jumped up on to the mattress.
‘Marko? It says Axxlyte, doesn’t it?’
‘Hang on, the letters are so small I can’t make it out.’ He stretched as far as he could up toward the light.
Fisher hissed, ‘What does it say?’
‘Axx…’ He strained to make himself taller. ‘Axxlyte. Yeah, Axxlyte.’
‘Axxlyte, I told you. The whole ceiling pressed down on me. It was crushing me. The light grew like it was swelling. How would I have seen the maker’s name on the bulb otherwise?’
Marko shrugged. There was an expression of genuine sympathy on his face. ‘The ceiling looks all right.’
‘Oh, God.’ Fisher’s chest hurt when he breathed in, but now he’d got some air into his lungs his racing heart started to slow down. ‘Sorry, Marko. Hell … I must have sounded as if I’d gone crazy.’
‘It was the dog that woke me. He started barking. When he stopped I could hear you making …’ He shook his head. ‘Making groaning sounds.’ He smiled to break the tension. ‘Didn’t sound like groans of fun, mate. I thought I’d better investigate.’
‘Sorry, Marko.’
‘Sorry? What for?’
‘For waking you. I must have been dreaming?’
‘No problem. You’re an old pal. We look out for one another.’
‘Thanks, Marko.’ Fisher briskly rubbed his face, then shook himself as if shaking himself awake. ‘Give Jak a pat on the head for me when you go back.’
‘Will do.’ Marko sniffed at the air as he looked around the walls. ‘It’s stuffy in here. Want me to open a window?’
‘Heck, don’t you go treating me like an invalid. I’ll do it.’
‘Fair enough. See you tomorrow.’
When Marko had left the room Fisher didn’t go to the window straight away. Instead he crossed the floor to the mirror. There he paused, glanced back at the ceiling light that was housed in its glass globe. Then he lifted his T-shirt. There on his chest was a large round bruise. A new one.
CHAPTER 5
Bruise or no bruise, Fisher was up by nine. He found he’d already missed the arrival of the others. He stood in the corridor rubbing his sore chest through his T-shirt as Adam Ambrose swept along the corridor with his harem. A brunette and the blonde. Yeah, trust Adam Ambrose to have two girlfriends. They were new. Fisher didn’t even know their names.
‘Ciao, Fisher. Nice boxers, man. Catch you later.’
Teeth and hair. That’s how Fisher always thought of Adam. Teeth and hair. Not so much a man but walking golden hair that framed a mass of teeth. Fabian had appointed Adam as lead guitarist and lead singer. There’d not been discussion or democratic vote in the band. One afternoon Fisher and Marko had turned up for rehearsal to be told by Fabian that Zak had left. His replacement was the golden-haired Adam Ambrose. That was that.
Marko walked along the corridor from the direction of the main entrance. Jak trotted alongside him. The dog looked up placidly at Fisher, his tail swished.
‘So they arrived,’ Fisher said; his ribs ached when he spoke.
‘Been here about an hour. Fabian’s been showing them round the place like it’s his own personal estate.’
‘Last night I was thinking we’d wake up this morning to find the dog had died. He looked pretty ropy yesterday.’
‘He’d probably lost so much body heat it made him lethargic.’
‘He seems fine now.’
‘Yeah, I gave him some milk and cornflakes, then took him out for a run in the woods. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘You found him?’
‘That doesn’t make me his owner.’ Fisher spoke good-naturedly. In fact, he found himself smiling at the look of concern on Marko’s face. ‘It’s not as if you’re stealing my girlfriend.’
‘So, you’ve no problems with me feeding him?’
‘Feed him, walk him, throw Frisbees – be my guest.’
‘Thanks, Fisher.’
There was something about Marko’s affection for the dog that was touching. Yeah, Marko would loon around doing the Keith Moon mad drummer bit, but the glow of pleasure on Marko’s face because he had the company of the dog was nothing less than heart-warming.
Marko said, ‘When you’re ready there’s cereal, milk, coffee and stuff in the kitchen.’
‘Thanks. Is everyone here now?’
‘Yeah, they got the first ferry over this morning. We’ve already started setting the gear up in a big room at the back of the house.’
‘I best get some clothes on, then.’
‘It’s cold in there so it’d be a good idea.’
‘Has Fabian said what time he wants to start?’
‘Wait, you’ll love this. He wants us to assemble at ten thirty sharp, as he puts it. But not to rehearse; he’s going to make a speech.’
‘A speech? Why? Is he making a declaration of war or something?’
Marko grinned as he bent down to pat the dog’s head. ‘Fabian’s planned to say something inspirational, I bet. Or tell us we’re locked up here until we’re note perfect.’
A speech? Isn’t that typical of the guy? Oddly, the amusing prospect of Fabian standing up to make his pompous pronouncement vanished the moment Fisher stepped back into his room. Sure the bed was how it should be, with the covers rucked after a night’s sleep. The curtains were partly open to reveal a grey morning. Beyond the glass, overgrown bushes clustered around the window. Steam still settled in the bathroom from where he’d just showered. He even caught the faint mint smell of his toothpaste. But it was those walls … he remembered how they crowded in on him. He rubbed his sore chest through the T-shirt. The bruise there was a big dark one. Round as a dinner plate, too. He glanced up at the globe light shade. At that moment he didn’t want to think about what happened last night. The incident – the nightmare? – had too much emotional weight involved, much like the death of his father ten weeks ago. He hadn’t figured out what that meant to him yet. So trying to deal with what the room did to him would be too much like emotional overload.
‘Get out; just get out,’ he muttered to himself, as he grabbed his jeans from the back of the chair. The place exerted a claustrophobic pressure. In fact, breakfast could wait; he needed fresh air.
The Tower by daylight. Well, daylight, almost. Even by 9.30 the light struggled to make it through the grey cloud that pressed down on this remote part of Yorkshire. Fisher stood on the driveway that had brought them to the house. He looked at the building, rising out of the bushes that crept up to it in a tide of spiky, leafless branches. There was a kind of megalithic simplicity in its architectural design. A horizontal slab that formed the bulk of the house consisted of three floors built from sandstone that had turned black from hundreds of years of violent rain and snowstorms. A vertical block formed the tower. That rose to five storeys with two oblong windows per floor. The entire struct
ure had been roofed in pantile that would have once been a terracotta red. Exposure to Yorkshire’s harsh elements had transmuted the red into a brown dirt colour. From where he stood beneath the trees, which dripped water and groaned in the breeze, he judged that the house was perhaps eighty yards in width. The oblong windows, of which there were dozens, had all the appeal of dead eyes. Set deep into the black sandstone walls they had a glistening grey quality; for some weird reason he wanted them to blink, anything to break that lifeless stare. Hell, the developers had their work cut out to transform this mausoleum into an alluring residence. Even the setting lacked picturesque appeal. The Tower sat on a flat agricultural landscape punctuated by copses of leafless trees; there were no other houses to be seen. The flatness created a massive grey sky that Fisher found oppressive. It was as if the huge hand of some eternally angry god pressed its palm down on the land, crushing the spirit out of every living thing. Sure, those trees would burst into leaf in a month or so – that’s what Fisher knew intellectually – but, emotionally, he sensed that this was a place that winter left grudgingly. Even then, something of the cold frosty spirit would remain lurking in the shadows.
Morbid thoughts again, Fisher told himself. Stop it. It’s too easy to start thinking about what happened to Dad. And about what happened last night. Hell … Why did the room collapse in on me? Is this how a nervous break-down starts?
Before he could stop himself, random helter-skelter images dashed into his mind. The hearse arriving at the house for the funeral. Just sight of his father’s coffin had knocked the air from his lungs. The way the ceiling appeared to descend to crush him. If it was hallucination, why did he have a bruise on his chest? He remembered the force of the light fitting pressing down on his ribs. The rescue of the dog from the road in the downpour of rain. Once more he remembered Marko talking about his grandmother’s passion for saving stray dogs, and her belief that the dogs assumed the characteristics of dead members of her family.
I should have brought Jak with me, Fisher told himself. He’d distract me from raking up the past. I could have thrown sticks for him. Anything to take my mind off what happened to Dad. Sixty years old? These days that was young. It shouldn’t—
Fisher shook his head. No, don’t go there … Walk round, get some fresh air, then go listen to what Fabian has to say. He kicked a stone as he walked. When he kicked stones like that in the past it was playful, just a habit from childhood. Now he injected fury into the kick. That’s unresolved grief, he told himself. He passed the band’s vehicles parked by the front door, then he pushed himself to walk faster to dispel the gloom-laden thoughts. To reach the rear he had to weave through hawthorn bushes that surrounded The Tower. The building looked like a dirty tomb poking up through the mass of spiky branches. For a while he even lost sight of the hulking presence of the house due to the wild, untrammelled growth of hawthorn taking root in every square yard of soil around the place. It wasn’t even the kind of ornamental bush you’d have in a garden. It was a feral plant.
So, House, you plan to keep visitors away, don’t you? Fisher intended the thought as a flippant distraction from his preoccupations, but the proximity and the density of the hawthorn really did seem evidence of a protective thicket around the building to prevent the uninvited getting too close. Every so often he had a glimpse of the dark stone flank of the house with its patches of green moss. At least he was moving in the right direction if he was to find the rear of the property. Gusts of wind tugged at the black hawthorn. The overgrown branches were whip thin. Fisher had to jerk his head back when a branch lashed at him with its weaponry of sharp thorns. He turned his mind to the US Air Force bomber crews stationed here. This bleak setting would do nothing for morale. He could imagine the men falling into moods of fatal gloom as they waited in that bleak pile of stone for orders to fly out over hostile territory to bomb cities and factories. How long before the crews found themselves brooding over images of the men, women and children their bombs had killed? How they might advance across those fields as an army of vengeful ghosts?
My God. That’s what this place does to you. It insinuates strange ideas. This is a house where you can imagine anything happening. A room where its walls deform, where they creep in to hold you like an alligator can hold a rat inside its mouth before crushing it. You could stare out of those bleak, dead-eye windows and picture the phantoms of mutilated people creeping in a dark tide toward you.
Fisher found that he’d been walking with his head down, his hands pushed into his pockets as his mind entangled itself in morbid ideas. When he looked up he suddenly realized he was free of the hawthorn bushes. Here at the back of the house the bushes yielded to an expanse of knee-deep grass that ran down a gentle slope to what appeared to be a dead straight concrete road. This has to be the runway, he told himself. Surely they’d have ripped it up years ago? But then some were kept mothballed, just in case more runway space was needed by the military at short notice. Straight away, he noticed a bunker at the side of the runway. Now the morbid thoughts slipped from Fisher’s mind as he waded through the damp grass toward the runway. So this is where the huge glittering bombers would sit with their propellers spinning in the dawn light before lumbering into the air eastward. From their bedrooms in the house, flight crews would be able to watch mechanics working on the wing-mounted engines of the B17s. When they’d finished, another team would hoist high explosive ordnance into the belly of the aircraft to be anchored in the bomb bay.
Some distance from the runway, Fisher paused. A strange thing had happened to the thirty yard wide strip of concrete that ran for perhaps a thousand yards across the landscape. Weirdly, it was surrounded on both sides by a shallow lake. The runway itself stood just an inch or so above the water’s surface. The whole area is reverting to swamp, he told himself. Drainage ditches in the area must be so neglected that the ground water is rising.
Evidence of this came in the shape of dead trees that presented their forlorn skeletal forms against the grey sky, while the bases of their trunks stood in stagnant water. So, clearly a few years ago, this would have been pasture that flanked the concrete landing strip. Fisher moved closer to what had become a narrow concrete island standing in what looked like about a hundred acres of water. He pictured himself strolling along it while frogs leapt off the sides back into the safety of the lake. He’d enjoy the exercise. It would dispel the residue of morbid thoughts that had followed him like a black cloud this morning. Only at that moment he heard chimes shimmer on the cold breeze. That was Marko’s phantom clock. How on earth could the sound of a clock striking ten in the house reach him down here? Another of The Tower’s secrets in need of an answer, he told himself. If it was ten o’clock he should be heading back. Fabian would be making his speech at half past. Being late would only piss the guy off. Still, he had a few minutes yet … There were no hangars that he could see. Then they’d be flimsy structures of corrugated iron. Nowhere as rugged as the bunker built from concrete blocks, and topped with a concrete slab roof. Clearly, they’d made sure it would not only be strong enough to withstand the fearsome northern weather but also bear the brunt of strafing attacks by marauding enemy fighters. This thought prompted him to check the building. He pushed on through the long grass, aware that his feet were soaked from the wet vegetation, but not in the least bothered. He was glad something had taken his mind off the morbid introspection. There were nothing that could be described as windows apart from half-a-dozen glazed slits set about ten feet above Fisher’s head. They might have been intended to admit daylight into the bunker. He walked round the building, which he judged to be about twenty-five feet in height. Iron ties that helped bond the structure together now bled rust-red stains down the dark grey walls. On the side that faced open countryside there were around about a dozen pockmarks that might have been made by machine-gun rounds from a German fighter. Fisher tested the depth of the bullet holes with his finger. They hadn’t gone all the way through. The bunker’s occupants had strolled
safely away from that attack at least. After walking completely around the building, which was in the region of ten by fifteen paces, he’d discovered the only entrance was a steel door that was solidly locked. He put his eye to the keyhole. All he could make out in the gloom was a flight of concrete steps that still bore traces of paint that could only be described as a drab military green. The odour oozing through the keyhole didn’t make him linger. It smelt as if some animal had crept in there to die. With a cough to drive the foul air from his lungs he stepped back. Time to call off explorations for now. He glanced at his watch. He had fifteen minutes before Fabian launched into his speech. If the man had any grand plan for the band’s future Fisher should be there to hear it. He turned his back on the bunker that squatted beside the runway and walked back toward the house.
CHAPTER 6
The man watched the new arrival through one of the window slits in the bunker. The stranger had emerged from the hawthorn at the side of the house to walk down through the long grass to the edge of the runway. There he’d examined the bunker before returning to the house. As the man watched the stranger ford his way through the grass, leaving a line of broken stalks, he picked a rat out of the mesh cage. The rodent twisted its head, fixed fierce eyes that glinted like beads of black glass in its head onto the man’s thumb, then thrust its jaws forward to bite. The man didn’t flinch. His heavy duty canvas gloves didn’t allow the teeth to penetrate. In his unhurried way, borne of years of practice, the man positioned the rat over a vertical metal rod that was no thicker than a pencil. The rod ran from elbow height down to where the other end was fixed into a baulk of timber that rested on the floor. Once the rat’s belly rested against the filed point of the rod, the man exerted a steady pressure downward against the rat’s back. The animal writhed; it arched its spine in agony; its jaws jerked wide open as its enraged squeaking rose into a high-pitched shriek. More pressure. The rat spasmed in his hand; its tail lashed – a naked snake-like member that curled around his wrist. Pressed harder, and … in. The spike passed through the rodent’s skin, through its gut to pierce internal organs, then its spine with an audible crunch. This was routine. Efficiently, the man threaded the body on to the metal rod. He slid it downward smoothly, its passage made easier by the creature’s own blood that lubricated the metal. When the rat couldn’t descend any further because of the fifteen skewered rodent bodies beneath it, the man stepped back to check his work. The apparatus resembled an abacus. The bodies of rats and birds on ten more steel rods that jutted vertically from the timber could have been the abacus beads. The upper parts of the rod were vacant as they awaited more animals. The bottom halves of the rods were sheathed in decaying animals. Dried blood formed sticky patches on the concrete floor. The weakly squirming rat with the rod penetrating its body added more oozing rivulets of crimson to the mess.