‘Is he hurt? John, what’s wrong? You look as if you’ve seen—’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘Jake, keep in here with your mother.’
‘But is—’
‘I’ll tell you everything in a minute. I need to phone the police.’
‘The police?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I repeated. Then the thought struck me: Don’t worry. If I repeated the words a third time it would become a gypsy curse.
I went to the kitchen phone. For some reason that spidery crack in the wall had assumed a new significance. Not so much a crack: an omen. A harbinger of doom. Picking up the handset I punched the buttons. I pressed the button on the cradle; tried again.
‘Damn….’
‘You can’t get a line, can you?’ Kathy’s eyes were round; her voice tight sounding.
I hissed, ‘Tonight of all nights this thing has to go on the blink.’
But that didn’t add up. That was coincidence tossed too far. And I knew it. I knew it as if it had been written in fire across that damn wall with its telltale crack.
‘Just a minute,’ I said, and went through into the living-room, switching on the light as I did so.
Something thin and snake-like hung down outside the window.
‘The telephone cable’s broken.’ The statement sounded lame. But perhaps it was better than the truth, namely: It’s been cut.
Coincidence be damned. A chain of events had started here: the earth tremor; the yawning pit in the field; the man lying half eaten out there in the street; the broken telephone cable….
‘Kathy, we’ve got to get the police here.’
‘What’s happening, John? Was there anyone out in the street?’
‘Yes.’ I spoke in a low voice so Jake wouldn’t hear. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
I held up a finger to my lips. ‘Don’t let Jake know. Is your mobile phone still in the bedroom?’
‘No, I always give it to Paula when she goes … Oh, Jesus. What time is it?’
‘Half past ten.’ I’d no sooner replied than the implications sank in. Paula would be on her way home now. The bus stopped at 10.30 by the crossroads. Then came just a three-minute walk up Meedholme Lane to the house. It was one of those moments of absolute mental clarity. A man lay slaughtered in the street. Slaughtered by something dog-like, but not by any breed of dog I recognized. Its appearance was connected to the coming of that evil-looking pit in the field. Now my seventeen-year-old daughter would be alighting from the bus. She’d walk home alone.
There were no options; no debates; no prevarication; I had to reach Paula before she got off that bus. Normally it arrived at the crossroads just a shade after 10.30. My watch said 10.29. With luck I’d be there to meet her.
With Kathy and Jake safely locked inside the house, I walked to the driveway gates. Behind me, lights blazed from the windows. The black cable hung slackly down the house wall. Severed from the telegraph pole. In retrospect it may have been wiser to take the car. But at that moment I believed I’d be faster covering the short distance to the crossroads on foot.
I gripped the torch hard. The urge to switch it on and rake the whole area around me with its honest-to-goodness light itched upon my skin like a rash. But I wanted to give my night-vision a chance to kick in. There was starlight; there was the light of the single street-lamp. If anything I might see more, certainly further, without the torch. That would be for emergencies only, I told myself, as I slipped through the gate.
A hundred yards to my left the body still lay on the street. Of whatever chewed its face there was no sign. Once more the rational self, so primly bolted there by a modern society that is still haunted by a terror of the unknown, rifled my head for rational explanations. The creature might be an escaped big cat of some sort. A black panther would fit the bill. Fast. Sleek. Deadly. That’s it, John, I told myself. You’re dealing with some wild escapee here. A big cat from a zoo or circus.
I listened.
Silence, only silence. But it was the shrieking kind of silence that stalks your every heartbeat. A silence that evokes mental images of the watchful predator. I glanced back at the house. Jake and Kathy stared out at me. Backlit, they were dark shapes themselves. Merely faceless silhouettes.
That was the moment the lights went out. The streetlight died, too.
So now they’d cut the power. My escaped big cat theory shrivelled and died. We were under attack. That was the honest-to-God truth.
My first instinct was to rush back to the house. But my wife and son would be safe there, I told myself firmly. The windows and doors were locked tight.
On the other hand, my daughter, my beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter, would be alighting from that bus in about sixty seconds’ time. She’d walk this way alone. Who knows what she might encounter on this solitary stretch of roadway.
Still I held off with the torch. Bright starlight touched the street with a phantom fire; it glinted off cats’ eyes and road signs, revealing the road as a grey strip before me. I moved through that virtual darkness like a swimmer diving into unknown ocean depths. And once more my mind turned to the darkness in the freshly opened pit that yawned like a new grave. In my mind’s eye I saw a tide of absolute dark welling up from the chasm; I saw it spilling out over the cornfield, oozing through the hedge into the garden. I saw it flow like oil into my house to engulf my terrified wife and son. I clenched my hand around the torch. Grit crunched beneath the balls of my feet. Now I moved forward somewhere between a walk and a run. My eyes constantly roved the fields at either side of the lane. I was looking for a black, sleek shape; I was hunting for a pair of eyes that burned an evil yellow. I willed a car to come. But there was only silence … and that ominous darkness. Above me, stars burned. I saw them as cold, unfeeling eyes. They watched with callous half-interest as yet another fragile human being enacted yet another scene in creation’s play. They’d watched children mutilated; men and women marched into ovens; innocents nailed to trees. If all this turned into tragedy they’d watch with that cold impassive glare. They’d seen it all before; they’d see it all again.
Alert, I scanned ahead, looking for the lights of the bus as it rumbled on its way to Wakefield. Then that cold starlight might, with luck, reveal the fair hair of Paula as she rounded the corner. I heard a noise above me. It was that same swishing sound I’d heard before; a noise like a bamboo cane slashing through the air. It came again and again. I pictured a lunatic perched on top of a telegraph pole swishing a cane left and right. I looked up. Stars burned with their witchfire as bright as before, and yet, just for a second, some small section of starry sky vanished. A blot of darkness had moved across the heavens, blocking those points of light.
The cane sound swished louder. Touching my lips came a breath of air that smelt of wet soil: then it was gone. Mystified, I glanced up as I walked, the torch ready in case it came again. But only silence returned to press its dead weight against my ears. Still no bus lights in the distance. With luck it was late. I’d meet Paula as she stepped off it. Then we’d hurry back to the safety of the house. In her bag would be the mobile phone.
The swish came again. This time it sounded close against my ear. It was rhythmic now. Instead of a stick slashing at the air I thought of wings. Great wings.
I swung the torch upward, thumbing the switch as I did so. Instantly light blasted from the bulb, catching a shape that twisted above my head. I glimpsed muscular movement; sensed its predatory power. Then with a slashing movement it speeded away. I tried to track it with the torch but I was pitifully slow. It had already gone. The thudding beat of wings faded into the night sky.
Yet the mental image stayed clear. I retained the picture of not fur, nor feathers, but skin; a skin that was as glossily black as patent leather. And, most clearly of all, wings. Vast membranous wings.
I accelerated to a full-blooded run. This time I didn’t trust my life to star-shine. I slashed at road and sky with torchlight, revealing tre
es, fence posts, ditches. The white lines on the road materialized from the dark in ghostly stripes. My breath gusted between my teeth.
Paula would be here on the bus at any second. I had to be there when….
I stopped dead in the road. And that was the moment I realized that Paula’s bus had, Heaven forgive me, arrived early.
In the road lay Paula. I recognized the long, fair hair. Her jeans were torn; her legs were painfully splayed. Her bag lay ten yards from her body, the contents splashed across the road – lipstick, cracked mirror, mobile phone, coins, pens. Her attackers, I saw, were still there. One squatted obscenely on her chest. The rest crouched around her. Their heads ducked down at her beautiful face. Again, that wet lapping. Black membrane wings straightened, shook, then curled back against their bodies. Those things were in ecstasy. They shuddered with pleasure, their vast yellow eyes glazed with rapture.
What made me do it I don’t know. I switched off the torch. Then I moved. Those things were so focused on my daughter that they didn’t see me. I ran at them, moving silently, staying silent, until the last second: then with a roar that seared my throat I punched the power button on the torch, blasting them point-blank. And I watched as that brilliant light seared their eyes like a Pentecostal flame. With a screech, they spread bat-like wings and lifted into the air. Beating wings snapped into my face, the blows stinging. Savagely, I lashed at the creatures with the torch. In that mad flurry of wings, talons and flashing light I saw the bloodied incisors, those lips like black rubber, their evil yellow eyes that were ablaze with a terrible craving.
Seconds later they were gone. Their body shapes revealed only by whole clumps of missing stars, as if their silhouettes possessed a dark power to excise pieces of Heaven itself. Stunned, I stood there panting. Paula lay on her back at my feet. Her arms were crossed over her face; her leather jacket slit a dozen times as if by a razor. Then as I gazed at her motionless body a clump of her lovely fair hair drifted down from the sky.
Violating it, a smear of red. My throat moved convulsively. At last, I crouched down to my daughter. As I did so, I saw something that I expected least in the world at that moment. She moved her arm – then I heard her whisper one word: ‘Dad….’
Sometimes the rhythms that govern the pace of our lives speed up or slow. Time flies. Time drags. After carrying Paula back to the house and setting her down on the bed where she was born, the rhythm of time altered for me at that moment.
Events accelerated; I moved faster; yet time itself, as measured by the mantelpiece clock, seemed to slow to a funeral crawl. I saw everything so sharply. By candlelight, I watched Kathy bandage those cruel slashing cuts on Paula’s forearm. I saw with absolute clarity her brother dab antiseptic with incredible tenderness onto her grazed forehead. I watched how Paula’s glazed eyes stared at the ceiling, and how they cleared as if a mist evaporated between them and my own. And I remembered shining the torch through Jake’s bedroom window out across the field. Whereas the wheat crop had appeared entirely grey in the starlight now the central part was black. A glossy black: shiny as a beetle’s shell. Those membrane-winged things with the yellow eyes were oozing from the pit like crude oil welling from a borehole. As I watched, I saw a thousand yellow eyes fixed hungrily on our home. I knew they would come soon. They’d tasted our blood. They had a liking for it now.
Again with a super-quick fluidity I was downstairs once more.
Vividly, I saw the can of lawn mower fuel in my hand. I remember its rainbow colours as I poured a full gallon over the back of the car and onto the blankets I’d tied there. I remember Jake and Kathy at the bedroom window, eyes wide, faces white, as they beat the glass; their mouths framing the word No! No! over and over again. I broke the first match. Tossed it onto the dirt. The second burned soundly. I dropped it onto the fuel soaked material. With a roar, the blankets, along with the whole rear quarter of the car, burst into flame.
It burned so brightly it looked as if I’d hitched a piece of God’s own sun to the car’s tail. Then came that eerie, timeless drive….
I didn’t bother with the roads. I drove the car forward along the driveway, down the side of the house, sheering away a drainpipe that cracked the windscreen; then I was bumping over the back lawn. Seconds later the burning car burst through the hedge like a torpedo. Headlamps blazing, engine roaring, tyres buzzing, I powered across that wheat field. The crops parted before the car. Mixed with the sound of the flames I heard the rush of wheat stalks against metal. Behind me I left a trail of fire. The summer dry wheat was alight, too. Smoke rolled into the night sky. Sparks rose to meet the stars. Flames lit those hundred acres as bright as day.
And there I was: driving a burning car. It must have resembled some dirt-hugging comet, carving a fiery streak across the earth. The creatures that were too slow were crushed beneath the tyres, then, in turn, the burning crops cremated them. Some rose into the air like ravens before me. Others fled back to their subterranean aerie. And I drove on. I didn’t slow the car. I held it straight as a guided missile locked onto its target come what may, do or die.
At the lip of the crater I opened the door. Then I stepped out into the flying wheat.
Geologists know more than me. They said the burning car had ignited naturally occurring methane gas in the pit. Later, whole families came from miles away to watch the pillar of flame jetting out of the ground as high as an oak tree. With a sense of the Biblical it burned for forty days and forty nights. No amount of water could quench that fire. At long last, however, firefighters succeeded in capping the hole with concrete. The field was black all winter. Then the farmer ploughed and sowed again. It’s green with barley now. The things that escaped the blaze had flapped away like starlings before the onset of winter. It’s my belief they’re not adapted to the light of this world. That they withered to dust with the rising of the sun. Here I sit typing. Moonlight spills onto the carpet. The scar tissue of that one bad burn between thumb and forefinger pulls tight a little as I hit the space bar. That’s a small price to pay.
Cryer bought the script I wrote last winter. It’s about what lies beneath this eggshell thin crust we call solid ground. The contract (which is as thick as a telephone directory) lies here on the desk beside me. So….
Do I still work for mail-sort? Am I contented? Am I rich?
Those questions seem unimportant now.
Because I’ve just noticed the window is open. The noise I heard earlier is getting louder by the minute. It’s the sound of roosting birds, I guess.
I can hear their sharp claws upon the roof.
THE BURNING DOORWAY
‘I told you, I saw them moving.’
The night-time attendant at the crematorium had almost shouted the words into the phone. This thing had frightened him, his hands were shaking. He wanted to let loose a mouthful at his supervisor who obviously didn’t give a flying fig. The lazy sod was probably sitting at home, a can of beer in his greasy hand, gawping at the television. What did he care that his tuppeny ha’penny assistant was alone in the crematorium with them moving about there … making those noises that made him sick to his stomach?
‘I’ve looked in there, Mr Winters, I can see them moving about.’
He heard his boss over the phone give a sigh. The sigh that says ‘Oh, no, here we go again.’
‘Danny,’ his boss began, ‘when you were offered this post, you were told it wouldn’t be very pleasant. To be bloody blunt, our job, Danny, is to burn dead people to ash. Specifically, your duties are to watch over the equipment at night. If it malfunctions then phone me. Otherwise, just leave me to a bit of peace and quiet, OK?’
‘But they’re moving around in there, Mr Winters. And they’re making these horrible sounds. You can hear them above the gas jets; I bet you can hear them over the phone, if I hold it to the ovens for you. They’re going—’
‘Danny, Dan – just listen to me, Danny. If I come down there now, I’ll have to file a call-out report. When my gaffer sees why I’
ve had to come out at midnight you’ll be out faster than shit off the end of a shovel. Now, think carefully, Danny, do you still want this job?’
‘’Course I do. It’s the first I’ve had in a year.’
‘Didn’t any of the blokes down there tell you what to expect?’
‘They said I’d got the cushiest job going. Just sit here all night and keep checking the burners are working all right.’
‘Bugger,’ said his boss, stoically. ‘Look, Danny, as I said, it’s not a pretty job. We burn people, right? Burning people isn’t like burning old cardboard boxes. They’re complicated mechanisms made up of skin, muscle, bone. Inside they’ve got organs – those are bags of fluid and gas. You with me, Danny?’
‘Ay.’
‘Also they’ve got mouths and arseholes. So if you heat them up fast, fluids boil, and I’m talking about blood and piss now. Gasses expand. They’ve all got to come out somewhere. So what you’re hearing is basically belching and farting. But on a grand scale; you follow me, Danny? Sometimes it works on the vocal chords, too, so you can actually stand outside the crematorium oven, and it sounds like people are groaning their heads off. I’ve heard it. It is nasty. It takes some getting used to. Believe me, Danny, I’ve heard a burning corpse actually sound as if it’s singing; it nearly turned my hair white.’
‘How is it then, they can move?’
‘You must have good eyes, Danny. When I look through the spy-hole into the ovens all I can see is flames.’
‘But they do move about in there, Mr Winters.’
‘Then it’s got to be a muscle reaction. When muscle burns it shrinks. I’ve heard stories of burning corpses suddenly sitting up. There are other things, too. You might hear bangs. And I mean really loud bangs like a cannon firing. Fluids boil in the stomach making it inflate like a balloon. Eventually, the pressure’s so great – BANG! – it explodes.’
‘I didn’t know that. They never told me.’