I followed Kate into the back seat. My foot caught the car’s tape player. Instantly music filled the car. A slow, sweet piece with lilting violins.
Damn.
I looked back. Water was finding its way in through the rubber door seals in a slow but steady trickle. It started to pool around the foot pedals on the floor.
On the bonnet Mental hung onto the wipers. One snapped away. He clung to the other one; his eyes burned with a mad intensity through the glass at me.
‘Swim!’ I shouted. ‘Swim back to the island.’
Now water covered the bonnet to reach the windscreen. It was like looking into a fishtank with a couple of centimetres of scummy water in the bottom.
Mental began to shout but I couldn’t make out individual words.
Kate did.
‘Christ,’ she said in flat voice. ‘He can’t swim.’
The car’s nose dipped down further into the water. To prevent ourselves falling forward, we had to turn round in the back seat and brace our feet against the backs of the seats in front.
It must have made a surreal scene. Brilliant sunshine, blue skies. A vast lake of flood water broken by little islands, the tops of telegraph poles, street lights, roofs of houses. And there, floating in the middle of it all, a powder blue Rolls-Royce, its nose with the big chrome grille and flying lady mascot already under water. The back end of the car—boot, rear wheels, rear half of the passenger compartment—lifted out of the water. The rear tyres dripped water, smack, smack, smack onto the surface of the lake. Meanwhile, a madman crouched on the bonnet, screaming, pounding on the glass.
The water now came halfway up the windscreen. Mental slapped the toughened glass, sending up splashes of water.
By this time, I could actually see underwater through the partially submerged car windows. The colour of the water was black from particles of suspended sediment. But enough sunlight still beamed through the water for me to see a metre or so through the water. Mental’s hands looked hugely magnified. I could even see the daggers tattooed on the backs of his fingers. He was shaking his head. Gasping, as the scummy water rushed into his mouth with every breath he took.
The car tilted more. Now we were crouching on the backs of the front seats as the car stood on its nose. And still the late-night orchestral lullaby came oozing, slickly smooth, through the speakers.
‘Oh God, it’s going down. It’s going down,’ Kate panted. She hung onto the back seat. Up through the back window I saw nothing but blue sky now.
A grating sound, metal on stone. A concrete lamppost passed by, scraping the car’s paintwork. The glass lamp itself knocked dully against the car roof.
I could see less than an upper quarter of the lamp post. So how deep’s the water? I wondered. Come on, Rick, how deep? Six metres, maybe.
The thumping sounded more panic-stricken as Mental belaboured the glass with his fists. I could hear his screams, loud but muffled by the car’s thick steel shell.
Completely submerged now, he beat at the car in a mad thrash of bubbles.
Then the car sank.
Chapter 65
As quickly as that. The car went down, smoothly as a submarine.
Kate gasped.
I gritted my teeth.
It took no more than four seconds.
Then the car was falling down through the water toward the bed of the new lake. Bubbles, looking like chains of silver balls, sped by the windows. Instantly a brrrr filled the car, sounding as if a dozen electric motors had just spun into life somewhere in its steel shell—the sound generated by air escaping from a dozen different cavities in the doors, engine compartment and boot. Following that came heavier thuds as water slammed in to fill the void created by the exodus of air.
We glided down into utter darkness. The ride seemed to take forever.
Then, at last, with a thump that sent us flat out onto the backs of the front seat, we hit bottom.
‘Rick—the water.’
‘I know, I know. Don’t panic, Kate. Please don’t panic.’
She breathed deeply. ‘I’m OK. But we must get out. We must!’
I looked round. It was almost dark now in the car. A little light filtered down through the water, creating flickering patterns of light on the richly upholstered interior. We were trapped in a pocket of air in the passenger compartment. For a few seconds we would be safe. Until the water oozed slowly in, filling the car, to drown—
Thump.
Mental still clung to the car.
I saw we’d come to rest, the car standing on its nose against a chain-link fence. Mental was sandwiched between car and fence.
The poor bastard was still alive. He pounded the windscreen with his fist as if we could open an airlock and let him in.
‘Dear God, dear God.’ Kate said under her breath. ‘Poor man.’
‘That poor man would have cheerfully killed us…Christ, how do we get out of this?’
I hit the switch on the Rolls-Royce’s courtesy light. It came on but dimmed, then brightened. A second later it dimmed again. The battery wouldn’t hold out long.
Water now oozed through the door seals. The dashboard, too, seemed to bleed that filthy flood water. It squirted through in jets. The river-water smell caught in the back of our throats. In a minute or two the water would reach the front seats. At this rate, the car itself would be full of water in less than ten minutes. Not that it mattered. By then the air would no longer be breathable anyway.
The music played on. Filling the car with the sounds of an orchestra whose members were probably all long dead.
And if I didn’t do something soon we’d be joining them.
Kate breathed in those frightened little gasps again. I noticed that when she exhaled she blew out puffs of white vapour. The water engulfing the car chilled the interior until it felt as though we sat inside a refrigerator. Condensation misted the windows.
I shot a glance back at Mental. He hung motionless in the water now, eyes and mouth wide open—painfully wide. The beard and long hair floated around his head to form a dark halo.
As I watched, a dark object the size of my fist flitted in front of his face. A mark appeared on his cheek the size of a penny. Blood flowed out. Another shape buzzed in. The tip of his nose disappeared.
The rats had wasted no time finding fresh food.
Kate spoke calmly, but insistently, ‘Rick…We’ve got…to get out…we’re going to die in here.’
‘I know. Perhaps…if we rocked the car we could free it?’
‘OK. Let’s try.’
‘On the count of three. One, two, three.’ We rocked backwards and forwards. The car moved. Metal scraped on metal with an eerie moan.
‘Try again. Harder. One, two, three.’ Again came the screech of metal against metal. Bubbles streamed by the window.
‘No good,’ Kate groaned. ‘We’re stuck.’
I crouched there on the front seat’s back-rest, fist tapping my chin. Christ. We couldn’t just sit here and drown. We’d got this far. There must be a way out.
The electric light in the roof flickered. The music became a dirge as the tape slowed.
Kate wiped the condensation from the window and looked out at what lay beneath the flood water.
‘My God, Rick. Have you seen what’s out there?’
‘The rats? Ignore them.’
‘Not rats.’ She looked at me. ‘People.’
I twisted round to face the window. ‘People?’ I rubbed at the glass. Stared out hard, trying by willpower alone to see through the black water.
Jesus.
A face.
I bounced back from the glass as if it had become electrified. The face stared in.
‘Christ, what is it?’ I felt panic crack through me. My scalp prickled.
The face. I’d never seen anything like it before.
It moved forward, staring into the car like we were specimens in a glass case.
Shit.
I found I was holding my breath. I
was staring at the face. Not able to tear my eyes away as it moved slowly forward to the glass, bumped softly against it, then turned slowly, slowly away.
The strands of hair danced around its head. The eyes stared unblinking through the water.
Then that terrible face swung back, again smoothly rotating to stare in at us again. Beside me, Kate’s whole body shook. The car seemed to shudder in sympathy, the metalwork groaning all the time.
The face stared in.
‘Rick. Don’t get any closer.’
Gingerly, I approached the window and looked back out at it.
She said, ‘It’s one of the Grey Men, isn’t it? Do you see the colour of his face?’
I looked. My eyes were so wide they stung. The face was grey, its skin the texture of white bread, somehow spongy-looking; the whole face was pocked with holes.
‘A drowned man.’ I let out a sigh. ‘That’s all it is.’ I looked past him. Suspended there in water that was as murky as a black mist there were more of them. Standing upright, they turned round and around as if engaged in some eerie postmortem dance. The drowned men’s arms waved sinuously in a way that was slow, serene, almost mesmerizing.
Hi, Rick Kennedy. Shame you never got to record the album. What’re you going to do for the rest of eternity, then? Jesus gonna give you an electric Stratocaster guitar instead of a harp? Time to come out and play with us, Rick. Time to come out and kiss our cold, bloated lips. Time to feel our bloated hands holding yours. Come on out here, Ricky boy, the water’s lovely.
Eat your heart out, Esther Williams. You can’t swim as good as that. You can’t…I felt a sudden desire to laugh savagely. To keep laughing until the build-up of carbon dioxide stamped consciousness from my brain. Until the toxic gas squeezed my heart so hard it stopped beating.
I looked at Kate. She was breathing hard, panting as if she’d run a marathon; clouds of white vapour spurted from her nostrils.
The air had turned poisonous. We’d consumed the oxygen. I felt my fingertips tingling; a pain had formed behind my eyes. I realized that I was panting too. Hell, we were dying in there. I couldn’t think straight.
Feeling like lumps of concrete had been chained to my arms, I hauled myself round to face Kate.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
‘The air’s bad.’
‘Oh…’ her voice was a whisper. ‘Time to go.’
‘Time to go,’ I nodded.
She reached forward and touched my face with her fingertips. Her eyes were glazed. She panted hard. ‘Rick…Rick Kennedy. I really liked you.’
‘Liked you, too.’ I could hardly speak now. ‘Liked…you…’
‘I wish…we’d…wish we’d made love this afternoon. Champagne. Soft beds…love.’
‘Me too.’ I couldn’t lift my head.
‘Time to go,’ she said.
‘Yes…time to go.’
The water had reached the front seats now. The light was fading. Darkness closed in around me like a cold hand. The music sounded as if it came from the lips of dead men: a long-drawn-out dirge, full of pain, despair and loneliness never ending.
I rolled my head on the back of the seat. My whole brain seemed to thump as if it pulsated inside my skull like some kind of mutant heart. My eyes dimmed. I gazed out of the window.
My eyes snapped open in shock.
Caroline hung there in the water. Her hair floated in a light froth around her head. Her brown eyes locked onto mine. She smiled. Behind her the drowned London streets stretched away into the distance. Cars lay on the bed of the lake. Shoals of fish drifted like silver clouds in and out of shop doorways. Thick-bodied eels nested in the rib cages of drowned policemen.
Caroline opened her mouth. Out swam a water rat with a piece of her tongue. She smiled. I heard her husky voice trickling up through the roots of my brain: ‘The city rots underwater. Gone, gone, gone…Rick. The last Queen of England is dead…’
Then Caroline’s face melted into the empty-eyed skull of a drowned man. The corpse floated, standing upright in the water; the whole front of the torso had been torn away, giving it the appearance of a cutaway illustration in a medical text book, the lungs, heart, liver, diaphragm, intestines exposed in perfect detail.
From the corpse’s lips purred Caroline’s voice, enticingly sexy.
‘Are you coming through, Rick? Auntie Caroline’s waiting for her kiss. Rick, aren’t you a naughty boy? Now, don’t keep Auntie waiting, do you hear?’
Dimly, I realized I was hallucinating. I couldn’t feel my fingers. A weight pressed down on my chest. Consciousness was dwindling, crushed by the poisonous carbon dioxide saturating my bloodstream.
‘Kate…Kate…uh…’ I could just make her out, her blonde hair, a fuzzy pale shape in the gloom. I saw she’d turned her back to me.
‘Kate…what’re you doing? What…uh…’
She sat down, braced her back against my shoulder, then kicked out hard with both feet.
It sounded like metal tearing.
Then I realized what she’d done. She’d stamped the side window through. The water came in with a roar, knocking us both back across the car. I grabbed a lungful of air, then I was swirled round and around, feeling like a kitten caught in a washing machine.
A hand grabbed me.
Pulled. Pulled hard.
For a second I thought one of the drowned men had reached in and caught hold of me. Then I realized Kate had grabbed me by the scruff of my T-shirt and was pulling me to the smashed side window.
I wriggled through it, scraping my back and arms against the remains of the glass. Above me there was light. I swam towards it. To my oxygen-starved brain it looked like the celestial wash of light that filters down through the clouds from Heaven.
I swam hard.
Then I was choking down fresh air into my lungs. The sun dazzled me. I turned round as I trod water.
Kate? Where the hell was Kate?
I couldn’t see her.
I could see nothing. A piece of debris blocked my view.
I blinked the water from my eyes. Christ, I was seeing a boat.
With a rush of gratitude to my guardian angel I grabbed at the gunwale and held on tight.
‘What in the name of Hades kept you down there?’
I looked up, squinting against the brilliant evening light.
I caught my breath. Cowboy and Tesco looked down at me.
They grinned. ‘Right little bloody Indiana Jones, aren’t we?’ Cowboy reached forward, grabbing my forearm with his hand. I saw him raise the other hand. I couldn’t see what he held in it but he swung it down across my forehead. I heard the sound it made as it hit my skull. An impossibly loud smacking sound.
He whipped it down again.
Lights seemed to roar up out of the water. Purple. Blue, Indigo.
He clubbed me again.
The lights came faster.
Red-green-orange-yellow.
He hit me again.
—yellow-green-blue-crimson-silver…
He struck again and again. Until the lights had gone, until I saw nothing but darkness, the utter darkness that lies at the end of the universe.
And I felt not pain, but some distant pumping sensation like a great pulse beating away in the back of my head.
Chapter 66
The Grey Man held Kate. His massive fists gripped her wrists. He held her so high from the ground her legs kicked uselessly at the air. He held her higher, her arms stretched. She was crying: ‘Don’t hurt the baby, don’t hurt the baby!’
The grey head with its mane of black hair tilted to one side, curious about this specimen of humankind it had just captured.
‘Don’t hurt…don’t hurt the baby. Please.’
The huge eyes, red as blood, peered into her face. Again the head tilted to one side—the same way a dog tilts its head when it hears something that interests it. Its blood-red eyes blinked slowly, as if it was pondering some new idea.
Then it transferred Kate’s left wri
st into its right hand, to hold her up above the ground with one hand. With its free hand, it ran its fingers — as thick and as grey as uncooked beef sausages—down her body. As if the contours and curves of her hips, stomach, breast, thighs were important.
Kate gasped in terror. Her eyes flashed. She tried to kick free.
With a savage snort the Grey Man seized her in both hands, then broke her across its knee like a stick.
‘Leave her alone!’
I swung my fist into its face.
Ugh…
I opened my eyes.
Newspapers.
The floor…thick with newspapers—like a carpet.
Christ, my head ached. I blinked. A sharp pain skewered my left eye; it seemed to drive all the way through to the back of my skull.
Daylight.
I looked round. The light came in through a window of frosted glass. A wrought-iron garden gate had been bolted over the window itself.
I rolled onto my back. The dream still seemed to overlay what I saw in front of me.
I saw whitewashed walls. More newspapers. No furniture. Steps going up to a door. And I saw the Grey Man, brutal, beast-like, picking up Kate. I saw the look of terror in her eyes. I saw pain blast through her once-beautiful face.
As the beast man broke her spine across its knee.
Shit.
I’d stood up too quickly.
Nausea oozed through my stomach. Something spun fast inside my head—around and around and around and…
Vomit splashed onto the newspaper.
I wiped my mouth. Looked round again. This time my eyes stayed in focus.
My prison cell.
Clearly that’s what it was meant to be. The bastard lunatics would keep me in there until they decided what punishment to inflict on my—
Christ.
Kate.
What the hell had they done to Kate?
I looked round the basement again in the hope that maybe she lay asleep beneath the newspapers. No. I was alone.
For the next ten minutes I hunted for a way out. The only exit was through a solid wood door. That was locked tight. I kicked and shouted. No one came.