by M. T Hill
‘Actually, yes. I was thinking… I thought—’
‘Spit, woman.’
‘I wanted to try and take the follow-up. I want to dig on the men who were arrested. It’s why I chased you last night.’
The editor shakes her head. ‘Can’t. I spoke to our friends in the force. They were released without charge in the early hours. There’s nothing there – the poor blokes were only trying to talk him down. Apparently all the CCTV footage shows Parsons drinking alone. He wasn’t spiked, that is. Wasn’t led astray.’
‘Talk him down?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looked like he’d jump?’
‘Oh God, no. Everybody is unequivocal on that. The witness statements say he was laughing. He slipped.’
Freya shakes her head. ‘Then why question these blokes about it?’
‘I asked the same. The theory was that they were encouraging him. Goading him. Evidently, some wires have been crossed.’
‘Then I need to tweak the copy before you send it out. It mentions the arrests.’
‘No. The men are staying anonymous, so their arrests are good colour. Keeps it lively. Keeps it sellable. You’d probably be cutting a good reason we’re syndicating.’
‘But it’s not up to date…’
‘It was true while you were at the service, and true while you wrote it. The whole piece is about the service. Come on.’
‘What about his climbing buddies? I could interview some of them, get their take. See if he was, you know. Struggling.’
The editor smiles, thin-lipped. ‘He didn’t jump – he didn’t even die climbing. He died of bravado. You saw the toxicology. Silly boy gets himself wasted and off he shuffles. Sob stories are best left to the features team.’
‘But this is the thing. At the funeral, Stephen’s brother said he never drank. Ever. We didn’t know that, did we? And I think that’s why the police started looking into who he was out with. Why they still picked up these two blokes after the inquest was closed. His parents must’ve kicked up a fuss. It was clearly out of character.’
The editor raises an eyebrow. ‘Should I be surprised by your rigour, Freya? It’s still not enough. A man lets his hair down? The mind is there for changing. What’s your hook?’
‘Okay, fine. But on top of that, he was into this urbex thing. That’s fascinating on its own.’
The editor scrunches up her face. ‘Urb-what?’
‘Just something about it,’ Freya goes on. ‘I can’t properly explain.’
‘Yes, but what is it? What’s urbex?’
‘Uh, urban exploration. Breaking into old stuff – manmade structures. Buildings, towers. All sorts. They share photos, video. Drone footage. You know those tiny fish-eye cameras they use? Picture desk would love it. You could easily do a feature, popular local sites – stuff like that.’
The editor straightens up. ‘You’re gushing, Freya. Who’s “they”?’
‘There are whole forums of it, people sharing tips and mission reports. I was pulling tributes from Stephen’s stream, and there was—’
‘Missions?’
‘Yeah. I’d hardly heard of it before, and—’
‘On private land? Is that legal?’
Freya shakes her head. ‘No. That’s my point. The police went zero tolerance on it a couple of years back. Couple of schoolkids slipped off a tower crane in Liverpool.’
‘And you think these people would actually welcome the press?’
Freya bites her lip. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, we don’t mind a challenge, granted. But it’s tenuous at best. Why would we ask you to cover illegal activities, in this climate? Never mind that there’s a whole team ready to follow up with his nearest and dearest. Why are you so interested, anyway?’
‘I just thought if I did a good job, there’d be a chance I could—’
The editor holds up a finger and glances at her desk. ‘Looking at the schedule,’ she says, ‘nobody’s covering obits today. We’ve also got the mayor of Stockport opening a mindfulness spa at two. You’d manage both, wouldn’t you?’
Freya looks down at her copy. The paper wrinkling in her hands. ‘But on this urbex stuff… did you want me to…’
‘Moonlight? Not especially.’
Freya nods.
‘Let’s catch up in a bit, then, shall we?’ the editor says, smiling thinly. ‘I’ll forward the syndication results when they come in, so you’re in the loop. And get yourself a coffee on me, please – it’s a good day’s work, that.’
‘One for the portfolio,’ Freya says.
The editor snorts. Freya gets the feeling she doesn’t even watch her leave. But where the editor’s cynicism usually puts Freya in her place, she doesn’t want to recoil this time. In the short walk to her workstation, she makes up her mind. Fuck the follow-up team – and fuck writing obituaries. She’ll find out what happened to Stephen Parsons herself.
The Steeplejack
Shep can pull chins on a doorframe with only his little fingers, so the ten-foot brick wall at the bunker’s site boundary is as easy as it comes. He runs at the slab of it and springs both-handed to its coping stone, hauling himself up in one fluid motion.
Standing on that skinny border, he already has to manage his breathing. The site beyond the wall is a lightless pool. He pulls on his dust mask and headtorch and quickly double-checks the scrambler and helmet are covered by the bushes. He sweeps his torch across the site. Vague outlines emerge: the ruined foundations and strewn masonry of a levelled outbuilding, the crude parallelogram of the bunker’s concrete entrance. His heart is going, and his breath rasps through the mask filter. He shakes out his arms and sweeps the torch vertically. Mechanical parts are scattered between him and the bunker door. He turns off the torch to wait and check. The stars glower through the canopy.
This, then, is the edge. Balanced with one arm, rocking over on himself, Shep twists the torch back on and looks for a place to land on the other side. Imagine you’re standing on a ledge of cold, wet slate. His toes pulse with strain as he leans over. At the wall’s base is a concrete border studded with broken glass, rusty nails and metal offcuts. He nods. Faint nausea like an affirmation. In some ways he expected worse than sharps – substandard measures, really – but figures the bunker being hidden counts in his favour. Dogs and glue traps are standard in more built-up areas, and sonic barriers aren’t out of the question. Not that sharps are easy, mind – he’s definitely taken some tetanus shots in his time.
Shep sits on the wall and unties his bootlaces. The torchlight falls onto him, jangling between his knees as he swaps the boots for rubber darts, a bit like covered ballet pumps. He stretches out the rubber with his toes, then folds the boots into his Bergen. He turns off his headtorch, transfers his weight over his knees and launches from the wall’s inside.
The breach is on.
* * *
Shep goes low through the grounds, closing on the sloped concrete lintels of the bunker entrance. A sharp thrill to find its surfaces unspoiled by graffiti. He gathers pieces of machine debris and wraps them with canvas strips, a bin bag for rain cover. He straps this bundle to his rucksack and takes out his ageing camera. Dicey, pausing here, so he reconsiders and continues towards the bunker entrance. Drilled. Trained. Alone by design. There he takes two flashless pictures of the land he crossed, as level as he can manage. The first in RAW format to fiddle with later, the second stabilised but overexposed to get an impression of his surroundings. He reviews them: grainy, yes, but useful. Nothing stands out, even as nothing is familiar. The aerials he saw in the pub toilet have no relationship with the terrain. Then he twists on the torch again. The darkness jumps back thirty yards.
There’s a codebox on the door shell, so he applies a skeleton-string. A mechanism stirs and the door clunks open, soil raining from the frame. The smell of must and metal. Shep takes out a wooden stopper and wedges the door.
The bunker’s entranceway gapes, wet and warm. Oesophageal
. Pale stones under a well-worn earthen path, which in the torchlight resemble fossils. Shep’s leading foot brings him out of the wind. He has his hands on the walls, and his skin crawls at the sound of dripping, the wind across the entrance. His tongue thick in his mouth. Now only the habit will keep him down here. Practice and persistence. He can’t see what’s dripping, and that makes it louder. Another set of deep breaths to try and slow things down before he creeps on. One step. Two. As he rounds a corner the wind dies off completely, and the Lake District is gone. He’s crossed a second boundary, and the acoustics change with it. He’s vaguely conscious of his eyes watering.
Shep soon reaches a vaulted antechamber, as dark and indefinite as the site appeared from up on the wall. Brown fluid leaks from what might be a run of shower fittings in the roof. The pools beneath crackle and splash. There’s still no graffiti.
When he hears a weak scratching, he stops.
To deal with fear, you have to reimagine the threat. So because Shep can’t shut his eyes, won’t dare, he tries to do just that – remodels the space as the foyer of a hotel, connecting to a corridor that leads off towards its suites. If he holds his headtorch at a certain angle, the rough floor passes for carpet. He puts a hand to the slick wall, and smells again the age of the place, the stagnancy. His breath, condensing on the mask, has started running down his chin.
As Shep goes to wipe his eyes, he stumbles on something soft. He cries out, then gags himself with his sleeve. The scream echoes, travelling deep inside, and his back ripples with cold trepidation. Look, don’t touch. Just beyond his vision, an animal flutters. It makes an injured-sounding moan of its own. ‘Shit,’ Shep breathes. And with that, the rasping pinballs from hidden wall to hidden wall, then comes at him. A thought exploding, taking his oxygen: It’s charging. Shep braces, wanting badly to shit, but the animal veers round him. A glimpse of it moving low and fast. He tries to follow its trajectory, the ticking, and half expects a set of eyes to be glinting back from the gloom – a bird? A cat? Nothing enters his cone of torchlight. He taps the wall to try and coax the creature forward. See it, confront it. He taps again. Nothing. He’s twitching, aware of the sweat between his toes, his buttocks, the heat behind his ears. ‘Fuck off,’ he whispers, and fires his camera flash once to saturate the corridor ahead.
In that whited-out instant, there are no animals. Instead, he glimpses what occupies the bunker. Walls covered with creeping plants and moss, gnarled shadows, flaking paint. Mineral deposits forming tiny stalactites in the pitted roof. Spider webbing strung wall-to-wall. Is it a blast shelter? Some paranoiac’s bolthole? He fights a rising gullet to carry on, loose straps tapping his wrapped salvage. This is the stuff you struggle to put in your reports. The smell. The taste. The way your body will make itself smaller until your back aches with tension. The marble of moulding fabrics. The colour of standing water. The alien heaviness of equipment left in corners under tarp, lost to the appetite of nature’s little helpers. Obsolescence and entropy twine and knot in these back pockets of little England. In them brick and vegetation fuse and grow together, form a kind of subterranean nervous system. Exploring is exhilarating because you never know how a changed environment will react to your presence. It scares you in some vital way, and you can never fail to be scared, because exploring is fear itself.
The tapping starts again. Closer. Wet, somehow. Shep is certain of being stalked. Teeth wait in the blankness with a kind of uneven breathing – hoarse and laboured. He listens and knows this. In any sane world, it should be the end of his mission. But he’s come too far.
How about I give you a fright?
Shep slaps the nearest wall, hard. To his horror, the wall gives. A plastic beam, a strip light casing, falls down from the roof and sweeps the torch clean off his head.
Shep is dropped into blackness, laid out flat and covered in dust. A wounded howl rises on all sides of him. He wants to get up, but the torch is face down, unfindable, not even a soft halo to place it, and this is both the reality – what can you do when you can’t even see your hands? – and the nightmare: thick and humid air, animal musk. And now he wants to stand out in the rain more than anything. He’s on his hands and knees, scrabbling to find the torch, which he can’t find for the life of him. Beyond him, the animal is closing.
At last Shep’s fingers graze a cold buckle, the torch strap; he tips it too fast and blinds himself. As he does, the howl stops with a crack. Dull as a compound fracture. A mass is propelled past him, improbably high, actually brushing his ear. He brings up the light and directs it.
Through a neon smear he sees it. A badger pinned with its belly against the bunker’s structural wall, fully a metre off the ground. The badger’s mouth, turned out, is far too open and frothing pink, its coat filthy with muck and livid swellings. To Shep it seems arranged. It hangs on the wall like a trophy pelt – broken legs splayed at all corners, one shoulder horribly dislocated under its weight. Along with deep claw marks on its flanks, the badger’s fur is missing in jagged, mange-like patches. An area of bald flesh, swollen taut across the animal’s backbone, is throbbing.
Shep grips the torch with both hands, skin detaching from his frame. How is it stuck there?
The badger emits a series of short, distressed snorts. Shep realises it’s trying to escape from the light; when he dips the torch, the badger instantly bites into the joint of its useless leg. The effort of this causes the animal’s other forepaw to come free, leaving the creature to swing on the wall, a grim pendulum, from little but the connective tissue of its shoulder. The bulging under its skin begins to calm. The badger stills momentarily before making a final, violent attempt to free itself.
At this – the animal’s terrible jerking – Shep is gone. Gone before he can think to stave in the badger’s head, catch its last breath and be sure of a small mercy. Gone before he can question what was holding it against the wall.
He runs blind, and the ticking follows. A hundred paces with the torch round his wrist, halogen flickering wildly up the corridor walls, before the light splashes into a wider space. A larger chamber, where Shep’s footsteps seem to travel faster and further than he does. He flashes his torch over a low, uneven ceiling. He’s come the wrong way. He’s standing in a cavernous space with a poured concrete floor, and it’s unbearable. ‘Hello?’ he yells through the mask, desperate for anything, for anyone, for a hint of secondary light; and his echo taunts him. He tries left and he tries right. The torchlight doesn’t reach another surface.
So Shep runs onwards.
Much deeper into the chamber with no walls, a new smell reaches him through his mask. He pulls it to one side, gasping, inhaling deeper, and finds himself stooped, as if pulled by some invisible rope. The smell is complex, thicker without the mask. Sweet, like petrol, if not a little more organic.
Shep inhales again. Panting. An island of light straining at the black. ‘Hello?’ he calls, sure of another person down here with him. A closeness, a warmth, spreads up from his perineum, through his hips, his guts, his lower back, up round his shoulders. Silken and familiar. He thinks he’s pissed himself, and he clutches his crotch, and he can taste the petrol. ‘Where are you?’ he shouts, squatting to steady himself. Hot hands on cold floor. Head down, the taste turning to sharp fruit, caramelised bread. In some memory pocket, his late nan is saying, ‘Isn’t that yum?’
The chamber closes around him. The ceiling seems to sink. The heat shifts and the smell returns to mouldering. And as he crouches there, ears roaring with blood, the far wall slides into view.
Shep stumbles towards it. Somehow the bunker controls him. A funnelling of surfaces brings him into another corridor, where he finds a run of shelves, inelegantly bolted into place. The shelves are stuffed with damp cardboard boxes and old gardening equipment, most of it spattered with plant matter. An old laundry basket containing waders, boots and thermals that reek of burnt plastic. The text on the boxes is unreadable, blacked out with moisture or missing entirely. But – and thi
s is what fortifies him – it’s human. These tools and boxes and clothes are evidence of life, occupation – and so he follows the shelves down the corridor.
‘Is anyone here?’ Shep shouts.
If they are, they’re hiding, and Shep finds it hard to blink, not to check what’s at his shoulder. This instinct proves remarkable: at the edge of his vision, right at the edge of the torchlight, one of the cardboard boxes starts vibrating. The ticking sound comes from inside it. Shep backs up against the opposite wall. The corridor is a stricture, ripe and hot, his breathing a phlegmy rattle. He pushes the dust mask tight against his muzzle, headtorch on the box. Then the ticking is replaced by the sound of fibres splitting. He watches the front panel of the box tearing slowly, intolerably, in half. He moves his hand closer, torchlight tightening to a bright white circle. A tight chimney, a three-hundred-footer, with a coin of white daylight above—
The box bulges. Through the fissure, the box’s contents appear smooth, like a ball. But in the flow of it, Shep realises it’s just his torchlight refracting. The ball is more of a translucent shell, or it isn’t there at all: an anti-space, an inversion.
A new rustling. Above and to the side. In the walls and the roof. It’s urgent, desperate. Clawed. Shep’s blood feels frozen and his pulse is fevered, and his feet are so sore inside his darts. The box gives out its own muffled sound, and Shep is sure someone, just along the corridor, is whispering his name.
The box panel breaks. Nothing leaks out, but the wet cardboard shifts aside. If it were anything at all, it would be a globular material sliding down the shelving unit. Those sweet fumes again – more intense – and Shep can’t breathe for coughing. Then, as though released by some obscene fallopian mechanism, a dead bird glides out of the box and down the shelves, propelled on this invisible jelly, and slowly twitches across the dirt towards him.
There between his darts, the dead bird begins to rotate, its tiny feet clamped tightly together. The bird is eyeless. Its skull is hollow. It only stops turning when a slit opens in its featherless breast, hairline and precise. The slit wells up with heavy liquid, pushed from within. As if a second invisible ball is about to emerge from the cavity.
