by M. T Hill
It’s the bin bag. It’s the sound—
Freya forces herself to a stop. There, in the wall, where the pipework forks left. She tears away another piece of the bag and follows the pipes into a corridor of naked metal shelving. If she can lose him, she might find a way back up, back outside.
‘Freya,’ Shep calls out, more indistinct. Behind her, the main chamber still lighting with camera flashes, like a storm out at sea. ‘They’re waiting.’
A narrow gap in the shelves reveals itself, and Freya slides in. A cold pressure through her clothes. She’s saturated with sweat. Holding her mouth to stifle herself. There are old gardening tools on the shelves, and the smell of soil takes her back to the garden centre.
Stay right out of it—
Reaching, overreaching, Freya’s fingers touch and tease down a trowel. It tips, and she catches it by hugging herself. She squeezes the handle until her hand burns. She kills the headtorch.
‘I only want you to see,’ Shep’s saying. ‘To admit it’s real.’
Shep’s own torch stretches the corridor, and its light catches her hand, the trowel’s blade. She lowers it, but the shelves aren’t deep enough to hide her. Before he can get any closer she slides out and side-steps on, trowel to her stomach like a warding charm, the other hand skimming the degrading shelves, braille-like metal running beneath her skin. Another space. Another.
Right there—
She stands suspended in total darkness, muscles burning, blinking tears. She’s about to try and hurry him on – a challenge? A capitulation? – when a separate ribbon of colour flares and zeroes her attention. A shelf further along emits a luminescence. A soft light, nearly missable, almost a vapour. There’s an object sitting on the remains of a cardboard box. Its sides are flapped open and dripping with a substance like syrup.
Freya swallows a breath. The colour transfixes her – monochromatic, pulsing, at its most vivid after blinking. It draws her out. It draws her closer. Within a metre, headtorch still off, her gait careful, she recognises it.
It drags into its wake proximal asteroids. It bends the also travelling light.
Stephen’s nest.
‘Don’t,’ Shep whispers. He’s there with her, scent sour and metallic.
Freya lunges with the trowel. He catches her wrist, locks it off. Not forceful, more to show he anticipated it. The trowel falls from her hand.
‘You couldn’t smell it,’ he says, his thick face in hers. ‘But you can’t miss it.’
He brings her closer. Inside the nest lies a knotty mass of tiny bones and feathers.
‘They waited for me,’ Shep tells her, edging past. ‘They tried to scare me off… But that was only a test.’
Freya reaches for him. Grips his jacket sleeve so now they hold each other. ‘You knew this was here?’
He shrugs off her hand. She’s seething. She’s distraught.
‘It was always going this way,’ Shep tells her.
‘But they got here before you.’
Shep turns off his headtorch. ‘Who?’ he asks. ‘There’s nothing. No reports.’
‘Except there is,’ Freya says. ‘There were two of them. Two reports. I know who posted them.’
Shep angles back to the shelf, eyes glowing. It’s a chance, but Freya can’t see the trowel on the floor. ‘I was first,’ Shep says. He extends a hand, its shape cutting into the light.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t think you—’
‘Let me,’ he says. ‘Let me in…’
‘Stephen found it,’ Freya tells him. ‘With Alba. I can show you the picture he took.’
Shep’s face is expressionless. He hardly reacts. ‘It isn’t theirs.’
‘Listen to me,’ Freya says firmly. ‘We need to go.’
‘It’s mine. You can see that. You can.’
‘We need to go, Shep.’
‘They caught me last time,’ Shep says, placing a finger against Freya’s lips. ‘Don’t ruin this.’
The path for its replicants is decided, for the extremities of worlds are essential.
Shep’s other hand, tangential somehow, begins to reach. It’s coming from the wrong part of him, misgrown or stunted. The movement is too slow, like his hand isn’t properly attached to his forearm, his steady bicep, the action of his shoulder in its socket. It twitches as he holds it up to the nest, a sudden fragility to him, and he’s neither the Shep she met at Big Walls nor the driver in the van. She has no idea who he is.
‘It’s glanding,’ Shep tells her. ‘Can’t you see?’
Freya just stares. Shep’s scissoring fingers, the nest’s luminosity on his face, his wide eye in profile, his awed smile. The glow, the vapour, expands across him.
‘I’m here,’ he whispers.
Freya wants to turn away, and she can’t. She wants to stop him, and she can’t. She gets the unshakeable feeling that Shep might want to eat her, and that interfering will only encourage him. Instead she stands there, complicit, and watches Shep grope the honeyed bones of Stephen’s nest.
SUNDAY RITES
The Landowner
Sunday breakfast is a tradition in Em’s house. Ted does the bacon and eggs and the girls cut the soldiers at the breakfast bar and Em sits and reads old spy novels. It’s been this way as long as Em remembers, in the same way that it feels like the children have always been there, or like she and Ted have always been going out, or married, or at least living together. And it’ll stay this way, she wants to think, when they’ve moved. Because it has to, doesn’t it?
When Ted’s phone goes, he throws the call to the dining room speakers. These are their Sunday rites: his mother phones at this time every week, and they each – Ted, then Em, then the girls – take turns to chat with her. The unspoken rule that as a family, they’ll address the small things, report the small events, and hurry her off the line again. This way the day can run as usual, as anticipated: a walk after breakfast, probably an animated film late afternoon, an early supper, before the girls’ bath time and a story.
But today marks their last catch-up in this house. Their last Sunday before they move out. And Em, clinging to the last ledge of normalcy, doesn’t mind the intrusion for once.
So, it surprises them all when another voice fills the room.
‘Is that Emma?’ a woman says. ‘Hello?’
Ted clears his throat, but Em answers anyway. The girls, sensing a difference, stop what they’re doing.
‘Who’s this?’ Em asks.
‘Oh, hi—Hi there. So sorry to bother you on a Sunday. This is Tracy from Neighbourhood Watch over in Whitehaven.’
Ted puts down the knife he’s using to rind the bacon.
‘Are you in private, Emma?’ Tracy asks.
Em doesn’t know how to turn off the kitchen speakers. Ted looks at the controls and then at her, and shrugs. Em waves at him, and he hushes the girls.
‘What’s going on?’ Em asks.
Tracy clears her throat. ‘Well, I’m sure you know your security contract has a first response clause. I wanted to tell you that a young man trespassed on your property last night.’
‘Where?’ Em asks.
‘The old shelter, our contractor says. It was a one-man job. He told us he was exploring.’
Em closes her eyes. A resigned sigh. Again? If she were more superstitious, she’d write off this land as cursed. First the ‘fairy fire’, as the girls had taken to calling it, still officially unexplained, but likely ‘kids messing about with lighters and deodorant’ if you went by the police report. Then the council’s surveying drone fell from the sky and shattered in the bunker yard (even though Em suspects Graham and his shotgun had everything to do with that). Next, the young couple that somehow broke in through the bunker’s old door before vanishing the second Em tried to press charges. Then three members of some effing amateur ufology society turning up on the doorstep with all their kit, asking if they could camp out on the grounds to observe and ‘take some readings’, because they’d heard someo
ne nearby had seen an object streak out of the sky a few weeks earlier.
‘Was he actually in the bunker?’ Em asks Tracy. ‘As in, he got inside?’
‘’Fraid so,’ Tracy replies. ‘Patrol picked him up. Young lad from Wythenshawe.’
Em shakes her head. ‘What was he doing in there? None of your perimeter stuff worked? The door?’
‘’Fraid not,’ Tracy says. ‘We caught him with a bag of debris. Came in by motorbike. We’ve confiscated some of his equipment and took swabs, which the police now have. As you know, they’ll come down hard. There’s only so much we can do at this stage, however—’
‘What kind of equipment?’ Em says. ‘What the bloody hell are these kids doing in there that needs equipment?’
‘Em,’ Ted hisses. He’s nodding at the girls. Damson is staring at her, horrified.
Em tuts loudly. ‘We paid a hell of a lot to have that wall reinforced,’ she says. ‘And I needn’t remind you that we never wanted any of that nasty stuff put down on our land, not with the girls running around. Not with the animals we get here. Are you seriously telling me it’s done nothing?’
‘Yes,’ Tracy says. ‘I know that must be frustrating. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.’
‘The inconvenience!’
‘We do recommend pressing charges…’
Ted is shaking his head. Quiet in the kitchen. This time next week they’ll have moved out, and the trespassers will be someone else’s problem. Why put themselves through the fuss?
‘Or we can liaise with your gardener again?’ Tracy suggests. ‘There are some additional, more robust security measures we can put in place, I’m sure. And these would be at no extra cost.’
Ted goes on shaking his head.
‘Graham doesn’t work with us any longer,’ Em tells the woman. And from no more than a glance, Em can already see the histrionics that are coming. Damson swivels to Ted, who puts a finger against her lips. Dolly is bolt upright in her seat, like a meerkat.
‘Okay…’ Tracy says. ‘Well, we can file a report and include some recommendations. There’s nothing else from me, unless you have any other questions. Again, I’m sorry for the Sunday call. If you have any concerns or queries, please get in touch. We’re open twenty-four hours a day.’
‘Thank you,’ Em says. But the look on the girls’ faces says the damage is done. Now it’s about containment.
The call dies. Ted stares at the bacon. Em watches the girls.
Dolly gulps a breath, winding up. Damson is wincing. Dolly says, ‘The burglar-man was looking for fairies, wasn’t he, Mummy?’
Em doesn’t know how to answer.
‘Graham hid them,’ Dolly adds. She nods adamantly. Surer than sure. ‘Graham told me where he put them. Graham went away because they told him to.’
Ted strokes Dolly’s hair. ‘Let’s not do this again, sweetheart. There’s nothing down there at all.’
But that’s not good enough for Dolly. It never is. She looks disgusted by Em, by Ted: disgusted by how they keep skirting what happened. She protests every time it comes up, and still her parents insist. Still they tell her.
‘Graham said it gets on your lungs,’ Dolly adds.
Damson, next to her, nods in agreement. ‘And eats up your brains.’
‘That’s enough,’ Ted says.
‘But they got him!’ Dolly shouts. ‘They got him! He said they went inside! And that’s why you made him go.’
‘Girls,’ Ted says. ‘That’s enough.’
Dolly points at Em. ‘You made Graham vanish,’ she shrieks. ‘It’s your fault he came here and now he’s gone and the lawns have gone all long and weedy, and that’s your fault.’
Ted slams his hand down on the hob. He catches the pan handle and the egg whites splash all over the top, all over Ted, and in the girls’ hair.
Damson starts to wail, and Em rushes to the breakfast bar, stickiness on everything, and she wants to tell them, she wants to scream at them: we haven’t been lying to you. Because Em and Ted don’t know where Graham is. They don’t know where Graham went.
PART II
VERTEX ISLAND
The Steeplejack
Shep has a first-class ticket from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. He’s early for departure, and straight on the train with his gear. Carriage X, a chartered carriage on an otherwise routine service, is empty save for a guard standing by the luggage rack. ‘Morning, sir,’ the guard says. Shep nods as he comes along the aisle, kit bags clanking against the fixtures.
‘How about this one?’ the guard says, motioning to a table seat. ‘Or this one, with the extra legroom. Or any you like, frankly – it’s only you in here today.’
Shep stows his case and sits down in his coat, baffled and harassed. He opens his rucksack and takes out his Portsmouth literature and a small Tupperware tub wrapped inside an old hoodie.
‘I’ll leave you be,’ the guard says, ‘but if you need anything…’
Shep carefully wedges the tub between his thighs and places his head against the window. The train slides out of Piccadilly, the ribs of the station roof giving way to mottled grey-blue. A soft humming in the low range as Manchester expands across the glass.
‘One more thing,’ the guard says, placing a carefully folded paper bag on the table. ‘Enjoy your journey.’
Shep takes off his coat. The paper bag contains a sandwich, biscuit and apple, a bottle of water and a can of craft lager. A folded letter tucked in a pocket, sealed by a piece of red moulded plastic. This carries a V, with ornate curlicues flowering from both points. Vaughan.
Dear Billy, the letter starts. Welcome to a critical stage of our not-so-little plan. We’re proud to have a crew like this, which is to say a crew comprising frontiersmen and women like you, who even while testing are working to further the endeavours of our kind. With your help, we will extend the reach of our planet in pursuit of what lies beyond these bounds. Your name will be among those written about for all the years to come.
Line after line it goes on like this. Shep reads in bemusement, remembering Mallory Junior’s cynical assessment of the project, the many trials the Vaughans face.
The train passes Stockport, Macclesfield. Shep tries to read his Portsmouth literature, keep his learnings fresh, but it’s hard to muster the enthusiasm. His training down there – mainly on proprietary protection systems developed for the beta scaffold tower – had been dry in extremis. His trainers were indifferent, his colleagues dull, his digs a bleak cell in ex-student halls. So instead, Shep reclines and stares out of the train, counting through container yards and hollowed factories, obsessively kept scrapyards, sidings of obsolete machinery. Past Wilmslow, a small fire burning unattended in scrubland. At Crewe, a group of neon-clad workers eating chips gormlessly. And between these markers, the countryside proper: pylon-stitched fields leading into the West Country. Undulations in the land where, after rain overnight, unmapped lakes glitter in the sun.
It’s hard to be enthused by any of this. In truth, nothing much has excited him since the mission. A real sense that nothing could excite him ever again. He touches his Tupperware tub and, smiling, reflects on Freya’s gift to him.
* * *
Does Shep feel any guilt for taking Freya to the Lakes, knowing what might have been waiting for them there? Not really. Or not guilt, exactly. Guilt thrives on looping specifics, and his recollections are too hazy, too abstract. Maybe the sheer intensity of being in the bunker a second time had burned holes in his mental record, flattened everything out. But apart from his numbness, it strikes Shep that he should feel bad for manipulating the situation, and Freya, to his benefit. There’s just nothing to link their mission with remorse. If anything, he feels the opposite. When he concentrates, when he visualises how it all happened, the overwhelming sensation is one of warmth and intimacy. It makes his skin sensitive to the touch.
His starkest memory of the evening is sitting on the van bonnet with Freya, the smell of nettles and sweat.
It turns vague after that: a hike in the dusk, going over the wall, finding the hole full of burned boxes, going inside. A strobe of colour and sound, bursting, like coming up on something, and a crescendo in which he lost time and linearity. Then an image of Freya – who’d somehow got back outside on her own – slouched against the site’s perimeter wall, gaping at her feet, which were bleeding. Freya in what was left of her bin bag shawl, the plastic torn and clapping in the wind. Freya lashing out at him – cornered as she was – slapping his face and chest. Another jump forward to his van, and him driving her home in silence. A sign for a place called Dillock, a long way from anywhere. A wordless goodbye.
Shep’s last reliable memory of the night is arriving back in Salford and kneeling over the van’s passenger seat, savouring the perfume of Freya’s fear, the petrol still in the fabric. There he’d collected all the stray hairs she left on the headrest, thankful for a way to remember their night.
Shep takes his head away from the train window and opens the Tupperware tub between his legs. He’s been keeping Freya’s hairs in here with the small bones and feathers of a bird, bound by a chalky substance that had started to liquefy in his fridge the day after their mission. He slides a finger inside the box and stirs the mixture. Gritty at first, but softening quickly. When it’s smooth, he puts the finger inside his mouth and rubs the mixture on his gums. Even after so many days of doing this, there’s still no guilt – no shame or sadness, no self-loathing or intrusive thoughts. He can’t rub in the blame, can’t rub in the fear. He tests it every time by recalling Gunny’s confused, trauma-blown look on the stack at Clemens, the state of Gunny’s hand, but his stomach stays settled. With this box he carries their night with him, and he’ll salve himself like this until the box is empty. The contentment the substance gives him – its deadening of bad feeling – seems a fair price for all other food starting to taste like blood. It’s like he’s being replaced by a better person from the inside out, molecule by molecule. The bunker no longer frightens him, because it is him. It lives inside him, now. Going back there with Freya was part of the process.
