‘We have to leave this place,’ she mumbled. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’
He said nothing, only squeezed her hand once, hoping that would fill in the great cavernous gaps in what he understood. Their hands remained closed over each other, fingers resting against fingers, sweat mixing with sweat, staying together in their flimsy connection.
They stood in the corridor outside the room. Maddox had the walkie-talkie to his mouth and was shouting into the silence. Again and again he bellowed; Bergan’s name echoing out along the corridors, bouncing and breaking and then dying in the air as it wafted back to them. Turtle took a few steps to the left, convinced he’d heard something.
‘Frankie? It’s Maddox, where are you? What the hell happened to you? Talk to me!’ Maddox released the button and listened. The familiar crackle returned, and again, just under it, there came echoes of footsteps; heavy thuds of boot on metal, feet ascending a staircase, coming back to them like a corrupted heartbeat. ‘Frankie? Come in. Frank?’
Standing at the crossroads of corridors, they each stared off in a different direction. A light in the main corridor, the one they had walked to get here, gave a weak bloom of orange at the ceiling; the bulb seemed to be spinning, the light patch moving against its distorted wash. Then, as quick as the light grew, it faded out, and back in the darkness there was a delicate shatter of glass as if the bulb had suddenly broken.
From the left hand corridor there was another noise, a shuffling sound and this time they all heard it. They turned to it, Maddox’s rifle out in front of the three men, ready to fire. It sounded for a moment as if something was being dragged, a body, many bodies perhaps.
‘Frank?’
Kendrick took a step back, involuntarily moving in behind Maddox’s bulk.
‘What is that?’
There was a voice from the walkie-talkie, yet not quite a voice; a sound, a growl, words pushed together by the cry of something inhuman. Again it came and the noise seemed to fill the corridor and each man’s mind in turn. Turtle held his hands to his ears, pulling his neck into his collar as if trying to escape it. Even Maddox seemed to waver in his rock steady position.
There were suddenly sounds all around them; a light scraping like fingers at the wall, a crude snapping like fingernails breaking, footsteps starting and then stopping, a cry, the delicate whimper of something unknown, and then out of the shadows in the left hand corridor, Frankie Bergan slowly limped forward, stumbled and then fell flat on his face before them. The sounds rose up and then dropped down on them, echoing through the three corridors and dying to silence where they stood.
Night
1
Time had become a contradiction. For so long it had been the most valuable of commodities, it had been their greatest weapon and their biggest desire – the time to escape, to rebuild or just to think and to plan – but now, prompted by Turtle simply asking the room what the time was, it soon became obvious that not only did no one know, but that no one saw the need to know either, not any more, not where they now stood. This far underground, in windowless rooms feeding off corridors with broken lights and steadily growing shadows, somehow knowing the time seemed utterly irrelevant. Kendrick rolled up his right sleeve, wiggling the flashy timepiece on his wrist and realised it was broken, the hands frozen and the glass cracked. The only other member of the group to own a watch had been Bergan and that had long since given up the ghost.
Kendrick shrugged at Turtle’s question, no one else even acknowledged it. ‘Night time? I don’t know. Does it matter?’
They had decamped to the sleeping quarters that Turtle and Bergan had found earlier, Maddox roughly depositing Bergan on to the nearest bed and staring down at him like he were about to perform the last rites. The others were gathered around like concerned family members, gazing at the ashen face and the oil black eyes in reverential silence. Only Mia hung back, standing away from the group, just behind Sullivan, her head lowered against his back.
Turtle pulled off Bergan’s boots, placing them neatly at the head of the bed and then tucked the giant man’s legs under the sheets, yanking the bedspread over his body and up to his neck. Bergan’s head sunk into the pillow, his eyes roaming the ceiling and the lights before disappearing under slowly closing lids.
They all just stared.
Gently he breathed, his large chest rising and falling, occasionally catching and stuttering before finding the rhythm again and carrying on. The giant hands turned and rested palms down on the bed covers, and his mouth broke delicately into what seemed to be a smile. Their fallen leader slept, and for several minutes no one knew what to say, let alone what to do.
Kendrick didn’t need to look up from Bergan to realise that eyes were now on him. He could sense it. Turtle and Davenport were staring, that he was sure of, Maddox too, he thought, and he took a moment to enjoy it before speaking, and when he did the words were calm and assured, an order not allowing any room for doubt or question.
‘We rest. Now. Turtle and Maddox, I want you with Frankie,’ he said, placing Bergan’s walkie-talkie into the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘He says anything, he moves, he so much as gets a hard on, I want to know. It would do neither of you any harm to have a shower either.’
‘What you saying there, Joe?’ Maddox’s words were light and jovial, the tone utterly unsuitable.
‘I’m saying you stink.’
Maddox laughed and ripped open his jacket.
‘I’m not staying in here,’ Mia said towards the floor, moving further into the protective wall of Sullivan’s back, putting him between herself and Bergan.
‘No, no you’re not. I want you near me,’ Kendrick said, pulling out the pistol and waving it casually around like it were a sparkler, lest anyone be in any doubt who was now in charge. ‘You think I’m leaving you alone? You need to be kept in check. You want to do that for me?’ He was looking at Sullivan. It wasn’t a question and he made no attempt to convince Sullivan that he had any choice.
‘And where are you going, Joe?’ Maddox asked accusingly, pulling off his jacket and shirt and sniffing his armpits in turn. ‘Mia, sweetheart, you wanna stay and do my back?’
Mia kept her head down, shuffling even closer to Sullivan.
‘Communications, Theo, we need to try and make contact with the Party and the next group. Let them know our…situation. Have to see what’s left worth a damn. Something must still work.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Good luck trying to raise the dead.’ Maddox blew the group a kiss and then stripped down and swaggered off towards the showers. ‘Be seeing ‘ya, killer,’ he shouted over his shoulder to Sullivan. ‘Be sure to keep our girl warm for me.’
Kendrick swiftly moved the others on, leaving Turtle alone, sitting perched on the bed opposite Bergan. For a second or two he couldn’t help but nod in synch with the rise and fall of Bergan’s chest, it was hypnotic, almost calming, and then, as water began to spurt from a shower cubicle at the back of the room and Maddox started to merrily whistle a tune he couldn’t quite place, Turtle turned to the line of sinks and mirrors just at the edge of his sight. He had seen something there earlier. Someone. At the time he could have conned himself, the rational mind could have answered the question a thousand ways, but now, much like time, rationality seemed just out of reach, blessedly hidden somewhere outside, unable to breach the walls. Not wanting to. Turtle felt an icy grip at his neck, and as the sensation travelled through him the squat chef started to shiver.
2
Kendrick led them back through the safe house, reversing the path they had taken when they arrived. He stopped at certain open doorways and peered in, trying the light switches, going no further into the rooms that gave no reveal. He walked in short, direct steps, his body a twitching bag of nerves, yet he tried so hard to cast an air of authority as he spoke. His words were direct, teacher-like proclamations, delivered, it felt to Sullivan, with the rhythm of the waving gun
he couldn’t seem to holster. As ridiculous as he knew the emotion to be, as dangerous even, Sullivan couldn’t help but find Kendrick’s demeanour ever so slightly sad. Was he so very different from Hudson, the feared jailer of Thinwater prison? Indeed, was anyone who sought power in a hopeless world any different?
Then there was Davenport, the weak man that held the title of power as if it were aflame, chaotically juggling it, dropping it or passing it on. Davenport walked along behind them, and Sullivan didn’t need to see him to make the contrast between the two men. Davenport gave away his position in every weak utterance, more so in everything he didn’t say, or didn’t do. Sullivan remembered seeing posters of him plastered all over Thinwater; the smug look, the impossibly clean and unblemished face. A man more suited to selling shaving cream than politics, yet was that not the point? Davenport was supposed to be a salesman. Sullivan had vague recollections of that time rattling around his mind like memories of a childhood film watched a thousand times, and he could recall the accusations, the jokes, the pen moustaches drawn on to the posters. Davenport was, in some respects, every bit as lost as Sullivan was himself. Had Wiggs called him a patsy, or was it he who had said it? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t really care. He was merely painting pictures over great, gaping holes in his mind. Nothing mattered except the answers that would fill those voids and connect up the empty galaxy of dots. She was holding his hand, the girl, Mia, the haunted looking child that claimed the most incredible things. He gripped her hand tightly and she gripped back. He wasn’t ready to float away. Not just yet.
They arrived back at the first floor, the great metal doorway standing atop the staircase just in front and above them. Davenport, his head bowed, entered the communications room at the base of the stairs. Kendrick was blocking Sullivan and Mia’s path, an arm out again, the pistol tapping at one leg. They were at the door to the small bedroom on the opposite side of the corridor. Sullivan gave no argument, merely turned into the room and made for the nearest bed. Mia broke their hands apart and remained in the doorway, drawing up to Kendrick.
‘I want you both to rest,’ Kendrick started. ‘It’s been a long day. They aren’t likely to get shorter anytime soon either. Perhaps when you have slept, you may be more…coherent. Yes? We can talk some more later.’
‘You’re optimistic,’ Mia said, pulling back her greasy black hair into a ponytail and tying it with an elastic band plucked from deep within Wallace’s old trouser pockets.
‘It’s my job. Optimism.’
‘Coming up short, Mr Kendrick. If you don’t mind me saying.’
Sullivan read those big, pained eyes again, knowing what was at her lips and what she was going to say before she said it. Kendrick clearly did too and jumped in before he could hear it. ‘You’re Party property now. Both of you. The Party will decide what to do with you. The Party looks after its own.’ Kendrick pocketed the pistol in a wildly elaborate manoeuvre. ‘One way or another.’
Kendrick slowly pulled the door to and left them.
For a while they just stood in the middle of the room, looking at each other, looking away, unsure, awkward, like it were a first date.
‘Sleep,’ Sullivan said quietly and motioned to one of the beds. Mia looked ready to protest, to ask things of him that he wasn’t ready or able to do, so he said it again, louder and firmer, stopping her before she had chance to begin again. ‘Sleep, Mia. Please.’ He slumped down to the other bed and fell back with a weary sigh.
‘They’re going to kill me.’ She said it as if it were the most obvious statement she could have ever uttered. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
He raised a hand up before him and slowly closed his eyes. ‘I wont let them,’ he replied, unaware at that moment of the weight of the words. Tiredness washed him, drenched every fibre of his being. It was a heaviness pushing on to his body and he had little choice but to let it take him. Drifting away he could sense her crossing the room, could hear the other bed squeaking lightly as she sat.
‘Don’t sleep. Please don’t leave me alone.’
‘It’s okay. Really, it’s all okay.’ He didn’t know what he was saying, just that he needed her to stop talking and let him succumb to the sudden aching exhaustion. ‘Just sleep, Mia. Please. Sleep.’
‘Tell me about your daughter.’ It was a ploy; a ruse to stir him awake again, to keep him with her and Sullivan knew it.
‘Please, Mia.’
‘Where is she?’
Sullivan shook his head and scrunched his eyes. There was a dream waiting for him just beyond the door of his subconscious. He could feel it watching him. He opened his eyes slowly and felt the definition in the room softening. “A padded cell” he said to himself. “Good.” He rolled into the dream and her voice fell away, calling to him from a great distance and an impossible height.
‘Please don’t leave me.’
‘Have you tidied your room?’
‘What?’
‘You have to look after your mother. Will you do that? Will you do that for me? You know I love you, don’t you?’
He was in the dream and his daughter was there on the bed next to him. He expected her to start reading him a bedtime story, something about monsters and castles and heroic knights. The dream started to wrap itself around him.
“Don’t leave me alone.”
The dream ate him alive.
His wife was there as she always was – her home, the place she crawled from his heart so as to speak to him – and she was touching him, reaching out and taking him in. He looked for his daughter again but couldn’t find her. His wife held something in her arms, something that wouldn’t show itself. She was leading him down endless corridors and through doors that led back to where they started. The maze never ended. She turned as she walked and spoke words he couldn’t quite hear. He could smell her; still she carried that delicate aroma that he knew so well and as she touched him his skin flared with a coldness that caught his breath and made his heart falter. It wasn’t love, it was fear, “and how tightly those two things are tied together” he could hear Wiggs saying in his ear, and then Wiggs was there in front of him, his body bent and broken under Hudson’s rage, and then the body was Ellis Schaeffer and it was carving things into its skin with a scalpel, gently and methodically, like a child that had just learnt to spell.
He parted the blackness with a flat hand, like cutlery running through treacle; it moved, but only briefly, oozing back again slowly to where it began. She was there and he was falling behind. He pushed on, but it hurt, the muscles in his legs now nothing more than balloons with the air slowly being released from them, and then as he fell through the blackness, red and white and blue shapes started to fill the corridor, belching out of nowhere like a probing tongue. The balloons came towards him, hundreds, thousands, bobbing and drifting, bouncing together and floating past. His wife stood in the middle of the steady flow, hands reaching out to them, jumping to catch them, playfully beating others away, and laughing like a child. He called her name but she didn’t hear, he shouted it, but she didn’t seem to understand. She looked to the sound and stared straight through him. Lost eyes, he thought. Not dead, just lost. Much worse.
There are things worse than death.
Blood in her eyes. She was crying blood.
He ran to her and forced her into a hug. Her arms flapped at her side and her head lolled around. She gibbered things at him as a small trickle of saliva escaped one corner of her mouth.
The hug became a slow dance.
A white balloon wafted up between them and she caught it, holding it up in front of her, caressing it, laughing at it and then taking it to her face and pressing it close. He could see her hands gripping it, the veins like brilliant blue lakes washing up to her arms under the snowy skin and then, in one quick moment, the balloon popped with an unearthly bang.
He awoke with a start and sat up, his face seeming to break through a large cobweb above his bed, yet he knew the cobweb wasn’t there and that it
was in fact the air itself that was breaking apart and sticking to him. There she was again, hiding from him at the foot of his bed, giggling childishly and then running to the door as soon as he caught her. She swung it open and jumped out and he was following. The girl was lying in the other bed stroking a finger along the grooves cut into the wall beside the bed. Blood in the grooves. A fingernail embedded in the wall. Then, as he passed her, she rolled into the wall and then started to fall up it. Her nimble, frail body tumbling over and over, until she was at the ceiling, squatting into it and staring down at him with bloody eyes blasted through a face as luminous as the moon. She growled, just once, like a cornered animal and then started to reach for him with a hand that seemed to be extending; impossibly long fingers, like spiders legs, rising and falling as they combed the air before him.
He turned away and lunged for the door, out he went and instantly he was standing in a wide room opposite a chair bolted into the floor. His wife, or at least what he had known as his wife, was sitting on the chair before him, her arms and legs secured by unforgiving metal. Again she was looking past him, through him. Flames were sprouting from the floor, fiery arms growing out and stroking the walls, beckoning him in. A man in white surgical scrubs entered from somewhere, just to his side, and approached the chair. In his hand an implement, something long and thin, and sharp at the end. Sullivan called to the man but it did no good. The implement was at his wife’s head and he was leaning in, starting to apply pressure and then the man was turning to Sullivan just as the sharp end of the implement broke his wife’s skin, and Sullivan could see his face. It was bright in the darkness. He was looking at himself.
Bleeker Hill Page 18
