Sleepless

by Lou Morgan

  “It’s in your head, Noah. Just like you said – it’s not real. You’ve got to ignore it. We’re coming to you right now. Where are you?” Izzy asked him again. She could hear him breathing heavily into his phone. He sounded panicky and he wasn’t listening to anything she said. This wasn’t the calm and serious Noah they all knew, not now. This was a different version of him – one who was unravelling fast.

  “I think there’s someone following me. I can’t… I don’t know. I just…” His words faded in and out as if he was turning his head away from the phone and then back again. Like he was looking around quickly, trying to spot someone in a crowd.

  “Noah! Listen to me – stop. Wherever you are, just stop. We’re coming to you. You just need to tell us where you are.”

  There was a crackle on the other end of the line, and then Noah’s voice again, clearer than it had been. “North side of the market…” The line went dead.

  They dodged between two delivery vans and crossed the road back over to the long, single-storey structure of Smithfield’s market building. With the evening light gone, the bulbs around the building had turned on, casting uneven shadows on the red bricks and the elaborate wrought-iron that decorated the edges of the roof. It looked more like a theatre than a market. A nearby lorry’s air brakes hissed loudly as the two of them hurried into the central aisle of the building, doubling back the way they’d come.

  The iron railings and gates dividing the market were painted in garish shades of blue and green and purple, clashing horribly in the artificial light with the bright red phone box standing in front of them. The railings separated the working areas of the market, with their refrigerated stalls, from the aisle and anyone who happened to be passing through. And while the lights were on outside the market and in the roof over the aisle, the main lights inside were still very definitely off. Tiny red and green lights glowed in the darkness of the hall – the power lights on the fridges and freezers of the stalls. The air was cooling quickly, too. It spilled through the railings and pooled around their feet. Izzy shivered. One of the market porters strode past the end of the building, whistling. In his white coat and hardhat, he was already dressed for work. There were more lorries outside, and on the street Izzy could hear the sound of loading-bay doors rolling open, of vehicles reversing into their docks and of vans hooting to get past. But although the market hall was still dark, she was sure she could hear a faint noise from within.

  “Aren’t we forgetting something? Like … Noah?” Grey stood beside her as she stared into the gloom.

  “What if he’s in there?”

  “What would he be doing in there, in the dark?”

  “Hiding.”

  “From what?”

  “Everything. He was scared, Grey. Really scared.”

  Izzy leaned her head against the gate and listened. There was definitely something – it sounded like heavy plastic rustling, shifting in a breeze. She strained her ears for it, but it was almost too faint to make out.

  Someone, somewhere in the darkened hall, moaned.

  Izzy saw Grey’s head whip round to follow the sound. “You heard that?”

  “I did. You?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that means…”

  “It must be real.”

  There was a thick chain with a heavy padlock wrapped around the two halves of the gate into the market hall, but the padlock hung open and useless. It looked like it had been smashed open rather than just unlocked. Izzy put her shoulder against the wrought iron and pushed. The gate resisted, then swung open. Side by side, they stepped through and into the shadows of the hall. It smelled of disinfectant and raw meat. The smell hung in the air and clung to her clothes.

  “Guys?” Izzy called. “Mia? Jools?”

  “Noah?” Grey joined in. Their voices echoed back to them, distorted.

  “Come on.” Izzy pulled at Grey’s arm, urging him to follow her further into the darkened market.

  “You know,” he whispered, taking a careful step forward, “you had no memory of taking a scalpel from Bart’s. I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of you around a load of butchers’ cleavers.”

  “Shh.”

  They crept forward again, still listening. Izzy could just make out the crackling, crinkling sound of plastic, right on the edge of her hearing. Grey was twitchy and wired, seeing things in every shadow, or imagining something behind every refrigerator. Maybe he really was seeing things, she thought, trying to shrug off the memory of the things she’d already seen.

  “Any minute, someone’s going to come in here and switch the lights on, and we’re not supposed to be here,” Grey hissed.

  You shouldn’t be here, dearie… The nurse’s words echoed in Izzy’s head.

  “I know I heard something. So did you. What if it’s Mia? Or Juliet? Or Noah? What if they’re hurt?”

  “What if we’re crazy and you lose it and go after me with a knife?”

  “Well, you’ve always said we should go on a date…”

  They had almost reached the end of the hall and they had found precisely nothing. Just a load of deserted butchers’ stalls. She leaned forward to peer around the last of them. Everything was dark and quiet and still. Everything was – as far as she could tell – just the way it should be. The counter of the final stall was draped in plastic, presumably to keep it clean during the day. It swept down and over the front of the glass and almost to the floor. A draught from the refrigeration unit made it sway backwards and forward, brushing the steel of the base. That was what she’d been able to hear. She sighed with relief.

  “I’ll be honest, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said that.” Grey had already turned and was heading back to the gate. “But if you’re—”

  He stopped as, with the click of a timer and a loud buzz, the lights flicked on.

  They both saw her at exactly the same time.

  Above them, the roof soared upwards, supported by iron buttresses like the inside of a cathedral. And hanging from a meat hook in the middle of it was Juliet.

  She had been hoisted up by a steel cable slung through the buttress and wrapped around the handle of a freezer unit. The wire had been wrapped round and round her neck before the hook had been buried in it, cutting into her throat and splaying it open. Her T-shirt and shorts were stained with the blood that had run down her body, dripping off the toe of her leopard print ballet pump as she swayed in the refrigerated air. Her pendant had fallen to the ground. The red glass had smashed into hundreds of tiny fragments, most of them lost in the pool of blood collecting below her body.

  Izzy’s breath caught in her throat and stuck there. Something was threatening to bubble up and out of her, but she didn’t know what. For a moment it felt like laughter.

  “We’re going to die. We’re going to die. We’re going to die…” Her voice was rising and she had no way of stopping it. She couldn’t stop it. All she could see was Juliet twisting above them. “We’re going to die, Grey. We’re going to … to—”

  Grey pressed a finger to her lips. “I don’t care what Noah said about Dom.” Grey’s voice was little more than a croak. “There’s no way this was an accident.”

  “Noah…” Izzy repeated, tearing her gaze away from Juliet’s lifeless body. Her eyes were still open and her glasses sat crookedly across the bridge of her nose. “Noah. He said…”

  “He said someone was following him.” Grey already knew what she was thinking. “What if they were following Juliet first?”

  “I’m calling him. Now.” Her hands were shaking so violently that she missed the redial button the first time she tried to hit it, and her phone let out a squawk of protest. She tried again, getting it right the second time. It rang, and rang, and rang. There was no answer.

  “We have to go. Juliet’s not going to stay hidden. Someone’ll find her, and soon. We don’t want to be here when that happens.” Grey grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the exit.

  “What if
she’s not…?”

  “Look at her, Izzy. She is. Trust me. We have to leave.”

  Clinging to each other like their lives depended on it, they stumbled through the darkness. Only once they were out of the building did Izzy slow her pace to check her phone.

  “Noah’s still not answering.”

  “Let’s just get back to the Barbican. Either your place or mine. We go in, we lock the door, we don’t come out till this is over.”

  “He’s not answering, Grey!”

  She realized that neither of them was listening to the other. They had left Mia and Juliet. They had as good as abandoned Tigs and Kara, all thoughts of them forgotten until that moment. And wherever Noah was, he wasn’t picking up – that couldn’t be good.

  Music spilled out of a bar on the far side of the street and there was laughter as a group of friends stood around outside, sipping drinks. They were maybe two, three years older than her at most. That was supposed to be her life.

  “Try him one more time. And then we’re done.” They were past the market now, back on Carthusian Street, where she’d had to pull Grey out of the path of the taxi. At the end of the street, the solid concrete of the Barbican really did look like a fortress. Now, though, it wasn’t intimidating. Now, it was almost welcoming. It was solid and it was safe. It had doors and locks and gates and keys.

  And none of those had kept Dom safe, whispered a voice inside her head. Tick tock, tick tock. Stick together and stay alive.

  She fought back a sudden urge to giggle, horrified at herself. It wasn’t funny. Nothing about this nightmare was funny.

  And yet…

  Her fingers moved of their own accord, tracing the tender streak on her cheek where the scalpel had slashed it.

  When she finally realized Grey was talking to her, it was an effort to focus on his voice. She could barely make out the words.

  “Are you going to call him?”

  “Call who?”

  “Noah, Izzy.”

  “Oh. Noah.”

  Her fingers felt as though someone had wrapped them in cotton wool. They were thick and clumsy as she fumbled with her phone.

  She dialled.

  And somewhere very, very close by, a mobile phone began to ring.

  Izzy felt a prickle of fear down her spine. A glance at Grey told her he felt exactly the same. Tiny beads of sweat were forming on his forehead.

  “Hang up,” he said quietly. She did.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Now try again?”

  She dialled. The call connected, and the phantom phone started to ring again.

  It was coming from somewhere behind the blue painted chipboard hoarding that protected the building site in the corner of Charterhouse Square.

  “Maybe he dropped his phone…” Izzy tried. Grey’s face was grim.

  “I think we both know that’s not what happened here.”

  He turned towards the hoarding and ran his hands over it, testing it. It didn’t give beneath the pressure of his fingers; didn’t even wobble.

  Finally, he dropped his hands. “We should go.”

  “And Noah?”

  Grey didn’t answer.

  Izzy hadn’t expected him to.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Neither of them spoke on the way back to Izzy’s apartment, and it wasn’t until they were safely in her hallway that she felt like she was actually able to talk at all. Whether or not she wanted to was a different story. She blinked, and the image of Juliet swinging from the rafters flashed in front of her, vanishing as she opened her eyes. She blinked again, and there was the body. She could already hear Grey moving around in the kitchen – doing what, she had no idea. It was all she could do to lean back against the door. Everything was suddenly such an effort now the first rush of fear had worn off.

  All the way back to the Barbican, she’d felt as though her heart was in her mouth and that was the only thing that had kept her from screaming. The idea that if she opened her lips wide enough to scream, her heart would tumble out and on to the pavement. But it had done whatever it was supposed to do, and it had propelled her back up Carthusian Street and inside the solid concrete walls. She still felt numb.

  Was it shock, or was it just another side effect of the pills? Noah had said they did something to adrenaline, hadn’t he?

  Noah.

  What had happened to him? Was he dead, too? Was he just lost or missing and scared? Was he hiding? Was he hurt?

  And Mia – what about her? Izzy had already tried her phone. It went straight to voicemail.

  The only good thing was that it wasn’t Mia’s mobile they heard ringing in the building site, but then, if it was there, how would they know? What if two of their friends were lying hidden behind the boards, and Izzy and Grey had been standing within reach? What if Noah was bleeding into the ground even as Grey laid his hands on the hoarding – separated by only a thin piece of board that might as well have been an ocean.

  No. It was too much.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to pretend she didn’t still see what was left of Juliet. And when she opened her eyes and there, out of the window, she saw Juliet’s corpse dangling from the balcony above, she could only manage a small sound in the back of her throat. The body spun slowly in the breeze. It rotated enough to reveal the end of the metal hook jutting out through the back of her neck, smeared with red and splinters of shockingly white bone. As Izzy stared at it, the corpse raised its head and twisted its broken neck to look around at her. It blinked through its glasses.

  Izzy fought another urge to throw up.

  The world flickered again and adjusted itself – and the body disappeared.

  Not that that made her feel much better. In fact, it made her feel like she was losing her mind.

  “What are you looking at?” Grey was standing in the hallway from the kitchen, watching her.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  She followed him through into the kitchen, where she rummaged out clean mugs, remembering the promise she’d made to herself that she was done with coffee. Maybe she’d have to take a break from that, at least for the next thirty-six hours or so. The way she saw it, coffee was all that stood between her and, well, Bad Things.

  “So what now?” She flicked the switch on the coffee machine and turned to find Grey leaning his head against one of the kitchen cupboards. He looked over at her blearily, not even lifting his forehead from the cupboard door.

  “Dunno.” He looked back down again.

  “It was your idea to come here…”

  “You have a better one?”

  “No.”

  “Right, then.” He blinked slowly at his feet – one, two, three times. All the energy seemed to have drained from him.

  “Are you feeling OK?”

  “Nope. Not OK. Not even close.” He rolled away from the cupboard, then leaned back against it, rubbing his eyes with both hands. “My head hurts. It hurts so much. It’s like there’s a little guy in there sticking me with a spike.” He took the mug of coffee she handed him. “I was doing all right, you know? I was holding it together. Even with all this –” he waved a hand vaguely – “crap.”

  Crap didn’t quite cover it, somehow.

  He downed the hot coffee and winced. “And then there was the thing with Juliet, and now Noah and … I don’t even know any more.” His eyes met hers and all Izzy could see was despair. “Maybe we should just give up now. We’re screwed either way, aren’t we?”

  “That’s not what Noah thought…” Izzy took a sip of her own coffee and immediately regretted it – it was far too hot. How had Grey drunk his so easily?

  “Noah’s dead.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yeah, we do.” He pointed to the window on the far side of the kitchen – the one looking towards Smithfield. Sure enough, there were blue lights flashing everywhere. Izzy slid open the balcony door and stepped outside, peering down at the street. Two police cars had
pulled up across each of the roads leading towards the market, blocking them off – the roads they had all covered earlier. A cluster of emergency vehicles were parked at the nearest corner of the market building; the blue lights strobed off the little tower that marked the edge of the roof. Another cluster crowded around the next corner, too. The one at the bottom of Carthusian Street, right beside the building site.

  “Oh,” she said. Her fingers gripped the balcony rail more tightly.

  “They’re not there just for laughs, are they?” said Grey from inside. He had picked up the remote for the television and was jabbing buttons. As Izzy slipped back inside and closed the balcony door, the screen flared into life showing the road outside, and a woman’s voice filled the room.

  “…from Smithfield, right in the heart of London, where police have discovered the bodies of two local school students…”

  Grey hit the mute button and the voice evaporated. “Question is, which two?” he muttered darkly.

  The live footage disappeared and was replaced by a split-screen of two photographs.

  Juliet and Noah.

  Izzy recognized the pictures immediately. Both of them were in their Clerkenwell uniforms – they were the pictures from the last school portrait day.

  “Oh, no.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “School.”

  “School,” Grey echoed. “And that’s not the worst part.”

  The photos cut away to another live shot. The reporter was hurrying past the police cordon and down towards the building site, glancing over her shoulder to the camera as she went. The picture bounced and rolled as the cameraman tried to keep up, then steadied as a trolley with a body bag on top of it was wheeled away and into a waiting van, its windows blacked out and ‘Private Ambulance’ printed in sombre lettering on the side.

  “Noah.” Izzy’s voice was barely even a croak as the live feed cut to something else. This time, it was footage – obviously recorded minutes before – of the inside of the building site. The hoardings had been peeled open, and whoever was holding the camera was standing at the top of the newly dug borehole for the tunnel, looking down. A man wearing orange high-vis clothing and a hard hat was being lowered on ropes into the hole. The edges of metal reinforcing mesh poked out of the soil around him, snagging at the ropes. And below him was a large blue tarpaulin, hastily unfolded and surrounded by a ring of vertical steel reinforcing bars. It was smeared with mud, and with blood, and although the hole was dark and the way the tarp draped was meant to hide the truth, anyone could see there was a body underneath it.