by Guy Adams
Luis came jogging over, a look of excitement on his face. He was only a kid, Barry thought, barely out of school. One day he’d learn that you didn’t get excited about trouble.
‘What is it?’
‘Cameras on the house have all gone down. I need you to sit here and mind the gate while I go and have a look.’
‘Shit, can’t I go?’
‘No, you bloody can’t. Do as you’re told.’
Luis slunk inside and dumped himself on the chair in front of the monitors.
Barry didn’t blame him for wanting to go but the kid was too wet behind the ears. If there was something wrong up there then he wasn’t going to be the one to send him running off into it.
‘I’ll keep in touch on the radio,’ he told Luis. ‘It’s probably just a technical problem.’
He didn’t believe that for a moment, but it would keep Luis happy. If it had only been one camera that had packed up, then fine, maybe a loose wire or something, but all three?
He jogged up the road, trying to think of a reasonable explanation for the outage. He couldn’t see how someone had got past the wall in order to interfere with the cameras. He’d been on the ball and had seen nothing on the perimeter footage. Nor had any of the alarms tripped. Maybe it was a technical fault somehow – did all three feeds join at some point? Maybe that was where the problem lay?
As he crested the hill so that he could look down on the Hall itself, such simple thoughts as a severed cable vanished. He stood there for a moment, staring ahead, not having the first idea what to think.
His walkie-talkie crackled. ‘Barry?’ came Luis’ voice. ‘See anything yet?’
Barry pulled the walkie-talkie out of its holster and wondered exactly how to explain what his eyes were telling him in a way that didn’t sound completely mental.
There was nothing wrong with the cameras. The black screens in the guardhouse were only showing precisely what lay in front of them. The entire Hall was covered in a dome of darkness. Like an uneven, black pudding bowl had been flipped upside down and placed over the building.
‘Just hold on a minute, Luis,’ he said. ‘I’m still checking.’
He began to make his way down towards the front of the Hall. As he drew closer, he could see that the surface of the darkness wasn’t smooth. It rippled as if it were made of smoke. Maybe the whole thing was some kind of gas?
He approached via the front lawn. From close up, the darkness appeared like a liquid wall, bubbling and shifting. It cut right through the large urn water feature at the centre of the lawn.
He walked right up to it, holding his hand in front of his mouth in case it was something poisonous. It didn’t smell. He didn’t taste anything as he breathed. Neither of which meant much, he knew, but it didn’t look like gas. It was too thick, too glutinous.
He looked around for some sort of tool, snapping a branch off a bush from one of the flower beds.
He stepped up towards the wall of darkness and slowly poked at it with the branch. As the tip entered the darkness, his walkie-talkie barked into life once more, Luis’ voice coming out through the speaker.
‘You must be there by now, Barry. What’s up?’
Barry dropped the stick in surprise, swearing and yanking the walkie-talkie free.
‘I’m there, Luis,’ he said, ‘and it’s really weird so bear with me for a minute, will you?’
‘Weird how?’
‘Jesus …’ Barry reached down to retrieve the dropped stick. ‘Weird as in … I don’t know, “weird”.’
He picked the stick up and carefully stirred the surface of the darkness. Tendrils of it seemed to chase the tip of the stick around.
‘Fuck it,’ said Barry, pressing down the call button on the walkie-talkie. ‘Just get over here, will you? I need you to see this.’
b) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
‘What the hell is going on?’ Clive King shouted, his voice echoing around the darkness of the entrance hall. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘Just stay calm,’ said Shining. ‘We need to keep our heads.’
‘Says the man who is out of his.’ This was Rowlands, somewhere off to Shining’s left.
‘There’s no time for arguing,’ Shining insisted. ‘You’re not an idiot. Stop pretending to be one.’ He turned towards where he thought Rowlands was standing. ‘This is obviously something from outside your experience so let me do my damn job.’
He tried to move towards where he thought Rowlands had been standing. It was so disorientating, nothing but panicked voices in the dark.
‘Rubbish,’ Rowlands replied. ‘There’s a perfectly rational explanation for this.’
‘I wish someone would tell me what it is,’ said Tae-young.
‘This is not rational,’ Jae-sung added, his voice close to Shining. The old man reached out a hand, hoping to touch the Korean.
‘I think you’re right next to me, Jae-sung,’ he said. ‘Keep talking.’
‘I can’t believe you’re all playing into this!’ shouted Rowlands. ‘Wandering around like idiots. We need to find the door and get out of here.’
There was a crackle of static from Rowlands’ walkie-talkie as he tried to contact the rest of his men. ‘No signal,’ he muttered. ‘Something must be jamming it.’
‘No shit,’ whined Spang. ‘As far as we know, the whole world’s vanished. We’re probably on Mars!’
‘We’re exactly where we were,’ Shining said, ‘more or less. Just try and stay calm.’
Shining heard Rowland’s footsteps on the tiles, some distance away, the man pacing up and down in frustration and panic.
‘I’m here,’ said Jae-sung, doing as Shining had asked. ‘You are close. I can hear you moving. Very close.’
Shining swung his arms around, hoping to connect with the man.
There was a crashing sound as Rowlands tripped over something. ‘Jesus,’ the SIS man shouted. ‘Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.’
‘I have a light,’ said April, and there was the sound of her Zippo bursting into life. ‘There. It’s not really helping … I can see the flame but it’s not lighting up the room.’
‘I can’t see any flame,’ said King. ‘I can hear your voice, I know you’re close. But I can’t see any flame!’
‘Please try not to panic!’ said Shining. ‘If we panic then we’re lost. We need to find one another.’
‘How can we find one another when we can’t see?’ said King. ‘What’s happened to us? Have we all gone blind?’
‘No,’ said April. ‘I can see the flame, I’m not blind, it’s just that …’
‘We can’t see it,’ said Tae-young. ‘It’s like we’re all in our own darkness.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Rowlands. ‘Some sort of chemical agent. A nerve gas, maybe.’
‘Mars!’ Spang shouted.
‘That doesn’t even make sense,’ insisted April. ‘Please listen to August.’
‘Not a chance,’ Rowlands replied, banging around at the far end of the room. ‘The man’s mad. If we listened to him, we’d be – the door! I’ve got the door.’
‘Don’t open it!’ Shining shouted, not really knowing why, just a gut instinct that overtook him.
‘Oh shut up,’ Rowlands replied. There was the sound of a door opening and then silence.
‘Rowlands?’ King shouted. ‘Rowlands?’
Silence.
‘Where has he gone?’ asked Jae-sung, his voice almost right in Shining’s ear. He reached out and put his hands on the man’s shoulders.
‘I’ve got you,’ he said.
‘Who?’ Tae-young asked.
‘Jae-sung,’ said Shining.
‘Yes?’ Jae-sung’s voice was now some distance away. Shining held on to the pair of shoulders in front of him and squeezed.
‘Who am I touching?’ he asked. ‘I have my hands on your shoulders. Who is it?’
‘I’ll give you three guesses,’ came Fratfield’s voice in his ear.
c) L
ufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
Toby cut across the sculpture park aiming for the rear wall.
How far was far enough to be safe? Nothing seemed out to kill him right now. His balance was steady, his footing sound. Most importantly: there was no rain. He was soaked to the skin but the air around him was now dry. Surely that meant he was beyond the curse’s range?
He looked back over his shoulder and what he saw stopped him for a moment. The entirety of Lufford Hall had vanished from view, a wall of darkness surrounding it. It was the same as he had experienced in the car. What horror show would be playing out for those inside even now? Shouldn’t he try and get them out?
‘Oi!’ a voice shouted and he looked over towards the left-hand side of the wall and saw one of Rowlands’ men, obviously working his way around the perimeter, trying to understand what had happened. Good luck on that one, Toby thought, I’ve seen my fair share of the impossible, and all of this is beyond me.
‘Keep your distance,’ Toby shouted, moving back towards the Hall and the security officer. ‘Don’t cross the threshold.’
Then he felt the air change. The faint sound of thunder. A couple of raindrops fell on his head and, to his right, moving amongst the metal sculptures, he saw the Bride.
Too close, he was still too close.
A shot rang out and Toby let himself fall backwards. The security officer was firing at him! Why the hell was he firing at him?
Because you’re cursed, he thought, and because it wants you dead.
He scrambled to his feet, turned back in the direction he had been aiming and made a zig-zagged run towards the far wall.
Another shot. Toby moved into the cover of the forest, taking the opportunity to turn and look.
He saw the officer, aiming towards him, but that wasn’t all. Behind the officer, stepping out of the darkness, like a man rising up through marshy water, Fratfield appeared.
The rogue agent reached for the security officer who was completely unaware that there was someone behind him.
‘Behind you!’ Toby shouted but the officer just took another badly aimed shot in his direction.
Fratfield grabbed the officer. He gripped the hand that was holding the gun and threw the man down onto the ground, wrestling the gun from his grip.
The man turned to try and defend himself but Fratfield shot him at point-blank range and then continued to walk away from the Hall, in Toby’s direction.
The sound of thunder increased and Toby saw the Bride, still moving amongst the sculptures, her white dress flitting in and out from between the sharp iron structures.
‘You said it yourself,’ Fratfield shouted. ‘Doppelgänger contract. There can be as many of me as I like. One to play with the old man and one to play with you. So, let’s have a little fun. I’ll give you a head start.’ He held his hands up to his face covering his eyes, the gun barrel sticking up like a strange antenna. ‘A count of twenty. One … two …’
Toby turned and ran towards the wall.
d) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
Shining let go of Fratfield’s shoulders but not before something struck him in his midriff and sent him skating across the tile floor.
‘August?’ April shouted. ‘Are you all right?’
That’s a good question, he thought as he got to his feet, spinning around, trying to get a sense of whether whatever had attacked him was still close.
‘I’m fine,’ he replied, then felt the air around him shift as if something massive was surging towards him. He doubled over, trying to make himself a smaller target. Perhaps it helped, though he was still sent tumbling backwards, colliding with what felt like a chaise longue and falling behind it.
The room is still here, he thought, we can still interact with it. We can’t see it, but it’s physically here. Along with something else, something dangerous.
And what had happened to Rowlands? What had he found on the other side of the door?
e) Who knows?
Mark Rowlands stepped through the door only to find himself facing more darkness.
‘It’s the same out here,’ he shouted.
Out here? It didn’t feel very much like outside. The sound of his voice was muffled as if he were stood in a small room.
‘Did you hear me?’ he shouted, still holding the door handle. He turned to step back into the room. ‘I said it’s …’
He was suddenly flooded by light as he stepped back inside. He momentarily screwed up his eyes in shock, opening them to find himself on a city street.
‘Impossible,’ he muttered to himself, even as the warmth of sunlight fell on his face, as real as anything he had ever experienced.
He squatted down and touched the tarmac beneath his feet, rough grit pressing into the tips of his fingers.
‘Impossible,’ he said again.
He turned around to find the street continuing behind him with no sign of the door he had just stepped through.
He rubbed at his face, unable to process what was happening to him.
He stared up and down the street. A familiar street. Very familiar.
A car drove past him. He watched it pass, a red sports car. He knew the car. He knew all of this.
The car parked up a short distance ahead and he watched a familiar man step out, look around and then cross the street.
The man, Rowlands knew, was called Napoleon Ayoade. Nigerian by descent, he had been in the UK for four years, part of a criminal chain running a network in human trafficking. He ruled an army of street kids through a mixture of fear and cash. The rod and the carrot. He claimed voodoo ancestry. He said he had demons on his side, the Devil watching his back. Rowlands hadn’t believed a word of it, of course. An opinion that had only slightly wavered when the man had nearly been the death of him.
All of this was years ago. What was he doing here now? It must be, as he had said before, some form of gas. He was lying on his back in Lufford Hall, dreaming everything.
He watched as Ayoade paused outside a large, red door, the staff access to a nightclub called Revolutions that the man used as cover.
Unable to restrain himself from mirroring the actions of the past, Rowlands waited until the man had entered the building then slowly followed after him.
He listened at the door, as he had all those years ago, then looked over to a tatty hatchback parked a couple of doors away where two of his fellow SOCA officers were sat observing the building. The one in the passenger seat, a middle-aged man called Philips that Rowlands had always looked up to, nodded. They had his back. Or at least, that was the plan; Rowlands knew they would arrive too late to save him a savage beating because he had the advantage of hindsight. He also knew that Philips would be dead of bowel cancer in three years’ time. History was where ghosts really lived. They filled it to the brim.
Rowlands opened the door and walked quietly up the dark stairwell that led to the offices above the club. His job was to check the location of Ayoade’s prisoners. The first thing Ayoade and his men would do on SOCA storming the building would be to kill them. These were men who left no wagging tongues. The powers that be were not willing to risk such a potential media shit-storm so it had been decided that Rowlands would enter the building first, the rest of the team on standby. He would locate the prisoners, if possible free them, if not then do his best to provide protection while the others came in from the front, all guns blazing. It was a mess. Badly conceived and barely planned. Rowlands was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth and he knew it. Their intelligence suggested that there were only three of the slavers in the building: Ayoade himself and two of his men. Still, the risk was higher than should have been countenanced.
But this time Rowlands had an advantage. He knew what was going to happen.
f) Fields outside Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire
Toby had gone over the wall, imagining the security system lighting up in the guardhouse, and dropped down into the open fields on the other side. Looking around for pot
ential cover, he was forced to accept there was none until he got to a hedge that lined the far side of the field. He could run along the wall that lined the house, but that would still leave him exposed by the time Fratfield appeared. The far hedge was the only viable option.
He ran, aiming for the shortest line between the wall and the hedge. He forced himself to sprint as fast as he could, trying to control his breathing as he pushed his speed faster and faster across the cold, hard earth beneath his feet.
As he drew close to the hedge, he scanned along it, trying to find a break that he could force himself through to reach the relative safety of the other side. The foliage was dense, an advantage if he could only get through it. It was too high to jump and, by now, Fratfield must have reached the wall of Lufford Hall; Toby would be an obvious and easy target as he tried to throw himself over the top of some bushes. Spotting a small gap a few feet to his right, he changed direction and, squinting his eyes shut against the sharp branches, dived at it, hoping his momentum would help carry him part of the way through. He became wedged against the thick branches and they hooked and tore at his suit as he pulled himself through, adding countless new scratches and cuts to the mess the shower of glass from the chandelier had made of him. For one awful moment he thought he was going to be stuck, hanging there, unable to turn or defend himself as Fratfield and the curse he brought with him approached from behind. Then, with an almighty shake, he pierced the hedge, pulling himself along the ground on the other side until his legs were free. He turned to look through the hole he had left behind. Fratfield was stood on the far side of the field; there was no sign of the curse spirit.
Toby ran along the hedge. A few hundred yards away there was the cover of trees that ran along the road to Alcester. Once there he would be relatively safe from gunfire at least.
His skin was burning as sweat poured into open wounds. His muscles were already cramping after having to force himself so hard. Bruises were erupting at every point he had fallen or been hit by the various inanimate objects that had been aimed at him. He was already struggling and the pursuit had only just begun.
