Darkfall

by Stephen Laws

  He pushed inside and stabbed the button for Floor 2. The hell with it!

  McEwan’s Loans and Investments and Holsten Computer Inc. occupied the bulk of the offices on Floor 2. Parties had been taking place in both of them . . . but both offices were empty.

  Alec tried all of the floors until he had reached the top.

  There was no trace of a single soul on any of the floors.

  No one in the offices.

  No one in the cupboards.

  No one in the toilets.

  No one.

  But on the fourteenth floor, Alec found something lying on the carpet which sent him staggering in panic back to the elevators.

  “Oh my God . . .”

  He didn’t like the way his voice sounded as he stabbed at the elevator buttons; didn’t like the way his voice seemed to echo away and die. He didn’t like the horrifying feeling which now overwhelmed him that, just as everyone else in this place had vanished . . . he might suddenly vanish too, and wake up in a place that was the last nightmarish place he wanted to be in.

  Trying to control his ragged breathing and fighting to control nausea at his discovery, he reached the ground floor again.

  He staggered out of the elevator into the corridor.

  Don’t run . . . Alec told himself, when he reached the reception area again.

  Don’t panic. And don’t run.

  Thunder rolled and grumbled in the skies again as he made his way towards the glass frontage. The lights flickered again, and Alec froze . .. as if waiting for something terrible to happen. Outside, he could see the wind and the sleet as it gusted at the window.

  “Don’t panic,” he said aloud again, taking deep breaths. “And don’t run.”

  He rolled up the collar on his boiler suit and headed for the main door.

  Outside, the wind was bitterly cold and snapped at his face as he walked out into the sleet. Icy spasms racked him as he crossed the flagged forecourt of the office building. Through slitted eyes, he could just make out the rain-blurred headlights and darkened silhouettes of cars on the main highway, not fifty yards from where he walked. Should he go over there and try to flag a car down? No . . . no . . . he would do what he planned to do. He would play this by the book.

  Still thinking of the thing that he’d found on the top floor, Alec struggled through the wind and the rain and the sleet towards the public telephone box which nestled in the concrete alcove beside the office-block car park. He hoped to God that it hadn’t been vandalised like so many of the public boxes in the area.

  Pausing only to lean against the red booth door to catch the breath which had been whipped away from his mouth by the icy wind, Alec yanked open the door and slid inside to the temporary respite that this small shelter could give.

  NINE

  “Nine nine nine. Which service do you require, please?”

  “Police, get me the police. Quick!”

  “Could I have your name please, sir?”

  “Beaton. Alec Beaton. Look, tell them to get over . . .”

  “And your address, sir?”

  “What the hell has my address got to do with it?”

  “Where are you calling from, please?”

  “Oh, I see. Look . . . My name’s Alec Beaton. I ‘m caretaker at Fernley House Office Complex on Fernley Road. And everyone’s gone . . .”

  The Civilian Receiver at Police Headquarters typed up the message on her video screen, shook her head, smiled and looked at her colleagues as the message was relayed to the Receiver in HQ Control Room.

  “Another one?” asked her colleague.

  “The seventh so far. And it’s ages until the pubs are closed. What the hell are they putting in the beer these days?”

  TEN

  The Receiver slapped his thigh and leaned back in his seat. It had been a long day and his shift was due to end shortly.

  “Why me? Why do I always get them?”

  “A good one?” asked someone from the other side of the Control Room.

  “Not bad. There’s a guy here from Fernley who says that an entire office-block of people have gone missing.”

  “Nutcase?”

  “Well . . . yeah, I suppose. Says he’s the caretaker at some office complex on Fernley Road.”

  “Crank.”

  “Yeah, but that’s what they’re paying me for, I suppose. Who’s out on Fernley Division?”

  The owner of the other voice began stabbing at his own console.

  “Barry Lawrence and John Simpson,” came the reply.

  “I can imagine the response. They’re due to finish shift themselves in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Time stops for no man. Not even on Christmas Eve.”

  “Okay, then. Here we go. This should be good for a laugh, if nothing else.” The Receiver sat forward again, cleared his throat and stabbed at the console. “Hello Panda seven-nine-two. This is Control. We’ve got a 999 call from a Mr Alec Beaton, at . . .”

  ELEVEN

  Sergeant Barry Lawrence and Police Constable John Simpson were not full of Christmas spirit. In fact, they had had enough of this particular Christmas Eve. The fact that the Division was short-staffed was taken for granted, and with teeth gritted they hadn’t complained when they had been advised that they would have to work on Christmas Eve right through to Christmas Day, even though they’d had to do the same last year. But after three drunken punch-ups in pubs in the City Centre and two burglaries (one of which had involved the lifting of a single-parent mother’s entire Christmas presents) their patience was wearing thin . . . and the weather was not helping matters one little bit. Every trip out in the panda car was an ordeal.

  Now this.

  How much did they expect?

  The panda passed under a flyover and took the Fernley Division main road. The weather had closed in fast and thin snow slashed across the windscreen as they moved. The windscreen wipers could barely cope so that the way ahead was a blur. Once again, thunder grumbled somewhere in the sky.

  “Bloody hell,” said Simpson, who was driving. “This weather . . .”

  Lawrence shifted in his seat but said nothing. He yawned and ran a hand across his face. He was forty-five, twenty years Simpson’s senior and feeling more like retiring now than he’d ever done in his life. He was a big man and his close-cropped hair was a salt-and-pepper colour, giving credence to the description of ‘grizzled’ which he’d once heard applied to him in the police social club. He still wasn’t sure whether it was an insult or a compliment. Lawrence had seen a great deal of hard street action in his time and was relied on by his seniors to show relative newcomers ‘the ropes’—and if it meant that as a result his constables ended up literally on those ropes with some drunken lunatic throwing body punches, then so be it. It was a hard job, and if they weren’t able to accept that then they shouldn’t be on the force.

  The main Fernley Road became the dual carriageway which would lead to Fernley House, and now the rain was slashing at the windscreen in a continuous sheet. Lawrence watched PC Simpson grit his teeth as they pulled up at an intersection. Rain-blurred headlights swam against the windscreen. And then Simpson tugged hard at the wheel, swinging across the road and into the layby which led to Fernley House forecourt. He could tell by his tense white face that he expected at any moment to see twin headlights blazing through that murk towards them. Simpson was too nervous. Never mind, he’d straighten him out eventually. If they did get hit by an oncoming car, it would be the perfect end to a perfect bloody day.

  In the forecourt, there was a little more shelter from the storm than they had on the road. The windscreen wipers cleared the slush away from the windscreen now as the panda swerved into the side pavement.

  “Now where . . . ?” began Simpson.

  And then a hunched figure scurried from the main reception doors of the office block. He had obviously been standing there in the shelter, looking out for them.

  “If there’s drink on his breath,” said Lawrence wearily, �
��I’m taking him straight in.”

  The man, about sixty years old, scurried up to the driver’s door, holding his boiler suit close up to his neck to ward off the cold. Simpson wound his window down, wincing and shivering as cold air stabbed into the car.

  “Mr Beaton?”

  “Yes, yes. That’s me. What took you so long?”

  Now it was the Sergeant’s turn to wince at the whisky fumes that Beaton was breathing directly into the car.

  I knew it. “It’s Christmas Eve, Mr Beaton,” said Lawrence. “And in case you didn’t notice there’s a storm. The roads are bad.”

  “But they’ve gone,” babbled Beaton. “They’ve all gone. Did you get my message? That was the first thing I did after I checked the floors. The boilers, you see? God knows what’s happening. I mean, they’ve . . .”

  “Yes, Mr Beaton. Now if you’d care to just stand back, away from the door, we’ll be able to get out of the car, won’t we?”

  The Constable had also picked up the tell-tale waft of alcohol as Beaton stood back nervously, and he climbed out of the car simultaneously with the Sergeant. The cold wind stabbed through his uniform. All he could think of now was a warm fire at home, a hot drink and the kids ogling the presents his wife had carefully placed around the Christmas tree that morning.

  “All of them,” continued Beaton again from the pavement, his words snatched in a blur from his mouth by the wind. “Every single one of them. Just all got up and gone and then when I checked the floors I . . .”

  “Let’s go inside, Mr Beaton,” said the Sergeant. “It’ll be better inside, in the warm.”

  “. . . the boilers, see? Those bloody boilers were acting up. The noise. That bloody awful noise. Thought it would send me mad. I had to make sure, see? Make sure everyone was okay. That’s my job, after all.”

  The Sergeant walked forward, holding out his hands in a ‘shooing’ gesture. Still facing the Sergeant, Beaton backed away from him as they both moved towards the glass reception doors and windows, the Constable following behind. I

  “. . . this noise they were making, see? But when I checked the floors, they weren’t there, were they? The people, I mean. Then on the top floor I found that . . . that . . .”

  The Sergeant gently shoved Beaton so that he bumped against the glass door. Suddenly seeing where they were, Beaton looked nervously behind and seemed alarmed to see his own shadowed reflection in the rain-streaked glass.

  Somewhere above, thunder grumbled in the clouds and the Sergeant saw Beaton’s nervous glance skywards. For a moment, it seemed as if Beaton was afraid not only to go inside but also to stay outside. Slowly, he pulled his collar tight around his throat again and said: “Let’s go in.”

  Again, the Sergeant had a waft of whisky-tainted breath and exchanged a knowing glance with the Constable as Beaton pushed on through the glass double doors, glancing back to see if they were following.

  They followed.

  TWELVE

  The dirty rain and snow slashing in runnels across the office window reminded him of things he could not forget, so he’d lowered the venetian blinds and sat back in his swivel chair again. Through the plastic slats, he could still see the snow and the rain but could not somehow find the energy to reach over, pull the nylon cord and block the winter out altogether.

  There was no way, he knew, that he could block out the winter which was behind his eyes.

  He swung around in the swivel seat and examined the empty office. Three untidy desks, covered in paperwork. Lever-Arch files on the floor-to-ceiling shelves and also lying in a jumble on the floor. Twenty-year-old Christmas decorations festooned the tops of cupboards and window frames: red and green tinsel in a rapid state of disintegration having been pulled from a battered cardboard box in the storeroom for the annual airing.

  He was alone in the office.

  He could hear the others next door, grabbing half an hour on-duty for an illicit drink; toasting-in Christmas off-the-record since they’d all drawn the short straw and had to work the Christmas Eve/Christmas Day shift.

  “A policeman’s lot . . .” he said to himself.

  Beyond his office, through the partition wall, someone cracked a joke (probably dirty) and everyone guffawed. Glasses clinked.

  “. . . is not a happy one,” he finished ruefully.

  He had volunteered to man the DI office for the Christmas shift, and everyone knew why. Just as he’d volunteered to stay behind the emergency desk while the others went next door, just in case the phone rang. Again, they knew why he didn’t want to join them in their Christmas toasts and they respected it, but secretly were relieved that he wasn’t going to cast a pall over the proceedings. In truth, it had nothing to do with commitment to the job and everything to do with hating the hell out of Christmas and all the bonhomie that went with it. He leaned forward and picked up the plastic desk-sign on his desk, turned it over in his hands and looked at it.

  Detective Inspector Jack Cardiff.

  He grimaced. Someone had spilt Tipp-Ex on the lettering. It reminded him of snow. That’s what it was, after all, wasn’t it? Wasn’t the trademark “Liquid Snow”? Christmas again! It wouldn’t go away. He began to pick absently at the dried Tipp-Ex.

  It was the third Christmas without Lisa and Jamie.

  The photograph of them both was in his top left—hand drawer. It had been on the desk itself for the first year, but far from consoling him, it only made him feel worse. He had placed it carefully in that drawer, face down. But its presence always made itself felt. Sometimes, it was almost as if it was still there on the desk top, facing him. The effect was the same.

  Cardiff dumped the name-sign unceremoniously down on the desk, turning his attention to the right-hand drawer. The presence of the something else in that drawer was also a life-balancing constant—a balance for the photograph on the left. No one knew it was there but him, although the inevitable inventory check of the Evidence Room drawers would show that it had been removed without authorisation.

  More laughter from next door.

  “Jingle all the way,” he said, without emotion.

  Cardiff opened the right-hand drawer of his desk, still looking at the outside door and prepared to slide it shut if someone came in. He picked the consoler out of the drawer and placed it on the desk so that it was hidden by a file and a pile of paperwork.

  Cardiff held it up above the level of the desk, no longer obscured by the pile of paperwork.

  It was a Browning Automatic. .38 Calibre.

  Then he reached for the companion piece; a magazine clip of thirteen bullets. There were only six shots left in that magazine. The others had been used by a gun freak who had taken exception to the garage that had refused to honour an insurance policy on the second-hand car he had bought from them. Full of happy-hour whisky, he had rammed that car into the garage wall and then stormed inside, demanding that they pay for the damage. When they had refused, the gun had come out. Fortunately, no one had been hurt. The drunken shots had punctured the glass frontage of the shop and blasted a shelf behind it. The felon had then collapsed drunk on to the garage forecourt and lain there until collected by the police. The law had taken its course, and the felon was now serving four years in Durham Jail. After the trial, the physical evidence had been placed in Locker 53 of Fernley Divisional Police Headquarters. After the statutory time period, it would be transferred to Regional Divisional HQ, and disposed of thereafter.

  Detective Inspector Jack Cardiff had been in charge of that job.

  And on one particularly bleak September evening when the memories and the pain had been too much to bear, he had gone down to the Locker Room, opened Locker 53 without authorisation, and had taken the gun away.

  It had stayed in his right-hand drawer now for three months. Its disappearance from the locker still undetected and its presence in his drawer always begging the same question.

  Cardiff looked at the streamlined muzzle, watched his thumb move to the safety catch.


  Outside, the wind moaned at the window. He looked at the outside door and then at the snow and rain flurrying against the window between the plastic slats of the venetian blind.

  And then he looked back at the gun in his hand.

  THIRTEEN

  “And then the boilers, you see? The boilers . . . I thought . . .”

  “Mr Beaton!” snapped the Sergeant at last, now that they were in the comparative warmth of the office-block reception. A fresh wave of rain rinsed against the blue-blackness of the sheet glass windows. Beaton stood back, as if the words had slapped his face. Astonished, he seemed to see the Police Sergeant for the first time.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not making a great deal of sense. Your telephone call was garbled. And I have reason to believe that you’ve been drinking. Now, I want you to tell me. Clearly, calmly. Take your time. Just what is wrong?”

  Beaton seemed to take half a step back as the policeman’s words registered. He swallowed, looked at the Police Constable, took a breath and said: “Everyone’s gone. And I think the boilers in the basement are going to blow up.”

  “Shit!”

  Ten seconds later, the policeman had dragged Beaton back out on to the pavement and into the car. The car screeched in reverse away from the office-block frontage and into the car park one hundred and fifty yards away. Twenty seconds later, the Sergeant had radioed headquarters.

  This was a job for the specialists.

  Or . . . as the Sergeant so eloquently put it after the call had been made . . . it was a job for some other bloody idiot to go down into that boiler room and check things out.

  FOURTEEN

  “It’s okay,” said the guy in the blue boiler suit, emerging from the office-block frontage. “There’s nothing whatever wrong with those boilers. I’ve checked and double-checked. They’re working fine. No pressure build-up, no irregularities. No nothing.”