by Stephen Laws
“It wasn’t a thunderclap.”
“What then?”
“Well if it wasn’t the boilers, I don’t know what the hell it was. All I know is that my head’s still ringing with it and I’d rather we didn’t stay down here too long, thanks very much, if it’s all the same to you.”
The windows at ceiling level flickered again. Two seconds later, the sky grumbled, not unlike the hollow booming sound made by the boiler, and the panes rattled.
“Funny bloody storm,” said Pearce. “Always seems to be coming, but never seems to get here.”
“Alright, Mr Beaton,” said Cardiff at last. “I don’t think there’s any further reason to stay down here.”
Beaton was almost at the stairs again, anxious to get away, when the windows flashed and rattled again.
“Storm is getting closer . . .” began Cardiff.
And then the windows exploded with ferocious impact and a detonating roar of noise.
Beaton shrieked as he was knocked flat on the stairs. Cardiff and Pearce staggered backwards in the blast, hands flung to their faces. Cardiff had been closer to the windows, and felt flecks of glass whicker across his fingers. The torch was torn from his grasp, falling somewhere on the floor and rolling crazily, casting huge dancing shadows in the basement.
Rain gusted in through the shattered windows.
“What the bloody hell . . .” began Cardiff, then saw even in the darkness the flecks of blood on his hands.
“A lightning strike!” exclaimed Pearce, reorientating himself again. “Must have hit the building!”
Beaton was scrabbling on the stairs, looking for something that he had dropped and making a low moaning noise. He found them . . . his false teeth had fallen out on to the stairs, and Cardiff didn’t know whether it was comic or tragic. Runnels of drain water from the pavements began to splatter in through the windows.
And they all heard the noise.
Distant at first, following on from the explosive roar of the lightning strike, but now growing. Like a distant, muffled explosion. Like the beginning of a faraway mortar bombardment. Like the slamming of a great steel door in a crypt.
Once . . . twice . . . three times.
Growing louder.
And now Beaton’s nerve had completely snapped. Howling like a wounded animal, teeth back in place, and hands clamped firmly over his ears, he scrabbled up the stairs towards the opened doorway.
Cardiff and Pearce exchanged glances. The fourth ‘echo’ . . . if that was what it was . . . resounded even louder, and Pearce moved quickly to the nearest boiler and placed his hand on it. The fifth crash made their ears ring and Beaton was out of the basement and away from sight. Pearce shook his head in confirmation that the sound was not coming from the boiler.
The sixth explosion was like a hand grenade exploding in the basement. The sound of it pierced their eardrums. Cardiff bent double, hugging his hands to his head. The shock of it flung Pearce back against the boiler.
“Get out! Get out!” yelled Cardiff and seized Pearce by the sleeve, dragging him to the stairs.
Cardiff’s foot skidded on Beaton’s vomit. He struggled for balance and threw Pearce ahead of him as a seventh detonation shook his optic nerves and threatened to make him keel over off the stairs. He shouted—a wordless yell of anger—and pushed hard at Pearce’s rear, aware that his Sergeant was also crying out in pain. Cardiff was a powerful man and Pearce was pushed to the top of the staircase. He braced himself in the doorway, whirled around, grabbed Cardiff as he blundered upwards and pulled him clear away from the doorframe and back into the reception area.
Ears ringing, Cardiff braced himself against the cold tiles of the reception wall; waiting for the next literally deafening blast. But up here, on the ground floor, there was no further eruption of that noise. He clasped his hand to his head again. There was a ringing, singing, hissing sound in there; just like the sound he heard after he’d got drunk and put on the headphones with the volume up too loud, to drown out the sorrow. Pearce had staggered over to the elevators, directly opposite, and was suffering from the same kind of side effects. There was no sign of Beaton.
Cardiff moved back to the basement door and looked down. The rain still hissed and runnelled into the room. The torch had come to rest beneath a boiler, its beam casting bizarre and surreal light and shadow.
But the noise had gone.
Somewhere beyond, thunder groaned in the sky. But the ear-splitting detonations had ceased.
“Been drinking, Pearce?” asked Cardiff.
“No.” Pearce moved to join him at the door.
“Think it was just echoes?”
“Nope.”
“Then I think we’ve just heard the funny noise that Mr Beaton heard.”
Something scuffled behind them, and they turned from the basement to see Beaton on all fours emerging round the corner from the main reception desk. He stood up, leaned against the wall and gave a painful-to-hear, racking cough. Using the wall to keep him erect, he staggered towards them.
“You bastards . . . I told you about that noise . .. but you thought I was just bloody drunk, didn’t you? Well, I tell you . . . I tell you . . . there were times at sea when I would have kicked the living shit out of anyone who called me a liar . . . the living shit . . .”
Beaton launched himself from the wall in a feeble attack, which turned into a dive for the floor when gravity took over. Pearce was nearest; he was able to catch him by both feeble arms. Cardiff quickly joined them, helping Pearce to lift him back down the reception corridor and into the main reception area. He gave a quick look back in the direction of the basement door. But there was no more sound other than the hiss and splatter of rain and the groaning rumble of the sky. They manoeuvred Beaton back into the chair where Cardiff had first seen him slumped. Beaton seemed to accept the position gratefully, putting his hands to his head just as Cardiff first remembered seeing him.
“Sir?
Cardiff looked up to see PC Simpson standing at the main doors, rain glinting black on his Waterproofs.
“Sergeant Lawrence is outside, sir. He had to leave the others. He tried to give a sit rep but his radio wouldn’t work upstairs. So he popped out to use the car radio. Still too much static interference so we can’t . . .” And then Simpson realised that something had happened, and shut up.
“Lawrence is outside?” snapped Cardiff.
“Giving a sit rep like you said, sir . . .”
“Get him in here straightaway.”
Simpson turned to open the door and shout for Lawrence, still unaware of what was happening. A cold gust of winter wind sent a spray of water into the reception area.
“Did you hear it?” asked Pearce as the Constable joined them again.
“Hear what, sir?” asked Simpson.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Pearce.
“You mean you didn’t hear anything?” rejoined Cardiff. Beaton was flopping back in his seat now and moaning. He didn’t like the caretaker’s chalk-white complexion.
“Nothing, sir . . . apart from a lightning crack. A pretty loud one.”
“Loud enough to blow in the basement windows without your seeing,” said Cardiff impatiently, loosening Beaton’s collar. “But nothing else? You didn’t hear any other loud noises—like explosions?”
“No, sir,” replied Simpson, now completely confused as Lawrence appeared through the reception doors again. “Nothing else. We can’t see the basement windows. They’re screened off to the side. Blown in you say?”
“And how. Barry . . . did you get through?”
“Yes, boss. Pretty bad reception, though. Must be the storm.”
“We need another sit rep,” said Cardiff. “Where the hell’s that ambulance for Beaton?”
Lawrence reached automatically for his personal radio, remembered that he couldn’t use it indoors because of the electrical interference caused by the storm and cursed again as he pushed back outside into the rain.
>
“Pearce,” said Cardiff. “I want you and Simpson to recall the lads searching the upstairs floors. I want to know if they heard anything.”
Pearce nodded and headed for the elevators with the Constable following.
“The living shit . . .” mumbled Beaton again as Cardiff tried to hold him in his seat.
“Yeah. I know,” said Cardiff, ears still ringing from the noise that-hadn’t-been-heard. “When you were at sea.”
Not the only one at sea, he thought. Just what in hell is going on here?
TWENTY FIVE
Farley Peters—columnist, interviewer, nom de plume and would-be novelist—had been just about to give up this ridiculous vigil at the office block, when interesting things had started to happen.
Nothing better to do on Christmas Eve, Cardiff had said—and he had been right. Peters had been idly monitoring the police air waves in accordance with the usual eavesdropping procedure, on the shortwave he kept in the office for just such occasions. It was a useful way of picking up juicy stories and getting people out into the field. Tonight’s idle Christmas Eve had picked up a really juicy one.
Some frantic old caretaker with a piss-crazy story about an entire office-block of people vanishing. A crazy enough scenario. Worth ignoring perhaps as the fantasy of some alcoholically deranged old fart or a prankster. But something about the report, something about the bizarre nature of it had caught Peters’ attention. Maybe there was something in this story. Most of Peters’ colleagues would be in the boozer at the moment; the others working shift. If this was a scoop . . . and he laughed at the clichéd way the word sounded . . . then he would have it.
He hadn’t been at the office block for more than two or three minutes, sheltering from the storm behind the workmen’s hut in the car park which fronted the office block, when the first panda car had pulled up and the old man inside had rushed out to meet them. Through rain-blurred windows, Peters had been unable to make out what was going on inside except that the old man—presumably the caretaker who had made the call from the public telephone box at the car park entrance—was extremely agitated. Peters scanned each of the fourteen floors for signs of movement. Lights were shining on most floors but he couldn’t see a damn thing.
The storm had continued to build and the chill of the winter night and the acid-cold bite of the rain on Peters’ face had convinced him after a further hour that he really was wasting his time here. Look at him. A forty-five-year-old professional man with a wife and three kids at home waiting excitedly for Christmas—and here he was, standing in a bloody car park in the freezing rain while his mates were partying in their local boozer. He had continued to use his shortwave radio, but the interference had been bad; a mad crackling of static, no doubt caused by the storm. He had furiously tried to zero in when the Sergeant had emerged and given a situation report from one of the panda cars. But his own radio was less sophisticated than the police model, and the snatches of words he’d picked up in no way enlightened him. He cursed in the wind; the words snatched away from his lips.
Maybe it was time to pack it all in.
Twenty angry minutes later he began to walk back to the car park entrance.
And all because of—his laugh held a trace of bitterness and self-contempt—a so-called ‘scoop’.
Then the Incident Squad van had pulled up in a spray of dirty water and Peters’ self-contempt had vanished. He dashed back to the workmen’s hut. Four men clad in yellow waterproofs and carrying equipment of some kind had hurried through the reception doors.
Maybe something was going on.
Peters’ new-found enthusiasm and self-justification was further fuelled when further panda cars had arrived and officers had climbed out on to the pavement under grumbling skies.
When he recognised Cardiff, Peters had broken cover and made his approach—only to be threatened with arrest. He knew Cardiff of old. He was a hard bastard and it wasn’t a threat to be taken lightly.
But all of Peters’ suspicions had been confirmed.
Something big was happening and he knew that by now, others with a vague interest in the police call—being monitored in at least half a dozen other places of which he knew—would now have listened intently to the further calls which he knew must have taken place.
The police were too absorbed in what they were doing to take a real interest in him once he had been given the bum’s rush. Once they had vanished into the reception area, he had slipped back across the road and resumed his former vantage point behind the workmen’s hut.
From there, he had seen the arrival of the police pathologist—and wished he’d known what the man had taken away. There was now too much static on his radio to even pick up garbled words—just a maddening electric hiss. Peters wiped water from his face to see the police in the main reception moving to the elevators—and knew that a search was underway. He crept forward, sheltering behind a car.
Cars?
He looked back. There were thirty or forty cars in the park; presumably owned by those in the office block. He looked back up to the office block.
All vanished?
Where the bloody hell had they gone?
And now, Peters realised that his vantage point might soon be under threat. It was only a matter of time before the police started to check the licence plates of the cars in this park in an attempt to identify the missing people.
He waited, watching the office block and ready to move. A Police Constable emerged on the pavement and headed for one of the pandas.
Overhead, there was a terrific crack of thunder. The sky blazed blue-white for an instant and Peters seemed to feel the ground tremble under his feet.
That was bloody close!
Peters knew that it was now or never.
He broke away from the shelter of the car and ran into the teeth of that biting wind and slashing rain, keeping his eye on the Constable.
Rain-soaked in slush water, he sprinted across the car park forecourt and around the side of the building. The builders had been landscaping there in the summer, and young saplings in wire cages thrashed in the wind.
In the shadows of the office block, Peters found the rear access to the building where large van deliveries were made. He clambered over a small brick wall, cursing again at how out of condition he had become, and skirted around an outside generator.
The service door set into the office block before him was marked ‘Staff Only’ and Peters considered whether the back doors would be burglar-alarmed. Using the keys he held for just such a purpose, Peters tried four before he found the right one.
The service door snicked open.
Only blackness within.
Excited in a way he had never been before, he let himself in and closed the door behind him. There were so many questions.
Wondering what the police search party might have found, Peters felt his way along a wall in blackness, hunting for a light switch.
TWENTY SIX
“Radio?” said Cardiff when Sergeant Lawrence re-entered again, soaking wet.
“Nothing, boss. Just bloody static. How’s Beaton?”
“Not good.” Cardiff checked the caretaker’s pulse again. His breath was ragged. “Look, Barry. I don’t know why the hell it’s taking Pearce and Simpson so long. But I don’t think Beaton can wait. I want you to drive him to hospital now. Then I want you to . . .”
The elevator doors pinged open.
Pearce and Simpson emerged.
“Wait a second, Barry. That you, Pearce?”
When the Detective Sergeant and Constable turned the corner from the corridor into the main reception area, Cardiff saw the joint expression on their faces; a bewildering mixture of doubt, embarrassment and outright confusion.
“What’s happened?”
Simpson turned to Pearce, acceding to authority to make some sense of what was happening tonight.
“The others,” said Pearce. “The others searching the floors.”
“Well, come on, then.
What have they found?”
“Well, well . . . nothing they’ve found. Just that . . .”
“What?”
“We can’t find them, sir. They’ve all gone. We can’t find them anywhere in the block.”
Thunder grumbled in the skies again and the windowpanes in the reception rattled.
“They’ve gone,” continued Pearce. “They’ve just bloody vanished into the woodwork.”
Cardiff stood in rage, scrutinising both Pearce and Simpson’s faces. Now the rage was subsiding and for the first time, Cardiff could sense the overwhelming feeling that they were conveying to him.
Fear.
He beat down the knots that were tightening in his gut, and turned back to Sergeant Lawrence.
“Barry. I want you and Simpson to get Mr Beaton to hospital. Pearce. The radios are no good here. We’re going back to HQ smartish. I want a full-scale op and back-up here. Urgent. I want another squad for full-scale supervised search. The office block has to be cordoned off, manned and patrolled. Simpson. How far did you get with the licence plates?”
“Not very far . . .” said the Constable.
“Alright. It doesn’t matter for now. When we get back, I want the licence plates in the car park identified and the men from the lab here pronto.”
Nervously, Lawrence and Simpson helped Beaton to his feet. They headed for the reception door—and for an unreasoning, terrifying instant—Simpson felt sure that the doors would be locked and they wouldn’t be able to get out. They would be locked in this Godawful place until whatever had happened to the office workers—and now the police search party—had happened to them. Terror made his stomach lurch when the door wouldn’t open.
But it was only the force of the wind and rain holding it shut. Seconds later, they were out on the pavement, with Beaton hanging between them, heading for the panda car.
