by Stephen Laws
“Brother . . . ?”
“Get away from it, you bloody fool!” Cardiff had appeared on the tenth-floor landing above and behind the thing. The thing seemed to falter momentarily at the sound of his voice, half turning that huge and dreadful head in his direction . . . and then turning back to Rohmer again as it took another shambling step down. From somewhere behind’ Rohmer on the ninth floor came the sounds of an avalanche of shattering glass.
“Is it you?” Rohmer asked the thing. “Is it you?”
And Cardiff was looking at Rohmer now with stunned surprise as he fumbled with the gun in his jacket and Jimmy Devlin was suddenly at his side.
Rohmer shrank back against the wall on the ninth-floor landing, a wall that was suddenly covered in spreading black patches. The thing took another step down . . . and then Jimmy yelled: “WATCH OUT, CARDIFF!”
This time, the thing was turning slowly to look back up at them. Cardiff had raised the gun in the thing’s direction, but Jimmy had pulled him back, and now Rohmer could see the undulating, spreading black patches on the wall all around them both on the tenth-floor landing. He could see the web-like crackling traces of energy in those spreading black patches, could see now that the wall was bulging in several places around them as they backed off. The staircase shaft was filled with the continuous avalanche sound of thunder now, and Rohmer cried out in alarm when he felt something in the wall at his back suddenly press outwards against him. He jerked away from the wall . . . and saw it bulge towards him as if it were made of canvas and something alive on the other side was trying to push through with both hands. He could see finger-like indentations.
The thing on the stairs turned back to him.
On the tenth-floor landing, Cardiff and Jimmy Devlin backed away from the three living faces which jabbered and contorted from the bulging black stains on the wall. A hand emerged from the plaster-work beneath one of those faces, groping blindly for them. That hand and arm were the colour and consistency of the plaster from which they had emerged. Another hand appeared, fingers groping and clutching. Jimmy looked around in alarm. There were spreading stains and sections of bulging brickwork all over the staircase.
“Oh Christ, they’re all coming back . . .” said Jimmy in a strangled voice as he backed away up the stairs. Cardiff was Waving the gun back and forth at the emerging nightmare. And then the thing on the stairs finally decided between the Food on offer . . . and whirled with the savagery of its dreadful hunger, shrieking with a roaring bellow that sounded like several hideous demons at once. It lunged up the staircase after Cardiff and Jimmy. Cardiff saw it coming, spun away from the things that were emerging from the staircase wall and fired at it. The shot blew part of the thing’s ‘face’ away, but did not halt its monstrous advance. Cardiff saw those mutated talons groping through the dust-choked air, knew that he had somehow escaped this thing once before . . . but that he could not hope to get away from it again. A thought came to him unbidden as it reached the tenth-floor landing, this ravaged, monstrous nightmare with its dreadful hunger and its billowing shroud of plaster dust: “Is it you?”
Suddenly too weak to lift his gun, knowing that it would do no good anyway, Cardiff saw it come. He hoped that the first Horror of its embrace would take him away quickly, hoped that while it fed the other two could get away . . .
Something exploded by his shoulder; something that gushed white foam and hissed even more angrily than the thing which was bearing down on him. Cardiff was suddenly soaked by the gushing, white flurrying of that ‘something’ and staggered to the banister as someone pushed past him in a welter of foam and spray.
It was Barbara. And she was striding past him, holding the fire extinguisher that she had torn from the wall on the landing above. Keeping the nozzle trained directly on the thing, she strode across the landing towards it. A shroud of white liquid splattered over the thing’s head, coating it. Grim-faced, teeth set, she quickly flashed the nozzle from side to side so that the entire upper half of the thing’s head and torso were covered in the stuff. And Barbara yelled at the thing as she advanced: “Get! Out! Of! My! Head!”
She could hear it now. Not the bellowing and screaming that the thing made as it raised mutated claws to its face, but the other sounds that it was making in her head.
No, Barbaaaraa! Food, that’s all!! Just Want Eat and . . .
Barbara knew that the thing had no eyes to be blinded, but she knew from the sounds that it was making in her head that the foam and the spray were nevertheless “blinding” it in some way as it staggered back, waving its claws.
The velocity of the spray from the jet began to falter.
“Ohhh, please . . .”
And then the thing backed into the wall where the nightmare shapes were emerging. One of the disembodied arms from the wall clutched at the thing’s sodden torso, seizing a concreted fist full of the thing’s ravaged substance. Another arm was groping at its head. It snapped foam-filled jaws at the second arm, severing it and spitting it to the floor. But another arm had appeared on the other side of the thing, grabbing its shoulders. Shrieking, the thing staggered in pools of white foam, clutching blindly. Beside it, the wall bulged and coughed! Something indeterminate, man-shaped, but horribly misshapen and grey was spat from the wall and into the pool of froth at the thing’s thrashing feet. It writhed, grasped . . . and sank its face into one of the thing’s legs.
The fire extinguisher made a sound like water going down a plughole . . . and then dried up. Yelling in fear and anger and grief, Barbara swung the extinguisher underarm with all her might. The red cylinder whirled through the air and struck the thing full in the face. It tottered, and the extinguisher bounced clanging down the stairs towards Rohmer, still cowering on the ninth floor from the hands that were emerging from the wall down there. The thing tore itself free from the wall as Barbara ran back to the stairs. Jimmy seized her as she joined them, and they all scrambled hastily away up the juddering staircase. At the next landing, they looked back.
The thing was thrashing on the landing. Now, they could see that three hideous and mutated forms were clinging to it. The grey shape still clung to the thing’s leg, still worrying its head into its ‘flesh’. In the frenzied blur, it seemed that the thing had more than two arms. On the thing’s shoulders, a tentacled brown mass with a recognisably human face clung to it; like some hideous leech. The thing lashed backwards with its talons, trying to dislodge the thing, but it clung fast. And now they could see that fastened to the thing’s chest was another, more human figure than the others, this one impossibly wearing a dark business suit and clinging to that monstrous breast like some kind of adult baby trying to be suckled. The combined shrieking of the thing and the nightmare shapes that clung to it sounded as if there was wholesale slaughter taking place in a Zoo in Hell. The staircase shuddered again as thunder roared. Other arms and faces were appearing in the walls down there, clutching and beckoning like something from Dante’s inferno.
The thing bellowed and lunged sideways at the stair-rail.
It shattered.
For one second, the thing lifted his head to where Barbara stood on the eleventh floor with the others. It raised one claw towards her.
“Oh God, John. I’M SORRY!” sobbed Barbara, hands flying to her mouth in grief and distress. And in that one instant when brother and sister really did recognise each other at last, the stair-rail disintegrated with a tending, metallic screech. The thing twisted for balance, claws flailing. The Returners which were still fastened to it gibbered and ranted and squealed.
And then the thing fell from the landing and into the staircase shaft.
“JOHNNNYYY!” screamed Barbara.
The shrieking and gibbering were lost somewhere below in the explosive crashing and roaring of the Darkfall Storm and the destruction it was causing.
Rohmer was staggering up the stairs towards them. Dark and hellishly swollen shapes were falling out of the walls behind him, squirming in darkness on the landings
and staircase. The wall on the tenth-floor landing was suddenly a hellish tapestry of contorted and silently screaming grey faces, some human .. . others like nothing on earth.
“Wait . . . wait . . .” breathed Rohmer, staggering past those faces. The others saw his hideous burns, the tatters of his clothing, his singed hair and white face. His teeth and fingernails were black. He started up the stairs towards them. Struggling against nausea, Cardiff clambered down, seized his arm and dragged him up the staircase, dimly aware that the staircase below was alive with writhing, squirming, climbing shadows.
The thing that had been Barbara’s brother was gone.
But the Hordes of Hell were after them now.
Rohmer understood at last as the others dragged him up the stairs. The thing that had fallen into the staircase was just like all the others. All the others, except Bissell. He had sensed no kinship in that monstrous thing’s visage, because it had lost its mind in the Absorption by succumbing to fear; the way that Gilbert had succumbed to the fear. It was an Inferior Returner. That fact reinforced his beliefs as Cardiff and Devlin dragged at his sleeves, pulling him upwards. They reached another landing and started up a new staircase.
Something exploded far below, and Rohmer heard Devlin exclaim in a grim voice.
Glancing over the vibrating banister rail, Rohmer could see that the staircase up to the sixth floor had been wrenched from its supports in the stairway shaft and had collapsed in a roaring cloud of rubble and concrete dust. On the remaining flights of stairs below them, he could see squirming, thrashing grey-black forms crawling and tottering up through the swirling concrete dust. Something with burning yellow eyes was looking up at him. When their eyes met, it gave vent to a loud and ululating howl, like some monstrous wolf. The other things on the stairs joined in: a hellish chorus of shrieking and ranting and gibbering. It was Feeding Time for that Zoo from Hell.
The stairs beneath Rohmer’s feet juddered violently again, and now he was being dragged to the top of the flight. Even the girl was hanging on to him, the girl who had Returned . . . but Rohmer did not shrink from her now, he only smiled a ghastly smile and saw her horrified reaction to that smile as they climbed.
“What . . . do . . . we do . . .” gasped Jimmy as they moved. “When . . . we . . . get to the top?”
Cardiff ‘s breathing was a rusty wheezing: “Christ knows.”
And now they were on the top-floor landing. Above them was one more flight of stairs leading to an Exit door marked: ‘Roof’.
“If He has a helicopter up there waiting for us, then I’m a Believer,” said Jimmy. He clambered ahead up the remaining flight of stairs to the Exit door, expecting a lever-bar that he could depress and push. But there was not. It was a functional wood and steel door . . . with a functional lock. He grabbed the door handle and twisted.
The door was locked.
Jimmy wiped the blood from his face, checked his gloves and then hit the door with his shoulder. Hard. He had hoped that the force of his impact would burst the door wide open. But it did not . . . and pain seared his shoulder and the side of his neck.
“Shit!”
He stumbled back from the solid door. Behind them, down the staircase, they could hear the Hordes of Hell shrieking and gibbering and scrabbling up the office block staircase after them.
“Let me . . .” began Cardiff.
“No!” Angrily, Jimmy stood back, braced himself on the alcove walls with either hand and kicked out at the lock. Once, twice, three times . . . and the door juddered, giving a crack of light along its length. Anger fuelled now by small success, Jimmy kept on kicking.
The girl looked back over her shoulder and saw contorted, writhing shadows on the landing below them. Something shrieked, and the echoes bounced all around them.
“For God’s sake, quick, Jimmy!”
And this time, Jimmy lunged at the door again with his shoulder as he had done first, all his weight behind it. The lock shattered and the door swung open. Jimmy fell outside, carried by his own impetus, sprawling on a flecked grey surface. The alcove was suddenly lit by mad, dancing, chasing light. A chiaroscuro of white and blue and green. Shadows leaped and crawled. Behind Cardiff and Barbara, darker and more hideous shadows pounded and scrabbled through orange light towards them.
Cardiff pushed Barbara through ahead of him and then followed her. Even as he swung that door back hard to slam it into place, the inevitable horror of their situation flashed through his mind: Jimmy’s smashed the door lock. How the hell do we lock it and keep those things on the other side?
Cardiff tried not to panic; saw the heavy-duty hasp swinging on the door, the lock lying on the white-gravelled surface of the office-block roof. Strange shadows were chasing over the surface, as if some gigantic light bulb was up there, swinging around, making their shadows leap and dance. What the hell could they . . . ?
And suddenly, there was a monstrous, gibbering shadow in the alcove stairwell, reaching for them. Standing forward, Cardiff pulled the Automatic out of his inner pocket, aimed and fired.
The gun bucked in his hand. The sound was heavy and somehow flat, any possibility of echo swallowed by the peculiar atmosphere and crazy light patterns on the top of the office-block roof. The shadow screamed and clutched the dark, liquid mess that had been its face, staggering backwards. More than anything else right now, Cardiff did not want to see that face, before or after the bullet hit it.
Probably an improvement, some hopelessly casual and inappropriately calm voice said inside him, as the thing thrashed wildly back in a liquid blunder, falling back down the stairs and into its fellows, causing a momentary confusion. Hopelessly, Cardiff flung himself at the door and swung it shut, knowing that there wasn’t a hope in hell of keeping it locked against them. He leaned heavily against it.
“Look out, Cardiff!”
Jimmy was at his side again now, and Cardiff could see that he had torn what looked like a TV aerial from its mounting on the roof and was holding it like some bizarre kind of devil’s tripod. Suddenly, he knew what Jimmy intended . . . and flung the broken hasp back against its housing, holding it there tight. Jimmy jabbed downwards with the haft of the aerial, thrusting it through the hasp in place of the lock and leaning down on that hasp with all his strength and weight. The aerial haft juddered into place.
They both started back from the door, eyes fixed on it.
And then became aware of Rohmer, somewhere behind them, saying: “Look . . . Look . . .”
They turned. Barbara was kneeling, on the rooftop, not far away, looking up into the sky. And Rohmer was walking in a small circle, hands at his sides, also looking up as mad shadows and light chased all around them.
At last, they both looked. And couldn’t believe what was happening in the raging sky above them. Clouds of colour swirled and blossomed and chased and eddied, in a vast, silent whirlpool around the office block. Standing on the rooftop, they were in a calm eye of some strange and awesome hurricane. And all around and above them, the myriad colours of a supernatural rainbow bathed them in the flowing reds and greens and blues and yellows of some spectacular cosmic storm. They were somehow centre-stage in some bizarre planetarium. Awestruck, they watched that firestorm of light and cloud in a domed funnel all around.
“The Darkfall . . .” said Rohmer in a voice that was too quiet to hear. “We’re in the middle of the Darkfall. I never thought it could be . . .”
Suddenly, the sky above them exploded.
A thermal, swamping blue-white light turned the air and the surrounding canopy of electrical chaos into a hissing negative print. For an instant, their four gigantic shadows leaped across the gravelled roof of the office block as they flinched from that explosion. The hissing negative images dissolved away again, and now they could see another chasing crack of electric blue splitting the whirling chaos of the Darkfall storm; a crepuscular shattering of that dome by another ferocious blue-lightning bolt. Jagged blue-white lightning cracked across that massive chaotic c
anopy in a roaring avalanche of sound. Another hissing negative black-white swamped them, momentarily negating the whirling St Elmo’s fire all around. For one incredible second, as a third Darkfall crack of thunder rent the air, it seemed to Cardiff that their very presence on the roof had caused the sky to erupt like that. He turned to the others, saw their look of new horror and then jerked his head skywards again as a further massive blue-white fracture of the sky appeared . . . and that fracture suddenly erupted from the canopy with sizzling deadliness towards them.
Cardiff tried to shout a warning, but Jimmy had already thrown himself bodily at Barbara and they both fell heavily to the shale—an instant before the thunderbolt hit the roof.
The Darkfall bolt had been drawn by the partially glassed canopy which covered the elevator housing. Cardiff covered his head with his hands as the canopy exploded with a detonating roar in a firestorm of sparks, concrete and whirling glass. The rooftop juddered beneath them and chunks of plaster and concrete whirled into the sky. Jimmy lay on top of Barbara, covering her head with his hands and waiting for the chunk of concrete which would end it all for them. A part of him felt that it might be the best way. But now the roaring detonation was over; the fireball of sparks had returned to the sky, and the debris had scattered over the roof without damage to them. Jimmy rolled over and saw Cardiff scrabbling towards them on hands and knees, checking his clothing for tears.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, we’re okay.”
“It’s the Darkfall, Mr Cardiff,” said Barbara. “All around us. We’re at the top, at the peak of its power. I can sense it.”
“Where the hell is Rohmer?” asked Cardiff.
“Dead, I hope,” said Jimmy.
“Don’t say that, Jimmy,” returned Barbara.
Twenty-five feet away, Rohmer was already climbing to his feet, looking in awe at the thirty-foot ragged hole that had appeared in the top of the office-block roof. The canopy and concrete ceiling over the elevator shaft had been blown apart and smoke was drifting up through the aperture.
