by Simon Clark
chapter 21
Tanshelf High sprawled over three acres between cornfields and an expressway that thundered with traffic. I’d been schooled there and so had Eve. For years, parents complained that the school was too remote from Tanshelf; finally, they’d got their way. A new one had been built closer to town. Although the old site had been zoned for redevelopment, the business community considered its out-of-the-way location as instant death to any commercial opportunity. They kept their cash in the bank. Tanshelf High kept itself to itself as it quietly rotted into the ground.
We arrived mid-afternoon. The sun shone warmly enough but the place made the blood run cold. In that scattering of blocks that housed the gym, cafeteria, classrooms, labs and staffroom was the swimming-pool block. Once it had meant a welcome break from class, plus the opportunity to duck friends and ogle girls in their swimsuits. Now it brought more recent memories charging back. The long narrow cell in the pool. The hours of darkness. The fear. The image of my mother floating dead in the water.
As I drove the car through the school’s busted gates I glanced at Eve beside me. Far stronger than I’d given her credit for, she gazed at the school buildings, determined to get in there and find the evidence she needed. In the back seat Madeline’s eyes took in the derelict buildings with their boarded windows. Her face held no expression, so I couldn’t tell if she was afraid or simply curious about what we might find. On occasions, I’d picked up on her emotions; however, nothing reached me at that moment.
‘If they’ve got any sense,’ I said, as I stopped by the main building, ‘they’ll have got out when we escaped.’
‘Don’t expect them to do the logical thing.’ Madeline sounded matter-of-fact. ‘They don’t think like us.’
Eve spoke bluntly, ‘They don’t think like Mason and me. You’re one of them, remember?’
Madeline didn’t answer back. Again there was that sense she knew her place in the pecking order. Her demeanour was submissive in the presence of Eve.
Eve drove the point home. ‘Not only one of them, I don’t trust you either.’
‘Eve, she’s on our side.’
‘Why? Because she told you so – or because she looks like you, so she can’t be evil?’ Eve opened the door. ‘By the way, a car kept driving by our house today. I didn’t recognize the people. Maybe your special friend here telephoned the Echomen when we were asleep.’
‘Eve—’
‘Watch your back, Mason.’ Eve climbed out the car. ‘Madeline might be only biding her time.’
Despite the air of decay about the place the authorities had made the classrooms blocks secure from intruders. They might be worthless structures that were covered with peeling paint and rampant ivy growth, and containing nothing more precious then air once breathed by 3000 hormone-fuelled teenagers, but the windows were covered with mesh screens, while doors were not only locked but padlocked.
‘I was unconscious when they brought me here,’ I said, as we walked along an overgrown path. ‘Did anyone see how they took us into the swimming-pool building?’
Madeline simply gave a little shake of her head. If you ask me her mind had been wiped during the transformation. All she seemed to recall from her old life was her name.
Eve shivered. ‘They covered my head with a blanket. I didn’t see a thing. All I know is there were lots of them.’
‘Lots?’ That made me pause. ‘I only ever saw around half a dozen.’
‘Trust me, Mason. There are dozens of the monsters.’
We moved on through grounds that were near jungle. I recognized a brick sculpture of an athlete built by the art class. Once it stood in the middle of a neatly mown lawn near the gym. Now only the top of a red-brick hand stretched above the bushes, having long since drowned in a tidal wave of greenery. By the time we reached the swimming-pool block I could have vomited. The pale concrete walls seemed to ooze dread. You hear of people suffering from panic attacks – at that moment I began to know its reality. My breathing went shallow, my heart raced, a taste like mouldy bread filled my mouth. We pushed through the long grass that touched our hips. Here, a way had been trampled where the Echomen had approached the side door. I took a deep breath; this was something I had to do. The Echomen didn’t worry me, it was the thought of finding my mother still floating in the pool. By now the long period of immersion would be making a mess of her face.
‘I’ll go first,’ I told them, as I surged toward the door. ‘Damn. They’ve sealed it.’ For a moment we stared at the massive nails that they’d driven into the timbers in such a way as to hold the door shut. ‘We’ll need tools to get it open.’
Madeline scanned the stark walls. ‘There’s no other way in?’
‘There are no windows at ground level and the main door’s padlocked.’
‘I’m not going yet.’ Eve’s expression was determined. ‘I’m going to stay here until I’ve found enough evidence to have the police swarming all over the place.’
‘I’ll help you, Eve,’ Madeline said.
Eve grunted. ‘Don’t bother. I never asked for any help from you.’
‘We’ll check the classroom blocks.’ As much as anything that was intended to steer Eve away from a confrontation with Madeline (hell’s bells, Eve wanted to kick Madeline in the head – I didn’t doubt it for a moment).
Once more we waded through the green lake of grass. Brambles snagged our ankles, thorns pricked through our clothes. That minor physical discomfort was one of the more pleasant aspects of this wilderness. Though the sun might be shining, it wouldn’t prevent any of the Echofolk, who’d spotted three intruders, from dashing out of their lair to beat us to pulp in broad daylight. I mean, who’d hear your death screams in a place as remote as this? Eve moved in a resolute manner. She was here to get the job done. Madeline expressed her loyalty to me by sticking close. From time to time she pushed back her hair where it fell across her face. I noticed the Y-shaped scar that was identical to mine.
When I glanced through a grove of trees I saw Natsaf-Ty. He did that thing of appearing to gaze at me through his closed eyelids. Yellow butterflies flitted around his dried husk of a body. One loose end of a bandage swung in the light breeze.
‘Mason?’ That was Eve’s curt whisper. ‘What have you seen?’
‘Uh, nothing.’ I glanced at both Eve and Madeline to check if they’d noticed the ancient Egyptian mummy standing in the shadows. They hadn’t. Or they weren’t letting on that they’d noticed anything strange. Well … when your childhood imaginary friend returns, what does that say about your state of mind? A good sign? Or symptom of impending madness?
If anything, it seemed to me that our meagre force of three had risen to four. With a renewed sense of purpose I homed in on a classroom block. More peeling paint, cracked boards, torn roof felt – this was the place where I studied history.
‘There’s no point in going through the doors; they’re padlocked.’ I tugged at the steel mesh that had been used to secure the windows; the same mesh that had been used to form the roof of our makeshift prison cells. Eve and Madeline began to test the mesh too, searching for a loose corner. In between tugging the mesh I tried to peer through the windows. Not only were the panes crusted with grime it was dark in there. For all I knew there could have been an Echoman staring out at me.
‘The nails are moving on this one,’ Madeline said.
Eve pulled a carving knife from her boot. She noticed my reaction to the knife. ‘I wasn’t going to come here without a weapon. Dear heaven, I wish I’d got a machine gun. Out of the way, Madeline.’
Eve attacked the nails like she wanted to attack those Echomen who’d murdered our mother.
‘Let me,’ I said.
‘You think I can’t manage?’ She ripped out the first nail. ‘Grab the screen. Let me know when it starts to give.’
In less than three minutes the screen had come free. A minute after that I climbed into my old classroom. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine seeing my old friends t
here as fourteen year olds when we listened to Mr Grasse (or ‘Seedy’ as we called him. Grass Seed? OK, classroom wit was never sophisticated). The place was dry; it retained that distinctive school smell. You only have to walk into a classroom after years of not stepping foot inside of one, and that smell brings with it an entire cargo of memories – of friends, bullies, practical jokes, nice teachers, mean ones, the pangs of forgetting homework, or the thrill of dashing out the door at the sound of the last bell. Those recollections rushed me as I stood in the gloomy void. Although the furniture had gone there were still posters on the walls: Roman Emperors, an Inca timeline, a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, complete with the hand-drawn addition of a fart jetting from Orville’s bottom. Remember classroom wit?
‘Is it clear?’ Eve whispered.
‘Looks deserted.’ I helped the pair through the window.
Eve looked round. ‘My old classroom for history.’ She gave a grunt. ‘See that Blue-Tack on the wall above the window? I remember Todd firing that from a rubber band.’ Then in an instant she switched off the nostalgia. Nothing would deflect my sister. ‘Listen. We’ll go through the building room by room.’
‘We could split up?’ Madeline suggested.
‘No way,’ I told them. ‘We stick together.’
Classrooms on the ground floor were duplicates of one another. Posters on the walls, rooms empty of furniture but bursting with memories. We ascended to the next floor by stairs I’d charged up and down maybe a thousand times before.
Eve rushed ahead.
‘Slow down,’ I hissed. ‘We don’t know if there’s anyone in here.’
I was proved right. There were people. Lots of them.
chapter 22
The next floor: blinds had been drawn in the classrooms. Despite the sunshine outside in here it was a gloomy light that had a dirty look to it. Dirty light? How can you have dirty light? Yet, that’s how it appeared. The glow coming through the window blinds had a soiled aspect. What illuminated the classroom upstairs was a grubby yellow. I didn’t want to be touched by light like that, as if it would contaminate my skin if it laid its grubby beams on me.
Eve whispered in alarm as she peered into the room, ‘It’s not empty.’ The blade glinted as her fist tightened around the knife handle.
‘Keep back,’ I hissed.
But Eve surged into the room as if on a suicide mission.
‘Eve.’ I rushed after her, ready to fight for our lives. Madeline followed me, her hand protectively pressed against my back.
‘Don’t worry,’ Eve sighed. ‘They’re dead.’
Piled here were what appeared to be giant versions of the frozen turkeys you can buy in supermarkets. The iced poultry forms something like a hard, rounded boulder, shrink-wrapped in tough plastic. This was similar. As many as two dozen human corpses had been piled against the classroom wall, partly obscuring posters of Aztec pyramids. The bodies had been folded up like foetuses. Then they’d been vac-packed. Each body formed a lumpy boulder shape with the limbs scrunched in tight to the torso and the head forced sideways so it lay pressed against the shoulder.
‘They’ve shrink-wrapped their own dead?’ Eve was mystified. ‘Whatever for?’
I crouched to examine an old man in a bag. ‘They don’t know what happens to a human body.’
‘They need to observe the process of decay,’ Madeline added. ‘The Echomen are learning about you.’
Eve’s eyes roved from both myself to Madeline; the way we answered like a pair of twins reading one another’s minds made her uneasy. ‘Or maybe they just don’t like the stink of death.’
Madeline reached out to lightly press one of the hard vacuum packs. ‘Mason and I talked about it. We concluded that Echomen are the product of an alien species. They act like a time bomb to disrupt human progress.’
‘To prevent us from developing interstellar space travel, which would threaten the security of aliens in neighbouring planetary systems.’
Eve watched as Madeline pressed her finger against the plastic. A green slime oozed out of the eyes of a shrink-wrapped woman to form a layer between the inner plastic and her dead skin. The liquid made squishing sounds.
Without taking her gaze from the cadaver’s face Eve grunted, ‘Aliens? Remote control security systems? You two got it all worked out.’
Madeline pushed the plastic membrane harder; the pressure caused one of the woman’s eyes to bulge from the head, like a new-laid egg popping out of a chicken’s rear. I even heard a muffled flupp. The dead were rotting at a furious rate.
When Madeline pressed the shrink-wrapped cheek, causing a black tongue to swim through the lips with all the slippery speed of an eel from its underwater hole Eve barked, ‘Stop that!’
Eve shoved Madeline. OK, so she meant to move my deviant twin away from the vac-pac dead, but Madeline blundered against them causing one from the top to fall on to the classroom floor. The impact made the bag burst open in a flood of juice produced by putrefaction during the warm spring days. Once the compressive force of the plastic membrane had been released so violently, the arms, legs and head of a dead youth unfurled itself.
‘My God, it’s alive.’ Eve got ready to fight.
The wave of bad meat stench punched me in the nose. I reeled back like it really had been a physical blow. Meanwhile, the corpse straightened its arms so quickly the hands splashed into that growing pool of crap that leaked from its internal organs and out through every hole in its body – God-given or otherwise. With the pressure of the chest released it appeared to suck in air with a tremendous gurgle that had the intensity of a whole bathtub of water being dragged down the plughole. Its eyes pressed out against the eyelids to deform them into two brown domes, then the eyeballs themselves squirted out just as the woman’s had done a moment ago. Once more, with a loud flupp. Clearly, gas had built up considerable force inside the corpse; the release of the vacuum pack allowed it to exit, spluttering, sighing, burping from wherever it had been contained.
The stink hit Eve and Madeline, too. They rocked backwards as if hit by a hurricane, their faces screwed tight with nausea.
I gulped. ‘It’s dead … get out of here….’
We bundled ourselves chaotically from the room, with me slamming the door shut behind me so prematurely the bottom of it knocked my heel. That stench hurt a whole lot worse though. It felt as if I’d poured acid down my throat.
Eve coughed; the flavour of the dead even coated itself on her tongue. Then she pushed Madeline in the chest. That symbiosis again, I felt the bruising shove, too, as Madeline gasped with shock.
Eve pointed the knife at Madeline. ‘You did that on purpose. You knew the bag would burst open!’
‘I lost my balance when you pushed me.’ Madeline pressed her hand to her breastbone where Eve’s shove hurt her.
‘Why touch the damn things, then?’
‘To help you. I thought they might have given us clues.’
‘Clues? You bust one open so the stink would stop us looking any closer.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Madeline dropped her gaze in that submissive way.
‘You will be sorry.’
‘Eve,’ I panted, ‘this stench is going to kill us if we stick around much longer.’
I hoped she’d take the hint to return to the fresh air; instead, my sister marched upstairs to the top floor of the classroom block. If anything, however, the next floor was worse – much worse.
chapter 23
For the moment, leaving the God awful stink was the only matter of importance as we raced up the staircase to the top floor. It didn’t smell like the level we’d just left, it didn’t exude the familiar school smell either. This place smelt wrong for different reasons. Aromas of the farmyard rolled into us as we cleared the top step. The kind of stink that makes you think of beasts sleeping in none too fresh hay. Although Eve hadn’t voiced her doubts that the Echomen were the work of a non-human race, she’d clearly thought it from her reaction to our statements
in the mortuary of shrink-wrapped corpses. What I witnessed now was, for me, evidence we were dealing with beings that had no morals, scruples, conscience; hell, they hadn’t a shred of an idea what pain is. Because the classrooms were full of pain. They housed agony. This, the epitome of torture.
On the top floor of the block a central hallway ran from one end to the other. Leading off from that hallway at regular intervals – classrooms: six of them. The same classrooms where I sat and learned about the history of humanity. Humanity existed here no longer. As for mercy …
We moved slowly along the stinking hallway to look in through the glass panes in the doors. In classrooms, bathed in a dirty, yellow light that oozed through closed blinds like puss oozes through a bandage, were figures. Around a dozen per classroom.
‘Who are they?’ Madeline asked.
‘Your people, probably.’ Eve’s voice became a whisper.
‘Now do you see?’ I grimaced. ‘This is proof. Whoever did this to them can’t be human.’
We moved on. At the end of the block lay another stairwell that would take us back to ground level, and that beautiful open window that led to wonderful fresh air, far from this reek of dying men and women.
Eve paused. Through the window in the classroom door she regarded those figures that were nine-tenths dead. Had this been part of a test? Inflict injury; make a note of their ability to perform tasks with half a face missing, or a foot hacked off; then select another specimen. Shoot a woman in the guts; time how long it takes her to die.
