Crawlers

by Sam Enthoven

  Jasmine looked at her teacher. If this was Ms Gresham’s best effort to reassure them, it wasn’t working. In fact it just made things worse: something was wrong here, badly wrong, Jasmine knew it. She stood on tiptoe, craned her neck and looked over at the Barbican’s main entrance. Six angry people in Shakespearean costume – actors from the play – were arguing with glassy-eyed Barbican staff there and meeting with just as little response as Ms Gresham had.

  ‘Someone must have known about the alarm,’ said Jasmine, thinking aloud. ‘Why did they lock the doors? Why won’t they let us out?’

  ‘We’re trapped here,’ said Samantha.

  ‘What’re you talking about, trapped here?’ asked Lauren, her voice rising. ‘Why would we be trapped here?’

  ‘Calm down, Lauren,’ said Ms Gresham. ‘And Samantha, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep observations like that to yourself. This will all be over in a moment, I’m sure.’

  Still on tiptoe, Jasmine craned her head round as best she could, looking for clues about what was going on.

  There! She saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye: something had dropped from above to land in the crowd.

  The hubbub was pierced by a scream.

  Jasmine’s eye was caught by another falling object, closer this time, over to her left. Now more were falling, and more, until the objects were dropping all over the room.

  More screams. Jasmine felt the crowd crush in around her, flinching as one.

  ‘What’s happening?’ a woman next to her was saying, her voice high and shrill. ‘What are they trying to get away from? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s—?’

  Then, unbelievably, the whole ceiling seemed to fall in.

  Ben ducked, instinctively throwing his arms up over his head. But the impact when it came wasn’t like a ceiling collapse; it was more like . . . what? The touch on his head was light, scrabbling, ticklish. Shuddering, Ben batted it away hard without thinking. He straightened up, opened his eyes, and saw pandemonium.

  All over the foyer people seemed to have gone into some sort of dancing frenzy – twisting, slapping at themselves, waving their arms about. ‘Get it off me!’ roared Mr Clissold, crashing into him and almost knocking him over. ‘Get it off! AAAAAGH!’

  Ben’s eyes went wide.

  One of the crawling creatures he’d seen earlier was on Mr Clissold’s back. Quickly but very deliberately it made its way up the centre of his spine, out of reach of his slapping hands. Now it was between his shoulder blades. It waited there a moment, reared up on its rubbery legs and then, before Ben could do anything more than gape, it clamped itself to the back of Mr Clissold’s neck.

  Mr Clissold went rigid. His eyes rolled back. Then he fell to the ground.

  Ben stared at his teacher’s prone body for a moment, blinking, unable to process what he was seeing. Then suddenly he noticed space all around him: the pressure of the crowd was gone. This, he realized, was for the simple reason that what had happened to Mr Clissold was happening to others too.

  Everywhere people were screaming, going rigid and falling to the floor.

  ‘Aaaaaaah!’ Jasmine was shrieking like a banshee. She couldn’t help it. Some kind of horrible spider had dropped from the ceiling and was clinging to her stomach. She tried to brush it away: there was a repulsive sticky sensation on the side of her hand where she made contact with it, but the creature just clung on stubbornly. It reared up. Jasmine slapped at it again, and this time she dislodged it. But as the creature hit the floor it righted itself, dodged left, climbed her leg, and now it was crawling up her back.

  Jasmine froze to the spot, frantic with horror and disgust. As it climbed, she could feel the tips of its feet through the material of her school bl—

  The blazer. Jasmine grabbed her lapels and yanked the jacket off. Ripping her arms out of the sleeves, with trembling fingers she threw it down on the floor.

  Still the creature was undeterred. Jasmine watched as first one then the rest of its scrabbling limbs found their way out from underneath the cloth. It was coming for her again. In another second it was going to jump up her legs again, but this time—

  RUTCH!

  The pointed tip of an umbrella speared it where it stood. Its legs quivered for a moment, then went still.

  ‘Yuck,’ said Ms Gresham. She pulled the umbrella out of the creature’s body and wiped the prong on the side of her shoe with a grimace.

  ‘What . . .?’ gasped Jasmine. ‘What is that thing, miss?’

  ‘Right now I suggest we don’t hang around to find out,’ said Ms Gresham. ‘We’ll try for the lifts. Everyone follow me!’

  As Jasmine scrambled after Ms Gresham she saw a blur of horrors: shrieking faces; bulging eyes; kicking legs. Everywhere she looked there were the wriggling movements of more of the creatures – on torsos, in hair, scampering over mouths and ears and nostrils. Jasmine glimpsed all this but there was no time to take it in; that would come later, when her mind would play everything back to her in full and excruciating detail. For now she was like an animal, her whole being stripped down to the most primal response there is. For now, Jasmine just ran for her life.

  ‘This way!’ Ms Gresham shouted, holding the door as Jasmine piled into the metal cubicle, behind Samantha and Lauren. ‘And you!’ she added. ‘You boys! Come on – in here!’

  The voice snapped Ben out of his paralysis. He saw the lift with the lady outside it – the one sheltered spot in the room – and he ran for it.

  At the threshold he hesitated. The lift was small, perhaps only a couple of metres square, and already packed with people. But hands shoved him on and more bodies squashed in behind him.

  ‘Let’s go, miss!’ said a girl’s voice. ‘Come on! Let’s get out of here!’

  The lady teacher shepherded in one more student (a girl with her hair over her eyes, Ben noticed) before finally forcing her way in herself. The hot crush of bodies in the lift became tighter still.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Whoever can reach it, press the button for Level Two. There’s another exit with a walkway to street level there, I think.’

  ‘Doors closing,’ said a recorded female voice. With agonizing slowness the lift’s metal panels slid shut.

  The screams from outside were muffled.

  Silence.

  Ben looked around numbly. They had lost Mr Clissold, but he realized that the rest of the tutor group, amazingly, was still intact: it had been Josh and Hugo who had shoved him into the lift, and white-faced Robert’s finger was still on its control panel. As well as the lady teacher there were four girls in the lift too. One of them wasn’t wearing her blazer any more, but even after the madness of the previous few minutes Ben had no trouble recognizing the beautiful girl from earlier. Then any further thoughts he might have had were abruptly interrupted.

  Lauren’s lower lip wobbled, her eyes squeezed shut, she threw back her head and she wailed.

  Jasmine stared at her. The noise Lauren was making was like the scream of a baby – a rising cry of anguished complaint that bounced around the tiny metal cubicle, setting everyone’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Calm down, Lauren,’ said Ms Gresham. ‘Will you calm down, please?’

  Purple-faced, Lauren just drew breath and wailed again.

  ‘She’s claustrophobic, miss,’ said Samantha helpfully, over the din. ‘She can’t stand small spaces. She just freaks out completely.’

  Jasmine realized they had more pressing things to worry about. ‘Miss,’ she asked, ‘why aren’t we moving?’

  ‘Maximum safe weight limit exceeded,’ said the female voice from the lift’s speakers. The voice was rich and musical, and probably intended to have a calming effect on its audience. ‘Maximum safe weight limit exceeded,’ it repeated – doing the opposite. ‘Doors opening . . .’

  ‘No, no, no!’ said someone. Ben was surprised to find it was himself.

  ‘Hold the door, Robert!’ barked Josh. ‘Hit the button, Robert, quick!’

&nbs
p; Robert jabbed at the panel frantically. The doors ground to a halt halfway across.

  A big, bespectacled, balding man dressed in black thrust his stricken face in through the gap. ‘Let me in!’ he shouted, hammering on the outside of the metal. ‘You’ve got to let me in! They’re right behind me! They’re—!’

  The man went rigid. His eyes rolled up in his head; for a second only the whites were visible before he fell back out of sight. The doors closed again. Now Lauren wasn’t the only one making a noise: everybody in the lift was shouting, swearing, yelling, screaming.

  ‘Quiet,’ said Ms Gresham. ‘Quiet!’ She was a good teacher: when she wanted quiet she got it – even, for the moment, from Lauren. ‘Listen,’ she said.

  ‘Maximum safe weight limit exceeded,’ the lift’s recorded voice repeated. ‘Maximum safe weight limit exceeded. Maximum safe weight limit exc—’

  ‘There are too many of us in here,’ said Ms Gresham. ‘I think . . .’ She paused. ‘I think one of us is going to have to get out.’

  Everyone stared at her. The dreadful truth of her words sank in straight away. The lift was not going to move with the number of people currently inside it. To lighten the load and save the others, someone would have to be sacrificed.

  But that wasn’t their only problem.

  Ms Gresham frowned. ‘Did one of you touch my foot?’ she asked. ‘I . . . felt something.’

  No one answered.

  Ms Gresham blinked. ‘Now it’s on my leg. None of you are nudging me by mistake, are you? Because . . .’

  She trailed off. Her eyes filled with a kind of hopeless horror. ‘Now, nobody panic,’ she said. ‘But I’m rather afraid one of those . . . things has made it into the lift with us.’

  Her last few words were drowned out by moans and screams from the lift’s other occupants. The little metal cubicle had been crammed and claustrophobic enough already; now, as everyone inside it struggled and shoved, madly trying to get away but with nowhere to go, it became intolerable.

  ‘It’s on my back,’ said Ms Gresham, into the rising pandemonium. ‘If we can get it on the floor maybe we can stamp on it. I can’t reach! Can’t one of you get it off me? It’s under my jacket. Now it’s under my collar. It’s . . . For God’s sake, someone help me!’

  Jasmine saw the pale, eager legs emerge at the nape of her teacher’s neck, touching the short hairs there. But Jasmine’s arms were pressed against her sides by the crush. She was powerless.

  Ms Gresham went rigid, then limp. The press of people in the lift was so tight that there was nowhere for her to fall: she just stayed there, head lolling, with the creature clamped to the back of her neck.

  Everyone just stared at her, too horrified to make a sound. For several seconds the silence was broken only by the machine-voice uselessly repeating its message: ‘Maximum safe weight limit exceeded. Maximum safe weight limit exceeded.’

  Then the teacher twitched. Her chin lifted from her chest. Her head, still with the creature attached to it, came upright on her shoulders. Her eyelids trembled, then opened. Slowly, as if with great effort, she turned to face Robert and fixed him with a glassy stare.

  ‘Open the door.’ The voice that came from her mouth sounded harsh, guttural – not at all like it had before.

  ‘I – I’m sorry?’ stammered Robert.

  A scowl crossed the teacher’s brow. Wrenching one arm free from the surrounding crush of bodies, she reached across and took hold of Robert’s wrist.

  ‘Open the door!’ she roared.

  ‘She’s . . .’ said Robert, hardly able to believe it. ‘She’s pulling my finger off the door button!’

  ‘Doors opening . . .’ the recorded voice intoned mercilessly as they slid apart again.

  For a frozen moment Jasmine stared out at the scene beyond.

  She saw heads and shoulders of an army of what had been ordinary adults crowding at the door. She saw a forest of hands reaching in. She saw eyes: glassy, mindless, staring, their pupils like bottomless black pits.

  Then:

  ‘Gaaaaaaaaaaah!’

  Jasmine turned and glimpsed a flash of blonde hair as Samantha slammed into Ms Gresham – and shoved her out.

  The forest of hands grasped the teacher and bore her out of sight. The army of staring adults fell back for a moment. Samantha teetered on the grooves that marked the lift’s boundary. Hugo grabbed her. Robert hammered the button.

  ‘Doors closing,’ said the voice again – and then, at last, ‘Going up.’

  8:09 PM.

  ‘Less than four hours left now, my Queen.’

  Steadman’s sudden voice from the pit’s wall-mounted speakers almost broke my concentration.

  ‘Three hours and fifty-one minutes, to be precise,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘What’s your situation?’

  ‘I now control the Barbican,’ I said aloud, through the young man’s mouth. ‘I took the staff first: I used them to seal the exits, then drove everyone else into the foyer, where—’

  ‘I know,’ said Steadman.

  ‘You . . . know?’ In the darkness of my pit I waited, puzzled.

  ‘You are surprised, my Queen?’ said Steadman. ‘You thought I would let you loose without keeping an eye on you?’ He chuckled drily. ‘What you’ve achieved so far is . . . promising. One begins to see why the Corporation felt driven to do what it did to stop you in sixteen sixty-six. But we are stronger now. I have eyes everywhere. I am watching you – never forget it.

  ‘Besides which,’ he went on, ‘you are mistaken. You do not, in fact, control everyone in the Barbican. Right now, at this moment, I can see that eight . . . children’ – he said the word with disgust – ‘are escaping from the foyer in one of the elevators.’

  My turn: ‘I know.’

  There was a short silence, during which my brief satisfaction at giving Steadman a taste of his own medicine was somewhat spoiled by the knowledge that I was still utterly at his mercy. If he chose to end his ‘bet’ now, he could simply leave. The Barbican was a deathtrap, and I would die his prisoner.

  ‘Well,’ said Steadman, ‘I’ve taken steps to ensure they can’t call for help. What I want to know is, what are you going to do about them?’

  ‘The children have not escaped, Steadman,’ I explained. ‘I too now have eyes all over the building – including,’ I added, ‘in that lift. Everything is under my control.’

  ‘We’ll know by midnight,’ was Steadman’s answer.

  8:13 PM.

  ‘Level Two,’ said the voice. ‘Doors opening . . .’

  The group braced themselves for fresh horror as the doors slid back.

  Nobody there. Nothing moving. Silence.

  ‘Right,’ said Josh in his best take-charge voice. ‘Everybody follow me as quickly and as quietly as you possibly can.’

  They stepped out of the lift and onto a landing.

  As elsewhere in the building, the walls of the corridor in which the group were now standing were made of concrete – grey and rough and harsh-looking. But the patterned carpet of the foyer had given way to a brick floor, smoothed to a ceramic sheen. Every footstep anyone took sent an echoing clopping sound into the surrounding silence. This made Ben feel very exposed and vulnerable, so to dispel the feeling he tried to occupy his brain by re-counting the people in the group.

  There were eight of them now. Four boys. Four girls. No adults.

  ‘Now what?’ asked the blonde girl – the one who’d pushed the teacher out of the lift. She stepped forward and looked straight into Josh’s eyes.

  ‘We look for that way out your teacher mentioned,’ said Josh. He looked back. ‘All right?’

  After a pause to show that Josh’s leadership was strictly temporary, Samantha nodded.

  As they set off down the corridor, Jasmine looked around the group to see how everyone was doing. Though no one seemed hurt, they were all very pale. Lauren’s lower lip was trembling again, and the eyes of one of the boys looked dangerously watery. Jasmine couldn’t bla
me them: she wasn’t feeling too solid herself. The group’s current superficial quiet was not going to last.

  They came to a security gate. Beyond it were wooden double doors with a green ExIT sign above them. Through the doors’ glass portholes they could see another concrete walkway, with open night sky at its far end. But the way to the doors was barred by the security gate. It was the exact height and width of the passage and made of black painted metal. Samantha strode forward and kicked it: the resounding bang made everyone wince, but of course it didn’t budge.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Does that mean we’re stuck here?’ Robert asked. ‘Does that mean . . . we can’t get out?’

  ‘I don’t know, Robert,’ said Ben patiently. ‘It’s starting to look that way. Yes.’

  ‘But . . . those spider-things,’ said Robert, ‘and the people downstairs – they might come up here and—’

  ‘Shut up, fat boy,’ said Samantha. ‘We need to think.’

  Robert’s face reddened. Sticky tears began to run down his cheeks.

  Samantha strikes again, thought Jasmine. She took a deep breath. ‘Who’s got a phone?’

  The whole group stared at her blankly.

  ‘Mine was in my blazer,’ said Jasmine, keeping her voice level. ‘So which one of us is going to call for help? Come on, it’s a simple question.’

  The girls snapped out of their trance and began to pat pockets.

  ‘No signal,’ said Samantha. ‘Haven’t had one since we got here.’

  Lauren shut her useless mobile and shook her head; Lisa too. Jasmine turned to Josh and looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Josh blithely, ‘we’re not allowed mobiles at our school.’

  Jasmine blinked. Not having a working phone wasn’t something to be casual about: unless they got lucky and found a landline, they had no way of calling for help.

  ‘All right, next question,’ she said. ‘Does anyone actually know any other ways out of here?’

  No one answered.

  ‘Then,’ said Jasmine firmly, ‘we need to find somewhere to hide. Quickly too. We don’t know how long we’re going to be alone up here.’