Sam stopped. It was difficult to see clearly in the dark but it appeared that a space had been made through the middle of a bush. It was flattened and the branches were broken.
"What do you think?" she said.
Billy stood beside her and looked at the spot. "What do you think?"
She tried not to sigh and only half-succeeded. For the last half an hour he had been becoming increasingly vague and useless. It was as if he was regressing into pre-island Billy.
"It's better than anything else we've seen."
"Okay then," he said. "Lead on."
She stepped gingerly over the bush and the darkness of the forest consumed her. She could hear him behind her, breathing on her neck. She couldn't see more than a foot in front of her. Any track that might have been there was invisible.
She considered turning back but then she heard the voices.
They were just soft whispers at first. She couldn't make out words or even individual sounds.
There was something comforting about them, something that made her check her better sense at the door and continue into the pitch black forest.
She walked on and forgot all about Billy behind her. Somehow she even managed to forget about the forest itself. It was as if the soft ground disappeared and was replaced by hard, solid wood. She could no longer hear the creatures braying softly in the distance or the insects buzzing in the undergrowth. She could hear music and laughter.
'Kill him,' said a voice so loud that she stopped and turned around.
The illusion was shattered and she was suddenly back in the forest with Billy.
She stopped walking and looked at him. His eyes were glazed over like glass balls.
"Billy?" she said.
She felt his rough palms on her waist. His grip was strong but at first she didn't try to get away. The blank expression on his face gave nothing away. It might have been her imagination but his eyes seemed to be larger.
"Billy," she said again.
'Run away.’
"Billy you're scaring me."
His jaw dropped and his tongue rolled lazily out of his mouth. It was covered in the black things, crawling around like a million tiny insects.
She tried to pull away but he held her tight.
'He's going to kill you. Kill him first.'
"Billy please," she said. She hated the begging tone in her voice but she was scared now.
He didn't move.
"Let go," she said and, with an almighty convulsion, she managed to wrench one of his hands away, but as soon as it was gone it was back again. She screamed with surprise and fear. "You're hurting me."
'Kick him. Kick him in the balls.'
For the first time she seemed to hear the voice. It was not her own but it gave good advice. Billy didn't seem to have heard it.
Samantha was too close to actually kick him but she brought her knee up into his crotch as hard as she could.
He didn't let go. He didn't seem to have noticed anything had happened at all. With that much power she would have expected him to fall on the floor, clutching himself in agony. But he just stood there, the same dumb passive glaze on his face.
'He's going to kill you,' said the voice in her head and for the first time she actually believed it.
Samantha struggled. She thrashed from side to side, punched his chest and kicked his shins. Real panic was beginning to rise in her chest now and the worst part was that he didn't even seem to notice that she was struggling. He just stood there, solid as a rock.
The effort was exhausting and eventually she had to stop just to catch her breath. He continued to do nothing except hold her waist.
If he had been a rock, rather than a person, she thought, it would have been stupid to try to beat it into submission. If he was a rock it wouldn't have mattered how much she punched and kicked and begged and screamed. All that would achieve was sore hands and feet. If Billy was a rock instead of a person she would try to move herself. To wriggle and squeeze her way through a gap.
'When you run he will catch you and kill you. Just kill him now.'
That might be true, the first part anyway. If she got free his paralysis might break and he might chase her. But she thought she stood a good chance of getting away.
She wriggled her hips against his hands and slipped down. As she had hoped his hands didn't move. She slipped free from them and turned away. She looked back for long enough to see that he was still holding his hands up as if holding her.
Then she was gone, running into the forest blind.
"Samantha?" he shouted. She couldn't tell how far behind her he was but he sounded strange. He sounded scared.
'It's a trap,' said the voice and she knew it was telling the truth. She ran on as fast as she could.
30
Rachel wasn't crying anymore and that, she thought, had to be a good thing. She could hear the sea washing against the beach. It sounded cold and sounded hostile.
The ground was hard and she was covered in cuts and bruises from her run through the forest. It hurt to breath but she had to. It hurt to stand up but she forced herself to do that as well. Slowly, and far from surely, she put one foot in front of the other in an imitation of walking.
The forest seemed to grow around her, expanding with each step that she took, the beach getting further away. She had not set out to go to the beach. Her first thought had been to get away from the man. She had tried to get Millie to go with her but the girl had just stared and shaken her head.
The sky seemed almost purple. She could taste lemon on the breeze. The beach appeared spread out before her like a carpet. She fell towards it and tasted a mouthful of sand as she hit the ground.
She didn't think she would ever get up. Why would she want to? She had the sand, the sea and the sky over her head. She could sleep at last.
"There you are," said a voice.
She froze. For a moment she thought he must have found her but it didn't sound like him. This voice was softer, kinder.
"We've been waiting for you."
She swam in the words that could only mean that she was being rescued. Another boat had come for them and had been waiting for her.
Rachel rolled over with a smile on her face but what she saw was not the captain of a ship. A man stood over her. Even in the moonlight she could see the shaggy unkept look about him. He wore a vest that was covered in holes.
"Who are you?" said Rachel, her disappointment evident.
His eyes boggled in his head. They seemed somehow bigger than a normal persons eyes. "Why I'm the host of course."
"The host of what?"
"Of the Ball of course."
He offered her his hand and she took it. He lifted her to her feet easily. She followed him along the moonlit beach, a few steps back, wondering what she was going to find when they arrived. She could hear gulls and see them floating across the moon, on air currents above the sea.
It seemed that at one moment he was there and the next he was gone. Rachel stared at the space he had occupied in disbelief and wondered if she was going mad. Maybe her sleep deprived mind had made him up.
She stopped walking and turned towards to sound of the waves. The horizon was flat, there were no ships approaching, no sign of rescue. She wondered what she would do. If she was trapped here then how could she survive. She had gone past the point of feeling hungry. All she really wanted to do now was drink gallons and gallons of water.
"Are you coming Madam?"
She turned around and saw him standing by a tree. For one moment she thought she saw him in a top hat and a coat with tails. She looked down and saw that she had taken several steps towards the sea without realising she was doing so.
Suddenly drowning did not seem like such a good idea. She turned around and followed the strange man into the woods.
31
Samantha ran. She ran until her chest hurt and it felt as if she was breathing poison. Then she ran some more. She ran from the memory of Billy with his fly
eyes holding her as solid as a mountain. She bounced off tree trunks and scraped her arms on thorny bushes. Her greasy hair trailed behind her.
She went further and further into the forest with no idea where she might end up. She could see nothing except the blackness.
"Sam wait," called Billy. He kept calling her, his voice never seeming to get further away. He sounded worried, maybe even hurt, but she didn't stop. All she saw was his tongue hanging from his mouth, those black dots crawling over it like ants at a picnic.
'He's going to kill you.'
She ignored the voice, it was only in her head, it wasn't a real thing, she realised. It was a phantom of her own fear, a dark thought finding a voice in her terror. That or something else. It was the something else that scared her most of all.
"Sam please," called Billy in a whine that almost pulled at her heart strings. She shook it away. She couldn't take the chance. She dug down deep and managed to find the strength to speed up further.
She lost track of how long she ran for. At a certain point she no longer even had to make an effort. It was as if her legs had become springs and slowing down would be more work than to continue running.
Billy continued to call her, never sounding out of breath, never sounding nearer of further away than he had always been. And of course the voice continued nagging her, telling her that he was going to kill her and that she should kill him first.
She kept running.
32
Grace stood in front of the nest and looked down. It was a shear ten foot drop and there were no ladders or steps. She wasn't supposed to be here. She wasn't supposed to have given Mikey a name though and following his progress as she had done would have been frowned upon by her superiors.
'The real scientists.'
She pushed the thought away but realised it had been a voice. Outside of her head but at the same time not. She wondered if this was the start of it, hearing voices. How long before she was imagining elaborate scenarios that couldn't possibly be real and how long after that before the mutation?
There had been experiments. The Grigori was completely unrestricted on the island so of course, when they'd found out about the mutating affect of the air they had wanted to test it.
It only worked on humans. The creatures they were creating and even every day animals like rabbits and dogs were completely unaffected. It had some effects on gorillas but nothing that would stop them living out their lives as they had done before. As far as they could tell only humans had the imagination required to hallucinate.
She didn't have long. She walked to the edge of the pitt and looked down. She couldn't see the bottom but she had seen it often enough in the daylight to know that it was down there. She could hear the damp breathing and knew that it was Mikey.
Grace took a rope out of her bag. She tied one end to a nearby tree and the other end around her waist. She took a final look into the darkness below and then began to climb down into it.
The Pitt smelled of rotting flesh, slightly sweet, and with a hint of dung. Grace held her breath for a while and then began to take short gulps of air.
She found the floor with the tips of her toes and lowered herself the rest of the way. The rope was long enough that she wouldn't have to take it off and risk not being able to find it again. She couldn't see anything.
"Mikey?" she whispered.
She heard a guttural animal grunt from deep within the darkness. He sounded bigger than she remembered. She hoped he wouldn't be too big to carry because she didn't think he would follow her.
"Mikey," she said again. "It's Gracey." That was what he always called her.
There was no reply and she walked further into the pit, clutching the red nylon rope as if she were a diver and two tugs would get her pulled up and out of trouble.
"Mikey?" she said again.
The clouds shifted and moonlight came through. She had a momentary vision of what lay in the pit and it was not Mikey. He might have been there somewhere, sure, but she didn't see him. What she saw was dozens and dozens of eggs.
She had walked into a nest.
'They're going to kill you.'
She started to back away very slowly. She was suddenly sure that she was being watched.
Something growled and she didn't think it was Mikey. She started to move more quickly and then she turned so she was running forwards.
The edge of the pit couldn't have been more than twenty metres away but she seemed to run for a long time before she finally found it.
She scrambled up the rope...
'It's behind you.'
...convinced that she could feel warm breath on the back of her neck.
She threw herself over the top of the hole and fell onto her back. She didn't think she was safe, not by a long shot, but she was still surprised when the giant reptile leaped out of the hole.
It seemed to hang in the air. It's grey green skin glistening with slime. It looked down at her and she rolled away moments before it landed in the exact spot she had just been.
It's horny yellow claws dug into the soft earth and it growled. It sounded like a thousand badly tuned car engines through broken exhausts.
It took a step towards her and the ground shook. She got to her feet and by the time she had turned around there were more of them, climbing like moles out of the hole. Smaller ones and bigger ones, their stink filling the air.
"Mikey?" she said but there was no answer.
She turned and ran as fast as she could for the cover of the forest and they came after her.
33
The lights seemed to sparkle in the distance like forgotten Christmas decorations. She could still hear Billy behind her calling out. She had slowed down to a walk though and was half convinced that it wasn't Billy at all, just the dark voices in her head telling her what she was afraid to hear.
The forest thinned and then it was gone. She saw that the lights were part of a building, an unnatural concrete structure that contrasted awkwardly with the natural landscape it stood in. As she walked closer she saw that it wasn't just one building but several.
Samantha had worked at The Agency for long enough to know that buildings on strange islands were rarely a good thing. She approached with caution.
'Sam are you there?'
She ignored it, it wasn't Billy. If Billy was still alive he was somewhere back in the forest. There was no way he could have followed her all the way.
The ground sloped upwards and she found a path worn into the grass. At the top of the hill she found an empty glass cube next to a gate.
Flood lights illuminated the chain link fence and the rubble ground beyond. She could see a grey concrete building but no signs to identify what it was, what it was doing there or whether it was still occupied.
She tried the gate and to her surprise it swung inwards. She knew that she was unlikely to find any shipwreck survivors here but she was unable to resist the mystery of the place and went through. There were no alarm bells but that didn't mean her intrusion had not been detected.
Samantha pressed on towards the nearest building. Her long shadow spread out behind her. There was a blue door but no other features. She pushed it and it was with no surprise, but a certain amount of relief, that she found it locked.
She continued along the building, keeping close to the wall where it felt, but probably wasn't, safe. She wished that she had kept hold of the gun she had taken from the woman, she felt naked and unprepared.
Around the corner she found an identical wall and an identical blue door. She pushed it casually as she passed. The other door hadn't opened so there was no reason to expect this one would, but it did.
Inside there was darkness broken again and again by a flashing red light. At first she thought it was for her and she considered turning around and running away. She didn't hear any voices and she didn't hear anyone running towards her.
'Wait for me Sam,' said bad vibe Billy but she ignored him.
Cautiously she let
the door close behind her and went into the darkness. She found herself in a corridor. There were doors along one side but no windows.
The place had the quality of abandonment. Her footsteps echoed as she walked and she could hear herself breathing.
Eventually the corridor came to an end and she found herself at a door. There was a hi-tech looking number pad / finger print reader next to it which she wouldn't have been able to bypass. Fortunately the door wasn't closed and when she pushed it she was able to get inside.
It was a lab. Not like any she had seen before but her last experience of a lab had been at school. There were large tanks filled with murky water and slime, there were robotic arms hanging lifelessly from the ceiling. At the back of the room there were steps leading down to another corridor, this one lined with glass walls and dark wooden doors.
She walked around the lab but didn't find anything. If the tanks had contained more than water and slime it was gone now. Her boots crunched a shattered glass beaker and she looked down. The whole place had been ransacked.
34
Peter looked at the boy he had come to kill. He stood completely still, his face a grotesque mask of lumps and scars. His eyes were as big as fists. He looked dead but he was still standing and breathing.
The skinny bitch stood somewhere in the darkness. He could hear her sobbing to herself. He wanted to tell her to shut up.
'Or kill her. Slit her throat and dance in her blood.'
He walked around the boy, expecting to see his eyes turn to track him but they didn't.
He fingered the handle of his knife. His bosses wanted the boy dead but it seemed such a waste to kill him when he couldn't feel it. Dead or alive it didn't look like it would be much different.
The knife was sharp. It took almost no effort for him to push it through the boys chest. Thick blood that looked black in the night dribbled from his mouth.
The skinny bitch started to scream but quickly muffled it with a hand over her mouth.
Three Stories Tall Page 23
