The Darkest Corners

by Barry Hutchison

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I admitted. ‘Everything’s broken. I’ve… I’ve ruined everything. ’

  Ameena rolled her eyes. ‘And I thought I was being a drama queen! You haven’t ruined anything, kiddo. Your dad has. All you’ve done is try to stay alive and try to protect people.’

  I looked her in the eye. ‘That’s not working out too well, is it?’

  My lip wobbled and I looked away again. My mum: dead. My nan: dead. My mum’s cousin Marion: dead. So much for protecting people.

  And then there was Joseph, the mystery man. He’d popped up all over the place with his cryptic clues, helping me when I didn’t even know it. I’d watched him die too, right before my eyes, and I still didn’t know who he was.

  ‘We sit tight,’ Billy said. ‘That’s the plan. We sit here and wait for help to arrive.’

  ‘Help isn’t going to arrive, Billy. Grow up,’ Ameena said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because this isn’t a bedtime story. There’s no knight in shining armour climbing up this tower. There’s no fairy godmother about to come swooping in. There’s just us.’ She pointed to the boarded-up window. ‘And there’s just them. If we want to live we have to fight. That’s how it is.’

  Ameena turned to me. ‘And you’re the best fighter we’ve got. Much as I hate to admit it.’

  Billy shook his head. ‘You’re not buying this, are you? You saw what was happening down there. I don’t want more monsters coming through.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Billy? Scared?’

  ‘Of course I’m scared!’ Billy yelped. ‘I’m terrified. I’ve never been more scared in my whole life, and if he starts doing his, his thing, then it’s all just going to get worse.’

  Ameena spun to face him. ‘You don’t get it, do you? This is it. This is the end. It can’t get any worse.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I groaned. ‘As soon as anyone says “It can’t get any worse,” it always gets worse.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Ameena said, turning back to face me. ‘Everyone in this village has been turned into a monster, and they’re going to spread like a virus all over the planet. Your mum is dead. Your dad is out there somewhere, waiting to unleash God knows what on the world, and we’re stuck in an attic with a screecher downstairs and Billy No-Dates for company.’

  ‘Maybe… maybe someone will come,’ I said weakly.

  ‘No one’s coming!’ Ameena said. ‘There’s no one to fix this but us. But you.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Billy snapped. ‘Why do you keep egging him on? It’s like you want him to break down this big barrier thing.’ He looked to me. ‘She’s pushing you into it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Billy,’ I said. ‘Of course she isn’t.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Billy asked. ‘You said yourself you don’t know anything about her. How do you know she’s not working with your dad?’

  Ameena drove her elbow into Billy’s face. He staggered back, his hands over his nose, a sharp yelp of pain bursting on his lips.

  ‘Whoa! What did you do that for?’ I asked. I was used to sudden bouts of violence from Ameena, but never like that.

  ‘You heard him.’ Ameena sounded defensive. ‘He was starting to rant. Ranting’s noisy, and the last thing we want right now is someone getting noisy.’ She smiled in that way that made her nose wrinkle up. ‘Am I right, kiddo? Course I am; I’m always right.’

  I began to smile, then stopped. That word replayed in my head.

  ‘Kiddo,’ I said, my face fixed in a half-smile. ‘You called me “kiddo”.’

  ‘Yeah? So? I always call you “kiddo”, kiddo. It’s one of the things that makes me so adorable.’

  A sickening stirring began in my gut. I glanced at Billy, who was still clutching his nose. He watched us in silence through eyes filled with tears.

  ‘He calls me “kiddo”,’ I mumbled, and I saw the smile fade from her face. ‘My dad calls me “kiddo”.’

  She shrugged, but it looked forced and not at all natural. ‘Does he?’ she said. ‘What are the chances?’

  I stared into her eyes, and in that moment I realised that I didn’t really know her at all.

  Shadows moved behind her and the sound of in-rushing air filled the tower. The shadows became a man and the man became my dad. He wrapped his arms round Ameena and flashed me a wide grin.

  ‘Whoops,’ he sniggered, and then they were gone. I looked blankly at the spot where Ameena had stood. I was still looking at it when Billy spoke.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘He took her,’ I said.

  The floorboard creaked behind me.

  ‘No,’ Billy said. ‘They went together.’

  ‘No,’ I snapped, turning on him. ‘She wouldn’t. She’s… I…’ I curled my fingers into fists. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back.’

  ‘Back? What do you mean you’ll be back? Where are you going?’

  But Billy’s voice was already becoming distant as I focused on one of the sparks and flitted myself through to the Darkest Corners.

  The inside of the tower looked exactly the same, only now the hatch was open. The howls of the screechers had faded along with Billy’s voice, but now I could hear a steady creaking coming up through the hole in the floor.

  I looked down in time to see Ameena jump the last few rungs and land lightly beside my dad. She raised her head and her eyes briefly met mine, then she was off and running with him through the door that led into the main part of the church.

  My stomach flipped. I thought back to the figure in the brown hood I’d seen so many times with my dad. Ameena’s height. Ameena’s build. But it couldn’t have been her. I refused to accept it.

  She had saved me. So many times, she had saved me. She couldn’t have been working with him this whole time. She couldn’t.

  I called her name, hoping she would come running back to tell me it was all some stupid mistake. To tell me I was wrong, and that she’d never betray me. But she didn’t come back. No one came back.

  The ladder was more rusted on the way down than it had been on the way up, but that was the Darkest Corners for you. It twisted things, corrupted them. Had it done the same to Ameena somehow? Made her as much a monster as the rest of them? No. No way.

  Please no.

  I jumped the last few rungs just as she had done and charged through into the main church. It now stood in ruins, most of the sky visible through the crumbled roof. The doors at the far end of the room were still standing. They swung closed as I raced towards them.

  A ragged shape lay there in the middle of the aisle. As I drew closer I recognised the tattered remains of Joe Crow. They squirmed as if alive, and I saw his body begin to reform, like footage of rotting fruit played in high-speed reverse.

  ‘S-see you, boy,’ he slurred. A half-formed hand reached out for me. ‘Don’t you g-go nowhere.’

  I clambered over the pews beside him, not daring to get too close. The rest of the aisle passed in a blur as I raced through the inner doors and out through the exit into the world beyond.

  A foot stuck out from round the doorframe and I tripped. My momentum carried me down the stone steps and I landed on my back on the damp, dirty ground.

  My dad stood at the top of the steps, laughing as he looked down. And there, beside him, was Ameena. My dad and Ameena. Together.

  There had been a little hope inside me, buried deep down. A hope that somehow everything was going to be OK. A hope that, no matter how bad things seemed at the moment, they weren’t broken beyond repair.

  That hope died when I saw them standing there together. My dad was grinning, but I didn’t look at him. Instead I just stared at Ameena and asked her, ‘Why?’

  She shrugged and pushed her hair out of her face. ‘Nothing personal.’

  ‘Nothing personal?’ I said. I was on my feet in an instant. ‘Nothing personal; are you nuts?’

  I began to climb the stairs towards them. Ameena raised her fists and boun
ced on to the balls of her feet. ‘Don’t,’ she warned.

  I stopped. Not because I was scared of her, but because I suddenly had no energy left to climb with.

  ‘So, what?’ I asked croakily. ‘The whole time? It’s all been a lie?’

  ‘Bingo,’ laughed my dad. ‘All that stuff about you making her, about her being –’ he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers – ‘“a tool”? All rubbish. None of that was true.’

  ‘Then why say it?’ I asked. ‘What was the point?’

  ‘The point was what it’s always been,’ he continued. ‘To make you care about her. To make you want to protect her.’ His grin widened. ‘And you do, don’t you, kiddo? You care about her a lot.’

  I didn’t answer. Ameena tried to hold my gaze, but glanced away.

  ‘Man, that must be a kick in the teeth,’ my dad chuckled. ‘There you are falling for her charms, and all the while she’s just trying to get you to use your abilities so you break down the barrier and she can get the Hell away from you.’

  ‘It was you in that brown robe all along,’ I said. ‘It was you.’

  ‘Bzzzzt! Correct answer,’ cried my dad. ‘And I think if you’re honest with yourself you always really knew that. You just didn’t want to believe it. Am I right? Kiddo?’

  I didn’t answer, just kept staring and waiting for it to sink in. She’d been working against me. Right from day one, she’d been working against me.

  My dad put a finger behind his ear and pushed it slightly forward. ‘You know, the walls between this world and yours must be paper-thin now. If you listen, you can hear your little friend Billy screaming.’

  He was right. Billy’s screams were muffled, but there was no mistaking them. They came from high up in the church, a whole other world away. They were screams not of panic, but of pain.

  My dad and Ameena stepped apart, leaving the path to the door clear. ‘You’ve got maybe a minute to get back there and save him,’ said my dad. ‘Or you can stay here and chitchat with us. The choice is yours.’

  Far away, Billy let out a squeal of agony. My dad’s face lit up with a manic grin.

  ‘But whatever you decide, you’d better do it quickly.’

  I threw the church doors open and sprinted along the aisle. I was still in the Darkest Corners – it was too dangerous to jump back into my own world until I was up the ladder and inside the tower itself – and Joe Crow had almost finished pulling himself back together on the ruined church floor.

  He was drawing himself up on his stubby legs as I ran towards him. The sackcloth mask he had been wearing hadn’t made the trip back with him, and his wrinkled, old-man face twisted into a scowl at my approach. He snarled, revealing dozens of tiny, shark-like teeth poking out from his pale gums.

  ‘I see you came back, boy,’ he spat; then he stopped talking as the sole of my shoe slammed hard into the centre of his weather-beaten face. He stumbled backwards on to the floor, and then I was past him, through the door behind the pulpit and scrabbling up the rusted ladder.

  I was halfway up before I realised I couldn’t hear Billy screaming, and all the way at the top before I realised I couldn’t hear anything from within the tower at all.

  As soon as I was through the hatch I focused on a spark and moved between worlds. To my relief, Billy was there, almost exactly where I’d left him. He was kneeling down, facing away from me, his hands hanging limply by his sides so his knuckles were almost touching the floor.

  He was half hidden by the shadows, but as I took a step closer I saw the spots of blood on the side of his face. I thought back. He hadn’t been bleeding after Ameena hit him, had he? In all the panic, I couldn’t remember.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

  Billy didn’t answer. Up close I could see that his whole body was vibrating. His breath was whistling unsteadily in and out, and he gave the occasional soft whimper as I took another creaky step closer.

  ‘I heard you screaming,’ I said. He flinched, but didn’t turn round. I took another step towards him. ‘What happened? Why were you screaming?’

  Billy’s trembling was becoming more and more violent, as if his body was going deep into shock. He flinched again as I laid my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s wrong, Billy?’ I asked. ‘What happened? Talk to me.’

  With a sob, he slowly turned his head. I felt my guts twist in horror. I stumbled away from him, swallowing the urge to throw up. His eyes bored into mine, ringed with red and filled with tears.

  I tried to speak, but no words came. Tried to scream, but my throat was closed tight. Instead I raised a shaking hand and pointed. Pointed at his face; at his mouth; at the thick black stitches that threaded through his lips, pulling them tightly together.

  He tried to say something, but the words came out as a jumbled mumble of syllables. His fingers brushed against the stitches, then pulled quickly away. His eyes bulged. His nostrils flared. He let out a high-pitched moan that would have been a scream if he could open his mouth.

  ‘Wh-who…?’ I began, but a blast of music answered my question before I could even ask it.

  It came from the room below, loud enough to shake the floor beneath us.

  If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…

  ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Not him. Not here.’

  If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise…

  Of all the fiends I’d faced so far, Doc Mortis was up there with the worst of them. He was a sadist, a madman who believed himself to be a surgeon, and who kidnapped innocent people and performed grotesque operations on them. I’d barely escaped his hospital. I thought he was dead. It appeared I was wrong.

  A crash of breaking wood temporarily drowned out the music from below. One of the wooden boards that had been fastened over an opening in the tower wall was smashed in right behind Billy.

  Before he could even turn, a freakishly thin figure reached through the gap. I caught a glimpse of its bald head and its surgical mask. Eyes that were no more than buttons stitched on to skin flashed at me through the gloom, and I recognised one of Doc’s porters.

  A scarred hand caught Billy by the back of his jacket and dragged him towards the hole in the wall.

  Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic…

  ‘Billy!’ I cried, reaching out a hand. His fingertips touched mine, but then he was gone, dragged out into the chill night air. I ran to the broken wood and looked out. Screechers heaved through the streets, but there was no sign of Billy or the porter anywhere. They couldn’t have gone far, though. I had to find him. Too many people had suffered because of me as it was.

  The wind pushed against me as I squeezed out through the gap and on to the roof, which led down at a steep angle from the side of the tower. The roof extended a few centimetres past the top of the wall, and beyond that lay a dizzyingly long drop to the ground.

  With great care I inched away from the tower, trying to get a better view of the roof. My feet slipped on the snow-covered slates and I had to grab for the broken board to stop me sliding off.

  My legs kicked frantically, trying to back-pedal to safety. I dug in my heels and pushed until I was finally able to get back into a standing position.

  I spent a few seconds getting my nerves back under control, then looked around for Billy. Aside from mine, there were no footprints in the snow. I craned my neck and looked at the top of the tower, but nothing moved up there in the dark.

  ‘Billy,’ I hissed. ‘Where are you?’ But only the wind replied.

  Dozens of panicked screeches began to rise up from below. I leaned out, trying to see over the edge and down to the street. I held on to the wood with my fingertips, craning my neck in an attempt to—

  Something slammed against my fingers from inside the tower. There was no time to turn and see who or what was responsible. My feet slipped out from under me and I began to slide towards the edge of the roof.

  Th
e sparks fizzled behind my eyes, and I had to grit my teeth and force myself not to give in. Billy had been right. Using my abilities was playing right into my dad’s hands. Was playing right into Ameena’s hands. He – they – were trying to make me end the world. He’d told me right from the start I was going to kill everyone on Earth. I wasn’t going to let him be right.

  I closed my eyes and let myself go limp. It was the best I could come up with at short notice.

  The edge of the roof came up quickly, the ground almost as fast. The snow was thin beside the wall, the church sheltering that spot from the worst of the snowfall. I landed with a crunch on icy gravel. The impact forced a yelp from me and a dozen deformed figures turned to look in my direction.

  I climbed clumsily to my feet, using the church’s brickwork to pull myself into a standing position. A jolt of pain shot up my spine from where I’d hit the ground. I glanced frantically left and right, searching for a way past the screechers, but the screechers were busy with problems of their own.

  Something that was more Beast than anything else pounded through the snow on all fours, its huge head lolling left and right. Hot saliva dripped from the monster’s mouth, melting the snow where it fell. It advanced slowly on the screechers, then occasionally leapt at them and snapped its vast jaws.

  I pressed myself in tight to the wall, half hidden in a narrow alcove. The screechers who had seen me hesitated briefly, but the beast-like thing began to gain on them and their instinct for survival forced them to leave me behind.

  I waited, holding my breath until this new Beast had herded the screechers away, then I crept out across the snow and into the street. The darkness was drawing in, and only a few of the streetlights were working. Staring into the gloom, I tried calling Billy’s name again – quietly, so as not to attract unwanted attention.

  No such luck. A screecher appeared in the doorway of the church. Its black eyes scanned the street. Its nose, now elongated into a narrow snout, snuffled hungrily at the air. Its head snapped in my direction and I began to run, tripping and stumbling through the deep snow.