Darkest hour aom-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  "Sorry." There was a stress-induced unnecessary sharpness in his voice which he instantly regretted.

  He felt Laura's muscles tense next to him and a second later she had levered herself up on her elbow to fix an incisive eye on him. "What's on your mind?"

  "What isn't? The weight of the responsibility on our shoulders. All that bullshit the spy told us last night-I can't get it out of my head, even though I know I should. The fact that I'm eaten up with vengeance for whoever it was killed Marianne and your mum." He caught himself. "You've never told me how you feel about that."

  "I don't feel anything. I'm not even numb. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it wasn't me who did it to the old bitch-at least I can still look at myself in the mirror-but it's not as if I'm tearing myself apart that she's dead. After all she did." She shifted self-consciously to hide the original set of scars on her back.

  The tone of her words made him feel uncomfortable. "That sounds a little-"

  "What? Cold? Psychotic? Don't criticise me. You don't know anything about my life."

  "I'm trying-"

  "Not hard enough."

  He suddenly felt angry that he constantly had to pussyfoot around her; it was more strain that he didn't need. He knew she had her own problems-the rumbling trauma from the scars Callow had inflicted on her face, the doubts over why Cernunnos had marked her-but all of them had problems and no one else acted like a spoiled brat.

  They sat in silence for five minutes watching the dust motes dance in a sunbeam, and when she spoke again she sounded calmer. "Anything else on your mind?"

  He paused for a long time, then admitted it aloud, to himself as much as to her. "That I should be sending us all to look for Ruth instead of-"

  "What? Trying to save the world and everyone in it? That makes sense." Another whiplash in her voice; he felt the irritation rise again.

  "I'm on your side. Why do you always give me such a bad time?"

  "I'm having a bad life."

  "It's not all about you, you know," he snapped. "I sit here with my thoughts and I can't even tell who I am any more. Thanks to that stuff I drank from the Danann cauldron, sometimes I think I can hear alien voices chattering at the back of my head, saying things I can't understand but I know they're terrible. Then everything flips on its head and I feel the rumblings of whatever the Fomorii did to me with the Roisin Dubh, deep in the same place-"

  "Well, boo-hoo for you."

  Unable to contain the building rage any longer, he hammered his fist into the mattress. "Shit, why am I here?"

  "Yes, why are you here?" She gave him a harsh shove to the other side of the bed. By the time he'd turned back, angrily, she was out and starting to get dressed. He wanted to shout at her, that she was the one destroying the relationship, but then her mask of cold aloofness dropped slightly and he saw the hurt burning away underneath. He had never seen such emotion in her face before.

  The shock of it calmed him instantly. "Look, I'm sorry. We're all under a tremendous strain."

  She muttered something under her breath as she marched to the door, then turned and said, "Go fuck yourself," before slamming it behind her.

  Laura hated the way she had to blink away tears of anger and hurt as she marched out of the hotel. For years she'd been good at battening down any emotion so that even those closest to her had no idea what she was thinking. But now it seemed as if the stopper had come out of the bottle and wouldn't go back in again. And Church seemed to have a particular talent for painfully extracting feelings, even when he wasn't trying; and somehow that made the process hurt even more.

  However much she tried to pretend to herself she didn't like him, she realised she felt something closer to a childish ideal of love than anything else she had experienced in her life. At first she had hoped it was purely sexual, like so many of her previous relationships. Then she wished it was born of circumstances; of fear; of desperation. But it wasn't. Emotionally she'd suffered enough at the hands of her parents. And now everything was happening just as she'd feared.

  She headed directly towards Princes Street, hoping to lose herself in some of the trendy bars which were still doing a roaring trade. Shavi and Tom, who had been in search of psychoactive substances for their respective rituals, hailed her as they returned to the hotel. She pretended she hadn't seen them.

  She opted for the noisiest, most crowded bar and forced her way to the front to buy a Red Stripe. Although her attitude never wavered, it wasn't long before the locals were trying to pick her up. She fended a few off with acid comments, but as the drink took hold a little company that was interested in her seemed increasingly attractive.

  For the next two hours she found herself at the centre of a group of young men and women whose only concern in life appeared to be having a good time. The conversation was sharp and witty, the jokes raucous, the flirtation charged. There was no talk of darkness or death. Laura found herself gravitating increasingly towards two of the most powerful characters in the group: Will had short brown hair and blue eyes that were gently mocking, a supremely confident demeanour and a certain sexual charisma; Andy was more openly loud and humorous, taller and bigger-boned, with corkscrew hair and a wispy goatee.

  After a long, sparring conversation, Will grinned at Andy knowingly before turning to Laura. "So, you up for going on somewhere else?"

  "Subtle. Wouldn't happen to be your sweaty, beery bedroom, would it?" Laura sipped on her beer, enjoying the game.

  "You've got me all wrong." Will's grin suggested she hadn't got him as wrong as he'd like her to think. "We're going on to a club. Great fucking place. Different venue every week. Cool fucking crowd. Good beats. You'll like it."

  "Ah, I don't know… I'm getting a bit old for clubs. I'm usually tucked up long before now with something hot and comforting."

  "You can't pull out on us now. Or we'll have to call you a big, blonde, soft, southern saddo." Andy pushed his face into hers in a mock challenge.

  "There might be another way we can convince you," Will interjected. "Come to the toilet with us."

  "Like I haven't heard that one before."

  He took her by the hand and led her through the crowded bar to the toilets at the back. Laura whistled at the men at the urinals before they herded her into a cubicle. Once the door was locked Will surreptitiously pulled out a small plastic bag from his Levi's pocket. Inside were five or six yellow capsules.

  "Es?" Laura said.

  "Like none you've ever tasted before. The best MDMA cut with a little something extra. Same loved-up strength with a little more trips. Straight off the boat from the States." Will waved the bag in front of her face. "Our gift to you, just to show you how much we want you along."

  The sight of the Ecstasy made her suddenly uneasy. Too many unpleasant memories surfaced of the months she'd spent in Salisbury and Bristol blasted out of her head, driving herself to the brink with a wilful disregard for her own health, both mental and physical, before she'd finally cleaned herself up. Drugs weren't good for her; or rather, she wasn't good for drugs; and she didn't want to go down that road again. But she'd had enough of all the repression and fear of the last few months. She wanted to celebrate life with abandon, forget Church and the stupid mission that was ruining her life, forget who she really was. She just wanted to have fun.

  She dipped her hand in the bag and then, fighting back the nagging doubts, she popped one of the capsules on to her tongue. "Let the good times roll," she said with a grin.

  The grim shadows that gripped the Old Town by day had merged seamlessly into the oppressive darkness of night as Shavi made his way cautiously along the Royal Mile. He had attempted to put on a brave face for the sake of the others, but he felt a nugget of dread heavy within him. Each new experience since he had discovered his aptitude for the mystical and the spiritual seemed to have taken him another step away from the light of humanity into a tenebrous zone from where he feared he would never be able to return. All he had to see him through was an outsider resili
ence honed through the disenfranchised days of his youth. He hoped it was enough.

  He started as the slam of a door echoed along the length of the near-deserted street. Someone emerged from one of the pubs further down the way, glanced around uneasily at the gloom, as if surprised by the lateness of the hour, then broke into a jog towards the bright lights of North Bridge.

  Shavi sucked in a deep breath to calm himself. He had read and reread the guide book entry for his destination, but its terrible story had done little to ease his anxieties. The handful of mushrooms taken to enhance the shamanic experience hadn't helped either. At the cobblestoned Heart of Midlothian at Parliament Square he paused briefly and spat, as custom dictated, to ward off the spirits of those executed at the old Tolbooth Prison. It might have been ineffective-the customs of the Unseen World were unknowable-but he thought it wise to proceed with caution; he had no desire to be confronted by the spectral severed heads of those dispatched and later exhibited in the area.

  Across the road loomed the Georgian facade of the City Chambers. It spoke of elegance and cultured discourse, the best humanity had to offer; like all of the modern world it hid a multitude of sins. Beneath the chambers was what remained of an entire city street, Mary King's Close, locked away in darkness. The guide book described it as the most haunted place in all Scotland, which was hardly surprising. The City Chambers had been built there to seal off forever a part of Edinburgh history the people hoped to forget, couldn't bring themselves to face, with all its shame, guilt and suffering. But like all bad memories it refused to stay buried.

  In 1645, when Edinburgh was in the grip of the Black Death, the filthy, overflowing tenements of the Old Town were filled with the diseased and the dying, and Mary King's Close was worse than most. A sickening plague pit, the city fathers had said. The rich, cultured, upstanding Great Men of the City had a view of the poverty-stricken that was less than human, and in an act of brutality that reverberated down the years they ordered the entire close blocked up. They called it quarantine. The truth was not so clean: every resident was left to die without food or water in the hope that the disease could be contained. And if that was not enough of a monstrosity, when the moans of the inhabitants had finally drifted away, two butchers were sent in to dismember the corpses.

  Shavi shivered at the extent of the cold-hearted cruelty. No wonder the spirits of those who had suffered couldn't depart the prison of their misery. For hundreds of years, visitors to the hidden street had reported the most awful, shrieking spectres, accusing revenants, a little girl, her china doll face filled with such overwhelming sadness it caused physical pain in those who saw it, watchers from the shadows whispering threats and prophecies of suffering and pain; an oppressive atmosphere of despair hung over all, and even the sceptical left the place changed on some fundamental level.

  Shavi surveyed the City Chambers carefully, then let his gaze slowly drop to ground level. If even normal, rational people experienced such dread, what would he find, with his super-charged perceptions? With apprehension tightening a band around his chest, he set off across the street.

  The entrance to the buried close was a nondescript, rickety wooden door off Cockburn Street. He flicked on his torch the moment it opened, listening to the echoes disappear into the depths. Spraying the light around inside, he was confronted by a path that rose steeply to another entrance. To his left, about halfway up, was an ancient front door almost lost in the gloom. Dust was everywhere, in thick layers on the floor and hanging in choking clouds in the air, so that he continually had to stifle coughs; the resultant noise, twisted by the echoes, was like the bark of a beast prowling nearby.

  Slowly he moved through a maze of bare rooms, claustrophobic in the dark, where an oppressive atmosphere gathered among the creaking timbers that propped up the ceilings. He tried to shake off the knowledge that he was alone there, far beneath the road where no one would ever hear him if he yelled, but the thought kept creeping back.

  The mushrooms turned the echoes of his footsteps into percussive bursts rattling off the confining walls in a syncopated rhythm that rose and fell, grew and receded; there was something about the quality of the reverberations that didn't seem quite right and in the brief snatches of silence that lay inbetween them he was sure he could hear other disturbing, muffled sounds. He didn't pause to listen too closely. The air grew dank as he moved deeper into the heart of the Close's system of ancient bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens, where families of ten or more were forced to live together in abject poverty.

  After a while he stopped to try to get his bearings; the last thing he wanted to do was get lost down there. In the darkness that lay beyond the beam of his torch he thought he could see sparks of light swirling like fireflies; he dismissed it as a trick of his eyes, although it continued to nag at him. The atmosphere was even worse than he had anticipated, alive with dismal emotion and sour memory, brooding for centuries, ready to lash out with bitterness.

  Shavi attempted to maintain his equilibrium. His gradual understanding of the Invisible World told him that whatever power lurked there away from the light would see anything less as a sign of weakness; and that could, very possibly, be a fatal mistake.

  He sprayed the beam around. He was in a small room next to an old fireplace. The plaster on the walls was cracked and flaking. There was nothing out of the ordinary until something caught his eye in a flash of the torch beam: one corner was filled with an incongruous collection of dolls, teddy bears, photos, dollar bills, Tamagotchis: a pile of offerings left by those who had been there before him. It was just rubbish, but there was a strange, eerie atmosphere that surrounded it.

  The place was starting to affect him; his breathing had grown shallow. A compulsive desire to flee came in waves, forcing him to grip the torch tightly as he fought it back. Briefly he stared at the torch, trying to clear his mind; despite years of meditation, in that spot, it was almost impossible. His heart was pounding so wildly, the throb of his blood made his head ache. But somewhere he managed to find the reserves of strength for which he was searching. He switched off the torch.

  The darkness was all-encompassing.

  His breathing stopped suddenly, until his head spun and he thought his lungs would burst. And when the ragged inhalation did come, it sounded so loud he wanted to tear the air from his throat for fear it would mark him out. Cautiously, he lowered himself to the ground and sat cross-legged, and through an effort of pure will he managed to calm himself a little; at least enough to remain in that awful place.

  The dark gave him the destabilising sensation that he was floating in space. There was no up or down, no here or there, just a sea of nothing, with him at the centre of it. Gradually his other senses became more charged to make up for his lack of sight: distant, barely perceptible echoes bounced off the walls which seemed, unnervingly, to have no particular point of origin, but which he attributed to changes in the temperature of the building fabric; the floor was dusty and icily cold beneath his fingertips; his nostrils pierced the cloying mist of damp to pick up subtler smells which intrigued him-tobacco smoke, perfume, leatherwhich he confidently told himself were the fading memories of visiting tourists.

  But he knew what he was really sensing: the smells and sounds and textures of the resting body of that place, which was, in a very real sense, alive, more than an amalgamation of bricks and mortar, a creature bound together with the bones of pain and the blood of suffering, guts of despair and the seething, sentient mind of hatred. He knew. And he knew he was there at its mercy.

  For nearly half an hour, he sat in the deep dark, listening to the sound of his own breathing. He had just started to wonder if the place would keep him there in torment without presenting itself to him when his nerves began to tingle; his heightened senses had picked up a subtle change in the atmosphere. The temperature had dropped by a degree or two and a strange taste like milky coffee had materialised beneath his tongue.

  There was no sound or movement, but he suddenl
y felt an overwhelming presence looming behind him. His mind demanded that he turn round, defend himself; somehow he managed to hold still. He could feel it, he was sure; it wasn't his imagination. Whatever was there seemed to rise up over him, poised to strike, still silent but radiating a terrible force. It hung there, his hair prickling at faint movements in the air currents. The effort to turn round almost drove him insane, but he continued to resist. And in that instant he knew, although he didn't know how, that if he had turned, he would have been struck dead immediately.

  Although it was dark, he closed his eyes and concentrated. He could feel it above him, frozen, waiting for him to make any move that would allow it to attack. Shavi sensed oppressive, primal emotions, but not what it truly was.

  And then, when he thought he could bear it no longer, it receded like a shadow melting in the dawn sun, slipping back and back until Shavi felt alone once more. He released a tight breath of relief, although he knew it was not the end.

  He didn't have long to wait. At first he couldn't tell if the odd movement his eyes registered were the purple flashes of random nerves sparking on his retina or if it was some external phenomenon. White dots sparkled in one spot, like dust motes in a sunbeam, but moving with a life of their own, coming together almost imperceptibly, coalescing into a shape. His heart began to beat faster.

  The shape glowed with an inner light, took on a pale substance, until he realised he was looking at the form of a small girl. Her blonde hair was fastened in pigtails, her face as big and white as the moon, from which stared the darkest, most limpid eyes he had ever seen. She wore a plain shift dress and had her hands clasped behind her back. More than her presence, it was what she brought with her that truly disturbed Shavi: an atmosphere of suffocating despair. It didn't simply make him sad; he felt as if it was being curled into a fist and used to assail him.

  "Hello," he said in as calm a voice as he could muster.

  Her eyes didn't blink. The more he looked into them, the more he felt they were not human at all: alien, demonic, too dark and deep by far.