Darker

by Simon Clark

  Crack.

  He’d run full into a tree trunk. He bounced back, head ringing with pain.

  But still he pounded on through the forest, leaping over branches, cutting through clumps of stinging nettles. He felt nothing.

  Only the searing need, the burning need to run, and to run faster and faster, until his feet hissed across the leaves and grass as if he flew.

  The next time he looked back he saw the sky had turned green.

  A million leaves torn from branches and lifted by the updraught of the thing hung in a great cloud between ground and sky, turning even the sunlight that fell on him green.

  His chest burned. His heart felt as if it would erupt through his mouth.

  Behind, the crashing sounded deafening. By now the tops of falling trees whacked to the ground at either side of him.

  It was nearly on top of him.

  The ground grew steeper.

  He ran down it faster. Perhaps gravity would give him the speed he needed to outrun this thing.

  Just another few yards. If he outran it, it would dissipate into thin air; he’d seen it happen before. He’d be safe. It couldn’t harm him then. It couldn’t —

  His foot hooked a tree root. His body whipped forward and down. The ground slammed into him. Winded, he rolled over and over.

  That’s when he knew he’d run his last step.

  Overhead branches sheared as his Destroyer crashed down towards him.

  Balling his arms and legs tight to his body, he screwed shut his eyes and with a yell that mated the anticipated agony with rage he waited for the hammer to fall.

  Part 3

  ‘Although they rarely realize it, the ultimate ambition of every man, woman and child is to control the uncontrollable.’

  John Ducas. Constantinople. Easter Day, AD 1057

  Chapter 55

  Ground Zero

  At the T-junction a sign pointing left read BANWICK. The combine harvester turned right.

  Rosemary hissed, ‘Thank heaven for small mercies.’ She gunned the van’s dangerously overheated engine and pounded it through the village of thatched cottages. She drove so quickly she overshot the turn-off downhill which was marked with a sign painted on wood that read Glebe Cottage.

  Again she was following a narrow road with high-banked sides and nowhere to turn round. After another nerve-stripping mile she came upon a cart track. She swung the van off the road, then reversed savagely back, bumping into the opposite bank of the road and leaving a scattering of broken amber indicator lens in the grass.

  A bus braked hard, sounded its horn; the driver held out his hands, his mouth moving as he described Rosemary’s driving abilities to her. Scowling, she crunched the gear home and lumbered back the way she’d come.

  It hit Richard square in the back. A blistering shaft of light pierced his brain.

  Then there was nothing more.

  He joined the dust of dead worlds that float silently in the void between galaxies. Where there is absolute cold, absolute silence; absolute loneliness.

  His lips began to burn. Was that the kiss of eternity itself?

  He grunted. Moved his head. His head began to pound.

  His lips stung as if they rested on hot metal. He grunted again, opened his eyes.

  He lay face down. The stinging grew worse.

  This time he pushed himself up on his hands. He saw the cause of the stinging.

  His face had been crushed down against a stinging nettle.

  But what was it that had crushed him?

  He dragged himself from beneath whatever lay across his back.

  For a moment he sat panting, staring at the thing in a daze, allowing the image to take shape in his brain.

  He kicked it experimentally with his foot, as if to reassure himself it was real.

  A branch, he thought. A bloody branch: as tall as he was and as thick as his arm. It had been sheared from a tree overhead and had fallen on him, knocking him to the ground. The leaves that remained on the thing had been ground to a wet pulp. Still in a daze he rolled one between finger and thumb. It left a green stain on his skin.

  Why wasn’t he dead?

  By rights he should be as flat as a hedgehog that had wandered out into the path of a truck.

  He stood up, feeling his body – ribs, arms, legs, head. Nothing broken: his back ached where it had been slapped by the branch. If anything, the nettle sting on his lips was worse. He touched them with his fingertips. They’d swollen. And they burned like bloody hell fire. But he felt a damn’ sight better than he should have done.

  His brain took some loosening up. Without understanding, he looked up at the trees. Here, the tops had been sheared off. As he retraced his steps uphill, he saw that the destruction became more savage. Twenty paces further up the hill the trees had been broken in two, with the top halves lying, bleeding sap, on the ground. While the bottom halves with a few branches still attached stood untouched. As he walked back towards the barn, he saw the trees had been severed closer and closer to the ground until, fifty paces from the barn, there was nothing but knee-high stumps surrounded by sloppy mounds of wood pulp. Another twenty paces and there was nothing but wood pulp. The trees had been snapped off at ground level.

  Of the barn itself nothing recognizable remained. Just a half-acre orange dust smear that had once been a thousand or so roof tiles and limestone clippings that had been walls. Beneath that would be tinfoil-thin sheets of metal that had once been two cars and a mess of red that had once been Isaac with the mild, baby-blue eyes.

  Richard shook his head. It was too much to take in. If anything, the idea that buzzed around his head was somehow to get to the service station in the village in the hope Michael hadn’t gone yet.

  He paused, surprised by the understanding that lit up his brain. Michael had planned this. He’d cut the cables when he’d gone out for his supposed stroll round the garden. He’d deliberately abandoned them to the Beast.

  Why?

  Richard touched his nettle-stung lips. He only knew that Michael had gone now, and taken Richard’s family with him. He knew, also, that the Beast had gone with him. Somehow he’d taken it.

  Richard pressed his finger against his lips. The burning sting helped clear the fog from his brain. He felt as if he was waking from a trance that had lasted for the last three days. Michael had been lying to them. He understood that now. How much had been lies he didn’t know. But he did know the lies had been for a purpose. And as Richard headed up through the trees towards the village at the top of the hill he guessed that purpose had been to get Christine from him somehow.

  But was it Christine? He remembered the secretive glances they’d exchanged. But also he remembered Michael’s interest in Amy. When York Minster had come down round their ears it had been Amy, only Amy, whom Michael had been interested in saving.

  With questions circling in his brain like the rooks above circling the treetops, Richard plodded up the hill.

  He half-noticed a yellow VW van come bouncing down the track fifty yards away to his left. But the only idea taking shape in his head now was:

  Find Michael. Find him quick.

  Because Richard knew as surely as the sun would shine in the morning that something terrible was going to happen. And it would happen soon.

  Chapter 56

  Near Miss

  ‘Hallo, Michael. Do you remember me? Rosemary Snow? My face has changed a little since the last time you saw me … you bastard!’

  In goes the knife. Stick it right through one of those gentle, cow-brown eyes that are as soft as a saint’s.

  Drive it hard. Pierce the retina; puncture the orbit. Don’t stop there.

  Keep pushing, pushing. Push the tip of the blade along the channel occupied by the optic nerve; it’ll be soft, pulpy – no resistance there.

  With luck you can push the blade deep into his skull. So deep it pierces the frontal lobe of his brain. He will die at your feet.

  ‘Michael dead.’

>   Michael dead … she loved the way the sound of the words jingled together like a song lyric.

  ‘Michael’s dead, Michael’s dead,’ she sang as she drove the van down the lane through the wood. ‘Michael’s dead, Michael’s dead. And I’ll bury your bones, hallelujah!’

  She giggled. The sound, harsh and loud, drowned even the overheated motor.

  Now, terror and excitement filled her with an energy that bordered on the electric.

  Above the treetops she could see the red roof of the cottage. She’d seen enough through Amy’s eyes to know that this was the place.

  This was where her destiny once more intersected with Michael’s. She planned nothing fancy. With the knife hidden behind her back she’d knock on the door. When he opened it, she’d say, ‘Remember me?’

  Then stab.

  The transmission whined as she coasted down the hill, the van bumping over tractor ruts. The cottage swung into view around the next bend. She switched off the motor and allowed the van to freewheel on to the pebbled yard.

  But even as she climbed out of the van, the knife gripped tight in her fist, a gut feeling told her she was too late. There were no cars in the yard; the cottage windows were all shut. The place looked dead.

  And after five minutes of pounding on doors and windows with her fist she realized they had gone. She looked through a window. The kitchen looked tidy so they’d not left in a hurry. On the kitchen table was an empty shoe box on which someone had drawn wheels and doors to make it look like a car.

  ‘Damn!’ She kicked the door.

  Suddenly overwhelmed, she sat down on the doorstep. Her whole body shook. And although she wasn’t actually crying, tears streamed down her face. When she wiped them away the scabs came off, sticking to her finger tips in black crumbs.

  So close, she thought. So damn, fucking close. I must have missed them by minutes.

  Damn.

  She picked up the knife and looked at the steel blade. The sunlight it reflected dazzled her. She closed her eyes.

  For some reason the flashes continued in her head.

  ‘Amy,’ she whispered. ‘Amy, where are you now?’

  Richard’s leg ached. He guessed he must have pulled a calf muscle in the mad run downhill.

  Nevertheless, he pressed on through the wood, limping over knots of roots and pushing aside branches. The walk seemed to take for ever. His mind spun. The only idea he could cling to was to make for the garage in the village. Perhaps Michael might be waiting for him there.

  But he knew he was deluding himself. Michael would be long gone, and he’d have taken Amy, Christine and Joey with him.

  That’s plan A, he thought grimly. But what the hell is plan B?

  Rosemary stood where the barn had been. The sun reflected from scraps of metal. The smell of evaporating petrol hung heavily in the hot summer air.

  She knew instantly that the thing had been here, too. Running downhill to her right a swathe had been cut as straight as a road through the trees. From what she could see the trees hadn’t merely been toppled. They’d been pulped.

  A little way off to her left, a swarm of bluebottles buzzed around a stretch of rubble. She’d moved closer to it, waving the flies away. Her mouth turned wet. An unpleasant taste seeped across her tongue.

  Someone has died here, she told herself. She knew it wasn’t Amy because as she sat on the cottage doorstep a sudden rush of images had come flooding into her head. Not much had been clear. But she’d seen enough through Amy’s eyes to tell her that Michael was driving the family along a twisting country road. There’d been the fat man. Repeatedly, he ran his thick sausage fingers through his hair. Amy’s mother, looking out of the window, expression serious. But —

  Rosemary caught her breath. She stepped back from the patch of rubble where the flies crawled so thickly they created a swarming mat.

  She’d not seen the little girl’s father, Richard. She looked down at the rubble.

  Maybe he was beneath that. Reduced to fly meat.

  Unable to bring herself to look more closely, she ran back to the van and drove away.

  Chapter 57

  Adrift

  At the same time that Rosemary Snow ran back from the remains of the barn to the van, Richard reached the village. His lips still tingled from the nettle sting.

  Market day. Whole families carried bags full of carrots, eggs, bananas, melons.

  The normality of it all made Richard feel even more like the outsider. For one insane moment he could have believed he’d become invisible. Couldn’t they see terror on his face? Hadn’t they heard the thundering roar of the barn being flattened or a hundred trees being pulped?

  He paused to look at his reflection in the post office window. What he saw surprised him. After all he’d been through, the panic, the terror, brushed by the lips of death itself he saw, reflected, a perfectly normal-looking man of thirty-something. Expression calm. Clean shaven. He didn’t look in any way dishevelled. There was a grass stain on his elbow and down one side of his jeans, but as they were black anyway it hardly showed.

  Suddenly he was seized by the burning need to jump on to the steps of the war memorial and shout – DON’T YOU PEOPLE KNOW WHAT’S HAPPENED TO ME? I’VE SEEN MEN AND WOMEN DIE! I ALMOST DIED MYSELF! MY FAMILY HAVE BEEN ABDUCTED! WHY CANT YOU GUESS WHAT’S HAPPENED TO ME BY THE LOOK IN MY EYES?

  People bustled by. All looked so happy and relaxed, every smile on their faces a vicious stab in Richard’s heart. Why couldn’t they share his pain? Why couldn’t they suffer like he suffered?

  He wanted to grab people by the arms and tell. He wanted to shout it out in the streets.

  But he knew he couldn’t. Parents, school teachers, society as a whole had conditioned him to behave ‘normally’. He could no more shout the truth from the top of the war memorial than he could strip off his clothes and walk down through the market naked.

  Come on, Richard, he told himself grimly. Pull yourself together. Amy and Christine need you now. Find them.

  He walked quickly along the street, looking for a car rental office. How he’d pay for the car God alone knew. He’d got about three pounds in loose change in his pocket, no wallet – only this … this certainty that boiled like molten metal through his veins that he needed to find Amy and Christine and take them away from Michael as quickly as possible. Again the sense of dread and danger rolled through him in great dark waves.

  Above the thatched roofs a balloon hung in the sky like a World War Two blimp. Tethered by a line; printed in black along its flank the word THANNATOS.

  Possibly it advertized a garage, thought Richard. Anyway, it was a start. As for paying for a hire car, he’d have to cross that bridge when he came to it.

  He followed a stream that ran through the village. Two black swans floated midstream.

  THANNATOS turned out to be a warehouse-sized store selling antiques. The village’s only garage was next door. It had two rusty pumps, one diesel, one petrol. Its core activity seemed to be the sale of animal feed.

  ‘Damn,’ hissed Richard. Time was running out. Already ideas of stealing a car were running through his head.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures, he told himself, flexing a fist as he walked along the pavement. There was no time to worry about consequences. All that was important was that he reached this place in Norfolk. Before Michael did whatever he planned to do to Amy or to Christine.

  A hot wind blew down the street. It tumbled a sheet of newspaper against his leg. There was a photograph of York Minister. A headline: DEATH TOLL RISES TO 63.

  Richard’s blood turned cold and he began to walk faster.

  Rosemary Snow took her life in her hands every time she opened the radiator cap. The metal cap came off with a bang. If it wasn’t for the fact she’d wrapped the coat round it she’d be sprayed with boiling water. More boiling water squirted out from a crack at the bottom of the radiator, running away down the road in rivulets.

  ‘Heap of shit.’ Sh
e cursed as hot water spat across her bare arm. As soon as she could get near she topped up the radiator from the water bottle. An ominous rumbling followed by a knocking came from the radiator as cold water streamed across hot metal. More steam blew from the cap like from a whistling kettle.

  Then, at last, she was back on the road again, hot air blasting through the smashed passenger window.

  ‘Christ, Robbie,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve done you a favour ripping off this pile of junk.’ She turned into the village’s main street. ‘At least you can claim on your bloody insurance.’

  She eased the van along the busy street, overtaking a couple of stationary buses, then stopping at the pedestrian crossing as mothers hauled kids across by the hand. Two black swans glided along a stream. Overhead a balloon wrinkled and tugged at the cable.

  ‘Come on, Amy,’ she whispered. ‘Show me where you are. Show me pictures, Amy. Show me road signs. Show me names. Ask Michael where you’re going. Ask your mummy. Ask – Christ … I don’t believe it.’

  Sitting on a bench, at the side of the main road, was the man she recognized as Amy’s father.

  She felt a sudden surge of relief. At least he hadn’t died in the barn wreck. And maybe if he was here so were the others. Perhaps even Michael. She felt across the passenger seat. There was the knife.

  Excitement buzzed through her as she pulled the van to the side of the street about fifty yards from where the man sat, then climbed out of the van.

  She decided to cross the road and, making no bones about it, tell the man about the danger he and his family faced. Particularly his daughter.

  Come on, come on! Traffic streamed by preventing her crossing the road to him.

  Then came the unexpected.

  A bus pulled up. The man got on it, paid the fare and the bus pulled away before she could even shout.

  Damn … open-mouthed she stood and watched it go. Richard Young sat and even stared over her head as it passed. She waved and shouted but he was so preoccupied he never even noticed.