by Mark Roberts
The same thought chewed her mind, over and over.
What was going on down there?
She tried to rationalise. There had been no gunfire. Apparently. No sound of voices or conflict rising to the surface through the paving stones and tarmac.
She shivered in the night air and imagined how much colder it must be beneath the ground with its damp walls and uncertain darkness. Still she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the tunnel entrance.
Fear for Eve Clay gripped her. The silence could be read another way. Maybe they had waited in the darkness, hiding until Eve came into their space and—
Riley was seized by a dangerous compulsion. She looked around and observed Hendricks watching her with quiet intensity.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
‘You can’t go down there, Gina.’
‘How did you...?’
‘I’ve been watching your face. I know how much you think of Eve. And I’m telling you now, if you and Eve both came out alive, she’d kill you with her bare hands for risking both your life and hers. We’ve seen inside the Red Cloud...’ He pointed at his own head. ‘We’ve seen their collective psyche on the walls of their shrine. Eve’s got a unique status. It gives her ambiguity. Down there, with them, that’s as good a weapon as a gun and a brighter hope than anything you or I can offer.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Riley.
‘I’m sure.’
She felt the weight of his arm across her shoulders.
‘You’re a terrible liar, Bill.’
Silence.
‘Liar? Optimist? Is there a difference?’
She felt his arm rise from her shoulders, sensed him moving away quietly.
Gina Riley looked down into the dark hole into which Eve Clay had descended and fought back a wave of tears.
85
1.16 am
Clay sensed a change, a slowdown in the blind march from Anais at the front, through Faith immediately ahead. She in turn drew Coral to a dead halt. She ransacked the darkness but there was no break in the blackness, no shimmer or suggestion of shape, light or substance.
Coral’s hand unfolded from her shoulder and as Clay withdrew her fingers from Faith’s shoulder, Anais said, ‘We’re here.’
Nowhere. Clay reached out to her left and right, touched thin air and nothing else. ‘Where’s here?’ she asked.
‘The way in and the way out,’ replied Anais. ‘The way up and the way down.’
Clay tilted her head and was astonished at the sight of a single point of light, a lone star in the barren heavens above them.
‘What is it?’
She sensed Anais coming towards her, pictured the woman in her doorway on Barnham Drive with the crucifix around her neck. She felt Anais’s breath streaming into her as her lips brushed her left earlobe. ‘Come with me.’ Anais’s hand tightened around hers. ‘Walk.’
As they walked, Clay focused on the pinpoint of light above them. It shimmered, seemed to vanish, came back.
‘Steps.’
Anais guided Clay’s hand towards the wall of the tunnel. She fingered the flat, narrow indentation, a tight ledge, the base of a crude stairway hacked out of the sandstone.
Clay felt Anais’s hands fold against the sides of her face. Her breath washed over her lips. ‘Do you want to see Maisy?’ she whispered menacingly. Anais let go of her face. ‘Then climb. Follow me.’
As she began to climb, Anais said, ‘We’re behind you and in front of you. ‘If you do anything wrong, we will wipe you from the face of the earth. The work of a lifetime will simply have to start over again.’
Clay reached up and felt the edge of two uneven steps above her head. Her right foot found the flat of another step at the bottom of the wall as her hands gripped the stone ledges above. As she began the ascent, she felt a pair of hands at the base of her back and the sole of Anais’s foot brushing her scalp.
She looked up to the point of light and found another handhold set into the sandstone wall.
Clay climbed towards the star.
86
1.20 am
With each painful step of the long climb, the light above grew larger. Clay worked out a method. Reach up with the hands, grip, lift, and probe with the feet.
She felt warm breath at her heels.
As she climbed higher, she felt a compulsion to grab Anais Drake’s ankle and fling her down into the darkness. And then jump down and fight her to the bloody death. She glanced back at the darkness and was filled with an even stronger compulsion: to press on towards the light.
Clay’s arms and legs burned and she felt herself slowing down as the distance between herself and Anais Drake grew wider. How many times have you done this? she wondered, glancing back at the dark form of Coral below her.
She paused, turned to the girls and asked quietly, ‘What does this lead to?’
‘You’ll soon see,’ said Coral. ‘Keep moving.’
‘What’s that light?’
Drip drip. Drip drip. Inch by inch, Clay pulled her way up the wet sandstone, heart pounding, her breath short and heavy.
Anais Drake. Clay tossed the name up and down in her mind, pulled it apart, juggled the letters and played them back to front as she climbed, trying to divert her attention from the pain in her arms and legs.
An ais Dr ake
ek a rD si a nA
Clay froze. The light disappeared briefly as Anais Drake pulled herself through the opening. Then it returned. Another step up and the light was enticing and big enough to swallow a grown woman. It’s a hole. Beyond the hole, Clay saw a flat surface, a wall or a ceiling.
She tried to speed up, desperate now to get to the hole and pass through it and out of the tunnel, but the grip in her right hand suddenly failed and her fingers slipped off the slimy stone. Clay’s body swung away from the rock. Her right foot shot off the step. She anchored herself with her left foot and hand, stretched her right arm up again, connected, then slipped off again. She tried again, heard the blood banging inside her head, felt the sandpaper of her tongue rasping against the bone-dry roof of her mouth. The whole of her body was slick with sweat. She pictured Philip and Thomas standing over her grave.
She twisted towards the rock one more time and was back on the stone ladder.
‘Climb!’ nagged Coral behind her.
The temptation to stamp on her face was immense, but the overwhelming need for light pushed Clay up another rung. And another.
An. A. Dr. De. Ka.
And another. Above Clay’s head, a foot pounded out a heartbeat.
The white surface grew clearer. Ri.
It was flat. S. A. The closer she came, the more her muscles burned.
Clay could smell a different damp, the damp of an unloved room.
There was a division in the white where a wall met a ceiling.
A naked light bulb hung from a white plastic flex.
Her hand clutched the ragged edge of a damp floorboard.
Another step and her head touched the light.
Two hands on the edges of the hole and she pushed herself up.
It was an empty room. Ka.
Anais stood in the corner, watching as Clay hauled herself into the space. ‘They’ve weakened you,’ she said. ‘You are soft, but we will make you strong.’
Clay pulled her legs and feet onto the floor of the room. Taking a huge breath, she stood to her full height. In each hand, Anais held a metal bar.
Coral pulled herself up into the room with practised ease and Faith followed.
‘It’s time,’ said Anais, ‘for your act of faith.’
87
1.28 am
The wooden ladder leading from the damp, bare room to a trap door in the ceiling told Clay they were in a basement, the basement of a house that opened onto a maze of underground tunnels.
Anais Drake watched Clay closely. Clay cast her mind back to when she was based at the nearby Admiral Street police station and worked out a possible location
for the building.
There was a row of terraced houses on one side of Smithdown Lane.
Somewhere above, Clay heard the sound of a child crying. ‘Maisy?’ she asked. ‘What have you done with the little girl?’
Anais stared in silence at Clay. The crying intensified. ‘What little girl?’
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Clay.
‘What we deserve. What we need. What we shall have. There are many of us. Not just me and mine. We are all over the world. You were born to be the Matriarch, part human, part inhuman, the sum much more than human.’
‘Which part of me is human?’
‘Your flesh, Eve. That which your mother furnished.’
‘Who was my mother?’
‘You’ve seen her,’ said Anais.
‘When?’
‘Recently.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. Today.’
‘She’s still alive?’
Clay tried to match the women she’d encountered since midnight with the ones who’d crossed her path prior to that. There was no one who could possibly have been her mother.
‘Give me a name.’
‘No. She gave you a name, but it was taken from you.’
‘Her name?’
‘Your face, face your face, your face.’
In her mind she walked up to the altar in the Drakes’ sanctum.
Above her head, a floorboard creaked. She recalled the surface of the altar.
She heard a heavy footstep near the creaking board. Maisy’s crying intensified. She sounded terrified. Each passing second was a second lost. If Maisy was crying, she was alive – but for how long?
‘Concentrate!’ snapped Anais. Irritated, she clicked her fingers.
Clay focused.
The image of her on the altar. That face. The naked body. The serpent and demon at her breasts. Her thighs straddling the fire-spouting Satan.
‘You’re thinking about the altar, Eve. That woman wasn’t you. It was your mother, who gave you your flesh, your limbs, your body, your face. It wasn’t you on the altar, Eve. But it soon will be. Because it has to be. Soon that will be you.’
It wasn’t her at the centre of the altar, it was their vision of her parents at the moment of her conception. A pipe rattled in the fabric of the house above them and Clay’s skin crawled.
‘I look like my mother, don’t I?’
‘When you look into shadows, you look into mirrors. When you look into mirrors, what do you see?’
‘Maisy Tanner?’ replied Clay, glancing at the wooden ladder but seeing only the metal bars in Anais’s hands. The crying drifted further away. A sour taste filled Clay’s mouth. She wanted to be sick.
‘Think about your mother, Eve.’
In Clay’s head, insanity translated into a possible narrative. Her mother had been snared by a cult, a Satanic cult. She had become pregnant. As the baby grew inside her, so did her love for it. She had given birth and risked death for running away and abandoning her baby to the mercy of strangers. To save me from the madness which I now face.
Anais pointed at the corner in which Coral stood. ‘An act of faith. Kill Coral.’
Clay looked at Coral.
‘Kill Coral,’ said Anais calmly. ‘Kill her and I’ll take you back down into the tunnels. I know a way out. I will take you to safety and all that will follow. There are many waiting for you in this world. Kill her. It will be your act of faith, your way back to us, away from the world of lies.’
Clay waited, counted to ten, looked at Coral in the corner. This time, Coral looked back at Clay with the doleful gaze of a cow as the abattoir door slams shut at her back. From another corner, Faith stared at her mother.
With her back to Anais, Clay said, ‘Give me the metal bar.’
‘No,’ said Anais. ‘Do it with your bare hands!’
Clay hung on to Coral’s gaze. ‘Coral, come here. I will make a martyr of you. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Coral?’
For a moment, a look of panic crossed Coral’s face.
In the space above, hasty footsteps thumped up a staircase. The bland noise of a television in another house leaked into the pit.
‘Coral, come here.’
As Coral stepped forward, Anais watched impassively. The sound of water running through pipes in the house above them masked Coral’s laboured breathing.
‘Kneel down in front of me.’
Coral knelt down in front of Clay.
‘Why Coral?’ Clay asked Anais.
‘Kill her,’ replied Anais.
‘Why Coral and not Faith?’
‘Strangle her. Do it!’
‘No. Leave Faith alone,’ said Coral, turning to Clay, her eyes pleading. ‘Let her live.’
‘Kill the bitch now,’ said Anais.
‘Coral your first choice again, Anais? What’s she done to make you hate her so much?’
Clay turned to Faith and said, ‘Come here, Faith, and say goodbye to your big sister.’
Faith stood over Coral and rested a hand on her sister’s shoulder. ‘Coral,’ whispered Faith. Coral looked up at her sister. ‘I’ve got that painted-in-a-corner feeling, the one we talked about.’
‘Well, when I’m not here and you get that feeling, talk to me inside your head and listen to your memory of me. Remember all the things I’ve said to you. Remember what I’ve always said: I will live in your mind if your mind lets me in. Death cannot part us. Only we can do that.’
The silence between the girls was dense with grief. And Clay understood that, in their brief lives, death was always a moment away and their mother was the reaper.
Coral picked up her sister’s hand and kissed it.
Walking backwards towards her mother, Faith’s eyes were pinned on Coral, two sisters reading each other’s faces as all hope collapsed.
A distant ambulance siren sang out from the night, advancing deeper into Edge Hill.
‘Do you believe in me, Coral?’ Clay watched Anais and sensed the quickening warmth of sadistic pleasure in her eyes.
‘I believe in you.’
Clay placed her hands on Coral’s shoulders. ‘And I believe in you, Coral. Get up!’
Coral stood.
‘Kill...’ Anais double-clicked her tongue. ‘Kill...’ Click click. ‘Kill...’ Click click. ‘Kill...’
Clay saw impatience rising in her eyes. ‘No!’ she said. She fixed on Faith. ‘No!’ Anais’s face froze. Pleasure became rage in the turning of a moment. She prodded Faith’s shoulder with the iron bar.
‘She’s lied to you, Coral,’ Clay said. ‘Faith, everything she’s told you is a pack of lies.’
‘Do not listen to the corruption...’
‘I’m not going to harm either of...’
‘...in her mouth.’
‘...you. Listen to me!’ Clay wrapped her arms tightly around Coral and focused on Faith. ‘I’ll protect you. That’s what mothers do. I’m painted into the same corner as you.’ A low, bestial note sounded from the base of Anais’s throat. ‘This is my act of faith with you. I will live and die and stand by both of you. This is my act of faith.’
The sound of the child crying drifted higher into the building above and Clay felt herself torn between two dreadful realities. The one she was trapped in and the one that was playing out somewhere upstairs.
Anais thrust a metal bar into Faith’s hand. ‘Kill your sister, Faith, and when you’ve killed your sister, kill Clay!’
Clay released her arms and ushered Coral behind her. ‘Faith!’ She made eye contact with the girl and held it. ‘Don’t touch your sister!’
‘Faith! Kill both of them before I smash your head wide open.’ Anais shoved Faith in the back.
The girl took a step forward and stopped.
Clay watched Faith’s face. She was fixed on Coral. Love surged through her eyes and a cold darkness followed.
‘Kill?’ said Faith.
‘Kill!’ commanded Anais.
‘Obey?’<
br />
‘Obey!’
Faith threw her arm up and over her shoulder and smashed the bar into her mother’s face.
Anais stood her ground, weaving left to right. She raised the other bar over Faith’s head.
Faith turned and moved back as her mother swiped thin air.
‘Come to me, Faith. Come to Coral, she needs you.’
Faith raised the bar again and smashed it into her mother’s face. A line of blood sprayed around the room as Anais dropped to her knees. Faith hit her mother again and again on the head, each blow quicker and more fierce than the previous strike. In moments, Anais’s blood had coated the wall and the low ceiling.
‘Coral, tell her to stop!’
‘Faith, stop it now!’
But she carried on hitting her mother’s body and venting a lifetime of rage. She screamed. An inarticulate rage poured from her. She clicked and uttered noises, sounds that had no recognisable phonemic notation but were thick with obscenity and hatred. Her screams filled the room and echoed down into the tunnel.
Clay looked directly at Coral, connected with her.
Faith’s rage intensified, power picking up with each blow, her mother’s blood showering her face, hair and body.
‘Faith!’ Clay stepped towards her, looked anxiously in the direction of the ladder. As the bar swung back, Clay grabbed it with both hands. Faith froze and released the iron bar. Coral picked up the other weapon.
Clay threw the bar into the tunnel below and stared at Coral.
Coral dropped the bar into the darkness beneath them.
As Clay moved to the bottom of the ladder, Anais raised her hand, her arm rising towards Faith.
Clay was on the bottom step.
Faith stamped on her mother’s face and the basement filled with the sharp crack of bone as Anais’s arm dropped like a falling tree.
Halfway up the ladder, Clay paused, torn between the girls in the basement and Maisy in the house above.
Faith stared down at her mother. The little girl had become still and calm.
‘Coral, you stay here with her!’ ordered Clay, as she hurried to the top of the wooden ladder. ‘Good... riddance... mother...’ Faith smiled.
‘We’ll stay!’ whispered Coral. She drew her little sister back from their mother’s corpse. ‘This is our act of faith.’
