by Rhys Thomas
‘Right,’ said Adam. ‘So now we need to get to the top of the cliff and wait. You got the binoculars, John?’
The fat kid with glasses lifted up his sweater. Strapped to his belt was a pair of binoculars in a hard leather case.
‘Cool. OK, ready?’
Adam looked at each of the boys. John removed his glasses and pinched the top of his nose in a dramatic display of stress.
‘I don’t know about this.’
‘What don’t you know?’ Adam tilted his head.
‘I don’t know. If this is really a good idea.’
‘It’s too late now. We have to go.’
‘It’s dangerous, Adam.’
‘So why did you come?’
John shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Edward felt the same way as him. He knew this was stupid.
‘Come on, let’s just fucking go,’ said Michael from the back in his squeaky voice. He passed the boys and hopped up on to the first step of the cliff path. ‘We’re just wasting time.’
The dead ferns on either side of the path were thick and damp. Water evaporated from them into swirling ghosts of mist that magically disappeared when the boys got too close to them. Whenever they came to a bend in the path they would stop and listen. But it was always quiet. Edward looked out over the bay. The sea was such a long way out.
Adam moved silently behind him and he could hear Saul and Trio talking quietly until Adam told them to shut up. They were near the top of the path. Edward knew the final strait of steps well, with their rocky, clay surfaces.
He strained his ears. There was still no sound. Suddenly he realized something. The marauders would never leave this path unguarded. What they were doing was ridiculous. Even if the marauders were vampires, their masks protected them from sunlight.
They were here. Just as he had known the kids had been watching him from the gorse bushes that day on the cliff top, he knew that alien eyes were on him now. His sixth sense was never wrong. He stopped.
‘What?’ Adam whispered.
But Edward was watching the damp, brown bracken of the ferns. They were moving. Edward swung his body round to the other side. Another form was rising up out of the undergrowth, this one already further out of the bracken than the first. The movement was sickeningly slow, like a long-dead monster coming up out of a swamp.
The boys turned to run but the path was blocked. A man dressed in black clothes and wearing a black gas mask was standing over them. He aimed a short rifle at them and used its tip to point them up the path.
‘Go,’ he said, through the mask in a deep, fuzzy voice. ‘Up the hill.’
Edward had never felt his heart beat as fast as it was beating now. It thumped with such ferocity he thought it might explode out of his chest.
They reached the summit of the path and walked out on to the grassland where four more of the vampires waited for them. The boys had nowhere to go.
The men looked ugly and dangerous. Edward imagined their heavy, thick boots kicking him in the head as he lay helpless on the floor. Up ahead the old house looked cold and dirty. There were lots of big trucks parked in front of the garage and on the grass at its side. He wanted to do something, take some action. His mind raced for an idea that would help them escape. He could smell the damp on the air, the scent of the grass, the salt from the sea. His senses were stronger.
To his left, Saul started to cry. Edward looked at him. Saul was a foot shorter than he was. His clothes were tiny. He must have been years younger than him.
‘Please let us go.’ Michael looked at the ground as he spoke. ‘We won’t do it again. We’re sorry.’
‘What is it that you are doing?’ one of the vampires said. With the gas mask pulled over his face the voice sounded like a robot. The big insect eyes of the mask reflected the grey sky.
‘You won’t do anything to us,’ said Adam.
Edward looked at him. ‘Adam.’
‘If you don’t let us go, we’ll sue you.’
The largest vampire tilted his head and said something that sounded more like an insect clicking than a voice. All the other vampires started laughing. The large one stepped closer to Adam.
‘You will report us to the police, is that right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I do not think we will let you go.’ He paused. ‘Your parents – they have one of my friends down there and so we will keep some of their friends up here.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Adam. Edward couldn’t believe what Adam was doing. ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ he spat.
‘What have we done to you? Have we attacked you, or your family? I don’t think so. And so why do your parents have our friend, when we have done nothing to you?’
‘That’s not my fault,’ said Adam.
In a burst of violent movement the faceless vampire rushed Adam and grabbed him roughly by the back of the collar. He yanked him forward. Adam would have fallen if the vampire hadn’t held him up.
The boy’s face went red.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Michael. He tried to prise the vampire’s fingers from Adam’s collar. ‘He can’t breathe.’
The faceless figure pushed Michael away and the boy fell awkwardly to the ground. ‘You must behave while you are with us.’ He turned his head to Edward and the other boys. The sound of Saul’s quiet sobs drifted on the wind. ‘If you don’t behave yourself you will be in very big trouble. We are not like your fathers. We come from a more cruel world than you.’
He turned and pulled Adam towards the cliff edge, away from the path, to where the grass ran away to nothing. Adam’s legs dangled behind him, trying unsuccessfully to get a grip.
Edward felt his own body grow taut and hollow. The fibres in his flesh went hard.
Adam’s red face looked strange against his blond hair.
The vampire stopped and turned back to them. He was five yards from the cliff edge. The grass sloped horribly towards it. Edward looked at the other vampires. They passively watched their leader do whatever it was he was about to do.
‘This is your first lesson,’ shouted the lead vampire. ‘It is called “obeying”.’
One of the smaller marauders was close to Edward. He could get the gun off him if the other boys saw him and helped him.
‘You will obey me, or I will kill you.’
He swung Adam around like he was made of nothing but feathers, and let go.
Edward watched as the boy ran towards the cliff under the momentum. He tried to stop but his legs were not his own, he was going too fast, the ground was too steep. He fell to the grass but his body continued to roll horribly down the slope. Time moved so slowly. If he could get his body to move, Edward was sure he could reach Adam in time. But his body wouldn’t move. Adam started to scream. He wasn’t going to stop. The scream disappeared and he fell. His body vanished. He was gone.
Everything came to life. The vampires encircled the boys, shouting instructions through their alien masks. Saul was screaming. John and Michael were standing with their hands on their heads, looking at the spot where Adam had just been. Trio watched the largest vampire lumber back towards them with giant strides.
Edward felt warmth against his legs. He had wet himself. A grown-up hand pushed his back. An angry voice echoed around the inside of his head. His legs stumbled forwards and he fell. Hands picked him up and moved him on. They were heading for the house. He thought of his mother and how she would feel if she never saw him again.
The house looked monstrous. The door was opened and the boys were pushed forcibly into its throat, into the dark.
The vampires had put a large, metal lock on the outside of the cellar door. One of them slid it back and the boys were thrown inside. John was pleading something with them but Edward was unable to comprehend his words. He went obediently down the steps and the door was slammed closed behind them.
The lock on the outside bolted shut.
He reached the bottom step and stopped. There were eyes in the dark. The
window through which he had escaped before had been boarded up with wooden planks. He couldn’t see properly.
‘Hello?’ His voice went timidly out in front of him and searched for a reply.
It came back quickly. It was another child’s voice. ‘Hello?’
‘Come in.’
Charlie went in to Dr Balad’s office. His desk was empty apart from the pair of glasses that lay upside down in front of the doctor.
‘Hello, Charlie.’ His quiet, measured voice sounded tired.
‘Emily doesn’t have long,’ he said. He just needed to say what he had to say without thinking too deeply about it. ‘She’s in her last day.’ The doctor’s eyes reflected the faded light of the weak lamp. He said nothing. ‘I know we can do something,’ said Charlie.
Dr Balad nodded. ‘I see.’
‘Mims. He was cured. He had it and got better, didn’t he? Everyone knows. That’s why we have him here. Isn’t it?’
The doctor sat up in his chair. The wooden frame creaked under his movement. ‘It is true,’ he said.
‘So you can cure Emily.’
‘We don’t know the cure, Charlie.’
Charlie shook his head, refusing to believe it. ‘You can do something for her. Mims has been here for the same length of time as us – you must have learned something.’
‘Now you must listen,’ said Dr Balad, his voice suddenly tight. ‘I am not a scientist, I’m a medical doctor. I have done everything I know but it has led to nothing.’
His eyes seared with desperation that mirrored Charlie’s heart. The answer to everything was with them but they could not access it.
‘Have you not been able to get anything out of him?’
Dr Balad steepled his long, thin fingers underneath his chin. ‘Christopher Mims has no idea what happened to him. They cut his skin up into lines and yet he remembers nothing. And I can find nothing medical in what they did.’
‘But who did it? Can’t we find them?’
‘He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t know where he came from, or who did it.’
‘But –’ Charlie put the ball of his hand to his forehead – ‘there must be some way.’
‘I will tell you everything I know but it will not help you. Just like everything with this disease, the cure, if it happened, would defy logic. I like to see people die no more than you. I can assure you that I have been affected in an equal way to everybody by what has happened.’
‘Tell me what he said.’
‘He spoke only of a great pain. The people who did what they did . . . they cut him open. There are surgical wounds, all over his body, and they are very clean. They were made by a surgical knife but to what end I have been unable to discern. It makes no sense to me. Really, he should have died from his wounds – they are that extensive. It is a miracle he is still alive.’
Charlie sensed that what the doctor was saying to him was something he had said countless times before, like an actor reciting lines. He wondered to how many families this man had said this, how many times he had been made to quietly crush the hope they held for their loved one’s survival. All they wanted was answers, knowledge. Understanding. That would make it easier. But there was none.
‘The cuts he said brought him great pain and all he can remember apart from the pain itself is emerging from it into a room with bright lights, the operating theatre. After that, his memory clouds again and then he wakes up not far from here. And that is his story. There is nothing more to it than that.’ Dr Balad took a handkerchief from his white jacket pocket and placed it to his nose.
‘So you think there’s a place near by that did this? A hospital, or a government facility or something?’
‘No.’
‘There must be.’
‘There is no such place, Charlie. We have looked. It does not exist.’
‘But—’
‘No. Charlie, understand me. We cannot save Emily.’
The two men looked at each other across the desk.
‘You know,’ said the old man, ‘you should feel blessed for your time with her.’
Charlie scoffed and turned his head away. He wasn’t looking for consolation.
‘I do not say that in a haphazard way. I have seen many people become ill here in this lazaret. Hell –’ he laughed – ‘I spend all day with them. And I have seen all of the different reactions to the illness. You see, to my own mind, this illness, this “Sadness” as they say, seems like nothing more than something going missing from us. As a doctor this is of course a silly thing to say, because illness is brought about in a typical way by the introduction of something into the body – a virus, a bacterium, a poison – but here we can find no such foreign invader. You know of what I speak, yes? Something is lost in those that become ill.’
Charlie closed his mouth tight shut.
‘People think that when somebody falls ill with this disease they become very still and sad, or if not they become angry and violent, you see? But that is not right. It is not one or the other, it is a whole spectrum. A sliding scale. That is what I think, judging by what I have seen. Whatever the illness is, the resulting symptoms are people’s reaction to whatever it is being lost from them. There are no tests to prove this, no experiments we can do. It operates entirely outside of our science. But I have seen it. Everybody has.
‘And people react in myriad different ways. Some will cry to their deaths, some will talk of their greatest fears, others of the things they never experienced, and others still will run away from everything they love –’
Miriam opened the door of the campervan and stepped down into the cold weather. The smell of salt was strong on the wind.
‘– Some will consider the very worst thing they can do, and then, despite every inch of them telling them to stop, they go ahead and do it –’
She pressed her hand against her stomach. The baby moved towards it.
‘– There is no loss of consciousness, not even in the violent ones. They do not turn into chaotic, thoughtless killing machines. As they carry out their atrocities, they know inside what they are doing. But they cannot stop –’
As she did every hour of every day, she thought about the night in the cellar. The flash of memories never went away.
‘– They do it anyway. They cannot stop because the thing they lost when they fell ill was all that kept them from slipping into their own terrible chaos.’
She was looking at Joseph’s dead body sitting on the wooden steps of the cellar. The yellow morning was peering through the tiny window above her head. She breathed in. The air was cold and soothing.
‘She told me she doesn’t love me any more.’
‘That was not Emily speaking. She was telling you something that was not true. She thought it was true because of the thing she had lost, but it is a funny thing, the truth. People always think it is a simple idea. They believe it to be flat, like a piece of paper, and if you shine a light on it you can see it and there is nothing else to be seen. But it is not like that. The truth is like a globe. You shine a light on one side and the thing you see will be different from that which you would see if you shone a light from another angle. Both are the truth, and both are different.’ He smiled. ‘That really is the truth.’
She went down the hill and sensed something in her chest. The density was returning. She turned her head and looked out of the camp to the old house on the top of the hill.
The kids in the cellar told them they been kept captive by the vampires for months. As they spoke, a feeling of sickness grew in Edward’s belly. The kids were weird. They said the marauders were not vampires at all, they were just normal men. None of them had ever seen any of them drinking blood or anything like that. They spoke very quickly and quietly. Their faces, even in the dimness of the light, could be seen to be thin and grimy and the whites of their eyes gleamed with their own light.
Edward hadn’t said anything. He knew that if he spoke he would start crying. The image of Adam being thrown over the cli
ff replayed in his head but it never seemed real. His brain would not allow him to accept it had happened.
The cellar was full of children. Many of them sat slumped on the floor between the shelves of supplies – lines of bodies disappearing towards the far wall, into the shadows. There was definitely something very odd about them, like they didn’t have any energy. They didn’t have the Sadness; it was different from that. To Edward, they seemed to be like old people but in children’s bodies.
‘What do you think they’ll do to us?’ said John. His voice was higher than normal.
‘They’ll train you up, probably,’ came the reply. ‘If you don’t mess up, they’ll keep you.’
‘What do you mean?’
The door at the top of the stairs swung open with a heavy creak and the boys stopped. Light flooded the stairway and a black figure appeared. He clomped down the steps and into the centre of the children. The light from a torch in his hands played over the boys – Edward was aware in a back corner of his mind that there were no girls down here – until it came to a rest on Trio. The boy squinted and held his hand up to block the light.
Edward watched in a detached, emotionless state. His fear was receding and being replaced by nothingness.
The man lurched through the protruding limbs of the boys, grabbed Trio and pulled him up to his feet with a violent tug. Trio tried to struggle, shouted, ‘Get off me,’ but the man beat him across the side of the face with the handle of his torch and after that Trio went quietly, dragged up the stairs and beyond the closing door.
Nobody said anything. No air was being breathed in the room. The boys waited.
Even through the ceiling Trio’s scream rang out clearly. Edward covered his ears to block it out. His heart felt like tiny needles of glass were being fired into it. When the glass shower was finished his pulse emerged as a deep thunderclap, thumping over and over.
