by Stephen Laws
“Jesus Christ, what’s happening…?”
I scrabbled across the wooden board or door that had been pinning me down. In the darkness it seemed to me that it was lying at an angle. I clambered upward, hearing the rubble slip and slide all around me. There was new terror now. It sounded as if everything were sliding down on top of me to fill up this hole that I’d found myself in. I grabbed the rim of the wooden board and hauled myself over the edge.
The slipping, sliding sound had become an avalanche, a gathering roar and rumble of sound. I kept scrambling upward, cleared the top of the mound of rubble—and the next moment I was over and falling. There was a sheer drop on the other side. I clawed and flailed at the rubble as I fell, crying out loud. It was sliding with me, down into some bottomless, pitch-black pit.
Water engulfed me, shooting into my mouth and jetting into my nostrils. I reacted instinctively, gasping for air where there was none—and filling my lungs with dirty water in one great sucking intake. The rubble was piling down all around me. It would push me down to the bottom of this water-filled pit, bury me and drown me. My legs thrashed and squirmed as I desperately tried to find something solid beneath my feet.
And then, I was standing in the hole, clawing at its side and vomiting out the water that had filled my lungs. It was waist deep, and there was an unbearable and unmistakable stench down here, too. Suddenly I remembered what had happened to me that day. Stafford, and the writing on the wall in the toilets. My overwhelming anger. And then the whole world somehow falling apart and collapsing into darkness.
Darkness?
There was a smear of light down here; just ahead of me, seeping under ragged brickwork. Still coughing and gagging, I clawed at the sides of the cesspool in which I’d fallen, trying to pull myself out. The shattered brickwork beneath my pistoning legs and clawing hands slid and crumbled as I ran on the spot, like some terrified animal in a caged exercise wheel. I was certain that my frenzy to pull myself out of the pit would make the sides cave in all around me, first trapping my legs and then dragging me down into the filthy water.
Something happened to me then.
Something was going wrong inside. I’d always known how to handle myself. I’d had to learn how to handle myself “on the street”. But I’d never known terror like this. I don’t know how to describe this properly—but in a crazy sort of way, it was like I was…catapulted out of my mind for a moment. Even though it was pitch dark down there; I was suddenly somehow up in the air, above myself and looking down. And despite the darkness, I could see where I was. In a rubble-filled pit, and the mad, clawing, thrashing thing beneath me was more like an animal than a human being. From that detached distance, I could see my desperate efforts to crawl out of the hell-hole. And from up there I knew…just knew…that the fear was doing something to my mind; something bad deep inside.
Suddenly, it seemed that the figure beneath me was able to brace its foot on the rubble beneath it. When it lunged this time, it was able to crawl out of the water-filled pit. In that moment I was catapulted back into the figure. Now I was that thrashing, clawing animal again. The edges of the pit were crumbling even as I got one knee over the rim. Sobbing, I clambered up and over the broken rubble towards the ragged line of light. Behind me, I could hear rubble sliding into the water, could feel and hear debris falling from overhead. I was out of the water pit, but my optimism was short-lived; because now I knew that this underground place was going to cave in on top of me and bury me alive.
I clawed towards the light, pulling broken brick and crumbling plaster away.
It was working. More light was flooding into this dark place.
My fingers were bleeding, my palms torn by the ragged debris.
Something hit me hard between the shoulder blades, knocking the breath from my lungs. The “ceiling” was coming down on top of me. I was going to be buried a second time in this living hell.
I was going to die a second time.
Chapter Four
Gordon Tranwell
Gordon Tranwell flinched when the pebble cracked against his windowpane.
He resisted the urge to jump up from the edge of his bed and run to the window; it only ever made things worse if he showed his face. If they knew they were getting a rise out of him, it just made them more insistent. Instead he remained sitting there, with his eyes screwed shut; hunched over his guitar, the last incomplete chord still hanging in the air as the music from the CD system he had been playing along with kept on going. From somewhere in the street below he heard the sounds of jeering. He clenched his teeth, leaning over to switch off the music, and then regretted that he’d been goaded into even doing that. When the laughter came again, it was because they knew they’d gotten a reaction out of him after all. He should just have let the music keep on playing, and to hell with them.
Below, one of the girls began to sing the old Beatles song: “Nowhere Man”. The lyrics were meant for him. He gritted his teeth again when another pebble skittered across the window, leaving a scratch. More laughter, fading away. And again, Gordon could feel the bitterness inside. He was close to tears. He screwed his eyes shut, then leaned over to rewind the tape. Pressing “Play”, he carefully placed both hands in position for the opening chord. He had played this piece of music so often, had memorised its chord sequences so well, that he even knew by heart the pop and crackle on the tape, taken from an old LP years ago. It didn’t bother him. There were only a few recordings available by the maestro, and he treasured every one of them.
The music began again. That first melancholy phrase that he now knew to be a minor chord. Gordon had never studied music, could not read it. But he could play by ear now, his love for this particular music style filling all the heartbreaking gaps in the rest of his life. There were no disappointments with his music. This track, for example. It had everything of loss and regret and loneliness…it seemed to mirror his life. But then the music changed…it surged ahead into a major chord sequence, changing the sorrow and the melancholy into something else. It had a yearning quality that he strove to emulate in his own playing. Sometimes he managed to get it, at other times it seemed that his fingers’ awkwardness in finding the chord brought it out too “flat”. Now the resolution, as the emerging melody cast off all the bad memories, finally bursting into that last wonderfully melodic phrasing. It was like finding light in dark cloud cover, soaring for it, bursting through the rain-clouds and finding the sun. It was ecstatic then, and it made Gordon ecstatic, too. At his best, copying the maestro, he could finally express things inside himself that he’d struggled all his life to express.
Gordon was eighteen, but could barely speak. His stammering had been treated in the early stages, when his mother and father had taken him to the consultant. But six months into the programme, when Gordon was eight years old and progress was being made, his mother and father had been killed in a car accident. It seemed to him now that he could remember very little of those days. There was a darkness; a chasm inside that seemed to blot it all out. But one thing had come out of it. It had cured his stammering, in a manner of speaking. Quite literally.
Cured it in the sense that he just didn’t talk any more. It was so easy, really. Don’t try to talk and you won’t stammer. His aunt and uncle, the ones who had taken on responsibility for him with an attitude approaching resentment, could not afford to continue with his special treatment, and there had been no insurance cover for the death of Gordon’s parents to enable the treatment to continue. So he had been transferred back to the “normal” education system; a school where he knew no one, where teachers were given the barest of instructions about his problems with communication, and children who felt that someone who didn’t talk was only behaving that way because he didn’t want to talk to them. As a result, Gordon was ostracised from the beginning. In desperation and fury and grief, Gordon had learned another thing. He had learned that he could speak, after all. If he tried hard enough—and was angry enough. When something happene
d that really hurt, or when he was really angry at his inability to speak—he could muster up the anger inside and spit out one word.
One word. Maybe two. Sometimes three.
Always spoken with anger.
Just confirming what the other kids thought: that he didn’t like them, that he didn’t want to talk to them. That he considered himself different.
The jeering continued in the school yard. The beatings continued. His uncle died, and his aunt became more withdrawn.
And the overworked, overburdened teachers in a stressed-out system somehow managed to avoid the problem.
At fourteen, he had discovered an old guitar at the back of a cupboard. It had been bought by his cousin, now grown up and moved to another country. Knowing his uncle as he did, he wasn’t surprised that his own son had put a sea between them. His aunt had forgotten that the guitar was there, didn’t notice when he took it. She never questioned him when she heard him trying to tune it, plucking absently at the strings. Over the months, and then the years, Gordon had got used to the feel of the instrument. He had learned where the notes were, the chord combinations. He’d heard a story once; about how if you put a monkey at a typewriter and left it there for eternity, with the animal just pounding at the keys, eventually it would turn out the works of Shakespeare. Ruefully, he wondered if he was like that. Instead of a typewriter, he had a guitar.
And then one day, on the radio, he heard an instrumental piece of music. Something that sounded foreign; maybe Italian, or Spanish. He wasn’t into that kind of thing at all, but something about it made him turn up the volume. That first time he missed who had composed and performed it. But there was a special quality that haunted him, made him keep on tuning into the same station in case they played it again. They did. A week later. It was called “Come un uragano”—“Like a Hurricane”. An instrumental theme composed by a Spanish guitarist called Nicola Spagnole, who’d had some success on the Continent with a small orchestral group. Someone on the radio termed it “rock flamenco”, with something that sounded like a smirk. It was a minor hit, staying in the charts for three or four weeks, never reaching the top twenty. But something about that music had lit a fuse in Gordon. For weeks, months, after the music had vanished from the airwaves, he continued to practise on his battered old guitar.
The Monkey and the Typewriter.
Eventually, he had discovered how to play the lead guitar part. That understanding gave him his first knowledge of the musical scale, gave him an understanding of the basics. From there, he had sought out other music by the same man, discovering with real disappointment that Spagnole had died shortly after “Come un uragano” had been released on the Continent. He had been young—thirty-six—dying of a congenital heart condition; leaving behind a mere three CDs and a handful of singles.
Unable to communicate, unable to make friends and with the normal avenues of expression denied to him, Gordon found in Spagnole’s music and his cousin’s battered guitar a way to bring out the feelings inside. Even if he couldn’t share them, even if his loneliness continued, he could still make that beautiful music himself, could practise and practise until he had learned each track, each chord combination. Sadness, joy, melancholy and anger. All of them coming from his fingertips, purging the frustration inside. Soon he was also learning to play the harmonica and had moved to keyboards.
But to the kids at school, the kids who threw rocks at his windows as they passed (because only a fucking weirdo would listen to that crap over and over again, and never come out of there to show his face), Gordon remained as distant and strange a lunatic as he always had.
The window rattled again, and Gordon missed a chord. The discordance made the anger flare inside again. Now the track was fading, and he’d cocked up the beautiful final phrasing. Once more, the window rattled. But this time it sounded different. Not like a pebble or a rock being thrown; more like a heavy goods vehicle passing by outside, making the foundations of the house shudder, making the windowpanes tremble. Except that couldn’t happen here. There were weight restrictions on this road, with a major water main running down the centre. Again, the shuddering. Angrily, Gordon turned from the window, rolled over the mattress and grabbed his headphones from the bedside table. Jamming them over his head, he rolled again and plugged the lead into his CD player. Stabbing at “Track I”, he rolled for a third time and swept up his guitar. Refusing to look at the windowpanes, refusing to give in to the goading from the street below, he prepared for the first chord yet again. When it came, he was on cue, and the music had distanced him from what was happening beyond the windows on the street below.
When the track finished, with its final flourish, Gordon felt that he’d never played better; knew that even though he couldn’t hear how he was performing because of the headphones, he hadn’t made a single mistake. Defiantly, he looked back at the windowpanes.
To see that something was happening there. Something strange.
They were…blurring.
Each pane still reflected the light from his bedside lamp, but the light was somehow shifting and flashing. The second track began, but Gordon leaned over to switch the CD player off and, as he did so, two things happened simultaneously.
First, he felt the bed shift, as if one of the legs had broken. And then he heard the noise. As if a piece of fluff had caught somewhere on the CD, causing it to make a ragged, roaring sound. Gordon snatched the headphones from his head, but the noise was even louder now. A grinding and roaring that seemed to be coming from outside. Now anger was overcoming his fear. He tore the headphones from around his neck and flung them across the bed, kicking himself clear of the mattress to stand in the middle of the room.
And instantly became aware that the noise was both outside and inside his bedroom. In fact, it was filling the room; had been filling the room for some minutes but, until now, he had not been able to hear because of the headphones.
It was the sound of thunder.
Not outside, not in the sky. But here, right now, in this room. It was shaking the walls, making the bed rattle.
When he looked back in alarm at the scratched windowpanes he could see them trembling and reflecting light from the bedroom lamp in even wilder patterns. The thunder was in the floor now, juddering into his feet and legs. In fear, he stooped and grabbed both thighs, trying to steady himself. Was he somehow imagining all this? Above him, there was a rending crack. Suddenly the air was filled with talcum powder; a great drifting cloud of it from above, falling like thin snow all over his bedroom. Instinctively, he dropped to his knees and sheltered his head with his hands, watching the talcum powder float and drift in the air. When he looked up he could see that the plaster in the ceiling had cracked. Even as he watched, there was another shifting, grinding sound—and then the crack spread on both sides, racing to the corner beside the window and right across the room to the door frame. Gordon lunged back to his feet and felt the floor tilt. The movement shifted his balance and he reeled across the carpet to clutch at the windowsill. He looked outside into the day.
Someone was running down the alley on the other side of the street. Now there were three, four…and a young girl. Were they the kids who had been jeering and throwing stones up at his window? He didn’t recognise the silhouettes as they ran, but there was something…something wrong…about the way they were running. Something wrong about the way they were holding their arms. They were lurching from side to side, their arms thrown out as if they couldn’t keep their balance. They looked like sailors in a ship’s corridor, when there was a high sea and the vessel was pitching from side to side. Gordon felt a great shuddering in the windowsill, and the next moment the entire facing wall of the building opposite cracked, split and burst apart in a chaos of bricks and mortar and an erupting cloud of dust. Gordon flinched away from the window in shock as the running figures disappeared from sight in the dust cloud. An avalanche of masonry crashed across the street towards Gordon’s home. It stopped halfway, the sound of thunder now i
ntensified and the erupting dust cloud billowing up across the windows to obscure everything from sight. Suddenly Gordon was across his bedroom and yanking at the door. There was no lock, no way to jam it shut. But somehow the door was jammed shut.
Gordon panicked.
His world was falling apart, and he couldn’t understand what was happening.
Overhead the ceiling cracked again, and a chunk of plaster was dislodged. It exploded into a white spray of debris on the floor behind him. And now he had torn the door open, the hinges screeching. Did something want to keep him in the room when the ceiling collapsed? On the landing he steadied himself against the wall as another tremor shook the house. Was that someone in the distance, screaming?
Gordon tried to call for his aunt.
He opened his mouth. But nothing would come out. In anger and fear, he screwed his eyes shut, tried to form the words Aunt Sheila.
But he could only gag.
Gordon threw himself down the stairs, clutching at the handrail when something exploded somewhere—something that sounded like another house collapsing, shaking the foundations of his own home. He almost fell at the bottom step, but clung to the rail and twisted down the hallway. From his bedroom came the sound of another screeching roar, and another great shuddering convulsion shunted the staircase supports out of the wall in a rattling spray of plaster. Had the bedroom ceiling finally caved in? Still yelling his aunt’s name, he flung himself down the passage to the kitchen door. Would that too be somehow locked or jammed? This was a dream…it must be a dream. How else could he be moving so slowly when everything around him was shaking itself to pieces and his world was falling apart? He could see his hand, impossibly large, reaching for the door handle as the very ground beneath him vibrated and juddered. With his aunt’s name still locked between his teeth, he forced his hand onward. His grip on the handle felt unreal, hardly solid.
