Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  “I’m okay…”

  “She’s not telling the whole truth,” said Lisa. “For two days she was shaken up so badly she could hardly talk. When she did start talking, it was like she couldn’t stop. Juliet’s had an…” Lisa looked to her for a description.

  “An interesting few days,” replied Juliet. “Not something I’d want to put in a travel agent’s brochure. Where I used to work, by the way.”

  Lisa saw the cloud appear on her face and quickly continued. “Anyway, she talked it all out. And she’s okay now. We’re all okay.”

  “Speak for yourself,” slurred a voice from the next room. It was Candy. I pretended not to see the tense expression on Alex’s face.

  “Candy’s anaesthetic,” he said, trying to keep things light. From a starting point where I hadn’t cared too much for his attitude, things had changed a lot. Alex was okay in my book.

  It was all coming back to me now. The fallen mast. My first sighting of Juliet. The haul on the rope. And the madman who’d thrown stones and who now, I realised, had caught up with us at the last and tried to drag me back down into the Chasm.

  “That bloody madman…Trevor?” I looked over at Juliet. She looked away, kneading her fingers in her lap, now stroking a strand of hair from her face. She was trying not to react.

  “He was hanging on to you,” said Alex. “Gordon and I dragged you both back up. Then he attacked Juliet. I brought him down. For a while, I thought he was going to get the better of us. There’s something…well, something…” Alex was suddenly looking uncomfortable. Juliet was still working hard at giving no reaction. “…not right with him.” There was a silence, and I could sense there was something they either weren’t ready to tell me yet, or were unable to deal with.

  “I saw Gordon belt him with his guitar,” I said. “It was the last thing I did see. Cheers, Gordon.”

  “Two strings,” said Gordon, sadly shaking his head as if he’d lost two dear friends.

  “Now tell me about the light,” I said, pointing to the bedside lamp. “And please tell me I’m not dreaming about that.” It looked great.

  “We’ve had two nights by the bonfire,” Annie went on. “The Black Stuff didn’t come back. And there weren’t any more…well, you know, any more of them. But we decided, Lisa and I, that we weren’t going to have any more of it.”

  “So,” Lisa said, “we did something about it.”

  “We got some stuff from our hardware store, and after two hard days searching through the rubble we were able to rig up a petrol-driven generator in the basement. Sorted out the electrics in here. Well, most of it anyway. Hey presto! They said ‘Let there be light’. And there was light.” Annie was pleased with herself, and didn’t care who knew it.

  “Where exactly are we?” I asked.

  “Promise you won’t laugh,” said Alex.

  I just looked at him.

  He cleared his throat, guiltily wiping the smile away.

  “We’re in a three-star boarding house. Rooms for everyone, with en suite facilities—not that there’s any running water, of course. But I guess you can’t have everything.

  “Except a fleet of rescue helicopters.”

  “Well, there’s that, I suppose.”

  “But the Black Stuff…” I began.

  “It has a name,” said Alex.

  Everyone was trying to stay light, but the tension kept creeping in.

  “A name?”

  “It’s called the Vorla.”

  “And how exactly do we know that?”

  “Our new arrival, Trevor. He told us.”

  “How the hell does he know?”

  “Because…well, because…” Alex looked at Juliet.

  She was still looking down into her lap. With a measured voice, trying to keep calm, she said: “Because it’s inside him.”

  Everyone waited for her to go on. She was having difficulty, but now I had to know.

  “Trevor kept me…locked up, after the earthquake. I don’t know how and when it happened. But some time during that time, what he calls the Vorla got inside his head, inside his body. It’s still there, controlling him.”

  “You’ve seen it?” I asked Juliet. “The…what is it called, the Vorla?”

  “It came up the mast after me. Black Liquid, flowing up against gravity. Horrible. Something happened to stop it, but I still don’t understand that part.”

  “I mean, you’ve seen it in Trevor?”

  “Not when I was over there, but since I came here…”

  “We’ve all seen it, Jay. In his eyes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “There’s an extension out back with two or three extra rooms. We put him in one of those because…well, because we didn’t want him in the house. No one would feel at ease. We’ve got him locked in a room there. Tied up. Curtains drawn for the light. He had agonies during the day because of it, but the stuff…I mean, the Vorla…didn’t burst out of him the way it burst out of the dead people in the light. We’ve seen it in his eyes. For the most part, he keeps them shut, and that keeps the light out. We don’t understand what’s happening to him but…”

  “But it’s horrible,” said Candy, appearing in the doorway. She had a bottle in her hand, and was well on the way to oblivion. No one said anything for a long time. And then the boy also appeared in the doorway, yawning. He had been in the room beyond, asleep. He pushed past Candy and moved to his usual comforter, Lisa, snuggling in the folds of her arms.

  “You’ve got him tied up good and tight?” I asked. “No way he can get free?”

  “Trussed like a mummy,” said Lisa. “When I tie a knot, it stays tied. Believe me.”

  “Should…should…” Gordon smacked a fist into the palm of his hand. “Shoulda th-thrown. Him. Over the edge.”

  “We thought about it, Jay,” Alex went on. “But…well, you know. That would be murder. That stuff is in him. But he’s not dead. And he’s still human, whatever he’s done.”

  Juliet remained silent.

  “Is there enough light here to keep the Vorla away?” I asked.

  “You’ve woken up just in time,” said Annie. “Lisa and I have worked out a little surprise. You feel like getting up?”

  “Try and stop me.”

  Groggily, I rose from the bed. With a little help from my friends.

  Heavisides’ boarding house was a small bed-and-breakfast establishment that had suffered relatively little damage in the ’quake. Some cracks in the plasterwork, a fallen chimney and a few slates. That was it. It was a detached house, and had maybe been a private residence in the past, converted to its present use. It had just the right number of rooms. Like it was custom-built for us, really. The others had already christened it the Rendezvous. I never did get around to asking why.

  Annie and Lisa were bursting with pride, wanting to show off their petrol generator in the basement, and tell me how they’d gone about hooking everything up. But they could tell that I wasn’t up to a long tour, since I had to hang on to Gordon’s shoulder for most of the time. So they decided to go straight to the most important part.

  “This is going to be a good surprise, isn’t it?” I asked, when they opened the front door and everyone moved out into the garden. Slates were still embedded in the grass like bizarre ornaments. “Most of the surprises so far haven’t been what I would have asked for on my Christmas list.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed,” said Annie, and she walked out of the garden into the middle of the street. She stepped over thin cables on the way, kicking them as if wanting to keep them apart. Now I could see that the same cables were lying all over the street, stretching away on both sides past ruined houses, a shattered bicycle repair shop, and another garage. Some of the cables went into the garage. Others headed back to the house and around the garden wall, vanishing around the side of the Rendezvous. We had searched this part of the town, hunting for dead bodies. And the cables hadn’t been there then.

  Annie headed for the garage, ki
cking the wires as she went, the way that some people buying a new car might kick the tyres. I looked at the others, and saw how tense they’d become again.

  Lisa was standing in the doorway of the boarding house, like she was waiting for a signal. When an engine started up in the garage, and Annie appeared in the entrance with a wave, I knew that was just what she had been waiting for. Lisa waved back, and vanished inside. Now both women were gone.

  “What happens next?” I asked.

  “Just wait,” said Alex.

  Someone took my hand. I recognised the coolness of the skin.

  It was Juliet. She didn’t look at me. We just stood there, holding hands and waiting.

  Something fizzed and sparked halfway down the street. A shower of sparks fell from nowhere into the street.

  “Shit!” said Gordon.

  Had those sparks fallen from one of the streetlights? From the garage, I heard the growing whine of an engine or another generator.

  And the next moment most of the streetlamps still standing on the street suddenly began to glow. There were other lamps there, strung out along the fractured pavements and all connected, like the streetlamps, to the tangle of cables that ran down the middle of the road. There were two great round contraptions that looked like searchlights. They’d been aimed, not at the sky, but directly across the street at different angles. I could see that streetlamps behind the boarding house had also been connected and were also beginning to glow.

  Suddenly the entire street was lit up, and even though night had yet to fall on what remained of Edmonville, it seemed that the blank grey of the sky overhead was disappearing. For the first time since the ’quake, we had proper light thanks to Annie and Lisa.

  Annie appeared in the garage doorway, hands on hips. She dusted her hands extravagantly and came back towards us, grinning. Lisa stepped out into the garden, holding the boy’s hands and swinging him around in joy. The boy laughed loud. They embraced. Candy turned away to swig at her bottle and Damon sat on the garden wall, swinging his legs and looking at nothing in particular. But everyone else was…well, we were ecstatic.

  “I don’t think the Vorla is going to like that one little bit,” said Alex.

  If I’d felt good about seeing that small bedside table lamp and its beautiful orange glow, I felt like my heart was going to burst or something. I can’t tell you the way it felt. All of us standing in the ruins of this God-forsaken place, not knowing what was going to happen next. By rights, none of us should have made it. But here we were—thanks to Annie and Lisa—standing in the light that they, that we had made. A single street in the ruins. A street that had seen death and horror and the walking dead. But now we’d brought life back to it again.

  No one spoke.

  Juliet squeezed my hand harder, and we looked at each other. She’d been through her own hell before getting here, but knew that she could feel that…that…blaze inside. This wasn’t Hell any more. Hell was where the Vorla lived, down in the Chasm, in the darkness. Not up here in our light.

  I looked at Alex. There were tears in his eyes, reflecting the light.

  Gordon slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Drink?” he said.

  “A bloody good idea,” Alex replied. “Let’s celebrate.”

  Back in the boarding house, in the living-room area, we opened some bottles of champagne that Gordon had found in a nearby shop. We tried to ignore the bits and pieces of everyday material that were still lying around the place, evidence of the people who had boarded here. Photographs on windowsills, clothes hanging in wardrobes. We also tried not to think about what had happened to those people. We just felt good about the lights outside, and the knowledge that the Vorla would be kept away from us as long as they were burning.

  We all shared our stories again, for the benefit of Juliet. When it came to the Black Stuff, I mean the Vorla, it was clear that she could relate to that. But I couldn’t tell what she was thinking when we told her about the living dead people, and the burning, and the high-speed kids with the teeth. Eventually Juliet told me her own story. About Trevor Blake and her ordeal over on the other side. It was a story that needed no exaggeration, and I knew that only someone special could have got through what she’d endured without just giving in completely, surrendering to that mad bastard, or just cracking up altogether. Her voice never wavered.

  “How long can we keep the lights going?” I asked at last.

  “Well, not for ever,” said Annie. “We’ll have to be careful. Keep them maintained. But the main thing is the fuel supply. We’ve found quite a bit in the garage, and there’s a depot full of the stuff. We’ll need to siphon what petrol we can find from the tanks of all the other vehicles still lying around here.”

  “And what happens when it runs out?” slurred Damon. He’d taken to sitting next to Candy, who was well out of it by now. But he seemed to be wanting to catch her up, bottle in hand.

  “We’ll just have to think about that nearer the time,” said Lisa. “If everything else fails, we just go back to lighting bonfires again.”

  “There are other things to think about, as well,” I said. “We have to find out how much food we’ve got here. How long it’ll last.”

  “And what we’re going to do about basic things,” continued Annie. “The conveniences, or should I say inconveniences. Like if you’ll pardon my French, le pissoir.”

  “What?” slurred Damon.

  “Toilet,” said Gordon.

  “Up until now,” Annie went on, “we’ve all been, well…making do. But now we’re under one roof, we’re going to have to come up with something a little better than potties under the bed. Needless to say, I hope no one’s been using the toilet facilities in here, since there’s nowhere for anything to go. Tomorrow, I’m going to have another look at that factory unit, see if I can find a portable toilet. The kind they use on building sites. There’s bound to be something there.”

  “The electrics are fixed…” I said, suddenly getting an idea. “In the house, I mean.” I looked around, saw the television set in the corner. “Maybe…”

  “First thing I did,” said Alex. “As soon as we had power, I switched it on. Nothing on any of the channels. Just static. Like the time we tried the telephones and the radios.”

  “Not good,” I said, and everyone was quiet for a long time.

  I knew what had to come next. “There’s something else to discuss,” I said. “Unless you’ve discussed it while I was out.” They all knew what I was talking about, and I could tell by the silence and the way everyone had found something else to look at that maybe they’d been avoiding the issue. Even the blank televisions and radios hadn’t prompted anybody to start talking about the obvious. “Something that we haven’t got round to,” I went on. “Maybe because we don’t want to think about it.”

  Lisa cleared her throat. “You mean when we saw the Four Horsemen. And what Wayne…or at least whatever Wayne had become…quoted from the Bible at us.”

  “We need to decide for ourselves,” I went on. “Well, whether…whether…”

  “Whether the world has really ended,” said Alex. “Whether this is the Apocalypse. Or whether it’s something else.”

  So we talked on, aware that the night was closing in beyond our circle of light. And during that talk, we went over the same old ground, without getting any nearer to the truth of it. Either this was the End of the World, what Lisa had called the Day of Reckoning, or else…well, or else it wasn’t. One thing was for sure. This was no fantasy. We didn’t have to pinch each other to believe that we were made of flesh and blood, that we could bleed, that we could die. That we were terrified. Alex and Candy had seen Wayne killed, and no one doubted that. Fantasies didn’t kill people.

  We talked in circles.

  “Trevor,” I said. It seemed I had a way of bringing the conversation to a stop. “If the Black Stuff…the Vorla…is inside him somehow, then it must have the answers. Has anyone spoken to him? Asked him questions?”


  Silence again.

  “Then that’s who we have to speak to,” I went on. “Show me where he is and…” I tried to stand up, but my head began aching like hell. I slumped back again. “Must be the champagne.” I gave a hollow laugh.

  “Sit back and take it easy,” said Alex. “And no, we haven’t had a question-and-answer with our mad friend. Just being in the same room as him is enough to freak anyone out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Show me where he is and…”

  Gordon laughed, pointing a finger at me.

  “Wh-who said. You. Leader.”

  I must have looked at him like a gormless idiot, because it set him off even louder. “No one! Voted! You!”

  Then I realised. I was doing it again. Taking charge. I laughed and the pain hurt my head and my side. I put my head in my hands, trying not to laugh. And suddenly, Annie and Lisa, Alex and Gordon were all laughing. The boy burst out laughing too, even though he couldn’t understand what was so funny, was hugging his sides and curling up next to Gordon on the sofa. Even Juliet, who hadn’t been here from the beginning, was laughing. Damon gave vent to a loud snort and suddenly everyone was laughing fit to bust. It wasn’t such a great joke. But we were laughing and laughing, and feeling good. Maybe it was the lights outside, bathing the street and keeping the darkness away. Maybe there were shadows of grief in there, and huge relief that we were all still alive after everything we’d been through. Maybe it was the champagne. But it was good, and it was healing, and very, very special. There was something else there too. It was like that first night at the bonfire, when the dead had come to taunt us and Gordon had played his music. That music had been special—it had somehow bound us all together, and it had kept the nightmares away. The laughter was doing the same thing now.

  When it settled down, there was a glow in the room. No other way to describe it.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll speak to him in the morning. See if I can get something out of him.”

  “See?” said Alex. “Doing it again. Bossing every fucker about.”

  And the laughter had begun again. My head was banging like a bloody drum, my side burning. But I couldn’t stop it. No one could stop our laughter. Candy emerged, bleary-eyed, from her sleep. Wiping tears from his eyes, Alex moved to her.