Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  Now that I’m here, I have to do something.

  But I just don’t know what I can do. I have to think…think!

  What if the Vorla comes?

  Christ, I don’t want to think about that.

  So here goes, with the next tape. Talking and remembering will help me stay awake, maybe give me a fresh idea about what I have to do. Risk running at that bridge in the daytime, when I know the Vorla can’t come, but I’ve got to contend with our Caffney friends down there? Or try it during the night, sneaking past them, but risking what might come up from the Chasm below? And if I make it, what then? I need time. Time to think, time to remember, time to try and put a few more pieces of this nightmare together. For a time back then, after the Vorla that was in Trevor Blake told us just what kind of Hell we’d found ourselves in, it seemed that we were never going to pull ourselves out of this daze, trying to come to terms with the craziness of it all, and the horror of everything that happened; knowing that we were never going home again. In the days that followed our confrontation with the Vorla that was in Trevor Blake, we talked everything inside out…

  Chapter One

  The Journal of Jay O’Connor:

  Ace of Hearts

  Sometimes I think it was as if talking would help us to find other answers; other ways of explaining what it was that the Darkness in Trevor Blake had told us. (And yes, I got rid of Trevor’s body, just like I said I would. When Juliet wasn’t around.) Stuff like this wasn’t supposed to happen. But there were no other answers. No other reasonable and acceptable explanations for everything that had happened to us. Still no one came to rescue us. Nothing moved overhead in that grey sky. No aeroplanes, no searching helicopters. No clouds. No sign that there was anything out there. The world as we knew it no longer existed.

  There were lots of things to be done if we were going to make the Rendezvous a safe place to live. And we set about those practical problems and those physical jobs, throwing ourselves into them as we’d thrown ourselves into those other tasks as a way of trying to stop thinking and talking about it all. Even Damon, who remained isolated and hostile, began to muck in and do his share. Something had happened to him after Wayne’s death. It was as if his last hold on reality had gone. And it was obvious, just by looking at his face, that he hated me more than he’d hated anyone in his entire life. Maybe he somehow blamed me for Wayne’s death, even though I wasn’t there when it happened. I underestimated him and what he had in mind for me. Little did I know what a bad mistake I was making.

  The one thing we drew a blank on, since the Vorla had said nothing about them, was the savage little kids who had killed Wayne. Whatever they were, Gordon’s idea that they couldn’t be controlled or be a part of the Vorla seemed to make some sort of sense. Lisa had a name for them, based on how Alex had described what they looked like. She called them Cherubim. Out of the Bible. Little angels, with sweet faces. Except that these little angels had a much more dangerous attitude than the sweet plaster statues you see in churches and religious places like that. Of all the things we discussed, the Cherubim were the one aspect that we didn’t dwell on, maybe because they didn’t fit in anywhere and no one had seen them since. Candy and Alex remained convinced that one of those angels had the face of their dead son, Ricky. And the more we talked about them, the more pain it seemed to give Candy. I remember thinking also how strange Gordon looked when we did talk about them. He looked distant, thoughtful, maybe even a little bit anxious. But I didn’t dwell on it, which, as it turned out, was another mistake.

  Because there was a lot more going on there than any of us realised.

  Fuel, both for the generators and for our stomachs, was the most important consideration. So we organised new searches of the plateau. Annie was right about the depot she’d spotted. Fortunately for us there wasn’t much damage there. We began draining the petrol out of the remaining cars. And Gordon came up with something that none of us had thought about. The sewer system. He got the idea from hearing how the Vorla had escaped from Trevor Blake, down the sink. Why the hell no one else had thought about it, particularly me, I don’t know—especially since it could have held more danger for us than anything else. He reckoned that if the Vorla could escape down there to the Chasm, then there was nothing to stop it coming back up through those underground pipes that hadn’t been shattered. Up through the sewer gratings and the manhole cover in the middle of the night. That was another big job. Sealing everything down as tight as we could, particularly at the Rendezvous and the surrounding streets.

  It was hard, but not as bad as our search of the meat mart to find out if we were finally rid of Edmonville’s walking dead. The place had burned to the ground. And everything inside and just outside the building had burned with it. I’m not going to paint a picture of what we found in the ruins. You can probably fill it in yourselves. But at least we weren’t going to get any more of those visitors in the night. During the search, we realised just how lucky we had been. The fire hadn’t spread from the factory. If it had, maybe if sparks had carried over to the other buildings, we could have been completely burned off the crag we found ourselves on.

  There were twelve remaining stores on our plateau, three of them mini-supermarkets. All with a good supply of tinned and preserved foods. Some of them you could hardly get near, because of the smell. But we had to force ourselves, nonetheless. Clearing all the rotting stuff out of the place, and getting to the tins and the preserves. We would have to ration them, while we thought of ways of growing our own. We had soil here. A wrecked library with a good horticultural section, and plenty of crop potential from the ruins of a garden centre, provided that we got down to studying hard and planting early. At that stage, we had no way of knowing whether crops would grow in our new climate or even whether the crop seasons were the same in this “No-Place”. If there was no sun, then there’d be no ultraviolet light. How could anything grow? Still, the trees in the park and other surroundings seemed to be managing okay, so why not? But these were things that we didn’t dwell on too much either. We just had to get ahead and do it. For the time being, no one talked about the supermarket on the other side of the gorge. Because if we did, then someone would have to suggest that one of us go out over the broadcasting mast, which remained wedged between both sides, and start organising the transfer of surviving preserved food with no way of knowing when the mast would break loose and plunge down into the Chasm. We knew we’d have to get around to discussing it eventually, but in the beginning no one seemed inclined to raise the matter.

  And so it went on, for those first few weeks; then the first few months.

  We worked hard during the day.

  The floodlights burned at night. The Vorla showed no sign of returning.

  For a while, it looked as if we might be making a go of it. Starting afresh in our New World. Trying hard not to think about where we were, the nothingness that lay beyond, and the horrors of the Black Sea that lay in the bottom of the Chasm. That was the way to cope. Not thinking about it. That, and hard work.

  I only knew that, despite the unknown, I had found something with Juliet that I had never experienced before. It was the first really good thing that had happened in my life, and I could feel it changing me. Turning me into someone else, maybe even someone half good, as each day went by.

  No one could have known the ultimate nightmare that lay ahead of us, no one could have expected the way things were going to turn out. All the time we hoped and prayed that the Vorla would just leave us alone was time wasted. We’d underestimated just how much it hated us, just how much it wanted us to suffer, and to what lengths it would go to ensure our destruction. If we’d known then what we were to subsequently find out, maybe we would have just switched off all the lights and let it take us.

  But in that first year together in what Lisa started to call the Realm of the Chasm, there’s one memory that stays in my mind. Something that Juliet gave me. I’ve had it in the chest pocket of my jacket for nearly a mo
nth now—ever since that day we went “shopping”…

  It started with another one of those “leader” talks.

  I thought we’d managed to avoid it, since the matter hadn’t been raised in some time. We’d cleared some land within easy reach of the Rendezvous which was also covered by floodlights. This was the place we’d decided to start raising our own food, although no one knew whether we were wasting our time or not. The floodlights here were vital, since we didn’t want the Vorla flowing in over what we’d done during the night. We’d had a good sign the previous day. It had rained. A thin drizzle, but rain nonetheless. Not some bizarre bloody chemical, or acid. Just good old rainwater. It didn’t make sense. Where the hell was it coming from out of that empty greyness up above? We didn’t question it, or whether there was anything in it that might have long-term effects on us. We took another chance in drinking it. Our bottled supply from the ruined stores wouldn’t last indefinitely and we hadn’t found anything in the library about making our own. If it was going to poison us, so be it. Anyway, in good spirits, we’d brought back a whole pile of stuff from the garden centre in the back of the dump truck, and everyone was helping to unload sacks from the back. Alex and Lisa had begun “ploughing”, most of us had been reading up on the do-it-yourself farming bit, and we were ready to go.

  When I yanked a sack of seeds down to the ground, Alex said something simple, like: “Okay, boss.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thanks.”

  “No, what’s with the boss thing?”

  Alex dropped the sack, dusted his hands and looked at me. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he turned and called to the others: “Okay, everyone. It’s time.”

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  “Time for the talk that you’ve been avoiding.”

  I looked up to see that the others were all stopping what they were doing and coming back to the dump truck. The way they were walking, the way they were holding themselves, I could tell that something was up. Only Juliet seemed as puzzled as I was. She’d been driving the dump truck. Seeing my puzzlement, she jumped out of the cab and came to join me as the others crowded round.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, at last.

  “Nothing wrong at all, really,” said Alex. “Well, I mean apart from the fact that we’re stranded in another dimension or something, with no chance of ever getting home. Possible starvation at best, all kinds of other worse things that can happen. But apart from that, nothing wrong.”

  “So what…?”

  “It’s the way you react whenever any one of us talks about having a leader, or someone being in charge of what we have here,” said Annie.

  I opened my mouth to say something. I never got a chance to speak.

  “You get angry every time it comes up,” said Lisa. “So most of the time it never comes up. But we’ve been talking among ourselves, when you—and Juliet—haven’t been here. And we’ve come to a decision.”

  I waited.

  “First,” said Gordon, holding up a finger. “Not angry.”

  I shuffled uneasily and looked at Juliet. She shrugged.

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise not to get angry.”

  “We’ve had a vote, since we’ve decided we’re a democracy,” said Annie. “And it was a unanimous decision.”

  “We need a leader,” said Candy, looking at the sky. “And you’re it.”

  “Look, I’ve told you all before that I…”

  “Promise!” said Gordon, waving his finger again.

  “The fact of the matter is,” said Alex, “you’re the one who comes up with the way forward that everyone feels confident about. You’re the one we look to. You’re the one who comes up with the ideas…”

  “That’s bollocks. I was never cut out to be a leader. Look, we all have a say in what happens. No one tells anyone else what to do.”

  “But you’ve been doing that since the beginning, and getting it right most of the time. And yes, we discuss things and decide a way forward. But it’s you we look to, Jay. And you’re who we want.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

  “Did I say this was a democracy?” asked Annie. “Maybe I was wrong. We’re not asking you, Jay. We’re telling you. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have made it this far.”

  “Can’t you see?” asked Lisa. “We need you to accept it. It’s not going to make any difference to the way things are working now. And they are working. You just have to accept it. We know you’d never abuse it. We need your strength, Jay. It holds us together.”

  “Alex,” I said tightly. “You’re twice my age. You be the leader!”

  “You saved us at that community centre, Jay,” Alex replied. “You got us out of there before the place blew up. Everything that happened back there at the meat mart. That was all down to you.”

  “Gordon.” I turned to him, still trying not to fly off the handle. “You were there. Didn’t you tell them how terrified I was? How I couldn’t move?”

  Gordon shook his head. “You,” he said simply, echoing what he’d said the last time this bloody stupid discussion had come up.

  That was it. I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I was just about to tell them all to take a running jump off the cliff-edge when Juliet grabbed me by the shirt collar. For someone so slender, she was also very strong. She slammed me back against the dump truck. The sheer abruptness of her action not only took me completely by surprise, it also seemed to knock most of the anger right out of my system.

  “And you pulled me off that radio mast, Jay. If you hadn’t come down for me, I would have fallen.”

  “Juliet, it was Gordon and Alex who pulled us up. They were the ones who…”

  “Shut it, Jay! You’re the one who came down across the mast. No one said you had to. You did it, because you couldn’t do anything else. So if they…if we…want you to be the leader of our own little ratpack, just…say…yes.” And with each of those last three words she banged me against the dump truck by my shirt collar.

  When she’d finished, we just stood looking at each other, her fingers fastened in my shirt collar. And then she pulled me forward and kissed me hard on the mouth. There was loud laughter and applause. When she pulled away again, I tried to say something more, but Juliet crushed her mouth on mine again and this time there were whoops and wolf whistles with the applause.

  “Try getting out of that,” she said again, when we pulled apart.

  She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. And I was deeply in love with her. What the hell was I supposed to say, except: “All right, then.”

  If nothing else, it seemed to put everyone else in a good mood, no matter how mad I thought they were. Okay, then, I’d said yes; but nothing was going to change, so far as I was concerned.

  The best thing that happened was later in the afternoon.

  We’d made a pretty good first job of getting some vegetables planted. We’d just have to keep our fingers crossed. There was good compost—we’d followed all the instructions. Gordon had stuck up a handwritten sign, Sons and Daughters of the Soil, which gave everybody a good laugh. With any luck we’d have more vegetable stew out of that lot than we needed.

  There was still lots of “daylight” left when Juliet and I decided to go “shopping”.

  I needed a new jacket—the last one had been torn on the dump truck. She wanted new shoes. And there was a store on the other side of our plateau (well, half a store). Things like forgetting to take our credit cards just didn’t seem to be a problem.

  We were wary of most of the buildings still standing. There was no way of knowing how sound the structures were, but the department store looked to be okay. There was a car showroom next door. Everything in there had collapsed, except part of the frontage. Miraculously, the massive glass windows were completely undamaged and, standing centre-stage, unscratched, was a gleaming red Aston Martin.

  “How about that?” asked Juliet.

  “Ve
ry nice, but expensive.”

  “You mean you won’t buy it for me?”

  “When I win the lottery, it’ll be the first thing on the list.”

  Juliet began to laugh.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We could drive that car out of here and back to the Rendezvous. We can…afford it. But what we can’t afford is to use the petrol.”

  Both laughing, we entered the building.

  The ceiling had come down halfway into the store on the ground floor, burying whatever had been there. But just through the main entrance, just off Wady Street, there had been a men and women’s clothing section, and a bedding department. We stepped carefully over the cracked and littered floor. Rainwater was dripping from the shattered ceiling way across the store, like miniature waterfalls. Ridiculous, I know, but it looked beautiful. I found a rack of jackets and began trying them on for size, leaving Juliet to hunt for shoes. It didn’t take me long to find what I was after, and when I went to look for Juliet, I found her beside one of the counters beyond the clothing section. There had been several plexiglass stands on the counter, containing department-store jewellery. Most had fallen to the floor, but there was still one standing. When I reached her, she was looking at the necklaces thoughtfully.

  “Can I help you, miss?” I said, like a store assistant.

  “Hmmm.” She put a finger to her lips. “Not sure about these. Haven’t you got anything more expensive?”

  “Have you tried our ground-floor selection?” I asked, pointing down to the jewellery lying around her feet. She smiled and linked her arm with mine, dragging me away across the store with surprising strength towards the shoe section. While she set about selecting some boots, I wandered to a toy and games department. The ceiling had come down on most of it, but there was still a rack of tricycles and some kids’ games. For a moment, I had a mental flash of the Crying Kid. It threatened to ruin my good feeling, so I pushed it away. Maybe it was longer than just a “flash”, because Juliet seemed to come up behind me only moments later, even though she subsequently told me that she’d had to push her way into a storeroom at the side of the shoe section to find a pair of leather boots her size.