Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  Chapter Twelve

  The Journal of Jay O’Connor:

  Captured

  The first thing I remember was the screaming.

  Initially, I felt as if everything had done some kind of back-flip, and I was in bed with Juliet back at the Rendezvous. We were in some kind of crazy action replay, and were waking yet again to the sounds of what had once been Trevor Blake, locked out back in the boarding-house extension. But this voice wasn’t screaming that it was “too late”, and as I came out of this confusing blur I realised that it wasn’t Trevor’s voice at all. This was someone else. Was it someone I knew? Whoever, that person was in real pain, and now he was begging someone not to hurt him again. Him? Yes, it was a him.

  My eyes wouldn’t focus; everything was confused, just a jumble of colours that didn’t make any sense. And when I tried to move, my hands and feet were yanked up above me. I felt as if I were hanging in mid-air, could feel gravity pulling at me. The screaming faded to a horrible, low gurgling. And then a voice I didn’t know said:

  “Where are the other two?”

  “I don’t know…” Now I knew who had been screaming, knew who was in so much pain. It was Damon.

  “Where are they?” The other voice was a man’s voice, harsh and guttural. I didn’t recognise it.

  “They should be there,” babbled Damon. “I left them there. Both of them. On chairs, inside the boarding house. I swear to God…”

  “Swearing to God won’t do you any fucking good here!” snarled the other man’s voice. Damon began screaming again then, and I knew that the owner of this new voice must have been doing something pretty damn horrible for him to make a sound like that. It was barely a human sound.

  “Maybe they just came around,” said another, younger voice. This was someone else I didn’t recognise. It sounded like a teenage girl, but I couldn’t be sure. “Came out of it, and ran away.”

  “They could be hiding out there,” said another voice. A teenage boy? “Somewhere in the ruins.”

  The man didn’t say anything. Damon had begun to weep.

  “Want us to search?” asked the girl.

  There was another long silence.

  At last, the man said: “No, we haven’t got time. We’ve spent the whole night here, and that’s too long. We have to get back. We’ll send others to look later.”

  My eyes were beginning to focus at last. I twisted my head round, trying to make sense of what was happening.

  “Burn the house,” said the man.

  Blurred figures were running into sight now. I tried to fix on them, but before I could make out their shapes properly they had vanished from my line of vision.

  I turned to look up.

  My vision cleared.

  Now I knew what was happening.

  I’d been tied to some kind of pole by my hands and feet. One ragged figure was holding one end of the pole, another figure at the other end. And I was hanging between them like a freshly killed deer.

  “Well, hello,” said the face that suddenly thrust itself grinning into my sightline. There was a red sweat-band belt tied across his forehead. His eyes were a deep blue, his cheeks heavily pockmarked. This was the first time I’d seen him up close, but I knew straight away who I was looking at.

  It was the Big Man, the leader of the tribe.

  I couldn’t make any sense of it; struggled to remember what had happened, tried to put together in my mind what was happening.

  “Want to see something?” leered the face.

  I cried out in pain when a big, scarred hand grabbed me by the hair and twisted my head so that I was looking away.

  I recognised where we were.

  In the street, outside the Rendezvous, looking back at the boarding house. The front windows had all been broken from the inside. Glass littered the front garden. Deep inside the house, something crashed. The hand held my hair tight and forced me to keep watching. Suddenly, a billowing cloud of fire licked out of one of the front windows; the curtains catching alight and flapping smoke and sparks. The next instant flames gushed out of the other windows, one after the other.

  Ragged figures dashed from the front door as the flames leaped from the windows, blackening the brickwork. I had a glimpse of wild, painted faces as they ran past me.

  “Know what I call that?” asked the Big Man, twisting my head around so that we were face to face. “I call that a house-warming.”

  “And I call you an ugly-looking bastard,” I said.

  It came out without my thinking of the consequences. The old anger response.

  I like to think that I got one up on him by fainting away again before he could say or do anything else. But the bruise and the lump that I found later under my right eye seemed to suggest otherwise.

  Something was jerking and swaying me around.

  I woke up again, and felt the raw pain in my wrists and ankles. I was still hanging from the pole, but now we were on the move. The weight of my swinging body was rubbing my skin raw where the rough ropes had been tied tight. The motion was making me nauseous. I tilted my head back and tried to get my bearings. There were others behind us, a crowd of kids plodding on and nobody speaking. Then a body swung out from that crowd, and I recognised Alex. They had him strung up on a pole too. I tried to look ahead. More kids crowded together. And was that Lisa I could see strung up on yet another pole? This was like some bloody safari, where the big game was us.

  My stomach heaved and I retched.

  Surprise, surprise. No one came running to see if I was all right.

  When the cramps had gone, something else replaced the sick feeling inside. Where was Juliet, and was she all right?

  “Where…where the hell are you taking us?”

  Something cracked me over the head from behind. The pain was agonising.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said a young voice. I decided to shut the fuck up.

  And then everything started to come back to me. Everyone keeling over at the dump truck. And then Damon gloating over me when whatever he’d spiked our drinks with started to take effect. A lot of what he had said was still confused, but I think I’d managed to get the gist of it. He’d knocked us all out with whatever he’d put in the drink, and had made it easy for our newcomers to get over here and take us. Obviously, the tower-bridge strategy had worked. But what the hell did Damon expect to get out of it? I remembered something about Damon saying that he’d seen Wayne in his dreams, but that part of it didn’t make a lot of sense. Whatever Damon thought he was going to get out of betraying us hadn’t worked to his advantage, after all. Not according to the screams of pain I’d heard.

  Where are the other two? the Big Man had asked him. Did that mean that two of us had managed to get away? I prayed to God that one of them was Juliet.

  The swaying and jostling came to a halt. I twisted around to try to get a better view of where we were, and hissed in pain when the bastard behind me grabbed my hair and yanked hard. I’d managed to see a glimpse of cliff-edge, but we could be anywhere.

  “Right,” said a guttural voice from somewhere. The Big Man? “Lift!”

  Nothing happened, but I could hear the sounds of effort from up ahead. Then I could hear rustling noises, groans of effort, the scratching of wood on wood, metal on metal.

  “Again,” said the same voice. “Lift.”

  And this time I was hoisted up, feet first, as whoever was carrying my pole at the bottom end began climbing up some kind of tangled barrier. The blood rushed to my head, and I felt as if I might throw up again. Someone’s thigh smacked into my head. The guy who was carrying the front end of my pole? Now I was being hauled up. I could hear the kids above me as they grunted and groaned, could smell their stale breath on my face. What the hell were they doing, and where were they hauling me?

  After a lot of sweating and straining, we evened out again so that I was on the straight. I could still feel the blood beating in my ears, but the nausea had gone. I carefully looked to one side as we bounced and
jostled on ahead.

  I wished I hadn’t.

  I wished that I was still unconscious.

  Because now I knew where we were, and I swear that just the sight of it brought sweat streaming out of my body like the taps had been turned on.

  We were on the tower bridge over the Chasm.

  Beneath, nothing but the mind-numbing cliff-side drop into darkness. A Grand Canyon right down into Hell. Above and around us, the blank and empty grey. There was a familiar buzzing sound right then, and if I’d been struck dumb with the terror of the drop beneath us, what happened next made my head pulse.

  The microlight suddenly swerved into view. Not in the sky above us, but below in the Chasm. I saw it swooping along the crevasse, about two hundred feet below the cliff-edge, casting its shadow on the far cliff-face as it came skimming along like some motorised bat. Droning, it passed below us and out of sight.

  Someone up front bumped and jostled. The pole slewed across the edge of the “bridge” and suddenly I was hanging sideways on the edge, while everyone struggled to regain their balance. No one yelled or cursed or spoke. There was just the silent struggle to get me back again, while the Chasm yawned beneath me and I could feel the sheer bloody depth of it dragging at my body. It was as if gravity had suddenly come alive, had suddenly decided that I was ten times heavier than I should be…and wanted to drag me right over the edge.

  I heard feet slithering; heard the scrabbling sounds of hands gripping wood and metal. I slid again.

  I was too heavy for them.

  I was going over.

  Leaders don’t pass out, and they don’t piss themselves.

  I did both.

  When I came to again, I was in even greater pain than before. My neck was badly cricked and each movement caused me agony. My wrists and heels were on fire. But we weren’t on the tower bridge any more. I wondered if I had fallen into the Chasm and this was just another nightmare within a nightmare. Maybe that was what this was all about. The worst shit in the world happening, then the possibility that you were going to get out of it alive. Then even worse shit happening, when you never ever thought you were going to get out of it alive; then everything coming right for a while, maybe even falling in love with someone, and believing that you could make a go of it even in a worst-case scenario—and then the worst shit ever coming down on you.

  Get angry, Jay, said this little voice again. Get angry if you’re going to come through it.

  I tried. By Christ, I really tried. Maybe it was the stuff that Damon had put in our drinks still in my system, and still liquefying any guts I had left. Or maybe it was just that I just didn’t have any hope left, and this was one time too many. Part of me knew that once upon a time even the thought that I’d been gotten the better of would have brought anger flaring to the surface. Anger that I could use. Sometimes, back in Edmonville, for the wrong reason at the wrong moment on the wrong person. For some strange reason, here in New Edmonville it had worked right most of the time. Deep down, I knew that it was to do with Juliet.

  For the first time in my life, I really cared about someone.

  And the possibility that something bad had happened to her, and that there was nothing I could do, filled me with real despair.

  We were moving down the middle of a ruined street. There were shattered storefront windows on either side of me, and I tried to read the signs on the stores to get my bearings. Clearly, we were on the other plateau, and I struggled to remember what I could about what had been over here before the ’quake. I wasn’t having much luck; like I said, my geography was pretty bad. There were electrical stores, hi-fi dealers, a building where a double-decker bus had run straight into the front wall and demolished it. You could still see the rear end of the bus sticking out of the wall, the rest of it smothered by an avalanche of bricks. This was some kind of high street. I closed my eyes to help me think. When I opened them again, I saw a war memorial on a side street; an angel holding up her arms to the sky. One of the arms had snapped off and was lying in fragments in the rubble all around her, and she was tilted at a dangerous angle, but at last I knew where we were. This was the west end of Edmonville. There should be a traffic roundabout up ahead…and sure enough, there it was.

  If I’d had anything of a sense of humour left, the next thing that happened might have seemed funny. You see, the roundabout was just a simple grassed area, with four main roads connecting to it. Common sense would suggest that the quickest and easiest way forward would be straight ahead, straight on over the roundabout. But no, our safari veered left and went around the roundabout before carrying straight on. Right then I could have sweated blood before I found anything to laugh at.

  Past the roundabout, I could see that the buildings on either side of the main road had collapsed into huge mounds of rubble. We kept right on down the centre of the road, and as I was swayed and jostled along the ruins reminded me of photographs I’d seen back at school. It was like ruins you saw from the Second World War, after the bombings. Christ, it even seemed that everything here was in black and white, just like those photographs.

  We had reached the edge of this plateau. I saw the familiar peaks and crags ahead of us, even before we reached the edge. The same bizarre pillars of stone. The same crazy towers with those hundred-yard flattened-off tops; some of them with ruined buildings on them, others with houses intact. One with only a single house and its front garden. And a car parked in the driveway, ten feet from the cliff-edge, neat as you please.

  We kept right on ahead, following the white line in the middle of the road. And something came to me then, something that seemed very real, and it made me panic.

  They were going to march right down the centre of this road, following this white line…right over the edge, and into the Chasm.

  “All right,” I said. “That’s enough joking.”

  No one answered me.

  I swayed from side to side as we moved. I’d lost all feeling in my hands and feet.

  “Stop.”

  I could see the crumbled tarmac at the cliff-edge.

  “That’s enough, you bastards. Stop!”

  The anger was coming back. At last.

  “Will you stop!”

  I saw the new tower bridge just a second before someone grabbed my hair from behind again. The same ragged, primitive construction. The same makeshift scaffolding of scrap iron and wooden beams, all lashed together with whatever they’d been able to get their hands on from the ruins. Just before my head was slammed hard again, I saw that it was connecting this plateau to the next. Except that the flattened top of the furthest pinnacle looked to be no more than a few hundred feet wide.

  Just when my anger was flaring, the bastard behind me put it all out like pouring a bucket of cold water on a flame.

  Maybe he or she did me a favour.

  By knocking me out again, they spared me another of the nightmare crossings.

  After that, there was no way of telling how many other crossings we made or how far we travelled.

  But when I woke up again, it was in a place that our captors called home. A place where these other survivors had also carved out space to survive. The Vorla had come to us, and tried to take us. When it couldn’t do that, it had tormented us mentally and physically. It had told us that we were in Hell, had even used its own…its own substance…to create those Four Horsemen to convince us that the world had ended and everything was going from bad to worse for us. And then—under torture (and there’s no other fucking word for it)—it had told us the Truth. But before all of this, it had said:

  If there wasn’t a Hell before, then there is now.

  On that score, it hadn’t been lying.

  Because when we had driven the Black Stuff away, when Annie and Lisa had kept it at bay with the light, it had explored the other peaks and crags of Edmonville. It had found other survivors, others who had chosen a different way of surviving to ours. Other ways that had pleased it. Pleased it so much that it had allowed them to
live; had even encouraged them and helped them and given the poor bastards a new religion in the process. Eventually, it had told them about us and showed them where we were. It had sent them for us.

  Now they had us.

  And when I woke, it was in a place that had been created for us.

  I awoke in the ultimate Hell of the Vorla’s own making.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Nursery

  Gordon was suddenly aware of the light.

  There was no gradual awakening, and yet no sudden realisation that he was awake. There was only the light, filling his vision. It did not dazzle him, did not hurt his eyes. There was something curiously comforting about it. He did not have to avert his gaze, but was able to look at it continuously. There were very subtle, shifting patterns in there; sometimes like waves gently lapping at a shoreline. Was that the reason for the curious, barely audible hushing sound? Gordon had no idea how long he’d been staring into the light before he became aware of his body. Carefully, he moved his head from side to side, but there was no end to the light. He brought his hands up to his face, and in the process realised that he was lying on his back. Yes, he could see his hands, and wondered at how the light made the flesh of his fingertips look translucent. He struggled into a sitting position and realised that he was sitting on something firm but not uncomfortable. To his fingertips, it felt like perfect white marble.

  “Are you all right?” asked a familiar voice.

  And when Gordon turned to look, it was as if someone somewhere had turned a dimmer switch. The light was now no longer suffusing everything in his line of sight, although it still remained around him in a bathing glow. Sitting beside him was Robin. His hair was mussed, his eyes sparkling.

  “Yeah…where…?”

  “It’s wonderful,” said Robin. He looked like any ordinary child on Christmas morning, full of expectation and wonder; ready to dash downstairs and find the presents under the Christmas tree. “It’s wonderful, Gordon.”

  Gordon shifted, and tried to get a better view of where they were. It seemed that the light was willing to oblige; as if it were sentient, anticipating his curiosity. It swept away like a curtain, still hanging overhead and on both sides and behaving in a way that light shouldn’t behave at all. For a while Gordon could only gawp at the light, wondering at its strange behaviour…before he saw what the light had unveiled.