Chasing the Dead dr-1

by Tim Weaver

  The noise again. The same noise, every night, all night, coming from the corner of the room. He slowly sat up, and looked into the darkness.

  He’d got up and examined the corner of the room in the daylight, when the sun poured in from the top window. There was nothing there. Just the cupboard and the space behind it, a narrow two- or three-foot gap. In the dead of the night, when the silence was oppressive, it was easy to see things and hear things that weren’t there. Darkness messed with you like that. But he’d seen it for himself: there was nothing there.

  Click.

  He continued looking into the shadows — facing them down. Then, pulling the blanket around him, he got to his feet and took a step towards the corner of the room.

  He stopped.

  Out of the darkness and into the moonlight came a cockroach, its legs pattering against the floor, its body clicking as it moved. He watched it come to the bed then turn slightly, heading deeper into the room towards the door they always kept closed. It stopped for a moment, half-under the door, its antennae twitching, its legs shaking beneath it. And then it disappeared into the light on the other side.

  A cockroach.

  He smiled, slumped back on to the bed. Breathed a sigh of relief. Deep down, he knew no one could be watching him from the corner of the room. Not for all this time. Not all night. No one would do that, would even want to do that. The mind could play tricks on you. It could make you doubt yourself; it bent reality and reason and, at your weakest, you started to question what you knew to be true.

  It had only ever been a cockroach.

  He brought his arms out from under the blanket and wiped the sweat from his face. Wind came in through the top window. He lay there, letting the cool air fall against his skin. And, as he closed his eyes, he could — very distantly — hear the sea.

  ‘Cockroach.’

  His eyes flicked open.

  What the fuck was that?

  ‘I see you, cockroach.’

  He scrambled back across the bed, towards the wall. Brought his knees up to his chest. From the darkness came a second cockroach, forming out of the shadows, following the path of the first one. It started to arc left, towards the light on the other side of the door.

  ‘Don’t run, cockroach.’

  A hand came out of the night and smashed down on top of the insect. Its shell exploded under the force of the blow, clear blood spraying out either side. Then the fingers twitched and moved, turning over to show the remains of the cockroach, flattened and in pieces, coated on the skin of the hand.

  Slowly, the hand started to become an arm, and the arm a body, until a man emerged from the gloom, a plastic mask on his face.

  It was the mask of a devil.

  A smell came with the man as he looked up from the depths of the night, blinking inside the eyeholes. The mouth slit was wide and long, moulded into a permanent leer, and inside it the man smiled, his tongue emerging from between his lips.

  ‘Oh God.’ A trembling voice from the bed.

  The man in the mask moved his tongue along the hard edges of the mouth slit. It was big and bloated, red and glistening, like a corpse floating in a black ocean.

  And, at the very tip, it was cut unevenly down the middle.

  The devil had a forked tongue.

  From the bed, he felt his heart stop, his chest shrink, his body give way beneath him.

  The man in the mask blinked again, inhaled through two tiny pinpricks in the mask’s nose, and slowly rose to his feet.

  ‘I wonder what you taste like…cockroach.’

  PART TWO

  14

  The address that Cary had given me for the Calvary Project was a block of flats called Eagle Heights, about a quarter of a mile east of Brixton Road. On the way over, my phone started ringing, but by the time I’d scooped it up off the back seat I’d missed the call. I slotted the phone in the hands-free and went to my voice messages. It was Cary.

  ‘Uh, I’ve thought about…’ He paused, sounding different now: less officious than the last time we’d talked. ‘Just give me a call when you get the chance. I’m in this morning until ten, and then after lunch I’m here until four.’

  I looked at the clock: 8.43. I tried calling him, but the sergeant said he wasn’t around. Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I tried again, and the same desk sergeant said he still wasn’t around. I left a message just as Eagle Heights emerged from behind a bank of oak trees.

  It was featureless and grey. The concrete walls were marked all the way down, as if the building was rotting from the inside. It was twenty-five storeys high, and flanked by two even bigger blocks of flats on the other side of a ringed fence. At the front entrance, there was a board with Eagle Heights written on it. Someone had spray-painted Welcome to hell underneath.

  I parked my BMW next to a battered Golf, its wheels up on blocks and its windows smashed in. Across from me, a bunch of kids who were supposed to be in school were kicking a ball about on a patch of muddy grass. I got out of the car, removed my phone and my pocket knife, and headed for the entrance.

  Inside, there were mailboxes on my left, most with nothing in. I checked the slot for number 227: empty. To my right, stairs wound up and around. As I started to climb, a huge metal cage came into view, an air-conditioning unit inside. The higher I climbed, the worse the place started to smell.

  The door to the second floor hung off its hinges and the glass had cracked. I pulled it open. Background noise came through from the flats: the buzz of a TV, a woman shouting, the dull thud of a baseline. There were fifteen doors on either side, all painted the same shade of muddy brown. Flat 227 was right at the end.

  I knocked twice and waited.

  A council notice was nailed to the door. It was almost four years old, and warned people not to enter due to health and safety violations. Some of the sticker had peeled away and the bits that remained were faded.

  I knocked again, harder this time.

  Further down the corridor, two flats along on the opposite side, I heard the sound of a door opening. Someone peered through the crack, their eyes darting backwards and forwards.

  ‘Who you lookin’ for?’

  It was a man’s voice.

  ‘The guy who lives here,’ I said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘You seen him around?’

  ‘What are you, a copper?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Social services?’

  ‘No.’

  I knocked again on the door.

  ‘You ain’t gonna find nothin’, mate.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘There ain’t no one there.’

  I looked at him. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since for ever.’

  ‘No one lives here?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Am I sure? You can read English, can’t you?’

  ‘Only if the words aren’t more than three letters.’ I glanced at the council notice. ‘So, the council cleared out the last tenants?’

  ‘Last tenants? I been in this shithole twenty years. Ain’t no one lived in that flat since the floor gave in. Hole the size of Tower Bridge in there.’ He opened the door a little more. It was a white guy. Unshaven. Old. ‘No one gives a shit about us here, so ain’t no one been round to fix it. Must’ve been five years since it went.’

  ‘No one’s lived here for five years?’

  ‘Nope.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes the council come round. Inspecting it, I s’pose. But no one’s lived in there for a long time.’

  I started along the corridor towards him. As I got closer he pushed the door shut. I passed his flat, walked out to the landing area, and stood away from the door, out of sight. Then I waited. A couple of minutes passed. Once he was definitely back in his hole, I moved into the corridor and returned to the flat, taking my pocket knife out on the way.

  Slipping the blade into the crack between door and frame, I gently started to jemmy it open. The
door was damp and warped. There was a curve about two-thirds of the way up. As I worked the blade, I felt some give. I removed some broken slivers of wood and started opening up a hole. Through it some of the interior was brightened by the light from the corridor. Inside it was stark. No carpets. No furniture. No paint on the walls.

  More wood started to break, and the further down the door frame I got, the easier it came away. I tried the handle. The door moved in the frame. I glanced along the corridor, then gently used my shoulder to apply some pressure. Sliding the blade back in, this time at the lock, I wriggled it around and pressed again at the door. The wood was incredibly soft, bending against my weight. Finally, it clicked open.

  I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

  There were no curtains at the windows, only rectangular sheets of black plastic. Small blocks of light escaped around the edges and on to opposite walls. A kitchen counter was to my left. The room smelt damp but not unpleasant, and the floorboards were dirty. Some were broken. The old man had been wrong, though. There were small holes in the floor, but they didn’t go through to the room below. They went to a concrete support. Some of the floorboards differed in colour to the rest of the flooring and looked as if they had been replaced recently.

  I hunted for a light switch and found one a little way along the wall. When I flicked it on, nothing happened. I walked across to the windows, flipped the blade and slashed through the plastic. Morning poured into the room in thick cubes of dust-filled light.

  The flat was like a skeleton: every piece of furniture had been removed. There were Coke bottles and empty crisp packets on the kitchen counter. In a small rubbish bin there was an apple core and two sweet wrappers. I picked up one of the crisp packets and turned it over. The expiry date was six months away.

  The flat had definitely been used recently.

  I looked around. Pinned to the wall was a newspaper cutting, curled at the edges. BOY, 10, FOUND FLOATING IN THE THAMES. Parts of the story had been underlined in red pen. I stepped in closer: 13 April 2002. It was nearly eight years old.

  I walked to the bedrooms. Both were empty, dust on the floorboards and paint blistering on the walls. The windows had also been covered in black plastic sheeting. The third door led to the bathroom. The bath was filthy, mould climbing up the sides and around the taps, spreading like a disease across the enamel. Tiles were cracked and missing, and bits of tile were in the bath. The sink was cleaner, though, and there was a bar of soap on it, tiny bubbles on its surface. It had been lathered recently.

  Back in the kitchen, I checked through the cupboards. Two saucepans. A frying pan. Both had been washed. In another drawer I found washing-up liquid. Cornflakes. Matches. Cutlery. Orange juice. In the smallest drawer, right at the bottom, was a notepad. Nothing written on it. I took it anyway.

  I ran my fingers along the underside of the units, then climbed on to them and looked on top of the cupboards. They hadn’t been cleaned since they’d been put in. The dirt was an inch thick.

  The flat was obviously used as a base of some sort; a hiding place. Maybe Alex had even hidden here for a time. No one would live here. Not in conditions like this. There weren’t enough provisions and utensils for anyone to stay full-time. But as a place to disappear, it was ideal. The old man thought it was the council he’d heard — but it wasn’t them.

  I glanced at the slashed plastic sheeting and the jemmied lock, and realized they’d know someone had been here. But it was too late to worry about that now. Whoever owned this place wasn’t making contact with the neighbours and it was unlikely they were paying rent or rates. Any break-in was going to go unreported.

  Then, suddenly, a telephone started ringing.

  I stood completely still in the middle of the room, trying to figure out if it was coming from inside the flat. When I realized it was, I followed the sound through to the bedrooms.

  I checked the first one over. Nothing.

  In the second, the noise got louder. At the bottom of one of the walls was a phone jack, a small wire running up and out of it, disappearing behind one of the black sheets. I stabbed my knife into it and tore away the plastic. On the windowsill was a cordless phone with a digital display, sitting in a recharging cradle.

  The ringing stopped.

  I picked up the phone and looked at the display. LAST CALL: NUMBER WITHHELD. In the options menu, there were no names in the address book. Nothing on the ‘recent calls’ list. No messages on the voicemail. I punched in my own mobile number, and pressed ‘Call’. A couple of seconds later, my phone started buzzing. On the display: PRIVATE. So, the landline’s withheld as well. I deleted my number from the ‘recent calls’ list, and placed their phone back in the cradle. The fact that there was nothing on it — no history, no record of anything — meant either it was brand new, or they wiped it clean after every use.

  It was time to go.

  I went to the windows in the living room, trying to see if there was any way to reconnect the sheeting. There wasn’t.

  Then I caught sight of something else: two floors down, a man was standing next to my car, a mobile phone in his hands. The handset was flipped open, as if he’d just been using it.

  The caller.

  He leaned forward, cupped his hands to the glass and peered through the window into the front seat. He didn’t move for a long time. Then he straightened up, took in the full length of the car and looked up towards the flat. I stepped back from the window. Waited. Checked my watch thirty seconds later. When I looked again, he was gone.

  I made sure I still had the notepad I’d pocketed earlier, and moved to the door, opening it a fraction. I peered through the gap.

  The man was already inside the doors at the end of the corridor.

  Shit — he’s coming to the flat.

  I pushed the door gently shut and backed up against the wall, just to the side of the hinge. Gripping the knife, I listened for his footsteps. Then the door started opening.

  Hesitation.

  It opened further, but not the whole way. Through the slit between door and frame, I could see his face. He had a thick scar running towards the corner of his lips, which seemed to extend his mouth. He took another step forward. All I could see now was the back of his head. Another inch forward. His foot came into view at the bottom of the door.

  ‘Vee?’ he said quietly.

  He took a step back.

  ‘Vee?’

  Another step.

  It was so quiet in the flat now, I was sure he could hear me breathing.

  He backed up another step and, before I realized what was happening, a thin sliver of face was filling the gap between door and frame — and his eyes were moving from the knife in my hand, up to my face.

  Suddenly, we were eye to eye either side of the door.

  A heartbeat later, he ran.

  When I got out into the corridor, the doors at the end were already swinging open and he was out of them. I sprinted after him, taking the stairs two at a time, adjusting the knife so the tip of the handle faced down and the blade pointed towards my elbow. When I got to the bottom, he was looking back over his shoulder, heading out across the grass to where a length of metal fencing separated the buildings from the road. He looked younger than me, twenty-two or twenty-three. I’d run a lot since Derryn had died, pounding out the frustration and the anger, but at his age he would be naturally fitter. It was unlikely I could catch him on a straight run.

  Then the chase swung in my favour.

  The kids I’d spotted earlier had moved their game of football further up, closer to the flats. As he looked around again, one of the kids ran across in front of him. The two of them collided. The kid went spinning, almost pirouetting on the spot, before collapsing to the floor. The man tried to avoid him but failed, falling over him, his body hitting the floor hard. For a couple of seconds, he was dazed. He scrambled on to all fours, on to his feet, then his shoes slipped in the mud.

  He went down again.

  A
s I came at him, he jabbed a boot up into my stomach. I staggered backwards, losing my footing, but managed to cling on to his coat. I pulled him towards me. He jabbed at me again with a foot, catching the side of my face. The impact stunned me for a moment. I dropped the knife. Blinked. Tried to refocus. He looked between me, the knife and the fencing. The tiny delay worked in my favour: I grasped the front of his coat and landed a punch in the side of his head.

  He pushed back and grabbed my arm, trying to snap it. Wriggling free, I pumped a fist at his face, and missed. Then did it again. He rolled to the left, my fist slapping against the ground, then used my weight transfer to push me off. When I swivelled to face him again, he was already on his feet, caked in mud.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted.

  But he didn’t stop. By the time I was on my feet again, he had made it to the metal fence, then dropped to his knees and quickly crawled through a gap. As he stood up, safe on the other side, he pulled up the hood on his jacket so I couldn’t see his face properly, and jogged away.

  I got to the fencing and pressed against it. He was halfway along a narrow alleyway that led from the opposite side of the road, moving more slowly now to prevent himself from losing his footing again. Puddles were scattered around him, reflecting the sky. I watched him all the way to the end. When he got there, he stopped and looked back at me.

  Then he disappeared for good.

  * * *

  On my way back to the car, about twenty feet from where the kids were playing football, I spotted something: a mobile phone. Mud was caked to it, the display face down, wet grass matted to the casing. I knelt, picked it up and wiped it clean. As soon as I unlocked the keypad, it erupted into life. I hit ‘Answer’.

  On the phone: silence. Then the sound of cars in the background.

  ‘You’re gonna wish you hadn’t picked that up,’ a voice said.

  I paused. Stood. I could see my knife about six feet across the grass from me. I walked over and scooped it up, then glanced towards the fence, back to the flats and out to the main road again.

  I was being watched.

  ‘Did you hear me?’