by Fred Crawley
“You shouldn’t have come here,” the old woman said.
Nathan turned. She was standing beside the fire.
“You killed my friends,” Nathan said. “You killed all of those people.”
The old woman nodded. “And now you’re going to kill me?”
“Why did you do it?” Nathan said. He felt the knife in his hand and squeezed it. He had planned to kill as many of them as he could, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He wasn’t a murderer. He felt like throwing up because of what he’d done to the ghoul on the bridge, a creature that had been trying to kill Audrey and then him. Regardless of what the police had said he knew now that no delusion could have made him kill all those people.
“You can see us,” the old woman said. She turned to look at Audrey. “So can she.”
“So?” Nathan said.
“So you shouldn’t be able to see us,” the old woman said. “We should be hidden.”
Nathan nodded. His willpower was rising and falling. He didn’t want to die on his knees. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You killed my grandson,” the old woman said.
“And you killed everyone I care about,” Nathan said. “Maybe you should consider yourself lucky.”
The old ghoul turned away from him. Without Nathan realising it more ghouls, young ones this time had begun to gather behind her. Now they came forward and she spoke to them in their strange growling language. Nathan didn’t need to understand it to know what she had said.
The mass of giant bodies surged forwards and in a moment the old woman was engulfed by them. Nathan turned sharply and grabbed Audrey’s arm. She let out a shriek, but he didn’t let go.
“It’s time to get out of here,” Nathan said.
Audrey didn’t argue or attempt to resist. She turned with him and they started towards the door they had come in through.
The ground was littered with debris and dirt. He felt it kicking against his shoes as he ran. One step and then another. He tripped and he stumbled. He felt as if he was running through a dream. And Audrey was dragging him back, slowing him down and each time it became more likely, more certain that the creatures were going to catch them.
“Hurry up!” Nathan shouted. Although there was no noise except his feet on the ground and his beating heart he felt the need to shout.
“I’m going as quickly as I can,” Audrey shouted back.
But it wasn’t quick enough. He felt the ghoul’s bearing down on them. It didn’t matter how quickly they ran, he knew they would be able to get away.
His left foot hit something hard that jutted out of the ground. Nathan just had time to wonder what it could be and then he realised that he was falling. The ground came towards him and his only thought was that it was dirty and he didn’t want to get dirty. A stupid thing to think given how he had lived for the last few months, but he couldn’t escape the trappings of his upbringing any more than he could escape the ghoul.
He turned awkwardly in the air. His struck the ground and took the majority of the impact on his shoulder. It would later occur to him that this has probably saved his life. Then his head came down and he heard a hollow thump. Then everything went black.
CHAPTER 41
NATHAN OPENED HIS EYES. FOR A MOMENT, HE was disorientated and he couldn’t tell where he was. The room was familiar, but it felt strange as if he hadn’t been there for a very long time. He rolled onto his side and saw a lump in the bed beside him. It took a moment but gradually it came back to him.
“What’s the matter?” Gwen mumbled from the other side of the bed.
Nathan’s heart raced and he wasn’t sure why. “I had a weird dream,” he said.
Gwen sighed and moaned as she turned around to face him. Her blue eyes and her blond hair were the only part of her that he could see. In his dream, she’d cut her hair short after the accident. “What did you dream about?” she said.
Nathan considered her question and various images floated through his mind but none of it cohesive, none of it made any sense. “I was in a car crash,” he said. “And you ran off with the doctor.”
“Oh,” Gwen said without much enthusiasm. Nathan could relate, other people’s dreams were never as interesting as your own, but this dream felt different. It had all seemed so real. “Well don’t worry, it’s over now.”
He nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. It didn’t feel like it was over.
“Earth to Nathan,” Gwen said. “Are you reading me?”
“Huh?” Nathan said. They were in the kitchen and he was standing by the door. Gwen was frying bacon on the stove and it smelled wonderful. He had no memory of getting out of bed and getting dressed, but he had apparently done both.
“I said are you still thinking about your dream?” Gwen said.
“Yeah, I guess I was,” Nathan said.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Gwen said.
“What is?” Nathan said.
“How sometimes dreams can seem so real. Do you remember anything else about it?”
He shook his head, but he did remember some things: “There were these creatures called ghoul’s,” he said. “And I was homeless and you were...”
“I was what honey?” Gwen said.
Nathan’s mouth was suddenly dry, despite the smell of bacon. He didn’t want to say it, but he did anyway: “You were dead.”
“Dead?” Gwen said. She didn’t sound as worried as Nathan thought she should, but then it was his dream and not hers. Why should it matter to her if she had died in his dream? For that matter, why should it matter to him?
“Yeah, the ghoul’s killed you. I found your body in the underground.”
Gwen was nodding without listening to him.
“Are you going to eat that?” she said.
Nathan looked down and saw that he was sitting at the table, Gwen was beside him and there was a full English breakfast that he hadn’t touched.
“Because if you’re not I’ll have your bacon, you can give the rest to the dog.”
He had a dog, Nathan realised and suddenly that seemed more important than the fact that he was sitting at the table with no memory of having sat down. He could hear a yapping bark in the garden.
“What do you want to do today?” Gwen said.
“Don’t we have to work?” Nathan said.
“When have we ever had a fry up on a weekday?” Gwen said.
Nathan nodded, he supposed she had a point. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you feel like doing?”
“That’s it, right there,” Gwen said. “Oh god, right there!”
Nathan looked down and saw that she was naked. They were in bed and he was on top of her. He could taste toothpaste in his mouth. He carried on doing what he was doing and a few minutes later she was clutching the pillows and screwing her eyes closed as he fell on top of her.
“That was amazing,” Gwen said. “You should have weird dreams more often.”
Nathan nodded and closed his eyes. This wasn’t right. Time was jumping around all over the place. He couldn’t keep track of it. He wondered if he had a brain tumour.
They were on the train, fully dressed. She smiled at him over the top of a takeaway coffee cup. He smiled back.
They were on a bus and it was cold. They were both wrapped up in hats and scarves. The sun was bright and high.
They were on the beach and the dog was there as well. A scrappy little terrier that kept running after the gulls that landed to feast on discarded fish and chip dinners. There was no one else around. They walked hand in hand across the sand.
They were in a restaurant with a bottle of red wine open on the table.
“To us,” Gwen said.
Nathan caught on in time to raise his own glass and return the toast. A meal arrived that he had no memory of ordering and then they were outside again, untying the dog whose name he didn’t know and walking back along the beach towards the bus stop.
They were on the train and the dog was gone. Gw
en had her head on his shoulder and she slept. The windows were black showing him a reflection of the empty carriage. There should have been more people around, but he couldn’t remember seeing anyone except Gwen all day.
They were at home on the sofa, under a blanket with the television on. Gwen was laughing, but he didn’t understand what was going on. It wasn’t just that he had no idea what program they were watching, it was that the images jumped around, flashing brightly, and he couldn’t concentrate on them.
They were in bed and she was laying in his arms. He could feel her soft body against his, but the only thing he could think about was his dream, the creatures that had chased him and killed Gwen. When he looked down at her, she appeared to be dead even though he could feel her breathing.
CHAPTER 42
THE “JUMPING” SETTLED DOWN OVER THE NEXT FEW days. At least Nathan thought that it did. He had memories of the periods between events. He didn’t black out as much. The dream was more difficult to shake, although he seemed to do a better job of hiding it around Gwen than he had that first morning.
He still had a job and that was difficult to get his head around. A part of his mind still seemed to believe that he had spent the last six months unemployed and teaching was not a thing that you could just pick up and do. Nathan made what he thought was a good effort. That first day back after the weekend was difficult, though.
When he got to the school gate, he expected them to turn him away, just as they had done in his dream. When Gwen got her fob out and opened the gate his body instinctively froze and he had to force himself to cross the threshold. Even then he kept expecting someone to come running out of the office telling him that he had to leave.
“Have a good day,” Gwen said. She leaned up to kiss him.
Nathan appeared in his classroom and something about it was off. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. It all seemed familiar enough, but it wasn’t what he expected. There was a long corridor that went through the middle of it and he couldn’t work out where it went. There were a number of tables and chairs, but they weren’t the blue plastic one’s that he would have told people were there if he had asked. Some of them were black and some of them were green. Two or three of them were overstuffed red armchairs.
He waited for his class to come in and he didn’t seem to recognise any of them either. They all looked so similar to one another than he thought they might be related and that made perfect sense. Of course, they were related because the school broke classes down according to family name. How else could they do it?
One person did not look as if she belonged in the class, though. For a start, she was easily twenty years older than anyone else and for another she had dark hair, pale skin and red lipstick. The rest of the boys and girls in the room were either blond or redheaded. But she sat down on one of the little chairs with the other children and waited for him to begin.
Nathan wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be teaching them but apparently that didn’t matter. One moment he was opening his mouth to ask someone to remind him what they had covered last time, the next moment he was standing at the door getting ready to open it and send them out for morning break.
The woman with the dark hair and pale skin looked at him as she went past, but she didn’t speak. Nathan watched her go and she seemed almost like a dream but at the same time more solid than anything else in the world.
“Who was that?” Gwen said. She had appeared beside him suddenly but that no longer shocked him.
“I’m not sure,” Nathan said.
“I don’t like her,” Gwen said.
Nathan smiled to himself. “Are you jealous?”
“No,” Gwen said. And then: “So what if I am. I don’t like her. She shouldn’t be in your class.”
“That’s what I thought,” Nathan said. “What do you think she’s doing here?”
Before Gwen could answer, she was gone and the class were filing back past him into the room. This time, the woman with the dark hair and the pale face wasn’t with them and Nathan was relieved about that. Perhaps, he thought, she was an inspector. He hoped that the lesson, which he couldn’t remember teaching, had been a good one.
The day ended suddenly and he was walking out of a different room where they held staff meetings. He was talking to a middle-aged woman who he thought he knew but didn’t recognise. She was laughing and he supposed that it was something he had said.
“Where do you want to go for dinner?” Gwen said.
Nathan didn’t even have time to think about it before he found himself sitting opposite Gwen at a table by the large plate glass windows of one of their favourite Italian restaurants. There was a plate of cold meats, bread and olives between them and a half-drunk bottle of beer to his right.
“Something weird is going on here,” Nathan said before the scene could change and he found himself somewhere else.
Gwen frowned at him and popped a folded piece of ham in her mouth. Her forehead wrinkled in that cute way it always did when she was confused. “What do you mean?” she said.
But before he could say anything the waitress appeared at the table. It was the woman who had been in his class earlier and Nathan was at a loss to explain her presence again. “Is everything alright with your starter?” she said.
“It’s very nice, thank you,” Gwen said.
The woman turned towards Nathan. Her name badge said she was called Aude, but that didn’t seem quite right. “And for you sir?”
Nathan nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to speak. The woman smiled at him and then she was gone again as suddenly as she had appeared.
“Did you know her?” Gwen said.
Nathan shook his head. The power of speech hadn’t returned to him just yet.
“It’s just you were acting strangely.”
Strangely. Strange. That reminded him of what he had started to say. He opened his mouth to explain the way that he seemed to be jumping through time to Gwen but, before he could, the restaurant vanished and she was once again beneath him, moaning in exaggerated pleasure. Later they slept.
The next day he saw the dark haired woman at the school gates where she was dropping off a child who he knew didn’t belong to her. When he saw her, he looked away. He saw her in the canteen serving behind the counter when he went to get lunch (seemingly just minutes after the morning school assembly but the hunger suggested it had been longer) and then while he was walking home with Gwen she was standing at the window of a house looking out at them.
She seemed to be everywhere and he didn’t think that it was a coincidence. The dark hair woman felt like an ill omen hanging over his head and as he settled down in front of the television with Gwen that evening (either he or she had made dinner and washed up, he might never know which) he decided that he would do everything he could to avoid her in the future.
CHAPTER 43
AVOIDING THE DARK HAIRED WOMAN WAS NOT AS easy as Nathan had first thought. The next day he didn’t see her at all until after school. He was walking home by himself because Gwen taught football as an after school activity on Wednesdays. The playground looked empty, but that was only because he didn’t see her until she stood up.
The dark haired woman had been sitting on the benches by the hopscotch. She was wearing a long trench coat and dark glasses as if in disguise, but he recognised her at once. She looked at him and he turned away. He walked towards the gate and hoped that she wouldn’t follow him. Where was that time jumping effect when he needed it?
The dark haired woman (Aude?) went one better than following him (although she did that as well). She called out his name and he nearly froze. The only time she had spoken was at the restaurant and, although he had seen her name on her badge, he was pretty damn sure he hadn’t given her his.
But, a part of his brain said, what about all those times you can’t remember? What if you were with her then? Nathan didn’t think he was having an affair with the woman. There was nothing on Earth, he thought, that would
tempt him to cheat on Gwen. But he couldn’t deny that Aude had been familiar to him from the first time he remembered seeing her.
She followed him to the gate which he pulled open sharply. He didn’t wait for her to speak again. Nathan walked as quickly as he could along the alleyway towards his house. He could hear Aude’s footsteps on the wet concrete (when had it rained?) behind him but he didn’t turn around to look at her. Whatever she wanted he wasn’t interested.
“Nathan, wait!” Aude shouted. “This is important.”
As if the sound of her voice triggered something within him, some deeply hidden memory that he wanted to get rid of, Nathan remembered where he had seen her before. But it wasn’t possible. Aude was the woman from his dream. And Aude wasn’t her name at all, at least not all of it. Her name was Audrey.
Several days had passed since Nathan had woken up, but the dream was still as fresh in his mind as it had ever been. Audrey had been a woman who had tried to help him and who had ended up leading straight to the monsters. They hadn’t slept together and he supposed that was good.
By the time he reached the end of the alleyway, he had begun to come to his senses. Audrey wasn’t the woman from his dream, that wasn’t possible. But it could work the other way around. Clearly he had seen her before and remembered her just enough to insert into his dream. That had to be it. Nothing else made sense.
The realisation was like a weight lifting off his shoulders. For a moment there he had begun to consider the possibility that he was mad and that had been a part of his dream as well, hadn’t it? He had some vague recollection of nurses with big porn star lips trying to kill him but even in his dream that had turned out not to be true.
Nathan opened the door from inside the house and Gwen was standing there with her blond hair plastered to her face and her dark eye makeup beginning to run. He stepped aside and let her in. The moments between Audrey, no Aude, Aude was her name in real life, chasing him in the alleyway and now had passed in the blink of an eye, but he was glad that they had. Whatever might have happened in his dream he had no interest in Aude. He was glad to have Gwen back.
