by Tim Lebbon
What if she did not recognise the name? What would that mean?
She dropped the stick and backed away, and for the next couple of minutes as she walked along the road she expected to hear the ghostly roar of an engine behind her, or speakers spewing forth an unknown song.
The streets were closing in and becoming narrower. Houses loomed on either side, taller now, their crowns leaning over above Rachel as if trying to kiss eaves. Thick shadows sometimes filled the road entirely and Rachel had to wade through them, eyes turned up to the weakening sun, the fine hairs on her legs feeling nothing different even though her mind told her the shadows had substance, were much more than a simple absence of light.
Once in the light again she would look down to make sure there were no dregs hanging on.
Around every corner she hoped that she would see something familiar. A few minutes back she’d passed a church, but it had been much smaller than the one in the village, its stained glass windows long since given over to the branches and roots of dark green things growing inside. The leaves were lush, the red-centred flowers hanging heavy as if eager to reach the ground. Rachel wondered what the plants fed on. She tried not to think of the dead.
The sense of space closing in around her was becoming worse, and it was not only the narrower streets that caused it. It felt as if she’d been walking downhill for an hour and now stood in the foot of a valley, the whole sky above her and the hillsides pressing down from all around. The air was heavier, thick and soupy, even though it seemed to be cooling as the sun faded up in the sky.
Every few minutes she surprised herself by realising that she was no longer crying. Tears felt good and proper, but when she stopped and concentrated on her search for a way back, they stopped.
“Mum,” she said quietly. “Dad. Daddy?” Her voice sounded flat and quiet; it was not echoed back from any of the buildings. She wondered if these walls could swallow sound waves. She stamped her feet to test the idea and felt rather than heard their impact, her bones jarring and flesh shaking. The air felt thick yet sound was fading. The sun was high and the day was growing dark.
Rachel knew that she was lost, somewhere far removed from the village and everything familiar, and yet as things moved on there were some blessings: the humming had stopped, thank God, and if those faceless people were still in their homes they could do nothing to her out here. Maybe they were still sitting there, grotesque faces all turned to feel the fading sun on their skin, hands clasping the rotting arms of chairs or feeling along walls as they sought escape … but they were saying nothing.
She did not approach any doors or windows to check.
Instead she turned the way she had come, yet again, and found once more that the landscape had changed behind her back. The buildings had vanished and an orchard stood in their place. Its trees were high and wide, trunks close together, the foliage blotting out what little light remained from the fading sun. Rachel stepped forward onto the short grass of the orchard floor, passing small mouldy mounds that may have been windfalls. She tried not to look too closely, because one or two of them seemed to be oddly shaped. No point in looking. No need upsetting herself.
Home, she thought, pleased that she’d found an orchard. The village was surrounded by them after all, and if she walked straight through this one she was certain that she’d leave this lost place behind, emerge somewhere she recognised ...
She started to cry again, barely even registering the fresh tears as she walked between the trees, watching her steps but trying not to see the broken fruit on the ground. For a second each fallen apple was a hand, clawed up out of the ground and holding a handful of earth, ready to haul down and drag its owner up out of the dank earth and into the dull light of this lost place.
Rachel screamed, rubbed her eyes as she stumbled. Her heel landed on something and she heard it crunch, and she had to look down. Had to. Whatever fears held her were nothing compared to childhood fascination, the need to know and explore, however awful the truth was going to be.
It was only a crushed apple. It looked quite succulent and juicy, actually, and she realised how parched she was. She bent down to pick up the broken fruit before she saw what it contained. Where the core should be lay a tiny, wriggling thing. It had limbs, of sorts, but two of them were squashed. It had a head, perhaps, but that was ruptured and bleeding.
It had a voice, for sure. It was crying.
Rachel ran. She bounded into a tree and smashed her face into the harsh bark, opening a gash across the bridge of her nose. Blood ran down her face like the very best tears. She cried out again as she ran, striking more trees because they were growing in closer now, their canopies entwined like lovers’ arms, branches coiled around each other, leaves kissing. Whenever she thought she was heading for a space between trees she hit another trunk, her hand sometimes warding it off, other times her chin or stomach or nose meeting it first.
She knew what the thing had been thinking and that was worse than anything. It had wanted out, but once released from its prison by her unwary foot it had wanted back in again. Trapped and imprisoned was better than the spaces, the wide open spaces, never again did it want to see those big wide open spaces …
Some of the tree trunks were touching, now. Rachel was barely walking, shoving her way through the space between trees, crying tears of blood and salt. They pattered to the grass and sank in, turning the dried blades red, sowing a path she should be able to follow back … but upon turning around, she realised that she was trapped. Hardly any light made it down here. The canopies above, three or four layers thick, were heavy with summer leaves and unripened fruits.
What does ripeness bring? Rachel thought. Where’s my mum?
“Mum!” she called, “Dad, help me!”
Rachel tried to sit down but the trees would not let her. They held her up, pressed rough trunks against her back and sides and front, and she cried out one last time, not know or caring why she called for him.
“Andy!”
She began finding it difficult to breathe.
Ten
As they ran, Andy told Stig everything he knew. Stig, panting and gasping with the exertion, asked no questions until the end.
“So what do we do when we find her?” he said at last.
Andy slowed, stopped at the corner shop. Mr Howards was nowhere to be seen, and the ‘Back in ten minutes’ sign was still pinned to the front door. The sun had already curled its edges and Andy had a sudden vision of it being there for months, until the heat had bleached the ink away.
“I ask her forgiveness,” Andy said.
“Huh?” Stig stood with hands on hips, panting, glancing down at the book then back up at Andy’s face, down and up. He still hadn’t bothered wearing his T-shirt.
“There’s no one around,” Andy said. “It’s dead quiet.”
Stig nodded and looked along the road in both directions, then back down the hill towards their homes. “Maybe everyone’s inside like our mums.”
“My dad’s frozen solid in our car,” Andy said. “He came home from work because I phoned him. Because I was scared. And now he’s …” He felt tears coming on again and he welcomed them, because they made him feel normal. Ever since he’d picked up the book and read some of the entries, things had been making more sense; but he hadn’t liked it. He didn’t want to come to terms with people dying in churchyards or hanging in the air, or being frozen as hard as diamond in their cars. He didn’t want to know what was happening. Making sense was a bad idea.
For a while, the tears might camouflage his understanding of things.
“Christ,” Stig said quietly. He glanced back the way they’d come. “Can we go and see him!”
“Stig!”
Stig shrugged and glanced down at his feet. “Sorry.” He looked up again and grabbed Andy’s shoulders. “But how cool! A fucking witch, Andy, your great-great-great-great-grandmother, or something, was a witch!”
“Well, no, maybe not, not necessarily—“<
br />
“So why are we looking for Rachel again? I forget. What’s that all about? And why was that bloke up in the air?”
It’s like a film, Andy thought. Stig was watching a film, acting in it and reacting to it, and for a while it had been on pause. For an hour back there, when he was in his house with his crying and terrified mother, events had been put on hold for an intermission. Now Stig was acting the part again, and he wanted to be brought up to speed on the plot. Well, if that’s how he was going to handle it …
“The bloke was in the air because a nightmare had a hold of him. And he was living it awake.”
Stig frowned and waited for Andy to continue.
“An old nightmare. Centuries old. Mengezah – my relative from a long time ago – bled them from people for money. But she … well, she can’t have got rid of them properly.”
“Like toxic waste!” Stig said enthusiastically.
“What?”
“Toxic waste! Buried in leaking oil drums and then new estates are built on the dumping ground and all the female children under eight turn green and start using sharp instruments to slice their sleeping families’ throats. Or something.”
“Well …” Andy wondered whether that had happened somewhere in the village today.
“So why are we looking for Rachel?”
“I told you,” Andy said, turning and starting off towards the village square. “Forgiveness.”
Stig jogged to catch up and fell in pace beside him. “Oh. Right.”
The book felt moist and heavy under Andy’s arm. He was sweating, his T-shirt soaked through, but it was more that heat. It was nerves as well. Terror at what he had learned and fear at how easily he was accepting it.
(you pick up on things)
And above all, a simmering disquiet at the responsibility that had been laid before him.
Of course, he knew he hadn’t been forced to grab the problem and make it his own. But as Stig had said to him … A fucking witch!
“So these nightmares,” Stig said, “how do they …” He trailed off. There was a noise to their left, hidden behind the bulk of the factory. It sounded like a rug being flipped at the air. “What’s that?”
Andy shook his head as he felt his friend move up close to him. Could be anything, he thought, but decided not to say nothing. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get to Rachel’s house. If she still isn’t there we’ve got to start looking. We have to start looking.”
The boys set off along the road, both glancing warily at the factory and wondering what was going on behind it. Andy did not want to know. He could stop and open the book, browse through his ancestor’s writings – those he could read – and there was a chance that he would discover whatever was making the noise in there. But there was no time. For the last three hundred years, perhaps, there had been plenty of time, a thousand opportunities for his mother – and her mother’s mother, and so on back – to scour the book at their leisure, believing or disbelieving, laughing or frowning. But not now. Now, when Andy had one of the coolest, most exciting and terrifying things he’d ever imagined in his hands … he had no chance to look at it.
He discovered very soon that nightmares seek out their own victims.
The boys were looking up into the sun when the shadow came out of it. The crack, crack they’d heard was the thing’s wings beating at the air, not just flapping but whipping, as if angry at the heat the sun was giving the day, the brightness, the promise of more fine days to come.
As they both tumbled back onto the road, screaming and scrabbling backwards across the Tarmac like beetles before a magpie, Andy knew at last what real nightmares were. If anything can damage the air itself, he thought, this is it.
Some things belie description. Andy had never seen beauty adequately described in words, nor pain, nor the fear of a parent’s passing, nor the joy-laden release of an orgasm. And though he read a lot – children’s books, adult books, comics, newspapers, non-fiction volumes on the war and natural history and science – he knew that the thing coming at them now could never find itself within the pages of a book. A loose nightmare, perhaps. Undreamed up to now, and undreamable.
Even now, seeing and smelling and hearing it, it was indistinct.
It emerged from the sun aflame, as if travelling those cold depths of space instantaneously. Feathers of fire wavered behind and around it as it called out, the voice similar to nothing Andy had ever heard before, language unknown and unknowable. Great wings beat at the air and drove it down at the ground, each flap issuing a sonic boom that cracked windows, drove rose-bushes flat, exploded slates on the factory office’s roof. A stench was driven before it, fire and rot and the sweet perfume of a summer garden, mint and boiled apple and shit, all of these and more combined. Smoke curled into agitated shapes in its wake, giving a hieroglyphic warning that Andy was too terrified to understand.
Each time he blinked the thing coming at them changed. He flickered his eyelids quickly, trying to make it less bad.
“It’s everything!” Stig shouted. Andy felt his friends grabbing for him, and he had a choice: drop the book and hold Stig’s hands? Be together to face whatever was to happen to them?
He looked up. The impossible thing was bearing down upon them rapidly, but it could be ten feet or ten miles away.
“Everything, Andy!” Stig shouted, his eyes wide, nose running, one side of his face and chest apparently sunburned even more from the boiling apparition screaming down to them from above. He grabbed for Andy again, his fingers searching for their friendship that would never end, they’d sworn it, they’d made themselves spit-brothers and, only a week ago, blood brothers when both of them tumbled from their bikes and opened the skin on their hands. Blood brothers, they’d vowed, holding their bleeding hands together and letting the blood merge and flow, swapping each other’s life force and feeling so proud.
Andy held the book tightly under his arm.
And an instant later Stig was swept along the road for twenty feet, the thing’s huge talons rolling him and leaving a morse of blood behind, before being lifted clear into the sky.
“Andy!” Stig screeched, blood spraying through tattered lips. It drifted on the disturbed air, a red mist that coolly kissed Andy’s upturned face. “Andy!”
“Oh God ….” Andy could say little else. He could barely think. His knuckles were white where they grasped the book, his face spotted with freckles of his best friend’s blood. He could only watch as the nightmare stole Stig away across the rooftops.
It left behind charred air and a crying, terrified little boy.
And when Andy looked up and saw Bully Bradfield and his gang, he knew that his own nightmare had come true at last.
Forever Nightmares
As the afternoon drew to a close, and the sun dipped thankfully towards the wooded hills in the west, and the melted pitch on the roads began to harden again, and a soft breeze picked up screams and shouts and blew them against the walls of the church, the village could no longer ignore the nightmares it played host to.
In houses, basements, fields, gardens, outside on the road and inside in the minds of the terrified, disbelieving villagers, realities were slaughtered. Security was knocked down like so many bolted front doors. Safety was taken outside and gutted.
Whatever tomorrow may bring, for many life would never be the same again. How can it when nightmares live?
In the graveyard, the dead were walking.
Darren James – town drunk, petty burglar, car thief and all-round arsehole – was trying to press himself into the stone wall of the church yard. He was hidden beneath an ancient rose bush, its stems thick the business end of a baseball bat, but still he thought the things may see him if they turned his way. His gallon-container of White Lightning lay upturned on the gravestone where he’d been sitting sunning himself, letting the toxic brew burn into his stomach and press at his bladder while he considered his evening’s options. Fuck Debbie, or nick her old man’s shotgun? he’d been
musing. Now there was a choice he liked. Brain addled by the nuclear-strength cider, he had briefly considered combining the two in all manner of ways.
Then the gravestone had shifted. Long, black nails had preceded the skeletal hand that came out from beneath it, and the processed remains of that White Lightning had streamed down his legs and soaked his trousers.
Huddled up against the wall, at least it was keeping him cool.
There were five of them now, all virtual skeletons apart from the fat, burst corpse of that bastard Howards’ wife. She’d never liked him in her shop, always refused to sell him booze, forcing him to steal it and take continued abuse from the local pigs. Now here she was, two years dead and still as fat as when she’d been alive, stuffing her cream-cake stock into her disgusting mouth before it could be sold—
And, as if she could hear his thoughts, she turned to look at him.
James pressed back, willing the wall to crumble behind him and let him through, out into the square. He’d already looked up and figured that his initial hiding place had also turned into his prison; the rose was thick and dense above him, no way through there, the only way out was out, past those stumbling things. … those things …
