by Tim Lebbon
“Just what the fuck!” he shouted, because he didn’t care if they heard him anymore. The fat bitch was coming for him anyway, not as if he could give himself away, and “What the fuck! Eh? What the fucking fuck!”
The dead woman bent down and stared into the shadows at Darren James. Her eyes were darker than where he hid, damper than his soaked trousers, because she had no eyes, only holes in her ragged face where many-legged things crept.
“The fucking fuck indeed,” Mrs Howard's said, running a hand down over its crotch. For a corpse, its enunciation was remarkable.
Lesley Jones was running through a field. She loved the countryside, relished and revelled living in Whitgrove, and she often took long walks up to the woods and back. This field was usually on her route, because the clump of trees on the raised knoll at its centre was an ideal halfway resting place.
But she was running now, not walking, and at seventy years of age running was not a wise thing to do. Not for a mile, and certainly not in this heat. She could feel her heart struggling to keep up with her, muscles aching and cramping through lack of oxygen, joints rubbing and scraping, and she knew that she would kill herself if she continued.
But there was nothing else to do.
How else could she keep ahead of the Zipper Man?
He followed her, walking and admiring the scenery, laughing and singing like all the best jokers and jesters … and just as in all the worst movies, he kept pace even though she was running.
And slowly but surely, he was gaining on her.
His hand moved up and down his front. Down, unzip, and his skin fell away to reveal a slightly different him underneath. Up, zip, he closed himself, shrugged his shoulders into his new being and walked on a few paces. Then after a pause … unzip, off came his latest skin. He never reduced, like Chinese dolls. He never looked the same twice. His smile was always there, calm and whimsical and yet full of an insidious threat that Lesley had never really been able to identify. He can’t hurt you, her mother had used to coo all those years ago, even if he does catch you, which he never will. Because it’s just a dream, Lesley. And dreams can never hurt you … they just melt away.
Lesley was old and her hair was grey and sometimes she forgot where she left her glasses, but she was not stupid. She knew that she was awake right now. She could feel the sun on her face and the grass whipping at her ankles, and whenever she glanced back she could see the Zipper Man closing the distance between them, shedding his skin, hand down, up, that smile aimed at her whenever she looked—
She was awake, and the Zipper Man was still chasing her.
Gaining.
Slowly, certainly, as if he had all the time in the world …. gaining.
Wurzel couldn’t believe his luck.
Here he was laying low in an orchard with Debbie Worthington, his dick in her hand, her tit in his, and the best thing was he should have been in work! He’d made the final delivery of the day an hour ago, dropping a load of parts to Heggesy’s garage, but instead of going back to the yard he’d offered Debbie a lift. She was a pretty girl, eighteen next birthday, and he’d often caught her glancing at him in the pub or strutting her stuff if she walked by his parents’ house. But he’d never done anything about it, and that’s because he was scared. Scared of her boyfriend Darren James, an idiot of the worst kind because he could fight anyone who called him such. He was a criminal as well, a thief, trouble, and Wurzel knew that everyone hated him living in the village.
Even, it now seemed, Debbie.
“Why do they call you Wurzel?” she asked, her smile surprisingly sweet and coy considering what she was doing with her hand.
“My second name’s Strawbridge.”
“Oh.” And she bent down to start sucking him off.
He’d felt brave. Driving towards her as she walked along the lane, no other traffic around, he’d admired her long brown legs and bare back, just a shade too red with the effort of gaining a tan. He’d often wondered why she never appeared to go to work, but not today. Today, he was only glad that she didn’t.
“Want a lift?” he’d asked, leaning across the van’s front seat and opening the door without waiting for an answer. His voice was shaking but she hadn’t seemed to notice.
She’d hopped in. Seconds later her top had been off, she was complaining that it was sooooo hot, and the gate to the orchard was the first place he could stop the van.
Her head bobbed. Her teeth scraped him now and then, but the last thing he wanted to do was complain. The very last thing. He thought briefly of Darren, how all his mates maintained that Debbie was committed to him, even if she was a little flirtatious. And feeling her hair tickling his thighs, he smiled. Weird.
He’d have thought it weirder still had he known what Debbie was doing at that precise moment. Far from sucking on his cock, she was actually splayed out on her bedroom floor, arms and legs pulled taught and tight by the little grey creatures which had come out of her light fitting. They were busy snapping the bones of her wrists and ankles and using them to nail her to the floor. One of the things – it had a face like Christopher Walken and kept saying I haven’t killed anyone … I haven’t killed anyone … -- sat on her face so that she could not scream.
“Debbie, that’s good,” Wurzel said, leaning back against the apple tree so that he could look down and watch. He’d return the favour in a minute, oh yes, have a mouthful of her and smile with every lick as he thought of that bastard Darren, how cool he thought he was, how so very cool.
Debbie bit. Wurzel screamed. Then she was up, sitting astride his stomach and it wasn't Debbie any more, it was that Thing, that awful Thing he’d used to dream of when he was ill as a kid, naked and wrinkled and ugly and stinking of stale milk and raw bacon.
He hadn’t though of the Thing for a very long time.
“Debbie?” he muttered, because he couldn’t think of what else to say.
“You never really forgot me, did you?” it said. And then it kissed him.
For a second, as it ripped at him with the long hooked claws on its hands and feet, sucking his tongue into his mouth and pressing his head against the tree to keep him in place, he thought he’d parked up and fallen asleep in the sun. Sunstroke, he thought, fell asleep leaning out of the van window and now I’m burned and—
But when the pain kicked in and he still didn’t wake up, there was only one other possibility to consider.
Elsewhere in the village other nightmares descended upon their victims, instilling dreads old or new, from Mengezah or, more and more frequently, from the minds and memories of the victims themselves.
A sunbathing woman saw a giant fleshy ball approaching from the bottom of her garden, so she ran, pounding along streets in her bare feet and bikini, glancing back every few steps at the ball that followed her, always followed her, whichever way she turned and however fast she ran.
A man confronted his dead brother from thirty years ago and tried to convince him it had all been an accident.
The village pub’ erupted in flames when the landlord tried to fight off a swarm of ice-flies, their mandibles dripping cool death onto his skin, wings creaking at the air. He used an aerosol lit with a cigarette, swept it around the kitchen, shouting, searing his cook’s hair from her head and bubbling her skin as he was blinded by two flies that burrowed at his eyes. It only took a kiss of the flame on the gas canisters he kept beneath the table …
Stig’s mother, still locked in tearful indecision inside her home, found herself sitting on a toilet, knickers and shorts around her ankles, dozens of people milling around … and as soon as she stood to wipe they all turned to stare.
Nightmares everywhere.
Eleven
For Andy, the worst of nightmares.
When he was nine, Andy had been beaten up by a boy from the neighbouring village. There was no rhyme or reason behind the attack other than the fact that their schools were in competition in the local schools’ football league. Andy was walking home one af
ternoon when the boy jumped him, beat him to the ground and commenced kicking him in the head.
Bully Bradfield had saved him.
Bradfield was the last person Andy had expected to help. He had a reputation for beating on kids for no reason; one day you were his mate, the next his victim. He was the worst type of bully; one who liked to call you his friend. But Bradfield was only nine and the fights rarely ended with more than a bloody nose and dented pride, so the adults seemed to pass it on as a childhood phase. Even Andy’s dad had once told him: If he picks on you, just punch him back. Stand up to him and he won’t do it again. Andy could not believe how childishly simple a solution an adult could offer for such a nightmarish situation. Simple, and false, because someone who fought back was exactly what Bradfield craved. He liked to fight.
But this time he had fought off Andy’s attacker, helped Andy up and dusted him down, perhaps wallowing for a moment in some misplaced camaraderie with his school-mate. He put his arm around Andy’s shoulder and led him out of the village towards the woods, telling him it wasn’t safe, the boy could be waiting to pounce for him on the way home, he should come out here for an hour or two and let the danger pass.
Andy – nose bleeding, elbows scraped and sore – had let Bully Bradfield lead him away from the village, and his home. Every step he took made him more uneasy; he wanted his mum, he was bleeding and she’d kiss him better and douse the flame of his cuts with a damp flannel. But Bradfield may have been right … the boy might have been waiting …
Just outside the village Bradfield had steered him into an overgrown orchard, wild hedgerows shielding it from the road, abandoned pigsties islands in the green sea of grass. Waiting there for them, Bradfield’s gang. Six of them, all school-mates of Andy’s, some of them even his friends … but not that day. That day they’d had pain and violence in their eyes, because for a while Bradfield was their leader.
And how had Andy ever, ever believed that Bully Bradfield could ever change?
He’d run. The certainty that those boys were there to cause pain gave him speed. He’d seen their eyes; scared and excited as they looked from him, to Bradfield, back again, waiting for their leader’s word before they attacked this random victim. He’d noticed the sticks some of them had been holding. They were really going to hurt him.
He ran flat out for five minutes. Footsteps pursued him to begin with, shouts and whoops and the sounds of animal violence their accompaniment. They soon fell behind, but Andy kept on running.
Somehow he escaped the gang and the fate they had in store for him, and his escape had been permanent. Physically, at least. They never caught him and it was never mentioned again. He saw those boys in school, even became friendly with one or two of them over the next couple of years, and in his nightmares events had turned out differently. They’d caught him, beaten him, whipped him, cut him with rusted nails and bashed him against an old pig sty until its ragged edges started to gash flesh from bones …
Now they were here again.
“Hello pig-shit-breath,” Bully Bradfield said. He’d left the village with his family two years ago to emigrate to America. “Bet you can’t run faster than me now.” Nobody had heard from any of them since. “Want to try?”
Andy stood his ground for a few seconds, looking into the eyes of each and every one of the boys. Damien Cooper was there; he’d died a year ago from meningitis. Pete White, too, one of his best friends who’d just moved away to live in the city. In their eyes Andy saw none of the hesitation, the need to belong, the guilty fear that had been apparent four years earlier. Now, they were simply there to hurt him.
So he turned and ran. And like all nightmares, they wouldn’t let him go.
He stayed on the road. He could have taken one of the twisting paths that led between houses and gardens, disappearing around corners and reappearing on other streets, or in the square, or perhaps today nowhere at all. But the road looked safe, untouched, and here he could run faster. He thought ahead: past the school, under the bridge, around the corner by the post office and into the square. Maybe the police were still there. Or maybe not. If not, he would take the path by the stream. From there he could duck into any garden he wished, or dart along the side-paths that led back to the road. He could, if he ran fast enough and thought logically enough, lose them again.
But he was thinking of the boys as real. It all fell down, he knew, because as nightmares … as his worst nightmare … they would never be left behind.
Their footsteps pounded behind him, echoing from the school walls where it bounded the road. He could distinguish Bradfield’s footsteps from the others; they were harder, heavier, full of a darker intent. And they seemed more determined. He wondered whether Bradfield could actually reach him through a nightmare, satisfying a cruel desire he’d been denied four years ago in that overgrown orchard.
The book was becoming heavier. Should be shedding its nightmares and becoming lighter, Andy thought, not heavier. But perhaps exhaustion was settling in already. He could never discard the book to make the going easier. It was slowing him down, those steps behind him were louder – faster, if anything – and they were going to catch him.
The bridge. Andy looked ahead and saw the high railway bridge, the one he’d felt that awful presence beneath mere hours ago. He looked desperately to his left and right, seeking an alternate route that wouldn’t slow him down too much. The book slipped and he hugged it tighter, feeling its old leather corners digging into his ribs and armpit. He relished the sensation. It was real.
He risked a glance over his shoulder and instantly wished he hadn’t. They were closer than he’d thought, arms pumping at the air, feet kicking up puffs of strange black dust as if each footfall smashed the road surface into fragments. And at their fore was Bully Bradfield, his smile so wide that it looked as if he’d been struck with a scimitar across the mouth. At that thought thick black blood pumped down over Bradfield’s chin, dripping onto his white muscle T-shirt.
Andy darted left without thinking, vaulted the low wire fence and scrambled up the slope to the railway track. The climb would slow him for a few seconds, but if he could make it to the track before his pursuers it would slow them down too. In the meantime he could run left or right along the track, or go straight over and down the other side. This way, at least he’s miss the unseen thing under the bridge.
There was a train coming. Andy could hear it as he pulled himself up the steep bank with one hand, pushing with his feet, kicking himself up, kicking fast so that he didn’t give himself a chance to slide back down.
The wire fence sang as its tines were plucked by the gang behind him.
The train grew louder, its approach expanding out from a dull roar to a click-clack, click-clack, and as Andy reached the brow of the embankment he could sense the tracks vibrating with the promise of its imminent arrival. He looked left and saw the train coming through the old station. It was a local sprinter, a three-carriage affair that stopped at every station along the route, taking an hour to travel thirty miles between the coast and the local town. Full of shoppers and day-trippers today, Andy guessed, and he wondered just what would happen to them on their brief journey through the village?
He wondered also whether this was the train they’d heard hours ago, just after they’d passed under the bridge.
His questions were answered when he saw the driver. As the train bore down on him Andy could see the whites of the man’s eyes, the fillings in his teeth, his jaw tendons working as his chin struggled to touch his chest and his hands clasped at his hair in disbelief at something he had seen, or was still seeing.
Behind Andy the sounds of pursuit, and heavy breathing as Bradfield mounted the rise.
Without a second thought Andy leaped forward. He didn’t judge the distance and time, nor the possibility of escape. He jumped out of a blind, terrified instinct for survival, untouched by logic or even hope.
But hope bore out. If anything, the wall of air pushed before the tr
ain shoved Andy the vital few inches he needed to avoid being struck. He rolled across the gravel on the other side of the track and let the roll continue, slipping over the far edge of the embankment and sliding and bouncing down towards the garden at its base.
He still clasped the book, using both hands now, trying to roll with his shoulders and prevent his head from being struck. When he reached the foot of the bank he stood shakily and looked up. The train had just passed and there, standing in the centre of the track, Bully Bradfield glared down at him.
“Just fuck off!” Andy gasped. He launched himself over the privet hedge that marked a garden boundary, saw that the back door was open and ran. The house was dark inside and peculiar buzzing sounds came from the living room, accompanied by the stench of shit and rot and the sweet smell of decomposition. He looked at his hands as he fumbled with the front door handle and threw it open.
The buzzing house spewed Andy back onto the road three houses along from the post office. He slammed the door and ran along the road, wondering where everyone was. “Help!” he called, giggling as the desperate echo came back to him from the church. I’ve got family in there, he thought, and he laughed again, a mad cackle that only made him laugh some more. He sounded like a witch.
The train crossed the bridge behind him going in the opposite direction. It had been turned around.
“Andy!”
That was Rachel! The shout seemed to come from a long way off and Andy immediately thought of the guy he and Stig had seen floating in the air, behind the station and a billion miles away. He stopped, eyes wide and breath held, waiting for her to call again.
She did not. Instead the door of the house behind him smashed open, bounced across the street and shattered to shards against the churchyard wall. Bradfield sprinted out as if he’d never even broken step.
Andy ran around the corner, saw that the square was filled with abandoned emergency vehicles but no people, and darted up the small path that led next to the stream. The book no longer felt heavy. In fact it seemed to lead him on, its gravity hauling him forward as he held it against his chest. He emerged between buildings and saw the stream to his left, gurgling happily away as if nothing in the world was wrong, throwing up sparks of sunlight as it dipped down towards the hills in the west, and—
