“Nah. Thanks. Nah … see you,” he said, suddenly, and then the line went dead. I didn’t hear from him for several weeks after that, despite calling him often.
I bought a formerly expensive house at a ludicrously knocked-down price, one that I’d always liked out on the Kenilworth Road; I didn’t need to, but I wanted to. I could afford it, and the people that had simply abandoned it were overjoyed. They’d been living with friends, and I was put in touch with them through their estate agent. They’d pretty much given up on it as a loss. The place was a wreck inside, with every item of value taken and the carpets and walls torn up and vandalised, but it had a pool—a must for me now—and a fantastic garden, and it just felt welcoming. I hired some painters and decorators to fix it, bought new furniture, and by the end of the first week the place was immaculate. The teams I’d hired to fix it had charged an extra thirty percent to come into Coventry and work this close to town, which even I thought was a bit much, but it needed doing. I spent the weekdays in a Birmingham pub whilst they worked, and spent the evenings in a hotel at night (none were left open in Coventry, the Stone Man being the final nail in a dying local industry) and all that was fine by me. I thought that at some point I might write again, and return those calls (opportunities that had surely long since passed) but I didn’t want to think about that kind of thing. The money already in the bank meant that I didn’t have to, of course, and I continued to just piss my days away.
Once I’d moved in, I had food delivered once a week, and hired a team of two security guards to protect the place from looters, alternating shifts over twenty-four hours. They set up a little tech booth by the front door, and I had an electrified fence and gate built around the property. Yes, I’d returned home, and I might have become a drunken mess, but I would be damned if I was going to let any scum have my stuff. Plus, the country around me was getting steadily worse.
Despite government reassurances, every city—not just Coventry—was in a state of constant near-panic. I don’t think it was from a fear of being ‘next’—most people didn’t believe they would be, any more than anyone ever really believes they’re going to win the lottery—but more from a fear of losing everything, of having a Stone Man (blue or otherwise) come to their part of town and wipe it out. It made people extremely precious about their property and families, and therefore it was all too easy for some elements to fan that spark and get riots going up and down the country, particularly in more deprived areas. This led to even more people drawing into their homes, and even those in relatively quiet areas stayed indoors, watching the news for a sign or just making sure their loved ones were accounted for. The religious element, undeterred by previous violence, seized their moment and no doubt rejoiced as they drew record crowds at public rallies and events. To no one’s surprise, there was more trouble with rival organisations turning up, and there were more deaths. After a short time, a temporary ban was placed on religious gatherings outdoors. Tensions still simmered, however, and the fear and mistrust throughout the country continued to grow.
It was on a Thursday, roughly four months after the Stone Men had left, that I was sitting in my back garden. It was February by then, and still cold out, but the sun had appeared in a surprisingly blue sky for the time of year, and I decided to sit outdoors. I’d been in the new house four weeks, and I don’t think I’d spent any time in the expansive garden even once by then; I’d been occupied enough by moving between the home cinema, the kitchen, and the pool. Days were spent working my way through Netflix, the drinks cabinet, several porn websites and the freezer, followed by sitting on the bottom of the pool for as long as I could whilst holding my breath. All the while I dimly told myself that I’d get writing tomorrow, but I never did. I’d even tried once, but when faced with a blank page, my mind kept wandering to things that I didn’t want to think about, and I eventually gave up. I was occupied, which was fine, and starting to become too dependent on drink, which was a vague concern, but it all kept me distracted at least. That’s what I think I wanted, looking back. Either way, the surprise of the sunshine streaming through the curtains had dragged me out of bed and onto a deckchair in the garden before I’d touched a bottle, which was especially unusual that day; normally, if I woke up feeling as bad as I did that morning, I tucked straight into something strong to fight it off. But not that day. I just somehow felt that it would make me feel even worse.
It went on throughout the morning, this shaky feeling, and whilst I constantly thought that I’d grab a bottle and start to kill it off, somehow I never got around to it. Instead I carried on with my usual routine of films and floating/swimming, feeling more and more restless and troubled. I made myself a meal of pizza and chips (a personal favourite, I might add, that along with the booze had helped to add a second extra stone to my weight, and I would now be described as chubby) but it just felt dry and stodgy in my mouth. I left half of it unfinished, and later found myself upstairs in the bedroom, lying flat on my back and inspecting the ceiling. I couldn’t lie still, but my stomach felt like it was full of lead, and I began to feel helplessly alone. I called Paul, but he didn’t answer as usual, and I wondered if he were even at his old house anymore. The government knew where he was so they could get hold of him, I thought, and then found myself thinking about what would happen when the Stone Men came back. I wondered if we’d be called in anyway, despite being apparently cut off from the source, and thought that we would be. They’d have to check, wouldn’t they, and I remembered Paul’s ominous words on the subject.
Dangerous loose ends.
I lay there and almost hoped that we would be cut off, so at least we wouldn’t have to be a part of the madness again. Let Straub try out her backup options. They could take over, see how they handled the results. Then, to my total surprise, I began to cry.
Loud, barking sobs that fired out of me in staccato fashion as tears streamed down my face, and whilst this went on part of me marvelled at it. I never cried, and if I did, I instantly found myself looking at it in an abstract, curious way, as if it were happening to someone else. This always had the effect of separating me from such rare feelings, and therefore ended them at the same time. It wasn’t a deliberate process, and it always just happened by itself, but not today. It went on for a good twenty minutes, until my face was sore and I’d almost lost my voice. But stranger still, it didn’t stop. Emotion washed through my body, and the effect was all the more dramatic on me for being someone who usually felt so little. Forty minutes later, when I was still going, mild fear came into the swirling cloud in my head, unnerved by the amount of time this had been going on for. Worse still, I couldn’t seem to make it stop.
I don’t know when it finally ended, either, as I woke up the next morning, face down on the bed with my eyelids crusty and sore. I didn’t feel any better, either; in fact, I felt worse. I made a breakfast but I had no appetite for it, and left it untouched. I headed into the cinema room to lose myself in something loud and mindless but I couldn’t relax. The surround sound—which, on a normal day could often startle me when an unexpected noise came from the rear or side speakers—today had me nearly jumping out of my seat every time such an incident happened. After crying out in fright five or six times, I gave the whole thing up as a bad idea and headed for the pool, but the nervousness didn’t alleviate. I found myself jumping at shadows, and unable to shake this uncanny feeling that something was behind me, always staying just out of sight.
By the time the evening rolled around, I’d taken some herbal relaxation tablets in an attempt to calm my now tightly wound nerves, but they didn’t make a dent. I started checking in with the security guard over the intercom, first hourly, then half-hourly, then every twenty minutes. He, and later his associate, did a good job of hiding their growing irritation, but even if they hadn’t I wouldn’t have cared. That wasn’t important. I constantly checked the locks, and ended up lying awake all night with the lights on. By then, I was checking every five minutes.
By the
time the sun came up, I was a red-eyed wreck, and I had developed a near-constant shake. It occurred to me briefly that, despite company checks, I didn’t really know if I could trust my security guards. Once that thought had arrived, it grew infected roots, and I slowly decided that they couldn’t be trusted at all. I told the current guard on duty—over the intercom, of course, and with a shaking voice—that he wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the week, and that he should tell his colleague also. They’d get full pay, I assured them. I hung up before he could protest, and sat on the bedroom floor whilst I listened to him knock on the door downstairs. Once I heard a car engine start, I tiptoed to the window and watched his black BMW drive away. I thought it would make me feel better to watch him go, but it didn’t.
I thought it might be better if I actually turned the bed onto its side and pushed it horizontally into the corner. This would, I reasoned, create a little triangle of space behind it that I could sit in, safe behind the barrier. I then thought it would be even better if I got the mattress from the spare bed and put it on top of the gap, effectively sealing me off nicely. This idea filled me with a nervous, panicked, but determined energy, and although the thought of leaving the bedroom now filled me with anxiety, I worked like a madman, fetching the mattress from one of three spare bedrooms and dragging it on its end along the upstairs landing. It was harder than I thought it would be; if I’d thought about it more clearly, I would have realised that I was weak from not eating a full meal for two days.
I sat there in the darkness of my little fort, thinking that I would finally begin to feel safe, but it only got worse. I developed a cold sweat, one that formed a fine sheen over my body at first that developed into small rivulets as the day wore on. My shakes intensified, and in a moment of clarity it finally occurred to me to wonder why this might be happening.
Why it didn’t happen sooner I don’t know. I assume that, looking back, it was just part of the process; the difference with me being that, of course, when I stopped to think about it, I knew what was happening. I didn’t then, not fully—I was under the influence far too much for that—but in that moment it was a brief flash of thought, one that I clamped down on like a triggered bear trap. It can’t be that. It can’t be that. It can’t be that. I pushed it away, clung to ignorance like a drowning man clutching a piece of flimsy driftwood.
The second night in the bedroom was hell. Shakes became convulsions, and at several points I found that I couldn’t breathe, panic and fear gripping my throat and lungs and squeezing them tight, invisible hands squeezing my heart and chest. I came out the other side, but always knew there was another one around the corner. It can’t be that. It’s stress. It’s guilt. It’s the trauma coming back. It can’t be THAT. The more time passed, the harder I had to clamp down on such ideas, but the thought was slowly prizing the my mental bear trap open, threatening to let the truth out, undeniable and devastating.
It was during the next morning, when I woke up after having passed out for just a few minutes, that I realised I was going to be sick. I tried to throw off the mattress ‘lid’ of my enclosure in time, but my arms were clumsy and weak by then and the mattress just folded around me as I tried to fumble it open. I threw up all over myself and the nearest wall, and, panicked even more as I convinced myself I was going to choke to death. This in turn caused a full-blown panic attack, closing my lungs up as I desperately tried to emerge from my fort. The mattress was suddenly an attacker, wrapping itself around my weakened body, determined to smother me and force me to fatally breathe my own puke into my lungs. Soaked in sweat, with vomit smeared across my face and chest, I finally made it out and over the top of the overturned bed, tumbling onto the floor and gasping in air. There was no relief, though; I was out in the open, unprotected, and my mind screamed at me to find shelter, shelter, more shelter, to go to GROUND WHERE IT’S SAFE.
I curled up into a ball, making noises somewhere between crying and screaming, as my mind whirled with possibilities of danger, danger, and as a result of that my brain reflexively reached out and flexed that mental muscle again. It remembered how it had worked before and began to test, test like I’d been doing many times a day over the last few weeks.
I locked on.
As the sudden, deafening screaming sound snapped into my mind, louder than before, finding me, filling my brain with its painful white noise, I knew what I’d suspected all along was true, just as I knew in that same moment that I was doomed.
They’d noticed us, all right. We’d caught their attention before, and then we got involved. They were ready, therefore, the next time, the second time when we came back for more, and when we stayed in there too long they not only cut us off, but they made up their minds. They’d had enough of us.
Had enough of me and Paul.
I lay there, captured, pinned like a bug, a child staring into the headlights of the oncoming train. They knew where I was, knew me, and in that moment—whether it was just because I was now the target, or whether it was because they wanted me to know, perhaps even gloating as I realised my punishment—I thought I knew why they had come in the first place.
I unlocked with a cry, and wept helplessly into my hands, but this was now for real. Making the connection to the source had short-circuited their influence, the illusion broken, and my mind was once more my own, but now the fear and desperation were true and came from the heart; I was going to die.
I can’t really describe the feeling. Realising your own death is not only suddenly upon you, without warning, but within a few days. I couldn’t accept it. It was too big. As I lay there for a long time, weeping, my mind flitted amongst so many crazy subjects. I wondered stupidly what would happen to my mortgage, and who would buy my house. I wondered who would sort out my funeral. Would anyone even attend? I even wondered what would happen to the food still in the freezer, seeing a cleanup crew grimly taking dibs on whatever choice foodstuffs they liked the look of. Then I wondered what lay after death, and if it would hurt, and if I would be even aware of the footsteps of the Stone Man as they pounded up the road behind me.
I thought of all the things I had still to do with my life, and all the things that I would be cheated out of, the injustice of it. I wept, and wept, and thought of the others, and how I’d tracked them down. Then I wondered if maybe it wasn’t too unjust after all. (I don’t know. You decide.)
As you can imagine, this all went on for some time. I won’t bore you with it. I wouldn’t be able to do it justice anyway. If you were a cancer patient, and then found out you were terminal, you’d at least have had some inkling, even if it didn’t really prepare you. Or if you were waiting for test results, or had found a lump, or a badly misshapen and sore mark on your skin. But to find out you had mere days to live, with no prior warning … I can’t put it into words. I can’t even try. Wait … there is one, actually. Regret. There was a lot of that.
Eventually, after going through a million things in my head, I thought of Henry, and something snagged on that thought and wouldn’t let go, kept going back to it even when my thoughts tried to move on to the children I’d never had, the ones I’d never wanted but now seemed like the biggest opportunity lost. And as I kept going back to Henry, Henry, even in my worst moment of despair the edges of an idea began to form. I didn’t like it, and at first I couldn’t even bring myself to think about it—it was an idea no more frightening than knowing the Stone Man was coming for me—but as the hours passed, and my tears began to dry as practicality took over, I kept going back to it, knowing it to be right and letting it take hold.
I went downstairs. Made a cup of tea. As I drank it with shaking hands, the whole thing would hit me all over again and I would burst into tears once more, but they were brief. I was still beyond terrified, and I still desperately hoped that there might be another way, but I knew there wasn’t, and the determination that slowly grew in me made me functional if nothing else. I think … if I’d been happy before … it would have been harder, harder to move it
aside and work … but … if I’m honest … when I looked at my life … I don’t know. I was tired. Always tired. But I still didn’t want that. Either way, the added pressure of time gave me no choice but to get on with things; and as I’ve said before, practicality has never been too much of a problem for me. If I couldn’t get my head around my own impending death, then I wouldn’t try. I would get on with things. I found that I could do that.
The first thing to do was to get hold of Paul. And that was not going to be a pleasant phone call.
***
Time’s nearly up, I reckon. D’you know, I think I’ve drunk myself sober. I never thought that was really possible, but then I think the current … situation might have more to do with it than anything else. I still haven’t even had long enough to truly get my head around it, but then, I’ve been doing my best to think about anything else. I mean … well … anyway … not yet. Not yet.
Just enough time to finish this version of events off, yes? Jesus, how long have I been here? All day, I think. I’ve lost track of time, and that will be the booze. I’m trying to think what time they arrived … the last two times there was about eight hours in between the arrival and the time they began to walk. Big stone motherfuckers. Bastards … you’d think I’d remember what time they turned up, as that was the moment that proved me right. As soon as the Blues came back again, they proved that I was right about the reason they were here.
***
I knew he wouldn’t answer at first. He hadn’t been doing so for weeks, but I was working on a hunch that, if he’d been going through the same as me—and I thought that he would have been—if I rang his phone enough, he’d have to at least pick it up to turn it off, as the sound would have driven his nerves crazy. I knew that from experience. The idea was that he’d see my number and maybe pick up. Unfortunately, his mobile was already off, going straight to answer phone. I had his home number as well, but no idea if he was still even living there, especially with an upcoming divorce. Still, I had no other options; after this it was a drive to Sheffield.
The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller Page 35
