by Nick Moseley
‘We haven’t heard back, I’m afraid,’ Montano said as they appeared in her doorway. ‘We’re locking down the prisoners for the night soon, so if you want another chat with Corbyn it’ll have to be tomorrow.’
‘Crap,’ Trev said. ‘Thanks a lot, Feargal.’
‘Can’t be helped,’ said Desai. ‘Looks like we’ll be taking those rooms then, if the offer’s still open?’
‘Of course,’ said Montano. ‘I’ll get someone to sort you out.’
She made a phone call and after a while a guard appeared. Montano introduced him as Richie. He was about Trev’s age with a bad crew cut and a short, stoutly-built physique. His uniform shirt was being stretched to its limit by his beer belly and Trev stood to the side in case one of the buttons flew off and decapitated him.
Richie led them deeper into the maze of corridors. It was obvious that the building had been modified internally since its construction. With his estate agent’s eye Trev could see plenty of evidence of the changes, such as doors or windows that had been bricked up, or walls that had been knocked through or added.
The staff quarters were on the ground floor and, as Richie told them, not far from some of the cell blocks. The room Trev had been allocated resembled a cell itself. It was small and windowless, and furnished with an ancient-looking iron bedstead and a wooden desk and chair. There was a bracket for a TV on the wall, though the TV itself was conspicuous by its absence. Richie went to a linen cupboard and fetched Trev a sheet, blanket and pillowcase.
‘There you go,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ said Trev. ‘What do you lot do for entertainment in the evenings?’
‘There’s a telly in the common room down the hall,’ said Richie. ‘Or you could get a book from the prison library.’
‘Spoiled for choice then,’ said Trev.
Richie frowned at him and headed off to show Desai to her room in the women’s block. Trev made the bed as best he could and then sat on it, wondering what to do. As Montano had described, the room had a phone. Trev debated calling Sarah before deciding against it. I’d only embarrass myself one way or another, he thought.
He sat a while longer with only his depressing thoughts for company. ‘Might as well go and see what’s on TV,’ he said to himself when he could stand it no longer.
He got up and started across the room. He was halfway to the door when the lights went out.
Eleven
Trev stayed where he was, wondering if the light would come back on. It didn’t. The absence of any illumination seeping under the door indicated that the lights in the corridor were out as well, which in turn suggested a power cut.
‘Bollocks,’ he said. Spectre’s Rest wasn’t high on his list of fun places in which to be trapped in the dark; he’d been planning to sleep with the light on and the door locked. He was left with a decision to make: stay where he was, or venture out of the room to find some company. He was very aware that he was both alone and unarmed.
He took a couple of steps in the direction of the door and stopped. In theory he would be safer if he didn’t leave his room, but that would also mean he was cornered. And from a paranoid point of view – a perspective that Trev was increasingly finding himself adopting – it meant that if anyone had staged the power cut to get at him, they’d know exactly where to find him.
There was no point blundering about in the dark in an unfamiliar building, though. He might fall head-first down a flight of stairs and save any assassin the bother of killing him. A light source was required.
Trev concentrated and shifted some of his store of psychic energy out of his core and into his left hand. He was still nowhere near fully recharged after his efforts the previous day, but he only needed a small amount for the job. His hand began to glow with a soft light. It was enough to see by, though it was a poor substitute for a torch. He opened the door as quietly as he could and stood just inside the room, listening.
The corridor was silent. Spectre’s Rest being an old building, Trev had expected to hear some little sounds here and there in the background. Instead there was nothing. It was the total silence of a soundproofed room, a deadness to the very air itself. Was it like this before, or only since the lights went out? Trev asked himself. He wasn’t sure. For the majority of the time since arriving at Spectre’s Rest he’d been in company, talking or moving about. It hadn’t occurred to him to just stand and listen for background noise. Why would it?
He stepped out of the room. To his left was a short length of corridor that ended in a wall with a window. Trev headed to the window, his footsteps thunderous in the unnatural quiet. He extinguished the light from his hand in order to preserve his night vision and stared out past the bars. The view was of the wide lawn at the front of the building. It had stopped raining and the clouds had blown through, allowing the moon to provide a little illumination. Trev leaned close to the glass, trying to see if there were any lights on at the gatehouse. He couldn’t see any. The power cut didn’t seem to be limited to just the main building.
Trev’s eye was drawn to the right, where a huge shadow ran along the length of the outer wall, reaching out to smother the fence behind it. Trev squinted at it, wondering why it had caught his attention. All he could see was blackness.
And then, at the edge of the shadow, something moved.
Trev ducked away from the window and put his back against the wall. ‘What the hell was that?’ he asked himself, pressing his trembling hands flat against the bricks. He hadn’t been able to see any detail of the shape in the shadows, but he was sure it wasn’t human. It had been low to the ground rather than upright, and Trev’s brain had interpreted what it had seen as some kind of large animal. He ran through a mental list of the creatures one might expect to see in the British countryside, but none of them fit the bill.
Mostly because none of them were noted for having glowing green eyes.
Trev made an effort to gather himself. If there was a large supernatural creature prowling around outside he needed to warn somebody. He groped his way back to his room and found the telephone. It was dead.
‘Perfect,’ he muttered. He was going to have to go and find a member of the prison staff. The only problem was that he didn’t know where they’d be, and even if he did he wouldn’t know how to get there. He left the room again and turned right this time, glancing back over his shoulder at the window. The corridor took him past another two rooms and ended at a T-junction. Trev was pretty sure Richie had indicated the right-hand fork as leading to the common room, and, as that seemed like a logical place to find people, he went that way.
Despite his attempts to walk stealthily, the strange silence seemed to amplify the sound of his footsteps. He was sure that anyone listening would be wondering why there was someone doing a tap-dance routine in the corridor. The dim light from his hand flickered as Trev struggled with his concentration. The shadows shifted on the walls as he walked past; Trev hoped it was his imagination, but it seemed that they were moving independently of the motion of the light. He kept his eyes ahead and hoped he’d run into someone soon. Panic wasn’t far away, and the memory of the thing outside was driving it.
He came to the common room at last. A second’s glance was enough to tell him it was deserted. He went inside anyway, just to get out of the corridor. The floor was carpeted, and it was a relief to be able to walk without the clatter of his shoes on concrete.
The room was quite large and was obviously well-used. There was a flatscreen TV mounted on one wall, with two worn sofas facing it. Against the opposite wall stood a pair of vending machines, one for snacks and one for drinks, and a water cooler. A table with six chairs was positioned nearby. The tabletop was scattered with newspapers, and Trev noticed a plastic cup of vending machine coffee among them. It was still warm. Someone had been there recently, but where had they gone? Trev was sure that nobody had gone past his room, so whoever had been in the common room must have headed in the other direction.
Trev decided
to follow and turned away from the table to go back to the corridor. He held up his illuminated hand and froze.
A thick strip of shadow was sliding up one of the walls. Trev swung around, looking for an explanation, but apart from him, nothing in the room was moving. The shadow continued its silent progress. Its edges rippled like liquid as it flowed upwards, forming a block of pure blackness some six feet high and two feet wide. It stopped at that height and began to blur and shift.
Trev found himself unable to move. He felt Bad Trev spasm in his chest and the light from his hand wavered. Across the room the shadow drew inwards, stuttering, writhing and condensing into a familiar shape.
It was a human figure.
It stood motionless, its head turned to the side so it was shown in profile. Trev’s illumination dimmed and threatened to die altogether as the creeping panic that had been sneaking up on him finally took control.
The shadow, moving jerkily, turned its head to face him and a pair of glowing green eyes flared into life in its face. Its arms swung up as if to reach out from the wall and grab him.
Trev’s last shred of concentration disappeared, and with it went the light.
Panicking in a darkened room is rarely a good idea. Trev bolted for the door but caught his foot on one of the chairs and sprawled, hitting his head on the table as he went down. The impact stunned him, and for a few seconds he did little except stir weakly on the floor. The panic was still in his brain, insisting that he should get out of the room before the thing got to him. His body refused to cooperate and he was forced to crawl to the door, half-dragging himself around the doorframe with his arms. At any second he was expecting to feel the cold touch of the shadow-figure on him. Blood ran down his face from his cut head, trickling into his left eye, making it sting.
Having made it into the corridor without being grabbed, the immediate wave of terror receded enough for Trev to try and illuminate his hand again. He struggled to his feet and leaned against the wall. Haltingly, the light returned.
The corridor was empty. Trev gasped down some ragged breaths and swiped at his bloodied eye with the back of his hand. He knew he was going to have to look into the common room. He didn’t want to, but he had to check if the figure was still there. He needed to know if he’d really seen what he thought he had.
Holding his left hand in front of him like a shield, he stepped into the doorway. The room was deserted and the only shadows were those of the furniture.
‘I saw it,’ Trev murmured to himself. ‘I saw it.’ He shook his head. He had to find the prison staff as soon as possible.
Still leaning on the wall for support, he set off down the corridor. The wound on his head throbbed and he moved with the careful tread of a drunken student approaching a taxi rank. He had no idea where he was going, though even if he’d memorised the prison’s layout beforehand he was too shaken up to remember it. He followed the corridor, making turns more-or-less at random. He saw no signs of life. Where was everybody?
He turned a corner and found the corridor blocked by a cage wall. He rattled the bars of the door but it was locked. Beyond it, set into the left-hand wall, was a bulky metal door with a massive lock. Stencilled above it were the words “CELL BLOCK A”. Past the door was another cage wall, and on the other side of that Trev could dimly see a flight of stairs which led upwards into darkness.
‘Great,’ he said. He had no choice but to retrace his steps and take a different route.
He put his back to the cage wall and tried to remember the turns he’d made to end up there. As he grappled with his misfiring memory, a column of shadow rose up the wall of the corridor to his right. Trev’s hand closed around one of the bars behind him, the panic returning in a rush. The shadow was only a few feet away. With the door behind him locked, he was going to have to go past it to escape.
Unlike the phenomenon he’d seen in the common room, this shadow didn’t stop moving at head height. It stretched up to the ceiling and then began to spread out, expanding in his direction like a bloodstain soaking into a piece of cloth. Its leading edge slowly writhed across the brickwork as if feeling its way along, and Trev thought he could see the vague shapes of hands and fingers. Looking down he saw that it was leaking onto the floor as well, silently oozing towards his feet. The wall beneath the shadow appeared to be somehow gone, leaving a gaping black void.
Trev felt a certainty that if the darkness touched him he would find himself drawn into that void. He slid to his left along the bars, trying not to imagine what might be waiting for him inside. As if to answer that question, a pair of pinpricks of green light appeared in the depths of the black. Eyes, Trev thought. They increased in size, as if approaching from a distance.
Trev struggled to retain enough of his composure that he could keep his hand illuminated. It dimmed but didn’t go out. Holding his breath he moved further left until his shoulder hit the wall. He kept quiet, despite the strong urge to whimper. The shadow was closing in on him but it seemed to be searching, groping for him rather than lunging directly at him. It’ll find you soon enough when those eyes get here, he thought, and shuddered.
He was terrified but the fear seemed somehow distant, as if his brain couldn’t handle so much of it and had put it to one side to deal with later. All that mattered was getting away. He shuffled forwards, knowing that he had to risk making more noise. Standing still would leave him cornered.
The shadow responded. It spread across the concrete, drawn by his footsteps. Abandoning any thoughts of stealth, Trev ran for the narrowing gap between the shadow and the left-hand wall.
He’d left it too late. The gap closed before he could reach it. He pushed off on his right foot, intending to jump over the shadow, but slipped and stumbled into the wall. His shoulder crunched into the brickwork and he fell. The shadow flowed towards him and he scrambled away on his hands and knees until he was up against the cage again.
In desperation he hauled on the bars. ‘Help! Anyone!’ he yelled, clanking the cage door as loudly as he could. He glanced behind him. The shadow was almost on him, and the corridor was filled with a sickly green glow from the swelling eyes that now stared out from the black depths. Trev jammed himself into the corner, trapped on a rapidly-diminishing section of floor as the darkness slid in to claim him.
Suddenly there were voices and footsteps behind him. Trev turned and a bright light blazed through the bars, turning the world white.
‘Jesus, who’s that?’ said a voice.
‘The bloke we’re looking for,’ said another. It sounded like Richie. The torch beam dropped away from Trev’s face, leaving dancing blotches of colour in front of his eyes. There was a clank as the far door was unlocked and then footsteps as the guards approached.
‘Quickly, help me!’ Trev shouted at them. ‘There are shadows!’
‘Are you all right, mate?’ Richie said. ‘You’re bleeding, what happened?’
‘There!’ Trev shouted at him, throwing out an arm to point. ‘There!’
The torch beam played along the corridor. Trev’s eyes followed it. The shadow and the eyes were gone.
‘Shadows,’ Trev repeated weakly. He slumped against the bars.
The second door creaked open and one of the guards stepped past him. ‘Nothing there,’ he said after a pause.
‘Can you stand?’ said Richie. Trev nodded. Richie took his arm and helped him upright. ‘There you go.’
‘What do you want to do?’ the second guard asked.
‘I’d better take him to the boss,’ Richie replied. ‘Are you all right to check on Corbyn?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Right. Help me get him up the stairs first.’
The two guards helped the traumatised Trev up two flights of stairs, through another cage door, and along a corridor. At the far end Trev could hear a buzz of voices and see light spilling out of a doorway.
‘I’ve got him from here,’ Richie said.
‘OK,’ said his companion. He gave Trev a pat on t
he shoulder and headed back the way they’d come.
Richie and Trev continued along the corridor. The source of the voices and lights was revealed to be a security control room. It had a sturdy metal door, which stood open, and inside were banks of CCTV monitors, weapons racks, and a broad table which had a plan of the prison spread out on it. Montano and Desai were both in the room, along with two guards Trev hadn’t seen before. The room was lit with battery-powered lamps.
‘Found him,’ Richie announced, leading Trev inside. ‘He’s had a knock to the head, but I think he’s all right. Mac’s gone down to check on Corbyn.’
‘Trev! What happened?’ said Desai, examining his bloodied face with concern.
‘Fell in the dark and banged my head,’ Trev said. ‘It probably looks worse than it is.’
‘Found him down by the Block A entrance,’ Richie said.
Montano had been speaking into a walkie-talkie, but now she joined in the conversation. ‘What were you doing there?’ she asked. ‘Any sensible person would’ve stayed where they were and waited for help.’
‘I saw something,’ Trev said. ‘Wanted to come and warn you.’
‘What did you see?’ Montano said.
‘Outside,’ Trev replied. ‘A big creature. By the wall. Black. Glowing green eyes.’
The room’s occupants exchanged looks. ‘Was this before or after you banged your head?’ Desai asked.
‘Before,’ Trev said, annoyed.
Montano shook her head and turned away. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. She picked up her walkie-talkie. ‘Liz, what’s going on? Why haven’t we got power yet?’
‘Nearly there,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘Frank’s having to reset the system.’
‘Quick as you can,’ said Montano.
She opened her mouth to say something to Trev but was interrupted by her walkie-talkie.
