by Nick Moseley
The area around Block D, when they reached it, had even more of a neglected air than the rest of the prison. It was at the rear of the central section of the building, and was separated from Block B by a large enclosed courtyard that Trev guessed had once been where the prisoners took exercise. Outside, the rain had set in again and it spattered against the windows in heavy drops.
Richie was armed with a huge bunch of keys. He sorted through them and somehow found the one he wanted, which unlocked a small storeroom. He wordlessly handed Trev a penlight torch and ambled into the room, flicking his own torch left and right in a rather desultory fashion. A quick look was enough to show Trev why Richie didn’t seem bothered; the room had clearly been searched before, with marks on the floor and disturbed dust patches showing where the cardboard boxes, crates and other odds and ends had been moved about.
‘How many times has this area been searched already?’ Trev asked.
‘This is the third time,’ Richie said. He finished his inspection and walked out.
‘I don’t know what I like best about this place,’ Trev muttered to himself. ‘Is it the ambience, or the scintillating conversation?’
The process was repeated in the next four rooms. Each had been searched previously, and Trev didn’t think that any of them would be much use as a hiding place. They were all too small and too cluttered, and all of them had only one door. Richie’s apathy was understandable.
‘Right,’ the guard said, locking the door of the fourth storeroom, ‘we’ll do the cell block itself next, and then the last few offices.’ He hiked up his trousers. ‘But first, I need to go to the bog.’
The next door along the corridor was a tiny, cupboard-sized toilet. Richie opened the door and began to squeeze himself inside.
‘Weren’t we supposed to stick together?’ Trev said, nervous about being left in the corridor alone.
‘You’re welcome to come in with me and wait, but I wouldn’t recommend it,’ Richie replied. ‘Just stay outside. I won’t be long.’
He clunked the door shut and locked it. Trev wandered a short way down the corridor and leaned against the wall. After a few seconds the distressing sounds emanating from the toilet cubicle made him move a long way down the corridor instead.
Safely out of earshot, he yawned and rubbed at his eyes. It was late afternoon and his lack of sleep the previous night had caught up with him. How much longer can this go on? he thought. I’m supposed to be back at work on Monday. I can’t call the boss and tell her I won’t be coming in because I’m trapped in a prison for supernatural criminals. There’s a very real chance she might not believe me.
He rolled his head, trying to stretch some of the lingering stiffness out of his neck. As he turned his head to the left, he thought he saw a flicker of movement at the end of the corridor.
A jolt of adrenaline immediately banished the sleepiness from his brain. ‘What was that?’ he whispered.
He’d only seen it for a second, and with his head on its side, but he was pretty sure something had gone past the T-junction.
A person? He didn’t think so. It hadn’t seemed big enough. He stood for a moment, staring at the end of the corridor. The movement didn’t recur. Trev’s brain whirred with thoughts, sorting through possible explanations. If it wasn’t a person, what was it?
He considered knocking on the toilet door and telling Richie that he thought he’d just seen something, but that would have meant exposing himself to both possible ridicule and, perhaps worse, those upsetting sound effects again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to risk either outcome.
The flicker had been moving in the direction of Cell Block D. Trev crept as silently as he could to the end of the corridor and peered around the corner. There was no sign of movement, but the cell block door stood open. A dim light seeped out from within.
Trev knew that he ought to go back and get Richie, yet somehow he found himself edging towards the open door. He couldn’t explain it. He was scared, but the desire to know whether he’d really seen something seemed to have short-circuited his common sense. Bad Trev throbbed in his chest, apparently urging him on.
Treading lightly, fists clenched, he reached the cell block door and stepped inside.
Sixteen
Cell Block D looked much like Cell Block A, although Trev would have guessed that it was smaller and older. The rows of cell doors stood closed, shrouded in patches of darkness that the dim lighting didn’t penetrate. Only a handful of the block’s fluorescent lights were on. Enough to pick a path by – just – but leaving large areas in semi-darkness.
Trev observed all this from just inside the door. He shone his torch around but the feeble beam didn’t reach far. A small part of him was curious to have a look around the abandoned cell block, but it was being shouted down by the common sense part of him, which was quite insistent that he should turn around and go back.
Bad Trev was bouncing around, responding to some stimulus that Trev couldn’t identify.
Possibly it was Bad Trev’s influence that made him step forward, deeper into the cell block. His curiosity, despite being small and outnumbered, was apparently strong enough to override the noisier emotions that were trying to block it off. This was confusing. Trev had always operated under the assumption that “curiosity killed the estate agent” and as such had tried to avoid poking his nose into places it didn’t belong. Curiosity for its own sake was an alien concept to him. So what was he doing?
Richie’ll be along in a minute, he thought to himself. No doubt the guard would be annoyed with him for wandering off, but he wasn’t supposed to have abandoned Trev to go to the loo either.
He inspected a couple of the ground-floor cells. They’d been stripped bare and looked even less inviting than the furnished ones in Block A, something Trev hadn’t thought possible. His breath steamed in the torch-light.
‘All right, time to go,’ he murmured. Instead he walked a little further, his head tracking left and right. He didn’t see or hear anything unusual; Block D remained dark and silent, Trev’s soft footsteps the only sound. He eyed the pools of shadow, looking for movement. There wasn’t any. Just brick walls, cell doors, and blackness. The metal walkways loomed above him, a mass of flaking paint and rust.
To his right there was a gap in the line of cells to allow space for the prisoners’ dining area. The tables and seating were still there, bolted to the floor. Three dirty roller-shutters concealed the serving-hatches, spotlighted by a single flickering fluorescent tube. Trev passed by, staring into the gloom. Still nothing moved.
He shivered, mostly due to the cold. It was a large, unheated space, and Trev wondered what it must have been like to be a prisoner during the severe nineteenth-century winters. The answer he came to was “not much fun at all”, even for werewolves, who had access to their own fur coats.
Without ever intending to, he’d reached the far end of the cell block. There was another of the big metal doors there. It was closed. Trev put out a hand and attempted to open it. It was either locked or rusted shut; he wasn’t sure which, but the end result was the same. He wasn’t going to get through unless he went back for Richie and his big bunch of keys.
Trev felt his curiosity dwindle away, replaced with unease. He was suddenly aware of two things. Firstly, that Richie really ought to have come looking for him by now. And secondly, if there had been someone or something lurking in the cell block it couldn’t have left through the locked door and therefore had to be behind him somewhere.
Trev swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. His brain, on a roll, pointed something else out: he was as far from the only exit as he possibly could be. There wasn’t any way to put a positive spin on that, even for a salesman of Trev’s ability. He took a firmer grip on his little torch and slowly turned around.
The creature he’d seen outside the previous night was sitting just inside the entrance, its glowing green eyes locked onto Trev’s.
A sound escaped from Trev’s throat. It was the kind of sq
ueak that even the most cowardly mouse might have written off as being rather pathetic. The creature’s head cocked a fraction to one side, as if asking what the hell was that?
Having found it impossible to stop moving just a few seconds before, Trev now found it impossible to start. It felt as if there was a kind of fragile balance between him and the thing staring back at him. Trev feared that any slight move on his part might provoke the creature into action, and he was pretty sure that he didn’t want that. So he just stood there, in the vague hope that he could bore it into submission.
The intensity of the thing’s gaze was enough to suggest that it wasn’t going anywhere just yet, so Trev took the opportunity to study it. As he’d thought after his first glimpse of it through the window, the creature was shaped like a large animal, perhaps a wolf. It was composed of pure blackness, yet there was something about it that allowed Trev to pick out the lines of its body. The eyes were small, and the soft green light emanating from them didn’t reflect on the walls or floor.
His first thought was that it was a type of Shade. Shades were a variety of spirit that sought out and inflamed human emotions, on which they then fed until they burned themselves out. They were dangerous, but essentially mindless. They functioned on instinct alone and once they had broken through into the mortal plane they would pounce on the nearest person without hesitation. They wouldn’t sit and eyeball a potential victim, like this creature was currently doing. Trev was glad he hadn’t been attacked, but the thing’s calm demeanour indicated an intelligence behind the glowing eyes, which wasn’t reassuring.
Trev examined his options. The creature was blocking his exit, but he wondered if he could lure it into the dining area, where all the tables and benches would make useful obstacles and might enable him to get past.
Might.
Keeping his upper body still, Trev eased his left foot slowly forwards. The creature showed no reaction. Emboldened by this success, Trev shifted his weight and tried to repeat the trick with his right foot. It went well, at least up to the point where he put his foot onto a piece of grit which went crunch as he stood on it.
The wolf-thing sprang to its feet. Trev froze again, but he knew that the spell was broken. He held his nerve for approximately two seconds, then ran for the dining area. The creature shot after him, the light from its eyes streaking out behind it. Its feet made no sound on the concrete and it moved as a blur of blackness, slipping in and out of the shadows as it closed the distance to the dining area.
Trev knew that if he had just his own athletic ability to rely on, his plan would have had a potential success rate of less than zero. Even if he could get around the creature, it would be sure to catch him before he could reach the door. The good news was that he could use some of his store of psychic energy to give himself a burst of speed. The bad news was that he wasn’t at all sure whether that would be enough to out-run his pursuer. Which was an unfortunate thing to realise once he’d already committed himself.
He put his head down and made it to the dining area a second or two before the wolf-thing did. He stopped at the end of a row of tables, his chest heaving. The creature stopped at the opposite end of the row and put its head on one side. So what now? the gesture said, leaving Trev in no doubt that he was dealing with something far more than a mindless beast.
The tables and benches were arranged in a rectangular block. Trev edged along one side, working his way into a position where he had a clear route to the exit. The creature mirrored him. It kept exactly opposite Trev, its eyes never leaving him. Its movement seemed somehow mocking, as if it were fully aware of Trev’s plan and was treating the whole thing as a game.
Trev eyed the door. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been a brief stroll to reach it, but with the complicating factors – most notably a large supernatural predator – taken into account, it was miles away. He was going to need as long a head start as he could get, and that meant he would need to trade places with the wolf-thing so that he was at the side of the dining area nearest the door. Easier said than done. If the creature was as clever as he thought it was, it would surely guess what he was up to.
He sidled back the other way, moving towards the serving hatches. Again the wolf-thing tracked him along its own side. Trev reached the last table in the row and stopped. Once again the green-eyed head opposite him cocked to one side in a questioning pose.
‘Well we can’t just keep going backwards and forwards all night,’ Trev muttered. The creature apparently agreed, because as soon as Trev turned to go back the other way it launched itself at him down one of the aisles.
Without his vapour weapons, the Trev of old would have been left with just the reflexes and fighting skill of the average estate agent, which didn’t amount to much. However he’d dodged the reaper’s scythe more times in the last few months than most people did in their entire lives, and as such his self-preservation instincts had undergone a bit of weight-training.
He was terrified, of course. But he didn’t freeze. Nor did he turn his back on the creature and give it an easy target. As the thing closed on him in a cloud of green eyes and gaping jaws, he dodged towards it, driving energy into his legs and jumping up onto the table to his right. The metal surface bowed under his weight but held, and he used the flexion to bounce onto the next table over.
The wolf-thing, which had evidently been expecting him to turn and run and give it an easy straight-line chase, struggled to cope with the sudden change of direction. It snapped at Trev’s foot as he made his first leap, but it was a half-hearted effort that missed by some distance. Trev’s second jump put him out of range, and the creature’s paws scrabbled silently on the floor as it tried to arrest its momentum and turn back.
Trev bounded across the tabletops. He was now committed to making a run for the door. The tables groaned underneath his feet. He didn’t risk looking back at his pursuer, on the grounds that it would both slow him down and depress him, and he already knew that any lead he’d given himself was going to be pretty slender. He prepared to get a good push off the last table, in order to give himself the best possible start in his sprint for the door. He landed on it hard.
It made a cracking sound and shifted under his weight. Trev was thrown off balance. Instead of a dramatic leap from the table he barely managed a controlled fall, stumbling and dropping to one knee. He was back up and running almost straight away, but the slip had cost him the lead he’d built up and he knew that he had no chance of reaching the door ahead of the wolf-thing.
Panic rose up and threatened to strangle his brain. Enough rationality remained, however, to tell him to angle his run towards the stairs leading to the second level. He didn’t need to look back to feel the creature closing in on him. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up so rigidly he almost expected it to pull him into the air.
As he reached the foot of the stairs his left arm pistoned out and he grabbed the handrail. Using his hand as a pivot point, he swung himself through a hundred and eighty degrees and onto the stairs. The metal groaned, as did his left shoulder, but he was just able to stay on his feet and kept running, heading up the stairs with his energy-charged legs pumping.
The wolf-thing was once again caught out by Trev’s sudden change of direction. Unbeknownst to him, the creature had leapt at his back just as he swung into his turn. It sailed past him at shoulder height, landed, skidded, and reversed direction to follow him up the stairs. Its eyes glowed fiercely with annoyance.
Trev pounded along the walkway. It rattled and shuddered beneath him, sending flakes of rust and paint drifting down to the floor below. Metal cell doors flashed by to his right, oblongs of darkness in the half-light. He approached the stairs to the second level, which doubled back in the opposite direction. He threw out his right arm and performed his quick turn manoeuvre again, this time stumbling on the second step. Through the gaps in the metal staircase he saw the wolf-thing charging along the walkway towards him, and the sight was enough to dri
ve him up the stairs two at a time.
Both his store of energy and his physical endurance were reaching their limits as he burst up onto the second level walkway. He knew that there was now nowhere left to run, but while there was space in front of him he was determined to keep going. He flew down the walkway to the far wall of the cell block, turned ninety degrees to follow it, and then turned again to head back towards the exit, albeit two floors too far up. He saw the end of the walkway ahead of him and slowed, eventually coming to a panting halt with his hands on the top of the rail.
He looked down into the darkness before turning to face his pursuer. The wolf-thing rounded the last corner and dropped into a trot, taking its time now that Trev had reached the end of the line. Trev threw his torch at it and missed. The little plastic tube clattered off the walkway and disappeared over the edge. A faint cracking sound documented its introduction to the concrete floor of the cell block a second later.
Trev climbed onto the top of the handrail, steadying himself with one hand against the wall. The wolf-thing stopped a few feet away. Its head turned to one side in its familiar inquisitive gesture.
‘I’ll jump,’ said Trev. Considering the creature was trying to kill him anyway, it wasn’t much of a threat. The wolf-thing lowered its head and began to stalk towards him.
‘Right,’ said Trev.
He jumped.
Seventeen
Trev fell through the darkness, arms and legs flapping. The first-floor walkway flashed past in a blur, and then he landed in the huge net slung between it and the opposite walkway. The net creaked under his weight, but held. He was very glad that Block D was outfitted in the same way as Block A; if the net hadn’t been there, his escape plan would have had a rather significant flaw. Or perhaps more importantly, a rather significant floor.
