by Rob Parker
‘Are we connected to the sewers somehow?’ mused Grace, pulling Dewey close, after he’d been nuzzling something on the floor. ‘Dew,’ she commanded.
Dewey pulled forward again, and Grace admonished him softly. ‘Come on Dew, there’s a good boy.’ She absent-mindedly looked at what the dog had been trying to get and saw an object on the floor—and held her breath. Glancing around, she saw similar such items all over the place, which they had clearly overlooked in the poor light.
‘Watch your step,’ she said.
‘Why?’ asked Christian, as he walked past the nearest bed towards a door that was recessed into the back wall.
‘Because there’s human waste everywhere.’
‘I’m afraid a little shit isn’t going to stop me from finding my daughter,’ Christian said, as he threw open the door. The handle came loose in his hand, causing the door to swung inexorably into the wall, where it impacted with a loud metallic bang.
They stood still with sudden terror, as the sound chased down the other tunnels, off into the belly of the underground system.
‘Bollocks,’ he whispered, looking back at the other two apologetically.
They waited a moment, until the echo of the impact had fully disappeared, then Grace started investigating the space, paying no heed to her own earlier warning to watch her step. ‘What’s a bit of shit between neighbours,’ she murmured.
The place was a disgrace. If this really was their home, these people lived a life of filth and squalor.
People. The word didn’t work for Grace. People didn’t crap all over the floor, and sleep on old hospital gurneys in derelict tunnels. The word people inspired civility, thought, craft and cooperation—all notions far removed from what these things had done to her and her neighbours this awful day.
She counted the beds. She knew there were two at least, of that she was certain. But there were five beds—although they were so filthy, she wasn’t sure when they’d been last slept in. Could have been last night. Could have been years ago.
‘Oh my God,’ shouted Christian. Grace looked up. She didn’t like the tremor in his voice, the give in his words. He was stood in the doorway, shining a torch inside, the room beyond a black mystery.
‘What is it?’ Grace whispered. ‘What have you…’
Her words trailed off, because as she listened to her own words echo around the space, she noticed another sound joining in.
Footsteps. A lot of them.
Drawing near.
56
As soon as David eased the car into Broadoak, he knew something wasn’t right. Humans, modern humans at least, react with immediate disquiet when presented with darkness. It’s a stark reminder that, no matter how much brain power has put the species at the top of the tree, if you strip that away, there’s always something bigger and stronger out there with teeth and claws that would happily rip you to pieces. And darkness gives those things cover. It levels the playing field.
David wasn’t ever one for flights of imagination, and the rational part of his brain had been stubborn in its acceptance of events in the last few days. An explanation was there, he just needed to find it, see it, feel it. And he had been convinced that moment was coming.
Until he drove into the pitch-black cul-de-sac of Broadoak.
Every house was dead, the only hint of artificial light coming from the ever-so-soft orange smear in the sky beyond, where the motorway lights glowed heavenwards. He saw his husband’s car, parked oddly at the end, right in the middle of everybody else’s turning circle. He found that most strange of all.
He pulled up outside their own house, killed the engine and got out.
The night had held a stillness akin to anaesthesia.
His paternal instincts fired, and his mind catapulted to Olivia. He jogged to the parked car. Where were she and Christian, if they’d parked here?
The vehicle was empty and unlocked. Olivia’s empty car seat yawned balefully at him through the passenger window. A pang of fear, hot and white, threatened to puncture his shield of rationality—although he still clung to it for now.
The car had been left immediately between the two biggest houses, with the Adams house to the left and the Wests on the right. He looked at each in turn. Black and vacant, the pair of them.
Proactivity was always David’s default action, so he marched straight up the Wests’ drive. The moonlight was weighty enough to let him see where he was going, and he could even make out some damage to the hedging by the front door. Even though it was somewhat trivial, and could have been caused by any number of things, it was another little tick to add to the column of overall strangeness.
He pressed the door bell and immediately cursed his stupidity. The completeness of the darkness could only be attributed to a power cut—which meant no fancy electronic door chimes. So he banged three times on the door with a clenched fist.
He waited.
Nothing.
So deep was the silence, it felt futile to knock again, so he crossed the cul-de-sac to the Adams’, his steps scuffing soil that had been left on the path. He felt like he’d driven back onto an alternate plane, as if the Blackstoke gates themselves had acted as a portal and offered him carriage to a different reality—one of a whistling breeze through woodland canopies and the vacuum of abandonment.
He knocked on the front door to the MP’s house, but again, was met with silence. He didn’t even bother listening, and turned back to the street. Examining every house in turn, he saw that each front door was shut and all windows were darkened. It was a ghost town, but as he took the first step back down the path, something caught the corner of his eye, bright, and whirling, like a firefly. He turned back immediately, trying to catch sight of it, but it had already moved off.
No. There again.
Either side of the front door was a frosted glass panel, and, beyond the right-hand pane, a pin-sharp light danced a tight jig. He banged on the door immediately, this time much more forcefully.
‘Hello? Is anyone in there? It’s David Lyons here, from across the road?’
There was silence for a moment, before a muffled voice replied from within. ‘David Lyons?’ The voice was adolescent. ‘Prove it.’
‘Prove it?’
‘Prove you’re David Lyons.’
The youth in the voice made it hard for David to take the request seriously. ‘I don’t have time for games, young man. I want to know what’s going on.’
‘Prove it.’
David sighed with exasperation, and pulled his wallet out. He posted his driving licence through the letterbox. ‘Happy?’
‘Are you alone?’ came the voice again.
‘Yes, it’s just me.’
The door was unlocked, thick deadbolts retracted, and swung open just enough to let David see inside. The West boy was standing there holding a small tea light candle, flanked by the Adams twins, one on either side. They were holding tennis rackets and kitchen knives, and in the dim candlelight, David could see, piled on the stairs behind them, was all sorts of sporting goods like ski poles, golf clubs, cricket bats and so on. It was a sport store armoury.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ asked David, as the door was bolted behind him.
57
A whoop joined the pounding of feet, and the feral, animal sound had Peter raising the cricket bat over his head without a second thought. Suddenly four of those hairless monsters emerged from the right-hand tunnel, howling and bellowing in a baseless rage.
They all paused in unison at the threshold of the room, taking in the intruders one by one. To see them, the size of them, all of them taller than Christian who himself was the tallest, set off a firework of dread in Peter’s gut. Their eyes flickered from one to the other with cold reptilian malice—when another metallic impact sound jarred the room. It sounded like the last one, and all turned to look to the door that had caused the initial noise—but it was now shut.
Christian had shut himself in that room, away from the b
easts that had come to kill them.
Peter couldn’t believe it—the bastard—but didn’t have time to think, because they were coming for him. The four were stepping into the room, and fanning out, murder and blackness in their eyes.
It was as they began to run in unison when a disjointed fragment of Peter’s mind realised why their pupils were so dark and expansive. They were the direct result of a life in darkness, their bodies having adapted to their lot in life to make at least sight a fraction easier.
No time to dwell. Peter wanted to run, and he took two steps back, fully uncaring of what he might be stepping in now. Behind him was the stairway, the steps to nowhere, but at least it would give him the height advantage—so he went backwards, never turning from the oncoming group.
Grace was rounding the other side of the tunnel, with Dewey—but the dog was yelping and pulling to go to Peter. He could see her idea though. Double back around them. It was still strange however that not one of them had gone for her. Was it the dog? Were they really that scared of it?
He started swinging the cricket bat as he reversed up the first three steps, and as the four reached the bottom of the stairwell, they slowed. This was the first time he’d got a good look at them—a stomach-churning group of feral animals that somehow possessed human form. Where had they come from? What was their story?
The biggest one, the one who had held Fletcher down in his kitchen earlier, had taken a step up, the first to make a move, and he walked coiled like a panther, strike-ready. Peter jabbed with the bat, but the giant merely bobbed backwards to avoid it. The smallest one stepped up, a growl escaping his lips. Peter ran up the stairs as high as he could go before the ceiling closed in, and the steps finished at the horizontal door in the roof.
He turned, and tried to push it. It was no good—he couldn’t even twist the handle, it was that rusted. He tried to push the whole door from its frame, in the hope that the locking mechanism was so decayed it would crack under stress, but it wouldn’t budge. He merely turned and banged the door in anger. It was him versus the hoard.
‘Come on then, you bastards,’ he shouted, as he saw Grace at the mouth of the tunnel they had come from. She was looking down it into the darkness, then back to Peter up by the roof, all as the four took step after careful step up the stairs to him. ‘Go, go!’ he shouted to her.
He swung twice, back and to, and connected with the little one, who jumped back a few steps, yelping angrily, clutching its forearm. It gave the big one the chance to grab the bat, which he did with one massive hand, like a normal fist might grip a rolled-up newspaper. He yanked it, but Peter held firm—yet, in doing so, it held Peter in place. The other two saw the chance and moved in. Peter looked at Grace one last time. ‘Just go!’ he shouted, a tired, sad resignation creeping into his voice.
Grace looked at him, their eyes locking, and she released Dewey’s lead—before shaking her head once and sprinting into the blackness of the tunnel.
The dog snarled, darted across the room, and took the stairs in giant bounds, three steps at a time. He was on the men within seconds, and again, all of them span and looked at the wolfhound in pure terror.
It gave Peter the chance to swing the bat as hard as he could at the nearest one’s turned head. It was the one covered in blood—Fletcher’s blood. He felt his wrists jolt painfully with the weight of impact, and out rang the wet crack of splitting bone.
While the other three addressed Dewey, who was on them remorselessly, pulling and tearing at them, matching them animal for animal, the blood soaked one turned and looked at Peter with something close to confusion. A pure incomprehension at the gall of Peter for even thinking of swinging the cricket bat his way. Its skull was crooked, as if the two halves of the head were being viewed at different frame rates.
Abruptly, the head fell, lolling back while still attached to the neck and the weight shift caused the rest of the body to fall back too—right over the bannister. It fell the thirty feet to the ground, landing with a dull impact somewhere below. One of the others, the smallest, saw what had happened and unleashed a furious howl, agitated, pointing and hopping like a gibbon, all the while trying to avoid the thrashing jaws of Dewey, who simply would not stop.
He was pointing and chirping at the empty space on the stairs where their colleague had been. The big one, suddenly back in the game, stepped forward and grabbed Dewey by the chest and pushed him as far as he could—which was only a few steps back down. This didn’t get Dewey off their case, but did give the giant a second to look where the little one was pointing.
The giant’s eyes swung immediately to Peter, and he threw his head back to charge—when Dewey jumped on the monster’s back, biting at his thick neck.
‘Good boy, Dewey!’ Peter shouted, as the remaining two went for him, grasping and clawing him to the ground with rough hands, and sharp, claw-like nails. Peter screamed for Grace, for Dewey, even for that coward Christian, then eventually settled on God. His hand was outstretched, fingers reaching white-knuckled to the ceiling, the last remaining part of him free, expecting something awful and deep to suddenly strike and end it—when the ceiling opened, and a shaft of light rained through the gap.
58
Christian felt awful for closing the door on his neighbours, but felt, considering what he’d found in the room off that awful central living area, that there was no choice. The children came first.
When he’d first opened the door, he was awash with the purest joy when he saw an infant on the floor, in a makeshift pen made of over turned trolleys. Olivia. He hadn’t had time to fully appreciate his relief, when he saw a second infant had turned to look at his wandering torchlight.
Two children. In this awful subterranean… crèche?
And when his eyes adjusted to the torchlight, and he saw that this other child was far removed from his, that there was something fundamentally wrong with what he was seeing, he couldn’t help himself from saying: ‘Oh my God.’
Then the madness had started on the other side of the door and like any parent, he put a barrier between his child and harm’s way. Once it was shut, he searched for a catch or lock by torch light, but found nothing, so he readied himself by the door, prepared to defend the children to the last—his child and the poor wretched thing in there with her. But the door didn’t open. He heard voices, clattering, shouting, barking, but it was as if he’d been forgotten.
So he went to Olivia, and picked her up. She appeared unhurt, merely dirty, and recognised him instantly. She grasped for him, her cheeks making way for a huge grin. He held her to his chest and gasped a couple of sobs into her curls. The other child, in the pen, looked up at them both, bemused.
Christian couldn’t bear the confusion on the other child’s face. There was a lack of comprehension, but also a connection to what he or she was seeing. As if the child knew that was the normal way of things. To be comforted. To be nurtured.
‘Hello,’ Christian whispered, in as calming a tone as he could. As disturbing the child was, with its near-black eyes, pale hairless skull, it was still a child.
The child watched for a moment, as Olivia pawed at her father’s face, then crawled to the far end of the enclosure. When it reached the barrier, it sat, and reached upwards with one arm, fingers stretched. With the torch beam, Christian followed where the child was reaching, and was almost prompted into heart attack when the circle of light crept up a figure standing at the back of the pen. He saw the face of a man, and another hairless head, before a scream caught in his throat, the terror too fierce to even permit sound.
The man hissed, revealing a disgraceful chasm of brown teeth and black gums. Christian turned for the door, clutching Olivia as tight as he dared, but stopped. The sounds outside were cacophonous, as if a battle was raging. What would happen to them both if he took Olivia out there and they saw them? The image of Fletcher Adam’s body being hacked to ribbons by a meat cleaver crashed into his mind.
There was only one in here, and in pur
e numbers terms, one versus one was better odds.
With the torch in one hand, and his daughter cradled with his other arm, he shakily turned back to face the man.
Something about him provoked less fear than the others. The way he was stood. He wasn’t coiled and predatory like the others, and the hiss was a bit… half-hearted. It made Christian feel as if he could reason with him.
‘Hello,’ he said, bringing the torch light up a touch, but not so high that it was pointed at the man. He kept it aimed towards the ground, taking the glare out of the beam. A grunt came back. It didn’t immediately fill Christian with threat. It actually made him think they might get out of the room alive.
He turned slightly back to the door to listen, but, while it was quieter than it had been, he still didn’t feel he could go out there.
‘I no take child.’
Christian froze, half thinking it was he who said it, but unable to remember speaking. But the sound, the scratchiness of it, was nothing to do with him. The voice from the back of the room sounded like it was trying the words out. Like it was a forgotten skill, the communication equivalent of riding a bike after years without doing it.
He looked at the man, offering torchlight for them both once more. He was looking at Christian, who in turn was confident enough to regard the man properly. His eyes weren’t nearly as dark and passionless as the others, his head wasn’t completely devoid of hair, relegated to a few greased strands like oiled threads across his head. He wore a sweatsuit like the others, but there was something different about him. One of the sleeves was rolled up to the elbow. That was it. It imparted an air of personality, of character. Of human choice, and in turn, a hint of civility. The man held himself carefully. He was older—much older than the others. His pale skin curled into wrinkles and crow’s feet at the corners.
‘Child. I no take,’ he said again, like a broken gear box come to life.
