by Rob Parker
It was such a strange time for it to happen, but she suddenly felt free. Suddenly felt emboldened and powerful. Whether it was the knowledge of her husband’s death or an out of body experience prompted by acute fear, but she felt in control.
It was her own life now, and her own life to save.
And, as the stink of Runt became too much to bear without retching, she realised what that chair over there was. She looked at the lightbulb shards on the floor, plan forming.
‘Alright,’ she said calmly, with her hands up in front of her. ‘You win.’ As she spoke, she moved. ‘I know what you want. And you’re the little one, aren’t you? You never get what you want.’
Runt looked at her with abject shock, like he’d never known civility, conversation. He’d certainly never experienced the hand on his cheek, which Joyce carefully placed there, trying so hard to mask the tremor of revulsion coursing through her arm.
‘Come with me,’ she said, her hand still on his cratered face, still moving across the room.
After all this time, she felt powerful. Her husband, that sad streak of piss lying there, had robbed her of agency, of power, of autonomy in a steady coup which had gone on for years. Everything she was, had been eroded by him. But he wasn’t here anymore. And the chains were off.
‘That’s it. This will be more comfortable for us both,’ she said, as she lay back in the chair.
The chair had restraints, but she paid no heed to them, and with as much confidence as she could, she spread her legs and pulled runt slowly between. He was shaking almost as much as her now. Eyes darting, his brow furrowed with incomprehension. Placing a hand on the back of his neck, she pulled him down to her.
‘That’s okay, I’m grateful you chose me.’
Runt was firmly under her spell, his eyes so wide and close that she could see that the irises weren’t black, but the deepest purple.
And as she held him tight with clamped thighs, trying not to scream through fear and horror, she reached up and grabbed the pronged halo above her head—before bringing it down, jamming it onto Runt’s head as hard as she could. She kicked him off and he fell back.
The halo was still stuck there because one of the prongs was stuck in his eyeball, she’d jammed it that fiercely. Kicking him clear, she dove off the chair, and hit the switch on the wall next to it. The big red one. Hard to miss.
Sparks exploded from Runt’s head, and he screamed as his entire head fizzed and sizzled. The chair, she’d noticed, was an old electro-shock therapy unit. Zapping people back to full mental health.
Runt’s knees buckled slightly as she found the dial, the halo still stuck in his eye, blood and smoke now rupturing from every orifice, as he clawed to get if off.
This free and all-new Joyce twisted the dial on the unit, sending raw voltage down the halo prong through Runt’s eye socket and into his skull, cooking his brain.
Runt fell to his knees, his arms dropped to his side, his head fell forward, smoke ballooning from his pate, and finally, he dropped onto his face.
69
He heard the scuffling, as if it was being transmitted to him via megaphone, the ramped tunnel offering perfect conduction of the sounds, as Peter’s wife and daughter battled with that bastard he’d sprinted after. He’d left the main chamber and moments later it seemed to have been filled with an impact of some kind he just couldn’t place. He just had no idea at all what could have done that, but he couldn’t stop. He felt bad leaving his neighbours to it—these friends that had been through so much with him—but his family’s lives were in the balance.
As he ran up the corridor, and the incline reminded him just how tired he was, just how fraught and exhausting the night had been, he heard a loud whirring sound. Down at the bottom, in the distance, a rectangle of light emerged and started to get taller. And he could soon make out figures brawling in the light. One of them, the one on the floor was his wife. She had her arms around the man’s waist, and was stopping him from getting to Alice, who sprinted out of the door.
Peter’s legs pumped as he tried to convince them to go even faster, but it was no use, as the man unleashed a torrent of blows to his wife’s head, his beautiful wife Pam, and she fell. The monster reared up, pulled his knee high, bracing to stamp on Pam’s face as she lay there, when Peter screamed, ‘No!’
The man turned and saw him, and, after a moment’s indecision, ran after Alice, out of the door and into the dawn light.
He went to his wife’s side, and put a hand on her shoulder, unsure of whether to touch her. She was clearly in a bad way. To what extent, he didn’t know, and wouldn’t risk it.
‘Sweetheart,’ was all he could say, all the words he should have said so any times jamming his throat tight.
‘Alice. Save Alice,’ she croaked.
The parental bond between them was so strong, their roles so starkly etched on their hearts, that Peter knew she was right. He kissed her lightly on the lips, whispered, ‘I’ll come back for you,’ and ran.
Suddenly outside, wrapped in cool, fresh, clean air, he felt partly reinvigorated. He had no idea where he was, but he was surrounded by trees at the mouth of a tunnel entrance that merely pulled up and out of the ground, emerging like a vast, open-mouthed, brick earthworm. He shouted his daughter’s name into the trees. ‘Alice!’
‘Dad!’ came the near immediate response.
Not far away. Close enough to get a fix on a direction.
‘I’m coming!’ he shouted, as he took off in a sprint.
Grace didn’t ever think she’d forget the terror she felt when the car started to tumble, then spin like one of her little brother’s toys, discarded and tossed down the stairs at their childhood home. The bottom front bumper took the Giant’s head clean off, punting it deep into the room, but she didn’t have any time for relief when the vehicle didn’t stop. Sideways, like a twirling arrow, it flew down the stairs at them. Grace dove off the stairway, over the bannister, feeling the heat of the flying vehicle on her back as she fell, and landed hard on the filthy floor.
The scream of twisting metal split the air of the chamber, as a deafening impact shook the room, and even the tunnel system itself, to its foundations. She hoped, prayed, pleaded, that everyone that mattered to her had got out of the way. Dewey and Christian.
When she came to survey the wreckage, she saw immediately that one had survived, and one hadn’t.
Christian was pinned bloodily to the wall, which in itself had caved in, leaving him held in place by a bent fender and dislodged bricks. Further along, the body of his husband, David, lay in a disjointed jumble, evidently thrown through the windshield. She hadn’t even seen him. He wasn’t moving.
And under the car, the back wheel resting on his belly, was the security guard who had so abruptly appeared. He too, was still.
The other man who had appeared, the one who looked so much like the brothers but didn’t at the same time, was nowhere to be seen.
And over the bonnet, hopping right as rain with a click of claws, came Dewey.
‘Oh Dew,’ said Grace, the words falling out of her with such relief—although a good measure of grief came along for the ride.
She had no idea what injuries had befallen the men, aside from the obvious—but the fact that none were moving or conscious told her all she needed to know.
‘I think it’s time we got some help, Dew,’ she said, as the giant dog lapped at her face, and she looked up at the stairway to freedom. There, at the top, was a soft blue square of promise—but any sense of elation was dashed when she saw that the top portion of the stairway had completely given way under the weight of the tumbling vehicle.
She was still stuck in the tunnels, and her only way out was to embrace them again. It was bright now however, the power back in full force, and they wouldn’t hold the same fear. This time would be different. She just hoped she wouldn’t run into Cue Ball and Runt.
She got up to go, when her eyes were drawn to the door that Christian was protec
ting. What had kept him in there? And what was the other man, the other brother, doing in there too?
With keen memories of the last time she opened a door in this place, she entered, and couldn’t believe it. Olivia, the missing child, sat there, as if nothing in the world was amiss—next to another, who one simply couldn’t apply the same assessment to. And there in the room’s shadowed corner, lay a pile of fresh, clean baby clothes. Surely, she thought, the ones from Olivia’s nursery.
An instinct kicked in, untried and clumsy in its infancy, and she felt moved to assist in a way that went beyond obligation. She went to the children and Olivia reached up with a playful smile, unknowing that her parents were dead on the other side of the wall, while the other merely hissed. This other child, clearly born with the same afflictions as the others, was a boy, and clearly happy in Olivia’s company, but not Grace’s. But she refused to leave him here. Refused to leave him to this. It wasn’t his choice, this birthing into horror.
She scoured the main chamber, taking care to avoid faeces, blood and bodies, until she found something that could help. By the pile of sticks, was an overturned wheelbarrow. It would do. She put Olivia in, careful that she didn’t see what had happened to her fathers, and managed to do the same with the other infant, who kicked and scrabbled before settling, albeit grumpily.
She started to walk down the tunnel to the exit, Dewey in the lead, keeping close watch on everything.
It wasn’t long before, with elation, she found Joyce, who had been wondering which way to go. And together, they took another upward tunnel, firmly reasoning that up was always going to be better than down in this place. They soon found Pam. She had been badly beaten, but she was hanging on in there.
And so from a dank tunnel into the daylight of a frosty winter morning, their breath preceding them in ghostly flares of steam, emerged three bruised but defiant women, a wheelbarrow with two toddlers, both confused but safe, and one massive, proud, shaggy dog.
70
Peter West pushed through the brush and bushes, dodging trunks, listening for the sound of his daughter’s cries. It hadn’t even really occurred to him that they were outside, because, while escaping the tunnels had been their objective all night, the threat was still very much alive.
‘Dad!’ came the cry again, and Peter pushed harder. The trees parted and revealed a muddy track—and there, further down the track, in the morning fog, was his daughter, running for her life, from a bald, broad monster who had obviously taken the most appalling of shines to her.
He gave chase, and within seconds another shape emerged from the haze, high above, over the trees. A frame. Tall and boxy, on ever revealing stilts.
A watchtower.
And on the track below, preceded by frosted tyre tracks, was a car. It had the word security emblazoned on the side in navy lettering.
In the distance he saw Alice turn after the car, evidently having noticed something, and run towards the base of the tower. Peter heard her footsteps taking the metal as she ran, staccato clangs echoing through the forest. And that creep was following her. Peter soon made it to the bottom of the tower too, which was now fully formed, standing proud in the haze, and he climbed too. A handful of tight, calf-burning moments later, he was at the top.
The air was cool and fresh, the sky now white in all directions, as the day had just broken like a giant egg. And on the platform, a hand around his daughter’s throat, was this fucking creature.
In daylight, he could finally get a good look at it, and he was immediately glad it had taken this long—because if he’d known what he’d been chasing, his fears might have stopped him. Its skin was a mass of pustuled lesions, all except for the smooth crown. His eyes were gross flaps in his face like two leeches had made their homes by burrowing into the skin below his forehead. His nose was a hooked crook, tapered to a sharp point off to one side. And his mouth was black, filled with rotten brown teeth. All sharp.
His daughter looked at the thing, and he took immense pride in the knowledge that she was nowhere near as scared as he.
‘Give her to me,’ Peter said.
The thing looked at him, and bellowed. It echoed throughout the forest, a Tarzan call of outrage and belligerent evil.
It was an impasse, and before Peter could think what to do next, the monster’s call was answered. Somewhere else in the forest beneath the treetops below, rang sirens.
Peter could have cried, such was the relief he felt. But still, this thing had his Alice.
The sirens caught the monster off guard, and he reacted exactly as an animal would when its cry had been unexpectedly answered. It looked out at its territory for answers.
Alice, who had never been a slouch, always quick off the mark ever since she’d been a bright tumble of a toddler, took the initiative, and hit the monster as hard as she could with Grace’s torch, right in the temple, which caused it to howl.
Peter took his cue, saw how close the monster was to the railing, and charged it, driving his shoulder into the monster’s midriff, pushing him back into the barrier—which, to Peter’s horror, gave way. It had looked old—and now, as he met fresh air, he knew just how old. Monster and man fell freely into the morning, sirens growing in stature all around them, and Peter saw, over the tree tops, way in the distance, a familiar handful of rooftops. It was the Broadoak cul-de-sac, of the Blackstoke Estate. The place that started this whole thing. He’d always felt this place would be the death of him. He could have smiled with the irony, but saw the roof of the security car come up fast.
Everything stopped with noisy abruptness, and mercifully went very dark.
71
The warmth of the tunnels, his home for almost five decades, dissipated. He knew it wasn’t a real warmth—those dark corridors were freezing and always had been—but their smells and dimensions breathed an unshakeable fundamental resonance within him. A fondness. A sanctuary. It was womb-like. It was warmth.
His home, with Mother, was gone, infiltrated. And while the events of the night were the final chapters to the story of him and Mother, the infiltration had taken place years before. When she had promised him so much. When she had tricked him, when he was young enough to be tricked. When the boys came.
He found it. He’d never been up it before, but he’d often looked up the ladder, at the circle of stars formed by the shape of the vent’s mouth.
There were no stars today. The sky was a soft pink. Clouds rolled like great ships. It was dawn.
He knew his time here was over, that it was time for a rebirth. He put a foot on the bottom step and, shakily, began to climb. One foot, after the other.
Up.
That man confused him. With his words. With his voice. The man in blue, who he felt like he knew, but he couldn’t ever have seen him before.
Up he went.
It was cooler up here. The air growing crisper, the higher he ascended. It felt strange.
Every step higher removed him from Mother, leaving the smell and warmth he knew so well. He’d had visited her one last time, before coming here. Before leaving.
Seeing her like that compounded it. Made it somehow real. There was nothing for him here anymore.
So he climbed.
And suddenly, for the first time in his life, he felt sunlight.
Epilogue
Grace Milligan dipped her hand in the cold jug of water next to her bed, and enjoyed the cool kiss of the water on her fingertips. It was clean. Pure. Her gown was also spotless. The sheets were neat. The sunshine itself was crisp and faultless. She revelled in it. Cleanliness, and light. Two things she had grown very fond of in the days since that awful night. Two things she would never take for granted again.
As was life. She was here and others weren’t, the result of a demonic turn of events that few would care to believe. And as it happened, few did.
The table in front of her was stacked with files, the bedspread serving as an extension of her workspace. When the bodies were pulled up, and statem
ents were taken, COMUDEV refuted everything and absolved themselves of all responsibility. They believed that what had happened was nothing to do with them, and to an extent, they were right. Nobody had made those people live down there in squalor. The truth was, they merely hadn’t checked. They hadn’t bothered to clear the tunnels before building, let alone demolish them. The budget had been deemed too high, so they simply saw an abandoned tunnel system and built on top of it.
What was living in the tunnel system was another issue entirely, and the authorities were trying to make sense of it. And what was making by far and away the most sense, was the science. Data. Irrefutable facts, in this case given by biological information.
The woman had been DNA tested, and, along with known records of the Blackstoke facility, archival material from the NHS and long buried court documents, her identity had been proven. Her name was Madeline Morgan. A serial killer, who had been a resident of Blackstoke Institute for Good. Killing four women in their beds had got her there—along with whoever happened to be in the beds with them. Sentenced to life imprisonment, she had ended up in the asylum thanks to heavy pressure on an insanity diagnosis on the part of her legal team, and a soft-as-butter judge who was a sucker for the pretty dame in the hot seat, who couldn’t possibly have done these things without external factors playing a part. She was certified insane in the late sixties, and went into round-the-clock care at Blackstoke.
Thing was, the records also stated that she was missing, presumed dead, after a monstrous fire destroyed the asylum in June 1970. Also missing and presumed dead? Her baby son, just a couple of days old. She’d had the baby inside. Father unknown.
The mystery then expanded, the more Grace had dug. And dug she had. COMUDEV had indeed taken over dealings of the Blackstoke Estate, but the legal entity of the estate was still there. And she was gunning for both of them, in an epic legal battle, to bring them to account for the sheer negligence that resulted in many deaths of the people they had sold houses to. The people they promised new lives to.
