Authors: Nick Gifford
He pushed himself to his knees and peered around. Nothing had changed. Nothing ever changed.
The old tramp was a short distance away. Watching him. Smiling softly. This close, he looked older than he had before.
“You’re looking lost, boy,” said the tramp. “You don’t want to be looking lost here, boy. You don’t want to be losing your grip.”
Matt stared at him. The voice that had filled his head earlier, when he had been struggling through the brick-walled maze...
guiding
him.
“You?” he said. “Gramps, is that really you?”
The tramp chuckled. In a single movement, he turned and dropped to the beach so that he was sitting, watching Matt. He shook his head, still smiling.
“But you’re one of us, aren’t you? A Wareden.” From an earlier generation: a guardian of the Way.
The tramp was still shaking his head. Finally, he said, “Don’t you see, boy? I’m
you
. Every time you dream of this place you leave a part of you behind. I’m you, boy. I’m you when you’ve been here long enough to realise there’s no way out, that this is all there is. I’m just an old tramp, boy, and this is my home.”
Matt stared at him in horror, unable to believe, unable not to believe. “You mean... You mean there’s really no way out of here? No escape from Alternity?”
The tramp shook his head, sadness in his eyes. “Nobody gets out of here,” he said. “If there was a way out, then Alternity would spill over into the real world, swamping it, destroying it. And you know what happens when it spills out, don’t you, boy? Eh?”
Matt thought. “The graves,” he said slowly. “The vicar described it as ‘a madness’, ‘a night of horrific violence’. 1898 – it must have broken out then.”
The tramp nodded. “All it takes is a moment of weakness, a bridge between the two realms. All the time Alternity is reaching out to people out there: people who might cause the Way to be opened. And then it bursts out, boy – the power, the madness. Just think about it: all the trapped, tormented souls in Alternity bursting out. They take over the living and use their bodies to their own twisted ends.
“But there are too many, boy.
Far too many
escaping souls – all breaking out, all fighting with each other to possess the living... they drive people out of their own heads.”
“Is that what happened? In 1898? I’ve seen the graves, the six families...”
“Possessed by Alternity, or killed by those who were possessed. Thank God it was stopped in time.”
“How?”
“The Way. Your great-grandfather didn’t really understand his responsibilities. He didn’t understand the dangers and he experimented... He opened the Way and Alternity spilled out. He
invited
it, I think. At first, anyway. He wrote in his diary that he thought it was a force for good. He came to his senses quickly and he managed to close the Way. With the bridge between the two realms closed, the madness spread out and the dark powers weakened. Six families – it could easily have been more.”
He spread his hands and gestured at the warped world around them. “All this,” he went on. “All this is made out of all that is foul and corrupt in human nature. You’ve only seen a tiny fraction of it: multiply that by a thousand, a million, and you still wouldn’t be able to grasp how much evil our kind is capable of. And just you think what it would be like if this vile power was set loose in your reality...”
The tramp was staring at Matt, a twisted, bitter smile on his face. “A madness indeed – but really it’s far
more
than a madness. It’s violent and evil, a force that destroys everything in its way. Give it a chance and it will spread out from the ruptured Way like a dark cancer across the countryside.”
He leaned forward now, his knuckles pressing into the reddened sand. “There’s no way out, boy. We’re sealed in here good and proper and that’s the way it should be. No, the real art for us is to
stay
here...”
“What do you mean?”
“This isn’t really Alternity,” said the tramp. “This is Alternity’s dream of itself – a kind of limbo, an inbetween world built up from your own mind and from the minds of everyone who dreams of this place. Alternity itself is a realm of pure energy, seething forces and powers that are impossible for us to conceive of – we just don’t have the language, or the concepts. It’s a welter of primeval forces, where there’s no ‘you’ any more. It’s the chaos from which the universe was formed. And it’s the chaos into which the world will ultimately return if it is ever allowed to seep out.
“If you lose a grip on this limbo dreamworld then all that remains is Alternity. That’s your choice, boy: this macabre dream, or annihilation in Alternity. They’re all you have left.”
Matt was shaking his head. He couldn’t believe that there was no way back. He couldn’t believe that this was it.
The tramp was watching him closely. “You’ll believe it,” he told Matt. “One day, you’ll come round on the beach and you’ll believe it. Just like me!” He gave a short, loud laugh, then heaved himself to his feet and resumed his gruesome search of the tideline.
~
He had an idea: a single sliver of hope to cling on to. It was all he had.
It was about four miles to Crooked Elms, but he had nothing better to do with what passed for time in this perverted realm. He walked at a steady pace, concentrating hard to make sure he was on the right road.
Eventually he came to the roundabout on the edge of town. He stepped into the road, determined not to look too closely at what the crows were picking at in the gutter.
There was a sudden brain-shaking blast of a horn – he looked up and instantly threw himself back onto the verge. The gust of air from the passing lorry spun him like a windmill and he sprawled in the dirt. He watched as the lorry mounted the roundabout and went straight across, leaving twin tracks of ploughed up dirt in its wake.
Moments later, the lorry had gone.
He cursed himself. He had to pay attention.
Concentrate
.
Gathering his breath, he looked carefully before crossing. For the rest of his long walk, he clambered up the verge at the first sound of traffic. He was too tired to make this walk again, he knew.
Copperas Wood formed a dark fringe across the field to his right. Not far to go now. He kept going until he came to a gate at the end of a rough track. He could go down here and cut through the woods, he knew. It would bring him out into the field behind Gramps’ paddock.
He looked at the dark shadows beneath the trees.
He shook his head, turned away. He would take his chances with the road.
A short time later he was passing the first houses of Crooked Elms. Pale faces crowded together at every window, staring out, following his progress. Clawed hands scraped at the glass in frustration, longing.
They wanted him. He knew that at any second they might rush out at him and he forced himself not to think what they might do. Forced himself not to think of Uncle Mike’s lawnmower descending on him...
But why were they waiting?
He quickened his pace.
He reached the crossroads and turned right. Seconds later he was walking into the semicircular driveway.
He looked up at the house, puzzled.
It didn’t feel right. There was something missing.
He went up to the front door. It was locked. He peered inside: everything looked familiar, but somehow it was
different
.
He followed the path around the side of the house until he came to the back door. He took a brick and smashed a pane of glass, then reached in, groped around until he found the key and then unlocked the door.
He went straight to the basement. He knew what was missing now: his grandparents’ house felt just like anywhere else. There was nothing special about it. The place was dead.
The basement. A long, low-ceilinged room lit by a single, bare light bulb. He didn’t feel dizzy, he didn’t feel as if consciousness would slip away at any moment. His feet didn’t drag, didn’t feel as if they were encased in concrete.
“Never the doors of the righteous be breached.
“The minds of the pure are our shield,
“Protect us from evil, protect us from fear,
“Shine light where the shadow concealed.”
It wasn’t going to work. He tried again. He tried shuffling the words, but where before it was as if the poem had rearranged
itself
, now it stubbornly refused to find a new form.
The magic had gone. This Way was dead in Alternity.
His only hope had let him down.
He sank to the floor in desolation.
Now he knew why the villagers had let him pass: no need to hurry as he was going nowhere.
He was trapped. He really was trapped.
14 The Bridge
The headstones crowded together in silent ranks. A motley assortment of older lichen-crusted slabs, tilted and smoothed with age, were interspersed with a few clean, sharp-edged, marble headstones.
All of them were blank, like the war memorial that stood above the Bay at Bathside. Some of the graves were marked with shrivelled, decaying flowers. Others were bare, the earth around them disturbed, as if animals had been digging.
The wrought iron fence enclosing the dead families from 1898 was caked in rust.
Matt went closer.
Not rust, he saw: it was a deeper red, the red of dried blood. The stones within were bare, just like all the others.
Just then, Matt heard a scratching sound, a scraping: fingernails on stone. One of the six slabs started to move, vibrating as some unseen force wrestled with it from below.
Matt backed away and the movement subsided, the scraping sounds ceased.
He tugged the heavy door by its iron-ring handle. Inside, the church offered cool refuge from the muggy, stormy heat of the day. He slid into a pew and closed his eyes. He had to think, he had to get things straight in his mind.
The family talent: it was a special sensitivity, an ability to form a mental bridge between the two realms. But he had been entirely swallowed up by Alternity! How could he hope to form such a link when he was wholly trapped in one of the realms? He had nowhere to form a bridge to... He was just an ordinary person. Trapped.
No wonder the house had lost its special atmosphere: he was not sensitive to the Way from this side.
He remembered the tramp’s words:
Nobody gets out of here... this is all there is
.
He heard a sound from the far end of the church. There was somebody down there. Hiding? Spying on him? He remembered all the staring faces from behind the windows of the village’s houses. Had they come after him?
It was the vicar: the one Carol had called David, the one who had waited for Matt in the hospital garden with tales of madness and the Devil.
The man gave a slight start when he saw Matt sitting in the church. Then he came along the central aisle towards him. He smiled. “We don’t have many visitors these days,” he said. “Faith is such a rare thing here. Even the young don’t swallow our tall stories any more.”
Matt stared at him. And then, slowly, he started to smile.
The vicar raised his eyebrows, clearly confused by Matt’s expression.
Matt stood quickly and turned towards the door. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said the vicar. “They’re waiting outside. You’re new here, aren’t you? They don’t like your sort, you see. They hate you. They associate you with all that they’ve lost. They want nothing more than to get out of this damnable place, yet you and your kind keep them here. You keep them trapped.”
The vicar’s voice had become steadily shriller. “You can wait here. Really, you can wait here. Stay with me – go on, you’ll be much better off with me!”
And then Matt saw that he was carrying something small, glinting in the dim light of the church’s interior. A knife of some sort.
Matt ran to the door and pushed it open.
They were waiting in the churchyard, ghoulish faces all turned towards the door, waiting for Matt to emerge. Old ladies with broken bottles in their hands, children with hammers or sticks, a large black dog straining at its leash. A young mother, clutching a baby to her bare breast, held a machete in her free hand.
Matt darted through jostling headstones and found the small path that led around to the back of the church.
He came to a high stone wall, a row of plaques at its foot – these still bore names, he saw, and then he remembered: the cremated.
Ashes
, Gramps had said.
There’s no way back from ashes
.
Why wasn’t the crowd following, he wondered suddenly? What were they waiting for?
And then he heard the scratching again. And he felt the vibrations in the ground beneath his feet. He was standing by a small, plain headstone and now he could see the ground bulging upwards.
He backed away.
There was an abrupt tearing sound and the ground burst open. A figure pushed its way free of the loose soil.
A man.
Halfway out of the ground, he stopped and brushed soil from his face.
The man was young, dressed in black. He had a white collar around his neck. He was a vicar!
Back when Gramps had been young there had been a vicar: a strong man. An evil man. Gramps had defeated him – had he been trapped in Alternity as punishment?
Was this man the Reverend Harold Allbright?
The vicar looked at Matt and smiled crookedly. “Ah,” he said, in a rich, deep voice. “How
nice
: a Wareden. It’s been
such
a long wait.”
As he started to pull himself free from the ground, Matt turned and ran.
At the front of the church they were still waiting.
He had no way to turn. He stepped out into a pool of sunlight that had suddenly broken through the clouds.
He recounted the first vicar’s words in his mind –
even the young
– determined to lodge them there. He had to hold onto that thought. No matter what they did to him.
The dog got to him first. It broke free from its owner and came bounding towards Matt, teeth bared, drooling white foam. He felt those hard white teeth closing on his throat as he fell back towards the church and then he felt nothing at all.
~
He could hear gulls, mewing in the distance. People laughing. He could smell the fresh briny smell of the sea.
He opened his eyes, saw sand and shingle in front of his face. He was lying on the beach.
He knew better now than to hope he had escaped. He raised a hand to his neck, suddenly remembering the dog’s attack.
The tramp was a short distance away, watching him, chuckling. “Believe me yet?”
He ignored him, climbed to his feet and brushed the sand from his clothes. He knew what he had to do. He hurried up to the Promenade. As before, everybody stopped and stared at him. He tried to ignore them.
He paused at the memorial. He had to work out how he was going to do this. Death might have lost meaning here, but pain had not. Instinctively, he reached for his throat again, and thought of that dog.
Vince was still working on his car. He had an aerosol can and a rag and he kept spraying a small patch on the driver’s door, then rubbing it vigorously with his rag. Spraying and rubbing, spraying and rubbing.
But his eyes weren’t on his work, they were continually flitting from side to side, watching. Waiting.
Matt backed away. He could play the waiting game too.
~
Time didn’t seem to be passing. The sun stayed high in the sky, hidden mostly behind the heavy blanket of clouds. And Vince remained at the front of the house. Matt waited a short distance up an alleyway, as far out of sight as he could manage. Every so often he emerged and peered along the street to see Vince still there.
What if Vince never moved from that spot? It was a possibility he had to consider.
He went deeper into the alleyway. He knew there wasn’t a back way into his Aunt’s garden, but what if...?
The alleyway was enclosed by high, rendered walls, and cluttered at regular intervals by green wheelybins. A number of tall wooden doors were set into the wall. He approached the last of these, pushed at it, and passed through into an overgrown garden. He looked around, but nobody seemed to be aware of him, there were no staring faces at the windows.
He crossed the garden and clambered over a wooden fence. He tried to recall the view from the box room window so that he could work out where he was.
He headed across the garden, ignoring the sudden gasp of surprise from an elderly man who had been spraying his roses. He pulled himself up on the next high wall and was relieved to see that the garden was empty. He saw the small patch of short grass where Mike had been mowing and shuddered in sudden recollection.
He swung himself over the wall and landed in a crouch in a large patch of summer bedding.
At the back door he paused.
The kitchen was empty. He went inside.
There was a sound from the dining room, so he hurried through into the hallway before he was noticed. He could hear the sound of a computer game from the living room.
He stepped across to the door and peered inside. A single head was just visible over the sofa: Kirsty. He took a deep breath and stepped into the room, shutting the door gently behind him and leaning on it.
“Cousin Matthew!”
He turned. Tina was standing in the corner by a bookshelf. Smiling.
Kirsty looked up from where she was sitting on the floor. She glanced from her sister to Matt and back again, looking puzzled, a little frightened. “Tina?” she said. “Why are you looking at Matt like that?”
Matt backed away from the older girl.
She was coming towards him, still smiling. She didn’t have any weapons, but then, Matt realised grimly, she didn’t look as if she needed any. She looked as if she was preparing to rip him limb from limb...
And slowly.
Matt raised his arms in front of himself, trying to prepare for another attack.
Just then a large vase smashed over Tina’s head.
For an instant it looked as if the older girl would not react. She blinked, straightened a little, blinked again. And then she slumped to the floor, blood seeping through her straight brown hair.
Matt stared aghast at Kirsty, who was now standing on the sofa, wiping her hands down her front. She looked apologetic.
She glanced at Matt, then looked away. In a very quiet voice she said, “I hate it when she gets like that. She knows I hate it.”
She straightened, then stepped down from the sofa. In a stronger voice, she said, “She’ll be back, though. She never leaves me alone for long.”
Matt made himself think. He had to stay in control. “Kirsty,” he said. “I need your help. I’m trapped here. I can’t get out.”
She looked puzzled.
“The bridge, Kirsty! You can make the bridge in your mind.” He stepped towards her and placed a hand gently on her arm to try to reassure her. “Kirsty, please. Remember the poems that Gramps taught us – the ones that close the doors in our minds. You can use them to open doors, too. I need you to open a door for me, Kirsty, to let me back through. You’re still out there in the real world, Kirsty – it’s just a part of you that’s here with me. You can still form that bridge.”
She still looked confused, frightened by his intensity.
“Never the doors of the righteous be breached,” he recited at her. “Go on. Please, Kirsty: say the words.”
Hesitantly, she recited the poem for him. Immediately, he felt the words’ calming influence spreading, a bond forging itself between Kirsty and himself.
A dark shadow fell across the window.
Vince.
“The words have the power, Kirsty,” Matt pleaded. “Use them to open the door. Swap them around, reverse them. Just keep saying them!”
The window burst inwards and a bloody fist tangled in the net curtains.
Kirsty gasped and turned to the window.
“Please, Kirsty.”
“Never the shield of our minds be breached, shine shadow, where light had concealed,” she said.
“Protect us from evil, protect us from fear.” Once she had started the words came cascading out.
They repeated the last line together: “Shine shadow, where light had concealed!” Immediately, Kirsty started to repeat the distorted poem, mixing its words up even further.
There was a grunt from beyond the shattered window. Vince was staring curiously at his bloodied fist. Then he wiped it down his front and started to clamber into the room.
And, suddenly, the air shifted and an intense heat descended.
“Go
on!
” cried Matt, at his chanting cousin.
A disc formed, hanging in the air about two metres in front of Kirsty.
Matt lunged towards it and suddenly the shimmering disc folded itself around him, engulfing him. An intense dizziness washed over him, and he fell forward onto his knees, struggling to remain conscious.