Flesh and Blood (9 page)

13 Trapped

He was alone. He had never felt more alone than this.

And yet...

He was looking down on himself from a distance, it seemed. Watching himself: a figure adrift in nothingness.

All around was impenetrable darkness. A darkness so deep it was almost a physical thing, a solid. Black stone, engulfing everything.

He rubbed at his face, and saw the figure of himself reach up and rub at its eyes. It was like looking in a distant mirror. Watching an image of himself. He remembered Gramps’ words:
battling inside our heads is a whole set of alternative selves – the people we might have been
. That was the basis of Alternity: the realm of alternatives, the world inhabited by our rejected selves, our darker sides.

He turned – somehow he turned, although he realised he had no real sense of his own body. There was another figure, another Matt. Turning, peering around, looking lost.

He closed his eyes and the darkness was complete. What had he done? What had Vince led him into?

Did all these versions of himself feel this way, he wondered? Were they all as lost and confused, as vulnerable and scared, as he was?

In that case,
which one was he?
Where was he? Who was he?

He felt as if he was sinking, submerging in the madness of repeated, unanswerable questions. Sucked down by forces too awesome for him to comprehend: a leaf dragged from its tree by an October gale, a fish caught up in a tidal wave.

He was in Mad City. Loonyville. Gagaland.

He’d been taken by the family madness and Vince had led him right up to its front door and helped him ring the bell.

~

He was in a passageway, the maze of his dreams. Brick walls rose up on either side of him, their surfaces smoothed by the ages, slick with a slimy moisture that seemed to seep out through the mortar.

He felt cold, and his lungs were filled with the foul, fetid odour of decay. He hugged himself, and struggled to control his ragged breathing, to cut off a self-pitying whimper – because once it started, he knew he would lose control altogether.

He looked down at the stained concrete floor. A shallow channel ran along the centre. It glistened wetly with moisture from the walls. There was a red tinge to the moisture, he saw. The red of blood.

He became aware of something approaching. There were no sounds, he could see nothing, but he knew there was something there. It was a presence rising up in his mind, a dark shape which he knew would materialise at any moment.

He looked both ways, but they appeared identical: a short distance of corridor, then a blank wall as the route turned left or right.

Which way?

He chose at random and ran until he came to a junction. Was this the right direction? He didn’t know, he could only hope.

He plunged on into the gloom.

~

He had been running for what seemed like forever. Through endless brick-walled corridors, coming to junctions and guessing which way to go. He had no idea of direction, only that he had to keep going.

The presence was always there – sometimes near, sometimes distant. Occasionally he heard sounds, but could never be sure what they were, or where they came from. They might even have been his own sounds echoing back to him, for all he knew.

He had started talking to himself, chivvying himself along. “Left or right? Forward or back?”

Left.

Left again.

You’re going in circles. You don’t want to go in circles: you might just catch up with yourself.

But
was
he talking to himself, he suddenly wondered? Telling himself to keep going, or to go back. Telling himself that he had to run for his life, or that he should turn and confront whatever it was that was pursuing him.

Voices in his head.

Battling inside our heads is a whole set of alternative selves
... That was where Gramps had claimed Alternity came from: all the alternate versions of ourselves, battling it out in our heads, forging an alternative reality that haunts our dreams. The voices in our heads.

But he was
in
Alternity! If such voices came from Alternity, then were there other, deeper Alternities hidden within this one: an endless sequence of Russian dolls, one inside the other?

He felt dizzy, just at the thought. Like when he had come round first of all, and seen all those alternate versions of himself – losing track of his own identity in an infinite hall of mirrors.

He shook himself, made himself keep running. “Come on, boy,” he muttered. “Gotta keep going. Gotta keep on.”

But eventually it was no good. He had to stop. He had been running forever and his legs were like concrete.

He had to stop.

He came to a corner. It seemed darker here, welcoming.

He slumped against the wall, slid down. He was unconscious before he had even reached the floor.

~

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 close-up. He was lying face down on the beach.

Had he escaped? Had he broken free from Alternity? He tried to think what it was that he had done that might have been the key to his escape. He had run until his legs would carry him no farther. Was it simply that he had recognised that running would get him nowhere, that he could stop fleeing and stay in one place?

He should have known it would never be as simple as that.

He turned onto his sideHe and, gradually, his eyes focused on a pale object a short distance from his face.

Embedded in the beach was a human skull.

A jagged crack ran upwards from its left eye socket, and crawling all over the thing were hundreds of those small brown sand flies that usually rise up in clouds from dried seaweed along the tideline.

Horrified, he looked more closely at the sand and shingle: scattered throughout were small white fragments of bone, broken vertebrae, lost teeth.

Slowly, he swung his gaze out to sea. Dark storm clouds hung over deep red waves. It was the sea of his dreams, the sea of blood. Debris floated in the bay, dismembered body parts – hands, legs, torsos, heads even – and flocks of gulls soared and swooped, feasting on the carnage, their white plumage stained a gruesome, sticky crimson.

He twisted away and threw up on the beach.

He struggled to control his breathing, he had to calm down. For this was no longer a dream, he was actually
here
...

A few acrid traces of vomit burned at the back of his throat and nose with every breath.

He made himself look around again. He had to get out of here, but how do you wake yourself from a dream that has entirely swallowed you up?

For a few seconds he watched the figure of an old derelict – a man of sixty or more, wrapped up in numerous layers of filthy brown rags – shuffling along the tideline, turning over the jetsam with the open toe of one of his boots. Matt wondered what he was hoping to find.

His senses were becoming numbed to all the horrors that he was seeing, he realised. Even when the tramp squatted to extract something from a dark tangled mass, Matt didn’t look away. Even when the tramp raised his trophy to his mouth and bit into it.

Only when the old man wiped at his mouth with one foul sleeve and turned to stare at him, did Matt rise and turn away. The man’s eyes were deeply bloodshot, and there was an intense humanity about his look that reached out to Matt, breaking through his barriers.

Matt climbed the concrete steps to the Promenade and was surprised to see how many holidaymakers were here, despite the deep gloom of the weather. He stopped himself, suddenly frightened at how easy it was to accept this grim distortion as reality: a world of holidays and football and school and work, a world where nothing was really any different.

The people were dressed in a strange assortment of clothing, as if they had all taken part in a lucky dip at some monstrous jumble sale. Striped blazers, frilly summer frocks with parasols, mismatched items of school uniform, pin-striped trousers with torn tee-shirts, patchwork waistcoats, wide-brimmed straw hats, long leather coats, high boots, fur caps.

Couples strolled arm in arm, their faces pale and hollowed out, as if they were being eaten away from within. Emaciated dogs tottered along after grotesquely overweight owners. Tiny children, covered only in dark red ‘mud’ from the beach, chased each other through the crowds, while yet others gathered around an ice-cream vendor’s stall.

And all the time, as Matt walked along the Prom, eyes followed him, tracking his progress. Even the children stopped what they were doing to stare.

He headed for one of the paths that led up the grass slope towards Bay Road, grateful to be leaving the crowds behind.

At the top, he looked back down the cliff: hundreds of pale faces were tipped up towards him and beyond them, the deep red bay spread out towards the horizon.

Occasional cars steered crooked courses along the road, their grim-faced drivers leaning forward to stare at the road ahead, gripping the steering wheels with white-knuckled intensity.

He headed along to where the road forked, then crossed over to the white stone memorial. He would have walked straight past but something made him pause. He looked more closely at the memorial: on each of its six sides there should have been a list of names of the town’s men lost in the wars, but there were none, just a blank white panel.

He hurried on. He didn’t understand why, but something about those missing names chilled him deeply.

~

The house looked just the same as ever: tall, slightly dishevelled, the small patch of front garden looking neat and ordered as a result of the girls’ attention.

Vince’s car was up on blocks in the parking bay, and thin legs poked out from underneath.

“Vince?” said Matt, cautiously. He swallowed, and added, “What are you doing, Vince? Why did you make me come here? How do I get out?”

The legs twisted, and a body rolled out from under the car. Vince propped himself on one elbow and stared up at Matt, his white face smeared with oil. Only...

His eyes were reddened and his lips were dry and cracked. His hair hung in black, greasy strands.

He opened his mouth and a half-strangled croak emerged.

He started to get to his feet and Matt backed away. This wasn’t Vince: it was a cruel distortion of him. And it was holding a long-bladed screwdriver – gripping it as if it were a dagger.

With a strangled wail, the Vince-creature lurched towards him.

Matt darted into the house.

It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Nothing looked different. He peered out through the distorted glass of the front door. As far as he could see, Vince had returned to his car. He started to calm down. He had to think his situation through. He had to work out how to get out of here. There had to be a way!

The alternative was too awful to consider.

The living room door was ajar, and Matt suddenly became aware of a sound: the revving of engines. Kirsty was playing her motor racing game.

He pushed the door open and saw her small head over the sofa. He entered the room, and sat at the end of the sofa. She didn’t even look up, she was too intent on the game.

She didn’t look any different to normal.

“Kirsty,” he said. “We have to talk again. I have to get out of here.”

She ignored him.

Eventually, the race was over and she glanced sideways at him then. “Poor cousin Matthew,” she said. “You should never have trusted Vince. Tina doesn’t trust him. She says he’s not nice.”

“How do I get out of here?”

She looked confused. He had to remind himself that she was only seven.

“Out of this place,” he explained. “How do I get back to the real world?”

She shook her head. “This seems very real to
me
,” she said uncertainly. “Tina said you were strange – I think I understand why now.”

He went through to the kitchen, but it was empty. A hover mower whined nasally from the back garden. He went across to the window.

It was a peaceful summer scene. Uncle Mike was mowing a patch of the lawn, over and over again, as if he was stuck in a private time warp. Carol was clipping a hedge into a rippling, distorted shape that Matt didn’t quite recognise and wasn’t quite sure that he
wanted
to recognise.

He pushed the back door and stepped outside, suddenly aware of the eyes turning on him.

“I...” He stopped, unsure what he had been about to say.

Carol smiled, which was not particularly reassuring. “Matthew,” she said. “How nice to see you. Look, Mike, Tina: we have a visitor.”

Tina? He hadn’t seen Tina.

He started to turn, then stopped. She was coming round the corner of the house, carrying a hose-pipe.

She smiled, and raised the hose. With a deft twist of the hand, she turned the hose on and directed it at Matt.

A bright red spray emerged, covering him in an instant.

He gasped and turned away, but his mouth was full of the sharp taste of blood.

He stumbled and fell – he had forgotten that there was a step down to the lawn.

On his knees, he looked up. He raised his hands in front of his face as Tina advanced with her hose.

Too late, he became aware of the insistent clack-clack-clack of Carol’s hedge shears approaching. She lunged at him, and he felt cold, hard steel striking the back of his head.

He tumbled away, rolling, twisting, trying to get his bearings.

When he had stopped moving he found himself lying on his back. He looked up, and all he could see was a dark silhouette against the sky, and then the whirring blades as his uncle’s mower descended.

~

Intense, metal taste of blood. A booming pain filling his body. He was alive.

Had he found the way out?

He opened his eyes. He was lying on the beach again, further down, where the sand was packed hard, stained a dark, wet pink by the bloody surf.

Suddenly, he understood the memorial, the missing lists of names. What did death mean in this place? Nothing.