The Darkest Corners (7 page)

There was that itch again. That niggle at the back of my head.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘I suppose it would.'

‘Anyway, I'll leave you to it,' Dr Feder smiled. He strolled over to the door and made his way out into the corridor. Just before he left, he turned back to me. ‘You had me worried there for a while, but you came through.' His smile widened. ‘I knew you could do it, kiddo,' he said, and then he closed the door with a
click
.

I
t was an hour or more before my mum moved away from the side of the bed. She sat there, perched, listening to me tell her all about Mr Mumbles and Caddie and Ameena and all the others.

‘I knew we shouldn't have talked about that Mr Mumbles,' she said, stroking my forehead. ‘Trust your nan, filling your head full of nonsense.'

I frowned. Of course. The conversation about my old imaginary friend over Christmas dinner had happened.
Really
happened, I mean. It was later that the
intruder
came. I tried to remember back to that moment, but the only image that came to mind was of Mr Mumbles in his hat and coat with his mouth sewn tightly shut.

‘Nan,' I said, pushing the thought away. ‘Is she all right?'

Mum smiled. I had looked closely for any sign of stitching round her face, any sign that she wasn't who she said she was, but I had found nothing.

‘She's fine. Worried about you. But she's fine.' Mum stole a look towards the door. ‘I should phone her. Let her know.' Her hand reached for mine and squeezed it. ‘But not quite yet, eh?'

‘Did they catch him?' I asked. ‘The man who… The man?'

Mum shook her head. ‘No,' she said. ‘Not yet. But they will. Someone saw him attacking you and chased him off.'

‘Ameena?'

She looked at me strangely. ‘No, Kyle. There is no Ameena, remember? It was a boy from your school. What's his name? Billy.'

I sat up sharply. ‘Billy,' I gasped, remembering him in the tower, and then not in the tower as the porter dragged him away. ‘I have to help him. They've got him.'

My mum rested a hand on me. It was soft and warm, and the panic began to ease at once. ‘Billy's fine,' she assured me. ‘He came in the other day to see you. Brought a card too, I think.'

She got up and looked through the cards. ‘Here we are,' she said, passing me one of them. ‘It's not in the best taste,' she said, pursing her lips, ‘but he assured me it was a joke.'

I looked down at the card. It was a sombre-looking thing with “My Deepest Sympathies” printed across the top. Below that was a picture of a snow-covered church, not unlike the one he'd been taken from.

Hadn't
been taken from.
Hadn't
.

It was a sympathy card for relatives of people who had died. Billy's sense of humour was no better in real life than it was in my dreams, apparently.

Inside, in messy handwriting, was a short message.
I totally saved your ass. You're doing my homework for the rest of your life. Get well soon, dweeb
, and then Billy's scrawled signature at the bottom.

‘That was nice of him,' I said, handing the card back.

‘Hmm,' Mum said, unconvinced. ‘But as you can see, nothing bad's happened to him.'

‘Yeah,' I said. Then I added, ‘Shame, that,' and we both laughed.

I wanted to freeze-frame the moment. Me and Mum sitting there laughing, like everything was right with the world. All too soon, though, it came to an end.

‘Right, I better go phone your nan and let her know the good news.' She bent over me and kissed my forehead. ‘I won't be long. You want anything?'

‘No,' I said, and I really and truly didn't. I didn't want anything, didn't need anything. It was over. The nightmare was over.

Mum kissed me again, said a garbled goodbye, then left through the same door the doctors had, promising to be back in no time at all.

The door closed and I was left alone. I could hear the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, the normal sounds of a hospital at work.
Normal
. That was a word I didn't think would ever enter my head again.

I relaxed into the pillow. The top end of the bed was raised at a slight angle, and as my head sank down, I couldn't remember ever feeling so comfortable. The pain in my head was little more than a niggle.

My eyes closed. I lay still, enjoying the feeling of serenity that had begun to fill me. I didn't have to run any more, hide any more, fight any more. I didn't have to be scared, or be strong, or be anything but a kid.

And then the door opened and spoiled everything.

‘That was quick,' I said, opening my eyes, but it wasn't my mum stepping into the room. It was a girl dressed in black, with skin the colour of milky chocolate and boots that looked custom-built for kicking.

She looked around the room before fixing her gaze on me. ‘Hey, kiddo,' said Ameena. ‘You miss me?'

My body went tense, bringing the pain back to my head.

‘You just going to lie there with your mouth hanging open?' Ameena asked. ‘Or are you going to say something?'

I just lay there with my mouth hanging open. Ameena closed the door behind her, then came to the side of my bed. ‘You might want to pull yourself together there,' she told me. ‘We might not have much time.'

‘You're not real.'

‘No, I'm not. Well, not in the conventional sense,' she admitted. She gestured at the room around her. ‘But then neither is this.'

‘I dreamed you,' I said. ‘I dreamed you. You shouldn't be here.'

‘You're right, I shouldn't,' she said. ‘If he finds out I've snuck in to see you, he'll kill me.'

‘Who? Who'll kill you?'

‘Guess,' she said. Then added, ‘Your dad,' before I had the chance. ‘The handsome and dashing Doctor Feder.' She put her hand to the side of her mouth and spoke in a mock-whisper. ‘Who isn't really a doctor, by the way.'

I could feel my heart racing. The lines on one of the monitor screens peaked like a mountain range and a red light began to blink on and off.

‘You're not real,' I said again. ‘I dreamed you.'

‘No, listen to me,' she said, her voice low, her face serious. ‘The other stuff, the imaginary friends, the Darkest Corners. That stuff's real. All of it. This. This here now. This is the dream. This is what isn't real.'

‘You're lying,' I said, and the red light on the heart monitor blinked faster. ‘This is a trick, or a… I don't know… a hallucination or something.'

I rolled away from her and tumbled out of bed. The wires attached to my chest tore free and all three machines began to shriek in complaint. Ameena flicked the power switch at the wall, silencing them.

‘Calm down, kiddo, or you'll get us
both
killed.'

I moved round the bed and shoved past Ameena on my way to the door.

‘Get away,' I spat. ‘You're not real. None of that stuff was real. I want my mum. I'm going to get my mum.'

‘Your mum's dead.'

I stopped at the door. ‘Your mum's dead,' Ameena said again. ‘Your dad killed her.'

‘She's not dead,' I growled. ‘I saw her.'

‘You think you saw her. He convinced you into seeing her, like he convinced you into seeing all of this.'

‘No!' I cried, and I pushed through the door and out into the corridor. I stopped when I got there. I could still hear the hospital sounds bustling around me, but the corridor itself was empty.

And I mean
empty
. The floor was bare wood, the walls a glossy white. The
corridor
was nothing more than a short, narrow hallway with a door at each end and an opening that led on to an equally featureless stairway.

All those old feelings of panic and dread began to bubble furiously in my gut. I carried on towards the opposite door just as Ameena came through the one behind me.

The door opened on to a hospital day room. There were a few tatty armchairs and a mismatched couch in one half of the room, with a boxy old TV set squashed into the corner.

Three men and one woman sat on the chairs, reading magazines, doing crosswords, or just dozing gently in their dressing gowns. None of them looked up as I stumbled in.

The other half of the room was as blank as the hallway outside. There was a single window on the otherwise featureless wall, the blinds pulled half closed. I could see a darkening evening sky between the slats, but nothing more.

Some random pieces of medical equipment stood in the bare half of the room. A blood-pressure monitor. Some sort of ECG machine. One of those things they use to shock stopped hearts back into action. A defibrillator, that was it.

‘What is this? What's going on?' I demanded. Still no one in the day room looked my way.

‘He convinced you that you were in hospital. Your mind started filling in the details,' Ameena said. ‘But then it stopped.'

‘Details? What do you mean details?'

‘This,' she said, gesturing around us. ‘The whole thing. The whole hospital. It's not real.' She frowned. ‘Well, no, that's not true. It
is
real now. But it wasn't back then.'

‘What are you talking about? Back when?'

‘Back then. Back before you created it.' She paused a moment to let that sink in.

‘Created it?'

‘You still don't get it, do you, kiddo?' she said. ‘You still don't understand what you're capable of. The stuff Doc Mortis stuck in your neck – that needle – it was designed to make you open to suggestion.'

My hand went to my neck. Was there an ache there? I wasn't sure.

‘Your dad doesn't usually need that sort of thing. He can be pretty damned persuasive all on his own. But you were too stubborn, so he had to drug you first.'

‘Drug me…? I don't… No, none of this is happening.'

‘He convinced you it was all a dream. Convinced you that you were actually safe in hospital, and that none of the rest of it had really happened.' She smiled sadly. ‘And, man, I bet you wanted to believe that, kiddo. I bet your mind raced to believe it, to picture it, to imagine it was all true. But your mind isn't like anyone else's. You wanted it to be real and so it became real. The hospital. Your mum. All of it. You created your own little safe haven. Your own happy ending.'

My mouth was dry. ‘No,' I croaked. ‘No, that's not true.'

‘Sorry, kiddo, but it is. Every word of it.' Ameena looked down at the floor, considering her next few words carefully. ‘He needed you to use your abilities. He needed one more big push to bring the barrier down and let the Darkest Corners in. He couldn't force you to do it, so he tricked you instead.' She cleared her throat gently. ‘
We
tricked you instead. We tricked you into opening the door.'

‘There is no door,' I said through gritted teeth. ‘There is no Darkest Corners.'

She pointed in the direction of the window. ‘Take a look.'

I followed her finger, but didn't move. Not at first, anyway. Then, ignoring the pain in my grinding knee, I took a small, tentative step towards the window. Ameena gave me a nod of encouragement when I turned to look at her, and then I was there, standing before the blinds. I took a deep breath. I pulled the string to open the slats all the way. And then I looked, and the blood in my veins turned to ice.

What had I expected to see? I wasn't sure. An empty street. One or two late-night wanderers, maybe.

But not this. Never this.

There were hundreds of them.
Thousands
. They scuttled and scurried through the darkness, swarming over the village like an infection; relentless and unstoppable.

I leaned closer to the window and looked down at the front of the hospital. One of the larger creatures was tearing through the fence, its claws slicing through the wrought-iron bars as if they were cardboard. My breath fogged the glass and the monster vanished behind a cloud of condensation. By the time the pane cleared the
thing
would be inside the hospital. It would be up the stairs in moments. Everyone in here was as good as dead.

The distant thunder of gunfire ricocheted from somewhere near the village centre. A scream followed – short and sharp, then suddenly silenced. There were no more gunshots after that, just the triumphant roar of something sickening and grotesque.