Authors: James Everington
Get out of here
, Alan thought,
this isn't right and you need to get out of here...
Another voice came from above, tight and maybe angry, but he barely heard it. His thoughts seemed barely his own, or barely significant, and as muffled as the voices calling down from outside. He couldn't look away from the figures that glowed and vanished and were replaced:
A group of teenagers were playing cards and betting with pound notes; a large radio was dumb in the corner - the visions seemed to be moving closer to the present day. Alan looked away for a second, but he found the darkness of the rest of the shelter more scary than the slow-moving figures in front of him. When he looked back the youths were all on their feet, their mouths distorted and wide with anger, pound notes falling like feathers in the air.
Then two drunken men, both pissing on the beaten looking body of a third.
Then a set of glowing figures that he couldn't quite comprehend - they stood in a circle around a ring of fire on the shelter floor, blank-faced as if in a trance. There was something
odd
about their faces, something too stiff and unbending. Their arms and mouths moved slowly and rhythmically, and maybe it was an effect of the slow motion but the fire seemed to move in time to the same rhythm, and grow upwards. It was smokeless Alan realised, no wonder they weren't all choking in the confined shelter; but how could a fire be smokeless? The figures swayed, and Alan realised they were wearing masks.
Before he had time to work out what they were masks
of,
the figures vanished.
Then Alan saw Martin Longhurst.
He recognised him immediately, the same chubby, freckled face that he'd seen on television, on MISSING posters flapping from lamp-posts around his home village. He still had on his school uniform, the police had mentioned in their bulletins he'd been wearing it the day he vanished.
Martin also seemed to have a black eye, and his face looked puffy and red as if from crying.
Has he been in a fight?
Alan thought.
Bullied?
Martin, or this glowing likeness of him, was turning his head this way and that, and despite the slowness of the visions, Alan could tell the movements were frantic. As if he were casting about in the darkness.
I can only see him
, Alan thought,
because his ghost... or whatever, is glowing.
It doesn't mean
he
could see at the time.
Martin whirled round, as if he'd heard a noise behind him; Alan saw the way his eyes were wide but not focused on anything, the way his pupils were dilated. He was convinced that whenever this had happened the first time, it had been in pitch blackness. And it made him realise how little
he
could actually see - just these glowing performances, distracting him from the surrounding blackness in which anything could be lurking. He told himself there was nothing down here, he'd seen there was nothing down here before the others had shut him in.
But even though Alan didn't think there was anything down here, Martin Longhurst certainly seemed to have. The ghostly boy was backing slowly away from where he'd turned now, his arms outstretched as if to ward something off. Alan noticed the boy's palms looked bright red...
Every other scene I saw
, Alan thought,
I saw
all
the people there; they were all glowing. So how can there have been anybody else down here with Martin? I saw all the people...
Martin's palms were
burnt
, Alan realised. He thought again of the masked men swaying in a ritual around a smokeless swaying fire. And he thought of the visions of blood on concrete he'd been having all day, and how blood could be part of a ritual too.
("Hey Alan!" Tom called from above. "You coming up? You've been down there nearly ten minutes!" There was another, background voice, and then Tom said "Shut it, retard!")
Martin was crying now, sobbing; the hands he held out in front of him were trembling. He was still backing away slowly from something, and heading towards the ladder, towards where Alan was standing watching. He glanced behind a couple of times, but never bolted for the exit. As if he knew that the thing that was after him would be on him in an instant if he turned and ran.
He's leading it right towards me,
Alan thought, before correcting himself that there was nothing down here; even if there had been in Martin's time there wasn't now when he was watching it. He'd
seen
the shelter had been empty. But it was hard to believe this, when darkness pressed in from three out of four sides, and a terrified looking boy moved towards him from the forth.
("Let him out!" a voice cried from outside: Duncan's. There was the sound of metal on metal - tent pegs scraping against the shelter's hatch. Then there was a sound of scuffling, and Duncan shouted out...)
Martin Longhurst's resolve obviously snapped, and he started to turn, his legs tensed to begin sprinting.
No don't run
, Alan thought vaguely,
or it will stop playing games...
Even as Martin started to run towards the ladder his ghostly playback slowed even more, as if someone was playing with
Alan
, extending the fun. Martin's face was stretched with horror, blank with the look of someone just awakened from a nightmare. One of his eyes was almost swollen shut from the bruises around it; the other looked too large and manic in his face.
(Above Duncan gave a cry of anger, an uncharacteristic rage. "Fuckin' psycho!" Tom cried out, then he yelled, as if he'd been hurt. There was the noise of one of them sprawling across the lid of the shelter, and metal scraping.)
Someone's finally done it, Alan thought, finally spilt blood onto the stone. He heard a buzzing sound in his head, as if some of the wasps had got down into the shelter with him. The sounds of fighting continued above, but he didn't look up. For he was now convinced something was in the shelter too, something pursuing Martin. Something nebulous that could be made real by a spilt drop of blood. There was a roaring sound, but it seemed to be all in Alan's head, and he suddenly realised his nightmares and wet dreams had been one and the same, for he could remember now: he was chasing a fleeing girl through the darkness, eager with an overwhelming lust, but simultaneously scared of what chased him behind. And Martin Longhurst's body sprawled forward as if he had been tripped, and even as he fell Alan could see how he tried to look behind him with a terrified glance... and then it was as if something was pulling the boy by the legs, away from the ladder and escape. Martin's hands groped for purchase on the smooth dirty concrete floor, and in their slow struggles they were like pale undersea crabs scuttling. He was dragged backwards, and upwards, as if the thing holding him by the legs was straightening as it pulled him back. And into blackness, for Martin was fading now, his glowing image being swallowed up in the darkness of the shelter. Swallowed up by whatever hunched thing had him by the legs (which were already not visible). Alan had one look at the terrified and bruised face, and then that was gone too, and all that were left were the boy's hands, like two separate creatures scrabbling with a desperate and alien slowness to stay on the ground. As one vanished upwards into the darkness it opened so that Alan could see the palm again, and he saw that it wasn't just burnt, but cut and dripping with blood; one diagonal slash on the inside of the left hand. Like Martin had cut himself deliberately there with a blade... with a Swiss Army Knife.
("Yeah you'd better run away, freak!" Tom was shouting; his voice grew louder as he turned and spoke down to Alan. "Your fuckin' pussy psycho mate just tried to slash me in the face with a tent peg! Scarred me probably! You coming
up?
)
With Martin gone the strange, glowing light disappeared too. There were no figures to replace Martin.
But Alan's feeling that something tall and hunched and malignant was down in the shelter persisted, as if the things that had happened here had all happened
now
, and simultaneously. As if something was still hungry.
He remained still and silent, but imagined he could sense something's attention switch from Martin to him; as if the angry buzzing wasp sound in his head was giving him away.
Just a drop,
he thought incoherently,
just a drop of blood because Tom's still blabbing. How long would just a couple of drops call it up for?
Something was definitely coming towards him in the darkness.
"No!" he cried out.
He turned to run, and dazed himself against the wall behind. He had forgotten that the darkness wasn't infinite at all, but close in and confining, like the insides of a trap. He shook his head, and looked up to the pinprick of light from the shelter's hatch, like a diver to the sunlight above. Then he started to climb the ladder.
He was simultaneously relieved that it was all over, and convinced something was still after him, something light-hating that lived in the darkness. He imagined one of the masked men looking up the shaft at him; imagined the bandaged and bleeding hand of one of the tramps reaching for a rung of the ladder to start climbing. But he knew whatever might be down in the shelter was neither of those.
One of Alan's sweaty hands slipped as he climbed, and for one minute he thought he was going to fall down the shaft, and that if he did fall it would be into the clutches of whatever was below. But he didn't, and continued climbing, telling himself that there was nothing down there; that he was being a baby. The ladder moved back and forth slightly as he climbed, and he could hear the dull scrape of metal on metal as it dragged across the rusty bolts. With that, and the buzzing pressure in his head, he couldn't hear anything else, couldn't conclusively prove that there was silence beneath him. His arms and legs ached and he felt himself tire, moving in the same dead-slow way as the figures he had seen.
Alan only realised he'd reached the top of the ladder when he banged his head on the metal hatch. He cried out, then swore. He tried to push the hatch up with his shoulders, but it wouldn't budge. He punched it with one fist but just numbed his hand. He heard faint laughter from the other side of the hatch, and then silence. Tom and Mark were obviously trying to keep quiet.
He paused, and became aware of two things.
The ladder was still moving slightly back and forth, as if he were atop a tree in a breeze. And he could still hear it squeaking, the rhythmic high pitched scrapes. Something was coming up after him.
"Let me out!" he shouted, not at the two boys outside but as if at the shelter itself. He stared downwards but couldn't make out anything in the darkness.
There's nothing there
, one part of his mind said, while another thought that whatever was approaching was coming up slowly, clumsily, as if it had something slung upon its back. As if it had Martin Longhurst's body slung across its back.
Someone above rammed a tent peg into the gap between the concrete and the metal lid, which opened an inch before snapping down again with an angry clanging noise. Alan heard Mark swear.
He could smell blood now, he was sure of it. Whatever was coming up the ladder after him was stained with blood.
"Let me
out!
Please!"
Something grasped Alan's ankle and started to pull. He cried out, closed his eyes, and tightened his grip on the rungs. He felt his body being pulled downwards; imagined his hands letting go of the ladder one by one, just like Martin's had come away from the ground against which they had scrabbled for purchase...
Suddenly, even behind his closed eyes he was aware of light flooding the shaft. The hand (if it was a hand) grasping Alan's ankle seemed to let go; the pressured buzzing noise in his head faded, as if with a final whine. He opened his eyes and saw blurry hands reaching for him from the hot, bright air above. And as the two boys grabbed him by his t-shirt and hauled him up, Alan took one final look down the shelter's shaft. The distance to the bottom seemed puny, and didn't tally with how long he had seemed to be climbing the ladder in the dark. The shelter's floor was squalid and dirty, and there was nothing down there.
Then the hands which had hold of him pulled him up, up and out of the shelter, into the summer light.
***
Alan let his body go limp and closed his eyes, letting the others support him as they pulled him away from the shelter and laid him on the parched ground. He could feel the sun on his face as he lay there; hear the faint buzzing of insects.