All nightmare long, p.8
All Nightmare Long, page 8
A sense of time immediately enfolded me—the must of ages in my nose, dense shadows that seemed heavy and ancient. If the house above us was relatively new and pristine, this basement area was altogether older. The past hid down here, and I was an intruder.
“So he hunted for relics for you?” I asked. “The things that Fat Frederick deals in?”
“Oh, did he show you his angel?”
“Yes,” I breathed.
“Bless him.” She spoke like a mother talking about her child.
“It was...amazing.”
“It’s dead.”
I was watching my footing on the stone steps. They were worn concave by centuries of use, and the idea of who had walked here before filled the air with ghosts.
“Dead?”
“Through here.” The lighting was poor, spread weakly from a couple of bare bulbs swathed in dust and spider webbing. She walked ahead of me and I had to hurry to keep up. I had the sudden sense that I could get lost down there, and the thought of wandering in the darkness, hands held out before me, sent a chill down my back.
“Aren’t all the relics from dead things? That’s what they are, surely. Fossils. All that’s left of . . .”I trailed off.
“Do you really think that?”
“I . . .”I wasn’t sure what I thought.
“It’s dark in here,” she said. “It prefers it like that. Follow me, I’ll give you something to help you see.”
Mary Rock took my hand. It was unexpected and intimate, and I squeezed without even thinking about it. She squeezed back, this woman who might have been the most dangerous person I’d ever met, giving me comfort.
Darkness breathed us in as she closed a door. And there was something in there with us.
Mary held something against my face. “Put them on,” she whispered. “Keep your eyes closed, and only open them when I say.”
Glasses. Goggles of some sort. She let go and I used both hands to secure the strap around the back of my head, keeping my eyes closed as instructed. My heart thumped. I could smell something strange, a living scent that was unlike anything I had ever smelled before.
I wanted to turn and run, flee that place and keep running all day and night, out of London and into the countryside where perhaps I might find somewhere to hide, shed everything I was discovering, and live out my days in blissful ignorance.
“Open your eyes,” Mary Rock whispered. She had a voice demanding to be obeyed.
I looked, and saw, and my whole world grew wider and darker than I had ever believed possible.
“My retirement,” Mary Rock said beside me. “My future. One day I’ll figure out how to kill it, and then...I’ll start to harvest.”
Thin limbs, as if from malnutrition, but I thought not.
“Vince was one of those who helped bring it in.”
An elongated head, large eyes, elfin ears.
“In fact, he tracked it down. Ealing. Down beneath the city.
” The worn stubs of broken wings.
“There’s a whole world down there. Sometimes I fear that’s where he’s gone.”
A fairy, I thought. She has a fairy down here, alive, breathing, giving off warmth and a stench like.... like . . .
“I have to leave,” I said, and that was when the manacled, chained, wretched thing lifted its head and looked right at me.
I was surprised she let me go. Walking toward the front door, Mary Rock now at my back, I expected the impact at any moment. A heavy object against my skull, a blade between my shoulder blades.
“I want Vince back,” she said as I reached the front door.
“So do I.” My voice shook. Everything I knew had been shaken. The world beyond the door was a wider, stranger place. “If anyone can find him, it’s you.”
I turned, she smiled, but it did not touch her eyes. Coolness came off her in waves. I thought back to when she had squeezed my hand, but could not recall feeling any warmth at all.
I opened the front door and stepped out of her house backwards, still looking at her, trying to find something else to say. But what else could I say?
You have a fairy prisoner in your basement.
By the time I reached the street I was running.
Something followed me home.
The streets were busier now, and it was almost seven in the morning. Residential streets hummed with passing cars, early morning deliveries, and children hustling towards their pre-school clubs. With so many people on the streets, I did not feel any safer.
As I walked, I tried to connect Vince with the amazing things I had found out, tried to imagine him hunting things like that creature in Mary Rock’s basement through the shadowy places and forgotten buildings of this great, mysterious city. And as I remembered his warmth, his love, the look in his eye as he came in from one of his supposed late-night rehearsal sessions with his band—
Something brushed past me, just out of sight. I span around, ready to face anything, and instead there was only empty pavement. I was in front of a café filled with people having an early morning fry-up and tea, and several of them sitting at a window table stared at me. No one smiled.
I hurried on. I could feel attention upon me, a prickling on my neck, a cool tingle down my back. Traffic growled and tooted, people shouted, motorcycles grumbled, and in all that noise I still heard one whispered word:
Angie.
Only Vince called me Angie, and only when he wanted to piss me off. My name was Angelica, and that was what I liked.
I turned a full circle again, scanning the street and looking up to the rooftops. A shape shivered behind a window, shaking rapidly just out of sight. A shadow flitted from one roof to another, leaping along a ridge with the sun behind it. Looking into the rising sun, shielding my eyes, I could not quite make out what it was.
Maybe because of what I knew, I could sense so much more.
Or perhaps whatever was out there knew that I knew, and that was why it followed me. Stalking. Hunting. Letting me know that with the knowledge I now carried I might never be alone again.
I raised my hand for a taxi. It slowed, then sped up again as if the driver didn’t like the look of me.
I glanced in a shop window to see if I was crying or bloodied, and standing behind me I saw the reflection of a face I knew.
I turned quickly, gasping, “Vince!” and ready to embrace the man I loved. He’d lied to me for the six years of our relationship, but I was more than ready to forgive him. He had deceived me, perhaps believing that I was nowhere near ready to know what he knew. I’d prove him wrong. I’d tell him about Fat Frederick’s dead angel and Mary Rock’s barely-living fairy, and Vince would see my manic, ecstatic acceptance of this greater new world.
But the man standing behind me was not Vince. I didn’t know who he was, or what, but he stood so close that I would have smelled his breath, if he had any.
He examined me. I have never been so thoroughly analysed. He tilted his head to one side and looked me up and down, and I could feel his gaze brushing my heart.
“Don’t hurt me,” I whispered. All awareness of my surroundings was gone. I had no thought of help. Somewhere very far away I could hear traffic and see the vague, ghostly shapes of passing pedestrians, but in reality there was only him and me. His face was...forgettable. Even as I blinked I lost track, and saw him anew each time my eyes reopened. “Please don’t hurt me.”
He grinned. I was certain I would not forget that, even as his face faded from memory. I would never forget so many teeth.
Then the man leaned forward and smelled me, filling himself with my scent, before turning and losing himself in the crowd.
I did not even see him go.
I ran, like a scared little girl in a fairytale, all the way home.
The thing that sniffed me is still out there, and it knows me. I cannot let it scare me off.
I’m going to find Vince. My determination grows, and a desperate, deep part of me wishes he’d shared this part of his life so that we could have lived it together. That’s a big part of the reason I want to be with him once more. Because I love him, yes.
But also because I want us to share the adventure.
SOLE SURVIVORS
That final image caused me to recall the most terrifying seven hours of my life. It was his eyes. He didn’t look as though he’d spent nineteen days trapped underground in the mine, slowly starving, suffocating, breaking nails scratching desperately at rockfalls while he waited for the rescue teams to drill adjacent tunnels, avoiding flash floods, swallowed in the darkness when batteries finally ran out and the deep, endless black closed in at last. His face resembled that of a survivor, true. He had sunken cheeks and coal filth so ingrained I doubted he’d ever look clean again. But not his eyes. They were bright, gleaming.
Just like hers.
Thirty men and women had been trapped in the coal mine. It was a privately run business, the last working mine in South Wales, bravely hanging on to traditions and processes slaughtered by the Conservative government in the seventies and eighties. An explosion caused a cave-in, and the first few days were spent trying to establish whether there was even anyone left alive. They were almost quarter of a mile below the surface, and because the main shaft was still unstable, a hole was drilled directly down into the affected area. A fibre-optic cable was fed down, and those first haunting images of pale, desperate faces suddenly filled with hope went around the world.
There were fifteen survivors huddled there, praying for rescue.
Live coverage of the rescue attempt followed. Relatives of the fifteen were tracked down and interviewed, the engineers involved in the rescue operation becoming minor celebrities. I heard through a friend of a friend—these were the circles I moved in, after all—that the chief engineer had already signed an exclusive newspaper deal even before the main rescue shaft first broke through.
Food and drink was lowered. A doctor went down. Nineteen days after the disaster, news flashed around the world that the first of the fifteen trapped miners was being brought up.
One by one they pulled them out of the mine. It was covered live, with a global audience estimated, at its height, of almost a billion. I suppose good news has value after all. And even though I’m a jaded old fuck, I must admit even I shed a couple of tears.
It was the faces of the men and women as they came up. Like they’d been born again and were seeing the sky for the first time, the sun, the fluffy white clouds and the hundreds of family and friends who had been camped out at the pit head for two weeks.
The fifteenth miner surfaced. It was the ultimate feel-good story, cruel fate avoided and the Grim Reaper denied his full harvest. Celebrations at the rescue camp were exuberant and wild, and a famous image was born of a filthy, soot-covered woman holding her husband tight to her and laughing over his shoulder.
But it didn’t stop there.
They brought up a sixteenth survivor, a man, and everything seemed to change.
It was his eyes. Filled not with wonder and joy, but humour. As if he was laughing at us all.
Just like Jemima.
In October of 2012, three years ago, a train from London Paddington to Swansea derailed close to Bristol Parkway station. Someone had left a car on the line and then fled. There was CCTV footage, and a couple of witnesses, but no one was ever caught. There were whispers of terrorism, but general consensus settled on the notion that it was an idiotic prank gone wrong. Perhaps they’d intended moving the car before the train came along, or perhaps it had stalled during a dare.
I was sitting in the third carriage, working on a piece commissioned by a national triathlon magazine. I’d interviewed four ex-forces personnel who’d lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan and had then gone on to compete in an Ironman triathlon. I was proofing the piece and checking out some of the photos that had been commissioned, making sure my article sat well with them.
I’d been conscious of the woman across the narrow table from me for some time. An elderly lady, she’d tried catching my eye several times. I hated being rude. She wanted a conversation, that was all, and sometimes on train journeys I sought the same myself. More than one commission had come from casual chats with people at airports, train stations or in pubs or restaurants. But I had to get the article finished. I tried to keep to myself, but she was insistent.
“Looks very fascinating,” she said at last, nodding down at my tablet.
I sighed and sat back. She was right. It had been an inspiring job, because more often than not I was interviewing murderers and those left behind to grieve, politicians who could never give a straight answer, and the victims of disasters.
Three seconds later, before I could respond, we became victims ourselves.
The train juddered at first, then before I had a chance to think it jarred and shook so hard that I slammed forward against the table. Pain flared, a rib broke. The world seemed to lurch and then turn, and I slid sideways wondering why I was puking, I was never travel sick, I was so used to travelling that—
My tablet and the woman’s cup of scalding coffee flipped from the table and struck my shoulder and face. The tablet bruised my collarbone, the coffee burnt my left cheek and neck. I was moving by then, lifted up from the seat to crack my head on the overhead luggage rack. The woman bounced up and down again in front of me, and I thought, I don’t remember her wearing red.
Everything turned and twisted, glass shattered, metal crumpled, plastic tore and scraped and slashed, and I rolled, battered and mixed in with the wreckage, both mechanical and human.
When the train came to a standstill and everything fell still, the silence made me want to scream.
I didn’t lose consciousness. I have no idea why, because the pain from my ribs was exquisite. My head throbbed and my face was wet with blood. For a while I thought it was my own. Then I saw the woman above me, crushed between a table upright and a concertinaed seat. Her face was turned away from me, though it shouldn’t have been, and I remember spending a long time debating whether this was a good or bad thing. If her head hadn’t been twisted far around, I would have been forced to look into her dead gaze for those long, lonely hours between crash and rescue. It was the distorted version of a human body I had for company. Everything was wrong about the dead woman. No one was supposed to look like that. No one should have bled so much.
After a while the bleeding stopped. I found that I had one free hand, and I was able to wipe most of the mess from my face. But I couldn’t help swallowing some of it. Warm, sticky, I gagged and tried not to vomit again. Unable to turn my head, I hated the idea of choking on my own puke.
I lost track of time. Once, the wreckage moved with a jolt, and I thought someone was shifting it or cutting through to get me. But it must have been the wreck settling.
I tried to shout, but my mouth wasn’t working properly. Terror and pain had stolen my voice.
Hours passed. Trapped by a shattered train, I was constantly in fear of being crushed to death, or burning, or dying from my wounds. I couldn’t tell how badly I was hurt. Someone else was screaming, and that went on for what felt like forever.
They took me out eventually, as the sun was setting and I was starting to shiver uncontrollably. I’d been trapped for seven hours and had pissed myself. The dead woman’s blood had dried like a mask across my face, stiff and cloying.
They cheered when they brought me out, and I even managed to sit up a little and smile before the pain in my chest drove me down again. As they carried me on a stretcher towards a waiting ambulance, I saw a woman being helped out from the wreckage just ten feet from where I’d lain for so long. She was smiling, a soft, satisfied smile that disturbed me the moment I saw it. She did not have a scratch on her.
I’d learn later that her name was Jemima. That first moment I laid eyes on her I knew I would have to interview her.
I discovered more details later, when I was being checked over in hospital. Even though the train had been slowing on its approach to Bristol Parkway, once the engine derailed it ploughed on for almost quarter of a mile. Three carriages and the rear engine became detached, the remaining four rolled. Scores of people were injured. Hundreds poured from the wrecked train, helping hundreds more in acts of heroism that were talked about for weeks and months after.
By lunchtime, thirteen bodies had been recovered, and six people were confirmed still missing, including me.
At the end of the afternoon, when the crushed wreckage of the most badly damaged carriage had been sifted through, four more bodies were found. What was miraculous was the people found alive.
Three of them.
I was given a commission by the Guardian. I’d worked for them many times before, and I was friendly with the commissioning editor. She told me that Jemima had granted only one interview, and that I was the one.
It was an exclusive. That made me even more nervous than I already was.
Because there was something wrong. I didn’t understand why the media and public couldn’t see that. Was it just me? As well as the Woman Who Never Was, as someone on TV news had named Jemima—and we only had her assurance that that was her real name—she was also being called Miracle Girl. The girl part was pushing it, because she was easily forty years old. As for the miracle...I don’t know where that came from, but it didn’t seem to suit the circumstances at all.
Miracle implied survival against the odds.
Jemima had not survived. She had been born.
I met her in a hotel suite in central Bristol. They’d let her stay there free for several days, because it was good publicity for the hotel and she had claimed nowhere else to stay. She was drinking coffee when I entered her room, black and strong, unsweetened. She would have three cups during our short interview.
“So you’re the one I can talk to,” she said as I entered. Other than her, the room was deserted. I’d expected a publicist at least, clinging to her like some sort of fleshy parasite. But there was no one. The room was vast and silent, cooler than it should have been. I shivered as I crossed a desert of cream carpet to the chair set opposite her.
