No One Gets Out Alive (59 page)

Amber closed her eyes on it all.

Behind her closed eyes, deep within her mind, the red-black night leapt and was alive with movement. At the gate, even with her eyes shut tight, she plainly saw that more and more of
them
had come to stand like piecemeal relics risen on judgement day, their genders and identities erased by an age of suffering and decay. So many arms as slim as bamboo wavered in the air
as far as she could see. So many fingers reached for the blooded sky, like corn waving in a breeze, like the crucified, the gibbeted scarecrows left to the elements, to linger in suffering.

The end of the world.

Matches. Petrol. Burn it.

She opened her eyes to find the matches and remembered there was no light. Amber wasn’t sure if she was even awake. Was no longer certain where she was.

She placed the box upon what she hoped was grass, but the connection of the wooden chest upon the ground made a hollow knocking sound, as if it had fallen upon a stone floor.

She fumbled for the box of matches inside the pocket on the front of her hooded top. Her hands were real. The cardboard matchbox was real. She was real and warm and solid. ‘I’d
rather burn. You hear me, bitch? I’ll burn before you have me.’

A moving susurration, with a suggestion of a great weight and girth, began to circle her.

Amber slipped to her knees.

From inside the wooden box, a baby began to cry in a way that pierced her heart.

From the sides of the surrounding absence other unseen figures crawled across whatever she now sat upon in complete darkness. The crawlers wheezed, sucked at the air.

The baby cried with a consuming, engulfing distress; a sound from the beginning of time.

The circling movement about her position drew nearer.

Once the match was lit, at first it illumined nothing but her legs and the box. But then, beyond the flame, the air above the maize field appeared to lighten. She wondered if a red sun was
rising from the sea, up from the horizon to spread this hideously beautiful fire of crimson across the sky.

With her other hand she uncapped the petrol canister.

What is the time? Is dawn here for me?

Someone spoke, next to her ear. And she stifled a scream but dropped the match into the cold darkness where it doused. She did not turn her twitching head to see the face that had drawn so close
to utter, ‘Involved . . . you are . . .you said . . . not that simple . . . must understand . . . Not going . . . refuse. I said it. I said it . . . wouldn’t stop . . . and look . . .
what happened . . . the lights . . . even listening?’

Her arms were shaking so violently now, but her fear-weakened fingers managed to seize the handle of the can and then upend the nozzle over the purple curtained front of the box she had dropped
to the ground. The stench of petrol seemed to revive her, then make her nauseous.

‘I’m cold . . . I’m so cold . . . Hold me. I’m cold . . . I’m so cold . . . Hold me. I’m cold . . . I’m so cold . . . Hold me.’ The breath of the
girl was cold upon the nape of her neck.

The infant inside the box wailed anew. The newborn kicked and struggled for life behind the sopping purple curtain.

Black scales writhing in chitin. Black teeth on a thong. The arms of the bereaved raised to the ceiling of a black chapel. A withered man upon a pink bed, his eyes are open. A mother stands
up in polythene, her bulk mottled like the skin of a pudding.

What is the time?

Amber joined the babe in its misery and distress and horror, and she wept and felt her own mind sink away and give up its space to an urge that needed to scream until an artery popped and
sprayed behind her eyes.

The tightening coil, and its rasp across wet stone, was all but around her.

Her frail hands lit a second match. Dropped the flaring stick upon the tiny regal curtains of hell.

The fire licked petrol blue. Swayed and danced orange tips. And flared so fiercely she thought she was inside an explosion. The hair of her fringe crisped away with a crackle. Fire licked her
eyebrows. One leg caught fire. A sun’s warmth cupped her face.

A hissing of something dry and hollow followed the implosion of the spitting fire. Liquid dripped and fizzed in the grass about her legs. She slapped at the flames on her thigh.

Burning hair smoked the air.

Light.

She heard animal cries, bestial grunts, as if every field bordering the farmhouse were crowded with panicking livestock.

She slapped and slapped at her legs.

The small petrol-fuming pyre lit up the lawn nearby, but she refused to look into the crude shallow holes in which the black-boned crouched foetal and yawned. The land beyond was charred and red
with embers into forever, devastated like a great battlefield. She saw it for a moment. Distant stick figures tottered blind, felt their way through ruin.

Amber recoiled from the fire, and away from the activity in the flame-smothered box, from the small black head that rose to briefly gulp at the flames, as if in ecstasy. She fell to the ground
and rolled into the darkness to put out the flames on her legs.

‘Ashes in the water, ashes in the sea. We all jump up with a one, two, three.’ Amber didn’t know how long she had been singing to herself, but stopped when her
throat was dry enough to reduce her voice to a whisper.

Once the sun had gone down, the blue-black tumult below the passenger decks faded to black. Of the ocean she could see nothing, but the great heaving and occasional wallops against the hull of
the ship, so far below Deck 12, remained constant. Above her, the same infinite dark stretched, only pinpricked by stars so distant her dad had once told her that they were already dead. At the
time she had found the idea both awful and sad.

Despite her jumper, coat and the blanket she had wrapped around herself, the mid-Atlantic night air still beat against her body, bit her nose with cold, and stiffened her joints. But she
continued to sit alone on the balcony outside her cabin, content to stare into the darkness out there and inside herself. Only here, in such a cold and lightless place, did her thoughts find the
right space in which to expand and to cope with what had happened.

From the newspapers that had been brought on board in New York, she could see the story had now vanished from every tabloid and broadsheet. And for that she was glad. The story had never made
the front pages anyway. To her satisfaction, the fire in her home had only been treated as a novelty piece. Greater scandals and tragedies occupied the more prestigious and significant column
inches.
The Times
had shown a photograph of the blackened ruin of the farmhouse, the old picture of her walking into the inquest, and a still of the actress who played her in
Nine Days
in Hell
. The photographs were augmented with the headline: TRAGEDY CONTINUES FOR EDGEHILL ROAD GIRL. FIRE DESTROYS LUXURY HOME.

The articles mostly mentioned her success as a film producer, bestselling author, her reclusive existence following her escape from the notorious North Birmingham house, and the tragedy that
befell her plans to settle in South Devon. For once the media didn’t know anything else and appeared disinclined to just make things up.

Her representatives had said little and the journalists were probably too fatigued by her story to revisit her life in any great detail over a house fire. Online trolls had claimed the fire was
an obvious publicity stunt now that the theatrical run of her film was over, and that her exploitation of her story was exhausted. Others remarked upon the evidence of a curse without ever knowing
how close to the truth they were.

Remnants of what she and Josh had burned before the farmhouse would never be found. The ashes of her nemesis and its acolyte they had scattered in the Teignmouth Estuary to wash out to sea. It
was a measure they had devised in the hope that they could prevent such foul seeds taking root on land again. Perhaps they had even buried a God at sea. When she’d shared this thought with
Josh, he’d not said anything.

Josh had only begun to speak again two days after the sun had risen and bleached away that last night in the presence of the Maggie. And when he began to communicate he hadn’t questioned
Amber’s wishes to destroy the property. Instead, he had rediscovered those concealed resources that had performed so well for him in service, and had committed himself to a silent,
methodical, critical path that began with the disposal of an unnaturally long human body, and what was left of the effigy that had been obeyed so faithfully. The miserable trophies of the
thing’s constituency, that they had separated from the blackened effigy, they’d concealed inside a shoebox and buried the box in the corner of a local churchyard.

She and Josh had burned Fergal’s emaciated remains, and the charred remains of the idol of old Black Mag, in a metal skip. Josh had located the skip inside an empty feed barn near Newton
Abbot. Amber had not watched the cremation. Nor had she been expected to watch Josh’s smashing of the bones and teeth of the effigy that had survived incineration. Because it was not sawdust
or stuffing that they had found inside the burned idol. Amber had assisted Josh, with her face masked throughout the operation, with the sweeping of the ashes of their foes into dust pans, and then
into the plastic bags that they had later emptied into an outgoing tide from the end of a deserted jetty.

They left nothing behind.

Josh had then made sure that the fire in the farmhouse began in the kitchen, close to where
she
had lain. The incineration of Amber’s home was not viewed as suspicious by the
police; Josh’s expertise in such matters ensured the subtle tracks were covered. Amber’s solicitor was dealing with the insurance company over an electrical fire.

She had briefly wondered whether a priest could be paid to bless the ground, but had then realized that what had been buried in her home was probably much older than Christ and had been served
before the first Roman footfall on British soil. She was left hoping, desperately, that her salvation had been determined by something as crude as the exhuming and incineration of the relics and
remains that had followed her to Devon.

After they’d finished off her home and its unsightly intruders, Josh began his leave of absence from work. He’d didn’t know whether he would return to security duties, or what
he might do instead. Neither of them had been sure what they would do next. They had resided, mostly in silence and away from each other, in neighbouring hotel rooms for one week, and they had
waited, and waited, each dreading the fall of night to see what might happen in the darkness about their beds.

Nothing had happened. No nightmares had opened inside Amber’s dreaming mind, no desolate voices had called from beneath her windows, and no long, grubby figures had stood upright and
raised their blackened faces to grin at her. On the first night she’d slept eighteen hours. Only waking once when Josh checked on her.

Josh had struggled to communicate what he had experienced in the garden of the farmhouse. He had tried, but Amber realized that he was currently being forced to do what she had been forced to do
many years before: to question everything he had taken for granted, and believed, in life. And he too had been driven to wonder what else was out there, around them; where this torrid and
uncoordinated journey through life was headed, and what lay at the end of it. A man’s thoughts could not get much bigger.

But Josh had admitted that after they had left the garage that night, he had seen Fergal and Arthur Bennet, and other things that may have once been people; forms that no handgun offered any
protection against; things that were not there after the garden and sky had been briefly lit with a false red dawn.

Nothing had ever frightened him as much as what came to them within the darkness outside the rear walls of her house; nothing in the call of duty had shaken him in the same way before. His
presence had enraged Fergal and Bennet, he knew that much. And he had been sure that he had been only a boy when he could no longer find Amber in the darkness. He’d hoped to prevent them from
reaching her, but only half remembered being knocked around, then down, and finally savaged by what might have been dogs, or what had once been men, on a stone or cement surface that should have
been a grassy lawn beneath his body. He’d told Amber in the only way that seemed available to him, that he had ‘unravelled. Lost it. Thought I was a kid at school again. I was dragged
around the ground by someone with cold hands. My shirt was ripped off. I thought I was dead. They hit me hard. Think it was with a house brick. But I could still think, but not see. I thought
I’d been blinded. It was like hell.’

The bruises and gouges on his flesh had eventually faded. The septic bites she had cleaned and dressed for him had now healed. But Josh did not know where exactly he had been during that night;
he was certain he had not been in the garden that they had run into from the garage. Nor did he ever want to visit such a place again, and so he had agreed without complaint to the destruction of
the building where such impossible things had reappeared in his client’s life.

Eventually, Amber rose from the balcony lounger on stiff legs and sniffed. Brought a tissue to her eyes and nose. And slowly made her way back inside to the light and warmth of her cabin. She
would continue to sleep and eat inside there, to pass the time with small distractions, to accept sleep warily as if she was a sentry on watch for an unpredictable, patient enemy, and she would let
this ship take her wherever it went before she boarded another. And she would wait, and wait, and wait, until she knew where to go and what to do next.

It is with genuine fondness that I acknowledge the influence of the encyclopaedic work of the late Peter Haining and the late Dennis Bardens, who both wrote so enthrallingly
about apparitions. The absence of their books from my shelves would haunt me. The chilling, and near unbearably ghastly, true crime books of Howard Sounes (
Fred and Rose
), John Leake
(
The Vienna Woods Killer
), Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski (
The Crimes of Joseph Frizl
) were invaluable in my attempts at creating these killers, as were the studies of Martha
Stout (
The Myth of Sanity
) and Robert D. Hare (
Without Conscience
). P.V. Glob’s classic,
The Bog People
, offered a shrivelled hand in the service of creating Old
Black Mag’s history.