Reality Bites (5 page)

Well, he knew where she had gone; he would just have to go after her and try to trace her.  To hell with the premonitions of doom, he was not getting anywhere trying to work it out anyway; he just did not have enough to go on.  Action, that’s what he needed, to
do
something.

He grabbed a jacket, his wallet and a phone and stalked purposefully out of the flat; he got as far as the outer door when he turned back to get his shoes only to realise that he had forgotten his key.

He had picked up quite a few skills in the last year including opening locked doors with a credit card.  The only problem was that Denny did not command the kind of salary that permitted having a credit card.  He had a video club card, but, unfortunately, it was cardboard.  He tossed it on the floor in disgust and kicked the door in.  In a testament to shoddy workmanship, the door fell off its hinges in one smooth movement.  Denny hoped that it was not a bad omen that he would be starting his journey with a foot full of splinters.

He had hobbled halfway to the station before he gave in and hailed a cab.  The driver was disgusted at the small fare (only two streets) and by the fact that Denny spent the journey with his shoes off picking bits of wood out of his toes and bleeding all over the seat.  Denny gave him a tenner to appease him.*

*[
Denny was the sort of wimp who never complained in restaurants, even if there was a rat in his salad.  And he had not even
ordered
a salad; he was strictly a steak and chips man.]

* * *

The station was closed; well it
was
two O’ clock in the morning. ‘Damned one horse town!’
 

He supposed he had not really thought this through; he had been carried away up to this point, and now he was stalled – for the next four hours until the station opened.  The sensible thing to do would be to lamely slope off back home and wait, but he could not bring himself to do it; it would be such a letdown, like taking a step backwards. He sat down on a bench to wait.

* * *

By the morning, he had collected quite a bit of change; taking off his shoes had earned him even more. He only wished he had had a violin case or even a scruffy hat.  Still he had made more than enough for a return ticket.

As the train pulled away, he did not notice the creeping darkness spreading over the streets he was leaving behind

After about ten minutes, Denny’s brain woke up, and he realised that he was travelling in the wrong direction; he must have got on the wrong train. ‘Damn!  Oh damn and hell and – bugger – bugger – bugger.’

He panicked, what the hell was he going to do?  Without thinking, he pulled the cord marked “Emergency Only” and, in much smaller letters, the injunction “Improper use will result in a fine”

As far as Denny was concerned, this
was
an emergency.  The train lurched and shuddered to a halt halfway through a tunnel.  Still operating on automatic or “stupid mode” as Tamar called it, he tried to open the door it was locked, as train doors are during journeys.  Had it been a real emergency such as the train being on fire this could have been a problem but apparently nobody had thought of this.

The automatic locking is presumably to prevent children, stupid people and the suicidal from leaping off a moving train. If you want to kill yourself, you will just have to jump off a bridge like normal people, just as long as you do not disrupt the trains.  (Of course if you really want to die by rail travel you could always risk the buffet car.)

He heard someone coming. ‘Oh hell!’ He fumbled and managed to open the window and scramble through; it was a bloody good job he was so thin, he thought.  He landed on the tracks and cut his leg and his hand. ‘I am
not
having a good day,’ he thought, and he ran, or rather limped quickly, back down the tunnel. 

After about twenty minutes, he realised that he was still in the dark. ‘This is a bloody long tunnel,’ he thought.  Perhaps he was going the wrong way.  The train had only just entered the tunnel before it had stopped, he was sure.
S
urely he should have been out by now.

He heard voices behind him; he turned and the voices stopped.  He carried on limping, and the voices started again, and underneath them, now that he was listening, he could hear footsteps.  He stopped and turned again, silence fell again.  One more episode of this and Denny lost his temper; he squared up to the shadows behind him.

‘Okay,’ he snapped, ‘who the hell are you?  I’ve had a bloody awful day so far, and it’s still only half past six in the morning. I’m just not in the mood to play “Grandmother’
s
footsteps” in the dark.  So what do you want?’

He said all this with hardly a quaver in his voice. (His acting skills were really coming along.)  The only response was a gust of silvery laughter and a blast of cold wind.

Ghosts
? He wondered and shrugged; Tamar had taught him to be unafraid of the ethereal.

‘If you’re going to be afraid of something’ she had said, ‘be afraid of the thing that’s solid enough to bash you over the head with a big stick.  A spirit can’t hurt you and mostly they don’t want to.’

He had taken her word for it; she ought to know he reasoned and wasn’t the world full of enough dangers to worry about.  It was nice to know there were some things he did not
have
to fear.

There was anyway, the – to Denny’s mind – far more pressing problem of where the hell he was.  Since he had not hit daylight yet and he was certain that he should have by now, clearly something had gone very wrong – par for the course really.  But he still had to work out what he had done; he was having that strange feeling of destiny again, as if he was being manipulated. The only thing he could do was carry on following the tracks. He looked down; the tracks were gone – Well, of
course
they were!  He would have been far more surprised if they had still been there. 

‘Oh well,’ he thought resignedly, and headed off in what he hoped was the right direction.  Since he now had no idea where he was trying to get to this made navigation a bit redundant.

He trudged on; the voices were still behind him murmuring constantly.  It was annoying, like listening to someone else’s Walkman on a bus.  He wondered if this were another nightmare; it had that same feeling and the nightmares had been so real.  He closed his eyes and tried to open them again in a futile attempt to wake himself up, which is impossible, when you are not, in fact, asleep.  It occurred to him that the only time you
think
you’re dreaming is when you’re not.
 
Apart from the voices (he wondered what would happen if he just turned round and charged at them) he felt strangely calm now; bored even.  The nightmarish feeling was ebbing, as was his frantic anxiety about Tamar.  He was almost sleepwalking. A cloud of shimmering moths lit up the darkness, and he watched them dazedly, the effect was almost hypnotic.  The voices behind him ceased to bother him, they felt almost soothing.  It no longer mattered where he was going or why as long as he kept on walking and he felt like he could walk forever.

* * *

Of course, forever is a long time.  Denny came to in a small room that was reminiscent of a cell. His head hurt, as if he had been drinking, as did his leg, foot and his hand, all of which had been thoughtfully bandaged by some unknown person.  He was lying on a camp bed; he got up and tried the door it was quite naturally locked. He decided that there was no point in shouting for help. He was locked in a cell, and presumably whoever had put him in there had done so deliberately and was, therefore, unlikely to respond to a cry for help by letting him out. Besides which, his head hurt too much; at least he was not tied up.

He sank down on the camp bed; it collapsed, trapping him inside.

‘Christ,’ he groaned.  ‘How much worse can this day get?’  He immediately regretted this since asking this question usually guarantees that any minute now you’re going to find out.

‘That depends on you,’ said a voice above him, ‘and how co-operative you’re willing to be.’ A hand reached down and helped Denny to extricate himself from the mangled bed.

‘Okay,’ said Denny, ‘I’ll buy it, although you might want to work on the voice – a little deeper perhaps; more Darth Vader and less Julian Clary; that is, if you expect to be taken seriously when you make statements like that.

The man stared coldly at him.

‘I was just saying.’

‘Hmm, I think that that
female
has had a bad effect on you.  Before you met her, I think you would have been properly frightened.’

‘Of
you
?’ Denny was scornful.

The man stepped into the light.  Denny took an involuntary step backward.  ‘Oh my God!’

‘No.’ the man gave an evil, fanged grin.  ‘Not
your
God.  But I do move in mysterious ways.’

Denny scanned the cell for an appropriate weapon.  He spotted a wooden chair and dived; he smashed it against the wall and it splintered.  If he had thought about it, he might have wondered why his adversary did not try to stop him.  When he plunged the broken chair leg into his heart to absolutely no effect, it became pretty obvious.

‘Oh, just look at that.’  The (presumed) vampire simpered in camp tones, pulling the piece of wood out disdainfully.  ‘A perfectly good shirt – ruined.’ He grinned and took Denny by the throat in an iron grip.  ‘A lesson,’ he said.  ‘I cannot be killed by any means that you possess, puny mortal.’

‘
Puny
mortal
?’ croaked Denny.  He was going for withering scorn, but since he was being choked to death the best he could manage was cracked gasping, which is not nearly the same. ‘Who writes your lines?’ he added caustically.

The vampire (or whatever he was) released him.  ‘You will stay here,’ he said. ‘You cannot be allowed to interfere with our plans.’

‘Why don’t you just kill me?’ rasped Denny, and immediately wished he had not.  What fatal flaw was it that made him say things like that?

‘Fool,’ said the vampire thing. ‘You have no idea what you are mixed up in, do you?  Well let’s just say I have my reasons.  If it is any comfort to you, you will die soon enough, but I do not have to explain my reasons to you.’

Denny remembered something.  ‘Tamar,’ he said, more to himself than anything else.

 His captor turned and grinned evilly at him.  ‘Tamar Black cannot save you,’ he sneered, ‘if she’s even still alive – which I doubt.’

‘She is,’ said Denny defiantly.  ‘She is,’ he whispered to himself.  ‘I’d know – I’m sure I would – I’d feel it.’

~ Chapter Nine ~

‘T
amar Black is dead, or she soon will be. We have to send another.’  The thin man addressed his cabal.

There was murmuring around the table.  ‘She’s not dead yet,’ spoke up one.

‘She may yet prevail,’ said another, ‘she is quite – remarkable.’

‘And who else is there to send anyway?’ said yet another.

‘There is one,’ said the thin man.  ‘He does not realise it yet, but he is already on his way to us.’

‘A
man
?’ said the first voice.  ‘But he cannot, only a woman can … and a woman of great power at that. It has to be her; this is what we decided.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said another voice, and there was some nodding.

‘All right, it’s got nothing to do with her being a woman; it just has to be
her
then. Only her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because – shut up!’

‘Because, idiots – she is the only one who has the power to stop the – “Master”,’ someone else interrupted.

‘Oh! – well why didn’t you just say so then?’

The thin man waved his arms for silence.  ‘Yes, yes, I am aware.  You have misunderstood me.  She is in trouble, and we must send someone to
help
her.  And
he
is the only one who can.’

‘How can you know this?’

‘Because he is the only one who will try.’

* * *

It was morning – just barely, but it was definitely getting lighter.  Stiles’ head started to nod – the coming dawn meant that the danger was passing. Stiles knew better than this really, but thirty five thousand years of human instinct* was taking over.

*[
This instinct is taken advantage of by burglars and hotel thieves the world over – when even the most nervous and paranoid of people, the kind who stay awake all night with a shotgun in their hands finally feel safe and fall asleep.  Of course, what usually happens to these people is that the dawn chorus then keeps them awake. – A phrase that sounds a lot more pleasant and musical than the reality of a single magpie cawing incessantly in the eaves (so that, when you look out of the window to throw a stone at it, you cannot even see it) and sounding remarkably like an old man clearing his throat.
]

A shadow fell across him and he leaped up brandishing a handful of smouldering straw.  The girl jumped backwards; he burnt his hand and dropped the straw, cursing.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said, shaking his fingers and blowing on them.

She came nearer.  ‘Here, let me see.’

He held out his hand cautiously.

‘You stayed up all night?’ she said.  ‘That’s so – chivalrous.’

Stiles felt suddenly tongue-tied.  She was so beautiful, and she was looking at him with … what was it, admiration? The close proximity of beautiful young women was not something that Stiles was used to in any circumstances.  And no woman of any kind, except his late wife, had ever looked at him with anything other than disinterest at best.

‘Oh – well,’ he stammered. ‘I um – not really – I just – it seemed – er …’

She was rummaging in a backpack, which seemed to be mainly full of weapons.  Eventually, to his relief, she brought out a roll of bandage and a small jar.  ‘Arnica,’ she said. ‘It’ll help with the pain.’

It did too; it was remarkable – like magic. (
Very
like magic, in fact.)  She bandaged up his hand.