Relics (11 page)

Perry looked at his colleague.

‘I’ve noticed the same thing,’ he said. ‘Up until a couple of days ago enclosed spaces never bothered me, but working down here . . .’ He allowed the sentence to trail off as the lights flickered once more.

This time the power was not restored immediately.

‘I’m going to have a look at that blasted generator,’ said Perry, getting to his feet. He rubbed his hands together, removing the dust and dirt. He set off back towards the shaft and started clambering up the rope ladder. As he did so he felt as if his legs were made of lead. Each step up seemed a monumental effort, as if all the strength had been sucked from him. Halfway up he actually groaned aloud and stood still, sucking in lungfuls of air so cold it seared his throat and made him feel as if he were being strangled.

The lights finally came back on, and in the muted glow Perry saw that his hands had turned a vivid shade of blue, as if they were badly bruised all over.

With horror, he realized that he had little feeling left in them.

He began to climb, his progress agonizingly slow, the cold seeping through him all the time until he feared he would simply seize up. It felt as if someone had dipped his hands in iced water and held them there. He managed to hook his numb fingers around each successive rung, but the effort was almost too much.

The thought of that needle-sharp stake at the bottom of the pit made him even more fearful and he closed his eyes, trying to drive away the vision of Phillip Swanson’s skewered body as it had been lifted from the shaft what seemed an eternity ago.

He was just over halfway up the ladder now.

Some fifty feet from the bottom of the shaft.

And the stake.

He continued to climb, wondering now if he might be better off going back down. At least if he fell from lower down he ran less risk of badly hurting himself. But from fifty feet, he courted serious injury.

Even death.

Rung by rung he kept on climbing, however, sensing a little more feeling in his hands now. A sudden surge of relief swept through him and he urged himself on, confident now that he would reach the top of the shaft.

Perhaps it was over-confidence which caused him to slip.

He shouted in fear as one foot slipped off a rung.

Clutching the ladder with one hand, Perry desperately shot out searching fingers and succeeded in closing them around a length of the thick rope which had been suspended by the ladder as a safety precaution.

Above him he could see a vague circle of daylight. He guessed that he had thirty feet or less to climb.

Summoning up his last reserves of strength, he began struggling upward again, soon finding it a little easier. Nevertheless, he moved with an almost robotic rigidity, unable to escape the enveloping chill which squeezed tightly around him like a constricting snake.

Twenty feet to the surface.

His breath was coming in gasps now.

Ten feet.

Daylight washed over him as he emerged from the shaft, perspiration running down his face despite the cold.

Perry slowly straightened up, his entire body shaking. He leant against the generator for a moment, composing himself, thankful that no one asked him what was wrong. The others on the site were too busy with their own work to notice him. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow, looking around the site, his expression wrinkling into a frown.

For fifty feet all around the shaft the grass and bushes were blackened and withered, as if they had been sprayed with some deadly poison.

Clare Nichols pulled the covers more tightly around herself, trying to keep out the chill which seemed to have filled her bedroom. Each time she exhaled she expected to see her breath clouding in front of her, but this did not happen. Perhaps, she told herself, she was imagining it. Perhaps the room was really warm. Perhaps she was still dreaming.

She put her hand out from beneath the bedding just long enough to feel that the air was, indeed, cold. Clare wondered about calling her mother and asking if she could have more blankets on her bed. The added warmth might at least keep the cold away.

It wouldn’t keep the nightmares away, though.

She lay on her back staring blankly at the ceiling, feeling tired but not daring to drop off to sleep again. If she slept, she feared, she would return to the nightmare which had woken her just minutes before. Not with a scream or a cry of terror but with a numbing coldness which seemed to seep through every fibre of her body. Her eyelids flickered closed but she blinked hard, trying to keep herself awake, frightened of what waited for her beyond the boundaries of sleep. Frightened of the creature which crouched in her subconscious and had appeared so unexpectedly for the first time this evening. She’d had nightmares before, although she wasn’t quite sure that the dream she’d experienced less than ten minutes before could be classed as a nightmare. But a nightmare was a bad dream, wasn’t it? And this had been bad.

In her dream, Clare had been with several other children, none of whom she recognized. It had been dark and they had been as frightened as she because someone or something had been following them. Chasing them through the darkness, drawing closer all the time, until finally they had been unable to run any further and had been forced to turn and face their pursuer. The dark shape had run screaming at
her
, its clawed hands outstretched towards her throat. The worst thing was, she hadn’t even been able to see its face.

But despite that, Clare had sensed something horribly familiar about it.

She
knew
this creature from somewhere and it knew her. And wanted her.

Now she lay in bed, her breath coming in short gasps, trying to keep awake so that the creature couldn’t pursue her again and perhaps finally catch her this time.

She heard the sound of soft footfalls on the stairs and pulled the sheet tighter up around her face. The door of her bedroom opened a fraction, light from the landing spilling through the crack, and beyond it she saw a dark shadow.

‘Clare.’

She recognized her mother’s voice but she didn’t relax. She kept the sheets pulled up and screwed tightly between her fists.

‘Are you asleep, darling?’ her mother asked, but she didn’t answer, and after a second or two the door closed again. The room was dark once more. Should she call out? Tell her mother about the nightmare? She decided not to and pulled the sheets up still more, wrapping them around her head until she resembled a nun, with only her face visible.

Her eyes flickered again, and this time she could not fight the part of her mind which wanted sleep. As she drifted into oblivion she had one fleeting thought.

Would the creature come for her again?

And, if it did, would she see its face this time? The face which she felt she already knew . . .

The van was parked in the hedgerow with its lights off. So well hidden that Rob Hardy almost drove past it. He stepped on his brakes and brought the Vauxhall 1100 to a halt on the other side of the road. He switched off his lights and his engine.

He turned to see Mick Ferguson clambering out of the van and heading across the road towards him. Hardy swung himself out from behind the wheel and greeted the other man.

‘You took your fucking time,’ Ferguson grunted. ‘I’ve been freezing my bollocks off in that van for the last twenty minutes.’

Hardy shrugged.

‘Have you got them?’ the other man asked, smiling as he saw Hardy reach into the back of his car and grasp a well-secured sack which he dragged free. A chorus of squeals and whines came from inside and Ferguson looked at his companion approvingly. Then his eyes shifted back to the sack, which was twisting and writhing as if it were alive. The two men walked back across the deserted road, satisfied that no more traffic would come this way at such a late hour. It was well past one a.m. and they were more than three miles outside Longfield. No danger of any interference from the law this far out, Ferguson told himself.

They reached the van and he fumbled in his pocket for the keys to unlock the two rear doors, blowing on his hands in an attempt to restore some of the circulation, his breath forming gossamer clouds before him. Hardy, still gripping the sack in one hand, climbed over the nearby fence into the field beyond and trudged about fifty yards through the slippery mud, pulling a torch from his belt. He directed the beam at the sack, watching its frenzied movements and listening to the cacophony of noise from inside which now seemed to be growing to a fever pitch. He jabbed it with his torch and chuckled.

From the direction of the road he heard a loud bark, followed by Ferguson’s gruff voice, snarling a command for silence which went virtually unheeded. Hardy turned the torch towards his companion, feeling his own flesh rise into goose-pimples as he caught sight of the dog which Ferguson held securely on a chain as thick as his wrist.

The albino pit bull terrier pulled against the strong links, restrained by a metal collar. The torch light reflected eerily in its pink eyes, turning them the colour of boiling blood. Its lips slid back over huge and savagely sharp teeth. It was the first time Hardy had seen the beast and he was suitably impressed.

When Ferguson was about ten yards away he stopped, flicking off his own torch when the moon emerged from behind a bank of cloud, giving them all the natural light they needed. He held onto the chain with both hands, then nodded to his companion, who untied the sack and reached in, his hand protected by a thick gardening glove.

From within he pulled a spitting, rasping tomcat. Like some malevolent magician, Hardy removed the creature from the sack, gripping it by the neck, ignoring its frenzied attempts to scratch him.

‘Now let’s see how good this dog really is,’ Ferguson said.

Hardy hurled the cat towards him.

No sooner had the cat hit the wet earth than the dog was upon it.

Both men watched fascinated, as the terrier’s jaws grasped the bewildered cat’s right front leg and the dog pulled with all its strength. Most of the cat’s limb was torn off in the savage assault and the animal toppled over, blood spraying from the stump, its anger now transformed into terror and pain as the pit bull struck again. This time its teeth closed around the cat’s head. The steel-trap jaws crushed the helpless animal’s skull into pulp as the dog shook its head madly back and forth, ripping away half of the cat’s head. A sticky mass of blood and brain flooded from the massive bite and the terrier, apparently unconcerned that its victim was already dead, savaged the twitching body again, tearing the stomach wall open and ripping several knotted lengths of intestine free. Blood sprayed from them, some of it spattering Hardy, but he seemed barely aware of it. He merely reached into the sack and hauled out another cat.

This one was scarcely more than a kitten and a terrier needed only one savage bite to all but tear the little animal in two.

Ferguson chuckled as he watched the destruction which his mad beast wrought, keeping a firm grip on the chain as the dog tossed one half of the dead kitten into the air.

Hardy needed both bands for the next occupant of the sack.

While the terrier tore what remained of the kitten into blood-soaked confetti, he pulled a small labrador from the mèlée inside the hessian prison. The animal had its jaws firmly bound with strong tape. Hardy seized one end of the tape and tugged mightily. There was a sound like tearing paper as the sticky-backed binding came free, ripping tufts of hair from the dog’s muzzle with it. The animal yelped in pain and fear, barking loudly as Hardy kicked it hard in the side, pushing it towards the waiting terrier.

The albino launched itself at the labrador and ripped off one ear with a single bite of its powerful jaws. The stricken dog howled and tried to bite its opponent, but this only seemed to inflame the albino more and it struck upwards at the labrador’s belly, its teeth shearing through fur and flesh until it reached the soft entrails. The stomach wall burst open and the terrier pulled several lengths of throbbing intestine free. Blood erupted from the hideous gash and the labrador fell forward onto its front legs, helpless now as the pit bull seized it by the throat, almost severing its head, so awesomely savage was the attack. The spurts of blood looked black in the moonlight and both men watched in awe as the albino, now drenched in the dark fluid, tore ferociously at the body of its newest victim. The smell of slaughter was strong in the air, mingling with the pungent stench of excrement.

The terrier leapt and writhed amidst the carnage it had wrought, inflamed to the point of madness by the blood, until it was exhausted. Only then did Ferguson attempt to grab it by the back of the neck and secure its muzzle. The beast almost twisted from his grasp, its body was so slippery with blood, but he held onto its collar firmly and succeeded in fixing the restrainer over the deadly jaws.

‘I’ll get rid of these,’ said Hardy, prodding the remains of the dead pets with the toe of his shoe. He began lifting the tom remains back into the sack, blood soaking through the coarse material. ‘I’ll bury them somewhere.’

Ferguson grunted his approval.

‘That’s a hell of a dog, Mick,’ Hardy said, looking at the blood-spattered albino terrier.

‘Yeah, that mad fucker’s going to make me a lot of money. If you’ve got any sense you’ll have something on him when he fights.’

Hardy nodded.

‘Just remember, Rob, I don’t want anyone else to know about him, not yet,’ Ferguson reminded his companion. He turned and headed back towards his van, dragging the dog with him.

The moon cast a weak, silvery light over the deserted landscape.

The blood which covered the ground glistened blackly in the pale glow.

The rabbit was dying.

It lay on its side with its eyes closed, only the barely perceptible movement of its chest signalling that any life still remained.