The Rain-Soaked Bride (28 page)

Toby turned and ran towards the wall.

d) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Shining let go of Fratfield’s shoulders but not before something struck him in his midriff and sent him skating across the tile floor.

‘August?’ April shouted. ‘Are you all right?’

That’s a good question
, he thought as he got to his feet, spinning around, trying to get a sense of whether whatever had attacked him was still close.

‘I’m fine,’ he replied, then felt the air around him shift as if something massive was surging towards him. He doubled over, trying to make himself a smaller target. Perhaps it helped, though he was still sent tumbling backwards, colliding with what felt like a chaise longue and falling behind it.

The room is still here, he thought, we can still interact with it. We can’t see it, but it’s physically here. Along with something else, something dangerous.

And what had happened to Rowlands? What had he found on the other side of the door?

e) Who knows?

Mark Rowlands stepped through the door only to find himself facing more darkness.

‘It’s the same out here,’ he shouted.

Out here?
It didn’t feel very much like outside. The sound of his voice was muffled as if he were stood in a small room.

‘Did you hear me?’ he shouted, still holding the door handle. He turned to step back into the room. ‘I said it’s …’

He was suddenly flooded by light as he stepped back inside. He momentarily screwed up his eyes in shock, opening them to find himself on a city street.

‘Impossible,’ he muttered to himself, even as the warmth of sunlight fell on his face, as real as anything he had ever experienced.

He squatted down and touched the tarmac beneath his feet, rough grit pressing into the tips of his fingers.

‘Impossible,’ he said again.

He turned around to find the street continuing behind him with no sign of the door he had just stepped through.

He rubbed at his face, unable to process what was happening to him.

He stared up and down the street. A familiar street. Very familiar.

A car drove past him. He watched it pass, a red sports car. He knew the car. He knew all of this.

The car parked up a short distance ahead and he watched a familiar man step out, look around and then cross the street.

The man, Rowlands knew, was called Napoleon Ayoade. Nigerian by descent, he had been in the UK for four years, part of a criminal chain running a network in human trafficking. He ruled an army of street kids through a mixture of fear and cash. The rod and the carrot. He claimed voodoo ancestry. He said he had demons on his side, the Devil watching his back. Rowlands hadn’t believed a word of it, of course. An opinion that had only slightly wavered when the man had nearly been the death of him.

All of this was years ago. What was he doing here now? It must be, as he had said before, some form of gas. He was lying on his back in Lufford Hall, dreaming everything.

He watched as Ayoade paused outside a large, red door, the staff access to a nightclub called Revolutions that the man used as cover.

Unable to restrain himself from mirroring the actions of the past, Rowlands waited until the man had entered the building then slowly followed after him.

He listened at the door, as he had all those years ago, then looked over to a tatty hatchback parked a couple of doors away where two of his fellow SOCA officers were sat observing the building. The one in the passenger seat, a middle-aged man called Philips that Rowlands had always looked up to, nodded. They had his back. Or at least, that was the plan; Rowlands knew they would arrive too late to save him a savage beating because he had the advantage of hindsight. He also knew that Philips would be dead of bowel cancer in three years’ time. History was where ghosts really lived. They filled it to the brim.

Rowlands opened the door and walked quietly up the dark stairwell that led to the offices above the club. His job was to check the location of Ayoade’s prisoners. The first thing Ayoade and his men would do on SOCA storming the building would be to kill them. These were men who left no wagging tongues. The powers that be were not willing to risk such a potential media shit-storm so it had been decided that Rowlands would enter the building first, the rest of the team on standby. He would locate the prisoners, if possible free them, if not then do his best to provide protection while the others came in from the front, all guns blazing. It was a mess. Badly conceived and barely planned. Rowlands was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth and he knew it. Their intelligence suggested that there were only three of the slavers in the building: Ayoade himself and two of his men. Still, the risk was higher than should have been countenanced.

But this time Rowlands had an advantage. He knew what was going to happen.

f) Fields outside Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Toby had gone over the wall, imagining the security system lighting up in the guardhouse, and dropped down into the open fields on the other side. Looking around for potential cover, he was forced to accept there was none until he got to a hedge that lined the far side of the field. He could run along the wall that lined the house, but that would still leave him exposed by the time Fratfield appeared. The far hedge was the only viable option.

He ran, aiming for the shortest line between the wall and the hedge. He forced himself to sprint as fast as he could, trying to control his breathing as he pushed his speed faster and faster across the cold, hard earth beneath his feet.

As he drew close to the hedge, he scanned along it, trying to find a break that he could force himself through to reach the relative safety of the other side. The foliage was dense, an advantage if he could only get through it. It was too high to jump and, by now, Fratfield must have reached the wall of Lufford Hall; Toby would be an obvious and easy target as he tried to throw himself over the top of some bushes. Spotting a small gap a few feet to his right, he changed direction and, squinting his eyes shut against the sharp branches, dived at it, hoping his momentum would help carry him part of the way through. He became wedged against the thick branches and they hooked and tore at his suit as he pulled himself through, adding countless new scratches and cuts to the mess the shower of glass from the chandelier had made of him. For one awful moment he thought he was going to be stuck, hanging there, unable to turn or defend himself as Fratfield and the curse he brought with him approached from behind. Then, with an almighty shake, he pierced the hedge, pulling himself along the ground on the other side until his legs were free. He turned to look through the hole he had left behind. Fratfield was stood on the far side of the field; there was no sign of the curse spirit.

Toby ran along the hedge. A few hundred yards away there was the cover of trees that ran along the road to Alcester. Once there he would be relatively safe from gunfire at least.

His skin was burning as sweat poured into open wounds. His muscles were already cramping after having to force himself so hard. Bruises were erupting at every point he had fallen or been hit by the various inanimate objects that had been aimed at him. He was already struggling and the pursuit had only just begun.

g) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Shining reached out to the chaise longue next to him, rubbing his hand against its upholstery, trying to ground himself in the reality of it.

‘There’s something else in here with us,’ he said. ‘It just sent me flying. I’m OK but you need to prepare yourselves for it. I don’t think it’s the major threat but it—’

‘What sort of something?’ Spang cried. ‘What is it? What is it going to do to us?’

Then he screamed, the little reserve he had maintained completely gone now as the presence in the dark came for him.

‘It’s got me!’ he shouted. ‘It’s got me!’ As he continued to scream, the sound soared above them, as if the banker was being dragged through the air. Then, with a finality that chilled Shining, the sound cut off, replaced by a faint gurgling sound and then a rush of air and a crash as Spang’s body was dropped onto the remains of the chandelier.

The whole room erupted in panicked shouting, and Shining felt the force well up around them as, one by one, the panicked sounds were cut off in the dark.

‘Shut up!’ he roared. ‘For the sake of your lives, shut up!’

Silence fell once more. Though whether through his advice or simply because there was nobody left to make a noise, Shining couldn’t tell.

‘I think it tracks sound,’ he whispered, proven accurate as something collided with the chaise longue and sent him back against the far wall where, blacking out, he slumped to the floor, unconscious.

h) Who knows?

Rowlands moved quietly through his memory of the rooms above the nightclub. He held the layout of the building in his mind. It was easy enough, he would never forget this place for as long as he lived. There was a main room at the rear which Ayoade used partly as an office and partly as a recreational room. It had a large TV, games console and bar. They had found a cabinet filled with coke and pills. It was here that Ayoade like to entertain. Sometimes he would invite girls up from the club, sometimes he would just drag one of the slaves out from the cells he kept them in, waiting to have them shipped out to clients. Those cells were to Rowlands’ left at the top of the stairs, Ayoade and his men would be to his right.

Last time he had moved towards the cells, determined to fulfil his mission. That was where –
the things, the invisible things
– the gang had set on him. Men they hadn’t accounted for. He had only just survived, his backup arriving, storming the building and dragging him to safety. They had managed to save some of the prisoners. The gang that attacked Rowlands –
not a gang, something in the air
– had made their presence felt there too. They had torn into the captives with animalistic violence.

This time he went to the right.

He pulled out his firearm and walked quietly but purposefully towards Ayoade’s room.

Outside the door, he could hear the three men inside, laughing over the sound of a driving game on the console.

He took a measured breath, turned the handle on the door and burst inside.

He fired as soon as he had the target, taking out both of Ayoade’s men first then the man himself. The slaver slumped back in his leather sofa, a bullet wound like a third eye, weeping red into the thick curls of his beard.

‘Job done,’ Rowlands said, turning to leave the room as something unseen rushed along the corridor at him, the air whipping through his hair like the sign of an oncoming train.

‘Not again!’ Rowlands shouted. ‘Not again!’ Firing his gun at nothing even as he felt himself lifted up from the floor and forced back along the corridor towards a window that, he remembered, looked down on the delivery access for the club.

His back collided with the frame and it cracked beneath his weight. But he was damned if he was going to go down so easily. You could do as you liked in dreams, he thought, grabbing at the edges of the window and pushing himself against the pressure of whatever it was that was attacking him. It was as if someone had aimed an aeroplane engine along the hallway, the wind forcing the skin on his face to peel back, tugging his mouth into a distorted rictus.

But it’s a dream, he insisted to himself, and I’m damned if I’m going to give in to dreams.

He imagined his fingers digging into the frame of the window, nails piercing wood and plaster. He lowered his centre of gravity, bending his legs and summoning all the strength he could muster (which was infinite, he decided; how could you have limits in your own head?) and forced himself forward, straightening his legs and jumping back into the corridor.

He swung his arms against the wind, stamping his feet down with every step, imagining he was an immovable object, a rock around which the river of air would be forced to flow. It was easy enough. After all, hadn’t he been accused of having just such an attitude before now? He was the man who would not be moved.

Then the air began to alter its density. The steady flow shifted around him, forming dense bands that buffeted against him, trying to make him lose his balance, to push him back.

He roared with the effort, desperately trying to visualise his feet as concrete or iron, anchors against the flow. He turned on his side, making himself a smaller obstruction, cutting down resistance.

The pockets of denser air continued to come at him and he pushed the memories of his original beating from his mind. There was no way that, in the real world, you could be beaten up by wind. Ayoade had been full of shit. He had been a showman, like all gangsters, spreading lies about his abilities, encouraging fear. You couldn’t summon spirits from the air. Rowlands wouldn’t accept it. He believed in the solid. In the real. In an enemy he could see. An enemy he could shoot.

He cried out as an invisible fist hit him low in his abdomen. It wasn’t real, he repeated. It was a dream. It was just fantasies from his mind.

Another blow, this time to the side of his head and he spun back a few feet, losing ground he had fought hard to gain.

This was ridiculous. He couldn’t feel pain, he couldn’t reel from fantasy. He forced himself to push on. He focused his eyes, now streaming, on the end of the corridor. If he could just get there, he would be by the cells in which Ayoade kept his prisoners. Two rooms rammed full with people who had been lifted out of their lives, forced to sleep like animals on the floor with an overflowing bucket of waste in the corner. That had been real, he told himself. Pain, misery and shit. They were constants in this world.

He. Would. Not. Give. In.

Another blow, this time hitting his leg and he heard it crack, a bone in his thigh splintering as if it had been pounded on by a hammer.

A hammer that did not exist.

He screamed and continued to force his weight onto the broken leg, pain pulsing up through him, nausea and delirium.