Last Days (19 page)

He’d never seen Dan like this before. Kyle chose his words carefully, softened his voice. ‘Agreed. It was. But, mate, you have to admit, despite all the shit we’ve been through today, this is dynamite. I mean, we’ve been on two shoots, and on both of them we’ve picked something up on camera. How often does that happen? Never, that’s how often. It’s never happened as far as I know. Ever. To anyone with a camera rolling. A horror film from a big studio might get similar effects. But these aren’t effects.’

Dan closed his eyes and looked like he wanted to put his fingers in his ears too. ‘Kyle.’

‘And the interviews have been freaky, but it’s fantastic material. You could not make this up. It’s like we’ve been waiting our whole lives to get a piece of this.
Coven
and
Blood Frenzy
, we never got so much as a sniff of the paranormal. Some good interviews. Some nice shots of murder sites. Two cracking films. But this . . . this is on another level, mate. This is the making of us. This is the big time. From here on out, we will have officially made it.’

‘Agreed. But, Kyle, of the two former members of The Last Gathering we’ve filmed, one is dead, and the other lost his fucking leg this afternoon!’ Dan beseeched Kyle’s face for an explanation. It wasn’t forthcoming.

‘Dan. Dan. Dan. When we shoot a scene, we hope to achieve something. We have a goal. We want a disclosure that creates a story.
The
story. Agreed? Well we’re getting that every time. This is telling us more than we asked for. Gabriel 163

ADAM NEVILL

may have shot his bolt, but the farm told us things without him saying much of any use. We’re shooting one long take almost every time. This is too good to let go, mate. There is something about this story. This experience they all shared.

No one is dicking around or trying to make themselves look good. It’s like they are compelled to confess. How often have we seen that? Precisely. And you want to can it? You have got to be kidding me, big man.’

Dan stared at the floor. ‘Shit! I don’t know. I need to put some space between myself and this place, and then I need to have a good think.’

‘Your call. But I can’t do it without you. There’s no time

. . . no way I could replace you. We gotta be in America in two days.’ Kyle topped up Dan’s mug with rum. ‘And like you said, I have no choice. I’m thirty grand in the shit. I need this film.’

‘I know. I know, mate. It’s just . . . I don’t think I can.’

‘Sleep on it. Please. Don’t fucking do this to me. Dan?

Mate.’

‘There’s more.’

‘What?’

‘In the hospital, when you were outside talking to Max, I was wondering what the French guy who helped us was saying to the doctor. They were talking for ages. The guy was really getting worked up. So I asked the doctor about what the farmer had been saying. I was getting a hunch it might have been something about the farm.’

Kyle swallowed. ‘And?’

‘Doctor’s English wasn’t great, but the French guy from the village had been telling him that the birds never came back. Something like that. The birds never came back. To the 164

LAST DAYS

farm I’m guessing. And he said the dogs will never walk there, or go there.’

‘This is blowing my mind, Dan. It’s amazing.’

‘And then there’s this.’ Dan walked over to his bedside table and picked up his iPhone. ‘Message must have come in this afternoon. Didn’t even think to check it until you were having a shower. But it’s a message from Finger Mouse. It’s about the Clarendon Road rushes.’ Dan scrolled through a menu on his iPhone, then handed the phone to Kyle.

The message read:
Been calling you all day. You gotta see
this. While you two were filling your pants like a couple of
schoolgirls, there is some strange shit going down in the background. On three audio tracks. No way that’s ambient. You
must have played a CD. And the other guy in there with you,
the druggie that looks like he got up and walked out of a
sarcophagus at the British Museum, ain’t all there. It’s no
junkie. Blown up the image and bits of him are not there.

Missing. Transparent. How did you do it? Please tell me that
you did do it and are laughing right now? FM.

Neither of them were laughing. Dan blinked at Kyle in silent incomprehension. ‘What does he mean?’

Kyle felt himself go white. ‘Beats me.’

165

TEN

caen, normandy. 16 june 2011. 5 a.m.

There was no sun, only a forever of black cloud reaching from horizon to horizon above dark water and the dusty plain before it. Nothing grew there. A cold wind gusted across the grey dust, the ash and cinders, the still water.

His arrival in the emptiness did not go unnoticed. Because the raggedy figures upon the briny shore, where the oily waters lapped and fizzed and lapped and fizzed, raised themselves up wearily and onto their thin legs. Draped in remnants of cloth, the slender arms of these shabby silhouettes were raised to the sky and from unseen mouths came a faint wail.

There were no birds in the air; they formed the terrible flotsam upon the tide of the dead water. In their thousands they surged and flopped. A black flock of feather and bone, upon which the raggedy men descended to scoop them up with their scarecrow parts, and to offer them like treasures brought to a king by beggars.

Kyle came out of the dream, his face strewn with dried tears.

He had been dreaming for hours, but only remembered the last scene of some awful torment that ended by a great dead sea. But he did not wake fully. Could not have done.

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LAST DAYS

Bewildered by his passage from such strange sights, and confused by the unlit space about him, he could not understand where he was. There was a room in the distance, its door ajar. A thin brown light flickered around the outline of the doorway. From its rapid stutters the vague odour of things burned and still burning pulsed. Bonfire smells of autumn, the crackle of kindling damp with cold rain, the doused steam of blackened meats, the chill of wet stone.

He tried to move, but the thought failed to become motion.

There was no feeling in his limbs; just a numbness, a vacancy inside his joints. His breath failed to come out in more than shallow sucks and pants at the blackness before his eyes, as if some weight pressed upon his windpipe. Or maybe the chambers of his lungs were now too small for the task set them.

An absence of more than light hovered in the wings of his mind. Like a descent into the great cold depths of lightless oceans beneath icecaps and skies without stars, a curious unbreathable gravity pulled him down and down and down, through himself, then out of himself.

Struggling against the nothingness that tried to snuff out the little ember of his frantic awareness, he was suddenly and profoundly and absurdly aware of his hands, his feet. They seemed to redefine themselves from out of the darkness, without so much as a twitch, but he knew from their size and weight and unfamiliar lengths of finger and thumb, that they were not his hands. Nor were these his feet. Too thin and long, the cumbersome, lifeless feet hung over the mattress, as if his body had outgrown the bed of a child.

Within a sense of his own face, different contours of cheek bone and forehead and small mouth and longer teeth 167

ADAM NEVILL

suggested themselves. Long hair curled wiggish across his brow, about his jaw. It stank. Was oily, unwashed, dipped in spoiled water, rank upon the stained and musty pillow that cradled his skull. He couldn’t see it, but knew the pillow case was patterned with continents of aged stains.

He sank further into the darkness, beneath the unfamiliar body that had tremulously held him, like it tried to hold on to smoke within outspread fingers. Sank deeper into the void where the distant chaos of bird calls and the cries of men swirled around, far off but approaching. All attracted to his hapless sinking paralysis, his dropping off and away. And the swirling of this cacophony was driven from the screams of an animal within its heart. Swine bellows and guttural bleats rose from shaky jowls and a large mouth. A black tongue and yellow teeth. Wet, close . . .

And then he woke, and dropped. Fell from the air. But no more than a few inches, on to a bed. Where he bounced and snapped upright in a seizure that electrified his body into a sense of its former shape, its dimensions, its familiarity.

In the room . . . hotel . . . room . . . Caen . . . France.

He looked to his right and saw nothing. Raked his hands out to the sides and upwards. Was blind. Tried not to scream.

Then saw a little LED light wink against a wall; the phone charger. Another, a red speck in the lightless space up in the air, on the far side of the room; the standby light on the wall-mounted television.

The grinding fleshy machinery of grunts and buzz-saw whines made the air in his chest vibrate, made the darkness too alien for any thought of relief.
Jesus, that sound
. . .

S
noring
.
Only Dan
.
Thank God. Dan drunk and snoring
like an oaf.

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LAST DAYS

Lurching and falling from the bed, he scrabbled to his feet and staggered into the darkness. Arms outstretched, fingers fanned, he found a plaster wall.
Why is it so dark? The
temple. The air of the temple is still inside your eyes.
He nearly screamed.
Blackout curtains.
He remembered closing them the night before. They had them in hotels to cut out ambient light.
That’s why it’s so dark.

Relief sang through him. The dream, a nightmare, faded like a dim and incorrectly remembered photograph. That’s all it was and nothing more. The figures upon the walls of the temple, Gabriel’s terrible accident, half a bottle of spirits, exhaustion, an unfamiliar bed in a pitch-black room, Dan’s snoring, another country, another world . . .
Too much, too
much
. That’s why he’d had a nightmare. But why had he dropped on to his bed from out of the very air? That was new; he’d never experienced that before.
Part of the dream.

Like when you step off a kerb. The jolt, a shock
.

He clasped his hands together, rubbed them. They were his. His very own hands, and these were his feet: broad with bony toes. His hair was shaggy, but straight, not curly and unfamiliar like some mannequin’s wig.

His mouth was dry like it had been open for hours and thirst burned inside his body.

In the bathroom, he stared at himself under the welcome explosion of vanilla light before the spotless mirror. Confirmed himself with his blue-green eyes that girlfriends had loved. Shook the last traces of limb dislocation, of bone confusion, of flesh dismorphia from his mind. Gulped at the silvery clean water that gushed from the tap. Raised his wet face and turned back to the darkened doorway that led into the room and the bed he did not want to sleep in any more.

169

ADAM NEVILL

But turning towards the door, he glimpsed something in the mirror. A smudgy reflection of a mark on the wall opposite the washbasin.

Kyle turned. Moved to the series of dirty streaks above the towel rack. Shivered from what he assured himself was the cold of the tiles beneath his naked soles, tingling up his legs and across his goosing flesh, and not because of what assumed the outline of a boney thing with four skeletal legs on the wall.

No, now he was closer, it looked more like the imprint of a hand. With four thin fingers, curled inward at the last joint.

Cupping, or pulling, as if from beyond the wall.

A sudden whiff of old meat, like the moist underside of a pork chop he’d left for too long in his fridge at home, assailed his sinuses. He looked down at the towels, for an incrimin -

ating stain. They were fresh, clean, unused handtowels. And under the yellow light of the hotel bathroom, his blinking bafflement broke into comprehension of where he had smelled and seen such things before.

170

ELEVEN

mansfield street, marylebone,

london. 16 june 2011. 4 p.m.

‘Good morning, dear Kyle.’ Max must have been pressed against the other side of the door because the moment Kyle’s finger released the bell button, the executive producer stood in the doorway; a red velvet dressing gown over smart trousers and a white shirt complemented with a club tie and ruby cufflinks.

Max ushered Kyle into a long hallway where immaculate walls of cream silk intimidated with old-school swank. It was like being in an antechamber of heaven depicted by 1950s Hollywood. Scents of roses and polish clouded, an exclusive pollen bottled in another era. Long glass panels fitted into the ceiling cast intense, near phosphorescent light, making his scuffed engineer boots appear incongruous and uncomfortably noticeable against the gleaming blue-and-white marble floor. Periodically, little white plinths supported dark statuettes and artefacts made from stone. An ancient Persian vibe. And a vast gilt-edged mirror showed him every pore and bristle on his unkempt face.

‘Nice address, Max.’

‘Thank you.’

171

ADAM NEVILL

He’d run from Regent Street Tube station to Mansfield Road, and only slowed when he saw the size of the building Max lived in. He’d then waited downstairs to be summoned from a reception at least six times the size of his own flat, where a dark carpet, thick as bear fur, stretched to walls made from marble. A porter in silver livery called Max on the house phone to
announce him
. Kyle printed and signed his name in a desk ledger with leather covers, the size of a stamp album, before being escorted to the steel doors of the lifts, polished to mirrors.

Max’s information on the casualty list continued moments after he opened his front door. ‘Gabriel will be flown back to England in a few days, and transferred to a hospital. The operations have been a success, but he’s very poorly with an infection.’

Kyle winced. And swore an oath to visit Gabriel, though the idea made him uncomfortable as he experienced a shade of guilt about Gabriel’s accident; he had been too preoccupied with the shoot and too irritable with the old man to look after his interviewee. And his guilt was fattened by a feckless desire to now question Gabriel about what the doctor had told Dan about the birds and the dogs. A scene of Gabriel in a hospital bed, after surviving one of Sister Katherine’s traps, would be bizarre, tasteless and inappropriate, but also solid material for the film and too good to let go. But the impression of the bony hand on the bathroom wall he’d kept from Dan until the sun rose, by which time it had faded, considerably. They’d filmed the residue and fled.