The Overnight (48 page)

Until he takes a guarded pace he's able to believe he's seeing merely fog and darkness. As he shifts his weight, however, the tarmac under the hem of the marquee of fog blackens and grows visibly wetter. When he retreats he hears a muffled sucking sound behind him. He swivels in time to see moisture welling up to meet the edge of the fog, and then he has to fling his arms wide to maintain his balance as he feels the tarmac underfoot dip towards the jagged watery perimeter. He stands his ground, but that's no solution. All around him, lazily but relentlessly, the tarmac has begun to sink.

He twists around wildly, perhaps enough to disturb the fog, which withdraws far enough to let him glimpse a tree to his right He can see nothing else as solid. The tarmac beneath his feet is inclining itself like the deck of a ship towards a surge of black moisture as long and as uneven as the edge of the fog, which may be hiding more of it. Water oozes up outside the concrete rim that boxes in the strip of grass where the tree and its companions are planted. He flings out a hand as if he's clutching for a lifeline and makes a dash that fills his mouth with the stale taste of fog. He staggers coughing onto the grass and closes both hands around the trunk.

It's no thicker than a small child's arm. Beneath the ragged grass scattered with rotting leaves the ground is bony, obviously with roots. Are there insects or spiders in the branches? He hasn't finished spluttering out fog when his skin starts to crawl. It feels as if something akin to electricity is swarming over him. There's no discernible reason, yet he seems to hear a faint but piercing whine or buzz that reminds him of mosquitoes. As soon as he has caught his breath he stumbles to the middle tree and leans against the discouragingly slender trunk.

He won't loiter any longer than is necessary. The last few minutes have exhausted him so much that he has no idea what happened. His confusion is letting unwelcome thoughts into his head; the image of being supported by a tree between two others threatens to become unforgivably blasphemous. He makes himself stand unaided, as a man should. He's turning his head minutely in search of the bookshop, and willing Woody to help by uttering any kind of sound, when an object drops on his left wrist.

The object is black and glistening and unappealingly shapeless. It must be the remains of a leaf, Greg tells himself, glancing upwards as he shakes it off. His gaze snags on the first tree, however. A few leaves still cling to it, and the undersides of all of them are turned towards him. They're pallid as the fog; at least, the little that's visible is. Most of the foliage is covered if not encrusted with insects. The same, he sees, is true of the branches above him, on which a dripping blackened swarm of crawlers of no species he would like to name has started to demonstrate how flimsily attached portions of some of them are. For a moment he imagines that the trunk is shivering with the activity overhead, and then he realises that a mass of insects is squeezing out of cracks in the bark and flooding down the tree towards him.

He hurls himself away from the infested trunk, but his skin persists in crawling and prickling. Even if he can't see what's there, he's sure that insects are biting him—draining his strength. At first he thinks that's why his legs give way before he has taken a proper step: he's poisoned, he's weakened. But the soaked ground has yielded, not him. He's stronger than it is, and he almost shouts a challenge as it drags his ankles down. Before he can draw breath, he's up to his shins, his calves, his knees in icy glutinous mud.

He won't let the sensation cow him. While he's alive he can fight. His fingers scrabble at the earth where the tree's roots ought to be, but they must be clustered on the far side of the trunk. Mud grates under his nails as his feet plunge deeper, burying his chest and dragging his hands out of reach of the concrete rim of the stretch of grass. The fog stoops hugely to press him down. There are handholds to his left—two domed greyish rocks. By throwing all his weight in their direction he manages to grasp both.

His right hand can't sustain its hold. It slithers down the rock and uncovers its furrowed brow before his fingertips catch on the lower lids of both eyes full of mud. As he struggles to let go, his other hand claws all the way down the face of the second man he last saw reluctantly quitting his chair in the shop. Greg's fingers land on the bottom lip, tugging the slack mouth into a wide idiotic grin. He recoils, nauseated by the spectacle, and the corpses submerge into the morass as his shoulders follow them. He makes one last desperate grab for anything that may help, but the grass is as slippery as a slug. He thinks he can feel his body merging with the ground, which is worse than a marsh. The hungry gelid substance is digesting him. This is pointless, he wants to scream. It's stupid beyond words. He even opens his mouth, but mud drives his protest back inside him and fills his ears with a liquid hiss like a gigantic eager Yes.

Is he watching a religious channel or a scientific one? Perhaps the latter, since it seems to be dealing with a form of life so primitive it has little consciousness of anything except itself. It splits off portions of itself for companionship, but is so hostile to any other creatures and in particular the threat their intelligence represents that it reduces them to its own state in order to consume them. Yet the origin of life and of religion appears to be involved as well—the lives the shapeless entity creates out of itself, and the savage worship it attracts, simply to reward any sacrifice by engulfing the worshippers too. Only one, Woody keeps thinking or hearing, only one. How can the screen be conveying all this to him when he's unable to see any image on it beyond a blurred restlessness? It occurs to him that this is the merest fraction of the entity under consideration, so small a part and so close to the screen that he's incapable of focusing, or his mind is. The idea is enough to startle him awake.

He is indeed sitting in his chair below the screen, but it shows nothing like his dream. He rubs his eyes and wonders how long he has been asleep: long enough to have dreamed all manner of disasters—power failures, Agnes trapped in the elevator, mutineers abandoning the store. Every quadrant of the screen shows people diligently shelving, though for the moment he can't see who is who. A glance at his watch tells him that the sun will soon be up. He feels abandoned for having slept, but at least nobody has taken that as an excuse to slack. He reaches for the phone and thumbs the button for the speakers. "You're doing good, guys. Keep this up and—"

All the figures crouched in front of the shelves raise their blurred heads, trailing veils of grey. He has the impression that they're about to rise to their feet to celebrate his awakening, but the quiver that passes through them all sends them crowding through the aisles without having gained the least stature. He's unable to discern anything else about them, not least because the images on the screen are wavering like water that's about to yield up a secret. He can't be seeing the figures squeeze one after another under the door that leads up to the staffroom. The images stabilise, revealing that the store is far less brightly lit than he thought he just saw. Nevertheless the light through the windows is enough to show that the shelves have been ransacked, strewing books the length of every aisle.

Rage and dismay are all he feels or thinks. He stands up so fast that his chair slams into a filing cabinet with a clang like a rusty bell. He's stalking to the door when he realises that if the power failure is real, everything else must have happened too. He's still shut in, except that when he wrenches at the handle the door swings open at once.

Every computer in the outer office is switched on. Each screen displays a muddy blur rather too reminiscent of his dream. When he glances back he sees that's true of the security monitor as well. Their illumination is what matters, and he lets it urge him across the office into the staffroom, which is darker. "Are you there, Ray?" he shouts. "What's the latest with the fuses?"

He hears movement down the unlit stairs. It sounds like a herd of soft bodies shuffling about in the darkness, or a mass as large as the lobby slithering over the floor. Just now he isn't anxious to discover any more about it. He hurries past the table and the stagnant brimming sink into the stockroom.

The entrance to the aisle is defined by outlines of racks the colour of dim fog, but beyond them is little besides darkness. That needn't faze him if he walks straight surely he's sufficiently awake—but he has taken only enough steps to lose count when he cracks his elbow on the corner of a metal shelf. This simply enrages him further. He swings around and walks backwards, guiding himself by the silhouettes of shelves against the glow from the office. He has no idea why the light is shifting, nor does he care. All that matters for the moment is to set Agnes free.

He pilots himself backwards by grabbing the edges of shelves until he arrives at the doors to the top of the elevator shaft. He gropes past them and finds the banister above the stairs. Has the soft shuffling mounted the other staircase? In a fury he clings to the banister and tramps downwards, faster once he has gauged the depth of the treads. The banister ends, and he holds onto it while he plants his feet on the floor of the lobby and turns to face the elevator. "Agnes?" he shouts, and when there's no response "Anyes."

Even this brings no answer. He hopes that's because she has fallen asleep. He's about to knock on the doors as a preamble to trying to part them when he notices a thread of dimness on the far side of the lobby. It's beneath the delivery doors, which should provide all the light he needs.

He hurries through the empty blackness and shoves at the bar. It feels rusty, but after a second's resistance it gives with a clank, flooding the lobby with illumination not unlike clouded moonlight. He leans on the right-hand door until it jams too wide for its metal arm to haul it shut, and then he runs back to the elevator. He takes a deep breath that tastes of fog and braces himself to exert all his strength. Digging his fingertips between the door and the frame, he strains to increase the gap. In a moment the door slides all the way open.

Why couldn't Nigel have done that? Admittedly he still has to deal with the door of the elevator. It's just as accommodating, however. He almost wishes it were not, given what it reveals. Agnes is standing upright only because she's trapped against the elevator wall by a trolley in front of a pallet truck. Most of the books from the trolley are scattered across the floor. They resemble lumps of the mud that covers Agnes, not least her blindly gaping face, and fills her nose and mouth.

It's too much. His feelings are exhausted. All that's in his head is the knowledge that anyone who sees Agnes will know more happened here overnight than simple failure and walkouts and vandalism. He drags the trolley out of the elevator and catches her as she topples forward. Did her eyelids flicker? No, the light changed because its source moved. As he swings around, cradling Agnes by her shoulders, it recedes further and he hears a choked snuffle of brakes.

"Wait," he shouts, feeling as though his brashness has robbed Agnes of peace. He slips his other arm behind her knees to lift her. She's so light his eyes blur. Whoever's outside will take her wherever she must go. Perhaps Woody ought to accompany her once he has let Greg know, but where is Greg? If he's not on the sales floor, Woody can't leave; the store would be unguarded. Only one, he finds himself thinking again, only one. First he should take care of Agnes and then deal with the store. He eases Agnes head first out of the exit and paces into the fog, over the blackening tarmac, towards the lights and the moist snuffling. As he advances he takes a moment to prepare his face. Whatever his burden, he still represents Texts. The least he can do is smile.