The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller (17 page)

“All right, Dad’s Army, don’t panic, easy,” said Paul with a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He was trying to calm me down, but the idea had clearly rattled him too. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Worst case, we tried, right? Day off wasted. The answers will come out soon enough.”

I nodded—even though I knew he didn’t mean it at all—but Paul had no idea what I
did
have to lose. To have the golden ticket for your entire life dangled there to grab, in a way so few people ever get to have, and then have it snatched away … I decided right then and there that I didn’t care if my veins started rupturing, I was going to get to Blondie, on torn knees and scraped knuckles if necessary.

However, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, the pull
did
intensify as predicted, and heavily so. You know the feeling you get when you’re on a waltzer, that sense of shift and extra weight as it suddenly changes direction? The way your whole body is drawn along in the previous direction, even your skin? The pull became like that, but in our bones, too. That sounds more painful than it actually was, as pain was not, to my intense relief, yet present. But we were being pulled from the very
centre
of ourselves now.

The thing that did become a problem was light-headedness, as A roads became rural B roads and we headed across the eastern side of Barnsley. I found myself having to squint and breathe slowly in order to concentrate on driving; by now I was used to the intensified pull inside, but I was unaccustomed to this new, added difficulty. It made driving tough, to say the least, but roads that would have been quiet at the best of times were now completely abandoned, and I didn’t have to worry about killing anybody but ourselves. I started to perspire heavily as well, the sweat feeling cold on my forehead and leaving a chill on my neck. Paul didn’t sweat, but he constantly gave these goose-over-the-grave shivers, increasing in regularity until they were occurring once every three seconds, as regular as clockwork. We’d stopped talking altogether; not out of awkwardness but out of necessity, trying to focus, and the radio had eventually gone off as well. It was too much of a distraction.

As we pulled onto what was apparently called Stonyford Road, we saw, through squinted and shaking eyes, a sign that said ‘DARFIELD 1 MILE’. Paul pointed a limp hand as we went past, and I nodded as much as I could. We were only a mile away, I knew, and heading in the right direction. Our man was in Darfield, then. I felt no surge of excitement though; it wasn’t possible. Every nerve ending was already firing away, my heart pounding, my balls already shrivelled and my skin as cold as the grave. I couldn’t
be
any more wired. I looked at Paul, hunched forward in his seat, eyes squinting and panting like a dog.

Darfield was small, one of those places that has an odd blend of the rural and the urban, changing suddenly from one to other. Someone’s garden had a horse in it. A few buildings we passed were boarded up, which seemed out of sorts with the pleasant look of rest of the place, but then everywhere has its sad stories. The pull suddenly ratcheted up a small, extra notch, and we both knew that it had peaked. We were going to make it.

We were moments away from our goal, we knew, when Paul suddenly sneezed and sent a small spray of his blood up the inside of the windscreen. I whipped my head round to look at him more clearly, but he was already waving me away with one hand, wiping his face with the other. Blood was trickling out of his nose and pooling around his upper lip.

“Doesn’t hurt,” he said breathily, opening the glove box with a shaking hand and pulling out some tissues. “Bit ... bit of a relief, actually. It’s ... one of these, isn’t it?” Paul was pointing to a row of houses that began on the corner of East Street, running along the strangely named Nanny Marr Road. In my mild delirium, I thought they’d named it after the guitarist from The Smiths. I then remembered that was Johnny Marr.

“We’d …” I began, then became slightly more dizzy as I pulled the car to a stop along the kerb. My body wanted to keep moving, my bones still pulling forward as the car slowed. That was probably the worst of it, looking back. I thought I was going to be sick.

“Take a sec,” said Paul, leaning his own head back on the seat and taking a deep breath. “No rush, no rush. We’ve ... got hours yet, I reckon.” He was right, but I’d waited long enough.

“I was ... I was going to say,” I said, struggling to speak. I managed to unbuckle my seat belt after a few unsuccessful attempts to negotiate the clip, “We’d better be ... absolutely certain we both have the same house. We can’t show up on the wrong person’s doorstep ... looking like this. They’d call the police, and then the whole thing’s ... shafted. It’s one of these three houses, but I’m going to hold my hand behind my back with a number of fingers extended. You say which one you ... think it is, and if it matches the one I’m thinking of—”

“The first one,” said Paul, opening his eyes and looking at me with a tired expression. “It’s the first house. You know it, I know it. Let’s not ... piss about, eh? Come on. Let’s go and say hello.” He’d picked the same house as me, at least.

We staggered our way out of the car, me looking drunk and Paul looking like he’d been on the losing end of a fight. As we looked at the house we’d picked, I was glad that it was semi-detached. Only one set of neighbours to worry about. In fact, it was even better than that, with the nearest residential building being about twenty feet away; there was an expanse of grass between the left wall of the house and the row of fenced bungalows that would be its neighbours. Some sort of sheltered housing, perhaps. The house itself wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about, either; a nice little driveway to the left, leading to a garage set back at the rear. The garden had been concreted over, sadly, but either way it didn’t seem to be in too bad an area, and I thought it would have fetched a nice little price at auction. I hadn’t expected this. From the way Blondie had looked in the vision we’d had, I’d been half-expecting some kind of crack den. Paul looked mildly surprised, too.

“Guess he … bought this round about the same time that broken picture of his was taken,” he said with an effort, sniffing and wiping his still-bloody nose as he echoed my thoughts. “You knocking, or me?” he asked, gesturing towards the door. We were still stood at the edge of the concreted front garden. I looked at the windows, and noted the drawn blinds. It was mid to late afternoon, and the sun was still high in the sky.

“I’ll do it,” I said, and staggered towards the door, Paul falling into wobbling step. It occurred to me how unnatural the silence was around us; no passing cars, or even the constant, airy drone of distant ones. It’s funny how we never notice that, and even class it as silence. This country is never silent. Even on top of our mountains, there are distant motorways below and passing planes above. The Stone Man had silenced us all with its presence, a nation in awe of how such a thing could be amongst us.

I reached the doorstep, and as I moved for the brass door knocker I hesitated for a second, the idea that it was electrified in some way flashing across my mind. This wasn’t a premonition, or another manifestation of whatever psychic ability we’d been using; it was just my wired brain being overactive, I knew. Regardless, I chose to knock using my knuckles instead.

The knock was weak, but loud enough. Even so, there was no response from inside, the only sound being Paul’s laboured breathing as he leant on the wall for support. We waited for another twenty seconds or so, and then I knocked again. Time passed, and still nothing.

“Fucker’s ... in there,” breathed Paul, the words slightly muffled by his hand stemming the blood flow from his nose. “I can almost
see
him, can’t you? He’s in the front room, right there.” I knew what he meant; if I concentrated, the awareness of Blondie’s presence was so strong that I could almost conjure a vision of his outline. I tried harder, leaning on the wall myself so that my efforts could be totally focused, trying to home in on our quarry. The outline became clearer but still vague, like watching someone through extremely bad thermal imaging.

“Bloody hell, Paul, you’re right,” I said breathing hard myself. “He’s on the ... other side of this wall. He’s …” Something wasn’t right. The outline seemed squashed, misshapen. I concentrated as hard as I could, but it didn’t change. It was then that I realised there wasn’t anything wrong with the image, it was the just the angle that I was ‘seeing’ it from.

“He’s … low,” I said. “Isn’t he? He’s low down. He’s lying on the floor … he’s asleep on the floor?”

“Nope,” muttered Paul, grimly. His eyes were shut and his forehead was knotted in concentration. “That’s not someone asleep. That’s someone hiding. He’s hiding and hoping we’ll ... go away. He doesn’t want us to find him.”

Opening his eyes, Paul straightened up, swayed for a moment, and then moved to the letterbox and bent down. He pushed it open with his fingers, and spoke loud enough for his voice to carry inside the house but not out in the street.

“Hello?” he called, gently. “My friend here has ... come a long way to see you. We know you’re in there, so there’s no point in thinking ... we’re gonna assume you’re out. This all gets done a lot ... a lot quicker if you just come and open the door like a good lad, and we’re not ... here to hurt you or do anything nasty.” His struggling voice softened slightly, and he took on a more reassuring tone. “Seriously, we just ... want to talk. But listen, this looks like a nice house, and I’m ... sure you want to keep it that way, so it’s probably best that you come and open up, ’cos one way ... or the other we’re coming in. Trust me, mate. And hell, I honestly don’t want to break anything to get in, as ... uh, you know, I’d feel bad about that. Really. So do us both ... a favour and stop pissing about on the bloody floor, up you get now.” When he stopped speaking, he turned his ear to the open letterbox and waited, closing his eyes again and rocking on his heels slightly as he got his breathing under control again. After a while he looked up at me, raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He then turned his mouth back to the letterbox.

“Okay,” he called, “but I’ve got to say I’m not ... happy. Don’t worry, I still won’t do ... anything when I get inside, but you’ve made this into far ... more of an all-round ball ache for me than it needed to be. Not good to make a man’s day ... harder for no reason. Poor form.” He waited for a moment for a response, then let the letterbox shut and straightened up. He let out a weary sigh, shivering slightly as it left, and then shrugged slowly at me. “Right, fuck it, we’re gonna ... smash a window in round the back. I’m not pissing around here all day. Silly sod. I can’t take much more of this ... need this shit to stop. Come on,” he said, beckoning me to follow as he stepped down from the door and made his way round the back on shaking legs. I didn’t reply, and meekly followed instead. What was there to say? He was right. We were going in one way or another, so we might as well have been getting on with it. I did wonder, however, how he planned to smash in double-glazed windows without any heavy blunt objects, or at least alerting the neighbours.

The answer to the first question was fairly immediate; Paul checked the garage door at the end of the short driveway, found it to be unlocked, and disappeared inside. I leant on the house, breathing slowly whilst I waited, and he shortly returned carrying a small hammer and wearing a satisfied smile.

“Neighbours ... neighbours will hear you,” I said, shaking my head.

“Aha, not true,” he said, pointing at the rear of the house that I couldn’t yet see from where I was standing. I peeled off the wall and staggered towards him, resisting the pull that was trying to drag me through the brick wall and towards our target. The garden at the back was small but neat; no plants here, but several garden ornaments were present (stone bird table, ornate paving slabs down the middle, stone heron stood in the corner) and the whole thing was surrounded by a high wooden fence. All in all, nothing dazzling but perfectly pleasant, and again at odds with what I’d expected to find here.

Paul was pointing towards the back wall, or rather the section of the back wall that stuck out about seven feet from the rest of the house to create a small, one-storey extension. Embedded in the wall there was a door with a large glass panel, and to its right was a small double-glazed window.

“The trick with ... double glazing,” he breathed, pointing with the hammer now as well, which swayed left and right as his wavering hand held it, “is to get it in the corners, you see. It’s extremely strong in the middle, but in the corners …” he tapped his nose and grinned, pleased with himself.

“How do you know?”

“Friend of mine. Builder,” he said, staggering over to the window, “and this baby ... here is small enough so that when it shatters—and it
will
shatter, into lots of little bits—it won’t be that loud. We could both go through ... door panel, but the sound of that ... size of breakage
would
attract attention, so we’ll do the window.”