TWENTY-EIGHT

WEST HAMPSTEAD, LONDON. 25 JUNE 2011. 3.30 A.M.

‘Mate! Hey, mate! Where is it along here?’

Kyle jerked awake, out of a dream filled with barking children. ‘Not me,’ he pleaded with the children in his dream, who had faces of soot and bayed for what had been taken from them. He sat upright, rigid, awake as a trace of other images dimmed in his mind: black buildings under a yellow sky, squeals from an abattoir. He looked about himself in a panic. A cab. He was in the back of another taxi. He shook himself alert and wiped at the drool on his chin. ‘Here’s OK.’

He struggled to get out of the cab. His gut burned with hunger. He was jet-lagged to a concussion, exhausted, and flu-symptom achy. The waking world was surreal.

At the end of the short path that led to the front door of his building, he looked up and eyed the dark lounge window. He hadn’t closed the curtains before he left. When was that? Early hours of the morning the day they flew to America. So long ago. Another lifetime; one still precarious but better than this shuffling horror. Standing up straight was difficult. Down there in the night-time, the weight of what he had lost, was potentially about to lose, and of what he knew, curved his spine like a sickle, outside a home he had no wish to enter. Drizzle pricked his face.

He had to get inside; had work to do. A new outline for an edit to compose. And an insert to film: a final piece to camera for the rough cut of a documentary he doubted he would live to see aired. But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history; so his film should be right at home.

If it was the last thing he did with the last of himself, he would get a version of the film online. With the last dregs of his energy, he would shoot his postscript, quickly expand the rough cuts of the film with the video diary inserts and get Finger Mouse to cut them together, upload and post the film online with a trailer at the right time, in his absence. To be premiered posthumously on any site that would have it.

He never went back to Camden to look for Dan, or to the police to beg for help; the nullifying futility of either venture struck him the very moment he stood on the street outside Max’s apartment building.

Max nearly lost an ear. Kyle bent right over and clutched his knees. How had Max fought it off or escaped? He’d not had the time or presence of mind to ask. Max was an old man. Uselessly, he pondered if it had come down the walls of the master bedroom, with eyes wide and white. He imagined Max using Iris as a decoy to save himself. Wouldn’t put it past him. And the impossibility of what Max had just told him, and of what the Last Days story had always suggested in the film he was too desperate to abandon, and that had gotten his best friend killed, he now accepted as readily as his own miserable and barely continuing existence.

He looked up again at his windows and swallowed. The wires in the walls of his flat were made from copper as thin as thread, inside plastic. No Intercity protection here. What could he fight with? He ran through a list of his meagre possessions. Hammer! There was a hammer in his tool box. He’d wear it in his belt like a sword. It almost made him feel better, until he suffered a jump-cut to his room in Seattle and remembered a thing clawing at the bed, digging with bony toes . . . septicaemia, partially eaten by rats, bled out.

‘Shit, no. Please.’ Kyle felt so sick, he sat on the wall before the front yard of broken concrete slabs covered in bin bags. What he understood to be his consciousness, his soul, might be stolen, or snuffed out, or exchanged, at any time tonight. Preposterous. But there you have it, mate.

Should he call home? His parents. Brother. He checked his watch. Not at this time. They’d be worried sick. He almost laughed out loud at that. Don’t think about it. His family would have to watch his last film online, along with everybody else. Including the police and Dan’s folks. Would the police take the film down as evidence? He hoped not. People had to see their undoing, their masterpiece of guerrilla documentary film-making, and make up their own minds as to what happened in Arizona in 1975. His dream had been realized. Tears burned his eyes, but not from triumph.

‘Stop fuckin’ about, mate.’ He smiled, sniffed. How many times had he said that to Dan over the years? He wiped at his eyes with his sleeve and then let himself inside the building.

Light blazed in his flat: every bulb and the dawn-light simulators were on. The front door was wide open. He left it that way should he need to bolt down the stairs at some point, to either hammer on Jane’s door on the ground floor, or just run into the street screaming.

Sitting cross-legged before the laptop screen, he went through the rough cuts as quickly as possible; from Clarendon Road and dear old Susan, to that poor bastard Gabriel at the farm in Normandy, to Patrolman Conway, Aguilar, Detective Sweeney, and the tragic remains of Martha Lake’s miserable existence in a wretched kitchen. London, Normandy, Arizona, Seattle: glimpses into the dregs of a story that spanned four hundred years.

There were hours and hours of it, but his familiarity was good. All of the footage had been shot within the last two weeks, and it wasn’t the kind of material he’d forget in a hurry. Speeding through the rushes each evening, Kyle had already simultaneously visualized one edited scene after another while compiling rough cuts in Final Cut Pro on the road. The composition was all in blocks with few cutaways, but Finger Mouse could make it look more interesting to go online with, in a first assembly adding material from the rushes to Kyle’s rough edits. The transition from one scene and location to another would have to be heralded with titles.

He made quick decisions on where to include the little inserts he’d shot with Dan, when he spoke to camera in their motel rooms about Max. And as he viewed the raw footage, he noted how his face became increasingly drawn, the eyes witless, his aspect harried. He was a wreck; didn’t look like he was faking at all. Good material. His grin felt so inappropriate he killed it. Even now, boy, you just don’t learn.

The sound wasn’t always great and bits of the footage in France were too dark. But this was about content, not quality. The Mouse already had the rushes footage on his Avid system and could improve and balance the audio. The finished product would never win awards, but there were parts so arresting Kyle could barely stomach seeing them again; they might even make the attention-deficit crowd sit still in their bedrooms for more than four seconds.

And so far, so good. His head dropped a few times, and when he needed a piss he walked to the bathroom like a drunk with trousers full of his own waste. But he embellished the rough cuts fast, like his legacy depended on it. And Finger Mouse could make this work without Kyle sat next to him, day after day in Mouse’s basement flat, though he would have given anything to be there.

After he finished, Kyle began uploading the cuts to Finger Mouse’s FTP site from his desktop PC. Then on the sofa bed, with the hammer and a bottle of Jack Daniels on either side of him, he typed his notes and time-code references from the hardcopy logbook into a document on his laptop. Emailed it to Finger Mouse without any revision; praying his swimming eyes hadn’t transposed too many numbers. And he instructed Finger Mouse to upload his assembly edit in no less than three days’ time, on every free film site he knew of.

Perhaps this kind of distribution was more fitting for the project, and for his role as a perennial film-industry misfit. Blair Witch this, brothers and sisters. It ain’t a hoax. Make it as viral as the black death. He wanted three in four on the planet to see it. He cut his megalomania off at that point and ate four spoonfuls of brown sugar to stay awake. At 4.30 a.m., he set up the camera he used to shoot his first commercial film, a Canon XHA, on the little tripod and sat before it, to record an unscripted last testament. It would close the film. Or maybe introduce it? He was slowing down fast now and couldn’t decide. But he would dedicate their last film to Dan. Who got left behind. Once he was done with the final interview, he would upload the segment to the FTP server. The rough cuts would soon be in place at Finger Mouse’s online archive. Good, good. He looked at the window. Sun up in an hour; he’d nearly made it. Maybe they weren’t coming. He hoped they were busy with Max. They didn’t visit every night, or did they? And what about Finger Mouse: was the footage enough to draw them to him too?

And then he heard it.

A rat in the far-off walls.

Followed by a distant scraping. Then a tap tap tap. Arrhythmic. A pause of silence he thought even more terrible than the noise. Then more scratching. Yes, scratches and a muted bumping. In the communal area, but below his floor. The sounds were not inside the flat, he was certain, but issuing from one storey down: the reception of the building. He worried Jane would wake up and open her door. Jesus no, not that. His cat might even be on her bed. But it’d be on the ceiling very soon. It knew.

Maybe it was only the cat making a noise, trying to get into Jane’s flat and going through the impatient scratching ritual to wake her. The light in his hallway beyond his lounge dimmed, but so imperceptibly he wondered if he had imagined it.

Uneasily, after he unfroze his neck, Kyle leaned forward on the sofa bed and peered down the hallway towards the front door.

Nothing there. But the lights in the communal staircase were out. And he’d definitely left them on. He now wished he’d kept the front door of his flat shut and locked; if something had made a noise in the kitchen or bathroom while he was working, he’d intended to run down the hall like the devil was behind him.

‘Shit.’ He felt as weak as a kitten. He fingered the hammer’s rubber handle. Wondered if he could even fight; when was the last time? With his brother, when they were about fourteen. How fast were these things, these Blood Friends?

A bang. Downstairs. Like a heavy implement against wood. Hollow wood.

He panicked. Stood up to stop his left leg from going into a nervous spasm. Thought hard about what was down there, at the bottom of the narrow staircase, in the cramped communal hallway: a door to Jane’s flat; her bike; a bale of newspapers for recycling; the fuse box inside a wooden cabinet on the wall beside the front door.

Kyle hobbled to the sash window and unlocked the frame. He eased the window up on its recalcitrant runners. The cold came through, woke him up a bit. There was a small ledge outside. All the houses on his side of the street had them; people put plant pots on them. His ledge was covered in joint butts and cigarette filters. Darkness gaped beyond it. The front of his building fell between street lamps and two overgrown privet hedges he’d never been motivated to trim.

Could he jump? He imagined his ankles snapping like sticks of celery. A shin bone catching the corner of the brick wall around the yard. Tailbone on a drainpipe bracket. No way.

There it was again. A bang. And something he couldn’t identify or place. A whistle, or a whine interspersed with the thumps on wood that sped up. A voice? Maybe. Something like a baby’s cry, but coming from an older mouth. Kyle looked out the window again, and down into the thin lightless air.

What if it put out the lights? The fuses for the whole building were in that fuse box in the building’s reception. How did they know to go there? How had they learned to understand electricity? Like vermin, determined to gain access to a source of food, that’s how. Kyle felt faint, then tensed the muscles in his arms. He looked down at the hammer inside a clenched fist. ‘Come on. Come on. Come on,’ he started to say to himself in a little chant. He had to go look. Jane might wake up. Not Jane. It was bad enough he’d involved Dan in this impossible mess. Dan.

Jaw clenched, Kyle collected the torch from his desk. Walked across the lounge and crept down the hall to the doorway of his flat. Peered out, across the first-floor landing to the top of the staircase.

Empty.

Not daring to breathe, he stepped out and onto the landing. With the torch he’d be able to see down the one flight of carpeted stairs and view a section of the ground-floor reception. If he crouched down, the floor under the fuse box beside the front door might be visible. His entire musculature went as hard and brittle as bone china. If he saw anything untoward he might just shatter into fragments and dust. He was nearly crying when he stood at the top of the staircase and peered down.

The light from his hallway threw a vague peripheral glow across the top half of the stairs; revealed ingrained lint and oil stains on an old carpet. He crouched, aimed the torch down and listened. But couldn’t bear to switch the torch on. Not yet.

Down inside the darkness he heard a joint crack. A knee, an ankle, maybe a metatarsal. He was not alone. His fingers trembled around the torch handle, still couldn’t bring himself to switch it on. Doubted he could withstand what it might reveal. Down there.

Fingernails raked at plastic. The fuse box. Maybe.

It snuffled, it whined. Feet bumped. A low animal cry. A gargle of phlegm behind it. And then the lights went out in his flat. A sheet of total darkness covered him.

He whimpered. Clicked the torch on.

It was as if the warmer tones had been stripped from the world; no reds or yellows visible on the badly papered walls, no bottle-green left in the tatty old carpet. Within the torch’s white beam, that cut through granules of dust adrift, the walls and air faded to grey, with a dirty yellow tinge to the place it had birthed from. He saw the feet first. And cried out. The smell came next: burned-out house, wet with water from a fire engine’s hose, dead pigeons ripened by the sun, poisoned rats going soft under floorboards, a sewer pipe’s mouth agape.

It heard him, and rushed to the foot of the staircase on legs that should have been sealed inside a sarcophagus. Kyle froze.

Then stood up quickly, but not fast enough to avoid the sight of bone fingers clutched across the dry grimace of a face, to shield it from such a hateful sight as even the thinnest light. But the torch didn’t hold it back. It came up clutching at its face. And in the split second before he turned away, Kyle saw more than he wanted to. Much more.

Weeds of hair straggled from a wet skull. Brownish knees clacked together and the dark, leathery lower legs splayed outwards. There was a suggestion of tattered linen, stained brown, hanging from the pelvis.

Kyle stumbled to the doorway of his flat. He heard the lean form moving in the stairwell. Jerky and ungainly, it padded itself along the wall, felt for the miracle of solidity that appeared before its milky eyes and dim sight. The mewl became a whine, with a chitter of excitement inside it. Guttural, it rattle-moaned when it came up the last few steps fast on all fours.

There were no more than a dozen narrow stairs to traverse to reach the first floor and it was already on the landing as Kyle fled through the doorway of his flat.

Stand and fight? Too dark. No room to swing the bloody hammer!

He turned in the doorway and scrabbled for the front door, all clumsy and uncoordinated from the weight of the torch and the hammer in either hand. Swung it shut with an elbow. Something screamed. Down by the floor. His ears muffled like his head was underwater in a bath. A scrape against his front foot. The door refused to close tight within the frame. He looked down. Angled his wrist and the torchlight followed. He nearly threw up on his boots.

How did something that thin have so much strength?

Its weight was behind the door and it pushed from outside with all its might. Tried to force more and more of the trapped arm through. He could hear sharp feet outside, tearing at the carpet for purchase. The terrible hand inside the door stabbed about like a Japanese spider crab in some lightless ocean niche. Long fingers blackened by old skin, curled around the edge of the door, higher up, and far too close to his groin.

Somehow, Kyle got the latch chain on, then turned and fled deeper inside the trap of his flat. His thoughts came and went like confetti in a wind tunnel. Should he lock himself in the bathroom and scream? Face it in the lounge and try to get a hammer blow into that dead-skin face? The window?

He tore across the dark lounge. The torch beam lit his path. All around his head his breath was asthmatic-loud. He stuffed the hammer into his belt, the torch in his back pocket. Climbed over the window sill. Was halfway through, his face and chest pressed against the outside of the sash window, when he heard the front door blow in.

Shuffling to the side of the ledge, his hands snatched for purchase around the window frame. From the thin, ambient street lights, he received the impression of a thing that raced into the dark room on the other side of the sash window, but as low to the floor as a dog. And once it was inside, it went into a frenzy he heard more than saw. Long arms raked and trawled for him. Surfaces were swept clean. His laptop and whisky bottle clattered to the floor. A dozen books hit a wall.

Kyle looked down, beyond the heels of his engineer boots. And knew he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t jump.

Behind him, his DVD collection became an avalanche. He crouched and moved his legs and hips over the ledge. Gripped the cold stone edge with both hands, like he was about to slip into a pool feet first.

It heard him and the dim scarecrow silhouette paused in its frenzy. Then came at the window, low to the floor. It was sniffing. It was too dark for him to see it properly, and for that he thanked God. And then let his body drop from the ledge.

How they materialized, or what limits were imposed on a visit, he had no idea. Max said something about them needing to feed to remain, but he didn’t dwell on that detail. He guessed it never stayed long in his flat. Perhaps it could not and returned to that other place, from where its kind reigned for four centuries, over a kingdom of dust and dead birds.

He’d landed upon the refuse sacks, and cut his calf muscles on the only bag filled with garden waste that had been out front for so long the sticks had petrified into spikes. And then hobbled and whimpered into the street before he ran as fast as possible in the direction of the Finchley Road. Behind him, the noises of the destruction of his home had become fainter, and then stopped.

Shivering against the cold glass doors of Waitrose on the main road, he’d fallen asleep; curled into a foetal position around the hammer, on a sheet of cardboard. It hadn’t been possible for him to run any further, or even to stand up any longer. The escape from the flat had emptied the last of his batteries.

Curiously, no one bothered him as he lay in the street. The supermarket was visible from the road, so a police patrol car may have passed at some point in the two hours he shuddered fitfully upon the sheet of cardboard. Perhaps he was becoming a familiar sight, all over again, in the new economic downturn.

He awoke just after seven. No one in the street even looked at him. He stood up to let the early shift into the supermarket, and then just marvelled for a few minutes that he was still alive.

His wallet was still inside the flat, but his door keys were attached to his belt chain. As he brushed grime from the sleeves of his leather jacket, an Indian man in a Waitrose uniform brought a bin bag out of the store; it was filled with yesterday’s pastries and bagels. Kyle followed him to the rubbish collection point and helped himself to the booty. He walked back to the flat in the blessed grey light of dawn while he ate four plain bagels and one apple turnover. It was the best food he’d ever eaten.

The sash window was wide open, as he’d left it. He looked up for a long time, but nothing looked down. On his way back inside the building, he inspected the fuse box. Raking hands had managed to pull all of the switches down and smash the plastic mounting; the door of the cabinet was on the floor. The hallway stank of effluence and the places under houses where small things crawl to die. Upon the ceiling, he saw the stain, placed two fingers under his nose, and struggled to keep the bagels down.

Jane’s door was still shut. Dithering outside, he wondered if he should wake her, check on the cat. A white van parked up outside and distracted him. Kyle turned to watch a courier driver jump down from the cabin.

‘Kyle Freeman?’ the driver called at the open door. Kyle nodded.

‘Package for ya.’

Kyle signed for it and walked upstairs, a long heavy box under his arm. And as he sat amongst the wreckage of his life, he opened the envelope adhered to the side of the box. It was from Max.

Dear Kyle,

I sincerely hope you are still around to receive this.

Through my faith in your ability to survive, I have taken the liberty to check you in online: first class to San Diego via LAX at midday from Heathrow. Someone will meet you at the airport this side. Please accept the camera as a further token of my appreciation. It will suffice to record the last chapter of our film.

Fondest Regards,

Maximillian Solomon

Revelation Productions

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