Dark Screams: Volume Two (10 page)

“He came out of the wardrobe and attacked me. I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”

“Jack shouted out, and the man rushed back into the spare bedroom and Jack heard the wardrobe door slam shut. He took a poker from the fireplace and went to open the door, but when he did so he found that it was locked, which could only have been done from the outside. All the same, he opened the door, only to discover that the wardrobe appeared to be empty.”

“So what did he do?”

“At that time of night, there wasn’t much that he could do. But he woke his brother and told him what had happened, and between them they shifted the wardrobe around again so that its door was up against the wall.

“The next day, he got up early and went to the village as it then was and made some inquiries. In the end, he was directed to a man called Briggs who had lived in the village all his life. Briggs told him that The Kilns had been built in 1922 on the site of an old Victorian brickworks, which is why it was called The Kilns.

“The story went that the owner of the brickworks, a man called Stephenson, had a very pretty young daughter called Sophie. Sophie fell in love with one of the young workers at the kiln, whose identity we don’t know, but she became pregnant. When her father demanded to know who was responsible, she blamed an older man called Henry Bell—claimed that he had raped her. Obviously she wanted to protect her young lover from her father’s retribution, and Henry Bell was apparently a bad-tempered man, and much disliked.

“Although there was never any proof of this, Stephenson was said to have paid two of his workers to throw Henry Bell into the brick kiln, when it was all fired up. Bell was hideously burned but managed to escape. A local woman later claimed said that a man ‘all black and smoldering’ had entered her house in the middle of the night. She had called her husband, who slept in a separate room, but when he came to her assistance the man had disappeared—even though the window was closed and there was no other means of escape.

“She had opened her wardrobe to see if he was hiding in it, and her wardrobe had been filled with smoke, but that was all. No black and smoldering man.”

“So where did C. S. Lewis think the man had gone?” asked Dawn. “Or was he just totally baffled, like I am?”

“He wrote pages and pages about it. He conjectured that this particular wardrobe must somehow have acted as a way through to another plane of existence—a way that was open only to those in extreme distress, or in need of succor.

“He became convinced that there was another world there, beyond the wardrobe, but it could be found only under very special circumstances. He did strongly suspect, though, that Henry Bell had been allowed to find a retreat there because he had been the victim of a terrible injustice.

“The world beyond the wardrobe, he theorized, was a world where Christian justice and Christian mercy had at last prevailed, and all our trespasses forgiven, as we forgive those who trespass against us. However, he thought that Henry Bell was not yet ready to forgive the lie told by Sophie Stephenson, which is why he had reappeared in search of revenge.”

“And what do
you
think?” asked Dawn.

“Up until you came here, I had no way of knowing if this story was true or not. But there is one thing I do know. Briggs told Jack that the only way to prevent Henry Bell from coming back through the wardrobe was to destroy it—by burning, preferably, since that would finish the job that Stephenson’s men had started.”

“So why didn’t Jack just take it out in his garden and set fire to it?”

“Because he was such a committed Christian,” said Professor Walmsley. “Henry Bell was an innocent man, after all, and Jack couldn’t accept the responsibility for taking what was left of his life. ‘Whatever my failings, I can never act an executioner.’ That was what he wrote.”

Jerry took hold of Dawn’s hand. Neither of them spoke, but then they didn’t need to. They both knew what they were going to have to do next.

Jerry’s friend Mick had a Transit van that he used for his mobile car-cleaning business. He came around to Jerry’s house the following day and picked them both up, and they all drove around to Dawn’s flat. On the way they stopped at the Esso service station on Chiswick High Road and filled up a red plastic petrol container.

“What are you two up to, then?” asked Mick. He had a gingery buzz cut and a gap in his teeth he could whistle through, and he always splashed himself in too much Lynx aftershave, in the hope of attracting a girlfriend. “Spot of arson, is it? Never quite know with you two.”

“We’re having a bonfire,” said Dawn. “Kind of an early fireworks night.”

When she opened the door of her flat and stepped inside, Dawn sniffed. She could smell jasmine, from her Yankee Candle, but she could also smell that sour burned odor of black-faced man. She went into the bedroom with Jerry close behind her, and there it was, the wardrobe, with its door still locked. But she knew now that this wasn’t just any wardrobe. This was the wardrobe that had terrified C. S. Lewis, but also inspired him to invent a world where purity battled against evil, and the innocent were sacrificed for the greater good.

She pressed her hand flat against its polished walnut door, and said,
“Narnia,”
and thought of all those bedtime stories that her mother used to read to her when she was young, with the White Witch and Mr. Tumnus the faun and Aslan the lion. It gave her the strangest of feelings, both frightening and sad.

With Mick’s help, they dragged and heaved the wardrobe out of the bedroom, along the hallway, out the front door, and bumped it down the steps. They paused to rest for a moment or two and then they lifted it, grunting, into the back of Mick’s van.

Mick knew just the place. A developer was demolishing a block of 1920s flats on the Sheen Road. The site was screened off from the road with a green-painted hoarding, almost ten feet high, and there were fires burning there constantly, so one more shouldn’t attract any attention.

While Dawn and Jerry kept watch, Mick unfastened one of the wire security fences at the end of the hoarding. Cars and buses roared past, cyclists cycled past, but nobody took any notice of them. They lifted the wardrobe out of the van and carried it through the gap. The sun was going down now, and the hoarding blocked it out almost completely, so that the demolition site was chilly and filled with shadows. The ground was strewn with rubble and broken bricks, and so they had to carry the wardrobe almost to the far end of the site before they found somewhere level enough to put it down.

“Right, then, you going to burn it?” said Mick. “Should have brought some hot dogs and stuff. We could have had a barbie.”

“Sorry, Mick,” Jerry told him. “I want you to go now, and leave us alone.”

“Oh, that’s nice! I practically break my flipping back helping you carry that bleeding great wardrobe. I find you a great place to burn it, and now you won’t let me even watch!”

“There’s a good reason, Mick. Honestly. Besides, if somebody sees us and we get into trouble, you don’t want to get involved, do you?”

“All right. But you owe me five pints for this, got it?”

“Mick—whatever you want, mate, it’s yours.”

“All right. Five pints and a night with Rihanna.”

“Whatever. I promise you.”

Mick went stumbling off over the mountains of broken yellow bricks. When he had climbed back through the security fence, Jerry unscrewed the lid of the petrol container and said, “Okay, then, sweetheart. Here goes nothing.”

He circled around the wardrobe, splashing it with petrol. Then he took out a box of matches, lit one, and tossed it toward the wardrobe door. With a soft
whoomppphh!
the wardrobe was enveloped in rippling flames.

Dawn and Jerry stood side by side, watching it burn. The walnut veneer crackled and curled, and soon the oak underneath was being scorched black. Sparks flew up into the evening air like fireflies.

“I wonder what’s going to happen to him now?” asked Dawn.

“What do you mean?”

“Well—this wardrobe is like his only doorway to the real world, isn’t it? Now he’s going to be trapped forever in Narnia—although I don’t suppose it’s anything like Narnia in the books.”

The wardrobe was blazing furiously now, and the flames were licking nine or ten feet into the air. Dawn could see that a woman was watching them from a third-floor window in the block of flats next to the demolition site.

After five more minutes, the flames began to subside a little. Suddenly, however, there was a loud cracking noise, and then another, and then another, and the whole fiery wardrobe was violently shaken with every crack.

Dawn stepped back a few paces. “What’s that?” she said. “It’s not—”

There was yet another crack, even louder, and the wardrobe door burst open and fell flat onto the rubble. Dawn couldn’t stop herself from screaming. Out of the skeletal remains of the wardrobe, a fiery figure of a man appeared, blazing from head to foot. He was burning so fiercely that it was impossible to see his face, but she knew that it must be the black-faced man.

“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!”
he roared at her, and it was a roar of rage and agony and utter desperation. He stepped out of the wardrobe and came toward her, both blazing arms raised, walking with his knees half bent as if he were almost on the verge of collapse.

“Bitch!”
he bellowed, and a gout of flame rolled out of his mouth.
“I’ll have you, you bitch!”

He began to stagger toward Dawn much faster. Jerry said, “Run, Dawn! For God’s sake! Run!”

Dawn hesitated, and then she started to run, jumping and scrambling over the broken bricks. When she was halfway across the demolition site, she turned, to make sure that Jerry was running too. The fiery man was still staggering after her, and he was much closer than she had realized. She saw Jerry kick out at him, trying to knock him over, but then Jerry lost his balance and fell backward, and the fiery man kept on coming toward her. His flames made a soft rushing sound as he approached, and she could feel their heat.

“Aaaaaahhhhhhh!”
he roared again, but this time he sounded even more desperate.

She started to run again, but the broken bricks gave way beneath her feet in a tumbling cascade, and she had to scrabble for a handhold to stop herself from sliding backward.

The fiery man had almost reached her, and she twisted around and held up her arm to shield herself.

“I’m not Sophie!”
she shrilled at him.
“I’m not Sophie Stephenson!”

The fiery man stopped still.

“I’m not Sophie Stephenson,” she repeated, much more softly.

The fiery man lowered his fiery head, and began to turn away. As he did so, however, Jerry jumped on his back, even though he was blazing, and wrapped his arms around him.

“Aaaaaaaahhhhh!”
roared the fiery man, and Jerry roared, too, except that Jerry’s roar came from nothing but pain, as the flames shriveled his skin and cauterized his nerve endings.

The fiery man lurched, and spun around, but he didn’t fall over. Jerry was still clinging tightly to his back, but now he had no choice because the two of them were irrevocably welded together by the heat. They went around and around, and each time they went around Dawn saw that Jerry’s face was burning scarlet, and then crimson, like a Satanic mask. His arm muscles were charring, so that his white bones began to gleam through the black.

Dawn sank to her knees, stricken with shock. There was nothing she could do but watch Jerry and the fiery man as they continued to teeter around in circles, like some terrible children’s wind-up toy. After less than two minutes they were blazing so fiercely that she couldn’t see which of them was which. Then, quite abruptly, they collapsed, and lay among the bricks, still burning.

Over on the far side of the demolition site, the back of the wardrobe fell to the ground with a clatter.

Dawn didn’t hear the sirens, but she saw the blue flashing lights, and she heard the firefighters crunching across the demolition site toward her. A firefighter laid his hand on her shoulder and leaned down to look into her face.

“Are you all right, love? What happened here?”

“You’re not Aslan, are you?” she asked him.

“No, love. Alan. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

He reached down and picked her up as easily as if she were a little girl and carried her back to reality.

To: Michael Blaine, Senior Editor

From: Lisa Frankel, Executive Editor

M:

Bad news. Looked over Matheson’s pages. Frankly puzzled. They’re indeed a fascination. Yet somehow elusive. Despite the horror of what actually happened, they amount to nothing more than a scrapbook. Evocative. But transient. Not surprised
Esquire
and
The New Yorker
decided to pass. My best suggestion, we do the same.

I know this writer is a friend of yours. But I feel strongly if we get into this, we make a real mistake. Bottom line: The band once mattered, but in my mind is not legend; simply forgotten. And the manuscript, while accomplished, is unpublishable. Wish I had better news.

Awaiting your thoughts.

L.

cc: M. Blaine/L. Frankel/J. Wenner

A
UGUST 27,1969

Flies.

Striking skin; bullets with eyes of dried blood. Clinging to smooth stone, fortress walls, sleeping in chunks of shade that creep; shadow icebergs.

Tourists. Heat.

Salty half-moons under armpits. Sandals scuffing ancient rock. Turkish cigarettes. Lovers hold humid hands.

A deserted city. Long dead. Before Christ was born. Hated. Pounded onto wood with nails; left to bleed, a slaughtered calf. Cries unanswered. Reasons unprovided.

A couple.

Young. Nineteen. Seventeen. Him. Her.

A relationship. Two months. Moods beyond control. Passion and fear.

Suffering.

Her Nikon slicing moments off time; a gently clicking scalpel. Memories for a book. An album. A cocktail-table mausoleum.

Always fighting. Driving from Paris to Monte Carlo. Stopping for iced espresso in a town. A charming village. Staring in silence; a joint burial.

He opens his guitar case. Metal strings hot under sun; branding fingers. Plays a new ballad. Sings softly. Children gather. He smiles, a barefoot saint. It’s about her. She tries not to hear. Feels her life washed away. He isn’t hers anymore. This trip was an epitaph.

She begins to cry.

He’s going back to America. To that bastard Tutt. To record; to find fame.

To Whatever.