Falls the Shadow (20 page)

Winterdawn leant forward, speaking with a low, wistful obsessiveness. He seemed to have forgotten his dreams of new societies, swapping them for a more personal moment.

‘I can see her,’ he said. ‘Nineteen seventy. Walking in the New Forest, arguing about the election result. It was nice, a lovely day. She was full of energy. A very intelligent woman, a wonderful person. Loved cats and logic problems. Fun while it lasted. What a bloody way to die.’

The Doctor felt that he should say something, but there was nothing there. A cold lump in his throat and a blank mind in his skull. Winterdawn’s words reminded him of his age, of his past. It was not something he wished to remember. Concentrating his mind and energies, he leant forward, setting to work on the wheelchair once again.

There was a hand on her face, a hand so light it need not have been there. Fingertips tickled her skin. Someone was touching her – someone
scared
.

Page’s eyes snapped open.

Bernice was crouched before her, hands pressing against Page’s clothes and face. There was concern in her eyes. Page reciprocated with a pure glare, but she relaxed when she realized her fingers were still wrapped round the awkward shape of her gun.

‘Are you feeling okay?’ Benny was asking, voice stripped of any sense of malice or guile. ‘You were screaming in C sharp…’

‘Thanks, I’m fine,’ Page responded kindly. It was an uncomfortable, almost forgotten feeling. She pressed her gun to Benny’s throat. When she spoke, kindness had been replaced by weary cynicism.

‘I’m sorry. You should have taken it when you had the chance.’

‘There are worse things in this house,’ Benny replied, sad but composed. She pulled back from the gun. Page didn’t try to stop her. Ace stepped into sight, a harsh jagged shape in black and grey. Here was raw hatred. Once again Page felt something like remorse. She had to suppress it viciously. There were tear‐
stains on Ace’s cheeks.

Page had seen terrible things. So, she assumed, had Ace.

‘Thank Benny,’ Ace said without passion. ‘If it hadn’t been for her you’d’ve woken up with half that gun rammed up you.’

‘Thanks Benny.’ Page forced herself to stand, surprised at how little pain there was. She smiled broadly, checking the safety catch with a suitable amount of ceremony. ‘Let’s be off.’

Ace was shaking her head.

‘I don’t believe it. You’re still after Winterdawn! After all
this
… You just don’t care, do you?’

‘I care,’ Page whispered, ‘enough to keep going.’

‘What did they show you?’

Page let a blink play across her face, but Benny’s question had opened a channel of fear inside her. A powerful, rushing current tore at her composure, threatening to drag her away. Her fingers tightened round the trigger of her gun – a rock, the last stable thing left to her.

I saw nothing.

‘I saw myself,’ Page said, forcing her finger from the trigger.

There was something in the air – uncomfortable and intangible like an electric current. Wedderburn could sense it, building up, forcing him out, crushing him. Something terrible was about to happen, a storm on the verge of breaking. And this house was at the heart of it.

It was affecting him, though he was far from the centre. He felt peripheral, as though the action was unfolding elsewhere. Terrible events were occurring under his nose, but he was left out. He had felt alone for the whole of the morning, and loneliness was turning to paranoia. There was a conspiracy to which he was not privy. Perhaps he was its target.

He had even begun to suspect that he had woken in the wrong house.

He gazed around the conservatory, sighing to himself. The plants, for all their comforts, were poor substitutes for humans.

His kettle was warming nicely on the portable hob but he began to suspect that it might have been a better idea to make the tea in the kitchen. He might have met someone. Found out how Jeremy and the Doctor had got on. Yet somehow he felt
safer
in the conservatory.

Tired of familiar surroundings, Wedderburn stuck his head round the door in the hope of catching someone. Against all odds, he did. Sandra was outside the door, her shoulder pressed hard against one wall. The blandness in her eyes worried Wedderburn. He watched her scratching obsessively at her forearm, listened to her harsh breathing and suspected she was sick.

‘Sandra,’ he called. The girl started, wheeling round to peer at him suspiciously. He’d startled her, obviously.

‘Sorry,’ he said, clapping his hands, watching her relax. A light whistle came from his side of the door.

‘Kettle’s boiling.’ He flashed her a smile, wondering if she could see it. ‘Enough for two, if you want a chat.’

Sandra said nothing, still regarding him suspiciously.

‘Your choice,’ he continued, slightly unnerved by her silence.

He popped back through the door and strode across the room to silence the frantic screeching of the kettle. He heard the door pushed fully open behind him. Smiling thoughtfully, he called,

‘Take a seat, I won’t be a minute.’

Page had hoped that she’d left the fear behind her. Something in the past, to be forgotten. She’d been wrong. It was following her. It clung to her.

She’d lost everything. Her name, her memories, her life. That was okay from a professional view. She didn’t need her own life to help others lose theirs. She needed the experience, the skill, the practice. But that was all she had.

How had she become involved? She couldn’t remember. Despite her love for the kill she was certain she wouldn’t have become involved by choice. And before…? She must have been something. A normal person with friends, family, identity. She tried to remember, but there was nothing. Whoever she had been, she was gone. Jane Page was the best she could hope for.

She listened to Ace and Benny as they talked about their experiences. Gabriel and Tanith were to blame for everything, they said, though they weren’t sure how. Page didn’t understand. She’d never met this couple they were so eager to blame, but she could sense the frustration and the anger with which her companions invested those names.

Gabriel. Tanith,

A door rose before her. She made a threateningly metallic sound with her gun and the others drew up short.

‘In there,’ Page said. ‘We haven’t looked yet.’

There was no argument. Benny walked to the door first, reaching to pull it open then wavering, lowering her hand and pausing nervously at the threshold. The door remained solidly closed.

‘What’s wrong?’ Page called.

‘I can hear something. Someone talking,’ Benny called back. ‘I think there’s someone in there already.’

‘All the better.’ Page smiled warmly. ‘More targets. Shall we see?’

Benny pulled open the door. A black rectangle cut itself into the wall where the door had been, a silent portal into a silent room. Benny stepped through cautiously, the lightness of her back gradually absorbed into the gloom. Page rattled her gun and Ace followed. Page kept close behind her.

The room was wrapped in total night. There were no vague shapes on the edge of Page’s vision, no light from any source, no sense of where they were. Page saw nothing in the dark, but she could hear. A voice in the darkness – a low, gritty tone that Page had to concentrate to catch. Each word seemed heavy as if speaking was a labour. Each word came slow and slurred, thick and accusatory. The owner of that voice hated not just Page, but everyone.

‘You never gave us a chance.’

The lights came on.

Page assimilated her surroundings instantly. A small room and a quiet one. The silence in the room was so thick it was almost tragic. It was the most depressing place that Page had ever seen. She’d been in torture cells with happier atmospheres. It was a nursery, filled with old toys and old memories, kept neatly in good order. Dust had built on everything – everything convinced Page that this was a place that had lost its purpose.

That was the room. The occupants were something different. A man and a woman dressed absurdly. Both were young, blonde and attractive. They were so perfect it was suspicious. Page found her gun wavering away from Ace and Benny and training on these new faces. They ignored it. They seemed calm and arrogant, condescension etched into their smiles. Page had the sudden feeling that she was confronting something worse than she’d ever met before.

Gabriel. Tanith.

They stood before a velvet curtain which stretched across the top of one wall – hiding a window or a mirror, Page guessed. It was a new addition.

‘Welcome Ace, Bernice, Jane,’ The woman spoke – Tanith, Page presumed.

‘We are so glad that you could make it,’ Gabriel added. ‘This is a very special occasion for us.’

Page shot glances at her companions – she’d stopped thinking of them as hostages. She saw hostility and revulsion written large on both their faces, magnified by fear. Even Ace. Jane Page felt her knuckles itching, tightening.

Tanith was speaking:

‘It may seem that our sole objective in life is to hurt people – specifically your good selves. It is. But that’s not to say that we have no long‐
term plans.’

‘You are about to see them unveiled.’ Gabriel picked his words with relish. ‘Them dry bones gonna walk around, O hear the word of the Lord.’

‘We have the pleasure of introducing Jane to her fellow travellers.’

‘And Ace and Bernice, to their victims.’

Page glanced at Ace and Benny and saw confusion.

‘We present,’ Tanith threw her arms wide, her voice growing louder and deeper and more strident; her voice was joined by Gabriel’s to become a chorus, ‘the damned!’

The curtains exploded, blasted aside by a storm of wind, light and noise. The nursery filled with sound and fury. Page was knocked back against a wall. As she fought to steady herself, her eyes flicked wildly round the room. She saw Gabriel and Tanith withdrawing through the door, too vague in the harsh light to be decent targets. She saw Ace sprawled on the floor, limbs flailing as she tried to climb to her feet. She saw Benny, better placed than Ace, anchored by a chest of drawers. The light flooded the room, blue‐
tinged, casting hideous black shadows that might have been faces. They rose through the room, speaking in tongues, deformed mouths howling rage and pain. There were words beneath the babble and the noise of the storm.

‘We live.’

Two syllables beating again and again, lending rhythm and depth to the chaotic white noise. The voices were neutral, but punctuated by higher, accusatory shrieks, full of loathing for the women in the room.

‘What choice were we given?’ the shapes howled. ‘From darkness to darkness with darkness between.’

Page tried to blank out the assault, staring upwards and shielding her eyes to see the heart of the storm. Behind the curtains. A window set high on the wall, jet black but radiating light.

Page pulled her gun up to level on that window. Screaming soundlessly into the storm, she let her finger squeeze. Fire burned from the barrel of the gun, spitting viciously at the window. Page scowled and swore and kept firing. Nothing was happening.
Nothing
. The window was as flat and unbroken as it had ever been, as if her bullets were evaporating.

She stopped, seeing Benny forcing herself to climb. She was balancing precariously on the chest of drawers. Weak though it looked, Page had no doubt it could support Benny’s weight. And it was situated below the window. It swayed alarmingly as she balanced on its top, but Page could already see that it wouldn’t fall. It settled down and Benny seemed to relax. One hand had slipped down the length of her body and was forcing a boot from her foot. Page watched with a growing feeling of expectancy. This was going to
work
!

Benny weighed the boot in one hand, a hand that swung pendulously with increasing force. With a swift, powerful action she thrust her arm up, smashing her shoe into the black glass.

Glass which failed to shatter.

The light imploded into Benny’s body, becoming no more than a blue halo flickering round her shape. A brief, agonized scream formed on her mouth, sickeningly soundless in that storm of light and sound.

The light snapped off. The room reverted to normal.

The chest of drawers toppled over, smashing into the floor, shaking the boards, sending a shock up Page’s spine. Benny was on the floor by the chest. She had fallen clear of it and was lying awkwardly on her back, her neck twisted out of its natural crook, her arms splayed wildly at painful angles. Her eyes were closed, her chest was still.

Page had grown too used to death to feel anything more than a flicker of sorrow. Even that surprised her.

Ace climbed to her feet, hawkish features softening into confusion. She stared vacantly at the body then switched her gaze on to Page, something pitifully hopeful in her face. Page shook her head. A deep, dark frown grew across Ace’s features, then hardened. She stumbled across the room to crouch by the crumpled shape that had been Bernice Summerfield. With a façade of casualness, she reached for Benny’s wrist, prodding it in a fruitless search for a pulse. When she moved again, she was agitated, her hands leaping to Benny’s chest, to her neck, to her face, to her eyes. With each fresh move Ace’s actions became shakier, less restrained. Page watched the woman disintegrate. It was difficult to maintain her detachment. She managed.

Ace pulled her hands away from the body and shot a glance of utter hatred in Page’s direction. It was an anger so thick and tangible Page nearly reeled. But it wasn’t aimed at her. It was just anger, undirected and venomous, straight from the heart.

Ace turned back to the body, her shoulders rounding with renewed anger. Her arm swung down, the full force of her anger behind it, smashing a flat palm against the side of Benny’s face. Flesh cracked against flesh. The dead head rolled aside. Ace looked up at Page again, her anger evaporating, tears guttering down her face. Page watched without passion.

‘She’s not really dead is she?’ she asked. Page sensed the effort in that voice, the force keeping it calm and bland. Page nodded. She was dry and dead inside herself. She didn’t know why. Ace turned away, her body twisting up into something painful.