Pandaemonium (32 page)

He sees Michelle stumble, Carol-Ann having caught her heel. They both go down. Two more kids trip over them, the rest managing to swerve around the growing tangle. Guthrie rushes to assist, and as he does so he sees, undeniably, what they are fleeing from.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ he whispers, then launches himself into its path before it can reach its next prey.

Sendak hauls the girls to their feet and all but throws them through the doorway into the corridor. He slams one of the double doors closed, grabbing hold of the other as Guthrie emerges from the steam and the flickering semi-darkness. He’s blood-soaked and stumbling, but upright, the creature nowhere to be seen.

‘Dan! Come on!’ Sendak yells.

Guthrie stretches out a hand. Sendak does too, but he’s keeping hold of the door with his other, aware he cannot let go under any circumstances. It has to close, even if they both die closing it, but for now, he’s got a second’s grace. Guthrie staggers closer a step, then his legs give out and he drops to his knees, but he falls forward just enough for Sendak to reach his hand. As he takes hold of it, the demon hurls itself over Guthrie’s head and crashes into Sendak, knocking him backwards on to the floor of the corridor.

Oh fuck.

The creature scrambles to its feet less than a yard away, just inside the dining room. To his left and right he can see terrified kids who literally don’t know which way to turn. It’s quicker than him. He can’t even sacrifice himself by charging the thing because it will be through the gap before he’s even upright. Then the second door suddenly swings closed as Guthrie throws himself against it in what will be his final conscious act.

There’s a clunk as the doors latch together. Sendak leaps to his feet and seizes both handles, using all his muscle to keep them in place. A blood-streaked blade juts through the tiny gap where the doors meet, stopping just short of his face, followed by a resounding thump as the creature tests their integrity.

Sendak shouts to the nearest kid, one of the girls who fell. Michelle, he thinks her name is.

‘I can’t let go of these handles. I need you to take the keys from my pocket and lock this door.’

The girl looks at him as though he’s the monster. She just wants to run.

The blade is wiggling, the creature trying to work it free, Sendak keeping the doors pulled tight to prevent precisely that.

‘Now, goddamn it.
Now
.’

The girl shudders in response to his shout, but obeys nonetheless. Figures. When people are scared like that, they’ll follow orders simply because it’s the only thing that makes sense, a way of telling themselves that there is still some kind of process in control.

She extracts the ring of keys and starts fumbling though them. They all look alike.

‘Blue tag on the end. Says DR.’

There’s another thump, the reverberation enough to drive the doors slightly apart and free the blade. It comes through again a fraction of a second later, lower down, close to where Michelle is trying to fit the key into the lock. It cuts her wrist: nothing serious, but enough to draw blood and cause her to drop the keys.

‘I need this door locked,’ Sendak shouts. ‘Someone help her.’

‘It’s okay,’ Michelle says, tremulous. ‘I’ll manage.’

She reaches down to the floor and discovers that the keys are lying in a puddle of blood seeping under the doors.

‘Oh God.’ She starts to weep but doesn’t flinch from lifting the keys.

‘Mr Guthrie,’ she says, picking out the right key a second time and twisting it in the lock. ‘He saved me.’

‘He saved everybody,’ Sendak corrects. ‘And now you have too.’

He steps away from the door and looks at the milling shambles in reception. Mrs McKenzie, Heather and himself are the only adults present.

‘We need to get to the games hall,’ he announces, but they’re barely listening. They all stand and look at each other, not responding. Some of them are very close to losing it. Nobody wants to go first.

‘It was a demon,’ one of them says, almost hysterical. ‘A fucking demon.’

‘Come on, people,’ Sendak urges. ‘Let’s keep it together.’

He makes his way towards Heather, still squatting protectively beside the trembling and catatonic Gillian. She represents precisely how ‘together’ everyone else is likely to be very soon. They need someone to take the lead.

‘What the hell is in there?’ Heather asks frantically. ‘She said the Devil killed Liam. The kids are shouting about demons . . .’

Sendak holds up a clenched fist: signal for Stop.

‘The games hall has no big windows, and just two exits to control. We secure it first and deal with the weird shit that don’t make sense later.’

Heather nods. Got it. She gets to her feet and puts on her practised teacher voice. ‘Games hall. Everybody. Now,’ she commands. ‘Two abreast, but don’t run.’

‘Mrs McKenzie, you help Gillian get there,’ Sendak orders. He turns again to Heather. ‘You, come with me: double-time.’

They either don’t hear him or simply aren’t minded to take stock quite yet. A scuttling sound from not far beyond their periphery abruptly changes their minds. They pull up, turning around. It’s Rosemary and Bernadette. Deso looks back now too. He sees Cameron and Marianne. Beyond them, way beyond them, he sees the outbound facility, flickering lights and music still spilling from the side door they escaped through. It looks as though nothing happened. He doesn’t know what he was expecting to see - flames and pentagrams and shit, maybe - but it’s almost possible to imagine the party still going on, people inside laughing about some elaborate trick.

Except he can still taste Fizzy’s blood from when it sprayed his face, can still see the knife going into Fizzy’s naked flesh. It was dark, the lights were flashing, but he knows he saw Fizzy die just as surely as he saw Dunnsy die.

They all just stare at each other for a few moments. Nobody wants to say anything: it’s as though they all know what they witnessed, but it will only become real if someone verifies they saw the same thing.

‘We need to find some cover, some shelter,’ Deso says. ‘We’re wide open out here, and I’m fuckin’ freezin’. We should head back towards the buildings.’

‘Back?’ Bernadette asks. ‘That’s where that
thing
is. Or did you miss Philip getting carved up by a bloody
demon
?’

Deso wipes some of Fizzy’s blood from his face and holds his palm up to Bernadette.

‘I didn’t miss that, no,’ he says, trying his best to swallow his anger.

There is another scuttle in the blackness, the sound of a threatening low growl.

‘Deso’s right,’ agrees Marianne. ‘We can’t stay out in the open. We need to get back inside for protection.’

‘I’ve got my protection right here,’ says Bernadette. She reaches inside the collar of her blouse and pulls out a crucifix, suspended on a silver chain around her neck.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Deso says. ‘What’s that meant to do? It’s monsters we’re up against here, not fuckin’ Protestants.’

‘I know what I saw,’ Bernadette insists. ‘We all know what we saw. Father Blake was wrong: there
are
demons. I don’t know what brought them down upon this place, but I do know that faith is the only thing that can save us.’

‘Have you any holy water on you as well? I’m sure they’re shit-scared of that too.’

Deso starts to walk towards the facility. Marianne and Cam are turning back that way also. Rosemary is left next to Bernadette, looking unsure which option to take.

‘Come on,’ Marianne urges the pair of them. ‘You’ll be sitting ducks out here.’

‘I’d rather place my trust in the power of God than in the integrity of those buildings,’ Bernadette insists.

Deso turns around. ‘Walls can be breached, it’s true,’ he concedes. ‘But
nothing
fails like prayer.’

Rosemary shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe you’re reckless enough to be . . . blaspheming after what we’ve just seen.’

‘And after what we’ve just seen, I can’t believe you’d want to be standing out here, just waiting to be—’

Deso hears a scrambling sound and senses movement in the air, just too late to react as something pounces from the darkness, knocking him to the ground with a startling snarl of aggression.

He feels a pain in his back: sharp but shallow; a pre-pain, in fact, only the hint of how much it’s going to hurt in a few seconds from now. He’s been slashed by its claws, a glancing blow when it battered into him. He’s hit the deck with a bone-jarring wallop, the frozen ground biting into his bare skin. He rolls on to his side, but the demon is too quick. It pounces again, landing on his chest, and swipes a talon towards his neck. Deso throws up an arm. It gets batted away by the impact, but it saps the momentum enough to prevent the intended effect, that of ripping his fucking throat out. The demon reaches off to Deso’s left and locates a stone, about the size of a grapefruit. It raises it as high as its scaly arm will reach, and is about to bring it down when it suddenly hears something and glances to Deso’s right.

Bernadette has stepped forward, thrusting her crucifix towards the demon with her outstretched hand, chanting:

‘Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra . . .’

The demon seems almost hypnotised by her voice, its gaze fixed upon the out-thrust statuette. Its eyes flash, a low growl beginning to grow in its throat. It sounds angry, but to Deso’s ears, it could also be fear.

Over Bernadette’s shoulder, Deso can now see a second demon converging on the group. It is also seemingly hypnotised by the crucifix, also very agitated by the sight, to the extent that it stalks past the frozen figures of Cameron, Marianne and Rosemary, to take up position on the other side of Bernadette, equidistant from where its partner is straddling Deso.

‘Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie
,’ Bernadette continues, her voice tremulous but clear. ‘
Et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo
.
Amen
.’

Upon this final word, both demons - plus two more Deso was unaware of - suddenly attack Bernadette with a yowling, hissing, rending ferocity. They tear her apart in a blind rage of claws and teeth and knives and stones. There’s something worse than primal brutality here: there’s fury, there’s bloodlust, there’s hatred.

Suddenly rendered invisible to the brood, Cam and Marianne take their cue and flee. Deso gets to his feet and grabs Rosemary, spinning her away from the awful sight and dragging her along with him.

‘Just keep running,’ he tells her. ‘Don’t look back. Don’t look back.’