Pinprick (18 page)

Epilogue

She was bound, tight clamps of metal dug and gouged in to her wrists and her ankles. In her dream she could feel as though it were real. Jennifer opened what she presumed were her eyes and immediately felt the psychological and physical pull the hole had over her. She wasn’t frightened, it was more ecstasy. Like walking for days in a desert to be greeted with the cleanest, clearest of lakes. Every part of her wanted to dive into the black pool before her. After fighting with all her strength against the restraints she felt herself give up and half collapse. Her body was not her body, it was her uncle’s, the clothes filthy and wet with god knows what. When her energy had returned slightly she fought again against the restraints and laughed hysterically as she was suddenly unbound. As she dived into the beautiful black abyss she let the darkness engulf her and marvelled at how real the dream was, the rushing of the slightly sulphuric air past her ears and she plummeted to unimaginable depths…

Jennifer blinked and sat up.

“You’re awake,” Mum sounded relieved.

“The ambulance is coming!” Dad stood ashen faced in the kitchen doorway.

Her face felt wet to touch and came away bloody.

“You’ve got a nose bleed.” Dad unrolled a wad of paper towel and crouched down to hold it to her face. She took it from him. “Jen, are you okay sweetheart?”

She felt dazed.

“My head hurts,” she mumbled. “What happened?”

She was really confused. Why she was sat on the floor in the kitchen with a nosebleed with everyone fussing over her? And what was that about an ambulance?

August 2006

The two men had finished the last layer of plastering and stood back to admire their handiwork. There was no sign that there had ever been a little doorway there at all. Brian Dury looked sorrowfully at the wall and then at his companion, Mark Somerfield, as tears of regret fell down his cheeks. The loss of two children would send him to his grave.

“We should’ve done this years ago!” Absentmindedly, he wiped his trowel clean on a piece of old rag.

Somerfield pitied his old friend and placed a hand on his broad shoulder. “The time wasn’t right and you know it. It would have sucked the good out of the land until there was nothing left, just a barren slag heap with a cancerous wound infecting everything.”

Dury closed his eyes and tried not to imagine what else would have happened if they hadn’t got Colbert, or if he had died elsewhere. He had lost but so had many, many others in this cursed land. But now it had come to an end.

The two men collected up their trowels, mud pans and the bag of plaster and left the cellar.

“Do you think it will be safe?” Dury asked as he locked the door to his empty bookshop for the last time.

Somerfield nodded, “Wartburg will no doubt fill the place full of cement when they start construction, just to make sure the foundations are solid. It’s over now.”

*

As Shane lay among the ruins of a thousand bodies he saw that, while some were centuries old skeletons with wisps of opaque hair, there was one who was fresher. Its mouth was stretched open in one last scream.

He heard his bones crunch back into place and imagined them healing. He was completely detached from any feeling. Even though he knew the answer, he wondered how long this total paralysis would last; until there was another like him.

“Which one came first The Whistler or The Pit?” he whispered. A nearby skeleton leaned in to hear him. A low continuous laugh came from his mouth as he lay there cradled by the stench of the dead. He laughed even harder at the prospect of a hundred years of total conscious paralysis. The skeletons were in on the joke and laughed with him. Their voices vied for space under the cavernous ceiling and echoed back at them.

A long time later, his eyes rolled back into his head and he sank into the tormented oblivion of madness.

Matthew Cash, or Matty-Bob Cash as he is known to most, was born and raised in in Suffolk. He has always written stories since he first learnt to write, and most, although not all, tend to slip into the many layered murky depths of the horror genre.

He is a father of two, a husband of one and a zoo keeper of numerous fur babies.