The Outsiders (12 page)

His
remorse chased off the remnants of his anger. His desire for
vengeance now giving way to his desire for her. He opened his mouth
to say something but nothing wanted to step up to the mark. Nothing
wanted to be shot down in cold blood. Instead he turned and without
looking back left Jennifer’s flat to the sound of sobs and ragged
breathing.

Threlfall
House had fourteen floors; a stalagmite of shite brought from the
brink of demolition on more occasions than anyone could remember.
The housing estate that existed in its shadow was no better; tried,
run down, the people who lived there pretty much the
same.

Anderson
loathed the place. The smell of stale piss and booze pervaded the
stairwells. And the lifts were something else. Floors eroded by
years of drunks using them as latrines, the top layer of linoleum a
corroded ovoid, a mini piss-lake for all to avoid.

But if
Anderson was totally honest, it wasn’t this that kept him from
using the lift. It was something far more primordial, far more
basic.

Confinement wasn’t a friend of Cory Anderson. The thought of
those small cars and the long drop had him shivering and heading
straight for the stairwell. What was nine floors amongst friends?
Besides he’d have guilt and the sharp stinging in his knuckles to
keep him company on the way down.

He’d not
meant to loose it like that. He just wanted to know why Jennifer
had traded him in for a no-mark like Malcolm. And then the little
shite had answered the door, the grin on his face, Jennifer’s
lipstick on his neck, pushing all the wrong buttons and setting the
green eyed beast loose. It had started with a shove and then went
from there. Anderson’s muse unleashed in the tiny flat in a giant
turd of a building.

Anderson
began his descent, his footfalls amplified by the concrete space
about him. He kept his hands in free space, avoiding the stair
rail. His hands hurt enough without coming across a hypodermic
strategically placed to catch an unsuspecting police officer or
Community Nurse.

Junkies
and their sense of humour.

He made
the seventh floor before he heard it. It was loud enough - close
enough - to make him stop in mid stride.

Growling.

His first
thought was that a dog was loose in the stairway. There were plenty
of them in the building after all; their owners mostly drug dealers
or games machine junkies. He tried to place it. Was it above or
below? He waited; his breath on hold for a while.

It came again, from the landing below, thick and gruttal. And
no matter how many times Anderson told himself the contrary, he
knew now that it was definitely not a dog. He knew this for many
reasons, but the main clue making him sure enough to start backing
up the stairs, was the
click
clicking
sound accompanying the growls; the
sound of big claws tapping against concrete.

Someone
had once said that we fear the unknown more than anything else in
the world; and it was this adage that had Anderson going against
his instinct to get the hell moving and encouraging him to peer
over the railings, to make known the unknown, to quell the gnawing
fear in his belly.

Slowly he
inched over the banister, the vertical corridor of railings coming
into view and dropping out below in a dizzying sense of height. He
leaned over a little more, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever
was on the next landing, and began to question his initial
trepidation. He was about to call time on his misplaced anxiety
when he saw it.

And
it
saw
him.

Anderson
pulled sharply away from the railing, his back slamming against the
pistachio coloured wall behind him. He wished that the concrete
barrier could absorb him in some way, make him invisible to the
thing he’d seen on the floor below. The thing that was slowly
making its way towards him.

It had
been a brief glimpse, but the image was branded upon his brain,
seared there as though he’d inadvertently stared at the mid-summer
sun. Red eyes, it had red eyes and they bore into him, marked him
far deeper than the nails of his ex-lover ever could. And teeth, oh
God it had teeth, lots of them that cluttered its maw so much so
that the mouth had been forced into a razor sharp grin.

Anderson
noted the door leading to the seventh floor flats. It was made of
wood and glass and had no chance of stopping the thing coming to
introduce him to those terrible teeth.

But
through the glass he saw something else; the steel doors of the
lift were open; wide and inviting. And although Anderson never
thought the day would come when he’d welcome such a thing, he found
himself weeping with joy. He edged towards the stairwell’s exit,
eager to get inside the lift before the creature could get anywhere
near him. The door to the exit opened smoothly for the first few
inches, then the squeal of neglected hinges carved its name in the
air.

“
Shit!”

An
explosion of movement now; heavy footfalls from below, the hideous
growling a soundtrack to the event as the creature pounded up the
steps. Anderson moved too, throwing open the door and launching
himself towards the lift, his feet slipping haphazardly on the
greasy linoleum.

But he
was a few feet away when, to his total horror, the doors began to
close.

He threw
himself at the doors, his arm stuck out in front of him in an
attempt to activate the opening mechanism. He got lucky, his hand
made it through and the sensors picked it up. The doors slid lazily
open with the incongruous, bright chime of a bell.

Just as
Anderson bundled his body into the car, the doors to the stairwell
were yanked open, the noise loud as the frame came with it and the
remains were cast aside with the din of splintering wood and
shattering glass.

The
growling was louder now, filling the landing, filling Anderson’s
world. The reek of piss was overwhelmed by another stench, the
stench of something he couldn’t immediately place until it was so
powerful it was difficult to suppress.

The stink
of dead meat.

Not the
clinical butcher’s shop stink, but that of road kill, or something
trapped under a floorboard or behind a skirting board.

In his
frenzy, Anderson flailed at the buttons on the wall. The lift doors
began to close just as Anderson’s new buddy came into view, the
eyes - ruby red and devoid of empathy – scanning his, a streak of
viscous saliva swinging from its lower jaw almost hypnotising the
trapped man with its pendulous motion.

The doors
dragged themselves together as the creature launched at them. The
lift began its descent as the beast’s bulk struck the outer doors,
the impact bowing them inward and shaking the car violently.
Anderson cried out as he was dumped on his ass as the car shimmied.
The lift shaft creaked and groaned but the car was moving, leaving
the thing battering the external doors on the seventh floor
landing.

“
Guess again, you sonofabitch,” he said, his voice frayed with
fear and relief. As the car slid down the shaft, Anderson climbed
to his feet, his mind trying to shrug off the sluggishness his fear
had saddled him with. Rational thought needed to re-assert itself
and fast.

He pulled
out his mobile, his intention to notify the cops, to tell Jennifer
and that sorry fuck Malcolm to stay put. His brain was just
registering that there wasn’t any signal when a huge, distant thud
occurred overhead. There was the distinct din of metal being bent
and twisted and then something clattering down the lift shaft,
bouncing against the sides with a series of dull echoes until it
smashed into the roof of the car.

Again the
whole lift bucked and Anderson was knocked into the doors, cracking
his forehead a good one as he went, and filling his head with
bright shiny lights. The car came to a shuddering halt as fell to
his knees, his hands clutching his brow.

Then, the
lights went out.

Darkness,
complete and suffocating.

Anderson
tried to stem the tide of horror threatening to wash over him and
drag him down into madness. The car remained stationary; the steady
creaks from outside adding to the ominous sense of
threat.

He
activated his mobile phone, the light from the tiny screen
seemingly huge in the pervading blackness about him. He checked his
signal again, his heart scudding against his sternum before falling
into the pit of his stomach when he saw the “No Service” warning on
the screen.

Another
squeal, another creak brought him into focus. The car jolted,
skidding down the walls of the lift shaft for a few seconds before
grinding to a halt. Anderson cried out in surprise and
terror.

How the tables have turned
, his mind
teased. And it was wearing Jennifer’s voice just to drive the point
home.
Who’s scared now, Cory? Who’s at the
mercy of something that has no care for the fear of others? How
does it feel? How does it taste?

He tried
to shut her out. But that would mean facing something else, right?
Facing his true fear: the confined space.

The
darkness.

It
brought back memories, memories as dark as the ebony piss perfumed
cloak wrapped about now. Hiding from Tommy, his psychotic brother,
a perverse game of hide and seek that always ended the same: a
beating for being so shit; then confinement, thrown in the cupboard
under the stairs, a real life Harry Potter but wearing bruises
rather than a cloud of magic.

Even
though Tommy was now kept somewhere with lots of doctors and nurses
keeping him a splendid isolation, courtesy of heavy doses of
Olanzepine and dull brown leather straps with bright silver
buckles, Cory Anderson wore his brother’s legacy like an ill
fitting suit. Usually a quiet soul, nagging from a distance, but
sometimes, times like these for example, coming to the front of the
stage and bringing the whole wretched house down; the phantom
bringing about destruction in a wreath of flame.

A huge
crash on the roof of the car sent the phone tumbling from
Anderson’s grasp. The small screen splashed its watery light to the
ceiling, and Anderson followed its beam instinctively, his braised
hands clamped across his mouth; not in an attempt to stifle his
scream but to stop a huge wave of vomit ejecting from his mouth.
“Fear is nature’s purge” Tommy had once said before beating Cory
senseless with their mother’s old broom.

Now the
purging was back and wanting to let off steam. He swallowed hard,
the acrid vomit burning his throat on its return journey. And all
the time Anderson watched the roof of the car, waiting for
something terrible to happen.

His fear
wanted to morph so badly into anger. Some of the hot stuff he’d
dished out to Malcolm not fifteen minutes ago as Jennifer begged
him to stop. But impotence had moved in, his fear consuming as the
thing overhead began to pace, heavy foot falls making the car
tremble in a steady, sullen rhythm.

“
Oh God, oh God,” he whispered behind the palm clasped to his
mouth. “What the hell is it?”

But he wasn’t really concerned about what it was; he was more
concerned about what it could do. What it
would
do. Part of him became convinced
that there was no way on this God-given-Earth the thing would be
able to get into the car.

Get to
him
.

But then
Anderson’s rational mind suggested that if it could smash its way
into a lift shaft and jump three floors onto the roof of the car,
then it would be near enough able to do what the fuck it wanted.
And what it wanted now was to torment and tease and show that it
called the shots. It wanted its prey to know that it was cornered,
and although he’d fought against his darkest fear and entered the
lift, Anderson was yet to know what fear truly was; what it could
truly do.

The power
save mode kicked in, throwing the lift into total
darkness.

“
Jesus H. Christ!”

The words
were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and the sounds of
pacing overheard came to a sudden halt. And then the growling
returned, deep and coarse and powerful.

Anderson
scrabbled around for his phone, trying bring back the light. “Are
you nuts?” his mind sang. “You really want to see what’s about to
tear you apart?”

From far
away, he made the decision, that yes, perhaps, after all of these
years the dark could become a friend. He would make his peace with
it. Just for this one day, the last day of his life.

The roof
overhead groaned as a huge force struck it, and the lift was
suddenly full of light, Anderson covering his eyes from the
brilliance as the fluorescents came back online. Through his
blurred vision he could see a portion of the roof had been hit with
such might it sagged inwards. Another blow opened the dent like a
lanced blister.

Anderson
could only stare as the big gnarled hand came through the gap,
probing, searching for the edges. Twisted fingers - thick as rope
and blending seamlessly into wicked, wicked talons - curled around
the ragged hole they had carved and then yanked backwards, peeling
away a section of roof as though it were a swatch of
fabric.