The Last Aerie (76 page)

“Inside the police station John saw the evidence, knew that this was his man—and cracked. He’d taken a cutthroat razor with him, and went for Prentiss to kill him! The desk officer had a gun. He made to produce it but Prentiss beat him to it, started shooting. He wounded two officers who got between him and Scofield, before a plain-clothes man with a handgun of his own came on the scene. In the shoot-out that followed Prentiss was hit in the heart and died on the spot. And if John Scofield had been a little bit crazy before, now he really went over the top. God only knows what was in his mind at that moment! But we all know what’s been in it ever since—
and what’s in it right now!

“Because that was when he took his cutthroat razor and put it to his own throat, and sliced as deep as he could go without actually sawing his own head off!

“Why did he do it? Well, we’ve thought about that…

“You see, whether we believed in John or not—in his deadspeak, I mean—
he
believed in it, just like his mother had believed before him. Also, he’d read the Keogh files and knew there
are
worlds beyond. Now that’s a concept which it’s still very hard for us to accept. Despite that we knew Harry and now have his son right here in our midst, it still feels very strange to us that death isn’t the end, that whatever a man was and did in life, he continues to be and do in his afterlife. The reason it’s hard for us is that we’re still very much alive. Who knows? Maybe the closer we get to it, the more we’ll be willing to believe.

“But as I said, John Scofield did believe. In fact, John
knew
that Tod Prentiss had got off too lightly, too quickly and easily, and that his evil incorporeal mind was still thinking its evil incorporeal thoughts among all the generally clean thoughts of the Great Majority!

“He
knew
that Prentiss would be thinking of the girls he’d raped and one in particular who he’d murdered, getting his mental rocks off on thoughts of Lynn’s sweet body before he soiled it and stilled the air in its lungs and the blood in its veins. But worse than all that, John knew that Lynn was there! She was there in Prentiss’s dead world, where even now the evil bastard might be whispering to her in the endless night of the tomb, telling her how good it had been for him and reminding her of the hell he’d put her through! And that’s why John had cracked.

“For while Tod Prentiss had been put beyond John’s reach in this world, he was still very much ‘alive’ and perhaps even available in the next. And what was there left for John here? Not even revenge, not now. But down among the teeming dead …? His cutthroat razor had been John’s visa into a world where he would continue to pursue what he’d pursued here. In this world he had practised his deadspeak; perhaps with some small measure of success, we’ve no way of knowing now. But he’d also used telekinesis. Maybe that, too, would have its incorporeal uses. The ability to move things with the power of the mind alone … And since mind would be all John had left, there would be nothing to distract him from his main pursuit:

“The pursuit of a man called Tod Prentiss!

“At the rear of the police station where the final act in this drama—or what ought to have been the final act—had taken place, stood a morgue. In fact the morgue joined the police station to an old, brick-built Victorian hospital, and served both institutions or facilities equally well. As the mess got sorted out, both Scofield’s and Prentiss’s bodies were put in cold storage there. And by that simple act—the placing in close proximity of these two dead bodies—the police brought into being the Nightmare Zone.

“That night the duties consisted of a Desk Sergeant and his radio op assistant, a two-man standby patrol, and a car on prowler duty. It wasn’t one of the big stations. Some old down-and-out—a drunk with nowhere better to go—was snoring in one corner of the inquiries room; all in all it was quiet, and not a lot was happening. Nothing odd about that, for after all it was a wintry Wednesday night, and the streets were empty.

“All admin attended to, the Sergeant joined his standby crew in a three-handed game of cards behind the desk, and the time crept round to midnight. Which was when things began to happen.

“First of all, it grew cold. That was hard to understand. Despite that it was bitter outside, the station was centrally heated and the heating turned up full. But the cold came seeping from the rear of the station, out of the wide, tiled, cell-lined corridor that led like a tunnel to the morgue. Back there was a door to that silent, grisly place, and on the other side of the morgue another door to the basement of the hospital. Of course at this time of night both doors were locked, and they would stay locked until the morning … unless there should be business to attend to in the interim.

“Well, it was possible that something had gone wrong with the refrigeration units, which might have started to leak their frozen air into the corridor. But before the Desk Sergeant and standby crew could investigate, they saw their first real signs that something was very, very wrong—and not only with the morgue’s refrigeration—and they began to hear the sounds!

“The signs came first:

“The walls of the place seemed to vibrate like a fleet of articulated trucks had gone by, causing ‘wanted’ posters and other notices to come loose and flutter to the floor. Documents on the desk danced in their trays, and the cards on the small folding table shuffled themselves this way and that across the green baize. Venetian blinds at the windows went jerkily up and down, up and down, like some idiot was playing with the cords and couldn’t get it right. So maybe it was an earthquake …

“Yes, and maybe the faint, dull
grunting
, the
moaning
,
howling
, and
crashing
that was coming from behind the locked doors of that morgue was only the wind in the old brick chimneys, or the agonized, echoing cries of incurable patients in the old hospital, finding their way down here from above. But it all added up to too many maybes, and finally the Sergeant took the keys and went to investigate—on his own!

“Now, I’ve read the reports over and over again, so that I’m pretty sure I know what broke the Sergeant’s nerve, put him in mental care, finally got him discharged from the force. The reports speak of hooliganism, vandalism, and ghoulish activity. But the standby crew only saw what was left
after
the sounds from the morgue had reached a crescendo and stopped—and after the Sergeant’s weak, shrill, girlish little titters had started!

“Then they’d walked slowly and carefully down the tiled tunnel between the empty cells and through the open door, to find him stumbling about among all the debris, drooling like an infant, pointing to the mess in the morgue and muttering over and over again what amounted to a confession of madness. And all around him …

“Chaos! Most of the refrigerated drawers were open, their—contents?—lying spilled on the cold tiled floor in grotesque attitudes of disarray. It was as if some lunatic had been looking for someone, a dead someone, and in his frenzied searching had ripped open the rows of temporary coffins, tumbling the bodies out onto the floor. But those bodies … their positions!

“There were eight of them all told, and six of the eight were where you’d expect to find them in those circumstances: close to the drawers which they’d occupied. But the other two …
weren’t
where you’d expect to find them, and their coffins weren’t in any condition you’d expect to find them in! For it was John Scofield who had kicked open the bottom of his drawer, slithered out and gone on the rampage in the morgue, and it had been Tod Prentiss he was looking for—
still
looking for, even in death! What’s more, Prentiss had known he was coming, for his drawer had been forced from the inside, and the lid almost torn from its hinges as the dead rapist and murderer had tried to get away from his pursuer!

“And
their
bodies?

“They were discovered well away from the other six, in a corner lined with toppled filing cabinets where finally John had trapped his prey. There they lay, frozen again in the paralysis of death, one with his throat sliced open and the other with a hole through his heart, and Scofield’s cold hands wrapped around Prentiss’s throat as if to choke the ‘life’ out of him!

“And the Desk Sergeant? Well obviously he’d walked right into it; he’d actually seen these two corpses … what, fighting each other? Well, whatever name you’d give to their zombie struggle. He’d seen it, and known what he was looking at, and couldn’t accept it. Even here in E-Branch—knowing what we know, having seen what we’ve seen—it would be hard enough.

“And as if all of this wasn’t bad enough in itself, then there were the looks on their faces: John with his lips drawn back in a snarl, cording the ligaments of his neck, and Prentiss with his tongue lolling, eyes bulging, ‘scared to death’ of the madman who was killing him a second time! The same man who couldn’t lie still but would return to kill him again and again, presumably forever, or at least until we can discover a way to bring peace again to that dreadful place—

“That place we call the Nightmare Zone …”

IV

To Soothe the Dead

Looking down at the drawn, fascinated faces of his espers, Ben Trask stood up straighter, straightened his shoulders. Towards the end of his story his eyes had seemed glazed, almost vacant. Now they focused again and he coughed, clearing his throat before continuing.

“Almost done,” he said. “These things I’ve been talking about happened some two years ago, just the way I’ve told them to you, when E-Branch agent John Scofield took his revenge from beyond the grave. But as I also told you, or hinted, he hasn’t let it go at that but keeps right on taking his revenge. Which gets worse all the time.

“Six times now he’s been back, and each manifestation has been worse than the one before. The police station has gone—or rather, it’s just an old, dilapidated shell of a place now—its area of responsibility absorbed into the larger Police HQ at New Finsbury Park. The morgue’s no longer a morgue, just a damp and disused basement. Even the hospital has closed down, eaten up in the Green Health Plan and moved out into the countryside. But these places didn’t just close down, they
had
to close down. Because as John Scofield practices his telekinesis in the next world, so he gets better at it…

“… And the Nightmare Zone gets bigger!

“That’s how it all works out, you see? Deadspeak or whatever power it is that John’s got on the other side—plus his telekinesis and a dash of sheer incorporeal malice, or revenge if you want to call it that—equals bad dreams, poltergeist activity, fear and loathing and a hell of a lot of dirty work for us on
this
side! And the thing is, John probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Oh, he knows he’s doing it to Prentiss, but he can’t possibly know what effect it’s having here in the world of the living.

“You see, he wasn’t like that. John wouldn’t be giving us all this trouble if he knew. Except he can’t know, because living people can’t talk to the dead …” Trask paused and looked straight at Nathan. “Or maybe we can—now. We damn well have to try, anyway …”

After another long pause, Zek spoke up. “You haven’t told us what’s been happening,” she said. “I mean, how is the Nightmare Zone getting bigger?”

Trask nodded tiredly and seemed to slump down into himself once more. “At first it was local,” he said. “That first time, it only affected the police station and the morgue. But since then it’s been spreading. Four months later it was half-way up the Seven Sisters Road, moving down towards Highbury, and into Stroud Green. Another four months and it reached Crouch Hill, moved over into Newington, encroached upon Stamford Hill. Last time it was as far out as Islington, Upper Clapton and Hornsey. At the rate it’s growing, it’s only a matter of time before the whole of inner London falls inside its perimeter. Can you imagine that? All London the heart of the Nightmare Zone!

“As for what happens, what John Scofield’s ‘talents’ cause to happen … that has to be seen to be believed. Inanimate objects move of their own volition, graveyards send out foul-smelling fogs in the middle of summer, pet dogs set up a frenzy of howling for no apparent reason. Fires start by what appears to be spontaneous combustion, and go out again just as mysteriously; street lights dim and only come up again when it’s over; rats pour out of the sewers, and roaches desert infested houses in their droves! Dead things—I mean people or the left-overs of people, zombies, corpses, cadavers—are seen moving, walking,
crumbling
in the weirdest places: private gardens, behind the plate-glass windows of locked stores, along disused railway lines and in underground stations. Even time is affected. There are inexplicable distortions: events which should take hours are contracted down into minutes, while others of short duration extend themselves apparently indefinitely. And these are just a few of the so-called ‘poltergeist activities’.