The Mammoth Book of Terror (32 page)

“God,” he thought, “I am pitiable!”

Then, “No, make that pathetic.”

He lay alone with this insight and other thoughts, at times almost dozing, for some hours, until his doorbell rang. Someone seemed to have their finger glued to the buzzer. The single ring went
on and on. Every nerve in Maurice’s body jangled with it.

He sat up, switched on the bedside light, and grabbed his watch. It was ten past two in the morning.

The ringing stopped at last.

He thought he heard a thump on the door.

His house, in spite of the fact it was second hand, was one of the most recent of its kind built in Buxton. It was big, pretentious, had been very expensive, but the walls and ceilings were
thin. Sound travelled from room to room without hindrance. A radio playing softly in the kitchen could be heard clearly in the bathroom one floor up at the other end of the house. Maurice was sure
someone was doing something to the front door; perhaps forcing the lock.

He sneaked downstairs in his dressing gown, shaking with sickness and, yes – he acknowledged – fear, as well!

The street light outside cast enough illumination for him to make out the shape of a figure on the other side of the distorting glass in the front door. Well enough for him to be sure that his
visitor earlier in the day, who he had kicked, had returned. The man was bending forward, pushing clumsily at his letterbox, trying to get something through. Part of a small package and the tips of
two fingers and a thumb protruded through the slot.

Maurice went and picked up the telephone he had flung at the wall in rage after his conversation with good old Neville Gale.

The ancient instrument had survived in one piece. It was satisfyingly heavy. He went to the door, held the phone up high, and brought it down with brute force on the letterbox.

There was a sound from beyond the door that made Maurice drop the phone and hide his face in his hands. It was a wail of pain, outrage, and despair, and somehow it expressed, with acute
accuracy, the fears, thoughts and emotions that had been haunting him that night, and during the recent past. It gave voice to them exactly. It was as though his own soul stood out there, lost,
alone, and in great agony. Maurice felt a sickening mixture of compassion and self-pity.

He
was
sick. He tried to reach the washing-up bowl in the kitchen, but didn’t make it.

After he had cleaned himself up, he forced himself to inspect the letterbox, expecting to see blood. There was none. Fragments of charred newspaper were caught in the flap, nothing else.

“No finger-tips,” he thought, “thank God!”

On impulse, he turned the locks, shot back the absurd, over-ornate bolts, and opened the door wide. He peered out at his morbidly tidy garden (his one hobby) and found it empty. All was
quiet.

His cat ran urgently towards him across the road, then changed its mind, and scampered back. Something behind the privet hedge, near the spot where the cat had changed direction, moved heavily,
shaking the bushes. Maurice stared hard, but could see nothing through the darkness under the tight, trimmed leaves.

A shadow passed swiftly across his lawn towards the house, as though a large bird had passed above.

But that was impossible! Nothing had moved below the streetlight, that could cast a shadow!

Then he saw something tall and thin, like the trunk of a narrow tree, in his neighbour’s garden. He was sure it had jerked into brief motion; had scuttled quickly a little closer, then
gone still.

It did it again, seeming to cover ten feet of ground in a split second. It was now close enough for Maurice to form some idea about what manner of creature it was.

It had many legs.

Maurice ran inside and slammed the door. He locked and bolted it. The doorbell was operated by batteries. He removed them and put them into the pocket of his dressing gown. He sat on the stairs
watching the front door for ten minutes, waiting for the bell to ring. He knew that it couldn’t, but thought perhaps it would.

He ran upstairs and threw himself into bed. He lay face down, with a cushion over his head, cocooned in his sheets and blankets.

Later, he heard a movement on the roof. Something had climbed up there, and was making its way along the gable above his bedroom. It made harsh, scratching sounds on the tiles, and dislodged
some of them. Maurice heard them crashing down into his garden. From the sounds, he judged that whatever it was had clambered out to a position just above his window.

As if to confirm this speculation, there came a loud, spasmodic tapping on the glass.

Maurice half sat up. He was glad that his curtains were pulled shut. As he stared at them, the window behind was shattered and one of them twitched open. A long, grey, scrawny limb, perhaps an
arm, but without a proper hand on the end of it, waved a little bundle at him. It dropped the bundle and withdrew.

There were more scampering sounds from above as Maurice fled from the room.

He didn’t go near the packet; he thought he knew what was in it.

Something he didn’t want.

Then he dressed and went out to his car.

To his surprise, hundreds of birds were singing enthusiastically all round him. It was the dawn chorus. It was just like the sounds on the CD he had been playing, and it scared him stiff.

He got hurriedly into his car and drove towards Dove Holes again.

He got out of his car and pushed the gates hard with the heel of his shoe. They hardly moved. He climbed back into the driving seat, backed the car away as far as he could, keeping in line with
the gate, then accelerated straight down the centre of the access path.

The chain and lock held when the car hit, but the hinges on the left split from the concrete gatepost, and the gates whipped up over the bonnet. Something smashed the windscreen, which fell in
fragments on his lap. The car slewed round out of control when he applied the brakes, and tobogganed along on top of the crust of dried mud which opened behind him like a huge wound. The line of
trees flashed by as the vehicle spun. The air was full of flying earth, scraps of refuse, and noise.

The rear left side of the car smacked against the right front end of the porta-cabin which reared up under the impact. It did not topple over, but jumped some distance out of its original
position. The side caved in and the door flew wide open.

Maurice sat stunned in the driving seat. He didn’t seem to have hurt himself in the crash. He felt nothing except numb, possibly from all the pills he had been taking. Too many, maybe. He
noticed his reactions were slowed down and movements faltering. His fingers felt wooden as he fumbled with the clip of the seatbelt. The door lock was jammed and he couldn’t open it. He
crawled over the passenger seat and let himself out that way, emerging face down and on his hands.

He stood up, shook himself, and climbed onto one of the big skips to take stock of his situation.

Although the sun was hardly up, the landscape was bathed in clear, soft, almost creamy light. There were shreds of thin cloud squatting on the fields that clung to the sides of Combs Moss, and
frozen billows of morning mist hovered above the surfaces of the small lakes that had formed, over the years, in the quarry bottoms. Something in motion caught his eye, running away from him along
a line of wall, but he realized at once, from its russet coat, that it was only a large fox. There were rabbits, too, munching the tall grass around the edges of the tip. The air smelt clean and
dry, as he imagined desert air must.

Except for the regular clanking and glugging of a distant pump engine somewhere down in the old diggings, all was stillness and silence.

Nothing moved or made a sound in the line of dark trees.

He clambered over the broken steps leading up to the cabin, and went inside.

The pile of mattresses had fanned out like a pack of cards. The old caretaker was spread-eagled across them on his back. His face looked raw, and was mottled with dark stains like those that had
remained on Maurice’s hands after he had crushed the egg-like object he had found. The man looked dead, but wasn’t. A heartbeat was just detectable under his overalls, and he was
drawing rasping breath through his mouth. Maurice tried to rouse him, but soon gave up. The man seemed in a trance, or coma.

Many of the piles of cases and boxes scattered along the length of the cabin had toppled over and burst open. Maurice was not surprised to see that some of them had been packed with bones, and
that two of them contained dozens of the eggs wrapped in scraps of grubby paper and plastic. Bundles of the long, thin bones, tied like firewood with electric cable, were revealed behind a
half-fallen rubber sheet.

Maurice left the cabin and wormed his way back into his car. He tried the engine. It started without trouble and he found he was able to back the vehicle away from the cabin. He drove cautiously
down into the tip. Something under the chassis was grating against the wheels, but he didn’t give it a thought.

The cinder path took him past a high wire fence marking no apparent boundary. Twice he stopped to look round, hoping to catch sight of some of the scavengers, but there was no one else about at
all, he was soon convinced of that.

In one of the deeper sections of the recent workings he nosed the car out over what appeared to be dried mud; but the caked surface broke and the vehicle tipped forward alarmingly. The back
wheels spun strands of slime, like black mucus, out behind.

He could not reverse out. The car was sinking. Oily stuff oozed in through the bottoms of the doors around his feet.

He awkwardly hauled himself out the passenger door again, and abandoned the car. He walked back the way he had come, out of knee-deep, liquid filth, then climbed up to the top of one of the
highest mounds of builder’s rubble. The position gave him a view over most of the tip. He noticed little clouds of smoke or steam were starting to drift up from the surface in various places,
as though fires had been started underground. He went to investigate.

The smoke, for that was what it was, was coming up through some of the tunnel-like holes he had noticed on his first visit. It was slightly scented, not unpleasantly, and had a greenish tinge.
He wandered round for a while, peering down into the openings, then sat down next to a large hole that was not emitting smoke. He could hear a sound deep down in the tunnel, a regular heavy
pounding, like the bass line of a musical composition. He leaned out over the hole and cupped his ear with his hand. He thought he could hear other sounds down there, like snatches of a whispered
conversation.

He was propped up on one arm with his hand outstretched on the encrusted mud. Suddenly, as he adjusted position, the surface gave under his weight and he dropped into the tunnel clumsily. He lay
still for a moment, winded. Then, instead of drawing back out again, he tentatively reached down even further. The tunnel was quite wide enough for him to squirm into. It descended at an angle of
about thirty-five degrees to the surface; a comfortable angle to slip down.

And, he judged, not so steep that he could not make his way back out again without too much trouble, if he had to.

It was not absolutely dark down there; there seemed to be some source of dim light ahead of him. Feeling his way carefully and methodically, he lowered himself into the ground. When he felt his
feet slip over the lip of the tunnel, he had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of what he was doing, which he forced himself to ignore.

Moving with great caution, he descended perhaps forty or fifty feet down the narrow passage without much trouble.

The tunnel got a little less steep after a while, however, and became narrower, and he found he was having to make more effort to make any progress. Also, the air was getting musty and
unpleasant to breathe.

He rested, and began to worry about the sides of the tunnel collapsing on him. He would suffocate. No one knew he was there, or would come looking for him.

Total loneliness stabbed up inside him again, with an accompanying, enervating, surge of self-pity.

Although he was strong, he was not at all fit, and what he was doing, in his condition, seemed suddenly crazy.

He was just about to start wriggling back out when he saw and heard a motion in front of him.

Something reached out of the dark ahead, and clasped his hand. It was a thin, dry, loose-skinned hand, and it took a powerful hold on his. His fingers were crushed painfully together. Whoever
was in front of him began to retreat, pulling him further down the tunnel. He tried to resist, but discovered he was at the end of his strength. He plummeted lower very fast, hurting himself
against stones and other objects that protruded from the sides of the crudely dug hole.

He tried to keep his free arm bent across his face to protect it, but smashed his elbow against something sharp.

He thought whoever was pulling him was whispering something earnestly to him, that he could not catch. After a while he gave up trying to hear and started howling with pain.

Something hit him hard above the right eye. He became unconscious.