We had met at university. I had left the house in Herne Bay and taken a flat just off Parnell Road. The university work was easy and I felt free. That was the best time of my life. I imitated the way of life of the other students and did a lot of pretending but generally I was really happy. Perhaps the confusion began during those years; maybe I came to deceive myself into thinking my sociable, amenable behaviour represented a complete deep change; and I fell for that, at least for a while. I met Joanne at a third-year party. She was intense and intelligent, but with a nice sense of humour; and she was attractive. Her parents disapproved of me. She defied them, and occasionally stayed weekends and overnight at my flat. I think it was her first fling at independence. After I began doing postgraduate work I took a flat in Northcote to be nearer the research unit at Albany because the university had leased research facilities there. Joanne moved into my new flat with me, in spite of her family’s de facto objections. We decided we both valued our independence too much to make firm commitments. I did well at the unit and gained a full-time job there after two years.
We had already begun to test the effects of radioactivity on chromosomes and although it was early days I knew it was going to be important work. When Joanne became pregnant we married for the sake of the child, and it looked for a while as if the breach with her parents would heal, and we would get a house and settle down and have kids and that would be life. Yet looking back I wouldn’t say either of us really wanted that, we just seemed to…
Christ! There was something ahead, on the road, running into the car lights! I jerked the wheel hard across, braked, swerved, nearly lost control. There was a wild screeching. The car tipped right, skidding, and I flinched, expecting it to roll. It didn’t. The wheels lifted, then fell back. The car stopped, sideways across the camber, headlights whitening trees. What in the name of God had I just seen?
It had appeared out of nowhere, loping diagonally along the road from right to left, glaring hideously in the lights, an unrecognisable thing. I sat paralysed, then wrenched my eyes to the left to look back, but outside the patch of car light there was only the black of the road and forest below dull sky. First move was to grab the shotgun. Then panic. The engine shuddered and died. Sudden, heavy silence packed the car, pressed in. I writhed around, left hand frantic for the ignition, found it, turned the key, the engine dead, stalled—come on, again, again, for God’s sake—it started. I rammed down the accelerator. Not in gear. First, first, where the hell was it—there. The gears crunch-connected, my foot came off the clutch and with a muscular spasm hauling the wheel round I was off. Wildly. The car lurched all over the road. My arms had no strength, I couldn’t steer. The terror had done something to my spine and the nerves of my shoulders; my right foot went numb thrust down on the speed pedal. Space rushed past. The black came quick at the patch of light. Faster.
I had glimpsed, briefly, a bone-white beast the size of a big dog or a calf, hairless, wet and pallid like an abortion. Its head was deformed, a mutant of dog and goat, yet fat and imbecile, wide mouth snarling to the roots of its teeth, and glistening with spit; the car lights had glared back from red points of eyes rimmed pink. I had never seen such a monstrosity, not even amongst Perrin’s worst experimental aberrations, and they were all mercifully dead. The double shock here was that this nightmare was alive, the only other living thing—
The car ran round bends squealing and roaring. How did I miss hitting the thing? It had gone straight at my left headlight but there’d been no sound or impact. I kept staring in the rear-view mirror half expecting the abomination to be coming after me; no, nothing but dark. That sounded biblicaclass="underline" abomination, it surfaced like some diseased vision from Revelations. The way the creature moved! The slow lope totally alien to the run of a dog or calf, a kind of upright slithering…
Overwhelming fear had been dreadful enough inside the motel. Now it struck at me here, in half-dark on a remote road cut through hills and forest in the back of nowhere. I struggled to stop the panic. Calm down. It’s gone. You’re safe in the car. You have the gun. You’re safe. It wasn’t real. You were asleep for a second, it was a hallucination. Don’t think about it. Just a stray dog, or something, distorted in the light. Control it.
I drove on to Rotorua, the whole place standing dark, powerless, empty. The stench was the same as ever, like shit in hell. Clouds of white steam lurched in the distance and spurts of vapour were dissolving in midair over the road. There seemed to be movements everywhere. When I turned to look, they vanished.
I went fast down the main street, saw a hotel block on the left, turned off, drew up next to the main doors, switched off, and got out with the shotgun ready.
The only sound was a background hissing and rumbling, becoming more violent nearby in the bushes beyond the car park. Boiling water spattered up in a roar for a moment and then subsided. The bushes were coated with sulphurous powder. Some were dead. They stood out very pale against the edge of the darkness, trees from another planet, fuming suddenly. The air was thick, evil with heat.
I grabbed what I needed from the car and locked it. The hotel doors were open. I entered and latched them behind me. Shining a torch around I got a room key from reception and found the stairs. I went up six floors, let myself into the room, then locked and barricaded the door.
I stayed awake. My mind raced.
I know what I saw back there. If it was real then there were now things living on earth which should be dead, which defied every law of nature I ever knew. And there must be a reason for that. Something I could not live with, in any sense. It demanded my death.
And if what I saw had slid into my retina from inside my mind, then God help me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I put the muzzle of the shotgun in my mouth and reached down to the trigger. My fingers touched the trigger guard. The gun barrel was hard steel. It tasted of metal and machine oil, a sour, hard taste. And I could do nothing. I took the gun away and laid it down.
When I was small there was a story about a boy in a forest walking along a path as night draws on. The trees make strange shapes. Shadows move and rustle. He is afraid to look back. He walks faster and the path strays until he is lost. The forest has a power to transform itself and to sense fear, and a power to change people. They never return. If they try to turn and go back they meet a terror.
It was so dark in this room. The night was starless, it seemed to go on forever. A long time in the past I would keep my eyes closed if I woke from a bad sleep and would think of words to plead for help, for the night to stop; but I never spoke them. When scared, I always thought, Oh God, or said to myself words like ‘God help me’, but they were just words and meant less than nothing. I had never been able to believe in God. Teachers had ransacked the Bible to cram morals into our minds like metal fillings drilled into teeth. There was small forgiveness in those stories. Animals were slaughtered, vengeance extracted, cities desolated, eyes and tongues rooted out, spikes hammered into wrists; the pain demanded belief to make sense. The more pain, the madder the belief. I remembered a man holding a Bible, his face tense, and the way the vein on his forehead writhed as if there was a worm beneath his skin straining to get out. God is not mocked. God is just. Close your eyes, pray, and you will be heard. I had not believed it.