12:07 The Sleeping, page 7
“Make a note of all that, Lance. You will need to recall ‘The Room of Truth’ when you visit Sister Miriam.”
Mr. Green craned his gaze upwards towards the ceiling. It was as if he was looking through the upper floor and roof, towards the dark, star-lit sky. He lowered his gaze to Lance, who was busy scribbling away. He held that gaze, waiting for the inevitable question.
Lance paused his writing. The pen wanted to deposit more ink, but without any more words there was nothing more it could do. It waited ready in the hand that quivered.
“And?” Lance asked, itching to know.
“Do you want to know about the depravity?” Mr. Green said playfully.
“You know I don’t,” Lance said.
“I know you don’t,” Mr. Green smirked. “I’ll tell you what you want to know tomorrow. At this moment in time I need to rest.” He pushed his bent body up by the use of his arms, as hydraulic jacks, against the table top. “I recommend that you sleep before we meet again,” he said, turning and leaving the room.
Lance remained seated. Nothing more was going to be written tonight. He lowered his pen and watched Mr. Green leave.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Lewisham,” Mr. Green said, passing Katherine in the hall. She was still sat on the floor. “I hope you heard all there was to hear?”
The front door opened and Mr. Green stepped out into shadows. The door closed behind him, leaving The Sleeping’s deathly odour to remain in every shadow for a little longer.
A few minutes passed before Katherine managed to pull herself up. She stumbled into the kitchen and sat shakily next to her husband.
The glass of vodka and coke, that Lance had poured earlier, was still on the table. Katherine grabbed it and drank it, in one gulp.
“I think I’ll make a few more of those,” she said in a hazy calm.
Lance followed Katherine into the living-room. Neither felt like eating an evening meal. The lap-top was brought out and surfing commenced, initiating a liquid supper. Katherine poured the drinks. Lance didn’t object.
Mr. Green was right about St. Thomas’ being built in the 11th century. He was also correct in its rebuild in 1571. And annoyingly, he was also truthful about there being nothing in regard to what lay beneath St. Thomas’. A search into the nearby Sisters of Hope Convent also brought up nothing about secret passages or rooms. The only new thing to learn was that the original convent had suffered the same fate as the original St. Thomas’, which was originally a monastery. Both had suffered from the fury of Henry VIII. After the pillage of their wealth, the monks and nuns protested conversion to the new religion. Many who were true to the Catholic faith died for their beliefs. Both buildings suffered the same fate of fire in 1538, with the dissolution of the monasteries. It wasn’t until twenty-four years after the death of the King that building upon the monastery ruins had begun.
Lance thought about the worship that was performed far underground between these two buildings. Did those followers of Satan destroy the houses of God above, in a bid to hide their secrets from those that chose to pry?
About an inch of vodka remained in the bottle. Katherine was drunk and feeling sleepy.
“Mr. Green thinks my mother is watching over me,” Katherine slurred.
“He’s a crank.”
“He hasn’t a soul.”
Lance picked up the bottle of vodka, looked at it, and put it down again. He swayed slightly.
“Beddy-bye’s is calling,” he said, pulling Katherine up. He turned off the lights and directed his wife towards bed.
Katherine staggered towards the hall and climbed the stairs, gripping tightly to the banister. Lance followed and made sure she didn’t fall backwards by placing his hand in the small of her back.
Katherine went into the bathroom first. She came out looking deathly white. She climbed into bed with all the grace of a bandy-legged ostrich. Her head hit the pillow; she clung to the bedside as the room spun. Then she was out like a light.
The only thing Lance did in the bathroom was to empty his bladder. He dropped his clothes in exactly the same place as Katherine’s—the floor. Then he climbed into bed as he always did, naked.
Katherine’s arm lay outside of the bed. Lance leaned over and pulling it in, slid it under the covers. Her body was warm and inviting. He tenderly kissed the nape of her neck and curled up behind her. His eyes closed and his mind wandered to visions of sex with young pretty things, all of them looking exactly like his secretary.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A stone chamber, of ample proportions, hid between two solid oak doors. It was a crypt in the bowels of the earth that displayed all the magnificence of the macabre. The walls were adorned with human skulls—they were the audience of the dead, in waiting. An iron wheel on a wall looked like it was going to be turned.
Beauty knelt at the feet of the Beast. A naked, horned-man stood in the richness of his conviction. In one hand he held something that shone like a dagger; in the other was a breast of Beauty. Hooded figures came from the darkness, each one fluent in his recitation of the rite.
The horned-man now also knelt. He kissed with a penetrating tongue. The dagger flashed across Beauty’s neck. It slashed—blood spurted.
Lance suddenly sat upright; a horned-man’s splattered bloodied face lit his vision with searing power.
Lance’s nightmare-eyes burned. He began pushing his fists into their sockets, twisting them in fear, until the bloodied face scorched away amongst a wash of red. His heart was a double kick-drum playing glam-rock. His body sweat panic.
When he dared to open his eyes, into the blackness of the room, he was challenged with another face, just inches away. This face had no eyes. And yet it stared at him with a hungering look. This face was white and it masked its own shadow.
It lingered until Lance screamed. And Lance did scream. He screamed the house down.
The face dispersed into the room’s darkness, the shadow hid itself away in the corners that are the blackest.
Katherine heard nothing.
When Lance finally stopped screaming, his throat was sore. He lay back down amongst his thoughts. He understood the nightmare. But what was the white face masking its shadow? He had the strangest feeling that he’d seen this shadow once before, a very long time ago.
It was 2.00 a.m. Lance stared up at the ceiling. The room was silent in its early hour.
With a renewed strength, the shadows converged to make the shape of a human-like figure. A face of white appeared out of its desire. The figure stood in the corner amongst the darkness, its face now veiled in its own fabric.
Slowly it moved. It was a whisper in the silence. When it reached the foot of the bed it knelt upon it. Lance felt the bottom of the bed dip. It was as if a heavy-laden suitcase had been placed there. But suitcases don’t move. The black figure crawled up Lance’s legs. Lance tried to sit up and push whatever he was feeling off him. He couldn’t move. Fear gripped him.
He called out to Katherine. He called again, and again, and again. His throat was ripping. But Katherine didn’t hear.
The black figure had now reached his chest. It was covering him with its body, slowly inch by inch, until the corpus necessary to absorb, was fulfilled.
Lance, with strength of mind, looked down across his body.
The figure of dense black loomed up to stare into his face. The veil fell to show a face of white, absent of eyes, yet it stared into his own, in searching.
Lance screamed. The figure absorbed the scream. Lance’s scream joined all the other screams that had been collected over time. The shouts of help invited him to attend. The more he eavesdropped, the clearer he could hear. Distant voices sobbed. Crying and shouting and screaming all intermixed, yet each could be heard in their singularity. In that sound, amongst Lance’s screaming, was his own crying when he was a young child. It was being woven to his teenage screams. There were other voices too; all were lost in the darkness. The sound that was once a frightened child’s single cry, had now become an ensemble of cries as fragments of living souls were being interlaced to the souls of the dead. The sound was becoming deafening.
The air in Lance’s lungs was being compressed and squeezed out. Lance exhaled as the figure lowered itself. The weight was unbearable—it felt like a hundred lifeless bodies were crushing him—as the white face pressed against his own. He could see a light, deep within the eye sockets. The light was calling him. He felt that the light needed him. He thought of Katherine.
Katherine turned in her sleep and put her arm over Lance’s chest.
Lance suddenly inhaled. His throat burnt as his lungs expanded. Oxygen rushed to his brain—he wasn’t going to die.
The figure dispersed again into shadow.
Lance sat upright. Katherine woke as her arm fell to her side.
It was now 2.09 a.m.
“Are you O.K.?” she said sleepily, as Lance lay back down. She again put her arm across his chest.
Lance’s breathing was fast and loud. His kick-drum was rocking. He was drenched.
Katherine swiftly removed her arm and turned over. She opened her eyes and quickly shut them again. The room was beginning to turn again. Feeling queasy, she hung her head over the edge of the bed.
“If you’ve been dreaming of her again I’ll…” was as far as she got before she vomited. It wasn’t pretty.
Lance helped her to the bathroom where she vomited some more, luckily this time, into the toilet. He left her with her head over the rim.
“Never again,” she spluttered. “I hate vodka!”
Lance cleaned up and put his rescuer back into bed, placing a bucket by her side. He looked about the darkness. The darkness didn’t scare him; it was what was in the darkness that scared him. When he climbed into bed he thought about his nightmare. If that’s what it was. It felt so real. To deny it was admitting to being dead, which he wasn’t.
A shadow from behind the bed stretched up a hand that rested upon a shoulder. Lance felt nothing except that it would be better to think about more pleasant things. He switched his thoughts towards work. Imogen was all he saw.
The hand vanished from his shoulder.
No. 111 Padstow Avenue still had its hall lights on. Mr. Green was in his living-room. The only light he could see by was that which entered from the door left purposely ajar.
Mr. Green paced as a bear does when confined. He was waiting.
The front door opened and closed again. Mr. Green walked towards a small side-table and looked into the mirror placed above. He stared at himself and thought about what he’d said to Katherine. Soulless eyes, hollow of any emotion, stared back.
Behind him a shadow moved. It rose to a human’s height and walked through him, into the mirror. Now he stared at the face of his soul captor. A white face stared back from sockets of black. It was one of The Sleeping. They were many, so which of them this was made no difference. They all looked the same to him. They all had the same purpose. How many were there? He had no idea. If he had to guess—he would say thousands.
Mr. Green explained his meeting with the Lewisham’s and especially his talk with Lance. The Sleeping writhed in its mass as Mr. Green bent a little further.
He managed the pain in his spine with his own personal belief. It wasn’t his fault that Lance was good at resisting. How could he be blamed for a soul that wouldn’t surrender? He must try harder to break into that psyche. He would do that today, as soon as Lance paid him a visit.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lance woke, climbed out of bed and threw open the curtains. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. If there was anybody at the window of the house opposite they would be greeted by a naked man standing proud. There wasn’t. And if there were, the exhibitionist didn’t care. Not this morning.
Lance made himself presentable and went downstairs to make coffee. His stomach felt as if someone had taken it out, wrung it and turned it inside out before ham-fistedly putting it back. He also had a headache that craved painkillers.
Tablets and coffee were making their presence welcome as he recounted the previous evening. He went for the controversial file. On reading his notes of how James described his encounters, he felt a connection. He needed to see Mr. Green, urgently.
Katherine was awake and standing at the bathroom mirror. Her reflection looked ghastly. A shower was needed to wash away the decay that layered itself over every part of her. Soon water was falling through her hair, over absorbing flesh, down legs that trembled, and away. Handfuls of shower gel did nothing to remove that unfavourable feeling she had about the soulless man she’d met yesterday evening. Even though he never touched her sexually, he’d left what felt like a strange discoloration to her skin. It was something suggestive of mild sunburn—no amount of washing was going to make it go away. It remained an invisible taint.
It was 9.00 a.m. Lance knocked on the front door of No. 111 Padstow Avenue. He waited with all the nervousness of a condemned man at the gallows. Where the hell is the executioner?
Mr. Green opened the door.
“Please come in,” he said, and stood aside.
Lance walked past Mr. Green, down the hall, into the living-room, and sat in one of the two armchairs that were beside the fireplace.
Mr. Green followed, with a lower stoop, and sat in the remaining armchair. Both looked at each other, both wanting to speak.
“I presume, from your manner, that you’ve had a visit from The Sleeping?” said Mr. Green. This made a perfect, poignant starting place.
Lance’s reaction to Mr. Green’s deduction was balanced somewhere between anxiety and professional calm. It wasn’t easy.
“I feel as if I have to bow to your assumption,” he said.
“Then I will continue from where we left off.”
“Not more history, Mr. Green.”
Mr. Green laughed. “Lance,” he said, “history is part of this. Yesterday is history and so is every day before that. But I understand. Let’s start with The Sleeping, shall we?”
Lance merely nodded.
“The Sleeping, as far as I’ve fathomed, go back to when human life began. Let’s not get into anything biblical.”
Lance nodded to this.
“Do you agree that bodies have souls?”
Lance again nodded.
“Well then, The Sleeping are wardens for those souls that are in the underworld.”
“You mean Hell?”
“We said not to get biblical,” Mr. Green said. “Each soul starts as pure light. It then, like a sponge, absorbs what the body feeds it. The soul is our very being. It is the best of us and the worst. The Sleeping suckle from those that enter into their realm. Evil is their existence. The Sleeping can enter into your world only when they come for the souls of the unwanted and only when they have a key. I am The Messenger—I am The Key.
“I told you that I have lived and died and lived again. I lived my first life as many men do; I wanted money and lots of it. I was doing well, hundreds of thousands of doing well. Then it happened, the economy collapsed. It was the blackest day in financial history, it became known as Black Tuesday. October 29th 1929 was the day I first died. I took my Pocket Hammerless—the same model that Bonnie Parker had taped to her thigh to help Clyde Barrow break out of jail—from the right-hand drawer of my beautiful burr walnut desk and shot myself. It was suicide, and my soul was instantly grasped and taken to the underworld.”
Lance listened. He needed to listen, to understand. He could have simply stood up and walked out. He thought it was the description of the semi-automatic pistol that rooted him to the chair. But it was simpler than that. It was the need to know more about James Walker. He craved that knowledge.
“I was offered, in exchange for another soul, my soul,” Mr. Green said. “If I helped them collect a soul from the Unwanted, then my soul would be released from their grip and allowed to enter the light—I was assigned to James Walker. I have never been far away from him. But every time he resists their calling, I am tortured by the bending of my spine. They cannot hurt my soul, for in this existence I am soulless.”
“You said yesterday that your job was to tell me the truth and help me back to where I belong.”
“I did.”
“Then where is it that I belong?”
“Lance, my dear friend, and for all the time that I’ve known you, that’s what you are, there is more you need to know before I can answer that directly.”
“Answer me this then—what do The Sleeping look like?”
“Is this a test?”
“Yes,” Lance said.
“But you know what they look like. You saw one of them last night.”
“Then describe them to me, if you can.”
“Very well,” Mr. Green conceded. “They are like shadows…”
Lance spluttered through his laughter, “Whoa! Ghostly shadows—that’s original! You’ve got to do better than that.”
“May I continue?”
“Please do.”
Mr. Green thought it funny that he wasn’t being believed. But then again, Lance was a rather strange character, much like himself.
“Last night you were visited by a human-like figure that presented itself to you. It appeared as it did when James was five, when it walked out of the wardrobe, white-faced and eyeless, and yet it sees from sockets of the darkest black. When The Sleeping come in bodily form, it is because they are in great need of that soul that was created for the Unwanted. To show itself showed its need. It will continue to come, no matter how long it takes or by what measures, to take it.”
Lance was no longer laughing. “Do The Sleeping want me to give them, in some way, James Walker?”
“Yes. Are you now in acceptance of me?” Mr. Green asked.
“Almost,” Lance said.
