CHAPTER THREE
Thin unseen hands paw her body. Just like the night before. Until long fingers grip her shoulders and yank her upright in bed. Then her face is touched by something sharp before her limp shape is thrown down to the mattress, so it can clamber upon her. Rustling, as if spidery limbs are being drawn in, it perches upon her chest. Before lowering its face. To whisper.
Punched from sleep, Kerry's long blue eyes open. Pebbles of sweat cool on her forehead.
Only the dream. She exhales. It's over now, it's gone.
Should have gone to sleep on my front. I'm sure I went to sleep on my front. But understands the bad dream came back to turn her over.
Out of dream-time, Kerry glances around her dark room, cocooned within the sturdy walls of St Salvator's Hall of Residence. Moonlight filters through the thin curtains and transforms her quiet chamber into smudges and silhouettes. She swallows to calm her staccato breaths, and the waking moment brings tears to her eyes and a shudder beneath her ribs, as if she's just climbed out of cold water to seek a towel. There is an urge to cry, to call Sarah in from next door so she can cling to her neighbour's gown in these first moments of waking. But beside the window she sees the outline of a Sheryl Crow poster and above her desk Brad Pitt hides in shadow, with his shirt off, square jaw clenched and strong hands still. Familiar things kill her desire to cry. This is Kerry's real world in real time, and safe from nightmare.
Smiling through her tears, she hears the little ticks from the Homer Simpson alarm clock. At nine in the morning he'll shout 'Doh!' and she'll phone home. Her thesis is nearly finished and she's ready for her dad's comfy arms and her mom's raised eyebrow. Back to Kent, back home and away from the nightmares. Relief makes it possible for Kerry to almost smell dad's pipe-smoke, to hear her little sister's piano, Jasper barking in the conservatory, and her grandmother cackling before the television. She can even hear . . .
Something moving.
No God, please.
A sniff and then a rustle out there in her room.
Please, please, please, no more. She's awake. It can't continue.
The sounds are coming from the dark annexe by the en-suite bathroom. Something is on all fours as it pads through the murk of night. She can hear it feeling its way about the floor, as if blind but intent on being close to her.
Kerry tries to move her head and sit up. No use. A familiar tingling, a paralysis, fastens her down beneath disturbed sheets still damp with sweat. Her legs and arms are immobile, useless. Not wanting to see, Kerry closes her eyes. Muscles twitch in her face and then crease. Panic surges through her body and she wants to beg, plead, and then scream, to bring the world to her door.
But maybe if she doesn't struggle and stays quiet it won't find her.
A lump gathers in her throat. A swollen clot of fear, because she can sense it emerging from around the corner to turn its face toward her. She holds her breath, her stiff body shivers and a deep silence engulfs space and time. There is no sound or movement for a moment, just the dark room and the waiting she must endure inside it.
And then the touch. It has reached out.
Something dry and sharp presses into her cheek. A spider web of icy tingles spreads up from her shoulders and sparks inside her neck. Hair follicles prickle on her scalp and her blonde hair stiffens against the pillow. It's freezing now and the sheets feel like tissue paper. Stillness roars. She gasps. Keeping her eyes shut tight, she tries to scream but everything swirls inside, voiceless and adrift. A sudden thought demands annihilation to end the delay. The sharp thing then scratches down and across her face and pushes at her lips. A bitter taste seeps into her mouth and spreads to her sinuses, leaving a taint of blackened antiquity. There is a sudden hiss and a gust of air teases the feathery hair around her ear. A presence hovers above her face. It has risen to stare.
Suddenly, her throat feels naked and exposed, and she tries to push her chin down to protect the soft cartilage and intricate pipes in her neck – the flesh she imagines being smashed flat or squeezed until it cracks – but lowering her jaw is impossible.
Little pin-pricks of red light flash beneath her eyelids. She thinks she will faint. Or is this shock?
A weight spreads across her chest, and her small breasts are flattened. Long frozen fingers clench around her biceps and pin her to the bed. A face she cannot see nears, to hover no more than an inch from her own. The image of a thing old and bestial and terribly thin bores through her failing mind. The salvation of darkness claims her.
The cold that numbs her feet and spears her ankle bones wakes Kerry. She's outside and it's still night. There is a sound of water, swelling and lapping around stone. Peering down, she sees her long white feet, oddly luminous against a black surround. Before her stands a small tower with an iron ladder clinging to it. To her right she hears the power of the sea, rushing in to froth around the pier.
The pier. I'm on the pier. And right down at the end, so far from the shore, with her arms wrapped around her chest. It's freezing and her skin shivers beneath the thin T-shirt and underwear she wears to bed. Stepping from one foot to the other, she tries to make sense of her situation and turns around to see the lights glimmer in the harbour and around the cathedral walls that loom upward to craggy demolished towers and holed fa?ades.
Am I drunk? Am I mad?
And just as she remembers the thing in her room, sitting on her chest, something scrabbles across the wall by the little black tower. She staggers backward, her foot slips and the night sky whirls above her. The sound of the inky sea, heaving down below, becomes deafening.
She shrieks, regains her balance and then hops forward, away from the edge. She looks to the pier wall on the other side, more than a metre thick and raised four feet off the promenade. A memory of edging along it on her first day at university, four years before as a fresher, spills into her mind. She sees herself hugging the wall with friends who giggle, terrified of the unprotected edge so close to her with the sea below it. It had been a dizzy, spinning fear back then, that secretly demanded she hurl herself off and down to the clashing waves.
Must be a dog, she tries to convince herself. A big dog and it's gone away now. Go home, run home, get Sarah. But something is still moving up there. It crawls forward on its front, indistinct but for its length, pressed into the stone.
Kerry begins to sob. She remembers the smell and movements of the thing that groped around her bed and paralysed her muscles. Instinctively, her hands fly up and cover her nose and mouth. It was there in her room, and now it has brought her down to the pier. She will die. It will take her to the edge of the pier and bite her, throw her off, leap after her and hold her head under the cold water. Already, she can feel her lungs screaming, the briny freeze in her mouth, and the long fingers capping her skull and ready to push down.
Kerry screams. In her mind, she can see her own face: a wrinkled tomato-face. What Dad used to call it whenever she had a tantrum as a child. Now she has it again, on her own, down on the pier. Instinct tells her to fall to the floor, to grip the polished stone, worn by pilgrims' sandals, to hold on with all her might and save herself from the edge and the waves that will smash. If it kills her on the pier, she won't have to go over the side and see it follow.
The thing hisses. It scuttles like a crab. The head is dark but something glints inside the oval of its coverings. Images of yellowed ivory and black lips flash through Kerry's mind. Running away is impossible. She knows she lacks the strength, and it's so fast up there, skittering about, before it tenses and makes ready to leap.
'No! Leave me alone. Please!' Kerry screams. Her voice breaks into sobs. She falls to her knees, where the hard stones thump her bones and freeze her thighs. It will get her, swing around her neck, and take her over the side. Raising itself upright on the wall, it hisses with delight.
'Hey!' someone shouts from the shore.
'What the f*ck's going on?' another voice bellows, words slurred by drink, the accent local. At the base of the pier, she sees two silhouettes, that run and then bump against each other; the soles of their feet slap in a frenzy, sounding a welcome urgency. On the wall, the thing raises itself to nudge at the air with its mercifully obscured face. Then it glances at Kerry before settling down to its haunches. Rage trembles through it.
The men draw closer, out of breath, intent on reaching the frightened girl, all sunken and witless on the pier. With a sound of dry cerements dragged across stone, the ragged shape disappears over the side of the pier. One of the drunken men has seen it and leans over the wall, ten feet away from where Kerry sits. 'Oi!' he shouts, craning further forward over the edge.
Kerry hears a distant splash, far away and below.
'What . . .?' The man on the wall queries, and squints into the moving darkness below.
'You OK luv?' the other asks, and squats down, wide-eyed with shock. His breath reeks of beer. Kerry sobs – it's the most wonderful thing she can remember smelling.
On shore, away from Kerry and her two saviours, a car engine erupts into life on the road that runs alongside the masts of small fishing boats bobbing and grinding together in the stone-walled dock. Lights flash on, tyres ripple over tarmac, and a sleek black vehicle speeds away towards the Pens archway.