Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

‘Just what?’ Holly asked.

A soft, ghostly sound filled the room, like a breeze blowing through weathered rocks.

Alex was looking at the biologist in amazement. He was still holding his hands out to either side, not wanting to touch her anywhere, when she grabbed his head, pulled it towards her face — and bit him.

Vic Pearson dreams of his dead sister. It is the worst kind of nightmare, one where he knows what is to come but cannot wake up or change its course. And in the waking hours to follow, he will think that quite appropriate. Charlotte’s real life had gone the same way, with him as a passive but supportive observer, unable to nudge her from the track of self-destruction that had finally taken her from him. He’d loved her and hated her, but in the nightmare she terrifies him.

Charlotte died at nineteen, but in the dream she, like Vic, is in her forties. She has hair greying at the temples and a face pinched by her troubled life. Stone-cross gravestones have been tattooed onto her forearms by blunt, infected needles, and he follows her through their Boston suburb as she goes from house to house, gathering the paraphernalia of her demise from people who should know better. At one house their mother opens the door and hands Charlotte a family heirloom to sell for drugs, and as Charlotte walks away without saying thank you Vic rages at his mother, shouting. But he has no voice — she does not hear. She averts her eyes and closes the front door on the smell of baking and despair. At the next house, Charlotte’s teenaged school friend answers the door and starts nodding, agreeing with every mad thing that Charlotte says. Satisfied, she walks on to the next house, and the next, and each time Vic tries to plead with the person who answers the door to make a stand against his sister’s downward spiral.

He knows what is coming and whose the last house will be, but it is still a surprise when he spies the toys scattered across the lawn and his own car in the driveway. It’s a house that he has never lived in, but which feels more like home than the Danton Rock bungalow he has shared with Lucy since their marriage.

This is the only part of the nightmare where he actually hears the words being spoken.

Lucy answers the door when Charlotte knocks.

‘Charlotte! You’re looking well. Death becomes you.’

‘Hi, Luce. My loser brother at home?’

Loser! Vic thinks. She dares call me a loser! He hears Olivia’s sweet girly voice from inside the house, and he starts to loathe himself as his hatred grows for his sister, dead for over two decades but alive and ageing along with him right now, because of the sense of dreadful loss she’s instilled within him. When she died he felt the guilt resting squarely on his shoulders, and though he’d seen the same responsibility crushing his parents and her friends as well, he’d never been able to shake it. His unrelenting and almost painful love for his wife and daughter is fed partly by that guilt, and partly by the hopeless loss he still feels for Charlotte.

And the dream turns to nightmare.

‘Vic’s not in right now,’ Lucy says. ‘He’s at work.’

‘Right, yeah. At work .’ Charlotte leans against the wall and rubs a powder into her gums and stabs her forearm with a hypodermic that instantly vanishes. ‘He’s fucking Holly Wright, you know. Any chance they get. They’re down there for days on end sometimes, and she likes him to eat her out in her shower cubicle. She sucked him off in the canteen’s kitchen once. She doesn’t like to swallow, but she takes it over her tits.’

‘Vic’s not in right now,’ Lucy says again, apparently not hearing.

‘He says he loves her,’ Charlotte says, and her skin starts changing, hanging slack from her frame as death catches up with her. She turns and acknowledges him for the first time. ‘When we were kids he said he loved me, too.’

I did , Vic screams, but no sound emerges. And then to feed his guilt comes Charlotte’s denial of what he is trying to say. She opens her mouth and starts screeching at him, an intermittent cry that raises the hairs on the back of his arms and neck and makes his balls quiver, just as thoughts of Holly used to. They sometimes still did.

Lucy smiles uncertainly at the terrifying sound, glancing around her front lawn, not seeing Vic but carrying in her eyes a suspicion that he has spent years trying not to see for real.

Vic snapped awake and sat up in his small room. He sighed, wiped a hand across his face, and fell out of bed. He looked around for Charlotte, but she was only ever in his dreams. The sound was something else. The sound was-

‘“Fuck me, it’s the alarm.” He stood and tried to shake the last remnants of the nightmare, knowing from experience that it would haunt his mood and mind all day. The nearest sounder was at the corridor junction a dozen steps away, but the sound was designed to penetrate every corner of Coldbrook. Already he could hear running feet outside. They’d rehearsed for this; it was one of the safeguards that Jonah insisted upon. What they’d never designed was any method of communicating just what the emergency was.

He looked around his small room. It was a stopover place, because his main home was up in Danton Rock with Lucy and Olivia. They had always been the most important things in his life, despite what Charlotte might have to say, and he’d die or kill to protect them. If necessary, both.

He groaned, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to shake off sleep. Dream and reality were still bleeding together, the nightmare tenacious, so much so that he expected to see Charlotte in front of him when he opened his door. But out in the corridor a technician ran by, dressed in boxers and boots and a scruffy Motorhead T-shirt.

‘Andy! What’s up?’

He skidded to a stop past Vic’s door and looked back. ‘Dunno. Alarm woke me so I’m off to my station.’

‘Yeah,’ Vic said, and Andy turned and hurried on. Off to my station . They all knew what to do should the alarm sound. It had been drummed into them enough.

Vic slipped back into his room and closed the door, searching through the mess of clothes on the floor for his satphone. He was one of several in the facility who kept them on their person at all times — him, Jonah, Holly, the guards’ captain Alex — and it was also a direct link to outside. His priority now was to find out what had gone wrong, and then decide what he should do about it. Gotta get to my station in Secondary , he thought. That was what procedure said — the alarm would initiate Control lockdown, and Secondary should be his aim. But that was not what his heart said, and never had been. He’d always promised himself that if things went badly wrong down here, his family would come first.

He dialled Holly but received an unavailable signal. What the fuck. .? He cancelled, and dialled Jonah. It was answered in three rings.

‘Vic. . something came through.’ The old man sounded breathless and panicked, and Vic had to close his eyes for a moment, sick at the knowledge that this was not a false alarm. He’d always had his doubts and fears, but even then he hadn’t really believed that something would go wrong. Not really.

‘Jonah, what was it? Where are you? Where’s Holly? I can’t reach her.’

‘I’m going for Secondary. Control’s locked down.’ He panted, running as he spoke. ‘Something came through.’

‘ What came through?’ Vic asked again, cursing the continuing alarm that stole some of his words.

‘Don’t know. . a creature, but. .’ Gasping, coughing.

‘Where’s Holly?’

‘Control.’ Vic stared at the narrow cot where he and Holly had made love so many times, felt her breath on his neck and her fists squeezing his shoulders as she came, and his sister’s voice echoed from his dream. Right, yeah. At work.