Tom Weaver - The Dead Tracks

And this time her eyes were open.

She was looking up at me, wide-eyed, fear etched so clearly and completely in her face, it was like she'd been frozen in ice. She shuffled back across the floor, away from me, her hand covering her stomach, protecting herself and the life she was carrying.

'Megan, it's okay,' I said softly, dropping to my knees.

Her eyes flickered again. She was scared.

'My name's David Raker.' I held up a hand, but stayed where I was. "Your mum and dad sent me. I'm getting you out of here, okay?'

Her eyes filled with tears.

'But first I need your help. Can you help me, Megan?'

I looked around the room using the light from the phone. Towards the back were a series of six-foot-long metal poles. 'Megan, I'm not going to let anything happen to you. You and your baby are safe. But I need your help. I need to know what you've seen of this place. I need to know how we can get out.'

She didn't say anything.

'Megan?'

Then the static stopped. The silence crashed along the corridor. Five seconds of absolute nothingness. We both looked up to the speaker above the hatch.

And then there was a cry.

'Noooooooooo! No, no, no, no .'

Sound suddenly crackled through it, every letter distorting. And my heart sank. It was Healy.

'You fucking bastard! You fucking piece of shit!

He'd found Leanne.

Healy shouted something else, screamed it, but his words were twisted and broken; one long, terrible wail. Then he burst into tears, waves of emotion consuming him. He tried to talk over them. Tried to make sense. But, for a while, nothing came out. Then eventually he just screamed again.

'Where are you? Where the fuck are you ?

My heart was beating faster. My mind ticking over. Should I go and find Healy? Should I take Megan with me? Should I take a chance on her staying safe? I could get her to wedge the door shut with the metal poles. But then I'd be hoping I found the surgeon first. It was a risk whatever I decided. Leaving her here would invite him on to her. Take her with me and I didn't know what awaited.

Then I realized something: Healy.

His crying was coming through the speakers, gradually getting louder as if the volume was being turned up.

Or someone was getting closer to him.

'I'm going to gut him, David'

A whisper through the speaker.

Then the feed cut out.

Chapter Sixty-seven

Thirty seconds later we were at the door with the rivets, stepping into the darkness. I'd brought Megan with me, had her hand in mine. I could hear her breathing close to my ear — soft, short, scared — and knew I was taking a risk. But I had to get her and her baby to safety. And I had to get to Healy now too.

We moved inside. I felt a hesitation in her stride and glanced back. She looked terrified. Her eyes widened, glistening in the blue glow from my phone. I squeezed her hand and swung the light around. The room was big. It had ceilings so high the light wouldn't stretch to them. There were no speakers inside this part of the tunnel system, and as we inched further in, the static was replaced by a gentle buzz, like an electrical current. It was freezing cold too. I could feel a breeze at ankle level and chill air against my face and hands.

A breeze. That means an exit .

There was a red-brick wall about fifteen feet to our right, wooden crates stacked up against it. We couldn't see where the room ended on our left. In front of us, a path wound its way through more crates, some broken and empty, some unopened. We must have been going for forty seconds when the buzz got louder. It was definitely an electrical current — and powering something big.

I looked off to the right, the glow of my phone following.

And then it felt like my heart had hit my throat.

Out of the darkness, a series of mannequins appeared, all in a line, all looking straight at us. Some were missing arms. Some legs. All of them were female and completely unclothed, and all were attached to a base by a metal pole.

They were wearing latex masks.

Milton Sykes, over and over and over. Each mask slightly different, a prototype for the next. Adjusted nose. Adjusted cheeks. Bigger chin. Smaller chin. More prominent forehead. Different colouring. Some had torn and didn't hang as well. Some looked completely realistic in the lack of light, only the dummy beneath giving it away. Megan went to scream and then squeezed a hand against her mouth, her breath whistling out of her nose in short bursts.

A noise from our left.

I swivelled and lifted up my phone. The blue light from it dropped off about twenty feet away. I could see the polished concrete floor fade off into the darkness, and some sort of base unit on the edge of the phone's glow. It looked like a plinth. I took a couple of steps forward, pulling Megan along behind me, and the blue light extended across the structure. Another step. Another. It was definitely a plinth.

Then I realized what was lying on top.

A coffin.

It was completely transparent. Reinforced plastic. Every surface, every angle, shone in the light from the phone. Inside it, at the bottom, I could see two blocks — but then realized they weren't blocks. They were feet. I moved the phone up the side of the coffin: feet, legs, hands, arms. It was a woman. Her head was turned to the right, facing out at us, her hair hovering around her face in snaking strands of blonde. She was naked and floating in formalin.

'Fucking hell,' I said quietly, stepping up to the coffin and looking down through the top. Her skin had bleached white, but otherwise she could have been drifting beneath the surface of the waves. Apart from her hair, she was completely still, her body hardened, arms out to either side, legs together, eyes open. She'd been operated on before she died: there was a scar along the side of her face, running past her ear and around to the back. A facelift. The stitches were still in place, but they didn't run all the way down. Level with the top of the ear lobe they stopped, as if the surgeon had abandoned the procedure. Flesh was visible where the stitches didn't continue.

I recognized her as Isabelle Connors.

The first woman to go missing two years before.

I glanced back at Megan. There were tears running down her face as she looked at the woman in the coffin. I brought her into me, partly to shield her from the sight of the woman looking out, and partly to quieten the sobs she was making.

We moved on.

Out of the dark emerged more shapes, defined and frozen in the glow from the phone. More coffins. More women. All blonde, all posed Exactly the same as they lay submerged. When I moved to the next, I could see she'd had the same surgery, except her chin had been cut open too, a piece of silicone visible where the stitches hadn't been closed properly. April Brunei. The second woman to be taken. The coffins were in order.

Then behind me, another noise.

A dull clunk.

I waited for it to repeat, but there was nothing. Just a buzz. I knew then I was right: it was a generator.

The lights came on.

For a second I was disorientated. Then I realized why: the light was purple. Above us, a series of strip lights ran the length of the room, a dull glow travelling along them. It created a watery effect, as if the room's colouring had been turned up a notch on the dial. Every shape in the room suddenly emerged, without being fully defined.

The room wasn't anywhere near as big as it had seemed in the dark, but the ceiling was high — maybe sixty feet — and a half-oval shape, like the mid-section of a railway tunnel. There were crates all over the place, but congregated mostly on my left. Coffins in a row to my right. A big archway behind them, leading into a room full of more mannequins, standing like an army.