Part 22 (2/2)

”I'd hope not,” Nigel says without striving too hard to be audible as he turns to the desk. Now he understands why the dim glow that clings to everything in the office is grey as fog: the computer screen is. The icons on it look drained of all colour, in danger of losing their outlines and sinking into the depths. He's afraid that if he tries to improve its appearance the terminal may crash. Instead he moves along to his own computer. He's stooping to unplug it when he freezes in a crouch, and the throbbing of his shoulder is imitated by his skull. ”Oh, for the love of--was Ray pokes his greyish face out of the gloom next door. ”What's up now, Nigel?” 271 Is he ensuring Woody hears? He's loud enough that Woody demands ”Right, what is?”

Nigel isn't to blame. The holes between the desk and the wall are--holes just large enough for the wires from the computers to pa.s.s through. ”We aren't going to be able to move these unless we take the plugs off.”

”Who's got a screwdriver? I've not, have you?”

Nigel owns up to the lack and Angus gestures it while his ill-defined shadow wags its swollen hands behind him. As Nigel pulls out drawer after drawer under the work shelf Ray says ”Better try switching them on.”

Nigel presses the b.u.t.ton on his computer and more viciously on Ray's. The greyness of the screens turns luminous, and two sets of icons bob sluggishly up. They look too tentative for Nigel's liking. ”What's happened to the computers?” he's increasingly anxious to know.

”The main thing is they're lit up, isn't it?” says Ray. ”I can stand how it is.”

The office must be three times as well lit as previously. More to the point, the staffroom has grown brighter, and Nigel can even distinguish the faint outlines of racks in the stockroom. However difficult he may find the next few minutes, Agnes is in a far worse situation. How ashamed would he deserve to be if he neglected to help? ”I'll have to,” he tells the others and especially himself.

”Maybe I won't leave you in the dark too long.”

Surely Ray is undertaking not to rather than saying he'll consider it. He props the stairway door open with a chair and leaves the staffroom at a trot before his footsteps start losing their momentum on their journey downwards. Nigel is tempted to wait until Ray arrives at the fuses or even deals with them, but that's too cowardly for him to bear. He hurries through the staffroom, past the table that looks coated with glimmering greyish plastic, into the stockroom.

The moment he steps through the doorway he's flanked by blocks of darkness that feel solid as earth. He can just 272 distinguish the ends of the shelves they've buried, bony outlines the colour of fog at night and not much less inclined to s.h.i.+ft. Perhaps being relieved of most of their stock has left the shelves more capable of movement; as he ventures between the next pair, whose edges resemble ash both in greyness and a tendency to crawl, they begin to jangle as though whatever contents they still hold are inching towards him. He tries to concentrate on seeing ahead, though there's a distraction in that part of the dark as well. The nearly shapeless blotch that's slithering along the aisle to beat him to his goal has to be his shadow, especially since it hesitates whenever he does, but he's surprised that he can even glimpse it in the suffocating dimness. He's unable to make out the third set of racks, but he knows by their stealthy jangling that he has pa.s.sed between them.

Now that they're behind him he would expect them to stop vibrating with his footfalls. Once they fall silent he attempts to gain some control over his swift unsteady breaths. He senses as well as remembers that he has reached the s.p.a.ce largely occupied by the wooden bin topped with wire mesh where all the cartons of new stock are unloaded. The shelves beyond it are fixed to the walls, and it's surely impossible that he's hearing any movement from them. However surrept.i.tious it sounds, the noise must be under the wire mesh--the feeble squealing of bits of polystyrene that his footsteps have disturbed, though it makes him feel he's roused a nest of insects in the blackness. At least by keeping well clear of it and to the left of it he knows he's within an arm's length of the bare wallHe's stretching out his hand in that direction when he almost drops into an inadvertent crouch, though the dark hasn't seized him and Woody's voice wasn't intending to. ”No need to call it quits down there,” it says. ”No need to call it a day. You can see better than us.”

He's addressing the staff on the sales floor, of course. Until Nigel divests himself of the impression he even 273 thinks he hears a m.u.f.fled underlying echo, but he's certainly too far from the office. As his splayed fingertips locate the wall, Woody reduces himself to interrogating Angus through the door about the latest situation. Nigel's fingers slide over the chill slippery plaster and then, sooner than he was expecting, lurch off its edge to encounter metal. It's the more recessed of the two doors to the lift shaft. He raps on it with his knuckles and calls ”Agnes, can you hear me?”

She gives no indication that she can. He presses his ear against the door, which is so cold it feels like the threat of an earache. If there's any response beyond the door it's blotted out by the savage drumming of his pulse. He runs his fingertips over the door and digs them between it and the frame, where he succeeds in hauling open a gap of a few inches, through which he shouts ”Agnes, it's Nigel. Are you all right?”

He hears his flattened dull voice plummet down far too deep a well, which he hopes is as much of an illusion as the chilly damp it seems to breathe at him. He's wondering if Agnes is refusing to answer because of the way he p.r.o.nounced her name when she says ”I don't know where I am.”

”You're below me somewhere. I'm at the top doors. I'll come down.” It's Agnes that he mostly means to rea.s.sure by adding ”Down the stairs, that is.”

”Can you see where I am?”

”I can't see a thing, to be honest. Ray's gone to operate on the fuses,” he says, only to realise Ray should be more than there by now.

”Will you be able to find your way?”

Presumably that's intended as concern, but his nerves don't welcome it. ”No question of it. I'm coming immediately,” he says, and rather more than that, because the last 7 words burst into a flurry of extra syllables that bloat them shapeless. ”I'm coming now.”

He lets go of the door, which meets the frame with a 274 clunk. As he runs his fingers over the metal a fingernail catches on the edge of the second door. Once he has found the wall again he shuffles sideways until he arrives at the corner. Now he's facing the stairway, and it feels as if the blackness of the lift shaft has been tilted to receive him. He reaches into it with his left hand, lower and lower. At last he touches an object like a stick that someone's holding up for him to find: the banister. He restrains himself to grasping it with only one hand and takes the first step down.

He doesn't like wobbling on one leg while he gropes for the stair with the other foot. It must be the blind dark that makes him seem to have to stretch farther than he ought to need. He plants his heel as far back on the tread as there's s.p.a.ce for, and slides his sweaty p.r.i.c.kling hand down the banister, and lifts his other foot to hover above the oppressive depthless dark. It's just the night, he tries to tell himself--the same night in which Laura will be asleep, her face calm and still on the pillow, perhaps unconscious of a lock of hair that's tickling her cheek. The thought nerves him to shout at or into the dark. ”I'm on the stairs now, Agnes. I won't be long.”

”Don't be.”

Her response sounds more distant than ever. Of course it's m.u.f.fled by the wall. He wishes he could think how many steps lead to the delivery lobby: surely less than a couple of dozen. Since he's performing the identical action each time he clings to the banister and lets a foot sink into the blackness until it meets a stair, why isn't the process growing easier instead of seeming ever more dangerous? Perhaps that's because he didn't count the steps he has already taken, thus losing all sense of how far he has yet to descend. He could shout again to Agnes, but he's wary of discovering how remote she may sound. The edges of stairs sc.r.a.pe the backs of his ankles, and whenever a foot settles on a tread he feels as though he's leaning out too far over the blackness. He takes another wavering pace downwards that only the banister renders 275 slightly less perilous--and then his fist closes on emptiness. Before he can catch his balance he flounders off the stair on which his left foot was supporting all his weight.

He's staggering across the lobby to crash into a wall, unless he sprawls headlong on the concrete. He flings out his right hand so violently in search of anything to grab that the action throws him against the doors to the lift shaft, dealing his shoulder a bruise that may even outdo its twin. ”It's me,” the darkness suggests he ought to call. ”It's Nigel. I'm here.”

”Where?”

He almost wonders that himself, because her voice is farther beneath him than seems possible. She must be sitting down--on the pallet truck, no doubt. ”Very close,” he a.s.sures her as he feels for the edge from which the doors open on the shaft. He drags a gap wide enough to insert his fingers; at least, he struggles to. His fingers won't penetrate even as far as their nails. The doors might as well be a solid block of metal embedded in the wall.

He hauls at them until the throbbing of his shoulders unites across his neck while waves of grey light surge into his eyes. He has the irrational notion that his inability to see what he's doing is the reason he's so useless. Why hasn't Ray fixed the fuses by now? How much longer will it take him? Nigel is wondering if he can shout loud enough for Ray to hear when he realises he shouldn't have to. He has nearly allowed the dark to get the better of his brain. There ought to be plenty of light within reach.

He lets go of the unyielding door and closes his eyes until the waves of false illumination fade, and then he opens his eyelids a slit to peer across the blackness that's the lobby. There is indeed the thread of a glow under the delivery doors opposite the lift, although it's so thin he is barely convinced he's seeing it. ”Hold on,” he calls. ”I've seen something I can do and then I'll be back.” Agnes is silent. Perhaps she thinks it was stupid of him tell her to hold on, which he supposes it was. He paces 276 through the unseen lobby towards the promise of light and fastens his hands on the bar across the doors. It can't be as rusty as it feels; that must be the p.r.i.c.kling of his fists. He flings all his weight against it and hears a s.h.i.+fting that someone less in control of himself might imagine was the sound of an eavesdropper retreating outside. Then the bar splits in two with an emphatic clank, and the doors swing so immediately wide that Nigel reels out of the building.

He has let the light in. This should be all that matters, but he can't help wondering why it doesn't appear to be s.h.i.+ning from above him. He turns to squint at the rear wall of the shops. The source of the illumination isn't above the giant X; the spotlight is smashed, and so is the one behind Happy Holidays. The whitish glow is at his back, and creeping closer, to judge by how his shadow that lies face down in the lobby is shrinking and blackening--shrinking as though it's desperate to conceal itself.

He swings around to confront the luminous fog. A glow about the size of his head and more shapeless than globular blunders almost into the open before it either merges with the fog or sinks into the glistening tarmac. At once the lobby doors are pulled shut by their metal arms and lock with a triumphant clank, shutting him in not much more than darkness.

He stumbles through the clinging chilly murk to fetch up against the doors. They're just as unresponsive as he feared. No amount of bruising alternate shoulders on them will move them. He could pound on them, but what effect would that have beyond distressing Agnes? It would take Angus far too long to find his way down to them. The fog or rather its inertia must be gathering in Nigel's brain, because he has to make an effort to remind himself that he can head for the front of the building. There'll be light as well as a way in.

He has taken only a couple of steps between the dim walls--one of concrete, one of fog--when he notices 277 there's light behind the bookshop too. It's more of the kind he encountered as he left the building. It dances lazily through the fog, making his shadow prance on the wall of the shop to keep him company. It would be more welcome if there weren't other signs of life in the fog. He can hear something else on the move, shuffling towards him while dragging a package that sounds worse than waterlogged. Indeed, the noise makes clear that there are two of whatever is approaching.

He peers into the fog and glimpses movements. Although they're low on the tarmac, he doesn't think the intruders are crawling on hands and knees. They could owe their glistening greyness to the murk, but he can't maintain this as an explanation for their lack of shape. He stares at them until he distinguishes that the unstable packages they're dragging are themselves, and then he bolts for the alley between Texts and the holiday agency. The sight that greets him jerks him to a halt as though he has stepped deep in a marsh.

Fog radiant with floodlights blocks the far end of the alley, but that isn't why his mind feels near to paralysis. He's no longer even slightly glad of the light. His shadow has thrown itself face down in the alley, and it's no longer alone. On either side of it a squat lumpy silhouette is expanding like a misshapen balloon, either creeping closer at his back or swelling up from the tarmac, unless they're doing both. For the moment they have nothing he would want to call heads, but they have at least one arm each, altogether too long in both cases, that they're stretching out to him.

He daren't look. He can't even bear to see their increasingly malformed shadows. As he dashes into the alley he shuts his eyes tight, feeling like a child who's trying to believe he can hide in his personal dark. He has fled just a couple of steps when the shuffling converges swiftly on him. In a moment his fists are captured by appendages too 278 cold and soft and uncertain of their shape to pa.s.s for hands.

He can make no sound beyond a low choked wordless moan. His fingers writhe in a desperate attempt to pull free but only embed themselves up to their knuckles in the oozy substance. The sensation makes him unable to open his eyes; he squeezes them tighter as if that can drive away what feels like a nightmare born of his sleeplessness. He's trapped in his own night, where he no longer has a sense that Laura is anywhere he can reach. All he seems able to do is strive to retreat into it as digits or tendrils of various thicknesses slither like worms between his fingers. He's held fast by their engulfing clutch as his captors whirl him vertiginously round and round before scuffling away from the shop with him, into the pitiless dark. A solitary hope is left in his whirling brain, and he's past caring how desperate it is. It occupies so much of his mind that surely it has to be true. He hopes that by the time whatever is going to happen takes place, he will no longer be able to think. 279

AGNES.

”Gee, I wish I knew what 'so happening to time around here 8 'so happening to time around here 8 Woody uses the speakers to remark, as if his voice isn't already overbearing enough. ”He's what you need, right?”

”Should be,” Ray shouts.

Of course he must be. He's a man, and on top of that he's Angus, than whom n.o.body on the staff is more anxious to please, however little self-respect it leaves him. If all they want to apply to the problem of Woody's door is brute force, no doubt he'll do as well as anyone. Agnes only wishes she could believe that the exchange wasn't meant for her to hear. If management have turned so petty and vindictive, she needn't let it affect her. She grabs handfuls of Gavin's books off the racks and slams them onto the trolley to deafen herself.

It doesn't work. She can hear Woody saying ”Maybe I should solve your other problem too”--the whole shop can. She isn't sure that isn't addressed to or aimed at her until he offers to count, and then she feels stupid for wondering. Now he's saying he needs someone's body, and 280 she's glad to be out of reach of the suggestion, though he'd better realise he shouldn't dare make it to her. Perhaps on balance she's grateful to have been sent off by herself; she can't bring to mind anybody on the staff whose company she would welcome. If they aren't trying to prove they're ent.i.tled to tell people what to do, they're showing how small they are in some other way. Perhaps the best course for everyone would be to spend time by themselves.

”One,” Woody's pointlessly exaggerated voice announces, and Agnes is ready to propose that he might like to do without the phone when he does. She hears the start of an argument of some kind in the office, but amusing as it could well be, she won't indulge in eavesdropping. She loads the last few books there's s.p.a.ce for onto the trolley and wheels it through the stockroom, past a m.u.f.fled squeaking that she takes at first for mice. Polystyrene fragments are rubbing together under the mesh on die bin, she realises as she arrives at the lift and thumbs the b.u.t.ton.

”Lift opening,” she's told at once as if it was waiting for her. The doors shrink aside, revealing the empty pallet truck, which barely leaves room for her and her cargo. Having manoeuvred the trolley in sideways, she squeezes between its end and the wall of the lift to poke the Down b.u.t.ton. There's no point in struggling out again; at least Woody won't be audible in here. The lift gives her notice of its intentions and shuts her in just as she blurts ”What did you say?”

She's glad there's n.o.body to observe her being idiotic. The tape or whatever the lift uses to speak must be growing worn, however premature that seems. Of course it said ”Lift closing,” not ”Still hoping.” She finds it less easy to dismiss the impression that the lift itself feels worn out-- that it's descending more slowly than usual. Perhaps she's fancying this because she's wedged in a s.p.a.ce that would barely let her turn around if she had any reason to. She resents having to borrow an idea from Woody, but n.o.body will know. ”One,” she murmurs, and ”Two” after pausing for a second, though she isn't sure whether she's timing 281 the lift or occupying her mind so as not to feel at the mercy of the time the descent takes. ”Three,” she adds, ”f-was Whatever word she might gasp retreats into her mouth, because the lift has jerked to a halt as though it has run out of cable. Instantly it fills with blackness.

For rather more than a moment, during which she's unable to breathe, she begins to imagine that she has been engulfed by a medium more solid than a simple absence of light--that the lift has been flooded with black water. No doubt that's how quite a few of the staff would expect her and any of the women to react, which is why she isn't going to panic. Once she succeeds in drawing a breath she repeats it until it comes naturally, and then she runs her fingers over the cold metal wall to her left and level with her head. In certainly no more than a handful of seconds her forefinger locates the door to the compartment that houses the emergency phone. It must work even if the power to the lift has failed, otherwise what would be the point of it? She snaps the door open and gropes into the recess to find the receiver clinging to the wall. As she lifts it out, a worm as cold as midnight fog squirms over her bare forearm. It's only the cord of the phone, but her arm recoils and she almost drops the receiver. She seizes it with her other hand as well and is bearing it carefully towards her face when it says ”h.e.l.lo.”

It sounds almost too welcoming under the circ.u.mstances, and not unlike the voice of the lift. Both must have been chosen for their rea.s.suring quality, of course. h.e.l.lo,” Agnes feels bound to respond.

”h.e.l.lo.”

Her tone is more welcoming still; Agnes could almost call that mocking. She's close to being prompted to echo the greeting once more but understands how stupid that would be. Instead she says ”I'm stuck in the lift.” ”We know.”

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