Carver Chapter One

The bedroom was a mess. The wardrobe doors had been flung open so aggressively one hung off its hinges. Drawers were ransacked, a trail of garments left across the room. 

A woman was on her knees beside the bed, her hands clumsily snatching at a mound of clothes and shoving them, three or four items at a time, into a bag. She rammed the zip shut and took a deep breath. Then she got to her feet, hoisting the bag over her shoulder and leaving the room.

That was when she felt it.

The murmur in the air, the tread of darkness. 

She couldn’t say what it was at first, couldn’t quite work out why her humid skin started to tingle or why the air sharpened, becoming harder to breathe. 

She dropped the bag, her eyes scrutinising the living room of her flat. Nothing moved, not in the room, not outside the ice-frosted windows. But under her nails, her skin itched. 

Sound smacked her: a deep, visceral hum, like amplified electricity. She dropped to her knees, clamping her hands over her ears as she tried to push it out. The pitch squeezed, getting higher and tighter until it filled the room, burst in her head like a boombox. Her eyes filled with tears, the noise choking all sense from her thoughts.

When she could stand it no more, when her hands, shaking with the pressure, turned blue, itcut out. 

The room retreated into silence.

She lowered her hands. Her vision blurred as her eyes darted back to the front door. 

Too late, she thought, her panic a scream. Time is up.

***

The security guard hadn’t taken the concierge job out of choice; he was ageing, balding, grown too soft in the years since he’d been retired from the army – a sergeant with questions of misconduct over his head. No, if he were to choose a job, it would not have been babysitting luxury London flats, pandering to bankers and privileged students. It smacked of class warfare, his role: delivering mail for the most part, occasionally waving through couriers. It pained his pride to sit there, to be dismissed so easily, to have the suited men and women pass him without a second glance. And tonight he was supposed to be at home with his wife, but she’d been nagging him about overtime and if anything was going to push his button, it was her nagging about overtime.  

He glanced at his newspaper, snorted at the sex advice pages, cursed the politicians, the latest immigration scandal. Idly he returned his stare to the lobby’s fountain, scowling at the pretentious jade figurine veiled behind the water.  

An impatient tapping broke his attention.

He looked up, saw two men in police uniforms outside the glass doors of the building. Their faces were part obscured by hat rims. The security guard cocked his head, maliciously enjoying the moment, wondering which one they’d come for this time. Which one had gotten caught embezzling or defrauding or embroiled in some other salacious crime. Half the time the bastards lied to themselves. They certainly lied to the world.

Barely after he had buzzed the policemen in, they were standing in front of him. His confidence faltered as one thrust his hands onto the marble desk, spewing dirt and - something else. His left hand was little more than a stump at the knuckles, missing a finger, half a thumb.

They smelled awful, of rot and death.

The guard looked up, and tried not to panic. He knew people couldn’t join the police force if they had tattoos on visible skin. He’d been told as much when his application was rejected, an age ago. But underneath their police caps, the two men in their dishevelled, ill-fitting uniforms had tattoos scrawled over their cheeks. 

And knives. 

Vicious knives with jagged teeth gleaming in the soft foyer lights, haphazardly tucked into their belts. And the holes ripped in the front of the uniforms, stained bloody brown. One still wet with it.

‘What do you want?’ he managed.

‘The manifestor,’ the one on his left whispered.

Even though the guard was much bigger than them – the officers were tall, but gaunt, as though wasting away – he felt himself recede further behind the safety of his desk. 

Saliva oozed over the bottom lip of the speaker as he shoved his knife in the guard’s face. 

The guard shook his head, unable to speak, fixated on the agitated spittle running over the man’s chin. His shaking fingers searched underneath the desk for the silent alarm. 

‘What’s a manifestor?’ the guard asked, swallowing.

The policeman flung a bloodied photocard on the end of a lanyard onto the marble and tapped it with a coarse fingernail.

‘Alice Anderson,’ the guard read slowly.  

The other policeman - can’t possibly be a policeman - slapped the guard’s face with the flat of the knife. The guard howled, covering his nose and recoiling from the desk. He was slow to hit back as his shoulders were grabbed, powerless to stop his attacker hoisting him up and throwing him across the lobby: his military training long forgotten, his body fat not cushioning the blow. His hip cracked as he crashed into the fountain. 

There were no screams this time, just a flurried moan as the guard pressed his hands to his side, his uniform soaking through as he lay twitching in the water. His thoughts slowed as blood pooled around his back, his side slashed open on the stone. The men before him were senseless blurs as he tried to lift his head, failed. 

But he smelled them, coming closer.

‘Seven,’ the guard gasped. ‘Seventh floor.’

The bell of the lift arriving sounded far away. The last thing the guard saw before he passed out was the men running into the lift cage, shrieking as they went. 

And an emaciated girl, in a dirty yellow dress, walking towards him, a bloodied knife in her hand.

***

The buzz of a phone broke the silence of the woman’s living room.

‘Go, you fool,’ she whispered to herself, snatching up the handset from the sideboard.

‘The Shekana are coming.’ The woman on the other end spoke quickly, urgently. ‘Get out, Alysa, you must get out now -’

She ran to the door. 

Time seemed to hesitate. Then a soft, strange sensation, like air filling.

If sound could have colour, this was black. Black and primeval and incapacitating.

She grimaced, forced herself to stay standing, close enough to the front door to smell something rotten the other side of it. She put her free hand on the wood and felt it vibrate. 

Something, some terrible thing, was outside.

She stumbled backwards, tripping on the edge of her rug and catching her ankle on her side table, dropping the phone. Her every movement sludgy, thought deafened by the thick cloud in her head, eyelids pressed shut to control the pain of it.

The noise tremor went higher. She forced her eyes open, watched lines snake outwards through the windows, cracking as the frequency shifted. Groggily she tilted her head left, remembering just how much glass she’d bought for the flat, how many vases  and baubles and trinkets she’d indulged in, an age ago.

The lightbulbs cracked apart, shattered filaments plunging the room into darkness.

Shit. 

She flung herself behind the couch as the mirror exploded, clear blades like bullets as they hit the walls. The couch was ripped to ribbon as the slab atop the coffee table erupted. Then the windows burst, spitting shards out into the night.

She couldn’t think through the pressure squeezing her brain. Barely had the sense to grab her car keys as the front door burst open. 

Took in the disheveled police uniforms and face tattoos. Stumbled backwards, the broken window at her back, the wind howling in, a dagger on her exposed skin. She looked down, down at the ground outside her broken window, a hundred feet or more away, and began to panic.

One of the intruders emitted a low humming sound. The air hissed around his hands, a strange non-light clustering around spindly fingers. He flexed and the non-light pulsed forward, a shockwave of sound that hit her like a wall. The noise electric, an all-encompassing scream that made her ears bleed. He flexed again, the force kicking her backwards and through the broken window.

Then she was falling through the darkness. 

The hundred foot drop stole her scream, air pressed into her skin. 

No time to react, no time at all.

Her heartbeat split apart, furious, deafening - leaving drums, just drums, instead of thought, and with them a surge of electricity through her ribs, a terrible crucible firing something, something -

Her body pulsed with ice blue light, light that flared from her like a halo. The air seemed to distil around her, as though gravity, as though the world itself, was fading away. 

Then she landed on the grass below, feet crunching heavily into the frost, arcane blue light lingering around her, as though she had done nothing more than jump out a ground floor window. 

She didn’t, couldn’t, react to what she’d just done. The impossible thing she’d just done. 

Above her, in the dark block that was her front room, something moved. 

Run.

Her eyes darted to the street and fixed on her car, parked in a lay-by. After another furtive glance upwards she sprinted to it. Slick hands fumbled with the door handle and she fell into the driver’s seat. She released the handbrake with a violent jolt and tightly clasped the steering wheel. Her foot struggled to control the clutch and the car jumped forwards, precariously close to stalling. Finally she got it into second gear, her toes pressing into the accelerator.

Her mind wasn’t processing thought as she navigated the West London streets, broken until she hit the motorway, until the carnage was far behind her. Only then did she see the blood on her shirt, and the glass shards wedged in her forearm like diamonds.

Only then did she realise she was trembling