Kristin Read online

  The nun reeled, and stumbled to the floor, paralyzed. She grasped the small cross that dangled from a thin silver chain around her neck, squeezing it until her knuckles turned white and pushed herself backwards through the open door, flooding the carpet with urine. ‘My dear God!’ she gasped, tripping to the stairs. ‘It’s inside her ... inside her!’

  At their foot she turned to face him. ‘This monstrosity, this ... thing you’re sharing your life with,’ she whispered, clutching his shoulder. ‘Its soul is damned beyond all redemption. I’ve seen the evil of man at work first hand, but never have I felt anything so vile, so sinister as the presence inside that room. I fear for you, for me, for all of us, but now at least I understand why I had to return — to pray for its victims. It will create hell on Earth — nothing can prevent that now. The church has dreaded its coming for time immemorium and now it’s upon us ... and we only have ourselves to blame.’

  As fast as her habit would allow she rushed from the building. ‘Promise you won’t ever go back in there? Leave here at once! Never return!’

  Eight

  A second sleepless night plagued him. Why had the mother superior been so terrified? Why had she run? What had the she meant, that Kristin’s soul was beyond redemption? Kristin was irascible, enigmatic, plain weird, maybe, but evil? That was absurd. He was too good a judge of character to have let someone who was essentially bad in to his life. He placed trust in the intrinsic goodness of the human spirit. He trusted Kristin. He loved Kristin; he loved Kristin like he would never love another woman.

  The crucifix, the claw-marks, the fingernail, the nun — they'd made his flesh creep, toyed with his sanity, but he'd satisfied himself they were anomalous aberrations, incomprehensible occurrences that had no place in the natural world, incidents that could never be attributed to the will or actions of any human being. He couldn’t explain them because they were inexplicable, and so he’d simply accepted them: Maybe they were all just part of one of his nightmares? Maybe he’d never met anybody called Kristin? Maybe there was no threat of nuclear war? Maybe he was steadily descending into a state of madness from which he would never recover?

  The barrage of sirens tore him from his contemplation. He stumbled into the lounge, raised the blind and wiped condensation from the window. A pall of dense, black smoke was rising into the steely, early morning sky.

  ‘ ... The church burns,’ breathed a repelling voice.

  He knew she hadn’t followed him to the window. From the bedroom he heard her groan, and he turned … she was standing behind him. He stared at her half-lit face.

  ‘The worshipers are nothing but deluded fools,’ she rasped, her black eyes glinting malignantly.

  He shuddered as the hideous voice left her lips.

  ‘Will prayer prevent the armageddon thou hast spoken of? It will not. Devotion to this son of God is misplaced. There will be change soon, great change.’

  She moved forwards and looked out at the church. ‘This burning was meant to be.’

  He went to the back of the room and stood silently in the enveloping darkness: Kristin was no longer anyone, or anything he recognized. She’d become much more than the cold-blooded woman who chilled him to the bone, the enigmatic stranger to him. Now she represented something from another dimension, a terrible, alternative reality.

  ‘Thou shalt all receive what thee deserve,’ the voice croaked, as she swayed from side to side. ‘Thou shalt all receive what thee deserve ... thou shalt all receive ... ’

  He backed against the wall, ‘ ... I found marks ... on the bedroom door.’

  She caught her breath.

  ‘ ... And a fingernail.’

  Her head turned slightly, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits. ‘So now she stands accused of scratching at the door like an animal?’

  ‘ ... I haven’t lost a nail.’

  ‘Neither has this bitch!’ it yowled, making her splay her fingers.

  ‘ ... Where did it come from ... ?’

  ‘I DON’T KNOW!’ Kristin shrieked, regaining control, her bones cracking. ‘ ... Fucking Shannon’s?’

  ‘ ... Shannon didn’t use nail varnish.’

  ‘Shannon! Shannon! Fuck Shannon, I tire of that name!’ it rattled, vitriolicly. ‘What about me ... her ... what about this whore, Kristin?’

  He picked up a heavy book and hurled it at her, catching her in the chest and she sprang forwards, her teeth coruscating in the dawning light.

  ‘PAIN! FUCK YOU ... LEAVE HER ALONE!’ She slumped into the sofa and dug her nails into a cushion.

  ‘ ... I’m going ... to see if there’s anything I can do.’ He dressed quickly, threw on a coat, and left her.

  St Mary’s Catholic Church was built in 1573. Thom’s parents had married there on a bright, spring morning thirty-six years earlier. Both Thom and his brother, Nicholas, had been christened at its font and Nick’s funeral service, attended by more than a hundred, had been conducted at its altar. Now it was gone.

  Within half an hour the fire crews had brought the blaze under control. When the smoke and steam cleared he saw that the great walls of flint and mortar were largely intact. But the beautiful stained glass windows were no more, blown out by the intense heat that had built up inside the church, and through the chasmal holes the devastation inside was evident.

  ‘Two people,’ an old man said.

  Thom stared at him.

  ‘Two people died in there. The vicar, and his daughter. Just a little girl. I saw it go up. No explosion, just burst into flames.’

  An urgent message came through on the two-way radio and the chief firefighter bellowed instructions to his men.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Thom asked, approaching him.

  ‘St Magdalene’s Convent! The roof has fallen in ... suspected fatalities!’ He pushed Thom aside and jumped up into the cab. The wail of sirens restarted and most of the engines sped away.

  He’d never heard a sound like it before ... so highly pitched ... almost above his range of hearing ... quickly, it developed into a piercing whistle that filled the air, penetrated the ground, the trees, the buildings, permeating and poisoning everything around him. Screams ripped through the inert air. The monotone overcame him, deafening, unbearable. He covered his ears, fighting to prevent the evil, latent commands concealed within it from entering his mind. The sound forced him to the ground and he buried his face in the cold earth.

  When he regained consciousness, several minutes later, the world around him was not the same.

  His hearing was reduced to the sound of his own breathing, the muted thump of his footsteps. Thom tried to orientate himself; he was no longer by the church. Ahead, a middle-aged woman sat on the kerb, her bruised legs in the road. When he got closer, he saw that her head was bald, burned black, as if it had been overloaded with something it couldn’t absorb. He touched her on the shoulder and her head crumbled to dust. He retched violently.

  Thom passed into the shadow of a railway bridge and when he came out into the light he saw two children in school uniform copulating hard against a wall. She, red-faced, frightened, in pain. He, embarrassed, confused, unable to stop — controlled by an unseen force.

  At last he recognized one of the roads — The Rise, a short, excessively steep hill lined with enormous evergreens whose leafy branches scattered the sunlight in dappled patterns across the frosty ground. A heavily pregnant woman headed towards him and as they passed she stopped, smiling warmly, as if he were an old friend.

  ‘Thank you ... for all that you’ll do,’ she whispered, in a soft, Irish brogue. ‘We’re going home now, my baby and me.’

  He watched her leave.

  Another figure, a sharply dressed young man, appeared at the foot of the hill. Gasping for air he doubled over, hands on knees. Then he straightened, saw the woman and ran at her. ‘YOU FUCKING BITCH!’

  Soon he was upon her, battering her around the head with his case. The sharp, steel corners caught her again and again, gashing open her s
calp, showering the pavement with her blood. ‘FUCK YOU! FUCK THAT THING INSIDE YOU!’ He drew back his leg, aiming a kick at her unborn child, but Thom rushed forward, lifted him and threw him onto an iron railing.

  The blunt, black spike erupted from the man’s throat, punching his larynx into the open air, and his blood spurted into Thom’s face, doused the prostrate woman. The young man jiggled helplessly, his distended eyes staring down at Thom as his body weight caused the wound to stretch and open into a gushing cavity that deluged his grey suit with blood. He grabbed at his throat, gargling, choking, lashing out with his feet. And then he was still. A house door opened. They saw the body, the blood. Thom ran.

  A quarter of a mile away he found a small patch of wasteland between two Victorian houses, thrust his head over some rusting, chain-link fencing and emptied the remaining contents of his stomach into the thicket. Then he fell onto his haunches and wept.

  He had killed a man with his bare hands.

  He hadn’t meant to kill him, just stop him ... the siren had made him do it, forced him to go too far. But he was a murderer; he would always be a murderer, for as long as he lived. And yet he felt no remorse, no pity.

  The man’s frenzied assault seemed symptomatic of what appeared to be happening everywhere since the siren. Would he otherwise have had the volition, the capability to carry out such a senseless, brutal act? Thom visualised the woman, lying in a pool of her own blood — badly wounded, childless, but still alive, still saveable. What if nobody had helped her? He had to go back. But when he tried to get up the energy drained from his legs and he fell back against the fencing, slipping into unconsciousness once more.

  Two hours later, Thom opened the door to his home and slammed it hard behind him. A scrap of pink paper had been stuck to the banister. He pulled it free: “tom in parc same playse cristen” read the barely literate scrawl.

  He climbed Maze Hill and entered Greenwich Park. When he reached the observatory he saw her sprawled upon the grass, staring at the London skyline. The day was bright and the azure sky was decorated with white cumulus clouds. She didn’t look up, didn’t speak, didn’t notice him. He sat down beside her on the hilltop and darkness engulfed him like the lid being closed on his coffin. She felt his fear. ‘Something’s altered,’ he said.

  ‘What has altered?’

  ‘Everything. You must feel it?’

  ‘All I can feel is my love for you.’ She leaned forwards and kissed him.

  ‘There are things that have happened since we met that cannot be explained.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘What things? Are you stupid ... have you forgotten yesterday?’

  She glared at him, wheezing abnormally.

  ‘I saw a five hundred year old church burn this morning. It just combusted. And the roof of the convent, the mother superior’s convent, collapsed. Old buildings, well made structures, don’t do that. People are dying. A little girl lost her life in that church today.’

  ‘Do you think I’m capable of killing somebody by looking at them? That I’m able to destroy buildings through pure willpower? What, precisely, do you think I am, Thom?’

  ‘After this morning I’m not sure what you are.’

  She began to glisten with tiny pearls of unnatural, milky perspiration as the wind blew, bringing a chorus of screams from all corners of the park.

  ‘Did you here the sound?’

  ‘What sound?’ she sneered.

  ‘A piercing sound ... like a siren?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘I saw a man attack a woman today, a pregnant woman. He wanted to kill her ... he tried to kick her to death, and so I ... ’

  She locked her pitch eyes onto his, ‘Yes Thom, tell me, what did you do?’

  ‘I stopped him ... I killed him.’

  ‘Is that all?’ she laughed, tossing her head back. Then she turned on him, ‘So you think I made the sound? … What do you think I did, put my lips together and whistled? … Do you think I can get into people’s minds, turn them bad? … One day you’ll make me really angry, then you’ll see what I can do!’

  An explosion, somewhere in the city rocked the ground beneath them.

  ‘ ... It was as as if something had invaded their minds, made them do terrible things. You must have heard it?’

  Sinew, tendon, stretched and snapped inside her slight frame, ‘HEAR THE SOUND?’ she shrieked, standing. ‘I AM THE SOUND!’ She stood and took several paces forward, facing down the hill.

  The gently undulating grassed slopes of the park combusted in a fiery wave that swept down their length and he watched in horror as scores of men, women and children, dazed from the siren, were helplessly caught in the inferno and incinerated, crumbling into the smoking ashes one after another, like a defeated army.

  As she presided over the carnage she’d wrought something else took her attention and she glanced upwards. High in the crystal sky, thousands of feet up, an airliner sparkled in the winter sun like a tiny, translucent fly.

  He heard a crackling noise like electricity discharging. Microseconds later the plane exploded in an immense fireball and he saw her salivating with satisfaction, her arms held aloft in triumph.

  Nine

  Thom spent the remainder of the day staring into space, sitting on a muddy patch of earth behind a grocery store whose front windows had been smashed out. What he had seen could not be real. It could not have actually happened, no matter how realistic it had seemed. His brain must have been fried by the monotone. It was some type of signal, he was certain, an instruction to act, to degenerate, to inflict suffering, pain, death. How many had been brainwashed he wondered, just those in the immediate vicinity? All of London? The whole world? Who had produced the sound — the terrorists who acted in the name of Allah? The North Koreans? Was this a new form of warfare? Perhaps the siren had been a precursor to a nuclear attack? They would wait until the societies of the West had completely broken down, were unable to retaliate, and then finish them off.

  But none of it was real. He was losing his mind.

  Evening approached. He considered returning home. If it was all in his mind why should he fear doing so? He prayed for the nightmare to end. But it would continue, and dusk became the blackest of nights.

  Thom stood on the doorstep and leaned his head against the flaking wood of the door frame, his breathing laboured. He turned the key and in the gloom ascended the staircase soundlessly, his bloodstained, sweat-sodden clothing adhering to his skin.

  The lounge door was a couple of inches ajar. Fearfully, he prodded it open and walked into a darkened room full of ominous silhouettes and macabre shadows. The stench of rotten meat had returned.

  ‘ ... Why didst thou leave thy love?’ grated the menacing voice.

  He whirled.

  ‘Why didst thou abandon her?’

  ‘ ... Because ... ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘ ... Because I was frightened ... ’

  ‘Frightened?’ it snorted. ‘As well thee should be, because I have only just begun.’

  ‘ ... What do you mean?’

  ‘Thou wilt learn.’

  ‘ ... What are you?’

  ‘I am part of thee, the part thou wouldst deny.’

  ‘ ... There’s no part of me that’s like ... ’

  ‘BE QUIET!’ it screeched, coughing up something that splattered onto the carpet. ‘Didst thou not kill one of thy fellow men this day, impale him on a spur of iron? Shocking, is it not, the horrors man is capable of?’

  ‘ ... But I didn’t mean to kill him, I was angry, I was trying to defend the woman.’

  ‘Ah, that open-legged harlot! Thine efforts were in vain, she left this world, along with her unborn, bastard infant, in a medical vehicle.’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘Thou didst slaughter him needlessly, the wounds he inflicted upon her were fatal anyway.’

  ‘It’s a nightmare! A fucking nightmare!’

  ‘One from which thee, and
thy kind will never wake.’

  He wiped his tears away.

  ‘What happened in the park?’

  ‘I incinerated the lush, green foliage, killed many. I obliterated the air transport, atomized those inside.’

  ‘Where is Kristin? Only she could know these things.’

  ‘Precisely, only she could know.’

  ‘ ... Where is she?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘If you’ve hurt her, I’ll kill you!’

  It cleared its throat and spat an unseen volley of bile across the room that hissed and burned when it landed on the exposed skin of his left arm and he screamed with pain. He hurled himself against the wall, threw the light switch and lurched backwards, falling hard on the base of his spine.

  She sat on a wooden dining chair in the far corner of the room, shrivelled, gaunt, as if sucked dry of blood, and the carpet at her feet was spotted with black scorch marks.

  ‘ ... Where have I been?’ she asked, her eyes red and raw. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Are you Kristin?’

  ‘ ... Yes ... I think I’m Kristin.’

  ‘Is this real?’

  ‘ ... Yes.’

  ‘Did I dream today?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember today, I can’t remember anything at all.’

  ‘Some terrible things have happened. They’re still happening.’

  ‘I know, I can feel them.’

  ‘What were you ... a moment ago?’

  ‘I’m not sure ... Thom?’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll wake in a moment?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘So am I.’

  The doorbell chimed.

  Ten

  The knuckles of Nathan Van Allen’s hands were bruised and bloodied. He bore a large graze on his forehead and a deep, five-inch laceration, bleeding heavily, extended from the bridge of his nose to the lobe of his right ear.