The Stuff of Nightmares (20 page)

18

HOW HORRIBLE. POOR
Conor’s nan. Poor Conor. His grief struck me hard. I knew exactly what he was going through. He really loved his nan and I felt like a voyeur spying on his grief. Of course I couldn’t stay. I had to get back to the train.

I could feel Rachel trying to pull me back into Conor’s dream but I couldn’t stay. I just couldn’t.

‘Kyle …’

I raised a finger to shush her. I could hear something. From above came the welcome sound of an approaching helicopter. Now that the wind and rain had died down, they’d come back to rescue us. And not a moment too soon. I didn’t even have the nerve to look directly down the carriage. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a more solid shape than ever before, but I wasn’t going to turn my head for a proper look. It was was wet and squelchy underfoot, and I’m sure all the water beneath us wasn’t helping us to stay on the bridge. A different colour helicopter came into view and hovered above. Waving my hands above my
head
, I waited eagerly to see a paramedic descend. But instead a TV camera appeared, its lens trained straight down on me. I couldn’t believe it. A TV camera. We could all die at any moment and the best the gits in the chopper could do was train a camera on us. I’d felt a lot of things since the crash, but this was the first time I’d felt burning anger. Well, if they wanted a spectacle, they weren’t going to get it from me.

Clambering over debris, I studied the faces of my friends, trying to jump into someone’s mind and away from the intrusive TV camera. Then I saw Naima. Hell! I didn’t want to invade
her
dreams. I couldn’t stand her and she was so damned selfish and spiteful, her dreams would probably be worse than Elena’s – but what choice did I have? I closed my eyes – and hitched a ride on the nightmare running through Naima’s head. And for once I didn’t feel Rachel with me. I searched around for her but she’d obviously decided not to follow me. I turned my attention back to Naima, dreading to think what I would find. When I opened my eyes I saw something I never, ever thought to see on Naima’s face. A sadness, an intense but contained grief that made me start with surprise. Even with everything I’d seen before now, it still took me a couple of seconds to realize that I wasn’t looking at the Naima of here and now. The girl with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen was yet to come. The girl with the saddest eyes was at least a decade away. Maybe even two. A moment later and I was no longer looking at Naima; I was inside her head looking out.

19

Naima’s Nightmare

DYING WAS A
great disappointment to me. I had expected burning, choking flames and demons and screams of rage and pain. I had
hoped
for soothing music and welcoming light and smiles and flowers; but what I got was Payne’s Cemetery. Payne’s Cemetery was really two cemeteries divided by a line of solid, majestic oak trees. On one side – my side – were the bodies of us ‘People’. On the other side were the bodies of those we called the ‘Others’. On my first day dead, when the sun had just set and the evening sky was a suffocating purple-blue, I awoke to find myself buried next to Mrs Statson, probably the biggest gossip anywhere, alive or dead. She had been my boss for more years than I cared to remember so I knew how vicious her tongue could be.

‘Well, well, Naima! So you’re dead too,’ she said smugly. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t die before me, the way you always carried on. Look who’s here, everyone.’

Maybe I
was
down in Hell after all.

‘Well, child,’ Mrs Statson urged, ‘what happened to you? What did you die of?’

‘Loneliness, Mrs Statson.’ I smiled. ‘I missed your gossiping tongue so much.’

‘Don’t get smart with me, Naima.’ Mrs Statson frowned. ‘You always were no better than you should be.’

‘Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’ I said sweetly.

Eternity next to this woman? God forgive me my sins!

‘Never mind Mindy Statson. She has the fastest tongue on either side of the oaks.’ I looked at the man who had just spoken. I recognized his face, although I didn’t know his name. He worked – or used to work – in the garden of one of the Others. In fact, if memory served, he was quite a famous gardener, constantly sought after in the City. He had a rugged, interesting rather than handsome face and shoulders almost too broad for his short height.

‘Naima, you have to understand something,’ he said. ‘The first rule of this place is that we each tell what brought us here.’

‘Why are you here?’ I questioned. By this time more and more People were gathering round, staring at me, the newbie. A few I recognized; most I did not.

‘I died of a heart attack,’ he said.

‘And what is this place?’ I asked. ‘Heaven? Hell? Or somewhere in between?’

‘We don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s not too bad though … once you get used to it.’

That could be said for anywhere in the universe.

I looked up at all the faces staring down at me before scrambling to my feet. I don’t like to be looked down on.

‘Are you in charge here?’

The man smiled before replying. ‘In charge of what? There’s nothing to be in charge of.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Oliver.’

‘Hello, Oliver.’ I thought about holding out my hand, but then decided against it. After all, this wasn’t a party.

‘We’re still waiting to hear how you died,’ Julia Greeg piped up from behind him. I never did like that woman. She was responsible for whipping up the mob that killed my best friend Raven. Raven believed in live and let live, even when it came to the Others, and she made a lot of enemies because of those beliefs. Julia Greeg managed to convince a few drunken hotheads that Raven was a fraternizer – worse than a murderer in our colony. They went to her home and torched it, aiming to make Raven homeless. None of them realized that Raven was fast asleep inside. The smoke made sure she didn’t wake up. The flames made sure she didn’t get out.

‘Is Raven here?’ I looked around the crowd eagerly. At least Raven’s presence would make this place bearable.

‘No,’ Julia said smugly. ‘She didn’t make it here.’

‘She didn’t miss much,’ I spat back.

I remembered that Julia Greeg had been knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. Everyone knew that the driver had to be one of the Others – they were the only ones who could afford to drive in our colony – but not exactly which one. Or if anyone did know, they certainly weren’t saying. Not that it would have made much difference: the driver would be tried by his peers and found not guilty. After all, it was only one of the People who had died and we People didn’t matter. My only regret about Julia’s death was that I hadn’t been the driver.

Julia marched forward and grabbed my arm. ‘How did you die? We won’t ask you again,’ she hissed at me, her cold breath fanning my face.

I looked down at her arm, feeling her bony fingers clutching at my flesh. ‘Move it or lose it,’ I said quietly. She removed her hand immediately. Julia may have been a coward but she was no fool.

‘I’m here …’ I spoke slowly to the eager faces crowding around me. ‘I’m here because I killed one of the Others.’ It was the truth but I didn’t tell them to get their approval, I just wanted them to hear it, then leave me alone. Some cheered, some smiled, every hostile expression disappeared. The atmosphere changed immediately. I was instantly one of them. I was
accepted
. I listened to their eager questions firing at me – questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

‘Which one …?’

‘What happened …?’

‘Which of the Others was it …?’

‘Why only one …?’

It went without saying that I’d paid the ultimate price for taking out an Other. There was no way in the world I would survive after that. No one was terribly interested in how I’d died, just why. Maybe this
was
Hell after all.

‘Leave the girl alone,’ Oliver bellowed. ‘She’s only just got here.’

Silence. Oliver might say he wasn’t in charge but they sure respected his orders.

‘Well, girl, you can’t have been as bad as I thought if you took out one of the Others.’ Mrs Statson smiled. This was the first time I’d ever done anything right in her eyes. She belonged to a Resistance movement that I considered a waste of time and I had told her as much when I came to work for her. She’d never forgiven me for that when we were alive. After all, I should’ve been a prime candidate for recruitment. My mother, a singer, was taken to the City to perform for the Others soon after we joined the colony, only I never saw her again. Then my dad had been killed in a hunt organized by the Others a couple of years later. He had to work as a beater, driving the nesting birds out of their gorse nests and up into the air for the Others to shoot. Only a stray bullet ate its way into my dad’s back, killing him instantly. Just a bit of sport for them, a day out. But one moment I had someone and next moment I was alone.

With my background, I should’ve been begging the Resistance to take me in – I guess that’s how Mrs Statson saw it. She didn’t understand that all I wanted to do was keep my head down and get on with my life. I didn’t want to make a stand, cause any fuss, stand out in any way. She said that made me a coward, too afraid to stand up for what I believed was right. I told her that made me smart and liable to live longer than her or anyone else in the Resistance.

I was no fan of the Others but I was no fan of Mrs Statson either. And the Resistance movement just didn’t interest me – at least, that’s what I told myself at the time. The thing was, Payne’s Cemetery didn’t interest me either.

I walked away from all of them towards the edge of the cemetery, ignoring their whispers behind me. I had to get out of this place. Eternity here would drive me crazy. The cemetery was bordered by a low, white, wooden fence, which gleamed in the cold, silvery cemetery light. The light spilled a metre or two beyond the fence, but I could see nothing past that. I peered, trying to stare my way into the darkness beyond. It was enveloping, almost welcoming. And it was away from Payne’s Cemetery, which was all I cared about. I lifted one foot and stepped over the knee-high fence. I gingerly placed my foot down on the ground beyond. I was unsure what to expect but the earth was solid beneath my feet.

‘It won’t work,’ Oliver said quietly from behind me.

I ignored him and swung my other foot over the
fence
, only to find myself somehow back on the cemetery side of it. I tried again and again and again – and got precisely nowhere. With each step outside I’d be back inside the cemetery.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ve tried. Hell, I’ve been here for ever but still a day doesn’t pass when I don’t try to get out.’

I turned to look at him. ‘So we’re all stuck here?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

I looked around. ‘What about getting out from the other side of the oaks, past the graves of the Others?’

‘I don’t know. I think this fence runs all the way round the cemetery but I can’t be sure. Besides, the Others would never let any of us get far enough into their side to find out. But I don’t think they can leave any more than we can. Otherwise they wouldn’t still be here.’

‘Does no one ever cross over to their side?’

‘Never,’ Oliver stated firmly. ‘And if you want to stay healthy, I wouldn’t try it.’

‘What could they do to me? Kill me? In case you hadn’t noticed, they’ve already done that.’

I’d only been dead a few days before I lost track of time completely. Time was a measure against which I had nothing to hold. I sometimes glanced over to the side of the Others, past the oaks, but I never saw him. I wondered if perhaps he searched for me as I searched for him … if he was even there. But it wasn’t as if I could ask anyone for information about him. I didn’t
talk
to anyone really, except Oliver. They all wanted to know every little detail of how and why I’d killed one of the Others, which one I’d killed and how I’d died and I wasn’t prepared to open myself up like a book for them to read. They wouldn’t like the answers anyway.

One late evening I sat just outside a circle of us People discussing the Others – again – but I wasn’t really paying much notice. The Others seemed to be the only topic of conversation anyone had. And it was the same old boring diatribes I’d heard when I was alive being aired yet again. But then – of all people – something Julia said caught my attention.

‘I’m telling you, there’s something very strange about their zenerths. They say their music is unique – in a secret tradition handed down throughout the generations – but the zenerths are like nothing I’ve ever heard before.’

‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you,’ an old man across the circle from her snapped. ‘Their music is as disgusting, as depraved as they are. They beat on those drums and dare to call it music.’

‘I never said it wasn’t disgusting,’ Julia retorted. ‘I just said—’

‘I think the zenerths produce some of the finest music I have ever heard … from anywhere.’ Although Oliver’s voice was quiet, it seemed to carry across our side of the cemetery. Suddenly not a sound could be heard.

‘How can you say that?’ Mrs Statson’s voice
exploded
into angry indignation, shattering the stunned silence. ‘The zenerth is one of
their
instruments. How can you possibly say that it produces fine music?’

Oliver shrugged. ‘Because in my opinion it does. Just as I can look at a house burning and admire the form and beauty of the flames but abhor the violence and destruction it causes.’

‘Surely one can’t be separated from the other?’ someone else demanded.

‘Why not?’ Oliver shrugged again. ‘You all know how I feel about the Others, but you have to admit, their zenerths are like nothing any of us have ever heard or seen before. And when one of their skilled musicians plays a zenerth, they can make you laugh or make you cry or any emotion in between.’

I stared at Oliver without really seeing him. The arguments flying around me faded to a slight buzzing which could’ve been inside my head. I was no longer in Payne’s Cemetery, no longer dead. Instead I was back. Back in the past. Back with
him
.