And he let fly onto the soil.
Ross cried out as she flew back into her body. She had a second to grab hopelessly for a ceiling joist, and then she fell again, and had a moment to gauge how far it was before she landed, managing to take the brunt of it on her legs. The others dropped like fruit around her, shouting wildly as they landed, bouncing and rolling on the thick furs. She lay there in pain, but adrenalin was already shouting at her to get up. For a moment she wondered if this nightmare was over, if they’d look around now to find that that thing was gone.
But, no, there she was, turned to look at them, her mouth open, staring at them in horror. Ross roared inside to see it. The bitch was surprised.
Meanwhile, thunderclouds were boiling their way out of that pile of soil, like special effects in forties Technicolor.
Quill hauled himself to his feet, and zipped himself up. ‘Mora Losley. .’ he began again, and this time he was yelling it.
He had to yell it because now, rising from all around them, there came an enormous rumbling noise. Was this her power falling apart?
‘Modern. . children!’ she bellowed. ‘Who allows you this? You have no privilege! You have no idea! This is not how things are done!’
‘Fuck you!’ yelled Costain.
She made a gesture and they all flinched, and just for a second Quill was sure that something had hit him, but then he saw that all her gesture had done was to grab the cat up into her arms. ‘I am not limited by such as you!’ she shouted above the noise. ‘I have more soil! I will live as I have always lived. I will do as I have always done. In the past it has been my pleasure sometimes to show mercy, but now you must be taught! I will continue to support my football club! I will kill any player who scores three against them! Try to find me, try to change the way things have always been, and my lord will have you!’
She and the cat somehow folded together. .
And vanished on a dark wing that roared away through Quill’s head. And rushed out though that impossible door.
He looked round at the others. They’d all felt it. They were looking around them desperately, afraid of their own fear, not quite believing they’d escaped, still aware of that enormous noise around them. A shout from Sefton made Quill look up again. Something odd had started to happen to the walls: they were buckling inwards. The pieces of furniture were shoving themselves up against each other. It was all starting to fall towards that red door, which still lay open, like the plughole which the room was starting to revolve around, as it began to suck everything inside it, downwards into. .
Quill looked to the trapdoor.
Even as he looked, it warped and slowly started to spin its way up the wall.
‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ he yelled to the others. ‘Leg it!’
To Quill’s enormous relief, they did.
They threw themselves down through the trapdoor, and landed hard on the floor below. ‘Out!’ shouted Quill to the forensics shift. ‘Out!’ So now others were running with them, uniforms and forensics in crime scene suits, like a bomb was about to go off. They ran for the stairs, which were folding in on themselves, and were even harder to see and understand now, and they fell down them and rolled, and the uniforms helped them up and rushed down around them, nimbly navigating all the impossibilities.
The child’s head fixed on the top of the banister was screaming, and the shape of it was starting to peel off into a long ribbon of flesh that led back up into the twisting, knotting building. Up ahead there was the front door. .
. . racing away from them. Receding into the far distance at the end of an impossible corridor, as space stretched under this strange new gravity. Uniforms were running out through it, receding with it. This trap was intended just for the four of them.
Quill turned on his heel, grabbed a fur from the floor, wrapped it around him. He made sure the other three saw what he intended, then he flung himself at the nearest window.
The crashing glass expanded slowly outwards. They were escaping something dreamlike and hugely gravitational which was trying to haul them back inside. They burst out of the house as if it was a dying universe, slowly, slowly, reaching the limit of where it could hold on to them. .
And they were in the frosty night air, above the passage running along one side of the house, and everything was real again.
They heard the distant slam of that impossible door. The entire contents of the house had now fled through it.
And they fell and hit the ground hard, again, and lay there together, gasping, and the window threw itself back together, and the house vanished towards a point that hurt their eyes.
And then it was gone, heading somewhere into the fine structure of the night.
As they lay there, Quill realized he was still holding a scrap of dirty carpet. It evaporated a moment later into a billow of dust.
Slowly, they picked themselves up. A uniform peered around the corner of a wall. ‘The evacuation’s complete, sir. How far back should I set the perimeter, sir?’ Urgency and disbelief were fighting on his face. Behind him, Quill could see the big lights of the TV crews coming back on.
Quill turned round to look at what they had just escaped from.
Where a moment before there had been a sort of vacuum, an ordinary house had reappeared. Ordinary to his eyes now, too.
From which all the weight and horror had vanished.
ELEVEN
Quill led them back into the house. The skull was still there on the newel post, but it wasn’t a head any more. It looked perversely dull in comparison, simply mundane. So did the soil upstairs. Perhaps this ‘Sight’ had now left them all? He hoped that was the case.
She had been in this house all the while it was searched, hiding behind a door that existed only for her. They had then made her retreat, through mere instinct and accident.
He shut down all these questions and allowed the forensics shift immediately back into the house. Emergency over. His mistake. He was aware of the forensics shift and the uniforms looking startled to the point of laughter: what had all that been about? He couldn’t satisfactorily answer them, so he bundled his team into a marked car and they got the hell out of there.
An hour later, Quill stood again outside the Portakabin, and listened on his mobile to his home phone ringing. He thought he could see dawn approaching, or maybe that was just something weird over there towards the east. Because the drive here had shown them that they most definitely all still had the Sight, whatever that meant. His hands were shaking.
The world was much more terrifying than anyone had known — and it had been pretty terrifying before. He had called Sarah intending to. . what? Warn her? Tell her not just ghosts actually, love, witches too? Nobody would believe them. She wouldn’t believe him either.
Just in the moment before he switched off the connection, he thought maybe he heard the phone being picked up, but she didn’t call him back.
The others were sitting in the Portakabin, drinking strong sweet tea, not speaking, not looking at each other. In the car they’d kept their eyes closed, pretending they were trying to sleep. Quill felt the same great tiredness, but knew no sleep would come. He’d suffered from shock before. He sat down alongside them.