The Darkest Corners

Please no.

I jumped the last few rungs just as she had done and charged through into the main church. It now stood in ruins, most of the sky visible through the crumbled roof. The doors at the far end of the room were still standing. They swung closed as I raced towards them.

A ragged shape lay there in the middle of the aisle. As I drew closer I recognised the tattered remains of Joe Crow. They squirmed as if alive, and I saw his body begin to reform, like footage of rotting fruit played in high-speed reverse.

‘S-see you, boy,’ he slurred. A half-formed hand reached out for me. ‘Don’t you g-go nowhere.’

I clambered over the pews beside him, not daring to get too close. The rest of the aisle passed in a blur as I raced through the inner doors and out through the exit into the world beyond.

A foot stuck out from round the doorframe and I tripped. My momentum carried me down the stone steps and I landed on my back on the damp, dirty ground.

My dad stood at the top of the steps, laughing as he looked down. And there, beside him, was Ameena. My dad and Ameena. Together.

There had been a little hope inside me, buried deep down. A hope that somehow everything was going to be OK. A hope that, no matter how bad things seemed at the moment, they weren’t broken beyond repair.

That hope died when I saw them standing there together. My dad was grinning, but I didn’t look at him. Instead I just stared at Ameena and asked her, ‘Why?’

She shrugged and pushed her hair out of her face. ‘Nothing personal.’

‘Nothing personal?’ I said. I was on my feet in an instant. ‘Nothing personal; are you nuts?’

I began to climb the stairs towards them. Ameena raised her fists and bounced on to the balls of her feet. ‘Don’t,’ she warned.

I stopped. Not because I was scared of her, but because I suddenly had no energy left to climb with.

‘So, what?’ I asked croakily. ‘The whole time? It’s all been a lie?’

‘Bingo,’ laughed my dad. ‘All that stuff about you making her, about her being –’ he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers – ‘“a tool”? All rubbish. None of that was true.’

‘Then why say it?’ I asked. ‘What was the point?’

‘The point was what it’s always been,’ he continued. ‘To make you care about her. To make you want to protect her.’ His grin widened. ‘And you do, don’t you, kiddo? You care about her a lot.’

I didn’t answer. Ameena tried to hold my gaze, but glanced away.

‘Man, that must be a kick in the teeth,’ my dad chuckled. ‘There you are falling for her charms, and all the while she’s just trying to get you to use your abilities so you break down the barrier and she can get the Hell away from you.’

‘It was you in that brown robe all along,’ I said. ‘It was you.’

‘Bzzzzt! Correct answer,’ cried my dad. ‘And I think if you’re honest with yourself you always really knew that. You just didn’t want to believe it. Am I right? Kiddo?’

I didn’t answer, just kept staring and waiting for it to sink in. She’d been working against me. Right from day one, she’d been working against me.

My dad put a finger behind his ear and pushed it slightly forward. ‘You know, the walls between this world and yours must be paper-thin now. If you listen, you can hear your little friend Billy screaming.’

He was right. Billy’s screams were muffled, but there was no mistaking them. They came from high up in the church, a whole other world away. They were screams not of panic, but of pain.

My dad and Ameena stepped apart, leaving the path to the door clear. ‘You’ve got maybe a minute to get back there and save him,’ said my dad. ‘Or you can stay here and chitchat with us. The choice is yours.’

Far away, Billy let out a squeal of agony. My dad’s face lit up with a manic grin.

‘But whatever you decide, you’d better do it quickly.’

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I threw the church doors open and sprinted along the aisle. I was still in the Darkest Corners – it was too dangerous to jump back into my own world until I was up the ladder and inside the tower itself – and Joe Crow had almost finished pulling himself back together on the ruined church floor.

He was drawing himself up on his stubby legs as I ran towards him. The sackcloth mask he had been wearing hadn’t made the trip back with him, and his wrinkled, old-man face twisted into a scowl at my approach. He snarled, revealing dozens of tiny, shark-like teeth poking out from his pale gums.

‘I see you came back, boy,’ he spat; then he stopped talking as the sole of my shoe slammed hard into the centre of his weather-beaten face. He stumbled backwards on to the floor, and then I was past him, through the door behind the pulpit and scrabbling up the rusted ladder.

I was halfway up before I realised I couldn’t hear Billy screaming, and all the way at the top before I realised I couldn’t hear anything from within the tower at all.

As soon as I was through the hatch I focused on a spark and moved between worlds. To my relief, Billy was there, almost exactly where I’d left him. He was kneeling down, facing away from me, his hands hanging limply by his sides so his knuckles were almost touching the floor.

He was half hidden by the shadows, but as I took a step closer I saw the spots of blood on the side of his face. I thought back. He hadn’t been bleeding after Ameena hit him, had he? In all the panic, I couldn’t remember.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

Billy didn’t answer. Up close I could see that his whole body was vibrating. His breath was whistling unsteadily in and out, and he gave the occasional soft whimper as I took another creaky step closer.

‘I heard you screaming,’ I said. He flinched, but didn’t turn round. I took another step towards him. ‘What happened? Why were you screaming?’

Billy’s trembling was becoming more and more violent, as if his body was going deep into shock. He flinched again as I laid my hand on his shoulder.

‘What’s wrong, Billy?’ I asked. ‘What happened? Talk to me.’

With a sob, he slowly turned his head. I felt my guts twist in horror. I stumbled away from him, swallowing the urge to throw up. His eyes bored into mine, ringed with red and filled with tears.

I tried to speak, but no words came. Tried to scream, but my throat was closed tight. Instead I raised a shaking hand and pointed. Pointed at his face; at his mouth; at the thick black stitches that threaded through his lips, pulling them tightly together.

He tried to say something, but the words came out as a jumbled mumble of syllables. His fingers brushed against the stitches, then pulled quickly away. His eyes bulged. His nostrils flared. He let out a high-pitched moan that would have been a scream if he could open his mouth.

‘Wh-who…?’ I began, but a blast of music answered my question before I could even ask it.

It came from the room below, loud enough to shake the floor beneath us.

If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Not him. Not here.’

If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in disguise…

Of all the fiends I’d faced so far, Doc Mortis was up there with the worst of them. He was a sadist, a madman who believed himself to be a surgeon, and who kidnapped innocent people and performed grotesque operations on them. I’d barely escaped his hospital. I thought he was dead. It appeared I was wrong.

A crash of breaking wood temporarily drowned out the music from below. One of the wooden boards that had been fastened over an opening in the tower wall was smashed in right behind Billy.

Before he could even turn, a freakishly thin figure reached through the gap. I caught a glimpse of its bald head and its surgical mask. Eyes that were no more than buttons stitched on to skin flashed at me through the gloom, and I recognised one of Doc’s porters.