The Inner Circle (Short Story)

 

They didn’t really know when it all began. In a sense, it seemed like it had always been that way, the dreams, that is.   There was a time when the dreams didn’t come. That was – then. It was –another time. They didn’t. Recall. Then there was the time when they were here: a time when they had always been here. A time, now, when they could not recall what it was like to be without the dreams.

I turned back and now his face was visible. It was the expression that frightened the most but what made you start running were the eyes. As you looked into those enlarged black pupils you knew it.  Perhaps it was the same thing that animals feel when  a predator attacks and when the world is about to erupt into them in the form of talons or teeth  or some vice like grip that will , hopefully mercifully, rip out their life in an instant.

A moment  later he  was watching the metro pull away and push its way into the tunnel, bits of newspaper and crisp packets tossed up behind as it made its way, brimful with people, towards Upminster or Dagenham or Barking. Soon the noises were gone, even the ghost rush of air that followed behind. He watched his feet pulsing in his trainers. Pulsing like the syncopated rhythm of his arteries, throbbing like the rush of blood into his capillaries, the simple chemical exchanges of the cells. Was that...?

They lay together in the grass, face down and holding hands. The damp smell of soil and crushed cellulose crept upwards into their noses whilst, through the damp membrane of their clothes, a little of their being leached away into the warm earth. They hardly dared to move. They kept their breathing calm and slow despite the hammering of their hearts. They waited as the moments passed through to moments.

The door was opened as he approached along the long corridor and he could see the room within. It was bathed in a grey and hazy light that lanced downwards to his left from what he presumed to be a series of large windows obscured in the room beyond. At the threshold he paused and was about to look around when he heard a cough: a brief and intensely artificial cough. It came from a point directly ahead of him. From a small wooden table in fact where, in a light grey suit and upright and still, as though going to the toilet, there sat a slightly built woman of indeterminate years.

Once he had started running he knew that he would not stop or rather, could not stop. He felt, rather than saw, his pursuer loping along somewhere behind him. He guessed rather than knew that the distance behind them was shortening. He fixed his eyes on the street ahead of him, occasionally glancing to the right to check the numbers that were barely visible on the shrouded doors.  Number 87. He stopped and turned around.

Overhead the clouds rushed across a grey sky as though they were late for some important event or perhaps as though they were being pursued by some unseen foe. Or some fear. Or a beast of nightmare. Or even... His finger dipped into the reflection of his face looking up at him young and unfamiliar from the mercurial pool below. The image rippled out from the cut off finger, the quicksilver surface. He felt the push of its density, trying to thrust his finger upwards and out onto the surface. The clouds continued the headlong rush.

He could hear the steady resonance of his footsteps as he crossed the floor towards her. Resonance. A  good word, like resolute: his determination not to be deterred. Red, white and black fabric was draped from the ionic columns on either side of him. Were they flags - he wondered briefly – or just marketing banners. Looking to his left he could see the shadows of the others moving parallel with him beyond the columns. Glancing right he saw other shades passing beneath the dirty windows that shed the iridescent light before him like a strip of carpet.

Someone touched his arm, a light pressure on his skin setting sensory receptors sibilating. He looked down and saw nothing for that was a long time ago: another train through a tunnel, another image reflecting in the silver exactness of his young mind. Older, perhaps not wiser, he still felt that hand and that soft skin on skin. The grass beneath. The clouds rushing overhead as though pursued by a fear.  The smell of the earth and the crushed grass beneath them.

When you wake, you expect light and so you open your eyes and all is dark. Stupidly you blink and it is still dark so you listen, abandoning the one sense for another, discarding the work of pax genesis in favour of sensory equipment of greater antiquity. Of course there is no silence, for inside your head you hear the blood pulsing outside, you hear the sound of breathing and feel the vibration of the pumping heart. 

He rose up from the limp form that lay in a pool of silver light and dark blood on the otherwise empty pavement. Looking around, he wiped something wet from his lips onto the back of his sleeve. It was an oddly discordant gesture given what came next.  He took something from his pocket and for a brief instant there was a metallic flash of moonlight on tungsten steel. He stooped again and slipped the blade into the soft yielding flesh of the corpse. A quick flick and then a pale hand penetrated the gash and lifted something clear.

In the darkness, I could hear a dog barking, a wolf howling, some strange and fearful creature sniffing. My beating heart...stopped. For a moment, I thought it was one creature but as I watched I saw the heads of Cerberus move and within a short space of time, the pack moved away into the alleyways and the darkness and the slick wet night. Only then.

Only then did I dare move from the shadow of the building where I had been cowering. Only then did I shuffle across the road, careful not to step into the pools of watered blood that ran and washed in shiny blackness among the cobbles and down into the Hadean gloom of the drainage system. There to slip with the viscera of the city away into oblivion.

Once the small group had passed down the path and on into the coolness of the trees, they dared to move once more. He first: lifting his head to look about. All clear. She opens her mouth as if to speak but he covers it with a kiss as he pushes further into her. Her eyes, inches away, are moist: her pupils wide and dark, her skin warm and soft. Her body rippling with pleasure.