Crawlers Read online

  ‘Jasmine!’ yelled Samantha, starting to struggle, but the grip that held her was inescapable. One finger at a time, a crawler came into view over her shoulder. ‘Help me!’

  The creature positioned itself on Samantha’s neck, then struck. Lauren’s hands released their grip. As Samantha dropped to the floor like a rag doll the lights flicked off again.

  Until this moment Jasmine had stood rooted to the spot, barely believing what she was hearing and seeing. Now, at last, she launched herself out of the cubicle and lunged for the door, flailing blindly for its handle in the darkness. Of course she was too late.

  ‘No, Jasmine,’ she heard. ‘I’ve something special planned for you.’

  She felt a hand on the back of her neck.

  Then, when Jasmine understood what it really was, she screamed.

  Ben was already up off the floor and running.

  ‘Ben!’ he heard. ‘Help! Quick! Ben!’

  The lift doors closed behind him but he didn’t even notice. His eyes were only on the girl who had just staggered into view.

  ‘Lauren?’ he asked. ‘What is it? What’s the problem? What’s going on in there?’

  ‘It’s Jasmine,’ Lauren wailed. ‘She . . . changed. Then crawlers came out of the ceiling, and they got Samantha, and . . .’ she choked and fell against him heavily. ‘Oh, Ben!’

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Ben, putting his arms around her awkwardly. ‘Um, what are you saying? Tell me again slowly.’

  ‘It was true, Ben!’ said Lauren, staring into his eyes. ‘Samantha was right: there was a traitor. She was bitten right at the beginning. She’s had a crawler on her the whole time: Ben, it was Jasmine!’

  ‘What?’ asked Ben, horrified, looking past Lauren at the door to the Ladies. ‘Really?’

  ‘No,’ said Lauren, in a deeper voice. She produced the fresh crawler she’d been holding at her side and put it on the back of Ben’s neck. ‘Not really.’

  Ben felt its bite, like two hot needles being shoved under the base of his skull. He went rigid, helpless.

  ‘I had thought that tricking you into mistrusting Jasmine would be harder, Ben,’ said Lauren’s mouth, making a moue of disappointment. ‘Perhaps the two of you aren’t becoming as fond as you seem.’

  ‘I . . .’ Ben croaked, staring up at the camera on the ceiling.

  Then everything went black.

  11:42 PM.

  Jasmine returned to consciousness in darkness, but the first

  thing she noticed was that she was standing up.

  OK, she thought, that’s kind of odd.

  Her eyes felt dry, so she blinked – or rather her brain sent the message to her eyelids, but nothing happened. The same thing occurred when she tried to lift her hands to rub her eyes: the hands remained at her sides without even so much as moving a finger. She tried to open her mouth – even to twitch her tongue: nothing. Jasmine was just standing there, like a mannequin waiting to be positioned.

  Her body was no longer her own. She began to panic.

  The lights flickered on overhead, revealing Lauren’s face, just centimetres from hers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lauren – or rather what was controlling her. ‘This is exactly why I never allow my subjects as much awareness as this. It’s too distressing for them. But you, Jasmine, you’re not like the others, are you?’

  They were in the toilets, but Jasmine didn’t care about her surroundings. Inside, she was screaming. She was utterly helpless. She still had sensations – hunger, fatigue, a persistent itch at the sides and back of her neck – but her mind was only receiving these signals. She was incapable of sending anything back. Her body was a prison. Jasmine was locked inside her head, every bit as securely as if she’d been locked in a cage.

  ‘Are you as strong and clever as I’m hoping, Jasmine?’ said Lauren’s mouth. It smiled. ‘This is where we find out. Let me explain . . .’

  Lauren turned, untucking and lifting the back of her grimy white school uniform shirt to expose the clinging creature that lay nestled at the base of her spine.

  With a mental spasm of revulsion, Jasmine realized why her neck itched so much.

  ‘That’s right. My hand is upon you. So now you, like this one’ – Lauren’s hand gestured at herself – ‘are almost completely under my control. Where it becomes interesting, of course, is the “almost”.’

  Lauren’s face loomed in Jasmine’s vision. Lauren’s eyes, and what looked out of them, stared into Jasmine’s.

  ‘You are resisting,’ the voice stated. ‘I would expect no less from you. If you were like the others – if there was a part of you that wanted to give up – then I would not be so interested in you. You see, I’ve been watching you over the course of the evening. You have intrigued me, Jasmine.’

  The voice was deeper than Lauren’s, slightly husky, with an easy, velvet musicality to it. But Jasmine was barely listening. Her mind battered against its limits like a prisoner hurling herself against the bars, screaming, crying, until she was dizzy with pain. Of course, it all happened in silence. Any outward sign of her struggle was impossible.

  Lauren’s lips formed into a small pout. ‘I do not ask for your surrender,’ she said. ‘All I ask, for now, is a truce.’ She leaned forward until her lips were next to Jasmine’s ear. ‘Don’t you want to know what’s really happening here, and who is behind it all? Hmm?’

  Wrenching her mind back into focus, Jasmine tried to calm down. When Lauren’s face came back into sight, she was smiling again.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Oh, that’s much better.’ Then: ‘Let’s go.’

  The overhead lights flicked off again, but Jasmine found that she was already turning. Her hand reached out, found the door handle easily in the pulsing dark, and pulled.

  Jasmine walked out – but Jasmine herself had nothing to do with any of it. She was aware of every movement: she was aware of the air around her and the way it moved across her skin. But the movements themselves did not come from her. She was being controlled.

  ‘There,’ said the voice from behind her, ‘you’re becoming accustomed to it already. But . . . Oh. Yes, of course.’

  Jasmine had caught sight of Ben.

  A part of her had been hoping desperately that he might have escaped somehow – that he might still be free, hiding in the building somewhere, figuring out a way to rescue everyone. Instead he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, with a crawler clamped to his neck. He stood there with his back to her – ignoring her. His hands, by his sides, were clenched into fists. Jasmine felt a soft pang of despair.

  ‘I sent Samantha to join the battle upstairs,’ said Lauren’s mouth. ‘I left Ben here on guard. Forget him. He can’t help you; nobody can. Now let me show you why.’

  Then Jasmine was walking again. As she passed Ben she wanted to keep looking at him, but her head wouldn’t turn. She and Lauren were going towards the door she’d noticed earlier – the one that said THE PIT.

  Lauren held it open for her, then followed her through.

  11:45 PM.

  ‘We have to do something,’ said Robert.

  He and Josh were standing in the monitor room. Between them they’d at last got the hang of the console. They’d had trouble keeping Ben and the girls in sight in the fog of the foyer, but had found them again in time to witness what had happened. They had seen Lauren put the crawler on Ben. They had seen where Lauren and Jasmine had gone.

  ‘Come on,’ said Robert, when Josh didn’t reply. ‘I’m sick of waiting. Let’s you and me go and do something, for a change.’

  Josh turned and raised an eyebrow. ‘Robert,’ he asked, ‘are you having some sort of episode? When we first came up here, you were crying like a baby. Now, what? You’re an action hero?’

  ‘No,’ said Robert. ‘All I’m saying is—’

  ‘Yes, I heard what you’re saying.’ Josh’s lip curled in disdain. He pointed at the screens. ‘Robert, the army’s down there – people with guns. But here you are, sudd
enly getting the urge to ride in and save the day. You, Robert. Wow, if this wasn’t so pathetic I’d be laughing.’

  ‘Coward,’ said Robert.

  Josh frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

  Robert’s face was red with emotion. ‘You heard. Lauren may have tricked Ben and Samantha and Jasmine, but at least they tried. All you do is sit there waiting to be rescued and telling people what to do.’ He shook his head. ‘And I used to think you were so great. Well, see you.’

  He turned and set off.

  ‘Robert . . .’ said Josh, following him into the security room. ‘Robert, your arm’s broken. What exactly do you think you’re going to do? You won’t even get out of that door! Robert, come back!’

  With his good right hand Robert opened it, revealing the empty passage beyond.

  ‘The sentries are gone,’ he told Josh, ‘you knob.’ He nodded at the unconscious body of Lisa. ‘Stay here with her.’

  With that, he left.

  Josh stood there for a moment. He looked down at Lisa. Then:

  ‘Robert?’ he called. ‘Robert! Wait for me!’

  11:46 PM.

  Jasmine passed through another set of doors and entered a dimly lit room. Rising to her right were twelve rows of empty seats. A metal frame holding a lighting rig hung from the ceiling.

  The Pit was a theatre. It wasn’t anything like as big and impressive as the one upstairs, nor was it supposed to be: this was a studio theatre, used for smaller-scale, more intimate productions.

  ‘There’s a story about this place and how it got its name,’ said Lauren’s mouth. ‘They say the Barbican was built on one of London’s plague pits – a mass grave for victims of the Black Death.’

  Helplessly Jasmine followed Lauren across the performance space, through a gap in a blackout curtain and into the Pit Theatre’s backstage area. Jasmine passed some painted wooden boards and a pile of steel scaffolding poles – theatrical scenery of some kind, apparently abandoned in mid-construction. In the far wall, flanked by two open, plain, black doors with signs on them saying WARNING: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, she saw a tunnel.

  ‘Elements of that story are true,’ said the voice. ‘The Barbican Centre is built over a pit. The pit was dug at the time of the Great Plague – the epidemic that ended in sixteen sixty-six. As to what the pit really contains, however . . . well, you’re about to find out.’ Lauren’s body stood to one side of the tunnel entrance, and gestured. ‘After you.’

  The tunnel was a twenty-metre-long downward-sloping tube of bare, grey Barbican concrete. The air coming up from it was cold and damp and smelled of sewage. The tunnel did not seem to Jasmine like a good place to be. But her reluctance made no difference: her legs began to plod down it just the same.

  ‘Sixteen sixty-six,’ the voice behind her repeated. ‘The Great Fire of London. If even Lauren here knows the date all British schoolchildren must do, one imagines. But what you don’t know is that the fire was started deliberately.’

  The tunnel’s slope was too steep to walk down comfortably: with each step Jasmine’s toes pressed hard against the ends of her school shoes, and her ankles and calves quickly began to ache. While she waited to arrive wherever her stolen body was taking her, Jasmine thought about Lauren. Had there been some clue, some giveaway word that Jasmine could have picked up on earlier? Perhaps. But, Jasmine wondered bleakly, how could she have known? To Jasmine, Lauren had always just been Samantha’s pet – sucking up to Samantha in return for the protection of being with her. Jasmine had never felt any wish to get to know Lauren well enough to have noticed anything different about her tonight. Neither, it seemed, had Samantha.

  ‘The city’s owners, the Corporation of London, started the blaze to flush me out,’ the voice went on. ‘Imagine it: a whole city on fire for three days! I never could have guessed they would go to such lengths. But it worked. Here, under what is now called the Barbican Estate, is the northernmost point the fire reached. They had destroyed my hiding places, forced me out into the open. This was where they caught me.’

  Jasmine had reached the end of the tunnel. To her right lay a massive round steel door of the kind used in bank vaults: presumably there to seal off the tunnel when closed, the door now lay open, flush with the wall. To Jasmine’s left was a domed chamber.

  It looked like a shallow, upside-down bowl. It wasn’t especially high – perhaps five metres at the dome’s highest point – but it was very wide, something like thirty metres in diameter. The walls, the ceiling and some of the floor were constructed entirely of pinkish red brick. The bricks looked old: they were worn, bulged outward by subsidence in some places, blackened with mould in others. But the chamber also featured some incongruous-looking modern touches. On the other side of the chamber Jasmine saw another round steel door, also standing open. A ring of chrome-sided light globes were bolted onto the wall, together with what looked like PA speakers and several types of camera, all angled inward.

  In the centre of the room, taking up a good two-thirds of the floor space, was a wide circle of reinforced glass. Lauren walked out into the chamber until she was standing at the glass circle’s edge.

  ‘This is what gave the theatre its name,’ said Lauren’s mouth. ‘This is the pit where the Corporation held me prisoner for almost three hundred and fifty years. This is where they insulted my person, with fire and steel and . . . devices. But no more. Tonight I leave this place behind for good.’ Lauren pointed past Jasmine. ‘Press that button, please.’

  Jasmine turned, and found herself looking at a wall-mounted plastic box with a large red button in its centre. Her thumb pushed the button almost before she herself had seen it.

  ‘Now wait there,’ said the voice behind her, over the rising whine of machinery.

  Jasmine did as she was told. She didn’t have any choice. All she could do was stand there, looking at the wall, listening.

  For ten slow seconds the sound of the machine continued; to Jasmine, it felt longer. Then, with an echoing hiss, it fell silent.

  Jasmine waited.

  There was a sudden great rasp, as if something large, heavy and wet was being dragged across the floor. This was followed by a snort, then a low crooning sound that was somewhere between a wheeze and a moan.

  With no control over where her eyes went, Jasmine focused on her other senses. As well as the sewage smell she’d noticed earlier there was now a sudden extra noxious tang in the air – raw chicken, bad armpits, or some unholy mixture of the two.

  Raaaaasp – that sound again, then the same deep, wheezing, booming moan of effort. Both were louder this time, and Jasmine sensed a definite increase in the smell’s potency.

  Jasmine knew what was happening: something was coming up behind her – something big. She did not enjoy waiting for whatever it was to come into view. If she’d had any choice in the matter, she would be running. But she couldn’t even shiver. She had to stand there as the sounds got closer, powerless to do anything but wait and see whether the truth behind the sounds was as horrifying as what they did to her imagination.

  RAAAAASP. The smell was even stronger now – almost unbearable. The moan, when it came, was close enough for Jasmine to feel a warm exhalation on her back.

  ‘There,’ said the voice, from what felt like just beside her ear. ‘Now you may look on me.’

  When Jasmine turned, the first thing she saw was the all-too-familiar figure of Lauren. But there was something strange about her. Was Lauren . . . taller? She was looking down at Jasmine and grinning – a wild, cruel grin that showed all her teeth. Jasmine’s eyes travelled downward, and that was when she noticed that Lauren was up off the ground. Her feet were dangling in the air, her legs swinging gently.

  Then Jasmine saw why.

  Oh. My. God.

  Jasmine’s first impression was of a sort of hulking boulder shape, perhaps three metres across. But instead of rock, this thing was made of flesh. It was milky white in colour. Rings of grey muscle striped its rubbery sides. On the bit neare
st to Jasmine was a primitive tube of a mouth from which projected a thick, dirty-grey, glistening tongue. The tongue had attached itself to Lauren’s back somehow: it was this that was holding Lauren in the air.

  Lauren’s eyes seemed to glow as they stared down at Jasmine. Her arms lifted from her sides. Her terrible grin widened.

  ‘Behold,’ said her mouth, ‘your Queen.’

  11:48 PM.

  Protect the Queen, said Ben’s brain. Then again: Protect the Queen.

  He was standing guard at the bottom of the stairs. This was his place – his line in the sand. He would allow no one to pass him. If anyone tried, he would stop them. Ben would fight – fight until he was dead if he had to – and he wouldn’t die easily. He would fight until his last breath, until the last drop of blood left his body. He was protecting the Queen. And the Queen, to Ben, was everything.

  The Queen’s hand was upon him, laid gently on the back of his neck. She was there on the inside of Ben’s head too, behind every thought. She was with him, cold and calm and ageless – watching through his eyes, keeping his thoughts straight, smoothing away anything that was complicated. For that, he loved her.

  Ben loved how easy everything felt, now that the Queen was with him. It was simple: where there had been fear, now there was certainty. Where there had been doubt, now there was clarity – freedom. Ben felt so light, so full of energy, that he thought he might actually lift off into the air. He stood there at his post at the bottom of the stairs, absolutely and utterly still, and the deliberateness of that lack of movement was like a charge of electricity building up in his chest. His blood seemed to crackle and fizz in his veins. Protect the Queen. Fight for the Queen. There was nothing else he wanted.

  And now, he thought, instantly spotting the shadow that moved on the wall at the top of the stairs, here comes my chance . . .

  The shadow loomed larger, became a full-sized silhouette, then a face was poking around the corner on the landing. The face was earnest and worried, round and a bit pudgy. It was also familiar.