Crawlers Read online

  ‘Waiting for us,’ said Josh, looking back at Samantha. ‘They’re on guard, in case we try to come out of these rooms.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Samantha. ‘Maybe. So?’

  ‘So,’ Jasmine answered for him grimly, from her place on the floor, ‘do you notice a toilet in here?’

  There was a moment of scandalized silence as the full implications hit home.

  ‘No way,’ Samantha announced. ‘There is no way I’m going to go to the loo in that sink. Not with you lot right there.’

  ‘Then I hope you don’t mind holding it in,’ said Josh. ‘We could be here a long time.’

  Samantha made a contemptuous sucking sound with her teeth, and turned to Jasmine. ‘All right then, genius,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘What about you? Discovered anything yet?’

  ‘I’m . . . not sure,’ said Jasmine.

  She had retrieved the flattened remains of the three dead creatures and was now using the notice board on her lap as a makeshift dissecting table. Well, strictly speaking she was poking at them with a biro, but that was the best she could do in the circumstances. English might be Jasmine’s weakest subject but biology, supposedly, was her strongest. Examining the creatures seemed a sensible next step: it might give her an idea of what they were up against. But so far all that she had managed to do was disgust herself.

  Each spider-thing was about twenty centimetres across. Instead of eight legs though, weirdly, they had five – four long ones on one side of their wide, flattened bodies and only one, a thicker one, on the other. Also, apart from a thin band of red at the joints of each of their legs, they were almost transparent – like jellyfish. The creatures were nearly as unpleasant dead as they had been alive. They gave off a faint fishy smell and they were sticky to the touch. There was something deeply wrong about their see-through legs and the little strips of blood at their joints. Jasmine was not squeamish, but the rubbery way the creatures’ flesh resisted the push of her pen made her gorge rise.

  None of this was visible to anyone else. To Ben, Jasmine seemed as unfazed as if she dissected monsters every day of the week.

  ‘What have you found?’ he asked, even more impressed by Jasmine than he had been before. ‘What are these things? Where do they come from?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘These animals . . . they’re not like anything I’ve ever seen before.’

  Ben looked at her. ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, for one thing’ – Jasmine grimaced – ‘it looks like they don’t have any . . . orifices.’

  Samantha made a snorting sound in her nose. Lauren sniggered. Jasmine sighed.

  ‘Er, what about the mouth, though?’ asked Ben. ‘We’ve seen them bite, so . . .’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Jasmine, pointing. ‘Look: they’ve all got these two probosces . . .’

  ‘Pro-whatties?’ said Samantha.

  ‘Like needles,’ Jasmine explained. ‘A pair of them, very sharp, for puncturing skin. But that’s it. There’s nothing here you could really call a mouth, and nowhere I can see for food to go. In fact . . .’ She paused. ‘I think that whatever this creature is doing when it bites, it’s got nothing to do with eating at all.’

  ‘What do you think it’s doing, then?’ asked Josh, without much patience.

  Jasmine looked at him. ‘I’ve . . . got a theory,’ she said carefully.

  ‘When Ms Gresham got bit,’ put in Samantha, ‘she just seemed to go mental – right?’

  ‘Her eyes were weird,’ said Ben.

  ‘It was the same with the Barbican staff,’ Jasmine told him, glad he’d noticed that. ‘When we were trying to get them to let us out, they had the same look.’

  ‘And then the people outside,’ said Ben. ‘The way they attacked, the way they stopped – it was all at once. Almost like . . .’

  ‘Like they’re being controlled,’ said Jasmine.

  Ben and Jasmine looked at each other.

  ‘So you’re saying . . .’ Josh began. ‘Wait, what are you saying? That what we’ve got here is some kind of spider that takes over your mind?’

  ‘Like I said,’ said Jasmine, looking down, ‘it’s just a theory. Anyway,’ she added a little defensively, ‘I don’t think you could really say they’re spiders.’

  ‘We could call them something else,’ said Ben, eager to help. ‘How about . . . crawlers?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Samantha, putting up a hand. ‘Hello?’

  Everyone turned to look at her.

  ‘This conversation is fascinating to you, maybe,’ she said, ‘but we’ve got a bit of a situation here, don’t you think? For a start, I mean, is anyone’s phone working yet? Anybody?’

  Lauren flipped her mobile open, then shut it again glumly.

  ‘Well there you go,’ said Samantha. ‘No phone. No Internet. Not even texts – and believe me, I’ve tried.’

  ‘What’s your point?’ asked Jasmine.

  ‘If we’d kept moving,’ said Samantha, ‘we might have been all right, but oh no! Thanks to you we’re stuck here, with no phones, no food, and not even a toilet. What I want to know is, what are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know – Samantha, wasn’t it?’ said Josh with icy politeness. ‘If you have any thoughts to share I’d be delighted to hear them. What do you suggest we “do about it”?’

  ‘You’re the one who put himself in charge,’ Samantha snapped back. ‘What made you feel you could do that, by the way? What makes you the boss here? Have you got some special qualifications we should know about, or what?’

  ‘You mean, do I have any prior experience of being attacked by’ – Josh sneered at Ben and made quote marks in the air – “crawlers”, then trapped in a room?’ He smiled at Samantha mirthlessly. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Then what gives you the right to put all our lives in danger like this?’

  Josh’s smile froze.

  ‘Samantha . . .’ said Jasmine warningly.

  ‘No, you just shut it too, Jasmine,’ said Samantha, not even looking at her. ‘I mean listen to you, all of you, poncing along with your “I’ve got a theory”. What are we doing here? Why is this happening to us? What’s going on? When are we going to get out?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ roared Josh, ‘that’s precisely what we’re trying to work out, you stupid pleb!’

  Ben blinked, and there was a sharp intake of breath from the rest of the group. Here it was: the side to Josh he’d always suspected, the side that people at Walsingham pretended wasn’t there.

  The effect was immediate.

  ‘Why, you stuck-up . . .’ began Samantha.

  ‘. . . snot-nosed . . .’ said Lauren.

  ‘. . . arrogant little public-school git!’ Samantha finished. ‘How dare you call me a pleb?’ Apart from two hard spots of red on either side of her nose, her face had gone pale with rage. ‘But that’s what you think of us,’ she added, triumphant now, hitting her stride. ‘That’s what you all think of us, all of you, isn’t it?’ she repeated, turning to include all the boys.

  Uh-oh . . . thought Ben.

  ‘Just ’cause your parents paid money to send you to school, you think that gives you the right to look down on the rest of the world. Look at yourselves,’ said Samantha, ‘acting the boss, giving orders like you’re born to rule.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Josh repeated, rolling his eyes. ‘For your information, the only reason I took charge is because nobody else did!’

  Samantha snorted. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘It’s true! I didn’t hear you coming up with any ideas until we were in here. Come to that, you haven’t said anything worth a damn since, either. All you do is bitch about how your mobile doesn’t work!’

  ‘Don’t call her a bitch!’ put in Lauren.

  ‘What?’ Josh blinked. ‘I didn’t! I said “bitch”, as in “to bitch”, verb, meaning “complain and whine and drone on about everything”. What are you, stupid?’
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  ‘Stop calling us stupid!’ shrieked Samantha.

  ‘Shut up a second, all of you!’ yelled Jasmine. ‘You,’ she added, pointing at Hugo, who was standing in the doorway, looking startled in the sudden silence. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘It’s . . . one of the screens,’ stammered Hugo, bewildered. ‘The camera that covers the main entrance to the street. Some police are trying to get in!’

  ‘Well, about bloody time.’ Samantha sniffed. ‘Out of my way, I want to see what’s going on.’

  Elbowing Josh aside, she strode past him and Hugo. Josh turned, as if about to say something, but his way was blocked by Lauren, who now stood between him and the monitor-room door, arms crossed, face set, like a sneering female bouncer.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Josh, a third time.

  But Jasmine had dodged behind him too. Now she, Hugo and Samantha were all in front of the monitors.

  The first thing Jasmine noticed was that most of the screens were empty. Or rather, they continued to show the parts of the Barbican covered by their cameras. But apart from the eerily silent adults outside their own door, no other people could be seen except on the monitor Hugo was indicating.

  ‘But . . . there’s only two of them!’ said Samantha after a moment, annoyed.

  It was true. The view of the Barbican’s main glass entrance doors was grainy, bluish, a little unfocused, but the two police officers currently trying to get in appeared clearly enough: one man, one woman, dressed in regular uniform – ordinary street police.

  ‘Why’s there only two?’ said Samantha.

  ‘Because they don’t know what’s happening,’ said Jasmine, realizing. ‘They probably only came because someone heard the alarm. You said yourself: mobiles don’t work here. And for all we know, we could be the only people in the building who haven’t been bitten. Maybe no one outside has any idea what’s really going on.’

  ‘But it must seem a bit weird that the doors are locked . . . right?’ asked Hugo. Then: ‘Look, one of them’s going for his radio.’

  While the female officer looked for a doorbell or buzzer, the male one lifted his lapel radio to his lips. But Jasmine knew he would only be saying something like ‘We’re checking it out.’

  Suddenly there was movement on another of the monitors. Six Barbican staff – two men and four women – were now walking up the wide white passage that led to the entrance.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ asked Samantha, pointing.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ said Jasmine. ‘Watch.’

  Onscreen, the six staff members approached the glass doors. While one, a woman in a smart knee-length skirt and fitted jacket, made ‘just a moment’ gestures, the others set to work, reaching up and down, busying themselves with the locks at the tops and bottoms of the heavy glass panels. Finally one of them held the door open, and the smart lady beckoned the two police officers inside.

  ‘Oh no . . .’ said Jasmine.

  The next bit happened very fast. As soon as the two officers were inside, the rest of the welcoming committee dropped their pretence with the locks. Two of them produced what they’d been hiding behind their backs and – as the others blocked the door – strode up to the unsuspecting officers while they were talking to the smart lady. They didn’t stand a chance: before they could even react it was over. The two police went rigid then fell to the floor, with crawlers on the backs of their necks.

  9:08 PM.

  ‘What?’ asked Josh as Samantha and Jasmine came out of the monitor room. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know,’ said Samantha. Her voice sounded small and strange after all her bluster from before. ‘There were two police officers. Some people let them in, and . . .’ She paused and looked wildly at Jasmine. ‘That can’t be all, right? Those can’t be the only ones coming to help us. Everybody knows we’re stuck in here! Any second now they’re going to come and . . . and . . .’

  Lauren looked uncertain for a moment, then her arm went around Samantha’s shoulders. She took her over to a chair and sat her down.

  Everyone else looked at Jasmine.

  She took another deep breath. ‘All right, everybody,’ she said, ‘I’m going to tell you something. You’re not going to like it, so I’ll tell it to you straight: I don’t think anyone’s coming to help us. For now, we’re on our own.’

  There was a moment of silence, then a rising hubbub of voices.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Of course they’re coming to help us – why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘When are we going to get out of here?’

  Jasmine waited for a chance to continue. She didn’t get it. Until—

  ‘Quiet!’ roared Hugo from behind her. Then there was silence.

  ‘Er, thank you,’ said Jasmine.

  Hugo, who was standing in the doorway, didn’t acknowledge the thanks; he looked at Jasmine, just like everyone else was doing – again. She had to swallow before starting to explain.

  ‘The two police who came to the door . . .’ she began. ‘Well, I think they just happened to be passing by. They had no idea. The fact is, right now I don’t think anyone outside knows that any of this is going on.’

  ‘But . . . we’ll be missed,’ said Josh.

  ‘So will all those other people,’ said Robert.

  ‘Not for a while yet, though,’ Ben put in bleakly. ‘We’re all supposed to be at the theatre, remember? The play wasn’t even due to finish till after ten.’

  ‘After that, though,’ said Jasmine, wanting to soften the blow, keep people’s spirits up, ‘you’re right: people are going to wonder where we are. Calls will get made. Someone will come and investigate. You obviously can’t keep something like this a secret for ever. Besides, the police radioed in to say they were checking the doors. But’ – she hesitated – ‘that was before they . . .’

  ‘Before they what?’ asked Ben.

  ‘The crawlers got them,’ said Samantha dully.

  ‘What?’ said Lauren.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Jasmine. ‘Some Barbican staff, ones who’d been bitten, tricked them into coming in. Then, while their backs were turned, they—’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Lauren, taking her arm off Samantha’s shoulder. ‘But if they got the police, then what chance have we got?’ She blinked, and her bottom lip started to wobble again. ‘We’re – we’re going to die in here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Now, come on!’ said Jasmine, with a firmness she didn’t feel. The situation and what she’d seen were taking their toll on her too, and she was wondering how long her outward cool was going to hold. But she forced herself. ‘Come on,’ she repeated. ‘It’s all going to be all right.’ Remembering that the last person who’d said this was Ms Gresham, she added: ‘Listen to what I’m telling you. Help will come at some point, definitely. We’ve . . .’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘We’ve just got to sit tight and wait.’

  ‘But . . . what about the ones who’ve been bitten?’ asked Hugo. ‘The way those things attach themselves to you looks pretty nasty.’

  ‘Hugo . . .’ said Josh.

  ‘No,’ said Hugo, oblivious to how little he was helping. ‘No, listen: what if, when you get one of those things on you, you die? When you walk around afterwards maybe you are some kind of zombie, like the films. Maybe the spider-things eat your brain and – yeah! – maybe the only bits of your mind that they leave behind are the bits that help you find more people, with more brains to eat. And—’

  ‘Hugo!’ said Josh.

  ‘Yes, mate?’

  Josh just looked at him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hugo, going red. ‘Um. Sorry. I’ll just, ah, watch the monitors.’ He stepped through the doorway again, closing the door behind him.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Josh, with obvious effort, ‘the barricade with the lockers looks pretty secure, at least. And I blocked the air-vent myself. We’ll be watching it: the . . . crawlers’ – he grimaced – ‘won’t be able to get in, not
that way, not without us noticing.’ He clapped his hands loudly and gave a horribly enthusiastic grin. ‘So! Since we’ve got some time on our hands, why don’t we all have a bit of a sing-song? Come on now: who knows a good one to start with?’

  Everyone stared at him.

  ‘I’m joking,’ he said.

  Nobody laughed.

  9:21 PM.

  ‘My Queen?’ said Steadman, interrupting again. ‘One of our police stations has noticed that those two officers aren’t responding to radio.’

  He paused as if this news was significant.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, when I didn’t reply. ‘Aren’t you going to do something?’

  ‘What do you suggest I do, Steadman?’ I asked back, through the young man’s mouth.

  ‘The obvious step, one would think, would be for you to make those two police call in. Use your power on them. Do what you do. If you don’t, very soon you’re going to have a lot more of them on your hands.’

  ‘That,’ I told him, ‘is precisely my intention.’

  The speakers on the pit’s brick walls were silent again for a moment.

  ‘You want more people to come?’ said Steadman. ‘Are you sure you can handle that?’

  ‘You doubt me?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Steadman blustered. ‘It’s just that—’

  ‘It’s just that in your experiments on me down here,’ I told him, ‘I ruled just a few at a time. You weren’t alive to witness my power all those years ago; you’ve never seen for yourself the full extent of what I can do. So now I rule some two thousand subjects in this building of yours, you worry I’m not really strong enough to rule more. Correct?’

  ‘Tell me again how it works,’ said Steadman.

  The voice from the speakers was thick, urgent, with none of the arrogance to which I had grown all too accustomed. Steadman needed reassurance: to continue to believe in me he required another glimpse of what I was offering him. So, for what I hoped was the last time, I gave him a reply.

  ‘When you feel my hand upon you, Steadman,’ I began, ‘you experience two things. The first is the physical shock as I penetrate your nervous system, but that is brief; next comes what will feel like complete and total normality. You simply find that all your wishes now coincide with mine. They will coincide so sweetly,’ I told him, ‘that you might not even be aware of a difference.’