Several deaths are reported in a caving accident in northern Moldova. The Discovery Channel was broadcasting a live transmission from the site when the accident happened. There is no indication that Discovery Channel employees are among the dead. The nature of the accident is unclear, and claims that “creatures” were seen emerging from the cave have yet to be independently verified. Dr Kyrylo Orlyk (Moldova State University, Chişinău) who saw the footage from the scene says, “It’s quite evident that a scientific expedition, or perhaps the coverage of that expedition, has been hijacked by publicity hounds seeking coverage for some as-yet unnamed media event.”
Reuters, Friday, 18 November 2016
I surfaced from one of those nightmares that follows the sleeper into reality. As sleep faded and my whole life rushed in—reminding me of the person I was, my mind once again rescuing itself from the endless void that dreams can become—the monsters were still there. Normally I could not identify them, nor could I really say what they looked like. They were just a presence, a background threat, a weight behind every waking moment, and with them came the usual soundtrack to my nightmares: the screeching of brakes.
The screech went on and on, as it sometimes did when I was having a nightmare. It didn’t matter what the bad dreams were about; they were always about the accident.
This time it was different. Trying to open my eyes, squinting against the dawn sunlight that pierced through a crack in the curtains, I saw one of those ambiguous flying shapes circling the fragmenting landscape of my dream. Its mouth was open. It emitted an endless, limitless screech of desperate car brakes, and I hauled myself up at last to escape the inevitable crash.
I sat up quickly in bed, and silence smothered the dregs of my nightmare. It was so unfair that the only times I could hear were in the grip of my worst dreams.
I looked around my bedroom. I loved that room. Beside my bed was the iPad that linked me to the world. My small desk was awash with sketches, notes, open schoolbooks, other bits and pieces. There were several posters on the walls, ranging from a stunning Canadian landscape to a cartoon version of that summer’s Olympic Games in Rio. My guitar stood on its stand in the corner; clothes were strewn at the foot of the wardrobe; and in one corner lay the mixed chaos of my constantly changing sporting preferences—a hockey stick, running shoes, basketball. I sighed, breathing away the bad dreams. Just a nightmare, I thought. That’s all.
Touching the tablet screen, several messages popped up from friends. One of them glowed red—I’d given one name that distinctive tint—and I felt my own cheeks flushing the same colour. Rob had messaged during the night. He might not have been my best friend, but he was my best boy friend. Dad took the mickey out of me about that. But that’s all he was, a mate, and something of a special one. Apart from my best friend Lucy, he was the only other kid in school who could sign.
I opened Rob’s message.
Don’t ever ask me to go caving with you.
I frowned, and everything rushed back in. Not a dream at all, I thought, and I remembered all the fears and doubts of the night before. Watching the strange, confused news item had been bad enough. There was little detail, and the snippet of film they showed again and again was nowhere near as distressing as what I’d been watching live on the Discovery Channel. The people in charge of the news reports must have decided that most of the footage was too traumatic to show.
But as well as that, there had been the troubling atmosphere between Mum and Lynne. They had been sitting close together, and the tension that I’d felt between them when I’d entered the room had not dissipated. I had become very sensitive to atmosphere and emotion. Sometimes Mum said it was because of my deafness, but I didn’t think that was the case at all. Maybe I did compensate in some ways, but empathy and an ability to sense the emotional load of a situation had always been with me.
Later that evening I’d asked my mother what was wrong, but she’d simply shaken her head and kissed me goodnight.
I swiped the screen and accessed the BBC News home page. The fact that the headline stretched right across the page alerted me to its seriousness, even before I started reading.
The details did little to make me feel better.
Something was happening in a region of Moldova. No one seemed to know what. There was talk of a chemical spill, a terrorist attack, even a plague of hornets. A couple of clips of mobile-phone footage showed two scenes that disturbed me more than their content alone should have: a car stuck on a bridge with a huddle of clothes beside the open driver’s door; and fleeting things like large, agitated moths fluttering through the shadows beneath trees, the camera turning to reveal two frightened, silent faces. Death tolls were mentioned. Russia had closed its borders. The UN was watching. It was a news report that relayed no real news, only the fact that something had happened.
I scanned the report again, and it was only on second reading that I spotted a mention of the caving operation, and only as a passing mention at that. It was almost as if the two had barely been connected.
Surely anyone who’d seen the Discovery Channel footage would link the two?
A meeting of Cobra is being chaired by the Prime Minister…
No comment from the Russian President at this time…
The United Nations says…
I picked up the tablet and went to wake up Mum. The house was still, and as I opened my parents’ bedroom door I looked at the time. It was earlier than I’d thought, barely 6 a.m.
“Mum?” I said. Mum opened her eye, face screwed up, hair awry, and she instantly came alert.
“What’s wrong?”
She never stopped worrying, I knew. Ever since the accident she’d become someone on edge, a light sleeper; sometimes she admitted to me that she always feared the worst. Even when I told her that I’d been lucky—the crash that killed my paternal grandparents could well have killed me too—Mum found it hard finding any luck in what had happened. No good luck, at least. The accident had changed my whole family, and I constantly did my best to edge that change for the better.
“There’s something—” I began, but then I saw the pulsing blue tone of the phone on the bedside table.
I grabbed the phone and looked at the name on the screen: Huw. I handed the phone to my mother.
* * *
“Hey, babe,” Huw said. He suddenly felt foolish, calling Kelly about something happening so far away. TV news had a way of upping the ante on things, and sometimes the constant barrage of repeated information made events seem more serious and significant than they really were. Am I being stupid here? he wondered. Maybe he was more homesick than he’d first thought. He had one more day and night away before heading home, but he’d woken up feeling maudlin.
But he was also unsettled.
“Hi,” Kelly said, groggily. “You okay?”
“I’m fine, fine, just… have you seen the news?”
“Hang on,” Kelly said, and Huw heard the rustle of sheets. “Ally’s just come in to show me something.”
Ally! But Huw should have guessed. His daughter had always been an early riser, and she was developing a keen interest in world events. Whereas lots of kids her age would log on to Facebook the minute their eyes opened, her first call was usually one of the news sites. She was a bright kid, but sometimes he mourned her childhood.
“So what am I looking at?” she asked.
“The thing in Moldova,” Huw said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got that. But what is it?”
“No one seems to know.” He was sitting on the edge of his bed, TV flickering before him. He’d muted the sound to call home, thinking, That’s how Ally sees the world. “I saw something on TV last night. It’s just scary.”
“Yeah. Well, at least it’s a long way away.”
Huw thought of the map of Europe, but he couldn’t accurately place the country. Just how far away was it? Moldova was one of those places only talked about when something bad happened there.
“It’s just… it sounds serious.” He heard more rustling from the other end of the line, imagined Kelly sitting up in bed and Ally propped next to her. “It’s confused right now, and a bit panicked, but it’s got the feel of one of those stories that’ll really expand soon. Know what I mean?”
A pause. He heard Kelly sniffing. Then she said, “But it’s in Moldova.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Hang on,” Kelly said. The line fell silent for a moment, then he heard Ally speaking.
“It’s what I saw on the TV last night.”
“Tell her I did too,” Huw said. There was silence while Kelly signed to their daughter.
“It was horrible,” Ally said.
“It was,” Huw said. “Babe… I might come home now instead of tomorrow.”
“Because of this?” Kelly asked. “Have you finished up there for the week?”
“No, plenty to do here: we’ve hit problems with the site drainage, might need to install a pump and Max is arguing over who’s responsible.”
“So shouldn’t you leave things in good shape there?”
“Yeah,” he said, because he knew his wife was right. “Yeah, maybe I should come home later this evening.” But he watched the muted news reports, already back at the beginning of the loop because they had nothing new to show or talk about. “Several deaths reported,” they’d said, and even that had a vague, remote feel, because there was no talk of how the deaths had happened, who had died, or where. I saw at least one of them on the end of the rope, he thought, and he wondered yet again why those images he’d watched live the night before did not form part of the news report this morning.
“Missing you,” Kelly said.
“You too. All of you. Ally okay?”
“Yeah, she is. You know her, she fixates on things sometimes. And I know she was a bit upset last night at the stuff they were showing.”
“It wasn’t nice.” He turned the TV off. He couldn’t talk to his wife while watching that—the pile of rags beside a car that could be a body; the things in the trees.
“Let me know what time you’ll be home,” she said. “I’ll cook us a nice meal. Steak.”
“Sounds good to me.” They exchanged goodbyes and hung up, and his room suddenly seemed quieter than ever. At his loneliest, those moments just after he’d spoken to his family on the phone were always the worst. The old analogue clock beside the bed ticked away the seconds, and from somewhere else in the small hotel he heard the muted rumble of another TV.
It was an hour until breakfast. Huw hit the shower.
* * *
“Morning,” the hotel owner said. Her buttons were done up today. “Just choose your own table and help yourself to cereal. I’ll come and take your breakfast order in a couple of minutes.”
“Thanks,” Huw said. She offered a business-like smile and turned away. He walked through into the dining room, glad to see other people already seated. There was an Indian couple with their daughter, a middle-aged woman working on a laptop, and a couple of young men wearing sports kit and consulting a map. The men chatted and laughed loudly, and the little girl made faces at them. One of them reciprocated, and the kid giggled.
Soft music played in the background, not too loud to be cloying, but loud enough to give some privacy to conversation. It was a nice atmosphere. No one seemed unsettled or disturbed. Maybe none of them saw the news, Huw thought. He exchanged nods with the men and smiled at the family, then took a table close to a window. It was more likely that they’d all seen the news but it had made no impact on their day. The men were probably planning an adventure—a bike ride across the moors, or perhaps a coastal trail run. The family might be here on holiday or visiting relatives in the area. And the woman was obviously on a business trip, already working at seven-thirty in the morning.
They weren’t like him. They weren’t doomsdayers.
Kelly was always gentle when she called him that, and with good cause. His parents had both been killed in the car crash that had seriously injured his daughter; she’d broken several ribs, a collarbone, and fractured her skull. Most of the physical damage had been repairable. But her cochleae had suffered severe deceleration injuries, and combined with a bleed on the brain from her skull fracture, this had resulted in profound deafness, changing her life and theirs irrevocably. It was the worst day of his life. From what they’d been able to gather from police and witness reports, the crash had been caused by a fox running into the road. His father had swerved, clipped the kerb, and rolled the car into a stone wall. Ally could remember little about the crash or the several hours before. She found that loss of memory almost as traumatising as the hearing loss itself, because she was desperate to remember what she and her grandparents had been doing. She told her parents that she felt like she’d lost the last good times she and her grandparents had spent together, and Huw sometimes lay awake at night wondering what they had done and where they had been. Maybe they’d taken Ally to the cinema. Perhaps one day, when she was watching a film for what she thought was the first time, she would suddenly remember the end.
Huw was doing his best to move on, but during his worst, most pessimistic moments he had no trouble justifying his doomsdaying. He’d project the path of events to the worst conclusion imaginable. Say Jude asked for a skateboard for his birthday, they relented, and he went out on his first jaunt. Most parents would worry that he might fall and break his arm. In Huw’s version, the fall would result in a broken arm, which would lead to Jude staggering home crying, and then he’d faint in the road and be crushed beneath the wheels of a passing car.
His mental gymnastics were often horrific, but he could not help himself.
The previous evening, and then while experiencing an unsettled sleep, he’d been doing the same with that disturbing news report.
“What can I get you?” The hotel owner had appeared beside him while he was daydreaming, and he jumped in his seat. “Oh, didn’t mean to startle you, darling!” She touched his shoulder and squeezed, and Huw had a sudden, shameful thought—I wonder how many guests she’s fucked in their rooms. It was offensive and probably very unfair, but it arrived as surprisingly as the woman.
“No problem,” he said, smiling up at her. “I’ll have the full English, please. And coffee.”
“Coming right up. Help yourself to cereal.” She left without waiting for a reply. He looked around the room at the other guests, all caught in their own world, their own day. The two men on the next table were poring over a map, and one of them glanced up.
“Mountain biking?” Huw asked.
“A bit,” the man said. He was maybe mid-twenties, fit-looking, with a casual rugged appearance that only comes of loving the outdoors. “Bit of running, bit of hiking too.”
“Coast to coast,” his mate said. He was older, his hair thinner, but he looked just as fit. “Starting at Polperro this lunchtime, hitting Tintagel in two days. Hopefully our wives will still be waiting there for us!”
“So you’re going across Bodmin,” Huw said.
“Yeah, my favourite place on the planet,” the first guy said. “Do one thing every day that scares you, right?”
Huw found himself feeling outlandishly jealous of the men. They seemed worry-free, ready to spend time purely fulfilling their own desires. He’d once spent an enjoyable year training for his first marathon, soon after Ally was born. He’d completed the challenge, run his marathon in a little over four hours, and had made plans for what to do next. But work had got in the way. Then Jude came along, and the spare hours in his life seemed to dwindle down to spare minutes. He hadn’t run in over a year, though he frequently considered digging out his trainers. He took them with him every time he stayed away from home, tied in their little blue bag. They’d probably gone mouldy by now.
In truth, he knew it was motivation rather than time. Many of the days he spent travelling could have been bookended with a run. It was just that he’d rather have a pint in a hotel bar or sit in his room, watching a film and ordering room service.
Middle-age spread had crept up on him, and sometimes he thought that if he’d jumped ahead to where he was now from ten years ago he’d be shocked.
He wished he was going with these guys. Wished he had a mountain bike that wasn’t rusted solid in the garage back at home.
He sighed, and then the hotel owner was placing a coffee pot on his table.
“Lovely morning out,” she said. “You staying for the music festival tomorrow?”
“Actually I was thinking of checking out this evening, after work,” Huw said. “I’ll still pay for the night. I’ll need to come back later to shower, then I’ll head off.”
“Fine by me,” the woman said, and he wasn’t sure whether he imagined the shimmer of regret in her eyes. Probably. Maybe he was just kidding himself.
The sound of cutlery clinking, subdued conversation from the family, and the men planning their outing filled the room, and Huw sighed and poured his coffee.
It was going to be a long, hard day. Max was a decent enough sort, but like any successful businessman, he didn’t like waste, nor did he entertain avoidable mistakes. The drainage problem they’d encountered on the site of his new mansion was both. Huw’s difficult position was that the drainage engineer they were using had been recommended by Max himself. Max’s position was that Huw had given a guaranteed price for the work, based on the designs and ground investigations carried out at the time. It was the engineer’s fault, but his company was not keen on taking the hit. Softly-softly was probably the way to go with this, but Huw feared that Max would explode when cost was mentioned. Thirty grand was a conservative estimate of the additional work required in rerouting a main drain, and incorporating a pumping station to lift the site waste up into the neighbouring system.
He drank his coffee, wishing he was back at home. He ran a good, profitable business, and it had given them a decent standard of living over the years. But it had aged him.
He looked at the two men again. “Got room for one more?” he asked. They glanced up from their plates, the younger one automatically looking him up and down and seeming unimpressed with what he saw.
“Got a bike?” the older guy asked.
Huw laughed softly, took another sip of coffee. “I wish.”
“Got some first-world problems, mate?” the young man said through a mouth of food. Huw decided he didn’t like him very much. He carried a cockiness that his older companion did not.
“Something like that.”
“Breakfast,” the owner said, crossing the room and placing the plate before him. “I gave you an extra sausage.”
Huw laughed aloud, and then from across the room the businesswoman said, “Oh my God!”
The dining room fell silent. A knife clanged against a plate as it was put down. The Indian woman paused with a napkin to her mouth; her daughter rocked back on her chair.
The woman was looking at her tablet computer, from which tinny, unidentifiable sounds played. For a moment she seemed unaware of the sudden stillness around her, then she looked up. But her expression did not change—no embarrassment, no shy smile as she waved away her outburst. “Have you seen this?” she asked.
Huw rose and crossed to her table instantly. She flinched back a little as he stood close beside her, shocked by his sudden proximity, but he didn’t care.
Some celebrity split from her husband after nine days and a thirty-million dollar wedding, he thought. Or the Prime Minister being arrested for squeezing an assistant’s arse. He really hoped it was something inconsequential. But then he saw the screen, and the first thing he did was reach out to tap up the volume.
“…isolated incidents in Ukraine and Russia, and unconfirmed reports of similar events in Romania. This footage was captured on a mobile phone east of Donetsk.” The footage played. It was silent, and showed the view from a second- or third-floor window looking down onto a street. People were running. Several cars had crashed, and further along the street a fire raged, consuming several smaller vehicles and a bus. Some people had already fallen, and others soon followed. It was a depressing echo of recent images from the troubled Moldova. But then there were the things.
“We’re not quite sure what we’re seeing here…” the newscaster said.
They flew through the air, landing on people, bringing them down.
“They seem to be… bats? Birds of some kind? Attracted by the violence, the rioting and unrest, perhaps, but they seem to be…”
“They’re the cause of the violence!” Huw said. Hadn’t anyone seen that thing at the cave last night?
The camera moved violently left and right, blurring the picture. Then it steadied again, zooming in on a shape crawling along the road below. It was a woman in a short white and red dress. Several of the winged creatures—they were about the size of a small cat, Huw reckoned—were clasped to her back, and two more flapped their wings to reach under her. Clawing at her face. Biting.
“These images are distressing, but as yet they haven’t been independently verified.”
The woman rolled onto her back and slapped at the creatures attacking her face. One of them came away, and it seemed to take some of her with it. She opened her mouth to scream, and in the silence the action seemed even more terrible.
She bled.
The image flickered and then cut out, replaced by the two newscasters back in the studio. The man seemed shocked, but the woman was as professional as ever.
“More on that breaking news as and when—”
The businesswoman cut out the volume and sat back in her chair. “Horror movie,” she said. “Viral marketing. Very clever, and to have it on national news is genius.”
“No,” Huw said. “It’s not that.” He and the woman swapped glances, and he knew that she knew the truth as well. She was simply in denial.
“I saw something last night,” the Indian man said, standing beside his wife and daughter. “I turned it off. It was horrifying.” The two men gathered around to see the tablet screen. The younger man still chewed his breakfast, and he seemed more interested than concerned.
“Thought it was something on the movie channel, or something,” his older friend said. “We switched to the match. United got their arse handed to them.”
Huw continued watching the tablet. The sound was muted now but the newscasters were still there. The woman was talking, but the man next to her seemed to be listening to his earpiece, fingers tapping across his laptop. His eyes went wide. He looked around, first at his companion and then off-screen. Very unprofessional.
“Look,” Huw said, and the woman turned up the volume again.
“…some breaking news coming in right now,” the male newscaster said. “This time from Buzau, seventy miles north-east of Bucharest in Romania. We’ve no footage, but there are reports of a massacre at a nursery, and further deaths at a restaurant, electrical component factory, and several other places. Erm… there’s no indication of who is responsible for these attacks. Or how.” The newscasters were becoming more fidgety, and the man pressed his earpiece in again, head tilted to one side.
“And another report from closer to Bucharest,” the woman said. “A train has been attacked by what’s described as a ‘swarm of flying rats’.” She frowned, staring down at her laptop screen. It was one of the first times Huw had seen a newscaster showing anything approaching emotion. Usually they were cool, calm, almost inhuman. “Oh, my God,” the woman breathed.
Huw backed away, feeling suddenly crowded by the others. He caught the young girl’s eyes and saw that she was scared, huddled into her mother, chairs now side by side.
“It’s spreading,” he said.
“What is?” the businesswoman asked.
“Last night, the thing on the Discovery Channel. It was at a place in northern Moldova, now there are attacks in Ukraine and Romania. That’s hundreds of miles. And they said Russia too?”
“So what is it, terrorists?” the younger man said through a mouthful of sausage sandwich. “At least it’s a long way away.”
Huw just looked at him, searching for an answer but finding none that made sense. “Excuse me,” he said. He left the dining room, dashed into the hotel’s large hallway and ran up the wide staircase. He caught a whiff of something—it smelled like stale piss—and realised that the whole hotel smelled of it. Perhaps it was the carpet cleaner they used, or the little dishes of potpourri scattered around.
He fumbled with his room key and slammed the door behind him, but he felt no more protected. Of course not. He was on his own and his family were at home, without him. Four hours away in the car, and that’s if he did the journey in one go and there were no hold-ups.
He was breathing too fast, and not just from running up the stairs. Doomsdaying, he thought, that’s all I’m doing. Whatever had happened—was still happening—was more than a thousand miles away, in towns and cities whose names he’d never heard before, and countries that he rarely even considered. He was safe. His family was safe.
But it spread hundreds of miles overnight!
He stood there for some time with his back against the door, but in reality he’d already made his decision. It was unreasonable, irrational. He hadn’t rushed home to Kelly on 9/11. He’d been overseas when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami hit, visiting a building firm in Brittany and circling the idea of going into partnership. He’d watched in his gîte’s bedroom as Fukushima exploded, wondering whether the hazy image would change the world. That business association had never solidified, but he’d not felt the need to jump on a plane and fly back to his family.
So why now?
He didn’t know. What he did know was that it felt right, it felt good, and he was not going to fight his feelings on this one.
Before pulling his bag from the wardrobe and starting to pack, Huw held his breath and turned on the TV once more.
The weather forecast was on. It was going to rain.