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First published in Great Britain in 2019
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Text copyright © 2019 Kevin Brooks
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2019
ISBN 978 1 4052 9391 4
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1825 7
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
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true adj 1 in accordance with fact or reality; not false, wrong, or made up 2 faithful; constant; agreeing with reality
false adj 1 not based on reality; untrue or incorrect 2 intended to deceive; artificial; illusory
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Acknowledgement
Back series promotional page
1
My name is Kenzie Clark.
I’m eighteen years old now (it was my birthday last month), and sometimes I forget that my last day of normality – the last day of my life as a relatively ordinary girl – was only two years ago. It doesn’t feel like two years. It feels like a lifetime, like I’ve been like this for ever. And sometimes, when I think back to the days before the horror, I find it almost impossible to remember the ‘me’ I used to be – the child, the teenager, the girl who wasn’t like this. It’s as if she never existed. I’ll be lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, trying to picture her . . . trying to remember how she looked, how she was, how she felt about things . . . and nothing of her will come to me.
All I’ll see is all I am.
A faceless face, eyeless eyes, a skull, bones, blood . . .
All I am.
A lot of my memories of the day it happened are either shattered beyond recognition or buried so deeply that I doubt they’ll ever come back, but I know it was a rain-sodden Sunday – I remember getting soaked when I went to the corner shop to get Dad’s newspaper – and I’m fairly sure that it started out as just another day.
I would have got up at the usual time – around seven o’clock – and before doing anything else I would have checked on Finch, my younger brother, just as I did every morning. We shared a bedroom, so all I had to do to make sure he was okay was get out of bed and shuffle across to his side of the room. If he was still asleep I would have left him, and if he was awake, which he usually was, I would have asked him how he was doing and if there was anything he needed – water, the toilet, any painkillers or anything. I can’t recall how he was that morning, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember if it had been one of his really bad days, because that was the only time he ever showed how much he was suffering. The rest of the time he kept it to himself, and most mornings he’d just give me a tired smile and tell me he was fine.
I can still hear his voice sometimes . . .
Hey, Kez . . .
. . . all weak and croaky.
How’s it going?
And always that smile . . . the one just for us. Like a momentary light in the gloom.
The day would have passed like any other Sunday – looking after Finch, helping Dad with the housework . . . cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing, sorting out my school clothes for tomorrow. I probably had some homework to do – I usually left it till Sunday – and I know for sure that as the day wore on I would have started feeling worse and worse about going to school on Monday. Not because of the homework – I never had any problems with that – but simply because of all the crap I was going through back then. The nastiness, the taunts, the lies . . . the sickening knot that twists in your stomach when you see the faces you don’t want to see . . . and you know you should just ignore it all – it’s nothing, they’re nothing . . . it’s a waste of time even thinking about them . . .
But you can’t help it, can you?
It hurts.
You’d think it wouldn’t bother me so much anymore. Now that I’m like this – and being like this is a thousand times worse than anything I had to put up with before – you’d think all the hurt that I went through back then would have paled into insignificance. But it doesn’t work like that. It’d be nice if it did – it might have given me a small crumb of comfort now and then – but it doesn’t.
I was alone in the house with Finch when it happened.
One of the reasons I know it was a Sunday is that Dad wasn’t home that evening. Sunday nights were his ‘night off’, which meant that as long as Finch was relatively okay Dad would leave the house around seven o’clock and head off to the George and Dragon. It was his local pub, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away, and he’d been a regular there for years. He was in the darts team, the pool team, the quiz team . . . he’d even played in goal for the pub’s football team a couple of times. He didn’t drink very much – I don’t think I ever saw him drunk – he just liked being in the pub, being with his pub-friends, being what he used to be before it all went wrong. He used to go to the pub at least two or three times a week when Mum was still here and Finch wasn’t so bad, but since then he’d gradually cut it down to just the one night. I can’t remember when – or why – the one-night-a-week had become Sunday-night-only, but by the time of that rain-sodden Sunday two years ago, the routine was always the same. At six-thirty Dad would stop whatever he was doing. At six-forty he’d have a shower and change into his going-out clothes – jeans, polo shirt, fleece if it was cold. At six-fifty he’d check on Finch to make sure he was okay, then he’d have a few quick words with me – Call me if you need me, I’ll be back by twelve – and off he’d go.
I can’t really remember what I did between seven and nine o’clock that night. There’s a picture in my mind that shows me sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, but I don’t know if it’s a true memory or just something I’ve imagined so many times that it’s become my truth. Not that it makes any difference. Wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, I know – I know – that at nine o’clock I was sitting on my bed staring stupidly at my phone.
My memory of that moment is seared into my mind.
I was sitting with my back against the wall, my knees drawn up to my chest, and the clock on my phone read 21:02. My thumb was hovering over the yapTee icon (yapTee was the messenger app that we all used back then), and a pulse was throbbing in the back of my head.
They’re nothing, I kept telling myself. They’re not even worth thinking about . . .
But the ever-tightening knot in my stomach told me otherwise.
‘Why don’t you just get rid of it?’ I heard Finch say.
I looked over at him. He was half sitting up in his bed, a paperback book in his hand.
‘Get rid of what?’ I said to him.
He just smiled. He knew that I knew what he meant. He’d been telling me to keep off yapTee ever since all the nasty stuff had started. He couldn’t understand why I kept looking at it when I knew what I’d find, and I knew it would make me feel terrible.
I couldn’t understand it either.
‘You should get rid of all of them,’ Finch said. ‘Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat . . . just shut them all down. You don’t need them, do you?’
‘Well, no . . . but –’
‘Give it to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for my phone. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’m putting it away now anyway.’ I shut off the phone and put it in the pocket of my hoodie. ‘See? It’s gone . . . easy.’
‘Yeah, but it’s still all there, isn’t it?’ He smiled again. ‘Come on, Kez, just give me the phone . . . it won’t take a minute. You know I’m right, don’t you? I’m always right. That’s why . . .’ His smile suddenly faded and his voice became urgent. ‘What’s the matter, Kenzie? Kenzie? What’s going on?’
I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that everything felt wrong – my skin, my head, my hands, my eyes . . . everything felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. Every cell in my body – inside and out – was shivering, tingling, burning, freezing . . . hot and cold together . . . clammy and sick . . . electric . . .
Indescribable.
Jagged flashes were cracking through my skull – shapes and sounds together – and the room was melting and spinning . . . there but not there, sizeless, whirling . . .
The air was a roar of silence.
Beyond silence.
I could hear a voice – deep and slow, distorted . . . the nightmare voice of a giant – and it was coming to me from nowhere and everywhere, from a million miles away and no distance at all, the sound of it soaking into me through my skin . . .
It was Finch.
I know that now. He told me later that as he’d tried to help me – scrambling out of bed and into his wheelchair, wheeling himself across the room – he’d kept on calling out to me, screaming and yelling at the top of his voice, but no matter how loudly he’d shouted, I’d just sat there on the bed, my head in my hands, oblivious to everything.
‘It was really scary,’ he told me. ‘Your face, your hands . . . there was this weird kind of shimmery paleness to your skin, like a . . . I don’t know . . . like a milkiness. Or a cloudiness or something. Like your skin was floating.’
He also told me that just as he reached me, just as he was manoeuvring his wheelchair alongside the bed, I suddenly groaned, doubling over and clutching my belly, and a moment later I scrabbled off the bed, almost falling over as I got to my feet, and the next thing he knew I was stumbling across the room – stooped over, still clutching my belly – then lurching out through the door and along the landing towards the bathroom.
I don’t remember that.
I remember being in the bathroom though – bent over the sink, retching and heaving, my ice-cold face streaming with hot sweat. My insides were wracked with a strange swell of nausea that kept surging up into my throat then erupting into nothing, so all I kept doing was sicking up gobs of horrible brown phlegmy stuff. And every time the sickness surged, and every time I retched, a wrenching pain ripped through my belly. And all the time my skin was shivering and prickling . . . hot but not hot, cold but not cold . . . and my head was still crashing with electric madness, flashing and cracking with bolts of black lightning . . . and then all at once, just for a moment, everything seemed to stop – no movement, no sound, no pain, no time – and all I can remember is staring down at my hands as they gripped the sides of the sink, wondering distantly why my fingers were as white as the porcelain . . .
Then out of nowhere a sudden massive spasm shot right through me, and as I jerked upright – my back stretched tight – I came face to face with a nightmare vision staring back at me from the mirror above the sink. A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .
It wasn’t me.
It was a human skull.
Faceless, stripped . . .
Muscled red . . .
It couldn’t be me.
But it was moving with me . . . turning as I turned, leaning closer to the mirror with me, its lipless mouth dropping open in horror with mine . . .
And it had my hair.
It had my stupid dyed-black hair . . .
It wasn’t real. I knew that. There was something wrong with me, that was all. I was sick, feverish, hallucinating . . . my head was all messed up. All I had to do was close my eyes and take a few deep breaths . . .
I closed my eyes.
Nothing happened.
I could still see.
I opened my eyes and closed them again, squeezing them shut as tightly as possible . . . but it didn’t make any difference. I could still see. And I realised then that I was seeing through my closed eyelids . . .
The skull in the mirror opened its mouth and screamed.
2
As far as I know, the only time I was actually unconscious over the next few days was just after I’d screamed in the bathroom. There wasn’t a lock on the door, and when Finch had heard me screaming he’d rushed in after me and found me lying on the floor with my eyes closed. There was a smear of blood on the wall above me, so I think I must have staggered backwards from the sink and collapsed, cracking my head against the tiled wall as I fell.
When I asked Finch how I looked when he found me, he said I was incredibly pale and drenched in sweat, but apart from that I looked reasonably normal.
‘Normal for you, anyway,’ was how he put it.
I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few minutes though, because when I came round Finch had only just called for an ambulance. He’d called Dad too, but for some reason he hadn’t answered, and Finch had had to leave a message. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time . . . at least, not in the usual sense of ‘being aware’.
It’s very hard to describe my state of awareness when all this was happening. I wasn’t actually unconscious, but I wasn’t fully conscious either. I was aware of things going on – I could see, I could hear, I could feel – but it was as if everything was happening in a different world, a world I didn’t belong to, and there was some kind of invisible and incomprehensible barrier between me and this world that wouldn’t allow me to connect with it. And sometimes it wasn’t just the world that was different. Sometimes it was me. I never stopped being myself, and I never stopped experiencing things as myself, but sometimes that self was a stranger . . . a ‘me’ I didn’t know.
And there were other times . . .
It’s hard.
All I can do is tell you what I remember.
Dad turned up just as I was being stretchered into the ambulance. I remember his face looming over me – panic and fear in his eyes, the smell of beer on his breath – and I remember him reaching out to me, his arm turning elastic, stretching down from the sky, a giant hand with giant fingers reaching down to crush my head . . .
A voice spoke.
The hand went away.
The rain was silver in the night.
I was taken to the local hospital at first – Burgess Park General, or BPG as it’s known – a sprawling maze of ugly grey buildings just off the bypass on the outskirts of town. I’d been there so many times with Finch over the years that when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics transferred me to a trolley bed and started wheeling me inside, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there. I kept asking the medics where he was, telling them that we had to wait for him, that he’d probably just gone to the toilet or something . . .
No one seemed to hear me though.
It wasn’t until later that I realised the reason that no one could hear me was that I wasn’t actually saying anything. Something inside me was speaking out loud, and I could hear my voice coming out of me, but my lips weren’t moving, and wherever the words were coming from, they died when they hit the invisible barrier that separated me from the other world, popping like soap bubbles against a wall of glass.
The barrier affected sounds coming from this other world too, but not in the same way. I could still hear the sounds all around me – voices, footsteps, the soft beeping of monitors – but most of it was distorted. It was as if each different sound had been taken apart and put back together again before reaching my ears, but they hadn’t been put back together properly, so they didn’t sound how they should. I could hear people talking to each other, for example, and I could hear them when they were talking to me – asking me questions, trying to tell me something – but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Their words were so garbled and warped that they barely sounded like words at all.
I remember being wheeled along hospital corridors – lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, watching the lights rushing past – and at one point I was wheeled into a big silver lift, and as the doors closed and the lift lurched upwards, I was vaguely aware of a babble of voices talking urgently about something. The lift stopped, the voices continued – and I think the doors stayed closed – then I felt the lift lurch again and we carried on going up.
Then more corridors.
Fewer people.
Less noise.
And into a white room.
In physical terms, I wasn’t feeling anything now. No sickness, no pain. I wasn’t hot. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t even numb. I wasn’t anything. My entire body, inside and out, had become something beyond description. There but not there. Mine but not mine. Without feeling, but not without sense. It knew when the doctors and nurses were doing things to it – sticking needles into it, attaching sensors, prodding and poking it about – and somehow it passed on something of this awareness to me. But there was no feeling involved. Just a sense of happening.
I knew it wasn’t right.
Nothing about this was right.
And the doctors knew it too. I could tell from their increasingly troubled eyes, and the way they were beginning to behave around me – uncertain, hesitant, almost fearful at times. There was something seriously wrong with me. They knew it. But they had no idea what it was, or what to do about it.
I don’t know what time it was when my skin started shivering and prickling again, but it must have been past midnight, maybe even two or three in the morning. The room was quiet – dead-of-night quiet – and the only thing I could hear was the muted presence of one of the doctors who was standing at my bedside taking readings from the monitors. She was one of the doctors who’d been there since I arrived – a serious-looking middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a downturned mouth.
I could feel everything tightening inside me now, and I knew my body was going to spasm again, just as it had in the bathroom. I tried calling out to the doctor, but it was hopeless. I just couldn’t get any words out. And a moment later it was too late anyway.
The convulsion was more violent this time – the spasm crashing through me like an electric shock, the sudden massive jolt almost lifting me off the bed – but it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, and the next thing I knew I was just lying there on my back, my heart beating hard, and the doctor was staring down at me with a look of sheer horror in her eyes.
I knew what she was staring at.
The horror in her eyes was the same horror I’d felt when I’d seen my skull in the bathroom mirror.
It didn’t take long for one of the other doctors to arrive – I think he was the most senior one, the one in charge – but I could tell from the way the woman was urging him to hurry up that I was already beginning to look normal again. I could feel it too. The prickliness in my skin had faded to a fluctuating tingle. I can’t have changed back completely though, because when the other doctor came over to the bed and looked down at me, it was obvious that he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He wasn’t quite as shocked as the woman had been, and as the tingle in my skin became more and more faint, his stunned expression gradually gave way to a look of utter bewilderment.