The November Featured Writer is Terry Grimwood

Please feel free to email Kevin at: terrypgrimwood@hotmail.co.uk

THE LISTENERS
by Terry Grimwood

“Let us in, please, let us in!”

There was someone on the other side of that faded, blue door, trying to conceal their presence. Their silence was a messy, incomplete thing, different from real silence. Paul knew they were there, and they were his family’s only chance for survival. “For Christ’s sake, open the door!”

“Paul, stop it,” Judith pulled at his shoulder; crying, angry, frightened. “You’ll bring those things here.”

You’ll bring them here? This was his fault? 

Paul swung round. Judith recoiled, her hand flying from his shoulder as if stung.

“Where else can we go, Jude? What do we do? Tell me.” He grabbed her arms, too roughly; an attempt to calm her. Her dark hair was awry, her face, a mottled map of ashen-white and crying-red. Still, her eyes burned with rage and contempt. 

“There’s no one home,” Judith said. “We have to try the other doors.”

Paul released her, swung round and hammered at the blue door again. His fist hurt. Everything hurt. “Help us. We have a child.”

Their child, Sarah, was fifteen years old. She stood apart from them, head bowed, face concealed by the fur-edged hood of her coat, arms wrapped, protectively, about herself. She leaned against the wall between this door and that of the next flat. Sarah had separated herself. Even here, in the midst of this catastrophe, she was acting like the moody teenager she was.

Judith turned her back on her husband, clutching at the low wall of the connecting balcony like a doomed Titanic passenger watching the departing lifeboats. Paul wanted her to step back from the wall. If they were down there, those things, swarming in the scrubby-grassed, litter-strewn triangle that separated these three ghastly tower blocks, the things would see her.

Except they couldn’t see.

They listened.

That was why there was silence, why the city was empty and absolutely quiet.

“Please, in the name of Christ, help us!” Paul’s fist bled. His voice was hoarse.

Judith uttered a brief scream. Startled, Paul turned. She was looking down, over the edge. “They’re coming up the walls!”

Paul rushed to the balcony, his right arm pressed against the soft quilt of Judith’s coat. He could feel her trembling, hear her ragged breath. Losing his anger, he wanted to hold her.

Movement? He couldn’t be sure. There were too many shadows, too much emptiness, silence; a white, howling tornado of blank noise.

But instinctively he knew they were coming…squirming, up walls, over windows, pouring into the balconies below. Suddenly he could hear them, their whispers and rustle and wet breath and the scratch of their claws—

Paul spun around as the blue door was flung open to reveal a broad, muscular man, whose big right hand was curled about an iron pipe. He was heavily tattooed; neck, cheeks and arms. There was stubble on his jaw, a fuzz of regrown hair on his shaved scalp. He wore an unseasonal tee-shirt, plus camouflaged combat trousers and boots.

The man glared at Paul for a long moment. Then he growled, “You’d better get in here,” and stepped aside.

*****

“I couldn’t leave them out, there could I?” the big man shouted at the slim, thin-faced woman who blocked their way. She had short, dark hair, tattoos of her own, and a baby in her arms.

Paul, Judith and Sarah were trapped behind the man, just inside the flat, crammed between him and the door as the argument raged.

“Stupid bastard. We ain’t got no food or water, Carl,” the woman snapped. “We don’t even know who they are.”

The big man’s name was Carl, then.

“The bloke can come with me when we go out for supplies, someone to watch my back,” Carl told the woman.

Bloke? “I’m Paul.” He was ignored. “Look, we want to thank you—”

“You can trust him, can you, Carl?” the woman interrupted. “And what’s wrong with Justin?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Justin, but three of us will be better than two. We can get more stuff.”

“We’ll need more stuff.”

“They were desperate Aims, what was I supposed to do?”

Aims was Carl-speak for Amy, Paul figured.

“Listen!” Judith shouted, struggling to make herself heard above the argument.

“What is it?” Paul asked her. He was forced to shout.

“It’s them. Paul, listen, it’s them.”

He put his ear against the door and heard the familiar ocean-wave hiss of his own blood. Then...

“Quiet,” he said.

Still no one listened.

“Shut up! Bloody shut up!”

Carl and Amy were startled into silence. Its soundtrack was breath and baby-murmur.

“I don’t hear nothing.” Anxiety replaced Amy’s anger. Her baby’s murmurs grew louder, mounting towards a full-throated cry.

Something collided with the outside of the door, heavy, violent.

Crying out in shock, Paul leapt back into Judith, who stumbled against Carl. Everyone shouted and screamed. They all writhed and struggled to force their way into the flat. Paul dropped to his knees, hands over his ears as the world turned grey and the wet, mocking voices babbled. As the pounding and squealing spiraled in and filled the entire universe and all self-control broke down in the flat.

Someone sobbed, and Paul realized it was his daughter Sarah. He couldn’t get to her because Judith was in the way, her arms already wrapped about the girl. Amy’s baby cried too, loud grating wails that went on and bloody on.

At any moment the door would crash inwards and hell would boil through, an unimaginable hell of claws and teeth and pain and raw, primal terror—

But instead, the assault on the blue door ended.

*****

They hid in the lounge—Paul, Judith, Sarah and their reluctant hosts. No introductions, barely a word spoken. The baby cried. Its face was purple with rage, its tiny fists clenched. It stank. Someone needed to change its nappy. The room’s big window and its view of the Emerson and Lake tower blocks were hidden behind a heavy, blue curtain. Paul leaned against the wall, arms folded. Judith and Sarah, were huddled together on the floor beside a huge television, which was switched off and would probably never be on again.

It was Carl who finally spoke. “Why were you out there?” 

“Good question,” Judith said, her tone sour. She had wanted to stay in their four-bed, three-bathroom, suburban fortress and wait for the rescue she was sure was on its way. All systems may have failed; internet, television. Power and water supplies were intermittent. People had disappeared and something terrible had taken the night, but, surely, the government would have contingency plans. COBRA would meet, and the army would mobilize.

“We needed to know what was happening,” Paul said, which was true, to a point.

“Well you know now,” Carl said.

“Do we?” Judith asked. “Really?”

A moment of awkward silence. Judith glared at Paul. He decided not to respond. They were trapped in here. A fight was not a good idea at this moment.

Paul noticed a teenage boy sitting on the floor at the far end of the room. Presumably, it was the Justin that Amy had mentioned earlier. Justin was so quiet and still, it was no wonder he had been overlooked. The teenager leaned against a wall under the window, his hood up, staring at no one or anything in particular, though Paul had already seen his furtive glances towards Sarah.

Carl saw the look Paul gave his teenage son. “Me and Justin are going out to and scavenge later,” he said, “before we all starve to death.”

“I’ll come with you,” Paul said, and regretted it immediately. He didn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary, or get involved with these people. There had to be shelters, some official sanctuary. Surely the government would be organizing rescues…

Even so, they needed to rest. Judith was exhausted, and Sarah was pale and wretched with shock.

*****

Judith had demanded that they board-up the windows of their home, lock themselves in and wait for the police, the army, the rescue services, because they were coming, they had to be coming. But Paul had dragged them out, early that morning, while it was still dark and frost-rimed, unable to control his spiralling claustrophobia, unable to stand the walls and locked doors and fear of another attack. They drove. Through streets of shutdown houses, empty shops, broken windows and burning buildings, until the snarl of abandoned cars choked off their progress.

Then they ran. Under a lowering sky that was the colour of rust, lit by a sun that was too large and too pale to be their own. They headed for the centre of the London they had lived in and known all their lives, driven by the belief that it would be there that control had been restored. They ran—joining, then leaving small knots of similarly terrified refugees—knowing that they were being pursued, that the Listeners were closing in. The day drained towards night. In need of refuge, any refuge, they had pounded doors until this one blue door had been opened to them…

*****

The baby cried. Amy shushed and rocked and patted its back, but nothing would calm it down.

“Your baby’s hungry,” Judith said. It was impossible for Paul to tell whether she was being friendly, helpful, or impatient.

“Nothing to give her,” Amy replied, openly hostile now.

Her baby cried, on and on, incessant, loud, and desperate. The sound drew in the walls, echoed as if from the end of a long tunnel.

“They’ll hear the baby!” Judith cried in fear.

“You don’t like it, you can leave,” Amy said.

The light in the room had changed; the dull grey of the dying winter afternoon had turned ochre, dirty. As if the air itself was stained. The electric wall lights buzzed and flickered into brief, staccato life. No one seemed to notice. Paul tried not to look at them, their stroboscopic bursts were a dripping tap, unpredictable, nerve-shredding, all-consuming.

It was as if the world itself was bending out of shape, tearing at the edges.

Then Judith was up, fists clenched, shouting. “Shut it up, shut that bloody baby up! Shut up!”

Amy shrank back, face twisted into a mix of hate and fear. Paul and Carl were on their feet simultaneously.

“Take it out,” Judith screamed. “Take it into the bedroom, anywhere, just make it shut up!”

“Fuck off, she’s my baby and it’s my flat,” Amy yelled back. She was standing face-to-face with Judith. Paul made to force himself between them, but Carl got there first.

“Back off,” he growled at Judith. She flinched, intimidated.

“Leave her alone,” Paul snapped at Carl, who turned to glare at him.

“She doesn’t talk to my Aims like that.” Carl’s voice thrummed with barely concealed threat.

“All right, we’re all scared. We need to calm down.” Paul dug deep into his management training. It all seemed very feeble now in this, the real world. “Please,” he said. “We mustn’t fight among ourselves.”

An uneasy calm fell, a surface calm.

Judith sat down. She propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her forehead in her hand. The hand trembled.

“We need baby food,” Amy sounded panicky now, appearing worn; ragged by the baby and shaken by Judith’s outburst.

“Let me take her for a bit,” Sarah said.

Amy started and looked round. Paul, too, was surprised to hear such concern in his teenage daughter’s voice.

“You need a break,” Sarah continued. She was on her feet.

“It’s all right, love.”

“Please, for a few minutes,” Sarah said.

“Yeah mum, give her to us,” Justin added, got up and moved across to stand beside Sarah.

Us? Paul was horrified at the thought.The two of them, his beautiful, raven-haired, hazel-eyed daughter and that rat-faced loser were us?

Amy shrugged, and sniffing back tears, handed the child to Sarah, who was awkward at first then managed to shift the child into a more comfortable position in her arms. She rocked her and sang to her. Paul shook his head in disbelief. This was too ironic for words. His teenage daughter, baby in arms, in the middle of this council estate, with that scrawny, good-for-nothing gazing over her shoulder and sharing the moment with her, looking for all the world like the kind of too-young parents you found in these bloody places.

Judith also watched her daughter, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

The baby cried for a few more moments, then stared up at Sarah and settled, still tetchy, but no longer howling. Sarah returned to her patch of floor by the television. Justin sat with her. Too close.

The lights flickered and sparked.

Paul watched Justin lean in towards Sarah, to make faces at the baby. He heard the baby chuckle. He saw Sarah glance at Justin, and he did not like what he saw in her eyes, not at all. It was time to put a stop to this. Judith didn’t seem to care. Instead, she watched the two of them, her eyes soft, smile-edged. Didn’t she understand what was going on here?

Agitated, Paul tried to get her attention. “Jude—”

The Listeners came back.

Everything froze…

…as something slammed against the flat’s window. Voices flooded Paul’s head, clamoring, mocking, growing louder and louder. The window shuddered as something battered at the glass behind the curtain, which was not possible. Surely there was a sheer drop out there.

The hammering grew faster and faster until it was a staccato rattle, followed by an explosion of glass.

Someone screamed. Justin dived floor-wards, taking Sarah with him. Carl shoved Paul aside, shouting. “Come on, you fuckers!” the iron bar once more in his fist. He ripped aside the curtains too reveal empty, dirt-brown sky. Rain lashed in, driven by gusts of icy wind.

A quiet, still moment.

Then they came.

Reality side-slipped. Paul saw liquid shadow pour over the window sill and onto the floor. Around him, people clawed and struggled for escape. He couldn’t move. The world closed in on him, crushed him in place.

All he could see and hear and feel was the shape by the window. It uncurled as he watched; long arms, dark-furred, but not mammalian. Its coarse pelt was like the hair on the bloated abdomen of a tarantula. Huge hands opened; long-fingered, viciously taloned. There were suckers on its palms, like those of an octopus.

The thing’s head snapped up. There was no face, only a vast mouth, a gaping, pink, wet hole, from which a translucent, snake-tongue lashed out. Teeth appeared: a portcullis of yellow-white nails that slid down from the roof of the creature’s tunnel-mouth.

It surged to its feet. Paul felt helpless with shock. He couldn’t move, couldn’t protect his family, couldn’t even run away to protect himself.

But Carl was there. Howling in rage, he brought the iron bar down on the creature’s skull, which shattered into a bloody spray.

Now Carl filled Paul’s vision. A huge figure, wielding the iron bar like a club, a sword, a spear, who beat desperately at the seething knot of limbs and wide-open jaws framed in the broken window. Carl seemed tireless, solid, a wall of flesh and bone.

For a moment, a stupid, deluded moment, the frightened child that had awakened in Paul was sure everything was going to be all right. He was on his hands and knees. He still couldn’t move. He wanted to stay where he was until it was over. He wanted people to stop screaming. Everyone was screaming. His arms began to shake. He could barely hold himself up anymore.

He saw Sarah, crouched against the far wall, her body curled protectively around the baby. He saw Justin, holding her, shielding Sarah and infant. He couldn’t see Amy or Judith. They were gone. Good Christ, suddenly Paul realized they’d been taken…

Paul watched as Carl fell back and crashed heavily onto the floor. He lifted his head, turned to look at Paul. The look was a plea.

Then one of the creatures was on him. Paul flinched back, horrified by the thing’s proximity, by its sheer physical presence. By its musky smell and the thrum of violence in its every movement, in every minute part of it.

“For bloody sake, help me!” Carl screamed as he slammed the heels of his hands under the creature’s chin and forced the snapping, drooling jaws away from his own throat. Paul saw Carl’s arms shake. He heard the man’s groan of effort. The creature squealed and slashed at Carl’s chest with its claws. There was blood.

Paul saw the iron bar. On the floor. Within reach—

Justin scrambled into view, snatched up the bar and swung it hard at the creature. The thing’s back snapped with a horribly loud crack. It shrieked and twisted free, writhing and convulsing like a thing insane.

More of The Listeners were at the window, scrambling to gain entrance. Justin staggered back, eyes wide. The iron bar hung from his hand. He seemed to have no strength left. There were too many to fight

Carl tried to sit up, but he clutched at his torn chest, and gasped with pain.

My life is over, Paul thought. He slumped onto the floor and began to curl, fetus-like. He prayed to whatever deity would listen that it would be quick. 

Judith. She’s still here!

Paul saw her rush past with Amy. They carried something, awkward, heavy. A bowl. They stumbled towards the window. Paul yelled at her to stop, to not be a fool, but his voice was lost in the roar and screams and porcine squeals and the howl of the icy rain-laden wind.

His shouts became a whisper: Judith’s name, over and over again.

Still feeling unable to move, Paul watched as Judith and Amy swung the bowl towards the creatures, who shrieked in pain and fell away into space. He could smell the bleach that must have been in the bowl. The chemical drenched The Listener’s insect-fur their flesh and tore out the insides of their wide-open mouths.

Silence fell hard, like a hammer blow.

Then there were sounds. The baby, crying again, Sarah’s shushes, made tremulous by her own sobs. Carl’s groans of pain, Justin’s hard breathing. Amy’s crying as she clutched at Carl and clawed him to herself. And the wind, that droned in through the shattered window.

Rain, driven in through the now-empty window, pattered at the floor…where two of the monsters lay, broken and dead.

*****

Weary, wounded, but energized by panic, they threw out the corpses, broke furniture, hauled mattresses and did what they could to block up the window frame and build a barricade against the nightmare outside their walls.

Paul threw himself into the work as an act of atonement, which he knew to be wholly insufficient to wash away his sin of cowardice.

There were no spoken accusations. He was not ostracized. But the truth was too loud and too livid to ignore, and angry glares toward him confirmed his cowardice.

Everyone else had done their part. Even Sarah, who had not left her post, but protected the baby.

Exhausted, the group occupied the floor and the one remaining sofa. Without the motivation of conflict and repair, they lapsed into a wordless stupor. Sarah and Justin had retreated to the shadows, unselfconsciously close. The baby was asleep, now back in Amy’s care. Carl was slumped by Amy’s feet. His torn t-shirt revealed painful-looking scratch marks and cuts. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“We need supplies,” he said.

“You can’t go out there,” Amy’s voice was shrill with panic. “You’re hurt. You have to stay here, you can’t go.”

“We’ll starve, Aims. The baby needs milk.”

“No—”

“I’ll go,” Paul said.

Was that relief in Amy’s eyes? And why wouldn’t Sarah, his own daughter, even look at him? And, worst of all, why hadn’t Judith fallen into his arms to weep and beg him to stay, instead of glaring at him as if he had just said the most ridiculous thing in the world?

“It’s too dangerous, Mate.” Was Carl really his only ally now?

“I’m going,” Paul said to him, beginning to lose his certainty. “You and Justin need to stay here, to look after everyone.”

Because I can’t.

*****

The fire door creaked as he pushed it open. Paul froze, his mind filled with images of blind, loping, hungry shapes, drawn by the sound, converging on the tower block, pouring up the stairs...

His descent was slow. His legs were stiff, his back ached with tension. And fear, real fear, for the first time in his life. He thought he knew what fear was, but it had been a philosophical construct. Now the frightened animal waking up inside the cage of his soul, previously barred-in by complacency, logic, and self-delusion over his own imagined courage.

Each turn of the fire escape led into a darkness, deeper than the one before. Most of the lights were broken, but some worked. Which meant that somewhere, somehow, electricity was being generated, although the light was wrong, too dim and rusty, almost a living thing writhing within each glass bulb.

Another landing, its edges and corners inked by shadow. It was cold, urine-scented, there was litter, graffiti. Next flight. Each step took him further from his family. His family? Were they his family now? Hadn’t Carl adopted them, or rather stolen them? Big, scary-but-gentle Carl, the antithesis of everything he and Judith stood for, was the sort of father Paul had fought hard not to be. Yet Carl was the patriarch now. Paul began to doubt that this act of atonement would win his wife and daughter back.

Outside, a few tenacious streetlamps illuminated the scrubby grass of the communal area with their unwholesome, stroboscopic flicker.

There were cars, abandoned, doors open. Some had broken glass, one looked to have been burned. Others, however, were untouched. Perhaps he should take one, drive to the shop. There were probably keys in their ignitions.

No, he didn’t know the area; he would get lost! If they came for him, he would be trapped. And they would, because cars had engines, engines made noise.

He wanted to go back, to hammer at the faded blue door and beg to be taken in. He would weep and his wife and daughter would forgive him and tell him he had been brave, and that what he had attempted was humanly impossible—

Instead, he walked on through the narrow alley between Emerson and Lake, and into an underpass. There was still light in the tunnel, uncertain but sufficient. His footsteps mingled with others. He spun round…no one. An echo, nothing more. 

There were others out here. Glimpsed, scuttling away from him, as he scuttled away from them. But most of all there was silence. Paul wanted noise. Any noise, a shout, a scream, anything but this utter, raw silence.

The store Asda loomed in front of him.

Familiar, though not a place at which he and Judith ever shopped. It was in darkness, plate-glass windows broken, doors hanging off their runners. Its entrance was a yawning, empty mouth.

Inside, he moved cautiously over floors littered with broken cartons, bottles and food. Small animals scuttled away at his approach; rats.

There were tinned and sealed foodstuffs scattered along the shelves. There would be nothing to cook them with, but cold food was food and his own burgeoning hunger had already overcome his ingrained revulsion to convenience meals. He grabbed one of the many abandoned trolleys and a handful of bags from the tills and filled as many as he could; beans, soup, tinned fruit, vegetables and meat, bottles of water. He moved to the baby care aisles and filled another bag with powdered milk tins, and as many nappies as he could handle.

He crept along the lanes, pleased with himself. Paul the hunter-gatherer. He chuckled and for a moment, forgot—

His nerve failed, suddenly, catastrophically. The dark, the emptiness of the place, the sounds and shadows...

And something else.

He ran, shoving the trolley ahead of him, careered through debris, bumped into shelves, the door frame.

Coming.

He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to see them. If they took him, he wanted it to be sudden and quick. He heard them though. Christ, he could hear them, pouring towards him along the pathway, running down its steep sides, a swarm, a horde, a herd, a pack...

He made it to the Palmer Tower and rammed the trolley through the doors to the small lobby at the bottom of the fire escape. He stopped and held his breath. Silence, his only defense. He waited.

Nothing. They were out there, of course, somewhere, milling around, confused, their prey vanished into the quiet.

Carefully, he scooped an armful of supplies from the trolley and mounted the stairs. He was out of breath, but there could be no gasping or wheezing.

He stumbled out onto the fourth-floor balcony, and hurried to the faded blue door. He felt sick, his head throbbed. The night was wrong, red-tinged, as if the moon bled. The bulkhead lamps on the balcony flashed, buzzed and danced their staccato dance. Paul rapped at the wood.

No answer.

He knocked again. Still no reply. Only the messy, incomplete silence of the hidden.

“Judith, Judith? Carl?”

The silence went on.

His knock became a frantic hammer. He dropped the bags, battered the door with both fists, shrieked, raged.

“Judith! Open the door! I’m sorry, please...”

No answer, no sound, apart from his own voice.

Oh Christ, his voice, a beacon in the dark—

And then there was no silence at all. 

As well as being a writer and publisher, Terry Grimwood is a college lecturer, amateur theatre ham and occasional harmonica player—oh and proud Englishman. 

His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Tales from the Vatican Vaults, Sensorama, Creeping Crawlies and the forthcoming Terror Tales from the Ocean. Terry has three novels to his name: The Places Between, Axe, and Bloody War; and a collection titled The Exaggerated Man. 

He also contributes to academic text books and writes teaching material for a major educational publisher. He runs theEXAGGERATEDpress and edits Wordland magazine. Keep an eye on the submission guidelines HERE

See The Horror Zine review for Axe HERE