Reality Bites Page 7

  Then they came to the surface. Dark holes opened in the skin and smooth, rounded heads stared at us with lidless eyes. The pale walkers were covered in them.

  What had Diogenes been about to say – worms.

  In places the worms were so many they sat next to one another with no skin in between.

  I swallowed back a surge of vomit and looked away. As I did so I thought I saw a trace of dark threads in the air, emanating from the worm-hosts. Everyone else, I noticed, was looking at Birdie Collins. Wise move.

  "Psycho-worms," said Linda Khan. "And they're all looking at you, Birdie."

  "Ghosts," said Collins. "No such thing as ghosts." His voice was becoming slurred.

  "Well," Linda said, "you're right about that."

  "Not ghosts?" I wondered.

  "No," she said. "These poor unfortunates didn't die. The psycho-worms take over their bodies and keep them going by feeding off mental energy. They'd been dormant until we arrived, just the occasional tramp or dosser to arouse their interest over the years. Only if you're pissed it doesn't work, they can't latch on properly and so they can't spread. Lucky tramps really, full of Super Brew, no harm done and he stumbles out again in the morning. But in your case, Birdie, you're sober for a change. How does it feel?"

  "Do they know what's happening?" Matt wondered plaintively, pointing to the worm-hosts.

  "I hope not," Linda said. "I don't think they do, not really. They might as well be dead, poor things."

  "Can't we do something for them … " his words tailed off.

  Collins was still staring at the worm heads protruding from the hosts. As I watched him his mouth and eyes opened wide, as though he wanted to scream but couldn't. He raised his hands to his face, scratching, then let his hands fall, exhausted.

  Flecks of shadow were moving inside his cheeks.

  The white figures shambled to the shadows they had come from. Birdie Collins sat in the wheelchair, head slumped to one side. Diogenes was talking to the camera crew, who had now stopped filming.

  Linda Khan walked up to me by the long tables of food. Somehow none of us were hungry any more. He told us the booze buffered the effects but was he right? And Collins – no matter what he'd done, – shouldn't it have gone to court instead? He could have gone to jail where he would get a taste of his own medicine. My drunken head was full of thoughts like that. And also of my own past: not Collins, but others, people at school, interference. When even my body wasn't my own. Doors kicked down, hands, fingers.

  Linda put a tiny but determined hand on my arm. I looked down into her face. "Don't worry about it," she said. "We'll work something out."

  I looked away into the darkness beyond the lights and I wondered if we ever could. If we

  would be forever checking ourselves, and everyone else, for shadows beneath the skin.

  Day 34 Simon Kurt Unsworth

  02.13 - Camera 1: Interior, Lounge. Pricey and Lucy are talking about Jamali. Lucy is on the couch, Pricey the floor. Lucy is playing with Pricey’s hair as they talk. They had the lowest ratings of the last 4 series, and their budgets had been cut as a result. Where before there would have been three or four of them on the overnight shift, now Anders stared alone at the multiple screens stacked above the control desk in careful rows displaying the inside of the house. It was late and two of the four housemates were asleep; in these weary hours, it was his job to simply review the images and decide which went to the live feed, and to mark anything that might be useful for that evening’s highlights show. The conversation between Pricey and Lucy wasn’t bitchy or unpleasant enough to be used, so he simply let it run and watched the other cameras.

  02.17 – Camera 5: interior, large bedroom. Jamali is snoring; Ellie turns in her sleep, pulling the duvet around herself in a twist.

  02.18 – Camera 13: exterior, garden. Dark shape crosses the lawn. Foxes sometimes found ways into the garden and cats occasionally made their way over the lower parts of the wall, and once a couple of series back there had been a seagull that landed and waddled around the lawn before crapping a stream of chalky white liquid and taking off again. Anders rewound the film but the shape was too dark to see clearly, simply a moving blur of shadow. They used wildlife shots as inserts sometimes, overlaid with the sound of a camera’s pan and zoom gears whirring, but this wasn’t good enough quality so he forgot it and brought his attention back to the screens and the now that they showed. Lucy and Pricey’s conversation seemed to be winding up, was increasingly punctuated by yawns and mumbles, so Anders drifted from it and let his vision loosen and blur, ceasing to focus on any one screen and taking in all of them en masse. If anything moved or changed in the images, he’d sense it rather than see it and could bring his attention back easily enough.

  02.23 – Camera 6: Interior, large bedroom. Lucy and Pricey enter, hug and go to separate beds. Jamali rolls, stops snoring. Ellie twists again. 02.35 – Camera 6: Interior, large bedroom. Someone enters, although without lights they are little more than a silhouette. They go and stand over Ellie, bending so that their face is close to that of the sleeping girl’s.

  Anders blinked, sat upright. All four housemates were asleep; he’d tracked them all night, they were in the bedroom and none had moved, so who the fuck was this? An intruder? Jesus! he thought, reaching out for the alarm; they had a direct line to the police in case of things like this. The programme generated strong responses in viewers, and not all of them were positive.

  The figure was gone and the only thing above Ellie was the room’s comforting, familiar darkness. Anders rolled the recording back, the digitised sleepers disintegrating and then reforming as he sped up and then slowed down the film. There were Lucy and Pricey, conversation falling away as they entered the room, embracing (no romance though, despite the producers’ hopes, and certainly no sex), climbing into their separate beds. Spool forwards, but no. No one else came in, no one stood over Ellie’s bed. Had he imagined it, dozed off and dreamt of a figure whose head almost touched the top of the doorframe as it entered, making it nearly seven feet tall, a painfully thin figure stalking into the room with a step almost like a dancer’s lope?

  Yes, he must. He must have imagined it.

  Anders rubbed his eyes, waited for the floaters in his vision to clear and then peered again at the images before him. Some of the screens showed the dark green of night-vision lenses, some the dark greys and blacks of rooms without light. The external images were brighter, the scenes lit by the wall-mounted security lights and the moonlight, and in none of them did anything move. He checked the images going to the live feed, but he hadn’t changed it to the bedroom when the two housemates had retired; it still showed the lounge, so whatever he thought he’d seen had been a private twitch and nothing more.

  03.16 – Camera 9: interior, small bedroom. Shadows in the corner of the room shift slightly. Something that might be the edge of a shoulder appears and then the top of a head emerges, caught by the pallid light from the garden entering window. The head is bald, the skin uneven and ridged.

  03.17 – Camera 9: interior, small bedroom. Image pans left and zooms in, changing from normal to night-vision as it moves. The corner is empty. Anders let the camera’s gyros return it to its default position and depth of focus, but left the image as night-vision. It gave the small bedroom a dirty lime wash but meant he could see into all the corners except the one directly below the camera itself. After a moment, he flicked all the other cameras except the large bedroom and the gardens to night-vision as well, so that the interior of the house appeared before him as a fractured scale of greenery. Apart from the sleepers, the building was empty.

  04.40 - Camera 3: interior, kitchen. Image pans left and then back right, sweeping the whole room. Nothing moves. There is a person, tall and almost anorexia thin, standing at the sink. Camera jerks, overzooms and then pulls back.

  04.41 – Camera 3: interior, kitchen. The kitchen is empty.

  05.01 – Camera 2: interior, lounge. Something dark s
cuttles across the floor and disappears behind the sofa.

  05.01 – Camera 1: interior, lounge. Opposite side of the sofa. Nothing moves.

  05.01 – Camera 11: exterior, chill-out space. Cushions shifts and tumble off upper bunk.

  05.01 – Camera 19: exterior, isolation pod 1. Water suddenly ripples as though something has been dropped in it. The lid of the pod is closed. Anders watched it all, or thought he watched it. The falling cushions and rippled water remained, caught by the cameras and recorded to the vast hard drives, but nothing else out of the ordinary appeared in the playback. There were no figures or scuttling things; there was simply the house and its occupants, now at the end of their fourth week of luxury imprisonment, watched by millions each night. Even now Anders could see from the viewer count under the live feed that over a million separate computers were logged in to the streaming images. Over a million, simply to watch a silent, motionless house and four sleeping fame-hungry housemates. He flicked the live feed to another camera, picking one at random and sat back. He was tired; this shift tired him, and he thought this might be his last season with the show. He was bored.

  05.13 – Camera 5: interior, large bedroom. Jamali is the first to awaken. He sits up, climbs out of bed and leaves the room.

  05.14 – Camera 1: interior, lounge. Camera pans to track Jamali as he crosses the room to the bathroom.

  05.14 – Camera 21: interior, bathroom. Jamali urinates (not on camera but audible), reappears in the image, washes his hands and looks at himself in the mirror. 05.15 – Camera 22: interior, bathroom viewed from behind mirror. The room is dark. Jamali is leaning close to the mirror, his face filling the image, removing sleepcrust from the corner of his left eye with one index finger. He yawns. As he does so, someone steps forward from behind him and a face appears at his shoulder.

  Anders started, literally jerking back from the screens. The face was thin and, even in the low light, it looked sallow, the skin a dirty grey, lips darker and wrinkled back from teeth that were crooked and discoloured and terribly, obscenely large. Its eyes were invisible in the pools of shadow that gathered under its hairless, bone-ridge brows.

  It was grinning.

  Anders leapt forward, hand darting for the alarm for the second time, and then the face was gone. Swearing, he rewound, watched for a second time as Jamali dug the grit from his eye, and this time no one stepped close behind him and Anders watched and waited for a face that did not appear.

  05.16 – Camera 2: interior, lounge. Jamali emerges from the bathroom and goes to the kitchen, where he puts the kettle on and gets a cup out of the cupboard to make himself tea. 05.17 – Camera 4: interior, kitchen. Jamali is stirring sugar into his tea. Behind him can be seen the large glass doors into that lead to the garden, where three figures stand motionless on the lawn.

  05.17 – Camera 4: interior, kitchen. Image pans up and zooms, wobbling, but the figures are gone. Another pan, blurring past a now out-of-focus Jamali, to the other visible portion of the glass doors. Zoom out. The garden is empty.

  Anders reached for the alarm again, then stopped. He was a director and assistant producer, and AP’s had no authority. If he called the police over nothing, he’d be fired. Above him in the pecking order was Pearson, and above him a complicated tangle of production company and television channel executives, all of whom could and would oversee his removal without breaking stride or sweat. He hesitated, undecided, hand hovering.

  05.21 – Camera 5: interior, large bedroom. Ellie rolls, falls out of bed. The noise wakes Pricey, who laughs at her. Lucy wakes, yawns, stretches, sits up. Pricey says something inaudible and all three laugh. The fourth figure, sitting on the far bed, simply watches them, clutching the duvet up around itself so that only its eyes and one long-fingered hand are visible. Its nails are black and twisted.

  Anders made sure the live feed was from the bedroom, that the figure on the bed was visible to him in the feed, and then checked the comments thread that constantly unspooled below the image on show’s website. For thirty seconds of the comment conversation no one referred to the figure and then someone mentioned that the duvet behind Ellie was “all rucked up like a person was there”. Anders let out a sigh of relief; someone else could see it too, although the responses to the sighting showed that viewers thought it was either a trick of the light or, possibly, something done by the programme-makers as part of the housemates’ next task or test, or simply to surprise them. The question was, what should he do about it?

  05.27 – Camera 6: interior, large bedroom. Pricey walks past the far bed, going to his drawer. He catches the bed with his hip, knocking it, and the duvet pile collapses. The figure is gone. Anders’ hand was shaking as he held it over the phone. To call or not to call? Either there were people in the house, somehow manipulating the cameras, or the image software or computers had been hacked. Or, worse, he was suffering some kind of breakdown and needed help. His jaw clenched, trying to keep the panic inside, his hand dipping, rising, dipping.

  05.37 – Camera 7: interior, diary room. Lucy comes in to speak to the all-seeing-eye and omnipotent voice of the programme. She is still half asleep, slurring her words slightly, as she talks about her home and wanting to see her family. After six minutes in the room she gets up and walks out. A second person passes in front of the camera, following her.

  05.43 – Camera 4: interior, kitchen. Lucy walks through the room away from the diary room. A tall, thin figure follows her. The kitchen lights are off and the figure is indistinct.

  Anders’ hand darted, away from the phone and to the alarm, pressing it before he could stop to think. Whatever this was, it was above his payscale, and he was scared.

  05.44 – Camera 13: exterior, garden. Lucy emerges from the house. There is no one behind her. 05.45 – Camera 14: exterior, garden. Lucy walks across the lawn towards the hot tub. Behind her, lined up against the wall of the compound, are several tall figures. They turn to watch her as she passes. One reaches out and strokes her hair.

  05.45 – Camera 14: exterior, garden. Image pans and zooms, jerky, losing Lucy and closing in on the figures behind her. For a second one of them is caught, face long and stretched, mouth open and tongue licking blackly at its teeth. It is the one who stroked her hair and it turns to look directly at the camera and it grins and grins. It pulls its hand back and sniffs its fingers and then it steps back and vanishes into the gloom. Image swings side to side but the garden is empty.

  Anders shrieked, hand hitting the alarm again and again. 05.45 – Camera 21: garden, looking down from corner turret of the fence around the compound. Lucy and Jamali are in the hot tub, both leaning against its side, talking. Between them, under the water, several figures are crouched. Through the rippled surface it is impossible to make out details, only a general outline: they are gaunt and dark. As Lucy leans back, arms stretched out along the tub’s sides and eyes closed, someone enters the picture and stands behind her on the step. It is not Pricey or Ellie. It kneels and sniffs her hair.

  05.46 – Camera 11: exterior, chill-out space. Pricey and Ellie are sitting on the upper bunk. A third figure is seated between them. It is thin and naked, its legs crossed, its skin a mottled patchwork of grey and browns like rotting leaves. It has one hand on Pricey’s shoulder and the other high on Ellie’s leg, under the hem of her skirt. It is stroking both of them. As the camera zooms in, it leans to the side and a tongue the colour of slugs emerges from its mouth and licks slowly at the strap of Ellie’s nightdress.

  05.47 – Camera 20: interior, isolation pod 2. The water in the empty, closed pod swirls and then something rises up. It smiles, its teeth the only thing visible in the darkness. There are long and uneven, sharp. Above them, after a second, a pair of eyes opens, the pupils slits that slowly widen.

  05.49 – Camera 11: interior, chill-out space. Pricey stands up, telling Ellie he’s going to go back to bed. As the camera pans to follow him, the figure sitting next to Ellie grins smiles even more widely and puts its arms aroun
d the girl, leaning in to her face, its mouth opening wide, too wide, and its teeth are huge.

  05.50 – Camera 13: exterior, garden. Pricey starts across the lawn, turning to Lucy and Jamali in the hot tub. He screams and starts running for the house. 05.50 – Camera 14: exterior, garden. As Pricey screams, one of the shapes under the water in the hot tub stands up. It is very tall, very thin. Lucy gasps, backs away and the figure kneeling behind her wraps its arms around torso, one clawed hand clasping her breast and the other at her face. Jamali is frozen, only moving when the other figures rise up, water splashing. He tries to throw himself over the tub’s side but the figures grab him and they struggle before dropping below the water. The figure holding Lucy topples forward into the water, still holding her. The water churns, its turbulent surface showing nothing but lights and ripples, and then clears. The tub is empty.

  05.50 – Camera 4: interior, kitchen. Pricey can be seen through the doors at the top of the image running across the lawn towards the house. A tall shape steps in front of him and grasps him and they tumble sideways, out of view.

  05.50 – Camera 13: exterior, garden. Nothing moves.

  Where the fuck was everyone? Where were the police? Why hadn’t the alarm gone off in the house, sending the housemates to the exits through the diary room or the eviction door? Anders banged his hand on the alarm again, then picked up the telephone.

  Silence.

  05.51 – Camera 1: interior, lounge. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 2: interior, lounge. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 3: interior, Kitchen. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 4: interior, kitchen. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 5: interior, large bedroom. Nothing moves.

  05.51 - Camera 6: interior, large bedroom. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 7: interior, diary room. Nothing moves.

  05.51 – Camera 8: interior, diary room. Nothing moves.