The high ceilings and tile floor did nothing to alleviate the cold that was setting in, the clock above the large electronic timetable stated that it was eleven twenty-seven and he suspected that the heating – if there was any – had been turned off at least an hour before.
Toby clicked through the photos on his Digital SLR and made notes on those that had potential. Each image effectively showed the yearly festival in full swing, but he was looking for something more; occasionally the image showed the face of the collective joy of the city, and it was these that Toby noted.
It had been a long day, his back hurt and his right elbow ached from holding the Panasonic camera he favoured for his work, and he stretched and heard something in his back pop, and he wondered if he was getting a little old for this work.
Fifteen feet away a sensor was triggered, opening the doors to the frigid air outside but Toby saw nothing in the darkness; a moment later they slid closed again. Around him the other people waiting had also looked up, after a moment returned to their own distractions, one woman locked eyes with him, and he thought he saw her lips move before she averted her gaze.
The bus station was large, new, and white, a mausoleum to public transport. Apart from the half dozen people who sat around the stand for the 114 the building appeared empty. The small newsagents had drawn its shutters and the escalators sat silent and still.
Toby looked at the large clock over the timetable; it now read 11:30 so he peered out through the floor to ceiling glass to the road outside. Spots of orange light hung in the air, falling away into the distance like a string of Christmas decorations but other than that it was a sheet of black.
Toby scratched his chin and returned to his photos, he flipped through them slowly until he reached the end and then glanced at the clock again; 11:33.
Around him people started to get restless. A group of youths no more than nineteen but probably closer to fifteen were huddled around one young girl with close cropped red hair watching something on her phone, the sounds emanating from it suggested something their parents might object to and the look on their faces confirmed the idea.
Toby was tempted to raise his camera and take a shot but resisted it. Instead, he sat and wondered whether their parents knew where they were and if they cared. His eyes moved from person to person until they once again met with the woman, she had shared a glance with earlier.
She was short and dark and huddled in an overcoat that was too large for her. She appeared to be homeless, as if she weren’t in the station waiting to go somewhere but because it offered some small protection from the cold. Across her cheeks were the pockmark scars of bad acne that in Toby’s eyes did little to detract from her beauty, and he knew from experience that thirty minutes with a good makeup artist and she would be as lovely as any centrefold.
Carefully he looked down into the LCD monitor on his camera and angled its body to frame her, his thumb poised over the shutter release and then; he stopped. Between the woman and empty seat beside her was a formless smudge of black.
Toby took out a cleaning cloth and ran it gently over the lens and then looked again.
The black smudge was still there.
Around the woman people started to stand. An old woman, laden with shopping bags swayed between the woman and his lens and when she exited the frame the woman was gone as was the black smudge.
He looked up as the doors opened, a bus idling the other side of them and a queue forming at its door.
Toby climbed to his feet and joined the queue.
Inside the 36-seat bus it was comfortably warm as the half a dozen patrons gravitated towards their seats, the gaggle of youths moved towards the back of the bus, while the more elderly favoured the front. Toby found a spot about halfway, across the aisle from him sat the woman.
He smiled and she looked back at him with mild disgust, so Toby looked down again at his camera, thankful for the distraction.
With a pneumatic hiss the door closed.
Outside the streets were nothing more than smears of darkness over darkness and the streetlights that dotted them the feeble illumination from bugs caught in a breeze. He raised the camera, set the exposure, and clicked off a few shots. In the monitor he saw the world outside in monochrome grain, completely by accident he’d managed to frame the bus station sign over the empty street.
He liked the shot and decided to keep it.
From the back of the bus the gaggle of youths laughed, and a sudden burst of quarrelling burst from two of them; the words themselves completely unintelligible. Toby glanced back at them, careful to keep his face neutral, and then over to the woman across the aisle. She had her head down and he could see her lips moving urgently, her face pulled into one of controlled anger.
Unmistakably the woman had problems, the tell-tale signs of serious mental illness permeated her every movement. Still Toby stole looks at her and the artist in him urged him to raise his camera.
The scars across her cheeks were a delicate patchwork that reminded him of the scarification that some African tribes used in their adulthood rituals; they were lace-like in their intricacy, a veil of sorts and he found the artistic implications enticing.
The scars were a veil over her beauty, a symbolic rendition of the inner turmoil of her illness.
Oh, he so wanted to raise his camera!
Behind him the gaggle’s cacophony rose again, and next to him the woman glared back at them angrily. She looked at him and her jaw was set jutting forward and the image almost made him want to laugh; she looked like a petulant child, but something in her eyes froze him to the bone.
The gaggle shouted, all Toby could make out was “looking” and “freak”; the woman glanced back at them again and a muffled scream cut through the bus.
Toby looked back and saw the red-headed girl half standing with her phone out in front of her, as if taking a picture, one hand was over her mouth and Tony saw fear in her eyes. He turned his attention back to the woman and for a moment they shared a look, his confused but hers one of scared realisation. His eyes darted to the camera in his lap, then back to his eyes; she shook her head urgently.
He raised the camera.
Through the viewfinder he saw her head shake violently through a fog of black mist. The mist undulated and twisted, wrapping a tendril around the woman. A spot of it darkened and deepened as if a hole was opening in existence itself and Toby thought he saw something shine in there like moistened teeth in a feral grin.
The woman slapped the camera from his hands, and it smashed onto the floor, the sharp cracking sound it made telling Tony that its lens would not be any use to him anymore.
In front of him an old lady, the one he saw with the shopping bags, shrieked and before his eyes her outstretched hand disappeared, severed at the wrist. She raised the bloodless stump to her snow-white face and took a deep breath in preparation for another shriek, but she never got there. Her head disappeared and her body slumped.
Behind him the gaggle broke like a glass ornament, shards of it scattering. Tony saw one rush down the bus between him and the woman. It was the red-headed girl. One of her feet disappeared as if she had walked into a pothole and she tumbled to the ground. Her shoulder did the same and in the bloodless arc of flesh Toby thought he could see the impression of tooth marks; but this was the last he saw.
The woman pushed him to the floor of the bus, her hands over his face. He could feel the warmth of her breasts pressed against his back and heat from the inside of her thigh as she pressed him down under his seat.
More screams tore through the bus and Toby screamed for the driver to stop, but halfway through the woman clamped one hand over his mouth and hushed him quiet.
Toby huddled there, he could have fought the woman, she was short and through her thick clothes he could tell that she was slight of frame, but he just lay there. She whispered to him; words that were nonsensical but comforting. He thought of the warmth of her and the smell of her and anything else that would blot out the screams.
The bus still moved along the road, the driver had not stopped, he hadn’t even seemed aware of the bloodless carnage in the seats behind him.
Eventually the screams stopped, they didn’t peter out or end in the dying gargles you see in movies, they just stopped as if someone had just turned off the sound. A minute later the low squeal of brakes broke the new silence and Toby felt the momentum sway him back, then forward.
The woman climbed to her feet, grabbed at his clothes, and dragging him up with her; this was when he realised his eyes were squeezed closed. The back of his hand brushed the fabric of a seat and he almost cried out.
“Open your eyes.” A woman said, in a voice abrasive with disuse, and involuntarily he did just that.
He expected to see the results of carnage his ears had told him had happened. He expected to see the blood smeared windows and dripping seats; but there was nothing but a pile of shopping bags on one seat and his own shattered camera at his feet. He reached down and picked it up, across the 80 to 140 mm lens was a thick crack, black against the distorted reflection of his own face staring back at him.
He heard a noise and looked up.
The woman was going through the shopping bags. She collected a bag of oranges, some crisps and a can of Dr Pepper and pushed them into the huge pockets of her oversized coat.
She looked back at him and nodded towards the open doors.
Mindlessly he followed her.
The driver grinned as they passed him with eyes that were small and heavy lidded, predatory eyes. There was something unwholesome in the way he looked at the woman. The driver glanced at Toby, and he grinned.
Toby’s heart missed a beat.
“New convert…?” He said.
The woman half nodded and grabbed Toby by the wrist.
Gladly Toby stepped off the bus.
The door swung closed, and the bus pulled away; leaving Toby with the bus driver’s grin and the sharp needle-like teeth he showed with it.
The day had been a nice one until the fine rain had driven the young girl under the narrow-corrugated iron of the bus shelter, but it was then that things really did take a turn for the worse.
The young girl slid a little further away from the man, perching precariously close to the very edge of the plastic seat that ran the length of the bus shelter.
He muttered to himself, and she could feel herself shudder in response.
He scared her.
She took out her mobile phone and checked the reception again, knowing there wouldn’t be any but desperate to find some other way home. She didn’t want to wait here with the man, and she didn’t want to get on a bus with him either; but she had no other choice.
He was unshaven and unkempt, and she wondered if he would even get on the bus when it arrived. He looked as if he was just under the shelter until the rain ceased to fall.
He looked homeless, so she thought this a possibility.
Next to her, folded over the plastic of the seat was a newspaper and without thinking she picked it up. She didn’t read the news, the cartoons on occasion – as she thought of herself as an artist – but that was about it, but right now she wanted something between her and the man, even if it was only a few sheets of cheap paper.
She opened it and instantly regretted it.
The headline read: “Mass disappearances across the city.”
She stood, dropped the paper back onto the seat and walked away.
She’s gone back to work and beat on the door until security turned up; then she’d refuse to leave until she got a phone. She wasn’t getting on any bus, she wanted to phone her father; and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Toby watched the young woman leave silently and he knew that he had scared her.
He was glad.
They would be angry with him if he found them no food, but he could stand their displeasure; the alternative was worse. He wanted to see the woman again, but he wasn’t sure why. He thought that he wanted the company of someone who knew and understood, but he feared that he would wrap his hands around her throat instead.
The things that lived in the black mist called him an emissary.
The woman had called him a hunter.
He called himself a monster.
The world around him called him nothing, because – for the moment at least – the world around him didn’t care.
He sat in silence and waited for the bus.