In a Handful of Dust.

Winter's cold bit hard into the city, sharp and icy as a vampire's fangs piercing deep into the quivering jugular of a mesmerised virgin. All warmth drained, the place was frozen, pale grey and practically lifeless, merely exhibiting a vague pulse of tired workers necessary for maintaining its vital functioning. Managed erosion was taking place, a tearing down of massive unwanted structures, a sickly cluster of high-rise slums that pockmarked the modern landscape like a clutch of ancient unlanced boils. Within one of these ugly protuberances, the echoes of heavy labour reverberated down the disused lift shafts, shuddered across load-bearing walls and floated like noisy wraiths through dark abandoned corridors. The noise of thudding hammers, power-drills and clattering masonry almost drowned out the sounds of the humans hollowing out the condemned and inconvenient tower. Upon the eighteenth floor such hammering had momentarily ceased to be replaced by another sound as Greg Mason coughed. It was a thick rasping sound that did little to dislodge the glue-like mucus that had affixed itself to the inside of his throat. With a wet rattle some of it leapt into his mouth, a clotted jelly that he expelled onto the rotting floorboards in disgust. It left a stale, dirty taste in his mouth.

“This fuckin' place will be the death of me.” he groaned. He had not felt well for the last few days and had decided the building was to blame.

“Whit's the matter wae ye noo?” Patterson asked, annoyed by Mason's perpetual complaints. He'd been at it all morning.

“I dunno, feel like shit. This dust's playin' havoc wae ma throat an' sinuses.”

“Wear a fuckin' mask then.” Patterson suggested, still smacking the interior walls with a large mallet.

Mason wasn't happy with that answer, it was if Patterson was undermining his masculinity, as if he thought Mason was too weak to cut it. “Naw it's awright, it's probably jist a cauld.”

Patterson tutted. “If the dust is botherin' ye, jist go an' help Gray move that auld furniture oot fae next door.”

Mason considered that for a second but knew that Gray would just rip the piss out of him about the game on Saturday, a catastrophic loss for Celtic. He couldn't be bothered with the gloating, he'd just have to make do. “Naw, its fine, I'll jist open the windaes fur a wee bit.”

Patterson stopped hammering. “Are you kiddin' me? It's minus three oot there an' we're oan the 18^th floor, that wind will cut us in two.”

“Ah said jist fur a wee bit, calm doon. A bit a fresh air will dae us baith the world of good.” Mason moaned, a bit annoyed with Patterson's attitude.

“Aye well if it gets too cauld it's gettin' shut.” Patterson demanded.

“Aye awright, fuck sake, whit's up your cunt the day?” Mason protested.

“Ma heid's splittin' an' the gaffer says we've got tae huv this finished before the end of the week. He's comin' up tae inspect the place this efternin” Patterson hissed.

Mason picked up a mallet. The boss was a right wee prick and would have no problem replacing them if they didn't get all the walls down in time. The high-rise was the last remaining of four, known locally as Barrowfields. They were being torn down manually for some unknown reason, probably because ecologists were up in arms that some rats or pigeons might get a fright if they blew them up. So far they'd done two floors in a week and a half. “Fuck, we better get movin', eh?”

“That's whit am sayin'.” Patterson said and began thumping the wall again.

Mason joined in demolishing the wall. Despite being condemned the place had been built well and beneath the broken blue plaster was a heavy layer of concrete covering the brickwork. It was the plaster causing them problems, breaking through it had been proving surprisingly difficult even though they had been attacking it with mallets. It took them quite a while to crack through but once they did it crumbled easily revealing the brickwork beneath and an odd black vein running through the bricks and mortar, almost like coal. It was about two feet wide, uneven, like spilled ink had ran down the inside of the wall.

“Whit d'ye think that is?” Patterson asked, pointing at the blackened brickwork.

“Dunno, probably damp, who fuckin' cares? Knock it doon.” Mason asked, feeling too ill to care.

Patterson shrugged, complied and whacked the running line of black brickwork with the mallet. The area burst into a thick cloud of dust which quickly filled the room like smoke. Most of it dissipated quickly due to the brutal wind blasting through the place. Still, flakes of it lingered in the air, occasionally lit by the shaft of dull grey light that faintly penetrated the gloom.

It didn't take too long before Mason felt worse. His limbs ached and a painful throbbing at the front of his head grew more intense. Luckily the sharp cold gusts that blew in through the windows kept his temperature down even as he felt the sweat run under his clothes. Patterson didn't seem to notice, just kept hammering away at the crumbling wall. Within minutes they'd smashed a large rough hole through which the emptied kitchen could be seen. Mason felt dizzy, was finding it hard to breathe and stumbled back, pressing all his weight on the mallet, like it was a walking stick.

“Kin we shut that windae noo? I'm fuckin' freezin'” Patterson asked.

Mason turned when he heard that, but did not hear the question, instead he heard some gutteral grunts gurgling out his workmate's throat. As he looked at Patterson, trying to ascertain what was wrong with him, he noticed thick twitching antenna growing out of the top of Patterson's bleeding forehead. He blinked, agog, hoping he was imagining it.

“Whit the fuck's the matter wae ye noo?” Patterson asked.

Again the unintelligible growls made no sense to Mason, they seemed angry, threatening and what with the dozen or so long thick insect-like limbs bursting through Patterson's face and scrambling vigorously against the air, terrifying. Mason stepped backwards, horrified into a state of panic. It was when Patterson's jaw extended like melting wax and his eyes began replicating at such a rate that they appeared to bubble and froth down his face like foaming tears that he lifted the mallet and with all his fading might swung it at Patterson's head. Patterson's head was struck on the right side of his face, near the ear and his head cracked with a hollow sound, akin to that of a coconut being broken. The man crumbled instantly but Mason wasn't finished and whacked him again and again until there was nothing recognisable left of his head, just a bloody meaty pulp with bone shards sticking out from it. The mess steamed in the cold morning air.

Mason, now sated and confused, started on the body, pleased with the crunching noises as the ribcage was shattered, as the limbs were broken into pieces. The mess of clotting blood and bone started to jerk and ripple and Mason realised it was being moved by the floorboards, which were now the colour of dirty water and reflecting large pale faces around him that he otherwise could not see. As the madness overwhelmed him Mason dropped the mallet and began to vomit on the remains. He couldn't think straight and laughed so much he began to choke, coughing so loud that it attracted the attention of Gray next door who came in to see if everything was all right. It only took him milliseconds to see that everything certainly was not. He gave a wordless gasp, his eyes wide in horror, in a state of complete disbelief. Grey looked at the mess that was Patterson and then at shambling, raving Mason, who had already picked up the blood matted mallet again. Gray said nothing, just ran. Mason sped after him, roaring like a maniac.

Panicked, Gray started shouting for help as Mason's growled, crazed, incoherent noises echoed through the graffiti laden corridor. Luckily the building was filled with workers who soon rushed to see what all the fuss was about. Gray rushed into a gang of men who were all filthy with dust and dirt and all of them saw the deranged Mason careering towards them. One of the workers also had a mallet which he threw at Mason's legs. Mason, who was by this point too far gone, didn't seem to notice his legs giving out from under him and landed flat on his face. Despite crawling on his hands and ranting, Mason was quickly subdued. The police were called, as was an ambulance, since he was unconscious from a heavy beating by the time the officers arrived.

By the time the paramedics wheeled Mason out of the ambulance and into Accident and Emergency, he was in a coma.

The Barrowfield flats had a notorious reputation in their day and to hear the tales of the place you'd have thought every floor in each of the buildings had its own resident smack dealer, deranged psychopath, coven of witches and violent street gang. This wasn't entirely true, though like most legends, it had its basis on fact which was why the local evening paper reported Mason's rampage as “Barrowfields Claims Last Victim?”

Everyone knew what that meant, knew the estate had been notorious back in the day. Sadly what they knew was the compression of sixty odd years of incidents into a collective perception of “a bad place”. Statistically, there were many far worse places, but there was something about those huge black slabs, At close range they loomed, gigantic, blazing dozens of low watt lightbulb lit rooms for eyes. In the distance they looked out of place, like a vast dark urban henge, sentinels that seemed to scan through the city streets. Straight, featureless, with functional architecture and exterior so basically designed that the buildings seemed alien stretching above the city which was essentially a living museum of Victorian architecture.

Needless to say, the police, who had been relieved that the whole estate was turned to rubble, were not particularly happy that Mason had been delivered into hospital in a coma, where he was blissfully free from their clutches. Luckily or unluckily, depending on your viewpoint, the flats still had a few more tragedies waiting to happen prior to the day they were due to be toppled.

The forensic officers who were called to the scene later that day were one Adam Bryce and Anne-Marie Reid. Both were in their mid forties, hardened professionals who'd seen all manner of horror committed by criminals. The splattered wreckage of Kevin Patterson was not even in the top ten of the worst atrocities they'd been called to analyse not even in the last year.

Anne-Marie was a pudgy, ginger woman with skin so pale there seemed to be a light blue tone to her whiteness. She noticed the black stain first. It was unusual, almost gleaming black, little glints of light seem to spark and fade from it, just out of the corner of her eye. Curious, she ran her gloved fingers over it expecting some solidity. Instead, her fingers sunk into and ran through it. It was dust, slightly compacted somehow, but it was like running her fingers through black talc. She turned to Adam to remark upon it but he was already watching. The troughs made by her fingers was slowly being filled in by more of the black dust, even as tiny clouds of it expanded and seemed to vanish into nothingness. “Ever seen anything like this?”

Adam walked closer as she displayed some of the dust on the tip of her rubber gloves. He shrugged. “Some kind of dry rot?”

“In concrete?” She asked

“Possibly, I'm guessing.” He answered, seemingly uninterested.

Anne-Marie understood that, there were pictures to take, remains to be tagged and measured then bagged. They had to sift through the place for any more evidence they could find. Work had been halted but the building firm were less than pleased to be waiting. Anne-Marie took to the work. “Let's get this started.”

She was doing a thorough job, they both were but something kept distracting her. At first she thought it was a tone in her ear but then it seemed to turn a whistling sound, a tune, distant, almost imperceptible. Anne-Marie tried to locate the direction of it to find it was coming from outside. She walked over and opened the window and there is was, singing almost drowned out by the wind but singing, the voice of a woman, from behind the clouds. The song was dreamlike, soft and melodic but occasionally atonal, out of step with the rest of the song. Anne-Marie wondered what this invisible voice was singing about. At the distance she was from the source the individual words were imperceptible. She had to get closer. She stepped out to climb the glowing staircase up into the clouds just to find out who it was that was singing such an odd and beautiful song. Anne-Marie felt a lurching in her stomach and a crushing annihilating force, then nothing more.

Adam stood frozen on the spot staring at the gaping window, the panes of dirty glass on either side swinging back and forth slightly. She had just walked up and out, he couldn't really believe what he'd seen. Anne-Marie had just plummeted to her doom. He thought about walking over to the window, to look out, hoping she was hiding in the window cleaners cart affixed to the floor below, but knew there was no cart. He'd heard the splatter from far below. Anne-Marie had just walked out the window and… He had to phone his boss. As he did so he looked at the black stain on the wall and had the idea to collect some of it for analysis.

The grim proceedings were not quite over. Having been delayed, the building company were getting pressured by the council to make sure the building came down on time. They even sent out an assessor, a twenty six year old man called Henderson, to make sure they weren't slacking. The eighteenth floor was still off limits until the police got round to sorting out the mess, but he was lucky enough to see the black vein nevertheless. It had been discovered in another wall in another entirely different end and floor of the building. All work had stopped. Henderson wanted to know why and was told by the workers that they believed that the black stuff was dangerous. Wouldn't touch it. Henderson wasn't happy until the foreman slapped him down chapter and verse from the health and safety rules. They weren't touching it. Henderson almost lost the rag right then. Still the anger management and parole officers of his wayward youth would have been impressed when he just bit his lip and told them he'd find another solution.

Henderson was a spiteful little man and decided, as he was driving home to nag at his family about useless workies, that he knew one way to stop all those smug builders getting money hand over fist for doing nothing and to bring the place down on schedule.

“A controlled detonation.” He suggested to his boss the following afternoon.

Smith was a vole-like man and seemed as suspicious and nervous as one. “Blow it up?”

“Blow it up. Give everyone a warning and then….” He expanded his hands outwards for emphasis. “Booom”.

“Will that not have the environmental mob on our backs?”

“Nope, the whole area is train tracks, 4-lane roads and industrial estate, a few hooses, but not enough to cause any issues. It will save us about 60 thousand quid.”

“Sixty thousand?” Smith said suddenly grinning. Blow it up.”

Gabriel Spencer, who was one of the last foremen of the original deconstruction project was glad to be out of it, the place had spooked him even before Greg Mason went crazy and that forensic lady walked out the window. He'd spent the final morning helping to pull out all the heavy and expensive industrial machines which had left him exhausted. They'd worked hard and finished it all by eleven, the boss told them they could take the rest of the day off, which cheered him up. He called home and suggested to his wife that they go have lunch and see a movie. She liked that idea. He told her he'd be home soon to freshen up, ran back in grabbed his toolbox, wiped some dust off the top of it and rushed to his car to get home for a pleasant afternoon out with his young wife Elaine.

As he drove home his left hand felt itchy, he scratched at it for a while until it was stinging when he glanced over at it, not only was it red and torn but there were mites pouring out from under his skin, hundreds of thousands of tiny legs rampaged across his skin and they kept coming, as the car screeched and swerved off the road. They were in his hair, his nose, his eyes. He was blinded by them, trying desperately to keep his mouth closed as they scrambled about in his ears. The car had already ran over and killed two people at a bus stop when it crashed through the glass and into the corner wall of an abandoned post office. What was left of Gabriel screamed “get them off me” in the few moments that remained of his existence.

“Blow it up.” Smith ordered when he heard the news. The press were loving this he wanted it gone before the City Elders ended up getting involved.

They had to make sure there was no health issue of course but given there was no asbestos and the place had been half-gutted anyway, all permissions were swiftly given, especially when the number sixty thousand was mentioned. Within the fortnight the majority of builders had all been laid off, much to the delight of the company's board and their handful of shareholders, most of whom also held high ranking positions within the council. A couple of demolition experts were hired, valuable people, who were given haz-mat suits as they analysed the remains and placed the explosives. The police were given notice and they cordoned off the assigned area and alerted the few people living in the area who were likely to be affected. Everyone knew exactly what they were doing. Everyone except for Adam Bryce.

It had escaped his mind anyway, he'd sent the dust off for analysis and then been treated to a gangland slaying in the Black Lamb pub. Three men killed with, so it seemed, a hedge trimmer or something similar. Messy work.

When he came into the office the morning after that novel attempt at human butchery that had taken him three days to analyse and clean up, he found envelope lying on his desk, “URGENT” it said. Bryce, wondered how long it had been lying there.

He sat down at his desk and opened the envelope with his long, pick nail of his left thumb. Inside was an analysis of the black dust. He was surprised to see it was biological, that it was a kind of spore cluster which had some interesting properties, to wit, it drove rats into an almost immediate murderously violent rage. Somehow he was less surprised by that. Immediately he phoned his superior to tell him they'd found the culprit. “Hi,” he began, pleased with himself. “You remember I told you there was a weird black dust in Barrowfields?”

“I do indeed.” His boss replied, unconvincingly.

“Well I've just got the analysis results back and well, I think we've found the culprit for the deaths.”

“What? What analysis?” The boss answered, a panicked urgency in his voice.

“The black dust. Turns out it's a dangerous organic neurotoxin. It probably drove them insane. We'd best get them to stop working and get the place quarantined, yes?”

There was silence for a moment. Then the voice at the other end of the phone said. “Jesus, Adam. They blew the place up yesterday afternoon, there was a big black cloud of dust got blown all over the city by high winds. Don't you watch the news?”

Adam felt a horrible shrinking feeling which grew worse as the sounds of enraged screaming, violent thumping and screeching, crashing cars escalated outside his window.