by Mark Morris
For a moment Max looked at him uncomprehendingly; then he nodded and swung his rucksack from his back. As he lit the strip of cloth and hurled the bottle savagely into the creature's face, Steve was already scrambling to his feet, retrieving his gun and his torch from the wet cobbles, turning to give what aid he could to Sue.
But someone was already there, crouched beside her, holding her head in his hands. For a split second Steve thought it was Dylan, but then his vision cleared and he realized the newcomer's resemblance to his son was nothing but superficialsimilar build, roughly the same age. Even as his mind adjusted, he saw the door into the Muniment Tower standing openand at once everything fell horribly into place.
Leave her alone! he tried to scream, but all that emerged was a wordless screech. He rammed his torch into his jacket pocket and scrabbled to aim his gun, but the grinning creature in the form of Cal MacDonell was already fizzing and changing. By the time Steve fired, the thing was a bewildering mass of black energy, jagged and overlapping shapes, glittering fronds of light. It absorbed the bullets he fired into it with barely a ripple, and then it began to absorb Sue.
Still wearing that same expression of clench-teethed intensity, Sue's body began to convulse. Her back arched and slammed down, and at first Steve thought she was doing it in voluntarily, her dying brain shooting out random signals like sparks from a Catherine wheel. But then he heard the tinkling of glass, and saw her hand scrabbling in her jacket pocket. It emerged clutching a match box, which she tore open with both hands (one wet and bloody from the bullet wound in her shoulder), causing long-stemmed matches to scatter across her stomach and chest. She grabbed several and scraped them down the sandpapery side of the box, and a bloom of flame appeared, delicate and ephemeral. As the flame met the fumes of the petrol soaking into her clothes and the ground beneath her, there was a soundless sound, an absence of sound, like a sucking in of air, and all at once Sue and the Callum creature were encased in a raging pillar of flame.
Sue did not cry out, but simply lay there, turning black and withered and less human as she died. The creature, however, thrashed and writhed, trapped within the fire as it had been trapped within the cell below, screaming its shrill and somehow electronic screams. Steve stood and watched, shocked beyond reason and yet at the same time full of vitriolic triumph and savage pride. The creature seemed to take a long time to die, and by the time it did, Steve's skin was black with greasy ash, his body drenched in sweat. There was a stench in the air, like scorched rubber and roasted meat and smelted iron and something else. Something sickening and indefinable. Something alien.
He felt a hand on his arm and turned to see Max, his hair flecked with ash, his skin glossy with sweat.
"Did you see what she did?" Steve mumbled.
Max nodded and tugged at his sleeve. "Yeah, man, but we gotta go. We still got stuff to do."
There was someone in the room. Jean McGregor knew that as soon as she opened her eyes. She knew too that it wasn't Alex. Alex's was a big presence-tall, broad-shouldered-and even in the darkness she was aware of the space he filled. This, though, was someone small and light. She reached out unerringly in the blackness, found the matches, lit the candle. A face appeared, glowing yellow. An angelic face, framed by a halo of golden hair.
"Marcie!" Jean exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
Marcie looked at her without expression. "I want a story, Aunty Jean."
Aunty Jean. Both little girls had taken to calling her that. Even Portia did sometimes, in her more vulnerable moments. Jean couldn't deny that it gave her a warm glow
"A story?" she said. "My goodness! Whatever's the tine?"
She consulted the battered alarm clock which she and Alex had owned for donkey's years.
"Ten to four! Your uncle Alex will be back soon. What do you think he's going to say when he finds you here?"
"Just one story, Aunty Jean," said Marcie.
Jean knew she was a soft touch; knew that Marcie and Victoria could twist her round their little fingers. She only hoped they didn't know it too.
"Just one then," she said firmly. She pulled aside the blankets. "Come on, dear, climb up beside me. Don't stand there catching your death."
A moment later she said, "Dear me, your wee feet are cold. Like little ice blocks."
Marcie looked at her. In the candle's glow her eyes seemed lit by a strange and avid light.
Although the cry woke her, Daphne couldn't rightly say whether it was part of her dream or outside in the real world. Whichever, her heart was going nineteen to the dozen, and it was hurting too, each pulse bringing a spasm of pain that radiated out from her chest and rippled through every part of her fleshy body.
Perhaps this is it, she thought. Perhaps the Lord is finally calling me. She was not afraid of the prospect. This world had col-lapsed beneath its Weight of Sin, had become the Devil's Play-ground, and she wanted no further part in it. Thus far, her Lord had seen fit to spare her, but perhaps He had now de-cided that the world was Beyond Redemption, that the time had finally cone to call His Children home. Whatever His decision, Daphne was happy and willing to comply with it. She trusted implicitly in the Word of her Lord.
And so she lay in the dark, her swollen heart thumping in the corpulent mass of her body, and she waited patiently for His Judgment. As she waited she thought about her husband, Alastair, and her son, Gregory, his flesh (but not his Immortal Soul) destroyed by the minions of Satan, which had crawled up from the Pits of Hell to lay waste to Mankind's poisoned realm.
Would they be waiting to greet her, her loved ones? She pictured Alastair with his arm around the shoulders of their son and her eyes pricked with tears. Gregory had been a wee boy when his daddy had died, little more than a baby, in fact. Perhaps she could picture them so clearly now because they were calling to her, because the veil was thinning between this Fallen World and her Lord's Eternal Kingdom.
Another cry came tearing out of the darkness, shattering her reverie. No, more than a cry this tinze-a scream. The sound of a mortal soul in appalling distress.
Daphne wished she could close her eyes and ears to this Babel, but perhaps her Lord was Testing her? Perhaps it was her Christian duty to ease the passage of His children from this world to the next? If so, she would fulfil it, she would not turn her face from Suffering. She would go forth and be the Lord's Good Samaritan on this Fallen Earth.
The scream came a third time, a hideous, guttural sound, full of agony. Daphne squeezed her crucifix briefly with her pudgy fingers, then took several deep breaths and began to rock herself from side to side, trying to gain enough momentum to swing her purple-blotched, elephantine legs to the floor.
She was a large lady with bad hips, a weak heart and poor circulation, and rising from her bed was not a simple task. At last, however, she managed it, and fumbling open the drawer of her bedside table, she groped inside for the small torch she kept there. Using its narrow bean of light, she fed herself two aspirin from the blister pack she kept on her bedside table, washing them down with a mouthful of bottled water. That done, she reached for the stick propped against the wall at the head of the bed and used it to raise herself into a standing position.
Since that last terrible scream perhaps a minute ago there had been nothing but silence. Although it was hard to tell where the scream had originated, Daphne was almost certain it had come from the McGregors' room, farther down the corridor. There were only two occupied rooms aside from her own on the ground floor, and one of those belonged to Brian West, who was in his old room, way down at the opposite end of the corridor, close to the headmistress's office. The room occupied by the McGregors (who had been forced to move out of their cottage in the school grounds) was just a few doors down on Daphne's right. Of course the upper levels of the castle were also occupied, but the staircases were steep and the walls thick and she doubted whether a sound from up there would have been loud enough to have woken her.
Shining her torch along the corridor, Daphne saw th
at the McGregors' door was ajar. However, although her heart was pumping madly, she could honestly claim that she wasn't frightened by what she had heard. She was concerned for Jean, certainly, but she felt comforted, as ever, by the presence of her Lord. As she puffed her way closer to the McGregors' door, she thought steadfastly, Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death...
She was a few feet from the partly open door when she became aware of a faint sound coming from beyond it. It was a hissing; no, more of a fizzing. Rather like the sound of soluble painkillers dropped into a glass of water, or chips into a deep fat fryer.
"Jean?" Daphne ventured. "Are you there, dear? I heard you cry out."
There was no response but the peculiar fizzing noise. With the fist that was holding the torch, Daphne pushed open the door.
The thin torch beam sidled around the edge of the gap and probed into the room ahead of her. The bean seemed drawn to the bed, which was where the fizzing was coming from. There was something there all right, but at first Daphne could make neither head nor tail of it. It was blackish and big, like an inky shadow that had come alive, and it seemed to glow, but also to bounce light away from it at the same time. Although she had never seen one, Daphne had no doubt that this creature, this abomination, was what her fellow survivors referred to as a slug. They professed not to know where these horrors cane from, but Daphne had no doubt at all. A creature such as this could only have been sent by the Dark One himself. She looked around for jean-and then, with a jolt that sent her heart into wild and chaotic arrhythmia, she saw a pair of blood-streaked legs jutting from what she could only assume was the creature's maw.
The legs jerked, shedding droplets of blood, which sprayed through the funnel of her torch bean like a scattering of tiny jewels. White feet waggled obscenely at her; Daphne clearly saw blood dripping from the ragged yellowed end of a toenail. Then, with an awful crunching of bones, she saw one of the feet swivel around, so that it was facing in the opposite direction to its twin.
The haphazard booming of Daphne's heart grew louder, filling her head. Her eyelids fluttered and she became aware of the sensation of falling, and then of a thump that seemed both jarring and distant. When her eyes drifted open again, she was vaguely surprised to find herself lying on her back. She was equally surprised to see a dark ovoid rising into her frame of vision, a blot of darkness that she realized was a head, attached to which, presumably, was a face, peering down at her.
Aware that she was still holding her torch, she shone it onto the face and saw that it belonged to Andy Poole. She tried to speak his name, but couldn't get the words past the bludgeoning cacophony of her heart, which had become so loud that it seemed to fill every hollow and vessel of her body.
PerhapsAndy had heard her,though,because he was grinning. Daphne tried to smile at him, but then noticed that blue sparks were dancing around his teeth. An instant later the sparks zigzagged from his mouth, tracing spidery lines of icy light across his face. His skin turned ashen and then dark, like a photo negative. As she heard the fizzing sound again, Daphne used the last of her strength to grasp the tiny silver crucifix at her throat and hold it up towards the creature that Andy Poole was becoming.
Her lips moved, mouthing words that her failing heartbeat prevented her from hearing: Get thee behind me, Satan....
Libby and Moira met in the corridor. Moira normally wore her mousey hair pulled back from her sharply boned face in a tight ponytail, but now it was loose and tousled, which made her look softer, more feminine. Her pale eyes were wide with the startled expression of someone who had just jumped straight out of bed, but despite appearances Libby knew the Irish woman was anything but a helpless female.
"Hi. You okay?" Libby asked.
Moira gave a swift nod. "You got your gun and your rucksack?"
Libby nodded, tapping her gun pocket with her torch and holding up her empty rucksack at the same time.
"Come on then, let's fill these and go get the kiddies," Moira said in her broad accent.
As Steve had promised, a dozen petrol bombs had been left behind for the girls. They were standing upright in a cardboard box against the wall in Sue's room. As they loaded up their backpacks, Moira said, "We should give the matches to the kids. Then if we do meet a slug they can light the bombs as we grab 'em."
Libby hauled her rucksack onto her back and smiled wryly. "I thought as a parent you were supposed to tell your kids not to play with matches?"
"So y'are," said Moira, "but that's only if you're not setting fire to a big fecking monster."
Libby laughed and they moved along the corridor towards the head of the stairs. They were almost there when someone below started screaming.
It was an awful sound, high-pitched and ragged. "That's one of the girls," Moira said, and broke into a run.
Libby had momentarily frozen, but now she forced her legs to move and followed Moira. The screaming continued as the two women pounded down the wide staircase, the bottles in their packs jangling. Mixed in with the screams were other voices. Libby clearly heard Abby yell, "Let her go! Leave her alone!"
As they reached the foot of the stairs, they heard a gunshot, then another, and seconds later, a third. The two women ran along the corridor, torch beams jolting ahead of them, towards the open door of the younger girls' dormitory
They burst in, the white cones of their torch beans leaping crazily into the room. Libby's bean picked out Abby. She was standing on Portia's unmade bed, dressed in a long gray T-shirt and underpants. Portia was behind her in a pair of yellow pajamas, crouching on the floor, clinging on to Abby's ankle. Abby was pointing her gun at the fully transformed alien on the far side of the room, which was absorbing the little blond girl, Victoria.
The bottom half of Victoria had disappeared into the jagged black space in the center of the creature. Her top half, and the bed from which she had evidently been plucked, was covered in blood, but horribly she was still alive. She was no longer screaming, but her mouth, drooling blood, was opening and closing, as if she were impersonating a goldfish. Her eyes were bulging, as though about to burst from their sockets; the left one was full of blood.
Libby took all this in within seconds, and then she became aware that Abby was swinging towards her, leveling her gun. Libby realized that she and Moira must be nothing but black shapes behind the dazzling whirl of their torch beams.
"It's us, Abby!" Libby shouted. "Don't shoot!"
Abby's eyes were wild, and Libby thought for a terrible second that she was too far gone to listen. She was bracing herself for the bullet when Abby lowered the gun. In fact, her shoulders slumped, her arms came down and the gun slipped from her grasp and bounced once on the bed before coming to rest.
With no preamble, Moira crossed to the bed, picked up the gun, turned and fired at the creature. Unused to the recoil, her first shot went wild, thwacking into the wall, and she grunted in surprise. She advanced a couple of steps, shone her torchlight directly onto Victoria's bloated face, and aimed the gun again. This time when she fired, the top of the little girl's head ripped away in a lumpy splash of red. What remained flopped forward, blood and brains leaking from the hole in her shattered skull.
Libby felt faintness wash over her, and she stumbled backwards and plumped onto her ass. Abby dropped to her knees on the bed and tried to scream, but could produce nothing but a high-pitched wheeze. Still training her torch on the creature, Moira lowered the gun and turned to face her companions.
"I had to," she said. "I couldn't let the wee thing suffer any more."
Libby nodded, still trying to fight the swimming sensation in her head, and swung her rucksack from her back. She placed it on the floor between her knees, pulled it open with shaking hands and lifted out one of the bottles. Moira swiftly followed suit, putting her rucksack on the edge of Portia's bed. As she pulled on the cord, she glanced at Abby.
"Listen, sweetheart," she said, "go into your room and get dressed. Take Portia with you. Try and find som
ething to keep her warm."
Abby looked at Moira as if she didn't understand what the Irishwoman was saying. But then she gave a quick nod and led Portia from the room.
Libby took deep breaths to fight off the dizziness in her head. She had risen to a kneeling position now, and was unscrewing the cap on what had once been a bottle of elderberry cordial. Warily eyeing the creature on the other side of the room, she hissed, "Why's it just sitting there?"
"Maybe Abby injured it," Moira said.
"Or maybe it's digesting its meal," said Libby.
"Wonder where Marcie is," Moira said.
"Maybe she escaped. Or maybe that thing ate her too."
"Or maybe," said Moira, "that thing is her."
"What if-" Libby said, and then the creature began to move.
Fizzing and crackling, it rolled towards them. In motion the creature was even harder to focus on than usual. It appeared to leave a series of fading afterimages as it flowed across the room.
"Fuck!" Moira shouted.
Libby leaped to her feet, instinctively switching the bottle to her right hand and drawing back her arm.
Seeing what she was doing, Moira tossed her torch onto the bed and delved into her pocket for matches. She had the box in her hand even as Libby dashed her bottle to the ground a meter or two in front of the advancing creature. The bottle hit the carpet and bounced, petrol sloshing out of it-though to Libby's horror, it didn't break. A split second later Moira threw her own bottle down, and whether by luck or design, it hit Libby's bottle, causing both of them to shatter in a spray of glass and petrol. The creature flowed over the broken glass just as Moira scraped a fistful of matches down the side of the box. The creature was less than five meters away when she flung her handful of flaming matches at the crackling blueblack mass.
Libby was scooping up her rucksack when, suddenly and spectacularly, the creature became a sheet of flame. For an instant it seemed to shrivel into itself, and then it began to shudder and thrash about, hurling itself this way and that, as though attempting to shrug off the fire that engulfed it. In the enclosed space the stink of the burning creature was awful, and within a couple of seconds the two women were choking on thick black billows of rubbery smoke. As the creature ricocheted off beds and walls, it left black burning smears of itself behind.