As I sat in the clearing, waiting for Alkland to catch up, I heard a sound in the distance. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded a little like a tiger, and I was glad when the dishevelled Actioneer eventually made his way to where I was sitting. He looked as hot as I felt, and regarded me with some caution as he approached.
‘I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you,’ he said, looking contrite.
‘Not your fault. You pressed an old button, that’s all. How are you feeling?’
He plonked himself down on the ground next to me.
‘Tired. And hot. Do we have to stay in this jungle? Can’t we find a nice meadow or something?’
‘Possibly. But I don’t think we should. The only way to find whatever’s giving you grief is to follow its trail. This is what you dreamed of in my apartment, and you haven’t dreamed since then, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Then this is the nearest to where it’ll be.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Anything. Nothing.’ I shrugged. ‘Whatever. Stop me if I’m being too precise for you.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Wait and see.’
I clapped him on the back and stood up.
‘I think you’re getting the hang of this.’
Mid-afternoon found us still tramping through the jungle. Alkland was bearing up pretty well, but I felt completely whacked and doubted he felt anywhere near as good as that. The Actioneer had experimented with not wearing his jacket for a while, but I explained to him that the point about a jungle was that it was hot, and that it would feel the same whatever he was wearing. The fact that he absorbed this immediately seemed to show that he was finally getting a grip on how the whole thing worked.
We had broken for lunch at mid-day, Alkland’s parcel from the farmer’s wife holding more than enough to fill us both up. Apart from that it was solid tramping though, so I’ll spare you the details: we walked, then we walked some more, after that we walked a bit, I’m sure you get the general idea. The only mildly different aspect of the walking we were currently doing was that the path was now slightly lower, with gentle banks leading up to the jungle on either side of us. Different, but not exactly exciting.
I was beginning to think that the jungle was going to go on for ever, featureless and unrelenting, when Alkland pointed in front of us.
‘What’s that?’
At first I thought the answer was ‘More bloody fronds, what does it look like?’ but then on closer inspection I saw what he was talking about. I went up to the fronds in question and pushed a few of them aside.
‘It’s a wall,’ I said, factually, because it was. Built into the right-hand side of the path was a piece of wall. It was fashioned out of grey blocks of stone and looked very old, like a relic of some Inca civilisation. I say grey, though of course the blocks were a speckled mixture of black, grey, blue and white.
‘So it is,’ said Alkland, rubbing a grimy hand across his damp forehead. Thank God I’ve got an experienced guide with me.’
‘What can I say? It’s a wall. Come on.’
A little further we found another piece, and looking ahead we could see that the vegetation seemed to be breaking up in the distance, as if the jungle was thinning out. Unless I was much mistaken, the next bit was on the horizon, and I told Alkland so.
‘Good. I’m getting a bit bored with this jungle,’ he said, swatting at another bug. They seemed to go for him in a big way. Bugs can take or leave me, it seems: the insect kingdom has its Stark habit well under control. Alkland was clearly a major attraction, the Dopaz of the bug world.
Suddenly there was a sound, and we both whirled round to stare back the way we came.
‘What was that?’
‘I think it was probably a tiger,’ I replied. The sound came again, sounding about half a mile off. ‘Yep, it’s a tiger.’
‘That’s, uh, not ideal, is it?’
‘No. Interesting though. Listen.’ When the tiger roared again, it was unmistakable. It was exactly the same sound each time, like a digitised snatch of noise. ‘That fits, I guess. A digital tiger in a bitmap jungle.’
‘Would its digital teeth be a good or a bad thing to have round one’s throat?’ asked Alkland, peering anxiously in the direction of the sound.
‘Probably bad. And I suggest that for once we don’t wait and see.’
We hurried along the path, and the next time we heard the roar it sounded a good deal further away. The tiger appeared to be moving in a different direction, which was good. It obviously wasn’t tracking us, which meant it didn’t know we were here. Alkland was visibly relieved. I didn’t break out the champagne or anything, but I felt pretty positively about it too.
Within half an hour the thinning was beginning to happen in the trees around us. There began to be as much sky as vegetation above, and the wall had become an unbroken stretch of grey on the right. The path itself had been on a gradual incline for the last mile or so, slowly heading upwards. Looking back, the jungle seemed to be an enormous basin of colour, a bowl whose lip we were approaching.
The trees became fewer still and suddenly it was as if we were walking in a damp forest rather than jungle. The ground was less covered too, red earth showing through the creepers. There was an outcrop of rock about fifty yards in front of us, seemingly the border at the edge of the jungle, and we headed for that. The last stretch was pretty steep, and by the time we reached the top we were both panting heavily.
It was worth it though. Before us lay a plain which was flat and featureless apart from a regular sprinkling of shrubs and stunted trees. At the far side, a mile or so away, a range of grey mountains took up half the sky.
More importantly, there was a building on the plain. Right at the other side, snug up against the mountains, a castle sat on top of a column made entirely out of red brick. The base looked about twenty yards across, a huge pillar that went up about two hundred metres before widening massively to support the castle proper. Thinner columns, a couple of metres across, stood at the four corners of the upper portion. From the highest roof-top was flying a white triangular flag. We stood shakily staring at it and grinning.
‘Weird building,’ panted Alkland. ‘But I love it.’
‘It’s a good place,’ I said. ‘We’ve lucked out. Again.’
‘Do you know whose it is?’
‘No. But they’ll know me. Come on: let’s go.’
There was a very loud roar from right behind us.
‘Shit,’ we said in unison, whirling round.
There was nothing there.
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
Back to back, we slowly turned a circle, staring into the bushes.
‘Stark.’
‘Shhh.’
We stopped rotating and listened. Only the faintest crackling of dried leaves told us that the tiger was there in the bushes somewhere.
‘How did it get here?’
‘Quietly. Now shh.’
The tiger roared again, the sound coming from the dense bank of fronds to the left of the path. The jungle was growing up around us again, and quickly: the edge was now ten yards away, and each time we turned it got thicker and thicker. Another roar and we both turned to face it, standing side by side.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Dunno. Yes, I do: slowly back towards the edge of the jungle.’
At first I thought night was beginning to fall, because out of bright sunlight we were once more in an increasingly murky green haze, but looking up I saw that the sky was obscured with trees and vines again. We backed more and more quickly, but the jungle kept pace, thickening all around us. Although we were making quite a lot of noise as we stepped through the fronds, the rustling from the bushes in front of us was more than loud enough, and the roar when it came again was deafening.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘This isn’t working. We may have to go for Plan B.’
‘Which is?’
&nbs
p; ‘The usual. Running away.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
We turned as one and started to run. We got two yards.
Standing rangily in front of us was the biggest tiger I have ever seen. Okay, I’ve not seen that many, but I know the average proportions, the standard package. This one was not average. This was the Mack Truck of the tiger world, an eighteen-wheeler. Its back was about five feet off the ground and its jaws were a foot wide and distressingly full of teeth. Its coat was a vivid mat of orange, black and white stripes. The colours were still digitised, but that didn’t feel as comforting as it sounds. This was not a computer graphic. We could hear it breathing.
‘Oh dear,’ said Alkland, with commendable restraint.
The tiger growled, an extraordinary sound that filled the jungle, filled the world. I put my hand on Alkland’s arm. At first I thought he shrugged it off, but then I realised it was just the fact that he was trembling so violently.
‘Back up,’ I said quietly, looking at the tiger, trying hard to gauge what it was going to do. Wild animals, especially the horrendously carnivorous kind, are a little unpredictable in their behaviour. They don’t circulate agendas: they action things immediately. We took a couple of small, slow, careful steps backwards. The tiger took one rangy pace forward, growling massively again.
‘Fuck.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s a Plan C, is there?’
‘Not at this time.’
‘Pity.’
The tiger roared again, and took another pace forward. It was now about three yards away, a distance it looked more than capable of leaping. I say that because the tiger started to go down on its haunches, its muscles bunching as it prepared to pounce. How far it could leap seemed very relevant at that moment, more relevant than anything else I could think of. Suddenly Alkland said something.
‘Here, kitty, kitty.’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said, turning to stare at him. The Actioneer, still trembling, was reaching out one shaking hand towards the tiger, his predominantly green face twitching occasionally with fear.
‘Here, kitty. Nice kitty.’
I looked back at the tiger, and was stunned to see that he looked as fazed by this development as I was. He was still down, back swaying, ready for action, but his body was tensed, in reserve.
‘Here, kitty, kitty.’
The tiger stared at us for a moment longer, and then abruptly sat up, front paws neatly in front of him, head on its side, looking at us.
‘Nice one. What made you think of that?’ I asked, impressed.
‘It just popped into my head,’ whispered Alkland. ‘Now what, though?’
I took a cautious and microscopically small step forward. The tiger stayed where it was, regarding us curiously.
“The problem is,’ I said, ‘we want to be on the other side of him. And relaxed though he looks…’
I stopped, and stared. The tiger wasn’t just still. It was dead.
‘Oh no,’ said Alkland. ‘Oh no…’
The tiger’s eyes were glazed over, unseeing, and its whole body was trembling. The shaking got more and more violent and then its eyes popped, one immediately after the other, spilling jelly and blood out onto its nose. Red bleeding flesh started to string out of the sockets as if pulled on invisible hooks, and gashes appeared all over its body, the skin bursting from the pressure inside.
‘He’s coming—’ wailed Alkland. ‘It’s going to split…’
Suddenly the tiger’s pelt burst apart as a tower of solid meat pistoned upwards, trembling and shaking. It stopped when it was fifteen feet high, grotesquely large, a hundred times too much matter to have been in the tiger, pulsating and dripping blood, writhing and forming some shape in terrible silence.
Night fell instantaneously, total darkness everywhere except ahead, where the metamorphosis shed a rancid orange glow for yards around. Nothing was digitised any more, I noticed unhelpfully. This was for real in every way. Then the noise started.
‘Come on!’ I shouted, and grabbed Alkland, who was transfixed in horror.
‘I can’t, I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. Quickly, before it gets any worse!’
By brute force I managed to pull his roots out and bundled him round the side of the mound of flesh. A stray tendril of ropy meat flicked out at us as we passed, and the heat and smell of the thing pushed into my nose like a pencil hammered upwards. Alkland tripped and fell over a shrub in the darkness and I yanked him back up again.
I shoved him in front of me as a noise from the thing behind us began to climb in pitch, a huge twisting whine. We’d got about ten yards, stumbling and careering across the plain, when the sound reached a peak and exploded into a roar that made the tiger’s seem like an effeminate squeak, made the bones in my head vibrate. Alkland moaned and mumbled incoherently, feet tripping over themselves, body flopping like an unrelated set of parts loosely tied together.
He’d gone. The can-do Actioneer wasn’t there any more, had fled as if he’d never been. Alkland was a child again, a terrified five-year-old in a sixty-year-old body. I grabbed one of his arms and strung it across my shoulders. Gripping his hand with one of mine, my other arm behind his back, I pulled him onwards as quickly as I could, feeling the muscles in my back strain and pull. The roar came again, and this time, unbelievably, it was louder. It was everything: it was behind and around us, it was inside us. Bent over with Alkland’s weight, I wrenched my head up to look into the distance. In the darkness I could see the castle, bizarrely spot-lit from below, with yellow points of light high up above the column. It looked like some water tower of architectural significance, an urban son et lumière, and I propelled us towards it as fast as I could.
But it was far too slowly, and it was such a long way away. There was a flash of light and the way in front of us was illuminated for about five yards in a virulent red glow, a glow which I knew was pouring out of holes in the body of the thing behind us.
‘I couldn’t help it,’ mumbled Alkland, his head lolling, jerked up and down as I ran. ‘I couldn’t stop it.’
He wasn’t talking to me. Behind I could hear the sound of the thing approaching, a horrible noise: somehow the fact that it was a light rustle when it should have been earth-shaking thuds made it even worse. Dragging Alkland was getting harder and harder: he wasn’t participating, just muttering that it wasn’t his fault over and over again. It was like carrying a heavy sack of bricks that didn’t want to go with you, bricks that didn’t even know you were there. I didn’t see the bush in front of us until it was too late. We tripped straight over it and fell headlong, faces crashing onto the hard gravelly earth. I leapt to my feet as quickly as I could, feeling blood trickling down my cheek, and looked behind.
You’re not going to get it. There’s not a hope in hell I can make you see what I saw. Remember what it was like when you were five, and you dreamed a bad thing. Remember what made you wake screaming for your mother, what made you shriek your throat raw until the light in the hallway went on and you heard her feet swish along the corridor towards your door. Remember the way it felt as if your heart would stop, as if your bowels would fail, as if your whole body would just seize and turn to stone, cold stone.
It was thirty feet high. It galloped like a horse in sickening slow motion. It had no skin, just twisted red muscles that rubbed against each other, pulling and stretching, breaking and knitting back together. It looked like it had a rider, but it hadn’t. There was just a dripping red shape on its back, a shape that writhed and spat, a shape that was the churning remains of everyone who hurt you when you were too young to remember. It was the man in the park and the stepfather, the janitor and the sweating uncle, smashed into one and dead, dead but still moving, growing and writhing, grown insane with death, with a roar than burnt the inside of your head and torched what you’d built to cover the remembrance of misery.
It was a bad thing.
I bent and grabbed the back of Alkland’s jacket, yanking him
to his feet and then pulling him along again, throwing everything I had left into a last effort to get away. Bobbing in front of us were the lights of the castle, still impossibly far away, and behind us was the rustling which wasn’t getting louder, although it was getting nearer. I tried to focus on the light ahead, tried to feel it pulling us towards it, tried to pour myself down that channel and drag Alkland with me. Then it blinked and the castle jumped back a hundred yards. As we ran it blinked again, keeping pace and then gaining on us, jumping further and further back each time until it was getting further away no matter how fast I scrambled and pulled. The ground was now muddy and deep, my shoes caked in pounds of grey mud. Wrenching my feet up out of the clinging muck got harder and harder and still the castle lights bounced back further and further until they were a mile away, two miles, a hundred miles.
I steeled myself and glanced back again. The bad thing was getting closer, much closer, and we were going nowhere. We’d had the same bush to the side of us for thirty seconds now. We weren’t moving, no matter how fast I ran, and in the castle a thousand miles away the lights were now going out.
‘Alkland!’ I screamed into his ear, still dragging him forward. He chuntered on, weighing more and more with every step, the purple in his face spreading visibly, cell by cell. I screamed at him again and slapped his face as hard as I could.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ he shrieked, the words suddenly cutting though his mumbling. ‘I couldn’t help her!’
‘Alkland! We’re going to turn round!’
‘NO!’
‘Yes, we have to. Trust me.’
‘I can’t!’
‘You have to. You have to face this, or it will get you.’
‘No!’
He was crying, tears streaming down his face, and I hated to do this to him, but I knew I had to.
‘Yes!’ I stopped dead in my tracks, pulled his arm off my shoulder and turned round. The rustling grew louder suddenly, a scratching, scraping noise, like metal on glass, or a zip being pulled down by shaking hands in desperate, trembling haste. I saw the monster again and, barely aware I was doing it, threw up. I tried to turn Alkland but he was strong in his terror, strong like a rock. The monster roared and blood spurted out of my nose, spattering onto the ground.
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