Only Forward

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Shit,’ said Ji shakily. I had to agree.

  We walked on more slowly for a moment, and then the light crashed on again and the screams poured down, louder, more terrible. Then they disappeared. We glanced nervously around us in the darkness and then just as we were about to step forward the light belted on again and this time the shriek was louder still, clubbing down into our skulls like fists of ice. Blood spattered out of Ji’s nose and onto the flagstones.

  Dark silence snapped down again but we barely had time to move before the faces were back. The stroboscope quickened, crashing on and off, surrounding us with darkness and nightmare, flashing quicker and quicker until it was a perpetual flicker of sound and fury. As the flickers got closer and closer to each other my own nose went and blood flooded down my shirt and we clamped our hands to our ears even though we knew that would make no difference. Still the stroboscope quickened until it was more light than dark, and as we bent under the weight of noise and pain it became possible to see beyond the ring of faces to see that tall dark towers loomed behind them. The towers were faceless, featureless, and stood in front of a sky that was swirling black, a sky that didn’t stay behind the buildings but whirled and ran in front like shadows out of huge corners.

  As the flickers got brighter the ring of faces started to glide in towards us and all the light was in them, a sickly red glow strung with threads of sallow yellow. Beyond was murky rich twilight, a twilight that ran with oily colours and spiralled up to join with the sky.

  It was Turn, Turn Neighbourhood in a nightmare, and as we staggered and flailed I tried to push Ji down so he wouldn’t see.

  The circle got smaller and the faces came closer and every set of eyes was one I knew. Zenda’s were there, and Shelby’s, and my father and mother’s, and they flicked from one interchangeable empty face to the other, stretched out of shape by the skin-tearing violence of the shrieks.

  Suddenly there was a baby on the floor. It didn’t have a lower jaw. Its face was running with brown sores and blood dripped out of its mouth onto the stones as it crawled towards us, leaving stains of falling flesh smeared in its wake.

  Ji and I shouted helplessly, ripping shrieks of horror that were almost in time with the flashing of the light. Unthinking, uncontrollable screams, bodies without minds beating out a metronomic beat of helpless terror. The top of the baby’s jaw caved in and dropped out as it reached for Ji’s hand and he leapt to his feet away from it in a muscle spasm his mind had no part in.

  We didn’t really know each other was there by then, perceived each other only as a shape that shared this darkness. Ji’s eyes flicked unseeingly past mine and up to the sky and his mouth widened in a howl as he saw where he was. He howled again and the tendons in his neck tightened to snapping point as every muscle in his body clamped at once, as his body tried to run in every single direction at the same time. His face whipped past mine again and he had no idea who I was, none at all.

  He lurched forward towards the wall of faces and his foot crashed through the baby’s back, punched through with his weight. He struck out blindly at the faces and they split on his hands, iridescent muck slipping out from under their smooth skins. Ji charged through the curtain and as he raised his foot again to run the baby went with it, impaled by his leg, caught on his foot. As I fell towards the wall, stumbling to follow Ji, the baby looked at me and gurgled.

  ‘I would have been a daughter, Stark,’ it sang thickly. ‘I would have been a daughter.’

  I swung a kick at it and the head ripped off and split on the wall, and as the mess dripped down it looked like a pattern, a pattern of a cotton dress from long ago.

  At first Rafe and I were partners. We were the only people who knew how the thing worked, the only people who could share people’s dreams. Jeamland was ours, and we revelled in it, getting to know it, finding out how it worked. It was marvellous, a playground, a summer. We were young again, and we remembered how it felt, basked again in the kind of suns you used to know when tomorrow was just a more exciting version of today, when summers seemed to last for ever.

  Until we found our way out of it, we didn’t really know what it was, of course. It seemed like a dream world, and worked like one, but we didn’t really know. Then Rafe found that we could punch through the wall. It was always Rafe who found out things, apart from the very first time. He led, and I followed, as I always did. When I remember Rafe from those days I remember his back, and the panting of my breath as I tried to keep up with him.

  As time went on I spent more of my time in The City. I’d run on wild empty for too long, and I’d burnt myself out. I needed a base, needed some sort of structure. I couldn’t get it from home any more, I knew that by then, but I needed it from somewhere. I think that’s when Rafe started to go off me, when I turned my back on everything we’d found, when I lost my courage, lost my need for adventure at all costs. And then I met Zenda.

  I met Zenda, and I lost her. I never had her, in fact, and it was that which made me realise that I was still the same person inside, that fleeing and finding had not changed me at all.

  That hurt me. That hurt me so badly. She was all I had ever wanted and I never reached out and tried to have it, never let her see what I felt, except once.

  I suppose she was sad: after a while she stopped standing beside me, stopped wondering if we were supposed to be looking forward together, and she turned to the side and carried on with her life. She got on, moved forward but not away, and left me there standing in the coffin I’d built for myself. To have come all this way and to have stayed in the same place was more than I could take, and when I learnt what Rafe had to tell me, I snapped. All I had done was shred myself up, cut myself off at the roots. There was nothing coming up any more, and all I’d discovered was how long a tree can look strong after it’s dead and dried inside.

  Rafe, meanwhile, had progressed. He wasn’t the same person, hadn’t hung around. He’d gone on, changed, like everyone does. Everyone except me, and when I looked at him I found I didn’t even know him any more, didn’t know the only person in the world who knew who I was.

  I don’t know what his motivations were then. I didn’t see him often enough, and after a while we only ever saw each other in dreams. By then it had all fallen apart and we hated each other so badly that we almost ripped the world apart in our need to kill each other. I swear I thought that I was the one who was in the right, and I still believe it.

  But it’s so difficult to tell, and when it came right down to it, who was right wasn’t the issue. We’d changed Jeamland, and Jeamland had changed us. I killed Rafe to save Jeamland, to save the memory of childhoods past. I also killed him because I wanted him to be dead. But we were strong dreamers, Rafe and I, and so I didn’t kill him at all.

  He was always faster than me, always one step ahead, and he still was. There was I, still padding around The City like some poor man’s Philip Marlowe, trying to be hip, trying to be funny, trying to be something, anything. And he just played me along like a fool.

  Yeah, pick someone from the Centre so that Zenda gets involved and calls Stark in. Yeah, say there’s a threat to Idyll so he’ll go all the way, for her. Yeah, give Alkland nightmares so Stark sets himself up to remember things he would die to forget. Stark won’t notice: he’s too fucking stupid.

  And why was he able to do all this? Because I let him.

  I fell on my face almost as soon as I got out of the circle, cracking my cheek on the hot cobblestones. The baby on Ji’s foot was still trying to sing at me even though it had no head, and the rasping buzz of its breath amplified the rushing in my ears. I scrabbled up onto my feet and followed Ji, shouting at him, screaming at him to stop. But he couldn’t hear me, and probably didn’t even remember I was there.

  I ran slithering down the road, slipping on the oily stone, only really following the sound of footsteps. The air was too thick for me to see through it any more, thick with rotten green. It was also hot, far hotter than it is in Turn, and
as I ran it coagulated slowly, slipped into shapes that buffeted me, thickened until I was pushing through a loose mountain of meat that moved and flexed and smothered. It was like trying to run through a sea of dismembered arms in the dark, through arms and legs that filled every inch around me and slipped and squirted as I fell forward through them. I couldn’t hear anything, and all I could see was black green, as if my eyes were shut, but I pushed and I ran to be with Ji, though in a sense I was with him already.

  I smacked up against something very hard and realised it was a wall. Groping to either side I found a door and yanked it open against the weight of the falling air. I ran through the doorway and tripped again, fell onto some stairs. I crawled up them as quickly as I could, feeling as if part of my mind had been nailed to the bottom and the flesh was pulled with every yard I made. It pulled like tendons, hard, taut and ready to tear.

  At the top I got to my feet again and padded down greasy flagstones, the treacly air getting hotter and hotter as I caught up with Ji. He was still yards ahead, but I could feel him pulling, could sense that all of Jeamland was funnelling into the rotted corridor of this dead building. It pushed me forward and I fell with it, every step like the news that someone you love has died, every breath a moment when the world shoves a hot iron in your face. I heard a cry and pushed even harder through the greased slickness of the air that was now flesh. I had no sense of time, no idea of space. I could have pushed for minutes or for hours. I could have pushed for years.

  Then suddenly I crunched into something hard again. I felt around for a door but couldn’t find one, could only feel rough grooves of stone.

  I pulled my head back and looked up. A few yards above me the baby’s windpipe rattled and buzzed, and then it smacked down into the wall. Except it wasn’t a wall. It was the floor, and Ji was crawling just in front of me, crawling towards something that howled in the corner of the room. I broke nails on the grooves between flagstones as I pulled myself after him. There was no question of standing up, none at all. Even pulling forward was like pushing your head through rock.

  I felt a warm dry hand on mine and pulled my hand back with a howl before I even recognised the feeling. As I stared at the muck on my fingers I knew I’d felt a father’s hand, and as I smelt the stink from the smear I was crawling through I knew what it had to be, and knew where I was. I’d been here once before and been able to pull Ji back. But I had been stronger then.

  ‘Ji, no!’ I screamed. I flicked the decayed flesh off my hand and bent my back up against the weight in my head. I couldn’t get up, but I moved slightly quicker, quick enough to see Ji hauling himself to his knees at the feet of a woman. She had long black hair like a flood and vibrated with something curdled, and her eyes were black too because her head was full of spiders.

  She smiled at Ji as he groped for her lap, pulling himself up, and her smile was the worst thing I have ever, ever seen. Ji’s face turned up towards her, full of all the hurts he’d had since she’d died, twisted with all the adult things she hadn’t been there to make go away for him. She reached out for him, reached her hand to caress his face and I knew that this time I would not be able to save him.

  Because instead of stroking she ran her nails across his cheekbones near the eyes, scratching, cutting, and when the cuts were deep enough she pushed her fingers deep into them, rubbing them up against the bone and tearing the skin as she pushed. Ji screamed but didn’t try to get away. He didn’t want to escape. He wanted to be with his mother.

  When her fingers were pushed in deeply enough she jerked to her feet, legs planted sturdily apart, and she twisted and pulled and Ji’s head broke off his body trailing his neck like the root of a tooth. As she raised it above her head and then hurled it towards the floor his lips were still moving and the last thing he shrieked was to me.

  ‘This is you, Stark. You did this!’

  It split open on the floor in front of me and suddenly I could stand. I could stand because finally I understood. It wasn’t Ji talking, but he was right. I’d done this. I’d done it all.

  I ran for Ji’s mother and threw myself at her. She disappeared before I got there and I tripped over Ji’s body and fell sprawling. As I tumbled I saw a flick of black, the black of a coat that I used to follow, the coat of a man who was always there in front of me. I saw the texture of the cloth, the seam that ran down the back, the flow of the material as it sailed behind someone who was forever moving forward. I heard his breath and the sound of his boots on stone, and I remembered how then it had been a heroic sound, back when we had both been heroes, when we had been friends. And I remembered how I had loved that sound, that coat, and the last of the sludge drained out of me into the air and all that was left was memory.

  21

  I met Robert Afeld when I was eight. By then Stark’s Books was doing well, flourishing in the quiet way that my father wanted, and we’d moved into a detached house in suburbia. I was a quiet boy, serious and bookish, someone who could be relied upon to keep his room tidy and be polite to visitors.

  By the time Rafe joined the school I’d settled into my own life there. I was the quiet one, the one who worked hard. That was all most of them saw, and few of them wanted to know any more.

  Rafe was very different. Rafe was the bad boy, the one who always seemed to be standing out in the corridor, the boy who couldn’t seem to make it through a lesson without saying something the teacher would take exception to. He wasn’t stupid—just restless—but schools don’t like restless children.

  We became friends by chance and against the odds. I was playing marbles out in the playground with my set of acquaintances, and Rafe was in a separate game a couple of yards away. The groups were like sovereign states in the land of the playground, each denying the other’s existence. I’d never spoken to Rafe then, not exchanged a single word. Though we’d been in the same class for a couple of months our paths simply hadn’t crossed: we were two bits of jetsam, being carried downstream on different sides of the river. The funny thing is that, but for a bump in a playground’s tarmac, we would have stayed that way, and none of this would ever have happened.

  I can’t even remember how you play marbles now, haven’t the faintest recollection of whatever rules seemed so important then. All I remember is that a shot of mine took an odd bounce off that lump in the tarmac and careered across into the neighbouring game, scattering their marbles.

  I was on my feet to apologise immediately, good little boy that I was, but Rafe was having none of it. He grabbed my marble out of the confusion and hurled it through the fence. It was stupid, and childish, but Rafe had had a rough few months at the school, and was gravitating towards being a bad boy for life. I discovered it was an understandable impulse too, because before I knew what I was doing I furiously grabbed one of his marbles and hurled it the same way.

  Rafe looked at me for a moment, baffled. Then he snatched a handful of the marbles from our game and out they went. By this time the boys we’d been playing with had scattered to a safe distance, leaving just the two of us there by the fence, alternately flinging each other’s hard-won marbles out of the playground with the stern fury of gods.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  When we heard the shout we both whirled at once, to see Mr Marchant striding towards us like an angular hurricane. Suddenly we were just two little boys who’d been caught, and as the teacher shouted at us, demanded to know what would have happened if someone had been walking by, we felt the hot embarrassment of the stupid. We were marched back into the school and made to sit on the bench outside the headmaster’s office.

  It was there that the bond was struck. The good boy and the bad boy, on the same bench for the same crime. We had nothing to say to each other, no common ground, but as we sat there we were in it together, and Rafe smiled at me when I was called into the study. He had a good smile.

  After that we nodded at each other in corridors, and in time found ourselves talking to each other. By t
he time we were ten we were best friends.

  I’d been to Memory once before, long ago. It’s not so different from Jeamland really. Simpler, more stark. More Stark, in fact, because this is where I come from, really. This is me.

  Tall trees like giant redwoods stood either side of the path, in random ranks as far as I could see into the darkness. It was a little like the forest Alkland and I had walked through, but more majestic, more elemental.

  I love redwoods. The trunks were metres across, and leapt up into the sky, not even starting to branch out until they were thirty yards above my head. Way, way up above the foliage was thick, impenetrable, and no light filtered down from there. I walked the path in front of me, not bothering to turn to see what lay behind. There was no other way.

  I like to think that I saved Rafe from something, that if he hadn’t become my friend he would have carried on heading downwards, would have flunked out, been expelled. That’s probably true, in fact. But what is also true is that Rafe saved me too.

  What I had was thought, and reflection, an interest in things that went beyond the here and now. I’d always been an avid reader, couldn’t help but to have been, with my parents. I knew that there were worlds beyond the one we lived in, worlds that you could find on paper.

  But I had no drive. I was an armchair romantic, someone who sat and thought and might have done so with increasing pointlessness until the end of his days. Rafe was the opposite: he was a maelstrom of activity, of will. He was always on the move, going somewhere, doing something.

  What happened as we grew up was that we grew together, intermeshed until the two of us were really a one and a half. Rafe taught me to act, and I taught him to think. I was someone he could drag along with him, and he was someone I could bounce ideas off, and in time I learnt to do the dragging occasionally, and he sometimes had the ideas.

  It was Rafe’s idea that we start playing music, in fact. He badgered his parents into buying him a guitar when he was fourteen, and my parents soon found themselves doing the same. It makes me smile now to think of their forbearance in those days. Where in your contract for being a parent does it say you have to put up with grotesquely loud and hideously incompetent electric guitar as well as everything else?