He nodded.
She counted down with her fingers: 3… 2… 1…
He booted the door open and covered her as she went in. She would be vulnerable in the first few moments as her senses adjusted to what was inside, and he was ready to haul her out again if necessary. She’d do the same for him, and so they’d leap-frog each other into the madness.
a dizzying moment of disorientation, like coming off a carousel too fast while the world twisted around her in opposite directions, perspective contracting and expanding simultaneously, and a fragmentary glimpse of a perfectly ordinary sitting room before
It was a hospital, but like no hospital she had ever seen. Instead of the comforting glow of rose-coloured tiles under naphthene lamps, the walls were concrete and a sickly pale green. Lit garishly by glass tubes which spat and fizzed, many of them broken while others dangled from the ceiling, it looked more like an abattoir. The only reason she knew it was a hospital was because of the empty gurneys ranked along the corridor – evil-looking contraptions of levers, wheels and shackles which looked more like torture devices of the Hadrine Inquisition. All were empty except one.
It was impossible to tell whether the patient was male or female, young or old, because every inch of visible flesh was encrusted with barnacles. He or she was singing in a high, fluting voice more like that of a bird, nonsensical words (‘I’m a mellow yellow jello fellow’) which she didn’t bother stopping to listen to. There was nothing to be gained by trying to make sense of anything in a subornation – the only thing that mattered was ending it. She kept a bead on it with her tez-gun and let Buster off the leash.
He ran over, sniffed the figure, and gave a couple of excited yips. She motioned to Runce. ‘Salvol here.’
Runce took his canister of smelling salts and gave the figure a brief squirt, enough to make it jerk sharply. For a moment it flickered enough for them both to see the figure of a young boy lying on a settee, staring up at them with suddenly bewildered eyes.
‘Wha…?’ he said, and then the subornation closed in again, and the barnacled figure was back, fluting softly. Berylin decided he could be left safely – just so long as underneath it all he stayed awake, it would be fine. A subornation in daylight was generally not too much of a problem. At night, when the victims were almost all asleep, it was imperative that they all be roused, because the thing that scared her the most – more than death, fire, or insanity – was the danger that if any of them were asleep when the subornation was dispelled, they would be carried off with it and out of the world altogether. It was rare, but it happened. Once there had been a massive Event which had encapsulated an entire city block, and even though the census records were a reliable enough guide to whom should have been resident in any given place, there had been no possible way that the DCS were able to keep track of all the visitors, passers-by, and general transients in such a large area; the missing persons tally had finalised in the dozens. Dozens of living souls plucked straight out of reality and into Reason-knew where.
‘Clive, the son,’ she confirmed.
‘Which just leaves the daughter and the wife.’
‘Not to mention the phantasm.’
‘Silly me,’ he replied drily. ‘There was me forgetting all about the one responsible for this. PV plus point seven inside.’
‘Noted.’
What complicated matters was that in the protean flux of a subornation, it was impossible to tell the difference between the innocent human victims and the incorporeal entity which had created the event. Nobody knew what they were, where they came from, or even what they looked like, and some in the DCS believed that they didn’t originate subornations at all but simply rode in on their wakes like sharks following boats. Berylin believed otherwise. She’d seen enough to know that they might not always be in control of what happened, but they were certainly responsible. One thing everybody agreed on, however, was that a good solid couple of thousand volts from a tezlar pistol was enough to send them packing. It was also enough to kill a person several times over, hence the absolute necessity to be sure with the salvol and a good old-fashioned sniffer dog like Buster.
She put him back on the leash, and he trotted on ahead.
3
The corridor ran straight towards a pair of large swinging doors, which, if this were a hospital, looked like they might belong to an operating theatre. Building specs put it analogous to the apartment’s main bedroom. From inside, a voice was shouting something about angels, but it was hard to tell with the tinny muzak.
Something beeped on Runce’s console. ‘PV spike,’ he warned.
They braced themselves for anything from a sudden rush of cold air to a total gravity inversion.
The air became opaque, blurring in drifting colours – umber, bruise, kaleidoscope – as if gauzy veils were drawing across ahead of them, and the corridor which had been straight now twisted and crouched in feral geometries so that as Berylin and Runce moved forward cautiously they were walking one moment, climbing the next, and sliding after that.
‘It’s no good, you know,’ giggled a voice behind them. ‘They’ll never let you in dressed like that.’
Something which looked like a monkey’s head on the body of a wooden toy train was goggling at them from halfway up the wall. It stuck its tongue out and crawled off, caterpillar style, at a fair speed. Giving chase, Berylin managed to get off one good dose of salvol and watched with satisfaction as the creature squealed and fell, flickering into the form of a young girl running away down a perfectly ordinary hallway. Then the hospital settled back around them like heavy canvas.
‘That’s the children accounted for, then,’ Runce observed. ‘Somehow it’s worse with the little ones.’
‘It’s worse with everyone. Let’s find Mrs Drabble and put an end to this.’
As they approached the operating room doors, they were able to clearly make out – between sobs and shrieks of insane laughter – a voice screaming over and over again: ‘Angels in my head! They’re putting angels in my head!’
Then, somehow, without knowing quite how it had happened, they were through and inside the operating theatre, and the scene which presented itself stopped her breath. Buster was barking continuously, furiously. Even Runce, who was about as superstitious as a piece of toast, shrank back against the wall, muttering ‘Holy Mother and all the saints in Heaven.’ In her short but shining career in the DCS, Berylin had witnessed scenes ranging from the most brutal atrocity and orgiastic licentiousness to those verging on holy revelation, but never anything which seemed to combine both in such a disturbing manner.
A man, the patient, lay shackled and screaming to the operating table, while over him towered a female figure of skeletal, ravenous appearance. Its limbs were so long and spindly that it had to crouch to being itself level with its ‘patient’, and even then its knees arched high up above its head like a spider. It had twin rows of wizened, pendulous teats from which a bitter fluid dribbled, battened upon by a crawling swarm of pale, blurred things which Berylin’s eyes refused to acknowledge. But worst of all was what it was doing with its hands. It had six arms, two of which were restraining the writhing man while one fed handfuls of the pale things into a meat grinder socketed in his forehead, and another turned the handle, while the stinking juices of their entrails ran down the side and over his face like tears as he screamed ‘Angels in my brain! They’re putting…’
‘Enough!’ bellowed Runce. He snatched the tez-gun from Berylin’s holster, aimed it at the towering monstrosity and fired.
‘Runce, no!’ She shoved the weapon aside as a jagged beam of purple-white fire raved from the barrel and scorched a smoking black trench along the wall (which, for just a second, was perfectly ordinary wallpaper). He stared at her, aghast. She reached for her salvol.
But they had caught the creature’s attention. Roaring, it unfolded two impossibly long arms. One hand cl
amped itself around Runce’s throat while the second slapped the spray canister from her hand and returned for her eyes, fingernails hooked into claws. She ducked, rolling, grabbing at the gun flex and reeling it in. Claws raked at her face, yanking away her rebreather mask. She gagged on the stench of rotting flesh and ammonia-like disinfectant. Acting on the crudest instinct, she aimed her tez-gun at the patient on the table and fired.
Energy seared through the air, frying it to ozone and igniting the man. For a moment he burned like a star and then just as quickly collapsed into blackness as if falling down a well, taking everything of the hospital with it.
Reality flooded back in a sudden restoration of normal air pressure which blew out every window in the apartment and would have burst Berylin’s and Runce’s eardrums had it not been for their earplugs. They were left slumped against the wall of a perfectly normal bedroom: paisley wallpaper, candlewick bedspread, wardrobe a-teeter with boxes – and a very dazed-looking mouse of a woman standing by the bed looking around in confusion.
‘Ooh, I say,’ she murmured. ‘I do feel peculiar,’ and fainted dead away.
Chapter 12
To the Islands
1
‘I swear those fish are following me,’ said Bobby, peering over the side.
He and Allie were a day out from Stray, en route to the Islands for supplies. The Tatterdemalion II – or, as Allie affectionately nicknamed her, Tatters – was a single-masted fishing skiff so thoroughly patched and repaired that probably not a single one of her boards was original. Astern of her threadbare sail was a tarp cover which gave just enough shelter for two people to sleep, sit and eat; in the bow was cargo space currently stocked with their food, water and sacks of oyster shells, their mother-of-pearl being a highly tradable commodity. Most precious of all was the small bag of pearls which Allie kept on a string around her neck.
‘Mm-hm.’ She was on the tiller, apparently dozing. Her sunhat was pulled far over her face, and she looked like he imagined Snufkin would appear in a film if he was a she and played by Meryl Streep.
‘No, seriously,’ he insisted. ‘It’s those three from when I cut my hand. They’ve been following us since we left Stray.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she murmured. ‘Fish don’t track boats. Unless they’re sharks. You haven’t been upsetting any sharks, have you?’
‘They’re definitely not sharks. Truth to tell, I don’t know what they are.’ He peered closer. It was definitely the three fish which had made such a feast of his blood. The smallest of the three had protruberant eyes and looked like some species of blenny; the next possessed a flamboyant collection of fins and tail, which reminded him of the outrageous outfits of Carmen Miranda, and the third was a monstrosity from the lightless depths which was all jaw and fangs. ‘I’m not even sure that one should be alive this far up,’ he said. Igor, that was it – Professor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant. Blenny, Carmen, and Igor. The Three Fishketeers. But why were they following the boat? ‘They’re not tracking the boat,’ he realised. ‘They’re following me. I think they want some more of my blood.’
‘Oh yeah,’ she nodded drowsily. ‘Because that makes much more sense.’
‘Watch.’ He pricked the end of his finger with a knife and squeezed several ruby-red droplets into the sea. Just as before, they see-sawed lazily down through the water like pearls rather than diffusing in clouds, and the Three Fishketeers dashed to gobble them up. Apparently satisfied with that, they flashed away into the depths. ‘See?’
‘Mm-hm,’ she replied, plainly not at all interested. From time to time she consulted a small plastic compass which looked like it had come out of a Christmas cracker – but he knew that her navigational instincts were razor sharp all the same. The boat was a miniscule speck in the immense, glittering blue desert of the Flats.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he said, taking back the line he’d been splicing before the fish arrived. ‘Let me get this straight. Normally it’s you and Seb on the supply run, yes? Because it takes two people to get back to the Stray.’
‘Yep.’
‘Because there’s bugger all wind out here, and when the boat’s fully loaded you have to mostly row back.’
‘Got it in one, old sport.’
‘So here’s my question. I’ve told everyone that my plan is to find someone on Danae who can get me back to civilisation. I’ve made my goodbyes. I’m not coming back to Stray.’
‘That’s not technically a question,’ she pointed out.
‘Smart alec. Don’t avoid the subject. My question is, how are you going to get back on your own?’
She raised the brim of her hat and tilted a dangerously bright eye at him. ‘What – you think I can’t look after myself just because we’ve fucked a couple of times?’
He winced. ‘You know I don’t like it when you talk like that.’
She flapped dismissively. ‘Ya big baby.’
‘And in any case, that’s not what I meant.’
‘Damn straight it isn’t.’
‘I meant, you’re going to row it all back by yourself?’
‘Meh. So it’ll take a little longer, that’s all. It’s worth it to have you to myself for a couple of days.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘You should be. I’m a fine lookin’ woman.’
He grinned and went back to splicing his line.
‘This civilisation of which you speak,’ she said, after a while.
‘What about it?’
‘I don’t mean to be blunt, and try not to take this the wrong way, but you know it ain’t there any more, don’t you?’
‘Ah.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Very philosophical. Very zen. If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody to hear it, and all that.’
‘No, what I mean is, whatever home you’re trying to get back to, it doesn’t exist. You won’t find it.’
‘Is this supposed to be some kind of riddle game? I hope it’s better than I-Spy. That got old fast. Something beginning with W, you say? Hmm, let me see. Ah yes, water!’
She sighed. ‘It’s okay. I don’t really expect you to believe me. I’m telling you now because when we get to Danae, the first thing you’re going to find is that there aren’t any phones and no internet access to contact the “outside” world. There are no radios, no TV, and the one newspaper which does the rounds out here will tell you about wars and crimes in countries which you’ve never heard of but which sound kind of familiar all the same.
‘You won’t find anything remotely like a British embassy, that’s for sure. Come to that, you won’t find any Brits, or Americans, or Outer Mongolians, no matter how many of the tavernas you go into. You won’t find anybody who even knows a Brit or an Outer Mongolian.
‘So you’re going to think fine, screw these insular hicks, and you’re going to want to pay for passage on a fishing boat, but you won’t recognise the names of any of the nearby places – even if you can find a map, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any on Danae – and the skipper won’t recognise the name of anywhere you’re trying to get to – Tahiti, Vanuatu, Fiji, whichever. Doesn’t matter. It won’t stop him taking whatever you can pay, of course, and he’ll get you to the next island – probably Aura or D’unjin – and there the whole sorry situation will play itself out again.
‘I’m betting that you’ll have popped long before that, though. At some point you’re going to lose it completely and go postal on the natives; you’re going to start running around making a big fuss about why you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere and how you just want to go home and what kind of fucking conspiracy is this anyway. Trust me. I’ve been there.
‘Here’s my point, Bobby: I don’t need that shit. The locals don’t like us Strays too much as it is because we don’t belong here – we’re wrong in a way I don’t understand, but it’s there all the same. We need to trade with th
em to survive, and I can’t have you jeopardising that. I’m telling you all this so that when it goes down I’ll be standing right by your shoulder, and you’ll look at me and remember we had this conversation, and hopefully we’ll all get to eat for the next month.’
Bobby thought about all of this as Tatters dawdled through the Flats, and there was nothing but the creaking of wood and lapping of water to fill the silence.
‘If all of that is true,’ he said at last, ‘then where exactly are we?’
She looked at him full on for the first time. ‘Let me ask you something else. Why has it taken you so long to ask that one simple question? I would’ve though it would be the first thing out of your mouth. You got close to it that first night, but never since. Why do you think that is?’
He frowned, puzzled. ’I don’t know, now that you mention it. That’s very peculiar.’
‘Have you considered that it’s because part of your mind simply doesn’t want to know and is afraid to ask?’
‘Alright then.’ He faced her squarely. ‘Where exactly the bloody hell am I?’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘Oh no. You don’t get that until I’m even halfway sure that you believe me. Until you go pop, anything I tell you is only going to do more harm than good. Rationing, remember?’
‘Bloody rationing!’ He threw down his half-spliced line in annoyance. ‘Isn’t there anything around this place I get for free?’
She cocked her hat at him again, but the gleam in her eye was different this time. ‘Oh, I can think of something,’ she said and reached for him.
2
It was a relief when Berylin finally received the summons from Director Jowett’s office. A week’s recuperation leave might be the prescription of the DCS’ psyrgical department, and though in truth it helped her get over the immediate shock, it did little to alleviate the underlying problems, which had nothing to do with her job. Too much time spent rattling around in a house with too much space, that was the problem. Space which should have been a nursery or filled with the sound of male company. But Stephen was gone these ten years, finding it easier to blame her barrenness than admit his own inadequacy in the face of her more successful career. She’d had her dalliances then, to be sure, and asked for nothing from them except company and an assurance that the world was basically right and normal (even if she wasn’t), but still, an empty house in autumn was a sad thing.
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