by Simon Clark
The kinder part of me almost told the kid, ‘Don’t worry, he can’t hurt you. You’re seeing something I used to imagine when I was your age.’ But still I recognized in Natsaf-Ty a secret weapon. The Echomen wanted me to fight Natsaf-Ty on their behalf. Yet in reality was there anything to fight? OK, I could see Natsaf-Ty in Kirk’s cell as the kid slobbered with fear. I can even describe him because his appearance hadn’t changed from when I was a boy: a gaunt figure with dark-red skin. Egyptian priests shaved off all body hair. The scalp’s a mess of cracks; Few mummy wrappings remain. There are criss-cross bandages over part of the chest with more forming a loin cloth around the waist.
Kirk’s terrified of the apparition but what of Madeline? I turned to her. Eyes wide, staring, breath coming in shallow tugs; OK, so terror hadn’t overwhelmed her, but the tawny phantom disturbed her. I remember how she described the tug of vertigo when she tried to picture Natsaf-Ty. Although something odd was happening … I knew the Mason Konrad clones couldn’t see the mummy clearly like I could so they failed to identify it, but when I studied Madeline and Kirk’s reactions I realized they didn’t stare at the place the figure occupied, their eyes had a searching quality as they looked around it. As if they sensed it was far bigger than it really was, and they were trying to see something that had swollen to, I don’t know, the size of an elephant? A house? A mountain?
‘Wait here,’ I told Madeline, then I ran to the toolshed. There I found an axe that Eddie must have used to chop firewood in the winter. Seconds later, I laid into the padlock on the cell gate. Each blow produced a gush of glittering sparks. Yet despite the firework display plus the crash of axe head against padlock, neither Kirk nor Madeline could wrench their fascinated, yet fearful gaze from the space around the dusty red guy with his pizza crust flesh. After the fifth blow the hasp snapped.
I hoped Kirk would have readily sprinted for freedom. However, fear paralysed him. In the end I picked him up then carried him past the mummy.
‘Good work,’ I murmured to my imaginary buddy. ‘I hope you’ve other hidden talents, because we’re going to need them soon.’
Of course, the old gentlemen didn’t reply. After all, he’d not spoken to me since my teens. Imaginary friends are like that. Your conscious mind doesn’t pull the puppet strings, it’s the dark creatures in the abyss of the unconscious that have supreme control, just as they exert their power over your dreams and nightmares.
If the carnage tonight had flowed from Paddy’s actions then he’d done one thing right: he’d left the door in the wall unlocked. Madeline exited the rose garden first with me following. Kirk appeared to weigh nothing in my arms, he didn’t wriggle or utter a sound. That must be the Natsaf-Ty effect, I told myself, the boy’s mind and body have been shocked into shut-down. That knowledge might come in useful later.
The next move would be to report what had happened, only the closer we got to the house it became obvious that not only the cottage in the rose garden had suffered an assault. A path led across the lawn to the mansion where we’d met Saffrey and where I anticipated Eve, Ulric and the others were billeted with the soldiers. From the house windows came a yellow glare that had nothing to do with electric light. Glass shattered from the heat of flames. Smoke gushed between the slates in the roof.
I nodded at a patio in front of the doors. ‘Naylor wasn’t the only one to snap.’ Bodies lay in bizarrely twisted positions on the stone slabs. ‘They’ve been thrown from the upstairs windows. Here.’ I handed Madeline the comatose child. Her biceps bulged as she bore Kirk’s weight.
‘Mason, don’t go in there. The whole lot’s going up.’
‘I’ll be right back.’ Even though it was night I could make out the area around the house as flames rolled through the windows. A cursory examination of the corpses revealed them to be military personnel who’d managed to hurriedly pull on their trousers before tragedy overtook them. I checked the backs of their hands, half-expecting to see the Y-shaped scar that marred my own flesh. This time the skin of these dead infantry men was unblemished. Although they had wounds consistent with a twenty-foot fall on to a stone surface, their skulls bore the signs of some fairly ruinous injuries. Half of them had ligatures around their necks, too. Therefore, they’d died in relative silence, certainly quietly enough so we hadn’t heard them from our cottage tucked away in the garden. A form brushed my shoulder. What appeared at first to be an attack turned out to be yet another corpse falling from above. The guy in military fatigues smacked into the ground hard enough to shatter the stone patio slab beneath him. He’d had time to don a sidearm but not the opportunity to use it. I slid the automatic from his holster then shoved it into the belt of my jeans. In the firelight I could see Madeline anxiously looking this way as she cradled the boy in her arms. Staying here much longer couldn’t be wise but I had to find my sister. First, I tried the doors to one of the downstairs rooms, only chunks of burning debris were dropping from the ceiling. All that ancient timber that had been steadily drying for the last three centuries didn’t just burn it exploded into an inferno. The stench of smoke choked me. The heat now belching from the house seared my skin. That and the brightness of the flames had me scrunching my eyes shut so I could barely see.
‘Mason.’ Madeline beckoned me. The heat had grown intense enough to force her away from the house. ‘Mason!’ Then I saw she didn’t beckon but drew my attention to a section of the building to my right. Through a door came a stream of figures. They were burning from head to foot. Yet they weren’t screaming in agony. They moved purposefully toward me. That high pain threshold did nothing less than yell at me the word: Echoman. They’d finished killing inside the house. Now they were going to mop up the humans in the grounds. Me, included. I drew the handgun from my belt. Three rapid shots bust the heads of the three monsters in the lead. Blood streaming from the bullet holes in their skulls extinguished their burning clothes in the region of their shoulders with a loud hissing sound. The three fell without a whimper. Behind them were twenty more. Blazing zombie figures that didn’t appear fazed by the fact they were walking funeral pyres. I reckon I had maybe five rounds left in the gun. No need to waste them gifting the Echomen with an easy, pain-free death. I backed away. They kept advancing but the burns had taken their toll. They lost sight of me as the heat destroyed their eyes. Another moment later, one sagged to the floor. Their lungs must have melted as they’d inhaled super-heated air inside the blazing building. The others were dying, too. One by one they sagged to the ground in a mess of burning flesh. A wave of roast pork smells washed over me. Worse than the smell, was the fact another dozen Echomen had rounded the corner – don’t ask me how I knew; I guess I’d developed an instinct for who and who wasn’t an Echo creature. These hadn’t been touched by the flames. With there being too many to fight I decided to retreat while we could.
When I reached Madeline I took the child off her with the command, ‘Run!’ So with the blazing house at our backs we raced for the forest where an unknown territory lay in wait for us.
chapter 41
Fortunately the boy – that ten year old facsimile of me as a child – appeared to weigh nothing in my arms. He still hadn’t moved or spoken; come to that he hadn’t given any indication of being awake. With Madeline keeping pace beside me we ran into the forest that rolled up to the mansion like a black ocean. At this time of night the world had become a compilation of faint greys, shadows, purples, and pools of utter blackness.
This journey was a voyage into the unknown. I didn’t know the terrain. All I’d seen of it beyond the house were what appeared to be around a million trees with a narrow channel cut through them along which the Echomen had walked to their doom a couple of days ago. Far from the Echomen being idiot monsters they must have somehow engineered an effective attack on Dr Saffrey’s headquarters. Now the building blazed like fury. A torrent of fire rose into the night sky.
So I didn’t know where I was headed. Had the Echomen followed us? Was Eve dead? None of thi
s I knew. All I had was the instinct to get away from the burning house. And that we did. Madeline accepted my plan, if you can call it a plan, without question. Unhesitating, she placed her trust in me. The boy remained inert in my arms. Presently, we adopted a steady, rhythmic pace. The massive columns of the tree trunks glided by. The night air possessed a hush that went beyond silence. It seemed to draw sound into itself, so I found myself half-believing we glided through a black and white photograph of a forest at night. A still-life where we were the only three creatures that floated through the darkness.
Above me, a canopy of branches hid the sky. Beneath me, soft dirt robbed my feet of any sound of their passing. And it was then, as we moved deeper into the forest, that I couldn’t shake off the notion we passed from this world into a separate reality. One that wouldn’t obey the laws of physics – where up could be down, where yesterday might be in the past or still yet to come. This could be a place where life and death are simply masks that are switched back and forth on the face of a single, constant entity that is eternal.
My mind touched on memories as if they were promises of things to come rather than recollections of the past. An image came of my mother sipping white wine in front of the TV on a Saturday night as I combed my hair in front of the mirror. A ten-year-old Eve sighed, ‘I wish I was grown up. I want to go out at night.’ Then I lay in the bedroom of the house that Paddy’s gang had occupied, the child’s robot droned: ‘If you should die, do not lie screaming in your grave …’ The image of the Echo people who wore the faces of Eve and myself that were nailed to the classroom floor, and as they broke free to launch their attack on us.
‘I’m lost,’ I told Madeline.
‘We’ll be all right,’ she replied.
‘We could be going in circles. The bad guys might be lying in wait for us.’
She gave me a sympathetic look.
‘Aren’t you afraid of being killed?’ I asked.
‘I’m with you. That’s what’s important to me.’
We continued walking through the night-time forest. Everything had become a uniform black – above, below, behind, in front. More than once I uttered, ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’
A faint glow appeared ahead. Instinctively, I headed toward it. Moments later the glow resolved itself into a red figure.
‘Natsaf-Ty,’ I murmured. ‘Keeper of the crocs.’ I glanced at Madeline. She didn’t appear to notice our visitor. I spoke louder. ‘So, do you intend to be useful? Have you come to show us the way?’
A pale mist formed just above the ground. Even so, I could still see the Egyptian mummy. I used the word ‘see’ because even though the gaunt figure must be a product of hallucination it did appear real to me at that moment. And complimenting that image of the mummified priest a characteristic aura of serenity. I’d grown up with Natsaf-Ty; he’d been my trusted mentor as I sat on the top stair at home and he seated himself on his habitual third riser from the bottom. The years rolled back. In my arms an identical copy of me, aged ten, slept. In the gloom I could see the shape of the face and pale bump of his nose. That was near the age when my world suffered the destructive attention of school thugs. Meanwhile, my mother’s own life appeared to be on the verge of mental and economic collapse. Then the miracle: Natsaf-Ty stole into my life one night. He listened to my troubles, and in my childhood imagination at least, he whispered answers to my problems. Was this coincidence? But at nearly the same time as Natsaf-Ty’s arrival Mom landed a well-paid job in Tanshelf. Suddenly the world of the Konrad family became a happy one. Mom’s spirits lifted, she sparkled with a healthy vitality I hadn’t seen before. I wish I could report the bullies suffered horrible injuries at the hands of a mysterious assailant (just picture the news story: ‘Police report traces of ancient bandage were found at the scene of the crime, while grains of sand found on the slain have been identified as Egyptian’) but life rarely delivers such a conveniently satisfying climax to episodes like this. Instead, the bully squad just faded out of the scene; either they’d got bored with tormenting me, or they’d moved to other schools; I can’t remember. All I am sure of is that school, if not exactly a shipload of laughs, became sort of OK. I made friends with Tony Allen; he had a knack of making everyone smile. From then on, what I most remember about school were the jokes and the crazy adventures we enjoyed.
With these thoughts came a growing certainty that my life had followed a cycle. The dangerous times I’d known as a child, when there was a possibility our family would be torn apart, maybe with Mom needing psychiatric care, and me being remorselessly beaten down by classroom sadists – well, that kind of danger had returned. Only worse. I’d lost my mother, my career, my home, my identity; here I was lost in a forest in the middle of night, in absolute darkness, with a distinct probability that in the next few hours I might lose my life. With me were monsters. Nothing less than that. Here’s a girl who has been transformed into a female version of me. In my arms is a boy who has been rendered into a ten-year-old version of yours truly, Mason Konrad. When disaster threatened to fall on me when I was a child I’d visited Tanshelf Museum. Along with the other kids I’d pressed my nose to the glass case that housed the mummy of Natsaf-Ty. We’d made silly comments about the shrivelled body, or tried to peer through the gap in his loincloth while making willy jokes. Only everything changed for me. There I was on the brink of personal disaster. But when I woke at midnight to find Natsaf-Ty had followed me home, seemingly with an interest in my welfare, that’s when my life was saved.
So, whether this was the first sign of mental collapse in me I don’t know, but I addressed the figure that glowed in the mist. ‘I’ve done everything I can to get through this. But I can’t make it on my own. I need you again. Just like I did when I was boy. Without your help I’m dead.’ The figure didn’t move. When I spoke again it seemed as if I’d passed through a doorway of no return. ‘If you help me now, I’ll give you whatever it is you need. Did you hear that? I owe you. I’ll be in your debt.’ You’ve just made a deal with the Devil, Mason. You’ve gone and sold your soul. Those words came in a searing blast of revelation.
Madeline shot me a startled look. What’s more, I could tell she was frightened because she asked, ‘Mason, what is it you can see?’
‘Don’t you see anything?’
She shook her head, but something there in the wood troubled her so much her eyes had that scared, searching quality, as if she knew a danger lurked just beyond her range of vision. Natsaf-Ty? Why did he panic the Echomen? What power did my old-time imaginary friend have to reach into their heads to hit all the fear buttons? Echomen couldn’t see Natsaf-Ty. But they sensed him; that knowledge of his presence filled them with nothing less than supernatural dread.
I addressed the luminous shape in the mist, ‘Do we have a deal? Come on, we used to talk all the time when I was kid. You can understand me. I’m promising to give you anything you want in return for getting us out of here. What’s your answer?’
The ancient red face became suddenly clear through the vapour. That ruin of dried skin appeared to tighten. Lines appeared round the mouth. It only lasted a second, then the serene expression returned. But at that moment I told myself: If I’m not mistaken, that was a smile. A smile of friendship? Or a smile of triumph? Only time will tell.
I realized the red figure had begun to move. I hadn’t seen him turn. This had to be nothing less than a reassembly of his molecular structure. Where I’d been seeing the front of him, his face and chest, now I saw the back of his head with the cavernous hole in the skull.
‘Come on,’ I murmured to Madeline. ‘If I’m not mistaken we’re being shown a way out of here.’
‘Shown?’ She didn’t understand because she couldn’t see Natsaf-Ty.
‘Trust me. We’re on our way to safety.’
She did trust me in a way that had the power to be unnerving. If I asked her to dowse herself in petrol and light a match she’d do just that. Anyway, we followed the red sprite through t
he night-time forest. For ten minutes we walked in silence. I kept my eye on the skull gliding through the darkness; sometimes, however, it looked less like a skull than a red planet drifting in the depths of space, one with an enormous black crater that scarred its surface. Then I realized a salient fact: the boy had become an inert weight in my arms.
‘The child’s dying,’ I said to the red globe, as it drifted through darkness. ‘Can you do anything for him?’
A second later the boy woke with the words, ‘What you carrying me for? I’m OK, I can walk.’
I set him down. Without any difficulty on his part Kirk walked in between Madeline and me. We could have been some weird clone family out for a stroll in the dark. The other notion that struck me: how helpful the old mummy has become tonight. For days he’s been content to observe, now he’s turned into the genie of the lamp, granting wishes like there’s no tomorrow. Go on, ask him for a helicopter to fly us to safety. I dare you. And while you’re at it, have him supply a sackful of diamonds so you’ll be rich for life. Flippant thoughts … they had their purpose though: to mask an anxiety that sounded a faint, yet persistent warning note inside my head.
We followed the red figure for at least an hour. The canopy of branches above our heads never broke once. Down at ground level the darkness possessed a quality that went beyond the mere absence of light. It felt as if I pressed my head into a thick fabric. Night filled my eyes; in an uncanny way it filled my ears and nostrils too.
It’s because you sold your soul to Natsaf-Ty, came the voice in my head. In return for saving your skin, Mason, he wants something from you. A BIG something. And BIG doesn’t come cheap. This is one debt you’ll wish you never owed….