Black Rock
Page 48
‘That fucking hurt!, he said in a small voice.
Martin stepped forward and slapped his face. Hard.
And suddenly James was back.
He was in pain, but he was back.
Did it! Martin congratulated himself. ‘Let’s see what you can do about that Mister Fucking Perfect!’ he added aloud. ‘Your nemesis is here. The eagle-eyed editor has arrived and boy is he pissed off with you!’
‘Martin?’ James said in astonishment. ‘What happened?’ He touched his head and looked vacantly at the blood on his fingers.
‘You were hypnotized and I got you out of it,’ Martin snarled. ‘Now for fuck’s sake get with it because we’ve busted the story wide open and now we have to zap the writer before he recovers.’
‘Too late,’ James said, pointing at the cloud. It was spinning like a top now and the lower part of it was snaking down towards the ground in a point.
‘Twister!’ James said.
Christ, Martin thought to himself. I thought twister, and he fucking well made one. This isn’t a thundercloud at all, it’s a bloody whirlwind.
And even as he had the thought, the tip of the cloud touched the ground. Martin watched, amazed, expecting the whole revolving mass to start moving up the track towards them now that it had made contact with the ground, but a piece of it seemed to break off, still spinning.
This piece was a six-foot-high column that snaked across the forecourt of Black Rock, picking up gravel and dust as it reeled back and forth. Beside it, another part of the cloud snaked down and made another little twister.
But Martin was watching the first one. It seemed to have found a track to follow, and it was serpentining towards them.
‘Here it comes,’ James yelled.
‘It’s an hallucination,’ Martin shouted, hopefully. ‘It isn’t real.’
He had half expected his disbelief to make the twisters vanish, but this did not happen. There were four now, lining up in single file and heading towards the gate in huge sweeping curves. Another was being formed every five seconds or so.
‘What do we do?’ James yelled over the increasing noise of the revolving cloud.
‘We go down there,’ Martin said. ‘Come on!’ The wind was already tearing at his hair and clothes and most of the twisters weren’t even out of the gate yet. ‘We’ll have to dodge ‘em,’ he said. ‘You ready?’
He looked over at James and saw that he was. Just standing beside the tyre-fitter gave him confidence. If James had survived a wall of fire, a few tornadoes weren’t going to be much problem.
Get thee behind me, Peter Perfect, Martin thought and found that his headache had gone. And it had taken the ice block with it. During the last two seconds, his face had lit with a big, stupid grin of the kind you saw in kids’ war-hero comics. What a wanker you are! he told himself and didn’t care. If he was going to go, he couldn’t imagine a better way of doing it than fighting for something he loved.
‘Let’s go!’ James yelled at him and Martin saw that his face also bore the same crazy comic-book hero expression.
And side by side, they walked towards the house.
The first twister had wandered off the track and wound its way down the bank, picking up stones and dirt and throwing them out again in a circular hail. The second one did a kind of stall between the gate posts. It remained where it was, debris falling out of it as its spinning slowed. It petered out entirely before the third twister reached it.
‘They’re not very strong!’ James shouted over the roaring swoosh of the big cloud.
‘He’s losing power for some reason,’ Martin yelled back, eyeing the revolving vapour in front of the house. The author wasn’t losing enough power for Martin’s liking. That big disc of cloud was forty feet across and twenty or thirty feet deep. It looked as if it could muster plenty more whirlwinds.
The third twister came out through the gates, in a dead straight line towards them, the fourth close behind it. The fifth stalled and vanished, and the next peeled away and headed for the side of the house.
He can’t control them, Martin realized. He’s just making them and throwing them in our general direction. He can’t steer them.
‘Look out!’ James yelled as the one approaching grew close. The lowering air pressure made Martin’s ears pop. ‘Just leap aside when it gets here!’ James advised, running forwards. He dodged to the side of the twister and was obscured from Martin’s vision by the cloud of vapour and debris.
Gravel whipped out from the whirlwind into Martin’s face and he brought his arms up to shield his eyes. He was ready to leap when the twister veered away from him, leaving a clear passage through to where James was crouched ready to leap away from the next little tornado.
And Martin began to run.
And as if it had been waiting for him to do this, the wind whipped back across towards him.
Missed me, you bastard! Martin crowed as the twister whipped at his heels.
And then he was in the air being pelted with stones and grit and twigs and leaves. For a moment there was no world, no up or down, just an ear-tearing shriek of wind, a face stinging shower of missiles and a vast centrifugal force.
And then he was slammed face first into the track.
Martin’s body felt as if it had been hit by a truck. There seemed to be no air out there to breathe.
‘Come on!’ James was screaming from above him. ‘There’s another one coming, get up!’
Martin raised his head far enough to see the next whirlwind cruising towards him but that was as much as he could do. Suddenly, James was dragging him out of the twister’s path.
The following tornado danced in front of them and left the track. The one behind it spun into streams of vapour and vanished, throwing droplets of stinging water into their faces.
‘Nearly finished!’ James shouted and pointed up at the mother cloud.
With stinging eyes, Martin peered up at the huge revolving disturbance and saw that it was thinning.
James pulled him to his feet, propelled him forwards, yanked him out of the way of the next twister, and suddenly they were passing through the Black Rock gateposts.
The last of the whirlwinds danced towards them.
James stayed where he was, holding Martin up. ‘It’s gonna miss us!’ he said.
‘No it isn’t!’ Martin screamed. And closed his eyes.
There was a noise which sounded like a cannon firing and suddenly the air seemed too thick to breathe.
‘It went!’ James said as Martin opened his eyes. The forecourt was clear. The big cloud had gone. Apart from the channels the twisters had dug into the gravel forecourt there was no sign that they had ever existed.
‘You OK?’ James asked, scanning the area.
Martin nodded. He’d lost a shoe back there somewhere and he was bruised, but otherwise all right. ‘He’s exhausted himself,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t believe it. No good book finishes that quickly.
There has to be more.’
‘And there it is,’ James said, stabbing a finger at the sky. ‘The cloud cover. It’s getting lower. More puffy. He’s bringing the real weather down. Come on!’ He started towards the front door and Martin followed, ignoring the pain where sharp stones bit his shoeless foot.
They stood outside the big, black, impenetrable front door, gazing at it. There really was no lock or letter box. Just a gold knob.
James looked at Martin. ‘How do we get in?’ he asked.
‘You should know this,’ Martin said. ‘The getting in is easy. It’s the getting out again you have to worry about.’
And the door began to move, opening slowly and soundlessly.
Martin shuffled backwards, pushing James away from the threshold.
And there was Janie.
Or at least a wet red thing with her head on top of it.
Something that didn’t quite become a scream gurgled in Martin’s throat.
Janie advanced from behind the door, as though propelled on rollers. There was no body movement that might suggest she was walking.
Which wasn’t so surprising since she couldn’t be walking.
Janie had no feet.
Martin glanced at her and his mind did a double-take. Even on the second try, it still didn’t believe what Martin’s eyes had shown it.
Janie, Martin’s stunned mind informed him, was just about as naked as it was possible for a woman to get.
From her neck down to her ankles, Janie’s skin had been removed.
‘I was… a… shreddie, Martin,’ Janie’s face said in a tiny pained voice. ‘A bit part player. It hurts.’
Impossible as it seemed, Janie was alive. Her face had expression, her eyes moved.
But she can’t be alive! Martin’s mind protested. Her hands and feet are not present and the only reason she is upright at all is because there is a wooden post stuck through her chest at an angle of thirty odd degrees.
‘Kill… me,’ Janie implored. ‘Get me out… of… here. Kill… me! Please.’
‘Don’t you touch her, she’s mine!’ a voice said from the shadows.
And Janie’s body did a horrible little dance as whoever was holding her up on the wooden stake worked his way up towards her.
If it was possible for Martin to have felt any more shock, he would have felt it now. The man who was holding Janie up on this stake was not Peter Perfect at all, but good old Billy-Joe, Janie’s husband.
Janie might still be alive, but Billy-Joe was surely dead. His head was smashed in like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. His eyes were filmed and all the blood that had ever been in his body was soaked and dried into his clothes.
Billy-Joe reached his wife, put his arm around her back and heaved her towards him with one arm so that he was supporting her at his side.
Janie made a tiny squeal like that of a kitten being tortured.
‘She’s mine,’ Billy-Joe said proudly. ‘We had a reconciliation. We’re going to Hell in a hand-basket.’
‘Oh,’ Martin heard himself say. His mind had just noted that the ends of Janie’s handless arms had been cauterized by burning. He was trying not to look at her ankles.
‘And guess who’s coming with us,’ Billy-Joe said. His hand and wrist protruded from beneath her armpit and now his fingers began to move, tearing parts off her.
‘Let her go, Billy-Joe,’ Martin said and was distantly aware that he’d spoken a little rhyme. It didn’t sound even a bit like a magic one.
Billy-Joe shook his head. ‘Like I say, we’re going to hell, my old story-book editor. Not just me and Janie girl, but you and Drezy too. And the fuckhead behind you. We’re all going.’
‘Is this real?’ James said from behind Martin. He sounded like a five-year-old at a showing of The Exorcist.
Martin nodded.
‘We are pleased you’ve come,’ Billy-Joe said. ‘Aren’t we, Janie?’ he added and shook her.
Janie squeaked. Blood dripped from her mouth.
Billy-Joe nodded at his wife. ‘Cry baby,’ he said, rolling his eyes. He dug his fingers into Janie’s rib cage and she produced a scream which made Martin want to die.
Then Martin was yanked aside and a blur of metal passed his head. James had come to the end of his tether and struck out. But Billy-Joe and Janie both vanished instantly beneath the blow.
‘Oh Jesus!’ James cried.
‘A trick,’ Martin squeaked. ‘That’s all. A pretty picture to fool us!’
Black Rock’s interior did not look as it did in Martin’s imagination, or as it had been described in the pages he’d read of Peter Perfect’s book. Where it should have been carpeted and decorated, it was bare and empty. There was nothing here to suggest the house was inhabited at all.
‘What do we do?’ James asked.
‘We go in and look for your girlfriend, of course,’ Martin replied.
And there she was, at the far end of the hall: Martin’s little Essenjay, dressed in a man’s white shirt and nothing else. A distant part of Martin noted what fabulous legs she had. She was looking directly towards him, but didn’t seem to be able to see him. It was something to do with the haze in front of her, Martin knew. Peter Perfect had placed it there to confuse her.
‘Essy!’ he shouted.
‘That’s not her!’ James said, placing his hand on Martin’s shoulder. ‘It isn’t her, Martin. It’s… something else.’
‘This way!’ Martin yelled, ignoring him. ‘This way, Essy! We’ve got her, Jimmy boy. We’ve got her!’
Martin started forwards and felt James tug him back. He spun round. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he screamed and knocked James’ hand away from him.
‘Don’t, Martin. That isn’t her. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t her. Don’t go down there. Don’t!’
Martin glared at him and turned away. His little Essenjay was there and she was stuck behind something that looked like a heat-haze, but he would have her out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. No problem.
‘I’m coming Essy!’ Martin yelled, and as he started down the hall, James grabbed his shoulder again and shouted something at him.
Martin didn’t hear it. He shrugged James’ hand away from him and sprinted down the hall.
32 - Retreat from Black Rock
Which left James.
Martin had a weak point and Peter Perfect knew exactly what it was and had gone to work on it. Martin had seen Drezy and wild horses weren’t going to keep him from her.
The thing down there, he would later admit, had looked rather like Drezy for a moment. After that it had begun to look like a human sized column of melting pink candle-wax. What worried James most was that the rippling waxy thing smelled rather like fire lighters. The paraffin odour reeked of potential disaster. James had always looked at those innocuous white blocks and told himself that there was a fire waiting to happen.
And, in his judgement, this was exactly what the thing at the far end of the corridor was. Literally. Fire waiting to happen.
H
e was bigger and faster than Martin, and was closing on him fast. Martin was almost within reach now and if James could just grab hold of his jacket, he could yank him off course, swing him into the wall and it would be over and done with. He leaned forward and stretched out his fingers. For a moment they brushed against the flying cloth of Martin’s jacket. James grabbed and came away with a handful of nothing. In desperation, he launched himself at Martin’s legs in a rugby tackle. A moment later he was trying to keep hold of one flapping trouser-leg and one shoeless foot.
A moment after that, Martin was down, skidding on the bare and dusty floorboards. The pickaxe handle thumped against the wooden wall panelling, but he didn’t let go of it.
‘You cunt!’ Martin screamed, kicking out at him and crawling away as James tried to restrain him.
‘It’s not her!’ James shouted as Martin broke away on all fours. ‘It isn’t her!’
Martin stopped of his own accord when he reached the shimmering patch of air that stood between the end of the hall and the flowing waxy column that looked like S’n’J.
‘Oh my Christ!’ he moaned. ‘She’s melting!’
‘Get up!‘James screamed. ‘Quick!’
He was on his own feet now, but Martin was just kneeling there, one hand around the axe handle and the other clapped to the side of his face, expressing anguish like an actor in a silent movie.
Seconds, that’s all! James told himself. Seconds before we die!
He reached Martin, took hold of the collar of his jacket and hoisted him to his feet.
‘Out!’ James screamed into Martin’s face and began to drag him back up the corridor. Martin didn’t resist, but he didn’t help by walking either. He’d gone board-stiff and James had to pull him along by the armpits. His heels made tracks in the dusty floor. Half-way down the corridor he lost his other shoe.