Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  She couldn’t say “Grandad” back then. It was too hard a word for her. She called him “Gaga”.

  “Gaga,” she said now, the first time she had uttered the name since his death in 1976. It was like understanding what life meant. It was like, for an instant, glimpsing a detail of God’s face. He might as well have died yesterday, so fresh in her mind was he now. And suddenly she could remember how he spoke. The richness of his voice slammed into her consciousness with such clarity that she staggered. Sean reached out and grabbed her arm. He appeared to her as though through a sea of syrup. His eyes were wide, his mouth comically stretched. Was he shaking his head?

  Emma flapped his arms away and turned again to her grandfather. He was laughing, his eyes screwed up, happy wrinkles squeezed into the corners of the face. “Count my happy wrinkles,” he’d say. “Count my happy wrinkles and times by five, that’s how long I’ll stay alive.”

  Here he was, saying things to her again that she couldn’t hear. Conscious that Sean was behind her, reaching out, trying to stop her from being with a man she had loved so much, she ran to her grandfather, arms outstretched. The flames, when they consumed her, didn’t hurt at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: SALAMANDERMAN

  “CROSS HIS PALMS with crimson, traveller,” the nut said, capering in Will’s wake like a harlequin on speed, busting his guts to impress a king. Ahead of them both, a man in a long brown coat was striding across the cricket pitch, the straps of his First World War flying helmet whipping around his neck in the wind.

  “Plasma or fire, he takes either,” the nut was saying now. “He’ll juggle with flames and make your blood disappear into his skin.”

  Will was exhausted, and in no mood for verbal trickery. After recovering from his faint, the bus driver giving him a cup of tea from his flask, he had thumbed a lift to Sloe Heath from a guy in a lorry on his way up to Leigh. At the hospital entrance he had stood for an age, as sunlight began colouring in the things around him, not quite believing that he had reached his destination. His relief was offset by the hollowness of losing Elisabeth and Sadie so close to his target. If it wasn’t for him, neither of the women would be... Well, best not to think too much about that.

  He had not been approached by any staff as he made his way through the hospital grounds. It seemed that they were quite happy to allow pedestrians to use the path through to the north end of the site. He had barely walked for five minutes before he was accosted by this nut and his tall, silent, striding friend.

  “Where do you want to go?” the nut asked. “Where do you want to be?” He was dressed in blue plus-fours and a white T-shirt. A red baseball cap was jammed down on his head, the peak violently curved. He wore tiny round sunglasses. His eyebrows were conjoined, forming a single black bar above the lenses.

  “I don’t know just for the time being, thanks,” Will said, in what he hoped was a dismissive way.

  “Just browsing, are you?” the nut said, and gave him a shocking, wolfish grin, full of long, white teeth. “Tarry a while,” he said, putting on an upper-class accent. “Take tea with Christopher and I, and we’ll talk of how we might help you. He said you’d be coming. We waited for days. But he was right. He was right. You came.”

  Christopher wasn’t hanging around to see what Will would do. Will shrugged. It was just nice to get the offer of help after such a long time making his own luck. Keeping up with someone who was around six and a half feet tall wasn’t easy though. Will and the nut had to jog in order not to lose him.

  “What’s your name?” Will asked, in an attempt to halt his plasma and fire nonsense.

  “Yoda,” the nut replied.

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Tonto Moratorium-Pith. Junior.”

  “Yoda it is,” said Will, trying hard to conceal his irritation. “What about him?”

  “That,” said Yoda, reverentially, “is Christopher.” He said the name in a voice filled with awe and looked at Will expectantly, as if he should know who he was talking about.

  “Who is Christopher?”

  Yoda affected a puzzled look and pointed at the diminishing figure. “Christopher’s him.”

  “Yes,” Will said, patiently. “I know. But who is he?”

  “He is special,” Yoda said. “Come on. He makes blinding tea. And biscuits. Sublime biscuits the like of which you have never eaten.”

  The sublime biscuits turned out to be a plate of malted milk, ginger nuts, and Jammie Dodgers. In a room that was like a shrine to brown, Christopher served tea from a brown teapot and sat cross-legged to drink it, his attention solely on the television, which was broadcasting a Rita Hayworth film.

  “He won’t blink while he’s watching this,” Yoda educated Will. “But his mind will be ticking over like a Swiss clock factory.”

  Will slurped his tea and ate more biscuits than he was probably welcome to, and found that they were sublime after all.

  Yoda said: “Watch this.”

  He cleared his throat and crouched by Christopher, looking up at his face as a mother might regard a son who had just come top in an exam.

  “Twenty-eighth of May 1959,” he said.

  Christopher said, in a sing-song voice: “Thurs-day.”

  “Fourth of February, 1962.”

  Christopher said: “Mon-day.”

  Will sniffed. “Is that right? How are we supposed to check?”

  “You try him then, doubting John-Thomas.”

  Will shook his head. “This is stupid.”

  Yoda took off his sunglasses. He might as well not have bothered. The eyes were small, black and round. Red marks remained where the bridge and arms had been. “You pig our biccies and won’t play? Then git, boy. Git. And see if anyone else will help you out. Our hospitality is third to second. And we’re second. And we happen to be second to none and all.”

  “Sorry,” Will said, and thought of his own birth date. “Christopher. Eighth of June, 1970”

  Christopher said: “Mon-day.”

  Will clapped slowly. He thought of the date he had lost his virginity. “Tenth of May, 1986”

  Christopher said: “Sa-tur-day.”

  “Hurrah,” Will said. “Nice trick. Impressive.”

  Christopher turned to lock eyes with him.

  “Oh dear,” Yoda said. “You distracted him from his viewing.”

  Christopher was crying. He said: “Flame me.”

  “What?”

  Yoda was flapping. “You heard him. Quick, quick, or it’ll be blood he needs. Where are the matches. Where are those bloody-goody matches?”

  He reached over and drew Christopher’s hand out, palm upwards. Yoda struck a match and gently placed it onto the skin. The match flared and went out. A line of smoke rose from Christopher’s palm. Christopher leaned over and inhaled it.

  He said: “21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. 22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. 22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. 23rd January, Birmingham, 10.19 p.m.”

  “What’s this?” Will said, laughing nervously.

  “I don’t know,” said Yoda. “He’s done it before but I don’t know what it means.”

  “Write them down,” Christopher said. “Write them all down. You’ll wish you had if you don’t.”

  He went on for another ten minutes, listing dates and locations and specific times. His tongue peeking from between his lips, Yoda scribbled what he was saying on the inside cover of a tattered Graham Greene novel. When Christopher had finished, he fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be revived, even when Will started kicking his chair and demanding to know what these dates meant.

  “Leave him,” Yoda said, reverentially. “He has spoken.”

  “Spoken gibberish, more like. I shouldn’t have come here. What a waste of time.”

  “Christopher said, while we were waiting for you, that the girl wasn’t dead. That she would return to you. Soon.” Yoda’s beatific smile failed to curtail Will’s sudden rage.

  “Sadie? What do you kno
w about it?” he shouted, leaping from his chair and causing Yoda to rock back on his heels and fall to the floor. “Where is she? What about Eli? Cat?”

  “I don’t know,” Yoda said, trying to crawl away. “I don’t know. Christopher said...”

  “Christopher said? Christopher said? He doesn’t fucking know me.”

  Will didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a very strong feeling he might actually try to harm Yoda or Christopher, anything in order to get some information from them.

  He was reaching down to grab hold of Yoda’s T-shirt, ignorant to the barked demands for an explanation for his presence from the starched nurse standing in the doorway, her hands squirming together. He was reaching when, out of the window, he saw the mountaineer, Flint, striding towards him across the grass, gripping by the hair the heads of Elisabeth and Sadie.

  But then he saw that it wasn’t Flint after all, just a groundsman carrying buckets of pondweed. The nurse had her hand on Will’s arm now, but he couldn’t turn away, even though the shape of his shock had been softened, made manageable.

  “I think you should leave, sir,” the nurse was saying, at the same time as exhorting Yoda, whom she called Mickey, to get up and tidy his magazines. “It is you who should be leaving, isn’t it?” she said to Will, her brow knitting as she volleyed a glance between the three of them.

  “Probably,” Will said, shaking his head. Nice place, he thought. Even the staff get in on the madness. He took the Graham Greene novel and stuffed it in his coat pocket, wondering what he should do now. So much of his hope had been pinned on Sloe Heath that he had been unable to see beyond what might happen here. He had hoped to find an answer to Cat’s death, or even to find Cat’s killers. He had not expected this Laurel and Hardy nonsense to impede him. There must remain some kind of clue here – why else would those murderers have mentioned it?

  Unless, he thought grimly, as he headed for the exit, he had misheard after all and had wasted all of this time. If that was the case, then he deserved to wander these corridors for ever, with the rest of the nutjobs.

  “No, no, no,” he heard Tonto/Yoda/Mickey whining, “you’re not right. You’re not right,” and the increasingly shrill demands of the nurse to shut up and play nice.

  Will ran his fingers along the dense block of pages in his pocket, wondering what the dates could mean. A slap resounded through the shiny corridor, followed by the smash of a lamp. Will heard Christopher, his voice laden with sleep, laced with terror, say: “You promised never to hurt me! You promised you’d leave me be!”

  And now someone else was speaking, but it wasn’t Mickey and it wasn’t the nurse.

  “Did I make a mistake?” it asked, in a voice that sounded full of wetness. “Did I err?” An airless giggle tightened Will’s skin. He stood in the middle of the corridor, looking back the thirty feet or so to the open door on the left. Thin shadows jerked across the blade of pale sunlight that had collapsed across the hallway matting. Mickey and Christopher weren’t talking any more.

  Will crept back towards the doorway.

  “Was it him?” the nurse was asking. “Was it the other?” Her voice was muffled, and punctuated by rhythmic, moist smacking sounds. A lump stuck in Will’s craw; he suddenly could not get the dream memory of himself fucking Sadie out of his mind.

  As he reached the crack in the door, he moved only his neck, stretching to make sense of the movement within that narrow gap. He saw the nurse half-undressed. But then, how could clothes be expected to cling to her when her own flesh could not? She was gamely trying to gather loops of subcutaneous fat as they peeled apart from the muscle, like so much molten cheese. But her true focus was elsewhere. It looked as though she were kissing Christopher. Her mouth was fast against his, but surely her face should not be journeying so deeply. He heard her trying to talk again, as she burrowed further. The tall man’s body hung slackly from the powerful joist of her neck. His leather flying helmet jiggled around his throat.

  Will turned and ran when he saw her teeth begin to inch their way out of the back of Christopher’s skull.

  “My God,” he moaned, as he hurtled for the exit doors, waiting for the crash of her pursuit. “God.”

  Outside he pounded across the car parks, past a gaggle of white-coated doctors bewildered by his haste. Climbing the rise that took him onto the cricket pitch, he risked a look around and saw the nurse’s arm like a prop from a horror film, reaching out through the brick wall.

  “Fuck.”

  The cricket pitch was greasy from the previous night’s downpour, and Will forced himself to traverse it before he checked again as to her whereabouts, lest he slip. He felt horribly exposed on this huge square of lawn, the naked trees surrounding him, rattling in the wind. The space made him aware of the frantic schuss of his coat and the hiss of his breath as he sprinted. The colour and shade of the grass merged and separated under the insistent wind, like the nap on a suede coat when it is brushed. He was almost at the other end of the pitch when he saw the nurse emerging from the grass: a swimmer hauling herself from the deep. She even shook her head a little, as if to rid her ears of water. He viewed, with nausea, how scraps of Christopher’s face clung to the uncertain flesh of her own, how green blades from the pitch slashed her skin as she dragged herself clear and turned to look up at him.

  He wouldn’t meet her gaze; not until he had to. Not until she had him and he could look nowhere else. He swerved right and scampered for a ramp that would take him into the laundry department of the hospital. Large, lidded skips queued outside, bulging with yellow plastic bags awaiting incineration. The smell of shit and disinfectant hit him like a shovel as he shouldered the door open; he heard the ratty clitter of what could only have been claws moving fast across the road in his wake. Elbowing past great steel cages rammed with dirty linen, Will ducked into a mess room and forced himself to freeze. A kettle was boiling on a Baby Belling, funnelling steam into the face of a chimp on a calendar. That day’s Sun fought for possession of the small table with a series of coffee rings and a bowl of labelled keys. Will silenced the room by removing the kettle from the hotplate. Sweat blinded him. He blinked it away. What if she was smelling him out? As if to confirm the fear, he heard a snuffling in the corridor, as of a dog pinning down the location of a hidden bone.

  When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was her. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.

  “Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.

  She made to rub her hands together but the mime only resulted in her gluing the muscles of the two limbs together. Her flesh stretched and tore as she attempted to separate them, and, her concentration lost, she made herself fully known to him, shedding the hastily donned disguise of whichever hapless cleaner she had devoured outside. Will took two steps towards her and swung the kettle, connecting with her head just above the right eye. There wasn’t any sense of jarring, just a sickening giving way of the meat, as if there was no bone beneath to support it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Boiling water spattered her face, and poached an eye in an instant, turning it opaque. Her shriek, Will guessed, as he dived for the doorway, was not of pain but of frustration. He didn’t hang around to see how that fury would manifest itself.

  He clattered through corridors, turning left and right at random, hoping that the sickly-sweet smell of medication, disinfectant, and mental decay would unhinge her and shake her off his tail. He thundered out onto a tarmac drive that led to the carriageway. He was half-way up the gates, trying to cock his leg over the evil spikes without skewering himself, when he heard her behind him, mewling like a lost pup. He watched as she staggered after him, and feared that there would be no respite until she had him dead and ingested.

  In the seconds before he managed to disentangle himself and
drop to the ground, he found himself marvelling at her mercurial skills, no matter how clumsy they were, because he knew she was better than she had been when he first encountered her and that she would no doubt continue to improve. He backed away from the gate as she shambled towards it, reassembling herself from whichever body patterns she had absorbed and made her feel comfortable. She hit the gate and wrapped herself around its bars, becoming interstitial, forcing the solids through her body with little grimaces of pain. He didn’t hear the sounds of tyres screeching on the road, or the blare of a horn. It was almost, in the moment that the car hit him, that Will had become like her, so that instead of being shunted onto the road the vehicle would simply travel through him, and he would filter the metal and plastic and leather and tissue through his body until it was on the other side of him, and the car could go on its way.

  He didn’t see her finish her journey through the bars. He was too busy screaming at the pain that was ricocheting through his body. And dimly, he was aware that the scream was not just for his pain, but an accretion of agonies that had heaped upon him over the last week. Agonies and terrors in equal measure that his body, in extremis, was only now beginning to deal with.

  PART THREE

  ULTIMA THULE

  Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us.

  – Gustav Hasford,

  The Short Timers