Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  Sadie liked to ride him naked. She liked it better when he had his shirt off too. She bounced around as he galloped through these catacombs, a nightmarish Godiva and steed, pulling at his hair to turn him left or right. When he was allowed to reduce his speed, he padded along, breathing hard, checking the progress of his strange disease as it turned his limbs black. The infection was reaching a critical stage, he saw. His flesh and bones were becoming as pulpy as overripe bananas. These parts – his shoulder, the lower portion of his arm – had been digested by the monster in its sac via some supernatural method of ingestion. Something was going to give soon. He wished it hurt more. To simply see his body failing like this without even the remotest twinge made him feel inhuman, unreal. He knew he existed at some level in the world of the living, but any dignity he might have had here was being literally stripped away.

  “Cherub will be on solids before long,” Sadie commented blithely, as if she were relaying to him the price on a tin of carrots.

  He would kill himself, he decided, coolly. If Joanna had forgotten about him or the infection looked likely to incapacitate him, he would end it somehow. And he would try to find some way of taking the bitch and her fucking demon child with him.

  SHE COULDN’T DREAM of anything else, she found. And it was strange, but whenever she settled on an aspect of it, her mind, unbidden, tossed her little nuggets of information. It must have been a result of the trauma of her accident, she thought, a jolting of her brain that meant it spewed out facts at every possible opportunity. It was as if her imagination had been given a power surge.

  This man, for example, with his brown curly hair and hurt expression. Big brown eyes. He looked lost and lonely. And, without digging for it:

  His name is Will.

  “Oh really?” she whispered.

  “Chick?” Her husband leaned over her.

  His name is Harry. She giggled.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t feel anything,” she said. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to return to her curly-haired man, with a mouth that looked so soft and red that it might burst when you kissed it.

  “You’re very lucky, you know,” Harry said. “We thought you were a goner. But you came back. My strong chick.”

  She said, “Water.”

  “Water you shall have,” he said, folding his newspaper and leaving the room.

  He didn’t look well, this Will chap. He looked scared and cold and injured.

  He’s been shot. He’s in danger.

  “I don’t doubt it,” she muttered. A nurse put her head around the door, smiled, and retreated.

  She pictured Will in a bar, looking around him like some hunted animal. And then it was as if her brain gave up its control and Will turned to look at her mind’s eye. “You promised,” he said. “Find me. Follow me.” He raised his glass in a silent toast and drank the contents, never taking his eyes off her.

  “I can’t,” she said. “My injuries. I think... I think I was paralysed.”

  His eyes on her as she opened them, the first time. It must have been a dream. That place with the strange emulsified tones, the glaring whites and the glossy blacks. Like walking through a negative strip of film.

  “You aren’t paralysed. You were lucky. It’s just bruises and bumps. You made a miraculous recovery.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Will.”

  When Harry came in and saw Joanna sitting on the edge of the bed, timorously combing her pony tail, he dropped the glass of water.

  “I need you to take me somewhere, Harry,” she said.

  THE MOOD OF the night was on the wane. Sean could see it in the way the scars bled into its colour; could hear it in the hum – like that of bees trapped in a jar – that steeled in from the invisible horizon. The grey smocks on the hill had vanished. They were alone. The sealed, scarred walls of the ziggurat leapt away from them, its uppermost heights lost to the dark.

  “Do you think it’s safe to be here?” Emma asked.

  He turned to her; she was watching his face. “I’m sure it is,” he soothed. “How bad can their monsters be? I’m sure they’re just seeing little flashes of what it’s like back where we’re from. Maybe they’ve forgotten. They see a bus or a plane and, well, if you didn’t know what they were, I’m sure you’d be scared too.”

  “I am scared.”

  Sean kicked her playfully in the seat of her jeans. “Come on. We’ve got to find a door.”

  They moved around again to what Sean guessed must have been the rear of the building, abutting as it did the edge of a thicket of dense purple and green reeds. There was no obvious route up to any of the windows, which were, in any case, much too narrow to squeeze through. Sean was about to suggest that there might be a more prosaic means of entry, similar to their passage to Tantamount, when Emma noticed the stream.

  It was a paltry affair, piddling between the reeds like urine pissed into the woods by a drunken camper. Yet it was constant, and it ran down through the thicket to a point where it met the ziggurat and ended. They spent five minutes dragging away the reeds and ferns that were clustered around the base of the ziggurat. A metal grille, badly corroded, framed the water’s route into the building; they could see the trickle disappear into a throat of black. Sean worked his fingers between the struts in the grille but he didn’t need to pry it off: it broke under pressure.

  “I don’t think I can go in,” Emma said.

  “It’s okay,” Sean assured her, snapping more pieces of rusted metal. “We have an escape route, don’t we? We can pull ourselves out of it at any point.”

  “I don’t like it. I just don’t. The thought of pushing myself down a tunnel. We might get trapped.”

  “Are you listening to me?” Sean asked, pausing to look at her. She was sitting back on her haunches, her hands clasped in front of her, arms outstretched, as if she were offering him her wrists to be bound. “We can get out at any point. Whether it’s monsters or claustrophobia or a need to pee. We can do it.”

  Emma breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay.”

  Once Sean had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his shoulders, he edged his feet over the hole and slid into it until he was half-way through, keeping his body levered upright with his hands either side of the grille.

  “It might be that once I let go,” he said, “I’ll go very quickly. It feels as though it’s pretty well greased up underfoot. So come in soon after me, yes?”

  Emma nodded.

  Sean blew her a kiss and lifted his arms.

  There was no light whatsoever. But there was plenty of sound, the sluicing of the water and the hiss and chatter of unseen animals nesting in little ledges and bunkers off the main chute. The clank and throb of machinery was closer, echoing through the tunnel, causing it to vibrate as Sean slithered along on his backside, trying to keep himself from going into a spin. He heard Emma close behind him, yelping as the tunnel took unexpected turns left or right. Sean only became aware that the sides of the tunnel were closing around him when the water started showering the top of his head instead of providing a frictionless cushion for his back. He hit his head twice against the metal duct, but even though he drew his body in as tight as he could, he was slowing down. Emma’s feet slammed against his crown and he saw stars for a second. When everything became clear again, they were stuck and Emma was wailing.

  “This is fucking it,” she cried. “We’re going to be here for ever.”

  “Relax,” Sean said. “We’ll opt out, easy, and then we’ll come back in again and try to find another way. Portion of micturate, as we used to say at my posh school.”

  Emma said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”

  Sean pressed the cuff of his sweater against his mouth and felt for the pin secreted there. He withdrew it with his teeth and transferred it to the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Too fucking right,” Emma said. He smelled her breath, hot and sour with panic. H
e stuck the pin into the thin flesh of his wrist, relishing the bright pain and the tiny bubble of blood that appeared there.

  “Fucking Einstein,” Emma said, her voice screechy with panic. “Fucking Einstein.”

  Sean tried again, using the point of the needle to score his skin rather than puncture it. A beaded line of blood popped onto the surface. The pipe did not retreat, nor did it resolve itself as something else from the world he preferred.

  “Something’s not right here,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

  Emma wasn’t listening to him. She was thrashing around like a beached fish. He reached up and tried to stroke her legs, imbue her with some of the impossible calm that he was feeling, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  Trying to ignore her feet as they clouted his scalp, Sean probed the pipe with his feet, stretching as far as he could. Its bore did not seem to decrease much more. Travelling south was a risk they had to take anyway; they couldn’t return the way they had come. He began working on his clothes, shedding them. He unbuckled his jeans and worked them down his legs. By kicking off his trainers (they slithered down the pipe at some speed, giving him hope that the route, if they could just get going again, would not impede them) he was able to lose his jeans and then he worked on his jumper, hunching it back over his shoulder blades while all the time Emma kicked and cursed and screamed as her phobias came home to roost. He scooped as much grease from the sides of the pipe as he could gather and rubbed it into his hips and shoulders. When he began to shift, slipping incrementally down the pipe, he stalled his progress by grabbing hold of Emma’s trousers. Inch by inch he hauled himself up until his hand was able to undo her belt. As he dragged her trousers down over her legs she seemed to come to her senses.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled.

  “Look, trust me,” he soothed. “Take your top off.”

  She began to laugh. “Take my top off? What are you after? A fuck? Now?”

  “Emma, take it easy. Trust me, please.” Her trousers were in his hand. He handed them to her, asking her to stuff them behind her shoulders. He could feel, by the heat of her breath and the exertion of her body, that she was obeying him despite the protests. Her body slid down a considerable distance, threatening to block them both in, but he pushed out a hand to lever himself away from her. It was enough to set their bodies sliding along again. They gathered pace. He warned her to keep her head back. Seconds later, maybe half a mile traversed, the pipe opened out and they were upended into a tank of water at the centre of a huge arena, the walls of which twisted fluidly with umbral colours and shapes. Theirs was just one of maybe half a dozen similar pipes emptying into this reservoir. Other pipes came in, changed their minds, and plunged back out again through the wall, in black, wormlike U-turns. A fan beat slowly, high overhead, concealed by the steam rising from the hot floor. Sean could just make out, on the bottom of the container, another grille, much larger and sturdier than the one he had broken into. Maybe this recycled water was coolant fed to the area where all the industrious machinery pounded away. They heaved themselves out of the reservoir onto cold stone flags.

  “What is it they do here?” Emma asked, struggling into her wet clothes. “I mean, this place is supposed to be the dead zone, the final resting place. And what’s going on? They’ve got a fucking mine up and running.”

  Fully clothed, they cast around for an exit but found that there wasn’t one. Sean led Emma towards one wall and pressed his hand against it; it went through, visible but paler, like a vegetable blanched in boiling water. “The dead don’t need doors,” Sean said, cheerily. “And apparently, in here, neither do we. Come on.”

  WILL RAN UNTIL he dropped and then she flogged him. The thing in the womb woke as she beat him with a broom handle, and grinned at him whenever the fluid shifted it around to a better view. It winked at him, it licked its lips. Sometimes Will caught glints of teeth when it did this. Sometimes, in his darker moments, when he believed that Joanna had died or had forgotten about him (believed he was part of a dream?), he imagined the thing was sizing him up.

  Whether his mind was giving up on him or his injuries were causing delusions he couldn’t be sure, but he wondered now if the shadow he had seen in the church that morning, the morning after Sadie had forced herself upon him, was in some way an aspect of her reality, or a foreshadow of the thing that he had helped to impregnate in her. He had half-hoped, in some fractured way, that the shadow in the church had belonged to Catriona, or their dead child. A sign meant for him from them, a comfort.

  “Do you know somebody called de Fleche?” Will asked, breathing hard as Sadie turned her body this way and that in a full-length mirror that had escaped the fire relatively undamaged. A crack across the centre jarred the firm length of her flesh slightly as she stretched and twisted, eyes following each curve as if seeing it for the first time. Her use of the whip had brought her out in a healthy glow. She was sheened with perspiration.

  “I never looked so lovely,” she said, wistfully. “And I’ll always look like this.”

  “De Fleche? Know him?” Will persevered.

  She regarded him with ill-veiled disdain. “Of course I know him. Why do you think I was trained as an Insert in the first place? We were told the story, Christopher and me. We were given the meat and two veg of the whole affair.”

  Will took advantage of Sadie’s distracted attention to sit down on the cinder-caked floor. The meat of his buttocks spread a little too broadly and moistly for his liking. “But you fucked it up for them?”

  Sadie cupped her breasts with her hands and lightly pushed upwards. She licked her fingers and gently pinched her nipples erect. She shifted to let the light glance moistly off them, making a little affirmatory murmur. “They fucked it up for us, more like. We were promised all kinds of stuff. A lot of money, for a start. I was stuck in the shittiest job on the planet when I saw their advert. I was working in a canning factory. Who’d have thought they’d advertise for that kind of work?”

  “What happened?”

  Now Sadie had turned and was watching the muscles in her calves become taut as she stood on tip-toe. The foetus in its sac applauded silently.

  “What happened was that Christopher went mad and, well, I suppose I did too, to a certain degree. We both legged it, but I had a better grasp of this terrain and used it often. Chris couldn’t get his malfunctioning head around it. They caught him and put him in the nuthouse. Safer for everyone with him in there.”

  She bent over from the hips, her hands sliding down her thighs like some grotesque pole-dancer in a shifty drinking club. Her hand swung round to check on the curve of her backside. She made another approving sound, deep in her throat. Will could see that she was getting turned on. He pulled himself to his feet.

  Sadie continued: “They realised they had got it wrong. A bit gate-after-the-horse-has-bolted and all that, but that’s what happened. I’ve had a price on my head for some time but they’ve never been close to getting me. They realised they needed kids. Impressionable types. It would have worked too, but they fucked up again, didn’t they? And now de Fleche has got it all wrapped up, nice and spicy.”

  Sadie drew herself upright and stood opposite him, breathing hard. She was stroking the little V of fuzz between her legs. Will clenched his teeth when he glimpsed the thing in its womb: its tiny prick was hard and cherry-red, like a twist of lipstick.

  “Call the doctor,” she said. “I think my waters are breaking.”

  THE MAN IN the rugby shirt and the long scarf parked the car in the hospital car park, as close as he could to the main entrance. Then he turned to his wife. The hospital porter heard everything as he wheeled his laundry trolley from the geriatrics ward to the wash rooms, a brief trot in the cold between buildings. They had their windows down and it was a still, frosty night. He had good ears and the sound carried.

  “I still don’t understand what we’re doing here, Joanna,” the man in the beanie said. “You’re beginning
to scare me, do you realise that? Do you understand?”

  His partner fumbled for the door lock, her limbs moving as though hampered by glue. “I’m okay, really I am. Stop worrying, Harry. You’ll get crow’s feet.”

  “I’ll get that,” Harry sighed, climbing out of the car and coming round to the passenger side to help his wife. She felt brittle and hot under his fingers, like a pile of barbecued ribs. Her eyes had locked with the entrance doors of the hospital.

  “He’s here,” she said.

  “Who?” Harry demanded. “Jesus, Jo, we’ve been driving for three hours and you haven’t told me a thing. You haven’t even said you’re happy to see me.”

  Still gazing at the hospital doors, she cradled Harry’s face in her hands and kissed his cheek. “Darling, I am thrilled to see you.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “A friend is in need of my help.”

  “Who?”

  “A chap called Will. At least, I think that was his name.”

  Harry puffed out his cheeks in frustration. “We don’t know any Wills. You’re imagining it. You’ve been out cold for days, love.”

  “But you didn’t refuse to bring me here, did you?”

  “Of course not. If anything, I thought we could do with some time away. Get up here, see the Lakes maybe. Go further. It’s been years since I went up as far as Ullapool.”

  Joanna started walking towards the hospital.

  “Wait,” cried Harry. “God, you can hardly walk. We’ve got a wheelchair in the back of the car you know.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry but I need it. I need you to be in it. Do it for me, please.”

  The couple toned down their conversation when they caught up with the porter, who smiled at them and helped Harry get the wheelchair up the ramp after a rogue patch of ice made him slip.

  CHEKE WATCHED THEM move along the corridor after they had asked to see Will and were given a private room number. There was a policeman outside the room, warned the staff nurse. He might want to ask questions.