Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  Cheke followed at a distance, dumping the laundry trolley for a new prop, a watering can that was sitting in the reception area. When the guy pushing the wheelchair looked around at her twice, she slipped into the nearest gents’ toilets and reassembled herself. Derek came out of the toilet, smoothing down his hair, straightening his £500 Armani jacket.

  She was getting the moves down pat, now. Gleave had shown her where she was going wrong. He had taught her what pain was. Not what she thought it was. She had thought pain was being born into a world without asking for it. She had thought pain was sifting alien molecules – a wall, a door, a pane of glass – through her own. It wasn’t. That was nothing next to the agonies Gleave visited upon her. She had told him she loved him when he started. By the end, she wanted him dead, his family dead. She wanted to find the bones of his ancestors, dig them up, and stomp them to splinters. But she was focused. She knew what was expected of her, and any interest she had shown in tampons, hairstyles, or whether to wear a liquid-filled or an underwired bra, was forgotten.

  Gleave, standing over her, his arm in her throat up to his elbow. Gleave, ripping out her heart and showing her how black it was, how malformed. “Your heart in my hand, girl, and you stare up at me as if I was holding a sick puppy. You should be dead. If you were like us, you would be.”

  And then:

  You aren’t human, you will never be human... learn it... believe it...

  “Afternoon,” Derek said, as he caught up with Harry and Joanna. He held the lift doors open for them. “Which floor you after?”

  “Three, please,” Harry said.

  “Nice one,” Derek replied. “Me too.”

  WILL’S NOSE STREAMED with blood but it had nothing to do with any injury Sadie inflicted upon him. Out of the blue came a torrent of red. It was a fashionable colour. Sadie was on all fours, gasping as the sac tore open. Gore was flushing across the black floorboards, giving them a gloss that no varnish could deliver. The child wriggled on its back, trying to chew through the cord that connected him to his mother with teeth that looked like broken bits from a straight razor. Even as he did this, he was scrabbling with his hands, trying to gain purchase on the slippery boards, trying to crawl over to where Will was crouched.

  There was no exit behind him. High above, thirty feet or more, the ruptured stage let through shafts of granular light, thick with dust. The only exit was beyond Sadie and her grim spawn.

  Staunching the flow of blood with the back of his hand, Will stood up. Sadie swung her head to look at him. Her face was covered in sweat and darkened by blood, building up in her temples. Her teeth were bared and a rope of saliva shivered from the corner of her mouth.

  “Say hello. To Daddy,” she managed, the words coming out packaged in little coughs of pain. “Give. Daddy a big. Kiss.”

  “Fuck that,” Will said, and took off.

  He hurdled Sadie, but she managed to lift her forearm, which she smashed across Will’s shin. He toppled forwards and landed heavily against a rack of microphone stands. There was something wrong with the way he tried to stand up, and he saw that he couldn’t get any leverage from his hand because now it was lying, palm upwards like a weird ashtray, six feet away from his body. The thumb and forefinger made an OK sign. He closed his mind to what was happening. He stood up, shakily, and tottered over to the hand, which he picked up with the other

  Nice to meet you, I’m fine, how are you?

  before vomiting thinly and lurching away from Sadie, who had rolled onto her back, scrabbling in the wet for her crop. He stuffed the hand into his pocket and backed off, his head ranging to and fro, trying to spot the child in the gloom. Presumably Sadie was shielding it from harm. Perhaps it was too raw to harm him just yet. He eyed the microphone stands, their heat-warped, splintered bows of metal, but what use was a weapon here? He could slash, spear, or cudgel Sadie, but to what effect? She was this place and it was her.

  “I saved your life, you fucking bitch,” Will said, needing to say something, anything that might get through to her and stop her from causing his decomposure. She sagged back into her own juices and stared at him, her mouth parted, hissing through her clenched teeth a sound that might or might not have been laughter.

  Will jogged for the exit, briefly appalled by another spray of blood that gushed from his nose. He needed to find somewhere dark and quiet, somewhere he could turn his thoughts inwards, to make some sense of what was happening to him. Once free of the awful cinders and smokiness of the theatre, he ran until his lungs burned, ignoring the hellish fragments being enacted on these stages around him. He caught glimpses of animals forced into acts that made them shriek; shadowy things swinging on the ends of ropes in dank alleyways; men huddled around a core of something wet and pink that mewled when they leaned into it. He blocked it all out as he ran, or tried to trick himself into believing that the scenes around him were more benevolent than they appeared. It was the only way to deal with it. He had no choice. It was all move, keep going, the next thing and the next. It didn’t matter any more what leapt out at him or winked from the shadows. The goalposts had moved and he had to move with them. Keep going. Keep going. What was the alternative?

  He stopped running when the blood from his nose was smeared across his chest and splashed into his eyes, making him blind. He could taste it, hot and bright in the back of his throat, next to the sweetish flavour of his own depletion. The blood was an honest taste. It persuaded him that he was still alive and that getting away was still of use to someone, even if that someone was no longer himself.

  Up ahead Will saw a boat moored to the bank of a slow-moving river. He slid and scuffed his way onto the bank, where the heavy, organic smell of the water assaulted him, slapping him further awake. The boat was a small cutter tethered to a post with a series of old, fraying ropes. A faded name etched on a brass plate, Koimao, was attached with rusty screws to the bulwark. It listed heavily to starboard, and the aft deck was a riot of birdshit and sodden flyers exhorting visits to clubs that might well have been called abattoirs in another time and place.

  Cautiously, he stepped aboard, risking a “Hello?” before pushing open the cabin door and peering into the depths of the boat. A smell of boiled onions and vinegar. Six inches of brackish water on the floor. A coil of rope, fat and sodden like a snake on a chair fit for anything but sitting on. There was nobody on board. Will grabbed a rusty knife from a rack in a galley that was decorated with grease and mould. He went back to the bank and cut the boat free. Then he took his hand from his pocket and tossed it into the water. One of the black, spangled parrots gawked at him from the coach roof when he turned around.

  “Wanking hand, was it? Tough titty, tough titty, tough titty...”

  Will sat back and watched the bright and broken lights of Mash This retreat. The river had the cutter and it tugged it slowly with a current that rocked the collapsing vessel. Will responded to its rhythms, allowing the currents of his own exhaustion to pull him on too. He folded his damaged arm under the other, to keep it warm. The ancient wood of the vessel sang and cried as it rolled downriver. The mainsail, jib, and stay sail were ragged triangles shot through with holes. The water stretched out behind the boat like braids of hair slowly being plaited together.

  A querulous chittering.

  The baby’s hand wrapped itself – a wet, pudgy claw – around the rail. Its oversized head rose like an awful moon. Will saw the glitterflash of light off its razor teeth and felt a perverse wave of pride wash over him.

  HARRY TOOK IT in, sat down calmly on a chair next to the bed, regarded his wife with cool detachment, and whispered: “Are you completely and utterly out of your nutty bloody skull, woman?”

  “I promised him this,” Joanna said. “Like you promised me. I’ll sit by him until, well, until whatever.”

  “Promised him how?” Harry asked.

  “When I was in a coma I... well, I don’t know, I somehow joined up with him. There was a link there, Harry.”

&nb
sp; Harry was looking at Joanna as if she had suddenly grown a ginger beard. “You should still be in that hospital bed,” he said.

  “I’m perfectly fine, Harry,” Joanna maintained. “But this poor guy is not. Believe me.” She searched her husband’s face, but it was grey and flinty with worry. She took his hand. “Listen,” she said, “if I was making all this up, how come I knew that there would be a coma patient called Will in this hospital?”

  Harry shook his head. It didn’t seem enough to convince him.

  “Why don’t you wait outside,” Joanna said, gently. “Get us a couple of teas, yes? I’ll be out shortly.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Sit with him for a while. See if he wakes up.” She shrugged, smiled. “I don’t know.”

  Harry got to his feet and kissed the top of his wife’s head. “I’ll get us some tea then.”

  WHEN HE THOUGHT to look at the sky and try to find the moon, something to comfort him and make him feel rooted to reality on some plane or another, he was too far gone in sleep to manage it. Amazing, that he could drift off while that child, his child, that creature came slithering along the deck for him.

  In sleep, he saw Joanna’s face leaning over his. She kissed his lips tenderly. He couldn’t open his eyes to ask her what he needed her to do but he could pull back from the dream and imagine himself lying there between the sheets, gaunt with skin like tallow. With his good hand, his fingernail, he gouged a message on his sleeping form’s forehead. Blood magicked onto the surface of the first letter as he moved on to the third. The word sprang out of his skin and Joanna sat back, shocked.

  Do it, he urged, pressing the thought out of him with as much force as the child’s jaws as they closed around his ankle. He closed his mind to the terrible wet snacking and the absence of pain.

  Do it.

  OUTSIDE THE ROOM, the police officer looked up at Harry from his chair with ill-disguised boredom. A faulty striplight sizzled above, intermittently spitting bleached light or dropping shadow onto them.

  “I’m getting some tea,” Harry explained. “Would you like a cup?”

  The police officer shook his head.

  Harry left him and headed down the corridor to the drinks machine, wondering about the policeman’s hands. Pianist’s fingers, he had thought, idly, when he jotted down their names and addresses in his notebook. “I’m his ex-wife,” Joanna had said. But, he saw now, they weren’t pianist’s fingers. Folded in the policeman’s lap, they were thick and meaty. Like pork sausages.

  The light then, playing tricks. The light and the effect his crazy wife was having on his brain. By the time he got back, his hands being slowly scalded by the superheated tea in its flimsy plastic container, the policeman had disappeared and Joanna was leaning over Will, crying a pool into the tucked skin between his thumb and forefinger. Scars on the man’s forehead were vanishing as he watched. They looked like letters. What was it they said? Was it, was it Kill me?

  “It’s finished,” she said, looking up at him and smiling crookedly. “All done. All done.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: THE BLACK FACTORY

  THE ZIGGURAT WAS the tip of what was proving to be a monstrous iceberg, a labyrinth that twisted and U-turned, jinked and kinked back on itself like the fissures of a brain. Sean and Emma moved through the walls, children cheating the maze by crawling beneath its hedges. They were slowly advancing on the foundry sounds at the heart of the construction. Hot and cold air rioted against their skin. They smelled sour sweat and heard the hitching whimper of babies in discomfort. A snatch of melody, a lullaby. A scream that started off as something erotic and became terror-driven.

  Sean was remembering. It had been hard, over the years, to give much thought to the terrible occasion of his parents’ death, harder still to acknowledge their complicity in the use of him as an Insert. Cash had gone into their pockets while his mind had been invaded, tuning him into the frequency of the dead. It was difficult to accept that he had run away from home and fended for himself for so long without belief in his own ability. Perhaps it had been a way of blocking out the hideous memory of the double murder. He had run half the length of England but had failed to get away from the cold facts. He was different. Trying to gouge out that difference with a drill all those years ago had served only to illustrate his rarity. Trying to kill himself was as much an attempt to confirm that dreamlike knowledge that he could never take his own life as it was a need to damage himself into oblivion. Emma had been the walking stick he needed. Though she was growing ever paler, and tired-looking, in here she was strong and limber. Her eyes were wide and bright here. In here, her brain was lightning.

  “It’s opening up,” she said now.

  He saw she was right. The walls were further apart and the light was improving, deepening the corners of the corridors, picking out the patterns in the floor and ceiling. The patterns were replicated in the walls too, he saw, squinting to study what they might be. It was a little like staring at complex patterns on wallpaper, or the mesh of twigs in a winter tree. The patterns forced faces out of the wall.

  “Sean,” Emma said, her voice toneless, inelastic.

  He couldn’t understand her terse address. But then he saw that the faces were really faces, two-dimensional visages locked into the fabric of the wall like tesserae in a mosaic. They possessed animation, these tiles. They blinked and gurned and pouted, shifting along like the accretion of frost on a pond.

  “Who are they?” Emma asked.

  “People dreaming,” Sean said. “People dreaming of death. People dying. This is where our minds go when we sleep, when we’re closing in on death. The cusp of it. Death is like one huge plughole and when we sleep, when we play dead, it sucks us towards it.”

  “I can hear babies crying, Sean. It’s horrible.”

  “Babies know death well. They’re closest to it when they’re born. Being born is like cheating that plughole at the last moment. Babies scream at the moment of birth because they know what death tastes like. They know that they have been born in order to die.”

  The corridor broadened and then it was no longer a corridor because the walls sank and curved, feeding into the floor. They stood on a desert of faces that moved ceaselessly, minutely, like the incremental journey of a dune. A hundred metres away, the floor heaved up again and became a column that rose so high that they could not see the tip of it. There was no machinery here, but there ought to have been. The air was thick with movement, as though all of the molecules in it had been heated to a point of constant agitation. Some huge labour was occurring on a plane of consciousness that was beyond Sean and Emma. They felt the tongues of furnaces lick their foreheads and backs wet; puffs of arid air exploded across them from the pistoning of unseen hardware. Motors and rotors churned and whipped the air, girders plunged and spun as the giant, invisible machine ground out its unknown product.

  Sean ventured out onto the landscape, clasping Emma to him when its limitless expanse threatened to squash him to nothing. They approached the column, seeing at a distance how the faces were drawn into it and coiled around the cylinder as they were sucked up like the slashes of blood and bandage in a barber’s shop pole. The symphony of creation went on around them, smashing and howling as steel heated up and steam was vented and bolts and pulleys clanked together. Sean got a trace of its mischief as the column loomed miles above them. White tunnels, friendly faces, open arms. Brilliant light.

  “It’s feeding them,” Sean said, the faces on the column as they neared becoming easier to pick out. These faces were less motile, less lined. They had the serenity that comes with reassurance, with knowledge. When they woke, the corporeal forms that projected their identities down here would feel fresh and heartened.

  “De Fleche is behind this,” Sean said. “A sugar-coated version of what death is, slammed into the dreaming mind of those who need it. It’s like TV. It’s like bad TV.”

  “What is?” Emma was holding on to
his arm, trying to read the messages she saw in the twisting core of faces.

  “This place, dressing up death in a pretty frock and pearl ear-rings. Bit of slap. Bit of scent. All those pitiful fucks sucking it down, befriending the costume and not the clown that wears it.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” Emma wanted to know. “Is it bad to not be scared? Of dying, of death?”

  “No it’s not. But we develop our own defences. We read our holy books or we believe that Uncle Fred is ‘up there’ looking down on us, minding us as we dawdle after him, catching him up. We deal with death our own way. We pack our travel bag for that journey because nobody else can pack it for us. This...” Sean waggled his hand at the busy, hot air, “...this is force-feeding. This is Walt Disney on a bad day.”

  “But why is he doing it?”

  Sean said, “The dead are seeping back into our world, Emma. They’re infecting the living, damaging life, just as his being here is damaging this place too.”

  “Why though? Why does he want that?”

  “I don’t know yet. But we’ll find him and we’ll stop it.” He looked back the way they had come. “Out there is what death is really all about. The hill and the forest and the sea. And the monsters. Tranquillity and discord. It’s all we’ve ever wanted from anything we do. Life, stories, love... there’s no life without darkness. So it is here. So.”

  Emma kissed him. “De Fleche,” she said. “Where do we find him?”

  Sean looked at her. “The place where all the monsters live. In fairy tales. In fact.”

  Emma said, “The forest.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: POSITIVE ID

  CHEKE WITHDREW THE policeman deep into herself and allowed Susannah to come forwards. She stepped onto the hard shoulder of the M62 and waved at the oncoming articulated lorry as it steamed up the inside lane. She breathed in and pulled her shoulders back, smiled, showed Susannah’s tiny, white teeth.