Immediately, the HGV indicated and pulled onto the shoulder. Susannah ran alongside the lorry, its passenger side door opening even before the wagon had come to a stop, and clambered up into the seat.
She noticed the badge on his shirt pocket first – Come ride my long vehicle – then his sunglasses and an unattractive beard as tight and curly as sheep’s hair. The boy-in-a-sweet-shop smile. Those lenses could not hide from Cheke his long gaze into the valley between her breasts. She leaned over and let him have a better view, then she killed him. He jerked and bucked as if he were a robot and she a technician, trying to reattach some faulty wires in his CPU. His glasses fell off revealing a new expression for her burgeoning library: it was neither repulsion nor relief and probably wasn’t even a combination of the two. When she’d taken it from him she rested, trying to bring some harmony to the constant ripple of her body. Finally, he was still and she could begin.
The last thing she had been expecting as she closed in on Will was that her job would be executed for her by someone else, and a weak-looking invalid at that. She had dogged them, the man in the scarf and his extraordinary wife, intending to kill them both, but it was clear that the couple were going home. They had no impact on what was about to be played out here because they were oblivious to the situation, that much was clear from their expressions as they hurried from the hospital. Their agenda with Will was separate, inspired – judging from the abject look on the woman’s face – by pity. Fair enough. She would claim the kill for herself. Gleave would be none the wiser. It angered her a little that she had been dispatched to get rid of this runt of a man, this no-hoper, this failure. Will was nothing special, she felt. He was just somebody who stumbled upon horror and reacted as anybody might react, if their hand were forced. But, as Gleave had pointed out to her, to get to Will was to get to all of them. It was for such reasons that she was a doer, and not a planner.
As she fed on the gruel that had once been the driver, mopping up juices as his baseball cap deflated on a baked-vegetable head, she considered her next move. She had the scent at last, for the quarry in which she was most interested. It tingled in her nostrils like pepper. It was so fresh and near she could almost envisage its owner, sitting at a midnight table with a glass of something warming, riffling a newspaper, listening to the radio, his muscles squirming gently against each other, built for action.
Cheke brought the trucker back, scooted over behind the wheel and let his driving instincts take her over. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. That God-awful beard! She erased it, replacing it with Derek’s smooth jawline. Better. Much better.
THE FOREST HAD changed since their initial recce. Its purple boughs were streaked with moss. Mushrooms clustered in moist creases like rashes of acne. It seemed much denser, much more forbidding. Emma said as much as they strode deeper into it.
“I know,” Sean said. “Something’s happened. Something’s brought this on. Be careful.”
He wasn’t just pleading with her to be cautious because of the more menacing aspect of the forest, she saw. Great swathes of the thing just didn’t exist any more. Like blighted tracts of land in an otherwise green, rolling plain, the forest had suffered losses. It was difficult to stare into the abyss gouged out of the loam. It was plumbless, brimming with a vast pacific nothingness that was beyond anything that death could possibly mean. Looking into these vacuums was too much like studying one’s own heart. Emma shivered and hurried after Sean, who was picking his way over a series of collapsed branches. Magnificent trumpets of fungus had erupted across the timber, exuding a rich, meaty odour and a sweat too, which dribbled across the flesh of the growth and ringed its uppermost parts before lifting, weightless, into the black like some sort of strange, anti-gravity rain.
“Don’t touch a thing,” Sean cautioned.
There was death in the forest, as he had expected. How could there not be, in death’s homelands? This was death’s acres, death’s back yard. Death came out to play Ring-a-ring-of-roses and What time is it, Mr Wolf? Death told sick jokes in its own playground, where it was bully and best friend.
The corpses were lined up neatly for a while and then strewn higgledy-piggledy as though the person laying them out had grown tired of his own methodical approach. But they were not corporeal. They had owned the ephemeral nature of old cobwebs or dandelion seeds. Just walking past them caused enough of a draught to lift half a dozen of them into the air and separate them to the extent that it was hard to believe they had had any recognisable form to begin with. They were like candyfloss shells, a playtime dead.
Tiny creatures, that may or may not have been lizards or skinks, had spent so long sitting still on the limbs of trees that they had fused with them and become dreadful, blinking twigs. Spiders had spun webs of gold between the reeds and ferns, sometimes stretching a tightrope of glittering silk across the path. When Emma reached to swipe it away, it sizzled into the edge of her hand, branding her with pain. Sean caught sight of one of these trap spinners, a tiny pale orb ringed with eyes like succulent blackcurrant pips and legs that seemed too thin and long to carry even that infinitesimal weight. It didn’t shuffle off into the shadows when they approached; it stood its ground, slowly turning to watch them go by, milky venom oozing from a cleft beneath its eyes like sap from a rubber tree.
The forest was deep and dense. They drifted down an incline until the darkness was raven-blue, writhing in front of them. The roots of great banyan-like trees were too mighty for the soil and rose above it, choosing instead to decant their nutrients from the more slender boughs around them. The roots were knotted, huge things, hispid with moss like the limbs of men in repose. At the heart of one configuration, Sean saw a hand, white and stiff as asbestos board. The fingers jerked at him.
“Jesus,” Sean said. “Emma, come and help me.”
It was Will. They could just make out his face through the slow strangulation of roots around his torn, white body, and the scar in his forehead made by the police marksman’s bullet. Sean closed his mind to the fear that had been sown by the forest and tried to send Will a message, but Will was panicking too much to prove a clear receptor.
“My puh–” he was saying. “Myyy puh!”
Sean slid his hand into one of the cracks between a root and Will’s hot chest. He felt ribs with his probing knuckles: a stick being dragged across a xylophone. He was dimly aware of Emma’s attention wandering from Will’s rescue to something in his peripheral vision.
“Puh... kit,” Will breathed. “Puhhh-kitt!”
Emma was moving away. Sean made to call out to her, but now Will was trying to speak again and the earnest glare in his eyes, the effort going into it, made him concentrate hard.
“Tekkit,” he wheezed. The root cosied up closer to him, like a python beginning its death squeeze. White spittle had formed a crust on his mouth. He looked frostbitten and feverish and fucked-up. Sean realised he must be dead and that it didn’t matter how he looked any more. Will showed him his teeth and hawked up some strength from somewhere deep inside.
“Mah... pocket!” The sound was a violent gargle. Sean watched a split running up the length of Will’s torso and a thin slick of lymph flood out. “Qui...” he heaved, imploring Sean with his eyes. “Qui...” The split became a broad seam, flesh tonguing out of it like a dark red cloth fed through a mangle.
Sean tore at Will’s clothes, trying to find a pocket, any pocket. He found the mouth of one pocket and the neck of what was sitting inside it. He pulled it out. It was a slender phial of green crystals, with a label that read Paleshrikes. He held the container at arm’s length, looking at Will uncomprehendingly.
Emma said, “Sean.”
He turned. She was staring off into the trees, as if, through all of the vertical slashes of wood, she could see something else, something different. Some tree tops maybe a hundred metres away were shivering but there had been no wind on the hill, no indication of any kind of weather here. Now another clump of trees shivered, a little
nearer. There was a splitting, rending sound, a groaning and thrashing. The tree tops in the distance sank from view. Sean was put in mind of King Kong, a film he had first watched as a child. He remembered how frightened he had been when Fay Wray had stopped struggling against her bonds on the sacrificial plinth at Skull Island and looked up at the trees as they shuddered and parted with the coming of something that ought only be given life in the depths of nightmare.
Will was sending him another garbled message. “Lidov... porrit... qui...”
Sean again tried to make his mind a millpond, flat and still and deep. He ignored the ground-shaking approach and Emma’s increasingly urgent demands that they do something now. He focused instead on Will’s brown eyes, still clear and animated despite the fact that they, and the soft cradle of his face that they lay in, were gradually turning to soup back in the real world.
Sean sent: Will, relax. Tell me what it is you want me to do. Feed this stuff to you?
Will’s eyes became less intense, as if Sean had done something unexpected to disarm him, which, he realised, was exactly what he had done. The tree squeezed its baby to its bosom, five tendrils – slim tubers extruding from the tap root – tentatively meshed with Will’s hand like the fingers of a shy girlfriend.
No, Will sent, as much with his eyes as his mind. Open it, pour it on the tree. It’s foreign to this place. It’s poison.
Sean unstoppered the phial and shook some of the crystals onto his palm. They looked like bath salts. He flung them at the roots and the dense trunk and stepped back as the bark began sloughing off in great swathes, like the skin of an unfortunate who had been consumed by fire. The roots blackened and popped, petrifying in an instant. The whole tree took on the appearance of a child recoiling from a mad dog. Will slithered from its grip and lay gasping on all fours, keening and puking into the fractured loam.
“Nice one,” he said at last, sticking up an approving thumb.
“What is this stuff?” Sean asked, shaking the remaining granules in the phial.
“I picked it up in Gloat Market.”
“Where?”
Will shook his head. “No matter. I don’t know what it is. Weedkiller, maybe.”
Emma looked at them, a mix of disgust and dread spoiling her features. “Boys,” she said. “I mean, boys!” Her finger was pointing at the treeline as the great columns were felled in an instant. The noise now was deafening, a timber tide crashing against their shore. The final cluster of trees dropped to reveal no monster, no Kong, no dream demon from the Sandman’s bag. The pulverised trunks formed a path buzzing with wood-dust. A smell blasted over them of sourness, rotten timber heavy with the waste of weevils and disease. As if in sympathy with this little eco-disaster, a fresh puncture sucked away the ground into a limitless black throat. Far away to the right, a small group of grey smocks had gathered on the hill and were watching this new round of cataclysms with stoic indifference. It was as if they knew they were here for the duration, no matter what the outcome. Were they the true dead, the ur-dead? The people who had shaped this mirror-Eden only to find it, like the villages and towns and cities of the world, become cluttered with litter and pollution; populated by murderers and despots and the self-destructive. De Fleche, then, was the Serpent in this garden, knowing the smell and flavour of ruin and how best to help it spread. Vernon Lord was right to fear this place. Death, a release? A big adventure?
What was it de Fleche hoped to achieve? Where was the sense in building one last great folly and filling it with dark confections to soothe the dying, the agnostics who didn’t know, who hoped, but couldn’t be sure? What was the worth in luring shaky atheists who hammered up their barriers until death began to pluck at them and then removed the nails one by one, daring to peek through the cracks to see if, maybe, there was something else after all?
Emma said, her voice misfiring, “What is this?”
The wood-dust settling, they could see at the end of this arboreal gorge a figure sitting with his back to them. He was hunched over, gazing out at a mere ringed with brown, wilting reeds. Sean moved towards him but Will hissed at him to stay put.
“It’s de Fleche. He has to die,” Sean said.
“How, exactly?” Will asked.
The question flummoxed him. “I’ll busk it,” he said. “It’ll come to me.”
“This is his playpen,” Will warned. “He has more toys than you.”
The grey head of the figure vibrated. His hair danced as though it were plunged in water. Even at this distance they could see the black scimitar grin in his face, the gold tooth as it winked. “He wants you to go to him. Look, he’s psyched up for it. He knows he can finish you now.” He laid a hand on Sean’s arm. “There’ll be a better time,” he promised. “A fairer deck.”
“But Pardoe said we have no time left.”
“There’s time enough,” Will said. “I saw things happening, before... shit, before I was shot–” He paused at that, and tried to absorb it. Emma rubbed his shoulder. “This kind of decay is going on back home,” he said. “People passing back who have been dead a long time. I remember, when Cat died, a guy called Gleave who came to collect her and the woman, Cheke, the killer. He said something about ‘leaks’, about mopping them up. They have to be stopped, Sean.”
“But Pardoe was adamant that de Fleche–”
Emma said, “Pardoe is a dinosaur. All he’s interested in is carrying through a plan that’s twenty years out of date. Will’s right. De Fleche can’t do anything while he’s stuck here. He’s done what he set out to do. The wheels are in motion.”
Sean watched the old man swivel on his seat and gaze back at them. Distance reduced his features to a whitish smear. “I can’t believe that’s it. That’s all. There must be something more. De Fleche isn’t dead. He’s an intruder here. What’s the point of drumming up an army of dead people to walk among the living if...” Sean frowned, “...you weren’t going to come back when all the killing was done?”
“Who said anything about an army?” Will stammered, the thought of it, the weight of it settling in him like a badly digested meal.
The figure was standing now, turning fully to face the three. He began to pace towards them. At this distance, he seemed too angular and unathletic to cause them any harm. Sean bristled as if sensing a confrontation. Will pressed a hand against his chest.
“Go,” he said. “Take Emma and get away. Plug the leaks.” He offered a flattening of his lips which passed for a smile. “Do what I couldn’t do,” he said, bitterly, “and save a few lives.”
The old man was approaching quickly. From his hand swung a length of rope. They could tell, even at this distance – some eighty metres – that he was grinning, his mouth a scythe of teeth.
“Okay,” Sean said. “Okay.” He gave the phial back to Will and took Emma’s hand. He pressed the edge of his knife against the flesh where it joined and, fading as he drew blood, said to Will, “Watch yourself. You’re dead. It’s probably for the best that you try to stay that way.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: THE CUCKOLD'S NECK
THEY STOPPED IN front of an electrical shop in Market Gate to watch a news bulletin. Shaking cameras relayed live footage from Charing Cross Road of a cordon of mounted and armed police trying to peg back a mob of pale, unblinking corpses. They were untainted by putrefaction, these dead. It was as if they had been rehabilitated, captured at their physical peak, perhaps thanks to the abiding memories of those they had left behind. Nobody wants to remember the sick and the infirm.
Emma said, “How long, do you think, before we have the same problems up here?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Maybe never.”
“Yeah, right,” Emma chided him. “Looks like it.”
The town centre was deserted. When the clock struck the hour, Emma jumped and the sound flew through the empty streets, carrying its cold, lonely message.
Cars had been abandoned on the roads, some of them having flipped onto the pavement or bee
n involved in minor collisions with other vehicles. In one of the more serious accidents, a woman had been trapped in the driver’s seat of her Mini by the steering wheel, which had been pushed forwards into her chest by the force of a bus’s impact. A fire had broken out and ravaged her. Smoke rose from her charred remains. Her eyes swivelled as Sean and Emma walked past, and followed their progress along Sankey Street. Emma thought she was grinning at them but felt something rise in her throat when she realised it was only because her lips had been burned away.
At the town hall Sean broke away from Emma and jogged towards the taxi rank. The lawns of Bank Park surrounding the town hall were in need of a trim. A lawnmower had been left in the middle of the task. A single gardening glove lay next to it, bright orange in the green.
There were no drivers in the taxis, but more than one had failed to take the keys out before leaving their cab. Getting into one, he started up the engine – a shocking roar that broke the silence – and swung the cab out of the queue, halting in front of Emma, who climbed into the back.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Farmhouse,” Sean replied. “Somewhere I saw a gathering of my softstrip friends some time ago. I didn’t get a chance to go in and look around. But I think that’s where their HQ is.”
The streets radiating out of town shed their drifts of traffic until the route was relatively unimpeded. Emma saw dark figures in windows looking down on the cab as it wound its way towards the dual carriageway. The houses in these terraced streets seemed to be affected by the tension in the air, the loss of community. They hunched together, seeking safety in numbers, and closed their eyes to the outside world. Their hard, cement faces found sympathy in Sean’s and – Emma noticed in the rear-view mirror – her own.
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