‘Tell me another, pray,’ Rachel said at the conclusion.
‘Did your father tell you tales?’
‘My father had no time for mere japes. He never told me a story. He never offered me his embrace. A goodnight kiss was precious rare. I believe he loved me.’
Tough love, Ruthie thought, who didn’t remotely believe in it, catching sight of Rachel’s reflection in the wall-mounted mirror they faced despite her efforts not to; and noticing in so doing so that Rachel was changing, transforming. It wasn’t just the honeyed sheen of her now unexpectedly luxuriant hair. It was everything. She was solid and nourished under the nightdress. The scent of her was wholesome and sweet. Her eyes were china blue and her mouth a crimson bud and there was expression on her face. She looked pretty and healthy and truly alive.
In a voice that was full and properly girlish she said, ‘Tell me another story.’
This was Shaddeh’s doing, Shaddeh’s deathly enchantment, it had to be. Ruthie couldn’t but wonder at the reason for the transformation. It wasn’t to make her feel more comfortable. There was something graver and more significant to it than that. There was, she sensed, a far bigger imperative.
‘Pray, another story,’ Rachel said.
Ruthie had lit candles. They were scented and she’d bought them at the same time as she’d bought the nightdress and the hairbrush and she didn’t think Phil would at all approve, but the scant daylight brooded wetly over the bleak vista outside and the candle flames illuminated gently. There’d been 12 Princess Avalon stories in total. Ruthie reckoned she could remember about eight of them fluently enough to recite them verbally. She cleared her throat with a cough and closed her eyes recalling and began another.
Patrick Lassiter was uncertain about what to do. It was now 4 o’clock in the afternoon, there were only a couple of hours of light left in the day and there was no sign in the sepulchre of their blighted, ambivalent little would-be saviour. He pondered on the risk of going to the storm shelter, which in his heart he believed to be the Being’s lair. Was there any point? If he put himself in jeopardy, he might force Rachel Ballantyne’s hand. Above all, she sought rest. He’d promised her that. No one else, he was confident, could deliver it to her.
He went there. He couldn’t think what else to do. The entrance was narrow, in its cleft of stone behind the stunted bush. He thought given its size, the shape-shifter would have to squirm to get its bulk through such a narrow aperture. The thought of that made him wince with disgust.
He found his way by torchlight. Inside the great chamber, a huge spider’s web had been spun, stretching from the high ceiling all the way to the floor, its rough strands the gluey thickness of a man’s arm, trophies thickly clustered at its heart. There was a watch cap and a camera and an outboard propeller. There was a pistol with a bloodied grip. There was a book, Lassiter knew without examining it was Thomas Horan’s journal. The web told Lassiter the creature wasn’t humanoid all of the time. He inhaled air with a feral, tainted stink and wondered where to go from here. He was exhausted of ideas and soaked through and he felt bitterly defeated.
He wondered why it bothered to ape a man, when its dimensions made the impersonation so inevitably grotesque and unconvincing. All the circumstantial evidence suggested that this was a difficult trick to accomplish. It required much painstaking study, the only reason he’d survived his island sojourn. He’d still been being studied when he’d fled the place.
He figured it might be because man was the dominant species on the planet and the Being recognized and wished to gain a sort of perverse kudos from that. Like a man, then, only bigger and vastly quicker and more powerful than a man, like a savage evolutionary step beyond man, enabled not by natural selection but by occult power. Lassiter shook his head. If this theory was right, the creature mythology described as Grendel or the Wendigo manifested vanity. Vanity was always a flaw making those that possessed it vulnerable.
Maybe the Being didn’t see itself as a monster at all, Lassiter mused. Maybe it was closer to the Nietzchian Superman rudely and abruptly brought to life. Smelling its departed stink in that vast and melancholy chamber, he actually thought it though more like the child-eating giants rampaging through medieval forests in folkloric stories compiled by the Brothers Grimm. Except of course, it wasn’t a fairytale, he thought, seeing the trophies shiver slyly at the centre of the web. It was a nightmare. And it was real.
He was out of ideas. His leads had dried up and withered away. He was down to speculation and his last vestiges of hope. He would go back to Rachel’s sepulchre on the bleak prospect of seeing her there and beseeching her to help them. He didn’t honestly at that point know what else to do.
Chapter Seventeen
It capered across the façade of their shelter, drawn by the light. It stole but a snatched glimpse as it slid over the lit glass and clambered up to consider for a moment on the building’s roof. It squatted in the deluge and pondered, its weight and mass untroubled as it rested there by the force of the gathering gale. It had hoped the young meat, the tender cuts it craved, would be soon coming. Now it had glimpsed one, here already, yellow haired and succulent. Could it resist?
They were coming in their numbers now, foolish and blind. The time for waiting was at an end, it thought, the time for the feast was upon them. They were the feast and there would be no gristle and soft bones in the succulent flesh of the one it had just seen chattering with its dark-haired companion through the glass.
It hungered. It had discovered that the females tasted infinitely sweeter than the men. The glass in their window was no obstacle to its gathering strength. It would indulge its appetite and doing so would not stop them, they were blind and stupid and would come anyway in their numbers to be weakly consumed as was their deserved lot and humble human destiny. It would not wait. It would feast now and it would savour.
The glass imploded behind them and Ruthie turned sharply and saw huge limbs wrestling through the heavy shards and above the limbs a swollen head with livid eyes and drool hanging and looping thickly from its leering mouth.
Rachel turned her head to their intruder. She did so slowly, almost imperiously, Ruthie thought. And she saw from its expression that the creature had been unaware outside of who Rachel Ballantyne was. It knew now, though. Caution flickered like a shadow across its features. Then the grin returned. It licked its swollen upper lip with a rough, barnacled tongue, squatting because the generous dimensions of the room still obliged the creature to fold its limbs into a crouch. It didn’t look cramped, she noticed, seeing the way the flesh of it rippled and roiled uneasily under horny bristles of body hair. It looked coiled.
And she heard its thoughts. They danced and capered uninvited through her mind. They were shrill with triumph. It slid the focus of its eyes to hers in thinking what it was. They were bloodshot eyes and they lustered with a savagery so ancient that the mind reeled as if with vertigo looking into them. She was aware of the awful stink of it, rough, bleak and inhuman. Ruthie fought not to piss herself in terror. Her heart stuck hammer blows against the anvil of her chest. Her scalp under her hair seemed to tingle and tighten in every follicle. She shuddered uncontrollably, struggling to remember how to breathe, crawling backwards involuntarily until the bed’s headboard creaked against the hard press of her spine.
Strong enough now, it said, strong enough to destroy the thing I’ve been obliged to hide from in the past. Ready to end the wait here and thus end that long indignity. And then afterwards you’ll perish too. And then the waiting begins, only until your remains grow cold, for I’ll savour you, madam, as carrion.
The creature extended an arm. The reflex was piston quick. The hand on the end of the arm was a clenched club the size of a bowling ball. It stilled a foot to the side of Rachel Ballantyne who didn’t react to it at all. Then it moved suddenly, with spasmodic speed, swatting her into a wall. She bounced off masonry and slumped onto the floor. Fingers the thickness of tow ropes plucked her up by her new ni
ghtdress and flung her upward to collide with the ceiling where she thudded and moaned before clattering back down to the floor again.
It toyed with her. She was a rag doll made brittle by antique bones. And the bones were breaking. Her little right leg was twisted grotesquely. Her tiny left forearm poked shattered through torn flesh. The creature dragged itself over to where she lay and hammered its fist into her face with a wet crunch of impact. It used its tongue to tease at a rip in her nightdress and tear it off her with a grunt. Rachel lay there petite and pale, blood filling her livid bruises, those of her ribs still intact, shaping a small cage under the stretched skin of emaciation.
The beast rested above her on its haunches. There wasn’t the room for it to stand up straight. It put its head to one side staring at Rachel in a parodic gesture of sympathy and then it picked her up delicately between both hands as though deliberately gentle now. It folded her and raised her to its mouth and Ruthie heard the soft snap of collarbones and spine. It unhinged its gaping, slathering jaws and Rachel disappeared as it swallowed her whole. Then it bellowed in primeval triumph and the remaining shards of the broken pane tinkled out of their sill and the walls seemed to shake with the magnitude of the sound.
I was wrong, Ruthie thought, could not have been more wrong. Catastrophically wrong, hideously mistaken about the magic’s balance of power on the island. She sniffed, she was crying. She was in mortal terror and filled with self-pity too but the tears weren’t for her. They were for Rachel Ballantyne, the poor, waifish, twice-dead child long cheated of life and now grotesquely perished.
Ruthie felt shipwrecked or crash-landed somewhere alien. There was nothing about this awful new world she recognized. She tried to keep still. The fresh aroma of pee and wet gush of it cooling on her thighs told her she’d pissed herself. Air shuddered in and out of her despite her efforts to remain motionless. Escape was impossible. A part of her mind was still incredulous at the fate befalling her. The creature was a nightmare made corporeal, stinking and solid, massive and inhuman, its primeval reek filling the suite’s air with a rich and revolting warmth. It had destroyed Rachel Ballantyne. It had tenderized the small morsel of her meat with its cudgeling fists and then it had consumed her.
That destruction, though, appeared to have come at a cost. The creature had retreated to where it could lean back against a wall. The fingers of its great hands clutched at its torso. They danced over the coarse bristles covering its belly in a spider-leg frenzy as if seeking escape from themselves. Ruthie swallowed disgust. There was something arachnid about the creature even when it disguised itself like this. It was a shape-shifter, wasn’t it? It was a living lie, an insult to nature, a corrupt, impossible sorcerer’s conceit.
It fought and struggled interminably and Ruthie sat on the bed’s counterpane as still as she could and watched it do so. She saw it dribble a yellowish fluid from its jaws and then heave. It heaved again. It labours, she thought, almost like some creature giving birth. She watched as something she thought akin to dread clouded its eyes. She watched as dread morphed into pain and then into the rictus mask of agony. It seemed to pucker and wilt. It moaned and shrank massively into a corner, folding its great arms and legs, seeming to diminish somehow.
And Ruthie remembered where this alien world was. She might have been shipwrecked on its desolate shore, but she knew its name. It was the Realm of Anguish and the Kingdom of Decay. It was the Land Without Light. It was Rachel Ballantyne’s domain, and she had the distinct impression the creature in front of her was being obliged to learn that sorry lesson now.
The creature convulsed forward and the vomit was expelled from it in a crimson caul that thumped and then shivered and decayed on the deep, creamy pile of the suite’s ruined carpet. Heat came off the caul as it shrank and withered away from a crouched shape within. The shape gained substance, hardening in growth while the creature that had voided it mewled and gasped and whimpered now.
When the figure escaping the caul came to resemble Rachel Ballantyne its growth accelerated and it sat up on the floor, limbs and torso shaping and swelling subtly to their familiar size. It was intact again; she was intact again. Ruthie saw that her clothing was tawdry and ragged and that her hair was once again dull and knotted and unkempt. The cloying stench of decay once again came off in nauseous waves from her pale, grimed skin. Her face was no longer pretty now but vaguely assembled, a child’s careless recollection, a living contradiction of death stubbornly reluctant to surrender what passed for its life. Edie had called her a living nightmare. It occurred to Ruthie that their time for fairy tales had been altogether brief.
Hardly worth the bother, make-overs, she thought giddily, they never last. She wasn’t far off hysteria. She was surprised she hadn’t gone into shock or simply passed out. She’d been chosen for this, singled out for it, honoured and cursed both. Cheers, she thought.
The creature mewled. Rachel was ominously silent, climbing to her feet, ascending a foot into effortless space, standing now on nothing more substantial than air, floating poised before it.
‘Kill it,’ Ruthie said. ‘Kill it, Rachel. I know that you can.’
Her voice was strange to her own ears, a guttural scrabble of urgent barks that didn’t sound like her at all. It debated fear and fury in its tone, this new voice of hers. Fury was winning, though.
Rachel spoke her voice was soft, contemplative. ‘It fancied it could best me. It entertained me briefly to allow it that conceit. Ha! I like sport. I’ve long sported. Twas my own creator gave this mean creature life. He possessed the key to the gateway it stole through into the world. That took but a fraction of the trick required in summoning me. Mine is truer magic, storyteller. Here I rightfully rule. So I lulled and sported with it.’
‘Kill it.’
‘Merely a game,’ Rachel said.
‘Kill it, please,’ Ruthie said. She could smell the odour rising from where she’d soiled herself. She needed to shower and change. That would wait. It occurred to her a bit desperately that she’d altogether run out now of stories. At least, she had of the sort that little Rachel seemed to like.
Rachel laughed. It was a high, harsh sound, an expression of glee. The creature panted and bled. It had cut itself breaking the glass. It must have done and the cuts looked to Ruthie as she watched to be deepening. Cuts became rents, furrowed into savage crimson wounds ruining its bristly hide. It groaned. Some of the wounds were developing a greenly gangrenous, spoiled meat hue. Ruthie wretched. Wind howled into the room, filling the space with cold, briny air from the darkness outside. All the candles had blown out.
She heard its voice, then, more accurately the rude clatter of its thoughts careening uninvited through her mind; It hurts, it hurts, I hunger and hurt, I want to feast, not to bleed and perish, I am riven and dying and it hurts so. I will bargain. I will reason. I will give.
Another, deeper, entirely implacable voice: You have nothing to give.
I will serve.
Silence. Then, I have no requirement of servitude from such as you.
‘Kill it,’ Ruthie said again.
‘Why would I kill it, Ruthie?’
‘You’d be saving lives.’
Rachel laughed again. The creature winced and flinched, a cowed monster, sickly pale, oozing blood. Rachel said, ‘You’re skilled at your craft, there’s no denying it. Your tales have a bright spark to them and they fair diverted me. But I’ve a fate for this creature you’d never in a lifetime think to invent.’
Ruthie said nothing.
Rachel said, ‘You’ll find Mr. Lazziter at the settlement my father built. Go now. Thank Mr. Lazziter for his patience and prey tell him I’ll be with him shortly. Perhaps remind him I have been patient too.’
They wrapped themselves in warm clothes and waterproofs and set off for the settlement. Ruthie brought her bag. She had more candles for the sepulchre. She didn’t mention this to Phil. He’d spent his time underground teaching Helena the words of Shaddeh’s incantation, lea
rned by heart from the final pages years earlier of Thomas Horan’s journal. The sorcerer had recently told Ruthie that it would no longer work and Fortescue knew that. But he’d had to do something to occupy a mind that would have been driven to distraction otherwise with worry over Ruthie. And Helena had been absorbed in learning the liturgy.
Ruthie thanked Edie for her surprise, soapy cameo.
‘It was all I could think of to do,’ Edie said. ‘I was kind of vacillating between nervous wreck and complete bitch and I’m not really either of those, most of the time.’
It was Helena who had guessed from below ground that Rachel had arrived. The power output metres on the generator had signaled it was working harder to heat the complex. She calculated a 10 degree fall in the temperature registered by the building’s thermostats on the basis of the metre readings. It was too great a plunge for the meteorological conditions on the island to have caused it.
‘She thought our guest might be responsible,’ Edie said, shivering.
‘What you did was incredibly brave,’ Ruthie said, ‘and incredibly well timed. I was losing it when I heard your voice from behind me.’
Edie shook her head. She said, ‘You’re an easy woman to underestimate, Ruthie, and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. But I think you’re actually braver and smarter than the lot of us.’
They found Lassiter, when they got there, sheltering in one of the hovels with a view of the breach in the settlement wall, cold and grim-faced. Helena had brought with her flasks of coffee and chicken broth and some bread she’d thought to defrost in the morning. Ruthie told him what had occurred and he ate bread and spooned broth into himself and they all drank coffee as the rain puddled around them in the gathering gloom.
‘I won’t be sorry to say a last goodbye to this place,’ Edie said.
‘Amen to that,’ Helena said.
The Colony Trilogy Page 73