One

by Conrad Williams

  Table of Contents

  Critical acclaim for The Unblemished

  Title

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES Chapter 1 RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

  Chapter 2 PRESSURE

  Chapter 3 DEAD CLADE WALKING

  Chapter 4 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

  Chapter 5 THE SEA EAGLE

  Chapter 6 TRESPASS

  Chapter 7 2500°C

  Chapter 8 ZOMBIES

  Chapter 9 THE PLUCKING POSTS

  Chapter 10 PICA

  Chapter 11 HIBAKUSHI

  Chapter 12 BREAKING AND ENTERING

  Chapter 13 TRACHEOTOMY

  Chapter 14 DESCENT

  Part Two LAZARUS TAXON Chapter 15 CITY OF CODE

  Chapter 16 SKINNERS

  Chapter 17 STALL WARNING

  Chapter 18 RAGCHEW

  Chapter 19 FOETAL ECHO

  Chapter 20 THE HINDMOST

  Chapter 21 SOMA

  Chapter 22 FEARFUL SYMMETRY

  Chapter 23 EXODUS

  Chapter 24 CAST-IRON SHORE

  Chapter 25 THE FARM

  Chapter 26 THE RAFT

  The Unblemished

  Primal

  My Work Is Not Yet Done

  Teatro Grottesco

  Thieving Fear

  The Grin of the Dark

  Banquet for the Damned

  The Perils and Dangers of this Night

  Critical acclaim for The Unblemished

  'His carefully crafted descriptions of horrific images, along with the ability to suggest they are even worse than words can tell, is reminiscent of Poe and the early stories of Clive Barker. Not for the squeamish, but no fan of literary horror should miss it.' The Times

  'The Unblemished, winner of the International Horror Guild's Best Novel award, is cleverly constructed, building relentlessly from intense, intimate terror to something on another scale altogether . . . the ruined London in the closing chapters of this stark gripping novel will stay with you a long time.' Guardian

  'Top-notch writing skills, poetic vision and beautiful prose raise this way above your Hammer House of Horror . . . unusual as well as highly accomplished terror.' Sunday Express

  'Williams is so good at what he does that he probably shouldn't be allowed to do it any more, for the sake of everyone's sanity.' Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  'Williams has built a whole mythology, one that makes the book feel like a cobwebbed relic from another time. Dust it off, if you like. Just do it at, say, ten in the morning. In a crowded room. In a military compound.' Time Out

  'The Unblemished scooped last year's highly coveted International Horror Guild Award, beating off some pretty stiff competition (which included some bloke called Stephen King). The Unblemished is a stomach-churning vision by an accomplished and courageous author and definitely not for the faint of heart.' John Berlyne, SFREVU

  'The Unblemished is a strong book that gets in your face and doesn't back down. Its unsettling nature is one of its biggest assets. This is one of the best books that I've read this year.' Bookspotcentral

  'Williams' threat emerges from the world like an optical illusion being revealed, then you find that society fell apart while you were looking somewhere else.' SF Site

  'A terrifying tale of violence and determination to survive. Highly recommended.' Monster Librarian

  'This book scared the crap out of me . . . In my estimation, Williams does so many things so well that there's really not much he can't do. He is one of the few writers working in the area of horror and dark fantasy who has my full attention all of the time. The Unblemished is further evidence of his superlative talent.' Jeff VanderMeer

  '[A] rich, emotionally engaging and extremely fast-paced novel . . . The Unblemished achieves the admirable, tricky task of interweaving physical horror with spiritual terror . . . an unapologetic white-knuckle thriller.' William P Simmons, Infinity Plus

  'Conrad Williams takes us on a roller-coaster ride through ancient buried secrets and body-horror invasion into the pulsing gut of apocalyptic British horror.' Christopher Fowler

  'The Unblemished combines a carefully orchestrated accumulation of paranoid detail reminiscent of Ramsey Campbell with passages of vividly described transformations evocative of early Clive Barker.' Steve Rasnic Tem

  'An apocalyptic nightmare narrated with great vigour, clarity and stylishness. Steel yourself for some hideous sadism – there's awe along the way.' Ramsey Campbell

  'A tour de force. Awe-inspiring in its sheer unsparing, unflinching, grimly horrifying view. One nasty piece of work.' Ed Bryant, Locus

  ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Conrad Williams is the author of the novels Head Injuries, London Revenant and The Unblemished as well as a collection, Use Once Then Destroy, and the novellas Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms and Rain. Born in 1969, he sold his first short story at the age of eighteen and has gone on to sell over 80 more. He is a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Manchester with his wife, three sons and a monster Maine Coon cat.

  ONE

  Conrad Williams

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9780753520529

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Virgin Books 2009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright©Conrad Williams 2009

  Conrad Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Virgin Books

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.virginbooks.com

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9780753520529

  Version 1.0

  For Zachary

  All these miles, and more.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I'm extremely grateful to Dr Christoph Winkler, Project Scientist for the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (Integral) at the European Space Agency, for his input regarding gamma ray bursts. Paul McAuley also helped with the science (and encouraged me when the idea for this novel was in its infancy). If there are any factual howlers, point the finger at me, not them.

  Thanks too to Rob Wilcock for details regarding oil platforms and for checking a couple of early chapters. Alan McGrath also chipped in with anecdotes regarding life on the rigs.

  Other people who helped during the writing of this book were Nicholas Royle, Shaun Hamilton, Simon Strantzas, Etha
n, Ripley, Zac, Mum and Dad. My superb editors at Virgin Books, Adam Nevill and Simon Lee-Price, made sure I didn't take my eye off the ball. Thanks also to Robert Kirby at United Agents.

  As always, Rhonda Carrier read drafts, rolled her eyes, shook her head, but generally infused me with confidence and hope. I love that woman.

  'We live as we dream – alone.'

  Joseph Conrad

  Part One

  BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MARRIAGES

  1. RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

  . . . and in the morningtime we can drive in the jeep to the zoo and bort tikits and see the munkiz. Our jeep is cool acoz it goz reely fast and plays som grat muzik and its a green car . . .

  Richard Jane glanced to his left and saw the other divers ranged away from him at ten-foot intervals, ghosts fading into the distance. Visibility was poorer than usual but he could just make out the yellow flashes of Henrikson Subsea's company logo on the dive suits. His breath came in shallow stitches. He could feel his heartbeat where it played in the thin skin of his wrist whenever it pressed against his suit as he applied pressure to the wrench. Another few turns and this section of the clamp would be sound. The fatigue crack, fully three feet long, was a black frown in the scarred weld between the node and its supportive brace. The great leg of the oil platform rose into the murk and was lost. You had to move against the current to get the job done. You had to anticipate where it might try to drag you and plant your stance accordingly.

  This deep, the pressure was so great that it could be felt like a vice around the chest. The first time Richard Jane experienced it, all those years ago during his training – hard, filthy work burning three-inch monel bolts out of the flanges of a rig in the Gulf of Mexico – he thought he was having a heart attack. Breathing was labour. But the complexity and physical demands of his work took him out of his environment, helped him to forget about the risk, or at least keep it at a manageable distance. The ocean was unforgiving at these alien fathoms. Death was in the deep. It cruised around like the shadows of sharks. And like a shark it could smell a drop of blood from miles away. It preyed on the mind after a while, if you let the thoughts settle. No amount of reading or cards or letters home would steer you away after that.

  Jane had known two men, in his four years as a saturation diver, who had taken their own lives because of the pressures of the job. He was a veteran already. Few lasted longer than two years in this line. Despite the advances in technology and safety, it still put a drain on your health. Holes in the lungs. Neurological threat. Aseptic bone necrosis. A sense of never being able to escape the cold: helium's thermal conductivity sapped the body of heat. The hot water pumped through the wetsuit was just never hot enough. Sometimes the grand a day he made on these two-week stints seemed insufficient. You spent so long down here you forgot what trees looked like; you'd be forgiven for believing the entire planet looked like this.

  The helium mix turned everyone's voice cartoonishly high, but it could only have been Stopper who said, 'Down tools in fifteen. Three days from now I'm going to be suffering from a bad case of boozer's elbow.'

  'Better than tosser's forearm, you skirt-frightener.' That was Carver.

  Tyldesley's voice, coffeewarm in the control room, nearly a thousand feet north of here, said, 'Cut the banter, you prozzers. Job's not over till you hear the school bell go. Till then, your freezing cold arse flesh is mine, d'you hear me? All mine.'

  'Charming fucker,' said Rae, immediately to Jane's left. He was making wanking gestures. There was something about seeing that, 600 feet beneath the surface of the North Sea, 150 miles from Aberdeen – that and Rae's falsetto profanity – that Jane found hilariously funny. He started laughing and could not stop. He felt something pop in his head and thought he might have pulled a muscle. Tears in his eyes threaded his vision with colour. There was a strange sensation of increased pressure, as if a gust of wind had suddenly barrelled into them, and then the soft hiss of the headset died, the heat from the circulating water began to rapidly dissipate.

  He saw Rae turn to him, arms outstretched: What the fuck?

  'Tyldesley? Tyldesley? Are you reading me?' There might have been a trace of panic in Jane's voice but the helium disguised it. He gave three quick tugs on the security rope binding them all together and made a start for the pair of two-man diving bells, twenty feet east. There had been some failure, some catastrophic failure. Fear swelled inside him, like decompression sickness. He had seen a man with the bends once. You don't forget that. All of the limbs withdrawn into a core of impossible pain. The welter of blood at every orifice, fizzing bright red. Bubbles opening in the jelly of the eyes.

  He checked back a couple of times on that shambling race for the bells. He could only see Stopper, but the silver streams of bubbles rising behind him suggested that Rae and Carver were at his heels.

  Jane reached the second bell and swung himself under. He rose through the open hatch, pulling himself in with arms that felt too weak to support him, or anything else. He was shivering, trying to shoulder off his bale-out bottle when Stopper's head emerged into the wet porch.

  'Electrics?' Stopper asked, when he'd levered off his helmet.

  'Must be,' Jane said. 'Thank fuck the back-up kicked in or we'd have been sucking in nothing but the taste of rubber.'

  'What do we do?'

  'I'm calling this an emergency,' Jane said. 'How about you?'

  'I second that.'

  'We get back to the habitat,' Jane said. 'Decompress. Then kick the cock off whichever twunt sat on the off button. Are the others in?'

  'Already ascending,' Stopper said.

  Jane sealed the inner hatch and turned his attention to the depth gauge, so it was Stopper who saw the first of the dead fish drifting past the portholes. 'Look,' he said. His large goalkeeping hands kept wiping and rewiping the Zappa moustache that bracketed his tight nervous mouth. Shoals of dead fish – cod, coley, pollack – were raining down around them.

  'What's it look like to you?' Stopper asked Jane.

  Jane shook his head. Visibility was improving as they rose out of the black of deep sea into the blue surface waters above 200 feet. Blood billowed out of the fish from the gills and the eyes, swinging in the pulses of current. 'Explosion, maybe?' he said. 'Poison in the water?'

  'Poison wouldn't put our comms out,' noted Stopper. 'But maybe they're unconnected. Shall I try the radio in here?'

  'Already did,' Jane said. 'It's dead.'

  'We need to get back to the Ceto,' Stopper said. 'We need to get inside.'

  'It's OK,' Jane said, and the words died between them.

  'What if there's nobody up there to disconnect us from the stage?'

  'Seriously, Stopper, give it a rest,' Jane said. 'What do you think happened? Everyone fucked off and left us on our own? Check the pressure. I don't want us going fizzy.'

  'Pressure's stable,' Stopper said. And then: 'Oh my God.'

  A human body. And then two, three more. Drifting down through the water, arms outstretched as if they were skydiving.

  'Oh, Christ,' Stopper said. 'Who's that? Is that Terry Mead? What's going on?'

  Jane joined him at the tiny porthole. Together they watched as what looked like black cobwebs funnelled from the sockets of Terry Mead's face – his mouth hanging vastly open as if it had been dislocated, clouds of blood pumping from it like a belching factory chimney – before he twisted and tumbled away from their field of vision. More bodies sank around him. Jane counted a dozen before Stopper, weeping, dropped to his knees.

  'We're dead,' Stopper said, hysteria threatening to take his voice to a point where it could not be heard. 'That poor man. All those poor fucking men. We're dead.'

  'It must be an explosion,' Jane said. His own voice was rendered toneless by the panic. 'But then, I don't think so. Look at their clothes. Nothing got torn off.'

  'They jumped? A fire?'

  'Maybe. Maybe a fire. In the comms room? Spreading to the generators? It would explain the blackout. It wou
ld have to be a nasty bastard to make men jump.'

  'Jesus,' Stopper said. 'Who's going to plug us in?'

  They ascended the rest of the way without speaking. The bell filled with hard hot breath. As they neared the surface they braced themselves. The bell began to rock violently on its hoist wire, more so than was usual when they lifted out of the wet and into the air. The great legs of the platform seemed to be swaying in the current, as if about to pull themselves free of the bed and start walking.

  'This is not good,' Jane said.

  The bell broke the surface and he had time enough to see the service chopper hanging from the helipad with its rotors torn off. The portholes became caked with a sudden thick black residue. He hadn't seen anybody else on deck and had no idea what had happened to the bell containing Carver and Rae. Their own bell swung about on the end of its cable like a wrecking ball in search of something to hit. The abandon-platform siren was coming to him, shredded by the wind to an ineffective stutter.

  Even as he tried to grab hold of something to stop him being clattered around the unforgiving innards of the bell, Jane was thinking of reasons. Electrical storms. Terrorist attacks. Dirty bombs. Chemical agents.

  Stopper cracked his head hard against the CO2 scrubber and fell back against the top hatch, his foot folding under him as if it were without bone. Jane heard something crack dully, like the sound of splitting sapling branches. Stopper made no protest; blood pulsed steadily from a wound behind his left ear. Jane ducked down and propped him against the rack of heliox cylinders, strapped a belt around his chest and trapped it behind the heater. The diving bell jerked back on itself and Jane crashed into the control panel, tearing what felt like a foot-long strip of skin from his back.

  But then there was a jolt that seemed unnatural, a punch that had not been dealt by the wind's fist. Water cleared a viewing space in one of the portholes; Jane swung over to it and peered out. He could see the other bell swinging around on its hoist wire and little else through a blizzard of spume. They were level with the decks but waves were crashing over the sides. He hadn't seen that in ten years of working around rigs. He'd much rather not be seeing that while being inside a pressurised diving bell. Again, that feeling of something controlling the bell came back; he heard the cable grind as it was shifted against the direction in which the wind wanted to take it. He felt a tightening, a drawing-in; he realised it must be the motion-compensation system, which meant that someone was supervising their return. He saw the other bell impact against a landing stage, almost crumpling it as if it were fashioned from aluminium foil.