Mirror of the Nameless

by Luke Walker

  More gunshots drowned out the rest. We ran for the van and four of the things came at us.

  Screaming, Tom shoved his knife deep into one of the things’ heads. He yanked it out and the thing kept coming. I tried to scream for him to get back, but smoke filled my mouth. Coughing, eyes tearing, I swung my bat around in a circle, hit nothing but air, and Derek pushed me out of the way. He smashed one of the monsters to the ground. Tom ran past us, keys in hand, pulling at the van door. More gunshots split the air. Directly above, the helicopter dropped commands on us, telling us to give ourselves to our dead god, telling us it was for his glory and ours.

  Derek and I hit the things at the same time. Their blood and pieces of bone coated our bats. The mess of the bodies fell to the dirty road. Tom was in the van, door wide open, the engine kicking in.

  “Come on,” he screamed.

  Derek and I ran for the van and then Derek was a heavy weight crashing into me. We both fell against the side of the van. Winded, I pulled us up, holding my boss in a bear hug and trying to find the breath to shout at him.

  There was blood on my hands. Derek’s blood.

  Swearing as much as groaning his pain, Derek stood. He’d been shot in the stomach and chest. His midsection was a red painting.

  With a shaking hand, he lifted his gore-streaked bat and thumped the side of the van. “Go,” he said and lurched across the boiling street, a big shape swallowed by the smoke and dancing lights of the flames.

  “Dave,” Tom shouted. “Come on.”

  My last glimpse of Derek was him raising his bat and breaking into a wheezing, coughing run towards the police.

  I turned and ran for the van while the voice of the helicopter might as well have been the voice of a god.

  12

  We arrived in Norwich late afternoon. The roads had been pretty much dead. Not a surprise after the events with Segoth. We caught a bit of the news, which didn’t say much. No mention of names or those left behind. No mention of Derek or whatever was left of his pub.

  Putting the whole horrible business out of my head was close to impossible. I had no choice, though. If I thought about what we’d seen and my friend running into the battle to help us, I’d break down. I couldn’t let that happen. Not if I wanted to help my daughter.

  We trudged up the path to the main entrance to the flats, the road quiet for the most part. The building was slap bang in the middle of the takeaway and pub district. Drinkers filled the pubs. Students for the most part.

  Once inside the building and up to the sixth floor, my worry was we’d need to break down the door to Ashleigh’s flat. As it happened, Tom had a key. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been happy knowing a young kid had a key to my daughter’s flat but we’d gone way beyond ordinary.

  Tom let us in to the gloomy hallway. Even with a single step inside, the smell hit me. Stale air, rotting food. Nobody had been in for days.

  Silently, we went through to the living room. Piles of books and sheets of paper covered the floor. Without hope, I called my daughter’s name and got nothing back in reply.

  “Any ideas where she is?” I said.

  Tom shook his head. He’d barely spoken on the journey to Norwich. What had happened outside the pub was probably the worst thing he’d gone through. Not that it’d been easy for me, either. The image of Derek lurching towards the police wouldn’t leave me alone. As much as I wanted to believe my friend would be okay, there was no way I could do so. Not with all the police and the fire and the monsters formed from Segoth’s dead flesh.

  According to the news on Tom’s iPad, the authorities were calling the fires and deaths a great result for our god. He was reported to be well pleased and was last seen ascending to his place in the sky twenty miles from the chaos and death he’d created.

  “Open a window, will you?” I said.

  Tom did so, then stood limply against the wall. The hot air flowing in did little to shift the stale stink. I checked my watch. Coming up on two o’clock. We were right in the middle of Norwich; my daughter was missing and my stomach demanded food. Ignoring the hunger, I picked up a few random books. If there was any surprise at seeing more books in one place than I had in years, I’d lost it below my fears.

  The books didn’t mean much to me. They appeared to cover every subject possible with no link between them. I dropped them, left Tom by the wall and entered Ashleigh’s bedroom. As in the living room, books and papers covered the floor. The bed was clear, the covers thrown back. Tom joined me and I wondered what he felt. The boy obviously loved my daughter. Despite my age, I remembered enough about twenty to know what being in love meant back then.

  “We’ll find her, won’t we?” he asked.

  “Only if we start looking.”

  I checked the nearest pile of books. They were about stately homes throughout the country. Guidebooks for the most part. A couple of history volumes although neither were noticeable enough for the police to want to know about them. Still, the question remained: where the hell had Ashleigh got hold of so many books?

  “I’ll check the kitchen,” Tom said in the same little voice he’d used a moment before.

  He left me. I sifted through a pile of Ashleigh’s clothes dumped in a chair. Nothing there. At the window, I stared down to the street below. Business to be had in the pubs, money to be made and students to buy all the drink and drugs they could afford. Not for the first time, I wondered why Ashleigh had wanted to go to university. None of her friends had. Her mother and I hadn’t. Maybe she saw something in further education I didn’t.

  Hope, my mind whispered and I ignored it.

  Opening the window let in more hot air. It moved sluggishly through the room, bringing in the smells of dirt and food from the takeaways. My stomach rumbled.

  “Dave.” Tom’s shout came from the other end of the flat. I joined him in the kitchen. He stood beside the fridge, door open. In one hand, he held a carton of milk.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The date.” He held the carton towards me. The liquid inside was an unpleasant color. Not quite yellow and definitely not white. “It’s four days ago. She’s long gone.”

  He slammed the fridge door shut.

  “Relax. We’ll work it out. In the meantime, get us something to eat.” I handed him a couple of notes, trying not to think of Derek passing them to me. “Anything you fancy,” I said before he could ask. “I’m not picky.”

  Tom took the money and left. I waited until the thud of his footsteps faded before I returned to the living room. Voices rose from the street, a few shouting, most good-natured. I hoped.

  There were a few small cardboard boxes tucked under a table beside the television. Sliding one out, I found a load of what appeared to be essays although I doubted Ashleigh had passed them to anyone else.

  All of them were about Bertram Fitzgerald Makepeace. And every one would have turned her into a sacrifice in minutes.

  13

  Tom returned with a bag of burgers to find me deep into the second box, Ashleigh’s essays all around me on dirty carpet. He dropped the bag on a table and crouched beside me.

  “Anything?” he said.

  Wordlessly, I handed him a random essay. He scanned it for a few seconds, then swore.

  “She kept this quiet,” he said.

  “She’d have to. This isn’t the sort of stuff you hand in to your lecturers, is it?”

  “Is it all the same?”

  “Looks like it. All of it’s about Makepeace. All of it…it’s a defense and support for his ideas.” I shook the papers in my hands, frustrated and proud of my daughter in equal amounts. “You were right about him. All this is on how we should give up fearing the unknown and superstitions and gods. And a fair bit on the other worlds you mentioned.”

  “Yeah, Makepeace was big on those.”

  Tom grabbed two burgers from the bag, handed me one and ate his in four large bites. I nibbled mine, still reading.

  “Where’s the proof?”
I said around the meat and bread. “If Ashleigh really does think he’s for real, where’s her proof?”

  Tom took another burger. “No idea, but I know someone who will. Her name’s Suzanne. Runs the restaurant pub place I work.”

  I checked the time. Coming up on five. “We should go and see her now.”

  Tom shook his head. “Not on a Friday evening. It’s too dangerous. Gets a bit wild around here.”

  I smiled bitterly. “After this morning, I think we can face a bunch of drunk students.”

  He shrugged. “If you say so.”

  We ate quickly, the stodgy meat sitting uncomfortably in my gut. There were a few shouts outside, some loud music from a car, then someone praying much too loudly to Segoth. Someone else shouted for the praying man to shut up. Then someone shouted for everyone to shut up.

  “Nice area,” Tom said.

  “I know of worse.”

  While we ate, I called Ashleigh. Voice mail. Swearing, I sent her a text, asking her to call me. No delivery report came back.

  “Tried that. Got nothing,” Tom said.

  We finished the food, gathered our bloody bats and knives and headed to the door. I reached for the handle and a flurry of running steps dashed past in the corridor.

  “Wait a second,” Tom whispered.

  We stood motionless. Shouts had joined the pound of running feet. Mad laughter. All at once, I wished Ashleigh’s flat was on a lower floor. There were six floors between us and the outside, and the image of Tom’s van felt very far away.

  “Probably nothing,” Tom said. “Like I said, it gets wild around here on a Friday. Starting early today, though.”

  “Let’s check outside again.”

  We returned to the living room. Even without looking to the street, we knew things had changed.

  The mucky yellow light of a normal afternoon had become a dirty green.

  Gatur green.

  14

  We stood side by side, not speaking. I think both of us were too scared to speak.

  Many of the shops and takeaways were lost behind a rolling green mist, their doors and windows obscured by the strange light. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The green was the same horrible green I’d noticed the previous night while we’d parked next to the woods. Gatur hadn’t been with us last night but she had been in the woods at some point, touching the bark and the leaves, turning them into the same wrong shade below. The shade that made my eyes want to scream, that brought to mind all the regrets of my life and gave them crippling weight. But there was no sadness. Only a growing anger. A shaking rage that turned my hands into weapons.

  “Down,” Tom said and yanked me back. I slipped, fell to my knees and the pain from the impact helped me to focus.

  I cleared my throat a few times. “We’re in trouble.”

  “We’ll just keep quiet. She’ll pass.”

  Breathing slowly, I stood and closed the curtains. At the same time, the screams from below met the screams out in the corridor. They could have been answering each other.

  Tom and I looked at each other. I said what we were both thinking. “We can’t stay here.”

  He shook but didn’t argue.

  Gripping our bats and knives, we returned to the door and I pressed an eye against the spyhole. Within seconds, I wished I hadn’t.

  Great smears of blood coated the opposite wall and doors. There were three bodies, their faces torn to shreds. A fourth attempted to crawl away. The man was missing a leg; blood pumped from the stump, soaking into the carpet.

  “What is it?” Tom whispered.

  Two figures sprinted past, one carrying a machete, both screaming. Not in fear, though. In joy. Gatur the Green’s work right in front of me.

  They fell on the crawling man and while he screamed, they cut his other leg off at the thigh. My eye was glued to the spyhole. Freezing cold claimed me while the man howled and his blood spurted from a severed artery.

  The two figures ran farther along the corridor and another appeared. A woman. She held a hammer with a loose grip. Both the hammer and her hand were bright red. She turned to our door, grunting. I made no move at all, aware she’d hear if I gave the slightest sound. For whatever reason, she chose the door opposite Ashleigh’s flat. Still grunting, she swung the hammer at the door. Wood exploded. The handle cracked, then fell. From beyond the door, someone began screaming.

  I looked away at the fifth smash of hammer into wood when the door opened and the woman entered, still swinging her hammer.

  Tom tried to push past me to look. Using my greater size, I shoved him away. We staggered into the kitchen and I spat into the sink, wondering if I was going to vomit. My stomach eventually settled. If nothing else, the few seconds were a moment I didn’t have to focus on the screams.

  “We’ll have to sit this out, Tom. We’ll be dead in seconds if we try to get out now.”

  “But, Ashleigh. She’s—”

  “I know.” I spat again and stood straight. “But we’re no good to her dead, are we?”

  He pushed his loose hair from his forehead with a shaking hand. Tears threatened to spill. He breathed deep once, twice, then nodded.

  “Good boy,” I said. “Now we need to block the door and do it quietly.”

  “Gatur.” Tom coughed and gestured to the window. “What happens if she rises? If she comes in the window.”

  “Then we’ll kill each other, Tom.”

  His mouth twitched. A few seconds passed before I realized the boy was attempting a smile. “Then let’s hope she stays down on the street.”

  As if on cue, a fresh volley of screams rose and I had no wish to see what people were doing to each other thanks to our green goddess’s influence. Nor did I want to imagine their grief and regret when Gatur left the area, returning people to their conscious, rational state. I knew, though. Gatur’s visits were rare (or at least rarer than Segoth’s) but the damage she did went way beyond the killings. Parents came back to themselves to find their children dead at their hand; spouses tore each other apart; strangers attacked strangers. And all of them came back to life with blood all over their hands.

  The suicide rate after one of Gatur’s visits always rose exponentially. Always.

  “Dave?”

  I shook myself. “Come on.”

  We took one of the armchairs from the living room and carried it the door, neither of us daring to make a sound. Beside it, we placed two bookshelves. Not much but at least it would give us some time if the woman with the hammer came knocking. Or anyone else for that matter.

  We crouched below the window, the mess of the dislodged books and Ashleigh’s essays all around us. That horrible green pressed in on the glass. The air was made of heat and howling. Sweat stuck to me all over and I kept still. Better to be hot than cold. Better to be alive than dead.

  As the minutes stretched into hours, I told myself that over and over. These days, I have a harder time believing it.

  15

  “You know what’s funny?” Tom said. Screaming punctuated each word. We’d both closed our eyes hours before so I had no idea if he reacted to the screaming. Better to keep your eyes shut when Gatur was around.

  “What?”

  “I know you’re Ashleigh’s dad, obviously, but that’s about it. I mean, she talks about you, but I still don’t know much about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  He didn’t answer. I shifted, dislodging a few droplets of sweat. The evening, then night, had grown warmer than the day, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. Some of the increased heat was due to the fires outside. Some. Not all. Most came from Gatur’s presence. They said she liked it hot because she lived in the fires of exploding stars. What was more likely was people became angrier in the heat.

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah?” He was exhausted. No surprise. We’d been through some horrendous moments in the previous twenty-four hours. This nice university boy wasn’t used to it.

  “What do yo
u want to know?”

  “About what?” he murmured.

  “About me.”

  He kept quiet.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you,” I said as if he had replied. “I’m forty. My birthday was last month. I used to write. Now I work in a pub and write on the side. Well, I did until this morning. Looks like I need a new job.” He didn’t laugh. To be fair, neither did I. “I got married young. Eighteen. I have one daughter. Ashleigh. You two should meet. You’d like her.”

  That got a little laugh. A snigger, really.

  “She’s twenty and more like her mother than I would have thought possible. My wife died when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-two. Since then, I’ve kept my head down and hoped that one day I’ll wake up and everything will be different. It never is, though. We’re still ruled by monsters people worship. I’m still just a dad. I’m still a widower. The world’s still little better than hell and we’re still trapped in my daughter’s flat in the middle of a nightmare.”

  Tom licked his lips. The sound was a rasping hiss.

  “That’s about everything I wanted to know,” he whispered.

  Outside, something exploded. Fresh heat shoved through the tiny opening in the window. An answering thud rolled through the block of flats and someone hooted mad laughter. I pictured the corridor and how much blood would now be coating the carpet and walls. How many bodies torn apart and how many people like the woman with the hammer.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  It seemed he wouldn’t answer. Eventually, he shrugged. “Not a lot to say, really. Parents dead. No brothers or sisters. I’m doing Engineering. Hope to get a job with the government. Hope to make some money and hope I never end up a sacrifice. The usual.” He sighed. “And I’ve been in love with your daughter for the last eighteen months.”

  Knowing the boy needed a quick reply, I gave him one that happened to be honest. “I know, Tom.”

  “How?”

  For the first time in well over a day, I smiled. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”