"Think happy thoughts, huh? What's the thing they do? The monks..."
"Om?"
"Yeah! Om."
"This is ridiculous," Kimberly sighed, but repeated the mantra anyway. "Om. Om. Hurry up, Om."
Maybe it worked. Maybe it was just the repetition drowning the voice out. But as Fitch led her onward, the distance falling away beneath her feet, she thought the voice was getting fainter. Losing strength, like a radio dial being twisted off-frequency.
Better than nothing. Better than having that invader whispering in the recesses of her skull. "Om, Om... What the hell?"
Fitch had stopped too. "Never seen that before."
Doors. Big doors, short doors, revolving doors, set into the wall of the mine. Every one was different, like they'd been stolen from apartments and tenements all across Rustwood. Some small and wooden, painted sky blue or lilac with tiny fish-eye peepholes set into the wood. Some tall, double-wide, stained oak and cedar with intricate reliefs swooping across their surfaces, carved with delicate hands. A glass sliding door torn from some government office, opening on to an empty dirt chamber. Wrought iron gates set into the stone. On the other side, darkness.
"What is this?" she whispered.
Fitch shook his head. "Interior designer with a bad sense of humour."
"It's..." She couldn't find the words. Unsettling? Grotesque? Her hand hovered over the handle of a door that resembled the front door of one-one-eight Rosewater. The handle was buzzing, like an electric drill applied to her molars.
A low groan echoed behind the door. A drowning gurgle that put Kimberly in mind of a man being gutted. She pulled back. "We need to get out of here."
"No turning back now, lady."
"You gonna stop me?"
"Not me. Something else." He pointed back down the tunnel. "Big sucker. Can't you hear it?"
Kimberly couldn't hear anything over the panicked clatter of her own heart. "You're just saying that to scare me."
"Lady, you're the one hearing voices. I don't need to make things up to scare you."
There was light further up the tunnel, not strong but steady, enough so that Kimberly could make out the path. She flicked her flashlight off and let her eyes adjust. "How much time do we have?"
"Fifteen minutes."
"Is that enough?"
"Has to be, otherwise we're going back the way we came."
Kimberly thought of the coughing, gurgling laughter of the thing passing by them in the tunnel. How close it'd come to reaching out and touching them. The cold radiating from its skin.
"No chance," she said. "We've gotta be close. Do you smell water?"
"That's the river. Almost there."
"Better be," Kimberly whispered, and pushed on.
* * *
He'd heard her beyond the door. Not his imagination. Not one of the sudden, body-shaking fever dreams that'd descended upon him in the hours since the hooded stranger last checked in. He'd heard his wife Kimberly whispering. He'd seen the doorknob jiggle.
Peter tried to call out, but his throat was a wasteland. Breathing ached like he'd swallowed pins. He'd quit crying. There wasn't anything left in him to cry.
All he managed was a low groan, so quiet it barely reached his own ears. The gurgle of a dying man.
You're just saying that to scare me.
Yes. It was Kimberly, no doubt. If he could just get the strength to scream-
I don't need to make things up to scare you.
Someone else with her. The man he'd seen in the yard? Her friend, her lover? It didn't matter. Any anger he'd felt when he'd first seen the man outside his house was swept away by the thought of Kimberly holding him again. The cool kiss of her hands on his cheeks lifting him up, taking him out of this terrible place, Curtis swaddled in the crook of his arm...
He drew breath to scream and the pain bloomed again, bright as campfire flame in his lungs. He jack-knifed, clenching around the agony.
A finger trailed up his cheek. "Hush, dear."
Peter glanced up. He didn't know how the stranger had gotten into his little dirt cell - the door hadn't opened in hours. Maybe the door was only for show and the stranger could come and go as it pleased, materialising beside him with as much fanfare as the turn of a key in a well oiled lock. It didn't matter how. It was here now, crouched by his side, the black robe falling back from one wrist to reveal an arm as skinny as bone. An alabaster-white sliver like a blade shivered inside that sleeve, and pulled back into darkness.
"Hush," the figure repeated. "Hush now. You don't want to make a fuss, do you?"
Peter looked to the door. Sweat pricked on his forehead. Kimberly's name was on his lips but the stranger had dropped its finger to the line of his jaw. Blunt as the stranger's fingernail was, he knew it would open his throat like cheese-wire if he screamed.
If he could find the strength to scream.
"Good boy." The stranger drew back. "You're almost there, now. Almost one of the team. You'll be so pretty. So malleable."
The footsteps outside the door receded. Heat blurred Peter's vision. He took one shuddering breath. His shoulders shook. He cried silently, without tears.
It was a long time before Peter realised he'd stopped breathing altogether.
Chapter 19
They were back, all three of them. Goodwell knew it as surely as he knew the feel of his wife's hair between his fingers or that two and two made four. The dead boys were back.
He'd tried to dismiss it at first. Make excuses for the shadow on the McCarthy pass. Midnight moonlight was a tricky thing. It turned boulders into hulking monsters and saplings into ghouls. But as the night wound onward into early morning and the rain eased, he found it harder and harder to pretend.
It wasn't just the shadows, those creeping silhouettes in the corner of his vision. It was the sounds, as real as the shiver of midnight wind through the firs, or the splash of rain off the puddles at his feet.
A thick, wet sound, like someone walking in squishy, rain-soaked socks. Or, God help him, rotten feet, slipping and bending blackly inside tatty sneakers.
No. Impossible. It was a deer or maybe rabbits or rats, please, rats would be better. Anything but those accusing eyes, the dead stares, reaching for him with fingers turned black by pooling blood. And they'd laugh, wouldn't they? Trust those bastards to laugh, stumbling over roots and muddy hillocks, sliding through the trees, stubbing their dead toes on rocks beneath the mud. Laugh as they slid damp hands around his neck...
"You see it? They even left the lights on for us!"
Detective Chan was fifty yards ahead, her coat now thrown over her head to shield her from the rain. Her shirt had pulled out of her slacks, revealing the pale sweep of her back, the nubs of her spine. Her pistol swung at her hip. She was listing, her left leg weak - she'd slipped in the mud a half hour before and twisted her ankle. They made one hell of a pair, limping together, swearing together.
And if they continued down the hill to the Pentacost Convent, dying together.
"Half an hour," Chan said, more to herself than to him. "Half and hour and we're home and dry."
"Seriously, Chan. You can't ask for help from a nunnery."
"I'm gonna drown out here if you keep moaning, Goodwell."
Christ, was he going to have to smack her over the head and drag her all the way back to town to keep her from the beast's door? He didn't know exactly what was waiting in the convent, and for good reason. Like St Jeremiah's Hospital, there were sicknesses in places that weren't his concern. The Queen employed her little clean-up teams for just that reason, and when the Queen decided to give a place a wide berth it was best to follow her lead. If she'd wanted him poking his nose into the convent she'd have sent him there.
It was all about checks and balances. Rustwood was a complex system of frayed piping and pressure gauges all jammed up against one another, ready to explode at a touch. Sometimes those pipes had to be capped, and that was when Goodwell got the call. Other times the Queen decided to let tho
se pipes vent, to keep the rest of the town from erupting.
The convent was one of those vents. At least, that was Goodwell's theory. It wasn't like his employer made sense more often than once a full moon. Sometimes it was left to him to put the pieces in place.
Maybe it was for the best. If he stepped back far enough to see the whole situation, he'd probably go mad.
The incline grew steeper, until Goodwell found himself leaning way back to keep from tumbling down the mountainside. The McCarthy pass split when it met the river - one route led back toward town, a walk of maybe two hours. The other led over the old stone bridge where he'd collected Martin and Taram. Would they be waiting there? Eyes shining in the darkness, mould growing on their palms from the long hours spent soaking in the bottom of the well? And beyond the bridge, the kink in the river where the rotten convent waited...
The intersection. That's where he'd do it. Better a bullet in Chan's head than to let her knock on the convent doors. She'd never come back out, and even if she did... it wouldn't be her. Even without being told what truly happened inside that ruin he knew that much.
He'd let the river carry her away. Then the boys could come to him and take their pound of flesh. Not the best ending to his story, but at least it would be neat.
"Hey, slow-ass! You see that?"
He wiped the rain from his eyes. Far below, beyond the bridge and the bend of the Pentacost River, the light inside the arch windows of the old convent was flaring. Not flame - this light was too white, too... electric.
Looking at it made Goodwell's back teeth buzz. "Late night welding?"
"I dunno. Wish I could call it in." Chan rested one hand on the butt of her pistol. "I think we should see if everything's okay."
"Chan, please-"
But she was already running down the slope, towards the bridge. Goodwell unstrapped his pistol. "Chan! Hold it!"
She didn't even look around. Goodwell swore, steadying his aim, but she was moving too fast.
All he could do was follow, and try to ignore the noises keeping pace. That low slap, slap, slap. The wet, choking giggles.
"Detectiiiiiiive..."
"Fuck you," he whispered. "Fuck you. You're dead. Stay that way."
The laughter rose and rose and rose.
* * *
Fitch's plan to follow the smell of water was solid. The tunnel kept angling up, until Kimberly's calves ached from the ascent. The ceiling had dropped as well - twice now she'd slammed her head into the stone hard enough to see stars. The second time, she patted her forehead and found her fingertips sticky with blood.
She pushed on. There'd be bandaids waiting in New York, after all.
The path grew thin, the shaft partially collapsed, and she had to turn sideways to fit through the gap. The molotovs in her back pack rattled together like chimes. They passed another intersection, this one thankfully marked on the map - now tattered and barely holding together at the seams, crushed to powder where Kimberly had shoved it into her coat - and Kimberly thought she heard those terrible footsteps echoing not far down the shaft. The whistling intake of breath. Air being drawn through brass pipes.
The sounds moved on, and so did they.
Fitch checked his watch compulsively. "Cutting it mighty fine."
"How much time?"
"Less than a quarter hour. Think we're close, though."
"What happens if we're late?"
"Then we backtrack and try again. Just what Rosenfeld wanted." He chuckled, but it was dry and mirthless. "Like she set this whole thing up."
"Don't be stupid. She couldn't have known-"
"You hear that?"
Kimberly cocked her head, but couldn't hear anything but the manic thud of her own heartbeat. Thank God that voice had faded, that sickly, whistling, crooning voice. Any longer and she might've screamed... or worse. She might've obeyed. "Trouble?"
"Sounds like... something cooking." Fitch sniffed the air, nostrils flared. "Like the air is sizzling. You really don't hear it?"
She certainly felt it. An electric tingle on the edge of every small movement, tickling the nape of her neck and making the hairs on the back of her arms stand tall. She was goosepimpled from head to toe.
She licked her lips, and a little spark jumped between the tip of her tongue and the crown of her incisor. "I've felt this before."
"Yeah?"
"Science class. With the..." She squinted as she called up old memories. High school was a blur of frantically puffed cigarettes behind the gymnasium and making moon-eyes at boys with greasy hair, but she could still recall the quiet contemplation of science class with Mrs Patch, the solemnity with which she stirred acid and base together... "Van de Graaff generator," she said, finally. "You know what I mean?"
"Like something's tickling my guts," Fitch whispered. "Come on, before I'm sick."
Following Fitch was easier said than done. Every step dragged, like she was pushing her way through deep water. The air was too heavy and that electric tingle seemed to bind her in place, glue her feet to the floor.
Or maybe that was the fear. Maybe it was all an excuse to turn around and run back down the mineshaft, stumbling blind until she found moonlight and blessed open air. Anything to put distance between herself and the convent, the old stone walls slick with torchlight, the dirt floor crawling beneath her feet, the buzzing in her fillings, behind her eyes...
"Here."
If she'd planned on running, she'd missed her chance. After two hours of creeping though the dark, following seemingly endless tunnels, the shaft had finally terminated in a small wooden door barred with rust-pickled iron. There was no handle. Fitch pressed his ear to the wood and flinched back. "This is it," he said.
"How do we-" A cry echoed in the tunnel behind them, the sort that couldn't be mistaken for a rockfall or the wind mourning over the tunnel entrance. Kimberly's teeth sank into her lower lip. "Can you open it?"
"Not without making a lot of noise."
"Be quick."
"I'm watching the time, don't you worry. Ten minutes."
"If Rosenfeld wasn't just making it up."
"She never does." Fitch crouched before the door, running his hands over beams almost grey with age. When he rapped on them with his knuckles the echo was thick and dull. "Crowbar."
Kimberly handed it over, feeling like some TV nurse on M*A*S*H. All she needed were the scrubs and a face-mask. The image almost got her giggling, and she bit down on the laughter to keep it from bubbling over.
Fitch jammed the crowbar into the gap and hauled back. "Tough bastard," he grunted. Sweat soaked into his shirt collar. "Just... won't..."
"Together," Kimberly suggested, and they squeezed into the tiny space beside the door. The crowbar was only just long enough for her and Fitch to get their hands on together, and when the weird extra finger on his left hand brushed hers she suppressed a shudder. "On three."
The bar creaked. The wooden door groaned. Kimberly grit her teeth, bracing one foot against the wall of the mineshaft. The crowbar was old, paint peeling from the shaft, slick in her grip. "Come on," she grunted. "Didn't come all this way to-"
The crowbar bent in the middle with an eye-watering squeal of steel under pressure. Kimberly fell back, smacking her head against the rock wall. The high crash of breaking glass echoed down the corridor, and Kimberly clapped her hands over her mouth in shock. "Oh Jesus..."
There was an agonising moment as she slipped her backpack off and aimed her flashlight inside. The beam glittered on broken glass. Of the twelve carefully capped and assembled bottles, maybe half were shattered.
"I'm sorry, Fitch. I'm so sorry." She tipped a sea of shattered glass and petrol out on to the floor of the mineshaft. "I'm such an idiot-"
"Did it touch you?" Fitch spun her around and ran a hand up her back. "Did it soak through?"
She'd almost forgotten the benzene. She peeled out of her jacket - the back was soaked with sticky napalm but her shirt was dry. "I almost..."
; Fitch snatched her coat out of her hands and threw it into the darkness. "You don't want that on you. Not now, not ever." He took her backpack and counted out the remaining molotovs. Seven in all, slick with napalm. He wiped each bottle clean on his pants. "Got gloves?"
"Sorry. Forgot."
"That makes things awkward." His smile was a barely disguised grimace. "Useless anyway, if we can't get inside. Never seen a crowbar bend like that. Make those things out of rubber these days."
Kimberly stepped over the mess of glass and napalm now soaking into the dirt floor and ran her fingers up the edge of the door. The wood was unmarked. "You know what they say. They don't make it like they used to."
"It's not about the wood, it's the lock. Look at it! Iron. Should be rusted to hell and back, but it's stronger than my prybar. Bullshit." Fitch spat on the floor, his hands hooked in his pockets. "Should've known. If they don't want us in, we're not getting in."
"So, what? We give up?"
He checked his watch. "Five minutes. Unless you've got a hairpin and some Mission Impossible tricks up your sleeves-"
A low click echoed through the wood. The heavy thunk of iron sliding into place.
Fitch leaped back, the busted end of the crowbar held out before him like a dagger. "Hide!" he hissed, and Kimberly pressed into a dirt hollow, soft mineshaft earth falling on her shoulders, her flashlight shaking in her hands. She tried to flick the switch but couldn't get a grip. Light danced across the ceiling of the mineshaft, over beams pickled grey by age, the moss speckled red and green and black, stalactites of muck reaching down like grasping fingers...
The door swung open.
She'd expected someone waiting on the far side - an irritated nun at best, another one of the thrashing, bloody-jawed clickers at worst. Instead, soft candlelight washed across Kimberly's cheeks. She peered out into a great vaulted hall, over rows of bare wooden pews and arched windows boarded with blackened planks. The chapel nave. Far away to her left were tall wooden double-doors that, as far as she could tell, led out on to the moors and the Pentacost river.
Rust: Two Page 16