Eber gazed out through the broken walls. He could see a sand storm on the horizon, heading away from him.
He clambered out onto the highest terrace at the front of the old mansion. He picked his way across to the front, careful to avoid the huge wells. Once a showpiece of hydroponic extravagance to create a lush garden in the desert’s heart, now they were just a good vantage point.
Eber scanned the skies to the west – towards Ankot. Nothing.
He didn’t feel too exposed on the terrace in his sand-caked clothes. By the time anyone got close enough to spot him he’d be back inside. Besides, only Eleann would head this way; there was nothing out here but the ruins, thanks to Balatan-Liantkk’s desire for solitude. An ideal location for him to indulge his taste for orgiastic excess.
He sat scanning the horizon until his eyes stang in the rising heat and he went into the relative cool of the interior, still thinking of Eleann.
He waited for her in soundless, slack anticipation.
Eventually he became bored and, feeling the nervous afterglow of the Teplin start to bite, began to pace the ruined mansion. He knew that another piece of Teplin would take the edge off, but then he risked dehydration, and that could be lethal out here.
He scanned the huge hallway and thought of the overwhelming ambition of its builder. The poor old sod would have been put out of business in a few years by the Cianmant’s matter messaging systems even if his business hadn’t failed, he mused. “Overtaken by progress. Aren’t we all?” he muttered.
“Very philosophical,” came a voice from behind him. “You shouldn’t talk to yourself. It shows neural misalignment.”
Eleann clambered down over the broken wall. Eber hugged her tightly. “Thank gods you came,” he whispered.
Eleann dropped a large bag behind her as Eber crushed her to him. “Hey, let me breathe.”
She still had her medical activist’s harness on and clicked the small latches to release it. “That’s better. Why wouldn’t I come?” she asked, smoothing her hair back from her eyes.
Eber shrugged. “It’s not exactly safe, is it?”
She smiled sweetly, inclining her head on one side as if to say ‘that’s the fun part, stupid’. She stooped to the bag.
“I brought some water tubes,” she said, rummaging. “They’re a bit warm I’m afraid. And food … best I could get.”
She stood to face Eber. “Here. I got some nutrient spray for you.”
Eber grimaced, obviously confused.
She popped the top off the tube, miming the action. “For under your tongue. In case your food runs out.” She held it out to him.
He didn’t take it.
“You might need it. Just in case, hmm?”
He nodded then took it from her. “Thanks. Didn’t want to think about that but …”
She smiled sadly at him, wrinkling her brow. “Oh, I forgot … I’ve got a present for you.” She rummaged in the bag before coming up empty. “Hmmmm. Must have left it in the trackar,” she said, starting to head for the opening.
He leapt after her, grabbing her arm and pulling her around. “You brought a trackar?” he hissed, angrily. “A blind man could follow your trail! Why didn’t you get a hover?”
“Because,” she growled, “I couldn’t get one, they are all registered and fuel is gods-damned expensive – and I didn’t have the credit.” She kept her teeth clenched after speaking.
He released her arm. “You’re right, you’re right. I’m sorry. I should be grateful you came at all.”
She pushed herself against him. All thoughts of his gift were forgotten after the third kiss and they spent the next hour making love with a gentle intensity that Eber now thought of as typically her.
When Eleann awoke the chill of the night had crept into the house and the first moon was above the horizon. She rolled away from Eber and dressed quickly.
She peered into the darkness at the far end of the giant hall. It was heavily influenced by Postlon architecture, which she’d always found confusing when it wasn’t ugly, and it threw up odd shadows. She was sure she could hear something.
Eleann sat on the floor and rummaged in her bag for a large light-cube. The shadows sped away when she struck it open.
Behind her, Eber groaned and rolled over. “Who turned the lights on?” he croaked, still half asleep.
Eleann glanced back at him. “I thought I heard something.” Eber was at her side in what seemed like seconds, already half dressed.
“There’s no-one here – not this far out.” It was half a question.
She looked at him with concern. “I’m going to have a look.”
He half stepped in front of her. “Well, don’t go alone.”
She led the way into a tall corridor at the far end of the hall. She was sure this was where it had come from.
“What sort of sound was it?” he whispered close to her ear before kissing her on it.
Eleann couldn’t help smiling. “A sort of thumping … a rhythm. Listen!”
Eber strained his ears but couldn’t hear anything. “I can’t hear a thing.”
After nearly 20 minutes of wandering through rooms and corridors Eleann began to think it was something she could feel inside her head rather than hear. But she knew how insane that sounded and kept it to herself.
Finally Eber became tired of their pointless rambling.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anything,” he said, leaning against a large carved ornament.
Eleann had disappeared into the next room, taking the light-cube with her.
“Hey … come back with the light,” he protested, starting to follow her.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
A dirty chuckle began at the back of his throat. He thought she was about to play one of the sex games that was so typical of their relationship so far.
The sound stopped in his throat as he saw for the first time the tall fluted columns and knotted limbs of something inexplicable.
Eber let his eyes roam over the strange sight before him. Even though it seemed to stretch out to touch all the extremities of the large chamber, its heart was a smoothly complex shape nestling at its centre. Largely ignorant of cultural matters, Eber puzzled over whether it was sculpture, architecture or some sort of unusual toy.
“It feels weird in here. Heavy, somehow,” said Eleann. Eber didn’t respond, too engrossed in their new find.
On closer examination what looked like an odd instrument panel convinced him he was looking at some sort of machine. But he couldn’t begin to guess its use.
His head began to throb and he wondered if the air pressure was greater here than in the rest of the house. It felt like an itch at the back of his head, one he had no way of scratching.
The machine didn’t seem to have any relation to Balatan-Liantkk’s ancestry. It belonged to neither the cultures of Earth or Postlon, as far as Eber could see. Though there was something oddly familiar about it.
He shrugged. “I’m no expert,” he mumbled, wiping his hand across the curved flank of the machine and dislodging a thick layer of vermilion sand.
Under the sand lay a depressed panel and, as Eber looked more closely, the panel contained writing. Scraping away more sand, he recognised the lines, loops and hollows of the markings in the high dunes.
She was pulling him away now. “Leave that. Come on,” she sighed, reaching around to grab his penis through his clothing. “I need you now.”
He tried to pull away. “Look …”
His resistance stopped as he began to feel the blood pound in his head and his penis begin to stiffen. He found it impossible to concentrate as Eleann leant back against the machine’s dark surface, pulling her blue bodysuit apart with one hand and discarding it. “I want it now,” she hissed, rubbing herself between the legs.
Eber tried to think, knew this wasn’t like Eleann, but his body didn’t care.
He quickly unhooked his clothing and dropped it to the flo
or. He was shocked at the size and strength of his erection, a bead of stickiness already gathered at its end. Taking his penis in his hand, Eber felt he wanted to use it to hurt Eleann as much as make love to her.
As he grabbed her hips, she hooked her legs behind his thighs, pulling him to her. Eber pressed the head of his penis against her, ready to push it home. They both growled with lust as he sank into the liquid core of her.
Eber tried to ignore the grains of sand that chafed uncomfortably, trapped between their hot bodies, as Eleann began pumping against him urgently. He sank his teeth into her shoulder, desperate to gain any extra purchase he could, desperate to be further inside her.
They seemed to couple for hours yet neither of them felt any nearer to climax. Eber’s penis began to feel sore from Eleann’s fierce activity. She even refused to stop when blood began to trickle from her.
Sweat mingled with the sand, caking Eber in a thin layer of mud as he pumped himself into her. He felt a tingling across the backs of his thighs and his buttocks. Exhaustion setting in, he thought, before realising the feeling was spreading up his back.
He glanced backwards, panting hard, as hundreds of tiny black objects ran across his skin, joining where they met to form a thin shell over him.
Streams of the things began to run off him and across Eleann’s writhing body. Too lost in her urgent ride towards elusive orgasm, she failed to respond.
Eber’s passion was overtaken by panic. What was happening? Where were these things coming from and what were they?
He tried to pull away but Eleann’s nails dug into his flesh, clawing him further into her in her intense need of him, panting swiftly like a running beast, unable to stop despite her exhaustion and pain.
Looking around desperately, Eber saw the tiny moving black objects pouring out of slitted openings near the base of the machine. As he realised they were part of the device, he suddenly knew they had to get away.
He tried to speak, tried to make his lips form her name, but was too exhausted for anything but sex. He could feel himself failing, slipping away.
Only now, in these last moments, did he realise why parts of the machine looked like limbs as he realised the bulk of the machine was covered with the forms of dozens of alien couplings. Across on the far side of the vile alien creation he saw a human hand, frozen and dead, clawing desperately round the thigh of a solidified quadruped. There were faces too. Awful faces.
A hundred alien memories of ecstasy and death rolled towards him over a plain of burning ice. His scream froze as dozens of the tiny objects poured into his mouth, silencing his voice forever. The last thing he saw, before the things covered his eyes, was his lover panting in fear and exhaustion as the objects swarmed across her breasts and up her neck, sealing her in as they went.
He felt Eleann try to struggle beneath him as the shell now covering them hardened like steel, turning the same dull black as the rest of the machine. Somewhere, somehow, he heard her screaming.
Having no master now, the machine sighed its own satisfaction – energy without end, power without purpose.
Eber and Eleann’s forms, drained of matter and meaning, joined the dozens of others who had come to couple her. And, after coming, stayed forever.
And before their minds finally faded they were filled with a sound like a gigantic heart, beating in a huge chamber, a million miles or more away.
TRACKSIDE
They stood staring down at the tracks, the sleepers blobbed here and there with filth-stained toilet paper.
“When the train is at the station, we encourage constipation,” chanted Steve in a comic deep bass.
“Trouble is ‘alf the fuckers ‘round here can’t read,” said Owen, “and even if they could, they’d ignore the sign.” Steve stamped his feet on the September platform. “Where’s this bloody train, then? I’m freezing.”
The single platform and its inadequate shelter stood on an embankment that gave a depressing view over the town and the road out of it. The cramped streets looked like an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle, intersecting one another at uncomfortable angles before climbing the valley sides.
The last of the day’s light was tucking itself behind the hills and the street lights took over, casting a miserable yellow gloom over everything. Owen hated this time of the year and always felt like he was hanging on desperately for the summer to arrive again.
“Well, I always wait until the train has pulled out of the station before flushing,” said Owen.
“You’re a fine, upstanding citizen, Mr Thomas.”
“Even if it’s only gone as far as Cwm,” he added.
“Aye, well, better than they deserve, anyway,” said Steve with sincerity.
From where they stood the pair also had an open view over where the old Co-op creamery had stood. Flattened by the council, it had now been dignified with the name of ‘car park’. Few motorists were brave enough to leave their vehicles there at this time of day and the sole occupant was a battered old Land Rover in one corner.
It was parked near the stretch of uncleared rubble that led up to the old station building, sitting further up the tracks. It had been closed up long before the coal trains stopped but nobody had bothered to knock it flat. Owen had always supposed it was on railway land and had just been forgotten about. The cellar was now used by teenagers to drink, take drugs and fuck. Lucky bastards, thought Owen in a moment of jealousy.
Growing impatient, he wandered over to the timetable next to the shelter, hoping for a little reassurance. He got none. “Oh, bollocks! The timetable changed on Wednesday. The last train’s bloody gone, hasn’t it? They’ve moved it so it’s 10 minutes earlier now!”
“Fuckin’ typical. They don’t let anyone know, do they?!”
Owen wandered back to the platform edge. “Oh well, the walk will warm us up, anyway.”
“Walk? Sod that! We’ll go and have another couple in ‘The Butch’, then we’ll get a taxi.”
“A taxi? Feeling flush are you?” They never took a taxi.
Steve grinned. “Well, it may be my last chance. Once the baby’s born I won’t have anything to spare, will I?”
“How’s Suze doing, anyway?”
“She’s great. She’s at her mum’s tonight ‘cause her sister’s home from London.”
Owen perked up noticeably. “Liz? Oh aye, what’s she up to now, then?”
“She’s playing bass with Sadistic Syringe. She joined them last month after that other bloke pissed off to America.”
“Is she?” Owen was obviously impressed. “I like them, they’re OK.”
“They’re shite! They sound like a cat being strangled inside a busted accordion.” Steve put the lid on any further discussion.
As they were about to start down the steps leading to the street, Owen peered out into the gloom and tugged at Steve’s jacket. “Hey, look at that.” He pointed across the tracks at a man who was loitering at the entrance to the car park below the station. The man looked around for a moment before heading across the car park towards the old station building.
“What’s he up to then?” asked Owen.
“Why don’t you mind your own business for a change?” his friend answered, continuing to follow the man’s progress closely.
“Maybe he’s the owner of that old shed,” said Owen, nodding towards the Land Rover.
“Nah. That’s old Hywel Griffiths’ charabanc, innit? He’s probably in ‘The Cambrian’.”
The man walked curiously. A lope here, a lurch there. Even the unevenness of the ground and the remaining rubble couldn’t explain his strange way of moving. His face was hidden by the hood on his top, pulled far forward. He carried a sports bag that seemed to have something heavy in it, or maybe something he didn’t want to damage.
The man had passed the rusty old vehicle and was by the wall of the abandoned station building. He crouched down and unzipped the sports bag. Looking around him carefully, his long face became visible for a moment in the poisonous yell
ow light cast from the top of the distant lampposts.
Even though he didn’t raise his eyes high enough to take in the station platform, Owen and Steve cautiously ducked back into the shadows.
The man pulled a black bin liner from the sports bag and started to cover it with bits of rubble. Once he was satisfied that his task was finished, he zipped up the bag and made his way towards the main road.
His route took him past the station steps. Steve and Owen waited until he’d passed before descending.
Owen looked at Steve quizzically.
“What?”
Owen grinned. “Well, what was that all about, then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“You must want to know what was in that bag he dumped. Might be something dodgy.”
“Aye, and might just be a load of dirty laundry that’s he’s too lazy to do, and all.”
“No, go on. I’m busting to know, innit?”
Steve looked at him wryly out of the corner of one eye. “What’s that old bollocks about curiosity and cats again?”
As the patch of ground was more-or-less on the way to their next venue, Steve headed off towards the old creamery site. His uncle had worked there when Steve was a kid and, once or twice, he’d ridden on the milk float back to the yard. Whenever he looked at it now, Steve always superimposed the picture in his mind of how it had looked then over the stretch of open ground and rubble that was there now.
“P’raps it’s drugs,” offered Owen, interrupting the flow of memories.
“You don’t throw drugs away, you sell them.”
“Well, maybe he’s tried and he can’t.”
“Why? Past their ‘best by’ date, are they?”
Pausing only to admire the time-warp graffiti – ‘Alice Cooper’ and ‘NF’ – on the back of the old creamery wall, they made their way across the rubble. The writing had been there as long as Steve could remember.
Looking around, he could see pieces of black plastic poking up through the sections of toppled, broken bricks, mortar still tenaciously holding them together. “There you are then, nosey. Help yourself.”
Songs From Spider Street Page 14