by Penny Grubb
Figures burst out of the blackness all around her.
She threw out her arms to ward them off and opened her mouth to scream for her mother, her father … for Jak … for anyone.
Hands grabbed at the cape.
In a starburst of colour and flashing lights, she fell down … and down … into a spiral that ended the world.
Chapter 26
A dream that came in fragments.
I’m lying here asleep. Where’s here?
Nothing for a long time, just a disembodied voice. ‘… to her dad …’ Small sounds. Rustlings, creakings. Someone moving about. ‘… Yeah, and Jules too …’
Too soft for a floor. I’m lying in a bed. I don’t know what a floor is. Or a bed.
Shadows dance out beyond the reach of sight. Footsteps. People come and go.
Where am I? What happened?
A first stirring of awareness. Annie knew she had eyes and that eyes could see. She tried out the mechanism for opening them. It felt rusted with disuse. Through the bars of a cage she saw a hunched figure.
Am I looking in or looking out? Is Lorraine a bit part in a book I read?
Her eyes closed. The cage door shut.
From a long, long way down, Annie rocketed up. At first, there was relief. Release from limbo. The ascent became a terrifying upward rush. Propelled as high as the clouds, spinning into nausea and dizziness, knowing she must drop like a dead weight to a crashing death far below. Her world exploded. A huge wave broke with a deafening roar, hurling spears of light to hit her senses. She screamed out in terror.
Through the pain she was aware that a hunched figure started up in alarm. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell!’
Footsteps. Another voice. ‘She awake?’
‘Iss Caine.’ The words slurred, but she heard herself say them. ‘Tell ’em iss Caine.’
‘Aw, fer crying out loud, Annie! Will you stop saying that?’
No, no. Not Caine. Someone else. Caine isn’t important.
Liquid at her lips. She gagged on it.
Wake up, Annie. It’s OK. It’s just a dream.
Yes, Mummy.
‘Wake up, Annie. Wake up.’ The voice insisted. She couldn’t shut it out.
No, I’m not better yet.
‘Wake up, Annie.’
She opened her eyes, tested her power to see, to hear, to feel. The pain hammered dully behind her eyes, the nausea subsided. She tried speech as she looked up at Jak. A gravelly croak she didn’t know as her own. ‘You saved me?’
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Look, Annie, you’ve got to wake up. We’ve got to get going. C’mon.’
Two pairs of arms eased her to her feet. Jak to her left with the firmer grip. To her right, a hunched figure it took a moment to identify as Dish. Upright, she was able to see the contours of a small room. Scruffy, paint peeling from the walls. Damp. Progress was slow on feet that were attached but wouldn’t do as she told them. A steep wooden staircase pitched in and out of focus. This wasn’t possible. She tried to say so.
‘Go first,’ she heard Jak’s voice. ‘No room.’
The bundle of rags that was Dish shambled down below her. She wondered who would hurt the most when she fell on him. Jak, behind her, grabbed a handful of clothing, pulling material tight round her neck, pinching her skin. Her feet floundered, useless. She hung awkwardly from his grip, a cub in the mouth of a lion, and felt surprise he was so strong. Jak grunted with the effort of holding her as they went down … down … to a cold, damp basement.
Dish, ahead of her, was a hunched head and shoulders above a foreshortened body with no feet.
Somewhere along the way they put her down and left her. She huddled on the stone floor. The cold seeped into her bones. She had no means to gauge time passing, but knew they returned for a while, because the arms were under hers again, moving her. She sat on a heap of rubble propped against something scratchy. Jak talked. She thought she’d remembered how to understand, but it was hard to follow, like listening in a language where she had no fluency.
‘Dish … he’ll show you … wanted to know … fire … Jules … Knows how … Going to show us … Pig …’
Pig? She stopped following, tried to interpret. Wait. I can’t hear you yet. Her mind reached out to feel the space she was in. Cold, and more than that, empty. A space that had forgotten its purpose. A tiny part of it was her, lying up against the detritus of whatever it had once been, her breathing shallow, her body not her own. And a tiny part more was Jak and Dish, but their role shrank as she watched it. They moved away.
Don’t leave me. I don’t know what’s happening.
People are like pigs … Pigs are like people … And she could hear snuffling sounds, grunts. A real pig. A pig of a day … pig in a bonnet … And sounds of laughter, some of it her own.
She tried to move, and felt herself slip. The rubble was uncomfortable, and packed with sharp edges that sliced into her skin. The odour of decay rose up as the heap shifted to accommodate her weight. Her head rested for a moment on something deliciously soft. She struggled between disgust at the soggy smell of it and comfort at the feel. Then slid further until there was nowhere left to slide. Jak’s face close to hers. He was trying to talk to her. The words made sense as disjointed snatches. ‘Dish found it all out … he’ll show us how it’s done … he got a pig … pigs are like people … burn a pig’s carcass … just like a person … burn to ash …’
No, Jak. No. Impossible to muster the effort needed to speak. Dusk settled over her and she felt her eyes close.
When she woke it was dark. The only light crept in from high above. It showed silhouettes, shapes not forms. Numbed and part of her surroundings, it was as though the cold had welded her to the floor. She didn’t know if she was close to death, but she was whole. Her mind worked again. She made no attempt to move. Just lay still and worked through the path that had led her here.
Jak had tried to keep her going by feeding her something. A crack derivative of sorts by the arrogant rush it produced. They’d crossed the mountain towards her father’s house. And they’d had a car. So close … There was no gain now in agonizing on if onlys. He’d got her free of the building-with-eyes. How? Where was she now? Where was he?
Maybe he hadn’t got her free. This malodorous space might be a disused part of the labyrinth. Maybe he’d left her hidden and gone for help. They’d be back for her soon. She could prepare herself to help the helpers once they arrived. She would remember everything about the building-with-eyes.
The thought buoyed her up, then smashed her down again, as she remembered why she’d been able to infiltrate the place so effectively. She’d broken the spell of the forget-pills, torn through the heavy curtain that shrouded her mother’s face. Her mother was there at the heart and the start of it. Joining the rituals, ceremonial eating, drinking, smoking … a route to find the spirit of the earth. And after all these years, her mother’s face slotted back into memory as easily as though it had never been absent. It wasn’t the magical face she’d yearned for. It was ordinary, banal. No trace of the loving smile she’d assumed would be there. Her own face but different, harder, no trace of her father’s gentler features, and she knew her mother had never wanted her.
All that pageantry couldn’t have survived the old man by long. It had been dragged into the modern world as a lucrative warehousing venture. That Customs operation had been closer than it knew, almost following back to the heart of the lair. Her father couldn’t have helped even if he’d known. He didn’t know about the labyrinth. The Doll Makers knew and a few outsiders like Annie and her mother and Charlotte’s sister, Julia Lee.
Kovos, the one Elora called the supplanter, was the key to it. Caine, an eccentric figure on the periphery, kept up the old traditions, with the traditional plants, with his specialist stock stuffed by Beth into the stomachs of the dolls. Elora was angry even back then. Annie remembered her face, her voice. Elora and her mother together. No wonder the voice had captured her when she’d heard it ag
ain.
What had Jak said? Something Dish found out. No, Jak. It’s not important. Get word to my father. She’d let Jak down when he needed her, so he’d turned to Dish, his only other ally. She struggled to remember what he’d said that Dish would show her.
Fire … No, I don’t want to know.
How they burn to ash? No, Jak I don’t want to know.
She summoned every spark of energy left and pulled herself to her hands and knees to crawl across to the door. Her eyes saw the stone slabs, dirt ingrained into the worn contours, as they swayed in and out of focus too close. The inferno raged in her head. ‘No, Jak. Forget it. We’ve got enough. Take me home. Jak …’ Her voice dragged through gravel.
The bottom edge of a door appeared in front of her. A draught sliced through the gap beneath it, cutting across her face. She strained upward and grasped the handle. It turned as she hauled herself upright, but the door didn’t budge.
‘No, Jak. Tell him we don’t need to see.’ The words were whispers now between gasps for breath. Glass-encased wire-mesh made a window in the top half of the door. She peered through the filthy glass; felt the smell of dank neglect seep into her nostrils. Another stone-floored space. Another door opposite. Closed. She imagined dragging herself across that other room, hauling herself upright at the next door, looking through on to an infinity of enclosed stone-floored spaces. Trapped in the labyrinth. It was the old nightmare come to life.
The space the other side of the door was empty but for a fat bundle in the middle of the floor, like a body wrapped in oil cloth.
She grasped the door handle, desperate to stay on her feet. Something caught her gaze. A red stain near one end of the tightly wrapped bundle, almost too small to notice at first. Now as she watched, it spread and oozed through the cloth in thick red gobbits that hung and then eased themselves to the floor. Pigs are like people … Dish had found a real pig and cut its throat, and now … No, Jak must stop this right now. She pulled in as big a breath as pain would allow, twisted the handle and pulled the door towards her. It didn’t even creak.
‘Jak!’ she put all her effort into it and heard just a thin wail that wouldn’t penetrate this one door, never mind the infinity of doors beyond. ‘Jak! He’s locked me in.’
Her legs began to buckle, giving up the struggle to hold her upright, but while she could still see through the glass panel, the first wisp of smoke rose from the bundle in the next room.
Chapter 27
Annie lay against the wood until an acrid smell made her flinch. She coughed and retched as the stench hit her. A thick silver blanket oozed under the door, tendrils of smoke snaking up, dissipating as they hit the cooler air.
She dragged herself away from the creeping blanket of death that followed her across the floor. Flashes of light reflected in the glass panel. The fire was burning fiercely now. She could hear the crackle of flames bedding themselves in for a long haul.
As she listened, the sound changed and became the roar of a burner at full power. It startled her into action. There was no escape from this windowless hole, no matter how high the ceiling. She had to find another way.
She crawled to the heap of rubbish. The skin tore from her fingers as she scrabbled through bits of brick and concrete until her hands grasped the slimy black gunge that had once been material. She lay across the heap, pushing the bricks aside, releasing the cloth.
As she dragged it back, she had to dip her face to the floor to find air she could breathe. Blinded by the smoke, she shoved and pushed at the cloth, ramming it into the gap under the door, cramming every last inch home to stop the silver cloud.
The smoke thinned as tendrils spiralled lazily upwards and away.
She reached again to clasp the door handle and hauled herself upright. A malevolent workforce laboured double-speed with knives and hammers in her head, pounding her senses to pulp. She hung, still, against the door until the frenzy subsided.
The oily cloth did its work. A tiny flash of triumph sparked. I’m still here. Still fighting.
Her gaze was pulled to the glass panel, the window on her only way out. Smoke from threadbare black to smooth rounded silver radiated from the tiny furnace at the heart of the blaze. Air currents she couldn’t guess at took curling tendrils up beyond where she could see. The bundled shape was visible through a flickering film-reel of swirling smoke. At its heart, it burnt fiercely as though it had an acetylene torch planted there, yet cloth was still recognizable at the edges.
Poor pig.
The smell of burning accompanied every memory of her mother’s death. The accelerant. She could smell the accelerant. Her father had known. Right from the start when he’d seen Freddie’s catch. He’d recognized the heat damage in what she’d seen as decay. He’d known it was the same murderer, all these years later.
As she watched the fire, pieces of the cloth curled in the heat and began to unravel. With that furnace roaring at its centre, it was clear it would burn to ash. But it explained nothing. Was it something in the wrapping, something in the accelerant?
She thought of the care with which leaves and bark were harvested, seeds pressed, oils extracted. Didn’t know if she remembered sights from hours or years ago. She could tell him what they used in the fires now. It’s a by-product of one of their magic potions, she’d say. It’s from the stuff they grow underground.
‘Oh God, Jak. We didn’t need to see this.’ Her voice grated against the roar of the flames. And where was Jak anyway?
‘Jak!’ She tried to shout, and banged her hands against the door. There was no way to be heard through the roar of the flames.
The seat of the fire shifted. A binding gave way and more of the bundle unwrapped. Something broke free and flopped out, as though trying to escape the flames. Annie couldn’t break the vice that held her gaze. She stared as the fire blackened and puckered the flesh on what should have been a porcine leg and trotter. But it wasn’t.
It was an arm, a man’s arm, and at the end of it a hand whose fingers curled in the heat.
Her legs succumbed to a violent shivering and couldn’t hold her. She sank down. Now she knew why Jak hadn’t come back to get her.
Time didn’t matter now. Memories didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the only person who knew where she was, lay just beyond that door, crumbling to ash.
Dish was one of them. Had she known him from years ago, had his face nagged at her subconscious all this time? She didn’t think so. He was no more than a foot-soldier, but what a good one and what an act.
The only face she couldn’t remember now was Kovos’s, but when the fire burnt itself out, he’d come for her. And she could do nothing but wait.
Where would Kovos dump her body? In the loch? Would her father be there when it was found? Would he recognize what was left of his only child?
A part of her wanted to hear footsteps, to see the door handle turn, to have just one glimpse of his face to confirm that she knew him. Of course, he couldn’t come for her yet. The fire made the only way in and out impassable. It would be hours, and all she could do was wait.
It would be hours.
She gave her attention to the door. The only exit. The only entrance. Would he expect her to be conscious after hours in here? Would he even expect her to be alive? She pulled herself half upright and looked round. The smell of burning flesh seeped through. Her stomach churned. She reached her hand to her head and felt the stickiness of congealed blood in her hair.
No, he wouldn’t expect her to be alive, and he certainly wouldn’t expect to find any fight left in her.
She pulled herself along the floor to the rubble heap and picked through it. A sharp-edged piece of mortar yielded to her efforts. She hugged it to her breast and curled foetal-like around it, in as comfortable a position as she could find on the hard floor.
Hours yet before anyone could use that door to come or go. Time to sleep. If he came back and found her sleeping, he’d finish her off, but if she woke first with energy leve
ls boosted just enough to get behind the door as it opened. Just enough for one good blow before he realized she was capable of it …
It was the thinnest plan she’d ever concocted, but as she sank into sleep, she gambled her life on it.
Her eyes seemed to open a moment after she shut them. She lay still.
Awake.
Aware.
She moved her hands, felt the scratch of concrete. A brighter light than she remembered filtered through. The air felt damp and heavy with the smell of recent fire. The background noise was different. No roar of flames, just a steady drip of water.
She hadn’t woken by chance. Her subconscious had jerked her out of sleep as a new sound filtered in. A soft grunt of effort and the rasp of something scraping on the ground.
She rose to her feet, ignoring the band of pain that tightened round her head, and made herself glide slowly, silently towards the door. Strength was there for one strike.
The handle turned and the door began to open. It stuck on the cloth she’d shoved under it. Another grunt of effort as it was pushed from the other side. She froze in the shadows, waiting. A foot appeared first, kicking out at the cloth to get it free of the door. Annie’s stare was drawn to it. Red and black. She tensed, gripped the lump of concrete and raised it to strike.
Ellie and Kovos … Elora and … the supplanter … Kovos?
Out of nowhere she remembered the biblical name for the supplanter. Had her mother told her or her aunt? The supplanter. Kovos, short for Iakovos.
Or Jakovos.
The door opened and he stepped inside. He looked right at her, took in the stance, the raised weapon. When he spoke, there was amusement as well as exasperation in his tone.
‘Chris’sakes, Annie, you’re fucking hard to kill,’ said Jak, giving her a small back-handed slap to the side of her head that threw her screaming to the ground in agony.
Chapter 28
He grasped her upper arm and yanked her through the door. Pain speared through her head. When he stopped to kick out at the still smouldering remains, she felt only relief that he let her stand still.