by Paul Meloy
“Can’t I just come with you?”
“No,” Babur said. “If I take you out of here, you’ll die. You’ll die in your mother’s belly.”
Chloe’s eyes filled with tears. It was sudden and unpleasant and she rubbed her fingers against her closed eyelids.
“Babur—”
Babur held out his arms. This time when Chloe stepped into them he held onto her and they hugged.
“You’ll be okay, girl. Look, we’ll load some stuff in here and I’ll take you as far as I can. You can lug it through the forest yourself though, I’ve got to get going. You have plenty of daylight. Come on.”
Chloe shrugged against him.
“Come on, Chloe. Sooner I find him the sooner we can get back.”
Chloe stepped from the embrace and ran her fingers through her hair, then pulled at the skin beneath her eyes with her fingertips. It pinched a bit but that horrid welling of emotion seemed to recede.
Without another word she turned and stepped out of the van.
Babur started to get out but Chloe held up a hand. “Go,” she said. “I’ve got enough shit. I’ll grab a few more bits and head back.”
Babur looked relieved. “Good for you,” he said. “Women, you know, I never know when they’ve got enough...shit.”
Chloe laughed. “My mother has an awful lot of shit.”
Babur began closing the door. Before it clunked shut completely, he said, “Say these words: Junction Creature.”
“Junction Creature?”
“Excellent. It’s a book. Your mother has already started buying books for you. It’s one of her favourites. It’ll be just inside the door. A lot of pictures. It might comfort you. It might give you some idea of what’s coming and what we can do to defeat it.”
Chloe nodded and watched Babur climb into the driver’s seat. He turned a key and the engine racked into life. Babur turned and grinned and held his fist up, a thumb raised. Chloe copied the gesture and Babur laughed. Then he was off, bouncing the camper up the high street. Chloe watched until the road curved away behind the shops and he was gone. She listened for the engine, which continued to blat and rattle in the distance until that, too, had faded.
Chloe went back to the shop. Inside on the windowsill lay a book. It was a good-sized hardback with a glossy cover. There was a picture on the cover, an ink line drawing on a sepia background. In the picture a small boy was standing cowering at the bottom of a railway cutting at the entrance to a tunnel full of eyes. Chloe shuddered. Whatever was coming out of that tunnel was terrible.
“Junction Creature,” Chloe said, and then thought: comfort me?
She put the book under her arm and made to leave the shop. As she was turning she heard a sound. She paused. An echoing, husky sound, full and deep. Once, twice: a good sound. She peered out and looked up the road. Overhead the sky was darkening as a low bolt of cloud rolled across it.
Something fell to the floor in the shop. She whirled around. Another book. Small and thin and delicate. She went over and picked it up. A Ladybird Spotter Book of Dogs. Chloe was frustrated that she still couldn’t make out words, hadn’t been able—or permitted, perhaps—to form the pathways necessary to decipher them. But a word did come:
Dogs.
She flicked through the pages. She thought these animals looked funny. And then she stopped and held the book up. An elegant hound peered out at her, its long snout raised, its brown eyes gentle and wise.
“Hello, handsome,” she said.
And from outside, that deep, warm assent.
The Night Clock gathers its numbers to its own face.
TREVENA OPENS HIS eyes. The raggedy hood of the parka restricts his vision down to a dim oval. This coat stinks. He feels sweaty and stuffy and begrimed. Impatient with it, he rucks the hood back off his head and looks around. The night air is cool.
He is alone.
“Daniel?” He calls.
There is no reply. He looks around.
They are no longer on the street outside the shop. Instead he is standing on a broad promenade that stretches miles in both directions. The sea beats its black and foaming edge against a beach beneath him. He turns, and behind is nothing but darkness; it could be concealing anything but nothing he can discern. It’s like the sky above has folded down to box in the promenade and he shudders at the enormity of it and fears he will lose his mind should the vast edge of a proximal planet begin to lift its arc above the horizon. He shudders and turns his back to it.
The sea at least is blunted in the distance by a starlit horizon, which gives Trevena a small but necessary focus. Something has a limit here.
He decides to move, to walk along the promenade and hope to find Daniel. As he turns he sees that a red castle has appeared some way ahead, its rugged, curious bulk rising up from the sea like a beached and crumpled tanker thrown against the promenade and corroded scarlet by the salt, and its sudden materialisation—and its insolent familiarity—trigger an awful doldrums at Trevena’s heart.
He slopes up the prom. He feels the tug of that drop into darkness to his right and concentrates his mind on the lashing hiss of the sea as he approaches the castle. And as he draws near it all changes again and he is standing outside an apartment block. The exterior of the castle is gone but as he looks up at the front of the apartment, Trevena has the sense that it has merely turned inwards and that its scale and internal dimensions are still contained behind the pink stone cladding of the facade.
Trevena walks up to the door. It is smoked glass and he can see the foyer beyond. It is sparse, marble-floored. There is a tiger curled up asleep in front of the lift. Its huge head lies on its front paws and its wild, flaming flanks ripple like a bonfire as it breathes. It has a long scar beneath its ribs, from a terrible wound. It has healed to a raw, pink curve.
Trevena pushes open the door. He approaches the tiger. He is aware of a great feeling of relief as the door closes on the black trench of space and the tremendous length of working sea. He stands in the silence of the foyer and listens to nothing but the air in the tiger’s bronze throat.
A flight of stairs leads up to the right of the lift. Trevena walks across to the stairwell and starts up. He looks back and sees that the tiger is watching him. It yawns and stands, stretching low, its backside in the air and as high as Trevena’s shoulder. Its tail curls like a crook and switches idly back and forth. Trevena continues upwards. There is a landing ahead and he reaches it and looks back and sees that the tiger is following him, padding up the stairs, its head swaying, grinning.
Trevena trots up the next flight. He can hear the click and clack of the tiger’s claws against the marble steps. This is familiar, too, to Trevena, this lazy stalking, but it seems to hold no threat, as if there is an understanding between them, man and tiger. Trevena looks over his shoulder and the beast’s head is coming around the corner, still grinning, looking up at him. Now Trevena begins to think that getting a door between them might be a good idea.
And perhaps the tiger knows what he is thinking, because it tenses there on the landing and springs, bounding up the steps in what looks to Trevena like a teleport because one moment it is down there, and the next it has its tawny face a foot away from his own. It is as broad and pointed as a shield reflecting the strewn fires of war, and Trevena is terribly afraid that if it roars he will be blown apart by it.
But it does not roar. It speaks:
“It would be a good idea to keep me close,” the tiger says. Its eyes are almond-shaped, gentle. Its teeth, though, its jaws: like something lethal borne with enormous caution by a wise man, something that could explode and leave nothing behind but fluttering strips of flesh. The tiger smiles; it knows what it has.
Trevena recalls something he was once told, by his doctor, about his dreams: everything in your dream represents a part of you.
He has dreamed this tiger before.
But the tiger says, “This is not your dream, remember.”
Trevena remembers a
nd suddenly his knees weaken and he is galvanised by a barbaric terror and tries to turn and open the door in the wall of the landing but the tiger is on him before he can grasp the handle.
BABUR STOOD OVER Daniel’s body and experienced a rush of dejavu. Or something-vu. He couldn’t settle on a satisfying way to describe this unexpected, inverted scenario. Inverter-vu? This time it was he climbing out of the camper and approaching the prone body of a man. Babur realised his mind was struggling to accept the familiarity and, more significantly, the emotions it bore. The camper idled at the kerb. Babur knelt and shook Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel opened his eyes.
“Dad?” he said.
“No, son,” said Babur. “Come on, up you get.”
He helped Daniel to stand.
“Oh, God, no,” Daniel said. He was looking down at the pavement. His hands began shaking. His complexion was ashen.
Babur put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “What is it?”
“Dr Natus,” said Daniel. He fell to his knees and lifted a small, limp white object to his chest, rocking it with great tenderness. He wept. Babur noticed broken glass scattered around their feet, and a dark, drying puddle of gritty liquid.
“Oh, he’s dead,” Daniel said. “He’s dead.”
TREVENA FREEZES, PINNED against the door of the apartment. He can feel the tiger’s opulent cheek, soft as ermine, against the side of his neck.
“Don’t be afraid,” the tiger says. Its breath is winter light radiating over the cold, exposed flesh of his throat.
“I’m afraid,” Trevena says. “I am so terribly afraid.”
“You’re not afraid of me. You are afraid of what those rooms contain.”
Trevena shakes his head. Tears run down his cheeks.
“We will go in together,” the tiger says.
“No.”
“We will go together.”
Trevena closes his eyes. Puts his hand on the door handle.
BABUR KNELT WITH Daniel. Daniel held the tiny creature in his cupped hands. He pressed the ball of his thumb into the palm of one of its hands making the fingers curl involuntarily around its tip like a pale anemone.
“Come on, Daniel, we have to go.” Babur said.
Daniel stood up. He looked lost and Babur was unable to avoid thinking of the fathers he had seen during the Soviet war all those decades ago, broken men standing amongst rubble and fire holding the bodies of their children in their arms as the tanks rolled past.
He put a hand on Daniel’s arm and guided him off the path and over to the camper van. Daniel was shaking his head.
They climbed up into the van and Daniel slumped down on the seat, still cradling Dr Natus.
“What happened?” Babur asked.
Daniel looked up, his expression distant. “He attacked me.”
“Who did?”
“The man I brought through with me. I didn’t know it was going to happen but I should have anticipated it when he came dressed in that coat. Cade got to him.”
“Where is he?”
Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere here. He has another controlling him. His name’s Cade and he’s a very angry entity.”
Babur took off his jacket. “Here,” he said, offering it to Daniel. “Wrap the child in this.”
Daniel took the jacket and placed it beside him on the seat.
“He’s not a child,” he said in a quiet voice.
“No?”
“No. I don’t know what he is. I don’t even think he’s real.”
TREVENA AND THE tiger go into the apartment. Trevena moans and draws back as the door opens onto the first of a hundred red rooms, a glistening atrium studded with leather, walls, floor and soaring ceiling. To his right a balcony gives onto a sunken ballroom, it, too, surfaced with that carnal and immodest hide. Despite the size and inner dimensions of the building, the red leather makes Trevena feel snug, and suddenly capable of great acts against his will, acts of harm to flesh. The tiger nudges him. Trevena focuses on a door standing ajar at the end of a corridor that leads off ahead of them from the far side of the entrance hall.
They walk the length of the corridor and come to the door. Trevena feels a wild panic overwhelm him and he freezes, filled with a dread so paralysing he thinks he might be about to open a door that reveals all of God, and God is darkness and the weight of regret, and the Truth is this feeling, tremendous for all time.
“Open it,” the tiger says. “I’m with you.”
And Trevena thinks then that he could face an eternity of Hell with this tiger alongside him, and the dread recedes like a current, alternating in a quantum instant into courage, and he reaches out and grasps the handle and pulls the door open.
DANIEL WRAPPED DR Natus in Babur’s jacket and covered his face with the lapels folded over, and then he sat back with his hands held limp in his lap. He blinked and looked around.
“I came to find a girl. Chloe,” he said. “Can you help?”
“Yes,” said Babur. “I know where she is.”
Daniel’s expression hardened, and Babur saw the strength of the man become apparent, the essence of who he really was emerge again, like a performer coming out of a gruelling role, and he was glad to see it. Glad to see the confusion and grief subsumed by a fierce and hard-earned will.
“What about the man you came with?”
“We’ll have to leave him. He’s a good man. He has his own conflict to overcome.”
THERE SHE IS, the girl. Always the girl.
She has long red hair that lays straight and wet between her narrow shoulder blades. It glistens, enhanced by the light reflected from the leather that lines the walls of the bathroom. She is naked and has her back to him but she is not caught unawares because she is bent slightly over the sink and her legs are a little apart and Trevena can see the full, mature convexity of her cunt seamed with its tidy slit, and the indrawn pucker above it like a navel, a darker pink, and her head is turning revealing her prettily flushed profile, and Trevena knows that she is about to ask him to fuck her, and this time he will, despite the tiger, despite his repulsion, because he can feel the other, Cade, rising, and he is powerful and full of fury. And now he is fully here and he will make Trevena do the one thing that will destroy everything he believes in, everything he thinks he is.
There’s an oval mirror above the basin, and Trevena can see his reflection. He watches himself shake his head. He watches himself take a step forward. The girl is smiling but her eyes are full of something else: uncertainty, confusion. Dread?
Her hand reaches around and it’s soapy and she smears the palm between her thighs leaving herself pearled with a glaze of tiny bubbles.
Trevena groans. Who are you? He thinks, but he thinks he knows, and he can’t bare it. He can’t do this but his erection is monstrous, immeasurable, so big he feels that the lagged walls of the apartment itself want to contract and close around it.
A stranger is watching him from the mirror. The man is mad. He wears the parka coat but he is no longer human beneath it. He is misshapen as if the coat has been thrown over struts. Only the head with the mad, beaming face is something like human, although all that is fallen about it. The arms come up like a conductor’s and the sleeves reveal wrists and fists of a beast that has been tearing at shit and guts.
“Lizzie,” Trevena whispers.
“Lizzie,” the man in the mirror hisses.
Trevena takes another step and can see more of the reflection, and he sees that the madman is standing in a much different room. It is an office with a view out onto an orchard. There is a desk, and a couch, and behind the desk a man lies dying, with a wound in his chest.
“No,” Trevena says.
“Yes,” says the man in the mirror, in the office. In Doctor Mocking’s office. The man Trevena has been seeing for therapy for the last year, since his divorce, to stave off his mental collapse, his therapist, is dying. And what had Daniel said? In the future you will do some very bad things, or Cade will, through you
.
Why the Doc?
The girl snarls. Trevena’s attention is jolted away from the mirror for a moment. Her fingers are a V, her seam unpicked. The madman laughs.
“Fuck her, Phil. How you’ve longed to do it.”
Trevena feels all that red throb in towards him, a warm cushion, tightening. He is sweating. He tears his eyes from the girl and looks through the glass, desperate.
The doctor, Trevena’s kind and wise psychiatrist, has turned his head and is looking back at him. He looks tired, but he smiles. He lifts a hand an inch from the floor. His lips move.
This is not your dream.
Trevena stands still. He breathes out slowly and looks at the girl.
“Fuck her!”
“No,” Trevena says. “Never.”
“FUCK HER!”
Trevena stands aside and lets the tiger come through.
The madman gapes.
“Remember me?” the tiger says. And it leaps toward the dawning horror on the madman’s face, and it must look to Cade like a furnace door has been flung wide beyond the mirror and a bolt of some righteous inferno has been launched at him, all broad white beautiful paws unsheathing their daggers. He staggers back, but the tiger hits the glass and passes straight through it.
Trevena goes to the girl. He has reached for a towel to cover her, but sees that he does not need it. This dream has changed again, and for the better.
It is not his daughter standing there, it never was. This girl is clothed, and small and dark and no more than eight.
Trevena squats down. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” He asks.
The girl looks to be in shock. Her eyes are wide and she is pale, but otherwise she looks unharmed.
“Anna,” she whispers.
“Let’s get you out of here,” says Trevena, and she goes willingly enough to him and he lifts her up and turns and walks out of the bathroom. He closes the door behind him so that Anna does not have to hear Cade’s screams.