Directly over my bare stomach, one of the darts was working its way loose.
Sniggering laughter echoed behind me. I twisted my head as far as I could to see Spanky, resplendent in a shining emerald green suit, sliding his hand beneath Sarah Brannigan’s skirt, rubbing his leg between her thighs. She was naked to the waist, her breasts opaque in the glare of the steel room.
‘Sarah’s here to help me punish you, Martyn. This is my torture box, where a minute can be stretched to last for an eternity.’
Sarah slipped her arm around Spanky’s waist and pulled him close. ‘This’ll teach you to treat women like dirt, Martyn, you sad little shit.’
She stamped her foot hard on the floor and the steel dart broke free and fell, cleaving through the heavy air to pierce the skin of my abdomen, pinning me firmly to the table. Three feet of shining grey metal cut through my burning intestines and protruded from my stomach as the next dart plunged down into the skin of my left thigh, tearing it and pinning me—
None of this is real he’s trying to make you lose control he’ll slip in when you cry out in agony slip inside your mind and promise to take away the pain you’ll let him, too, anything to make it stop just make it stop but it’s not real not real not real not real not—
—I was standing soaking wet in the middle of the traffic-packed road at Hyde Park Corner.
A bus horn was blaring at me. I ran for the safety of the far pavement, slipping on wet tarmac, nearly falling beneath the tyres of a delivery truck. Even in the rain, exhaust fumes saturated the air. I landed beside a concrete litter bin, cracking my forehead, and sat there, trying to regain my breath.
What the hell was happening to me? The face of my stolen watch had cracked, sticking the hands together. I looked up at the waves of cloud driving across the dark sky. It had to be midevening. I was missing some hours. I’d been in Lottie’s room. Spiders in my mouth. The taste of daemon flesh. The ecstasy of becoming lost—
Where was Spanky?
My hands stretched out across the cold spattering pavement at my side. This was real. This rain, the concrete gutter filled with dogshit and discarded chips and empty packets of crisps, these homegoing commuters in their steamed-up cars, the neon of the fried chicken takeaway on the corner of Oxford Street. They were all real.
Where the hell had I been for the last few hours?
I figured he’d been trying to disorient me, barraging me with hallucinations—and what had I been doing, wandering the streets like a strung-out junkie, lost in some hallucinatory internal flight. My jeans were torn out at the kneecaps and smeared with blood. I had grazed the palms of both hands and gashed my right arm. There were bits of gravel stuck all over me. My head was hammering. My back was sore and felt massively bruised.
Where the hell was he?
He couldn’t be far away, I knew that. I tried to rise to my feet, but the pain in my legs was too great. I felt as if I had run a marathon with broken knees, but I didn’t care. I searched the corners of my body and knew that I had not given in. Only a short time to go and I would be free—if there was anything still left of me by midnight.
By gripping the lip of the litter bin I was able to slowly raise myself into a standing position. Thank God he had no desire to engage me in physical combat; right now I couldn’t take on a five-year-old. I needed to get to a call box and find out what had really happened to Lottie. I’d spent the day fighting apparitions, and felt like a drunk coming down from the bender of all time. My head stung and throbbed harder than ever, and I could feel a fresh crust of blood around my damaged eye.
I limped into the subway. I wasn’t about to try crossing the road again. I entered the public toilet and washed the scarlet-black streaks from my face and hands, but my reflection in the mirror was still unnerving.
It took me half an hour to make it to a callbox, only to find that I had no money in my pockets. I was able to beg/threaten ten pence out of a wide-eyed Japanese woman armed with Harrods shopping bags, and dialled Lottie’s number. Susan answered. She told me that she’d only just come off duty, and hadn’t seen her flatmate. She sounded as puzzled as I was.
‘Do you have any idea where she might be?’ I asked, trying to sound as normal as possible.
‘No, but she can’t have gone far. Her purse is still here.’
Had I managed to surface from Spanky’s psychedelic onslaught long enough to warn her to escape? My immediate past was a morass of half-seen visions and muffled cries, fading fast from my bludgeoned mind like overloaded circuits burning out. I hung up the receiver and limped toward the lights of Oxford Street. According to the clock above Selfridges it was almost 9.30 p.m.
Two and a half hours.
One hundred and fifty minutes.
William Beaumont’s mortal flesh, descending into collapse and corruption with each passing moment, making Spanky stronger with desperation, less mortal, ready to make the leap across.
Why wasn’t he here to hound me? His time on earth was fast coming to a close. I breathed deep, forcing the cold fume-laden air into my lungs, shaking my head free from the remnants of Spanky’s aphrodisial embrace. Then I looked along the street.
He was waiting for me, of course.
Changed into his tuxedo for the big finish.
The suit he was wearing when we first met. Very smart.
Nonchalantly leaning against the doorframe of the newest Oxford Street entertainment complex, still open for business. Inside, warm bodies and sheer glass walls. Bad combination.
‘You’re late,’ he said, smiling warmly. ‘You mustn’t be late for your own rebirth.’
Chapter 39
Transmutation
The Oxford Street entertainment complex.
Five landings of glass and chrome suspended by angled steel cables for that user-friendly industrial look I associate with the arse-end of the eighties. The place was busy because there was a special promotion going on at one of the stores. Lines had formed to see an ancient American TV star sign autographs for anyone who’d bought her perfume.
Spanky marched swiftly ahead of me through the shoppers, who veered from my unsteady path when they caught sight of me. I was still suffering from the after-effects of my hallucinatory trip, and was trying not to walk into things.
Nothing seemed real any more, especially in here. The shops were bursting with bright photographic displays of crotch-thrusting teenagers stroking tanned thighs. Around them milled fat young mums with desperate eyes and beer-gutted dads in garish tracksuits.
Spanky seemed perfectly at home in the EuroDisney fakery of the mall. Perhaps its tatty car-ferry chic fulfilled his criteria for hell on earth. A condensation of human misery, Spanky-world. It was an odd place for him to choose, though. Too bright, too crowded—and then I realized that it was exactly what he wanted.
‘Quite,’ Spanky agreed.
We had arrived on the second floor of the building. Spanky stood at the top of the escalator, backlit by the vast ficus-filled atrium. My foot was hurting so badly that I could barely manage to stand. From behind us came a sickly aroma of popcorn, as one of the multiplex screens voided its chattering audience.
‘What a palace of modern culture,’ declared Spanky. ‘A shrine to the new obsessions. So warm and friendly and human. Those people down there.’ He pointed at the crowd surrounding the wizened celebrity at the perfume stand, which had been decked with garish gold balloons at the entrance of the store. ‘How many would you say are in that group? Thirty-five? Forty?’
‘What are you going to—’
‘—offer you a trade, of course. No time to waste now. Their lives for yours. A straight swap, no blinkum, flim-flam or jiggery-pokery. What a deal, forty for one. Doesn’t that make you feel special? What do you say?’
‘You can’t hurt them,’ I said loudly, causing a woman to pull her child from my path. ‘Your illusions can’t possibly affect so many people.’
‘Who said anything about illusions? This will be real. First, let
’s stir up some panic.’
He drew a deep breath, rubbed his hands together hard and then opened them. A roar of stinging white flame scorched the air between us as I stumbled back. He blew on the plume of fire, spreading it evenly across the floor, buckling and blackening the tiles. Overhead, the sudden localized change in temperature caused electronic alarms to sound.
The open design of the building had prohibited the installation of a complete sprinkler system, but part of the damaged area was sprayed from overhead pipes. Within moments shoppers began pointing and glancing up at the ceiling, as if expecting to find instructions displayed there.
‘I’ve closed all the deadbolts on the entrance doors. No hallucination, just good, hard kinetic chemistry. There are escape routes through to the next building on this floor.’ Spanky pointed out across the confused, milling crowd. ‘So now they get on the escalators.’
Spanky was flicking gobbets of fire from his fingers as he walked, tossing one burning spear into a stationery shop, another into an orange-juice stand. Did it appear that I was the cause of the fire? Whether it did or not, people were staying the hell away from us.
All around our feet, the rubberized floor tiles were starting to leak tarry black smoke. Looking from the balcony I could see that already, dozens of people were pouring on to the lowest of the moving staircases.
Spanky had always operated with a fluid grace that made his miracles appear effortless. Now he concentrated, closing his eyes, a thin blue vein pulsing at his temple.
‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him. ‘Tell me what you’re doing!’
And as I stared at him I knew for the briefest of moments what was happening in his head. I saw what he could see. Inside some kind of machinery, oil-covered parts were slowly revolving around each other, then one sheared with a crack like a gunshot. I ran to the balcony and looked over as the steep escalator carriage jammed dead, cascading its screaming passengers over each other. Elderly women, mothers and children pitched forward, heavy husbands and folding prams and pregnant girls tumbling on to each other. Anguished shrieks could be heard over the piercing alarm.
Despite the sprinklers, the fire was spreading across the floor in a luminous orange sheet, setting light to the dry tubbed trees.
Spanky still had his eyes shut and his teeth gritted tightly together. He hadn’t finished.
One of the nearby shopfronts cracked across its largest pane, glass diagonals tottering lethally in their frame. One section lazily divorced itself and fell forward, shearing down on to a running child.
I darted forward, too late to do anything in the ensuing explosion of glass. I tried to reach the screaming sprawled infant but Spanky’s hand dug into my shoulder and he dragged me back, away from the bloody carnage.
He raised his hands to the ceiling and slowly clenched his fists, drawing down his arms. The floor above bowed and gave way, groaning and cracking apart in a spray of plaster, concrete and steel pinions. A woman fell through, still clutching her shopping bags against her breasts, as though they were more precious than her children. One of the ceiling service pipes stretched and fractured, spraying shit across the screaming crowd as another began to pour gallons of effluvia on to the burning floor.
I looked back at the tuxedoed figure, half-obscured by smoke, backlit by flame.
Spanky was laughing. Really enjoying himself.
I had no way of fighting him. My hand brushed against the penknife Lottie had left in my pocket. What could I do, try to plunge it into his heart? He sensed my every move. He was invulnerable, all-powerful, and he was prepared to kill as many people as it took to let him win.
I knew at that moment it was over.
‘Spanky, stop. I’ll do it.’
His eyes snapped open, and for a moment only the whites showed. Then the emerald pupils rolled disconcertingly into place. When he spoke, his voice was little more than a guttural croak. Psychokinetic activity clearly debilitated him.
‘Good,’ he grunted, panting slightly, ‘I always knew you’d see it my way.’
‘You must end this. Don’t hurt anyone else.’
He stared up at the ceiling. The electronic wailing above the screams suddenly ceased. He looked back at me and smiled.
I shifted uncomfortably on the crackling, hot floor. I wanted him out of here as quickly as possible.
‘What happens now?’
I had committed myself. Thinking back, I suppose I’d always known that I would have to admit him. After all, as he liked to remind me, we were one person with two radically opposed sides. Isn’t everyone?
‘Not here. Can’t do it here.’
He took stock of the unfolding chaos, flicking his head from side to side. ‘Has to be somewhere quiet. Follow.’
He unlocked the safety doors at the back of the second floor, and we left behind the wailing tangle of arms and legs at the foot of the jammed escalator.
The rain had died to a spattering, carried by the rising wind. We avoided Oxford Street, where police cars and fire engines were now arriving, and moved into one of the squares behind the main thoroughfare.
We passed beneath a blue neon clock, and I saw that it was still only 11.00 p.m. I had hoped it would be later. My plan, if such a thing existed in the buzzing remnants of my brain, was to hold out until just before midnight. I had this idea that I would give in with just minutes to go. Then I’d find a way to hold him at bay until the appointed time had passed.
But it was too early, and he knew it.
This was no vampire locked from his coffin at sunrise, but a fast-thinking wraith, a quicksilver spirit-human. I had no way of stalling him at close quarters, not when he could read my mind. Worse than that, I was having trouble just remaining on my feet. My vision kept blurring, and there was something wrong with my sense of balance. I felt as if I was suffering from dysentery. My stomach and bowels seemed to be filled with warm churning water.
My daemon-kin strode on ahead, ever ahead, hale and hearty, a grotesque British rambler, all fresh air and cold baths, dragging behind his wasted human incubus like a man rescuing a mongrel from the gas chamber.
I could not keep up. My eyes wanted to close, my mind to descend in the comforting murk of sleep. I just wanted it to be over. He would occupy my body and crowd out my mind and I would simply cease to exist. Let him wreak the havoc he so dearly desired. I no longer cared. I was abdicating my responsibility toward the rest of the world; I hadn’t asked for it in the first place. Let someone else save them. I was too fucking tired.
I wanted to die.
We were there, at the gates of the park once more, back where it had all begun, back in my old life, as distant to me as an earlier incarnation. The wind was pulling at my torn wet sweatshirt as I crossed on to the grass, following his lead.
‘Here,’ he said, turning and pointing down at a spot three feet from where he stood. ‘Stand here.’
My watch was broken, but I knew no more than fifteen minutes could have passed since we left the chaos of the shopping mall. There was no stalling now, and no turning back. What could I do to distract him for three quarters of an hour, perform a few musical numbers? I knew that my bluff had been called, and that I would have to go through with it.
Hearing the sound of a footfall on leaves, I looked behind myself and fancied I saw a figure between the blustering bushes, but there was no one. This was the eleventh hour, all right, but nobody was going to rescue me at it.
‘Take off your clothes.’
‘Jesus, it’s freezing. I’ll die in this rain. I’ll be of no use to you.’
‘Take off your clothes.’
The sweatshirt was stuck to my chest with blood and mud. I laboriously removed my jeans and made a display of folding them, careful to concentrate my mind elsewhere.
‘Stop wasting time. Throw them over there.’ He glanced carelessly at his watch, and waited. ‘Empty your mind. Think of nothing.’
And then I was newborn naked, standing beneath the roaring tree
s in the middle of Regent’s Park, in more elemental contact than I had ever experienced, waiting to be taken like some parody-sacrificial virgin, host to something beyond my powers of comprehension.
Around us the wind hissed and soughed in the flapping branches, as turbulent as whitewater. I looked back at Spanky, who removed his jacket and shirt, pulled off his shoes and socks, stepped out of his underpants and tossed the whole bundle back at the trees, knowing that he would no longer have need of them.
‘Ask me to enter you. Invite me in. Say the words.’
‘Enter me,’ I said quietly.
‘Louder.’
‘Enter me.’
He released a low sigh of anticipation.
There was something different about Spanky’s body now. He raised his shoulders and hunched forward, the skin of his chest darkening.
It wasn’t darkening.
It was drying out, starting to slough off like a snake’s.
As the translucent epidermis, all that remained of William Beaumont, gradually flaked away, torn into tatters by the wind, I saw my Spancialosophus Lacrimosae for the first time. I saw what was about to inhabit me.
And I cried out at the sky.
Scarlet eyes, searing and sore, narrow slits, barely visible at all.
A raw, cracked texture to the skin, painful blotches of pink and brown, like severe sunburn.
No lips.
No teeth.
Mouth like an unhealed wound.
Flickering crimson triangle of a tongue.
Bony starved body, angular and cramped, suffering under too-tight musculature, a figure aching to be sheathed in the plump soft flesh of humanity.
I had wondered about his—its—true appearance, but I had expected nothing like this. Here was no brave, broad-backed daemon but a pain-racked, twisted thing, a peeled starving concentration-camp corpse of a creature that could not bear to be exposed, and had to hide itself away.
It opened its mouth to speak but it had blood for saliva, and the redness leaked from the sore opening, so it quickly sealed shut once more and contented itself with flexing the scabrous little stumps of its fingers.
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