Harry wept. Tears of joy, salty and hot, ran down his face and into the corners of his mouth. He was alive again. He was unfossilised. He squeezed his eyes shut, and soon he was asleep as well.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Christy had no idea where he was when he woke up.
It was dark. It was cold. It was noisy. There was a tremendous storm. The wind and the waves were very close. The sea was crashing at the foot of a great cliff, and he was on top of the cliff, with the sea below him.
No, he was in a house. He could sense the walls and the ceiling and the floor, although it was too dark to see them. The house was shuddering and groaning as the storm swept through it, and he could hear thudding somewhere below him, downstairs. He shuddered too, and when he brought up his knees and wrapped his arms around his body to try and keep himself warm, he found that he was encased in layers of crackling, cold, rustling stuff . . . He didn’t know what it was, but he was naked inside it, in a cloying, crinkling tangle.
Frightened, he sat up. His head hurt. His tongue was furry and dry, stuck to the roof of his mouth. When he unstuck it and ran it over his teeth, they tasted sour, a row of dirty, dead things he should have spat out a long time ago. He rubbed at his face with his hands. He stared about him and made out the shape and size of an enormous bed with pillars like tree trunks rising from each corner and a great black canopy above it; and then the shadows of a room, the gleam of a mirror, the bulk of a wardrobe, the glimmer of glass in the darkness of the ceiling, the outline of a door . . .
Door. He had to get out. He rolled off the bed and groped his way across the room. All he knew, for the time being, was that he had to reach the door and go through it, whatever he might find on the other side, wherever he was, whether the place was real or only a dream, however great the pain in his head. He had to. There was one overpowering need to take care of, and only when he’d done it could he think about anything else. He was bursting to piss.
He was going to tug the door open, but he didn’t need to. As he fumbled for the handle and turned it, the door flew open so hard that it struck him on the forehead and almost knocked him over. A hurricane hurtled through it. The wind flung the door wide open with a tremendous crack, the storm howled into the bedroom and the boy bent into it, to try and force his way out. He could see nothing in the screaming darkness. He felt layers of material wrapping around him, clinging to his legs like weed in a rock pool; his hair whipped round his face and his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut, leaned into the wind and held onto the doorjambs to stop himself from being blown back into the room where he’d woken up.
At last he could wrench himself through. There, at the brink of a yawning staircase, he paused and peered down, blinking and blinking to try and understand what he thought he was seeing. At first it was black, a blackness without light or movement. Then the blackness broke in a crashing white wave which churned at his feet and spattered his face with spray.
The sea was inside the house! Icy cold! Roaring waves! A howling wind!
A silvery light, the light of moonlit foam, suffused the landing. Gradually, slowly, the boy began to see where he was and to remember what he’d been doing there. At last he could see what he was wearing, a great white dress which clung to his chest and his waist, which fell to the floor in yards of sequinned, spangled silk. He saw the gloves he’d got on, held them in front of his face, saw his fingers and hands and his arms agleam in the gleam of the sea. Then the waves withdrew. They sucked at the shingle in the hallway, rumbled the boulders in the living room, and the water was black again, a gathering swell which glistened like oil. A moment later, the swell heaved towards the landing and broke in tons of churning white water at the top of the stairs. The whole house shook at the weight of the impact.
Christy wiped the spray from his face with his gloves. He fumbled at the dress, bending to the floor to try and pick up the hem, but there was so much of the flimsy stuff that he couldn’t get a proper hold on it. He gathered it in his arms, straightened up, bent to gather some more . . . and all the time he was bursting to piss, bursting so hard that he thought he must piss down his legs, piss on his feet, piss anywhere to relieve the pain in his belly. At last, as another wave came boiling to the staircase and lit the landing with a swirl of fluorescent bubbles, he managed to hitch the dress up to his waist. The spray was like ice on his nakedness. The water gleamed on him. Jutting his hips forward, he pissed long and hot and powerfully into the sea.
The relief was wonderful. Even when he’d finished, he remained like that for a blissful moment, his eyes closed, his lips parted in a smile of satisfaction.
Then he opened his eyes. He caught a movement on the landing beside him. A grey-haired man in a dark suit and a shirt and tie was watching him from the bedroom door.
Harry Clewe had woken up when the wind howled into the room. He felt terrible. His head hurt, as though he’d been slugged with something very hard and very heavy. Now, staggering onto the landing, he gaped and gaped and tried to understand.
An angel had come for him.
She was standing at the top of the stairs, an angel with long blonde hair, an angel in a glittering, spangled dress. She was more beautiful than all the angels that had visited him in all his life. As Harry’s head blazed with sparks, the angel shimmered in the silvery light. She was feeling into the material of her dress with her white gloves, feeling and feeling for something in the sequinned folds. Transfixed, agog, Harry stood in his bedroom doorway and he stared. It was a glorious vision. A shimmering angel, ablaze with sparks . . .
But then the vision went wrong. It turned ugly. The angel lifted her dress. She thrust her hips forward and started to piss. Harry goggled and gasped. The angel had a penis. A penis, aiming a jet of piss from under the folds of an angel’s dress . . . When the angel shook it, the last amber droplets fell into the foam. Then there was darkness, as the wave withdrew.
Harry sprang forward, shrieking murder. And Christy fled for his life.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The boy leaped from the landing.
He felt the wind of the man’s hand, then the grasp of the man’s fingers in his hair, as he flung himself from the landing and into the booming, black well of the staircase. For a split second Christy smelled the man’s breath and heard the bellowing beside his ear, before he hurled himself into the next wave that drove into the house. Careless of where he might fall, reacting instinctively to the gleam of pure murder he’d seen in the man’s eyes, the boy dived into the crashing water.
He surfaced as the wave was withdrawing. It dragged him with it, bumping him and rolling him over and over until he felt himself land in the banked-up shingle in the hallway. His head struck something very hard and very sharp, a corner of the piano which was being smashed to pieces at the foot of the stairs, and then he had a moment to gulp at the air, with the water boiling around him, before the next wave crashed on top of him. It lifted him right off the shingle, as though he were a piece of the storm wreckage, and he was flung up the stairs again, head over heels, lost in the foam. Opening his eyes, staring about him, he saw his legs, white and thin and bare, banging at the banister. He saw his hands and arms in the white gloves, like strange sea creatures which swayed with the swirl of the flood. He saw the great white dress billowing around him, the sequins gleaming in the gleam of a million bubbles which burst from its folds, the pearls like a shoal of tiny fish trapped in the frothing, gauzy stuff. He saw a woman, whose face was horribly bloated, who swam towards him and brushed her mouth on his in the softest of submarine kisses . . . The woman swam away. His ears roared with the roar of surf; they started to whine. Once more, his head came clear of the surface, he gulped at the air, and, as the wave fell back, he was pitched down the stairs, bouncing, bumping, tumbling, until he banged so hard on the edge of the piano that all the wind was knocked out of him.
This time, finding himself the right way up for a second, the boy kicked with all his strength. He forced himself
to his feet. The water raced around his waist, around his chest, but he lunged for the piano and clung to it, to anchor himself while another wave crashed up the stairs and fell back again. As he sucked at the air and filled his lungs with it, as he swept the hair from his eyes, he glanced up to the landing. There was the man, Harry Clewe, silhouetted against the moonlit window . . . the gleam of his wiry grey hair, the gleam of a wild eye, the gleam of his hook, and another metallic gleam which made the boy gasp and then fling himself to his left and scrabble for shelter behind the piano . . .
It was the gleam of the gun barrel. Harry had picked up the gun from its customary position on the landing and was pointing it downstairs into the hallway. The boy moved just in time, because the dress was a fine target, fluorescent in the silvery surf like a huge jellyfish that the storm had fetched up. There was a colossal explosion as the gun went off. For a moment, the sea was lit by a belch of white flame. The boy felt the spatter of shot in the water, splinters of wood on his face as the corner of the piano was blown into pieces . . . and, riding a roller which broke through the front door, he kicked towards the living room.
The wedding dress ballooned with water. It buoyed him up and bore him along. The sea hurled him out of the hallway, just as a second deafening, blinding explosion shook all the air around him. The boy plunged into the wave and let the force of it tumble him to relative safety.
In the living room, he found something of a lull in the storm. Although the water was waist-deep, it didn’t churn and roar as it did in the hallway. The swell drove in; the gale came straight off the ocean, across the fields and through the shattered windows, flinging a spray from the chopping waves . . . but Christy could stand up. He could breathe. The sea lifted him, filling the dress so that the material frothed and shimmered on the surface. It carried him about the room, banging his feet and legs on boulders, and then it put him down again until the next swell came surging through the doorway. But at least he could breathe. His chest was thudding with the fear of what the man would do to him. The water was icy, and the storm howled around him, but the boy found his breath and his footing, and he strained his ears to hear.
He didn’t have to wait long to find out what the man was up to. He thought he heard a voice above the booming of the storm, a shout and the slam of a door; for some reason, Harry Clewe had gone into the little bedroom, cursing and kicking at the dogs, and had come out again. The boy held his breath and tried to hear. Surely the man wouldn’t come down the stairs for him, wouldn’t plunge into the freezing waves and wade through the water to look for him . . .
But, as Christy cocked his head and listened, he heard the creak of the banister, a heavy footfall, a splutter and a gasp and a walrus-snorting as the man trod from the landing and breasted the next great wave that drove into the house. Harry Clewe was coming downstairs.
Before he had time to think where he might hide himself, Christy saw the bulk of the man forcing into the living room doorway, a big, black bulk borne up on a big, black wave. The sea pitched Harry forwards into the room, and put him down again; it lumped him from the door to the middle of the room in a single step. The same swell that had lifted him broke in the boy’s face with an icy slap. Automatically, Christy wiped at his eyes with his hands, and then he saw that the man had turned his head straight away towards him. Harry had caught the flash of the long white gloves, and was spitting and roaring and levelling the gun, which he’d been carrying over his head to keep it dry. Christy, without taking the time to gulp a breath, plunged beneath the surface.
The water folded around his head. He heard the muffled explosion, saw the blaze of light through the swirl of foam, felt a shudder in the sea itself as the gun went off. He groped at the boulder-strewn floorboards, scrabbling with his fingers for something to hold on to, something to anchor him down there, because the force of the swell in the dress was trying to lift him to the surface again. He caught at the trap door, which the waves had sprung open, and closed his fingers on the hinge. But his head was splitting as the surf thundered around him, his chest was bursting as he held his breath to the limit of his endurance . . . so he let go of the trap door and bobbed to the surface, buoyed up by the dress. He broke into the spray and the howling storm in time to inhale a mouthful of the next wave that rode over his face, in time to glimpse the gleam of the gun that was pointing straight at him. He drove himself downwards again.
Another explosion, another flaring of flame. He thought he must drown as the sea rolled him over and over. His chest seemed to fill with water, which swelled inside him and drove every precious bubble of air from his body. Down there, the world was a booming, pounding, turbulent place, streaming with foam and tangled with weed, where he tumbled this way and that and banged on boulders, where his long, white, naked legs were rasped on razor-sharp barnacles, where he was dumped like a doll against the slab of a cold, black wall. Instinctively, knowing that he must fight his way upwards and upwards where the air must be, where his life must be, the boy felt at the wall and forced himself up it. At last his head burst clear of the surface. Choking, retching, his chest hurting so much that he thought his ribs must be broken, he spewed a gallon of sea water. He filled his lungs with air.
Harry was waiting for him. Hysterical with rage, bellowing murder, he flung the gun across the room. The butt caught Christy very hard behind his left ear. As the boy clutched at his head with both hands, Harry surged towards him, brandishing the dismembering knife which he’d fetched from the little bedroom before he came downstairs. The boy tried to writhe away, but Harry had him. They grappled chest to chest in the deep water. The hook came up, ripped into the material at the back of the dress and yanked so hard that the boy’s neck seemed to snap. Harry thrust his face forward. His spittle hot on Christy’s cheek, he screamed the words with all his strength.
‘See this knife? Know how sharp it is? Course you do, you little butcher! D’you think I’m going to cut your lovely white throat with it? D’you think so? Well, you’re wrong! It’s not your throat I’m after!’
He drove the knife under the water. He thrust it into the folds of the wedding dress, fumbled and tore at the layers and layers of silken stuff. Christy squealed, the blade keen on his thighs, on his belly. He arched away. He squirmed his hips as the blade sawed at him, at the piece of him that had enraged Harry Clewe so much.
‘That’s what I’m after!’ Harry roared. ‘You can wriggle as much as you like, but I’ll get it! It shouldn’t be there, should it? So it’s got to come off? Yes, right off, and fed to the dogs!’
He lunged with the knife. Christy felt it on the soft bare skin on the inside of his thigh, burning him terribly. He felt his skin opening, felt the hotness of his blood come welling out. Forced back to the wall, he cracked his head again, where the mantelpiece jutted and caught him on the wound that the gun butt had made. His hands, which he’d been flailing at his groin in a futile attempt to protect himself, shot to the surface and flew into the air, the gloves long and white and dripping like a pair of leaping fish . . . so that Harry recoiled, freeing the hook from the wedding dress, hesitating for a second before aiming the dismembering knife at the defenceless member.
A critical hesitation . . .
Christy groped at the mantelpiece, knowing in an instant what he must find and how he must use it. He reached with both hands. Yes, the ammonite was there, just behind his head. The wedding gloves felt at the smooth cold stone. His hands closed around it.
Suddenly paralysed, Harry watched. He froze with the knife under water. But, as the fingers gripped the ammonite, he smiled, because he knew that the fossil was heavy. So heavy that a girl, young and lovely in a gorgeous wedding dress, could hardly lift it . . .
Christy wasn’t a girl. He heaved the ammonite off the mantelpiece. With every ounce of his strength, he crashed the fossil on Harry’s head. He crashed it again. He crashed it a third time, aiming the blow at the flickering smile. Until the face was stove in, the teeth in splinters and bloo
died spittle.
Harry sank into the sea. With the next wave that drove through the hallway and into the living room, Harry Clewe was gone.
Postmortem
For a long time the boy stood in the deep water and held the ammonite to his chest. The waves lifted him gently, the swell ballooning in the wedding dress. They carried him from one part of the room to another, setting him down, lifting him up and carrying him, setting him down again. He didn’t try to anchor himself; he moved with the rhythm of the sea, going wherever the waves would take him. His feet knocked on hard, sharp things, on the bulk of a big, soft thing which had sunk to the bottom of the flooded room, but he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. He was numb. His mind was blank. He didn’t feel the spray on his face or hear the wind which came straight off the sea and into the derelict house. He clutched the fossil to him and he floated on the spreading folds of the wedding dress.
As the tide began to turn, the moon fell through the empty windows and lit on him, on his face and throat which were drained so white, on the bodice of the dress so trim and neat on his marbled skin, on the yards of sequinned stuff which swirled around him like foam. The boy turned his eyes to the moon. But they were dead eyes. He didn’t know what the moon was, any more than he knew what the sea was doing, what the wind was doing, what he was doing. It was only a light, beaming on him, and he was adrift on a deep, cold sea.
Gradually, he knew that the thing he was holding was heavy, so he let go of it. The ammonite fell through the surface of the water and disappeared. He knew that he was cold, so he waded across the room to the doorway and started to drag himself up the stairs. He only managed the first three steps before he collapsed, face down. The weight of the waterlogged wedding dress was too much for him. He was too weak, too exhausted, too traumatised to move any more.
The Blood of Angels Page 46