The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  ‘He wants to help. He chose this.’

  ‘Bollocks! He chose nothing! This was done to him. He’s just a thing to you. A tool.’

  Hagar took a step forward. Gideon’s mind squirmed under her control. Even as she helped him suppress his torment, the proximity of his daughter was disturbing him. Sarai’s consciousness was the faintest of stirrings, barely perceptible. The poor girl was probably going to die. No matter. She had played her part. It was Gideon who still had work.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hagar, ‘but it’s for the greater good.’

  Delphine grimaced. She hung her head.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know you’ll kill me if I try to fight. No more death. I want it to stop.’

  ‘Then we want the same thing.’

  ‘So no bloodshed. Please.’ Delphine looked up. ‘Let me help you.’

  Delphine watched Hagar’s expression shift – cautious but intrigued.

  Alice threw her arms wide. ‘Delphine! No!’

  As Hagar turned to look, Delphine pulled the trigger.

  The chamber rang with the report. The slug blew through Hagar’s collarbone, blasting a hole in her shoulder. She spun and fell from the walkway.

  Delphine stared into the space where Hagar had stood, panting. She walked to the edge of the walkway and peered down into a mass of old webs and fungi. She flashed her gun-light around. Rats scurried from the beam. She saw no sign of Hagar. The drop was less than thirty feet. They did not have long.

  ‘Butler!’ Her yell rang off the walls. Patience was still unconscious, slumped against the rubble, her gunshot wounds not bleeding but visible – ugly dark gouges. Delphine sprinted to Father’s side.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Alice.

  Delphine nodded. She wiped her lips.

  ‘We need to get him out of here.’ She grabbed Father under the armpits. His flesh was frighteningly hot. ‘Come on, help me!’

  Father raised his head and screamed. Delphine nearly fell over. The heat beneath her palms surged.

  She clung on till the pain was unbearable. She swore and let go. Gouts of flame erupted from broken flesh across his back. His hair blackened and crisped. He shrieked, thrashing.

  ‘Hold on!’ said Delphine. ‘Daddy! Get up and things will be fine. Just a little farther, I promise.’ He writhed. ‘Daddy, it’s me. Daddy! It’s me.’

  ‘Please stop this.’

  Delphine turned.

  Round the edge of the chamber walked Hagar, gripping her wounded shoulder, holding it in place while threads of scar tissue relearnt its shape. ‘Stop this, Delphine. You can’t look after him.’

  ‘You stop! He’s my father!’

  ‘What about your friend?’ Hagar nodded at Alice.

  Delphine turned. Alice was walking towards Patience.

  ‘Alice!’

  Alice did not react. Her eyes were glassy. Patience’s eyelids flickered. Alice strolled up to her, raised the machine pistol and emptied the entire clip into her head. Patience’s body jittered, sagged.

  Delphine aimed at Hagar’s head and fired. The shotgun’s muzzle jinked to the left. The slug struck the far wall with a crazy ricocheting sound, slicing through cobwebs. She pumped the slide action and fired again. The muzzle jinked to the right. Both times, Alice lurched as Hagar briefly relinquished control.

  ‘Look at yourself! Can’t you see what this world makes us do?’ Hagar smoothed a hand over her shoulder and, like a magic trick, the skin had sealed up. She poked at the waxy mass of keloid scars. ‘We age and sicken and die. Suffering makes us afraid, which makes us selfish, hateful and cruel. Even a mother’s love for her child . . . The desire to protect easily turns into a willingness to kill. This . . . place was designed to take every good emotion and poison it.’ She crushed her fingers into a fist. Her left hand was pink and without fingernails, strangely oily. ‘I’m going to undo that. I’m going to save everyone.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I can. Even you.’

  Delphine backed onto the walkway. ‘I’ve killed a peer before.’

  ‘Anwen?’ Hagar smiled. ‘Oh yes, she told me.’

  Delphine had a moment of disorientation. Surely a lie.

  Hagar spread her arms. ‘Don’t you think there might be a better way?’

  ‘You are not a better way.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a horror, then? Babies turning to frail, broken husks?’ She gestured at Sarai. ‘Your father, trapped forever in that body, burning?’

  ‘I’m trying to save him!’ Delphine tried to fire but her trigger finger froze. She fought Hagar’s control, but it was absolute.

  ‘Sarai is the only relief he’s ever known. She drinks his pain. Turns it into beauty. And just look what she could do when she had the suffering of a whole city to feed on.’ Hagar patted her own chest.

  Father howled. Flames were licking from his flesh, catching layers of cobwebs draped across the floor.

  ‘Fight me,’ said Delphine. ‘You’re a bully.’

  ‘The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. We were created to suffer.’ Hagar looked as if she were barely listening. She ran a thumb across her chin, examined the blood. ‘We’re food, Delphine. Fodder for the rex mundi. But there’s a place beyond pain. Gideon is going to lead me to his earthly god. The beast of lies and shadows. Then I’ll stop the wheel of birth and death. Smash it right off its axle. Not for some. For everyone.’

  Delphine felt Hagar grip her mind.

  Alice cried out: ‘Delphine!’

  Hagar glanced at Alice. ‘I need to show you both, don’t I?’

  Delphine’s hands chambered a round. Hagar made her rotate to face Alice.

  ‘No!’ yelled Delphine. She fired.

  The slug hit Alice in the belly. The impact threw her back against the rubble. She slumped, limp. Blood flowed over her legs.

  Delphine blinked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hagar. ‘You need to understand.’

  Delphine could not speak. She felt weightless. It was as if the room were a sketch drawn on paper.

  ‘All that is beloved and pleasing will become otherwise,’ said Hagar. ‘All that we cherish will be separated from us.’ The air was rich with the scent of burning flesh. The squeak and skitter of rats grew louder.

  Hagar brought Delphine back around, dropped her to her knees. Delphine’s hands turned the shotgun round and thrust the muzzle into the soft palate under her jaw. Her thumb settled on the trigger.

  The muzzle pressed against her tonsils. She tried to move her fingers, but they would not obey.

  ‘Do you really want to cling on, Delphine?’ said Hagar.

  Delphine’s body refused to struggle. It was over. She could not go on without Alice. She could not bear to face a world where Alice’s death was a reality.

  Hagar watched, trembling with anticipation.

  Delphine looked into the face of death, and did not feel afraid.

  Her thumb twitched. Slowly, deliberately, Hagar forced it down.

  Delphine closed her eyes.

  The hammer fell.

  CHAPTER 28

  PLAGUE

  Clack.

  Hagar heard the hollow punch of the hammer. Delphine knelt there, eyes closed. The shotgun was empty.

  Flames spread from Gideon. Fire ate through cobwebs, illuminating patterns in the exquisitely carved ceiling, picking out hundreds of rats watching from the shadows, their shining eyes and whiskers. Hagar strode onto the walkway and moved behind Delphine. She whipped the garrotte from inside her sleeve and wound it round Delphine’s throat. She pulled crosswise; the wire bit, the flesh beneath cinching like a corset. Delphine jerked and gagged. Hagar dug a boot in the small of her back and yanked.

  Delphine’s chokes echoed through the chamber. Hagar wished the stubborn girl could have understood. Heaven was nigh. It would be painless.

  Something brushed her ankle. A second later she felt a mild pressure between her shoulder blades. She grabbed at it, re
leasing the garrotte. Her fingers closed round a hairy, squirming body. A rat.

  A second one dashed up her leg and lunged at her throat. She snatched it off, shocked, and crushed its head in her fist, blood and fur oozing through her fingers, its pink legs convulsing. She flung the other rat against the wall. Another bit into her thigh, puncturing skin through her breeches. Tiny claws scrabbled up her back. One tugged on her bootlace. She stamped, punched.

  Rats were streaming over the walkway, dozens, hundreds. She tried to drop into the theodic kata, but her training had no answers. She pirouetted, flinging rats in all directions, slammed herself against the wall, leaving an imprint of smashed, maimed carcasses. Still they surged, a deluge, two deep, three deep, springing up, gnawing her clothes, tangling themselves in her hair, scratching her skin.

  She fled. They were on her back, her arms. In her eyes. The world went black. She stumbled – the weight of bodies brought her down. She felt tiny mouths inside her, fangs shredding sinew, working at her vertebrae. It did not hurt, and she could not make it stop. Shrieking drowned out everything.

  Fear rose in a bewildering rush. What was happening? How could this be? She tried to find her feet, to resist.

  But already, the wicked, fallen world seemed horribly far away. She tried to resist, but her limbs refused. Little tongues were lapping at her brain. Of course. How bewildered Noroc must have been, beneath that heap of gnawing, struggling bodies. How sorry.

  CHAPTER 29

  NOT TILL THE NEXT WORLD

  Delphine lay rigid, windpipe crushed. Thousands of rats swarmed over and around her, and ate Hagar alive. The last Delphine saw of her was a child’s bloody fingers, grasping at air. The wave rolled and she vanished. Fur seethed and churned. Rats burrowed between one another, bodies rolling off the walkway, fat and sated.

  Father lay at the centre of a wheel of flame, burning. Dripping, golden strands of cobweb hung about his body. The fire was spreading fast; it had reached the big wooden discs in the ceiling. Smoke churned lower, thicker.

  Delphine staggered onto all fours, struggling to draw breath. Rats flowed round her, rubbing against her wrists and legs but never biting. Some scampered through the flames and caught light, spreading the fire. Slowly, the throng thinned, sinking lower and lower until she saw a ribcage, the pale dawn of a skull. The rats were scattering. Stragglers squeezed in and out of the eye sockets, gnawed connective tissue from between bone splinters. Dead rats lay all about the bones, most stripped to skeletons themselves.

  She watched in horror as the swarm bore away Hagar’s ribs and skull and shins, drifting under the archway like sticks in a river.

  Delphine staggered to her feet, hacking. She ran to Alice’s body. Alice lay on a heap of soil. There was a purple mark on her forehead. Her eyes were closed. Blood covered her legs and pooled on the ground. Delphine dropped to her knees. Her legs would no longer hold her.

  ‘Alice.’ She could barely say the name. ‘Alice. Alice. Alice.’

  Firelight danced over the body. Delphine was so desperate to touch her, so scared to confirm what she already knew. She reached for the bloody patch on Alice’s stomach.

  Her palm stopped, halted by an obstruction. Beneath her fingertips was something smooth, hard. There were anomalies in the air over Alice’s belly – places where the shirt behind seemed to warp, as if viewed through a lens. Delphine pressed against it, felt resistance, then gradually a shape began to emerge, a curve, a ridge, the comb-shaped head of an antenna.

  She let out a moan.

  Lying in Alice’s lap, her armoured back shattered, was Martha. Blood and a yolky, pinkish bile flowed from the ruin of her wing cases. A single round was embedded in her back. She had curled her legs up into her belly. Her eyes were the colour of water.

  Alice stirred, blinked awake. ‘Wha . . . Where . . .’ She looked at Delphine, then looked down at the body in her lap. ‘Martha!’

  One of the moons fell with a crash. It dragged down blankets of cobwebs. Fire and smoke woofed over the walkway.

  All was lost. And yet. She snapped her fingers in front of Alice’s eyes.

  ‘Can you move?’ The words came out as a rasp.

  Alice tried to lift herself, winced. She shook her head.

  ‘I think my leg’s broken.’

  ‘I’ll help you. You’ll be all right.’ Delphine crouched, nearly swooning with exhaustion. She hauled Alice over one shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and hugged Martha’s body to her chest. She staggered as she rose.

  ‘Your dad!’ said Alice.

  God. She had almost forgotten. She cast around. Where was he? Smoke was thickening, stinging her eyes. Each step was agony.

  ‘Father!’ She could not speak above a strained croak. Was he back the other way? She started stumbling back across the walkway.

  The heat was incredible. Sweat was dripping down her. Strands of burning web fluttered past on intersecting currents. A wind was beginning to roar through the gap beneath the western archway. What about Sarai?

  Alice cried out. ‘Ah! Delphine, it’s too hot. I’m burning.’

  Delphine squinted across the walkway, through the flames and smoke. There he was, in the doorway! She could barely see him, just the black outline of a man swathed in fire.

  Another moon fell, smashing through fungi and sending up thick green clouds of spores. The crash made her ears ring. Father stood, just a few yards away.

  She felt herself decide before she did it, felt her heart drop away.

  She turned her back on Father, and began staggering towards the exit. Her eyes were streaming. The rubble and archway were a blur, lit golden by the raging fire.

  Her leg gave. She dashed her knee on amber stone. Heat pounded against her back. She forced herself to stand. No. There was no power left in her leg muscles. She felt them convulsing as she strained to rise, to bear Alice up and to safety. Please God. Please.

  Alice shoved herself free. She landed on her hands and knees, grunting with pain.

  ‘Argh! Come on!’ Her white hair hung in knotty strings. Her teeth were bared. ‘I’m fine! Let’s go!’ She began dragging herself arm over arm towards the way out, kicking with her good leg.

  Delphine staggered beside her. She focused on the archway. Every step hurt.

  Beside the archway, Patience lay in the heap of debris, slowly coming round. As they reached her, she opened her eyes.

  ‘What did I . . . oh shit.’

  Delphine set down Martha’s body. ‘Take Alice and Sarai and run.’ She turned. ‘I’m going back for Butler!’

  Alice grabbed for her ankle. ‘Delphine! No!’

  But Delphine was away, slipping off the ledge onto a ridge ten feet below, then from that down into the swirling wet heat of the basin. Crooked mushrooms with thick, cerise gills threw jagged shadows. The floor was choked with mulch that squelched and crackled beneath her boots. She flashed her gunlight around, trying to keep her balance.

  His headless body lay at the base of a bulbous fungus, having smashed through the cap, wings crumpled. Flesh was threading up from the neck stump like the tentacles of a sea anemone. She dashed about wildly, hacking with her sickle. Where the hell was his head? Mushrooms were burning. The aroma was heady and stifling and her vision began to blur.

  She slipped, landed flat in a bog of mulch and red algae. Her hand found something wet and sharp.

  She dragged Butler’s head out of the muck by his fangs. His eyes were open, twitching. She nearly dropped it in revulsion, but holding her breath, she managed to clamber back to his prone body. She pressed the head against the stump of his neck.

  Ten seconds passed. Smoke swirled and thickened, blotting out the light. She tried not to inhale. Her eyes were burning.

  His hand fluttered. Butler rose, gasping.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ He dragged Delphine upright. They ran for the side of the pit, Butler wafting a path through the smoke with his wings. The walls were smooth, greased with muck. Fire closed around them. Delphine jumped
and scrabbled at the sheer wall. Butler got beneath her, tried to lift her.

  Ropes of flesh whipped down through the smoke and lashed round their arms. Delphine rushed upwards through a hot wind; her feet hit the ground, then Patience was shoving her under the archway into the passage beyond.

  Another moon smashed down behind them. Butler grabbed Alice, Patience carried Sarai in a mesh of shock-absorbent dendrites, and together they fled down the corridor, grit blowing in their eyes as the fire drank oxygen.

  Delphine tasted blood and charcoal. She clutched Martha’s broken body to her chest. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  For a time, all she knew was the rhythmic pain of one foot thumping into the floor, the other rising. She wanted to shrink herself down to that sensation. Hide in it.

  A hand gripping her shoulder. Butler had stopped.

  It took a few seconds for Delphine’s eyes to focus.

  At the end of the tunnel a figure waited, hunched in the dust.

  He shrank from the torchlight. He was filthy, his clothes ragged tatters. He had a scraggly beard and matted brown hair.

  ‘Hello?’ said Delphine.

  At his feet, spreading outwards in a sea, were thousands of rats.

  They were eerily still. Some were sitting up on their haunches. Some were big as dogs.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Butler.

  The challenge rang flatly off the tunnel walls, fading.

  The remnants of Hagar’s bones were scattered amongst the rats, skull included.

  The figure looked from Butler to Delphine, sniffed. The rats parted and he began moving towards her with a strange, bent-backed gait, keeping low to the ground, sometimes letting the backs of his fingers drag along it, as if tasting its texture. He wore a backpack that swayed as he moved, its contents clanking softly. He seemed relatively young, just dirty, weathered, with long side whiskers. Butler moved as if to block him, but Delphine waved Butler aside. It was the oddest thing. She already knew.

  The man stopped in front of her. He licked black grime off his palm. A swarthy grey rat was sitting on his boot. Another, smaller rat scrambled from the folds of his shirt, up into his hair. His sleeves were rolled up, his forearms lean. He gave off the sweet-sour stink of piss and sweat. A tumour the size of a peach clung to his neck. He scrutinised her without awkwardness. His gaze lingered on Martha’s body for a time, then rose to meet Delphine’s.