by Paul Meloy
First published 2019 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-114-5
Copyright © 2019 Paul Meloy
Cover art by Ben Baldwin
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
Adornments of the Storm
Paul Meloy
Part One
Flying Ant Weather
ROB LITCHIN WAS drunk for the first time in seven years.
Pissed on the sofa in his mum’s lounge at ten o’clock in the morning. How easy it had been to sink back into the cushions and unplug that two-litre bottle; the plastic suppleness and the liquid weight of it, the slosh, the flex in his fist as agreeable as squeezing high up on a young girl’s thigh.
And the lively flood of sour factory cider. Cheap and pale, rinsing the fuzzy brush of his tongue, sluicing down his neck, hitting his empty stomach and leaching into his blood like herbicide up the stems of mortified plants.
Rob closed his eyes. His long hair, very grey now in streaks and roots, hung over his face. A sigh shuddered through him and he reached out for the bottle on his mum’s coffee table. His thin, trembling fingers prodded it, and it rocked on the moulded crown of its base and toppled over with a hollow, playful sound: boink-bok bok bok bokbokbokbok.
Empty, or as good as, with less than a mouthful swilling about along the flank of the bottle, streaked through with plankton-like flukes of dribble. Backwash, you called that. Never share a bottle with someone who’s eating biscuits. Rob lifted his head and looked at it, lying there on its side on the dainty little table. You could put a ship in that, he thought. A shit one. A ship of fools. A shit little ship of fools.
But, Rob not being a hobbyist, the bottle would never be anything more than recyclable. He reached down between his heavy black biker boots and pulled another two-litre bottle from a carrier bag. SHOP AT BALV’S it said on the side of the bag, which Rob had been happy to do. Beanie the dwarf had been surprised but not dissuasive when Rob had pitched up at half seven that morning and gone straight to the drinks aisle. No concern for Rob’s wellbeing, just a small mittened fist to snatch the notes and push across some negligible change. “Bin a while, chap,” Beanie had said. “Back on the jink, is it?” He had withheld thirty-seven pence in coppers, payment for the plastic bag. Overheads. Rob had declined to reply, demurring to mutter about the ramped-up price of the packaging. His mouth was too dry. He wasn’t even gratified to notice Beanie was sporting a black eye and a fat lip.
Rob unscrewed the cap of the new bottle and shot a cupful against his tonsils with a precise squeeze. He swallowed, eyes watering, and put the bottle between his knees. He slumped back against the floral bolsters and let the first real tears come.
DOCTOR MOCKING WAS dying.
His girls were there: Lesley, in her late teens, beautiful, her blonde curly hair tied up in a pony tail; Anna, younger, dark, quiet, as mysterious as Lesley was open and frank. Gifted girls, marvellous girls.
Doctor Mocking smiled. He looked up as the door to his bedroom opened and a man walked in. The man ducked beneath the lintel and stood immobile, looking down at the bed. He was huge, beard and hair wild and tangled as briars, long coat to his calves; his eyes held all the sorrow of an endless Gethsemane night.
“You came,” the Doctor said in his gentle voice. “Bismuth.”
“Of course,” the giant said. “Old friend.”
Doctor Mocking lifted a hand and the other man took it in his huge fist. He swept his coat away from the backs of his legs and sat on the edge of the bed. He peered down at the Doctor.
Lesley and Anna both kissed the man, once on each bearded cheek. Bismuth looked at them with tired eyes. They fell against him and he held them, staring over their heads at the far wall while they cried, and when eventually they calmed and released him, he spoke softly to them and sent them away.
“What is it?” Bismuth asked. “Your heart?”
“Yes. It’s weak now.” Doctor Mocking sighed and patted the back of Bismuth’s hand. The hand was huge, calloused, tanned.
Doctor Mocking closed his eyes and rested, his breathing shallow, while Bismuth told him what he had found.
THE AUTOSCOPE SQUIRMED beneath Bismuth’s boot. Bismuth trod hard on its throat and drove his Egress Lever into its face. The brass Lever punched through the black skin between its verminous eyes, driving through its brain and the back of its skull to puncture the filthy, sodden ground beneath it. Bismuth gripped the handle at the top of the Lever and a Gantry opened in the middle of its head and it was sucked away like slurry, infolding and tearing, screaming, ravelling into the slot Bismuth had summoned inside it.
Bismuth lifted his boot and glared at the sky. He roared, and yanked the Lever out of the earth. He turned as another Autoscope roiled across the silted and stinking surface of the dump. It cast a spray of wet filth before it and a cloud of gulls rose screeching from the colossal piles of refuse through which it thundered. They hung on the disturbed currents of night air like cinders blown from a dead fire.
Bismuth stepped forward and swung the Lever but the Autoscope hit him and they fell back against a heap of junk. Bismuth felt the edges of cold metal dig into his back. He twisted, pushing at the same time, sending the Autoscope stumbling away to his side. He moved, backing into the gap through which the Autoscope had just passed, his Lever back in his belt, his fists raised.
The Autoscope spun around, six eyes blazing beneath a diadem of splintered horns, the diamond-shaped wings that hung from its flanks rippling black kites. It advanced on Bismuth slowly, claws digging in the muck.
Bismuth felt the air move and threw himself towards the advancing Autoscope just as an Incursion Gantry opened a foot away from where he had been standing. His heavy boots pounded the dirt and he leaped to the side at the moment the Autoscope darted its head at him. Long, curving tusks slid from slits beside its mouth and it swung its face, goring the fetid air. It shook its head and ropes of purple saliva spooled from its mouth, fuming in the dirt where they spattered.
Bismuth landed against a stack of tyres and shouldered himself off, colliding with the side of the Autoscope. He grasped a bony wing and twisted it, wringing it like a sheet. The Autoscope howled, twisting its body and biting the air in front of Bismuth’s face. The bone snapped and the creature slumped to the side, its legs buckling in agony. Bismuth kicked it beneath the abdomen, the tip of his boot finding a soft spot between two overlapping chitinous plates and sinking into something meaty that felt like it was wrapped in polythene. The Autoscope collapsed, its howl strident and enraged. Bismuth twisted the wing again and leaped onto its back, driving his knees into its shoulder blades. The Autoscope bucked, trying to throw him off, but he hung on, reaching forward to grasp the hilts of the tusks that jutted from the sides of its mouth.
Bismuth looked up, staring through the ring of horns protruding from the monster’s brow, and watched as a woman stepped from the Incursion Gantry.
She ducked through the livid crimson slot as if emerging from a limitless space built to house a dying sun. The enormity of what lay behind her made Bismuth shudder. He glimpsed things moving at her back that he knew were the size of cathedrals, made paltry by their distance, shuttling to and fro, engulfed by that terrib
le light.
The woman was naked but for a decomposing strip of flesh wound around her chest covering her breasts and another strip fashioned into a garment between her legs and over her narrow hips. Dark hair fell to her shoulders, and her white face, with its pointed chin and full, dark lips, was framed beneath a heavy fringe. Beautiful but for the eyes, which opened to display corneas the colour of infected piss, each eye containing a set of six pupils like holes bored into the white of a putrid egg.
Bismuth held fast to the tusks, pulling the Autoscope’s head down into its neck, the muscles of his shoulders and arms taut and burning with the effort.
The Autoscope that had emerged from the Gantry reached behind her back and drew a bone saw from the belt of flesh. Its serrated teeth were rusty with blood. She tossed her head and glared at Bismuth with those alien, pitiless eyes, the bone saw held loosely in her slender, manicured hand.
“Long Man,” she hissed. “Come down and fight.”
Bismuth released the tusk he was gripping in his right hand. The downward force of his left hand and the sudden freedom of movement given to the straining muscles in the Autoscope’s neck caused it to wrench its head sideways, and Bismuth pulled the Lever from his belt and plunged it into the creature’s temple. He depressed the handle and the Autoscope’s head began to collapse. It slumped to its knees and Bismuth slid from its back and crouched over it, the tusk still clenched in his fist, as he monitored the dissolution.
The female stepped forward, bone saw swinging.
The Autoscope twitched in the dirt, its torso sucking away into the slot. Bismuth waited until it was almost consumed and wrenched the Lever from its withered skull. He rose with it clamped beneath his arm, the tusk held in his fist, and charged the female as she came at him, the saw raised and coming around in a fast arc.
Bismuth blocked the swing and felt the teeth of the saw snag on the thick material of his coat sleeve. He drove forward and rammed the tusk into her belly.
The Autoscope gasped and Bismuth propelled her backwards. Her long-nailed feet scrabbled in the dirt and her dark, dead blood welled around the tusk in her gut in a thick, oily collar. Bismuth felt the tip of the tusk strike bone and he wrenched upwards, fastening it between her vertebrae and lifting her from her feet.
The Autoscope had dropped the saw. Her arms hung loose at her sides. Her hair covered her face, but he could see her eyes between strands of fringe, blazing like pots of disease in her face. She wasn’t dead, nor would she die from this. Bismuth carried her towards the dwindling red light issuing from her Gantry. It shone a pinkish glow across the floor of the dump, a blood-and-water colour, sluice from abattoir tiles.
Don’t close, he thought. I want you to have these back!
He reached the Gantry as it was closing. Bismuth could feel the air clench and he shoved the conjoined Autoscopes through the gap before it sealed itself. They were snatched away by the currents within the Gantry and hurtled into the red blaze.
The Gantry closed and Bismuth stood alone in the trench between the mountains of junk. He slid his Lever back into his belt and pulled his coat together. He turned and headed towards the back wall of the dump and what leaned there.
As he walked he thought about the female Autoscope. It was the first time he had encountered the bitch, but he knew of her.
The Despatrix.
She was a high-level Autoscope, ancient and unique. A primordial predator so successful at what she did that she had never lost her original form; unlike the others Bismuth had killed, this one was almost as beautiful as when she had been created. Before she had fallen. And if she was being sent out to face him then something was either very wrong, or he was doing something very right.
Bismuth had been coming to this place for seven years, and every night he came he killed more of them. They had always outnumbered Bismuth and his kind but now, just maybe, they were running low on numbers. Unleashing the Higher Ones must be significant.
Bismuth reached the crumbling wall at the back of the dump and stood looking at the old refrigerator leaning against it. It had been placed upon a low pile of rotten and flattened cardboard boxes. The words English Electric were stamped on the door with raised chrome letters. He reached out and grasped the handle. It looked like the handle on an old car door. It had an ivory-coloured button, which he pressed hard with his thumb, knowing it would stick, and pulled the handle. He opened the door; it came away with a dry sucking sound, its rubber seal parched and powdery, and he stepped back, ready for what might come out but expecting it to be empty, as it was every night.
But this time it was full.
Bismuth moved forward and swung the door shut on it. But not before he had seen something move within, come floating up to engage him, to mock his wasted years and efforts. Bismuth closed his eyes and leaned his back against the refrigerator door. He was trembling.
After a while he opened his eyes and straightened up. The gulls had drifted back to the piles of rubbish and the dump was silent but for the irregular ticks and groans of junk settling throughout the yard.
Bismuth set off back the way he had come, through the trench of refuse, heading for the gate that led out onto a bombsite, a terrain of rubble he would cross to reach another door. A door set in a wall that opened into a shop at the end of a long arcade.
The arcade is empty now; all the little units are shut. He is the only one who comes here but he can still smell the perfume from the flower stall as he passes, and the air is resonant with memories of life. It has been a long time since Bismuth has brought anyone out through here from the bombsite. He had hoped for so long to bring just one more. Pigeons used to roost in the iron struts that ran beneath the long corrugated roof, but they are gone too. It is dark in the arcade.
The blackouts are down.
"A BLOCK OF living darkness,” Bismuth said. “As if the refrigerator was a mould full of its substance. And there were eyes in there. They floated up through the darkness and hung at the surface looking out at me. They were the boy’s eyes. He’s gone. I couldn’t save him.”
Doctor Mocking was sitting up against his headboard supported by his pillows. He was pale but alert. He reached out and put his hand on Bismuth’s. Bismuth stared at the floor.
“Is the Despatrix dead?” Doctor Mocking asked.
“No,” said Bismuth. “Not this time.”
“And you think the boy is gone?”
“Yes.”
“You did everything you could. You’ve destroyed more Autoscopes than the rest of us put together.”
“It wasn’t enough. I kept getting close but every time something pulled him away. The Night Clock is running down.”
Doctor Mocking shook his head. “No. But I think it’s weakening, because of my frailty. That thing you saw, somehow the devil-in-dreams is reaching out again. I hoped this was over.”
“It will never be over.”
“The devil-in-dreams has found a way to reach its Autoscopes. There’s a crack in the containment somewhere. It’s giving them power. We have to close it up.”
Bismuth nodded and stood, his shadow enormous against the walls and ceiling. He took Doctor Mocking’s hand.
“You know what to do.”
“Yes,” said Bismuth. “I’ll find Daniel.”
“Find him and tell him what you’ve seen. If the Despatrix is emerging then so might the remaining Higher Ones. They’re using a stream of Dark Time somewhere, I can feel it. You’ve got to seal it up.”
Bismuth walked to the door.
“Send Anna up,” Doctor Mocking said. “And please warn Lesley before you go.”
Bismuth nodded, and went out.
DANIEL AWOKE TO find Dr Natus sitting on his chest.
“Come with me,” Dr Natus said.
Daniel stared up at the tiny bleached creature. It wasn’t the weight that had woken him—Dr Natus was as light as an empty paper bag—it was the smell. The vinegary stink of formaldehyde. And beneath that he could determine ano
ther smell, something of sugar and sloes, of viscid homemade gin. Not on Dr Natus’ breath. Dr Natus couldn’t breathe. Had never drawn breath, dead in all ways but one from his mother’s extraordinary womb. It was what Daniel had pickled him in, back then. Back then when he was insane. Back when he had thought he’d needed Dr Natus.
Daniel turned his head on the pillow and glanced at Elizabeth asleep beside him. She was on her side, facing him, her breathing slow and regular.
“Why?” Daniel whispered to Dr Natus.
Dr Natus stared at Daniel through huge, sealed-shut eyes. The black pinpricks of his pupils were visible behind the fragile, translucent bulges of his eyelids, through the superfine network of veins underlying them. His tiny hands plucked at the hem of the sheets at Daniel’s throat, a ripple of strengthless white, damp cilia.
“I was dreaming,” Daniel said.
“I know,” said Dr Natus. “You were amongst the cans.”
“I was.”
Daniel closed his eyes. He had been in a forest, walking a path. Ahead was a dense stand of trees. Elms, elegant and tall, downlit by the pale autumn sun, a knot of hushed archangels. As he drew near he saw that the lower branches were hung with thousands of old tin cans. They were rusty and pitted, with holes punched into their sides near the rims and strung through with fine silver chains. They hung still and heavy. Daniel walked amongst them and looked inside them and saw they were all brim-full with rainwater and that all the surfaces of the waters flickered with the anxious movement of a billion mosquito larvae. Daniel was repulsed by so much movement, so many basic units of parasitism; all that carbon, all that potassium, all that nitrogen, knitted into cans full of bloodsuckers and hung from the branches of such beautiful trees.