by Paul Meloy
They reached the steps leading up into the clubhouse. Despite being breathless, Colin swore when he saw the open door and the tangled remains of the multicoloured fly blind lying on the floor.
They went up the steps and into the shaded interior of the clubhouse. Trevena noticed the string of dead fairy lights coiled around the legs of the overturned bar stools. Colin no longer seemed interested in the state of his bar. He cried out, and stumbled across the floor towards the back of the clubhouse.
John lay there. Bix lifted his head and whined. Colin knelt beside them and put his head in his hands. There was a lot of blood surrounding John’s head and shoulders, but it was drying, and no more flowed from the wound in John’s neck.
Colin embraced Bix and Bix sat, trembling, his forepaws dark red, soaked in his master’s blood. There was blood on his muzzle, too, from where he had been nuzzling John’s face. If they had been discovered by anyone else, Trevena thought, there might have been a very different interpretation of events.
Colin was rocking Bix. The dog’s paws were sliding in the blood but he didn’t appear to care. He just let the old man hold him and sob.
Trevena and Andy stood aside as Bismuth stepped past them.
“Colin,” he said. “Colin.”
Blinking, Colin looked up at the man who towered above him.
“Get a table cloth. We need to cover him.”
Colin shook his head, more from shock than negation. Bismuth squatted beside him. Colin looked into his face with eyes glassy from exhaustion.
“Get John a cloth, Colin. For his dignity. For Bix.”
“Yes,” Colin said. “Yes. For Bix.” Bismuth helped him stand and sent him over to the bar where Colin searched in his small store cupboard for a tablecloth.
Bismuth and Trevena shared a glance and Trevena could see the grief in the big man’s face. Andy went to Bix and stroked the dog’s head. Bix let the boy comfort him. Colin came back with an orange tablecloth decorated with small, silver stars.
“We put these out at Halloween,” he said, handing the cloth to Bismuth. “We always have a do. John loves my fruit punch.” He was crying again, and Trevena put an arm around him while Bismuth knelt and tenderly wrapped John’s body in the cloth. Andy had led Bix away while Bismuth worked, and the dog had gone willingly enough. The boy found a couple of bar towels and wet them in the sink beneath the bar. He used them to wash the blood from Bix’s muzzle and get the worst from his paws.
Bismuth stood and looked down at John’s body. Trevena had taken Colin to a table and they sat together, Trevena watching Andy tend to Bix while Colin sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
Bismuth put a hand in his pocket and took out his compass. He flipped it open and peered at it. He tapped the glass with the tip of his index finger. He frowned, closed the compass and put it back in his pocket.
“What is it?” Trevena asked.
“Nothing yet,” Bismuth said. He came over and sat with them, his bent knees higher than the top of the table. He appeared frustrated, and took the compass out again, opened it and put it on the table. The needle pointed southeast, unmoving.
They sat in silence, waiting for the needle to move.
DOCTOR MOCKING STOOD alone in the orchard at the back of his house. He wondered whether Chloe had sent him here, or whether he had brought himself here by some default mechanism he did not fully understand. This time he was home and not in his Quay, and the sound of traffic on the road behind the house was louder than the sound of the stream that flowed between the two small bridges, and there was rain in the air. He looked up through the branches of the apple trees and saw the darkness of the sky. He shivered. What now? he thought. He had expected to feel weak, fragile, the terminal stage of his illness gripping him and bringing his end, and he had been happy to embrace it. But he felt strong, fitter than he had in the months since the onset of his heart failure. And this realisation brought fear, and a moment of light-headedness close to panic.
He knew, standing there in the shade of his apple trees, that he wasn’t going to die.
He turned at the sound of a voice, his heart—no longer frail but powerful, too powerful—pounding in his chest.
Chapel stood smiling. There were eyes in his mouth. Eyes everywhere.
“How are you feeling?” he asked in a thick, clotted voice. “In fine fettle, I hope. It sounded like he’d said, I’ fie feddle. Saliva mixed with some thicker humour ran from the corners of his mouth and dripped from his chin.
Doctor Mocking clenched his fists. Chapel laughed. “Come on then,” he said.
There was nothing left of Chapel, Doctor Mocking realised. The creature was embodied, nothing more. He was looking at the devil-in-dreams, still contained, but for how much longer?
The devil-in-dreams walked Chapel’s body towards him, and Doctor Mocking went to meet it.
THE AUTOSCOPE ARMY amassed at the edge of the meadow. Their machines idled, huge black metal engines made from the salvaged wrecks of sinking ships and the torn plates and turrets of battlefield tanks, blown up and mired in blood-soaked mud and the carnage of the trenches. Less than a hundred remained, drawn here by the call of their master. No generals to marshal them, their fallen stars quenched by the ferocity of the Firmament Surgeons. They waited, but could no longer hear the call. It had cut off moments before, sudden and unanticipated. There was confusion. They leaned their black, scaled bodies over the controls and out of cabs, waiting, irresolute. They moaned and growled. The tracks and wheels of their machines span and jolted as they revved, wanting to plunge on, across the meadow, and kill the thing that sat in the rocks. They could sense it, a child, and its grace and beauty filled them with revulsion. And they were afraid of the mountain. The mother’s blood in the iron of the rocks; the terrible, unendurable love.
CHLOE AND ROBIN stepped from the Gantry onto soft forest earth. Robin carried his device in both arms. It was heavy, shaped like a triangular prism. It was covered in dials that twitched and fluttered, and luminescent bulbs, switches and a big brass lever set into a slot towards the right hand end of the control panel. It looked arcane and naïve, like everything Robin built, something knocked up in a shed that could never work, a child’s science project, but Chloe knew different. She knew how powerful Robin’s machines could be. He had salvaged this from the dashboard of the camper van and spent part of his time trapped in the Compartment making alterations.
Robin pointed in the direction of the mountains that lay behind them.
“You should go to your brother,” he said. “Protect him.”
Chloe nodded.
“Are they coming?” he asked. “Can you feel them?”
“Yes,” Chloe said. “Six of them. Something’s happened to John. You have to be quick.”
Robin touched her brow, brushed a strand of hair from it.
“Take care,” he said. “And thank you for coming.”
Chloe smiled. She turned and followed a path that led through the trees towards the base of the mountains. Robin watched her for a moment, and then he took a different path, one that would lead him out onto the meadow. Already he could hear the sound of the Autoscopes, the rumbles and oily piston-hisses of their machines, impatient yet momentarily indecisive. He broke into a run, ducking beneath branches and leaping over roots. The apparatus was light in his arms but cumbersome and he was careful not to let it slip or run it into the side of a tree.
He headed for a thinning of the trees, where daylight dappled through in weak, dusty shafts. He slowed, and stepped with great care onto the edge of the meadow. He kept low, the device held at waist height to prevent the setting sun catching the metal and sending an ill-timed semaphore giving away his position. He looked up and saw that the sky was storm-blue, and filled with clouds of an even darker shade. A chill wind blew and bent the grass, and rattled the branches and leaves at the edge of the forest. Robin smelt dust and hot sump-oil, and something sharper, like the savage stench from the pen of a
great beast that had died in terrible heat and ferocious temper.
They were massed a quarter of a mile away, their engines steaming, smoking, sending up pillars of gas that hazed the air and made it tremble. Against the darkening sky it was difficult to tell where the silhouettes of the buildings at the top of the town ended and the piled clatter of black machinery began. Perspective made it look like the town was transforming into something industrial, extruding blocks and edges of metal, a morbid conversion with intent to shear the meadow and the forest to muck and splinters.
Robin clutched the apparatus to his chest and loped towards the middle of the meadow. When he had judged his position well enough, he stood up.
The sun, setting behind the dark rooftops of the town, caught the lenses of his glasses and reflected back in quick twin flashes.
The Autoscopes roared and gunned their machines. They poured onto the meadow, instantly churning it to a battlefield morass. Sheaves of grass flew into the air, blackened with oil. Mud sprayed, dense and bound with roots. Tracks and wheels bit, driving the black rigs towards where Robin stood. He was smiling. The sun set and the light went out of his face.
He looked down at the apparatus and put a hand on the brass lever. The metal hummed. He checked his dials, and waited.
CHLOE REACHED THE base of the mountain. She recalled the route well and emerged a few yards away from the ladder that led up to the cave. She went to the bottom of the ladder and started to climb. She didn’t call out, just kept her chin up and made the thirty feet as fast as she could. She hoisted herself the last foot and climbed into the cave. It was as she remembered it, narrow and deep and warm, with a curving ceiling and a flat, worn and dusty floor. She went further, peering into the back of the cave. She had been here last with Bix, before her birth, and the dog had read to her and kept her safe. And now, here in the back, on her old pile of rugs… a child. A boy.
Her brother.
“Adam,” she said.
The child was unmoving. He lay curled on his side, a thumb hooked loosely in his mouth. His eyes were closed and his face was white. Chloe knelt on the rugs beside him and put a hand on his cheek. The child was cold.
He moaned, and his eyes fluttered open, and then closed again. Chloe wrapped the rugs around him and sat in the back of the cave on the floor, her arms around the boy, and rocked him. She stared the length of the cave and watched the opening at the other end grow dark.
DOCTOR MOCKING FOUGHT the devil-in-dreams, and even as he did so, even as he rained punches and kicks, and grappled with Chapel’s body, he felt his opponent grow. He had no plan, no hope of winning, and no strategy to delay the inevitable, but still he fought. He felt his strength, and it was good and fierce, his muscles responding, his heart pumping blood with thunder in his ears. He had gained something from his time in the Compartment, had drawn power from it. In his understanding of its immensity he had been charged, perhaps only briefly, but he used the supremacy it gave him to batter the devil-in-dreams across the orchard, between the apple trees, beneath the darkening sky.
The devil-in-dreams fought back, its thousand eyes rolling, blazing, and swelling shut beneath the Doctor’s blows. It saw golden light flash behind the Doctor’s own eyes, and how it wished to pluck them out and add them to its haul. It used Chapel’s body to swipe at the Doctor’s face but the old bastard was fast, and ducked beneath the lashing arm and brought a fist up into its ribs. It felt things mush there, against the bones, and another part of it went dim.
The devil-in-dreams enlarged within the casing of Chapel’s flesh, the body too limited to contain it now. It knew the other was dead, the John Stainwright thing, but it knew also that they remained ten still, and it thought about the child in the cave and its dimness increased because it couldn’t see its purpose. It was concealed. It spat scalding fury for its limitations and threw itself against the Doctor, grappling with Chapel’s swelling, worthless flesh, feeling it split and peel. Its true form bulged from the lengthening gashes; imaginal, a horrible maturity of filth.
Doctor Mocking swung punches, took hold of an arm as it brought an inflamed fist around to club him, and bent it against the elbow. It snapped, but instead of rendering it useless, the flesh sloughed off leaving the black cancer of the devil-in-dreams pouring from the bone in a vile, expanding foam.
Doctor Mocking was weakening, but still he fought. He fought with a hope that he might die here, and be reborn as the child awaiting his spirit in the cave, and that would be acceptable, a victory. But as quickly as the thought formed he realised that the devil-in-dreams had out-thought him, or at least anticipated this,because there was a sick scarlet light blooming in the air behind the misshapen remains of Chapel’s body. The devil-in-dreams was opening a Gantry to some hellish Quay, and he realised his adversary’s intent.
CLAIRE SAT DOWN on a chair in Johnny’s café, her face drained of colour, suddenly afraid, and put a hand on her belly.
Steve knelt beside her. “What is it?”
Claire groaned and leaned forward, into her husband’s arms. Her body tensed as a jagged pain twisted inside her.
“I’m bleeding,” she said. She was crying. “I’m losing the baby.”
CHLOE HELD HER brother and felt his life ebbing away. The sun had set and the cave was dark, the rock cold, and damp, lifeless. No ruddy glow throbbed within. It was a dead tunnel at the end of which, against a curving wall that lacked friction, it seemed, to bind them, they remained curled together. Chloe felt the mass of the mountain move above and behind her, a contraction throughout the rock, and with the quake came a thought, that in a moment the cave would tip, like a slide and send them tumbling through it to fall from its mouth onto the forest floor.
“Robin,” Chloe said, “Hurry.”
ROBIN WAITED.
The Autoscopes approached. Their machines lumbered, cutting through the grass. The twilight air filled with a lacy exultation of seeds and pollen, and petals from the wild flowers. They came on, flailing chains and shafts, clogged tracks and thudding fabric belts, a black and sterile wind across a dustbowl. Their distance closed.
Flying things rose at the rear of them, fanning out, three of them in formation, and flew low over the heads of the Autoscopes in their machines, and those that walked alongside. Heads twisted on black, corded necks and red eyes blazed.
Robin watched them come.
And then he pulled the lever.
DOCTOR MOCKING FELT himself lifted, held in a saturated embrace. He moved his arms and pressed against the substance of the devil-in-dreams, but it had him fast. Chapel’s misshapen head, a bulging dome of eyes, was at the level of Doctor Mocking’s throat.
Doctor Mocking flexed against the devil-in-dreams. He pulled an arm free, brought his fist down on it, felt it sink into the viscous matter. He clenched his fist and pulled it free, bringing with it a handful of eyes. He squeezed, and the eyes burst, the leathery flesh splitting and spilling gelid muck. The devil-in-dreams bucked, loosening its hold, and Doctor Mocking kicked himself free. He stumbled away, and stood, breathing hard, watching the Gantry open.
It throbbed, a red slit widening, and limned the trunks of the apple trees a ghastly septic pink. It opened fully and the devil-in-dreams leaned forward and lashed itself around the Doctor again, and this time Doctor Mocking found he had little strength left to resist it. He was pulled against the devil-in-dreams, and felt the violation of absorption. It wanted to swallow him, and drag him into the Gantry. It wanted to draw him through into an Autoscopic Quay, a place of desolation and misery, and finish him there. So he could not be reborn.
The devil-in-dreams rolled backwards, taking the Doctor with it. The Gantry flushed, beckoning, and they slid into its trembling breach.
Doctor Mocking saw what lay beyond, and despaired.
THE FORCE OF the EMP lifted Robin off his feet. The apparatus flew out of his hands and disappeared into the long grass. He landed on his back and lay staring up at the sky. In the sudden silence he heard bi
rdsong. A thrush, crepuscular and haunting, deliciously pure. He pushed himself to his feet.
The Autoscope horde had ground to a halt, their machines dead beneath them. Steam and greasy smoke rose into the air. Some of the machines had collapsed on buckled and powerless legs, others had collided, or drifted out of control and crushed those that marched alongside. The flying machines had dropped out of the sky. One had cut out above the army and had crashed onto something that looked like a customized plough. Tangled together, the blade of the plough was a distorted sneer of metal that had clearly torn one of the adjacent Autoscopes in half. Another flying machine had gone wheeling overhead into the canopy of trees somewhere in the heart of the forest. There were screams and roars, of agony and fury. Those that rode in cabs were dismounting, and pulling heavy weaponry from clasps and slots welded into the bodies of their contraptions. The march would continue, on foot now, to the cave in the mountain.
Robin watched them regroup, some carrying spears and clubs, others relying on the savagery of their own claws and brute strength. They crowded together and began again to cross the meadow.
A pinprick of light appeared behind them. Robin saw it. He forgot about the EMP device he had salvaged from Babur’s camper van. Its job was done, the formidable modifications he had made to it during his time in the Compartment proving to be as effective as he had hoped. He left it lying in the long grass, turned, and ran back towards the forest.
The Autoscopes saw him and roared at his flight, mocking and contemptuous. They raised their weapons and shook them, jeering. They started to run, their victory assured, any dread of the mountain or what hid within it forgotten in the moment of conquest.