Саймон Морден - Down Station

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, no, no, no, no. No.’

She pulled him back, all the way to the entrance, and he let himself be led, unblinking, to where the wind buffeted his clothes and tugged at his loose hair.

Mary looked up at him, and he’d never thought of himself as tall until that moment.

‘You said a wolf. A wolf!’

‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘that’s what I said.’

‘That, that thing is not a wolf.’ Her voice was as tight as a drum, as high as a bat.

‘But it is Stanislav. I guess.’ He finally did blink, and the fleeting instant of his eyes closing showed him a writhing mass of barbed tentacles, tooth-lined mouths, glistening, dripping spikes, vacuous sucking holes, and eyes. So many eyes, and all of them disturbingly human.

‘We can’t fight that,’ said Mary, pointing back inside.

‘I know, I know. But… it’s him.’

‘Dalip. He’s gone. Whatever he was, has gone.’

‘But you, you’ve changed backwards and forwards. Maybe he still can.’

‘I change into a bird. The first couple of times almost broke me. You ever seen him like that before?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘When Crows was showing me how to do magic, I got a bit carried away. This… thing, like that thing, appeared. It was sort of me, but not me. I told it to fuck right off, and it disappeared. If Stanislav took one look at his true self and gave it a big, wet kiss, then he’s finished as a human being. Your mate’s come home. That’s what he really wants to be.’

Dalip thought about the shifting, pulsating mass, constantly forming and breaking down. A wolf, a werewolf even, would have been reasonable, understandable. Instead, they had unfathomable chaos.

‘What should I do?’ he asked.

‘You cannot go in there. I mean, fuck. Did you see what he’s done to the guards?’

Dalip had. There were bits of them everywhere, just rolling around on the floor at the urging of the ever-moving tentacles, and some seemed to be in the process of being absorbed into the main mass.

‘There might be part of him I can still talk to.’

‘No!’ She slapped his arm. Twice. ‘No. Your parents◦– and at least you’ve got parents◦– are going to want you back, and I’m not telling them you fed yourself to some monster because you thought you ought to try or some other shit excuse. Just no.’

‘So what happens now?’

‘I don’t fucking know. You’re supposed to be the smart one. Think of something… smart.’

Dalip tried, but couldn’t. All he could think of were tentacles with teeth like chainsaw blades, turning, always turning.

‘Let’s go back to the tower,’ he said.

‘That’s an idea I can get behind. And you know what? I’m going to run.’

She did, and Dalip was right behind her.

Mary sat herself down in front of Bell and steepled her fingers. ‘We have a problem.’

‘You have a problem,’ said the geomancer.

‘No, we have a problem. And it’s your fault. So what we’re going to do is find a way to fix it, before anything else happens. Stanislav—’

‘The man, the one who attacked me—’

‘The one you took and put in a cell. That one. Turns out that’s the worst thing you could possibly have done. He’s got bad memories of some war he fought in, and now it’s all spilling out of him like a sewer. So you’re going to tell us how we deal with this, one way or another, before he comes for you, and then decides that the rest of us are part of the meal deal as well.’

Bell touched the scab on the end of her nose. ‘You can just fly away. So can I.’

‘I think I know how this works,’ said Mary. ‘You get to become what it is you want to be, deep down, but you also don’t get much of a choice over it. So the fact that you change into a dragon tells me everything I need to know about you. You’re like that whether or not you’ve wings and a tail. Stop shitting me, because you’re not getting away from here.’ She leaned closer. ‘If it comes down to it, I will throw you to him. And if you’re lucky, he’ll kill you first.’

‘She doesn’t mean that,’ said Mama quickly.

‘I do. I really mean it. Cross my heart. So tell us, what the hell do we do?’

Bell shrugged and looked away. ‘I don’t know everything. I’ve been here for twenty years, as far as I can tell, and I know half of what I need to.’

‘And we’ve been here for a week.’ It was longer than that, but she wasn’t going to split hairs. ‘Why don’t we start with what’s happened to him.’

‘You tell me. Some people◦– the ones most susceptible to change◦– get the idea that they can turn into a creature. Then they do. That’s all there is to it. Some survive. Most don’t. At least, this is what I’ve been told. Down is riddled with beasts that used to be someone, and can’t change back. What form is he?’

‘Formless,’ said Dalip. ‘A thing with teeth and claws and arms and eyes.’

‘I remember,’ said Bell, ‘back in the beginning, I found myself in a dream, staring at the void. It tried to suck me in, but I refused to go.’

‘I had the same dream,’ Mary said. ‘If Stanislav did, too, then night after night, locked in a cell, no one to talk him out of it…’

‘Almost as if that’s what Down is, its raw essence. It changes everything it comes into contact with.’ Bell drifted off with a thoughtful expression, and that wasn’t what Mary wanted.

‘Enough of the whatever-stuff. He’s already killed your guards, those that didn’t have the sense to run away, the two servant women you had are missing, your steward bloke, and I don’t think he’s going to be that worried about adding us to his score. Can we change him back?’

‘No,’ said Bell.

Mary heard Dalip shift behind her.

‘Can we, I don’t know, tame him in some way?’

‘No. Any more than you or I can be tamed.’

‘Can we… lock him in a room somewhere so that he’ll never be able to get out?’

Bell snorted. ‘If you want to stop him, you’ll have to kill him.’

‘Can we kill him?’

She shrugged. ‘If he’s that different from us, he might be impossible to damage him enough to finish him: where’s his heart, his brain, how does he bleed? When we change, we have a fixed form. We’re beasts, but we’re mortal, for the want of a better word.’

‘I proved that with you.’ Mary sat back and wondered if Bell was telling her the truth. She’d admitted that this was outside her own experience, and perhaps this had never happened before. Perhaps it had, and there’d been no survivors left to tell the tale. It could be that dotted all over Down were dark places, filled with visceral, primal hate, and a monster feeding from it.

‘Fire,’ said Dalip. ‘We’re going to have to use fire. If words don’t work, of course.’

That made a sort of sense. It was quite clear that if any of them got too close to Stanislav in his changed form, he could deal with them however he wanted, singly or all at once.

‘And how the fuck are we supposed to do that?’ Mary thought of all the things they didn’t have: petrol, empty bottles, lighter fluid, fireworks, tyres, old mattresses and settees, meths, even flaming sambucas.

‘There’s some bottles of spirit in the store room, and that might burn. Magic? Can you magic up fire?’ Dalip turned on the geomancer. ‘You can, can’t you? In the pit, you light all the candles.’

‘That’s as much as I can do.’

‘And I’m not happy with a plan that involves her in any way. Not happy at all.’ Mary got to her feet and looked around her, hands on hips. ‘What else?’

‘Everything will burn if you try hard enough,’ offered Bell. ‘Even stone.’