Конрад Уильямс - Decay Inevitable

The clamour of rescue behind him, Will breasted the embankment to find more confusion. The explosion that had halted him was not the only one. The distant road sported similar eruptions. Will almost hoped that Elisabeth would die; the remainder of his journey would have to be by foot.

He had to get her off the road, at least until the pandemonium was over. A series of blackened farmhouse buildings – stock-sheds, stables, a barn – were collapsed against each other about a quarter of a mile to the east. There was nothing else.

The embankment was less treacherous on the opposite side, the fence not as well tended. Elisabeth sneezed three times as he made his way through the rape fields, knowing that he must be as conspicuous as a fly on a wedding cake, but nobody called to stop him.

About three hundred yards shy of the fire-ravaged stables, Will heard the first deep, blatting rotor beats of helicopters. It was a directionless sound, fading and coming, fading and coming. Will’s neck ached, trying to pinpoint the source. He didn’t like the way his senses were abandoning him; perhaps he had been damaged in the crash, in a way he could not yet understand. Finally, as he moved into the shade of a line of silver birch, he saw them: half a dozen emergency service helicopters, low on the horizon, coming in from the south.

The stables were gutted. None of the four had contained horses for a long time. The fire that had done for the buildings had been a major affair, although the main house had been only partially consumed.

Will left Elisabeth propped up against an ancient engine block that was so large it must have belonged to a tractor. He spread his coat across her. She was still unconscious but her brow was knitted, as though she were deep in concentration. Will whispered to her that he would be back, then padded across to the farmhouse. Fire engines were scattered across the motorway, trying to control the flames. As he watched, a car exploded, half of it spinning into the air like a toy at the hands of a tantrum child. Great arcs of thick foam were directed to this fresh blaze. More helicopters clattered overhead, heavier types carrying water that was discharged in ribbons over the carnage. A rainbow flashed across the sky for a few seconds.

To gain access, Will had to kick in some boards covering a ground-floor window, but they were rotting and gave way easily. Fire had peeled away much of the inner skin of the room; the walls were scorched brick, floorboards had been exposed above and beneath him. The smell of the fire had long since vanished; now the dampness was thick with the sour smell of spoor and rot. There was nothing of use here. Will moved deeper into the house. A staircase reached into the heights but had been cheated of its ambition; the final half-dozen risers were missing, trashed by an infalling of masonry. In the kitchen he found an old, unopened roll of toilet tissue. Cairns of unidentifiable animal shit were scattered in some indecipherable pattern. A cracked, fly-speckled window wrenched the M1 disaster site into something unworldly. Smoke was condensed by the flaws in the glass; the rescuers were more hunched and twisted than the survivors they pulled from the wreckage. Will’s neck tingled. It was not just the shock of the accident or the thrill of having survived. He had witnessed something other just now. An opening, a promise of a different place. The opportunity to gain finer understanding. The unimaginable laid bare, perhaps, and made simple. It was as if God had dropped some of his blueprints into Will’s lap.

He tried to push the sensation away. Thoughts like this weren’t going to help Elisabeth. Will climbed the stairs carefully, vaulting the gap and moving across the landing to the bathroom. Fallen chunks of plaster concealed much of the carpet in here. A faded map of Australia took up the majority of one canary-yellow wall. Cracked, multi-coloured tiles finished the decoration above a badly stained enamel bath. An upside-down bottle of Aveda shampoo and a nailbrush were the only adornments, not counting the desiccated robin in the wash basin.

In the medicine cabinet, Will found a small, ancient tube of lignocaine and a plastic tub filled with Ibuprofen, the seal of which was still intact even if the expiry date had come and gone a year ago.

“It will do,” he muttered, and the closeness of his voice made his neck tingle.

He retraced his steps and was about to leap over the gap in the stairs when he saw something glittering in its darkness. At first he thought they were coins, but when he bent to pick them up, he realised, too late, that they weren’t.

THE FOREMAN WAS a stocky, catarrhal man who wore a Manchester City pin just below the knot of his tie. “Rapler,” he introduced himself. “Tony Rapler.” It wasn’t much of an interview. Rapler asked him, over superheated cups of weak coffee, what experience he had had on building sites.

“Not much,” admitted Sean. “But when I was younger I did some casual labour on small sites. Building garages and extensions, that type of thing.”

“You look fit. Work out much? Swimmer?”

“I run a bit. And my last job was warehouseman, humping kitchen units and firecheck doors around. It helps.”

“Any form?” Rapler asked.

“No. I’m disappointingly clean.”

Rapler laughed. “You’ll be fine. We need a few more meatheads about the place. All we get are students sniffing around for a few weeks’ work in the summer. They usually cry off after a couple of days. Think they’re going to turn into Lou Ferrigno – ‘Aye, boss, no trouble. I could carry bricks all day’ – and before you know it they’re walking around like they’ve just had a hernia.”

“What was this place?” Sean asked.

“Built in the 1970s. Nobody knows what it was meant to be. Hotel most probably. But it was also an office block, with a private residential quarter and a leisure facility. You could have been born inside and never had a need to go out. Maybe if they built it down south it would have worked, but up here?”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, up to a point. Guy who designed it, Peter de Fleche, hanged himself. Dutch. After it was abandoned and the demolition orders went through you’d see him in this fucked-up Jag, giving it the slow drive-by. Felt as if he’d failed, they reckon. Did a couple other buildings in a similar vein. Then nothing.”

“He doesn’t need to know any more.”

Sean turned to see the barrel-chested man from the funeral standing in the doorway. He had so much neck it resembled a collar for his head to nestle in.

Rapler said, “This is Ronnie Salt. You’ll answer to him on the softstrip. He runs a good team, does Ronnie.”

Ronnie nodded at him. Up close, his eyes were unpleasant splashes of cement-grey either side of a nose that might have once been used as a blacksmith’s anvil. The two men walked across the sunken, blasted forecourt to the condemned building as another man turned up. He nodded at them and Rapler clapped his hand on the new man’s shoulder. “Marshall?” Rapler asked, “Jamie Marshall?” They disappeared back inside his Portakabin.

“Why is it being knocked down?” Sean asked, as they approached the de Fleche building.

Salt regarded him with what looked like a wince, as if he had expected Sean to be mute and was now resigned to having to converse with him. “Well, it’s completely shagged out. I mean, look at it. Nobody has lived there or worked in it for years. Sick building. Air conditioning system never right. Couple of people died. Airborne disease.”

“Great. Must be a pleasure to spend your days in there.”

Salt sneered at him. “It’s a job.”

The front of the de Fleche building soared away from them like the prow of a ship. The entrance was a fly-blown revolving door ten feet high with so many cracks it looked like a feature. Behind the fogged barrier of glass, a bank of shattered TV screens hung from the ceiling over a horseshoe desk. Sean tried to imagine what the lobby must have looked like.