Конрад Уильямс - Decay Inevitable

As she fed on the gruel that had once been the driver, mopping up juices as his baseball cap deflated on a baked-vegetable head, she considered her next move. She had the scent at last, for the quarry in which she was most interested. It tingled in her nostrils like pepper. It was so fresh and near she could almost envisage its owner, sitting at a midnight table with a glass of something warming, riffling a newspaper, listening to the radio, his muscles squirming gently against each other, built for action.

Cheke brought the trucker back, scooted over behind the wheel and let his driving instincts take her over. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. That God-awful beard! She erased it, replacing it with Derek’s smooth jawline. Better. Much better.

THE FOREST HAD changed since their initial recce. Its purple boughs were streaked with moss. Mushrooms clustered in moist creases like rashes of acne. It seemed much denser, much more forbidding. Emma said as much as they strode deeper into it.

“I know,” Sean said. “Something’s happened. Something’s brought this on. Be careful.”

He wasn’t just pleading with her to be cautious because of the more menacing aspect of the forest, she saw. Great swathes of the thing just didn’t exist any more. Like blighted tracts of land in an otherwise green, rolling plain, the forest had suffered losses. It was difficult to stare into the abyss gouged out of the loam. It was plumbless, brimming with a vast pacific nothingness that was beyond anything that death could possibly mean. Looking into these vacuums was too much like studying one’s own heart. Emma shivered and hurried after Sean, who was picking his way over a series of collapsed branches. Magnificent trumpets of fungus had erupted across the timber, exuding a rich, meaty odour and a sweat too, which dribbled across the flesh of the growth and ringed its uppermost parts before lifting, weightless, into the black like some sort of strange, anti-gravity rain.

“Don’t touch a thing,” Sean cautioned.

There was death in the forest, as he had expected. How could there not be, in death’s homelands? This was death’s acres, death’s back yard. Death came out to play Ring-a-ring-of-roses and What time is it, Mr Wolf? Death told sick jokes in its own playground, where it was bully and best friend.

The corpses were lined up neatly for a while and then strewn higgledy-piggledy as though the person laying them out had grown tired of his own methodical approach. But they were not corporeal. They had owned the ephemeral nature of old cobwebs or dandelion seeds. Just walking past them caused enough of a draught to lift half a dozen of them into the air and separate them to the extent that it was hard to believe they had had any recognisable form to begin with. They were like candyfloss shells, a playtime dead.

Tiny creatures, that may or may not have been lizards or skinks, had spent so long sitting still on the limbs of trees that they had fused with them and become dreadful, blinking twigs. Spiders had spun webs of gold between the reeds and ferns, sometimes stretching a tightrope of glittering silk across the path. When Emma reached to swipe it away, it sizzled into the edge of her hand, branding her with pain. Sean caught sight of one of these trap spinners, a tiny pale orb ringed with eyes like succulent blackcurrant pips and legs that seemed too thin and long to carry even that infinitesimal weight. It didn’t shuffle off into the shadows when they approached; it stood its ground, slowly turning to watch them go by, milky venom oozing from a cleft beneath its eyes like sap from a rubber tree.

The forest was deep and dense. They drifted down an incline until the darkness was raven-blue, writhing in front of them. The roots of great banyan-like trees were too mighty for the soil and rose above it, choosing instead to decant their nutrients from the more slender boughs around them. The roots were knotted, huge things, hispid with moss like the limbs of men in repose. At the heart of one configuration, Sean saw a hand, white and stiff as asbestos board. The fingers jerked at him.

“Jesus,” Sean said. “Emma, come and help me.”

It was Will. They could just make out his face through the slow strangulation of roots around his torn, white body, and the scar in his forehead made by the police marksman’s bullet. Sean closed his mind to the fear that had been sown by the forest and tried to send Will a message, but Will was panicking too much to prove a clear receptor.

“My puh—” he was saying. “Myyy puh !”

Sean slid his hand into one of the cracks between a root and Will’s hot chest. He felt ribs with his probing knuckles: a stick being dragged across a xylophone. He was dimly aware of Emma’s attention wandering from Will’s rescue to something in his peripheral vision.

“Puh… kit,” Will breathed. “Puhhh- kitt !”

Emma was moving away. Sean made to call out to her, but now Will was trying to speak again and the earnest glare in his eyes, the effort going into it, made him concentrate hard.

“Tekkit,” he wheezed. The root cosied up closer to him, like a python beginning its death squeeze. White spittle had formed a crust on his mouth. He looked frostbitten and feverish and fucked-up. Sean realised he must be dead and that it didn’t matter how he looked any more. Will showed him his teeth and hawked up some strength from somewhere deep inside.

“Mah… pocket!” The sound was a violent gargle. Sean watched a split running up the length of Will’s torso and a thin slick of lymph flood out. “Qui…” he heaved, imploring Sean with his eyes. “Qui…” The split became a broad seam, flesh tonguing out of it like a dark red cloth fed through a mangle.

Sean tore at Will’s clothes, trying to find a pocket, any pocket. He found the mouth of one pocket and the neck of what was sitting inside it. He pulled it out. It was a slender phial of green crystals, with a label that read Paleshrikes . He held the container at arm’s length, looking at Will uncomprehendingly.

Emma said, “Sean.”

He turned. She was staring off into the trees, as if, through all of the vertical slashes of wood, she could see something else, something different. Some tree tops maybe a hundred metres away were shivering but there had been no wind on the hill, no indication of any kind of weather here. Now another clump of trees shivered, a little nearer. There was a splitting, rending sound, a groaning and thrashing. The tree tops in the distance sank from view. Sean was put in mind of King Kong , a film he had first watched as a child. He remembered how frightened he had been when Fay Wray had stopped struggling against her bonds on the sacrificial plinth at Skull Island and looked up at the trees as they shuddered and parted with the coming of something that ought only be given life in the depths of nightmare.

Will was sending him another garbled message. “Lidov… porrit… qui…”

Sean again tried to make his mind a millpond, flat and still and deep. He ignored the ground-shaking approach and Emma’s increasingly urgent demands that they do something now . He focused instead on Will’s brown eyes, still clear and animated despite the fact that they, and the soft cradle of his face that they lay in, were gradually turning to soup back in the real world.

Sean sent: Will, relax. Tell me what it is you want me to do. Feed this stuff to you?

Will’s eyes became less intense, as if Sean had done something unexpected to disarm him, which, he realised, was exactly what he had done. The tree squeezed its baby to its bosom, five tendrils – slim tubers extruding from the tap root – tentatively meshed with Will’s hand like the fingers of a shy girlfriend.