Конрад Уильямс - Decay Inevitable

Vernon was nowhere to be seen. The lorry’s cab with its starred windscreen was empty, the door swinging on its hinges. Sean worked his wrists inside the loop that trapped them, trying to ease them free. Gleave’s screams were like cups of espresso for a drunk; they slapped him awake when it would have been easier to drift off and let things happen without his say so for a while.

But the knots were complex and keen. Already Sean could feel an oiliness on his skin that was not just sweat. Gleave was looking at him now with clownish wide eyes. His lips had been given a coat of purple greasepaint. He was going to black out soon. He focused on the appalling injury to Gleave’s leg, and the hands, outstretched as if Gleave was pretending to turn an invisible steering wheel. He worked against the knots more feverishly, shutting his mind to the heat they forced into his wrists. His blood helped to lubricate the configurations. He felt a swooning in the centre of his brain and blackness moved in on his vision, dark fire burning at the edges of paper. He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply. To faint now was to die. He imagined Naomi stroking his forehead and kissing his cheek with her cool lips. He smelled her: rosewater, chocolate, the faint vegetable whiff of henna in her cropped hair. The knots gave a little and the snake around his throat relaxed its grip. Oxygen flooded him and he revived, the miasmal chaos of the dining room resolving itself around him into its constituent parts: pebbles of glass, dunes of dust, splintered beams. Gleave was hunched over his ruined limb, shaking, his skin bleached by shock. The engine block of the lorry had ruptured: the room was filling with the stink of scorched oil.

Naomi’s smells lifted from him, but he felt her near. If he could turn around he felt he might see her. He fought with the rope at his wrists and got a thumb free; the knot’s grip lessened and he had a hand free in seconds. He lifted the noose from his throat and rubbed at the tender burn that encircled it like strange jewellery.

Naomi was nowhere to be seen, but his disappointment was brief: she had been here for him, in some form or other. She was still alive for him, if he wanted her. He just had to deal with their new level of involvement. She was still Naomi; she was different, that was all.

Sean got to his feet and kicked away the remaining coils of rope. As soon as it was off him, he felt strength beat a path through his limbs again. Something caught his eye on the floor in the midst of all the rubble: Vernon’s whistle on its chain. He gathered it up and slipped it over his head, relishing the feel of the cold metal against his chest.

Ignoring Gleave, but pocketing his revolver, he ducked out of the dining room and padded in darkness down a corridor that led to the kitchen. A track in the lino: the heel of Emma’s remaining shoe as she was dragged to the back door. Outside, the cold air scoured the inside of his throat as effectively as the rope had done for the exterior. It beat tears from his eyes as he stumbled over the cobbled yard. A mealy smell drifted to him from the barn, of ancient manure and stale hay cleansed by the wind and made palatable.

She was a broken heap in the corner of the barn, inches away from a pile of straw that might have cushioned her and kept her warm if she had been placed in it. The foot without a shoe had blackened on its short journey outside. A stick of chewing gum peeked from the top of her jeans pocket. He went to her and smoothed her hair, rested her head on a pillow of straw, trying not to dwell on the lack of firmness in her neck, or the way her tongue would not stay inside her mouth. Instead he thought of how her neck had tightened when he kissed it, the pulse quickening as he drew her towards him. How her tongue had flickered around his own, or mapped a silver route across his torso.

He wanted to take her away now. Find the taxi and drive them somewhere safe. Force Pardoe to take care of her. Her death ought to be the end of it, the right kind of closure. He held her hand for a little while longer, then went out to find Vernon Lord.

WILL COULDN’T GET his balance sorted out for long enough to take a proper look at where he was. He remembered de Fleche’s remarkable eyes joining with his and making it hard to see anything of any significance in his periphery. At one point it appeared that he was inside de Fleche’s pocket, with its silk lining and corners deep with lint, a forgotten Polo mint and the book Catriona had given him. He had forgotten who he was and what was happening for a while, content instead to flick through the pages while what must have been a surrounding illusion tried to impinge on him. He found a receipt for a meal they had shared in a Hammersmith restaurant and a passport photo of Cat in frightened rabbit mode. He lingered over her inscription to him.

When he finally closed the book, he was on the floor, alone, shivering in an uncommonly chill wind that channelled down to the end of the alleyway in which he was crouched. Blackened brick walls made a chute that lifted on either side of him, so high that he couldn’t see where they turned to rooftops, or gave way to the night sky. The book was gone. He felt cheated, unfulfilled. What had de Fleche promised him, in the end? Words that wound themselves around his mind like mating worms.

“De Fleche!” he called out, and the flat, dead weight of his words bounced back off the walls. The wind filleted him. He did not recognise this place.

He walked without seeing another person for what seemed like hours. All of the streets he turned into were like photographs he had seen of wartime London, windows boarded up, shivering under the sky and what it might bring. All lamps had been killed. Then the rain started. Serious rain. Good old Great British rain. Rain that did not fuck about.

“This is death for me, then,” he thought. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but find a chink of light in an eternity of darkness. High on an embankment a rail track slithered away to unknown, unknowable, distances. Shop fronts that might have given him something with which to entertain the eye for a little while were barricaded with corrugated iron, their awnings selfishly hiding their names from him under coats of rot or rust or graffiti.

But he felt somewhere, not too far away, a tiny coal of warmth that pulsed in the cold, perhaps just for him. A speck of relief. The dot of an island in the Pacific.

Like a hungry dog nosing around for the merest shred of scent that promises dinner, Will made long detours into unlikely streets or cut across unkempt lawns booby-trapped with plastic toys in his search for the warmth. Sometimes – he couldn’t explain how – he knew he was on the wrong track and had to double back and find his original spot, where the feeble pulse of heat had been detected. Then he would be off again, trying to plug into the current and let it pull him in.

It took an age, and Will realised that in real terms that was exactly what might have happened. But suddenly, the heat was stronger and he gave himself to it, the decisions to turn into this street or hurry across that square coming more fluidly as the pulse quickened. At one point he laughed out loud: this must be what it was like for animals, the scent of blood hot and heady in their nostrils. He understood the thrill of the hunt as he closed in on his catch. He could almost see it, a red ball throbbing in the midst of so much blue-black emptiness. Its promise of succour was great; his veins sang and sweat broke out on his forehead, despite the wind’s cruelty.

A door. A red door. It might have been a blue or a green door, but it had been overtaken by the red of warmth. What lay behind it understood the secret of need, the science of comfort. He touched the door and suddenly he was inside the house, sitting on the edge of a bed. He was unhappy now because the interior of the house had proved to be chillier than he expected. No warm welcome. No lack of tension to relax the tight band of pain that circled his head. His hands itched. He stared down at them, at the raw welts scoring the pads of flesh on a parallel with his life lines. If he put his hands together, miming an open book, the weals made a V-shape across them. Their pain was fresh and bright. Closer inspection revealed a pattern in the welts, a series of raised obliques, as though a length of hemp had bitten into his flesh.