Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Sean said, the words coming hard and nasty, curling his lip.

“Believe it,” Will said, quietly. “I saw it happen. I saw her. I remember her. They called her something. Cheke , I think it was.”

“Cheke. Yes, that’s one of the swine. We know about Cheke.”

Emma’s face bore the look of someone who had eaten something sour. “It has a name?”

“Of course.” Pardoe seemed put out. “We’ll have to watch out for her. Do not underestimate her. She might seem a bit ungainly at the moment, but she will grow into her role. She is a supreme talent, make no mistake. She will improve.”

“You sound like you admire her,” Will said, bitterly.

“Oh, I do. I do. She is to the land what the shark is to water. She has few peers. Be alert, my friends. You must be very, very careful. I can’t emphasise that enough. She’ll do for you all if you aren’t.”

Pardoe’s jaw clenched and relaxed as a silence wadded the air between them. Into it, Sean whispered: “Why are you telling us all this?”

“As I was saying, there were three of you, three Negstream Inserts,” Pardoe continued. “I thought that only Sean had survived. But his running into you, Emma, sounded the alarm bells. It’s like there’s some kind of, shall we say, ripple when Inserts get together. It’s there. Very strong too. If you know how to look for it.”

Inserts . That word again. Sean liked that. Not one bit. He returned to the cupboard, put down the gun, and withdrew a bottle of Absolut.

“Sit down,” he said. “Tell us everything. But don’t expect me to stay sober.”

It was almost five a.m. by the time Pardoe finished. Sean and Emma and Will had drunk most of the vodka; the bottle lay stoppered on the floor between them pointing out through a window that was gradually filling with chalky streaks of light. Pardoe had refused to drink with them. He told them he would wait in his car, an olive-green Jaguar that was parked in the street, for as long as it took for them to feel comfortable enough about the situation to join him. He would take them somewhere safe. Where they lived at the moment was not safe. Outside elements were closing in. It was time to move.

Unspoken questions fluttered around Sean’s mind but their urgency had been tempered by Pardoe’s gentle voice and his unheralded, understated revelations. Sean’s unease about Pardoe had vanished before the knowledge that he had found an ally for the first time in his life. It helped to be told that Naomi had been a part of it, something that he instinctively knew to be true, as it was with Emma.

Hadn’t he always felt something different? A calling, a significance that plucked at his imagination, like a dream that refused to be remembered? Hadn’t he always possessed the dead zone of what had happened to his parents without ever fully understanding the source of it? It was a dark land that he returned to whenever he slept. He had always thought that the knots in which he was trapped were for him alone to pick at. He never believed the knot might be solved by someone else. Having a discussion that involved his parents, people he had not referred to in public for as many years as they had been dead, made him feel sick.

An hour or so later, Sean, Emma, and Will trooped out to the Jaguar. Pardoe was sitting in the passenger seat, nibbling on a croissant. A large man in a blue cagoule nodded at each of them via the rear-view mirror as they got into the back. Jamie Marshall.

“Hi, Marshall,” said Sean. “Recovered from the stag night?”

“Sorry to be so hush-hush, mate,” Marshall said.

“I doubt I’ll ever be surprised by anything ever again,” Sean remarked.

“You know each other?” Emma asked.

Marshall drove for twenty minutes, navigating A roads and B roads with an almost supernatural knowledge of where explosions had prohibited access. They arrived at a church on the outskirts of Warrington just as sunlight was touching colour to the streets.

There Pardoe kept them, and told them what they needed to know.

“It is unfortunate,” he told Sean and Emma, when they gave their account of what had happened in the house on Myddleton Lane. “But, expected, given your resourcefulness.”

“Why unfortunate?” Emma wanted to know.

“Because once you have passed through a Negstream, you cannot use it again. You have to find your own way back. We think that this is ultimately what did for de Fleche. He constructed his follies around these glorious gateways, one of which he no doubt passed through, and then found that they were as useless to him as a fart in a colander. Oh, do excuse me.” Pardoe flushed. “I’m given to these pathetic little collapses in etiquette. Quite unforgivable. When he found another, he went through and stayed there. He’s been there ever since.”

“And we were detailed to go in and get him?” Sean asked. “Get him how? You can’t bring a dead man back. You can’t kill a dead man.” He looked around at the others. “Can you?”

“Well, he’s not dead. That’s the thing. There are ways and means. It really is fortunate that we found you. De Fleche, in the years since we lost you, has become quite a problem. He’s upsetting the balance and causing a gradual decay. Which is bad for all of us, really. He shouldn’t be there. That’s the bottom line. Negstreams were never meant to be used for travel. They are momentary monuments to the dead at the instant that life departs. The soul made visible as it leaves the body. Death’s mirror, perhaps. Sometimes, like the one you found, Sean, they remain. Flukes of nature, they are. Frozen memories of a life. True ghosts. They are not doorways. Not doorways.”

Will wanted to know if what he had glimpsed after his accident with Elisabeth on the motorway out of London had been a Negstream. He wanted to know where the “there” Pardoe had mentioned was and what it might be. He wanted to know if Catriona might be “there”.

“It’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bother trying to find out if I were you. You aren’t trained for it, dear boy. You aren’t... one of us.”

“What can happen if this guy stays over there?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been there twenty years. So who cares? Let the fucker rot.”

“He isn’t dead. And he’s in a dead zone. How healthy can that be? He is in the place where we all go the second we die. His presence is causing it to decay. Dead things cannot rest easy there.”

“How does that affect us?” asked Emma.

“Well, now, how should I put it?” Pardoe pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and studied the middle distance for a few seconds. “I suppose it affects us because, well, because the dead can leak back.”

Will said, into the heavy silence: “You. Fucking. What?”

Pardoe nodded. “Marvellously put, lad. It’s true. The dead walk among us, if I might be so bold as to put it in hammy language.”

They sat in silence, digesting this, while Pardoe slurped at his tea.

“How do we go about getting back there then?” Sean had asked.

Pardoe spread his hands. “Do you know, I haven’t the foggiest.”

SEAN GREW JITTERY around ten o’clock so Emma took him walking. She’d fastened his coat up to the collar in order to disguise his scarified features. Sunglasses concealed the destroyed eye. They’d draw attention on this wintry night, which they could do without, but not as much as an open wound.

He walked stiffly against the restraining bandages on his legs. He leaned heavily against her and she smelled the copper of his blood seeping through the makeshift dressings. She helped him walk to the estate entrance, where they turned right, towards a tunnel of pedestrian bridges and sodium light.