Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“She’s closing in on us,” Sean observed. “When we give her the slip, she simply goes back to the trail and rubs it out bit by bit until she makes fresh contact.”

“When does it end?”

Sean squeezed her arm. “When we go down. Or her. Don’t lose that thought. She’ll have an Achilles heel.”

They were on their way out of the flat when Emma halted Sean, her voice a whispered, frantic appeal. In the cracked, foxed mirror hanging in the hallway, trapped between the silvered background and the solid reflections of Sean and Emma, Cheke lingered, in the act of departure. Emma reached out for Sean and held tight to his hand as they studied the wolfish profile and the volley of deep-red hair that tumbled across her shoulders. The eye regarded them, unseeing, yet giving the illusion of awareness. It hung there, beneath the lid, sly, gem-bright. Teeth glistened between slightly parted, ruddy lips. She had a bloom about her, even in the ghost of this reflection. She was formed. Ripe.

“She looks so real,” Sean said. “She looks... beyond real. Jesus.”

He delved for some kind of conversation as they drove back to town, but nothing could penetrate the vision they had witnessed. He guessed that her reflection, in its reluctance to leave the mirror, counted for something, might point to a weakness, but was baffled as to what that could be. He had been shocked by the perfection of the woman. She looked so hungry and ambitious, yet utterly fulfilled at the same time. She was an advert. She was aspirational. His lust stirred at the thought of her wide, thick mouth, the carnality that played in its shape. She had developed so much in the short time since her last attack it seemed impossible to believe it could be the same woman.

“How far can she go? Where can it take her?” Emma asked. He saw in her glazed countenance how Cheke had stayed with her too.

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But she’d have us as a part of her in an instant.”

Saying the words, he hadn’t meant to invest them with enthusiasm, although that was how it had sounded. Would it really be a bad thing to have your make-up absorbed by her, to become a part of the perfection she was zeroing in on? Would it hurt so much? He thought of her body opening, sliding across his, the heat as she sucked him into her. To be indivisible from her.

He swallowed thickly and wound down the window, allowed the frigid January air into the car.

“She would kill us in a second,” Emma said. “No mercy.”

“I know.”

“Be strong,” she said. “Be careful.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MASH THIS

THERE WERE OTHERS.

Sometimes they appeared as subliminal slivers of colour and movement. Sometimes they loitered. Will slowly began to understand the migrations here, but he never got over the patterns of damage, the abundance of injury in all its manifold, grotesque variations.

Joanna said, “Look.”

A boy and a girl hurried along a path flanked by fluorescent yellow mushrooms. In contrast to her brother, the girl seemed to have only superficial injuries: a slight concave aspect to her skull, a ragged wound that flapped on her arm. Half of the boy’s head was hanging down his back, like some ghastly pony tail. They skipped and giggled, oblivious to their plight, excited instead by the lure of this strange wonderland.

“Look.”

A woman was trying to pick the crystallised cobwebs from hedgerows packed with thorns and fingers and teeth. She kept forgetting, it seemed, that she no longer had the hands to perform the task.

“Look.”

An elderly man with bulging eyes and empurpled skin tried to force his fingers into his gullet to remove a chicken bone that was lodged there. Somebody had performed a tracheotomy on him: a black hole in his throat wheezed and sputtered as he calmed down, realising that he could quite happily exist here with the foreign body trapped in his windpipe. Somewhere, a surgeon might be operating on him now, trying to remove the bone, trying to bring him back.

“Look. Look. Look.”

He did not become inured to the circus that passed him by as they sought the train station. When he asked a woman for directions, he completely missed what she said to him, partly because of his fascination at the sight: the mouth through which the instructions were coming had been widened by the blade of an axe that separated her face; partly as the words were rendered unintelligible because of it.

In the end, a man with a sanitised, almost beautifully neat incision across the centre of his forehead pointed them towards the station. Will led Joanna through a ticket barrier that was unmanned and over a small footbridge to a similarly unpopulated platform.

“If we were in real-time,” Will posited, “this train might actually take about a thousand years to get here.”

“Don’t,” Joanna admonished. “That’s just too bloody cheery.”

He asked her about Harry and her job. She was studying to become a barrister. Harry worked in the City, part of the pinstripes and braces brigade. “But he’s all right, believe it or not. He makes lots of money, but he’s not a wanker.”

“It feels funny, doesn’t it,” said Will, “talking about this kind of stuff while we’re standing here, waiting for a train? Especially when we’re not waiting for a train. We’re lying on crisp white sheets in a hospital somewhere, while the machine that goes bing! goes bing! by our beds.”

Joanna nodded. “It’s grim, when you think of it, that everybody in a coma thinks about a place like this. Our minds come up with this. Of all things.”

“Yeah,” said Will. “Imagine what we’ve got lined up when we die. It won’t be The Magic Roundabout , that’s for certain.”

There was the sound of a whistle, splitting the cold, foggy air. In the distance, smoke billowed into the sky. A minute later, the snout of a steam train rounded a curve in the land and bore down on the platform, pistons shunting the train forwards, the sound of the engine chuntering happily. The engine was created from bones. Skulls adorned the buffers; ribs that could have only come from a whale bent around the wheel arches.

“Nice touch,” Joanna said, as the train drew alongside. A becapped figure leaned out onto the footplate and beckoned them to hurry aboard. The point of an iron had been driven into his eye; the rest of it stuck out, the flex dangling as though he were a robot with his innards unravelling.

Will and Joanna found themselves alone in the carriage. The seats were beautifully patterned with gold thread, the wall space ornamented with sketches of steam trains in full flight. The train gathered pace, forging a path through the busy sprawl, nosing into a countryside filled with mountains and veldt and vast lakes that bubbled and geysered what might have been tar, what Will hoped was tar, many metres into the sky.

They bought tickets from an inspector in an immaculate black uniform who, like Will, sported a gunshot wound. His, though, was located under his jaw. It had made an exit wound through his nose, turning that part of his face into an extraordinary melange of pink tissue and black, burnt meat.

“I’b god a dreadful aib,” he said, apologetically. “I could neber eben pid draight, neber bind blow by own head off.”

A haughty voice came to them, crackling over the tannoy, to direct their attention to some piece of local interest or another. Somebody else came by with food for them. A woman asked if they needed their shoes cleaned.

Somehow, Will fell asleep, a weird sleep within sleep, in which he dreamed of his real life, his animated life. In it, he was sitting with Elisabeth and Cat and they were enjoying lunch together on a sunny patio. There was wine and cheese and fresh bread and fruit. He kept wanting to turn around to look at the lawn that was behind them because he could hear something approaching, but Cat kept stopping him.