Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“Now... open wide. Godspeed, my angel.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

SHE GAVE HIM hell, and then some. She forced him to wear a saddle and carry her around the blistered chambers of the theatre. Together, they explored the areas beneath the stage, cluttered rooms filled with thespian paraphernalia that was now wreathed with permanent smoke ghosts, all detail sealed black by the long-spent flames. There were uniformed mannequins that had once stood in for warring hordes as a backdrop to some military drama or other; deep wooden chests stuffed with costumes; scorched stacks of plays tied up with string. Everything had a wafery feel to it; the rooms had not known moisture for decades. An hour of stalking through these secret rooms with Sadie on his back gave him a furious thirst. If that wasn’t bad enough, the thing that was developing in Sadie’s external womb had begun to teethe. It chattered and ground its new gnashers in his ear as he negotiated the maze of thoroughfares beneath the stage and the auditorium. He caught glimpses of it in the corner of his eye as it twisted and grinned like some malformed specimen pickled in formaldehyde.

Sadie liked to ride him naked. She liked it better when he had his shirt off too. She bounced around as he galloped through these catacombs, a nightmarish Godiva and steed, pulling at his hair to turn him left or right. When he was allowed to reduce his speed, he padded along, breathing hard, checking the progress of his strange disease as it turned his limbs black. The infection was reaching a critical stage, he saw. His flesh and bones were becoming as pulpy as overripe bananas. These parts – his shoulder, the lower portion of his arm – had been digested by the monster in its sac via some supernatural method of ingestion. Something was going to give soon. He wished it hurt more. To simply see his body failing like this without even the remotest twinge made him feel inhuman, unreal. He knew he existed at some level in the world of the living, but any dignity he might have had here was being literally stripped away.

“Cherub will be on solids before long,” Sadie commented blithely, as if she were relaying to him the price on a tin of carrots.

He would kill himself, he decided, coolly. If Joanna had forgotten about him or the infection looked likely to incapacitate him, he would end it somehow. And he would try to find some way of taking the bitch and her fucking demon child with him.

SHE COULDN’T DREAM of anything else, she found. And it was strange, but whenever she settled on an aspect of it, her mind, unbidden, tossed her little nuggets of information. It must have been a result of the trauma of her accident, she thought, a jolting of her brain that meant it spewed out facts at every possible opportunity. It was as if her imagination had been given a power surge.

This man, for example, with his brown curly hair and hurt expression. Big brown eyes. He looked lost and lonely. And, without digging for it:

His name is Will .

“Oh really?” she whispered.

“Chick?” Her husband leaned over her.

His name is Harry . She giggled.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t feel anything,” she said. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to return to her curly-haired man, with a mouth that looked so soft and red that it might burst when you kissed it.

“You’re very lucky, you know,” Harry said. “We thought you were a goner. But you came back. My strong chick.”

She said, “Water.”

“Water you shall have,” he said, folding his newspaper and leaving the room.

He didn’t look well, this Will chap. He looked scared and cold and injured.

He’s been shot. He’s in danger.

“I don’t doubt it,” she muttered. A nurse put her head around the door, smiled, and retreated.

She pictured Will in a bar, looking around him like some hunted animal. And then it was as if her brain gave up its control and Will turned to look at her mind’s eye. “You promised,” he said. “Find me. Follow me.” He raised his glass in a silent toast and drank the contents, never taking his eyes off her.

“I can’t,” she said. “My injuries. I think... I think I was paralysed.”

His eyes on her as she opened them, the first time. It must have been a dream. That place with the strange emulsified tones, the glaring whites and the glossy blacks. Like walking through a negative strip of film.

“You aren’t paralysed. You were lucky. It’s just bruises and bumps. You made a miraculous recovery.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, Will.”

When Harry came in and saw Joanna sitting on the edge of the bed, timorously combing her pony tail, he dropped the glass of water.

“I need you to take me somewhere, Harry,” she said.

THE MOOD OF the night was on the wane. Sean could see it in the way the scars bled into its colour; could hear it in the hum – like that of bees trapped in a jar – that steeled in from the invisible horizon. The grey smocks on the hill had vanished. They were alone. The sealed, scarred walls of the ziggurat leapt away from them, its uppermost heights lost to the dark.

“Do you think it’s safe to be here?” Emma asked.

He turned to her; she was watching his face. “I’m sure it is,” he soothed. “How bad can their monsters be? I’m sure they’re just seeing little flashes of what it’s like back where we’re from. Maybe they’ve forgotten. They see a bus or a plane and, well, if you didn’t know what they were, I’m sure you’d be scared too.”

“I am scared.”

Sean kicked her playfully in the seat of her jeans. “Come on. We’ve got to find a door.”

They moved around again to what Sean guessed must have been the rear of the building, abutting as it did the edge of a thicket of dense purple and green reeds. There was no obvious route up to any of the windows, which were, in any case, much too narrow to squeeze through. Sean was about to suggest that there might be a more prosaic means of entry, similar to their passage to Tantamount, when Emma noticed the stream.

It was a paltry affair, piddling between the reeds like urine pissed into the woods by a drunken camper. Yet it was constant, and it ran down through the thicket to a point where it met the ziggurat and ended. They spent five minutes dragging away the reeds and ferns that were clustered around the base of the ziggurat. A metal grille, badly corroded, framed the water’s route into the building; they could see the trickle disappear into a throat of black. Sean worked his fingers between the struts in the grille but he didn’t need to pry it off: it broke under pressure.

“I don’t think I can go in,” Emma said.

“It’s okay,” Sean assured her, snapping more pieces of rusted metal. “We have an escape route, don’t we? We can pull ourselves out of it at any point.”

“I don’t like it. I just don’t. The thought of pushing myself down a tunnel. We might get trapped.”

“Are you listening to me?” Sean asked, pausing to look at her. She was sitting back on her haunches, her hands clasped in front of her, arms outstretched, as if she were offering him her wrists to be bound. “We can get out at any point. Whether it’s monsters or claustrophobia or a need to pee. We can do it.”

Emma breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay.”

Once Sean had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his shoulders, he edged his feet over the hole and slid into it until he was half-way through, keeping his body levered upright with his hands either side of the grille.

“It might be that once I let go,” he said, “I’ll go very quickly. It feels as though it’s pretty well greased up underfoot. So come in soon after me, yes?”