Sean was remembering. It had been hard, over the years, to give much thought to the terrible occasion of his parents’ death, harder still to acknowledge their complicity in the use of him as an Insert. Cash had gone into their pockets while his mind had been invaded, tuning him into the frequency of the dead. It was difficult to accept that he had run away from home and fended for himself for so long without belief in his own ability. Perhaps it had been a way of blocking out the hideous memory of the double murder. He had run half the length of England but had failed to get away from the cold facts. He was different. Trying to gouge out that difference with a drill all those years ago had served only to illustrate his rarity. Trying to kill himself was as much an attempt to confirm that dreamlike knowledge that he could never take his own life as it was a need to damage himself into oblivion. Emma had been the walking stick he needed. Though she was growing ever paler, and tired-looking, in here she was strong and limber. Her eyes were wide and bright here. In here, her brain was lightning.
“It’s opening up,” she said now.
He saw she was right. The walls were further apart and the light was improving, deepening the corners of the corridors, picking out the patterns in the floor and ceiling. The patterns were replicated in the walls too, he saw, squinting to study what they might be. It was a little like staring at complex patterns on wallpaper, or the mesh of twigs in a winter tree. The patterns forced faces out of the wall.
“Sean,” Emma said, her voice toneless, inelastic.
He couldn’t understand her terse address. But then he saw that the faces were really faces, two-dimensional visages locked into the fabric of the wall like tesserae in a mosaic. They possessed animation, these tiles. They blinked and gurned and pouted, shifting along like the accretion of frost on a pond.
“Who are they?” Emma asked.
“People dreaming,” Sean said. “People dreaming of death. People dying. This is where our minds go when we sleep, when we’re closing in on death. The cusp of it. Death is like one huge plughole and when we sleep, when we play dead, it sucks us towards it.”
“I can hear babies crying, Sean. It’s horrible.”
“Babies know death well. They’re closest to it when they’re born. Being born is like cheating that plughole at the last moment. Babies scream at the moment of birth because they know what death tastes like. They know that they have been born in order to die.”
The corridor broadened and then it was no longer a corridor because the walls sank and curved, feeding into the floor. They stood on a desert of faces that moved ceaselessly, minutely, like the incremental journey of a dune. A hundred metres away, the floor heaved up again and became a column that rose so high that they could not see the tip of it. There was no machinery here, but there ought to have been. The air was thick with movement, as though all of the molecules in it had been heated to a point of constant agitation. Some huge labour was occurring on a plane of consciousness that was beyond Sean and Emma. They felt the tongues of furnaces lick their foreheads and backs wet; puffs of arid air exploded across them from the pistoning of unseen hardware. Motors and rotors churned and whipped the air, girders plunged and spun as the giant, invisible machine ground out its unknown product.
Sean ventured out onto the landscape, clasping Emma to him when its limitless expanse threatened to squash him to nothing. They approached the column, seeing at a distance how the faces were drawn into it and coiled around the cylinder as they were sucked up like the slashes of blood and bandage in a barber’s shop pole. The symphony of creation went on around them, smashing and howling as steel heated up and steam was vented and bolts and pulleys clanked together. Sean got a trace of its mischief as the column loomed miles above them. White tunnels, friendly faces, open arms. Brilliant light.
“It’s feeding them,” Sean said, the faces on the column as they neared becoming easier to pick out. These faces were less motile, less lined. They had the serenity that comes with reassurance, with knowledge. When they woke, the corporeal forms that projected their identities down here would feel fresh and heartened.
“De Fleche is behind this,” Sean said. “A sugar-coated version of what death is, slammed into the dreaming mind of those who need it. It’s like TV. It’s like bad TV.”
“What is?” Emma was holding on to his arm, trying to read the messages she saw in the twisting core of faces.
“This place, dressing up death in a pretty frock and pearl ear-rings. Bit of slap. Bit of scent. All those pitiful fucks sucking it down, befriending the costume and not the clown that wears it.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Emma wanted to know. “Is it bad to not be scared? Of dying, of death?”
“No it’s not. But we develop our own defences. We read our holy books or we believe that Uncle Fred is ‘up there’ looking down on us, minding us as we dawdle after him, catching him up. We deal with death our own way. We pack our travel bag for that journey because nobody else can pack it for us. This...” Sean waggled his hand at the busy, hot air, “...this is force-feeding. This is Walt Disney on a bad day.”
“But why is he doing it?”
Sean said, “The dead are seeping back into our world, Emma. They’re infecting the living, damaging life, just as his being here is damaging this place too.”
“Why though? Why does he want that?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’ll find him and we’ll stop it.” He looked back the way they had come. “Out there is what death is really all about. The hill and the forest and the sea. And the monsters. Tranquillity
and
discord. It’s all we’ve ever wanted from anything we do. Life, stories, love... there’s no life without darkness. So it is here. So.”
Emma kissed him. “De Fleche,” she said. “Where do we find him?”
Sean looked at her. “The place where all the monsters live. In fairy tales. In fact.”
Emma said, “The forest.”
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
T
HREE:
P
OSITIVE
ID
C
HEKE WITHDREW THE
policeman deep into herself and allowed Susannah to come forwards. She stepped onto the hard shoulder of the M62 and waved at the oncoming articulated lorry as it steamed up the inside lane. She breathed in and pulled her shoulders back, smiled, showed Susannah’s tiny, white teeth.
Immediately, the HGV indicated and pulled onto the shoulder. Susannah ran alongside the lorry, its passenger side door opening even before the wagon had come to a stop, and clambered up into the seat.
She noticed the badge on his shirt pocket first –
Come ride my long vehicle
– then his sunglasses and an unattractive beard as tight and curly as sheep’s hair. The boy-in-a-sweet-shop smile. Those lenses could not hide from Cheke his long gaze into the valley between her breasts. She leaned over and let him have a better view, then she killed him. He jerked and bucked as if he were a robot and she a technician, trying to reattach some faulty wires in his CPU. His glasses fell off revealing a new expression for her burgeoning library: it was neither repulsion nor relief and probably wasn’t even a combination of the two. When she’d taken it from him she rested, trying to bring some harmony to the constant ripple of her body. Finally, he was still and she could begin.
The last thing she had been expecting as she closed in on Will was that her job would be executed for her by someone else, and a weak-looking invalid at that. She had dogged them, the man in the scarf and his extraordinary wife, intending to kill them both, but it was clear that the couple were going home. They had no impact on what was about to be played out here because they were oblivious to the situation, that much was clear from their expressions as they hurried from the hospital. Their agenda with Will was separate, inspired – judging from the abject look on the woman’s face – by pity. Fair enough. She would claim the kill for herself. Gleave would be none the wiser. It angered her a little that she had been dispatched to get rid of this runt of a man, this no-hoper, this failure. Will was nothing special, she felt. He was just somebody who stumbled upon horror and reacted as anybody might react, if their hand were forced. But, as Gleave had pointed out to her, to get to Will was to get to all of them. It was for such reasons that she was a doer, and not a planner.
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.
T
HE 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.