The Dickens Mirror (44 page)

No!
Dropping the chopper, she clawed at her neck. There were other hands on her now, and they bore her to the snow, smashing her facedown the way you might bludgeon a large fish you’d just hooked. She felt cold sheet over her face. Snow clotted in her mouth and plugged her nose, not that it mattered, because she couldn’t breathe anyway. Above the pound of her pulse, she thought she heard Tony bellow something, and then Emma’s shout. An instant later, whatever had hooked her shawl jerked and then the pressure eased: not a lot, but enough that she was already blindly surging up from the snow.

Coughing, she wrenched the shawl from around her neck.
Tony … Emma … the chopper, where’s …
She spotted the chopper’s bone handle two feet away to her right. To her left, Tony had impaled her attacker in the neck. The pike had pierced clear through, and the hook was now snagged under the dead woman’s right ear.

“Hurry, Tony!” Emma had her back to him, and now she swung her pike, jabbing at hands and bodies. A boy—most of his chest gone and only shreds of muscle clinging to jagged ribs—clamped both hands on the pike’s handle and gave the girl a mighty jerk. Crying out, Emma stumbled, then loosed her grip on the pike. Without her weight, the boy lost his footing and staggered to one knee. Racing forward, Emma aimed a kick for the boy’s jaw. There was a sodden crack, and suddenly, half the boy’s jaw ripped free to career away, like the broken handle of
a jug, into the snow. Gargling, the boy clapped both hands to his ruined face. Seizing her pike, Emma levered the iron spike upward. Another crack, and this time what remained of the boy’s head split in two. The girl danced back. “Tony, come on!”

“Can’t!” Try as he might, he couldn’t wrest his pike free. “Clear out, Emma, back up!”

“No, let it go!” Emma shouted. “You can have mine!”

“She’s right!” Rima croaked, as the dead woman wrapped both hands around the pike’s iron shaft. “Let go, Tony! Leave it!”

Too late. As the woman fell back, her momentum dragged Tony forward and off his feet. Rima heard Emma shriek as grasping hands shot out to latch onto and then swarm up Tony’s pike. A leering boy with no lips opened his naked jaws—

Tony began to scream.

Domain

“BODE.” BLOOD SLUSHING
with terror, Emma put a hand on his arm. Up and down this corridor, each cell door was slowly swinging open. “Bode, the doors … how …”

“I don’t know, but … 
Christ
.” His eyes bulged. His hand closed over her elbow, and he began taking slow steps backward, tugging her along with him. “There are cells ahead
and
behind. We got … we got to get out of …”

Yes, but go where?
As they drew back, she saw that the doors were wide open now, each coming to rest with a resounding
clang
of metal against brick wall. Her heart squeezed down with dread. In the nacreous green light, each open door was a blank, a yawning void. She could hear
them
—the scrape of Bode’s boots and the tap of her heels—but from the open cells, there was nothing. No one wandered out. For a split second, she let herself think,
They’re all empty. No one there. Just props, like in a horror movie
.

“Meme!” Bode shouted, still moving away but slowly, his head swiveling from side to side. “Meme, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

“I told you.” Meme’s voice came back, instantly, not only from the tunnel before them but all around: misting from the ceiling, steaming up from the rock floor, sighing from the many cells’ black mouths. “She has to come with me.
She
is the reason we are all dying.”

“That’s not true, Meme, and you know it.” Bode was already crowding her back the way they’d come. “We were dying before Emma got here. London’s been falling down forever.”

“I am not speaking of Emma but Elizabeth, too. Kramer is right. She is the key, the nexus. Stop Elizabeth—stop
Emma
—and all this goes away.” Meme’s words were a mournful sough, like wind through bare branches. “I do not want to do this, Bode. But you leave me no choice.”

“You’ve got choice, Meme,” Bode said. “There’s always choice.”

They were about halfway down the tunnel from which they’d just come. Still a hell of a lot of open doors between them and that junction, too. That crazy, chain-smoking miner dude from years back said that miners left behind blind tunnels all the time, places where they’d started to core out rock and then stopped either when the vein petered out or when what they were getting wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe there were other, smaller openings and corridors here, too, or a shallow room, something with an entrance that was kid-sized, low to the ground. That would work if it wasn’t too obvious. She thought of the dark square down in Jasper’s cellar, which looked pretty damned good right now, back door into her
Now
or not.

“I am his creature,” Meme said from ahead, above, behind. From the open cell doors. “I must do what he wants.”

“But you haven’t.” Bode pulled up. “You helped me. You helped my friends.”

“Bode,” Emma warned, in a low voice. “You’re not going to convince her.”

“I knew her before you and that damned nightmare.” His words quavered with anger. “Why’d you have to come? Why’d you spoil it all? I was better off
not
knowing,
not
dreaming.”

“She is not your friend, Bode,” Meme said, and now Emma heard the rustle of a woolen skirt coming from her left.
Shit, she sounds close
. Emma peered into an open cell door.
Like she’s right beside us
. She thought of House and that barn in the valley, both of which had been manifestations of Lizzie’s parents.
It’s like this
is
Meme, or her domain: it responds to her. When she screams
, it
screams and …
That rustle came again—and her blood froze.
Oh shit
.

“Meme, I know what … 
who
you saw in those glasses,” Bode said. “That don’t matter to me. There has to be an explanation, a reason, a—”

“Bode.” Emma’s hand shot for his arm. “Bode, shut up. Listen.”

“What?” Rounding, teeth bared, Bode snapped, “I don’t
care
what you say; Meme will listen to …”

The sound came again.

“Oh holy God.” Bode’s eyes went round, and then jerked to the open cell door on her left. “Do you hear?”

She tried to say
yes
, but her throat wouldn’t let go of the word.

The rustle coming from the open cell door was not wool, because, she thought, this wasn’t Meme. Instead, what came was a rhythmic
shush-shush-shush
of feet over worn canvas, and not
just
in that cell now. That steady
shush-shush-shush
was everywhere, as whatever was inside each cell kept coming on and coming on and …

Shush. Shush-shush-shush
.

She didn’t think she was even breathing. If her heart was beating, she didn’t hear that either.

Shush-shush-shush …

Then, the thick, impenetrable darkness of the cell on her left peeled back, like a heavy curtain being raised on a stage, as something within slowly slid into view.

IT WAS A
man—and it wasn’t. It had the right form, like a man-sized silhouette on a target range. It wore clothes, but they were nondescript: a general impression of a shirt and trousers and boots, but with no detail or color or buttons or lacings. It was like looking at the
idea
of clothes on the
idea
of a man: a cardboard cutout with just enough detail for her mind to fill in the blanks and register
shirt, pants, boots
, the same way she might read
tree
or
mountain
in a book and let her imagination give the tree color, the mountain height and definition.

What drew itself from the dark of each cell had a head and shoulders, arms, a torso, and legs. There were hands and fingers. Ears … she wasn’t sure. Really, she was too stunned by the rest of its face to worry about that.

The face was a swirling, churning, amorphous mess. No eyes or mouth. Nothing, not even the blade of a nose. The face was flat and blank, though it simmered like the surface of a pond in a heavy rain.

She’d just seen Weber’s head, reduced to paste and pulp, begin to stitch itself together. Somehow, though, this was worse.

For a stunned instant, she was paralyzed, a deer caught in the headlights.
You watch
. She stared at the thing with the swirling,
seething blank of a face.
It’ll settle; it’ll be a mirror or the whisper-man
. Or her face, swimming up to spread and mold itself to this thing’s skull. She could practically hear her doctor from so many years ago:
I can give you any number of looks …

“Come on.” Bode gave her arm a hard tug that made her stumble and nearly fall. “Come on! We don’t got time for this! We got to go, we got to go, we got to run.”

He was already turning, yanking her along. All up and down the line, blank-faced things stepped from their cells—then turned, en masse, and started for them.

It’s the scorpions again
. But she thought this might even be worse, and not only because
they
had no weapons at all—and God, what good was a lousy little scalpel against things like these?

Grabbing her skirt in both hands, she floundered after him. Keeping up with Bode was torture; he outpaced her in an instant. She wanted to shout at him to slow down, but she had no breath in reserve.
It’s Elizabeth’s body wearing out; whatever’s making her sick is eating her up from the inside
. Her lungs were on fire, and every step jarred and ripped at the muscles around her ribs. That crushed-tin-can taste was on her tongue again, and she could feel blood splash her lips and trickle from her gaping mouth. Every inhalation was like pulling air through a throat jammed with broken glass. Elizabeth’s body was rail-thin, but Emma felt heavy and clumsy, as if wading through concrete. Her vision was going fuzzy, too. Far ahead, Bode was graying out, seeming to disappear before her eyes.

Don’t pass out. Keep going
. Hands whisked through her hair, and she gasped, whipping her head to one side. More hands seemed to sprout from open cells to snatch at her clothes. If she’d had breath, she might have screamed. God, it was like that sea of
hands and fingers in her cell, only this she couldn’t command or wish away, if she even had before.
Can’t be that much farther to the junction, can it?
Unless the tunnels were changing, too, like one of those movie special effects where things telescoped away in a swoop.
Maybe there is no junction anymore, and these things will keep after us and after us, run us down, tear us apart …

Then, like a mirage, the end of this particular tunnel swam into view. Bode was already past. To her left, the last cell was coming up, and then she was even with it, though nearly spent.
Need to rest
. She slowed without really meaning to. Reflex, that was all, and Elizabeth’s body wearing out.

Then, out of the corner of her left eye, she saw a smudgy blur.
What?
She looked, but in slow motion, her mind as gluey as her body, and by the time her brain ticked through what she was seeing …

It was already too late.

These Ravening Dead

“TONY!” HER PARALYSIS
lifted. Sweeping up the chopper, Rima screamed to Emma, “Back up, back up!”

She brought the blade straight down. The chopper’s keen edge buried itself with a hollow crack, splitting the boy’s skull. A gray slop of decaying, jellied brains gushed from the split, and more dribbled from the boy’s ears and eyeless sockets. The boy’s jaws slackened, but now there were other hands on Tony and he was screaming, the snow under his torn arm going crimson, as they swarmed him like ravenous rats feasting on carrion.

“NO!”
Emma was stabbing at backs and buttocks, but it was like spitting into the face of a hurricane. “Let him go, leave him alone!”

Rima sprang for the roiling mass of bodies. Tony’s pike still jutted straight up, waggling like an obscene masthead void of its sail, but she couldn’t see him for all these ravening dead. Slashing in a sweeping cut, she drove the chopper into the side of a neck—man, woman, she couldn’t tell—and watched with sick horror as the head swooned until the right ear rested on its shoulder … 
and still, the thing did not turn to face her but jabbered and tried clawing up the back of another blocking its way.

“Stop it!” It was Emma, fists balled. She shrieked at the woman. “Don’t hurt him anymore! I’ll come with you! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Rima!” Whipping round, she saw Tony rearing up, smeared with his own blood and the viscous tar of foul ichor and decayed guts. A girl with no nose or lower jaw had twined her arms round his neck and now clung to him like a lover. “Rima!” he shouted, and then she spotted a flash of steel in his right hand. “Emma! Girls, run, get away,
run
!”

No, no, no!
“Tony,
stop
!” she shrieked as Emma screamed, “Kill her, Tony,
kill
her!” He was already driving, ramming the blade home, his penknife burying itself in the girl’s swollen, churning belly.

That’s it
, Rima thought.
We’re done for
.

The girl arched. Her mouth unhinged, and what came was a wordless, ululating bellow. Then, in the blink of an eye, her stomach erupted, tore itself apart, releasing a mist of red fluid and black squirmers.

No
. Her breath stoppered in her throat. The mist bloomed over Tony, who was already coughing and choking, clawing at his face as the ebony whips wormed down his mouth, up his nose, and into his ears. Dumb with horror, Rima watched as they thrashed and cored into the whites of his eyes, and now there were ruby tears streaming down his cheeks, as Tony, back bowed in agony, collapsed to the snow, gargling blood, his skin rippling as squirmers bored and chewed.

“What are they?” Emma shrieked, eyes bulging with terror. “What are they, Rima,
what are they?
”