Decay Inevitable

Pink, dusty Anglo bubblegum. Fruit Salads and Mojos for half a penny each. Dandelion and burdock. Lurid green American cream soda.

“I banged my head when I was three years old,” Sean said. “On the door of my dad’s van. I had to have stitches.”

He put his fingers to the old scar. It felt febrile, tender; he withdrew his hand and opened his eyes, half-expecting to see fresh blood. Five stitches, the nurse had given him. He had not cried because the nurse was young and pretty and he didn’t want the tears to prevent him from seeing her clearly. She had given him a lollipop when it was over and told him her name. Gloria. Gloria would be a middle-aged woman by now. Nearly an old woman. She would have known, perhaps, many different kinds of love in the three decades since she treated Sean. He hoped they were all good.

Emma was squeezing his hand.

“I know,” he said. The night sky, with its feverish black sun, boiled above them. Cool grass sprang between their fingers as they pressed their hands into the ground to sit upright. The hill spread out around them.

He said, “We’re here.”

Up ahead were a number of figures, a gathering of grey smocks meandering on a hill above the ocean. At the bottom of the hill lay a series of drab, grey buildings with narrow windows and flat roofs.

“It’s just how I remember it,” he said.

“Me too. Just think, when we were young, when we came here, we might have walked past each other without knowing.”

“Naomi would have been here too,” he said. “She might be here now. She ought to be.”

“Don’t get too hopeful, Sean,” Emma warned. “We don’t know as much about this place as we feel we do.”

They saw how the topography roughly traced the same lines as the city that existed here during daylight. The sea followed the path of the river and consumed the south bank that had lain beyond it. The skyscrapers of tents and shacks and scaffolding had been eclipsed by the hill. Occasionally, perhaps due to some de Fleche-inspired fault, they witnessed a flash of daylife. A man carrying bread in a basket. A woman shouting for help after a pickpocket had helped himself to her purse. The barge as it ferried people across the river. Sean remembered the black clouds he had seen on the day he chased Tim through the marketplace and realised they must have been some hint of this aspect.

They walked towards the figures as they milled slowly around the top of the hill. As had happened many years before, they respectfully stepped out of the way and bowed ever so slightly as Sean walked by. They talked in low voices, too deep for any sense to be made of it. The grey smocks and the pale, bald heads edged with fuzz relaxed Sean for some reason. The murmuring too, though the content was unknown, worked on him like a masseur’s fingers. Yet even here, on the hill, de Fleche’s insidious presence was noticeable. It stained the bark of the trees with white rot. It turned large patches of the pasture into scarified stubble. Spume lacing the shoreline carried with it the whiff of raw sewage.

It had not been like this early on, when de Fleche had only just discovered this dead country and Sean and Emma had first wandered its confines. But long years had elapsed. Enough time for his freshness to stain what relied on the dark and the cold, just as death and disease will eventually cause what is wholesome to fail. There was taint in the air. It caught in Sean’s craw and made him feel sick.

“This isn’t good,” Sean said. Little ribbons of a blackness so deep it seemed to be blue or purple shimmered against the night sky or wormed through the meadow. Some of the figures avoided these cracks as if they represented the Devil’s maw, but others tiptoed at the edges, peeking, awed, into unconscionable depths.

Sean and Emma explored for what felt like hours. They plunged into the forest at the foot of the hill, alive with the marine scent of the nearby ocean and the wet, autumnal musk of mushrooms and leaf mould. They scared animals into flight that they had never seen before and they were glad that the dark kept them from being revealed completely. On the beach, they picked up strange shells that resembled fossilised organs. Other flotsam and jetsam looked more like petrified limbs than driftwood.

They saved the buildings until last. Time, and perhaps de Fleche’s mischief, had ruined their symmetry. What had once been sharp corners were now crumbling bevels. Some of the steel reinforcement rods peeked through the mortar, brown with rust. Lancet windows peppered the structure; glassless, they let in the wind. As they prowled the exterior, Sean and Emma could hear the grim tunes it played inside.

“I can’t see a door,” Emma complained. “Not that I want to go in.”

“Yes you do,” Sean said. “We have to.”

“Can you hear anything, other than the wind?”