Decay Inevitable

Trying to ignore her feet as they clouted his scalp, Sean probed the pipe with his feet, stretching as far as he could. Its bore did not seem to decrease much more. Travelling south was a risk they had to take anyway; they couldn’t return the way they had come. He began working on his clothes, shedding them. He unbuckled his jeans and worked them down his legs. By kicking off his trainers (they slithered down the pipe at some speed, giving him hope that the route, if they could just get going again, would not impede them) he was able to lose his jeans and then he worked on his jumper, hunching it back over his shoulder blades while all the time Emma kicked and cursed and screamed as her phobias came home to roost. He scooped as much grease from the sides of the pipe as he could gather and rubbed it into his hips and shoulders. When he began to shift, slipping incrementally down the pipe, he stalled his progress by grabbing hold of Emma’s trousers. Inch by inch he hauled himself up until his hand was able to undo her belt. As he dragged her trousers down over her legs she seemed to come to her senses.

“What are you doing?” she yelled.

“Look, trust me,” he soothed. “Take your top off.”

She began to laugh. “Take my top off? What are you after? A fuck? Now?”

“Emma, take it easy. Trust me, please.” Her trousers were in his hand. He handed them to her, asking her to stuff them behind her shoulders. He could feel, by the heat of her breath and the exertion of her body, that she was obeying him despite the protests. Her body slid down a considerable distance, threatening to block them both in, but he pushed out a hand to lever himself away from her. It was enough to set their bodies sliding along again. They gathered pace. He warned her to keep her head back. Seconds later, maybe half a mile traversed, the pipe opened out and they were upended into a tank of water at the centre of a huge arena, the walls of which twisted fluidly with umbral colours and shapes. Theirs was just one of maybe half a dozen similar pipes emptying into this reservoir. Other pipes came in, changed their minds, and plunged back out again through the wall, in black, wormlike U-turns. A fan beat slowly, high overhead, concealed by the steam rising from the hot floor. Sean could just make out, on the bottom of the container, another grille, much larger and sturdier than the one he had broken into. Maybe this recycled water was coolant fed to the area where all the industrious machinery pounded away. They heaved themselves out of the reservoir onto cold stone flags.

“What is it they do here?” Emma asked, struggling into her wet clothes. “I mean, this place is supposed to be the dead zone, the final resting place. And what’s going on? They’ve got a fucking mine up and running.”

Fully clothed, they cast around for an exit but found that there wasn’t one. Sean led Emma towards one wall and pressed his hand against it; it went through, visible but paler, like a vegetable blanched in boiling water. “The dead don’t need doors,” Sean said, cheerily. “And apparently, in here, neither do we. Come on.”

WILL RAN UNTIL he dropped and then she flogged him. The thing in the womb woke as she beat him with a broom handle, and grinned at him whenever the fluid shifted it around to a better view. It winked at him, it licked its lips. Sometimes Will caught glints of teeth when it did this. Sometimes, in his darker moments, when he believed that Joanna had died or had forgotten about him (believed he was part of a dream?), he imagined the thing was sizing him up.

Whether his mind was giving up on him or his injuries were causing delusions he couldn’t be sure, but he wondered now if the shadow he had seen in the church that morning, the morning after Sadie had forced herself upon him, was in some way an aspect of her reality, or a foreshadow of the thing that he had helped to impregnate in her. He had half-hoped, in some fractured way, that the shadow in the church had belonged to Catriona, or their dead child. A sign meant for him from them, a comfort.

“Do you know somebody called de Fleche?” Will asked, breathing hard as Sadie turned her body this way and that in a full-length mirror that had escaped the fire relatively undamaged. A crack across the centre jarred the firm length of her flesh slightly as she stretched and twisted, eyes following each curve as if seeing it for the first time. Her use of the whip had brought her out in a healthy glow. She was sheened with perspiration.

“I never looked so lovely,” she said, wistfully. “And I’ll always look like this.”

“De Fleche? Know him?” Will persevered.

She regarded him with ill-veiled disdain. “Of course I know him. Why do you think I was trained as an Insert in the first place? We were told the story, Christopher and me. We were given the meat and two veg of the whole affair.”