Decay Inevitable

WHEN HE THOUGHT to look at the sky and try to find the moon, something to comfort him and make him feel rooted to reality on some plane or another, he was too far gone in sleep to manage it. Amazing, that he could drift off while that child, his child, that creature came slithering along the deck for him.

In sleep, he saw Joanna’s face leaning over his. She kissed his lips tenderly. He couldn’t open his eyes to ask her what he needed her to do but he could pull back from the dream and imagine himself lying there between the sheets, gaunt with skin like tallow. With his good hand, his fingernail, he gouged a message on his sleeping form’s forehead. Blood magicked onto the surface of the first letter as he moved on to the third. The word sprang out of his skin and Joanna sat back, shocked.

Do it, he urged, pressing the thought out of him with as much force as the child’s jaws as they closed around his ankle. He closed his mind to the terrible wet snacking and the absence of pain.

Do it.

OUTSIDE THE ROOM, the police officer looked up at Harry from his chair with ill-disguised boredom. A faulty striplight sizzled above, intermittently spitting bleached light or dropping shadow onto them.

“I’m getting some tea,” Harry explained. “Would you like a cup?”

The police officer shook his head.

Harry left him and headed down the corridor to the drinks machine, wondering about the policeman’s hands. Pianist’s fingers, he had thought, idly, when he jotted down their names and addresses in his notebook. “I’m his ex-wife,” Joanna had said. But, he saw now, they weren’t pianist’s fingers. Folded in the policeman’s lap, they were thick and meaty. Like pork sausages.

The light then, playing tricks. The light and the effect his crazy wife was having on his brain. By the time he got back, his hands being slowly scalded by the superheated tea in its flimsy plastic container, the policeman had disappeared and Joanna was leaning over Will, crying a pool into the tucked skin between his thumb and forefinger. Scars on the man’s forehead were vanishing as he watched. They looked like letters. What was it they said? Was it, was it Kill me?

“It’s finished,” she said, looking up at him and smiling crookedly. “All done. All done.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: THE BLACK FACTORY

THE ZIGGURAT WAS the tip of what was proving to be a monstrous iceberg, a labyrinth that twisted and U-turned, jinked and kinked back on itself like the fissures of a brain. Sean and Emma moved through the walls, children cheating the maze by crawling beneath its hedges. They were slowly advancing on the foundry sounds at the heart of the construction. Hot and cold air rioted against their skin. They smelled sour sweat and heard the hitching whimper of babies in discomfort. A snatch of melody, a lullaby. A scream that started off as something erotic and became terror-driven.

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.