Decay Inevitable

No, Will sent, as much with his eyes as his mind. Open it, pour it on the tree. It’s foreign to this place. It’s poison.

Sean unstoppered the phial and shook some of the crystals onto his palm. They looked like bath salts. He flung them at the roots and the dense trunk and stepped back as the bark began sloughing off in great swathes, like the skin of an unfortunate who had been consumed by fire. The roots blackened and popped, petrifying in an instant. The whole tree took on the appearance of a child recoiling from a mad dog. Will slithered from its grip and lay gasping on all fours, keening and puking into the fractured loam.

“Nice one,” he said at last, sticking up an approving thumb.

“What is this stuff?” Sean asked, shaking the remaining granules in the phial.

“I picked it up in Gloat Market.”

“Where?”

Will shook his head. “No matter. I don’t know what it is. Weedkiller, maybe.”

Emma looked at them, a mix of disgust and dread spoiling her features. “Boys,” she said. “I mean, boys!” Her finger was pointing at the treeline as the great columns were felled in an instant. The noise now was deafening, a timber tide crashing against their shore. The final cluster of trees dropped to reveal no monster, no Kong, no dream demon from the Sandman’s bag. The pulverised trunks formed a path buzzing with wood-dust. A smell blasted over them of sourness, rotten timber heavy with the waste of weevils and disease. As if in sympathy with this little eco-disaster, a fresh puncture sucked away the ground into a limitless black throat. Far away to the right, a small group of grey smocks had gathered on the hill and were watching this new round of cataclysms with stoic indifference. It was as if they knew they were here for the duration, no matter what the outcome. Were they the true dead, the ur-dead? The people who had shaped this mirror-Eden only to find it, like the villages and towns and cities of the world, become cluttered with litter and pollution; populated by murderers and despots and the self-destructive. De Fleche, then, was the Serpent in this garden, knowing the smell and flavour of ruin and how best to help it spread. Vernon Lord was right to fear this place. Death, a release? A big adventure?

What was it de Fleche hoped to achieve? Where was the sense in building one last great folly and filling it with dark confections to soothe the dying, the agnostics who didn’t know, who hoped, but couldn’t be sure? What was the worth in luring shaky atheists who hammered up their barriers until death began to pluck at them and then removed the nails one by one, daring to peek through the cracks to see if, maybe, there was something else after all?

Emma said, her voice misfiring, “What is this?”

The wood-dust settling, they could see at the end of this arboreal gorge a figure sitting with his back to them. He was hunched over, gazing out at a mere ringed with brown, wilting reeds. Sean moved towards him but Will hissed at him to stay put.

“It’s de Fleche. He has to die,” Sean said.

“How, exactly?” Will asked.

The question flummoxed him. “I’ll busk it,” he said. “It’ll come to me.”

“This is his playpen,” Will warned. “He has more toys than you.”

The grey head of the figure vibrated. His hair danced as though it were plunged in water. Even at this distance they could see the black scimitar grin in his face, the gold tooth as it winked. “He wants you to go to him. Look, he’s psyched up for it. He knows he can finish you now.” He laid a hand on Sean’s arm. “There’ll be a better time,” he promised. “A fairer deck.”

“But Pardoe said we have no time left.”

“There’s time enough,” Will said. “I saw things happening, before... shit, before I was shot–” He paused at that, and tried to absorb it. Emma rubbed his shoulder. “This kind of decay is going on back home,” he said. “People passing back who have been dead a long time. I remember, when Cat died, a guy called Gleave who came to collect her and the woman, Cheke, the killer. He said something about ‘leaks’, about mopping them up. They have to be stopped, Sean.”

“But Pardoe was adamant that de Fleche–”

Emma said, “Pardoe is a dinosaur. All he’s interested in is carrying through a plan that’s twenty years out of date. Will’s right. De Fleche can’t do anything while he’s stuck here. He’s done what he set out to do. The wheels are in motion.”

Sean watched the old man swivel on his seat and gaze back at them. Distance reduced his features to a whitish smear. “I can’t believe that’s it. That’s all. There must be something more. De Fleche isn’t dead. He’s an intruder here. What’s the point of drumming up an army of dead people to walk among the living if...” Sean frowned, “...you weren’t going to come back when all the killing was done?”

“Who said anything about an army?” Will stammered, the thought of it, the weight of it settling in him like a badly digested meal.