Decay Inevitable

Who was this Slowheath? How did you begin to find a person you didn’t know anything about? That question, and the sight of a slow-moving police car nosing into the lane from the Finchley Road end, got him moving.

Maybe there was one person he could rely on after all.

SHE COULD SENSE them, beyond these walls. Somehow they were watching her.

Her body wanted to change. It fluxed and fluttered beneath a skin that seemed too paltry to contain her. The woman and the boy forced themselves to the surface and she had to work hard to quell them. Only when she could exercise control over herself would it be possible to bring her otherness into play.

She felt their eyes scorching her. They were waiting for her to acquiesce to what was inside her; to be comfortable with who she was. She sensed they were testing her. Well, she thought, pressing her hand against the thick wooden door, the test was over.

The cameras were not, as Cheke had supposed, inside the cell, but poised just outside. A guard with a grenade launcher was positioned in full armour at the mouth of the corridor, ready to abort should she render.

“It’s started,” the guard said.

His earpiece crackled. “Stay with it.”

The paint on the door blistered. The smell of charred wood prefaced the sudden shape of two hands emerging through the door. At the same time, in the small viewing window, a face appeared, rippled to nonsense by the cracks and the natural warp of the wire-enforced glass pattern. The face became the glass, cracks and all, oozing squarely through the frame. Coins of blood fell from its skin and the guard noticed how the glass had somehow fused with the flesh. He was so taken by the beauty of its passage that he sat back against the wall to watch, his lips shock-dry, his need to both laugh and bawl cancelling each other into awed silence.

He could see every nuance of her progress through the door; an intimacy between the living and the inert – if living was what she was. Only when her eyes, freshly blinked free of paint, splinters of wood and glass, met his own did he feel the first stitch of panic.

As she plucked the last shreds of her body from the door, the guard realised she was naked, but it had taken him until now to establish that. Her body was of a rudimentary configuration only; much of it ran in loops and strands. Liquid parts of her dribbled to the floor then swiftly collected and rejoined her mass like quicksilver. They wrapped around gaping, bloodless holes in which hints of muscle and bone could be seen. Her body turned brilliant white in an instant, generating a burst of intense heat that did for the cameras and tanned the guard’s face.

“What is it, Exley?” The fussy voice was full of needles. Exley, the guard, had forgotten all about his grenade launcher.

The flux of her face was at the same time both horrific and bizarrely tranquil; he was put in mind of lava lamps. When his voice came back she’d surged across the few feet between them, flowing over his legs, numbing them with her delicious chill.

“I don’t know what it is,” he whispered, as she covered his mouth with what passed for her own.

Although they were on her within fifteen seconds, dragging her away from Exley, the damage had been done. The soft tissue of his face was a pulped mass. Gleave, in the moment before he shot him through the forehead, couldn’t work out whether what dangled from the centre of his face was a tongue or an eyeball.

“Impressive,” came a gravelly voice at his shoulder. “And I don’t mean your sharp-shooting.”

“She’s the fastest we’ve seen. She’s almost ready. And this is, what... eighteen hours after we put the draw on her?”

“Give or take.”

“So what now?”

“Come and have a drink.”

Gleave followed the older man along a corridor carpeted with deep, wine-dark pile. He had been with the Junction for almost fifteen years now, yet was no closer to knowing Leonard Butterby than he was his partner, Thomas Lousher, or the history that they shared. Rumour was a rogue bull in this place: it could gore you if you messed about with it. The only whispers Gleave allowed himself to believe involved the suggestions of violence that had followed the pair around as they grew up in London during the ’60s and ’70s. Neither Butterby nor Lousher had any previous; at least, there was nothing on record. What the linens had printed on the couple over the last quarter of a century you could find in a few paragraphs devoted to their charity work. They were barbed wire without the barbs; nothing snagged.

“Absolut, isn’t it?”

Gleave nodded.

“Absolute disgrace, more like. Arseman’s drink, if you ask me. Here–”

Gleave took his drink and sat opposite Butterby, who had poured himself a large Scotch. A big desk, empty but for a blotter and a Meisterstück fountain pen, separated them.

“I don’t need to tell you how bollock-shrivellingly important the next few weeks are going to be–”

“No,” said Gleave.