Decay Inevitable

“I don’t know,” said Yoda. “He’s done it before but I don’t know what it means.”

“Write them down,” Christopher said. “Write them all down. You’ll wish you had if you don’t.”

He went on for another ten minutes, listing dates and locations and specific times. His tongue peeking from between his lips, Yoda scribbled what he was saying on the inside cover of a tattered Graham Greene novel. When Christopher had finished, he fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be revived, even when Will started kicking his chair and demanding to know what these dates meant.

“Leave him,” Yoda said, reverentially. “He has spoken.”

“Spoken gibberish, more like. I shouldn’t have come here. What a waste of time.”

“Christopher said, while we were waiting for you, that the girl wasn’t dead. That she would return to you. Soon.” Yoda’s beatific smile failed to curtail Will’s sudden rage.

“Sadie? What do you know about it?” he shouted, leaping from his chair and causing Yoda to rock back on his heels and fall to the floor. “Where is she? What about Eli? Cat?”

“I don’t know,” Yoda said, trying to crawl away. “I don’t know. Christopher said...”

“Christopher said? Christopher said? He doesn’t fucking know me.”

Will didn’t know what he was going to do but he had a very strong feeling he might actually try to harm Yoda or Christopher, anything in order to get some information from them.

He was reaching down to grab hold of Yoda’s T-shirt, ignorant to the barked demands for an explanation for his presence from the starched nurse standing in the doorway, her hands squirming together. He was reaching when, out of the window, he saw the mountaineer, Flint, striding towards him across the grass, gripping by the hair the heads of Elisabeth and Sadie.

But then he saw that it wasn’t Flint after all, just a groundsman carrying buckets of pondweed. The nurse had her hand on Will’s arm now, but he couldn’t turn away, even though the shape of his shock had been softened, made manageable.

“I think you should leave, sir,” the nurse was saying, at the same time as exhorting Yoda, whom she called Mickey, to get up and tidy his magazines. “It is you who should be leaving, isn’t it?” she said to Will, her brow knitting as she volleyed a glance between the three of them.

“Probably,” Will said, shaking his head. Nice place, he thought. Even the staff get in on the madness. He took the Graham Greene novel and stuffed it in his coat pocket, wondering what he should do now. So much of his hope had been pinned on Sloe Heath that he had been unable to see beyond what might happen here. He had hoped to find an answer to Cat’s death, or even to find Cat’s killers. He had not expected this Laurel and Hardy nonsense to impede him. There must remain some kind of clue here – why else would those murderers have mentioned it?

Unless, he thought grimly, as he headed for the exit, he had misheard after all and had wasted all of this time. If that was the case, then he deserved to wander these corridors for ever, with the rest of the nutjobs.

“No, no, no,” he heard Tonto/Yoda/Mickey whining, “you’re not right. You’re not right,” and the increasingly shrill demands of the nurse to shut up and play nice.

Will ran his fingers along the dense block of pages in his pocket, wondering what the dates could mean. A slap resounded through the shiny corridor, followed by the smash of a lamp. Will heard Christopher, his voice laden with sleep, laced with terror, say: “You promised never to hurt me! You promised you’d leave me be!”

And now someone else was speaking, but it wasn’t Mickey and it wasn’t the nurse.

“Did I make a mistake?” it asked, in a voice that sounded full of wetness. “Did I err?” An airless giggle tightened Will’s skin. He stood in the middle of the corridor, looking back the thirty feet or so to the open door on the left. Thin shadows jerked across the blade of pale sunlight that had collapsed across the hallway matting. Mickey and Christopher weren’t talking any more.

Will crept back towards the doorway.

“Was it him?” the nurse was asking. “Was it the other?” Her voice was muffled, and punctuated by rhythmic, moist smacking sounds. A lump stuck in Will’s craw; he suddenly could not get the dream memory of himself fucking Sadie out of his mind.