Decay Inevitable

In the seconds before he managed to disentangle himself and drop to the ground, he found himself marvelling at her mercurial skills, no matter how clumsy they were, because he knew she was better than she had been when he first encountered her and that she would no doubt continue to improve. He backed away from the gate as she shambled towards it, reassembling herself from whichever body patterns she had absorbed and made her feel comfortable. She hit the gate and wrapped herself around its bars, becoming interstitial, forcing the solids through her body with little grimaces of pain. He didn’t hear the sounds of tyres screeching on the road, or the blare of a horn. It was almost, in the moment that the car hit him, that Will had become like her, so that instead of being shunted onto the road the vehicle would simply travel through him, and he would filter the metal and plastic and leather and tissue through his body until it was on the other side of him, and the car could go on its way.

He didn’t see her finish her journey through the bars. He was too busy screaming at the pain that was ricocheting through his body. And dimly, he was aware that the scream was not just for his pain, but an accretion of agonies that had heaped upon him over the last week. Agonies and terrors in equal measure that his body, in extremis, was only now beginning to deal with.

PART THREE

ULTIMA THULE

Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us.

– Gustav Hasford,

The Short Timers

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE GUARDIAN

SEAN’S HEAD RESTED against the lip of the bath. His arms were bared, as if readying themselves for a needle. Blood in the water webbed the flesh below his elbow where it had been flayed. Deep cuts to his thighs hung in feathered crimson gouts. In his despair, he’d done for his left eye: its gelid cargo formed a clear, stiffening thread of fluid over his cheek. The razor blade was a red tablet sticking up from Sean’s thumb.

Emma studied the scene as a way to concentrate on staying upright and calming her heart. She found herself snagging on minutiae previously overlooked: a spatter of bleach discolouring the shower curtain, a crack in one of the wall tiles.

She sat down on the toilet lid. Eventually, Sean opened his good eye.

“I waited for ages,” she said. “I thought it was happening.”

He wiped the mess from his cheek and fingered the sticky remains of his socket. He said, “This isn’t going to fucking work.”

THEY HAD BEEN staying in the safe house for the best part of four weeks. As she dressed Sean’s wounds while he sat on the edge of the bath trying to fasten the gashes in his thighs with safety pins, Emma thought back to the moment that Pardoe had caught up with them. In the intervening weeks, she had been able to think of little else. The little man in the round spectacles and the brown worsted suit had arrived on Sean’s doorstep a little after three in the morning, when she and Sean were trying to relax Will. It had been a bizarre evening up until that point. After almost running Will over on the dual carriageway back into Warrington, they had bundled him into the back of the car when they saw what was trying to follow him through the gates of the hospital. All Will had done, in his delirium, was mumble what sounded like “casually” over and over. In a way, Emma had been grateful for the incident. It prevented her from concentrating too much on what had happened at 26 Myddleton Lane. It prevented her from suspecting she had finally gone mad.

Once they got Will back to Sean’s bedsit (he had railed violently against being taken to the hospital), they covered him in a blanket and let him sleep. Still he persisted with his strange litany, only now, Emma noticed, as he relaxed, did it sound as though he was repeating names. “Cat”, he would say. And “Eli”.

“Who do you think he’s talking about?” she asked Sean, but Sean wasn’t saying anything. He was sitting in the dark, in an armchair by his window, his fingers steepled together and pressed against his lower lip. She thought, maybe, by the way the low light from his kitchen glistened on his face, that he was crying. She did not go to him, but sought her own retreat, curled in a ball on Sean’s bed, hugging a pillow.

An hour later, Will woke her with his thrashing on the sofa. In sleep he was begging to be killed. She went to him and revived him, helping him to calm down, bringing him tea, stroking his forehead. Sean had not moved.

“What’s to be done?” she asked him.