Decay Inevitable

They walked on. It was too new an experience and too much of a relief to have cheated death to allow a coldness to develop between them. Sean apologised.

“It’s okay,” Emma said. “It’s been a bad day.”

Had he been disappointed to find a humdrum city through such a magical, awe-inspiring door? It had not been high on his list of expectations. He found himself wondering if they had passed through into a different place at all, when he saw the people on street corners chatting while they toted carrier bags rammed with food, or dogs crouching in the gutter, emptying their bowels. It didn’t appear to possess anything to mark it out from the place they had departed. No angels. No dragons. No Cheshire cat.

“What’s this place called, do you think?” he asked. “The Zoo, as Pardoe said?”

“We could invent a name for it, if you like.”

“I’m sure it already has a name.”

“Why? It might not. Just because it seems familiar to you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be called something like Stoke or Liverpool or Hull.”

Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of the nuances to which she alluded. It was a little bit like playing spot the difference. A police car might flash past and it would be a full minute before he suspected, the image catching up with him, that the C in POLICE painted on the bonnet was actually a K. POLIKE. But it was after the fact that he had these intuitions. He couldn’t check them out. The next time he saw a police car, the letters were spelled correctly, but after the car was long gone, he started doubting there had been anybody sitting inside it. A bird flitting from the branch of a rare tree was gone before he could ascertain whether or not it owned a beak. They turned a corner just as the corner of his eye insisted that a woman walking down some steps to a wine bar was shedding little pieces of her body. A bus roared by, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust, which blinded him to his initial sighting of a man in the window taking bites out of a badger.

By the time they reached the end of the long, busy street, his head was pounding.

“I need to slow down a bit,” he said. “Can we have a rest?”

In the rear of a coffee shop, well clear of the entrance, Sean rubbed his head and sipped hot chocolate from a large mug. Whatever else was out of whack about this place, his drink was real, almost life-affirmingly hot and sweet. He warmed his hands on the mug and looked around him, catching his reflection in a mirror that eclipsed one entire wall. His eye had recovered well and a surreptitious peeling back of his cuff revealed a completeness about the flesh, where it had been riven. Only a slight discoloration remained, the razor’s route outlined in white.

Emma was resting her head in her hands, regarding him across the table through the steam from her green tea. The bullet’s path through her throat had left scarring but already the wound was sealing itself. Being here seemed to have changed her, slightly. Her eyes seemed to contain less white; the iris was fatter here. When she spoke or breathed, tiny, almost imperceptible vibrations spoilt the air around her lips. Sudden movement caused a similar disruption. He saw it as he stirred his drink with a spoon. He saw it too blur a woman’s head behind the counter as she sneezed. Watching for too long made him feel nauseous.

“I can’t believe that the hill we dreamed about will be a part of this place,” he said. “It all seems too busy.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “It’s busy, but it seems manageable. Best we don’t give up on it before we’ve started. We’ll get there in the end.”

Sean nodded and drained his mug. He had noticed another subtle upheaval: the change in their dynamic. Before arriving here, Sean had definitely driven their progress and felt, sometimes, that he was shielding Emma. Now the balance of power had shifted. He felt good about that. He felt comfortable. She reassured him as much, he hoped, as he reassured her.

“It doesn’t seem so noisy, outside, does it?”

Emma picked out her tea bag and discarded it on the saucer. “Well, we’re underground.”

“I know, but still. The din up there was awful.”

The din, when they returned to street level, was still awful, but Sean couldn’t shake the belief that it had been reintroduced as they came back to it. As if it was all for their benefit. Something about these people too, so vital, so vocal, hinted of only recent animation. When he voiced his concerns to Emma, she seemed uninterested. “You might be right,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sinister. It’s just different.”

They continued down the street, happy for now just to absorb the newness of this experience. It was nice to not have a direction in mind. To not have immediate purpose. “Do you think she can come through too?” Sean asked. He didn’t feel he needed to qualify the “she”.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if she does, she’s different too.”