Decay Inevitable

HE WAS GLAD of that, in the end. Although he was not attacked by the people he had had to disable when he first came with Vernon Lord to visit the old woman, Mrs Moulder, in the tiny flat near Runcorn’s Shopping City, the presence of danger was very real and constant. Emma helped just by being there. She lent him the mettle that she thought she had seen in him in the other place, over there.

Her door was closed but the latch was off. Inside, the smell of death was overwhelming. There were no signs of struggle, but there was an intense feeling of a presence in the flat which they both acknowledged.

Emma said, “It’s as if someone has just left the room, do you know what I mean?”

Sean nodded. “Or is hiding. Is still here.”

They found Mrs Moulder in the kitchen. Sean said, simply, “Cheke.”

If her method of dispatching victims was becoming more skilled, the manner of her disposal of the bodies was shockingly clumsy and tokenistic. Mrs Moulder had been forced into the oven, but when Cheke had found she would not fit, the old woman had been abandoned, half-sprawled on the floor, her head burned like a forgotten roast. An older wound in her chest told the story of Sean’s first visit here. A story, the ending of which he had not been privy to. The ribs had been snipped open and bent back to reveal the heart, which was no longer there.

Cheke had half-heartedly begun hacking off Mrs Moulder’s legs, but had given up, no doubt bored. The body was partially digested too: a naked portion of the abdomen bore sucker scars and the flesh had turned to porridge. Presumably Cheke had given up on this idea too when she realised how pointless it would be to assume the form of an elderly blind woman.

“I’ve seen enough,” Emma said.

“She’s closing in on us,” Sean observed. “When we give her the slip, she simply goes back to the trail and rubs it out bit by bit until she makes fresh contact.”

“When does it end?”

Sean squeezed her arm. “When we go down. Or her. Don’t lose that thought. She’ll have an Achilles heel.”

They were on their way out of the flat when Emma halted Sean, her voice a whispered, frantic appeal. In the cracked, foxed mirror hanging in the hallway, trapped between the silvered background and the solid reflections of Sean and Emma, Cheke lingered, in the act of departure. Emma reached out for Sean and held tight to his hand as they studied the wolfish profile and the volley of deep-red hair that tumbled across her shoulders. The eye regarded them, unseeing, yet giving the illusion of awareness. It hung there, beneath the lid, sly, gem-bright. Teeth glistened between slightly parted, ruddy lips. She had a bloom about her, even in the ghost of this reflection. She was formed. Ripe.

“She looks so real,” Sean said. “She looks... beyond real. Jesus.”

He delved for some kind of conversation as they drove back to town, but nothing could penetrate the vision they had witnessed. He guessed that her reflection, in its reluctance to leave the mirror, counted for something, might point to a weakness, but was baffled as to what that could be. He had been shocked by the perfection of the woman. She looked so hungry and ambitious, yet utterly fulfilled at the same time. She was an advert. She was aspirational. His lust stirred at the thought of her wide, thick mouth, the carnality that played in its shape. She had developed so much in the short time since her last attack it seemed impossible to believe it could be the same woman.

“How far can she go? Where can it take her?” Emma asked. He saw in her glazed countenance how Cheke had stayed with her too.

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But she’d have us as a part of her in an instant.”

Saying the words, he hadn’t meant to invest them with enthusiasm, although that was how it had sounded. Would it really be a bad thing to have your make-up absorbed by her, to become a part of the perfection she was zeroing in on? Would it hurt so much? He thought of her body opening, sliding across his, the heat as she sucked him into her. To be indivisible from her.

He swallowed thickly and wound down the window, allowed the frigid January air into the car.

“She would kill us in a second,” Emma said. “No mercy.”

“I know.”

“Be strong,” she said. “Be careful.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MASH THIS

THERE WERE OTHERS.

Sometimes they appeared as subliminal slivers of colour and movement. Sometimes they loitered. Will slowly began to understand the migrations here, but he never got over the patterns of damage, the abundance of injury in all its manifold, grotesque variations.

Joanna said, “Look.”