Decay Inevitable (25 page)

“As I was saying, there were three of you, three Negstream Inserts,” Pardoe continued. “I thought that only Sean had survived. But his running into you, Emma, sounded the alarm bells. It’s like there’s some kind of, shall we say,
ripple
when Inserts get together. It’s there. Very strong too. If you know how to look for it.”

Inserts
. That word again. Sean liked that. Not one bit. He returned to the cupboard, put down the gun, and withdrew a bottle of Absolut.

“Sit down,” he said. “Tell us everything. But don’t expect me to stay sober.”

It was almost five a.m. by the time Pardoe finished. Sean and Emma and Will had drunk most of the vodka; the bottle lay stoppered on the floor between them pointing out through a window that was gradually filling with chalky streaks of light. Pardoe had refused to drink with them. He told them he would wait in his car, an olive-green Jaguar that was parked in the street, for as long as it took for them to feel comfortable enough about the situation to join him. He would take them somewhere safe. Where they lived at the moment was not safe. Outside elements were closing in. It was time to move.

Unspoken questions fluttered around Sean’s mind but their urgency had been tempered by Pardoe’s gentle voice and his unheralded, understated revelations. Sean’s unease about Pardoe had vanished before the knowledge that he had found an ally for the first time in his life. It helped to be told that Naomi had been a part of it, something that he instinctively knew to be true, as it was with Emma.

Hadn’t he always felt something different? A calling, a significance that plucked at his imagination, like a dream that refused to be remembered? Hadn’t he always possessed the dead zone of what had happened to his parents without ever fully understanding the source of it? It was a dark land that he returned to whenever he slept. He had always thought that the knots in which he was trapped were for him alone to pick at. He never believed the knot might be solved by someone else. Having a discussion that involved his parents, people he had not referred to in public for as many years as they had been dead, made him feel sick.

An hour or so later, Sean, Emma, and Will trooped out to the Jaguar. Pardoe was sitting in the passenger seat, nibbling on a croissant. A large man in a blue cagoule nodded at each of them via the rear-view mirror as they got into the back. Jamie Marshall.

“Hi, Marshall,” said Sean. “Recovered from the stag night?”

“Sorry to be so hush-hush, mate,” Marshall said.

“I doubt I’ll ever be surprised by anything ever again,” Sean remarked.

“You know each other?” Emma asked.

Marshall drove for twenty minutes, navigating A roads and B roads with an almost supernatural knowledge of where explosions had prohibited access. They arrived at a church on the outskirts of Warrington just as sunlight was touching colour to the streets.

There Pardoe kept them, and told them what they needed to know.

“It is unfortunate,” he told Sean and Emma, when they gave their account of what had happened in the house on Myddleton Lane. “But, expected, given your resourcefulness.”

“Why unfortunate?” Emma wanted to know.

“Because once you have passed through a Negstream, you cannot use it again. You have to find your own way back. We think that this is ultimately what did for de Fleche. He constructed his follies around these glorious gateways, one of which he no doubt passed through, and then found that they were as useless to him as a fart in a colander. Oh, do excuse me.” Pardoe flushed. “I’m given to these pathetic little collapses in etiquette. Quite unforgivable. When he found another, he went through and stayed there. He’s been there ever since.”

“And we were detailed to go in and get him?” Sean asked. “Get him how? You can’t bring a dead man back. You can’t kill a dead man.” He looked around at the others. “Can you?”

“Well, he’s not dead. That’s the thing. There are ways and means. It really is fortunate that we found you. De Fleche, in the years since we lost you, has become quite a problem. He’s upsetting the balance and causing a gradual decay. Which is bad for all of us, really. He shouldn’t be there. That’s the bottom line. Negstreams were never meant to be used for travel. They are momentary monuments to the dead at the instant that life departs. The soul made visible as it leaves the body. Death’s mirror, perhaps. Sometimes, like the one you found, Sean, they remain. Flukes of nature, they are. Frozen memories of a life. True ghosts. They are not doorways. Not doorways.”

Will wanted to know if what he had glimpsed after his accident with Elisabeth on the motorway out of London had been a Negstream. He wanted to know where the “there” Pardoe had mentioned was and what it might be. He wanted to know if Catriona might be “there”.

“It’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bother trying to find out if I were you. You aren’t trained for it, dear boy. You aren’t... one of us.”

“What can happen if this guy stays over there?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been there twenty years. So who cares? Let the fucker rot.”

“He isn’t dead. And he’s in a dead zone. How healthy can that be? He is in the place where we all go the second we die. His presence is causing it to decay. Dead things cannot rest easy there.”

“How does that affect us?” asked Emma.

“Well, now, how should I put it?” Pardoe pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and studied the middle distance for a few seconds. “I suppose it affects us because, well, because the dead can leak back.”

Will said, into the heavy silence: “You. Fucking. What?”

Pardoe nodded. “Marvellously put, lad. It’s true. The dead walk among us, if I might be so bold as to put it in hammy language.”

They sat in silence, digesting this, while Pardoe slurped at his tea.

“How do we go about getting back there then?” Sean had asked.

Pardoe spread his hands. “Do you know, I haven’t the foggiest.”

S
EAN GREW JITTERY
around ten o’clock so Emma took him walking. She’d fastened his coat up to the collar in order to disguise his scarified features. Sunglasses concealed the destroyed eye. They’d draw attention on this wintry night, which they could do without, but not as much as an open wound.

He walked stiffly against the restraining bandages on his legs. He leaned heavily against her and she smelled the copper of his blood seeping through the makeshift dressings. She helped him walk to the estate entrance, where they turned right, towards a tunnel of pedestrian bridges and sodium light.

“Can we stop a moment? I’m having trouble breathing.” He hacked up a lot of blood, and she wiped away the crimson bubbles and ropes from his mouth while he bared his face to the rain. “God, Emma,” he said, “didn’t it used to be so easy? You’d turn a trick here and there and have food for an evening; I’d break my back chasing shoplifters and things would keep moving. I’ve made a bit of a mess of things. I do apologise.”

She hushed him and held him a while, thinking that, compared to what she’d been doing when they first met, this wasn’t too bad. Not really. Remembering his conversation with Pardoe, she gently asked Sean about his parents and why he had not volunteered the information about them earlier.

“Why?” he asked, cruelly. “Because you feel an extra-special bond between us? Because you think you’ve got a right to know stuff just because of what we are?”

“Never mind,” she said, trying to smile to show that she didn’t care what level of divulgence he wanted to allow. The smile didn’t fit too well.

When she felt the rain trickling down the back of her jumper she moved away from him. “Come on,” she soothed. “Let’s get us a drink. Get us both dry.”

In a grim little pub, Sean slumped into a chair while Emma bought whisky. They sat together in silence and sipped, Sean’s damaged fingers curled awkwardly around his shot glass. The punters formed a thin gruel of human waste in the bar that evening. They were either propped up like puppets in broken chairs or sinking their measures of rocket fuel in slow motion, eyes fixed upon a hazy somewhere between heaven and hell. Around the red baize of a pool table pock-marked with cigarette burns, three men took it in turns to smack the cue ball into the pack without the manifest intention of potting anything.

The bartender leaned against the counter at the far end, eyes swivelling up from his motorbike magazine to watch old sports videos playing on the TV that dominated one side of the room. The sound was muted; two teams – one wearing red, the other, blue – stroked a football around a pitch.

A woman in a fake fur coat piled through the doors, the wind and rain at her back as though fuelling the fury she seemed to contain. “Where’s Joey?” she shrieked, looking around the bar. “Shitting priests, I’ll swing for him!” Then she was gone, the door rattling in its frame.

The bartender hollered at the men playing aggression pool to help with the storm shutters, and they returned a few minutes later, having secured the wooden covers over the windows, to be offered free drinks and a towel.

“I like this place,” Sean said. He regarded his drink for a moment and apologised to Emma for snapping at her. “It’s just, I’ve kept so much locked inside me for so long. Sometimes I think about talking to someone about it, but it’s almost as if it never happened and that talking about it will make things bad for me again. Not talking about it keeps the lid on tight.”

Emma leaned over and hugged him. “What are we going to do?” She could see her reflection in the brass tabletop. Even in its honey colour, she could see the dark patches that shaded her eye sockets and hollowed her face. That morning she had brushed her hair and been mortified to find a hank in the bristles the size of a tennis ball.
I know what I shall look like in the coffin
, she had thought, inspecting the mirror. It had not taken a gigantic leap of the imagination to see how she would appear when she was old. And only ten years previously she would have been unable to legally buy a drink in this bar. All that tautness, that sass, was gone. All that pink.

Sean noticed Emma slump and reached out, stroking the back of her wrist. When he had opened his eyes in the bath to find her sitting by him, waiting, he had been overcome with a surge of need and affection for her and knew then that he loved her. He had recognised their link, at a level too deep for him to comprehend, and believed she did too. Making flesh what had until now been some kind of forgotten knowledge made things between them awkward. But they had both found de Fleche’s house and the strange flame within it. They had both peeked through to see what lay on the other side of the portal before Sean pulled them out as the door locked, the flame solidifying and crumbling to dust as they staggered back. But this whole experience was obviously debiting her reserves of energy. He could see it in the pallor of her skin and the lines that grooved her forehead. The way she looked at him now, for example, over the rim of her glass, an expectant look in her eyes. And a resignation too. Slow fright. He knew that she was building up a defence against the fantastic events that were invading their lives. If he wasn’t careful, she would shore herself up so completely that he would have a hard time getting her to speak to him about anything. She was slowly closing all the doors, all the windows. Switching off all the lights.

“I’ve always dreamt of that place–” they both said.

I
T WASN’T TELEPATHY,
but Emma understood him, and trusted him, more than anybody else she had known. She had dreamed of the hill and its strange population ever since childhood, but she had never credited it with much thought beyond her sleeping hours. She had no idea what it signified, if anything, nor did she pay much heed to it, until now, when Sean confessed of his own awareness of the place.

Sean said, “Pardoe told me that Inserts were agents who were trained to work in unusual territories. Under unusual conditions.”

Emma shook her head. “But I don’t recall being trained for anything.”

He wasn’t fazed by that. “You know I’m telling you the truth. We share the same dreams. I don’t remember being trained either. I just know something happened when I was younger. Something bad.”

She shrugged. “Race memory. Coincidence. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not because I’m an Insert, or a Pervert or whatever jargon it is that you’re trying to sell me.”

“Pardoe says that we are in danger if we stay here. Anywhere, more than a few days at a time.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“He says that we’ll be tracked down and destroyed.”

Losing patience now. “By whom?”

“Whoever it was that trained us in the first place, when we were kids. They thought we weren’t fully formed when we escaped, that we couldn’t have any sway on what happened. But obviously we can. He says that the same ripple that alerted him could also alert the people who got us involved.”

He made to take another swig of his whisky, but he had finished it. The bartender noticed and brought a bottle over.

“You saw that thing, that doorway in Myddleton Lane,” Sean continued when the bartender had taken up his original position. “We almost went through, for God’s sake.”

Emma nodded. “What is that place?”

“Pardoe kept referring to it as the Zoo. I don’t know.” Sean rubbed the back of her neck with his fingers. He noticed that the guys playing pool had picked up on the bandages covering his wrists. The bandages that were staining heavily.

“Look, Emma, do you think you could help me staunch some of this blood? It’s getting a bit too obvious. I mean, do you think I’ll ever stop bleeding?”

Emma rummaged in her coat pockets and pulled out some fresh packets of gauze. “What’s the Zoo? And how can we influence what happens in it?”

“I don’t know what the Zoo is. I suppose it’s the area we dream of. And I don’t know how we affect what goes on in there. But someone thinks we do. And feels threatened enough to do something about it.”

Sean was looking tired. She felt sorry for giving him such a hard time, but she couldn’t accept the way things were panning out. Her entire life so far had been dangerous, but predictable. It was when events started getting so that she couldn’t second-guess them that she became worried.