Decay Inevitable (39 page)

“Of course! And he had those bits of rubber for skin. You peeled them back and you could get at his bionic circuits in his arm.”

“What was his enemy called?”

“Maskatron. I had one of those too. Quite nasty, really. You could put his own face on, or Oscar Goldman’s or Steve Austin’s.”

“Before he grew that minging moustache, thank God.”

It was like word association, only much deeper than that. He was getting aromas and tastes from his childhood that were coming back after a twenty-five-year absence. He remembered programmes from the television that he used to watch when he came home from school at lunchtime.
Rainbow
and
Pipkins
and
Handful of Songs
. He remembered wrestling with his dad on the patio, Dad pinning him to the ground with his superior weight and challenging him: “Now get out of that, go on.”

Pink, dusty Anglo bubblegum. Fruit Salads and Mojos for half a penny each. Dandelion and burdock. Lurid green American cream soda.

“I banged my head when I was three years old,” Sean said. “On the door of my dad’s van. I had to have stitches.”

He put his fingers to the old scar. It felt febrile, tender; he withdrew his hand and opened his eyes, half-expecting to see fresh blood. Five stitches, the nurse had given him. He had not cried because the nurse was young and pretty and he didn’t want the tears to prevent him from seeing her clearly. She had given him a lollipop when it was over and told him her name.
Gloria
. Gloria would be a middle-aged woman by now. Nearly an old woman. She would have known, perhaps, many different kinds of love in the three decades since she treated Sean. He hoped they were all good.

Emma was squeezing his hand.

“I know,” he said. The night sky, with its feverish black sun, boiled above them. Cool grass sprang between their fingers as they pressed their hands into the ground to sit upright. The hill spread out around them.

He said, “We’re here.”

Up ahead were a number of figures, a gathering of grey smocks meandering on a hill above the ocean. At the bottom of the hill lay a series of drab, grey buildings with narrow windows and flat roofs.

“It’s just how I remember it,” he said.

“Me too. Just think, when we were young, when we came here, we might have walked past each other without knowing.”

“Naomi would have been here too,” he said. “She might be here now. She ought to be.”

“Don’t get too hopeful, Sean,” Emma warned. “We don’t know as much about this place as we feel we do.”

They saw how the topography roughly traced the same lines as the city that existed here during daylight. The sea followed the path of the river and consumed the south bank that had lain beyond it. The skyscrapers of tents and shacks and scaffolding had been eclipsed by the hill. Occasionally, perhaps due to some de Fleche-inspired fault, they witnessed a flash of daylife. A man carrying bread in a basket. A woman shouting for help after a pickpocket had helped himself to her purse. The barge as it ferried people across the river. Sean remembered the black clouds he had seen on the day he chased Tim through the marketplace and realised they must have been some hint of this aspect.

They walked towards the figures as they milled slowly around the top of the hill. As had happened many years before, they respectfully stepped out of the way and bowed ever so slightly as Sean walked by. They talked in low voices, too deep for any sense to be made of it. The grey smocks and the pale, bald heads edged with fuzz relaxed Sean for some reason. The murmuring too, though the content was unknown, worked on him like a masseur’s fingers. Yet even here, on the hill, de Fleche’s insidious presence was noticeable. It stained the bark of the trees with white rot. It turned large patches of the pasture into scarified stubble. Spume lacing the shoreline carried with it the whiff of raw sewage.

It had not been like this early on, when de Fleche had only just discovered this dead country and Sean and Emma had first wandered its confines. But long years had elapsed. Enough time for his freshness to stain what relied on the dark and the cold, just as death and disease will eventually cause what is wholesome to fail. There was taint in the air. It caught in Sean’s craw and made him feel sick.

“This isn’t good,” Sean said. Little ribbons of a blackness so deep it seemed to be blue or purple shimmered against the night sky or wormed through the meadow. Some of the figures avoided these cracks as if they represented the Devil’s maw, but others tiptoed at the edges, peeking, awed, into unconscionable depths.

Sean and Emma explored for what felt like hours. They plunged into the forest at the foot of the hill, alive with the marine scent of the nearby ocean and the wet, autumnal musk of mushrooms and leaf mould. They scared animals into flight that they had never seen before and they were glad that the dark kept them from being revealed completely. On the beach, they picked up strange shells that resembled fossilised organs. Other flotsam and jetsam looked more like petrified limbs than driftwood.

They saved the buildings until last. Time, and perhaps de Fleche’s mischief, had ruined their symmetry. What had once been sharp corners were now crumbling bevels. Some of the steel reinforcement rods peeked through the mortar, brown with rust. Lancet windows peppered the structure; glassless, they let in the wind. As they prowled the exterior, Sean and Emma could hear the grim tunes it played inside.

“I can’t see a door,” Emma complained. “Not that I want to go in.”

“Yes you do,” Sean said. “We have to.”

“Can you hear anything, other than the wind?”

Sean tilted his head. There was another sound, but it was distant. It was deep too, as if it was coming to them from beneath the ground. It sounded like old machinery, steaming and clanking, struggling to provide the energy for whatever was being constructed or processed or destroyed.

A splinter group had broken away from the gathering on top of the hill; five men, deep in conversation, were slowly walking towards them.

“Excuse me?” Emma called. “How do we get in?”

All of the figures bar one made a detour at the sound of her voice and strolled away. The dissenter hesitated for a few seconds and made a beeline for Emma.

“We cannot sustain more aliens here,” he insisted, in a voice that seemed to be the sum of a cathedral full of echoes. His eyes were lilac and filled the sockets with colour, leaving no room for any white. “There is imbalance. We are in danger and you are endangering yourselves. You must leave us.”

Sean joined Emma and explained that they couldn’t leave until they had found de Fleche. “Do you know where we can find him?”

But the other man was already shaking his head, the bluish dome of his scalp waggling like a fallen saucer coming to rest on the floor. “Names have no place here,” he said.

“Then where do we have to go? How do we get in there?”

“You can’t,” the man said quickly. “And anyway, why should you want to? I wish you would leave. It’s dangerous for you here. There are monsters...” He bit down on the word as if it were forbidden and he had committed an awful transgression by uttering it. “I wish you would leave,” he said again, before hurrying away in pursuit of his colleagues. “You have no place here. No right to be here.”

“He’s lying about this building,” said Emma. “There must be a way in.”

“I’m kind of on his side now, though. I mean, why
would
we want to?”

“Because it’s here. Because there’s nothing else.”

Sean rubbed his chin. “What’s all this about monsters?”

Emma grabbed his hand. “You’ve had a stomach full of monsters over the past few weeks. A couple more aren’t going to frighten you off.”

He watched the gathering of smocks as they drifted out of sight over the crest of the hill. The night swarmed around them and the ocean whispered as it collapsed against the shore. In the forest, new noises were emanating, from things Sean guessed they hadn’t seen when they first entered it.

There are monsters
. If the dead could be moved by such things, if they could suffer fear, then what hope was left for anyone else?

P
ART
F
OUR

T
HE
S
HERIFF’S
P
ICTURE
F
RAME

What shall we be when we aren’t what we are?

– Derek Raymond,

He Died With His Eyes Open

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY:
XX

L
AST NIGHT
.

Last night, it had seemed there would be no end to the pleasures that accosted her every move. There were many options and she explored them all. It was a long night. It was a very messy night.

At first the town was too bright for her. Lights on every building dazzled her as she walked through streets thronged with people. She felt her mouth watering but quelled that appetite in the hope that it might be superseded by another. She saw herself, ghostly and unsure, in the deep-black panes of shop windows. She concentrated on her panic, which threatened to engulf her whenever she lost her reflection to a group of men or women walking by. Just because she didn’t see herself didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Once the group had bypassed her, she returned to the window. The black dress. The long, almost uncontrollably curly hair. The eyes that seemed too green to be human and better suited to a large cat. The décolletage. The curve of the buttocks. The jewel on a necklace. She saw these things on herself and echoed on the women around her in different styles and colours. The men looked at her. The women did not. She fitted in.

She focused on a group of men and followed them into a pub called the Tut ’n’ Shive. The inner walls of the pub were painted black and the lighting was more subtle than on the street. The music and voices were very loud however, and she had to compensate for that. Susannah’s hearing was extremely good – too good – but she found that Simon’s was less so, which helped in here. She felt confident about the way she looked, an amalgam of the best of those with whom she had come into contact.

She ordered a drink at the bar, pointing to a silver bottle that a number of other women were swigging from. When the bartender asked her for money, she stared at him blankly.

“I’ll get this.”

She turned to find a man standing next to her, brandishing his wallet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

“Forgot your purse?” The man shook his head. “It happens.” When she took a sip of the stuff in the bottle (foul – so sweet it coated her throat with an awful, syrupy skin) she sensed him assessing her body. It made her giddy and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing him right now, and doing what the women in the pictures had done.

“I’m Mick,” he said, wiping a hand against his thick denim shirt exaggeratedly before offering it for her to shake. This she did, tasting him through her pores and finding it hard to relinquish his fingers. He didn’t seem to mind too much.

“I’m Susannah,” she said. “Susannah Gleave. I’m twenty-four. I have good tits.”

Mick’s eyes widened. “Well, yes, I can see that.” He assessed her more openly. “Yes. The jury has returned its verdict. Guilty. Of having good... bosoms.” He laughed, a strange, staccato yammer that sounded like a child’s impression of a machine gun. “Are you foreign?” he asked.

“Foreign?”

“Yeah, you know... not from these shores.”

Cheke smiled uncertainly. “You can tell?”

“Not much,” Mick said, theatrically. “What are you? Swedish? You look Swedish. Athletic. Tall.”

“Swedish,” Cheke said, trying out the unfamiliar word. “Yes. If you like.”

Mick took a sip of his pint, the first flicker of a frown creasing his forehead. He shook it away. Cheke looked him over. He was quite a bit shorter than she was. His hair was dark, but was silvering at the temples. He was balding at his crown. He wore his shirt outside his trousers. Black, chunky boots rooted him steadily to the beer-soaked floor. She liked his overall chunkiness. She liked his pale eyes too. Grey, like Gleave’s. Wolfish.

“Your prick,” she said. “I need to know. Is it–”

Mick spluttered foam over the edge of his beer glass. “Ex
cuse
me?”

“Sorry... I mean... your cock? Is that right? I wondered, is it big? Are you shaved? Down there? Have you fucked before? What noises do women make, when you–”

Mick held up his hand. “Look, if I’d had twelve Kronenbourg, it might be that I’d be all over you for what you’re saying right now. But as it is, this is my first. And this is all a bit too weird for me. So, good luck. Maybe some other time, hey?”

She watched him back away and then press through the cluster of bodies massing at the bar. Somebody vacated a stool and she slid onto it, nursing the bottle between her fingers. She was considering going after him when another man stepped up beside her, glanced once at her and then, when she didn’t avert her gaze, turned to face her and smiled broadly.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Derek.”

“You’re black,” Cheke said.

The smile died. “Yes. I am. Is that a problem?”

Cheke was astonished by the cat and mouse. There didn’t seem to be any scope for direct talking. She thought of how quickly Mick had retreated when she cut through any charade. She smiled, as warmly as she possibly could, shifting her body around on the stool so that he could see whatever, and as much, as he wanted of her. “No,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

It was the right answer.

He took her back to a flat in Woolston, on the eastern fringes of the town. He poured her a glass of wine from a half-finished bottle in the fridge and put on some music – something he called hip hop – before making it clear that the stereo cost a month’s wages. The music meant nothing to her. It hurt her ears, made it hard for her to understand anything he said. He asked her if she fancied some coke, extracting a small bag of white powder from beneath a sofa cushion. She nodded, said sure, she wouldn’t mind, and waited to see what he would do with it. He chopped a few lines with a razor blade on a mirror and offered her a rolled £50 note.