Decay Inevitable (44 page)

Emma said, “Sean.”

He turned. She was staring off into the trees, as if, through all of the vertical slashes of wood, she could see something else, something different. Some tree tops maybe a hundred metres away were shivering but there had been no wind on the hill, no indication of any kind of weather here. Now another clump of trees shivered, a little nearer. There was a splitting, rending sound, a groaning and thrashing. The tree tops in the distance sank from view. Sean was put in mind of
King Kong
, a film he had first watched as a child. He remembered how frightened he had been when Fay Wray had stopped struggling against her bonds on the sacrificial plinth at Skull Island and looked up at the trees as they shuddered and parted with the coming of something that ought only be given life in the depths of nightmare.

Will was sending him another garbled message. “Lidov... porrit... qui...”

Sean again tried to make his mind a millpond, flat and still and deep. He ignored the ground-shaking approach and Emma’s increasingly urgent demands that they do something
now
. He focused instead on Will’s brown eyes, still clear and animated despite the fact that they, and the soft cradle of his face that they lay in, were gradually turning to soup back in the real world.

Sean sent:
Will, relax. Tell me what it is you want me to do. Feed this stuff to you?

Will’s eyes became less intense, as if Sean had done something unexpected to disarm him, which, he realised, was exactly what he had done. The tree squeezed its baby to its bosom, five tendrils – slim tubers extruding from the tap root – tentatively meshed with Will’s hand like the fingers of a shy girlfriend.

No,
Will sent, as much with his eyes as his mind.
Open it, pour it on the tree. It’s foreign to this place. It’s poison.

Sean unstoppered the phial and shook some of the crystals onto his palm. They looked like bath salts. He flung them at the roots and the dense trunk and stepped back as the bark began sloughing off in great swathes, like the skin of an unfortunate who had been consumed by fire. The roots blackened and popped, petrifying in an instant. The whole tree took on the appearance of a child recoiling from a mad dog. Will slithered from its grip and lay gasping on all fours, keening and puking into the fractured loam.

“Nice one,” he said at last, sticking up an approving thumb.

“What is this stuff?” Sean asked, shaking the remaining granules in the phial.

“I picked it up in Gloat Market.”

“Where?”

Will shook his head. “No matter. I don’t know what it is. Weedkiller, maybe.”

Emma looked at them, a mix of disgust and dread spoiling her features. “
Boys
,” she said. “I mean,
boys
!” Her finger was pointing at the treeline as the great columns were felled in an instant. The noise now was deafening, a timber tide crashing against their shore. The final cluster of trees dropped to reveal no monster, no Kong, no dream demon from the Sandman’s bag. The pulverised trunks formed a path buzzing with wood-dust. A smell blasted over them of sourness, rotten timber heavy with the waste of weevils and disease. As if in sympathy with this little eco-disaster, a fresh puncture sucked away the ground into a limitless black throat. Far away to the right, a small group of grey smocks had gathered on the hill and were watching this new round of cataclysms with stoic indifference. It was as if they knew they were here for the duration, no matter what the outcome. Were they the true dead, the ur-dead? The people who had shaped this mirror-Eden only to find it, like the villages and towns and cities of the world, become cluttered with litter and pollution; populated by murderers and despots and the self-destructive. De Fleche, then, was the Serpent in this garden, knowing the smell and flavour of ruin and how best to help it spread. Vernon Lord was right to fear this place. Death, a release? A big adventure?

What was it de Fleche hoped to achieve? Where was the sense in building one last great folly and filling it with dark confections to soothe the dying, the agnostics who didn’t know, who hoped, but couldn’t be sure? What was the worth in luring shaky atheists who hammered up their barriers until death began to pluck at them and then removed the nails one by one, daring to peek through the cracks to see if, maybe, there
was
something else after all?

Emma said, her voice misfiring, “What
is
this?”

The wood-dust settling, they could see at the end of this arboreal gorge a figure sitting with his back to them. He was hunched over, gazing out at a mere ringed with brown, wilting reeds. Sean moved towards him but Will hissed at him to stay put.

“It’s de Fleche. He has to die,” Sean said.

“How, exactly?” Will asked.

The question flummoxed him. “I’ll busk it,” he said. “It’ll come to me.”

“This is his playpen,” Will warned. “He has more toys than you.”

The grey head of the figure vibrated. His hair danced as though it were plunged in water. Even at this distance they could see the black scimitar grin in his face, the gold tooth as it winked. “He wants you to go to him. Look, he’s psyched up for it. He knows he can finish you now.” He laid a hand on Sean’s arm. “There’ll be a better time,” he promised. “A fairer deck.”

“But Pardoe said we have no time left.”

“There’s time enough,” Will said. “I saw things happening, before... shit, before I was shot–” He paused at that, and tried to absorb it. Emma rubbed his shoulder. “This kind of decay is going on back home,” he said. “People passing back who have been dead a long time. I remember, when Cat died, a guy called Gleave who came to collect her and the woman, Cheke, the killer. He said something about ‘leaks’, about mopping them up. They have to be stopped, Sean.”

“But Pardoe was adamant that de Fleche–”

Emma said, “Pardoe is a dinosaur. All he’s interested in is carrying through a plan that’s twenty years out of date. Will’s right. De Fleche can’t do anything while he’s stuck here. He’s done what he set out to do. The wheels are in motion.”

Sean watched the old man swivel on his seat and gaze back at them. Distance reduced his features to a whitish smear. “I can’t believe that’s
it
. That’s
all
. There must be something more. De Fleche isn’t dead. He’s an intruder here. What’s the point of drumming up an army of dead people to walk among the living if...” Sean frowned, “...you weren’t going to come back when all the killing was done?”

“Who said anything about an army?” Will stammered, the thought of it, the weight of it settling in him like a badly digested meal.

The figure was standing now, turning fully to face the three. He began to pace towards them. At this distance, he seemed too angular and unathletic to cause them any harm. Sean bristled as if sensing a confrontation. Will pressed a hand against his chest.

“Go,” he said. “Take Emma and get away. Plug the leaks.” He offered a flattening of his lips which passed for a smile. “Do what I couldn’t do,” he said, bitterly, “and save a few lives.”

The old man was approaching quickly. From his hand swung a length of rope. They could tell, even at this distance – some eighty metres – that he was grinning, his mouth a scythe of teeth.

“Okay,” Sean said. “Okay.” He gave the phial back to Will and took Emma’s hand. He pressed the edge of his knife against the flesh where it joined and, fading as he drew blood, said to Will, “Watch yourself. You’re dead. It’s probably for the best that you try to stay that way.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
F
OUR:
T
HE
C
UCKOLD'S
N
ECK

T
HEY STOPPED IN
front of an electrical shop in Market Gate to watch a news bulletin. Shaking cameras relayed live footage from Charing Cross Road of a cordon of mounted and armed police trying to peg back a mob of pale, unblinking corpses. They were untainted by putrefaction, these dead. It was as if they had been rehabilitated, captured at their physical peak, perhaps thanks to the abiding memories of those they had left behind. Nobody wants to remember the sick and the infirm.

Emma said, “How long, do you think, before we have the same problems up here?”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Maybe never.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma chided him. “Looks like it.”

The town centre was deserted. When the clock struck the hour, Emma jumped and the sound flew through the empty streets, carrying its cold, lonely message.

Cars had been abandoned on the roads, some of them having flipped onto the pavement or been involved in minor collisions with other vehicles. In one of the more serious accidents, a woman had been trapped in the driver’s seat of her Mini by the steering wheel, which had been pushed forwards into her chest by the force of a bus’s impact. A fire had broken out and ravaged her. Smoke rose from her charred remains. Her eyes swivelled as Sean and Emma walked past, and followed their progress along Sankey Street. Emma thought she was grinning at them but felt something rise in her throat when she realised it was only because her lips had been burned away.

At the town hall Sean broke away from Emma and jogged towards the taxi rank. The lawns of Bank Park surrounding the town hall were in need of a trim. A lawnmower had been left in the middle of the task. A single gardening glove lay next to it, bright orange in the green.

There were no drivers in the taxis, but more than one had failed to take the keys out before leaving their cab. Getting into one, he started up the engine – a shocking roar that broke the silence – and swung the cab out of the queue, halting in front of Emma, who climbed into the back.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Farmhouse,” Sean replied. “Somewhere I saw a gathering of my softstrip friends some time ago. I didn’t get a chance to go in and look around. But I think that’s where their HQ is.”

The streets radiating out of town shed their drifts of traffic until the route was relatively unimpeded. Emma saw dark figures in windows looking down on the cab as it wound its way towards the dual carriageway. The houses in these terraced streets seemed to be affected by the tension in the air, the loss of community. They hunched together, seeking safety in numbers, and closed their eyes to the outside world. Their hard, cement faces found sympathy in Sean’s and – Emma noticed in the rear-view mirror – her own.

The dual carriageway became a road became a track littered with leaves and mud. On either side, ploughed fields spread out, their furrows parallel to the road, perspective sucking all of their lines to a point straight ahead where a farmhouse with a sunken, defeated look sat waiting for them.

Sean ditched the car half a mile shy of the building, having turned it to face the opposite direction. He pocketed the keys and they took to the field. Hunched low to the ground they slowly neared the farmhouse, their breathing becoming more laboured, hanging like empty speech bubbles around their heads.

It was late in the afternoon and the sky was heavily bruised but no lights had come on in the farmhouse.

“We could be in luck,” Sean said. “It might be empty.”

“Wait,” she said. She drew him to her under the protective spread of an oak tree made naked by the cold. The bark of the tree was true and good. Somebody had carved their name in the wood, an ancient graffito professing love for another. The person who had scratched that wish might well be dead now. Emma clung to her man and her skin felt as crumbly and delicate as the tree’s. Sean had made his mark on it long ago, before he was aware of her, branding her with his heat. She had felt the scorch of it deep in her heart and she knew the warmth she felt now was partly down to Sean’s arms around her, but also partly due to the core of need he had fixed in her all those years ago. She wanted to make love to him here, now, but it was too cold and he was too focused.

Something about the farmhouse worried her. It might have been the way its slouched windows frowned down at her or the broad door beneath its arch, like an opened mouth. She held on to Sean and rubbed his back, ran her fingers through the clipped fuzz at his nape, and moved her body so that as much of its surface was in alignment with his. She searched for the things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but the look in his eyes told her that he was fully aware of that.

“I don’t like it, Sean,” she whispered. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m not happy.”

Sean pulled back and placed the warm flat of his hand against her cheek. “It’s all right. We’ll be careful. Promise.”

She allowed herself to be escorted closer to the farmhouse, but the nearer they got, the more she felt repelled by the ugly building. Red curtains in the windows reminded her of the freshly harvested hide of animals her grandfather had hunted during her youth. She remembered one freezing morning in particular when she had been given the treat of accompanying him on a shoot in the fields near his house. She had trotted happily alongside him, the memory of the warmth of her bed lost to her but for a crumb of sleep in the corner of her eye and her pyjamas, which she had refused to take off and which provided an extra layer of warmth beneath the jumper and coat and trousers.

The sky had a bleached look about it. The sun was imminent, a burst yolk dribbling across the horizon. Chalky scratches in the blue told of aircraft nosing towards somewhere far away and much warmer than this starved place. Emma had gabbed away at the hawkish profile of her grandfather as he stalked across the frozen ridges of the field, shotgun broken across his arm, heading towards the mist-bound acres of the wood at its far end. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about – her dolls, maybe, or an enjoyable painting session at school. But she remembered turning around when the church bells tolled six to see the quickening sun pull the shine out of the spire and the clockface. For a moment, the church seemed to be on fire, and then she heard a mighty crack and she whirled to see her grandfather’s gun slotting smoothly into the cushion of his shoulder. She caught a brief glimpse of movement high to her right, a flutter of wings, and then came the explosion of the gun and she screamed, tears in her eyes before the retort’s echoes had spent themselves on the field’s furrows and fences.