by Greg James
“What’s happening?” asked Liz.
Lightning again, deep, somnambulant sapphire this time, raining down, then dispersing, a pulse of burnished bronze came and went.
“He’s drawing close. Jerry, we must be ready for him.”
Spice hesitated, to draw Jack in, they must have no protection, no barriers. There was so much danger in what he was about to do. He turned off the vacuum tubes. Liz stepped into the circle.
“Liz, what are you doing?”
“You said this is his last kill. Well, you need me then, don’t you? Bait for him.”
“You know how dangerous this is? You don’t need to do this.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m not just going to stand in the corner and watch.”
Liz and Jerry shared a look, Dr Spice sighed.
“Very well. Jerry, I may need you if Jack is not ‘co-operative’.”
“I’m ready for him, doc.”
Jerry stood at the old man’s side, eager for Jack to make his appearance. All his hurt, all his pain, since his plane had ditched into that damned wood. His fingers were curling into fists.
He owed Jack plenty.
Liz tried to keep her breathing steady, there were thoughts in her head that were not her own, her toes curled in her shoes.
A man at the door, framed in poor light, he wore a top hat.
and what’s your bus’ness, mate?
Moonlight catching on silver cufflinks, shaped into wicked points.
oh god oh no
Dirty floor scuffing under her suddenly bare soles.
you get out you hear me get out
A scabby black rat running around her heel, making her stumble and fall.
murderpolicehelpmurder
She could feel him, closer, coming closer, closing the distance, drawing the knife. His hand at her throat, turning her face on its side, preparing to take a life, complete the design, end the Ceremony. Passover. Get born again.
Red, Grey, Darkness, Death.
The door to Room Thirteen crashed open.
Standing before them was Cutter, his empty, dripping eyes were alive with midnight storms and a butcher’s smile adorned his face.
Jack was home.
He strode in, eyes on Liz, making for the circle.
Dr Spice crouched, his fingers resting on the battery, his eyes on the unlit tubes, hoping this would work.
Jack paused.
Looking down, seeing the glass circle enclosing Liz. Jerry saw the indecision crawl across the walking corpse’s face. He went for Jack, reaching for his throat, meaning to drag the dead man into the vacuum tubes.
The room itself rocked, knocking Jerry down, a galleon pitching in a storm.
The vacuum tubes shattered into pieces.
A scalding gale tore in, leaving Jack alone. Wild webs of cracks spread across the walls. The air was pulsating, a frenzy of shadows weaving and dancing about, every mote of dust and trace of dirt became a burning point of stale light. Jerry’s fingers brushed upon Liz’s just then, as the world fell away, crashing over, falling off its axis. He saw flying glass pieces slash into Dr Spice, skinning the old man down to blood and screams.
Jerry’s fingers raked over bare boards, scrabbling for a hand-hold. Fingernails tore out, blood ran down his hands. They were falling, plummeting into the churning stygia of the Grey. It was all-consuming, leaving no trace, no last touch, no glimpse of each other.
The sound of the Grey was a degenerate choir, soaring, eclipsing everything.
Jerry screamed.
Liz screamed.
He could hear the Vetala below, the promises they made, to strip every ounce of flesh from his bones, eat him slow, gorge on his gore, make him squeal like a stuck pig. Then, they told him of how well the woman would be digested, how sweet and succulent she was, what they would do with her remains, what shuddering forms they would mould her into.
And then, there was nothing left but shapes in the mist.
*
Maygrave was breathing hard by the time he got to Dorset Street.
Christ, the things I’ve seen tonight, he thought, maybe I’m not so mad after all, talk about nightmares coming to life.
There was a fungal foetor settling over the buildings, it clung, spreading roots that ran down the walls, over the roofs and into doorways, seeming to become one with the Grey, making it grow and blur into the shifting indistinct layers of mist. Doorways became weeping mouths. Windows, rotting orifices ovulating until gristled ghosts were born from colourless wrappings, thriving with a lively lug worm tumescence. Grumbling gloms of pale, blotched matter trawled through the streets, tearing and sundering the failing matter of Creation, opening moaning holes of absolute ruin in their bulky hides, goring reality with black jagged teeth until it bled out in viscous gouts. The grey light suffusing the streets was dense and cloying. The disintegrating outlines of houses were traced out in a flickering indigo.
Through the archway, in the courtyard, there was the door. Unlucky thirteen. Maygrave could hear voices inside. Light was visible, seeping out from underneath the door, dissolving into smoky ropes as he watched it. Maygrave heard a scream. Sliding the revolver out of its holster, he weighed it in his hand, curling his fingers around its metal curves.
He kicked open the door.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jerry was flying again. His Nieuport cradling him, the joystick comfortably vibrating in his hands. There was nothing in the sky but him. The sun was a blinding smear, above and below were the churned-up fields of Belgium. Horse-drawn limbers were jumping along broken roads, leading tatty swarms of refugees. In copses, craters and shallow trenches, the troops of the Entente were sheltering, waiting for the order to advance.
Then, the other plane came plunging out of the sun.
Barrelling down towards him, intent on collision. With a fierce twist of the joystick, Jerry banked the Nieuport off to the right, feeling the rush of air as the suicidal airman’s craft thundered past.
Jerry glimpsed a satanic flash of scarlet.
Richtofen?
What the hell’s he playing at?
“Tried to smash me out of the goddamn air.”
Jerry leaned out, watching his opponent’s plane execute an impossible recovery from its steep dive. Then, jerking its nose upwards, it began to climb, accelerating at a ferocious rate. Its propeller blades, a murderous blur.
Pulling back on his joystick, Jerry angled the Nieuport up into a parallel climb. The sun was right overhead and its light made his eyes water. He headed straight into the punishing glare, hoping to blind the other man, force him to drop away. White light flooded his field of vision, making his skull ache and his brain burn, stinging hot needles were raking the soft pulp of his eyes. He couldn’t keep this up for much longer. His opponent had to be suffering the same pains. He’d have to give it up, break away from this pursuit.
But the hungry thunder of the enemy plane did not pause, nor fade away.
Jerry dropped the Nieuport out of its sunward climb, blinking patches of fuzzy colour from his eyes, he could feel the sweat soaking through him. He blinked biting salt from his eyes.
There was no audible sign of his pursuer having pulled back.
The plane was approaching from the left. Jerry banked to the right, he wanted to shoot the bastard down. But not a shot had been fired at him yet and he couldn’t bring himself to do it, to be the first one to break.
Was that what this was about? Was Richtofen testing him? Seeing how far he could go? Waiting to see if Jerry would break and open fire?
No, Jerry thought, I won’t give in to him. I can keep up these aerobatics as well as you can. You’ll be out of gas soon. You’ll have to peel off, head home.
The scarlet plane buzzed overhead. Arcing upwards, its crimson tail almost clipping Jerry’s wings.
Crazy German bastard, he thought.
He prayed this would be over soon; but they spent what felt like an hour dodging, weaving and spinning,
neither gaining an advantage over the other, equals in the air. The Nieuport’s engine was coughing now, choking on fumes, almost empty.
“Just like the last time.”
Jerry gritted his teeth. He did not want to be the one to break this off. He did not want to be the one who turned tail.
He wanted Richtofen to be the loser, but there was no way he could keep the Nieuport aloft much longer and, if he risked many more minutes, he’d be the one to crash and burn. The Fokker whined alongside him, not charging this time, flying as if it were a friend, not a foe. Its wings seeming to flap and tremble in the rushing currents of the wind.
Jerry looked out of the corner of his eye at it.
He did not like what he saw.
He felt the blood draining from his skin.
His hands shook on the joystick, making the plane wobble violently.
“Can’t be.”
It was no longer a plane alongside but something monstrous and alien. The spans of its wings were concave craters of leather, pitted and scarred. The body itself was a writhing cable of discoloured coral vertebrae. The head was a proud skinless beak. Daggers of limpid light shone in the black hole pits where eyes should be. The mouth nestled within the beak was a grinding torture-trap of ancient craggy teeth. Flying back from its scalp was a mane of lank oily hairs, spun into these tenebrous strands were numerous skulls of many creatures, yellowed, hollow and decrepit. It was through these that the wind blew, making a hooning shriek when the creature then swept down out of the air. The plane shook as his adversary passed underneath the fuselage, missing it by inches.
And then Jerry remembered; London, the Vetala, Jack, Liz!
The creature banked, wheeling, curving up high in a loop that would take it back into the mountainous strata of materialising clouds.
Jerry flipped the Nieuport sharply over to the left. Blinding halos of St Elmo’s Fire burst around the wings of the plane. Jerry looked down at his hands, they were dim, there and then not there, flowing in and out of being. He shivered at the sight. The pterodactyl cries of the Vetala died away and he was left alone, for now.
Jerry righted the plane, levelling her out. He looked below. He wasn’t over France anymore. He saw a bleak sea of fog and miasma formed into low-lying hills and desert-crust hollows heaving and dissolving into a chaos of fragments. Though the space was vast, he felt his breath quickening on occasion, his skin becoming tight, claustrophobic. Jerry felt a drunken dizziness wash over him. Cliffs arose from the tumultuous depths, great stone masks of old dead gods that had fallen into the seamy folds of the Grey. Jerry could not shake the chill from his bones as they came seemingly closer and then receded in his vision, behaving as if there were a heat haze magnifying them. The spaces in the sheer rock formations were deepening, as the Grey’s light shifted, revealing ever greater, twisting angles of despair in the long-abandoned features. Mottled, leprous, cankered and sullen.
He knew he must be coming near to the heart of this febrile place.
He glimpsed rags fluttering, passing by, dragged on dead winds. They were of differing hues and patched with blood, possibly scraps of living skin, remnants of Vetala prey. He passed drifting gatehouses of shattered architecture, cyclopean in their construction, looking like squat, fluted renderings of a human heart left to rot in a nest of barnacles upon the seabed.
Far out, on what passed for the horizon here, stood the Stones; a host of black daggers aligned, darkness against darkness. A shimmering black forest of polished obelisks, teeth of the gravelands, which waited deep below, the sires of Black Wood.
He struck out for them, not sure what he would do when he came to them. Though the Nieuport coughed and sputtered, she was not losing altitude, she was stable.
Like in a dream or nightmare, Jerry thought, nothing here is certain.
Anything is possible.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The room was empty and quiet as Maygrave entered. He took a careful step across the threshold, neglected floorboards creaked underfoot as he crept further into the room. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed, there was no sign of anyone within. He felt the cold as a long, thin line interrupting his breathing. There was a knife at his throat and it now drew quickly across it. His hand clutched the open ridge made by the blade, the wet leaking parting. Blood went pumping out through his slithering fingers. Maygrave choked on the dense flood in his throat, staring off into a distance that the dying alone perceive.
Standing over him was Cutter, brandishing a blade.
Laughing, he knelt and drove his knife deep into Maygrave’s abdomen, slitting him wide open, right to left. Intestines came spilling out, Maygrave caught them in his free hand wringing the spongy ropes tight enough to tear them. Dark winds went whistling through his age-spotted bones. His thoughts fluctuated on the borders of death, he tried to lift the revolver, take aim, fire.
A brute kick to his wrist broke his grip and he heard the sound of the gun slithering away from him through dirt and dust. Jack’s face was pushing through the stuff remaining of Cutter’s visage, Maygrave could hear the bone of the Sergeant’s skull creak, snapping, being remoulded into a brand new mask. That bloody smile did not shift though and the empty eyes continued to flicker and burn like funereal lanterns.
Maygrave’s body was throbbing, bound with freezing wires, winding tighter and tighter, soon the wires would cut through him altogether and that would be his death.
I have to get the gun back.
Clawing at the floor, Maygrave dragged his weight after it. Sure he could see it, feeling his innards ache and sting as, exposed, they were abraded and torn by the rough wood beneath. Tears swam as trailing tadpoles from his eyes, he hacked and spat out chewy mouthfuls of blood.
He could hear Jack’s patient footsteps at his back, knowing he was being stalked, that the creature was amused by his performance, the struggle against certainty and death. Wheezing, whistling, his failing heart pounding, Maygrave reached for the revolver, the spark in the gathering dark.
His fingers closed over cold, hard metal.
A boot-heel ground down onto his hand, driving his trigger finger through a knothole he could not see. The heel stamped and dug into flesh, pushing bone and tendons together until a wet cry was wrung from Maygrave’s suffering throat. Time was slowing, stopping for him.
The light was going out.
He did not have long before it was over.
Grinding his teeth, Maygrave tightened his grip on the revolver and heaved, screaming as his trigger finger broke, bone shattered, severed at the knuckle, trailing cartilage and thin strings of gore.
He smiled through the steady stream of fluid running from his lips at the sound of Jack coming for him, looming so high in his vision, smiling and smouldering black.
Maygrave brought up the revolver, the stump of his mutilated finger jammed through the trigger guard. He cocked the hammer with a juddering thumb. Slitting his eyes, he breathed in hard.
One shot, one chance to do this right.
The gun went off.
The silver bullet shone, bright and brilliant on its course through the black air. It burrowed into Jack’s skull, bursting it, creating a small, hot shower of smoke and charred meat that pattered down around the creature’s feet.
Jack swayed and then fell.
His smile extinguished, the firelight in his eyes snuffed out.
For Maygrave, soundlessness descended. He let the revolver clatter from his fingers. He could no longer see, there was nothing there, no-one to say farewell to or mourn his passing. He could not feel his heart beating. He strained against the weight of lethargy gnawing at his body to no avail. His hands were no longer moving, he could not feel his fingers. They were no longer there. He was no longer there. He could not see. He could not breathe. He could not cry out. It was over for him. It was done.
The Darkness was All.
And All was One.
*
This was the heart of the Grey.
&nb
sp; In no time it seemed, he was there, before the Stones, in the place where they stand and groan, looking down from the heights of despair for unmeasured aeons. Jerry gently steered the Nieuport through them, weaving figure eights around their impossibly smooth, sheer sides. He could not see where they were rooted, they plunged down too far and too deep into the flowing fog of the Grey. Their song, that wordless sound, was a constant that made his teeth and bones hurt, curdling marrow and blood alike.
I want to say something, Jerry thought, to these things, curse them.
But he could not.
They looked as insensate as rocks but he knew they were not and that there was no point in speaking.
He was nothing to them.
He could do as he pleased. It would change nothing about the Stones. They would always be here, in this place, feeding on the wounds of all things, all Time, everything that dies.
There were voices here, he could feel them, calling out, subtle and subliminal, so faint. The voices of the dead, calling out from inside the Stones as a radio signal does, a transmission. One of them he knew, it was close by.
It was her, it was Liz.
This Stone was her Stone. She was trapped inside it, piteously crying out, in pain. She needed him to do something.
He knew what; accept what had happened, what should have been.
It had to be done, much as his heart screamed no.
Jerry closed his eyes against tears. Remembering mother and his baby brother, Badger. His thoughts shone silver-bright, almost blinding behind his eyes in this dismal place.
Stay safe, big brother.
Jerry wept, knowing he was about to break his promise.
It screamed and came sweeping down at him with a deafening carrion cry.
The banshee howl of the winged Vetala cut him to the bone. Jerry tried to swallow the hard, cold nugget lodging in his throat as he watched the darkened ebony curve of its beak arrowing down towards the Nieuport.
