Death's Dominion

by Simon Clark

  Death’s Dominion

  SIMON CLARK

  For Janet

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: First Light

  2: Shades of Frankenstein

  3: Burn, Monster, Burn

  4: I, GOD SCARER

  5: PREY

  6: The Stone Sisters

  7: This, Our Monster Law

  8: His Death

  9: Attack of the Fearless Corpse Killers

  10: Times of Thunder

  11: The Town of Sleep

  12: The Pharos

  13: Trespass

  14: Her Flesh

  15: The Vanished

  16: The Various Postures of Death

  17: Demands of the Dead

  18: Scaur Ness

  19: White Hands

  20: A Blood Red Tide

  21: Down Town

  22: A Monstrous Hunger

  23: SLAUGHTER MAN

  24: Taste the Blood and Coffin Paint

  25: Kissing the Monster

  26: The Fall

  27: Body Talk

  28: Regenerator

  29: Tastes Like Violence

  30: The Monster’s Monster

  31: The Remaking of Saiban

  32: Sacred v Profane

  33: Dead Mouth – What Sweet Melody it Sings

  34: Final Hours

  35: Siege

  36: Darkness Descending

  37: The Dammed

  38: Here Comes a Chopper to Chop off Your Head …

  39: Assault

  40: Anatomy of a Monster

  41: The Last Day

  42: One Year Later

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  1

  First Light

  Hard to kill …

  Today. He opened his eyes to find that the morning had gone all wrong. Instead of daylight falling through the vast windows that were always open wide to the blue skies, there was darkness. He still didn’t fully understand the meaning of ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Beyond the windows the sky was black. Inside his bedroom, he could barely see the outline of the television on the wall, or his sun hat suspended by its peg behind the door.

  The morning was every which way wrong because that door didn’t open as it should to admit a figure with a smiling face, a comfortingly familiar figure that brought his food.

  The sense of wrongness wouldn’t leave. Because, instead of birdsong and the soothing hum of voices in the hallway, an odd silence dominated his world. The child reached out for the reassuring presence of the bars around his bed. It took a moment to find them because this blackness getting in the way of his eyes meant he couldn’t see the sheltering frame around his mattress that kept him safe. Nevertheless, his newly born fingers found the smooth bars soon enough.

  ‘Ah?’ Although he couldn’t yet frame the sound into a coherent word he succeeded in adding the rising inflection so it sounded like a question. ‘Ah? Ah?’ What’s happening? Again, he couldn’t articulate the confusion, but the sounds he made were infused with the note of asking what had gone wrong with the world.

  What could he do? Maybe if he waited long enough the friendly blue sky would return to his window. Then, not long after that, the smiling face would appear to feed him. After all, this is what he’d always known. It was beyond his understanding to imagine circumstances would ever change.

  Then he did hear. It was a sound loud enough to startle him. He’d heard a door slam before. That bang he’d just heard was a bit like the slam of a door. Only it had been a lot, LOT louder.

  It happened again – that bang. But before the sound he’d heard a scream. It had been at such a volume that it made him flinch. The bang came again … and again … then a voice that shrieked, ‘No!’ Another slam echoed down the hallway. So many slamming doors …only they didn’t really sound exactly the same as a door crashing shut. Just as the morning being all wrong, there was a pervading wrongness about that sound, too. Quickly, he reached out a hand, grabbed the bars and pulled himself into a sitting position. No sooner had he accomplished that than the door burst open. With it came a spill of brilliant light, followed by a figure he recognized. It was the happy lady who brought him his food. Only this time there was no smile. Her eyes were very wide; the expression on her face alarmed him. For some reason she wore a pair of hands on each shoulder. Was this a funny thing intended to make him laugh? But her expression frightened him. Especially the way her normally friendly eyes stared at him. And the hands on her shoulders belonged to arms that pulled her back through the doorway (though she didn’t want to go).

  He heard her shouting, ‘Don’t hurt him! Whatever you do don’t hurt him … he’s not like the rest. Do you hear? He’s not like the rest – he’s different!’

  She’d only been gone for a moment when he heard the sound like a slammed door. After that, he didn’t hear her voice.

  With the door part way open, light flooded into his room. He could clearly see the frame around his bed and his sun hat on its peg. A smell also reached him. A spiky smell, which made him so uneasy that he climbed over the bars that enclosed his bed. His feet pit-pattered on the tiled floor as he scampered to the door to find out what was making all that sound.

  Blood.

  A word without meaning. Blood … blood … blood … it ran through his mind like music. He couldn’t link the word with all that red stuff on the walls and floor, and the red juice that poured from the crevice in his feeder’s shoulders where her neck had been. Her head, he noticed, lay near his feet, its eyes wide open.

  ‘Uh.’ She always looked at him when he made that sound. ‘Uh-uh.’ So why didn’t she look at him today? He crouched down to touch his feeder’s face. The red juice transferred itself from her to his finger.

  ‘Uh.’ A sense of profound sadness engulfed him. It was if the darkness beyond his window had somehow found itself in his body. Why didn’t the lady move? Why had her head moved away from her body?

  Dead, dead, dead … That had no meaning either, yet it set up a chanting resonance inside his head. The sense of internal darkness intensified. For a while his eyes locked on the still face of the lady. Dead, dead, dead …

  ‘Uh!’ He pushed the head with his knuckle. It rolled over so it faced away from him. Trembling now, he rose to his feet. Instinct drove him to find other people. He pictured smiling faces and knew the reassurance such faces would bring. The hallway was empty apart from the lady. There were sounds, however, coming from the far end where there were a pair of doors. Even though he wasn’t strong and not yet sure of his balance he managed to reach the entrance by supporting himself with the wall.

  Unlike the hallway this big room was full of people. For a moment he watched because what took place had no meaning for him. Men and women sat on a line of chairs in the centre of the room. More men in grey clothes walked along the seated people and they placed a big fat red necklace over each head. Then the men in grey moved back to the wall.

  Oooh …

  So this is where the sound of slamming doors comes from. He watched without any reaction as a blossom of flame erupted from each necklace. Then, one after another, the seated people fell off their chairs and, just like the feeder-lady, their heads came away from their bodies.

  Blood, blood, blood …

  They no longer moved.

  Dead, dead, dead …

  Again, those words without meaning swam through his mind. And when he watched the men in grey who hurried another group of people forward to sit in the same chairs another strange word infiltrated his mind: Soldiers.

  Still too weak to do anything but watch, he witnessed a second bat
ch of men and women in pyjamas decapitated by red necklaces of high explosive. The torn, bloody bodies formed mounds on the floor. The men in grey shouted to another group to hurry in. Each seated individual was garlanded with a red tube around their necks.

  Didn’t they know what would happen to them? There were no words at his disposal to shout a warning but a forceful, ‘UH!’ burst from his lips.

  The men in grey noticed him now. One of them carried a stick-like object. He pointed it at a lady in white who was dressed the same as a feeder. The man ordered her to perform some action.

  She came forward to take the child’s arm. She smiled like his feeder-lady who now lay back in the hallway. In that soothing way she said, ‘You come with me. I want you to sit with the others.’

  She’s terrified. Her mouth is bleeding. They’ve beaten her …This time the words appeared to form some connection. They made him anxious. Rather than these events being inexplicable, and having nothing to do with him, suddenly he was part of all this. Instead of walking obediently with the lady as he would do normally he stopped dead.

  ‘Please, child.’ She gently pulled at his arm, ‘We have to sit in these chairs for the men.’ She smiled, yet her eyes glittered with tears. ‘I’ll sit next to you and make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘What’s the hold-up?’ one of the men barked.

  ‘Nothing, he’s coming,’ she told him. ‘He’ll do as I say.’

  ‘He better.’

  Men in grey yanked the red necklaces down onto those already seated. They were pliant and accepting …

  … when they should be refusing to do this. Don’t they know what the necklaces will do to them …? The words began to assume meaning now. This isn’t right. The men in grey are hurting these people … He tried to tell the feeder-lady this, but all that came from his mouth was, ‘Uh . . rrr.’

  ‘I told you to make the bastard sit down.’ This came as an angry shout from one soldier. He lifted the stick-shaped thing and struck the feeder-lady on the side of the head. Her smile melted as the pain blasted through her.

  ‘Your turn, handsome.’

  The child realized that a thick red necklace had been dragged down over his head to encircle his neck.

  ‘Do the nurse as well,’ called another of the soldiers.

  The lady pressed her lips together to stop herself from crying as a soldier slammed the red loop over her head. No … this is wrong. He knew he was too weak to stop the soldier, but he tried anyway. He raised both his hands and gripped the soldier’s muscular forearms in each fist.

  ‘Lieutenant? We’ve got a live one here,’ the man shouted. ‘Will someone take care of him?’

  The feeder-lady pleaded, ‘My dear, accept your fate. You mustn’t fight them. Come sit with me, there’s a good child. It’ll all be over in a second … No, don’t resist … you’re not allowed to hurt them.’

  The soldier’s face darkened with fury. ‘Hurry up! stick a Someone bayonet in the bastard!’

  ‘That’s a good boy,’ the lady said, as the child released his grip on the man’s arms. ‘Let the soldiers do what they have to do.’

  The soldier, who was hauling the strawberry-coloured necklace over her head, cuffed her with his fist. ‘Stand still!’

  The child watched. This time the sense of wrongness overwhelmed him. He knew he was no match for the man, but he pushed him. To the child’s surprise the man fell onto the mound of headless corpses. And he clutched his chest as if that little push had hurt him.

  ‘No, listen to me, child,’ the lady begged. ‘You must not hurt them. Do as they tell you.’

  Why he hadn’t noticed he couldn’t tell, but he saw a pair of soldiers gripping his arms. For a second it puzzled him that they were panting as they tried to pull him backwards. With a sweep of one arm he sent them both tumbling across the room. The child was weak – he knew he was weak – so why did the men shout in pain as they threw themselves onto the floor?

  Another man in uniform ran at him with a stick … no, not a stick, a rifle. The rifle had a knife blade fixed at the end. He jabbed it at the child’s stomach. It didn’t hurt. It felt like a gentle prod. The child reached out one arm, spread his fingers across the man’s face, then pushed. This time the force was greater. And away went the man to crash back against the wall. He didn’t shout like the others had done. He just lay there, while blood trickled from his nose.

  All this appeared to happen in a leisurely way. Nothing had been rushed. Although now the child realized the other soldiers were running toward him. Why did they appear to move so slowly? One raised a sub-machine-gun. Lights flickered at the end of the tube. The child felt a stinging sensation in his chest. Angry now, he snatched the machine-gun from the soldier; one of the man’s fingers snapped away from his hand where it caught in the trigger guard. As the man screamed the child hit the man in the face with the gun. The metal object disintegrated on impact, while the man’s lower jaw ripped clean away before the force of the blow. The disfigured man went whirling away in a geyser of blood; ruby drops moved in slow motion through the air.

  The child noticed the men and women who’d previously been sitting dispassionately were now on their feet. Some started to remove the red necklaces. A number of soldiers were fleeing, while others were screaming in panic into their radio mics. Backup urgently needed…He sensed rather than interpreted the meaning of the sentence. More troops swarmed into room. These wielded bulky weapons that they fired at their victims. People in pyjamas toppled as huge calibre bullets smashed their bodies.

  The feeder-lady grabbed the child’s arm as she fell dying. ‘Run!’ she screamed. ‘Get away from here!’

  Through the window he saw the blue sky at last replacing the blackness. This was the only thing he could see that held a promise of friendly reassurance. The child must take his chances in that welcoming azure glow. With tracer shells flashing by his head he launched himself through the glass in the hope there was a power that would raise him up into the safety of that serene, blue world.

  2

  Shades of Frankenstein

  A great, dark pounding roar. That sound became his world. There was sound, nothing but sound – no sight, nor touch, nor smell. The child didn’t know how long he’d been walking when the rolling waves of thunder inside his head started to recede. At long last he began to see the dark, vertical columns that were clad in a multitude of soft forms. They were the most brilliant green he’d ever set his eyes on.

  Trees … leaves … The words slipped into his mind. Their meaning was difficult to grasp. These giant forms were strange yet familiar at the same time. For a moment he was hypnotized by the vivacious emerald hues. ‘Ah …’ He reached up to grasp the delicate greenery. Some of it came away in his fingers. It filled him with curiosity. He examined it closely, seeing the gloss on the green surface, and the veins running through its flesh. He sniffed it. Chlorophyll … rather than a word it was a sound in his mind; the sound itself was associated with green. He smelt the fistful of leaves again; a subtle fragrance of something akin to mint. He sighed. ‘Ah … ahhh …’ He allowed the emerald shreds to flutter away from his fingers.

  The child touched his ears. The thunder had gone now. When his eyes were open he saw this lush, billowing thing that generated the word ‘forest’. Above him, blue sky. Birdsong. Tiny creatures, far smaller than birds, hovered over yellow flowers with a buzzing sound. Their wings were iridescent rainbows of colour; he was conscious of blood flowing through those transparent membranes. A breeze gently caressed his hair. This was a warm, friendly world. And yet … and yet, when he closed his eyes that dark thunder returned. Images spat through his head. Men in grey. Slamming door sounds. Red necklaces that exploded … tore away the heads of those apathetic men and women. Violence. Blood. Death. Why did he see one set of images with his eyes open? And another chaotic mix of images with eyes closed?

  Memory …

  ‘Uh …’ Eyes open. Much better. He liked the blue sky. Birds glided from
through the air.

  Gun … Lady dying … ‘Run child, run!’ Yes, he’d run. Men firing their guns at him. Into the window – smash! Then over the fence. Run, child, run … His eyes watered with the effort of keeping them open so he wouldn’t be forced to see the terrible pictures inside him. Birds are good to watch. He locked his gaze onto a black one with a yellow beak as it soared out of the blue to alight at the top of the tree. It perched beside a nest that contained squeaky creatures. What’s in there?

  A moment later he gazed into the nest of woven twigs. Three little balls of speckled fluff cheep-cheeped away as hard as they could. Their beaks were open. Each creature had bright eyes that shone like black gemstones.

  In surprise the child looked down at the ground from where he crouched on the branch. It was an astonishing distance to where he’d been standing in the grass just a blink of an eye ago. He must have climbed up here to see the chicks in the nest. Only he hadn’t been aware of doing so. From this height at the top of the tree he could see the forest stretching away. Beyond that there were rectangles of gold (fields …); there were houses clustered by a lake.

  ‘Dotty …Dotty … didn’t you hear me?’

  He looked down as a tiny figure approached through the trees.

  ‘Dotty! I can’t keep up. Slow down!’

  From his treetop the child watched the figure on two legs pursue another figure on four legs.

  ‘Dotty!’

  Instinct prompted him rather than curiosity. Effortlessly, he dropped from branch to branch. A second later he landed lightly on his feet in front of the two-legged figure.

  ‘Oh! You shocked me!’ The girl regarded him with huge brown eyes. ‘What were you doing up that tree?’

  A nest … chicks … He knew what he wanted to say. All that escaped his mouth, however, was another of those grunts. ‘Uh.’

  ‘Aren’t you tall? You’re bigger than Jason and he’s bigger than my dad.’ She yelled, ‘Dotty! Where are you?’ Her eyes searched the woodland. ‘Where’s that bad dog gone? He knows I can’t run as fast as him.’ She folded her arms and made a stern face. ‘But he does it every time. Dotty!’