Tourmaline

by James Brogden

  2

  They will help you, if they can, Joe had said. Bobby’s rescue squad was – unusual, to say the least.

  Blenny was a little guy in a drab-looking suit, with the same protruberant eyes which gave the impression that he was staring around at everything in a state of permanent anxiety – which given the situation, thought Bobby, was entirely justified. Igor was as nightmarish a man as he had been a fish: massively muscled, with a scowling, lumpen face and an underslung jaw full of teeth which were a dentist’s wet dream. But Carmen, appropriately enough, stole the show; her flowing, diaphanous fins and tail had become a rainbow of flamenco excess – all she needed was a basket of fruit on her head to complete the outfit. But she, like her companions, was glaring at Lilivet with undisguised hostility.

  ‘Put him down, bitch,’ she snarled, ‘before I turn your coño to calamari.’

  Lilivet laughed. ‘This is it? This is what you bring against me?’

  ‘Please, you three,’ Bobby pleaded. ‘Don’t do this.’

  This seemed to confuse Blenny. ‘Um, really? Sorry, we just assumed that you needed…’

  Igor simply roared and charged in. Along his arms and down the sides of his neck – and probably all down his body underneath his clothes – points of bioluminescence burst into life as he threw himself at the guards holding Bobby. One was caught by surprise and flung to the side of the room, which gave the other just enough time to try to use Bobby himself as a shield against this unexpected new threat; Bobby elbowed him in the guts and then ducked out of the way as Igor waded in with both fists. Carmen shrieked a high-pitched battle cry and leapt at Lilivet, fingernails clawed to rake at her eyes. Blenny scuttled away along the floor on all fours looking for the sword, babbling ‘Oh-dear-oh-dear-oh-dear…’

  It was hopeless before it had even begun, Bobby saw. Already the doors at the far end of the room were opening, with armed gunmen pressing through from the other side. Maddox had drawn a pistol and was bringing it around to bear on Igor, who, despite his size, was getting the worst of it from the two guards. Carmen, bless her, couldn’t really get anywhere near Lilivet, who was easily able to fend her off and was already wrapping black limbs around her arms. And Blenny was never going to find that sword in time.

  Standing before the painting, battered and still half-drowned, he drew his fist back and with every ounce of his fading strength punched through the stiff canvas. Pins and needles exploded in his arm from knuckles to armpit. Pulling out again, grimacing at the pain, he grabbed a handful of canvas and tore a long ragged hole downwards to the bottom of the frame.

  Lilivet screamed her denial. It was echoed by Vessa.

  And Sophie Marchant awoke as the waters of the Tourmaline Archipelago poured into the world.

  3

  What streamed through the rip in the painting was not, strictly speaking, water. Nor was it air. It plumed outwards in roiling clouds and streamers which looked like heat-haze, or the shivering refractions of alcohol stirred in water, and since it could not by its very nature co-exist with matter from the continuum called the Realt, the two chased each other about the room in shifting veils and rolling breakers, through which those in the room caught tantalising glimpses of sunlight on the open sea of another world.

  More than just the sea. Stray was there, shifting in and out of focus, at one moment close enough to touch, at another barely visible. Bobby saw Runce and Allie standing on the very edge, and knew that they could see him in turn, even though he couldn’t hear them; they were waving crazily and shouting something. It looked like Runce was having to physically restrain Allie from leaping into the waters and swimming across the tumultuous breach between worlds to help him.

  Wait for me, he urged her silently. I’m coming back. I promise.

  To those who belonged in the Realt and were firmly anchored there, the sensation of having these veils washing over and through their flesh was delicate but visceral, like the ghost of silken threads drawn through their nerve endings or the faint vibrations of a far-off earthquake felt through fingertips. To others, their touch was cataclysmically powerful. The guards – both of them Passengers working for the Hegemony, and more recently Lilivet – were instantly discorporeated, caught up in the tidal flow of Tourmaline’s inundation and swept home while the people who had been their vessels collapsed in shock. Igor went down with them and began struggling to drag himself from underneath.

  On the other side of the rip, dozens of worldpools opened simultaneously around Stray as the newcomers surrounding it were the first to be sucked back into their own world. All over the room they began awakening. A cascade of EEG alarms went off in a shrilling din, and the former psychiatric patients started tearing at their restraints – then at their IVs, and before long were staggering out of their beds in a milling, brawling mob.

  Lilivet picked up Carmen, who was still thrashing and spitting, and threw her aside as if she were nothing more than a rag doll.

  ‘Don’t just stand there!’ she screamed at the guards by the door. ‘Kill them! Kill them all!’ They were hesitating in the face of the flood, but she barely cared. There was no longer any question of trying to secure the subornation, thanks to that bastard Jenkins; all that was left was to avoid being dragged back into Tourmaline like the rest of them. That meant breaking the link between worlds she’d worked so hard to create.

  She leapt at Vessa. Bobby, clutching his numbed arm, could do nothing.

  McBride, still tied to his chair, threw himself sideways and collided with Lilivet, shoving her into the path of a cloud of Tourmaline’s reality. It caught her, slewing her around as if she’d jumped into a raging torrent. Panicking, she clawed at the floor, the walls, the ceiling – anything to keep a purchase on this world. The part of her which had been Berylin Hooper was as foreign to the Realt as any Passenger, while the part of her which was araka belonged to neither world and so was powerless to act as an anchor – but the tiny amount of Bobby’s blood which it had consumed allowed her to maintain the most tenuous of grips in the world.

  ‘Not,’ she panted. ‘That. Easy.’ She managed to brace herself and stood. In one human hand she held Bobby’s sword.

  ‘Caffrey, do something!’ yelled McBride.

  Bobby staggered to his feet – but he was too far away and too slow. With a scream of triumph, Lilivet lunged forward, driving the sword to its hilt in Vessa’s stomach so hard that it punctured through the back of the chair in which she was strapped. Lilivet leaned forward hungrily, expecting to enjoy the sudden rush of agonised horror which she had been anticipating for so long, but it didn’t come. There was nothing in her victim except a sense of grim, satisfied finality.

  Because it wasn’t Vessa any more.

  Sophie grinned in the face of the malicious thing which had caused her so much anguish for so long, and showed it what she had brought through from Stray. The Berylin-part of the thing recognised it and pulled away in sudden, terrified realisation.

  ‘No! He wouldn’t!’

  Sophie aimed Runce’s tezlar gun, even though at such close range she could hardly miss, and fired. The purple-white bolt of energy took Lilivet high in the torso, burning a foot-wide hole clean through and scorching her thrashing araka limbs to blackened stumps, before her charred corpse tumbled brokenly away into the depths.

  4

  Runce watched her death from the other side of the rip.

  ‘I took care of the monstrosity, Berry, just like you said,’ he whispered. Tears were on his craggy cheeks. ‘Sorry, lass.’

  5

  The code sent by Regional activated a series of demolition charges built into the foundations of the concrete buttresses which reinforced the cliff directly below Lyncham. They blew a horizontal gash twice the height of a person and just as deep into the crumbling chalk slightly above high tide level, and running for a hundred yards past each end of what was left of the village. Th
e rock netting shredded like cobwebs as debris puckered the ocean, and the shattering noise drove clouds of cliff-nesting seabirds screaming from their perches. By itself this explosion would not have been enough to drop the cliff into the sea, which was why a set of secondary charges also blew.

  These were embedded along the centre of the Lyncham road and were both smaller and further apart. They were not designed to blast great chunks out of the earth, but to perforate it in a long shallow arc which would cut that slice of the cliff out neatly – it and the buildings on it. A dozen geysers of pulverised tarmac fountained upwards simultaneously, in one case directly underneath an ambulance which spun apart in a Catherine-wheel of shrapnel. From the smoking craters, cracks ran across the spaces of what solid road was left, joining the craters together. And widening.

  Ahead of the destruction, a large car crashed through the barrier gates which closed off the Lyncham Road from the A3052 to Lyme Regis, swerving to avoid a couple of tourist cars that blasted their horns indignantly at him. Behind the wheel, Maddox didn’t give a toss.

  6

  After everything that had happened, Bobby was surprised at how easy the return to Stray seemed to be. Like a fresh-water spring welling up in an undersea cavern, the waters of Tourmaline spilled upwards after the turbulence of their entry and collected under the ceiling, slowly filling the room from the top down. Where the two realities met, a shifting haze distorted the view of everything on the other side – it was like looking up at the surface from the bottom of a swimming pool. All he had to do was give it a little time, and he could jump up through it and get back to Allie. Or if he timed it right he could leap into the breakers billowing out of the painting and ride them upwards. But it looked like he wasn’t going to be given that time.

  For a start, Sophie wasn’t dead. She was making wet hiccoughing noises and her lips were twitching as if she were trying to say something.

  ‘Jesus, Caffrey,’ complained McBride. ‘Get me out of this thing, would you?’

  ‘We’re going to need to talk about this Caffrey thing, sooner or later,’ said Bobby, helping him out of the gaffer tape which tied his arms and legs to the chair.

  ‘Fine. Whatever. Not now.’ McBride dashed to Sophie’s side and then could do nothing but stare at the weapon jutting obscenely from her torso, appalled at the amount of blood and utterly at a loss as to how to deal with it. ‘What am I supposed to…’

  The earth shrugged violently, throwing the room into further chaos. Gurneys tipped, dragging tangles of heavy equipment onto the floor. Windows shattered and door-frames twisted. People fell, screaming.

  Bobby, McBride, Blenny, Carmen and Igor stared at each other, stupefied.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ demanded Carmen.

  ‘Blenny, go find out,’ Bobby ordered.

  ‘Who? Er, what, me?’ Blenny stammered, but Bobby ignored him, so he went and did as he was told.

  ‘Igor, the doors. Get these people out. I don’t care how. Hurt them if you have to. If you see anybody with guns, hurt them a lot.’ Igor gave him a toothy grin and roared off, shoving at the already terrified patients and driving them towards the exit. ‘Carmen, we need bandages. There should be loads of them lying around in all this.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she huffed. ‘I have to be nursemaid because you imagined me as a woman, yes?’

  He looked at her. ‘You really think this is the time?’ Chastened, she stomped off to scrounge what she could. ‘Right, let’s have a look at this.’

  Sophie was in a bad way. The fact that she was alive at all was something of a miracle. He suspected that it might be to do with the waves of Tourmaline which kept washing over them; something vital about them which was giving her the strength to hang on, but it was really just a guess. ‘We can’t get her out with that thing in her. We’ll probably kill her if we take it out, but I can’t see that we’ve got much choice.’

  ‘No way.’ McBride shook his head firmly. ‘We need to find one of those medical people and let them take a look at her.’ He wasn’t at all happy about Caffrey performing his inevitably cack-handed first aid on her.

  ‘See many of them around, do you? Because good luck with that.’

  Blenny ran up, white-faced and out of breath. His big eyes were staring. ‘The cliff!’ he gasped. ‘It’s collapsing! This entire place is going to fall into the sea!’

  ‘That settles it,’ said Bobby. ‘Carmen!’ he yelled. ‘Get back here – whatever you’ve got, it’ll have to do!’

  She returned with an armful of bed-linen. ‘Is the best I could find,’ she apologised.

  They wadded the cotton sheets around where the blade of the sword entered Sophie’s torso, and Carmen stood ready with another pile to press against her back when it was withdrawn. McBride found the remains of the gaffer tape nearby, and stood behind the wheelchair. He held onto her shoulders firmly as Bobby grasped the sword’s handle – and then stopped. He met McBride’s anxious stare. ‘You ready?’

  ‘Not really. Do you have any clue what you’re doing?’

  ‘Not really.’ He grinned. It was a ghastly sight.

  ‘Neil, I don’t think…’

  Bobby yanked the sword out as hard as he could. It came free a lot more smoothly than he’d been expecting; the blade had been buried in soft tissue and the back of the wheelchair was mostly padding. Sophie coughed wetly, and a gout of blood flew from her mouth; it was bright, arterial red.

  ‘Oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus-oh-Jesus…’ moaned McBride, as he wrapped gaffer tape around the bedsheets which Bobby and Carmen were pressing to her wounds. When he’d used the entire roll, he stepped back to survey his handiwork. ‘What a fucking mess,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We can’t carry her like this. It’ll just tear her up inside even more. Let’s get her onto one of those beds and see if we can wheel her out of here. Maybe steal one of those ambulances.’

  Between them they managed to shuffle-carry her onto one of the wheeled gurneys. Igor went ahead of them, clearing their way of obstacles – other beds, fallen furniture, and the occasional distraught patient. Long vertical cracks were appearing in the walls, and there was the sound of heavy objects falling and breaking in distant rooms. Halfway to the doors, the building gave another shrug, and all the lights went out. Blenny gave a little scream. Carmen swore at him under her breath.

  There were stairs; they lifted her down them and got as far as the main entrance, but any hope McBride had entertained of taking an ambulance died when he saw what it was like outside.

  Beyond a wide forecourt, a low wall, and then the pavement, the road had split along its length in a raw, two-foot wide crevasse punctuated with large craters every few hundred yards. Water from ruptured mains geysered out of it in half a dozen places, and there was a sickening stench of gas. Many of the buildings on the other side of the road – cottages converted into residential and administrative buildings for the Hegemony’s more mundane employees – had suffered subsidiary cracks and broken windows from being hit by chunks of asphalt shrapnel. The few vehicles he could see that hadn’t already been smashed by debris or partially slipped into the crack were never going to be able to get out of the village. He thought they’d be lucky if they made it the next dozen yards.

  ‘How the hell are we going to get her across that?’ He pointed at the crevasse.

  ‘How do you think?’ Bobby returned. ‘We carry her.’

  ‘That’ll kill her for sure.’

  ‘Then she’s dead either way, isn’t she?’

  There was no arguing with that. They slung her arms over their shoulders and staggered out into the road.

  It was trembling – they could feel it shuddering like a dying animal through the soles of their shoes. At the very edge of the crack, pieces of debris were still crumbling and falling in. They could see broken pipes, split cables and the gleam of copper wire. If they had any lingering doubts about the
truth of Blenny’s report that the cliff was collapsing, these disappeared when the earth spasmed once more, the crack widened another few inches, deepened another few feet, and it swallowed more shovel-loads of itself. The ground was definitely lower on their side.

  It looked easy enough for a person to step over – just not while carrying another. After a brief debate, Igor took her, carrying her in his arms like a sleeping child and laying her gently to the ground on the other side. The others followed closely.

  Bobby turned back and measured his chances of returning to the Rip. In the few minutes since they’d escaped, already the Park Hotel and its grounds had deteriorated. Transverse cracks were spreading backwards from the main crevasse, chopping the slice of severed cliff into uneven chunks, and large parts of the building’s façade were crumbling away. As he watched, everything on the other side of the crevasse suddenly dropped six feet in a tremendous, grating roar; he could see now how neatly the explosive charges had cut this thin slice of cliff-top free from the main land-mass. It curved away to meet the edge a few hundred yards on either side and was clearly designed to drop just this bit with the buildings into the ocean. He could still jump down, but he’d never get back up again – and even if he did manage to make it safely inside, there was no way of guaranteeing that that painting would still be upright and the Rip open. Voices from behind him were calling urgently.

  ‘She’s dead! Jesus Christ, I think she’s dead!’

  Turning away from the door back to Stray and Allie was like having a limb pulled from his body.

  Igor was hovering beside Sophie’s limp body in a state of great agitation, wringing his hands and making small noises in the back of his throat. Sophie’s skin was the colour of candle wax, except around her lips, which were a grey-blue. The bedsheet bandage strapped to her front was already soaked with blood. McBride felt frantically for a pulse, and when he couldn’t find one laced his fingers together to start giving her CPR.

  ‘There’s no point,’ said Bobby wearily. He sat on a low wall belonging to one of the deserted cottages, looking utterly exhausted. ‘She’s gone. Let her go, Steven.’