Will moved towards Sadie, but she drew another flame from the Zippo and kept it burning, wafting the flame towards Joanna’s face, a slow grin blossoming, made grotesque by the tremble of light against her skin.
“Don’t,” Will said. The thought of his being responsible for another woman’s death turned him ice-cold inside. His heart, once so warm, once so full of hope, was now little more than a hard twist in his chest. When it beat, it spelled out the names of Catriona and Elisabeth. They were scar tissue on the tired, cold chambers. He didn’t think there was room enough for one more without it stopping altogether.
“I thought you said you’d never seen her before. She meant nothing to you.”
“She doesn’t,” Will said, but his voice told her otherwise.
“You have to learn,” Sadie said, soothingly. “You have to know that I’m in charge around here.”
Was it the light sucking the colour and the firmness from Joanna’s skin? Her cheeks hollowed out. Her hair lost its shine. She settled more completely on the wasted limbs of the dead man in his chair. She opened her eyes and turned to him, ignoring the indignity of the TNT jammed between her teeth and tucked into her cleavage. She smiled at him around the stick and winked. She nodded. She was gone.
“You missed your chance,” Will said. Did she die, or was she pulled back?
Cheated of her display, Sadie lapsed into a shrieking fit. She swore and stomped and burned the unfeeling flesh of Joanna’s husk. She promised Will a thousand million years of suffering. She screamed at him until his face was pitted with her spittle. But he didn’t hear a single word. He was watching Joanna’s face sag on the bone, failing in seconds. At one point, just before the top half of her body crumbled away from her spine and made a nonsensical dustpile on the floor, he thought he saw a spiral of light lift from the centre of her chest: a fine necklace catching the light as it was removed by a lover’s careful hands.
And then the bouncers moved in at Sadie’s behest to show him how well their injuries had healed.
IN A HOSPITAL room in east London, a woman’s eyes fluttered. Sitting beside her, her husband put down the book he was reading and leaned across the bed. Around them, well-wishing cards crowded the tables and the windowsill. The amount of cards, the various colours of hope, could not shake the husband’s belief that his wife was as good as dead. He had decided, when the week was up, that he would switch her off. She wanted it that way. They both did. The ventilator had been breathing life into her for five days. It could not fix the warp of her spine, the crushed vertebrae, the jigsaw puzzle of her ribs.
Her eyes opened.
The husband ran to find one of the nurses. She told him to relax, then gently pushed past him and closed the door on the bedroom. A short time after, there was activity. A great deal of it.
“Joanna,” he said, his voice staggering over the word, as if he had never said it before. “Joanna.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: THE HILL
THEY MADE LOVE. The Negstream shivered into view. They went in.
It was still daytime. A raw wind funnelled down the street, stripping the soporific warmth of climax from their bones.
Sean said, “Pardoe found three leaks this morning. They had passed through overnight and were walking down a Newcastle street. They killed and ate a dog. They didn’t have much clue as to where they were or what they were doing, thank God, or it might have been a lot nastier. Pardoe said that he spent most of last year tracking down what the police had thought was a serial killer. It was just a very clever leak who developed an appetite for young women. He took seven before Pardoe caught up with him and sent him back home. They found some of the bones in an old skip near the public tip. He had been living there. Or dying there. Whatever.”
Emma looked tired. Her eyes were developing raccoon-like rings and her lips carried a grey tinge that had nothing to do with the flat, colourless light here. “How long, do you think, before there’s a flood?”
“Pardoe reckons two or three days, but he looked a bit white while he was saying it. I reckon we’ve got around twenty-four hours. Give or take.”
“Give or take a minute?”
Sean laughed. Emma was still strong, despite the attritional nature of crossover. The Negstreams caused no immediate wear and tear on the body or the mind; rather, it caused a gradual stripping-away of the body’s defences. Sean was managing with the erosion for the time being but Emma appeared to be feeling the full brunt of its subtle violence. She was being steadily dismantled, softstripped from within. Sometime soon he would reach out to touch her and she would implode, like a fractured china jug handled by a clumsy child, or the shell of a condemned building battered by the wrecking ball.
Seeing Will hadn’t helped. Thin and pale in his hospital bed in high dependency, he had been surrounded by machinery and nurses. The police were nearby too, guarding him from vigilantes who wanted to mete out some rough justice to a man who had used a young girl as a hostage. Maybe they were also on hand to make sure he didn’t make a miraculous recovery only to bolt. That didn’t seem to be an option to Sean as he had looked down at the other man’s bandaged head. Serious tissue loss, a doctor had told him. Which was a fancy wrapping for half his brain was blown away.
A nurse had come in to wipe Will’s face and check his IV was feeding the right amount of saline into his veins. The slackness of his skin as the swab cleansed his lips and eyes had made Sean’s back creep. It was as if Will was dead already but his body didn’t know how to play the part.
They had promised him that they would visit him again, but Sean doubted he could hear their pledge.
At the end of the street they came upon a park that, for a moment, filled Emma with enough hope for a little sunshine to return to her demeanour. But there was no hill to be found in the park, just a pond with water so still and black it resembled a polished slab of ebony. Sean hugged her for a long time in an attempt to lift her out of her disappointment.
“We have to go at this a different way,” he said.
“Doggy style?” Emma asked, her voice muffled by Sean’s jacket.
“No,” Sean laughed, closing his eyes and breathing deeply the scents that clung to Emma’s hair. There was apple in there, and honey. And good old-fashioned I-want-you-till-I-die pheromones. Not for the first time, he wished this was somebody else’s problem and he could get on with unwrapping Emma’s various layers, getting to know the woman who meant so much to him. It had been a long time since he felt so committed, so clear about what he wanted. Being with Emma was like sucking a strong mint: she cut through all the dross in his head and found the little part of his brain that said yes all the time.
“I think we have to try to remember how we found the hill when we were children. I know it came to me so easily sometimes, it was as if it was hanging around behind my eyes, just waiting for me to shut them.”
Emma nodded in his arms. “I know. I can still smell what the grass was like. It was always midnight on the hill. There were always people walking around. They seemed lost but they gave off this indestructible air.”
“Who else but the dead can be indestructible?” Sean asked.
“Maybe we should find a hill near Warrington. Maybe that would help.”
“At night.”
Emma moved away from him. “Yes, at night. We should take a picnic. Kids’ food. Comfort food. Try to find a way back to a time when we were young. When we didn’t have to worry about anything.”
“We could go to Hill Cliffe. There’s a pretty little cemetery there. And a good view of Warrington. You can see the parish church and the detergent factory–”
“How lovely...”
“–and Fiddler’s Ferry power station. You can see the old clocktower in the centre of town, at Market Gate.”
“I’ll make us jam sandwiches, that really sweet, seedless stuff. And margarine. On cheap white bread.”
Sean closed his eyes and smacked his lips. “Mmm-mmm!”
“And Monster
Munch,” Emma suggested.
“Pickled onion flavour?”
“Of course.”
Sean opened his eyes and frowned. Something was going wrong. The sky had bruised a little and the air had grown chillier. Looking at Emma was like looking at someone through unwashed gauze. Her edges had softened; there was a smudgy gleam to them. He reached out for her and told her to close her eyes, to lie back on the grass with him. She didn’t question him. Her breath, excited and hot, told him all he needed to know. His heart was pounding.
Emma said, “And I’ll bring some of those cheese triangles...”
“Ugh, I hated them,” said Sean, remembering the flavour in his mouth, the sludgy texture. “But I liked sweets. Sherbet fountains and moon dust.”
“Okay. We’ll get some. And comics.”
“The Beano and The Dandy. 2000 AD. Look-in.”
“Twinkle,” Emma said.
Sean shrugged. “It’s a whole different world to me, all that girl stuff.”
“Didn’t you have a sister?”
Sean shook his head. “Naomi was always into whatever I was into. Football, war comics. Bollocks like that.”
“Shall we take some toys to the hill?” Her hand in his grew damp; the dewy grass moved through their clothing. The air turned heavy with moisture. Something was happening to the ground at their backs. It felt as though they were being gently tilted.
Don’t open your eyes, he sent to Emma, hoping that she’d get it.
I won’t, I won’t.
“I preferred Sindy to Barbie,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“I had an Action Man with rubber hands and eagle-eyes. Proper hair. Not that plastic moulded shit you get these days. I had a Six Million Dollar Man too.”
“In a red track suit?” Emma was getting so excited it sounded as though she were being pumped with helium. Other voices were joining theirs; deeper, more sombre, less urgent. They were far away, a susurrant shifting. Getting closer.
“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 m
ade 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.
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