Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  There are monsters. If the dead could be moved by such things, if they could suffer fear, then what hope was left for anyone else?

  PART FOUR

  THE SHERIFF’S PICTURE FRAME

  What shall we be when we aren’t what we are?

  – Derek Raymond,

  He Died With His Eyes Open

  CHAPTER FORTY: XX

  LAST NIGHT.

  Last night, it had seemed there would be no end to the pleasures that accosted her every move. There were many options and she explored them all. It was a long night. It was a very messy night.

  At first the town was too bright for her. Lights on every building dazzled her as she walked through streets thronged with people. She felt her mouth watering but quelled that appetite in the hope that it might be superseded by another. She saw herself, ghostly and unsure, in the deep-black panes of shop windows. She concentrated on her panic, which threatened to engulf her whenever she lost her reflection to a group of men or women walking by. Just because she didn’t see herself didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Once the group had bypassed her, she returned to the window. The black dress. The long, almost uncontrollably curly hair. The eyes that seemed too green to be human and better suited to a large cat. The décolletage. The curve of the buttocks. The jewel on a necklace. She saw these things on herself and echoed on the women around her in different styles and colours. The men looked at her. The women did not. She fitted in.

  She focused on a group of men and followed them into a pub called the Tut ’n’ Shive. The inner walls of the pub were painted black and the lighting was more subtle than on the street. The music and voices were very loud however, and she had to compensate for that. Susannah’s hearing was extremely good – too good – but she found that Simon’s was less so, which helped in here. She felt confident about the way she looked, an amalgam of the best of those with whom she had come into contact.

  She ordered a drink at the bar, pointing to a silver bottle that a number of other women were swigging from. When the bartender asked her for money, she stared at him blankly.

  “I’ll get this.”

  She turned to find a man standing next to her, brandishing his wallet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

  “Forgot your purse?” The man shook his head. “It happens.” When she took a sip of the stuff in the bottle (foul – so sweet it coated her throat with an awful, syrupy skin) she sensed him assessing her body. It made her giddy and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing him right now, and doing what the women in the pictures had done.

  “I’m Mick,” he said, wiping a hand against his thick denim shirt exaggeratedly before offering it for her to shake. This she did, tasting him through her pores and finding it hard to relinquish his fingers. He didn’t seem to mind too much.

  “I’m Susannah,” she said. “Susannah Gleave. I’m twenty-four. I have good tits.”

  Mick’s eyes widened. “Well, yes, I can see that.” He assessed her more openly. “Yes. The jury has returned its verdict. Guilty. Of having good... bosoms.” He laughed, a strange, staccato yammer that sounded like a child’s impression of a machine gun. “Are you foreign?” he asked.

  “Foreign?”

  “Yeah, you know... not from these shores.”

  Cheke smiled uncertainly. “You can tell?”

  “Not much,” Mick said, theatrically. “What are you? Swedish? You look Swedish. Athletic. Tall.”

  “Swedish,” Cheke said, trying out the unfamiliar word. “Yes. If you like.”

  Mick took a sip of his pint, the first flicker of a frown creasing his forehead. He shook it away. Cheke looked him over. He was quite a bit shorter than she was. His hair was dark, but was silvering at the temples. He was balding at his crown. He wore his shirt outside his trousers. Black, chunky boots rooted him steadily to the beer-soaked floor. She liked his overall chunkiness. She liked his pale eyes too. Grey, like Gleave’s. Wolfish.

  “Your prick,” she said. “I need to know. Is it–”

  Mick spluttered foam over the edge of his beer glass. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry... I mean... your cock? Is that right? I wondered, is it big? Are you shaved? Down there? Have you fucked before? What noises do women make, when you–”

  Mick held up his hand. “Look, if I’d had twelve Kronenbourg, it might be that I’d be all over you for what you’re saying right now. But as it is, this is my first. And this is all a bit too weird for me. So, good luck. Maybe some other time, hey?”

  She watched him back away and then press through the cluster of bodies massing at the bar. Somebody vacated a stool and she slid onto it, nursing the bottle between her fingers. She was considering going after him when another man stepped up beside her, glanced once at her and then, when she didn’t avert her gaze, turned to face her and smiled broadly.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Derek.”

  “You’re black,” Cheke said.

  The smile died. “Yes. I am. Is that a problem?”

  Cheke was astonished by the cat and mouse. There didn’t seem to be any scope for direct talking. She thought of how quickly Mick had retreated when she cut through any charade. She smiled, as warmly as she possibly could, shifting her body around on the stool so that he could see whatever, and as much, as he wanted of her. “No,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

  It was the right answer.

  He took her back to a flat in Woolston, on the eastern fringes of the town. He poured her a glass of wine from a half-finished bottle in the fridge and put on some music – something he called hip hop – before making it clear that the stereo cost a month’s wages. The music meant nothing to her. It hurt her ears, made it hard for her to understand anything he said. He asked her if she fancied some coke, extracting a small bag of white powder from beneath a sofa cushion. She nodded, said sure, she wouldn’t mind, and waited to see what he would do with it. He chopped a few lines with a razor blade on a mirror and offered her a rolled £50 note.

  “You first,” she said. She followed his lead.

  After they had snorted a couple of lines each, Derek pushed her back against the sofa. He unbuckled his jeans and let them fall to the floor.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked. He was wearing white cotton boxer shorts that hugged his hips. The outline of his cock was obvious. It made a long, vague S-shape.

  “Do you like what you see?” he asked. “Would you like to see more?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you have to take something off too.”

  She unzipped the dress and let it slip off her shoulders. The coke had made her feel tingly at the back of her brain, as if she was being tickled by a feather there. It was hard to keep control of herself. Derek’s fingers slipped into the waistband of his boxers. His eyes were fixed on her nipples, which were visible through the sheer fabric of her bra. Susannah’s nipples, Susannah’s breasts. Small, perky breasts; very pink, very stiff nipples. He failed to see the slight failure of her right hand, which morphed for a fraction into the gnarled fist of the guard she had attacked at Gleave’s hideout. Get a grip, she ordered herself. Concentrate.

  She wondered whose pudenda she should present to him. Susannah’s was a tight, pink, neat affair, the blonde pubic hair trimmed, the mons moisturised and scented. The nurse from Sloe Heath had a sex that was looser and more hairy, but shockingly carnal in a way that Susannah’s was not. Perhaps she should offer her own. She felt a flood of warmth through her loins, and an almost unbearable heat that gave her a melting feeling in her stomach.

  Derek slipped the waistband down over his cock, which sprang lightly away from its nest of hair. It was thick and heavy, not yet fully erect, and it bounced to the rhythm of his heartbeat. It was different to the guard’s, or the pictures she had seen. A sheath of skin covered the glistening core. She was about to ask him what it was, but remembered Mick’s retreat. She must feign some sass, some knowledge.

  Derek dabbed half th
e remaining coke from the mirror onto his finger. He smeared it onto the tip of his cock and leaned over to kiss her. She moved back under the weight of his mouth as it melded with her own. His tongue tasted of rum and Coca-Cola. This was like the pictures in Jonathan’s magazine. The stories too. She made a low noise in the back of her throat and reached down to caress his balls. She had read this in a reader’s letter: Marge from Crewe. She squeezed lightly, aware that the organ needed to be treated tenderly. Derek closed his eyes and hissed.

  Now she moved her hand so it encircled his cock. She lightly moved the outer skin against the stiffening core until the prepuce peeled back from the head, swollen and tan and glossy.

  “Put your mouth on it,” Derek said, his voice thick. He had his hands under the frame of her bra and was massaging her breasts, rolling the nipples between his fingers. It felt good. The tickle at the back of her brain increased and spread. It linked up directly with the V between her legs. If he didn’t rub her there soon, she would have to touch herself. It was almost unbearable.

  She slid down on the sofa until his cock was level with her mouth. She saw the pictures in the magazine and gently enclosed the head with her mouth, moving her head slowly down the shaft until his balls were flush with her lips. He gasped.

  “Nobody did that before,” he said. “Nobody took the lot. What are you? Linda Lovelace?”

  She ignored him; she didn’t know what he was talking about. She continued to suck, remembering the pictures, remembering to keep her hand moving on the base of his cock, remembering to keep it wet, keep it moving, keep it moving. Never let up. He began to tense. She remembered the magazine. The readers’ letters. Rhiannon from Newcastle. He began to jerk and she moved her hand underneath him, between the hard, muscled curves of his buttocks. The tip of his cock began to pulse and spasm – she had read about this too – and she slid her forefinger deep into his anus. He cried out and rammed into her mouth. She felt his come, so much of it, too much of it, jet against the back of her throat and she gagged. She pulled away and he fell back against the sofa cushions.

  “Me now,” she said, wiping her mouth.

  “I’m knackered, babe,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Me now.”

  “Tomorrow. Let’s get some kip.”

  “No,” she said. Something in her voice made Derek’s eyes snap open. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want it all. I want you to suck my clit and fuck me every way there is.”

  He knelt before her. His cock was ebbing, dwindling, its tip endowed with a pearl of come. The sight of her pale, smooth thighs didn’t resurrect it. Neither did her pink, liquid core as she yanked off her knickers and spread her legs. Her cunt yawned before him.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” he said.

  “Put some of that powder on it,” she demanded. “That coko. Put some on.”

  “The music needs changing.”

  She clamped his head with her calves and, leaning forwards, pressed a fingernail against the bridge of his nose. “Do. It.”

  Derek collected the dregs of the coke from the mirror and rubbed it into her lips. Cheke gasped and screwed her eyes shut. She clenched her buttocks and thrust her crotch up against his fingers.

  “Easy, girl,” Derek said. He continued to rub, his wet fingers slithering against her clitoris, slipping up her cunt, or sliding against her anus. He changed the rhythm and pace, the depth of his strokes. Cheke was crying with pleasure. He leaned forwards and covered her vulva with his mouth. Cheke’s eyes flew open. She reached out and grabbed Derek’s hair, pressed him deeper into the soft, hot centre of herself, a place where she no longer seemed to hold any sway, a place that didn’t appear to have any substance or structure any more. Waves of heat were rolling deep inside her. She locked her heels behind his back and squeezed him deeper. It wasn’t enough. She needed him inside her. She pulled him up alongside her and began working his spent cock with her hand. Nothing was happening.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered to him.

  “I can’t,” he said. “The beer. The coke. I’m done in.”

  She forced his cock against her and pressed with her fingers, trying to nudge the flaccid tip between her lips. Again, she locked her heels at the small of his back and dug down. “Come on,” she said. “Come on.”

  “Susannah, you’re hurting me. What’s the rush? Susannah?” He grunted and his eyes bulged. He lifted his chin off her chest and tried to speak but only tiny noises were bursting from the back of his throat.

  She felt his pelvis pulverise under the persistent crush of her feet. “You fucker,” she said. “You miserable fucker.”

  She let herself come through.

  Cheke watched Derek’s eyes, hazy with pain, as her body changed beneath him. The puckered mouths emerged through the taut flesh of Susannah’s torso and gulped at him. Her own cunt grew and broadened until it trembled beneath Derek’s shattered groin.

  “Give me what I need,” she said, and sank him into her. Before too long, Derek was unable to say anything, even if his mouth had been able to form the words. The blood, so much of it, could only get out of him that way.

  HER INDUSTRY WAS not to be questioned, surely, and she had done well so far, or so she thought. Gleave came to her at the house, stepping through the drying waste of the hallway with the look of a man who had just found a hank of hair in his soup. She had been warned of his arrival; her inner eye, recalling the previous night’s excesses, had been interrupted. She envisioned Gleave’s car sweeping into the street, saw his grey face press up against the window pane as the neighbouring houses rushed by. There had been enough time to change: another of Susannah’s black dresses, sleeveless, short, generous around the bust. In the mirror she checked her colouring and sucked out a deep, plummy colour from the palette of mouths in her memory, dusted her cheekbones with the hint of blush Jonathan had sported when she took off her robe in front of them, before he understood what was happening to him.

  “What are you doing?” Gleave asked when they were seated in the living room. Cheke had left one of Jonathan’s magazines open on the coffee table in the hope that Gleave would see. She wanted him to do to her what the men in the pictures were doing. She wanted to do to him what the women were doing. The more she did it, the closer she would come to knowing the secrets. Maybe in this way she would understand what normal was. What it meant to be human, to be a woman.

  “I thought you’d like to see me being less unusual.”

  Gleave took something from his pocket and sat down on the sofa next to her. He trawled the fingers of his other hand through his soft, white hair.

  “Do you like me like this?” she asked. She said: “Can I call you Daniel?”

  Gleave turned and smiled savagely at her. “No, you cannot call me fucking Daniel,” he snarled. He showed her what was in his hand: a canister that fit snugly in his palm. He flipped off the lid and sprayed the contents full in her face. He calmly replaced the lid and slid the canister back into his pocket. Then he stood up and clasped his large, soft hands in front of his greatcoat, watching her all the while.

  “I think,” he said, “that it’s time you understood what pain is.”

  Cheke blinked at him. She brushed away the spray from her eyes and waited for him to go on. She was not yet aware that half of her face had come away with her fingers.

  “Pain is master, anywhere you look in the animal kingdom,” Gleave said. “So it is with us.” He spotted an errant hair on his cuff and tweezered it off with his elegant fingers. He removed his lenses and polished them on a white handkerchief which he then folded precisely and kept in his palm. “I thought you were aware of the job you had to do for us,” he said at last.

  “I am,” Cheke wanted to say, but the words would not form, in the same way they had failed in the seconds after she was withdrawn from her resting place. The word am didn’t have any closure about it. It drifted on instead: ahhh. Dro
ol glazed her chin. She felt for her mouth and there was no bottom lip for the top one to shut against. As if triggered by this ghastly discovery, a flood of heat wound tightly around her lower jaw. She made a gagging sound and dropped to her knees.

  “You will know pain,” Gleave said. “Maybe that’s where we went wrong at the start. We should have tied you to your job with the threat of pain. You must not underestimate us, Cheke. We need you, but there are others. Do as you are told and then we can discuss your rehabilitation.”

  He stepped towards her suddenly and she flinched. Gleave smiled. “It’s good that you are afraid of me. Good that there is something to scare you. Fear is an ally. It will help you to stay alive.

  “Now... open wide. Godspeed, my angel.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

  SHE GAVE HIM hell, and then some. She forced him to wear a saddle and carry her around the blistered chambers of the theatre. Together, they explored the areas beneath the stage, cluttered rooms filled with thespian paraphernalia that was now wreathed with permanent smoke ghosts, all detail sealed black by the long-spent flames. There were uniformed mannequins that had once stood in for warring hordes as a backdrop to some military drama or other; deep wooden chests stuffed with costumes; scorched stacks of plays tied up with string. Everything had a wafery feel to it; the rooms had not known moisture for decades. An hour of stalking through these secret rooms with Sadie on his back gave him a furious thirst. If that wasn’t bad enough, the thing that was developing in Sadie’s external womb had begun to teethe. It chattered and ground its new gnashers in his ear as he negotiated the maze of thoroughfares beneath the stage and the auditorium. He caught glimpses of it in the corner of his eye as it twisted and grinned like some malformed specimen pickled in formaldehyde.