by Gary McMahon
Ah," said non-Benson finally catching sight of Usher as he reached the top of the stairs. "Here he is, the man of the hour. So good to see you again, Usher."
The boy, still standing in the bedroom doorway, took a single step back. In that moment, before the boy composed himself, Sarah realised something important: these other two were afraid of Usher. She didn't know why or even how he had achieved such a feat, but they were cowering before him and trying not to show it.
"So bright…" The boy's eyes were wide. His face went slack. "It's so bright. So big and bright and perfect."
For a split second, Sarah thought that she could see an aura around Usher's head, a golden halo of light within which twisted strange veins of some kind of translucent matter. They turned and corkscrewed, those veins, never at rest. They were in constant motion, changing the shape of the brilliant penumbra. Then the vision was gone and she tried to make sense of the glimpse she'd had, the brief moment when something numinous had entered her field of vision.
"I can't ever escape you, can I, Pilgrim?" Usher stood at the top of the stairs, on the edge of the landing. His hands were clenched into fists. He looked bigger than before; his body seemed to take up more space than it should. His outline fluctuated, shimmering like the outline of a poorly projected image. Not for the first time, Sarah felt detached from the situation, like she was watching a film.
"I've followed you since the very start," said non-Benson. "Tracked you from between realities, reaching out to you the only way I could. You were born with something that only we are meant to create. You are unique. A beautiful mutation."
The boy stepped forward, reaching out towards Usher. His eyes blazed. "He was born with this? Born with a design of this magnitude?"
Usher shook his head. "What does this mean? What are you saying? Who the hell are you?"
"We are the Architects," said non-Benson. Sarah felt herself moving away, retreating into darkness, but she fought to remain conscious. She had to see this; she wanted to watch it play out to the very end.
"What?" Usher slammed his fist into the wall. "No more games. Just tell me what you want!" His voice seemed to make the walls vibrate, but surely that was an illusion. Energy buzzed and crackled around his shoulders, making the air fizz like carbonated water.
"We are the Architects, Usher. It's what we are. Our job is a simple one. We create designs, and then we send those designs out into your reality, where they latch onto whatever person attracts them. Serendipity is an illusion: it is all part of our designs. Like bees pollinating flowers, the designs feed from their new owners but they also make them grow, develop their lives along certain routes so that the seeds my brothers and I planted in the original designs may flourish."
Usher fell against the wall, as if he were growing weak. The boy could not take his eyes from Usher; he was transfixed by something that Sarah had merely glimpsed. Was it his "design"?
Non-Benson moved away from the wall, but he didn't quite touch Usher. It was as if he were afraid to get too close. "You are the only person to ever have been born with a design. It has never happened before. But I witnessed such a thing, during one of my forays into this reality. I've kept an eye on you ever since, and tried to… mould your life so that I might take the design away from you, take it away and use it."
The boy staggered backwards. "No! This is wrong. Such beauty… such potential power… It must not be stolen or degraded." The flesh of the boy's face began to wither. His teeth were too prominent and his cheeks sunk as she watched, giving him a skeletal appearance.
Non-Benson ignored the boy. He spoke directly to Usher, holding his gaze. His features wavered, the bones beneath Benson's pilfered face going soft and malleable. "I can't touch it, Usher. If I did, it would destroy me. Why do you think I've not just killed you and taken what you have? I don't understand what it is, or where it came from, but I know I cannot lay a hand upon it… it… is… untouchable. I would be torn apart by its power if I even tried."
Usher straightened his back. Power flooded back into his body. Sarah realised that some unseen battle was raging: Usher was fighting off a psychological attack from the other two. "I've always had this with me? This ability. Is that what you're saying?" The veins on the side of his neck bulged, as if filling with air.
Non-Benson nodded. "Yes, that's it. The design was dormant. It had reached its finished form even before your birth. You were born with it, and I arranged the crash to kick-start it, to see what it was capable of."
"And I started to see the dead." Usher looked down, at his feet. He was losing strength again.
"You began to see through the façade, that's all. Instead of your own reality, the one all you silly little puppets believe in, you saw that others exist alongside. You started seeing what we see. You became a little like us – like the Architects."
"This is all… it's all too much. All my life I've felt cursed, and now you tell me that I always was." Usher turned away. His face was deathly white. His eyes were almost black. "I've been cursed from the start."
Non-Benson hovered behind him, clearly desperate to touch him, to take what he had always wanted. Sarah felt nauseous. Sickness burned within her, and then, suddenly, hot vomit spurted between her lips. It tasted bitter. She couldn't keep it down.
"We cannot take this design." The boy had grabbed hold of non-Benson's arm. His fingers sank into the softening flesh beneath his shirt. "You must come back with us, so we can examine the situation. This alters everything. Our designs are no longer simply ours. Don't you see what this means?" His voice was weird; it sounded like an amalgamation of voices.
Non-Benson smiled. His lips skinned back from his face, exposing lion's teeth as they jutted from his skull.
The boy began to shudder. His entire body shook, causing his clothes to writhe. The flesh writhed with them, and his bones began to pop to the surface. There was no blood. The boy was not in pain. Then, in one sudden paroxysm of shuddering, the boy divested himself of both clothes and skin, showing his true form – or forms – at last.
There were two of them; they emerged from the boy's body like bugs from a chrysalis. The first thing Sarah thought was that they looked like conjoined locusts, with huge, chitinous rear legs and pigeon chests that were covered with a crust of black shelllike material. Their hair was long and golden, and slathered in some kind of clear fluid. It fell down across their shoulders as they moved apart: sticky golden tresses, sparkling in the poor light of the landing.
"Oh, God," said Sarah, and her words were not random.
She recalled one of Emerson's favourite sections from the
Holy Bible: Revelations. He had read it to her and her mother often, relishing the descriptions of demons.
And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions…
She could barely believe that these things, these beings, were standing above her, still shuddering and rejoicing in their nudity.
Huge dark wings flexed from their shoulders, dripping with more of that viscous matter. They were the giant wings of flies: black, shining, jittering with nervous energy.
…and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle…
Hanging from their fat rear fat ends, dripping venom, were massive scorpion stings, thick and bloated and twitching. The tails danced in the air as they stretched out to their full length, the thick black wings buzzing around them and disturbing the air with their brilliant motion.
One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter…
Was that what these things were, woe personified? They had called themselves the Architects, the creators of unknown designs, but to Sarah they were the demons of Emerson's worst nightmares. They were things, they were dead, and they were bad, so very bad.
But the worst thing about them was their faces.
…and their faces were as the faces of men…
They were rudimentary, inchoate, but certainly hum
anoid in origin. It was as if these creatures had once been men, or were striving to be manlike. Sarah could not imagine which of these options frightened her more: the bare scraps of humanity left in their hideous features, or the beginnings of it poking through the horror as if attempting to be born.
She tried to move her legs but nothing happened.
Usher stared down at her, his pale face hanging in the air like a floating mask.
"Oh, it's so sweet," said non-Benson, shed of his borrowed flesh. His wings burred; his stinger dripped; his enormous back legs flexed and bounced. He looked like he was ready to pounce, but he was unable to direct an attack at Usher because of the power within him. So now, instead, he had turned his attention upon the only thing Thomas cared about…
"Father and daughter, together at last."
She had known that he was her father for some time now, but only at the back of her mind. The knowledge had been buried away where it could do no damage. The idea made sense, really: she almost laughed at the symmetry of the situation.
"Your mummy had an abortion, and I took what was left." His voice buzzed, like flies around shit. "And I nourished you in the spaces between, suckling you from the milk of my imagination. I believed… I believed, and whatever I believe shall come to pass." His lion teeth gnashed at the air as he spoke, but his voice was now perfectly clear, the buzzing sounds having receded. "The clock of the universe ticks us towards the end of things, and only I know the secret that stops the mechanism." He was ranting now, his human aspect being devoured by the monster he had become.
Just before the thing leapt down the stairwell, the other two creatures grabbed him, drawing all three together in a grotesque group hug. "No," they said, in unison. "This is not how it ends."
The thing Usher had called the Pilgrim turned and began to grapple with the other two creatures, pincers snapping, poisontipped tail thrashing against the walls in the confined space of the upstairs landing. Sarah once again tried to move, to stand, to crawl… but her legs refused to cooperate.
Usher ran down the stairs and grabbed her by the arms, pulling her up against the wall. "Come on, Sarah. You can do it." His face was contorted from the strain of pulling her dead weight upright, and then he somehow managed to haul her upper body over his shoulder and continue on down the stairs in a lumbering hunched swagger.
Sarah's legs dragged along the floor, hitting the skirting boards, but she didn't even feel the impact – all she was aware of was the distant motion of her feet, as if she were remembering what it felt like to move them.
Behind them, the creatures squirmed and fretted like boiling lobsters. Their cries were oddly forlorn, like whale song, and it seemed to Sarah that they had now abandoned human speech completely in favour of their natural tongue.
Then, as she lifted her head and blinked through tears, she saw them tumbling down the stairwell behind them. "Run…" She hoped that Usher could hear her, but her voice was frail and broken – just like her body.
When she opened her eyes again they were heading down the cellar steps, and Usher had shut the door at their backs. Sarah toppled from his shoulders and he was forced to drag her by her wrists. Behind the cellar door, up on the ground floor, that eerie whale song had changed pitch. It was beautiful in a way, but achingly sad. Her fear of these creatures was slowly being overtaken by an overwhelming sense of pity.
"I'm sorry…" Usher held her face in his hands, stroking her cheeks with his cold fingers. "I'm so sorry… for all of this."
Sarah smiled – or she tried to; the numbness in her lower body had begun to creep upwards, and had already reached her face. Her body felt loose, slack. She had little control over her muscles. "S'OK," she muttered, her eyes growing heavy. "S'OK, Dad."
Usher smiled. His eyes, usually hard and sunken into his tired face, shone like gemstones in the cellar's gloom.
Just as Sarah was falling into a deep, dark place, the cellar door burst open. Detritus rained down the narrow stairwell, littering the concrete floor. The sound of something large and cumbersome descending the stairs was awful, and Sarah's fear returned, adding to the numbness to nail her to the spot.
Usher stood and turned to face the area at the bottom of the stairs. His hands were clenched into fists and his feet were positioned shoulder-width apart. "This is where it all stops," he whispered. Sarah wished that she had the strength to cry out to him, to tell him to be careful.
The first of the creatures hopped off the bottom step and into the cellar. It was ragged, with parts of its anatomy dangling by threads. The chitin breast plate had come apart, flopping open like a door in its chest, and numerous pale, hairless insect-legs twitched as they groped at the air. Flowers sprouted and died from the tips of these appendages, and each one cried out in muted agony as its brief lifespan came to a halt.
"You've been part of my life for so long that I almost don't want this to end." Usher's voice was steady; his body seemed to swell, filling the airless cellar with his presence. "But everything ends, doesn't it?"
The creature – the Pilgrim – shuddered. One of its limbs came away from its battered torso, falling to the floor. Its feet skittered on the concrete. The whole underground room smelled of sulphur and lilies. It was an odd combination, and the resulting feeling of nausea brought Sarah back to her senses.
Behind the Pilgrim, the other two creatures came into view. They moved slowly, and where in worse condition than their brother, but their lethal teeth and scorpion tails remained intact.
"You once told me that the only reason this reality exists is because we believe in it." Usher shuffled his feet. He clenched and unclenched his fists. "Well, I no longer believe in you. I don't believe you ever existed. I. Don't. Believe." Slowly, he turned his back on the creatures. His gaze locked onto Sarah's face, and she felt a warm breeze kiss her cheeks in the dark, dank cellar.
The rest of it was over in seconds. The end came not even with a whimper.
Usher was still standing in position at the foot of the stairs, his eyes fixed on Sarah's face. And behind him the two injured Architects quickly disassembled their distracted brother; pulling off his legs like a crustacean meant for the pot, plucking his wings at the root, biting off his barely human face. They feasted on their kin, absorbing him, bringing him back into the family. Whale-song cries filled the cramped space; they were so loud and sonorous that Sarah could hear nothing else. But she knew that an echo of those cries would remain inside her head until the day she died… and possibly beyond even that.
Then, in a sort of folding motion, the three straining creatures all became one pulsating mass of wings and legs and lion teeth, of golden hair and scorpion tails, of otherworldly pain and forlorn whale-song.
That busy fury, in the form of an unruly storm of woes, rose slowly from the floor and folded even further in on itself, becoming smaller and denser, like a collapsing star drawing energy into its failing orbit: a tiny black hole suspended in the solar system of Emerson Doherty's cellar. There was a loud shattering sound, and a trembling not unlike a minor earth tremor and when Sarah blinked, they were gone.
Up above, in the house, the tremors continued, shaking apart the walls and buckling the floors. After-shocks travelled throughout the structure, creating a storm of brick dust that blinded Sarah. Then even this leftover energy was dispelled, directed into the building's foundations and then deep into the waiting earth.
Usher went down on his knees, exhausted. His hands flailed at the wall, his nails scratched at the dry plaster. He looked spent, and Sarah wondered what part his mysterious power had played in those final horrifying moments of absolute destruction. And what price it would demand of his body.
Sarah was still unable to move. She felt that she might never move again, not without aid. But now, she realised with a warmth at her core, there was finally someone here to help her. Because her father, for whom she had spent a lifetime wrapped up in grief, was back; he was home; he was here.
He was her father. And sh
e loved him, no matter what the cost.
THIRTY-FOUR
When I emerged from the cellar we expected the house to be in ruins, but it still stood. The main walls remained upright, the doors and window frames were intact, despite the shattered glass and broken furniture. The internal damage was extensive, but at least the roof was not going to fall down and crush us – what irony that would have been, to be killed by falling masonry after defeating the Pilgrim and his siblings.
The main thing was that we were safe. I carried Sarah in my arms, like a baby, and walked through the mess of the ground floor. We were both crying, but silently. I'm still not sure exactly what we were crying for.
I set Sarah down on a filthy sofa and used her mobile phone to call an ambulance. I told them that there had been some kind of freak earthquake, and I knew the damage to adjacent properties and terrified accounts from the neighbours would probably make that story stick. Why would they want to consider an alternative reason for the destruction anyway, when a rational story was so close to hand?
