He attempted to shove her away but she felt heavier than he would have believed possible. The angle his body was locked in – bent into the crook of the old sofa – made it impossible for him to find leverage. He pushed forward with his head and she moved with him, locked onto his lips like a leech. He did it again, butting her with more force. Her head swung back.
It wasn’t Lisa.
It looked like her but there was something wrong with her face, like it had melted. All of her muscles had gone slack, reminding him of his nan when she’d had a stroke. It made her look years older, decades older. It made her look dead.
‘Lisa? Lisa?’ Brick said, the words half eaten by fear as he squirmed beneath her. ‘What’s wrong? Baby, tell me what’s wrong.’
She came for him again, that sunken face closing in, her mouth so wide that Brick almost screamed at the sight of it. He grabbed her shoulders, keeping her at arm’s length, trying to manoeuvre himself towards the edge of the sofa.
‘Lisa, snap out of it, what’s wrong?’
What if something happened to her out here. What if she died? And Brick realised with a sickening sense of shame that the first thought which flashed into his head – there and gone in a heartbeat – was that he’d have to leave her here and run, get the hell away before her parents found out. But no, of course he wouldn’t, he could call for an ambulance, they’d be here in minutes, she’d be okay. She’d be okay.
He shook her, her head lolling back on her shoulders like a rag doll before snapping back, dropping towards him again.
‘Brick,’ she slurred, and he could see that the paper bag of her mouth was almost smiling.
‘Lisa?’ he said. ‘You okay?’
And just like that the pounding in his head stopped, the pain vanishing with such speed that its absence was almost as frightening.
‘No way,’ he said. Lisa had stopped trying to kiss him, her head tucked into her chest, swaying gently. He still had her by the shoulders and he could feel the muscles beneath her T-shirt, small but tense. He wondered if maybe his headache and her weirdness were related. Maybe he shouldn’t have lit the candles without proper ventilation. ‘You okay, baby? Let’s get—’
Lisa arched her back, her head twisting up to the ceiling, the tendons in her neck like steel cables. Then she screamed, the noise like nothing Brick had heard in his life. It was raw, it was savage, it was hate-filled, and it seemed to go on forever, threatening to bring the walls of the pavilion down. The scream died out with a hideous rattle, flecks of spit popping from her lips. Lisa lowered her head, her eyes so dark they looked black; insect eyes, fixed on Brick with a look of undiluted fury. He tried to call her name but he never got a chance.
She went for him, her head darting forward like a cobra’s. Her teeth scraped down his forehead, locking onto the flesh of his eyebrow and biting hard. Brick found his voice, shrieking. Blood gushed into his eye, trickling into his mouth, choking him. She was chewing, working his face like a tough lump of lamb, her breath coming in short, meaty gasps. She was punching him too, he realised, the blows lost in the supernova of agony that burned in his face.
He shoved her as hard as he could. Her body snapped back but her teeth anchored her in place, threatening to tear off his forehead. He cried out again, adrenalin catapulting him off the sofa. Lisa clung on, wrapping her legs around his waist, her fists slapping against his shoulders, his ears, his throat.
Brick staggered, tripping on the coffee table, both of them toppling. She hit first, grunting as he crushed her, his weight rolling them both off the other side onto the floor. She landed on top of him, her teeth ripped from his eyebrow. She lunged again, going for his cheek, and he only just managed to get a hand up under her chin before her jaw snapped shut. He noticed she’d lost one of her teeth but she didn’t seem to care. Her eyes blazed only hatred. She was rabid, feral.
And she was going to kill him.
He drew back his arm and punched her, catching her in the nose, showering himself with warm blood. Then he brought his knee into her ribs, twisting the same way so that she tumbled off him.
He grabbed the table, hauling himself to his feet. Lisa was quick, though, uncoiling like a snake and sinking her teeth into his heel. The pain almost sent him sprawling to the floor again. He wrenched his foot loose, limping towards the basement door. He could hear Lisa scrabbling and glanced over his shoulder to see her squirming on her back. Her ankle looked wrong, bent at a strange angle. She rolled, jerking up onto her feet like she didn’t even notice her leg was broken, coming after him with long, clumsy strides.
Brick threw himself away, hearing her gaining, hearing that animal groan spilling from her lips. He careened into the door, falling through it face-first into the wall beyond. He thrashed in the darkness, turning, seeing Lisa tear towards him, foam spilling from her jaw, blood trailing out of her nose.
He kicked the door shut, and the whole corridor seemed to tremble as Lisa hit the other side. It started to open and he braced his back against the wall, keeping his legs tense, grateful for once to be six-five and tall enough to keep his feet against the metal fire plate. There was a patter of footsteps then another spine-snapping crunch, more like a rhino charging at the door than a sixteen-year-old girl.
More steps, another attempt. Brick didn’t move, just kept his whole body rigid as the door bulged then clicked shut, bulged then clicked shut, some awful heartbeat as she charged again and again and again. Only now did he notice that he was bawling like a baby, his face wet with tears and blood and snot. But he couldn’t stop, those sobs too big to be kept inside. He lay there crying, screaming into the boundless darkness of the corridor, while Lisa bayed for his blood.
The Other: I
Heed the breath of the Beast;
in death he rises,
and in our darkest days
he will devour us all.
The Book of Hebron
Murdoch
Scotland Yard, 11.59 p.m.
Almost midnight, on one of the hottest, muggiest nights of the year, and here he was buried alive in the morgue at Scotland Yard.
And it wasn’t even his shift.
Inspector Alan Murdoch traipsed down the last flight of stairs and along the green tiled corridor. There was nobody at the reception desk, which wasn’t surprising given the time, but he knew the way all too well. The morgue was his second home, he spent more time in this crypt than he did at home with his wife and the baby he’d seen maybe a dozen times in twice as many days since it had been born. He could picture the room on the other side of that door – the chipped notice board with the ‘Clean Hands Won’t Contaminate Evidence: Wash Them Now!’ poster, the upholstered benches against the walls, foam spilling out of them as if they were corpses too, the pocket of dust and lint in the corner around the fake cactus that the cleaner always seemed to miss – better than he could picture the face of his son.
Murdoch sighed, wiping a hand over the thick stubble he hadn’t had a chance to shave since beginning his own shift twelve hours ago. Then he leant on the door, almost falling through it into the waiting area. He was expecting it to be deserted as well – during the graveyard run people tended to avoid coming down here – but it wasn’t. He did a quick head count: eight people crammed into the small room. His good friend and the force’s chief pathologist, Dr Sven Jorgensen, was in the middle, a blond beanpole in a white surgical suit who towered over the similarly dressed assistants to his side. Even through the biohazard mask Murdoch saw that his face was creased into a deeper frown than usual. He caught sight of Murdoch and looked over, the reflection of the harsh halogen lights exploding in his visor.
‘Good to see you, Alan,’ he said, his voice muffled. He waved a hand and scattered his assistants as Murdoch walked over. ‘You’re not going to want to miss this.’
‘Miss what?’ Murdoch asked. ‘Why the suit? Terrorists?’
The last time he’d seen the pathologist in a biohazard suit had been when the anti-terrorist squad
had brought in three jihadis who’d poisoned themselves with the ricin they’d been planning to use on the Tube.
‘Uh uh,’ Jorgensen said, shaking his head. ‘This is . . . This is something different. I can’t explain it.’
Murdoch felt his pulse quicken. Jorgensen wasn’t the kind of guy who scared easily. Murdoch had stood by the pathologist’s side as he’d sliced open corpses of all shapes and sizes, kids and adults, men and women, burned, drowned, beaten, drained, punctured, flayed, cannibalised, starved, beheaded, disembowelled – pretty much every method of dying possible. He’d never so much as seen the man tremble. But something had rattled him, that truth was in the waxy colour of his cheeks and a sheen of sweat on his forehead that had absolutely nothing to do with the close confines of the biohazard suit.
‘Sorry to call you out so late,’ Jorgensen went on. ‘I wanted to show you. I don’t know how much longer I’ll have.’
‘What?’ Murdoch asked. ‘Why?’
‘I had to call this one in,’ he said, brushing his gloved hands down his overalls. ‘MI5. This is something new.’
‘The security service?’ Murdoch said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Seriously?’
‘You’ll understand when you see it.’ Jorgensen paused, and in that hesitation Murdoch understood that the man didn’t want to go back inside the morgue. He felt a cold sweat of his own creep over his face and down his spine. Jorgensen not wanting to go to work was like a kid not wanting to go out to play – something was seriously wrong. The man seemed to snap out of his trance, turning a pair of bloodshot eyes towards the door. ‘You’ll need a mask.’
Murdoch looked up at the pathologist for a moment longer, then turned and walked to the steel lockers against the far wall of the waiting room. The one marked ‘Hazardous’ was already open, a couple of full-face masks left near the bottom. He slipped one over his head, switching it on and making sure the rubber seal was tight around his neck. He hated these things, the air inside them was like breathing from a dead man’s lungs. Still, better this than inhaling whatever was inside the morgue, whatever had unsettled Jorgensen so much.
‘This way,’ said the pathologist, as if Murdoch hadn’t been here a hundred times before. One of the morgue assistants held open the waiting-room door for them and Murdoch followed Jorgensen through, past the viewing window where loved ones had to stand and identify the remains of those they had once called mother or daughter or brother. The main entrance to the morgue was a few paces further down and yet more white-suited staff were clustered outside it. One of them pushed the door, holding it for them as they passed through.
‘No change, sir,’ the woman said. She had to shout over the rumble of the air conditioning units which were working overtime to cope with the heat. Even here, beneath the ground, Murdoch could feel it prickling his skin, making him itch all over.
Jorgensen nodded at her, leading the way across the huge room towards an area sectioned off with hospital-style privacy curtains. He stopped next to them.
‘This is top secret, Alan, okay?’ he said. ‘Until we know what this is, nobody can find out about it. I brought you in because you’re a friend, because I trust you. But nobody else can know. Okay?’
Murdoch nodded, trying to wipe a hand across his stubble again and knocking the mask. A bolt of pure, white adrenalin exploded in his gut and he took a couple of long, deep breaths which misted his visor. He was grateful to them, because they obscured his vision as Jorgensen reached out and pulled the curtain to one side.
He didn’t want to see what lay in the corner of this room. He could hear it, though, a sound that rose up over the rattle and clank of the overworked air conditioners. It was a scream, a wretched, terrible, strangled scream gargled through a wet throat – not one thrown out but one clawed in, like a desperate asthmatic breath. He could almost feel that breath on his skin, breaking out a blanket of goosebumps that clung to him like a disease. It made him want to run from the room and throw himself into a bath of disinfectant, to hurl himself into the sun just so it could burn the touch from him.
The mist on his visor was clearing, and through the plastic he saw a naked body lying on a stainless steel surgical table. It was a young man. And it was a corpse. Of this there could be no doubt because its chest had been opened up like a birthday present, torn flaps of wrapping-paper-red skin pulled to the side to reveal a gift basket of withered organs. Its body was blackened on the underside where the blood had pooled in post-mortem lividity.
Don’t look at its face, his brain told him. Yet he could no more turn away than he could sprout wings and fly out of the morgue. His eyes drifted up from the feast of its stomach, past its pulseless throat, to a face that was still alive.
No, not alive. Animated, yes – its mouth hung open, too wide, wide enough for Murdoch to get his whole fist into if he could ever bring himself to move again. It was this that was making the noise, that gurgling wheeze. It reminded Murdoch of the old VCR he used to have, the one his wife insisted they kept even though they didn’t even make video tapes any more. If you hit the pause button the people on screen would freeze but they would still be moving, flickering, trembling, and the tape would emit a throbbing purr that would last until you pressed play again. This corpse was frozen in the same way, because even though it was dead, even though it wasn’t moving, he could sense life inside it. It was as if something lay just beneath the surface of that parchment-thin skin, something writhing and twisting and breathing in that endless inverted scream.
It was its eyes, he realised. They were white marbles in puckered sockets, shrouded with death, and yet they could still see. He understood that instinctively, that these two pinprick pupils which stared at the tiled ceiling of the morgue were seeing something; they were watching.
‘It’s been like this for an hour now,’ said Jorgensen from his side. ‘Since the road patrol brought it in.’
Murdoch staggered, collapsing against the wall to his side. Jorgensen was looking at him, and he could see his own open-mouthed reflection in the pathologist’s visor.
‘There’s no pulse, no blood pressure,’ he went on. ‘It’s one hundred per cent dead.’
‘It’s not,’ Murdoch spat. ‘It’s breathing.’
Jorgensen turned back to the corpse, shaking his head.
‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘It’s inhaling. But its lungs are flat, we opened them up to see where all that air was going.’
‘Where is it going?’ Murdoch asked, shouting over the same grating, unchanging, unending breath from that dislocated jaw.
Jorgensen shrugged.
‘That’s the weirdest thing,’ he said, opening a bottle of talcum powder that was lying on the tray next to the table. He took out a pinch and flicked it over the corpse’s mouth, watching as the dead man sucked it in like a vacuum cleaner. Murdoch managed a step forward, peering down into the gaping maw to see that the powder had vanished down the black pit of its throat. Jorgensen put the cap back on the bottle as he spoke. ‘That’s why I called MI5. That’s what I don’t understand. That air, it’s not going anywhere; nowhere we can find, anyway.’
Behind them, one of the assistants appeared at the door.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I think the government is here.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ Jorgensen said. He turned to Murdoch. ‘Whatever this thing is, wherever that air is going, it’s not here.’
‘Not here?’ Murdoch asked. He looked at the corpse – its open chest gaping, its mouth inhaling, those pale eyes burning into the ceiling. ‘Sven, what do you mean not here?’
Jorgensen sighed, a noise that sounded more like a sob.
‘I mean exactly that,’ he said. ‘I mean it’s going somewhere else.’
Friday
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
Brick
Fursville, 12.24 a.m.
Brick sat at the top of the basement steps, his head in his hands, flinching every time he thought he heard a noise from below.
He felt empty, completely and utterly drained. It had taken all his strength just to make it up the stairs. Shortly after getting out of the basement he’d found a steel rod in the pavilion – it looked like one of the electrical poles from a dodgem – and had managed to wedge it tight between the door and the wall. He’d packed everything he could find around it to lock it in place, praying that it would hold up against the onslaught from the other side. It had, so far. Lisa had spent the best part of three hours battering the door, each attempt growing weaker and feebler until the sound of her body hitting the wood and metal was no louder than a gentle slap.
It was the noises in between the crunches that had turned his stomach, though, that had made him think he was going to go insane sitting there in the darkness. Brittle snaps, something wet that accompanied her steps, shuffling flaps that he imagined were her falling and trying to get up again, some of which went on for ten, fifteen minutes at a time.
And worst of all were the groans and snarls, noises that could have come from a wounded animal in a trap if it wasn’t for the half-words buried in the mess. The only one he could recognise was his name, spat out again and again in panting, wretched screams until he had to clamp his hands over his ears and blot them out with cries of his own.
The Fury Page 6
