The air thudded in her lungs. It breathed for her.
Axis Mundi. Navel of the world. The womb.
Fitch's hand was on her shoulder. "Who opened the goddamn door? You see anyone?"
She leaned out into the nave, one foot on the cold flagstones. The thrumming sensation grew, fizzing on the tip of her tongue. Hair stood tall along her arms. Her stomach corkscrewed down into her abdomen.
They were waiting.
Chapter 20
For a moment, one precious moment, Kimberly thought it'd all been a big misunderstanding.
They stood with their backs to her, a row of fifteen or more figures in long black robes, cowls pulled over their heads, hands clasped before them. Nuns. Of course. What else did she expect to find in a small-town convent? And she'd just busted her way into their private ceremonies, for what? To ask for a lift back to New York?
Then she noticed how ragged those robes were. Shredded as if by blades, or claws, exposing swathes of pale flesh. They were tall, too. Not one of them less than six foot, some more than seven. Even stooped, they towered over the pews.
Not praying, either. The figures were silent, heads bowed, worryingly still, as if carved from granite. There was no altar or pulpit at the head of the nave: only a blank wall, red brick laid neat. They faced that wall, unmoving and unbreathing.
Yes, Kimberly realised. That was what felt so wrong. No hitch of the shoulders, no twist of cloth as they exhaled. Corpses propped at attention.
She grabbed Fitch's sleeve. "What do we-"
"Thirty seconds!" He stared at his watch, licking his lips in anticipation. "Twenty five."
"They're not real, are they? They're not people!"
"Twenty seconds." Fitch set his crowbar down and fished two molotovs from the pack, setting them upright on the stone. "I think I'm gonna puke."
Kimberly felt it too. The electric buzz was peaking, vibrating her eyeballs in her skull. It felt like she'd stripped the cord to her bedside lamp and clamped her teeth on the copper. "I don't understand-"
"Ten," he whispered. "Five seconds, run, run, lady, you've gotta run-"
The world exploded.
A supernova unfolded like origami inside the nave. Light in her bones, in her flesh, in her guts. She threw one hand up over her eyes and saw the little bones of her fingers wiggling, and behind those bones the red brick wall was opening, spilling light, so bright she couldn't hold in a sob of pain.
She stared into the midnight sun.
The nave was cast into sharp relief. Black wedges of shadow arched across the floor. The figures waiting at the front of the chapel hadn't turned at her cry, and through her tears Kimberly thought they were being swallowed by the light altogether, that whatever star had been born at the heart of the chapel had burned them to ash.
As suddenly as it'd appeared, the light faded. Kimberly wiped her eyes. Her hands trembled on the flagstones. The buzzing had faded to a low moan, a tickling finger along her ribs, and the far wall of the chapel...
Was gone.
A hole. A hole leading into nothing, a blackness so black it had no colour at all. A circle cut from reality leading to a space divided by zero. Looking at it ached in her eyes and in her heart. It was, she thought, like drilling into her skull and putting the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner against the raw, sucking wound.
And yet, she couldn't look away. She wanted to scream but couldn't find the air - the void had sucked all that out, too.
Fitch, too, was rooted in place, hands by his sides, mannequin-still. His ragged coat flapped around his ankles but his expression was stone. There was nothing in his eyes but terror.
The hole widened.
Not nothing, any more. Now she was watching a bad film projected onto a sheet of cloth suspended in air. A still shot of a bedroom: pink wallpaper faded by sun, bedspread crumpled like discarded manuscript. Sprawled across the bed was a girl of no more than twelve in royal purple pyjamas. Auburn hair fanned across her pillows. Cherry-red hair elastics on the bedside table. Her mouth hung open in sleep, wide enough that Kimberly could see her braces. On her bedside table was a statuette of one of the seven dwarves - Grumpy, if Kimberly remembered her Disney. Beside it, a black alarm clock blazed red numbers into the night: 2:18.
"Go," Fitch hissed. "Get through!"
"But-"
The figures were moving. The moment when they snapped out of their statue-state was so unexpected that Kimberly almost squeaked in surprise. Three approached the hole in reality, two flanking the bedroom and the third stepping up to the barrier, stepping up and through-
Out of Rustwood and into wherever in less time than it took to draw breath. The hooded figure leaned over the bed. Hands of silver slipped from beneath the sleeves of its robe and closed around the girl's neck.
She opened her eyes at the last moment. Even from such a distance Kimberly could see the poor girl was terrified.
She didn't cry. No time for that. Just a twist and a pull, like popping the cork from a champagne bottle.
Kimberly bit down on her fist to keep the scream inside. It'd snapped her neck like an afterthought, the poor girl, Jesus Christ, only a child, only a child... Fitch was pushing her, whispering run, lady! What're you waiting for? She couldn't, not now. Not after watching a child of twelve broken so easily, hands twitching on the bedspread, her dead eyes still open, still staring.
And then-
Kimberly blinked. What she was seeing didn't make sense. There was a girl on the bed and a girl in the figure's arms, but they were the same girl. The figure in black had lifted its hands from the dead girl's neck and tugged something free, something in the shape of a child.
Her spirit? It didn't look like a spirit - solid, heavy, bare feet dangling, tiny toes brushing the bedroom carpet. The figure turned to face the congregation, and for a moment Kimberly saw beneath the hood. Hollows of shadow, cheekbones sharp as blades, and the teeth, so many teeth turned in like beartraps. Then it let the body fall, tumbling from that distant bedroom into the nave.
The girl that landed on the flagstone floor was naked, wisps of smoke still trailing from her skin, as if passage through the doorway had burned away every scrap of cloth. She fell to the floor on her hands and knees and lay still. If she was breathing, Kimberly couldn't see it.
Behind her, in another world, the alarm clock ticked to 2:20.
"Jesus Christ," Kimberly whispered. "Did you see what they did to her? Did you see-"
"Quiet!" The figure was returning from the doorway, shimmering as it approached the barrier. There was a thick, gluey sound as it stepped through, and then it was in the room with them, slipping through that mirror as easily as someone breaking through the surface of a still pond.
The door flexed. The dead girl's room was fading, like God had turned down the brightness knob on the entire world, but Kimberly could still make out the horses emblazoned on the pink wallpaper, the upturned toys by the foot of the bed - she'd expected dolls, but this girl had what looked like an entire collection of TONKA trucks stacked in the shadows - and most important of all, the corpse atop the bedspread. The crumpled figure, neck twisted at a lunatic angle, so far around that the poor girl was almost looking out over her own shoulder blades. Blood spotting her cheeks, running from her nose in two finger-thick streams. Eyes open, lips drawn back. Tongue clenched between her teeth. White on pink, and below her, where blood had dripped from the duvet and soaked into the carpet, pink on white.
Fitch whispered, "Go!"
His voice was in her ear and a thousand miles away. She swallowed convulsively. Her throat was closed over. God, the dead girl and the naked one now lying on the chapel floor, so small, so vulnerable. Kimberly wanted to snatch her up and press her to her chest. Whisper comforting nothings.
"Go!"
"I can't!"
"Don't run now, you're never getting home." Fitch had a molotov in one hand and his lighter in the other. He flicked the lid from his zippo and touched the flame to the cloth. It flared i
nstantly, the heat enough to make Kimberly flinch back. Then he took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, wrapped it around the base of the bottle and handed it to Kimberly. "If they get in the way, you burn them. Get through no matter what, you hear?"
Kimberly grabbed the bottle by the base, forefinger and thumb, trying to keep scraps of flaming cloth from landing on her wrist. "How're you getting out?"
"I'll figure a way," Fitch was already lighting another molotov. No handkerchief for him - his skin was already stained by benzene. The stench of petrol was dizzying. "No goodbyes, lady."
He sprang to his feet before Kimberly could reply, leaping from the safety of the pews and crossing the nave at a sprint. The creatures turned at the thud of footsteps, hissing in alarm, although Kimberly saw no eyes beneath those cowls, no eyes at all.
"Burn!" he called, and hurled his molotov overarm.
It was a near miss, spiralling between two of the figures and exploding against a wooden pew. The crash of breaking glass was followed by a low whump of ignition. Heat splashed against Kimberly's cheeks as the convent filled with the roar of flames.
Fire lapped across the backs of pews and clung stickily to the flagstone flooring. The creatures didn't seem to mind. They left the dead girl where she lay and angled around the flames, sliding soundlessly between the pews as they closed on Fitch.
He was pressed against the opposite wall, another molotov already in hand, struggling to touch the lighter to the rag. His eyes met hers as they surrounded him.
Go.
The path was clear.
Kimberly ran like a live wire had been touched to the soles of her feet, leaping the first pew and skidding around the second, aiming straight down the central aisle. The figures spun as she passed, pulling back and forth between herself and Fitch. One creature lunged for her, a single finger scraping along the back of her neck, but she kept moving, aimed for the doorway at the furthest end of the convent.
The doorway was fading fast: barely a projection through which she could make out the old red brick of the chapel wall. But she could still feel it, the chill of that bedroom, the fan in the far corner revolving slowly, blowing her hair back over her shoulders. She could smell the blood, the detergent used to wash the bedspread. The delicate remnants of a dead girl's perfume.
The copy, the stolen girl, lay in front of the doorway. Or was the one left behind the copy? A mirror image with a broken neck?
She didn't have time to check the girl's body, but as she jumped over the corpse she realised it wasn't a corpse at all, that she was breathing ever so slightly. Dead in one world and living in another, and that meant-
The train bearing down. She hadn't been dragged away from the tracks at all. She'd died there, she'd died in New York, and-
Glass crashed behind her. The hairs on the back of her neck curled. Kimberly spun.
A great wall of fire had leaped up between her and Fitch, blocking her path back to the tunnel and the double doors. Fitch was capering, leaping between the pews, a third molotov in his hand, and in the heart of the flames...
Two figures. The nuns, or whatever they were, swatted at their arms as the inferno licked over their shoulders and crowned them in light.
They didn't scream. In that moment it seemed as if they were dancing, throwing their arms high as their robes fell away in tatters of ash. And beneath their robes...
Firelight glittered on something that wasn't flesh.
"Go!" Fitch screamed, and hurled his third molotov. One of the figures caught in the fire raised one twig-thin hand and slapped the bottle out of the air. Flame plumed around its bony fingers. "Look out, you stupid-"
Not all the things in robes were chasing Fitch. One had turned on its heels and was moving to cut Kimberly off. The doorway was almost gone now, a thin film thrown across the red brick, the sort of illusion that would blow away in a strong wind.
She reached for it, and-
It was like standing beneath the stream of an ice-cold shower. A sudden chill slammed up her arm and clicked her jaw shut. Her fingers passed the threshold, slipping through that mirror-doorway into the bloodstained bedroom, becoming like a watercolour painted on rotten canvas, insubstantial, a ghost image half-glimpsed through moonlight.
Her hand was in the chapel, still pink and dirt-stained. Her fingers were in another world, fading fast. The dead girl on the bed stared at her with blood-spotted eyes. The clock on the bedside table read 2:22. It seemed like hours had passed since the girl's neck had been twisted backwards, an age since she'd bitten down on the screams.
It was freedom she could touch. A strange girl's bedroom, somewhere beyond Rustwood. All she had to do was throw herself those final few yards, plunge through the illusion before it winked out altogether.
Behind her, Fitch screamed.
She shouldn't have looked back. Even as she turned her head she knew it was a mistake. Better to forget him, to plunge through into the relative safety of the bedroom, to leave Rustwood behind. But, still, she turned.
Fitch was backed up against the double-doors, cut off from the tunnel exit by an arc of fire so tall and hot it burned almost white. He had another bottle in hand, his fourth, but the zippo slipped from his grip and clattered across the stone floor. It glittered where it lay, reflecting the firelight.
"Fuckers!" Fitch yanked at the bar set across the double doors but it was too heavy - all he could do was grunt and strain as the figures closed in, flames falling from the ends of their robes.
Kimberly pushed her right hand deeper into the mirror-doorway, the cold wrapping around her bones. The doorway was almost gone, the bedroom a bare whisper on the other side. One step...
The molotov was still in her left hand, still burning, the wick reduced to a stub of fluttering fabric. Fitch was backed against the doors, encircled, scrabbling for his lighter. The figures closed in, still burning, their cowls reduced to ash around their shoulders. In the lunatic flicker of firelight Kimberly saw hairless skulls stitched with old scars, black thread looping from pus-filled wounds. The shiver of flame on steel cabling, holes in paper-pale skin big enough to slip her hand through, and God, inside, there were things squirming in there, white and slippery and foul.
The doorway was a sepia memory. Home was so close she could smell it. The molotov rag was barely a stub. The last flakes of ash fell across her fingers.
"Go!" Fitch called. Then a shriek like he'd been skewered.
Then, silence.
Chapter 21
Kimberly moved on instinct. She didn't think of New York. She didn't think of the doorway vanishing behind her. All she thought about was Fitch, stumbling and screaming.
She hurled her molotov across the nave. It was a poor throw, so high the bottle clipped a wooden beam bracing the vaulted ceiling.
Glass rained across the chapel. Napalm fell in a thick cloud like spring mist.
It ignited.
A tornado-wall of flame rolled across the nave. It engulfed the hooded strangers and boiled over the pews, lapping at the cold stone walls, spreading bright white fingers of heat across the vaulted ceiling.
Sap boiled and popped, loud as gunshots. Smoke threaded between the beams. She managed one breath and gagged, tears springing to her eyes.
Tall figures stumbled in the flame. Fitch had stopped shrieking. She squinted through the waves of heat. There: a hunched silhouette, pressing against the barred double-doors that led to the outside world, warding the robed figures away with clenched fists.
Alive.
She'd done everything she could. No more molotovs, no knives, nothing but the flashlight tucked into her belt. Fitch was strong. He could make his own way out.
Kimberly turned to the doorway.
It'd faded further, becoming a watercolour painting on the rear wall of the nave, the dead girl's bedroom less than a memory. She threw herself at that distant, impossible place but her fingers only brushed rough brick.
"Please," she whispered.
The doorw
ay vanished.
Home was gone. Nothing for her but the convent, the fire, the tall black figures striding through the flames with their robes falling in tatters around their feet.
She was frozen in place. Her legs were cramped, her lungs seized, her last breath bubbling in her skull. I'm going to die here, she thought. This only happens to other people. I can't die, I can't-
The closest figure leaped at her through the flames, and Kimberly threw herself low. It snatched at her hair with spiderlike fingers, and she screamed as it dragged its nails along her scalp, a sudden heat blooming there like she'd been cut down to the bone.
Kimberly drove upward off the flagstones, slamming her shoulder into the figure's gut. She'd expected to meet belly-flesh but her shoulder sank in, sank through, like she'd driven her fist into jelly. Something crunched, a dry snapping noise like stale bread broken in half.
The creature in the robe didn't wail, didn't protest. Its grip tightened on Kimberly's hair and before she could pull free it hurled her aside. She tumbled, skidding on the stones and slamming spine-first into a pew.
The wood was hot against her back, searing through her shirt. She rolled away, nostrils already full with the stink of burning hair, and scrambled on hands and knees around the edge of the nave. If the passage to the dead girl's bedroom had been on the north end of the convent, she was pressed against the west wall, far from Fitch and the double doors on the south end. As for the exit back into the mines, the fire had cut that off completely, pools of napalm coating every surface like sticky resin. The heat was so intense she thought she might faint.
The convent was large enough for a couple hundred worshippers and there was more than enough space to skirt the fire, but the nave was becoming a kiln. She'd bake from the inside long before the flames caught her.
Fitch yelled at her from the far end of the convent. "You idiot! I told you to run!"
"I can't! It's closed! Where's the girl?"
"What girl?"
"The little girl, the one-"
Rust: Two Page 17
