Diary of the Displaced Box Set

by Glynn James

  But my disbelief continued all the way back to the unnamed street beyond Merriwether Avenue. At first my instinct was to go to the house, but because it was so quiet in the street I found myself walking past the street and on to the next. Then we started down the street towards where the crucified body of Dha'mir was waiting for us.

  We made our way past the long rows of abandoned houses, their broken windows like gaping holes leading into the darkness inside, a darkness that could hide any number of horrible things.

  Finally, in the middle of the street, was Dha'mir, just as I had thought I had seen. He was nailed to a wooden post, and not just by his hands and feet. Six-inch-long stakes were driven through his arms, legs, everywhere. There was a gaping hole in his stomach that should have held the mass of intestines that hung down to the ground. There was dried blood everywhere.

  I approached him slowly, realising that I was not going to get any information out of him. He was long dead.

  Or so I thought until his eyes opened.

  He looked at me and the edges of his mouth curled into a painful smile.

  "I wondered how long it would take you to get here, James."

  I jumped back, surprised, as did DogThing and GreyFoot. Then they began to growl. I glanced around, realising that my instincts had been correct after all. From the dark places around us the Kre'esh crept. Out from windows and broken doorways they came, dozens of them. I looked around quickly for a direction of escape, but knew that we were surrounded. We were trapped, and there was no way that we would be able to battle this many of them. I expected Nua'lath to step out from the darkness at any moment, to survey the success of his subterfuge.

  "Do not worry about them," said Dha'mir. "They are under my control and will not harm you." His voice was strained, and considering how much of his insides were no longer inside his body I wondered how he was able to speak at all.

  I turned back to face him. His face was pale and his eyes burned red with some kind of infection.

  "Like I can trust anything you say," I said, almost spitting the words out at him.

  He laughed and I could feel the mockery in his voice. Then his face contorted with pain and blood trickled from his mouth.

  "You have little choice, do you not?"

  I said nothing.

  "I have been a fool, James. And this is my final punishment. It is all that I can do with my remaining powers to keep myself alive and keep the Kre'esh from eating me. And you for that matter. Though I have managed to feed from their energy enough that they are now held together only by my will."

  "I should just kill you now, and take my chances."

  "Oh you will not need to fight them. They, as I said, they are alive only by my will. If you kill me, which I am hoping that you will do, they will die too. I was merely using them to guide you to me."

  I lifted my gun towards him, determined to end him before his poisoned tongue could persuade me otherwise.

  "Wait," he said, his body shuddering as he coughed up more blood. "You need to know..."

  "Need to know what?" I almost spat the words at him. "More of your twisted lies?"

  "Not this time." He coughed again, and visibly strained to continue speaking. "If you wish to know where your family has gone, you will listen. Please. I have held on for as long as I can, but the waiting has been torturous. I need to tell you."

  I lowered my gun. Beside me DogThing growled.

  "Nua'lath is no longer in this place," said Dha'mir.

  My heart nearly stopped at hearing those words.

  "What do you mean? He can't..."

  "Oh but he can and he has. I learned much as he tortured me. And he did torture me, very slowly. The sword that I thrust into your chest is nothing to what you would have been subjected to had you been with me when I confronted him."

  I peered at him. Hatred burned inside me. I had no sympathy for this creature who, in my opinion at the time, had played us all in his game and had failed.

  "He has your family. They are now his gate openers, chained together and under his control. I am sure they suffer greatly."

  At this I collapsed onto the road, unable to speak.

  Dha'mir continued.

  "I was not aware that he had captured them, and if I had known that he had found a way to regain some of his former strength I would not have ventured to face him. He overpowered me as though I was but an insect."

  "How?" I said, finally.

  "They sought to leave and he was waiting. Do not concern yourself with them, though. If you act fast you may be able to save them and they may not be entirely destroyed. His gate openers are his most precious of pets, and he sees to it that they are not harmed. Otherwise they would not perform their duties well."

  Chione, Abegail, Andre. They were in the hands of the enemy.

  "He is gone to another place now, and no doubt already bringing forth the armies. If you are quick, you may be able to follow him. It was no more than a day ago that he headed out of the city, to a place out there beyond these ruins. I could see the place in my mind before, but now I don't have the strength. The portal's activation and my own efforts to live have drained me beyond repair."

  "How? How did he manage to open a gate out of here? We thought it wasn't possible."

  "You were right. It is impossible. But it is possible to get into here from the outside. It is possible if you have enough power. Your pathetic portals are nothing when compared to the great storm portals that move The Horde to new worlds. Nua'lath merely had to find a way to contact one of his lieutenants to aid him in opening a way through, and oh how you helped him to achieve that did you not? How proud he was of his success when you handed him his escape."

  At this I stood up, the anger surging forward again and replacing the grief and horror of the knowledge of what had become of my family.

  "Me? How did I help him?"

  "The one with whom your mind joined. The one from another world. The memories of this place would linger in his mind, just as his memories stayed with you. There were already minions of Nua'lath's on your home world, were there not? It was only a matter of time before one of them sensed the poor creature's troubled nightmares. Then they would look closer, they would delve into his mind, they may even have hurt him, tortured him, until they found how deep the nightmares went, and then they would discover the secret buried inside, they would know where to find their master."

  The man from London.

  The man in the mirror.

  He would not forget everything, just as I had not forgotten.

  "They found the man you shared your mind with, and took him away to somewhere that they could use him, pry into his mind and pull out what they needed to find their master and open a way out for him. The portal will still be open. They can be open for days, weeks, even years. Some remain open for ever."

  I looked him in the eyes.

  "Which way? Where will the portal lead?"

  He looked along the street, towards the edge of The City, to the area of The Corridor that I had not explored, the area of which my own memories of the past had yet to give me any recollection.

  "That way. Find the hill. It is not far into the darkness. As to where it will come out, I have no idea, though I would guess that he will head to one of the old worlds, a place that has already been attacked, but one that still has a large amount of Horde minions on it still. Also there are other places, places in between worlds. Pocket dimensions. They are everywhere. I would suggest he will try to head for one of those, for there are many that he used as hidden bases before."

  "Why are you helping me now?"

  "Because you are the only one who can avenge me by destroying him. You must go beyond the City, and cross the darkness to where his home lies. Beyond that you will find the hill. I suggest you do not look at what else is there, for it may disturb you. Kill him."

  "But we never found a way to destroy him. He was impervious to any damage. Nothing we tried would do it. That's why we had to trap him
in the end."

  Was he? I thought for a moment and the image of a lump of raw flesh on the ground outside the house on Merriwether appeared in my mind. I had wounded him with a simple weapon. But how?

  "The key is in his gate openers, the Icons. Kill them and he becomes mortal once more. He wasn't always immortal. The talisman that is buried in his heart, the one that he stole, is what made him that way. The power that feeds that talisman is drawn from his Icons, the Gate Openers, and through them it is drawn from his minions. They are his conduit."

  "I will not kill my own family."

  "Then you will not kill him. You must destroy them, for they are now his link to every creature in the Horde, his source of power and the thing that makes him immortal. You must kill them, or you must separate them somehow. But be wary. The power that his gate openers lend him, the power that they draw from the lives that the horde destroys, is also gifted upon them to some degree. It heals them as much as it heals and sustains him. But I think that they can be destroyed. Once he is separated from them he will become mortal. Do I have to say this a third time?"

  "How do I do it? If he heals them and they heal him, it's never-ending. It's been tried for centuries. No one succeeded."

  "Indeed. And if I had known how to do it I would not be hanging here, on this cross, dying. Now, I have told you what you must do. You must kill me. Release me from the fate that he has given me. If I die slowly upon this cross, my power will become his. Such is the nature of this death. But you can stop it. If you kill me, then he will not gain."

  I glanced around at the Kre'esh. They encircled us, keeping their distance, hissing and spitting, then I turned back to Dha'mir.

  "I should leave you here to rot."

  He laughed once more, this time through a barrier of agony as his body wracked with pain and he coughed up yet more blood.

  "Kill me and the Kre'esh will also die."

  I raised my gun, stepped forward and aimed at his head.

  "I hope that you burn forever in hell."

  He opened his mouth to speak, but I didn't give him the chance.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The loud crack of the gun echoed through the streets, and all around us the Kre'esh dropped dead.

  We moved quickly. Once more I was on Professor Adler's bicycle, with DogThing and GreyFoot running at my side, but this time we were venturing into the unknown, just as every step had been when I originally woke up here. We had rushed back to the house on Merriwether, and as much as my stomach was now screaming at me for food and water, I didn't stop. I probably could have cooked up the mushrooms that I had, or found something in the house, but if the gateway closed whilst I was there then I would be trapped in The Corridor with no way of knowing where Nua'lath had gone, and no way to get there anyway. We rushed through the streets of The City and out into the darkness that surrounded it.

  The land this side of The City was a barren place, much like the desert near The Warrens, but the ground was hard rock, so it was easy to ride the bike. Unlike the smooth marble of the plateau, this was bare rock littered with collapsed, dead trees and rubble. I had no memory of this place or of us ever bringing trees into The Corridor, and no flashback leapt at me to fill in the gaps, but it was of no matter. I pressed on ahead.

  Dha'mir had said it was not far, and he was not lying this time. I had only been pedalling across the hard ground for twenty minutes or so, maybe half an hour, when the looming shape of some kind of large building slowly crept towards us from the gloom. Beyond that, in the distance and silhouetting the monster of a building was some kind of bright light.

  I jumped from the bicycle and the three of us moved slowly and cautiously forward.

  The building was maybe a hundred feet high, and stretched into the darkness in both directions. Large gothic windows, now glassless, left huge gaping black holes in the brick-work, the darkness from within seeming somehow blacker than anywhere else, like the evil mouth of some great beast.

  It must have once had a very grand roof spanning the top of it, but now only some of the rafters stuck out into the air like a blackened ribcage. Littered across the floor, everywhere, it seemed, were broken bones covered in rags and pale white skulls looking up at me from the dirt.

  I pushed the bicycle along with one hand, drawing my gun with the other as we stepped through an archway and into the building's interior.

  It was at that moment that I remembered Dha'mir's suggestion of not spending too long looking at what else would be here, and I regretted not taking his advice immediately.

  Everywhere around us was evidence of how truly evil Nua'lath really was. More crosses lined the walls with skeletal remains hanging from them. Metal machines, most of which I hadn't the faintest of clues as to their function, other than finally death, were scattered across the ground, the remains of their victims still clinging to them, and dark, dried stains splattering their rusted surfaces.

  I felt sick as we moved through the vast building.

  It was a train station.

  Four deep pits ran through the entire length of the building. Rusted and broken railway tracks still lay at the bottom of each pit, each of them leading away from a crumbling retaining wall all the way out to the other side of the massive structure through four gaping holes that had once been ornately decorated archways. That would have been a long time ago. Now these four archways lay in ruin, with barely any of the stonework still standing.

  Where had this place come from? There were no recollections jumping into my mind to tell me, no flashbacks seizing me to force the memory upon me. I just stood there, with DogThing and GreyFoot nearby, gawping at the one thing that was still, almost, in one piece.

  A train.

  On the third track, parked as though it were still waiting, as it had been for decades, was an old steam train with four gaudily painted carriages attached to it.

  This must have been Nua'lath's home. Had he lived in the train?

  I took a step towards the first carriage but stopped as I heard a quiet whining noise behind me.

  "We should leave this place."

  I turned and looked at DogThing, and then back at the train.

  Some things are best not known.

  Light does not travel far in The Corridor, as I had learned so many days ago, and had probably known for years if I could have remembered, and when the portal appeared it was quite sudden. A few hundred yards away, beyond the four ruined archways, another massive archway of an entirely different kind stood. It was of red crackling energy and was perched atop a small hill. It was barely big enough to be called a hill, maybe thirty feet high, but it seemed like a mountain jutting from the completely flat ground that surrounded it, and was dwarfed only by the monstrous ghost of the train station.

  The portal.

  "Let's go."

  I holstered my gun and jumped back onto the bicycle, pushing off a little harder than I intended. And I didn't slow down until we reached the foot of the hill.

  It was then that I saw that it wasn't made of rock or earth. Thousands of bones and skulls were piled high, gradually sloping upwards towards where the portal burned with energy. Underneath the mound of skeletons, even the hard, rocky ground was black and charred.

  As sickening as it felt, I left the bicycle and climbed up to the summit. It was a hard climb, and very steep, and every step I took I could feel the bones underneath me shift and collapse. Dead and hollow faces stared back at me from the mass of shifting bones.

  Where in the hell had they all come from?

  Eventually I reached the top of the hill and stood before the portal. I tried to make out what was beyond the crackling waves of energy, but unlike the portals I had opened before, and the holes that we had seen, there was no view of where the gate would take us. I turned to DogThing and GreyFoot.

  "You don't have to come with me."

  It was a stupid comment. I knew, just as they did, that they had no other means to escape The Corridor, but I also knew that
wherever we were about to go was probably even more dangerous.

  "We are coming."

  I nodded, took a deep breath, and then stepped through the portal.

  Into dark streets that bustled with life and movement.

  I stood for a moment, taking the scene in, and then I looked to my side and thankfully found DogThing and GreyFoot there. Behind me was just darkness. No portal, no crackling, fiery light.

  No way back.

  I was standing in a dark alleyway that ended directly behind me in a stone wall and the overhung tiles of a low roof. A stack of bags spilling with foul-smelling refuse was a few feet away, and just beyond that, a busy street. Above me, the pale light of two moons shone through the overhanging buildings on either side, a thin line of eerie light. The other thing that I noticed was the state of disrepair. Three windows faced onto the alleyway, all of them small, the windows broken and the woodwork rotten and cracked. Twenty feet away, the wall at the back of the alleyway was partly collapsed, exposing the larger blocks of the inner wall. This was also crumbling. Weeds and grass pushed up from between the gaps in pavement that looked like it was at least a hundred years old, maybe older, and the guttering that ran down the alleyway to my left was broken in many places.

  It would have been nice to have seen somewhere that wasn't falling apart for a change, but that was not to be.

  I was so busy taking in my surroundings that I hadn't even noticed that I was being watched.

  "They went that way," said a voice from the darkness behind me. "Turned right."

  I spun around, nearly jumping out of my own skin, but still managed to aim my gun into the shadows at the back of the alleyway, and even though I squinted, I couldn't see the person who had spoken.

  DogThing and GreyFoot crouched and glared directly at one dark corner.

  "Easy. I was just trying to be helpful. I don't mean no harm."