The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  The orderly hurried off to attend to another patient. Dispirited, Hadrian sank back onto the mattress and pulled the covers up to his chin. The news that Stockholm was in as bad a state as he was didn't help. Sadness rose over him like a cowl. More than anything, he wanted to call home, to hear a familiar voice. Your brother is dead. Did their parents know yet? Did they know Hadrian was still alive?

  And Ellis. Where was she? Was she safe? Did she think he was dead too?

  A murmur of voices teased him as Bechard talked to someone outside the ward. Beyond that, in the distance, he heard what sounded like a crowd at a football match: the mingled throats of thousands of people all shouting at once. Shouting, or screaming.

  He didn't know if they played football in Sweden, and he supposed it didn't matter much.

  Bechard returned with a glass of warm orange juice and placed it on the table next to his bed. Hadrian's mouth was dry and his throat still raw from the chokehold. The bitter taste of the juice reminded him of happier times, of breakfasts and fruit picking during the holidays. Tears came again, and he was glad to be secluded with his grief.

  An unknown time later, Hadrian sat bolt upright, clutching the bed, totally disoriented. His heart shuddered in his chest. Adrenaline gave everything around him a cold, brilliant clarity. The cotton weave blanket was rough under his fingertips and the air cold against his skin. Moonlight angled in a sharply defined rectangular block from a window on the far side of the curtain. There was no other light at all.

  He forced himself to breathe. The knowledge of where he was—and what had happened to him—gradually returned. He felt like a skier swallowed up in an avalanche, unable to evade each crushing revelation as it came. If only they had gone somewhere other than Europe, he thought. If only they had listened to Ellis about the Swede. Now, because they hadn't, he would always be on his own.

  The weird thing was, he didn't feel alone…

  “You were dreaming,” said a voice out of the darkness.

  He jumped. “Who—?” He choked back the question as the broad silhouette of Detective Lascowicz eclipsed the moonlight. “What?”

  “You were dreaming. Do you remember?”

  Hadrian struggled through the shock to recall. If the detective had come to him in the middle of the night, it had to be important.

  “There was a pit, a gulf. Everything was dark and upside-down. There were—things—with giant lobster claws chasing me. I could smell smoke, and hear lions roaring…”

  He stopped in sudden embarrassment, feeling the detective's eyes on him. Other people's dreams were not to be taken seriously.

  “That's all,” he lied, although there was much more: a gold-skinned demon running under a sky full of shooting stars; a landscape as tortured and twisted as a First World War battlefield; and Seth, alone and afraid, just as he was.

  “I am not here to talk about your dreams,” Lascowicz said, “although they do interest me.” His manner was tense, tightly contained. “Locyta. The Swede. You said he spoke to you. Can you remember what he said?”

  “Something about our time coming. I already told you that.”

  Lascowicz nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes. Was there more?”

  “It was in Swedish. I didn't understand it.”

  “Did he ever use a word that sounded like ‘Yod’?”

  Hadrian was about to repeat, angrily, that he wouldn't remember a single word—when he realised that this one did strike him as familiar. The Swede had babbled something just before stabbing Seth in the chest. The stab itself had coincided with the sound Lascowicz was asking about.

  “Yod,” he said, nodding. “Yes. He did say that. What does it mean? Is it significant?”

  The detective stood. Moonlight caught his face. Eyes and teeth gleamed silver.

  Hadrian froze. Something had changed in the detective since their first meeting. He was taciturn, almost hostile. And he stank of dog.

  That wasn't unreasonable, he told himself. If Lascowicz had been working all day without rest, abruptness was the best he could expect. And police everywhere employed tracker dogs. There was no reason to feel unnerved.

  Yet he did. Something was different. He could feel it.

  “I don't know,” Lascowicz said in answer to Hadrian's question. His voice shook. “I think that it might be significant, but my thoughts do not make sense. I feel—I feel as though I am waking from a long, deep sleep, as you just did. I see things. I hear voices that tell me everything I knew before was a dream. I am—” The detective hugged himself. The sound of his breathing was loud in the darkness. “I am on fire.”

  Hadrian didn't know what to say or do. Every muscle in his body was rigid, responding to the passion he heard in Lascowicz's voice.

  “Wait here.”

  The detective moved suddenly, launching himself through the curtains as though a bomb had gone off under him. His footsteps ran down the length of the ward. The door slammed heavily behind him.

  The echoes of the slam dropped like a stone into a bottomless lake. Hadrian waited for his fellow patients to complain about the noise. And waited…

  Within a dozen breaths, the strange encounter was overtaken by another strangeness entirely—one of absence, not presence.

  It was quiet in the ward. Too quiet, he realised. He could hear no snoring or breathing of the other patients in the ward. The man with the broken leg was wordless for once.

  Uneasily, Hadrian pulled back the blanket and slid his bare legs off the bed. Standing in nothing but his boxer shorts, he took stock of his surroundings in the dim moonlight. There was the bedside table, there the end of the bed. The chair was well out of the way, where Lascowicz had sat. He put on the hospital robe, and shivered.

  “Hello?” His voice wavered from the tiled walls. “Is anyone awake?”

  No answer.

  He padded softly around the bed to the gap in the curtains. The jingle of the rings securing it to the rail above sounded very loud as he peered out at the room beyond. The other five beds also had their curtains closed. The window through which the moonlight shone was at one end of the ward; at the other, the double door leading to the hallway was closed.

  “Hello?” he called again. Still no sound. With a whisper of fabric, he slipped through the curtain and darted across the room, into the space between the berth opposite his and the one next to the window, where the man with the American accent had been sleeping. He felt for the gap in its curtains and stuck his head through.

  The bed was empty. The sheets were pulled back, as though the man occupying it had got up to go to the toilet. Hadrian withdrew his head and tried the berth next door, only to find it in a similar state. Increasingly mystified, he checked all the berths. They were all unoccupied.

  Apart from himself and the moonlight, the ward was empty.

  His disquiet grew upon realising that the silence around him extended beyond the walls of his ward. He crept closer to the door and pressed his ear against it, irrationally afraid of it bursting open in his face. The corridor outside was as still as the grave. No rattling of trolleys and the chattering of nurses and orderlies. Even the air-conditioning had let up.

  When he touched the door, intending to peer outside, it didn't budge. It was locked.

  He raised a hand to hammer on it, then lowered it to think. The door wasn't just locked; he was locked in. Lascowicz would only have done that because he thought Hadrian was either guilty or in danger—but why not tell Hadrian in either case? Why leave him literally in the dark?

  He tried a light switch. It was dead. The generator appeared to be out again.

  Something was going on. Feeling trapped and frustrated, Hadrian crossed to the window. He didn't want to wait around to be arrested or attacked without knowing why. The glass was smoky and dirty, but a pane shifted under his hand, and he managed to open it a fraction. Cool air greeted him, but not as cold as he had expected given the frigid weather in Stockholm. No rumble of traffic came from the street.

&nbs
p; He craned his neck to see the ground below. A stone ledge blocked his view. He was quite high up, maybe five storeys, and the buildings around him were dark. A smell of smoke came faintly on the wind, sharp and acrid, as though something other than wood was burning. The moon was almost full, he noted—putting the date within a day or two of the attack on him and his brother—and by its light he made out roofs, pipes, chimneys, and fire escapes. The skyline was a jagged toothscape silhouetted against the stars. Two slender skyscrapers dominated the view, but he didn't recognise either of them.

  He tried to push the pane wider. It wouldn't give. That was lucky, he told himself, because the thought of crawling through it and dropping to the ledge below made his bowels turn to water. Being trapped inside was no good either, though. He had to find a way out that didn't involve further risk to life and limb.

  Before Hadrian could think of one, he heard footsteps approaching the door. His first instinct was to get back into bed so no one would know that he had been out of it. A flare of resentment put paid to that possibility. He wasn't going to wait quietly for whatever was going to happen to him. That would get him nowhere. It could be the murderous Locyta returning to finish the job he had started.

  The footsteps reached the door and stopped. Keys jingled softly. Hadrian moved quickly up the centre of the room and ducked out of sight behind the curtain closest to the door.

  The doors opened with a sigh, admitting a wash of soft yellow light that seemed bright to his dark-accustomed eyes. He shrank back into the shadows as two people stepped into the room, one large and the other slight. He recognised them instantly: Detective Lascowicz had returned with the orderly Bechard. They moved with heavy steps into the room.

  He held his breath and asked himself what Seth would do. Would he reveal himself, or run? His brother wasn't one to take anything lying down, given a choice, but getting out of the room would solve only part of Hadrian's problem: he had no clothes, no passport, no money, and not the slightest idea where he was. Who was going to help a panicked tourist in his underwear and a gown made of little more than tissue paper?

  You'll just have to look out for yourself, he imagined Seth saying.

  Lascowicz and Bechard reached the curtain surrounding his bed.

  On shoeless feet, Hadrian slipped around the curtain's edge and towards the door. He fought the urge to run. One sudden move or misstep would ruin everything. Peering around the jamb, he found the corridor beyond long and empty, lit only by moonlight from open windows. Darkness crowded each patch of light, giving the view a strange perspective. The elevator doors at the far end were dead. The police officer who had been there earlier was gone.

  Hadrian put the ward behind him just as Bechard raised his hand to open the curtain.

  “Wait,” said the detective, his voice deep and guttural. “I smell—”

  A window shattered with a sound like night itself breaking. Bechard yelled and Hadrian heard scuffling feet on linoleum. He didn't stop to find out what was going on. He just ran, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the ward while Lascowicz and Bechard were distracted.

  The orderly shouted again. A high-pitched cackle mocked him in return. Hadrian heard growling, like a large dog warning off an intruder. There was more scuffling, then the sound of a curtain being torn aside.

  The roar of anger that followed was like nothing Hadrian had ever heard before.

  He ran down the corridor and took the first corner he came to. His breath rasped in his throat and lungs, scalding hot. Someone (or something) was running behind him. He imagined that he heard football spikes (or claws) ripping into the linoleum, tearing it up with every step. He whispered “Jesus!” without knowing he was doing it.

  Lifeless fluorescent lights swept by overhead. No one stuck their head out into the corridor to see what the commotion was. He saw an EXIT sign ahead and kicked the door next to it, making it swing open and slam closed. He didn't stop, though. He kept running to the next corner and turned out of sight just as his pursuer reached the corner behind him.

  The swinging door distracted the person chasing him. He had hoped for that. He could hear them scuffling on the stairs, trying to find him. His breathing sounded like bellows in his ears as Hadrian ran along the corridor to a nurses’ station at the next intersection. It was unattended, and he didn't dare call out.

  He stopped momentarily, trying to think. He had nothing: no weapon, no plan, no way of calling for help, no hope. There wasn't even an “In Case of Emergency, Smash Glass” option at hand. He had left his only chance of escape behind him, in the stairwell. Now his pursuer lay between the stairs and himself.

  He ducked behind the nurses’ station as Bechard appeared at the end of the corridor. The orderly was obviously looking for him. When Bechard had moved on, Hadrian reached up from his hiding place and picked up the nearest phone. He heard nothing but silence; not even a dial tone.

  “Fun and games,” whispered a voice. A shadow moved beyond a half-open door. Something tinkled.

  Hadrian shrank down again. Too late.

  “Come in here, boy. I can help you.”

  Hadrian shook his head.

  “Don't be shy,” hissed the voice. “You can't afford that luxury.”

  Hadrian raised a finger to his lips, urging the owner of the voice to be quiet. The sound of footsteps had returned to the corridor behind him, picking their way across the linoleum with stealthy caution. Again, there was an unnerving hint of claws to the sound, as though the feet belonged to a large animal, not a person.

  “Now, now.” Two gleaming eyes resolved in the shadows, unnaturally close to the floor. “You want your brother's body, don't you?”

  Hadrian felt his face go cold. What do you know about my brother? he wanted to shout. What do you know about me?

  All he could do was nod.

  “Come on, then,” hissed the voice. “In here—now!”

  The eyes retreated. Hadrian followed as though tied to them, scurrying across the floor and into the room in one ungainly motion. The door clicked shut behind him.

  “About time, boy. Stand up.”

  Thin fingers tugged at him. Bony limbs wrapped themselves around his legs and torso. A child-sized body clambered up his, pinching his skin and then tugging on his ears. Dexterous toes gripped his shoulders; sharp fingernails dug into his scalp.

  “What—?”

  Flame burst in the darkness, yellow-bright and flickering. Hadrian would have cried out but for the hand that suddenly clapped itself down on his mouth.

  “Not a sound,” breathed the creature in his ear, “or you'll kill us both.”

  He nodded despairingly. Dark limbs unfolded and the flame—just one, apparently sprouting from the tip of a knobby finger—rose back up to the ceiling. The flame tickled the base of a fire detector, making the plastic blacken and buckle. Water exploded from two sprinklers on either side of the room, instantly drenching both Hadrian and the creature standing on him.

  The flame went out. Hadrian staggered as the creature on his shoulders leapt down onto the floor near the door. It pressed its ear against the dripping wood.

  Heavy footsteps splashed up the hallway away from them. Something growled.

  “Who are you?” Hadrian managed. The hissing water was cold and he was beginning to shiver.

  “Pukje.” It sounded like “pook-yay.” More monkey than man, Pukje scampered back to Hadrian and leapt onto his chest. He caught it automatically. The creature was wearing rags so densely matted they resembled thatching and the water ran off him as if from a dirty raincoat. Feet dug into his stomach; childlike, hands grasped his shoulders. Hadrian forced himself not to flinch as the hideous face thrust close to his. Pukje's features were narrow and long, squashed inwards on both sides. A bowed, pointed nose separated two tilted eyes. Thin, pursed lips parted to reveal a mouth devoid of teeth and a slender, coiled tongue.

  “If you won't give me your name in return, Hadrian, you could at least thank me for s
aving your life.”

  Hadrian flinched. Pukje's breath was redolent of old, mouldy things and places long forgotten. “You already know my name. How?”

  “I've been watching you and listening in. It's quite a show.”

  “Was it you who smashed the window?”

  “Yes, to distract your friends.”

  Hadrian didn't argue the point. “Why are you helping me?”

  “I'm Pukje, and I'm helping myself.” A contained but incorrigible smile briefly lit up the strange face. “My list of enemies could change at any time, boy. I'm not charitable by nature.”

  “Thank you, then,” he said hastily, “but who are you? And who are they?” He jerked a thumb at the door. “What's going on?”

  Thumb and forefinger gripped his nose with surprising strength and twisted. “Don't mention it, boy. You can owe me.”

  Pukje hopped down onto the floor and skittered to the open window.

  “Wait! You can't just leave me here!” Hadrian had no idea what to do next. What if the thing outside returned?

  “Your brother is in the basement of the next building along,” said his unusual benefactor, pointing with one long finger. “Wait a minute, then try the stairs. There's a way across one floor down. If you're thorough, you'll find what you want.”

  “But—”

  “I'll look for you later.”

  Before Hadrian's lips could frame another word, Pukje leapt fluidly through the empty window frame and vanished into the night.

  Someone shut off the water ten minutes after Pukje had activated the emergency sprinkler system. Either that, Hadrian thought, or the water supply had run out. Those ten minutes enabled him to get safely to the stairs and descend to the next floor. Everything was sodden and dripping. His bare feet squelched softly when he trod on carpet, and threatened to slip on linoleum and concrete. He yearned for something to cover his near-nakedness. The corridors were empty, as was the stairwell. He didn't know what sort of beast had got into the hospital—for that was the only sane way he could interpret what he had heard following him—but that it had gone with its masters was a cause for intense relief.