When I dodged around my hideous companion on the roof it made no move to hinder me. I should have recognised how ominous this was, but I was desperate for refuge. I had a wild hope that the one-way windows at the top of Starview Tower could hide me. I sprinted into the lift and poked the button for that floor, but the door stayed wide. However much I bruised my finger, the door didn’t stir. I retreated to a corner, where I was surrounded by a mob with my face, each emitting a scream as silent as mine. I was trying to crouch lower and smaller despite all the pains this entailed when two appallingly elongated limbs reached into the lift for me.
They were translucent and gelatinous, grey as slugs and no thicker than a baby’s arm. Their substance looked restless with eagerness, twitching with a rapid intermittent pulse. The conical tips crawled along the side walls of the lift, slithering over innumerable multiplications of my petrified face, and I was wondering how long I could avoid them—I was preparing with an awful weariness to try—when they sprang off the mirrors with a sound like a moist kiss and came straight for me. I wanted both to dodge and close my eyes, but had no time. In a moment the thin tips plunged into my eyes and fumbled deep into my brain.
I felt them swell and merge with it. I had a sense that they were transmuting the whole of me into their substance or else draining me into themselves—not my body but my essence. The sensation of hatching that had almost overcome me when I’d last visited Safe To Sleep had caught up with me at last. Before I could struggle, however I might have, I felt myself drawn out of my body as if it were an egg if not a chrysalis. In a moment, though time seemed to have lost all significance, I was elevated high above the world.
I was no longer Dominic Sheldrake. I was an insignificant aspect of the entity that had encircled the world to feed upon every scrap of life it still harboured—to aid the planet in taking its minuscule role in the reversion of the universe. Even that entity was no more than a minor participant in the eternal cycle, the cosmos returning to its primal state in order to give birth to new and unimaginable kinds of life beside forms recalled only in myth, perhaps together with a recurrence of humanity on this little globe. Perhaps the entity in all its vastness was only a function of the process. All this knowledge and a great deal more came to me in an instant, and I was further overwhelmed by using the entire sky to perceive the world, less like a gigantic eye than as the organ of an amalgam of inhuman senses. It was very nearly too much for my consciousness, which felt simultaneously dwarfed and expanded by the colossal intelligence of which I was an atom. I’d passed beyond terror and awe—I seemed to have no option other than to shrink into acceptance—but some residue of my personality made my awareness loiter near Starview Tower, clinging to that last trace of familiarity. I was wondering if I might be afforded a sight of whatever remained of me on the roof, if anything did, when I sensed movement near the tower. Someone was trying to hide.
Perhaps my perceptions were so acute because they had only just been fully wakened. If adding them to the monstrous consciousness had helped it locate its prey, I felt shamefully proud. Tendrils of which I had become a part stalked across the dead city to close around a house in the middle of a terrace that had retained some of its roofs. All the windows of the house had been blocked up from within, a betraying detail. Our tendrils dislodged rubble from the frames and stretched into the house, where they showed us a ragged grimy man cowering in a corner of a derelict room. Before they reached him he bolted out of the house, almost sprawling over wreckage as he fled. We had many tendrils ready for him, but we let him dodge like a rat through the maze of desolation while we relished his invigorating terror. For a time we kept a tendril poised above him, and at last extended it to pierce his skull.
I was only distantly reminded how tendrils had entered Dominic Sheldrake’s head, whoever that had been. We feasted on the man’s terror and his essence, leaving just enough of a mind within the withered remnant to send it jigging through the ruined city in a helpless convulsion of panic. A frisson of pleasure at the spectacle and at consuming a life passed through our body that cocooned the world. Eventually the shrivelled victim fell to crawling on all fours and then to writhing on its emaciated belly until it found a patch of mud. As it wormed out of sight the transformed earth grew visibly eager to help it on its way—hungry to revert to the primordial state that would redefine life.
My senses were continuing to expand. I embraced other hunts that were taking place, countries and continents apart. The elation I’d experienced at helping track down and pursue the first victim felt like attaining a height, a vantage Sheldrake could never have begun to imagine. It must relate to being elevated above the prey as the alternative to becoming one, but why should that matter? Lesley was gone, and Toby too, taking his wife and daughter with him. The Nobles had done away with Bobby and Jim, and so the searching tendrils could find nobody I cared about. If the prey were anything more than infinitesimal elements in the progress of the cosmos, they were simply objects of sport, robbed of individuality by the terror that was all their little minds could hold.
The dismissal didn’t quite convince me. It belonged to the entity that had reduced me to an aspect of itself; it wasn’t mine. Even if the victims were utter strangers to me, whatever race they were and of whatever creed, they were human. My memories of family and friends had restored a sense of myself that hadn’t quite been engulfed, and I grew conscious of Starview Tower. My awareness focused on it—on the deformed mass the Nobles had become, roaming back and forth on the roof. All their eyes were turned up to me, and a single grin stretched across the entire width of the bunched heads. Perhaps it expressed triumph, or even satisfaction that they’d brought me at last to my appointed place.
They’d appointed it, I thought. In some way they’d used me to help bring about the future they were bound for. Loathing overwhelmed me, not just of them and all that they incarnated, but of myself. I’d agreed to a bargain I had lacked the courage even to define—to join the predator so as not to be a victim, to deny my humanity in order to scapegoat the human. I began to struggle to wield a tendril, to skewer whatever was left of me on the roof and drain it of everything but terror. I had to think this would return me to my body, and however dreadful my fate would be, remaining complicit with the feaster on the world was infinitely worse.
I’d gained no physical control when I was flung into a void. I felt as if my thoughts had caused me to be cast out, unless I’d been ejected just for staying stubbornly human. I sensed something like contempt, although by no means as definable, so enormous it seemed cosmic. In addition somebody, if that term was even remotely appropriate, was disappointed in me—the Nobles, as though a prize pupil or an item they’d chosen to display had let them down. For a moment all this helped define how human I’d managed to remain, and then I knew nothing at all.
26 - Gone Back
“Watch out, you old twat.”
“Try looking where you’re going.”
“Does he know where he is?”
A loud loose thunder had produced three voices. My head was as wet as a baptised infant’s, and once I grew aware of this I grasped that I could see. I was one of an indeterminate number of people who had been herded into an enclosure whose translucent walls writhed like restless flesh. No, we were in a bus shelter that was blurred like my vision by the downpour drumming on the roof. I must have stumbled out into the rain, perhaps almost in front of a bus as it arrived at the shelter. Presumably someone had rescued me or at least pushed me out of their way to let them board, and as I blinked about me in bewilderment, passengers crowded onto the bus. The last of them was finding a seat when the driver stared at me. “Do you want this?”
His was the last of the voices I’d heard. I rubbed my eyes clear of water with a hand that felt as though it was rediscovering its use. A narrow screen above the entrance to the bus displayed a number, and I struggled to understand its significance. Once I succeeded in recognising it I found words. “That’s me.”
“Don’t keep us waiting, pal.”
I did while I recalled the need for a travel pass and found mine. Having fumbled the card onto the reader in his cabin, I lurched along the aisle as the driver sent the single-decker forward. I had to quell my progress by grabbing a metal pole, which let me collapse on a seat beside a woman with an obtrusively outspread handbag. I might have welcomed her presence if it had helped me return to myself. More rain met the bus as it emerged from the terminal, but the world looked no more distorted and unstable than I felt. I hoped any difficulties I was experiencing with my eyes could be blamed on the downpour, but I had an awful notion that they might consist of more than their own substance—that I could. Even if I was able to believe where I was now, I had no idea of when. I groped for my phone and peered uneasily at the screen.
It was still the same day, and apparently not much later in the afternoon than I’d retreated from the confrontation at Starview Tower, Hearts Released and their supporters opposing the police. All this felt hardly real, any more than the local news feed I brought up. The last of the squatters had been evicted from Starview Tower, and police were ensuring nobody could enter. I was trying to judge what if any difference this made when I realised my seatmate was reading the screen. “Got them out, have they?” she said. “Good riddance and hope we don’t see any more of them.”
“I wonder if something else will take their place.”
“Shouldn’t leave places empty, then.” As I tried not to feel personally accused she said “Maybe it can still be a church.”
I wondered how much knowledge her comment involved, or what proportion of ignorance. She wasn’t helping to anchor me in the present, and I tried to concentrate on the journey, the abrupt stops and jerky recommencements of the bus, the passengers inhabiting the worlds of their own phones, even the smeary view the windows admitted, veiled by breaths on the panes as well as rain. None of this convinced me much, and by the time I reached my stop I could have concluded the world was so temporary and vulnerable it wasn’t worth calling it real.
Trees anointed me with raindrops as I trudged through the suburb. The storm had moved on, but I felt as if its residue were rapping for admission to my skull. Although I’d had far worse invade my brain, this was an unwelcome reminder of how exposed it was. The sensation pursued me all the way home. In the drive Lesley’s car rested next to mine, both glittering with beads of rain. As I let myself into the house I wondered who would dispose of them and so much else, a concern I found irrelevantly banal. Perhaps it was a last bid to engage with the mundane, to hold myself back.
The house felt no more substantial than I did, nor any less impermanent. I limped straight to my desk and began to record the most recent events of my life. I could only be thankful that I’d already set most of this down. For a long time I’d imagined I would be addressing my descendants, helping them understand whatever they needed to grasp and warning them, but Macy was gone with her parents, leaving nobody to follow me. Subsequently I’d been trying to secure myself, to fend off the pull of the past and the future and where they both led, a ruse that hadn’t worked. Even if my genes led nowhere after me, the Nobles had already shaped my future. No wonder Toph had told me I was theirs when they wanted. Starview Tower was cleared, but that had never been the focus of the future the Nobles were born to herald and to cultivate. The name of the focus was Dominic Sheldrake.
Had Toby suspected this at the last? Perhaps that was one reason why he’d tried so hard to persuade me to join the retreat before Claudine had reassured him, but I would never know. Deep within myself I felt a stirring of nostalgia for the hunt I’d taken part in—for being elevated above humanity and the world, no doubt as a preamble to viewing greater secrets of the universe. The longing appalled me more than the hunt itself had, and I was afraid to delay any further. I felt sure the Nobles would come for me again. However much they’d found me wanting, that wouldn’t be their only bid to lodge me in the future they lived to achieve. Returning me to it might even be their notion of an honour rather than a revenge, a grotesque celebration of how intertwined our lives had been.
Death in the ordinary sense wouldn’t rescue me from them. I would be more at their mercy than ever. I had to follow Toby’s lead, though not my son himself. I mustn’t invade his eternal refuge or anybody else’s, in case this put them at risk. Suppose my experiences at Safe To Sleep and at the Church of the Eternal Three had left me capable of finding him? There was far too much I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t take the chance. Even thinking about him or anyone I’d lost might take me dangerously close to joining them—dangerous because of what I might bring to them.
I was unable to refrain from looking in my desk for a last reminder. The stack of tales of the Tremendous Three had grown precarious, and I lined up the volumes, feeling as if I was tidying the past into a preferable shape. “We always did,” I murmured when the sight recalled the vow I’d made with Bobby and Jim. The transcription of Christian Noble’s journal was piled beside the stories, scarcely distinguishable from them. However innocent it looked, it felt eager to call up the author and his brood, and I shut the drawer at once.
I had no reason to delay any longer. I strove to put the Nobles out of my mind before they could head me off. Even saying now that I did so feels capable of bringing them. I can only hope—yes, pray—that I’m able to accomplish what Toby and the others did without having seen exactly how. The night of Macbeth has to be my destination, my most vivid memory that need involve nobody else, because we were waiting for each other miles apart across a town I might no longer recognise. “When shall we three meet again…” I mustn’t let that recall my friends, and I mustn’t summon Lesley into my refuge either. “If you can look into the seeds of time…” That was one of her favourite quotations, but in my case the trick would be to avoid seeing the future—any of the futures I’ve seen. Waiting for her will be enough, even if I know she mustn’t come. Eternal anticipation will be its own kind of paradise when I know I’m keeping her safe, and protecting who can say how many others too. Everlasting hope is my reward, and for that I have to be alone. May that keep me out of reach of the Nobles and their eager future—even hinder it, perhaps. May anyone who reads this find it of some use. Perhaps I am after all.
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Archived 21 March, Third Year of the Transformation
Jenny was there first, as ever. Perhaps in the case of this trilogy I should say almost first (though anything but second best), since without our good friend Pete Crowther the books would never have been conceived. Paul Finch must not be held responsible for any of my inventions in this volume, based upon advice and information he kindly gave.
Like most of my books, this went on its travels. It was worked on at the Myeongdong Ibis Style hotel in Seoul, our well-loved favourite the Deep Blue Sea apartments in Georgioupolis on Crete, and over Fantasycon in Peterborough.
Once again Keith Ravenscroft kept me supplied with recherché films on disc—some of my well-nigh daily rewards for finishing work.
The Way Of The Worm Page 30
