by Paul Meloy
Phil looked along the corridor that stretched away to his right. It was dark and could have been a mile long as it disappeared into the distance. He could hear a muted flapping sound. The opening at the far end of the corridor gave onto a slope that led off into the baroque hinterland of the asylum and was protected from the elements by heavy strips of opaque and durable plastic that always made Phil feel oddly phobic as he pushed through them. They allowed the trundling passage of the porters’ trucks without the inconvenience of doors but to Phil they looked like a heavyweight fly blind hung up against the onslaught of a great and meaty species of insect he had no wish to encounter battering itself mindlessly against them.
He squinted and peered into the gloom. The lights on the Christmas tree flickered through a timed cycle, and then there was a pop as a tiny bulb blew somewhere amongst the untidy coils and the tree went dark. Phil jumped, unnerved. As the lights had died he had seen something emerging from the darkness at the end of the corridor. A figure in a white coat, groping along the wall, its face a pale thumbnail and its mouth open black and wide.
Phil recoiled from the sight and turned and headed in a fast walk away to the left, out of the foyer and through a short corridor leading to the admin offices and staff canteen. He hoped to find someone, perhaps a domestic, or a kitchen porter, but the corridors and offices were deserted. He stopped in a small atrium that housed the patients’ shop. The shutter was down. He looked about, listened for movement or a sign of human activity anywhere. He heard nothing to comfort him, but was able to make out the shuffling sound of something coming towards the atrium, something that made use of the walls to guide it.
Phil swallowed, his mouth dry, and turned and headed off again. He took a right at the end of the atrium and hurried along another long, darkened corridor, one parallel to the corridor that led off the foyer. He passed the doors that opened onto a large hall where occasional discos were held. The doors had been propped open with fire extinguishers and he glanced left and could see the low stage at the back of the hall, and on it, prancing, the shadows of things moving, enacting something that looked obscene. He didn’t stop, but looked back over his shoulder as he hurried past.
The groping figure had negotiated the atrium and was coming towards him, picking up speed as its hands fingered the wall, its mouth hanging open and its eyes glittering. Phil began to run, all meaning gone from the day now but for an awareness of terrible menace. Thoughts of Carol dissipated like a dream; their first, precious lovemaking a fantasy. He was aware only that there was a thin light coming now, through the skylights set in the high, flaking ceiling of the corridor, and it was daybreak, but all it was bringing was an illness of clarity he would rather not have.
And now he could see something else, and it was craning against the low ceiling of the corridor ahead of him, its long blue face dipping, reaching thin arms with tiny fists that were the skulls of birds, empty-socketed, beaks opening and closing with horrid dry clicks.
How, he could not fathom, but somewhere in his mind a word formed as if whispered and Phil knew this thing that strutted towards him, knew what it called itself. Knew this was
Rainscissor
and he slid to a stop on the buckled linoleum, his mind spooling into white panic. There was a sign hanging from the ceiling above him. It read:
ARMAGH
TIZARD
KESTREL
and Phil threw himself left and along the corridor that led to the wards as the thing jolted forwards, a terrible, clattering insect racing up a pipe to seize him. He reached the door to Kestrel ward and fumbled for the handle. Rainscissor had reached the entrance to the corridor and was clambering towards him as if rising up through a well. Phil looked down at his hands, raking at the handle and willed himself to grasp it, to turn it. He leaned against the door and shoved inwards, wrenching the handle, and as he did so, a door further along the corridor opened and he heard a calm voice say:
“Phil. Don’t open that door. Come here.”
Phil threw a glance towards the voice, his eyes wild, and the skin crawling over every inch of his body. The dreadful, speckled shadow of Rainscissor cast itself across the scuffed lino, reaching for him as its arms unhinged and the birdskull fists clicked like dice, pecking the air.
A man was standing in the doorway. He was wearing a long coat and worn-looking desert boots. He had a trimmed gray beard and clear, intense blue eyes. He pointed through the door from which he had stepped, indicating that they should make haste.
Phil dropped his hands from the door to Kestrel ward and stepped towards the man.
“Don’t look,” the man said. “Run.”
But Phil did look, was unable not to as the door swung open. The smell snagged him and he glanced through, and could see all the carnage wrought there. And just glimpsed enough to know what it was that had done the killing, because she was hunched over the body of Jase, her hacking stilled for a moment as she turned her mad, grinning, heavily jowled face towards the door, her long, tangled red hair swinging like a mat of bloodied Hessian.
Phil ran. The man stepped aside and swept him into the room, guiding his blind panic with a firm grip on Phil’s arm. Phil stumbled against an old wooden desk and the man closed the door behind them.
Phil swung around, hands held before him in a wild gesture of defence.
The man stepped towards him and Phil cowered back against the edge of the desk. They were in an abandoned office and there was grainy light coming in from a single window that looked out across the cricket field.
The man held his own hands up.
“Try and relax, son,” he said.
Phil pulled a face, a grimace. It was all he could muster in way of response.
The man took another step towards him.
“My name is Daniel,” he said. “I am the Hypnopomp. You’re dreaming, Phil.”
Phil dropped his arms and his eyelids fluttered. There was a serene expression on his face. He sighed. “Yes,” he said with a tone of relieved comprehension.
“Close your eyes,” Daniel said.
Phil closed his eyes.
Daniel opened a Gantry and led them through.
WHEN PHIL OPENED his eyes he was sitting on a stool at a bar in a busy pub.
He blinked and looked around. He felt content. The pub had low, beamed ceilings and a wooden floor, and there was a fireplace in the far wall that was swept and full of dried flowers. He smiled as he looked around. The place was packed and noisy and smoky. The sounds of children playing outside threaded through the low murmurs and sudden roars of laughter from the adults like bright, colourful fish darting through deep, silted water. He could smell beer and cigarettes and the hospitable aroma of a barbecue working away outside.
He looked at the bar and saw that he had a pint ready.
Somebody said, “Crusader, Phil. Best beer in the world. On the house.”
Phil looked up, the sweet nature of the dream infusing him.
A man stood next to him. He was in his late fifties, tall and rangy. He was wearing a red pullover. His face was kind and his eyes were shining with a joy usually only ever seen in those of a delighted child.
“How quickly we lose that,” Phil found himself saying.
The man smiled. “We get it back,” he said and both he and Phil laughed, the sound loud even above the conversation and merriment around them. People turned and looked in their direction, all smiles and approval. Some nodded and raised glasses. Phil stared at the man who was talking to him, his eyes wide, and still laughing.
“Have a drink, Phil, and I’ll tell you more,” the man said.
Phil took his pint and sipped it. It was cool and golden and unbearably lovely. Despite the lucidity and good humour of the dream he felt a sudden, palpable sorrow for a moment, that he would never taste anything like it again. He put the glass down, his face a picture of wonder reflected back at him from the mirror behind the bar.
“So,” said Phil.
“Let’s
go outside for a little while,” the man said. “It’s noisy and we need to talk.”
Phil obliged. He stood and followed the man to the door. Before they went outside, Phil took hold of the man’s elbow.
The man turned, his hand on the door handle.
“Who are you?” Phil said.
“I’m Les,” he said. “Come on.”
They went outside. Phil blinked and squinted against the sudden brightness of the day. They were standing at the edge of a road that ran through a village. The pub was called The Dog With Its Eyes Shut, and it stood on a bend in the road, and across the road he could see what looked like a building site. There was a high chain-link fence ringing a large pit and there were piles of masonry scattered across a wide vacant slab of land. Beyond this he could see hills climbing off into the distance. He looked up. The sky was blue and clear and full of planets.
“Wow,” he said.
There were hundreds. They speckled the blue like filmy, exotic baubles. They were misty with reflected light from the sun the way a hint of summer moon looks ethereal and oddly astray in a morning sky. Some were small, no bigger than the moon, but others hung immense, their rims pale arcs visible beyond the hills.
Les said, “The Firmament Surgeons are working on the exo-planets. They’ve drawn them here to the Quay to adjust their orbits and monitor the retrograde paths.”
Phil nodded, understanding nothing, still peering up. As he watched a number of planets disappeared, popping out of existence it, seemed, like soap bubbles.
Phil laughed; it all seemed very jolly.
Les leaned forward, just a little, so that for a second Phil thought he was going to whisper in his ear, but instead, Les tried to bite him.
Phil stumbled away, horrified. He stood, arms raised, halfway across the narrow street.
Les had changed. He had claws.
There was silence now. Above, the planets had evaporated and the sky was an uninterrupted blue. There was no sound coming from the pub although Phil could see movement behind the windows; a muffling pressure had descended over the village and it was humid. Phil turned and ran towards the vacant lot and the fenced-in pit.
Les dropped to the ground and scrabbled towards him, his thorax bulging and tearing the fabric of the red jumper. Les had an insect’s head now, and sepia coloured wings like nicotine-stained net curtains unfolding from his back, sliding from between the rents in the jumper. Serrated bolt-cutter jaws slid from beneath his bugging compound eyes.
Phil reached the ring of chain-link and span around, hearing the clatter of the Les-bug as it raced towards him. Despite his terror Phil was aware that details of his surroundings were snagging his vision, drawing his attention. He could see that the earth around the lip of the pit was granulated and fine, no longer a spill of tumbled masonry. And something was coming, rising up from the depths. Phil could hear their legs rattling, and their wings pulsing.
He had nowhere to go. He turned.
The Les-bug was almost upon him. Its jaws pincered and its claws were reaching for him.
Phil prepared himself to fight, bunching his fists and stepping forward to kick the thing in the head, but he knew he had no chance. This was a dream, he thought, I can make something happen.
And as he stepped forward to plant his boot beneath the thing’s throat, something did happen.
The door to the pub opened and a tiger sauntered out. A man so tall he had to duck a full foot to get beneath the lintel followed it. He was carrying levers.
Phil lowered his foot and pressed himself back against the chain link fence. He could feel the air move behind him, pushing up moist and warm. It smelt of minerals and earth mined by beasts and churned to paste, of depths turned to chemicals with things set in it to rot. He watched as the tiger and the tall man (long man, he heard in the back of his mind; again, he knew, the dream told him) crossed the road. The man was wearing a coat that swung to his ankles and heavy boots dusty and worn with age and momentous journeys. He held a lever in each huge fist, brass pipes with handles that looked like shoehorns, or the gear levers of old cars. The Les-bug sensed their approach and swung around, its shadow hard-edged beneath it. All human form was gone; it raised its shining head and its abdomen twitched, and something that looked like a funnel slid from beneath a fleshy hood at the base of it.
The tiger kept coming, padding across the road. It was huge, and dramatic in the sunlight, and Phil thought it might be better suited there, amongst the hydrogen jungles (the relentless hydrogen jungles of the sun, Phil thought, astonished by its implication) and coronal plains.
The insect reared up on its back legs and lifted its abdomen, pointing the funnel at the tiger. It sprayed a jet of electric-blue fluid with a grotesque, rippling contraction of its body. The arc hit the dry earth of the road and hissed with a sound like fatty meat frying, but it had missed the tiger, because the tiger was already in the air.
It leaped as the insect reared up, anticipating the move, and vaulted the jet of acid. The tiger hit the insect’s midsection and threw it to the ground. Its front paws came down, pinning the crumpled wings to the road and the tiger opened its jaws and bit into the monster’s throat. There was a splintering sound and the tiger tore off the insect’s head with a single twist of its neck. It fell back onto the road like a Halloween mask, its calliper jaws closing slowly over each other as its muscles relaxed. The tiger shook the rest of it out of its mouth, bits that looked like shattered razor shells, and stepped from the deflating body.
As the tiger finished off the insect, the tall man walked to the fence at the edge of the pit. He didn’t look at Phil, hadn’t once glanced in any direction other than the fence and the piece of land it penned. He went down on one knee and raised the lever he held in his right hand. He narrowed his eyes and plunged the lever into the rocky dirt near the bottom of the fence. He compressed the handle.
He looked up at Phil then, seemed to notice him for the first time pressed frozen against the fence, his fingers entwined in the links by his waist in an instinctive grip of fear.
“Go back into the pub, son.”
Phil let go of the fence. The links had made livid red marks in his palm and between his fingers. He stepped away from the pit on unsteady legs. The tiger had come over and it stood next to the kneeling man. Phil gaped at it, not because of its size or proximity, but because it had been the tiger that had spoken.
The tiger held his gaze, and seemed to grin.
Phil circled away, his mind reeling. As he backed across the road he saw light bloom in air above the middle of the pit. It glowed like a fuel rod and expanded, broadening into a searing cylinder. Phil shielded his eyes, lingering in the doorway of the pub. The tiger was still watching him and it lowered it head in a restrained assent. Its lips were curling and Phil hoped it wouldn’t roar at him, because that sound, from those disquieting and implacable jaws might blow him apart like a bundle of sticks.
He felt a hand on his arm and turned into the cool shadow of the pub.
A man stood there, a kindly man with bright eyes full of delight. He was in his fifties. He was wearing a blue jumper the colour of the sky outside.
“I’m Les,” he said. “Come in, Phil. Have a pint and we’ll all talk.”
PHIL, LES AND the tall man—his name was Bismuth, Les had informed Phil—sat at a table at the back of the pub. Phil and Les each had a pint of Crusader, but Bismuth wasn’t drinking. The tiger—Bronze John—was curled up by the fireplace, watching them with his head resting on his front paws. There was a yellow plastic washing-up bowl full of water by his side from which he took an occasional languid lap and a scattering of crisps and peanuts on the floor, snacks people in the pub had delighted in putting down for him. They didn’t seem at all worried that they were sharing their pub with a massive tiger, and Bronze John seemed quite happy to let them stroke the fur beneath his throat and tickle behind his ears. He had sat with enormous patience while a little girl aged about six had climbed onto his back a
nd ridden him like a pony.
Phil had been warned about going outside. “You were tricked. We all were.” Les had explained. He had pointed to his jumper. “Blue,” he had said. “I wear blue. They can’t seem to manufacture the colour. Always comes out a muddy red. Watch out for it, Phil, it’s a clue, a giveaway. A tell, if you like, like a liar’s tic.”
Phil had asked who ‘they’ were. Were ‘they’ the same as the thing he had seen in the corridors of the asylum?
“Rainscissor? No. That is an Autoscope, a terrible, ancient thing. The Les you met before was a dupe, a Toyceiver. They serve the Autoscopes. They can mimic people like me, but they can’t mimic a Firmament Surgeon. Like your man Bismuth here.”
“They don’t have the balls,” Bismuth said. It was the first time he had spoken.
Phil grinned. He liked these men. They felt like old friends. The dream was as vivid a one as he’d ever had. He pondered the words they had spoken, the strange neologisms and descriptors, savouring them like the nectar of his pint. Was his subconscious making all this up? He had no idea he could be so creative. Perhaps making love to Carol had loosened something up. The words seemed familiar to him, though, like hazy memories of the names of exotic places visited as a child.
He came out of his reverie, a drift within a dream, as Les continued to speak.
“What bothers us is how it managed to get in here. How it reached you before I did. You’re safe now Bismuth and Bronze John are here, but don’t leave the pub. Daniel brought you here because it’s a safe place. None safer in all the Quays.”
“What went on out there?” Phil was looking out of the window, past the bulk of Bismuth’s shoulder. He could see a portion of the fence glittering in the sunlight like chain mail. The sides of the pit were steeper now, and the hole wider, where Bismuth had shut down the invasion.
“It’s an Incursion Gantry,” Les said. “We closed it off once but now it’s opening again. We’re trying to find out why and we have some ideas.”
