Fellside

by M. R. Carey

Involuntarily she looked over her shoulder, as though she might find the cell there. Find her own body, and Grace and Earnshaw working out their differences without weapons or distractions. But they were in the night world now. Memories and echoes were their only companions.

  Jess let her shoulders droop. If she’d had a breath to let out, she would have released it in a long-drawn-out sigh. Mostly what she felt was weariness and desolation, but she was surprised to find that there was some relief in the mix too. To be dead. Finally to be dead and done with. It didn’t feel, right then, like anything she couldn’t cope with. At least she had friends here.

  “You did it,” Naz said. “Jess, I don’t know what to say to you. You found her and brought her back to me. Or me to her. Both. Everything I forgot, it’s all here now. It’s all…” She faltered into silence. She was staring at Jess in mute dismay.

  The penny’s just dropped, Jess realised. She thought I’d slipped away from the fight of my own free will. Now she knows. Somehow. Just by looking at me.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s fine. Well, most of it is fine. If I regret anything, it’s… him, Alex. He had such an awful life. I wanted to help him. I wanted that so much. And now I know for sure I’ll never see him again.” She felt a welling-up in her throat that wanted to be tears. She groped for more words that wouldn’t come.

  And then a monstrous sound broke over them like a wave, making speech impossible. It was a peal of thunder, and it was a scream. Both things at once. The air curdled and the world tilted, as though gravity was a pair of scales and someone had just put their thumb on the balance.

  Harriet Grace when she was alive had been all about control. She burst into the afterlife like steam shrieking out of a pressure cooker valve. Her gaping mouth opened behind the sky. A second mouth opened within it, and then a third, her titanic rage coming now in three deafening, clashing registers.

  “You can’t do this to me! You can’t! I won’t let you!”

  The storm slammed into them, knocked them off their feet and snatched the ground out from under them when they fell. For a moment, Jess found herself falling horizontally across the endless plain, as she had on the night of her involuntary overdose.

  But she knew where that led to, and she fought her way back from it with quiet, deadly ferocity.

  “You can’t! You can’t! You can’t!”

  Down is down, Jess told the world. And the world obeyed. She caught hold of Naz’s hand as she tumbled by, reeled her in and set her on her feet. Naz clung to her, terror etched across her face.

  “It’s her!” she gasped. “It’s Grace!”

  “I know.”

  “Jess, we’ve got to run. We’ve got to hide until she—”

  “No. Not this time.”

  A grey-black mass was rushing on them, reaching out for them with taloned hands.

  Jess turned her attention on it like a cold spotlight. “You’re not so big,” she said tightly. And then again, in her mind, You’re not so big at all.

  She picked that thought up and hurled it. It hit the storm that was Harriet Grace full on and folded it in half.

  When she had given wings to Patricia Mackie and a boy’s face to Naseem Suresh, she hadn’t known what she was doing. But her mind had been able to shape dreams like clay. And the dead were dreams that dreamed themselves alive. Maybe the living were too. Another time for that.

  For now: You’re a tiny little thing. A speck. A dot. A dust mote in my eye.

  The churning madness of the storm shrank and shrank again, forced back into itself until it was a black shape no bigger than a pillow.

  She took it in her hands, and she was surprised by the weight of it. Its surface was fractal, writhing like worms. It hurt to look at it.

  I’ll kill you, Moulson, Grace raved. Keep killing you again and again and again.

  Naz was staring wide-eyed as Jess turned to face her. “We’ve got to,” she said, as though Naz had spoken. “We’ve got to do it now.”

  Naz nodded. She didn’t have to ask what Jess meant. The thought had occurred to both of them at once.

  She grabbed hold of the dark mass that was Harriet Grace’s naked soul and held it tight. Jess did the same. It twisted in their grip as Grace tried to squirm free. Tried to squeeze or thread herself through the gaps between their fingers. They started to walk, and then to run, gripping the dark, writhing mass at either end like firemen or stretcher-bearers.

  The speed with which Grace adapted came as a nasty surprise to both of them. Jess had thought her first sucker punch might have ended the fight, but Grace was already fighting back. They had to dispose of her, put her where she couldn’t do any further harm. And there was only one place that would let them do that.

  But it was further away than either of them remembered. They lumbered on and on through the night world with their burden clasped tightly between them. Grace seemed to be getting heavier, but that had to be impossible. It was just that they’d never really carried anything here, and they didn’t know what their own limits were.

  But it was true, Jess realised. Grace was changing. Growing more massive in their arms. What had taken Jess days to learn and weeks to get any good at, Grace was figuring out in minutes. She had understood what Jess had done to her and she had learned from it. Squashed down as she was into this coiled, compressed essence, she couldn’t attack them directly. But she was making herself denser and more massive, reconfiguring herself into an uncompromising weight that would slow and hamper them.

  And when you stop, when you let go of me – oh, then you’ll see. I like this place. I think I can make something of it. I think it has possibilities.

  “Which way?” Jess cried.

  But right then she caught sight of it up ahead of them. They were approaching the lip of the abyss.

  Perhaps Grace saw it too, or sensed it. She was applying herself with relentless focus. The shapeless lump that was her soul was growing again moment by moment. Growing and changing, becoming more solid and textured. Ropes of muscle and sinew swelled and stood out on its surface. It looked now like some sort of human embryo that had been kept from birth and fed on steroids for a human lifetime. It looked as though it was about to unfold, to open like a flower. Jess didn’t want to see what might be inside.

  Born again! Grace exulted. It took Jesus three fucking days!

  They drew back their arms to hurl the terrible thing over the edge, but the edge receded from them. One moment they were almost there, the next they’d lost sight of it. The abyss’s rim was pulling back like a Hitchcock dolly zoom faster than they could walk towards it.

  They ran again, trying all the while to bear down hard on the dark mass, to push it back into itself. Trying too to concentrate on their destination and how close it was. Grace had outstripped them in mere minutes, and now they were learning from her, learning that where there was a will, there had to be a way. In the night world, your way was your will, and Grace applied that principle with berserker finesse.

  They fought back. They struggled inch by agonising inch all the way to the pit, imagined it gliding to meet them as they came. But when they got there, when they drew back their arms to throw the seething mass over the rim, they couldn’t let go of it. It stuck to them, flowed over them, welded itself to their hands and arms.

  With a scream of disgust, Naz staggered back. The black blotch clung to her, stretched out into filaments of pulsing dark. Then they snapped and she fell backwards. The tendrils groped for her, whipped like broken guy-ropes in a hurricane before wrapping themselves around Jess’s forearms and burrowing into her flesh.

  But of course it wasn’t that. It wasn’t flesh at all.

  Desperate, losing, Jess turned her thoughts in a different direction. She stopped trying to get free. Her mind filled with Grace’s gleeful, mocking laugh. She ignored it and thought instead about the pull of gravity. The dead weight of herself, from which she’d tried so hard and so often to escape.

  Grace pressed h
ard against her, bit into her as though all of that dark smeared bulk was one big lamprey mouth. It was just the two of them now, balanced on the brink of the bottomless fall. Jess wrapped her arms around a part of Grace’s squirming, mutating mass that might have been her waist or her chest or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it had just grown a row of serrated hooks like the heads of harpoons. That’s fine, Jess thought. She hugged Grace close and ground the wicked barbs into her body as deep as they would go. Anchored herself in them.

  Weight, she thought. Just weight. The weight of being me. She leaned forward, far out over that emptiness. Sent her centre of gravity out and out, past the tipping point.

  And carried Grace over the edge at last, off balance, Grace so full of the ache and lust for life that she couldn’t imagine someone weaponising suicide.

  They dropped out of sight in a heartbeat.

  Approximately. Hearts in that place by definition don’t.

  98

  Dennis Devlin lay where he’d fallen until he was absolutely certain that Liz Earnshaw wasn’t there any more. That took a while because Liz sat for a long time on one of Grace’s comfy chairs, talking to herself in an endless rumbling monologue.

  It was actually a dialogue but the Devil couldn’t be expected to know that.

  “I missed you so much, Naz,” she said. “I went… oh, I think I went crazy! I didn’t know what to do without you.”

  Well, I’m back now, Naseem told her. And I won’t leave you again. I promise.

  “You’d better not!”

  Feel that? That’s me touching you. I’m inside you, Lizzie. You can cut your hand off, or your foot, or any bit of you, but you can’t ever cut me out, because I’m everywhere you are.

  Earnshaw cried then. Great gulping sobs that Devlin, lying motionless on the floor and unable to see her face, mistook for grief. But it was the opposite of that. Earnshaw was so happy she felt it was going to burst out of her like a fire and burn the world up. She thought, I will never hurt anyone again as long as I live. Everyone should be like this. Everyone should always feel the way I feel now.

  As part of that, part of the business of atonement that was going to take up so much of her time from now on, she picked up Moulson’s dead body and carried it out of Grace’s cell to the ballroom. It felt wrong to let her lie with the enemies who’d destroyed her, especially after Naz told her all the brave and kind things Moulson had done for her. How it was really Moulson who had brought them together again.

  The riot was petering out into random skirmishes as more and more of Fellside’s manpower and womanpower was concentrated in Goodall, and more and more of the inmates were corralled into service corridors which could be locked and turned into temporary holding pens. The ballroom was still part of a tiny free republic though, and Earnshaw’s arrival there with Moulson dead in her arms caused something of a sensation. Or maybe the opposite of that. Everyone who saw Moulson had the wind whipped right out of their sails.

  The dismay that struck them then was strange, considering how few of them had ever spoken to her, even in the casual coinage of good-mornings and how are yous. Every woman there had dreamed of her, and because of that each of them had come to think that she must hold some personal meaning for them and them alone. Now they felt, in a way that was even harder to define, that her death was a tragedy that touched them all.

  Earnshaw set the body down on a table and kept vigil as the rioters surrendered to the warders or else went back to their cells to wait for the other shoe to drop. More than half of them were in tears as they went. Some hugged each other for comfort, or pressed hands on each other’s shoulders as though to offer condolence.

  The guards watched in absolute silence, not wanting to say or do anything that might derail this fortuitous surrender.

  And through the middle of it all, Devlin slipped away. It wasn’t easy. A riot makes good camouflage, but he was a mess and his appearance wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. He had a broken wrist and a broken jaw. He could barely walk. He was covered in blood, most of which wasn’t his. If he was found now and taken to hospital, his body and his uniform would be teeming with evidence of one kind or another that would link him to the bloodbath in Grace’s cell.

  He had to get out of Fellside on his own two feet, scrub himself sterile, ditch the uniform – no, burn it – and then deny everything that was deniable. The injuries would work in his favour, up to a point. He could say he was concussed. He’d wandered away from the prison without even knowing what he was doing. Had found himself at home, not knowing how he’d got there, and fainted because of the pain. Everything after that was a blur.

  Playing up to that scenario, he walked past the duty desk without a word, ignoring the officers and secretaries on station there. Only one of them, Kate Mitchell, actually saw him; the rest were watching the riot play out on the CCTV feed from Goodall, which someone had finally managed to switch back on again. Kate called out to the Devil as he passed by like the walking dead, and getting no answer, she placed an emergency call. Ambulances were already on their way to Fellside, summoned by the governor when the first alarms went off, but she couldn’t leave the desk and she wanted to make sure that someone knew Mr Devlin was injured.

  Devlin exited through the main gate and crossed the road to the car park. The silence out there was almost perfect, only slightly spoiled by the faint clamour of distant alarms. Ambulances, police cars, fire engines, journalists and camera crews would soon be swarming thicker than flies on shit, but for now he had a window.

  He was thinking that driving one-handed was going to be a bitch, and that he’d have to stick to back roads so he didn’t meet that incoming armada. Have to take it really slow too, because he was hurting so much that he might actually black out from the pain.

  He walked down the bank into the car park, too fast and off balance because he didn’t have the strength to check his forward motion and he couldn’t throw out his arms to stabilise himself: the broken wrist hurt too much.

  As he reached the bottom of the bank, two men appeared from among the parked cars, one from either side of him. Hands closed on his arms.

  “Minnie Weeks says hello, you worthless fucker,” Kenny Treacher said.

  The two men just pushed Devlin along in the direction in which he was already moving. Gripping his arms and twisting them up behind his back – the pain made his breath stall in his throat – they accelerated him until they were running on either side of him and he was stumbling, almost falling, a prisoner of his own momentum.

  To the edge of the asphalt. Across the narrow paved verge.

  They gave Devlin the bum’s rush. Pitched him out over Sharne Fell, whose outstanding natural beauty he had about six and a half seconds to appreciate.

  99

  Dr Salazar’s body was found the next morning. Someone – probably not the doctor himself – had driven his car from the car park at the Pot of Gold to a quiet and secluded place a few miles out on to the fell and then killed him, execution-style, with a single bullet to the head.

  The unexplained murder was driven into sidebars and filler spots by the more dramatic events at Fellside itself. But then the balance shifted as various news organisations began to process the information that Sally had posted along with his confession. Hold the front page, the nine o’clock news, the whole damn internet.

  Sally’s whistle-blower emails were rambling and disjointed, but they were full of circumstantial detail. The drug allegations were exhaustively backed up by the sound recordings he’d made of his conversations with Devlin in the infirmary. Harriet Grace, her lieutenants and fixers, her retail staff and every bent screw in Goodall, they all got a mention one way or another.

  Sally also offered a thrilling eyewitness account of Moulson’s near-death from tramadol overdose. Stock might still have scraped up a reasonable doubt or two if her accomplice, Lovett, hadn’t made a full confession as part of a plea bargain – revealing that having tried once and got nowhere, she’d
conspired in the murder of Jess Moulson all over again.

  Stock got twenty-to-life and as a supreme irony was sent to Fellside to serve it. Lovett got away with seven years on account of that plea bargain. If he was haunted by his past, he never gave any outward sign of it.

  Sylvie Stock was haunted, in very short order.

  It came on her first night as an inmate in the prison where she had formerly worked. The enormity of her reversal of fortune sat in her stomach like a slab of undigested gristle, and she didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight. She just lay in her bunk listening to her new room-mate’s snoring, and feeling somewhat bitter and unamused about most things.

  When she did finally doze off, she slept fitfully and had unsettling dreams. She was struggling and sweating her way through the worst of these, in which she was performing open-heart surgery on herself in front of a live TV audience, when Naseem Suresh came strolling along and sat down next to her.

  The laugh track tailed away into silence. The MC stopped commentating and the audience bowed their heads.

  Could I have a word? Naseem asked Stock.

  “Yeah, sure,” Sylvie said. “Do I know you?”

  You treated me for an ear infection once. It was a long time ago. I wouldn’t expect you to remember.

  Stock just nodded and waited for Naz to go on, but she was already starting to have a bad feeling about this. The texture of the dream had changed. She was sort of awake inside it, and wishing she wasn’t.

  You hurt someone I love, Naz said. I’m not really big on vengeance any more, but I can’t let this one go. Sorry.

  “I didn’t mean to…”

  Naz shook her head, and Sylvie left the sentence unfinished. Something in the other woman’s face told her that she wouldn’t be doing herself any favours by lying. It’s all right, Naz said. Things are better here than they used to be, in all sorts of ways. Nobody gets murdered now for not facing the way the wind is blowing.

  She was looking at Stock searchingly, expectantly, as though there was some sign she was hoping Stock would give her. You understand me, Sylvie? If I could hate anyone, it would be you. But I can’t. I can’t afford to. Everything just runs in together here, and we’d keep drinking that hate until it made us all sick. I’m not prepared to do that.