Adornments of the Storm Page 15

  “May we come in?” Daniel asked.

  The woman stood aside and Daniel and Trevena stepped past her into a bare, narrow hallway. The house stank of stale cigarettes.

  “Is your son home, Mrs. Chapel?”

  The woman stared past the two men.

  “I was dreaming about him,” she said. Her voice was a dry rasp, toneless.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  She frowned. “Where he always is,” she said.

  “Can you tell me?”

  The old woman shrugged her thin, bony shoulders.

  “He’s at the dump,” she said.

  BISMUTH AND BIX crossed the dereliction. Bismuth trod over the rubble and the pipes and craters with long, heavy strides. Bix stepped more lightly but kept up, jumping over steel cables and an endless dry shore of rocks that might lead eventually to a terrible black, metallic sea. The air was thin and dusty and had the unremitting smell of minerals and the smoke from scorched buildings.

  Eventually they could see a wall rising from the rubble. It could have been the walls to a mythical city, a sanctuary in the midst of a desolate plain, but there were no lights, no life, and no guards at the ungated entrance. As they approached all that was visible were towering pyramids of rubbish and a maelstrom of gulls wheeling above it all, crying like a nursery of forsaken children.

  They went through the gates and entered the dump. The ground was white with gull droppings and wet slurry. The stink of scorched masonry was replaced by the fetid odour of rotten waste. It was overpowering and Bix growled, unable to keep his distress contained. Bismuth stopped and said, “Breathe through your mouth, Bix. You’ll never get used to it.”

  Panting, Bix followed Bismuth through aisles of refuse. Muck welled between his paws. His tail was low, clamped against his back legs.

  They rounded a mountain of junk and came to a space at the rear of the dump. It looked like it had been cleared by a bulldozer. There were caterpillar track marks in swoops and rucks but the ridges were hard, ossified, like work done an age ago.

  Against the far wall, perched on a platform of flattened, saturated cardboard boxes, leaned the refrigerator.

  As they stood together before it, waiting, hushed, the insubstantial night-shadows of airborne gulls flickering across the dirt and the ivory ceramic door of the fridge, a crimson light blazed suddenly at their backs.

  Bismuth and Bix turned to face it, and what came out from it.

  TREVENA FOUND A coat hanging on the back of the kitchen door and helped Chapel’s mother into it. She complied without issue, and Trevena couldn’t help feeling that he was partaking in a form of abuse. Daniel caught his expression.

  “You know what it’s like, Phil,” he said. “She thinks she’s dreaming.” He tapped his temple with a finger. “No trauma.”

  “I know,” Trevena said as he ushered the old girl to the front door. “But it’s kind of against her will.”

  “No it isn’t. This is what she’s always wanted. You know it. Freedom from the nightmares, the fear. All the shit she projected onto Chapel for decades. All the self-defeating, repressive crap.”

  “Who’s projecting now?” Trevena said. He lifted Chapel’s mother’s feet, one at a time, and took off her slippers. He replaced them with a pair of soft zippered boots that Daniel handed him from a corner of the hallway.

  “Fuck off,” Daniel said mildly.

  Trevena took her arm and led Chapel’s mother down the path to the jeep. He helped her into the front seat and put the belt around her.

  Daniel started the engine.

  “Give me directions to the dump, Mrs. Chapel,” he said.

  The old woman was staring ahead, her eyes fierce with native scorn.

  “Turn left at the bottom of the road,” she said. She sat back in her seat and smiled, the look of a woman being taken on a surprise trip somewhere nice during the entire course of which she would carp and disparage incessantly.

  “Can she hear me?” asked Trevena from the back of the jeep.

  “She won’t remember it,” said Daniel.

  “That’s a nasty old cow, isn’t it?”

  CHAPEL STOOD INSIDE the grounds of the recycling centre. He had climbed the gate regardless of the CCTV cameras situated around the vicinity. What he had to do would not take long. This was no longer the dump he had played in as a child, grubbing through the mountains of rubbish looking for treasures with his friends, but it was built on the same site. Now everything was divided up into huge containers, all ranked along one side of the recycling centre. Everything was swept and tidy. Officials patrolled the skips in green uniforms and watched for recycling misdemeanours with an eagle eye. When he had been a boy there had been an old, crumbling wall at the back of the dump leading onto allotments and alleyways and he and his friends would drop down into the back of the dump and scoot about dodging the old man who guarded the entrance. Sometimes they found transistor radios that still worked, and once a pile of mouldering dirty magazines that they divvied out quickly and shot straight off home with.

  He had done something bad here. He had done a cruel thing. He had been playing with a boy called Peter who had learning difficulties. Peter had died a year or two later of a brain tumour. They had found an old refrigerator at the base of a pile of rubbish and Peter had climbed into it. An impulse of pure and unanticipated spite had made Chapel slam the door shut on him. He had stood there, breathing hard, a coil of fierce excitement in his belly, for over a minute and then he had snapped back to himself, horrified at what he had done. He had torn open the door and pulled Peter out. Peter was in some kind of shock. His face was slack and his lips were blue. His eyes were staring off into the distance. Chapel apologised, expressed his regret at his sudden cruelty but Peter was unresponsive. In an attempt to show Peter how sorry he was, Chapel climbed into the refrigerator himself and shut the door.

  The door locked itself and Peter had never opened it.

  In the night, long after Chapel’s screams had ceased and the air had mostly gone, something else opened the door.

  And got in with him.

  JOHN STAINWRIGHT EMERGED from the Gantry and it was raining there on the caravan site. He stood in a fine drizzle and recalled the squall that night seven years ago, when Colin had come to him and explained to him who he really was and what his calling was. He looked up into a sky almost dark brown with low cloud, an unsettling storm-colour polluted by the sodium lights of the surrounding town of Invidisham-next-the-Sea.

  There had been a Gantry up there then, revolving above the site, some kind of monstrous rig out of which emerged a raiding party of Toyceivers, falling from the clouds to search for him and destroy him. But he and Bix had escaped, opening a Gantry for themselves to Quay-Endula. There he had found Lesley in mortal danger and had rescued her from an Autoscope called The Flyblown Man.

  He wondered about the Gantries the Autoscopes used, and how they constructed them. He had seen them open, watched things emerge, and always there was a terrible red light, or an abyss forced out of the earth, or sometimes, when Toyceivers were unleashed, that colossal scaffold of assembled, twisted metal excising chunks from the air. What he sensed was the application of awful effort, a breaking out, rather than a passing through. John’s experience of travel was the ease of it, the effortless passage to the Quays. The Autoscopes must be contained somewhere hellish and given authority to travel but with limitations, a principality from which they drew a certain amount of influence, or rights, until the war was finally over.

  There was nothing overhead now, except that industrial-looking cloud cover, and he ducked into the blowing drizzle and made for Colin’s clubhouse.

  He stopped outside. The door was open and the interior was dark. The fly blind had been knocked from its hooks and lay tangled across the top step. John went up the steps and looked inside. As his eyes became accustomed to the dark he was able to see why the fairy lights above the bar were out. They had been yanked from the top of the bar and were
looped around the two bar stools, themselves tumbled over onto the floor beside the bar. Some of the tables and chairs had been scattered and overturned, and there were pools of spilt beer and broken glass across the floor. John walked in and went over to the bar. He put the Instruments Bismuth had given him on the bar and then he put a hand flat on the worn but lovingly polished surface. The bar top was split lengthways. John could smell perfume on the air, dry and antique, but pungent, as though the splitting of the bar had released a fresh reserve, or emptied it through trauma in an aromatic abreaction.

  On impulse, John placed both hands on the top of the bar and closed his eyes. He pressed his palms flat against the wood and ran them over the surface. He lifted his hands to his face and inhaled.

  Then he picked up the Instruments lying next to him and ran out of the clubhouse into the rain.

  LESLEY AND ANNA were sitting in their father’s study with Jon Index when the windows on the top floor landing blew in.

  They ran into the hall. Elizabeth came out of the kitchen to meet them.

  No one spoke. Index led them to the stairs and they followed him up to the first floor. Index pointed to the bedroom where Steve and Claire were asleep.

  “Anna, go with Elizabeth,” he said. “If you have to, take them all out of here. Go to a Quay.”

  Anna nodded and she and Elizabeth opened the bedroom door. There was no movement from inside, just the sound of two deep sleepers breathing. They went in and shut the door.

  Index and Lesley went around the banister rail to the bottom of the stairs leading up to the top floor. They could hear the wind gusting through the shattered window but could see no movement.

  They heard something, though, above the sound of the wind and rain. And as they stood there, something appeared over the top step and peered down at them, the sagging oval of its face grinning with mad, awful effort.

  Index switched on the light and the shuddering bulk of Nurse Melt was thrown into sharp relief on the landing. Behind her, folded and crumpled in a terminal pile, the wreck of her old cloudbike lay in a heap on the landing.

  Melt toppled towards them and thudded down the stairs headfirst, arms flung out in an attempt to slow her descent. Her fat, white palms thumped against the steps and her shoulders shuddered and she shrieked, the red mat of her hair trapped beneath her, knotting around her throat making a dirty flaxen bonnet out of which her bloated, tattered face bulged.

  Lesley and Index stepped backwards and let her come. Melt fetched up in a heap on the landing between them and tried to roll onto her back. Index helped her with a boot to the ribs. Melt collapsed onto her back and stared up at them. Her torn mouth—ripped and hanging in a wedge from an old injury at Lesley’s hands a decade before—worked but made no sound. Her small black eyes roved between them, fixed in a furious dilation, and she tried to sit up but her legs were too heavy and too twisted. Still, a hand groped for Lesley. Fingers flexed, plump as grubs, reaching for any final, lethal purchase.

  Lesley knelt before the stricken creature. She took Melt’s hand, grasping it, and closed her fist around the twitching fingers. Lesley looked down at Nurse Melt and considered her ways. Melt made a small, questioning hoot, her whole body trembling.

  Lesley put a hand on Melt’s wide, bovine brow, brushed strands of wiry hair from it. The flesh was cold and lifeless as tripe. Melt’s eyes rolled and again she made a small sound in the back of her throat.

  “Are you afraid?” Lesley asked.

  Melt sneered and lunged upwards, her other arm coming around fast.

  Index was faster, and caught it. He twisted and wrenched the arm from its socket, dislocating it like he was pulling a cork from a bottle. Melt howled and the arm dropped to the carpet.

  “Are you in pain?” Lesley asked.

  Melt rolled her head and stared into Lesley’s eyes.

  “I wonder what you were? Did you want this, or were you made?”

  Melt grunted.

  “No…choice…” she said, and closed her eyes. Lesley felt the fingers trapped in her fist grip her own.

  Lesley looked up. “Is dad’s bag still in his room?” she asked him.

  “I’ll look,” Index said. “Are you all right?”

  Lesley nodded and looked back down at Nurse Melt.

  Index went to the Doctor’s bedroom and returned with a large black leather bag. It was soft and creased with age and had a large brass clip holding it closed. Index put it down next to Lesley.

  “Thank you.” Lesley opened the bag with one hand and sorted through the contents until she found what she needed. She withdrew a large glass syringe and an ampoule of clear fluid. She let go of Melt’s hand and unwrapped a needle from a strip she found in the bag. She fixed the needle to the end of the syringe and used it to draw up the entire contents of the ampoule. There was a sharp, disagreeable odour.

  “Paraldehyde,” Lesley said. “100 milligrams. Lethal at a third of this dose. It’s vile stuff. They used to use it in the old asylums as a sedative. It caused abscesses, and had to be given in a glass syringe because it melts plastic.”

  Melt eyed the syringe.

  “It’s as if dad was keeping this just for you,” said Lesley, and she pushed the needle deep into the sagging flesh beneath Nurse Melt’s chin.

  She felt no mercy as she depressed the plunger, merely relief.

  THEY WRAPPED MELT’S body in a blanket and dragged it to the top of the stairs. Elizabeth and Anna came onto the landing and together they got the corpse downstairs and into the hallway.

  “She can’t stay there,” Elizabeth said. Her face was flushed and had an expression of immense aversion writ large there. “It’s seeping.”

  Melt’s remains were breaking down quickly. The blanket, which they had wrapped taut around her body was now noticeably slack where Melt’s flesh was collapsing. There was a large brown stain spreading from the head end of the shroud the size and shape of Melt’s face.

  Index opened the front door. “Get it outside,” he said.

  Index got a grip of two handfuls of blanket and dragged Melt out onto the porch. Lesley and Anna took a leg each but the going was easier. Her stout calves were becoming pulpy and their hands could feel bone through the material. There was another smell, too, above the institutionalised tang of the Paraldehyde. Decomposition. Melt was dissolving with monumental speed, and by the time they got her out onto the drive she was little more than a hammock of slops. They cast her to the gravel and watched as the saturated blanket deflated further in the rain.

  Lesley stood with her hands on her hips. Her expression was reflective. Her eyes shone with emotion. She thought of the times this creature had come for her over the past two decades, and how each time she had bested it, made Melt look inept. She wondered why Melt had latched onto her with such savage and determined resolve when Lesley had such a history of victories. Melt was bungling, incompetent, senseless, yet still she came, like a stooge to be battered. Lesley realised that her feelings for Melt were ambivalent. She had finally done to Melt what Melt surely would have done to her, but still, there was a complex symbiosis between old foes and Lesley had been a component of it for most of her life. Looking down at the putrid blanket, Lesley felt a pang of… what? Pity? Remorse?

  “Forgive her,” Index said.

  “Huh?”

  “You have a chance to forgive her. Take it.”

  They all looked up as headlights lit them up like the shock of sudden judgement, and a car turned into the drive. Melt’s body looked liked the shucked, still wet skin of something awful that had crawled away into the night.

  It was a white Hillman Minx. It shuddered to a stop and John Stainwright got out.

  “The boys are in trouble,” he said. “We have to find them.” He was holding something in each hand, strange looking brass objects he had scooped from the front seat as he got out of the Minx. He held them up for the others to see.

  “I know what that is,” Lesley said, pointing to the Instrument in Joh
n’s right hand. “It’s Eliot’s kaleidoscope.”

  “And that’s Alex’s,” Index said as he indicated towards the other Instrument. “It’s Railgrinder’s throttle.”

  “I think I know where they’ve gone,” John said. “We have to regroup. The devil-in-dreams is trying to separate us again.”

  JOHN TOLD THEM about the clubhouse and the missing boys as they headed up to the room in which Steve and Claire were sleeping. Elizabeth went in first and roused them while the others stood on the landing outside and talked.

  “When I touched Colin’s bar,” John said. “I saw what had happened. The Despatrix attacked them while they were sitting playing cards. I saw it in a series of broken images. I saw the boys’ faces when they looked up and saw it standing inside the clubhouse. I think its beauty caught them by surprise. They were still staring at it when it attacked them. Alex grabbed Colin and pushed him towards the bar. I could see his expression, too, as he stumbled into the stools and pulled the lights down around him. He couldn’t take his bloody eyes off it. He went and hid around behind the bar while Alex and Eliot fought back. Tables went over and Eliot caught the Despatrix with a blow to the side of the head. They came around to protect Colin and the Despatrix launched itself over the bar. Its eyes were blazing, speckled with awful lifeless pupils. Colin was terrified but he was pissed off too and he grabbed it by the arm and yanked it across the bar. Alex took its head in both hands and smashed it facedown into the bar. The bar top split. He’d used enormous force, he was so angry. Then light streamed from the split in the wood, a huge silver fan of light. His beloved bar had absorbed so much positive energy, it became their Gantry and the boys took Colin through it. It gave up every last ounce of its power to take them away. When I touched it I smelt something else. Something other than perfume. It was coal dust.”