Adornments of the Storm Read online

  Bismuth shifted in his seat. He sighed. Phil looked at him.

  “One of us is dying,” Bismuth said.

  "AND WE THINK that because of this the Autoscopes are gaining power. And if they gain enough power they might be able to breach the containment we’ve set up to imprison their Lord, the devil-in-dreams,” said Les.

  “I’m dreaming, right?” said Phil. He lifted his glass and tipped it towards the two men. He wasn’t losing the moment exactly, but he was aware of a feeling of caution threading its way through his contentment; he could feel it there at his heart, like a fine thread of dark silk being pulled through the muscles of his chest. He took another sip of Crusader, which reinforced his sense of unreality with its heavenly flavour. He closed his eyes as it went down. “That’s what Daniel told me.”

  “Not strictly,” Les said.

  Phil’s glass wavered at the top of its salute.

  “You are and you aren’t.”

  “I am and I’m not?”

  “The reason you’re accepting what we tell you is because of Daniel. You’re in a hypnopompic state. He’s maintaining it so we can protect you. Also, you know all this already.”

  Phil put his glass down. He leaned forward.

  “I do?”

  “Yes. But it’s in your future. Because the Autoscopes know how important you are to us they tried to take you out using a narrow flux of Dark Time. They hunted for you and went back to while you were training to be a nurse in order to stop you becoming one. A good one. A hope-giver. They hate hope, Phil. It thwarts them.”

  “What do I do?”

  Les smiled and made an expansive gesture taking in the pub and the gardens beyond. “Stay here. Make friends. Drink! Have a hotdog.”

  Phil looked around. A couple of people acknowledged him with a nod and a motion towards the bar.

  Phil pursed his lips.

  “Okay,” he said.

  IN 1985 A man and his dog step into a corridor from the room into which Daniel had moments earlier taken a young and terrified Phil Trevena. A young woman follows him. She is strikingly beautiful, with curling shoulder-length golden hair and green eyes. She carries herself with authority and precision of purpose. She has a crossbow in her left hand, cocked and loaded. She indicates that they should proceed along the corridor with great care. The man nods, and smiles at her, his fearless and wonderful Lesley, and together they head up the corridor beneath its low and mottled corrugated roof. There are large Perspex windows set into the frame of the prefabricated passage and the sun is up now and it shines down on the vicinity of buildings and sheds, chimneys, water towers and alleyways at the back of the asylum with a flat, oppressive light.

  There is a door to their right and they stop outside it. The sign above the door reads KESTREL WARD. The door is ajar. The man, tall, fair-haired and rather tired-looking—it’s not fatigue his features impart, though, more an expression of relaxed contentment one carries after a good night’s sleep. His name is John Stainwright, and he used to be an apprehensive chap, rather isolative, but the last seven years have been good to him and he’s never felt so happy. He watches Lesley as she approaches the door, and he is still smiling as she pushes it open with the palm of her hand.

  The three of them, Lesley, John and his dog go through the door and look around. It is a huge ward, with scuffed and peeling columns holding up the high, arching ceiling. The floor is blue lino and the walls are tiled and chipped. There are chairs and some low tables scattered about. There is a long room off to their left and they can see rows of iron beds and piles of clothes and dirty sheets on and beneath them. To their right is a door leading to an office.

  On the floor right in front of them is a dead man. He is lying on his back, arms and legs splayed, a deep gash in his throat and another in his belly that looks pulled apart and rifled. His guts glisten like a trough full of offal beneath a butcher’s block. The vitiated air of the ward is leaden with the stink of blood and meat. The flies that at all times circle the ceilings of the ward and crawl the filth of the huge sash windows—too heavy to open, or painted shut, their ropes and pulleys greasy with dust —have found something fresh to alight on. As Lesley and John approach, they rise from the body in a clot.

  “Where are the patients?” John asks, mostly to himself. He steps past the body and heads into the dormitory. There is a large double door in the wall at the end of the ward and it is wide open. Curious, John walks the length of the dormitory, past the beds with their attendant sad, empty cabinets that display no photographs of families, no trinkets, just overflowing ashtrays and some blue china hospital property teacups, and takes a look outside.

  Milling about in a wide concrete enclosure are about twenty old men. They are huddled in corners or wandering about clutching precious possessions: comics, annuals, and transistor radios. They are all in various states of dress. Some have managed to pull on trousers and shirts; some have shoes. One is in underpants and by the size of them they might not be his. Some are sharing the remains of cigarettes they have found scattered around the square, a habit that has, over time, caramelised their fingers and top lips as they smoke the butts down to a washer.

  John pulls the doors shut, leaving them out in the relative safety of the yard, and goes back to Lesley and the dog. The dog has trotted over to the closed office door and is sitting there, ears flat against the side of his head. He isn’t growling, but John can see that the dog is keyed up.

  “Coming over, Bix,” John says and he and Lesley go to the door.

  It must be the nursing office, because they can see what look like ranks of filing cabinets against the back wall through the frosted glass. There is a desk, too, and movement behind it.

  John looks at Lesley. Lesley nods. “Stay here, Bix,” John says.

  He tries the handle and the door opens.

  THERE IS A young man sitting behind the desk. He is wide-eyed with terror. He is about twenty years old. As John and Lesley step into the room he opens his mouth but he is too late to shout any warning.

  But John catches a warning in the slight glance the young man gives to his left, towards the filing cabinets lining the wall of the office. Except they are not lining the wall; some are askew as though something has squeezed behind them.

  John puts an arm across Lesley’s chest to prevent her going further into the room. He is just in time, because something shoves the filing cabinets from behind and three of them crash to the floor a few feet away from where John and Lesley are standing.

  The man behind the desk flinches but doesn’t move from his chair, and he cries out as the thing that was hiding behind the cabinets is revealed.

  It clambers over the fallen cabinets, buckled shoes denting the steel and making it groan. It sees Lesley in the doorway and hoots, its bulk tottering astride two of the cabinets, and waves the bloodied blade it is carrying in front of its slack, mad, terrible face.

  It’s Nurse Melt, and she and Lesley have history.

  Lesley’s turns to protect John. She grabs him by the arm and pulls him out of the office. At the same time she raises the crossbow and points it at Nurse Melt.

  She fires, and the bolt hits Melt in the shoulder, throwing her against the wall. Melt’s hand spasms and she drops the knife. It hits the back of a cabinet with a clang and bounces beneath the desk. Melt slumps against the wall, her torn mouth hanging open revealing black pegs of teeth. She looks down at the bolt protruding from her shoulder, a bloodless wound. Her coarse and knotted red hair swings across her face as she shakes her head. It is impossible to tell whether she is in pain or merely stunned. It gives Lesley enough time to reload, though, and she pulls back the bolt and lifts the crossbow. This time she tries to take better aim but Melt is moving again.

  Melt leaps sideways, towards the desk, with a ghastly, nimble grace. The dented steel pops back into shape with a hollow clang as she launches off the backs of the cabinets. She lands on the desktop, scattering a pile of green folders, and perches there, unba
lanced, her flabby arms wheeling. The man in the chair could shove her backwards off the desk, but still he doesn’t move, just presses himself further into the chair as Melt looms over him. Her hair covers the lumpy obesity of her back like a shawl. Lesley swings the crossbow and fires, cursing her lack of aim, and the bolt flies wide. It hits the discoloured wall and punches out a chunk of plaster.

  Lesley reaches to take another bolt from her belt and as she does so, Melt swivels her head and glares at her. She has regained some balance and squats there on the edge of the desk and looks like she is about to take a dump off the edge of it. Her broad backside beneath the stretched and filthy fabric of her uniform dress wiggles and clenches, but she isn’t about to eliminate; her muscles are bunching. Her calves bulge and as Lesley reloads, she leaps from the desk and crashes through the sash window in the wall behind the desk. Thick chunks of glass blow outwards and splinter against the sill. Melt hits the pane with her outstretched hands and her weight carries her most of the way out. She has misjudged the trajectory and as her body tumbles through, her knees smash down onto the sill and are sliced to ribbons by the shards still sticking up from the wooden frame. She howls as she falls forward and thuds onto the concrete below.

  Lesley and John run to the man in the chair. He is crying now, an open expression of childlike distress on his bloodied face. As they come around the desk they see why he cannot move. Melt has tied his arms and legs to the chair with thick hanks of her own hair, pulled from her bloodless scalp in astonishing fistfuls. John comforts the man as he takes a penknife from his pocket. He pulls out the blade and eases the flat of it beneath the hair cinching the flesh of the man’s wrist. The man is still weeping but he is gaining coherence. John says shush and slices through the hair. The man lifts his hand and shakes the copper strands from his wrist, his face a grimace of disgust. John works at the other wrist.

  Lesley has gone over to the window. There is no blood—Melt is congealed inside—but plenty of flesh hanging in grey strips from the frame. Lesley brushes fragments of glass from the sill and leans out. She can see Nurse Melt crawling along a path leading around to the front of the asylum, the flesh at the backs of her thighs blotchy and hanging like dough.

  “We have to be quick, John,” she says.

  “Got ’em,” John replies as he releases the last of the bonds around the man’s left ankle. He places a restraining hand on the man’s chest because it looks like he wants to bolt. The man sits back, chest heaving with panic.

  “Be calm,” John says, and the man relaxes beneath the gentle pressure of his hand. His eyes roll and then re-focus. Lesley comes around and squats in front of him and despite his shock, the horror of his ordeal, the man cannot help but be aware of her beauty—his pupils dilate and his face softens—and is soothed by it.

  “What’s your name?” She asks.

  “Charlie,” the man says in almost a whisper.

  “You’re safe now, Charlie. What happened?”

  Charlie looks away, towards the open office door and the ward beyond. John feels him resist the pressure of his hand. “Look at Lesley,” he says.

  Charlie looks back at the girl, gazes into her wide green eyes.

  “We were just getting the boys up,” he whispers. Lesley lifts her chin slightly and cocks her head, a gesture for him to speak up. Charlie coughs, then goes on, “We were getting the boys up for breakfast. The main door opened and that thing walked in. Just walked in. It jumped on Jase and… and stabbed him in the guts. There was only Jase and me on this morning and all I could think of was to get the old boys out into the back yard. I was shutting the doors, but that thing came running up the dorm behind me and grabbed me and dragged me in here. I thought she was going to… torture me.”

  “You were brave,” Lesley says. “You did a good thing for those men. She would have killed them all.”

  “What is she?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Charlie. You’re going to sleep for a while now. John and I are going to go and make it like none of this happened, but we have to move fast.”

  Charlie strains against John’s hand again but his resolve is weak. Lesley holds his gaze. She smiles, leans forward and kisses him on the lips.

  Charlie slumps in his chair and sighs. His eyes close.

  Lesley and John leave the office and go to Bix, who is standing guard in the corridor outside the ward.

  “Anything, Bix?” John asks.

  Bix growls low in his throat and starts off up the corridor.

  John turns to Lesley. “He can smell them,” he says.

  Lesley wrinkles her nose.

  “Can’t you?”

  John laughs. He takes a quick look back into the ward. He can see Charlie asleep in the chair behind the desk in the office. His head is resting against the back of the chair, but even at that angle John can see that he is smiling.

  John shakes his head and follows Lesley and Bix up the corridor.

  THEY REACH THE main corridor that runs perpendicular to the prefabricated passage that leads back to Kestrel ward and stand under a sign (KESTREL TIZARD ARMAGH) to think.

  “Split up?” Lesley suggests.

  John isn’t sure. It’s a huge place and it makes sense, but there’s unknown dangers here, unknown numbers.

  “If you take Bix with you,” he says.

  Bix looks up at him, then at Lesley. He wags his tail.

  “It’s ok,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

  John is adamant. “It’s dangerous, Lesley.”

  Lesley smiles. “You think?” she says and looks past John, back along the corridor they have just passed through. A door has opened.

  Something is coming.

  SOMEONE HANDS PHIL a hotdog. It’s wrapped in a yellow serviette and smothered with onions and tomato relish. He looks up to say thank you and sees that it’s Les.

  “Thanks, Les.”

  “Having fun?” Les asks.

  Phil nods, his mouth full of hotdog. He is on his third pint and has been playing pool with a couple of the lads. He feels safe and happy. There’s a free jukebox on the wall over by the gents and he’s unsurprised to see that many of his favourite albums are on the play list.

  Les has been outside in the garden all afternoon. His family are there. Phil watched them for a while, through a window. He hasn’t wanted to interrupt them; their time together looks precious. Les has a pretty wife and two young boys, and they are laughing and playing and scoffing burgers and chips at a table towards the rear of the garden in the shade of a willow tree. If Les wants to introduce them, Phil will wait until he’s ready.

  Phil looks around the pub. Bismuth and Bronze John are gone.

  “Where…?” he begins, but Les points outside.

  Phil looks through the window and sees them standing on the path outside. Bismuth is looking down at the tiger and consulting with him. Bronze John strolls across the road and Bismuth walks with him.

  They reach the far side of the road and Bismuth locates a patch of earth to the left of the fence ringing the pit. He pushes a lever into the dirt and compresses the handle. A Gantry opens, a line of white light.

  Bronze John tenses, and leaps through.

  "AH,” SAYS JOHN Stainwright. Bix barks and his tail becomes a blur.

  Bronze John sways up the corridor. Lesley kneels and embraces his neck, caresses the soft flames of his cheek with her own.

  John and Bix strike off left, heading towards the rear of the hospital. Lesley and her tiger go right, back towards the foyer at the entrance. They intend making a circular sweep of the hospital and grounds before meeting up again on the green at the front.

  They don’t get far.

  PHIL WATCHES AS Bismuth returns to the pub. He feels relief as the giant ducks beneath the lintel and comes across, retaking his seat at the table. His sense of well-being notches up again and he asks his companion if he would like a drink now.

  Bismuth leans back against the wall and glances at the bar and the pumps and optics
displayed there. All those ales and malts. He frowns and scratches his chin, his huge fingers deep in the thick fronds of his wild beard.

  “I’ll have a Martini,” he says. “Thank you.”

  BRONZE JOHN SEES it first as they round the bend at the top of the corridor.

  There is a dark atrium ahead, and something clawing the walls.

  There are no lights on anywhere in the asylum; the corridors of the main building are more like tunnels, or shafts, the ancient brick of their walls cold and impregnable. Small windows let in narrow, dusty stanchions of grey light. Bronze John’s eyes have adjusted and he sees clearly. Lesley squints but can see movement.

  The thing in the atrium blunders its hands across the metal shutter covering the counter of the patients’ shop and its fingers rattle with a sound like rats teeming over a tin roof. As the sound echoes, Lesley and Bronze John approach and enter the atrium.

  The thing stops. It stands with its shoulders slumped beneath its soiled white coat. It turns its head.

  Lesley has seen much horror, but this Toyceiver is foul.

  It has a mouth, which is open like a hole, and a nose, which is clogged with blood, but it has no eyes. But it sees them. Somehow, through the two narrow cylindrical brass peepholes that have been pushed into its jellied sockets, the puckered skin of its eyelids sewn around them with shoelaces in tight, brutal loops, it sees them.

  What sickening, hall-of-mirrors distortions must it glimpse come lurching towards it? A stilted tiger billowing against the roof of the atrium like some paper Chinese carnival puppet and a waddling girl beneath it, rippling, concave-faced, convex-throated, carrying something blunt in her swollen fists.

  It juts its face towards Lesley and Bronze John, its entire head a crucible of molten agony, and waves its arms before it, trying to judge their distance. It is looking down twin red tunnels of buckled glass.