Adornments of the Storm Page 7

  Lesley fires a bolt into what remains of its left eye and kills it.

  It collapses to the floor and Lesley and Bronze John go past it. Lesley reloads.

  JOHN STAINWRIGHT AND Bix head towards the back of the asylum. The corridor is empty, cold. An intermittent draught moves the air around them. High double doors to their right give onto a large staff canteen. They comb the room with caution, through ranks of tables cluttered with the remains of the previous evening’s meal and check behind the counter. They search the kitchen and establish it’s clear. It stinks of unwashed pans, plates and dishes. They return to the corridor.

  John tries every door they come to but they are all locked. He wonders what is behind them. Wards, offices, storage rooms probably. Nothing comes to investigate his attempts to open the doors.

  Bix trots at his side alert as ever, even though he’s an old boy now. His muzzle is mostly gray and his eyesight isn’t what it once was. Bix is a saluki, a sight-hound, and he’s still an elegant dog. His coat is lush and the feathering of hair at the backs of his legs, and his lively brush of a tail, are as fine as they ever were.

  They reach the end of the corridor and push through thick, heavy strips of plastic to get out into the open.

  They stand at the top of a wide slope. It leads down to a road that winds off through ranks of single-storey buildings. There is a small car park fenced with iron railings, its surface pot-holed and gritty. Directly ahead is a laundry. John can see huge stainless steel washing machines and oblong flumes bolted to the walls and ceiling. It looks like a ship’s turbine room.

  Behind this is a long L-shaped building. They walk down the slope and go past the laundry. The L-shaped building is an industrial therapy unit. Daniel has told John about these places. Daniel used to work in one similar to this, when he was a patient. It was menial work to occupy them. Making paper hats and stuffing cocktail sticks in tubes. Never eat anything off a cocktail stick, Daniel had warned John. You never knew who’d been masturbating while they packed them.

  They go on, past the industrial therapy unit with its rows of long, rickety Formica topped benches piled with folded cardboard boxes and packing tape. John can see cockroaches squeezed into the gaps between the flattened boxes. Daniel had told John that they infested the hospitals; when he took a flattened box and popped it open hundreds would clatter to the floor around his feet and scuttle into corners and up the walls. They left behind a miserable greasy stink and the insides of the boxes were smeared with oils from their glands. In went the cocktail sticks.

  There is a row of huts with blinds drawn down over the windows. Workshops of some kind. As they walk past John notices movement in his periphery and turns to see one of the blinds being rolled up. In the darkness of the hut someone has appeared at the window. A lean face peers out at them, dark-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He has a bald head with tufts of white hair sprouting above each ear. He is grinning.

  John and Bix stop. The bald man gestures, pointing to the door. John looks at Bix. Bix wags his tail.

  John goes up to the door and tries the handle. It opens and he sticks his head in. There is an all-pervading stench of hoof glue and leather that reminds John of a key-cutting kiosk. He looks around. There are shoes and boots scattered across a narrow workbench and stacked beneath it in boxes.

  The bald man emerges from the shadows at the back of the workshop. He shuffles across the floorboards, his shoulders narrow and hunched. He is wearing a grey overall. He holds out a hand that is bruised, scratched and covered in strange oval blisters.

  “Lenny,” he says, still grinning. John takes his hand and looks into the man’s fear-filled eyes.

  “I’m John.”

  “Lenny!” the man says brightly.

  Bix peers into the shack and Lenny points and grins more widely.

  “Lenny?” he says with less assurance.

  John nods. “That’s Bix. He’s my friend.”

  Lenny appears satisfied and steps up to the bench. He pulls out a stool and begins sorting through a pile of old worn boots.

  John is about to leave him to it but Lenny turns to him and says, “Get the fuck out. Get out before I hunt you down and kill you both and that bitch and her toy tiger.”

  John freezes. His mouth dries. Bix lowers his head and whines.

  Lenny is no longer grinning. He turns the boot he is holding over and over in his bony hands, the laces flopping and the black leather tongue lolling as if in derision. Lenny’s eyes are blank in their dark, baggy sockets.

  Bix stands at John’s side.

  John says, “You think we fear you?”

  “I think you do.”

  John shakes his head and laughs. “You even lie to yourself.”

  Lenny’s lips are pressed together in a tight, furious line. They gleam with spit. A cloud passes over the sun and the flat mean morning light turns grey and cavernous. A horde of dark, extraordinary shadows invade the asylum. John hears things racing around outside, things thundering through the lanes and passageways, fumbling against the buildings and flexing in the lines between the doors.

  John kneels and puts an arm around Bix’s neck.

  “Shut your eyes, Bix,” he says.

  Bix nuzzles John’s arm and closes his eyes.

  JOHN AND BIX connect. They see the same things now, through one set of eyes. John has the benefit of Bix’s heightened perceptions and at once feels alert and powerful and incredibly vigilant. He stands and turns to Lenny. Lenny has dropped the boot and is sitting slumped against the bench. His face is sagging with terror. Surrounding him is an aura. It is black and soulless. It is full of eyes and they swirl, planets in hellish orbits without a sun to bind them. The darkness is at once fathomless and bound by an indissoluble force. It rages against that force. John can feel it, sense it invading his mind with tendrils against the smallest of cracks. John can see where the containment is failing.

  Outside, the shadows crash about. There is desperation and fury about their passes, but they are unseeing, unable to locate the man and his dog now they have connected and can see their enemy on better terms. John sees this place though a watery green light. The shadows weaken in this uncanny light, fade and disband. It is silent outside. John approaches the darkness encompassing the man at the bench. He peers into it and feels the entity recoil. The eyes that float in its mass draw back, gathering in a clump. It is like looking at the compound eye of some rank and incensed pest damned to the Pit.

  “You burned,” said John. “Forever.”

  The dark beast says something that John cannot fully understand.

  The devil-in-dreams says, “Not all of him.”

  LESLEY AND BRONZE John are standing outside the entrance to the asylum concealed by the recess of the porch. The monstrous fair is spread before them across the green. There is movement now, some activity of preparation. There’s no joy to this, no animation that comes with the setting up of a grand entertainment. White fleshed creatures move as broken slaves across the churned mud of the green. They are carrying large pieces of machinery but they are not the parts of rides or stalls. They appear to be scavenged components of fierce machines, corroded, serrated, heavy. They are lugged to the middle of the green and thrown onto a growing pile in front of the circus tent where other Toyceivers are constructing contraptions and modifying apparatus from the heap. The black and grey pennants dangling from the tent look like rotten fangs. Most of the caravans and trailers that circle the green have their doors open and Lesley can see that they are damp, empty shells containing nothing more than filthy mattresses.

  Lesley rests a hand lightly on Bronze John’s neck.

  “Shall we?” she says.

  Bronze John flexes his shoulders, rolls the muscles beneath his pelt.

  They leave the shelter of the alcove and race towards the green.

  JOHN STAINWRIGHT AND Bix open their eyes. John is shaken. Bix whines. The asylum is silent, all the shadows are gone and the sun is shining again, dousing them with
its jaded light.

  Lenny is on the floor. He has collapsed from his stool and lies curled up beneath the bench. John goes to him.

  “Lenny?” he says and tries to sit the man up.

  Lenny moans and blinks. He jolts at John’s touch and cringes against a pile of boxes stacked beneath the bench.

  “It’s all right,” Johns says. “It’s gone.”

  He helps Lenny stand. The man is trembling. He has wet himself.

  John looks around. On a hook on the back of the door is a long white coat. He takes it down and encourages Lenny to put it on, buttoning it for him and covering the dark patch that has spread across the front of his overalls.

  Lenny looks at John and grins.

  “You’d better come with us,” John says, and is unabashed when the man gently takes his hand. They leave the workshop and make their way along the path away from the back of the hospital. The path curves around, past a redbrick wing that is probably a ward and they follow it, heading towards the front of the hospital.

  They can hear something now, an intermittent clang and jangle. It reminds John of the sound of metal dropping into a skip from a magnet in a scrap yard. And above that, coming closer, the sound of an electric motor labouring to propel something overloaded along the uneven ground of the path.

  Lenny grips John’s hand. “Lenny!” he says.

  A porter’s float rumbles around the bend. It has been modified, as has the driver.

  It rides low on its small narrow wheels. Its electric motor wheezes beneath the weight of the modifications, the blades and spinning toothed wheels that have been welded and wired into it. The canopy that covered the flat bed at the rear is gone, torn from its struts, to make room for the craning arm that swings out over the cab and slashes at John and Lenny with a rusty sickle.

  John pulls Lenny out of the path of the sweeping blade. Bix barks and ducks beneath it and approaches the cab. The driver glares at the dog and stamps on the accelerator. The float lurches forward and the blades fitted beneath the chassis scissor from between the axles and almost hack Bix in half.

  Bix leaps as the blades chop together and they close an inch shy of his back legs. Bix hits the driver and knocks its foot from the pedal. The float drifts to a stop.

  The driver flails at the dog. It is wearing a dark blue porter’s overall and its lower jaw has been wired shut, the thick copper strands threaded through the flesh beneath its chin and soldered in a molten knot at the top of its long, nodding head.

  It kicks out and sends Bix sprawling from the cab.

  Lenny grabs John’s hand again and presses something into his palm. John looks down. It is a stubby bradawl. Lenny pulls open the deep pockets on either side of the white coat and John sees they are filled with the things.

  John turns just as the float lunges forward again with a straining electric whine and watches, horrified, as a slender cone made from a rolled sheet of steel lances from a box fitted to the side of the cab and plunges through Lenny’s chest.

  John steps back and Lenny falls to the ground. The lance slides free and retracts back into the compartment bolted to the flank of the float. John can hear a heavy spring winding and the sound of a ratchet clacking.

  He has to leave Lenny. Bix is up and preparing to leap. He has caught the driver’s attention and it floors the accelerator to prevent Bix leaping into the cab again. John dodges around the side of the float as it rumbles towards him and swings up onto the footplate to the left of the driver. The steering wheel is in the centre of the cab and the driver is unable to decide from which side the most danger is coming. It bends over the wheel and presses the accelerator into the floor.

  John leans into the cab and plunges the bradawl into the long, sloping nape at the base of the driver’s neck. The driver spasms and its hands fly off the wheel. It scrabbles behind its head but John twists the wooden handle of the bradawl and drives it in deeper, right up to the ferrule. The driver mewls and hisses a thin fan of blood and saliva through the wires clamping its jaw. Its back goes ramrod straight and its fingers rattle against the sloping fibreglass rear of the cab. John shoves forward and the driver collapses over the steering wheel. The float jars to a halt.

  John breathes deeply. He steps down from the cab and goes over to where Lenny is lying in a pool of blood.

  He kneels and takes Lenny’s hand. Lenny opens his eyes and grins. His teeth are red with blood. His breath bubbles in the back of his throat. The hole in his chest is dark and deep with an exit wound that has torn through the fabric at the back of the white coat.

  “Sorry, Lenny,” John says. Lenny squeezes his hand.

  Bix comes over. He cocks his head and John nods.

  Bix licks John’s face and is gone, running off around the bulk of the float to find Lesley and Bronze John.

  John Stainwright sits beside Lenny and holds his head in his lap. He whispers something and Lenny’s grin softens. It becomes a smile.

  John opens a Gantry and discharges Lenny from the asylum.

  AS THEY STORM the green, Lesley realises they are outnumbered.

  Not only by the white-fleshed Toyceivers, who are feeble and drained of vitality, but by what they have let out of a cage at the edge of the green.

  And then by what emerges from the tent in front of them, its long blue head ducking through the fleshy pleats that conceal the opening, to stand clicking its fists and working its gash of a mouth as it switches a dreadful ancient face around to locate them.

  Bronze John doesn’t pause; he continues his arcing trajectory and tears apart four of the Toyceivers even before the monster has a chance to pull its heavy, lobed abdomen from the darkness of the tent. The tiger skids to a halt on the churned earth and darts across Lesley’s path as she charges the Autoscope.

  He faces the thing slouching down from the cage.

  It is a huge black bear. It is old, with a vast sagging belly and rolling gait. It lumbers towards the tiger and shakes its head spooling great caramel-coloured loops of saliva either side of its muzzle. Its eyes are gluey, almost closed with muck but they gleam, hazardous and savage, from the slits it can muster. It bellows and ITS jaw unhinges, webbed with mottled flesh and reveals the well of its throat and its blunted, tusk-like incisors.

  Bronze John roars and they meet, head-on, and roll in the dirt tearing at each other. Lesley doesn’t spare them a look. She continues on her way towards the Autoscope, her crossbow taking out two Toyceivers who are caught in her path dragging something made of chains. They look startled, but only for a second.

  Lesley vaults their bodies and lands six feet away from Rainscissor.

  She tries to reload but the Autoscope is fast now that it is free of the tent, and it shuttles towards her and flings out one of its long, bony arms. It catches her in the chest with a bird-skull fist and Lesley is thrown backwards. She loses the crossbow and lands amongst the chains and dead Toyceivers. She kicks her heels, her chest throbbing, and untangles herself. She slides her backside in the dirt, pushing herself away from the advancing monster. Rainscissor drops its head and opens its mouth to reveal three rows of square, ridged teeth in black gums. It makes an awful whistling sound in the back of its throat and clicks the sharp beaks of its fists together like blades.

  Bronze John has rolled on top of the bear and has the bear’s jaws clenched shut between his own. He bites down and feels the sinuses collapse and the fangs break and tear free of decaying gums. The bear blows twin pipes of grey snot from its nostrils and tries to twist its head but the tiger has him fast. It flails a paw at Bronze John’s flank and its talons tear open an old wound, a long curving scar beneath the tiger’s ribs. The tiger jumps to the side, twisting with its mouth, and the bear’s muzzle comes away with a brutal, carnivorous sound, pelt being ripped straight from the muscle. Bronze John takes a few paces backwards, the bear’s face in its mouth and spits it onto the ground.

  Somehow the bear manages to roll onto its belly. It pushes with its front legs and lifts its head.
It looks at the tiger with eyes that are now lidless and wide in their exposed sockets. It has a hole that is splinters of bone and strands of red meat in its head beneath them. Its brown tongue lolls and dangles almost to the ground. It is so badly maimed that it can express nothing, just expel clouds of rank air from the hole where its jaws had been as its chest heaves, but it drops its head and lays back its grizzled ears and that is enough.

  Bronze John approaches it, lashes a paw and breaks its neck in mercy.

  LESLEY STANDS. SHE thinks she might have a fractured sternum. She bends and tries to pull a length of chain out of the mud to use as a weapon, but pain lances though her chest and she gasps for air, unable to complete the move. She backs away.

  Rainscissor steps towards her, over the chains, and raises its arms.

  Bronze John is too far away. Lesley glances to her right and he looks like a toy over there at the edge of the green. He is running now, getting bigger, but still too small. She looks up at the Autoscope and stands as tall as her injury will allow. Her breath is catching, stitches of fire between her breasts. She brushes a curl of golden hair behind her ear and winces at the pain this causes. She will fight, though she will be beaten this time. She just hopes her tiger will get away.

  Lesley is thinking of her father as Rainscissor comes for her.

  DOCTOR MOCKING OPENS his eyes.

  He has a visitor.

  “How long have you been here?” he asks, smiling.

  The man is sitting in an armchair by a window that looks out over an apple orchard. He closes his book and rests it on the arm of his chair. He is a large man, well muscled, blond. He looks to be in his late thirties or early forties. He is wearing a blue pullover. When he speaks, Doctor Mocking can see the silver piercing in his tongue. It is, he knows, a tiny silver strawberry.