He said, “We’re here.”
Up ahead were a number of figures, a gathering of grey smocks meandering on a hill above the ocean. At the bottom of the hill lay a series of drab, grey buildings with narrow windows and flat roofs.
“It’s just how I remember it,” he said.
“Me too. Just think, when we were young, when we came here, we might have walked past each other without knowing.”
“Naomi would have been here too,” he said. “She might be here now. She ought to be.”
“Don’t get too hopeful, Sean,” Emma warned. “We don’t know as much about this place as we feel we do.”
They saw how the topography roughly traced the same lines as the city that existed here during daylight. The sea followed the path of the river and consumed the south bank that had lain beyond it. The skyscrapers of tents and shacks and scaffolding had been eclipsed by the hill. Occasionally, perhaps due to some de Fleche-inspired fault, they witnessed a flash of daylife. A man carrying bread in a basket. A woman shouting for help after a pickpocket had helped himself to her purse. The barge as it ferried people across the river. Sean remembered the black clouds he had seen on the day he chased Tim through the marketplace and realised they must have been some hint of this aspect.
They walked towards the figures as they milled slowly around the top of the hill. As had happened many years before, they respectfully stepped out of the way and bowed ever so slightly as Sean walked by. They talked in low voices, too deep for any sense to be made of it. The grey smocks and the pale, bald heads edged with fuzz relaxed Sean for some reason. The murmuring too, though the content was unknown, worked on him like a masseur’s fingers. Yet even here, on the hill, de Fleche’s insidious presence was noticeable. It stained the bark of the trees with white rot. It turned large patches of the pasture into scarified stubble. Spume lacing the shoreline carried with it the whiff of raw sewage.
It had not been like this early on, when de Fleche had only just discovered this dead country and Sean and Emma had first wandered its confines. But long years had elapsed. Enough time for his freshness to stain what relied on the dark and the cold, just as death and disease will eventually cause what is wholesome to fail. There was taint in the air. It caught in Sean’s craw and made him feel sick.
“This isn’t good,” Sean said. Little ribbons of a blackness so deep it seemed to be blue or purple shimmered against the night sky or wormed through the meadow. Some of the figures avoided these cracks as if they represented the Devil’s maw, but others tiptoed at the edges, peeking, awed, into unconscionable depths.
Sean and Emma explored for what felt like hours. They plunged into the forest at the foot of the hill, alive with the marine scent of the nearby ocean and the wet, autumnal musk of mushrooms and leaf mould. They scared animals into flight that they had never seen before and they were glad that the dark kept them from being revealed completely. On the beach, they picked up strange shells that resembled fossilised organs. Other flotsam and jetsam looked more like petrified limbs than driftwood.
They saved the buildings until last. Time, and perhaps de Fleche’s mischief, had ruined their symmetry. What had once been sharp corners were now crumbling bevels. Some of the steel reinforcement rods peeked through the mortar, brown with rust. Lancet windows peppered the structure; glassless, they let in the wind. As they prowled the exterior, Sean and Emma could hear the grim tunes it played inside.
“I can’t see a door,” Emma complained. “Not that I want to go in.”
“Yes you do,” Sean said. “We have to.”
“Can you hear anything, other than the wind?”
Sean tilted his head. There was another sound, but it was distant. It was deep too, as if it was coming to them from beneath the ground. It sounded like old machinery, steaming and clanking, struggling to provide the energy for whatever was being constructed or processed or destroyed.
A splinter group had broken away from the gathering on top of the hill; five men, deep in conversation, were slowly walking towards them.
“Excuse me?” Emma called. “How do we get in?”
All of the figures bar one made a detour at the sound of her voice and strolled away. The dissenter hesitated for a few seconds and made a beeline for Emma.
“We cannot sustain more aliens here,” he insisted, in a voice that seemed to be the sum of a cathedral full of echoes. His eyes were lilac and filled the sockets with colour, leaving no room for any white. “There is imbalance. We are in danger and you are endangering yourselves. You must leave us.”
Sean joined Emma and explained that they couldn’t leave until they had found de Fleche. “Do you know where we can find him?”
But the other man was already shaking his head, the bluish dome of his scalp waggling like a fallen saucer coming to rest on the floor. “Names have no place here,” he said.
“Then where do we have to go? How do we get in there?”
“You can’t,” the man said quickly. “And anyway, why should you want to? I wish you would leave. It’s dangerous for you here. There are monsters…” He bit down on the word as if it were forbidden and he had committed an awful transgression by uttering it. “I wish you would leave,” he said again, before hurrying away in pursuit of his colleagues. “You have no place here. No right to be here.”
“He’s lying about this building,” said Emma. “There must be a way in.”
“I’m kind of on his side now, though. I mean, why would we want to?”
“Because it’s here. Because there’s nothing else.”
Sean rubbed his chin. “What’s all this about monsters?”
Emma grabbed his hand. “You’ve had a stomach full of monsters over the past few weeks. A couple more aren’t going to frighten you off.”
He watched the gathering of smocks as they drifted out of sight over the crest of the hill. The night swarmed around them and the ocean whispered as it collapsed against the shore. In the forest, new noises were emanating, from things Sean guessed they hadn’t seen when they first entered it.
There are monsters. If the dead could be moved by such things, if they could suffer fear, then what hope was left for anyone else?
PART FOUR
THE SHERIFF’S PICTURE FRAME
What shall we be when we aren’t what we are?
CHAPTER FORTY: XX
LAST NIGHT.
Last night, it had seemed there would be no end to the pleasures that accosted her every move. There were many options and she explored them all. It was a long night. It was a very messy night.
At first the town was too bright for her. Lights on every building dazzled her as she walked through streets thronged with people. She felt her mouth watering but quelled that appetite in the hope that it might be superseded by another. She saw herself, ghostly and unsure, in the deep-black panes of shop windows. She concentrated on her panic, which threatened to engulf her whenever she lost her reflection to a group of men or women walking by. Just because she didn’t see herself didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Once the group had bypassed her, she returned to the window. The black dress. The long, almost uncontrollably curly hair. The eyes that seemed too green to be human and better suited to a large cat. The décolletage. The curve of the buttocks. The jewel on a necklace. She saw these things on herself and echoed on the women around her in different styles and colours. The men looked at her. The women did not. She fitted in.