“It’s finished,” she said, looking up at him and smiling crookedly. “All done. All done.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: THE BLACK FACTORY
THE ZIGGURAT WAS the tip of what was proving to be a monstrous iceberg, a labyrinth that twisted and U-turned, jinked and kinked back on itself like the fissures of a brain. Sean and Emma moved through the walls, children cheating the maze by crawling beneath its hedges. They were slowly advancing on the foundry sounds at the heart of the construction. Hot and cold air rioted against their skin. They smelled sour sweat and heard the hitching whimper of babies in discomfort. A snatch of melody, a lullaby. A scream that started off as something erotic and became terror-driven.
Sean was remembering. It had been hard, over the years, to give much thought to the terrible occasion of his parents’ death, harder still to acknowledge their complicity in the use of him as an Insert. Cash had gone into their pockets while his mind had been invaded, tuning him into the frequency of the dead. It was difficult to accept that he had run away from home and fended for himself for so long without belief in his own ability. Perhaps it had been a way of blocking out the hideous memory of the double murder. He had run half the length of England but had failed to get away from the cold facts. He was different. Trying to gouge out that difference with a drill all those years ago had served only to illustrate his rarity. Trying to kill himself was as much an attempt to confirm that dreamlike knowledge that he could never take his own life as it was a need to damage himself into oblivion. Emma had been the walking stick he needed. Though she was growing ever paler, and tired-looking, in here she was strong and limber. Her eyes were wide and bright here. In here, her brain was lightning.
“It’s opening up,” she said now.
He saw she was right. The walls were further apart and the light was improving, deepening the corners of the corridors, picking out the patterns in the floor and ceiling. The patterns were replicated in the walls too, he saw, squinting to study what they might be. It was a little like staring at complex patterns on wallpaper, or the mesh of twigs in a winter tree. The patterns forced faces out of the wall.
“Sean,” Emma said, her voice toneless, inelastic.
He couldn’t understand her terse address. But then he saw that the faces were really faces, two-dimensional visages locked into the fabric of the wall like tesserae in a mosaic. They possessed animation, these tiles. They blinked and gurned and pouted, shifting along like the accretion of frost on a pond.
“Who are they?” Emma asked.
“People dreaming,” Sean said. “People dreaming of death. People dying. This is where our minds go when we sleep, when we’re closing in on death. The cusp of it. Death is like one huge plughole and when we sleep, when we play dead, it sucks us towards it.”
“I can hear babies crying, Sean. It’s horrible.”
“Babies know death well. They’re closest to it when they’re born. Being born is like cheating that plughole at the last moment. Babies scream at the moment of birth because they know what death tastes like. They know that they have been born in order to die.”
The corridor broadened and then it was no longer a corridor because the walls sank and curved, feeding into the floor. They stood on a desert of faces that moved ceaselessly, minutely, like the incremental journey of a dune. A hundred metres away, the floor heaved up again and became a column that rose so high that they could not see the tip of it. There was no machinery here, but there ought to have been. The air was thick with movement, as though all of the molecules in it had been heated to a point of constant agitation. Some huge labour was occurring on a plane of consciousness that was beyond Sean and Emma. They felt the tongues of furnaces lick their foreheads and backs wet; puffs of arid air exploded across them from the pistoning of unseen hardware. Motors and rotors churned and whipped the air, girders plunged and spun as the giant, invisible machine ground out its unknown product.
Sean ventured out onto the landscape, clasping Emma to him when its limitless expanse threatened to squash him to nothing. They approached the column, seeing at a distance how the faces were drawn into it and coiled around the cylinder as they were sucked up like the slashes of blood and bandage in a barber’s shop pole. The symphony of creation went on around them, smashing and howling as steel heated up and steam was vented and bolts and pulleys clanked together. Sean got a trace of its mischief as the column loomed miles above them. White tunnels, friendly faces, open arms. Brilliant light.
“It’s feeding them,” Sean said, the faces on the column as they neared becoming easier to pick out. These faces were less motile, less lined. They had the serenity that comes with reassurance, with knowledge. When they woke, the corporeal forms that projected their identities down here would feel fresh and heartened.
“De Fleche is behind this,” Sean said. “A sugar-coated version of what death is, slammed into the dreaming mind of those who need it. It’s like TV. It’s like bad TV.”
“What is?” Emma was holding on to his arm, trying to read the messages she saw in the twisting core of faces.
“This place, dressing up death in a pretty frock and pearl ear-rings. Bit of slap. Bit of scent. All those pitiful fucks sucking it down, befriending the costume and not the clown that wears it.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Emma wanted to know. “Is it bad to not be scared? Of dying, of death?”
“No it’s not. But we develop our own defences. We read our holy books or we believe that Uncle Fred is ‘up there’ looking down on us, minding us as we dawdle after him, catching him up. We deal with death our own way. We pack our travel bag for that journey because nobody else can pack it for us. This…” Sean waggled his hand at the busy, hot air, “…this is force-feeding. This is Walt Disney on a bad day.”
“But why is he doing it?”
Sean said, “The dead are seeping back into our world, Emma. They’re infecting the living, damaging life, just as his being here is damaging this place too.”
“Why though? Why does he want that?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’ll find him and we’ll stop it.” He looked back the way they had come. “Out there is what death is really all about. The hill and the forest and the sea. And the monsters. Tranquillity and discord. It’s all we’ve ever wanted from anything we do. Life, stories, love… there’s no life without darkness. So it is here. So.”
Emma kissed him. “De Fleche,” she said. “Where do we find him?”
Sean looked at her. “The place where all the monsters live. In fairy tales. In fact.”
Emma said, “The forest.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: POSITIVE ID
CHEKE WITHDREW THE policeman deep into herself and allowed Susannah to come forwards. She stepped onto the hard shoulder of the M62 and waved at the oncoming articulated lorry as it steamed up the inside lane. She breathed in and pulled her shoulders back, smiled, showed Susannah’s tiny, white teeth.
Immediately, the HGV indicated and pulled onto the shoulder. Susannah ran alongside the lorry, its passenger side door opening even before the wagon had come to a stop, and clambered up into the seat.
She noticed the badge on his shirt pocket first – Come ride my long vehicle – then his sunglasses and an unattractive beard as tight and curly as sheep’s hair. The boy-in-a-sweet-shop smile. Those lenses could not hide from Cheke his long gaze into the valley between her breasts. She leaned over and let him have a better view, then she killed him. He jerked and bucked as if he were a robot and she a technician, trying to reattach some faulty wires in his CPU. His glasses fell off revealing a new expression for her burgeoning library: it was neither repulsion nor relief and probably wasn’t even a combination of the two. When she’d taken it from him she rested, trying to bring some harmony to the constant ripple of her body. Finally, he was still and she could begin.