Dalip climbed the rocks against the wall, which all but reached the top. He felt his way up, and peered over the edge, out towards the lake. Doing so exposed him to the full fury of the storm, and he ducked down almost immediately. Above them the clouds boiled and the sky flickered, the thunder an almost continuous barrage.
‘Come back,’ she shouted. ‘He won’t be out there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he’s after people, right?’
Dalip scrambled back down. ‘But there’s only us left, I think. The others are either all dead or they’ve run away.’
‘Then where is he?’
They stood against each other, waiting for the lightning, trying to see through the darkness.
‘There.’ She pointed. A shambling figure was briefly outlined on the bridge from the pit to the tower, only vaguely human shaped. Too many limbs, too many of the wrong sort.
The light failed, and when it came back, he was gone.
They ran, the storm behind them, scourging them with hail. Then they were inside, gasping and panting.
‘Should have barred the door again.’ Dalip swallowed hard. ‘Stanislav? Stanislav! Don’t do it.’
He led the way this time, the spiral staircase proper dark now, and though Mary was close behind, it was Dalip who’d come up against Stanislav first.
He stopped suddenly, bracing his outstretched arms against the walls. Mary ran into his back, but the boy was like a rock. He wasn’t going any further.
‘Is that you, Stanislav? It’s me, Dalip.’
There was something ahead and above. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear it. A rasping breath, slow and deep, a wet burbling that was almost a voice. They needed light, but she was secretly glad that they didn’t have any, because the one thing they needed more than light was to keep their sanity.
‘We need to talk, Stanislav. We need to talk about what you’re doing. Why don’t you come with us and we can sit down and see if we can help you?’ Dalip’s voice was trembling. When Mary put her hand on Dalip’s arm, he was, too.
‘Stanislav? It’s Mary. Something’s happened to you, something that Down caused. Do you understand that this isn’t your fault? Come downstairs, and I’ll tell you about it, because it happened to me, too.’
She held her breath, and in the silence, there came a sibilant gurgle that might have been ‘yes’ and probably wasn’t a ‘no’. She pulled at Dalip, and they backed down the stairs to the bottom room.
Dalip heaved a table upright, and put it on its legs between the end of the stairs and the broken-down door. He stationed himself behind it, and put the knife in the middle of the table. Mary immediately leaned across him and took the knife. She held it, point down, behind her back.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to decide that.’
He nodded, and then faced the stairs again. Something, someone was coming.
30
It looked like him. It had the same close-cropped bullet head, the same bull chest with a mat of grey hair, the same muscular arms and short, thick legs. But his own mother would have taken one look and realised that this wasn’t her son.
Or rather, it had been, and now wasn’t. Something else was wearing his skin, and it fitted badly.
Dalip pulled at his beard. This, this whole thing was a miscalculation. It might remember being Stanislav, but there was no way he could count on it ever being him, on knowing the difference between reason and instinct, right and wrong, friend and enemy.
Still he had to try.
‘Stanislav?’
His head came around, slowly. He blinked his blue eyes at Dalip, and tried to get them to focus on him, but they kept wandering. Literally wandering, because they should really have stayed under his prominent brow bone and either side of his nose, but had a tendency to slide in all directions before returning: down the cheek towards his mouth, off towards his ear, up his forehead.
It made Dalip feel nauseous. It was only the lack of food in his stomach that kept him from doubling over and vomiting at his feet.
‘I need to talk to Stanislav. Is he in there?’
The face shifted again, like a Picasso portrait. The eyes◦– suddenly three of them, then back to two◦– settled, and for the briefest of moments, it was Stanislav. The man even gave an uncertain smile, before his teeth began to dance in his gums.
‘I can’t do this,’ gasped Dalip. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
Stanislav’s demeanour changed, and stubby fat tentacles erupted from his mouth, writhing obscenely, questing in the air for prey. Then they were gone again, swallowed up.
‘I think you’re going to have to,’ said Mary. She stood very close behind Dalip, her bare shoulder touching his arm. ‘He doesn’t like “no”.’
‘Right.’ The light flickered outside like a broken fluorescent bulb, the electrical storm so intense now that objects were glowing on their own. Stanislav’s changing form was still ill-lit but visible. Dalip could see, and how he wished he couldn’t.
He tried again to find the person inside.
‘Stanislav. I’m talking to Stanislav. You’re lost, and you need to find yourself again. What you are isn’t what you’re supposed to be. You’re supposed to remember who you are, and keep hold of that when you change, so that you can turn back into a human. Isn’t that right?’
‘I can change too,’ said Mary, ‘into a huge eagle-thing. But I don’t think like a bird, not completely. I know who I am. Whatever it is you are, you don’t have to be it.’
More eyes floated to the surface of Stanislav’s skin, all fixing on Mary. Dalip’s dread deepened.
‘We may have to run,’ he said.
‘Why isn’t he answering?’
‘I don’t think he can. I don’t think he’s got lungs any more, or a voice box, or… anything. It’s just a shape, a bag of stuff that can be anything it wants to be.’ Dalip took a deep breath, feeling his own skin tingle, flexing his muscles, stretching his tendons and his joints, strangely comforted by the way God had knit his bones together and hung flesh from it.
He thought… What had he thought? Running through the tunnels with fire at his back, there hadn’t been time to consider the future, just the present. And then afterwards, struggling through the surging sea to an unexpected shore, the whole proposition of another world just the other side of a door had been so overwhelming, he hadn’t been able to comprehend it. Being captured by the wolfman, becoming a slave who was supposed to fight or die: that was clarity, existence reduced to its barest, meanest form. Everything had been focused on the geomancer◦– how to frustrate her, how to escape her, and finally how to beat her.
They’d done that. Not easily, but with Mary’s intervention, they’d succeeded.
While all the time, the monster in their midst had gone unnoticed.
How many nights, after being herded back into his cell, had Stanislav felt the raw, untamed power of Down unravel successive parts of his body until he became not a person, but a thing. How desperate had he become in the darkness, only to wake and believe it a terrible dream? Dalip had heard nothing, hadn’t suspected that a few doors down from his, a strange and awful transformation was gradually taking place.
One last go then, before all hell broke loose.
‘Stanislav? Stanislav!’ He spoke clearly and firmly. His family had never owned a dog, but it was how he imagined it felt like to call one to heel. ‘You need to focus. On me. Listen to my voice, Stanislav. Tell me you’re listening.’
There came a sucking sound that sounded less like the intake of breath and more like a moist cavern opening up.
The following exhalation was sigh of regret and loss.
‘Look, Stanislav. Look at me. You remember me, don’t you? You remember Dalip Singh, who you taught to fight with a knife, to save his life in the pit? You remember training me, all the hard work you put in, the way we escaped in the end? You remember that? Because that’s you, that’s the real you. This thing in front of me now, that’s not Stanislav. It’s not the man I remember. That’s—’