The Unblemished, page 39
Instead of going directly to the dilapidated pub on the corner he forced his aching legs to take him to the canal where he listened to the song of the Marylebone Flyover, hoping for calm, strength. The sounds emanating from that elevated sweep of road were anything but soothing. The mechanical chunter of caterpillar tracks and diesel, military vehicles that reminded him only of the way those fucking mouths had split open, jaws unhinging like snakes ready to swallow him whole. The hiss of tyres on rain-soaked tarmac put him in mind of nothing but the wet air that had sped from Losh’s chest when they burrowed into him. Farther afield, concussions and stitches of gunfire. London was fighting a war that was already lost.
By the time he returned, he saw in the pub a low-wattage bulb turning the glass of an upstairs window milky. He went to the door and tapped on it with a coin in a pre-arranged code. Then he went back to the car and opened the boot. He wrestled with Claire and managed to clamp a hand over her mouth, which she bit, hard. Swearing, he dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it in her mouth, punching her twice to get her still. It was a good thing he could no longer feel anything in these limbs. She had teeth like razors. Flaps of skin hung off his roasted palm; he was bleeding badly. Queasy at the sight of the wound, he staggered with Claire to the door, which was now open. He went through it and kicked it shut. Upstairs, Harrison, the landlord, was sitting in a chair containing more holes than stuffing.
‘This was a good boozer before it was closed down,’ Manser said, his excitement unfolding deep within him.
‘Was,’ Harrison said, keeping his eyes on him. His eyes couldn’t have been wider, more terror-filled, had he stapled them open. ‘Everything changes.’
‘You don’t,’ Manser said. ‘Christ. Don’t you ever wash?’
‘What’s the point? The smell confuses them. They don’t come near me. They don’t even know I’m here.’
‘Nobody comes near you, save me. And only because I have to.’
Harrison smiled. ‘Didn’t anybody ever warn you not to piss off the people you need help from?’
Manser swallowed his distaste of the smaller man. ‘Can’t we get on?’ he spat.
Harrison stood up and stretched. ‘Where’s your partner in grime?’ he said, luxuriously.
Manser pulled a wad from his jacket. ‘There’s six hundred there. Privacy please.’
‘Let’s call it eight hundred.’
A pause. Manser said, ‘I don’t have it with me. I can get it tomorrow.’
Harrison said, ‘Looks of you there’ll be no tomorrow.’ But he got up to leave anyway.
As he opened the door, Manser said, ‘Nip outside for some fresh air. See if you can’t get yourself eaten.’
Harrison flipped him the Vs, said, ‘Nice tan,’ and left.
The first incision. Blood squirted up the front of his shirt, much brighter than the stains already painted upon it. A coppery smell filled the room. The pockets of the pool table upon which Claire was spread were filled with beer towels. Losh was there in his mind, talking him through it, keeping him focused.
‘Soft tissue?’ Losh said now.
Manser’s voice was dry. He needed a drink. His cock was as hard as a house brick. ‘As much off as possible, I’d say.’
‘She won’t last long,’ Losh said.
Manser licked his lips. ‘She’ll last long enough. Longer than me.’
Manser reached for a Samsonite suitcase. He opened it and pulled out a hacksaw. Its teeth entertained the light and flung it in every direction. At least Losh kept his tools clean.
An hour later: ‘Is she okay?’ Manser asked. He heard Losh’s laughter in reply; an infectious sound. Soon he was laughing too, despite the pain it ratcheted around his face. As he unbuckled his trousers, a movement brought his head snapping up.
Manser said, ‘Who opened the window?’
But Losh had deserted him.
Nobody had opened the window; the movement of the lace curtains was being caused by the glass as it bulged into the room. Manser tore them back at the moment the glass shattered in his face. He screamed and fell backwards, tripping on the bucket of offcuts and sprawling to the floor.
His face was burning again. He was blinking furiously, but he couldn’t see anything out of his left eye, only feel the sound of glass splinters grinding in there. What he could see through his right made him wish for total blindness. It seemed that strips of the night were pouring in through the broken window. They fastened themselves to Manser’s face and neck and munched through the flesh like caterpillars at a leaf. His screams were low and already being disguised by blood as his throat filled. He began to choke but managed one last hearty shriek as a major blood vessel parted, spraying colour all around the room with the abandon of an unmanned hosepipe.
He saw Sarah stepping towards him, her face screwed up with anger and grief, a cleaver in her hand. She began hacking at his neck but he could hardly feel it. So much blood had drained from him that the edges of what he thought were real were fraying, turning grey, flitting away like burned paper.
‘For Andrew,’ she was saying, ‘for me. For Claire. For Claire. For Claire.’ The blows rained down on him. It was almost comforting. He wanted to say something to her. He had always wanted to talk about their names, Hickman and Manser. He wanted to tell her, where you end, I begin. He thought it would be amusing, romantic even. But what remained of his sight filled with red and he could understand no more.
37. HARDWIRED
BO DRIFTED ALONG streets he barely recognised. He felt as light as a polythene bag, and sometimes imagined he was moving as swiftly as one snatched up by the wind. In one hand he carried a five-litre plastic container sloshing with petrol. Sometimes he thought he could hear her ghost as she followed him, a heel scuffing against the kerb, the vicious swit of her belt as she tied her mackintosh more tightly around her.
A long narrow band of pale yellow and green on the horizon marked the beginning of the new day. By the time he reached the cathedral and climbed the scaffold, that colour had deepened and pushed a hefty wedge into the dark. He piled the bodies into the nave and placed Keiko on top. He poured every drop of petrol on to the cairn of bodies and stepped back, blinking, the fumes blinding him for a second.
He said to her, ‘You sent me those emails.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice was as he remembered it: clean, clipped, alluring. ‘I was trying to help you. I didn’t want to see you get hurt.’
‘You didn’t want to see me dead before I’d finished my job, more like,’ he said.
‘However you want it, Bo,’ she said. ‘You were always like this, chipping away at supportive things I said, suspicious of everything.’
‘Well, it stood me in good stead, didn’t it?’ He pulled a box of matches from his pocket. Most of them were damp, but he struck them anyway, enjoying the theatre, enjoying the panic he imagined would be in her eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘The gig’s finished. All the punters have jumped in their cars and are on their way home. There’s no point in hanging around. This lot have done all the encores they’re ever likely to do.’
‘We will come again,’ she said.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it,’ he said.
‘You won’t be able to stop yourself,’ she said. ‘It’s in your blood. It’s part of your code. It’s who you are.’
Bo stopped striking matches. Outside he could hear the thrum of attack helicopters as they swooped low over the city. Under that was the sporadic sound of gunfire, precise, military bursts. A voice rasped like an insect through an amplifier in authoritative tones. He imagined tanks rolling down The Mall, troops in combat gear, picking over the remnants of the city.
‘There’s timing for you,’ he said, but his voice had lost any of its cockiness.
He imagined her smiling at him now, in that way she used when she wanted to get something from him. He remembered how she used that smile when she emerged from a steamy bathroom, her robe barely on, to ask him for a massage.
Of course, he’d said. You can brain me with a rake and drown me in porridge as long as you smile like that while you’re doing it.
He looked down at his ruined hand, at the way the fingers were slowly lengthening through the riot of muscle and ligament that was trying to make a fist of itself. That was the reminder, if he needed one, of what he was, who he had become. Surely they could not rally after this. The Queen was dead. Claire was dead, or as good as. There were no more hosts. Surely?
‘We can be together again,’ she said, reaching out a hand.
‘I loved you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to marry you.’
‘We can talk about it,’ she whispered. ‘Come with me.’
The next match he struck flared wildly. ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,’ he said.
He stared at the flame and curled his injured hand around it to protect it from a sudden breath that rose in the lungs of the foetid edifice. He sensed the cathedral shifting around him, the faces loosening, turning his way, moaning in what might have been approval or objection. He closed his eyes and saw the map. It was reassembling itself, reformatting itself. Not on my fucking watch.
He tossed the match on to the pyre and reflexively stepped back as the petrol ignited and a sheet of flame rose into the heights. She might have been reaching for him. Her thin, delicate fingers.
‘We’ll be together,’ he said. ‘For ever.’
He caught hold of Keiko’s hand and allowed her to drag him screaming into the blaze.
EPILOGUE
SHE HAD BEEN back home for a day. She couldn’t understand how she had got here. She remembered the maelstrom of leathery limbs and needle teeth, remembered being born from the warmth of her companions and standing up to find Manser little more than a pink froth filling his suit.
She saw the bloody, tiny mound of towels on the pool table. She saw the bucket; the dishcloth had shifted, revealing enough to tell her the game. Two toes was enough. She didn’t need to be drawn a picture.
And then somehow she found herself outside. And then on Edgware Road where a pretty young woman with dark hair and a woven shoulder bag gave her a couple of pounds so that she could get the tube to Euston. And then a man smelling of milk and boot polish she fucked in a shop doorway for her fare north. And then Preston, freezing around her in the early morning as if it were formed from winter itself. She had half expected Andrew to poke his head around the corner of their living room to say hello, the tea’s on, go and sit by the fire and I’ll bring some to you.
But the living room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she couldn’t remember what Claire’s face looked like.
When she revived, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house. Outside, in the tiny scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding frost. The creatures were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with basilisk eyes. They didn’t speak. Maybe they couldn’t.
One of them leaped down and landed by the box, nudged it forwards with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet.
Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the gap between them. Then they were gone, moving fast; they were more limber, more muscular than the others she had seen. Sarah took the box into the living room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt herself become more and more peaceful. As dawn began to brush away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid. She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
In the end, she didn’t need to. Whatever shifted inside the box managed to do it for her. Here it was, a pathetic comma of skin and bone, barely formed, barely functional at the point of what ought to have been its death. Its head was smashed in, its fishbone-thin ribs threatening a collapse under the speed of its heart, the labour of its lungs. The tiny belly was translucent; Sarah could see the thousands of eggs that it would release over its lifetime.
There was so much blood on the thing’s mouth that it took Sarah a long time to realise it was smiling at her. And much longer than that to find the strength to return that smile, and to reach out her hand.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I couldn’t have written this without the love and support of my selfless wife and our beautiful sons Ethan, Ripley and Zachary.
Thanks also to Jeff VanderMeer, Jim Frenkel, Joel Lane, Paul Miller, Robert Kirby and Adam Nevill.
The title of Chapter Twenty Two is a line of dialogue from the film Blade Runner (1982), written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, directed by Ridley Scott.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9780753516263
www.randomhouse.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Virgin Books Ltd
First published in the US by Earthling
Copyright © Conrad Williams 2006, 2008
The right of Conrad Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 7535 1351 4
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Conrad Williams, The Unblemished
