‘Why?’ the woman asked.
‘Can’t rightly say.’ He shook his head. ‘Some places… They just don’t work out.’
Lights flickered on in the chamber beyond when they entered. The Needleman took ten long breaths then followed. It wouldn’t be long now…
Her quarry was on the far side of the warehouse, lurking in a shadowed corner. There was no mistaking it. Vast and dark, the barrel loomed over its fellow containers like a cylindrical monolith. Its dark body was girdled with broad iron bands and massive rivets.
Like a cage, Chel thought, approaching the vessel warily. It was almost twice her height, yet that wasn’t what unsettled her. No, it was the age radiating from it – a deep and baleful antiquity that seemed to diminish everything around it.
‘This what yer after?’ her guide asked, speaking quietly, as though afraid of waking the slumbering giant.
‘Yes. Have you seen anything like it before?’ Chel asked, already knowing the answer.
‘No,’ the sergeant whispered. ‘No, I ain’t.’
Chel realised he was hanging back. His stubborn vitality had drained away, yet there was steel in his eyes. This was a man who’d faced down fear before. Why had she never taken the time to learn his story?
‘You can go, sergeant,’ she said, releasing him from whatever vague obligation he felt towards her. This wasn’t his problem.
‘You sure?’ His expression teetered between gratitude and guilt.
‘I am. Thank you.’
‘I’ll be right outside then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Holler if you need me.’
Chel watched him go then faced the vessel again. There was a brooding expectancy about it, as though it had been waiting for her. How long had it been here? And who’d brought the sample to her lab? It hadn’t appeared with the regular batches. For that matter, the name on the testing requisition form – Vedas – had been unfamiliar, though its authorisation stamp was in order. How was that–
No, such mysteries were inconsequential. The drug had come to her because it wanted to. Wanted her. She felt sure of that.
‘Why?’ she asked, taking the final steps towards the barrel. ‘Why me?’ That was the only question that really mattered. ‘Tell me.’
Up close, she saw the bands girdling the container were engraved with runes, though she couldn’t make them out clearly in the gloom. Hesitantly, then with sudden eagerness, she reached out and ran her fingers over them, trying to identify their forms by touch, though she couldn’t say why. Like so much else recently, the action felt inevitable, as if she were snared by some implacable gravity that rendered volition obsolete. Perhaps that had always been the way of things, but she’d never noticed before. Maybe choice was only ever illusory. She couldn’t decide whether the possibility was repellent or comforting.
There was a scuffling sound somewhere behind her, punctuated by a harsh gargling. Chel tried to turn, but the runes wouldn’t allow it. They crawled beneath her fingertips like worms etched in water, urging her to follow their flow. Follow… Closing her eyes, she circled the barrel, drawn along by the riddle. Follow…
‘What are you?’ she murmured.
‘What are you, Chel Jarrow?’ the enigma asks in answer.
Opening her eyes the Grey Woman sees she is in the infinite ward once again, standing over the sick girl. No… not sick. Rozalia Temető is already dead, her face livid with decay, yet her eyes are open, their faded irises fixed on her.
‘Why?’ the corpse demands in a drowned voice. ‘Why me?’
The Grey Woman stares at her victim, aghast.
‘Tell me.’
‘An accident…’ she confesses. ‘It was an accident.’ She had been so tired that night, drained by a triple shift she should never have accepted, but pride had demanded. She’d misread the bed numbers, mistaking XVI for XIV, and administered a blood thinner to the wrong patient – a girl whose metabolism had reacted violently to the error. ‘It was a terrible mistake.’
‘Then it was for nothing,’ the dead girl croaks.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t want your pity.’
‘No,’ the Grey Woman whispers. ‘But–’
‘Make it mean something.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Believe in it. Embrace it. Choose it.’
‘Choose it?’
‘Make me a sacrifice.’
‘I…’ The Grey Woman hesitates, sensing a final, unforgivable precipice. ‘I can’t change the past,’ she protests.
‘But you can choose your present.’ The revenant leans towards her, its body creaking with rigor mortis. ‘Choose!’
‘Yes,’ Chel breathed, accepting her fate. In that moment her hand found the barrel’s spigot. It protruded from an octagonal panel, almost level with her face. The plate was embossed with the cryptic acronym, along with a phrase in bold Gothic script:
VLG
~ AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT ~
While her eyes lingered on the words, Chel’s fingers turned the spigot’s tap. Then her mouth found the spout.
As above, so below, she prayed as the dark nectar gushed past her lips.
The Needleman took the watchman as he left the warehouse, slitting his throat with a strike intended to silence and slay in the same instant. The wound was mortal, yet the old man still fought back, scrabbling for his killer’s throat as his life leached away. The fury on his face was exhilarating to behold – so much sweeter than the dog’s mindless rage – but like the beast before him, he was defeated by his foe’s iron visage.
‘So it flows,’ the victor whispered, lowering the watchman’s body gently, wary of alerting its true prey. ‘Until all the world’s bled dry.’
Sighing in anticipation, the Needleman crept into the warehouse. The overhead lights were sparse and feeble, leaving much of the chamber in darkness, but that was no impediment to its purpose. No, it was the leg wound that dismayed it. Spasms wracked the hunter’s muscles and its vision fluttered as it moved, threatening to disintegrate altogether.
‘I am legion,’ the Needleman hissed, steadying itself with the promise of its brethren.
The woman was waiting beside a massive container, her back to the hunter. She turned as it approached, meeting its gaze without surprise or fear. Indeed her long, pale face was entirely devoid of expression. Dark liquid trickled from her lips, staining her chin and the front
