Decay Inevitable

had been pinned on Sloe Heath that he had been unable to see beyond what might happen here. He had hoped to find an answer to Cat’s death, or even to find Cat’s killers. He had not expected this Laurel and Hardy nonsense to impede him. There must remain some kind of clue here – why else would those murderers have mentioned it?

Unless, he thought grimly, as he headed for the exit, he had misheard after all and had wasted all of this time. If that was the case, then he deserved to wander these corridors for ever, with the rest of the nutjobs.

“No, no, no,” he heard Tonto/Yoda/Mickey whining, “you’re not right. You’re not right,” and the increasingly shrill demands of the nurse to shut up and play nice.

Will ran his fingers along the dense block of pages in his pocket, wondering what the dates could mean. A slap resounded through the shiny corridor, followed by the smash of a lamp. Will heard Christopher, his voice laden with sleep, laced with terror, say: “You promised never to hurt me! You promised you’d leave me be!”

And now someone else was speaking, but it wasn’t Mickey and it wasn’t the nurse.

“Did I make a mistake?” it asked, in a voice that sounded full of wetness. “Did I err?” An airless giggle tightened Will’s skin. He stood in the middle of the corridor, looking back the thirty feet or so to the open door on the left. Thin shadows jerked across the blade of pale sunlight that had collapsed across the hallway matting. Mickey and Christopher weren’t talking any more.

Will crept back towards the doorway.

“Was it him?” the nurse was asking. “Was it the other?” Her voice was muffled, and punctuated by rhythmic, moist smacking sounds. A lump stuck in Will’s craw; he suddenly could not get the dream memory of himself fucking Sadie out of his mind.

As he reached the crack in the door, he moved only his neck, stretching to make sense of the movement within that narrow gap. He saw the nurse half-undressed. But then, how could clothes be expected to cling to her when her own flesh could not? She was gamely trying to gather loops of subcutaneous fat as they peeled apart from the muscle, like so much molten cheese. But her true focus was elsewhere. It looked as though she were kissing Christopher. Her mouth was fast against his, but surely her face should not be journeying so deeply. He heard her trying to talk again, as she burrowed further. The tall man’s body hung slackly from the powerful joist of her neck. His leather flying helmet jiggled around his throat.

Will turned and ran when he saw her teeth begin to inch their way out of the back of Christopher’s skull.

“My God,” he moaned, as he hurtled for the exit doors, waiting for the crash of her pursuit. “God.”

Outside he pounded across the car parks, past a gaggle of white-coated doctors bewildered by his haste. Climbing the rise that took him onto the cricket pitch, he risked a look around and saw the nurse’s arm like a prop from a horror film, reaching out through the brick wall.

“Fuck.”

The cricket pitch was greasy from the previous night’s downpour, and Will forced himself to traverse it before he checked again as to her whereabouts, lest he slip. He felt horribly exposed on this huge square of lawn, the naked trees surrounding him, rattling in the wind. The space made him aware of the frantic schuss of his coat and the hiss of his breath as he sprinted. The colour and shade of the grass merged and separated under the insistent wind, like the nap on a suede coat when it is brushed. He was almost at the other end of the pitch when he saw the nurse emerging from the grass: a swimmer hauling herself from the deep. She even shook her head a little, as if to rid her ears of water. He viewed, with nausea, how scraps of Christopher’s face clung to the uncertain flesh of her own, how green blades from the pitch slashed her skin as she dragged herself clear and turned to look up at him.

He wouldn’t meet her gaze; not until he had to. Not until she had him and he could look nowhere else. He swerved right and scampered for a ramp that would take him into the laundry department of the hospital. Large, lidded skips queued outside, bulging with yellow plastic bags awaiting incineration. The smell of shit and disinfectant hit him like a shovel as he shouldered the door open; he heard the ratty clitter of what could only have been claws moving fast across the road in his wake. Elbowing past great steel cages rammed with dirty linen, Will ducked into a mess room and forced himself to freeze. A kettle was boiling on a Baby Belling, funnelling steam into the face of a chimp on a calendar. That day’s Sun fought for possession of the small table with a series of coffee rings and a bowl of labelled keys. Will silenced the room by removing the kettle from the hotplate. Sweat blinded him. He blinked it away. What if she was smelling him out? As if to confirm the fear, he heard a snuffling in the corridor, as of a dog pinning down the location of a hidden bone.

When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was her. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.

“Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.

She made to rub her hands together but the mime only resulted in her gluing the muscles of the two limbs together. Her flesh stretched and tore as she attempted to separate them, and, her concentration lost, she made herself fully known to him, shedding the hastily donned disguise of whichever hapless cleaner she had devoured outside. Will took two steps towards her and swung the kettle, connecting with her head just above the right eye. There wasn’t any sense of jarring, just a sickening giving way of the meat, as if there was no bone beneath to support it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Boiling water spattered her face, and poached an eye in an instant, turning it opaque. Her shriek, Will guessed, as he dived for the doorway, was not of pain but of frustration. He didn’t hang around to see how that fury would manifest itself.

He clattered through corridors, turning left and right at random, hoping that the sickly-sweet smell of medication, disinfectant, and mental decay would unhinge her and shake her off his tail. He thundered out onto a tarmac drive that led to the carriageway. He was half-way up the gates, trying to cock his leg over the evil spikes without skewering himself, when he heard her behind him, mewling like a lost pup. He watched as she staggered after him, and feared that there would be no respite until she had him dead and ingested.

In the seconds before he managed to disentangle himself and drop to the ground, he found himself marvelling at her mercurial skills, no matter how clumsy they were, because he knew she was better than she had been when he first encountered her and that she would no doubt continue to improve. He backed away from the gate as she shambled towards it, reassembling herself from whichever body patterns she had absorbed and made her feel comfortable. She hit the gate and wrapped herself around its bars, becoming interstitial, forcing the solids through her body with little grimaces of pain. He didn’t hear the sounds of tyres screeching on the road, or the blare of a horn. It was almost, in the moment that the car hit him, that Will had become like her, so that instead of being shunted onto the road the vehicle would simply travel through him, and he would filter the metal and plastic and leather and tissue through his body until it was on the other side of him, and the car could go on its way.

He didn’t see her finish her journey through the bars. He was too busy screaming at the pain that was ricocheting through his body. And dimly, he was aware that the scream was not just for his pain, but an accretion of agonies that had heaped upon him over the last week. Agonies and terrors in equal measure that his body, in extremis, was only now beginning to deal with.

PART THREE

ULTIMA THULE

Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us.

– Gustav Hasford,

The Short Timers