“Subjects?”
“Yes. Here, I’m important. If I was a cheese here, I would be a big one.”
“I don’t get it.”
Sadie winked and rubbed the shiny skin of the sac. It wrinkled and gurgled beneath her fingers. “You did get it though, didn’t you? Remember? In the church? Naughty boy.”
Will forced himself to concentrate on one thing at a time. He felt as though he were sinking under the weight of so much innuendo and concealed threat. If he was going to be of some use to Cat or Eli, wherever they were now, then he had to tread water. “Why are you so different?” he tried again. “What marks you out as something special?”
She said, “I was an Insert once. Like your friends. One of the first. A guinea-pig. They lost me as soon as they put me in. I’ve been lording it here ever since. I’m a rare bird, Will. I can cross over. I have that talent thanks to the men in the white coats and the big beards. A failed experiment, but I’m not complaining. I didn’t go in quite as far as they were hoping, or needing, me to go. But, as I say, I’m not complaining.”
“And what about George and Alice. Relatives of yours?”
“Ah yes,” Sadie said. “George and Alice. No. Not relatives. That was me. A welcoming party for you. How’s your arm?”
Will stiffened. “What’s all that about?”
“Well, a girl’s got to eat, hasn’t she?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Sadie?”
She licked her lips at him. “What is it, you think, keeping our child here sustained? Nourished? Gold top milk and a pot of pureed chicken and sweetcorn?”
“It’s not my child. I don’t know what sickness has got into your brain, but it’s got to stop, Sadie.”
“Will, meet Cherub, Cherub, meet Will. Daddy’s home.”
The curl of grey flesh twisted. A smile curled its lip.
“Come home with me,” she said.
“Fuck off, Sadie. I’m not scared of you.”
Sadie widened her eyes. “Jesus, Will. You should be.” She tapped a nail against her teeth; her other hand absently stroked the umbilicus joining her to her progeny. “Tell you what, let me show you why you need to be scared. There’s plenty to be scared of, you know.”
She reached behind her, for one of the puling idiots begging to be put out of his misery: an elderly man whose spine was a shattered bow sticking through the sheepskin coat on his back gibbered his appreciation. He placed a gnarled hand in hers at the same time that she caught hold of Will’s sleeve.
A blink: the bar resolved itself into the twisted, burning carriage of a passenger train. Commuters lay around the carriage in various states of physical collapse. There was a lot of blood. The old man was now lying half in, half out of the train, his spectacularly ruined back shredded apart on the mangled remains of the window. Will watched as he turned his face to them, his shattered teeth bared in a grateful leer, bloody bubbles bursting on his tongue as he fought for breath.
“Now,” he begged.
Sadie leaned over and covered his mouth with hers. She drew breath so violently that it seemed half the old man’s jaw was sucked between her lips. His body jerked twice and was still. She let him fall. The scene disintegrated around them as she let go of the man’s hand.
“Now then,” she purred, leaning over to kiss Will’s cheek with her bloody mouth. “Come back to my place.”
“I saved your life, Sadie. I came after you when you went missing.”
“Pah.” Sadie dismissed the claim with a flap of her hand. “I was prospecting for a mate. You were strong and resourceful. And your arse looks good in jeans. Now. Home.”
He could hardly object, not when two of the bouncers moved behind him, casting long, long shadows across the bar.
“Meet Kynaston and Drinkwater,” Sadie said. “Evil bastards the both of them.” The two bouncers saluted him.
Joanna murmured as they brushed past her.
“Who’s this?” Sadie asked. “Got some competition, have I?”
Will said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
Sadie smiled. She reached out and flicked the end of his nose. Her fingers smelled of cold, old things. She nodded at one of the bouncers. “She’ll do. Take her.”
THEY WALKED THROUGH the seething streets, but nobody jostled them. Bodies parted in Sadie’s path as though she and the oncoming throng were repelling magnets. Eventually, the strip clubs and dive bars and street corners haunted by junkies dwindled. The traffic shook off its insanity. Will followed Sadie along a series of ever- narrowing corridors in a mangled spread of housing that seemed to have been jammed together like ill-fitting Sticklebricks in a child’s playpen. Flues and drainpipes, vents and fire escapes clung to the superstructure, little more than add-ons or afterthoughts. Some people were on the fire escapes, drinking tea or watching the stars or fucking. Cardboard boxes, tarps and plastic sheeting had been arranged on some of the landings, makeshift houses for the wretches who couldn’t find themselves a toehold. Will wondered about them, what their lives beyond coma must be like. So-called lives.
It grew so dark in the rabbit warren that Will had to listen out for the sluicing of the foetus in its membrane. At least, in here, he didn’t have to look at it. Nevertheless, his mind settled upon the developing child, and he imagined it rotating in its vital jelly, watching him as he followed Sadie through passageways so thin he could feel the cement of the walls muscling in against him. He smelled Juicy Fruit on the breath of the bouncers marching behind him, and when he looked back he could just see a reflected gleam off the insectile lenses of their sunglasses. They walked until they came to a set of storm doors set into the floor, at a point where the walls actually converged. All around them, lifting into the night, were sheer edifices of urbanity: greasy windows filled with dirty yellow light, a jungle of satellite dishes and TV aerials, telegraph wires, and cables. Will saw figures using these as a monkey might use a vine in a rainforest. It seemed a safer option than using the streets. As if in confirmation of this, the rooftop horizons were spoiled by the shape of tents and bivouacs.
Kynaston pushed past Will and grappled with the storm doors. Sadie descended, but paused when half of her body had disappeared to look back at Will.
“Welcome to my palace,” she said.
SHE SAID, “I need you.”
He knew he ought to be impressed by what she said, and at some level he knew he was, but for the time being his eyes were too busy to allow anything else to bother him. They kept returning, despite the opulence of the surroundings, to the head on the stage behind him. One of the eyes was only half-shut, as if trying to trick people into thinking it belonged to a dead person. At any moment, the mouth seemed as if it might open and sing-song: “Fooled you!” The head had begun to shrink, and the skin had tightened into an arid mask, but the hair was still lustrous, the thing that helped Will identify it as belonging to Elisabeth.
Sadie’s palace had turned out to be an underground theatre that had been gutted by fire. Seated in the auditorium, either slumped with decay into the burned seats or erect with rigor mortis, death grins, and clenched fists, corpses blankly contemplated the stage with its craters and its mountains of ash. Joanna had been draped across the laps of one of these bodies. Her arm was around its shoulders. She twitched in sleep and nuzzled up against its puffball throat. Up in the gods, bodies twirled slackly on ropes, swollen necks bent bonelessly over the slipknots.
Whatever fire had scoured clean the theatre had done for the curtains too. Immense runners hinted at their extravagance; Will could almost imagine a great weight of maroon velvet and gold brocade sweeping across the stage to consume the players. He could almost hear the clamour of the ovation, the hands blurring as they clapped
