THE MOOD OF the night was on the wane. Sean could see it in the way the scars bled into its colour; could hear it in the hum – like that of bees trapped in a jar – that steeled in from the invisible horizon. The grey smocks on the hill had vanished. They were alone. The sealed, scarred walls of the ziggurat leapt away from them, its uppermost heights lost to the dark.
“Do you think it’s safe to be here?” Emma asked.
He turned to her; she was watching his face. “I’m sure it is,” he soothed. “How bad can their monsters be? I’m sure they’re just seeing little flashes of what it’s like back where we’re from. Maybe they’ve forgotten. They see a bus or a plane and, well, if you didn’t know what they were, I’m sure you’d be scared too.”
“I am scared.”
Sean kicked her playfully in the seat of her jeans. “Come on. We’ve got to find a door.”
They moved around again to what Sean guessed must have been the rear of the building, abutting as it did the edge of a thicket of dense purple and green reeds. There was no obvious route up to any of the windows, which were, in any case, much too narrow to squeeze through. Sean was about to suggest that there might be a more prosaic means of entry, similar to their passage to Tantamount, when Emma noticed the stream.
It was a paltry affair, piddling between the reeds like urine pissed into the woods by a drunken camper. Yet it was constant, and it ran down through the thicket to a point where it met the ziggurat and ended. They spent five minutes dragging away the reeds and ferns that were clustered around the base of the ziggurat. A metal grille, badly corroded, framed the water’s route into the building; they could see the trickle disappear into a throat of black. Sean worked his fingers between the struts in the grille but he didn’t need to pry it off: it broke under pressure.
“I don’t think I can go in,” Emma said.
“It’s okay,” Sean assured her, snapping more pieces of rusted metal. “We have an escape route, don’t we? We can pull ourselves out of it at any point.”
“I don’t like it. I just don’t. The thought of pushing myself down a tunnel. We might get trapped.”
“Are you listening to me?” Sean asked, pausing to look at her. She was sitting back on her haunches, her hands clasped in front of her, arms outstretched, as if she were offering him her wrists to be bound. “We can get out at any point. Whether it’s monsters or claustrophobia or a need to pee. We can do it.”
Emma breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay.”
Once Sean had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his shoulders, he edged his feet over the hole and slid into it until he was half-way through, keeping his body levered upright with his hands either side of the grille.
“It might be that once I let go,” he said, “I’ll go very quickly. It feels as though it’s pretty well greased up underfoot. So come in soon after me, yes?”
Emma nodded.
Sean blew her a kiss and lifted his arms.
There was no light whatsoever. But there was plenty of sound, the sluicing of the water and the hiss and chatter of unseen animals nesting in little ledges and bunkers off the main chute. The clank and throb of machinery was closer, echoing through the tunnel, causing it to vibrate as Sean slithered along on his backside, trying to keep himself from going into a spin. He heard Emma close behind him, yelping as the tunnel took unexpected turns left or right. Sean only became aware that the sides of the tunnel were closing around him when the water started showering the top of his head instead of providing a frictionless cushion for his back. He hit his head twice against the metal duct, but even though he drew his body in as tight as he could, he was slowing down. Emma’s feet slammed against his crown and he saw stars for a second. When everything became clear again, they were stuck and Emma was wailing.
“This is fucking it,” she cried. “We’re going to be here for ever.”
“Relax,” Sean said. “We’ll opt out, easy, and then we’ll come back in again and try to find another way. Portion of micturate, as we used to say at my posh school.”
Emma said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”
Sean pressed the cuff of his sweater against his mouth and felt for the pin secreted there. He withdrew it with his teeth and transferred it to the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Too fucking right,” Emma said. He smelled her breath, hot and sour with panic. He stuck the pin into the thin flesh of his wrist, relishing the bright pain and the tiny bubble of blood that appeared there.
“Fucking Einstein,” Emma said, her voice screechy with panic. “Fucking
Sean tried again, using the point of the needle to score his skin rather than puncture it. A beaded line of blood popped onto the surface. The pipe did not retreat, nor did it resolve itself as something else from the world he preferred.
“Something’s not right here,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”
Emma wasn’t listening to him. She was thrashing around like a beached fish. He reached up and tried to stroke her legs, imbue her with some of the impossible calm that he was feeling, but she wasn’t having any of it.
Trying to ignore her feet as they clouted his scalp, Sean probed the pipe with his feet, stretching as far as he could. Its bore did not seem to decrease much more. Travelling south was a risk they had to take anyway; they couldn’t return the way they had come. He began working on his clothes, shedding them. He unbuckled his jeans and worked them down his legs. By kicking off his trainers (they slithered down the pipe at some speed, giving him hope that the route, if they could just get going again, would not impede them) he was able to lose his jeans and then he worked on his jumper, hunching it back over his shoulder blades while all the time Emma kicked and cursed and screamed as her phobias came home to roost. He scooped as much grease from the sides of the pipe as he could gather and rubbed it into his hips and shoulders. When he began to shift, slipping incrementally down the pipe, he stalled his progress by grabbing hold of Emma’s trousers. Inch by inch he hauled himself up until his hand was able to undo her belt. As he dragged her trousers down over her legs she seemed to come to her senses.
“What are you doing?” she yelled.
“Look, trust me,” he soothed. “Take your top off.”
She began to laugh. “Take my
“Emma, take it easy. Trust me, please.” Her trousers were in his hand. He handed them to her, asking her to stuff them behind her shoulders. He could feel, by the heat of her breath and the exertion of her body, that she was obeying him despite the protests. Her body slid down a considerable distance, threatening to block them both in, but he pushed out a hand to lever himself away from her. It was enough to set their bodies sliding along again. They gathered pace. He warned her to keep her head back. Seconds later, maybe half a mile traversed, the pipe opened out and they were upended into a tank of water at the centre of a huge arena, the walls of which twisted fluidly with umbral colours and shapes. Theirs was just one of maybe half a dozen similar pipes emptying into this reservoir. Other pipes came in, changed their minds, and plunged back out again through the wall, in black, wormlike U-turns. A fan beat slowly, high overhead, concealed by the steam rising from the hot floor. Sean could just make out, on the bottom of the container, another grille, much larger and sturdier than the one he had broken into. Maybe this recycled water was coolant fed to the area where all the industrious machinery pounded away. They heaved themselves out of the reservoir onto cold stone flags.
“What is it they do here?” Emma asked, struggling into her wet clothes. “I mean, this place is supposed to be the dead zone, the final resting place. And what’s going on? They’ve got a fucking
Fully clothed, they cast around for an exit but found that there wasn’t one. Sean led Emma towards one wall and pressed his hand against it; it went through, visible but paler, like a vegetable blanched in boiling water. “The dead don’t need doors,” Sean said, cheerily. “And apparently, in here, neither do we. Come on.”
WILL RAN UNTIL he dropped and then she flogged him. The thing in the womb woke as she beat him with a
