Falls the Shadow (15 page)

Her skin was warm and slightly damp with sweat. It was a good thing, the best thing Truman had known in his life.

‘Don’t stop,’ Sandra was whispering, repeating it like a holy chant. He had to in the end, withdrawing his hands in slow motion. Sandra opened her eyes and stared at him. He stared back, wondering what to do now.

Sandra leaned closer, pushing her head towards his. Instinctively Truman let his head swing round to meet hers, their faces locking together in a perfect, passionate motion. Sandra’s soft lips pressed forcefully against cold, dead wood, an inanimate grin, the lips of the false face.

Truman could feel the pressure of her beautiful mouth through the hole in the mask. It was a second before that pressure became unbearable.

He dragged himself away from her, pulling away from her grip, burying his face – his mask – behind writhing hands. He screamed, at the frustration, at the injustice, at the insides of his mask.

‘Take it off!’ It wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. He stared at Sandra through the sockets of the mask, watching her pull round to face him. ‘Take it off.’

‘I can’t.’ Truman mustered as much calm as he could manage. He stabbed a finger viciously to his temple. ‘Here is a
mess
! You don’t want to know, believe me.’

‘No,’ Sandra replied in the same steel voice, ‘I do. Take it off. Now.’

‘No!’ Truman screamed, desperately shaking his head.

‘Then I will.’ Hands clamped themselves onto the side of the mask and wrenched with an unexpected strength. The mask flew away from his face.

Sandra flinched as she saw his face. But it was momentary and it disappeared with the speed of its arrival.

There was silence, encapsulated in a second.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Sandra said.

‘You’re lying,’ he accused. ‘You can’t see properly.’

‘I wouldn’t lie. And I can see perfectly.’

Truman found himself kissing her before he realized what he was doing. It was a wonderful feeling – to kiss again, to kiss properly for the first time – made more wonderful still by Sandra. She wasn’t repulsed. She was enjoying it.
Enjoying!

They broke off simultaneously, staring into each other’s eyes with a new understanding.

‘Stop shaking,’ Sandra insisted, smiling with a vicious and exhilarating arrogance. She closed her eyes and in the single most sensual movement Truman had ever seen, peeled away the top of her gown to reveal beautiful, milk‐
white shoulders. Truman just stared. He never understood quite what happened next. There was a flurry of limbs and wild actions and suddenly Truman found himself lying on his side on the floor, half‐
pinned down by Sandra, her thighs wrapping around his hips. Her dressing‐
gown had mostly slipped away, revealing far more of her wonderful body than he had ever hoped to see.

Everything crystallized into a single moment stretching into forever.

…Truman leant forward, pushing a hand under one of Sandra’s breasts, his lips against hers, everything was perfect and…

Eternity was blown away by a modest cough. A meaningful cough from the other side of the room. The moment unravelled. Truman looked up.

There were two figures. Two utterly normal and utterly unfamiliar figures. Truman stared at them in disbelief, feeling no guilt, no shame. He wondered why they seemed so ridiculous.

‘And what will daddy say if he catches you?’ the male figure asked.

Truman stared at the man’s hand.

The man was holding up the tetrahedron for him to see.

The tetrahedron‐
light was dying, pulsing slow and dim.

In another facet of reality, Winterdawn
knew
. His head snapped up in alarm.

‘The gate!’ he yelled. ‘The gate is closing!’

The Doctor was already spinning the wheelchair round, shoving it with vicious energy. The chair hurtled back at immeasurable speed. Kaleidoscopic unreality became fantasmagoric truth – colour blurring around them like a tunnel of blazing light. The gap became focused by their thoughts, their desire to reach the gate.

It was visible in the distance – a pin‐
point of fixed colour.

The light at the end of the tunnel,
Winterdawn snatched wildly at his random, incoherent thoughts,
is the headlamp of an oncoming train.

‘How do we know?’ the Doctor screamed, voice caught in the slipstream, absorbed into the sound and momentum of the tunnel.

‘We don’t
know
!’ Winterdawn howled back, uncertain whether the Doctor could hear. ‘We
feel
!’ It sounded hollow – facile even. A burst of optimistic rationalism surged inside him. Maybe it was a false alarm, a panic reaction to some extra‐
real phenomena –
anything
so long as the gate was there.

It wasn’t. Stained‐
glass colours flared at the end of the tunnel. The light streaked. And then, then there was no light, no colour, no tunnel, no sound, no urgency, no gate. The Doctor pulled the wheelchair to a halt, though it felt to Winterdawn that they were spinning unguided through the dark like a space capsule out of orbit. They hurtled past meaningless grey shapes that pierced the gloom.

One of the grey‐
shapes was the Doctor. He was larger and darker than Winterdawn remembered.

Winterdawn hugged himself as an icy hopelessness cut through him.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor’s voice was light. ‘I was too slow.’

‘No. We were too far. We couldn’t have made it in time.’

The Doctor became a brooding shape on the edge of his vision. Winterdawn also fell silent, because there was nothing to say.

Then there was.

‘You understood Truman better than I did.’

The Doctor shook his head slowly.

‘No,
you
were right. I don’t think this is deliberate. I don’t know… Truman fascinates me.’

‘He does? He’s always seemed perfectly normal to me.’

‘Normal?’ The Doctor swung round so that Winterdawn caught a sudden blast of sharp features. ‘How long have you known that he isn’t human?’

Truman extricated himself from Sandra’s tangled limbs. The strangers didn’t move, nor did Sandra – she lay on the floor, half‐
covered by her gown, watching the newcomers in meek abeyance.

Truman was reacting. The shock faded, replaced by anger and shame at the shattering of
his
private moment, of Sandra’s moment. Their moment of intimacy. But even his anger was counterbalanced by his curiosity.

‘How did you get into this house?’ His voice shook, restrained.

‘Through the front door. Ms Winterdawn let us in.’

‘No. She wouldn’t let strangers in.’ Truman surprised himself with his reasonable tone.

‘Oh she knows us,’ the man replied. ‘Not as well as you know us.’

‘I don’t know you,’ Truman snapped, but he began to doubt what he was saying. There
was
something familiar about the pair.

They were immaculate. They were beautiful. Truman had never seen a more attractive woman than the blonde standing in front of him – not even Sandra – though her sexuality was lined with an icy, physical humour that Truman found repellent. There was something in their appearance that was sickening – flesh too pale, features too precise, too perfect to be genuinely attractive.

They were there, in his deepest, darkest memories.

‘I know you?’ Anger evaporated, replaced by fear.

‘Forgive us,’ the woman replied. ‘Our manners are so very coarse. I am Tanith and this is my brother Gabriel.’

‘Harry Truman,’ Truman replied weakly, automatically.

‘No,’ Gabriel insisted. ‘Harry Truman does not exist.’

‘I exist.’ It was a statement of fact. No argument.

‘You exist. Harry Truman doesn’t,’ Tanith pointed out.

‘Then who am I?’ he laughed, bewildered and afraid.

Gabriel’s reply was soulless and deadpan. And, Truman realized, true.

‘You’re Justin Cranleigh.’

Truman made tiny shakes of the head, but it was self‐
denial. Tanith was talking but he didn’t take it in. Only the gist, the bare bones.

Justin Cranleigh was a vain and stupid man, a man whose mind worked on such a simple level that he was the perfect victim for Gabriel and Tanith’s mental attack. It came quickly but viciously. They used his mind as a blueprint. Minor background details they changed, memories they blurred. They drove a block through his mind – a trauma, a terrible accident – a fiction to cover the memory gaps. In the process, Cranleigh was driven insane – a side effect. Gabriel and Tanith noted it, regretting nothing.

They took Cranleigh’s revised mind and shaped it, built it a body from the stuff of chaos from interstitial space, the building blocks of reality. This proved a partial success. Their creature seemed perfect but his body structure was unstable; there were physical defects. But it lived.

Several weeks after Cranleigh went mad, Truman arrived in response to an advertisement. The two identical minds had a certain rapport, but no one saw the similarities. Cranleigh himself had only made stabs at the truth, in the darkest moments of his madness.

Tanith stopped talking. Truman let his body sink into itself.

‘Why?’

‘You were a prototype,’ Gabriel announced. ‘For a project we are about to launch in this house.’

Truman didn’t care. He could no longer care.

‘You are a great achievement.’ Tanith told him. ‘You’re Justin Cranleigh as he might have been. Compared to him, you’re a saint.’

‘Look.’ Gabriel pointed at Sandra. ‘She loved you more than she ever loved him. We didn’t make her feel anything – all we did was remove her inhibitions. She was a distraction, but not a hollow one.’

‘I see,’ Truman continued, pulling himself up in an attempt to regain his dignity. ‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?’

‘How can we kill you? You were never alive to begin with.’

‘We are going to dissolve your body,’ Gabriel said, without a hint of emotion or relish. ‘Your mind‐
set will be re‐
absorbed by Cranleigh.’

‘And that will restore his sanity?’

‘No.’ Tanith’s retort was dull but Truman had caught the hint of a smile twitching on the edge of her lips.

‘Just one thing,’ Truman said. ‘You say my accident never happened. What about my face?’

‘Look,’ Gabriel said, and brought the tetrahedron up to Truman’s face. In each surface he saw his face, reflected.

His face was no‐
face. From chin to hairline, ear to ear, there was nothing but blank flesh.

‘I saw the scars,’ he said. This wasn’t enough to shock him, not now.

‘You saw what you wanted to see,’ Gabriel said. ‘Your mind could shape your face briefly. That’s how you manage to eat and talk and see and kiss.’ He rolled to a halt, then checked himself. ‘Sandra saw a blank, but she didn’t care. It was your face: she thought it was beautiful.’

Truman nodded and smiled. Imagined a smile.

‘Goodbye Truman,’ Tanith said suddenly. ‘I liked you.’

She raised her fist and pushed it into Truman’s head.

Truman felt no pain, no fear, no anguish, just a gentle suggestion of decay. His mind crumbled away at the edges, the remains floating away into a vacuum. Memory, experience, sensation eroded. It was a good feeling.

My name is Harry Truman.

Harry Truman.

Truman.

T…

Tanith swept across the room to recover the abandoned mask. She clasped it in both hands, stared into its hollow eyes and smiled at the empty grin.

‘How sad,’ she pronounced.

Benny was a weight against Ace’s side – propped upright only by Ace’s strained efforts to hold her. Ace’s experience of journeying from the cellar was one of exertion, of stumbling in the darkness, of grim silence broken by Benny’s infrequent mumbling. Not that she minded.

There were bodies in the cellar, maybe twenty or thirty. Serious collateral damage. No, sod the euphemisms:
corpses
. Men and women, old and young. Ace couldn’t blame Benny for freaking out.

They’d found the body of a little boy on the edge of one pile. Better preserved than the rest, he could only have been there for a few days. Benny crouched over his body, crying quietly, making no secret of it. She’d touched the kid’s face.

Cold, dead, blue‐
white. Serene but lifeless. It crumbled and broke apart as she touched, sunk into the skull. If she could have ignored the churning in her stomach, Ace might have found it fascinating.

Benny had collapsed into a shrieking mess on the floor. Ace took it better. Her horror was more refined. Fear, revulsion, frustration – all compacted into a cold arrowhead in her mind – the desire to find out what could have done this to all these people and crush it. Maybe that was no better a reaction that Benny’s.

She was no longer fazed by some of the things she’d seen in her travelling with the Doctor. When you’re up to your neck in shit on some alien world while what started as an exercise in precise military planning is turning into an exercise in getting out with your major organs intact it wouldn’t pay to freak. Ace had done it once and almost lost her legs and central nervous system as a result – never again. She’d become hardened to death and gore. She’d told the Doctor.

‘You’re lying,’ he had said.

‘No. This shit doesn’t screw me
period
.’ She was trying to sound cool.

‘It should.’ The Doctor pulled a sour face. Ace had withdrawn to her room for a few hours of self‐
examination. She’d ended up crying into her pillow for something delicate and gentle that she’d lost for ever.

She put an arm round Benny, half‐
leading, half‐
dragging her into the darkness. The bodies and the sickness they left behind them.

She was already thinking dispassionately. Why should the bodies corrupt so quickly? How did they die? Who had killed them? She found herself discounting Winterdawn. Obviously you couldn’t get a wheelchair down there, but also it wasn’t his
style
. Ace had him marked down as the sort of person who put non‐
traceable poisons into china cups at tea‐
parties, not a cold‐
blooded killer clutching the throats of anyone who came in reach. He was too sinister to be
that
banal.

They reached the central cellar passage. Ace had become tired through the exertions of propping up Benny, and pushed the older woman up against the wall where she had a more solid and enduring support. Ace slumped beside her, pressing her hands against her face and drawing in huge breaths of air.