Falls the Shadow (21 page)

Page loathed herself. She felt useless here. Her gun was hanging limply in a loose fist. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d mourned for anyone she knew or loved.

‘Get out of here,’ Ace said suddenly.

Before she realized what she was doing, Page found herself at the door, turning the knob. She saw no reason to stop.

The passage outside the nursery was cold and dark and still. It was also full of insect. It was pink and grey‐
skinned, part fly, part locust, part beetle, unnaturally huge. Formidable when it came to teeth too. It had a maw that was a mix of twitching mandibles, wet jaw and chiselled teeth. Its eyes were multiple compounds – a maze of glazed honeycombs locking together without flaws. Each compound reflected a tiny human shape.

‘Bloody hell!’ Page exclaimed. It seemed appropriate.

The insect unleashed a howl composed of a hundred unique voices and lurched forward. It bore towards Page – an ominous shape looming towards her in the dark, shadows doubling its size.

Page watched fascinated as the bulk of the creature thrust towards her. She welcomed it, perhaps even worshipped it. She hadn’t been surprised when it appeared. Subconsciously she had been expecting something loathsome on the other side of the door. She bit her tongue until she could taste the blood; her eyes locked into those repellent compounds, willing the creature back. Here and now its appearance was perfect and meaningful. It was the ultimate confrontation between the pure human and the demon, the myth, to be cut away. Page despised mysticism but for an instant she felt a grudging respect for the power of romance. She would have to shoot it in a minute, or the climax would see myth triumphant. The human’s head torn from her body and raised on a pole by her enemies. For the last few moments of the confrontation she remained still, savouring the moment.

Then she raised her gun until it was level with the hateful demon‐
eye, squeezing softly with her finger. The eye exploded. The demon shrieked.

It was a dull feeling. She didn’t feel like a human avenger slaying the great beast, not any more. She was a woman with a gun making a mess of something else. The thrill of the kill wasn’t there. One side of the insect’s head was a nightmare, the shattered eye seeming to unbalance the whole symmetry of its body. In any other circumstances Page would have delighted in the visceral pleasure of it all.

The monster was howling and shrieking. It jerked and twisted in the passage, confined by its cramped surroundings. It twitched and flexed but was no longer moving towards her. It was scared, aware of its agony, too scared to keep going. Page felt something as she considered this, but it was too muted – too intellectual – to feel good.

She lined her gun against the other eye and shattered the compound into gory fragments. It was unnecessary and it didn’t help.

Blinded, the creature began to move again. It wasn’t running though, it was
charging
. Despite its pain, it was aware of Page, aware of how close she was, the role she played in the escalation of its agony. Wounded though it was, it was still powerful and vicious enough, Page had no doubt, to rip her head from her shoulders.

Blood burst in Page’s mouth, flooding her nostrils, guttering down the back of her throat. Her heart began to pound under pressure. Something in her abdomen tightened. Page lowered the gun, pulled the trigger, didn’t release it. The bullets riddled the creature’s hide, marking it with deep, dense holes. Enough to slow it, not enough to stop its attack. Page fired and fired and fired and thrilled to the reaction she drew.

Ace appeared on the edge of her vision. There was a stone thing masquerading as her face. It stared at Page with cold eyes. Too distracting.

‘Get out!’ Page howled, having to scream over the constant rattle of gunfire. ‘Get out of here!’

‘But Benny’s…’

‘Leave her!’ Page yelled, trying to keep a grip on her gun and her edge.

Ace tumbled past her suddenly, disappearing down the passage behind her. Page didn’t turn – she couldn’t, not now,
not now
– but she could feel the distance grow between them.

The insect blundered closer, the pain goading it on now.

five yards four closer three two closer closer

one yard

Page fired one final burst then kicked herself backwards, forcing herself to retreat. She turned and fled into the dark corridors.

The world began to swirl around her.

Gabriel and Tanith stood and watched the women from inside their minds.

Women running through passages on the uppermost storey of the house.

Gabriel and Tanith gave the world a tiny push. Small enough to change everything.

The laws of logic unbound themselves. The architecture of the house melted under the pressure of those minds. Corridors extended into places where there should be no corridors, passages linked with passages they should not, different floors blended together, landings grew to impossible lengths, rooms blossomed into the cracks between reality. Architecture distorted into a mess of arteries and veins of wood and dust and doors.

Now where are you going to end up?

A wall loomed in Ace’s path, erupting from the floor like a blank tombstone. She kicked towards it, flattening herself against the wall, shaking, forcing herself to take heavy breaths and still the rapid throbbing of her heart. The texture of the wall was bristling cold against her cheek. Brick dust crumbled down her face, fragments slipping down the crack between her neck and her collar, scratching her shoulder. She didn’t care. She didn’t care.

There was blood on her cheek, mixing with the dust. When had she cut herself? She couldn’t remember.

Didn’t matter.

Benny was dead.

Ace found herself sobbing, working her grief out into a slab of brickwork. She smashed her knuckles into the wall pointlessly, perhaps enjoying the pain.

Pointless, everything was so bloody pointless.

She’d never felt like this before. Not when Julian died. Not when Mike died. Not when Sorin died. Not when Jan died.

So what did Benny have that they didn’t?

Her fingers ground uselessly into loose mortar, crumbling it over her hands. She howled uselessly at the ceiling,

‘Damn you Doctor! Why the hell are you never around when we really need you?! Benny’s dead! Hear that! That’s another! How many does that make?’

She scowled. Brick dust ground against the corner of her mouth, flecks scratching against clenched teeth.

‘Bastard,’ she muttered, hoping that whatever vantage point he had on reality, the Doctor could hear her.

A fluid, darting shape flitted across the line of her sight before vanishing into the darkness. She recognized it.

‘Sandra!’ she screamed after the receding shape. ‘Wait!’

She kicked herself away from the wall and set off in pursuit.

Page had run from the nursery without really caring where she ended up. She had run until she found a door, and beyond the door she’d found sanctuary. Someone’s bedroom. A temporary but cosy bolt‐
hole.

Secure position.

The door had no lock, but she was able to jam it shut. Check.

Check weapons.

She’d almost emptied the clip she’d been using. The result of her obsession with that monster Gabriel and Tanith had conjured up. Still, it didn’t matter. There was still enough for one clean kill. Or three clean kills as she’d come to believe was now necessary. Check.

Freak out.

She flopped carelessly onto the bed and lay still, her face buried in the softness of a pillow. She wasn’t trying to sleep – she doubted she could. All she needed to do was relax.

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, wondering how something so solid could seem so unreal.

She felt thirsty. She could live with that.

She felt angry and weary of anger. Sad too. She wished she knew how to react to that. She tried to find something she could latch onto inside herself, a reaction or an understanding. She saw blackness, a hole.

She wished someone would kiss her.

She wondered what she really thought. All her life she’d been telling herself that all she wanted was the best for people. Now she wasn’t too sure that she believed it. It was as if all she’d been doing was working her way through the movements with none of the feeling.

She wanted to lie on the bed until she died.

There was a bullet hole in the ceiling.

Some colder part of her took control. Jane Page sat bolt upright, hands leaping to the barrel of her gun.

It was here that she’d first encountered the weirdos that infested this house. That Doctor, Truman, Cranleigh, Benny. All now dead, or mad. She’d held them all at gunpoint, wondering which one she could kill first.

She’d brought two guns to the house.

The wardrobe was the first place she thought of. She hurled it open. Her instinct drew her to the other gun, sitting squat on a plain carpet.

‘Bittersweet,’ Page whispered through her blissful smile. She spent a moment stroking the trigger, letting her finger become reaccustomed to the feel of the gun. It was as fine a feeling as she remembered.

Air rushed behind her. Suddenly she was spun around, down on one knee, arms projected from her body, gun an extension of her fingers. It aimed still and straight at the far wall.

The wall was growing. Bubbles expanded like boils on the wallpaper, ripe and taut, fit to burst. The bubbles merged into new shapes. Something was haemorrhaging itself into being out of that wall. Two distinct solid shapes, crude but familiar. They broke away from the wall, inflated bags of paper covered in a repetitive flower pattern.

Gabriel and Tanith stood before her. Mortar and brick dust churned in their eye sockets. They breezed towards Page, rustling as they moved.

Gabriel spoke first, solid lumps of brick spilling from his mouth. Page felt nauseous but refused to allow it to cloud her judgement.

‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,’ Gabriel declaimed, ‘irrevocably dark, total eclipse, without the hope of day!’

‘Hiya Pagey,’ Tanith intoned, spitting and speaking gravel. ‘We’ve not been prop’ly introduced. Him’s Gabs, me’s Tan, y’know how it is?’

‘Singing bitter songs of shattered flowers slice and slice and bloody and bloody staining white thighs and eyes quite mad how sad too bad and all things in totality my little blossom floating on the water in the land of murder where the shadows never lie.’

‘One more time: We love you. We need you.’

‘Come with us Pagey‐
girl,’ Gabriel called. ‘Like us you are a shadow dancing on the edge of truth. Time to fall.’

Page made a hole in his head. The wallpaper man jerked backwards, dust fountaining from the crevice in his temple.

Page frowned. She’d aimed for an eye.

She put four more bullets into him, one in his shoulder, two in his chest, one in his groin.

She swung the gun round and took out Tanith’s jaw, forehead, right thigh, womb, throat, finally making a crater in the heart of her left breast.

Page took no immediate pleasure from this. It wasn’t as if they were real people. They were just parodies, grown out of the wall for the sheer kick of scaring her. Once they were killed, the wallpaper people lost their human shapes, becoming piles of dust and torn paper. There was no fun in inflicting pain on this kind of creature. The only real thrill was that which shook her body every time the pistol kicked.

Page surveyed her work with professional pride. Then she made for the door with a renewed sense of purpose. She knew what she was going to do and how she was going to do it.

It was nice to have things back to normal.

Ace didn’t known where she was going, her attention was focused solely on Sandra, on little more than a fleeting glimpse of her back or a shoulder in the passageway ahead. Ace managed to keep her in sight. Just.

How could anyone run so fast?

She’d called to her a couple of times, weak shouts forced through breaks in her heavy, wheezing breath. She’d been running for so long, her head was feeling bloated and dizzy and there was a haze in front of her eyes. The exhaustion was going to kill her before anything else.

Sandra was there in front of her, a suddenly tall, suddenly imposing figure with soft, blank eyes. She was smiling, a kindly, motherly smile.

Ace grabbed the nearest wall and tried to steady herself.

‘Shit!’ she snapped, forcing herself to breath sensibly, forcing back the sick taste. ‘Bloody
bloody
hell! Oh God, hard‐
boiled skull! How can you run so bloody fast?’

Sandra smiled in silence.

‘Benny is dead.’ Ace spat the words. They had a gristly taste which she wasn’t yet used to. ‘Benny is dead, we’ve got three psychos on the loose not to mention that bloody insect. Christ!’ She clenched her arms against her stomach, half‐
falling to her knees as something seized painfully in her gut. The pain was long and dull and intense but it concentrated her mind, stopped her from crying.

‘She’s dead.’ When she looked at Sandra again, her eyes were stark, filled with sadness. ‘Travel a lot, you get close to the people you spend your time with, s’right? No one I’ve loved’s been killed before.’

Sandra slipped an arm under Ace’s shoulder. Slowly she levered Ace upright, gently but with a surprising strength. The pain still waged its war in Ace’s intestines, but it was softer now. She rested against the other woman for support, letting herself be guided through the nearest door.

‘I’ll tell you what though,’ Ace mumbled, wondering how much of the pain was her and how much of her was the pain. Sandra propped her up against a wall. ‘A lot of people I’ve fancied’ve been killed. I can’t remember half their faces now. I never hang around long enough to get to know anyone.’

There was a new burst of pain and she grimaced. The graze on her face was dribbling a steady stream of blood now, and Sandra had pressed something right against the wound.

‘I wish I’d had the chance though.’

Sandra nodded, leaning closer to the wound. Her face disappeared from Ace’s sight, becoming something dark on the edge of Ace’s perception.