Janus (41 page)

She got up and slapped the switch and then went over to the window. The landing field was lighted—but only partially, she realised. A dirigible was moored at the pylon, a silver-black ellipsoid against the empty darkness of the valley. As she watched, it swayed. Henry inhaled sharply beside her. The dirigible started to rise.

“Your pager’s been beeping for two minutes now,” she told him. “Hadn’t you better get back where you belong?”

“And leave you here alone, sweet child? Who knows what mischief you might get up to.” He turned from the window and faced her. “Why, such innocents as you have been known to go about recording private conversations. How can I know you haven’t done just that, using a machine you keep hidden on your person?” His fingers clamped onto her wrist. “I really have to be sure, you see.”

She tried to pull away, suddenly realising that her coat, with Carlo’s gun in it, was where she had left it on the chair. “You’re crazy. If you don’t answer the call—”

“There’ll be an investigation, into a minor traffic irregularity while I was busy with a patient. Later—all later. But now, sweet child, angel of lightness and artistry, we have our own investigation to make.”

“Is this what you did to Barbara? While you were playing with her head, with her mind? Jesus Christ!”

For an instant the window blazed orange. Then it was black again, and thunder rocked through the air.

Henry flinched, half-turned to the window. She clawed herself free and grabbed her coat. “Air-defence weapons this close to the Settlement!” he cried. “Who gave the order? It’ll mean a full board of enquiry.” He had got between her and the door while she was fumbling in the coat pocket.

“Child, the future is in ruins. All we have left now are whatever few hours we take for ourselves.” And then he was on her.

She was driven bodily backwards. As her fingers clenched on cold metal, she slammed against the wall, head and shoulders. An explosion seared the night—from the window, the room, inside her skull, she could not have said. Shockwaves smashed the air from her lungs, twisted her fingers open and tore them empty.

She was drowning in a tide of sick roaring pain. Then air prised its way into her chest and someone screamed in fury. She made frenzied swimming motions, struck something that yielded, twisted away from the grip of claws. The screams must be going on, but she could not hear them, because the air was like treacle. It choked her ears, it was all she could do to heave it in and out of her throat.

The silence engulfed her, cold and palpable.

Overhead, if she dared to look up, would be the sodium lamps of the bridge.

The water reached up and seized her, shook her as a dog shakes a rat. She fought through it and strained to push it away, to break the grip of the hands that clung to her. They should have fallen away, hit with a splash, but the hands, the arms were larger than she could have believed, and appallingly strong, clinging to life. For a moment everything seemed wrong, she was casting away part of her self to drown, she had to stop and pull them both out of the water. But why were the hands so strong?

Then her sight started to clear. Some dark embodiment of the water clung to her, clawed and would not sink. She pushed at it, twisted and squeezed, tried to tear it and crush, where it spluttered and choked at the end of her arms and wheezed and slowly grew still. . . .

She found she was on her knees with her head in her arms, listening. There was her own breathing, hurried and painful, and another, rasping, a low gurgle. Dizzily she sat up. Her cheek felt as though the flesh had been smashed into the bone. Other pains were starting to penetrate the numbness of her body. She was shivering.

In the distance were sirens, men shouting, the roar of engines. She expected to see oil-scummed water and the concrete balustrade of the highway bridge. But there was just a room with toppled chairs and machines, and a man sprawled on his back. She found a light switch and turned it on and looked at him. Blood oozed from a wound in his side, above his waist. One of his hands was pressed to it. There were strands of blonde hair caught in the fingers. His face was scratched and his throat was marked with red bars that seemed to be darkening.

She looked at her hands. They were shaking violently. Two nails were torn back, her fingers were stiff and swollen. She rubbed them down her forearm as though scraping off water.

From outside came two sharp sounds, unmistakably shots, and more shouting. She sensed that at any moment she would understand what had happened to her here. Then she realised she was about to throw up. She lurched into a corridor, and found her way out into a night torn by wind and fires.

He crawled through pain. It burned and tore in his arms and chest and throbbed in his skull. He dragged it with him, clamped to the ruin of his ankle. Sometimes the pain obscured his thoughts so that he was unsure of anything but his own aching body and the need to crawl. To crawl downhill. That was central. That and his name. Grebbel. Jon Grebbel. His mouth shaped the syllables and croaked them even while it gasped for air.

Greenish lights drifted over him. Wings slid across one of the moons. He crawled. In front of his eyes a pale flower closed its petals, separated from its stem and shrank beneath a rock.

There was more light behind him, up on the slope. Something burning. And searchers: a strung-out line of them, with lights, calling to each other. But still behind him. That was important.

Crawl.

He bruised his knees on half-buried stones, and struggled through thorns that tore cloth and skin with equal indifference. After a time, he became aware of other light filtering through the undergrowth. The moons, rising. And with that, he began to understand where he was and why he was crawling.

Up the slope, that was the remains of the dirigible. When he had left it, it had been a black skeleton with flames pouring from it. He remembered the trees sweeping up outside the window, and then the shock. The gasbag must have ruptured and the fuel tanks exploded. He could not remember jumping clear—just the dark trees, and then the inferno above him as he lay crushed tothe ground. Some time afterwards he had become aware again. He was scrambling away from the wreck as fast as his damaged leg would let him. He must have broken through the cordon of searchers converging on the fire. He had discarded the pistol. The pouch on his belt, where the spare magazines had been held, was empty, and his hands still remembered the hammering of the recoil.

Now he tried hauling himself upright and hobbling. He found a branch to use a staff. He made better progress with that, but limping on one leg over the broken ground taxed his balance and made him feel conspicuous. The first time he stumbled, the staff slipped from his hand and he fell back to his knees.

He crawled again.

In front of him now, patches of moonlight flitted among bark and stone and earth, like scraps of burning fabric. The roar of burning he heard was the wind moving through the trees, or the blood in his head. And the voice, the whispering voice that had been dogging him, tugging at his attention while he crawled, was drooling from his own mouth.

As he became aware of it, the voice stopped. The part of him that ached and burned stood back and waited to find out what the creature using his mouth had wanted to say. He had begun to shiver. The flesh was giving out, demanding rest. He would have to find somewhere to sleep.

His teeth rattled in his skull, and the voice started again. “Crawl. Down you go. Down the slope,” the mouth slobbered. “Through the shadows. Feel with your hands, a step at a time. Down the stairs, through the dark . . .”

. . . through a darkness alive with hidden claws. Down, step. Down, step. One hand clutching the rail, the other out somewhere in front to grope, protect, ward off.

Down, step, down, and off the wooden stairs. The darkness silent again, after the noises that broke through sleep.

Rough cement underfoot.

Four steps now to the door.

Count—

One. Two. Three. Four.

There: hands reaching up to the handle, shoulder high. It slips between sweating palms. Turns. The door seems to fold inward, its groan lost under the hammering pulse. Despite the dark, pink spots flicker in front of the eyes.

Standing just inside the door, incapable of going on, unable to go back.

One hand is scraping its fingers over the whitewashed brick, clawing for the switch.

Is there a sound from the blackness in front? A moan, a single, unbearable syllable? In the furry dark, the mind creates a phantom communication.

The switch clicks. An explosion of white light—eyelids crimson until the terror forces them open. Light sears the white rough walls, and the things huddled in the far corner, one of which still moves. This thing looks up and reaches with its bloody claw, this thing that used to be—

Eyes prickling, mouth jerking uncontrollably.

“Dad—?”

The thing croaks and grins, slithers forward. Something grinds beneath it, and is pushed clear: a needle, with shards of glass.

And then the stairs lurching underfoot, the light pursuing, the shadows leaping ahead. Back into the little room and the frail door, the dark, the bed of nightmares. . . .

The light in his eyes now was the moons, rising together. The mouth had been muttering over and over. It fell silent and he stared into the dark in a dull astonishment that a vision from another age and another universe could leave his eyes still burning and his chest tight.

“Fake,” he muttered. “Planted in my head. Layered defence. If I got through the first layer, there’d be this to explain where it came from—to make me feel—” He shook his head and hugged himself against the cold and rocked from side to side, shivering. “To make me believe I’m still a puppet. Just different strings. Fake. Fake.”

He crawled.

Behind him, when he looked, the fire had sunk to a crimson glow. There were still occasional shouts from the searchers, but no more gunshots. Maybe they had realised he had slipped through and they were working their way back down the slope. He wondered how long it would take them to hunt him down.

He was shivering continually now. The aurora had turned the wood into a ruin of shadows and eroded columns, a boneyard. The sound of water reached his ears, and then he came to a clearing, with a boulder pushing through the loam like a huge buried skull. Heaped around it was a leathery, spiky mass of fallen leaves. He wouldn’t find a better place to rest before shock and exposure crippled him.

A pale light silhouetted the peaks at the eastern end of the valley. The wind was beginning to comb through the branches—was a high shriek somewhere far above.

He hutched himself into the space between the boulder and the upper slope, where two trunks and their spreading roots hid him from higher up the valley. Reaching for armfuls of the dead leaves caused a thunderous crackling as though the forest were burning up around him. If the hunters were anywhere near, they would be onto him now, but he was too exhausted to care.

Inside the noisy prickling blanket, a feeling of warmth crept over him. He felt himself falling into the dark tunnel between worlds and selves. He had time to fear the dreams that waited there, and then the dark closed on him.

She had fled from the sound of sirens, as it seemed she had done once before. Thorns clawed at her. Lights swam across her vision, snapped with tiny mouths. Vegetable fingers clutched at her limbs.

The world opened its mouth and roared at her. She was flung, pushed, battered, clawed. The air flashed and roared. Overhead, shapes like huge disembodied arms thrashed. Icy wind poured over her, filled her eyes, her nostrils, sucked the warmth from her body. Pale shapes scuttled away from her.

Something like a huge sail was whirled out of the sky. It screeched as it tangled among the upper branches. She saw a long, beaked head raised like a spire. Then it screamed again and was dragged out of sight.

She stumbled away, crawled, tried to hide from the wind, and was battered onwards.

Then an expanse of water lay glittering before her, the boundary of another existence. The limbs that had been twisting and roaring in the dark were suddenly quiet. The fractured light from the water engulfed her. She waded into the brilliant silence, a burden in her arms. She held the burden away from her. It clung to her for a moment, and she had to free it from her sleeve. She let it fall.

The silence shattered. Stingingly cold water crashed over her waist. The dark shape slipping away from her in the stream was only a log, and she wondered why she was screaming.

At some point she realised it was sunlight that glimmered through the flying clouds, and there was mist in the lower valley. She was staring into a mountain stream.

The water was clear and swift. It foamed over the yellowish pebbles and splintered the sunlight into her eyes. She did not know how long she had been sitting beside it, but her hands were purple and bright pink with the cold, and too numb to close. Her body shivered as though someone were shaking it.

She rubbed her hands together, then lifted them and stared at her bruised fingers. She tried to think.