Last Days (52 page)

ADAM NEVILL

about Hitler, Max? Without the Russian mobilization, Hitler would have won the war.’

Max smiled. ‘Really? Or overextended his war effort. Not even Germany could have held such a front. And Hitler’s mania, and that of his sycophantic elite, was at that very moment destroying him and all he had dreamed of. You could say his ambitions had already passed into the realm of fantasy. His day of reckoning began when he invaded Russia.

Even if Russia had fallen quickly, his reckoning would merely have been postponed, until another inevitable opportunity for self-destruction.

‘But I am glad you mention this more, how will I put it,
analyzed
sociopath. Because Hitler was Stalin’s great evil peer.

And like Stalin in his Dacha in 1941, opportunities to kill Hitler were also missed. Twentieth-century history would have been different if we’d had more luck in assassinating our tyrants. Two men and their wills, and the wills of their amoral favourites, we can say at the last count, were responsible for the deaths of fifty-six million people within that seven-year conflict. Not forgetting the irreparable devastation to the lives of those who survived the respective legacies of these tyrants. Can it be sanely argued that men such as they should not have been executed earlier?’

Jed winked at Kyle, who watched Max through two parted fingers on his right hand. Max caught the wink, smiled, and chuckled to himself. ‘Am I being disingenuous again, boys?

Talking in grand platitudes about Stalin and Hitler?’

Kyle felt too weary, too shocked, too appalled, by what had happened in his own life, to grasp the greater meaning behind any more monsters.

‘My point, my dear boys, is that there is something 464

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demoniac in human nature that we are unable to stop revering. Unable to stop ourselves serving. This is our greatest tragedy. A tragedy because it is universal, and it is timeless, as all true tragedies are. And we cannot learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forefathers. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot are the macrocosm. Add Napoleon, perhaps Caesar, even Alexander? These great historical figures we admire for their conquests, their drive, their ambition, and the progress they are said to have been responsible for. But would we have not been better off as a species without them?’

Jed knocked back a glass of whisky. ‘There would have been others. It makes no difference.’

Max clapped his small hands with excitement. ‘Which makes our tragedy all the greater through its inevitability. We seem incapable of being led by any but the monstrous. The malignant narcissist. And there are many willing to take the place of a deposed tyrant, to ape them. And the rest of us, down here, cannot discriminate in the choice of our leaders, even if we have anything resembling a real choice. We cannot lead ourselves rationally or humanely or fairly, so we choose the most unscrupulous and egotistical to lead us. Into one war and one holocaust after another.

‘It was why I began The Last Gathering. To create one small pocket of cooperation and decency. Of humility and grace. And look what happened. We were hijacked by a psychopath who would not have flinched at becoming a Hitler or a Stalin if the opportunity presented itself to her. We are here, my friends, to correct a very grave mistake I made in 1967.’

Max stood up and walked to his bed. Sat down, then reclined his upper body. An informal gesture that seemed 465

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inappropriate for their boss; his thin legs dangled above the floor and its banal carpet. He was wearing odd-coloured socks: one red, one brown. ‘I am an old hippy. Who believed in peace and love. Sharing and fairness and compassion. I was a young fool and now I am an old fool. But I once believed The Last Gathering was a hope. An example for a better way of living. Of understanding myself and other people.’

‘Sure didn’t turn out that way,’ Jed said, smiling.

Max sighed. ‘We worshipped a devil instead. Asked it to lead us. To manipulate and divide us. To disinvest us of our livelihoods, our freedom, our dignity, and even our lives, in the service of
itself
.’

‘We all make mistakes, Max. But that was a big one.

Though not as big as Molotov’s in forty-one.’ Jed laughed until it petered out into a sound of gas escaping from his big red face. He sounded drunk.

Max spoke as if to himself. ‘I could have stopped her in London. There were enough of us who saw what was happening. And we did nothing but hope. It’s our vain hope that is their fuel.’ Max dropped his hands over his face.

‘Hey Max,’ Jed said. ‘Take a hit off Mr Jack Daniels.’

‘I think I might.’ Max sat up and gracefully accepted the whisky bottle in Jed’s outstretched hand.

Jed smiled at Kyle. ‘So, what we’re dealing with, Max, is some pissant Hitler or Stalin. One of them. And we sure don’t need another one hanging on for too much longer, ain’t that right, Spielberg?’

Max winced through the afterburn following a huge gulp of bourbon. ‘One of them. Precisely. And I extend this to so many of our corporate leaders. I ask you to draw your eye 466

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down to our glorious professional leaders in the commercial arena, in this most material of ages. How many of them should be in charge of anything, let alone other people?’

‘Amen to that,’ Jed said, before gulping at his own whisky.

‘Would have been happy to take a few of my old bosses out of the game. But don’t they get shit done?’

‘Mere public relations.’

Against his will, Kyle felt himself smile. Jed grinned.

‘They’ve been selling us that line since we walked out of the primordial surf, Jed. That we need them. That they are the
talent
. Born leaders, and we must rely upon their leadership qualities. We must be led by them, or they will go elsewhere. Well go, I say.’

‘I’d drive them to the airport myself, Max. Hell yeah!’

Max chuckled. ‘And you have hit upon a very prescient line of enquiry, Jed. I believe the vulpine greed of the corpor -

ate world is cut from the very same cloth as the tyrant of history. Different worlds, different means, same intention.

Empowerment, enrichment, self-interest, at the expense of all but itself. Their strength is their suppression of conscience.

But is there another way? This is the question we should ask.

I would—’

Right around then, Kyle fitted his airline ear plugs and fell asleep.

And awoke in darkness with a whimper. From a dream hectic with thin figures he could see little of amongst the rafters of a dark ceiling, before the memory of them was gone. He tried to remember where he had been in the dream, but the noise inside the lightless motel room snatched his attention. Guttural barks interspersed with avian screams poured past the 467

ADAM NEVILL

one earplug still in place. He’d heard similar before. Urgent sounds of alarm, or excitement, clotted by a bronchial wheeze.

There was light. He turned his head. On the far side of the room a door was ajar. The bathroom. Emitting a thin blast of silvery light so sharp it hurt his eyes. Sitting up, he called out for Max, for Jed, but in his terror and disorientation could only manage a low voice from a dry throat.

He could hear the other men. They talked in raised voices to be heard by each other in the din beyond the door haloed in white light.

Kyle scrabbled for the dawn-light simulator lamp beside his bed. It was gone. Yanked at the cord for the reading light above his head. Nothing. Stood up fast and fell forward in the darkness and onto the next bed. From which he thrashed upwards again. He had no balance. His blood didn’t appear to be in his head or legs; he stumbled sideways and hit the wall. Righted himself with a shove. Fell backwards. Sat down hard on his bed. He felt stupid, absurd in his fear.

Anger rushed inside him. He kicked out. Slapped about himself. Got to his feet and staggered across to where he thought the table might be. Wiped his hands across maps and shiny photographic paper, but could not find the holstered pistols.

From behind the bathroom door, he heard Max’s voice.

He was speaking in French. A name he recognized was spoken twice, the last syllable raised questioningly. ‘Kath

-

erine? Katherine?’ But Max’s voice was drowned out again by a torrent of liquescent rasps.

‘Max! Max!’ Kyle called out at the bathroom door he was too afraid to go through. No answer. Kyle pushed the door 468

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open. White light exploded outwards and turned the hotel room behind him silver-blue.

‘Oh, God,’ he said. A stench of decomposition hit him hot in the face. As if the doorway offered respite, or even salvation, to the origin of torment that issued from inside the bathroom, the rattle and hiss of these last breaths amplified.

And for a few moments, he wasn’t sure what Jed or Max were doing. They were engrossed in an activity their bodies obscured. Jed’s broad back in the blue polo shirt was patterned with sweat under the arms and between his big shoulders. Max stood half behind Jed. His face in profile was twisted with revulsion at what he looked at in the bathtub.

At who he attempted to question.

Jed turned his head to the side and barked, ‘Shut the door for chrissakes!’

Max looked at Kyle as if he didn’t recognize him. Then frowned. ‘Get in! Now!’

Kyle stepped into the bathroom and pushed the door closed behind him. It wouldn’t close. A black electrical cable ran outside to a multi-board from which three portable lamps were powered. Which meant Max had taken the lamps into the bathroom as Kyle slept. Had left him outside. Alone and without protection.

Max stepped aside and seized Kyle’s arm under the shoulder, like he was a child. Pulled him out from behind Jed’s back. ‘We caught one!’ he said with such inappropriate excitement, Kyle stared at him and was again convinced the old man was insane.

Kyle coughed to clear his lungs of the sewer gas and rot.

Thought he might be sick. Peered into the bath. Then looked away. Covered his mouth and nose with a hand. ‘Oh, God.’

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Again, he took in the vision that demanded he run now from this room and not stop until he reached the airport. ‘No.’

Brown acrid smoke, or steam, drifted off the thin figure within the bathtub. There was a pitiful sniffing at life, and its whimpers filled the small space it slowly expired within.

It appeared that an unnatural imposition had been made upon the world through a motel bathroom.

Jed had it trapped by the throat. A metal loop was tight about the shrivelled neck. The wire noose was attached to the pole Jed clutched in his meaty hands. Holding the pole took all of the strength in his thick hairy arms, to keep the captive in place at the far end of the bathtub, where it burned alive in the light from three lamps.

Kyle swooned. His vision juddered like he’d been clouted across the skull. He burped fragments of burger and whisky into his mouth.

At the sight of him, in what was left of the black eyes, a savage energy animated the cadaverous face under the bath taps into a sudden roar, that made all three of them step backwards. Emaciated legs kicked at them. The hideous strength in the intruder seemed to have gathered again. Subduing it forced a pop of sweat beads over Jed’s entire strawberry skull. But Jed didn’t flinch, just said, ‘It ain’t got no tongue.’

It had no language then. Just a lipless maw and a cluster of broken teeth set at chaotic angles about the blackened gums. At that point, Kyle realized he was chanting, ‘Kill it.

Get rid of it. Kill it.’

The UV lights continued their slow incineration. Above the bath, the ceiling was tar-black and sticky where it had come through. Incongruously, on the counter beside the 470

LAST DAYS

wash basin, a large silver salt-shaker stood beside a silver hip-flask.

‘Look, it’s going.’ The crack of bony heels and hands on the enamel diminished in force. The cries softened to mewls that pierced Kyle’s heart. The chest and prominent ribcage appeared translucent in patches. Visible bones were covered by a membrane, reminiscent of that surrounding a vast tad -

pole or larvae. Black and shrunken eyes deflated into papery creases within dark sockets.

Max grabbed the flask; his hands shook. Gingerly, he turned the flask over the shrunken face of the thing in the bath. A thin stream of dark liquid trickled out of the flask and splashed across the head of the captive. Where the liquid spilled onto the white porcelain it was bright red and syrupy.

Blood.

Jed renewed his efforts with the pole. Pressed it down hard.

Sweat ran in milky rivulets off his chin. Kyle looked from one man to the other, dizzy with shock and confusion. Until he was distracted by the mottled head in the bath. It bumped about horribly. Twisted its throat inside the wire noose and rubbed a dry mouth against the smears of blood. It gave the impression of trying to lick the porcelain without a tongue.

And vigour had returned to the activity of the brown bones inside the bath. A receptacle it had discoloured; tainted with soot and something that glistened like a trail left on a window facing an overgrown garden.

Again, in French, Max hurriedly spoke to it. But the thing was too keen on the blood splattered about it, and too enrap-tured by its suffering.

‘Hell with this, Max,’ Jed said. ‘Let’s off it.’

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Max sighed with disappointment, then nodded. He placed the flask down on the side and picked up the salt-shaker.

‘Quick, Max,’ Jed said. ‘Only takes a drop.’ His voice died into a grunt of exertion as he leaned into the pole to keep the reinvigorated thrashing of the figure inside the bathtub.

Max uncapped the shaker and poured the contents over the snatching face. Kyle thought he heard something crackle, like crystals exposed to water. Carefully, holding it high, Max manoeuvred a dawn lamp over the tub, then lowered it slowly.

A mephitic cloud of dark steam made them all cry out with revulsion. An acidic burn across their eyes made them tear up. The shrieks cracked ice inside their ears, then descended into a drawn-out gargle that became a gasp, before a blessed silence thickened inside the room.