Last Days (58 page)

ADAM NEVILL

shoulder bag and changed the function to night mode, killed the spotlight.
Which way?
He turned the camera and looked through the viewfinder towards Jed’s remains.

The world in the viewfinder was underwater-dark, green, black, relieved with patches of milky luminance. In it he saw the approach of another Blood Friend across the floor on all fours, from the far end of the corridor, clad in some unrecognizable motley of stained shroud and what must have been Chet’s clothes. It had managed to get inside a tailored shirt. And the figure leaped like a leopard intended for the haunches of a gazelle. It reached its target and fell upon it, kicking and raking, its face snapping at Jed’s wet shape. Kyle couldn’t feel his legs; his wide eyes filmed with tears.

But the trio of Blood Friends were too busy with Jed’s remains to notice his fretting in the dark so near. It was the only reason he was still alive. Trying to keep the contents of his stomach in place, Kyle turned and staggered towards the lobby, using the camera’s viewfinder as his eyes to see if there was a way through to the staircase.

He shuddered to a standstill before he’d taken four steps.

Max had not made it very far or cleared any kind of route.

And at first Kyle wasn’t sure whether the grunts and squeals originated from Max or the pale but indistinct bulk that must have recently arrived, or been hiding down there, to snatch Max from his feet as he ran for the stairs. A thing the size of a bear, on its hind legs, now held the executive producer’s small body aloft. Away from those others that Kyle was grateful he could not see in any great detail, who jerked around the rear legs of the bulk, all eager to join the feast. Additional snarls and cackles and cries of bestial delight issued from the scrum of small emaciated silhouettes to fill 516

LAST DAYS

the second-floor lobby, and accompanied the sounds of wet leather strops and gristle pops that emerged from whatever was being done to Max’s diminutive body.

The conclusion of the night vision’s furthest reach disintegrated at the top of the staircase, and yet upon the large figure the night vision’s dimming found a wet snout at head height. Beneath that, the great blackened belly of a sow, the teats wet with brine.

A terrible splash beneath its mass was followed by inhuman snuffles and a snatching
clomp
of a mouth upon what fell wetly from its prize. In his twitching dismal light, Kyle saw an impression of small black eyes too, set deep behind great dark bristles. A suggestion of a wet maw grunted. Tusks were awash with fluid, parts of the moist bulk enshrouded in vestiges of tatty cloth; it was upright and festooned with what may have been the rags of a bishop dispossessed four centuries before this night. And as the Unholy Swine swayed on its rear trotters, about the blasphemous hierophant of St Mayenne, the congregation of scarecrow parts shrieked and wailed and snatched upwards with thin hands and renewed vigour at what began to fall from the noisy feast in progress above them.

Max’s thin ankles twitched, or even still kicked, until the porcine squeals were cut through with the final shriek of a man opened alive. The second wind of Max’s agony and terror only served to increase the spidery antics of the figures that continued to swarm into the lobby from the floor below and from the opposite lightless archway. Maximillian Solomon was gone, was no more, had found his end trying to finish what he unwittingly started in 1967.

Of more concern, the lobby and connecting stairwell were 517

ADAM NEVILL

blocked. Nothing would get through to the stairs alive. What little reason still flickered in a head swimming with nausea and terror told Kyle that he would have to run the other way, back across Jed’s remains and amongst those who were busy upon his fallen comrade. The thought of which made his entire being shudder, while his face screwed up for tears he did not have time to shed. Panic electrified him. He knew he had to run now, somewhere, deeper inside the building, but could only fight the desperate competing urge to just sit down and shake until they came for him too.

End. The end. The end of him right here. Katherine wins.

Goes into the child. The child. Another child. Kyle whimpered. Then snapped alert the very instant a clear idea broke from the maelstrom in his mind.

Holding the camera with one hand, he raised the Gloch and aimed it at the squealing commotion in the lobby. Kyle took aim at the indistinct bulk and talked out loud, but was unsure what he said or to whom he spoke. Acting on some instinct he could barely account for, he stood with his legs apart and pumped five rounds down the corridor in the direction of what fed so intently and greedily down there in the dark.

A wet thump sounded as the great shape went down to its haunches. A scream seared then muffled Kyle’s ears like gloved hands. Inside the trembling viewfinder, the black-haired flanks of the swine shuddered in the pallid light and between the green-white walls that juddered as if it were they that had been hit. But the wet bulk, that had been so busy with Max’s carcass, turned heavily upon the floor, and rose unsteadily to what might have been all fours, with the limp remains of the old man still clutched to its belly.

518

LAST DAYS

In a heartbeat, the wounded bulk was covered by an opportunist scramble of the thin limbs and clawing hands that had previously only been able to clutch and snatch at the prize held above them. Kyle turned his face and camera away as the vile parish pulled out the first parts of their Unholy Swine.

He withdrew back to the room where Jed had fallen. He was still trapped. The lobby represented an orgy of pain and dismemberment; behind him, the old friends still stripped Jed down to wet bones. But as he’d hoped, Jed’s assailants began to rouse, stirred from their increasingly meagre fare by the sounds of fresh excitement bursting from the lobby. In the viewfinder he watched three dark heads emerge like hyenas from the ribcage of something felled, whinnying, on the grass-lands of Africa. The faces were stained but within their white eyes Kyle identified a desire to satiate their mindless appetite elsewhere, to feed anew using those dirty fingers and what black teeth they could summon within their mouths. At the sight of their distraction, and then their eager scurry through the corridor, and right before the toes of his boots, Kyle thought of putting the gun inside his mouth. But on they scraped and bumped and raced to the lobby, where the felled swine bleated and splashed and flopped amidst the scrum of old bones.

From hopeless despair and grief, Kyle passed into lunatic hope, and before it fully registered that he was even moving, he was engaged in a stagger away from where so many small brittle figures now crouched and noisily suckled.

He stopped a few feet before Jed’s now insubstantial silhouette on the carpet of the hallway. He looked down through the viewfinder, and tried not to see, and then un-see, 519

ADAM NEVILL

what was left of Jed and his one eye that still stared upwards.

One of the flares that he sought was broken, the other two were wet, but intact, and still attached to the discarded utility webbing. Kyle retrieved them both. Wiped them on his jeans.

Clenched his teeth as he did so, to stifle the desire to sob.

He let the camera swing away, under his shoulder on the strap. Gripped the Gloch tight and lit one of the flares between his knees as quickly as he was able. Thrust it above his head in enough time to see three figures pause in a stalk across the ceiling towards him from the lobby, their jaws black with blood.

Kyle lurched to the end of the corridor, peering back over his shoulder at those that had paused and clutched at their faces in shock and pain before the flare. Turned right.

Remembered what Jed had said about there being twelve rooms. How many had they checked?
One, two, three.
‘Shit!’

He had to break into another nine before the two flares ran out. The clip inside the Gloch gave him another ten rounds

. . . he thought. Should he go back and find Jed’s weapon and spare clips? He hadn’t seen any weapon or magazines back there; Jed’s gun could be anywhere in the corridor too, or even in the last room they checked, where he fell. And without night vision goggles, once the flares were gone Kyle would have to hold the camera again with one hand and look through the viewfinder while shooting at thin, fast-moving targets at the same time; he’d be dead in seconds. He was no marksman; fighting his way out was not an option.

He carried on.

In the long corridor across the rear of the mansion he saw three doors; another three would be further down, another three at the front, on the opposite side of the lobby to the 520

LAST DAYS

one they had searched. He thought of what was down there waiting for him and felt faint. Where would Chet be?
Where,
where, where?
Max said it ended with him. Hoots and shrieks echoed from the other side of the building about the swine’s still-grunting remains, and pierced the darkness at the far end of the corridor he faced. He dithered. Looked about himself.

‘Shit!’

A door. Try a door. Any door.
The first one was locked.

The flare guttered. He ran down to the next, yanked at the handle: locked. ‘Fuck!’ The third opened. He kicked the door in. Turned and looked about the corridor left and right. Walls, ceiling and floor would soon be a highway of hideous traffic; he could hear it baying in both directions now, underwritten by a determined scurrying through the shadows. The lobby banquet must be winding down. There was no way he could stand and fight. He had nowhere else to go. An urge to cry out for his mother came to him.

Instead, Kyle lobbed the first dying flare into the room and saw that it was big. Full of chairs facing away from the door.

Were they occupied? He whimpered. The flare died. He lit up the second flare after three attempts. It came up frothing and fizzing and beautifully white with intense light and he heard the encroaching tide of mottled bones in the corridor outside pause, then scamper into a reluctant and temporary retreat.

Gun arm outstretched, flare held high and out from his body, Kyle stalked into the room and slammed the door behind him with a foot. He went inside, amongst the chairs.

And he stood mute at what sat up straight and grinned within the room he’d shut himself inside.

*

521

ADAM NEVILL

He didn’t know what to scream at first, because there were so many things to scream at. And he found himself reduced to a strengthless thing that remained still and mute and gaping.

It took him a few seconds to realize that none of the seated figures were moving. The audience propped upright on the white chairs, or even tied in place with silk scarves, were long dead. Mostly bone. A few had teeth, long horsey teeth, still yellow, that protruded from cartilage mouths. Where flesh still existed it was beef-jerky dry as if preserved by dusty, airless places. Eye sockets were empty and noses were long gone. But all brought here? For what? To be seated as if for a performance on chairs from the dining room, which explained the empty tables downstairs.

The silent, fragrant dead sat and looked at the two beds at the far side of the penthouse. Kyle forgot to breathe, until it panted out of him as he moved deeper inside the room, the walls entirely draped with purple cloth, satiny in the flare’s icy reach. Maybe he was still hyperventilating at the atrocity outside, out there, and behind him; the continual display of horror that had marked his progress from the first day of principal photography in London to the top of a mansion in San Diego. He followed the unseeing line of sight from the hollow eye sockets about him. Walked to the two beds.

‘Jesus no,’ he spoke to himself and for the world that should never behold, in any of its parts, no matter how remote or forgotten or Godforsaken, the sight of such things.

And he remembered so vividly his own haunted nights when he too had risen in dreadful sleep from off his bed while unconscious, as if occupied by a nocturnal intrusion that 522

LAST DAYS

rebuilt his dimensions with the limbs and hands and feet of another.
This other
. In the large bed, surrounded by a clear plastic tent, to protect it and the white instrument panels from the very air of the room, and from those inside it that sat as still as the embalmed on the white chairs, he could just make out the dim shape of a wasted body within.

But he should not have been able to see the soles of its ivory feet or its buttocks shrivelled like figs, or the long carcinoma-mottled limbs, these arms that dropped beneath it and the legs that stuck out straight. Nor should he have borne witness to the hairless head, yellowy with jaundice, the facial skin sucked back to the bone. He should not have been able to see any of this, but as it was raised at least three feet from the bedclothes where it hung suspended on unseen threads like some horizontal puppet, he could see the wasted remnants of a human being in all of its horror.

Hard hands and feet hammered at the door behind him.

Kyle turned. The door clicked open and swung wide and the shrieking crowd outside in the corridor darted back and forth across the open space. Grisly heads turned inwards, then away at the hateful light of the diminishing flare that held them back. But as soon as the flare died, they would be inside and he would be overcome. Down amongst the chairs of the already dead he would meet his end. Unfilmed. Undocumented. Untold.

And it came to him them; these upright rags and bones upon the chairs may have once been followers,
her
constitu -

ency. The dried fruits of Sister Katherine’s former following.

Those who had the temerity, the unforgivable audacity, to desert her. To reject her. Perhaps the silent dead were the disinterred victims of the farm and the copper mine; the run-523

ADAM NEVILL

aways, the missing who had been hunted down and taken to another place, or disinterred from whatever un marked grave she had left them inside. Another exhibition, but one so exclusive as to be held in the royal bedchamber of a queen. Dry, cadaverous, eyeless, even in death these husks of the mis-guided must have been brought forth to sit upon chairs against their will. Witnesses. Revenge. At which the thing in the giant bed could gloat. Even in death, and what a terrible end they had seen, they were summoned again to their queen to witness her blasphemous miracles, her monstrous vanity, because all must serve it, for ever.