Others (41 page)

He was yanked back by his ankles so that his arms gave way and he collapsed on to the sill, his neck catching the broken glass, cutting deep into his throat. The wall beneath him was immediately drenched in a great wash of blood and he was caught there, the underneath of his jaw snagged by the embedded glass, his knees bent, toes against the floor. The mob had paused momentarily as though fascinated by the blood that was pumped from the wound in a regular cadence. Perhaps they had even become afraid, awed by what they had done to their master, this hated but venerated demi-god; perhaps, like Dr Moreau’s wayward, island children, they had become overwhelmed by the realization of their own rebellion. From where I stood I had a view of Wisbeech’s profile and I could see that he was gazing at the dried little husk that had once been his brother, a wrinkled cadaver strapped to an invalid chair from where, when alive and, it seemed, long after, Dominic Wisbeech had been entertained by acts of the worst depravities, perverted copulations that sometimes ended in the death of one of the participants, a private affair to begin with, but later a financial enterprise with high rewards; all arranged and, in a way, engineered, by his sibling, Leonard. What the doctor was thinking as his life’s blood poured away and his eyes slowly glazed, can only be guessed at, but at least his dying muse did not last long.

His creatures,
his
mutants, had become emboldened by their master’s helplessness and they plucked at him, touching his hair, his shoulders, immediately snatching their fingers away like nervous kids touching a dead animal; then, impatience getting the better of them, they hauled his body off the glass and threw it to the floor. I was glad I could not see what they did to him then - there were too many heaving backs and rearing heads and limbs - for the sounds of ripping and the breaking of bones were enough.

We backed away, Constance, Joseph and Mary gathered behind me, clutching each other, Mary out of her shock and whimpering uncontrollably. Our escape route was blocked by the melee between us and the double doors and I knew we had to skirt around it. But when I realized the extent of the conflagration, I wondered how.

45

Although the flames were still some distance away from us, they were spreading fast and their heat already seemed to be searing our flesh. It was becoming difficult to breathe too, great billows of black smoke filling the air, the inferno itself greedily consuming the oxygen we needed. Across the room, the bed that had been draped in red velvet was nothing but a funeral pyre, the wall behind it and ceiling above obliterated by fire. Great chunks of plasterboard that had covered the ceiling joinery were falling inwards, burning as they dropped; light reflectors blazed like burning bushes and the snake nest of cables on the floor was melting, the acrid fumes poisoning the atmosphere, causing us to clamp our hands over our mouths and noses. My eye stung and tears began to blur my vision; my throat felt scorched and each breath became successively more laboured. It was the same for the others and I knew I had to get us all out of there before we succumbed to the heat and smoke.

It took me less than two seconds to figure it out. If we couldn’t skirt around that rabid mob hunched over its gory prize, then we’d go through it. All right, maybe not directly through it, but through the edge of it, as far away from the fire as possible.

‘Constance, give me your stick.’

Her teared eyes looked at me uncomprehendingly.

‘One of your sticks,’
I repeated, pointing at it.
‘I’m going to need it. Joseph, help them both and follow me. Stay close, but
keep behind. If I run into trouble, keep going.’
My throat felt raspy, but not from shouting.

Taking Constance’s metal elbow-crutch and holding it before me like a baseball bat, I began to make my way towards the blood-crazed creatures, flinching at the sight of a naked arm raised high into the air. It wasn’t attached to its body and I knew it belonged to Wisbeech: they were literally tearing him apart.

‘Oh my God!’
I heard Constance cry and I knew she had caught sight of the dismembered limb too.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that my companions had stopped. Despite the swift-approaching flames, the stifling heat, the choking smoke, they were frozen to the spot.

‘Come on, keep moving?
I yelled at them, grabbing Constance and pulling her forward.

Unfortunately, either her cry or my yell had attracted the attention of one or two of the creatures. Two began to rise -the tentacle-armed man and the backless girl. I think the girl recognized me, for her lunatic smile widened and her arms reached forward as if to embrace. I noticed the running blood that covered her hands and wrists. The tentacle-man started coming towards me. The girl disengaged herself from the crowd and followed.

I was ready for them though. I felt no pity, no shame, as I rushed forward and brought the metal cane down hard on the naked, hairless thing’s bald skull.

The impact ran up my arms, almost numbing them, and the man went down hard and fast, his skull caved in like a broken egg shell; I hadn’t realized his bones were so fragile and I don’t suppose I would have cared anyway. All I can say in my defence is that there are extremes and then there are
extreme
extremes. The fact is, these creatures were scarcely human and they appeared to be driven by something evil inside them. I’m sure some social workers would condemn me for my uncompromising stance, but then, what the fuck do
they
really know? Besides, these demented creatures were going to kill us, just as they had killed Nurse Fletcher and Leonard Wisbeech, just as they would kill anyone they came across that night. They were bad and they were mad, and that’s the end of it.

Its tentacle-arms twitched and quivered and it was soon gone.

The girl with the lovely face and raven hair and madness in her stare, whose inner organs, bones and arteries were exposed inside her fleshless back and legs, was not at all deterred. She stepped around her companion on the floor and continued to approach, her arms still stretched towards me. I saw others behind her beginning to take notice.

Even when a burning ember flew into her hair, causing it to smoulder, she continued. It was hard - oh, it was goddamn hard - and I had to keep reminding myself she was too far gone to listen to reason and even if she meant me no harm (which I seriously doubted) the fire would take us both within minutes. I hit her, not as brutally as I had hit the man, but with enough force to stop her in her tracks.

I had struck her on the shoulder and she had staggered a little. Now she blinked and I thought she was about to cry. She didn’t though. Her face turned into an expression of utter vileness, as though the insane gleam in her eyes had merely been seen through the holes in a mask. The mask had slipped, somehow knocked away by the blow to her shoulder, and here was the real face, no longer beautiful but ridden with malevolence. Her stretched-out hands slowly curled to become claws. But at the same time her smouldering hair flamed up to become a blazing halo around her head.

She started screaming, the harsh fact of being alight cutting to the core of her deluded mind, and wheeled around and around, metal inside her body catching the fire-glow, distracting the other creatures from their task.

‘Now!’
I shouted to Constance and the others.
‘Runt

Although traumatized - Constance had her hands to her mouth, Mary was sobbing helplessly, and Joseph’s mouth was agape - they did as I bade them, scuttling past me while I brandished my weapon at the mob. There was a sudden
whoosh
behind me and something fell from above, sending showers of sparks and embers our way, a wave of fresh heat washing over us all like a dragon’s breath. I felt my hair singe at the back, another blast of fiercely hot air engulf me, and then I, too, felt as if I were on fire.

The creatures fell back, not afraid of me, but of what lay behind me, and for a brief moment I saw what was left of Dr Leonard K. Wisbeech on the floor. One arm was missing, cleaved from his shoulder by God knows what, and his face, his once handsome, distinguished face, was a bloody pulp. His clothes were torn open and so was his body: it was as if they had dug into him with trowels, yanking his innards loose so that they glistened in piles around his inert form. It was just a glimpse, and quite enough; I turned my head away.

Then I moved fast, running after my friends towards the double doors, flames licking at the left side of my body, scorching my cheek. Half the room was an inferno, the bed vanished, the door by which we had entered behind a wall of fire (a fleeting thought of all those inflammable film cassettes in the storeroom, the flames reaching them…) the wood floor itself ablaze. At least some of the smoke had found an outlet, most of the ceiling covering gone, the fire licking at the exposed beams, already eating into the room above, timber crashing inwards. A figure appeared before me - I think it was the thing whose face was mostly covered by a huge hard beak, but my vision was too blurred by tears to see properly - and I swiped at it with the crutch without thinking, without even hesitating, concerned only with escaping the fire. Something else rose in front of me and I didn’t even
try
to look, I just swatted at it with my sturdy weapon and it, too, disappeared - disappeared with a shriek. I stumbled over something lying on the floor and I think it was the creature whose lower limbs were transmuted into what resembled a fish’s tail. Its bloodied hands snatched at my ankles, just as they had in the dungeons below when they had reached through the aperture at the foot of the cell door, but I kicked them away. Ahead of me, a black-skinned man had his arms wrapped in Mary’s long, tangled hair and was pulling her backwards, away from the door and back into the throng where some of his fellow fugitives cowered before the advancing fire, while others continued their work on Wisbeech’s mutilated corpse, too retarded to appreciate the terrible danger they were in. I was only momentarily distracted by the growth at the centre of Mary’s attacker’s naked back, for nothing else could shock me that night. It was a superfluous head hanging there just below the man’s shoulder-blades, its dead, white-eyed gaze on me, the eyelids drooped, its features slack: this was merely a growth like the membrane sac on my own shoulder, an addition of no merit and absolutely no use. I reached over to grab its host’s wild, coarse hair, and, pulling the legitimate head backwards just as he pulled Mary’s, I brought his forehead within reach of my weapon. I brought the iron rod down hard, once, twice, and a third time, after which he released Mary and staggered away. I bundled the sobbing girl towards the door where Constance and Joseph anxiously waited, both of them almost doubled up with the pain of coughing smoke from their lungs.

There was a mighty roar behind us, another explosion of heat, but I didn’t turn back, I just kept going, dragging the tall girl with me, helping her keep upright, my own limp unnoticed. Joseph was on his knees when we reached him, his slight body wracked with pain, and I mentally chided both him and Constance for not getting out of there while they had the chance, for waiting for us when the blaze was about to consume everything in the room.

Thrusting Mary and the metal crutch at Constance, I picked up Joseph in my arms, his weight hardly slowing me at all. Together we fled the inferno, bursting through the double doors, leaving behind the sounds of screams and crashing timbers, the blistering, destructive heat.

Leaving behind the creatures who didn’t stand a chance of surviving. And who never had.

Smoke gushed through the double doors after us as we all but fell into the hallway beyond. Choking and spluttering, I dropped to my knees, hastily laying Joseph on the floor and pounding his back as he tried to draw in great gulps of purer air. His aged lungs wheezed with the effort and I kept thumping him with a flattened hand between the shoulder-blades until he began to gain some control and his breathing steadied. Constance and Mary clung to each other, tears running down their dusty faces, they, too wheezing as they gasped for air. There was movement around us in the smoke-filled hallway and I assumed, although it surprised me, that those who had fled the fire before us still lingered. When I hauled myself to my feet I saw that I was wrong.

Milling around us, while some still descended the stairs, were the others from the dormitory at the top of the annex. They were crowding around Constance and Mary, calling their names like excited children, clutching at them, trying to gain their attention. There were no nurses or supervisors among them - as far as I could tell in that short time and hazy atmosphere - those who had been inside the studio with Wisbeech, including the film crew, had vanished into the night. Maybe one or two staff members had run to the main part of the building to warn of the fire outbreak, but I heard no alarms. I did hear someone calling my name though.

It was difficult at first to detect where it came from over the hubbub of other shouts and agitated voices, but then I noticed someone waving at me from the stairway.

‘Louise!’

She and two others from the dormitory were helping the woman whose stomach bloated massively beneath the bed-sheets that had been wrapped around her, the gigantic ovarian cyst hidden under the material impossible for her to carry alone; while Louise supported her on one side, the girl with the excrescent tusk held her on the other, the young man, whose face was only partially concealed now by a great tagged-back flap of skin and flesh, was on the lower steps beneath the swelling, bearing most of the growth’s weight on his shoulders. Louise awkwardly waved at me again.

‘Dis, thank God you’re all right,’ I thought I heard her say.

I pushed my way through the crowd to reach her, yelling back to Constance to keep everyone away from the studio entrance, one side of its double doors now closed, probably by the rush of scorched air from inside, flames seeming to fill the opening completely. I turned my attention back to Louise, disengaging myself from the woman whose arms clung to me and whose double-face, another’s melded into her own, was only inches from mine. She was frightened, pleading for me to help her, to help them all, and as gently as I could I directed her towards the open door at the end of the hallway, pushing her towards it, reassuring her with words spoken close to her ear so that she could hear them over the clamour. Louise and her ungainly little troupe were almost at the bottom of the stairway by the time I got to her and she managed an anxious smile.

‘Dis, I was so worried about you,’ she said breathlessly.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said as I helped the young man who had literally been taking most of the load on his shoulders. He twisted as he rose, his arms continuing to take the woman’s weight. ‘How did you get in here, Louise?’

‘Let’s get everyone outside first, Dis,’ she said, and I saw the soundness of her advice. The fire was going to spread rapidly, the ceiling above the studio-room already eaten through.

I squeezed her upper arm and looked behind her as more figures appeared above at the turn of the stairs. The three headed boy, the third head lolling uselessly from his shoulder, was making his way carefully down the steps, beside him the youth who carried the extra half body that sprouted from his own chest through a large hole in his gown, holding it before him as though it were a younger sibling who had fallen asleep. They looked petrified and I pushed past Louise to get to them.

‘You’re going to be okay,’ I told them, trying to smile in the hope it would calm them a little. The door’s open at the end of the hallway and you’ll be safe once you’re outside.’

Something caught my eye behind them, something very small scuttling down the stairs. I saw it was the one whose body ended just below his chest and I waved him forward when he stopped to survey the scene below, his eyes fearful and his arms trembling.

‘Come on,’ I encouraged him. You’re all getting out of this place right now.’

A different fear came into his eyes and I realized that even though they hated it here, it was the only home they had ever known. Of course the idea of leaving was intimidating to them.