The Unblemished (33 page)

Bo frowned. He shook his head. 'This was no human being.'

And now Sarah was gabbling about how she ought never to have
let Claire out of her sight. Thinking they were safe, thinking they
could get back to a normal life: boyfriends, jobs, college, a future. She
told him about the boy, Edgar, in Liverpool. She could see in him
now what she had seen in the thin man in Southwold. That unhinged
look. That desire. Her daughter was the pooch in heat that all the
scummy dogs in the neighbourhood were drooling and howling over.

'I noticed something about them,' she said, once she'd calmed
down and enough quiet had filled the flat for her to imagine the
conversation had not even taken place. 'They seemed to be confused,
blank. Like an old man raised on typewriters being given a laptop and
expected to carry on without any help.'

'That was happening while I was awake. They've moved beyond
that now. They're in charge, you might say.'

'Who are they? What is it we're in the middle of?'

He told her about Rohan Vero, who seemed to have been a part of
his life that was so old now that he imagined him in sepia tones. He told
her about the map, and his hand, and the strange organic grid that
rippled behind his eyelids. He told her about the horrors of the graves,
of Liverpool Road and Eton Avenue, of his life as a resurrectionist,
deliverer of meals on wheels, unwitting trainer in the art of murder. He
explained what he had learned by the osmosis that had come from
living within a hair's breadth of something at the polar extreme of what
he believed himself to be. That they were ageless and sad, but not for
pitying. That they had a genuine grievance against the city. That despite
their slumber, they were already infiltrating every crevice and crack in
London's tired old body and were close to overrunning its heart.

'But this happened so long ago,' Sarah said. 'They're belly-aching
to the wrong crowd.'

'Eddie was right when he talked about forebears. It's about bloodlines,'
he argued. 'And, well, it's about blood too. It's as simple as
that. You wake up, you're hungry. They're breakfasting like kings at
the moment.'

'On us.'

'Yes. They've always had quite a taste for our kind of meat.'

She grimaced. 'But they
are
us. They're cannibals.'

'No. They've evolved to look like us. A tiger walks down the high
street and everyone fucks off. But you can get close to someone, close
as you need to be, when you look like them.'

'You look like us,' Nick said, startling them both.

'I'm not rising to it, Nick,' Bo replied. 'I've already told you. I'm
in between. I'm dangerous. But I'm your best bet, too. I haven't given
in to the temptation and I don't intend to.'

'That's what you say. But I'm warning you. You come near me and
I won't hesitate to stab this –' he brandished a screwdriver '– right
through your dirty little heart.'

'Or maybe you could just shake my hand, depending on how all
this turns out.'

'We're all going to die. That's how this is going to turn out,' Eddie
said in a low voice, his attention on his daughter, who was sleeping
against his arm.

'That might well be the case,' Bo said. 'But it's all about how you
do it, isn't it? I'm not going to die sitting on my arse in this room,
pissing myself, puking, crying, begging them to take my daughter, not
me.'

'You don't know if that's how it will go,' Eddie said, his head
jerking up to meet Bo's gaze full-on.

'But you know it might,' Bo said. 'Give your daughter some hope,
even if you don't have any. Be a fucking father.'

Eddie looked as if he might take it further, but Lamb moved in her
sleep, put her arm across his leg. He visibly slumped, the tension
seeping out of him, and he placed his hand on her head, stroked her
gently.

Bo looked at them all closely, each in turn. He was trying to see
something that would trip them up, hinder them, weaken them. He saw
it in all of them and none of them. Sarah's weakness was the desperation
of her search to free her child. It could conceivably compromise their
aims, but then, that unshakeable drive was also her strength. He knew,
from the moment he met her, that he was grateful she was on his side.
Her single-mindedness would be a boon if she could channel it correctly
at the critical moment. Of the others, only Claire seemed capable of
seriously hampering their progress. Her weakness was obvious in the
firm cluster of metallic blue that was visible in the yoke of her arm. She
was staring back at him with a kind of baffled determination, as if she
were unable to reconcile her condition with the bizarre grouping in
which she found herself. Nick and Tina stood close together and Bo
didn't know which of them was the more scared. Tina plumped
cushions on her sofa as if she were preparing for a marathon session in
front of the TV rather than a suicidal dash across central London. Nick
kept looking around, perhaps for a weapon, perhaps to keep himself
busy so that his trembling would not be so apparent. There was also his
barely disguised contempt for Bo and his jealousy at having been nudged
out of some position of prominence, perhaps where Sarah was
concerned. Bo wanted to disabuse him of the notion; that kind of thing
was as far away from his mind as his hand was from his wrist. But they
had no time to waste on cautious discussions, reassurances, promises.
Bo felt sorry for them, but he had no choice but to force them through
this hoop. To leave them here was to let them die.

Eddie and Lamb – she had woken up now – held on to each other
and batted whispered reassurances to and fro. There was a slowness
running through the group. They were lame backmarkers in a
stampede of wildebeest. They were going to be taken down. But what
else could they do but try?

'Why can't we just stay here?' Tina was asking, again. 'I mean, I
stockpiled all this food. I mean, why did I go to all that trouble if
we're just going to run for it? And where are we going? Why is where
we're going any better than here? I mean, this is
my
flat. I should be
making the dec–'

'That noise again,' Bo said, and Sarah heard it too, a faint
rhythmic sound, like that of a spoon violently scraping the bottom of
a pot. Bo stood up abruptly, causing the legs of the chair to skid on
the floorboards. The sound stopped, but after a few seconds it began
again, more urgently.

'That's not good,' Bo said.

'What isn't?' This was from Nick. Sarah thought that the faint
hysteria in his voice made everything he said seem like some garbled
code for
I wish to fuck that I hadn't clapped eyes on you.

'That noise. I don't like it.'

'It sounds like something being scratched.'

'Gouged, more like. It sounds like someone hacking through the wall
with a chisel.' As Bo cocked his head, he saw Sarah shift her position on
the blankets she had been sleeping on. She made to rest her head on the
elbow that she placed on the floor. Almost immediately she sat up and
stared down at the bare wood.

'Get up,' he said to her. 'Get up.
Now.
'

'I felt this weird vibration,' she said to him, pushing herself to her
knees. 'Coming right up through the –'

There was a deep snapping sound; the floorboard that she was
levering herself up on burst apart, spraying splinters and blood in a
sudden, shocking spume. Something white moved up through the
breach until it was flush with the surface. Sarah's jaw dropped and
she scooted back on her arse, knocking over mugs of tea and knives,
and cracking her head against the corner of a coffee table.

Teeth. Grinding up through the floor. She stared at them while
blood leaked out of the wound in the side of her head, wondering
why she couldn't feel any pain, wondering, crazily, how she had
discovered a wonderful new way to anaesthetise people: shock the
living shit out of them. The teeth were bared, slicked with blood from
their own beribboned lips. They thrashed and tore at the edges of the
hole and were replaced by a hand with horribly long fingers, horribly
long nails. At the same time a weight crashed against the front door
of the flat, popping one of the locks clean off its housing.

'Jesus fuck,' Nick said.

Eddie said, 'They're coming through the door. The door! How do
we get out?'

Bo turned to Tina and spread his hands. 'Well?'

She was staring at the hissing, chomping mouth as it tried to gnaw
off another chunk of wood. The hand reappeared, lashing around as
if it could exercise an effective attack if only it could find something
to grab hold of.

'Tina. Now.'

'There's a hatch, just by the door. A hatch to the attic.'

'Christ,' Nick breathed. He was hopping from one foot to the
other as if he were in desperate need of the toilet. 'What was it you
said about exits?'

'We have no choice,' Bo said, already moving. Sarah was at his
heels. The others scrambled to their feet and dithered in the area
between the front door and the ruined boards.

'Is there a ladder?' Bo asked.

'You have to pull it down,' Tina explained. 'It's folded into the
hatch.'

The door bulged as more weight flew against it. Another lock
sprang free. One of the bolts bent. A large split appeared down the
centre.

'What is it they've got, do you think?' Lamb asked, her head against
her father's chest. Sarah thought that she looked as if she might try to
burrow into his jacket at any moment. 'An axe? A sledgehammer?'

'Hunger,' Bo said evenly. 'And determination.' He flipped the
catch on the attic seal and a fold-up aluminium ladder concertina-ed
into the hallway.

'Come on,' he said, clapping his hands. 'Let's go.'

'You go first,' Nick said.

'Oh for fuck's sake, Nick,' Sarah said, and started up the ladder.
She saw his nervous little look behind him and bet he had rued his
challenge as soon as it was uttered. She had to believe it was safe up
here. If it wasn't, if they were as crazed as the attack made her believe,
then they would be coming in through the ceiling, through the
windows as well.

It was hellishly dark in the loft. She pulled herself up, then twisted
around to duck her head back through the hatch, just as Nick was
about to follow her through.

'Tina, do you have a torch in your bag of tricks?'

She saw the other woman shrug off her rucksack, and then Nick
was barrelling past her and she reached out her arms for Lamb,
who was next. Then Eddie, then Tina, brandishing a large Maglite,
then Bo.

'I'm guessing we can't lock the hatch from this side,' he said.

'No,' Tina said.

'At least we can pull this ladder up. That should stall them for a
minute or two. Any luck with a route out of here?'

The beam from the torch picked out a surprisingly uncluttered,
relatively dust-free space. A water tank, a few picture frames and a
small box of cheap white crockery were the only stored items. There
was an unpleasant stuffiness, a smell of mice and damp. The attic was
walled in at each end of Tina's flat space. There were no windows.

'Shit,' Bo said. 'I was hoping this might be a communal attic, that
it would run the whole length of the block.'

'We're fucked,' Nick said.

Bo reached out and grabbed him by his shirt collars. Tina's grip on
the torch slipped as she recoiled from his violent reaction. Clownish
light jounced around the ceiling boards. Some of them were rotten and
cracked; she could see the silvery sarking beneath, the insulating
barrier against the roof tiles.

'Say that again and I'll make sure you are,' Bo said. 'Let's do this
as a unit. We have to work together.'

'Do
what
as a unit?' Nick asked, but the aggression had fled his
voice. There was an incredulity there now, born of the fatalist's logic.
'Die?'

Tina's hand steadied in time for Sarah to see Bo push Nick away
and move into the centre of the attic, where he was able to stand
erect. From beneath them, the sounds of rending wood deepened and
quickened. Another clatter as the third or fourth lock burst. They
would be inside within a minute. Sarah imagined her blood on this
attic floor. She didn't want her body to be left here; this was no place
to die. She didn't want mice running over her. She didn't want to be
a fixture with a few tatty frames and chipped cups.

She reached up and tore away some of the fibrous insulation.

'Cover your mouths,' she said, and lifted her jersey to mask the
sudden dense rain of dust and filaments.

'Here,' Bo said. 'This one's loose.'

'This one too,' Sarah cried.

'Punch it out if you can. Use the butt of the torch. Use anything.'

Tina pushed through and cracked the rubber casing of the torch
against the tile. It flew out of its position, causing a small landslide of
slate. 'If I'd known about this, I'd have had the managing agents in,'
she said. 'Do you know how much my service charge is each year?'

'We'll never fit through that,' Nick said. 'There's too much timber
in the way.'

'Much of it is rotten, Nick,' Bo replied. 'Come on, give us a hand.

And watch out for nails.'

They all hit out at the slates and the battens they were positioned
upon. Some of them gave way easily; other sections were more
resistant. Sarah didn't like how slowly they were progressing. At the
moment they had a hole that Lamb would barely be able to fit
through, let alone the larger members of the group. An almighty crash
heralded the invasion. It wouldn't take long before they realised what
had happened. The thought that very soon she might be dead – or
worse – turned her bowels to soup.

And then a large section of the ceiling simply gave up the ghost and
slithered into the gap they had created. The noise was immense; if the
creatures in Tina's flat had been unsure of where they had vanished
to, they knew now.