The Unblemished (39 page)

Haltingly, he said: 'Imagine the hell his parents went through
when he was teething.'

The scaffold completely surrounded the building. Bo was getting
increasingly frustrated by the apparent lack of an entrance, kicking
out at the tubes, stamping his feet against the duckboards and making
them rock alarmingly. Sarah was about to suggest they descend to the
ground and start again, that they must have missed something, when
he collapsed. She ran to him, grabbing his jacket as it seemed he was
about to roll off the edge of the walkway. He was barely able to hold
himself up with his arms, so spindly and weak were they; they shook
as a steady black stream of vomit poured from his lips. It seemed he
was too weak even to retch.

'Don't give up,' she said to him. 'Not here. Not when we're so
close. Don't die on their doorstep. Don't give them the pleasure.'

But then it was over, the torrent becoming a trickle, becoming
drips that he spat and rubbed away from his mouth. He was coughing
– jarring, squealing hacks – that sounded as if they must be coming
from lungs made from twisted metal and broken glass.

The wind was becoming lustier. Soon it would be impossible to
walk upright on this scaffold. Already she could feel the braces and
ties tensing as the construct was tested by the gusts spanking in from
the east. She could hear the overture of the storm that was thickening
further out over the Thames estuary. She saw a deepening in the
darkness, as if something solid were being pushed through the air,
into
the air, increasing the pressure around them. The warning light
at the tip of the tower at Canary Wharf was slowly snuffed out.
Claws of lightning raked at the city and she had to turn away, in fear
of what those sudden flashes might illuminate.

Bonfires were being lit along the riverbank, and further afield,
dotted around the city's northern borders as far away as Ruislip,
Stanmore, Enfield and Dagenham. Occasional screams twisted out of
the confused dark. There was gunfire too, and a crisscross stab of
torches. She could see orange points of light shimmering on the water
and smell wood smoke. She wondered how many of those fires had
been started by people, real people, like her. And how many were
improvised barbecues knocked up by diabolical chefs. It was heartening
to think that there might be little pockets of resistance still
surviving in the torrid streets. She wished she could connect with
them in some way, but how could you know for sure who was
genuine and who was all too ready to split you open like ripe fruit?
A jangling sound drew her attention away, back to the furnace-like
heat of the wall. In places it had blackened, as if at any moment
flames might spill out from the weakened pointing.

She said, 'Do you hear that?'

Bo was sitting on the planks, all the fight gone from him. He
looked like a child who has played to the point of exhaustion, ready
to teeter over into sleep in a second. He nodded. He was looking up
at the thin plastic sheeting that was slung over the uppermost points
of the scaffold. He drew himself shakily to his feet and made to climb
on to one of the beams.

'No,' she said. 'Let me.'

She hoisted herself up to the makeshift roof and yanked at a
portion of it until the ties loosened and she could raise her head
through the gap. She sucked cold air through her teeth as the roof of
the building stretched away, seamlessly merging with the featureless
night beyond it, suddenly giving her the impression that she was not
on the doorstep of one of the most populated cities on earth, but in a
limbo where nothing but this edifice existed. The wall itself was
nothing more than a skin to conceal what she now saw inside. An
Escher-like series of stone stairwells traversed the black windowless
fist of profane architecture that lay, steaming, before her. It looked
less a building and more a hard knot of muscle, like a heart defying
the crematorium's flame. The odd adjunct of narrow steps resembled
veins lacing its chambers.

She felt Bo nudge up beside her. The sight of this vast necropolis
gave him a boost from some deep source of energy that his body had
not appeared to possess any more. His posture improved; the glimmer
of a smile touched his face.

'I knew this was here,' he said, 'waiting to be found. But even
seeing it, I still can't believe it's real. It's just ... it's beautiful.'

Sarah clenched her teeth, jabbing herself with the reminder of
what he was, or might still become. Despite his help, his willingness
to put himself in jeopardy for her and readiness to attack the
creatures he was so much a brother to, there were moments, as now,
when he became his own warning.
How far gone was he?
she
wondered, as she divided her attention between the gnarled surface
of the nest and Bo's rapt profile.
Is there a way back for him?
She reminded herself that she had cleaved herself to him, assured
him of her faith in him. She must not allow herself to give in to
suspicion. If he had been going to swap allegiance, she would be dead
by now.

She supposed the building
was
beautiful, in that it was something
she had never seen before. The truly alien possessed its own charm
and fascination. It was like being a child again; that capacity for awe
restored in full. But she shook herself away from it, knowing how
close fear had been to those experiences.

'Claire is in there,' she said.

He cried out as he swung his injured leg over the edge of the
brickwork and shakily lowering himself on to the first of what looked
like a million thin steps down to the skin of the nest. She followed,
wishing there was a rope to hold on to. If she slipped, that was it. The
depth of the drop seemed crazily plumbless, much greater than that
on the other side of the wall. She drew the jacket more tightly around
her, found gloves in the pockets that she pulled on, silently thanking
the dead man in the NFT. A piece of paper too, with a shopping list
on it:
milk, eggs, nappies, cereal.

Other lives. Other tragedies.

As she descended, her eyes intent on the poor stone steps, her hand
lightly touching Bo's shoulder, she thought about how many other
families had been shattered by what had come to London, and – who
knew? – maybe other parts of the country as well. How many
mothers were hauling themselves through the rubble to search for lost
children? The notion, although repugnant, also served to fuel her. She
was not alone, no matter how wretched conditions became.

Her blood sugar was so low she felt she might faint at any
moment. The exertion of her fight on the scaffold sat thickly in her
limbs, stiffening her. But eating seemed utterly inappropriate,
especially when she considered that Claire was unlikely to be eating,
whether through fear, or inability, or by her kidnappers' design.

The steps zigzagged down to a floor that was littered with dung
and the bones of small mammals and birds. There were fresh
footprints in the scum; discards of bondage lying around: rusted
cuffs, broken chains, buckled leg-spreaders. Fat misshapen candles
bled orange light and a carrion stink. The air was damp. It nestled in
the lungs like catarrh; a smell of waste that was so redolent of
ammonia it burned Sarah's throat as she breathed.

They were close enough to see that the skin of the nest was exactly
that. It was huge, composed of human tissue, turned by centuries of
pressure into grotesque knots and swirls. Here and there a face could
be discerned, crushed and curved into aspects of agony. The hide was
a patchwork of colours, all of them variations of mahogany, and it
was awash with some kind of heavy oil that kept it moist. She
glimpsed slight movements as portions of jowl or chin or brow
realigned themselves microscopically within the great crucible of
flesh. Mites and worms burrowed into or out of the leathery mass.
She saw fingers with wooden rings, wrists with bronze bangles. She
saw hanks of hair that were braided into fashions forgotten by
history. She kept wanting to see lips trying to form words, to articulate
the complex misery that she needed a voice for. But nothing
lived here. She could hear the grind of wet bone as the building
shifted on its poor foundations. Greenstick fractures in anonymous
limbs created weird U-turns and loops that anatomy never intended.

She wanted to hold Bo's hand but he was still guarded about his
repairing fingers. He held them close to his body, as if he had a fistful
of jewels he didn't want to share. She consoled herself with thoughts
of Claire; it was as if, like Bo, she possessed her own uncanny radar.
Claire was alive within its range; the restless seed on a display, the
answering blip to the sonar's call.

A horribly sexual aperture appeared in the surface of the nest.

She thought of her child's face at the moment she was born. Andrew
had been listening intently to the radio that was playing in the
background – he had wanted to make a note of whatever recording was
being broadcast so that they could buy a copy and listen to it to remind
them of the moment – but Claire had arrived at exactly one o'clock, to
the strains of a news jingle. She had held her for so long in those first
few hours that her fingers had sunk slightly into the unformed bone of
her skull.

The slit parted, gummily.

She thought of the sacred smell of her baby's head. How her heart
had missed a beat at the moment Claire latched on for her first meal
at the breast. She thought of Claire's hair, so blonde as to be almost
luminous. It hung around her head in defiance of gravity, light as air.
She remembered trying to brush it and only succeeding in making it
more flyaway.

Claire was alive for as long as she gave her mother strength.

'Bo?' she said.

Bo stood before the opening, his eyes restless upon it, as if he were
expecting it to speak, or attack. Finally, he shot a resolute glance back
at her.

'We go in,' he said.

Sarah's first impression, on appraising the density of darkness's
approach through that irreligious doorway, was that she would not
be able to see anything, that its colour was so impenetrable as to be
solid. Yet there was movement too, the blackness ribboning like the
currents she had earlier escaped, threatening to spill out: thousands of
flies, millions of them; the kind of lazy, corpulent flies that meandered
drunkenly through the air at the tail-end of summer.

Bo showed no hesitation in driving a path through this droning
barrier. Sarah followed, disgusted, batting the tiny bodies away,
clenching her teeth as they became caught in her hair or landed on her
face. She smelled a wave of rot that was so intense as to be an assault.
Spitting, shaking her head, she emerged on the other side of the
curtain into another kind of darkness.

Eventually, she noticed streaks of detail seeping out of it, like the
strange oily rainbows that film the meniscus of a puddle. Highlights,
if that was the right word, in cobalt, coral, teal. Haematoma colours
that picked out the unspeakable hammerbeam roof.

Her feet moved tackily across the floor. In places, they made small
pleshing sounds. She couldn't yet see what was causing the wet, and
wasn't sure she wanted to. She wanted to call Claire's name, but
something held her back. Not the possibility of stirring something
best left avoided, but because to speak her daughter's name would be,
somehow, to sully it in here. This place was not deserving of a name
that meant light.

She realised she had lost sight of Bo and almost whimpered with
childlike panic. But he was just a little way in front; she could make
out the shape of his head as he swung it this way and that, searching
for some sign of what was happening here or what dangers might be
revealed. He seemed comfortable enough, perhaps because his eyes
were better prepared for this kind of darkness. She felt a frisson as she
realised what this signified. She was on her own, species-wise, despite
Bo's promises and efforts, but all of her fears dissipated when she
came upon the first of the bodies.

The light was improving enough for her to be able to see the extent
of the wounds that had done for it.

The body was lying face upwards, but closer inspection revealed
the torso to be arched to such an extent that no portion of it touched
the floor. The cerebellum and the sacrum were the two ends of this
bridge. The stomach had sunk into the corpse like a deflated balloon.
Blisters and lesions skipped across the flesh. The mouth was wide
open, the legs spread. It was as if whatever passed for life inside for
these creatures had fled at such speed as to have ripped the body
apart. And yet a look of peace and satisfaction hung around the
features. She looked as though she had died after a particularly
enjoyable meal, or in the midst of a fine dream.

A little further on she found another body, similarly positioned. A
few feet away there were two more. More lardy candles pushed back
the dark, providing pockets of half-light the colour of tanned leather.
She lifted her head and saw Bo frozen before what appeared to be a
mountainous shape that would not resolve itself. Her eyes slowly grew
accustomed to the murk, allowing her to recognise the tumbled mass
ahead of her as an avalanche of cadavers. Her heart was beating so
hard it was hurting her eardrums and she didn't know why. She simultaneously
felt herself to be at the end, and at the beginning, of things.
But there was also the nagging suspicion that her daughter might be
lying at the bottom of that scrum, despite her earlier confidence. Just
the rank humours and the lack of light, she thought. Just the depression
of maintaining hope. Nothing was harder than being an optimist.

Bo was now standing some way off from the main gathering. He
was inspecting another body that was different from the rest; Sarah
could tell that even from this distance, even in this poor light. It was
thin, mummified almost, as if it had been dead for centuries and
preserved in the frigid, arid conditions of this sepulchre. Bo fussed
around it with a tenderness that both touched and concerned her. He
was still acting too flakily to convince her that she was truly safe with
him, but retained enough of what she supposed it meant to be human
to stoke her encouragement.