The Wraiths of War (22 page)

Clover woke me at lunchtime, prior to pulling off the motorway so we could grab a bite to eat in a service station Costa, and then I spent most of the afternoon alternately staring unseeingly out of the window as the M4 unrolled before us, and drifting back off to sleep. In one of my wakeful periods I also called DI Jensen and told him Kate had been found safe and well, and that he could call off the police search for her. It was an awkward conversation, but he’d seen my future self on the beach, and eventually swallowed my rather sketchy explanation. After calling Jensen I called Candice, which was an altogether more pleasurable experience. When I told her the good news, she screamed in delight, then abruptly burst into tears. In a rushed, blubbery, emotion-filled voice she asked me a ton of questions, but I managed to deflect them, telling her things were still hectic and that I had to go, but would give her the full story in due course (which I didn’t say would be when I could come up with an explanation she’d be likely to believe).

We hit pre-rush hour traffic on the M23 at around 3:30 p.m. and eventually drove in through Darby Hall’s imposing iron gates just before five. Clover cut the engine in the tree-lined car park behind the main building, and groaned and stretched before squinting at me.

‘How you doing?’

‘Okay.’

‘You haven’t exactly been scintillating company these past few hours.’

‘Sorry. Had a lot to process. Needed the head space.’

She told me she’d have a walk round the grounds to stretch her legs while I went up to see Lyn. Five minutes later one of the orderlies, a gangly black guy called Richard, was leading me up the wooden staircase towards Lyn’s room on the first floor.

‘Where’s Dr Bruce today?’ I asked, more to make conversation than anything.

Richard briefly wrinkled his nose as if at a bad smell. ‘She’s around somewhere.’ He gave me what I thought was a reluctant sideways glance. ‘I can find her if you wanna see her.’

‘No, that’s okay.’

Lyn was sitting by the window, reading a book by lamplight when I entered. Outside the sun was creeping towards the horizon, filling the room with pre-dusk shadows.

‘Alex,’ she said, closing the book and smiling up at me.

‘Hi,’ I said, and put out a hand to the light switch.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I like this time of day. I like to see the colours in the sky.’

The only colours I could see were grey and black, with maybe a hint of murky green at the horizon, but I let it slide.

‘How are you?’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Getting better all the time.’ She stood up, dropped the book on the chair and gave me a twirl. ‘What do you think?’

She
did
look better. Less scrawny, less hesitant in her movements. There was even a flush of pink in her cheeks, a suggestion of vitality in her previously lank hair.

‘You look great,’ I said. ‘Every time I see you, you look better.’

‘I feel great,’ she replied. ‘Well, maybe not great, but better than I was. Dr Bruce said she might even reduce my medication soon if I keep improving.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ I said, crossing the room towards her. I felt uneasy, though, because despite coming all this way I suddenly began to wonder whether asking her to help might not be the right thing to do. In the early hours of the morning, by the cosy glow of a cottage fire, and with several Southern Comforts inside me, Clover’s suggestion had seemed reasonable, even inspired. But now that Lyn and I were in the same room, facing each other, I was starting to have doubts.

Although her condition had improved dramatically in recent weeks – since I’d acquired the heart, in fact – that shouldn’t lull me into thinking she wasn’t still fragile and vulnerable. The main reason she was
getting
better, it seemed to me, was due to her interactions with the heart, to whatever succour it gave her when she held it, and to her belief that I had trapped the Dark Man within it, which meant not simply that he could no longer harm her, but that we now had power over him.

How would it affect her, therefore, if I showed her the now-crumbling heart? And if she discovered the Dark Man was not trapped, as she had thought, but still at large, and that I had come to seek her help in tracking him down? Would she have a relapse, retreat back into herself?

Convincing her that we were in a position of strength, and that the Dark Man would be running scared of both of us, was, it seemed to me, the way to go. Perching on the edge of the bed, I said as earnestly as I could, ‘Look, the reason I’ve come to see you today is because you’re the only person strong enough to help me. There’s something I need to do, and I won’t pretend it’ll be easy, but if we work together I know we can do it.’

I’d certainly grabbed her attention. She was all eyes. Nodding solemnly, she said, ‘If I can help you, Alex, I will. What is it you want me to do?’

I took a deep breath. ‘I want you to help me find the Dark Man.’ Before she could respond – almost before she had chance to assimilate what I’d told her – I said quickly, ‘He’s running and he’s weak and he’s scared of us. All I need is for you to help me find him and then I can do the rest. Can you do that?
Will
you do that?’

I looked at her steadily, calmly, but inside I was bracing myself, more than half-expecting her to freak out.

Her eyes, though, remained as calm as I hoped mine were. She regarded me for a moment, as though coolly assessing what I’d told her, and then she held out a hand.

‘Give me the heart.’

Just like that?
I wanted to ask.
Don’t you even want to know what happened, how he escaped?
I didn’t know whether to feel alarmed or heartened by how well she seemed to have taken what could – and maybe should – have been a devastating piece of news.

Looking at her outstretched hand, though, I realised there may yet be a further hurdle to negotiate.

‘One thing I should tell you before I do,’ I said, ‘is that the heart is… not as you remember it. What I mean is, it’s damaged. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still be effective. And it doesn’t mean it can’t be renewed.’

She gave me an indulgent smile. ‘You don’t have to mollycoddle me, Alex. I know you’re trying to protect me, because you think I’m still liable to fall apart at any moment, but I’m much stronger now than I’ve been for ages. I’m genuinely getting better.’

‘I
know
you are,’ I said, with so much conviction that I only ended up sounding – to my ears at least – entirely
in
sincere.

If Lyn picked up on that, though, she decided to ignore it. Still smiling she held out her hand again. ‘So will you give me the heart?’

I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket, wondering whether she had already come to the same conclusion I had – that her link with the heart might be the best way to track down the Dark Man – or whether she simply wanted to glean some comfort from holding it. Feeling I ought to clarify this, I said, ‘I will, but be careful in case—’

‘Just give it to me!’ she snapped.

I froze, startled. Okay, so maybe she
wasn’t
quite so sanguine and stable as I’d thought. But before I could decide how to respond to her flare-up, she was raising her hands, a sweet smile of apology replacing the momentary anger on her face.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘that was uncalled for. It’s just that—’

Something moved under the bed.

Instinctively I jumped up from where I was sitting, half-turning to look behind me.

‘What was that?’

‘What?’

‘Didn’t you hear it?’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’ That indulgent smile again. ‘I’ve never seen you so jumpy, Alex. Look, why don’t you just give me the heart and we can—’

Another sound from under the bed. Another scuffle-creak of movement. But it was accompanied by a groan this time. A decidedly human groan.

I took a couple of steps back from the bed, half-expecting someone – or something – to lunge out at me. I kept my eyes on the shadowy space between bed and floor, diverting my attention only for an instant to flick a glance at Lyn. The groan had been unmistakeable, and I expected her now to look as startled and alarmed as I felt. If anything, though, her face had become hard and blank.

‘Lyn, what’s going on?’ I said. ‘Who’s under there?’

Instead of waiting for an answer I dropped to my hands and knees and lowered my face to the floor. I felt horribly vulnerable, but I had to see.

Due to the gathering dusk, there was very little I
could
see at first. Only a vague, elongated shape smothered in shadow with a pale patch at one end. Almost immediately my eyes began to adjust, and I realised the pale patch was a face. As I stared at it, the features formed through the murk, like the image on a developing photograph. Recognition suddenly hit me like a cold electric shock and I cried out.

It was Lyn.

Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open, but she was stirring, as if from a long sleep. As she drifted back to consciousness another low groan drifted up and out of her. By then my head was already snapping round to regard the woman sitting in the chair by the window.

‘You’re not—’ I began.

At which point the imposter’s body erupted upwards and outwards into a nightmarish mass of thrashing, tar-black tentacles.

The transformation happened so suddenly, so abruptly, that I registered it purely on a subconscious level. Recalling it later, I could only liken the sight to footage I’d seen of oil strikes, whereupon a huge geyser of viscous black liquid would burst under enormous pressure from the newly ruptured ground.

In this case, though, the ‘oil’ was
alive
, and it shot not just up into the air but outwards in all directions. Tendrils of it crawled across the ceilings and walls and smothered the window, blocking out what little daylight remained. It reminded me of a fungus, or a virulent climbing plant, which had somehow managed to condense many years’ growth into an explosive split second.

The ‘oil’ was the shape-shifter, of course, one of the Dark Man’s cohorts.

Before I could even think about how to react, several of the tentacle-like strands swooped down and smashed into me with tremendous force, pinning me face-first to the floor. The thickest of the strands was no more than the circumference of a broom handle, but each of them was nevertheless so incredibly strong that, try as I might, I couldn’t move a muscle. The strands had me pinned by my wrists and ankles, and there were also several pressing into my back – one of them exerting such effortless pressure on the base of my spine that I had no doubt it could crush my bones to powder if it wanted to.

Why
the shape-shifter didn’t simply kill me I had no idea – though that wasn’t a question that occurred to me until later. Feeling movement around my hip area, I turned my head (the only part of me I could still move) and saw another of the black, rope-like strands delving into my jacket pocket, where I kept the heart. The Dark Man already had the ‘new’ heart, so why he should now want the old, crumbling one, which he had left me in return, I could only guess. Maybe it was to prevent us from tracking him down?

As the shape-shifter’s rope-like appendage rose almost gracefully from my pocket, its tip curled around the ‘old’ heart like a long black finger, I tried to project my will into the heart, tried to impel it to react, to burst into life and fight back.

But nothing happened. Either the heart was too weak and decrepit to respond or it needed a physical link between us to do so – needed, effectively, to match its energy to mine to complete a circuit and create a charge.

When the door to Lyn’s room smashed open, I assumed at first that the shape-shifter had ripped it from its hinges, perhaps prior to making its escape. Turning my head towards the sound, however, my chin scraping the carpet, I saw the door had been shoved open from the outside and that Dr Bruce was now standing on the threshold, her arms outspread, her eyes wide and fixed, as if her mind, presented with the impossible sight in front of her, had checked out, shut down.

I opened my mouth, intending to shout a warning to her to get out, but then an extraordinary thing happened: Dr Bruce’s body began to
glow
. It flared into life like an energy-saving light bulb, and within seconds was glowing so brightly that I could no longer make out the doctor’s features; could only, in fact, vaguely discern the shape of her body within the nimbus of radiance that engulfed her.

Just as extraordinary as the light emanating from her was the fact that the shape-shifter was reacting to it, shrinking back. The tendrils of its tarry flesh that were closest to her body were flinching and drawing themselves in like a slug poked with a stick.

And then, like the shape-shifter before her, Dr Bruce’s body
exploded.
Light erupted up and out of it, though it was a light that seemed sinuous, thick,
purposeful
. It was as if lava, bursting from a volcano, had become sentient; as if molten rock was creating a semi-fluid, multi-limbed form for itself. I saw it fly at the shape-shifter, gained a fleeting impression of two vast leviathans clashing together in combat. Then the radiance became overwhelming; my eyes began to smart, and I was forced to shut them.

I lay prone and unmoving as the battle raged above me. At least, I
assumed
it was raging; the combatants were silent. Indeed, I felt
encased
in silence – a silence that was profound, that blocked my senses; a silence that was like being underwater, or sinking in mud. I only knew the battle was over when the silence was broken by the discordant clamour of breaking glass, and I suddenly realised that I could move, that the tendrils that had been pinning me to the floor had released their grip on me. Groggy and bruised, I sat up and tentatively opened my eyes.

I was facing the row of windows overlooking the hospital grounds, one of which – the one the shape-shifter had been sitting beside when I’d entered the room – had burst outwards in a cascade of shattered glass. Not only that, but the anti-suicide bars across the window had been snapped and twisted back as if they were sticks of liquorice. Through the window I could see a long, undulating ribbon of black birds – crows perhaps – staining the dusky sky. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I got the impression they were ragged, panicked, in retreat. Within seconds the flock had become a speck in the distance, and then it was gone.