Authors: Simon Morden
‘Should have barred the door again.’ Dalip swallowed hard. ‘Stanislav? Stanislav! Don’t do it.’
He led the way this time, the spiral staircase proper dark now, and though Mary was close behind, it was Dalip who’d come up against Stanislav first.
He stopped suddenly, bracing his outstretched arms against the walls. Mary ran into his back, but the boy was like a rock. He wasn’t going any further.
‘Is that you, Stanislav? It’s me, Dalip.’
There was something ahead and above. She couldn’t see it, but she could hear it. A rasping breath, slow and deep, a wet burbling that was almost a voice. They needed light, but she was secretly glad that they didn’t have any, because the one thing they needed more than light was to keep their sanity.
‘We need to talk, Stanislav. We need to talk about what you’re doing. Why don’t you come with us and we can sit down and see if we can help you?’ Dalip’s voice was trembling. When Mary put her hand on Dalip’s arm, he was, too.
‘Stanislav? It’s Mary. Something’s happened to you, something that Down caused. Do you understand that this isn’t your fault? Come downstairs, and I’ll tell you about it, because it happened to me, too.’
She held her breath, and in the silence, there came a sibilant gurgle that might have been ‘yes’ and probably wasn’t a ‘no’. She pulled at Dalip, and they backed down the stairs to the bottom room.
Dalip heaved a table upright, and put it on its legs between the end of the stairs and the broken-down door. He stationed himself behind it, and put the knife in the middle of the table. Mary immediately leaned across him and took the knife. She held it, point down, behind her back.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t get to decide that.’
He nodded, and then faced the stairs again. Something, someone was coming.
It looked like him. It had the same close-cropped bullet head, the same bull chest with a mat of grey hair, the same muscular arms and short, thick legs. But his own mother would have taken one look and realised that this wasn’t her son.
Or rather, it had been, and now wasn’t. Something else was wearing his skin, and it fitted badly.
Dalip pulled at his beard. This, this whole thing was a miscalculation. It might remember being Stanislav, but there was no way he could count on it ever being him, on knowing the difference between reason and instinct, right and wrong, friend and enemy.
Still he had to try.
‘Stanislav?’
His head came around, slowly. He blinked his blue eyes at Dalip, and tried to get them to focus on him, but they kept wandering. Literally wandering, because they should really have stayed under his prominent brow bone and either side of his nose, but had a tendency to slide in all directions before returning: down the cheek towards his mouth, off towards his ear, up his forehead.
It made Dalip feel nauseous. It was only the lack of food in his stomach that kept him from doubling over and vomiting at his feet.
‘I need to talk to Stanislav. Is he in there?’
The face shifted again, like a Picasso portrait. The eyes – suddenly three of them, then back to two – settled, and for the briefest of moments, it was Stanislav. The man even gave an uncertain smile, before his teeth began to dance in his gums.
‘I can’t do this,’ gasped Dalip. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
Stanislav’s demeanour changed, and stubby fat tentacles erupted from his mouth, writhing obscenely, questing in the air for prey. Then they were gone again, swallowed up.
‘I think you’re going to have to,’ said Mary. She stood very close behind Dalip, her bare shoulder touching his arm. ‘He doesn’t like “no”.’
‘Right.’ The light flickered outside like a broken fluorescent bulb, the electrical storm so intense now that objects were glowing on their own. Stanislav’s changing form was still ill-lit but visible. Dalip could see, and how he wished he couldn’t.
He tried again to find the person inside.
‘Stanislav. I’m talking to Stanislav. You’re lost, and you need to find yourself again. What you are isn’t what you’re supposed to be. You’re supposed to remember who you are, and keep hold of that when you change, so that you can turn back into a human. Isn’t that right?’
‘I can change too,’ said Mary, ‘into a huge eagle-thing. But I don’t think like a bird, not completely. I know who I am. Whatever it is you are, you don’t have to be it.’
More eyes floated to the surface of Stanislav’s skin, all fixing on Mary. Dalip’s dread deepened.
‘We may have to run,’ he said.
‘Why isn’t he answering?’
‘I don’t think he can. I don’t think he’s got lungs any more, or a voice box, or … anything. It’s just a shape, a bag of stuff that can be anything it wants to be.’ Dalip took a deep breath, feeling his own skin tingle, flexing his muscles, stretching his tendons and his joints, strangely comforted by the way God had knit his bones together and hung flesh from it.
He thought … What had he thought? Running through the tunnels with fire at his back, there hadn’t been time to consider the future, just the present. And then afterwards, struggling through the surging sea to an unexpected shore, the whole proposition of another world just the other side of a door had been so overwhelming, he hadn’t been able to comprehend it. Being captured by the wolfman, becoming a slave who was supposed to fight or die: that was clarity, existence reduced to its barest, meanest form. Everything had been focused on the geomancer – how to frustrate her, how to escape her, and finally how to beat her.
They’d done that. Not easily, but with Mary’s intervention, they’d succeeded.
While all the time, the monster in their midst had gone unnoticed.
How many nights, after being herded back into his cell, had Stanislav felt the raw, untamed power of Down unravel successive parts of his body until he became not a person, but a thing. How desperate had he become in the darkness, only to wake and believe it a terrible dream? Dalip had heard nothing, hadn’t suspected that a few doors down from his, a strange and awful transformation was gradually taking place.
One last go then, before all hell broke loose.
‘Stanislav? Stanislav!’ He spoke clearly and firmly. His family had never owned a dog, but it was how he imagined it felt like to call one to heel. ‘You need to focus. On me. Listen to my voice, Stanislav. Tell me you’re listening.’
There came a sucking sound that sounded less like the intake of breath and more like a moist cavern opening up.
The following exhalation was sigh of regret and loss.
‘Look, Stanislav. Look at me. You remember me, don’t you?
You remember Dalip Singh, who you taught to fight with a knife, to save his life in the pit? You remember training me, all the hard work you put in, the way we escaped in the end? You remember that? Because that’s you, that’s the real you. This thing in front of me now, that’s not Stanislav. It’s not the man I remember. That’s—’
The gurgling sucking noise came again, and between the pops and bubbles he could hear distinct words.
‘Me. This.’
‘You were never that. You were never a killer, never a murderer, never a …’ Dalip’s voice dried up. He realised the truth, and put out an arm to reach across in front of Mary, to push her behind him as he stepped back. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way. We all got a new start, every one of us. Even you. It doesn’t matter now what you did then. All that matters is what you do now.’
He could feel Mary press the hilt of the knife into the palm of his hand. His fingers closed around it.
Stanislav seemed to melt in front of them. The effort of keeping human form was no longer required. He slumped, the top of his head sinking and flattening, his legs turning to puddles of wax. Eyes popped out like bubbles, and the skin twisted and rose into ropes.
They were outside. The wind was tearing at them, and the sky was ablaze with ragged streaks of light. Inside, the transformation was almost complete. Stanislav swelled and undulated, but rather than follow them, he started back towards the stairs.
‘Hey,’ shouted Dalip. ‘Not that way. Look at us. Us.’
Stanislav ignored them, and continued his slow advance toward the staircase. The mass that was his torso divided, and divided again: the first of four legs of protoplasmic flesh felt its way to the top of the first step, dragging the body along after it.
‘We have to do something.’ Mary stood in the doorway and
the debris on the floor rose up at her command. She flung it, piece by piece, at Stanislav’s back.
Such was the concentrated barrage that Dalip couldn’t get anywhere near, reduced to watching lengths of wood, bottles, and pans snap forward, accelerated into a blur and crash into the figure on the stairs.
Except it had little effect. Stanislav had no bones to break, no muscle to bruise. Everything seemed to bounce off him. Mary tried harder, putting extra effort into each missile, grunting with the effort.
Now that did get them noticed. Stanislav writhed, tentacles bursting out to bat the hurled objects aside. Eyes congregated, blinking wetly in the shine. Mary was throwing everything at him, and he took it all.
It couldn’t continue. She only had so much she could give. She sagged against the doorframe, skirt snapping and cracking like a sail at sea, and the few objects still in flight lost their momentum. They tumbled to the floor, rattling and rolling.
Stanislav stared at them, his many eyes reflecting the outline of the woman in the red dress. Then he came for them, faster than was conceivably possible, flooding towards the door in a wave.
Dalip stepped forward, arm extended, and the knife went straight in: up to the hilt, up to the wrist. Warm, cloying wetness engulfed his hand, and it was a shock. He remembered enough not to let go, but to turn the knife with a twist and drag it out sideways.
It would have been enough to kill any man – catastrophic injuries that would have bled out in seconds.
Stanislav was not a man, nor did he care about such calculations.
Dalip was punched harder than he’d ever been punched before. It was like being hit by a bus square in the chest, hard enough to break his ribs and stop his heart. He flew without the aid of wings, ending up on his back in the mud outside, gazing up uncomprehending at the flickering, churning sky.
He should, by rights, be lying still, waiting for the ambulance, reassured by strangers that everything was going to be okay and being asked if there was anyone he needed to call.
Instead he found himself getting to his feet, renewing his death grip on his knife, and taking the first unsteady step forward.
Mary had picked up a broken table leg. Holding it in a two-handed grip, she swung it over her shoulder as she retreated, almost unbalancing herself.
‘Dalip? Dalip?’
He could barely breathe to reply.
‘This isn’t working.’
‘If you’ve got something else we haven’t tried, don’t hold back.’
Stanislav was in the open with them, now fully visible in his pomp, crowned by an ever-moving halo of tentacles.
And then Dalip shouted to her: ‘We have to get him to follow us.’
‘Is that it?’
‘For now.’
‘Fuck,’ said Mary, and threw herself at the dark, seething mass, swinging as she came within what she hoped was range. The blow was blocked with such severity that it nearly broke her arms. She was wrenched off her feet, and she fell hard. Her wounds stretched and tore.
Dalip ducked under the flailing suckers as they tried to reel both him and her in. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her backwards, out of reach for a moment.
‘Tell me we’ve got its attention.’
Stanislav surged towards them.
‘Run.’
They ran hand in hand, for no other reason but to help the other up if they fell. Dalip guided them towards the gatehouse. The gates were, as they always had been, open, but the arch tying the posts together had fallen into ruin.
And above them, the storm gathered itself, ready for its final onslaught.
He glanced behind as they reached the line of tumbled stone. Close, too close.
‘Climb,’ he said, and swung around.
Stanislav rose above him, and he held out the knife. As inadequate as it seemed, the tentacles reared away from it and tried to come at him from the sides. Dalip slashed at the air to keep them away, and gain time for Mary to get clear.
It was impossible to tell whether Stanislav was actually frightened of the knife, or whether he was simply playing. Dalip didn’t think he’d wounded him. But hurt him? Surprised him? Perhaps that.
The creature could simply fall on him, envelop him completely and tear him apart like he’d done to the guards. But it didn’t. Because some of its reactions were still human.
That insight might save him yet.
A block of dressed stone whirled past his ear. It was big, spinning, and not particularly fast, but Stanislav was too preoccupied to dodge it. It entered the central mass and disappeared. Then Stanislav was on the ground, surface churning as he tried to rid himself of this sudden cold, hard intrusion.
Dalip scrambled up the fallen arch to the top.
‘We can’t keep this up all night,’ said Mary.
There was blood coming from her mouth, and Dalip instinctively reached up to wipe it away.
She knocked his hand aside. ‘Bit my tongue, that’s all.’
They jumped down the other side. He was outside the crumbling castle’s walls for the first time, and looked back at his prison. He didn’t recognise it – it had seemed secure, and now it was a shambles of collapsed buildings and broken masonry.
Also, the rising tentacular creature lit by the burning sky.
‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘Is it really stupid?’ she asked.
‘Very.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and that was the last thing he heard her say for a while. The storm beat down at them with everything it had. The wind tore at them, strong enough to blast them with small sharp stones, and the lightning became a relentless static discharge above their heads.
Dalip raised his arm to protect his face and leant in hard, heading towards the flank of the mountain, to the edge of the bowl carved in it, and where it would be possible, perhaps, to climb to the summit.
After that, it was one foot in front of the other, the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet bleeding from each new cut as he reached up, pulled hard and dragged himself closer to the top. Mary, wearing the red dress, struggled, and he had to stop for her, wordlessly tell her to trust him, tell her that it would all be worth it in the end.
The mad monster that was Stanislav seemed to be having just as much difficulty. The loose surface slid underneath him, and his tentacles fought to hold on to the shining rock.
Pushing Mary ahead of him, he turned to Stanislav and brandished the knife.
‘You want me? You want her? You can’t have us. You can’t keep up because you’re weak. Weak, you hear me? You’re just a sheep like the others. A sheep.’
He had no idea if Stanislav had heard him or not. The wind stole his words away the moment they left his mouth. But what was important wasn’t whether Stanislav understood, rather that he could see his defiance with all hundred of his eyes.
Taunt him. Goad him. Make him angry and make him careless. Just as long as he followed them up the mountain.
It seemed to be working. He crawled and rolled up the bare rock after them, thrashing and bubbling, extruding tentacles into crevices and joints, slowly, inexorably, coming after them.
Whereas they were nimbler, but less sure-footed. Stanislav wasn’t going to get blown over the edge of the cliff; they, with their bloodied fingers and toes, their long limbs and impractical clothing, might.
They kept belly-low, but sometimes it wasn’t enough. The wind would whip in between them and their handholds, and bodily lift them into the air, driving in like a crowbar to separate them from their tenuous grip on life.
Whenever it happened, Dalip’s stomach lurched and his blood ran cold. He splayed himself out and pressed himself to the rock, and prayed for it to pass so he could keep going. It wasn’t far now. If he looked up, craning his neck at an unnatural angle to see the zenith, it glowed with pent-up energy. He could feel the buzzing on his skin, the prickle of electricity dancing in the clouds so close above his head, he could have reached up and touched them.