“You murdering whore. What have you done to her?” Alex spoke softly, and Richard realised what the man was seeing. The woman Greg Summers loved was dying in front of him, victim of whatever elaborate scheme his mistress Georgina had concocted to fracture his life.
Before Richard could say a word, Alex strode over to the bed and dropped to his knees, eyes watering to see his wife so helpless. Running a gentle hand through her lank, greasy hair, he whispered to her. “Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ, what has she done to you?”
Flicking open with spring-loaded violence, her eyes fixed his. For one shocked moment, Richard watched them regard each other, then his ears split as Alex screamed.
How could a human being reach that pitch, find that savage note?
Face to face with the woman he believed he loved, Alex stared into her eyes and howled.
With an abruptness that made Richard’s heart leap, it stopped. Alex switched off. Pulling his hands from his bleeding ears, Richard watched in mute horror as his friend went rag-doll limp and fell to the floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
EXPOSURE
Alex glided to the floor in warped slow motion. Richard wanted to blink, to shake his head free of what had to be an illusion. What had just happened? The sharp, solid retort of Alex’s head smacking against the concrete floor made it a hard reality.
Jennifer rose, bending at the waist to sit upright. Blankets fell to expose her naked torso, and the gauze-thin skin stretched to breaking point over a fleshless rack of bone. She looked as though her innards had been vacuum-pumped out, making her smaller and smaller, liposuction at its most extreme. She could have been a joke-shop zombie were it not for her breasts, two grotesque and pallid paper bags. Dead flesh, nothing more.
She looked at him. At first he was fascinated by her eyes. There was something wrong with them, something missing. It took a few moments, then he realised that what they lacked was life, and any trace of humanity at all. Chilled, he tried to make himself turn away from this thing which part of him still wanted to claim as his wife.
He couldn’t. There was nothing wrong with his neck, he could feel his battered muscles ready to perform the act, but he couldn’t give the command or even remember what the command was. Despite the chorus of terrified screams in his head, he could not will himself to look away. All that existed for him were those two wet images of the grave. If Gregory Summers had managed to pull back the lids of his mother’s eyes, they might have looked very much like Jennifer’s. Nothing was more real than those slack eyes, for he was looking through the trickster veil of reality and seeing what was on the other side.
As though aware of his sudden scrutiny, reality contracted. Still looking into those dry pupils, he found himself uniquely attuned to his own body. Aware of every tiny particle, he was struck by the multitude of what lay in Richard Jameson. Each individual nuclei and electron called out for his individual attention, and with each cry he was larger. All those microscopic particles, every one independent and whole in itself, joined to form atoms, molecules, chemicals, cells, organs, sub-systems, systems and, finally, the entity of Jameson. He was huge, a giant. Like a universe. Or a god.
With a sickening mental jerk, his perspective inverted. He was aware of his whole being, but suddenly he also felt the room he stood in. Only a small part of the space was filled with Jameson. A minuscule thing, he was aware of the displaced air that his foreign body had shifted from this part of the overall structure. Perceiving the tank in the centre, the walls, the ceiling, he was diminished.
With another dizzying mental lurch, his awareness expanded to the size of the whole building. Rooms, corridors, halls and stairwells were known to him, each in shocking detail, each a tiny contributor to the whole. Somewhere amongst this was a speck called Jameson, a small, mobile particle hardly touching what he drifted through. Seen from above, he was barely noticeable, a shifting grain.
With crushing immensity, he whooshed outwards to know the metropolis of London. Fighting for breath, still aware of himself and his position in the whole, he thought that somewhere in there, he was starting to scream.
Where he had been inconsequential before, he now became something smaller than that. Boroughs made up the organs of this grand beast, buildings and streets were cells and capillaries. So then, what was he to this titan? Less. How could he be of importance to anything in this place? Where was his legacy? A nothing such as he could not hope to leave even a mark on this beast. Knowing what would come next, fighting against it as tears drowned his face, he saw London against the British Isles, the colossus now a Lilliputian, he so small as to not register at all. Sweat dripped from his hands, though this tiny reaction was a literal nothing to him. It was agoraphobia as few living souls could understand, pounding him, reducing him.
Wrenched outwards again, he was shown his place against the backdrop of the planet. Would he ever breathe again? He felt the universe, and his part in a void where the very stars were grains of nearly nothing. If God existed, if God could see and feel all that Richard saw and felt, then surely He was long mad. Was he shrieking as Alex had? Did it matter? When galaxies died within him and he barely noticed, nothing he did mattered.
It all switched off. Feeling the universe in one moment, he was next conscious only of the dying screams from his bleeding throat. Drool dripped from his chin, and he collapsed to the floor. None of his muscles worked. He had forgotten how to move them. In trying to flex a bicep, he was at the same time attempting to change the orbit of a sun, the direction of drifting tectonic plates. Even the pain, as his flesh slammed hard against the concrete, was nothing next to the implosion of a star or the birth pangs of a mountain. Wetness dripped from him to the floor, and he could not remember if they were tears or tsunamis. All he could do was fight to inhale each immaterial, hurricane breath, wrestle with the continuation of his insubstantial, thunderous heartbeat.
His unblinking eyes saw pallid stick-legs drop to the ground next to the bed. It was not possible for him to glance upwards at Jennifer, but he concentrated on those thin appendages as they limped by. Though his face remained slack, he winced inside as he watched the pressure of her weight on the floor split the soles of her feet. Only a little blood seeped from her wounds. She walked beyond his static field of vision, and he wondered how those twig limbs even held her upright.
Anxiety flushed rationality away as he realised he had ceased to breathe. Frightened that he might forget how to begin again, unable even to indicate that he was in trouble, he waited in horror.
His chest rose in a gasp, an automatic muscular twitch that he could not control. If it stopped, he would die.
Voices. Hoping that he would survive the distraction, he separated a very small part of his attention from the effort to live, and listened.
“…waiting for Jameson.” Tremulous and hesitant, the voice belonged to the creature. Now Richard understood why it was so afraid, how wrong his assumptions had been. She was the adversary, and the creature only a slave. Like an eager spaniel it had obeyed her instructions as best it could, but Richard had foiled whatever careful schedule she wished to maintain. Now the creature too would suffer, and Richard felt a strange pity for it.
“It will be brief, my sweet. Only pain. I do it because I love you.” Jennifer’s voice, but colder and deeper than he remembered, as though it echoed off forever.
A brittle snap, sudden and loud, followed by a tentative whimper. Jennifer spoke again.
“Now place Seven in the bed. I will speak with him.” A tremor tried to ripple his lifeless muscles, but failed. “Take Six for preparation. We start in an hour.”
Damp footsteps approached him, the almost familiar, fresh meat stench of the creature’s true form forcing passage through his nostrils. Still paralysed, he could do nothing to avoid the forthcoming touch. At least he lacked the strength to vomit, and so a small piece of dignity would remain his. As the creature bent to lift him, slick reds and dank blacks suddenly filling his sideways view
of the world, he realised that something was wrong with what he saw. Skinned arms bore him up, and his lifeless head fell back. For a few seconds the world, vast and incomprehensible as he had seen it, was yet less explicable as he perceived it upside down. Then he was lying on the camp bed, looking up. If his inert mouth were not already hanging open he would have gawped.
The creature’s foul skull also dangled limply from a useless neck. At first he thought it had received a smaller dose of what he had undergone, but then he noticed the angle at which the cranium lolled. Jennifer’s love, it seemed, had manifested in reaching out and breaking vertebrae with her bare hands. Jennifer, even ravaged by whatever ailment beset her, had twisted and shattered the spine of this awesome horror. Terror puked over Richard’s soul.
The creature departed his field of vision. If his vocal cords could be forced into some semblance of life, he might have called out, begged it to stay. He would have grovelled, debased himself, cast aside the little shreds of dignity he had won – anything to make it remain. He was discovering that the devil he knew was the preferable torment.
The gunshot bang of the closing door marked its exit. Those shuffling steps which now drew closer to the bed could only belong to whatever monstrosity Jennifer was. Hard, bony fingers touched his hair, trying to stroke but managing only to scrape. Scalp howling at her scratching, digging touch, he would have given his life to be able to move his head away from those five probing digits. He could not, nor could he close his dried-up eyes as her skeletal face filled the fullness of his view, hanging just inches from him, like death itself. That was what she represented now.
“You think you want to see.” To his surprise, her breath was not rank. Where he had expected, perhaps, the stale odour of the morgue to coat her exhalations, he was stunned to smell the feminine taste of the woman he had thought he loved. On a primitive level, the Greg Summers Program responded to the proximity of the wife he had wished so hard to reclaim. Despite the haggard, starved skull that balanced inches from his face, he was getting an erection. Regardless of his terror, he wanted to guffaw. Of all the organs in his body, that had to come back online first.
She smiled down at him. “Oh, Gregory. You realise this is practically incest? I birthed you, child. This is oedipal.” Richard realised, with a piercing emotional stab, that she was right. Though Richard Jameson had been brought into the world by an act of physical procreation, this thing had somehow created Gregory Summers. When her near fleshless hand cupped his engorged penis, sending a delicate trickle of sensation through his groin, he did not know whether he was weeping tears of revulsion or frustrated desire. “Still, what mother could deny her own child?” With a malicious half-smile, she leaned forward and kissed him. Though the sensation was harsh, her teeth having infinitely more substance than her parched lips, it was the most bittersweet experience of his short life.
When she withdrew both hand and mouth from him, he could not help but wonder if she had just kissed him farewell. He had been promised answers.
She broke into his chain of thought as though she had read his mind. “Answers you will have, to make of what you will. Now that we are close, our link becomes so much more than a passageway for suffering. I have always been with you Gregory. Now you shall be one with me.” Her words were a nonsense, and her smile blossomed into the grin of the Reaper itself as she collected this thought too.
Her eyes bloomed into dark pits. His mind toppled forwards, into her.
Years rolled back on her long, long life. Richard saw a hovel home, and a scraping existence. An attack, the slashing of her neck, and the deep, orgasmic death to service another. She had risen, unaccepting, until the shattering cramps of need drove her into a dark new life.
Memories flowed past and through him like a powerful breeze, images flying by so fast he could not land on any single one, and was left with the most inadequate impressions. Days, then years, of running, hiding, feeding. Powerful but fragile, afraid of no man, yet plagued by fool weaknesses. Her power grew. Others of her kind came to know her, respect her authority.
Centuries streamed by, and even the weaknesses grew less potent. Passing into myth and fiction, the printing press gave her new freedoms. The long sea voyage to Great Britain, and then humanity’s two vast attempts to slaughter itself. Feeding on battlefields, the corpses she left behind unnoticed in the carnage.
Capture. The round-up of her kind by the great superpowers. The experiments and cages, the constant testing, starvation, and madness. Years wondering whether those like her were changed in the same way, whether they had survived at all, contemplating eternal loneliness. Evolved beyond what she should be, she found escape, and slaughter. An impossible pregnancy as she toyed with her new gifts, discovered how they had advanced her. The birthing of the skinless thing, with gifts of its own that became clear in time.
Coming to know her new self, and the thrilling new ways to feed that had been bequeathed to her by men in white coats. The feast that came with the suffering she could cause, and the raw power it gave her. Developing templates. Rowena Murphy. Ashgar Singh. Settling on Gregory Summers, the richest pool of suffering, the most prone to guilt and self-torment.
The hunts began, her link with each victim feeding their pain to her long before she came to drink them, and she had never been captured again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
VICTORIES
His mind slammed back into his head. He had fallen right through her life, and then been hurled back out again. A lifetime spanning longer than he could comprehend, fed to him in the space of...what? Seconds? Minutes? Less than an hour, for that was when the process was scheduled to begin. Now he had the first horrible notions of just what that might be. A relic of childhood superstition, made real.
What was he to the haggard thing that hung above him, watching the events in his mind with an inhuman curiosity so old it had forgotten how to be human? She was a functional, evolved killing machine enduring existence by stealing joy, life, and sustenance. The mundanities of a human life were far behind her, and she toyed with mankind like a malignant god.
Those were his answers, both crushingly simple and terrifying in their complexity. She had found him at the club, programmed him, and fed off his suffering as he struggled with each carefully designed torment. She had been with him for the entire of the short life Summers had endured. Linked in an unfathomable way, his pain had channelled to her, fodder for her soul’s appetites. That single moment of rape he had experienced was nothing to what she had done to him.
Bitter, guilty relief washed through him that whatever came next, Alex would be first. Now that he knew the answer he found that it was not enough. He wanted to move on, and rebuild. If Alex could buy him enough time to recover from his paralysis, he was shocked to discover that he would take it.
“We are all slaves to base instincts, sweet.” She spoke with almost touching sincerity; there may have been a momentary glint of remorse in her eye before she turned from him, towards the sound of an opening door. As she shuffled away, her footfalls were drowned by the heavier steps of the creature entering the room. Without ceremony, it pronounced the doom of Alex Carlisle.
“An hour has passed. He has yet to move of his own volition. Does that change things?”
“The process will work as always. Prop the other so he can witness what is to become of him.” Had she heard his treacherous thoughts? Of course she had, and he could not have prevented himself thinking them.
The creature was surprised. “Mistress?”
“You question?” Soft, harsh sounds. Power shone from them, and Richard had no doubt that she could easily best the creature she had spawned.
“Mistress I...no I…”
“Then still your tongue and obey.”
When it touched him this time he felt no horror, only disgusted pity. It was not some powerful demon at all. It was little more than a child, fearful of punishment. What stories surrounded this pair? He was glad that he would never know,
for to feel compassion for such things as these might mark the end of his own humanity.
It said nothing more as it shifted Richard to look at the tank, this thing he had feared reduced to a petulant infant. Alex lay on the floor halfway between the tank and the bed. He was stripped naked, his body lean and muscular. Jennifer directed a sly smile towards him from where she stood over the prone figure. He swore in his mind, damning her and her powers. Was nothing he thought sacred? Her broader grin, sallow and feverish, told him not.
The creature, moving to the machine beside the tank, began to operate a series of controls, then turned to the mother-mistress. As she nodded, curt and impatient, a rush of transparent fluid gushed from the pipes connecting the steel container to the glass cube, crashing against the far wall. Deafened by the roar, Richard could not make out what Jennifer said after this. The creature did, for it went to lift Alex from the floor.
It was time.
Carrying Alex with a strange, mournful tenderness, the creature climbed the steel steps running up the side of the tank. Gaining the top, it waited. Richard prayed as the cube filled, for it was all he was able to do. The God he did not believe in ignored his pleas. Unable to avert his gaze, he watched the creature, magnificent and gothic atop the steps, outstretch those flayed arms. Alex was cradled there like a naked babe, weighing nothing to the thing holding it.
When the tank was half full, Jennifer limped to the intravenous drip running from the steel drum. Her movements had acquired a new vigour at the prospect of the banquet, and she inserted the thin tubes into her wrists with the practised ease of an addict.
The tank was three quarters of the way full. An awful tingling began in Richard’s muscles, the desire to act fighting the inability to do so. In the tank, the contents had stopped rising. No, thought Richard, fill it all - give me more time! Each passing second might be the one in which he remembered how to use his Judas limbs.