She rolled her eyes. ‘He’s a dancer.’
Grigor’s shoulders slumped. ‘Oh dear.’
‘What?’
‘I want to see him.’
Gez was nowhere to be found. Nell called his home, and there was no reply. She and Grigor went out looking in his usual haunts, but there was no sign of him. ‘What’s this about?’ Nell asked. ‘It isn’t just a fancying situation, is it?’
Grigor wondered whether he should tell her about the dream, then decided against it. ‘No, it’s just that he was a bit odd with me too last night, before you came in with the VCR. I think he has got something to do with the mutilation.’
‘Perhaps we should just tell the police.’
‘No, I just want to know why. Something tells me that if the police are involved, Gez will never be found.’
They left messages at various places for Gez to get in touch with Nell. ‘It won’t work,’ she said. ‘If he really did do it, he’ll know I’m on to him. I never chase him around. I think this is just going to be an unsolved mystery.’
She and Grigor went back to Grigor’s apartment - the first time Nell had been there. They drank coffee and Grigor questioned Nell about how she’d met Gez. ‘It was at the club. We got on well. I liked him. He’s a great dancer...’ She paused. ‘It was about three weeks ago.’
‘Are you...?’ Grigor enquired delicately.
Nell rolled her eyes. ‘Get real! You think I’m interested? You think he is?’ She grinned. ‘Grigor, you’re so innocent. The place where he works, it’s a gay club. My girl-friend and I go there. I thought you knew that part of my resumé.’
‘Oh.’ Grigor couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Nell jumped to her feet. ‘Well, I’d better get back, otherwise the Dragon might think I’m off hawking stolen feet somewhere.’ She leaned down and kissed Grigor on the forehead. ‘Don’t worry, Papa G. It’ll all be fine. Call me if you want to. I’ll look in on you later, after work. That, OK?’
‘Yes, thanks. I’d appreciate it.’ He’d already decided that later, after a bottle of good wine, he’d tell her everything.
Left alone, Grigor paced around his rooms, full of a strange energy. He felt he should be doing something, but didn’t know what.
At six o’clock, his doorbell rang. Grigor thought it must be Nell and opened it without checking through the spy-hole. But it was Gez standing there. Grigor felt instantly surprised and pleased, feelings which were soon eclipsed by doubt and a tremor of fear. ‘What are you doing here?’
Gez’s dark eyes bored into him. ‘Invite me in.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Don’t be afraid of me. There’s no need.’ He took a step forward.
Grigor felt as if he knew the boy, had known him for a long time. All because of the activities of a single day and the strange dream. It didn’t make sense and yet it did. Feeling as if something had snapped inside him, something that had been causing discomfort without him knowing it, Grigor stepped aside and gestured for Gez to come into the apartment.
In the living room, Gez sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. His bony knees showed through rips in his tattered jeans. He looked starved and furtive like a runaway.
Grigor stood over him with folded arms. ‘Did you damage the mummy?’
‘What?’ Gez appeared genuinely surprised, so Grigor explained what had happened.
‘You think I did this? Why?’
Grigor shrugged. ‘Your behaviour last night.’
Gez frowned. ‘I gave you something you wanted and now you think I desecrate the dead? That’s kind of you, very kind.’
‘You said things - strange things.’
‘So did you.’ Gez leaned back on the sofa, spread out his arms along the back. ‘That mummy is weird. It affects people. I don’t think anybody cut its feet off. They’re just walking.’
Grigor couldn’t repress a shudder. He laughed nervously. ‘Drink?’
‘OK.’ Gez took off his leather jacket. ‘So that was why you and Nell were looking for me today - because you think I’m a grave-robber. I thought it was because you wanted to see me - for yourself. What a shame.’
Grigor handed him a glass of red wine, watched him drink it. ‘Your world is not my world - er - Gez. What is your name - your real name?’
Gez smiled disarmingly. ‘Angelo, but call me Nezzar, if you like.’
I don’t know what to do with you, Grigor thought. You are here because of me, and absurdly I don’t feel worried about it, but I still have no idea what to do with you.
Gez patted the seat beside him. ‘Sit down. I have something to say.’
Warily, Grigor did so.
‘I think we’ve known each other before,’ Gez announced in a grave tone.
Grigor laughed. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘Not in this life, stupid. Another.’ He put his head on one side. ‘You don’t believe, do you.’
Grigor turned his wine-glass between his palms. ‘At this moment, I don’t know what I believe. It’s been a very strange couple of days.’
Gez punctuated his speech with emphatic hand gestures. ‘I had to kiss you last night, because it felt as if I’d waited a long time to do so. You know this too.’ He let his head fall back against the sofa and blinked at the ceiling. ‘You are a good, upright man from a good neighbourhood, and look at me, but I feel I can speak to you like this. We know each other - that’s why.’
Grigor wondered if things were getting out of hand. Where was Nell? He wished she’d arrive. In a silence, Grigor rose and went to his stereo, inserting one of his favourite CDs into the player. Strains of eastern music twisted into the room. ‘You want me to dance for you?’ Gez asked.
Grigor opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He shrugged and nodded, sat down again.
There was hardly any room to dance, but Gez insinuated himself around the cramped furniture, his expression distant with concentration. Grigor sat on the sofa watching him, knowing that at some point the music would stop. Nell was right - the boy was a good dancer. He seemed made for it, moulding his body to the sound. Grigor remembered the dream and felt a stirring within him. It was another voice that said, ‘Come to me’; a voice low and measured. Gez paused, then did so, kneeling at Grigor’s feet. He put his hands on Grigor’s knees, pushed them apart, then reared up between them. They embraced.
Grigor thought that he heard the door-bell ring, but ignored it. He was wrapped in a caul of exotic music and ophidian limbs. Their passion was claws and heat, demanding, almost angry and impatient. Finally, they went into the bedroom, and there fell asleep, with the window open and the CD player on repeat.
Grigor walked the path to the temple again, but this time went directly to the Tower of Silence. Nezzar was waiting for him there. He jumped up and ran over to Grigor, threw his arms around him. ‘We have triumphed!’ he cried. ‘The work is over.’
‘Yes,’ Grigor said, and pushed the boy away from him a little. He traced the line of Nezzar’s jaw with his thumbs, wondering.
Nezzar seemed puzzled. ‘Is something wrong, master?’
‘No,’ Grigor said. ‘Nothing’s wrong. You are most dear to me.’
Nezzar smiled and rested his head against Grigor’s chest. ‘I love you. You are my lord.’
‘You have worked hard for me,’ Grigor said. ‘I’ll not forget that.’
Perhaps Nezzar sensed some finality in the remark, for his body stiffened in Grigor’s arms, but Grigor wouldn’t let him pull away. He kissed the boy, plunged his hands into the thick coppery hair, bit his lips, his neck. Responding, Nezzar purred like a cat and sank down to the floor of the shrine.
Grigor’s consciousness partly left the body it inhabited. He felt himself being drawn away, down the labyrinthine corridors, into darkness. Another part of him was animal lust, grunting and thrusting into compliant flesh, but it was fading away.
When the screams began, he was tugged back into his dream body, instantly and shockingl
y. Blood everywhere, flailing hands, terrible cries. Nezzar jerked beneath him in the throes of death, his heart ripped out. ‘Most dear to me,’ Grigor murmured, the long-bladed knife slick in his hands. ‘Most dear.’
Nezzar’s eyes were filmed with blood, but for a moment, before they clouded for eternity, their expression was fierce and clear. He was already dead, but his arcane art permitted him to speak. ‘You can’t throw me away. Not now. Not ever. My spirit leaves this world, but I will find you! I shall always dance. You have killed my body, but in memory of our love, do not take from me that which is my true spirit.’ His face fell slack, his lips silent, yet still his voice echoed around the walls of the tower. ‘Ah, Sin-na’el, hear me! This is forever!’
Grigor, who was Ashur, adept of the inner temple of the Stamping God, knelt alone with a dead boy in a veiled shrine. He had fulfilled his part of the contract, as far as he was able.
When he awoke, Grigor opened his eyes to find Gez leaning over him, his hair hanging down. It was all so clear now. Not dream, but memory, long buried. ‘Will you kill me now?’ he asked.
‘You believe?’ Gez whispered.
Grigor nodded. ‘Yes.’
Gez plunged his hands between his thighs, hung his head. ‘I came a long way to find you.’
‘I know. Some part of Nezzar - some part of you? - influenced events so that the mummy ended up where I worked. This, I believe now. We have unfinished business from the past.’ Grigor’s voice was weak. He didn’t know how he could believe such things. The world he knew had fragmented and blown away from him.
‘I should kill you,’ Gez murmured, ‘but for the fact that in our other life, you granted my last wish. That means something.’ He glanced up. ‘You did what you felt you had to do. Neither of us went into that business without knowing the risks, the possible cost. And...’ he paused, ‘I still love you, Ashur.’
Grigor closed his eyes, his chest filled with an ancient pain. For some moments, there were no words between them.
Circles of time, ever repeating. Outside, sirens wailed and traffic growled. Hot summer air twisted the drapes. Gez’s body began to move, his legs and feet trembled, vibrating upon the bed. He threw back his head and howled. ‘What’s happening to me?’
Grigor reached out and gripped one of the boy’s wrists, unable to still the tremors in his body. In the living room, beyond the bedroom, shadows stirred and a reek of carrion polluted the air.
Gez expelled a sobbing sigh, as if he could barely draw breath. ‘The moment we met the other night, just that one moment, He found us. We called to Him like a song. And He comes for what we denied him.’
Grigor’s grip intensified around Gez’s wrist. He sensed something swirling in the living-room beyond the reach of his bedside light. Something forming; hungry. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The feet,’ Gez hissed. ‘The heart and the feet.’ His eyes were round and dark, full of terror. ‘You fulfilled only half of the deal back then. I begged you to honour my feet, the house of my spirit, and you were weak. You obliged me. But it was never finished. Now, the Stamping Good has found us and taken the feet from the mummy.’ He paused, expelled another sobbing breath. ‘But will that be enough?’
From the living-room came the sound of something breaking; an ornament or a glass. I should know the right words to protect us, Grigor thought. Ashur would have known, but I can’t remember.
Furniture scraped across the carpet, more things were broken. Grigor and Gez clung to each other in the bed, protected only by a small pool of electric light. Presently, that too was denied them and the room plunged into darkness. There was breathing at the threshold, a sense of something huge and unseen looming there, exhaling the stench of carrion.
‘The feet,’ Gez breathed, and began to ease himself slowly from Grigor’s hold. ‘They dance.’
Return to Gehenna
She didn’t know how she’d caught the awareness. Perhaps she’d walked through an infected area one night, when she’d been drunk, and hadn’t felt its presence. Or, it could have been coughed onto her by someone. Maybe. Perhaps its spore had impregnated itself into a piece of paper she’d handled at work. She hated work. Wouldn’t it have come for her there? Work was hell.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly when the awareness had started, and whether the incident that occurred on the dead-skied Tuesday had actually been the first or not, but it was the first that Lucy could remember.
‘Hell is not a place, it is a state of mind.’ So said Dolores, who occupied the desk opposite Lucy’s.
Lucy had just kicked herself backwards across the floor on her swivel chair, having announced, ‘This place is hell.’ Her work bored her rigid; the company sold insurance.
Dolores, with her long pink nails, which Lucy suspected were false, liked work. She had double chins, and a strangely slow tongue that reminded Lucy of a parrot’s. It was pointed and narrow, and peered out without speed to lick the sticky parts of envelopes like a questing blind worm. Dolores disapproved of what she saw as Lucy’s lazy temperament and streak of rebellion. Everyone had to work, so why not do your best? To help fulfil this urge, Dolores made copious cups of tea for the boss - a mangy non-entity, who smelled salty - and grovelled before the boss’s wife whenever she called into the office. The boss’s wife was vague and always seemed slightly surprised, unnerved by the obsequious Dolores. Lucy could not imagine that all of these drab people had a life beyond the office walls.
Lucy hated Dolores’ smug piety more than she hated the job, but if she didn’t get on with the woman, life there would be unendurable, since there were only the two of them and the boss didn’t count. She also suspected that Dolores was quite capable of losing her her job, if she felt riled enough, but fortunately the woman made an effort to excel at being kind. Dolores was just too good; perhaps it was why she looked so poisoned and bloated.
‘You make life so hard for yourself,’ Dolores said. She was filled to the brim with platitudes and sayings that advised on how to exist nicely and properly. Niceness and properness were concepts that filled Lucy with dread. She felt she had somehow been cut adrift from the life she was supposed to have had and become marooned here, eking out a living in a nine-to-five job that barely paid for her small apartment. It wasn’t as if she could get a better job, with her lack of qualifications. Sometimes, she wished she’d done something with herself at school, or perhaps later, but in her early twenties, all she’d wanted to do was party. Now, on the cusp of thirty, all her wild friends had turned suspiciously into people who wanted children and normality. Somehow, without Lucy noticing, they had acquired degrees or training that ended in certificates. They had deceived her; they were not the people she’d believed them to be. If they did come out for an evening, they talked about what their kids did, or joked about wall-paper. Lucy’s horror had reached its height when she’d spotted a set of golf clubs in the boot of a car belonging to a man who had once sold drugs in the shadowed corner of the local student bar and whose hair had been long. Lucy’s old friends were all sailing away from her and she could only wave sadly at their departure. Recently, she had half-heartedly made newer, younger friends, who were happy to go out whenever they could afford it, but they seemed shallow in comparison to the memories of her youth; they had no opinions and no fire. They were too interested in money.
‘I’ve woken up in the wrong life,’ Lucy told Dolores. ‘But I can’t remember when it happened.’
Dolores smiled in gentle disbelief and shook her head. ‘Really, Lucy, I think you enjoy being miserable. You’re an attractive girl. What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’m not a girl,’ Lucy said, slouching backwards in her seat like a relaxing puppet, arms hanging down to either side. ‘If I was, it might not be so bad. I’d have time to change things.’ She could see from Dolores’ quick, bright glance that the woman was longing to tell her to sit up straight.
‘Have you done the filing?’ she said instead.
It was dark at five
o’clock when Lucy left the office, leaving Dolores to fuss around (unpaid) for an extra fifteen minutes, before locking up. Outside, the air was cold and damp with invisible rain, and sound seemed muted. Soon, the nights would be drawing out; Lucy looked forward to spring. This year, the winter seemed to have been going on forever. In the mornings, she hated leaving for work in the dark and then having to come home in it again at night. Lucy preferred heat, raging heat and blistering light. Was it feasible to emigrate to a warmer country when she had no money and no training?
Lucy hurried to the bus stop, intent only on getting home, where she could shut out the night. Just as she was rounding the corner, she saw the bus coming toward her, having already drawn away from the stop.
‘Damn!’ She threw up her arms and waved frantically at the driver, but he ignored her. Greenish faces peered down at her in mild curiosity through the passengers’ windows.
‘Damn!’ Lucy glanced at her watch. Since when had the bus been early? It was supposed to leave at ten past five, and she could see it was still only five past. Usually, she had to stand there waiting, getting progressively more annoyed. Living on the outskirts of town as she did, she wouldn’t be able to catch another direct route bus for at least half an hour. Half an hour of standing in the depressing drizzle of a late January evening. She didn’t have enough money for a cab; it was too near the end of the month when her bank account tended to dry up, or rather her overdraft did. She considered approaching a cash dispenser in the hope of invoking money, but knew her prospects of success were bleak, and it would take her at least five minutes to reach the machine in the square. She might as well walk home. If she walked briskly, it would take only twenty-five minutes.
Her shoes weren’t made for walking; they leaked. Lucy cursed the fact she had forgotten about that before she’d started off. As she walked, it seemed the dreary town shimmered in a mist, but the effect was not beautiful. Cars and buses hissed along the main road, throwing up dirty spray. People hurried along with their heads down through the garish gouts of radiance thrown out by shop-fronts. The puddles of light on the floor seemed muzzy at the edges, as if Lucy’s vision were blurring. She blinked, cleared her eyes. Perhaps I am crying, she thought, subsequently wondering why she felt so numb.