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  DECAY INEVITABLE

  CONRAD A. WILLIAMS

  To die will be an awfully big adventure.

  – James Matthew Barrie,

  Peter Pan

  SOLARIS

  For Rhonda, Southwold 2000

  First published 2009 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (ePUB): 978-1-84997-309-0

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-310-6

  Copyright © 2011 Conrad Williams.

  Cover image by Dave McKean.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  ALSO BY CONRAD WILLIAMS

  One

  The Unblemished

  London Revenant

  The Scalding Rooms

  Rain

  Head Injuries

  Nearly People

  Game

  Use Once Then Destroy

  1992

  THE BOY HAD been asleep for a long time and woke up feeling sick. A wedge of midday sunlight contained him; it splintered in his eyes and, along with a gruel of rheum, made it difficult for him to see. Beyond the almost granular curtain of light, objects moved slowly, as though shifting through fluid. He couldn’t make out what they were. He was in great pain, but it was a pain that seemed detached, enveloping him rather than embedded within. It was a strangely comforting pain.

  The dream retained its clarity, even as he swam up further from the dead pool of sleep. It crystallised and reached deep into his unconscious, revealing new nodes and structures that initially had been lost upon waking. Soon the dream had a root, the origin of his mind’s play. The more recent tendrils of the dream wavered, like new leaves on a plant cauterised by fierce sunlight, unable to go on, frustrated by a lack of completion. Still, the thick, coppery taste of fear in his throat suggested he’d been lucky to have been pulled out of the dream, before it had a chance to scar him with anything too vile.

  He had been walking a midnight field; up ahead were a number of figures, a gathering of grey smocks meandering on a hill above the ocean. At the bottom of the hill lay a tower of drab, grey buildings with narrow windows and flat roofs piled on top of each other like a ziggurat.

  Although it had been dark, details could be gathered from his companions: the bluish tinge to their skin, the thin worms of veins sprawled across the shorn planes of their skulls. As he approached, some of them turned to look at him. Some of them didn’t have eyes, or rather, they contained black, protruding orbs in their faces, like moist olives plugged into chunks of focaccia. The sky and sea were cut from the same fabric, a slightly darker pleat offering only the vaguest nod to separation. Directly above them, the heavens seemed feverish and uncertain, fussing and disintegrating like a nimbus of midges.

  The mass of tunics fell away from him as he breached their community. They faded, swift as hot breath on glass, to leave a stain in the air that smelled of cinnamon. Another face drifted by his own, the eyes soft, wet and totally black. It was a face that had followed him into his dream, but he couldn’t place it. The frustration of failed recognition piled up against him until he started crying. The face drew away, despite his attempt to get nearer, and before it vanished into the sweep of pine trees down by the water he saw it open in a smile; the glutinous, amber light of his dream snagged on a gold tooth.

  Out of the dream, his surroundings continued to burn into him. For some reason, his eyes were failing to become accustomed to the glare. Even the sunlight, fixing him to the floor through the frame of the window, was not losing ground to the spin of the Earth. Its heat was constant, and a finger of cloud reaching for the sun never eclipsed it.

  Awake, he moved away from the cage of sunlight and was able to gauge his position. A black suggestion remained where he’d been sitting, as of a shadow severed from its generator. He had the impression of a single, thin arch through which he could see a tower with lights burning in a window. The sound of wind chimes. Then that was fading too and:

  His father was frozen into his armchair, hands gripping the sides. Half a digestive biscuit had been caught in the process of falling, a foot shy of the carpet, surrounded by a cloud of crumbs. His father’s head was on its way backwards, larynx proud, mouth agape in the act of laughing. Spit formed a hinge for his lips. The boy’s mother was a dim figure approaching the doorway, carrying a tray and looking down at a cat trapped in the act of rubbing itself against her ankles. On the television, shoppers were still as dummies, undecided over which margarine they liked best in a taste test.

  Before the explosion of sound, colour and light brought him crashing into real time again, he heard a voice, brittle with concern, bark: Do we have him? Okay, okay, pull out.

  Now his father’s laughter was yo-yoing around the room, his mother pleading for Benny to go and catch some mice. Everything seemed normal, yet there were things that seemed out of kilter with what had gone on before he slept. Benny, for example, had changed. The cat approached him, affable as ever, yet one of his white “socks” had swapped feet. When he went to his room he found that his bookshelves had been altered and were now arranged alphabetically by author, rather than by title, which was how he preferred it. Outside his window, in next door’s garden, Mrs Pleat’s pond fountain chuckled happily; only last week the pond had been filled in because it attracted frogs, creatures Mrs Pleat couldn’t abide.

  He saw many other inconsistencies that day, but when he woke the following morning, they had all resolved themselves. All was as it had been and nothing else was amiss.

  He spent a long time worrying about the dream and trying to remember what had happened before he fell asleep. Had he spent all afternoon there, on the floor? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t recall an alternative.

  He went to the bathroom and checked his eyes in the mirror. They appeared normal, their usual brown colour. He gritted his teeth against a strong compulsion to cry and backed away from the mirror to sit on the edge of the bathtub. He was not usually given to emotional blips such as this, but then he could never understand why people always offered comfort to those who had suffered a nightmare by saying it was just a dream. This was why he had not confided in his parents.

  He began to dream about the hill regularly and found that he could control his actions while he was there. He visited the wood and walked the edge of the ocean. The building, if he pressed his ear up against it, made soft, clanking noises, like machinery heard at a distance. He discovered these places were comforting to him, no longer associated with the pain or shock of his first journey. As his real-time experiences developed, so the surroundings in the dream followed suit. The trees grew. Flowers bloomed and died, corresponding with the seasons. There was an abundance of plantlife that he could never find replicated in any garden or botanical encyclopaedia during his hours of wakefulness. There were animals too, although they were timid and he never saw more than a glimpse of them in the wood. He discovered that he could not travel beyond the limit of his vision. He tried often to escape the confines of his surroundings, but at the moment he felt he had broken free, he would find, by some strange trick of perspective, that he was running back in the direction from which he had come. It didn’t bother him; he felt it was something he would achieve one day. It was something to be learned.

  It was always night on the hill, and always the summit would be crowded with shaven-headed peo
ple dressed in plain, grey tunics. He grew to recognise some of the inhabitants and looked out for them on subsequent journeys to help convince him that his dreaming was lucid, although the gold-toothed character did not resurface in all this time. On occasion, he attempted to communicate with them but invariably the object of his attention would back off, eyes averted deferentially.

  On the morning after one of these failed contacts, a week after his thirteenth birthday, he woke to the sound of voices. Pulling on a pair of track suit bottoms, he opened his bedroom door and peeked out onto the landing. The voices were coming from the bottom of the stairs; both were male, one calm and measured, the other breathless, threatening to become desperate. He could not hear his mother. He checked his watch. Only six a.m.; she would be in bed for at least another hour.

  He crept to the top of the stairs and sat down. From here he could see the shadows of the men. He recognised his father’s voice patterns even before he’d understood what was being discussed. When it became clear it was him at the centre of their debate, he found it difficult to follow the conversation over the clamour of his heart. They were discussing money, a final payment. He forced himself to concentrate.

  His father was begging the visitor now but the other was apparently unmoved.

  “We have the facility ready, Mr. Nevin, and a car waiting outside. It’s really out of your hands now. We’d appreciate it if you went and woke the boy.”

  “But my wife... she’ll be devastated.”

  A sigh from the visitor. “Mr. Nevin, Joe, we had an agreement. Monies have been paid into your account for the past year. You don’t seriously believe that we are simply going to turn around and leave without the boy? That isn’t going to happen.”

  “It is,” said the boy’s father. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  There was a silence and then, very clearly, his father said: “Fuck.”

  It was the profanity rather than the explosion that followed it that startled the boy onto his backside. He heard a burst of static and then the voice say: “Round the back. Quick. Watch out for the boy.” Once the radio had been switched off, he heard the voice say: “Godspeed, Joe, you stupid, stupid bastard.”

  Now feet on the stairs.

  The boy scampered back to his room just as his mother emerged from her bedroom, her hair in curlers, a white dressing gown wrapped around her.

  “Joe?” she called, querulously. Another explosion: the top of her head came off. The boy watched, open-mouthed as his mother elegantly lifted her hand from the door as though about to primp her curls. She fell like something without bones, the remaining half of her head spread across the balustrade.

  The boy ran to his window and shoved it open. He swung his body out and, clinging to the lintel, waited until he’d stopped swinging before dropping to the ground. He landed awkwardly and twisted his ankle. He didn’t feel a thing. Glancing at his window – the light just coming on – he ran across the garden and began leapfrogging the neighbouring fences until he’d lost count and the sounds of his pursuers’ cries were lost to a cacophony of disturbed dogs and the labour of his own lungs. By the time he stopped running, thin light was breaking above the roofs and he was standing bare-foot, bare-chested, at a traffic island, shivering with cold. The early-morning churn of the M56 lay below him. He realised he didn’t have anybody to turn to.

  He hurried to the southbound sliproad and huddled by the verge. Tired, dirty and half-naked, he guessed it would be a while before he flagged a lift, if at all, but the first vehicle that swung by – an Escort van driven by a builder on his way back to Birmingham – stopped for him. The driver’s name was Jerry. He provided the boy with a jumper and a pair of boots three sizes too big from the back of the van. By the time they arrived in Birmingham, the boy had been offered a job as a builder’s mate on a site just outside Walsall.

  Wolfing breakfast in a lorry drivers’ café at the end of his journey, the boy watched TV over Jerry’s shoulder and was surprised to see his parents’ house appear on the screen. It seemed alien to him, pinned beneath the harsh lights of the TV crews, barricaded by yellow police tape, despite the many years he’d spent there. A hunt was on for the killer of his mother and father. A photograph of their missing son appeared, shocking him. His own face seemed unfamiliar to him. He glanced around at his fellow diners, but they were deep in their tabloids, or their bacon and eggs.

  He couldn’t risk anybody recognising him. He knew it could only lead to his being presented to the people who had destroyed his parents. When they’d finished, Jerry led him to the van and took him home, which turned out to be a small terraced house in Acocks Green. Jerry showed him the spare room and told him he could stay until he’d earned a bit of cash and found some digs. When Jerry disappeared into the bathroom for a shower, the boy walked through the kitchen into the utility room at the back of the house, plugged in the Bosch drill and drove the hammering bit deep into his right eye.

  PART ONE

  UNREAL CITY

  Parting is all we know of heaven,

  And all we need of hell.

  – Emily Dickinson

  CHAPTER ONE: SUDDENLY, AT HOME

  IF THIS JOB was a dog, I’d have it put down.

  Sean watched Sally let the steering wheel spin back through her hands as the squad car righted itself; a fluid movement. It was early, no need to use the sirens, a good hour and a half before the traffic began to breed. Sally was a good driver and she drove best when she was telling a story. She was deep into one now.

  “Next time I took a wander along Loampit Vale, Hunter had shrunk. He was about two foot six. He was kneeling down on the floor counting the coins he’d made from that morning’s begging.”

  Sean watched the dawn parade of buildings stream past the liquid windows. Limp Christmas decorations hung from telegraph poles like ropes of phlegm. Neon lights sizzled: Happy 2K9. Static barked from his PR; his first coffee of the day was a greased, tepid knot in the centre of his chest. He was glad of Sally’s persistent murmur. He hated getting the Devil’s Hour calls; they were always the worst. This morning looked like being a total bastard. On the shift ten minutes and already there was someone intent on ruining his good mood. He thought of his bed, probably still warm but getting colder by the minute.

  “I actually says to him, ‘Come on there, Hunter. Up and at ’em. Bow down for royalty if you like but I’m a far cry from that.’ I didn’t realise, did I – the bastards at the nick never told me – poor Hunter there’s had both his legs off. Thrombosis. Been injecting Temazepam. I gave him a quid – he saw the funny side.”

  Slowing now, switching off the police lights, coasting into George Lane, the disused Hither Green hospital on their left a series of black shapes against the failing dark. Sally parked on Lullingstone Lane and they waited for a moment, the engine’s tick a strange comfort as it cooled.

  Sean assessed the buildings. “Which one does the girl live in?” he asked.

  “That one there. Number fifty-six. Bottom flat. The call came in from a neighbour who lives across the way. He said he saw someone creeping about outside her window.”

  “Really? What’s he doing up so late? Wristing himself off watching her curtains?”

  “He works nights. Security guard at the hospital.”

  “We’re going to get piss-wet through,” Sean said.

  Sally opened her door; late December wind knifed them. “It’s good for the skin. Come on.”

  They searched the gardens and gulleys surrounding the flat, Sally with markedly greater conviction than her partner. Sean knocked on the door of fifty-six and was about to suggest to Sally that they visit the man who had made the emergency call when he saw movement: a face peering from the window of the woman’s home.

  “Sally, there’s someone watching us,” he said, and, to the face, stridently: “Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?”

  It was a pasty-faced thirty-something in a towelling robe that greeted them. Nuggets of sleep in the co
rners of his eyes. Bed hair.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” droned Sean, going through the motions. He felt like a glove puppet in an act that hadn’t changed for decades. “We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?”

  The guy shook his head. “I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.”

  “Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?”

  The guy looked back over his shoulder. When he returned his gaze to Sean he was wearing a sleepy grin. “Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.”

  “Very sorry... If you should happen... don’t hesitate... Goodnight, then.” All of that jargon made him ill. The constabulary vocabulary; nobody believed the politeness had any depth. He was even starting to speak like a policeman at home. It wouldn’t be long before he flipped his notebook out to give Rachel a report on how the weekly shop had gone.

  Flapping through the rain, Sean and Sally hurried back to the car. While Sally negotiated the quiet roads back to the main street, Sean called in to let control know the score.

  I hate this job.

  It was a different job to the one that had been sold to him. A memory, unbidden, expanded in his mind like a drop of oil in water. Coming home one evening on the train with a friend who had recently enlisted, Christmas bags forming a barrier between them, Sean had been asked what he wanted to make of his life, the odd jobs and dole cheques having left him without any sense of progression.