Falls the Shadow (22 page)

‘Looks like a bomb’s hit this place,’ Ace announced, studying the room from over Sandra’s shoulder. It wasn’t an ill‐
judged statement. The room was a conservatory, filled from wall to wall with exotic plants and vegetation. That explained the heat and the chlorophyll tang. Someone had gone out of their way to create a rainforest in this room, so Ace expected it would be more than a little chaotic. But it was also filled with the tools of civilization – and they were in a real mess. A desk had been overturned, books strewn everywhere – their pages stained dark red and torn to shreds. A gas hob had been smashed against the wall; beside it lay a twisted piece of kettle, water frothing from its crushed spout.

There was something warm and relaxing pressed against the wound on Ace’s cheek. There was something thick with spikes expanding in her stomach. Between pleasure and pain, Ace found it difficult to concentrate.

‘Hey,’ she said, struck by a memory. ‘This isn’t the place with those plants that tried to eat Benny?’

She cast round the room, lighting on a patch of orchids, a few yards away from her. They were writhing and shaking, spitting long, thin tendrils from their crushed mouths. Ace reckoned this was what she was looking for. The orchids swept in wave patterns. Beautiful. They clustered round each other like a pack of hunting animals, swooping down on the corpse, sinking their tendrils greedily into its exposed flesh. The lines pulsed, redness seeping through in what was clearly a hungry transfusion.

Ace smiled.

The body was that of a man in his fifties, recently dead, Ace guessed. He was already pale from the blood drain, but there was some quality to his skin that suggested he had been heavily tanned in life. The plants hadn’t killed him though. The marks on his face told Ace the whole story. He’d been attacked by something vicious. It had probably been a violent death. Ace had lived with death long enough to recognize the signs of death‐
agony. This man hadn’t gone easily.

Ace smiled and closed her eyes.

After a couple of seconds, they were open again, staring.

She pushed Sandra away from her, shoving the woman so quickly that she stumbled backwards without putting up a fight. Ace stared at her face, repelled.

Sandra’s eyes were blank and callous, dazed but sharp. There was blood on her lips and her teeth and her tongue. There had been something warm and wet against Ace’s cheek, and she suddenly realized what it was.

‘What have they done to you?’ Ace asked blandly. Her well of emotion had already run itself dry, she couldn’t make the effort. Exhaustion had got the better of her. All she wanted to do was curl up in a corner and cry. Hardly fighting talk; she’d had enough of that for one day.

Sandra leant forward, baring her teeth and hissing. Her eyes had become squints, sharp and venomous. There was nothing human in them.

‘Look, don’t give me this!’ Ace told her, shaking her head in near‐
hysteria. ‘I’m not going to fight you. Really, I’m too bloody tired!’

The animal Sandra tensed and leapt, smashing Ace into the wall. Sandra’s face pressed against hers, a magnified mask of grotesque scowls, teeth and hateful eyes. Pain lanced through Ace’s spine, across her shoulder‐
blades, bringing on a shocked surge of adrenalin. She shoved Sandra away from her and dived across the room, blundering through the undergrowth, crushing flowers under her boots. Her head was light and the world spun and shook around her. She lost track of where she was, of where she was going, of everything save the overriding need to get away.

Sandra howled with inhuman hunger. A dead weight crashed into Ace’s back, sending her sprawling forward. Her knees cracked as she hit the floor, her body flattening itself across the corpse of the old man. Bulbous plant faces brushed against her face, sharp‐
tipped tendrils pinned themselves like razors into her face, one digging itself into the edge of her eye. There were claws in her shoulders, dragging her back. She crawled free of the orchids, smashing them aside. Sandra’s grip remained firm.

The hands were at her throat, under her chin jerking upwards, trying to pull her head off. Ace could feel her spine curving backwards. There was enough force there to break her neck, enough pain to amply fill the seconds before that final bone‐
cracking wrench.

‘Sandra!’ Ace howled, opening her lips and gaining a mouthful of wet earth. ‘Sandra! It’s me! It’s Ace! Sandra!’

Sandra growled by her ear, a guttural croaking sound issuing from the back of her throat, devoid of meaning, devoid of human sound. An elbow drove Ace’s face into the earth, burying it in a cool haze of wet brown and green. Sandra was pressing her shoulders and neck down as if trying to drown her in the mud. Ace no longer had the energy or the inclination to rise.

Better if she died here. Now.

Sandra’s teeth cut into the back of her neck. There wasn’t any pain now, just the gradual sense of despair that had built up along with the mud on her face. Ace lay still and waited for the end.

‘I think your chair’s in something like working order,’ said the Doctor.

‘Fine. Where shall we go first?’

The Doctor raised the chair onto its wheels and watched it wobble slightly before righting itself. He felt no pride in the restoration. His eyes flicked down to stare at his hands. They were dark with grime from the dirtier parts of the wheel’s anatomy. The layer on his hands conjured up images of the effort he’d put into repairing the chair. A pointless effort. It served to keep his mind off the situation – the last practical goal to be achieved in the empty plains of the interstix.

He’d been dreading this moment. The repairs were effected. There was nothing else to do but wait – and pray – for madness and death.

‘All art is quite useless,’ Winterdawn said, smiling without feeling.

The Doctor helped Winterdawn back into the chair then squatted on the pseudo‐
ground to watch the never‐
ending show.

Years passed. Perhaps they were seconds.

They watched together as the interstitial world turned inside out, displaying patterns and colours and designs too complex to be conceived in the real universe. The Doctor smiled. At times he thought he could see people dancing in between those shapes, people and creatures from a thousand worlds and a million times. His eyes followed the tortuous geography, trying to find an end to it, certain that there was none.

He felt exactly like he had done as a child, sitting on a beach, tossing pink pebbles into a golden sea. A good feeling.

A shape moved in the very distance, on what the Doctor would have called the horizon, had such concepts applied outside of normal space. It was a speck, moving in a way that nothing else in interstitial reality had ever done. The Doctor couldn’t define the difference. It was something he sensed.

It was a dreary sight, lacking the sparkle and the transience of the usual conjured images. Just the blot moving slowly, at the slowest crawl imaginable. As it moved it grew. It grew with proximity. The Doctor found he had the impression of a man trekking the incredible hot distances of a desert plain, forever walking towards the horizon.

After several days the shape was large enough to be made out as a man. Male humanoid at least. A man walking the interstitial planes, toiling grey paces in the direction of the Doctor. The man moved easily with long, measured strides. He wasn’t hurrying.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ Winterdawn said quietly. His tone was bland, but the Doctor caught a hundred subtle inflexions. Hope, confusion, curiosity. Foremost was terror.

The Doctor nodded, turning back to scrutinize the man, contemplating his new knowledge, wondering what the figure’s significance would be.

The man wore a long grey coat covering a grey shirt and grey trousers. On his head was perched a grey hat. His skin was thin and grey. There was no part of him that was not grey, save for the black glass of his spectacles. The greyness lent him ambiguity. The Doctor studied the distant face, wondering whether this was a young man, or an old one. It was impossible to tell. He was neither. He was grey.

Time stopped inside Ace’s skull. There was the taste, the stench, the warmth of mud against her face, frozen in a single moment. Her pain froze, Sandra’s weight on her back froze. Both seemed cold, almost abstract. Ace lay half‐
buried in the conservatory wondering only why she wasn’t dead.

Hands seized her shoulders roughly, pulling her upwards again. She shook weakly, a hopeless effort to free herself. There didn’t seem any point in fighting, her body was riddled with weariness, aching with the sheer effort she’d gone through that day. She hated her weakness. Not much point, she’d be dead in a few moments. So close to the final end, she found herself harbouring a much more resigned attitude to life.

She turned her head, staring hopelessly into the face of death.

Jane Page smiled back at her.

‘Oh, you are still with it then?’ Page grinned, face like a scored potato. ‘I was beginning to think I was the only one left.’

Energy kicked back into Ace’s body. She pulled away from Page.

‘Where’s Sandra?’ she asked coolly, trying not to match the assassin’s stare. Page indicated a slumped shape lying in a damaged patch of fronds.

‘Vicious little harpy isn’t she?’ Page said. ‘You’ve not thanked me.’

‘Is she dead?’ Ace growled.

‘No.’ Page shook her head with dismissive sincerity. ‘I was tempted.’

‘Thanks.’ It took an effort, but Ace managed to say it.

Page nodded, her features losing their sour sense of humour and becoming grim cold. She pulled something from the folds of her coat and pitched it in Ace’s direction. Ace caught it in her cupped palms. It was metal. Familiar.

It was a pistol. An unfamiliar design. Ace guessed that it was an automatic repeater backed up by more than a fair force and capacity. Loaded with… explosive bullets. Big league for a small firearm. A very heavy, very comfortable piece of weaponry. High kill‐
power. Very nice.

In the right hands.

‘This,’ she said flatly, ‘does a lot of damage.’

‘I like damage.’ Page’s voice was coarse. ‘It’s an artform.’

Ace stepped forward and pressed the gun under Page’s chin, forcing the woman’s head upwards. Page made no attempt to move. Her face and eyes seemed to bloat, not with fear but with arrogance.

‘That was a mistake,’ Ace said.

‘Possibly.’ Page’s voice was loose and easy, still seeming to sneer at her. ‘You know how to use one of those? Which ends goes “bang”?’

‘That’s obvious. I’ve seen more action than you ever have.’

‘Killed anyone?’ Page was almost casual about it. There was a coolness in her manner which Ace found admirable. And callous.

‘One or two.’

‘I believe you,’ Page said, her voice growing slightly more emotive. ‘We’re very similar, you and I. What I can see in your eyes…’

‘Shut up!’ Ace spat. ‘I only kill people who deserve it. I can name one now.’

‘Only one? I can name two.’

Ace studied Page’s face with new intensity. She kept the gun cradled in her hands, but no longer quite ready to kill.

‘You’re bloody good.’ Page smiled, fixing Ace with a sharp stare, her voice becoming slow. ‘I’ve changed my plan about Winterdawn. I’ll catch some stick from Ten, but all I want to do is get out of this house with body and soul intact.

‘Before I go, I have to kill Gabriel and Tanith.’

Ace said nothing.

‘I can do it,’ Page insisted. ‘Go in with guns blazing and don’t stop until they’re scattered across the floor in bits. I can go alone. Or I could have help.’

‘Me?’ Ace asked, shrugging casually.

‘So quick,’ Page sighed. ‘Everyone else is dead or mad. I’d lay odds those two are responsible. You’ve got the gun, the ability, the inclination and the desire to use it. Up to you.’

Ace stared at Page, then at the jagged shape in her hand, then back to Page. Her face was bland. Ace levelled the gun at it, wondering whether it would be worth it.

‘I don’t like you,’ she said. ‘Remember that.’

She lowered the gun and watched Page nod.

She felt as though she’d sold her soul.

A pentecost was babbling on the inside of Cranleigh’s head. A thousand languages rattled from a thousand tongues across the landscape of his mind. They screamed their rage, anger and lonely emptiness, the hollowness left by the absolute destruction they had known. Worlds burned in meaningless holocausts. These were the voices of the survivors screaming for justice, or explanations.

Cranleigh might have sympathized, but Cranleigh was gone, buried deeper in his psyche than even the insubstantial legion could reach. They called to a husk Cranleigh, stripped of mind. The pentecost called to him, drawing him to its heart. Cranleigh’s hollow body stumbled through twisted corridors to the nursery.

The husk stared with vacant eyes at its surroundings. The toys, the furniture, the chest of drawers, the body sprawled on the carpet. These were meaningless things on the edge of its perception. But there was something else. Something that fascinated even the void Cranleigh had become, something that stimulated the last fragment of his mind. A black window, glowing with darkness. Cranleigh saw no reflection in its jet surface.

Unquestioning, Cranleigh leapt towards the window, driving his fist towards the glass. Contact came, brief and violent.

The sound of shattering glass reverberated along empty passages.

Sandra woke to the smell of mud and blood. The mud was on her face and hands and clothes, hardening into thick cakes. The blood was dry in her nostrils, on her teeth and flecked on her hands, black crusts gathered under her finger‐
nails. Both her sight and her memory were clear and sharp.

Wedderburn’s body was a withered thing on the far side of the room. It seemed too fragile ever to have been human.

Shaking, Sandra climbed to her feet. What she had done seemed so unreal. She stared at her hands and remembered her blood‐
lust. She recalled the swiftness, the pleasure, the taste of the kill. Her body was dirty, covered in the stench of her actions. Her skin writhed. She began to scratch, finding she couldn’t stop. She needed to purge herself of the scent of the kill.

The world tottered as she moved. This
was
real and this was
now
. She slumped against the door, barely reacting to the diffuse pain that shocked through her arm. She cupped her hands over her face and began to scream into the soiled darkness of her palms.

The gun was a weight in Ace’s fist. The sweat building on her palms hadn’t made the weapon easier to hold. She didn’t feel happy, going coldly, without passion to kill. She thought she’d feel safer with a gun. Instead she felt inadequate. This wouldn’t be a kill in the heat of battle, it would be her, alone with the gun, facing an unarmed enemy. The advantage was hers; she held all the aces. It didn’t feel right. She steeled herself, working up the nerve to squeeze the trigger, working up a righteous hatred for her target. Not too difficult. She just thought of Benny. The rest was easy.

She stared at Page. The assassin was in her element now, deriving deep satisfaction from the moment. She would have no compunctions about slaughtering Gabriel and Tanith if Ace’s nerve gave out. This was her show. She was making it work her way.

Tracking their targets hadn’t proved difficult. Page guessed that they would have marked off some space in the house as their own, and Ace saw no fault in that reasoning. Despite – perhaps because – of the miscegenation of floors and passageways and rooms, they stumbled across Gabriel and Tanith’s hideaway in minutes. The couple’s voices caught in a passageway, echoing from another room.

They were together in that single room, a bedroom, Winterdawn’s shrine to his wife. Through the gap in the door, Ace saw them moving, talking, kissing. She watched their activity with cold and hateful eyes. Benny was in the room with them, stretched on the bed. Gabriel and Tanith must have brought her there and the thought that they must have touched her to move her uncovered within Ace a deeper revulsion than she had felt before.

She glanced at Page, catching a glimpse of quiet confirmation in her colleague’s eyes. Ace kicked the door wide open and tumbled into the room, into the midst of the enemy. The blood that surged through her body, the hatred she felt for this couple wiped away her guilt, fears and compunctions about killing in cold blood. So they were unarmed. It was better that way. There was a perverse pleasure to it.

She raised the pistol and pumped a bullet into Gabriel’s chest. His shirt gained a scarlet‐
flower stain and he staggered backwards under the impact. Not quite dead, Gabriel released a low, jarring howl. Agony made sound. Ace ground her teeth into her lower lip and fired again. Each new shot knocked Gabriel further backwards in a perverse, jerking walk. He smashed into the wall. His lifeless shell of a body sunk to its knees, leaving long smears on the wallpaper behind him.

Tanith stepped forward. Ace spun round, training the pistol on her. Too late – Page was already by her side, arms swinging upwards in a perfect arc. The graceful motion of her limbs was accompanied by the monotonous music of the machine‐
gun. Tanith’s body gained a clean line of red holes from thigh to neck. Pink stains blossomed across her suit.

Page let her gun fall. She grinned toothily.

‘Lovely jubbly,’ she announced.

Ace dropped her pistol. It hit the thick carpet with a near‐
silent
thud
.

‘This,’ Tanith patted her chest, ‘
burns
. We’re grateful.’

A line of blood slipped from her lips down her chin.

Ace stared.

Jane Page loomed behind Tanith’s shoulder. Ace registered the cocktail of confusion and determination picked out on Page’s face. The assassin swung her arms, gun aimed at the back of Tanith’s head.

The gun fired silently. Tanith’s forehead exploded. Ace looked down, thoughtfully studying the butterfly patterns of blood that stained her combat jacket. And she felt nothing.

Tanith’s lips assumed a rictus smile. Her teeth were ivory pillars flecked red.

‘Jane!’ she said slowly, mocking and deliberate. ‘Are you selling your soul to a cold gun?’

Ace watched Page lower her gun, watched the incomprehension grow on her face, watched it blossom into rejection. She was shaking her head wildly, sharp eyes full of good‐
humoured madness. Ace watched and still felt nothing, as if this was an ancient piece of film – silent and unnatural. Page didn’t seem real. Tanith didn’t seem real. Ace didn’t seem real. The reel spun, clicking through the projector. On the screen, Gabriel appeared behind Page and wrested the gun from her. Gabriel’s body was a patchwork of bullet holes so that it seemed in danger of falling apart. Page’s guns were designed to damage; they didn’t do things by halves.

‘Unimaginative.’ Gabriel was shaking his head ruefully. ‘We had hoped for something more original.’ He broke into a hearty laugh.

He didn’t seem real either.

Ace felt herself begin to shake. Tanith swung her head to one side, letting it loll like something dead. Her eyes and her mouth were alive with insanity. Slowly, aware that she had Ace’s total attention, she dug her fingers into the wounds, twisting her hand to work it further into her body. She clenched her fist, her face wrenching into a contorted portrait of agony, hissing pain through gritted teeth. Ace tried to draw back, but Tanith’s other arm leapt to grip her shoulder.

Tanith threw her head up, breaking into a scream of pain that endured for minutes, changing in neither pitch nor intensity. Ace kept her eyelids tight together for the duration of the screech, grateful she couldn’t see her own expression, grateful that there was so little left in her stomach.

‘The beauty of pain,’ Gabriel was saying, his voice clear and concise above the scream. ‘The ugliness of pain. Both lend us something unique. As the bullets cut us we were born anew, embodied in the experience.’

The screech stopped.

Ace opened her eyes.

Gabriel and Tanith stood before her, their bodies clean and repaired. Even their clothes were unbroken and unstained. The couple shared a smile – sweet, condescending curves quivering on their lips. Page lay slumped by one wall, shaking her head on the verge of tears. Beyond Page was the bed and on the bed lay the body of Benny Summerfield.

Ace felt the room grow arctic cold.

‘What are you?’

‘In the Dark Ages,’ Gabriel said, as if he was a schoolteacher delivering a particularly dull lesson, ‘Christians believed the suffering of the world was caused by the presence of Satan’s evil in God’s creation.’

Ace’s eyes flicked from Gabriel to Tanith and back again.

‘And what’s this got to do with you?’ she asked.

‘We
are
the suffering.’

Ace opened her mouth to speak but was silenced by a gesture.

‘Not in any religious sense,’ Tanith said hastily, lowering her hand. ‘We aren’t responsible for
all
the ills of the universe. Not yet.’

‘The cosmos is in agony. Its structure has been maimed.’

‘We are the damage on this level of existence. We are the scream.’

‘We are the cosmos, replicated in microcosm. We draw our power from the structure of reality, aligned to all things, all spaces.’

‘We can do anything. We know everything. We are inextricably linked to the nature of now. Does that answer your question?’

Ace nodded, trying to appear knowledgeable, tough and grim. She wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all herself.

‘You’re bloody mad!’ Page snapped. Ace’s eyes leapt across the room to the manically grinning face, the constantly shaking head. Ace could see that she hadn’t believed. She hadn’t seen their sincerity.

‘There is no such
thing
as the cosmos!’ Page declared. There was sincerity in her eyes too, but also something dangerous. ‘There are individual humans and loyalties. There is
nothing
larger than human action!’ She nodded, as if the act of nodding automatically confirmed the truth of her words. It confirmed only her instability.

Gabriel and Tanith were exchanging glances thick with humour.

‘Nothing bigger than human action?’ He sounded unusually reasonable.