Gethsemane Hall (25 page)

“There is,” Hudson whispered, a last-chance plea on his own behalf. Meacham heard a man who, desperate as he was to save his friend, was even more desperate to save his truth.

Gray sat back against the spikes of the chair. He grinned in the relief of gouging pain. “You’re both going to be wrong.” His right hand grew a claw in Meacham’s flashlight beam. He had palmed a blade from the table. It was six inches long, hooked for gutting, saurian black iron. He raised it, as if it were the material evidence of his claim. Perhaps it was. Meacham couldn’t move. Hudson moaned but stood still. Oncoming revelation was holding them fast. Gray’s eyes focused on the tapestry behind Meacham’s head. His face sagged. She didn’t understand the expression she saw. The anger hadn’t gone. Nor had the triumph. But they were fused with grief, a greater terror, and an even more terrible acceptance. Then he spoke. The revelation was a single sentence. Four words. “God is the Reptile.”

He dragged the hooked blade across his throat. The movement was harsh, powerful, jagged. The knife was old. It had been dulled, perhaps deliberately, perhaps through use. Gray had to work hard. He dug the hook into the side of his neck and pulled, hacking through flesh and tendons. The blade went deep. Meacham heard the sound of gristle parting. Gray’s head lolled back too far. Blood gouted. His arm didn’t relax. It finished the act.
He’s dead,
Meacham thought.
He’s dead. He can stop now
. But the gesture was important, and it carried through to its end, the arm gathering energy as it hacked through the last of the throat. It flung out to the side, job done, and went limp. The fist didn’t open. It held on to the knife. Gray’s mouth moved. There was a gurgling sound, and then there was nothing but blood. It poured black from his mouth. It sprayed from the wound. Some of it hit Meacham and Hudson. Most of it poured down the front of Gray’s body. It drenched him, clothed him in a red, shining robe. It flowed into the gutters around the iron throne. It pooled on the floor. It disappeared down drains, feeding something beneath. Meacham had exactly one moment to think that the blood was what Rose wanted, that it was the key she needed to unlock absolute freedom, and then even that idea died, a comforting illusion. It wasn’t the blood. It was the act. The willing sacrifice on the altar of truth.

Gray’s corpse became harder to make out. The flashlights were failing. Meacham gasped and turned the light to look at the bulb. She was almost blinded. The batteries were fine. The lights weren’t going out. It was the darkness that was gathering. Ectoplasmic mist formed around Gray. It grew dense. Meacham grabbed Hudson’s sleeve and yanked him after her. They ran. As they left the chamber, Meacham caught a glimpse of a tapestry. One of the damned had Gray’s face.

John Porter saw what the trees had done to Sturghill. He looked back over his shoulder as he ran. He saw them line up and advance. Fully mature yew trees, giant with age, were tangled together, a monolithic hedge. They had become a tightening noose around the grounds of Gethsemane Hall. No way through them. Nowhere to run except towards the Hall. Porter felt like a pheasant, flushed by the beaters towards the hunter’s guns in the house.

The party was over. Screaming everywhere. The treeline reached the marquee tent. Branches coiled around it, lifted it up and shredded the canvas. Roots tangled and crushed tables. Not everyone was running fast enough. Porter saw an older woman stumble, fall. The roots wrapped around her. The sound of bones cracking to shards travelled across the lawn.

Then the worst thing happened. Porter didn’t know what it was, only that it had taken place, and the last of hope had suddenly died. Something spread itself over the Hall and the grounds in a rush. His vision began to swim. His flight slowed. He tried to run faster, but he couldn’t. He could barely move at all. He was still moving as if he were running, his legs working in slow motion, but it took endless seconds for each step to happen. He realized he was dreaming and tried to laugh with crazy relief. There was only weakness in his chest, and the laugh was a half-wheeze. A nightmare. He was at home. In a moment, the monster would come for him, the big fear would arrive, and he would wake. His foot finally finished its descent. It hit the ground with an impact that ran up his spine. He could feel the burn in his lungs from running. The night breathed against his skin, a cold wind growing to chill his sweat. He was awake. He was dreaming. His nightmare was leaking out into the conscious world and becoming flesh. His pre-scream breath was long and slow in building. His shriek was silent, as all nightmare cries are. His right foot caught itself up in the left, as it would have to. He fell through air thick as dough. It took a long time to hit the ground. He landed on his side and saw the trees marching forward. Were they dreaming, too? Perhaps this was their dream: to move and grind the mammals that had shaped them, trimmed them, mutilated them, ruled their fates. Now they were nothing but motion and vengeance.

The dreams spread. He tried to rise, but the weight of the air was now on him, a palm pressing him hard into the earth. Everyone he saw was stumbling, clawing at things in front of their eyes, falling.

The ground beneath him squirmed.

They were climbing the spiral staircase to the crypt when the nightmares began. Strength had gathered behind them in the tapestry chamber and then leapt through and ahead of them, engulfing the world of Gethsemane Hall. Hudson felt the nature of things change. At first, he and Meacham were left alone. He hoped they were being ignored, beneath notice. Then, on the stairs, he saw Meacham gasp and bang against the wall. He opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, and then he was dreaming too. The staircase doubled. Overlaid on the real one was another, running slick with blood. The walls began to flake black chunks. A smell dug into his nostrils, pungent and eye-watering in its awful identity. The stone of the walls had become burning flesh. He struggled to retain his footing. He tried to see through the blood and flesh to the real. He put his foot down, and it slipped in blood. He reached out to steady himself. The wall beneath his hand gave and trembled. It was hot. Its pulse was very, very fast. The lesson Gray had begun to teach sank in further. The nightmare hadn’t infected and disguised reality. The illusion of the comforting mundane was being scorched away, revealing the nightmare at the heart. The nightmare
was
the real. He took another step, prepared to sink ankle-deep in gore, and his balance steadied. “Accept it,” he called to Meacham. He was preaching Gray’s word, Rose’s word. He cursed the world. “Don’t try to fight what you’re seeing. It isn’t you. It’s really there.”

Meacham found her footing. They splashed up the rest of the way, against the current, trying not to touch the agonized walls. Hudson’s vision stabilized. The ordinary staircase faded away, its illusion dying. When they reached the crypt, Hudson almost fell again. For a moment, the double-vision returned, two identical visions of Gethsemane Hall dancing over each other. The house as he had known it, and as it really was, were the same. He and Meacham paused, catching their breath. The sense of oasis was false, and he knew it, but he took it anyway. He looked around. “Why?” he asked. Why hadn’t it changed?

Meacham grunted. “Because it was the lure,” she said.

Hudson pictured it. The house as an extrusion of the real, calling and seducing, powerful because it wasn’t disguised, effective because it appeared to belong. It was a monster that could hide in plain sight.

Screams outside. Bigger sounds, too. Huge movement. “Where do we go?” Hudson asked.

He was speaking to himself, putting his fear into words, but Meacham answered. “Outside. Like we said we would.”

“They’re dead.”

“Probably.” She started moving again anyway, leaving the crypt, heading for what waited beyond the walls.

“And if they are?” Hudson asked.

Meacham said nothing, walked briskly.

Hudson caught up. “What are we going to do?” he insisted.

Meacham said, “How well can you die?”

Hudson wondered about that as they walked through the Great Hall. Each echo of their footsteps felt different now. The sounds did not belong to them. They were another creation of the real, a planned element of Gethsemane Hall’s bait. They were as much a piece of the house as the timbers and masonry.

Could he die well? He wanted to. In Darfur, he could have. There, he’d been surrounded by the savage worthlessness of man, but he’d had God. There had been faith and its promises. He could have fallen there. He wished he had. He would have been happy in his last moment, ignorant of what really waited on the other side. That ignorance had been stolen from him now. He still wanted to believe. More than ever, he needed his faith. But Gray had killed it.

God is the Reptile
.

What was left was human dignity? Die well. Don’t bow your head to the worship of agony. Make that futile gesture as a gift to yourself. And try not to think about what comes next.
I can do this
, he thought.
I can do this.

The outer hall. The courtyard. The main gate. They were at the exit. They crossed the moat. They saw what was outside.

Hudson tried to utter the word
no
. He couldn’t. The denial that filled him was too huge. It couldn’t come out. It filled his chest to bursting. And it was also too small. In the face of what he saw, denial was senseless.

They were back in the cave. The tapestries had followed them here. There was nothing but the tapestries. The gardens had become the depictions of Hell. There were cauldrons. There were crucifixes. There were flames. There were the damned. The yew trees were the borders, containing the art and celebrating it with storming, writhing branches. The wind was the sound of the screams.

There were the coils.

Immensity moved through the gardens. It governed the atrocities. It looked upon its good works. It made them happen. It was too big for Hudson to make out a shape. He saw scales. They said
god
. They said
dragon
. They hurt his eyes. He was too small to look at the lord of the dance. So his gaze went to the suffering. He had recognized faces in the tapestries. Here he
saw
the faces. There were no representations. That really was John Porter on a crucifix, only it was a crucifix
in
John Porter. The vertical beam plunged between his legs and emerged from his mouth. The cross-beam shot out of his wrists. His head was split wide open, his jaw into four hanging pieces. He was dead. He still screamed. His body still pulsed and twitched against the wood. So did those of every other person on the grounds. In their thousands. The town of Roseminster was dead and shrieking in Hudson’s face. Hudson saw what his faith was worth, and he shrieked back.

Consequences. Connections. Viral infection. Spread.

In London, the good news editors of the print and visual media were working phones, digitally circling the black hole into which their staff had fallen. They knew their people had been off to a big do at Gethsemane Hall. Some had even been in contact as they approached the gate to the grounds. And then nothing. The silence stretched long. The editors told themselves they were angry at derelictions of duty, at failures of responsibility. They wondered why their palms were so sweaty, why their hearts were sick and pounding.

In his office in the MI-5 building, Gerald Fretwell was ploughing through files that had nothing to do with Pete Adams and Gethsemane Hall. But suddenly he was thinking of the scream recording, and he was hearing the sound of the shriek in his head, not cut off this time, but going on and on, building in pain and horror, and he was trying very hard not to scream himself.

In Washington, DC, it was late afternoon. Jim Korda was working hard and sweating worse. The Geneva shitstorm had birthed a new one. The designated scapegoat was fighting back. Things were hitting too close to home. His position was not secure. He was having to move beyond aggressive damage control and into pre-emptive strikes. His mind wasn’t on Meacham’s mission. That scandal was a mosquito annoyance. He was worrying about exploding hornets’ nests. So was President Sam Reed. Korda had him on the horn. Reed asked a question. Korda opened his mouth to answer.

“Jim?” Reed asked into the silence.

Korda heard the president. He couldn’t answer. He was having a nightmare, and he couldn’t punch through it back to waking reality. Claws sharpened on fear sank into his gut. In the dream, he was dying. The world had gone a searing flash-white. It was filled with a sound so loud it destroyed his hearing, and Reed’s voice disappeared along with everything else. He was burning. His flesh was evaporating from his bones. His bones were disintegrating. He knew his death was done in an instant, but it took a very long time. It was eternity. His dead tongue found its voice in the dream.

In the White House, Sam Reed jerked away from the phone and the howl.

Meacham retreated a step from the phantasmagoria of the gardens. Hudson had fallen to his knees. She looked away from the torture and the coiling. She kept her eyes on the ground. It was bad enough. The gravel looked like skin. It heaved with slow, lizard movements. Its texture was familiar in all the wrong ways. She reached out and grabbed Hudson by the collar. He didn’t respond, wouldn’t stop screaming. “Patrick!” she yelled, and yanked. “Get away from there.” Hudson fell over. His face went slack. The screams moved into his eyes. Meacham looked closely. Her breath caught. Hudson’s pupils had expanded, swallowing up the whites. Their darkness didn’t reflect Meacham’s face. They were the torture garden in miniature, updated in real-time. Meacham backed away from him. Hudson’s agony was working on him from the inside out. As she stepped backwards into the courtyard, Hudson’s body began to jerk as the pain made its way out. Something that looked like a mouth formed in the ground just outside the Hall’s entrance. It was a tube lined with teeth. It grabbed Hudson’s ankle and sucked him off the bridge. He raised his head, and Meacham knew he was dead now. He turned to face her. There was pleading on his face as he was dragged into Hell.