World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine (40 page)

“You must have been terrified,” said Mee.

“Damn near crapped my pants,” said John, smiling ruefully. Then his smile slipped. He shook his head. “It was just the sheer power of nature,” he said. “I felt—no, I
knew
that we humans were insignificant. Nature could brush us aside, swat us like bugs, any time.”

He pushed the plate away, leaving half of his food untouched.

“And that’s how Seb makes me feel,” he said. “There’s an atmosphere around him. I feel like I’m back in that tree, just before the storm broke.”

Chapter 48

Four nights after her conversation with John, Mee woke up to find Seb’s side of the bed empty and cold. He wasn’t standing by the window. The door to their room squealed like an outraged cat every time it opened, so she knew he must have Walked. Without telling her. Which was a first. Not a precedent she liked at all.

When he wasn’t back by 5am, Mee, unable to sleep, decided an early morning walk would be better than sitting up in bed, her thoughts whirling in an unhelpful spiral of speculation and uneasiness.
 

The approaching dawn was just beginning to lend some definition to the buildings, trees, and paths as she set out. She could hear the hooting of owls, and the scurrying of small mammals hoping to avoid predators. In places, the grass was long, and the dew had soon soaked the ends of her pants. After a few minutes, she realized she’d been mentally humming four bars of a song she’d written with Seb. They hadn’t written lyrics yet, so it was just a melody—a haunting, wispy line that sounded like it was written centuries ago. It had just that hint of darkness that Mee always tried for. The grit in the pearl. She’d always distrusted music without that suggestion of fracture, melancholy or pain.
 

She shook her head and tried to change her internal soundtrack to something else, despite knowing it was a next-to-impossible task.
 

She almost walked past Seb without seeing him at first. A person standing still is never completely motionless. The human body just isn’t built for it. Buckingham Palace’s red-jacketed guards, world famous for standing still with furry microphone pop shields on their heads for hours at a time, still have to breathe. But Seb was so uncannily still, Mee’s conscious mind dismissed the statue-like figure, until her sub-conscious pulled her up and made her look again.

When she realized what she was looking at, she didn’t run. It was that unnatural posture that made her slowly and carefully make her way across the rocky beach. Part of her was reluctant to get close. She acknowledged her fear, and firmly decided to ignore it.

Up close, it became even more obvious something strange was happening. Seb looked normal at first. Then she realized he wasn’t breathing—or possibly, was breathing so slowly that nothing was outwardly discernible. His eyes were open. Light fell on his face, but the sun was still down and the night had been moonless. Mee reached out a hand and put it between the moon and Seb’s face. Impossibly, no shadow appeared on his features.

Mee reached for Seb’s hand. As soon as she touched his skin, she pulled back her hand with a hiss. It was like touching cold, hard metal. She reached out again, more slowly this time. She tried not to flinch when her fingertips touched his skin, although her lips twitched. It felt exactly like a cold beer can. She pushed. There was resistance. Not quite like human skin, more that of an under-ripe avocado.
 

Mee took a step backward and looked carefully at Seb. Neither his hair or his clothes were moving in the breeze that was constantly flicking Mee’s bangs in front of her eyes.
 

Steeling herself, she stepped forward again and put a hand on his shoulder. She silently counted to three, then gave him a hard push. She wasn’t sure what to expect. He might rock backward, fall over, or—hopefully—wake up, look at her, and come back to reality. None of those possibilities occurred. What did happen was so unexpected that Mee stumbled backward and sat down heavily in the sand.
 

Her hand
penetrated
his T-shirt and skin, went through his shoulder. She actually saw her fingers emerging just outside Seb’s right shoulder blade. It felt like her hand was pushing through very thick oatmeal. It was even slightly warm. Mee felt like throwing up.

Instead, she stood again, stamped her feet on the shingle to force some warmth into them and remind herself she was awake, then stood in front of Seb and looked into his eyes.
 

“Seb?” she said. “Can you hear me? Seb?”

His eyes were definitely seeing
something,
but it wasn’t Meera Patel. She had heard that expression:
he had a faraway look in his eye.
Yep. Far away. It was just that
far away
couldn’t even begin to cover the sense of distance she saw in Seb’s eyes. A better fit might be:
he had that ‘seeing another galaxy possibly in a parallel universe’ look in his eye.
Yep. That was more accurate.
 

Mee didn’t cry on her way back to the main house to tell Kate, but she did swear. Loudly.

***

Two weeks later

For the first thirty-six hours, only Mee and Kate had known what was going on, but within a few days the entire community was whispering about it. A meeting was called, Kate told them what little they knew, suggestions were made, and a plan of sorts was approved.
 

“Better than doing nothing,” said Mee, but she didn’t sound convinced.

The two women made their way down to the beach at midnight. Mee hadn’t slept at all the first two nights, so Kate had organized shifts of volunteers to make sure nothing happened without Mee knowing about it. Kate and Mee were going to cover the 12-4am shift.

Two men stood up as they approached. A temporary camp had been set up under a tree overlooking the beach. It was little more than some folding chairs and a two-person tent containing a camping stove.

As she got closer, Mee realized one of the men was John, drinking from a tin cup.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I
want
to like tea, especially now that I’m in Britain, but I guess I’m too old to change.”

Mee forced a smile at his attempt to keep the atmosphere light.

“You, of all people, know you’re never too old to change.”

“Good point,” said John, grimacing as he took another sip. “You don’t suppose coffee beans would grow here, do you?”

Mee and Kate stood alongside the two men and looked down the slope to the beach. The tide was going out, exposing the wet rocks dotting the sand and shingle. The moon hung big and low in the clear sky.

Seb still hadn’t moved. He stood with his back to them, looking straight ahead. At night, the temperatures plummeted, but he was only wearing a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Fifteen days into his silent vigil, the only things that changed were the light, the weather, the observers and the unceasing wash of the tide as it came in and receded. Seb stayed exactly the same.

“Even the bloody gulls won’t perch on his head,” said Mee, finishing the tea John hadn’t quite managed to bring himself to drink.

Kate and Mee watched Seb for their allotted four hours. During the day, many of the community had taken to making their way one by one to the silent figure and talking to him. Not expecting a response perhaps, but letting him know they were there. At night, it was just the rota of watchers and the bats that flickered in and out of the branches above them.

***

Ten days later

Mee had experienced bad shit before. She knew that prevailing wisdom claimed things got bad before they got better, that the night was always darkest before the dawn, but—in her experience—things were just as likely to get worse as get better. And what kind of idiot thought the darkest part of the night was just before dawn? The darkest part of the night was
hours
before that.
 

On this particular night, the darkest part was at 3:40am.

Mee sat bolt upright in bed and was fully awake instantly, which had never happened before. Ever. She’d taken to sleeping in one of Seb’s T-shirts since he’d been gone. The principle of which half-comforted and half-horrified her. In the end, she mentally justified her action by describing it as, “giving my inner militant feminist a cuddle,” and left it at that.

She grabbed a pair of jeans, a jacket and her sneakers and half-ran, half-hopped through the sleeping house, getting dressed as she went.

Outside, everything was quiet. It was so dark, she almost ran headlong into Sarah, one of the women covering the 12-4am shift that night. The other woman gasped in surprise as Mee rushed past. She called something after her, but Mee wasn’t listening.

When she got to the tent overlooking the beach, no one else was there. Breathing heavily, Mee looked down to the beach. It was a starlit night, but hard to see exactly was going on. There was definitely a figure down there.
 

Mee scrambled down to the shore.

The figure was Kate.

“I saw it,” she said quietly as Mee came closer. She took the younger woman’s hand and they both looked at the spot where Seb had been standing for nearly a month.

“What happened?” said Mee.

“There was nothing dramatic about it,” said Kate. “He took a couple of steps forward. I stood up, called Sarah—she was sleeping in the tent. By the time she’d come out, he’d gone. He took one more step. Halfway through it he disappeared. As if he’d walked through a door.”

Kate looked at Mee’s face for a few seconds. “I’ll wait up there for you,” she said, and walked back toward the watcher’s station.

Mee could still see Seb’s footprints. She knew the tide, which had washed around his feet every day for a few hours, would soon wash them away forever. She carefully put her own feet where his had been. Stood where he had stood. Looked out toward the sky the way he had been doing for the last twenty-five days.

Mee tried to see what Seb had seen. Tried to think like him. And finally, admitted to herself that she didn’t know how to do that anymore. She couldn’t think, or see, what he saw. The Seb she’d known had changed beyond recognition. Not in a bad way, perhaps. Maybe from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Which was all very lovely, but not so great if you were the caterpillar’s girlfriend. The thought made her laugh. The laugh turned into sobs, and she allowed herself a cathartic ten minutes of howling. Then she wiped the tears from her face with the bottom of Seb’s T-shirt and made her way back up the slope.
 

She allowed herself one last look back. She slowly scanned the empty beach, then raised her eyes and gazed at the night sky. For most of her life, the stars had seemed friendly, exciting and mysterious. Tonight, they were cold, distant, and unknowable.

She put one hand on her stomach and wondered if he had known. He seemed to know everything else. Could he have missed what was going on right in front of him? She knew the anger she was feeling was misplaced and unfair, but she couldn’t help it.

“If it’s a boy,” she whispered, “I’m definitely
not
calling him Seb.”
 

THE END

Author's note

The World Walker series will continue…

Thanks for reading The Unmaking Engine. If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon USA or UK (apologies to all other nationalities who bought the first book—but please leave a review on your country’s Amazon page!)
 

You can join my mailing list here -
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, and I'll send you a free copy of the unpublished prologue to The World Walker. I blog very occasionally here -
https://ianwsainsbury.com/
and you can email me on
[email protected]
. I'm on Facebook:
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On March 21st 2016, I published The World Walker—my first novel—on Amazon. And now, five months later, I've written the sequel. Which you've just finished reading.

Oh, hang on. Before I go on, I have to address a little problem I didn't anticipate first time around. Apparently, some people read the Author's Note before they read the book. Why? I can't answer that, because I've never done it. But I have solid evidence that it happens. So, can I just point out that Author's Notes sometimes contain spoilers? You might read something that diminishes your enjoyment of the story.

So...don't do it.

Seriously.

I’m talking to you, Auntie Hazel. Stop reading immediately, go back and start at the beginning. We'll wait.
 

Right, on with the note. Honestly, some people. Tut.

The World Walker took me about eighteen months to write from the time I first scribbled the initial idea into a notebook. The Unmaking Engine took five months. So, if my calculations are correct, the next one should take about 15 days. Hmm. Apparently, there are folk out there who
can
write that fast. I haven't a clue how. I imagine they have some sort of Faustian pact with a minor demon who slows down time around them in return for sexual favors and exclusive access to their immortal souls.
 

Just so you know, I don't think I'll ever be able to write a novel that fast. If I did, I’m reasonably certain it wouldn't be worth reading.
 

On the other hand, I can't ever see myself following in George RR Martin's footsteps, making desperate readers wait years for the next book in a series.

(An aside on George RR Martin. He's my equivalent of an Indy band you discover years before the rest of the world catches on. In the early 1990s, I read Fevre Dream, a vampire story set on the Mississippi in the golden age of the steamboat. A long, long time before Twilight made vampires ubiquitous. Anne Rice was doing her lush, sensuous vampire stuff of course, but there was something about Fevre Dream. Maybe it was the evocative prose, or the wonderfully flawed human hero, Abner Marsh. Maybe it was the believable vampire culture and history. Maybe it was the tightness of the story—compact, fairly short, possible to read in one or two obsessive sittings—which I did, first time around—try doing that with A Song Of Ice And Fire. I love Fevre Dream. I've given copies of it away at least three times and bought myself a new one. In fact, looking on my shelves, it’s not there now. Time to buy it again. These days, of course, everyone knows who GRRM is. Which—totally unfairly—irks me. I am irked. He was
my
author. I wish I was a bigger man and could be unirked. But I can't. Grr.)