Always Forever (42 page)

It continued much further than he imagined. At the far end he found stone that
had definitely been worked into blocks. It formed a doorway around a black hole
leading into the ground. With the relentless grey shapes drawing in on him, he
had no choice: he dived in.

Inside he was surprised to find more worked stone lining the walls, floor and
ceiling. He had no idea who was responsible-surely not the dead-but it gave
him hope it might lead to a way out. Fumbling for the matches he always carried in his pocket, he struck one and saw the walls were covered with primitive
paintings, inexplicable in design but which resonated uneasily with him. The
match also illuminated a dead torch. It was dry as a bone and lit quickly.

Glancing back, he could just make out hints of movement at the other end
of the fissure. There was no time to proceed with caution. His footsteps bounced
off the walls of the tunnel as he ran.

After five minutes the tunnel led into an enormous room that must have been
carved from the bedrock and then lined with stone blocks. The ceiling was lost
in the shadows far beyond the reach of his torch. The effort that must have gone
into its construction stunned him: the wall paintings were now the size of three
men, and there were carved effigies all around, squat, misshapen figures with no
human characteristics, and tall, spindly forms that loomed over him like
grotesque children's doodles. He couldn't help slowing to a walk to mask the
echoes of his feet; suddenly he didn't want to make any sound that would bring
attention to him. The scale of the place suggested no human sensibilities, nor
did the jarring lines of the alien and unsettling architecture. It reminded him of
a temple. Did the dead have their own gods? Did they pray for relief from the
bitterness of their grey reality?

The grey shapes were again visible where he had entered the cavernous
chamber. He hurried on, hoping he hadn't taken himself into a cul-de-sac.

But the more he progressed into that place, the more he felt an oppressive
dread, even worse than the feeling when he had first entered the Grim Lands.
Something was out there, lurking in the shadows, perhaps, or even further
afield: just beyond the spiderweb veil that separated the worlds. Close enough
to reach out and swallow him whole.

Do the dead have their own gods?

He couldn't shake the question from his head.

Before he could consider skirting the perimeter in search of an exit, he
found himself at a slightly raised area. At the centre of it was a short column on
which stood a foot-high egg, its surface swirling with shades of sapphire and
emerald. The moment he laid eyes on it, a part of him told him to avoid it, keep moving by. But there was something hypnotic about the thing that sapped his
natural caution. He took a step on to the dais and realised obliquely it was even
more than that: the egg was actively blanketing his fears to draw him in; he
could feel it tinkering on the edge of his consciousness. The time when he could
have ignored it had already past, and so he found himself approaching the
column with trepidation.

Three feet from the egg he passed through some invisible boundary. The air
wavered briefly and then he was inside a bubble where everything was greentinged, the chamber beyond unreal, all sounds muffled. The egg was pulsing
slightly, although it was certainly not alive in any true meaning of that word.

Tentatively, he reached out. The air itself gathered a charge, humming like
an electricity pylon. A second later he felt a dull jolt and the bubble transformed. He was in the centre of a three-dimensional view, so real he might as
well have been amongst the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the banks of Loch Ness,
looking down at himself being charged by the Questing Beast. The detail left
no doubt that it was a true view, across time and space. Had it been plucked
from his mind, he wondered? And if so, why that moment? He had a vague
answer to that: it was the moment when he felt he had really, truly failed, not
only everyone else, but also himself.

The repercussions of what he was seeing began to worm its way through his
mind. On a hunch, he thought of Ruth and what she was doing at that moment.
The 3-D view shifted and he was on the rolling deck of a boat in the middle of
a nighttime storm. The rain was flying horizontally, the sails flapping so wildly
it was almost deafening. A figure crept in the shadow of the raised cover to the
hold, its long hair flattened to its head and back. As he watched, Ruth looked
around, her face grimly determined. The first thing Veitch noticed was how
much her features had changed in the short time they had been apart. A hardness made her appear, if not a little older, then certainly more mature; some of
the innocence that softened her features had gone.

Seeing her brought a damp wave of emotion inside him, but in an odd way
it invigorated him too; here was all the motivation he needed. Focusing his
mind, he pushed Ruth out of it and thought of Shavi.

There was only the briefest period of transition before the image around him
showed a strange, hopeless landscape of yellowing grass and twisted, leafless
trees. Shavi sat on a stone box of some kind, staring deeply towards the horizon.
Witch couldn't tell if there was anything wrong with him or if he was simply
lost in thought.

"That's a start," he muttered. "Now show me how I get to him."

He was now looking down on himself standing at the egg, only the shadows all around had cleared to reveal several tunnels leading off. The angle of his view
highlighted one directly ahead.

Cautiously he walked backwards until he stepped out of the bubble with a
faint pop. Away from the magical cocoon, he felt suddenly exposed and hurried
towards the tunnel, pausing at the threshold to look back. Curiously, the dead
did not appear to have pursued him; he would have expected some of them to
have arrived by that time. Something else was in the chamber, though far away.
He could hear the dim echoes of the movement of an enormous shape. With an
involuntary shudder, he hurried along the tunnel.

Laura lit a small fire in the corner of the warehouse while the Bone Inspector foraged for food. The last time he came back with cans for just the one meal. She
berated him enough that he wouldn't make the mistake again, stressing that a
choice between meatballs resembling glutinous chunks of mud and fatty steak
pie filling was really no choice at all.

In the cavernous warehouse, the fire provided little warmth, particularly at
night when the chill radiated up out of the concrete floor. For some reason she
felt the cold more than she ever had.

She pulled the packing crate closer so she was almost on top of the flames
and rubbed her hands together. She found it amazing she still hadn't given in
to despair. The Fomorii now appeared to be everywhere in the city. They'd
climbed up into the roof of the building to peer through broken slates across
the capital. There were swarming black shapes as far as the eye could see. The
sheer volume was sickening, drawing on the basic human revulsion for anything insectile. At times they would disappear to some lair, possibly beneath
the ground, in an eerie, silent exodus. The Bone Inspector had suggested
fleeing through the deserted streets at that time, but the beasts were never gone
for long and the thought of being trapped as they swarmed out of the sewers
filled Laura with dread.

In the firelight, her skin looked even greener. Earlier she had cut her wrist
on a rusty nail. The blood-green blood-had flowed freely for a second before
performing a startling u-turn on the back of her hand, returning to the wound,
where it proceeded to seal it as if it had never been there.

The Bone Inspector had stared in amazement, but nothing shocked her any
more. She'd died and come back; after that anything paled into insignificance.

She was a freak in a world that no longer made any sense. What was the
point in considering it for even an instant? Instead, her thoughts were for the
others: Church, of course, Shavi, Ruth, Tom, even Veitch. She missed them in a
way she never thought she'd miss anyone. More than anything, she wanted to be sitting round a roaring campfire in the cold night, laughing, teasing, mocking; the company of good friends made life right.

The army of Fomorii on every side told her it would probably never happen.
Samhain was coming up hard, the world was going to hell, and they were scattered God knows where.

She wondered what was to become of her; what was to become of all of them.

The rope bit roughly into Church's wrists and his joints ached from having his
arms dragged so tightly behind him. He'd been in this position before, looking
up at a sneering Callow pacing maniacally and triumphantly back and forth, and
it had made him sick to his stomach then; of course, on that occasion Callow
hadn't looked like someone had injected printer's ink into his veins. Now his
nightmarish appearance made the situation even worse, as if Church had found
his way into a Goya painting.

The Malignos kept to the shadows-they'd extinguished several torches to
feel more comfortable-and the Fomorii were now nowhere to be seen. Baccharus
was next to him, bound just as tightly, but the rest of the room's occupants had
been dragged somewhere else, out of sight, possibly out of the chamber.

It was obvious what his own eventual fate would be, but Callow was determined to get some kind of payback for the suffering that had been heaped upon
him; agonies which he blamed on Church and the others, but which had come
only from his own will.

"These are the ways we live our life," Callow was saying, not making much
sense any more. "In fear of this and in fear of that, never quite knowing the
wherewithal and the whywithal. It makes us broken, like dogs in the yard. But
you wouldn't know about that, would you?" He turned and spat in Church's
direction, the lamps of his lidless eyes bright and terrible.

"Take a stress pill, Callow." It was childish, but Church couldn't resist it,
even knowing the reaction he would get.

Callow hovered for a long moment, then threw himself forward wildly to
swing a vicious kick into Church's gut, as if he were planting a football the
length of the pitch. Church snapped shut, retching, before two of the Malignos
ran forward to haul him back up. The pain was so acute he cursed his stupidity,
fearing something had ruptured and his stomach was now filling up with blood.

"Violence is unnecessary," Baccharus interjected gently. "You fail to see we
have a common enemy."

"Oh, you're so superior," Callow mocked in a pathetic singsong voice. "I have
no friends, I have no enemies. That makes it easy to understand how things work.
No surprises." He bent down until his face was inches from Church's, the rotten meat reek of his breath blooming, his features hideously distorted by the tear blur
in Church's eyes. "You and your filthy little followers destroyed everything. I had
plans for my life. I had a way out of the misery of my existence. Unlike you and
your favoured brood, there have been no opportunities in my life. No pleasant
acts of chance that lead me on to the sunlit uplands. It has been hard toil and suffering. And when I found a way out of that, you spoiled it for me."

"Quisling," Church said through gritted teeth. "You tried to sell out all of
humanity just to get some grubby little advantage for yourself."

"You say that like it's a bad thing." Callow jumped back, his eyes rolling
like a madman. "Life is brutal and short and we need to take what we can to
make ourselves comfortable before the jaws of night close around us forever."

"Fine. As long as no one else gets hurt in the process."

"Oh, why qualify it? Will it matter you made a few people cry when the
worms are crawling in and the worms are crawling out?"

"Look at yourself, Callow. Where's your self-analysis?" The sharp pain had
turned to a dull throbbing. "Has that philosophy worked for you? At all?"

"There is only hope," Baccharus interjected, "if you look beyond your petty
concerns, to the needs of your fellow Fragile Creatures, to the needs of all things
of existence. Everything is-"

"You should not preach goodwill to your fellow man." Callow danced
around him, but couldn't bring himself to strike out.

"So you've teemed up with those things now?" Church nodded towards the
Malignos. "Are they the only ones left who'll have you?"

"The Malignos recognise the opportunities for personal gain in any situation. They always loved their hoards of gold. And their human flesh, of course."

"But you're helping the Fomorii again, after all they've done to you!"

"I may not be able to forgive, dear boy, but I am incisive enough not to
antagonise the eventual winners."

Church snorted bitter laughter. "You think they're going to take over like
any other invader? They're going to wipe out everything, you mad bastard!
They're not interested in gold, or any other creature comforts." He laughed
again at the stupid pun. "They're driven by the need to eradicate all of existence.
They're a force of nature. A hurricane-"

"Oh, well, you've won me over. Of course I'll help you," Callow mocked.

He wandered over to converse with the Malignos. Church seized the opportunity to talk to Baccharus. "How did the Fomorii manage to get on board the ship
without anyone knowing? I thought it was completely under Manannan's control?"

"The power of the Heart of Shadows is growing. The Night Walkers can
achieve things they never would have been able to do before."

"Do you think this might actually motivate your people to do something
about it?" Church asked acidly.

"It may already be too late for that."

"What do you mean?"

"If the Night Walkers can strike at the heart of Wave Sweeper, they can
strike anywhere. They might have already launched their assault on the Court
of High Regard."