Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2) (21 page)

In the end she grabbed hold of his right hand and raised it in front of his face. “This is more your scene.”

She flashed a fake smile and left hurriedly to get a drink of water.

On her way back she got drawn into the heart of the dance floor where she lost herself in the music. It was the relief of nothingness, but as the trip reached one of its plateaus, she was irritated to discover occasional thoughts leaking through to her foremind. Most of them concerned Church, but she didn’t want anything to bring her down. Angrily, she looked for something to distract her, losing the rhythm of the music in the process. Stomping off the dance floor she leaned against a pillar with her arms folded, where she waited for the trip to pick up again. A good-looking young man with an annoyingly untroubled face came up to talk to her, but she couldn’t hear a word he was saying over the unceasing thunder of the music. She waved him away furiously.

After a few moments, she was relieved to feel the drug begin to take her to the next level and her mood calmed. A smile sprang to her face; she was surprised at how good it felt. The closeness of all the other clubbers cheered her, made her feel part of something. She surveyed the moving crowd warmly, then found her gaze drawn to the flashing lights which a moment ago had seemed dissonant, but now, with the music, made perfect sense: red, green, blue, purple. A white flash. Red again. A strobe. The meaning of life. Slowly she raised her eyes heavenwards, revelling in the growing sense of bliss. And there, as if in answer to her feelings, was an astonishing sight. The entire ceiling was sparkling like a vast canopy of stars in a night sky. She caught her breath as a revolving light splashed upwards, adding to the coruscation. “That’s amazing,” she whispered in wonder.

In the throes of the trip she suddenly became obsessed with sharing her breathtaking vision with Will and Andy. The crowd was so densely packed she felt a moment of panic that she wouldn’t be able to find them, but after pushing her way back and forth through the dancers for a few minutes, she spied Andy sitting at a table near the door with a glass of water before him and a cigarette smouldering between his fingers.

“You’ve got to see this!” she called out. He didn’t respond, even glance her way. She guessed her voice had been dragged away by the rumble of the music. She waved excitedly to catch his eye. Still nothing.

The trip started to roll with force and she was almost distracted by the music and the lights, but one thing stuck in her mind and wouldn’t shake itself free: the sparkling that had glimmered across the ceiling had now transferred itself to Andy. His corkscrew hair glistened in the occasional beam of light, stars gleamed in his goatee.

“Amazing,” she whispered once more.

But the thing was still niggling at the back of her head, like fingernails scratching on a window pane. It was something more than the spangly effect; something discordant. What was it? she mused. She tried to take a step back through the effects of the drug. His skin, too, had that faint twinkling quality. It wasn’t that he had been dusted with the gold make-up some of the women dancers used, nor was it the drug. She was seeing it. Wasn’t she? Her inability to distinguish reality from mild hallucination began to irritate her, throwing the drug off-kilter.

Be careful, she warned herself. You don’t want this trip to go bad.

She concentrated, focused. The effort twisted the trip a little more.

And there it was. The water before him had risen a full half-inch above the level of the glass. And there it hung, suspended in time.

First the scratching at the back of her head turned to an insistent hammering. Then the trip turned, sucking up the anxiety from the pit of her stomach. She knew. If only she hadn’t been drugged she would have seen it long before. She wouldn’t have gone there at all. She would have known better.

The water hung, suspended. Frozen.

She took a step back, desperately trying to stop herself falling into full-scale panic. Her heart was thundering like it was going to burst out of her chest. She was finding it difficult to breathe.

Andy’s stare was locked on the dance floor. It didn’t waver, he didn’t blink. There was no movement in him at all.

Frozen, she thought.

Behind him, the walls, too, glistened. It was spreading out gradually from the doorway like an invisible field, creeping across surfaces, leaving its tell-tale sign.

Poor Andy, she thought obliquely. Then, a drug-induced twist: My God! He’s dead!

And now that she knew, she could feel the bloom of it on her skin; the temperature had dropped several degrees and was still falling fast.

She’s conning. The notion drove her into action. She ran for the door, but as she neared it the cold was almost unbearable; her skin appeared to sear from its presence. It was more than winter, more than Arctic; it seemed to Laura to represent the depths of space. She took another few paces and then gave up as the hoar frost thickened on the door. She began to shake as cracks developed in the wood. She was already backing away rapidly when it was torn apart by the freezing moisture and burst inwards with a resounding crack.

The Cailleach Bheur was framed in the doorway, painted red, then blue, then green, then purple by the club’s lights, like some hideous MTV video effect. Laura’s breath caught in her throat. At first she couldn’t quite make out the creature’s appearance as the shape shimmered and danced, becoming briefly this and then that. But then her mind settled on a form which it found acceptable and Laura saw an old crone hunched over, dressed in tattered, shapeless rags, her face a mass of wrinkles, her hair as wild as the wind across the tundra. She supported herself on a gnarled wooden staff that was bigger than she. And all around her the air appeared to shift with gusts from unknown origin, suffused with an icy blue illumination that seemed immune to the club’s lights; in the glow were flurries of snowflakes that came and went eerily without leaving any trace on the floor behind her.

She moved forward spectrally, almost as if her feet weren’t touching the ground. And then she slowly turned her terrible gaze on everyone in the room. In the depths of those swirling eyes, Laura saw nothing remotely human; they contained the desolation of the ice-fields, of the depths of frozen seas. And the sight triggered the trip to bring up a fear so powerful and primal it wiped out all conscious thought. Laura turned and drove herself wildly through the crowd, knocking people over, punching and gouging to get away, oblivious to the angry shouts directed at her.

She was on the other side of the club, huddled behind a table on the beerpuddled floor, when some semblance of sense returned to her, and even then the panic was coming and going in waves. She cursed the drug, but knew she had no option but to ride it out; and that could last for several more hours.

The lights were still flashing, the music still pounding, but through it she became aware of sudden frenzied activity. The dancers had recognised the threat of the Cailleach Bheur. They were surging around crazily, searching for an exit, trampling anyone who fell before them in their panic. Raw screams were punching through the beats like some hellish mix. Laura tipped over the table in front of her to offer her some kind of protection and then desperately tried to order her thoughts enough to get out of there. An emergency exit. Surely there must be one somewhere. But it wasn’t a regular club, probably wasn’t even legal. What if there was only one way out?

That brought another wave of panic which almost sent her fleeing into the tumult, but she’d used enough drugs in her shady past to know how to calm herself a little. She focused on one of the flashing lights and did deep breathing to clear her mind. When the wave had passed, she peeked above the lip of the table to get her bearings.

What she saw filled her with dread. The walls, floor and ceiling shimmered with ice, reflecting the flashing lights in a breathtaking manner that was amplified by the drugs coursing through her system: it was the ultimate light show. But the wonder was corrupted by the grisly piles of frozen bodies heaped across the floor, faces locked in final expressions of terror, hands clawed, legs bent ready to thrust forward, taken by the cold in seconds. Laura instantly flashed back to sickening images of World War I battlefields she had seen in a history lesson.

And moving through the scene slowly was the Cailleach Bheur, her face as dark as nature. The cold came off her in waves, metamorphosing at the tips into snaky tendrils which reached out to anything not yet touched by the icy blast of eternal winter. The speakers fizzed and sparks flew off the decks. A second later the ear-splitting music ended in a shriek of feedback. That only revealed the awful screams of the surviving clubbers huddled in one corner of the room. Laura covered her ears, but couldn’t drive out the sound. She couldn’t even tear her eyes away as one of the tendrils wound its way along the floor like autumn mist before wrapping itself around the ankle of a young man who was futilely trying to kick it away. It was followed instantly by an odd effect which, in her state, she found both fascinating and horrible: ice crystals danced in the air before forming around his leg, moving rapidly up to his waist. Yelling, he tore at it, but it simply transferred to his hands where he touched the crystals, turning the skin blue, then forming a film of ice over it.

A second later he fell to the floor with the same rictus, catching the light like a gruesome ice sculpture.

Laura was convinced she was going insane from the magnified panic and terror. Irrationally, and with desperation, she threw herself over the table and ran to the men’s toilets. The door slammed behind her just as a rapidly pursuing wave of cold crashed against it. She heard the familiar cracking sound as the wood froze, but when it didn’t burst in she guessed the Cailleach Bheur had turned her attention back to the remaining clubbers.

Frantically she tore around the small room and was overjoyed when she discovered a tiny window over one of the cubicles. She wrenched it open gleefully, oblivious to the breaking of a fingernail and the spurt of blood as it ripped into her skin. When she saw the solid bars that lay on the other side she burst into a bout of uncontrollable sobs.

“I can’t think straight!” she yelled at herself between the tears. “Why was I so stupid? I’m a loser! A fucking loser!”

The screams echoing dimly through the walls were bad enough, but when they finally faded away, the silence that followed was infinitely worse. Laura collapsed into a corner of the cubicle and hugged her knees, realising how pathetic her whimpers sounded, unable to do anything about it.

The silence didn’t last long. The telltale sounds of forming ice and cracking wood gradually made their way towards the toilet door. Laura pressed her back hard into the wall as if, just by wishing, it would open up and swallow her. Her cheeks stung from the tears which had soaked her top. She was already making desperate deals with God: no more drugs, no more stupidity, if He whisked her out of there to safety, turned the Hag away from the door, did anything, anything-when she suddenly noticed a curious sight which broke through the panic. The blood which dripped from her cut finger was green. It wasn’t a trick of the light or a vague visual hallucination; an emerald stain had formed on her top. Cautiously she touched the tip of her tongue to it; it didn’t even taste like blood. It reminded her, oddly, of lettuce.

“Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” It seemed like the final straw of madness. And an instant later she heard the toilet door begin to break open. Her breath clouded around her; the temperature was plummeting.

Clarity crept back into her mind as the drug entered one of its cyclical recessions, and with it came a decision not to die screwed up on the floor of a toilet like some pathetic junkie. She jumped up on to the toilet seat and began to wrench at the bars on the window in the hope that they were looser than they appeared.

By now she was shivering uncontrollably. The door groaned and began to give way.

“Come on,” she pleaded, but the bars held fast. Then another strange thing happened. Where her blood splashed on to the bars it appeared to move with a life of its own, spreading over the metal, changing into something which, in the gloom, she couldn’t quite make out; all she could see through the shadows was movement and growth. Instantly the bars began to protest and a few seconds later they burst out of the brick.

The sound of the toilet door bursting inwards and the wave of intense cold that followed drove all questions from her mind. She pulled herself through the opening and fell awkwardly into a dark, litter-strewn alley that smelled of urine. Pain drove through her shoulder where she hit the ground. Ignoring it, she forced herself to her feet and hurried away just as a white bizzard erupted out of the window above her.

The relief that hit her was so overwhelming she burst into tears again, but by the time she stumbled out on to a main road her head was spinning; there was no point trying to make sense of what had happened until the trip was over. Yet she couldn’t resist one last look at the green smears across her hands. An involuntary shudder ran through her that did not come from the cold.

(here was never-ending darkness, and pain, more than she thought she could bear. How long had it gone on for now? Months? Ruth’s head swam, every fibre of her body infused with agony. At least the sharp lances that had been stabbing through her hand where her finger had been severed had subsided, a little. She didn’t dare think how the wound had healed in the dirty confines of her tiny cell.