Elemental (19 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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What's more, there was something wrong. When he'd looked over the surrounding area from his balcony he'd been able to see several other buildings. They should have been in easy walking distance. They weren't. They had disappeared. He'd slogged across fields and clambered up and down huge steplike levels, but there were no buildings. At all. And no people, and no animals. Just clumps of unhelpful trees. He'd changed direction several times, hoping to find a more profitable tack, and now had very little idea of where he was in relation to his starting point.
It was all going very badly.
After flapping his hands against his sides vigorously to get the ice off, Dark put his head down and tramped away from the trees and up the hill in front of him. He hadn't liked being amongst the trees. The whole of the Compound had a forlorn atmosphere, but it had been worse in there,
darker and older. He made a grimace with his face to see if he could move it. He could, but it was hard work. If he didn't find some shelter soon, he was in trouble.
The thought of death, he found, was still unappealing. So the Compound itself clearly wasn't death, unless his mind was just taking a long time to catch up with events. Maybe his mother had been right. Maybe this
was
where careless people went. The problem was working out what the hell that might mean. Maybe it was some kind of Symbolism: the Goudy had always been very keen on such weapons, had started to use them in earnest during the last few offensives. The Gillsans had never really understood Symbolism, and there had been great losses. That was why they had been prepared to use the services of outfits like the Spartan Bold, who were immune.
As he got farther up the hill he realized that it seemed to stop at the top, as if the drop was much steeper on the other side. This was confirmed when he reached the summit. In front of him the hill shaded away quickly, into several hundred feet of stepped fields. At the bottom was a valley, which was largely filled with trees. Squinting against the snow, however, Dark thought he could make out something else. Nestling into the edge of one of the clumps was a building. Hardly noticing he was cackling to himself, Dark rubbed his hands over his lips to thaw them and then set off carefully down the slope.
Carefully wasn't careful enough, and in the end he covered a third of the downward distance in one ungraceful slide, tumbling over and over through the snow. He fetched up in a painful heap at the base of a tree, but nothing was broken and as a means of descent it had been a lot quicker than walking. He picked himself up and hurried toward the bottom of the slope, not bothering to brush the snow off.
As he approached the building, it became clearer that it exactly resembled the one he had left, now at least four hours ago. It could have been one of the ones he'd seen from the balcony, were it not for the fact that it had taken far too long to get to, and had involved walking several
miles. It was about thirty stories high and built of the same dark brown, almost black, stone. A dim glow showed behind the glass doors. Dark fell against them, expecting at the last moment for them to be locked, but they parted and he stumbled into the lobby.
It too was exactly the same as the one he'd left, deserted but warm. As the water began to drip out of his clothes and hair, Dark paced round the foyer, luxuriating in the warmth and considering what to do next. Striking out for the edges of the Compound was clearly not a viable course of action. Things didn't work properly out there, and it was just too fucking cold.
When he was perspiring lightly Dark stopped pacing, shook himself like a dog to get rid of the bulk of the excess water, and took stock. He felt much more together now, more alive. Nearly freezing to death had done that much for him, at least. It had also made him irritable. He was fed up with being in a cold no-man's-land. He wanted to get back to the fight. But how?
It was impossible to tell whether this was actually the building he had left before going out into the cold. It shouldn't have been by any logical means, but it might be. It was so identical that it could be either the same one, or a different one that was exactly the same. Dark decided that his first step should be finding out which was the case. If this was the building he'd left, which was clearly impossible, then there was definitely Symbolism at work; and in that case the Compound was almost certainly Goudy territory. If so, then he'd know what to do. Liberate any imprisoned Gillsans sleepers he could find and try to discover the way out, killing any attendants who showed up.
If it wasn't, he still had to find a way out, but he'd be doing it by himself. Loosening his robes he strode toward the elevator.
The elevator looked the same, and the music was the same, but that didn't really prove anything. Elevators were always the same. As the doors shut behind him, Dark realized he didn't know what floor his suite had been on. Looking round the room he saw it wouldn't have made any
difference. There were no buttons to press. It would either take him there, or it wouldn't.
It didn't. The elevator flowed smoothly upward, and after about three minutes Dark was forced to concede that it wasn't going to stop anywhere near the floor he'd found himself on earlier. After about twenty minutes he began to wonder if it was going to stop at all, and after an hour he lay down on the floor and went to sleep.
When he woke the elevator was still climbing at the same steady rate. Dark dedicated a desultory couple of minutes to checking once more that there really was no way of influencing the elevator's progress, but soon gave up. He used up some time looking at the carpet, trying to work out where the bland, almost indiscernible pattern might have come from. Its regular overlapping rectangles looked a little like Goudy workmanship, but not enough to make anything of.
Just when Dark was becoming convinced that the elevator was destined to climb calmly forever, the sound of ascent dropped rapidly in pitch and the room juddered to a halt. The doors took a moment to open and Dark readied himself in front of them. His bet was that they would open on the foyer, proving that there was Symbolism afoot. If so, he'd just have to find some other way upstairs. He took his knife out and held it lightly behind him, just in case.
When the doors did open, however, it wasn't onto the lobby. It wasn't clear what it was, in fact. All Dark could see was a faint dark green tinge, accompanied by distant dripping sounds. He stepped carefully up to the door.
It took him a second or two to make sense of what he was seeing. The elevator opened out of a wall, a wall of mossy concrete that seemed to stretched indefinitely in all directions. The only light was a faint glow, probably some kind of phosphorescence. Just below the elevator door was a narrow staircase made of wrought iron. About two feet wide with a low handrail, it climbed at an angle of forty-five degrees up the wall into the darkness. About thirty yards away, directly in front, was a similar wall. That was all he could see, though as he listened carefully he
could hear occasional dripping sounds, and, very far below, the suggestion of a larger body of water.
Sighing irritably, Dark stepped onto the staircase. The elevator pinged and the doors shut behind him, removing some of the light. It was much warmer here than it had been in the building, and he loosened his robes before setting off up the steps.
 
 
At six Daniel returned to the kitchen, and made himself some dinner. It was bologna and cheese again, which he was heartily sick of, but until Mrs. Johns called by tomorrow morning with more groceries, that was all there was. He might try asking Mrs. Johns if she could bring him something different this time, but she was old and didn't seem to hear. It was more important that he kept her from realizing that his dad had gone away, leaving them alone. For two weeks he'd kept up the pretense that he'd just popped out for an hour. If people found out, they'd come and take his mother away and he knew she didn't want that. He finished his food and then warmed a little chicken noodle soup and put it into a cup for his mother.
His mother didn't eat again, though, didn't take even a little. He tried to prop her head up and pour some into her mouth, but it wouldn't stay open for long enough. The skin stretched thin on her forehead was very hot, her hair matted on her neck. She seemed hotter than she had yesterday, and he wondered again how she could stand the duvet on top of her.
Daniel turned the bedside light on, thankful for the glow it pooled onto the little table. Of all the watching times, the evenings were the worst. It was very quiet in the house, quiet upstairs, quiet in the kitchen. He could have turned the television on, but somehow that made things even worse. When you went into the kitchen it sounded as if you were outside the house.
When he'd washed up, Daniel made himself another cup of tea, changed the water in his mother's glass, checked for the fourth time that the door to the cellar was firmly shut, and settled back down to count.
 
 
He walked up steps, he walked down steps. Dark was reconciled to the fact that he had to tramp up the damn things, but it was galling to find yourself suddenly sent down again, undoing all of the previous hour's tramping.
There didn't seem to be an alternative. The metal staircases hugged the walls, going around the corners of the huge blocks, sometimes up, sometimes down. At one point it dropped for hundreds and hundreds of steps, and Dark got close enough to the water to see its slow lapping against the walls. The water looked very deep and viscous, but he didn't think anything lived in it.
The overall trend was now upward, which was both good and bad. It was good because it meant he was closer to wherever the staircase led, and bad because it kept getting hotter and hotter. Several times he had considered jettisoning his robes, but he didn't know if he'd need them later. He was presumably going to have to face someone at some point, either the Goudy or whoever the hell else ran this place. He'd rather not do that clad only in a grubby loincloth: it was difficult to exude the necessary violent authority while informally clad.
The higher he got, the lighter it became. Visibility was still no more than fifty yards and still showed nothing but walls, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther, but it seemed to prove he was getting somewhere. It was getting lighter because the moss that covered the walls was getting thicker. Dark didn't like the moss. He suspected it was alive in some unusual way, and he knew it was where the heat was coming from. As time went on he began to think he could hear a rustling sound, a damp scratching. The moss was twisting, reproducing, dividing, and swelling. Where before it had been patchy, now it was universal, and six inches thick in places. It was taking over the walls, and it didn't look like it would be very long before it clogged the spaces in between them, choking them. It was like the Goudy themselves had been, insinuating themselves slowly, unnoticeably, and then suddenly striking; blossoming blackly and taking over their hosts.
Suddenly afraid as well as angry, Dark plunged his hand into the moss and ripped out a lump. It was hot and fleshlike and seemed to pulse in his hand, and he flicked it away with distaste. He was now too high above the water to hear the splash. A sensation was left in his hand, a feeling of disease, and he realized that all this was not Goudy at all. In some way he didn't understand, it was Gillsans, and it was a weapon.
Confused, Dark continued to climb, getting hotter and hotter. The steps led always upward now, and the higher he got the odder he felt. It was partly the heat, and partly the moss, which was now over a foot deep and exuding an unpleasant decaying odor as he pushed through it. But it wasn't just that. His mind was becoming unclear, watery, as if it was boiling with fever. A couple of times he stumbled hard against the railing, and it was only years of dedicated self-preservation that enabled his hands to instinctively grip it in time. He climbed for a while with his eyes shut, but that didn't make it any better. It felt as if he was pushing upward through the revolting moss, cutting a channel through its black and glistening warmth.
The opposite wall was getting closer, too. At times it had been as far as a hundred yards away, but now it was only a matter of six or seven feet. The moss was pushing out from there too.
Dark jerked his neck back as he tried to roll the ache out of his shoulders, and saw that far above, there was a roof. The stairs led up to a door set in the wall where it met its opposite. He stumbled and fell hard onto one knee on the stairs, making them vibrate. Shaking his head made no difference. His mind was running as if stirred with a warm finger. He pulled himself to his feet again and hauled himself up the steps.
 
 
Hand on the phone, Daniel watched his mother. Something was wrong, much more wrong than usual. Her breathing had deepened again and was very uneven. She seemed to be even hotter; from where he stood Daniel believed he could feel the waves of heat coming off her. She gasped suddenly, a wet choking sound, her mouth gaping open.
Daniel turned. He'd heard something else. His mother was still breathing loudly through the black clogging mass in her lungs, but that wasn't it. It was the sound he'd heard before. Fifteen minutes ago, when his mother was still quiet, he'd thought he'd heard something from behind the cellar door. It had been very faint, a distant muffled clang, as if something was approaching from below. This sound was similar, but different. It sounded closer.

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