Furnace 5 - Execution (26 page)

Or die trying.

The heavy doors opened without a sound, revealing a world that was the complete opposite of the derelict mansion above. A plush red carpet ran the length of the corridor, the wood-panelled walls gleaming. The ceiling was made of vaulted brick arches and in each one was a spotless crystal chandelier. The light they cast was golden, banishing every shadow.

There were noises here, and I followed them to the nearest door, my heart pounding so far up in my throat that I could taste nectar on my tongue.

Inside the large room were seven rows of wooden cots. Two of them were occupied. In one was a baby,
swaddled in cloth and evidently fast asleep. In the other, on the far side of the room, was a boy about two years old. He clung to the wooden bars of his cot, grinning, bouncing up and down on his mattress. When he saw me in the doorway he stopped, his smile vanishing, his brow creasing.

I was so shocked by the sight of him that I almost didn’t see the wheezer in the room. Only, it
wasn’t
a wheezer. It wore the same clothes, that long trench coat, a bandolier of syringes around its chest. It had the same face, too, pasty flesh, its eyes like blocks of coal.

But it wasn’t wearing a gas mask.

It stared at me, its lipless mouth peeling back into some hideous parody of a smile, its black tongue flopping around inside like an eel. It twitched, the same way the wheezers back in the prison had, its head snapping back then its whole body juddering. The toddler watched it, starting to laugh, clapping its chubby hands together. I turned away, back into the corridor. I had to; the sight inside the room was almost enough to obliterate the last of my sanity.

I carried on along the corridor, past a dozen more rooms like that one. I tried not to look but I couldn’t help myself, catching glimpses of more children, older now, strapped to machines or lying on operating tables. Some weren’t human any more, I realised, their bodies so bent and broken that they could only be called berserkers. The wheezers watched me pass with their dead men’s grins, uttering those same nightmare purrs and ear-piercing shrieks that I knew so well.

I wanted to run in and kill them all, but there wasn’t time. For all I knew Panettierre was already on the island, rounding up Zee and killing the others. Besides, my fear of being caught by the wheezers, of ending up once more under their knives, was over powering. The thought of looking up into those piggy eyes while they smiled down at me made me nostalgic for the old wheezers, the familiar ones in gas masks.

I walked on, feeling the nectar rage only for its fire to be dulled by fear, each cycle leaving me more exhausted. It was okay, though. I wouldn’t need my strength for much longer. There was just one more job to do, one more promise to keep, then I could rest for all eternity.

The corridor ended up ahead in yet another double door. On one door was painted a coat of arms – a red and white shield, two apple trees growing on either side and an animal in the centre. I wasn’t quite sure what the beast was – a jackal, maybe? – but I recognised its silver eyes. They seemed to sparkle in the light from the corridor, as if the creature was ready to spring from the painting and devour me. On the other door was the Furnace logo I was more familiar with, emblazoned on a red flag.

Even without the markings I would have known that these were Furnace’s quarters. I could feel him there, his presence an endless pulse which seemed to reverberate through my body. I paused, offering a prayer to anything that was listening. Then I reached out my hand, turned the handle and pushed open the door.

I honestly don’t know what I’d been expecting. But it wasn’t what lay before me.

I stood at the entrance to a large chamber, the ceiling draped in shadows. Columns of crumbling brick seemed to grow from the floor, and although they weren’t carved like trees – the same way as the ones back in the tower had been – they still resembled them, their vaulted branches interwoven overhead. A handful of flickering lamps were embedded in the walls, their nervous light doing little to illuminate their surroundings.

A berserker was perched on either side of the room, basking in the darkness. I couldn’t get a good look at them behind the pillars, but I could make out bladed limbs of obsidian, jaws that dripped dirty saliva, and piggy eyes watching me warily. One of them growled when I entered, but neither seemed to see me as a threat.

It wasn’t them which both fascinated and terrified me, though. It was the machine. It dominated the entire room, a monstrous engine of copper, glass and steel. Countless moving parts danced back and forth,
producing a quiet pulse which made my bones shake. And yet it seemed organic too, as if it had sprouted from the damp stone, endless pipes like the thorny tendrils of a plant. It was enormous, stretching from one end of the room to the other and lost in the dark pools of the ceiling. Its design was so complex, and its movement so mesmerising, that it took me a while to notice the figure that was strapped to it, almost as if he had been crucified there.

It was Alfred Furnace.

He was human, and yet at the same time he wasn’t. His body had been ravaged by age, his skin so rotten that in places it hung off him in strips, like old jerky. Parts of him weren’t there at all – the upper half of his right arm, and the whole left side of his throat – and in those places sat a network of tubes and pipes, carrying the nectar around his body. He was so emaciated that he could have been a corpse, his skeletal ribs pulled open to reveal the organs beneath. Most seemed to have been replaced by pieces of machinery, yet his heart remained, as shrivelled and as black as a decayed fig, but still beating.

It was his face, though, which almost sent me tumbling back through the door, which made a scream vomit up from my stomach, held in check only by the fact that there was no air in my lungs to fuel it.

It was as if Furnace was three different people at the same time. I could see the child there, the one from my visions, a kid no older than me. And yet he was also an old man, his face as withered as his body, his skin the colour and texture of decomposed apples. The two faces
seemed to strobe back and forth, so fast that they almost merged.

But there was something else there too, a figure laid over Furnace’s head and body like a photographic negative, one that couldn’t seem to stay still long enough for me to focus on it. I knew what it was, though. I had seen this thing before.

The stranger, the creature from the orchard.

It was as if Furnace’s skin was radiating a living darkness, an impossible silhouette which thrashed and pulled and fought like a prisoner trying to escape his chains. I recognised his face, or the void where his face should have been, opening and closing as if formed of a million moving parts. The stranger’s eyes – no, the place where his eyes should have been – watched me, two gaping, boundless portals in his head that were infinitely darker than the shadows around them, like holes burned through the skin of reality. They seemed to suck in all the light and warmth from the room, devouring it, throwing out only cold night. I knew that to stare into those eyes for too long wouldn’t just erode my sanity, it would kill me.

I collapsed to my knees, the pillar beside me the only thing stopping me from falling flat on my face. The same fear which had gripped me in my dream of the orchard had found me again, that unspeakable, unthinkable, unbearable terror. Everything in the room seemed to be unravelling, as if the surface of the world was peeling away to reveal the abyss beneath. That endless void was infinitely quiet, and yet at the same time it was deafening.
I could feel drops of nectar drip from my ears, squeezed from my tear ducts, from my nose. I was unravelling too, every cell in my body withering into a dust which defied gravity, rising towards the ceiling.

Alex
, said Furnace, and his words ended the chaos, rooting me back inside the room. His voice was the sound of continents shifting, and yet within it I could also hear the husky, gentle tones of an old man and the higher pitch of a boy, each speaking the same words and yet ever so slightly out of sync.
There is no reason to fear me
.

‘What are you?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure if the words left my mouth, but it didn’t matter. He could see inside my mind as if it were his own.

I am old
, he said.

He was, not just years, not just decades, but centuries. That knowledge lay in my head, impossible but undeniable. The nectar had kept death at bay while generations of people had lived and died, while billions turned to dust and ash around him.

Not nectar
, Furnace corrected, reading my mind.
What runs through my veins is something far more powerful.

I remembered my visions, the stranger in the orchard, the one who had forced Furnace to drink his blood. What was it if it wasn’t nectar?

In your soul, you already know
, he replied.
This blood is eternity, immortality. It has existed since before mankind stepped onto the earth, and it will exist long after the last of us has rotted back into the dirt. It is the very essence from which the nectar is made. I died, and behold I am alive for
ever more, and I hold the keys of death and the grave.

My thoughts were a storm and I fought to remember why I had come here. But all that existed were questions. Questions, and the unrelenting terror.

‘What was that thing? The creature in the orchard?’

The two faces – the old man and the boy – seemed to howl in silent agony at the question, their mouths open too wide as their heads writhed back and forth. But the being which overshadowed them smiled without smiling, the place where his eyes should have been seeming to grow brighter and darker at the same time.

He has no name, and yet he has many
, said Furnace.
He saved me, and now he will do the same for you
.

Furnace’s hands moved as he talked. The two smallest fingers were missing on the left, the thumb absent from the right. His remaining digits were slender and too long, three or four knuckles on each one. They unfolded with a sound like popping joints until both his palms were facing me. Pipes and valves punctured his ancient flesh, imprisoning him within the machine. I doubted he could move even if he wanted to, and surely even if he did break free then he would just fall apart.

The thought brought me back, quenching some of the fear, reminding me why I was here. I attempted to get up, ready to attack. Furnace was so withered, so broken, that killing him would be no different than smothering an old man in his bed. I was so much stronger than him. I called out to the berserkers in the room, imagining them reaching out for Furnace, ripping him from his contraption, tearing him limb from limb.

‘Kill him,’ I wheezed at them. ‘Do it!’

The berserkers didn’t move, blinking their oil-well eyes at me. One shifted its position like a restless cat and I could see the immense bulk of its body, endless clusters of muscles barely held by a patchwork of skin. It settled on its haunches, its face the most human thing in the room.

‘Kill him,’ I commanded, but those few words had used up all but the last of my strength. Furnace began to laugh, a sound that I felt rather than heard. It seemed to sit on my spine, gripping my vertebrae like a dirty fist. I tried to get back to my feet, ready to run my bladed hand through Furnace’s open chest, but my body wouldn’t obey.

Did you really think it would be that easy?
Furnace asked, his eyes blazing black light, roaring like blowtorches.
Did you honestly believe you could control them?

I
had
been controlling them, the berserkers. Ever since the hospital I’d been able to tell them what to do, hadn’t I? Once again Furnace plucked my question from my skull.

You did not have the power
, he said, his voice like liquid thunder.
I read your mind, Alex, and I relayed your commands to my children. It was not you who gave them orders, but I
.

I didn’t want to believe him, except I knew it was the truth. I felt panic once again claw through my body, dousing the nectar like a blanket over a fire. What the hell was I doing? Did I honestly think I could just walk into Furnace’s own house and kill him? I was going to
die here, I was going to be executed.

No
, said Furnace, his tone surprisingly calm.
It is I who will not live to see tomorrow
.

I lifted my head, feeling like the weight of the world was pressing down on it. For a second the blurred, flickering silhouette of the stranger faded and I could see the two other people beneath, the boy and the man. Both looked utterly exhausted, especially the kid. His thin face reminded me of the inmates inside the prison, the ones who looked like they would never be able to get through another day behind bars. The face vanished once again behind the invisible grin of the stranger.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

Why do you think I brought you here, Alex?
said Furnace.

I opened my mouth to give an answer, realising that I didn’t have one. I thought I had known. There had been a reason I had come here, a reason I had thought it would be so easy. I had come to kill Furnace. My thoughts were disintegrating, collapsing in on each other. I saw one in the confusion, grasping for it before it could disappear.