The Key (27 page)

All was quiet.

All was calm.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling the tension in her shoulders melt away. She felt relaxed – at peace.

Then a loud knock split the silence like a gunshot.

Liv sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the door, running through the short list of people who knew she was here: Gabriel; Ski; Dr Anata. No one else.

The chances were it was Ski, checking up on her, but she was reluctant to call out and confirm her presence in the room until she knew who was there.

Another knock made her jump, loud and emphatic, still no identifying voice. Even room service would have announced themselves by now.

She slipped quietly from the bed, wrapping the discarded bathrobe round her as she ran through her options. There was nowhere to hide in the tiny room, nothing she could see that could be used as a weapon. Her room was a trap – one way in, one way out.

Slipping round the edge of the bed and keeping as far away from the door as possible, she scooped up Ski’s cell phone from the desk and quickly copied the number of the main switchboard from the hotel stationery into it. If whoever was out there tried to get into her room she would lock herself in the bathroom and call for security, scream rape – anything to get them running. She started moving, then a voice called out that stopped her dead.

‘Liv?’

‘Gabriel?’ She had spoken his name without thinking and, in the silence that followed, instantly regretted it.

Whoever was out there had only said one word and it had been muffled by the thick hotel door. Was it Gabriel? It couldn’t be, she had not long spoken to him in Ruin, half a day’s journey away. Unless … maybe she’d slept longer than she’d thought; she’d certainly been tired enough.

‘Liv?’

The voice again – so like him.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said, realizing there was no point in further caution. ‘How come you got here so fast?’

‘I came on the first flight. You must have been sleeping all day.’

It
was
him. Liv felt a flush of heat on her skin and lunged for the door, opening it without a second thought.

Another blast of heat hit her from the corridor, hotter even than the air in her room.

Gabriel was standing a little way back from the door, his arms by his sides, looking slightly awkward. He was exactly as she remembered, his white skin made whiter by his black clothes and hair, the cold blueness of his eyes the only point of colour in the windowless corridor. She looked into his face and smiled – but he did not return it. A single tear ran down his cheek, as though the blue ice of his eye was melting in the heat.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Then the whole corridor erupted in flame.

Liv was knocked backwards by the blast. She landed on the bed and covered her face with her arms. Through the roar of the flames the whispering filled her head like a warning. When she tried to look at the place where Gabriel had been, the heat and the brightness forced her eyes shut. She stood up and tried to get closer to the door, covering her face with the sleeve of her bathrobe, hoping that Gabriel might somehow have survived the furnace.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the fire vanished, and instead of a hotel corridor a desert landscape was now framed by the open door. It was flat and featureless and made up of night-time shadows and the soft glow of moonlight. Liv drifted towards it, drawn by its strangeness.

She reached the door and saw it – the beast – the source of the inferno. It squatted on the sand; a huge lizard thing made of spines and plate and fire. Its red eyes were staring straight at her, while its spear-like tail quivered and curled towards the night sky where a full moon shone.

The beast took a breath, sucking in the flame and smoke that circled its mouth, closing its red eyes as it savoured her scent. Then something flew through the night, striking her in the middle of the chest and skewering both flesh and spirit. She tried to scream but no sound came out. She could feel her blood coursing down her skin like a memory of her time in the Citadel. It felt almost cool against the heat of the desert night. Then the thing lifted her up, raising her towards its mouth on the spike of its tail. She could smell death on its breath and saw a mark on its neck – a cross in the shape of an inverted T. Then it let out a shriek so shrill that it ripped through her head, and fire poured from its mouth to consume her.

Liv jerked forward in bed, the shrill shriek of the nightmare still echoing in her ears.

The hotel room was a mess – the chair tipped on its side, bedclothes twisted from the bed, and pages of torn paper drifting over everything. She wondered whether she was still dreaming and this was part of a layered nightmare she would have to escape bit by bit. She drew her knees up to her chin, waiting for what terror might unfold next, but no one knocked on the door, the temperature in the room stayed normal, and no dragons appeared in the middle of strange desert vistas. What she was looking at was real, and all the more disturbing because of it.

She tried to rationalize what might have happened: either someone had broken into her room and done this while she slept, or she had done it herself in some kind of dreaming fit. Neither explanation gave her much comfort. Her laptop was folded shut on the side where she had left it. Surely an intruder would have taken it? The only sensible conclusion was that she had done it herself, or whatever entity she now carried inside her had done it while her conscious self slept.

She scooped up a handful of paper from the bed. They were pages of scripture, ripped from the Gideon Bible. The cover lay on the floor by the bed. She picked it up and it flopped open in her hand like a dead thing. There was one page remaining, from the Book of Revelation, and it had clearly not been spared by accident. Most of the text on the page had been crossed out by a jagged, angry hand, but there was one section left:

… and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a child, who was to rule all nations …

She stared at the words, the shrill sound of the dragon’s cry still splitting her head.

A loud rap on the door made her jump.

‘Make your way to the stairs, please, quickly now.’

The man moved away down the corridor, banging on every door and repeating his order as he went. The wailing sound was not the continued roar of the demon in her dream, but a fire alarm.

She quickly pulled on the clothes she’d laid out and grabbed her bag.

The siren was louder outside in the hallway and she clamped her hands over her ears as she headed towards the stairwell. She wondered at the coincidence of the verses from Revelation describing her nightmare so exactly. Maybe she’d read it before falling asleep and planted the seeds of those images in her mind.

She reached the fire door and pushed her way through, wondering if Gabriel had managed to sort out her passage to Ruin yet. She couldn’t believe she was actually looking forward to going back. Seeing him again had rekindled something inside her; something connected to him.

She was so distracted by these thoughts that she didn’t hear the swish of the door opening behind her, or catch the sharp whiff of chloroform until the towel was already clamped on her face and held there by a hand as big as her head.

She tried to scream but the siren and the towel drowned it out. She tried to pull the huge hand away, but her arms were already wilting as the drug took hold. The last thing she remembered before the darkness rose to swamp her entirely was a sudden rush of fear as she noticed the image of a cross tattooed on the forearm of the man who held her.

Dick kicked the door closed and laid the girl down on the bed.

He checked his watch. Still ten minutes before he was due to report back. The hardest part was done. He had flushed her out, discovered she was alone and now she was his. All he had to do was snap her neck, then slip away. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door would ensure no one discovered her body until tomorrow at the earliest, by which time he would be long gone.

Leaning in close to study her face, he caught the hint of hotel soap above the ethanol-tang of the chloroform. She had clear, almost translucent skin stretched over fine bones. Her lips were parted, and small white teeth shone in the moist darkness of her mouth. He leaned close enough to feel her warm breath against his skin and noticed a faint crease of concentration running between her closed eyes. He had one himself, forged over years in the furnace of self-education, mostly in prison libraries.

Seeing her holdall, he picked it up and rummaged inside for the book she had been reading on the flight. He always liked to keep something. A
sou-ve-nir
. There was hardly anything in the bag so he found it immediately. But he also saw something that soured his good mood.

He removed the Gideon Bible, handling the tattered remains as tenderly as if it were an injured bird. The cover fell open and he felt fresh disgust when he saw all the scribble on the one page remaining. She had taken the Lord’s words in vain, destroyed them even, and in doing so had committed, in his eyes, the gravest of sins.

He looked down at her unconscious form. She no longer seemed pretty to him. All he wanted was to finish the job and leave.

Outside, the fire alarm cut out and the room fell silent. He would have to be quick if he wanted to use what confusion remained to aid his escape.

She had broken the spine of the Gideon Bible and now he would break hers. There was a certain Old Testament balance to this: an eye for an eye.

As he took hold of her head in his giant hands and tensed his shoulders ready to snap her neck, something chirruped in the silence of the room, the sound of a text message. He so wanted to hear the noise of her neck breaking, but instinct and experience told him to wait, and discipline made sure he complied. Pulling the phone from his pocket, he opened the message. It made his own frown line deepen. He read it twice then looked back down at her.

‘You like words,’ he whispered at her sleeping form. ‘Well, I have a good one for you.
Re-prieve
.’

Ruin

The old town had remained closed all morning while the earthquake damage had been cleared away from the streets. When they finally did open the portcullis gates, a little after two in the afternoon, there were thousands of people waiting to climb up to the public church at the top of the hill to give thanks for their safe deliverance. Dr Anata was one of them.

She jostled along with the flow of packed bodies, noticing how everything in the old town appeared remarkably untouched. Some of the pilgrims remarked on this apparent miracle, but Dr Anata knew better: it had more to do with geology than theology. Earthquakes were like waves and so looser ground amplified them, whereas the solid rock the old town was built on had damped them down, rendering them less effective. The earthquake had been less intense here, that was the only difference.

It took her nearly forty minutes to make it to the top of the hill and pass into the cool, monolithic interior of the public church. It was packed with the penitent and hummed with the combined sound and nervous energy of all the tourists and worshippers who had gathered to offer up prayers of forgiveness, thanks or contrition. Dr Anata weaved between them all, heading directly across the flagstoned floor to the confessional booths in the furthest corner of the church. Gabriel had offered to go, but with normality returning to the city, and too many people on the lookout for him, she had gone instead, thrilling at the opportunity to play a small part in something as momentous as this. Her entire life she had read about history; today she was actually making some.

She arrived at the confessional and took a seat on the end of a pew lined with subdued worshippers, all staring resolutely at the curtained booths. The walls behind them were painted with an elaborate and vividly imagined mediaeval fresco depicting the day of reckoning. Dr Anata wondered if they would let her jump the queue if they knew she was here to try to avert the very thing they were all staring at. She doubted it. People were funny about queues – even when the end of the world was at stake – so she settled down for a wait. It took a further twenty minutes before she made the short walk of shame and closed the curtain behind her.

Inside, it was cramped and smelled of incense and fear. She perched on a wooden ledge, bringing her face level with the grille.

‘Do you have something to confess?’ a muffled voice prompted.

‘I would like to pass a message to Brother Peacock.’ There was a brief pause, then whoever had been sitting there promptly got up and left without uttering another word.

Dr Anata listened to the sound of retreating footsteps melting into the general hubbub of the huge church. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but this sudden and silent departure certainly wasn’t it. She felt nervous in its wake. As an academic she was wholly unused to situations that placed her at risk and her mind was now in overdrive, imagining all sorts of scenarios involving security guards and brutal interrogation. Only the importance of the message she carried, and everything that hung on its safe delivery, prevented her from slipping away while she still had the chance. A moment later the hiss of the curtain on the other side of the grille told her it was already too late for escape. A different voice spoke, so close it made her jump.

‘I am the emissary of Brother Peacock,’ it said. ‘Do you have a message for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell it to me and I will make sure he gets it – in confidence.’

Dr Anata pulled a sealed envelope from her pocket. ‘I have a letter for him.’

‘Then bow your head before God and pray that he receives it.’

She did as she was asked. A small section of panelling slid open to create a hatch between the two stalls. She reached down and passed the envelope through it. There was a slight tug as it was taken from her, then the hatch slid shut as quickly as it had opened.