Vivisepulture (43 page)

What was out there?  

Was that Rob, dead and parched and cracked and hungry?  Was that Tari, corpse or victim or scrabbling for help?  

I couldn’t leave Lyn!

But--!

The indecision was timeless, breathless – I felt as though the world were spinning round me, oblivious of the tumult that thundered in my temples, roiled in my throat.

I was going to puke.

Then, in a snap decision that roared silent defiance, I lunged for the hatchway between living room and kitchen.  Poker at the ready, I shoved open the doors.

Oh yeah?  Come on then!

The kitchen was dark; the only light the LED on the microwave that told me it was 3:29.  I stared though the hatch for a moment, was about to turn away when the noise came again, a plastic clattering, back and forth.

For a split-second, my heart screamed in my chest.  Something moved, swift and close to the floor.

Shit!

Then Lyn’s little grey cat, creatively called Smoke, blinked at me and meowed for food.

Letting out my breath in a gasp, I swore softly – relief flooding me like warm water.  My knees folded.  I was staggered, almost laughing – damned beast!  The cat was a jittery creature at best and, where there was Smoke, there was unlikely to be fire – or the zombified bloody remains of its family.  

My own ghastly pun made me laugh, teetering on the edge of hysteria.  Fighting for control, I pulled the hatch shut – didn’t want its open blackness behind me – and turned back to the sofa.

Get a grip, Kate!

“Lyn?”

The little girl was glued to her DVD.

I’d not seen this one before, and I blinked at it, slightly confused – it seemed like an odd choice for the girl who played Princesses.  On the screen, bright and raw with colour, there was a great battle, a harsh clamour of detonation, a rage of silver machines.

But Lyn wouldn’t take her eyes from it; she followed its every flicker and flinch, the doll clutched hard to her chest.

I said again, oddly nervous, “Lyn?”  She didn’t react.  “You should probably turn that off, now, love, it’s very late.”

She muttered sulky refusal and gripped the doll tighter.  As I came closer, the plasma-light was shining from its face.  It seemed to be looking at me.

Eyes cold as steel; hard as an edge.

Bright as a blade.

The world shrank to a single, sharp focus.

The bloody
doll.

A flicker of elation thrilled my nerves; chased the fear right down to my tingling fingertips.  Whatever the hell all this was, it had something to do with the
doll,
the doll and the harsh lights of the cartoon…

The lights in Lyn’s skin.  

The lights in Rob’s eyes.

I was shivering now, tension rising, a fusion of terror and realisation.  As the little girl yawned and snuggled lower under the duvet, the war-light played across her face.  Something in my head screamed at me,
‘Don’t let her go to sleep!’

It was strident, loud as shriek, but it still didn’t quite make sense – not yet.  Groping for an elusive, impossible truth, I stood in the centre of the room, iron poker forgotten, bright animation glaring from the television screen.  

The doll.  The lights.  Don’t let her sleep.

What the hell had happened to Rob?

Lyn yawned again; wriggled further down.  Her thumb was in her mouth and her eyelids were closing.  Her other hand huddled the doll, close as a parasite.

The lights were playing in its face just like they’d played in the girl’s skin; a horrifying familiarity.

I swallowed, hard.  Tried to concentrate.

My head was full, full of panic and insight and disbelief and growing certainty.  I shook Lyn’s little form, shook her harder.  “Lyn?  Love?  You need to stay awake, now, there’s a good girl.  I’ll get you that squash you wanted.  Maybe there’re some biscuits, hm?  Good girl, wake up now.”

Don’t let her sleep!

Trembling, I lunged for the light-switch, flooding the room and making her blink.  Grumpily, she sat up, rubbing her eyes.  Her lower lip quivered and her little face started to screw up – but something in me shrank from touching her again.

I held her as a baby, I remember… 

I knew I should go and get her food – sugar, anything to keep her up.  An answer was growing in me; a rise of energy and fight, but the pieces were not all there, not yet.  I knew only that she mustn’t sleep.  Whatever dream that damned doll had planted in her head, in her skin, it must not be let loose.

Or it would drag me down,
tabula rasa.  

The thought made me feel sick.  

The idea of the little girl left here on her own, with the doll, made me feel even sicker.

What the hell would happen?  There’d be no-one here to care for her.  And what if she and her doll and her nightmare got
out?

Jesus!

I knew it didn’t make sense, but I didn’t care, I didn’t
care
.  How long could I keep her awake?  Today, tomorrow?  How long before she started to hallucinate? 

And what would
that
do?

What the hell had she done with her parents?

I desperately needed help but had no clue where to look…

Jesus H Christ and little fucking fish, this is madness!

My phone was in the bag of overnight things I’d brought from home – but who the hell did I call?  

I gripped the poker like an anchor for my sanity.  I was starting to wish it had been a bloody zombie infestation after all – hell, I’d seen enough movies to know how to cope with that one.

“Stay with me, Lyn, c’mon now.”  Sparking my courage, I shook her again.  “Sit up now.  You can’t sleep, there’s a good girl.  Come with me into the kitchen and we’ll find some biscuits.”

If the girl went to sleep, the nightmare would be loosed.  I’d up like Rob – brain-wiped and staring, the flickers of lights in my eyes the only hint that I’d ever had life…

Shit!

The thought made me retch; there was a mouthful of sickness and I swallowed bile
.  I have to get help.  I can’t leave her alone!
  My throat burned with fear.  

I rallied, shook her again, started to strip the blanket from her and make her sit up.  “Lyn!  Come on, now!”

Don’t sleep.  C’mon, little one, don’t sleep.  Don’t do this to me!

She started crying, fought me to stay under her covers.  When I tried to take the doll from her, she gripped it like a lifeline and her face creased round a full-on howl.  

The doll…

The damn thing was
warm
.  Not flesh-warm, it was smooth, more like heated metal.  Its material reflected the light of the television screen; the battle had gathered in the needles of its sewn-on eyes.

Oh, this was just too fucking much.  Annoyed, freaked, I let go of the doll and grabbed the remote.  Turned the DVD off.

Right then!  Enough!

The film didn’t stop.

Oh, no, no, no, no…

There on the flatscreen, the conflict continued, explosion and fury, flooding the room with harsh angles of rage.  Sounds of gunfire and combat clashed in my ears, surely louder than they had been, surreal and all-encompassing.  On the screen, there were huge, lumbering animations, grey and shining like the doll in the little girl’s hands.  Their light raced round the room like the headlights of the car that had passed earlier, like the maddened moths upstairs.

And somewhere, I could hear Tari screaming.

The sane part of my mind bawled that this was impossible, ridiculous; I jabbed the button repeatedly as if determination alone could shut the damn thing down – then dropped the remote altogether and slammed the poker into the television’s ‘off’ button.

Nothing happened.

“Stop, damn you, stop!  For God’s sake!”

I wasn’t even aware I’d spoken aloud.  The room was alive with it now, the figures on the screen were reflecting around the walls, dancing massive, like shadows in firelight.  I could hear Tari calling me, “Kate!  Kate!”  The figures flickered, fought, raged and detonated – the sounds swum for a moment and then snapped sharply into focus. 

“Katy-Kat, I’m here!”

The battle was all round me.

I could hear screaming, voice and engine and tortured metal.  I could hear orders barked in a harsh, female tone.  The machines were close now, grinding and massive, ever more real – almighty versions of the grey doll that Lyn still clutched to her skin.  

Lyn!

I remembered where I was, shook the images from my head, fought to breathe, to think, to reach the surface.

On the sofa – yes, there
was
room, a sofa, a fireplace – the little girl was asleep, her body slumped and her skin blazing with her dreaming, with the fight that now raged around me, around the room.  “Lyn!”  I was aware that I was screaming at her, my burning throat was full of the noise. Her nightmare was manifest; she shone with brilliant, angular animation.  As I touched her, she made my hand tingle with electrostatic shock.  

I didn’t care.  I shook her harder, was screaming in her face.  Fell to my knees beside the sofa, though the room swam round me. 
“Lyyynnnn!”

The doll’s stitched eyes shone cold.

Lyn didn’t move, was barely breathing.  Her skin was alive, a kaleidoscope of motion, some huge tattoo of light that writhed across her body and face, reflected out into the room.  She was node and projector, nexus and focus – the screaming colours that pulsed and exploded in her skin were the warfare that now thundered around my ears.

As I shook her, her eyes snapped open – windows onto madness.

I heard Tari again, calling me desperately, pleading.

I tried to call back through the noise, to hold onto the sofa. “Tari!”  Around me, rising smoke, the stamping ankles of the huge machines, the stumbling human figures that were now surrounding me, coughing and crying, groping through the carnage.  Did I know them – faces familiar, there for a second, then lost in the smoke?

There!

There was Rob, there was Tari, stumbling and hopeless.  They were caught, held in line by some harsh-voiced, decorated officer.  I tried to reach them, but the smoke swirled, blinding and choking me, and they were gone.

I shrieked, “Tareeeeeee!”

As if in response to her mother’s name, Lyn’s head swivelled like an automata, her eyes blazed with live horror.  The doll in her arms was smiling at me; it had teeth like the cat’s.

Got you.  Just like the others.  You’ll fight for us now.

I tried to reach for it, dash it away, but the little girl started to stand up, her eyes alight with fire and machine.  She held the doll close and her skin blazed higher, her hair stood out like a nimbus.  The room spun harder.

Sleepwalking.  Jesus.

Somehow, I hung on to the sofa like a woman drowning in madness.  For Tari, for Rob, for little Lyn.  The television was still that way, over there; the poker was still in my other hand.  

Cold iron.  Anchor.  

This is beyond insane!  I will not believe this!

Was I there, on the carpet?  Slumped like Rob had been?  Was the girl’s living nightmare even now sucking my mind from my body?  My body into the dream?

If I touched her, would I too, vanish into this world of warfare and never be seen again?

With a banshee-like shriek, the last yowl of the damned, I threw the poker at the television, watched the image shatter into a thousand tumbling fragments.

Shards of light, spinning out into the darkness. 

The machine-world around me shattered, the sounds exploded into a flare of white noise.

But the madness barely flickered.  My sight cleared and the screen was undamaged; the climatic stamp of the machines unabated.

“No!”

The war still roared, the smoke still seethed, the room still spun, the little girl held her doll.  They stood in the centre of a battlefield that defied my human mind in its power and scale.

Fading fast now, lost in a dream, I saw the poker rebound and tumble slowly, end over end, though the smoky air.

It seemed to fall forever.

My anchor.  My sanity.

My world had shattered like thin glass.  My friends had been swallowed alive by this nightmare horror, and it had taken me too.

The sofa was gone from my grasp, spinning away; the gentle sanity of Tari’s house swirled into the smoke and was gone.

The machines screamed round me.

Stumbling, blinking, I picked up a sidearm.

But when I raised it to my shoulder and turned back to Lyn – a last, desperate measure – even she had gone.

And there was only the war.

The little girl called Lyn woke on the sofa.

The house was quiet, the morning sun shone behind the living room curtains and Smoke was standing on his hind paws, buffeting her hand.  He meowed again.

Lyn fussed his ears.  He purred, but his meow was most determined.  It was breakfast time.

“Mummy?”

Sitting up, Lyn saw that the television was smashed into pieces and she shrank back, pulling the duvet round her tightly.

“Mummy?”  Louder this time.

The house was silent.

“Daddy?  Aunty Katy?”

Scared now, Lyn huddled, holding her new doll tightly to her.  Daddy had found it, it had come in a packet with a new DVD – he’d said something about a man who was selling them from the back of his car.  Helen had one, next door; Dawn, a little further up the road.  Zizi and Sean had them too, they’d been playing Robot Machines in the playground.

Lyn looked at the doll.

Its eyes were shining at her.  It was warm, comforting.  With it held to her, she was able to face the smashed television and the quiet and get up.  Smoke padded after her, still meowing.

Somewhere in her head, Lyn could hear Aunty Katy, calling frantically between sobs. 
Please,
she was saying,
please.  I know you can still hear me…