Coldbrook

8

Every minute I’ve been out of it, Holly thought as she came around. Every minute, every second, it’s getting worse. The scenes that she had seen in the casting room flashed before her again and again, and before she opened her eyes she saw a parade of dead children and bloodied, blank faces.

Drake Slater was sitting beside her as she surfaced. The fainting fit pulled away quickly, her senses returned, and she realised that she’d received a far lower dose of whatever had knocked her out than she had last time.

‘Nice way of greeting a visitor,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry,’ Drake said, not sounding like he meant it. ‘We’ve grown used to looking after each other.’

‘And you drugged me because I was losing my temper?’ Holly sat up on a cot bed. The room around her was sparse and functional She ran a hand through her knotted hair, wishing for a brush, some shampoo. She was beginning to understand why the people here wore their hair short or in tight braids.

‘Moira heard you say “God”.’

‘Oh?’ She’d already clocked their aversion to the G-word.

‘We’re people of science. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fear the Inquisitor.’

Holly remained silent, hoping that he would continue. And he did.

‘I’m as convinced as I’ll ever be that you’re telling the truth, so. . I suppose that now it’s safe to tell you. There are those who believe that because some of us survived, the Inquisitor will return one day.’ He smiled, with little humour in his expression. ‘It’s the opposite of the old Jesus legend.’

‘This Inquisitor — it’s a legend?’

Drake shrugged. He seemed suddenly nervous again, evasive. So Holly tried another tack.

‘You cast God aside so easily?’

‘Easily?’ Drake asked. ‘Not easily at all, as far as I’m aware. When I was a child God was a comfort to many, though not all. Much like in your world, I suspect. My father was a true believer but, since the Furies, God has been down there with them. And any mention now is an offence.’ He shrugged, at the same time trying to smile.

‘Just because this happened doesn’t mean that He doesn’t exist,’ Holly said.

‘Perhaps in your world. But keep it to yourself. There are people here who’d attack you if they heard that, and some who might even kill you.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Holly shivered.

‘We believe the End was God’s fault,’ Drake said. Holly snorted, but he continued. ‘That’s what most of us believe. It’s what the Coldbrook journals tell us — that the Inquisitor was a servant of God, and it came through to ensure that the Fury plague took our whole world. It oversaw our demise, and then took Coldbrook’s chief with it. To another new world. A new Inquisitor to continue spreading the disease.’

‘The Inquisitor sounds like a ghost.’

‘Most people believe in it.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think God was as much to blame for the Furies as he was for a hundred wars through history.’

‘But that was forty years ago. You’re maybe forty yourself? I haven’t seen anyone here old enough to remember.’

‘There are a few. But blame is handed down through the generations. And there is proof.’

Holly leaned back against the wall, saddened, and convinced more than ever that Drake was only telling her parts of the story.

‘I’d like to know. .’ Drake said, but he trailed off as if he was unsure.

‘Know what?’

‘Where we parted,’ he said. ‘Where our Earths became different possibilities.’

Holly smiled. ‘You’re talking Jonah’s language now.’

‘We seemed to be far ahead of you,’ Drake mused. ‘Our technology a long way further on than yours. Perhaps that’s why the Furies hit us first.’

‘You don’t seem that far ahead,’ Holly said defensively. But then she thought of the casting room, the incredible technology of the mini-black hole, and wondered just how much Gaia had lost.

‘You’re aware of the many-worlds interpretation?’

‘Jonah’s tried explaining it to me. An infinite number of universes, created at every possible quantum event? Everything that could have happened in our history but didn’t has happened in some other universe. Or something.’

‘Every decision, every event, creates another possible universe,’ Drake said.

‘Much more eloquent than me.’

‘So which decision or event separates our Earths?’

‘How can we ever tell?’ Holly asked.

‘It could be something as small as someone turning left instead of right,’ Drake said. He stared at her, his piercing eyes filled with his sense of wonder. Jonah would love him, Holly thought.

‘You had Beethoven?’ she asked. ‘Mozart? Brahms?’

Drake nodded. ‘Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville.’

‘The First World War?’ she asked. ‘Hitler? Nagasaki?’

‘Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman.’

‘The Swinging Sixties?’

‘I’ve read about that,’ Drake said, and Holly could see that he did not understand. How different his forty years must have been here, compared to her thirty-seven years on Earth. So different that she could not count the ways.

‘Kennedy?’ she asked. ‘Led Zeppelin? The Beatles?’

‘“Lucy in the Sky”,’ Drake said. ‘This could take for ever.’ He shook his head, smiling, and his sense of wonder was more visible than ever.

‘Jonah would so love to meet you.’

‘And I him.’ Drake stared at her, more intensely than ever, and for so long that Holly felt the true impact of the distance between them. Then he smiled again, and held her hand.

‘I have more to show you.’

‘I’m not sure that I want to see it.’

‘You have to,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because others here at Coldbrook insist upon it,’ he said. ‘This plague was no accident.’

‘And you have no cure,’ she said. ‘In all these years, has nothing been found?’

‘There have been attempts,’ Drake said. ‘But no cure. I’ve been looking for one all my life. Even Mannan. .’ He trailed off, clenching his hands as if realising his mistake.

‘So many secrets,’ Holly said. ‘What or who is Mannan?’

Drake shook his head slowly. ‘In your world, are there still wars?’

‘Wouldn’t be Earth if that wasn’t the case,’ Holly said.

‘That’s the one thing the furies stopped, at least. There are no more wars, because the whole world’s fragmented and regressed. From here, we sometimes deal with a dozen other communities, some of them quite large. But there is always some risk from the furies. One community gets too close to another, too tied in, and they’ll both go down if the plague catches them out. So isolation is the key to survival.’

‘That excuses secrets?’

‘From you, yes. Of course. You’re not just from another settlement or continent.’

‘Hopeless,’ Holly said.

‘Hope is what keeps some of us alive,’ Drake said, and the sudden passion in his voice was contagious. ‘Much of the world has given up, winding down as much as the furies have. But we still have reason to believe.’

‘In a cure?’ she asked. ‘Something unproven and seemingly beyond your reach? Surely you need proof to believe.’ She didn’t mean to mock him but she was tired and scared, and she didn’t care about Drake’s disquiet. She grasped at her own faith, and it gave her comfort in this strange place, with these strange people.

‘Perhaps,’ Drake said softly. ‘The Inquisitor, have you seen-?’

Someone passed by the open door — a young boy bearing a tray of food and a steaming bowl. Drake glanced over his shoulder, then nudged the door closed.

‘I’m so tired,’ Holly said, leaning back against the wall. She let her eyelids droop and willed her muscles to relax, slumping down, feigning sleepiness when in fact she felt more awake than she had since arriving here through the breach. She wanted to be with Vic and Jonah, she wanted to know that her friends and family were still well, but most of all she wanted to be alone. And then she could decide what to do.

‘I want us to be friends,’ Drake said.

‘We are. .’ she said, her voice slurring. Leave me, she thought. She lowered her head with every breath, and Drake came to her, easing her down onto the cot. His hands lingered on her shoulders, but she kept her eyes closed. He’s touching someone from another world, she thought, realising only moments later that she felt the same.

Holly breathed deeply, concentrating on the fluid movement of the darkness behind her eyelids and wondering whether that was the true space between universes. Even when Drake left the room and closed the door she kept her eyes closed. She prayed into the uniform darkness, silent prayers that banished the gnawing loneliness inside her. She had never been embarrassed by her beliefs, even though there were many among her friends and colleagues who claimed not to understand them. Even that lovely old Welshman was a staunch atheist, and they’d had many long discussions about how she could maintain such faith while remaining a scientist. Just because most things demand proof doesn’t mean that there’s something that never will, she’d say, and Jonah would shake his head and take another sip of his whisky.

She opened her eyes to silence. The room was empty, the oil lamp still alight on a small table beside the door. There’s something deeper, she thought. This Coldbrook was similar to her own in name only, and she knew she had barely touched its surface. She had to get a grip on the place.

Holly stood up and rubbed her eyes. The door was locked. She knelt and examined the lock, then carefully unscrewed the oil-flow control knob on the lamp. She plucked the pin out, and the flame increased in intensity. Kneeling at the lock again, she remembered those old days at university when she was tasked with small engin-eering problems. It’s as important to know how to take things apart as it is to know how to put them together, her lecturer had said. It took her a minute to strip the lock, and a minute more to roll the tumblers and slip back the bolt.

The corridor outside was clear, its wall lamps providing low-level lighting. The floor sloped down to the left, so she went that way, conscious that the air was growing cooler and the lighting fainter. It wasn’t far to the first stairwell and Holly did not hesitate. She went down.

A trickle of water ran along the lower corridor that she soon reached. The floor sloped here as well, and the water seemed to have been flowing for a long time — it had worn a channel at the junction of wall and floor, and she could see mineral deposits below its clear surface. She followed the slope, then paused at an intersection with another, darker corridor. Its wall held only one oil lamp, and beyond this oasis of light the darkness was deeper than ever.

Holly smelled food. Warm, spiced, perhaps a soup. And she remembered the steaming bowl passing the doorway: Drake’s reaction had been cagey — he’d nudged the door closed.

‘There’s someone down here,’ she whispered. As she edged forward, a crack of light appeared under a door in the wall to her left. She heard singing coming from inside.

The voice was low and rumbling, the tune nothing that she had heard before. She wasn’t sure whether it was words or just notes, but the song seemed to settle in her stomach and vibrate there. She paused for a few seconds, then walked on. Why keep someone locked away down here?

Or were they hidden?

Approaching the doorway — seeing the light spilling into the corridor, and sensing the warmth and illumination beyond — Holly thought that perhaps she should have fled at the first chance she’d had. They had saved her life after she’d come through the breach, but everything she’d seen and heard since then had made her more and more uncertain.

She nudged the door open enough to see inside, and gasped. The square room was much larger than she had expected. It was well lit with at least six oil lamps fixed to the walls. The half of the room closest to the door was a living area, with several huge floor cushions bearing the impressions of frequent use, a selection of threadbare rugs covering the floor, and a couple of low, wide tables bearing books and candles. The wall to her right was lined with shelves, bearing books and pictures and other objects that she could not quite make out. There was a distinct dividing line across the room marked by waist-high cabinets, and beyond that was a sleeping area and a table and chairs. The bed was wide and round, scattered with crumpled sheets and blankets, and several pillows that were propped against the side wall. The formal seating area comprised a table and six metal chairs. The walls were lined with dozens of movie posters — Psycho, Once Upon A Time In The West, The Graduate, Peeping Tom — with barely a space showing between them. Some of them seemed to have been drawn upon with elaborate markings, others appeared to have been vandalised with a knife. They were all pre-1972.

The room looked very lived-in. Cared for, but well used, and shockingly normal in many ways. There was one door leading from the back left corner of the room and it hung open, light and steam spilling out from behind it. A man was washing there, and singing while he washed.

Drake was keeping this from me, Holly thought, and that was reason enough for her to stay. She entered the room and pushed the door closed behind her. Crossing the room, dodging books on the floor and several empty cloudy glass bottles with chipped necks, she approached the postered wall. The posters were all old, with tears and worn edges, and many of them had yellowed over time. One was smudged beyond recognition, as though it had been soaked and dried again, the names and the shout-line blurred. Another was stained a rusty red. Blood? But she saw names that she recognised, and familiar faces.

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

Holly jumped and took a few steps back. The singing had stopped.

‘I said, hello,’ the short man said.

‘H-hello.’

‘You must be the next one.’ He was standing in the doorway, steam drifting and swirling around him, a heavy towel tied around his waist. In his right hand he held a smaller towel that he was using to rub and dab at his wet hair. His left hand was missing.

‘Next one?’ Holly said. Why call me that? She glanced at him and then looked away again.

‘You can look, you know,’ he said. He walked into the room and sat on the edge of the circular bed, whose base appeared to be made from chairs with their backs removed.

She glanced at his back and saw a constellation of scars.

‘Would you like some soup?’ He pointed towards the table, where several bowls sat stacked beside a steaming container, and wine bottles caught the light. ‘A drink?’

‘Y-yes, please. Thank you.’

‘Pour some for me, too.’ He draped the towel over his head and continued to rub, tilting his head to the left so that he could use his stump as well.

Holly walked to the table and kept her back to the scarred man. She sniffed a bottle and poured, the ruby fluid splashing into the glasses. She heard him humming as he dried himself. God help me look at this man with kind eyes, she thought, turning around with a glass in each hand.

He threw the small towel onto the bed, then unknotted the towel around his waist and dropped it. Unabashed at his nakedness, he walked past Holly and opened one of the low cabinets that divided the room. Trying not to look, but unable not to, she saw more scars on his right leg, and noticed that a chunk of flesh had been taken from his right buttock, his hip, and his lower back. His shoulder blades were slashed with dark red welts, old and rough. He might have been fifty or sixty — she could not be sure.

He turned back to her as he shook out a pair of trousers. His genitals were intact, but his face was not. She looked from one to the other, and then he grinned.

‘It’s good wine,’ he said, nodding at the bottles. ‘They grow vines up in the mountains, use water lenses to concentrate the weak sunlight. A huge amount of effort for such little gain, but that’s what I love about it so much.’ He seemed to drift away for a beat, staring past her with his one good eye, unaware of his nakedness. ‘But then, you probably know that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, unsure why. She watched him slip into his trousers and button them with one hand, an easy fluid movement that he’d obviously performed many times before. And she knew then that all his old wounds were bites. Some were obvious, like the chunks taken from his hip and buttock, and the garish purple wounds on his legs. Others — the torn cheek and eye, the rash of bubbled flesh across his throat — were not so obvious, but she still thought she could see teeth punctures and track marks. Bites. Many terrible, brutal bites.

‘Your name is. .’ she said, trailing off as he stared at her with frank fascination.

‘I’m Mannan,’ he said, a flicker of doubt furrowing his forehead.

‘Yes,’ Holly said, stepping forward and handing him a glass. He nodded, tipped his glass against hers, and took a small sip.

‘Please,’ he said, pointing at her glass with the stump of his left arm. Healed puncture wounds, skilful surgery, skin folded and stitched. ‘Drink.’

She drank, and it was gorgeous, with a rich fruity depth.

‘This time comes around so quickly,’ Mannan said, draining his glass. ‘I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy it, or that I’m sorry they keep trying. Even though it’s hopeless. Never works.’ He held his glass out to her, requesting a refill. ‘I won’t pretend it doesn’t make me happy.’

Holly filled his glass again. Her heart was thumping now, because something was so wrong here. No cure, Drake had told her, and yet here was a man clothed in bites, a man whose naked parading of his scars had seemed without deliberate design.

‘Your scars,’ she said, looking at him more closely now that he was partially covered. She saw now that some wounds were old — scar tissue forming a hard, ridged landscape of pain — and some more pink, recent. He raised his left arm, and at first she thought he was pointing at something away from them, a map or something else on the far wall. But then he performed a slow circle, arms raised so that she could view each terrible, ugly wound.

‘A yearly test,’ he said. ‘I wear them with pride. They’re evidence of my uniqueness.’

‘You’re immune,’ she said. Drake had kept this from her, a hidden man clothed in fury bites and living a pampered life below ground. And as she thought perhaps she could ask why, Mannan’s expression changed.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘You don’t know of me?’

‘And you haven’t heard everything about me,’ she said, realising that she must be a secret as well. Whatever ‘next one’ meant, it was nothing to do with her.

Mannan threw down his glass. Holly jumped, taking a few steps back until her thighs hit the table. He didn’t take his one-eyed stare from her face, and Holly dared not look away. She could see danger in him as well as pain: her pulse thrummed in her ears, her vision blurred.

‘Last year,’ he said, touching the indentation in his left hip. ‘The year before.’ He held up his stump. ‘They lost control of the fury then, and by the time they smashed its skull it had chewed so hard that my bones fractured and crumbled.’ He touched the stump to the ruined cheek and eye socket. ‘Five years ago. Casey was holding the collar rod, she tripped, it took off part of my face and then turned on her. Drake was holding a dressing to my face, but I had one good eye left. I saw her fall, saw the life go from her eyes. And she stood again, and they fired an arrow through her head. Casey.’ He touched other scars one by one, but no longer relayed their history. Perhaps he was paying homage to Casey as the most important.

They bite him every year, Holly thought, trying to discern his intent. But his ruined face was unreadable, scar tissue having hardened it against the subtleties of expression. He’s immune, and they test him every year.

‘I’m not from your world,’ she said. ‘I came through a breach from somewhere else. A parallel Earth. Another universe.’

‘Whatever,’ he said, his one eye glittering. He grinned again, started singing once more, a wordless tune. Then he cut off his song. ‘One thing I ask, and I ask it of everyone, only when they get down here, though, not so Drake could hear, if Drake knew he wouldn’t approve, so don’t-’

‘No,’ she said, trying to sound strong but hearing only fear in her voice.

‘Don’t interrupt.’ He moved quickly, pinning her back against the table. ‘The one thing I ask is. . when I’m inside you, I like to be bitten.’

She shoved him back, pushing away from the table and heaving with all her strength. Mannan stumbled back against the bed, laughing, touching his scars again, one after the other and perhaps in the order of their annual origins, and as he came at her once more Holly realised that he was down here because he was mad.

She darted to the left, heading for the gap in the room divider, but he was quick, and lithe for his age. He rolled across the bed and jumped over the divider, kicked a floor cushion, tripped her. By the time she’d gained her feet he was at the door. He shoved it closed.

‘Let me out,’ she said.

‘You knew what you were doing, coming down here,’ Mannan said. ‘They told you what you were doing, and what would happen, and that you need my child. So don’t be afraid. I might be scarred up here. .’ He indicated his scars again, that sequence of touches that might have become some kind of personal prayer. ‘But I’m not scarred here.’ He unbuttoned his trousers and wriggled until they dropped. His erection sprang up, and he closed his hand around it, stroking.

Holly thought of Vic and Jonah and the others at Coldbrook, and she felt certain that they were dead. If they were still alive, how could this be happening to her? How could she be so alone and so threatened, here in the depths of another Coldbrook?

‘I told you, I’m not from here,’ she said. Her voice shook.

Mannan came forward, a monster from the mind of Goya.

Holly looked at his erection and smiled. He chuckled back at her — and she kicked him between his legs as hard as she could. He gasped in shock, then screamed louder in agony, and for a crazy moment she wanted to stay and apologise. But he grabbed for her foot, and when she took one step away from him she found it easier to take another.

‘One more scar, fucker,’ she said. Then she ran.