Coldbrook

9

‘I am the Inquisitor,’ the voice said, ‘and you will be the same.’

Jonah opened his eyes and looked around his room. Nothing.

‘See what we have done,’ the man said. Jonah tried to sit up, but there was a pressure on his shoulders, pushing him back down. That flailing red organ was pressing against his head once more. The Inquisitor was standing behind his bed, upside down in his vision and even more grotesque.

He sees people on a beach and drowning in the emerald sea, trying to escape the deadly tide from inland.

‘A living history of the greatest Inquisition,’ the man said, lifting the orb away momentarily. Jonah gasped as he was pulled from the dream, glimpsing once again that smudged tattoo on the Inquisitor’s arm. He felt around on the bed for his gun, his finger brushed cold metal, and-

He looks across the countryside at a farm, where cattle lie dead and bloated in untended fields and winged things swoop in to chew on them, carrion creatures almost the size of the cattle themselves, their auburn and white fur glimmering with wet blood.

‘And your world now needs you to write its final book.’ The Inquisitor was beside the bed now, sticky wet mask held inches from his face. He pressed forward with the thing in his other hand one more time. Jonah lifted the gun. The Inquisitor moved swiftly, knocking the weapon back onto the bed, and Jonah felt those tendrils kissing his temple again, wondering if he was already dead. .

Eight people rush across red sands, eight hundred follow, and it is the living who will lose this race. .

Men and women with pronounced brows, wide faces, and more hair than anyone he has ever seen pursue the uninfected past a high bamboo wall. .

Thousands of dead bob in the ocean, clawing at the hull of a ship drifting in their midst. .

Biting, screaming, dying, rising, he saw it all, realising that much of what he was seeing was not from this world but another.

And he had the dreadful sense of another mind existing alongside his own, believing that this all constituted a great cleansing.

When the Inquisitor finally left him and Jonah sat up, he raised the gun and lifted it towards his head, remembering his father’s face and the strength he had given his son. ‘I am being strong,’ he said, but something knocked the gun aside. He tried again, and it happened once more. There was nothing in the room with him. The muscles in his arm flexed, the skin was depressed as though squeezed by fingers, and for all the world he would have loved to believe it was Wendy insisting that he remain alive.

But he knew that was a lie.