THEY WERE DEEP in the trees that led to the forest. Rain had filled the land, stirring up the odors of earth and wood, and the stones gleamed with the clean smells of slate and moss.
“Wait,” said Sep, rolling to a halt. “What about Mario?”
“What about him?” Lamb shouted over her shoulder.
“I’ve just realized—we’ve left him with a dying animal.”
Arkle jingled up beside Sep. “So?” he said. “He’s a vet.”
“Don’t you see? We keep getting attacked by dead animals—what if the stag dies then comes back to life? He’ll be trapped in there with it!”
“Oh,” said Hadley.
“I need to warn him,” said Sep, wiping his brow. Blood from his severed finger spilled down his face.
“Holy shit!” said Arkle. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah . . .” Sep blinked slowly. “But I probably need to wrap this up before I pass out. I can get a bandage in the clinic.”
“You’re going on your own?”
“I won’t be—Mario will be there. Then I’ll come and meet you at the edge of the wood, just before the ravine.”
They looked uneasy.
“You want me to come with you?” said Arkle. “In case, you know, you pass out again.”
Hadley nodded. “I’d come, but you’d have to carry me twice as far then.”
“She can ride with me,” said Mack, and even in the throes of everything, Sep felt a stab of jealousy in his stomach.
“Cool,” he said as Hadley climbed from his saddle and up behind Mack. “I’ll check on Mario, bandage this, and come straight after you.”
He tried not to think of his fox, but hoped, hoped, that it was dead and quiet, and wouldn’t open glowing eyes once the crabs had finished.
“This way’s quickest; it’ll only take a few minutes.”
“For you maybe,” said Arkle, angling the tiny bike downhill. “I’m riding Twinkle Snowdrop here. That’s got to be tough,” he added once they were away from the others, speeding toward the back of the town.
“What?” said Sep.
“Watching your girl ride off with another man?”
“She’s not my girl.”
“She is—she’s got a geek-on for you. I told you.”
“Shut up.”
“Dude, I’m—”
“Shut up.”
They rode in silence for a minute, picking their way carefully between the roots and stones, until they emerged onto the road beside the graveyard.
“It’s so creepy. Jesus, it’s so creepy,” said Arkle, crossing the street onto the other side, away from the tall dark gates.
“There’s nobody here,” said Sep. “Don’t worry.”
“Nobody alive!” said Arkle, looking through the dark layers of neatly stacked headstones. “What if, you know, like, Roxburgh or—”
“It’s fine—the gates are locked.”
“What if they’re gate-opening zombies?” said Arkle, the tassels on his handlebars fluttering as he sped up.
“Stop saying—” Sep began.
He looked into the darkness of the graveyard, and felt the vast pull of its reservoir of decay. He imagined what might happen if the box were to grow further in strength—if it could reach its vile power into this space—and felt a surge of deep, dark sadness overwhelm him.
He pedaled after Arkle as fast as he could, and a moment later they arrived at the little row of shops, leaning their bikes silently in the shadows.
“I’m cacking myself,” said Arkle matter-of-factly. “Like, seriously—I think my guts have given up. I can’t hack this. I know you’re a crab-fighting zombie-whisperer now, but some of us have delicate bowels.”
“I’ll be quick, then we’ll get to the box as fast as we can,” said Sep as they tiptoed toward the clinic’s front door.
The blood was running freely from his finger. He breathed in, and felt light-headed, as though he were being carried in strong hands.
“Wait here,” he said.
Arkle grabbed his arm. “Here?” he whispered. “Here?”
“Yeah. I’ll only be a minute.”
“But—the—”
“You need to keep an eye on the bikes—if anything happens to them, we’re screwed.”
“God, I wish I had another cigarette,” said Arkle, kicking the fence and wrapping his arms around his chest.
Sep crept inside the silent, pitch-dark reception, ghosted across the floor, and tentatively edged open the door to the operating room.
He strained his deaf ear, pressing his tongue into the bloody space in his gums—but there was nothing. No noise, no breathy whisper.
But the door had been open, and Mario always locked up. Always.
So he was still here.
With a sickening twist in his stomach, Sep took a deep breath and moved into the room.
The stag was on the table. Its enormous legs were spindling off the sides, bones splintered like wood, hooves resting on the floor. The room was boiling, and Sep gagged on the hot stink of fresh blood, dark puddles of it pooled on the floor.
His finger was throbbing, waves of pain roaring through his arm with pressure and heat, the severed tip burning in the air. He fought back a swell of nausea. He had to cover the wound, get some kind of antiseptic on it before it became infected—if an infection moved into his blood, he could get septicaemia. Fever.
Death.
Swallowing the lump of his fear, Sep tried the light switch, easing it over noiselessly, and then flicking it up and down with despair when it clicked emptily, leaving the room drenched in shadows that were large and dark and altered beyond recognition. He looked, concentrated: the cabinet, the scales, Mario’s chair, the drawers of paper files, the shelves of tinctures and medicines on the wall.
And the stag, gigantic in the small room—a part of the outside world brought where it didn’t belong, the edges of its bulk bleeding into the darkness. Beneath the sharpness of its blood it stank of sweat and a dirty, wild musk, and Sep felt an ancient terror creep through his bones as he approached it, screaming at him to run.
But he felt more blood run from his wound.
It needed a dressing; otherwise he’d eventually lose consciousness. He spotted the little box—top shelf on the other side of the room—and took a step toward it. The shadows moved as he did, turning around him in the dim glow from the street.
The stag’s ears shifted suddenly in the lights of a passing car, and he leaped back, thinking for a moment the beast had cocked them with living instinct. But as the lights spun away, the giant ears remained still, and he breathed again.
Pocketing the antiseptic, Sep moved until he was level with the animal’s head. Its eyes were huge, bulbous and dark, and still shiny. The tongue was stuck out between the teeth—a great curtain of stinking meat from which hung thick drool in a stalactite of gray thread. Close to, the antlers were enormous, a bark-textured cage of short points, like blades sprung from the boughs of an oak.
Fascinated, he leaned toward the animal, for a fraction of a second forgetting where he was and why, fear nudged aside by the creature’s immensity and presence, and as he crouched down he noticed the other shadow, the one that wasn’t visible from the door, the one that didn’t fit into his memory’s roll call of fixtures and furniture. A motionless body, huge and round, faceup and still—one hand reaching for the table leg, the other clasped to its throat.
And a huge mop of dark curly hair.
“Mario?” he said breathlessly. “Oh—oh my God, Mario, oh Jesus Christ, no—”
He grabbed the table for support, then staggered back, blinked away tears, and took a deep breath of the stinking air.
The throat under Mario’s hand was grossly distended, like a stuck frog bubble, and the veins along its side were dark and vivid and thick as worms. Blood had spilled from his mouth.
Fighting against his own body, Sep forced himself up and reached for his friend.
The stag bellowed and rose from the table, its shattered legs scrabbling for purchase. It swung its head around, catching Sep’s shoulder with the spike of its antlers and knocking him into the cabinet, which fell onto Mario’s prone corpse. Sep cried out as his skin burst on the antler’s points, then he dove away and backed into the corner.
The stag reared up, its broken bones splintering like glass, and Sep looked at it in horror: its chest cavity was gaping and wide, split open and glistening, the little clamps on its severed arteries chiming as they swung. The animal was dead, torn open, and empty, but it lashed wildly at him and howled in rage.
It reared again with a sound like tearing meat, and as he ducked from the antlers, Sep realized the animal was splitting apart under its own weight.
He heaved until he saw spots, and lifted the cabinet free, but was caught again by the stabbing antlers, and as he fell backward the cabinet landed on Mario again with a metallic crash. A drawer slid out, fluttering index cards onto the congealing blood, and as Sep watched their paper darken, he felt his head spinning with nausea once more, the pain from his finger lighting his arm with bursts of fire.
The stag was between him and the door. Mario’s body was crushed. There wasn’t anything else he could do but run.
He grabbed the points of the antlers and held them as far from himself as he could. The stag roared, throwing back its head so that its mouth was in Sep’s face, the air of its throat hot in his eyes, flecks of blood pattering his cheeks. He pushed back, driving the animal’s head away, shocked at the strength of its neck and its kicking limbs, and it bellowed as it tried to reach him.
Sep slipped in blood, righted himself and slipped again, holding the antlers above his head like a trophy—when something at ground level caught his eye.
Mario’s mouth was moving. First a twist of lip, then a burst like pus from a wound, leaving the skin suddenly loose beneath the packed thing that had spilled outward: a dark shape, cloaked in a sac of glistening mucus.
Sep screamed.
Barnaby unfurled on Mario’s chest, his little limbs popping back into shape as he stood upright and turned to Sep with shining green eyes.
He had climbed inside Mario’s throat and choked him to death. Mario, Sep’s protector and friend; Mario, who had nothing to do with any of this.
Sep screamed again as the little bear ran at him, and as he stood up to run the stag pulled back its head, readying the antlers to strike. But as the deadly points swung toward him, he ducked, saw them swipe past his head and catch Barnaby like a fly in a web.
Sep landed on something hard and square and, rolling away, saw it was Mario’s Dictaphone.
He grabbed it, and turned to see Barnaby writhing in the antlers’ cage as the stag tossed its head again, its eyes like green fire.
And just as he gasped with relief, he saw Mario’s ruined body shift on the floor, the green-eyed head turning to look at him.
Sep threw himself into the chip shop, away from the trapped, bloody heat and toward the only door that wasn’t locked with a key—the cold store.
But the slick blood on his hands made his fingers slip from the numbers on the little lock, and as he wiped his fingers dry on his jeans to try again, he realized his mind was blank—he couldn’t remember the code.
The door to the operating room opened behind him, and Sep saw two green glowing specks of light reflected in the brushed steel of the door.
“It’s your birthday,” he said under his breath as the Mario-thing shuffled toward him on heavy, dragging feet. “We stayed late and had pizza; we always have pizza on your birthday—”
The thing moved around the counter.
“And it’s Greece’s day—”
He gasped as thick fingers touched his bare arm—and he remembered.
“The twenty-fifth! Your birthday is the twenty-fifth of March!”
He punched in the digits and ran inside, felt the wind of the grabbing arms brush his skin, and as Mario’s body thumped loosely on the door, Sep covered his face with his hands and wept.
The cold store was dark, but for the dim glow of streetlights coming through the old window in the roof, its glass shrouded in a thick fabric of cobweb.
“Mario,” Sep whispered, listening to the big hands move on the door and looking in despair at his cell. “Jesus Christ, Mario . . . Jesus Christ, I can’t—”
Then he remembered Arkle, sitting cross-legged in Lamb’s living room. He turned up to the skylight, and took a deep breath.
“Mario goes bad,” he said. “The hero escapes by climbing.”
He put a foot on the empty bottom shelf to haul himself up.
Then realized it wasn’t empty.
A dog, green eyes slitting open, had shifted its head to look at him, and there were countless more eyes—smaller and sharper and rounder—behind it.
The door thumped again.
“Oh, come on!” Sep shouted, kicking away the lunging mouth and scrambling onto the next shelf.
Teeth locked on to his jeans, and something—some long, cold thing—began to drag itself slowly up his leg. He looked down and saw a pair of the tiny green eyes inching toward his face, and felt long-toed feet drag over his legs. With a sinking heart Sep recognized the shape of Mr. Snuggles.
The iguana hissed, and Sep realized that not only would he die if he stayed still, but his death would be slow and painful.
And his body would be eaten by a costumed zombie iguana.
“Bollocks to that,” he said, and heaved up with all his strength, touched the window, and pushed. It was locked fast by paint and time and rust. He pushed harder, hammered with his fist, heard it begin to give.
The door cracked with the force of Mario’s weight.
Sep hammered again, harder and harder until the glass shattered and fell, and he pulled himself through the empty frame, knocking the lizard to the floor just as the Mario-thing roared into the dark space behind him.