Chapter Thirty-Seven

All Souls

 

 

31st October – 1st November 2016

 

THE RED MAN let out a cry; he swayed, staggered, fell to one knee. A grinding sound issued from his head.

Arodias raised an eyebrow. “Ah,” he said, and turned back to Alice with a shrug. “That’s the only problem with tools, of course,” he told her. “Sooner or later, they wear out or break. But when that happens, all one need do is discard them. And then, manufacture a replacement.”

He walked over to the Red Man and kicked him once. The Red Man cried out and keeled over. The children moved; Arodias took a step towards them and they recoiled. “Still afraid of me,” he said. “And they could do nothing to harm me in any case.”

“Are you sure of that?” asked Alice.

Arodias studied her. “One thing I have noticed about women,” he sighed. “They always think they understand everything, when they understand nothing. But please go on, Miss Collier. Amuse me. Tell me what it is you think you know that I don’t.”

“You’re a man again,” she said, “but that’s all. You don’t have any great powers.” She nodded to the pool. “I had to restore you to how you were before. So I did. You’re just a mortal man again, Mr Thorne. No immortality. No special powers. Just yourself.”

“Just myself? That was more than enough to get me here,” he reminded her. “And do you really think you can keep me from that spring? Even if those pathetic little wraiths took a hand in things, you couldn’t prevent me. I have fought too long and too hard. I’ve earned this. I will drink from the spring, and I will claim it – claim the Fire Beyond as I did before. And this time – this time – there won’t be any mistakes.”

Mistakes? Still he didn’t really understand. The spring amplified what was already there: it wasn’t any weakness of his cast-iron will, but his selfishness and greed that had warped him into the Beast. It was only a matter of time before it happened again – and what happened then? The Red Man, repaired or replaced, would go in search of another like her. And until the Beast overwhelmed him again, Arodias would find new ways to prey upon the world, and when he’d devolved once more the Red Man would try to contain his excesses. More death, more suffering, added to the bill.

“No,” she said, “there won’t be any mistakes. Because you won’t be there to make them.”

Alice hadn’t opened her fist since she’d closed it while restoring Arodias. Now she opened it, and something lay in the palm of her hand. Just one more thing, she’d thought, and here it was. She took it between finger and thumb and held it up: a tiny vial of glass, with a blue glass stopper. Filled with a fine white powder like caster sugar.

“Oh?” Arodias chuckled. “Now what’s this? Poison, Miss Collier?”

“It isn’t –”

“Let me guess, you plan to throw it in the spring?”

“ –poison, Mr Thorne.”

“One swallow of the water and I’d heal myself with a thought – not poison? Do tell, then? What is it? This is, I take it, the fearsome weapon with which you intend to destroy me?”

“It’s time, Mr Thorne. That’s all there is in here.”

Arodias smirked, but there was a little less certainty in it than there had been before. “Time? What are you –”

She nodded toward the spring. “That isn’t really water. It’s something else, put into a form we can understand. Some things here are what they are, and other ones are something else. Yes?”

Arodias didn’t answer. Alice shook the vial. “You’re just a man again, Mr Thorne; an ordinary mortal man. An ordinary mortal man who would by now be... let’s see...” Alice thought back to the dates on the plaque in St Thomas’ Church “... about two hundred and thirty-eight years old. Men don’t live that long, Mr Thorne.”

Arodias’ smile faded.

“So I had to stop you ageing. Oh, I took that effect away from you, but I did keep it. This is a rather nice little symbol, don’t you think? The dust in here is time: all the time you should have aged since you ‘died’ back in 1851. It can’t affect you, of course. Not as long as this vial’s intact.”

Arodias wasn’t smiling at all now; Alice thought she saw a muscle twitch in his cheek, and his thin lips were compressed, growing white.

“But if this glass breaks,” she said, “and it is very thin glass, then all that time will find its way to you. All those years will fall on you, and in seconds. In far less time than it will take you to reach that spring, Mr Thorne.”

Arodias looked from her to the blue flames flickering on the surface of the pool. Here it was, all he desired, almost within arm’s reach. Could it really be that this woman could deny him that?

“So,” he said, “what do you propose? Safe passage? The Red Man to escort you back to where you came, free what’s left of your... friend... from the Moloch Device? Very well.”

“No,” she said. Not because his proposal was insincere – although of course it was, he would break his word in a moment. Not even because he would feel safer, but purely because it would amuse him. She remembered what they’d found in the chambers below the house, what Mary Carson, the children, the apprentices in Thorne’s mills, had suffered at his hands. Arodias Thorne was living proof that a human being could be beyond all hope of redemption.

“No?” said Arodias. He was very still, his posture close to crouching. A cat ready to spring.

“No,” she said. “No deals, Mr Thorne. I just wanted you to know.”

Arodias leapt at her with a roar.

Alice pressed thumb and finger together, and the shell-thin glass splintered and broke.

The white dust hissed out in a stream like smoke. Defying gravity, it didn’t drift down or dissipate: it shot through the air like a vaporous arrow towards Arodias Thorne, and struck him.

He screamed and fell before reaching her, fell writhing to the ground. The Red Man stood; the children rushed forward, gathered to watch.

His hair greyed and whitened. His face seamed, thinned, stretched tight on the bone. Cataracts exploded in his eyes like pale dead stars. His hands became clawed, then knobbled with arthritis.

And then age was joined by decay, even while he lived and screamed. Green and black stains spread across his flesh, rotted into holes. Maggots teemed in his flesh, darkened into pupae, exploded into flies that swarmed upon him and fell dead even as their children boiled out of the rot they’d battened on. Flesh fell off, peeled away, liquefied. His scream split his decaying cheeks wide and they slid off to make his face a laughing skull from the nose down. His screams gurgled, then perished as his throat rotted. But still what had been Arodias Thorne moved, while the muscles and tendons were still there to twitch the bones, until they fell away and became a tar-black stain on the grass of Collarmill Height.

The stain faded, steamed and dried. The bones beneath twitched a few more times, though what could have moved them Alice didn’t know. The jawbone worked as if Arodias was still trying to scream, and then was still. The bones bleached white, grew porous, cracked and collapsed. In seconds there was only dust: fine, white dust, like the powder in the vial.

The wind blew over Collarmill Height, and cleaned the dust away.

Alice brushed crumbs of glass from thumb and forefinger. She heard the children laugh, but when she looked up they were gone.

Done. Arodias was gone; the children were free. Now: Emily. She stepped towards the spring.

“Alice.”

A hand seized her wrist.

She turned. “Let me go!”

The Red Man was swaying. As she watched, he fell to one knee, then forced himself to his feet again. “I am dying,” he said. “When Arodias goes, so do I. That is how I was built.” His other hand extended, to point at the spring. “But first I will keep my word.”

“No,” she shouted, “wait –”

The flames on the water surged up, brightened. A pillar of fire. So bright Alice could barely look upon it.

“I will keep my word,” he said again.“Wait!”

But the Red Man walked into the fire, dragging her after him.

 

 

DARKNESS, BROKEN BY lantern-light and a chill blue glow; a smell of dirt and damp. Water running; a man’s voice whimpering in agony.

Alice opened her eyes. In front of her was the Moloch Device, and John. Or what remained of him. “Oh God.”

“Step aside,” that four-toned voice called behind her. She obeyed: looking back, she saw the Red Man standing in the pool, in the column of fire. He raised a shaking hand and pointed; the Moloch Device grated and ground to a halt. Then its blades and hooks and heated wires peeled outwards, its clamps opened and its straps snapped, and finally the chair itself shattered, splintered in two from top to bottom. And John fell, torn and bleeding, barely recognisable, to the floor, moaning.

“The water,” said the Red Man. There was effort in his voice and every line of him as he stood in the Fire Beyond. “Give him the water... heal.”

The water was on fire. Blue fire. Alice ran to it, caught it in cupped hands, ran to John as he rolled onto his back, his mutilated lips gasped. She poured it between his lips; the blue fire lit the shattered cavern of his mouth. He coughed, choked, spluttered – but the water went down.

The chamber shook and rumbled; a thin stream of dust poured down from above. Alice looked up, but couldn’t see if the ceiling had cracked or not.

“Alice?”

She looked down. John blinked up at her – unwounded, unhealed. “What the fuck?” he said at last.

The Fire Beyond still danced on the water. There was still time; a mouthful was all she’d need. Alice lunged for the water – but in the second she did, the flames flickered out. “No!”

She scrabbled at the water as if she could dig the fire back out, but there was nothing. She gulped a handful of it, but it was only water, cold and metallic-tasting. There was, maybe, just the faintest flicker of the power it had held seconds before, but it was a ghost; the ocean wouldn’t come. “Emily,” she said, in little more than a whisper.

“Go,” gasped the Red Man. “Quickly.”

John grabbed her arm; she pulled him to his feet and they ran for the tunnel. He went quickly: he had only the memory of pain to haunt him now. Rubble crashed behind them.

“Here!” John shouted. “Come on.”

He pushed her to the rungs in the wall. She climbed up through the shaft, the rust gritting under her fingers.

Dim light at the top: she could barely see it for her tears. She reached it: yes, it was her kitchen floor, complete with gaping hole. The house shuddered and a stench of brick dust came billowing up the shaft. “John?”

“I’m here, I’m here.” He scrambled to the top. She caught his hands and helped drag him out.

The house shook again. The floor tilted. Clouds of dust. Screams. She dragged John towards the door.

Then the dust was falling, and so were they.

And after that, nothing.

 

 

MORNING. BIRDSONG. LIGHT.

Alice opened her eyes, stared at laminated wood. Something soft and warm pressed against her back. It snored softly. Then grunted. “Alice?”

“John.” She got to her knees, then stood, wincing. Then she went through into the kitchen.

The floor was level and unbroken. The sink unit was undamaged, and no fire had marked the table or the ceiling. The camera stood in its corner; it was intact, but its light was out.

Outside, there was a blue, open sky and the sunlit yard. Squinting at the glare, Alice thought she saw a group of figures outside the window: small ones, gathered round a taller one robed in red. But when she rubbed her eyes and focused again, the yard was bare.

On Collarmill Road, an engine growled and a car passed by. There were voices, the clatter of boots on cobbles; the laughter of children.

But one child’s laughter was missing. I could have restored it, Alice thought. I could have brought her back.

But the chance had gone. Even if she brought workmen and drills, tore up the floor, she knew she wouldn’t find the spring again.

She would tell herself it was better that way, or at least try. If she could believe, she might build some sort of life.

“We’re back,” said John.

She took his hand in hers. “Yes,” she said. Her voice cracked; she fought to keep it level. “We are.”