Chapter 8

 

Kimberly had searched the whole hospital, peered into every open room, peered behind barriers and scoured the waiting room. No sign of Mister Gull.

A trio of nurses came out of a side room as she was passing the payphones on the second floor, and Kimberly hid her face, pretending to dial in time with the hospital muzak. The sportsbag was a great weight over her shoulder, crushing her. She couldn’t stop thinking about what was inside, the blood in the jar turning like great tides.

Blood that would capture a Queen. It still seemed like a bad joke. She ran one finger down the cold steel edges of the payphone. A memory almost blanked, crammed down into the darker corners of her mind, was swimming back to the surface.

“I called home,” she whispered. Weeks ago. Felt like years. She’d gotten money off a nurse when she’d first arrived in town and tried to call New York. Nobody had picked up. Christ, how could she have forgotten? All the times she’d tried to contact those on the outside. The clink of coins, the slow burr of dialtone. Waiting for someone... a man, a man with kind eyes and a knowing smile, a man who was sometimes quick to anger, who could raise his voice to a roar in seconds and then collapse back into apologies. Not perfect, but special. His name...

She lifted a plastic receiver, shuddering at the click in her ear. The purr of dialtone was painfully familiar. She’d called her Mom, and then...

Someone else had answered through static fuzz. They’d said trust Goodwell.

That night was distant, a hushed memory. Rustwood was trying to push it away, like the town didn’t want her to trust the detective... or something inside the town, something with power.

She’d taken every opportunity to run from Goodwell since then. He’d come to save her from Bo Tuscon. He’d pulled her out of the fire at the convent. He’d even warned her about Fitch. So why did she keep turning her back on him? Had she really allowed the town into her head? It wanted her afraid of him, the same way it wanted her to believe in her fake husband and child. She could remember the pregnancy, so many tiny white bottles, folic acid, iron tablets, Bendectin. Two in the morning, two for the blues, she’d whistled that tune while Peter rubbed her back as she vomited convulsively into the kitchen sink. The sensation of Peter’s hand on her skin, the chalky flavour of the pills as they scraped her swollen tonsils.

She’d never been there. Never been pregnant. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t her-

“Mrs Archer? Are you alright?”

She straightened as a strange hand touched her elbow, and looked up into the eyes of Doctor Keller.

Kimberly’s breath stuck in her throat as she took in the doctor, the man who’d treated her when she’d first arrived in town. It’d been a week since Kimberly had last seen Keller... or was it more? Time had run together, the days and nights gone fluid. The doctor had aged since their last consultation - his hair was shiver-grey around the temples and his eyes were so bagged it looked like his cheeks were about to drip right off his face.

Keller was the one with the keys to her restraints back in those early weeks, but he was also the only one that listened. He’d sat by her bedside, nodding and taking notes no matter how angry she got or how crazy she sounded. She’d screamed about train lights, the hand at her back shoving her on to the tracks, being dead and born again, and he’d always said, “Tell me more,” in his kindly, curious way.

He’d been her only friend in the world. She’d never known whether to confide in him or hate him.

Keller squinted. His eyes were distant, confused. “Mrs Archer? You didn’t have an appointment, did you?”

“No, no! I was in the area, and...” She didn’t have a lie prepared. “I thought we could talk about... painkillers. I’ve been getting headaches, cramps, all sorts of stuff, and-”

“You were supposed to see me last week, weren’t you? Or was that the week before?” Keller twitched, hands crossed before him, fingers tapping out a rapid beat against his silver wrist-watch. His pupils seemed to vibrate. “No matter. I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Not at all. Just something you mentioned in our last talk. Aspects of your psychosis that...” Keller coughed, struggling to force his words out. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurses passing by, other doctors in blue scrubs and hairnets on their way to surgeries. “I’m starting to feel there was, perhaps, more to what you said. Something I missed. I wish I could-”

Gull appeared like a ghost in the hall behind Keller, walking on his toes, eyes screwed down to tight slits. He didn’t look at Kimberly. His attention was on Keller’s coat pocket.

He passed the doctor, brushed his coat with one hand, and kept walking.

Keller didn’t look around.

“You spoke about misremembering things,” Keller said. “An old boyfriend, I believe. Some times I think I was too hasty in my diagnosis.”

Kimberly resisted the urge to look over her shoulder and track Gull as he vanished into the halls. If she ran after him now, Keller would follow, and everything would be blown. “It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. Or maybe it’s never too late.”

“What, you think you could mark not crazy on my forms?”

“That’s... one way of putting it, yes.”

Kimberly hugged herself as an air-conditioned chill rolled down the hall. The air tasted of antiseptic and floor polish. A nurse was approaching, the soft slap of her flats on the linoleum ominous.

No way would she just accept Keller’s apology. He was the one who’d sent her home with Peter, her false husband. No way to forget how Peter had stared after she first returned from hospital. Sitting outside the bedroom door when she locked herself inside, rapping gently at first, then more insistently, finally banging his fists against the walls. The pleading, the simpering. The way he used their son as leverage. Curtis needs you. Why won’t you hold him?

When she closed her eyes she saw the viscera in the bath tub, the loops of intestines gleaming wetly beneath fluorescent lights.

And still, she thought she could feel Peter out there. Not dead, just hiding. Tucked away in a dark corner of Rustwood with her not-son in hand. Baby Curtis still bawling, fists clenched, waiting for his mother...

“I don’t have time for this.” She turned away, intending to chase down Mister Gull, but Keller’s hand fell on her shoulder. “I said-”

“Please,” the doctor whispered. “Something isn’t right here. I’ve been doing things I don’t understand. I just keep doing them.”

His eyes were cold and hopeless. They left a knot in her throat she couldn’t swallow. “I can’t help you.”

“Mrs Archer-”

“Try the highway.” She jerked free. “Head through the tunnel. Maybe you’ll see something new.”

Keller rocked back and forth on his toes. In a voice strangled down to a whisper: “Something’s wrong with me.”

Kimberly ran.

She had no idea where Gull had gone. All she could do was stomp through the corridors, ignoring Keller’s cries for her to stop, until she found a familiar door: small, unassuming, unlabeled. No handle, just a keyhole. She’d seen Keller there before, peeling off rubber gloves, tossing them in the trash.

Something made her stop. Ten seconds later, the door creaked open and Mister Gull peered through the gap. “Clear?”

She saw a dark stairway behind him, easing down, down, down into the black of an unlit basement. “The hell’re you doing? I’ve been looking for you all over.”

“Exploring. Here and there.” Gull’s face, already so pale, was almost white. He unfolded his hand to reveal a Yale key on a plastic fob. “I apologise for leaving you to distract the doctor, but there was something I had to know.”

“You son of a bitch. He might get fired for-”

“The good doctor has larger problems.” Gull wriggled his fingers, and the key vanished. “No magic, just sleight of hand.” He wasn’t look at Kimberly; his eyes were unfocused. “We should go. So much to do.”

He didn’t say another word, not as they hurried out into the rain or as they climbed back into Gull’s sedan. An ambulance screamed into the parking lot as they exited, flanked by police cruisers, and for a moment Kimberly’s heart rose into her mouth - they’d been found out, less than fifty yards from their escape. But the police cruisers simply escorted the ambulance into the emergency bay, and Gull was still silent as they left the lot, winding down the mountainside towards the muzzy glow of Rustwood.

His hands shook on the wheel. His knuckles were white, eyes pinched. He whispered under his breath. When he paused he bit his lower lip, teeth sinking deep into red flesh.

For the first time since Kimberly had met him, Mister Gull had run out of words.

 

* * *

 

For Peter Archer, there was no difference between sleeping and waking. Hadn’t been for many days. Simply existing was an act of rebellion. Every moment was a battle against the crushing pressure of the air around him. The urge to simply close his eyes and let the world drift away.

And yet, he fought. Not for himself. For Curtis.

Peter had been on the rack for what felt like millenia. In the absolute black of the mineshafts there was no telling who or what was circling him, peeling him open. He felt the claws and blades as hot, thin lines of pain, but even that was muted now, like all his nerve endings had been sutured and cauterised.

Pain was only a concept. He didn’t have to feel it if he didn’t want to.

His hands were secured so tight he couldn’t wiggle his fingers. His legs didn’t work any more. Nothing happened when he tried to scream. He could speak when they asked him questions - always in those low, grinding voices, like they weren’t talking with lips or tongues at all but some sort of clacking simulacrum of a human throat - but when they put the knives in him, nothing. Just a hiss of air from a punctured tire.

He couldn’t fight or pull free. All he could do was curse, over and over. Threaten and plead. “Gonna kill you,” he sobbed. “All of you.”

Finally, they’d left him. It was cold in the dark. He felt his own blood turning to jelly on his skin. They’d opened him, flayed his chest, left him raw and splayed but, somehow, still conscious.

He kept sane by thinking of Curtis. His child, his only boy. He remembered Curtis curled against his chest, chubby fists battering on his collarbone as he nursed from a warm bottle. His sleepy eyes. His burping, satisfied, fat-cheeked smile.

And now his child was somewhere in the dark. Cold, alone. Crying...

Something brushed his cheek.

Peter jerked around, sweat pearling on his skin. “Who’s there?” He’d been lying alone in the black for hours, waiting for the familiar cold kiss of the knives or whatever it was they were using, waiting for another opportunity to beg. Now that they’d returned, he’d changed his mind. Loneliness was better than the surgery. “Who-”

“We finish now.” It was a voice like a lizard whispering around a lashing tongue. No emotion, not even a hint of laughter. He’d have preferred that to the detachment, like he was only meat on a production line. “One last thing.”

Scaled fingers reached into the hollow of his abdomen, the pit they’d torn in his gut. They’d taken everything from him - his guts, his lungs, his bladder. Torn out the things that let him breathe and pump blood and left him a shell without a pulse.

And yet, he lived.

Maybe it was his punishment. Eternity stretched out before him, a thousand years of bleeding and howling in the dark, unable to die. Peter hadn’t read scripture in many years, not since he’d watched his father being lowered into the ground, but maybe this was hell.

Pinpricks in his abdomen. Not needles or knives but claws, something skittering, turning in place like a dog following its own tail before finding a place to nest.

Peter gasped as long fingers tugged at ragged flaps of skin. The pain was bright and lancing. They were sewing him back up, stitching him together with that thing, whatever it was, inside him.

And it felt good.

As the needle... God, he hoped it was a needle... dipped and punctured and dipped again, the thing they’d put inside him settled, hot and heavy. It spread tendrils through him, tickling, creeping into the empty places. It sent shivers down into his toes, the toes he’d thought were dead and black.

He wriggled his fingers, clenched them into fists. Strength rushed down his arms, pricked at the ends of his fingers. He jerked against the straps binding him to the stone and they snapped with gunshot cracks.

No more pain. No more anger. Just a hazy, cotton-wool contentment. He’d been hurt, yes, but that would end soon. The darkness would peel away. He’d see the sun, he’d carry his child up into the light, he’d hold Kimberly against his chest...

The last of the thread was pulled taut. The straps around his ankles fell away.

“You are ready.”

 

He stumbled without knowing why or where, guided through the dirt corridors by a voice inside his head. “Yes. Closer. So good, so obedient...”

Mud squirted between his toes. He was naked but he didn’t mind. The cold was a bare brush on his skin. The thing inside him kept him warm. It was meant to be there, meant to be a part of him. How had he ever managed without it? An old friend returned after far too long away.

He knew the rock halls, even though he’d never walked them before. He knew because the thing inside him knew. It’d crawled there a hundred years before Peter was born, and flown, and skittered along the ceiling, long spear-toes digging into the muck. It’d guided so many bodies. Some warm and pink, some black and cold. All of them loyal servants to the power growing beneath Rustwood.

He was only one in a long line of many, and that was comforting. He’d be taken care of. Everything would fall into place, so long as he didn’t fight.

A low wail carried down the corridors. The squawl of a child in distress. “Curtis,” he whispered, and broke into an awkward run.

A great light flowered in the tunnels ahead, bright as a nova star but somehow cold, aching in the hollow of his chest. Before the light was a wriggling silhouette, a baby left in the mud, flailing its tiny, pudgy arms.

He sobbed in relief as he closed the distance, falling to his knees before the light and scooping Curtis up into his arms, pressing his child to his chest. Curtis burbled weakly, turning his face in to Peter’s neck. His cheeks were wet with tears and snot.

Peter knew what had been taken from him, that his veins were bloodless and his lungs long gone, but with Curtis’s heartbeat against his skin he felt whole again. He could live forever just on the whisper of Curtis’s breath, the tickle of his tiny fingers against his cheek.

The light spoke. No, something behind the light, low and hissing and yet loud enough to vibrate in Peter’s teeth. “Your son is precious to you.”

Peter knew he was supposed to be scared, but the voice felt like an old friend, one he’d known and been waiting for for many years. “Is he sick?”

“He has been cared for.”

“What did you put in me?”

“Destiny.”

He nodded. Nothing had ever made more sense than that word in that moment. He hadn’t been kidnapped by the thing in the rainslicker, he realised. He’d been guided.

“I have a task for you,” the voice crooned.

“Anything.”

“It will be brief. I need a man removed.”

“Where?”

“Away.”

“Can I take my boy?”

“He stays. He is important. Not to be risked. He will be kept here, safe and warm. All of this, you do for your son.”

Peter nodded, even though there was a part of him that knew he should be screaming. The contentment, the warmth, the feeling of fingers tickling up his spine... it all started in his gut. Not in his head.

A different voice, an old Peter, wailed in the back of his head. A part of him that could so easily be pushed away. He’d been born again. Why bother listening to the cries of a dead man?

“Come closer,” said the voice.

He crept onward, up the path. In his arms, Curtis blew spit bubbles. The light was so bright he had to shield his eyes with one hand. It seared him, left him gasping, even though he knew he had no lungs with which to gasp.

This is impossible! They killed you! You’re dead or dreaming and you have to wake up, Kimberly needs you, you have to find her, get out, get out-

The light quashed that voice, and he was grateful. It seared away the doubt, the lingering pain of what the thing in the rainslicker had done to him.

“Do you know where we are?” The voice buzzed in his ears like an angry bee caught in a glass jar. “Do you know what this town is?”

“It’s...” He stopped, licked his lips, tasting the cold meat. “It’s on the coast of... I don’t know.”

“There is Rustwood, and only Rustwood.” The light arced out to brush his shoulder, cupping his nakedness. “But outside, beyond, there is another place. A dangerous place. You will go there. You will kill.”

“Anything for you.”

“Do you know who I am?”

He did, even though he’d never been told. The knowledge came from the thing inside him, churning, spreading roots through what remained of his body. “The Queen.”

“The true Queen. There is another who goes by my name: the old monarch, withered on the vine. She needs to be removed, but not by you. Your job is to prune her fruits.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. There’s a woman you know, a woman very important to the Old Queen, and to me. She is not bound to this place, not yet. Something draws her back to the old world.”

The light was all around him, inside him. It glowed in his fingers. It cauterised his doubts.

“Cut her ties,” it hissed. “Kill the one who pulls her back.”

He set Curtis down in the muck. The light rose around him, lifted him from his feet.

Goddamnit, fight! Fight it, you idiot! Don’t let it take Curtis. You have to push...

It was only the voice of a stranger. The whisper of a madman he could squeeze down, stuff away into the furthest compartment of his mind. He didn’t need those thoughts. He was a tool in service to something magnificent. The true, one and only Queen of Rustwood.

Nothing but the light now. Nothing but the searing brightness propelling him onwards, beyond the borders of his world.

He was prepared.