The Breaking of So Great a Thing
“You look nervous,” Jem Foreman observed, and Theo tried not to blush. Nerves were natural, he told himself, and not at all a sign of doubt. It was the thrill of it, being so close to ultimate power, the source of their family’s glory.
Of course, Jem was never nervous. He was as stoic as usual, defying the warmth of the late spring evening with a plain grey golf jacket to hide the ooze seeping through his shirt. They were in the car park of an abandoned warehouse, where Japanese knotweed and nettle patches had fought the concrete and won. The warehouse was one of David Wend’s, but Theo wasn’t sure if he knew his relations had commandeered it.
Uncle David hadn’t used it for a while, probably not since the people trafficking thing. Theo had heard rumours that had ended badly. He wondered why Uncle David was still alive.
Theo shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“You better be.”
“I told you I wouldn’t let you down,” Theo said, trying to keep his voice level, “And I won’t.”
Jem eyed him. “I hope that’s the collective ‘you’, not me personally, because this isn’t about me. And it’s not about us, either. You know that, right?”
Theo wanted to know what the fuck ‘us’ meant if it didn’t mean dinner and a bottle of red wine in front of the television and screwing whenever Jem felt like it. If that wasn’t enough, he’d hoped being part of this greater cause would at least make Jem see he was boyfriend material.
“Of course I do.” Theo licked his lips. “Am I in trouble? For running away yesterday?”
Jem shook his head, giving him a soft smile of reassurance. “No. You’re not in trouble. Her glory has come in handy, though. We’re making use of that in the ritual today.”
He turned and beckoned Theo to follow him.
“Her glory?” Theo picked his way carefully around the potholes and headed to the heavy metal side door.
“Such as it is. Wend-McVeys aren’t exactly prime specimens. But the shrine wants what it wants, and it wants someone’s glory for this ritual. Why cut one of ours off when hers was lying there?”
Theo tried to act nonchalant. “Granny Shaw used to say—”
“With the greatest respect,” Jem said, cutting him off, “If it wasn’t for Olive Shaw, we’d have already Ascended. Neither Beverley Wend nor Olive Shaw had the sense to see Granny Foreman was right. It’s our time. That’s why we’re here. Right, Theo?”
Theo stopped, cheeks burning. He made himself nod.
“Right, Theo?” Jem repeated.
“Yes, Jem,” Theo said.
“Are you ready?”
Beyond Jem was the darkness of the warehouse. It was all very straightforward, nothing to worry about. Theo licked his lips.
“Sure.”
Jem handed him a robe and a mask from just inside the door. Theo slipped them on, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.
The light was steadily fading over the tarmac and concrete beyond the car park fence, the sky bleeding reds and oranges in sickly bands that made him feel empty inside. Sunsets always made him feel weirdly anxious, balanced on the edge of the definite velvet energy of nightfall on one hand and the clear rush of day on the other.
He didn’t like the weak amber of the dying sunlight, refusing to give up for far longer than it should. It was a nothing time, a nowhere time, and Theo hated it.
The warehouse swallowed them in shadow, and it was a relief when the door closed and left him safe in the dark.
The Remnant were gathered, robed and Changed, and Theo allowed his proboscis to slide out of his throat to demonstrate his own glory, such as it was. It unfurled hesitantly, hard slim casing pressing on his tongue, a reedy thing next to all the crustaceous limbs and anemone fronds like udon noodles cased in aspic, the thick octopodid arms and needle-mouthed suckers, the tight, thick coils, strong as snakes, tough as tree roots.
Theo rubbed the back of his neck beneath his hood and nearly knocked it down again, jostled by the press of relatives.
He had managed to hunker down in his pew when the family fled the church, but bruises were starting to form on his sensitive skin, marks of sensible heels and just-in-case umbrellas as his aunts clambered over him to flee their Death God. Theo had fled too, once he’d stopped being trampled.
The jostling reminded him of where the bruises were, and he whimpered, scuttling through the crowd to find somewhere he wouldn’t be elbowed in his tender ribs.
He didn’t know what had happened to Layla, but he prayed to Grandad that she was all right. He’d always liked her.
The shrine was in the middle of the derelict space, containing pieces from the Wend shrine salvaged from Wundorwick and articles from the Foreman shrine used by the last head of the family. With the devouring of Uncle Marcus and Aunty Ida, the family were rudderless, and there had been no time to call another election. The other shrines lay silent and abandoned.
Theo slipped to the front, letting the conversations wash over him.
The body of this shrine was an antique apothecary cabinet that had belonged to Olive Shaw. There was an engorged heart pierced with a large hatpin on the flat top. The drawers were open in a pattern forming a rough spiral, and in each one a strange stone phosphoresced. A ring of candles encircled it, more for the aesthetic, Theo supposed, but also because there was no electricity in the warehouse, and it was getting dark.
His proboscis throbbed with his quickened pulse and flicked involuntarily around before he could retract it.
Jem oozed over to his brothers Gavin and Brandon, laconic Gavin fresh from his latest hike across the Andes with his close-cropped beard and chestnut man-bun perched high on his head, bully-boy Brandon standing to attention like a militarised slab of beef.
The three of them entered the circle of candles, and a hush descended on the gathering.
“Are you ready to see yourselves for what you are?” Gavin asked, taking the lead.
“We are,” Theo said with the others, sucking in his proboscis to speak clearly.
“Are you ready to see what awaits us?”
Theo was less sure of this, but he answered appropriately, and in unison. “We are.”
“Tonight, we open the portal,” Gavin said, and a thrill chased up Theo’s back. There was a hiss of anticipation, and Theo stopped listening.
Gavin was giving it the hard sell, the way Theo tried to sell waistcoats to the guy who came into his shop every Wednesday to buy another tie, but it was the shine in his eyes that held Theo’s attention.
Gavin had never looked twice at Theo, but the few words they’d exchanged over the cold buffet last Yule had been pretty great.
Theo huddled in the safety of his hood and robe, burning with guilt over Jem’s brother, desperate for Gavin to look his way, while wondering if Jem even cared where he was. The more impassioned Gavin got, hood down, candle flames throwing sharp shadows across his strong cheekbones and chiselled jaw, the more Theo throbbed with shame and longing.
It was when he missed a crucial part of the speech that prompted liturgical responses, too tongue-tied to get a word out, that he realised his heart wasn’t in the future of the family the way it ought to be.
He wasn’t ready.
The three Foreman brothers began to chant. Layla’s severed glory was unwrapped by Brandon and placed alongside the heart. The mouth at its tip fastened onto the oversized organ like a leech, the severed end jerking into life.
Theo flinched as Jem cut his arm and oozed over it.
It was always about sacrifice, about pain, about blood.
Doubts prickled in the back of his mind. Would it ever be anything else? When Grandad rose, when his priests swarmed and covered the earth, what would they get at the end? What would be left?
Until then he had imagined a new world order, the kind of hedonistic utopia of legend and myth.
Gavin was waxing lyrical about conservation and eco-spirituality and how they were really saving the planet, how nature would find a balance and the Remnant would be transcendent, Ascended, the true gods ruling over lesser species. That didn’t sit well with Theo.
Jem had always emphasised the physical changes, the attaining of godhood, the power they would wield as their birthright and reward. Now, he wasn’t sure what sort of reward that would be, but he was starting to think the image he had in his head – an image Jem had encouraged – wasn’t quite what would happen.
The ritual began.
Theo hadn’t been part of one like this since his own Changes, drawn into Great-Aunt Beverley’s cellar with his siblings and parents, trying not to cry.
He quivered, wishing he hadn’t pushed his way so close to the shrine, and realising the press of family at his back meant he was stuck there.
The stones glowed; the heart began to pulse.
Reality tore in front of him, a white-hot flash ripped through the air in an arc within the circle of candles. Theo couldn’t catch his breath, air rushing by him in a rollercoaster of spinning fractals while he knew he was standing still.
The light was bright as lightning, and then it was daylight. A blinding sun lighting a wasteland of obsidian and jet, reflecting into the warehouse. Theo stared into the desolation of Grandad’s domain, eyes aching and dry, and saw things that might once have been trees, stunted and fossilised on a headland of rotting fish thrown up in low tide. This was no utopia.
The chanting of the Remnant reminded him he should be chanting too.
Jem was shifting shape in front of his eyes, twisting into something elastic and indescribable, something fluid and solid at the same time, something alien and erotic and wonderful. Theo felt a tug in his own throat and let his proboscis free.
His throat expanded around it as it uncoiled, not the reedy little thing of a few moments ago, but something that the rest of his body burgeoned from like a fruit, his whole sentience and senses bound up in the length of star-grey, rippling power arcing from his mouth. His lips stretched wide, then wider, his teeth sank into his own flesh and his skull cracked and split.
Everything that was Theo was falling away, limbs nothing but stumps, extremities discarded. He was only his glory, his glory was him. He arced through the air, hungry for assimilation.
LET ME THROUGH!
The Voice filled Theo with ecstatic terror. It brought him down from his flight of glory and flung him back to his eighteenth birthday, the day he’d Changed. He remembered the pain, the needle in his neck that pushed through and strangled his vocal chords, the blindfold that itched, the way the cellar floor had become hot black sand…
He shrank back into nothing at the irresistible demand and realised how small he was compared to the Voice, the power in it reverberating through every fibre of his body.
His proboscis withdrew, all its glory illusory.
Theo would have fallen if it weren’t for the family pressing around him, keeping him on his feet.
His doubts crystallised in cold certainty.
He didn’t want to meet the Voice at all.
There was no way to close the portal now that it had opened; or if there was, Theo couldn’t think of one. He couldn’t move, the candles now an impassable ring of brilliant fire that was somehow a solid wall of glittering air. Nothing made any sense. The warehouse was twisting out of shape, and Theo was sure he was upside down.
Then he heard it.
Not the Voice.
Worse.
The rustling of insects, wings beating in sync, a swarm of something terrible, massing over the volcanic crags and filling the alien air. The swarm grew louder, and Theo saw them masking a shape, something that moved in impossible angles, something vast and horrible, coming for them with frightening speed.
Panic seized him. His chest turned to ice.
He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Someone pushed him, desperate to get closer, and Theo fell into the candles. He bounced back, singed, and knew even if he ran away it wouldn’t help.
Joining an apocalyptic death cult solely for someone he was screwing to finally admit they were together was the worst choice he’d ever made, and it was also going to be his last.
Theo braced himself, a sob of horror escaping his dry mouth, waiting for the swarm.
Something twinkled in the wasteland between the rocks. It grew and glittered, a second portal of light drawing energy from this one.
Theo felt a tug in his head, a strange itch behind his eyes.
He saw a face.
It burst into his head with sudden clarity and it was not a face he had ever seen before, but it had a strange air of familiarity as if it had always been lodged in his brain somewhere.
It was not a human face, but it wore one like a mask.
It had too many dimensions, too many layers, too many sides. It had human features, but even they weren’t right, as if the Face had heard about human eyes and noses and mouths when making its copy, but had never seen them before. The Face defied description, eating away at his attempts to make sense of it, feeding from his confusion.
The Face was the only True Face he would ever see.
Theo prayed to the Face to save him from the swarm, offering his strength and soul to the Face if it would close the portal.
The True Face stared through him, now all that he could see, all that he was aware of. Its not-human eyes glittered darkly, a myriad of others trapped behind them, making up the fractured colours of the irises.
It saw him, saw straight through him, saw him naked and exposed and raw, a grub of slime and quivering terror, and its lips peeled back from too many molars into a wide, stretched smile.
Theo’s strength leached out of him.
Something cracked. He heard it, a sonic boom somewhere in the Outside. The shrine exploded in shards of stone and painted wood. The portal closed.
Theo fell back as the candles were extinguished.
He lifted his head from the blood-splashed concrete.
Jem, Brandon and Gavin Foreman were dead.
He was coated with them.
The warehouse echoed with the Remnant’s moans, mutterings and wails of dismay.
“Did you see that?” Theo hissed, grabbing a cousin’s arm. “The Face! Did you see it?”
But the cousin shook her head. “I don’t – what happened?”
“The Face,” Theo whispered, too stunned to process the fact that bits of his lover were all over the fucking walls. Weirdly, he didn’t care. The Face stuck in his mind, sharp as a cravat stud. “Did anyone see it? Anyone else?”
Only a few looked at him as if they knew what he meant. The others had glazed expressions, as if waking from bad dreams.
“The Face,” Theo whispered, his head buzzing.
He stayed on the floor, coated in blood and scraps of Foreman flesh, as the screaming finally started.
Wes stayed at the country club hotel overnight, unable to sleep, thoughts of the Beast and Ricky’s demise charging his whole body. When he did sleep, it was in fits and starts, reality and unreality blurring with the unfamiliar bed and rustic chic. Shapes loomed at him in the dark, soft furnishings of mediocre taste, and collided with the mundane settings of his nightmares.
He called Carrie’s number as soon as it was light, only to find Ricky had ‘gone for a walk’ sometime around midnight and not come back.
“Not again,” Wes groaned, groping for his watch. One of his visions, where Ricky had been easy to capture and unconscious, either wasted or knocked out, swam back to him. “I’ll bloody microchip him.”
“He’s only in Barrow Field this time, he took a piece of me with him.” Carrie still sounded worried.
Wes blearily rubbed crusts from his eyes. “Is he drinking?”
“No. Leave him alone, he doesn’t do this often.”
“If he went out to enjoy himself for once, that would be different. It’s the pity-parties for one that I can’t stand.”
“You told him he was going to die, how did you think he’d take it?” Carrie’s snap was almost a snarl.
Wes held the phone away from his ear. “All right, don’t shoot the messenger! It wasn’t much of a picnic having to watch him die three times, either.” He stretched and rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t see if he came back or not. Dead doesn’t mean the same thing for him, does it?”
There was a pause. “Didn’t you see his head being cut off?”
“Well. Not every time.” Wes scratched his chin, unable to keep still. “I maybe didn’t talk it through with him very well last night. I got – weirdly emotional about it.” He sighed. “Look, I said I’d come round today and we could pick it back up, but if he’s determined to sort it on his own…” He left that unfinished, rounding off with an exasperated sigh that turned into a yawn before he could stop it.
Carrie’s voice softened. “Do you want to come over before you go back up?”
Wes was still in yesterday evening’s clothes. He’d sat and watched the carnage, barely moving as the Beast filled the church, blinking reflexively as arterial spray splattered his face. It was nothing a few wet wipes couldn’t fix, and he’d brought a change of shirt. The bloody one was still in the boot of his car.
He didn’t think she’d mind seeing the same outfit twice, given the circumstances.
“Love to. Just need to catch up on some sleep. Give me until this evening, I’ll be over.”
He managed to sleep well beyond check out, had a walk to avoid thinking about how badly he was craving something to take the edge off all this, and wished Uncle Barry hadn’t been eaten so he could take another little pill and see the future clearly.
He messaged Carrie again when he remembered to eat something, and it was already late afternoon. There was still no sign of Ricky returning.
So, he’s still out. He said I could use the Pendle Stone if I wanted to…
It was a good opportunity to try it, now that that the stress of yesterday had been overtaken by lack of sleep.
He drove back to Fairwood House, prepared for a little experimentation.
When he got there, the front door was open, ready for him.
“Are we alone?”
There was a low tone, a musical chime in the background, ringing in his ears.
He took this as a yes.
He headed straight to the kitchen. She had laid out a light supper for him, as if she knew he hadn’t eaten much that day; orange juice and warm crusty rolls that Ricky wouldn’t normally touch, and a selection of vegan spreads.
“You trying to tempt him to eat more variety? How’s that going?” Wes noted most of the jars had never been opened. “Ah, that well.”
The Pendle Stone hummed, so close. Wes wondered if now would be a good time to see if he could get back to the Stone Circle and commune with the monoliths, try to figure out a way to master his glory and avert the crises he’d foreseen without losing Charlie.
Perhaps he could be selective; turn himself on and off at will. Disappear entirely. Who’d notice or care? Charlie and Hugo would get over him eventually.
Hugo would lose his apartment. Better make a will first.
But it was only a passing thought, a darker whisper that came and went. Supper helped him rise above it, and the Pendle Stone’s pull became more and more difficult to ignore.
Finally, Wes wiped his lips with a piece of kitchen roll and addressed the accommodating warmth of the hosting room.
“Would it be all right if I had a bit of a practice? With the Stone, I mean? He did say he didn’t mind.”
Draughts sighed through the corridors in resignation.
Wes took that as assent.
He settled himself on the floor in front of the range, wondering how long it would be before Ricky came back.
“Listen, he really loves you,” Wes said, stroking the stone with practiced tenderness. “He’s not very good at loving things. Never had the practice, I guess. You know he adores you. Every brick. Always has.”
The house hummed with pain.
“No, I know, I know it hurts. You can’t fix him.” Wes sighed, wondering who he was really talking about, Ricky or himself. “None of us are any good at… you know. We all have to be right, or obeyed, or in control of something, some bullshit like that.”
She didn’t say anything to that. Wes kept stroking the hearthstone, letting her get used to his touch instead of Ricky’s.
He felt the house shudder. It wasn’t a physical movement, but it resonated inside him, as if her essence had spoken directly to his. “Believe me, if I knew how to make this better, I’d do it.”
Now, the house whispered to him.
…Why?
“Why? Why what?”
…Why would you want to make it better?
Wes shrugged. “It’s not like I hate him. I used to. Then I just stopped caring. I’m good at that. But, you know. I guess if you saw something in him to fall in love with—”
…Carrie didn’t fall in love with him. It’s different.
“If I’m not talking to Carrie right now, who am I talking to?”
…Me. And I am much more myself like this, than when I’m just one thing, one room, one person.
“I’d like to be much more something.” Wes managed a crooked smile. “Listen. I wouldn’t do this without your permission. This is important. I’m just asking.” He breathed in. “If I die, I’m not sure what happens to people addicted to me. We all go sometime, right?” He gave a short bark of mirthless laughter. “Anyway, you know, whenever it is… I want to be sure Charlie’s okay.” He frowned. “Could you… could you come out? You don’t have to be Carrie, you can… you can look however you want. I’d rather… I’d rather see you, to talk to you.”
…We can talk like this.
“Yes,” Wes allowed, tracing patterns on the flagstone in front of him with his finger. “If that’s what you prefer, obviously that’s fine, that’s the way it should be. But it feels kind of like you’re hiding from me.” He lifted his head. “I’m not him, but you can talk to me.”
The avatar emerged slowly from the closed kitchen door, pulling itself away from the white gloss and wood with stiff, stilted movements, as if it had forgotten how limbs worked.
It looked semi-human.
“You miss him.”
She smoothed her features, shrugging. “Obviously.” Deep lines appeared in her brow as she frowned. “He hasn’t been right since January. Since you stirred everything up in his head.”
Wes scoffed. “Since I—” He stopped himself. “How do you mean?”
“He was getting comfortable. I thought so, anyway, and then… he had to go and look ahead, didn’t he? He saw I’d have guests here, and he was sulking for months. Then came Yule, and he had to look at the family’s fate. He stopped eating properly. His organs were eating themselves because his metabolism couldn’t keep up with the Changes, and he was obsessed with the bloody cull.”
She shook her head.
“And when you and Katy were here in January, it was like a dam burst in his head. You know, when he stayed here for the first time, he thought it was the first time he’d spent three nights away from his cottage? The man’s been to bloody Majorca.”
Wes snorted and chuckled. “When we were kids? Once, yeah. He hated it. No wonder he blanked it out. He’s slept rough too.”
“He’d pushed everything else down so far that nothing mattered before he was, what – twenty-one? Twenty? Can you imagine that? He just didn’t think about it at all. And then being around you two, but especially you, made him remember.”
Wes raised his eyebrows, the faint stirring of guilt as acidic as the orange juice. He scratched his chin. “It must be difficult, being the only one who knows the inside of his head the way you do.”
The avatar narrowed its eyes at him. “And what you want to do, behind his back, with me, that’ll help him, will it? Or will it just help you?”
“It’s not behind his back.” Wes lied well. “I’ve spoken to him about it, you heard him say he’d let me. But if it’s all right with you—”
“You thought you’d help yourself?”
“I thought I’d ask you about it. If you let me, I’d be much obliged, and I think it would help everyone. Especially Charlie.” Wes took a breath. “If I die – and I think I probably will, I’ve burned too many bridges to get out of this now – then I need… I need to know she’s all right.”
The house’s avatar relented, as he’d hoped she would.
“Once. You can open the portal once. He’ll have to be here for a second time, I won’t let anyone else touch it without him.” Her hands fused as she pressed them together. “And you mean it, this is just to help your girlfriend? I’ll know if you’re lying.”
“No, you won’t.”
She breathed deeply, in and out, as if she were real – but that only compounded the uncanny nature of her current form.
“Okay. Make it quick.”
So he had won this round.
He took no great pleasure in that.
“Thanks.” Wes managed a smile. “Will you tell him that, um. That I’m sorry, I guess. And I, er. I hope things work out.”
He hummed a few notes, harmonising with the chiming tone the Pendle Stone made. The chants he knew were Gran’s chants, and she had never opened up the way to his Circle. She hadn’t known it existed. Perhaps it hadn’t, until he came into being. He didn’t know how it worked.
It didn’t much matter, anyway.
His memory, shot to shit though it was, came through for once. The symbols flickered in his mind’s eye as if the Pendle Stone had put them there.
The kitchen was flooded with daylight.
Wes tipped forwards and into a gash of bright grey, rolling over and onto his back in the middle of the Stone Circle. The sky above him was featureless and the colour of polished steel.
It worked! It only fucking worked!
Wes held his breath involuntarily, sitting up, checking the area for insectoids or anything squid-like. There was nothing. He was alone in a wasteland of volcanic rock, safe on his slab of stone, surrounded by monoliths in a configuration that bore a strange resemblance to Stonehenge.
He released the breath in a gush of relief. He pulled a silver shaving mirror out of his jacket pocket and stared greedily into the glass.
His face was all there, and all memorable. The cheekbones that his highlighter did wonders for, his tired eyes disguised by moody eyeliner, lips not quite as full as his cousin’s but more mobile, more practiced, more expressive.
He propped the mirror up and stepped back to see as much of himself as he could, wishing he could have a full-length one here. He looked good in plum and black.
The glimpses he had of himself were sweeping angles and sharply-ironed lines, a well-tailored ensemble of fragments, but he remembered every one of them. He flexed his fingers, long, dexterous, skin soft and moisturised.
“Fuck me, you handsome devil,” he said to his circular reflection. “I could look at you all day.”
Time worked differently here – it was slower, or faster, or whichever way was the one where not long passed at home and hours went by in this place, although he couldn’t remember exactly. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Charlie had seen him that morning and she’d be fine for a day or so. Besides, if he could undo the addiction he would.
Then he’d not be tied to video calls every forty-eight hours, and limited weekends away, and she could go away for holidays without him.
Without him.
Wes wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“If this place is mine,” Wes said aloud to himself, “Then there won’t be any studying involved, right?” He ran his hands over the slab he was lying on and swung his legs off. “Because my memory’s fucked, so that would be a bit pointless, wouldn’t it?”
He crossed the Circle to the nearest monolith, where green symbols glowed against the dark rock. The green wasn’t painted on or any kind of lichen that he could see, it was more like it was a natural part of the rock itself, what you got when the surface was gouged away.
Ricky and Katy had failed to notice them, and when they had done they couldn’t remember them for more than a few seconds at a time, so that meant they were attuned to him.
He ran his hand over a few, and they resonated against his palm.
He’d touched a few before, the first time he’d been here. Were they the symbols trapped in his head? Was that how it worked?
Wes pressed both hands on the rock and closed his eyes. Rather than try to empty his mind, he focused on the pressure and texture, concentrated on the way the resonance vibrated into his bones.
Wes breathed slowly, and the symbols began to form in his mind’s eye, burning brighter and clearer.
He spoke them out loud.
They tasted like static, leaving sparks behind like popping candy.
He slid his hands over the rock. There were fucking thousands of the things. A hundred or more at least on this one slab, and he couldn’t even reach most of them. It would take him several trips and maybe a step ladder.
He didn’t really know what they all did, or which ones were useful.
They were arranged in rings, though. Wes felt his way in an anti-clockwise circle around the stone and completed one ring, then decided to move on to another monolith and try to absorb one complete ring from each of the standing stones. That would do for a day’s work.
One of them was bound to be useful, and he’d definitely find the one that made people do what he wanted, how to turn it on and off on purpose rather than by accident. He’d got lucky in the pub toilets.
He needed a test subject when he got back.
Someone who didn’t matter too much.
“Minions had better not be the only thing I can raise on command, let me tell you,” Wes said to the next monolith, pressing his hands against a new set of signs. “I better be back up to scratch after all this.”
Not that he didn’t know a hundred ways to please his partners without a reliable erection, but it would really fucking help.
Charlie only stayed because she had to, and Hugo – Hugo felt sorry for him. What did Wes even bring to the relationship, anyway?
He shook himself. “No. Stop that. You’re a fucking god too. They’ll see. Come on.” He slapped himself sharply across the face, the shock of the sting bringing him out of the spiral before it took hold. He whacked his other cheek to match. “Stop it. You’re a motherfucking god. Like Pan. Bacchus. Aphro-fucking-dite. Get this right and you’ll be balls deep in nubile nymph orgies for the rest of your goddamn life.” He breathed in and out a few times, psyching himself up for the last few stones. His whole skeleton felt like he’d been set to vibrate.
That would be a good trick.
“Consensual orgies,” he added, in case that was in doubt.
The stones did not reply.
“Doant you fucking judge me,” he snapped at their dispassionate silence, slipping into his natural accent. “I’ll be responsible with this, you’ve picked the right single-birth, don’t you worry. I won’t fuck this up.”
They didn’t agree, but they also didn’t object.
He was about to lay his hands on the next one, when a pain stabbed into his chest and tugged so hard he gasped.
The sky rumbled.
“What the—” Dread swept through him.
The central slabs were shimmering as if heat were rising from their planed surfaces.
“Oh, fuck.” He didn’t know what it meant, but something told him it wasn’t good. He didn’t have time to finish.
Story of my fucking life.
He sprinted for the slab and chanted, opening the portal back to Carrie’s kitchen, and as it opened, he saw two portals shimmering in front of him, not one.
Wes just stopped himself from jumping right in the middle of the two, arms wheeling to catch himself. His shaving mirror tumbled in and shattered into pieces, glass disappearing into the shifting dimensions beyond.
He heard a chant and a shout from one side.
Wes picked the other.
He tumbled through into Fairwood and a few shards of mirror glass crunched under his arm as he landed, embedded in his jacket sleeve.
Wes cursed.
“Someone’s opened another portal,” he said, understanding dawning. “Shit. Shit, I need to close it.”
Carrie was more human-looking now. She got up from her chair, a hand pressed to her chest.
Wes winced, a pain in his own. “Jesus, do you feel that too?”
“Close it,” Carrie said urgently. “We have to close it.”
Wes tried, but the Pendle Stone stayed open. From the other side, he could hear the rumble of the sky and the low susurrus beginnings of something he didn’t want to think about, something that sounded like the gathering of a swarm of insect wings.
They were getting louder.
Wes remembered the equine heads with mouths split all the way back like muzzles, the wings and legs, the sharp, metal-ripping teeth.
“Wes, come on.” Carrie grabbed his shoulder and leaned beside him. “Channel it through me, we have to close it. I can feel them, I can feel them scratching inside me, what are those things?”
Wes swallowed. “Priests. They’ll eat anything. Flesh, metal, wood— oh my god, oh fuck.”
Her eyes were wide with terror. “Oh my god, Wes, I can feel—”
“On one,” Wes said, raising his hands. “Hands down. Ready?”
Carrie nodded.
The furniture was melting, the floor swampy and unstable under his feet. Beside him, the avatar was gaseous and solid, fluid and frozen all at once.
“Wes!”
“Okay,” Wes steeled himself. “Three, two, one.”
They slammed their hands down in unison on the slab and Wes thought his heart was about to be torn from his ribcage. The power ripped through him, juddering through his skin and bone, and his chant got lost in the howling notes of raw energy coming from the hearth.
It tore through the whole house, swelling like a violent wind, rushing to fill every room. Wes kept up the pressure, sure he was about to be blown away.
The symbols danced through his head.
He felt something inside him awake with a roar of a million voices. It offered him exactly what he needed: the strength of all the people who kept a spore of him in their brains without even knowing it. There were thousands upon thousands of them. Every party he’d ever been to, every photo he’d ever been in, every time his image had been posted on social media, shared, glanced at. Every time someone had walked by him on the street, sold him something, danced with him, every one of them infected with the insidious absence in their memory.
Every single one of them were his now, that Wesley-shaped hole in their minds a means for him to access them whenever he wanted.
He drew on them, sucked out what he needed, channelled it all through himself and joined it with the energy of the house.
Wes didn’t stop to think about it, he needed the boost and there it was. He drew additional power from his unwitting hosts, and he didn’t stop until he’d taken what he needed from them all.
With that last effort, both portals closed.
The light shuddered and died.
Wes fell back on the floor, panting, praying he hadn’t killed anyone.
He had no way of knowing.
What the fuck have I done?
He reached for his phone, hoping he was shared around so many people that it hadn’t registered, maybe nobody had even noticed at all. What if he’d given people brain damage, or he’d fucked Charlie up worse, or made everyone as addicted as she was?
Was this how he ended the world?
No, no, surely not, stop it, stop panicking.
But something was wrong.
He sat up. “You all right?”
Carrie didn’t answer.
“Hey, Carrie?” He shook his head to try and clear the ringing in it. “Hey—”
The avatar was lying on the floor in pieces.
He froze. “Oh fuck.”
The house was empty. It felt wrong.
“Carrie? Carrie, come on, speak to me.” He rolled the torso over and the chest cavity gaped at him, all burst pipes and broken wires.
The avatar was utterly lifeless.
Plaster fell off her in chunks.
Her face was split in half by a fissure that seemed to extend to the base of the cavity, and he was scared to touch her again in case she actually came apart.
“Oh my fucking god, no.”
He pulled himself up and felt the kitchen wall. “Hey, hey, come on, your boy’ll do his nut if he sees you like this, you’re all right, come on, you can come out now.”
He was talking to an empty room.
“Carrie?”
Something else was wrong. His skin itched. He scratched his hand, and the itch became a burn and spread. Blisters bubbled under the surface of his hands, pressed against his clothes, and he couldn’t breathe.
The protection curse against his blood kin had nothing to override it anymore.
The house couldn’t make decisions.
Its consciousness was gone.
Wes stumbled for the back door and yanked it open. The handle scorched his hand as if it was red hot, the shape of it burning into his palm.
He grabbed a tea towel and got it open, dropping it as soon as he made it out onto the grass. The lawn stretched out before him, a sea of blades and toxic haze.
He ran for the fence.
It was like running through a thick, poisoned fog he couldn’t see. His eyes were streaming, running with sticky tears.
It was only when he crawled under the wire and landed in the peace of The Chase that he realised the stickiness streaming from his eyes was blood.
Wes curled up in a dip under a tree, trying to breathe, trying to calm the fuck down, hoping he hadn’t gone permanently blind.
Bit by bit, his layers knitted back together.
Eventually, he uncurled himself from his agonised foetal position and managed to lever himself upright, blinking away the blurred dizziness that remained.
The Crows called to him softly, ownerless, forgetting that it had once owned itself, casting out its mindless aura. It was once again desolate, empty, alone.
Wes steadied himself, numb with pain and shock.
He tried to swallow down the lump in his throat, not sure what came next, or who to call. Ricky, obviously, but the bastard didn’t have a phone. He focused the way Gran had taught him, reaching out, bone calling to bone and heart-flesh to heart-flesh.
He couldn’t feel Ricky near, which could mean he was protected in the long barrow, a weird place of sanctuary among the long dead, or he was far away in another form, draining the sanity and thoughts from anyone who saw him, feeding on the auras of those who got too close, leaving them a frothing shell. He hoped not.
Wes called Katy.
She picked up on the eighth ring with a graceless sigh.
“Who do you want me to eat this time?”
“Babe, you need to get to wherever the fuck your cousin is, right now.” Wes dashed the last of the blood clots from his eyes and tasted iron and hot copper at the back of his throat. “Meet me down here, at the house. Don’t for the love of God try to get near the grounds, meet me in the woods round the side. It’s bad, I’ll explain everything when you get here, but fucking get here.”
He hung up, still staring at the place a living thing had once been. The manor gave him an eerie feeling, like he was looking at a dormant corpse. Any moment he expected it to move – a curtain to twitch, a door to open. But it couldn’t do any of that.
It was a house, and nothing more.
“How am I going to fix this?” he murmured, sitting back down in the dip under the tree, not knowing what else to do.
The answer came to him in a sudden flash.
Tina.
At short notice, Tina was the only person he could think of who could get into the house – the curse only affected his blood-kin, not hers – and the only person who had access to whatever passed for higher powers.
How can I tell her I just smashed her friend? He couldn’t even raise a smirk at the innuendo. She’ll kill me.
But she would also want to help.
She’d have to, if she wanted her friend back.
Wes couldn’t bring himself to say the old name, didn’t trust himself to pronounce it, and couldn’t quite face saying it three times like Bloody Mary, only for nobody to listen to him. No – it had to be Tina. She’d know what to do.
God, she really is going to kill me.
He steeled himself and rang Tina Harris, hoping for a miracle.