And then a monstrous sound broke over them like a wave, making speech impossible. It was a peal of thunder, and it was a scream. Both things at once. The air curdled and the world tilted, as though gravity was a pair of scales and someone had just put their thumb on the balance.
Harriet Grace when she was alive had been all about control. She burst into the afterlife like steam shrieking out of a pressure cooker valve. Her gaping mouth opened behind the sky. A second mouth opened within it, and then a third, her titanic rage coming now in three deafening, clashing registers.
“You can’t do this to me! You can’t! I won’t let you!”
The storm slammed into them, knocked them off their feet and snatched the ground out from under them when they fell. For a moment, Jess found herself falling horizontally across the endless plain, as she had on the night of her involuntary overdose.
But she knew where that led to, and she fought her way back from it with quiet, deadly ferocity.
“You can’t! You can’t! You can’t!”
Down is down, Jess told the world. And the world obeyed. She caught hold of Naz’s hand as she tumbled by, reeled her in and set her on her feet. Naz clung to her, terror etched across her face.
“It’s her!” she gasped. “It’s Grace!”
“I know.”
“Jess, we’ve got to run. We’ve got to hide until she—”
“No. Not this time.”
A grey-black mass was rushing on them, reaching out for them with taloned hands.
Jess turned her attention on it like a cold spotlight. “You’re not so big,” she said tightly. And then again, in her mind, You’re not so big at all.
She picked that thought up and hurled it. It hit the storm that was Harriet Grace full on and folded it in half.
When she had given wings to Patricia Mackie and a boy’s face to Naseem Suresh, she hadn’t known what she was doing. But her mind had been able to shape dreams like clay. And the dead were dreams that dreamed themselves alive. Maybe the living were too. Another time for that.
For now: You’re a tiny little thing. A speck. A dot. A dust mote in my eye.
The churning madness of the storm shrank and shrank again, forced back into itself until it was a black shape no bigger than a pillow.
She took it in her hands, and she was surprised by the weight of it. Its surface was fractal, writhing like worms. It hurt to look at it.
I’ll kill you, Moulson, Grace raved. Keep killing you again and again and again.
Naz was staring wide-eyed as Jess turned to face her. “We’ve got to,” she said, as though Naz had spoken. “We’ve got to do it now.”
Naz nodded. She didn’t have to ask what Jess meant. The thought had occurred to both of them at once.
She grabbed hold of the dark mass that was Harriet Grace’s naked soul and held it tight. Jess did the same. It twisted in their grip as Grace tried to squirm free. Tried to squeeze or thread herself through the gaps between their fingers. They started to walk, and then to run, gripping the dark, writhing mass at either end like firemen or stretcher-bearers.
The speed with which Grace adapted came as a nasty surprise to both of them. Jess had thought her first sucker punch might have ended the fight, but Grace was already fighting back. They had to dispose of her, put her where she couldn’t do any further harm. And there was only one place that would let them do that.
But it was further away than either of them remembered. They lumbered on and on through the night world with their burden clasped tightly between them. Grace seemed to be getting heavier, but that had to be impossible. It was just that they’d never really carried anything here, and they didn’t know what their own limits were.
But it was true, Jess realised. Grace was changing. Growing more massive in their arms. What had taken Jess days to learn and weeks to get any good at, Grace was figuring out in minutes. She had understood what Jess had done to her and she had learned from it. Squashed down as she was into this coiled, compressed essence, she couldn’t attack them directly. But she was making herself denser and more massive, reconfiguring herself into an uncompromising weight that would slow and hamper them.
And when you stop, when you let go of me – oh, then you’ll see. I like this place. I think I can make something of it. I think it has possibilities.
“Which way?” Jess cried.
But right then she caught sight of it up ahead of them. They were approaching the lip of the abyss.
Perhaps Grace saw it too, or sensed it. She was applying herself with relentless focus. The shapeless lump that was her soul was growing again moment by moment. Growing and changing, becoming more solid and textured. Ropes of muscle and sinew swelled and stood out on its surface. It looked now like some sort of human embryo that had been kept from birth and fed on steroids for a human lifetime. It looked as though it was about to unfold, to open like a flower. Jess didn’t want to see what might be inside.
Born again! Grace exulted. It took Jesus three fucking days!
They drew back their arms to hurl the terrible thing over the edge, but the edge receded from them. One moment they were almost there, the next they’d lost sight of it. The abyss’s rim was pulling back like a Hitchcock dolly zoom faster than they could walk towards it.
They ran again, trying all the while to bear down hard on the dark mass, to push it back into itself. Trying too to concentrate on their destination and how close it was. Grace had outstripped them in mere minutes, and now they were learning from her, learning that where there was a will, there had to be a way. In the night world, your way was your will, and Grace applied that principle with berserker finesse.
They fought back. They struggled inch by agonising inch all the way to the pit, imagined it gliding to meet them as they came. But when they got there, when they drew back their arms to throw the seething mass over the rim, they couldn’t let go of it. It stuck to them, flowed over them, welded itself to their hands and arms.
With a scream of disgust, Naz staggered back. The black blotch clung to her, stretched out into filaments of pulsing dark. Then they snapped and she fell backwards. The tendrils groped for her, whipped like broken guy-ropes in a hurricane before wrapping themselves around Jess’s forearms and burrowing into her flesh.
But of course it wasn’t that. It wasn’t flesh at all.
Desperate, losing, Jess turned her thoughts in a different direction. She stopped trying to get free. Her mind filled with Grace’s gleeful, mocking laugh. She ignored it and thought instead about the pull of gravity. The dead weight of herself, from which she’d tried so hard and so often to escape.
Grace pressed hard against her, bit into her as though all of that dark smeared bulk was one big lamprey mouth. It was just the two of them now, balanced on the brink of the bottomless fall. Jess wrapped her arms around a part of Grace’s squirming, mutating mass that might have been her waist or her chest or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it had just grown a row of serrated hooks like the heads of harpoons. That’s fine, Jess thought. She hugged Grace close and ground the wicked barbs into her body as deep as they would go. Anchored herself in them.
Weight, she thought. Just weight. The weight of being me. She leaned forward, far out over that emptiness. Sent her centre of gravity out and out, past the tipping point.
And carried Grace over the edge at last, off balance, Grace so full of the ache and lust for life that she couldn’t imagine someone weaponising suicide.
They dropped out of sight in a heartbeat.
Approximately. Hearts in that place by definition don’t.
98
Dennis Devlin lay where he’d fallen until he was absolutely certain that Liz Earnshaw wasn’t there any more. That took a while because Liz sat for a long time on one of Grace’s comfy chairs, talking to herself in an endless rumbling monologue.
It was actually a dialogue but the Devil couldn’t be expected to know that.
“I missed you so much, Naz,” she said. “I went… oh, I think I went crazy! I didn’t know what to do without you.”
Well, I’m back now, Naseem told her. And I won’t leave you again. I promise.