All nightmare long, p.32
All Nightmare Long, page 32
I’m in her world here, he thought, but he shut down the panic. He ignored the thing inside that was not part of himself—could never be part of his real self, whatever Florist said—and thought instead of his family. Janie, with her gorgeous hair that he could not help stroking. Holly and Sean, sweet and small, beautiful human beings with little history and futures waiting to be formed. He wanted to be a part of their future, as much as he had been present in their past. Their lives from now on could not be without him. I love them all more than this, he thought, and the dark thing inside him twisted and writhed as if he was slicing it with his sharpest scissors.
Florist grabbed him beneath the arms and lifted, ripping off his mask and flinging him across the dome. Leaves and fronds slapped at his face as he fell. Something scratched across his eye.
“You have to be one of us!” Florist said. “There is no Jason. But if you don’t agree, I have to kill you. And...I care, Stylist. I always have cared about you.”
He picked himself up, gripping the scissors, and he glanced in the keen open blade and saw her reflection forming behind him in a wall of greenery. She comes from them, he thought, and he spun around with the scissors held out.
It sounded like shears cutting long grass. Florist’s fingers fell away with a spatter of greenish sap. She stared at her hand.
“Sorry,” Stylist said. He ran. Bashing between plants, shoving heavy blooms aside, tripping on trailing vines, tendrils stroking around his ankles and seeking beneath his clothing, and every step of the way he heard her calling after him.
“I can’t let you!” she said. “I won’t let you. They won’t allow. I’m sorry, Stylist. Goodbye, Jason. If only you’d been willing to look deeper, without fear. If only you could have been Gleeful.” And in concert with her sadness, he heard plant noises. The pop of opening buds, the hiss of escaping spores, the groan of branch upon branch. The insides of the dome were more than alive, and the air around him changed colour. Clear, yellow, and then bright red.
Though he held his breath, he looked down at his hands and clothes, and the layers of Florist’s stuff coating them.
Soon, he would have to breathe.
Some of what he saw was nightmare, given to him by Florist to wipe him out. Some might have been real. All the way home, Stylist had no idea which was which.
There were monsters in the nighttime streets. London crawled with shapes dragged up from its hidden guts—subterranean things, slicking and leeching along streets. They screeched when they saw him, letting out vicious ululating cries that echoed between the high buildings and drifted away into darker streets. Some of them manifested more fully, as if the sight of him drew them further in from whatever reality they had previously inhabited. They squirmed and groaned their way to solidity, growling through the pain and showing teeth reflected in starlight. Their bites were a billion years old. They came for him, darting across streets from hidden corners, crossing intersections, springing from shop doorways and leaving wet trails on the roads. Stylist dodged them and ran on, scissors grasped in one hand but feeling, for the first time, ineffectual.
The scissors belong to it, not to me, he thought, but he could not quite throw them away.
He heard laughter that turned to screaming as he rounded a corner and passed a busy club entrance. A dozen misshapen creatures were piling in towards the laughing screaming woman, and though she herself was monstrous in ways he could not quite place, the things they did were much worse. Limbs and phalluses punctured her, blood flowed in crimson tides, and luminous fluid spurted across the pavement and the club’s façade, catching starlight and setting fire to everything.
Stylist should have gone to her aid, but he was not sure how real she might be. The thing inside that drove him in these dark forays seemed to cringe back, driven down by something that surely could not have been fear.
“It’s not afraid,” he said aloud. “I’m not afraid.”
Janie and his children drew him on, and the scent of daffodil fields and bluebell woods accompanied him as he ran. Buildings seemed to move around him, as if shifting independently of the ground he covered. More screams, more shouts, more shadows forming and becoming grotesque.
Stylist shook his head and wondered how much she could have affected him. He snorted to clear the alien spores from his nose, and a cloud of something yellow hazed his vision. The colour was felt rather than seen. Her sweet pollen.
Stylist stripped the trappings of his alien identity as he ran, throwing the bland mask aside, stumbling and falling as he tore off the boilersuit, and he turned a corner onto a large square as Jason Hamm.
The monsters were still there, gathered at the square’s far side in one undulating mass. Individuals darted from the crowd and seemed to stretch echoes of presence behind them, joining them to the throng like memory tentacles. He skirted the edge of the square but they saw him, flooding across the pavements smoothed by decades of feet, cawing and calling for his blood, and for that thing inside that made him what he was.
Florist’s plea that it was the core of him, not apart from him, had marked the greatest difference between them. Her and her kind—the Gleeful Ones—considered themselves different, and blessed by differences. But Stylist knew the truth. He was a simple man, and whether what he did was a blessing or a curse, he would do everything he could to clasp hold of his humanity.
As the shapes stormed across the square towards him he turned to face them, holding his scissors high. He snorted and took deep breaths. He squeezed his eyes closed until he saw stars. And as the shapes came, so they began to change.
By the time they reached him they were people again. Men and women, dressed for a night out but now scared, frightened by something he could not see. He saw hatred and terror in their eyes, though he could get the measure of neither.
As the first woman skidded to a halt ten steps from him and started shouting, a massive explosion rumbled through the air and ground. Stylist crouched to keep his footing and looked to the east. The sky was aflame, and a boiling, blazing mass drifted gracefully down from the heavens, trailing a cloud of fire behind it. Burning shapes fell away and matched its descent. Another explosion bloomed from inside, and for a moment he thought of one of Florists’s most beautiful blooms.
Then he saw the ribs and skeleton of what the thing had been, and his blood turned cold.
“Another one!” someone shouted. “Oh God, another, they’ve done another! How many now? How many?” The voice was rough with the remnants of hallucination, but now Stylist knew that he had almost purged himself of Florist’s touch. There were no monsters other than what she had wished him to see.
Or maybe there are, he thought, watching the horrendous burning shape plummet behind distant buildings. The impact was gentle in comparison, but he thought of those hundreds or thousands caught within its fiery embrace.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Bastard,” someone muttered. A man, sneering at him.
“You freaks,” a woman said. She was wearing a slight summery dress and high heels, and she carried an empty wine glass.
“I don’t understand,” Stylist said. “My name’s Jason Hamm. I don’t know—”
“Don’t lie!” the sneering man said. “I saw you throwing your mask away. Trying to hide as a human. But you’ll run, and hide, and it won’t do any good!”
“Like the Nazis—”
“Always knew it would come to this—”
“A war, my father said that’s the only way—”
“The Gleeful Ones have begun,” Jason said. It was so obvious now. The councillors would be first, blown from the sky by the Vees who craved exposure and control. And what else had they done? What other horrors had been taking place whilst Florist tried to steer him to their cause? The crowd looked shocked and terrified, but angry as well. And perhaps there lay the Vees’ first, greatest mistake.
Jason ran. Their fury followed him, but he was faster. All he could wonder on the way home was whether they had known who his Vee was. Everything might depend on that.
Now, more than ever, he needed to hide.
Extract from Once Were Vigilantes,
by Max Gold, London Council Press
That first night and the day that followed shocked everyone. Few had any real understanding of how many Vees were out there. While some branches of the police and military were in contact with certain Vees—and no one can or would deny that many worked in cahoots—the numbers were thought to be in the scores. Many had perhaps not even practised their skills (or curses) until that night. It became Gleeful Night. Named by the Gleeful Ones, the name stuck, even after the terrible battles and their eventual defeat, arrest, incarceration, and the executions that followed.
One thousand is a conservative estimate. Some suggest many thousands across the globe. For every one caught, a hundred might have escaped.
They’re out there now. Hiding. Sleeping. But after what they did—the assassinations, the slaughter, the poisonings and pollution, the explosions and savagery—they cannot expect any form of immunity. And even though many captured Vees profess anger at what the Gleeful Ones perpetuated, there can be no pity.
They’re not human. And the Council will never rest until every single one of them has been found.
Jason Hamm reached his street, and many lights were on. It was almost 3 a.m. People were milling in the street, huddled in groups, talking animatedly while they watched the fires to the east. Others were hurrying from somewhere to somewhere else.
Jason looked for shadows that did not belong, and saw so many.
He gripped several opened foil folds in his left hand, scissors in his right. His mask and boilersuit were gone, but if needed he would still be Stylist.
I am always Stylist!
The thought was fleeting, and surprising in its intensity. It had come from him, in his own voice, not from the thing inside that he put to sleep each morning in that tumbled-down shed, storing his Vee clothing and implements. He still felt its presence, but it was calm and contemplative now. As if waiting for something.
“I am Jason Hamm,” he said. There is no Jason, Florist had told him. He dashed along the street towards his house, and several sets of eyes turned his way.
“Jason!” someone called. Ten minutes before, Jason would have heard the voice as an animal, monstrous roar. The shapes of his neighbours would have writhed and seeped as Florist’s pollens worked through his system. Now, he found the voice almost comforting because it recognised him as a human being.
“What’s happened?” Jason asked.
“Where have you been?” The woman was looking him up and down, and her eyes settled on the scissors in his hand.
“Out,” Jason said. He glanced at his house. The upstairs light flickered on—his bedroom. He so wanted to be there now with Janie, but he also needed to know the lie of the land.
Something flickered across the rooftops and he turned, crouched, left hand expertly presenting a foil packet ready to whisk and blow.
“Jason?” the woman asked, uncertain.
“What’s happened?” he asked again.
“Three airships,” she said. “They say it’s Vees. Some of them have made a broadcast, and...oh my God.”
Jason had seen it as well. The man flowed down the side of a house from the shadowy junction of roofs, moving like thin oil, slinking across the garden and then standing upright, shaking slightly as a ripple passed through his form. He smiled softly at Jason, but there was something in his eyes. Perhaps sadness, or resignation.
“No,” Jason said.
“I wasn’t sent to ask.” The man’s voice was slick as blood.
Jason did not wait. With one sweep of his hand and a gush of breath—pushed from deep down by the thing that drove him, shoved out and across the street towards the danger—he cast his dust into the Vee’s face.
The man twisted sideways, but then started batting at his head with both hands, as if waving away a swarm of flies. He was living a thousand nightmares, and he screamed. Jason had never met anyone who did not scream.
“Jason’s a—”
“That guy from number 42 is—”
“Get back, get away—”
“His poor kids, do you think they—?”
For the first time ever, Stylist had no mask or boilersuit when he darted in and slashed the man’s neck. A spray of blood caught him across his face. He closed his eyes and turned away, and the man fell with another splash. He seemed to spread across the pavement even as his blood pooled around him.
Stylist turned around when he felt eyes on his back. They were staring, his neighbours and friends. He saw them through the sticky mess of the dying man’s blood, dripping from his eyelashes and slick against his cheeks.
“I’m no harm to any of you.”
“You’re not human!” the woman said.
Jason dropped the scissors. He closed his eyes. And for the briefest instant he considered running as far and as fast as he could, leaving his family behind to live whatever life he had left. But the thing inside him rebelled. They’re all you really have, it said in Stylist’s voice, and the voice was Jason’s as well. The last thing he could do was give in.
“Stay away from me,” he said, and his neighbours cringed back. As he snatched up his scissors and ran for home, Jason looked around at the strange night. There would be more of them, coming for him and for every other Vee who refused their exhortation to reveal themselves. There was a difference between being open with who you were, and using that openness to gain advantage. Gift or curse, Stylist’s talents could never be used for self-benefit. Jason had always understood that when Stylist was something separate, and it persisted now that . . .
Now that he was beginning to see the truth. We’re pretty fucking far from human, Florist had said, and she might have been right.
“There are ways and means,” Jason muttered. He opened the front door, entered his home, and closed it gently behind him. As he turned in the hallway Janie was coming down the stairs.
She screamed.
“No, no, no,” he said, holding out his hands and seeing the terrible blood across them, feeling it tacky on his face, and he knew it would take more than a calming touch. “Janie!”
“Jason?”
“Wake the kids. We’re going.”
“What’s...? Why...?”
“It’s not my blood, Janie,” he said. “And I have something to tell you.”
They watched the news as they packed. It was easier that way; it meant he didn’t have to explain everything to Janie on his own.
The images were startling and shocking. Four airships had now been brought down, and while chaos and violence were rife all across London, three Vees were transmitting messages across all radio and TV stations. One of them was Succubus, and each time he looked at the screen, Jason thought she was speaking only to him. He remembered her exposed tattoos flexing luxuriously as she slipped off her top, and the animal desire she had inspired in him. Her gaze pressed into the heart of him, and he imagined a million other men feeling special.
“They’re taking over,” Janie said.
“They’re trying.”
“And you?” she asked. He’d washed most of the blood away, but his heart would not settle. He had never killed a Vee before. He did not like the feeling it invoked—a sense of power, and superiority. I am Jason Hamm, he kept thinking, but Stylist haunted every word.
“Me,” he said. “Me.” He sat on the bed and Janie came to him, holding his hands as he brought them up to his eyes.
“I never liked that other part of you,” she whispered. “I always thought it might come between us. I feared it.”
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “It was never another part, Janie. I thought it was, but that was just...self-deception. In truth, it was always just me.”
“But you changed when you were him. I sensed it in you, and saw it. Sometimes I thought I could smell it, as if you were a different man. Different smells, senses.”
“No,” he said. “She was right. Florist. But not right in everything.” He sighed and stood, hugging his wife close and feeling the heat of her, the slight tremble.
“Where are we going?” Janie asked.
Jason did not answer. When she pulled back to look up into his eyes, he touched her chin and smoothed his other hand across her tangled hair.
“Trust me?” he asked.
She frowned.
Jason flexed his fingers in her hair, and understood at last that being more than human did not mean he had to exclude humanity. He kissed her gently on the lips. “Trust me.”
Jason woke his children and took them with him. He held Janie’s hand as he guided her through the back garden to the narrow alley that ran behind their houses. Sean and Holly followed obediently. The explosions in the distance seemed not to trouble them. Perhaps they were still half-asleep, or maybe it was simply that they were children.
He considered running, fleeing as far as he could, but decided against it. They had sent that one man against him, but with everything going on tonight, he did not imagine they would send any more. He was not special. And if for some reason they did want him that badly, running would offer no defence. On the confused TV reports, the Gleeful Ones were relishing exposure—flyers, tunnellers, fire-makers, thought stealers, and people whose powers could not yet be understood.
So they went to the abandoned house’s garden, and into the shed where Jason kept the paraphernalia of Stylist’s existence. He had lost the key to the lock with his boilersuit, but he picked it quickly and easily. It fell to the ground with a wet thud, echoing a distant explosion that might have been another airship coming down.
“Are there fireworks, Daddy?” Holly asked.
“There are,” he said.
“Can we see them?” Sean asked.
“Soon,” Jason said. “Got to do something first. Here, all of you sit on this bench.” He sat the three most important people in his life down in the dark, and scanned the gardens and houses around them. Please no more, he thought, gripping his scissors. The power thrummed within him, the sensation that was all his own and which made him so different. And using it to slice throats was an abuse of such power. Please, send no more to find me tonight. He closed the door and turned back to his family.
