Cold Fire Read online

  That something, that thing, greater than myself, has been leading me by the nose the whole time. I never did have a choice.

  Now it’s time to see its true nature.

  *

  56.

  I know where we’re going. The cat leads me there, just the same.

  Once, I was afraid of the cat. It doesn’t inspire fear now. It’s broken. Its stumped tail, its silent voice. I find comfort in it.

  I’m only scared when I lose sight of the cat in the shadows, when I’m alone, but before long we’re walking on snow and I can see it easily.

  We walk across the green. The sirens behind, the fire turning the snow pink and orange. My feet crunch on the snow. The cat makes no sound.

  There’s something ahead. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. A black spot in the white. Pulsing. Beating.

  The heart.

  Eventide waits for me. It's calling me home to whatever end waits for me. I have a feeling it’s not salvation they deal in there.

  The cat stops. The fence is white, the snow clinging to the diamond shapes of the wire. It’s the fence I remember from my dream; a nurse, pushing an old lady with a fuzzy halo of white hair to her death. A life to feed the damned.

  Maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. It doesn’t matter now. I’m going in anyway.

  I brush away snow from a white board, red print barely visible.

  PRIVATE.

  Bold. Capitals.

  I fumble around, find the catch. There’s a padlock. I pull it and it snaps. The metal’s frozen solid. I look at the cat. It sits on its haunches, just looks right back at me.

  I’ve been pushed, pulled. Guided by whatever guides the cat. I don’t like it, but I can’t deny it. I can’t fight it.

  Frank kicked the cat. I hunker down, pet it. Stroke it behind the ear. I don’t know anything about cats. That’s OK. The black cat’s not fussy. It makes no sound, but I can feel it vibrating as it purrs beneath my hand.

  Whatever it is behind the cat’s eyes, it’s watching me and I could use a little goodwill.

  ‘Watch out for me, huh?’

  It turns away, just gives a flick of its stubby tail, melts into the night.

  The message is clear.

  You’re on your own.

  I pull back the latch on the gate and step onto the grounds of Eventide.

  *

  57.

  I walk a circuit of the building. I can’t see very far now, because the snow is heavier. I get no real sense of how big the Eventide home is. The snow lays thick on my shoulders, in my hair.

  I haven’t got a coat on, just my jacket. I shiver. My fingertips are going numb and my ears are burning.

  It’s OK, though. It’s good cold. True cold.

  I don’t know what I expected. Maybe dogs, Alsatians, howling. Security. Alarms, lights. There are lights inside, but the glass is misted over. I can’t see. Warmer inside than out. The thought doesn’t make it any more inviting.

  I don’t have any kind of plan. I don’t have a weapon. I don’t even know what I’m going to find.

  I think I’ll know what to do, though. I have to believe that. I have to place my trust in that.

  The sense that something bigger than my concerns, my friend, my family, is at play weighs heavily on my mind. I can feel it watching me. It makes me nervous. I should be glad that something powerful is watching over me. But I’m not. I don’t think it’s there to help. I think it’s there to judge, see how I perform. How I hold up. I’m its emissary, but it’s holding the option to just turn and walk away at any time should I fuck up.

  I get to the front door. The snow has drifted against the door. It’s locked. I try touching the lock, but nothing happens. It doesn’t just fall out of the door like I was hoping.

  Apparently that only works once.

  I walk back the way I came until I find a long window. Most of the windows I pass are sash windows with wooden struts. This is a newer replacement, or maybe a recent addition. The brick work around it is fresher, the pointing crisp where it was crumbling around the older parts of the building.

  I’m not having much luck breaking windows. This is single glazed, but I don’t want to put my hand through it. I hunt around for a rock, a brick, anything, but the ground is covered so thickly with snow that I could hunt all night. I’m not going to find anything.

  I test my cast with my left hand. It feels pretty sturdy. I figure, what the hell. My right hand’s broken anyway.

  I thump the window. The shock travels up my arm, ignites fire in my broken thumb and my ribs.

  The window is absolutely fine.

  So I hit it harder. Hard enough to crack the cast and shatter the window. It hurts like fuck, but that’s good, because the cold could make me slow. Sleepy. I don’t want to be sleepy.

  I don’t want broken bones, either, but if they let me know I’m still alive, that’s good.

  The cast is hanging off. I pull it and wrench it and twist it until most of it comes away. There’s a ring left, around my forearm. It falls down, like a cuff.

  I flex my broken hand. It hurts, but it works well enough.

  Once I’ve cleared the window of shards I boost myself through into some kind of storeroom. It’s lined with long rows of metal shelves, the kind that slot together. They look heavy. Everything in the store cupboard is boxed up. I read a few of the labels on the boxes. Companies I’ve never heard of. Things only a care home would have. Unisex slippers. Gowns. Nappies. One size fits all.

  I guess the door won’t be locked. Who’d steal nappies?

  It’s open. I push through, into the building proper, and into Hell.

  *

  58.

  It’s a world I’ve never seen before. A world that doesn’t exist outside, where real people live.

  People, dressed alike, are shuffling to and fro in a plain room. They sit, or they rock, or they pace. All of them are old, crumpled, broken people. The forgotten.

  A woman sits on a hard plastic chair, staring at the misted window. Her head is cocked to one side, like she can hear the snow falling.

  She’s thin. They’re all thin. Just shells, waiting to pass on. They don’t know they’re dead. This is a waiting room.

  Shitty fucking service.

  That’s all I can think. The smell hits me. Unchanged nappies. Bile. Blood. Pus.

  I wretch, holding my stomach. I dry heave.

  I haven’t eaten all day and I’m thankful.

  Not one of them looks at me. They exist in their own worlds. They live in some private hell, waiting for the end.

  I guess there are places like this all over the country. All over the world. Places where old folk and broken folk go so people like me don’t have to look at them and wonder at our own mortality. It’s like death has taken over living bodies and made them something else, something no one in their right mind could bear to look at for long.

  Places like this in every corner of the country, in every country in the world, but while they might be like this, they couldn’t be more dissimilar. This place is like the difference between cancer and a love bite.

  No, I don’t think other places are like this at all.

  This place is different in part because each man, each woman, has a chain around their ankle, bolted to the floor.

  The skin is worn thin. Some bleed, some sit and pull at the chains absently. Some pace, get to the end of the chain, fetch up, turn back. Some have fallen over. Some are crying.

  Most.

  There’s a repetitive nature to their torment. They don’t know they’re in torment. That makes it worse. Much worse. This time, I am sick. Nothing but bile, but I’m glad I can be sick.

  I’m still alive.

  I walk through them, all the while trying not to gag anymore on their putrid stench.

  They don’t see me. I wish I was the kind of person who could reach out. Comfort them. But I can’t touch them because they repulse me.

  My sanity wouldn’t let me touch them.
If I could feel an emaciated shoulder beneath my hand I could no longer allow my mind the illusion that somehow it’s not all real.

  No. I’m not here as a comforter. That’s not the way.

  I scoot around some, step over others. Old men, old women. Chained, like animals.

  I didn’t come here for them, but then, I didn’t know about them when I started. Now I know, things have changed.

  I laugh out loud and feel like the world’s biggest shit, laughing in this place of torment, but I can’t help the laugh that bursts out at the thought that I came here for anything. Like I had any choice.

  I didn’t choose to come here at all, no matter what I might think. I was sent.

  I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood just so I can keep the laughter in.

  I wish I had a gun, so I could put them down. Or a flamethrower, so I could burn the place to the ground.

  At the taste of blood I know I’m not laughing because it’s funny. I’m laughing because I’m fucking furious and all I’ve got is my anger. It’s incandescent. A furnace burning in the heart of me.

  I push on through the mass of broken dignity, out of the door.

  I find a stairwell and climb, because that’s where I’ve got to go. Up.

  I’m not alone anymore.

  The stranger. He’s back.

  It’s good he’s back. I know I’m not the only human in this place of shades.

  Up.

  The wooden banister thrums under my hand. Power. The place is feeding. Whatever it is, it’s getting stronger.

  It’s angry.

  But so am I.

  I grip the banister hard, pull myself up. I’ll drag myself up if that’s what it takes. Ever up.

  *

  59.

  I lose track of time, but it’s not like a blackout. It’s just I’m concentrating on putting one foot on the next step, and the next. The stranger helps, lending me his strength.

  Occasionally I stop, open a door. A room, full of people. Some floors, they’re in beds, some they’re pacing, some they’re just lying in heaps on the floor. The smell of shit is the only thing that lets me know they’re alive.

  On. Higher.

  Twenty floors.

  Another room. There’s a man in there with electrodes on a shaven scalp. He’s naked and his thighs are covered in shit and he’s got an erection.

  I shut the door. Colder on the inside than I’ve ever been. Even the stranger has never been this cold.

  Thirty floors and I’m dripping sweat. The place is getting hotten as I climb. The banister is hot to the touch, almost burning, but if I let go of the banister I won’t make it. I need it to climb. My legs are burning, getting hotten. Hotter.

  Hotter.

  My bad leg’s getting weaker. It buckles when I’m tired. If it buckles here, I’m going to break something, maybe my neck.

  But I can’t stop to rest. Even though my vision’s swimming, my heart pounding, my limbs trembling, I won’t stop.

  I’m in so much pain but my rage draws me on. It’s too much, the thumping in my head and the agony from my ribs and back as I gasp in breath after breath, but I can still breathe. I’m not chained to the floor or covered in shit, tortured in some fucked up hell hole.

  It’s too high and I can’t walk anymore, but each time I think I can’t go on, I open a door. It’s too high, sure, but there’s a woman with stumps for legs gnawing at her wrist to try to break free of her shackles. There’s a toothless man on one floor smashing his feet against the metal foot of his bed, and I’m fairly sure he’s trying to break his own foot off to get free. And I figure, it’s not too high.

  Forty floors and they’re not the worst. Screams come from behind the doors now. People who know well enough the pain they’re in. I’m frightened to open those doors, but I do, because each time I think it’s too high I get my fix of horror, like a snort of coke, and enraged, sweating, tired, in agony, I go on.

  I get to 50 and something’s different. I know the end is near. It helps me. Draws me on. Draws me to the top.

  Is it the knowledge that the end is near that draws me on, or something other? Something bigger than all this.

  I don’t know and I push the thought down and let my anger take the reins.

  I pause at 56. Each floor has a sign, and a number, letting me know how far I’ve come. But no sign saying how much further.

  I stopped looking in at the doors at around the 50th floor. I could bear it for as long as it took, but I didn’t need it anymore.

  The sight of all that food has made me sick. This place, whatever it is, feeds on them. They feed me, too. Feed my anger. But I’m full.

  57, 58…space out for a while…71…75…on. Up.

  I feel it. It’s there. I pause, because this is it.

  Of course. It would be.

  There is a solitary door at the head of the stairs. This is where she is. Synchronicity. The place has a sense of occasion. 79. The same number as Samantha’s room. A private room, all to herself.

  It’s been drawing me in all this time. Since we moved in. Since we saw the lost girl.

  Since London? A woman with her head on fire in a chapel, and a man burning in a sports shop. Yes. Since London. I think that’s right. I think it’s been drawing me in all along.

  Room 79. This is where Helen is. This place created this for me. My own personal hell. It knows things I have forgotten. It knows the heart of me.

  I don’t stand a chance.

  But maybe, there’s hope. Maybe it doesn’t know the stranger.

  Maybe it doesn’t know about the other thing. The other thing that’s been making me blind, so I can see.

  There are two entities at work. The one that owns the cat, and the one at the heart of this building, behind the door marked 79.

  I fucking hate them both.

  I push the door. It burns, but with a cold fire. There’s frost on the door. My hand leaves a mark and my fingers go numb. But that’s OK. My feelings are fine.

  Until I look in.

  *

  60.

  The thing pulsates with a darkness like a beating wound. Eruptions on its sickly flesh leak stinking pus. Bloated, it assumes the shape and boundaries of the room, but I know it exists beyond the walls. It is larger than the room, larger than Eventide.

  With each beat, with each soul it consumes, it bulges and grows. The walls, lost to sight in the distance, groan under the strain.

  It has no regard for me. I’m nothing but a mote in its eye.

  This room exists in no realm. It can’t. I can’t see the edges of the room, but I get the sense that the creature is boxed in, bound by the room, prevented from growing any further. But it is toxic. I can hear hissing from far away. Poison, dissolving the walls.

  It is something powerful and evil beyond reckoning and it is growing.

  The door slams behind me and I am a tiny spot in a distant glow. My eyes adjust, and I can make out light, way, way off into the distance. Firelight.

  The walls that contain it are burning. The fire is at the edge of this room, but I know that the fire is the estate, burning. Both things are true, but the reality is bigger. The truth is a thing as big as evil and goodness. Too big to hold. Too big to see. Far enough out to be of no consequence to me.

  The thing touches those walls. It must be in pain, if pain holds any meaning for such a thing. It’s a tumour. It’s an obscenity. For all I know the pain is feeding it, too.

  The small portion that I can see is charred from flame.

  The thing cannot move, cannot escape the flame. It’s dumb, but malevolent. Stupid, but sly, too.

  Above all, eternal. The twin of its opposing force, and like its twin, it does not care. It cares nothing for people, or worlds, or universes. Like its twin, it exists, forever, uncaring and unknowable.

  I am not just small in its eyes.

  It cannot see me because to it I am nothing.

  It doesn’t feed on flesh, because it has no mouth. It’s ju
st a mass of pustules and rot and malignant cancers, a creature made of corruption.

  The pus runs down its sides, only to be sucked in again through its pores.

  I can’t kill it. I understand that. It is immortal. Maybe this is what evil looks like, it’s pure manifestation. It should drive me insane.

  But the stranger’s got my back. He’s holding me up. I can feel him, slipping from me, becoming solid.

  He stands next to me. Outside.

  He looks like me, but he’s drawn, haggard. His face is older. Wiser. Harder.

  He walks forward and pushes against the flesh of the creature. He makes his hand straight, like a knife, and the flesh gives.

  There is a terrible sickening smell. Putrid fluid runs across the floor, toward me.

  It sees me, at last. It sees me through the blood. It hears me, because I’m screaming, screaming with insanity at the sight and smell of it, and insanity is the only language it understands. I scream so loud my ears burst. I can’t hear the pulsing of the black heart anymore. I can’t hear my hate, my fear, but the stranger turns to me and takes my shoulder and gives me strength.

  He nods, and speaks. We hear each other just fine.

  You have to go in.

  He cuts a bigger hole through the fleshy thing with the edge of his hand, slashing at the hide. Fluid pours out, bathing him.

  Then the mass shifts. Expands. Sucks him in.

  I look down at my hand. It’s elbow deep in the mass. My hearing comes back.

  I can hear her sighing, there, behind it, inside it, inside the madness.

  She’s breathing her last breath.

  I push my other hand into the rent and tear. The pus covers me but I close my eyes and mouth and climb inside.

  *

  61.

  Inside is another room, empty but for a cold steel bed. The back is inclined at an angle so my daughter can read, or watch the TV that hangs over the bed, attached somehow above to nothing. I can see the sheets covering her gaunt frame are crisp. Steel bars run along one side so she can’t fall out in her sleep or when she’s racked with pain.