Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [6]
Caroline stood in the bathroom again. Remembering. Remembering the first time she’d cut herself, the first time she’d tried to kill herself, the first time she made herself puke. She remembered the scars, both inside and out, and the stories each one told.
Tomorrow she would be nineteen. For the first time her father wouldn’t be there to wake her with bacon and toast on a tray, and a card full of record tokens and money – he was so crap at choosing, but be loved her so much, and she said it didn’t matter, but he wouldn’t listen. There was no one to pull back the curtains, no one to ask her brightly how the world looked through slightly older eyes. If he’d been around he’d probably remind her that some of his family were coming over to see her that afternoon, but that then she’d be free to go out with her mates. Maybe go for a meal up at that nice Italian and think about hitting the clubs. Caroline wondered if he’d have bought her another dress, like he had last year. It was still in her wardrobe, elegant and sleeveless.
‘Happy birthday,’ Caroline said, and slashed at her arm with the blade.
9
Two
Suicide Isn’t Painless
(In Fact It Hurts Like Hell)
It came out of the darkness towards her, as if she were flying – or being carried – over a landscape choked by fog. Through the grey mist the familiar building emerged in a rush as emaciated tree-hands endlessly deferred to its majesty. She stopped, aware now only of the great stone walls, the dark corridors – the place swamped every sense, dominated every emotion. The building, set square on the gently ascending lawns made steel-grey by filtered sunlight, was all.
Over decades the structure had absorbed and perpetuated an atmosphere of disease. Three storeys tall, it resembled a demented castle as described in a twisted fairy tale. Its corners rose as stunted towers, its frontage, of dark and unwieldy granite, formed a crenellated archway pierced by huge windows.
The cruciform main building was surrounded by a rectangle of shabby outbuildings and old stables. The piecemeal place seemed an extension of the dark soil that gave it birth, something that had evolved in secret away from human eyes. Ugly black walkways of cast iron linked the various wings; a bare frame of primitive scaffolding rested against the rear of the place. If it had once been temporary it now seemed locked into the bricks and mortar by thick ivy and calcification. Nothing moved in the courtyards or behind the barred windows; indeed, the only sign of life was the smoke that billowed from the east wing, where untidy metal pipes protruded from dirty brickwork.
Suddenly she was on the gravelled walkway that led up to the great house, surrounded on all sides by vast hedges and sombre angelic statues that stared down at motionless fountains of dust. She was running. Something was coming – through the fog, through the trees – something was coming for her.
Her feet pounded against the driveway, arms hitting out at the fists of twig and leaf that threatened to hold her back. Lungs burning, heart thudding, she ran towards the building. No longer a threat, no longer a tomb to the dead, it now became sanctuary.
She risked a glimpse behind – the creatures were coming, enormous and black, eyes roving from side to side like lamps. She could hear their paws 11
thudding through the grass, their snuffling breath as they surged effortlessly forward.
Just because you feel them, a distant, too-quiet voice in her mind tried to tell her, it doesn’t mean they’re there.
A coughing, rasping howl from one of the animals silenced the rational voice in her head. She fixed her eyes on the building, striving for speed, working arms and legs despite every tired protest of aching muscle and fatigued sinew. If anything the building slipped further and further away, almost sliding into the darkness at the back of the hill – as if the ground were a cloth map and the geography was changing beneath her. The door, a bright beacon in the velvet dark, receded still further, then blinked out of sight.
Death itself