Chapter 5 #4
She got one shout out, or possibly a scream, before he had her by the throat.
The ficklest glimmer from one of the slanted skylights pasted Godfrey’s face with a ghastly slug-silver sheen.
He hoisted her off her feet, and he was gigantic, the angular bulk of him pressing on all sides.
She saw the top button of his shirt flit past her face as his exertions tore it loose.
Her breath was a hoarse wheeze, but she kicked her heels at the crates and old furniture around her, even as she pried impotently at his grip.
“I said,” he ground out, “we should have just vanished you. We should have taken you into the trees with the others. But they’re still soft, Gil and the children.
Soft and young. They don’t know how to make the hard decisions.
” He coughed suddenly, disgustingly, right in her face.
Her ears shook from the sound. It filled the whole attic, like a discharged gun.
That was how they found her, probably. Ross was suddenly wrenching at Godfrey’s arms, unable to move them, like the man was a statue, a machine.
Elena could feel her whole head pounding by then, no breath in, no breath out, a dreadful pressure building within her.
And Godfrey seemed almost to be suffering the same thing, his eyes protruding, his jaw wide as though he was about to tear her face off with his teeth.
He said something, but none of it was words, just mad snippets of babble escaping from the corners of his mouth.
Melissa let out a scream and hit him with something. An old umbrella, in fact, snatched from an elephant’s foot bin. It shattered into splinters, but they all heard the heavy snap from within Godfrey.
His eyes stopped seeing Elena, or anything. His mouth relaxed momentarily and she heard a long exhalation of breath, as though it was all a grand relief.
His grip loosened. He sat down heavily one way, and Elena fell the other, gasping for breath, hands to her bruised throat. Ross had his torch up, checking her over with the determined focus of a medical student who wished he’d studied harder.
Melissa was standing at the edge of the light, a hand to her mouth, staring at what she’d done. When Godfrey let out another long breath, she actually squeaked, fear and relief combined.
He continued to release that last breath, until there surely had never been so much air ever inside one person. His arms and legs flapped, fishlike, undirected. His head tilted slowly backwards, mouth yawning wide.
Something went snap inside him again, and then again, as though inner restraints were breaking.
A great shudder rose up through his torso, like reverse peristalsis. His face split.
It split. As though it was dried paper. His jaw parted from his skull.
They saw a segmented dislocation of collar bones and upper ribs.
Something pushed itself up and out from within Great-Uncle Godfrey.
Something big enough that it must have been filling a fair proportion of that big barrel chest and abdominal cavity.
Ross’s hand was shaking violently by then, making the torchlight dance, but Elena saw the gleam of blood-red eyes, round and bulging, and a scrabble of horrible little clawed hands pushing and prying as it freed itself from the hollowed-out thing that had been Godfrey, and a long dagger beak like a flexing syringe.
Melissa lunged for it, not from rage or anything properly heroic.
Pure loathing was in the driving seat, attacking because the alternative would be to share the world with what they were seeing and that would be worse.
She picked up a cricket bat that had spilled from the same bin as the umbrella and hit Godfrey’s corpse so hard that the handle sheared off.
The thing was quicker, though. Elena saw it complete its exit, a hard, hunched shape skidding across the attic floor, limbs flailing for purchase.
Its back split and she saw wings like crushed-up plastic bags, inflating and straightening out.
With a wordless cry, Ross took up an old chair and brought it down on the thing. They heard the sharp crack as it split open, but he didn’t stop there. He went on slamming the chair onto the hideous escapee until he held only two broken pieces of wood in his hands, and the rest was darkness.
One had the weird side-on stylisation of a medieval manuscript, showing a monastic figure kneeling before a winged figure that recalled the Enderby Angel she’d seen on her way in.
And probably the one had copied the other or vice versa, but seeing the same weirdnesses reproduced with remarkable faithfulness—fidelitatis—made her shiver.
The beaked, bulgingeyed face that radiated a kind of idiot beneficence for all its horror.
The thin arms crooked into prayer in the shadow of wings that seemed more of the moth than the avian, painted with fierce and vigilant eyes so that the whole figure, at a blink, became an awful, divine countenance, the oval end of its trailing robe became the very beard of God, the V of its beak a celestial frown.