Chapter Eight
“Priddy, for God’s sake help me!”
Not a
She-Creature scream, not whale song. Just a man in unbearable pain.
Priddy shot up the stairs. He burst into the upper room. Merou was
sitting bolt upright in the bunk, clutching his knees to his chest.
“Help me,” he repeated, holding out a trembling hand. “Don’t let it
happen to me here. Please help.”
Priddy
put a foot up on the lower bunk so he could see. “Don’t push me
away, you idiot. What’s going on?”
“I shouldn’t’ve smoked that weed. I forgot about full moon. Oh,
hell, it’s starting... Priddy!”
He
hoisted himself up beside Merou, put his arms around him in the
confined space of the bunk and held on. Merou stiffened for a
moment then surrendered, laying his head to Priddy’s shoulder and
releasing cry after piteous cry. “It’s all right,” Priddy told him,
clutching him tight and rocking. “I’ll get help for you, okay? But
you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t. I can’t let a topsider see.”
“Oh, give over with this topside crap. You’re burning
up.”
“I need the sea.”
“Well, short of chucking you out the window... Can you
walk?”
Merou
gave a pain-racked shout of laughter, then bit off a howl. “That’s
just the... fucking problem.”
“Something to do with your legs, then?” Still propping him,
Priddy pushed the bedclothes aside, avoiding his dive to get them
back. “Have you got cramp? I get that sometimes, and it’s bloody
agony. Look, your tendons are all ridged up. Open up your knees a
bit, and I’ll...”
Merou recoiled. He pressed himself against the granite wall.
“I told you,” he hissed. “I told
you.”
Maybe
Priddy had passive-smoked enough of the weed to explain what he was
seeing. He knelt on the bunk, one hand on each of Merou’s knees,
frozen in the act of trying to ease them apart. He’d been right
about the lack of belly button, but that was a detail, an
oversight. Merou didn’t have two separate knees anymore. A kind of
skin had formed between them, glimmering in the light from the
anglepoise lamp screwed to the bedframe. It looked like living
clingfilm, shot through with blood vessels and golden filaments
that crackled and sparked as he watched, like neural pathways
firing signals through the brain. Merou was encased in it from the
waist down, his cock and limbs and feet disappearing behind its
increasing thickness. “Merou, what... what the hell is
that?”
“The beginning of my change. I have to stop it before the
joints begin to fuse.”
“Shit. All right—how do we do that?”
“I’ve got to tear it apart.”
“What? No. It’s alive. There’s blood flowing through it,
and—”
“You think I don’t know? Jesus, Priddy—if you can’t help me,
fuck off and let me see to it myself.”
“I’ll call a doctor for you. Trewin will come out from Hawke
Lake.”
“Bollocks to Trewin!” Merou’s head snapped back. Cords stood in
his neck. He couldn’t get another word out, and his lost, desperate
wail cut through Priddy like a knife. He joined Merou in his
clenched-jaw efforts to force his legs apart.
The
membrane ripped. Blood sprayed across the white wall. An arc of it
hit Priddy in the face, smelling of hot salt and ozone, and that
was far from the worst of it: something snapped like a whiplash
under his hands, some new-formed tendon or ligament cracking under
the strain, and Merou fainted cold.
Priddy
knelt over him, fighting not to throw up. To stay conscious,
because two passed-out bodies piled up on the bed would do nothing
to stop whatever hellish thing was happening here. Tentatively he
patted Merou’s face. “Mate. Wake up.” Some of the damage Vigo had
done to him was good: he’d have walked a mile to avoid hitting
someone, but a pat wasn’t going to do the business now. He braced
up and delivered a ringing slap. “Come on!”
The
long-lashed eyes opened. Priddy wished they hadn’t. The silvery
third eyelid was back, sweeping up in a diagonal to hide iris and
pupil, all the humanity of his gaze. “Help,” Merou whispered, one
webbed hand blindly seeking Priddy’s face. “The sea.”
“What happens otherwise?”
“I’ll die. Not here, please, not... caught halfway.”
“I don’t think I’m strong enough to carry you down.”
“Try. We’re different when we’re leaving our
bodies.”
“You’re not leaving anything.” Priddy stroked his hair, took
firm hold of the hand reaching out for him, not caring that it was
now webbed to the fingertips, the inside of the wrist trailing a
blue-green frill. “You’ve got to hang on.”
“Then... you’ve got to try.”
At least
they were starting from the top bunk. Priddy sprang to the floor.
He reached up and helped Merou roll to the edge, wincing for him as
more of the enclosing membrane ripped away. “Come here. Lean out
towards me. Hold onto my shoulders and...”
Merou
slipped past his centre of gravity and fell out of the bunk. Priddy
gave a cry of fear at dropping him, torn and bleeding as he was,
but seized what he could—armpit, waist, the skin there scouring his
hand with its textured pattern of perfectly arrayed little
scales—and hoisted him somehow over his shoulder into a fireman’s
lift.
Easier
than he’d imagined. Priddy could even spare a hand to grab a
blanket off the bed as he backed away. He threw it over his burden,
turned round carefully and headed for the stairs. He was much
healthier now than when he’d arrived to take up his duties—clean,
although as both Merou and Baz had pointed out, less through virtue
than necessity; beginning to harden up again with muscle from all
those stairs. Maybe that explained how he was doing this, how he
was able to cart a grown man taller and heavier than himself down
the treacherous flight. Merou had passed out again and was
deadweight over his shoulder, limp hands passively bumping off his
arse.
We’re different when we’re leaving our bodies.
Lighter, he meant. Priddy had encountered this
before, in a long-ago family dog, an unloved lump, inherently
vicious and carefully taught by Vigo to remain that way. When fate
had caught up with the beast, Priddy had tried to carry it to the
vet, too sick to snap at him for once. He’d never got there. A
curious weightlessness had come over him as he’d stumbled down the
pavement, just before the creature had stopped breathing and fallen
still.
“Shit,” he said, coming to a halt on the stairs. “Merou, no.
No, no, no, no.” Awkwardly he turned, getting the best purchase he
could on the handrail, and laid him down, cradling his skull to
rest on the edge of the blanket. “You’re not a dog, or a—a bloody
fish. You don’t just slide away like that.” The frill had wrapped
itself protectively tight around Merou’s wrists, so he felt for a
pulse in his throat instead, and yelped in fright as his fingers
passed through the skin and into a chilly, green-fringed space
beneath. “Oh, fuck,” he choked, snatching his hand away. “Dude,
what is happening to you?”
Dying. That was all he needed to know. Dead already was a possibility he
refused to admit. The fireman’s heft seemed brutal now, so he eased
one arm under Merou’s shoulders and the other beneath his knees, or
whatever the hell he had there instead, now that the membrane had
grown back with ferocious vigour and his feet, ankles and calves
seemed to be one long tapering bone inside it. Lifting him this way
ought to have been impossible, but the terrifying lightness was
still there, the weight in his arms no harder to bear than a
child’s. Once he’d got his balance he was able to set off once more
at a good pace, Merou’s head resting quiescent against him. It took
him less than a minute to reach the ground floor.
Still too late, still too long. Priddy began to cry, unable to
help himself. Bless Baz Dingwall, bastard that he was—he’d left the
iron door inched open in his panicked flight, and Priddy didn’t
have to stop to struggle with the lock. He shoved his foot into the
gap and dragged it open. The night outside was pure and still, a
jewel-prickled majesty of stars in the darkness after moonset. He
carried Merou down the steps of the foundation block, slipped and
stumbled with him over the slope of rocks and yarrow-fragrant turf
to the beach. Almost
there, he’d have said, if he hadn’t been
sobbing aloud like a frightened kid. Almost at the sea. Now Merou felt
like nothing in his arms, ready to crumble to iridescent dust, the
force of the life that was trying to leave him lifting him up and
away. Priddy almost ran the last few steps: splashed frantically
waist-deep into the star-shivered water. Leaning to plant a kiss on
his brow, he lowered him, letting the next crest of the gentle
swell surge up to rock and reclaim the tortured flesh.
And
somehow Priddy lost him. On instinct he’d kept the dark head above
surface—mouth and nose anyway, whilst at the same time a deeper
understanding prompted him to let the salt water flow freely over
and into the new creases in his throat. He’d been holding him,
unable to control his noisy grief over the stillness of his face,
and...
Nothing.
His arms were empty, the rippling surface vacant. He whipped round,
losing his footing, submerging under the weight of his soaked
jeans. That was all right—he needed some ballast, something to keep
him down here while he searched, because he was damned if he was
going to let the sea snatch Merou now. He kicked off his shoes and
dived.
The
water was so dark! He lost his bearings instantly. Something was
swirling around him, a heavy current or one of the vortices that
occasionally formed as the tide combed the ocean back through the
Hell’s Teeth barricade. Priddy tumbled through it, blind, casting
hopelessly around him for a floating limb, a handful of hair.
“Merou,” he yelled, wasting his last breath on the cry. Silver
bubbles, soundless, shimmering away into the abyss...
Something bumped against him. He had a DNA-deep west
Cornishman’s terror of sharks, and he lashed out wildly. If it was