Sufferer's Song Read online

  THE SUFFERER'S SONG

  by Steven Savile

  Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Steve Savile &Macabre Ink Digital Publications

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  Part One

  The Fools that Live on the Hill

  - 1 -

  Jude Kenyon sat on the rotten stump of dead oak, her legs crossed and arms folded, watching the sun fade and the sky redden around the snow-dusted rooftops below. She sat that way, ignoring the cold seeping through her skin and numbing her bones, dwelling on all the things that were wrong with the world she was so eager to run away from, hungry, sore and cold.

  Moses Hill was quiet, save for the occasional whisper of sounds; the rush of the stream nearby, the flit of bird's wings, and her own shallow breathing.

  Jude cupped her hands around her mouth to form a wind tunnel of warmer air and breathed, thawing her nose and the skin around and underneath her eyes. So far from home. A self-obsessed, self-destructive part of her half-wished that she might never go back – that home and work and Nick weren't the sole ingredients of her every day.

  Nick, a man whose only genuine talents seemed to be failing to catch the waiter's eye in the local Trattoria, and standing on the curb and getting soaked down one side as the cars aquaplaned through the gutters of puddles. Sometimes he stretched himself and wrote mind-numbingly dull poems under the auspices of social conscience. Jude had had two weeks of splendid isolation in the Northumbrian moors to get away from her eclectic Mister Wonderful and already they had slipped into three and were threatening a fourth. Time aplenty to cast a cold - lucid - eye over the remnants of what was a rather anaemic infatuation. She balked at actually calling it a mistake; they had been young when they first got together, and she couldn't deny they had shared a few good times between them, but those good times seemed to be getting fewer and further between. Now he buried his heart in blissful ignorance and continued to offer up that sickly, claustrophobic, smother-love that made every new day they spent together another gentle delirium to be endured rather than enjoyed.

  She stared down the hill, looking for some small consolation in its rolling blanket of whites and greys, but saw only man and dog racing up the tricky slope, dog -a black and tan Doberman- bounding, man semaphoring his difficulties as he struggled to keep his balance.

  Jude didn't hear the footsteps moving up behind her.

  “Don't scream,” the man’s accent was thick and difficult to follow. “And I won't hurt you.”

  Then his hand was across her mouth, reeking of stale cigarettes, and his laughter was in her ear, slow, maniacal. Any doubts that may have lingered were suffocated beneath those stinking hands.

  She couldn't stop her heart from scrambling; couldn't stop her lungs from constricting; couldn’t stop the fear from reaching down into her stomach. She saw him out of the corner of her left eye; his vague outline crouched down to form an evil cradling cup around her back. Her right eye fixed on the stranger racing up the hill and the black and tan flurry at his side.

  Jude felt two fingers trace almost gentle lines across her cheekbone before they clenched, bitten-down nails digging into the tender skin, drawing blood.

  “He'll break your heart,” her attacker goaded, breaking the long seconds of dark-sliding silence to grab a handful of Jude's hair and force her head back until she had no choice but to look at him: at his short-cropped hair, peppered with the white of falling snow, at his simian brow and his predatory eyes of ice and fire, at his face, so close to hers. “Because he ain't no White Knight, believe me.”

  She felt him kneading at her breast; tasted his sour breath in the back of her throat. The barking of the Doberman subsided into familiarity.

  He spat in her face, and when she tried to wipe it away casually back-handed her across the cheek, hawked and spat again. She tried to scream as he forced her head down so far she thought she was going to choke on her own breastbone. Then he yanked it again, demanding she watch as the running man slowed to a more sedate jog, then, twenty feet away, a walk. “Man, you started without me,” he called, shaking his head.

  The hand covering Jude's mouth withdrew. “Nobody's going to hear you scream,” her attacker goaded, and punched her in the throat, hard.

  Both men knelt over her while she clawed at her throat and choked on the damage the punch had done.

  The last feeling Jude suffered before she lost consciousness was of her mouth being pried open and some kind of fabric being stuffed inside. Small mercy that it was, Jude Kenyon was saved from the real hurts of the violation that followed.

  - 2 -

  Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto fairly rolled out of the recessed speakers, the sounds swelling, sweeping and swooning while Brent Richards hummed his own gentle parody of notes.

  The crane fly on the desk blotter ceased to be an amusing distraction and became another component of his bleak mood. Recapping the lid of his tortoiseshell pen Richards walked his fingers in behind the fly’s back and with a deft swoop pinned one leg to the inky paper. The suddenly higher, more frantic, pitching of the wings amused him while he amused himself. He pinched the chitinous wings between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, felt them vibrate, desperate for flight, and rolled them, crippling the fly before he plucked the whisper-thin wings free. Playing God and destroyer.

  “If thine wings do offend thee, then pluck them off,” he told the dying insect. “Do you hear the silence as an absence of sound or as a complete swamping of sounds so full, so intense, that they drown out everything, even your wing beats?” It was something to hide himself in instead of facing the ugly truth that was written so plainly in his journal. Kappa was suffering some form of retrograde devolution. It was disturbing. She was shrivelling into a husk, but why? All of the indicators, alpha and theta waves included, were positive. By rights Kappa ought to have been growing her own metaphorical wings. Not . . . not – he could barely bring himself to think it – dying.

  With the pad of his thumb, Richards pressed the fly into the weave of the blotting paper, careful to preserve the illusion of a miniature man made by the dead fly. Uncapping the pen again, he wrote on the pristine white of the blotting paper, very neatly, very precisely: Evolution Hurts. Then framed the whole macabre joke as if it were some caption cartoon by Schultz – his own social comment – in a web of black ink around the letters N.E.S.T..

  Neurological Emotional Stimuli Trigger.

  He knew what he wanted to write now. He reached across for his journal, thumbing through the pages until he found the demarcation Imperfect Evolution, and began transcribing his doubts about the E-Motion enzyme and its anomalous retrogressive effect, inserting the Greek Kappa in place of the name Kenyon.

  ‘April 11th:

  ‘The viral based manipulation mechanism ought to be nothing more than a natural extrapolation of the NEST PROJECT but test case Kappa remains an anomaly. Like the other Pilgrims she persists with dangerously high levels of endorphin addiction to the extent of mirroring the effects of delirium tremens. Kappa is no more than an addict; there is no other way to explain it. For every one step forward she makes mentally her body weakens threefold. How much more can she take?

  ‘The infiltration of the host nuclei has worked thus far to produce a tandem Foundation-Slave relationship. Isolated NEST cultures show
the prevalent E-Motion suppressant enzyme, which in turn stamps its trace identity onto the Foundation – host – cell and proceeds to habituate the host as a pariah, sapping everything it has to give. The process is similar to that of a wandering hermit crab although in Kappa’s case the drain is dangerously close to being lethal in terms of cytotoxicity and rejection of the hermit spores.

  ‘After the short-lived downtime during which the enzyme gestates, the Slave antigen triggers a rapid acceleration of the host’s metabolism, accounting for much of the physical weight loss and energy drain. Epinephrine works in some ways to stimulate a transferral of Kappa’s emotional condition. Sexual urges appear to heighten markedly after exposure to the Epinephrine. Kappa has taken to throwing herself bodily about the cell, beating her face, tearing hanks of hair from her scalp and abusing her body in any manner we cannot prevent. She has gone wild. Appetites are best described as insatiable, and again I would diagnose this to be an effect of the accelerated metabolic rate. But there are so many things I do not understand. Why is she withering to a husk despite the rapid escalation of her appetites? Why is she driven to masochistic extremis? No matter how desperately I might wish it otherwise, it seems we cannot simply rush headlong into Hell’s fires. No, softly, softly, catchy monkey as they say. The dimensions, the implications of NEST beggar comprehension. It could be the beginning of the human revolution if only we can isolate the rogue element.’

  Richards found himself wanting to say so much more, but words had to descend into formulae and formulae in turn needs must descend into the murky realms of biofeedback, genetics and supposition. DNA. It was like a fingerprint smeared across his cornea; a blueprint for Homo Superior. Man plus. A man capable of turning on or tuning out emotion, tuning out pain and hurt, but with the flipside capability of exploding hatefully when he needed something more. Something that cold. Something that cynical. The latent talent to turn on or off the whole gamut of emotions and fine tune the blend when the situation demanded something infinitely more complex from him. A man to react as the new world warranted. The perfect man for all seasons. Lover, Warrior, Friend.

  It was close. So very, very close. Yet so impossibly far away.

  Kappa was just the beginning. A Pilgrim making a long journey towards her God. Perfect could not be rushed. So, she had her sweats, her addictions, but these were nothing more than a wrinkle to be ironed out. Something in the dosage of the enzyme, perhaps? Something as sublime as their storage techniques, maybe? Something to think about definitely, like the enzyme itself, something to build a foundation upon.

  That first step on the road towards Oz for its not-so-wonderful wizard. Only the rapidly degenerating wreck of a human being that had been Jude Kenyon stood between the foundation and laying the first solid bricks.

  Objectively, Richards held out little hope of her surviving the coming night. After that, well then Kappa was just one more corpse in a shallow grave. Another brick undermining his wall.

  Outside, an alarm sounded.

  The cries were taken up inside.

  “Oh, dear God, what is it now?”

  The office door opened before he was halfway out of his seat.

  “Dead,” a face as white as the lab coat beneath it blurted even before it was in the room. “Two of them. Dead.”

  “What are you talking about, man?” Richards demanded. Calm. Clinical. Already thinking in terms of damage limitation. “Slowly. Tell me slowly. What happened?”

  The lab assistant swallowed a huge lungful of air and tried to moderate his frantic breathing. “I found them in the N.E.S.T. lab. Graeme and Hobart. Ripped apart,” he seemed to be caught up in the last vestiges of the nightmare. “Their eyes had been clawed out.” It was almost an afterthought. “It was horrible. There was blood everywhere. The lock on the cell door had been shattered. How could they hold so much blood?”

  Richards had stopped listening. His was trying to think like Kappa. Where would she go? Back to the hills where she had been kidnapped? It made a sick kind of sense. “I want three teams combing the compound. Two outside. Damn. Send Sanders and Dickinson into the wilds, and have Duncan and Sawyer head towards the village. Find them. Bring them back.”

  - 3 –

  The tap was dripping again; the slow, monotonous splash of each tear breaking in the porcelain cup enough to rouse Frank Rogan from his meandering daydream and set his teeth on edge.

  One minute closer to death, the tears seemed to be mocking in their whispering, watery voices.

  One minute closer…

  “And just what the hell d’you know about it anyway?” Frank accused the tears, angry with himself for letting Billy's forgetfulness get under his skin.

  He looked up at the window, aware that the soft keening of the wind had stopped and a deep, heavy silence had gathered within the woods outside; the night brooding over the summer and slowly shattering dreams. It was too dark even to see the twisted branches of Hangman's Oak in the yard.

  A quiver of something akin to dread trembled through his heavy bones. Frank stretched, his shoulder joint popping like a broomstick, and stood up.

  Reflected in the glass he saw a square face formed around deep-set, morose eyes; a tight web crow’s feet and worry lines, hair shot through with silver. Rogan had never been a handsome man, but in that moment, as another watery drop escaped the tap's mouth, Frank recognised the mirror-man as a smaller, tormented caricature of his long gone youth. Compared with the sketchy portrait of an unreliable memory, the face caught in the glass seemed the cruellest trick of time itself.

  There was something else, too; something else that had shifted within the face of the reflection. Frank couldn't put his finger on it, but whatever it was, it left him feeling decidedly uneasy.

  Moving cautiously, careful to step over the lifted floorboard in the centre of the room, he reached the sink, his eyes drawing level with those of his ghostly doppelganger, pressed his palms against the glass, and strained to peer out into the darkness behind the mirror-window.

  Everything out there was shadows and smears.

  With the main Hexham to Carlisle road more than three miles away to the north, the world was silent. Standing blind at the window, Rogan was hard pushed to suppress the shudder he felt from rising.

  “What choice have I got?” he asked himself bitterly. He thought of the girl in the photograph lying on the kitchen table and knew that the answer was no choice at all.

  Rogan took a step back and turned stepping over the shallow hole that had been left by a missing floorboard. He reached across to dim the light, picked up his lukewarm mug of coffee from the kitchen table, put it down and picked up a photograph in its place. Rogan saw the accusation in her blackened eyes. He crumpled the photo and threw it at the back wall. “No choice,” he said again as he went through to the hall and made the call.

  And still that sense of wrongness, so hard to explain, so impossible to ignore, continued to fester inside Frank Rogan. The cold voice of instinct whispered in his ear: death was one minute closer,

  And someone – something – was out there, in the darkness.

  Watching him.

  - 4 -

  Spring had been late this year, its light, childish touch not chasing away the damp, grey days and frost-bitten nights of March until it had felt like the snow would never thaw.

  Even in spring there had been the bad weeks of course, just as there had been good ones. Too many were passed waiting for twilight seep the colours out of the houses and trees, taking long walks through the small lakeside park or along the jetty. Watching the children on the swings and roundabouts, laughing and giggling, swinging high and racing round, bubbling so full of life whilst Ben Shelton wallowed in what-might-have-beens.

  Every once in a while, as a giggling child was lifted down from the swings, a parent would catch a glimpse of the small plaque on the seat and read his worn farewell: For Hannah and Holly, my two girls, who had so much fun here so long ago.

  They would hug t
heir children that little bit harder then, and those that knew would remember his story and his sadness, which wasn't such a bad thing.

  Done with walking, Ben came home to Wit's End to stare at the blank computer screen. Okay, Benjamin, what say we exercise the old fingers before they start growing leaves?

  Ben slipped the work-in-progress flash drive into the USB slot, and tapped out the commands to take him through the directories until SUFFERER1 -- May 11,’ appeared in the corner of the screen.

  He tapped out a few keys – the same ones he had hit, in the same combination maybe a hundred times before.

  - THE SUFFERER'S SONG –

  BY

  Benjamin Shelton

  The words appeared within the pristine white sheet of the screen.

  Then he sat there, shifting his attention to the row of books on the bookcase beside the idling computer. It wasn't a handsome bookcase, but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up with a series of volumes on fairy tales, legends and strange phenomena. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Charles Beaumont's The Hunger and Other Stories jostled for place with a countless array of stock-in-trade King, Koontz and Herbert paperbacks. Older stuff too, M.R. James, Henry James, Lovecraft, Nolan, Matheson, Blackwood, Shelley and Stoker. The last but one shelf housed more modern epics again, Eddings’ Belgariad, Martin’s Ice and Fire, Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Donaldson's Covenant, and Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion trilogy, while Anderson's fairy tales lay one on top of the other with the Grimm Brother's own disturbing visions in a pile on the floor.

  On the top shelf –though there were others – one book dominated the row. Its pale blue dust jacket drew the eye: The Swords of Scorn.