“Come on,” she whispered, stepping past him and walking swiftly down the hill. He ran after her and they made their way without speaking, both of them casting nervous glances back up the vast, shadowed bulk of the mountain. There was no sign of anything living up there, but the slope was pocked with craters and hills. His skin was crawling, too, like there were eyeballs pressed right up against his flesh.
He didn’t know how much longer it was when he skidded down the last section of the hill, skulls and bones skittering out across a cracked and broken street. Pan had been right, it was getting darker, the shadows growing longer. The generator hum in the air was louder now, like he had a bumblebee inside his head.
“You feeling that?” he asked Pan.
She nodded, grimacing. “Was the same last night,” she said. “It gets weirder.”
“Got any idea where to go?”
She nodded toward the nearest building. It was an immense concrete corpse, its crumbling flesh pierced by huge shards of steel all the way up to where its top floors were shielded by the smoke.
“That place looks … wrong,” he said.
Something screamed, the noise distant but still somehow deafening. Marlow pressed himself up against Pan before he even knew what he was doing. She didn’t move away, and he could feel her tremble. The shriek came again, closer this time, then again from another direction, and only then did Marlow recognize what he was hearing.
“Demons,” he said, and Pan nodded.
“They come out in the night,” she said quietly. “There were hundreds of them.”
“Great,” he muttered.
Three more screams, and the streets were darkening at an alarming rate. He didn’t know much about this place, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that if they got stranded outside then bad things were going to happen. The building was a hundred yards away, behind one of the snaking pipelines that crossed the city. The pipe was as tall and as thick as a car, a knotted cord of metal rings and tubes and fleshy parts that looked almost like muscle. Marlow put his hand on an exposed section and the hum inside his head seemed to double in strength, pulsing. A supernova of darkness exploded in his vision, a darkness that coiled like snakes, that parted to reveal a figure there, as big as a mountain—one that watched him with a cluster of insect eyes.
It was like something was pulling him, or part of him at least—a magnet trying to tease out the shrapnel in his skin, in his muscles, in his organs. He snapped his hand free, staring at Pan. She had clamped her hand under her armpit, her body spasming like she’d had an electric shock.
“You see that?” she said.
“I felt it,” he answered. “Is there another way around?”
A shriek answered him, coming from close behind. He searched the rubble, seeing nothing, turning back to see Pan lobbing the femur over the top of the pipe. She followed it, yelping as she dropped down the other side. He sucked in a lungful of air and climbed, ignoring the pain, ignoring the figure who thumped into his head. He jumped, landing on a pillow of ash. As soon as he let go of the conduit his skull stopped buzzing, but it felt like it had left a mark there, greasy fingerprints on his thoughts. He shook it away to see that he was at the base of a drift that covered the lower floors of the tower.
“Hurry,” said Pan, already scaling the slope. He started after her, struggling with the effort.
It was almost dark by the time they scrabbled through the broken window and onto solid ground. Marlow leaned against the frame, seeing that they were in a large space that could once have been an open-plan office. It was completely empty.
“Where now?” he panted.
She didn’t answer, but Marlow could see her shrug, her body an ink spill against the dark. He heard her shuffle closer, felt her press against him, and he fumbled through the night, found her hand. He squeezed, and she squeezed back.
“I’m glad,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Glad I got torn to pieces and sent to hell,” he said. “Jeez, thanks, Pan.”
Her other hand slapped him across the shoulder and he had to stifle a laugh, pinching his nose to hold it at bay. Even so, it still came out as a wet snort. It seemed crazy, that he was having to hold back laughter, but then how else were you supposed to fight? It was the only weapon he had here.
“I take it back,” Pan said, letting go of his hand. He could still hear the fear in her voice but it was quieter now. It had lost some of its power. “I’m not glad.”
A fresh round of screams had started up outside and he waited until they had died down before speaking again.
“What now?”
“Nothing,” she said. “The dark, it’s … it’s like some kind of wild dream, Marlow. A nightmare. You can’t see anything. But I don’t think they can either. If we’re quiet, they might not be able to find us.”
“Sit still, be quiet,” said Marlow. “That sounds like one of Herc’s plans.”
This time it was Pan who breathed a laugh, but it was short-lived. Marlow wondered where the old guy was now, whether he was still alive. Charlie, too, and Truck, abandoned in Venice. He half hoped they’d all show up here the way that he had—better to enter hell with an army by your side, right? But none of them had been under contract. If they had died, they’d have gone somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
Outside, a demon howled—the sound half pig squeal and half death rattle—too close.
“It won’t be long,” Pan said. “Night here isn’t like back home. Just be quiet, just stay in the dark, and they won’t find us.”
And the words were still leaving her mouth when the sky began to burn.
THE WALL
It burst up from the horizon, a wave of flame that could have been an oil fire. The inferno burned across the sky, so low that it engulfed the tops of the skyscrapers in whirling, spitting vortexes. The heat was unbearable, like sitting underneath a grill, and Pan covered her head with her hands, curling up beneath its spitting, crackling fury, beneath its unending thunder.
It wasn’t the noise and the heat that worried her, though.
It was the light.
The world was bathed in it, brighter than the day. It seared its way through the broken windows of the high-rise like a searchlight. The city was picked out in shades of orange and red, echoes of the fire rippling across its surface. Above, the sky burned like the surface of the sun, choked with smoke. Molten energy burst from the chaos, dripping down to earth and forming glowing pools on the asphalt, revealing the shapes that moved there.
Demons. The city crawled with them. Twisted forms of bone and muscle, some with two legs, some with three or four or five or more. From here she couldn’t make out their faces, thankfully, but she could see enough to know that they had no eyes, just those cement-mixer mouths lined with shark teeth. They seemed to be reveling in the raging sky, bounding wildly across the scorched earth, screaming into the smoke. Whenever two demons crossed paths they would fight, pounding each other until one either collapsed or retreated. Pan could hear the thump and slap of their heavy paws even over the groaning skies.
“Did this happen last night?” Marlow asked. His face was a mask of light, the fire reflected in the metallic sheen of his eyes, in the ribs of metal that carved through his face. She shook her head.
No. This was something new.
He said something else, lost beneath the noise. But she got the drift.
We need to move.
She glanced through the window again, the demons teeming from the earth like ants—too many to even begin to count them. They had no eyes, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hunt.
Marlow tugged at her and they crawled away from the window, into the interior of the building. Her muscles were cramping from the weight of the weapon she held, and she shifted it to her other hand. There was a concrete shaft up ahead for the elevator, and once she was clear she got to her feet and ran for it. To the side of the elevator was another door and she shouldered it op
en, seeing the stairwell. Light burned in from above, but the steps leading down were drenched in darkness, as if the night had crawled down there to hide.
“Down?” said Marlow, and she could hear the doubt in his voice.
She answered by leading the way, stepping cautiously onto the first step, her foot slipping on the layer of ash that covered it. Marlow walked by her side, closing the door gently behind him and plunging them into a muffled quiet. She held her breath, waiting for a scream, for any sign of life down there, and when there was only silence she carried on.
Now that her eyes had shaken off the afterglow of the outside she noticed that there was a little light in here, just a whisper on the walls and floor. When she turned the bend in the stairwell it was stronger, and she could make out the outline of the door that led into the floor below. Marlow pushed the bar but it was wedged tight, and he braced himself, shunting. She joined him, the door opening an inch, then two, ash pouring through the bottom of the widening crack. It had to be a foot thick on the other side, but together they managed to create a gap big enough to let them pass.
She let Marlow go first, her whole body tense, waiting for a shape to pounce from the shadows, to sink its teeth into him. But after a moment he beckoned her in.
“Seems safe,” he said. “It’s dark, anyway.”
She pushed through the door into a space identical to the one above. The only difference was that this floor was beneath the dunes that had formed outside. Mounds of ash shielded all but the very tops of the windows, letting through fingers of firelight that reached maybe a dozen yards. They muted the screams, too. She took a step, her foot sinking into the soft ground.
“Pan,” said Marlow.
“What?” she replied, working her way around the elevator shaft.
“What?” said Marlow.
She turned to him, just a smudge of shadow fringed by firelight.
“What?” she asked.
“Pan,” he said again, and this time she froze, because the voice hadn’t come from Marlow at all, but from another part of the room.
Somebody else was calling her name.
She half thought about running, but what was the point? If they stepped outside they were dead anyway. She gripped the bone, swinging it lightly from side to side. If it was one of the doppelgängers, then at least she knew she could stave its head in.
“Who’s there?” she said.
“We are.” The voice was a whisper—no, it was a hundred whispers, so quietly spoken that it was like a pulse of alien noise. “We have been hiding. We have been waiting for you.”
She glanced at Marlow, just to make sure he was still there. She could see the whites of his eyes hovering in the gloom, wide and frightened. She nodded, willing him to go first.
“Hey, it’s your party,” he said. “You’re the one they’re waiting for.”
“We have been waiting for you both,” the voice said, then it shaped his name from a legion of rasping whispers. “Marlow.”
“Great,” he muttered.
“It is safe here,” it said. “We are hidden. He cannot find us.”
Pan stared into the dark, trying to work out who was speaking. But nothing was there, just the open space of the office and then the far wall, everything filthy with dirt and ash and buried in darkness.
“You can hide here, too,” the voice said. “Come, join us.”
No stampeding feet, no growls, no screams. Whatever was over there, she was pretty sure it would have attacked them by now if it had any plans to. She stumbled forward, her feet sinking into the ash, kicking up great clouds of it that filled her mouth, her lungs.
“Pan,” said Marlow. She ignored him, squinting into the shadows, still no sign of who was there. Another step away from the elevator shaft. She felt like a boat that had pushed itself away from shore, drifting into the moonless night.
“Who are you?” she asked again. “What is this place?”
This time there was laughter, soft and yet deafening, like the drum of rain on a tin roof.
“You know what this place is,” it said when the laughter had passed.
Another step, and the far wall was visible now. There was something growing there, like ivy. Pan could just about discern the contours of it, etched in the light from outside. It seemed to be rustling gently, as if there were a wind. The air here was perfectly still, though, and a creeping sense of unease began to burrow out from the center of her.
“This place is your home now, too,” it said. “But he doesn’t have to have you. You can hide here with us. It is safe here. It will always be safe here.”
“Pan,” Marlow said again, but she kept walking. She didn’t think she could stop. The closer she got to the wall, the more movement she saw there, as if it were itching with spiders, thousands of them scuttling over and over and over one another. But they weren’t spiders, because she could see something else in the faint glow from the windows—countless pale white circles.
It was only when she took one last step, the wall now a stone’s throw away, that she realized they were eyes.
“Welcome,” the voices said. “We are glad you are here.”
It wasn’t a wall of brick and plaster, of steel and stone. It was a wall of flesh. People hung from it like creepers, their bodies peeled open and woven together so that it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Internal organs drooped like heavy figs, ready to be plucked, glistening in the muted firelight. Limbs, withered into vines, twitched and swung with deranged excitement, fingers clasping feebly.
It was the faces, though, that made Pan’s blood run river cold. There were a hundred of them, maybe twice that, most of them crushed beneath the vegetative weight of all those bodies. Cheeks bulged, cracked eye sockets leaked fluid, distended mouths hung open like shopping bags, some stuffed with arms and legs and intestines and whatever else had grown there. The eyes stared at her, unblinking, rimmed by dust so thick it might have been mascara.
“We are glad that you are here,” it—they—said again, the mouths moving as one, the bodies trembling as one, the eyes staring as one. A shudder ran through Pan, one that made her feel as if her own body would start to unravel, as if her skin would slough right off her bones.
“Please,” she said, because it was the only word she had. Please tell me who you are. Please let me go. Please don’t let me be in hell anymore. Please just put me out of my misery, let me die and stay dead. She didn’t even know which thing she wanted more.
“What happened to you?” Marlow said, speaking for her in a voice made of dust.
Another laugh, the faces choking on it, the eyes opening so wide they looked ready to roll right out, to patter onto the floor.
“We were like you, once,” they said. “We used the Engine.”
“No,” said Pan, taking a step away from them.
“Our fate is your fate is our fate is your fate is our fate,” they said, the words rolling over each other. “The demons came for us, they brought us to hell, and now we hide here.”
“They’re Engineers,” said Marlow.
“But why?” Pan said, ignoring him. “I mean … it doesn’t make sense. What happened to you?”
“For the first years we roamed,” said the faces in a voice made of a thousand breaths. “We tried to find a way out, the way that you will try to find a way out. But you cannot leave this place. There is nothing else but this. So instead we hid.”
“From who?” Pan asked, and at this the faces fell into motion, shaking themselves as if they meant to rip free of the wall. They all began to gibber—not as one, this time, but individually, the sound threatening to drown her. The voices shook and shuddered themselves back into one:
“From him. From him. From him.”
A scream, from outside, and hundreds of eyeballs slid wetly that way in their sockets.
“They must not hear us,” they said, more quietly this time.
“Pan, let’s go,” said Marlow. But there was so much
she didn’t understand, so much she needed to know.
“You’re Engineers,” she said, thinking of the Book of Dead Engineers that had once sat in the Bullpen, back home, back in another world. How many names had been inscribed inside that book, in those countless pages? Thousands of them, all men and women and children who had made a deal with the Engine and lost everything in the process.
“This place is hell,” the wall said. “It is our punishment. Our souls were sent here, but a soul cannot exist without flesh, so the mountains grow us, over and over again. You cannot die here, Pan. Whatever you do, however you try to end it, you will come back. This place is a prison of souls, and yours will lie here forever.”
The groan climbed her throat and spilled between her lips. She was shaking her head, as if it might scare away the madness that was already frothing there.
“How long?” she found herself asking. “How long have you been here?”
At this the wall broke into chaos again, each face screaming out its own answer. The noise was like a tide but she could still hear them, she could still hear those individual cries—eight hundred years, a millennium, a hundred millennia—before the cacophony collapsed into itself again.
“There is no time here,” they said. “There is only now, there is only forever.”
And the laugh that spilled from those bloodless lips almost pushed her over the edge. An eternity here. It couldn’t be real, it couldn’t be happening, not to her.
Please God please God please God please God.
“He will not help you here,” they said, reading her thoughts. “Only we can help you. Come.”
A hundred withered arms began to twitch away from the wall, stretching out toward her like iron filings to a magnet, fingers trembling with the effort.
“Come, Pan. Come, Marlow. We will keep you safe. In time you will not know enough to suffer.”
Woven into this forest of the damned, hanging there in the dark, in that web of cold flesh. Pan felt as though her mind might boil itself into nothing.
“Come,” the faces said. “He will not find you here.”