“Come on. Let’s check the rest of the house.”
Ralph pulled back the curtains in the kitchen. There was a smell of yeast and sweat.
A man’s clothes had been discarded on the floor. A blue t-shirt and khaki trousers. Black socks and boxer shorts.
“What do you think of that?” said Ralph.
Frank crouched, prodded the t-shirt with his axe. “Weird.”
“That sums up the last few days.”
“They’re not torn,” said Frank.
“But it looks like they’ve been taken off in a hurry.”
“True.”
“Do you smell that?”
“As soon as I walked in here. It’s like yeast.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing good.”
There was a door leading away from the kitchen into dreamy shades of ash and darkness.
“You want to go through that door, don’t you?” said Ralph.
Frank stood and looked at him.
“You know, mate, you could just tell Florence that we couldn’t find her aunt and uncle, then she’s all yours to look after.”
A flicker passed over Frank’s face. Maybe he was considering it. He shook his head. “It would be easy, wouldn’t it? But it wouldn’t be right. We have to do this properly.”
“You and your conscience.”
“What do you think’s through that door?”
“Another room,” said Ralph. “Maybe a cellar.”
They switched on their torches.
A set of steps led down beneath the house. Frank went down first.
Their torchlights revealed a damp cellar dripping moisture from its walls. A dirty stone floor stained with mould. Cardboard boxes and junk piled in shadowed corners. Ralph’s face brushed against a cobweb, and he swatted it away with his hand. He ignored the thought of a spider skittering across his body to lay eggs in a sweaty fold of his skin.
A woman was sitting cross-legged with her back against the wall directly opposite them as they stepped onto the cellar floor. Her face was revealed in the torchlight. She raised her head, her eyes glazed and large inside the moon-like frailty of her face. Her blonde hair was lank and greasy, hanging to her shoulders. Naked, save for her underwear, she grinned at the men as they halted before her.
Florence’s aunt. Ralph recognised her from the photos.
She let out a short, high-pitched giggle. Wiped her mouth with the back of a pale, veiny hand.
The smell of yeast filled the air down here. It had become the air. The moist, pickling smell of fermentation.
Ralph said nothing. Frank said nothing. They directed their torch beams around the cellar.
Symbols and shapes had been carved into the wall above the woman’s head. Strange eldritch sigils. Crescents and nonsense shapes; curlicues and narrow dagger-like triangles. Shapes without meaning, at least to Ralph. All of these symbols were contained within a carved sphere filling most of the wall.
And on the wall to the woman’s left, there was something else. They trained their torches upon it, taking a step backwards as they realised what they were looking at.
“Fucking hell,” said Ralph.
Frank’s mouth fell open. He was blinking quickly, as if doing so would erase the thing on the wall from existence.
“Very soon,” said the woman. A whisper.
It was like a fungus, a sack of pulsing fluids and blubber, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. Fibrous and wet, the same colour as a spider’s nest, glistening in the light. Big enough to fit a man and attached to the wall by some sort of resin. Patches of it were transparent. Something moved inside it.
“It’s a chrysalis.” Ralph stepped forwards.
“Careful,” said Frank.
Ralph shone his torch into the glistening sack, and it showed him what was curled up within the briny juice of its amniotic fluid. A shape. On the floor next to the wall there was a pile of dead rats, mice and birds.
The woman was humming a happy tune.
Wetly encased in the sack’s sallow skin was a head, a torso, and legs. The curved line of a jaw and a dreamy smile. Arms folded into its body, legs raised to its chest. Foetal. In the silence Ralph thought he could hear a heartbeat that wasn’t his own, muffled by the protective liquid enveloping it.
“Open your eyes,” he whispered to the thing.
The sack’s pulsing grew faster, reacting to his proximity.
Ralph held out the torch until it was almost touching the sack; it gurgled like an upset stomach. The creature within flinched.
Ralph wondered if it was dreaming. And what it dreamed of. What was it seeing behind its eyes?
“All flesh is useful,” said the woman. “Did you know that?”
Ralph turned to her. “What does that mean?”
“You’ll all be welcomed into the flesh. None of you shall go to waste. Every one of you. All the men, all the women…all the little children. All flesh is useful.”
Ralph stepped back alongside Frank.
“What’re you doing here?” Frank asked the woman.
She looked at him. A secretive grin. “He’s going to be a beautiful butterfly. I’m waiting for him to wake up. He’ll wake up soon. Maybe today.”
“Who is in there?” said Frank.
“Her husband,” said Ralph. “Florence’s uncle.”
The woman’s grin faltered. “Florence? I remember that name. A little girl. Part of my blood.”
“She’s your niece,” said Frank.
“That’s right,” said the woman. “I remember now. Is she here?”
“She’s outside,” said Frank.
“Maybe you should bring her down here. She can be a beautiful butterfly as well.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Maybe not now, but eventually…”
“Never.”
She giggled.
“What’s happening to your husband?” said Ralph.
Her eyes searched him up and down. The grin never left her face. “He’s becoming something else. He’s changing. Something better than before. Something stronger.”
“He’s turning into a monster,” said Frank.
The woman’s grin consumed her face until she was all teeth and eyes. “I’m waiting for him to emerge. He’ll make me like him.”
Frank looked at Ralph. “We’re done here.”
“We could kill them.”
“We don’t need to. They’re not a threat to us. Let them be together. They deserve that, at least.”
As they left the cellar, the woman said, “Say hello to Florence for me.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
After leaving Bordon they skirted the northern edge of the South Downs National Park, passing through Alton, Alresford and Kings Worthy.
Frank had told Florence that her aunt and uncle were dead. The girl accepted this without question. She was already traumatised by her parents’ death and killing Bertram, so the death of her aunt and uncle didn’t make much difference to her. She went to sleep with her head on Frank’s chest. It was best for her to sleep.
Poor girl, Magnus thought. How many other children are orphans now? At least Florence wasn’t alone. Magnus was glad he wasn’t alone. At least they were all together.
They bypassed Winchester. The city was burning. A fire so intense it burned an afterimage in Magnus’s vision.
That night they stopped the car at a rest area just outside a small village called West Tytherley. The petrol gauge was getting low, but there would be enough to reach Salisbury.
In the morning they would enter the city. Getting closer to home.
The sky darkened into night. No stars. Magnus sensed the presences in the sky and was terrified one of them would find him again.
They were all hungry and thirsty. They slept in the car that night, and they locked the doors. They made sure to lock the doors.