2003-4 fic: Shards, part VI
Disclaimer: Fox logos, the LXG trademarks and characters do not belong to me. I make no profit from this venture, the folklore/ghosts stems from Black Hart Storytellers, Auld Reekie's Terror Tour and Meercat Tours.
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Shards
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Chapter Six: As shadow, a light and body must be here.
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He's soaked, and that's the strangest thing.
Someone would have thought that with all the heat and the stillness of the air he would have dried off by now; but he sits on his chair, cards in his hands, completely and utterly sodden.
He looks at the cards; it’s an incredibly poor hand. He knows that the rules of the game mean he shouldn’t show anything on his face but he can’t help the disappointment spreading across his skin.
Opposite him Quatermain laughs, slow and low.
He looks at the pile of chips in front of him and there’s practically none left; a little isolated stack on the big table. He must have been losing badly, but the previous dealings seem very distant and the more he tries to recall them, the more he mislays them in the watery murk.
“You’re losing quite badly you know.” Quatermain states from the other side. “Perhaps you should just give up all together.” The voice isn’t his, it’s darker, colder and echoed, reverberating with a strange doubled quality that wakes something in Sawyer’s memory.
Tom looks at him and is given the fleeting impression of someone entirely different.
“Perhaps we should just call this a game.”
Quatermain leans back, cards still in his hand. Sawyer is aware once again of the wrongness in his movements, the coldness that surrounds this thing even as the heat of the room becomes stifling. The strange doubled quality to its voice.
Movement in the shadows behind it.
“What-”
Even as he wonders the shadows begin to grow brighter.
“I shouldn’t worry,” exclaims the thing, leaning forward once again. “You’ll be fine.”
But that’s not what makes him terrified, makes his heart suddenly clench in absolute fear with a sudden cold that spreads from the thing across the table. It’s the sight of Hyde, flayed, strung up against the stone wall and bleeding; a soaked redness that seems to shudder in pain even as it looks at Sawyer, eyes wide and blue.
Tom staggers backward and with the sudden clunk of his chair hitting the floor he becomes aware of the smell, the sound; screams and burnt flesh, the same ones he runs down corridors on the Nautilus to meet, echoing through these windowless rooms, dungeons: this entire bloodied, medieval torture chamber.
Eyes darting from Hyde who’s trying to speak to him but can’t draw enough breath because of the blood pouring from out him mouth, to the people roasted, crying on the floor, amongst whom is a tattered black trilby and duster, torn, covered in blood and greasepaint.
It’s almost too much to take in; the eyes pleading, the burnt forms huddled in the corners, the cold seizing his muscles even as the heat from the walls becomes almost too much to bear. The scent: sweet and roasted and cloying. It’s no longer an empty room, it’s hell.
It’s coming towards him, no longer Quatermain but Dorian, all sinful decadence and dead eyes in the blood and heat; cold radiating from it winding him up, trapping him on the floor.
“What are you?” he asks, words coming unbidden to his mouth even as the thing stands above him.
“I’m something you released, Mr Sawyer, something that feeds on your pain, your despair,” The thing smiles, languorously, empty. “Something looking to fill this soulless emptiness with a little colour.” Once again it smiles and flickers, eyes black.
He feels cold, beyond cold. And the heat seems to be disappearing along with the room, with the pleading eyes of Hyde. It’s replaced by a deep cold ache in his chest and the feel of wood beneath his back and the terrible knowledge that even as the hell around him disappears the thing above him has not.
It leans close, close enough to kiss.
“You are losing badly Mr Sawyer. I am free, we are growing stronger every hour and the people who stand in my way are dead or dying.”
Tom scrabbles away. Cold, wet and alive, very alive. Aware too of the fire out in the Firth burning behind Dorian, the figures in the water swimming for shore. Back in Edinburgh in the docks, the thing in front of him even more terrifying in the real world.
“Your Nautilus is destroyed, your League is destroyed. You cannot win this.”
There is a horrible purpose to its movements now as it comes towards him, and Tom knows that unless he gets away now he’ll be bleeding on a wall.
“No-” Whether it comes from him or someone else the intention is the same.
He runs: Up, away; dodging around the corners, the walls that seem intent on holding him. Cold night air burning in his lungs, laced with the smell of burning oil. Onto the Royal Mile, slipping across cobbles. Muscles tight, bruised in complete agony, full of sensation. Suddenly in the real world; the Hell not quite forgotten but replaced by the memories of Mina’s stricken face, Skinner’s ghostly form, Jekyll’s burning eyes.
And cold, ominous cold that seems to bleed along behind him. He lunges into the warmth-the stale smell of beer and sweat and smoke in the gaslight. A pub, warm and tangible and protection from the blackness beyond its windows; all Scottish voices and concerned arms reaching out to hold him.
“Are you all right?”
The voice is warm, concerned and in the haze of pain Sawyer feels nothing but panic, the desire to get away.
“I’m fine-fine” he mumbles faces swimming before him. He reels backwards but the arms won’t release him. “I have to go-let me go-”
He feels trapped, drenched in the murky light and all that’s anchoring him is this arm, attached to a hazy face that resolves itself into Quatermain.
There is blind panic now sharpening everything and Sawyer swings wildly; hitting this person in the face with the first thing that comes to hand-the butt of his rifle.
An old man staggers back, nose dripping with blood and it’s not Quatermain he has hit-it’s an innocent bystander. No, Quatermain is now behind him; flickering into Mina, then Dorian.
He hits out wildly, striking another person and then another but the thing eludes him flittering around the corners of his vision, dodging between those who fight a standard bar brawl: all shouts and roars and glancing blows.
Someone hits him and he staggers, grabbing a stool, swinging it, everything happening too fast, too sickeningly fast.
Someone has a hold on the back of his neck and is dragging him with a force that he can’t resist, even as he fights it-this feeling of invisible claws ripping into his clothes, his skin-dragging him out onto the street, into the cold night air.
The stars twist above him. All is black.
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He is alone, cold, drenched in sewage and stiffly scraping the cover back onto the drain. The houses loom above him, windows deserted and lights off; streetlamps weak and red in the dark. And thrumming through him, along with the pain and nausea is the incredible ache of bereavement.
The intense heat of burning oil covering the water: a flaming cape, the cold which made his muscles tense and scream so that in a few seconds he could hardly swim except to paddle upright, mouth swallowing water along with air... He knows few of Nemo’s crew survived-the bodies in the drains testifying- and he hasn’t seen the rest of the League.
Skinner’s tempted to crawl back into the sewer and lie there; let the chewing numbness that follows each stab carry him off- back where it’s warm and dark and the trickle of water can reassure him he isn’t burning alive. Waiting in the dark for some ethereal form to carry him off again, perhaps Jekyll’s voice again telling him everything will be fine, there’s salve for the burns back on the Nautilus and morphine and respite from the snow and Sawyer mumbling his thanks over and over, tears in his voice saying: Quatermain’s gone, don’t you go too Icouldn’tdealwithtwosacrifices...
Only when they get there there’s no Nautilus, just sirens and fire engines rumbling off down towards the Firth; and Skinner comes back into himself with a groan, realising he’s drifting, that he’s collapsed on a street covered in blood and shit and soaked through, greasepaint gone, skin barely visible.
He begins to crawl up the hill.
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The weight of his boots would be enough to drag him down if he wasn’t used to water.
Perhaps he would have frozen sooner if the heat from the burning oil slick wasn’t singeing his skin.
Perhaps he might have done what a captain should-go down with his ship-if he didn’t feel the need for retribution; the boiling hate of something that tears metal to shreds to smother and burn and drown the men within it.
Of these men few remain-and he feels the loss keenly, burning in him like a stab to the chest.
A captain should protect his crew.
A team member should protect the team.
They swim now, little dark forms in the water, and he can’t see their faces; the docks rising like salvation from the fire of the Nautilus, which is twisted; intact but for the huge gash down her left side, made worse by the wrench of the metal and the oil that burns beneath it.
Some don’t swim, some float; some are dragged; some are no longer intact.
Jacobs is floating off to his right, illuminated, intact. The temptation is strong to leave him to let him rot, let him sink into salty water: thick as blood in the night air.
Nemo, however, knows he needs this floating fool.
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It feels like blood pouring from her lungs, but it’s seawater.
She can feel the burn of sand beneath her hands and the weight of her soaked dress and the tightness against her skull of wet hair and the ache, the terrible ache of a burn on her face.
All around her are retching, staggering forms in the dark, but she can’t see who they are and she doesn’t understand what they are saying and as hard as she clutches at the sand the world spins around her.
She needs to know she’s not alone-that there’s someone she can cling to, to help her fight this thing because she can’t do this alone.
And that’s when she sees him.
She would give a prayer of thanks if it wasn’t for the terrible burning in his eyes and all that comes out is “Jekyll, Thank you thank...”
And it’s him she clings to, even though he’s almost too harsh when he pulls her to her feet, and it’s him she turns to to ask: “Have you seen the others? We need to-”
But it’s not him that answers with a cold voice, all snarl in the dark: “We don’t need the others.”
And it’s as if she’s falling again; struggling against his grip as sound seems to reverberate to her through a tunnel as she tries to speak, to cry for help when she realises she is alone...
The last thing she feels is the back of his fist on her face.
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He awakes at the graveyard gates. Black wrought iron, in the night locked up tight.
He’s on the wrong side.
Sawyer, clothes shredded, back bleeding, knows he’s trapped, and knows that he’s here for a purpose.
But he doesn’t expect it when it comes.
A grip around him that crushes him drags him suddenly up and backwards-flying through the air in an impossibly large wrench and he struggles against it-all arms and legs and wobbly pirouettes as he lands-fighting desperately.
Tombs, glowing grey granite in the dark look like salvation, but even as he clings to them they seem to give him up- letting him be torn backwards.
He’s breathing so hard and fast and crying out so loud- but no-one sees or comes to help-
Leaping again and again and again; all the way up the hill.
Up past the church, past a moulding of the Grim Reaper dancing around his scythe.
Fighting and losing and breathing.
Up to another set of gates, right at the top in the corner, which he clings to, desperately fighting in a terrible clown dance, a puppet’s ballet, a tattered black bird in ragged clothing about to be sucked backward into the space beyond the gates.
He’s losing the fight.