Fuller heard the sound.
‘Doctor?’ He looked up from his tinkering and his face — washed with a blue light she could see from the corner of her eye — bore an expression of enquiry.
‘Did you say something?’ he asked.
She thought, with a fillip of her stomach, of how this was bound to end.
The ether-faces of the dead were quite clear in front of her. She could see the profundity of their suffering and she could sympathize with their ache to be heard.
She saw plainly that the highways that crossed at Tollington Place were not common thoroughfares. She was not staring at the happy, idling traffic of the ordinary dead. No, that house opened onto a route walked only by the victims and the perpetrators of violence. The men, the women, the children who had died enduring all the pains nerves had wit to muster, with their minds branded by the circumstances of their deaths. Eloquent beyond words, their eyes spoke their agonies, their ghost bodies still bearing the wounds that had killed them. She could also see, mingling freely with the innocents, their slaughterers and tormentors. These monsters, frenzied, mush-minded blood-letters, peeked through into the world: nonesuch creatures, unspoken, forbidden miracles of our species, chattering and howling their Jabberwocky.
Now the boy above her sensed them. She saw him turn a little in the silent room, knowing that the voices he heard were not fly-voices, the complaints were not insect-complaints. He was aware, suddenly, that he had
lived in a tiny corner of the world, and that the rest of it, the Third, Fourth and Fifth Worlds, were pressing at his lying back, hungry and irrevocable. The sight of his panic was also a smell and a taste to her. Yes, she tasted him as she had always longed to, but it was not a kiss that married their senses, it was his growing panic. It filled her up: her empathy was total. The fearful glance was hers as much as his — their dry throats rasped the same small word:
‘Please —‘
That the child learns. ‘Please —, That wins care and gifts.
‘Please —‘
That even the dead, surely, even the dead must know and obey.
‘Please —,
Today there would be no such mercy given, she knew for certain. These ghosts had despaired on the highway a grieving age, bearing the wounds they had died with, and the insanities they had slaughtered with. They had endured his levity and insolence, his idiocies, the fabrications that had made a game of their ordeals. They wanted to speak the truth.
Fuller was peering at her more closely, his face now swimming in a sea of pulsing orange light. She felt his hands on her skin. They tasted of vinegar.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, his breath like iron.
She shook her head.
No, she was not all right, nothing was right.
The crack was gaping wider every second: through it she could see another sky, the slate heavens that loured over the highway. It overwhelmed the mere reality of the house.
‘Please,’ she said, her eyes rolling up to the fading substance of the ceiling.
Wider. Wider —The brittle world she inhabited was stretched to breaking point.
Suddenly, it broke, like a dam, and the black waters poured through, inundating the room.
Fuller knew something was amiss (it was in the colour of his aura, the sudden fear), but he didn’t understand what was happening. She felt his spine ripple: she could see his brain whirl.
‘What’s going on?’ he said. The pathos of the enquiry made her want to laugh.
Upstairs, the water-jug in the writing room shattered.
Fuller let her go and ran towards the door. It began to rattle and shake even as he approached it, as though all the inhabitants of hell were beating on the other side. The handle turned and turned and turned. The paint blistered. The key glowed red-hot.
Fuller looked back at the Doctor, who was still fixed in that grotesque position, head back, eyes wide.
He reached for the handle, but the door opened before he could touch it. The hallway beyond had disappeared altogether. Where the familiar interior had stood the vista of the highway stretched to the horizon. The sight killed Fuller in a moment. His mind had no strength to take the panorama in — it could not control the overload that ran through his every nerve. His heart stopped; a revolution overturned the order of his system; his bladder failed, his bowels failed, his limbs shook and collapsed. As he sank to the floor his face began to blister like the door, and his corpse rattle like the handle. He was inert stuff already: as fit for this indignity as wood or steel.