Wickerman Cove

Part 39: The Best Known Work of Dante

Under a sagging paunch of fleshy polyps, the Guide's real body opened its eyes. It looked out from behind the curtain of tumours with yellow-rimmed blue eyes, and screamed.

The sound went through Steph's bones. The soot-stained plaster cracked and fell off the wall, the wood vibrating in the doorframe. She let out a low, throaty sound of pain as the pulp in her teeth started to feel like it was boiling.

The flames spread just like in a movie. Fire spread out over the surface of the gasoline, reaching in all directions. The avocado couch caught, and burned with black smoke. The linoleum bubbled.

Gabriel and the Guide's body caught at the same time. It shrieked with both mouths. Steph hadn't thought the sound could get any worse until it doubled in pitch and force. The Wyrd went from chaotic eddies to the madness of a storm as the thing lashed out in every direction, its limbs tearing free as it thrashed.

The Guide screamed through Gabriel's mouth as Mak stepped into its path and put another bullet into its chest. A second shot, aimed at the head, passed through the space where it had once been as the moving corpse ran blindly, hitting the burning shell of the avocado couch, which promptly collapsed.

Poetically, the bullpup had landed at Steph's feet. She scooped it up, checked the magazine, and fired a semi-automatic burst at the fiercely burning mass which was the Guide's original body.

This seemed to make a difference. The Wyrd shivered as the bullets struck.

Gabriel's body, wreathed in flames, stopped running and turned. Steph put another semi-automatic burst into the Guide's fleshy mass, and took a step back towards the door. If there was anyone alive who wasn't involved with the ritual, they would be on their way.

The Guide's newest body barrelled towards her. Steph shot it once, then again, the world beyond convulsing as the rounds hit the corpse that had been David Gabriel.

A tearing in the Wyrd blinded her for a second; half from the pain, and half from the sudden storm of things she couldn't comprehend. Worlds superimposed themselves on each other, as if someone had set off dynamite and blown up Salvador Dali's imagination.

Gabriel's shoulder exploded into her face. He hit her with the momentum of a college linebacker, which shoved her clear before the fire licking up his body could do any serious damage. If he hadn't been covered in flames, she would probably have tried to grapple him, but nobody wanted to hug something that was trying to kill them and on fire.

Another crack of gunfire indicated that Mak had tried to bring him down too, although from the sound he made kicking the fragments of charcoalised door, it hadn't done much more than anything else they'd tried.

It was hard to see. In the Wyrd, everything was a storm. A whirlwind of blood that meant all she could see in either world was a curtain of reddish brown. Cold hands made her start as Penny – or hopefully it was Penny – grabbed her and dragged her back until the heat of the fire was more bearable.

She felt the Guide's body move. A final, dagger-like, pain went through her temples and the Wyrd went still. Her vision opened up into a silky, almost metallic, darkness.

"What was that?" Steph asked.

There was silence. She still couldn't see properly. A moment's anxious eye rubbing helped coherent shapes to resolve from the reddish-brown fog: they were out in the corridor, with the Guide's room burning fiercely. A noxious smoke billowed around the corridor's ceiling.

Steph could feel the path in the Wyrd where the Guide had forced its way through with desperate inelegance.

"Shit," she said, blinking away the last of the blindness. "I hope I'm not going to stroke out from all this."