The Green and Pleasant Land (Book 1): Old World Read online

  I slashed my way through to the doorway. As I looked back I could see that half a dozen of the mad men were down, it was not enough. Then I saw the hulking brute deliver a right hook to my wife's face which sent her sprawling to the floor, my sons were overwhelmed, their fight had descended into an on the floor grappling match which they would not win. There were shouts and screams and cries of pain and then there was me having to make the most agonising decision I'd made since this whole nightmare started. I ran out of the room, I ran after my sick little girl and I choked on the guilt for the ones I'd just left.

  I had no idea where I was going. I followed the screams, I followed the feral laughter and the furious footsteps racing away from me into the darkness. I had a dozen cuts that pained me, and dozen more I didn't know about such was the cocktail of adrenaline pumping around my body. I left my blood upon the walls here and there, leaving it to dry and join with others who had suffered the hunt, I left my sweat to mingle with the cracking paint, the only evidence that I was ever there.

  I stumbled in the gloom and realised after a time that the screams and the laughter were getting further away with each moment. I ran up and down stairwells hopelessly. Too many minutes had passed. Too much time had gone by, hope breathed its final breaths, this was not right, this just was not right, after all we'd endured. Then I stopped dead before a shadow filled doorway.

  I was at the bottom of a flight of stairs. This was below ground level and the darkness was almost total. My heart beat so fast I could barely hear the still raging storm outside. I felt my way into the shadows, it was a long corridor again, one in which I feared to tread but knew that I must. There was a pinprick of light in the distance which grew bigger as I stumbled towards it. The light was red, or maybe that was just the blood in my eyes. Either way it felt like I was walking into a photography dark-room.

  I still could not see the source of the light, but in the low ruddy glow which it cast I could make out the large underground vault into which I'd walked. There were row after row of metal tables, each one held a body which might once have been a person but was now a mound of gore and bone. I heard a cry, a sniffle, I would recognise that sniffle anywhere.

  “Ellie” I whispered.

  “Dad” she whispered back. I crept to the back of the vault and saw her huddled there against the wall. Then I saw him step from the shadows, the brute, the big man from upstairs who looked like he could snap me in half like a twig. Well he could try. But he didn't look ready for a fight, he smiled a gap toothed smile at me as he stood over my little girl. Then I heard another whisper, very faintly from behind, words I'd heard before “Are you feeling better” came the sibilant hiss. I turned too late, I saw nothing of the snake as a blow was struck and my world descended into darkness.

  Chapter 7, The mad harlequin

  You will often hear of the human body being described as swimming in a sea of pain. But until you have taken a dip yourself then you will never be able to truly comprehend those words nor have any notion of such pain. Such was the level of agony I felt that it swam around my body, which was bereft of enough pain receptors to convey the hurt in its entirety. So they took it in turns, my injuries, to inflict their presence on my mind.

  In a minute I'm going to open my eyes, then you will see as I see and we can live this together. That way, I will not feel quite as alone. My other senses are in disarray, all I can feel is the pain, all I can hear is the sound of my own mind screaming. My nostrils are clogged with so many dark scents that I could not possibly prise them apart. No, only when I open my eyes will I be able to make some sense of my fate, only then will we see what has become of me...

  Night had fallen. I was tied to a chair in the courtyard that we'd circled around during our hunt for medicine and doctors and many other things that evidently were not here. After the basement I no recollections, which was a good thing, being able to remember the ruin that had been done to my body during its doing would have probably left me as mad as the inmates.

  I could feel a wet sticky feeling all over, I hope that it might be sweat but I knew that it was not. My clothes were sticking to me, in the places where they had not been torn by the ravages of my captors.

  “Wakey wakey” came a voice I recognised. It was the brute, the gap tooth hulk hovering in the shadows of the courtyard. Despite being high Summer I shivered in the open air.

  “Nice of you to join us” came a voiced I did not know. With difficulty I moved my head to the other side and stared at another madman. This one was stick thin, with long bony arms that reminded me of the horror I'd killed in the back garden at Mrs Robinsons. Much of his skin was sagging and discoloured, he looked like someone who'd lost a great of weight since the end of the old world.

  His bespectacled eyes were grey and shining in the light of the low fires burning around the courtyard. In his hands he was holding something, every now and then he brought that thing to his red red lips and nibbled on it. “Thank you for this” he said sounding almost genuinely grateful. It took a long time for my mind to process what I was seeing, for me too see the shape and texture of that on which he fed, my arms were tied to the arms of the rickety wooden chair, I looked down almost dispassionately at my hands which had once been home to fingers and thumbs but from which there now protruded ten bloody stumps and a few bits of gleaming white bone.

  I vomited long and hard while I listened to their laughter. After I was done retching I looked around again seeking out some sign of the other Locklears. There was none but the brute leaned in as if he'd read my mind.

  “Want to go see your family?” he said with feigned friendliness. I nodded dumbly. And he produced a scalpel. I expected another cut to add to the hundreds I'd sustained while I was out cold. But instead he slashed at the thin biting ropes which held me to he chair until they fell away. I felt dizzy and wired. Despite the pain there were moments of intermittent clarity and focus. Had I been conscious half and hour ago I would have seen them injecting me with a cocktail of drugs from the asylums stores that were designed to keep me alive, for just long enough to see what they wanted me to see.

  “Come on then matey” said brute walking away from the chair and gesturing for me to follow. I lifted myself out of the chair and then fell straight to the floor much to the amusement of the inmates in the courtyard. The pain in my legs was agonising, bloodied stumps where there had once been fingers scrabbled and rubbed uselessly against knees which once had caps and ankles which once held intact tendons.

  “The harlequins done a right number on you pal” laughed brute who then leaned in close with all humour gone from his voice. “Who do you think you are eh? Where do you think you are eh? What the hell are you going to do now? What the fuck are you going to do now?” he ended his last unanswered question with a solid boot to the ribs which broke several of them.

  I coughed and spluttered and started to crawl across the courtyard. This is the nightmare. I'm going to wake up, I'm going to wake up back at Mrs Robinsons, or further back, maybe I will wake up in the tent and Greg will still be there and we can talk about the things men talk about. Maybe I will wake up in our family home on Dovecoat Road. Maybe not.

  “Get him up” said Brute. I felt hands, oily, slimy hands that hoisted my ruined form up between them. “Time for the grand tour” said the man munching on my fingers with a titter. I lapsed in and out of consciousness as they carried me through the asylum. We proceeded down a long flight of stairs, down into the bowels of the old hospital, the dusty places where doctors who'd known best once employed their own brand of mad medicine on the sick.

  We did not go near the red room. All the lights down here were made of fire, and they made as many dancing shadows as they did illuminations. I could not tell how long we'd been moving but we eventually came upon a larger underground room in the middle of which they was a large round circular hole. There was a lot of dirt and debris piled here and there around the hole, it was not something which had been a part of the asylum before,
this was a renovation.

  The hole was about thirty feet wide and as we reached the edge more terror met my eyes. Down inside the hole was a beast, it was death walker, but one on which three heads sat on its shoulders, huge eyes the size of fists bulged out of those heads obscured here and there by strange pointed horns that made it look like some sort of very twisted unicorn. It was injured. Around a dozen of the inmates stood around the hole cheering, but they were not the source of the injuries. On the other side of the pit swayed a second figure who held a club in his right hand.

  This one looked familiar, his head was covered in blood, his hair was matted with it, barely an inch of his skin was not tainted by the sanguine plague.

  “Daddies little boy, daddies little boy, daddies little boy, daddies little boy..” screeched one of the inmates over and over until one of his fellows silenced him with a cuff to the back of the head. Then I saw the eyes of the fighter in the pit, I'd seen those eye but seconds after he'd been born, after he'd been brought forth into the world from his mothers womb. I tried to speak his name but no words came. The sea of pain still swam within me, it masked the very specific nature of many of my wounds. It was only now as I tried to voice Mac's name that my ruined tongue made itself know, a shredded mound which flopped uselessly inside a mouth which no longer had lips.

  I do not know what is worse, the unfolding knowledge of just how ruined I am or the look in my youngest sons eyes as he recognises what is left of me.

  “He's done well your little'un” says brute. “Come on” he says and we move on. At the end of the next corridor there are a set of strangely ornate wooden doors, they looked like a great deal of intricate craftsmanship had gone into them, a level of care which had been desecrated by the carvings. There were numerous references to satan and death, the obligatory pentagrams and six, six, sixes scrawled here and there. But in the centre there was a carefully carved image of a face, a smiling friendly face that seemed oh so welcoming. The face broke in two as Brute pushed open the doors and we passed into the scene of my final act.

  It was a grand hall. Around the edge ran a balcony which looked down upon a vast space with a stage at one end and rows of benches which met it from the other. Many of those benches had been piled up at the side of the hall to create a large opening at the foot of the stage. The walls of this place were not a part of the asylum above, they were older, much older, seemingly hewn from the bare rock of the underground. They spoke of a purpose far removed from that of Ravensburg Secure Hospital. This had the look of more of a church, though what kind of church would be set deep in the earth I could not fathom, I'd never been a religious man and would be hard pressed to tell one demon from another.

  I was vaguely aware of the inmates from around the pit behind us dragging my son in with them as I was pulled along the ground like a rag doll down the aisle between the benches, down towards centre stage, down towards destiny.

  I could still cry, and cry I did. The tears poured freely from me, in them was all that had been good, desperate to escape before my body and soul were cast into whatever dark fire the inmates had prepared.

  As we reached centre stage I saw two more of my darling Locklears. Zak was propped up against one the front benches with his chin against his chest. Whether he was alive or dead I could not tell, but judging from the amount of his own entrails cupped in his hand the candle of hope burning for him that I held flickered out.

  I saw Sue. She was chained to the floor like a wild animal. She'd been stripped naked and her once beautiful skin was now etched with a tale of brutality. A mass of bruises, cuts and lash marks covered her from head to toe. I gurgled and gasped but despite the fact that I could see her body rising and falling with breath she did not look my way, her eyes were open but they were empty orbs which did not lift themselves from the cold stone floor on which she lay.

  Then I looked up at the stage and I saw him. The good doctor. The man in the white coat, the face from the carving on the door, the image of a million nightmares which I'd had but always remembered to forget.

  Something stirred in me when I looked upon him. He exuded a strange welcoming aura, he had such patient eyes brimming with compassion. As I looked into them I saw memories, but they were not mine, they belonged to the world, they belonged to the future.

  I saw a greatness that was such in name only, I saw the changing face of the land which had taken place under the watchful gaze of the carrion. I saw blood drawn and seep into the earth and I saw the ground sickened by the touch of such unwanted sacrifice. Centuries of greed, millennia of avarice stacked upon one another became too much for the world to bear. They toppled over and the hands which had laboured so long to build them fell down with their creations into the abyss.

  I saw battles take place in far away lands, I saw the rise of the clansmen and the rebirth of an era of smoke and fire when men built a world of iron and sweat. I saw the tiny grains of sand tumbling by, etched on the side of every single speck was a version of the future, all of them building up to a single event, the linchpin of destiny from which all the other events sprung. I saw the high towers of the raven and wars which were fought to the sounds of singing, a song which sung of the emptiness between the stars and the few virtues which linked us across the distance. I saw all this and so much more, but the vision disappeared in an instant when he spoke, when the harlequin said those words “Are you feeling better?” he asked excitedly. I slowly shook my head and he clapped his hands in delight.

  The veins on his hands had a silvery tinge which I noted as he rubbed them together. There were about thirty inmates gathered before the central stage. All of them were on their knees with their heads bowed. Brute and his cohorts propped me up on on the front bench and the joined their fellow inmates briefly before they all got up and moved to either side giving me full view of the stage and leaving nothing between my ruined form and the man in the white coat.

  He stared at me for a time, swaying, dancing even from side to side, pondering, considering me with his kindly gaze. There was a deadly silence in the hall. I stared back at him, barely able to comprehend the horrors Id already looked upon this night, I could not begin to fathom what might come next.

  Then he clicked his fingers and smiled again. At that signal several of the inmates moved to behind a thick velvet curtain at the back of the stage area. They had one last punishment for me. My daughter was dressed in a plain white smock, she did not struggle as they carried her and placed her on her knees before the man in the white coat, before the harlequin. I thought back to all the school plays I'd been to see, all the musicals, all the award ceremonies, how could this sick perversion of all those pure moments have been allowed to come to pass by any god real or imagined, how could the universe in all its infinite majesty allow itself to be infested by such dark plagues as the one which was here before me.

  Her her was almost torn out by the gruff hands which held her head up to look upon the harlequin. Those same hands held her still as the kindly doctors hand beat her face from side to side several times, with each strike he would ask her if she was feeling better and with each question she responded with more tears, and more blood.

  During a brief pause from the beating our eyes met, she made contact with the broken form of her father sitting on the front row. Then she spoke, the last word that would ever part her lips, the last gasp of desperation. “Dad” she whimpered. And the walls of my sanity came crashing down, her voice, her last word was the epitaph for the man who was Robert Locklear. All that was good and noble was gone, a nothing sat where I had sat but moments before, a beast, a ghost, and a madman. The father was gone, the husband was gone, I was now flesh and bone and little else.

  The show continued. Through dead eyes I watched as brute came forth bearing a long sharpened stake. She struggled in vain as the inmates held her up and brute put the sharpened end into her mouth and started to impale her. My daughter died the moment the stake pierced her heart and carried on through. Even so her e
yes were open still and her body spasmed as the stake finished its grisly work, emerging with a wet cracking sound from her lower back.

  The dead thing that was me could not see how the situation could get any worse, a testament to the lack of imagination that ghosts possess. For the good doctor, I think that he'd barely begun to do his work. He gestured to his craven who started to build something on stage. As they did so he reached a hand into his pocket and brought forth something flat and soft.

  He unfolded the mask and placed it onto his face, held in place by some artifice I could not glean. The dead me saw that it was a mask of skin, taken from some former victim, or a dozen former victims, sewn together and bound even in death to be a part of the mad harlequins dark machinations of misery. With the mask in place his smile was hidden, but I could see his pale green eyes gleaming from behind the sockets.

  It did not take the inmates long to get the fire going. Within minutes the foul stench of burning flesh filled the room. But their purpose was not to burn the body of my angel, the stake with which they'd impaled has was used to turn her over the flames. They cooked her for some time until her beautiful silken hair was burned away, the ruins of the white smock were ash amidst the tendrils of fire, and her skin began to crackle and split.

  Brute smiled as he did his work. Eventually the grey eyed vermin from upstairs took a wicked blade to the body, carving off a slice and depositing it on a ceremonial looking gold plate. They passed it around, the vultures, each taking a bite and passing it on until eventually it got back to Brute who walked with a casual air down from the stage to stand before me. “Eat” his said with venom.

  The ghost inhabiting my body struggled from side to side but it was to no avail. Oily arms seized the body of Robert Locklear and held it still. “Eat” said Brute again, slowly emphasising the word as he pushed a mouthful of the cooked flesh between the lipless mouth, between the teeth until it touched against the frayed end of the tongue. I choked as it got to my throat, I choked and gagged and vomited the meat into Brutes face, he laughed and wiped the gore from his features before lifting another slab of flesh out of the bowl. “Moooore” he said pushing it towards me.