Nightbleed, Peter Fehervari [short story to read .TXT] 📗

of the flyers had defected to the steadier illumination of Chel’s torch. Like many citizens, she carried her own light source, fearful of getting caught in a blackout. They were becoming more frequent, occasionally plunging entire districts into darkness for hours. Lyle, who refused to carry a light, claimed it was nothing to worry about, but–

There was a scraping noise along the shunned corridor.

Chel shone her light into the gloom, her other hand drawing a shok-jak from her pocket. The compact weapon only had a single charge, but she’d been assured it packed a heavy punch. She’d bought it from one of the stimm dealers on her district’s outskirts. Like the seller’s primary wares, it was illegal. Lyle would be scandalised if he found out, which pleased her.

‘Hello?’ Chel called out. Her beam couldn’t penetrate beyond the first few dark patches. ‘Is someone there?’

In theory the tower was safe, sealed behind shutters and coded gates, but strangers still got inside. The upper seven floors, which had been gutted by fire years ago, were overrun with vagrants. The block’s wardens stayed clear of the derelict floors, but they’d cut off power and lift access, sealing their status as a no-go zone. Lyle called the area The Warren – capitalised like The Balance, but the spiritual opposite of his beloved harmony. The disorder overhead symbolised everything he loathed.

‘I’m armed,’ Chel added, raising her jak pointedly. There was no reply. It was probably just a rat or one of the feral cats that hunted them. Both were getting bolder – and bigger – but they usually avoided residents, though they’d been known to attack young children. But it wasn’t vermin that worried her. Not that kind anyway.

The stairs to The Warren had been sealed off many times, but the barriers never held and the wardens eventually gave up repairing them. There’d been talk of starting up a resident’s watch, but nothing united the people of Barka Tower except misery, so it went nowhere. The squatters had been reported to the authorities, but the city’s law enforcers had bigger problems on their hands. It would probably take another fire to purge the infestation.

Infestation? Purge? Chel frowned, ashamed of using such terms. His terms. The intruders might be unsettling, but they were still people, many of them probably only a few bad choices along from her own position, if they’d ever had a choice at all. Since her dismissal from the municipal medicae service Chel had drifted between jobs, never lasting more than a year in one place. The trajectory in respect and pay had been relentlessly downward. That was why she’d stuck with Lyle. The Congregation would look after him if they split, but she’d probably end up in one of the periphery slums.

There’s no way back from that, she thought as her light played over the flaking, graffiti-covered walls. It illuminated declarations of love and hate, devotion and revolution, and more often than not, sheer nonsense, or something that would only make sense to its author. The many-coloured scrawls overlapped each other in a continuous skein, recent avowals smeared over the old, creating layers of desire and delirium. There were pictures too, caught amid the tangle like snared hallucinations. Most were obscene, but two – undoubtedly the work of the same hand – were striking.

You’re new, Chel gauged, certain she hadn’t seen them before. Her gaze lingered on each in turn. They sliced through their rivals in stark black lines, sometimes flowing, sometimes jagged, but always vicious. The nearest depicted a spiralling mandala that bristled with spines and sharp petals, like a malignant flower. A vertical eye nestled at its core, wide open and defiantly insane. The composition was disturbing, though not without beauty, but the other…

Chel shivered as she studied the second picture. Was that meant to be a person? The bipedal figure was about the height of a man, but it wasn’t remotely human. It looked like the thing’s body had been torn apart then strung back together at random, with the pieces connected by taut tendons. Spindly limbs sprouted from its torso, jointed in multiple, sometimes conflicting angles that forced the appendages into zigzagging contortions. The legs tapered into sharp points while the arms bloomed into sheaves of needle-like talons. But the head – if it could be called a head – was the worst part. That swirling ribbon of fanged eyes glared at her, alive with gleeful malice.

Who had painted these things? The prospect of the mind behind such visions wandering the corridors was frightening, yet also exhilarating. There was a mystery here and mysteries had no place in Barka Tower, let alone the limbo of Chel Jarrow’s life.

What do you mean? What are–

There was a chime beside her. The lift doors parted, releasing the pent-up stench of vomit and urine, laced with the tang of some narcotic. It was a foul mixture, but Chel had smelled worse. Sometimes there were more substantial deposits waiting inside. Predictably the lift’s light was out, leaving only faint rings of radiance from the buttons on the control panel. With practised wariness, she scanned the compartment’s floor before stepping inside. The enigma of the pictures would have to wait.

Don’t go away, she prayed to them. It was a peculiar wish, yet she couldn’t deny it.

As she reached for the panel the scraping sound came again, closer and more protracted this time, as though something sharp were being drawn along the wall towards her. Several sharp things. A glassy chittering accompanied the scraping – so delicate it might be subliminal. Chel froze, picturing the shredded man slithering along the wall, navigating its peeling canvas in a ripple of black lines.

The noise stopped just outside.

Waiting for me to choose…

Strangely Chel felt no fear, just an apprehension of disappointment. What if she looked and found only vermin, animal or otherwise? No, it was better not to know. Let the mystery endure. She pressed the button to the lobby.

There was a uniformed man standing on the street