Year Zero (2000), page 8
"I'm a good hanger-on," Molly assured him. "I expect I'll be here for quite a while—and I never see things I'm not supposed to see." She was trying to reassure him that she wasn't available for witness duty—which was what he'd meant when he'd warned her to be careful—but he seemed to take it differently.
"I hope you don't," he said, as he disappeared through the door, "but you probably will, no matter how hard you try. " It wasn't a threat, and it wasn't quite a warning. It was mostly just a doleful comment.
When she went to close the door behind the boy, Molly finally recognised the odour lingering in the corridor. If it had only been sulphur she'd have cottoned on sooner, but the sulphur was partly masked by something much sweeter, like warm molasses. The odour was still there when she popped out to Kwik-Save to lay in supplies—and by the time she returned, it was even stronger.
The music started at nine o'clock, while Molly was making a fried egg sandwich. It wasn't particularly loud, and it wasn't the kind of drum'n'bass stuff that mimicked the effect of a migraine if you listened to it long enough without being stoned, but it was unsettling nevertheless. It seemed strangely sinister, although Molly couldn't quite figure out why. The best she could do when she tried to put a name to it was that it was the kind of music you'd use for charming very large and extremely poisonous snakes, although she wasn't quite sure how that conviction had come into her head.
By the time she'd finished the sandwich, with the music still echoing insidiously around her walls, the races got under way. She went to the window to watch. Either the twockers had gone all the way up west or they'd struck exceedingly lucky, because they'd brought back something a lot sexier than the average salesman's fleet car: a low-slung two-seater sports job.
As a lifelong non-driver Molly didn't know enough about cars to be able to tell a Lamborghini from a Lada, but it was easy enough to see that this one had far too much under the hood for the pursuing pandas. She didn't know the ins and outs of the track—or even where the main circuit was supposed to be, given that it was a purely theoretical construct engraved upon the local streets by the teenage imagination—but she could tell by the way the vehicles cornered that the pursuers and the pursued were giving it their all.
It might have been fun if it hadn't been for the thing that suddenly popped up out of nowhere to leer at Molly through the window.
The thing had red-glowing eyes and fangs like a sabretoothed tiger, a nose like a bat and ears like a hog. Its body was like a gibbon's but the hands at the ends of its anorectic arms were like sharply taloned claws. It had six limbs in all, the extra pair being wings, more like a pterodactyl's than a bat's.
It was extremely ugly, but its appearance was not quite as intimidating as that of the inhabitants of 61 Cygni C VIII—who had turned out to be very amiable—and nowhere near as strange as that of the cloud-dwellers of Procyon XXI. While it stared lasciviously at Molly, Molly stared insouciantly back, but it wasn't built for hovering and soon had to dive away into the darkness.
Well, Molly said to herself, under her breath, it's a good job I wasn't moved here six weeks ago.
By the time the joyriders had abandoned the two-seater Molly was absolutely beat, so she figured that she might as well have an early night. She pulled her sleeping bag out of the box. In spite of the music she fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the bundled-up coat she was using as a pillow, and didn't wake up until something brushed her face.
The bedroom curtains were far too tatty to keep out the ruddy light of the cloudy night sky, but as soon as she opened her eyes Molly realised that the darkness was nowhere near as deep as it should have been. The ceiling seemed to be leaking silver tracery into the air, whose threads coiled about one another in serpentine fashion, like moonlit cigarette smoke blown into the catchment of a slowly-turning fan.
While Molly watched apprehensively, the swirling light began to form suggestive shapes—and what the shapes suggested to Molly were human figures writhing in cages of icy flame. Their limbs and torsos thrashed and quivered, and their eyes were pits of infinite darkness set in brightly agonised faces. It was like something out of Poltergeist, although Molly didn't have a TV set and Arcadia House presumably hadn't been built on a graveyard.
The eerie music was still playing in the background, not loudly but insistently and ominously. The ghosts, if that was what they were, were moving in time to the rhythm, although no one would have called what they were doing dancing. The cloud-dwellers of Procyon XXI, by contrast, had most certainly been dancers, and their accompaniment had been a far more convincing rendition of the music of the spheres.
This, Molly knew, was fakery. It was very clever, but it wasn't authentic. She watched until the ghosts faded out, and then she relaxed—but only slightly. She had the feeling that there was more to come. Almost immediately, there was a knock on the bedroom door.
18
Molly had carefully secured both the locks and the deadbolt as soon as she'd got her groceries back from Kwik-Save, so nobody should have been able to get to the bedroom door without battering down the main one.
Although she was naked, except for her knickers, Molly immediately got out of bed and moved towards the door, sweeping her arms back and forth about her head as she went. The sinuous threads of light resisted slightly, like fresh spiderwebs, but they didn't hold her back.
When she opened the door she found a quasi-human figure standing there, softly lit from behind. A fleshless skull peeped out of a capacious hood mounted atop a voluminous black robe, while two skeletal hands displayed a huge scythe. The edge of the scythe-blade sparkled in the uncanny light.
Molly had taken a few self-defence lessons after her second rape, and she'd taken care to remember the flashier moves. She reached up to take the haft of the scythe in both hands, and immediately fell backwards. As soon as her back hit the threadbare carpet she brought her feet up hard into the costumed joker's midriff, intending to throw him head-first into the iron rimmed bed.
The move was more successful than she'd hoped. The skeletal figure weighed no more than a child of ten, and when the skull smacked into the bedframe it shattered into a thousand pieces. The rest of the bones immediately fell apart, sending the folds of the black robe cascading down upon Molly's tanned and unprecedentedly lithe body.
When Molly got up again she shook the bones out of the robe, making sure that all the shards were gone before she put it on herself. She picked up the scythe and marched to the front door of the flat. When she found it still triple-locked she went to get her keys, then let herself out.
It only took a moment to ascertain that the music was coming from the door opposite—the nearest of the nine that were sheltered by iron gates. She stepped across the hallway and used the top of the scythe's shaft to pound upon it.
The music stopped, and there was a pause of at least thirty seconds before someone shuffled to the door. Molly heard two keys and a deadbolt turn, then the door opened by the merest crack. A single bloodshot eye peered out at her from a point some four or five inches below her own eye-line. The occupant of the flat made no move to open the security-gate, being perfectly content to peer at her through the grille.
"Is this yours?" she demanded, brandishing the scythe fiercely.
"No," said a small voice. It was probably male, but she couldn't be absolutely sure.
"Well, whose is it?"
"Death's?" the small voice guessed, suggesting that its owner knew only too well what kind of visitation she had just received. Now that the music was off, another faint sound was emanating from the depths of the flat, like the buzzing of a swarm of flies.
"Well," said Molly, again. "Next time you see your friend Death, you tell him that he'd better come collect it real soon, or I'll trade it to the lads downstairs for some cutlery I can use. While you're at it, you can tell your pet that he's the worst excuse for a parrot I've seen this side of Wolf 359. And while I'm here, I might as well tell you that if you'd only change the fucking record once now and again, your phantom snakes probably wouldn't be swarming all over my place interfering with my beauty sleep. Okay?"
"Um," said the small voice.
"Is that um as in I'm really very sorry or um as in it definitely won't happen again?" Molly wanted to know.
"Errrgh," said the small voice, uncertainly.
Molly decided to take that as a yes to both questions.
"Good," she said. "And good night." She turned on her heel and marched back into her own flat, closing the door as firmly as she could without actually slamming it. She locked it as tightly as before and went back to bed, stepping carefully over the remnants of the skeleton after she'd divested herself of the robe.
When she woke up in the morning the broken bones were gone, but the black dressing-gown was still hanging on the hook on the back of the bedroom door. The scythe was where she'd left it, propped up against the cooker. She made herself some coffee before she went to the window to greet the morning sun but the grill on the cooker wasn't working so she couldn't make toast.
The burnt-out husk of the two-seater hadn't been collected yet. Either police thought that there was no great hurry or they figured that it was now the sole responsibility of the owner's insurers.
Molly had just put the kettle back on the gas for a second time when there was a knock at the door. She couldn't suppress the sudden hope that it might be Christine, or a social worker bearing glad tidings thereof, but when she had wrestled the door open she saw that it was only three old people, two male and one female.
Superficially, they seemed like the oldest people she had ever seen, but she could tell that there was more to them than met the everyday eye. Their hidden depths were sufficiently well-concealed that her eyes couldn't quite fathom them, but her wide experience of the extraordinary allowed her to be immediately aware of an awful lot of things that they weren't. One of the things they weren't was human; another was nice.
"And which of you gentlemen would be Mr. Death?" she asked, ironically.
"We're sorry about any inconvenience you might have suffered," said the taller of the old men, insincerely. "May we come in?" His ash-grey suit certainly hadn't come from Oxfam, or M&S, or any place that the men from darkest Croydon were likely to shop.
Molly stood aside to let them pass. The female led the way. Her ankle-length dress was silvery in hue, its delicate texture not unlike the skin of a baby grey, and her slippers looked as if they might be made of porcelain. The shorter and stouter male was comparatively underdressed, having no jacket, although his red velvet waistcoat was spectacularly tasteless. The spokesman's lounge-lizard outfit was topped and tailed by a bow tie and spats; if he'd been funny he could have stepped out of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, but whatever he was—and it wasn't easy to put a name to it—funny definitely didn't cover it.
The set of chairs that went with the table in the kitchenette was one short, so there was only one to spare once the female and the shorter male had sat down. Molly and the taller masquerader eyed one another carefully, neither wanting to accept any positional disadvantage. The kettle was boiling, and that gave Molly a chance to turn away with the contest still unsettled.
"Coffee?" she said, blithely. "It's only instant, I'm afraid. I'm Molly, by the way."
The unhuman visitors didn't introduce themselves and made no reply to the offer of coffee. Like little Dean they were trying to look hard as well as sinister, but like little Dean they hadn't got the wherewithal. As soon as Molly condescended to meet his gaze again, the tall one said, "Who are you?" in a conspicuously frosty voice.
"I just told you," she reminded him. "My name's Molly. You don't have to worry about me. I'm not the neighbour from Hell."
The female and the shorter male started visibly at that. Molly guessed that it had been the short one who had answered his door to her the previous night, although his eyes were no longer unduly bloodshot.
"We know that," the short one countered. "The point is, where are you from—and what do you want with us?"
"I just want to be a good neighbour," Molly assured them all. "But in my book, that means no nocturnal visitations of the carnival kind. I do hope you won't take this amiss, but I really don't want this affair to escalate. Judging by your first three shots, things could get rather grisly if you decided to try much harder. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather you didn't. It's not for myself, you understand—there's nothing much that I haven't seen before, and worse—but I have two children who might just be allowed to come and live with me if I can only persuade Social Services that it's safe enough and not too cramped. For that reason, of course, I'd be perfectly happy for you to go on frightening the pants off everybody else—so if, by chance, you're only doing it for fun you needn't feel deprived."
The imitation man in the grey suit didn't bat an eyelid, although Molly could tell that the prospect of having two children move into the corridor was far from welcome. He didn't venture any immediate reply when Molly stopped speaking; he seemed to be thinking hard about what to say next.
"I take it, then, that you're not doing it for fun," Molly said, by way of a prompt.
"No," said the female, softly. "We're not."
19
"Is it gang kids you're worried about?" Molly asked. "Are the cheap tricks intended to deter would-be burglars?" she knew that it couldn't be the right answer—for one thing, the tricks weren't cheap, and for another, she'd got enough out of Mrs. Peach to know that her rapidly-deterred predecessors hadn't had any gang material in tow—but she figured that she might as well try to get warmer by degrees if her mysterious visitors were intent on not giving her a straight answer.
"Who sent you?" the tall one asked, sharply. He was reluctant to concede that she had as much right to ask questions as he did.
"The same people who sent the last three people you scared off," Molly replied, with equal sharpness. "Who did you think sent me?"
"We were rather hoping to take over the entire floor," the female said, ignoring the tall one's censorious glance. "We had no trouble getting this far, so it's a little disappointing to trip up at the last hurdle. Our friend would have been in if you hadn't suddenly jumped the waiting list. We could help you to obtain other—and better—accommodation if you wish. You've seen a small sample of what we can do. That was crude, of course, but we can be subtle too. Given that you're so resilient, we're prepared to work with you rather than against you, always provided that we could come to a mutually acceptable arrangement." By the time she'd finished her tall companion was looking daggers at her, but she was just cutting through the bullshit.
"I'm very discreet," Molly assured them. "Who, exactly, are you hiding from?"
"Who told you we were hiding?" the short one asked, in frank amazement.
His taller companion groaned. "I told you we shouldn't have let him come," he complained to the female. To Molly, he said: "You really don't want to know. The last thing you need is for our enemy to decide that you're an enemy too."
"I have friends in very high places," Molly told him, cockily. "I may not look like much, but you already know that I don't scare easily. I wouldn't call in my favours for anything trivial, of course, but even if the Devil himself were to come after me ..."
She paused then, because even the tall one couldn't help flinching visibly at that name, while his two companions were stricken with expressions not unlike the one she'd noticed on the face of the Housing Officer-cum-nightclub bouncer.
"Oh," she said, as the one in the grey suit finally condescended to sit down on the empty chair. "It's that bad, is it?" She remembered the fallen angel she'd sent back up to Heaven, and tried to imagine what he'd have looked like if he'd stuck around—not just for another few days, but for a very long time. Then she remembered the odour of brimstone and treacle that had haunted the corridor on the previous evening, and the sound of buzzing flies that she'd heard in the short one's flat.
The reason they only looked human, she realised, was that they were demons—presumably renegade demons, if they were in hiding from their old boss.
When none of them had said anything for a further half minute, Molly got three extra cups and began to spoon coffee out of the jar.
"Well," she said, as she turned the gas back up to pep up the cooling water, "now that I know the worst, you might as well tell me everything, mightn't you?"
It wasn't that easy, of course. Even when the coffee had loosened them up a bit the tall one continued to be recalcitrant, deploring the fall of every nugget of information that his companions let slip. The smaller one, on the other hand, admitted when charged that they were indeed demons. The tall one's swift corrective assertion that they were very minor demons didn't seem convincing to Molly.
The female added that all nine of the heavily-defended rooms on the thirteenth floor were occupied by what were, in essence, draft-dodgers who had given up the thankless business of temptation centuries ago. His Satanic Majesty apparently hadn't bothered to take them to task for their negligence because they'd been virtually redundant by that time, humankind having become so addicted to sin that they no longer required prompting, but circumstances had recently changed. Rumour among the fallen apparently had it that summonses had been sent out requiring all "reservists" to report back to Hell for retraining.
"Retraining as what?" Molly wanted to know.
"We're not sure," said the shorter male demon, sourly. "Tormentors, maybe." He gave the impression that he could imagine fates worse than torment duty.
"Hell's not like Heaven then," Molly said. "It's not timeless."
The smaller demon, who had evidently never mastered the art of self-control, looked utterly flabbergasted. "How do you know that?" he asked.
"An angel told me," she said, trying to imply that it wasn't the only thing the angel had told her, although it very nearly was. "He fell, but only for a little while. He wasn't too proud to get up again—unlike your glorious leader, if Milton can be trusted."
