Lets Drink To The Dead by Simon Bestwick Read Free Book Online

Warbeck’s heavy body, the fifth like the scorpion’s tail, extended behind it.
    Lower down the slopes are other buildings: on one side, a farm and watermill, on the other a chapel and cemetery.
    Inside are corridors with flaking walls. Inside are empty rooms with bare bedframes and barred windows. Some of the bedframes have perished leather straps hanging from the corners. Restraints. There are rooms with padded walls and heavy, iron doors.
    Empty, all empty. She knows this. But they don’t feel empty. They feel crowded; they make her feel the way you do when you’re on the bus and everyone’s crammed shoulder to shoulder. Even though there’s no-one there. And the air, the air wavers like the trees did on the way up, like it’s about to become something else.
    Passing a cell, and the shift she’s been dreading finally happens. There’s a man with his back to her, facing the barred window. White ridges of scar tissues carve channels through his black hair, down the back of his head. He only has one ear. He cocks his head to one side. He starts to turn. No. She mustn’t see this. Mustn’t. Please God, no, she mustn’t see his face.
    But she’s about to; she can’t move and he’s still slowly turning. The moment seems endless, the anticipation of seeing his face worse than actually seeing it. And then the door is swinging shut, slamming in her face just in time. She backs away, but can’t take her eyes from it, especially when two hands slam flat against the wire-reinforced glass, their remaining fingers splayed, and something blurred and dark presses itself to the glass between them, a single bulging eye set into it, staring out at her in forlorn rage.
    Something squeaks. Rusty metal. She turns and looks down the corridor behind her, and from one of the rooms a figure in a wheelchair emerges. It has no legs and only one arm, with a mutilated hand. At first its face looks perfect, unmarked, in contrast to its grey, disordered hair, but then she realises it doesn’t move, because it can’t; it’s a mask. And the mutilated hand is fumbling its way towards the mask, it’s trying to take it off.
    Other doors are swinging open, other shapes emerging into the corridor’s thin half-light. She turns to run but the door that was closed is now open again, and something’s lunging out–
    Running. Footsteps echo down the corridor. Clouds of dust boil up in her wake. Doors swing open in front of her, swing shut behind.
    Down the corridor, ahead of her, there’s laughter. Laughter and screams. She doesn’t want to go. But behind her are the others: the shapes, the thing in the wheelchair, the man whose face she does not want to, will not, see.
    Surely there must be an alternative, a corridor going off to the side. But her legs won’t stop pumping; she can’t control where she’s heading.
    The doors fly open. A room. Tiered ranks of seating. People are sitting there, jeering. Their laugh is a metallic, abrasive sound.
    Below the seats, in the centre, there’s a dais. A naked woman is lying on it, screaming. On top of her is a man. Or what’s left of one.
    Oh, he’s not dead. He’s very much alive, and very much a man, if his relentless thrusting and heaving between her splayed thighs is anything to go by. But Dani’ll see what’s left of his face in nightmares for years to come, maybe forever. His hands paw and claw at the naked woman’s face and breasts; drool falls from the hole that used to be his mouth. She screams and thrashes and twists her face away.
    The laughter, and rising above, a high, horrible titter, infantile. At the foot of the steps, watching it all, stands a fair-haired man in a suit. A beringed hand lifts a cigarette to his mouth; clouds of smoke swirl around his head.
    The crowd laughs. The woman screams. The disfigured man grunts and the man in the suit titters.
    And then she blinks and it’s all changed. The dais is empty and the theatre is filmed with cobwebs and dust. Even the