Caitlin Roesbuck and the Foil Men
Chapter Five
Caitlin caught a glimpse of pulsating organs, silver-veined and flatly metallic, stacked up on top of one another like a house of cards, threading in and out of one another with puzzling dimensionality. Then the organs slid past, and the darkness swallowed her up.
She had no sensation of falling, but wiry things kept slapping against her arms and legs. Once, she snagged for a moment on a particularly large tendril, but then her t-shirt ripped at the sleeve, and she didn’t feel herself moving downwards again.
When the king of the foil men had eaten her, the Spear had come along for the ride. Where it had once been almost impossible to hold because of the heat, it was now almost as difficult to grip because of the cold. It was almost as if she were holding the twin sister of the Spear that had stabbed through the belly of the beast, an inverted mirror. Or perhaps, she thought, some of the foil man’s shimmering metal had wrapped itself around the weapon. That was not a happy thought.
Cold or not, Caitlin clung tightly to the only thing that was not herself as she spiralled through the absence of light.
In the strange gullet of the creature, she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed, or even if she were breathing. Certainly, she couldn’t speak or cry out. Maybe she was dead. This could be what being dead felt like, only, for some reason, Caitlin thought that she was still alive. Having the Spear with her helped, but everyone had always explained to her that being dead was full of light and clouds. Caitlin had always liked the kindly, if a little stern faces of the Angels she had seen in paintings, but there were no angels here.
Even as Caitlin was thinking, her fall ended with an instant transition of states, and she found herself sprawled uncomfortably on a great grey plain, stretching into infinity in infinite directions.
She stood up, and brushed off as much dust as she could. It gripped her tightly, attempting to smother her with greyness and make her as non-descript and dull as the scenery. She resisted as best she could.
The sister-Spear had clamped itself tight to Caitlin’s hand, like a frostbitten pipe clinging to naked skin. She tried to shake it loose, but it seemed determined to follow her wherever she decided to go.
She looked up at the sky, or what passed for sky in the spirit limbo of the foil man’s stomach. Shadows darted across the inverse dome like creaking puppets on a pudding bowl. It was almost as if the foil men were broadcasting their evil to their victims with a magic lantern show in their hellish heavens. Caitlin shivered a little under their eyeless gaze but, on seeing that there was nothing to hide behind on the infinite plain, she straightened herself and resolved to make the best of it.
The obscene light show continued about her, but it seemed to affect her less and less, as if she had started radiating something from within her that held the fear at bay.
With no directions evident, and not a landmark in sight, aside from columns of dust that whipped themselves into colonnades of drunken mountains from moment to moment, Caitlin set off entirely at random. Her feet, dressed in a sock and trainer combination, alternately picked up and kicked up the dirt.
After she had walked a distance of who-knows-how-far in who-knows-how-long, Caitlin looked around and discovered she might as well have been walking on the spot. Was this the hell her uncle had talked about? The punishment the foil men meted out to their victims after death? Eternal loneliness in an empty world seemed to be the most hellish thing Caitlin could think of.
But then, she thought, if the foil men had really eaten as many people as they had, it would take an awful lot of work and effort and magic to make everyone their very own personalised hell – and the way Caitlin saw it, the foil men seemed like simple and lazy creatures. She bet that the cities they lived in beneath the waves had been built by older, cleverer, kindlier creatures than they.
So it stood to reason that all of those people were trapped in the same infinite waste, and that all that was stopping them from bumping into one another was the fact that infinity was a pretty big place. You might get lost if you didn’t have a map. Or a compass.
It took a little while for Caitlin to realise that she was holding a compass, of a sort. The Spear was still twisting cold in her hand. She knew that it had served as a location and early warning device for the foil men, and she figured that, now that she was inside one of them, it might stop being distracted by something so big and start concentrating on the smaller, more important things.
Like Cathaoir Roesbuck and her parents, for instance.
It was certainly worth a try.
Caitlin closed her
eyes, and started to do one of the relaxation exercises from her mum’s
self-hypnosis tapes. She breathed deeply and slowly, and pictured herself on a
beautiful
At the thought of her mum, the sound of the surf disappeared, with a fluffing hush like a radio playing in reverse.
Caitlin harrumphed at herself, and then tried to clear everything from her mind.
Soon, she could feel the warm sand beneath her toes, a warmth that spread up her legs, across her chest, and down her arm to the Spear.
Cathaoir, she thought, picturing her uncle’s smiling, care-worn face, and walking straight forward in no direction in particular.
She could have sworn she felt a breeze – fresh, real air – blowing on her face.
Then something touched her on the shoulder, something that felt a lot like the hand of her uncle clasping her for reassurance.
“Caitlin,” he said, and she believed.
“Uncle!” She gripped him tightly round the midriff, the Spear still swinging in her hand, and he staggered back a little, as if surprised by the sudden contact.
“Ooof!”
She turned to look at him properly, and drew in a gasp of sympathy. His clothes, previously neat, if a little dishevelled, had been systematically ripped into poorly woven sackcloth, and his skin, wherever it was exposed, had been lightly touched by razorwire. His face slowly moved its muscles into a smile, as if he had been lost in the wilderness for so long that he had forgotten how.
“Caitlin,” he said again, his voice the rasp of the confessional. “I had to know… I’m so sorry. I had to know…”
“Know what?”
“Whether she could still be alive.”
He bowed his head, and Caitlin thought sadly of the box in the alcove.
“I promised myself I’d remember,” he said. “But I…I… I forgot to look for her. Something about this place. But now you’re here… Everything seems clearer.”
Caitlin remembered a promise of her own.
“I used the Spear to find you, uncle… We should see if we can find her, too…”
Cathaoir’s eyes lost their ageless quality, shed their sorrowful layers and opened again as pure hope. “Would you?” He whispered.
“You’ll have to hold on to the Spear,” Caitlin said, “because I can’t remember her as well as you can.”
“Agreed,” he said, and suddenly he was the twinkly-eyed patrician again.
Caitlin held out the Spear to him, and Cathaoir wrapped his hand around the cold blade point. Rather than cutting him, it seemed the cold blade caused the razored cuts around his hand and arm to scurry away from the point, leaving healed and pink skin in their wake.
“Let’s find her, Caitlin.”
So Caitlin closed her eyes, and stuffed her ears, and imagined the cool breeze rolling in from the crashing waves on her hypnotherapy beach.
Infinity dropped away, though, as it did so, Caitlin was aware of something like snow precipitating out of the air.
“Annabella,” Cathaoir said, “Annabella Roesbuck.”
This time a wind howled, and Caitlin’s hair flew back from her face. Snowflakes heavy with dust struck her skin, and she opened her eyes.
As white specks tumbled out of the sky, squared at the edges and oddly angled, Caitlin saw her uncle already moving, trancelike, towards the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Her face was hidden within waves of dark hair, blue-black like pooling oil in the desert, with skin like the red-pink of a freshly laundered rose. Cathaoir held his palm out to her, fingers upright, and she reached out dreamily to touch him in kind, fingertip to fingertip.
Caitlin could see, even at this distance, that they were lost in each others eyes already, to depths unmatched by the years spent in an infinite wilderness.
The two resisted a moment longer, and then kissed, passionately and deeply.
Caitlin watched for a few minutes, purely out of curiosity, and in wonder at the coil of red-blue smoke that curled out of Annabella’s chest and wreathed the pair in twisting clouds. When she realised that they had no plans for stopping any time soon, she turned her back and gave them a little privacy.
Occasionally she sneaked a peek through her fingers to see whether they were still at it.
When Uncle Cathaoir and Aunt Annabella had composed themselves sufficiently, they walked over to Caitlin.
“Annabella, this is – ”
“Caitlin Roesbuck,” Caitlin said, proffering her free hand and dropping in a mock curtsey. “At your service, ma’am.”
Annabella smiled, the warmth of human contact spreading through her once more. Her heart-smoke was running pure red, like a flue heating up to the correct temperature, purging itself of impurities. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Caitlin.”
Caitlin smiled in reply, and then said, with the teensiest smidgen of urgency: “Uncle, have you noticed the people?”
Cathaoir looked confused for a moment, but, rather than repeat Caitlin’s question back to her, he chose to take a look for himself.
Sure enough, where previously the horizon had been bare, now thin vertical shapes were visible in between the drifts of dustsnow, moving and walking and dreaming and stumbling. People!
“Why,” Cathaoir began, and Annabella finished for him, “The barriers must be weakening. The stomach walls begin to fade!”
And it was true. What had once been infinite now seemed… bounded… in some way, as if a wall had been erected around the rim of the universe to keep out the nosy universes next door. Caitlin could see the little blobs of people getting closer to them as the infinite grew smaller with every passing second. Some of them were bumping into each other and talking, using vocal cords that had been wasted on pitiful cries for the more cheerful business of greetings and laughter.
“But if the walls are fading,” Caitlin asked, “does that mean that we could escape? And shouldn’t we find my parents?”
Cathaoir studied the horizon with intent. “A tentative ‘yes’ to both your questions, I think. Look there, at that patch of sky… I could have sworn I saw a hotel wall through it a moment ago.
“Hmmm. Caitlin, could you try something for me? Could you try to cut through the sky?”
Caitlin frowned. The sky still seemed a long way away. “I don’t think I can reach it, uncle.”
“Ah, but you shouldn’t have to. The foil men may have dark magic in their stomachs, but much of what they do is illusion. Close your eyes and try and cut your way out of his belly.”
So Caitlin did as she was told.
She closed her eyes, as tightly as she could, so that little ladybirds and supernovas burst into being behind the lids. Her jaw was clenched, and she could feel her back teeth working against each other, the clunk-clack, clunk-clack of tooth on tooth sounding like a railway siding inside her head.
There was no need to focus on the beach this time, only on the Spear, and to Caitlin, the ice-cold rod was glowing amber and white behind her closed eyes so bright and odd that it bypassed her retinas entirely and appeared directly in her brain.
She reached out with the end of the Spear, jabbing gently, then slashing sideways, trying all the ways she knew to cut things with, and getting nothing in return but the shifting of weight as the Spear swung this way and that.
Then she stopped imagining that there was a sky, and an infinite plain, and hundreds of people all around her, and started imagining that she was in a giant paper bag.
Her dad had sometimes said, disparagingly, that Caitlin’s cousin Roderick was so thin and undernourished and generally wet that he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. Caitlin thought this was slightly unfair, as adults should not have any reason to put toddlers in paper bags to see if they could fight their way out, and anyway, she thought he might have been joking, just a little bit. But a paper bag was an easy thing to fight your way out of, if you weren’t thin and wet and a toddler, and especially if you had a magically glowing Spear on your side. So Caitlin pictured a paper bag, all thin and brown and papery, with rustly crinkles around every fold, and a neat tuck, like an envelope, underneath, that had nearly worn through from carrying so many vegetables and tins of fruit. She pictured the bag, and then she gave a tentative jab with the Spear, fully expecting the brown paper to rip, buckle and tear.
And it did.
The Spear-tip, along with half of the haft, punctured straight through the sky, punching a hole in the horizon big enough to see that the foil man was still in the hotel. When Caitlin opened her eyes, she could see that they were still in the corridor she had been swallowed in. Perhaps time passed differently inside the belly, or perhaps the foil men had decided to make the hotel their new home.
Either way, Caitlin had found an escape route.
“Well done!” Cathaoir said, his face aglow. “Now, can you make it bigger? We need room to get everybody out.”
Caitlin frowned, and thought about it. “Maybe if I try to make two cuts on either side, the hole will unravel?”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” said Annabella. “It looks as if everything you do weakens the creature.”
Caitlin looked about her. Most of the people were near enough now that she could make out their faces, and they were banding together, pointing together as one at the hole she had ripped in the firmament. Around the edges of the world, the rest of the horizon seemed to be fraying at the seams, and bits of different realities were poking through, like toes from an undarned sock.
She raised the Spear again, but before she could attempt to widen the hole, her uncle gave a despairing cry.
Opening her eyes, Caitlin followed Cathaoir’s outstretched finger upwards, to see that the shadows that criss-crossed the sky were peeling off like burnt skin and flapping down towards them: tendrils, appendages and limbs flowing and growing and intermingling like runaway Rorschach blots.
The shadows cast new shadows on the ground, which grew up into creatures of their own right, which cast shadows of their own, propagating a seemingly endless horde of darkness that swam the skies and shoaled in eddying whirls of night.
Fierce cries of blood-anger and death-pain echoed around the dwindling world, as if the stomach acids of the foil men had grown to consciousness and realised their livelihood was escaping.
“Uncle? What do we do?”
“I…” His sentence broke off as the swarm headed towards them. “Open the hole as wide as you can. I’ll do my best to hold them off, and keep them away from you!”
“Here,” Annabella said, reaching inside her smock, “Take this.”
She handed Cathaoir a small dagger, its golden blade ridged and crenulated with gut-wrenching protrusions, its hilt lightly engraved and wound round with a single bind of leather.
Cathaoir looked at the blade as if recognising an old friend, lost long ago and suddenly found again.
“I kept it for you,” Annabella said. “Though it didn’t do me much good.”
“Then let’s hope it fares better with me. Caitlin? Don’t wait any longer!”
Caitlin nodded, and did her best to clear all thoughts of swarming black death from her mind, focusing only on the bright point of the Spear, and the rapidly unweaving hole she had made.
Cathaoir drew Annabella to him tightly. “Stay close. This could get rough.”
“As always… To your left, my love.”
He drew to one side as the advance guard wreathed in, casting shadows out of itself and scything down with bone-hard lack of light.
The shadows coalesced around him, and he swung an arc with the knife, feeling the tug and pull as the serrated edge caught and dragged on each shadow in turn, separating their treacly mass and cauterising the edges with golden reflected light.
The shadows fell back a pace, and Cathaoir stood, panting, shadow matter dripping into fresh cuts all across his body.
Caitlin, meanwhile, had set the Spear back into the hole, and was focussing all her energies on its tip. She ignored the fluttering sounds of exertion behind her, drew in a deep breath, and slashed, as hard as she could, in both directions. She felt reality tear around her, tangling up on the end of the Spear; the fabric of space-time rusching and bunching like a designer dress consigned to the dustbin in a fit of pique.
For added measure, she sliced upwards and over, neatly bisecting the dome of the sky, and sending half of the shadows spilling out in the light.
“Uncle!” She called. “I think we’re good to go!”
Her uncle and aunt came towards her, Cathaoir walking a little unsteadily, and supporting himself on Annabella’s shoulder. “Agreed,” he said.
The infinite plain had retreated yet further, and the three found themselves at the advance guard of several thousand people, all pushing towards the newly formed hole.
“Let’s just focus on getting out,” Annabella said, starting to walk a little quicker.
It took them many minutes to reach the hole but, when they did so, Caitlin paused on the lip.
“What happens when we cross over?” She asked. “Will all of these people end up back in the hotel?”
Cathaoir’s face was drawn and more than a little pale. “There’s only one way to find out…” He nodded towards the hole, and then let go of Annabella, striding across the boundary with only the faintest hint of a limp.
He crossed the barrier… and disappeared.
“Uncle!” Caitlin cried, reaching out a hand towards where he had just been.
Her hand disappeared, too.
Caitlin looked at it in surprise for a moment, wondering why it hadn’t appeared in the hotel scene before her, and then, with a resigned sigh, took hold of Annabella with the hand that was still visible, and pulled them both through.
Caitlin and Annabella stumbled into the darkened hotel corridor, and just avoided bumping into Cathaoir, who was looking back in confusion at the way they had just come.
After Caitlin had hugged her Uncle happily, she said: “Why couldn’t we see you? It doesn’t make any sense…”
“Perhaps the hole
doesn’t lead to the same place for everyone. This was the place where we were
taken, but some of the people in there were probably swallowed long before
hotels, or
“I hope that’s how it works, Uncle.”
As if to prove that that was, indeed, how it worked, there came a quartet of soft pops, the sound of a thousand water bottles unscrewing themselves, and Mr and Mrs Roesbuck, along with their two longest-standing guests, Mr Blofume and Ms. Britten, walked out into the corridor. Mr Blofume seemed to be patting his jacket pockets for a cigarette or pipe, while Ms. Britten was endlessly straightening her hair with nervous, fidgeting hands.
But Caitlin looked past all this, and saw her parents, her wonderful, innocent parents, who didn’t know about foil men and immortal uncles and living shadows and ancient knives, but who let her stay up later than her friends and always gave her a treat if she was good.
She ran up to them and hugged them for a good long time.
They hugged her back.
When Caitlin looked up, she noticed that their eyes were blinking a little sleepily, and with every blink, it seemed like the memory of their recent ordeal fell away, until even the dream of the memory had faded and all that was left was the now.
“Why, whatever has happened to this corridor?” Mr Roesbuck asked, looking from Caitlin to Uncle Cathaoir and back again.
Caitlin hadn’t really taken any notice of the corridor, but now she saw that, although it had reverted to its old, beaten-up self, one end of the corridor was occupied by something that looked like a thousand origami birds. A thousand origami birds that had wandered into a minefield and been inadvertently massacred.
Tinfoil and paper strips of silver daubed the walls, and a slick of mercury stuck and dripped and spotted the walls, ceiling and floor.
The king of the foil men was dead.
“Long live the king…” Cathaoir murmured, thoughtfully.
With all the flustered competence of an experienced hotelier who has just realised she has overlooked a new guest, Caitlin’s mother spoke up. “Why, John,” she said, meaning Cathaoir, “do introduce us to your beautiful companion! It’s very unlike you to have company…” Her barbs were humoured, and Cathaoir took them as such.
“This is my wife, Annabella,” he said. “She’s been through an awful lot in the past few… months, and this is the first chance I’ve had to see her in a long time. I hope you won’t mind her staying here with me?”
“Of course not! We’d be delighted to have you stay. In fact, we should go and find you some fresh linen – shouldn’t we?”
The last was directed at her husband, who recognised the code for giving a guest some privacy, and nodded, vigorously.
“Thank you,” Annabella said, smiling, her voice soft, as if walking through the barrier had been a great effort.
The Roesbucks bustled off, followed by Ms. Britten, who blew her nose noisily for the length of the entire corridor.
Mr Blofume paused before he went, and bent down to Caitlin.
“I just wanted to say,” he said, “that in my opinion that you did a damned good job.”
And then he winked.
He was already in the elevator by the time Caitlin could think of something to say.
As the three stood in the emptying corridor, there was only one thing that preyed on Caitlin’s mind.
“Aunt Annabella, why did you come here, instead of where you were taken?”
Annabella smiled, and the soft creases around her eyes seemed less soft than before. “I just followed my heart…” She placed a hand over her breast. “The first time I’ve felt it beat in what seems like centuries… Still a little cold, mind. But it will get warmer.”
Of all the things Caitlin had seen that day, it was this that made her gape.
She was so surprised, that she nearly missed the rustling and hissing behind them, nearly missed the sight of the foil men gathering limply around their fallen leader, their bodies already crumpled and fading. Nearly, but not quite.
She quickly retrieved the Spear from where it had fallen, and Cathaoir stood at her side with the Blade.
The foil men made no movement towards them, so they merely watched.
The sword-arms of the foil men were now cupping the pieces of the king, trying to reassemble him and patch the holes, but without a chance of success. Without their incomparable leader to show them the way and grant them form, the foil men were fragmenting, pieces falling off and floating away, independent of gravity or any natural law.
As each segment cracked, more and more of the foil men’s shadows could be seen, like liquid nougat centres in the middle of a rotten chocolate, and finally, with a gust of unseen and unheard wind, the last pieces sloughed away, and the spirits were set loose.
With a cry that rattled the fabric of the building, a mix of cetacean wail and promethean anguish, the shadows funnelled along the corridor, heading towards the sea.
“Look out!” Cathaoir cried, and he and Caitlin darted aside, the shadows whipping around and about them, but leaving them untouched.
Annabella was not so lucky.
The lead shadow caught her full on the chest and ploughed straight through her, chilling her bones and organs and spiralling out of the other side. She collapsed to the ground as the rest of the shadow swarm furled overhead, entered the darkness at the far end of the hallway, and disappeared.
Caitlin thought she heard a voice like scissors on sandpaper say: “Vengeansssssssss…”
Cathaoir dropped to Annabella’s side, clasping her hand, and biting back tears.
“No! No! Annabella, stay with me. Stay with me! Listen to my voice. Listen, Annabella! Everything is going to be fine. Everything is – ”
His cracked and broken voice came to a halt, and, in the silence…
… Annabella coughed.
“You… always were… one for drama… Cathaoir Roesbuck…”
She smiled, and he smiled back, and then they were kissing again, and Caitlin had to turn her back even though she wanted to hug them both, just for being alive.
It looked like things were finally over. All of the silver paper and luminent liquid was fading and crackling like manuscript in a fire, vanishing before her eyes until there was only a stubborn, nubbly centre left.
When Caitlin looked at it later, she thought that what it resembled, more than anything, was a human heart.
THE END