Free Book 1 - The Man With the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green Page A

was like shit smeared
across my soul. Like a mountain of maggots, or the smile the razor blade leaves
as it slices through a suicide’s wrists. It was almost upon us, and it hated us,
just for being human.
    The wood-panelled wall to my left groaned loudly as it bulged
inwards, the old wood stretching impossibly, forced out of shape by some
unnameable pressure from Outside our three-dimensional reality. The floor rose
up at its centre like some monstrous boil, and the ceiling bulged down. All the
walls were crying out now, straining inwards towards the Heart. Something was
forcing its way into the Sanctity, from some higher or lower dimension, from
some place we couldn’t even hope to comprehend. And one by one, all the many
layers of protection the family had set in place around the Heart shattered and
blew apart, like so many cheap firecrackers.
    Family magicians were in the room now, crowding around the
Heart, chanting spells and brandishing ancient talismans, trying to set up new
defensive parameters. Family scientists worked right there beside them,
operating esoteric constructions of weird technology, some of which looked like
they’d dragged right in from the testing labs. All kinds of energy fields
crackled on the air, but still the awful Presence surrounded us, descending on
us from everywhere at once.
    And finally, it broke through. Something was just suddenly there
in the room with us; or rather, Nothing was. There was a Gap, an Absence, a
horrible Void just hanging on the air before the Heart. I couldn’t see or hear
it, but I could feel it on a level that had nothing to do with senses. It was as
though some terribly old, perhaps even prehuman part of me recognised it. A
great sucking pit of the spirit; a hole in reality itself. It pulsed, like some
great malignant heart, and then it reached out and sucked the flesh right off
those members of the family nearest it.
    We lost a dozen men and women in a moment, meat and blood torn
from their bones, whole organs flying through the air and into the Void to make
it a body, to give it shape and form in this world. The bloody pulp of organs
and muscles slammed together, flesh slapping upon flesh, building a body whose
shape made no sense, to house and hold the awful thing that had forced its way
in from Outside. Bloody bones lay scattered across the floor, unwanted, along
with a dozen golden torcs. People were puking and retching everywhere, even as
they backed away.
    "Armour up!" James yelled. "Everyone! Now!"
    We all subvocalised the Words, and living armour encased us,
glorious and golden, sealing us off from the pull of the Void. For the first
time I felt sane and human again, able to think clearly, my spirit no longer
soiled by the presence of the thing before us. Where the Void had been, a huge
new thing had taken shape. It looked like it was made out of cancers, like
sickness and death made solid and vicious. It was scarlet and purple with
bulging dark veins, and it glistened wetly. Uneven rows of human eyes stared
unblinkingly out of a pulpy mass that might have been meant as a face. It rose
up to the bowed ceiling, big as ten men, limbs of a sort radiating from its
central mass, but its shape and dimensions and attributes made no sense at all.
I felt its attention turn away from the family, towards the Heart, and I sensed
a terrible emotion in the shape that might have been rage, or hunger, or a need
to violate. It moved towards the Heart, surging forward like a snail, and the
great diamond’s light seemed to flicker and diminish, just from the thing’s
proximity.
    "Stop it!" James yelled. "Don’t let it touch the Heart!"
    The Sarjeant-at-Arms had already opened fire, blazing away with
both guns at once. James strode forward, pouring bullets into the bloody shape
from close range, and I was right there with him, firing my needle gun. Everyone
else in the Sanctity opened fire on the mass with whatever weapons