Free The Fury by Alexander Gordon Smith Page A

into if he could ever bring himself to move again. It was this that was making the noise, that gurgling wheeze. It reminded Murdoch of the old VCR he used to have, the one his wife insisted they kept even though they didn’t even make video tapes any more. If you hit the pause button the people on screen would freeze but they would still be moving, flickering, trembling, and the tape would emit a throbbing purr that would last until you pressed play again. This corpse was frozen in the same way, because even though it was dead, even though it wasn’t moving, he could sense life inside it. It was as if something lay just beneath the surface of that parchment-thin skin, something writhing and twisting and breathing in that endless inverted scream.
    It was its eyes, he realised. They were white marbles in puckered sockets, shrouded with death, and yet they could still see . He understood that instinctively, that these two pinprick pupils which stared at the tiled ceiling of the morgue were seeing something; they were watching.
    ‘It’s been like this for an hour now,’ said Jorgensen from his side. ‘Since the road patrol brought it in.’
    Murdoch staggered, collapsing against the wall to his side. Jorgensen was looking at him, and he could see his own open-mouthed reflection in the pathologist’s visor.
    ‘There’s no pulse, no blood pressure,’ he went on. ‘It’s one hundred per cent dead.’
    ‘It’s not,’ Murdoch spat. ‘It’s breathing.’
    Jorgensen turned back to the corpse, shaking his head.
    ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘It’s inhaling. But its lungs are flat, we opened them up to see where all that air was going.’
    ‘Where is it going?’ Murdoch asked, shouting over the same grating, unchanging, unending breath from that dislocated jaw.
    Jorgensen shrugged.
    ‘That’s the weirdest thing,’ he said, opening a bottle of talcum powder that was lying on the tray next to the table. He took out a pinch and flicked it over the corpse’s mouth, watching as the dead man sucked it in like a vacuum cleaner. Murdoch managed a step forward, peering down into the gaping maw to see that the powder had vanished down the black pit of its throat. Jorgensen put the cap back on the bottle as he spoke. ‘That’s why I called MI5. That’s what I don’t understand. That air, it’s not going anywhere; nowhere we can find, anyway.’
    Behind them, one of the assistants appeared at the door.
    ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I think the government is here.’
    ‘I’ll be right there,’ Jorgensen said. He turned to Murdoch. ‘Whatever this thing is, wherever that air is going, it’s not here.’
    ‘Not here?’ Murdoch asked. He looked at the corpse – its open chest gaping, its mouth inhaling, those pale eyes burning into the ceiling. ‘Sven, what do you mean not here ?’
    Jorgensen sighed, a noise that sounded more like a sob.
    ‘I mean exactly that,’ he said. ‘I mean it’s going somewhere else.’

Friday
     
     
    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
     

Brick
     
    Fursville, 12.24 a.m.
     
     
    Brick sat at the top of the basement steps, his head in his hands, flinching every time he thought he heard a noise from below.
    He felt empty, completely and utterly drained. It had taken all his strength just to make it up the stairs. Shortly after getting out of the basement he’d found a steel rod in the pavilion – it looked like one of the electrical poles from a dodgem – and had managed to wedge it tight between the door and the wall. He’d packed everything he could find around it to lock it in place, praying that it would hold up against the onslaught from the other side. It had, so far. Lisa had spent the best part of three hours battering the door, each