Nailed by the Heart

Author:Simon Clark [Clark, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780843947137
Google: jOqG5-iP4GcC
Amazon: 0843947136
Publisher: Leisure Books
Published: 1995-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-one

This is Chris Stainforth's nightmare:

Night-time.

He had been walking around the sea-fort searching for an axe-head he could fix to the end of the axe-handle he'd chosen for a club. He wanted to upgrade his makeshift weapon. He knew he would need it soon.

His dream search for the axe-head took him onto the sea-fort walls. The dream, unusually vivid, was richly detailed. He saw his surroundings clearly-the car in the courtyard, the timber and bricks piled behind the sea-fort gates to strengthen the barricade, the caravan in darkness. All the good villagers of Out-Butterwick soundly asleep.

He reached the walkway that ran around the top of the walls and looked out. The night-time beach, a vast expanse of sand; the causeway ran ruler-straight toward the dunes.

Tide out, the Saf Dar sat, sentinel-like, dark, brooding, staring at the sea-fort. As he leaned forward, his hands

210

resting on the cold stones of the wall, he saw more things. These were awful.

Lucky it was only a dream. If this were real he didn't know whether he could take it and stay sane.

Approaching through the mist, more figures ... eleven, twelve, thirteen.

As he watched the figures emerge from the mist, the dream became a nightmare.

They formed a procession. Like the victims of some nightmare weapon that existed only in a diseased mind.

He knew these were people lost to the sea.

They were the recently dead, and the long dead.

Almost straight away he recognized Fox. The beard, matted, hung down in rats'-tails. The wild-man hair had gone, along with the scalp, leaving nude bone gleaming whitely. Only one eye remained. The other socket, a raw split, looked as if it had been roughly packed with raw liver.

One hand lacked fingernails. From the tips of the fingers grew pink cones. As if the force that had thrust its version of life through what had once been dead flesh had also crudely repaired the damaged body.

Pink growths sprouted from any break in the skin. These men weren't dead. This was life-some form of life-at its most explosively dynamic.

A larger figure followed Fox, its man-shape being lost beneath the volcanic pressure of growth beneath the skin. How little of the original man remained Chris did not know. But from the resemblance to Fox, Chris instinctively knew it was Fox's brother who had died ten years before.

This figure was a bloated copy of his brother. Shellfish grew across its forehead, creating a heavy black crust; barnacles rashed in white speckles over its bloated chest which was bare of any clothing; sea anemones clustered in red and brown lumps around its distended genitals.

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A sick feeling bit into the pit of Chris's stomach.

It followed his brother, its oversized feet slapping against the sand.

Behind the Fox twins came more:

A drowned pilot wrapped in a rotting parachute like a funeral shroud.

Then a boy who'd swam too far out twenty summers before, now bulbous-headed with hands the size of footballs.

Following him, a fisherman with a monstrous growth erupting from his throat; as big as a beachball, it was stretched so tight you thought it would burst with every step he took.

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