better liar might be able to stop it from accelerating. But like you said - you don’t get out much. Should have waited for the NHS.”
“Waiting was death.”
“This,” we retorted, “isn’t living. But since you seem to value it so highly, let us make ourself clear. Tell us the truth, or we will kill you.”
He just laughed, arrogance and error. We picked ourself up carefully, half-turning our head to eye up his deafened drones.
“Death couldn’t kill me!” he said. “They thought it would, but I stopped it. I locked death out and now my heart is life, my heart is . . .”
“‘Give me back my hat’.”
His face froze. We smiled. “You recognise it,” we said. “That’s good. That means we’re right. Tell us about it. Tell us about the boy called Mo.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Matthew Swift.”
“So who are you?”
“I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” He had; his accelerating heart was a great thumping blister, an alien out of a monster movie trying to break free of his bones. “I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We . . . made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us.”
He licked his lips. His tongue was the colour of rotting strawberries. He nodded carefully and said, “OK. I get it. I see what you’re saying. And sure, yeah, I’m smart enough to be scared of sorcerers, they always end in a bang. But the thing is, while it’s sharp to fear you, I just fear him a whole lot more.”
Like a schmuck, I turned my head looking for the him. I guess I wasn’t at my best. There was no one there, just the two guys with the bloody ears. I looked back. He had one hand over the controls that turned on the speaker. His other was pulling at the buttons of his shirt.
He turned off the speakers; he pulled back his shirt. His ribcage was a mess of broken bones, sticking up from his skin, creating great dark voids between his flesh into which muscle had long since sunk and withered, ragged torn bone shattered away from the twisted breastbone protruding upwards like ruined towers in an ancient desert. We could see his heart beating beneath it, four great, coated valves smeared in clinging white flesh pumping one to the other, could see it shrink down to the size of a pear and then burst upwards again, pressing the ribs out so far that they creaked and cracked, little fracture lines running down the stuck-up grey bones where they had ruptured from his chest.
And his heart went: deDUM!
The shock of the sound had nothing to do with ears; it was long past the point where audible frequencies played a major part. His ribs twisted outwards with the blast, his whole chest rising up; then the force of the sound knocked into me and threw me back shaking, slamming into me so hard that all I could hear was a rumble like the sea.
We landed face-down on the floor and crawled away from him. It went again, deDUM! We covered our ears with our hands, with our elbows, buried our face in the floor and our knees in our face and again it went deDUM! The plaster cracked on the wall, and spilt trickles of dust; the lights hissed and swayed, flickered, began to shatter and go out. The two kids with the bloody ears were on the floor, blood running from their ears, their noses, their eyes, with ugly bruises where the blood from a thousand broken capillaries was spilling out beneath their skin. I tried to get up and another heartbeat knocked me down. We might have called out, we couldn’t tell, couldn’t hear anything but our own dying cells singing in our ears. His heart was going too fast, beating too fast for us to move, to stand a chance against the roar, everything we did took a heartbeat and one beat was one too many.
So we lay still. We pressed ourself into the ground, dug our fingers into the thick blue carpet, and let it buffer us, let the sound push us across