The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH The Ocean Grand, North West Coast

MANDEVILLE TWISTED ON the key, hard, and felt it grate in the lock. With a final yank, it came around and then the Ocean Grand was open for the first time in fifteen years.

The central door was large and heavy and, even unlocked, it took him several hard shoves to open it fully; it had swollen from the years of disuse, clinging and screeching as it moved and cutting tracks through the dirt on the floor. Pieces of crumpled paper shifted away in the light breeze that entered the hotel around Mandeville. Of course, he thought, it wasn’t really the first time the building had been open for fifteen years, and he had to be careful not to romanticise the experience or what he found inside. Safety assessors had been inside only recently and security checks were carried out monthly, but he was the first outsider to gain entrance since it had closed as a working site in the early 1990s.

Actually, even that wasn’t quite true. A local television news team had accompanied one of the early safety crews and had filmed them placing boards over the wall murals and picture windows. Mandeville had a copy of the footage in his bag; in it, the unseen presenter talked about the glories and controversies of the art deco pieces that adorned the Grand’s walls whilst workmen nailed large boards over each piece “to protect it for the few months that the hotel was shut during its refit”. The “few months” had turned into almost two hundred, the refit had never occurred and the Grand had remained shut to everyone as it changed owners time and again in the intervening years. Until now.

Behind Mandeville, Parry began to unload the van, dropping their gear onto the cracked surface of the car park and telling a joke to Yeoman, the third member of the self-dubbed “Save Our Shit Crew”. Mandeville could already smell the sharp tang of Yeoman’s cigarette, and he smiled to himself.

Yeoman had said little on the journey, but his silence had become more pointed as they travelled and Parry refused to pull over for a rest stop, claiming that he was helping to break Yeoman’s habit by forcing him into periods of abstinence. Yeoman wouldn’t enter the Grand until he had smoked at least three cigarettes in the car park, Mandeville knew. It was an old routine, practised and refined over the previous years until they were all comfortable with it. Leaving them, Mandeville stepped forward into the Grand.

The foyer was large and circular, with the wings branching off through large, arched entrances at his left and right. Opposite Mandeville, the reception desk hugged the curved rear wall, its surface thick with dust. The great staircase rolled around from Mandeville’s right, clinging to the wall as it rose before letting onto the floors above the reception. He could just see the dark smears of the doorways leading to the upper bar and the outdoor sun deck.

Under his feet, the original wooden flooring was hidden under heavy linoleum, assuming it still existed at all. The light reaching him was dirty and dank; two storeys above him, the atrium’s great glass roof was mostly intact but had been covered from the outside with wooden sheets. Where these had peeled back or broken, allowing the light to enter, he saw a film of dirt and old leaves covering the glass.

Clicking on his torch, he let the beam play across the roof’s frame. It looked to be in fairly good condition, all things considered. There were rust patches, not unexpected given the Grand’s coastal location, and several of the more delicate sections of the pattern looked to be twisted out of shape. Some of the glass had been removed by the safety team; other panes, he knew, had fallen in long ago, the coloured glass swept up and discarded.

“Can we come in yet?”

“No,” said Mandeville. He wanted to savour this; he felt like a time traveller, stepping back into a past placed in storage and only now being brought back to use.

The Ocean Grand had been decaying for years, not just for the fifteen it had been closed and its ownership a fluid thing; even when it had been open, the rising costs of maintaining a building that had so many unique features had led to a legacy of mismanagement, cost-cutting and barely done repairs, of unique fixtures and fittings falling into disuse, of damage, of art lost and stolen and sold. The Ocean Grand was a part of England’s industrial and cultural heritage, abused and battered and only now receiving the attention it deserved.

Mandeville and his small team had to find out how bad things were in the Grand, catalogue what remained, and work out what could be saved and what was gone.

Even in the foyer, Mandeville could see evidence of the neglect. There should have been ten balustrade tops in the “primitive figures” style, cast in metal and spaced every five feet up the staircase, but three were missing. Sections of the reception desk’s ornate wooden panelling had been replaced with plain wood sheets and, worst of all, the large panels of the Gravette mural that should have faced the guests as they approached the reception desk were gone.

Mandeville knew two were in storage in London; the other two were missing, presumably destroyed or taken when the mural was removed in the early 1980s rather than pay for its professional renovation. There was always someone prepared to buy an original Gravette, even one that was painted on a twenty-foot by six-foot wooden panel and which was only actually a quarter of the whole piece.

To the left of the reception desk was the entrance to the restaurant and, beyond it, the sun corridor. Moving to the doorway, Mandeville saw immediately that sections of the intricate floor designed by Constance Priest were gone. Created by using nearly four thousand handmade tiles, its pattern should have covered the floor, an interlocking swirl of lines and blooms suggesting water, air and life. However, some of the tiles had been replaced by ones that only almost matched and whose colours, size or patterning was just off-kilter. Other tiles had been replaced by plain squares which cut into Priest’s patterns clumsily, disrupting its movement.

Mandeville sighed to see it.

Tables, cheap Formica models with spindle legs, were piled against the walls like the skeletons of long-dead animals. In the sunlight, the floor pattern and the shadows from the tables merged at the corners of the room, bleeding together in black clots.

The doors to the sun corridor were open and through them, Mandeville could see the grey ocean churning beyond its glass walls. He walked towards it, his feet crunching on the grit and dirt on the floor, and peered into the glass corridor.

A later addition to the Grand, running the length of its rear, the 1950s structure had suffered badly from neglect during the previous years. Streaks of rust crawled down the glass from metal struts that were losing an uneven battle against the corroding, salt-laden atmosphere. Several of the panes were broken and had been replaced by plywood sheets. More sheets lay piled against the seaward wall, having been removed from the windows at Mandeville’s request. Apart from the roof in the foyer, all the windows that had complete glass panes had been uncovered so that the Crew could work in daylight where possible.

Mandeville was about to leave the sun lounge when he noticed something beyond the glass. No, not beyond the glass, on it: swirls of colour, so incredibly pale as to be almost invisible, but present nonetheless. An arc of red and green straddled the pane nearest to him, blue and red in the next pane along.

Stepping close, he ran his fingers across the glass, leaving streaks along the surface. Looking at his fingertips, he saw that the ovals of grime below his nails also contained tiny flashes of colour. Paint? he wondered, sniffing at it. Had someone sprayed or splashed paint on the windows in the past and then tried to wipe it off? Vandalism? He would check with Parry, see if there was a record of that kind of damage; God alone knew what other problems they would come across in here.

Turning, he called for his colleagues.

Parry, the Crew’s archivist and researcher, had set up in the foyer. Laid out across the floor were photocopies and typed sheets, indicating precisely what the Crew was to look for and where within the Grand it was, how it was made and the materials used. Where makers were known, this was indicated as well.

Yeoman, the architect, who had less to do in this initial phase, was setting up a base camp in the restaurant.

The Crew was staying in the hotel, sleeping in the open expanse of the empty dining area to save time. There was a lot to do, and they had only a week to do it before the owners wanted an initial report. In seven days, Mandeville had to be able to make recommendations about the order of jobs and which parts of the hotel’s original decorations could be preserved or restored and incorporated into the latest developments planned for the hotel. It was a big job, the biggest the Crew had taken on.

Mandeville was re-reading the initial site assessment carried out by the owner’s own assessors. There were a couple of areas in the hotel the Crew had been instructed to stay away from (the kitchen; not an issue as there was nothing in there for them to assess according to Parry, and a first floor bathroom whose floor was rotten but which Mandeville did want to check out if he could).

Up or down? he asked himself. Top or bottom first? Finally, he chose bottom simply because the closest of what Parry called his “Interest Lists” dealt with ground floor.

Taking the sheet of paper, Mandeville moved into one of the Grand’s lower corridors.

Parry was in the top corridor. Unlike Mandeville, the artist and restorer, or Yeoman the architect, Parry was a historian and he simply wanted to see what remained of the hotel’s past. Of course, the great delight in being part of the Save Our Shit Crew was that sometimes they could persuade those designers of the present and the future to save or incorporate the past into their plans.

Take this place, for example; the Ocean Grand. Originally owned by one of Britain’s smaller rail companies, the Grand was the crowning glory of the artists Howard Gravette and Marie Priest, and the only hotel they had ever designed. Working with the architect, Edward Manning, they had created a small, opulent establishment, intended for the moneyed classes. Its every element was part of a unified, intelligent whole, creating a unique holiday venue that had been popular in the periods just before and after the First World War.

Manning’s architecture and Gravette and Priest’s designs incorporated the ideas and principles of the art deco movement, blending them with, in particular, Gravette’s ideas of art as a reflection of what he called “the lived life”.

Aided by Priest’s skills in the use of pattern and intricate textile work, Gravette’s intense, layered artwork utilised images from both the natural and industrial worlds, turning the Grand into a building that was, in a review of the time, “simply astonishing” and which celebrated both mankind’s move towards an industrialised society and the supremacy of the natural world.

Guests in its heyday found themselves surrounded on the ground floor by designs that were solid, geometric, echoing the patterns found in the factories of the time. On the first and second floors, the designs became more fluid, twisting and losing their angles, and by the third floor, nature had taken over.

Here, every element of the decor and the original furniture had implied a triumphant natural world, burying the industrial world’s edges beneath the flows and sweeps of leaf and coastline and animal. The Grand was unique, and strangely subversive.

As he walked up the tattered staircase to the third floor, Parry couldn’t help but smile. Gravette and Priest had been lovers at the time of the hotel’s design and construction, and throughout the building elements of that sexuality, slipped in below the radar of the rail company executives, were apparent.

It wasn’t subtle even; Parry had seen photographs of the missing mural that had adorned the foyer. Across the four sections, a vast and dark locomotive had strained, its windows filled with pale and crammed faces. The train was, in the leftmost panel, erupting from a copse of twisting, stunted trees, and in the rightmost was burying itself into a tunnel whose dark brickwork was surrounded by a collar of white.

Celebrated at the time as a grand depiction of the reach and the power of the rail industry, it was in actuality, a huge cock disappearing into a vagina. The white collar was a not-very-subtle reference to Priest, the stunted trees Gravette’s own pubic hair. How had they missed it? mused Parry as he wandered the corridors. How had they not seen?

“So what’s left?” asked Mandeville that evening. A small lamp illuminated the three men; takeaway pizza boxes littered the floor between them. Around them, Parry’s lists were piled, now covered in notations and scrawled comments.

“The carpets are all gone,“ said Parry. “I can’t find any of the original designs. Most of the rooms have been refitted, so none of the original furniture’s left, although rooms 212 and 208 have the lamp fittings in the wall. The bathrooms on the second floor were torn out in the sixties, so we know that all that’s gone, but the suites on the third floor still have the original baths with the bath taps.”

“Are they the ones shaped like breasts?” asked Yeoman.

“Not breasts, octopuses,” said Mandeville, smiling.

“Whatever,” said Yeoman, also smiling. “They look like tits to me.”

“They’re supposed to,” said Parry. “The third floor suites are all about sexuality, about sex and it being the driving force in nature. Octopuses suited Gravette because he could mould the taps to look like their bodies and still have it represent the female form. Priest’s form, to be precise. His own form was there in the long lines of the taps’ stems. It’s all over, the male and female, Gravette and Priest. This whole place is a shrine to them, to their love.”

“Did they really fuck in every room on the third floor before the hotel opened?” asked Yeoman, which made Parry grin broadly.

“That’s the rumour. They called it ‘christening the hotel’, according to Manning’s diary.”

“What else?” asked Mandeville, bringing back the discussion to the hotel’s current state, knowing that Parry could happily talk about the history of a place for hours, and that Yeoman would encourage him just because he could.

“The first floor sun deck is pretty solid,” said Yeoman. “I went up after I got the camp sorted. It’s just a reinforced roof space, but the walls have still got designs etched into them. Waves, by the look of it, although I’m fairly sure I made out fish and fins and things like that. It’s pretty faded.”

“That was Manning,” said Parry, checking a sheet. “He worked with Gravette and Priest pretty closely, but he didn’t do much in the way of decoration. It’s good that the sun deck still exists; it’ll probably be the only bit by him left that isn’t the actual structure. He was a big believer in the energising power of the sun, though, and the bracing sea atmosphere, and insisted on having his own designs in the area of the sun lounge.

“Can you imagine all those rich men and their wives lying on stripy deckchairs in the chilly British summer? Overlooked by the people on the second and third floor?”

“Was he another mucky one?” asked Yeoman.

“No,” said Parry, not hearing the humour in Yeoman’s voice; Yeoman knew all this, he just wanted Parry to talk. “He was tightly buttoned by all accounts, but got on surprisingly well with Gravette and Priest. They believed in the same things, ultimately, in the human body and the power of the natural world. They liked fucking, he liked sunbathing.”

“So where do we concentrate?”

“We need a full inventory,” said Parry, “but the third floor’s the least changed. There’s panels covering the walls between the room doors, which might mean they were protecting artwork. The contemporary reports aren’t very clear about what was actually done to protect the art, and I didn’t want to remove a panel without help.”

Mandeville made a note on his work plan. Gravette had designed and created two large murals, one for the reception and one for the restaurant, which depicted scenes of men, women, animals and machines existing in verdant landscapes of greens and blues. Both were gone, although his smaller pieces were hopefully still inset into the third floor corridor walls. Mirroring the stations of the cross, the fourteen small panels showed mythological scenes re-imagined so that in every piece the nude figures of gods and people moved around animals and plants. It would be a real bonus if the fourteen still existed and could be restored and incorporated into the new decorative scheme. Tomorrow, he thought. We start finding out tomorrow.

Mandeville couldn’t sleep. It was partly that his camp bed was uncomfortable and that both Parry and Yeoman snored, but it was also excitement; the Grand was the most important job the Crew had ever taken on, and it could make their reputation.

Most of their other work had been in helping homeowners discover the histories of the buildings they lived in and to carry out refits and rebuilds taking this history into account, but the Grand was a step into the next league. The art alone, even if only a part of it could be rescued, would add to their understanding of how art had changed and grown between the wars, and the building itself was, in design and construction, almost unique and certainly one of the few surviving examples of its type.

Restless, he walked through to the sun corridor but could see little through the glass. He heard the sound of the ocean crouched in the darkness, muted and elastic like the breathing of some huge animal at rest. It was cold and he pulled his coat tightly around him, watching as his breath misted on the glass in front of him, bleeding to odd colours because the thin coating of paint smeared across the inside of the panes.

I forgot to ask Parry about that, he thought briefly and made a mental note to do so before they started work tomorrow. When he played the narrow beam of his penlight across the pane, the smears of paint were clearer than they had been in daylight. For a moment, he couldn’t tell what the smears reminded him of, and then it came to him; it looked as though the windows were covered in hundreds of handprints.

Yeoman whistled as he worked, and knew that his whistle would reach throughout the building. At some point in the near future, Parry would go and turn on the radio that was sitting on the floor in the middle of the foyer to drown him out, but for now he was enjoying the idea that something of him was filling this place, swooping along the corridors and entering the rooms, tuneless and sharp though it may be.

Parry was somewhere on the first floor, he thought, and Mandeville was recording the art that remained on the ground floor, noting the missing or badly repaired sections of Priest’s tiled floor on which they slept at night.

Yeoman himself was in the bar that emerged from the rear of the building over the restaurant. Panels of dark wood, designed but not carved by Gravette, lined the walls, many were warping and sagging, and he was trying to ascertain whether the problem lay with the walls themselves or simply the panels. His initial thought was that it was the panels; each was hanging loose from the walls, the wood twisting and buckled so that the figures carved on their fronts (barely seen workmen, faceless automata, things that might have been gods or giants standing above them and all around the edges animals and fish) seemed hunched and wretched.

As he leaned in to get a better look at the wall, Yeoman placed his hand on one of the panels, holding it steady away from the wall so that he could angle his torch into the space behind it. The concrete seemed fine; dank, certainly, covered mould spores that probably indicated some minor damp problems, but essentially sound and with no sign of cracking.

He started back from the wall, pushing his hand against the panel for leverage, and was alarmed to feel it give around his fingers. The wood, oddly soft, separated and his fingers descended into the warm and damp wood.

Warm? Everything else in the hotel was cold and damp. Yeoman pulled, but his hand didn’t come free from the panel and he pulled again, laughing as he thought of Mandeville’s face when he told him that he’d accidentally pushed his fingers through a piece of artwork.

The wood felt tight around his fingertips, still warm, but there were splinters in there as well, sharp and needling. He pulled again and then, when his fingers still were not released, he pulled a last, forceful, time.

Mandeville had gridded and completely mapped the floor in the restaurant and was taking a rest. His eyes ached from trying to plot the precise positions of the missing or replaced tiles, almost two hundred of them, on a copy of Priest’s original plans. It was a job made more difficult because, in the bright sunlight, the pattern, despite its disruptions, seemed to swirl in a constant half-seen movement, black eyes and mouths forming at the corner of his vision and then breaking up again, only to reform moments later.

Imagine eating with this under your feet, he thought, it’d be like floating on the surface water in which huge fish swam and kept breaching and peering at you! He started to laugh and then saw the three camp beds, pushed back against the wall, and had a sudden vision of a vast leviathan emerging from under the floor and swallowing him and Parry and Yeoman whole as they slept.

Something clattered in the foyer.

It was Parry, Mandeville assumed, come to turn the radio on to drown out Yeoman’s whistling, although the architect had actually stopped his tuneless noises several minutes earlier.

He waited for the music or inane DJ chatter to begin, but nothing came except another clatter and then the sound of rapid footsteps. Sighing, he got to his feet and went to the doorway, expecting to find some trick or joke being prepared or having already been enacted; Parry and Yeoman were his friends, and were the best men he had ever worked with, but they wound each other up and let the tension out in bickering and jokes and tricks. Sometimes, it was funny; more often, it was childish and irritating.

The foyer, however, was empty.

Well, not empty. The radio was lying in the middle of the floor, no longer standing but on its back, its power cable tangled into a black knot next to it. The floor around it was covered in footprints, scuffed and indistinct in the old dust.

At first, Mandeville thought that the prints were from Parry or Yeoman, but something about them made him reassess. There were lots, overlaying each other, small and with their edges bleeding into each other, making the floor around the small radio into a manic dance chart.

Small?

The prints were small, and neither Parry nor Yeoman was a small man.

These prints were much smaller than any he or his colleagues would make. They were narrow, short, a different shape to their own footwear.

Experimentally, he placed his foot in an unmarked space and pressed it down hard. When he lifted it, he saw a faint impression of the diamond pattern of his boot sole pressed into the grime. The other footprints were far clearer, as though their makers had trodden in something before walking around the radio.

Mandeville pressed his fingers into one of the prints. His fingers came away smeared with dirt that smelled of something familiar, although he couldn’t remember precisely what.

Some of the prints appeared to trail back towards the staircase and he went to the bottom step, peering up and wondering. If it wasn’t him or Parry or Yeoman, then there was someone, several someones actually, in here with them, and judging by the size of the prints, the someones were probably kids.

Mandeville cursed under his breath. It was to be expected, of course; closed-up buildings like the Ocean Grand attracted different groups of people who wanted to get inside. Aside from historians and urban creepers, kids were the commonest intruders, with drunks and vandals close behind, and they could be a pain. If they had kids breaking in, the likelihood was that they’d damage the place, they’d piss in the corners or set fires, maybe try and steal from the SOS Crew’s equipment or belongings.

They’d have to be found and turfed out, he thought. He’d need to pull Parry and Yeoman back from the jobs they were on and they’d need to do a systematic search of the hotel. Damn, damn, damn.

Before Mandeville could call his colleagues, however, Yeoman appeared from the bar, holding one hand out in front of him. The hand was dripping blood, bright in the musty surroundings, and in a tone that was almost conversational, he said, “The fucking thing bit me!”

Yeoman refused to go to hospital, despite Parry’s insistence that the slash across his fingers needed stitches. Instead, he made Parry bind each of his injured three fingers with gauze from their first aid kit and took painkillers and told Parry to stop nagging him.

The wounds were messy, punctures that had torn sideways, elongating the openings in his flesh into a series of ragged-edged striations between the first and second knuckles of his middle fingers. They bled heavily, slow to clot despite the pressure that Parry put on them, ripping open as soon as Yeoman moved his hand. Fresh blooms of blood soon soaked the bandages covering his fingers and by the time the three men came to eat their evening meal, Yeoman had gone through three sets of dressings.

Food that night was pizza again, collected by Mandeville from one of the seafront takeaways, and over it they assessed their progress.

“There were two sorts of art here,” Parry was saying as they finished their food, “what Gravette called ‘integral’ and ‘peripheral’. The integral stuff is the panels, the floors, the stuff that was built in from the beginning. The peripheral is the other stuff, the things that could be moved or changed, like hanging pictures or chairs or the types of plates used.

“From Gravette’s perspective, the whole place was art, and everything in the building was supposed to add to the feeling of being inside a piece of living, breathing, functional art, from the taps that looked like octopuses or tits, to the colours they used in the original carpet. The peripheral stuff has mostly gone although we have records of some of it from the original design plans and in photographs, so what we’re looking at here is the integral, about fifty per cent of which is still here as far as I can tell.

“The top corridor is the best bet, although a lot of what should be there is hidden at the moment, so tomorrow we’ll take the boards off and see what state it’s in, but the rooms are mostly intact. The bar and sun deck are pretty much in their original state, although some philistine has replaced the pumps in the bar, probably in the sixties.”

“Gravette designed the pumps?” asked Yeoman.

“He designed everything. Well, he and Priest did, letting Manning in because they needed his technical skills for the building itself. I keep telling you, this whole place was a testament to Gravette and Priest’s belief in the supremacy of the natural world over the things man created.

“The fittings, the art, the colours, all of them were designed to tell people that they were insignificant when faced with the grandeur of God’s creation. The richest guests had to caress something that might have been an octopus, that might have been a tit, when they wanted to turn the tap on to run a bath or brush their teeth.

“Think of it, all the rich industrialists whose money came from the mechanical and soulless, come to the seaside for bracing fresh air and views of the North Sea having to rub their great callused hands over brass tits every day and then had their bathwater spurt out of something that could well be Gravette’s cock! And when they went into their corridor, they were surrounded by art that only barely hid its message that shagging was the profoundest act a human could engage in behind classical and religious allusions. Even on the sun deck, they were faced with it.”

“With what? You said the sun deck was Manning’s creation.”

“It was, but he couldn’t draw for shit apparently, so he had to ask Gravette and Priest to help him. You can’t see it when you look at the carvings of the waves straight on, but when the shadows are right, you can.”

“See what?”

Instead of replying, Parry got to his feet, lifting the last piece of pizza from one of the boxes. “Come with me,” he said, chewing, and led the other two upstairs.

Mandeville followed because Parry had an artist’s heart and eye and sometimes saw things that he did not. When he put the final report together, containing his recommendations to the new owners, Parry’s suggestions about the art and what could be done with it would be central to the document.

The sun deck was dark and cold, and the sound of the nearby sea was a grey, shifting mass in the night, chilling the air further. “Stand there,” said Parry, pointing to the centre of the deck, “and crouch, so that you’re the height of someone on a sunlounger. Now, imagine, you’re reading a book, maybe having a little drink, and this is what you can see.” He pointed his torch beam at the wall, showing the carved indentations of Manning’s design; the waves, line etchings of what might have been fish, plants or undersea grottoes.

“Now,” said Parry, “watch the shadows.” He began to move his torch slowly around in an arc, travelling over the carvings. The shadows caught in the etched lines and then spilled over, stretched, blossoming into black patches like moss on the wall. Mandeville did not see anything unusual and was about to say so when Yeoman said, “Holy shit!”

“No, holy vagina, technically,” said Parry and Mandeville was about to ask why when he saw it too. The lengthening shadows reached a point where they combined with the lines of carving and the image changed, danced into something new, a stylised picture of a woman’s legs, curved and invitingly open. As Parry kept moving the torch, the image wavered and then vanished, collapsing back in on itself and reforming into waves and sea creatures.

“There,” he said triumphantly. “Even out here, this place is about being surrounded by femininity, by procreation. By sex. By life.”

“We have got to recommend that they re-etch these,” said Yeoman, laughing.

“Absolutely,” said Parry without pause, “and don’t tell them why,” and Mandeville could only nod in amused agreement.

Already, a plan was forming for the report, where he would recommend that restoration of the hotel back to its original state, and the use of modern artists to fill in the gaps. He was thinking about how to word and present his proposals as they walked back down to the restaurant, his head filled with the possibilities of this place, and it was only later he remembered about the children.

The thought actually pulled him back to consciousness as he was drifting off to sleep, lying wrapped in his sleeping bag on his travel cot. In all the excitement of Yeoman’s fingers, and then eating and catching up, he had completely forgotten the intruders. Now he remembered them, though, the thought that they hadn’t checked the hotel for obvious entry points wouldn’t leave him alone.

The Grand had survived its locked-up years surprisingly well, with little damage apparently done by vandalism. There was definitely evidence that people had broken in, he had seen it: a pile of old food cartons in the kitchens, a blackened circle in one of the bedrooms that might have meant a small fire had burned there, but there was no real damage. Most of what had broken or collapsed had done so as a result simply of time and the coastal atmosphere, of dampness and neglect and air closed in on itself, trapped and rotting. But still, he should check. Kids, once they found an entrance could be persistent and destructive.

Sighing, he clambered out of his sleeping bag and slipped on his boots and a thick jumper; he was sleeping in his jeans and shirt anyway, to ward of the chill air. His breath misted in front of his face as his tied his laces, and he wondered about waking Yeoman and Parry up to help him, but both were snoring and he decided against it.

Yeoman had been weary by the time he fell asleep, and his fingers clearly causing him pain. Parry, he knew from uncomfortable experience, was terribly grumpy if woken before he thought he ought to be. He would scout around himself and if he found anything, they could call the security service tomorrow and get them to deal with it.

In the almost complete darkness, Priest’s flooring seemed to shift and swirl under him in shades of luminal grey as he walked from the makeshift camp to the entrance to the foyer, tracking him. His footsteps were gritty, fractured things, his breathing loud, and there was someone standing in the sun corridor.

They were only a shape in the darkness, pressed against the glass with their arms stretched out as though supplicant to the grey swathe of beach and sea beyond. Surprised, Mandeville stopped. The figure did not move. After a moment, he began to approach it cautiously, listening; they were singing, low and wordless, crooning something that might have been a lament or a lullaby, and they were scratching their fingers against the glass. The sound of it was carrying descant to the song, setting Mandeville’s teeth on edge.

The figure was female, he thought, certainly long-haired and curvaceous around the buttocks and thighs, and wearing some kind of long dress or coat that swayed as she moved.

Standing in the entrance to the sun corridor, perhaps fifteen feet from the intruder, Mandeville stopped again and watched her. She was pressed up against the glass, flattened against it, her hair hanging down the sides of her face so that he couldn’t make out her features, just a veil of thick tangles that seemed to be catching distant lights from outside and glittering a myriad colours.

Her outstretched arms were fully extended, reaching above her, and her hands were splayed out, hooking against the pane, and she was still singing.

Close to, he could almost hear words in the song, muffled and lost. Her lips and nose had to be pressed hard against the glass as well, he realised. Perhaps that was why her voice was so muffled, seemed to be coming from so far away. This didn’t seem like normal vandal behaviour, he thought. Perhaps she was ill? If so, she might need help. “Hello,” he said quietly.

The girl fled, spinning away from Mandeville and running down the sun corridor at high speed. Startled, it took him a moment to follow, wondering fleetingly as he did how she had managed to leave an image of herself printed on the glass and why it was so smeared and shot through with wide sweeps of colour.

The girl darted down the sun corridor and Mandeville went after her.

When she reached the far end, she ran through a second doorway into, if Mandeville remembered rightly, a games room off the lower corridor. By the time Mandeville reached it, the girl was nowhere to be seen, but he instinctively ran through the room and out into the corridor, turning back towards the reception area.

Something skittered through the shadows ahead of him, telling him that he had guessed correctly, and then he was into the reception, its floor crossed by the weak light falling through the iron lattice of the glass roof far above him. He expected to find the girl here, but there was no sign of her.

Mandeville slowed, confused. The nearest staircase started at the far side of the reception area, and even if she’d made it there, the girl should have still been visible on the stairs. There was nowhere for her to hide except behind the reception desk, but a quick check told him that she wasn’t there. The main door was still shut and locked; he checked it with a shake. Turning, he peered up the stairs and saw movement in the murky depths of the bar.

How did she make it up there without me seeing? he wondered as he started to climb the stairs. She must have moved like a fucking gazelle!

Whatever it was he had seen, it wasn’t there now. The bar was deserted, the floor space empty of chairs and tables as it had been for years. As he cast his torch beam around, the only movement was the warped wooden panel that hung loose from the wall, rocking slightly as though moved by a breeze.

Mandeville peered behind the bar, but the mirrored walls reflected only dust and empty shelves. The wooden panel swayed again, leaning drunkenly out from the wall, held by two of its fittings, the other two dangling loose, the screw-threads clenching torn shreds of wood and plaster.

It was the panel that Yeoman had caught his fingers on, Mandeville saw, that he had said had bitten him. Parry had ribbed him mercilessly about it after binding his fingers, particularly when they found a torn string of skin caught in the lion’s mouth on the front of the panel. Dried blood was still crusted around its wooden teeth, dribbling down its chin and the rest of the panel in long, clotted strings.

Mandeville went back across the bar, flicking the torch around him as he went. Nothing. The girl had either gone further down the corridor, which he doubted as all the doors along it were locked except the very furthest, an exit to the fire stairs which squealed violently as it opened, or she had gone higher, to the second or third floor.

This was becoming annoying and complicated, and he would have to wake the other members of the Crew to help look for her.

As he reached the doorway, a noise came from behind him, a throaty, hoarse growl that stretched for seconds, and as he turned a dark shape came across the floor at him with a rapid, ferocious clatter.

Yeoman woke to find himself staring a warped wooden lion, blood flaking from its mouth in dark red drifts.

“It fell off the wall last night,” said Mandeville by way of explanation, “and nearly fucking gave me a heart attack. Maybe it’s got it in for us, what do you think? By the way, we’ve got an intruder, or at least, we did last night. Somewhere there’s a place to get in that we don’t know about, and first job today is to find it.”

It was colder that morning, and even dressed and with coffee and breakfast (cooked on the tiny camping stove) inside him, Yeoman shivered.

Outside the temperature was even lower, and as he walked the perimeter of the Grand smoking and looking for potential entry points, Yeoman tried to see the hotel as it might be in the future.

Architecturally, it was generally sound, so most of his work was done. He had some suggestions to make about the use of the lower floor rooms and about how some of the walls could be altered to make a more open space, but he knew that his role here had become one of support rather than leading. This job would bear Parry’s and, especially, Mandeville’s stamp rather than his own. He was fine with that, knowing that he would get equal credit anyway; Mandeville was strict about the fact that the Save Our Shit Crew were partners. Whatever fortune they shared, they shared in equal proportion.

There were no obvious entry points that Yeoman could see, and Parry told the same story from his search of the hotel’s insides. Mandeville himself didn’t look convinced, but didn’t argue, telling them instead to keep an eye out and to be alert. He was distracted, Yeoman knew, because once the search was done they could reveal the third floor’s secrets.

“The rooms are intact,” said Parry, unnecessarily. They had discussed this already, but he looked as nervous as Mandeville. “Whatever other idiocies the various owners inflicted on this places, they knew that keeping the suites on the third floor as close to their original state was important.

“The carpets have gone, of course, but we have the patterns for them in Priest’s records so they can be recreated, the wall hangings likewise. The taps, the window latches, the door handles, the bath feet and the fittings for the showers and toilets are all original except for one or two replaced items, but they can be easily sorted out.

“The carpet in the corridor has been replaced as well, and we don’t have a pattern for it, but we do have photographs and descriptions, so recreating it might be complex but it’s achievable. The theme is all there, waiting for the new owners to agree it, but it only works if the art itself still exists. It’s the thing that ties it together, gives the guests the language to understand what their rooms were telling them.”

Parry spoke like this when he got excited, Yeoman remembered, talking about art’s “language”, its “voice”, its “pulse” and its “heartbeat”.

“If it’s survived, we can recommend that the top floor is recreated in its entirety, that the new guests can be as surrounded by Gravette’s and Priest’s beliefs in God and nature as interchangeable beauties as their predecessors were. If it’s damaged, irreparable, then it doesn’t matter, the heart will be gone.”

As he spoke, Parry was levering the first of the cheap panels from wall. The screws came unwillingly from the wood with a noise like cats in the darkness. The panel, a composite of some sort, bowed out damply, splintering apart as Mandeville took hold of it.

“Shit,” said Mandeville quietly; the panel was so damp his fingers were leaving denting grooves in it, “they didn’t even use decent fucking wood. In this atmosphere. ” He voiced tailed off, miserable in the silence, as Parry removed the last screw and then the first of Gravette’s pieces was revealed.

It was a picture of a woman standing on the edge of a great sea. She was naked, her back to the canvas, her buttocks and shoulders clearly delineated by Gravette’s loving brush, her hair long down her back. Although there was nothing obvious, something in the way the brushstrokes, still visible in the thick paint, formed the sea and the sky hinted at things below the surface or just beyond vision, things that swirled and glided and floated.

Around the woman, by her feet on the sand, pieces of machinery lay glittering with oily life, cogs and levers and panelling and rivets forming a platform that looked like a vast mechanical hand upon whose edge the woman was precariously balanced.

The picture was, despite the damp affecting the panel covering it, in remarkably good condition. Apart from a small amount of blackly-furred moss just creeping along a part of the picture’s bottom edge, there was no obvious damage; the colours were bright, vibrant, the detailing astonishing. The woman’s muscles were distinct beneath her skin, her outstretched hands seeming to grasp at the whole of the scene beyond her.

“Beautiful,” breathed Mandeville, and Parry simply nodded.

Yeoman, less moved by the artwork but still appreciating the skill that had rendered the picture, said, “Is that Priest then? Nice arse.”

“It’s not Priest,” said Parry, ignoring the obvious provocation, “it’s woman, an archetype, a feminine ideal.”

“It’s an ideal arse,” agreed Yeoman, grinning at Parry.

Parry, shaking his head disgustedly but unable to prevent himself grinning back, said, “Let’s do the others.”

All fourteen pictures were in similar condition, having survived far better than Mandeville could have hoped. Collectively, the pictures were called The Stations of the Way, and if you followed their story, up one side of the corridor and then back down the other, right side along and left back, they told the story of Gravette and Priest’s beliefs as surely as any bible or philosophical tract.

Across the pictures, the woman waded into the ocean, leaving the machinery behind, swimming and dancing with vast and unnameable creatures under the green surface before being lifted out and hauled into the sky by flying versions of the same creatures.

The figure of the woman became smaller and smaller in the pictures, surrounded by winged and tentacled and finned creatures with fierce and unforgiving faces, but who robed her and held her as, in the distance, small and insignificant, machines ploughed the surface of the water and left tiny trails across the sky.

Despite her size, the woman remained the absolute focal point in each picture, and every one of the creatures in the picture laid their full attention upon her.

Although they hadn’t finished the job of assessing the Grand, Mandeville went out for champagne, and the three men drank it that night from plastic cups after they had finished another takeaway meal.

They had spent the evening photographing the pictures, making careful notes of any damage they found, and then had re-covered them, this time with plastic sheeting. As they had covered the last of the pictures, Parry had said, “Sorry, ma’am, but you can come out again soon.”

Mandeville had never seen Parry so excited. “Do you understand how important this is, that they’ve survived? Gravette and Priest, they were both fine artists in their own right, but this was considered by both to be their crowning glory, and it’s still here, and we can make it public again!

“As you move up through the levels of the hotel, you pass from the mechanised glories of the man-made world on the ground floor, through human pastimes, hunting and drinking and sunbathing, on the first floor.

“If the second floor had been left alone and not torn apart, we’d have found art that showed men and women abandoning their earthly pursuits, their clothes, work, so that by the time we hit the third floor we’re returning to an understanding that all of life is about the worship of nature and a recognition of its power, its supremacy.

“Do you know that through most of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the pictures on the third floor had other pictures hung in front of them? That they were considered ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘outdated’? What a fucking travesty, all that beauty and life trapped behind crappy prints and photographs of misty fucking landscapes and Victorian watercolours, desperate to be free, and we can do it, we can free it, let it out, let it be loved again!”

“Well, the owners can, if that’s what they want to do. All we can do is make the suggestion and try to persuade them,” said Mandeville.

“Persuade them?” said Parry. “They have to. We have to make them! It can’t stay hidden any more, it was made to be looked at, created to be seen. They have to.”

“We’ll try,” said Mandeville. “Trust me, we’ll try.”

Mandeville was woken by footsteps. Bleary, champagne-heavy, he forgot he was wrapped in a sleeping bag and on a cot and tried to roll, falling heavily to the floor. The shock jolted him fully alert, and as he struggled to his knees, he listened.

They weren’t footsteps, not exactly; they were too rapid, too light, and seemed to come from all around the room, from two or three places at once.

It was dark, the only light the digital glow from the clock and the glimmer from the extension cable’s unblinking LED eye. At the edge of the pale illumination, a darkness shifted, bled out into the shadows around it and formed again, low and cautious. Another patch moved on the far side of the room, easing in through the entrance from the sun corridor.

Mandeville freed his arms from his sleeping bag and unzipped it, stepping out and fumbling for his boots. As his hand found them, one of the patches moved again, slinking around the edge of the room.

Now the noise was slower, still light, like pencil tips tapping a wooden desk. Mandeville risked looking down for a second to slip his boots on, Priest’s patterned floor turning sinuously beneath his soles, and when he looked up, the two patches had been joined by a third.

Parry’s cot was empty, but Yeoman was sleeping soundly on his.

Mandeville hissed at him, leaning over to shake him when he didn’t wake. Even as he leaned, the flowing, creeping patches of darkness, somehow blacker than the shadows around them, began to come in closer, still circling.

“What?” mumbled Yeoman.

“Be quiet,” said Mandeville softly, “and wake up. Now. There’s something in here.”

“Something?” asked Yeoman loudly. His breath smelled of cigarettes and sour air and tiredness.

“Something,” repeated Mandeville. “Three somethings, actually. Look.”

Yeoman sat up in bed, rubbing his hands through his beard with a noise like sandpaper rustling. Whatever it was circling the room, they reacted to the noise, coming in closer, still just out of reach of the light, still mere blackness against blackness, moving with an increasingly rapid tactactactac sound.

“What the fuck?” said Yeoman, finally seeing them. “What are they?”

“Don’t know,” said Mandeville. “Have you got the torch?”

“Yeah,” said Yeoman and began rooting on the floor. Finally, with a muffled grunt that might have been the words “found it”, he emerged holding the large lantern torch they used at night.

The things were moving faster and faster around them, passing each other, getting lower, still impossible to see other than the movement, the rapid circling centring in on the two men, purposeful and raw.

There was a click as Yeoman turned the light on, the beam at first glancing into Mandeville’s eyes and then upwards, leaving him dazzled, before dropping and gleaming out into the room, catching in its gaze the things that moved about them.

Yeoman screamed.

Mandeville fled as things that could not be, impossible things, came streaking across the space towards Yeoman in a matter of seconds, brown and lithe in the jerking, spastic light from the torch, and fell upon him.

As Mandeville reached the entrance to the sun corridor, Yeoman shrieked, once, the sound cutting off with a noise like tearing paper.

The sun corridor was deserted, silent apart from the frenzied fall of his own feet, and Mandeville ran. The large panes were covered, he saw, in blurred silhouettes, arms outstretched as though trying to embrace the world beyond, overlapping and chaotic, a silent audience for his flight.

Ripping sounds danced around him, roars and snarls and, once, a sharp, heavy crack, and he ran faster. Through the empty games room and out, along the corridor and into the foyer towards the door, but he was already too late, one of the shapes was there before him, drained to a grimy sepia by the light from above them except around its mouth, where a rich redness pooled and dripped.

It came from the restaurant, cutting off his passage to the door, forcing him to shift direction, to go towards the stairs.

He hit them at a stumbled run, leaping two or three at a time as the thing streaked towards him, emitting a noise like an escalating fire siren. Its feet (claws, he told himself, disbelieving, they’re claws) skittered as it ran, the nightmarish tactactactac getting closer and closer.

At the top of the stairs, Mandeville hesitated briefly. The bar was open ahead of him, but he would be trapped in there. The panel that had nearly fallen on him was leaning in the doorway where he had propped it earlier in the day, its face now blank, the wood smooth and unsullied.

The tactactactac was getting louder behind him, closer, the fire-whistle sound of the impossible thing’s growling surrounding him, and then there was light from above him.

It wasn’t light, though, not really; more a kind of greasy glow that clung to the walls, dripping from above him, from the upper flights of stairs, from above the second floor in the shadows that clung to the opening of the third floor. In the opening, the darkness seemed to close itself up like a fan, solidifying into a figure that emerged from the doorway, waving at him.

He started towards it and then, shrieking, the thing from below was on him.

Despite the champagne, Parry couldn’t sleep. Even when Yeoman started snoring (which, oddly, he found a reassuring rather than an irritating sound), he found himself lying awake, teasing at something. He couldn’t work out what it was, not exactly; they’d uncovered the pictures that formed The Stations of the Way and found them in almost perfect condition, true, so he should be celebrating, yes?

No.

Something about the top corridor, about this whole place, bothered him. Despite what he had said earlier, flushed with success and alcohol, he wasn’t sure about recreating Gravette and Priest’s masterwork in its entirety.

It seemed too intense, almost extremist in its views; it was everywhere, when you looked. From the panels and pictures on all the floors to the design of the taps to the carpeting along the corridors (which no longer existed but which pictures showed had consisted of a complex paisley pattern of interlocking, swirling stems and buds which Priest had called “cunts and pricks” in one of her notebooks), this place wasn’t so much a homage to the supremacy of life and procreation over industrialisation as it was a proselytisation of it.

The Stations of the Way was a good example: taken by itself, it was simply a series of pictures that between them formed a narrative, one of returning to recognise the beauty of nature and God’s place within it.

The religious allegory was unsubtle, and the pictures themselves beautifully done, some of Gravette’s best work. But, read another way, they were something more.

Gravette and Priest had fucked in every room on the third floor once the pictures were set in place, and there were persistent rumours that Gravette had mixed his semen and Priest’s menstrual blood into his paints. Early sketches showed that the original ideas for the Stations pictures were far more graphic, with the angels of sea and air having sex with the woman, transporting her to God’s side in a storm of sexual energy and passion and lust.

The woman. It was the woman in the pictures that bothered him, he suddenly realised. Getting out of his sleeping bag, he pulled on his shoes and went to his untidy pile of folders and photocopies and prints.

The problem was that the art in the Grand hadn’t ever been formally catalogued, and most of it wasn’t recorded anywhere, so his research had had, by necessity, to travel circuitous routes to find the information they needed.

As well as Gravette’s and Priest’s notebooks, he had scoured old newspaper articles, private photograph collections and what little television appearances the Grand had made to try to get an accurate picture of its inside.

Leafing through the papers, he came across the screen grabs from the television documentary about the Grand’s closure, eight of them that showed in not particularly good details some of the pictures from the third floor. Looking at them by torchlight, prints from a not very high quality source document, he saw what bit it was that had been bothering him.

The pictures were different.

The positioning of the characters within the pictures was the same, their layout and structure unchanged, but the woman and the creatures that surrounded her were definitely altered.

Christ, had someone removed the originals, replacing them with fakes? Only, that didn’t feel right either; the boards covering the pictures had looked to be the originals from the documentary, filmed just after the Grand finally closed and the pictures themselves were, he would have sworn, original Gravettes.

This made no sense, none.

Taking the prints and the torch, Parry went out into the Grand.

The pictures were definitely different, every one of them that he could make comparisons for. In the prints he held, the woman and the creatures, both the ones that emerged from the air and the water, were painted as innocents. They had wide eyes, almost perfectly round (like anime characters, Parry suddenly thought, wondering if there was a research paper there, looking at the shorthand artists of different ages used to depict innocent and vitality), looking back at the observer as they viewed the pictures.

Now, though, that had changed. The woman looked past the viewer, her eyes no longer open wide but narrowed, focused on something over the viewer’s shoulder. The undersea creatures, although not completely anthropomorphic, had flickers of recognisable emotion painted across their features, mouths twisting in anger or frustration, arms and fins and tentacles curling around the woman not in support but in possessive twists, as though holding her back and preventing her from escaping.

The later pictures in the series, the ones with the woman being elevated into the sky and surrounded by things that might have been angels, or man’s better nature freed from the shackles of the flesh, showed the woman still looking back out of the pictures, still staring at something beyond Parry, beyond the Grand itself.

The angels looked cold, emotionless, their hands taut upon the woman’s body but the expressions on their faces supercilious and dismissive.

Parry had reached the end of the corridor, had studied each of the pictures as best he could in torchlight, and he was convinced that they were the work of Gravette. They were technically skilled, full of subtleties and tight, hidden details that only emerged when you looked at them for longer periods, but they weren’t the pictures that had been nailed behind cheap boards of wood fifteen or more years back.

Had the owners pulled some kind of switch? But why? What would be the point, when they could have merely taken the pictures? He’d have to tell Mandeville, let the owners know, assuming they weren’t already aware of the changes.

He made to go back down the corridor when he stopped. Was something moving down there, in the tar-like shadows that pooled along the edges of the floor? And there? There?

Everywhere?

As Parry watched, something glistening detached from one of the pictures and drifted to the floor in the centre of the corridor. It rippled and swelled as it fell, floated really, dancing in the air as more fell from every picture along the corridor.

Soon the corridor was full of the things, gossamer and glimmering. Some of them moved along the floor after they descended, slithering to the edges of the walls and joining the shadows, thickening them, making them pulse and bulge.

It was oddly beautiful, the descents drifting, slow, tracing gentle parabolas through the corridor before alighting with a touch that appeared as delicate as the spinning of feathers or the kiss of elegant mouths.

Soon, the corridor was full of them, pressing out from the walls, swelled by the arrival of more and more of the things.

In the centre of the corridor, the first shape he had seen was now moving, not to the side but away from him, along the carpeted floor towards the stairway. As it went, it coalesced, drawing in seemingly identical shapes that were standing ahead of it. Parry counted three, four, ten, fourteen, and as they merged the remaining moving shape became more solid, more real.

Parry made out the curve of buttocks, the sway of full breasts, the outstretching of arms, and the opening of hands, and then something else was moving.

A long tendril came out of the shadow by Parry’s side, solidifying as though it was drawing itself together from the thinner shapes, languidly curling in the air above his head. It tapered down to a delicate point, he saw, trembling as though sniffing the atmosphere. As it broadened, became fatter and more solid, pale discs emerged across its underside, shivering and clenching wetly.

It’s a tentacle, he thought to himself, but before he had time to scream, it had dropped onto him and wrapped around his neck.

It hurt, crashing into Mandeville’s legs and knocking him to the floor. He braced himself for further attack, but whatever it was simply flung him out of the way, growling, and dashed on. It hit the wooden panel leaning just inside the doorway, sending it spinning on one edge before it fell, ending up propped between the two sides of the doorframe, canted at a drunken angle.

Where it had been blank before, the wood now contained a carving of a huge jungle cat, not a tiger or a lion exactly, but a creature that was an amalgam of those and others.

Fierce nature, Mandeville thought wildly, Gravette’s fierce nature, hunted and abused but never cowed. Would two other panels in the bar be blank if he went in and looked at them? He suspected so.

His legs were bleeding, although the tears in his skin didn’t feel deep. Mandeville rolled and then stood, unsteadily, leaning on the wall for support.

The panel in the doorway swayed, making the cat’s face emerge and vanish into the bar’s darkness, as though it was rocking back and forth and considering him quizzically.

From below, in the foyer, came the sound of a distant train, the noise ascending, dopplering and then muffling within the space of a moment.

Going into the tunnel, he thought as the noise started again. In and out, in and out.

The other two cats were there, and God knew what else. He looked back up at the waving figure; it had emerged and was now standing at the top of the stairs, still waving, beckoning him upwards.

It was the woman.

Even in the grey light filtering through the glass ceiling, she seemed to glow all colours, casting her illumination about her the way great art did. And she was great art, he understood suddenly, perhaps the greatest there was.

He began to move to her, wincing as he climbed the stairs. Where else could he go?

As he approached, she moved back, returning to the corridor where her glow danced about her like distant, guttering flames. As he reached the corridor entrance, he saw movement beyond her.

At the far end of the third floor, almost lost to the darkness that pooled there like spilled paint, Parry was sitting against the wall as a myriad tentacles clenched about him. The largest was wrapped around his neck, was pulled so taut that the skin either side of the tentacle bulged, bloody and mottled.

The air around Parry was filled with moving, darting shapes, fins lifting and dropping and mouths open wide. As Mandeville watched, a larger shape emerged, conical, mouth agape, and tore into Parry’s side, shaking him like a rag doll, tearing a piece from him and disappearing back into the darkness.

Parry twitched spastically, blood spraying from him but not falling to the floor, instead floating around him, breathed in by the fish and the octopuses and squid and the things without names that scuttled and bobbed and feasted upon him.

Parry managed to twist his head, despite the ever-tightening arm of the octopus that was wrapped around his neck and whose bulbous body was drifting in the air above him. For a moment he was looking directly at Mandeville, his eyes desperate, and then the contact was gone as he was twisted further around.

Mandeville didn’t move. After all, what could he do?

There were none of the angels in the corridor, he suddenly realised, and just as quickly the realisation came that they were only metaphors, not alive in the way that the cats, the train that was in fact a prick, the undersea creatures were. They were intellect and spirituality, not flesh and lusts and desires and passions and things to worship. They weren’t alive in the way that she was, the woman.

She was standing in the centre of the corridor, her arms outstretched as though to show him the things that belonged to her, and they did belong to her, he saw; they moved around her, never touching her, always giving her space.

It’s how they’ve been painted, he realised, to worship her. If she’s a female archetype, then those other things are men, sleek and brutal and driven by lust and greed and desire, and between them they make. what?

She was approaching him again now, moving down the corridor as though carried by currents that he could not feel, moving towards him, beautiful and austere and suddenly he wanted her, was hard and sweating despite the pain in his legs and the part of him that even now was calling for his attention, was screeching its fear of this impossible situation.

She came closer still, her features resolving, streaks forming on her skin in a pattern of delicate brushstrokes. Her hair moved in clumps, strands matted together, painted together. Her arms were outstretched and suddenly Mandeville thought about her, about her pressing herself against the glass of the sun corridor, about her seeing the outside world at night and spending most of her time trapped under boards, locked inside the paint, alive and claustrophobic and alone except for creatures without mouths or intellects, just cocks made to love her.

How terrible must her life have been these last years, he suddenly thought, trapped here day in night out, with no one to look at her, no one to feast themselves upon her, how awful it must have been.

And what damage had it done to her?

Her face twisted into a snarl as she came, lips drawing back from teeth that seemed suddenly too large and too white and too hard, her arms stretching forward, the skin of her hands broken by paintbrush swirls that reminded Mandeville of the sucking pads of the octopuses and squid that served attendance upon her.

Sharks darted between her legs, and still she came and Mandeville saw the hate in her eyes, the desperation to hold him and own him, to take him from the outside and bring him in and keep him so that he, too, could look at her and worship her, and he turned and ran.

The two cats were waiting for him on the stairs between the foyer and first floor, brown and wooden yet terribly fluid, moving back and forth with a restless energy. Trapped between them and her, Mandeville stopped on the first floor and turned a full circle, looking for an escape route.

The bar was blocked to him; the third cat still stood in its entrance, back on its board but its mouth open in a rictus of teeth and ravenous appetite. He debated running back to the second floor, losing himself in the place where Gravette and Priest’s hold had been comprehensively removed, but the woman was already between him and it.

A vast octopus, stretching an impossible height from the floor, moved behind her, its black eyes gleaming, and around it circled the sharks and the smaller fish. She was smiling, possessive, absolute, still coming on, placid and inexorable.

That left only the sun deck.

Mandeville ran to it, crashing against the door and forcing the cheap lock in one stumbled fall of his body weight. One of the cats leaped at him, snagging its teeth into his leg, but its grip was weak and he managed to kick it off. The octopus came past the woman, spreading its arms in an effort to reach him but he ran, dodging past it and out onto the wooden apron of the deck.

He had time to wonder why, if they wanted to get out, the woman and her entourage didn’t simply come out here, and then he was at the concrete wall with its pictures that moved as he saw them, writhing and trying to grasp at him, and then he was over the wall and was airborne.

In the moment before he hit the ground, Mandeville suddenly realised: art, true art, has no urge to escape to the outside, it wants instead to bring the outside in, to make itself the centre of a world that it defines.

The last thing he saw as he fell past the sun corridor’s floor-length windows were the myriad images that the woman had left of herself across the inside of the glass, and he smiled.

Falling, colliding, escaping, these were human things and he was, at least, human and free to fall.