20.6

 

Paul doesn’t fall or collapse. He folds, as though something inside him has suddenly become too heavy. His shoulders curl inward, his spine bows, and his hands hover in the air like he’s trying to catch something that isn’t falling.

Roisin feels it before she understands it — a tug in her chest, a hollow ache that answers the hollow forming in him as he looks up at her.

And she sees it: a shimmer around him, faint at first, like heat rising from hot tarmac, except the room is cold. As hot as it was from the pressure of the Horse’s appearance, now it becomes so cold that they can see their breath condensing in the room.

Paul’s breath changes. He isn’t gasping or choking, it just seems wrong to her. It’s too slow, too shallow. She’s used to watching someone breathe. Endless hours of life classes, waiting for the model to breath in or out so that their shoulders, their ribs, their clavicles move into precisely the right position. He breathes as though each inhale must fight its way into his lungs, and each exhale leaves him emptier and more hollow than before.

Roisin’s own lungs tighten in sympathy. She knows that rhythm. She knows that hunger. It’s her own.

The air around him, already wavering like the heat haze on a sunny afternoon, begins to distort further, not dramatically; no swirling wind, no visible force, just a subtle bending, like the space around him is being pulled inward.

Roisin sees the shadows lean toward him, the light hesitate on his skin as the room tries to adjust to something it cannot contain.

Paul doesn’t notice any of it. He just clutches his chest, fingers trembling, as though trying to hold himself together. His eyes lose focus. She could cope if they rolled back into his head like a cheap horror prop or glazed over as if he was hypnotised, but the drifting, where one eye moves independently of the other, looking at two different things like the chameleon she saw on The David Attenborough Show. One seems to be looking at her, the other at the picture on the wall, a print of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children she hadn’t notice before. Another of Pestilence’s prized possessions that came with him, she supposed.

She steps closer. “Paul,” she whispers. “Stay with me.”

He tries to answer, his mouth moving and the one eye locking onto her, but the sound that issues from his throat is a thin, fragile wailing: a cry like a word that’s been hollowed out like a coconut husk. His soul is slipping.

Roisin can’t see souls. Not directly, anyway, but she can see the effect of a soul being pushed aside. Paul’s outline flickers — not visibly, not like a glitch, but perceptually, as though her eyes can’t decide where he ends and where the horse inside him begins.

He reaches for her. Not a grab or a lock but the tentative reach of an old man on his deathbed, scared to take the final step into oblivion. His hand shakes like a Parkinson’s victim

Roisin doesn’t touch him. She can’t. If she does, the horse will leap back to her instantly.

And God will see her.

The hunger inside him pulses.

She feels it in her chest — a deep, aching thrum that resonates with the part of her she’s been trying to forget.

Paul gasps. The sudden breath of someone carried under the waves and released, only to be pulled under again almost immediately. She can see the distortion in his chest, just like her own when she was reaching for her horse, except this time it’s the horse reaching out to her. Two souls, both in need of her, neither willing to concede to the other. It bulges as if something too large is pressing against the inside of his chest, trying to find space that isn’t there. His own private chestburster, striving to be free.

His shoulders jerk, his breath stutters, his fingers claw at the air.

None of this is violence. She sees it as misalignment — a mantle trying to settle into a vessel that doesn’t fit.

His voice breaks and the thin wail becomes modulated; a frequency on long-wave radio that’s just out of sync with the transmitter. Not a scream or a cry, but a small, very human plea issued from the red-stubbled, pox-ridden mouth of a human stonemason, whose concept of angels never prepared him for the sheer terror of meeting one in person. “Roisin… please…”

And Roisin feels the hollow inside him reach for her again — a pull so familiar it feels like her own heartbeat.

The worst part is the flicker.

For a moment — just a moment — Paul’s expression changes. Not into something monstrous or inhuman, but into something empty; devoid of expression or emotion. A blankness she knows has nothing to do with the man inside the body, because she knows it too well, for she wore it for millennia.