V 02 - Domino Men, The (39 page)

Her eyelids fluttered shut.  I kissed her once on the forehead, made sure the duvet was tight around her and left her alone.

Next door, Abbey was already in bed, dressed in a  man-sized T-shirt, tense, fidgety and chewing on her fingernails.  Self-consciously, I stripped to my boxers and climbed in beside her.

“How’s your mum?” she asked.

“Not sure,” I said.  “A bit shaky.”

We both knew that I was ready yet to admit the truth of it.  At least not aloud.

“She seems nice,” Abbey said.  “From what I could tell.”

“Well, you’re probably not meeting her at her best,”

“Probably not.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

“Henry?  Do you think we’re safe here?”

“Yes, I think we are,” I said.  “My granddad told me to go home.”

“I did a bit of research on this house once,” Abbey said, suddenly eager for a chat.  “It’s been here longer than you’d think.”

“Really?” I said, grateful for the shift in conversation, happy for any old nonsense to be spoken as long as it filled the silence.

“Back in the last century, before this place was divided into flats, there was a psychic who lived here.”

“A psychic?”

“A spiritualist, yeah.”  She giggled, and that giggle, it was wonderful to hear.  “Crazy, isn’t it?”

“I think a lot of dark stuff’s happened here in the past,” I said softly.  “I don’t believe anything’s been an accident in my life.  Not even this place.”

The moment of good humor had passed.

Abbey sighed, rolled over and switched off the light.

Later, as we lay together in the dark, she said:  “I can’t believe I’ve found you.  You’re my second chance, Henry.  I always wanted to do something worthwhile with my life.  Something that makes a difference.  With you, p’raps I finally can.”

I squeezed her hand and she squeezed mine as outside the snow continued to fall, covering the city in a second skin, in a carapace of jealousy and spite.

In the night, there were strange sounds — shouts and moans and smashing glass.  Once, just after midnight, we heard a whispered invitation at the letterbox.  Certain promises were made, certain boons offered in exchange for services rendered, for a number of small concessions.

But we held one another close and tried to stop our ears against it, knowing that this was our haven and that to leave the flat could mean the end for either one of us.

I suppose there might be some bitter kind of irony in the fact that the next day was Christmas Eve.  In all that had happened, I’d started to forget that there was supposed to be anything festive going on at all.

When I woke, Abbey’s side of the bed was empty and cool.  I wrapped a dressing gown around myself and walked through to the lounge to find her on the couch watching television, a mug of something hot cupped between her hands, riveted by the cataclysms unfolding on-screen.

She didn’t even look up.  “The city’s in lockdown,” she said.  “They’ve set up checkpoints at the edge of London.  People’ve seen soldiers.  They’re saying they’re shooting to kill.”

I sat beside her on the sofa and hugged her close.

“Everyone’s gone mad,” she said.  “They’ve all gone mad.”

I kissed her gently on the forehead, smoothed back her hair and whispered something treacly and cloying.

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled.

“I need to check on Mum.”

She nodded distractedly.  “Henry?”

“Yes?”

“What can we do?”

“We stay here,” I said firmly.  “We stay in this flat and we wait it out.  As long as we’re together — as long as we’re in here — then nothing can touch us.”

“But there are people outside I care about.  What about them?”

“Everything I care about’s right here.”  I sounded perhaps a little colder than I had intended.

“You think your granddad’s dead, don’t you?” she said.

I walked away.

Of course, I blame myself.

Mum was fine when I checked on her.  Her breathing was shallow and she was still murmuring and moaning to herself, but she didn’t have a temperature and seemed, if anything, to be slightly calmer than before.  I did what I could, gave her water, mopped her brow and, just before lunch, helped her lurch uncertainly into the bathroom, even cleaning up the subsequent mess.

I’m not a bad son, that’s what I’m saying.  I did my best.

Abbey and I were having lunch, eking out the last of our bread and fruit, when we heard the scream.

In the bedroom Mum was on her feet and almost fully dressed, lacing up her shoes with jerky, robotic motions, muttering endlessly about the snow.

She’d managed to tear out some of the fitted carpet, peeling it back to reveal old floorboards underneath.  Here she’d uncovered something extraordinary — painted markings, sigils, signs and symbols daubed in red upon the wood.

“Mum?” I said, moving warily toward her and trying not to think too hard about what I’d seen on the floor.  “What’s all this, Mum?”

“He sold your father.  Did you know that?  For the sake of his putrid little war he bargained away your dad.  And you know what scares me now?  I think he’s sold you, too.”

“Are you talking about Granddad?” I asked.

“That man,” she rasped.  “That vicious man.  It was always his idea.”

“What was?” I said.  “What are you talking about?”

“The telly…  Your father and I never wanted it for you.  And then — those operations.  He paid for them.  Oh, Henry.  Incisions to the brain.”

I edged closer.  “Mum?”

Then I made my mistake.  I placed my hand on her shoulder.  It was the gentlest restraint, the kindest holding-back, but that was not how my mother saw it.  She gave a roar of outrage and pain.  Until then, I don’t suppose I’d ever thought her capable of making such a sound.  If I hadn’t snatched my hand away as quickly as I did, I honestly believe she might have bitten it.

My voice trembled.  “Mum, what are you doing?  Please, Get back into bed.”

She bared her teeth and hissed.  “Leviathan is coming.  We must all go out to meet him.”

Hunched forward, simian in motion, she pushed past me and sped toward the front door.  Abbey appeared and stepped uncertainly in her path but Mum just slapped her out of the way.  Abbey squealed in shock and I saw that my mother had drawn blood on her cheek.

Mum reached the door and unlocked it, suddenly, helplessly desperate to be outside.

Stupidly, I touched her arm again and she snarled back something terrible.  Even now, I am unable to bring myself to set down those words.

She wrenched open the door and I saw the scene outside, a window onto what the city had become.  Chaos, smoke, endless snowfall.  Dozens of men and women in the same condition as my mother, loping through the snow, all of them streaming in the same direction.

They no longer seemed like people at all.  Drones.  That was how I thought of them now.  Just drones.

Mum stepped into the street and sniffed the air.

“Don’t go!” I shouted.

But she paid me no attention.  Mum gave another cry of fury and triumph, and ran into the street to join the others, into that exodus of the damned.

“Mum!”

She didn’t turn back.  I stood on the threshold, wondering what to do, uncertain whether to give chase, knowing that she wouldn’t thank me for it.  A few seconds more and she was lost to the snow and my decision had been made for me.

I stepped back inside and snapped shut the door, just as Abbey emerged from the bathroom, clutching a wad of tissue to the side of her face.

“She’s gone,” I said.

At five o’clock that afternoon, the television went black.  With the exception of half an hour of the test card on BBC1, there was nothing on any channel except static and interference.  Snow outside, snow inside, blackness crept all over London.  A few hours later, the lights went out as well and we lost power for good.

Abbey and I went to bed, too scared to sit up in the dark, not brave enough to pay any heed to the strange sounds we heard from outside, the rustlings and stampings, the whinnies of terror, the orgiastic cries.

Much later, as we lay close to one another, we heard the same hissing at the letterbox as the night before, the same whispered invitation.  But we held each other tight and stopped our ears against it.

As I’m writing this, I feel a flicker of hope.  You know what I’m talking about.  You must have noticed it yourself.

The other handwriting, that other story, has gone and there have been no more interpolations, no more intrusions, for days.

Maybe everything’s going to be OK.  Maybe there’ll be no need for that journey I thought I had to make, for that appointment of ours in the wilderness.  Perhaps at last I’m really free.

As Abbey and I tried to sleep, outside an old man was running.  I didn’t know it at the time but he was very near to us, almost in sight of our door.

His flight had not gone unnoticed.  He was being tracked, although not with any subtlety or grace as he could hear them blundering behind him, wheezing and squealing in weird pleasure.  There was a whole tribe of them, dumb but implacable, tireless, without morality, the new face of mankind.

The old man was growing weary and out of breath, his years of active service in the Directorate long behind him, weakened by his days in a hospital bed and ground down by the spectacle of his darkest fears become reality.  No one would have blamed him for giving up.  Thousands would have done just that, long ago.  In medical terms, he shouldn’t even have been on his feet.  But he didn’t give up.  He kept going, forcing his ancient body onward through the snow and the dark, pushing himself far beyond endurance just to try to reach me before the end.

He was less than a street away when they found him, the herd driven mad by the snow, inflamed by the ampersand in their systems.

Every breath felt like fire.  Each step was an ordeal.  He could feel them at his back.  Determined not to slow down, at the last instant he tripped, fell forward, grazing old hands, bruising old skin, until at last he righted himself and turned to face the mob, courageous and unflinching.

He would have fought, I know that.  He would have fought tooth and nail to the end.

Sentimental nonsense.  The old man had his wrinkled cock in his hand when they came for him.  They cut him down mid-dribble, his body made unrecognizable, battered by a thousand boot-heels, stamped into the snow by an army of our commuters.

Even this, of course, was very much more than he deserved.

Abby and I woke with the dawn, too distraught and too scared to kid ourselves that we were going to get much sleep.

I managed a wan sort of smile.  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas, Henry.”

We hugged, and I was clambering out of bed to get us some tea when Abbey reminded me that the power had gone.  No tea, then.  No heat, either, and the pair of us lost no time in wrapping ourselves in multiple shirts and jumpers, self-insulating in worn vests, old cardigans and favorite sweatshirts.

We had been up for a couple of hours, in which time we’d scraped together a meager breakfast, held one another tightly and swapped tender pledges of devotion, when there came a knock at the door — a sharp, brisk tap, all business.

I ran to open it.  “Granddad?”

A stranger stood at the threshold.  A man not much older than me, slim, blond and sharp featured, his hair cajoled into slick, brash spikes.

“You must be Henry Lamb,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked, although I think by then I’d already guessed the answer.

“I’m Joe,” he said, sardonically extending his hand.  “Joe Streater.”

You hoped that we had gone?

We were only resting.  We were relaxing, taking a little downtime, stepping back to gain a better perspective on all that has been laid before us to date.  It is of vital importance (Leviathan has always said so) to maintain an equal balance between leisure and our working lives.  But now our lunch hour is over and we have returned to work with a revitalized sense of purpose and a determination to succeed that I think you will find to be steelier and more implacable than ever.

We thought it might be of interest to adumbrate something of what occupied Arthur Windsor whilst the execrable young Henry Lamb was barricaded into his flat in Tooting Bec, crying into his pillow and quivering in the arms of his landlady.

Details follow, and as ever, unflinching accuracy is guaranteed.

As the prince slept upon the floor of his palace, a small, gray cat trod softly through his dreams.  He told Arthur the truth about the war, he told him about the innumerable clashes between Dedlock’s men and the House of Windsor — a secret history of the British Isles which had run beneath the surface of public life for more than one hundred and fifty years.  He spoke of the Process, of Estella’s sacrifice and of the dark miracle of Tooting Bec.  He spoke of the one who had been prepared to take Estella’s place, a boy groomed almost from birth to contain Leviathan and who now needed only to remember a simple formula, an incantation to activate the Process and close the ancient trap.  And the small, gray cat spoke, too, of the prince’s part in it all, his responsibility to deliver the boy into the belly of the beast.  If the boy is the bullet, said the cat, then you, Your Highness, you are the gun.