V 02 - Domino Men, The (40 page)

When Arthur opened his eyes again, he was at once aware that something had changed, that something had tipped and shifted in the balance of the world which meant that no day would ever seem quite the same ever again.  As he rose, awkwardly and painfully, to his feet, something of what had happened came back to him and, with it, certain details of his peculiarly troubling dream.  But the prince tried to shake it off, stretching, yawning, attempting to persuade his eyes to focus, forcing himself back into wakefulness.

He looked around for the cat, but if it had ever been there at all, it had long since vanished.  Only then did he notice what was happening outside.  Snow.  Jet-black, ebony snow, hurtling toward the earth.

He felt a strong compulsion to go outside — to run, not walk — to stand and luxuriate in that snow, to roll in it and, gawping happily into the sky, catch flakes in his mouth.  But something else, some quieter impulse, persuaded him to stay indoors.  It cannot have been later than lunchtime, yet it already looked dark outside.  The prince walked up to the windowpane and it seemed to him that there were figures moving in the unseasonal gloom and that he recognized many of their faces — staff, servants, even one or two that he might have been moved to call friends.  They were standing in the snow, allowing it to land upon their clothes and settle onto their skin, and they were laughing, all of them, gazing upward toward the heavens, emitting loose peals of demented laughter.

Remembering more now of what had taken place, Arthur’s thoughts returned to the well-being of his wife and he hurried into his quarters.  There she was, mercifully safe and sleeping as soundly as before, although the prince wondered if her slumber didn’t seem alarmingly deep.  How can she not have been woken by the ruckus outside?

Gently, he pulled side the covers.  Lovingly, he brushed his fingers against her face.  “Laetitia?” he whispered.  “Laetitia, it’s me.”

No reaction.  Not a murmur or a flickering of the eyelashes or even (how grateful he would the prince have been to hear this) a tiny, indecorous snore.

“Laetitia?”  The prince shook her, carefully at first, then with increasing vigor.  “Laetitia!”

She was breathing, at least.  Leaning closer, he could detect an unfamiliar smell on her breath, and as he arranged his wife upon the bed, tucking her in with almost maternal concern, he concluded with a guilty kind of sadness that she must have been drugged.  In this, if in pitifully little else in his almost entirely useless life, Arthur Windsor was correct.

He picked up the telephone and dialed Mr. Silverman’s number.  It rang for an eternity without reply.  He slapped at the cradle then dialed down to the switchboard.  Whoever picked it up said nothing.

“Hello?” said the prince.

There was a low burbling sound at the other end of the line which might almost have been a laugh.

“Who’s there?  Speak up!”

The same sound again — wet and gurgling.  “Good afternoon, sir.  This is Beth speaking.”

“Beth?  We’ve spoken before, haven’t we?  Good God, that seems a lifetime ago now.  Listen, I’m trying to get through to Mr. Silverman.”

“I’m afraid that will be quite impossible.”  Her voice sounded distant, flat and almost robotically toneless.

‘Impossible?  Why the devil will it be impossible?”

“The playing piece named Silverman has been removed from the board.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

The girl called Beth seemed not to have heard the question.  “Have you been outside yet?  Into the snow?  You really ought to, you know.  It’s so pretty, sir.  Like ashes from the sky.”

“Now listen here, young lady—” the prince began, but the woman interrupted him without a thought.

“It’s coming, sir,” she said.  “You know that, don’t you?  It’s almost here.  And the time has come for you to pick a side.”

“I’ve chosen my side,” the prince said firmly.

Beth just laughed at this, that same moist chuckle, before there was a tutting click and the line went dead.

Suddenly, as though all the fight in him had been used up in his conversation, the prince felt overcome by great waves of nausea and exhaustion.  Something inside of his spasmed once, twice, three times, each more urgent than the last.  It was all he could do to stumble into the corridor, where he was copiously sick.  This done, he wiped his mouth, retreated back into the bedroom and closed the door (just managing to bolt and lock it) before he collapsed onto the bed beside his wife and passed out.

It was dark when he awoke.  He was flat on his back, a hand was on his shoulder and a familiar voice was swimming hazily into view.

“Arthur?”

The prince blinked, tried to sit up, winced.  “Darling?  Darling, is that you?”  The prince attempted a rueful grin but discovered that smiling seemed to hurt him now, that it cost him dearly.

“Arthur?  Are you going to tell me what’s been going on?  I’ve heard the most fearful noises.”

“Leviathan…”  Arthur tried to push himself up.  “I think Leviathan must be here.”  The prince was in the most relentless, unstinting kind of pain.  He wanted to say more, to explain as much as he could, wanted more than anything, to beg Laetitia’s forgiveness, to throw himself upon her mercy and plead for the balm of her understanding, for her sweet clemency.  But he found himself unable to speak a single word — his throat tight and dry, his innards churning and swirling in a tempest of gastric distress, his head pounding with a fusillade of thunderclaps.

Just before he sank back into unconsciousness and the horrified face of his wife vanished first to a distant point of light and then into absolute nothingness, Arthur Windsor was granted clear and unambiguous knowledge of what was happening to him.  These are withdrawal symptoms, he thought, having attended several lectures on the subject as part of the work that he did for a spectrum of young people’s charities.  I am in withdrawal from ampersand.

Shortly before he went under, he managed to croak out a few words.  “Stay in here.  Promise me that you’ll stay in this room.”

But by then he was already sliding into unconsciousness and he never heard his wife’s reply.

The next twenty-four hours were a study in pain and terror.  There were moments of relative lucidity when he saw Laetitia and heard her voice quite clearly, moments when he sensed that she held him in her arms, rocking him gently as a mother would a child, even (although this may have been an auditory hallucination) that she was singing to him, some old melody part-remembered from his childhood.  Once when he awoke, she persuaded him to drink a little water.  On another occasion, when he emerged momentarily from the deep mists of his mind, he discovered her seated before him on the bed eating the most peculiar combination of food — peanut butter ladled directly from the jar, gherkins, pork scratchings, sardines.  For some time afterward he believed (quite erroneously) that this had simply been some overheated imagining of his.  Certainly, it grew almost impossible for the prince to tell what was real and what were merely tricks, snares and booby-traps laid by that ampersand which still fought for a foothold in his system.  There were the sounds that he heard from outdoors, the screeches and whisperings, the savage cries of triumph.  More than once, he discovered himself clutching at Laetitia’s arm and imploring her not to leave him.  The shutters were down, so he could not see outside, but there existed not the slightest doubt in his mind that it was still snowing.  He even believed that he could hear it, the ceaseless patter of the snow, the unending fall of ampersand from the sky, and as he lay in this febrile state, he was visited by memories of old sins.  He saw the woman at the station explode all over again, as though in slow motion.  He even thought that he heard the laughter of Virtue and Mercy, although he never saw them, their power fading, perhaps, even then.  But whilst he longed for it, the small, gray cat never visited him again.  Something in the prince told him that the animal’s strength was very weak now, if, indeed, it had not been extinguished altogether.

The future king of England slept and dreamed and sweated.  His wife lay beside him, doing everything that she could to ignore the terrible roars and shouts from outside, noises strangely echoed beside her as her husband swam in and out of consciousness, calling out unfamiliar names and screaming for forgiveness, his body a battleground for forces beyond her comprehension.

And so it went for a day and a night until, early in the dawn of the third day, as the prince seemed at last to be coming back to her, Laetitia heard a firm, decisive knock upon the door.

“Who’s there?” she cried out, shaking her husband hard to stir him.  “Arthur?  Someone’s at the door.”

The prince groaned, stirred and clutched at his forehead in a theatrical gesture which Laetitia had hitherto believed to be confined to stage drunks.

Then it came again — the same solemn tapping.

Laetitia looked around for something with which she might defend herself.  Although the room lay in sepulchral gloom (the power having gone out almost forty-eight hours earlier and the emergency generator secreted beneath Clarence House failing only a very few minutes thereafter), it was still possible to see that the place was tastefully studded with objects of breezily incalculable wealth — several immensely rare vases, pottery fragments which were believed to predate Christ, a glass case of butterflies, all extinct — but none of them looked as though they might prove of much use as a weapon.

Arthur was at least sitting up now and had taken to rubbing his eyes, with hands clenched into fists like a child woken in the night.  Laetitia was about to urge him into action when, from the other side of the door, she heard just about the most welcome voice in the world.

“Ma’am?  Are you all right?”

Relief gushed into her voice.  “Silverman?”

Behind her, Arthur, on his feet and searching for something on the floor by the bed, started to mumble a warning, but Laetitia ignored him and opened the door onto an old friend.

It was a friend, however, sadly changed.  Mr. Silverman stood upon the threshold, badly bruised, stained in mud, grease and blood, his left hand horribly mangled as though he had dipped it, for some inebriate dare, into the spinning rotors of an uncompromisingly efficient piece of farming equipment.

“Silverman!  My God!”  The prince, leaning against the end of the bed, seemed to be stowing something into his trouser pocket.  “What the devil have they done to you?”

The equerry stepped inside, closed the door and began to speak, briskly, urgently, but without obvious emotion, like a junior officer returned alone to HQ to deliver news of some catastrophic rout.  “Mr. Streater took out some of his frustrations upon my person, sir.  Shortly before imprisoning me in one of the wine cellars.”

“But you escaped?” Laetitia asked.

“Indeed, ma’am.”

Arthur gestured toward the gory remnants of Silverman’s hand.  “But not, it seems, without some cost to yourself.”

“This is nothing, sir.”  The man looked hideously pale, his skin taut and glossy with sweat, but it was still possible to discern a blush.  “It’s a scratch.”

“Can you tell us what’s going on out there?”

Silverman appeared to sway slightly on his feet.  “I think you might be able to teach us something about that, sir.”  There was a trace of recrimination in his voice — not obvious and probably invisible to anyone who did not know him but to Arthur and Laetitia strikingly and uncomfortably apparent.

“I’ve made some mistakes, I know—” Arthur began.

Silverman cut him off with a gesture.  “No time for that, sir.  The city’s being eaten alive.”

“What?”

“It’s the snow, sir.  It’s driven everybody mad.”

“And Streater?  What happened to him?”

“He’s gone, sir.  Took one of the Jaguars.  He said that he had to look up an old friend.  Although he was good enough to stop by the cellar for a few words.  He seems to believe that he’ll actually be rewarded for what he’s done.”

The prince straightened up, mopped his forehead, pushed back his shoulders, cleared his throat, and despite his evident exhaustion, the unkempt brush of his hair and the wildness which capered in his eyes, he looked, just for an instant, unmistakably a king.  Then his shoulders slumped, his posture sagged and he was only Arthur again.  “I want you both to listen to me.  This is what is going to happen.  Silverman.  I need you to stay here to look after Laetitia.  His wife began to object but Arthur waved away her protestations.  “I’m going outside,” he said.  “There is somebody I need to find.”

Silverman sank gratefully onto the bed and nodded in grave approval.

“Good luck, sir.”

But if you’re going outside, the snow—”

Arthur shook his head.  “Something tells me I’ve built up a resistance.”  He bent down and kissed his wife on her forehead.

“Be careful,” she said.

The prince reached into his pocket and pulled out the gun that Mr. Streater had given him what felt like a small eternity ago.  “I have this,” he said.

He nodded once, then, without saying goodbye, opened the door and stepped outside.

The house had been comprehensively ravaged and despoiled, as though an all-night party exclusively attended by vandals, incontinents and graffiti specialists had only recently moved on.  Steeling himself against the sight of it, Arthur stepped through rubble and rubbish, over broken glass and furniture reduced to matchsticks, skirted around slicks of blood and trails of indescribable fluids before, at last, he emerged into the open air.