"Billy," Cleve said.
The shadow moved. It pooled around his feet; it rolled up into his face, smelling of rain on stone, cold and comfortless.
He was standing no more than a yard from the bunk, and still he could make nothing out; the shadow defied him. Not to be denied sight, he reached towards the bed. At his solicitation the veil divided like smoke, and the shape that thrashed on the mattress made itself apparent.
It was Billy, of course; and yet not. A lost Billy, perhaps, or one to come. If so, Cleve wanted no part of a future that could breed such trauma. There, on the lower bunk, lay a dark, wretched shape, still solidifying as Cleve watched, knitting itself together from the shadows. There was something of a rabid fox in its incandescent eyes, in its arsenal of needle-teeth; something of an upturned insect in the way it was half curled upon itself, its back more shell than flesh and more nightmare than either. No part of it was fixed. Whatever figuration it had (perhaps it had many) Cleve was watching that status dissolve. The teeth were growing yet longer, and in so doing more insubstantial, their matter extruded to the point of frailty, then dispersed like mist; its hooked limbs, pedaling the air, were also growing paltry. Beneath the chaos he saw the ghost of Billy Tait, mouth open and babbling agonies, striving to make itself known. He wanted to reach into the maelstrom and snatch the boy out, but he sensed that the process he was watching had its own momentum and it might be fatal to intervene. All he could do was stand and watch as Billy's thin white limbs and heaving abdomen writhed to slough off this dire anatomy. The luminous eyes were almost the last to go, spilling out from their sockets on myriad threads and flying off into black vapour.
At last, he saw Billy's face, truant clues to its former condition still flickering across it. And then, even these were dispersed, the shadows gone, and only Billy was lying on the bunk, naked and heaving with the exertion of his anguish. He looked at Cleve, his face innocent of expression. Cleve remembered how the boy had complained to the creature from the city."… it hurts…" he'd said, hadn't he?,"… you didn't tell me how much it hurts…". It was the observable truth. The boy's body was a wasteland of sweat and bone; a more unappetising sight was scarcely imaginable. But human; at least that.
Billy opened his mouth. His lips were ruddy and slick, as if he were wearing lipstick.
"Now…" he said, trying to speak between painful breaths."… now what shall we do?"
The act of speaking seemed too much for him. He made a gagging sound in the back of his throat, and pressed his hand to his mouth. Cleve moved aside as Billy stood up and stumbled across to the bucket in the corner of the cell, kept there for their night-wastes. He failed to reach it before nausea overtook him; fluid splashed between his fingers and hit the floor. Cleve looked away as Billy threw up, preparing himself for the stench he would have to tolerate until slopping-out time the following morning. It was not the smell of vomit that filled the cell, however, but something sweeter and more cloying.
Mystified, Cleve looked back towards the figure crouching in the corner. On the floor between his feet were splashes of dark fluid; rivulets of the same ran down his bare legs. Even in the gloom of the cell, it was unmistakably blood.
In the most well-ordered of prisons violence could – and inevitably did – erupt without warning. The relationship of two cons, incarcerated together for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four, was an unpredictable thing. But as far as had been apparent to either prisoners or officers there had been no bad blood between Lowell and Nayler; nor, until that scream began, had there been a sound from their cell: no argument, no raised voices. What had induced Nayler to spontaneously attack and slaughter his cell-mate, and then inflict devastating wounds upon himself, was a subject for debate in dining-hall and exercise yard alike. The why of the problem, however, took second place to the how. The rumours describing the condition of Lowell's body when found defied the imagination; even amongst men inured against casual brutality the descriptions were met with shock. Lowell had not been much liked; he had been a bully and a cheat. But nothing he'd done deserved such mutilation. The man had been ripped open: his eyes put out, his genitals torn off. Nayler, the only possible antagonist, had then contrived to open up his own belly. He was now in an Intensive Care Unit; the prognosis was not hopeful.
It was easy, with such a buzz of outrage going about the Wing, for Cleve to spend the day all but unnoticed. He too had a story to tell: but who would believe it? He barely believed it himself. In fact on and off through the day – when the images came back to him afresh -he asked himself if he were entirely sane. But then sanity was a movable feast wasn't it?; one man's madness might be another's politics. All he knew for certain was that he had seen Billy Tait transform. He clung to that certainty with a tenaciousness born of near-despair. If he ceased to believe the evidence of his own eyes, he had no defence left to hold the darkness at bay.
After ablutions and breakfast, the entire Wing was confined to cells; workshops, recreation – any activity which required movement around the landings – was cancelled while Lowell's cell was photographed and examined, then swabbed out. Following breakfast, Billy slept through the morning; a state more akin to coma than sleep, such was its profundity. When he awoke for lunch he was brighter and more out-going than Cleve had seen him in weeks. There was no sign beneath the vacuous chatter that he knew what had happened the previous night. In the afternoon Cleve faced him with the truth.
"You killed Lowell," he said. There was no point in trying to pretend ignorance any longer; if the boy didn't remember now what he'd done, he would surely recall in time. And with that memory, how long before he remembered that Cleve had watched him transform? Better to confess it now. "I saw you," Cleve said, "I saw you change…"
Billy didn't seem much disturbed by these revelations.
"Yes," he said. "I killed Lowell. Do you blame me?" The question, begging a hundred others, was put lightly, as a matter of mild interest, no more.
"What happened to you?" Cleve said. "I saw you – there -” he pointed, appalled at the memory, at the lower bunk, “you weren't human."
"I didn't mean you to see," the boy replied. "I gave you the pills, didn't I? You shouldn't have spied." "And the night before…" Cleve said, "I was awake then too."
The boy blinked like a bemused bird, head slightly cocked. "You really have been stupid," he said. "So stupid." "Whether I like it or not, I'm not out of this," Cleve said, "I have dreams."
"Oh, yes." Now a frown marred the porcelain brow. "Yes. You dream the city, don't you?"
"What is that place, Billy?"
"I read somewhere: the dead have highways. You ever hear that? Well… they have cities too." "The dead? You mean it's some kind of ghost town?"
"I never wanted you to become involved. You've been better to me than most here. But I told you, I came to Pentonville to do business."
"With Tait."
That's right."
Cleve wanted to laugh; what he was being told – a city of the dead? – only heaped nonsense upon nonsense. And yet his exasperated reason had not sniffed out one explanation more plausible.
"My grandfather killed his children," Billy said, “because he didn't want to pass his condition on to another generation. He learned late, you see. He didn't realize, until he had a wife and children, that he wasn't like most men. He was special. But he didn't want the skills he'd been given; and he didn't want his children to survive with that same power in their blood. He would have killed himself, and finished the job, but that my mother escaped. Before he could find her and kill her too, he was arrested."
"And hanged. And buried."
"Hanged and buried; but not lost. Nobody's lost, Cleve. Not ever."
"You came here to find him."
"More than find him: make him help me. I knew from the age of ten what I was capable of. Not quite consciously; but I had an inkling. And I was afraid. Of course I was afraid: it was a terrible mystery."
"This mutation: you've always done
it?"
"No. Only known I was capable of it. I came here to make my grandfather tutor me, make him show me how. Even now…" he looked down at his wasted arms,"… with him teaching me… the pain is almost unbearable." "Why do it then?"
The boy looked at Cleve incredulously. "To be not myself; to be smoke and shadow. To be something terrible." He seemed genuinely puzzled by Cleve's unwillingness. "Wouldn't you do the same?"
Cleve shook his head.
“ What you became last night was repellent.”
Billy nodded. “ That's what my grandfather thought. At his trial he called himself an abomination. Not that they knew what he was talking about of course, but that's what he said. He stood up and said: "I am Satan's excrement -”." Billy smiled at the thought." “- for God's sake hang me and burn me." He's changed his mind since then. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes." He looked at Cleve intently. "Don't be afraid," he said. "I won't hurt you, unless you try to tell tales. You won't do that, will you?"
"What could I say that would sound like sanity?" Cleve returned mildly. "No; I won't tell tales." "Good. And in a little while I'll be gone; and you'll be gone. And you can forget."
"I doubt it."
"Even the dreams will stop, when I'm not here. You only share them because you have some mild talents as a sensitive. Trust me. There's nothing to be afraid of."
The city -”
"What about it?"
"Where are its citizens? I never see anybody. No; that's not quite true. I saw one. A man with a knife… going out into the desert…"
"I can't help you. I go as a visitor myself. All I know is what my grandfather tells me: that it's a city occupied by dead souls. Whatever you've seen there, forget about it. You don't belong there. You're not dead yet."
Was it wise to believe always what the dead told you?; were they purged of all deceit by the act of dying, and delivered into their new state like saints? Cleve could not believe such naivetй. More likely they took their talents with them, good and bad, and used them as best they could. There would be shoemakers in paradise, wouldn't there?; foolish to think they'd forgotten how to sew leather.
So perhaps Edgar Tait lied about the city. There was more to that place than Billy knew. What about the voices on the wind?, the man with the knife, dropping it amongst a litter of weapons before moving off to God alone knew where? What ritual was that?
Now – with the fear used up, and no untainted reality left to cling to, Cleve saw no reason not to go to the city willingly. What could be there, in those dusty streets, that was worse than what he had seen in the bunk below him, or what had happened to Lowell and Nayler? Beside such atrocities the city was a haven. There was a serenity in its empty thoroughfares and plazas; a sense Cleve had there that all action was over, all rage and distress finished with; that these interiors (with the bath running and the cup brimming) had seen the worst, and were now content to sit out the millennium. When that night brought sleep, and the city opened up in front of him, he went into it not as a frightened man astray in hostile territory, but as a visitor content to relax a while in a place he knew too well to become lost in, but not well enough to be weary of.
As if in response to this new-found ease, the city opened itself to him. Wandering the streets, feet bloody as ever, he found the doors open wide, the curtains at the windows drawn back. He did not disparage the invitation they offered, but went to look more closely at the houses and tenements. On closer inspection he found them not the paradigms of domestic calm he'd first taken them for. In each he discovered some sign of violence recently done. In one, perhaps no more than an overturned chair, or a mark on the floor where a heel had slid in a spot of blood; in others, the manifestations were more obvious. A hammer, its claw clotted, had been left on a table laid with newspapers. There was a room with its floorboards ripped up, and black plastic parcels, suspiciously slick, laid beside the hole. In one, a mirror had been shattered; in another, a set of false teeth left beside a hearth in which a fire flared and spat. They were murder scenes, all of them. The victims had gone – to other cities, perhaps, full of slaughtered children and murdered friends – leaving these tableaux fixed forever in the breathless moments that followed the crime. Cleve walked down the streets, the perfect voyeur, and peered into scene after scene, reconstructing in his mind's eye the hours that had preceded the studied stillness of each room. Here a child had died: its cot was overturned; here someone had been murdered in their bed, the pillow soaked in blood, the axe on the carpet. Was this damnation then?; the killers obliged to wait out some portion of eternity (all of it, perhaps) in the room they'd murdered in? Of the malefactors themselves he saw nothing, though logic implied that they must be close by. Was it that they had the power of invisibility to keep themselves from the prying eyes of touring dreamers like himself?; or did a time in this nowhere transform them, so that they were no longer flesh and blood, but became part of their cell: a chair, a china doll?
Then he remembered the man at the perimeter, who'd come in his fine suit, bloody-handed, and walked out into the desert. He had not been invisible.
"Where are you?" he said, standing on the threshold of a mean room, with an open oven, and utensils in the sink, water running on them. "Show yourself."
A movement caught his eye and he glanced across to the door. There was a man standing there. He had been there all along, Cleve realized, but so still, and so perfectly a part of this room, that he had not been visible until he moved his eyes and looked Cleve's way. He felt a twinge of unease, thinking that each room he had peered into had, most likely, contained one or more killers, each similarly camouflaged by statis. The man, knowing he'd been seen, stepped out of hiding. He was in late middle-age, and had cut himself that morning as he shaved. "W ho are you?" he said. "I've seen you before. Walking by."
He spoke softly and sadly; an unlikely killer, Cleve thought.
"Just a visitor," he told the man.
"There are no visitors, here," he replied, “only prospective citizens."
Cleve frowned, trying to work out what the man meant. But his dream-mind was sluggish, and before he could solve the riddle of the man's words there were others.
"Do I know you?" the man asked. "I find I forget more and more. That's no use, is it? If I forget I'll never leave, will I?"
"Leave?" Cleve repeated.
"Make an exchange," the man said, re-aligning his toupe.
"And go where?"
"Back. Do it over."
Now he approached Cleve across the room. He stretched out his hands, palms up; they were blistered. "You can help me," he said, "I can make a deal with the best of them."
"I don't understand you."
The man clearly though the was bluffing. His upper lip, which boasted a dyed black moustache, curled. "Yes you do," he said. "You understand perfectly. You just want to sell yourself, the way everybody does. Highest bidder, is it? What are you, an assassin?"
Cleve shook his head. "I'm just dreaming," he replied.
The man's fit of pique subsided. "Be a friend," he said. "I've got no influence; not like some. Some of them, you know, they come here and they're out again in a matter of hours. They're professionals. They make arrangements. But me? With me it was a crime of passion. I didn't come prepared. I'll stay here 'til I can make a deal. Please be a friend."
"I can't help you," Cleve said, not even certain of what the man was requesting.
The killer nodded. "Of course not," he said, "I didn't expect…"
He turned from Cleve and moved to the oven. Heat flared up from it and made a mirage of the hob. Casually, he put one of his blistered palms on the door and closed it; almost as soon as he had done so it creaked open again. "Do you know just how appetising it is; the smell of cooking flesh?" he said, as he returned to the oven door and attempted to close it a second time. "Can anybody blame me? Really?"
Cleve left him to his ramblings; if there was sense there it was probably not worth his labouring o
ver. The talk of exchanges and of escape from the city: it defied Cleve's comprehension.
He wandered on, tired now of peering into the houses. He'd seen all he wanted to see. Surely morning was close, and the bell would ring on the landing. Perhaps he should even wake himself, he thought, and be done with this tour for the night.
As the thought occurred, he saw the girl. She was no more than six or seven years old, and she was standing at the next intersection. This was no killer, surely. He started towards her. She, either out of shyness or some less benign motive, turned to her right and ran off. Cleve followed. By the time he had reached the intersection she was already a long way down the next street; again he gave chase. As dreams would have such pursuits, the laws of physics did not pertain equally to pursuer and pursued. The girl seemed to move easily, while Cleve struggled against air as thick as treacle. He did not give up, however, but pressed on wherever the girl led. He was soon a good distance from any location he recognized in a warren of yards and alleyways – all, he supposed, scenes of blood-letting. Unlike the main thoroughfares, this ghetto contained few entire spaces, only snatches of geography: a grass verge, more red than green; a piece of scaffolding, with a noose depending from it; a pile of earth. And now, simply, a wall. The girl had led him into a cul-de-sac; she herself had disappeared however, leaving him facing a plain brick wall, much weathered, with a narrow window in it. He approached: this was clearly what he'd been led here to see. He peered through the reinforced glass, dirtied on his side by an accumulation of bird-droppings, and found himself staring into one of the cells at Pentonville. His stomach flipped over. What kind of game was this; led out of a cell and into this dream-city, only to be led back into prison? But a few seconds of study told him that it was not his cell. It was Lowell and Nayler's. Theirs were the pictures sellotaped to the grey brick, theirs the blood spread over floor and wall and bunk and door. This was another murder-scene.