The gun, thought Swene, where was the gun? It had been under his mattress, then in the kitchen drawer, he'd even driven to work one evening with it shifting in the glovebox, sounding metallic and threatening as he lurched round corners and rolled through bends. He'd taken it out, hidden it under his jacket, and...where? Not behind books or concealed in a pan and not in the fruitbowl or behind the toilet cistern. He searched the chimney flue. He lifted floorboards, sweat coursing down his chin. No luck. He crawled in and inch by inch'd the cupboard under the stairs. Nothing. The gun was missing.
He sat and ruminated an hour, watching TV with the sound down. After all, what could the TV tell him he didn't already know? The shifting picture served as a distraction. A girl was singing in a video, thigh boots slapping thighs, her silver dress like a fish swimming across the screen, sparkling with a million tiny camera flashes.
Swene shook himself. Bounding out of the chair he switched the TV off, grabbed his keys, all the cash he had and his credit cards, ran from his flat to the bus stop and waited there, breath coming in snatches, clouding the Saturday morning air.
The number 1 bus took him into town.
He hadn't heard from Owen or Mickey since the previous weekend and wondered, as the bus jounced over sleeping policemen, snoozing, recumbent in the road, what they’d been up to. Had the graverobbers caught up with his friends? Were they his friends? Yes, he believed so. Anyway, he was stuck with them. And they were out there, he knew, discovering undiscovered alleys and subterranean walkways, engaged in a random exploration of a city at once alien and familiar, huge yet intimate, recognizable in parts and yet always, it appeared, on the brink of change. He sensed these new surroundings. He smelled them, and they smelled alive.
Gunless, Swene studied the houses beyond the glutinous bus window. Redbrick mostly, interspersed with more exotic dwellings of chiselled stone several storeys high. The bus travelled slowly on its circuitous route. The buildings became more complicated. There were fabulous glass castles. There were wretched slums. He spied a Railstation whose name he didn't recognize.
A naked man boarded and sat near the front. The man brought the total number of passengers on the upper deck to four; himself, the man and two middle-aged ladies with large plastic shopping bags. Neither of the women appeared perturbed by the arrival of the pot-bellied creature. He was nothing out of the ordinary in their world. Perhaps they didn't see him at all.
The bus drove past a park Swene knew and he gazed out at the trees, absorbing their leafless branches, their nakedness seasonal. It was odd, he thought, that they could wear less in winter than summer. The man too, now rapping bony fingers off even bonier knees, the sap drained from him and his flesh dormant, come spring to resume once more a youthful hue. For he was old, Swene saw, older than mere years. The man wore the age of dormancy, of patient introspection, sandwiched between earth and sky. Perhaps he rode the bus to pass the time. Youth and vigour lay months away...
There were any number of children in the park, chasing each other and different size balls. They all wore brightly coloured clothing and the balls were patterned and splashed much as they, red and blue and yellow in the clear morning air. There were dogs and squirrels. Waste-baskets alongside paths. A kite that was almost a bird, if only it could break its string, diving and swirling with a skill beyond any tugging arm. Branches raked the roof of the bus, startling him. He looked around and the two women had gone. They must have moved downstairs, he supposed, to alight. And sure enough the bell chimed and the bus glided to a halt by a post-box painted pink.
Swene laughed and thumped the seat. The naked man turned his head briefly. The bus trundled. The park fell behind and everything was beautiful. Swene was delirious. He sat another ten minutes while the bus cruised endlessly and then swung himself upright prior to his exit, his entrance on the other side of pneumatic doors cold and concrete.
The people here were unremarkable, quietly going about their business. Doing as people do. Pedestrians. Head bowed and hands in pockets, he walked in the direction the bus had taken. All he could smell were fumes, car exhausts pumping clouds of vapour as hot gases met cold. The breeze stirring in the street raised the hairs on his arms as it chewed, grazing those dead pores. Swene walked, seeing nothing but feet. Finally he gazed up, and down a lightly peopled boulevard. Spotting what looked like a clothing store he hurriedly closed the gap, feet slapping, arms swinging close to his chest as he advanced briskly on the chrome-fringed doors. Inside was warm and fluffy, apparel hanging on rails and adorning dummies, pinned to display boards and laid flat like corpses, the latest fashions in leather, plastic or natural fibres arrayed for his delight, tempting and tormenting to his chilled flesh as a smiling shop-assistant homed in on his need.
‘Jacket,’ said Swene.
‘Red, yellow, blue, green...’
Swene was having none of it. ‘Something in black.’
The assistant frowned, then pouted disbelievingly. ‘Sir, this is a most colourful store. Our stock is most colourful. We don't have black.’
‘You don't have black?’
‘Sir heard correctly.’
‘Nothing in black?’
‘No items of clothing on these premises, sir. As you can see, strictly colour.’
But how could he acquiesce?
‘Perhaps magenta or navy might suit?’
‘No, no - it has to be neutral. Black.’
The assistant smiled again, forcibly. ‘I'm afraid we can't help you there, sir. Might I suggest an ironmongers?’
Sarcasm?
‘Or a roofers,’ continued the assistant. ‘Sir could be painted with tar. Eminently waterproof.’
Swene peered hard at the man, considering his next move and how not to appear foolish.
The assistant's fingers flapped impatiently. ‘We've got all the colours in the world,’ he said proudly. ‘Wouldn't sir like to try something?’
‘No. No thanks. It has to be black.’
‘And we don't stock it.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No, sir, not so much as a tie. Black isn't a colour.’
‘It isn't?’
‘Quite.’
Swene left hugging his arms, having abandoned his fleece in the store. Outside, the flock overwhelmed, smothering. He held tight to his identity, but it was becoming increasingly fragile, tenuous, like its use-by date was imminent. The boulevard was long and undulating, the cars flowing by steadily. Their drivers and passengers seemed familiar somehow, strangers, nameless, going about their lives, encountering other strangers they knew as friends, making passes and comebacks and coffee and mistakes, some of which might find there way into Swene's life. A driver might let slip the wheel of his car, mounting the kerb and taking Swene out. Killed by a stranger, he thought, how would that feel? The same as being killed by a friend, he guessed, except a friend would be more brutal. No accident. It was impossible to be murdered by a stranger, after all. Deliberate killers possessed deliberate knowledge of their victims, even if that knowledge was fleeting. They knew their subject. Deliberate killing was the most intimate, friendly kind.
He wiped his brow, feeling warmer. A taxi pulled to a stop and he got in, realizing he'd hailed the cab even though the taxi driver was mistaken, requiring a destination from Swene as he chewed gum he hadn’t been chewing just prior and stared via the mirror, which he adjusted. Swene tried to think of an address. He mumbled something and the taxi sped off, filtering back into traffic without so much as a signal.
Other cars made way, melting left and right as the road broadened and the buildings narrowed, bricks and steel rising and in some cases swallowing the carriageway which passed through tunnels that were concourses, public places decorated with huge glass sculptures and lit by streams of varicoloured light, so that it seemed to Swene they drove round the arch of a rainbow. He could see a million faces through the window, each separate, some struggling vainly to merge, others heated, blistered, pocked, lost behind veils
of silk and hair. He sat with his fingers clinging to the lip of the door, a child fascinated by the grown-up world. It was all new to him. They passed under bridges and through tunnels, along tree-lined avenues. They swept down asphalt lanes and crushed slick motorways, the rubber of the tyres soundless on the pristine surface or thumping over cobbles as the taxi wound behind terraces and came to a stop outside a crude gate with the number 17 hanging at an angle, badly nailed. It was, Swene saw, his mother's home. But would she be? Hadn't she been dead eleven years? In fact this entire street had been demolished when he was sixteen. He searched the front of the taxi for a meter. The driver twisted in his seat and invited him to disembark. No longer chewing but smoking a cigar.
It was free. Swene alighted. He opened the gate and narrowly avoided stepping in some dog shit. The back door was open and he entered a kitchen full of cooking smells. There was a pack of cigarettes on the table along with a half empty cup of tea. The radio was playing.
The living-room smelled of dog hair and newspaper. It was deserted. There was a bottle top lying on the hall carpet. A shoe, one of his own, had given up halfway up the stairs and looked desperate. He carried it the rest of the way, depositing it near the bathroom door. The bathroom smelled of thyme. Swene unzipped his jeans and pissed in the bowl. The sound reverberated round the small tiled space and he smiled at the memory of it. His parents' room was tidied and aired, the floral curtains protruding like tongues into the air beyond. His brother's room was bare. His own? He hesitated outside the door. The image of it, quaintly boyish, model aeroplanes and a collection of beer cans, dissuaded entry. Who knew what might be lurking within? Some memories were best left undisturbed, like the family dog, old Farter whose favourite chair was always the one you were sitting in. Swene returned to his brother's room at the front of the house and gazed out into the street. There were a few cars and a young girl riding a tricycle, her red coat reminding Swene of his cold bones. Opening a cupboard he found what he needed, his brother's bike jacket scuffed and stygian, the zippers steel. Swene had envied this jacket from an early age, envied the associated machine, envied the elder sibling whose tools these were, the bike's noise and the jacket's blackness. A seemingly sure-fire route into generous amounts of frillies. It smelled of perfume.
A door slammed. He could hear somebody moving about downstairs. The sound of their return caused his stomach to flutter with excitement, then pain. His family were dead and buried with the exception of his father; but he was scant remembered. The cigarettes had killed his mother, their knowledge of her great and intimate. And his brother had died on the road, his jacket scant protection against the reinforced underbelly of a bomb and bullet-proof limousine. But such was fate and history, the two entangled like lovers on a beach of broken glass.
Swene, choosing his moment, turned up his new collars and retired via the stairs and the front door, closing it with both careful hands.
He ran to the Railstation and took the first train into town.
The Round Box
Approximately halfway up the wall, hanging sufficiently free that it shaded the wallpaper, was a portrait of the distinguished gentleman. He wore a moustache and his eyes followed Mickey about a room whose wood panels and heavy furniture offered the impression of a jungle but not the cover. He squirmed and smoked irritably, a hangover in his bones. Owen was leaning out the window, his attention to forty stories of fresh air slowly understood by his comrade, who joined him dozily.
‘If you threw-up now,’ said Owen, ‘you could take out half the building, not to mention the passers-by.’
‘They'd pass in their hundreds,’ Mickey concurred.
‘But that would be spreading it too thinly.’
‘Yeah...’
‘What we want is concentration,’ Owen affirmed. ‘And money.’
‘Money,’ said Mickey. ‘How much are we asking?’
‘It's government, so plenty.’
A door opened behind them.
The two turned and stepped away from the window.
‘Ah, gentlemen. Please, be seated.’
They sat.
‘I must say you come highly recommended.’
‘We're the best,’ Mickey said.
‘Just so. But have you the patience?’
‘Excuse me?’ inquired Owen, thumbing an ashtray, blackening his nail.
‘This is a baby-sitting job, gentlemen; not necessarily your cup of tea.’
Owen and Mickey exchanged glances.
Owen said, ‘Lay it on the table. A job's a job. But we baby-sit at a premium.’
The man nodded. ‘I understand. You'll be amply rewarded.’
Mickey wanted to hear numbers.
‘Half a million.’
Owen and Mickey exchanged glances, the latter fidgeting.
Owen said, ‘Okay, we'll do it. Reluctantly, but we'll do it.’
‘Good. The house and its occupier are in Mountfield. You know it? Or of it?’
They nodded.
‘Good. There's a car waiting for you in the basement. The best of luck, gentlemen.’
They stood and left, hands in pockets till they reached the elevator.
‘Is this as big as it smells?’ quizzed Mickey.
‘I certainly hope so.’
‘I've never been to Mountfield.’
‘They say it's nice.’
‘Yeah, swimming pools and loose women.’
‘All you can eat.’
‘And vegetables that are symmetrical.’
‘We can sunbathe.’
‘Of course, it'll be sunny up there.’
The steel doors opened and they stepped into the steel box. There were other portraits of the distinguished gentleman on the four flat walls.
Poses.
‘Now that,’ commented Owen, ‘is a face you can trust.’
‘I'd trust that face like my uncle.’
‘The one you gibbeted?’
‘Maybe. I've two uncles.’
Owen laughed. ‘You had two uncles!’
‘No, I still have, only one's in aunt Eleanor's freezer.’
The elevator dropped gently to the basement.
‘When we get up there,’ posed Owen, ‘what's the first thing you're going to do?’
Mickey thought. Then, ‘Make a sandwich.’
The car was an inconspicuous hatchback with a briefcase on the front passenger seat full of money.
‘What kind?’
‘Cheese and onion.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘And beer.’
Owen lit a cigarette. ‘No beer.’
‘Okay; too risky.’
‘Right. We're professionals.’
‘A little wine maybe.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It's all here.’
‘And we're here.’
‘Up the ladder to Mountfield.’
‘And business.’
‘Business...’
Mickey drove, his tie loosened, his gonads cramped, his new shoes on the pedals. Owen insisted they make a good impression, and it had worked, but the unfamiliar clothes made him hanker for less complicated days. It was a two hour drive to the first rung of the ladder. The roadside security increased with each passing mile. They drove through scanners onto the wide shiny platform and continued upward at a steady thirty-five as the lock gates closed behind. The ladder was three hundred metres across, one hundred percent sealed, its opaque walls emanating a waxy sheen. Messages and instructions were relayed to them via a voiceless computer. They were not to smoke or exceed the speed limit. They were on no account to stop or leave their vehicle. Their security clearance was under constant review and might be revoked at any time.
The rungs numbered six. Owen and Mickey sighed on reaching the exit.
They lit up. Mountfield was resplendent, manicured, evocative, impressive. The twosome admired the gardens of the houses in a way they hadn't admired gardens b
efore, or even noticed the magnificence of grass and bushes. They opened the windows and smelled the breeze, wondering what danger could possibly exist here. But it was their sworn mission to defend the life of the distinguished gentleman, whose fabulous abode they neared, a bungalow of not immodest proportions, its roof red tiled and its walls the white of snow. Irregular shaped openings broke the clean sweep of the walls, these openings framed by shutters painted the same blue as the sky.
Mickey pulled onto the driveway and drove till he could see a door. Theirs was the only vehicle outside the house. Owen stepped out onto crisp pink gravel and slipped his sunglasses over his eyes.
‘I think we've landed.’
Mickey alighted minus his cigarette. He too donned sunglasses and together they approached the portal.
The door stood ajar, a thin dark line separating its mating parts. They could hear no noise, so listened longer, too nervous to knock. Mickey eased back his jacket and palmed the cool metal heel of his automatic. Owen let his cigarette fall, marking the perfect tiles.
‘After you.’
‘Maybe he's expecting us,’ Mickey said.
‘Naturally. Or someone who looks like us.’
Mickey pushed open the door and entered, his body language treating the bungalow like an unfamiliar and disreputable bar. Owen wasn't far behind. Together they circled furniture and made careful scrutiny of the distinguished gentleman's residence. The man himself was absent. There was no sign of a struggle, or of anybody having lived here recently. The place was spotlessly clean, no dust, everything from vases to the grand piano in harmony with its surroundings, perfectly balanced, each item of furniture, every picture and ornament complementing its neighbour as well as those objects and features across the room. Nothing jarred. Everything was in good taste. All fittings and cupboards were manufactured and installed to the most exacting standards. Their contents too, whether collectable or comestible, were scrupulously arranged and chosen. The eggs in the fridge were white and gorgeous, as were the porcelain cups and saucers. Leather bound volumes filled one whole wall; ancient; priceless; yet as new. They even smelled new, Mickey found, the print sharp and the pages virginal. He stood on a coffee-table and ran his fingers round the rim of a lampshade, but found no dirt. It was as if the very air was pure, timeless and uncorrupted by so much as foul language, bearing neither pollutants or germs. It was, Mickey thought, like Heaven.
‘Now what do we do?’
He stepped off the coffee-table.
‘Can you see a phone?’
‘Kitchen,’ he replied.
Owen went looking.
Mickey walked down a corridor past six bedrooms and stepped out onto a golf course.
Approaching aboard an electric golf cart was the unmistakable countenance of the distinguished gentleman, his eyes crystal clear, his features chiselled, his moustache immaculately groomed.
Owen laid a hand on Mickey's shoulder. ‘Phone's out of order.’
Mickey didn't care, he was focused.
Owen watched too.
Who did he want to call anyway?
The distinguished gentleman's golf cart rolled to a halt two feet from the marble veranda.
Both men removed their shades in the sunshine, stowing them in breast pockets in a rehearsed reflex of politeness. Their host was smiling, setting at peace his guests. Owen and Mickey shook his stony hand in turn and nodded.
‘Good to see you, boys,’ said the distinguished gentleman. ‘How was the trip up? Your first outing on the ladder?’
‘Yes,’ Mick answered.
‘The trip was fine,’ added Owen.
‘Sir?’
‘Call me Egon, son, my mother does.’
‘Egon,’ said Mickey. ‘Your door was open on our arrival.’
‘Sure, my door's always open.’
Mickey shuffled, feeling young and inexperienced next to this politician and statesman.
‘I think what my partner means, Egon,’ Owen clarified, looping his thumbs in his belt loops like John Wayne, ‘is that your security appears lax. We're here to protect you. Make no mistake about that. It's just, well, our job would be a lot easier if you'd take these threats to your life seriously.’
‘Threats, son?’ Egon produced a cigar and lit it. ‘You mean toward the man himself, the chief administrator of this splendid and diverse superenvironment we call Ileum?’
Something was dawning on our heroes.
‘Yeah,’ said Mickey.
Egon clamped his teeth round the cigar, fat and fuming, his fists clenched on his hips with indignity. ‘So that's why the turd's in hiding. I impersonate him on a casual basis; you know, weekends mostly. Lately though I've being putting in a lot of overtime, even attending the odd official banquet. They'll be asking me to sign stuff next! I didn't realize his people were that worried. Must be a shit load of trouble.’
Mickey rushed back to the car to make sure of the money.
Owen slipped his shades back on and lit two cigarettes off Egon's cigar, handing one to Mick on his return, breathless but happy.
‘Any beer in this establishment?’
‘Sure, plenty,’ said the impostor, now looking slack-jawed and portly.
They played cards by the swimming-pool and sank the empties, turning the water green with reflected bottles.
Toward evening, as the artificial light began to soften, they scoured the kitchen and made sandwiches.
‘Not bad, eh?’ said Egon. Then, in a room filled with animal trophies, he paused over the billiard table, plush and velvet. ‘Hey, you boys really want to see something?’
They both agreed they did and followed their host to one of the lesser bedrooms, its silk and taffeta languid and flowing. Egon shouldered aside a wardrobe hewn from ebony to reveal an arched doorway the same quiet blue as the walls. Proud of the secret that was his to expose he turned the inset handle slowly, his tongue pushed behind his bottom lip and his mouth open. Beyond stretched a dim corridor that had no place in reality, being fully thirty metres long, a hundred times the depth of the wall into which it was constructed. At the end of the corridor was an ornate table and on the table a large box; only not a box, a sphere, a dark globe whose dimensions gave you a headache.
‘Of course it's all an illusion,’ Egon told them, and to prove it he reached in and lifted the box from the table.
The box-sphere was not as large as it appeared.
Was not a box.
‘It gets heavier the longer you hold it,’ said Egon. ‘I've seen the man himself climb inside.’
‘Inside what?’ queried Mickey.
‘Who knows - maybe the planet.’ He smirked, juggling it from palm to palm like it was burning hot, clumsily pretending to drop it.
Owen let his ash fall to the carpet. ‘Put it back.’ Who did he think they were, his grandchildren?
‘Hurting your eyes?’
‘Just put it back.’
Egon returned the object to the table and closed the door.
Owen fell on the bed, drawing his pistol as he reclined via gravity.
‘Don't shoot any holes in the ceiling!’ Egon pleaded. ‘It's just been painted.’
‘Get the fuck out. I'm sleeping.’
‘Sleeping?’ said Mickey.
‘Dead right. I suggest we all do.’
Egon nodded vigorously. ‘Sure, sure; morning will come quicker and I like to get nine holes in before breakfast.’
Mickey watched him scuttle from the room. ‘What's the problem?’ he asked his partner, assiduously rubbing one eye.
Owen sat up. ‘I think we're in deep shit.’
‘So? I don't get it.’
‘I don't believe Egon is who he says he is.’
‘Then who is he?’
‘Who we thought he was originally, that's who. The fucking genuine article. The chief administrator. The most powerful individual in the city. The mayor of Ileum. The genius behind this fairytale ki
ngdom and the master of all he surveys. Only trouble is, he's fucking crazy.’
Mickey didn't say anything. He was experiencing some - snap! crackle! pop! - interference.
‘We're here to fulfil our destinies,’ continued Owen. ‘We're been placed here for a purpose. Manipulated.’ He scratched his chin, feet in the air like a chimpanzee.
‘Are you suggesting there's a power vacuum among the higher echelons of privileged society and that we are merely pawns in someone else's chess game? Because if you are I'm comfortable with that and happy with the money,’ said Mick, surprised a little by the sentence. Such profundities were way over his head.
‘Really happy?’
‘Well, it's exciting.’
‘Better than killing wrongbodies?’
‘Yeah. For now at least. And anyway, there's bound to be some shooting.’
Owen smirked and grunted. ‘Checked your clip lately?’
Mickey checked.
‘No bullets.’
‘Hmm,’ said Mick.
‘The ceiling is safe then.’
For the two it was a strangely awkward moment, one to be shot from oblique angles with a cathartic absence of theme music, the camera slowly panning round as the intrepid pair silently reaffirmed their principles. They’d come a long way, this suggested. The movie was more than a theatre-going experience, it was for real. Ileum was for real. For false, possibly, too.
‘We need to get out of here,’ said Mickey, feeling a downer coming on.
But as a twosome or a threesome? Right now they were sitting ducks, dupes installed in the distinguished gentleman's residence as live targets for the sharpshooters poised to come to the rescue. Nobody watching TV would recognise them as anything more than lead-deserving villains, fleshy pouches whose blood and guts would be splattered across billions of hungry retinae, their obliteration and the saving of the distinguished gentleman providing a tasty and very public nine o'clock news filling.
ANARCHIST PLOT SMASHED! BIG CHIEF RESCUED FROM CERTAIN DEATH BY SELF-SACRIFICING POLICEMEN!
Owen and Mickey would be expected to play their full part in the charade.
But overtly?
Not so.
They made their minds up. They wouldn't go quietly. Or maybe they would.
‘Here, put this in your pocket.’
‘Ugh, it's heavy!’
‘So's that case of money in the car, but you'd carry that, right?’
Mickey shrugged. ‘I'd give the lot for some live ammunition.’
Owen agreed. He closed the door in the wall and with Mick's help slid the wardrobe back in place.
Outside the sun dimmed like a cooling bulb. Darkness emphasized the room lights and Owen reached for the switch.
‘That's our cue.’
There was no way out. It was scripted. But they were undaunted. They'd improvise. A trawl of the house turned up a number of well-balanced steak knives and several lengths of what Owen's mum would call “good meat string”.
Egon was roused from slumber and trussed like a turkey before being fastened to Mickey's back in a papoose made out of cut and torn cushion covers. The distinguished gentleman's surprise was comforting, suggesting as it did they were on the right track in regards to their paranoid thinking. Mickey found the weight uncomfortable but not overburdening. Balance was a problem, otherwise his load, gagged as it was, was manageable for, he reckoned, up to thirty minutes.
The intrepid pair mused over the money. They agreed it would be foolish to try and retrieve it from the car. One or the other would be booby-trapped. On the other hand, why go to the trouble of explosively rigging either cash or car when maximum TV gore would come from an open confrontation? Say five guys in peaked caps bursting in through the windows spraying the place with high-velocity bullets. Or one guy, good looking in a clean-shaven Aryan way, casually strolling through the front door with a news crew, a female reporter with a phallic mike and tight blonde hair, big eyes, taking out Owen and Mickey with his bare hands to the sound of bones breaking and throats being crushed in a subtle medley of understated violence, with her saying, ‘I almost can't look.’
It made the car appear a safe bet.
Owen panicked briefly over the whereabouts of the keys, but Mickey was only joking.
His burden began to struggle. He adjusted it. The box in his jacket pocket had seemingly melted away, its previously exaggerated weight now no more than loose change.
Owen appeared in the darkened portal and waved him through, Mickey managing to strike Egon's head off the lintel. Outside everything was at peace. No helicopters flew. No special services personnel ran guns blazing from the topiary. It was cool. Pleasantly so. Mickey clambered into the back of the car and Owen drove round the bungalow whose white walls cast deep shadows. There was no predetermined route to their escape. Getting to the car was as much as they'd planned. But steering into the depths of the golf course seemed as good an idea as any. And that was where Owen took them, dancing with trees in the moonlight and leaving a trail of broken foliage.
Mickey stared out the rear window. After a few seconds he saw moving lights.
‘Company,’ he alerted, stroking his polished chin.
Owen drove blind.
Their hostage dribbled.
A Vision Of The Future
Night was full of clouds. Thorp wished to scratch their soft underbellies and have them roll over like cats before a fire. But the Ventura wouldn’t take him so high. Pa's locomotive, on the other hand, had the potential to climb up onto the starry mantelpiece and from there survey the length, breadth and depth of the firelit room. The two men shared a desire for escape, and in escaping, discovering the truth of the world, that truth lying beyond gravity and atmosphere in the colourless, odourless void.
Venus was Pa's goal. Thorp only wanted to be dropped off on the moon, his mistress silver and grey.
Circling over the city at night, he sensed its unnatural quiet, the gentle anguish of suicides banished, the sudden shriek of accidents muffled by their absence as everybody drove home safely. Palmersville was at peace. Ileum, too, the former enmeshed in the latter, like a facet of a glitterball. Thorp was resident in both, his beginnings distant, yet possible to call back, memories he had had no use for for decades. All but the apple tree were dusty having spent the intervening years packed into boxes in his subconscious.
He lit a Woodbine and draped his arm out the window. Below, rising like smoke, was a thin white coil corkscrewing upward. Soon the thread passed the car and climbed until it met the slowly moving clouds. And where there was one thread twisting up into the night, there were others. A few at first, then tens, a hundred white strands unravelling from the city beneath and joining with the misty roof overhead. Carefully he steered the Ventura through the growing forest. Each separate strand swayed loosely, a soft curl gently pulsing with light.
What lay at their source? Thin tentacles suspended between clouds and buildings, Thorp had never seen anything like them before. They were a new phenomenon. He steered the car to a terrestrial road and parked, alighting to investigate. Not recognizing the neighbourhood he paused a while to get his bearings. There were few people afoot, but he paid these special regard. None seemed aware of the threads rising above. Mostly they were contented couples, walking arm in arm. All appeared happy. Enraptured. He entered a tenement block and choose a flat at random. Access was easy; he hadn't lost his talents, just his customers. The flat was deathly quiet. Thorp smiled and walked into a bedroom, a child's bedroom, toys on the floor and heroes pasted to the walls. A thread coiled from a young girl, rising to the ceiling. At first he thought she must be dead, that the collection of souls had, unknown to him, become automated. The girl breathed, however.
Thorp watched, puzzled. Time alone passed. The child sat up and he thought he’d woken her. But no, the girl's eyes were shut. She was asleep.
The base of the twisting thread encompassed her small body, wrapping her
in its warm glow. It became suddenly taut and she was lifted from her bed, her arms folded and her features beatific. She bobbed as if held in a thin plastic sack below the ceiling, before being drawn through it like an olive up a straw. Thorp took the stairs, running from floor to floor and entering the rooms above hers to see the girl emerge through carpets and furniture, ascending at a constant rate no matter the obstacle. He got to the roof and spun around, amazed to see that every thread had a body at its end, a dangling bundle of soft white light. The dead were being rescued, he thought. Only not the dead. They were, he guessed, heading for a better world, a world of respite. Where? Thorp couldn't say. Helpless, he watched the girl ascend through the roof and slowly rise, drawn upward into the clouds as if plucked from time. It was beautiful.
Could Hell be far behind? Had it already arrived? Was that what was sneaking up, the precincts of the dead percolating through the as yet unscalded beans of the living?
Thorp lay flat on his back and watched as hundreds of lives disappeared into the sky. He wondered what Byamol would make of it, of what the demon would do for souls now that death had been circumvented, not even leaving a corpse behind. Call it progress? He guessed not.
Automation? That didn’t ring true, either. There was another purpose here. It was as if there was a general recall of angels; like embassy staff evacuated before a war. Angels, he imagined, no-one - certainly not himself - had known existed previously.
Representatives on Earth...
The Honest Adventurers
It began snowing around the twelfth hole. Owen slid and slewed on the immaculate putting surface. Deliberately, Mickey thought, hunched in the back observing tracer red-streaking the firmament, splashing dramatically wide. They really weren't trying, he concluded. A tree exploded in their wake as if cleverly timed. It was a stunt they were filming, a complex series of near misses and pyrotechnic rain. Owen had no idea where he was driving; but it didn't matter so long as the over-staffed pursuit continued to target fresh air and leaves.
Then the car hit a bunker and sank, sand covering the front drive wheels.
‘Shit!’ Owen shouted. His door was stuck. He clambered out the window as a searchlight tickled the vehicle. Opening the rear hatch he helped Mickey out over the parcel shelf. The distinguished gentleman's head sagged alarmingly.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay - I think.’ Mickey juggled steak knives, snowflakes and lasers glinting off their toothed blades.
‘Okay...’ repeated Owen as the two ran for cover.
They'd been set up. Even the weather was against them. Blood against a backdrop of snow, corpses silhouetted...
Owen kicked in a door to a single storey building for the use of greenkeeping equipment.
‘Siege?’ queried Mick, crashing inward.
‘Fuck that,’ Owen replied. ‘Start digging.’
Mickey dug, and waited to be told why.
‘There can't be too much earth between us and the actual superstructure. Perhaps only a few centimetres of topsoil. Then we just have to find a way into whatever office space or service tunnel we encounter. They must run the length and breadth of Mountfield.’
Administrative cells.
Function suites catering to visiting generals.
Discussion rooms and lecture theatres.
Private cinemas.
Toilets.
Mickey dug with a fury, Egon lolling on his back while he attacked the dirt floor with tools and machinery.
‘COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!’
‘That's it, we're surrounded.’
‘RELEASE YOUR HOSTAGE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED!’
At least the searchlights let them see what they were doing.
‘YOU HAVE EXACTLY THREE MINUTES TO SURRENDER!’
‘Perfect,’ remarked Owen. ‘We made the commercial break. From here on it's easy.’
Mickey redoubled his excavation efforts, tearing the earth apart with his bare hands.
The minutes passed. There was a final crackle of static. The pickaxe Owen wielded screeched through metal. Smiling maniacally he levered it back and forth like a giant tin-opener.
Smoke grenades made the building suddenly inhospitable.
Mickey dropped through the hole. Owen followed, breaking his ankle; yet he remained optimistic. ‘Probably not as bad as it looks,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Come on.’
Mickey stopped. ‘We forgot the money,’ he said.
They were in a square passage lined with doors, some closed, some open.
‘No we didn't,’ said Owen.
‘You brought it with you?’
‘No, I left it behind.’
‘On purpose?’
‘Of course not on purpose!’
Mickey nodded, picked Owen up and started off down the passage, his limbs imbued with a peculiar energy. The combined weights of the men were easily bearable, he found. He simply focused on the way ahead, not stopping till he met with a wall that housed an elevator.
He was superhuman.
The elevator shaft, like the car, was invisible. They descended amid weather, encapsulated in a two metre square box whose dimensions were street lit and rain splashed.
They'd escaped.
Comeuppance
‘You didn't think you'd get away with it, did you?’
Portentous words. Thorp smiled. He wasn’t about to deny anything. Byamol picked his teeth a while before continuing. ‘The reason I'm unhappy, Thorp, is that I'm surrounded by treachery.’
But you're a demon, a high-ranking fiend, he wanted to say but couldn't.
‘I don't like it when the predictable becomes unpredictable. I don't like it at all. I prefer everything neat and tidy. You understand? Order. I like order. I want order, Thorp, and what you have brought about is disorder.’
‘But, but...’
‘No buts.’ Byamol's grey fingers tightened at the throat of Thorp's trenchcoat, the misshapen knuckles staring him in the face. ‘I hold you personally responsible.’
‘Me? Why?’ His back was to the wall.
The demon picked his teeth once more, squirming a long nail between sharp incisors as if tightening screws. Or oiling a portcullis. Drool hung from his pocked chin like mozzarella. His free hand dropped, only to rise in a fist. ‘The missing soul, Thorp. You let her go, didn't you?’
He nodded.
‘I thought so. The filthy priests got to you, eh?’
He nodded a second time.
Byamol slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Thought as much. Well…see you around!’
‘You're letting me go?’ Thorp asked, incredulous, burning his lips, his cigarette end poker hot.
Byamol offered a quizzical look. ‘Sure - why not? I've a sinner or two to fry before breakfast. And besides, I like you. There's history between us, eh?’
Thorp shrugged. Alone, he rocked on his heels, hands in his pockets, staring up at the stars. The sky was clear now. Gone were the clouds, their airy bellies full of the blessed. No souls littered the ground. No souls occupied his back seat. The Ventura's boot was empty of expensive lacy treats.
He put his sunglasses on and walked to the nearest pub.
Reality Takes A Beating
Fifteen minutes, pondered Nancy, what can I do for fifteen minutes that will take my mind off being bored? It was absurd, she knew; even felt a little ashamed. How could waiting in a graveyard in the dead of night for a known killer leave you bored? But the fact remained. Waiting was tedious, yet she'd thought it wise to arrive early. This meeting was on Mingis' terms. She didn't want to lose him. Her involvement was deep, deeper still with the appearance of Henry Eels. She'd guessed he'd be here. Their paths were undeniably crossed. Whether he had been joking about the picnic was another matter. She was certain his evening had been spent in criminal pursuit of the dread brothers, one or either destined to turn up in ten or so minutes. It was frustrating. She clasped her coat tightly round her waist and lurked in
the shadows of the church, its structure circular and buttressed by centuries of ghosts.
‘You're early,’ he said.
‘So are you.’
‘You got my note?’
Nancy tried to make out his features in the dark. ‘What note?’
‘Ah.’
‘Now you're going to ask me how come I knew where to meet you.’
‘Right. How come?’
‘Another source.’
‘Mysterious.’
‘Very. But you know him, or of him.’
‘Ah.’
‘Well?’
‘Huh?’
‘Did you bring the picnic?’ she joked, enjoying their frivolous tête-à-tête.
He was silent a moment. Then, ‘I left it in the car.’
‘Oh.’
‘Hm?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Sssh!’
Nancy shushed and listened. What she heard sounded very like a scream. For the first time that night she shivered. ‘That was near.’
Henry said nothing. He tugged her sleeve and left her side, giving her no choice but to follow.
He was carrying a video camera, she realized. He ran at a crouch as if ducking gunfire, head up, lens to his right eye, infra red scanning the bleakness. The closest street light was a mile away. She caught up with him by an iron gate in an iron fence.
‘See anything?’
‘No.’
‘There's five minutes yet.’
Together they circled the church, the hands of whose clock swung steadily vertical. No bells rang from the tower, but she knew it was twelve when the ground shook and the graves opened.
Henry filmed attentively.
Most of the dead were insubstantial, hazy ghouls, shapeless and without direction as they walked into each other, through each other. But two shapes were more coherent, broad and solid men whose features, although cowled in darkness, shone with a dull grey malevolence carved from the weight of years. The ghouls faded into the night like steam, but the brothers remained.
They were the image of one another. Stood side by side they were impossible to tell apart. Nancy peered intently from her vantage by the church wall, the two figures framed against a less dark sky. The chill outlined them, loaned them definition, till at last their faces could be seen, grim and cold, yet with a depth to their matched visages that spoke of hidden yearnings. There was more to these two than murder. More to the brothers than death dealing and mutual loathing. More than that driving force. Nancy blinked and lost one of them, his shape dissolving. The remainder, she couldn't say which, walked toward her and passed her wearing a dirty jacket and jeans. Henry panned, swivelling smoothly on his heel, the red light flashing on his camera as wordlessly he dogged the killer's heels.
That he would kill, and horribly, was to Nancy obvious. That he demanded an audience was repulsive. Still, she followed, intrigued. Perhaps Mingis, this or his brother, whichever they trailed, merely wished to confess his guilt, for his crimes to be borne out on film. Nancy guessed him to be the Mingis who resented his brother's enjoyment of the bloodfest, the Mingis she had first encountered on the quay, brooding over the river like a suicide. Had she met the other? She didn't know. It didn't matter. She walked in the wake of this Mingis now, Henry calmly recording his passage as you might that of a bride down the aisle. Or a convict to the gallows...a passage specific, yet full of unknowns, promises, expectations and fears weighing the body of the subject on whom the camera was trained.
Mingis knew fear, Nancy thought. He breathed it.
Did he feel it also? That question remained.
‘So just how did you two meet?’ Henry inquired, his posture balanced, his manner casual.
Nancy, at his shoulder, wondered how he could talk, walk and film at the same time.
‘You're enjoying this, aren't you?’ she replied, crossing her arms.
‘I'd be insane otherwise,’ said Henry. ‘How else do you cope with following murderous psychopaths in the dark? Our friend here might have us for breakfast, a fact which I'm sure hasn't escaped your attention, just as it hasn't escaped mine.’
‘That's as may be,’ Nancy answered, smiling. ‘I don’t have any choice though. I’m here because I have to be. You understand. Opportunities like this don’t come along every day and I’m sure as fuck not going to miss this one.’ She spoke with conviction, yet remained unconvinced, adding, almost apologetically, clothing it in humour, ‘This piece might even bag me an award.’
‘Your motives are selfish,’ he observed, not looking at her, fidgeting as they reached a bend in the narrow road. Ancient walls rose either side. They passed a series of park benches bolted to the pavement, interspersed with overflowing litter baskets. Several large rats scampered nearby.
Nancy found her whereabouts strange. ‘No more selfish than yours, mister documentary film maker. I'm sure there are awards for such productions, too.’
‘Yeah,’ he quipped, wondering if it was empathy he was feeling - so long since he’d experienced an emotion not directly attributable to her, ‘it's all fame and fortune, baby.’
‘Wild nights and parties.’
‘Too much to drink.’
‘Too little to say...’
Mingis had halted. Henry employed his zoom from ten metres.
There were steps leading down under a stone arch, worn at their centres by centuries of feet. To the right was a small open space, the hillside terraced and planted with stunted trees. To the left was newer brick, and a doorway barely visible.
Mingis took hold of the handle. Nancy glanced back the way they'd come, but despite her memory of the distance as short she could no longer see the church, which should have been uphill from here. Instead, rising on the horizon like blunt square fingers, was a row of high-rise office blocks, structures, in scale at least, not native to Palmersville. Monoliths of a post-industrial age, they impaled the sky, sharp ends buried deep in the naked flesh of space.
Very dramatic, she thought. Almost surreal. But that they were solid she was in no doubt. Which begged a question...
Henry edged forward.
Mingis appeared to wait till the whole door was in frame before turning the handle.
Nancy tip-toed, breath held as the door swung inward to reveal a golden-lit passageway made summery by floral wallpaper. Old photographs were suspended from brass hooks on long pieces of frayed string.
Mingis stepped inside, leaving the door open for them to follow.
Henry needed no second invitation. He picked his way carefully down the steps and into the house.
Nancy, her curiosity whetted, her uncertainty pushed aside, was as close behind as it was possible to get without interfering with the video's field of reference, that field now sloping upward in the guise of thickly carpeted stairs. A banister rail creaked under Mingis' heavy hand as he moved deeper into the house.
Who might the victim be? Could she stomach the proximity of violent death? Could she be, would she be, a party to murder? The whole episode was illusory. But they were solid, these three interlopers approaching a rendezvous with murder.
She rode Henry's ankles up the steep flight.
Wouldn’t now be a good time to call the police?
Mingis turned left.
Hers wasn't a sexual excitement; the opposite of that. Nor a professional one, the blood and guts of her job. These were not events she could factually write about.
Then why was she here? Research? She recalled the image of the office blocks, magnificent and strong. It was the city she was interested in, the city from whose ancient earth he had sprung. She felt at home here. She belonged. The city welcomed her with open arms.
What kind of a place was it? A place she knew intuitively, feared and loved.
The wallpaper coating the landing walls emphasized its narrowness. Yellowed bars were entwined by thin stalks of faded gold that led to metallic leaves and tired crimson blooms. Th
e bars created a dim channel along which they moved, a deep forest path, Mingis at their van closing in on a door old and warped in its frame. He came to rest with its knotted wood panels two inches from his nose. Henry and Nancy stopped behind, the vertical bars solidifying, the flowers and thorns, which was all the leaves were, tight and sharp, seeming to spread and grow as if at the passage of time. Perhaps Sleeping Beauty lay within, Nancy mused, a somnolent princess, hair combed and nightdress virginal, a cross at her bare throat, a steady rhythm in her chest that was unbroken for centuries, while the forest nestled thickly outside her door. Perhaps she awaited her prince, and a kiss. But it was a troll making ingress, a beast of crueller appetites, a nightmarish figure come to rend her tissue and suck her blood. And they were two feet behind this monster, the thick saliva of guilt in their throats.
Mingis opened the door. A draught escaped, a perfumed river of air that confirmed this to be a woman's chamber. No surprise, reasoned Nancy coolly. Murdered girls, beautiful girls, were so much more newsworthy than murdered boys. Would he rape her? Was this to be a sex crime? She felt sure the meat would be choice for his banquet. The choicer the meat the starker the remorse in the glutton. But which brother loomed here? For one would celebrate the act while the other mourn.
Part Two: THE MOTHER METROPOLIS
Chapter Four: Those Demonstrative Urges And Spontaneous Laughs