Angelmaker (62 page)

The letter is very plain, written on an expensive vellum. It is addressed to Joe, care of Rodney Titwhistle.

There is a PS, in Mercer’s execrable handwriting:
I’m sorry, Joe. It turns out they punch harder than we do
.

The letter is countersigned by all the partners.

Mr. Ordinary smiles. “There’s one from your mother, too.”

He seems to think that’s a victory for his side, which shows a pleasing lack of information about Harriet.

They leave the door to Joe’s cell open. He steps towards it, wondering. A shaft of light beckons him, and any moment he will hear Mercer’s voice. It is all a stratagem. He is free.

When his foot touches the ground outside the cell, it is like stepping on nails, except that he feels the pain through his entire body. He leaps back into the cell, and the door slams.

It opens again, and he doesn’t bother to step through. He realises, a moment later, that they have trained him to imprison himself.

They collect him and strap him on a trolley, then leave him in a different room. It is large and cold, and filled with people on gurneys, just like him, except that they are not restrained.

It takes him ages to realise that the others are not restrained because they are corpses, and even longer to recognise Ted Sholt, slack and waxy, alongside him. Sholt’s head is turned all the way around on his neck.

In the moment after he finally understands, Joe pictures Ted on the chariot of Daniel’s Death Clock, a wild rebel beating the Reaper with a sandal and demanding to be released back to his greenhouse. He smiles. Yes. That’s how it should be.

Except it isn’t. There’s just Ted, and Ted is dead.

Mr. Ordinary has another letter to show him. He seems particularly pleased with himself.

Joe lies on his back and refuses to say anything, and they take him to his tiny white room and cram him in and shock him over and over until he is one solid convulsing muscle. He starts to laugh at them for being so predictable. The pain just makes him laugh more, even when the electrodes run too hot and burn him, but then abruptly he wants it to stop more than he can remember wanting anything, ever. He wants not to laugh at the smell of his own burning skin. He wants not to go mad. Not to join Ted Sholt on the wheel of Daniel’s ridiculous, horrible clock.

Your special attention
.

Daniel, who held the keys to the world.

Special
.

Attention
.

He knows where to find the calibration drum.

He feels something stretch in his chest and then suddenly release,
and hears the crash warning. A strange peace is in him, cold and odd, and he realises he cannot hear his heart.

And then, abruptly, he is not in the cell.

It is as if someone has turned on the lights, and all the shadows have disappeared. The white room is gone. He feels fine. Good, even. A bit bored.

He knows, objectively, that he is experiencing some kind of break. It does not seem a bad thing. He looks down, wondering if there will be grass. When you are held in a cell and your mind snaps, surely you should get grass, and trees, and birds.

“You’re an idiot,” Polly Cradle says.

He stares at her. She wears the clothes in which he first met her, right down to her fishnet-and-varnish toes.

“They showed me your letter.”

“Poppycock. They showed you
a
letter. I certainly didn’t write it.”

“You might have.”

“They lied to you. That is what they do. Joe, look at me. Look at me right now. Look at my face. My eyes.” He does. “I will not leave you. You may try to send me away. But I will not leave, ever. I. Will. Not.”

“Oh.”

“So now you know.”

And even when he goes back to the cell and everything hurts again, it doesn’t matter.

He realises he has begun to say “I’ll tell you.” But things are different now.

You lie. You lie like a bald man in a fur hat. You lie like a rug. You lie, you lie, you lie. You went too far. I see you now. I see all of you
.

You should have said she was dead. Or captive, like me. That she was here. You should have said anything but that
.

You lie. It is what you are
.

You lie
.

Something inside him is burning.

When they come to take him away, he goes placidly, then thinks of the coffin man. The coffin man, who had been completely restrained and yet had somehow been able to hurt them. Who rode out the taser and whatever drugs they give him and was still so dangerous they had to keep him strapped down, and even then could not control him. The coffin man is captive, but he is not imprisoned. And he is an ally.

Joe reaches out sharply and breaks Mr. Ordinary’s nose with his right hand. He hangs on, twists, feeling gristle between his fingers, and blood. Mr. Ordinary screams at him.

“That’s how it’s done,” he tells Mr. Ordinary. “
That’s
how! That’s how it’s done!”

It takes five orderlies to hold him down so that a sixth can sedate him.

As grey rushes in from the edges of the world, he sees that they are afraid.

He wakes, and the aches and bruises are like balm. Up is down and the torturers fear the victim, and that is exactly the world as he wants it. The world of misrule.

He grins to himself and, tasting blood on a split lip, grins wider. There’s a curious beauty in the white walls of his cell: the textureless tiles are fascinating, the dry, tasteless air is a feast on his tongue. He flexes his legs and arms, feels himself, acutely aware of each muscle and its strength, its tolerances, its limits. He scents his own body, feels his ribs and knows that the layer of fat which has rested there for years has gone. He has not broken. He has actually, medically died here. Perhaps more than once, he isn’t sure. And yet he lives. He is more himself than he has ever been. He is the refined essence of himself.

He looks at his life, and sighs at it. There’s a pathos in seeing how foolish he has been, how he has fallen into an obvious trap of bad personal logic, but it’s still a cause for regret. So much wasted time … He follows the track of his error, just to be sure.

Daniel Spork always said that Mathew was no good, that there was never a time when his son was not on the make. He said Mathew was unrestful as a child, and then again as a man. He made no space for the possibility that Mathew’s badness was not a quality which inhered
in him, but rather the outcome of a learning process which began when he was quite small.

Looking down from his new mountaintop, Joe can trace the path quite easily. Mathew was a refugee. Mathew came into a world which was immediately broken. He was without his mother from almost before he could say her name, and when she returned she did so in a strange, half-hearted way, and she—like him—knew that everything about the world he inhabited was wrong at the most basic level. Fundamentally, Mathew could not believe the pleasant fictions which make life within the law palatable to others. He saw a world in a constant state of war. His father was losing money and losing his shop, which was the external manifestation of his self, because he did exactly what society said he should and society was a cheat. Daniel spent much of his life creating more and more wonderful things, a cargo cultist desperately seeking to achieve something so beautiful that his goddess could not resist. Mathew knew better. He watched, and learned, and saw that she came only in response to things most horribly broken.