UV light in the ceiling, nothing else; that uncomfortable blue that hurt your eyes, the brain aware that more was hitting the retina than it could understand. I walked down the corridor, found the manager’s office; it was empty, papers and cash, mostly cash, strewn over the desk. I kept walking, found a flight of stairs, the sound crashing on my ears,
deDUM deDUM deDUM
. . .
A door at the bottom of the flight of stairs. Above it a sign read, “Boom Boom - Executive Officer. By appointment only.”
It was not our place to question a name like “Boom Boom”. After all, you can’t run a nightclub and be called Leslie.
I looked over my shoulder; no one behind, no one in front. I knocked, but my knuckles were a nothing in the din, so, I opened the door.
The room inside was UV blue. The great semicircular arc of the sofa bed was blue, the floor was blue, the walls were blue, blue lights were hung from a blue ceiling and the two goons standing inside the door with blood trickling down from their shattered eardrums were lit up blue by the reflection of all that blueness. They caught me as I came in, grabbed my arms, pushed me back against the door as it slammed behind me. I looked into a pair of young faces, boys, spotty and greasy and pale, dressed in hoodies and fashionable trainers. Their blood looked purple in the light where it had pooled in their eardrums and dribbled down the sides of their necks, the capillaries stood out gleaming from the wide sockets of their eyes, their faces were empty of all feeling. Our instinct to hurt them faded at the sight of those faces; two walking hunks of deafened meat guarding the door, two kids who’d never hear again; it seemed pointless to set their blood on fire now.
We let them pull and shove and generally manhandle us into the middle of the room, pleased at not killing them for their indifference. If we had, it might have demonstrated our nature to the thing we could only guess at being the Executive Officer. As we were dragged before him, he looked at us and said, “Are you lost?”
His voice was a roar, but even then it was barely audible over the thundering beat that filled the room. It came from jaws whose opening was the size of my head, a great, gin-smelling depth lined with tiny white teeth set in a base of a rolling length of opening bone. His eyes were two piggy grey marbles, his skin was flushed the colour of a grilled tomato, with a surface layer of darker capillaries threaded across his flesh like a road map of the Alps. His hair, if you could call it that, was three black strands slicked over a hillside scalp. He wore a suit the size of a wedding marquee. His belly sprawled out the length of my outstretched, tugged-on arms, his feet were two stubbly protrusions wearing - how we were thrilled by this sight! - black and white spats, poking out over the edge of the sofa. He could have crushed a buffalo just by sitting on it, he could have suffocated an elk between his thumb and forefinger, and it was from his chest that the great pounding roar of noise was coming.
A hand the size of my chest reached out to a control panel designed for fat fingertips, and pressed a button. A light went on beneath a bank of speakers behind his head, and at once the great roaring
deDUM deDUM deDUM
grew less, covered instead by an irritating hiss. It was still there though; I felt it rising through my stomach, aching in my gut.
He repeated, smiling, from his predator’s mouth, “Are you lost?”
I tugged with deliberate weakness at the arms that held my own, testing their strength and doing my best to imply my own feebleness. I felt the stitches strain across my flesh, and grimaced in pain. “I guess so.”
“You don’t have an appointment.” It wasn’t a question.
We looked up and met his tiny eyes, almost lost in the folds of his face, then looked down. He followed our gaze and smiled. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I often get that reaction.”
Beneath the tent of his shirt, big enough to fill with hot air and fly in, something was moving
inside
his chest. I could see the shirt rise and warp, sink and flatten, then rise and warp again, as if a great big boil was being pumped in and out, or tectonic plate movement had decided to do its thing with his bone and skin. Its great rapid motion was in time to the beat, and it was moving above his heart.
I said, “
Oh
. I see.”
“Do you?” he asked. “That’s interesting. Most people go out of their way not to look.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to the NHS, like any ordinary Joe?” I asked.
“I’m not an ordinary Joe,” he replied, “and neither, I think, are you.” He nodded at his two hooded guards. They pushed me forward; I stumbled, tripped, fell at his spat-wearing feet. The white and black leather filled our vision and we bit back on a hysterical laugh. A smile must have shown because he said, “Is something funny?”
“You’re wearing spats!”
“And?”
“We just . . . it’s so nice to . . . we’ve
always
wanted to see
someone
wearing spats. We thought it only happened in films. Sorry. It must seem irrelevant.”
“You don’t need to apologise,” he grumbled, and now we realised what the hissing was, that irritating, needle-in-the-ear sound. The speakers were replicating the sound of his beating heart, the great swelling massive thing the size of a swallowed dog pounding inside his chest, but they were doing it a few instants out of phase. One sound met the other, and both were beaten down. That at least was the theory of it.
He leant forward. That is, his head bent down towards me half an inch. He didn’t seem capable of doing any more. He said, “Is there something I can do for you, little man?”
“I’ve got to ask - sorry about this - but I’ve got to ask - why spats?”
“Style,” he replied primly, “is more stylish if it’s done to a personal agenda.”
“And why is your heart pumping out enough decibels to shatter an eardrum?”
He smiled. This was a question he was clearly used to being asked, and enjoyed answering. “I,” he declared proudly, “am the lord of the dance.”
“You do realise that has slightly camp Irish connotations?”
His face darkened. “I,” he repeated firmly, “am the master of the heartbeat, the music maker, the drummer of fate, the . . .”
“You’re a cardiac patient with complications,” I snapped. “Don’t give me this destiny stuff.”
I could see the flesh of his chest warp a little faster, hear the rhythm of his beat, faint behind the hissing of the speakers, slightly out, picking up speed. And if we looked closer still, we thought we could see his ribs rising and falling against his shirt, broken, out of joint, forced to snap up away from the breastbone to make space for that massive engine pounding away within him, and we could see the capillaries across his face flush and fade, flush and fade with each pounding of his heart. “What do you know of it?” he asked.
“Well” - I ticked the points off on my fingertips - “I know that one: cardiac problems account for a high percentage of premature deaths in the UK. Two: there’s a very long waiting list for a very small number of hearts available on the NHS. Three: even if you get bumped to the top of the waiting list, sometimes it’s hard to find a heart that will match you, owing to medicine, antigens, blood groups and all that medical stuff. Four - are we on to four? Yes, four: there are some back-street clinics not registered on the NHS, or even popping up on the regular black market, where you can get a heart transplant if you’re in a bad enough way and have a bit of ready cash, but you can bet your buttocks that the individual performing the operation believes in the power of incense and bad spirits in their work. Five: it’s not just humans who can donate working hearts. With the right attitude, the correct approach and a hefty dose of obscure occultism . . . what did you get given? Sperm whale?”
He looked surprised. Then he smiled, a long, deliberate smile that clearly took a lot of effort. “You know more than I had expected,” he said.
“That’s me. Full of useful information, not that it’s the same as truth.”
“You are not just some lost buffoon.”
“Well, that depends on your point of view . . .”
“What do you want, little man?”
“We’ll get to that. First, I’ve gotta tell you - I don’t like the fact that you’ve turned the brains of these kids here” - I jerked my chin to the empty-eyed hoodies - “to jelly. I mean, it’s none of my business, but we do not like life when it is but a mimicry. Life should be lived. And they are not living it.”
He shrugged. The ripples of the movement passed all the way down his arms to his fingertips, made his belly shake and shimmer. “I’m not here to manage your problems,” he said. “I’m not here to have anything to do with you.”
“Then I guess we’ll come back to this one in a minute. Right now, what I’d really like to know, is whether you’ve seen a kid called Mo.”
He hesitated. Not for very long. Then he laughed. We watched the great rising and falling of that blister in his chest, saw the pressing of his ribs against his shirt as they were pushed out with a creak, sharp broken edges scratching against the cotton. His heart was going faster now; the speakers couldn’t keep down the sound:
dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum
“How should I know?” he chuckled. “I see very few people, in my condition, but some random kid? How should I know? Why should I care?”
“I’ve got a photo,” I said, fumbling in my bag.
“Is this really what you came down here for? To ask me,
me
, if I’d seen a boy?”
“Didn’t say he was a boy, and ‘Mo’ could be anything,” I replied. “But yes, you have the gist of it.” I found the picture Loren had given me, held it up for him to see.
“Recognise him?”
He studied it, too long, too deep, too carefully, a badly played act by a man who didn’t get out much. “Nope,” he said finally, chest heaving beneath his shirt, heart twisting and boiling within his shattered ribs. “Is that everything, little man? Would you like a back massage on your way out?”
“Look again.”
“I’ve seen . . .”
“And you’re fibbing. We are not in the mood for lies.”
“Arrogance!” he laughed.
“Impatience,” we snapped. “You have a great bursting blister contracting and constricting within your chest. A better liar might be able to stop it from accelerating. But like you said - you don’t get out much. Should have waited for the NHS.”
“Waiting was death.”
“
This
,” we retorted, “isn’t living. But since you seem to value it so highly, let us make ourself clear. Tell us the truth, or we will kill you.”
He just laughed, arrogance and error. We picked ourself up carefully, half-turning our head to eye up his deafened drones.
“Death couldn’t kill me!” he said. “They thought it would, but I stopped it. I locked death out and now my heart is life, my heart is . . .”
“‘Give me back my hat’.”
His face froze. We smiled. “You recognise it,” we said. “That’s good. That means we’re right. Tell us about it. Tell us about the boy called Mo.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Matthew Swift.”
“So
who
are you?”
“I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.” He had; his accelerating heart was a great thumping blister, an alien out of a monster movie trying to break free of his bones. “I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We . . . made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us.”
He licked his lips. His tongue was the colour of rotting strawberries. He nodded carefully and said, “OK. I get it. I see what you’re saying. And sure, yeah, I’m smart enough to be scared of sorcerers, they always end in a bang. But the thing is, while it’s sharp to fear you, I just fear
him
a whole lot more.”
Like a schmuck, I turned my head looking for the
him
. I guess I wasn’t at my best. There was no one there, just the two guys with the bloody ears. I looked back. He had one hand over the controls that turned on the speaker. His other was pulling at the buttons of his shirt.
He turned off the speakers; he pulled back his shirt. His ribcage was a mess of broken bones, sticking up from his skin, creating great dark voids between his flesh into which muscle had long since sunk and withered, ragged torn bone shattered away from the twisted breastbone protruding upwards like ruined towers in an ancient desert. We could
see
his heart beating beneath it, four great, coated valves smeared in clinging white flesh pumping one to the other, could see it shrink down to the size of a pear and then burst upwards again, pressing the ribs out so far that they creaked and cracked, little fracture lines running down the stuck-up grey bones where they had ruptured from his chest.
And his heart went:
deDUM!
The shock of the sound had nothing to do with ears; it was long past the point where audible frequencies played a major part. His ribs twisted outwards with the blast, his whole chest rising up; then the force of the sound knocked into me and threw me back shaking, slamming into me so hard that all I could hear was a rumble like the sea.
We landed face-down on the floor and crawled away from him. It went again,
deDUM!
We covered our ears with our hands, with our elbows, buried our face in the floor and our knees in our face and again it went
deDUM!
The plaster cracked on the wall, and spilt trickles of dust; the lights hissed and swayed, flickered, began to shatter and go out. The two kids with the bloody ears were on the floor, blood running from their ears, their noses, their eyes, with ugly bruises where the blood from a thousand broken capillaries was spilling out beneath their skin. I tried to get up and another heartbeat knocked me down. We might have called out, we couldn’t tell, couldn’t hear anything but our own dying cells singing in our ears. His heart was going too fast, beating too fast for us to move, to stand a chance against the roar, everything we did took a heartbeat and one beat was one too many.