Authors: Conrad Williams
Bo placed the side of his head against the door and listened for a
while. He could not hear the skittering sound any more, but there was
something going on in there. A slow, rhythmic tread; a measured
breath. He could hear something else, an odd sound, and all he could
think of when he heard it was a dry tongue licking an even drier pair
of lips.
He stepped back from the door and stared at the keyhole. The
dark was so profound now as to render it as something that was
waiting to be lost. Staring at it seemed to have this effect: it blurred,
it dissolved into the general grain of night. Sammy's room had long
vanished; it was as if Bo were standing in a void, somehow being
prevented from falling away to eternity by dint of the magnetism
attaching his gaze to this tiny metal tunnel of tumblers.
He quickly switched on the light and ducked to the keyhole. He
had hardly pressed his eye against it before another swam out of that
room's darkness to meet his, so swiftly as to suggest there was a
mirror placed flush against the lock. But if that were so, it would
mean that Bo's eye was somehow too small for the eye socket that
cradled it, for there was a large black gap all around this, and a sense
of strain, of trying to keep the eye where it was, and that if the strain
were given up, the eye would fall in, or tip out altogether.
He moved away from the door, the stillness in the flat seeming to
echo a new quietness at the centre of his chest. Death might only be a
step away, something that waited on the other side of a threshold. Its
proximity shocked him into greyness; he felt it creep into his lips, his
hair. A look in a mirror would show a whitened, famished figure, a
creature that existed at the margins of things, peeking into windows
showing a warmth and humanity that it struggled to remember. He
only realised he was still moving when he backed into Sammy Dyer's
futon mattress and stumbled over. He sat there waiting for impossibilities.
He knew the door could not be opened, but he was tensed for
its swing anyway. He wanted to call to that mystery inhabitant but
keeping quiet helped him in some way to cling to the possibility that
what he had seen was an illusion; the room was empty, he was not
going mad. But he had glimpsed what it was he might become.
Terrified, too scared even to reach out and switch on a lamp, he sat on
the mattress and watched the door. There were no other sounds from
behind it, and by the time Sammy entered the room, he was asleep.
He woke up to red. A tea light burned low in a scarlet container, its
shiver magnified across the whole room. Sammy was sleeping beside
him in a paint-stained Nike T-shirt riddled with holes, and a pair of
knee-length jogging shorts. A little cairn of spit bubbled up between
his lips. Bo fought the urge to wipe it away. He inched his way upright
until he was sitting with his back against the wall, facing the room. He
wanted to turn on the TV or the radio, anything to scour his ears of
Sammy's wet breathing, or the unstable memory of something dry and
thin moving too rapidly in the small room next to this.
He should get dressed, get going. Coming here had been a mistake.
He had hoped that in Sammy, his colleague, his drinking buddy, he
might find someone who could also be a confidant. But Sammy was
not right for this; nobody was. He was in up to his neck and he was
alone. If he didn't grasp what was happening, how was he to explain
it to someone on the outside?
He was decided and determined, about to tease back the sheet and
rise, when the tea light died. He smelled its acrid last breath at the
same time that the sealed door cracked and juddered open. Bo pissed
his pants. His eyes were so wide, sucking at the paucity of light in the
room, that he thought he might tear them. Fear seemed too puny a
word for his condition.
Now he saw the shape of a hand reach around the edge of the door,
its fingers shockingly long. Each of them came to rest against the
wood, nails tapping lightly as though it were still incarcerated,
knocking politely to be let out. Its smell reached Bo before anything
else did: old things left undisturbed for too long; wet rags that had not
been allowed to dry properly, desiccated newspapers, woodworm and
rust. It shifted like someone whose joints had recently been operated
upon, or someone coming back from a traumatic accident, at the start
of a physiotherapy programme. Bo resisted the insane drive to offer
assistance. He heard a terrible, dry clicking sound and, though he
didn't want to know what was producing it, found his mind throwing
up any number of horrid possibilities. What disturbed him was the
knowledge that the truth would be far worse.
Bo stood up and felt the coldness of the room focus itself on the
hot patch of dampness settling against both thighs. He couldn't leave
Sammy here. He nudged him with his foot but his friend merely
burbled some rebuke and rolled on to his side. The figure stopped and
shifted its head, like a dog that has heard a noise it finds interesting.
It came forwards, a shadow without a host.
'Don't,' Bo begged it, unable to shape the rest of the sentence,
unable to put into words an act that was unspeakable.
It was trying to say something. Bo could just make out the tortured
shift of a mouth that was little more than a painful dark hole. As it
reached the end of the bed, it folded, as if exhausted, or let down by
its weak limbs. It dropped to its knees and breathed hard, the dry,
clicking sound coming rhythmically, like some weird, skeletal heart.
Bo dithered, the fear puddling out of him as it appeared the other
had no intention of violence. He too dropped and they regarded each
other like boxers with no fight left. Bo inched nearer and was able to
pick out individual features. This was a very, very old man. He seemed
to wear a shroud, but closer scrutiny proved it to be a rotting grey shirt
and long pants made of linen, with a cloth stirrup under each foot. His
hair was scraped back from his forehead and plastered to his scalp
with oil or sweat or grease. His strange, detached eyes floated in their
orbits, perpetually affronted, or scared. The flesh of his face had pulled
away from his chin, nose and forehead, making those central dividing
characteristics seem more prominent than they might have been. The
face was like a blade, or a shark's fin. The remaining teeth in his
mouth were pebbles of dark glass set in a concrete pediment. As his
face became discernible, so Bo's must have become to him. A smile
cracked into it like a collapse in unstable land as a type of recognition
dawned. Blood escaped from tensions apparently unknown for many
years.
'Who are you?' Bo asked, and the voice was someone else's,
someone detached by fright and shock and exhaustion.
'My name is Charles Bolton,' the man breathed, a sound spoiled
by that persistent click, a sound like words being punched out of a
dulled typewriter.
Bo didn't know what else to ask. The situation perplexed him.
This was Sammy's flat. This ought to be his conversation, his little
pile of dust to sweep up and hide under the rug. He was about to
suggest calling for an ambulance when Bolton began singing, huskily,
tunelessly, as though through a mouth filled with hammers falling on
dry chambers in a gun too old to use.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy, when clouds are grey ...
'What?' Bo asked, hoping the desperation in his voice might force
a resolution.
'What?'
Bolton pressed a finger to his lips and indicated Sammy Dyer's
slumbering body.
Bo's shoulders slumped. He felt close to tears. He felt like the
character in that old episode of
The Twilight Zone
who wakes one
day to find everyone speaking English differently, every word he
thought he knew suddenly meaning something else.
'I was born here,' Bolton said. 'I lived here all my life.'
Bo could only sit and shake his head, waiting for whatever was to
happen to play itself out.
'I was warehoused by the eaters, the rogues you know, there are
always a few running around, no matter that most were chased away
during the fire. They thought I was promising nourishment. I was for
nectaring. Felt proud, I did. They kissed me all over, filled me up, left
me sleepy. I would have liked to say night to my Kate, but what's the
point of wishing now that time's knocked on, hey?'
A bit heavy on the old numinous.
Bo could barely stand the stench
of the man's breath, but he found himself leaning closer to him, trying
to unpick the knots from his confusing yarn.
'And here we are,' Bolton said. 'Thank you, I say. Thank you for
waking me up. Thank you for letting me go.' He smiled again, and it
was horrible.
Click-click-click.
Bo was sure the man's face would
come sliding off him if he kept taxing it like that. Behind him he could
hear Sammy stirring. Bo no longer wanted him awake to see any of
this, despite it being his little pile of dust. He didn't think there were
any rugs big enough to put this under and forget.
'Who are you?' Bo asked again, but really he wanted to ask
why
are you
? The man was regarding him with an expression like love
with those loose, liquid eyes. Behind that was yet another question,
too entwined with his psychosis for him to contemplate, but Bolton
was not too ravaged to pick up on it.
'Who are
you
?' Bolton said gently. 'Who are
you
? That's what
you're really after. And all I can say to you is that we don't care. You
are the light through the window. You are the alarum.'
'The light? The alarum?'
'I would have liked to say night to my Kate. I would have liked to
see the sea.'
His eyes were fogging. The click in his throat was becoming more
pronounced.
'Would you like some water?' Bo asked.
Sammy Dyer sat up behind him and said, 'Who the fuck is
that
?'
Things began to slip away from Bo, then. There was enough
ambient light in the room to see that Bolton was dying, or dead
already. Sammy flipped a light switch and suddenly Bo wished he had
not been leaning in so closely to their uninvited guest. As Bo took in
the heavily runnelled skin, the bones pushing eagerly through the
denuded flesh of his arms like black branches covered with frost, he
wondered who, actually, was the guest. How long had this man been
lying in state in the sealed room waiting for his
alarum
? Ten years?
Twenty? By the state of him, Bo would not have been surprised to
find it had been a century or two. Maybe even longer. It was warm
in the room, but Bo felt his scrotum convulse as Bolton began to
squirm on the floor. The clicks were louder now.
'He's dead?' Sammy asked. His face was a shock of shadows and
lines. 'He's still fucking breathing? Who is he? What are you fucking
playing at, Bo?'
Charles Bolton began to unravel.
Sammy had seen too much by the time he tried to stumble out of
bed and get away. His foot caught in the sheets, spilling him heavily
into the corner of the surround that housed the stairwell. A loud
smack managed to prise Bo's attention from Bolton's corpse. He saw
Sammy drowsily turn on to his back and blink up at the light while
blood pumped from a wound just above his left eye.
'Shit,' Bo said. He went to his friend and wrapped him in the
blanket from the bed. There were noises from deeper within the flat.
He heard a door open and someone call, 'Sammy?'
Shit. Shit.
'It's all right,' he called down. 'Just dropped a stack of books.
Sorry.'
By the way, if I were you, I'd jump out of any fucking window
that's available.
Some of the larvae trickling from Bolton's seams were still blind,
but others could see, and turned their eyes on Bo, as if for direction.
He had to struggle against the urgent desire to scream the place down.
Human eyes. They had human fucking eyes.
He raised his foot in order to trample them as they spewed on to
Sammy's carpet. There were so many now that it was hard to discern
Bolton's body beneath them. Many of them were trying desperately
to return to this convenient source of food but the numbers were so
great that there wasn't enough space for all of them to gain purchase.
Bo could not bring himself to kill them. Something was stopping
him.
Sammy's groans became less of a distraction. He would live. For
now he had to do something about this flood of grubs.
He got down on his hands and knees and tore open Charles
Bolton's garments. With his hands he scooped up as many of the
infants as he could and trickled them into the creases of the dead
man's body that were still soft, or moist. He heard a voice and turned
to look, but Sammy was in some kind of catatonia, staring down at
the patterns in his rug while his forehead swelled and darkened.
A little while later Bo became aware that it was his own voice,
cooing over the feeding brood, gently inciting them to tuck in, to
enjoy, to eat it all up.
'And then you'll grow big and strong.'
A few hours before dawn.
A light frost on the pavements, knubbly slush on the roads
where the gritters had already travelled. Nobody but fools and the
determined out on the streets at this hour. Labourers on their way to
building sites, security guards clocking on or clocking off a shift.
And Bo, on the Ninja, prowling down New Oxford Street, searching
for Rohan Vero, the man who had promised he was going to lose
himself as soon as he could.
Spot the fool.
But he had no other choice to make. Nowhere else to go. Getting
out of London wasn't an option, not when there were changes going
on in his body that he needed to check if he were to have any hope of
leading a normal life again.
The Princess Louise was an object lesson in closed. Desperation
forced his hand; he rapped hard on the windows with his keys.
Nobody came to help him, not even a face at an upstairs window
telling him to fuck off. He briefly considered breaking in, but for
what purpose? Rohan Vero was patently not here, enjoying a lock-in
at 6 a.m.
He stood in the road not knowing what to do. He'd burned some
bridges last night. Work and home were off limits; Keiko could find
him there. He didn't want her help. He didn't want her near him. Not
when he could wink out of consciousness like that, and do God
knows what without even realising it.
Burned bridges. Opened doors. Entered rooms. A house whose
address he did not know, a place where he never wanted to be.
Keiko was at the end of a line, worried for him, ready to receive
him. All he had to do was call her, say sorry, allow her to draw him
near, hold her until time stopped.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and hugged himself in
the morning chill. Sammy Dyer sat on the back of the Ninja like a
crash test dummy in a helmet waiting for another pummelling. More
people coming outside now. Light creeping into the deep blue of a
night Bo wanted rid of. He tried to persuade himself that the pedestrians
walking past him were staring at him because he was static,
something Londoners were not prone to be. But there was something
in their scrutiny of him that wormed inside him and fed the slow
panic he had been nurturing since the night he had met that bastard,
Vero. He felt like some sort of totem, something that was being
regarded as much for its curiosity value as its potential as a giver of
knowledge, reassurance, understanding. He sensed heads turning
wherever he walked, wherever he drove. His rear-view mirrors were
awash with small, pale ovals following his progress. He swerved and
sprinted to St Bart's. He dropped Sammy off outside the entrance to
Accident and Emergency. He cared enough to do that, but not to take
him inside. He didn't like enclosed places much these days.
'I have to be alone,' he told Sammy. 'I have to do this on my own.
It's safer for you this way. I can't, I will not endanger you.'
There was nowhere to go. He just had to keep moving. He pushed
the bike up to sixty along Gray's Inn Road, trying to blur the faces as
they leered after him and generate some cold air to slap him awake.
On Bernard Street, opposite the entrance to the Brunswick Centre, he
found an old second-hand bookshop that had been boarded up. The
state of the wood that shuttered the windows suggested that it had
been closed for a long time. Once-white lettering, SIMON BLONDELL:
BOOKSELLER, was fading into the awning above the shop as a cadaverous
grey. The shop was little more than a tattered façade of ripped
green canvas and buckled, rusting metalwork. On the doorstep, a
kind of offering almost: a dead rat was lying on its back, its stomach
torn apart like an envelope from a new lover. It was empty, gaping.
Neatly eaten. Bo stared at it for a long time.
He cruised around to the alleyway behind the main road and
stopped by the back gate. It was padlocked; razorwire made an ugly
spiral across the coping stones that topped the wall. He leaned the
bike against the gate and leaped up on to the saddle. The back yard
was a mass of collapsed cardboard boxes, receipt rolls, and bloated
paperbacks. Spare shelving formed a warped lean-to against the back
door, perhaps serving as a last-gasp attempt to keep people out. Bo
hopped down and examined the padlock. It was strong but the gate
it was protecting was not. A few stiff kicks took it off its hinges.
He wheeled the Ninja in and locked it, then repositioned the gate
as best he could, using the shelves to wedge it in the frame. The shop's
back door was open. Inside, a narrow corridor floored with blackand-
white diagonal tiling led through a flimsy plastic curtain to the
front of the shop. It was dark and stale here, with notes of damp and
rot. Light through cracks in the window boards picked out four rows
of bookshelves and a chair, so that punters could sit and flick through
potential purchases. It spooked him a bit, that empty chair, with its
sunken faux-leather seat and high back, so he turned it around to face
the wall. He tried the light switch and was mildly amazed to find that
it worked, although the forty-watt bulb served only to somehow
make the room seem even gloomier.
The cream paint on the walls was blistering. Spiders had created
weird shelving of their own in the high corners where redundant webs
were stacked, made visible with dust. He sat down on a table that
contained a pale square to indicate where the cash register had once
stood. On the wall behind him were fliers for book fairs, literary
festivals, and readings, the most recent being five years in the past.
Unopened post was still being forced through the letterbox: a tongue
that reached almost to the counter. Circulars and bills made a mosaic
of white and beige on the floor. What was that all about? Stupidity
or dedication on the part of the postal service? That he could
entertain a silly thought like this heartened him; he had not fooled
around with his imagination for too long. He suddenly felt safe,
anonymous again, if not entirely at home. He decided to get to know
his new space. There was a staircase leading up to two small
bedrooms, a kitchenette and a bathroom. There was a free-standing
gas cooker but the good fortune with the electricity had not stretched
to butane. On the wall in the bathroom he found a montage of
postcards from Lanzarote, all finished with 1970s fonts and poor
photographs of camels, badly designed hotels with lethal swimming
pools and black, volcanic beaches. The bedrooms were empty.
Back down in the shop he browsed the shelves, astonished that none
of the stock had been removed when the shop closed down. There must
have been a couple of thousand pounds' worth of paperbacks here. He
found tight, unmarked copies of early JG Ballard novels, John
Wyndham Penguins, Puffins he remembered from his childhood: Leon
Garfield, Iain Serraillier, David Line; a first paperback printing of Ian
Fleming's second Bond outing,
Live and Let Die
, a proof of Alex
Garland's
The Beach.
He only realised that a big chunk of time had
passed when he began to feel faint from hunger. He had been owling the
spines for three hours.
He went out on the bike to buy bread, milk, bacon and eggs, a
Baby Belling from a branch of Robert Dyas, and a sleeping bag from
the outdoor pursuits shop a few doors down. On the way back to
Bernard Street, a woman threw herself in front of him as he changed
up to third gear. He braked hard and swung the bike to his left,
ramping it on to the pavement for a few seconds before dragging it
back on to the road and coming to a halt. She was on the ground,
looking after him with a mix of desire, hatred and fear on her face. In
her belt a knife with a long thin blade was stowed. She peeled her lips
back and, Jesus Christ, she
growled
at him.
He stalled the bike in his haste to be away and she was almost
upon him at the moment the engine fired and he squealed up
Southampton Row, car horns blaring as he and the woman spilled
out in front of the usual parade of aggressive London drivers.
Adrenaline and the bike's spiked accelerator took him too quickly
into the corner of Guilford Street and he almost drove into the side of
a Royal Mail van. He forced himself to stop and check his breathing.
Sweat created a thin scarf around his neck, despite the bitter cold. He
retched, imagining himself newly dug from a grave topped with fresh
black soil, his flesh barely cold. Mouths all over him ...
Just a London nut. Just a mad woman. Wrong place, wrong time.
But he was offering these words as a balm too often for them to be
of comfort any more.
'Are you all right, mate?' A face swinging out of the sky, concern
written all over it. But it was the concern of a man trying too hard.
An actor. A bad actor. Someone who has been reading
Expressions
for Beginners.
'I'm fine,' Bo said, falteringly.
'You don't look fine,' the man said. His skin was like something
pressed from a plastic mould. His nostrils seemed too symmetrical.
They looked
painted
on to his face.
'You've seen worse, I'm sure,' Bo said, readjusting his position on
the bike, feeling panic rise again.
'I can help you,' the man said. 'We can all help you. You just have
to accept what's happening. Sooner or later, you'll have no choice.'
Bo kicked down hard on the starter and shoved the man away with
the heel of his hand. The man stepped back, smiling, spreading his
hands. He looked like an unbearably smug clergyman. His eyes were
like peeled grapes. His mouth was an oscillator awaiting a signal. He
said something else. Bo throttled up and stuck a hand to his ear, shook
his head. Another serene smile. The man knew he had been heard.
Don't fight it.
Yeah, right
, Bo thought.
Fucking watch me. All the way. All the
fucking way.
... body of Gillian Kynaston was discovered yesterday lunchtime near
a track at Clowbridge Reservoir, just south of Burnley, Lancashire, by
members of a local rambling association. A police spokesman said
they were keen to speak to any members of the public who might have
seen Ms Kynaston in the twenty-four hours before she was found. The
police were also eager to quash rumours that the murder of Ms
Kynaston was in any way connected to that of Jemima Cartledge, a
teenager who died almost thirty years ago to the day. That murder was
the last in a string of attacks nationwide, committed by one man,
according to experts, who was never apprehended and was assumed
to have died some time in the late 1970s. New techniques in forensic
science, notably DNA testing, have resulted in a number of possible
suspects being tested posthumously, all with negative results, leading
some to believe that the killer went into hiding for some reason and is
still at large. The death of Ms Kynaston will only help those rumours
to pick up steam, despite New Scotland Yard's insistence that,
although they consider the file on The Picnic Man to still be open, they
judge Ms Kynaston's death to be a completely separate incident.
Other headlines today. The spate of graverobbing across London
continues with another two bodies being unearthed last night at a
cemetery in Stockwell despite a pledge by the Police Commissioner to
safeguard the capital's graveyards and bring the perpetrators into
custody ...