Authors: Conrad Williams
The clean were warehousing the dirty.
A conference suite was being used as a walk-in larder. Bodies were
being stripped, laid out, shorn, disembowelled, marked with indelible
pen:
BEST BEFORE
3/1/09. Short, shocked screams were impacting
against the walls and ceilings like sporadic gunfire. The atrium
swimming pool was crimson, topped with pink foam and body parts
that rolled this way and that in the delicate ebb and flow. A man in a
dinner jacket, his bow tie loose, hanging at his collar, strolled along
the corridor holding a human rib in each fist, blood splashed like a
gunshot wound to his mouth.
Salavaria felt at home.
He moved through the suite, admiring the marble bathroom, the
view over the Thames, the extravagant bed, and deep pile beneath his
toes. In the full-length mirror on the wardrobe, he assessed his
posture and shape, gritted his teeth to check how strong and white
they were. While he was drawing a bath he heard the door breathe
open. He moved across the tiles to peek through the gap; three men
in long overcoats and short, dyed-red hair were moving languidly
across the room, pausing to pick up and assess ornaments or check
surfaces for dust. His attention dwelt upon the man at the rear, who
drew shadow to him like the others, but nevertheless carried
something, some lithe, sassy authority, that the others could never
hope to shoulder. Violence steamed off him. When he turned and sat
down, Salavaria found himself lifting a hand to his mouth in shock.
'I'm impressed,' he said, stepping from the bathroom. The two
men accompanying this strange, compelling figure jumped, spinning
to face Salavaria, struggling in their pockets for whatever weapons
were concealed there. The third man kept his attention on the gewgaw
he had picked up from the table: a thick glass ashtray. His teeth
tanged softly together.
'Doesn't that go through you?' Salavaria asked. 'I mean, Jesus,
that would set my fillings off something terrible.'
The man ignored him. 'We go and get what we want,' he said.
'Obliterate the fuckers. Take over.'
'Well, yes,' Salavaria said. 'By the way, what's your name?'
'Names are for tombstones, baby.'
'Hmmm. I'm Gyorsi.'
'You can call me Graham Greene.'
'Graham Greene. Very well, Mr Greene. You're in my room.
Would you mind fucking well not being?'
Now Salavaria was rewarded with a direct gaze. The other man's
eyes were large and dark, even in this brightly lit space, as if they were
congested with shadows created from within.
'I know why you're here,' Greene whispered.
'I'm ecstatic for you, really I am. But I have things to do. A long
bath and a cocktail for a kickoff. I'd really rather you weren't around
while I'm enjoying them.'
'We can take you to where you need to be.'
'I'm not a child. I can find my way around this stinkhole.'
Greene gave the approximation of a smile. His mouth seemed to
collapse back under the bent fence of metal piled into his gums.
Salavaria caught a coppery, carious whiff. A nasty-looking nail at the
front of the lower jaw had dug itself a socket in the upper lip. It
embedded itself there now, like a lock for his mouth. He seemed
unfazed by the fresh blood leaking from the wound.
'I don't doubt it. I'm not offering you a bodyguard service. I
know how dangerous you are. I'm just saying I can take you from
A to B, without you detouring off to X, Y, and Z first.'
'Maybe I
want
to have a look around. It's been some time. I'd
quite like to do a bit of sightseeing.'
Greene regarded him with a strange kind of patient disdain.
Salavaria guessed that any expression on that face could never fall
into a conventional bracket.
'I know why you're here,' Greene said, having to wipe and rewipe
his mouth as it dribbled and frothed. 'And I know who you are. What
you were. What you hope to become. We want to be a part of it. We
want to be there at the start of this new order. Happy, of course, to
doff our caps to the alpha male.' He lowered his eyes in mock tribute
to the older man, and for the first time Salavaria found himself
experiencing fear. He had to reach out and hold on to a chest of
drawers to prevent himself from losing his balance. It was like
receiving a blow. He realised now that his passage to the throne was
not as clear as he had envisaged. Squirrelled away in the trees for
decades, you developed a sense of yourself uncomplicated by
anything as inconvenient as other people. Being alone became a habit;
it was a difficult one to break. He was not used to such impudence,
but the world had turned; it was only natural that youth should rise
up against reputation. Perhaps Greene was unimpressed by
Salavaria's history, but his henchmen, Cobain and Kubrick, were
eyeing him with unalloyed reverence. He had them on his side for as
long as it took for his ascension.
'We should warn you,' Greene said, 'there is an obstacle to our
progress. A man called Mulvey. A reader of maps. A teacher.'
Salavaria couldn't tell if the way that last word was spoken was
down to the ruin of Greene's mouth, or extreme sarcasm. He smiled.
'I'm on nodding terms with that concept,' he said. 'Each generation
needs its hand holding, at least for a short while.'
'Yes, well,' Greene said, inspecting the crimson half-moons of his
fingernails, 'the hand isn't so much doing any holding as breaking
necks. Oh, he's put the hours in, but against his will. Now he's a
conscious conscientious objector. And as much as it pains me to say
this, he's dangerous.'
'Too dangerous for you?' Salavaria said, pursing his lips. 'I find
that hard to stomach. Strapping chap like yourself. A fellow with ...
presence. With gravitas.'
Greene smirked. A fingernail found the edge of a torn piece of tin
and played vile music against it.
'Kill this "teacher" for me,' Salavaria said. 'And I'll consider you
for a nectaring.'
Greene's eyes flashed and Salavaria felt his pulse slow a little. It
was in the bag. It was the reason he hadn't already been attacked.
'You know I have it in me, this essence, this dedication to the cause,'
Salavaria said. 'I need a right-hand man. And I offer you immunity
from the death hanging over your head. But we don't have much
time. Bring me Mulvey's head, and we can iron out the details of how
you'll become my prince.'
He heard a scream outside the door and a woman wearing a towel
around her waist sprinted along the corridor, skin creamy with suds.
Salavaria saw claw marks in the prodigious meat of her breasts; the
fear locked into her features ramped his heartbeat back up again. It
was healthy, he thought, an experience not to be missed, knowing
what it was to fear for your own life. The human face so often never
wore that particular cast. It could inspire a rare beauty, he felt. The
smell of her was wild, intoxicating. The fresh piss on her thighs was
giving him a lusty headache.
'Now,' he said, moving towards the threshold, his salivary glands
squirting painfully, 'we're all in agreement, I hope. So you'll excuse
me while I sort myself out a spot of supper.'
The Ninja pissed him off, in the main, but he couldn't argue that when
he needed to be away fast, there was anything better. Especially now,
in this city of abandoned or crashed cars, this city where the pavements
and roads were smeared with human remains, like paté trodden into the
floor. Buses were overturned and set alight; a thick pall of black, chemical
smoke moved through the streets, shrouding one moment, revealing the
next. He kept his head down and didn't study too much the shapes that
the smog peeled away from or coagulated against. He opened the throttle
when he could and relished the snarl of the four-stroke engine. He braked
hard and late when he had to, accelerating away quick as he could when
obstacles were rounded. He sensed the potential in the shadows of the
trashed buildings; a coiling of kinetic energy. If he paused too long, they'd
strike. His tenancy of the map meant that he had been granted some
grace, but it would be a short honeymoon period. He could feel their
movement, a rise and a sharing of knowledge. He could feel the map
being scrutinised by eyes other than his own.
He pushed the bike hard again as he reached the bottom of the Strand.
He leaned into the long turn around Trafalgar Square and tripped up
through the gears so that by the time he passed through Admiralty Arch
on to The Mall, the needle on the speedometer was hovering over sixty.
He heard a scream and turned in time to see figures piling into the
shadows of bushes by the Artillery Memorial at the eastern tip of St
James's Park. The bike wobbled; he swore, on the verge of losing control.
He managed to right the bike, and brought the speed down. He slowed
to a stop at the gardens by the Queen Victoria Memorial. Bodies were
draped all over the white marble. In such a short time they had grown
more confident, rediscovered their threat. He looked up at the windows
of Buckingham Palace. Some were shattered. He thought he saw
something fleeing across the roof. Something that was not the Union Jack
hung wetly on the flagpole.
He felt a bending in his mind. An unfolding. He felt the road
beneath him shimmer and fade. He felt it grow uneven, tracks
appearing out of the concrete like the muddied ridges of uncovered
bones. He saw the map's history spreading out before him, its ancient
reach, the stale breath of generations that had been born and lived
and died as it accrued its wealth of knowledge, its cultural, spiritual
content. The clatter of the wind on him was ice cold but he didn't feel
it. He took the Ninja left into Birdcage Walk and forgot where he was
headed or why he was even trying to go anywhere.
The map, giving up its glut of dirty secrets. It shows him a church. The
walls will not remain still enough for him to absorb any detail. That
recognisable shape is there, but it is a form made from smears and blur
and suggestion. The smell of old fires, the cold reek of charcoal and
burned meat creeps out of its history. His eyes slide off the walls. He
is either prohibited from, or simply physically unable, through great
fear, to see this place in full. And there's the suspicion, strong in him,
that this is somebody else's vision, filtered down to him through the
centuries. Another map-reader, perhaps the first. Dust and shadow
now. Molecules in the earth. Lucky you.
Sky black with soot and grease. The smell of carrion and shit;
animals lowing, sweating fear-tallow. Locked-in groans. A bell tolling
far away, clapper cracked, dull, dead. Dread and panic in the air and
bodies too weak to act. A sense of capitulation.
Drawing nearer, a feeling of resistance, as of walking against a
fierce wind. The map showing him a gallery of the dead, men who
perished in the creation of this twisted cathedral. Men who were not
carried away, but found their resting place in among the stones they
laid. The walls had taken on some of the physicality of the dead that
adorned them. They writhed, muscular, torsional, lubricated with
lymph. There was a skin covering everything. All light was absorbed
by it, but not before the map showed him half-formed faces pushing
out of the stone in a riot of pain and regret. He feels an affinity with
this place he has never seen before. He understands intimately its
measurements, its substance, the mass it possesses in space and time.
Its thereness. He knows the bones of its flock are scattered in the
grounds, knows their strange anatomy, the saddle in the pelvis which
allows for poison sacs rather than sex glands, appurtenances the like
of which should not be seen out of the bodies of serpents. Not men,
but hunters. Predators. Not of this world. Not of this time.
There are ceremonies that were undertaken when they were
stronger, not the vanquished breed creeping back from the margins in
2008. The map shows him feast days to commemorate the
anniversary of this black cathedral's completion. Children brought up
to the steps of the high Altar. A Reaper in vestments, garlands of
roses on his head and bowls of incense urging smoke of many hues
and fragrances into the heights. Children sent to be baked. Their
heads fixed upon poles, borne before a wailing, slavering procession
to a keeper at the door who blows the dead dust of these ground
bodies towards the city. The horners that are around him answer in
like manner. A curse upon the world. A line drawn in the sand.
The map shows him the way in which they have hidden from
human eyes for generations. It shows him deep woods, a dense intertwining
of branches that has never known the touch of man. There is
an impression of calm, of correctness; this is a place of peace. The
trees form an impenetrable canopy and keep hold of the dark as if it
were nourishment. Within that realm of shadow, a thousand
glittering eyes turn to look down at him.
Bo recoiled, slamming back into real time, and saw that he had come
to a standstill on Millbank. The engine was idling; he was sitting
upright, his hands resting lightly on the tops of his thighs. The map
stuttered and pulsed behind his eyelids, coming to life, disburdening
itself of all its packets of information. There was nobody else on the
road although he could hear shrieks coming from across the water. A
maroon streak mimicked the white lines in the centre of the tarmac,
stretching off in the direction of the Houses of Parliament.
He had seen something else at the moment of his snapping back to
consciousness. He had seen, in the twisting dance of bad humours
cloaking London, a face turn towards him, its mouth opening wide to
reveal a skyline purged of danger. He saw the city hardening beneath
that smiling mouth, and thought it might be a sign, disguised by the
map, that the city would endure. But then he saw how he was wrong.
The smile was nothing of the sort. It had been stretched wide in a
posture of devourment.