Angelmaker

XIII Panopticon days; Coffin Man; Escape.

The room is very small. In the centre of each wall, and in the centre of the floor and ceiling, there is a circle of transparent stuff with a light bulb behind it. The bulbs are always on. Behind or in the walls—Joe isn’t sure—there are speakers. Sometimes they blare out instructions. Sometimes they play music, very loud. Sometimes they just shriek, electronic wails of protest.

He’s not sure how long ago it was that he tried to go to sleep, or how long they have kept him awake. He thought he knew roughly, because there’s only enough stubble on his chin to indicate a day or so, but when he finally did sleep—he realises he has slept many times since he arrived, but he doesn’t know for how long—he woke to find a ghost face very close to his own and a razor moving very precisely over his cheek. He jerked away, or rather, he tried, but found he was restrained. When he kept trying, someone pressed a cold thing against his neck and his world was fizzy and bright and he screamed a lot. He assumes the cold thing was a taser. The linen face peered at him, as if wondering why he was upset. He wondered whether it was human or not, whether it was like the one he’d seen. He wondered whether he’d dreamed that part.

When he came back to himself after the taser, he was inexplicably and appallingly aroused. He wondered if they had drugged him, and then wondered why they would. Then he realised that this kind of dialogue about himself was probably what this was all intended to achieve. They are asserting ownership of him. They own his sense of time, his captivity, his sleep. They have his body entirely; it’s not relevant whether they have drugged him. It is only relevant that they could. The one thing he can preserve from them is his mind—and that is what they want. They cannot approach it directly, so they are holding his body to ransom.

He remembers reading about a man who had been tortured. The man said the worst part was when they played the same music over and over and over until he thought he would go mad. He said even the razors were not as bad as the sense of losing himself. Joe is greatly concerned that he has very little self to lose, and so this will not take long.

He shouts out something, and regrets it instantly. He does not want their attention. Mr. Ordinary comes, anyway.

Mr. Ordinary has a face like a country vet’s. He is not a Ruskinite. He is apparently a specialist, brought in for the occasion. When he speaks, he has a mellow baritone, suited to explaining that Rover has the canine pox or that Tiddles will do better on a more varied diet.

He asks questions. It doesn’t seem to matter what Joe says in answer to these questions, so he begins to make up jokes. Mr. Ordinary is apparently of the opinion that funny jokes merit a reduction in discomfort. Silence is punished mightily. Mr. Ordinary is kind enough to explain this on the first occasion that Joe becomes mute.

“By all means, lie. Lying is fine. Or if you have no notion what I’m talking about, you should feel free to babble, make stuff up. That’s fine, too. Mulishness, however… I take that as a sign of disrespect.”

When Joe obstinately clamps his lips closed, Mr. Ordinary sighs, and directs operations with a sort of genial competence. They put Joe into strange positions and make him stay that way. The pain arrives quickly and he accepts that, was expecting it. It becomes blinding much later, when he has become used to the aches, and thinks he’s doing quite well. Mr. Ordinary listens to him screaming, and does not appear to react at all. Joe starts to speak, randomly selecting the price list for repairs to self-winders, hoping that compliance, however belated, will yield mercy.

It does not.

He loses track of everything, but at some point the man with the hate-filled eyes sits in front of him and listens to him screaming.

Brother Sheamus moves with the same alarming fluidity he displayed that day in Joe’s shop. It is as if his bones are articulated in more places than they should be. His head moves smoothly to follow Joe’s eyes, to peer into his face. Blank, black-linen monster. Eggshell face. Mask. And yet, somehow, not expressionless. Whether his emotions are carried in his body, or whether they are so strong that Joe is catching the lines of the face through the shroud, the way he feels is quite apparent in the tiny room.

He hates Joe Spork. He hates him as you hate someone you have known your entire life and whom you cannot stand. Whose existence in the world offends you in your bones. Every line of his liquid body aches with it.

Joe has no idea what he can have done to inspire such wrath. He is not old enough to have hurt Brother Sheamus in that way, and would surely know if he had inflicted an injury of that kind on his fellow man. He has, after all, dedicated his life to being mild.

He tries to say so. Unfortunately, he can’t speak, because when he tries his teeth chatter and his tongue won’t behave.

“You have formed impressions of me, Joshua Joseph Spork,” Sheamus says clinically. “It cannot be otherwise.”

He is not asking a question, so by Mr. Ordinary’s rules, Joe doesn’t have to respond.

“You imagine I am a man in authority but under orders. You may know that I wear a variety of hats and crowns, and you may imagine that where these things contradict it is evidence of deception. But those impressions are shallow things. They are based on an understanding of the world which is impoverished by modern weakness, by this modern irony, which is so frightened of grand ideas that it must pick pick pick them apart. Britain’s ultimate triumph, Mr. Spork: a world of shopkeepers.” This last with contempt. Joe makes a mental note: modernity, shopkeepers: bad.

“I am so much more than you imagine. I am more, and yet I am a fraction of what I shall be in days to come. My victory is inevitable, child of my hate, because I shall become God. And being God, I shall be perfect, and being perfect, I shall always have been perfect. All of this apparent meandering is a straight line to my apotheosis, when viewed from the timeless and ineffable understanding of the divine.”

Joe Spork receives all this and knows that a week ago he would have laughed at it. Not now, not here, in this room. The eyes are not funny at all. In them he sees himself vivisected—not for interest, but for enjoyment. He knows absolutely that that is what this man would like to do. His only hope is that the master of the Ruskinites is lying, that he is indeed held in check by someone. And then, with a sinking feeling, he joins the dots and realises that the man so tasked would be Rodney Titwhistle, and the good Rodney has already sacrificed conscience in this matter for some greater good which only he can see.

“A different question, then, for variety. But you must get this one right, no half-answers. Are you ready? Good.

“If I have the mind of Napoleon, but the body of Wellington, who am I?”

And at Joe’s stricken look, he laughs, quite genuinely.

Joe Spork has no idea what the right answer may be, so he tries very hard to ask what it is that he has done to make his interlocutor so angry, and how he can make amends, but his mouth betrays him and he chokes, and spits slightly. The man takes this as a challenge, and a moment later Mr. Ordinary comes back and says he is very disappointed.

Joe tries to slip away and remember good things, but good things are far away and very pale, and there are sharks in his mind with him, memories he does not want and cannot avoid any longer.

On the occasion of Joshua Joseph’s fifteenth birthday, the young man opened the door to find his father on the step in a splendid suit, with a present under his arm. This was a surpassingly impressive feat, because Mathew was serving time in one of Her Majesty’s prisons for grand (even “grandiose,” the wits had it) theft.

“Hello, Joe,” Mathew Spork said genially, “thought I’d drop in, hope you don’t mind.”

“You’re out?” Joshua Joseph demanded.

“As you see, Joe. As you see. I am a free man—for the day, at least.”

“Just for a day?”

“Longer, if I can manage it.” This very drily, and the quirk of wickedness which is his father’s trademark alerts young Joe to an alarming possibility.

“You’ve broken out!”

“Yes, I have. Rather well, too, I must say. I had to see a man in Harley Street, you see, about my health. Prison food is terrible, my boy, it tastes of fat and is bad for the digestion. So I thought, well, why not? I’ll drop in on my son and hug my loving wife, and then I shall leg it for the bosom of Argentina, and you can pop out and join me from time to time. How does that sound?”

“You’re mad!” Joshua Joseph cries, delighted, “You can’t stay here, they’ll find you!”

“Your father, Joshua Joseph Spork, may be an old man and a decrepit one, but he is no fool and this is not his first fandango. There is even now a fine fellow by the name of Brigsdale, wearing a Mathew costume, waiting in the queue for the ferry to Ireland. Mr. Brigsdale has done no one any wrong in his life, Josh, but he greatly resembles your old man. He will go to the ferry and he will be apprehended, and Lily Law will falsely believe for several days that I have been caught, at which point Mr. Brigsdale will explain that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding and sue them for false arrest, not that he’ll need to because I’ve set him up somewhat… But by the time it’s all sorted out I shall have buggered off to Buenos Aires and all will be well.” Mathew Spork beams.

And to Joshua Joseph’s amazement, the door does not come crunching down, the Flying Squad does not arrive. Father and son sit there on the sofa (“I’m a bit puffed, Josh, I had to climb a very high wall, you know. This prison breaking is best left to younger men—I shall put that in my memoirs!”) and they drink tea, and wait for Harriet to come home. In honour of the old days, when Joshua Joseph used to slumber like a puppy, curled up on his father’s lap, the gawky teen rests his head on Mathew’s chest as they watch John Craven’s Newsround to see if it will tell them about the escaped felon, Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, and list his many iniquitous acts, but fame is fleeting and there’s a swimming rabbit instead.

“Will you teach me how to fire the gun in Argentina, Dad?” Because the day is coming, undeniably, when he will be old enough to learn.

Mathew sighs.

“Do me a favour, Joe, all right?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t be like me. Be a judge, be a rock star. Be a carpenter. Just… find a better way. Leave the gun to someone else if you can.”

“I want to be like you.”

“No, you don’t. You think you do, but this is what it comes to. It’s rubbish. Hiding in my own house. Promise me, you’ll be better than this.”

“I promise.”

“Gangster’s oath?”

“Gangster’s oath!” And if the backwardness of that is apparent to either of them, they don’t say.

“All right, then.”

They fall asleep that way, and it is only when Harriet Spork comes through the door from her yoga class and shrieks that Joshua Joseph awakes, and realises that his father has died, very quietly, with a smile on his face.

In the aftermath, it turns out that Mr. Brigsdale was a figment of Mathew’s outrageous imagination, and that there was no plan to get to Argentina. When Mathew Spork visited the prison doctor and learned that his life was coming to an end, he secured permission to visit his son on his birthday, and then he did, in fact, find a way to elude the clutches of the law for evermore.

Two shrouded faces watch Joe through a panel in the door. They jockey for position at the narrow hole, bobbing around one another. The room fills with a stink so vile he begins to vomit. When he reaches the point where his stomach is quite empty, and even the bile has stopped coming, they pipe more of the stink in, so that he arches convulsively, forehead and toes touching the ground and nothing else, as his body tries to get rid of things which are not there.

In his mind, he holds onto his father’s hand, that last day. Mathew would have known what to do.

“Where is it?”

They have been asking him the same question, over and over. When he objects that he does not know what “it” may be, they are particularly harsh. It is not their job to explain. It is his to offer possible locations of any object they might be looking for. He is to cultivate a habit of mind which opens to their inquisition. “Where have you hidden it?”

He tells them he keeps it in the sugar jar. He wants to tell them that whatever it is they already have it. They have everything he owns. Or owned.

You’ve got it. You’ve got everything I had. You took it all from my house, from Ted’s.

“Did Daniel hide it? Did he explain to you what it was? Who else is aware of it?”

Yes. Daniel hid it. He hid it so well you will never find it. And nor will I. In a library. In a bookshop. In a church. He burned it. He sold it.

“Where is it?”

It exists only in your mind. My mind. Our minds. We are all one.

Joe’s own mind is wandering, and he knows it, and knows that the wandering is a relief from pain. He fights against it, all the same, because he is frightened he will never come back.

“You cannot continue to resist us. In the end, you will tell us everything. Everyone does. In the end, we will become bored listening to you share your secrets in tedious detail. Where is the calibration drum, Mr. Spork?”

I have absolutely no fucking idea.

This is true, but at the same time he realises that the question tells him something. The calibration drum is used to change the settings on Frankie’s machine. Brother Sheamus wants to use the Apprehension Engine for something other than what Frankie had in mind.

He squashes this understanding, lest he blurt it out. He is sure that knowing too much is as bad as knowing too little.

“Where is the calibration drum?”

It occurs to him that they really do not know that he does not know. He is in the hands of incompetent torturers—and from this he conceives a new fear, that their physical skills are as limited as their analytical ones, and they will let him die by accident, by a moment’s inattention.

He finds himself in the bizarre position of hoping they are better at this than they seem to be.

He dreams that Rodney Titwhistle comes to visit him. He wishes he could dream something less grey and equivocal.

“They’re torturing me,” Joe Spork says through numb lips. Rodney Titwhistle shakes his head.

“No,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “they are not.”

“They are. And you know it.” He sounds like a child in his own ears, and something in him rages, but he wants to be rescued. He wants the Queen or the BBC to reach down and make it all stop. Rodney Titwhistle is neither, but he’s as close as can be had.

“They are not. And it is very wrong to suggest that they are. It is counterproductive. Worse, it gives assistance to the enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“Any enemy. All enemies.”

“So they’re torturing me to keep everyone safe.”

“They are not torturing you, Mr. Spork. That is against the law. I could not use them if they were to subject you to any sort of degrading treatment. However, I do use them. I know them to be lawful. I have asked exacting questions. I have received assurances. Therefore you are either making this up, or you are deluded. If you are making this up, I should warn you that manipulative falsehood is now considered a technique of Lawfare. You understand what that means? Warfare using the legal code, thus Lawfare. There are penalties for illegitimate Lawfare.”

“They won’t even tell me what they want. I want to tell them, you see. Only I have no idea.”

Rodney Titwhistle sighs. “They want the calibration drum for the Apprehension Engine, Mr. Spork. A small item. A thing no bigger than your hand. The Book, as it transpires, will turn the machine on but not off. We must have the drum. There is some suggestion that you possess it. Or that your grandfather did. You would do well to consider carefully before denying anything.”

“I don’t know. I want… I want my lawyer! Get me Mercer. I have rights. You know I do.”

“No, you do not. Not here. Not in this room, or this building. Here you are a patient. You are suspected of an act of terrorism so gross, so destructive, that it is the definition of madness. Patients have no rights. And I told you before, sir: there are penalties for Lawfare.”

Mr. Titwhistle leaves in a huff, and it turns out that there are, indeed, penalties. But Joe knows there are penalties for everything now, and they touch him less and less.

He lets himself go away for a while.

“This task. These words. Are against nature. They are against everything. Fathers should not bury their sons.” Daniel Spork, pendulum-straight, choking like a gritty caseclock.

“Not in war, not in peace. I have seen both.” He stops, and works his right shoulder, his neck. He contains a furnace of sorrow, and he is burning through. “My son was not a good man. By the measure of our country’s law. He was a transgressor. He. Could not be made to see. I tried, but I was alone, and I cannot. I am not. Good with words. Or people, even. I understand machines. So. He was a bad man. He stole. He robbed. He broke things and fired guns and he encouraged others to do the same. He tried to sell drugs. He went to prison. My son was bad. I mourn my bad son.” Defiance flares in him.

“But he was not. He was not bad. He was not. He loved. He loved his son. He loved his wife. He wanted above all to love his mother. My Frankie. His Frankie, that he barely knew. I believe he loved even me. Even though I failed him. Every day, I failed. I am so sorry that I could not. I could not.” Daniel stops again. Whatever, exactly, he could not, Joshua Joseph will never learn, because his grandfather must gather himself and go around it, or he will not recapture himself, will fail this one last time, and that is something Daniel Spork will not permit. The spring must unwind all the way.

“He was not bad. He was not. He was intemperate. Angry. Lawless. Not dishonest. Although sometimes the truth could not—like many of us, could not—could not keep up with him.

“And in this last thing, he is revealed. That he knew he was. He knew. He was not long. That he was. Dying. He got out of prison. To see his son and say ‘goodbye.’ He did not tell me he was coming. I could kill him.”

And this, impossibly, makes them laugh, not bitterly, but wholeheartedly. Yes. Mathew Spork, in going to his grave, is as infuriating as he ever was, and as stupidly, stubbornly heroic about it.

“So grieve. Please. Today, let it out. For me. Scream. Weep. Drink too much and be unwise. Be like him. Let go. Because I cannot. I do not know how.

“Fathers should not bury their sons.”

Outside, they lower the coffin into the ground. For some reason, the hole is decked out in AstroTurf. Joshua Joseph had imagined the soil would be loamy and soft, and that he would be able to scatter it, but London is built on clay, and so instead he hefts a great mustard-coloured clod into the hole and it makes a muffled, hollow thudding as it lands. He worries he may have chipped the varnish, and then feels stupid, because no one will ever know, or reproach him if they did.

The burial goes on and on.

Until, nearly an hour later and the box buried safe and sound, Joshua Joseph stands with his grandfather looking out across a little road. For five minutes they have stood thus, the old man boiling with whatever self-reproaches he has not voiced, and the boy seeking by instinct the one person equally responsible for Mathew Spork in life and death. Together, they watch—but do not watch—a red double-decker bus, the first of two, draw up to the stop across the street. After a moment, it pulls away again, revealing a single figure in mourner’s black, gaunt and straight against the newsagent’s window.

Joshua Joseph has a brief impression of grey hair cut in a severe bob, a scrawny neck like a silver birch tree, and two knobbled, arthritic hands clutching at a pair of severe black trousers. Very slowly, very deliberately, she raises the left in a gesture of greeting, and Joshua Joseph can see, even at this distance, that she has been crying. By her shudders, he deduces that she is crying still. He wonders dimly whom she mourns, and if she comes here every day, or every week, or if there is another funeral following on the heels of this one, and then his dawning realisation finds voice in his grandfather’s appalled, desperate shout, as the old man lurches forward, one hand outflung as if reaching from an icy sea for one last chance at the lifeboat’s ladder.

“Frankie!” he shrieks, “Frankie, Frankie, please!” as he flings himself, heedless of his gammy knees and his spindly ankles, towards the East Gate. “Frankie! My Frankie!”

And she responds. She does. Her face lights up at this unlooked-for, unimagined blessing; that even now, even in this cruellest moment, his love remains. The waving hand extends towards him as if blown by a breeze. And then, sharply, the open door slams shut. She is not yet done. She is not ready. She snatches back her hand and begins to turn away, and the second bus draws a temporary curtain between them. Daniel struggles with the catch on the gate, his grandson torn along in his wake, as desperate—almost—as the old man himself. The gate swings open—but when the bus moves off again, Joshua Joseph knows already what he will see. Sure enough, the bus stop is empty.

Daniel stares without understanding, and then whips around to follow with his eyes the departing double-decker, and sees—they both see—that narrow figure clasping tight to the silver pole at the back. Her face is turned away from them even as her body and her heart refuse to complete entirely the abandonment, and she remains rooted to the running board, standing full square as if she will embrace them both even as the bus carries her away and turns a corner, and she is gone.

They find Joe’s resistance—his unresistant resistance—curious and frustrating. They shut him in his little white room and a moment later the box seems to detach from the building and hurl him around, up, down, around. It occurs to him, as he hangs suspended, watching one side of the box retreat and knowing that the other must be rushing up behind him, that if he is moving at fifteen miles an hour—not unlikely—and the box at fifteen as well in an opposing direction, then he will strike with a total force of thirty miles an hour and quite possibly die.

He spreads his arms out and tries to slow himself. He does not die, or even suffer serious injury—although he suspects he may have dislocated a thumb and cracked some ribs, and wonders at the change in circumstances which causes him to see this as minor—and when they are finished, they let him out. He staggers and weaves and empties his stomach onto the white floor. They hold him, and he thanks them.

Mr. Ordinary smiles.

Instead of taking him back to his box (he struggles with himself to avoid identifying it as “home”) they put him into another room just next to it. There is a man inside, smelling of rubber boots, mud and seaweed, and his body is a mass of burns and scabs.

“We’re down in the ivy,” Ted Sholt says.

Joe, looking down at this silvered head and the man he suspects is dying, feels a strong familiarity.

They have done something strange to Ted Sholt, something odd and clever and very terrible. He is shaking, but not like a man who is cold or tired or afraid. He is shaking as if his muscles are coming away from his bones, and his skin has a strange, stretched look, as if the fat of his body is pooling in places where it should not.

“Ivy inside,” Sholt says hoarsely. His eyes are searching, but not finding, and Joe realises that he cannot see. “Ivy in the blood. Ted’s head’s full and Ted’s a fool, God’s a figment, devils rule.”

“It’s me, Ted,” Joe says softly. There’s no need to shout. They are pressed against one another like lovers. They can have something approaching privacy only if one of them stands. “It’s Spork the Clock.”

“You can’t let him go through with it,” Ted says vaguely. He tries to lift his body with his stomach muscles, and something makes a gristle noise. He moans.

“Ted… I don’t think there’s anything I can do. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Brother Sheamus. Frankie’s machine.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what they want from me. I don’t know anything. I’m just the idiot who turned the key. You were there, Ted.”

Sholt tries to speak, and then screams again, and this time when he arches his back he crackles, as if his bones are breaking. “What cart will Frankie’s engine pull? Science has many faces, each mouth whispers to the world in different ways. Frankie’s gone, her blade will cut in all directions. Whose hand holds the knife? Sheamus, of course. Always Sheamus. Bastards.” He shudders, and Joe feels something move inside the other man’s body, something which a profound instinct tells him should stay in one place.

“Ted, please. Stay still.”

“She said it was salvation. She said too much truth turns us to ice and we shatter, so she set it all perfectly. But Sheamus… he wants more than that. Wants a reckoning with God. Wants to reset the machine. See all the truths at once. He’ll kill the world.”

“But he can’t do that without the calibration drum, and he doesn’t have it, does he? Of course, he doesn’t. Because Frankie wasn’t an idiot. She gave it to someone she could trust.”

Oh, shit. Daniel. She gave Daniel the keys to the apocalypse. Of course, she did. Who else do you give something which can destroy the world, which will be hunted by monsters and thugs, except the father of your child who still loves you even after you’ve played hide and seek with his heart for thirty years?

Daniel, and hence, Joe.

Shit, shit, shit.

If Joe has it, he does not know. If they took it when they raided the warehouse, they also do not know. Therefore it is concealed. It is hidden, of course, hidden by Daniel against this very day. Hidden too well. Perhaps it was in Daniel’s lost effects. Perhaps Mathew, all unknowing, sold the ignition key to the most dangerous object in the world for the price of a meal at Cecconi’s.

Shit.

Ted Sholt is rattling on. “But Sheamus just wants to know his score. Wants to know if he won or lost. Stupidity is a symptom of enormous power, they say.” And then: “You must stop him. You must! Go to the Lovelace. Where I left her.”

“Don’t tell me, Ted. Not here. I can’t keep it secret from them.” They will have it from me. What they did not get from you, I will give up. I cannot keep it inside.

Sholt stares right at him, into him, madman’s fox-eyes seen briefly in the dark. He lifts his head, and something gristles softly in his stomach, something broken. He snarls. “Yes, you can! You must!” and he is going to tell, without question.

Joe bends his neck, and Sholt whispers directly into his ear barely any sound at all: “She’s under the hill at Station Y.” He slumps back.

Joe shakes his head, relieved. “Ted, I don’t know where that is.”

“Matter of public record. Obscure, but simple. No: listen! I can tell you how… Stand on the box and see the hill, down the tunnel into the dark. Open the door with Lizzie’s birthday. And you’re in. Now! Garble it, in your head! Mix the letters and remember the jumble. Say it: Matron Fry. Nation’s Eye. God loves sinners, patients cry. See? That way you can always choose whether to say it aloud or not. You can scream it, if you have to. Shout the answer at them and let them figure it out. Tell the truth, but keep it from them. You must, Joe! You must!” He wheezes and shuts his eyes tight. “It’s all in there. Do anything. But stop him.”

Ted gasps and squirms, and more things crackle inside him. Joe wonders whether, if he banged on the door and offered to talk, he could get Ted a doctor.

Probably not.

So he lies instead, mercifully:

“I will, Ted. I will.”

Later, when they use the water, Joe dies for two minutes and eighteen seconds.

The water is cold and fresh against his face, but tastes of salt and chemicals. It is a special preparation, Mr. Ordinary explains, to reduce the risk of fatality. Joe thinks, objectively, as it worms into his lungs, that it does not work very well.

He starts to drown. One of the Ruskinites is next to him, very close, listening to the sound of his choking. It turns its head, listening for the sound of water in his lungs. It has experience. It is a craftsman. It can tell by the noise his body makes when it is time to stop.

He wonders when he stopped thinking of the Ruskinites as people. He wonders whether they ever thought of him that way.

Part of him cannot help but notice that they have not asked him any questions recently. Perhaps they do not intend to. Perhaps they are just going to kill him.

The idea is horrible, and he starts to struggle. He struggles until he cannot continue, and inhales a great deal of water, and the listener holds up his hand. A crash cart barrels in, orderlies and doctors shouting.

They have to resuscitate him, which they do with a machine, because—when one of them goes to give him mouth-to-mouth—Mr. Ordinary warns that he is dangerous and may bite their lips off, also that they have no idea whether he carries any diseases.

Joe wonders why on Earth they haven’t checked for that. It seems so obvious. While they struggle to force him not to die, he debates whether to cooperate. He suspects he could just depart now, and be gone. But death does not seem much of an answer, and he has things to do. People are depending on him.

He has always avoided thinking too much about death. The whole idea appals him, and always has. Damn Daniel’s Death Clock, commended to his special attention. He wonders why it seems important, here, now: a wretchedly gloomy bit of Victorian tat. And why would Daniel be so keen on it, when he loved life so much?

He decides to give Daniel the benefit of the doubt. He won’t die just yet.

When his heart is beating again, Mr. Ordinary declares it’s time he had a break.

In pale yellow scrubs and with his throat still sore from tubes and retching, Joe sits in a room with window boxes and wishes himself a thousand miles away, wishes himself someone else, wishes he had never met Billy Friend, never chosen to follow his grandfather into the dying world of clockwork. Wishes his father had forced him to be a lawyer, which at one stage was very much Mathew’s intention, until Harriet’s tears pried him away from it.

So now he’s playing Snakes & Ladders with a woman inmate and watching the clock. In twenty minutes it will be eleven a.m. He wonders whether they will come for him then because it’s a round number.

Not all of the staff here are Ruskinites. Many of them are, as far as he can tell, conventional medical personnel. He is in a Ruskinite hospital for the mentally ill. One of the nurses—a pretty, roundish sort of woman called Gemma—told him in confidential tones that he is receiving the best possible care and will be all better soon. He responded that he was sure that was true, and she dimpled.

All the same, she would not reveal to him the name of the hospital (“I’m not allowed”) or get in touch with anyone for him (“You just think about getting better, all right?”) or give him any news from outside—about golden bees, for example, or whether they have yet provoked a war.

He has christened the place Happy Acres. The other patients—not all of them, he’s fairly sure, are prisoners—are mostly silent and bewildered. One man sings the first bars of a pop song over and over in the corner. A woman whimpers.

At five minutes to the hour, seven men walk into the room and clear a space for a sort of coffin. It is like the board which Joe was strapped to during the waterboarding (“saline disclosure therapy,” Nurse Gemma said reprovingly), but it appears to be made to measure and is more absolute in its restraint. The man inside is almost entirely cased in nylon straps and rubber. He is older than Joe but younger than Mathew when he died, and he has wild hair and a full beard and tanned, working man’s skin, pale beneath the restraints. Even when this man is outside, he is in his coffin.

At last. Someone they hate more than me.

They put the coffin man by the window so that the inmate can see the flowers, and he makes a rough, gargling noise, which Joe eventually realises is the man saying a polite “good morning.”

After a moment, they take Joe to stand in front of the coffin. All he can see of the man inside is one brown eye and one blue, staring back at him unblinking. Joe realises the man probably never gets to see anyone’s face for very long. He looks past the coffin and sees Mr. Ordinary watching him intently, reads the warning: There are worse places than the one you are in, lad.

“Hello,” he says to the prisoner, “my name’s Joe. What’s yours?”

He wonders briefly why they all laugh at him, even the man in the coffin.

They do not take him back to his cell. He can feel the little room behind him, not much bigger than his body, waiting to embrace him again. He stares at the white light from the windows and commits it to memory.

He plays draughts with the coffin man. They have to use an electronic board. The coffin man has a remote control, like the ones used by paraplegics. One of his fingers is released to operate a little joystick, one click at a time. Forward. Sideways. Forward. Sideways. Apparently it doesn’t do diagonal.

Joe wins. At the last minute, though, the coffin man gives him a scare with a rampaging king. It menaces, threatens, and bullies Joe out of position, captures a few pieces by sheer force of threat before he can corner it. In the midst of his pieces, the king is not at bay. Rather, it is surrounded by targets.

The coffin man says something around his bite plate. It’s hard to decipher. He hawks and plays with the thing in his mouth, curls his lips. Spittle glistens. He says it again.

“That’s how it’s done.”

And then he laughs.

When Joe asks why they don’t just let the coffin man speak his instructions, everyone laughs again. A tall orderly rolls up his sleeve and shows a scar on his arm, a long pale strip of grafted flesh. He doesn’t seem to resent the coffin man at all. The orderly seems to feel they’re all in this together. The coffin man gargles cordially.

Later, Joe is given a meal. They feed him, because he is shaking too much to do it himself. While they do this, someone else gives the coffin man an intravenous feed. At some point they make a mistake, and the coffin man opens a long, rich cut across a man’s face with his joystick hand. He snarls something. It is muffled, but somehow quite clear.

That’s how it’s done.

The coffin man howls, an incredibly loud, appalling noise. They taser him, which is utterly pointless because he is already restrained, and he starts to choke. A moment later he turns purple and slumps, and they call a crash team. When they try to resuscitate him, he casually claws across a woman’s eyes. He glowers, bright and angry, and finds Joe.

It is a question of focus, Joe realises. Of intensity. It is the thing Mathew must have had but which he never allowed his son to see, because it was only for emergencies, and in Mathew’s world—the version he allowed his son to know about—emergencies were forbidden: everything which happened happened to the advancement of the House of Spork. But when your back was to the wall and someone else had the knife, there was, in the end, a simple decision: They are not the monster. I am.

You can’t care about consequences. Every second becomes an end in itself. That’s how it’s done.

They beat the coffin man down, and he laughs the entire time. Joe abruptly realises what has just happened.

Tuition.

He stares at the wild, angry eyes, and feels comradeship. Then the orderlies drag the coffin man away.

“State of the nation,” Mr. Ordinary says regretfully from behind him. “I see you’ve made a new friend.”

“Crazy man. I don’t know his name.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Mr. Ordinary ponders. “Huh,” he says. And then break time is over.

“I wanted to show you this myself,” Mr. Ordinary says, “because I’m very much responsible for it. I had to work hard to make this happen. No one is coming for you.”

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.

So he cheated back. He abandoned Daniel’s world in order to preserve it, and from that lesson drew his entire life. He broke laws, cracked safes, smashed windows and shattered the public peace, and from destruction he drew consolation. The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Mathew Spork was free.

As his mother was free. And as his son, now, in this white cell which no longer frightens him, is free.

Outside in the corridor, Joe can hear footsteps. The Ruskinites are coming. Mr. Ordinary, perhaps. They will expect him to be cowed, as he has been before. They will expect him to wait and gather his strength. But his strength now is a thing made from opposition. If he backs down, he knows, it will ebb, and he will lose track of this spectacular certainty. That is not something he can afford. Beyond this, he has nothing left.

Which leaves open war. Each time the door opens, he will fight them with everything he has. He will no longer be restrained. He will drive himself against them until they shatter, or he does.

The door opens, and he moves.

He goes to meet them with a growl in his teeth which becomes a roar, and since his mouth is open he bites the hand which unwisely comes close to his face. He keeps going until he feels something crunch and hears a ghastly howling, but is too busy with his hands to worry very much about that. His left grips and his right hammers downwards, once, twice, like a copper pounding on a door. When the weight on his left hand increases, he lets it open, and instantly uses his left elbow on someone else, a scything downward spiral which opens the man’s forehead to the bone. He bowls on, barging and lunging, and suddenly they are all on the ground and he stamps and kicks, wading through the tangle as through a garden full of leaves. He keeps going and going and going, and he gets stronger rather than weaker with each blow.

Abruptly, he stops, because there’s nothing left to do. There are five men on the ground. Two are moaning softly. Three are quite unconscious.

It had not occurred to him that he might win this fight. Winning a fight, in his mind, is associated with some sort of skill. He had not realised that you could win by just doing the worst things you could possibly imagine, one after another, until your enemies fell over. There’s even a sort of cycle to it, like a very dangerous, very angry clock: grab, rake, gouge; twist, pummel, drop. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

But now here he is, and—within certain limits—free. Not likely to remain so, perhaps. But he can wreak havoc while he’s out. Do some damage to the machine which has hurt him. That has considerable appeal.

He kicks the nearest of his gaolers once more in the spine and gets no reaction. He searches the man and finds a keycard, repeats the process until he has several more. He considers pushing the men into his cell, but there are too many of them and it’s too much like hard work. Instead, he takes a shroud from the biggest man and drapes it over himself. On hemmed-in ground, use subterfuge. Billy Friend had been a devotee of Sun Tzu, though mostly in relation to women.

He walks away down the corridor, trying the cards on anything he can see. Doors click. He doesn’t bother to look inside. If there are inmates, they will either come out or they won’t. Behind him, he hears strange voices and cries, so he assumes there are at least a few. He hopes they are as angry as he is. Or mad in some horrible way. That would be fine.

He reaches a different sort of door, a double door, and when it opens, he realises it’s a lift. He goes in. Naturally, he will try to escape. They will know by now that he is out. Therefore they will expect him to go up. Up and out. They will be waiting.

So he goes down.

As soon as the lift doors open, he smells smoke.

There are red lights set into the walls on this floor, and they’re shining brightly. Somewhere there’s a klaxon going off. A crowd of Ruskinites slither past him, single-minded. He remembers at the last minute to bob his head in an approximation of their sinuous weave, but they don’t pay any attention.

He can’t assume it will last. There must be surveillance. They will in any case shortly realise he is wearing this rather minimal disguise, and they must have ways of knowing one another.

He walks on. A security door requires a different card, a blue one, from the deck in his hand. He steps through. The smell of smoke is much stronger.

In his head, he realises, he has a sort of ragged notion of how this place is laid out. It is a pyramid or ziggurat, of which the uppermost level is the garden and the common room. Below that is the standard accommodation for patients, and below that is his level: the holding cells for inconvenient people to be tortured, and a selection of actual torture chambers. This level, being below that one, must be more secret or more important in some way.

He rounds a corner, and finds himself in a cinema.

Or not. There is a screen, and there are chairs and speakers, yes. But there is also a species of stage or platform, and each seat has what appears to be a set of electrodes attached. The walls are covered in grey foam moulded in geometric patterns, like a sound studio.

“If an ordinary man were to wake with Napoleon’s memories, men would call him mad.” A vast face fills the screen, elegant, lean and cruel. A man in early middle years, his skin very clear and tanned, his features an indefinable blend of cultures. His mouth quirks. “But what if he woke with demonstrably accurate memories which were recorded nowhere else? What if he woke with the face of Napoleon as well? And finally, how, if this man arose from his bed with no mind of his own? What if John Smith ceased to be, and in his place was a perfect replica of the Emperor in body and memory? At what point would we acknowledge that he was identical with that first Napoleon? That he was not merely a copy, but an actual regenesis? What if the pattern of the mind itself could be measured and found to be identical?”

The camera draws back. The man lies on a plush, opulent bed, and his body is festooned with wires and sensors. Almost, he hangs in the bed, so many cables are affixed to his skin. More cameras are visible around him, recording him from every angle. He gestures off to one side, to a circular screen—Joe guesses it must be green—showing an oscillating pattern. A wave.

“This is my mind. This is my body. Make my history your own. Match it perfectly, and become part of me. Part of God.”

Joe Spork stares for a moment at the lean, evil face of Brother Sheamus. There is an intensity to him, a power, which is both alien and familiar. It reminds him of someone. And then he hears the screaming.

The screaming is very hoarse, very desperate. It’s a man, or a very big woman, because it’s deep. It’s not horror-movie screaming, designed to rattle the chandelier. It’s something else entirely, a mammalian noise. Alarm. Alert. There are tigers. I am taken. I am down.

Joe has recently made the same sound himself.

Around a corner, through a door, another door, and then:

Two men. One of them is Mr. Ordinary.

Mr. Ordinary stares up from his chair at another person, an altogether different sort of person. A tiger.

The tiger is smiling. He has a thick beard and greying hair tied back with a piece of orange string. His skin is pale, but leathery. Good teeth, a little snaggled at each corner of the mouth; you can see it in the line of his face. Wide lips.

Joe does not recognise him; not his movements, nor his face, nor even his eyes, until a glance at Mr. Ordinary shows an appalling, absolute despair, and then—as the torturer glimpses Joe in his Ruskinite shroud—the desperate hope of rescue.

There’s really only one person here who makes anyone that afraid. And now that he looks, he recognises the eyes, too.

The coffin man bends down in front of Mr. Ordinary, gets his head close to the other’s face.

“Where’s the way out, boy?” His voice is thick and he lisps. Those snaggles at the corner of his mouth: the bite plate has deformed his teeth, and he’s not used to not wearing it yet, can’t compensate. He’ll need practice, and a good dentist. All the same, there’s something about the voice: “buuwoy.” A fisherman’s voice.

“It’s down!”

“Is it bollocks.” Plymouth, with a taste of London, maybe. The coffin man shrugs, and lays his hand gently across Mr. Ordinary’s face. When he withdraws it, he is mysteriously holding something wobbly, and Mr. Ordinary is screaming again, this time sharply, and Joe realises it is an ear. The coffin man tosses it aside. Then he speaks again.

“Seen you.” He glances over at Joe. “You, I’m talking to.” He shrugs. “You ain’t what you look like, I know that.”

Joe realises he is still wearing the shroud. He pulls it off.

“Thought so,” the coffin man nods. “Trick of the walk, maybe.”

“How did you get out?”

“Well, some bugger poked the anthill, didn’t he? Set off all the alarum bells and what have you. Someone got careless. That don’t pay with me. I got him, and his friends, and I set ’em on fire. Doesn’t pay to show me disrespect. I keep trying to tell ’em. You look like you’ve come of age, though.”

“I’ve what?”

The older man shrugs. “All that strength. You walk through everything as if you’re afraid of breaking it. Keep it all down in the dark. Or you did, maybe.”

“Keep what in the dark?”

“Don’t be a tit. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Here,” he adds reprovingly, as Mr. Ordinary tries to get up, “no call for that, is there? Don’t be giving me force.” Force is a bad thing. The coffin man reaches down and does something at the open mess which used to house an ear. Mr. Ordinary doubles over and vomits, drily. “So what’s a Hakote, and what do they write about, that this bugger cares so much about it?”

Night Market instinct: evade. Joe shrugs. “Search me.”

The coffin man stares, and then starts to laugh. He can barely keep upright, he is laughing so hard.

“What’s funny?”

“You are! Bloody hell. Ohhh, bloody hell, that’s too much… You’ve got no more real clue what’s going on than I have, do you? And they knew it, too, but they were giving you the full works, and the more you didn’t tell them the more they were scared you were a real hard case, the more they did, the more you didn’t know… bloody marvellous!”

Joe stifles the urge to tell the other man that actually, yes, he does indeed know what’s going on and now he knows the one thing these bastards don’t. It’s like being at school. Instead of boasting, he laughs, too.

The coffin man leans on the desk and knocks over a stack of reference books, which is even funnier, and it appears that Mr. Ordinary is the only person in the room who is not having a good time. When the coffin man notices this, he sobers a bit.

“Where’s the way out? Come on, now.”

“Down! Down to the basement!”

“I don’t think so. That’s where they had me.”

“It’s a fake! Everything’s upside down! When you go to the basement the lift goes up! The mechanism’s so smooth you can’t tell. It makes everyone sick unless they know! The way out is down there!”

The coffin man grins at Joe.

“That’s got the ring of truth in it, for sure. Off you go, then.”

“Are you coming?”

The other man glances at him.

“You really don’t want me to, matey. I’m unpopular out there. I’m not a bad man, as it happens, though I will confess I’m pretty aggravated right about now. I’m of a mind to share my displeasure.” He leans down and does something quick and disgusting to Mr. Ordinary, who makes a dreadful little wheezing noise which suggests he may have torn something and now cannot scream any more. Joe steps back a pace. “Ah. You’re getting it now, aren’t you?”

“Who are you?”

“No one. Oh, sure, I was somebody, once. I liked Kenny Lonergan’s plays and Eartha Kitt’s music. I liked… orange juice. Fresh, from the sandwich place at the end of my road. Weekly treat, that was. I was that bloke. Who knows what I am now?”

“You’re a patient.”

“That, too. Mind you, that doesn’t make me bad, now, does it?”

Mr. Ordinary plunges one hand abruptly into his pocket and jams something the size of a mobile telephone sharply against the coffin man’s leg. There’s a strange, sharp noise like a robot blowing a kiss. The coffin man jerks, and smiles.

“There now,” he says, stuttering slightly, “that’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it?” He rolls his head on his neck and taps his teeth together. Even from this distance, Joe can feel static on his skin. Mr. Ordinary presses the taser again. The coffin man jolts a bit, then steadies.

“It’s all about p-purpose,” he says. “If you’ve got purpose and you just… nghh… you just hold onto it, these things are a b-b-blast. Like someone ss-s-scratching your back for you, from the inside… ggdah. Still, you can have too much of a good thing, ey?” He leans down and slaps the taser away. There’s a burn on his leg, twin black marks of charred skin.

“You’ve bollocksed my sock,” the coffin man says, and sticks his thumb sharply into Mr. Ordinary’s eye. Joe can feel his lips coming back around the question, as if he’s going to throw up.

“Who are you?” But he knows, now, or thinks he does.

“My name’s Parry,” the coffin man says. “You better call me Vaughn. My friends all do. I think it’s better off we’re friends, you and me.”

Fuck, yes.

“Tell you what,” Vaughn Parry says, “I think I was supposed to do for you. I think that was the idea. That other bloke, Ted… they gave him to me to scare him. ‘One for you, Vaughn,’ and all that crap. Ought to know better, I didn’t want anything to do with him, so they had to do it themselves.

“I think I was going to be your last stop, too, before they put you in the ground. Your destiny, as it were. Think about that for a sec.” Parry turns back to look at Mr. Ordinary again, and the man whimpers. “D’you believe in destiny? Seems to me there’s a thing about destiny. If there’s destiny, then choices don’t mean anything, do they? So I do something bad—” He does, and there’s a hard, flat scream, cut off in a fit of coughing. Mr. Ordinary is vomiting. “If I do something bad, I didn’t choose it. Or rather, I was always going to choose it, never was any way I could be me and not choose it, which amounts to the same thing. So I’m a monster from the day I die all the way back to when I’m born. It’s all one, isn’t it? But the question is, where am I in all of it? If I can’t choose anything, am I just watching? Am I there at all? That’s destiny, for you.” He shrugs. “Best you piss off now, young ’un,” he says, without looking back. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain,” he snarls at Mr. Ordinary sharply, as if this is all his fault, “and I’m going to extend myself a bit.”

Joe hesitates. Part of him has a natural instinct to stay and assist Mr. Ordinary. Mr. Ordinary has done very horrible things and is clearly a total bastard, but no one deserves what is happening to him. Joe would under other circumstances cheerfully give him a clean kick in the crotch and, say, break his jaw. This seems an appropriate iteration of his personal feelings. But Vaughn Parry, according to popular rumour and the opinion of Billy Friend, is not really a human being. He is something entirely different wearing a sack made of skin and gloating. There is some commonality of human experience, however attenuated, between Joe and Mr. Ordinary. Joe does not wish to feel any such thing with Vaughn Parry, who hears the Screaming and plucks off ears by way of diverting himself.

And yet, he does. He feels a fierce kinship for him, for his élan, his acquaintanceship with horror. Parry inhabits this world—this new world of professional torture and dark secrets for which a man may be killed—far more elegantly than does Joe the Clockmaker. It makes sense to him. He’s at home in it, in a way Joe absolutely is not. Vaughn Parry belongs here, and is unafraid. That is something Joe greatly envies. In one way or another, he has been afraid his entire life—until a few hours ago, when he found clarity and broke Mr. Ordinary’s nose.

He is afraid again now. He is terribly afraid of Vaughn Parry. It’s reasonable. Parry is the great bogeyman of the moment, a suburban killing machine with an apt sense of the appalling—and here he is, in living Technicolor, with a man’s face between his tapered fingers and blood on his shoes. Even if Joe wanted to argue with him, he could not. Parry would kill him.

Or not.

Joe rolls his shoulders again, for a moment fascinated by the very idea. He could scream and leap. He is a big man and Parry is not. He finds he does not care what happens now. The world is wrong. In fact, it is Parry’s world. Vaughn Parry makes sense, in a world where this can be done to Joe Spork. The gentle clockmaker, now: there’s a fellow who does not understand the way of things. A law-abiding fellow, is Joe. He never considered that the law might not abide by him.

He could scream, and leap, and things would happen. Either he would destroy Parry and the world would be that much better, or he would die, and his problems would be rather finally resolved.

Vaughn Parry glances at him, and grins.

“Not going to, are you?” he says, shaking his head. “Where are you, boy? What does it take to get you out?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe you make more sense than I do.”

Parry’s eyes open wide for a moment in surprise. “Ey, well, that’s not something I hear often. I suppose you’re right, anywise. I ought to leave this lad alone before I do him a serious harm and regret it. Lead on.”

With this unexpected sentiment, he shunts Joe out of the room, leaving Mr. Ordinary gasping in relief and misery on the floor.

Joe hesitates, then extends his hand to Vaughn Parry.

After a similar pause, Parry takes it awkwardly and shakes. They move quickly back through the building towards the lift. In the cinema, Joe pauses to look at the screen. The Recorded Man is running now, moving, his body strangely clenched as if around an old injury, yet possessed of a familiar, unpleasant fluidity. Joe scowls.

Parry nods. “This is where they make them,” he says, and goes to leave. Joe lingers.

“Make who?”

“Them. The monks. They run current through your head until it’s empty and then they turn you into one of them. With this.” He gestures around. “They tried it with me.”

“What happened?”

“A lot of them were damaged beyond repair, is what fucking happened. After that they decided I wasn’t monk material.” Parry grins, eyes sharp and teeth bloody, and Joe hopes devoutly he has bitten his tongue and not eaten part of Mr. Ordinary. “So can we get the fuck out of the burning mental prison, please?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Joe lets Vaughn Parry lead the way to the lift.

Parry pushes the button for the basement. Now that he knows, Joe can feel the lift rising. Up, up, and away. The doors open, and he sees actual daylight, grim and grey and very wet. English weather. The fire has not reached this floor yet, but the alarm is ringing. He listens to it, curious, and looks at the exit. Perhaps if he tries to cross the threshold, he will feel pain. Perhaps the entire Order of John the Maker is waiting for them. Perhaps there’s a sniper, a crowd of armed police marksmen. Perhaps the bees have come home and everyone has gone mad. Perhaps Polly Cradle really did write that letter.

He walks forward anyway.