Decay Inevitable

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE GUARDIAN

SEAN’S HEAD RESTED against the lip of the bath. His arms were bared, as if readying themselves for a needle. Blood in the water webbed the flesh below his elbow where it had been flayed. Deep cuts to his thighs hung in feathered crimson gouts. In his despair, he’d done for his left eye: its gelid cargo formed a clear, stiffening thread of fluid over his cheek. The razor blade was a red tablet sticking up from Sean’s thumb.

Emma studied the scene as a way to concentrate on staying upright and calming her heart. She found herself snagging on minutiae previously overlooked: a spatter of bleach discolouring the shower curtain, a crack in one of the wall tiles.

She sat down on the toilet lid. Eventually, Sean opened his good eye.

“I waited for ages,” she said. “I thought it was happening.”

He wiped the mess from his cheek and fingered the sticky remains of his socket. He said, “This isn’t going to fucking work.”

THEY HAD BEEN staying in the safe house for the best part of four weeks. As she dressed Sean’s wounds while he sat on the edge of the bath trying to fasten the gashes in his thighs with safety pins, Emma thought back to the moment that Pardoe had caught up with them. In the intervening weeks, she had been able to think of little else. The little man in the round spectacles and the brown worsted suit had arrived on Sean’s doorstep a little after three in the morning, when she and Sean were trying to relax Will. It had been a bizarre evening up until that point. After almost running Will over on the dual carriageway back into Warrington, they had bundled him into the back of the car when they saw what was trying to follow him through the gates of the hospital. All Will had done, in his delirium, was mumble what sounded like “casually” over and over. In a way, Emma had been grateful for the incident. It prevented her from concentrating too much on what had happened at 26 Myddleton Lane. It prevented her from suspecting she had finally gone mad.

Once they got Will back to Sean’s bedsit (he had railed violently against being taken to the hospital), they covered him in a blanket and let him sleep. Still he persisted with his strange litany, only now, Emma noticed, as he relaxed, did it sound as though he was repeating names. “Cat”, he would say. And “Eli”.

“Who do you think he’s talking about?” she asked Sean, but Sean wasn’t saying anything. He was sitting in the dark, in an armchair by his window, his fingers steepled together and pressed against his lower lip. She thought, maybe, by the way the low light from his kitchen glistened on his face, that he was crying. She did not go to him, but sought her own retreat, curled in a ball on Sean’s bed, hugging a pillow.

An hour later, Will woke her with his thrashing on the sofa. In sleep he was begging to be killed. She went to him and revived him, helping him to calm down, bringing him tea, stroking his forehead. Sean had not moved.

“What’s to be done?” she asked him.

“Things haven’t even started yet,” Sean said, cryptically. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was distracted by the sound of footsteps on the pavement. He put a finger to his lips and glared at her. When the footsteps ceased outside his door, Sean went downstairs. Emma heard him open the door while the visitor was in the middle of knocking.

It had been the strangest day she had ever lived. And now it just got weirder. The oddest thing, Emma thought now, as she carefully dressed Sean and kissed him lightly on the mouth, was that she had taken in everything Pardoe said to her as if he were trying to sell her life insurance. She had been mildly bored by it, yet understood that it was really quite important.

Jeremy Pardoe had been Sean’s guardian, many years before. “The only one left,” he said, almost smugly. “You would have had a guardian yourself, Emma, but no more. Frederique, her name was. Nice woman. Ran an amber shop somewhere out in East Anglia I believe. She died a number of years ago. I’m getting a little too old for running around after Sean now. I never thought I’d have to again of course, but, well, there you go. I’ve got some younger legs outside in the car to do my running for me.”

Pardoe had a sleepy voice that carried something of the Highlands’ softness in it. When she asked him about it, he confirmed that he was from Oban. A maltster by trade, as had been his father and grandfather.

“What brought you south?” she asked him.

Sean had rubbed his forehead, irritably. “Emma, he’s doing the talking. Let him finish, and then we can get on to swapping recipes and putting each other on our Christmas lists, okay?”

“No, Sean,” Pardoe had said. “It’s really all right. It might be best for her to hear this at her own pace. You’ve had a busy day.”

“Where’s my guardian?” Will said, groggily.

Pardoe had smiled. “You, sir, never had a guardian. But you’d make a very good guardian for someone else.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Will said, and turned away from their conversation.

“Well,” Pardoe sighed, moving to the window where he teased open the net curtain with his little finger. “I’ve known you, Sean, for a long time. I was detailed to shadow you from your fifteenth birthday, a couple of years after we lost you. You know, when you ran away from home.” He put his hand to his face and rubbed a while. “God,” he whispered. “I thought there’d never be a time when I had to tell you this. I thought the links were down. I thought the territory had been barred.”

Sean heard something squeaking stertorously but couldn’t be bothered to show surprise when he realised it was the sound of his own breathing. Deliberately, he walked to the sideboard and pulled Will’s gun from the drawer. Turning, he pointed it at Pardoe’s head. Pardoe was ice.

Emma said, “Who’s we?”

Sean and Pardoe ignored her. Sean said, “You know about my parents?”

A nod.

“You killed them? What? You worked with them?” He was getting jittery. Sean had never trained a gun on anybody before and he did not like it one bit. In the Force, he had done a little target practice, but had never taken it seriously. A rookie, he was a long way off being considered for armed service.

Emma said: “What about your parents?”

Now Pardoe held up a hand. “I don’t know about any of that. We didn’t know your father was involved with anyone or had deals with anyone. We were trying to track down people with, ah, a strong constitution.”

“What are you talking about?” Sean asked, his bead on Pardoe already wavering. Although he didn’t understand what the man was saying, he understood him to be innocent. Somehow he was as familiar as the jacket Sean had owned for ten years.

Emma’s first question caught up with him and he echoed it. “Who’s we?”

Pardoe did not answer. Clearly he had rehearsed this moment for some time, and his delivery was as dead and level as his hands were active, moving against each other, lightly greased with his perspiration. “You were the vanguard of a special project funded by a secret… society,” he said. “At the age of thirteen, as you reached puberty, it was decreed that you would be controlled, killed, and sent on your mission. You too, Emma. And a girl called Naomi.”

At this, Will turned his attention back to Pardoe. His face was all: What have I got myself into now?

Sean dropped the gun to his side. He suddenly looked very weak. “Naomi? Killed? Mission? Jesus, Pardoe I—”

“There was a man. A very important, very dangerous man called de Fleche. He disappeared. To a place he should not have gone to. We had to track him and bring him back, or… things would have become really not very nice. That’s when we started work tracking down suitable Inserts. The first wave we tried either died or were trapped inside. With hindsight, I suppose we put them in too early, before their training was completed, before we really knew what we were dealing with. But you… you were the true vanguards. You took to the Negstreams like a babe to the teat.”

“Negstreams? What the fu—”

Pardoe silenced Will with a wave of his hand. “I’ll fill you in on Negstreams some other time. For now, I reckon it’s important you find out who you are. Or rather, that you remember who you are.”

“Who was it tried to kill me? Weird woman she was. Coming apart at the seams like something made out of wax.”

“Ah,” Pardoe said. “I didn’t know about her. That makes things a bit trickier, it has to be said.”

“Who is she?” asked Emma.

“Well, I don’t know specifically, but she sounds like Canaille to me.”

“Can I?” Will said. “Can you what?”

“Canaille,” Pardoe enunciated. He spelled out the word.

“Like that’s supposed to mean anything to me?” Will sat up, his face hard-edged.

“You’ve drawn a blank with us too,” Sean said.

“Our opposing forces have a knack, shall we say. There’s a way of plucking from the ether certain individuals who, crude as they are to begin with, have skills that are above and beyond anything you or I could boast. Give them a little time and they can hone these skills until they are ultra-sharp. We are talking about extremely dangerous killing machines. Sorry to get all horrorshow about it, but there you are.”

“Plucked from the ether?” Emma said the words as if they were the magical combination with which to invoke a spirit.

“After a fashion, yes.” Pardoe rubbed his hands together, clearly delighted with the prospect. “They need a way in, it has to be said. A physical entry. This usually will be an expectant mother. Not that there’s much hope for mum or child once the Canaille individual has borrowed that route into the world.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Sean said, the words coming hard and nasty, curling his lip.

“Believe it,” Will said, quietly. “I saw it happen. I saw her. I remember her. They called her something. Cheke, I think it was.”

“Cheke. Yes, that’s one of the swine. We know about Cheke.”

Emma’s face bore the look of someone who had eaten something sour. “It has a name?”

“Of course.” Pardoe seemed put out. “We’ll have to watch out for her. Do not underestimate her. She might seem a bit ungainly at the moment, but she will grow into her role. She is a supreme talent, make no mistake. She will improve.”

“You sound like you admire her,” Will said, bitterly.

“Oh, I do. I do. She is to the land what the shark is to water. She has few peers. Be alert, my friends. You must be very, very careful. I can’t emphasise that enough. She’ll do for you all if you aren’t.”

Pardoe’s jaw clenched and relaxed as a silence wadded the air between them. Into it, Sean whispered: “Why are you telling us all this?”

“As I was saying, there were three of you, three Negstream Inserts,” Pardoe continued. “I thought that only Sean had survived. But his running into you, Emma, sounded the alarm bells. It’s like there’s some kind of, shall we say, ripple when Inserts get together. It’s there. Very strong too. If you know how to look for it.”

Inserts. That word again. Sean liked that. Not one bit. He returned to the cupboard, put down the gun, and withdrew a bottle of Absolut.

“Sit down,” he said. “Tell us everything. But don’t expect me to stay sober.”

It was almost five a.m. by the time Pardoe finished. Sean and Emma and Will had drunk most of the vodka; the bottle lay stoppered on the floor between them pointing out through a window that was gradually filling with chalky streaks of light. Pardoe had refused to drink with them. He told them he would wait in his car, an olive-green Jaguar that was parked in the street, for as long as it took for them to feel comfortable enough about the situation to join him. He would take them somewhere safe. Where they lived at the moment was not safe. Outside elements were closing in. It was time to move.

Unspoken questions fluttered around Sean’s mind but their urgency had been tempered by Pardoe’s gentle voice and his unheralded, understated revelations. Sean’s unease about Pardoe had vanished before the knowledge that he had found an ally for the first time in his life. It helped to be told that Naomi had been a part of it, something that he instinctively knew to be true, as it was with Emma.

Hadn’t he always felt something different? A calling, a significance that plucked at his imagination, like a dream that refused to be remembered? Hadn’t he always possessed the dead zone of what had happened to his parents without ever fully understanding the source of it? It was a dark land that he returned to whenever he slept. He had always thought that the knots in which he was trapped were for him alone to pick at. He never believed the knot might be solved by someone else. Having a discussion that involved his parents, people he had not referred to in public for as many years as they had been dead, made him feel sick.

An hour or so later, Sean, Emma, and Will trooped out to the Jaguar. Pardoe was sitting in the passenger seat, nibbling on a croissant. A large man in a blue cagoule nodded at each of them via the rear-view mirror as they got into the back. Jamie Marshall.

“Hi, Marshall,” said Sean. “Recovered from the stag night?”

“Sorry to be so hush-hush, mate,” Marshall said.

“I doubt I’ll ever be surprised by anything ever again,” Sean remarked.

“You know each other?” Emma asked.

Marshall drove for twenty minutes, navigating A roads and B roads with an almost supernatural knowledge of where explosions had prohibited access. They arrived at a church on the outskirts of Warrington just as sunlight was touching colour to the streets.

There Pardoe kept them, and told them what they needed to know.

“It is unfortunate,” he told Sean and Emma, when they gave their account of what had happened in the house on Myddleton Lane. “But, expected, given your resourcefulness.”

“Why unfortunate?” Emma wanted to know.

“Because once you have passed through a Negstream, you cannot use it again. You have to find your own way back. We think that this is ultimately what did for de Fleche. He constructed his follies around these glorious gateways, one of which he no doubt passed through, and then found that they were as useless to him as a fart in a colander. Oh, do excuse me.” Pardoe flushed. “I’m given to these pathetic little collapses in etiquette. Quite unforgivable. When he found another, he went through and stayed there. He’s been there ever since.”

“And we were detailed to go in and get him?” Sean asked. “Get him how? You can’t bring a dead man back. You can’t kill a dead man.” He looked around at the others. “Can you?”

“Well, he’s not dead. That’s the thing. There are ways and means. It really is fortunate that we found you. De Fleche, in the years since we lost you, has become quite a problem. He’s upsetting the balance and causing a gradual decay. Which is bad for all of us, really. He shouldn’t be there. That’s the bottom line. Negstreams were never meant to be used for travel. They are momentary monuments to the dead at the instant that life departs. The soul made visible as it leaves the body. Death’s mirror, perhaps. Sometimes, like the one you found, Sean, they remain. Flukes of nature, they are. Frozen memories of a life. True ghosts. They are not doorways. Not doorways.”

Will wanted to know if what he had glimpsed after his accident with Elisabeth on the motorway out of London had been a Negstream. He wanted to know where the “there” Pardoe had mentioned was and what it might be. He wanted to know if Catriona might be “there”.

“It’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bother trying to find out if I were you. You aren’t trained for it, dear boy. You aren’t… one of us.”

“What can happen if this guy stays over there?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been there twenty years. So who cares? Let the fucker rot.”

“He isn’t dead. And he’s in a dead zone. How healthy can that be? He is in the place where we all go the second we die. His presence is causing it to decay. Dead things cannot rest easy there.”

“How does that affect us?” asked Emma.

“Well, now, how should I put it?” Pardoe pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and studied the middle distance for a few seconds. “I suppose it affects us because, well, because the dead can leak back.”

Will said, into the heavy silence: “You. Fucking. What?”

Pardoe nodded. “Marvellously put, lad. It’s true. The dead walk among us, if I might be so bold as to put it in hammy language.”

They sat in silence, digesting this, while Pardoe slurped at his tea.

“How do we go about getting back there then?” Sean had asked.

Pardoe spread his hands. “Do you know, I haven’t the foggiest.”

SEAN GREW JITTERY around ten o’clock so Emma took him walking. She’d fastened his coat up to the collar in order to disguise his scarified features. Sunglasses concealed the destroyed eye. They’d draw attention on this wintry night, which they could do without, but not as much as an open wound.

He walked stiffly against the restraining bandages on his legs. He leaned heavily against her and she smelled the copper of his blood seeping through the makeshift dressings. She helped him walk to the estate entrance, where they turned right, towards a tunnel of pedestrian bridges and sodium light.

“Can we stop a moment? I’m having trouble breathing.” He hacked up a lot of blood, and she wiped away the crimson bubbles and ropes from his mouth while he bared his face to the rain. “God, Emma,” he said, “didn’t it used to be so easy? You’d turn a trick here and there and have food for an evening; I’d break my back chasing shoplifters and things would keep moving. I’ve made a bit of a mess of things. I do apologise.”

She hushed him and held him a while, thinking that, compared to what she’d been doing when they first met, this wasn’t too bad. Not really. Remembering his conversation with Pardoe, she gently asked Sean about his parents and why he had not volunteered the information about them earlier.

“Why?” he asked, cruelly. “Because you feel an extra-special bond between us? Because you think you’ve got a right to know stuff just because of what we are?”

“Never mind,” she said, trying to smile to show that she didn’t care what level of divulgence he wanted to allow. The smile didn’t fit too well.

When she felt the rain trickling down the back of her jumper she moved away from him. “Come on,” she soothed. “Let’s get us a drink. Get us both dry.”

In a grim little pub, Sean slumped into a chair while Emma bought whisky. They sat together in silence and sipped, Sean’s damaged fingers curled awkwardly around his shot glass. The punters formed a thin gruel of human waste in the bar that evening. They were either propped up like puppets in broken chairs or sinking their measures of rocket fuel in slow motion, eyes fixed upon a hazy somewhere between heaven and hell. Around the red baize of a pool table pock-marked with cigarette burns, three men took it in turns to smack the cue ball into the pack without the manifest intention of potting anything.

The bartender leaned against the counter at the far end, eyes swivelling up from his motorbike magazine to watch old sports videos playing on the TV that dominated one side of the room. The sound was muted; two teams – one wearing red, the other, blue – stroked a football around a pitch.

A woman in a fake fur coat piled through the doors, the wind and rain at her back as though fuelling the fury she seemed to contain. “Where’s Joey?” she shrieked, looking around the bar. “Shitting priests, I’ll swing for him!” Then she was gone, the door rattling in its frame.

The bartender hollered at the men playing aggression pool to help with the storm shutters, and they returned a few minutes later, having secured the wooden covers over the windows, to be offered free drinks and a towel.

“I like this place,” Sean said. He regarded his drink for a moment and apologised to Emma for snapping at her. “It’s just, I’ve kept so much locked inside me for so long. Sometimes I think about talking to someone about it, but it’s almost as if it never happened and that talking about it will make things bad for me again. Not talking about it keeps the lid on tight.”

Emma leaned over and hugged him. “What are we going to do?” She could see her reflection in the brass tabletop. Even in its honey colour, she could see the dark patches that shaded her eye sockets and hollowed her face. That morning she had brushed her hair and been mortified to find a hank in the bristles the size of a tennis ball. I know what I shall look like in the coffin, she had thought, inspecting the mirror. It had not taken a gigantic leap of the imagination to see how she would appear when she was old. And only ten years previously she would have been unable to legally buy a drink in this bar. All that tautness, that sass, was gone. All that pink.

Sean noticed Emma slump and reached out, stroking the back of her wrist. When he had opened his eyes in the bath to find her sitting by him, waiting, he had been overcome with a surge of need and affection for her and knew then that he loved her. He had recognised their link, at a level too deep for him to comprehend, and believed she did too. Making flesh what had until now been some kind of forgotten knowledge made things between them awkward. But they had both found de Fleche’s house and the strange flame within it. They had both peeked through to see what lay on the other side of the portal before Sean pulled them out as the door locked, the flame solidifying and crumbling to dust as they staggered back. But this whole experience was obviously debiting her reserves of energy. He could see it in the pallor of her skin and the lines that grooved her forehead. The way she looked at him now, for example, over the rim of her glass, an expectant look in her eyes. And a resignation too. Slow fright. He knew that she was building up a defence against the fantastic events that were invading their lives. If he wasn’t careful, she would shore herself up so completely that he would have a hard time getting her to speak to him about anything. She was slowly closing all the doors, all the windows. Switching off all the lights.

“I’ve always dreamt of that place—” they both said.

IT WASN’T TELEPATHY, but Emma understood him, and trusted him, more than anybody else she had known. She had dreamed of the hill and its strange population ever since childhood, but she had never credited it with much thought beyond her sleeping hours. She had no idea what it signified, if anything, nor did she pay much heed to it, until now, when Sean confessed of his own awareness of the place.

Sean said, “Pardoe told me that Inserts were agents who were trained to work in unusual territories. Under unusual conditions.”

Emma shook her head. “But I don’t recall being trained for anything.”

He wasn’t fazed by that. “You know I’m telling you the truth. We share the same dreams. I don’t remember being trained either. I just know something happened when I was younger. Something bad.”

She shrugged. “Race memory. Coincidence. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not because I’m an Insert, or a Pervert or whatever jargon it is that you’re trying to sell me.”

“Pardoe says that we are in danger if we stay here. Anywhere, more than a few days at a time.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“He says that we’ll be tracked down and destroyed.”

Losing patience now. “By whom?”

“Whoever it was that trained us in the first place, when we were kids. They thought we weren’t fully formed when we escaped, that we couldn’t have any sway on what happened. But obviously we can. He says that the same ripple that alerted him could also alert the people who got us involved.”

He made to take another swig of his whisky, but he had finished it. The bartender noticed and brought a bottle over.

“You saw that thing, that doorway in Myddleton Lane,” Sean continued when the bartender had taken up his original position. “We almost went through, for God’s sake.”

Emma nodded. “What is that place?”

“Pardoe kept referring to it as the Zoo. I don’t know.” Sean rubbed the back of her neck with his fingers. He noticed that the guys playing pool had picked up on the bandages covering his wrists. The bandages that were staining heavily.

“Look, Emma, do you think you could help me staunch some of this blood? It’s getting a bit too obvious. I mean, do you think I’ll ever stop bleeding?”

Emma rummaged in her coat pockets and pulled out some fresh packets of gauze. “What’s the Zoo? And how can we influence what happens in it?”

“I don’t know what the Zoo is. I suppose it’s the area we dream of. And I don’t know how we affect what goes on in there. But someone thinks we do. And feels threatened enough to do something about it.”

Sean was looking tired. She felt sorry for giving him such a hard time, but she couldn’t accept the way things were panning out. Her entire life so far had been dangerous, but predictable. It was when events started getting so that she couldn’t second-guess them that she became worried.

Sean said, “I need this. It might help me to find who killed my parents. Who killed Naomi. Naomi was a part of it. She was like us. They want us dead.” His face was set and she could see this was something he had been patiently waiting for all his life. He was hooked. He said, “You’re not convinced, are you?”

She shook her head, a little sad smile trying to soften the blow. And then: “I don’t know.”

“Let’s get back,” he said. He said: “I love you.”

RAIN, AND LOTS of it.

Marshall left a dent in a corrugated fence, failing to stop as he barrelled out of the alleyway opposite the tower block. He hardly felt his knee smarting. All he could think about was the gun in his hand and the need to get up the stairwell without expiring. The smell of toasted car and petrol hung around his clothes and clogged his nostrils, flooding his throat with a burn that at least kept him awake.

He had never seen anyone move like that before. He looked back. She was nowhere to be seen.

He wiped his face with a soaking handkerchief. Okay. Up ahead, losing itself to the sheet of rain above the streetlamps, stood Bagg Tower, one of the less savoury estate buildings in this part of the city. He picked up his pace, splashing out into the main road, having to climb over the bumpers of the parked cars clogging the street. As he stepped onto the road a shot rang out and he watched his left hand turn to mist at the end of his arm.

It’s not hurting, he thought, a moment before the pain exploded up his side and swamped his mind. Gritting his teeth, he dashed into the shadows beneath the punched-in forecourt of the estate, grateful that the streetlamps were smashed and the windows on the first two floors dead or boarded up. He chanced another look back from the safety of the dark but still couldn’t see anything. Another shot: the shell scorched his cheek as it screamed by and embedded itself in the wall.

He took the stairs at a canter, trying to listen above the clatter of his heart and the static hiss of rain for her noise as she pursued him. Pain flooded his body and he greyed out, only regaining his senses when he clouted his head against a drain pipe. He could smell the wetness of his flesh where the shell had torn him open.

Here she came. Here she came. He could hear her moving through the rain. It wouldn’t have surprised him to see her dodging the drops, mindful of how the water in her clothes might slow her down. The way she moved… in his delirium, Marshall almost laughed with the grace of it. He managed to lever himself up to look over the edge of the balcony, and as soon as he did so about a square foot of masonry disappeared, inches away from his face. She was shooting on the lam and she’d be here in about thirty seconds to mop up. He knew he was dead. It was just a matter of timing.

“Sean!” he called out, but his voice was relinquishing him, or he was relinquishing his voice. It was strange. He had never before felt so pumped up and yet so tired at the same time. The adrenaline flying through his system had no doubt been put there by the bullet that took his hand off, but the loss of blood was getting to him already. A veil was falling across his vision. There was not long left.

Marshall let himself into the flat with the key Sean had had cut for him. He moved through the corridor, listening to the rain fly off him and spatter the thin carpet. It was dark in there. Reaching out to flick on the light hardly helped, but he knew what all that was about. Hold out, just for a bit. God, the water. It was coming off him like he had a tap switched to flood mode. It was only when he reached the end of the corridor, where the unnaturally white glare from the strip-lighting in the kitchen fizzed its acid tones across the linoleum, that he realised that it was his gored arm that was causing the noise, emptying him of blood in little spurts and spits.

“Sean?” His voice was a croak, nothing more. Behind him, in the thrashing rain, he thought he heard footsteps on the stairwell, but they didn’t seem fast enough to be hers. He doubted he would hear her anyway. “Emma?”

Up ahead, the bedroom door was ajar. He could see shadows moving across the wall. He made his way, perilously slowly, towards the chink of light, wondering at the motes of colour that were spinning around the threshold. A moan. He heard a moan from the bedroom. God, please, had she beaten him to it? Was she here already? Was she killing them already?

Marshall staggered on the carpet and reached out his hand to break his fall. He collapsed against the door, feeling the specks of whizzing colour sting his flesh as though they were travelling right through him. In the bedroom, he saw through eyes that were filling with blood that Emma was naked, straddling Sean who lay on the bed. They couldn’t see him. They couldn’t hear him. Fading, he pulled his gun and summoned as much strength as he could to fire a bullet into the ceiling.

Emma whipped her head round at the retort. Marshall couldn’t be sure if the shock she registered was at the sight of him or the spectacle that filled the doorway behind him. He wished he could have stuck around in order to find out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: WORST CHASE SCENARIO

DEATHCHASER.

Will thought of the word and felt the bitter taste flood the back of his throat again. He had first heard it whispered in a café that morning as he breakfasted on poached eggs and toast. It had clearly been used to describe him; nobody else was eating at the neighbouring tables.

“You say something?” he asked the men hunched over the counter, drinking from chipped mugs of coffee. Heads shook.

Will had returned to his meal, mildly satisfied by the way he had silenced them. There had been a degree of fear in the way they regarded him, he felt. That could only be a good thing.

But, deathchaser.

They couldn’t know of his mission, could they? It was something he had decided to embark upon alone. So that meant – what?

Will twisted the rear-view mirror around so that he could see his face. Did he look that bad? Really that bad? The dusky arcs beneath his eyes, the pauperish complexion, the mottled aspect of the skin stretched across his hands – did these things make him appear as though he were on some irrevocable decline? Couldn’t it be seen as a good thing, his losing some weight?

He pushed the mirror away and concentrated on his job. On the passenger seat lay the Graham Greene novel. The End of the Affair. God, if only. It was in a parlous state now, that book. The covers had slowly come away and he had had to tape them up to keep the volume from disintegrating entirely. He had tried reading it, during cold nights parked off the roads, in an effort to keep sleep at bay, but as much as he admired the style, he had found it much too depressing. The bombs, the hatred, the jealousy of it all. It was all a little too close to home. Instead, he ran his fingers over the list of dates that Christopher had recited to him, in the hope that the ink from those dates past might imbue him with some comfort. The list was death. The list, though written in ink, might as well have been chiselled on stone, branded on the foreheads of the coming dead, an irrefragable mark of Cain.

The twenty-ninth of March, Hungerford Bridge, London, five past midnight.

Wasn’t it the ultimate irony, his travelling back to the capital after such a traumatic journey north? He felt like a character in a paranoiac novel, shoved from dire situation to even more dire situation. The night streamed around his car. Somewhere out there, Elisabeth and Sadie were buried or on the run. He hoped it was the former. It seemed that anyone coming in contact with him these days was better off dead.

He had narrowly missed out on the last date. The last English date, that was. He had neither the money nor the steel to attempt to travel to the other places in Christopher’s list. The chances of being picked up for Cat’s murder at air- or seaports were too great. Desperation had driven him to the roads. That and the knowledge that police resources would be stretched to extremes during this wave of terrorism.

Where had it been, that last one? His first attempt to get to one of the locations after the penny dropped as to what Christopher was getting at. Somewhere outside Leeds, a village on the outskirts. Boston something or other. Will had been trapped in traffic, maybe five miles from his goal, when the time Christopher specified elapsed. There had been nothing for it but to go home. On the way, his radio told of a fire in a tea shop on the main road through the village. A reporter at the scene was saying that fire crews were struggling to get the blaze under control and that the hopes of finding any survivors were low. It had been busy in the tea shop. It always was, according to neighbouring shopkeepers the radio reporter had interviewed. The woman that ran the tea shop never had a bad word to say about anybody, apparently.

Will checked his watch. He had a good six hours to make it to London and her river. This was positive action. Unlike the navel-gazing that Sean and Emma were being exhorted to undertake. He couldn’t understand how he had been cheated of new friends by that primping, preening prick Pardoe. For the first time he had felt safe, among similar lost souls who might be able to understand his dislocation, who might be able to offer answers to questions he did not yet know how to frame. But they were lost to him, hours after saving his neck.

“Jesus, Christopher,” he said. “Jesus. You were superb. But I’m glad I didn’t have to live in your head.”

21st January, Osaka, 2.03 p.m. There had been an earthquake in the afternoon, measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, just as people were emptying canteens and parks in the city, filing back into their offices after lunch. The death toll, 24 twenty-four hours later, had been put at a conservative 12,500.

22nd January, Basel, 5.22 a.m. A coach from England, carrying around fifty tourists on a skiing vacation, plunged off the road into a ravine, killing everybody on board.

22nd January, Darwin, 6.47 p.m. A birthday party turned into a grisly search for bodies after half a dozen backpackers staying at the Froghollow hostel went for a swim and were set upon by great white sharks. Will had seen a picture of one of the two survivors. He had a chunk out of his torso that resembled a bite mark in a biscuit.

And on, and on. A catalogue of carnage. How had Christopher been able to foresee all of this? How did he live with the knowledge? More, why didn’t he act upon it and prevent the accidents from taking place? The more he dwelled on the questions, the worse he felt. But if it weren’t for Christopher and his crystal ball, there would be no way of finding out what had happened to Catriona, of that he was certain.

Five miles shy of the capital, Will ditched the car and thumbed a ride into the city from a woman in a Morris Minor on her way to Elephant and Castle. In the half-hour it took for Rebecca to take him to the Strand, he learned that she was coming to stay the weekend with friends as part of a college reunion. She was getting married in the summer, to a man she had met on her course ten years previously.

He wished her well as he released the seatbelt and lurched out of the car. She was smiling, and in the colour of her cheeks, the rude clarity of her eyes, he recognised, for a second, something in her that until recently had fed him. He felt saddened by their conversation, as if it had tried to impinge on a part of him that had once been aware of hope and love. The clunk of the door as he slammed it shut might have been the shutters locking in the part of him that had understood warmth and security. All he wanted now was answers. There wasn’t much time for sentiment. Not much space for it either.

In a pub on the main drag, he drank lager without tasting it and swung his gaze to the clock behind the bar with metronomic regularity. It was a busy night. The pub was convenient for Charing Cross station and welcomed a mix of politicians, City workers and theatre-goers. Cliques buzzed and vibrated in batches of movement and regimented colour, magnets that repelled other groupings. There was tension in the air and Will wondered if it was being engineered by something beyond this social bagatelle. Maybe it had its source in what Christopher had foretold. Did these people, as they sipped their Pimm’s and gins and Guinnesses, have some animal signifier that was coming alive within them? Did they sweat in its shadow? Did they prickle?

Will felt it, coursing through his bones like cold. A couple of women in tight, shiny dresses knocked into him as they made their way to the toilets. He barely felt it, although they had caused him to drop his glass. He didn’t hear it shatter, or their apologies or offers to buy him another drink. He pushed his way through a corridor in the scrum and felt the bitter night air crystallise on the sweat that coated his chest as he reeled outside. Rain flashed in broken obliques where the streetlamps picked it out, liquid Morse code carrying messages too swift to be read. He splashed down towards the riverbank, clutching the Greene novel in his hand as though it were a cudgel. A train was nosing out of Charing Cross station, one of the last rides home, and he watched its broken passage through the lattice of girders on Hungerford Bridge. Couples were bent against the driving rain as it laced them on the pedestrian walkway across the Thames. Big Ben tolled midnight. Will scampered up the steps to the bridge and waited, his tongue thick and dry in his mouth, for something awful to happen. He counted seconds and had reached 300 when he heard the beginning of it.

What had he suspected, during the lonely drive south? A drowning, a collision of trains. A car crash. A collapse of scaffolding. Someone. A few somebodies. A blip on the statistical charts compiled by end-of-year accident and emergency investigators…

The thrum sounded like persistent thunder. It vibrated in his chest and made the rails and the girders pick up the song. Studded in the rain-scratched darkness, following the trajectory marked by the old river on a path to Heathrow, were the headlights of what sounded like a jumbo jet. But there was something not quite right about the sound it was making. It sounded like a big plane trying to do an impression of an even bigger plane and failing badly. It sounded, machine though it was, like a shriek of distress.

Will felt the cold air drying his tongue but could not close his mouth to protect it. He watched as the jet came out of the sky, twisting over to the left in a graceful banking manoeuvre that did not correct itself. Black smoke was chugging out of one of the engines on the port side; its mate was intermittently breathing fire. Carbon streaks concealed much of the empennage and the portholes. The air appeared ready to shear apart under the weight of the protesting engines as the pilots struggled to right the plane. Will felt the bridge quake as the portside wing clipped it. What he saw next, as the plane tumbled overhead, was hindered by the criss-cross of black metal. The bridge, where it had been struck, was on fire. Some pedestrians, drenched with aviation fuel and alight, had thrown themselves into the water, mindlessly desperate to consume one form of death with another. A train with its roof ablaze stopped short of the platform, as if unsure as to what to do. Will could see figures on board, rushing along the aisles to doors that were locked.

He sprinted across the bridge to the South Bank, trying his best to dodge the liquid flames that dripped from the metalwork above him. He was just over half-way across when he heard the jet impact. He felt it through his feet as the bridge shuddered. He hurried down the stairs and followed the Queen’s Walk east. A false sunrise had come to the city. It lit up the south-facing sides of the Houses of Parliament and Banqueting House. It turned the water furious orange. Fire surrounded the London Eye, which was tilting precariously over the river. The smell of aviation fuel was mixed with scorched dust and a terrible stench that was like burnt hair. As he approached, the heat already drawing the skin tight across his face, the Millennium Wheel gave up the ghost and toppled into the Thames. A huge tidal wave took off up the river, competing with the roar of the fire. Unable to get any closer, Will cast about for some sign, frantic that he was missing something.

Arc lights stitched the night over the city: scrambled rescue helicopters coming in fast and low to circle the accident site. Will saw Lambeth Bridge in front of him and Waterloo Bridge behind become clogged with emergency vehicles, but their sirens were no match for this roast’s clamour. The snout of the jumbo had pitched up against what remained of Westminster Bridge, a jagged grin having torn the undercarriage away from the part that housed the cockpit. It resembled the head of a shark coming up to attack. Bodies flung from the aircraft lay naked and glazed in impossible positions. Across the water, on Victoria Embankment, a great swathe of people had materialised, appalled and mesmerised by the inferno.

Will’s tears evaporated as soon as they fell. He retreated from the intense heat when he realised his jumper was smoking. He was about to turn away from the broken jet – firemen were pouring onto Jubilee Gardens – when he caught sight of a dimpled sheet of molten metal that emerged from the twisting columns of black smoke at the heart of the fire. It was perfectly square, and upright. It looked to Will like a large mirror, but its reflecting surface was a rilling, fluid riot. He remembered seeing something like this on the motorway, when he had carried Elisabeth away from their wrecked car. Then, as now, he was tickled by the conviction that he had been allowed a glimpse behind the complexity of death and understood what it meant, what it signified. But it was like waking from a vivid dream and finding it unwilling to resolve itself in the mind. Out of reach, on the tip of his tongue: a black thing in a dark room, and Will was hunting for it wearing sunglasses.

The dimpled sheet faded from his view, perhaps as the shattered hearts around it gave up their pulses and their last pints of blood. He couldn’t have approached this thing and touched it, as he would have liked, or looked upon its surface to view what might have been written upon it, and hoped to survive. He’d have been dead as soon as he came within fifty feet of it.

It was only as he hurried back along the Queen’s Walk, bitterly enjoying the fresh bite of cold air, that he realised, after all, that might be the point.

CHAPTER THIRTY: IN COUNTRY

“HE’S DEAD. LEAVE him.”

“But Sean, we can’t just—”

“We can. We’re going to. Now.”

Sean was moving as best he could, collecting his clothes under one arm and shooing Emma towards the door with the other. He caught sight of a slender woman in a black cocktail dress moving through the front door with all the padded stealth of a panther.

“Who’s there?” he asked. For his pains, he got an eyeful of timber as the doorway flew apart. Emma yelped and scrambled into the kitchen, trying to pull on her skirt.

“Fire escape,” Sean said, grabbing the Walther from Marshall’s fist. He was moving backwards slowly into the kitchen, dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, when she leaned her head around the doorway. The eyes were shifting around the flat, taking it in, the body constantly moving, like the seep of oil. Sean squeezed off a round and watched the bullet pass straight through the flesh of the woman’s forehead. The wound rippled and closed itself up. The woman might have frowned. That’s all.

“Right,” he said. “Fine.”

Emma was on the fire escape by now, clanking down it as fast as she could. Sean followed close behind, again moving backwards, his gun cocked and ready, for all the good it would do them. They struck off across the wasteland at the back of the tower block, aiming for the canal and the numerous neighbouring streets, which they hoped were gloomy and narrow enough to allow them to lose their pursuer.

Sean kept checking back and was rewarded with the sight of a black figure, moving impossibly fast on the other side of the wasteland, seemingly intent on blocking off their progress. They got to the canal, where Sean lost sight of their attacker among the long reeds that fringed the bank.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “Across the bridge.”

They scuttled over the wooden walkway, Sean peering into the distance but seeing nothing. He eased up on the opposite bank and, keeping his gaze fastened on the only access point across the canal, pulled on his trousers and shoes.

“Who is it?” Emma demanded, breathlessly.

“I don’t know, but Will, remember Will told us about that crippled thing that was chasing him? I think that’s her. I think. Maybe.”

“Fuck,” Emma said. She seemed impressed. “She, she…” Emma waggled her hands, trying to put it into words. “…she moved.”

“I know. Come on.”

The thick nest of terraces were formed like a maze. Darkness helped them move through it, sucking them into the core of green at the centre of confused streets and pathways. Few of the streetlamps were functional. Around half of those that did work spat and fizzled chancy orange light, a poor man’s disco. It did strange things to colour, this sodium pulse. It turned the skin into a dappled, beaten armoury of greys. Twenty minutes of rat-runs saw them hunkering down behind a squad of wheelie bins by a creosoted fence. The house at their rear was still awake. The sounds of laughter and glasses chinking. A smell of curried food. Beyond that, the night was silent but pregnant with something that felt like anticipation. It prickled the skin.

“How long do you think we’ve been waiting?” Emma asked after another twenty minutes had expired. “I’m cold.”

“Oh, not long enough,” he replied, drawing her under his arm.

“How long before we can go? How much longer do we have to wait?”

“Bit longer,” he said, and turned to smile at her. “Helpful, aren’t I?”

“Marshall’s dead, isn’t he? We couldn’t have saved him?”

“I don’t think so. He had lost a lot of blood. He was coming to warn us, remember that. He wasn’t coming to us for help. He saved our lives.”

“What do we do now?”

Sean squeezed her arm. He felt better. The wounds were knitting together quickly now. He could feel the fizz of repair coursing through his body.

He remembered something from his childhood. His mother leaning over him with a wad of cotton wool dipped in TCP.

“Where does it hurt, love?” she had asked him. “Show Mummy.” And he remembered laughing and trying to pull the cotton wool out of her hand. What had he done? Tripped on the road and grazed his knee? But in the time she had pulled his trousers down to sterilise his cuts, the wound had healed. A quick healer, they had said about him. It’s because he’s got good blood. He’s a strong lad, that one. On the football pitch, hoofed into the air by reckless defenders, he had picked himself up and plodded on. Tin legs, they had nicknamed him. Sean had believed it all. If you weren’t used to injuring yourself every time you fell over, you didn’t question your lack of bumps, bruises, breaks.

“When Marshall came in,” Sean said, “what was it he was covered in? I mean, what was it in the doorway? The colours.”

“While we were fucking?”

“Yeah. The colours. The light.”

Emma kissed his cheek. “Maybe you were dizzy. I was that good.” She kissed him again. “It was that good. Had to be we were disturbed on our first time, though, hey? I was ready to knock Marshall’s block off, before I saw what had happened to him.”

Sean returned his attention to the opposite edge of the lawn, where the pale narrow houses huddled together as if mirroring or mocking them. “I think, maybe, it was a way through. Being, I don’t know, born.”

He felt Emma drop away from him, an infinitesimal collapse. “Because we were fucking?”

Sean shrugged. “Jesus, why not? It was our first time. Remember what Pardoe said about ripples happening when we met up. Well, having sex… maybe it’s intensified the ripples. It’s triggered off something else. Something new.”

Emma digested this for a moment and then giggled, drawing herself into his protective warmth again. “You shouldn’t be throwing such big stones in,” she said.

Emma was having trouble trying to stop laughing now, but it was bitter, edgy laughter that threatened to spill over into madness or tears. Sean stopped it by kissing her hard. He wished he could pass something on via the kiss, as if in his saliva he possessed some balm that could help Emma make this transformation and help her cope with the immensity of the changes in her life.

Sean

He whipped his head up.

Emma, sobered now, said, “What is it?”

“Shhh.”

Sean

“Someone’s here,” he said. “Can you hear?”

Emma stiffened. Her hand rose out of the shadows between them and a finger pointed. Out of a black cumulus of hedges, Marshall stumbled. Now they both heard him, his voice weak, almost childish.

“Sean?” He sounded unsure, as if the mind controlling the utterance could not fully appreciate the awful prospect that he was still alive. “Sean. Help. Me. Emma. Emma. Save. Me. Oh. God.”

Emma began to rise, her breath coming in stitches, her eyes filled with tears.

Sean held her back and put a hand over her mouth. He drew her face close to his and slowly, deliberately, shook his head. Emma’s eyes widened and grew angry. He leaned into her and whispered, as quietly as he possibly could, “Marshall is dead. That is not Marshall.”

Marshall was standing at the centre of the green, cocking his head, as if he had somehow caught a sliver of what Sean had passed on to Emma and was trying to pinpoint where the fragments of sound had come from.

Watching Marshall, Sean could see little things, little tell-tale signs that suggested it was not the man. Marshall would not wear his hat so far back on his head, like Sinatra. His belt buckle was tied across his coat, something Marshall never did because it made him feel restricted and didn’t allow him access to his gun. This Marshall had thrust his destroyed hand into his pocket. Sean guessed that was because, dead, it would have stopped bleeding. This Marshall could not replicate the flow that was needed. This Marshall had to hide the lack of bloodshed.

Sean saw the only way they could escape. “Here,” he mouthed to Emma. She gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Love me. Fuck me.”

Already his hands were moving under her skirt, touching her, trying to coax some heat and wetness from her. She protested, trying to wriggle back, her eyes on Marshall as he staggered across the green. But maybe something in Marshall’s gait, the way his drunken stumble had arrested itself and was becoming, by the second, more controlled, caused her to give pause.

“Trust me,” Sean said, rubbing his fingers against and into the soft, moist yield of her sex. He guided her hand to his trousers and she unzipped him, drawing him out into the cold. He risked, “I love you,” because he needed to say the words and he needed her to be reassured. She nodded and leaned over him, quickly stiffening his cock with her mouth. She drew away and shuffled over him, apeing the position they had been in earlier. When she sank on to him, she had to stifle a moan by stuffing a fistful of jumper into her mouth. They moved against each other as slowly as they dared, and instantly rainbow motes began to tremble in the air, six feet away. It was like white noise on a television screen. Emma’s thighs trembled at the end of every upstroke, Sean’s when he rose to meet her coming back down, the price they had to pay for stealth: every shred of them wanted to speed up, to sprint for that delicious moment.

Emma watched Marshall, or what had once been Marshall. He seemed to have shed every aspect of the pretence, but for his shell. He knew they were there. He could read it in the warmth that had impinged upon the cold air of the park. He could smell the animal in them as they rutted. But he couldn’t see them. Yet. She recalled the pathetic, determined figure that had pressed through the bars of the hospital gates, like an unpopular child desperately trying to keep up with the would-be friends who were attempting to lose her. This person had evolved. This was real danger. It possessed knowledge and guile and strength. Will would have been dead by now, were he in the same situation from which they had rescued him. She wondered, as she felt herself grow giddy from the soft, impossible rhythms that her body was being sucked into, if the creature’s evolution had reached its ceiling yet. She wondered if, in a short while, it would be able to see them in the dark, if its eyes might develop some kind of thermal recognition now that it realised such a thing would be useful to it.

Pondering this, she felt the moment upon her. She knew she was going to come soon and could not stop herself from upping the ante. Sean tried to respond by reining in her new energy but she would not be denied. The colours sparkled and pulsed, as if catalysed by this development.

And Marshall saw.

The colours coalesced, forming a vertical palette. Smears of fresh hues as the colours merged ran up and down the palette as it twisted, creating a column. The air around it seemed to distort, as if unsure what side of the column to be on.

Emma bucked against Sean, beginning to make soft, yelping noises. Sean gave himself to the feeling too, and within a few strokes was there with her. They lurched apart at the moment of climax. Cheke was rushing them now, the glamour that was Marshall already reabsorbed. She shot twice, but the curtain of colour between them distracted her aim and the bullets were wayward. Dogs had started barking all around them. Lights were coming on in bedrooms. The third bullet caught Emma in the throat and she went down, clutching her neck with both hands. Somehow Sean managed to drag Emma into the maelstrom before Cheke laid her hands upon them. He had the final impression of her gun rising, level with his head, but he threw his arm across his eyes and toppled forwards into the cold fire. This time there were no faces in the flames, no incitement or enticement. None was needed.

Now, as with the first time in Myddleton Lane, Sean rewarded his courage, or recklessness, with a scream that he believed would never end.

A LOCK-UP GARAGE in the south of the city that he had broken into. A bottle of cheap wine. The remains of a bad chicken sandwich from a petrol station’s shop. Was this all he had left? Everyone with whom he came into contact had left him or died. Everything he owned had been reduced to rubble.

Will spread the tabloid on top of the crate and shifted his position on the cold, uncomfortable stone floor. There hadn’t been a car in this garage for years, although a black oil-stain proved that it had once been used for that purpose. Now it seemed the garage was used primarily by tramps, or crack-smokers. Someone had tried to set fire to the garage and succeeded only in blackening the walls and leaving behind a permanent sour-scorched smell. There was a sleeping bag in the corner, but it looked too ragged and stained to offer any comfort. Inexplicably, a garden rake and a broken hockey stick leant against the wall. The only other object in the garage was a cardboard box filled with swollen, mouldy paperback books.

The death toll from the previous day’s accident had reached a thousand. Of those, around six hundred had died on the ground. The number of victims was apparently increasing by the minute. Emergency crews weren’t rising to the questions asked of them by grisly reporters as to the likely final total. The newspapers had gone ahead with their guesstimates anyway. There were a lot of noughts.

Had Parliament been in session… they fantasised, lustily. If the crash had taken place at rush hour…

Will’s thoughts turned to that beautiful rippling mass at the centre of the inferno. It had resembled a wall of water, or of molten steel. He wanted it so badly. He could almost feel what it would be like to immerse himself in that thing. He might displace the surface without breaking it for some time, like the dimpling that a waterboatman’s legs create on the surface tension of a pond. He might suddenly burst through its pellicle in a sudden implosion of silver bubbles. He could taste a bright, fresh flavour – what an apple might taste of if it were a hybrid of fruit and steel – feel the gush, a slight astringent sting, through his nostrils. Brilliant shivers against the skin. What might there be to see on the reverse? He had to have it.

But there were no more dates from Christopher. The Graham Greene novel’s dark itinerary ended with this crash. He rubbed at the inked appointments as if believing that some final secret date might reveal itself from the smudges he was creating. He sat for a long time, trying to remember what Catriona’s laughter was like or how her lips felt on his body. He couldn’t do it. His memory wasn’t up to the task. Or was it that, as he shed the people who connected to his life, they became intrinsically, essentially unimportant? They didn’t have immediacy any more. They were memory. And memory faded. When Will died, he thought, Catriona would cease to exist for anybody anywhere. It would be as though she had never set foot on the planet.

Will pushed himself away from the crate, suddenly aware of the panic in his breath and the restive knock of his heart. Had Catriona existed at all? What proof had he that she had been there? If he met a stranger and tried to convince him of the reality of a woman that he had loved, that stranger might be as unmoved as the garden rake by the wall. He wouldn’t have to believe in her because he didn’t care. Whether she had existed meant nothing to anybody who had never met her.

Will jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes. She means something to me. But how could that be true, when remembering the colour of her eyes, or which of her breasts bore a pair of freckles, defeated him? He spent more time now thinking of the perfect stillpoint that announced itself in the midst of chaos than he did the thousands of seconds he had spent with Catriona.

He flung the Greene at the cardboard box and grabbed the rake. If Catriona did not matter to him, then how could anybody else expect to?

“IT’S DIFFERENT,” SHE said.

“How?” he challenged. “I can’t see any change.”

“Look.” She took his hand and led him along the path. The black sun burned fiercely in a white sky scratched with black chalk clouds. “The last time we were here, just for those few seconds, these buildings here were fine.”

Sean looked at the buildings, then looked at Emma. He didn’t get it. Patiently, she described how the windows of the building, the last time they were there, were clean and whole. Now some of them bore cobwebs and greasy smears. Some of them were cracked or missing. Others had been boarded up.

“So?”

“So nothing. So something. So what?”

They walked on. It was too new an experience and too much of a relief to have cheated death to allow a coldness to develop between them. Sean apologised.

“It’s okay,” Emma said. “It’s been a bad day.”

Had he been disappointed to find a humdrum city through such a magical, awe-inspiring door? It had not been high on his list of expectations. He found himself wondering if they had passed through into a different place at all, when he saw the people on street corners chatting while they toted carrier bags rammed with food, or dogs crouching in the gutter, emptying their bowels. It didn’t appear to possess anything to mark it out from the place they had departed. No angels. No dragons. No Cheshire cat.

“What’s this place called, do you think?” he asked. “The Zoo, as Pardoe said?”

“We could invent a name for it, if you like.”

“I’m sure it already has a name.”

“Why? It might not. Just because it seems familiar to you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will be called something like Stoke or Liverpool or Hull.”

Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of the nuances to which she alluded. It was a little bit like playing spot the difference. A police car might flash past and it would be a full minute before he suspected, the image catching up with him, that the C in POLICE painted on the bonnet was actually a K. POLIKE. But it was after the fact that he had these intuitions. He couldn’t check them out. The next time he saw a police car, the letters were spelled correctly, but after the car was long gone, he started doubting there had been anybody sitting inside it. A bird flitting from the branch of a rare tree was gone before he could ascertain whether or not it owned a beak. They turned a corner just as the corner of his eye insisted that a woman walking down some steps to a wine bar was shedding little pieces of her body. A bus roared by, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust, which blinded him to his initial sighting of a man in the window taking bites out of a badger.

By the time they reached the end of the long, busy street, his head was pounding.

“I need to slow down a bit,” he said. “Can we have a rest?”

In the rear of a coffee shop, well clear of the entrance, Sean rubbed his head and sipped hot chocolate from a large mug. Whatever else was out of whack about this place, his drink was real, almost life-affirmingly hot and sweet. He warmed his hands on the mug and looked around him, catching his reflection in a mirror that eclipsed one entire wall. His eye had recovered well and a surreptitious peeling back of his cuff revealed a completeness about the flesh, where it had been riven. Only a slight discoloration remained, the razor’s route outlined in white.

Emma was resting her head in her hands, regarding him across the table through the steam from her green tea. The bullet’s path through her throat had left scarring but already the wound was sealing itself. Being here seemed to have changed her, slightly. Her eyes seemed to contain less white; the iris was fatter here. When she spoke or breathed, tiny, almost imperceptible vibrations spoilt the air around her lips. Sudden movement caused a similar disruption. He saw it as he stirred his drink with a spoon. He saw it too blur a woman’s head behind the counter as she sneezed. Watching for too long made him feel nauseous.

“I can’t believe that the hill we dreamed about will be a part of this place,” he said. “It all seems too busy.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “It’s busy, but it seems manageable. Best we don’t give up on it before we’ve started. We’ll get there in the end.”

Sean nodded and drained his mug. He had noticed another subtle upheaval: the change in their dynamic. Before arriving here, Sean had definitely driven their progress and felt, sometimes, that he was shielding Emma. Now the balance of power had shifted. He felt good about that. He felt comfortable. She reassured him as much, he hoped, as he reassured her.

“It doesn’t seem so noisy, outside, does it?”

Emma picked out her tea bag and discarded it on the saucer. “Well, we’re underground.”

“I know, but still. The din up there was awful.”

The din, when they returned to street level, was still awful, but Sean couldn’t shake the belief that it had been reintroduced as they came back to it. As if it was all for their benefit. Something about these people too, so vital, so vocal, hinted of only recent animation. When he voiced his concerns to Emma, she seemed uninterested. “You might be right,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sinister. It’s just different.”

They continued down the street, happy for now just to absorb the newness of this experience. It was nice to not have a direction in mind. To not have immediate purpose. “Do you think she can come through too?” Sean asked. He didn’t feel he needed to qualify the “she”.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if she does, she’s different too.”

Sean fell into step beside Emma. He held her hand and tried to accept the differences around him. He couldn’t accept that there might come a time when they would never seem alien to him. He turned his head, too late, as a door snicked shut. He looked at Emma but she hadn’t seen. Or if she had, she happily accepted that a man could reach into his own chest, pull out his beating heart, put it to his ear and return it, seemingly satisfied, back inside.

THEY CORNERED WILL in a school.

He had been shot in the leg and he could feel blood still seeping out of the wound, even though he had tied his belt around the calf, just above the bullet’s point of entry. How had it come to this? He didn’t understand. It was frightening, really, to consider how far, how rapidly, one could fall from what had been, on the face of it, an unassailable position.

It had all gone wrong so quickly. He had stalked up the high street with his rake, but all his intentions had been spirited away the moment he started trying to choose victims. Should he take the lives of the old or the sick? Might he get the same result if he killed a dog? The beggar sitting outside the bank? Who would miss him?

In the end, his choice was taken from him. He accidentally tripped up a man of about twenty with the handle of the rake that he was dragging along behind him. The man’s mouth was full of the anaemic pie he clutched in one hand. The other was stretched around the shoulders of his girlfriend, an older woman on the heavy side, with features that seemed to be concentrated too much at the centre of a large face. It was as if someone had fed a hook through the back of her head and was trying to pull the face inside. She wore a large, billowing white T-shirt and leggings that emphasised podgy, orange-peel thighs.

“Ot the uckinell jaffink…” the youth began. A blue tattoo teardrop clung to a cheekbone. Across the knuckles of the pie-wielding hand, more blue: LUVV.

“Paste him, Teddy. Go on.” The pinched singularity of the woman’s face made little tremors as she spoke. A rouged pinhole at the centre was plugged with a cigarette that she sucked violently.

The man looked at his girlfriend, looked at his pie, and looked at Will. Then he dropped the pie and extravagantly slapped invisible crumbs from his fingers. Then he swaggered forwards, rotating his shoulders, lifting his arms, and waggling his hands. “Kincomonden! Come on!”

Will raised the rake and slashed it across the youth’s face. He saw the tines bite into the flesh and lift it clear of the boss of his skull before the tissue tore and the rake came free. The youth screamed and dropped to his knees, clasping his face to stop it from dribbling clean off the bone. Blood made red gloves for his hands. The pinched face on the girl relaxed and the cigarette dangled from her mouth, threatening to ignite the fuzz on her chin. She looked suddenly vulnerable, but then she breathed deeply and screamed for the police.

Will hit the youth on the back of the head, but had to stop to be sick when the teeth were hindered on their way out by the grinding of bone that he felt work its way through the handle of the rake. The youth was squealing, his face ashen. His eyes were closed.

Wiping his mouth, Will yanked again on the rake, which came free with a sucking noise. Something was spitting and bubbling out of the back of the youth’s head. He didn’t wait to see what it was, but swung the rake a final time, forcing the tines through the youth’s throat. He might well have been dead before that moment, but now Will was certain of it. He looked wildly around him. The street had filled up quickly, to rubberneck.

“Come on,” Will beseeched the sky. “Come on!” Blood from the rake, held aloft, splashed on his forehead.

The spectators drew back, thinking he was addressing them. A siren came to them through the streets and all heads turned in its direction. Will ran. Where was it?

In the playground of the school he had grabbed a girl and dragged her into a classroom. He sat on the floor with her while the evacuation went on around him. He heard lots of sirens wailing in the distance and cars pulling up on the road outside the school. There was a helicopter too. Someone said something he couldn’t understand through a loudhailer. He ignored it and soon they stopped trying.

They played Snap. She told him her name was Fiona and described what she had received for Christmas. On the way back from a visit to the toilet, he was shot in the leg by a police marksman. Now Will and the girl were sitting in the corridor, with their backs to the wall, beneath the window through which he had been fired at.

“Does it hurt?” Fiona asked him. Her brown hair was in bunches. On her finger there was a plaster that she was now picking at.

“Only when I go jogging,” he said. She laughed.

He wondered if Catriona might have given birth to a girl. They both had hoped for a daughter. Cat had said it felt like a girl even though it was her first child and she wouldn’t have known if a boy felt any different.

“Do you want to do some colouring in?” he asked her. He was so tired.

She brightened at this idea and nodded her head. She said, “You can help. I’ve got a farmyard to do. Can you colour in the chickens?”

He nodded. “Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

She ran back to the classroom. He heard the static of radios going mad as the snipers reported this. A minute later, he heard a door clicking open and footsteps in the corridor. He didn’t look up.

“I have a gun,” he said. “In my pocket.”

A calm voice, surprisingly young, told him to lie on the floor, face down, with his hands on his head.

“I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“It would be more helpful to us if you did,” came the voice.

“I’m tired of being helpful. I didn’t kill my wife, you know. Everyone reckons I did. But I didn’t. I didn’t do quite as much as I might have done to help her, but I didn’t kill her.” Now he looked up into the face of a young man, a ridiculously young man, holding a Heckler and Koch submachine gun. Will remembered running around a playground like the one outside when he was little, pretending to be a British soldier, or, if he drew the short straw, a German. Pretending to hold a Tommy gun. Pretending to spray the enemy with bullets while you made that noise with your tongue and your teeth: Ddddrrrrrrrrraaa! Ddddrrrrrrra!

The armed policeman said, “It doesn’t bother me what you did or didn’t do. We can sort all that out later. You need some rest.”

Will nodded. “Lots of it,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: KATHEUDO

HE OPENED HIS eyes and the sound was all around him. Incessant whispers, nervy bleatings, a cacophony that set his teeth on edge. The tree behind him bore a mass of black parrots chiding him like bitchy next-door neighbours. The stench from the parrots scratched at the back of his throat. White guano streaked the tree and turned its tarry bark into a nonsense emulsion, gleaming as it ran and set in the midnight sunlight. It wasn’t the parrots making the noise. He couldn’t see where the noise was coming from. Or what it meant, for clearly they were words: sibilants and fricatives multiplied by the many voices until form was lost to a hellish, snake-like hissing.

Will sat upright. He was perched on the edge of a path. Behind him, an ocean he couldn’t put a name to exploded repetitively on a shingle beach. On the other side of the path, a rank of houses turned tawny-coloured, peeling faces to the view. Made from tired wood, with overgrown gardens and gates that sagged like Friday-night drunkards, not one of the houses looked remotely habitable from Will’s vantage point.

Will too felt a little inebriated. Gathering himself, he rose, which brought a fresh, sarcastic chorus from the parrots. They flapped their wings, exposing deep-red feathers, and points of wild light, as if they were dotted with sequins or bits of broken glass. The air was warm and sweetly spiced, much like his mother’s kitchen had been when he was a boy. She made apple pies on Sunday mornings. Bramley apples that collapsed in a pan with a little more sugar than was strictly necessary. She put cinnamon in the pies, an idea that she pinched from the Americans. They were good pies, especially if they were served hot, with vanilla ice cream.

His mind on pies, he crossed the street to the houses and tried to remember what had happened in the seconds before he became aware again. It was no use. All he could picture was a childish face being obliterated by a black hole that became suddenly, intensely white, splintering like glass in his eyes.

The houses, as he had believed, were uninhabited. Through the windows he saw sofas that sagged with invisible bodies, and tables laid for a coming meal. Coats were piled on the newel post of stairs littered with childhood gear. Now and again, Will would blink, thinking that he saw movement. A hand on the banister; the shadow preceding a body, approaching along the hallway; a dog’s tail wagging. But it was all periphery. Whenever he jerked his head to catch the mote, it would be gone. A flaw in the eye, then. A blight on his focus.

Frustrated, he tried knocking on one of the doors, to prove his conviction that the row was deserted. The door duly opened, but there was nobody behind it. Will went in and hunted for life, room by room. The house didn’t smell old or disused; it smelled of nothing at all. Nobody here. He stalked out of the house and slammed the door shut. Marching across the street, he ignored the guffawing parrots and struck out towards the treacly sun, his boots crunching across the shingle beach.

The tide was out: the dark edge of water, periodically creaming into the shore, was only just distinguishable against the salt-and-pepper beach. The stones were smooth and uniform in size and myriad in colour. Some kind of coral provided relief for the eye, a friable, greyish species that poked from the stones like tiny signposts. A little further along, when he came across the bleached skull of a cat, he realised that the coral was not coral after all. He tried hard not to study the beach after that, and would have returned to the lane were it not for the fact that it petered out, swallowed by more acres of shingle. There was little to break up the skyline apart from the spire of a church that looked as if it should be in a children’s fairy tale: crooked and black, it made an arthritic gesture to the heavens. For want of something better to do, Will angled towards it, fingering the strange puckered mark that had risen on his forehead.

The church sat in the centre of a poorly tended graveyard. Bloated insects he couldn’t identify buzzed drunkenly by him. The trees here were stunted, purposefully it seemed, their heads lopped off before they could reach a certain height. Their boughs were famished affairs, the branches leeched of colour and as brittle as the bones on the beach, as if the stuff that lay in the ground was sucking the life from them. Will strayed off the path and tried to study some of the headstones, though time and neglect and the weather had conspired to polish the headstones almost clean of their inscriptions. This one, though:

Here lies Evelyn Marley, beloved wife of Hector. She died when the knife of a robber split her heart open. Humble Street, where it happened, knows her blood.

And this:

Beneath this stone are the mortal remains of Gregory Phipps who died, aged sixteen, brained by a stone wielded by his father. Ten days he took to die.

And this:

The bodies of Robert and Jessica Bunce feed the worms here. Fire took their sleeping forms and gave them eternal rest.

IT WAS A well-stocked graveyard. The stones encroached on each other’s plots and leaned into each other like poor teeth. Will was about to leave the cemetery when he heard a gritty noise rise up from the bottom of the churchyard. He stealthily padded among the stones until he saw its author: a woman wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, hacking at the gravelly soil with a trowel.

“Hello?” Will said, grateful to see another soul in this strange wilderness. The woman raised her head and Will was struck with a frustrating sense of recognition which would not reveal itself. “I know you, don’t I?” he asked, approaching.

The woman straightened and searched his face. “I’m afraid you’re at an advantage,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before in my life.”

“What’s your name?”

“Alice.”

“Alice. No, I don’t know an Alice. But you look like someone I know.”

They stood awkwardly, regarding each other among the bastard cabbage.

“Interesting graveyard,” Will said.

“Isn’t it?”

“But crowded.”

Alice nodded. “Yes, it is a little densely populated. But the beach is a fine overspill.”

“Isn’t that a health hazard?”

“For whom, exactly? The dead?”

Will laughed shrilly, and clammed up. It didn’t feel right. None of it.

“Well, I need to get on,” Alice said, waving her trowel at the weeds. It seemed a pointless chore when so much of the graveyard had already been conquered by yarrow, milfoil and fleabane.

“Don’t let me stop you,” Will said, jollily. “I just wondered if you could tell me where…” The question ran out of steam when he realised how odd he was going to seem when he finished with the hell I am? Without too much of a pause, he diverted to: “…I can find the nearest train station?”

“Oh, trains, they don’t come out this far. What is it? Are you lost?”

“I think so,” Will said. Despite their uncanny conversation, the woman made him feel comfortable. He felt that he could confide in her without embarrassing himself. “I can’t remember where I was about an hour ago. I woke up and I was on a beach. Empty houses.” It sounded so ridiculous when out in the open. “Parrots.”

Alice seemed unimpressed. “There’s a little village, a bit further along the beach, called Gloat Market. You might be able to find somebody to help you there. There’s a pharmacist’s. And a taxi service. They might be able to ride you out to Sud, or Howling Mile, or Mash This. Fair distances, but you’ll find trains there.”

“Gloat Market,” Will said. He didn’t know the place, or the others that Alice had mentioned, but he felt more confident now that he had a few locations to refer to. “Are we in Suffolk?” he asked, but shook his head when she regarded him with bewilderment. “Never mind. Thanks a lot. You’ve been a great help.”

“That’s okay, Will. Travel safe, now.” She reached out and touched his arm.

He waved and tramped towards the cemetery gates. At the threshold he stopped, trying to remember something. He turned back. Sixty feet away, her figure was bent over and earnestly engaged with the trowel, the edge of the blade tearing at the earth.

“How did you know—” he began.

She reared up and he took a reflexive step away. Her eyes glowered at him. The tool dangled from her grip, dribbling what looked like blood into the soft, gritty earth. He was smitten with the impression that she had been able to control who she really was while he talked to her, but that now, with contact broken, she had rediscovered her true form. Will pursed his lips to finish his question, but his mouth had drained of spit. She seemed to lean towards him, but she took off in the opposite direction at speed, moving to the blind side of the church before he could think about pursuing her. Half of her face seemed to be hanging off, a badly knitted balaclava that refused to hug the contours of her head. He hurried back to the beach and tried to calm himself down by reciting the name of the village, Gloat Market, over and over again.

GLOAT MARKET ROSE out of the shingle like an elephant’s graveyard. Great vertical twists of bone formed an ivory wall, protecting the village from the winds that steamed in off the sea, smelling of oil and dead fish. As Will passed through the postern gate at the edge of the village environs, he was again assaulted by the belief that there were others here, as real as he, capering just beyond the confines of what he was aware of. He saw flashes of movement, swatches of clothing; heard snippets of sound that were gone almost before they arrived. A brief smell of frying sausages, of dog shit, of soap. Yet there was nothing, in truth, for the village stretched out in front of him, as animated as the graveyard he had left behind an hour or so earlier. Didn’t it mean you were brain damaged, if you entertained the illusion of sensory input?

The bone shield seemed a little grand for the tiny web of streets it contained. A cross-roads at the village centre was marked with a stone flower. Some of the houses that flanked the lanes greeted his passing them by with open mouths; their doors swung rustily on tired, oil-shy hinges. The parrots, at least, had followed him. They sat on washing lines like scraps of filthy linen and heckled him remorselessly.

“Fuckhead!” they screeched. “Minging cock-gobbler! You piss shit! You piss shit! You do! You do!”

Above it all, a constant loop, a soughing as of summer breezes. It was there always, but he had only become conscious of it when the parrots provided their anti-rhythms.

He ignored the parrots and turned onto a lane that appeared to be more densely populated by buildings. It turned out to be called Humble Street. Will wondered if it was the same Humble Street that had seen Evelyn Marley’s final fall. He found the pharmacist that Alice had referred to, but it was closed. Rather, it was open, but unstaffed. Huge glass orbs sat on the shelves gathering dust. They were filled with powders and liquids of extravagant hue and even more alien names: Grivellage Salts, one was called. Dandiprat’s Tincture, was another. A phial of bleached green crystals bearing the label Paleshrikes found its way into his pocket, mainly because he liked the sound of the name, but also because he needed to have something real to put his fingers on. Too much of what he saw here seemed without substance or anchor. He felt that, once his back was turned on it, it would all dissolve to dust, or fly away into the sky.

Further along the lane he saw a trap without a pony and a pack of thin dogs conferring by a pond. They looked at him without interest as he walked by. As he drew alongside the gates of what appeared to be a salvage yard, filled with cracked, claw-footed bathtubs, radiators, steel buckets, and propellers, a voice cried out to him from an upstairs window in the building that backed onto the yard.

Will stopped and peered through the wooden slats of the gate.

“You, boy!” the voice called. “Give us a hand, won’t you?”

He saw a face at the window, and a hand waggling impatiently at him. Will pushed the gates open and jogged through the yard to the back door. Inside was a kitchen that smelled of suet and overcooked cabbage. Puddings wrapped in muslin were cooling on a windowsill. A recipe book was open and floury fingerprints spoilt a colour plate displaying a hollowed rabbit that was ready for the oven.

“In yet?” the voice called, a deep voice that was being peeled back to reveal a shrill centre.

“I’m coming,” Will said, and hurried up the stairs. On the landing he was greeted by an ecstasy of half-stuffed wildlife. He pushed by the still menagerie, with its glazed eyes and rictuses, and found the room in which the figure stood.

It was a man of around sixty years of age. He was naked. Will tried not to look, giving his attention instead to the framed maps on the walls. “My name is George,” the man said.

“Are you all right?” Will asked.

All bluster and bile, the other sputtered: “Of course I’m not all right, you blithering butterhead. What have you, a spatchcocked chicken for a brain? Can’t you see, I’m cut and bleeding and in a rare old state.”

Wishing he had carried on without stopping, Will said, “Do you have any bandages?”

“Do I look like a besodded pill-pusher? Great yawning twats, man. I should have called for help from that beetle over there.”

George had not yet turned around. Will’s eyes took in the heavily larded tectonic plates of his buttocks and thighs. One of this man’s calves could have stood in for Will’s chest. His back hung in layered scoops of fat that resembled a Christmas tree, the edges of which had been softened by snow. Slowly he turned, this shithouse, this pagoda of blubber, to fix Will with a niggardly eye like a currant pressed into pastry. Again the impact of recognition: there was something in the cast of these features that recalled those of Alice.

More of George was revealed. Will saw the manner of his injury and blushed. He had been winding his cock tight into a vice and had obviously caused some serious tearing at the moment of his climax. Will thought he was taking things very calmly, all things considered.

“Do you know Alice?” he asked, as much to deflect his study of the ruptured organ as anything. It jutted between the fat man’s thighs like a button mushroom. His abject expression might well have been displayed as a result of the wound, but it was for Will’s benefit.

“Shall we take tea and pikelets while we discuss such matters? Hmm?” George drew a podgy hand across his features and Will was struck with the horrifying certainty that the doughy mask would come off under his fingers. “I know of no Alice. All I know is that I am in pain, sir. The kind of pain that makes a man want to tear off his own head and cast it into the fire. Now, as you can see, I have damn-near castrated myself in a lunatic moment of self-absorption. Kindly fetch me something in which I might bind the old peashooter and help me get dressed. You might try that gallimaufry of men’s magazines over there. Under those.”

Will rooted around beneath the glossy, pink pages but only came up with a clean handkerchief folded into a neat square. He helped to jemmy George’s folds and flaps into his waistcoat and britches while they both wheezed with the effort. By the time Will had finished, the windows were steamed and George’s face was as ruddy as the blood on his hands.

“I’ll just buff the old wanking spanners, dear boy, then I’ll make you a bite. I apologise for the inconvenience, but not for my habits. I’m a lonely man who just happens to need extreme relief from time to time.”

In the kitchen, George pottered from larder to refrigerator to table, adding pickles and sausage and cheese to a large white plate. He handed this to Will and instructed him to cut some slices from a slab of bread. Will picked at the food, his appetite gone. George finished his food, then took on Will’s remains. His face in the trough, George became a personable companion, far removed from the objectionable bully Will had seen initially.

“Cakington-cakely?” George asked, when the last forkful of coleslaw had disappeared between his worming lips. Without waiting for an answer, he leaned across to the cupboard and extracted a huge Swiss roll.

It was something in the eyes, Will thought. Something that he and Alice shared. They must be related, he thought, regardless of George’s insistence that he did not know anyone of that name. He watched as George went at the cake with a spatula like a fencing expert showing off his best moves. Who was it that George and Alice reminded him of? He tried to push his mind beyond the young face and the black hole, the light, but he was not equal to it.

“My name’s Will, by the way,” he said, in the hope that offering his name might jolt some shred of recognition from his host.

“Short for?” George asked, working the question around a piece of Swiss roll that would have satisfied a family of four. Crumbs the size of £2 coins were ejected, retrieved and pasted into submission by his fearsome jaw.

“Just Will,” Will said. He heard the fatigue in his voice at the same time that he noticed the black sky begin to boil with clouds.

“George isn’t short for anything either. Good, stout, monosyllabic names. You can’t beat them.”

Unable, and unwilling, to mask his tiredness, Will said, “Where am I, exactly? Where is this place?”

“This is Gloat Market, quite evidently. There are signs as you enter.”

“Yeah, I know it’s Gloat Market, but what is Gloat Market in?”

George frowned. “Don’t follow you, friend.”

“I’m lost. I’ve never heard of this village, or Howling Mile or wherever else we’re near. What’s going on? What is this place?”

“Gloat Market,” George said irritably. “Crisp and oozing nips, man. I’ve never been to any of the other places. No need, really. I’m quite happy where I am.”

“What about everyone else?” Will persisted. “Are they happy where they are?”

“I’m quite certain of it.”

“Then where are they? It’s deserted. You and Alice are the only people I’ve seen all day.”

George gave him a look that suggested his leg was being pulled. “You’re tired, sir. Have a nap and all your nonsense will be forgotten.”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Will spat, and rose from the table. George laid a hand on his arm.

“You might want to try to settle in here,” he said. “Sometimes it’s best not to look too hard for something, even if you don’t know what that something is.”

“What are you trying to say?”

George’s hands flew into the air and he smiled a shockingly toothy smile. “Nothing, dear man. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Just sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you. As you were to me.”

Will said goodbye, and hiked up a short hill. The clouds gave up their attempt to hold on to the rain in their bellies and vomited a heavy, oily deluge that soaked Will to the skin in seconds. Cursing loudly, he ran to a cluster of trees and, once in their shelter, saw another house in their shade, its front door swinging merrily in the gusty blow of what was fast becoming a nasty little storm.

Will called a greeting as he entered the hallway and blinked hard as he saw a splash of motion – a woman carrying a tray – at the threshold to a dining room. There was nobody there. He hurried upstairs and flicked a light in the bathroom. There was nobody here either, despite the stroboscopic blip depicting a young woman soaping herself in a bath full of bubbles. He undressed and showered, leaning against the wall while the jet of water fizzed against his skin. When he finally stepped out of the cubicle and started drying himself in front of the mirror, he had to blink hard again, but not because he had seen the ghost of somebody sharing the bathroom with him. He reached out to the mirror and rubbed away the steamed surface. When it was clear, he was able to see the two patches of rot that were eating into his flesh: one on the side of his arm where George had touched him, the other on the back of his forearm: Alice.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: MARAUDER

PARDOE HAD SAID there were just three Inserts. Sean, Emma, and Naomi. But others, it seemed, had learned the secret. Crossing the bridge that spanned the river (known as the Timeless, according to an impatient tradesman on his way to buy calves at an auction), Sean had leaned for a moment on the parapet to watch the traffic below. A barge made its way to the north bank, farting black clouds of diesel smoke in its wake. At the bow, he caught a glimpse of Tim Enever. He was certain of it. By the time he’d nudged Emma to tell her, he was gone.

“I wouldn’t know him anyway,” Emma said, reasonably.

“Well, you won’t ever forget him when you do clap eyes on him. Come on.”

They hurried to the other side of the bridge in time to see the barge dock and the harbour master secure the boat with rope as thick as an arm. Goat-swift, Tim was off the boat and scurrying into a warren of backstreets, his arm clasping to his chest a package wrapped in cream-coloured paper. A red bloom was spreading across the bottom. For a moment, Sean supposed that the other was not Tim – how would such a physical wreck be able to move like that? – but then Sean himself was finding that he was able to move much more quickly over here. Over Here was how he preferred to call this place. Over Here and Back There. It tickled Emma to hear him talk in this fashion. She had christened it Tantamount.

As he cut into Tim’s lead, Emma began to drop back. He called to her to wait by the river and she pulled up, her hands on her waist, as he dived into the alleyway that had borne Tim’s feet not twenty seconds before. He kept to claws of shade as a filthy shower of sleet began, moving from pillar to post, pylon to pergola as Tim flitted through the heavily peopled alleys, his hair flapping around his tiny head like an anemone. At a covered market, he slowed to walking pace and took some time to inspect the produce, all the while rubbing at his booty (his lunch, was it?) as if it were a cat in need of succour. The stalls here were thick with game, vegetables, and pulses. Spice jars emphasised the lack of colour all around. Dogs and ferrets chased each other through the forests of legs while customers argued the toss over a couple of coppers to pay for their cockles and bully beef. A basket of chickens tumbled across Sean’s path, causing him to veer into a scrum of elderly men drinking tarry wine from a huge moonshine jug. Their curses followed him deeper into the gloom. A sticky smell of hemp hung here, like fragranced steam in a sauna. Tim was dawdling now, stopping to chat to a woman selling beads and to take a small cup of strong, thick coffee with the neighbouring café owner. Tim had a swagger here that seemed ridiculous in such a reedy frame. When he pushed on into the bazaar, Sean hurried over to the bead seller and pretended to browse her wares for all of two seconds before:

“That man, just now. That man you were talking to. Who is he?”

The woman looked up at him from beneath a pair of eyelashes that must have been three inches long. A rat squirmed in and out of the folds of her clothes. Her breasts sometimes jiggled into view, small and brown as nuts. She smiled at him and showed off teeth that had been ground and patterned like tiny tablets of sculpted ivory.

“That was Mr Edge,” she said. “Alderley Edge. He’s very popular round these parts.” She rubbed her finger and thumb together. “He has big pockets.”

“Does he live near here?” Sean was getting anxious. He would lose Tim if he wasn’t careful.

“Yes. He has an apartment in the clipper.”

“The clipper?”

“Yes. A grounded boat in Frenzy Square. You won’t miss it, I promise you.”

“Nice rat,” Sean said, as the animal slid luxuriously into the woman’s cleavage and lounged there, twitching at him.

The market stalls thinned out. He emerged in a tunnel filled with fresh air but scant lighting. At the other end, a courtyard floored with large, terracotta tiles boasted a ship at its heart, listing heavily to the port side without any water to support it. Huge wooden stanchions supported its bulk and prevented it from tipping over any further. He saw a figure against one of the portholes, observing his approach. He wondered if Tim would recognise him as he clambered aboard, a wave of vertigo almost tipping him over as the freshly canted decks of the boat, the Flat Earth if the nameplate above the wheel were to be believed, spread out around him.

“Tim?” Sean called gently, thinking, Alderley Edge?

The door to one of the cabins had not been closed properly. Sean let himself in and found Tim sitting on a chair by the porthole, trying to get the cork out of a bottle of rum.

“Do you want a hand with that, Tim?”

Tim tossed the bottle to him. “I’d rather you called me Alderley. Or Mr. Edge. Yes, Mr. Edge would be best.”

He took two glasses from a leggy cupboard that had been customised to deal with the absurd angles and set them down on the table. Sean poured. “So what are you doing here?” he asked, taking one of the glasses and drinking deeply.

“Any question you ask, I could ask of you,” Tim parried.

“I’m here because a girl died. If we’re playing quid pro quo, then I believe it’s your turn.”

He was still the gawky, ponderous Tim when you got up close. But cleaner somehow. Sharper. None of the serous fluids that wept from his cavities, or rumbled in his chest were in evidence here. The boy was almost good-looking. He realised that this would be answer enough for his question, but Tim led him in a different direction.

“There’s gold in these hills,” he said. “Why should I tell you about it?”

“Smuggling?” Sean guessed.

The curl went from Tim’s lip. “How would you know about that?”

“Oh come on, it’s obvious. I’ve been with Vernon on his little trips around the Northwest. I’ve seen his hand-overs. The little parcels. What’s in them?”

“You don’t know?” The curl returned.

“I could make you tell me.”

“You have no power over me here,” he purred.

Sean reached out to grab Tim’s arm, but his fist squeezed the meat out of both ends until he was holding on to nothing. It was like trying to grasp water. Tim’s arm reattached itself as he watched.

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” Tim said. “See, you’re not the only one who knows Latin.”

“Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turres,” Sean said, enjoying the crease in Tim’s forehead.

“Fuck off, Sean,” he said. “I’m strong here.”

“And you, such a spaz back in Warrington.”

“You’re dead, you know that, if you go back. Pig.”

“You been reading up on me, have you? Doing a bit of research?”

“Vernon is disappointed in you. He thought you were good stuff. He thought you were going to help him for years to come. He’s mostly disappointed in his own judgement though. He’s a harsh critic, is Vernon.”

“Which one of you was it?” Sean said. “Killed Naomi?”

“The name means nothing to me.”

“Do you at least know why she died? You were, after all, at her funeral.”

“In the bird’s nest, I am a quail’s egg, matey. If you’re looking for ostrich produce, you’re in the wrong place. I was at the funeral to keep a look out—”

“With your eyes?”

“—for somebody who wanted to disrupt the ceremony before she was put into that quiet earth. Anybody who wanted to make contact. She was still useful to some people even when dead. In the ground it was game over. We were there to protect our interests.”

“Well you didn’t see me, did you?”

“Maybe we did, but you wouldn’t have been classed as dangerous. Sorry to disappoint you. No, the danger would have come from someone a little less obvious. Someone using this place as a shield from which to attack us.”

Sean refilled their glasses. The paper parcel had been hidden somewhere. Sean sat back in his chair and sipped his drink. The walls of the room were festooned with sea-faring equipment: photographs of sailing boats, a barometer, portraits of salty old Jack Tars, a sextant hanging from a hook. Tim sat on the other side of the table, his head tilted, hands clasped softly together like those of a priest taking confession.

Sean heard a bell tolling in the distance, and a voice bellowing “Seven o’clock and all’s well!”

“That’s the sentinel,” Tim informed him. “The watch has started.”

“The watch?”

“Every night, from seven till dawn. This is the time of day when all the fun starts.”

“I’d like to see some of this fun.”

“You might. But then you’ll definitely see some if you go home too.”

“Are the others in on this?”

Tim blinked at him. “The others?”

“Yeah. Lutz, Robbie. That lot.”

“Foot soldiers. Cannon fodder. They’re helping us out. They don’t know a thing.”

“Helping you try to find the Negstream at the de Fleche building.”

“Why did you leave the flatfoot club if you’re so clever?”

“That’s nothing to do with you.”

Tim leaned across the desk, his hands splaying on the wood. “And, my friend, this place has nothing to do with you. Stay clear, or you will be harmed. I promise you that.”

“I won’t stop until I find out who killed Naomi.”

“I can’t protect you, Sean. I won’t protect you.”

“I don’t need protection from you, muppet-boy. Who’s going to look after you, at the end of the day?”

Tim smiled. “I am a king here, Sean. I’m better off here than I am back home. I don’t need protection. I’m well looked after. I’m untouchable.”

“I suppose it was you who burned the buildings down, once you were sure of where the Negstreams were.”

“Of course. Just following orders.”

“There are others. You haven’t got a stranglehold on this place, you know.”

“That’s not our concern.”

“Then what is?”

“Work it out yourself, you so-called Peeler.”

Sean stood up. “I’ll see you again, Mr. Edge.” He walked over to the door. “Thanks for the rum.”

EMMA WAS SITTING by the bridge when he returned. She was kicking out at a flock of shabby sea-birds that were circling her, shrieking for food.

“Have fun in the market?” she asked, but the cockiness in her voice cracked as soon as she spoke. She went to him and hugged him tightly.

“I was worried,” she said.

“It’s nice to know that.”

“Don’t leave me alone here ever again.”

He buried his face into her neck and breathed her smell deep into him. “I won’t. I promise. I’m sorry.”

“Where to now?”

Sean lifted his head to look at the river. “I suppose we should try to find the hill. I expect we’ll find answers there.”

Emma scanned the horizon, a daunting panorama filled with black glass and towers made from steel and neon signs that burned like little suns. Packed into the interstices were suffocating markets like the one Sean had explored, great scaffolds in which tents and bivouacs fluttered, hundreds of metres off the ground. The roads were jammed with dead cars that were either improvised homes for some or materials to be cannibalised for skeletal scooters that putt-putted along pavements thronged with tramps or thieves, and dead bodies that could not be buried for lack of space. They were salted, these corpses, and left to desiccate. Emma saw some of their mummified flesh used for storm shutters on crude windows. She saw others floating on the surface of the river.

“Do you think this is the kind of place where you might find a hill? A pond? A wood?”

“No,” Sean said. “But it must be here. It must.”

“De Fleche came here to stay. There must be more to it than this. Why would he want to stay here?”

“You’re right. We’ll find it. But let’s go back first. I want to talk to somebody.”

Emma held his hand. “What if we can’t get back the way we got in?”

He smiled. “Well, at least it will be fun trying, won’t it?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: THRESHOLD

WHEN HE WENT back to confront George about the marks on his arm, and to ask if he knew of anybody who might help treat his complaint, he saw that George had skin problems of his own. The yards of skin that contained the man had been stuffed into the toilet, as if it was a peel-off costume made of paper that could be flushed away. No other trace of him remained.

He found a cab with a horse attached, but nobody to drive him. As he had no map to show him the way to Sud or Howling Mile or the other place, Mash This, it seemed he was stymied. He needed to find a train station if he was to make any exploration of the countryside count. To understand this landscape might help him go some distance to understanding how he might find Cat. Nothing else mattered to him any more. Sean and Emma were too wrapped up in their own needs to consider the simple urge that now governed his life.

He got into the driver’s seat of the cab and took up the reins. He tried a few encouraging noises, and with a jolt that threw him back in his seat the horse began to trot along the lane. A couple of minutes and the village was behind him. One road lay ahead, bisecting the scorched fields and the crippled, denuded woods. The black sun burnt without heat, and after an hour of their journey it began to snow. Black flakes landed on Will’s skin and burnt into it. He had to draw the sleeves of his jumper over his fingers and hunch his head into his neck to shield himself from the acid flurry. The horse didn’t seem to mind, jogging along gamely, its white mane seething in the wind. No houses were visible on the roadside; no traffic passed him on its way to Gloat Market. He was alone. The fear of that speared him and he wept into his jumper for a while, but knowing that he was in the same place as Cat revived him. He would find her. Imagining how she would look, how she sounded, filled his heart to a point where he thought it must burst. The baby too, might be here, with its mother. All he had wanted was a quiet life. The three of them together, happy.

The horse drew to a standstill. Will shook the reins and made more chivvying noises but to no avail.

“Are you hungry, nag? Is that it?” He felt in his pockets for food but found nothing edible. Under the cushions on his seat was a carrot but when he offered it to the horse, it wasn’t interested.

“What’s wrong? Do you smell something?”

The road stretched ahead of them, seemingly no different from the road they had traversed so far. The same razed fields and stunted trees. The stench of dead things. The bones sticking out of the earth.

He tried tugging on the reins to lead the horse forwards but it strained against him. Will gave up and left the horse where it stood. The road led on for another half-mile or so before it petered out.

“Super,” Will sighed. The terrain grew rockier and the trees disappeared altogether, replaced by spiny bushes. It continued to snow, the large black flakes like wafers of ash from a burning house. Their burn was bearable, once you got used to it. Will clambered over the rocks and saw the house immediately. It was still a way off, but smoke was whipping from its chimney and a single window was a square of pale orange. The sea was here once more, fizzing against the shore, its skin vibrating with reflected crescents of black. Spume made quivering sculptures that the wind tossed into the air. Will reckoned it would take him twenty minutes or so to reach the house, but before he had crossed half the distance, he came across the woman.

She was lying on a ledge on one of the bigger rocks. She looked to be asleep; her limbs were not twisted to indicate a bad fall. Will got down beside her and patted her gently on the shoulder.

“Hello? Are you okay?” His voice, after a long silence, sounded alien to him. It buzzed in his ears, atonal and waspish. But it did the trick. The woman woke, frowning, her mouth moving as she tried to make words come.

“It’s okay. Here, let me help you stand.” Will gently pulled her upright. The woman was flapping her hands around as though batting away flies. Her eyes twitched and then flew open. She regarded Will with shock, as though she had never seen a fellow human being before. And then she screamed. The sound distorted as it came from her lips, glissading into a metallic, digitised howl, something that might be happened upon on a short-wave radio. Flakes of snow found their way into her mouth and she choked and spat them out. Her breath was coming in tight, short blasts.

“It’s okay,” Will soothed, trying to squeeze her hands together so she could do neither him nor herself any harm. “Try to relax. You’re okay now.”

Okay, he thought. Nobody here is okay.

Slowly the woman found some poise. She looked around her, taking in the surroundings with the wonderment of a child at the zoo. Will was ready for her first question, the inevitable, when it came.

“I don’t really know where we are,” he said. “But I just came from a small village a couple of miles back that way. There don’t seem to be very many people around.”

“Who are you?”

“Will.” He stuck out his hand and she shook it. The frown had yet to leave her brow. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, with a long, sleek pony tail and grey eyes. She didn’t have any of the characteristics of Alice or George. He was glad about that.

“Joanna,” she said. “My voice sounds funny. It’s like talking through a kazoo.”

“Yeah, I don’t know why. But there’s tonnes of strange stuff here. You won’t believe some of it.”

“I don’t know how I got here.”

“Me neither.”

“I remember…” Joanna faded out, looking away in the direction of the road Will had just travelled along. Her eyes seemed to be searching for visual clues as to what had gone before. “I remember two brilliant lights, and a roar. And falling, like you know, in a dream.”

Will had pricked up his ears at the lights. He mentioned his own hazy recollections. “I was just on my way down to that house. To see if they could help me find a train that went to somewhere with a bit more life.”

“Can I come?”

Will felt like hugging her. “Of course. I’d have been disappointed if you didn’t.”

They made their way over the rocks to a narrower path, hampered by offcuts from boulders and muddy puddles. The black sun had sunk behind the edifice they had left behind. The snow too had lifted; only a few flakes fell now. Will checked his hands. They were chapped and sore, but the skin had not broken.

“This place seems to me,” Joanna was saying, “the most familiar place in the world. But at the same time, I feel as though I have never been here before.”

“I know what you mean,” Will said. “I’ve been wandering around as though I’ve been lost, but not once have I panicked about it. It’s like I’ll turn a corner at some point and there will be a lane that I recognise, or a house belonging to somebody I know.”

“Not this one, though?” Joanna said, pointing to the building that loomed above them, on a small incline that formed a welcome mat to a dense, purple mass of strangled trees behind it.

“Afraid not,” Will said.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said, as Will reached up to ring the doorbell. He turned to thank her. And in that second, the light in the window went out.

Joanna said, “Ah.”

“That’s encouraging,” Will observed, and rang the bell anyway. They waited but nobody came to greet them. A chorus of rasps fell from the trees.

“Hahahahahahahahahaaaaaaa. You focken eejit! Knock-knock? Who’s there? Some git. Some git who? Some git who’d be better off throwing himself in the sea!”

Will picked up a rock and hurled it at the branches of the nearest tree. Three or four of the parrots took off, circled, shat at him, and resettled in the trees to blow raspberries or send him the odd extravagant curse.

“I have an elevated class of friends here,” he said. Joanna wasn’t comforted by his humour, preferring to watch the door intently as a shadow fell upon the pearlescent glass at its heart. It opened a crack and a child’s face peeked out. It couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven. Will’s first impression was that this was the offspring of Alice and George. It unsettled him to the marrow. But then he saw that the likeness those two had shared was not in evidence here. The boy was on the floor, looking up at them.

“Did you fall over?”

The boy shook his head.

“Is your mother in?” Will asked, appalled at his feeble voice. The boy shook his head, and then shook it again when Joanna asked to talk to his father.

“Can we come in then?” Will asked, trying to sound calmer, for the boy’s sake as much as his own. “Wait for them?”

“I’m not supposed to allow anybody through this door,” the boy stated, in a cultured voice that belied his years. But the statement sounded rote-learned. His eyes were playful and welcoming, as if he was grateful to see somebody who had come to visit. Picking up on this, Joanna asked: “How long have your mummy and daddy been away?”

The boy let the inch-wide crack of the door grow to a foot. He raised his eyes to the sky, adding and subtracting, the triangular tip of his tongue peeking from between his lips. “A year or so,” he said, carefully.

Joanna and Will swapped a glance. A parrot in the tree shouted: “Don’t let him in, kid. The peg-selling freak. He’ll have your Action Man! He’ll have your Tonka truck!”

Joanna squatted on her haunches and smiled at the boy. Even though Will could see she was scared, she still had a beautiful smile. “Can we come in, please? We just need somewhere to rest. And we need a big, brave boy to look after us. We’re both scared.”

The boy swung the door wide enough for them to enter. The light was poor in the hallway, but they could tell that he had trouble walking. They saw his head jerk in the darkness as he led them deeper into the house, heard his feet flailing spastically against the floorboards.

“What’s there to be scared of?” he asked, pushing open a door into another room that was darker than the hall. Will tried the light switch but the bulb was gone. Black shapes formed in the gloom. “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll make a fire.”

When Will’s hand accidentally brushed against Joanna’s, she clasped it tightly. The sofa that they lowered themselves into didn’t seem to have any upholstery. They sank into cushions that were slightly damp and smelled of laundry that had failed to dry properly.

“What’s there to be scared of?” the boy asked again, as he set about building a small pyre of kindling and folded paper.

“What’s your name?” Joanna asked.

“Luke,” said the boy.

“Luke. Where did your parents go?”

“One of them went back. One of them went on.”

“What does that mean?” Having conquered the tremble in his words, he now found he was close to shouting. He couldn’t find a happy medium; hysteria was close all the time. “Do you have to be so cryptic? A straight answer, from anybody, would be nice. Went back where? Went on where? Jesus.”

Joanna touched his knee. Her eyes were egg-large in the gloom, straining to swallow the most feeble glimmers of light. Will rubbed his face with his hands. It struck him that, throughout all this, his stubble had not grown any longer. He tried to remember the last time he had had a drink. A beer would be good now. A beer would be outstanding.

“I have been here for so… long,” Luke said, the words packaged in a long sigh. Tiny flames began to tongue at the bundle of tinder, green and blue. They liked the taste and grew. Shivering light enveloped the boy, outlining his shape for Will and Joanna behind him. His legs had no recognisable form; they looked as though they had been removed, fed through a mangle, and then reattached. They flopped around ineffectually as Luke arranged some larger logs around the heart of the fire, and then the boy slithered backwards as its heat became greater. Will didn’t know what to say. Joanna seemed to be trying to say something, but nothing was coming out of her open mouth.

“I know this place,” Luke said. “Not everyone finds it. Most only stay for a short time.” The words sounded familiar, like old friends. Perhaps the boy had been internally rehearsing them for a long time, and only now was putting a voice to them. “Some time ago, I remembered where I was before I was here. I was in a car with my mother and father. Dad was driving. He was arguing with my mum about money. I was sitting in the back with my colouring book. I was colouring a dragon. I remember I was angry because I didn’t have a green pencil for the scaly skin. Just this awful yellow. Dragons aren’t yellow.

“I looked up just as Dad lashed out and struck Mum across the face. She hit back and she was swearing at him, telling him she hated him, ordering him to stop the car. She was getting out. She actually opened the door. We were on the motorway. Dad kept telling her to shut up. She hit him again and his hands came off the steering wheel. The car went into a spin and then came off the road and hit a tree. Mum went through the windscreen. Dad’s head was wobbling like a doll’s. I was flying around the back of the car, but my legs were crushed under the chair in front. And then I was sitting on the doorstep outside this place. Mum and Dad were with me for a little while.

“Raymond Meadows told me at school about coma. His mum is dying from something in her brain. She’s in a coma. That’s where we are now. This is coma. It isn’t any kind of life. And it isn’t any kind of death. Mum went on. Dad went back. And now I’m on my own. I don’t know how long you can stay in a coma for. Maybe for ever. Coma is what we want it to be when we are asleep. I think death is like that too. We make death the way our dreams want it when we sleep. Nobody could accept death if it wasn’t prettified like that.”

Luke turned, the edge of his face limned with firelight. He giggled nervously. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

Will tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. His throat clicked with the effort. Joanna’s eyes were filmed with tears.

“How long have you been here?” she asked, breathlessly.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was born in 1960.”

“How did you remember what happened to you?” Will asked. “I can’t remember.”

“It comes to you. Eventually.”

Joanna’s mouth was on the verge of collapse. Fear shaded in all the places in her face where age was making a home.

“What is it?” Will asked.

Joanna put a hand to her mouth. “Harry, that’s my husband. We… we said to each other once, if ever we were on life support, if there was no hope… we said we’d switch the machine off. He’ll pull the plug on me.”

THEY ALL DIE on me, Will thought. I try my best to care for people but it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.

He and Joanna had left the house when the fire became too stifling. They thanked Luke and asked if he wanted to go with them.

“Go where?” he asked, not unreasonably. “There is nowhere to go. It’s all the same. All different types of badness. The same old badness dressed in different, horrible clothes. What’s the point?”

The point for Will was to not let the child’s melancholy infect him. But here it was, stringing out visions of Catriona, Elisabeth, Sadie, and now Joanna, all those who had gone with him and paid the price for it. He had fucked up. He remembered now, wanting to die, knowing that he might be able to make a difference from within, knowing that Catriona waited for him somewhere magical. He had lived like a clown. And now he couldn’t even die properly.

“I don’t know what happens to time here,” he said, as he and Joanna skirted an inky lake that bore awful salty deposits at its edges that resembled claws and faces stretched into different masks of pain. “Maybe it’s condensed or spun out.”

“I don’t know how long I’ve got,” Joanna said.

“Maybe it isn’t all that bad,” Will reasoned.

“I have to remember,” she said. “I have to, otherwise, I’ll die without knowing how I died. How tragic is that?”

“Is it? I’d rather not know.”

Joanna sat on the ground, brushing away the twigs that resembled fingers in rigor mortis, and the tiny leaves that were like desiccated eyelids. “My husband, Harry, God, what if he’s here too? I don’t remember if he was with me. What if he died?”

“Then you won’t be going anywhere. Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

But Joanna had ignored his tactlessness. “The last thing he said to me… I can see his face, he looked concerned. And then the flapping all around me.”

“Birds?”

Joanna shook her head. “Fabric. Like someone airing a bedsheet, but all around me, as if I was trapped in a bed while somebody was making it. Silk. Lots of billowing silk. And freezing. I was freezing my tits off.”

“You were sailing, maybe?”

Joanna snapped her head up at him. “No. Not sails,” she said. “Parachute.”

JOANNA’S RELIVING OF her sky-diving trauma helped Will in the remembering of his; a kind of trickling down of horror. He flinched as he remembered the barrel of the police rifle empty its contents into his head. It was as if he could follow the trajectory of the bullet enter his temple. It hadn’t taken his life, though. Just his senses. He fingered the bizarre, proud crater now, and saw how what he’d seen as the coquettish angle of Joanna’s neck had been caused by something far more awful.

“I need you to do something for me,” he said. “If you go back. If you get out of here and you’re okay.”

“God, I hope so.”

Will held on to her hand, almost desperately. “Remember this. I want you to find me. And help me to die.”

“But I couldn’t!”

“Please. You must. I need to die. I have nothing but that. I want nothing but that.”

It took hours to persuade her but in the end she agreed. Perhaps her relenting, or the forceful way in which he had put his argument, had helped to colour the scenery; either way, it had suffered more erosion. It was as if the heat of his need had scorched away layer after layer of rock and rubble, a gradual onionskin weathering, until everything was level, sanded, clean.

“What now?” she asked. Her exhaustion had manifested itself in the papery cracks around her mouth, the stone and glass that had filled her eyes. Her voice was the lonely shifting of wind across sand.

Will said, “We have a train to catch.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: CONTRABAND

THERE WAS A mini riot kicking off in Blackwood Crescent. The police had set up a cordon and would not allow Sean and Emma to pass.

“What’s going on?” Emma asked, trying to see further along the street. An armoured police van was parked on the pavement.

“Families at war,” the police constable told them. “Are you all right, mate? You look like you’ve just been caught up in something like this.”

“I’m fine. Look, my gran lives in there. Let me through, will you?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“I’m a copper too. Down in London. Here’s my warrant card.”

He showed him the defunct credentials that Sally had sent back to him, and the police constable sucked his moustache into his mouth. “Met, eh? Good pay down there is it?”

“You get by,” Sean said, giving him a grin.

“Danger money, isn’t it, though?”

Sean nodded in the direction of the police van. “You say that, but…”

“Aye. It happens all over, I suppose. Go on then, before my sarge catches me.”

Sean clapped him on the shoulder and he and Emma slipped through the cordon. He led her down a narrow walkway parallel to the main road. Tough-looking men and tougher-looking women watched their progress, tight-lipped from bedroom windows and back gardens. Dogs barked at them from behind every gate.

They caught a glimpse of some of the trouble as they neared Billy’s house. Two factions were pointing at each other and arguing heatedly. A policewoman was trying to broker some kind of peace. Two or three of her colleagues were standing by, sniggering into their hands. On its back, smouldering in the centre of the road, was a Ford Ka.

Sean rang the front doorbell and, too late, remembered how Billy had escaped the last time. A willowy woman poked her head out of the upper window and asked him what the fuck he wanted. Ash from a cigarette clamped between her lips dusted Sean’s beanie. A child was crying inside with rare athleticism. The sound drew goosebumps onto Sean’s skin.

“Billy,” he said. “Is he in?”

“He’s playing fucking footie. Try down the park. Now fuck off.”

The window slammed shut. As they walked away, they heard the woman berating the child, whose response was to take the shrieks up a notch.

The park was five minutes’ walk from Blackwood Crescent. They could hear the exhortations of the crowd and the snapped instructions of the players. They found a path through some wintry trees to what was little more than a morass with a few blades of green sticking up through it. Labouring in the mud, two teams whose identities had been lost to the plates of dirt that covered their strip, made the air steamy with sweat and foul language. On the touchline, two desolate-looking girlfriends tried to keep warm with cigarettes and gossip.

“Which one’s Billy?” Emma asked.

“I couldn’t say. We’ll have to hang around till they’ve finished.”

Sometimes the muddied ball seemed to get lost, camouflaged by the grey-blue miasma. But then a player would kick it into the air, more often than not falling onto his backside in the process. Tackles were going in all over the pitch; it didn’t seem important for there to be a ball involved sometimes. Minor skirmishes erupted. The referee blew his whistle but nobody noticed. Both goalkeepers leaned against the goalposts as though waiting for a bus. The lack of interest permeated the crowd, who both wandered off towards the pub. When the referee called an end to the match, nobody seemed to know who had won. Everyone trooped towards the squat changing rooms.

“Wait here,” Sean said, and followed the mudmen through the door.

The showers were already on, hot jets filling the changing rooms with acrid steam that tickled the craw. A malty smell of naked, damp bodies mixed with the harsh odours of cheap soap and shampoo. Talk was turning away from the football, to what was going to happen later that night. The pubs they would meet in, the girls who would be up for it, the men they wanted slain.

“Billy?” Sean called. Three men said: “Yeah?”

“Billy Morgan?”

“He’s outside,” said one of the other Billys. “Taking down the nets.”

The sweat that had been driven onto Sean’s skin by the steam froze instantly when he returned to the freezing pitches. He saw Emma mooching under the trees, looking at the flowers and the mushrooms. She waved at him and then shrugged as if to ask: What’s going on?

A more distant figure was struggling to unhook the nets from the goalposts. Sean pointed at him and motioned for her to stay where she was. Emma threw back her head theatrically but gave him a smile that made him forget all about the cold.

By the time Sean reached him, Billy had managed to divest the goalposts of their net and was bundling it up into a manageable shape to carry back to the sports centre.

“Want a hand?”

Billy froze as Sean approached, the net dangling from his grasp, giving him the bizarre appearance of a cheated fisherman. Billy scrutinised the stranger, the gauze over one eye, the black beanie, the way he favoured one leg over the other as he approached. “Who are you?”

Sean smiled. If Billy bolted before he was within arm’s length, he’d never catch him. “The name’s Sean. We’ve met before.”

“I don’t thi—” But now the eyes widened a little and the net fell from his arms. “Fuck off. I’m finished with him now. That Lord. That bastard. I don’t owe him nothing.”

Sean held his hands up, kept the smile in position. “I know, I know. I wanted to apologise to you.”

“You what?”

“Apologise, Billy. I was working for Vernon Lord, but I didn’t know what it was he was up to. I still don’t. I thought he was a debt collector. I swear. That’s all.”

“He was,” Billy said. His voice had calmed down, but he was still taking steps backwards, keeping the distance between himself and Sean. Sean stopped. Billy stopped.

“But you said, that day, that it wasn’t money…”

“It was never money,” Billy said.

“Then what?”

“Why should I tell you? You caught me that day. Gave me a hiding. Set me up for that bastard.”

“I’m sorry, Billy. I was… I’m a private investigator. I was trying to find out who killed a girl.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you are. You’ve spoilt me for life. I’m a wreck.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I hope you never have to.” Billy walked around Sean in a wide arc, as if fearful of a repeat attack.

“Billy—”

“Fuck off.”

Sean trudged after him as he returned to the changing rooms. The others had finished cleaning themselves and were standing around outside, hair nicely combed and glinting in the pale sunlight, sports holdalls slung over shoulders, car keys clinking in their fingers. Billy dumped the nets and went inside. Sean followed.

“I want to help you,” Sean said. “I want to get Vernon Lord. I think he had something to do with the death of this girl.”

Billy said nothing. He slowly peeled the kit from his filthy body. Sean turned away. “Who was the other guy who turned up after I left you that day, Billy? The man in the mask?”

He heard Billy snort behind him. The squeal of a tap was followed by the blast of water on tiles. Sean turned to see Billy eclipsed by a cloud of steam as he began to soap his body. “That was Dr. Chater.”

“Dr. Chater?”

Billy’s hair stood up in soapy tufts. His eyes closed as shampoo creamed across his face. He looked impossibly young. “Yeah,” Billy said, spitting out water. “Vernon has a deal sorted out. He finds prime cuts and Dr. Chater comes to harvest them.” The steam from the shower dissipated under a breath of air from outside.

There was still plenty of moisture in the changing rooms, sluicing along the floor, hanging in the air, but none of it could help the dryness that stripped Sean’s throat in the second that Billy’s body became visible.

Billy stood in the cubicle, rinsing his gelded body with a flannel. Wintry sunlight diffused by the frosted windows turned his flesh to powder; the spasming striplights arranged on the ceiling softened him to such an extent that it seemed the angles of his bones had been sanded down. Sean stared at the mangled nub of his pubis, beribboned with shining scars, as if a slug had made criss-cross journeys across him. And then he noticed Billy was watching him. As Sean made to say something (what comfort could he have offered?) Billy made a barely imperceptible shake of his head and, bringing his finger to his lips, locked the words Sean might have uttered deep inside him for ever.

“CHRIST, WHY?” EMMA asked him.

They were sitting in a café. From his seat, Sean could see through the misting windows to the muddy fields they had just departed. The sugar in his weak, hot tea was slowly making inroads to the core of his shock, thawing him, bringing him back. He shrugged.

“Billy said something about a deal. I’ve got a horrible feeling about this.”

“What?”

“I think… I think that Vernon is selling organs to someone over there.”

“In Tantamount?”

“I think so. I think he’s harvesting organs here and giving them to Tim Enever to sell over there.”

Sean told Emma about the package Tim had been carrying. It had been a smallish parcel, wrapped as the cuts from a butcher might have been wrapped. He told her of the blood that had seeped to the bottom of the parcel. “I thought it was something he had bought. For lunch. I’ve seen Tim eat the most God-awful lunches when we were working. Anaemic meat puddings, ribs from the Chinese takeaway that looked way out of date; it wouldn’t have surprised me, what he had in that parcel for his din-dins.”

“Why Billy? What’s so special about him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing obviously special about him. Maybe that’s it. On the surface it looks as if he’s being chased for dosh. Nobody looks twice. Happens all the time for those poor bastards.”

“What about the others you visited?”

“Jesus,” Sean said shakily, his hand trembling against his cup. The rattle of it against the plastic table drew attention from some of the other customers. “Those poor bastards.”

“Hark at him!” cawed a craven figure who seemed to have created himself from the sooty skin on the wallpaper by the café window. “Precious little wanker. Have some respect. Don’t think you’re any better than the rest of us.”

“God forbid,” spat Emma, screeching her chair legs back on the lino. “Come on, let’s go.”

Outside she held on to Sean while he tried to make his legs work properly. The cuts in his thigh were bleeding again, showing through the thinning denim. “God, I’m a mess,” he said wearily. His face was grey and scooped-out, like a pumpkin for Halloween.

“Over here you’re a mess. Over there, in Tantamount, you’re strong. You’re unbelievable.”

“Oh, go on,” Sean said, affecting a camp voice. Emma laughed.

“It’s true,” she said. “I watched you run after that Tim guy. You were incredible. People stopped to look. You were strong and fast.” Emma took his head in her hands and drew it towards her. She kissed him on the mouth, gently at first, but with mounting desperation, as if trying to feed off some of the steel she had referred to.

“I should check on those others,” he said. “Make sure.”

Emma nodded. “Okay. I’ll come with you.”

HE WAS GLAD of that, in the end. Although he was not attacked by the people he had had to disable when he first came with Vernon Lord to visit the old woman, Mrs Moulder, in the tiny flat near Runcorn’s Shopping City, the presence of danger was very real and constant. Emma helped just by being there. She lent him the mettle that she thought she had seen in him in the other place, over there.

Her door was closed but the latch was off. Inside, the smell of death was overwhelming. There were no signs of struggle, but there was an intense feeling of a presence in the flat which they both acknowledged.

Emma said, “It’s as if someone has just left the room, do you know what I mean?”

Sean nodded. “Or is hiding. Is still here.”

They found Mrs Moulder in the kitchen. Sean said, simply, “Cheke.”

If her method of dispatching victims was becoming more skilled, the manner of her disposal of the bodies was shockingly clumsy and tokenistic. Mrs Moulder had been forced into the oven, but when Cheke had found she would not fit, the old woman had been abandoned, half-sprawled on the floor, her head burned like a forgotten roast. An older wound in her chest told the story of Sean’s first visit here. A story, the ending of which he had not been privy to. The ribs had been snipped open and bent back to reveal the heart, which was no longer there.

Cheke had half-heartedly begun hacking off Mrs Moulder’s legs, but had given up, no doubt bored. The body was partially digested too: a naked portion of the abdomen bore sucker scars and the flesh had turned to porridge. Presumably Cheke had given up on this idea too when she realised how pointless it would be to assume the form of an elderly blind woman.

“I’ve seen enough,” Emma said.

“She’s closing in on us,” Sean observed. “When we give her the slip, she simply goes back to the trail and rubs it out bit by bit until she makes fresh contact.”

“When does it end?”

Sean squeezed her arm. “When we go down. Or her. Don’t lose that thought. She’ll have an Achilles heel.”

They were on their way out of the flat when Emma halted Sean, her voice a whispered, frantic appeal. In the cracked, foxed mirror hanging in the hallway, trapped between the silvered background and the solid reflections of Sean and Emma, Cheke lingered, in the act of departure. Emma reached out for Sean and held tight to his hand as they studied the wolfish profile and the volley of deep-red hair that tumbled across her shoulders. The eye regarded them, unseeing, yet giving the illusion of awareness. It hung there, beneath the lid, sly, gem-bright. Teeth glistened between slightly parted, ruddy lips. She had a bloom about her, even in the ghost of this reflection. She was formed. Ripe.

“She looks so real,” Sean said. “She looks… beyond real. Jesus.”

He delved for some kind of conversation as they drove back to town, but nothing could penetrate the vision they had witnessed. He guessed that her reflection, in its reluctance to leave the mirror, counted for something, might point to a weakness, but was baffled as to what that could be. He had been shocked by the perfection of the woman. She looked so hungry and ambitious, yet utterly fulfilled at the same time. She was an advert. She was aspirational. His lust stirred at the thought of her wide, thick mouth, the carnality that played in its shape. She had developed so much in the short time since her last attack it seemed impossible to believe it could be the same woman.

“How far can she go? Where can it take her?” Emma asked. He saw in her glazed countenance how Cheke had stayed with her too.

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “But she’d have us as a part of her in an instant.”

Saying the words, he hadn’t meant to invest them with enthusiasm, although that was how it had sounded. Would it really be a bad thing to have your make-up absorbed by her, to become a part of the perfection she was zeroing in on? Would it hurt so much? He thought of her body opening, sliding across his, the heat as she sucked him into her. To be indivisible from her.

He swallowed thickly and wound down the window, allowed the frigid January air into the car.

“She would kill us in a second,” Emma said. “No mercy.”

“I know.”

“Be strong,” she said. “Be careful.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MASH THIS

THERE WERE OTHERS.

Sometimes they appeared as subliminal slivers of colour and movement. Sometimes they loitered. Will slowly began to understand the migrations here, but he never got over the patterns of damage, the abundance of injury in all its manifold, grotesque variations.

Joanna said, “Look.”

A boy and a girl hurried along a path flanked by fluorescent yellow mushrooms. In contrast to her brother, the girl seemed to have only superficial injuries: a slight concave aspect to her skull, a ragged wound that flapped on her arm. Half of the boy’s head was hanging down his back, like some ghastly pony tail. They skipped and giggled, oblivious to their plight, excited instead by the lure of this strange wonderland.

“Look.”

A woman was trying to pick the crystallised cobwebs from hedgerows packed with thorns and fingers and teeth. She kept forgetting, it seemed, that she no longer had the hands to perform the task.

“Look.”

An elderly man with bulging eyes and empurpled skin tried to force his fingers into his gullet to remove a chicken bone that was lodged there. Somebody had performed a tracheotomy on him: a black hole in his throat wheezed and sputtered as he calmed down, realising that he could quite happily exist here with the foreign body trapped in his windpipe. Somewhere, a surgeon might be operating on him now, trying to remove the bone, trying to bring him back.

“Look. Look. Look.”

He did not become inured to the circus that passed him by as they sought the train station. When he asked a woman for directions, he completely missed what she said to him, partly because of his fascination at the sight: the mouth through which the instructions were coming had been widened by the blade of an axe that separated her face; partly as the words were rendered unintelligible because of it.

In the end, a man with a sanitised, almost beautifully neat incision across the centre of his forehead pointed them towards the station. Will led Joanna through a ticket barrier that was unmanned and over a small footbridge to a similarly unpopulated platform.

“If we were in real-time,” Will posited, “this train might actually take about a thousand years to get here.”

“Don’t,” Joanna admonished. “That’s just too bloody cheery.”

He asked her about Harry and her job. She was studying to become a barrister. Harry worked in the City, part of the pinstripes and braces brigade. “But he’s all right, believe it or not. He makes lots of money, but he’s not a wanker.”

“It feels funny, doesn’t it,” said Will, “talking about this kind of stuff while we’re standing here, waiting for a train? Especially when we’re not waiting for a train. We’re lying on crisp white sheets in a hospital somewhere, while the machine that goes bing! goes bing! by our beds.”

Joanna nodded. “It’s grim, when you think of it, that everybody in a coma thinks about a place like this. Our minds come up with this. Of all things.”

“Yeah,” said Will. “Imagine what we’ve got lined up when we die. It won’t be The Magic Roundabout, that’s for certain.”

There was the sound of a whistle, splitting the cold, foggy air. In the distance, smoke billowed into the sky. A minute later, the snout of a steam train rounded a curve in the land and bore down on the platform, pistons shunting the train forwards, the sound of the engine chuntering happily. The engine was created from bones. Skulls adorned the buffers; ribs that could have only come from a whale bent around the wheel arches.

“Nice touch,” Joanna said, as the train drew alongside. A becapped figure leaned out onto the footplate and beckoned them to hurry aboard. The point of an iron had been driven into his eye; the rest of it stuck out, the flex dangling as though he were a robot with his innards unravelling.

Will and Joanna found themselves alone in the carriage. The seats were beautifully patterned with gold thread, the wall space ornamented with sketches of steam trains in full flight. The train gathered pace, forging a path through the busy sprawl, nosing into a countryside filled with mountains and veldt and vast lakes that bubbled and geysered what might have been tar, what Will hoped was tar, many metres into the sky.

They bought tickets from an inspector in an immaculate black uniform who, like Will, sported a gunshot wound. His, though, was located under his jaw. It had made an exit wound through his nose, turning that part of his face into an extraordinary melange of pink tissue and black, burnt meat.

“I’b god a dreadful aib,” he said, apologetically. “I could neber eben pid draight, neber bind blow by own head off.”

A haughty voice came to them, crackling over the tannoy, to direct their attention to some piece of local interest or another. Somebody else came by with food for them. A woman asked if they needed their shoes cleaned.

Somehow, Will fell asleep, a weird sleep within sleep, in which he dreamed of his real life, his animated life. In it, he was sitting with Elisabeth and Cat and they were enjoying lunch together on a sunny patio. There was wine and cheese and fresh bread and fruit. He kept wanting to turn around to look at the lawn that was behind them because he could hear something approaching, but Cat kept stopping him.

“You don’t want to see, I promise you. It’s best you don’t see.”

Elisabeth would back her up, craning her neck to look at whatever was coming towards them. She’d pull a face and nod. “I’m with Catriona on this,” she’d say. “It’s probably best all round if you just sit tight. Maybe, if you’re quiet, it will go away.”

Joanna woke him from this uneasy snooze. He found he had been crying.

“How long have we been on this train?” he asked her, in an attempt to deflect her curiosity.

“You’ve been asleep for an hour or so. Whatever an hour means here.”

The crisp, authoritative voice burst out of the tannoy soon after, as if invited by Will’s impatience.

“We shall shortly be arriving at Mash This,” it said. “Please ensure that you take all your belongings with you. Have your tickets ready for inspection and leave no blood or body parts behind. Enjoy Mash This and be sure to travel with us again soon.”

Will collared the inspector as the train drew alongside the platform. Three children in swimming costumes were waiting to climb on board, shepherded by a lifeguard in mirrorshades with a shark bite the size of a dinner plate in his abdomen.

“What’s in Mash This?” Will asked.

“Whad idn’t, sir? Bash Thid id the playboy cabidal of our liddle world here. Ib you can’t bind a good tibe here, you bight as well be dead.”

They presented their tickets at the booth and were waved through onto the station concourse. Grunge music was being played at ear-splitting volume from speakers set into the ground that were as regular as cats’ eyes.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t think I had anything specific in mind,” Will said. “But take your pick. I think we’ll find it here.”

A taxi pulled up alongside them. A yellow cab that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the streets of New York, if the driver had been able to do something about the bubbled and blistered appearance of his skin. “Blowtorch,” he said, conversationally as they piled into the back seat. His eyes followed them in the rear-view mirror. They were large and vivid, almost obscenely big, like orbs of white icing on a sticky treacle cake. “Hurts like nothing you would believe, until the nerve-endings get fried off. Wife had it arranged. Hitman with an imagination. Not what you want, really. But the last laugh’s with me. I lied when I said I’d leave her everything. She’s in the hospital now. Tears streaming down her bloody face. ‘Pull through, Freddy,’ she’s whining. ‘Attaboy. You can do it!’ I tell you, it will be a tragedy if I come out of this. I’m having a fantastic time. But listen to me blabbing on. Where can I take you?”

“I could do with a drink,” Will said. “Know any good bars?”

“Do I know any bars? If people had nicknames around here, mine’d be Freddy ‘Bar-knower’ Fisk. Sit back and enjoy the ride. I hope you remember it after a night out at the place I’m going to take you to.”

The ride was like something out of a nightmare. The road was a trampled approximation of flatness, comprised of ancient speakers and strobe lights. Music was everywhere; rock competing with opera, acid jazz trying to subdue hip hop, reggae jousting with bhangra, all of it at volumes designed to make the ears retch.

Walking wounded shuffled along pavements or sat in recesses away from the throng nodding their heads to the variable beats. Great palaces of litter had risen from the sides of the road and faced each other across the traffic, a death’s door Vegas. Edged with flashing lights, they begged and bossed passers-by to come and watch dancing girls, and lose their money at the gaming tables. Other, less obvious attractions jostled for attention: gladiatorial bouts; suicide pits where failed souls could watch how-to videos by people who had checked out properly; mutilation chic clinics where those embarrassed by their wounds could glitz them up into this season’s must-haves.

Freddy dropped them off opposite a bar with a neon sign depicting a man drinking endlessly from an unlabelled bottle of hootch, his eyes turned into plus signs. The bar was called Cunted? You Will Be.

“I could come and pick you up later. Literally!” Freddy offered.

Sex alleys away from the main drag were rotting rat-runs filled with booths where the depraved could let loose the desires that convention and legality had forced to be hidden in life. Any permutation of animal and human was available, whether it moved around on the hoof, paw, webbed foot, or flipper. An old man whose mouth was a blood bath filled with dental equipment was standing on the doorstep of one of these cess-pools, stroking his chin while a bouncer challenged him to come up with something new that he couldn’t show him inside.

Gargling slightly, the dentist’s victim said: “Shaved cat used as a dildo on a superfat woman while a black guy, who’s being sucked off by a birthing goat, slams her tits repeatedly in the passenger door of a Peugeot 206.”

“I’ll get back to you on that one,” the bouncer said.

“Christ,” Will said. “Let’s get a drink.”

Inside Cunted? barstaff were trying to clear up the aftermath of a small war. Tables and chairs had been overturned. People were hitting each other with the abandon that comes with the knowledge that it won’t make a single bit of difference. Will and Joanna found a place at the bar; a bartender slid a couple of cocktail menus their way.

“I’ll have an Eggy Chin,” Will said, picking a drink at random.

Joanna said, “Piss on Your Chips.” The bartender went about magicking the drinks from the bevvy of shakers and bottles beneath his bar.

The entertainment, as far as Will could discern any beyond the brawl that was gradually being brought to an end, consisted of topless dancers on a stage going through a number of tired routines. Weary of the constant music, Will studied their injuries, which seemed to be fairly tame, apart from in the case of one lithe blonde who was gamely trying to dance with the branch of a tree rammed through her chest.

“Have you seen any more people like the ones you left behind at Gloat Market?” Joanna asked.

“Not yet, and I hope I don’t. That was too creepy. It was like looking at a series of really old photographs of your family and seeing your own eyes replicated in a person from each one.”

Jolted into remembering what he had seen in the mirror after his experiences with George and Alice, Will fingered his lower arm and his shoulder. Both areas felt sore and much too soft for his liking. Their drinks came. Will’s was some kind of hellish nog and spirits brew, while Joanna’s looked as if it had been drawn from a dodgy tap in the toilets.

Will excused himself and made for the gents, promising to come back quickly. He slalomed around the dregs of the fight, easily dodging punches thrown by the bloodied sacks staggering into each other, and pushed his way through a door bearing a medical diagram of a cross-section of the male generative organs. Bodies were piled up in the urinals, sleeping off the violence and the vodka. In the single cubicle, slumped on the seat, a man was trying to have sex with a woman who was fading from this place. Will watched, horrified, as he saw how it happened. How it would be for Joanna if her husband carried through his promise. The man didn’t seem to notice as he thuggishly, drunkenly lunged his hips into an area that was greying out, failing, rippling to nothing in his hands. Will caught a glimpse of skeleton, little more than a dim X-ray suggestion, and then the man was alone, reality slowly dawning on a face made imbecilic with booze.

Will averted his eyes, remembering what he had come here for. He unbuttoned his shirt and gingerly tugged back the two halves, almost swooning when he saw the spread of decay. His flesh resembled bacon that had been retrieved from the back of a fridge many, many days after it should have been consumed. It glittered and flashed iridescently. The patch on his shoulder had reached over to his chest and was consuming the pectoral on the left side. His right arm was completely infected, to a point just above his wrist. But for all that, he felt fine. As fine as it was possible to be, in the middle of a fever dream shared by all the poor bastards who were walking the tightrope between life and death.

The woman from the cubicle lodged in his thoughts. How her face had aged and crumbled as she fled towards death. The rictus of her mouth leered behind Will’s eyes. This was how Cat had gone. And the others, no doubt. He remembered his grandfather dying. It had been a dignified death, the doctors had said, something Will’s father had repeated whenever the subject came up. A dignified death. Did any such thing exist? After witnessing this, Will doubted it. Death was a down and dirty affair. You could wear a freshly pressed suit and your nicest tie as you prepared for the end, but your bowels didn’t give a fig for that when it came. A death during sleep, in a comfortable bed with the family holding hands around you, was the best way, he had thought. But someone would have to wipe the sputum from your face as the death rattle took hold of you. Someone would have to take the shitty sheets and burn them after you were carried out in a box or a bag. Death wasn’t dignified. Ever. It wore a joker’s costume and slipped a whoopee cushion under your backside as you relaxed into it. It shoved an exploding cigar in your mouth as you struggled for those memorable last words.

Will washed his face as best he could with the foul water in the basins and dried himself on the sleeves of his shirt. The light in here wasn’t the best kind, hardly flattering, but he knew he would never be able to look at himself again without being able to see that grinning loon pressed against the flesh, trying to break free. The harlequin, the skull beneath the skin.

“HAVE ONE OF these,” Joanna said, reeling against him as he fought his way back to the bar. “They’re really very good.”

Will sipped some of her cocktail and ordered a fresh one from the bartender.

“He must be wondering how he got the raw deal when it came to coma existence,” Joanna whispered, drunkenly. “I asked him his name. ‘Emperor Hirohito’, he says. I like that. I like that you can be whoever you want to be here. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be Ava Gardner, I think.”

A congenial buzz was spreading around the cavernous bar. People were righting seats and using them to sit on for a change. The glazed dancers scurried off the stage as a big band blare stormed from the speakers. A small man with oiled hair came onto the stage holding a wireless microphone with a huge blue muffler at the end, his red, velvet suit garnering a chorus of wolf whistles from the audience. Through squeals of feedback, his voice came at them in crescendos of sleaze. Will found himself wiping his palms on his jeans for the duration.

“Laze ’n’ gennermal. Thanoo, thanoo verr mudge. I’ve been Brad Pitt and you’ve been a wunnerful aujence. Abzlootlwunnerful.” The mic never left his lips. He strutted prissily around the stage, peering into the audience like a long-sighted passenger trying to read the number on a bus. “We’ve got a big, big treat for all you lovely, lovely folks now. All the way from wherever you want her to be, the delectable, the adorable, the you’ll wanna take her home in your pocketable, the one, the only, SiiiiiiiGOUrrrrrney WEAverrrrrrrrr!”

The MC backed off into the wings, his arm outstretched. From the other side of the stage, struggling with her balance thanks to the embryo that was hanging in a sac from her waist, Sadie emerged.

Will watched, spellbound, as she prowled around the stage in a slashed, tight black dress, filleted to allow the watery sac and its hideous progeny to depend comfortably from her abdomen. The foetus within turned slowly in the fluid, its ill-formed face and hands bumping against the membrane, dimpling it. Sadie sang a seductress’s song, baring plenty of flesh, pouting and winking at the shadowed heads dusted with a corona of soft, violet light at the front tables. She swung the umbilical cord that joined her to her baby as if it were a microphone cord. She bumped her hips against it provocatively. When the song ended she bowed and motioned to the bouncers at the back of the bar. Will saw them close the doors from outside and heard the heavy clunk of locks being slid into the place. He eyed the bartenders nervously. They were backing out of the bar and closing doors behind them. Joanna had passed out, her head resting against the chrome handrail.

Sadie walked to the edge of the stage and put her foot up against the highlight deck. Calmly, in the same velvety voice in which she had sung the song, she said: “Every man jack of you get on your knees now and worship your queen.” She whispered, “I want satisfaction. I want a show of loyalty. I want a sacrifice. And I want it now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: KEV

THE ALLOTMENTS ON Longshaw Street were a sad sight in late winter. Some of the rows had not been raked over since the cold snap; the dregs of last year’s crops lay like severed tongues on the soil, withered and brown amid the frigid lines of white. Some hardy vegetables were clinging on: sprouts, chard, leeks, but the majority had given up to the hard frost that had attacked the town in recent weeks.

Most of the plots were in some kind of disarray, except for one. Sean and Emma trudged along the tamped soil pathways towards it. A brief smell of peppery soup laced the chill afternoon air. To the west, over the dead airbase at Burtonwood, the sun was being teased into bloody ribbons by a thin raft of cloud. An upturned wheelbarrow rested against a compost heap enclosed by discoloured sheets of corrugated metal; off-cuts of carpet prevented the rotting matter from drying out. An old plastic bath was being used for water storage. Old window frames, complete with their thin glass squares, were a pauper’s greenhouse making the best of whatever sunshine was available. Halved plastic bottles improvised as cloches. Rolls of chicken wire and endless lengths of cane leaned against scruffy old sheds.

Restive eyes glared out from these retreats. The coals of cigarettes showed when the gloom within proved too great. Wirelesses played bland music or muttered dully. A man in a deckchair with deeply pitted, leathery skin sipped tea from a flask and turned the pages of a newspaper, refusing to acknowledge Sean and Emma as they walked by him. Somebody was leaning into a distant bonfire, feeding it with sticks and paper. Its smoke drifted across the allotments, making them insubstantial, enhancing their wasted appearance. It was hard to believe that this no-man’s land, this demilitarised zone, could cultivate anything so fancy as life. A slumped scarecrow stood sentinel, watching over a strip of ground choked with weed.

Plot number twenty-seven was a tidy strip of land tucked into the centre of the allotments, an exception to the utilitarian rule. The soil here had been cared for; it had been raked over and sieved for stones. Trimmed lengths from black binbags had been weighed down with bricks to protect something growing in one corner. A metal box contained non-biodegradable waste: packaging for organic slug pellets, tomato fertiliser, discarded seed trays, emptied cartons of Murphy’s tumble bug.

The shed was brightly painted and its window possessed a pair of curtains. A weathervane in the shape of a chicken rotated slowly on the roof. From within came a cough, a painful, damaged sound.

Sean called out. “Kev?” The name was brittle in the cold, a non-name, a pointless sound. Nevertheless, it drew a figure from the shed. Clad in a heavy blue greatcoat, a man of around sixty emerged, the bottom half of his cadaverous face swathed in a thick, bottle-green scarf. He looked at Sean first, then Emma, before casting a look further afield, at the allotment that was deserted but for the refugees from fracturing, loveless homes. The eyes came back to them, shadowed and hangdog.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice little more than a shifting of tortured air over dead or mangled vocal cords.

“I’m Sean Redman. This is Emma Lavery. Are you Kev?”

“Yes.”

Sean stepped a little closer. “It’s just that I was expecting someone younger.”

Kev allowed himself a dry little chuckle. “I was younger,” he said.

Sean said, “We wondered if we could talk to you.”

“About?”

Sean was about to answer when Emma stepped in front of him. “Is that a bird’s nest up there, mister…?”

“Blackbird,” Kev rasped.

“Mister Blackbird?”

Sean thought he saw a slight crinkling of the other man’s eyes, but if there was any humour there, it wasn’t reflected in his voice. “Mister Lovesey,” he corrected, briskly. “That is a blackbird’s nest.”

“I see,” Emma said. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologise. Now, what is it you want? How did you know I was Kev?”

“A friend of yours told me about you. Guy called Preece. Nicky Preece.”

“Nicky. Oh yes?” None of the suspicion was leaving his words, or his posture. He hovered at the doorway to the shed, cupping a plantpot in his hands. “What else did he tell you?”

“He told me how you used to work for Vernon Lord.”

The mention of the name made Kev step back into the shadow of the shed door, which obscured Sean’s view of him. “Oh? What of it?”

Emma touched Sean’s arm. “Mr. Lovesey, can we buy you breakfast? We understand you’re a bit of a connoisseur of English breakfasts.”

Kev moved out of the shadow of the door once more. He appeared even more pale and diminished. “It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t eat much these days. No doubt you know why.” He moved the scarf around his neck, so that it sat more comfortably. “You’d better come in,” he said, “seeing as you’ve come all this way to talk to me.”

Sean and Emma stepped over the corrugated iron fence into the well-manicured plot. They followed Kev into the shed, which was frugally furnished: a wooden stool, a fold-away table, a camping stove. The remains of a game of patience were spread out on the table. Garden tools made a homely jumble in the corner, a fresh, edaphic aroma rising off them. A sleeping bag was tightly rolled up and stored on a shelf over the door. A broken shotgun hung from a large hook beneath the window. A box of shells sat on the sill, open, ready.

“Sorry I don’t have more chairs,” Kev said, in a voice that was anything but. “The floor’s clean though, if you want to park yourselves.”

Kev went on with his game of cards. At close quarters, they could hear the wheeze of air in his throat as he took breaths.

Emma said, “How come you don’t have a scarecrow, Mr. Lovesey? Aren’t you worried the birds will take your crops?”

“None of us here has a scarecrow. Bloody worthless things. And it’s not crop-sowing time anyway. Nothing to take.”

“But there’s a scarecrow out there. Someone’s stealing a march on you.”

Kev grunted and shook his head. “No scarecrows here.”

Emma stepped outside and pointed. As soon as her arm was outstretched, she dropped it. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sure I saw one in that plot over there.”

“Nicky was fond of you,” Sean said, giving Emma an irritated look. “I think all of the lads were.”

“How do you know ’em?”

Sean spoke of the softstripping contract and the time he had spent with the crew. He stopped short of divulging that his relationship with the others had ceased, that any friends he had made during his time there were enemies now.

“And Lord?” Kev asked, his hands now still on the deck of cards.

“I went with Vernon on a few jobs,” Sean explained.

“A few jobs,” Kev said, and this time his blasted voice managed to carry a trace of sarcasm.

“You know what I’m here for,” Sean said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“People are dying. You were nearly killed for what’s going on.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Sean persisted. “It’s still happening, what Vernon is doing. He’s still collecting. Sometimes he takes… sometimes it’s unborn babies. Did you know that?”

Now Kev swivelled on the stool. His eyes were raw and flat: oysters on the half-shell. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“He needs to be stopped. I think he killed a girl I used to know. Or someone working with him did. I want you to help me.”

“How?”

“You know all about him. You’ll have seen things. You know his weaknesses.”

Kev shook his head. “It isn’t Vernon you should be worried about.”

“Oh really?”

“Why don’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to get back into that nonsense. I’ve got too much to do.”

Sean hitched around on his seat to get a view of the allotment. “Yeah. You’ve got a hole in your wheelbarrow needs mending and a rake to clean.”

“It suits me,” Kev said, quickly.

“I heard you were a good guy for Vernon. He rated you, I heard.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more.”

“I heard you were loyal and wouldn’t ever lie down for anyone. Hundred per center. Hundred and ten per center.” Sean leaned over and picked at the dried mud on a trowel. “Will you at least tell me what you know? And tell me why you bailed out? It wasn’t the gunshot wound, was it? At least tell us what happened with that.”

Kev sat across from him, staring at the younger man while Emma stood by the doorway, looking out at the pockets of mist in the rowans and the hawthorn. Chickens in a coop squabbled among themselves for a few seconds. The smell of the bonfire drifted through the open door. Kev’s stony face broke open to reveal a smile.

“Have a drink,” he said, pulling open a drawer and removing a half-bottle of whisky. “A nip, to keep out the cold.”

He poured three measures into three mugs and passed them around. They took sips. They nodded at the agreeable flavour, the migration of warmth through their bodies. A robin landed six feet away from the door and eyed them coolly.

Kev said:

I first met Vernon while I was working on the docks. I was doing anything I could for money back then. Seventy hours a week I’d be breaking my back loading or unloading ships. Fruit, textiles, meat, sometimes arms, although that was often midnight stuff. And never at the docks. Very naughty. Vernon was on one of the boats bringing in an illegal shipment of pistols from the Americas to sell on to Europe one night when I was helping out. I didn’t know much about his operations but I’d heard he was just about the best smuggler there was. I’d heard about him long before I met him. He was a bit of a legend.

We went down to a boathouse on the river and helped take the boxes off this boat while Vernon sat on a chair smoking cheroots and watching us working. When we’d finished, he called me back and thanked me, told me I put my back into it more than any other dogsbody that he’d seen. He was looking at me strange, like I had something green on my face. The others were in the boathouse by this time, divvying up the booty and loading it into the backs of stolen cars for delivery. They gave me filthy looks as they walked back and to.

Vernon never blinked when he talked. First time I ever saw his eyelids was when I caught him asleep one time. And even then I had to look twice because it was as though they were so thin they were almost translucent, like he was watching you while he kipped. He gave me a chunky little glass filled with rum and told me to down it. After the drink he asked me straight if I wanted to come and work with him. He needed someone he could trust, he said. He needed another set of eyes. Another set of hands. It was getting too dangerous, he said, this line of work he was in. He was getting too old. He pinched my cheek and laughed when he said this. He said that the rewards for helping him out would be great. Unimaginable.

I didn’t like it, the work he was offering. But I stuck at it and developed a tough skin. The boat work tailed off anyway. We lost our gills and went inland. I took beatings for Vernon. I took a knife once. I got harder. The beatings didn’t happen so often. I started doling the beatings out more than I was taking them. Vernon and me put the frighteners on this part of the country. We had the Northwest in our pockets. We got word of the rich pickings and went round to collect. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t money that Vernon was picking up. I thought he was a debt collector pure and simple. I never asked who for and I never asked why. I just matched him pace for pace and stood behind him in the shadows, cracking my knuckles while he pleased and thank you’d and scraped shit off his heels on the steps of all those sorry little houses.

It was seven or eight years before I twigged. A long time, I know. But if I’d been known for the quality of meat between my ears I’d never have been in this game in the first place, would I now? There’s me, picking up my grey hairs and getting a bit of lard round the guts and Vernon, my elder and better, looking as thin as a stiletto and twice as sharp. I never saw him exercising. He ate like a gannet and drank as if to chase off the Devil’s thirst.

We were friends by now. Fast and firm. We talked a lot, but he pretty much clammed up when the chat turned on him, his family, his loves. He got a cloud in his eyes when I asked him about his loves. Because I never saw him once with a lady on his arm. He had no tattoos proclaiming his desire for a Mavis or a Maude, or a Malcolm come to that. But we talked. One night he had had a bit too much to drink and the shakes were on him. I thought he was fearless, but this night he shook so much I could hear his bones rattling. He told me he was never going to be able to stop working. He was scared to stop working because he didn’t know what would happen to him. It wasn’t the poor bastards we visited that put the willies up him, nor was it the people he delivered the money to – what I thought was money. He said he was scared of himself. He had terrible dreams, he said. Dreams in which he walked through a corridor of mirrors and was terrified to turn to his left or right to see what kind of reflection walked with him. Ask him how he was feeling and he’d tell you that he didn’t feel himself today. Then he’d cackle to himself darkly for a bit. The drinking got worse. I drove him everywhere. But he got on top of it. Beat it, I suppose. Wrestled his demons to the ground like the hard bastard he is.

Doesn’t matter any more, he told me, when I asked him if he was okay. He dreamed of his corridor of mirrors and walked along it, smashing every one down with a baseball bat. Dead if I do and dead if I don’t, he told me. I never let it rest. I asked him to tell me what was going on. I dogged him. I went after him about the true nature of his work like a hound after a fox. I threatened that I’d leave him. He came round after that.

He showed me, one night, what the fuss was all about. We went out on a collection. A little house in Widnes. Old couple. Desperate for cash. Well, they’d got their bit of cash and Vernon came to balance the books. Instead of leaving me outside, he took me in with him. I wish I’d had a drink beforehand, let me tell you. What I saw… what I saw…

Vernon lays his hand on the old girl’s shoulder. Myra, her name was. Her old man, Clive, he behaves like a good boy and buzzes off to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. There’s the three of us standing in the room. I blink. And there’s four of us. I didn’t hear the door open or close. No footsteps. He’s just there. And it takes me a moment or two for it to sink in because he’s so still. This tall doctor bloke with a paper mask. His eyes are crawling all over Myra. Insect eyes, he had. They didn’t stop bloody moving.

Vernon goes, This is Dr. Chater. His voice is cracking all over the place like a wafer, like a bloody choir boy at bollockdrop. I realise, despite the smile on Vernon’s face, that he is shitting himself.

Dr. Chater moved like nobody I had ever seen before. If you think of a film of someone moving, and then take away all the frames that contain the getting from one position to the next, it was like that. Like looking at photographs. One second he was looking at Myra, the next second his hand was full of knives and she was forced back over the arm of the settee, antimacassars all over the shop. Another second, her blouse is up around her ears and Dr. Chater’s hunched over her. I watched him cut her. I watched him take a lung. No blood. He moved too fast for her body to even realise it was open. Clive came in with tears in his eyes asking who took sugar. One look at her and he shut the kitchen door. A good boy, Clive. She was stitched up and in her armchair within seconds. She was dead. She’d had a heart attack.

Dr. Chater slipped the lung into a plastic bag and tossed it to Vernon before propping a Radio Times into Myra’s hands, the doctor’s bloody prints smeared all over it. I blinked. There was three of us again. We left before Clive came back. I wanted to ask Vernon all kinds of questions but I couldn’t talk. Spit had turned to glue in my mouth. We drove for an hour until we came to a house in the country. Nice house. Big. There was this bloody freak waiting for us. He looked as if he was in a state of constant drowning. Snuffling and choking and coughing. I can see by your face you know who I’m talking about. He took the parcel and told us to wait. We were there for about half an hour, standing around, waiting. When he came back he had mud on his feet and he gave Vernon a couple of pebbles from his pocket. Do I eat this, I asked and Vernon started laughing his head off. The sickly kid was laughing too, but it was the kind of laughter people do when they don’t get the joke, but don’t want to be seen to not get the joke. Put it in your pocket, Vernon says. So I do and I sleep the sleep of kings that night and when I wake up in the morning I check for the pebble and it’s gone and I look in the mirror and all my grey hair has vanished.

That was 1970.

Couple of years ago, I’m with Vernon at a night club. This streak of piss called Norman Spence ran the place. Vernon had sorted him out with a loan and now he’s prospering, his club doing really well. We go round there for an eye. Eyes are needed for some reason. Vernon doesn’t get a chance to touch Norman, to bring in Dr. Chater. Doesn’t even get an audience with him. Bouncers pull guns on us. Guns are the thing now. I’m wondering, as this meathead draws a bead on me, is that one of the guns I carried off the boat all those years ago when I had a wet nose and wide eyes? Could be. Bastard shoots me through the throat. Tears half of it out. Vernon got me out of there. God knows how. Hail of bullets. He patches me up. We get Norman back. We sort him out. You might bump into him if you go paddling in the Mersey. I stick around for a while but my nerve has gone. It’s time to hand in my notice. Tears and hugs and take it easy mate, see you around.

He’s still caught up in it, Vernon. In his eyes, when I called it a day, I could see him thinking I was a jammy sod. I could see him wishing for what I had done. He’s been at it a long time. Maybe that payment, those pebbles, maybe it was worth it for a while. But you get trapped, don’t you? If he stopped now, what would happen to him? All that time, that experience, all of it comes piling down on you, crushes you. It would kill him to give it up now. He knows that. He has to carry on. He has to keep giving, in order to receive. He’s the most generous man in the world, but he doesn’t have a say in the matter.

Kev said, “Vernon Lord was born in 1892.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: THE GRAND PANJANDRUM

WHEN IT BECAME apparent that Sadie wanted someone dead, there weren’t as many rushing for the exits as Will might have anticipated. Some volunteered. And if Will had realised what was lined up for him, he might well have done the same. There was plenty of genuflecting going on as she stepped down from the stage and walked among the punters, the utricle hanging off her side sloshing in time to the swing of her hips. The sad-looking, pickled thing within turned and turned, its ill-formed arms hugging itself. Will realised what it was in George and Alice that he had recognised. It was Sadie.

Brad Pitt was back on stage now, trying to calm everybody down. He minced around, patting down his oily hair and lifting his voice to compete with the hubbub as people threw themselves at locked doors or tried to break windows with chairs.

“This guy walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre. So the bartender gave him one. Now then! Hey?”

Nobody was listening. Will slipped over the bar and knelt among the beertaps and barsnacks. From his position he could look up at the splashback mirror that ran the length of the bar beneath the optics and watch as Sadie stalked among the audience, rating and discarding potential victims. It took a few seconds for him to realise that there was another man down here with him, cowering just a foot to his left.

“Hi,” Will said. The other regarded him as if he had just extracted a monkey from his ear.

“Do you know who this bitch is?” he asked.

“Yes,” Will said. “Her name is Sadie. I rescued her from a bunch of travellers a couple of weeks ago. She’s a real handful.”

Will was rewarded with a slow shaking of the head, from the moment he had begun to speak. The monkey had become a belly-dancing piglet wearing nipple-rings.

“That’s Sigourney Weaver,” the man hissed. “The piece of skirt that bosses this place.”

“The bar?”

“No. The entire place. Queen bitch.”

“Really? She’s just a spoilt brat, you know. More trouble than good.”

The man was looking in the mirror now, his eyes widening all the time. He reached up and loosened the knot in his tie. “Okay. Well if you know her so well, put her in her place.” With that, he launched himself away from the box of crisps he was hiding behind, vaulted the counter, and hurled himself through the window into the night. When Will returned his gaze to the mirror, Sadie was standing at the bar, regarding him coolly.

“Fix us both a drink, Will,” she said. “On the house.”

“ARE YOU GOING to sacrifice me?” he asked.

Sadie, halfway into a swallow, looked at him uncomprehendingly and burst into laughter, spraying some of her champagne on his shirt. “God no,” she said, when she had finally managed to compose herself. “My hero. My saviour. Why should I do that?”

“You were looking for sacrifices.”

“And I’ll have one,” she assured him. “But not you. Not Uncle Will. There’s better in store for you. A more noble role.”

“What happened to you and Elisabeth, when I left you?” he asked, steeling himself for some awful reportage of what the mountaineer had done to them after the crash.

The bar had been emptied. Once it was clear that Sigourney Weaver had someone in her clutches, widespread calm had broken out. The bartenders reappeared and unlocked the doors, and people filed into the foggy twilight, chatting about where they were going to spend the rest of their evenings. Now a few bartenders were clearing away glasses and wiping down the tables. Bouncers were gathered by the doors, arms folded, nodding apocalyptically. Brad Pitt was sitting on the edge of the stage with a half a lager and his pants unbuttoned to allow his beer belly a breather, crooning to one of the cleaners who was gazing at him, a bucketful of cigarette ends in her hands.

“We’ll come to that, presently,” Sadie said. “In here, little man, you are no longer the boss. This is my playground. My sandpit.”

“How long have you been in a coma?” Will asked. Sadie laughed again. Maybe she was laughing because Will was studiously avoiding the obvious question. Maybe she was laughing because she found his questions to be piffling and trivial. Whatever, it was pissing Will off.

“I’m not in a coma, chucky-egg. It’s you who’s in a coma. You and all the other veg-heads floating around here.”

“You’re deluding yourself.”

“Am I?”

“Everyone here…”

“Everyone here is in a coma. Except me.”

Will looked around him, bored by the argument. “Tell me what happened to Elisabeth. Is she here?”

Sadie took a sip from her glass and rearranged the sac on her knees. The homunculus within rolled onto its back and gazed at her through the milky suspension with pale eyes. “I told you, we’ll come to that. When I say.”

Will turned the frosted glass in his fingers, spreading a base of condensation across the scarred bartop. He said, “If you’re not in a coma, what are you doing here?”

“Putting the fear of God up my subjects.”

“Subjects?”

“Yes. Here, I’m important. If I was a cheese here, I would be a big one.”

“I don’t get it.”

Sadie winked and rubbed the shiny skin of the sac. It wrinkled and gurgled beneath her fingers. “You did get it though, didn’t you? Remember? In the church? Naughty boy.”

Will forced himself to concentrate on one thing at a time. He felt as though he were sinking under the weight of so much innuendo and concealed threat. If he was going to be of some use to Cat or Eli, wherever they were now, then he had to tread water. “Why are you so different?” he tried again. “What marks you out as something special?”

She said, “I was an Insert once. Like your friends. One of the first. A guinea-pig. They lost me as soon as they put me in. I’ve been lording it here ever since. I’m a rare bird, Will. I can cross over. I have that talent thanks to the men in the white coats and the big beards. A failed experiment, but I’m not complaining. I didn’t go in quite as far as they were hoping, or needing, me to go. But, as I say, I’m not complaining.”

“And what about George and Alice. Relatives of yours?”

“Ah yes,” Sadie said. “George and Alice. No. Not relatives. That was me. A welcoming party for you. How’s your arm?”

Will stiffened. “What’s all that about?”

“Well, a girl’s got to eat, hasn’t she?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Sadie?”

She licked her lips at him. “What is it, you think, keeping our child here sustained? Nourished? Gold top milk and a pot of puréed chicken and sweetcorn?”

“It’s not my child. I don’t know what sickness has got into your brain, but it’s got to stop, Sadie.”

“Will, meet Cherub, Cherub, meet Will. Daddy’s home.”

The curl of grey flesh twisted. A smile curled its lip.

“Come home with me,” she said.

“Fuck off, Sadie. I’m not scared of you.”

Sadie widened her eyes. “Jesus, Will. You should be.” She tapped a nail against her teeth; her other hand absently stroked the umbilicus joining her to her progeny. “Tell you what, let me show you why you need to be scared. There’s plenty to be scared of, you know.”

She reached behind her, for one of the puling idiots begging to be put out of his misery: an elderly man whose spine was a shattered bow sticking through the sheepskin coat on his back gibbered his appreciation. He placed a gnarled hand in hers at the same time that she caught hold of Will’s sleeve.

A blink: the bar resolved itself into the twisted, burning carriage of a passenger train. Commuters lay around the carriage in various states of physical collapse. There was a lot of blood. The old man was now lying half in, half out of the train, his spectacularly ruined back shredded apart on the mangled remains of the window. Will watched as he turned his face to them, his shattered teeth bared in a grateful leer, bloody bubbles bursting on his tongue as he fought for breath.

“Now,” he begged.

Sadie leaned over and covered his mouth with hers. She drew breath so violently that it seemed half the old man’s jaw was sucked between her lips. His body jerked twice and was still. She let him fall. The scene disintegrated around them as she let go of the man’s hand.

“Now then,” she purred, leaning over to kiss Will’s cheek with her bloody mouth. “Come back to my place.”

“I saved your life, Sadie. I came after you when you went missing.”

“Pah.” Sadie dismissed the claim with a flap of her hand. “I was prospecting for a mate. You were strong and resourceful. And your arse looks good in jeans. Now. Home.”

He could hardly object, not when two of the bouncers moved behind him, casting long, long shadows across the bar.

“Meet Kynaston and Drinkwater,” Sadie said. “Evil bastards the both of them.” The two bouncers saluted him.

Joanna murmured as they brushed past her.

“Who’s this?” Sadie asked. “Got some competition, have I?”

Will said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

Sadie smiled. She reached out and flicked the end of his nose. Her fingers smelled of cold, old things. She nodded at one of the bouncers. “She’ll do. Take her.”

THEY WALKED THROUGH the seething streets, but nobody jostled them. Bodies parted in Sadie’s path as though she and the oncoming throng were repelling magnets. Eventually, the strip clubs and dive bars and street corners haunted by junkies dwindled. The traffic shook off its insanity. Will followed Sadie along a series of ever-narrowing corridors in a mangled spread of housing that seemed to have been jammed together like ill-fitting Sticklebricks in a child’s playpen. Flues and drainpipes, vents and fire escapes clung to the superstructure, little more than add-ons or afterthoughts. Some people were on the fire escapes, drinking tea or watching the stars or fucking. Cardboard boxes, tarps and plastic sheeting had been arranged on some of the landings, makeshift houses for the wretches who couldn’t find themselves a toehold. Will wondered about them, what their lives beyond coma must be like. So-called lives.

It grew so dark in the rabbit warren that Will had to listen out for the sluicing of the foetus in its membrane. At least, in here, he didn’t have to look at it. Nevertheless, his mind settled upon the developing child, and he imagined it rotating in its vital jelly, watching him as he followed Sadie through passageways so thin he could feel the cement of the walls muscling in against him. He smelled Juicy Fruit on the breath of the bouncers marching behind him, and when he looked back he could just see a reflected gleam off the insectile lenses of their sunglasses. They walked until they came to a set of storm doors set into the floor, at a point where the walls actually converged. All around them, lifting into the night, were sheer edifices of urbanity: greasy windows filled with dirty yellow light, a jungle of satellite dishes and TV aerials, telegraph wires, and cables. Will saw figures using these as a monkey might use a vine in a rainforest. It seemed a safer option than using the streets. As if in confirmation of this, the rooftop horizons were spoiled by the shape of tents and bivouacs.

Kynaston pushed past Will and grappled with the storm doors. Sadie descended, but paused when half of her body had disappeared to look back at Will.

“Welcome to my palace,” she said.

SHE SAID, “I need you.”

He knew he ought to be impressed by what she said, and at some level he knew he was, but for the time being his eyes were too busy to allow anything else to bother him. They kept returning, despite the opulence of the surroundings, to the head on the stage behind him. One of the eyes was only half-shut, as if trying to trick people into thinking it belonged to a dead person. At any moment, the mouth seemed as if it might open and sing-song: “Fooled you!” The head had begun to shrink, and the skin had tightened into an arid mask, but the hair was still lustrous, the thing that helped Will identify it as belonging to Elisabeth.

Sadie’s palace had turned out to be an underground theatre that had been gutted by fire. Seated in the auditorium, either slumped with decay into the burned seats or erect with rigor mortis, death grins, and clenched fists, corpses blankly contemplated the stage with its craters and its mountains of ash. Joanna had been draped across the laps of one of these bodies. Her arm was around its shoulders. She twitched in sleep and nuzzled up against its puffball throat. Up in the gods, bodies twirled slackly on ropes, swollen necks bent bonelessly over the slipknots.

Whatever fire had scoured clean the theatre had done for the curtains too. Immense runners hinted at their extravagance; Will could almost imagine a great weight of maroon velvet and gold brocade sweeping across the stage to consume the players. He could almost hear the clamour of the ovation, the hands blurring as they clapped beneath the smoky floods. The flowers. He could taste, behind the coarse, carbonated bones of the theatre, the electric clash of sweat and nervous excitement. He clung to those ghosts. Knowing they had been real once helped him to cope with the atrocity that had been visited upon Elisabeth and the madness that was devouring Sadie’s mind.

“We both need you.” She came to him and unbuttoned his shirt, looking up coyly through her fringe as she had when he came to rescue her from the travellers. He saw now how that had been a test. A trap, even. He had unwittingly created a bond in that moment that had doomed him as surely as the fly accepting the courtesy of the spider in his parlour.

Will looked down as Sadie gently peeled the shirt back from his shoulders. The rot that was displayed made Will gag. The muscle had stripped back almost to the bone, the edges of the wound were furred and discoloured, slowly spreading outwards to the uninfected areas of his body like a recalcitrant flame on damp paper.

“I’m dying,” Will said simply.

“Yes,” Sadie confirmed. “You’re being consumed.” Though she said the words gravely, she was racked with giggles. She covered her mouth with her hand and stepped back from him, her eyes becoming wet. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make fun of the dead. Or rather, the dead to be. But it was a good joke.”

“I’m cracking a rib here,” Will said, flatly. “What have you done to me?”

“I’ve touched you deeply,” Sadie said, and she was off again, chuckling into her palms.

“You’ve poisoned me.”

“No,” she said, hastily. “I’ve not poisoned you. I’ve taken from you, because my child… our child… needs nourishment from her father. That’s the way it is here. A true two-parent upbringing.”

Will licked his lips. “That,” he said, pointing at the sac, “is not my child.”

“In the church,” Sadie said softly. “Do you remember how I fucked you? How my legs spread wide on top of you? How I sucked in every inch of you? Do you remember how hard you came? Do you remember the shadow, the shade? The black shape that moved in the corner of the church? You know what that was. You know full well. You thought you had a headache, you weren’t entirely sure that any of it had happened.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss him. Will recoiled but one of the bouncers stepped up behind him, making a wall with his chest that Will could not knock down. Sadie’s lips were cold against his. Her tongue wormed between them. She tasted of damp woodlands. He closed his eyes when the sac slapped against his thigh and he felt the spindly limbs of what spun inside it grope for his hands.

“It happened, Will. You poured yourself into me. We made heat. We made a baby. And you have to provide for the child. You have to. You belong to us now.”

Where she had kissed him felt strange. There was a tingle there, like the phantom sensation on the mouth that heralds a cold sore.

“Don’t touch me any more,” he said. “Please.”

Sadie said, “Can’t make promises like that, Will.”

He raised a finger and probed his lips. They felt mushy and hot. They felt as though there was nothing as firm as teeth behind them. Fluid seeped onto his fingertip; it appeared black in the poor light. He hoped to God it wasn’t.

“I do like a sacrifice,” Sadie said, suddenly excited. “Don’t you? Doesn’t it just fill you with importance? A death, for your sake. This will be for you too. For our new family, for as long as you last.”

She caught hold of the sac by its umbilicus and swung it up so that she was eye to eye with its occupant. “And baba makes three! Yes he does!”

Joanna was stirring on her macabre throne. Sadie gripped Drinkwater’s arm and dragged him towards their prisoner, asking him if he had a knife or a gun or a grenade they could use. Attention diverted from him, Will moved towards the stage. He drew himself up onto it and carefully navigated his way around the weakened boards, the holes, and the splinters to the pike.

He reached out a hand slowly, reluctant to touch the failing flesh of her face but desperate to make one last contact. In the end, it wasn’t so bad, not really. It felt a little like the skin on his grandmother’s face when he had visited her in hospital, towards the end. She had been sleeping; he touched her cheek and it had been cool, dry and soft, slightly powdery. She had woken with a start and he had tried to smile at her tired, bewildered eyes, but it hurt too much to do so. “I love you,” he had told her, around the lump in his throat. The first and the last time. I should think so, she had replied, in a voice full of mock-chastisement.

“I love you,” he said now, through the mess of his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

As gently as he could, he wrenched her head from the spiked end of the weapon, feeling to the core of his bones his revulsion as it came suckingly free.

He turned to Sadie, who was pushing sticks of dynamite into Joanna’s pockets, into her mouth, under her seat. She was laughing with Drinkwater, who handed her the TNT as if it were treats from his pocket.

Will leapt from the stage and launched himself at them. Somebody was screaming, and it was only when he was within slaughtering range of the others that he realised the screams were coming from his own mouth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: SOFTSUCK

“I DON’T FEEL very well,” Sean said, pausing a moment to lean against the wall. Window-dressers stopped draping winter clothes on startled mannequins to watch. Emma moved to block their view and put a hand to Sean’s brow. Her fingers came away wet with his sweat.

“You were fine a moment ago,” Emma pointed out. “You were going on about ice cream. About how much you’d like to have some.”

“Well I’m not fine now,” he snapped. “Jesus. It feels as though my guts have been filled with hot grease. I think I’m going to vom.”

Sean staggered away from his resting place and dropped to his knees by the roadside. The occupants of the nearest gridlocked cars started honking their horns and yelling at him to puke on somebody else’s doorstep. One woman snatched the curtains together on her passenger-side window. In the next car, a man who was washing dishes in a tub clamped to the door tutted away like a faulty Geiger counter.

Emma gently rubbed his back and mouthed apologies to the bystanders while Sean heaved. Astonishing heat was rising out of him and changing the nature of the air. Jewels of sweat broke out on his nape and stained his blue T-shirt. There was an awful, vertiginous moment for her when she heard the cackle of a child and looked up to see a bird with a pair of fingers between its beak. Then Sean’s back moved in a way it shouldn’t have and she returned her attention to him in time to see her own hand sink into him. She had a brief, shocking sensation of her fingers grazing against the nubs of bone that formed his vertebrae, and then she was pulling away, dizziness clouding her vision. She was not so giddy that she missed the way that Sean’s back arched unnaturally at the apex of every retching fit. He seemed to become spineless, his body twisting so violently during the spasms that it threatened to bend him double. The small of his back where she had touched him developed a serious dip, a pocket that resembled the suck of a plughole as it devoured everything around it. He barked out, his face clenched shut with pain, and then the extremities of his body were drawn into the hungry pit at the base of his spine until, a second later, all that was left was a spinning disc of hot air trembling in the cold sky. By the time that vanished, Emma too was beginning to feel unwell.

“PARDOE. YOU BASTARD. You might have warned us.”

Emma was creased on the floor, her hands splayed out on the carpet of Pardoe’s living room. Her own vomit was drying on her fingers. Her stomach felt as though every muscle in it had been strained, her ribs like they had been swapped for a handful of scorched firewood. Six feet away from her, Sean was lying in a foetal position, shivering by the radiator. Pardoe was sitting in an ostentatious leather chair, regarding his two visitors bemusedly. He had shed the avuncular air he had carried with him on their first meeting. Instead of a slightly worn cardigan, he now wore a suit with creases so sharp they might have sliced flesh. On his desk was a telephone and a bunch of keys, a couple of paper clips, nothing else. He played with a small, matt-grey pen, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Do you enjoy the big blue yonder? Do you like the Zoo?”

“Is that what you call it?” Emma asked, wiping her mouth.

Pardoe sniffed. “It’s called what you want to call it. It’s home to some, it’s hell to others. To some it’s the Dead Zoo. I’ve heard it called Arcadia, Z, the Place… Tantamount, that was yours, wasn’t it, Emma? Particularly good name, that. We knew it simply as In Country. But I’ve heard it called – and this is a particular favourite of mine – Oh Shitting Nora, Is This It?”

Sean glared at him. “Considering you put us through enough grief to get us in there, you didn’t hang around for long to pull us out, did you?”

“I had news for you. What was I supposed to do?”

“There has got to be an easier way to communicate with us when we’re in,” Emma argued. Her mouth was spiced with her own sickness and her left eye felt dry and scratchy. “There’s got to be something safer than just pulling us out like that.”

“You find it, we’ll use it,” Pardoe said, and then, his temper showing through the usual reserve, he flicked a paper clip at Sean. “Oh get up, you big baby. Christ, anybody would have thought you’d just been born.”

“I can imagine what that must feel like now,” Sean croaked, pulling himself up to a sitting position.

“De Fleche,” Pardoe said, conversationally. “Any word?”

Sean shook his head. “We’re having trouble getting to the hill, where we think he’s based.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Every time we go in, we find ourselves in a big city. We never get in anywhere else. The hill—”

Pardoe coughed to interrupt. “This hill,” he said, ruminatively, the pen twisting faster in his grip. “What’s that all about? What makes you think there’s a hill, if you haven’t seen it? Surely it would be expedient to search this city. He must be there.”

Now it was Emma’s turn to shake her head. “No. There’s a hill. We both dreamed of it many times when we were children. I think it must have been around the time of our initiation.”

“Then find the fucking hill,” Pardoe said. “We don’t have for ever. I’ve had reports already of leaks in a number of places. The first in this country have occurred. We’re mopping up, but we’re missing quite a few.”

“How long do we have?” Sean asked. “Before it gets serious?”

“Oh, it’s already serious. But we’re holding our own for now. I’d say that in three days’ time, if we haven’t done for de Fleche, then the breakdown will be more pronounced. Think floods instead of leaks. Think of the sky rotting. Think of the ground falling away as you walk. It’ll be grade-one chaos. A free-for-all, with the dead at the head of the queue.”

They took this in, trying to wipe away the effluvia from their clothing.

“And this news,” Emma remembered. “What’s going on? What was so important?”

Pardoe studied a nail and took his tongue on a tour of his teeth. He slid the nail in between his incisors, digging for a speck of food. Emma and Sean waited, used by now to Pardoe’s theatre. “Your friend Will,” he said, finally.

“What about him?” Sean asked.

“He’s had a bit of an accident.”

DRINKWATER WAS QUICKER and more fancy on his feet than his bulk suggested. Will lunged with the pike but he was too slow, and Drinkwater ducked easily out of the way. Overbalanced, Will hit the edge of a chair with his shin and started to topple over. If the chair had survived the fire without damage, it might have floored him, but the arm came free at the moment of impact and Will was able to right himself, turning to defend the attack that Drinkwater had already initiated. A knife flashed in his hand.

Drinkwater was fleet, but he was stupid, relying on brute force and lots of noise for his offensive. Will was intimidated, but not to the point of freezing. He swung the pike around as Drinkwater reached out to slash him and lanced the biceps of the bouncer’s right arm. Having hooked him, Will dragged him around in a wide arc, and then, at speed, jerked back on the weapon and watched Drinkwater disappear over the backs of some of the chairs while about half a pound of his muscle flicked up into the air.

Will turned quickly in time to feel the fist of the second bouncer pile into his jaw. He staggered back, driving the back end of the pike into the shredded, scorched carpet beneath him. It skidded for a short while, and then caught in a series of cracks, inviting Kynaston to impale himself upon it as Will fell hard onto his back. But the bouncer was smart to the trick. He sidestepped the pike and batted it away with his forearm. Will changed his grip, holding the pike horizontally as Kynaston dropped on to him. He managed to lodge the handle under Kynaston’s ribs and tilt backwards, vaulting the bouncer over his head.

He was dimly aware of applause in the background, of Sadie clapping wildly, before Kynaston was back on his feet and rushing him again. Will feinted to go to his right and checked left, unbalancing Kynaston sufficiently to allow Will enough space in which to smack the blunt end of the pike across the bouncer’s jaw. He heard a splitting sound and Kynaston’s parted chin began bleeding profusely. The bouncer was preoccupied with keeping his face together with his hands, and backed off as Will approached.

“Enough,” Sadie called. She was standing over Joanna with a Zippo in her hand, flicking the wheel with her thumb.

The bouncers regrouped, their injuries already on the mend. Fibres of muscle knitted themselves across the gouges in Drinkwater’s arm; Kynaston worked his jaw as the skin zipped itself up over the rent in his chin.

Sadie kept the wheel turning, rasping sparks against the fuel nozzle. When it caught, the flame roared a foot into the air. Then she would extinguish it and begin again. With her other hand, she played with the fuse on the stick of dynamite in Joanna’s mouth. “When I play at mean motherfuckers,” she said, “people stay hurt.”

Will moved towards Sadie, but she drew another flame from the Zippo and kept it burning, wafting the flame towards Joanna’s face, a slow grin blossoming, made grotesque by the tremble of light against her skin.

“Don’t,” Will said. The thought of his being responsible for another woman’s death turned him ice-cold inside. His heart, once so warm, once so full of hope, was now little more than a hard twist in his chest. When it beat, it spelled out the names of Catriona and Elisabeth. They were scar tissue on the tired, cold chambers. He didn’t think there was room enough for one more without it stopping altogether.

“I thought you said you’d never seen her before. She meant nothing to you.”

“She doesn’t,” Will said, but his voice told her otherwise.

“You have to learn,” Sadie said, soothingly. “You have to know that I’m in charge around here.”

Was it the light sucking the colour and the firmness from Joanna’s skin? Her cheeks hollowed out. Her hair lost its shine. She settled more completely on the wasted limbs of the dead man in his chair. She opened her eyes and turned to him, ignoring the indignity of the TNT jammed between her teeth and tucked into her cleavage. She smiled at him around the stick and winked. She nodded. She was gone.

“You missed your chance,” Will said. Did she die, or was she pulled back?

Cheated of her display, Sadie lapsed into a shrieking fit. She swore and stomped and burned the unfeeling flesh of Joanna’s husk. She promised Will a thousand million years of suffering. She screamed at him until his face was pitted with her spittle. But he didn’t hear a single word. He was watching Joanna’s face sag on the bone, failing in seconds. At one point, just before the top half of her body crumbled away from her spine and made a nonsensical dustpile on the floor, he thought he saw a spiral of light lift from the centre of her chest: a fine necklace catching the light as it was removed by a lover’s careful hands.

And then the bouncers moved in at Sadie’s behest to show him how well their injuries had healed.

IN A HOSPITAL room in east London, a woman’s eyes fluttered. Sitting beside her, her husband put down the book he was reading and leaned across the bed. Around them, well-wishing cards crowded the tables and the windowsill. The amount of cards, the various colours of hope, could not shake the husband’s belief that his wife was as good as dead. He had decided, when the week was up, that he would switch her off. She wanted it that way. They both did. The ventilator had been breathing life into her for five days. It could not fix the warp of her spine, the crushed vertebrae, the jigsaw puzzle of her ribs.

Her eyes opened.

The husband ran to find one of the nurses. She told him to relax, then gently pushed past him and closed the door on the bedroom. A short time after, there was activity. A great deal of it.

“Joanna,” he said, his voice staggering over the word, as if he had never said it before. “Joanna.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: THE HILL

THEY MADE LOVE. The Negstream shivered into view. They went in.

It was still daytime. A raw wind funnelled down the street, stripping the soporific warmth of climax from their bones.

Sean said, “Pardoe found three leaks this morning. They had passed through overnight and were walking down a Newcastle street. They killed and ate a dog. They didn’t have much clue as to where they were or what they were doing, thank God, or it might have been a lot nastier. Pardoe said that he spent most of last year tracking down what the police had thought was a serial killer. It was just a very clever leak who developed an appetite for young women. He took seven before Pardoe caught up with him and sent him back home. They found some of the bones in an old skip near the public tip. He had been living there. Or dying there. Whatever.”

Emma looked tired. Her eyes were developing raccoon-like rings and her lips carried a grey tinge that had nothing to do with the flat, colourless light here. “How long, do you think, before there’s a flood?”

“Pardoe reckons two or three days, but he looked a bit white while he was saying it. I reckon we’ve got around twenty-four hours. Give or take.”

“Give or take a minute?”

Sean laughed. Emma was still strong, despite the attritional nature of crossover. The Negstreams caused no immediate wear and tear on the body or the mind; rather, it caused a gradual stripping-away of the body’s defences. Sean was managing with the erosion for the time being but Emma appeared to be feeling the full brunt of its subtle violence. She was being steadily dismantled, softstripped from within. Sometime soon he would reach out to touch her and she would implode, like a fractured china jug handled by a clumsy child, or the shell of a condemned building battered by the wrecking ball.

Seeing Will hadn’t helped. Thin and pale in his hospital bed in high dependency, he had been surrounded by machinery and nurses. The police were nearby too, guarding him from vigilantes who wanted to mete out some rough justice to a man who had used a young girl as a hostage. Maybe they were also on hand to make sure he didn’t make a miraculous recovery only to bolt. That didn’t seem to be an option to Sean as he had looked down at the other man’s bandaged head. Serious tissue loss, a doctor had told him. Which was a fancy wrapping for half his brain was blown away.

A nurse had come in to wipe Will’s face and check his IV was feeding the right amount of saline into his veins. The slackness of his skin as the swab cleansed his lips and eyes had made Sean’s back creep. It was as if Will was dead already but his body didn’t know how to play the part.

They had promised him that they would visit him again, but Sean doubted he could hear their pledge.

At the end of the street they came upon a park that, for a moment, filled Emma with enough hope for a little sunshine to return to her demeanour. But there was no hill to be found in the park, just a pond with water so still and black it resembled a polished slab of ebony. Sean hugged her for a long time in an attempt to lift her out of her disappointment.

“We have to go at this a different way,” he said.

“Doggy style?” Emma asked, her voice muffled by Sean’s jacket.

“No,” Sean laughed, closing his eyes and breathing deeply the scents that clung to Emma’s hair. There was apple in there, and honey. And good old-fashioned I-want-you-till-I-die pheromones. Not for the first time, he wished this was somebody else’s problem and he could get on with unwrapping Emma’s various layers, getting to know the woman who meant so much to him. It had been a long time since he felt so committed, so clear about what he wanted. Being with Emma was like sucking a strong mint: she cut through all the dross in his head and found the little part of his brain that said yes all the time.

“I think we have to try to remember how we found the hill when we were children. I know it came to me so easily sometimes, it was as if it was hanging around behind my eyes, just waiting for me to shut them.”

Emma nodded in his arms. “I know. I can still smell what the grass was like. It was always midnight on the hill. There were always people walking around. They seemed lost but they gave off this indestructible air.”

“Who else but the dead can be indestructible?” Sean asked.

“Maybe we should find a hill near Warrington. Maybe that would help.”

“At night.”

Emma moved away from him. “Yes, at night. We should take a picnic. Kids’ food. Comfort food. Try to find a way back to a time when we were young. When we didn’t have to worry about anything.”

“We could go to Hill Cliffe. There’s a pretty little cemetery there. And a good view of Warrington. You can see the parish church and the detergent factory—”

“How lovely…”

“—and Fiddler’s Ferry power station. You can see the old clocktower in the centre of town, at Market Gate.”

“I’ll make us jam sandwiches, that really sweet, seedless stuff. And margarine. On cheap white bread.”

Sean closed his eyes and smacked his lips. “Mmm-mmm!”

“And Monster Munch,” Emma suggested.

“Pickled onion flavour?”

“Of course.”

Sean opened his eyes and frowned. Something was going wrong. The sky had bruised a little and the air had grown chillier. Looking at Emma was like looking at someone through unwashed gauze. Her edges had softened; there was a smudgy gleam to them. He reached out for her and told her to close her eyes, to lie back on the grass with him. She didn’t question him. Her breath, excited and hot, told him all he needed to know. His heart was pounding.

Emma said, “And I’ll bring some of those cheese triangles…”

“Ugh, I hated them,” said Sean, remembering the flavour in his mouth, the sludgy texture. “But I liked sweets. Sherbet fountains and moon dust.”

“Okay. We’ll get some. And comics.”

“The Beano and The Dandy. 2000 AD. Look-in.”

“Twinkle,” Emma said.

Sean shrugged. “It’s a whole different world to me, all that girl stuff.”

“Didn’t you have a sister?”

Sean shook his head. “Naomi was always into whatever I was into. Football, war comics. Bollocks like that.”

“Shall we take some toys to the hill?” Her hand in his grew damp; the dewy grass moved through their clothing. The air turned heavy with moisture. Something was happening to the ground at their backs. It felt as though they were being gently tilted.

Don’t open your eyes, he sent to Emma, hoping that she’d get it.

I won’t, I won’t.

“I preferred Sindy to Barbie,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“I had an Action Man with rubber hands and eagle-eyes. Proper hair. Not that plastic moulded shit you get these days. I had a Six Million Dollar Man too.”

“In a red track suit?” Emma was getting so excited it sounded as though she were being pumped with helium. Other voices were joining theirs; deeper, more sombre, less urgent. They were far away, a susurrant shifting. Getting closer.

“Of course! And he had those bits of rubber for skin. You peeled them back and you could get at his bionic circuits in his arm.”

“What was his enemy called?”

“Maskatron. I had one of those too. Quite nasty, really. You could put his own face on, or Oscar Goldman’s or Steve Austin’s.”

“Before he grew that minging moustache, thank God.”

It was like word association, only much deeper than that. He was getting aromas and tastes from his childhood that were coming back after a twenty-five-year absence. He remembered programmes from the television that he used to watch when he came home from school at lunchtime. Rainbow and Pipkins and Handful of Songs. He remembered wrestling with his dad on the patio, Dad pinning him to the ground with his superior weight and challenging him: “Now get out of that, go on.”

Pink, dusty Anglo bubblegum. Fruit Salads and Mojos for half a penny each. Dandelion and burdock. Lurid green American cream soda.

“I banged my head when I was three years old,” Sean said. “On the door of my dad’s van. I had to have stitches.”

He put his fingers to the old scar. It felt febrile, tender; he withdrew his hand and opened his eyes, half-expecting to see fresh blood. Five stitches, the nurse had given him. He had not cried because the nurse was young and pretty and he didn’t want the tears to prevent him from seeing her clearly. She had given him a lollipop when it was over and told him her name. Gloria. Gloria would be a middle-aged woman by now. Nearly an old woman. She would have known, perhaps, many different kinds of love in the three decades since she treated Sean. He hoped they were all good.

Emma was squeezing his hand.

“I know,” he said. The night sky, with its feverish black sun, boiled above them. Cool grass sprang between their fingers as they pressed their hands into the ground to sit upright. The hill spread out around them.

He said, “We’re here.”

Up ahead were a number of figures, a gathering of grey smocks meandering on a hill above the ocean. At the bottom of the hill lay a series of drab, grey buildings with narrow windows and flat roofs.

“It’s just how I remember it,” he said.

“Me too. Just think, when we were young, when we came here, we might have walked past each other without knowing.”

“Naomi would have been here too,” he said. “She might be here now. She ought to be.”

“Don’t get too hopeful, Sean,” Emma warned. “We don’t know as much about this place as we feel we do.”

They saw how the topography roughly traced the same lines as the city that existed here during daylight. The sea followed the path of the river and consumed the south bank that had lain beyond it. The skyscrapers of tents and shacks and scaffolding had been eclipsed by the hill. Occasionally, perhaps due to some de Fleche-inspired fault, they witnessed a flash of daylife. A man carrying bread in a basket. A woman shouting for help after a pickpocket had helped himself to her purse. The barge as it ferried people across the river. Sean remembered the black clouds he had seen on the day he chased Tim through the marketplace and realised they must have been some hint of this aspect.

They walked towards the figures as they milled slowly around the top of the hill. As had happened many years before, they respectfully stepped out of the way and bowed ever so slightly as Sean walked by. They talked in low voices, too deep for any sense to be made of it. The grey smocks and the pale, bald heads edged with fuzz relaxed Sean for some reason. The murmuring too, though the content was unknown, worked on him like a masseur’s fingers. Yet even here, on the hill, de Fleche’s insidious presence was noticeable. It stained the bark of the trees with white rot. It turned large patches of the pasture into scarified stubble. Spume lacing the shoreline carried with it the whiff of raw sewage.

It had not been like this early on, when de Fleche had only just discovered this dead country and Sean and Emma had first wandered its confines. But long years had elapsed. Enough time for his freshness to stain what relied on the dark and the cold, just as death and disease will eventually cause what is wholesome to fail. There was taint in the air. It caught in Sean’s craw and made him feel sick.

“This isn’t good,” Sean said. Little ribbons of a blackness so deep it seemed to be blue or purple shimmered against the night sky or wormed through the meadow. Some of the figures avoided these cracks as if they represented the Devil’s maw, but others tiptoed at the edges, peeking, awed, into unconscionable depths.

Sean and Emma explored for what felt like hours. They plunged into the forest at the foot of the hill, alive with the marine scent of the nearby ocean and the wet, autumnal musk of mushrooms and leaf mould. They scared animals into flight that they had never seen before and they were glad that the dark kept them from being revealed completely. On the beach, they picked up strange shells that resembled fossilised organs. Other flotsam and jetsam looked more like petrified limbs than driftwood.

They saved the buildings until last. Time, and perhaps de Fleche’s mischief, had ruined their symmetry. What had once been sharp corners were now crumbling bevels. Some of the steel reinforcement rods peeked through the mortar, brown with rust. Lancet windows peppered the structure; glassless, they let in the wind. As they prowled the exterior, Sean and Emma could hear the grim tunes it played inside.

“I can’t see a door,” Emma complained. “Not that I want to go in.”

“Yes you do,” Sean said. “We have to.”

“Can you hear anything, other than the wind?”

Sean tilted his head. There was another sound, but it was distant. It was deep too, as if it was coming to them from beneath the ground. It sounded like old machinery, steaming and clanking, struggling to provide the energy for whatever was being constructed or processed or destroyed.

A splinter group had broken away from the gathering on top of the hill; five men, deep in conversation, were slowly walking towards them.

“Excuse me?” Emma called. “How do we get in?”

All of the figures bar one made a detour at the sound of her voice and strolled away. The dissenter hesitated for a few seconds and made a beeline for Emma.

“We cannot sustain more aliens here,” he insisted, in a voice that seemed to be the sum of a cathedral full of echoes. His eyes were lilac and filled the sockets with colour, leaving no room for any white. “There is imbalance. We are in danger and you are endangering yourselves. You must leave us.”

Sean joined Emma and explained that they couldn’t leave until they had found de Fleche. “Do you know where we can find him?”

But the other man was already shaking his head, the bluish dome of his scalp waggling like a fallen saucer coming to rest on the floor. “Names have no place here,” he said.

“Then where do we have to go? How do we get in there?”

“You can’t,” the man said quickly. “And anyway, why should you want to? I wish you would leave. It’s dangerous for you here. There are monsters…” He bit down on the word as if it were forbidden and he had committed an awful transgression by uttering it. “I wish you would leave,” he said again, before hurrying away in pursuit of his colleagues. “You have no place here. No right to be here.”

“He’s lying about this building,” said Emma. “There must be a way in.”

“I’m kind of on his side now, though. I mean, why would we want to?”

“Because it’s here. Because there’s nothing else.”

Sean rubbed his chin. “What’s all this about monsters?”

Emma grabbed his hand. “You’ve had a stomach full of monsters over the past few weeks. A couple more aren’t going to frighten you off.”

He watched the gathering of smocks as they drifted out of sight over the crest of the hill. The night swarmed around them and the ocean whispered as it collapsed against the shore. In the forest, new noises were emanating, from things Sean guessed they hadn’t seen when they first entered it.

There are monsters. If the dead could be moved by such things, if they could suffer fear, then what hope was left for anyone else?