Decay Inevitable

CHAPTER FORTY: XX

LAST NIGHT.

Last night, it had seemed there would be no end to the pleasures that accosted her every move. There were many options and she explored them all. It was a long night. It was a very messy night.

At first the town was too bright for her. Lights on every building dazzled her as she walked through streets thronged with people. She felt her mouth watering but quelled that appetite in the hope that it might be superseded by another. She saw herself, ghostly and unsure, in the deep-black panes of shop windows. She concentrated on her panic, which threatened to engulf her whenever she lost her reflection to a group of men or women walking by. Just because she didn’t see herself didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Once the group had bypassed her, she returned to the window. The black dress. The long, almost uncontrollably curly hair. The eyes that seemed too green to be human and better suited to a large cat. The décolletage. The curve of the buttocks. The jewel on a necklace. She saw these things on herself and echoed on the women around her in different styles and colours. The men looked at her. The women did not. She fitted in.

She focused on a group of men and followed them into a pub called the Tut ’n’ Shive. The inner walls of the pub were painted black and the lighting was more subtle than on the street. The music and voices were very loud however, and she had to compensate for that. Susannah’s hearing was extremely good – too good – but she found that Simon’s was less so, which helped in here. She felt confident about the way she looked, an amalgam of the best of those with whom she had come into contact.

She ordered a drink at the bar, pointing to a silver bottle that a number of other women were swigging from. When the bartender asked her for money, she stared at him blankly.

“I’ll get this.”

She turned to find a man standing next to her, brandishing his wallet.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot.”

“Forgot your purse?” The man shook his head. “It happens.” When she took a sip of the stuff in the bottle (foul – so sweet it coated her throat with an awful, syrupy skin) she sensed him assessing her body. It made her giddy and it was all she could do to stop herself from grabbing him right now, and doing what the women in the pictures had done.

“I’m Mick,” he said, wiping a hand against his thick denim shirt exaggeratedly before offering it for her to shake. This she did, tasting him through her pores and finding it hard to relinquish his fingers. He didn’t seem to mind too much.

“I’m Susannah,” she said. “Susannah Gleave. I’m twenty-four. I have good tits.”

Mick’s eyes widened. “Well, yes, I can see that.” He assessed her more openly. “Yes. The jury has returned its verdict. Guilty. Of having good… bosoms.” He laughed, a strange, staccato yammer that sounded like a child’s impression of a machine gun. “Are you foreign?” he asked.

“Foreign?”

“Yeah, you know… not from these shores.”

Cheke smiled uncertainly. “You can tell?”

“Not much,” Mick said, theatrically. “What are you? Swedish? You look Swedish. Athletic. Tall.”

“Swedish,” Cheke said, trying out the unfamiliar word. “Yes. If you like.”

Mick took a sip of his pint, the first flicker of a frown creasing his forehead. He shook it away. Cheke looked him over. He was quite a bit shorter than she was. His hair was dark, but was silvering at the temples. He was balding at his crown. He wore his shirt outside his trousers. Black, chunky boots rooted him steadily to the beer-soaked floor. She liked his overall chunkiness. She liked his pale eyes too. Grey, like Gleave’s. Wolfish.

“Your prick,” she said. “I need to know. Is it—”

Mick spluttered foam over the edge of his beer glass. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry… I mean… your cock? Is that right? I wondered, is it big? Are you shaved? Down there? Have you fucked before? What noises do women make, when you—”

Mick held up his hand. “Look, if I’d had twelve Kronenbourg, it might be that I’d be all over you for what you’re saying right now. But as it is, this is my first. And this is all a bit too weird for me. So, good luck. Maybe some other time, hey?”

She watched him back away and then press through the cluster of bodies massing at the bar. Somebody vacated a stool and she slid onto it, nursing the bottle between her fingers. She was considering going after him when another man stepped up beside her, glanced once at her and then, when she didn’t avert her gaze, turned to face her and smiled broadly.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Derek.”

“You’re black,” Cheke said.

The smile died. “Yes. I am. Is that a problem?”

Cheke was astonished by the cat and mouse. There didn’t seem to be any scope for direct talking. She thought of how quickly Mick had retreated when she cut through any charade. She smiled, as warmly as she possibly could, shifting her body around on the stool so that he could see whatever, and as much, as he wanted of her. “No,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

It was the right answer.

He took her back to a flat in Woolston, on the eastern fringes of the town. He poured her a glass of wine from a half-finished bottle in the fridge and put on some music – something he called hip hop – before making it clear that the stereo cost a month’s wages. The music meant nothing to her. It hurt her ears, made it hard for her to understand anything he said. He asked her if she fancied some coke, extracting a small bag of white powder from beneath a sofa cushion. She nodded, said sure, she wouldn’t mind, and waited to see what he would do with it. He chopped a few lines with a razor blade on a mirror and offered her a rolled £50 note.

“You first,” she said. She followed his lead.

After they had snorted a couple of lines each, Derek pushed her back against the sofa. He unbuckled his jeans and let them fall to the floor.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked. He was wearing white cotton boxer shorts that hugged his hips. The outline of his cock was obvious. It made a long, vague S-shape.

“Do you like what you see?” he asked. “Would you like to see more?”

She nodded.

“Then you have to take something off too.”

She unzipped the dress and let it slip off her shoulders. The coke had made her feel tingly at the back of her brain, as if she was being tickled by a feather there. It was hard to keep control of herself. Derek’s fingers slipped into the waistband of his boxers. His eyes were fixed on her nipples, which were visible through the sheer fabric of her bra. Susannah’s nipples, Susannah’s breasts. Small, perky breasts; very pink, very stiff nipples. He failed to see the slight failure of her right hand, which morphed for a fraction into the gnarled fist of the guard she had attacked at Gleave’s hideout. Get a grip, she ordered herself. Concentrate.

She wondered whose pudenda she should present to him. Susannah’s was a tight, pink, neat affair, the blonde pubic hair trimmed, the mons moisturised and scented. The nurse from Sloe Heath had a sex that was looser and more hairy, but shockingly carnal in a way that Susannah’s was not. Perhaps she should offer her own. She felt a flood of warmth through her loins, and an almost unbearable heat that gave her a melting feeling in her stomach.

Derek slipped the waistband down over his cock, which sprang lightly away from its nest of hair. It was thick and heavy, not yet fully erect, and it bounced to the rhythm of his heartbeat. It was different to the guard’s, or the pictures she had seen. A sheath of skin covered the glistening core. She was about to ask him what it was, but remembered Mick’s retreat. She must feign some sass, some knowledge.

Derek dabbed half the remaining coke from the mirror onto his finger. He smeared it onto the tip of his cock and leaned over to kiss her. She moved back under the weight of his mouth as it melded with her own. His tongue tasted of rum and Coca-Cola. This was like the pictures in Jonathan’s magazine. The stories too. She made a low noise in the back of her throat and reached down to caress his balls. She had read this in a reader’s letter: Marge from Crewe. She squeezed lightly, aware that the organ needed to be treated tenderly. Derek closed his eyes and hissed.

Now she moved her hand so it encircled his cock. She lightly moved the outer skin against the stiffening core until the prepuce peeled back from the head, swollen and tan and glossy.

“Put your mouth on it,” Derek said, his voice thick. He had his hands under the frame of her bra and was massaging her breasts, rolling the nipples between his fingers. It felt good. The tickle at the back of her brain increased and spread. It linked up directly with the V between her legs. If he didn’t rub her there soon, she would have to touch herself. It was almost unbearable.

She slid down on the sofa until his cock was level with her mouth. She saw the pictures in the magazine and gently enclosed the head with her mouth, moving her head slowly down the shaft until his balls were flush with her lips. He gasped.

“Nobody did that before,” he said. “Nobody took the lot. What are you? Linda Lovelace?”

She ignored him; she didn’t know what he was talking about. She continued to suck, remembering the pictures, remembering to keep her hand moving on the base of his cock, remembering to keep it wet, keep it moving, keep it moving. Never let up. He began to tense. She remembered the magazine. The readers’ letters. Rhiannon from Newcastle. He began to jerk and she moved her hand underneath him, between the hard, muscled curves of his buttocks. The tip of his cock began to pulse and spasm – she had read about this too – and she slid her forefinger deep into his anus. He cried out and rammed into her mouth. She felt his come, so much of it, too much of it, jet against the back of her throat and she gagged. She pulled away and he fell back against the sofa cushions.

“Me now,” she said, wiping her mouth.

“I’m knackered, babe,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Me now.”

“Tomorrow. Let’s get some kip.”

“No,” she said. Something in her voice made Derek’s eyes snap open. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want it all. I want you to suck my clit and fuck me every way there is.”

He knelt before her. His cock was ebbing, dwindling, its tip endowed with a pearl of come. The sight of her pale, smooth thighs didn’t resurrect it. Neither did her pink, liquid core as she yanked off her knickers and spread her legs. Her cunt yawned before him.

“This doesn’t feel right,” he said.

“Put some of that powder on it,” she demanded. “That coko. Put some on.”

“The music needs changing.”

She clamped his head with her calves and, leaning forwards, pressed a fingernail against the bridge of his nose. “Do. It.”

Derek collected the dregs of the coke from the mirror and rubbed it into her lips. Cheke gasped and screwed her eyes shut. She clenched her buttocks and thrust her crotch up against his fingers.

“Easy, girl,” Derek said. He continued to rub, his wet fingers slithering against her clitoris, slipping up her cunt, or sliding against her anus. He changed the rhythm and pace, the depth of his strokes. Cheke was crying with pleasure. He leaned forwards and covered her vulva with his mouth. Cheke’s eyes flew open. She reached out and grabbed Derek’s hair, pressed him deeper into the soft, hot centre of herself, a place where she no longer seemed to hold any sway, a place that didn’t appear to have any substance or structure any more. Waves of heat were rolling deep inside her. She locked her heels behind his back and squeezed him deeper. It wasn’t enough. She needed him inside her. She pulled him up alongside her and began working his spent cock with her hand. Nothing was happening.

“Fuck me,” she whispered to him.

“I can’t,” he said. “The beer. The coke. I’m done in.”

She forced his cock against her and pressed with her fingers, trying to nudge the flaccid tip between her lips. Again, she locked her heels at the small of his back and dug down. “Come on,” she said. “Come on.”

“Susannah, you’re hurting me. What’s the rush? Susannah?” He grunted and his eyes bulged. He lifted his chin off her chest and tried to speak but only tiny noises were bursting from the back of his throat.

She felt his pelvis pulverise under the persistent crush of her feet. “You fucker,” she said. “You miserable fucker.”

She let herself come through.

Cheke watched Derek’s eyes, hazy with pain, as her body changed beneath him. The puckered mouths emerged through the taut flesh of Susannah’s torso and gulped at him. Her own cunt grew and broadened until it trembled beneath Derek’s shattered groin.

“Give me what I need,” she said, and sank him into her. Before too long, Derek was unable to say anything, even if his mouth had been able to form the words. The blood, so much of it, could only get out of him that way.

HER INDUSTRY WAS not to be questioned, surely, and she had done well so far, or so she thought. Gleave came to her at the house, stepping through the drying waste of the hallway with the look of a man who had just found a hank of hair in his soup. She had been warned of his arrival; her inner eye, recalling the previous night’s excesses, had been interrupted. She envisioned Gleave’s car sweeping into the street, saw his grey face press up against the window pane as the neighbouring houses rushed by. There had been enough time to change: another of Susannah’s black dresses, sleeveless, short, generous around the bust. In the mirror she checked her colouring and sucked out a deep, plummy colour from the palette of mouths in her memory, dusted her cheekbones with the hint of blush Jonathan had sported when she took off her robe in front of them, before he understood what was happening to him.

“What are you doing?” Gleave asked when they were seated in the living room. Cheke had left one of Jonathan’s magazines open on the coffee table in the hope that Gleave would see. She wanted him to do to her what the men in the pictures were doing. She wanted to do to him what the women were doing. The more she did it, the closer she would come to knowing the secrets. Maybe in this way she would understand what normal was. What it meant to be human, to be a woman.

“I thought you’d like to see me being less unusual.”

Gleave took something from his pocket and sat down on the sofa next to her. He trawled the fingers of his other hand through his soft, white hair.

“Do you like me like this?” she asked. She said: “Can I call you Daniel?”

Gleave turned and smiled savagely at her. “No, you cannot call me fucking Daniel,” he snarled. He showed her what was in his hand: a canister that fit snugly in his palm. He flipped off the lid and sprayed the contents full in her face. He calmly replaced the lid and slid the canister back into his pocket. Then he stood up and clasped his large, soft hands in front of his greatcoat, watching her all the while.

“I think,” he said, “that it’s time you understood what pain is.”

Cheke blinked at him. She brushed away the spray from her eyes and waited for him to go on. She was not yet aware that half of her face had come away with her fingers.

“Pain is master, anywhere you look in the animal kingdom,” Gleave said. “So it is with us.” He spotted an errant hair on his cuff and tweezered it off with his elegant fingers. He removed his lenses and polished them on a white handkerchief which he then folded precisely and kept in his palm. “I thought you were aware of the job you had to do for us,” he said at last.

“I am,” Cheke wanted to say, but the words would not form, in the same way they had failed in the seconds after she was withdrawn from her resting place. The word am didn’t have any closure about it. It drifted on instead: ahhh. Drool glazed her chin. She felt for her mouth and there was no bottom lip for the top one to shut against. As if triggered by this ghastly discovery, a flood of heat wound tightly around her lower jaw. She made a gagging sound and dropped to her knees.

“You will know pain,” Gleave said. “Maybe that’s where we went wrong at the start. We should have tied you to your job with the threat of pain. You must not underestimate us, Cheke. We need you, but there are others. Do as you are told and then we can discuss your rehabilitation.”

He stepped towards her suddenly and she flinched. Gleave smiled. “It’s good that you are afraid of me. Good that there is something to scare you. Fear is an ally. It will help you to stay alive.

“Now… open wide. Godspeed, my angel.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

SHE GAVE HIM hell, and then some. She forced him to wear a saddle and carry her around the blistered chambers of the theatre. Together, they explored the areas beneath the stage, cluttered rooms filled with thespian paraphernalia that was now wreathed with permanent smoke ghosts, all detail sealed black by the long-spent flames. There were uniformed mannequins that had once stood in for warring hordes as a backdrop to some military drama or other; deep wooden chests stuffed with costumes; scorched stacks of plays tied up with string. Everything had a wafery feel to it; the rooms had not known moisture for decades. An hour of stalking through these secret rooms with Sadie on his back gave him a furious thirst. If that wasn’t bad enough, the thing that was developing in Sadie’s external womb had begun to teethe. It chattered and ground its new gnashers in his ear as he negotiated the maze of thoroughfares beneath the stage and the auditorium. He caught glimpses of it in the corner of his eye as it twisted and grinned like some malformed specimen pickled in formaldehyde.

Sadie liked to ride him naked. She liked it better when he had his shirt off too. She bounced around as he galloped through these catacombs, a nightmarish Godiva and steed, pulling at his hair to turn him left or right. When he was allowed to reduce his speed, he padded along, breathing hard, checking the progress of his strange disease as it turned his limbs black. The infection was reaching a critical stage, he saw. His flesh and bones were becoming as pulpy as overripe bananas. These parts – his shoulder, the lower portion of his arm – had been digested by the monster in its sac via some supernatural method of ingestion. Something was going to give soon. He wished it hurt more. To simply see his body failing like this without even the remotest twinge made him feel inhuman, unreal. He knew he existed at some level in the world of the living, but any dignity he might have had here was being literally stripped away.

“Cherub will be on solids before long,” Sadie commented blithely, as if she were relaying to him the price on a tin of carrots.

He would kill himself, he decided, coolly. If Joanna had forgotten about him or the infection looked likely to incapacitate him, he would end it somehow. And he would try to find some way of taking the bitch and her fucking demon child with him.

SHE COULDN’T DREAM of anything else, she found. And it was strange, but whenever she settled on an aspect of it, her mind, unbidden, tossed her little nuggets of information. It must have been a result of the trauma of her accident, she thought, a jolting of her brain that meant it spewed out facts at every possible opportunity. It was as if her imagination had been given a power surge.

This man, for example, with his brown curly hair and hurt expression. Big brown eyes. He looked lost and lonely. And, without digging for it:

His name is Will.

“Oh really?” she whispered.

“Chick?” Her husband leaned over her.

His name is Harry. She giggled.

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t feel anything,” she said. She wanted him to go away. She wanted to return to her curly-haired man, with a mouth that looked so soft and red that it might burst when you kissed it.

“You’re very lucky, you know,” Harry said. “We thought you were a goner. But you came back. My strong chick.”

She said, “Water.”

“Water you shall have,” he said, folding his newspaper and leaving the room.

He didn’t look well, this Will chap. He looked scared and cold and injured.

He’s been shot. He’s in danger.

“I don’t doubt it,” she muttered. A nurse put her head around the door, smiled, and retreated.

She pictured Will in a bar, looking around him like some hunted animal. And then it was as if her brain gave up its control and Will turned to look at her mind’s eye. “You promised,” he said. “Find me. Follow me.” He raised his glass in a silent toast and drank the contents, never taking his eyes off her.

“I can’t,” she said. “My injuries. I think… I think I was paralysed.”

His eyes on her as she opened them, the first time. It must have been a dream. That place with the strange emulsified tones, the glaring whites and the glossy blacks. Like walking through a negative strip of film.

“You aren’t paralysed. You were lucky. It’s just bruises and bumps. You made a miraculous recovery.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, Will.”

When Harry came in and saw Joanna sitting on the edge of the bed, timorously combing her pony tail, he dropped the glass of water.

“I need you to take me somewhere, Harry,” she said.

THE MOOD OF the night was on the wane. Sean could see it in the way the scars bled into its colour; could hear it in the hum – like that of bees trapped in a jar – that steeled in from the invisible horizon. The grey smocks on the hill had vanished. They were alone. The sealed, scarred walls of the ziggurat leapt away from them, its uppermost heights lost to the dark.

“Do you think it’s safe to be here?” Emma asked.

He turned to her; she was watching his face. “I’m sure it is,” he soothed. “How bad can their monsters be? I’m sure they’re just seeing little flashes of what it’s like back where we’re from. Maybe they’ve forgotten. They see a bus or a plane and, well, if you didn’t know what they were, I’m sure you’d be scared too.”

“I am scared.”

Sean kicked her playfully in the seat of her jeans. “Come on. We’ve got to find a door.”

They moved around again to what Sean guessed must have been the rear of the building, abutting as it did the edge of a thicket of dense purple and green reeds. There was no obvious route up to any of the windows, which were, in any case, much too narrow to squeeze through. Sean was about to suggest that there might be a more prosaic means of entry, similar to their passage to Tantamount, when Emma noticed the stream.

It was a paltry affair, piddling between the reeds like urine pissed into the woods by a drunken camper. Yet it was constant, and it ran down through the thicket to a point where it met the ziggurat and ended. They spent five minutes dragging away the reeds and ferns that were clustered around the base of the ziggurat. A metal grille, badly corroded, framed the water’s route into the building; they could see the trickle disappear into a throat of black. Sean worked his fingers between the struts in the grille but he didn’t need to pry it off: it broke under pressure.

“I don’t think I can go in,” Emma said.

“It’s okay,” Sean assured her, snapping more pieces of rusted metal. “We have an escape route, don’t we? We can pull ourselves out of it at any point.”

“I don’t like it. I just don’t. The thought of pushing myself down a tunnel. We might get trapped.”

“Are you listening to me?” Sean asked, pausing to look at her. She was sitting back on her haunches, her hands clasped in front of her, arms outstretched, as if she were offering him her wrists to be bound. “We can get out at any point. Whether it’s monsters or claustrophobia or a need to pee. We can do it.”

Emma breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay.”

Once Sean had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his shoulders, he edged his feet over the hole and slid into it until he was half-way through, keeping his body levered upright with his hands either side of the grille.

“It might be that once I let go,” he said, “I’ll go very quickly. It feels as though it’s pretty well greased up underfoot. So come in soon after me, yes?”

Emma nodded.

Sean blew her a kiss and lifted his arms.

There was no light whatsoever. But there was plenty of sound, the sluicing of the water and the hiss and chatter of unseen animals nesting in little ledges and bunkers off the main chute. The clank and throb of machinery was closer, echoing through the tunnel, causing it to vibrate as Sean slithered along on his backside, trying to keep himself from going into a spin. He heard Emma close behind him, yelping as the tunnel took unexpected turns left or right. Sean only became aware that the sides of the tunnel were closing around him when the water started showering the top of his head instead of providing a frictionless cushion for his back. He hit his head twice against the metal duct, but even though he drew his body in as tight as he could, he was slowing down. Emma’s feet slammed against his crown and he saw stars for a second. When everything became clear again, they were stuck and Emma was wailing.

“This is fucking it,” she cried. “We’re going to be here for ever.”

“Relax,” Sean said. “We’ll opt out, easy, and then we’ll come back in again and try to find another way. Portion of micturate, as we used to say at my posh school.”

Emma said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”

Sean pressed the cuff of his sweater against his mouth and felt for the pin secreted there. He withdrew it with his teeth and transferred it to the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Too fucking right,” Emma said. He smelled her breath, hot and sour with panic. He stuck the pin into the thin flesh of his wrist, relishing the bright pain and the tiny bubble of blood that appeared there.

“Fucking Einstein,” Emma said, her voice screechy with panic. “Fucking Einstein.”

Sean tried again, using the point of the needle to score his skin rather than puncture it. A beaded line of blood popped onto the surface. The pipe did not retreat, nor did it resolve itself as something else from the world he preferred.

“Something’s not right here,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

Emma wasn’t listening to him. She was thrashing around like a beached fish. He reached up and tried to stroke her legs, imbue her with some of the impossible calm that he was feeling, but she wasn’t having any of it.

Trying to ignore her feet as they clouted his scalp, Sean probed the pipe with his feet, stretching as far as he could. Its bore did not seem to decrease much more. Travelling south was a risk they had to take anyway; they couldn’t return the way they had come. He began working on his clothes, shedding them. He unbuckled his jeans and worked them down his legs. By kicking off his trainers (they slithered down the pipe at some speed, giving him hope that the route, if they could just get going again, would not impede them) he was able to lose his jeans and then he worked on his jumper, hunching it back over his shoulder blades while all the time Emma kicked and cursed and screamed as her phobias came home to roost. He scooped as much grease from the sides of the pipe as he could gather and rubbed it into his hips and shoulders. When he began to shift, slipping incrementally down the pipe, he stalled his progress by grabbing hold of Emma’s trousers. Inch by inch he hauled himself up until his hand was able to undo her belt. As he dragged her trousers down over her legs she seemed to come to her senses.

“What are you doing?” she yelled.

“Look, trust me,” he soothed. “Take your top off.”

She began to laugh. “Take my top off? What are you after? A fuck? Now?”

“Emma, take it easy. Trust me, please.” Her trousers were in his hand. He handed them to her, asking her to stuff them behind her shoulders. He could feel, by the heat of her breath and the exertion of her body, that she was obeying him despite the protests. Her body slid down a considerable distance, threatening to block them both in, but he pushed out a hand to lever himself away from her. It was enough to set their bodies sliding along again. They gathered pace. He warned her to keep her head back. Seconds later, maybe half a mile traversed, the pipe opened out and they were upended into a tank of water at the centre of a huge arena, the walls of which twisted fluidly with umbral colours and shapes. Theirs was just one of maybe half a dozen similar pipes emptying into this reservoir. Other pipes came in, changed their minds, and plunged back out again through the wall, in black, wormlike U-turns. A fan beat slowly, high overhead, concealed by the steam rising from the hot floor. Sean could just make out, on the bottom of the container, another grille, much larger and sturdier than the one he had broken into. Maybe this recycled water was coolant fed to the area where all the industrious machinery pounded away. They heaved themselves out of the reservoir onto cold stone flags.

“What is it they do here?” Emma asked, struggling into her wet clothes. “I mean, this place is supposed to be the dead zone, the final resting place. And what’s going on? They’ve got a fucking mine up and running.”

Fully clothed, they cast around for an exit but found that there wasn’t one. Sean led Emma towards one wall and pressed his hand against it; it went through, visible but paler, like a vegetable blanched in boiling water. “The dead don’t need doors,” Sean said, cheerily. “And apparently, in here, neither do we. Come on.”

WILL RAN UNTIL he dropped and then she flogged him. The thing in the womb woke as she beat him with a broom handle, and grinned at him whenever the fluid shifted it around to a better view. It winked at him, it licked its lips. Sometimes Will caught glints of teeth when it did this. Sometimes, in his darker moments, when he believed that Joanna had died or had forgotten about him (believed he was part of a dream?), he imagined the thing was sizing him up.

Whether his mind was giving up on him or his injuries were causing delusions he couldn’t be sure, but he wondered now if the shadow he had seen in the church that morning, the morning after Sadie had forced herself upon him, was in some way an aspect of her reality, or a foreshadow of the thing that he had helped to impregnate in her. He had half-hoped, in some fractured way, that the shadow in the church had belonged to Catriona, or their dead child. A sign meant for him from them, a comfort.

“Do you know somebody called de Fleche?” Will asked, breathing hard as Sadie turned her body this way and that in a full-length mirror that had escaped the fire relatively undamaged. A crack across the centre jarred the firm length of her flesh slightly as she stretched and twisted, eyes following each curve as if seeing it for the first time. Her use of the whip had brought her out in a healthy glow. She was sheened with perspiration.

“I never looked so lovely,” she said, wistfully. “And I’ll always look like this.”

“De Fleche? Know him?” Will persevered.

She regarded him with ill-veiled disdain. “Of course I know him. Why do you think I was trained as an Insert in the first place? We were told the story, Christopher and me. We were given the meat and two veg of the whole affair.”

Will took advantage of Sadie’s distracted attention to sit down on the cinder-caked floor. The meat of his buttocks spread a little too broadly and moistly for his liking. “But you fucked it up for them?”

Sadie cupped her breasts with her hands and lightly pushed upwards. She licked her fingers and gently pinched her nipples erect. She shifted to let the light glance moistly off them, making a little affirmatory murmur. “They fucked it up for us, more like. We were promised all kinds of stuff. A lot of money, for a start. I was stuck in the shittiest job on the planet when I saw their advert. I was working in a canning factory. Who’d have thought they’d advertise for that kind of work?”

“What happened?”

Now Sadie had turned and was watching the muscles in her calves become taut as she stood on tip-toe. The foetus in its sac applauded silently.

“What happened was that Christopher went mad and, well, I suppose I did too, to a certain degree. We both legged it, but I had a better grasp of this terrain and used it often. Chris couldn’t get his malfunctioning head around it. They caught him and put him in the nuthouse. Safer for everyone with him in there.”

She bent over from the hips, her hands sliding down her thighs like some grotesque pole-dancer in a shifty drinking club. Her hand swung round to check on the curve of her backside. She made another approving sound, deep in her throat. Will could see that she was getting turned on. He pulled himself to his feet.

Sadie continued: “They realised they had got it wrong. A bit gate-after-the-horse-has-bolted and all that, but that’s what happened. I’ve had a price on my head for some time but they’ve never been close to getting me. They realised they needed kids. Impressionable types. It would have worked too, but they fucked up again, didn’t they? And now de Fleche has got it all wrapped up, nice and spicy.”

Sadie drew herself upright and stood opposite him, breathing hard. She was stroking the little V of fuzz between her legs. Will clenched his teeth when he glimpsed the thing in its womb: its tiny prick was hard and cherry-red, like a twist of lipstick.

“Call the doctor,” she said. “I think my waters are breaking.”

THE MAN IN the rugby shirt and the long scarf parked the car in the hospital car park, as close as he could to the main entrance. Then he turned to his wife. The hospital porter heard everything as he wheeled his laundry trolley from the geriatrics ward to the wash rooms, a brief trot in the cold between buildings. They had their windows down and it was a still, frosty night. He had good ears and the sound carried.

“I still don’t understand what we’re doing here, Joanna,” the man in the beanie said. “You’re beginning to scare me, do you realise that? Do you understand?”

His partner fumbled for the door lock, her limbs moving as though hampered by glue. “I’m okay, really I am. Stop worrying, Harry. You’ll get crow’s feet.”

“I’ll get that,” Harry sighed, climbing out of the car and coming round to the passenger side to help his wife. She felt brittle and hot under his fingers, like a pile of barbecued ribs. Her eyes had locked with the entrance doors of the hospital.

“He’s here,” she said.

“Who?” Harry demanded. “Jesus, Jo, we’ve been driving for three hours and you haven’t told me a thing. You haven’t even said you’re happy to see me.”

Still gazing at the hospital doors, she cradled Harry’s face in her hands and kissed his cheek. “Darling, I am thrilled to see you.”

“Why are we here?”

“A friend is in need of my help.”

“Who?”

“A chap called Will. At least, I think that was his name.”

Harry puffed out his cheeks in frustration. “We don’t know any Wills. You’re imagining it. You’ve been out cold for days, love.”

“But you didn’t refuse to bring me here, did you?”

“Of course not. If anything, I thought we could do with some time away. Get up here, see the Lakes maybe. Go further. It’s been years since I went up as far as Ullapool.”

Joanna started walking towards the hospital.

“Wait,” cried Harry. “God, you can hardly walk. We’ve got a wheelchair in the back of the car you know.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Well, I’m sorry but I need it. I need you to be in it. Do it for me, please.”

The couple toned down their conversation when they caught up with the porter, who smiled at them and helped Harry get the wheelchair up the ramp after a rogue patch of ice made him slip.

CHEKE WATCHED THEM move along the corridor after they had asked to see Will and were given a private room number. There was a policeman outside the room, warned the staff nurse. He might want to ask questions.

Cheke followed at a distance, dumping the laundry trolley for a new prop, a watering can that was sitting in the reception area. When the guy pushing the wheelchair looked around at her twice, she slipped into the nearest gents’ toilets and reassembled herself. Derek came out of the toilet, smoothing down his hair, straightening his £500 Armani jacket.

She was getting the moves down pat, now. Gleave had shown her where she was going wrong. He had taught her what pain was. Not what she thought it was. She had thought pain was being born into a world without asking for it. She had thought pain was sifting alien molecules – a wall, a door, a pane of glass – through her own. It wasn’t. That was nothing next to the agonies Gleave visited upon her. She had told him she loved him when he started. By the end, she wanted him dead, his family dead. She wanted to find the bones of his ancestors, dig them up, and stomp them to splinters. But she was focused. She knew what was expected of her, and any interest she had shown in tampons, hairstyles, or whether to wear a liquid-filled or an underwired bra, was forgotten.

Gleave, standing over her, his arm in her throat up to his elbow. Gleave, ripping out her heart and showing her how black it was, how malformed. “Your heart in my hand, girl, and you stare up at me as if I was holding a sick puppy. You should be dead. If you were like us, you would be.”

And then:

You aren’t human, you will never be human… learn it… believe it…

“Afternoon,” Derek said, as he caught up with Harry and Joanna. He held the lift doors open for them. “Which floor you after?”

“Three, please,” Harry said.

“Nice one,” Derek replied. “Me too.”

WILL’S NOSE STREAMED with blood but it had nothing to do with any injury Sadie inflicted upon him. Out of the blue came a torrent of red. It was a fashionable colour. Sadie was on all fours, gasping as the sac tore open. Gore was flushing across the black floorboards, giving them a gloss that no varnish could deliver. The child wriggled on its back, trying to chew through the cord that connected him to his mother with teeth that looked like broken bits from a straight razor. Even as he did this, he was scrabbling with his hands, trying to gain purchase on the slippery boards, trying to crawl over to where Will was crouched.

There was no exit behind him. High above, thirty feet or more, the ruptured stage let through shafts of granular light, thick with dust. The only exit was beyond Sadie and her grim spawn.

Staunching the flow of blood with the back of his hand, Will stood up. Sadie swung her head to look at him. Her face was covered in sweat and darkened by blood, building up in her temples. Her teeth were bared and a rope of saliva shivered from the corner of her mouth.

“Say hello. To Daddy,” she managed, the words coming out packaged in little coughs of pain. “Give. Daddy a big. Kiss.”

“Fuck that,” Will said, and took off.

He hurdled Sadie, but she managed to lift her forearm, which she smashed across Will’s shin. He toppled forwards and landed heavily against a rack of microphone stands. There was something wrong with the way he tried to stand up, and he saw that he couldn’t get any leverage from his hand because now it was lying, palm upwards like a weird ashtray, six feet away from his body. The thumb and forefinger made an OK sign. He closed his mind to what was happening. He stood up, shakily, and tottered over to the hand, which he picked up with the other

Nice to meet you, I’m fine, how are you?

before vomiting thinly and lurching away from Sadie, who had rolled onto her back, scrabbling in the wet for her crop. He stuffed the hand into his pocket and backed off, his head ranging to and fro, trying to spot the child in the gloom. Presumably Sadie was shielding it from harm. Perhaps it was too raw to harm him just yet. He eyed the microphone stands, their heat-warped, splintered bows of metal, but what use was a weapon here? He could slash, spear, or cudgel Sadie, but to what effect? She was this place and it was her.

“I saved your life, you fucking bitch,” Will said, needing to say something, anything that might get through to her and stop her from causing his decomposure. She sagged back into her own juices and stared at him, her mouth parted, hissing through her clenched teeth a sound that might or might not have been laughter.

Will jogged for the exit, briefly appalled by another spray of blood that gushed from his nose. He needed to find somewhere dark and quiet, somewhere he could turn his thoughts inwards, to make some sense of what was happening to him. Once free of the awful cinders and smokiness of the theatre, he ran until his lungs burned, ignoring the hellish fragments being enacted on these stages around him. He caught glimpses of animals forced into acts that made them shriek; shadowy things swinging on the ends of ropes in dank alleyways; men huddled around a core of something wet and pink that mewled when they leaned into it. He blocked it all out as he ran, or tried to trick himself into believing that the scenes around him were more benevolent than they appeared. It was the only way to deal with it. He had no choice. It was all move, keep going, the next thing and the next. It didn’t matter any more what leapt out at him or winked from the shadows. The goalposts had moved and he had to move with them. Keep going. Keep going. What was the alternative?

He stopped running when the blood from his nose was smeared across his chest and splashed into his eyes, making him blind. He could taste it, hot and bright in the back of his throat, next to the sweetish flavour of his own depletion. The blood was an honest taste. It persuaded him that he was still alive and that getting away was still of use to someone, even if that someone was no longer himself.

Up ahead Will saw a boat moored to the bank of a slow-moving river. He slid and scuffed his way onto the bank, where the heavy, organic smell of the water assaulted him, slapping him further awake. The boat was a small cutter tethered to a post with a series of old, fraying ropes. A faded name etched on a brass plate, Koimao, was attached with rusty screws to the bulwark. It listed heavily to starboard, and the aft deck was a riot of birdshit and sodden flyers exhorting visits to clubs that might well have been called abattoirs in another time and place.

Cautiously, he stepped aboard, risking a “Hello?” before pushing open the cabin door and peering into the depths of the boat. A smell of boiled onions and vinegar. Six inches of brackish water on the floor. A coil of rope, fat and sodden like a snake on a chair fit for anything but sitting on. There was nobody on board. Will grabbed a rusty knife from a rack in a galley that was decorated with grease and mould. He went back to the bank and cut the boat free. Then he took his hand from his pocket and tossed it into the water. One of the black, spangled parrots gawked at him from the coach roof when he turned around.

“Wanking hand, was it? Tough titty, tough titty, tough titty…”

Will sat back and watched the bright and broken lights of Mash This retreat. The river had the cutter and it tugged it slowly with a current that rocked the collapsing vessel. Will responded to its rhythms, allowing the currents of his own exhaustion to pull him on too. He folded his damaged arm under the other, to keep it warm. The ancient wood of the vessel sang and cried as it rolled downriver. The mainsail, jib, and stay sail were ragged triangles shot through with holes. The water stretched out behind the boat like braids of hair slowly being plaited together.

A querulous chittering.

The baby’s hand wrapped itself – a wet, pudgy claw – around the rail. Its oversized head rose like an awful moon. Will saw the glitterflash of light off its razor teeth and felt a perverse wave of pride wash over him.

HARRY TOOK IT in, sat down calmly on a chair next to the bed, regarded his wife with cool detachment, and whispered: “Are you completely and utterly out of your nutty bloody skull, woman?”

“I promised him this,” Joanna said. “Like you promised me. I’ll sit by him until, well, until whatever.”

“Promised him how?” Harry asked.

“When I was in a coma I… well, I don’t know, I somehow joined up with him. There was a link there, Harry.”

Harry was looking at Joanna as if she had suddenly grown a ginger beard. “You should still be in that hospital bed,” he said.

“I’m perfectly fine, Harry,” Joanna maintained. “But this poor guy is not. Believe me.” She searched her husband’s face, but it was grey and flinty with worry. She took his hand. “Listen,” she said, “if I was making all this up, how come I knew that there would be a coma patient called Will in this hospital?”

Harry shook his head. It didn’t seem enough to convince him.

“Why don’t you wait outside,” Joanna said, gently. “Get us a couple of teas, yes? I’ll be out shortly.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Sit with him for a while. See if he wakes up.” She shrugged, smiled. “I don’t know.”

Harry got to his feet and kissed the top of his wife’s head. “I’ll get us some tea then.”

WHEN HE THOUGHT to look at the sky and try to find the moon, something to comfort him and make him feel rooted to reality on some plane or another, he was too far gone in sleep to manage it. Amazing, that he could drift off while that child, his child, that creature came slithering along the deck for him.

In sleep, he saw Joanna’s face leaning over his. She kissed his lips tenderly. He couldn’t open his eyes to ask her what he needed her to do but he could pull back from the dream and imagine himself lying there between the sheets, gaunt with skin like tallow. With his good hand, his fingernail, he gouged a message on his sleeping form’s forehead. Blood magicked onto the surface of the first letter as he moved on to the third. The word sprang out of his skin and Joanna sat back, shocked.

Do it, he urged, pressing the thought out of him with as much force as the child’s jaws as they closed around his ankle. He closed his mind to the terrible wet snacking and the absence of pain.

Do it.

OUTSIDE THE ROOM, the police officer looked up at Harry from his chair with ill-disguised boredom. A faulty striplight sizzled above, intermittently spitting bleached light or dropping shadow onto them.

“I’m getting some tea,” Harry explained. “Would you like a cup?”

The police officer shook his head.

Harry left him and headed down the corridor to the drinks machine, wondering about the policeman’s hands. Pianist’s fingers, he had thought, idly, when he jotted down their names and addresses in his notebook. “I’m his ex-wife,” Joanna had said. But, he saw now, they weren’t pianist’s fingers. Folded in the policeman’s lap, they were thick and meaty. Like pork sausages.

The light then, playing tricks. The light and the effect his crazy wife was having on his brain. By the time he got back, his hands being slowly scalded by the superheated tea in its flimsy plastic container, the policeman had disappeared and Joanna was leaning over Will, crying a pool into the tucked skin between his thumb and forefinger. Scars on the man’s forehead were vanishing as he watched. They looked like letters. What was it they said? Was it, was it Kill me?

“It’s finished,” she said, looking up at him and smiling crookedly. “All done. All done.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: THE BLACK FACTORY

THE ZIGGURAT WAS the tip of what was proving to be a monstrous iceberg, a labyrinth that twisted and U-turned, jinked and kinked back on itself like the fissures of a brain. Sean and Emma moved through the walls, children cheating the maze by crawling beneath its hedges. They were slowly advancing on the foundry sounds at the heart of the construction. Hot and cold air rioted against their skin. They smelled sour sweat and heard the hitching whimper of babies in discomfort. A snatch of melody, a lullaby. A scream that started off as something erotic and became terror-driven.

Sean was remembering. It had been hard, over the years, to give much thought to the terrible occasion of his parents’ death, harder still to acknowledge their complicity in the use of him as an Insert. Cash had gone into their pockets while his mind had been invaded, tuning him into the frequency of the dead. It was difficult to accept that he had run away from home and fended for himself for so long without belief in his own ability. Perhaps it had been a way of blocking out the hideous memory of the double murder. He had run half the length of England but had failed to get away from the cold facts. He was different. Trying to gouge out that difference with a drill all those years ago had served only to illustrate his rarity. Trying to kill himself was as much an attempt to confirm that dreamlike knowledge that he could never take his own life as it was a need to damage himself into oblivion. Emma had been the walking stick he needed. Though she was growing ever paler, and tired-looking, in here she was strong and limber. Her eyes were wide and bright here. In here, her brain was lightning.

“It’s opening up,” she said now.

He saw she was right. The walls were further apart and the light was improving, deepening the corners of the corridors, picking out the patterns in the floor and ceiling. The patterns were replicated in the walls too, he saw, squinting to study what they might be. It was a little like staring at complex patterns on wallpaper, or the mesh of twigs in a winter tree. The patterns forced faces out of the wall.

“Sean,” Emma said, her voice toneless, inelastic.

He couldn’t understand her terse address. But then he saw that the faces were really faces, two-dimensional visages locked into the fabric of the wall like tesserae in a mosaic. They possessed animation, these tiles. They blinked and gurned and pouted, shifting along like the accretion of frost on a pond.

“Who are they?” Emma asked.

“People dreaming,” Sean said. “People dreaming of death. People dying. This is where our minds go when we sleep, when we’re closing in on death. The cusp of it. Death is like one huge plughole and when we sleep, when we play dead, it sucks us towards it.”

“I can hear babies crying, Sean. It’s horrible.”

“Babies know death well. They’re closest to it when they’re born. Being born is like cheating that plughole at the last moment. Babies scream at the moment of birth because they know what death tastes like. They know that they have been born in order to die.”

The corridor broadened and then it was no longer a corridor because the walls sank and curved, feeding into the floor. They stood on a desert of faces that moved ceaselessly, minutely, like the incremental journey of a dune. A hundred metres away, the floor heaved up again and became a column that rose so high that they could not see the tip of it. There was no machinery here, but there ought to have been. The air was thick with movement, as though all of the molecules in it had been heated to a point of constant agitation. Some huge labour was occurring on a plane of consciousness that was beyond Sean and Emma. They felt the tongues of furnaces lick their foreheads and backs wet; puffs of arid air exploded across them from the pistoning of unseen hardware. Motors and rotors churned and whipped the air, girders plunged and spun as the giant, invisible machine ground out its unknown product.

Sean ventured out onto the landscape, clasping Emma to him when its limitless expanse threatened to squash him to nothing. They approached the column, seeing at a distance how the faces were drawn into it and coiled around the cylinder as they were sucked up like the slashes of blood and bandage in a barber’s shop pole. The symphony of creation went on around them, smashing and howling as steel heated up and steam was vented and bolts and pulleys clanked together. Sean got a trace of its mischief as the column loomed miles above them. White tunnels, friendly faces, open arms. Brilliant light.

“It’s feeding them,” Sean said, the faces on the column as they neared becoming easier to pick out. These faces were less motile, less lined. They had the serenity that comes with reassurance, with knowledge. When they woke, the corporeal forms that projected their identities down here would feel fresh and heartened.

“De Fleche is behind this,” Sean said. “A sugar-coated version of what death is, slammed into the dreaming mind of those who need it. It’s like TV. It’s like bad TV.”

“What is?” Emma was holding on to his arm, trying to read the messages she saw in the twisting core of faces.

“This place, dressing up death in a pretty frock and pearl ear-rings. Bit of slap. Bit of scent. All those pitiful fucks sucking it down, befriending the costume and not the clown that wears it.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Emma wanted to know. “Is it bad to not be scared? Of dying, of death?”

“No it’s not. But we develop our own defences. We read our holy books or we believe that Uncle Fred is ‘up there’ looking down on us, minding us as we dawdle after him, catching him up. We deal with death our own way. We pack our travel bag for that journey because nobody else can pack it for us. This…” Sean waggled his hand at the busy, hot air, “…this is force-feeding. This is Walt Disney on a bad day.”

“But why is he doing it?”

Sean said, “The dead are seeping back into our world, Emma. They’re infecting the living, damaging life, just as his being here is damaging this place too.”

“Why though? Why does he want that?”

“I don’t know yet. But we’ll find him and we’ll stop it.” He looked back the way they had come. “Out there is what death is really all about. The hill and the forest and the sea. And the monsters. Tranquillity and discord. It’s all we’ve ever wanted from anything we do. Life, stories, love… there’s no life without darkness. So it is here. So.”

Emma kissed him. “De Fleche,” she said. “Where do we find him?”

Sean looked at her. “The place where all the monsters live. In fairy tales. In fact.”

Emma said, “The forest.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: POSITIVE ID

CHEKE WITHDREW THE policeman deep into herself and allowed Susannah to come forwards. She stepped onto the hard shoulder of the M62 and waved at the oncoming articulated lorry as it steamed up the inside lane. She breathed in and pulled her shoulders back, smiled, showed Susannah’s tiny, white teeth.

Immediately, the HGV indicated and pulled onto the shoulder. Susannah ran alongside the lorry, its passenger side door opening even before the wagon had come to a stop, and clambered up into the seat.

She noticed the badge on his shirt pocket first – Come ride my long vehicle – then his sunglasses and an unattractive beard as tight and curly as sheep’s hair. The boy-in-a-sweet-shop smile. Those lenses could not hide from Cheke his long gaze into the valley between her breasts. She leaned over and let him have a better view, then she killed him. He jerked and bucked as if he were a robot and she a technician, trying to reattach some faulty wires in his CPU. His glasses fell off revealing a new expression for her burgeoning library: it was neither repulsion nor relief and probably wasn’t even a combination of the two. When she’d taken it from him she rested, trying to bring some harmony to the constant ripple of her body. Finally, he was still and she could begin.

The last thing she had been expecting as she closed in on Will was that her job would be executed for her by someone else, and a weak-looking invalid at that. She had dogged them, the man in the scarf and his extraordinary wife, intending to kill them both, but it was clear that the couple were going home. They had no impact on what was about to be played out here because they were oblivious to the situation, that much was clear from their expressions as they hurried from the hospital. Their agenda with Will was separate, inspired – judging from the abject look on the woman’s face – by pity. Fair enough. She would claim the kill for herself. Gleave would be none the wiser. It angered her a little that she had been dispatched to get rid of this runt of a man, this no-hoper, this failure. Will was nothing special, she felt. He was just somebody who stumbled upon horror and reacted as anybody might react, if their hand were forced. But, as Gleave had pointed out to her, to get to Will was to get to all of them. It was for such reasons that she was a doer, and not a planner.

As she fed on the gruel that had once been the driver, mopping up juices as his baseball cap deflated on a baked-vegetable head, she considered her next move. She had the scent at last, for the quarry in which she was most interested. It tingled in her nostrils like pepper. It was so fresh and near she could almost envisage its owner, sitting at a midnight table with a glass of something warming, riffling a newspaper, listening to the radio, his muscles squirming gently against each other, built for action.

Cheke brought the trucker back, scooted over behind the wheel and let his driving instincts take her over. She glanced in the rear-view mirror. That God-awful beard! She erased it, replacing it with Derek’s smooth jawline. Better. Much better.

THE FOREST HAD changed since their initial recce. Its purple boughs were streaked with moss. Mushrooms clustered in moist creases like rashes of acne. It seemed much denser, much more forbidding. Emma said as much as they strode deeper into it.

“I know,” Sean said. “Something’s happened. Something’s brought this on. Be careful.”

He wasn’t just pleading with her to be cautious because of the more menacing aspect of the forest, she saw. Great swathes of the thing just didn’t exist any more. Like blighted tracts of land in an otherwise green, rolling plain, the forest had suffered losses. It was difficult to stare into the abyss gouged out of the loam. It was plumbless, brimming with a vast pacific nothingness that was beyond anything that death could possibly mean. Looking into these vacuums was too much like studying one’s own heart. Emma shivered and hurried after Sean, who was picking his way over a series of collapsed branches. Magnificent trumpets of fungus had erupted across the timber, exuding a rich, meaty odour and a sweat too, which dribbled across the flesh of the growth and ringed its uppermost parts before lifting, weightless, into the black like some sort of strange, anti-gravity rain.

“Don’t touch a thing,” Sean cautioned.

There was death in the forest, as he had expected. How could there not be, in death’s homelands? This was death’s acres, death’s back yard. Death came out to play Ring-a-ring-of-roses and What time is it, Mr Wolf? Death told sick jokes in its own playground, where it was bully and best friend.

The corpses were lined up neatly for a while and then strewn higgledy-piggledy as though the person laying them out had grown tired of his own methodical approach. But they were not corporeal. They had owned the ephemeral nature of old cobwebs or dandelion seeds. Just walking past them caused enough of a draught to lift half a dozen of them into the air and separate them to the extent that it was hard to believe they had had any recognisable form to begin with. They were like candyfloss shells, a playtime dead.

Tiny creatures, that may or may not have been lizards or skinks, had spent so long sitting still on the limbs of trees that they had fused with them and become dreadful, blinking twigs. Spiders had spun webs of gold between the reeds and ferns, sometimes stretching a tightrope of glittering silk across the path. When Emma reached to swipe it away, it sizzled into the edge of her hand, branding her with pain. Sean caught sight of one of these trap spinners, a tiny pale orb ringed with eyes like succulent blackcurrant pips and legs that seemed too thin and long to carry even that infinitesimal weight. It didn’t shuffle off into the shadows when they approached; it stood its ground, slowly turning to watch them go by, milky venom oozing from a cleft beneath its eyes like sap from a rubber tree.

The forest was deep and dense. They drifted down an incline until the darkness was raven-blue, writhing in front of them. The roots of great banyan-like trees were too mighty for the soil and rose above it, choosing instead to decant their nutrients from the more slender boughs around them. The roots were knotted, huge things, hispid with moss like the limbs of men in repose. At the heart of one configuration, Sean saw a hand, white and stiff as asbestos board. The fingers jerked at him.

“Jesus,” Sean said. “Emma, come and help me.”

It was Will. They could just make out his face through the slow strangulation of roots around his torn, white body, and the scar in his forehead made by the police marksman’s bullet. Sean closed his mind to the fear that had been sown by the forest and tried to send Will a message, but Will was panicking too much to prove a clear receptor.

“My puh—” he was saying. “Myyy puh!”

Sean slid his hand into one of the cracks between a root and Will’s hot chest. He felt ribs with his probing knuckles: a stick being dragged across a xylophone. He was dimly aware of Emma’s attention wandering from Will’s rescue to something in his peripheral vision.

“Puh… kit,” Will breathed. “Puhhh-kitt!”

Emma was moving away. Sean made to call out to her, but now Will was trying to speak again and the earnest glare in his eyes, the effort going into it, made him concentrate hard.

“Tekkit,” he wheezed. The root cosied up closer to him, like a python beginning its death squeeze. White spittle had formed a crust on his mouth. He looked frostbitten and feverish and fucked-up. Sean realised he must be dead and that it didn’t matter how he looked any more. Will showed him his teeth and hawked up some strength from somewhere deep inside.

“Mah… pocket!” The sound was a violent gargle. Sean watched a split running up the length of Will’s torso and a thin slick of lymph flood out. “Qui…” he heaved, imploring Sean with his eyes. “Qui…” The split became a broad seam, flesh tonguing out of it like a dark red cloth fed through a mangle.

Sean tore at Will’s clothes, trying to find a pocket, any pocket. He found the mouth of one pocket and the neck of what was sitting inside it. He pulled it out. It was a slender phial of green crystals, with a label that read Paleshrikes. He held the container at arm’s length, looking at Will uncomprehendingly.

Emma said, “Sean.”

He turned. She was staring off into the trees, as if, through all of the vertical slashes of wood, she could see something else, something different. Some tree tops maybe a hundred metres away were shivering but there had been no wind on the hill, no indication of any kind of weather here. Now another clump of trees shivered, a little nearer. There was a splitting, rending sound, a groaning and thrashing. The tree tops in the distance sank from view. Sean was put in mind of King Kong, a film he had first watched as a child. He remembered how frightened he had been when Fay Wray had stopped struggling against her bonds on the sacrificial plinth at Skull Island and looked up at the trees as they shuddered and parted with the coming of something that ought only be given life in the depths of nightmare.

Will was sending him another garbled message. “Lidov… porrit… qui…”

Sean again tried to make his mind a millpond, flat and still and deep. He ignored the ground-shaking approach and Emma’s increasingly urgent demands that they do something now. He focused instead on Will’s brown eyes, still clear and animated despite the fact that they, and the soft cradle of his face that they lay in, were gradually turning to soup back in the real world.

Sean sent: Will, relax. Tell me what it is you want me to do. Feed this stuff to you?

Will’s eyes became less intense, as if Sean had done something unexpected to disarm him, which, he realised, was exactly what he had done. The tree squeezed its baby to its bosom, five tendrils – slim tubers extruding from the tap root – tentatively meshed with Will’s hand like the fingers of a shy girlfriend.

No, Will sent, as much with his eyes as his mind. Open it, pour it on the tree. It’s foreign to this place. It’s poison.

Sean unstoppered the phial and shook some of the crystals onto his palm. They looked like bath salts. He flung them at the roots and the dense trunk and stepped back as the bark began sloughing off in great swathes, like the skin of an unfortunate who had been consumed by fire. The roots blackened and popped, petrifying in an instant. The whole tree took on the appearance of a child recoiling from a mad dog. Will slithered from its grip and lay gasping on all fours, keening and puking into the fractured loam.

“Nice one,” he said at last, sticking up an approving thumb.

“What is this stuff?” Sean asked, shaking the remaining granules in the phial.

“I picked it up in Gloat Market.”

“Where?”

Will shook his head. “No matter. I don’t know what it is. Weedkiller, maybe.”

Emma looked at them, a mix of disgust and dread spoiling her features. “Boys,” she said. “I mean, boys!” Her finger was pointing at the treeline as the great columns were felled in an instant. The noise now was deafening, a timber tide crashing against their shore. The final cluster of trees dropped to reveal no monster, no Kong, no dream demon from the Sandman’s bag. The pulverised trunks formed a path buzzing with wood-dust. A smell blasted over them of sourness, rotten timber heavy with the waste of weevils and disease. As if in sympathy with this little eco-disaster, a fresh puncture sucked away the ground into a limitless black throat. Far away to the right, a small group of grey smocks had gathered on the hill and were watching this new round of cataclysms with stoic indifference. It was as if they knew they were here for the duration, no matter what the outcome. Were they the true dead, the ur-dead? The people who had shaped this mirror-Eden only to find it, like the villages and towns and cities of the world, become cluttered with litter and pollution; populated by murderers and despots and the self-destructive. De Fleche, then, was the Serpent in this garden, knowing the smell and flavour of ruin and how best to help it spread. Vernon Lord was right to fear this place. Death, a release? A big adventure?

What was it de Fleche hoped to achieve? Where was the sense in building one last great folly and filling it with dark confections to soothe the dying, the agnostics who didn’t know, who hoped, but couldn’t be sure? What was the worth in luring shaky atheists who hammered up their barriers until death began to pluck at them and then removed the nails one by one, daring to peek through the cracks to see if, maybe, there was something else after all?

Emma said, her voice misfiring, “What is this?”

The wood-dust settling, they could see at the end of this arboreal gorge a figure sitting with his back to them. He was hunched over, gazing out at a mere ringed with brown, wilting reeds. Sean moved towards him but Will hissed at him to stay put.

“It’s de Fleche. He has to die,” Sean said.

“How, exactly?” Will asked.

The question flummoxed him. “I’ll busk it,” he said. “It’ll come to me.”

“This is his playpen,” Will warned. “He has more toys than you.”

The grey head of the figure vibrated. His hair danced as though it were plunged in water. Even at this distance they could see the black scimitar grin in his face, the gold tooth as it winked. “He wants you to go to him. Look, he’s psyched up for it. He knows he can finish you now.” He laid a hand on Sean’s arm. “There’ll be a better time,” he promised. “A fairer deck.”

“But Pardoe said we have no time left.”

“There’s time enough,” Will said. “I saw things happening, before… shit, before I was shot—” He paused at that, and tried to absorb it. Emma rubbed his shoulder. “This kind of decay is going on back home,” he said. “People passing back who have been dead a long time. I remember, when Cat died, a guy called Gleave who came to collect her and the woman, Cheke, the killer. He said something about ‘leaks’, about mopping them up. They have to be stopped, Sean.”

“But Pardoe was adamant that de Fleche—”

Emma said, “Pardoe is a dinosaur. All he’s interested in is carrying through a plan that’s twenty years out of date. Will’s right. De Fleche can’t do anything while he’s stuck here. He’s done what he set out to do. The wheels are in motion.”

Sean watched the old man swivel on his seat and gaze back at them. Distance reduced his features to a whitish smear. “I can’t believe that’s it. That’s all. There must be something more. De Fleche isn’t dead. He’s an intruder here. What’s the point of drumming up an army of dead people to walk among the living if…” Sean frowned, “…you weren’t going to come back when all the killing was done?”

“Who said anything about an army?” Will stammered, the thought of it, the weight of it settling in him like a badly digested meal.

The figure was standing now, turning fully to face the three. He began to pace towards them. At this distance, he seemed too angular and unathletic to cause them any harm. Sean bristled as if sensing a confrontation. Will pressed a hand against his chest.

“Go,” he said. “Take Emma and get away. Plug the leaks.” He offered a flattening of his lips which passed for a smile. “Do what I couldn’t do,” he said, bitterly, “and save a few lives.”

The old man was approaching quickly. From his hand swung a length of rope. They could tell, even at this distance – some eighty metres – that he was grinning, his mouth a scythe of teeth.

“Okay,” Sean said. “Okay.” He gave the phial back to Will and took Emma’s hand. He pressed the edge of his knife against the flesh where it joined and, fading as he drew blood, said to Will, “Watch yourself. You’re dead. It’s probably for the best that you try to stay that way.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: THE CUCKOLD’S NECK

THEY STOPPED IN front of an electrical shop in Market Gate to watch a news bulletin. Shaking cameras relayed live footage from Charing Cross Road of a cordon of mounted and armed police trying to peg back a mob of pale, unblinking corpses. They were untainted by putrefaction, these dead. It was as if they had been rehabilitated, captured at their physical peak, perhaps thanks to the abiding memories of those they had left behind. Nobody wants to remember the sick and the infirm.

Emma said, “How long, do you think, before we have the same problems up here?”

“I don’t know,” Sean said. “Maybe never.”

“Yeah, right,” Emma chided him. “Looks like it.”

The town centre was deserted. When the clock struck the hour, Emma jumped and the sound flew through the empty streets, carrying its cold, lonely message.

Cars had been abandoned on the roads, some of them having flipped onto the pavement or been involved in minor collisions with other vehicles. In one of the more serious accidents, a woman had been trapped in the driver’s seat of her Mini by the steering wheel, which had been pushed forwards into her chest by the force of a bus’s impact. A fire had broken out and ravaged her. Smoke rose from her charred remains. Her eyes swivelled as Sean and Emma walked past, and followed their progress along Sankey Street. Emma thought she was grinning at them but felt something rise in her throat when she realised it was only because her lips had been burned away.

At the town hall Sean broke away from Emma and jogged towards the taxi rank. The lawns of Bank Park surrounding the town hall were in need of a trim. A lawnmower had been left in the middle of the task. A single gardening glove lay next to it, bright orange in the green.

There were no drivers in the taxis, but more than one had failed to take the keys out before leaving their cab. Getting into one, he started up the engine – a shocking roar that broke the silence – and swung the cab out of the queue, halting in front of Emma, who climbed into the back.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Farmhouse,” Sean replied. “Somewhere I saw a gathering of my softstrip friends some time ago. I didn’t get a chance to go in and look around. But I think that’s where their HQ is.”

The streets radiating out of town shed their drifts of traffic until the route was relatively unimpeded. Emma saw dark figures in windows looking down on the cab as it wound its way towards the dual carriageway. The houses in these terraced streets seemed to be affected by the tension in the air, the loss of community. They hunched together, seeking safety in numbers, and closed their eyes to the outside world. Their hard, cement faces found sympathy in Sean’s and – Emma noticed in the rear-view mirror – her own.

The dual carriageway became a road became a track littered with leaves and mud. On either side, ploughed fields spread out, their furrows parallel to the road, perspective sucking all of their lines to a point straight ahead where a farmhouse with a sunken, defeated look sat waiting for them.

Sean ditched the car half a mile shy of the building, having turned it to face the opposite direction. He pocketed the keys and they took to the field. Hunched low to the ground they slowly neared the farmhouse, their breathing becoming more laboured, hanging like empty speech bubbles around their heads.

It was late in the afternoon and the sky was heavily bruised but no lights had come on in the farmhouse.

“We could be in luck,” Sean said. “It might be empty.”

“Wait,” she said. She drew him to her under the protective spread of an oak tree made naked by the cold. The bark of the tree was true and good. Somebody had carved their name in the wood, an ancient graffito professing love for another. The person who had scratched that wish might well be dead now. Emma clung to her man and her skin felt as crumbly and delicate as the tree’s. Sean had made his mark on it long ago, before he was aware of her, branding her with his heat. She had felt the scorch of it deep in her heart and she knew the warmth she felt now was partly down to Sean’s arms around her, but also partly due to the core of need he had fixed in her all those years ago. She wanted to make love to him here, now, but it was too cold and he was too focused.

Something about the farmhouse worried her. It might have been the way its slouched windows frowned down at her or the broad door beneath its arch, like an opened mouth. She held on to Sean and rubbed his back, ran her fingers through the clipped fuzz at his nape, and moved her body so that as much of its surface was in alignment with his. She searched for the things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, but the look in his eyes told her that he was fully aware of that.

“I don’t like it, Sean,” she whispered. “It doesn’t feel right. I’m not happy.”

Sean pulled back and placed the warm flat of his hand against her cheek. “It’s all right. We’ll be careful. Promise.”

She allowed herself to be escorted closer to the farmhouse, but the nearer they got, the more she felt repelled by the ugly building. Red curtains in the windows reminded her of the freshly harvested hide of animals her grandfather had hunted during her youth. She remembered one freezing morning in particular when she had been given the treat of accompanying him on a shoot in the fields near his house. She had trotted happily alongside him, the memory of the warmth of her bed lost to her but for a crumb of sleep in the corner of her eye and her pyjamas, which she had refused to take off and which provided an extra layer of warmth beneath the jumper and coat and trousers.

The sky had a bleached look about it. The sun was imminent, a burst yolk dribbling across the horizon. Chalky scratches in the blue told of aircraft nosing towards somewhere far away and much warmer than this starved place. Emma had gabbed away at the hawkish profile of her grandfather as he stalked across the frozen ridges of the field, shotgun broken across his arm, heading towards the mist-bound acres of the wood at its far end. She couldn’t remember what she had talked about – her dolls, maybe, or an enjoyable painting session at school. But she remembered turning around when the church bells tolled six to see the quickening sun pull the shine out of the spire and the clockface. For a moment, the church seemed to be on fire, and then she heard a mighty crack and she whirled to see her grandfather’s gun slotting smoothly into the cushion of his shoulder. She caught a brief glimpse of movement high to her right, a flutter of wings, and then came the explosion of the gun and she screamed, tears in her eyes before the retort’s echoes had spent themselves on the field’s furrows and fences.

He sent her to collect the downed wood pigeon and she did so, not because she wanted to – she could have been the definition of squeamish in the dictionary – but because her grandfather, in that moment, though she loved him enormously, had scared her more than anything else in her short life. His face had retained its shadows despite the sun’s attempts to pick them out. The smoke from his shotgun coiled around him, snagging on his clothes, his jaw, as if its true home was inside his body and it was struggling to return.

She picked the bird up by its legs and was grateful that there didn’t seem to be any blood, but when she had returned to her grandfather and he took the bird from her, she saw a streak of it on her hand. Her grandfather lifted it off with a thumb and daubed it against her forehead.

Sean said. “What is it?”

Emma touched the spot on her forehead and took a step back. “I can’t go in,” she said. “I won’t go in.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay. But you know I have to.”

She nodded. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

He handed her the keys. “Go and sit in the cab,” he said. “Wait for me. I’ll be no more than fifteen minutes. If I’m not back by then, drive away and get the police. Tell them anything. Tell them you saw a murder here. Get a lot of police out here.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Sean kissed her hair and her mouth. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. He turned his back on her.

HE GOT IN through a rear window that had not been properly returned to its latch. His foot landed in something soft: a tray of dog food, he saw, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He realised instantly that he was not alone in the house and told himself that maybe that was a good thing. From deep inside the house came the sounds of exertion – grunts and thoughtless curses – and the squeal of wood as either its tensions were released or increased. It was the sound of light wind filling a sail, timber finding its own balance.

He padded to the door, taking care not to disturb any of the steel pots hanging from hooks on the wall. One of the pots was on the range, a thick skin having developed on its contents. Yesterday’s soup, by the look of it. In the hallway, about a dozen pairs of heavily muddied wellington boots stood to attention. The walls were festooned with brass and leather trinkets. A door on the right of the hall gave on to a drawing room with a fireplace, cold ashes in its hearth, and a table with a chess set, its pieces set up for a game that had managed just one move so far: king’s pawn advanced two squares. Classic, predictable. Sean smiled. He had the measure of these men. The paper tiger that was Ronnie Salt; the tragedy of Vernon Lord; Tim Enever who had impressed him at first, before it became clear that he was just a shabby fence. They were no-marks this lot, lowlife chancers who had hit the big time and were beginning to realise that it was a little bit too big for them.

He returned to the hall and whispered up the stairs. Momentarily, before he reached the landing, he thought he heard the beep of a car horn. He glanced out of the window up the lane to the taxi, the shape of which he could just see behind the hedgerow. No other cars.

Okay. Okay. Keep moving.

Bedrooms. Four of them. All empty. A bathroom. Ditto. He returned to the stairs. That creaking, squealing noise again. Very clearly, he heard a voice: Test it. Have a swing.

He was about to put his eye up against the crack in the door when he heard a chair being drawn back on its hind legs. He turned to see Vernon Lord standing by the chess set, looking at him. A gun was dangling from his right hand. His left held the chair and he was nodding his head, inviting him to sit.

“There’s always someone else who can do things better than you,” Vernon said as Sean entered the room. “You could practise for hours, finger shadows, perfecting a little rabbit, say, and someone will come along and do a honey osprey tearing a mouse apart.”

Sean sat in front of the black pieces. Vernon sat opposite, regarding the carved wooden figures with the interest a hungry man displays for a good steak. “Do you play?” he asked.

“I have done. When I was younger.”

“Course you have. Bright, healthy lad like you. With your big words and your gymnasium muscles. You look the part, mate, but you’re soft. You talk the talk but you don’t walk the walk. You don’t even limp the walk.”

Sean said, “If you’re trying to get a rise out of me, you’ll have to try harder.” He moved his own king’s pawn, mirroring Vernon’s move.

“There’s a surprise,” Vernon noted. “Follow my leader. That’s you all over, isn’t it? You could have had what you wanted, you know? You could have been somebody instead of fucking using me to get inside, to get at us.” He swept the pieces to the floor with his left hand and brought the fist holding the gun crashing onto the board. The barrel dented the soft wood, its muzzle pointed at Sean’s gut. Vernon’s palms were raw with rope burns.

“All I want to know is,” Sean said, trying to keep his nervousness in check, “who was it that killed Naomi Clew?”

“Who the fuck,” Vernon sneered, “is Naomi Clew?”

“I can answer that.” Another figure at the door, removing his suede gloves finger by finger.

Sean turned in his seat. He moved his lips but the air rushing past them didn’t possess enough strength to carry the name. The man had been with him since childhood but had not been allowed to dally in his thoughts too often. A man that was as synonymous with misery and dread as any of the wraiths from the Brothers Grimm.

“Godspeed, Sean,” the other man said. “Long time no parlay.”

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Sean managed at last.

“Oh, I thought we’d bump into each other eventually. I was young when I saw you the first time. And I’ve kept myself fit, see? Five per cent body fat, you know. Five per cent. Not bad for a bloke pushing fifty-seven. D’you know, I’ve got cholesterol levels so low you’d have to be a worm to read them.”

He leaned against the back of a sofa and folded his hands neatly across his waist. Without switching his focus to Vernon Lord, he said: “Naomi Clew was one of the Inserts. The next wave. The new, improved, bright white, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money-back Inserts that were being trained to go In Country to do for Mr. de Fleche, the bad man they wanted to tick off for trespassing.

“I was paid a hefty wedge, hefty for the 1980s anyhow, to blow these little bastards away. I’m still collecting a fair bit of interest on that pile, even though I didn’t make the first kill until Christmas.”

“You bastard,” Sean said. He could feel his heartbeat rising in his chest, in his throat, until it was sitting behind his ears, pulling tight the skin of his forehead.

“Hey, don’t have a go at me. I argued that we didn’t need to do it. You scarpered before I got the chance to open my account. But I had my orders from up high. They didn’t want to run the risk of your tiny minds being reactivated. They were quite happy to live with the fact that you might find it odd that you healed more quickly than the other girls and boys when you burned your fingers, but what did that matter, as long as you didn’t work out why?

“Truth be told, I have slowed down a bit over the years. And since it was you that found the Clew bint… do you realise, when you first knocked on the door, that she was still alive by the way? Since it was you that started up the itch in our little family’s balls that just would not be scratched, we had to call in outside help.” Here, Gleave’s smile faltered. “Not that it’s done us much good, it has to be said. But anyway. We seem to be on top of things now. Out of the three Inserts, Verny, only two are left, and they are both fucked.”

It became just another noise after a while, a noise that couldn’t get beyond the thrum of heat in his head. Even Vernon Lord seemed bored by Gleave’s speech.

“What is it you want?” Sean asked.

“I just want to plough my own furrow,” Vernon said. “I’m just making my own sweet way in the world.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sean sneered. “You fucking evil piece of shit. You fucking body-snatcher.”

Vernon screwed up his face in mock disgust. “Ouch,” he said, and started laughing.

“You bent old bastard,” Sean continued, stoking his rage, letting it come, getting on top of it, controlling it for what he needed to do next. “You ancient, sad old has-been. But no, I’m being kind. Sad old never-was, more like.”

Vernon had stopped laughing and was stroking the butt of the gun. “Stop it right there, you little shit,” he said. Now it was Sean’s turn to laugh.

He said, “You think a gun can do me any harm, hey?” He got up and slapped Vernon hard across the face.

“You fuck!” Vernon screamed, lurching back and swinging the gun until it was flush with Sean’s forehead.

“Go on!” Sean screamed. “Go on!”

Gleave said, affably, “Do it, Vern. Shoot him.”

The sound of the blast in the closed room was enormous. A hole burst open in the back of Sean’s head that enabled Vernon Lord to watch the framed painting directly behind him take the exiting bullet. Sean staggered back and slumped onto his backside. His head slammed back into the fireplace and his hair caught fire. It smouldered, filling the room with a sickly-sweet scorching.

“Pull him out,” Gleave said, “before he catches fire.”

Vernon, his face red and puffy with exertion, stuffed the gun into the waistband of his trousers and reached down to grab Sean. The skin of his temples was being licked by the flame.

Sean said, “Get your fucking dirty old man’s hands off me.”

He sat up. The hole in his head was diminishing, slowly spiralling shut like the iris lens of a camera. Vernon Lord had frozen, his mouth open as if to take receipt of a spoonful of soup. Sean rammed the heel of his hand into the bridge of Vernon’s nose. The resultant snap was almost as shocking as the gunfire.

Gleave was inspecting his fingernails. Vernon sat dazed on the floor, a crimson hand trying to keep his nose on his face, looking bovinely at Gleave and then Sean and then Gleave again.

Sean said again, “What is it you want?” He could see out of the window that the taxi had vanished. Maybe Emma had heard the gunshot and decided to get help. He hoped she wouldn’t be long.

Gleave said, “Peter de Fleche is a great man. An architect, but not just of buildings. Of people and dreams and futures so wonderful they’d set your head spinning. He was a seer and a joker and a thaumaturgist. Him being over there, it’s paved the way for some amazing things. A dream centre here, maybe. Dream control. Could be huge.”

Sean said, “You killed my parents.”

Gleave’s face fell, his oration wasted. “He’ll be back soon, de Fleche. A glorious return. Once scum like you have been put in the earth. Once all the Negstreams have been sealed for good.”

Sean felt heat flood his fingers, his hands. His arms stiffened with intent. “You killed them.”

Gleave affected a demure look. “A trifling detail in my biography, but yes, you’re right, I bagged those cunts.”

Sean launched himself, knocking over the table and causing the remaining chess pieces to skitter across the floor.

“Kryptonite for Superman!” Gleave laughed, and turned his back coolly on Sean as he swung a fist for him. A length of rope fell on Sean from the balcony overlooking the room. It wasn’t just the weight of the rope or its tenacious coils that trapped him, but something in the rope, something that turned and twisted with its fibres and chilled him to the point of inaction. He felt weak, drained, as though he had just stepped from a long bath that was way too hot for him.

He watched Gleave through a net of grey walk towards a set of double doors. “That, my friend,” he said, “is shroud-laid rope. It consists of four strands wrapped around its heart. It is a strong rope, Sean. And that particular coil is an ageless specimen. Its loops have held dreamships steady in the harbours of the mind. That length has known so many knots and splices. Knots that have been tied by sailors from distant lands and distant centuries. Maybe a million hands have shaped that rope into what? – sheet bends and true-lovers’ knots; the blackwall hitch, the sheepshank, the hackamore. It’s the only weapon your lot understand. It’s my gun and it’s cocked, every chamber filled; the muzzle is pointing at your heart.”

Gleave snapped the handle of the door down and let it swing open.

“It’s a long rope, isn’t it, Sean? I wonder where the other end of it could be? Hey, let me tell you, Sean, how to create a bowline knot. Let me show you how.”

Through the grey net that pulsed and shivered over his eyes, pledging to take him down into unconsciousness, he saw into the adjoining room. The rope snaked deep into it and rose into the air. Emma was swinging by the neck on the end of it, which had been lashed to a wooden tie-beam that traversed the width of the room. Her face was black and her tongue hung from her mouth, almost reaching as far as her collarbone. One of her shoes had slipped off. She swung like a metronome, ticking off the beat of his misery. He could still smell the apples in her hair.

The grey net turned black and he was saved from seeing any more.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: THE BURN

DE FLECHE HAD approached him with the timid politeness of an elderly man who wants to know the time, or directions to the library. His smile was disarming, but there was something about his eyes that unsettled Will. They looked as though they belonged to someone else, as if this body had come across them by luck, or poached them from another. They were too bright and vibrant for this vessel. De Fleche’s head flopped against his shoulder at a sickening angle as though he had no bones in his neck. He regarded Will almost curiously, the bizarre set to his head giving him a shy appearance.

“You help the man, the woman, yes? You tell them runaway chop-chop?”

Will bore down on his distaste. The voice was loose and phlegmy and sounded as though it were travelling to him over a bed of smashed glass. The smell that floated off the man’s lolling tongue – the size of a dog’s tongue – was rank in the extreme.

“I don’t know them.”

“You don’t? You chit-chat away like old friends. Talking weather? Talking sport? Talking who is poking who?” A forefinger stabbed into the O made with his other hand.

“I thought I knew him, but I didn’t.”

De Fleche grinned. “You’ll see many faces here that you thought you knew. Old friends. Old lovers.” He scrutinised Will’s face like an experienced shopper seeking bargains at a fruit stall. “You’re fresh.”

“Fresh?”

De Fleche nodded enthusiastically. “Cooling on the slab. Path man tucking into you with his saws and blades. Brain on the scales. Cause of death.”

“I suppose I’m fresh then. Yes.”

“You with me? You without me?”

Will looked around him. In the distance, a dozen grey smocks had clustered at the top of the hill, which was just visible over the tops of the trees. Their heads were turned towards him, he could tell. He wondered if they were the restful dead. The unpanicked dead. Those who had died before de Fleche’s time and were immune to his influence.

“Sorry?”

“You in my pocket or fodder?”

“Fodder for what?” Will asked. “I’m dead. I bought the extra-large T-shirt and I’ll wear it every day. I’ve done death. What else is there, for Christ’s sake?”

“Death is a beginning. Oh it’s other things too. It’s irony’s best mate. Death is a joker with a bag of pepper sweets. Death is an appointment it doesn’t know how to keep. Death doesn’t wear a watch. Death is yesterday and tomorrow all wrapped up in one. But most of all it’s a beginning. If you want it.”

“And if I don’t?”

De Fleche leaned into him, conspiratorially. “I know of things here, if you know where to look for them, that will devour your soul.” He stepped back, beaming at Will as if he had just told him a rude joke and was waiting to see the reaction. “Drink?” He pulled a bottle made from smoky glass from his pocket, leaving enough of the flap open for Will to see what else lay inside, if he so wished.

“You in my pocket?”

“What are you after?” Will said. His eyes hadn’t strayed from the pocket since de Fleche had withdrawn the bottle. He ignored the drink when de Fleche offered it to him again. Something was in there; he could see light glancing off it, slow liquid light that snagged in Will’s eyes like syrup spinning from a spoon.

“Simple things in life,” de Fleche said. “A steak pie and a glass of Tizer. A woman with big tits. Friday night is comedy night on Channel Four. Revenge.”

Will didn’t hear any of it. Instead, he heard de Fleche’s original question, repeated so often it became mantra-like, became nonsense, like repeating one’s name over and over until the monotony of speech takes away all of its relevance.

“What’s in there?” he asked, lifting himself on tip-toe to try to define its shape.

“You in my pocket? You in my pocket?”

youinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocket

It was a book. The first book Catriona had ever bought for him, when they had been seeing each other for about a month. It was a tatty old Corgi Carousel paperback by Gordon Burness called The White Badger. Cat had bought it for him because the picture on the cover – of Snowball, an albino badger – reminded her of Will: pale, bemused, babyish. Inside, she had written: For Will. My own little badger. Love, Cat.

He remembered the smell of that book. He had slipped it under his pillow once he had read it. He gazed at it now. He yearned for its smell, for its special feel between his fingers. Something she had bought for him. Something she had touched, just for a little time. Something she had touched.

youinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocket

Will said, “You don’t have any power over me.”

“We’ll see about that,” de Fleche replied, deepening the view for him. “We’ll see.”

THEY LIFTED SEAN and carried him into the room, a dining room with its long table set to one side. On the walls were various pictures of benevolent seascapes and smiling, matriarchal figures in the midst of picnicking families and frisky dogs. They provided a sickening diorama against which Emma swung gently, the rope (he hoped it was the rope, God yes, the rope, and not the bones in her neck grating together) grinding and popping as it shifted against the beam.

Gleave said, “Drop her. Take her out the back and put her in the stables. And shave a few fibres from that rope. Stuff them in her mouth before you take the noose off her.”

Sean tried to kick out, to make some kind of protest, but the strength had been drawn from his muscles as finally as a sting pulled from a bee. He watched Emma sink through the air and diminish, seemingly, into the floor, so violent was her impact with it. She was too slack, too lacking in control for Sean to believe this was Emma. Even in death, she’d retain her grace, her spine. He wanted to tell someone, you’ve got the wrong girl. That isn’t Emma.

Tim Enever sloped out of the shadows, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I told you, didn’t I? I said you were fucked.”

Sean spat at him. He wiped the spittle away with the same vapid indifference. “Do you want some kind of happy badge for that, you phlegm-head? You fucking freak.”

Tim bound Sean’s hands behind him with unexpected strength; rough hemp bit into his wrists, causing his pulse there to sing loudly. He wondered if he would exist long enough to feel it cease. When Tim had finished imprisoning Sean, he grabbed Emma by the hair and dragged her out of the room. Sean bit his lips when her head clouted the wainscot. Tim would pay for that. They all would.

Gleave had lost interest in him. He was standing by the window, looking out at the fields as their hard edges were slowly rubbed out by mist tip-toeing in from the river. Sean might as well have been dead already.

“I could be of use to you,” Sean said. Gleave did not turn around but Vernon Lord began cackling.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Like you were a great help to me.”

“Gleave,” Sean persisted.

“You’d kill me the first chance you got,” Gleave said. He could have been soothing a child to sleep. “You’ve worked hard, Sean. It’s time you had a rest. A long one.”

Tim returned, wiping his hands on a tea towel patterned with cats. He moved in front of him and draped the noose around Sean’s neck.

Sean said, hating the wheedling aspect that had crept into his voice, “Tim, how long do you think you’ve got? Hey? Before they fuck you up too?”

“I do good,” Tim said, conversationally. “Me and Lordy. We clean up. He harvests, I deliver. Nice.”

“And all because people call you ‘sir’ over there, is that it? Do you know how sad that is?”

“Do you know how sad you are? In two minutes, you’re going to be as dead as the thing in Vernon’s boxers, dangling there, kicking imaginary footballs, but I’ll still be earning a crust and getting my back scratched by the girls In Country.”

“For how long, Tim? As soon as you start slowing down, or fucking up, whichever comes first, how long do you think they’ll keep you in custard, hey? For as long as it takes to find another weirdo who’ll happily go wandering among the stiffs while they sit back and rake in the goodies.”

Tim was staring at him, but Sean couldn’t work out if it was because he had hit a nerve or whether Tim had just switched off, as he had seen him do at the de Fleche building sometimes.

“We all share the takings,” Tim said.

“Really?” The noose was causing Sean’s throat to itch. It hugged his Adam’s apple when he swallowed. It felt as though the rope was getting to know him, sizing him up. It felt impatient for the work it was best at. “There’s more than just money. Rich pickings you haven’t been told about. Vernon there. Have a guess how old he is.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Vernon. Do you know how old he is?”

Tim’s mouth was opening and shutting like the slow gape of fish in restaurant tanks. At last, he said, “Vernon’s my friend.” He busied himself checking the knots on Sean’s wrist and around his throat, but he was troubled, Sean could see that. He must suspect something himself, even if he wasn’t saying as much now. Sean suggested that was the case.

“Just fuck off,” Tim said, the profanity sounding clownish coming from his too-soft mouth. “All right? Just fuck off. It’s not going to save you. Nothing’s going to save you.”

“What’s going to save you, Tim?” And then he told him how old Vernon Lord really was.

“What?” Vernon said, when he was distracted from his tabloid newspaper for long enough to see that Tim was gazing at him, his shoulders slumped, the end of the rope like a limp prick in his hands. “What’s up?”

Sean said, “What is it, Tim? You not getting any of this deal? They give you a bit of pocket money to shut you up and send you on your way? And there’s Vernon. Pink and perky. And old enough to be your great-great-grandfather.”

“He’s having you on, Tim,” said Vernon. “Listen to what he’s saying. The madness.”

Sean went on, “You never see Vernon with a cold, or a bad back, do you? And all those things wrong with you, Tim. They could sort you out in a second if they wanted to. But they don’t want you or anyone else getting too strong. They want people they can control.”

Tim said, “In Country, I can breathe clearly. My chest doesn’t hurt. I’m well there.”

“And how often are you allowed over there, Tim? My guess is, not very often, and when you are, they’ve got you on a leash. Vernon doesn’t take those risks, and look at him. Look at a photograph of him from fifty years ago, like I did, something Kev showed me, and you won’t find a single difference. They’re ripping the piss out of you.”

Tim returned his attention to Vernon, who had pulled himself to his feet, a sorry expression on his face. He was slowly shaking his head. Tim said, “Is that true?”

“Timmy,” Vernon said, weakly. “You’ve been like a son to me.”

Gleave strode back into the room, a mobile phone clamped to his ear. It came away from his ear when he saw what was going on.

“Why isn’t he dead yet?” he asked, waving the phone vaguely in Sean’s direction.

Tim said, “I want more life.”

Gleave’s expression was that of a father who had just returned from an apocalyptic Christmas shopping trip to find he has forgotten the turkey. “I want you to do as you’re told. Now string that fucker up.”

Tim said, “No. I want to know why I’m not in the loop. Why aren’t I getting what I deserve?”

“You want what you deserve?” Gleave asked, all patience evaporated. He grabbed Vernon’s revolver from the older man’s hand and pointed it at Tim’s face. There was a flash of light, but the sound that the revolver made, in the same instant that Tim was launched off his feet to paint the wall with his own colours, was not that of a gunshot. Sean, pulled onto his side when Tim dragged the bight of the rope with him, his neck on fire, thought that clouds had entered the room. They passed in front of the sun, blocking the light. But clouds don’t carry brick-dust in their hearts, and their thunder is not caused by collapsing masonry.

The rope liked the feel of itself against his neck. It liked the taste of his sweat as it soaked into its fibres. Sean was sure he felt it constrict against him, like a boa sensing victory: a bitter peristalsis. For a second he thought he was back in the de Fleche building with Robbie Deakin and Nicky Preece, swapping insults and working up a sweat on the hammer. Plaster dust was in his hair, making an old man of him. It stuck in his throat. They’d take an hour after work and sink a few Stellas at the Ferry Inn. Home for a bath, phone Emma, go out for a steak, and take the car up to Walton Reservoir. Watch the sun go down, kiss her throat, see what happens next.

There was a lorry in the hallway. It had come at them across the field – Sean could see out of the grotesquely slanting window frame, through the settling plumes, a haphazard set of tyre prints slewing in great, lazy zig-zags as they homed in on the farmhouse – and ploughed through the face, lurching onto its side and taking out two of the walls completely. Gleave was trapped beneath one of them, screaming so violently that there was blood in his spittle. His leg was trapped under a pile of bricks and one of the ancient beams that had dropped from the ceiling. The shin was folded neatly back on itself. If Gleave could have waggled his toes he’d scratch his calf with them.

Vernon was nowhere to be seen. The lorry’s cab with its starred windscreen was empty, the door swinging on its hinges. Sean worked his wrists inside the loop that trapped them, trying to ease them free. Gleave’s screams were like cups of espresso for a drunk; they slapped him awake when it would have been easier to drift off and let things happen without his say so for a while.

But the knots were complex and keen. Already Sean could feel an oiliness on his skin that was not just sweat. Gleave was looking at him now with clownish wide eyes. His lips had been given a coat of purple greasepaint. He was going to black out soon. He focused on the appalling injury to Gleave’s leg, and the hands, outstretched as if Gleave was pretending to turn an invisible steering wheel. He worked against the knots more feverishly, shutting his mind to the heat they forced into his wrists. His blood helped to lubricate the configurations. He felt a swooning in the centre of his brain and blackness moved in on his vision, dark fire burning at the edges of paper. He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply. To faint now was to die. He imagined Naomi stroking his forehead and kissing his cheek with her cool lips. He smelled her: rosewater, chocolate, the faint vegetable whiff of henna in her cropped hair. The knots gave a little and the snake around his throat relaxed its grip. Oxygen flooded him and he revived, the miasmal chaos of the dining room resolving itself around him into its constituent parts: pebbles of glass, dunes of dust, splintered beams. Gleave was hunched over his ruined limb, shaking, his skin bleached by shock. The engine block of the lorry had ruptured: the room was filling with the stink of scorched oil.

Naomi’s smells lifted from him, but he felt her near. If he could turn around he felt he might see her. He fought with the rope at his wrists and got a thumb free; the knot’s grip lessened and he had a hand free in seconds. He lifted the noose from his throat and rubbed at the tender burn that encircled it like strange jewellery.

Naomi was nowhere to be seen, but his disappointment was brief: she had been here for him, in some form or other. She was still alive for him, if he wanted her. He just had to deal with their new level of involvement. She was still Naomi; she was different, that was all.

Sean got to his feet and kicked away the remaining coils of rope. As soon as it was off him, he felt strength beat a path through his limbs again. Something caught his eye on the floor in the midst of all the rubble: Vernon’s whistle on its chain. He gathered it up and slipped it over his head, relishing the feel of the cold metal against his chest.

Ignoring Gleave, but pocketing his revolver, he ducked out of the dining room and padded in darkness down a corridor that led to the kitchen. A track in the lino: the heel of Emma’s remaining shoe as she was dragged to the back door. Outside, the cold air scoured the inside of his throat as effectively as the rope had done for the exterior. It beat tears from his eyes as he stumbled over the cobbled yard. A mealy smell drifted to him from the barn, of ancient manure and stale hay cleansed by the wind and made palatable.

She was a broken heap in the corner of the barn, inches away from a pile of straw that might have cushioned her and kept her warm if she had been placed in it. The foot without a shoe had blackened on its short journey outside. A stick of chewing gum peeked from the top of her jeans pocket. He went to her and smoothed her hair, rested her head on a pillow of straw, trying not to dwell on the lack of firmness in her neck, or the way her tongue would not stay inside her mouth. Instead he thought of how her neck had tightened when he kissed it, the pulse quickening as he drew her towards him. How her tongue had flickered around his own, or mapped a silver route across his torso.

He wanted to take her away now. Find the taxi and drive them somewhere safe. Force Pardoe to take care of her. Her death ought to be the end of it, the right kind of closure. He held her hand for a little while longer, then went out to find Vernon Lord.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: HYDRA

WILL COULDN’T GET his balance sorted out for long enough to take a proper look at where he was. He remembered de Fleche’s remarkable eyes joining with his and making it hard to see anything of any significance in his periphery. At one point it appeared that he was inside de Fleche’s pocket, with its silk lining and corners deep with lint, a forgotten Polo mint and the book Catriona had given him. He had forgotten who he was and what was happening for a while, content instead to flick through the pages while what must have been a surrounding illusion tried to impinge on him. He found a receipt for a meal they had shared in a Hammersmith restaurant and a passport photo of Cat in frightened rabbit mode. He lingered over her inscription to him.

When he finally closed the book, he was on the floor, alone, shivering in an uncommonly chill wind that channelled down to the end of the alleyway in which he was crouched. Blackened brick walls made a chute that lifted on either side of him, so high that he couldn’t see where they turned to rooftops, or gave way to the night sky. The book was gone. He felt cheated, unfulfilled. What had de Fleche promised him, in the end? Words that wound themselves around his mind like mating worms.

“De Fleche!” he called out, and the flat, dead weight of his words bounced back off the walls. The wind filleted him. He did not recognise this place.

He walked without seeing another person for what seemed like hours. All of the streets he turned into were like photographs he had seen of wartime London, windows boarded up, shivering under the sky and what it might bring. All lamps had been killed. Then the rain started. Serious rain. Good old Great British rain. Rain that did not fuck about.

“This is death for me, then,” he thought. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but find a chink of light in an eternity of darkness. High on an embankment a rail track slithered away to unknown, unknowable, distances. Shop fronts that might have given him something with which to entertain the eye for a little while were barricaded with corrugated iron, their awnings selfishly hiding their names from him under coats of rot or rust or graffiti.

But he felt somewhere, not too far away, a tiny coal of warmth that pulsed in the cold, perhaps just for him. A speck of relief. The dot of an island in the Pacific.

Like a hungry dog nosing around for the merest shred of scent that promises dinner, Will made long detours into unlikely streets or cut across unkempt lawns booby-trapped with plastic toys in his search for the warmth. Sometimes – he couldn’t explain how – he knew he was on the wrong track and had to double back and find his original spot, where the feeble pulse of heat had been detected. Then he would be off again, trying to plug into the current and let it pull him in.

It took an age, and Will realised that in real terms that was exactly what might have happened. But suddenly, the heat was stronger and he gave himself to it, the decisions to turn into this street or hurry across that square coming more fluidly as the pulse quickened. At one point he laughed out loud: this must be what it was like for animals, the scent of blood hot and heady in their nostrils. He understood the thrill of the hunt as he closed in on his catch. He could almost see it, a red ball throbbing in the midst of so much blue-black emptiness. Its promise of succour was great; his veins sang and sweat broke out on his forehead, despite the wind’s cruelty.

A door. A red door. It might have been a blue or a green door, but it had been overtaken by the red of warmth. What lay behind it understood the secret of need, the science of comfort. He touched the door and suddenly he was inside the house, sitting on the edge of a bed. He was unhappy now because the interior of the house had proved to be chillier than he expected. No warm welcome. No lack of tension to relax the tight band of pain that circled his head. His hands itched. He stared down at them, at the raw welts scoring the pads of flesh on a parallel with his life lines. If he put his hands together, miming an open book, the weals made a V-shape across them. Their pain was fresh and bright. Closer inspection revealed a pattern in the welts, a series of raised obliques, as though a length of hemp had bitten into his flesh.

There was a knock at the door.

Will stood up. He didn’t want to look to his side. Someone lay there, unmoving. A body, losing heat. But that couldn’t be right. This was a house of warmth and promise. He went to the window and peeked through the curtains. There were people outside.

Sally, there’s someone watching us… Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?

The voice came to him heavy and full of interference, as though he were a child again, listening to a message from a friend through a Ski yoghurt pot at the end of a piece of string. He went to the door and opened it on a tired policeman in a wet uniform. For a moment he didn’t recognise the man for his scrubbed look and the extra few pounds he was carrying on his jowls and his waistline. But in the moment he recognised him, he recognised too how he had been tricked. Death didn’t work to a timetable. He remembered how de Fleche had put that. Death was sinuous and sly. Death was a Moebius strip, or Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. This was Sean’s beginning, and Will’s true end.

Sorry to bother you, sir. We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?

De Fleche spoke through him as he was about to give the architect to Sean, making a mockery of any belief Will had that he was in control.

I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.

Sean seemed satisfied with that. Will raged against the seal that de Fleche had squeezed between him and the outside. Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?

Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.

And then the policeman was apologising and backing off, hurrying back through the rain with his partner to a car that was warm.

When they were alone again, de Fleche let the leash out a little and Will struggled against it, battling to be free. The book was just pages and glue but it had more spine than he. It was yesterday’s book. Catriona didn’t exist any more, the book meant nothing.

“I don’t want to be in your pocket,” he said, sounding like a petulant child at a birthday party who had failed at every game.

“Too late,” de Fleche said. “You killed her. How does that make you feel? You and women are a potent combination, aren’t you? Lethal. How many’s that now? You should have some stickers done, slap them on the side of your cockpit. Authorised kills. Will, the Red Baron. The Strangler. Sleep-Stealer. Kids’ll have trouble going to bed knowing you’re on the hoof.”

“You killed her,” Will said.

“Oh go on, don’t be so modest. You passed my test, squadron leader. Ladykiller. You’re in the army now. Go out there and make mayhem. Make lots of what you are. It’s New Year’s Day for you, for all of us. Year Dot. Year Zero. Let’s have a fresh start.”

The door opened and he found himself in another street in a part of the world he didn’t know. There were others there like him, thin men with clothes that hung on their bodies in dire need of a wash. They sweated, these men, and he sweated too, despite the cold. One of them came up to him, scratching the back of his head and looking around him maniacally as if they were in the middle of a column of biting gnats. His hair was a greasy cap stuck to his scalp and his chin had not felt a blade for a week or so. He wouldn’t look at Will, and when he parted his lips to talk, a fist-sized glut of flying beetles buzzed out of his mouth. He didn’t notice them. They might as well have been exhaled smoke; he certainly looked nervous enough to need a cigarette.

“Are you hungry?” the man said. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Because, like, I am hungry. Am I hungry? Too right. Too right. How about you? You hungry?”

The other thin men were looking at him with similarly earnest expressions. There was trouble too, in their eyes, as if they couldn’t quite understand how they had come to be in this position. They looked at Will, the newcomer, as if he had brought some instructions with him.

Up ahead, behind a blockade of cars, he could see more people, but these were not like him or the other thin men. They were stouter and wore a better cut of clothes. They were nervous. Some of them held guns or knives. Their children stood behind them, guarded by the legs of their elders. Even at this distance, Will could smell their odious flesh and the alcohol reek of their perfumes and soaps. They smelled of fat and dairy products. They smelled of mouthwash and shoe polish. It made Will’s mouth sour to feel such an alien flavour in his throat. The thin men walked slowly towards the blockade, and all they could think about was how they wanted to make those fat people less glossy, less stench-ridden. Thinner.

GLEAVE WAS DEAD. But it wasn’t his leg injury that had killed him. Appalled, Sean took in the extent of his degeneration. He resembled potatoes that had been left to boil for too long and had collapsed to a watery vichyssoise in the pan. Tufts of hair or nubs of bone emerged – macabre islands – laced with bloody veins, like seams of sauce in raspberry ripple ice cream. His suit had become a poor-quality bag in which to contain him. Sean couldn’t feel satisfied with Gleave’s death. It had not been achieved by his own hand. He felt cheated, ill-organised. Things were passing him by.

The gun in Sean’s hand drew him on. Without it, he might have stayed with Emma until someone forced him to leave her. The ticks from the cooling engine of the lorry were more spaced out now. Water dribbled from the cracked radiator and a sigh eased from its innards, as if the machine were settling into its death.

He remembered little of what Pardoe had said of Cheke, but he remembered what he had said about her improvement. She had already been dangerous, and very fast, that day when Marshall had been killed. How long ago was that? A few weeks? Sean found it hard to nail down time now. So much had happened. His life had seen the kind of upheaval that a man of eighty would never witness. Time became unimportant in those shadows. All it did was tease you with how much more shit you might have to put up with.

The gun felt comfortable in his hand. He edged outside, past the creaking back end of the lorry and the rotting brick teeth at the smashed entrance. Small fires had combusted here, despite the cold and damp. They burned sootily and pumped oilsmoke across fields that were white with frost. Bare branches made stark exclamation marks on their perimeters. The sky was a beautiful blue, paling as it bent to touch the horizon. There were a few icy scratches up there but no clouds. A bird sang a brief, exhilarating snatch of song from the chimney stack. The taxi was parked to the side of the farmhouse, the door open, the keys still in the fascia.

He watched Vernon Lord staggering across the field, pursued, if such leisurely advancement could be described so grandly, by Cheke. The crash had realigned her somewhat: she was dragging her leg behind her and the leg, freed from any immediate control, was finding it hard to concentrate on remaining a leg. From here, it looked like a head, with a baseball cap jammed down over the ears.

There was nothing he could do. He watched until, like a leopard bringing down a deer, Cheke had Vernon underneath her. He screamed, or tried to scream, for as long as it took her to detach his face. Then Vernon withdrew into himself like a surly child. Age piled on to him, denuding his bones, puckering his flesh into a sea of wrinkles and liver spots. Cheke stepped back, aghast. He’d had enough, old Vernon. All the fight was gone from him and time, waiting in the wings, had recognised its cue. It came back to him, with interest, enjoying the feel of meat that it had been cheated of for so long. It wasn’t Cheke that killed Vernon Lord; it was his own greed that did it.

Two deaths, then, that could have gone one way but found another. And Emma, whose murder ought to have been foreseen. Pardoe, the bastard, should have paid out his story just as all that bad rope had been. They should have been warned. Sean wondered how his own end would come. He was tired of the body count and the unnecessary killing. He wouldn’t mind making a little peace with someone, anyone, for a change.

He returned to the barn and gently lifted Emma in his arms and walked around the building to the front of the house. He placed her in the back of the cab, securing her in the seat with the seatbelts. When he turned to get in the driver’s seat, Will was standing three feet away from him, smelling him on the air like a cat at dinner time. Only it wasn’t Will. It was too crude an approximation. Sean felt a flare of anger when he thought of how easily she hoped to fool him. She noticed the reticence in the way he appraised her. Slowly, Will sank from her true face as it emerged.

“I couldn’t take him in,” she said, almost apologetically, her voice coming as easily as if they had been chatting for an hour. “Vernon. I couldn’t take any part of him in. Too dry. No moisture in him at all. He was like something you’d use to start a fire. He’s still out there in the field. Mummified.”

“That’s time for you,” Sean said, carefully. Her eyes were dark and lovely and too intensely fixed upon his own for his liking. She was deeply, horribly beautiful. He was scared to look away and scared to maintain eye contact.

He said, “Your leg, it got better.”

Her hand brushed against her thigh. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a little difficult for me to concentrate sometimes. There’s so much here to distract me.”

“I know how you feel.”

Cheke moved around the bumper of the cab, six feet away from him now. “I’d like to know how you feel,” she said. “I’ve dreamed about you. I never had dreams before, before I came here.” She frowned. “At least, I don’t think I did. I can’t remember. But I dream now. Vivid dreams of you and me. All the different ways it could be.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. Do you find me attractive, Sean?”

“It’s hard to find somebody attractive when they’ve been spending such a long time trying to get you killed.”

Amusement played on Cheke’s lips for a second as she tried to gauge whether he was toying with her or not. “We’ve moved on from that,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I know what pain is. I wouldn’t want any of that for you.” She took another step closer. “I don’t have anything left to do and there’s nobody left to do it for.”

“Then you’re free.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be free. Maybe you’re the genie who rubbed my lamp for me. I’m indebted to you.”

Sean’s fingers on the keys twisted clockwise a fraction. “Really, you don’t have to. I did nothing.”

“You were the catalyst.” Her lips were carmine and soft. He could see every wrinkle and flaw in the flesh. It was good that she had flaws, this creature who had seemed so perfect. It was good, promising even, that she allowed them to show. “You were the reason they brought me here.”

“Then you have a job to finish.”

“It’s over,” she said. “Gleave promised me that he would help me change enough to be like him, like you. All of you.”

She was within touching distance, if he wanted it. Sean’s fingers loosened then recircled around the butt of the revolver. He said, “You look fine to me. Keep that look. It suits you.”

Cheke spread her arms and looked down at her body. “You think so? This is me, well, most of it. Plus a few modifications.”

“It looks good on you.”

“It would look good on you too,” she said.

“I’m not your type.”

“What is my type?”

Sean said, casually, “Dead.”

She bowed her lips in mock disappointment. “That can be arranged.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

Now Cheke smiled and Sean was overwhelmed, shocked by the depth of her mouth, the animal slant to it. Her teeth were packed in rows inside it, like a shark’s. “Of course,” she said.

“Then I can go. You won’t mind if I go.”

“A hug, first, to see you off. It’s only fair.”

Sean went immediately to her and drew her into the circle of his arms. He felt her ripple against him, every sensory pimple and pad snuffling into his secret smells. A slight burning, in his gut.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

He shot her twice through the heart. She buckled under him and staggered back, scooping up the fluid that was lost to the explosions. She was trying to breathe, but her lung had collapsed; Sean could see it, a deflated, frothy balloon of blood. Will’s face returned, a surprised oval that couldn’t quite complete itself: his mouth belonged to someone else, someone of a different caste that Sean didn’t recognise. While she was trying to rein in the loops and lassos that her body had become, Sean bent and picked up her heart, which was slowly, clumsily rolling back to the magnet of her body. He flung it into the fire.

She made an O of her mouth and blew a gust of air from it, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach. She looked surprised, as if she had never believed that she could be disposed of so simply, so swiftly. She said, “When we are married—” Then she fell back onto the frozen soil and began to drain into it. Bitterly, he went to watch until there was just a dark outline of her shape discernible in the white.

He went back to the cab, tossed the gun onto the dashboard, and started the engine. Then he turned it off, got into the back with Emma, and held her until her solid, cold flesh began to warm and he could almost believe she might turn in his arms and say hello.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: KILLENNIUM

YEAR ZERO.

The quiet houses were rebelling. People did not want to die in their beds. They came onto the streets with weapons that could do no harm and fought until the breath was squeezed from their bodies. Large men with powerful muscles folded under the thin men. Everybody folded under the thin men. They were irresistible. In seconds, the ranks of the thin men were bolstered by those that had just been dispatched. Enemy to ally in the beat of a heart, or lack of one.

Will moved on the periphery of the crowd, powerless to prevent the slaughter. He could feel de Fleche in him; he presumed they all did, gathering strength and pace. Rediscovering his appetite for a land he had not seen for twenty years. Tired of death’s environs, he wanted to branch out and have some influence over the living as well as the dead. He was ready to return, Will could feel it. And when he did, all would be lost. Architects made designs and he knew that de Fleche had been busy. He caught a glimpse of some of these blueprints when his eye, jaundiced by the street battles and the insensate dropping of bodies, turned away to look at the sky. He caught sight of vast machines of torture to process the living, of awful dark houses where the doors and the windows were ceaselessly motile to prevent any escape while the minions within went about their business of dismemberment and witchcraft. He understood de Fleche’s motives for the grand plan that he wanted to put into place – revenge fed his ambitions – but he did not know who the targets were. Nobody was to be spared in his search, however. It was this indiscrimination that cut Will to the quick.

“Are you hungry? Jesus, I am absolutely starving.” The man with the itchy scalp and the fidgeting hands had not left him alone. Will couldn’t see how his hunger had prevailed, not after the terrible feast he had gorged upon. The man sucked juices from his fingers and smacked his lips. “I could eat that again,” he said. “So hungry. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

If de Fleche was still near, Will could not feel him. He suspected that he was in the background, assessing his position, biding his time before the balance of power shifted and he could make himself known again. Revenge, he had said, Will recalled vaguely. Revenge against whom?

It didn’t matter, for now. What did matter was the hell that was being raised around him, not six feet from where he stood. Blood was being spilled as generously as red wine from a sot’s glass. The thin men were systematically wasting anything that stood in the way of the food they craved. Hunger tickled Will’s belly too, but not to the extent that he was ready to take life for it. Why was that? What was so different about him that brought on this moralistic stance? He thought of the man he had killed at the caravan site. Was that it? That he had broken the neck of some evil swine and had marked his own card by that action? There was no compulsion to add to the body count here because he had been blooded and could take on a supervisory role? The deferential way in which his colleagues treated him seemed to support that suspicion. And as soon as the seed was sown, he backed off, recoiled from it.

“Well then, are you hungry?” Fidget boy was pointing at a small girl holding a plastic doll with no head. He reached out, for God knows what purpose, and Will stood in his way, clamping a hand around his arm.

“Leave her alone.”

Fidget regarded him uncomprehendingly. His tongue stuck out from between pock-marked lips and ranged dryly around. “Hungry?” he whispered.

A bell rang, a tiny bell jang-jang-janging. Everyone turned to watch as the sit-up-and-beg bicycle wobbled through the throng. The man on the seat flapped his hands at people to get out of the way. His hair flew out behind him in grey streamers. His tongue lolled and dribbled against his cheek. When people recognised de Fleche, they cringed and sank into the shadows.

“Will, this simply won’t do,” he said. His tone was that of a prissy director at an am-dram rehearsal. He rode the bicycle round and around Will, rubbing his chin, while Fidget asked for a croissant, a pot of Müller Rice, shit mate, anything.

De Fleche clenched the brakes and skidded to a halt. He touched the little girl on the forehead with his thumb and she imploded. All that was left of her was a scrap of her skirt and the plastic doll, black, molten, and disfigured.

“Well that was fucking charming,” Will said, and pushed de Fleche off his bike. He was sickened that his ability to be shocked by anything had been closed down, as neatly and as finally as the switch on a life-support machine. A groan rose from the thin men behind him. De Fleche stood up and brushed himself off. He was laughing, but there was something unpleasant about the laugh. An edge.

“I haven’t the time for this, Will. What is it, do you think you’re too precious to be part of this revolution?”

“I don’t want a part of this. I want to be left alone.”

“You signed up.”

“You tricked me. You used Catriona as bait.”

“I did nothing of the sort.” He smiled and clapped Will on the shoulder. Will flinched, thinking of the way the girl had winked out of existence. “Some tatty little book I came across and you went all Bambi-eyed over it. I could have spread you on my toast at that moment. It was all rather sweet.”

Will said again, “You tricked me.”

De Fleche sighed and looked around him. “This is going on all over the shop, you know. Pretty small potatoes for the time being, but there’s some big King Edwards waiting to be pulled out. It’s in these places, Warrington and the like, where the grand changes, the new dawning will come into its own. Not London or Paris or Sydney. Warrington. Landevant. Beecroft. Places I know, but you’d be hard-pushed to find on a map. Out of acorns, and all that flim-flam.”

“Jesus,” Will said, and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw ideograms of colour dancing there. Not a bad trick, he considered, for a dead man. “Why?” he asked.

“Will, I’m not prepared to build a little campfire and have all you owl-faced cub scouts sit around listening to Uncle Peter telling stories while—”

“You said something about revenge,” Will cut in. “Revenge for what?”

De Fleche nodded, gravely. “Okay,” he said. “All right.” He put a fatherly arm around Will and led him away from the impasse. He said, “Three is the magic number. Three wise men. Three stooges. Three coins in a fountain. Three for the price of two at Boots. The Godfather trilogy. And then there’s me, and a man called Leonard Butterby and a man called Thomas Lousher.” He stopped and turned to Will, brought his other arm up to Will’s shoulder, and massaged them both gently. “I’m telling you this because you have promise. Also, because you have nothing else. Eternity without a bag of marbles to play with is like a Widnes prostitute with a corrugated gob. It sucks bad-style.”

“I don’t want anything to do with you, or your sick fantasies.”

“You will, once your dead brain kicks in. Once the maggots down south have reamed out your Willishness. Once you’ve become a puppet for me, like these other gawps.”

Will could hear something else nagging him above de Fleche’s hubristic spiel. Something clunkingly mechanical approaching from the end of the street where de Fleche himself had appeared.

“I worked with those two men for maybe ten years. They were attracted to me for my natural beauty, my collection of Japanese stamps, and, I suppose, my ability to sniff out the odd Negstream. They were impressed that I could track down ways into this place. They paid me to do research into it. We thought we could make a fortune by using the doorways into different levels of consciousness for all kinds of stuff. Sponsors might want to use it to advertise. Imagine. Go to sleep, we switch on, and people all over the world wake up wanting a bag of KP nuts, or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. It was naughty, but who was going to stop us? Bollocks to the standards agencies. How are they going to find out? How do you control something that you can’t touch? We were going to talk to film and TV bigwigs. Get people to pay us a subscription so that they could have films shown straight into their heads. Or football matches. Or porn. Or 24/7 news.”

It was a black cab, turning into the street. De Fleche was too caught up in his own reverie to notice.

De Fleche said, “Problem was, I couldn’t get in. Because once you get in, you can’t get out the same way. So we were a bit stuck. But those pricks, they were small-time idiots. They picked up some measly five-figure financial package from a company who were interested in backing them as long as they were guaranteed front-end mentions once the system was up and running. What did they do? Filled their nappies that they had so much money for the sweet shop that they pushed me through a Negstream and fucked off with the dosh.”

“Trapping you in here?”

“Only for the past twenty years. As I say, a Negstream is like a condom. You only use it once. You have to find your own way back. I couldn’t.”

“So what makes you think you can get back now?”

“You know the answer to that, Will. You, the great, white disaster hunter. Chasing tragedy all over the country when you could have done what I’m doing, and create your own. I’ve worked hard to get some influence. It’s here, in front of you, the fruits of all that labour. Enough deaths and I’ll have a Negstream of my own to step through. And then we’ll see what kind of influence I really have. Soon now. So soon that I probably wouldn’t have the time to soft-boil an egg. I can taste it. Life, that is,” he said with a grin, “not the egg.”

“This isn’t just about Lousher and Butterby, is it?”

“I suppose not. Golly, they might even be dead already. This travelling circus of mine know their scent well. It’s just a matter of time for them. But the bigger picture, I never lost sight of the bigger picture like they did. I am a master of dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears. Control. It’s what it’s all about, whether you’re a rat trying to build a nest in a sewer, or a president slapping wrists in the Middle East. I am in control. I am big in control. Do you know, Will, that in some places on this planet, that just about secures god status for me?”

The taxi pulled up about fifty metres down the street. When Sean slipped out of the driver’s side door, Will almost shouted out his name. He had missed him dearly. Emma too. He wanted de Fleche to disappear in a flash of light back to his little laboratory where he could make his alchemy all he liked. Will just wanted his friends back, at least for a few minutes. Just to say thank you, goodbye, remember me. Seeing Sean empowered him. Not yet, he said to his friend. Hang fire, just for a minute. You’ll know when to make your move.

“You’re insane, Peter,” he said. “What are you going to be? A living king with a country of dead subjects? How deeply, utterly satisfying. I won’t be a part of it.”

“Then you’ll be dust. I’ll use your soul for a money bag. I’ll have your eye sockets for pencil holders.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“I will, believe me.”

“Yeah, right. What is it, by the way, that scares you?”

De Fleche smiled at him. He reached out a finger and pressed it against Will’s forehead. He felt a strange buzzing there, not unpleasant, like a time as a child when he had pressed his face against a jar in which he had captured a wasp. Then he stepped away, his face changing, flooding with colour. “Christ, yes,” he said, the words jerking out of him rather than being impelled by his breath. “Christ. Yes!”

He looked down at the dust and moved. Footprints ate into the ground. De Fleche said, “Isn’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

“He asked you a question,” called Sean. To Will, the voice came from somewhere distant and muggy. He watched Sean lift something to his mouth and blow long and hard.

Sean didn’t hear anything, but the effect it had on the thin men was shocking. As one, they howled and scarpered, hands to their ears. Will dropped to the ground and was writhing in the dust, trying to beat from his ears whatever woeful sound Vernon’s whistle had made.

De Fleche ignored Will and turned to stare at Sean. Sean’s breath wavered, but only for an instant. De Fleche wore a fixed, flabbergasted look, the look of a father-to-be who has been pacing around outside the maternity ward waiting to hear if it was a boy or a girl only to be told that it was three of each.

“There’s a noise-abatement policy in these parts, I believe,” he said, his voice raised over a clamour Sean couldn’t detect. The air close to Sean’s left eye was shearing, as though he was looking through a window with a flaw in the glass. “I did not,” continued de Fleche, “wait two decades to come back to this place just to have some scarface twerp fuck it all up for me. Desist. Forthwith. Or I shall smite thee with a big stick.”

The air was rippling now, as unstable as the skin in a pan of boiling milk.

“Who are you going to mess with?” de Fleche asked. “Me? What did I do? Or would you rather mess with the man who killed your girl?”

Sean’s lips faltered on the whistle. The tremor in the air grew still.

“Don’t listen to him, Sean,” Will said, levelly. “Believe him and we’re all finished.”

Sean moved the whistle away. “What’s he talking about?”

“He showed me what happened that night. He fed me into the bedroom where Naomi died. He was in me. He was using me. I couldn’t do anything.”

Sean’s lips had turned white. “You killed her?”

“I didn’t kill her,” Will said, holding out his hands. “De Fleche killed her. But he was in me when he did it.”

Sean said, “What do I do, Will? Who do I believe?”

Will pressed his lips together. He closed his eyes. “He killed her. But the coward he is, he needed someone else to hide behind. A glove puppet. Me. It’s why you couldn’t remember my face. Because you weren’t just looking at my face. You were looking at his too.”

De Fleche said, “Yeah, and if you believe that, then I’ve got a tin of tartan paint I want to sell you.”

Sean returned the whistle to his lips. He blew, harder than before. The ripples returned.

“Hey,” de Fleche said. “Did you hear what I told you? Front-page news. Your killer is sitting in the dirt. Blood on his hands.”

De Fleche was approaching too rapidly to see the change. And when he did notice what was happening, he was too close to Sean to be able to escape the consequences.

The surgeon stepped out of the buckle in the air, clutching his battered leather medical bag, his stained green mask thankfully concealing an area of his face that was too loose, too wet. Sean heard a deep clack of teeth, too deep to be contained by any kind of mouth that he knew. Words came, coated in saliva so mangled by moisture that Sean couldn’t understand them. Instead of asking him to repeat himself, and too fearful to take his eyes off de Fleche, who was transfixed by the new arrival, Sean said, “Harvest all you like.”

He moved away as the surgeon magicked a scalpel with a bloody edge from the air and carved into the space that de Fleche filled. He wished de Fleche’s screams were beyond the capacity of his ears, as the whistle had been, but not as much as the other things he had been wishing for lately.

“Listen,” Will said, standing in front of Sean but looking over his shoulder at whatever awful scene was being played out. “Thanks. But it’s not over yet.”

Sean shook his head. “It is for me. I’m tired. I’ve had enough. Emma. Emma’s dead and I can’t go on any more. I’ve seen too much of this. Too many people down. More than most. More than you’d see in a fucking war.”

“These dead, these leaks. They all need to go home. They need to be sent back home. You’re the only person who can do it.”

“I want nothing to do with those freaks. No offence intended.”

“None taken. Look, Sean, you have to do it. You know it. Deep down you know it.”

Sean sighed. “Not that deep.”

They went over to the taxi and silently took in the small figure slumped across the back seat. Sean said, “Her too?”

Will said, “She isn’t dead.”

Sean stepped away from him and closed his eyes. “Don’t give me some fucking hippy shite about her being alive in my mind, Will, or I swear, I’ll piss on your grave.”

“She isn’t dead.”

Sean looked at him.

Will said it again, and then, “I’m dead. I should know. Look, take that shit out of her mouth.”

Sean did as he was told. There were more of the fibres than he had expected. He thought they had maybe caught in her lips when she was being dragged out of the noose, but he could see that they had been placed there with purpose, a great knot of hemp pressed into her gullet.

“Make sure you get it all out,” Will ordered.

Sean picked fibres from her teeth and from beneath her swollen, purple tongue. Her face was cold, waxen. Her mouth was as stiff as two slugs perished with salt. He lurched away, swearing and kicking out at the car and at Will.

“I’ve had enough,” he yelled. “I can’t take this any more. Nobody should have to… I mean, there’s a limit. It’s unbearable.”

“I know, I know,” Will soothed. “I know, I promise you.”

He waited until Sean had chased the anger and the fear out of his body, and then he said again, “She’s not dead.”

Sean went back and wordlessly finished the job. As soon as her mouth was empty, he slunk away to the shade of a shop front and sat down in the dust and cried into his hands. He didn’t stop. Not even when Emma slowly uncoiled herself from the back seat and, blinking the sunshine out of her eyes, trudged across the road to sit next to him and rest her head against his shoulder.

WHEN HE HEARD Will tell him what he had to do, he couldn’t accept it.

“The rope?” he said. “This rope? It was meant to kill me and Emma. And you’re saying it’s what I need to send the dead back to where they need to be? So we’re both the same kind of animal. I’m walking. I’m breathing fresh air, but I tell you kidder, there’s fuck all beating in the middle of my chest. I go to bed at night not hearing it. My headaches don’t contain a beat. If there’s a rhythm to life, I’ve lost mine.”

Will nodded, pressing the coils back into Sean’s hand. Emma was long gone. She had promised to wait for Sean, but couldn’t go with him. How could he complain?

“I won’t leave you, Sean,” Will said. “I’ll be your eyes and ears from now on. I’ll lead you on. I’m your friend. No matter what state we’re in.”

Sean stared up at him. He was like a little boy, lost, separated from the people who loved him and might protect him from harm.

Will said, “Tie a knot. I’m first.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: ROPE

ALL OF HIS horizons seemed the same, of late. Viewed under an ochre smog at dusk, the crenellations of tower blocks provided different backgrounds to the same story. Faded clothes fluttered on balconies. The ghosts of piss clouted him at the thresholds of those lifts that worked. His boots created a brittle symphony from the insect corpses underfoot. It was hard to find any comfort in the routine. His composure was found in the simple succour of his tools. That and the friend in his head.

Maybe the wood, over the years, had been eroded by his grip; that was why the baseball bat felt so comfortable as it was hefted. Ditto the blade, which might as well have been knitted into the flesh of his palm: he had to look into his hand to make sure he had remembered to pick it up. He loosened the buttons on his leather coat and stretched, forcing the tension of three hours on the road out of his spine, which crackled dully, like the sound of a dog gnawing a bone.

The estate reached above him in a series of black blocks against the night, punched through here and there with holes of television light. Only in the dark could these towers look clean, pretty, even. By dawn they would revert to sooty, scorched piggeries growing out of the city’s shit and grime. Lice and rot worming up every wall. Asthma was rife here, beating the national average by a fair whack. There had been a case of TB last year.

He approached the first of the towers, Brook Acre, gently whistling a tune he had heard on the radio that morning and swinging the bat in his fist. Grey net curtains tongued the sky from a dozen open windows. The howls of dogs were a strange, distorted surge of noise through the ginnels and stairwells of the estates. From a pall of cigarette smoke, kids watched him enter the lift and then leave it again in favour of the stairs. Laughter followed him, and couched in that was an insult: “Asshole!” uttered when he had gone beyond the point where he might catch them if he turned back.

“It’s arsehole!” he bellowed. “Arsehole! You’re not Americans! If you’re going to badmouth somebody, do it properly!”

He hated the influx of American influences. It was in the clothes kids wore nowadays; it had changed the pubs and restaurants he frequented; it was television’s primary language. He clenched his jaw when he looked down at the baseball bat. It even coloured his violence.

Whitby lived, after a fashion, on the sixth floor. There was a wife, a daughter, a son. A dog. A mistress for him on the fifth floor who scurried round to polish his knob whenever the wife was stretching pennies at the market. Cosy.

He strode into a poorly lit corridor, boots gritting on glass phials, dry vomit, stripped chicken bones. He caught an old man wanking himself off through his neighbour’s letterbox. A woman with a grubby, greenish bandage around her shin offered to fuck him in return for a quid. A child with diarrhoea had been locked out of his parents’ flat and was sitting in puddles of his own waste, crying silently, exhausted.

“All life is here, hey?” he said to the child as he walked past. “Such colour. Such spirit.”

He reached Whitby’s door and smoothed down his long hair and righted his shirt collars. He reached out a hand for the bell but never got as far as depressing it; he just wanted something to lean against, give him leverage while he kicked the flimsy thing in.

Whitby was in the hall between kitchen and living room, dressed only in a pair of beige Y-fronts. A jam sandwich in one hand, mug of tea in the other. “What the fuck? Who the fucking fuck? Fuck.”

It was all he managed before his sternum caved in under a massive blow from the baseball bat. Blood blackened his chest and piled into his face on his way down, as the internal trauma sought egress. A woman came clattering along the hall from the bathroom, holding a towel to her freshly showered body. Mistress or missus? She was squawking enough for both of them. “Leave him alone, leave him alone,” she crowed, an unpleasant, nasal voice. He lashed out and took her jaw off. She staggered away, clumsily trying to keep her face in place, her hands filling with red, towel dropping to reveal hubbie’s slap marks.

The dog was predictably big and nasty; a German Shepherd. He held out his arm, always padded on jobs like these, and waited until it had hold before slitting its throat with the knife.

“He isn’t here! You should just go away! I’ll give you money!” The daughter now, Honey (what a name for these parts, Jesus!), yelping at him, her big eyes flicking to her choking mother and her senseless father as she held out a blunt letter opener to defend herself. He decked her with a clip from the bat to the top of her head. “Keep your money,” he said.

He found the old man in a sleeping bag in a bedroom filled with cigarette ends and beer cans, soiled underwear, and towers of foil cartons.

“Excellent,” he said, noticing that the man hadn’t tried to make a noise. He regarded Sean calmly with the black, shark’s eyes they all possessed; even held out his arms when he was reached for. He had been waiting for this. Perhaps he had been wishing for it.

The old man didn’t cry when he saw his damaged family. As they left the flat he seemed to sigh with contentment.

“Too right,” growled Sean. “Anything you come to now is a blessing. Consider this a rescue.”

At the car he paused a while to search the horizon. No lights anywhere. Once this place had been a riot of colour and bright windows containing families watching television or eating supper, laughing or fighting, but always together. Now the population had thinned out. Those who had survived had run or tried to protect their dead. Those who were dead were directionless, without anchor. They wheeled around like seagulls playing on thermals, or like a confused compass. When Sean came to call, they pretended they were normal human beings leading normal lives. Normal people, with pieces of them dropping off while he chatted amiably with them in a doorway, the rope coiled around his shoulder burning with intent.

After the man was hanged and the shaved fibres from the rope deposited between his ash-grey lips, Sean dumped the body over a fence separating the rear gardens of a terraced house from a stream which dribbled along at the bottom of a deep gulley. Back in the car, he had barely started the engine before the next one came through to him.

It lives alone, Will said. It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’ll go without a struggle. It needs this. And it’s this way, Sean. Come on…

He powered the car too quickly for an hour and a half until he had reached the outskirts of a conurbation hanging on the edge of Birmingham like a wart on a scarred face.

Make a left here, Sean. Keep going. Just keep going…

There had been months of this. Closed doors, lonely motorways, miles and miles of self-doubt and nausea. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He asked Will once, do the dead breed? and Will had laughed hard and for a long time without answering him.

…keep going…

He knocked at the door this time. He knew he didn’t need to break it down. He waited for an age, but that was okay. He didn’t mind waiting. It gave him something else to do. Something different. He clenched the rope in his fist as he heard footsteps approach the door.

She opened it wide. Late at night, all alone, but what did she have to be frightened of? He gazed at her for a long time.

“I wondered if it might ever happen,” she said.

“I have something I need to do,” he told her.

“I know. I know.”

She didn’t fight him, or plead with him. She even helped him to get the rope over a branch of the ash tree in the garden. He kissed her beforehand because she asked him to, and he would have backed out of it if she hadn’t coaxed him to carry the job through.

As she swung, just before the end, she reached out her hand and he took it. He held it until it closed and shuddered into a fist. Lifting it to his face, Sean pressed his lips against the tiny aperture that her forefinger had made behind the curled thumb, and whispered a message and a promise.

A proposal.