The Third Person

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The day was beginning to die. There were still a few hours of daylight left, but even so: the sun had broken the backbone of the sky, and now it was falling. The air was that little bit colder and you could tell that the clouds gathering at the base of the horizon were going to stick there and darken, swelling up until they filled the world with dusk and then finally solidified into a night sky. Dennison told me it was raining back in Bracken; he’d heard the forecast while I was in the bathroom being sick.

‘I’ll drive you,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to.’

He shrugged.

‘At the moment, I’ve nothing to hang around for. And apart from anything else, I want to see the texts at that house.’

I’d given him the address of Hughes’ mansion. He’d told me that the texts there represented a new form of life, and that there was no way he was risking them falling into someone else’s hands. And perhaps there was some clue in them as to what was happening.

Ten minutes later, anyway, we were on the motorway – doing pretty much the reverse of the journey I’d made that morning, but at roughly twice the speed. Dennison had a fast car, and he was flooring it. I wouldn’t have cared if we crashed. The cars we were passing were like dreams.

I kept glancing down at the printout on my lap.

A blank e-mail, sent both to Dennison and my own account, but the header information told me everything that I needed to know. Everything, but it also led to confusion and mystery. The attachment, however, was clearer.

I said, ‘It has to be her.’

Well, it had certainly been sent from Amy’s e-mail address: the one that I’d set up for her in the second week we were going out. That address was the only one she ever used. When we first met, she didn’t know much about computers and so I’d said that I’d sort one out for her to save her the bother. Maybe I’d made it out to be slightly more complicated than it was: some stupid attempt to impress her a little. I can’t remember. It wouldn’t surprise me.

‘It took me quarter of an hour to explain what pop mail was,’ I said. ‘Even then, I don’t think she really got it.’

Dennison didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on the road.

‘I don’t think I explained it too well.’

Just show me how to use it, she said.

It doesn’t matter how it works.

Do I need to know how the tv works? No.

Do I need to know how the lightswitch works?

Sidling up to me, sly grin in place.

Do I need to know how you work to use you?

I swallowed the memory. ‘She never changed her password. We used to check each other’s mail all the time. But nobody else knew the password, apart from me.’

‘No?’

‘I don’t think she ever told anyone else.’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, why would she have done that?’

Dennison changed lanes, shifting down a gear. We edged a little faster past a dark grey pickup piled high with the skinned, burned remains of cars. The driver’s arm was resting on the open window-ledge, juddering with the road. I turned to watch him as we passed him. I don’t know why. He looked at me, and then looked away again.

‘I don’t know why she would have told anyone else,’ Isaid.

Dennison didn’t reply.

I turned back, more decisive now. The road was flying by underneath us.

‘I think it really does have to be from her.’

Dennison moved back into the middle lane and we started to leave the pickup behind us. The first few drops of rain started pattering against the windscreen.

Five megabytes of compressed video footage. Three different scenes in all, but spliced together into one long clip, which told a story if you knew some background. There were bits missing, but not important bits: if you were trying to get a particular message across, then the message was there: plain to see. There was even a progression to the separate scenes: the first was in the daytime; the second in the evening; the last at night – sort of, anyway. The grainy texture remained the same throughout, even as the scenes cut, and the closer you got to the screen, the more blurred and impossible it became: just smeary movements, like rain pouring over a painted window.

Scene One.

A man and a woman on a busy street. The sun is shining, but the traffic roaring past gives an artificial, whooshing undertone to the footage that sounds a lot like a strong breeze, or a downpour. The man and woman are walking along the pavement, away from a large, wide doorway, covered over by a green awning. I didn’t need to be able to see the white lettering on it to figure out that it was the train station in Thiene.

The man and the woman are walking away from the camera. The woman is wearing a pale blue blouse and a short white skirt, and she’s carrying an over-the-shoulder handbag, which nestles behind her hips slightly. Curly brown hair, tinged with blonde. Slim. She doesn’t seem to be being coerced in any way, and none of the people walking around the pair turn back for a second glance, or seem bothered about them. The man is overweight, with slightly sloping shoulders. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Kareem.

Cut to-

Early evening, the gloom supplemented by the storm.

Dennison pulled off the motorway, winding his way into the heart of the city. He neglected to slow down, and the air was suddenly filled with a cacophony of car horns as we shot past a line of semi-stationary traffic and cut in at the head of the queue. It was pouring down with rain, and the windscreen-wipers were squeaking back and forth. Dennison was hunched over the wheel, peering out. The red traffic lights were like two gigantic, bloody stars sparkling through the sheen.

‘You’re going to have to tell me where I’m going,’ he said. ‘This town is fucking crazy.’

The stars exploded in a burst of green and we set off with a screech.

‘Head in that direction. That’s the best I can do.’

The great grey lump of Uptown hung in the distance: a drab big top to our carnival city. Dennison weaved through side streets, slicing puddles apart in a watery spray. He slowed down a little, though, which I thought was good. The motorway was one thing, but three metre wide back alleys were entirely another.

We turned onto a minor loop road around the shredded face of the outside struts. The buildings that formed the edge of Uptown tended to be derelict and inhospitable: old tenement houses with windows made from nailed-in steel. You imagined them full of mattresses and needles, and stinking of rot. Dennison would drop me off soon. In the meantime, he sped up a little. Maybe he was afraid that – going under fifty – someone might steal his tyres, and if he was then he had a point.

I looked at the buildings we were passing. No McDonald’s here; no department stores. These were small shops: neighbour-hood grocery stores; shuttered pawnbrokers; greasy bars. There was hardly anyone about. Without much thought, I checked out the pavement by the edge of Downtown, and saw Kareem, walking in the opposite direction. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, and smoking a sheltered cigarette. I caught a glimpse of him, and flipped around in my seat as we went past.

‘What?’ Dennison sounded anxious, but I ignored him.

Kareem’s wide back, hunched up. Plodding along. Splash splash.

From behind, he could have been anybody. He didn’t look back, or give any indication that he’d seen me: he was just another dark figure on another dark street, meandering slowly wherever he was going, huddled up against the weather. I kept watching him through the streaky back window, and he seemed to move into a doorway, disappearing into Downtown. But I couldn’t be sure, what with the rain.

Dennison said again: ‘What?’

I turned back.

‘Nothing.’

It wasn’t Kareem at all.

Of course it wasn’t. Just some fat man that looked a little like him.

It couldn’t have been Kareem because Kareem was dead. Dead is dead. Go ask one of the non-existent vicars in the replica church on Graham’s street, and that’s exactly what he won’t tell you. When you’re dead, you don’t come back.

‘Nothing,’ I said again. ‘Thought I recognised someone. I just made a mistake.’

We travelled about half a mile further on, and then I said, ‘Drop me off up there.’

Dennison pulled in on the left.

‘You know where you’re going?’

I shook my head.

‘Not really.’

‘I think you’re crazy.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well you might be right.’

A last look at the e-mail on my lap, and then I folded it carefully and slipped it into my coat pocket, along with the information from Graham. I’d added a few notes in biro in case I forgot.

Fairway Street

‘I think you’re crazy.’

Combo’s Deli

I took the gun out of the glove compartment. If I could have checked for bullets, I would, but I didn’t even know how to open it. All I knew was: two shots down. If it came to it, I was going to point the thing and pull the trigger. And if bullets didn’t come out the end first time then I was going to be fucked.

I put it in my other pocket and opened the door.

‘Thanks for the lift.’

The rain was as grey and heavy as the sky itself, making music in the puddles and on the hard, wet surface of the pavement, slashing at the ground and buildings. As I got out, it felt like a hundred fingers tapping on me, demanding impossible attention.

‘See you around,’ I said.

Dennison didn’t reply, so I closed the door and tapped the roof. After a second, he pulled away, white lights trailing off up the street. There were signposts to Uptown every mile or so. He’d be fine.

I stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of myself as the rain poked and prodded me. Water ran down my face, pooling in my eyes, and when I blinked it away it felt like cold tears. There was a terrible, knotted excitement in my stomach that had as much to do with fear as anything else.

What I felt was solid. Something real and actual and living. I felt like something that could be injured and die.

That’s no way to feel in this civilised day and age.

There were a hundred worm-ways into Downtown, and I was opposite one: an old block of flats with the door kicked in. There’d be a back way out onto the outskirts of the underground, and from there I’d be able to follow abandoned ghost roads past ghost shops – maybe past ghost people – all the way through to the heart of the hidden city.

I’d never been in there before, and didn’t know what to expect, but I’d heard stories. And now, with the mpeg that Amy seemed to have sent to my e-mail account, I’d heard one more.

I crossed the street, and made my way in.

Cut to-

The second scene came in two parts, but you couldn’t really see the join: the camera didn’t move – it was just that things in the frame jerked into existence. Same scene, different times. In total, it lasted maybe two minutes.

Amy and Kareem walking towards the camera.

They start from quite some distance away. You can see them turn a corner, far up at the top of the picture, and then they come strolling down into view.

Like a gentleman, he’s on the outside. I guess he’s ready to draw his sword and protect her from attackers on horseback. They stop at a building two up from the end of the street and he finds keys in his pocket. Extracts them. Unlocks the door and holds it open for her. They go inside.

Cut to the second half of the scene.

A van flicks into view outside the building. White with blackened windows. I can’t read the number plate, although the vehicle looks to be in reasonable condition and I figure it’s fairly new. There’s no sign as to how or when it got there, or how much videotape is missing in the interim. You have time to notice it appear, and then-

Bang.

There’s no sound on this part of the video, but you feel the noise just from seeing it: the door on Kareem’s building kicked open from the inside, and out comes one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, carrying Amy, with three men following them out. The big man’s got her around the waist from behind, and she’s fighting, doubling up and lashing out. It was Amy who kicked the door open. One of the other remaining men gets in the back as well; another closes the door and gets into the driver’s seat.

The third man lights a cigarette, shakes out the match and throws it on the pavement.

The camera zooms in on him.

This close, he has a face made out of smeared blocks of colour. You blur your eyes and you get a better impression of him: young – mid thirties; slightly receding hair; narrowish face. Beyond that the details are invisible beneath smudges of colour. The image is badly distorted, both by the man moving his head and by the smoke drifting up from the bright, flaming orange star of the cigarette’s tip, which blurs out a good quarter of the screen.

He looks like an impressionist painting, on fire in one corner.

The man moves out of the frame.

The camera immediately zooms out to catch him climbing into the passenger side of the van. After a second the vehicle pulls away up the street. There are perhaps two seconds of emptiness.

Cut to-

Downtown.

When I was younger – thirteen or fourteen – I’d often go out walking in the middle of the night. My parents never liked it: they thought it was dangerous, but actually they couldn’t have been more wrong. There was never anybody around, dangerous or otherwise, and that was why I enjoyed it so much: if I’d wanted people and bustle, I’d have gone walking during the day, in the fucking sunshine. Instead, I’d walk down the middle of busy main roads, across teeming fields, scrape my shoes over the tarmac of jam-packed playgrounds, and there wouldn’t be anybody else around to spoil it all. The houses all seemed dead. The sky was black: full of blinking stars and wisps of cloud. No cars. Stray animals crossing the roads without noticing you; cats heading quickly from one meeting to the next. It was this whole other world: devastatingly quiet and endlessly different. If you’ve never walked around the streets in the middle of the night, then I don’t think you really know your home town at all.

Purely aesthetically, that’s what Downtown was like. It was shabby, but you were still walking down streets that were recognisable as streets. A lot of the buildings were boarded up, but the signs were still there, and more than one even seemed tenanted. The proper buildings – the ones still being used from top down – looked like enormous concrete pillars: cemented up to protect the white collar workers inside from what was down here, like supporting struts running down to an ocean bed of sharks.

Every little sound produced an echo. There were people dotted here and there, making no effort to hide from or approach any others. Some were shambling in the distance; others were talking quietly in abandoned offices, their voices drifting down like a quiet, mumbling word in your ear. You could hear the rush of a breeze, like a distant stream, but you couldn’t feel it, and the air was almost oppressively hot. You’d be able to sleep in a shirt and wake up happy, assuming you woke up at all.

Twenty or so storeys above street-level was Downtown’s sky: a black patchwork of star-less machinery. Most of the girders and pipes looked rusty and fractured – a support structure in need of some support – and all of it looked dark and shadowy. Water was dripping down everywhere. It was always night down here, and it was always raining: like some kind of quiet, noir Hell. There were occasional lights, but they didn’t seem to work too well, and so even the brightest bits of Downtown were bathed in a kind of dark, steely blue.

I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, but like all good cities there were signposts to point the way. Most of them were artificial – just daubs on the walls or chalk marks on the streets: more like jottings for residents than a guide for outsiders. My plan was equally vague. I was going to wander around until I recognised a notice for something I’d seen in the video footage – Combo’s Deli or Fairway Street – or until somebody shot me. The odds were probably about even on each.

I’d reached a vague kind of crossroads when I first heard it. I’d actually stopped, because I was faced with three possible directions. But the two to left and right were named randomly, while the road straight ahead was called Fairway Avenue, so that seemed to be the way to go. If I was in the Fairways, chances are that I was in the right area and I’d find the Street eventually. I started to head off, and was halfway over the crossing when I heard it.

A tapping noise, far away to the right.

I turned to look; the sound immediately stopped. But I could see where it had been coming from: there were two figures standing side by side in the centre of the street, about two hundred metres away from where I’d stopped. Blue silhouettes, identities hidden by the pale, sickly backdrop of a streetlight behind them. They weren’t moving, but the left of the two was leaning on a cane.

Walter Hughes, I thought.

The figure on the right was standing straight, with what looked like an overcoat pulled tightly around him. Broad shoulders. Hands clasped in front.

But if Kareem was impossible, then this was impossible a hundred times over. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of physics and biology that I hadn’t quite killed Kareem, and that he’d staggered away from the scene after I’d gone. But Hughes was dead. His bodyguard was dead. If they weren’t dead, they would have got up, but the truth was that you just didn’t get up after what had happened to them. After what I’d done to them.

Although I couldn’t make out their faces, the two figures were very clearly watching me.

I watched them right back.

And after a few seconds, they turned and walked into a nearby doorway and were gone. Just like Kareem. The chit of their feet, and the tap of the cane echoed down the empty blue street, and then faded away to nothing.

It felt like my heart was singing in my chest.

In the distance, far over on the other side of Downtown, somebody laughed. It was an insane sound: high and long, dying away into a sad moan. There was a moment of silence, and then more voices came, like dogs answering the call. Jeers and laughs and giggles. Somebody barked -whoo whoo whoo – and the sounds seemed to fill the air, circling around me. I knew it was only the sound of people, but it made my hair stand on end.

Eventually, the calls died down. There were a few quiet noises from the buildings around me: murmurs of conversation; half-contained belly-laughs; the crunch of broken glass being stepped on.

I began moving down Fairway Avenue, keeping my eye out for any signs I might recognise. A few times, I heard the tapping coming from over to the right, but – try as I might – there was nothing to see. The buildings were implacable, and I didn’t see the two figures again.

Cut to-

It’s the entrance to some wasteground. It looks like nighttime, but it’s quite obvious where this scene was filmed: we’re in Downtown, and so for all I know it could be the middle of the day. It feels like night-time, though, and these are certainly night-time activities taking place within the four solid walls of the camera frame. The entrance to the wasteground – a gap in the grey chain-link fence – is situated halfway between two inefficient streetlamps. One is flickering, turning on and off and on and off, while the other has attracted a globe of fluttering insects, in themselves too small to see, but you can detect them in the slightly shifting, blurry fuzz of the brightness.

The frame looks like this: a bright, pale blue explosion in the bottom left-hand corner; the same in the middle at the top. In between, there’s a mixture of black and grey pixels and if you look at it right they give the rough impression of a street edge, a pavement and the entrance to a black hole of wasteground.

A moment passes.

Then, the camera zooms in, moving between the two stars of the streetlights and arriving at the gap in the chain-link fence in time with the van. All the colour has been drained from it – and most replaced by shadow – but you can tell it’s the same van from scene two. The one they took Amy away in.

Dark figures emerge from both sides, and something clambers out of the guts of the vehicle. The big man again. There’s some brief conversation; a few heads looking this way and that. A shake and a nod, and then something that might be a laugh. One of the men – the same one as before – is smoking; the tip of the cigarette burns a bright, dancing red pixel into the screen. Beyond that, it’s difficult to make out the details. You can only really tell that they’re men at all from the way the spaces between them interact as they move. When they stand still, they vanish.

They unload something from the side of the van.

You can’t tell what it is, but there are two men carrying it between them. One of them backs onto the wasteground, and then they disappear through the gap carrying something which might be a bucket of some kind.

The smoker waits by the van, sitting down in the open side, elbows resting on his knees. He’s smoking thoughtfully. The camera stays on him for a second, and then cuts to-

– a different view of Downtown.

It’s more comprehensive than the last, and the light is better. As a result, the road is clearly visible, and you can see that somebody has painted the words FAIRWAY STR down the middle of it in such enormous white letters that it’s like a signal for rescue helicopters. The buildings are clearly visible as well: we’re on a street corner, and the centre of attention is what looks like a café. There are chairs and tables outside, and even a few people sitting at them. The inside looks bright. The view is too fuzzy to make out any details, but it’s certainly a place of business – although whether that business has anything to do with coffee or doughnuts anymore is difficult to say. A green canopy hanging over the outside seating area tells us exactly what this place used to be, regardless of its current occupation.

Cut back to the original camera.

The van is gone, and the street is empty. It’s lighter than before, though, and a shadow of the chain-link fence is dancing on the ground.

Cut to-

Combo’s Deli.

Despite all my negative expectations, it actually looked like a genuine soup kitchen, or – at the worst – a down at heel café. It was brightly-lit, which made all the windows into pale, yellow squares. It also appeared to be full of various kinds of smoke, and you could smell each of them from across the road: tobacco mingling with cannabis, mingling with something else, mingling with burning grease and frying food. I could hear the sizzle and scrape of metal spatulas chiselling burnt matter from the base of metal woks, and the shake of pans as onions and peppers were sent spinning. It made me hungry. I’d spent about six hours of the day in transit with little to show for it, and my stomach was clearly beginning to wonder why exactly it had kept up with me. I promised so much and delivered so little. With my stomach as with everything else in my life.

There were a few people hanging around in the Deli and a few more outside. One guy in tight blue jeans was trying to show his tightly-packed balls to the world, sitting spread-legged and lounging, sucking on a bottled beer. At the same table, another man was smoking a joint and considering the empties. That pair formed the centrepiece. On other tables around them: a gaggle of whores, deep in enthusiastic conversation; an old man, trying to form a loop of warmth with his coffee cup; an even older lady wrapped up in a tartan shawl, staring into space; a chef on his break, playing games with his lighter – the flame going on and off, hanging in the air in front of him.

None of them seemed to give much of a shit about me.

I looked over my shoulder. Halfway up the building on the opposite corner to the Deli, there was a video camera. If I hadn’t known it was there, I’d never have seen it.

The chain-link fence ran along the edge of the pavement to my left.

Beyond it, the wasteground.

The broken-down section was a little further ahead, almost directly opposite the Deli. I walked up to it. When I got there, I stopped in my tracks. The butt-end of a cigarette was resting in the gutter, looking faded and folded and old. My mind flicked back to the man in the video clip, and I stared at the butt for a few seconds, my heart beating hard and fast.

And then I looked through the break in the fence to my left.

There wasn’t much actual ground visible in the waste-ground. It was probably thirty metres wide, twenty deep, with a few other sections leading off from the main one, cornering around and between the surrounding buildings, as black as bad teeth. The floor was swollen with angles of discarded metal and rusted debris. Once upon a time this had been a park, perhaps: a nice place to come and sit. And then, when Uptown was being built, it became a place to toss superfluous machinery and unused bolts, struts and sections of frame. And then everything else. Mouldering suitcases. Old clothes. Furniture. Stuff that nobody wanted.

Stuff that nobody wanted anymore.

I looked up. A few spotlights on the buildings had gone in-growing, spreading light up at the roof and casting shadows downwards. A torrent of dirty rain was falling from the ruins above, spattering over the wasteground, and the air was full of the stink of corrosion and dying iron. Where the water spilled past the spots it turned into flashes that looked like laser fire.

I went in.

The air seemed to be darker through the fence, and the pattering of the rain sounded louder. It was like somebody pissing on wet soil – a moist, clicky noise. Over on the left-hand side, somebody had left a dead dog in a white bag beneath a strong flow. I grimaced, and then turned away when I realised it wasn’t in a bag at all. The steady cascade was nudging off its slack skin.

I moved deeper, edging between metal sculptures. It was difficult to make out much detail. Everything was just pieces of shadow or obscure shapes piled on top of even more underneath. Everything smelled of decay. There was rotting laundry, here, and food, and the air was itchy with spores of rust. There was a warm breeze tugging through from between the buildings, and a dangerous snake-like hum of electricity was coming from one corner.

Far above me, something groaned, and then the ground shuddered a little. Everything rattled for a second.

A tram, passing overhead in Uptown.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but in the end I found a smell and followed it, like it was a black ribbon hanging in the air. It was tenuous at best, but it led me to the back of the wasteground, to a narrow space between two of the surrounding buildings. The smell was strongest here, filling the air and giving it a sharp little twist, but there wasn’t much light to see by. I could make out a tent of black, charred iron resting loosely over a slight dip in the muddy ground, but hardly anything else. I looked to one side. More mud. More rubbish.

Water dripping down from above. One drop at a time.

Not mud.

Another drop.

Not rubbish at all.

Another drop of water.

Without knowing how I’d got there, I was on my knees, pulling fistfuls of black muck away from the ground. The mud that wasn’t mud made my hands go as black as the night.

Everything seemed suddenly concentrated, including time. I was smelling what was in my hands, and breathing in the long-cold memory of ash and fire, but I didn’t remember moving my hands to my face. And I was sobbing, too, but I didn’t even remember starting to cry. My head was filled with the smell of a hundred thousand pages burning down to black nothing, while a fire cast flickering shadows of a chain-link fence onto the pavement beyond. I could hear the crackling and popping as ink ignited, and see the curling tension in the spine as the book was engulfed.

Another drop of water. The rain was spattering down onto my face.

In my mind’s eye, I could see black bin-liners soaked in petrol and set alight, and, without thinking, I reached over and scattered the rubbish piled up on my right. Most of it was scorched and ruined: disjointed plateaus of sodden ash. But there were a few scraps, here and there.

Cloth.

Something harder, too: the pared-down bone of a blackened knife. Its handle was burnt away.

I heard the tapping sound again, drifting in from somewhere between the Deli and where I was kneeling, shins growing cold from the mud soaking into my trousers. I turned around. Walter Hughes and his bodyguard were silhouetted at the entrance to the wasteground. Just standing there quietly, watching me. Behind them, in the middle of the street, I could see Kareem.

I turned back to where Amy’s remains were lying. You couldn’t call it lying anymore, of course: if she was anything, she was lost at sea. My face had clenched up into this strange thing; it felt unreal. I was sobbing, and I realised I couldn’t even keep myself upright properly. I allowed the slide to happen, collapsing into the mud and rocking slowly onto my left-hand side. Feeling the cold seep into my body, but at the same time not really feeling it at all.

I reached out to gather up a loose armful of burnt rubbish, and I held it as close to me as it would come.