Decay Inevitable (49 page)

“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.

W
HEN 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.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
E
IGHT:
R
OPE

A
LL 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.