The Clown Service (24 page)

‘Impressed?’ asked Sünner.

He was. Of course he was.

Sünner switched off the recording.

‘Once it’s awake the prayer’s done its work,’ he said. ‘The only way you can stop it now is to remove the word of God.’

Sünner advanced towards the thing in the bath. The Golem grabbed at him, trying to beat his hands away as he shoved his fingers into its soft skull and pulled out the piece of paper buried there.

‘The thing is mindless. I cannot control it. Not yet. But if one can bring mud to life, then one can animate any inanimate matter.’

‘Cadavers?’

‘Cadavers.’

‘But the name … the piece of paper.’

‘Oh yes.’ Sünner led them back through into the sitting room and walked up to a set of bookshelves filled with a mixture of occult texts and medical manuals. ‘Inserting the secret name of God – that was the stumbling block. But you can write with more than just pen and ink.’

He held up a petri dish. ‘A nucleic acid sequence, for example, can, theoretically, be expressed as a set of letters. A notation. You can translate words into DNA. Combine that with the preservative—’

‘And you have a Golem made of flesh and blood. All you need is the prayer to activate it. A radio broadcast.’

They both drank their vodka, Krishnin’s hand shaking with excitement as he poured them one more.

‘In this case,’ Sünner continued, ‘it is not so easy to deactivate them. The word is written through their entire being. It cannot simply be torn out.’

‘Deactivate them?’ asked Krishnin, taking a mouthful of vodka. ‘Why would we ever want to do that?’

Jamie and I were still in the back of the van, or whatever mirror-image took its place here in the other plane. I sat up, consciously keeping the sensation of Jamie’s hand in mine even though we now appeared not to be touching each other, and shuffled towards the door. I reached out to open it, the handle feeling distant in my grip, as if I wasn’t quite touching it. Squeezing hard, I turned the catch, pushed open the door and swung my legs out.

The street around us had all the life of a postcard. A two-dimensional world that I was somehow sat in. There was utter silence until Jamie spoke.

‘We should take a minute,’ he said. His voice was quiet. I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking so delicately because he was acclimatising or because he was scared. When all around you is so still, so reflective, it’s hard to be the thing that breaks that peace. We had woken up in Library World.

‘It’s important to get the hang of the place before you go wandering,’ Jamie continued. ‘I picture it as if I’m a diver, regulating my breathing before dropping down into the water. Of course, part of it is remembering that here I’m not drunk.’

‘Why do you think that’s necessary?’ I asked. ‘The drink, I mean.’

He shrugged. ‘After all this time it might not be, but since when did life get so hilarious you can afford to cut back on the fun stuff? I’ve always been a bit of a control freak; the booze helps me let go of that, to just go for it. This is all about throwing yourself into the void. I’ve always needed a little liquid help to do that.’

‘And you don’t feel drunk now?’

‘Not really. You know how when you get wasted there’s always a quiet voice hovering above it all – the one that suggests that maybe it’s time to call a taxi, to put that drink back down, to stop looking at that boy on the dance floor as if he’s the most beautiful thing in the world and you’ll die if you don’t have him?’

‘Not exactly, but I get your point.’

‘That’s what I am now, the sane voice riding above the madness. The one who might just get you home if you stop dancing and drinking for long enough to hear it.’

I looked up into the flat sky as a large shadow passed overhead. It was shapeless, shifting and rippling above the clouds, an indefinable thing. I wondered if it was hunting.

‘What do you think this place is?’ I asked.

‘There are lots of theories. Some people consider it the headspace of the world, a collective dream, the noosphere. Thought given form. They say that that’s why the place is so hostile – this is where the fears go, this is the dream of a world gone mad. Reality painted by a fractured, shared subconscious.’

‘I think I’d have to be drunk just to say that, let alone believe it.’

‘To be honest it’s what I always believed. But if what Gavrill
says is right, then we are also somewhere physical. Which suggests the other popular theory – that we’re in a Ghost Universe.’

‘That sounds much more sensible …’ I was beginning to wish I had never asked.

‘Are you familiar with the concept of parallel universes? That every decision we make causes a divergence? The future is a massive network of potentials, winnowed down as we make our moves, turn left or right, take that job or quit, have that cup of coffee or not. Every time we make a decision, the alternative route – the option we dismissed – drifts away as a possible future no longer inhabited. That is a Ghost Universe, the road not taken. Some people theorise that Ghost Universes prove time travel may be possible – they’re the safety valve of causality, spare realities that absorb the impact of shifting probabilities.’

I thought about Derek Lime and his machine. He had talked about similar concepts. The machine had allowed us to view the possibilities inherent in the past. If it had stayed on too long, that fluidity of time could have become modified, the infinite possible futures found in the stones of that warehouse thrown into flux until one timeline, inevitably a different one, was settled on. The whole of history would change around it. Could it be that I was now sitting in one of the casual by-products of that process? A Ghost Universe contaminating reality like chemical effluent ejected into the sea from a processing plant?

‘Maybe it’s a combination of the two,’ I suggested. ‘We’re not physically here after all. This …’ I gestured around us, ‘is just an extension of our minds.’

‘Maybe,’ he agreed, bending down to pick up a stone from the road, ‘but we still have some physicality. After all, we aren’t floating through the floor and we can touch things.’

‘But the sensation is numb. It’s not complete. In this place, when I touch you, it’s like you’re not quite solid.’

‘Yeah, we can interact with things on the higher plane but it doesn’t come as naturally.’ He threw the stone to me. I tried to catch it, but it slipped through my fingers.

‘You have to concentrate,’ said Jamie. ‘Simple physical interaction takes effort.’

This was another possible problem I had not considered. How much use were we going to be here? Would we have enough of a solid presence to fight Krishnin?

‘Ready to move?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

We stood up and slowly worked our way out of the side street and onto the main promenade.

Suddenly, Jamie gripped my arm. I looked down to where his hand, so
insubstantial
in this world, pinched at the sleeve of my jacket. I could barely feel it.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Look …’ he whispered.

I turned my head to try to see what had startled him.

‘Keep still …’ he cautioned.

I detected movement to our right, something swirling along the walkway.

As it came closer I was able to discern more of its shape, or at least the shape it clung to. At its core it appeared to be a man and his dog, nothing remotely threatening. As it moved it blurred and stretched, like an image that was being digitally altered. Waves of colour rippled from it as it flowed towards us. It was as if the binding lines of the man and dog weren’t enough for the information they contained; distorted
colour and texture bleeding into the air and thrashing back and forth.

It stopped a couple of feet away. The dog portion lifted its muzzle to the air as if to catch a scent. Its head was a mess of after-images and the inhalation of its breath echoed. I felt Jamie’s grip tighten, desperately hoping I would neither move nor make a sound. I didn’t need the warning. I remembered what Shining had told me about this place – that you didn’t want to draw the attention of the things that lived here.

The dog’s head split to reveal a pink maw that contained more teeth than it could possibly hold. A low growl crept through the air around us, like a recording rather than a live event, something added on to this reality in post-production. The falseness of the sound made it all the more threatening, as if it was only an approximation of the danger that faced us, a translation of something our minds could not otherwise perceive.

The dog’s owner had little face to speak of, the features too blurred to be resolved into anything you could recognise. A bystander snatched in an old photograph, a smudge of pink skin and dark hair that would live on in the old image as a ghost of a real man. Its head divided in the same way as the dog’s, a random assortment of teeth, from fat yellow rectangles to insubstantial stubs, all moving as if on a conveyor belt. The growling sound came again. It sensed something was near. I could only imagine what it would do if it found us, what those teeth would feel like as they burrowed into this essence of ours that existed here.

Finally, it must have decided it was alone. The heads closed up like flowers in the evening and it continued on its way, moving along the path away from us and vanishing between the buildings.

As Jamie relaxed, so did I.

‘What was that?’

‘The things that live here take all sorts of forms, some recognisable, some not, some in-between … If this is a Ghost Universe, perhaps they are the Ghost Population – the people that might have been, the lives shed as their owners took a different path. They’re hungry – you can sense that much. Maybe they’ve become so insubstantial that they need to feed on something real.’

‘We’re not real though, are we?’ I said. ‘Our bodies aren’t here, after all, just our minds.’

‘And it’s those they feed on. What’s the body but a vehicle? It’s the indefinable energy at the heart of us they want. Thoughts and emotions, they’re the things that define sentience. The rest is just meat. We need to move carefully. Imagine you’re stood in the middle of a field of sleeping lions. In order to get to the other side you go slowly, tread carefully.’

‘We wouldn’t want to wake the lions.’

‘You’ve got it.’

I looked over my shoulder at the river. Its surface was rippled as if by winds and tides and yet those ripples were static. Like everything else it seemed to be an approximation of the real thing, an illustration of a river.

As I watched, something moved beneath its surface and I was reminded of the shadow that had passed over us when we first arrived.

‘The bigger shapes,’ I asked. ‘Are they like the thing I saw when Tim and I saved you, that wave of darkness?’

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’d never seen anything like that before. Maybe it was an after-effect of Krishnin being here. Something new. You get shadows sometimes, shapes that move
around the edges, but I’ve never seen them actually manifest themselves as that did. I always thought the shadows were just grey areas, you know? Undefined space shifting at the edge of your perception. This version of reality catching up with your presence. Like streaming video buffering on a slow connection.’ He shrugged. ‘That was my guess anyway. Just because I can travel here doesn’t make me an expert. I can get on a budget flight to Poland. Doesn’t mean I know the first thing about the place.’ He began to walk along the promenade. ‘Except that they make exceptionally fine plumbers – I call mine at every opportunity. It’s worth every penny just to see those arms of his …’

He carried on in this vein for a while, discussing the varied muscular qualities of everyone from the people he saw at the gym (‘It’s like belonging to a strip club that tries to hurt you’) to the surly nature of the owner of his local corner shop (‘If he can’t handle my manners when I’m at my lowest ebb, he shouldn’t sell me cheap wine and marshmallow teacakes at three in the morning’).

We moved at a slow pace, frequently stopping whenever we caught a glimpse of movement elsewhere.

‘This place is packed with them,’ I said after we had been forced to stop again just around the corner from the warehouse. They came in all manner of shapes, from faux pedestrians to vehicles – cars that slid along the road to the tinny sound of recorded engines. As Jamie had said, they all seemed to be approximations of real things. Creature-things wearing bad disguises trying to blend in.

‘Whatever’s going on here must be antagonising them,’ Jamie said. ‘Think how sensitive they are to our presence. Imagine what it must be like to have actual
physical
presences here. As
our charming Russian neighbour said – and I really must thank you for introducing us to him, so lovely that the FSB now has my postal address and can pop along and shoot me while I’m sleeping – this plane cannot bear physical intrusion. Krishnin will be like a fleck of dirt in its eye. A constant irritation it will feel desperate to scratch.’

Perhaps that also explained the shifting geography we had encountered. When Shining and I had visited here before, travelling through the approximation of Sampson Court, the place had at least looked like the real world it lay alongside. Here the roads stretched into new shapes, the landscape losing sight of the original it was supposed to be based on. In the distance, Tower Bridge reached high into the dull sky, a savage arc of metal and stone that looked like an upturned grin sculpted by a lunatic. If it carried traffic on its back, I had no desire to catch sight of it.

‘So what would happen to us,’ I asked, ‘if one of those creatures caught us? Nothing physical, I guess, because our bodies aren’t even here.’

‘I can’t speak from experience,’ said Jamie, ‘obviously, because I’m far too brilliant and careful. But there
are
travellers who have been attacked here, and all there is to show for it are the empty shells they leave behind. The majority of our minds are here. If we lose those, then we’ve lost everything.’

‘As good as dead then? Brilliant.’

‘Maybe worse,’ he replied, damn him. ‘I think I’d rather be dead than catatonic. I mean, there must be some brain function left behind, mustn’t there? Some trace element of our psyches still rattling inside. Imagine what it would be like to be trapped in our bodies forever, not able to do anything more than just lie there, breathing.’