V 02 - Domino Men, The
Read V 02 - Domino Men, The Online
Authors: Barnes-Jonathan
The Domino Men
by
Jonathan Barnes
Also by Jonathan Barnes
The Somnambulist
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE DOMINO MEN. Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Barnes. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53
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FIRST EDITION
Designed by Lovedog Studio
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-167140-1
09 10 11 12 13 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Amelia
Acknowledgments
In the U.S. — Diana Gill, for her invaluable guidance.
In the U.K. — Simon Spanton for his editing expertise; Bede Rogerson for his indispensable advice; Ben Marsden and Michael Caines for their ongoing encouragement; Thomas Ellis and Christopher Barnes for their assistance with research.
At home — my parents for all their support; Amelia for continuing to change everything.
Contents
Also by Jonathan Barnes
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Note
Editor’s Postscript
In preparing this manuscript for publication, I have made only minor adjustments and corrections, principally in matters of spelling and grammar, in the smoothing over of certain infelicities of style and in the division of the text into sympathetic chapters.
The rest may be considered verbatim — even those curious shifts and modulations against whose inclusion my advisers have so strenuously objected, warning of the most appalling damage both to my own reputation and to that of my family.
In all significant respects,
The Domino Men
is just as I found it, waiting for me on my doorstep last summer, on the day that its author disappeared from the face of the earth.
I believe that the pages which follow provide the nearest thing we shall ever be granted to an explanation.
—AW
THE DOMINO MEN
I’m horribly aware, as I sit at the desk in this room that you’ve lent me, that time is now very short for me indeed. Outside, the light of day is fading fast; in here, the ticking of the clock sounds close to deafening.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t have time to write everything that I’d hoped — my definitive history of the war, from its origins in the dreams of the nineteenth century to the grisly skirmishes of my granddad’s day to the recent, catastrophic battle in which you and I played modest parts. No, I simply have to hope that there’ll be time enough for me to set down my own story, or at least as much of it as I can remember before the thing which sleeps inside me wakes, stirs, flexes its muscles and, with a lazy flick of its gargantuan tail, gives me no alternative but to forget.
I know where I have to start. Of course, I wasn’t present in person — wasn’t even born then — but I’m sure that it was there, for all intents and purposes, that it began. I can picture it so clearly, as though these events are calling to me across the years, pleading with me to set them down on paper.
It’s probably no coincidence that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the old flat, the place in Tooting Bec where I lived with Abbey in happier times and which, in a strange sort of way, although I didn’t realize it back then), was always at the heart of the business. Our house was built at some point late in the 1860s. I had other things on my mind whilst I lived there and I never looked into its history, but Abbey did once, in an offhand, mildly curious sort of way, spurred on, I think, by some TV show or other. Her findings were faintly disquieting, although she never discovered what I know now about the place. But then, how could she? The Directorate kept those records locked up safe and everyone who was present or who knew anything about them is long dead.
It happened late one night toward the end of April 6, 1967. Years before the house was divided up into flats and a decade or so before I came into the world, a long, dark sedan motored to a stop outside the flat in Tooting Bec. Although spring should have been in full bloom, it had felt more like winter for almost a week and everyone had started wearing thick coats, hats and scarves again, shouldering their way to the backs of their wardrobes to tug out winter outfits that they’d hoped not to see again until October.
It had been raining for hours and the streets, lit up by the unforgiving yellow of the lamps, seemed to shine and dully glisten as though they’d been smeared with some grease or unguent. No one was abroad and the only sounds were the distant wail of a baby and the plaintive whinnies of urban foxes, padding through the darkened city, foraging for anything that might prove edible amongst the junk and wreckage so carelessly abandoned by humanity.
The car door opened and a tall man unfolded himself from the driver’s seat — middle-aged; sharply, almost dandyishly dressed in a dark blue, single-breasted suit and still handsome, albeit with a cruelly vulpine quality to his features. With him was a woman, about the same age, but already moving like someone much older, a brittle spinster decades before her time. Both wore expressions of stoic professionalism mingled (and I suppose we must consider this to be to their credit) with a kind of distasteful disbelief at the unconscionable demands of their jobs.
They had a passenger with them, lolling in the back seat, apparently drunk almost to the point of insensibility. It was a woman, very young and even then, after all that had been done to her, still extremely beautiful. Most of her hair had been shaved away, although a few scattered, tufty islets remained. Her scalp was marked out with scorings, scars and half-healed incisions, and she seemed only dimly aware of what was happening t her, clinging to the man in the same way in which a child clutches at her father’s hand on the way to her first day at school. He pulled her out onto the street and helped her stagger toward the front door of the house, letting her slump and flop against him, an arrangement which lent him the appearance of a shop boy grappling (not a little salaciously) with a storefront dummy.