V 02 - Domino Men, The (43 page)

“The cat had a message for you,” said the prince, swerving fast around a double-decker which sprawled across the length of the road like a great red seal bathing in the sun.

“I’m sorry?”

Arthur drummed his fingers excitedly on the steering wheel.  “He said you’d need a phrase.  For the Process.  An incantation to close the trap.  He told me you’d know what to do.”

I thought for a moment, then:  “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

Although I feared that the journey would last forever, that we would drive through this shadow realm, I feared still more what was waiting for us at our destination.  Then we turned a corner, the exterior of Waterloo station came into view and at last I realized where it was the drones were heading.

The streets were now so choked and thronged that we had no choice but to abandon the car and take our chances amongst the mob.  Stepping carefully from the vehicle and trying our best to stop our ears against the cries of the crowd, we moved toward the station.  The crowd seemed mostly oblivious to us, too close to the object of their quest to pay us much heed.  We had to join the surge, give in, become a part of the torrent and let ourselves be swept into Waterloo.

The place, though packed, seemed eerily neglected.  The small shops, fast food outlets and newsagents were entirely untouched, unstaffed but still open for business — burgers cold to the touch, days-old newspapers lying undisturbed, a rack of sandwiches starting to turn green and rancid behind their plastic wrappers.  The drones ignored them all, even their needs for food and current affairs now subsumed by the urge to reach their destination.  There was death, too — mangled cadavers clogging up the escalators, a solitary ticket inspector trampled underfoot, the flyblown corpses of a guide dog and its master — but Arthur and I walked past it all.

We were pushed through the main part of the station, then moved along with the drones, allowing ourselves to be jostled up an Escher maze of concrete, unable to stop or slow down, trying not to think too hard about those who were thrown to the floor and trampled underfoot.  We emerged onto the South Bank, almost exactly opposite the spot where, in a lunch-hour long ago, I’d sat and watched Barbara devour a cheese baguette.

Before us was the river, the great dark width of the Thames, and there at last we saw it — the sea beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads.

It must have been a crash landing.  The Houses of Parliament looked smashed and half-demolished, Cleopatra’s Needle was snapped in two and the Eye leant askew like something had simply batted it aside.  In the distance, the spires of the business district stood darkened and empty.  Boats of every kind — sight-seeing vessels, pleasure cruisers, industrial transport ships, floating restaurants and a fleet of police launches — had been hurled against the bank, where they lay shattered like broken toys, reduced to so much driftwood and debris.

The sheer mass of the creature had caused the river to burst its banks.  Water overflowed and sluiced across the pavement, making the ground slippery and treacherous.

The entire length of the Thames as far as the eye could see was filled with a vast black shadow, just out of sight.  The water around it was bubbling and broiling in distress, shooting out jets of steam and malevolent emissions from the deep.  All that was visible of the beast were slender tubes, long thin tentacular things which snaked out of the water and came limply to rest on the pavement like stems of meat or straws of flesh.

Our ampersand had made the people of this city so grateful!  They rushed out to meet us, eager to offer their services, aching to become part of something greater and more wonderful than themselves.  And, honestly, who amongst us can blame them for that?

To our horror, Arthur and I saw what was happening.  All the people who had been hurrying with such desperation through the city now dashed on toward the riverbank, skidding, sliding along the pavement with such insanely enthusiastic speed that I thought they were in danger of toppling into the water.  But no, they came to a halt just in time and fell to their knees.  Then, humbly, reverentially, each and every one of them picked up a tendril in their hands and, in a moment of unutterable obscenity, took it into their mouths, opening wide, gobbling with infantile glee.  The suckled for a moment, their faces suffused with pleasure, before, disgustingly satiated, they collapsed onto their backs and crawled away into the city, chattering to themselves, bleating nonsense words and strings of impossible numbers.  One of these unfortunates blundered past me, his eyes hopeless and black, his lips able to move only in the service of Leviathan, like a termite, an insect helplessly in thrall.  I tried to stop him but the drone barely seemed to notice and he shouldered his way past, still gibbering his incomprehensible language.

The city was Leviathan’s now.  It belonged, lock, stock and barrel to this monstrosity, this implacable enemy of life.

This is a slanderous misrepresentation.  We were only ever doing our jobs, fulfilling our quota and offering our customers the kind of top-quality service which they have deservedly come to expect.

As we reached the riverbank, I heard a noisy heaving to my right.  The prince was doubled up, powerless in the grip of regurgitation, spewing his breakfast onto the tarmac.

I was hunting through my pockets to see if I couldn’t find the poor man a tissue when somebody shouted my name.  With a gunslinger swivel, I turned around.

Joe Streater stood behind me.  By his side, stumbling and puffy faced — my landlady.

“Abbey?”

She looked at me blankly. “Leviathan?”

“This is your fault,” Streater said.

“Me?”

“They promised I could save her.  But as soon as she stepped into the snow…  It wouldn’t have happened if I’d got to her sooner.  If you hadn’t gone and hidden her from me.”

“I only tried to keep her safe.  You’re the one who practically kidnapped the poor girl.”

We were so occupied in our argument (soundtracked by the continued retching of the future king of England) that we didn’t even notice what Abbey did next, didn’t see her as she staggered toward the water’s edge, her eyes speaking only of hunger and lust.  It was Joe who stopped speaking first.  He was staring past me, toward the river.

“Abs?” he shouted, but it was already too late.  Before either of us could stop her, she crouched down, reached for a tendril, placed the thing between her lips and gurgled in delight.

“Abbey!” I shouted.  “Darling, for God’s  sake!”

Streater glared at me.  “Please,” he said to her.  “Please, babe.  Don’t do that.”

But she was already finished.  Abbey removed the tendril from her mouth and turned her face upon us.  The change was absolute.  Her eyes were pinpricks and she was chattering too fast — impossible formulae which should never have been spoken aloud, vile, blasphemous things whose very sound made some ancient part of my brain recoil in reptilian disgust.

She no longer knew us and staggered away to join the others, disappearing back into the city, gibbering and weeping, consumed by inexplicable purpose.

The girl should have been grateful.  After all, she had finally made herself useful.  At long last, she was doing something worthwhile with her life.

I didn’t need to think anymore but just launched myself at Joe Streater.  Shocked by the ferocity of my assault, he staggered backward and we scuffled incompetently together by the banks of the Thames, exchanging feeble blows and girly punches, close enough to the creature to hear its hisses of pleasure, its oozing exhalations of joy and repellent coos of victory.

I pulled on Streater’s shoulder, spun him around and kicked him in the stomach.  Although the impact hurt my foot, the traitor slid backward, slipping in the slush and water which lapped along the pavement.  Behind him, most of the railing had been peeled away by some surge of the crowd, so when I kicked him again there was no way to stop him toppling into the water.  He tried to save himself by clinging onto the last strip of railing with his fingers.  To my astonishment, it looked as though there might be tears in his eyes.

“That shouldn’t have happened.  They said she’d be safe.”

“They lied to you,” I said.  “Of course they lied to you.”

“You don’t understand.”  I saw now that I’d been right and that the man really did have tears seeping from his eyes.  “I only did this for her.  I wanted to win her back.  I wanted to give it another go.”

He looked pathetic — the great Joe Streater, Iago to the crown, Quisling to the beast — now just another sap clinging on to life at any cost, another loser, another opportunist who’s taken a wrong turn.  Mephistopheles reduced to a charity case.

I suppose the kindest thing, the most honorable and decent thing to have done would have been to bend down, offer him my hand and help him up.  Indeed, if either of us had been players in a Hollywood movie where character arcs and life lessons come as standard, then that’s exactly what would have happened.

It wasn’t, however, what took place that day by the banks of the river.

I kicked Joe Streater in the face, and I have to say — the wicket-crack his front teeth made when they shattered was one of the most satisfying sounds I’ve ever heard.  He spat out the bone and wailed up at me in rage and despair, pleading pitifully for mercy.

So I stamped hard on his fingers.

With a final whine, he let go and plopped miserably into the river.  I was just dreaming up an amusingly appropriate quip when two hundred pounds of royal bulk slammed into the side of me, delivering us both into the churning water.

For a moment, this was how I thought it was going to end — the prince, Joe Streater and me, all floundering in the Thames, our arms flailing, gasping at the col, struggling impotently against the tide — but then I became aware of something slick and ropey feeling its way toward me and I knew that this wasn’t the end.  Not quite yet.

I think I may even have tried to scream but my mouth was choked with river water.  Something slithered around the back of my neck, wound itself around my shoulders and pulled tight about my chest.  The last thing I remember is a sensation of movement, of being pulled fast through the river water, tugged deep into the belly of the beast, into the black heart of Leviathan.

What lay in the Thames that afternoon was a thing of beauty and wonder.  Henry Lamb should have welcomed it with hymns of praise and thanksgiving.  He should have kissed it.  He should have bowed down before it and worshipped it as a living god.

My first thought was that this might be purgatory.

It took me a moment to identify my overriding emotion.  It was boredom — enervating, brain-sapping, debilitating boredom.

Inexplicably, I appeared to be sitting at a desk in an office, warm, dry and apparently back to normal.  There was a computer in front of me, switched on and displaying a spreadsheet.  There was a telephone, a drawer filled with stationery products and a stack of dun-colored folders.  The place was crowded with the usual sounds — the faint hum of computers, the chuntering whine of the photocopier, the persistent insectoid buzz of ringing phones.  Somewhere, inevitably, there was the endless gnashing of crisps.

I craned my head to see who was with me, whom I instinctively thought of as my colleagues, but couldn’t get a good look at any of them.  Their faces were obscured by screens, blurred by distance or masked by shadows.

Unsure of my next move, I resorted to what I’d done on so many afternoons at work:  slumped back in my chair and stared at the computer.  Not that I could make any sense of the spreadsheet, of its alien letters, its repulsive alphabet and baffling strings of digits.

Just as I felt close to screaming (that quarter-to-three-on-a-Wednesday feeling magnified to an intolerable degree) the phone on my desk jingled to life.

And you know what I’m like with ringing telephones.

“Hello?” I said.

“Top o’ the morning ter you, sir.”  The man’s accent sounded like he was putting me on.

“Who is this?”

There was another voice on the line, another accent.  “Could you come intae  the office, laddie?  There’s a were matter needs clearing up.”

“Where—?”

I was swiftly interrupted by a third voice, crisper than the rest.  “We’re at the end of the corridor, my friend.  Second door on the right.”

I set the receiver gently back down and got to my feet.  Still unable to make out the faces of my colleagues, I moved cautiously toward the door.  As I walked, I realized with a twitch of disgust that the walls and floors and ceiling of this place were constructed not from concrete or brick but from some soft, hot, spongy substance.  Despite my very best efforts to forget, I remember this — walking through those corridors was like trying to escape from a bouncy castle made of meat.

As I walked, I had a sudden image of what Leviathan must look like in full, of how it must appear in motion — in flight.  I saw the beast in all its grisly majesty, gliding through the infinite nightmare of space, and in a sickening flash of vision, I knew how many worlds it had consumed.  I heard the pitiful wails of its victims, saw the inhabitants of unimaginable places look up when the shadow of Leviathan passed over their lands, and like them, I knew with a terrible certainty that the end had surely come.