by M. T Hill
‘You’re fine with me using it, then?’
‘What’s your game? I’m not being—’
‘—funny? You know it’s about Stephen.’
‘Of course it’s about Stephen,’ the editor says. ‘It’s been about him for a while now.’
‘I need to call the coroner.’
The editor comes round her desk, hands on her hips.
‘Why?’
‘I need to know what they found inside him.’
‘Bloody hell, Freya.’
‘It’s for the story.’
‘And that wouldn’t be gratuitous at all? Unethical?’
‘It’s colour,’ Freya says.
‘Colour? What the hell do you think they’ll have found?’
Freya shrugs.
‘Don’t be so bloody childish.’
‘Fine,’ Freya says. ‘I think he had…’ She breaks off. What’s more plausible? A disorder? A disease? Admitting she believes Stephen contracted a parasite that made him terminally overconfident?
‘He had a tumour,’ Freya says. ‘On his brain.’
‘That’s awful,’ the editor says. ‘Nobody knew?’
‘I don’t know what anyone knows,’ Freya says.
‘But surely the coroner would’ve found a tumour.’
‘I don’t know about that, either,’ Freya says. Then, after a pause, ‘Maybe the injury from the fall concealed it. Maybe it was so powerful an impact… Or maybe it was new? A tiny thing.’
The editor picks up the special handset and grips it. She taps it against her forehead. ‘How can you be sure?’
‘I’ve been putting it all together.’
‘But what difference will it make? If it really was? Apart from the fact that the coroner has, what, not done their job properly?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ Freya says. And like that, she has a new hook. The editor’s intrigue is so palpable that any headline suggesting his inquest could’ve missed something will be a puller.
‘Be quick,’ the editor says.
* * *
Freya breezes past the coroner’s front desk with a few rehearsed lines about delays in medical waste supplies. It isn’t luck: she knows they’ll burn through consumables from one day to the next, and it’s always easier to reach a decision-maker if the story sounds innocuous to a receptionist but potentially worrying to the higher-ups.
The front desk connects Freya to a distracted technician who quickly palms her back into the internal menu tree. This gives her options including the head coroner’s direct line.
‘Derek speaking,’ the coroner says, slight Yorkshire inflection. ‘Hello? Justina? I’m in lab.’
When Freya doesn’t answer, the coroner repeats himself.
‘Morning,’ Freya says. ‘This is Amanda from Civil Liaison, Greater Manchester Police.’
‘And?’
‘I’m chasing a post-mortem report,’ Freya tells him. ‘My team’s seconded to the uni over here and we’re collating inquest data. Traumatic brain injuries, mainly. A prevention study. I believe you recently signed off on a young man who died on your patch.’
‘And it’s his report in particular, is it?’
‘A man called Stephen—’
‘Parsons,’ the coroner finishes. ‘Yes. I ruled misadventure.’
‘Misadventure,’ Freya repeats.
Derek sniggers. ‘And you hope I’ll send you the report by email, for convenience? At some time today? Amanda?’
‘Yes,’ she croaks.
A pause, then: ‘Are you sniffing for the national rags or plain old click-whoring? You’ve done better than most, I’ll admit – TBI! Ha! – but your mistake is to think we haven’t already had a line of bin-riflers queuing up to sniff the poor sod’s body. You’re like flies.’ His voice falters then, revealing the fullness of his anger. ‘You bloody people.’
Freya hangs up. The editor stares at her, holding her face with both hands.
‘Part two,’ Freya says flatly. She dips inside her coat and removes an envelope.
‘Now what?’ the editor says. She gestures to her office window. Between the blinds, the whole floor is gawping at them.
Freya puts the envelope on the desk. ‘There’s a press junket,’ she starts. ‘These are the times, with my business justification. If you can pull some strings, I’ll be your copy-monkey forever. I don’t care about my salary. Use the Dalle fee. Fire me afterwards if it doesn’t work out. This is literally the only way I can file.’
The editor opens the envelope. ‘Good God,’ she says, scanning the page. ‘You want to go where?’
* * *
From the office, Freya drives straight up to the cemetery. A kind of pilgrimage, decided on without hesitation or the need for navigation.
The road inclines for the church hill, and the roof slate rises into view. A grubby St George’s cross flying above the tower, before the church emerges from the rock, Manchester in the basin beyond.
Out of the car. The smell of wet leaves. The wind is up, and the memorial garden’s silver birches spasm with every gust. Freya crosses the church path, lost names filled with lichen on the limestone beneath her feet. These graves are the oldest on the plot, their inscriptions worn shallow by acid rain. The masonry style changes between rows and ages, growing increasingly worse in condition as she nears the church door.
Freya stands there and hammers on the wood, a courtesy. Nobody answers, so she doubles back towards the memorial garden and pulls her blazer tight around her. She searches for Stephen’s grave in the fresh plots, between the pristine headstones, but none give up his name. At the very edge of the cemetery, two graves are laid open, earth piled on green felt bisecting them. No headstones yet, though someone’s left a posy between the holes. Dead flowers in bright acetate.
A car crash, Freya thinks. A double murder. A suicide pact—
Freya walks down into the memorial garden. The birches are all at different stages of maturity so she moves for the youngest. There’s a degree of acceptance in this, an odd calmness. The wind is more settled here, and that’s some comfort.
The newest silver birch isn’t Stephen’s. Its neighbour, however, is. The plaque is elegant, S. PARSONS, and Freya pictures him beneath the restful earth, bacterial processes already under way. The roots of the birch will spider deep to recycle what remains of him. She touches his plaque lightly.
‘Where are you?’ she asks.
Freya steps up to the trunk. The leaves underfoot feel oddly familiar. Already the trunk has a wonderful grain and finish – a cracked sheath of greys and browns and blacks, speckled with tiny fungi. She reaches to touch it and registers a low tinkling, so close as to be inside her head, but unmistakably there. Almost like a bell ringing. Did the tree just shiver? It could be the wind, of course, but the grass around her stands still. She peers closely at the bark.
She holds her mouth.
There are signs in the tree trunk. A network of lines. She knows this pattern: the black vein markings on Alba’s skin, her hairless arms. Her exposed breast on the park bench. And there’s more. About Freya’s chest height there are puncture holes in the trunk, minute perforations whose edges curl outward. As if something has burrowed out.
Freya allows herself a word. A single word. A word she almost can’t bring herself to say. She says it before the church, the man in the ground, and a fresh gust sweeps through and takes the word with it. She realises what’s strange about the leaves on Stephen’s grave. They’re skeletal, stripped of their flesh.
A car door slams in the car park. Freya burns up with discovery, the fear of being caught. She quickly takes a picture of the tree and pulls her scarf to her nose. Her phone displays ten missed calls. Lastly, there’s a text notification from her editor that she only half-understands on first glance:
Dalle will pay.
Freya darts away from the memorial garden, eyes running from the cold. She doesn’t acknowledge any of the mourners or well-wishers passing her on the chur
ch path. She can’t bear the thought of recognising them, or they her. Let them notice her bloodshot whites and think her lost in sorrow, drifting. Let them think her madness isn’t vindicated. Because Freya knows. Now Freya’s sure. Whatever had possessed Stephen, whatever lived in him and changed him, made him drink to his end – whatever that was, it has left him again.
The Steeplejack
Shep leaves the cabin in full kit. Away from the mosquitoes, the hornet husk, towards the base pad, from which the scaffold calls him. The heat draws sweat instantly. It’s already a sour, suffocating day, and owing to Shep’s sensory faults, the slime that’s lifted his veil, it’s harder to know if the scaffold is even there at all. Streaks of a vile colour backlight the clouds, and the clouds resemble the death mask of Harold the yard mannequin, mouth-slit parting, Mallory Junior’s hidden camera, a probing tongue moving slowly from side to side. Harold’s dead eyes search the sky dome before he speaks down to Shep – ‘Stratosphere!’ – as his face bursts into rain. The smell of the yard slop-bucket hits Shep.
Shep holds up a hand to shield himself from Mallory Junior’s inspection. ‘The absolute state of you,’ he hears.
What is the state of him? Shep is wearing his toughest clothes, right enough for snow at the tower’s tip. Right enough for cold. Because the island is the mountain now, and the tower is complete. That’s what Shep believes.
‘You need a word with yourself,’ the mannequin says.
At the base pad, Shep finds another mountaineer.
‘Shepherd?’ the man asks.
The tower is more tangible here, attenuated and thin. But the diamondoid ascender cable is live, running up from the top.
‘Shep, mate.’ The mountaineer taps him on the shoulder.
If he could see himself – bowl-eyed, slack-mouthed.
‘Where’s the trail?’ Shep says.
‘We need to get you back to medical,’ the mountaineer says. ‘Come on, pal.’
But the mountaineer can’t hold Shep. He’ll find a route. His perception shifts again. A sudden appreciation of humidity, the wetness in every line on every surface, and it’s fine, good, to be standing here, pregnant and willing, and to know the tower wants him. There’s fresh sweat under his pack straps, tool belt, the weight-bearing points of his harness. He likes this harness – it’s sophisticated. Though his tools won’t do for rock and ice, they’ll manage this mountain in particular.
‘Look,’ he urges, to nobody. Here’s a heavy spanner with a fine motor built into its head. Here’s a pack of tobacco. Here are things an explorer should carry. His hands are engorged, don’t seem to be his own.
‘Shep,’ the mountaineer says. ‘Have a quick sit while I call you a quad.’
Shep shakes his head and darts towards the tower, leaving the mountaineer grasping. He’s on the base pad, directly under the tower’s summit, where looking up reminds him of the first time he saw it in the bunker: a flash, a lacy shape in his peripheral vision. A nexus: the extreme detail of some fault-block spike, a ziggurat. As he stares, the whole structure appears to sway and flicker, the tower solid with beautiful markings scoured into its beams.
He thinks: They’ll be here longer than I will, and he doesn’t know why. But he does understand that his brain is oscillating between the real and the not. Some powerful stimulus isn’t being decoded properly: there’s a barrier inside him. He stands there to observe the tower-hive, nesting birds flitting in and out. It knocks the breath from him. He could touch its apex, even from here. All around him is the Pacific, and here he is, waiting to be swallowed.
Shep closes his eyes. He keeps them that way, and he listens: the creaking and buzzing, the arc-welders crackling, drone engines burning in the hangar. He’s never taken hallucinogens, never thought it necessary since the real world gives him so much to admire, and yet he’s surer and surer, rushing for the surface, that his visions are authentic. This is a new boundary line. He stands halfway in, halfway out.
He opens his eyes. The tower scaffold and nothing more. Even his cabin melting into irrelevance. In his sleep or not in his sleep. His stubble and his body hair. Toilet tissue and ash piles and bells ringing. Messages in blood.
Then the mountaineer’s back there with him, attaching Shep’s harness to a thick rope, frowning when Shep challenges him. The mountaineer faces away to the scaff.
‘You shouldn’t be out here,’ the mountaineer says. ‘You’re meant to be in bed.’
The sun-lenses are gritty; Shep blinks away the uncertainty. He squeezes out the tears, and the base pad is alive again, teeming with contractors. He chokes up to see fellow jacks surrounding him, the heave and push of flesh and fluorescent clothing. ‘Where’s Kap?’ Shep asks the mountaineer. ‘Where’s my crew?’ But the mountaineer has gone, and his crew have gone up to watch the test without him.
Stratosphere.
Shep makes for his quadrant entrance, bouncing off people on his way through. A woman takes him by the shoulders then lets go in disgust, stares in horror at her hands like they’ve been stained, like there was too much give in his flesh. She flashes a threatening look and says, ‘Chill out, man.’
‘Kapper,’ Shep tells her. ‘Where’s Kapper gone?’
‘Kapper?’
Shep dips under the stile outside the ladder tube. The accessway. He stumbles into a small crew sorting camera gear, a micro-drone. The lights inside the ladder tube flickering. He stretches onto it, climbing quickly until he grazes his head on the hard soles of another contractor’s boots.
‘Kap!’ Shep yells. ‘Is that you? What’s happened?’
What’s happened, of course, makes no odds. It’s still happening, and Shep, in shortening spells of lucidity, is beginning to grasp that.
He comes off the ladder at the hundred-metre mark. There’s a huddle of contractors on the work platform, a few with their legs dangling over the edge, the rest against the railings. All of them are clipped in.
‘You’ll miss the fun,’ Shep says to those at the wall, scanning them. No one acknowledges him. ‘Kap’s up here somewhere,’ he says, and they ignore him again. ‘Twats!’ he shouts, and crawls back into the cage, back to the ladder.
One-fifty, then two hundred metres, then two-fifty. Kapper isn’t on any of those platforms, either. A safety warning on one crossbeam shouts EGRESS WITH CARE, with a markered-on note: UV SUITS REQUIRED ABOVE THIS POINT.
He only pokes his head out at three hundred, and at three-fifty he does the same. Still no Kapper. The cold expanse. He gulps every breath. The wind is screaming. The ladder is a cage, a long cage, and in this thinning air it’s squeezing him.
At four hundred metres Shep finds them. Kapper and Eddy against the railings, cross-legged on the platform. The two women from his crew setting up what might be a telescope.
‘Kapper,’ Shep says firmly. ‘What happened?’
Kapper’s eyes go wide to see Shep there on the platform. A deep red that makes his ears glow.
‘Who let you up here?’ Kapper asks. ‘Who?’
Eddy giggles nervously. Shep’s insides twist and lock. For all the things he has or hasn’t seen on the ground, in his cabin, Shep is certain that Kapper and the foreman are sharing a look of resignation.
‘I know I’m late,’ Shep says.
‘Shep…’ The foreman clears his throat. ‘You’re not meant to be… Why are you out of bed?’
Shep clambers out of the hatch fully. ‘You knocked,’ he says, pointing to Kapper.
The foreman seems puzzled. Looking Shep up and down. ‘No, he didn’t. He’s been up here since dawn. You shouldn’t be—’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t back-chat,’ Kapper says, standing up.
‘It’s fine, Kap,’ the foreman says, then pinches the bridge of his nose in thought. ‘Ladies – we’ve got a spare winch-line, haven’t we?’
‘A winch-line,’ Shep repeats. ‘I’m right here. I can hear you.’
Eddy comes right to Shep’s side. He unclips a quickdr
aw, holds it about hip height. ‘Listen,’ he whispers, and snaps the quickdraw to Shep’s toolbelt. ‘Where’s your protection? Your helmet?’
Shep follows the foreman’s gaze to the empty loops on his harness. He realises he’s climbed here ropeless, and that he’s been dropping tools on his way here. The only things in his toolbelt are his Stillson and fraying knife.
But that can’t be, either. He dropped his Stillson a fortnight before—
Eddy notices the knife and takes Shep’s arm. Applies enough pressure to stop Shep’s jitters. ‘You’re cold. You know you shouldn’t be on here without gear.’
‘Course,’ Shep says, and he bats away the foreman’s hand. ‘I want to see it through. I want to know we did it – me and him.’ He nods to Kapper. ‘That the Merlins’ll fly safely.’
‘No,’ Eddy says. ‘Bed rest. That was the deal. Your head isn’t straight.’
‘Bed rest?’
‘Come on, Shep,’ he says. ‘Let’s not go over this again. You know we had complaints. Your bloods…’
‘Stop saying my name like that.’
The foreman swallows.
‘Kap,’ Shep says. ‘Tell him. You were at my door.’
But if Kapper hears Shep, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He’s standing back-to, bent at the waist and leaning out over the platform’s edge protection. The snub stings badly.
‘He knocked on my door,’ Shep tells the foreman. ‘Then a woman came…’
‘Who? Your nurse?’
Shep touches his cheeks. They’re slimy.
‘A woman came round. To my cabin.’
Eddy sighs. ‘Let’s lash you to the railings at least.’ He turns to Kapper. ‘Grab the ropes. We’ll abseil him down when the test’s done.’ Back to Shep. ‘Pick your moments, don’t you? You know Vaughan’s here on a tour this week? So, let’s compromise: you can stay here if you’re safe, if you behave, as long as you listen to me. But Christ, man, you needed your gear on for this.’
Shep senses the others’ gaze. He hears one of the women whisper to the other: ‘Won’t have a pissin’ clue where he’s been tomorrow.’
‘No,’ he says. And he draws his knife and slices once, twice, into the quickdraw fabric before pushing hard against Eddy. The foreman’s Stetson flips off his head and blows right off the tower. Kapper rushes over with his fists raised to his face.