by Heide Goody
“As far as I’m concerned, Sunny Jim, until I’ve actually punched a god in the face, that wish is unfulfilled. Still out for delivery. Sorry, you were out when you called, we will try to deliver it another time.”
“The three wishes have been granted,” said the King in Crimson, but his dramatic looming had ceased and he was shrinking, subsiding.
“But they’ve not been collected,” said Rod. “My soul is not yours, not yet.”
He saw that the King’s hands were empty.
“Where’s my jacket? You had it before. I’ve got valuables in there, in the pockets and sewn into the lining.”
Seeing that the conversation had moved on, that the claiming of Rod’s eternal soul was no longer under discussion, the King pointed in a surly manner to a gravestone some distance away. Rod’s jacket was draped over it. A scrawny masked figure was making her way across the graveyard towards it. Rod could read her intentions clearly.
“Oi! Oi! That’s mine!” he called and jogged over.
Threats were not necessary. The opportunistic thief reached out a hand, reconsidered her options and fled, tattered skirts flapping around her pale ankles.
It belatedly occurred to Rod to warn her about the skull-slug things but, by that time, she had vanished among the graves. He lifted his jacket up, dusted it, inspected it and slipped it on.
The King in Crimson was at his elbow, mask back in place, present without any sense of having moved.
Rod looked at the broken architecture of the city. “Where am I?”
“Carcosa,” said the King in Crimson.
“Carcosa,” Rod repeated. It seemed a familiar name, but he could no more place it than he could Atlantis or Brigadoon. “We’re no longer on Earth? My Earth?”
“You wished to be somewhere else.”
Rod gritted his teeth and took a deep breath. “There’s a word to describe what you are,” he told the King in Crimson. “It’s more than contrary, more than a jobsworth. You’re an arse, mate. Worse than flamin’ riddles, and that’s saying summat.”
He didn’t have a plan, but he wanted to show his general contempt for the King in Crimson, so he walked away in the direction of the nearest street. He had to side-step a few skull-slug creatures on the way, but he didn’t look back.
The cobbled streets were quiet but not empty. City residents drifted along in twos and threes. Clothes were mostly ragged and frayed and even the clothes of the better dressed had the air of museum pieces, carefully preserved and mended. Everyone wore masks across their mouths and noses; many filthy, some spotted with blood. No one spoke.
There was a strange rhythm to the way the people walked. They did not tiptoe as such, but moved with careful and slow footsteps as though fearful of making a noise. They were people pretending to be ghosts.
There were a number of market stalls in front of the ruins of what might have been a church. The sallow-faced stallholders averted their gaze as Rod approached. The nearest stall held a number of open boxes, all empty, save for labels and prices written on torn squares of brown paper. Next to Rod, a man in top hat and mask walked his fingertips from box to box, seemingly unable to decide between one empty box labelled ‘nectarines’ and one labelled ‘figs’. The man nodded his appreciation to the stallholder who silently doffed his cap in response. Not a word was spoken.
Rod stepped away. The King in Crimson was close. Rod was about to ask what the hell was going on here when he heard, clearly in the near silent city, the sound of music: the swirling sounds of an organ.
He hurried in the direction of the sound: some signs of life in a dead metropolis. People pretended not to look as he went by with unseemly haste and noise. Mothers physically turned their children away from him.
The music was coming from the archway entrance of a tall and possibly once grand building. Decorative columns topped with statues ran along the front of the building. Portions of the columns had fallen away, revealing them to be nothing but a plaster façade over a dull stone front. Several of the statues had lost their heads. The rest had had their faces removed.
A woman, in a dress so ripped and ragged that the bones of her corset poked through, stood beside a stout music box with a small array of organ pipes and a curved brass handle. As she cranked the handle, a melancholy tune wheezed from the box and she sang without enthusiasm or skill.
* * *
“Along the shore the cloud waves break.
“The twin suns sink behind the lake.
“The shadows lengthen…
“In Carcosa.”
* * *
The young woman saw Rod watching and met his gaze. In a city of creeping introverted souls, the gaze of this tired-looking lass was like a physical jolt. She did not stop her singing, but her eyes smiled and she nodded to him encouragingly, waving him towards the entrance.
Rod was wary of smiling and encouraging women beckoning him into strange buildings. He had heard enough apocryphal tales from armed forces colleagues. They all started with blokes being beckoned into foreign drinking dens by strange beautiful women and ended with the bloke waking up in a bathtub minus a kidney. But Rod had nowhere better to go, he was armed, and the people of this place were so uniformly pale and gaunt he couldn’t imagine any of them being much of a threat to him.
“Evenin’,” he said and stepped past her through the entrance.
The lobby was carpeted and lit by long rows of gas lamps. The carpet was so threadbare that the pattern had gone completely from parts of it and the coarse under weave dominated. Maybe a third of the gas lamps were working.
A slight lad in the remnants of a uniform, on which gold brocade was nothing but unravelling rope strands, scuttled forward. “Come, come,” he whispered. “You’re just in time.”
“Oh, is that right?” said Rod.
He followed the youth. The lad capered on the spot to try to get Rod to speed up. Rod followed him through a series of heavy dusty drapes and into a theatre auditorium. Hundreds of empty seats were gathered in tiers before a curtained stage. The air tasted of dust.
“I think we have a seat for you,” said the usher.
“Aye. I imagine so,” said Rod.
He followed the usher down to a middle row and a middle seat.
“I can’t really stay,” he said politely, feeling himself adopting the language to suit the dream logic of this place. “I must get back. The end of world is happening.”
“Please, sir. Don’t spoil the story for the other patrons.”
03:17am
There was a knock at the door and then, “You’ve locked yourself in, Vivian,” said Lois.
Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas squatted in the corner with her back against the sink unit, the Bloody Big Book open across her knees while she tried to continue her writing with the deficient biro Lois had initially brought her.
“Besh-e cudj yeh’a?” said ap Shallas and then remembered to speak in English. “Have you brought more pens? Good pens.”
“What I could find, bab.”
Lois’s tone did not fill her with confidence. Nonetheless, ap Shallas shuffled over and flicked the door catch. Lois all but fell in. She had a bunch of pens and pencils clutched in her hand.
“Oh, you’ve been busy, haven’t you?” she said in a deliberately cheery tone. “You all right down there?”
“The world as we know it has hours left,” said ap Shallas. “We are not all right anywhere.”
“Yes, I just meant—”
“I know what you meant,” said ap Shallas. She frowned and interrogated her own memories. “I did know what you meant. I recall knowing what you meant.”
Ap Shallas gripped the edges of the Bloody Big Book as though it was the handrail of a ship in the middle of thrashing seas. Dropped here, back in the mortal world once more, ap Shallas could feel her life in hell slipping away from her. An eternity of memories, an active omniscience granted by the eyes of Hath-No— As Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas she had seen everything and transcribed everything
– nearly everything! – into the book. But now, trapped once more on the mortal plane and in the pathetically finite body of Vivian Grey, she could not hold onto that mental power. Her brain wasn’t large enough. Her vision wasn’t wide enough.
“I need to finish it!” she said. “A line here. A reference there.” She held out her hands for the pens.
Lois showed her what she had found.
It was evident that during the construction and equipping of this Doomsday HQ, scant budget had been set aside for quality stationery. There were several of the cheap transparent biros that ap Shallas was already struggling with. She hoped they were cheap; if anyone had paid good money for nasty pens that snapped under the slightest pressure and which produced gunky ink, emerging in sporadic and miserly spurts, then they had been horribly duped. She ignored the few similar pens Lois held. She picked up a four-colour retractable biro.
“The blue and the black have run out but the red and the green are still good,” said Lois.
Ap Shallas made a doubtful noise and selected the most promising pen on offer. It was a rollerball and produced a smooth track of black ink on the edge of the current page in the book (which she turned with millennia of practice into a minor decorative border).
“And what is this?” she said, flicking the plastic animal head on the end of the pen. It wobbled on its spring mounting, cartoon eyes bulging.
“It’s a unicorn,” said Lois.
“I can see it’s a unicorn,” said ap Shallas. “I meant … why?”
“Unicorns are fun,” said Lois. “Now, what’s so important that you need all these pens, eh? Wouldn’t you like maybe to get a shower, some nice fresh clothes and maybe a bite to eat? Nina’s mom’s brought in some delicious samosas.”
“I need to write,” said ap Shallas. “I need to describe it all, recount it all, before the world is ended.” A horrible, nervous and wretched energy flowed through her.
“But why?” said Lois.
Ap Shallas flicked back to a partially completed section. Dipping to a precise location in an infinite book should have been impossible but ap Shallas clung to vestiges of her power as its creator. It obeyed her touch and command for now.
Lois turned round and looked down awkwardly to see what was being written.
* * *
“You understand what needs to be done?” Vivian Grey asked Steve the Destroyer (for the fourth time) as they walked to the throne room of the regent Sha-Datsei.
“Get the pathetic humans back to Earth, find any remains of Crippen-Ai, notify the authorities,” said the pabash-kaj doll.
“And the authorities are…?”
“The consular mission. The ginger one, Morag Murray, if I can.”
“Failing that?”
“Scientists. Doctors. Anyone who is not a brainless fool.”
Vivian made a sceptical noise, a vocalisation of her lack of trust in the doll’s abilities. “This mission might be harder than it appears.”
“You could come with us. You’re not half as annoying as some of these creatures,” said Steve.
“No. I am staying here. I have to write the Book of Sand. It’s self-evident.”
Steve shook his head. “You have to write it because you know you’re going to write it?”
“And I must therefore be writing it for some greater purpose. Perhaps it is the key to this whole thing.”
“Thing?”
Vivian Grey looked at her hand. It was a delaying action, time to gather some unconnected thoughts. “The end of the world,” she said. “Judgement Day.”
* * *
“I see,” said Lois once she’d read it all. “Then you’d better crack on with it. With any luck we’ll be dead before long. Now, can I bring you a cuppa?”
That gave ap Shallas cause to pause. Food and drink as sources of nutrition had vanished from her routine aeons ago, but the ritual of drinking tea – the act of heating the water, soaking the leaves, savouring the taste – these had stayed with her a lot longer.
“I know how you like it,” said Lois.
Vivian remembered cups of tea that Lois Wheeler had brought her. They rarely matched her expectations.
“No,” she said. “Bring me pens. More pens. Not—” She flicked the plastic novelty head on her pen. “—Unicorn pens.”
* * *
In the conference room, a map of the northern hemisphere, green lines on a black background, dominated the wall of screens. Nothing at all was occurring on the map but it held everyone’s attention.
Sanders had explained the appearance of dots on the screen would indicate nuclear missile launches.
Mrs Seth bustled quietly around the table, collecting plates and replacing untouched hot drinks with new ones. She maintained a low-grade cheerful muttering to herself but kept her head down so as not to disturb the fretful watchers. Morag didn’t know if she comprehended what was happening on the screen, and what it meant for the world at large. If she did, she was truly taking it in her stride.
Chad from marketing strode into the room, a cluster of presentation boards under one arm and a heavy folder of notes in the other.
“Prepare to be astounded,” he declared loudly. “Prepare to be amazed.”
“Be quiet and sit down,” hissed Morag.
“But I’ve got the mood boards for our communication campaign. I’ve decided a triadic colour scheme is called for. Bold? Yes. Occasionally over-powering? Perhaps. But I think we’re beyond the looking glass here, folks, so why don’t we—”
“Just shut up,” Morag snapped.
“There!” said Sanders, pointing at a spot on the screen. “Scotland.”
“Oh, God,” quailed Councillor Rahman softly.
The board was starting to light up. Orange glows appeared along the North Mediterranean coast, central Asia and up into Russia.
“That’s pretty,” said Chad. “What is it?”
“Nuclear missile launches,” said the major.
Chad blinked. “What? No, nonononono. That can’t be!”
“This was what we always planned for,” said Morag, even though the words themselves sickened the pit of her stomach (although she did not properly understand where the pit of her stomach was located in the deflated ruin of her lower abdomen). “This is our best-case scenario.” She thought about that. “Our least-worst-case scenario.”
Chad floundered in distress. “But – but my presentation. My vision. I had a five-part programme for keeping the public on board and informed. There would have been live broadcasts by our esteemed leaders.” He gestured open-palmed at the deputy council leader. “A Q&A with trusted journalists. We get some buzz going. Some sure-fire twitter trending for the older market segments.”
Morag and simply pointed at the screen.
“How long have we got?” said Chad.
The major took a deep, weary breath. “Our own nuclear arsenal will reach local targets within five to ten minutes, but we don’t have the stockpiles we used to have. We will rely on partner countries to finish the job.”
“We’ve asked the Americans to nuke us?”
“Among others. In which case we could have anywhere between thirty and forty minutes until thermonuclear annihilation.”
Chad twisted his lip. “I mean it was going to be a whole hour presentation, but I suppose we could ditch the icebreakers, and the word association thought shower. I could bring it down to a half hour.”
“You want to do a marketing pitch with the last half hour we have left to live?” asked Morag.
“That would be great!” said Chad, pleased by the suggestion and thoroughly missing her tone. “I can set up in five minutes. Anyone need any comfort breaks?” he asked the room. “It’s going to be an emotional and intense ride.”
Chad took his presentation cards to the front of the room and rested them against a flipchart in front of the screen currently detailing creeping flight paths of thousands of nuclear warheads.
“Not the best backdrop,” Chad noted
. “Could we perhaps change it to…?” He looked around his audience but didn’t find any willing volunteers to change the image. “Okay. We work with what we’ve got. Now I’m going to hand these out. Just for fun. Just for fun. But it’s to get you thinking.”
“‘If I was a yoghurt, what kind of yoghurt would I be?’” read the council CEO.
“Just for fun,” said Chad. “But it will prove relevant later on. Just you wait and see.” He glanced at the board of flying missiles. “Yeah, I think we’ll get to that bit. Just.”
Morag put her pen down and with an aching grunt, got to her feet. “I’m going to leave now.”
“But the presentation…” said Chad.
“Yeah. I’m going to spend these final precious minutes with my daughter.”
She walked out – walked, not waddled, she told herself – and made for the lift. As she waited for it to arrive, her thoughts went momentarily to Nina and Rod and where they might be spending their final moments. She didn’t know if Nina had even reached Sutton Coldfield, let alone found the donkey she was looking for. She wanted to picture Rod driving back to base from the university, but it felt like he’d been gone a long time. She couldn’t help thinking something had delayed him; perhaps permanently.
She rode up to the Vault level. Security Bob was in the lobby area. He let her through to the Vault without a word. Belatedly it occurred to her that he might not know about the missiles. Why would he? She considered saying something pleasant and reconciliatory to him, but it would sound awkward, and wouldn’t make their final moments any better for either of them.
The Vault was quiet but for the hum of the aircon and the low-level scratches, clicks and ululations of those artefacts which refused to stay still. She found Professor Sheikh Omar walking with obvious discomfort down an aisle of confiscated books. His head swung from side to side as he looked about.