A Man of Shadows

by Jeff Noon

  He kept telling himself to let it be, to let it go. But he couldn’t.

  He took the photograph of Dominic Kinkaid out of his desk drawer. He placed it next to the one of Eleanor. Was there a connection, a familial relation? Perhaps. They shared a certain look in and around the eyes: a darkness. A sadness, even.

  Father and daughter?

  Yet she had mentioned none of this to the police.

  Family secrets, perhaps; the Bales keeping their public image firmly intact.

  Nyquist tried to sleep, still sitting in his chair. He placed a cloth over his face, holding it there with one hand. Eventually, a small piece of the night laid its veil over him. And once again he was trapped in the room on the edge of twilight, with this time himself pushing the blade forward, right into Kinkaid’s neck. Blood spurted onto his hand.

  He woke up shaking. Only a short time had passed. A few moments. His eyes ached and would hardly open. He stood up and started to pace the room, end to end. He needed a shave, a shower. He needed release. Most of all he needed to get out of here, out of this space. It felt like his own shadow was creeping up in him. He switched off the desk lamp, switched it on again. Off again. On. Off. On. He was living to a timescale of his own mad creation, pure stretched-out body clock, moment to moment. It was a sickness. He was heading for breakdown, he could feel it. Time was fragmenting around him. He’d be one more statistic in the newspaper.

  Lonely private eye found dead in office.

  Maybe his ex-wife had been right all along: more and more his life was playing out like a character in a pulp crime magazine. Maybe he was heading for a lurid end, a madman raving in a padded cell in a hospital for the chronologically deranged.

  The clock on the wall read six minutes to eleven. And his wristwatch read seventeen minutes past one, or twenty past. The hands flickered in his sight, back and forth; the dial was fuzzy, filled with smoke, with mist. Dusk had got in the workings: he still couldn’t read it properly. Nyquist shook his head. His mind buzzed with images. A clock spinning round, too fast for the eye to register, ticking loudly. The cuckoo calling, once, twice, a third time. Four times, five. And suddenly he was back there again, inside the house, he saw the fog as it swirled, the man on the bed, the girl, himself. Time skipped. Eleanor was screaming. He couldn’t make out the words. The knife flashed. But whose hand was wrapped around the handle? He couldn’t be sure: Kinkaid’s, or Eleanor’s? Or his own. The fog closed over the memory.

  A terrible knowledge flashed in his head: Eleanor Bale was still in peril.

  Eleanor, my child. You have to leave the city. They’re looking for you!

  Kinkaid’s final words to the girl, to his daughter, if that much was true. He was trying to protect her, to warn her, to make her run away. The danger still existed. But who was looking for her? Did they mean her harm? It certainly sounded that way.

  He looked at the typewriter, the piece of paper still inserted in the roller:

  THE ELEANOR BALE CASE

  The blank space beneath.

  On an impulse, he started to type, the keys clacking like bare bones against metal:

  What the hell happened in that room?

  That was all. Nothing else. He reached for the phone on his desk and rang the Ariadne Centre. A woman greeted him with a cheery message. He jumped in before she could finish.

  “I need to speak with Patrick Bale.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “Listen to me, please. This is important. I need to get in touch with his daughter. It’s urgent.” Nyquist’s voice was slurring. “Can you give me their home number?”

  “Company policy dictates that–”

  “Please. Listen–”

  The call was cut off.

  He looked at the clock on the wall, at the watch on his wrist. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Somewhere between the two different times, he was caught, trapped.

  Feeling like a dog locked in a cage, he strode to the window and wrenched back the curtain. The light and the heat poured in, the colours struck at his eyes. Electrical sparks jumped across his vision and he couldn’t tell if they were coming from the lamps pressed up tight against the glass, or from inside his skull. His face was moist, his hair matted down flat to his brow. He could hear a hissing noise at the back of his head somewhere. It was too much. Too much light, too much heat, too many colours. Too many goddamn fragments of time circling around him. His senses fused together and his hands reached out to press themselves against the glass, the burning glass, and he kept them there as long as he could, palms flat and fingers outstretched, forgetting himself, forgetting, until the pain and the heat got too much, far too much, and he was shocked back to life.

  He needed to escape.

  A Ladder to the Sky

  He came out of his office and turned to face the stairs leading upwards. Nyquist had visited the floor above a few times. Some time ago, there was a woman who worked up there, Janice, and a kind of relationship had taken place between them. He recalled the moments of pleasure as he started up the stairs. Maybe something could have been made from it on his part, but Janice had moved on to a new job in a different part of the city and, as the wise man once said, many bulbs had popped their filaments since then.

  Nyquist started to climb. He had to get above the lamps if he could. He had to find out where the lamps ended and the normal sky began. Was such a thing possible? He didn’t know; it was a need within him, a way to break loose, to break free. Upon reaching the landing above he turned around in a half circle and carried on upwards to the next floor. He had been here once, just once, when a cheque had been sent to the wrong office. He could not remember which office, or when this incident had taken place. It didn’t matter. Nyquist reached the landing and turned onto another flight of stairs. He was now entering unknown territory. How many floors did the building contain? He didn’t know. How many of them were occupied? He didn’t know. The higher you reached, the fewer people you found; that was the ruling. Nyquist carried on and at the next landing he walked a little way along the corridor to the nearest open doorway and looked inside. The space was twice as big as his own, as though a wall had been knocked down and two offices joined together. The workers stared at him, this wild-eyed intruder. A woman asked him what he was looking for. He didn’t answer. “Hey, buddy,” one of the men said. “What’s your problem?”

  Nyquist walked over to the window. “This won’t take a second,” he said. “Just doing a test.” The blind shot upwards as he jerked on the cord and the usual array of lamps came into view. Nyquist looked at the flashing colours and the dazzling, burning rays of light. He was feeling more than a little bewildered as he turned to face the workers in the office: all these people watching him, peering at him. Nyquist smiled weakly, then headed back to the stairway. Now he was taking the stairs two at a time. He was losing breath, his muscles started to ache. Footsteps sounded behind him but when he stopped to look, there was no one there. Just an echo. And so he carried on, climbing upwards. Every so often he would make a detour to glance through an office doorway, only to see the curtains drawn or the blinds pulled down. As he went higher he saw improvised protection: old blankets pinned up over the windows, or sheets of typing paper glued to the glass, layer upon layer. Still the lights outside could be seen, shining through the coverings. Only two or three workers manned these upper offices, pale silent figures, the ghosts of haunted business ventures. They stared at Nyquist blankly with their sunken eyes. Nobody spoke.

  As he climbed higher the stairwell lights grew dark and he saw that many offices were now empty, sometimes completely stripped out, or still furnished with their work desks, chairs and filing cabinets. Sheaves of half-finished documents lay scattered on the desks next to rusting typewriters. In these offices the windows were often bereft of any covering. And yet even at this height the neon sky was still on display, albeit entirely neglected, the bulbs either dead or smashed into shards. Sometimes the window glass itse
lf was shattered. It was easy to imagine people reaching the end of their tethers and taking up a paperweight or a typewriter to crack the glass and darken the lights outside forever.

  Nyquist carried on, reaching each landing in turn and skidding around to climb the next flight, and so on, flight after flight, his pores flooding with sweat and his shirt clinging to his back. He was slipping, falling, righting himself again. He had set his mind on this task and would not stop now, and he tugged open his collar to get some air to his system. It was so humid up here, he was entering a different climate. Finally he had to stop for a moment, to rest, leaning against a banister. His body was overheating. His lungs wheezed, his heart pounded. He could smell the alcohol in his sweat. It made him feel nauseous.

  All was quiet this high up. Nyquist imagined that the workers had long since fled to other office blocks in more downmarket parts of town, where the lower levels came at a cheaper price. Slowly, his breathing settled and the pain in his chest eased a little. He was all set to carry on climbing, when he heard a noise from the nearest corridor. A pale light was shining through one of the office doorways. Nyquist made his way towards it. The noise turned out to be a transistor radio or a gramophone; he vaguely recognised a tune in praise of the sun, popular a while ago. He entered the room unannounced. It was populated with a half dozen or so people, each of them intent on some task at hand. They were drawing or painting pictures at easels. Nyquist saw comic book images of the sun bursting over the city in a ball of flames, or of rain falling in great jagged lines, and countless lamps and bulbs exploding into fanned-out rays of colour. Nobody talked to him; some looked up at his passing and then went back to their work. The music played on. Nyquist went over to the window and pulled at the curtains so hard they tore free from the runner.

  He stared out through the glass. All he could see were bulbs, more bulbs, lamps and flames and colours and all kinds of light-emitting devices. He turned to the artists. “Where does it end?” he cried. “Where the hell does it end?”

  Nobody answered. One woman shook her head slowly from side to side. Her lips moved in silence. Nyquist banged a fist down on a desktop. He walked out of this last office, this final outpost, moving more slowly now. He was coldly determined in his heart, not wasting his energy, but simply taking each flight of steps in turn. Very soon he was moving through areas of complete darkness, the corridors gloomy and silent and dust filled, where every bulb had long since burned out and never been replaced. And then finally he reached the very top floor. One further door marked Roof Access led to a narrow flight of stairs. There were just six steps altogether, these leading upwards to a green metal fire door, which was propped open with a small length of timber. Nyquist opened the door fully and stepped through.

  The vast dome of the neon sky stretched over the roof of the tower block, reaching down to touch the building on all four sides, but leaving a gap of some ten feet or so, between the roof itself and the dome’s highest point. It was an irregular construction, made entirely of lamps, each of which was ablaze with colour. There was no glimpse of the real sky, of the sun and the clouds. Nyquist stood beneath this vault of lights. His hands reached up above his head and his mouth opened in a cry of abject despair. This cry was trapped beneath the neon sky like a bird in a coop, made frantic in its bid to escape, the sound merging with the constant buzz and pop of electricity. Nyquist was wondering why these bulbs were still alight, when he heard a voice.

  “There’s nothing else.”

  Nyquist turned. At first he could make out no human shape amid the fiery glow of the dome. And then the voice came again. “It’s no good crying out or screaming, mister, there’s nothing else.” And now Nyquist could see the speaker more clearly. It was a woman sitting on an upturned crate. He guessed she was in her sixties, with skin the same colour and texture as brown leather. Her long greying hair was held back by a pair of designer goggles, which she had pushed up from her eyes, to her brow. She had the haunted look of a long-term photon addict, someone who had spent far too long in direct illumination. She was dressed in clothing made from many different patches of material, in all colours and shades; it was this outfit that made her almost invisible against the multicoloured complex of lights. Nyquist stepped closer. The woman’s eyes were unlike any others he had ever seen, being a pair of overly large, pale, bloodshot orbs.

  She stood up at his approach, saying, “It’s just bulbs. All the way.”

  “There’s no… there’s… no…” Nyquist was having trouble speaking.

  “There’s no sky,” the woman said for him. “Not here. Not in Dayzone. We don’t believe in the sky. We believe in the Glow. The neon, the shimmer. The power and magic of heat and light.”

  Nyquist watched the woman as she bent down to choose a yellow bulb from a large cardboard box on the floor. He saw that her jerkin-style waistcoat had been fitted out with tools and gadgets, each assigned to its own specially sewn-on pocket or loop, and that her hands were protected by a pair of thin canvas gloves. “My name’s Lucille,” she said, as she walked over to where the neon sky came down towards the edge of the building. “Lucille Firstborn.” She reached up to screw the yellow bulb into an empty socket. The light glowed evenly and she nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, I was a bulb monkey once. Over twenty-five years’ service, mending the lights. Fixing the sky, we called it. Hanging on, clinging tight, swinging across upside down from hold to hold, from the ropes, the harness, the belts. Very often going ‘pure’ as we called it, with no safety gear. All the tricks and shortcuts, the technical knowhow, the snazzy uniform, the special glasses. The tools of the trade.”

  She smiled and then reached up to screw in a second bulb, this one shining with a bright red light. She stepped back to admire her work.

  “There we are. That’s much better.”

  “Stop doing it,” Nyquist said. “Why are you doing it?”

  “What?”

  “Stop replacing the bulbs.”

  Lucille looked over towards him, before sitting herself back down on her crate. She reached into a shoulder bag, pulling out an electrical plug. A tiny screwdriver was extracted from one of her pockets, and with this she removed the top of the plug. Nyquist had never seen it done so quickly. She beckoned him forward.

  “Do you see them? The wires?”

  Nyquist nodded.

  “One, two, three.” Each wire was pointed out in turn. “Do you know what they mean, these connections? No? It’s the Holy Trinity. Now, follow if you can. The neutral wire, here see, that’s the Father, the circle that always returns upon itself. The earth wire, here, well that’s the Son isn’t it, the spirit made flesh, brought down to earth from the sky, so to speak. You see what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “And here, the live wire? Well that’s easy.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course! The live wire is the Holy Ghost, the power itself that brings all to glorious existence.”

  Nyquist was confused. “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m showing you the way, the Way of the Light.”

  A bulb blew out a little further across the roof top. It made a dull popping sound.

  “Now! You see?” Lucille got to her feet. “Ablaze one second. And then darkness. Such is life.” She walked over to the spot. “Help me. Quickly! The ladder.”

  Nyquist fetched the stepladder from where it was standing, already open. He set it in place for Lucille and she clambered up to remove the dead bulb. This she wrapped in a piece of newspaper, placing it in her shoulder bag. Then she pulled out a new bulb from a pocket. “The city wasn’t always like this, you know?”

  Nyquist did know, but he let her carry on.

  “I was only fifteen years old when I first started out as an apprentice, and back then I often heard stories from the older bulb monkeys, the veterans. They said that the city was perfectly normal once, although it prided itself on being the ultimate twenty-four hour experience zone. This
is what they called it. Later on, it became Dayzone. Well, it was just the city-centre at first, then it spread. And from that moment on, the lamps never went out.” Lucille screwed in the new bulb and the light came on immediately with a lovely azure glow to it. “There were many benefits. Increased work time, without let up, because the machines need never rest, never go quiet, never stop turning. That was the promise. And therefore, increased profits. A better lifestyle all around, for rich and poor. Ha!” She let out a loud guffaw. “I’m still waiting.” She climbed back down the ladder and Nyquist noticed for the first time the slight limp in her left leg.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  She shook her head as though to dismiss a troublesome thought.

  “I fell.”

  And then she spat, aiming the large ball of phlegm upwards in a long arc so that it hit a naked bulb and sizzled like fat on a fire.

  “Early retirement. Full pension. Such as it is.”

  She moved from side to side, to better admire the new light bulb she had fitted. But then, even as she smiled at her work, the bulb started flickering, and dying.

  “Oh my. You see that? The wiring is shot. You see the trouble I have?”

  The bulb flashed again, went dark once more, and then finally caught hold.

  Lucille laughed. “It burns! Life itself.”

  Something happened. The woman’s face changed. If there was a cloud in sight it would have passed over her features at that moment; but the artificial sky was bright, bright with the illuminated icons of the new electrical gods. “I’m only keeping the darkness at bay,” she said, her voice quiet, directed inwards. “Truly, there is no greater process by which a human being can prove him or herself. None greater.”

  “So you do this just for fun, Lucille, is that it? For yourself?”

  Her eyes squeezed shut at this. She grimaced.