A Man of Shadows

by Jeff Noon

She didn’t answer.

  “Eleanor? You have to start helping me. You have to believe me, your life’s in danger.”

  Now she looked at him, disgust having won its place. “What the hell do you know? I mean, really? You don’t know anything about me, or my life.”

  Nyquist held his hands up in surrender. But she wasn’t taking it.

  “You’re a sad and lonely little guy, aren’t you? Behind the muscle and the scars.”

  He shrugged in response.

  “Were you ever married?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “Children?”

  “It didn’t last long enough for all that.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  He kept the hurt hidden, as best he could manage. He walked over to the window, looked out at the dark streets below, the few lights on display in the buildings on the other side of the train track. Life went on behind the shades and drawn curtains: people in love, families, eating, chatting, listening to the radio, playing board games.

  “What’s this?”

  Nyquist looked over. She had pulled the music box from her bag.

  “Your mother, Catherine, she placed it on Kinkaid’s grave. You have to lift up the lid.”

  She did so and the melody rose into the air. It sounded very ordinary now, a few brittle notes plucked by a metal plectrum, almost pitiful. Had he read too much into it?

  “I thought it belonged to you, as a toy.”

  “No.”

  “From your childhood…”

  “I’ve never seen it before.” She closed the lid. “Another mistake.”

  “Give it to me.”

  She handed it to him. He lifted the lid and listened, searching for a memory, something from his own childhood.

  It wasn’t there. It was dead. Dead and buried.

  He threw the box to the floor and brought his boot heel down on it, breaking it in two.

  “Oh my god!” cried Eleanor. “What is wrong with you?”

  Nyquist stared at her. Her hands punched the air.

  “You’re crazy,” she yelled. “I actually think you’re halfway disturbed.”

  “I’m doing what needs to be done.” He wiped at his face with his hand. “What does the time seven past seven mean to you?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Think! Seven minutes past seven. It must mean something.”

  Eleanor ignored the question. Instead she started to push her belongings back in the bag. She stood up.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I need to get out of here.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “This is ridiculous. I’m leaving. Open the door.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Give me the key.”

  “Sit the hell down!”

  Nyquist’s face had a brutal look, there was no arguing with it. Eleanor sat down on the edge of the bed. She said, “You’re as bad as they are, as bad as Kinkaid and Bale.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Nyquist took a breath. His eyes held too much darkness.

  And then he said, “I have no parents. None. My mother died when I was young, a boy. My father left me shortly afterwards. I was eight years old. He walked off into the dusk.”

  “Oh.”

  “There it is.”

  “You poor man. How on earth did you manage?”

  All emotion had left his face. “I got by. I’m still doing it.” The bare code of living. “It drives me forward. It pulls me back.”

  “How did she… how did your mother die?”

  “Run over. I was there with her, standing on the pavement. My father was coming to pick us up, but he was late. He drove a red saloon. I’ll always remember that car. He’d been drinking with his friends. As always. Mother bent down to wipe dirt off my face, then turned and stepped out into the road. Without looking. He didn’t stop. He did not stop. My father…”

  Nyquist stared into space, his face and eyes taken over by the memories. The old traffic lights and road signs flickered over his features, his mother’s hand in his for that last moment, the speeding red car still swerving, the cry, the noise her body made when it broke, when it broke apart. His father’s face behind the wheel, the look of utter despair…

  The girl stared at him without speaking.

  “It was an accident,” he said. “He never meant to…”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence. The shadows grew along the walls and ceiling like a sickness.

  He felt at his throat. “I need a drink.”

  “There’s no more.”

  “I need something.”

  “Let’s ring down, we’ll get you some–”

  “No.” His head shook violently. “I have to… I have to keep…”

  “You don’t look too good, Nyquist.”

  Another train passed the window. It was so loud, it sounded like it was almost inside the room with them. Lines of shadow and light crossed Nyquist’s face. His parents stood in opposite corners of the room, staring at him.

  He waited until the sound had fallen away and the vision had faded. Then he said, simply, “That’s how it is. One moment. That’s how we lose people.”

  Eleanor whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  Nyquist grunted. His eyes narrowed. “Tell me. Have you heard of a girl called Elise?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Or Eliza. Or Liz. Elizabeth?”

  “My mother used to mention that name sometimes. Eliza.”

  “Eliza. Right.”

  “I thought she was an old childhood friend of my mother’s, or a distant relative.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s difficult to unravel the truth from what she says.”

  Nyquist kept his voice level as he said, “I think she had another child.”

  Eleanor was shocked. “What?”

  “Your mother. She had a second child. Another girl.”

  “That’s not true. That can’t be true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Lord Apollo. So they did have a child, Patrick and my mother.” Her voice sped along, excited by the revelations. “Eliza. I wonder where she is. Do you know? This could explain a lot, about their relationship, I mean.”

  “It’s not that easy. Patrick told me he was shooting blanks.”

  “What?”

  “He’s sterile.”

  “But that means…”

  “It means your mother had two children by Kinkaid.”

  Her eyes screwed shut, as though to hide the truth from herself.

  Nyquist asked, “Was your name mentioned in the letters you found, the ones Kinkaid sent to your mother?”

  “My name? No, just… the girl. The girl. That’s all it said.”

  “So it could be…”

  “I’ve got a sister?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It might be…”

  “What?”

  “I think she died.”

  “No… don’t say that.”

  “Your mother said as much. But of course…”

  “How can we trust anything she says? We can’t.”

  Nyquist shrugged.

  Eleanor looked at him, her face beset with worry. “I can’t take this in.”

  “It all depends. I might be wrong about Eliza. And Patrick might not be telling the truth about being sterile.”

  “Why would he lie about that?”

  “I don’t know. But this whole case was suspect, right from the very beginning, when Bale first employed me to find you.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “People are keeping secrets, burying things. And you, Eleanor, you’re tied up in it somehow.”

  “How?”

  “I’m still figuring that out.” He pulled the last of the orange vials from his pocket. “Have you ever taken this?”

  She nodded. “Kia? Yeah, a few times.�
�

  “Why? What does it do to you?”

  Instead of answering the question she looked at him and said, “Have you tried it?”

  Something in his eyes or his gesture gave him away.

  “I thought so. What was shown to you?”

  “Nothing,” he lied. “I fell asleep.”

  “Of course you did.” She smiled. “Did it scare you? Or did it thrill you?”

  He moved back to the window and its view of the nightbound city. Another train passed along the elevated track, right at his eye level. He could see the passengers – black shapeless figures in the barely lit carriages. A cargo of shadows.

  The train vanished. He was aware that the girl was standing close behind him.

  He didn’t turn to her.

  Quietly she said, “Can you hear them?”

  He listened.

  Yes, there they were…

  Voices.

  Many of them.

  All murmuring through the walls.

  He lowered his own voice as well. “Who are they?”

  “The whisper poets. Shhh. They’re reciting…”

  Together they listened. No words were discernible, no lines of verse, only a soft hissing sound; and no meaning, only the sound itself, searching for meaning in the night, in the ill-lit realms of Nocturna.

  She said, “I gave up on kia. I was getting addicted to it.”

  “What did you see?”

  Her voice was still quiet, the speech split into fragments. “Myself. In dusk. Dancing. With a young woman. Under moonlight. It was… it was the most beautiful feeling I’ve ever known.”

  He waited a moment. The whisper poets continued.

  He asked, “Do you think it’s true, Eleanor, that kia reveals the future?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Someone told me that you don’t need the drug, anyway. That you have control over time.”

  “They were lying.”

  “So you have no power…”

  “Not power, no. Not control. But some small effect. It’s chaotic. Watches, clocks, they might speed up or slow down in my presence. It started when I was young, a little girl. It happened only occasionally, and without my knowing when or how.”

  Nyquist thought back to the confusion he’d felt whenever he looked at his wristwatch, the hands slipping this way and that, the blurring of the dial; yes, the trouble had begun after his first meeting with Eleanor, after he’d held her hand in the room of lights.

  “Is this why Bale tries to protect you so much?”

  “Maybe. But I think the effect scares him, more than anything, because it can’t be explained. Maybe he sees it as a random element that threatens to destroy all his carefully managed timelines. He’s petrified there might be another time crash.”

  “His worst nightmare.”

  “Exactly.”

  He moved away from the window. “Tell me what you know about the kia drug.”

  “Kinkaid told me it came from the dusklands, from a flower that grows there.”

  “So Kinkaid was a dealer?”

  “Yes. He admitted as such.”

  “And Bale?”

  “He’s in the chain as well. He’s making a profit from it.”

  “Kinkaid told you this?”

  She nodded. “But Dominic hated the drug himself. He said it was dangerous, and warned me off it. In fact…”

  “Yes?”

  Eleanor screwed up her face. “He told me that he regretted going into the business now. He’d made a mistake.”

  Nyquist sneered. “It’s too goddamn late for regrets.”

  She turned away from the remark.

  He watched her as she returned to the bed, to take her seat once more. Sometimes she was a teenager, a girl; while at other times she appeared older, beyond her age. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. The poor kid had two fathers, and both of them were scum. Her life was a tragedy waiting to happen. And for some reason his life had joined with hers: two timelines crisscrossing in the night, under a scattering of stars, fusing for a while. And there seemed little way of escaping the pathway.

  He spoke sharply to get her attention. “Eleanor. How did Quicksilver commit the murders without being seen? Did Kinkaid tell you?”

  “He did.”

  “And?”

  She looked down at her own hands where they rested in her lap. He waited. The room held them both in its bare, cold, dingy embrace.

  Far off a train whistle called, a lost animal in the night.

  Then silence.

  Eleanor spoke at last. “He stole time.”

  Nyquist wasn’t sure what he’d heard. “How do you mean?”

  She sat up on the bed and told him what she knew.

  “It’s something Kinkaid was born with, something to do with the city, and with dusk in particular. And it only happened when he was in a certain mood, whether disturbed or fearful, or angry, and overtaken by emotions. He told me it first happened when he was a youth, around puberty.” She paused. “He could never go far from Dusk without feeling weak. He said it was a bit like being a vampire in the daylight.” She grinned at this memory, as Nyquist did a quick calculation in his head: yes, every Quicksilver killing had taken place in those populated areas that were closest to the fogline: Moonstruck, Fahrenheit, Glareville, Penumbra. In itself it meant little, but it added substance to Eleanor’s claim. She carried on. “He was always being bullied, beaten up, especially by a gang of lads that used to hang around the dusk edge. They caught him spying on them one time and the leader made a big show of it, he really laid into Dominic. The others held him down as the leader punched at my father’s face, over and over.”

  Nyquist watched her. She was telling the story from the inside out, as though she herself were the subject.

  “He was helpless. In great pain. There was blood everywhere. In his eyes, his mouth. And the gang leader wouldn’t stop. He just kept hammering him. And then it happened.”

  She stopped for a moment as she sought to get the details right.

  “This is how he told it to me. He felt that he’d passed out. Or fainted. A blackout, he called it. In fact, a few seconds of his life had been taken away. One moment he was getting beaten to a pulp, and the next he was the one on top. There was no inbetween. And suddenly he had the advantage. His attacker was reeling backwards, as though he’d been punched. It was all Dominic needed, those few seconds. He managed to get to his feet and start to run. He escaped. And he didn’t even know how it had happened. He didn’t have a clue. Not until later, when it happened a second time. And then again, a third time.”

  “So this only happened when he was in danger?”

  “In danger. In a rage. In pain. Or close to someone else’s pain. And the more disturbed he was, the more terrible or dangerous the situation, the more time he could steal. When someone died, for instance, or was killed. Murdered. Then he might steal a minute or even more from everyone in the vicinity. But he didn’t really have that much control over it, not to begin with. In fact the moment disappeared for him as well. Because he was also bound up in time, just as much as the victim was.”

  “So he couldn’t remember what had happened during the blackouts?”

  “No, only that something had taken place, usually to his advantage.”

  Nyquist looked at the broken pieces of the music box on the floor.

  Eleanor carried on. “It’s why nobody ever saw Quicksilver commit his crimes. One or two minutes of time had just disappeared. For everyone concerned. And all the witnesses saw was the beginning and the end of the sequence.” Her eyes looked up as she remembered. “He told me it was like being on your own personal timeline, one that no one else can ever travel on, and when you’re on it, it’s like you’re invisible. Time is still passing for you, and you can act within it; but you’re outside of other people’s time frame, don’t you see? And then you strike!”

  “And afterwards…”

  “And afterwards, you’re back in no
rmal time. And the memory disappears.”

  Nyquist thought back to the news reports he’d read, and also to the room on the edge of twilight, to the moment of his own blackout, how events seemed to go missing from his sight, and from his memory.

  “But why can’t you remember what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I really don’t. I think Dominic knew, but he wouldn’t tell me for some reason. But I see it as a scene cut out of a movie. Or like a tape recorder edit. The missing portion still exists, but separately from the rest of the film or the tape.”

  Yes, Nyquist could see that. The jump cut. It corresponded to what he’d experienced. Yet he found it so hard to comprehend.

  “And you think you stabbed your father in that missing minute?”

  “What else could have happened?”

  “And what, Kinkaid’s anguish, his pain, his body’s final torment in some way activated the process?” She didn’t answer. He carried on: “But how can you know for certain, Eleanor, if your own time was stolen as well?”

  “I can’t. All I see is darkness, like you. But I can feel the knife in my hand, I can almost see it there…”

  “You were holding the knife, I saw that.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  They both fell silent.

  “I don’t know if I can believe this,” he said. “Whole minutes can’t just be taken away like that. Not from a person’s life.”

  Eleanor nodded. “I know. It’s difficult. But if there’s one place on Earth where such a thing could happen, it’s here, in Dayzone, or Nocturna. Here, where we’ve broken the hours down into fragments, into dust.”

  “And you’re sure of all this?”

  “Believe me, I know. Because…”

  He waited. “Yes?”

  “Because it wasn’t Dominic that stole the time, not when he died. It was me. Because I can do it as well. He’s passed it on to me.” Her eyes blazed. “I’m Quicksilver.”

  One by One, the Stars

  A little later he was standing at the window, looking out to where the stars flickered in the sky. It was a tempting illusion and like many citizens, Nyquist had easily fallen into the spell. But really he knew the truth, that the entire sky of Nocturna was made from old burnt-out lights. Only a certain number were still working, and these were the current stars. They fizzed and sparked. Perhaps it was raining, up above, in the real sky, in the real world, where time behaved normally.