by Jeff Noon
He shivered. He knew none of the constellations in this area, not one. He was lost. And then he noticed a small, black-draped figure moving across the sky, not too far above the window. A lamp was being repaired.
Only a select band of bulb monkeys worked the darkness. It was seen as being one of the most revered and the most mysterious of all jobs in the city; but despite the workers’ best and bravest efforts, he suspected that fewer and fewer of the bulbs were being replaced. One by one, the stars were going out. The night was growing darker.
And somewhere out there in the city…
Nyquist wondered about Patrick Bale, and what he must be thinking right now, the anger he would feel when he learned of Eleanor’s escape from the Aeon Institute. It was easy to imagine the chief executive closing in, using his power and his money to seek out this damp, crumbling hideaway and the two people that occupied it.
Nyquist turned back to the room.
Eleanor was asleep on the bed, still fully clothed. A blanket had fallen off onto the floor. He pulled it back over her, and as he did so she murmured and her eyes fluttered. Her voice rose out of sleep. “I stole your time, Nyquist. I think I did. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help it.” He made no reply and in a moment she was slumbering once more. It made him think back again to the room on the edge of twilight.
The death.
The knife entering Kinkaid’s neck.
But whose hand had wielded the weapon, whose anguish had stolen the time away? Who was to blame, Kinkaid or his daughter? Nyquist couldn’t tell. And neither could Eleanor. That was the problem; everyone contained within the moment of time was equally affected, equally lost. There was no way of knowing.
And yet if Dominic Kinkaid really was Quicksilver, then why would he commit a series of murders that he had no later knowledge of? To what end? No, it didn’t make sense. There was something else going on that Nyquist could not yet understand. And the most disturbing question remained: if Eleanor Bale had really taken over the mantle of Quicksilver, if she’d inherited that terrible power in some way, as she claimed, then where would that lead? Would there be further victims?
Quicksilver awaits you…
One thing was certain: if Nyquist could only find out what had happened in the room on the edge of twilight, this case would be solved. Yet it seemed an impossible task, despite the fact that the answer lay somewhere inside his own head, painted over by darkness.
He sat in the wooden chair.
He was tired, and lonely. The girl had yelled at him, called him crazy. What was the phrase she’d used? Halfway disturbed. And maybe he was. But he had tried so hard. Nyquist had grown into adulthood determined to be a different kind of man than his father was, to be someone who didn’t drink, who didn’t hurt the ones he loved, didn’t run away. And he shuddered as he recalled how he’d behaved with his wife, towards the end of their marriage, how he’d increasingly taken refuge in the bottle as the troubles set in.
He should’ve told Eleanor about the vision he’d received. But how can you reveal to somebody that you’ve seen them being killed? The moment of their death. Even if it was only imagined. No. It can’t be done.
Nyquist looked at his wrist and cursed. He kept forgetting that he’d left his watch in the glove compartment of the hire car, parked in the alleyway.
His father’s wristwatch. Would he ever see it again?
Well then. Let it be. Good riddance. He’d carried that old thing around for too many years now.
The spell was tightening.
Seven past seven… seven minutes past seven…
His mind drifted as his eyes closed.
The girl had confessed to murder. If he found out that she was speaking the truth, he would have to report the crime, he had no choice.
These were his last thoughts before sleep took him away.
He lay back in the wooden chair, his head resting against the grimy wall behind him. Bars of light patterned the room, moving across his body and then across Eleanor’s form on the bed in fluid parallel lines, although the train’s passage made no sound this time.
His mother was sitting in the bedroom alone, at her dressing table. She was brushing her hair one hundred times precisely, her lips mouthing the numbers as always, every night the same. The brush moved slowly but firmly through the dark locks. The young boy liked to watch from the doorway. But now he was no longer young, no longer innocent; but he was still there at the bedroom door, fully grown, watching, hoping, praying that the brushing of the hair would never end, that his mother would never rise, never leave the house, never stand at the pavement’s edge, never step out into the road…
Nyquist couldn’t work out where he was when he first woke up. He felt terrible, aching from the awkward sleeping position, his joints painful. He thought he’d only slept for a moment or two, but how could he tell? It might’ve been an hour or more.
And then he noticed that the bed was empty.
The girl was gone.
His immediate thought was that she’d been taken, kidnapped while he slept. No. The room was too tidy. He reached inside his jacket pocket, searching in vain for the door key. He stood up and went to the door. It was open, just slightly, the key in the lock. He looked back into the room. Eleanor had taken all of her things.
“Damn it.”
Then he heard noises from the landing. Voices. Loud. Angry. He got to the door, closed it and turned the key in the lock. Just as he did so, somebody tried turning the handle from the outside, trying to get in. The lock held. A fist banged against the panelling.
Then: “Nyquist! Open up!” A woman’s voice.
It was Pearce. Bale’s assistant. Nyquist held his breath.
“Come on. We only want the girl, nothing else.”
He heard talking: Pearce and someone else, a man’s voice. But it didn’t sound like Bale. Probably one or more of the company’s bodyguards. Now the fist banged again on the door, more insistent. The door rattled in the frame. Somebody was trying to fit a second key into the lock, but the key on this side was preventing access. Pearce made a brutal curse, which was closely followed by renewed violence against the door.
“I’ve got a gun,” Nyquist shouted.
“We just want Eleanor, that’s all, no trouble.”
He pulled the gun from its holster, slipped off the safety catch and fired it, all in one nervous action, so that the bullet hit the wall above the door, tearing a hole in the cheap plaster: a warning shot. The noise was deafening.
Screaming, shouts from the corridor. Smoke from the barrel, white dust floating down. The smell of it inside Nyquist’s mouth and nostrils.
He hoped the shot would buy him enough time. He slipped the gun back into the holster and then rushed to the window. He tore aside the slatted blind and tried to lift up the sash. It was nailed shut, it wouldn’t budge. He grabbed the wooden chair and swung it around in a wide arc to smash against the window, shattering the glass. There were still jagged edges in the frame; he knocked a few of them out and then climbed up, over the sill. He scrambled through.
Outside.
He was standing on a narrow window ledge, three storeys above the street. It was pitch black except for a line of small red lights which lined the elevated train track. The lights blinked on and off. Nyquist peered into the darkness. Blood dripped from his left hand, where he had cut it on the glass. He felt no pain. His body trembled on the very edge of falling, the sickening drop, the street far below, passing cars, concrete. Ahead, he could just about make out the steel and wood structure of the train line’s platform, stretching out to either side. But how far away was it exactly? Three feet? Or four, or five or six? More than that, even? His vision was hazy. He could not judge distance correctly. What was he doing up here, what was he thinking? And then he heard the hotel room door splintering open. There were no choices left to him, none at all, and so he pressed his hands against the window frame as hard as he could on both sides, he bent his knees and then leaped out into spac
e.
The sudden cold rush of air.
The red lights.
Emptiness.
The night, the night’s breath on his face and the cold stars looking down, looking out for him, lighting his way in the darkness.
Blackout
It was too far. His lower body missed the edge of the platform by inches, and he fell. His arms flailed in the void, managing to grab hold of a wooden strut. His fingers dug in tight, his wounded fingers, and he clung on above the street, above the people walking by down there, the good citizens of Nocturna. He felt that all his bodily knowledge rested in those fingers alone, those hands, these arms, the muscles, his chest, and then his legs and his feet as they found purchase on a steel girder. With an almighty effort he pulled himself up onto the wooden boards that skirted the train line. He was winded, out of breath. But there was no respite. He heard voices from the hotel’s window, shouting at him, and he ran from them, along the platform, following the red marker lights as they pulsed in front of him. The metal tracks were vibrating, taking on a spirit. A train was speeding toward him. Time slowed down. For once time was on his side as he moved across one track, across the other. He could do this! His body knew precisely how long it would take, precisely where to place his feet, each step, each moment, and then the train’s whistle blew and the passing locomotive sucked every last particle of air from his lungs, and he was over, he was across, clouded in smoke from the engine’s funnel. He moved on a little further until he came to a ladder set in the structure’s side, which he climbed down, sliding down the last few yards to the street.
Immediately, Nyquist set off running. He had to get away, to keep moving. He took the first turning he came to and then the next, through the narrow gloom-filled alleyways, along shaded underpasses, beneath the elevated streets. Around the next corner, keeping the trail cold, cold and complicated. The streets were empty to begin with, and then dotted with a few stragglers, and then more, until the entire way forward was crowded with people. A huge outdoor market bustled with life as hundreds of customers and revellers milled around stalls and kiosks. Here they gathered like candle-moths for their dark-eyed entertainments, and Nyquist welcomed their embrace. The stalls were selling torches, designer body-lamps, vampire lingerie and accessories, and a whole array of dolls and play figures representing famous Night Stalker ballad singers. Just about everyone was dressed in dark clothing with here and there dots and splashes of colour. Many of the shoppers had small lights attached to their outfits, and some of them sported paper lanterns dangling from antennae-like wires strapped to their heads. They looked like bizarre hybrid creatures, half human and half insect. A pair of buskers were singing melancholic nocturnes together. Their harmonies seemed to come to earth from some region of further darkness.
Nyquist walked along in a daze. He had slowed down, moving at the crowd’s steady pace. He could feel the pain in his hand now, and he looked down to see the cut in the palm. It wasn’t too bad, not too deep. He pulled out a piece of glass and wrapped his handkerchief around the wounded part, holding it tight against the cut to stop the blood. To stop the pain. The doubt. The case was unravelling, coming apart in his grasp. Once again, he’d lost Eleanor. She could be anywhere by now. But at least she had escaped Bale’s heavies. He had to give thanks for that small mercy.
Before him stood the portable wagon of an itinerant clock-seller, where a vast mixture of illuminated wristwatches burned at the eyes, their iridescent dials glowing like sexually aroused beetles. Nyquist was pressed in on all sides by eager customers. The clock seller showed him a fake designer watch, which he bought without thinking. It cost next to nothing, a cheap plastic affair. The trader demonstrated the mechanism; by pressing on the dial, just so, the watch would light up in luminous green. Nyquist strapped the timepiece around his wrist and then activated the special feature. The dial shone with its own radiance.
It was twelve minutes to ten.
Oh, that felt good! The second hand moved around in its balanced rhythm, and his body responded; he could feel it, his heart, his blood. Time had hold of him once again, however gentle it might be, however crazed.
He moved on a little through the crowd.
And then he heard the voice.
It was a whisper at first, spoken by one person only.
Then another picked it up and passed it on.
Quietly.
Whisper upon whisper.
A single word passed from one person to another, gathering, growing louder.
Louder. More insistent.
Every mouth the same, the same word, the same emotion.
Fear.
Quicksilver.
Quicksilver. Quicksilver.
Quicksilver. Quicksilver. Quicksilver. Quicksilver…
Quicksilver!
Nyquist forced his way through a throng of people around a stall where a transistor radio was playing. He heard someone ask his neighbour: “What is it? What happened?”
“Another killing. A young man this time.”
“Helios save me! Is it Quicksilver?”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
And then the stallholder’s voice rose about the tumult. “Quiet! Listen!”
They listened, huddled in a semicircle, as the news announcer spoke to them from the radio’s speaker grille.
“…this time in Nocturna. Nobody saw anything…”
That was enough to set everyone chattering.
Nocturna
Whereabouts? Which precinct?
He could be anywhere, he could be among us!
But all Nyquist could think about was Eleanor Bale, the fact that she was out here in the streets. Had she told the truth about her powers? Had she left the hotel room, left him sleeping there for hours, and gone out, driven mad by her blood, by the force within, seeking her prey? Had she killed someone, a helpless victim?
Once the thought was in his mind, he couldn’t get rid of it.
He escaped the crowd of listeners and walked onto a boulevard of shadows, a long wide street lined with night clubs and occupied by a tribe of Night Stalkers. Dark complex music sounded from the club doorways. Nyquist realised that he must have entered the Shadeville precinct, where tribes of Gothic persuasion lived. They were easily recognised, with their purple clothing, cobwebby hair, and their stark white faces offset by violet lipstick. They glanced at each other in a disaffected manner, their kohl-lined eyes turning away almost immediately. Evidently, the news of the latest Quicksilver killing hadn’t reached them yet. Or else they were too caught up in their own fantasies to care.
Nyquist stumbled on. He’d seen a young woman ahead, moving away from him. It looked a little like Eleanor, but the figure vanished into the crowd almost immediately. He tried to push through, causing several people to hiss at him, like snakes. Ssssss! Their tongues were dyed black or mauve and tipped with silver metal extensions. The music grew louder, more hypnotic. And then the woman came back into sight just as she turned off the boulevard, entering a side alley. Nyquist followed her.
Shadows moved in the darkness of the passage, set in motion by naked gas flames that flickered from high on the walls. A voice was booming out from a public address system: “Amidst grief and torment! Amidst grief and torment!” The passageway led to a small makeshift church where a preacher worked his congregation into a frenzy. “Verily, amidst grief and torment I did wander, alone, trembling beneath Dayzone’s unforgiving glare. The artificial sun punished me. And though I tried to escape my suffering, I could never be free of myself, or my own torments.” Nyquist moved through the gathering, searching for one face alone. The preacher roared on: “Only when I let myself fall into night’s sweet embrace did I find my release. Therefore, in the soft darkness let us walk, all of us, seeking our salvation.” A low rumbling drumbeat could be heard. And then Nyquist saw her once again, Eleanor Bale; she was walking through an open doorway at the back of the church. The drums pounded out as Nyquist followed her, onto open ground. The
night air blossomed with sparks. A great line of people were carrying large illuminated lanterns up a hill, to where a bonfire blazed. The lanterns were designed to look like clocks of various types, shapes and sizes: hourglasses, sundials, giant pocket watches, old-fashioned alarm clocks, grandfather and grandmother clocks, traveller’s clocks, carriage clocks. They were made of transparent materials stretched over wooden frames, and were lit from within by brightly coloured bulbs, in green, blue, orange, yellow and red. The parade moved up the hill like a long tail of daylight caught in night’s grasp. Nyquist’s face danced in the light. The music pulsed. He looked around, dodging between the procession, calling out, “Eleanor! Wait!” But the young woman carried on walking, away from the crowd and down the gentle slope of the hill. She passed beneath a streetlamp, just as Nyquist caught up with her and grabbed her by the shoulder, pulling her round to face him.
“Eleanor!”
“What is it?” The woman looked at Nyquist. “What do you want?”
“I… I’m sorry. I thought you were…”
The young woman’s face was powdered to make her look like a ghost; her violet-coloured lips parted to form a smile.
Nyquist felt embarrassed. “I thought you were somebody else.”
“I am,” the stranger said, “every time I visit here.”
And then she turned from him, walking quickly down the hill and disappearing into the shadows. Nyquist shook his head to clear it. His eyes were hurting. He was feeling sick, both exhausted and manic at the same time. At the top of the hill, the clocks were being thrown to the flames, as though time itself was being set on fire. The words of the preacher rang in his ears like a mantra. Amidst grief and torment I did wander, alone, trembling. Amidst grief, torment, alone, trembling… He pulled the square of linen off his hand and stared at the blood on his palm. It was useless. The handkerchief fluttered to the ground, a scrap torn from a shroud. As he turned to get back to the main road he bumped into somebody. He started to apologise, when the person’s face moved into the light.