“I say,” said Hawker, as Boon let out an amused whistle. “What the Dickens are you?”
Barbara glared. “Where’s Estella?”
“No idea,” said Boon. “The old man only gave us the address. But come here anyway, you wonderful thing. We ought to have a bit of a chinwag.”
Warily, Barbara walked over to him. He whispered something in her ear, some poisonous lie or vicious half-truth, some dangerous arrangement of words.
I knelt beside the mutilated body of Miss Morning. Although she was dead, her eyes hadn’t stopped staring wildly toward the ceiling and her pupils still seemed engorged with fear. The only thing I could think of to do was to close them and, beneath my breath, murmur something halfway between an apology and a benediction.
“Henry?”
Barbara was shouting at me and the Prefects were gone.
“What did they want?” I stumbled to my feet. “What did they whisper to you?”
“Not now, Henry.” Remarkably, she smiled. “I’ve been a fool. I know where Estella is.”
Barbara ran from the room and I had no choice but to follow and abandon poor Miss Morning where she lay.
Only then did I realize where we were heading and who would be waiting for us. Certain things were starting to become clear. We were running toward the basement, you see. Running toward the mail room.
I had begun to appreciate the complexity of my grandfather’s design. How carefully he had arranged my life! With what diligence had he nudged the playing pieces of my existence into place. Now I understood why, in those long chats in his lounge, as both of us sat rapt over the newspapers, he had been so adamant that I should look at the flat in Tooting Bec, why he had encouraged me with such avidity to apply to the Civil Service Archive Unit.
I finally understood who was waiting for us in the basement and why the old bastard had sent me here to watch over her. I had even begun to chew over the significance of those operations that he had paid for me to undergo as a child.
But I saw also that his plans had not, in his absence, unrolled themselves altogether smoothly. There had been unanticipated flaws, human errors, problems it would have been impossible for him to have foreseen.
Problems like Peter-Hickey-Brown.
The building was completely empty now and the terrified employees of the Archive Unit had fled into the streets. There was only one exception, one loyal worker still at her post. The fat woman, the sweaty one. When we reached the mail room, she was exactly where she always was, sorting through files with her usual sluggish roboticism. At the sight of us, she grunted in greeting.
I walked over and looked into her sweaty blancmange of a face, her features swollen and distended by decades of overeating — and at last I saw the truth of it.
“Estella?” I asked.
The woman was in pain. Something was inside her, pushing and tugging and clawing to get out. Something trapped — like a genie in a bottle. Like a spider in a jar.
The door opened behind us and there was an unexpected voice at the far end of the room. “Hello, Henry. Hello, Barbara.”
It was Peter Hickey-Brown — dazed, hoarse and uncharacteristically emotional. “I knew you’d be coming for me,” he breathed.
Barbara seemed curiously unflummoxed even by this latest contortion of events. “Do you know, I thought it might be you?”
Hickey-Brown walked across the room, heading for the woman.
“Stay away,” Barbara warned.
“Please,” Peter wheedled. “Please. Just let me touch her one more time.”
“Did you enjoy touching her?”
“Of course,” said my old boss. “Of course, I did.”
“I have a… sympathy with this woman,” Barbara said. “I know you got off on it.”
“Hey,” said Hickey-Brown. “Am I denying it?” He giggled. “Oh, but she tasted so fine. Finger-licking good.”
I cleared my throat. “Would there be any chance of an explanation?”
“Leviathan has been engineering its own escape,” Barbara said. “The beast has been changing this woman’s body, tampering with her DNA. It’s done something to her sweat — given it the properties of a hallucinogen. Ever since Hickey-Brown discovered this he’s been harvesting it, replicating it, selling it on. He’s been dealing in Estella’s sweat and calling it ampersand.”
My former line manager shrugged. “I go to a lot of gigs.”
I stared at him. “How the hell did you manage that? I mean, what on earth were you doing to discover it in the first place?”
“She was so delicious,” he said simply. “I couldn’t resist.”
Unable to restrain himself, like a pastry addict passing a trolley of cream buns, he made a dash across the room, his fingers outstretched, clawing at the air, grasping for the prize. I suppose he wanted to touch Estella again, one last time. The need, the hunger in him, outpaced all rationality, any last remaining strand of common sense.
He was nowhere near the woman when Barbara flung him aside with as little effort as it takes you or me to bat away a wasp with one of the Sunday supplements. Hickey-Brown crashed to the floor and I heard a loud, final crack as his neck broke, his gig-going days gone for good.
Barbara’s attention shifted to the fat woman — the original Estella, the mold from which she was made. She strode over to her, crouched down and, in a weirdly maternal set of gestures, stroked her cheek, smoothed back her hair and cooed.
Estella gazed up at this weird, impossible reflection of herself with utter bewilderment in her sunken eyes.
“What have they done to us?” Barbara asked. “What the hell have they done?”
Estella began to cough. It started as a simple clearing of her throat and graduated to something hacking and painful before becoming a terrible convulsion as all the phlegm and mucus within her rattled toward an exit.
“Barbara?” We both of us just stood there, watching the beast inside tear that unfortunate woman apart.
Barbara was in shock. “You have to kill her,” she said slowly.
“Me?”
“If you don’t, then Leviathan will get loose. The city will be overrun. The casualties will be without number.”
The woman coughed and wheezed and spluttered. She shuddered and shook and she was rent apart.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t do it.”
Barbara produced a slender knife, tailor-made for gutting, and thrust its handle into my hand, not saying a word.
Then — something extraordinary. Something impossible and fantastic in a day already characterized by both.
What came first was the smell (so pungent that it drowned even the stale sock odor of the basement), the sudden scent of fireworks coupled with the lingering aftertaste of sherbet dip. It was followed by a violent disturbance in the air, a bewildering rush of colors — blue, pink, brown and black.
Finally, impossibly, the Prefects rippled into existence, materializing on either side of Estella.
Boon pursed his lips and tutted. “Nasty cough.”
“Sounds like she’s got a frog in her throat,” said Hawker.
“Awfully big frog!”
“More like a toad!”
They cackled deliriously.
Hawker slapped Estella on the back. “Come on, old thing, let it out!”
She groaned but he slapped her again anyway and Boon joined in too, until they were both hitting her, smacking her hard and enjoying it, sniggering as they competed for who could strike the woman with the greater ferocity.
I gripped my fingers tight around the handle of the knife and stepped forward, knowing what I had to do. I still have no idea whether I would have been capable of it. I strongly suspect, in the end, that I wouldn’t have.
Estella was coughing so hard that she had begun to exhaust herself. She lolled back in her chair, helpless against the sedition of her own body. Her jaw dangled open, her mouth was agape and she was staring fixedly toward the ceiling.
She shuddered
and cried out — not a cough now but a great and terrible wail of agony. I watched, spasming with nausea, as something streamed from her mouth. Liquid and fleshy, it forced its way out of her in something like a beam of pulp and skin — like a laser made of meat.
Given the volume of matter which was expelled from her body it must have been quite impossible for it ever to have been fully contained inside her. But I was growing well used now to impossibilities.
As it left her body, the beam punched a neat, surgical hole through the ceiling, cutting through the masonry of 125 Fitzgibbon Street and rising through the eleven levels of the Archive Unit as easily as a bullet would pass through paper. It blazed out to the sky beyond and disappeared.
“Barbara?” I asked in a very quiet voice. “What do we do now?”
But the woman was gone.
The last of the beam escaped Estella’s body and she slid to the floor.
When I looked again, the Prefects had vanished and I was left alone with the fat woman.
Flakes of plaster drifted onto my head, debris from where the roof had been punctured. The building bellowed and groaned, its structure finally weakened by the hole stamped through its center, its dignity in tatters thanks to that mutinous jab from its bowels.
“Henry?” The woman was still alive and better able to speak now that the beast was gone.
I wiped away the black sludge which still lingered at the corners of her mouth and asked: “You know who I am?”
“Of course. Of course I do.” She reached up and tugged at my sleeve. “Give my regards to your grandfather.”
I promised that I would but I’m not sure she even heard me.
“Having Leviathan inside you…,” she said. “It brings out your true self. Shows the world what you really are.” An ominous splintering sound came from the roof. “I’ve failed.”
I squeezed her hand, trying to reassure her.
“Leviathan is loose,” she said. “It’s called for reinforcements. They will not make the same mistake a second time.”
Another cracking sound from overhead, a second flurry of plaster and dust, another encore of debris.
Estella grimaced. “You’d better get out of here.”
I struggled to lift her up, pawed at her shoulders, tried to get purchase on her blubber. I did my best to save her.
“Go,” Estella wheezed after a minute or so of this gruesome tango. “Just go.”
As the building began to shake in rehearsal for its downfall, I set the woman back onto the floor and tried to make her as comfortable as I could. Her eyelids fluttered shut and her face relaxed. I kissed her twice on the forehead.
But I’m afraid that I left her there all the same and, as the place started to crash down around me, ran for the final time from 125 Fitzgibbon Street and the offices of the Civil Service Archive Unit (Storage and Record Retrieval).
Outside, it had begun to snow. But this was not like snow which anyone had ever seen before. It was beetle black, sticky to the touch and subtly unnatural. As I emerged onto the street, a crowd had gathered, their attention split between the collapse of the building and the arrival of the snowstorm.
They were catching flakes of it in their hands, speculating about what it might mean. A man in a suit, standing apart from the rest at the edge of the pavement, was laughing at the sight of it. Just laughing and laughing and laughing until he exhausted himself with his own hysteria.
Behind us, with a volcanic rumble, the building crumpled, cracked and fell in upon itself, burying the woman who had kept Leviathan beneath eleven stories’ worth of paperwork and filing.
In the Eye, Dedlock watched the snow fall, looking helplessly on as the sky grew black, failing to fend off a gnawing suspicion that what he had been afraid of for most of his long life had finally come to pass.
A woman stepped into his pod. She had vengeance in her eyes, murder in her heart and something terrible clasped in both hands.
“Who’s there?”
Flakes of black snow flung themselves at the pod window and dribbled downward, smearing the pane with ebony.
“Who’s there?” Dedlock asked again. “What do you want?”
Barbara trod forward into the light, and although she was smiling there was no true amusement on her lips.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she said.
Two and a half miles away, in the Machen Ward of St. Chad’s Hospital, my granddad was busy defying medical science.
At the very instant that the snow began to fall, his life support gave a squeal of cacophonous dismay, he sat upright in his bed and his eyes flickered impatiently open.
Although it was barely ten A.M., the view from his window was darkening and spotted with black.
I wonder what he thought when he saw it. I wonder what went through his mind. And I wonder if he knew, even then, that it was already too late for all of us.
Chapter 24
What follows is my transcript of a recording which I have been able to retrieve from the remains of the London Eye — a black-box recorder salvaged from the scrap metal of the city’s premier attraction.
When these events took place, my grandfather had just regained consciousness and the snow had been falling for about ten minutes.
As Barbara strolled into the light and Dedlock saw what she had clasped in her hands, he felt fear — real, irrefutable, bowel-quaking fear — for the first time in more than a century.
“Think, my dear,” he hissed, his voice already acquiring that wheedling plausibility which had sent generations of Directorate agents to their extinction. “Don’t do something you might regret.”
Barbara strolled closer, all smiley now, twinkling, light on her feet, like a party hostess greeting the first of her guests. She positioned a forefinger in front of her lips. “Shh,” she said and called him by a name I’d never heard before.
In his tank, the old man hissed in anger. “No one’s called me that for a long time.”
“And why is that, I wonder?”
“Nobody’s dared.”
“You prefer Dedlock?” Barbara said airily, still sounding as though she was merely making polite conversation with acquaintances she barely knew. “I always thought these code names made us seem so silly.”
“You think so? Well, if anyone’s left alive after today, I’ll be sure to look into it.”
Barbara merely smiled, slightly blankly, like she was handing out canapes.
The old goat in the tank, that impossibility, that living affront to the laws of science, was playing for time. Even as he spoke, he was wondering if he might not be able to contact someone on the outside, weighing up the odds of his raising the alarm before it was too late. Desperate for a distraction, he clenched his fists and behind him a map of London shimmered into existence, street after street of it smudged with black, eclipsed with the taint of Leviathan. “What are you doing here? Where are the Prefects? Where’s Henry Lamb?”
When she spoke again, Barbara’s voice was leeched of all emotion. “You know what’s happening. Leviathan is on the loose. All we ever did was stave off the inevitable for a few years. The blink of an eye for a creature like that.”
“Don’t say that,” Dedlock said. “I never give in. If there’s one thing you can say about my long life, it’s that I’ve never given in. Not once.”
Barbara yawned. “Your life. Your long, long life. Do you have any idea how tired everyone is of hearing about that? One hundred and seventy-five years of anecdotes and tall tales.”
“If It hadn’t been for me, this city would be a slave colony by now. You’d have been born into chains.”
“You know, a lot of stuff’s been coming back to me this morning. There’s a lot of Estella in this strange body that Jasper fashioned for me. In the last few hours, her memories have been flooding back. You asked me what I was doing here…”
“Yes?”
“I’ve come to ask you a question.”
“Fine time for questions when the world is shattering
around us.”
“Why me? Why did you choose me to imprison Leviathan?” You must have known you were handing me a life sentence.”
Dedlock swam close to the glass of his tank. “It wasn’t a choice I made lightly. God knows, I’ve had to live with it.”
“You’ve had to live with it? You?” Barbara blazed in fury, her face lit up with rage, like Moses when he first set eyes upon the golden calf. For an instant, she held what was in her hands high in the air. Then, recognizing her equilibrium, she lowered it. “I’ve seen what you allowed Estella to become. A mute in a basement, pawed at by a greasy little man. Harvested for my sweat.”
“Blame loverboy for that. It was he who hid you from us. And anyway we didn’t have much choice. You were the only one strong enough to hold the beast in thrall. And things were a little pressing at the time. Tell me, my dear, what would you have done?”
“I know the real reason you chose me.”
“Do tell.”
“You said you loved me once. Do you remember that?”
An uneasy splash. “Perhaps. I might have experienced a momentary spurt of affection. I might once have believed myself to have feelings-”
“You never had feelings for me. You certainly never loved me. You wanted to possess me.”
“What’s the difference?” Those last words emerged as a snarl. Dedlock paused and tried to compose himself, and when he spoke again it was in more collected tones, intended to mollify, to soothe, placate and appease. “But you were so beautiful, my dear.”
Barbara was unmoved. “Beautiful, yes. And young. And trusting.”
“But you were attracted to me. That was real. I could taste it.”
“What could I have possibly wanted with you? You used me. Worse than that, I let myself be used.”
“I’m not proud of what we did. But — oh! — you were magnificent. You were always at your most beguiling with a blade in your hand.”
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