She was breathing, at least. Leaning closer, he could detect an unfamiliar smell on her breath, and as he arranged his wife upon the bed, tucking her in with almost maternal concern, he concluded with a guilty kind of sadness that she must have been drugged. In this, if in pitifully little else in his almost entirely useless life, Arthur Windsor was correct.
He picked up the telephone and dialed Mr. Silverman’s number. It rang for an eternity without reply. He slapped at the cradle then dialed down to the switchboard. Whoever picked it up said nothing.
“Hello?” said the prince.
There was a low burbling sound at the other end of the line which might almost have been a laugh.
“Who’s there? Speak up!”
The same sound again — wet and gurgling. “Good afternoon, sir. This is Beth speaking.”
“Beth? We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? Good God, that seems a lifetime ago now. Listen, I’m trying to get through to Mr. Silverman.”
“I’m afraid that will be quite impossible.” Her voice sounded distant, flat and almost robotically toneless.
‘Impossible? Why the devil will it be impossible?”
“The playing piece named Silverman has been removed from the board.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
The girl called Beth seemed not to have heard the question. “Have you been outside yet? Into the snow? You really ought to, you know. It’s so pretty, sir. Like ashes from the sky.”
“Now listen here, young lady-” the prince began, but the woman interrupted him without a thought.
“It’s coming, sir,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? It’s almost here. And the time has come for you to pick a side.”
“I’ve chosen my side,” the prince said firmly.
Beth just laughed at this, that same moist chuckle, before there was a tutting click and the line went dead.
Suddenly, as though all the fight in him had been used up in his conversation, the prince felt overcome by great waves of nausea and exhaustion. Something inside of his spasmed once, twice, three times, each more urgent than the last. It was all he could do to stumble into the corridor, where he was copiously sick. This done, he wiped his mouth, retreated back into the bedroom and closed the door (just managing to bolt and lock it) before he collapsed onto the bed beside his wife and passed out.
It was dark when he awoke. He was flat on his back, a hand was on his shoulder and a familiar voice was swimming hazily into view.
“Arthur?”
The prince blinked, tried to sit up, winced. “Darling? Darling, is that you?” The prince attempted a rueful grin but discovered that smiling seemed to hurt him now, that it cost him dearly.
“Arthur? Are you going to tell me what’s been going on? I’ve heard the most fearful noises.”
“Leviathan…” Arthur tried to push himself up. “I think Leviathan must be here.” The prince was in the most relentless, unstinting kind of pain. He wanted to say more, to explain as much as he could, wanted more than anything, to beg Laetitia’s forgiveness, to throw himself upon her mercy and plead for the balm of her understanding, for her sweet clemency. But he found himself unable to speak a single word — his throat tight and dry, his innards churning and swirling in a tempest of gastric distress, his head pounding with a fusillade of thunderclaps.
Just before he sank back into unconsciousness and the horrified face of his wife vanished first to a distant point of light and then into absolute nothingness, Arthur Windsor was granted clear and unambiguous knowledge of what was happening to him. These are withdrawal symptoms, he thought, having attended several lectures on the subject as part of the work that he did for a spectrum of young people’s charities. I am in withdrawal from ampersand.
Shortly before he went under, he managed to croak out a few words. “Stay in here. Promise me that you’ll stay in this room.”
But by then he was already sliding into unconsciousness and he never heard his wife’s reply.
The next twenty-four hours were a study in pain and terror. There were moments of relative lucidity when he saw Laetitia and heard her voice quite clearly, moments when he sensed that she held him in her arms, rocking him gently as a mother would a child, even (although this may have been an auditory hallucination) that she was singing to him, some old melody part-remembered from his childhood. Once when he awoke, she persuaded him to drink a little water. On another occasion, when he emerged momentarily from the deep mists of his mind, he discovered her seated before him on the bed eating the most peculiar combination of food — peanut butter ladled directly from the jar, gherkins, pork scratchings, sardines. For some time afterward he believed (quite erroneously) that this had simply been some overheated imagining of his. Certainly, it grew almost impossible for the prince to tell what was real and what were merely tricks, snares and booby-traps laid by that ampersand which still fought for a foothold in his system. There were the sounds that he heard from outdoors, the screeches and whisperings, the savage cries of triumph. More than once, he discovered himself clutching at Laetitia’s arm and imploring her not to leave him. The shutters were down, so he could not see outside, but there existed not the slightest doubt in his mind that it was still snowing. He even believed that he could hear it, the ceaseless patter of the snow, the unending fall of ampersand from the sky, and as he lay in this febrile state, he was visited by memories of old sins. He saw the woman at the station explode all over again, as though in slow motion. He even thought that he heard the laughter of Virtue and Mercy, although he never saw them, their power fading, perhaps, even then. But whilst he longed for it, the small, gray cat never visited him again. Something in the prince told him that the animal’s strength was very weak now, if, indeed, it had not been extinguished altogether.
The future king of England slept and dreamed and sweated. His wife lay beside him, doing everything that she could to ignore the terrible roars and shouts from outside, noises strangely echoed beside her as her husband swam in and out of consciousness, calling out unfamiliar names and screaming for forgiveness, his body a battleground for forces beyond her comprehension.
And so it went for a day and a night until, early in the dawn of the third day, as the prince seemed at last to be coming back to her, Laetitia heard a firm, decisive knock upon the door.
“Who’s there?” she cried out, shaking her husband hard to stir him. “Arthur? Someone’s at the door.”
The prince groaned, stirred and clutched at his forehead in a theatrical gesture which Laetitia had hitherto believed to be confined to stage drunks.
Then it came again — the same solemn tapping.
Laetitia looked around for something with which she might defend herself. Although the room lay in sepulchral gloom (the power having gone out almost forty-eight hours earlier and the emergency generator secreted beneath Clarence House failing only a very few minutes thereafter), it was still possible to see that the place was tastefully studded with objects of breezily incalculable wealth — several immensely rare vases, pottery fragments which were believed to predate Christ, a glass case of butterflies, all extinct — but none of them looked as though they might prove of much use as a weapon.
Arthur was at least sitting up now and had taken to rubbing his eyes, with hands clenched into fists like a child woken in the night. Laetitia was about to urge him into action when, from the other side of the door, she heard just about the most welcome voice in the world.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?”
Relief gushed into her voice. “Silverman?”
Behind her, Arthur, on his feet and searching for something on the floor by the bed, started to mumble a warning, but Laetitia ignored him and opened the door onto an old friend.
It was a friend, however, sadly changed. Mr. Silverman stood upon the threshold, badly bruised, stained in mud, grease and blood, his left hand horribly mangled as though he had dipped it, for some inebriate dare, into the spinning rotors of an uncompromisingly
efficient piece of farming equipment.
“Silverman! My God!” The prince, leaning against the end of the bed, seemed to be stowing something into his trouser pocket. “What the devil have they done to you?”
The equerry stepped inside, closed the door and began to speak, briskly, urgently, but without obvious emotion, like a junior officer returned alone to HQ to deliver news of some catastrophic rout. “Mr. Streater took out some of his frustrations upon my person, sir. Shortly before imprisoning me in one of the wine cellars.”
“But you escaped?” Laetitia asked.
“Indeed, ma’am.”
Arthur gestured toward the gory remnants of Silverman’s hand. “But not, it seems, without some cost to yourself.”
“This is nothing, sir.” The man looked hideously pale, his skin taut and glossy with sweat, but it was still possible to discern a blush. “It’s a scratch.”
“Can you tell us what’s going on out there?”
Silverman appeared to sway slightly on his feet. “I think you might be able to teach us something about that, sir.” There was a trace of recrimination in his voice — not obvious and probably invisible to anyone who did not know him but to Arthur and Laetitia strikingly and uncomfortably apparent.
“I’ve made some mistakes, I know-” Arthur began.
Silverman cut him off with a gesture. “No time for that, sir. The city’s being eaten alive.”
“What?”
“It’s the snow, sir. It’s driven everybody mad.”
“And Streater? What happened to him?”
“He’s gone, sir. Took one of the Jaguars. He said that he had to look up an old friend. Although he was good enough to stop by the cellar for a few words. He seems to believe that he’ll actually be rewarded for what he’s done.”
The prince straightened up, mopped his forehead, pushed back his shoulders, cleared his throat, and despite his evident exhaustion, the unkempt brush of his hair and the wildness which capered in his eyes, he looked, just for an instant, unmistakably a king. Then his shoulders slumped, his posture sagged and he was only Arthur again. “I want you both to listen to me. This is what is going to happen. Silverman. I need you to stay here to look after Laetitia. His wife began to object but Arthur waved away her protestations. “I’m going outside,” he said. “There is somebody I need to find.”
Silverman sank gratefully onto the bed and nodded in grave approval.
“Good luck, sir.”
But if you’re going outside, the snow-”
Arthur shook his head. “Something tells me I’ve built up a resistance.” He bent down and kissed his wife on her forehead.
“Be careful,” she said.
The prince reached into his pocket and pulled out the gun that Mr. Streater had given him what felt like a small eternity ago. “I have this,” he said.
He nodded once, then, without saying goodbye, opened the door and stepped outside.
The house had been comprehensively ravaged and despoiled, as though an all-night party exclusively attended by vandals, incontinents and graffiti specialists had only recently moved on. Steeling himself against the sight of it, Arthur stepped through rubble and rubbish, over broken glass and furniture reduced to matchsticks, skirted around slicks of blood and trails of indescribable fluids before, at last, he emerged into the open air.
If anything, the devastation was even more advanced out here. Several vehicles were gutted and aflame and there were at least two bodies, which he tried not to examine too closely. As memories of what the cat had told him moved to the forefront of his brain and a more exact notion of what it was that he had to do began to form, he searched around for some means of transport.
When he saw it, he laughed out loud (a bitter, caustic sound). The only remaining car which seemed remotely roadworthy was an old Vauxhall Nova, effluent brown, the stink of Mr. Streater’s treachery still boiling off it. Swallowing his laughter, Arthur Windsor strode across to the car of his enemy, wondering if the man had actually been arrogant enough to leave his keys in the ignition.
And there, for the present, we shall leave him. For all that he believed himself capable of some species of Dunkirk’s courage, the Prince of Wales was undeniably a coward, a milksop and a fool, stepping dumbly into the role suggested by a small gray cat, whose owner, we are very glad to be able to report, was at that time either dying (slowly, with great and exacting pain) or else already dead.
The tragedy of it all — the sheer, mindless folly of these people’s actions — is brought home by the knowledge that we were only ever trying to help. However unfairly we may have been represented in these pages, you may be absolutely certain of the fact that Leviathan is here for one purpose only — we are here to tell you the good news.
Chapter 26
“Joe!” Abbey stood behind me in the corridor. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The blond man flashed a Hollywood grin. “Come to rescue you.”
My landlady blushed. “You’d better get inside. Shut the door. There’s things out there that-”
Like some laconic traffic cop, Joe Streater held up his hand to halt her. “They won’t bother me.”
“Why not?”
Streater shrugged. “Kind of a long story.”
Still flushing crimson, Abbey stumbled over her words. “Henry, this is Joe. Joe — meet Henry.”
The two of us glared at one another, both measuring and sizing up, the veil of civility already close to rending.
His examination complete, Joe gave me a dismissive smirk, and for this alone I could cheerfully have punched him on the nose.
Abbey touched me lightly on the arm, pivoting me away from the interloper. “This is awkward. I know that. Really, really awkward. But could you just give us a minute on our own? We’ll go in the sitting room. There’s some stuff we need to get straight.”
“Fine,” I said. “Dandy.”
Frothing with rage and envy, I stalked off into the bedroom, sat on my bed and took deep, calming breaths. What seemed like a thousand different scenarios suggested themselves to me, none of them remotely optimistic.
A few minutes later and feeling no better, I succumbed to the inevitable, got to my feet, tiptoed outside the sitting room door and tried my best to eavesdrop.
Streater sounded calm and laid-back, his voice wheedling and full of flattery. Abbey was less controlled, quickly sliding into tearful hysteria. I realized that I’d never heard her like that before. She’d always struck me as essentially unflappable.
Should we pity Henry Lamb? There’s something so pathetic about the man we can never quite bring ourselves to do it. The idea that someone like his landlady would ever look twice at him were she not recovering from the abrupt cessation of an earlier entanglement is palpably absurd. The idiot Lamb was never much more to her than a man-sized comfort blanket.
Even now, I’m not sure what passed between the two of them, but the first time I was able to catch exactly what they were saying, it was his voice that I heard.
These are the words of Joe Streater: “A new world is on its way. And if you wanna survive then you’ve gotta come with me. Stay here, and everything you know and love is gonna burn.”
I leaned closer, trying to hear more, but just as Streater finished his speech, the door was flung open and I scurried goonishly backward, almost tripping up.
Abbey hovered, tear stained, in the doorway. “Were you listening?”
I stuttered out a denial.
Behind her — friend Joe, grinning snarkily.
My landlady stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door shut on Streater.
“I can’t believe you were listening,” she said.
“Well, wouldn’t you?”
“Just give us a couple of minutes, OK? There’s lots of stuff we need to talk through.”
I spoke as evenly as I could. “I can imagine.”
“This is difficult for me. I’m confused.”
“Well, how do you think I
feel?”
“Sweetheart, please.”
I managed a bitter sort of smile. “Do you know, he’s not at all how I expected?”
Abbey conjured up a little smile — tentative, hopeful. “Oh? Why’s that?”
“I didn’t think he’d be so fucking ugly.”
A long, brittle silence. “That’s disappointing.” There was a flinty pragmatism in her eyes which I’d never seen there before. “That’s unworthy of you.”
She opened the door to the sitting room and for an instant I caught an almost subliminal glimpse of Streater. I can’t be sure that this is what I saw or whether it’s something I’ve imagined since, filling in the gaps with all that I’ve learnt, but I’m almost positive that I saw him brandishing a syringe, filled with pale pink, effervescent liquid.
Then Abbey slammed the door and I saw no more.
You can imagine the true scene here. A pretty girl, resigned to sitting out the apocalypse in the company of a bloodless mummy’s by, is overjoyed at the arrival of an old flame. The contest is over, before it has begun, the better man is victorious and all that remains is to find a way to eliminate the lodger.
The rest was sound effects — a muffled declaration of affection, a wet, puckering sound, a moan of pleasure, a round of male laughter. The swift strides across the room, the snap of the door as it wrenched open and Joe Streater was back in my face.
“Henry Lamb!” he said, walking up to me. “Weird coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” I said, trying not to flinch. “No such thing.”
The blond man flashed another savage smile. Silently, as though this was just another chore to carry out, quickly and briskly, before getting on with the rest of his life, he punched me hard in the stomach. Unprepared for this eruption of violence, I jackknifed in pain. My mouth bubbled with nausea. Streater pulled me upright and then he did it again — administered another pile-driving punch to my gut. As I stumbled, totally unable to muster the least defense, I saw Abbey watching as her boyfriend expertly beat me up, evidently appalled, her hand hovering toward her face as though to ward off what she was witnessing.
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