Fancy that.
It is our theory that the girl was laughing and that the hand hovering near her mouth was merely a device to disguise her smile.
Streater dragged me into the sitting room, grabbed a chair from the table and forced me down into it. I made a grim, scuttling attempt at escape, which was quickly and permanently proved to be futile. Joe produced a thick roll of duct tape from somewhere (I wouldn’t put it past him to have brought it with him) and lashed me to the chair, taping up my hands and ankles with practiced efficiency, winding a strip tight around my mouth. Already there was blood on my teeth, the taste of metal and, with it, the promise of vomit.
When he was finished, Joe Streater winked at me. “All right, chief?”
Abbey put a hand on the blond man’s arm. “Is this really necessary?”
Streater answered her with a kiss and I had no choice but to watch as she met his lips with hers and gave every impression of liking it.
Joe came up for air. “Take me next door,” he said, his voice filled with casual authority, with the certainty that he would never be disappointed. My Abbey smiled and led him from the room.
The next few minutes were a little difficult, trussed up in that chair, immobile, tasting blood and shame in equal measure as, from next door, I heard it all. Abbey and Joe in their scrabble to undo shoelaces, the clink of belts being unstrapped, the rustle of clothes being torn away and then — the creak of the mattress, the persistent rhythm of the headboard, the moans and squeals and ululations of delight. I wonder if she enjoyed it. I wonder how she possibly can have done.
Of course she enjoyed it. How could she not? The fumbling ministrations of Henry Lamb, gauchely performed and inexpertly delivered, had scarcely raised her heartbeat. Her mind was ever on the lithe form of Joseph Streater. All the time she was with Henry, whenever the lodger kissed, caressed or tentatively nibbled, she was thinking of Joe. And when Streater took her to bed that afternoon, it was like coming home. It as a glorious, orgiastic vindication of her choice.
Once it was over, Abbey came to say goodbye.
She asked me if I was crying. Grimly, I shook my head.
“I suppose you must be wondering why… why I’ve chosen him and not you. It has to sting, all this. It has to rankle.”
Through the duct tape, I groaned in affirmation.
“I hate to say it, Henry, but in the end it wasn’t difficult.”
I groaned again.
“You’re too nice,” she said. “You’ve got to have a bit of steel in you and Joe… Well, Joe’s iron straight through.”
This isn’t you, I wanted to say. God, Abbey, this isn’t you at all.
“Joe knows what I want,” she said. “And the thing is — you never got to know me at all.” She smiled sadly. “But we’re still friends, aren’t we? We’ll be better as friends, I think. Better as mates.”
I shook my head.
“Listen, Joe and I have to go now. There’s a lot for us to do. I’m sorry. Truly.” She kissed me on the forehead and walked away.
I heard the smack of the front door, the snap of the key in the lock, and for a short while, all was silence.
I think I must have passed out. When I opened my eyes, it had grown dark, the blood on my wrists had dried to crusts and I felt a burning desire to urinate. But I wasn’t alone. I could hard people moving about outside.
Someone come to find me? Abbey returned, stricken with conscience? Granddad?
I heard the rattle of the door, footsteps coming toward me, whispers which spoke my name. A faint hope reignited itself within me.
There was light in my eyes. A torch in my face. Hands reaching toward me.
I moaned a frantic greeting.
My rescuers grinned. “Hello, sir!”
“What ho, old top!”
The ginger-haired man yanked the tape from my mouth and I yelped in pain.
“You look a bit peaky, sir!”
Oh God.
“Please,” I muttered. “Please… Please help me… I know we’ve had our differences. But for God’s sake, let me go.”
One of them giggled. “Sorry, lamb chop. That’s not really on the cards.”
Boon looked around him and smacked his hands together cheerfully. “Where’s the little lady, then, sir?”
“Where’s the missus?”
“Popped out, has she, sir?”
“Gone to borrow a cup of sugar?”
“Please…” I said. “You can see what’s happened here. Please untie me. That’s all I ask.”
“Oh no, sir.”
“Couldn’t do that, sir.”
“Point of fact, this is how we expected to find you, sir. This is where your grandpapa told us you would be.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, wriggling my arms beneath the rope.
“He liked your ladyfriend when he sold her the flat, sir.”
“Thought she was quite a dish, sir.”
“Thought she’d be perfect.”
“Perfect?” I said. “Perfect for what?”
A wide grin spread across Boon’s face. “Perfect hair, sir,” he said. “With which to set the trap.”
Hawker pulled at each of my hands, wriggling them free from the tape and exposing my wrists.
“Now then, Mr. L,” said Boon, “have we ever told you about our penknife?”
“It’d be queer if we hadn’t, sir,” Hawker chortled. “We tell most of the chaps. It’s got a bottle opener and a corkscrew and a how-de-ye-do for getting stones from horses’ hooves.”
The pressure on my bladder had grown intolerable until, miserably, I felt a warm piss spurt into my pants and start to soak my trousers.
Hawker dug into his blazer pocket. With evident pride, her produced a long knife and brought it close to my left wrist.
I screamed. “Please! What are you doing?”
Boon sniggered. “We’re good boys.”
“We’re the sturdiest chaps in school.”
“We’re only doing what your grandpa wanted.”
Cold steel on my skin”
“I shouldn’t fret, sir.”
“Buck up, Mr. L!”
“It’s all part of the plan.”
“All part of the Process.”
Hawker cut into my wrist, slashing downward in swift vertical motions, following the path of the vein. Blood bubbled up. With hideous expertise, he did exactly the same to my other wrist.
As I screamed, Boon touched the brim of his cap. “’Fraid we’ve got to dash, sir.”
“But we want you to know it’s been a real pleasure.”
“We’ve had ripping fun”
“Such larks!”
“Such japes!”
“Ta-ta, sir!”
“Tinkety-tonk!”
With the smell of fireworks and sherbet dip, they shimmered and disappeared, and I was left alone in that wretched room, already too weak to cry out, watching my life pool away from me onto the floor. I stared down until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I closed my eyes, lost myself in the pain and sucked in a few last breaths.
A short while later, my heart stopped beating altogether and I burrowed down into the darkness.
Chapter 27
I’ve just seen what I wrote yesterday. Obviously, you realize what’s happened. The other storyteller (the interloper, the spite merchant) has returned and I no longer have complete control of my pen.
So this is it, then.
A race to the finish.
Chapter 28
Unexpectedly, I opened my eyes.
It was as if waking up from an unusually vivid and visceral dream. I felt groggy and dazed and there was a sour taste in my mouth by the symptoms were no worse than those you might expect from a medium-strength hangover.
I was still bound to the chair but there were no cuts to my wrists. They chafed against the duct tape but they weren’t bleeding now, nor did they even appear to be grazed. Of the Prefects, there was no sign.
The piece
s of tape which tied me to the chair seemed suddenly easy to remove. They slipped away like shrouds.
I stood up, shaky, slightly nauseous, quivering with pins and needles, but otherwise conspicuously unharmed.
I thought of what Miss Morning had told me about Estella — of how her skin had healed right back up again after the Directorate had bled her to the point of death. I remembered, too, what she’d hinted about the history of this place. I wondered about what my mother had uncovered in the bedroom, the significance of those sigils, signs and symbols, wondered about exactly what had been done to me in those operations I’d undergone as a child.
A couple of minutes ensued during which I tried to dismiss everything that had happened since Joe and Abbey had left as a hallucination or nightmare, but deep down I knew that something had been done to me, something set in motion. I even knew its name. Like everything else, Granddad had made sure of that.
The Process.
We count ourselves as no friends of his but in the final analysis it must be said that Henry Lamb was poorly used. The things that he allowed to be done to him were immoderate and inhumane. But the real tragedy lies in how bovinely he accepted it all.
Even now, his humiliations are far from at an end.
I took my leave of the flat and strode outside. The snow had finally stopped but its fall had rendered London strange and unfamiliar. The drones were everywhere. I couldn’t see them but I could sense them, moving past me, bustling onward, hastening into the center of the city. They seemed to be saying something and gradually I made it out — the same chant, heard over and over in a mantra of fierce joy.
“Leviathan! Leviathan! Leviathan!”
But for the first time in weeks, I no longer felt afraid. For so long, fear had been a part of my daily life, a car alarm whine which had swayed my every decision, stifled my imagination, stunted my morality.
I had only stepped a few meters from my front door when I saw it. Almost completely hooded in black snow, it was still immediately recognizable from the corkscrews of white hair which emerged like unusually hardy plant life through the darkness and the nose which jutted out like that of some ancient statue discovered in the dust.
The body of my grandfather.
As understanding began to percolate through my system, I felt to my knees with the same force as if I’d just been struck hard on the back of my legs. Tears crept from my eyes. I made no sound but began, reverentially, to scrape away the snow from his face, a patient archaeologist revealing, inch by inch, his cracked and weary features.
Then I heard the cry, much closer than before.
“Leviathan! Leviathan!”
With it, I could hear their raggedy breathing and smell the weird electric tang of their sweat. Slowly — very slowly — I looked up.
There must have been twenty of them at least, arrived like hooligans at a wake, all with flushed pink faces, all shambling toward me in the kind of frantic clump you get emerging from a tube station at rush hour. “Leviathan… Leviathan…”
I struggled up. ‘Can’t you fight it?” I asked a big bearded bloke in a postman’s uniform who appeared to be leading the charge. “At least try.”
He growled and lunged. “Leviathan… Leviathan…”
I was just beginning to wonder if it might be about to end here, after all, at Granddad’s side, when the postman’s head erupted, unexpectedly prettily, in a fountain of pink and red. He didn’t have time to cry out before he toppled to the ground, everything from the neck up a leaky scrag of gristle and bone.
I turned around. An old brown Vauxhall Nova had pulled up outside my flat and there was a man who I thought I recognized hanging out the driver’s window and holding a smoking gun.
“Get in!” he yelled. “Get in the car!”
The drones had cowered back at the gunshot but already they had begun to regroup and were starting to move toward me, their new leader a fat man dressed from head to toe in pinstripe.
For the last time, I reached down and took the old bastard’s hand. “This is my granddad,” I called back. “I can’t leave him.”
The man in the car looked at me as though I was an idiot. “There’s nothing you can do for him now.”
“You don’t understand. He’s… he’s the most important person.”
“Leviathan!” Stomach bulging through striped shirt, fat hanging heavily over belt, the new leader of the drones was clumping purposefully in my direction, the rest of them following cloddishly in his wake.
“For God’s sake! Get in the bloody car!”
I looked at what was coming toward me, squeezed Granddad’s hand and made my decision. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m so sorry,” and I turned on my heel.
I ran over to the car and scrambled inside. My rescuer looked haggard, unshaven and scarily bloodshot — but it was unquestionably him.
“Hello, Henry,” he said, and gave an unnervingly high-pitched laugh.
“You recognize me?”
“You are Henry Lamb, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean, yes, Your Highness.”
“I want you to call me Arthur,” the driver said, and pressed his foot down hard, squealing out of the street, bumping over a colony of rubbish bags and only narrowly avoiding knocking down several drones.
When we were clear, I asked again how he knew my name.
“I’ve been dreaming about you. The cat’s told me everything.”
“What cat?”
“Little gray fellow. He told me how to fight the effects of ampersand. He told me how to finish this.”
“Excuse me for saying so,” I said, “and thanks very much by the way for rescuing me, but aren’t you the enemy? Aren’t we supposed to be at war?”
“The war ends tonight,” Arthur Windsor said firmly. “You and I, Henry. We’re going to put a stop to it.”
As we drove from Tooting Bec, we witnessed first-hand the fall of the city. Houses were smoldering, pavements were carpeted in glass, cars had been reduced to blackened clinker and entire streets were streaked with red. I saw a bus stop mangled into scrap and what looked like the contents of a clothes store sprayed across the road, as though a bomb had exploded in a jumble sale. It was almost unendurable to see — London, that remorseless victor, that dead-eyed master of predation, turned victim and prey, defenseless meat for some parasite which, comfortably accommodated in its gut, now chomped its eager way into the world.
There were people abroad, drones streaming in the same direction, rushing forward in makeshift columns, and we had no choice but to drive funereally through their midst, like killjoys at a parade. In their haste to move forward some of the stronger ones were trampling their weaker fellows underfoot. A number of times, I asked the prince to stop so we could at least try to help, but he just snapped something about not having time for sentiment and kept on driving.
“They tried to send me mad, you know,” he said. “Can you believe that?”
I looked at him, with his tangled hair, tufty stubble and bulging eyes, and couldn’t believe that it would ever have taken that much.
“They tried to get me hooked. They showed me ghosts and slivers of the truth. Lord knows why but I think they wanted me to kill my wife.”
We left Tooting behind us and, following the mass of drones, roughly retraced my old route to work — through Clapham, Brixton, Stockwell and Lambeth. The further we went, the more the streets grew clotted with crowds and the harder it became to maneuver through the tide of humanity.
“The cat had a message for you,” said the prince, swerving fast around a double-decker which sprawled across the length of the road like a great red seal bathing in the sun.
“I’m sorry?”
Arthur drummed his fingers excitedly on the steering wheel. “He said you’d need a phrase. For the Process. An incantation to close the trap. He told me you’d know what to do.”
I thought for a moment, then: “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
Although
I feared that the journey would last forever, that we would drive through this shadow realm, I feared still more what was waiting for us at our destination. Then we turned a corner, the exterior of Waterloo station came into view and at last I realized where it was the drones were heading.
The streets were now so choked and thronged that we had no choice but to abandon the car and take our chances amongst the mob. Stepping carefully from the vehicle and trying our best to stop our ears against the cries of the crowd, we moved toward the station. The crowd seemed mostly oblivious to us, too close to the object of their quest to pay us much heed. We had to join the surge, give in, become a part of the torrent and let ourselves be swept into Waterloo.
The place, though packed, seemed eerily neglected. The small shops, fast food outlets and newsagents were entirely untouched, unstaffed but still open for business — burgers cold to the touch, days-old newspapers lying undisturbed, a rack of sandwiches starting to turn green and rancid behind their plastic wrappers. The drones ignored them all, even their needs for food and current affairs now subsumed by the urge to reach their destination. There was death, too — mangled cadavers clogging up the escalators, a solitary ticket inspector trampled underfoot, the flyblown corpses of a guide dog and its master — but Arthur and I walked past it all.
We were pushed through the main part of the station, then moved along with the drones, allowing ourselves to be jostled up an Escher maze of concrete, unable to stop or slow down, trying not to think too hard about those who were thrown to the floor and trampled underfoot. We emerged onto the South Bank, almost exactly opposite the spot where, in a lunch-hour long ago, I’d sat and watched Barbara devour a cheese baguette.
Before us was the river, the great dark width of the Thames, and there at last we saw it — the sea beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads.
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