“All I wanted was my house to myself,” I said to Suzie, stumping along the footpath with Luke ranging ahead of us, not necessarily out of earshot—I didn’t know how far his ears could reach, I’d never learned his physical limitations and wasn’t sure that he had—but at least far enough for this to feel possible if not comfortable, talking about him in his company. “I couldn’t have coped with Carol or anyone then, I needed to get my head straight; and I couldn’t do it without privacy. I wanted them gone, but I could only wait for that, I couldn’t throw them out. I’d invited them, after all.”
“So what happened?”
I just waited, was what happened. I waited a long time. They went off about midnight; I took a last cup of tea to bed with me, thinking that was it, no more rads for me, no revolutions. No Luke for a while either, they’d take him home or he’d find his own way, not my problem.
And I lay there in bed with my cup of tea and the radio on, wondering what they were doing, how it was all going; and an hour later I was still wide awake, not even trying to sleep, and the tea was cold and I hadn’t heard a word of what I thought I was listening to, and I was still trying to picture things a mile away like a movie in my head, trying to give myself psychic dreams wide awake. God knows why, they were all strangers to me bar Luke, and I didn’t need to worry about him; but I was worried.
And then there was a great knocking on the door downstairs, a pounding that went on and on like whoever it was didn’t know about stopping, they’d never got that far. I rolled out of bed and fumbled into my bathrobe, and half the street must have been awake by then and all of them hating me because you do that, you always blame the neighbour for his visitors.
And I’d just got out onto the landing when the knocking did stop, finally; but I’d only taken two steps towards the stairs when there was a different kind of knocking, right behind me.
I twisted round, and I was sweating cold suddenly, stinking with it; and worse when I saw who was knocking, where he was. I think I screamed a little, maybe.
It was Luke, and he was outside the landing window, knocking on the glass; and all I could see was his face against the night, and he looked like he’d been lifted entire from some cheap back-to-basics horror movie.
“His hair, his face, he was all running with blood,” I said to Suzie, and shivered again in the sunlight as I remembered, as I had shivered that night when I opened the door to him.
Eleven: Angelus Ex Machina
The decision to let him in, I don’t remember. It must have been made in the face of simple logic, in the face of blood. If I don’t open the door, I must have thought, he’ll only come in through the window.
Don’t remember the decision, don’t remember taking the stairs in a sprint in the dark, though I daresay that I did, I must have done. What I do remember is standing cold in the doorway, shivering for better reasons than my bathrobe being all I had against the night. I remember looking out, then stepping into the street and looking up. I remember seeing Luke standing on the little slate pentroof we had like a canopy above the door; being there, to be sure, he was right outside the landing window and not flying at all, not hanging like some bloody movie monster in the too-supportive air.
He stepped off the roof and came down, you couldn’t say that he jumped. And when his bare feet were on the pavement beside mine—too long a time they took, too slow they were—he said, “Come with me, Jonty.”
I could see now how the blood ran off him, how it soaked his clothes and pooled between his feet. Not his blood, I was certain, though it looked black and terrible in the sodium lights.
Why? was the question, why should I when I don’t want to, when I don’t know what the hell you’ve done and all I can see are the consequences, all I can see is the blood? But why? was too much to manage, with my body racked with shudders and my mind spindizzy with the stink of blood and Luke and danger. I knew what he’d say, anyway. Because I want you, he’d say, and nothing more. He’d never say need.
So all I asked was, “Where?”
“The laboratory.”
Of course, the laboratory. Where else?
“Let me get some clothes,” I said, stalling, hoping he’d see it as some faint gesture of defiance.
“Hurry,” he said; and I did that, I hurried. Defiance only runs so far. Me, I ran into the house, dressed fumblingly with fingers that were deathly cold and stumbled back down dark stairs into a street that seemed darker, as if Luke had barred all the lamps from working now. There were still shadows, so there must I suppose have been light; but I couldn’t see it or use it.
Luke didn’t speak again, he only turned and started running himself, not looking back, trusting me to follow. Assuming I could keep up. I did that, though barely; but I thought this hurry in him was almost as frightening as the blood that had drenched him, that he was leaving behind as black bare footprints on the paving-slabs. Those I could see, and him, and nothing else.
He led and I followed, though I knew a quicker way than the one he took; and at last I couldn’t run any more, I blundered into a massive wrought-iron gate and just clung, watching him. When he was far enough away my sight came back, and I realised we were there anyway. This was the gate to the old university campus, and there was the medical school just ahead. The labs, I’d gathered from the kids’ conversation, were in the modern block jutting out on the right; and to be sure, the foyer of that block blazed with light. Too much light there seemed to be, a beacon against the night, hey, look at me! I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t attracted attention already, burning alone like that, drawing the eye, surely asking questions.
There was the light, and there was Luke outlined against it, a silhouette of dark but flaming at the edges; and now, at the door, it seemed that he turned to find me and found me gone.
But took only a moment to see or sense me, there in the gate’s twisted shadow. His arm beckoned, and I went to him. Slowly now, not hurrying in any sense at all, and cravenly afraid.
Again he didn’t speak, he only led me inside through high glass doors that stood open but seemed bent out of true, so that they never would close properly again even if you had the strength to drag them against broken hinges and force them into their distorted steel frames. The kids had spoken of sledgehammers to smash the doors, but Luke had found a better way.
I wondered why there weren’t alarms shrieking against the silence of the campus at night, why the place wasn’t lit in strobing blue and swarming with police. But all the lights flickered above Luke as he passed, one of the neon tubes imploded in a shower of glass that he seemed not to notice at all, and I remembered how even the most unsubtle machinery in my car had been affected by his presence. What chance the sophistication of a contemporary alarm, against a spirit or a field or an atmosphere so discordant it could disturb the engineering in a Volvo?
But I still wanted to know why no one had noticed the lights. Didn’t they have security at the university? In the med school particularly, at a time when animal-rights activists were raiding and bombing like proper little terrorists?
There was blood in here also, tracks on the tiled floor and a little smeared across the glass of the doors.
Not all the tracks looked human. There were bare feet marked out, Luke’s for sure, and prints of many shoes leaving; but there were paw-prints also, and a couple of unstraight lines as if some bloodied thing had been dragged on a string to leave a snake’s path behind it.
Could’ve been snakes, of course, I thought. Bleeding snakes.
Did they keep snakes in medical labs? I didn’t know, nor why they would have been bleeding.
Nor why anything had bled that night, only that there was too much, way too much blood. The foyer stank of it, and that was only the foyer. There was nothing there that bled.
Correction. Something scrabbled in a corner as I walked behind Luke; my whole body jerked, and I was cold again despite the sweat on me as my head twisted round to see.
It was a rabbit, onl
y a rabbit. White once, a pink-eyed cutie of a little lab rabbit; not white now. Not cute. Smeared with blood and filth it was, and its hind legs didn’t work. It must have clawed itself into the corner there on its front paws only, and its blood-soaked belly had left another of those drag-trails along the wall.
And now it stared, it glared at us, pink eyes shot red; and it yickered with long yellow teeth, and it screamed high and gasping, and it looked and acted entirely mad.
Must have been the pain, I thought, driving it loco. Someone said once, there’s nothing so frightening as a mad sheep; but believe me, mad rabbit runs it pretty close. Anything shy and docile, I guess, turns scary when it turns.
I was scared, at any rate. I wasn’t going anywhere near the thing, even to put it out of its lunacy.
Luke neither, he fixed his eyes forward and marched along the corridor, and me I was like a dog in his wake, tail between my legs and whining softly in the back of my throat. I’d have been dragging hard at the leash, if he’d had one.
He did have one, only that it wasn’t material. Every step I took into that building, I didn’t want to go one more; every step I took I followed with another, only because he was there ahead of me. And he’d come for me, he needed me although he wouldn’t say it; and that was a first, and I owed him.
But God, I paid that night. I followed him, I dogged his heels like a good boy; and he led me along the corridor, along the tracks of blood to where more doors stood open and stairs and blood ran down into light.
A basement, of course a basement. Where else would a torture chamber be, where else keep your horror?
Down we went, two wide white tiled flights down; and not only blood on the stairs, there were animals here too. Dead animals, or as dead as makes no difference. Rabbits and rats and a cat I saw, and looked away from; and wondered what the hell more there was to see, what kind of hell it was that Luke had led me to. I could hear it, or something of it, unhuman screams and moaning, but the sounds shaped no pictures in my mind.
I was quickly answered, though, as we came to the foot of the second flight. Laboratories and store-rooms made this hell, and a long room like a corridor lined with cages. Pain and fear there must always have been down here, blood and death also, that was what it had been made for; but nothing on this scale, never before so much blood all at once, so terribly much death.
Most of the cages stood open and empty, and most of their former occupants lay dead on the floor there, or else in the labs or the doorways. Some kind of killing frenzy must have taken them; I saw a rabbit with its guts scratched out, its teeth still embedded in the throat of the cat that had gutted it. I saw rats in tangles, four or five knotted together in a single murderous tie, impossible to say which had killed which. There were mice and guinea-pigs also, all the pets of my childhood, all dreadfully dead and all by each other’s teeth and claws.
Luke, I thought desperately, what have you done here, and why in God’s name have you brought me here to see it?
He beckoned me from a doorway, and I went to him, and then I thought I knew; because this was a seminar-room or some such, a table and many chairs, and there were no dead animals in here.
A hell of a mess and two dead men, but no animals.
Lots of blood.
The dead men were in uniform; or half out of it rather, half stripped, their clothes as ripped and shredded as their bodies. For a moment I thought they’d been policemen; then I saw a shoulder-flash unstained, and thought not. Security guards looked more likely. Ex-policemen, perhaps, or ex-army: heavy men, the pair of them, or had been. Discipline gone to self-indulgence, muscle gone to flab.
Everything gone now, gone to teeth and claws and tearing, and for a moment I thought the rabbits and the rats had killed them too.
Stupid, I thought. And not in accord with what I saw, what the room said.
The room, it seemed, was of the opinion that they had killed each other.
The table was upturned, the chairs were scattered and tipped. The two men lay in the centre of the room, in the arena created by the havoc round the edges, and they still had their hands on each other. I didn’t go close, to see if their fingernails had been torn by all that tearing, if their teeth were stained with biting. Not my job, not my problem.
“Luke,” I said, “how,” I said, “why did they ever...?”
“They went mad,” he said. “Like the animals.” His voice was calm, neutral, unattached: not my problem, it seemed to be saying. And if that was so, if that described his attitude, then again the question came, why had he brought me here? Not to see it, that for sure, and for sure not to report it; nor I presumed to clean up, to cover up, to make it look like nothing had happened here...
“Where are the kids?” I asked dully.
“Gone.”
Well, no blame to them for that; they’d planned a raid, not a nightmare. Not a visit to hell. And of course they hadn’t tried to clean up, any more than I would. I only hoped they hadn’t left fingerprints behind them. Later, though, I wondered a little; when he said ‘They went mad’, did Luke actually mean the security guards? Or did he mean the kids? Maybe the kids it was had gone mad, maybe they’d done the ripping and chewing when the guards disturbed them. Maybe they had cleaned up a little, at least to the point of making a half-hearted attempt at misdirection.
In that case, I really did hope they hadn’t left fingerprints behind them. But all that came later. For now I stood with my eyes fixed on those bodies, first I’d ever seen and worse than anything I’d ever imagined seeing; and into the silence I dropped the only question left, the one that had been stirring all this time.
“Luke, why did you want me here?”
“You have to help them.”
“They’re past my help, mate. I’m sorry, but...” I still wasn’t going any closer, but sometimes you don’t need to feel for a pulse or auscultate for a heartbeat. Sometimes even a rookie can tell. Particularly when a head has been twisted entirely the wrong way on a neck or when a chest has been opened manually, when that rookie can look at a mess of wet red organs and see that the heart’s not beating.
“The animals,” Luke said; and now there was some emotion in his voice, now he sounded heart-wracked, with the weight of a world’s grief on his shoulders. “I can’t help them, and someone must.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Look,” he said, and walked just a little way into the room full of cages, where he’d let me go alone before.
The sounds in there doubled and trebled instantly, manic screaming and shrieks, and some were pain and some were not. I saw a rabbit in a still-closed cage roll on its back and bite at its own belly; I heard thumps and rattles, the sounds of bodies throwing themselves about, but I was only watching that one rabbit, watching its fur stain darkly as it bit.
“You see?” Luke said. “It’s the madness. They are mad of me.”
Sweet way to put it, but he was right. Just his shadow in the doorway was enough.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Free them. Care for them.”
“We should phone the police, Luke, there are dead men through there.”
“You can do nothing for them,” and again his voice spoke of his disinterest, his utter lack of concern. “And the police would cage again here, those that they did not kill. You must help the animals.”
“Oh, for the love of God, Luke...”
He flinched at that, and I wanted him to. Laboratory animals, rats and rabbits set against men and seen as superior, more worthy, certainly more deserving of his time and mine. I had no sympathy; but it was only Luke, it was all Luke and as before I couldn’t say no.
I did what I could, with fingers that trembled as they unlatched cages and separated the dead from the living. If anyone came, if anyone caught us down here—caught me, at least; they wouldn’t catch Luke unless he were willing, no, determined to be caught—with the blood and stink on my hands and the knowledge that I had, I’d be lucky to get away wi
thout a murder charge.
But I set free every animal that could still run, and sent Luke to stand in an empty store-room out of the way, to give them a swift run up the stairs to freedom if they chose to take it. With him not in line of sight, I was free also to despatch a few of the more cruelly injured, snapping necks with that tricky little twist of the hands that you learn growing up in the country.
Thinking myself all done, I called him out again and said, “Let’s get the fuck away from here, can we?”
“There are more,” he said. “At the far end, and through the door.”
“Well, the door’s locked.” I’d tried it, to be sure. “Nothing I can do about that.” And he couldn’t go down to open that locked door for me, because there were still a dozen small animals between it and us, free but clinging to their cages none the less, and he would kill them if he tried to walk that way.
For answer he jerked a fire extinguisher off the wall, balanced it for a moment in his hand, and then threw.
Old-fashioned it was to look at, for all that this was such a modern lab: big and red and heavy, seriously heavy. I could barely have lifted it one-handed, never have balanced it on my palm, never in a million years of trying have thrown it much further than its own length away from me.
Luke threw it, what, twenty-five metres? Thirty?
With one easy motion of his arm he threw it, and it burned through the air as though it too had a memory of wings long lost. All down that corridor of cages it flew, and it struck the door neatly beside the lock and smashed it open.
“Let them out,” Luke said quietly. “Please?”
And for that “please” I went, I ran all those metres down to the broken door and through, and found a pen littered with shredded paper, and two mad sheep inside it.
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