Sonata of the Dead

by Conrad Williams

  I was the stupid one, prepared to seize upon the first dodgy lead as having been authored by her. I’d fallen into a trap more crude than the one I was plotting with Mawker. I’d gone to it with open arms, never once suspecting that he knew more than we gave him credit for. He’d been ahead every step of the way. Slowly, sedulously, he was cutting down his targets, no matter the Accelerants’ cute little codes and curfews. If I died here, she was alone. I had to make sure that when the confrontation did come, I had a definite, immediate reason to face it. I had to be between him and her. I couldn’t risk a cold and lonely death, a pointless death, out here. Not tonight.

  I pushed myself upright and began inching away. Once I was on the other side of the bridge I intended to find some way to shimmy up to roadside if at all possible. But I wasn’t given the chance. I saw him stiffen and turn his face in my direction. It was in the cowl of a hood, pale and oval and stitched with shadows and intent. I had no idea of this guy’s physique – it was locked up inside a heavily padded jacket – but if he was stocky, it didn’t affect his speed or grace, because he came for me, hitting full pelt within seconds. I stared at him for a moment, shocked by his acceleration, and then took off myself, all thoughts of concealment gone.

  I raced past closed security gates and doors and generator housings containing multiple warnings of death and trespass. Padlocks winked at me. I didn’t look back. I didn’t need to in order to know that he was gaining, despite that unwieldy machete.

  A light up ahead. A train slowing for the buffers. If I could somehow get that train between me and my pursuer… but that wasn’t going to work. Someone had obviously alerted the driver to the power failure because the train was coming to a stop way before the tracks split for the platforms. It would be stationary before I reached it. Maybe I could alert the driver? But at this rate, The Hack would be upon me way before I became visible to any staff in the cockpit.

  I picked up my pace, but it was hard to run in the darkness on such unstable ground. I had to hope The Hack was suffering the same difficulties, although it didn’t sound like it. The crunch of the stones was nearer, and had a confident rhythm about it. Turn your fucking ankle, I thought. Trip and spear yourself on your own fucking weapon.

  A distant tannoy made an announcement nobody could hear. Westbourne Bridge was coming up. Across the tracks on the Westway side, I could see an area of flapping plastic net, where new constructions and refurbishments in the Basin abutted the railway. I angled right, hurdling the rails carefully. If I tripped I was dead.

  I got to the fence and rammed through it, stumbling into a cordoned-off building site filled with Portakabins and orange plastic barriers. The structures were wrapped in scaffolds and brick nets. Harsh sodium lights blazed on brackets high up on concrete pillars. I tried a couple of the Portakabin doors but they were locked. I could hear him at the fence, the gritting of the blade against the wall as he hoisted himself up. I ran along a blind alley, casting covetous glances at a scooter parked by a service hatch. No keys in the ignition. Not enough time to hotwire. Didn’t know how to do that anyway.

  I came out into a polished quadrangle of high rises and a token postage stamp of green space to keep the office workers happy. There was a hairdressers and a deli, a noodle bar and a mini supermarket tucked into a rank of shops under a walkway. Behind me was a coffee shop and a pizza restaurant. I ran along a corridor studded with lights, flanked by plane trees in the direction of an office block with rounded corners and ice-blue lighting recessed in gills that ran up the side of the edifice. It was like being on a science fiction film set after shooting has stopped for the day.

  I’d lost him. I was a couple of minutes away from Little Venice. I’d lost…

  He came up out of the dark and the machete moved so quickly it left a trace of where it had been, like a swipe of motion in a comic book. In that moment, before I felt it connect with the side of my head, I saw another figure shifting in the near distance. It raised its hand and cried out. I tried to scream at it to go, to run, to get away, but my mouth was filling with blood. The black outlines of the trees, like spiders’ legs frozen against the sky, began to twitch and move and grow. The thin black boughs swelled and blocked out all the interstices where there was light, until there no longer was any, and no longer any colours or smells or sounds. And I thought, What a ridiculous way to die.

  ‘CANCER PLANET’

  2 FEB – 10 FEB 1988

  They were coming for her – the Shadow Walkers – eating up the ground, showering plumes of oily, dark soil/flesh behind them, stabbing the overcast spears forged from disease, catching the red rain on tongues reeling with foulness.

  Thunder roiled and shuddered across the horizon, chasing them laughing and shrieking like hideous, mutated hyenas.

  Their teeth shone dully, mist filming their vision. Teeth long and wolfish, flashed in the light.

  They could see her.

  And too late, she saw them, but the pain was already therre, already deep and spreading blackly through her as a malignant

  cancer.

  She wakes, threads of perspiration stinging her eyes. Dawn is rushing into the sky outside the hospital window, pouring honey-coloured light across the roads and houses. She sighs and the air rattles through her like wind soughing through october leaves. The nightmare clings on, leech like.

  Shadow walkers.

  Cancer.

  The word injects fear into her bones and it buries deeper into her consciousness, wallowing in the damage it has already caused. It is as if she can feel herself steadily deteriorating: each doomed cell’s useless fight with an ancient, well near unstoppable horror, the steady onslaught of the sickness taking over. She winces when she realises that, in a way, she is killing herself. Her body is gradually eating her from the inside out.

  She reaches across to the bedside cabinet and gropes for the water jug. Her hand snags on something else and she tugs it towards her, appalled by her lack of strength. She holds the mirror up to her face and her reflection stares grimly back at her; a skull covered by a shrink rap of yellowing skin, punched with lifeless eyes. Her hair hangs in sparse clumps, the result of hours of chemotherapy.

  She breathes in, wrestling with the fear of pain, and her lungs seem to shred and part in her chest like so much wet tissue paper and when the pain does come, like a gout of white flame, she is ready, and for the first time since the Shadow Walkers invaded her dreams, she is able to force the tears back.

  The doctor arrives.

  He prods and pokes at her emaciated body, his face neutral, as expressionless as cream cheese.

  The doctor’s breath is redolent of cigarette smoke and she suddenly hates him, despises the face that he is standing on the other side of the sheets, treating her, a non-smoker, for the very thing that he should be suffering.

  He asks the questions, she answers, her voice distant and, al=most comically, disembodied from her, as though she were the world’s greatest ventriloquist.

  She eats well today, forcing the food, but getting it places, to the corners of her body that crave sustenance. As she eats – the tines of her fork clattering nervously on cracked hospital plates, she watches the sky darkes, the clouds shifting broodily before the menace of night.

  She contemplates reading a book, a collection of short stories by Ruth Rendell, but instead invites sleep and with it, the slow, seductive kiss of the nightmare. She acecpts that the kiss will be cold, but comforts herself with the knowledge that her fight has begun and the Shadow Walkers will not find her so easy to attack this time.

  The clouds

  * * *

  filled her mind as well as the sky that night and echoes became a part of her dream. She could hear them, not necessarily close by but they were there all the same, perhaps sniffing the air for her, perhaps confused by this new aroma of determination.

  Perhaps just biding their time. Stalking her.

  She breathed the sweet, heavy air of her dream and found it refreshing and
strengthening. She could feel the curl of a smile sweep across her lips. Then the clouds dispersed.

  The Shadow Walkers stared at her from across the black, oozing wasteland; eyes baleful, bodies twisted and grotesque, heaving with anticipation.

  Her smile widened.

  And they came for her.

  Or at least, that was the ida. Because, from behind her, hurtling out of her choking darkness, came a rush of diamond sharpo brightness, like the coruscating light flashing off storm torn water.

  The Shadow Walkjers were consumed by it, turned into thraashing figures and then –

  Then they were gone, their screams cut off with chilling finality.

  And when she remembered to turn arouns, in case there were any more to devour her, there was nothing but a vast, lovely light.

  * * *

  Fourteen weeks later, a lithe, beautful, slightly tired woman skips down the hospital steps, dark hair swirling in the

  24

  I came to a minute, an hour, a day later, I don’t know. A dog was licking my face. I lifted my head and pain unravelled from it. Everything felt loose and unconnected. Nausea filled me up and I turned to one side to be sick. Stars leapt and crackled in the dark spaces inside my head. I batted the dog away before he could get excited about the warm snack I’d provided. The back of my neck felt hot and irritated, the skin wet and chewed. I guessed I must have collided with the pebble-dashed edge of a nearby bench on my way down. I pushed myself to my knees, paused for a while to allow everything to settle, then got to my feet. I closed my eyes to the sway until I reclaimed control. Now. Why hadn’t he killed me?

  Right. I remembered. The other figure. That was why.

  The voice that had followed me down had belonged to an elderly man in a flat cap and a raincoat. Beneath it he wore an AC/DC T-shirt, although much of that was obscured by blood. Police sirens on the A104. Maybe they’d been there ever since I’d revived. Maybe they were on their way while I was still out. But they were for The Hack, or for me. Not for this guy. Everything was too late for him now. Blue strobes stitching into the black above Blade Runner town. I knelt down and thanked him and disappeared.

  * * *

  Two a.m. I was standing on the main road, staring down Homer Street, daring it to do something different, willing it to show me why I shouldn’t go home. I was desperate to go home. I wanted a bath, a drink, a bandage and a bed. I wanted to see the look on my maniac cat’s face when I tooled through the door looking like Joseph Merrick on a bad day. I wanted to talk to Mawker and find out the name of the guy who had inadvertently saved my life. I kept touching the area where the machete had hit me. Somehow, angles, fate, a shit aim: the blade had failed to lop the top off me like a boiled egg and had knocked me senseless instead. I had a lump the size of Berkshire growing out of the side of my head.

  Homer Street was quiet. Cars parked along the left-hand side. Lights on in windows. I get in and I’m safe. I stay out and I’m not. So move. But I couldn’t. There were sinkholes of darkness between me and the entrance. And as at Paddington, I was convinced I could see movement within them. I kept out of sight and moved away. At Baker Street Tube station I called Romy. She answered just as I was about to hang up. I shouldn’t be leaning on her. I could just go and stay at Tokuzo’s place after all. But I wanted to see a friendly face. I needed some positive physical proximity, to cancel out all the negatives of the last couple of hours.

  ‘What is it?’

  Her voice was thick and slow with sleep. I imagined her under the duvet. Soft, warm curves. Dips and swells. The smell of her.

  ‘That pasta was good,’ I said.

  ‘There’s some more in the fridge if you want it.’

  ‘Can I come over?’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Traffic tore up and down the Euston Road, unimpressed by the hour. I thought of Sarah somewhere in the city, maybe sleeping, maybe not. I hoped she was safe and invisible. I sent her every good wish I could muster.

  ‘I’m not that great,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you can come over. You don’t need to ask.’

  I waited some more before I descended into the Underground station. I kept an eye on the traffic and the few people meandering along the pavements. I had to be sure I wasn’t followed before I went to her. I wouldn’t put her at risk. And so, despite the burn to be with her, loops and false turns and switchbacks: Baker Street to Waterloo to Bank to Holborn to King’s Cross and finally to Angel. People staring at the lump on my head. People trying not to stare. A splitting headache was building behind my left eye. Maybe my brain was swelling. Maybe they’d find me at five in the morning, cold and blue in my seat somewhere in south Wimbledon.

  He’d known about the dead letter drop. How could that be? Either one of us had been clumsy and had been followed to the drop, or the killer was a member of the inner circle. I tried to marry the movements of my pursuer to the physical quirks and peccadilloes of Sean Niker. I couldn’t be sure because of that padded jacket and the camouflage of darkness, but I couldn’t see beyond him. Although it didn’t make sense. I knew, deep down, that he had nothing to do with these deaths. I just wanted an excuse to mash his face against my knee for an afternoon.

  She was at the window when I got to the flat, nearly two hours later. Her hair was tied back off her face. It was a good face, strong and kind. She was concerned about the state of my injuries and wanted to call an ambulance, but I showed her how well I could walk in a straight line. I counted backwards from twenty to one. I told her who the prime minister was, and the chancellor of the exchequer and the home and foreign secretaries. She drew me a hot bath while I raided the cupboards for painkillers. It seemed the trainee chef had suffered most of her life from cluster headaches and had a stock of weapons grade analgesics. I took two tablets that looked like rhinoceros suppositories and washed them down with a beaker of spiced rum.

  I slipped into the bath and it was a tad too hot, but I needed it. I felt the water touch every raw red part of me and my skin screamed, but I relished it; a little masochism never did anyone any harm. Under the water my flesh was strange, like the membrane of a cuttlefish in flux between colours. I rested my head on the lip of the bath and wished I had some more rum.

  Romy came in as if reading my mind and set a glass down. She was naked.

  ‘Is there room for two?’

  ‘At least,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of hosting a water polo tournament.’

  She slid in opposite me. The water lifted her heavy breasts, and clung to her firm skin in beads. My pulse sent ripples through the water that broke against her.

  ‘It’s hot,’ she said.

  ‘Yep.’

  She smiled. Her eyes went to my cock and appraised it. I swallowed and the sound was a sharp click in the steamy air.

  ‘Nervous?’ she asked.

  ‘Booze and drugs…’ I said. ‘I’m just glad you’re here in case I fall asleep.’

  ‘We can’t have you falling asleep,’ she said.

  ‘It’s unlikely now. I mean, a beautiful woman gets into my bath with me. How could I possibly fall as— zzzzzzzz.’

  ‘Very funny. Drink your rum.’

  ‘I would, but my shoulder feels as if it’s been dislocated and replaced with a bag of broken spanners.’

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. She planted her hands on either side of the bath and raised herself to her knees. Muscles jumped in the smooth skin of her chest. She leaned forward to get the glass. A breast slid against the side of my cheek. I felt the weight of it against me and groaned. Her pussy was shaved but the hair was growing back; stubble grazed the head of my cock, snapping it awake.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s the only part of me that hasn’t been destroyed.’

  ‘I’m sure I can fix that,’ she said. She began to rock her hips, sliding herself up and down the length of me.

&nb
sp; ‘Romy,’ I said. My voice was thick and ragged.

  She took some rum into her mouth and leaned forward, dribbled it into mine. Her eyes were locked on me the whole time. ‘Today I was piecing together fragments of a love letter from the seventeenth century,’ she said. Spice danced on her breath. She didn’t cease the slow back and forth of her hips. I felt the water move against me in beats, and the clinging wetness of her; it felt as if I was being massaged with hot oil. I reached up and pressed the spike of a nipple into the palm of my hand. She closed her eyes. ‘Words of concern and ecstasy, older than the light from some of the stars up there. Written before Napoleon was born. Tattered and torn and lost to the world all through the events of the last three centuries. Those unknown… unknowable lovers who cared for each other once, a speck in history, gone forever. But something remaining of them. A shimmer of heat in all those cold layers of time.’

  There was urgency in her movement now, and she was pressing against me harder with each stroke. I rose to meet it. I put my hand around her neck and drew her down to me and felt her tongue slide against mine. Pain was leaping around every corner of my body but the core of warmth and pleasure was keeping it at bay. She raised her hips higher and I slipped into her. Breath hissed. Water sloshed out of the bath. Control disappeared. I came hard and knocked the glass to the floor. I heard it smash as I felt the water slip over my head. I watched her through it, rising above me, her hands in her hair, and she was all sliced and blurred, her mouth a red O and all I could hear was the thud of my heart.