Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE GUARDIAN

  SEAN’S HEAD RESTED against the lip of the bath. His arms were bared, as if readying themselves for a needle. Blood in the water webbed the flesh below his elbow where it had been flayed. Deep cuts to his thighs hung in feathered crimson gouts. In his despair, he’d done for his left eye: its gelid cargo formed a clear, stiffening thread of fluid over his cheek. The razor blade was a red tablet sticking up from Sean’s thumb.

  Emma studied the scene as a way to concentrate on staying upright and calming her heart. She found herself snagging on minutiae previously overlooked: a spatter of bleach discolouring the shower curtain, a crack in one of the wall tiles.

  She sat down on the toilet lid. Eventually, Sean opened his good eye.

  “I waited for ages,” she said. “I thought it was happening.”

  He wiped the mess from his cheek and fingered the sticky remains of his socket. He said, “This isn’t going to fucking work.”

  THEY HAD BEEN staying in the safe house for the best part of four weeks. As she dressed Sean’s wounds while he sat on the edge of the bath trying to fasten the gashes in his thighs with safety pins, Emma thought back to the moment that Pardoe had caught up with them. In the intervening weeks, she had been able to think of little else. The little man in the round spectacles and the brown worsted suit had arrived on Sean’s doorstep a little after three in the morning, when she and Sean were trying to relax Will. It had been a bizarre evening up until that point. After almost running Will over on the dual carriageway back into Warrington, they had bundled him into the back of the car when they saw what was trying to follow him through the gates of the hospital. All Will had done, in his delirium, was mumble what sounded like “casually” over and over. In a way, Emma had been grateful for the incident. It prevented her from concentrating too much on what had happened at 26 Myddleton Lane. It prevented her from suspecting she had finally gone mad.

  Once they got Will back to Sean’s bedsit (he had railed violently against being taken to the hospital), they covered him in a blanket and let him sleep. Still he persisted with his strange litany, only now, Emma noticed, as he relaxed, did it sound as though he was repeating names. “Cat”, he would say. And “Eli”.

  “Who do you think he’s talking about?” she asked Sean, but Sean wasn’t saying anything. He was sitting in the dark, in an armchair by his window, his fingers steepled together and pressed against his lower lip. She thought, maybe, by the way the low light from his kitchen glistened on his face, that he was crying. She did not go to him, but sought her own retreat, curled in a ball on Sean’s bed, hugging a pillow.

  An hour later, Will woke her with his thrashing on the sofa. In sleep he was begging to be killed. She went to him and revived him, helping him to calm down, bringing him tea, stroking his forehead. Sean had not moved.

  “What’s to be done?” she asked him.

  “Things haven’t even started yet,” Sean said, cryptically. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was distracted by the sound of footsteps on the pavement. He put a finger to his lips and glared at her. When the footsteps ceased outside his door, Sean went downstairs. Emma heard him open the door while the visitor was in the middle of knocking.

  It had been the strangest day she had ever lived. And now it just got weirder. The oddest thing, Emma thought now, as she carefully dressed Sean and kissed him lightly on the mouth, was that she had taken in everything Pardoe said to her as if he were trying to sell her life insurance. She had been mildly bored by it, yet understood that it was really quite important.

  Jeremy Pardoe had been Sean’s guardian, many years before. “The only one left,” he said, almost smugly. “You would have had a guardian yourself, Emma, but no more. Frederique, her name was. Nice woman. Ran an amber shop somewhere out in East Anglia I believe. She died a number of years ago. I’m getting a little too old for running around after Sean now. I never thought I’d have to again of course, but, well, there you go. I’ve got some younger legs outside in the car to do my running for me.”

  Pardoe had a sleepy voice that carried something of the Highlands’ softness in it. When she asked him about it, he confirmed that he was from Oban. A maltster by trade, as had been his father and grandfather.

  “What brought you south?” she asked him.

  Sean had rubbed his forehead, irritably. “Emma, he’s doing the talking. Let him finish, and then we can get on to swapping recipes and putting each other on our Christmas lists, okay?”

  “No, Sean,” Pardoe had said. “It’s really all right. It might be best for her to hear this at her own pace. You’ve had a busy day.”

  “Where’s my guardian?” Will said, groggily.

  Pardoe had smiled. “You, sir, never had a guardian. But you’d make a very good guardian for someone else.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Will said, and turned away from their conversation.

  “Well,” Pardoe sighed, moving to the window where he teased open the net curtain with his little finger. “I’ve known you, Sean, for a long time. I was detailed to shadow you from your fifteenth birthday, a couple of years after we lost you. You know, when you ran away from home.” He put his hand to his face and rubbed a while. “God,” he whispered. “I thought there’d never be a time when I had to tell you this. I thought the links were down. I thought the territory had been barred.”

  Sean heard something squeaking stertorously but couldn’t be bothered to show surprise when he realised it was the sound of his own breathing. Deliberately, he walked to the sideboard and pulled Will’s gun from the drawer. Turning, he pointed it at Pardoe’s head. Pardoe was ice.

  Emma said, “Who’s we?”

  Sean and Pardoe ignored her. Sean said, “You know about my parents?”

  A nod.

  “You killed them? What? You worked with them?” He was getting jittery. Sean had never trained a gun on anybody before and he did not like it one bit. In the Force, he had done a little target practice, but had never taken it seriously. A rookie, he was a long way off being considered for armed service.

  Emma said: “What about your parents?”

  Now Pardoe held up a hand. “I don’t know about any of that. We didn’t know your father was involved with anyone or had deals with anyone. We were trying to track down people with, ah, a strong constitution.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sean asked, his bead on Pardoe already wavering. Although he didn’t understand what the man was saying, he understood him to be innocent. Somehow he was as familiar as the jacket Sean had owned for ten years.

  Emma’s first question caught up with him and he echoed it. “Who’s we?”

  Pardoe did not answer. Clearly he had rehearsed this moment for some time, and his delivery was as dead and level as his hands were active, moving against each other, lightly greased with his perspiration. “You were the vanguard of a special project funded by a secret... society,” he said. “At the age of thirteen, as you reached puberty, it was decreed that you would be controlled, killed, and sent on your mission. You too, Emma. And a girl called Naomi.”

  At this, Will turned his attention back to Pardoe. His face was all: What have I got myself into now?

  Sean dropped the gun to his side. He suddenly looked very weak. “Naomi? Killed? Mission? Jesus, Pardoe I–”

  “There was a man. A very important, very dangerous man called de Fleche. He disappeared. To a place he should not have gone to. We had to track him and bring him back, or... things would have become really not very nice. That’s when we started work tracking down suitable Inserts. The first wave we tried either died or were trapped inside. With hindsight, I suppose we put them in too early, before their training was completed, before we really knew what we were dealing with. But you... you were the true vanguards. You took to the Negstreams like a babe to the teat.”

  “Negstreams? What the fu–”

  Pardoe silenced Will with a wave of his hand. “I’ll fill you in
on Negstreams some other time. For now, I reckon it’s important you find out who you are. Or rather, that you remember who you are.”

  “Who was it tried to kill me? Weird woman she was. Coming apart at the seams like something made out of wax.”

  “Ah,” Pardoe said. “I didn’t know about her. That makes things a bit trickier, it has to be said.”

  “Who is she?” asked Emma.

  “Well, I don’t know specifically, but she sounds like Canaille to me.”

  “Can I?” Will said. “Can you what?”

  “Canaille,” Pardoe enunciated. He spelled out the word.

  “Like that’s supposed to mean anything to me?” Will sat up, his face hard-edged.

  “You’ve drawn a blank with us too,” Sean said.

  “Our opposing forces have a knack, shall we say. There’s a way of plucking from the ether certain individuals who, crude as they are to begin with, have skills that are above and beyond anything you or I could boast. Give them a little time and they can hone these skills until they are ultra-sharp. We are talking about extremely dangerous killing machines. Sorry to get all horrorshow about it, but there you are.”

  “Plucked from the ether?” Emma said the words as if they were the magical combination with which to invoke a spirit.

  “After a fashion, yes.” Pardoe rubbed his hands together, clearly delighted with the prospect. “They need a way in, it has to be said. A physical entry. This usually will be an expectant mother. Not that there’s much hope for mum or child once the Canaille individual has borrowed that route into the world.”

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” Sean said, the words coming hard and nasty, curling his lip.

  “Believe it,” Will said, quietly. “I saw it happen. I saw her. I remember her. They called her something. Cheke, I think it was.”

  “Cheke. Yes, that’s one of the swine. We know about Cheke.”

  Emma’s face bore the look of someone who had eaten something sour. “It has a name?”

  “Of course.” Pardoe seemed put out. “We’ll have to watch out for her. Do not underestimate her. She might seem a bit ungainly at the moment, but she will grow into her role. She is a supreme talent, make no mistake. She will improve.”

  “You sound like you admire her,” Will said, bitterly.

  “Oh, I do. I do. She is to the land what the shark is to water. She has few peers. Be alert, my friends. You must be very, very careful. I can’t emphasise that enough. She’ll do for you all if you aren’t.”

  Pardoe’s jaw clenched and relaxed as a silence wadded the air between them. Into it, Sean whispered: “Why are you telling us all this?”

  “As I was saying, there were three of you, three Negstream Inserts,” Pardoe continued. “I thought that only Sean had survived. But his running into you, Emma, sounded the alarm bells. It’s like there’s some kind of, shall we say, ripple when Inserts get together. It’s there. Very strong too. If you know how to look for it.”

  Inserts. That word again. Sean liked that. Not one bit. He returned to the cupboard, put down the gun, and withdrew a bottle of Absolut.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Tell us everything. But don’t expect me to stay sober.”

  It was almost five a.m. by the time Pardoe finished. Sean and Emma and Will had drunk most of the vodka; the bottle lay stoppered on the floor between them pointing out through a window that was gradually filling with chalky streaks of light. Pardoe had refused to drink with them. He told them he would wait in his car, an olive-green Jaguar that was parked in the street, for as long as it took for them to feel comfortable enough about the situation to join him. He would take them somewhere safe. Where they lived at the moment was not safe. Outside elements were closing in. It was time to move.

  Unspoken questions fluttered around Sean’s mind but their urgency had been tempered by Pardoe’s gentle voice and his unheralded, understated revelations. Sean’s unease about Pardoe had vanished before the knowledge that he had found an ally for the first time in his life. It helped to be told that Naomi had been a part of it, something that he instinctively knew to be true, as it was with Emma.

  Hadn’t he always felt something different? A calling, a significance that plucked at his imagination, like a dream that refused to be remembered? Hadn’t he always possessed the dead zone of what had happened to his parents without ever fully understanding the source of it? It was a dark land that he returned to whenever he slept. He had always thought that the knots in which he was trapped were for him alone to pick at. He never believed the knot might be solved by someone else. Having a discussion that involved his parents, people he had not referred to in public for as many years as they had been dead, made him feel sick.

  An hour or so later, Sean, Emma, and Will trooped out to the Jaguar. Pardoe was sitting in the passenger seat, nibbling on a croissant. A large man in a blue cagoule nodded at each of them via the rear-view mirror as they got into the back. Jamie Marshall.

  “Hi, Marshall,” said Sean. “Recovered from the stag night?”

  “Sorry to be so hush-hush, mate,” Marshall said.

  “I doubt I’ll ever be surprised by anything ever again,” Sean remarked.

  “You know each other?” Emma asked.

  Marshall drove for twenty minutes, navigating A roads and B roads with an almost supernatural knowledge of where explosions had prohibited access. They arrived at a church on the outskirts of Warrington just as sunlight was touching colour to the streets.

  There Pardoe kept them, and told them what they needed to know.

  “It is unfortunate,” he told Sean and Emma, when they gave their account of what had happened in the house on Myddleton Lane. “But, expected, given your resourcefulness.”

  “Why unfortunate?” Emma wanted to know.

  “Because once you have passed through a Negstream, you cannot use it again. You have to find your own way back. We think that this is ultimately what did for de Fleche. He constructed his follies around these glorious gateways, one of which he no doubt passed through, and then found that they were as useless to him as a fart in a colander. Oh, do excuse me.” Pardoe flushed. “I’m given to these pathetic little collapses in etiquette. Quite unforgivable. When he found another, he went through and stayed there. He’s been there ever since.”

  “And we were detailed to go in and get him?” Sean asked. “Get him how? You can’t bring a dead man back. You can’t kill a dead man.” He looked around at the others. “Can you?”

  “Well, he’s not dead. That’s the thing. There are ways and means. It really is fortunate that we found you. De Fleche, in the years since we lost you, has become quite a problem. He’s upsetting the balance and causing a gradual decay. Which is bad for all of us, really. He shouldn’t be there. That’s the bottom line. Negstreams were never meant to be used for travel. They are momentary monuments to the dead at the instant that life departs. The soul made visible as it leaves the body. Death’s mirror, perhaps. Sometimes, like the one you found, Sean, they remain. Flukes of nature, they are. Frozen memories of a life. True ghosts. They are not doorways. Not doorways.”

  Will wanted to know if what he had glimpsed after his accident with Elisabeth on the motorway out of London had been a Negstream. He wanted to know where the “there” Pardoe had mentioned was and what it might be. He wanted to know if Catriona might be “there”.

  “It’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bother trying to find out if I were you. You aren’t trained for it, dear boy. You aren’t... one of us.”

  “What can happen if this guy stays over there?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been there twenty years. So who cares? Let the fucker rot.”

  “He isn’t dead. And he’s in a dead zone. How healthy can that be? He is in the place where we all go the second we die. His presence is causing it to decay. Dead things cannot rest easy there.”

  “How does that affect us?” asked Emma.

  “Well, now, how should I put it?” Pardoe pressed the
back of his hand to his mouth and studied the middle distance for a few seconds. “I suppose it affects us because, well, because the dead can leak back.”

  Will said, into the heavy silence: “You. Fucking. What?”

  Pardoe nodded. “Marvellously put, lad. It’s true. The dead walk among us, if I might be so bold as to put it in hammy language.”

  They sat in silence, digesting this, while Pardoe slurped at his tea.

  “How do we go about getting back there then?” Sean had asked.

  Pardoe spread his hands. “Do you know, I haven’t the foggiest.”

  SEAN GREW JITTERY around ten o’clock so Emma took him walking. She’d fastened his coat up to the collar in order to disguise his scarified features. Sunglasses concealed the destroyed eye. They’d draw attention on this wintry night, which they could do without, but not as much as an open wound.

  He walked stiffly against the restraining bandages on his legs. He leaned heavily against her and she smelled the copper of his blood seeping through the makeshift dressings. She helped him walk to the estate entrance, where they turned right, towards a tunnel of pedestrian bridges and sodium light.

  “Can we stop a moment? I’m having trouble breathing.” He hacked up a lot of blood, and she wiped away the crimson bubbles and ropes from his mouth while he bared his face to the rain. “God, Emma,” he said, “didn’t it used to be so easy? You’d turn a trick here and there and have food for an evening; I’d break my back chasing shoplifters and things would keep moving. I’ve made a bit of a mess of things. I do apologise.”

  She hushed him and held him a while, thinking that, compared to what she’d been doing when they first met, this wasn’t too bad. Not really. Remembering his conversation with Pardoe, she gently asked Sean about his parents and why he had not volunteered the information about them earlier.

  “Why?” he asked, cruelly. “Because you feel an extra-special bond between us? Because you think you’ve got a right to know stuff just because of what we are?”