Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  “Well then, are you hungry?” Fidget boy was pointing at a small girl holding a plastic doll with no head. He reached out, for God knows what purpose, and Will stood in his way, clamping a hand around his arm.

  “Leave her alone.”

  Fidget regarded him uncomprehendingly. His tongue stuck out from between pock-marked lips and ranged dryly around. “Hungry?” he whispered.

  A bell rang, a tiny bell jang-jang-janging. Everyone turned to watch as the sit-up-and-beg bicycle wobbled through the throng. The man on the seat flapped his hands at people to get out of the way. His hair flew out behind him in grey streamers. His tongue lolled and dribbled against his cheek. When people recognised de Fleche, they cringed and sank into the shadows.

  “Will, this simply won’t do,” he said. His tone was that of a prissy director at an am-dram rehearsal. He rode the bicycle round and around Will, rubbing his chin, while Fidget asked for a croissant, a pot of Müller Rice, shit mate, anything.

  De Fleche clenched the brakes and skidded to a halt. He touched the little girl on the forehead with his thumb and she imploded. All that was left of her was a scrap of her skirt and the plastic doll, black, molten, and disfigured.

  “Well that was fucking charming,” Will said, and pushed de Fleche off his bike. He was sickened that his ability to be shocked by anything had been closed down, as neatly and as finally as the switch on a life-support machine. A groan rose from the thin men behind him. De Fleche stood up and brushed himself off. He was laughing, but there was something unpleasant about the laugh. An edge.

  “I haven’t the time for this, Will. What is it, do you think you’re too precious to be part of this revolution?”

  “I don’t want a part of this. I want to be left alone.”

  “You signed up.”

  “You tricked me. You used Catriona as bait.”

  “I did nothing of the sort.” He smiled and clapped Will on the shoulder. Will flinched, thinking of the way the girl had winked out of existence. “Some tatty little book I came across and you went all Bambi-eyed over it. I could have spread you on my toast at that moment. It was all rather sweet.”

  Will said again, “You tricked me.”

  De Fleche sighed and looked around him. “This is going on all over the shop, you know. Pretty small potatoes for the time being, but there’s some big King Edwards waiting to be pulled out. It’s in these places, Warrington and the like, where the grand changes, the new dawning will come into its own. Not London or Paris or Sydney. Warrington. Landevant. Beecroft. Places I know, but you’d be hard-pushed to find on a map. Out of acorns, and all that flim-flam.”

  “Jesus,” Will said, and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw ideograms of colour dancing there. Not a bad trick, he considered, for a dead man. “Why?” he asked.

  “Will, I’m not prepared to build a little campfire and have all you owl-faced cub scouts sit around listening to Uncle Peter telling stories while–”

  “You said something about revenge,” Will cut in. “Revenge for what?”

  De Fleche nodded, gravely. “Okay,” he said. “All right.” He put a fatherly arm around Will and led him away from the impasse. He said, “Three is the magic number. Three wise men. Three stooges. Three coins in a fountain. Three for the price of two at Boots. The Godfather trilogy. And then there’s me, and a man called Leonard Butterby and a man called Thomas Lousher.” He stopped and turned to Will, brought his other arm up to Will’s shoulder, and massaged them both gently. “I’m telling you this because you have promise. Also, because you have nothing else. Eternity without a bag of marbles to play with is like a Widnes prostitute with a corrugated gob. It sucks bad-style.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with you, or your sick fantasies.”

  “You will, once your dead brain kicks in. Once the maggots down south have reamed out your Willishness. Once you’ve become a puppet for me, like these other gawps.”

  Will could hear something else nagging him above de Fleche’s hubristic spiel. Something clunkingly mechanical approaching from the end of the street where de Fleche himself had appeared.

  “I worked with those two men for maybe ten years. They were attracted to me for my natural beauty, my collection of Japanese stamps, and, I suppose, my ability to sniff out the odd Negstream. They were impressed that I could track down ways into this place. They paid me to do research into it. We thought we could make a fortune by using the doorways into different levels of consciousness for all kinds of stuff. Sponsors might want to use it to advertise. Imagine. Go to sleep, we switch on, and people all over the world wake up wanting a bag of KP nuts, or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. It was naughty, but who was going to stop us? Bollocks to the standards agencies. How are they going to find out? How do you control something that you can’t touch? We were going to talk to film and TV bigwigs. Get people to pay us a subscription so that they could have films shown straight into their heads. Or football matches. Or porn. Or 24/7 news.”

  It was a black cab, turning into the street. De Fleche was too caught up in his own reverie to notice.

  De Fleche said, “Problem was, I couldn’t get in. Because once you get in, you can’t get out the same way. So we were a bit stuck. But those pricks, they were small-time idiots. They picked up some measly five-figure financial package from a company who were interested in backing them as long as they were guaranteed front-end mentions once the system was up and running. What did they do? Filled their nappies that they had so much money for the sweet shop that they pushed me through a Negstream and fucked off with the dosh.”

  “Trapping you in here?”

  “Only for the past twenty years. As I say, a Negstream is like a condom. You only use it once. You have to find your own way back. I couldn’t.”

  “So what makes you think you can get back now?”

  “You know the answer to that, Will. You, the great, white disaster hunter. Chasing tragedy all over the country when you could have done what I’m doing, and create your own. I’ve worked hard to get some influence. It’s here, in front of you, the fruits of all that labour. Enough deaths and I’ll have a Negstream of my own to step through. And then we’ll see what kind of influence I really have. Soon now. So soon that I probably wouldn’t have the time to soft-boil an egg. I can taste it. Life, that is,” he said with a grin, “not the egg.”

  “This isn’t just about Lousher and Butterby, is it?”

  “I suppose not. Golly, they might even be dead already. This travelling circus of mine know their scent well. It’s just a matter of time for them. But the bigger picture, I never lost sight of the bigger picture like they did. I am a master of dreams and nightmares, hopes and fears. Control. It’s what it’s all about, whether you’re a rat trying to build a nest in a sewer, or a president slapping wrists in the Middle East. I am in control. I am big in control. Do you know, Will, that in some places on this planet, that just about secures god status for me?”

  The taxi pulled up about fifty metres down the street. When Sean slipped out of the driver’s side door, Will almost shouted out his name. He had missed him dearly. Emma too. He wanted de Fleche to disappear in a flash of light back to his little laboratory where he could make his alchemy all he liked. Will just wanted his friends back, at least for a few minutes. Just to say thank you, goodbye, remember me. Seeing Sean empowered him. Not yet, he said to his friend. Hang fire, just for a minute. You’ll know when to make your move.

  “You’re insane, Peter,” he said. “What are you going to be? A living king with a country of dead subjects? How deeply, utterly satisfying. I won’t be a part of it.”

  “Then you’ll be dust. I’ll use your soul for a money bag. I’ll have your eye sockets for pencil holders.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “I will, believe me.”

  “Yeah, right. What is it, by the way, that scares you?”

  De Fleche smiled at him. He reached out a finger and pressed it against Wil
l’s forehead. He felt a strange buzzing there, not unpleasant, like a time as a child when he had pressed his face against a jar in which he had captured a wasp. Then he stepped away, his face changing, flooding with colour. “Christ, yes,” he said, the words jerking out of him rather than being impelled by his breath. “Christ. Yes!”

  He looked down at the dust and moved. Footprints ate into the ground. De Fleche said, “Isn’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

  “He asked you a question,” called Sean. To Will, the voice came from somewhere distant and muggy. He watched Sean lift something to his mouth and blow long and hard.

  Sean didn’t hear anything, but the effect it had on the thin men was shocking. As one, they howled and scarpered, hands to their ears. Will dropped to the ground and was writhing in the dust, trying to beat from his ears whatever woeful sound Vernon’s whistle had made.

  De Fleche ignored Will and turned to stare at Sean. Sean’s breath wavered, but only for an instant. De Fleche wore a fixed, flabbergasted look, the look of a father-to-be who has been pacing around outside the maternity ward waiting to hear if it was a boy or a girl only to be told that it was three of each.

  “There’s a noise-abatement policy in these parts, I believe,” he said, his voice raised over a clamour Sean couldn’t detect. The air close to Sean’s left eye was shearing, as though he was looking through a window with a flaw in the glass. “I did not,” continued de Fleche, “wait two decades to come back to this place just to have some scarface twerp fuck it all up for me. Desist. Forthwith. Or I shall smite thee with a big stick.”

  The air was rippling now, as unstable as the skin in a pan of boiling milk.

  “Who are you going to mess with?” de Fleche asked. “Me? What did I do? Or would you rather mess with the man who killed your girl?”

  Sean’s lips faltered on the whistle. The tremor in the air grew still.

  “Don’t listen to him, Sean,” Will said, levelly. “Believe him and we’re all finished.”

  Sean moved the whistle away. “What’s he talking about?”

  “He showed me what happened that night. He fed me into the bedroom where Naomi died. He was in me. He was using me. I couldn’t do anything.”

  Sean’s lips had turned white. “You killed her?”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Will said, holding out his hands. “De Fleche killed her. But he was in me when he did it.”

  Sean said, “What do I do, Will? Who do I believe?”

  Will pressed his lips together. He closed his eyes. “He killed her. But the coward he is, he needed someone else to hide behind. A glove puppet. Me. It’s why you couldn’t remember my face. Because you weren’t just looking at my face. You were looking at his too.”

  De Fleche said, “Yeah, and if you believe that, then I’ve got a tin of tartan paint I want to sell you.”

  Sean returned the whistle to his lips. He blew, harder than before. The ripples returned.

  “Hey,” de Fleche said. “Did you hear what I told you? Front-page news. Your killer is sitting in the dirt. Blood on his hands.”

  De Fleche was approaching too rapidly to see the change. And when he did notice what was happening, he was too close to Sean to be able to escape the consequences.

  The surgeon stepped out of the buckle in the air, clutching his battered leather medical bag, his stained green mask thankfully concealing an area of his face that was too loose, too wet. Sean heard a deep clack of teeth, too deep to be contained by any kind of mouth that he knew. Words came, coated in saliva so mangled by moisture that Sean couldn’t understand them. Instead of asking him to repeat himself, and too fearful to take his eyes off de Fleche, who was transfixed by the new arrival, Sean said, “Harvest all you like.”

  He moved away as the surgeon magicked a scalpel with a bloody edge from the air and carved into the space that de Fleche filled. He wished de Fleche’s screams were beyond the capacity of his ears, as the whistle had been, but not as much as the other things he had been wishing for lately.

  “Listen,” Will said, standing in front of Sean but looking over his shoulder at whatever awful scene was being played out. “Thanks. But it’s not over yet.”

  Sean shook his head. “It is for me. I’m tired. I’ve had enough. Emma. Emma’s dead and I can’t go on any more. I’ve seen too much of this. Too many people down. More than most. More than you’d see in a fucking war.”

  “These dead, these leaks. They all need to go home. They need to be sent back home. You’re the only person who can do it.”

  “I want nothing to do with those freaks. No offence intended.”

  “None taken. Look, Sean, you have to do it. You know it. Deep down you know it.”

  Sean sighed. “Not that deep.”

  They went over to the taxi and silently took in the small figure slumped across the back seat. Sean said, “Her too?”

  Will said, “She isn’t dead.”

  Sean stepped away from him and closed his eyes. “Don’t give me some fucking hippy shite about her being alive in my mind, Will, or I swear, I’ll piss on your grave.”

  “She isn’t dead.”

  Sean looked at him.

  Will said it again, and then, “I’m dead. I should know. Look, take that shit out of her mouth.”

  Sean did as he was told. There were more of the fibres than he had expected. He thought they had maybe caught in her lips when she was being dragged out of the noose, but he could see that they had been placed there with purpose, a great knot of hemp pressed into her gullet.

  “Make sure you get it all out,” Will ordered.

  Sean picked fibres from her teeth and from beneath her swollen, purple tongue. Her face was cold, waxen. Her mouth was as stiff as two slugs perished with salt. He lurched away, swearing and kicking out at the car and at Will.

  “I’ve had enough,” he yelled. “I can’t take this any more. Nobody should have to... I mean, there’s a limit. It’s unbearable.”

  “I know, I know,” Will soothed. “I know, I promise you.”

  He waited until Sean had chased the anger and the fear out of his body, and then he said again, “She’s not dead.”

  Sean went back and wordlessly finished the job. As soon as her mouth was empty, he slunk away to the shade of a shop front and sat down in the dust and cried into his hands. He didn’t stop. Not even when Emma slowly uncoiled herself from the back seat and, blinking the sunshine out of her eyes, trudged across the road to sit next to him and rest her head against his shoulder.

  WHEN HE HEARD Will tell him what he had to do, he couldn’t accept it.

  “The rope?” he said. “This rope? It was meant to kill me and Emma. And you’re saying it’s what I need to send the dead back to where they need to be? So we’re both the same kind of animal. I’m walking. I’m breathing fresh air, but I tell you kidder, there’s fuck all beating in the middle of my chest. I go to bed at night not hearing it. My headaches don’t contain a beat. If there’s a rhythm to life, I’ve lost mine.”

  Will nodded, pressing the coils back into Sean’s hand. Emma was long gone. She had promised to wait for Sean, but couldn’t go with him. How could he complain?

  “I won’t leave you, Sean,” Will said. “I’ll be your eyes and ears from now on. I’ll lead you on. I’m your friend. No matter what state we’re in.”

  Sean stared up at him. He was like a little boy, lost, separated from the people who loved him and might protect him from harm.

  Will said, “Tie a knot. I’m first.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: ROPE

  ALL OF HIS horizons seemed the same, of late. Viewed under an ochre smog at dusk, the crenellations of tower blocks provided different backgrounds to the same story. Faded clothes fluttered on balconies. The ghosts of piss clouted him at the thresholds of those lifts that worked. His boots created a brittle symphony from the insect corpses underfoot. It was hard to find any comfort in the routine. His composure was found in the simple succour of his tools. That and
the friend in his head.

  Maybe the wood, over the years, had been eroded by his grip; that was why the baseball bat felt so comfortable as it was hefted. Ditto the blade, which might as well have been knitted into the flesh of his palm: he had to look into his hand to make sure he had remembered to pick it up. He loosened the buttons on his leather coat and stretched, forcing the tension of three hours on the road out of his spine, which crackled dully, like the sound of a dog gnawing a bone.

  The estate reached above him in a series of black blocks against the night, punched through here and there with holes of television light. Only in the dark could these towers look clean, pretty, even. By dawn they would revert to sooty, scorched piggeries growing out of the city’s shit and grime. Lice and rot worming up every wall. Asthma was rife here, beating the national average by a fair whack. There had been a case of TB last year.

  He approached the first of the towers, Brook Acre, gently whistling a tune he had heard on the radio that morning and swinging the bat in his fist. Grey net curtains tongued the sky from a dozen open windows. The howls of dogs were a strange, distorted surge of noise through the ginnels and stairwells of the estates. From a pall of cigarette smoke, kids watched him enter the lift and then leave it again in favour of the stairs. Laughter followed him, and couched in that was an insult: “Asshole!” uttered when he had gone beyond the point where he might catch them if he turned back.

  “It’s arsehole!” he bellowed. “Arsehole! You’re not Americans! If you’re going to badmouth somebody, do it properly!”