by Tim Lebbon
“Angela, hello sweetheart. Where are you? It sounds noisy.”
“I’m in town. It’s chaotic, as usual. You and Dad okay?”
“Fine, yes, he’s out playing golf. I just had someone on the phone asking about you. Where you went to school, that sort of thing.”
“That’s fine, it’s someone from the university magazine who’s interviewing me.” The lie came quick and easy.
“Oh, well. Fame at last! Everything else okay?”
“Yeah. Mom, I’ve got to dash or I’ll miss my train and… Vince and I are out for a meal tonight.”
“Somewhere nice?”
“Chinese.”
“Lovely. Call me at the weekend?”
“Bye, Mom. Love you.” Angela had the terrible thought that she might never speak to her mother again. It was a chilling, painful idea, and its gravity forced the world away from her, leaving her ensconced in her own bubble of wretchedness.
Vince, you bastard, she thought, but loving him wasn’t a choice, and though she was scared about where he’d gone and what she might yet discover, her depth of feeling about him had not changed. Not yet.
She was taking action, and now wasn’t the time to pause.
She found a coffee shop, and just as she ordered and sat down her phone rang yet again.
“We’re ready for you now,” Cliff said.
“I’ve just ordered coffee.”
He remained on the line for a moment, saying nothing. She could hear faint jazz and the mumble of voices in the background. Then he disconnected.
Angela sighed and stirred her coffee, watching the chocolate sprinkles form a spiral in the frothy surface. She was in a spiral, too, and she’d put herself there. Maybe there was still time to climb out, but Fat Frederick knew a lot about her already, and he would probably make it his mission to find out more. A man like him put value on information, and she could understand that. As well as money, people like him dealt in knowledge. A skeleton in a closet could be worth more than a bucket of gold. A past misdemeanor might inspire devotion, the threat of a dark secret being revealed better currency than cash. Merely by going to see him, she had taken a step into his world.
Time to take another.
* * *
He had some coffee ready this time, and a couple of plates of biscuits and cakes. Fat Frederick was sitting on the small sofa when Cliff took her into the office, and as the door clicked closed behind the big man, he was already pouring.
“Milk, sugar?”
“Just white.”
“You’ll get a caffeine buzz.”
“I didn’t get a chance to drink the one I bought.”
“Yes, sorry, it wasn’t quite an hour, was it?”
“I guess you found out what you needed to know about me pretty quick.”
“You’re easy.” Fat Frederick stirred her coffee and offered it up to her.
“Finding such personal information that fast isn’t usually easy,” she said. She’d researched several prominent and notorious gangland characters, and sometimes gleaning even the simplest piece of information became a drawn-out process.
“It is when you know what you’re doing,” he replied, shooting her a look. “You more than anyone should know that.”
She wasn’t surprised. He probably already knew her from a while ago, from that time she’d almost approached him for her studies. She wondered if he knew who had scared her off.
Pulling around one of the chairs, she sat opposite him. There was no way she wanted to sit next to him.
She eyed the biscuits, realizing how hungry she was. She couldn’t even recall whether she’d eaten yet today, but it didn’t feel as if she had. Hadn’t felt like breakfast, and the rest of the day had been just too strange, staggered with surprise revelations and weirdness.
“Help yourself,” Meloy said. Angela did, and he ate a couple of biscuits, too. She had the ridiculous impression that it was so she didn’t have to eat on her own.
“So what does Vince do for you?” she asked.
“You know a bit about me,” he said. “You hinted that you know of my reputation. Fact is, I’m a businessman who’s found success where others have failed, and a lot of people don’t like me for that. I run several bars and clubs across London, and my clientele are very loyal. I serve good booze at decent prices—real ale from local breweries, fine wines, good liquors, not knock-off stuff from Eastern Europe. I pay my staff well and look after them.”
“So you’re saying things I’ve heard aren’t true?”
“Not saying that.” He sipped his coffee. “Just that sometimes, stories are blown out of proportion. Chinese whispers. I have a disagreement with an associate about a business deal, four weeks and ten retellings later, he’s at the bottom of the Thames wearing concrete boots.”
Angela actually laughed. She couldn’t help it.
“Concrete boots?”
“Just a saying. You know what I mean.”
Don’t let yourself get lulled by this, she thought, and she ate a Hobnob to pause the conversation. One of the many reasons she loved the UK was because of their wonderful cookies.
“So what does Vince do for you?” she asked again. She wasn’t certain she wanted to know, but that was why she was here, why Fat Frederick had agreed to see her and researched her so that he knew she had no ulterior motive. She’d asked for this, and now it was time to see it through.
“He helps me in pursuit of my passion,” Fat Frederick said. “I’m in business to make money, mostly so that I can pursue the one true thing that really sets me on fire. That passion costs lots of money, and Vince is very good at helping me spend it accordingly, on the right things and at the right times. I think you already know what that might be.”
He leaned forward across the low table, staring at her.
“I saw something,” she said, thinking of the one-eyed husk, the relic. “It was just a… thing. A model. An antique?”
“I’ll tell you something,” Fat Frederick said, leaning back on the sofa, hands on his knees. “But first, I need to see your phone on the table.”
“What?”
“Phone. Table. Turned off. Cliff has already scanned you for bugs.”
“He has?” Angela asked, surprised—but she took out her phone, glanced at the screen, and turned it off. No big deal. No service.
“I’m a collector,” Fat Frederick said. “I always have been, ever since I was thirteen. You ask the police, or people seen as my contemporaries, and they’ll tell you that was the time I started to go off the rails. Burglary, intimidation, violence. Some of it’s true, but few know the reasons. I didn’t need money for drugs or booze or women, or the power it brings. I needed cash to feed my new addiction. Relics. Not antiques, but the remnants of old, dead things. Parts of creatures and things that should have never existed.”
Angela couldn’t help smiling. Then she frowned.
That thing, staring at me with its single eye.
“Which one did you see?” he asked.
“How do you know I didn’t unwrap all three?”
“Few people would.”
“One eye,” she whispered.
“The infant cyclops. Not as rare as you might think. They were pretty common maybe eleven thousand years back, when the Time was coming to an end. South and east England mainly, but there was a tribe in the Welsh mountains, and I’ve heard of some dwarf specimens in Cornwall and northern France.” He leaned forward again, gripped by the subject, enthusing.
“If an infant died, they’d wrap its body in clay and bury it, and the clay would harden into a kind of solid earthen coffin. Lots of the graves were plundered at the end of the Time, the bodies thrown aside and broken down by the elements, though a few remained whole. That head you saw, that sort of thing is relatively common. But a whole cyclops, infant or adult, that’d be quite something. Don’t you think?”
“Hang on,” Angela said. She was shaking her head, frowning at Fat Frederick, and she had all but forgo
tten the deeds he was known for, the things he had done. He was just a man telling her an outrageous story, and there was something about him—such belief, such persuasiveness—that shook her to the core. He’s not lying, she thought. At least, he believes that he isn’t.
“Hang on,” she said again.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“Cyclops? The Time?”
“The era when all these weird, wonderful creatures still existed,” he said, eyes wide with a childlike wonder. She couldn’t help but like him, then, however threatening he was. He seemed like an innocent.
“But cyclops are make-believe,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “You think that?”
That dusty old thing, the single eye watching me, staring at me…
“You should have opened the other packages.”
“And what would I have seen?”
“A dragon’s tooth, packed and ready to ship to Sweden, and a scrap of centaur’s pelt. I’m a collector, but I trade in some of the more common relics. Good money.”
“Dragon. Centaur.”
“You’re not believing me.”
“Well…”
Fat Frederick laughed and waved a hand. “No worries. Really. But Vince is the best relic hunter I know. He’s always insisted on working freelance, but I’ve been his main employer for over five years. Good guy. I’d even call us friends. He knows who to deal with, what’s on the market, what it’s worth, and how to negotiate. He also sometimes goes on expeditions to find them himself. Sponsored by me, of course.”
“Expeditions,” Angela said. She had a sudden memory—Vince returning home one evening with dust in his ear and the creases of his neck, and grazes on his knuckles. She’d noticed as soon as he walked in the door. He’d mentioned having to force his way into a property that had been sealed up for a long time, ready for it to be cleaned out for a new resident. She’d even believed him. “Of course.”
“That’s why I want him back. So if you know anything about where he is…” Fat Frederick trailed off.
“You think I’d have come to see you if I knew where he was?” Angela asked, aghast. “Really? Down here to see… you? With your weird stories and lies?”
He actually seemed offended.
Angela stood to leave. This was bullshit. She’d seen something weird in that apartment, but her mind was clouded with worry and confusion, every step shifting her further into a world she did not know. A world where Vince lied to her daily, and where shady couples followed and accosted her in coffee shops. Were they his? It seemed likely, but right then she didn’t care.
She should have never come here. Turning her back on Fat Frederick, she grabbed the door handle, suddenly certain that it would be locked. But it turned and she started opening the door.
“I’ll show you,” he said. “I have other things here. Amazing things. Those items in Vince’s apartment were merely to trade, but I told you… I’m a collector. There are relics I’d never sell because they’re too…”
“Where are they?” she asked.
“Too unbelievable,” he continued, “and they’re deeper.” He nodded vaguely past her at the door.
A flutter of fear grabbed her, causing her heart to dance and perspiration to break out across her neck.
“I want him back,” Fat Frederick said. “Vince has something. A gift, a second sense for these things. He and I have talked about it, and even he’s not sure where that comes from. All I know is, without him I might never find anything else, ever again. And there are still wonders out there to be had.”
Angela shook her head, but curiosity had her, now. Beneath all the fear of this man, she’d found something that seemed to be the beating heart of him. She’d come here unknown and uninvited, and here he was, laid bare, his desires and passions presented for her examination. Maybe the route to finding Vince was in indulging him.
“Come on,” he said. “People know where you are, and I promise you, you’re safe.”
“Safe,” she repeated.
“Perfectly.” He stood and gestured to the door, inviting her to go first.
9
Cliff was standing just along the corridor that led back toward the bar, leaning against the wall and swiping his phone screen. From the bar came the strumming of a guitar and a soft singing voice. When Fat Frederick walked in the opposite direction, away from him, Angela saw Cliff take a couple of steps their way.
“Boss?”
“No worries,” Frederick said over his shoulder. “Just watch the place for a bit.”
“Sure.” He eyed Angela, expression hardened by suspicion.
They passed through a door and Frederick closed and locked it behind them. He seemed to be doing his best to stay in front of her, keeping space between them, acting as unthreateningly as possible… and there was something else. He had an eagerness about him, like a kid looking forward to showing an adult something he’d made, or an amazing secret he had hidden away. He reached a metal spiral staircase, peered down, descended, then waited for Angela at the bottom, watching her step carefully down.
“How far?” she asked.
“It’s the old basement of a building in the next street. Part of it’s blocked off, belongs to my club now. All to do with something that happened in the war or…” He shrugged. “Something. Doesn’t matter. Just along here, then through another door. There’s an air lock, though, so we’ll be in there quite close together. You okay with that?”
“Air lock?”
“They’re delicate.”
They?
Even if Angela wanted to turn and go back, she wasn’t sure he’d let her, and she didn’t want to get into a situation where there was that tension between them. For now she felt at ease, or as much as she could in the company of a man like Fat Frederick.
As he’d said, people knew where she was.
Lucy, and that’s all. What if they kill her, too?
She froze, staring ahead at Frederick and trying to convince herself of his honesty.
“Don’t you want to see?” he asked over his shoulder. And yes, she did want to see. Very much.
They stood in the air lock together, side by side with shoulders touching. It was uncomfortable, but the hissing of the air exchange kept silence at bay. A small buzz signaled the end of the procedure. Frederick flipped the handle and pushed the opposite door open.
“After you,” he said.
“It’s dark.”
He leaned past her and waved a hand, and a series of lights flickered on. A narrow, low-ceilinged room was revealed, barely larger than a wide corridor and perhaps thirty feet long. Along one wall was a low table, four feet wide and propped on fine metal legs. On the table at regular intervals were glass display cases, maybe eight in total. Lighting was arranged above and around them in a very precise manner.
“The first one, there,” Frederick said, mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warmth of his breath. “My first find when I was thirteen years old. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Don’t be scared. She wasn’t sure whether he said those words or she imagined them, but as she walked toward the first case and saw what it contained, fear solidified around her nonetheless.
Fear, and wonder.
“It doesn’t look much, I know,” Frederick said, “but it’s what set me on this course in life.”
“It’s…” Angela knew what it looked like, and the answer could so easily have been mundane. Yet here, now, she suspected it was far from that.
“The tip of a unicorn’s horn,” Frederick said. He reached out his hand, which hovered over the glass display case, not quite touching it. The object inside was perhaps eight inches long, vaguely pointed at one end and broken and rough at the other, ridged and cracked along its length. Its inside looked like quartz, dark and endlessly deep. “Beautiful,” he whispered.
“It could be anything,” Angela said.
“But it isn’t. I found it when I was thirteen, almost fourteen,
buried in a pile of crap at the back of an abandoned second-hand shop in Islington. I’d broken in with a couple of mates. Can’t even remember their names, now, but I do remember how scared they got, and quickly. Both older than me. They had reputations even back then.” He looked over her shoulder, as if into a distance. “I saw one of them—Jimmy, that’s it—once I saw Jimmy beating up a kid who wouldn’t hand over his bag of library books. Not as if Jimmy could even read. Beat the kid to a pulp, left him in the gutter, didn’t even take the books in the end.
“So Jimmy and my other mate, once we were in the shop and rooting around, they got really scared. Picked up on the atmosphere of the place. Tasted the… strength, the age. The strangeness.” He turned quickly to Angela and leaned in close. “Can’t you taste it now?”
Between breaths, between blinks, she realised that the atmosphere around her was touched by more than shadows and depth. There was something more down here. It was like a terrible, unknowable awareness, a palpable pressure similar to knowing when someone was looking at her but much, much heavier. The whole moment felt like a powerful dream that she would never be able to disassociate from reality. She had never felt less in control of her life.
Her heart started racing, and sweat prickled her skin.
“It’s not something to fear,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “I knew it back then, and that’s why it was me who found this. Not Jimmy. Not that other idiot. They ran, and I never spoke to either of them again. Just me, rooting through that shop for six, eight hours, still in there when the sun came up, and then I found this. I didn’t know what it was back then, just knew it was what I’d been looking for. When I touched it… He shivered. “You want to touch it?”
“No!” she said, backing away. “No, it’s… not mine.” Strangely that was the reason, but it covered other, deeper fears. If it makes me feel like this, just being close, what will happen if I touch it?
She wondered whether she was being hypnotised. She thought of how Frederick had been talking to her, the drink she’d accepted from him and sipped, the biscuits, and instantly disregarded the idea that any of them had been drugged. Though dreamlike, this was also far too real. She could smell the clinical sterility of this place, and the faint ozone smell of so many bulbs. The taste was of conditioned air and shadows, and her voice carried a strange, fragmented echo, passing down the wide corridor of display cases and fleeing back to her like a startled pet.