by Unknown
Buzzes and hums. Hums and buzzes. The soft roar of the air conditioning. Tony sat at his desk and answered the phone. It was a busy night. BT was working on some lines up north, leaving a slew of houses with malfunctioning alarms. Customers called in to complain. There were network failures, stray test signals, an old bell alarm that wouldn’t stop ringing that no one wanted to take responsibility for. Engineers called in, updating PDAs. Screens blinked on and off. The Dead Man’s Handle shrieked and was silenced. The boss sent an email, delegating some awkward new task in the middle of it all.
By midnight, Tony was mentally exhausted. That creeping suspicion had returned. No. He wished he could call it a suspicion – the fact that he was doing most of the work – but the way he rushed while Grimshaw dawdled told him all he needed to know. He saw no point in confrontation. He would save his grievance for his probation interview, then share his concerns with Mr Griffiths. It wasn’t personal. Wasn’t ageist. Grimshaw was simply too old for the workplace. Gramps just couldn’t keep up.
By four a.m., Grimshaw was snoring. The control room was quiet, the drudgery done. Relative silence blanketed all.
Tony sat and read his book, the pages curled back over the cover. His mind was in a club in Miami when a screen next to his desk blinked on, the slight increase in light catching his attention. He stretched and yawned, turned to face it – and froze when he saw the yard, the one he’d seen a couple of weeks ago (and had since forgotten): the warehouse over on Vestry Street. The pixellated scene was black, white and orange. A sodium glow soaked the walls, made the slush look like mashed potato. But the light could not touch that bricked-up arch, that shallow maw leading into darkness. Restless, thick, wormy darkness.
The memory of gloves (hands?) winged back to him, and Tony leant in for a closer inspection. What was setting off the alarm? A high wind? It hadn’t been windy on his way to work. Falling snow? But it hadn’t been snowing either. Tony could see no signs of wildlife.
Grimshaw had shown him how to use the cameras. With keyboard and mouse, Tony focused in on the yard, the camera lens panning slowly across it. For the most part, he only saw junk – broken trolleys, coiled springs – draped with rust and snow. There was a rough workbench scattered with tools, hammers, drill bits, a glass jar bristling with blades – scissors.
Sweat prickled under his shirt as he looked at them. The sodium light turned the rust on the metal to blood. Hands shaking, Tony zoomed out a little, letting the lens take in the arch once more. He gaped at what he saw there, etched into the scarred brickwork. This was more than graffiti, more than the vulgar scribbles of workmen. These were not chiselled swear words and scrawled cocks, but a chain of symbols, intricate and strange in design. The symbols ringed the shadowed mouth, carved deep into the brick. They reminded him of the foreign words that he saw almost everywhere these days, on shop front and sign, label and letter, but he knew that the symbols before him were not Islamic, Hindu or Sikh. They were like hieroglyphics or runes. They belonged to a language he had never seen.
“Fuck,” he breathed – a curse that was part wonder, part fear, all mystification.
The camera continued to zoom out, the yard once more opening up before him: scissors, symbols, slush and all. With an odd sense of invasion – that he was intruding on this empty, private space – Tony stared at the screen. He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. At this time of the morning, with body clocks winding down and caffeine lacing the blood, it was easy for the night to play tricks on the mind. You couldn’t always trust your own eyes…
Eyes.
Tony saw them before he knew what he was looking at. Two small round shapes placed before the arch. They stood out against the slush, the pale objects lying in a pool of some darker substance; a pool that he hoped was a patch of spilled oil.
Surely, I’m imagining things…
The camera zoomed in, confirming his horror. A pair of eyes lay on the ground before the arch, surrounded by a tangle of veins, thin, tiny and blue.
Vomit rose hot in his throat, choking his gasp. He pushed back from the desk, gagging, bumping his chair into Grimshaw’s. The old man spluttered awake.
“Eh? What’s going on?”
But Tony could only sit and point, his trembling finger directed at a screen that now went dark. The alarm abruptly timed out.
“Jesus, what’s the matter with you?”
Swallowing bile, Tony forced out the words. “You… you have to look at this. This yard… the arch… eyes…”
“Ok, calm down son. Here, move out the way. Let me replay the alarm.”
Grimshaw leant over the desk and tapped at the keyboard. A list of recent alarms popped up on the screen. Selecting the one at the top of the list, Grimshaw right clicked and pressed play. At once, the yard swam back into view. Slush, scissors, arch – no eyes. Now, the symbols round the arch resembled nothing so much as cracks, a random web caused by subsidence. The live camera revealed the same.
Grimshaw cocked an eyebrow at Tony.
“Did you see someone down there? Should we call the police?”
Grimshaw’s expression spoke volumes. Clearly, he thought Tony had been asleep. Asleep and dreaming.
In the face of it, Tony was no longer sure himself.
No, he said. He had seen nothing. There was no need to call anyone.
He was just tired. Imagining things.
The storm broke three days later. Jane found the Mercury under the stairs.
The cloud of tension that had been brewing between them burst wide open. There were layers to their row, the uppermost of which were the hours he worked, leaving her alone nights with nothing but game shows and soaps for company. Under this was the general fear stirred up by a killer on the loose, a killer that Jane now knew would not hesitate to climb through a window, drag a girl off to who knew what hell…
And beneath this was a sense of betrayal, an old and reopened wound from the one time Tony had cheated, falling for a redhead at the gas board.
As they stood in the hall, all scowls and blame, it was hard for him to know what the real issue was.
“Shit, Tony, how am I supposed to trust you? I thought you promised to tell the truth from now on.”
“Oh no you don’t. Don’t go bringing that stuff into this. This has nothing to do with it.”
“Really? So you don’t think that hiding this was a lie?”
She shook the newspaper at him, Susan Pepper’s face screwed up in her fist.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“From what? Being informed?”
“I didn’t want you any more scared.”
“More like you didn’t want me to tell you to change jobs.”
“Fuck Jane, you talk as if jobs grow on trees. There’s a recession out there!”
“Don’t give me that. If you looked. If you tried…”
“You think I don’t try?” Now he was yelling. “You think that I work nights for my health?”
Cowed by his anger, she lowered the paper, lowered her voice.
“I don’t like being left on my own.”
Tony exhaled. “What choice do we have? Pie in the sky won’t feed the baby.”
At mention of the baby, Jane cupped her stomach, an instinctual, protective motion.
“All those girls were blondes, you know.”
Ah, so the real issue was the Cutter. And here he was cutting – snip, snip, snip – away at their marriage.
“Jane…”
“Well, they were.”
“You think I enjoy it, down among the dead?”
She gawped at him. “What?”
Tony shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.”
The row dwindled into discussion and Tony did his best to calm her. He held her close, kissed her brow, told her not to start at shadows (thinking perhaps he should take his own advice). Keep all the doors and window locked. Keep your mobile phone switched on. Don’t watch the news. Try not to dwell. He would be home before she kne
w it.
Six p.m rolled around. He kissed her again and went to work.
Grimshaw was snoring by midnight. Tony sat, fielding alarms, gaze roaming across a world of screens. Thursday by moonlight flickered before him. He saw drunken lads piss against lampposts. Rats nibble discarded kebabs. Tramps root through rubbish bins. He saw empty boxes roll down streets, blown by the late January wind. In a shop doorway, two teenagers rutted frantically, her skirt hitched up, his jeans around his ankles. He saw drifts at the side of the road, streaked black by fumes, speckled with grit. He saw dead pigeons. Patches of vomit. Shattered glass. Bored-looking coppers.
The myriad scenes of sleeping cities. A kaleidoscope of darkened Britain.
The soft orchestra of hums and buzzes enveloped him. The phone rang and, dutifully, he answered.
“This is the third time tonight the alarm has sounded. I’m guessing there’s a fault…”
“Yes, you need to send the form in to us. The address is Panther Security, 9 Saint Matthew’s Way…”
“I’m afraid my colleague is dealing with that. He’s… out of the office at the moment…”
The Dead Man’s Handle shrieked, the banshee throwing a tantrum. He pressed the button to shut her up.
Three a.m. He sent Jane a text, typing his worry on yet another screen, albeit a smaller one. Half an hour later there was still no reply. But he knew she would be asleep. Either that or smarting from their row, although he didn’t really think so. Guilt caressed his mind, mingled with affection. He pictured her curled up on the couch in front of the TV, some late night show flickering there, the volume turned low. Or perhaps there was only snow, hissing gently, painting her blonde hair grey. Snow behind glass, falling from electrical clouds. Snow via satellite. Digital flakes.
Tony jerked awake, his head nodding sharply. The orchestra had almost claimed him, lulled him into restless dreams. Blearily, he rubbed his eyes, regarded the control room. Grimshaw was snoring, undisturbed. The air conditioning hushed and roared. All was well down among the dead.
When Tony turned back to his desk, the screen beside it blinked on again.
Again, it showed the yard on Vestry Street. Sodium light. Shadows. Snow.
Strange symbols around the arch.
The camera relayed the scene in grainy detail, recording a forgotten place, a place to which no one paid any mind. A place that, after five-thirty, might as well not even exist. Tony knew that the warehouse was nowhere special – only his curiosity rendered it so. Only his dread made the place unique, the yard an ad hoc temple to fear. But tonight he saw no hand-shaped smudges. No suggestive shadows by the wall. No small round shapes placed before the arch.
Tonight he saw something much, much worse.
There was a man standing in the yard.
His face was oddly familiar, a gaunt, pale, unshaven mask. The man wore rumpled clothes, a creased shirt and loose tie, both smeared with oil (blood?) and dirt. Grazed flesh peeked from the knees of his trousers. If he wore shoes, slush had buried them. Tony somehow doubted he did. The man’s fringe hung in his face, a dark, greasy curtain, speaking of wildness. Tony would have thought him a vagrant, some tramp high on meths, but his corporate attire, filthy though it was, seemed to contradict that notion.
So did the pair of scissors in his hand.
Tony registered the details slowly, shock stretching time to a crawl. It only struck him later how bizarre it actually was, the man standing in the middle of the yard, his eyes glinting bright through his fringe. Standing there at three in the morning, staring directly into the camera…
Staring at him. Staring at Tony in the control room.
“Fuck.”
His heart climbed into his throat, the world of screens spinning around him as Tony saw that the man was grinning. A wide-stretched, mad acknowledgement. The man slowly raised the scissors, snip-snipping the winter air. He splayed the fingers of his other hand, and Tony had no choice but to count them, hypnotised by pixels and dread.
…Two, three, four, five…
The Cutter grinned and the screen went dark. The camera switched off. The alarm timed out.
And Tony was yelling and scrambling backwards, his chair bumping Grimshaw’s with a thud. Jostled from slumber, the old man turned to face him with a groan, his lips wrinkling around a reproach.
He could not miss the look on Tony’s face.
Grimshaw kept his complaint to himself.
Dawn found Tony in bed, holding Jane a little too tightly. She did not resist him, no matter how hot the duvet became, how much sweat sealed them together. Obviously, she sensed his mood, was loath to light the fuse of his torment. He clung to her as if she were an anchor, mooring him to a rational shore, safe from a sweeping undertow of nightmares.
That was how Grimshaw had explained it away, of course. A nightmare. “Tony,” he’d said, “you fell asleep.” And then he had tipped a wink, a conspirator in idleness. The annoyance that Tony had felt at this had gone some way to alleviate his shock. He’d stood by what he had seen. Despite the old man’s incredulity, Tony had called the police. “A man in the yard,” he’d told them. “A break-in over on Vestry Street.” When he’d mentioned the scissors, Grimshaw had winced. Clearly, the old man had thought he’d seen all this before – visions inspired by tiredness, hallucinations, fugues of fatigue. The wry knowingness that had shone in his eyes had almost stirred Tony to rage, but instead he’d sighed and swallowed his temper, turning back to the screen next to his desk.
“Here then,” he’d said, trying to keep the strain from his voice. “Let’s take a look at the logs.”
They’d looked at the recorded log. Between the hours of three and three thirty, the warehouse yard had been silent and empty.
But that… that isn’t possible.
I saw him. I know what I saw. He was…
Just then, the police had called back. A patrol car had swung by Vestry Street. Found nothing. No sign of a break-in. There weren’t even footprints in the snow. Somebody there should drink more coffee, the cop had said. Tony’s cheeks had flushed at the rebuke.
Mumbling, he had tapped feebly at his keyboard, his back turned on Grimshaw’s satisfied eye.
Now he lay in bed next to Jane, wondering if he was going mad. Because a nightmare was of course possible. Far more likely than the Cutter in the yard. If the killer had really stood there, the police would surely have found some trace. And the camera never lies, does it? Round and round the questions whirled, an orbit of doubt inside his head. Had he drunk too much coffee? Were the thrillers warping his mind? Was the graveyard shift really for him?
Or had he witnessed something supernatural? Experienced some psychological tic? Tony had read enough pulp novels to spot the cliché in his situation. Was there a chance that he himself was projecting something onto the screen, his growing anxiety over the killings conjuring up pixellated ghosts? Lord knows he was stressed-out enough. The pressure of bills, unsociable hours, a wife with a baby on the way – none of these things exactly made for a walk in the park. The Cutter might just be the final straw, adding tension to the limits of his world, a proximate darkness hemming him in.
Of course, if life were one of the books he read, Tony would find out that he was the killer, avoiding the truth by playing some profound, introverted mind game, a game that used security cameras, triggered alarms, endlessly flickering screens as its props…
He snorted at his own stupidity. Life was hardly a book.
But as Tony sank towards sleep, he wondered what the Cutter was trying to show him. Wondered at the significance behind that greeting.
Five.
He held Jane tighter. “I love you, babe. If anything happened to you, I’d…” He couldn’t say the words. “Just be careful, okay?”
Jane turned, kissed him on the mouth.
“Now who’s starting at shadows?” she said. “Get some rest, big man. I’ve got the day off. I’ll still be here when you wake.”
Five.
&n
bsp; Saturday night. Eleven p.m. A freakshow on every screen. The streets of Britain teeming with pissheads. Bar crawlers. Temporary dipsomaniacs.
The surrounding bank of LCDs was like some weird, animate book, its pages ripped out and pinned to the walls, each one showing a piece of the parade. Lads sporting polo shirts. Chicks in fake Jimmy Choos. Skaters. Ravers. Scenesters. Goths. Even at a digital remove, the makeup looked thick enough to smear the lens of the CCTV camera. Tony could almost smell the aftershave. These veneers, he knew, would soon melt in alcohol and sweat, revealing the ugly truth beneath.
The vomit-spattered, violent truth. The beast behind the mask.
Down among the dead, you got to see the bones of the world.
Tony had already seen enough fights, inebriated brawls in car parks, fists and hair flying, for him to think of people as not entirely sane. People were different at night. The later the hour, the less of a hold the workaday world seemed to have on them. The less the laws seemed to apply. They would piss against lampposts. Fuck in doorways. Punch cars to set off alarms.
But soon even the people would be gone. The bars would empty. The nightclubs close. They would stagger away down chip-strewn streets, leaving behind only concrete and tarmac. Blank shop windows. Vacant benches. Chain-link fences rattling in the wind. The cage of consumerist culture. The skeleton of modern existence.
Bare, bare, bones.
Tony shook off the unsettling thought. All night, he’d mulled over his nagging question, waiting for the right moment to ask it. Before midnight, he had decided. Before gramps fell asleep again. His resolve was a flimsy thing, a veneer of his own, letting him think that he was still the one in control. That his suspicions couldn’t possibly be true. That he didn’t fear the answer.
In the end, simple frustration forced the words from between his lips.
“Grimshaw, what happened to the guy who worked here before me?”
Grimshaw, scanning the paper that took up over half of his desk, gave a snort and half turned, his white eyebrows twitching.
“Eh?”
“Just curious. Does Panther have a high turnover of staff?”