Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  Harry didn’t know what to do with himself. He wandered through Westwood, staring at racks of funky dead-media music in the mircostores where he’d brought Ax and Fiorinda when they’d first arrived: afraid to go home, afraid to be alone. He loved Westwood village. Kathryn’s friends lived here, and the whole ambience reminded him of her company. But she was not his pal anymore. The relationship which had been the most solid, lasting thing in his life was over, there was nothing left for him in Lurch’s smart little eyes…

  Sage’s effects had given him an immersion hangover, full blown paranoia. He’d been convinced all day, even while sitting in that fucking horrible meeting, that something was about to pounce. He wandered, fighting the brain-chemistry: over-tuned, pumped up, waiting for something to happen that would reveal the grotesque, virtual nature of his environment. Outside the Supernova, a juice-bar haunt of movie wannabe society, he was hailed by Lissa Cunningham, the kitten-faced neurology postdoc who wanted to direct (not having the wit to realise directing is a menial task in the modern industry). He sat down with her and she started talking doom news, which he really didn’t need.

  ‘You know, don’t you Harry?’ she said, touching his hand with the razor-graze of her retractable claws. ‘You know something really bad.’

  ‘You should be an agent, not a director, with this clairvoyant gift you have. Money would drip from you, Liss.’

  ‘I dream about the earthquake a lot. Some kind of hellish earthquake, bigger that you could imagine, is that it? Is that what’s going to happen when—?’

  ‘When what?’

  Liss rolled her eyes. ‘You know. When the Neurobomb comes on line.’

  ‘Anything could happen. Absolutely anything. Look, I have to go.’

  He had seen the brown Toyota Rugrat, with the scarlet trim and silver wheels. He got up and walked, fast. When he saw the Rat swinging in to the kerb he was outside the Empyrean Flea Market, where he could have lost them in the maze of stalls: but he expected them to leap out of the car. Instead he was grabbed by someone coming up behind, very tall and uncannily strong. Pinioned, moved across the sidewalk like a toy, he was thrust through the opened door.

  ‘Why did you do that to me?’ he gasped.

  Sage was not wearing the mask. His eyes seemed extraordinarily bright, his height, the long arms and legs, intimidating, almost monstrous, in the closed space of a moving vehicle. ‘Do what, Harry? I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

  Mr Preston was driving. He glanced around. ‘Better get his phone, Sage.’

  ‘He has an eyesocket button, but he hasn’t called anyone and he can’t now.’

  ‘Get it anyway.’

  Sage held out his hand, grinning with unnerving sweetness. ‘Give me the button. In case you’re wondering, you won’t get an outside line. There’s a temp’ry fault on telecoms in an’ out of our motor.’

  Harry dug for the button and handed it over, bruising his eyeball in the process. He remembered that the minders had been called off, oh fuck and this was why. They were probably, almost certainly, armed. He was not.

  ‘Are you abducting me? I can’t believe you’re abducting me—!’

  ‘Nah, nah, nah. It’s not like that.’

  Sage sat back and seemed to forget Harry’s existence; he gazed at the passing scene with shining, smiling attention, as Ax treated the traffic like a death-dicing video-game at which he excelled. They left the Santa Monica freeway on Overland Avenue. The Rugrat pulled up, after a bumpy ride, on a dirt lot surrounded by broken down industrial units. Some fragment of late-night urban rave adventure flashed into Harry’s mind, as if he’d seen this place before. It was a typical locale for factory parties, for Hollywood scruffs; for human sacrifice. But he recognised nothing. Ax sprang from the front of the car. Sage picked up a rigid white briefcase. They took him to a shipping container, a trailer-sized metal box lying on the ground. Inside, the walls were flooded with aerosol colour and aggressive black calligraphy. Cables snaked, fairy lights festooned the roof, the floor was littered with louche detritus; there was a faded smell of body fluids and cheap wine. Ax switched on the lights, hauled a metal panel down behind them with a cheerful clangour, and locked it by means of a padlock to a plate on the floor. ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘It’s a little pied à terre we found, basically a shooting gallery, we found our own level yeah, but a good place not to be disturbed.’

  Sage was crosslegged on the floor, his white box open in front of him. The box looked highly ominous, immanent with dread.

  ‘Why have you brought me here? What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s frightened,’ reproved Sage, ‘Now you’ve frightened him.’

  Ax looked into Harry’s face, his pretty brown eyes vividly intent, ‘Oh yeah. He’s frightened. Harry, here’s the key to the padlock. Now, you hold that, in your hand, and you’ll know you can get up and leave, any time you like.’

  Get up and leave. My God. He’d seen the tiger and the wolf in many moods, often inexplicable, never as dangerous as this. Oh, fuck, I knew we were handling them totally wrong, I knew it. He nodded earnestly, took the key and sat down, the fear mounting on him like a thirty foot wave.

  ‘Let’s do this,’ said Sage. ‘Harry, you were at the Bowl last night.’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘But you didn’t come near us,’ said Ax, smiling hard.

  ‘I didn’t want to intrude. It was your gig, your c-ceremony.’

  ‘Now he’s frightened again. Ax, you’re scaring him.’

  ‘No, I’m not. You are scaring him, I am not scaring him, I’m just telling him, because it’s time to cut the crap. Harry, you showed tact. It would have been dumb to fake the dressing room scene. We understand how you’re placed.’

  ‘First you told us you were a talent scout,’ said Sage, getting into the spirit of this levelling. ‘Then you said you were a hot young movie producer with friends in the White House. Then you turned into a gopher, fixing hateful things for a Committee of strange suits. You’re a confusing person, we’ve been confused: but it’s all right now. We know what you are, Mr Loman! You’re someone like us!’

  ‘It’s Lopez,’ whispered Harry. He balled his hands into fists to hide their trembling. Titration effect, he had such a high level of background panic, the awesome wattage of their attention nearly had him fainting.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ax, ‘yeah, yeah, of course Lopez. Stop calling him Loman.’

  ‘It slipped out.’

  ‘Well it upsets him, and it’s not funny any more. Harry, we do not blame you for anything, we know how these things happen. These are just the things that happened to us. The President of the United States says: come along Harry, get your life ripped apart, it’s in a good cause. What could you do? The Prime Minister of England didn’t ever say that to me, not in so many words, but there was the night the guns started blazing, blam blam blam, people falling down all around, with big red holes in them. Nothing was the same after that.’ Ax paused in this rapid fire, and added, distracted: ‘I got to know him, later. The PM. His name was David Sale, strange bloke, genuine flawed visionary. I liked him. He died of a heroin overdose you know, probably murder by magic, but it was never proved. Magic’s hard to prove.’

  ‘You’re loaded, aren’t you?’ said Harry suddenly. ‘Both of you?’

  The tiger and the wolf grinned, blue eyes meeting brown, in delighted recognition of Harry’s acumen. ‘Yeah,’ said Sage, ‘We are totally smashed.’

  ‘It feels like fire,’ said Ax, ‘Love is like fire… I love her lyrics.’

  ‘Me too… Hey. We must stick to the point.’

  ‘Stick to the point,’ repeated the former king of England, nodding fast.

  Bereft, vengeful, and out of their fucking heads. Harry did not feel any safer.

  ‘But for the record, Harry,’ said Ax, in a new tone. ‘I know when I am looking at my girl, and when I am not. Even if she has no face.’

  ‘Ax, we are past that. They apologised. An’ you
’re frightening him again.’

  ‘I’m your biggest fan,’ breathed Harry. ‘I just wanted you in my movie.’

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s why you romanced me into bringing Rufus O’Niall’s daughter here, so you could give her to the insane war-mongers.’

  ‘Hey, hey, Ax. Calm, calm. You know it’s not like that.’

  ‘Sorry… Sorry, Harry. I know it’s not like that.’

  ‘Moving on,’ said Sage, ‘Harry, you remember the finale last night?’ Harry swallowed, and nodded. ‘Well, that’s when I saw the stupid hat. I nearly had her, I had the local information space solved, an’ there she was. Something was in my way, but I came out of it knowing. I saw a hat, Mr Loman-’

  ‘I d-don’t—’ Harry recoiled from a dual plasma-jet of blue. ‘Okay, okay-’

  ‘I know it’s an ironic stupid hat, I knew that all along, but it’s still stupid. Of course it meant you. We all have ways of filing things, people, you’re the stupid hat kid. So I came back empty, all I had was this image of the hat, but I knew it was all we needed, and I knew we must speak to you with candour.’

  ‘You’re n-not making sense-’

  The tiger showed white teeth. ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘When she disappeared,’ explained Ax, wanting to set things straight. ‘Our response was fucked up, because of personal shit that we have to work out.’

  ‘That we will work out.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we will work out… Personal fuck-ups, and being in an alien land, clouded our judgement. You and the Committee were lying to us, ignoring us, not returning our calls: but you were silently telling us you were on the case and we must leave it to you. We should have known that.’

  ‘Actually, we did know it,’ Sage put in.

  ‘But that’s over,’ said Ax. ‘Now you have to leave it to us.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know why you’ve brought me here-’

  ‘Yes you do, Harry. It’s obvious. You have to tell us where she is.’

  ‘I can’t tell you, I don’t know. You’d have to talk to Mr Raine.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  The way they smiled, he knew—if he’d been in doubt—that they knew what wa supposed to happen to Fiorinda. The National Guard and the Terrorist Event Response Team do a combined operation, on a nest of insane insurgents armed with Mass Destruction: they pluck the young English woman out of the wreckage, dust her down and return her to her friends unharmed? Is it likely? Not even if there was an intention to save her—

  ‘I’m a movie producer. I’m just an errand boy.’

  ‘Really.’ Sage’s blue eyes narrowed, his smile got wider. ‘Okay, then you’ll let me check something out. Gimme a thumb.’

  Harry recoiled, but the guitar-man’s grip had fastened on his wrist. Sage’s hollow needle pounced. Harry’s blood was taken, was plunged into a clear vial in which a metallic shivering quivered and darted. Sage shook the vial,

  ‘Lo-tech assistance,’ he explained. ‘This won’t take a moment, hang on.’

  Oh God—

  He watched, from a rocketing, expanding distance, as they studied the confession written in his blood, inside the white case where he couldn’t see.

  ‘Yep,’ said Sage, motor mouth. ‘I’ve seen this, in his eyes, but I didn’t get it. It’s hard to decode the unexpected. See, this is snapshot, this is the Harry brand. Don’t it line up nice, spike squiggle dip spike, what I’d call unequivocal, Sah.’

  ‘Someone should have warned him, snap is not the ideal recreational drug. You might as well try sawing your leg off for the endorphins.’

  ‘I don’t b’lieve he was expectin’ to have fun. The golden boy has lunatic depths.’ Sage looked up. ‘Harry, you’ve been doing neural aligner. Somethen’ very like ‘snapshot’ which is the cocktail we used on the Zen Self trail. Now don’t tell me you took it in mistake for Tylenol or you bought it from a black lad in a club. Unless you’ve been playing with the terrorists, which we’d also be interested to know, but I don’t think so, the gear came from Vireo Lake. Maybe out the back door, but only from there. Whatever, you see where this is heading. You’re a lot closer to the fire than you’ve been lettin’ on.’

  Worst case—

  —Aerosol painted metal wall, the two beautiful crazed predators: gone. The déjà vu room was around him, like a fresh nightmare that you know you have dreamed before. He thought it was a hotel room. He could feel, a blurred mass, the welter of appalling memory that filled the narrow space (no more than weeks, maybe no more than days) left between him and this room. He didn’t know why he was naked. He knew the voice that issued the gross and ludicrous command, but he couldn’t remember the name, and could not turn his head to see who spoke. He heard himself crying, like a little baby: gagging and choking as his tongue reached out, hurting at the roots, getting longer, until he could hold it in his hands and push it, around his balls, into his anus. It was so real, so actual. Stink of shit, taste of shit. Gagging, choking, his tongue is boring into the, going up his spine, through the channel, it hurts blindingly. I’m sucking, licking I’m going to eat my own brains—

  OH GOD OH GOD.

  Oh God, oh God it’s going to happen. This is how I’m going to die.

  ‘Ah, problem—’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Flashback. I think the sight of the First Aid kit set him off, bad associations.’

  Harry was face down on the floor, fetal curl, his cheek flattened against urine-smelling grit, whimpering hoarsely, back in the present but knowing there was nothing but fear left, and room was still waiting for him, not far up ahead… He felt hands on him. He was lifted, he was being rocked in a man’s arms, the first time since he was about three years’ old.

  ‘Hey, baby, ssh, come out of it. It’s only a bad dream.’ He’d pissed himself, he couldn’t care less… Sage had made the fear go away, a relief that was utter bliss, but the room was still there—

  ‘No, it’s real,’ he sobbed, clinging, hiding his face. ‘It’s going to happen!’

  ‘What’s going to happen? What did you see?’

  ‘The Fat Boy makes me eat my brains.’

  Harry blundered out of the embrace and crouched with his head in his hands. ‘I wanted to know, and God, now I know. I’ve seen the future.’

  Unchangeable? When he was there he knew it was unchangeable.

  Sage was studying the inside of the white case again. ‘Harry, my screen says you took about two hundred mikes of the neuro cocktail, about ten, fifteen days ago: but that was your only time?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘You haven’t seen the future. Snap will give a virgin crackin’ special effects, an’ they will be nasty, because that drug is intrinsically a bastard: but you won’t hardly ever get a trip outside of time. What did you do? Ate your brains? Typical. The metaphor, word-play, tha’s a sure sign of internally triggered hallucination. You didn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ croaked Harry. ‘You know the rules, but the rules have changed, we’re in the worst case scenario.’ He looked up, he faced them. They were so loaded they didn’t get it. ‘Don’t you understand? There is a Fat Boy.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ax, bright-eyed and calm. ‘Fine. Now tell us where she is.’

  They watched him, with such animal calm.

  ‘It was when they started examining the body. The autopsy wasn’t done in Carlsbad, the notes you got were fiction. That’s when we knew the situation was out of control, and I took the neuronauts’ drug. I got it from a guy on the Committee from Vireo, who had access: he supervised my trip. I had grasped the awfulness. I wanted to know whether I was right.’

  Harry shuddered, and had to get his breathing back under control.

  ‘And I found out…oh, God, I found out. I’m sorry you’ve been treated the way you’ve been treated. Now you know the reason…are you satisfied?’

  ‘It’s all been good stuff,’ said Sage. ‘But we need to know where she is,’

  ‘She’s with the Invi
sible People. Don’t you get it? She’s with them.’

  ‘Great. Where are they?’

  ‘I’m not going to talk anymore.’

  ‘C’mon Harry. The time for secrecy is past.’

  ‘The body gave them away… They have effective magic. There’s only one way to deal with that, it was decided long ago and it can’t be stopped.’

  Ax nodded, patiently. ‘We picked up on that. And where is she?’

  ‘I can’t. Please don’t make me say this. Okay, there’s a profile. An abused child, abused children c-can grow up f-feeling they can do no wrong—’

  He thought they’d kill him then, but they didn’t move.

  ‘If there’s a willing Fat Boy candidate,’ said Ax, ‘it’s not our girl. But no matter who the candidate may be, if there is one we’re your only hope.’

  Harry quailed, ‘I’m very, very, sorry, but I’m not going to talk anymore.’

  ‘You think not?’ asked Sage. He leaned forward: shining like an archangel come down to earth, to teach a sinner an easy lesson. ‘Harry, you know the state you were in, ooh, minutes ago? I can put you back there, for as long as I like. I can make it your reality.’

  Harry was sweating hard. He could feel the déjà vu room forming, it was crawling out of Sage’s white briefcase, a heavy smoke. He couldn’t stop the abject whimpering that rose in his throat.

  ‘Ax,’ said Sage suddenly. ‘This isn’t the way!’

  They looked at each other, taking their blazing eyes off Harry.

  ‘You’re right.’ said Ax, intently. ‘Shit, we lost the way. We’ll have to find it again. We’ve finished with him, then. Harry? Let yourself out.’

  ‘Here’s your button, Mr Lopez. Call yourself a cab.’

  Harry managed to stand, clutching the key in one hand, his eye-socket button in the other. He took a step, and looked back. The wounded king and his noble Minister sat on the scummy floor of this disused drug-bunker, united in alert, silent concentration. Their gallantry amazed him. They were not defeated, they would never be defeated, they were just thinking of something else to try. A shock rushed through him, breaking all ties of convention. Ax glanced up and smiled, as if puzzled to see Harry still there, and he realised he was holding out for no fucking good reason at all.