by Luke Walker
“This is where I work,” he said. “In the kitchen.”
“Nice place.”
“Ashleigh worked here, too.”
He reached for the handle and I reached for him. “Tom, listen. I know this has been a nightmare. The things we’ve seen just in the last day…I know this is more than you expected, but we’re doing this for the same reasons, right? We both want to help the same person. So we need to stay together, stay focused.”
He let his breath out, sounding as if he’d let go of a heavy weight. “All right. It’s just this is all a lot to deal with.”
I gave him a huge smile. “Don’t worry. It’ll probably get worse. It usually does.”
He laughed, we left the van and he led us to the entrance. “Suzanne’s my boss. I think she can help us.” He shoved the side door open. We entered a spacious bar lit by natural light coming in through the unbarred windows. A guy stood behind the bar, chopping lemons and placing the small pieces into a bowl.
“Morning, Carl. Suzanne in?” Tom said and he sounded a thousand times happier and more relaxed than at any other point during our brief time together.
Carl pointed to a door at his side. “Yeah. In the office. You okay?”
“Been better. This is Ashleigh’s dad. Dave.”
“Morning,” I said and Carl gave me the once-over. I smiled weakly.
“We’re going to speak to Suzanne, Carl. I know I’m working tonight, but—”
“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be quiet after what’s happened.”
Carl continued with his lemons, happy in his ignorance of what the night had been like.
“Right,” Tom murmured. “Bad night.”
“Tom. Shall we?” I said.
He mentally shook himself and took me behind the bar to the staff door, then through. It opened to a short corridor, another door at its end, this one ajar. We entered without knocking. The woman at the desk glanced up. Although a lot of her was hidden behind a large desk, I got the impression she was tall. That put with a sharp haircut and an expensive outfit spoke of order and control.
“Morning, Tom. All okay? I trust you didn’t get caught in the business last night?”
“Just a little,” Tom said under his breath and pointed to me. “This is Ashleigh’s dad. We need your help.”
She appraised me and I resisted the urge to look around her sparsely furnished office. Behind her, a window let in sunlight. Although her computer screen wasn’t visible, the sound reached me. She was watching the news, the report all about the magnificent work Gatur had done in Norwich during the night.
“For what?” she said coolly. All at once, I was sick of every single thing. Sick of my fear, of the constant threat from above and from those in authority, sick of my own refusal to face what the world was, and sick of a woman I’d met thirty seconds before looking at me as if I were a gangly teenager instead of easily five years her senior.
I leaned on her desk, face close to hers. “We need your help, Suzanne. We need to know about someone.”
She hadn’t blanched at my tone or approach. “Who?”
“A writer. Bertram Fitzgerald Makepeace.”
When she looked away, I knew without question we’d come to the right person.
21
Suzanne’s response was nothing unexpected. “Who’s that?”
“We don’t have time.” Tom stood beside me. “It’s about Ashleigh and us and everyone. There’s trouble. A lot of it. We need to find Ashleigh and we need to talk to you about Makepeace.”
She had eyes for only Tom. “Never heard of him, Tom. Can you come in for your shift as usual, please? I—”
I shoved Tom to the side and did my best to fill Suzanne’s eye line. She didn’t appear at all intimidated by me.
“We know you know who we’re talking about so let’s not waste time.”
“Tom, I think you and your friend should leave. Come back tonight for your shift as usual, please. And if you see Ashleigh, ask her to do me the favor of letting me know if she still works here.”
Her eyes remained on mine while she spoke. We wouldn’t get anywhere with this woman. It was like talking to a wall.
Tom stood beside me. “Ashleigh’s up to something to do with Makepeace, Suzanne. And she’s in trouble.”
Suzanne blinked twice. That was all she had to do to give herself away.
“Tom.”
“Yes.”
“If you’re not being straight with me, we’re all dead. You do know that, don’t you?”
“More than anything.”
Suzanne stood and I fought the tremors threatening to rise from my stomach.
“This way,” she muttered and led us back to the short corridor and to a door I hadn’t noticed. It opened to small, curving steps. I’d worked in a pub long enough to know she was leading us down to the cellar.
I went straight behind her, Tom bringing up the rear. The cellar was no different to the one we’d been in the morning before. Same dank walls. Same gloom. Same smell. We could have been back there with Segoth’s rampage happening above our heads.
Suzanne pushed at a brown door dark enough to almost be missed in the poor light. It swung open to reveal an alcove piled high with small, rectangular objects.
Books. Dozens of them.
She stood aside, gesturing for me to come closer. At the door, I peered inside, the light too weak for me to make out any titles or authors. Even so, I could take a guess they were all fiction.
“Our customers don’t just come for the food,” she said, sounding just this side of smug.
I stared at Tom. “What the hell have you got my daughter into?”
“Me? You know Ashleigh. She doesn’t need anyone to get her into anything.”
As much as I wanted to argue with him, there was no argument. I jabbed my finger towards the books. “So what’s all this?”
Suzanne reached past me, dug through one of the piles, counting I realized, and pulled out the sixth or seventh book. She handed it to me.
“A history of British stately homes.” The cover and title meant nothing to me.
“By William Percival Thacker,” Suzanne said.
“Oh, shit,” Tom murmured.
“Who’s Thacker?” I said, moving closer to Suzanne.
Behind me, Tom answered. “One of Makepeace’s characters. One who wrote about other worlds.”
22
Back in Suzanne’s office, she sat at her desk while I flicked through the book and Tom stood at the window, nervously checking the car park and the little of the road visible from our spot.
“Your daughter is doing something very brave or very stupid, Mr. Anderson,” Suzanne said.
I closed the guidebook and dropped it on her desk. “Talk to me and make sense.”
“Fine. Makepeace was a writer without any real success during his life. Over the last thirty or so years, that’s changed. I know it seems that nobody cares about things now, that we’re either blind to our world or we willingly don’t think about it, but that’s not true of everyone. And that’s one of the reasons his books are so popular. People come here to get away from the world. They think that’s all they can do to help themselves, but your daughter found more than that. She found clues in Makepeace’s work.” She tapped the book. “This is one. A guidebook to stately homes written by someone with the same name as Makepeace’s most notable character. Someone who was an academic writer specializing in British history, who believed we had the potential to build a better world, who didn’t have time for religion or superstition.”
She eyed me, waiting. And it clicked.
“This is Makepeace? This is his own book?” I said.
She nodded and Tom finally left the window. “So where’s Ashleigh now?”
“I don’t know. All I know is what I’ve told you. The last thing she told me was she had an idea but that was all she said. That’s was the day before yesterday. I told her to stay here and keep her head down, but she told me that
wasn’t something she could do.”
Tom picked up the book and thumbed through it. “If she thinks one of these houses is the right place to…I don’t know. Change things. If that’s what she’s thinking, she could be in any of them.”
“We’ll have to come up with something,” I told him and faced Suzanne. “Can we keep it?”
“If you promise to bring it back. It’s probably the only copy around.”
“We’ll look after it.”
“And while you’re doing that, find out what Ashleigh has done with all my other books. I’m keen for them not to be noticed by the wrong people.”
“She’s got more of your books?” Tom said.
“Yes. You didn’t know?”
He glanced at me, waiting for my decision on how much to say about Ashleigh.
“We’ve seen those other books.” I pictured the floor of my daughter’s flat, piles of untidy books heaped high. “She got them all from you?”
“So it would seem.” Suzanne smiled. “And I tell you something, Mr. Anderson. The books cost me and various friends a lot of money. A lot. But if Ashleigh is involved in something this dangerous, I have never seen those books. Understand?”
I understood and said so. It wasn’t the books themselves that would get Suzanne or Ashleigh sacrificed. It was the content. Nobody publicly talked about our gods in a questioning way. They were what they were and we kept quiet. And we definitely didn’t talk about the potential of worlds where they didn’t exist let alone rule over us.
“Good.” Suzanne thumbed one of the old volumes. “I’d be an idiot if I thought the police didn’t know about these, but some of them know how to keep their noses out of businesses like mine.”
“Because you have money, you mean,” I said. “Because your customers are rich.”
Anger came and went in a moment. No point in comparing my pub and customers with Suzanne’s. The police and authorities left her lot alone; they took the poor and the drunk. As always.
“Absolutely,” she said without a trace of a smile.
I headed to the door, already trying to come up with a plan.
“I need the night off, Suzanne,” Tom said.
She sighed. “Go. Find her. Come back.”
We went.
23
Back in Tom’s van, we skimmed through the book, hoping for a clue. We found nothing. The book detailed a dozen houses throughout the country, all of them at least two hundred years old, a few now decaying relics. I knew of four that were still open to the public. While they probably didn’t do much business, they were still standing in one piece, which perhaps made them more likely destinations for Ashleigh than the others.
I handed Tom the book, flicked on the radio and found a news broadcast. The bad news found us immediately.
Segoth. The Rotting God was on the move. He’d been seen in Germany about an hour before. Deaths (or sacrifices as the news put it) were already numbered in the thousands and more were expected to die from those already consumed by his flesh.
We listened to the rest in silence. A quarter of Germany had felt the impact of Segoth’s arrival (news code for a quarter of the country was dead, dying or screaming) and France was preparing itself for an influx of Germans. Of course they were. However many millions of screaming Germans were now trying to pour into France, all desperate to get away from the two-hundred-foot-tall dead thing stomping all over the country, burning everything it could with its touch.
The report ended and went on with the usual news. I lowered the volume.
“Have you ever seen Segoth? Like up close,” Tom asked.
“No.”
“What about Naz Yaah?”
I shuddered. While I’d never seen the Worm in the flesh, I knew enough about her to feel cold at the mental image of a giant worm, tentacles growing all over her alabaster skin, slime coating every horrible inch of her. Perhaps worse than that, they said smaller creatures lived on her skin—things built like a cross between birds and insects. Things she sent out to bring food to her giant mouth. And by food, I of course mean people.
“No,” I said finally. “And I hope I never do.” I tapped the book. “Any clues?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Think.” I took the book from him and ran a finger over the author name. The author who was really my daughter’s obsession. “This whole book is a clue, right? Thacker is Makepeace. He wanted people to know that. Ashleigh knew it so we’re halfway there.” I fought off my tiredness. “What other clues could he have dropped? If Thacker was one of his big characters, then what about the places? Any of them feature in his fiction a lot?”
“Not that I know of.”
I wanted to swear, but held back. It made sense for Makepeace not to have been too obvious. Even though he hadn’t been a success in life, he still would have been risking a lot if he’d been found out by the wrong people.
“All right. What else? What was the guy like? Give me his background. The basics.”
“Okay.” Tom gathered himself. “It’s thought he was born around 1920 and died in the seventies. He worked in insurance and wrote a lot. I mean, a lot. A load of stories about industrious people like I told you. People in different worlds from ours. They knew about other worlds but their focus was their own. Making that one good and happy. That’s what Makepeace wanted for us.”
“That’s why he’s popular? Because he wrote about the best of people.”
“Pretty much.”
“Family? Parents? Wife?”
I’d closed my eyes as if it would help me think. Tom went on.
“Parents died when he was young. A brother who died near the end of the Second World War. Never married that I know of although there’s a rumor he had an affair with someone. Some aristocrat. I can’t remember who.”
I kept my eyes shut and pictured Ashleigh. I was doing this for her. I’d do anything for her. And maybe…
And maybe Makepeace would do anything for his lover.
I opened my eyes and said: “Like put her in his stories.”
“What?” Tom said.
“Tom, listen. This guy Thacker. Was he married?”
“What? No. I don’t think so. He was one of those old guys who lives alone and writes and reads and that’s about it.”
I pulled my hand into a fist, hoping more than anything in the world I was on the right track. “In his fiction, in Thacker’s, not Makepeace’s, did he write about a woman? About love?”
Tom stared at me. “Yes. Shit, yes. He, Thacker, he wrote a long story about a guy who went off to a war, wrote to his fiancée, got a letter back to say she was dead and he kept writing to her like she was alive. He kept doing it even when he came back from the war. The story ended with him getting a letter from someone and praying it was from her even though he knew it couldn’t be.”
“What was her name?” I whispered, knowing he wouldn’t remember.
“It was Japanese. That was the big thing about Thacker. He was an old racist. Big on white people being in charge because he thought everyone else was lower than us. A bit of a joke, I’m guessing, when you consider Makepeace was all about people coming together and—”
“The name, Tom,” I said.
“Kyoko. She was married to a lord. Lord Ashton.”
I snatched the book from him, sped through the pages and found it.
“Ashton Hall.”
24
After filling up the van, we were on the road again. We left Norwich behind and drove southwest, heading through quiet towns and passing empty fields. The day had become another hot one, the air thick with the stink of smoke and dirt even away from population. I used Tom’s iPad to get online for information on Ashton Hall. Tom drove and I read out what I found.
The hall was built in the early eighteenth century and had been in the Ashton family until the early forties when the government took over it for the war effort. For a few decades, it’d been a sort of museum and people were welcome to go and have a look
around free of charge either at the building itself or in the grounds—four thousand acres of them. Eight years ago, the museum closed due to lack of use and the building was now derelict: a rotting house surrounded by lakes and fields. The village of Ashton was a couple of miles down the road, more or less deserted now.
A final point: it’d been home to many interesting and valuable family heirlooms including some brought from Lady Ashton’s home country of Japan.
Lady Ashton. Thacker’s lover. Makepeace’s lover. He’d buried their relationship in fiction inside fiction. Which meant he must have buried whatever Ashleigh was looking for in the same place. At least that’s what I hoped.
We studied a few photos of the hall and its grounds, most of which were decades old. It had once been an impressive place, but was now probably falling apart like everything else.
Although Tom argued against it, I made us stop in a village pub for food and water. The landlord asked us no questions and we volunteered nothing. Just after noon, we drove on, baking fields rolling with us, no other traffic on the roads. Not out there in the countryside. Not a place you wanted to be after dark.
I found the news on Tom’s iPad and wished I hadn’t. Segoth was still on the move and the images were horrible.
Most of them appeared to come from mobile phone footage. The dead monster was working his way through a city, paying no mind to the buildings he hit or the people he crushed. A change of image took the shot to an hour later. Segoth was in the countryside, walking beside a river. Sludge dropped from him to swallow everybody it touched.
“Is it bad?” Tom asked.
“Pretty bad.”
The voice over the images said people were heading through France towards the Channel Tunnel and the military were “directing” those who came too close to the tunnel to head back. Directing. A nice way of saying firing at anyone who came within a mile of it. Whether they killed people or just injured them, it didn’t matter to them. Keep them out of the tunnel. Keep them in the country as potential sacrifices to our zombie god and hope he left as abruptly as he appeared. And of course, our government would be just fine with that plan on the pretense of avoiding any unpleasantness here.