His discomfort must have shown because Brick snorted out another one of his not-quite-laughs.
‘It’s not the Four Seasons or anything,’ he said.
‘It’s fine,’ said Cal, funnelling the crumbs into his mouth then flattening the crisp packet against the mouldering tablecloth. Daisy lay on a small, damp chaise longue to their side. She’d climbed on it about five minutes ago and she was already fast asleep, her snores as soft as velvet. ‘It’s safe.’
‘It’s definitely safe. Nobody’s ever here. Ever.’
That wasn’t a surprise, from what they’d seen in the last half hour. Brick had given them a guided tour, acting like he worked here as he showed them the roller coaster and the log flume and the carousel and the dodgem track and the overgrown miniature golf course. What he really should have been doing, Cal thought, was showing them the emergency exits, the safest hideaways, the supplies, the weak points, the lookout areas. At the very least he could have pointed the way to the facilities. But no, he’d walked around muttering about arcade machines and doughnuts and which was the best seat to take on the flume if you didn’t want to get wet – even though none of it even worked any more.
Cal hadn’t said anything, though. It did seem quiet here, and from what he and Daisy had seen in the car on the drive up this part of the coast was as good as deserted. There would be plenty of time to shore the park up in case people came looking.
He sighed, hard enough to make the candlelight flutter. It was the first time he’d admitted to himself that this might not go away overnight. It might not go away at all.
‘What?’ Brick asked.
‘Nothing. This whole thing, it doesn’t seem real.’
‘I know. Feels like another lifetime that I was riding out here with Lisa, that we were fine.’
Another lifetime, thought Cal. It really did. How long had it been since he was back at school playing football? Maybe ten hours. Ten hours for the rules of the universe to unravel around him, for everything he knew to turn to rot. It reminded him of a poem they’d done in English, but he couldn’t remember how it went. Something about things falling apart. They sat in silence, both of them chewing their own thoughts as the candle guttered like a chesty breath, a death rattle.
‘Your girlfriend,’ said Cal. ‘Lisa? What . . . I mean, er, is she—’
‘You don’t have to worry about her,’ said Brick sharply, with a look that told Cal it would be better not to pursue the subject any further.
‘You have any idea what might be causing this?’ Cal asked, quickly changing tack. ‘I mean I can’t think of anything. Except genetics maybe.’
‘Huh?’ Brick grunted.
‘Like cats. You know how some cats are, they just need to see another cat and they go for it. They fight to the death sometimes. Dogs too, I guess.’
Brick nodded, deep in thought.
‘But something like that doesn’t just happen,’ he said eventually. ‘You don’t just flick a switch and everyone hates you.’
‘It wasn’t just that with me,’ Cal said. Daisy stirred, snuffling and pressing her face into the chaise longue. He waited for her breathing to even out again before continuing. ‘Things have been strange for a few days now. People were ignoring me, acting weird. I thought they were just playing games but . . .’
He didn’t need to finish. Brick drew patterns in the dust on the table, the nail on his forefinger a crescent moon of dirt and blood. When he lifted his arm Cal saw a circle with two x’s for eyes, angry slanted eyebrows and a downturned mouth. A smiley without the smile. Somehow, without properly acknowledging the thought, he’d known that was what Brick was going to draw.
‘The fury,’ Brick mumbled, looking at his creation. ‘Good name for it, right?’
‘Certainly fits the bill,’ Cal said. ‘Why us, though? And why now?’
Brick’s eyes met Cal’s for a fraction of a second before bouncing off. He leant down and rummaged in a carrier bag – one that he’d picked up from the foyer as they were passing through. He hefted a laptop from it and laid it carefully on the table, covering up his dust drawing.
‘I need to show you something,’ he said as he opened the lid. Cal heard the whine of the hard drive coming to life, and the boy’s face was suddenly bathed in a sickly white glow. Cal got up, wiping the dirt from his palms as he walked round the table. Brick was online, the browser showing the same Yahoo Answers page that Cal had seen back at home. He could see Rick_B’s original message, and below that his own panicked response. Brick peered up, looking half his age from this angle. ‘It’s not just us,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Cal replied, watching Brick’s eyes widen. ‘I saw it happen on the motorway, a ton of people on top of a car attacking somebody inside. It was someone like us. I’m not sure how, I just know it.’
He choked as the memory burned back, the flames from the explosion seeming to sear the flesh of his brain. Brick turned back to the screen. When he raised his dust-blackened finger to the trackpad it was shaking.
‘It’s not just that,’ he said. ‘You weren’t the only person to reply. Look.’
He scrolled down the page slowly enough for Cal to read the eleven answers that followed his, all of them but two almost a carbon copy of his own. By the time he’d reached the last he felt like he’d run a marathon – that or been punched hard in the gut. He had to lean on the back of Brick’s chair to stop his disco legs throwing him to the floor.
‘That’s from four hours ago,’ Brick said, moving the pointer over the time of the last entry, 6.05 p.m. ‘I haven’t checked since then.’
He led the arrow up towards the refresh button and Cal almost screamed for him not to press it. He didn’t want to see. He didn’t want to know.
Brick clicked. The page loaded up painfully slowly. The Yahoo header, then the adverts, then the frame, then Brick’s message. The answers followed, all together like they were being vomited onto the page.
All forty-eight of them.
‘Jesus,’ said Cal, and this time he had to sit on the chair to the left of Brick’s. His whole body felt numb, cold. ‘Please tell me they’re not all real.’
Brick was scrolling down again, and his ghostly pallor had nothing to do with the light from the screen. Cal watched the boy’s face crumple into itself a little further with each new answer he read. It seemed like an age later when he finally turned his red, swimming eyes up. They looked at each other properly for the first time, and despite their differences they could have been mirror images.
‘Brick?’ Cal asked. ‘What do they say?’
‘The same thing,’ he breathed, breaking away to the screen again. ‘They’re all exactly the same.’
‘What do we do?’ Brick didn’t reply, the candlelight giving his skin a waxwork sheen. Like he isn’t real; like none of this is real, Cal’s brain insisted. How can it be? How can this be happening? ‘Brick, what do we do?’
Brick looked up, and this time when their eyes met, Cal knew exactly what Brick was thinking.
‘We tell them,’ Cal said. ‘We tell them about this place.’
‘We have to,’ Brick confirmed. ‘I don’t want to but we have to. Look, you and me, we haven’t killed each other, or Daisy. If we’re . . .’
‘Different,’ Cal said when he saw him struggling.
‘If we’re different, if there’s something about us that’s different from the others, from the Fury’ – He’s given it a capital F, Cal realised, it’s more than just a word now – ‘then we have to get together, as many of us as we can. It’s the only way we can be safe, we can figure it out.’
‘But you can’t tell them where we are,’ Cal said. ‘Not on there, what if the others find us? Brick, we need to think about this.’
‘We don’t have time,’ he replied, tapping his finger on the top of the screen. Cal noticed the battery icon there, red and flashing. ‘It’s about to shut down and there’s no power here.’
Cal swore, loud enough to stir Daisy again.
She wriggled over, opening her eyes and seeing him. By the time her distant, dreamer’s smile had faded she was asleep again.
‘Look,’ said Brick quietly. ‘I won’t tell them about Fursville. There’s a second-hand car showroom just over the road, it’s empty. I’ll tell them to go there and wait for someone to come to them. We can keep watch on the place, and if anything looks suspicious we just won’t show ourselves. Yeah?’
Cal shook his head.
‘Yeah?’ Brick repeated.
‘Okay,’ Cal said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Okay, whatever.’
Brick was already typing:
You’re not alone. We have a safe place, there’s a few of us here and we’re not attacking each other. If you can get to us, we’re in a town called Hemmingway, in Norfolk, right on the beach, up from Hemsby. On the main coast road there’s an abandoned car showroom, called Soapy’s. Go there and wait, we’ll check it at noon every day.
He stopped, running both hands through his hair.
‘Will that do?’ he asked. Cal didn’t reply. Brick read it through once more, the pointer hovering over the Post Reply button. ‘I guess it will have to.’
He clicked, and five seconds later the post appeared on the refreshed page.
‘You know it’s not gonna take a genius to work out that if we’re not in the showroom we’re gonna be in the bloody great big empty amusement park next door,’ Cal said, slumping back. ‘We should have met them at the car park.’
‘It’s too far away,’ Brick said. ‘We’d have to make that slog every day. It’s not safe.’
‘This isn’t safe,’ Cal snapped back. Brick closed the laptop, tapping his fingers on it. ‘We need to make extra sure this place is secure,’ Cal went on. ‘Seal up the fence, have an emergency plan, just in case.’
It took Brick a moment to look up. He stared at Cal, but it seemed that he was peering through him, at something much deeper.
‘Things fall apart,’ he said, his voice as low as the guttering candle. Cal shook his head as the poem he couldn’t remember, the one he’d learned at school, tumbled from Brick’s lips. ‘The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’
Brick looked away, firelight burning in his eyes as he finished.
‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. And goddamned everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.’
The Other: II
In his presence the mountains quake,
and the hills melt away;
the earth trembles, and its people are destroyed.
Who can stand before his fierce anger?
Who can survive his burning fury?
His rage blazes forth like fire,
and the mountains crumble to dust in his presence.
Nahum 1:5–6
Murdoch
Thames House, London, 11.40 p.m.
‘Look, I just want to know what’s going on.’
Detective Inspector Alan Murdoch had been speaking the same words to the same locked door for the better part of three hours. And it was nearly twenty-four hours now since he’d been bundled into a car along with Jorgensen and his assistants from the morgue and taken to the massive MI5 HQ by the Thames. He was being treated like a terrorist, as though somehow he was responsible for the freak corpse and its endless breath. When he’d first arrived they’d strapped him with diodes and sensors and asked him question after question, blatantly refusing to answer any of his. And after that he’d been thrown into this basement room to rot.
He hadn’t even been allowed to call his wife. His mobile phone and police radio had been confiscated; so had his warrant card. He was supposed to have been home this time yesterday, she’d be worried sick. He felt something shift in his gut, the dread of never seeing her again, of never holding his baby boy.
You’re being ridiculous. It’s the exhaustion talking. Only he knew it wasn’t. He’d seen it, this impossible thing, this living corpse which made a mockery out of everything he knew. Reality had begun to crumble, and here he was with a front-row seat to the end of it all.
‘I really am sorry,’ said Jorgensen for what must have been the hundredth time that day. He sat on the other side of the small room – no, the cell – looking a hundred years old. ‘I never should have called you in, Alan.’
No, you bloody well shouldn’t have, Murdoch thought, saying: ‘This isn’t your fault, Sven. You were just doing your job.’
The pathologist gave him a weary smile then planted his head back in his hands. Murdoch slammed his fist against the door, hard enough to hurt.
‘You’ve got no right to keep us in here, dammit,’ he roared. They’d been given water and a sandwich each but that had been hours ago. Murdoch’s hunger was lost behind the rage inside his gut. ‘I’m a police officer, I have a right to know what’s going on.’
Rights. Murdoch laughed bitterly. He had no rights, not here, not in the heart of the government’s secret service. They could hold him forever and make sure nobody ever asked any questions. But why?
There was a metallic clang from outside the door, followed by footsteps. A key turned, then the door swung out to reveal a man and a woman in orderly uniforms. The man was holding a tray with more sandwiches and two bottles of water. He started to walk in but Murdoch barred his way.
‘You can’t keep us here,’ he said. ‘I demand to see your commanding officer.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said the woman. ‘I’m afraid nobody is available to speak to you right now.’
‘Please wait inside the room,’ added the man, and there was a definite or else that he left unvoiced.
Murdoch bit his tongue, looking past the orderlies to see a long, windowless corridor. At the end of it was a reinforced metal door, guarded by armed men. Murdoch knew that’s where it was, the living corpse. The thought of it there, so close, made him shudder. Even as he watched, the door opened and a group of people walked out. They wore a mix of uniforms – some military top brass, some white surgical coats – but they all wore the same expression of fear. They strode down the corridor and turned out of sight.
‘Look,’ said Murdoch, forcing himself to stay calm. ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble, I just want to go home. My wife, she doesn’t know where I am. Can you at least tell me how long you’re going to keep us here?’
The orderlies must have seen the desperation in his gaunt face, because their expressions softened.
‘The truth is, we don’t know,’ said the woman. ‘There’s something . . . They’re saying it’s something bad, really bad. They’re holding anyone who’s had any contact with it. Did you see it?’
‘Yeah,’ said Murdoch, sighing. ‘And they’re right, it’s bad.’
‘Take this,’ said the man, passing the tray to Murdoch. ‘It might be over soon, they’re bringing in some kind of expert. With any luck they’ll be able to work out what’s going on and get you guys out of here.’
‘An expert?’ said Jorgensen, walking over. ‘What kind of expert?’
The man shrugged, saying, ‘Just somebody who might know what this thing is.’
And what it wants, Murdoch’s mind added.
The sound of voices rose up, a group of soldiers walking out of the same corridor the others had left by. They headed up towards the guarded door and Murdoch saw somebody else with them, somebody dressed in black robes. The orderly looked over her shoulder.
‘That’s him now,’ she said.
‘The expert?’ Jorgensen asked. The man and woman nodded.
‘No way,’ Murdoch said, scarcely able to believe what he was seeing. The soldiers reached the door and the man turned, revealing the white collar around his neck, the heavy crucifix that hung over his chest. The expert wasn’t a scientist or a doctor or a general.
He was a priest.
Saturday
The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘Young Goodman Brown’
Rilke
> Farlen, Lincolnshire, 12.23 a.m.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’
Rilke Bastion ignored her brother the way she had learned to do through years of practice. He trotted along by her side as if he were a dog, not her fifteen-year-old twin, his sad little face turned up to her with those puppy-moist eyes. If Schiller had a tail, it would be permanently fixed between his legs.
‘Rilke, please, mother will be angry.’
Their mother wouldn’t even know. She was cocooned in the same musty, tea-stained sheets she spent half her life in. She spent the other half in the old-fashioned wooden bath chair that sat wheel-locked beside the huge windows in her bedroom suite, her eyes watching over the estate but her mind rotted, unthinking.
‘Please, Rilke, I don’t want to go.’
His canine whine was a knifepoint in her ears, making the headache she’d had for at least two days now infinitely worse. She stopped, spinning round and grabbing Schiller by the collar. Looking into his face was so like looking at her own reflection, and yet utterly different. She could see the same high cheekbones, the same sharp green eyes, the same narrow nose. And yet it was as though she were staring into a trick mirror, one of the ones that distorted your image, making her chin too weak, her jowls too loose, her eyes too watery. She glared at Schiller until he looked away, as he always did. Only then did she release him.
‘Go on, then,’ she said as he brushed his hands down his polo shirt, trying to get the creases out. ‘Go home.’
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