Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  “See?” Wardley said. He was whispering without knowing it. “See what I mean?”

  “Anyone found out anything yet?”

  “Paul said the ferry stopped to pick up a boat. Get this. That was the last they heard from it.” Wardley looked at Goose significantly.

  “He thinks . . .”

  Wardley nodded. “They pick her up in the sea somewhere. Next thing anyone knows they’re all gone.” He pointed at the door to the sarge’s office. “I locked it.”

  She’d been thinking she should go in and at least make her presence known, maybe offer the woman a pillow, make a bit of an effort. Now that the sarge had decided to treat her as some kind of suspect, the woman was presumably going to spend the whole night in the office. Goose looked unwillingly at the almost white lips poised at the rim of the mug and then turned her back.

  “By the way,” Wardley added, “you get the desk.” Which was protocol; technically she was junior to both him and Kalmykov, so she’d be the last to answer a call. But he said it with unnatural relief.

  • • •

  Half an hour later and she was on her own. She didn’t know what counted as normal here in Hardy, but it seemed like it was a busy night. She tried to keep tabs on where her colleagues were but the radio was cutting in and out.

  At least the mainframe was functioning here. She made herself stop looking over her shoulder and settled down at the computer. She went through the security procedures and got into the shiny new Missing Persons registry. It was evident from talking to Wardley that no one had yet made any effort to identify H Jia. He and Kalmykov had barely even registered that an unidentified juvenile had been rescued the day before. They’d had other things to occupy them in Hardy, clearly.

  She hadn’t used the registry before. It seemed like searching by surname ought not to be too complicated, but when she entered jia she ended up with more than a thousand results. She tried again. Frowning, she browsed through a couple of the results. They didn’t seem to be case files at all, not even the sketchiest outlines of case files. Beyond the names the fields were mostly blank. There were over seventy H JIAs. It looked more like the census than a missing persons registry, so much so that she logged out and back in again in case she’d opened the wrong database by mistake. She hadn’t. It seemed the RCMP software had in its wisdom declared that every single person in Canada was missing.

  She searched maculloch.

  And there she was. Name, address (the one from Victoria), date of birth. No more details. She had an unpleasant sensation at the back of her neck as her eye strayed to the “Date Missing” box, as if she was afraid she might not find it empty, but it was blank.

  She logged out again. If in doubt, she thought, try the Internet. The RCMP had just spent God knows how many million on their database, but it looked as though she’d be just as likely to get a result for nothing. If the kid had run away or disappeared, there was every chance Google would be able to tell her about it. Everything that happened left its more or less indistinct footprints in the Internet somewhere. She opened a browser. The unreadably bland Mounties’ home page popped up, ready to keep the population of Canada docile by the sheer anesthetic power of bureaucratic prose. She went to a search page and tried again: h jia.

  Again, there were hundreds of results. Hundreds. This time, though, they weren’t the wrong people.

  She read, and read. There were pictures too.

  • • •

  “Sarge?”

  “Hello?”

  “Sarge. It’s Maculloch.”

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t tell me.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, sir.”

  “Well, you’ve bothered me now. Let’s get it over with.”

  “I found the boy. The kid Jonas and me brought in yesterday. I have an ID for him. Sir.”

  A heavy silence.

  “Is this important now, Maculloch?”

  “He’s from England. He went missing from”—she checked the screen, where Horace’s face looked back at her, wearing the forced and mirthless half-smile of seventh-graders in school photos all over the world—“Falmouth, southwest England, three months ago. That’s where all that trouble started. He went missing that day.”

  More silence.

  “It’s definitely him, sir. He had his home number in the pocket of his jacket, it’s the right area. And the jacket’s his school uniform. I’m looking at it right now, sir. In a photo. His name’s Horace. Horace Jia. It was a big story.”

  Still the sarge didn’t answer, though she could hear him breathing.

  “He’s twelve years old. Thirteen in a month.”

  “You’re looking at what photo?”

  She knew by his tone of voice that she shouldn’t have called. “His school photo. It’s the mug shot they released over there.”

  “This is on the Internet.”

  “That’s right, sir. I’m looking at a page from a British news service. There are lots of others.”

  “What’d you use, freaking Google?”

  “It’s him. No possible question.”

  “This is the same place people said they saw that flying thing, right?”

  “I checked the BBC website. Plus the national papers, a couple of them carried the story.”

  “You know what, Maculloch? I’m sitting here trying to think of a reason this can’t wait till tomorrow.”

  “He’s a twelve-year-old boy. He’s been lost for three months. I’ve been watching the video clip of his mother’s appeal.”

  “Okay, I have an idea. You deal with it.”

  “Sir—”

  “You get hold of the police over there. Tell ’em you found this kid in Hardy. You explain it to them. By the way, you might want to remember they’re kind of busy with people rioting in the streets and such, but hey, I bet they’ll be delighted to hear from you. Oh, and it’s, what, seven a.m. there? But go right ahead.”

  This is how people do it, she thought to herself. This is what you do: you put off thinking about a lost boy appearing, after three months, on a tiny island on the far side of the world, because you’ve had a long day, you’re grouchy and tired, you just want to go to bed. That’s why things appear to go on as if they were the same as always.

  “All right. Thank you, sir.”

  “Maculloch—”

  But she had hung up.

  • • •

  It was the same day. How come no one had pointed that out before? Or perhaps they had. Somewhere in the nightmare babble of the Internet, in among the millions of insect voices all chirping simultaneously across the dark cave whose limits none of them could guess at, someone—perhaps a few people, picking up the idea from one another in random conjunctions of bored accidental clicks—had probably noticed that the day Jennifer Knox had (or hadn’t) pushed her brother down the stairs and stopped talking was the same day that it had started snowing in the southwest extremity of En­gland and people had (or hadn’t) seen a gigantic black flying beast circling overhead. But why would Goose have cared about the coincidence before? Why would she care now?

  Because, she thought. Because . . .

  There was no reason she could put into thoughts. It was like being in the fog; but the fog held snatches of voices.

  She looked over her shoulder. Her breath caught.

  The woman in the sarge’s office had turned in her chair. Her sightless face was directed toward Goose.

  A car door banged outside. She heard scuffling. Kalmykov came in, steering a big shouty handcuffed teenager. Goose didn’t realize how fast her heart was beating until she got up to help. For the next few minutes the station was blessedly full of yelling and banging and paperwork. She threw herself into it energetically, so energetically that the shouty teenager dialed down to a more respectful volume much faster than he’d perhaps expected to. They got h
im into a cell, where he went very quiet indeed.

  “Shame they can’t all be like that one, eh?” Kalmykov nodded toward the office. “She doesn’t seem to be any trouble.”

  Goose laughed nervously and didn’t look. Her ears were singing. The boy was a whale. The thought kept passing through her, a weird thought from somewhere else, like a directionless noise floating in fog. The boy was a whale, then he became a boy. It was Jennifer’s coat.

  “Who’s been looking at junk online on company time?” Kalmykov was in a good mood. They all complained about the busy nights afterward, but while it was happening it was actually a lot better than sitting at the desk or cruising around at random in a patrol car. He leaned over the computer. “Hey! This isn’t porn! What are you, Goose, some kind of weirdo?”

  Wardley came back. The two of them came and went. Goose stayed at the desk, hoping she’d be needed outside as well. She wasn’t. She tried not to let her look stray to the office, not too often at least. She saw that the woman had drawn up her knees under the blanket and was sitting curled tight in the chair.

  “Think she’s asleep?” Wardley was also trying not to look, and failing.

  “I hope so.”

  “You been in there?”

  She shook her head. “Going to leave her alone. Who’s coming in at two? Thorpe?”

  “Thorpe and Turner.”

  “She can be their problem.”

  “Oh yeah.” Wardley gave up trying and stared through the glass and the blinds, as if hypnotized. “Oh yeah. Someone else’s problem. That’s the idea.”

  Midnight. Wardley went off duty. Kalmykov was out. As if by instinct she could feel the town settling down, giving up, going to sleep. It was something about the rhythm of the noises from outside. The passing of cars up the block became rare enough that she noticed each one, consciously: there’s someone out late. The shouts of macho laughter from the park down the block stopped altogether. Two hours in the silence, she thought, as the clock ticked by. Kalmykov radioed in a couple of times but he was less cheerful now that things were settling down. Another night, then another day.

  Things could change, though. Things could be different, utterly different, overnight. The first of December. She faced the screen, her back to the office, reading, clicking. She leaped from point to point in an unreasoning nebula of information, cold and distant spots in a universe of dark matter. “Someone must have seen Horace that afternoon,” DCI Franklin said. The devil is growing more brazen which is a sign the end time is closer, see all the things which are happening in Cornwall they are not natural. A twelve-year-old boy has gone missing from his home in Mawnan Smith. Rescue efforts have been hampered by the extreme weather. What do they mean state of emergency, this is a free country last time I checked, we are not living in a police state. Mrs. Jia had to be physically supported as she read the appeal. Lol i bet that bird ate him lol. West Cornwall police have been overwhelmed by emergency calls as the bitter weather continues. These are NOT RUMOURS hundreds of people have seen it how would you fake ALL those videos anyway???

  It was him. There was no point trying to doubt herself. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be him, not according to any sequence of events she could imagine. There was a limit to what she could imagine happening, what anyone could imagine happening. She’d already met that limit. It had faced her in the cell in the station in Alice, looked at her eye to eye, before going out and disappearing into the fog. (To the island, to the whale, the mask, the boy.)

  She looked at the phone number.

  Protocol told her to leave it alone. The proper course of action was to get in touch with the authorities over there and leave it up to them. She checked the clock. Eight hours’ difference. It was half past eight in the morning in England. The authorities might not be in their offices. There might not even be any authorities anymore. It was too late for protocol, too dark, too quiet. But the sun would be up there, on the other side of the world.

  She worked out the numbers for an international call. They were supposed to log things like this. Janice would be mildly cross, in the morning. ( Janice, the morning, the sun up: she couldn’t imagine any of it.)

  The station was completely silent beyond the hum of the lights. She listened to the hiccupping double tone. Stop-start, stop-start. When she was little, calling her grandparents in Scotland, she always used to think it meant something was wrong on the line.

  A click.

  The funny echoey silence.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?” a voice answered, hesitantly.

  Goose sat up in the desk chair, swiveling. “Hello? I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning.” She listened to herself sounding like a policeman. “I’m calling from Canada. Officer Séverine Maculloch of the Mounted Police. May I confirm who I’m talking with, please?”

  After a pause, the voice answered, doubtfully, “You’re somewhere else?”

  The voice’s intonation was almost comically British, neat, small. She sounded like a child.

  “In Canada, yes. I have some information that may be important. Is this the Jia household?”

  Again the person took a while to answer.

  “Are you to do with Horace? Where are you? I was trying to stop this thing making a noise. My friend’s asleep.”

  There was a small noise behind her. Goose swiveled around, the phone still at her ear.

  In the office, the blind woman had risen from her chair. She let the blanket fall behind her. Her clothes were mouldered and torn.

  She stepped without uncertainty or hesitation toward the office door.

  “I,” said Goose, her hand suddenly tight on the phone. “I need to talk to an adult. Can you do that for me? Can you get an adult? What’s your name, by the way?”

  The blind woman put out her white hands and spread shriveled fingers against the glass. Her head turned to face Goose: straight to face her.

  “Get her where? I don’t understand where you are,” the child said. “My name’s Marina.”

  PART II

  13

  Marina?”

  No answer. No running footsteps upstairs, either. He saw her shoes in the hallway, though, and the only marks in the grainy snow outside the front door had been made by small animals, or were his own.

  “Marina!” She’d left the door unbarred again. He pulled it shut. The noise rolled ahead of him, expiring in the house’s empty passages. He edged forward in the gloom, holding a canvas bag to his chest. His shoulders ached from carrying it. There were no easy journeys anymore, not even bringing the shopping. “Marina?”

  He stepped on something yielding. It crunched. He jerked his foot away. As his eyes accommodated to the shadows, he saw a small brown dead thing on the hallway floor. A songbird, mangled. The cat had broken off its head.

  The house was freezing, as usual. There was still plenty of wood in the stable barn after all these bitter weeks but, because, she wouldn’t use it. He’d start a fire in the main room, he thought, once he’d rested his arms.

  He carried the bag toward the light at the far end of the hall, calling up the stairs. The sloping field beyond the window caught his eye. It had been white for so long, he’d forgotten it could ever change its face. Now it was mottled with grey slush and pocked all over with what looked like shallow bullet holes, the impact craters of sleety rain.

  “I brought some food!”

  He set the bag down in the kitchen. There were plates on the floor, scattered with peelings and wilted leaves. Feathers and tiny bones. She and the cat ate together, both half wild. The larder smelled of stale milk. He poured the four-pint bottle he’d brought into a clean jug and tipped the remnants of the last one out the window, under trickling eaves. He unwrapped the cheese and left it in paper on a shelf, promising himself he’d watch her eat at least a few bites later. Everything else he left in the bag while he
went to find her.

  The cat hopped soundlessly down the stairs, meeting him halfway. It was looking lean too, but at least it was happy to see him.

  “Marina? Where are you? It’s me. Owen.”

  He hoped she might be asleep, for once. Since she’d been on her own, six or seven or eight or however many weeks it was now—the calendar, like a lot of things that before the snow had felt as ordinary and inevitable as oxygen, no longer seemed much use as a way of describing the world—he’d had no firsthand evidence that she ever slept at all. But all the beds were empty. All the rooms too. She must have gone out somewhere barefoot.

  (He had a sudden memory from the previous summer: Marina sitting on the front step in sunshine, laughing at something he’d said while she bent forward to lace up her shoes, suddenly almost pretty in a way that wasn’t quite childlike anymore, and he noticing that and being struck by the unwanted thought: How much longer can this go on?

  Not long at all, it turned out.)

  He was about to go back downstairs when a draft surprised him. She’d left a window open, then. All night, probably. Though the snow had begun to thaw at last, the nights were still icy. He followed the trickle of cold air. The cat overtook him, lolloping ahead and disappearing around a narrow side door. With that, he realized where she was hiding.

  “Marina?”

  He hadn’t seen that door open for years, so long that he’d forgotten it wasn’t just a cupboard. Behind it was a flight of tiny twisting stairs. The chill spiraled down them. He put his head around the first corner and called up.

  “Is it all right if I join you?”

  No answer. He sighed, ducked, squeezed himself into the ascent.

  A hatchlike window under a cramped gable led out onto the roof of the house. The cat’s tail brushed out ahead of him. He’d lost weight himself or he doubted he’d have been able to wiggle after it. Lean months. People like him, comfortable English people, had lost their collective memory of such times. The myth of perpetual abundance had stopped being a myth. This is how it is, they’d thought, and how it always will be: always more than enough.