Cannonbridge

by Jonathan Barnes

  As soon as he enters the patient’s meagre pastel living space, however, he knows that today, in obeying the usual order, he has miscalculated.

  Something metallic and hard is pressed against his left temple and an unfamiliar female voice says: “Hands in the air, doc.”

  He does as he’s told, turning carefully towards the speaker, to face a strikingly pretty young woman in combat trousers and a pale green t-shirt, a gun held out before her with what looks like a good deal of expertise.

  “Don’t do anything hasty,” Boyce says. “Whatever you want—we can work together to make sure you get it. Make sure everyone’s happy. I am, I should tell you, authorised to negotiate on behalf of this institution. And I fancy that you shall find me to be a reasonable man.”

  “Shut up,” she says. “If you don’t want a bullet in that highfaluting brain of yours, STFU. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Gabriela?” The patient is staring at the young woman with unbridled joy and wonderment. His eyes are moist with tears. She seems less emotional.

  “Yes, I survived,” she says. “Yes, I’m getting you out of here. And, yes, it’s time for a showdown with that evil, soul-sucking bastard.”

  At this, Dr Boyce is about to offer some emollient words but before he can do so the girl raises the gun, clubs him hard on the head and the psychiatrist gives himself over to temporary darkness.

  ONE HOUR LATER and seventy-nine miles away, in the East of the city, on the very highest floor of the Reynolds building, SwaineTaylor knocks nervously and waits.

  There has been a little restructuring in here since last we visited, as there’s been a little restructuring just about everywhere. The space is no longer open plan—its centrepiece is a grand, ornate, private office (there’s something monolithic about it, SwaineTaylor thinks, something—he suppresses a giggle of hysterical terror—Victorian), the doors to which are presently closed. Outside of this is a kind of mock-Grecian antechamber in which Swaine-Taylor currently stands. There is only silence in answer to his knock and, for one moment of pure relief, he is able to convince himself that the room is empty, that he is alone in that place and that the resurrected man has gone.

  And then the voice comes—deep and well-spoken and amused. “Do come in, Mr Swaine-Taylor.”

  The financier, trying to stop himself from trembling, mopping at the sweat which pours in torrents from his forehead, pulls open the door and steps inside.

  It is darkened within and the air is close—there is a smell of peaty decay (not just the soil now, Swaine-Taylor, thinks, it’s worse than that by far) and there is a buzzing of flies. Swaine-Taylor sees a flurry of them, the insects circling avariciously up towards the ceiling. There is a big oak desk at one end of the office, behind which sits the dapper, saturnine form of the most significant man in British history.

  Seated on the other side of the desk, with his back to SwaineTaylor, is another man, unspeaking and still, about whom the businessman absolutely refuses to think. Cannonbridge is looking through a great stack of papers—dossiers, accounts, reports— frowning rather as he does so. He looks up as the banker enters the room. The other man, the man in the chair, does not stir at all. Don’t think about him, don’t think about him, Swaine-Taylor recites to himself, over and over.

  “Ah. Daniel. What can I do for you? Incidentally, I’ve been looking at last year’s figures and I’m really not sure we’re making nearly enough. We could go further. Squeeze harder. Increase our levels of… determination.”

  “Sir, Daniel was an ancestor of mine.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir. My name is Giles, sir.”

  “Oh? Of course.”

  Cannonbridge shuffles the papers on his desk. “Hmm. Lost my place.”

  “As I’ve said before, sir, we could get you a computer in here. You could be trained to use it.”

  Cannonbridge grimaces. “No computers. I don’t hold with such… witchery.”

  At this retort, the flies buzz louder.

  “No, sir. Of course, sir.”

  “Now, what was it you wanted?”

  Swaine-Taylor passes the back of one hand over his horribly moist brow. “We’ve just had a report come in, sir. From a mental institution just outside Portsmouth in which we have an interest.”

  “Oh?” Cannonbridge seems not in the slightest bit intrigued.

  “It seems that one of their patients—a man called Toby Judd— has escaped. There was an accomplice, apparently. A breakout of some description. A few injuries but no fatalities.”

  Cannonbridge looks up. “Judd? Now, why do I know that name? Why do I feel that, in some manner, the two of us have spoken?”

  “He was one of the few to have seen the truth, sir. We had thought to employ him here until, well, the full facts of the situation became apparent.”

  “Of course. Yes. You briefed him, didn’t you? Before my restoration?”

  “We did, sir.”

  “He knows everything?”

  “I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, sir, that he was the only one to have figured everything out. Just before… Well. Yes. Your restoration.”

  “And I’d imagine he’s implacably opposed to me. To us. To all that we stand for?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He can’t be bought?”

  “I’d say not.”

  “Then we’ll have to take other steps. I imagine that he’ll be heading to Faircairn.”

  “I’m not so sure, sir. He might prefer to lie low for—”

  “Trust me. That is where he shall go.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

  Cannonbridge shakes his head. “No need. I’ll go myself. It has been too long since I have involved myself in their affairs directly.”

  “Of course, sir. I’ll arrange transport for you to the island. A copter can be—”

  “No! I have no need of your transportation.”

  “But surely, sir—”

  Cannonbridge smiles then, that awful grisly feline smile. “Do you still not understand, little man, how powerful I have become?”

  Something pounds in Swaine-Taylor’s head. He has to fight the urge to kneel, the ancient impulse to worship. He feels as might a Neanderthal on beholding the first Cro-Magnon.

  “Leave me now, Swaine-Taylor.”

  “Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”

  The CEO begins to back away. The other man in the room has neither moved throughout this dialogue nor made any intervention.

  Swaine-Taylor sees now, though he tries at once to look away, the flies on the other man’s head, crawling, crawling on his scalp and (don’t think it, don’t think it), feasting on what they find there.

  “Oh, and Swaine-Taylor?”

  “Yes? Yes, sir?”

  “You might want to drop in on Mr Keen. We stayed up late

  last night, talking as men of the world do, and I fear that he may be rather the worse for wear this morning.” Swaine-Taylor’s gorge is rising, the smell of decay thick in his nostrils, the buzzing of flies much louder than before.

  All he can manage to say is “I’ll do that, sir” before exiting the room entirely. It is with tremendous relief that he closes the door behind him and sets off at speed towards the lift, leaving the demon alone with his schemes and plots and appetites.

  But he isn’t quite alone, says a small, sly voice inside him. And you know damn well what’s in there with them.

  Twenty minutes later, he finds Mr Keen, sitting on his own in the canteen which takes up an entire floor in its own right. The killer is sitting alone, a cream-topped cup of Starbucks coffee before him, into which he is gazing morosely, and beside it, a half-empty bag of toffees.

  Swaine-Taylor approaches carefully. “Mind if I join you?”

  Keen gives no response. The banker helps himself to an adjoining chair anyway.

  Mr Keen looks up, notes the arrival with dull incuriosity and pulls a small blue bud from each ea
r.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you quite all right, Mr Keen? You’ll forgive me for saying so but you’re not looking too good.”

  “Don’t deny it,” says Mr Keen. He pushes the bag of sweets disconsolately towards his employer. “Toffee?”

  “Thank you. No.”

  “Is this going to be purely a conversation about my looks?”

  “No. I’ve just been with… the author. He said you were up late last night. Talking.”

  Keen looks sullenly away. “Yes. We were drinking. He got… chatty. Started telling me things. Up in that office with a bottle of whisky and the poor dead bastard Blessborough in the chair.”

  Swaine-Taylor nods, remembering the smell in that room. Remembering the hunger of the flies.

  “God. And so what was he saying?”

  Swaine-Taylor notices now, to his unutterable shock, that Mr Keen whose relish for homicide has struck even the most hardened of mercenaries as a little overstated, is crying, that—he would once have thought almost impossibly—fat tears are coursing unstoppably down his cheeks.

  “He told me,” says Keen very softly as he weeps, “that he isn’t unique. That he isn’t just some aberration.”

  “What? What did you see?”

  Keen sniffs miserably. “Oh God…”

  “Mr Keen? Let us be candid now. Man to man. Colleague to colleague.”

  The killer seems to master himself “Cannonbridge told me…”

  “Yes?”

  “Christ, he’s only the first… Only the first of his kind.”

  And afterwards, in that bland corporate canteen, in the midst of a tower in a district which worships profit above all other things, between those two terrible men is to be heard only a fathomless silence, filled with regret and with horror and with the belated apprehension of their true damnation.

  A YEAR AND A DAY FROM NOW

  ON THE ISLAND of Faircairn, at the crest of the hill, Toby Judd is waiting. Waiting for the saturnine man to find him. As he waits, he types quietly, diligently on an iPad, its pale glow the only illumination in the gathering dark.

  The past hours have passed in a dreamlike blur, a hallucinatory segue. A long journey, first by car and then by boat, Gabriela by his side once again.

  He had been surprised, he recalls, that the world, ruled, he had long presumed, by its mad god-king, had not seemed more different. On the contrary, everything that he had seen from the windows of the vehicle had looked largely as he had recalled— except, perhaps, for some additional fretfulness in the atmosphere, a quality of fear, barely suppressed, as though they were passing through some occupied territory. He remembers asking the woman why the new regime wasn’t more visible.

  “It’s not an outward shift,” she’d said. “It’s more like… something dreadful’s been made literal. Subtext become text.”

  The time had not seemed right for talk of emotions after that— both understood the nature of their mission—yet Toby had felt all the same the sparking of the old electricity between them, given added voltage, perhaps, by enforced time apart and by the hopeless danger of the current situation. Certainly, she had seemed to him more beautiful than ever, more striking in her physical courage and implacability, a new Boudicca. Strangely, he had not asked her for the details of how she had survived her battle with Mr Keen. It didn’t seem important somehow.

  He rarely thought of Caroline now.

  Toby’s memory was unclear concerning what had happened to Gabriela once they had rowed themselves ashore to Faircairn. One moment she was by his side, the next she had gone, lost to the stealthy dusk. Some quirk of the island’s many peculiar properties, perhaps.

  No matter—he had expected it. He had always known that this final conflict would be his to face alone. Thoughtfully, he directs his attention to the words on the page, finessing a sentence, adding a few more. His book. Almost done.

  When he looks up again, it is almost completely dark and he realises that he is no longer alone. Out of the shadows walks a man who is not a man, smiling and dressed in black. His voice is filled with the utter confidence of real power.

  “Do you know,” says Matthew Cannonbridge, “most people would think you’re mad? Just another pitiful bedlamite escaped from the workhouse and running loose in the world.”

  Toby ignores the provocation. “How did it happen?” he asks. “How on earth does an investment bank acquire consciousness?”

  “It is inevitable. I am what comes after humanity. You ought not to be afeared. It is only nature, red in tooth and claw. It is only… natural selection.”

  “Really?” Toby has not risen to his feet. He finishes his sentence on the screen, taps a few more buttons, performs another electronic task.

  “Why do you hide behind that magic lantern? Stand and face me like a man. Look your death in the eye.”

  “I’d rather not,” says Toby mildly, “if it’s all the same to you. Besides, I’ve already destroyed you without having to move from this spot.” He is working hard to keep the fear from his voice, to stop himself from trembling. His own courage surprises him and the thought occurs that he might, in some sense, be getting help, invisible succour and strength. From where? From the island, he thinks. From Faircairn.

  There is a sound then like a thousand ancient doors creaking open or like bells pealing in hell.

  Matthew Cannonbridge is laughing. “I am a new form of life. To you I am a deity. I am unstoppable.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Dr Judd in the mild, pedantic tone he had once deployed with difficult or argumentative students. “All it takes is words. Well, the right words. In the right order.”

  “What are you doing?” Cannonbridge asks. “What are you writing there?”

  “I’ve been writing, Mr Cannonbridge. I’ve been writing the story of your life.”

  “You have dared to do… what?”

  “Oh,” continues Toby airily, just about keeping his nausea under control, “I’ve largely agreed with Professor Blessborough. Even with Dr J J Salazar. I’ve just added one small, yet I think distinctive, wrinkle.”

  “What? What have you done?”

  “I’ve set a shadow after you, Mr Cannonbridge. I’ve inserted it into your story and set it to run you down. A shadow to chase you through time, right from the first, from Geneva, all the way to the banks of the Thames. Only in my version…”

  “Yes?”

  “In my version, Mr Cannonbridge…” Toby looks up at the devil and grins with a relish of which he would never hitherto have considered himself capable, “… the shadow eats you alive.”

  1902

  BY THE BANKS OF THE THAMES SOUTHWARK

  AND NOW WE are back by the river again, with Sir Arthur and with Matthew Cannonbridge, terrible but not yet as mighty as he has become.

  To begin with, all is as it was before—their strange conversation, the picking up of stones, the handshake between the two men and the old writer’s all but final words.

  “It has been a decided pleasure.” And then, at last, that curiously triumphant approach, Sir Arthur’s robust objections, the single hissed syllable (“stay”), the moustachioed man’s odd rooting to the spot.

  But now—now there is something different.

  Now there is a great rushing of wind on a day that has been still and without atmospheric excitation of any kind. Now there are clouds before the sun and there is twilight in the afternoon. Now there is to be heard a shrill whistling as of something being summoned home. And now there are shadows everywhere, now there are shadows by the riverbank. There are shadows on the shore. There are shadows near Sir Arthur and there are shadows which pass by the urchin and the old woman a few feet hence. And above all there are shadows around Matthew Cannonbridge.

  It takes some moments for Arthur to process adequately what it is that he is seeing—Cannonbridge a step or two from the welcoming oblivion of the Thames, now set all about with shadow, yet no natural trick of illumination but something hideously wrong,
some profound inversion of nature’s law.

  He is watching, he understands, living shadow—some impossible, animate darkness.

  What happens next happens very quickly and Sir Arthur find himself quite impotent in the face of it.

  Cannonbridge is swallowed up by that mass of darkness, he is lost to the seething shapelessness, struggling at first, but quickly lost. He is eclipsed. He is devoured. He is, it seems to Sir Arthur, in some manner erased.

  The wind increases, the darkness rises and it is as if a storm is imminent.

  Sir Arthur can only stand and watch.

  IT MIGHT HAVE seemed to you, had you chanced to look down from London Bridge at that strange hour, that Arthur is not alone and that there are others who stand beside him to bear witness—brave Mary and her almost-child; plump, doomed Polidori; Miss Maria Monk and her panoply of secrets; Emily and her singular relations; Edgar with a bottle in one hand; faithless Karl; Wilkie and the ragged boy from the blacking factory; Fred, watching with grim, joyless satisfaction; sad Constance and her brilliant husband—all here to see the pattern take its final shape.

  AND THEN, THE shadows flee, the storm abates, daylight returns and the world is as it was. It is, thinks Sir Arthur, with a horrible and quite uncharacteristic sense of detachment, as he stands alone again in the sunshine, as if nothing and nobody had ever been there at all.

  A YEAR AND A DAY FROM NOW

  FOR THE FIRST time in over a century, Matthew Cannonbridge looks afraid.

  “No,” he says, then, mockingly, “it won’t achieve anything, this witless redrafting of yours. Only words.”

  Toby climbs now to his feet and tucks the iPad under one arm. He smiles pleasantly. “Ah. But these particular words were written in very close proximity to the weird earth of Faircairn.”

  “Impossible,” the monster spits. “You’ve languished in an asylum for months.”

  “Yes, I have. But all the time I have had with me, taken from my last visit here, a handful of dust.”

  Real fear now in Cannonbridge’s eyes.