The Truants

by Lee Markham

  His jaw hanging loose. Down and to the left. Like he was faking a laugh at a bad joke.

  The train stops. She opens her eyes. One more stop until home. A short hop. She feels queasy. The lights too bright. And for a very brief moment she is fully back within herself. Fully here. She watches the cables lining the tunnels whip up and down and round each other in the light from the train, occasional sparks from the tracks throwing the brickwork into even sharper relief. At the next station she pushes herself up and out of her seat and almost blacks out. Her legs buckle and twang and she leans against the wall and fumbles her way up and out. Back into the streets. She drifts away again, back into space. And once again she is back in the flat.

  Back in the room. Taking it all in. Dealing with it.

  Three dead people.

  And a dog, on the table.

  And it’s the dog that gets to her. The dumb, fucking animal.

  That’s when she gets the lump in her throat.

  She moves into the room, across to the table, and looks down on the dog. He lies there, not breathing, his eyes full of sadness. And fear. He is covered in bite marks. She bets there are bruises beneath his pelt. She reaches down and gently touches his cheek with the back of her knuckles. Poor thing.

  The dog snaps and snags a chunk out of her wrist.

  One final reflex before death.

  She snatches her hand back. She doesn’t scream or cry out or make any sound at all. She is too shocked. Her heart in her throat. But that is the moment everything inside her starts to seep out. Her disgust. Her rage. Her abhorrence.

  Her terror and her frailty.

  She weighs anchor then and sets sail for where she is now. And where she is now is in the lift heading up to her flat. She needs to lie down. She is nearly there.

  She goes into the flat, throws her coat on the chair in the hall. Then she goes from room to room closing the curtains. In the living room she stands at the window and looks out on the city. There is so much to see that nothing stands out. It looks like a dungheap littered with orange glow-worms. And it goes on and on and on. In the distance, glass cathedrals of commerce are hidden somewhere in the dark November night. She doesn’t know why she stays here. She doesn’t have anywhere better to go.

  ‘You stay here because you are a rat, just like all the rest of them,’ she intones meanly to her faint reflection in the glass before her.

  Then she closes that final set of curtains, turns to the sofa and falls onto it. She cries a little bit then. And she thinks of her parents. She thinks of them and thinks that they were kind. That they weren’t rats. But they were the only ones. That maybe he is right. He that is in here with her. Maybe he is right. And that maybe, at last, she’s found someone who feels the same way she does. She closes her eyes. She stops breathing. And she sleeps.

  She doesn’t put any food down for the cat. She doesn’t have a cat.

  Never had.

  And now she never will.

  4

  Ricky lives in a basement bedsit on his own, the only window a pavement-level frosted pane of glass affording the murkiest of illumination. He has spent the night listening to the voice in his head and has decided he can go fuck himself. He didn’t invite him in and so he doesn’t have to listen to him. But Ricky has an inkling. An inkling that he has become something else. And he welcomes the change. He pushes himself up from his bed and massages his belly. It is growling. It is hungry. The pain in his arm has retreated now – the fierce burn of it. He still can’t believe that little John bastard knifed him. The child will pay for that. But not before Ricky has dealt with the snarling hunger in his gut.

  He pads across the room to the front door, opens it and puts it on the latch. He peers into the darkened communal hallway beyond, his vision peculiarly acute. He peers, and he listens, and he pauses. He smells the air.

  There are two more doors leading off the hallway. One of them houses those two miserable fat old cunts who are always bitching about his music. The other one a cute chick who moved in only a month or two back. She seems nervy, but hasn’t given him any shit. Yet. Bit anorexic? Maybe. Issues? Very probably. Whatever.

  His stomach growls again.

  He makes his decision then, and steals silently across to her flat, his feet bare. He presses his ear against the door and listens. He can hear the TV murmuring in the space beyond. He knocks quietly. A few moments later the door opens a crack and she peeps anxiously out.

  ‘Hey, sorry. Any chance I could borrow a cup of sugar?’

  ‘You serious?’

  He smiles devilishly. ‘Deadly.’

  She actually laughs at that. Which is good, because if she hadn’t he would have barged in and forced the issue. As it is she swings the door open and invites him in. He stays for a few hours, and he shares his new gift with her. And then, later on that same day, they head next door for lunch.

  This is how it goes.

  This is how a plague catches light and starts to smoulder across the yawning maw of the concrete-splintered city, hiding in the shadows from the extinguishing light of the sun.

  And this is how the young seize power from the faltering hands of the old.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SUNBURN AND DEADLIGHT

  1

  He wasn’t always like this.

  There was a time, long ago now, when he was so alive. Not this living dead thing. Not this coiled serpent, spitting and snapping and raging. There was a time when I wasn’t scared of him. When I didn’t hate him. When he was beautiful. And good.

  And I loved him. So much.

  But watching the eruption of blood and carnage, borne on a wave of whispered terrors and misplaced blame – the usual: immigration, the poor, the blacks, the whites, the them, not us – that sweeps the towers, it’s almost impossible to feel anything but hate, and I despair of it all.

  Yet I know that despair is just as useless as hope. Both are simply costumed hesitation, and they are for the weak. But I do hesitate. Am I now weak? Curse this fear that he has stewed over centuries into my marrow. I am free of him, and yet here he is, again, as always, destroying everything I see, everything I am.

  Damn him.

  I have all the cards. I have the boy. I have the knife. I have my anonymity – he doesn’t even know I exist any longer! And yet I lurk and watch and I wait. And for what?

  And so the first days and weeks blur by – the caboose got loose, and smooshed the hoose… I laugh at that. At least I still know how to be an idiot. I laugh again. It’s not funny. Nothing is funny. Was it ever? Oh shut up… for god’s sake…

  At which point, belatedly, a moment of clarity in the orange-painted concrete shadows: go home. Rest. Think. Let it go. Come back at it from a different angle. There is no new information here. No murder here is significantly different to the thousands, millions of others that have been observed over the years. No sundered artery or mournful infant death rattle that hasn’t played out in some variation or other before. No eventual outcome that will ever be final.

  When did I become susceptible to all of these mortal assumptions? When did I forget that there is no destination, no purpose, nothing more than the fall, endless into the deadlight? When did I ever think it mattered? Because it doesn’t. Nothing matters. I simply want this to end. But that’s my want. And even that doesn’t matter. And I’ll get it in the end either way. So just go home.

  It is with the residue of these spiralling ruminations and dancing considerations roiling through my mind that I eventually find myself away from the city and back at the retreat, in my bed, after too many sleepless days, at last drifting off to sleep. Restless, though, the constant grinding of the gears holding stillness at bay, each question sparking the next, all cycling back to the beginning, repeating. I know that something is eluding me. That in the morass of noise, even if there isn’t an answer, there is a thread that might lead to the question that might break the stasis. But what?

  We’ve been here so many times before. It’
s what he does. What he’s always done. How he’s always been. I don’t know why I ever loved him. Why did I love him? I loved him before… before this.

  Before humanity.

  Back at the dawn.

  At the beginning…

  The transition to sleep, and the dream, is in the end seamless. The question was never about me, or the current situation. It was always about him. About then. But what? What is it I need from him?

  I go in search of him in the ancient lands that I prowled with my kind in the days before him. The earth back then was its own mistress – the ground and air, the flora and fauna, all uncontained, cycling, breathing, alive. Not the scarred and macadamised circus beast it has since become. In the dream my kind haunt the periphery, a sketched memory presence, much less than the very present group-self they were in actuality. In the dream they are a summary of a much more complicated truth, a truth I can only barely recall, and even then in just the broadest, vaguest of ways. In the dream I am the I that I have been for so long, as opposed to the all and part of the we that I once was. It has been so, so long since I have even considered that former self that it almost draws me away. But that is not for now. That’s not why I am here. I am here for him. And I find him now where I found him then. In the treeline at the foot of his encampment.

  Perhaps he heard me there, or smelt me. Perhaps he simply sensed me. Some lethal gravitational tug that drew him down from the safety of his kind, with their flinthead spears and stone-head axes, their skins and their fire pits. I don’t know. I never knew. I never asked. He never told. How could we have lived so long together and never explored that first, impossible moment? And yet we never did.

  He joined me in the trees that morning and he had no fear. Just fire in his eyes. Hunger in his belly, and in his loins. And power. A raw, muscular, torsional hunter. Fearless. Reckless. Impatient. Urgent. Mortal. His ironthick blood thundering through veins that itched to hunt, to seize, to devour. And to fuck. No matter what it was that drew him to me, I know that what drew me to him was the animal that he was. The living, breathing, primal beast. How I wanted to touch him. Taste him. And, perhaps for just a moment, to be him. To walk in the shadow of his mortality and relish the inevitable end of it all, both without fear and with ferocious relish. To accelerate into it, through it, away from it, knowing that I would never escape it. How it must have felt to run through those trees with such utter oblivion forever snapping at one’s heels. To live like that, every millisecond of that fleeting life worth infinitely more than all the assurances the certitude of my immortality bestowed upon me.

  So we ran together. We chased and pounced. We fought and we fucked and saw everything through each other’s eyes. And we saw each other. And we loved each other.

  He became me, and I became him.

  In those days we walked in the sun.

  In those days we were the sun.

  But it wasn’t to last. I should have known. But I was consumed, lost in him, in this new, exhilarated, visceral paradigm of being. It was all my fault.

  The screams came to us through the trees before dawn. Terrible, terrified, awful cries.

  In my dream we sit up, as we did that morning, and we move without hesitation as we did then. And I know that in my bed I am weeping, as he did when we reached them, and as I didn’t know how to until much later. In my dream we race back through the trees to his encampment, his people, and we find it as we found it then.

  Not all of them were dead. Just the strongest – skewered and gutted, their faces mutilated into cruel mockeries of laughing terror, propped up like scarecrows in a ghastly theatre of death-as-life. The rest – the aged, the children, the nursing mothers – all bound and ablaze in a pyre at the centre of it all. Weeping and screaming. And throwing curses at him. Blame. Those who understood the concept of blame. And those who didn’t, the children mostly, throwing prayers at him. To be saved. To make the pain stop.

  His mother was one of the ones burning. As were five of his brothers. And a sister. A little one. She had adored him. And he her. He listened to her skin crackle and pop as she died, his name sobbed over and over through blistered and blackening lips.

  And, with dead eyes, from his position on a stick, his father watched him fail to save the family he had damned the moment he had followed me into the trees.

  My kind had made their feelings on our courtship clear.

  I watch him fall to his knees and tear at his hair as the sun rises behind the flames and looks down on him, his vengeful god in all its wrathful glory, transmuting flesh into law.

  I struggle to remember how things went after that, but in my dream it is more than I can bear. It is more than I dare to imagine, what he must have borne.

  It breaks my heart. It is unbearable.

  And then the narrative of the dream diverges from the past. In my dream someone steps from the fire.

  It is the boy. The boy with the dark skin. The one that he lives in now.

  And I know that this is not a dream of him. It is actually him, here, in my dream. My dream terror and horror instantly turn into very real terror. He has found me. I am sure of it. Then the boy speaks. ‘I am alone. He is with the others.’

  ‘How are you here?’

  ‘I’m not sure. When he is with the others, I can look around. There are pathways. Corridors. Rooms. Places. So many of them lead to here. The ones he walks the most. They all circle here. This fire. That sun. The Sun that Burns. That is what he calls it… it’s what we all call it… isn’t it?’

  The boy looks confused and I suspect that he too is dreaming. And while a million questions radiate out from my conviction that our presence here in this place is fact, one monolithic truth assails me. That while I may have made him, he then went on to make us. His impossible, impervious, excruciating guilt and entrapment in this moment, fuelling millennia of guilt and loathing, exiling us all to the shadows, hiding us all from the Sun that Burns. Defining him. Defining us. Making us what we have become.

  ‘Yes child. That is what we call it.’

  The child then looks over his shoulder, eyes wide. ‘He’s coming back.’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Wait for me. I will come for you.’ And at the final moment the right question comes to me, at last: ‘Do any of them ignore him? “Feral rats”? Has he found their leader yet?’

  The boy nods. Yes. But he says nothing. He puts his finger to his lips and his eyes command silence. Then the sun and the pyre and the light detonate and I am thrown from the dream and back into the reality of the darkened room, and my tear-soaked pillow.

  2

  Happens every time.

  Always some that are intransigent. Lawless. They fear no god. Not even me.

  But there are ways. There are always ways.

  Yet it’s so much harder this time, with no corporeal presence to stand before them. No eyes with which to stare them down. No presence to communicate my alpha dominance to their beta insurgence.

  Those first few days I concentrate on drawing in the obedient ones. Mostly the younger ones. A few of the older ones, the ones who will be missed by their parents. Who have never been in trouble before. The dull ones. I have them come to the rat nest where the rat-mother lives. I bring them in and cage them like the vermin they are. The mother retreats into her narcotic refuge and that’s fine. Better that than her mewling and rocking and shaking and all the rest of it. As long as she doesn’t die. I will need her to draw the son – and the fucking knife – home. All in good time. Rats always return to the nest, no matter how much they desire to escape it.

  I had hoped that more would come. Situations like this are always a numbers game, and the numbers this time lean away from me. Tiresome. Not impossible. Just more work – more engagement – than I have the appetite for. There was once a time when I had appetite for nothing else. But no more. The material quality has dropped too far. The high not high enough. Dirty drugs. Dirty lives.

  So
– we have eleven of them here. Plus Danny and Peter. And out there perhaps twenty or thirty. It’s hard to tell exactly. A lot of the connections are weak. Stuttering. And some of them huddle in small packs, making it hard to distinguish the individuals within them – formative group-think always blurs the lines. What they need is a ringleader. But leaders must lead. This is going to get messy before it can be cleared up.

  His name is Ricky. Of the host of them out there, on the loose, paying the barest heed to my will, it is this Ricky that carries the most authority. And only with some of them. But enough of them. A gang. A singular, manipulable mass. Easy enough to turn it into a cause, give it gravity, draw them in. Make them an ‘us’, and set them against a ‘them’. The poverty and hunger and hate gifted them by the world has already done half the work for me.

  Over the first week or so I embed myself with Ricky and influence. His small pack continue to defer to him, and that is good. But their hunger is ferocious. Their aggression even more so. It is not as simple as minimising the collateral damage. If anything I have to exaggerate it, if only momentarily. Burn bright, hard, fast. Out.

  I send them out into the city to indulge their new-found appetites and urges. But I ensure they destroy, every time. No more spread of me into the morass. When they take, they kill, they devour every drop. And I have them target appropriately. The lonely and infirm. The vulnerable. Children are out of bounds – a shame really: every child destroyed at least being a life of pain spared – but the rats seem to care about them. Child-destruction mobilises them, and I’m not ready for their involvement. Not yet. In time I will need them to do what they always do when driven by fear of the other in their midst: segregate and destroy; but too soon and I will only disperse these plague rats of mine that I so need to congeal.

  So a feast, in the beginning. Milk and honey for the faithful. The city spasms.

  And then, as their hunger abates I have Ricky rise up in front of them. Speak to them. I prime him with the dialogue of the persecuted that has been recycled endlessly since the very dawn of them. I make him their prophet. And, their bellies full, their emergent sense of place taking hold, they listen. To him. Not to me. They don’t need to listen to me. They just need to nod their solidarity with him in unison when I suggest it. Raise their fists in common cause upon my whispered insinuations. By the end of the second week the pack is knit, with Ricky at its core. And perhaps less than thirty deaths across the city is the price. Affordable. Not as dear as I’d anticipated.