V 02 - Domino Men, The

by Barnes-Jonathan

  Although it was barely ten A.M., the view from his window was darkening and spotted with black.

  I wonder what he thought when he saw it. I wonder what went through his mind. And I wonder if he knew, even then, that it was already too late for all of us.

  Chapter 24

  What follows is my transcript of a recording which I have been able to retrieve from the remains of the London Eye — a black-box recorder salvaged from the scrap metal of the city’s premier attraction.

  When these events took place, my grandfather had just regained consciousness and the snow had been falling for about ten minutes.

  As Barbara strolled into the light and Dedlock saw what she had clasped in her hands, he felt fear — real, irrefutable, bowel-quaking fear — for the first time in more than a century.

  “Think, my dear,” he hissed, his voice already acquiring that wheedling plausibility which had sent generations of Directorate agents to their extinction. “Don’t do something you might regret.”

  Barbara strolled closer, all smiley now, twinkling, light on her feet, like a party hostess greeting the first of her guests. She positioned a forefinger in front of her lips. “Shh,” she said and called him by a name I’d never heard before.

  In his tank, the old man hissed in anger. “No one’s called me that for a long time.”

  “And why is that, I wonder?”

  “Nobody’s dared.”

  “You prefer Dedlock?” Barbara said airily, still sounding as though she was merely making polite conversation with acquaintances she barely knew. “I always thought these code names made us seem so silly.”

  “You think so? Well, if anyone’s left alive after today, I’ll be sure to look into it.”

  Barbara merely smiled, slightly blankly, like she was handing out canapés.

  The old goat in the tank, that impossibility, that living affront to the laws of science, was playing for time. Even as he spoke, he was wondering if he might not be able to contact someone on the outside, weighing up the odds of his raising the alarm before it was too late. Desperate for a distraction, he clenched his fists and behind him a map of London shimmered into existence, street after street of it smudged with black, eclipsed with the taint of Leviathan. “What are you doing here? Where are the Prefects? Where’s Henry Lamb?”

  When she spoke again, Barbara’s voice was leeched of all emotion. “You know what’s happening. Leviathan is on the loose. All we ever did was stave off the inevitable for a few years. The blink of an eye for a creature like that.”

  “Don’t say that,” Dedlock said. “I never give in. If there’s one thing you can say about my long life, it’s that I’ve never given in. Not once.”

  Barbara yawned. “Your life. Your long, long life. Do you have any idea how tired everyone is of hearing about that? One hundred and seventy-five years of anecdotes and tall tales.”

  “If It hadn’t been for me, this city would be a slave colony by now. You’d have been born into chains.”

  “You know, a lot of stuff’s been coming back to me this morning. There’s a lot of Estella in this strange body that Jasper fashioned for me. In the last few hours, her memories have been flooding back. You asked me what I was doing here…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve come to ask you a question.”

  “Fine time for questions when the world is shattering around us.”

  “Why me? Why did you choose me to imprison Leviathan?” You must have known you were handing me a life sentence.”

  Dedlock swam close to the glass of his tank. “It wasn’t a choice I made lightly. God knows, I’ve had to live with it.”

  “You’ve had to live with it? You?” Barbara blazed in fury, her face lit up with rage, like Moses when he first set eyes upon the golden calf. For an instant, she held what was in her hands high in the air. Then, recognizing her equilibrium, she lowered it. “I’ve seen what you allowed Estella to become. A mute in a basement, pawed at by a greasy little man. Harvested for my sweat.”

  “Blame loverboy for that. It was he who hid you from us. And anyway we didn’t have much choice. You were the only one strong enough to hold the beast in thrall. And things were a little pressing at the time. Tell me, my dear, what would you have done?”

  “I know the real reason you chose me.”

  “Do tell.”

  “You said you loved me once. Do you remember that?”

  An uneasy splash. “Perhaps. I might have experienced a momentary spurt of affection. I might once have believed myself to have feelings—”

  “You never had feelings for me. You certainly never loved me. You wanted to possess me.”

  “What’s the difference?” Those last words emerged as a snarl. Dedlock paused and tried to compose himself, and when he spoke again it was in more collected tones, intended to mollify, to soothe, placate and appease. “But you were so beautiful, my dear.”

  Barbara was unmoved. “Beautiful, yes. And young. And trusting.”

  “But you were attracted to me. That was real. I could taste it.”

  “What could I have possibly wanted with you? You used me. Worse than that, I let myself be used.”

  “I’m not proud of what we did. But — oh! — you were magnificent. You were always at your most beguiling with a blade in your hand.”

  “You’re sick. And getting sicker by the hour. Look what you’ve done. Hijacked the body of this poor girl.”

  Dedlock rallied to his own defense. “That girl should thank us! We’ve made her beautiful! She was only a filing clerk before she came under the influence of the Directorate.”

  “She was happy before!” Barbara shouted, the, checking herself: “I was happy before.”

  “You can’t have been.”

  “Do you understand what your man’s done to me? The alterations he inflicted with his wretched pill?”

  “Mr. Jasper didn’t wish to trouble me with specifics.”

  “I’ll just be he didn’t. So allow me to enlighten you. I don’t sweat anymore. I only need to breathe three times an hour. I’ve tried my best but I no longer eat or drink or shit. And I’ve been neutered. What was between my legs has been fused shut.”

  “Like an angel,” the old man murmured.

  “Like a monster! A parody of a woman!”

  “We need you,” Dedlock said quietly. “The city needs you.”

  Barbara shook her head in pity. “Oh, sweetheart. Have you not realized it yet? The city is lost.”

  She raised the ax which she grasped in her hands high above her head and brought it savagely down against the glass of Dedlock’s tank.

  First, the old man whimpered.

  Next, he leaked fat, tadpole tears which dripped down his cheeks like rain.

  Then, at last, he begged.

  But he did not apologize, nor did he show the merest shred of remorse for his actions, and so in consequence Barbara merely continued her assault. The part of her which was Estella had dreamt for years of this moment, had spent decades in the basement plotting and scheming toward this man’s comeuppance, and so, even in the face of his wailing pleas for pity, she simply struck again, and struck harder, redoubling her efforts as the old man thrashed and squirmed and wailed. Cracks appeared in the glass, turned into fractures and fissures, widened into fault lines until the contents of the tank began to gush forth, geysering into the room. A final blow shattered the tank entirely, evacuating everything into the pod. London washed out with hit, the city sluicing across the floor.

  Barbara winced as Dedlock flailed and flopped upon the ground, helpless as a beached carp, gasping and wheezing for air as the gills on his sides trembled in pitiful failure. He looked up at her pleadingly but there was no clemency in her eyes.

  “This is what they planned,” she said. “This is how the Domino Men wanted you to die.”

  “Would you…” Poor Dedlock, struggling to breathe, drowning on dry land. “Would you believe me if I said I was sorry?”

  Ba
rbara bent over his trembling form, and for the first time since her poisoning at the hands of Mr. Jasper, she seemed to show a filament of compassion. She stroked his hair. She kissed him chastely on the cheek.

  “Too late,” she said as she sat cross-legged beside the body of her tormentor, gazed out of the window at the gathering snowstorm and settled down to watch the end of the world.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t snow. It looked the same, of course. There were superficial similarities and for a second — if you were indoors, say, and looking out at it — you might even have been fooled. But once you’d touched the snow, once you’d held it in your palm and felt it close to your skin — then you wouldn’t be fooled any longer.

  It settled thickly, dense and compacted, on the ground, on rooftops and car hoods, like it wasn’t planning on budging, as though it was here for the long haul. It didn’t seem at all prepared to melt, not even in the center of the city where real snow rarely lasts beyond the hour.

  The only time it did what it was supposed to do was when it landed on human skin. There it melted straightaway, seeping past the epidermis, snuffling down into the pores. Oh yes, it was happy enough then. This stuff — it loved the human body and we were all sponges to it, as blotters are to ink.

  Apart from me, strangely. That stuff slid off my skin in seconds as though it couldn’t find a way in.

  The snow had just begun to fall when the hospital phoned to tell me the news.

  I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to St. Chad’s. On the way, I asked the driver to pull over by an ATM, where I withdrew a couple of hundred pounds. I felt oddly certain I’d be needing it.

  As I passed through the streets, I saw that the panic had already started. People left work early, before it was even lunchtime, and headed wordlessly home to their families. The supermarkets were packed with hysterics stocking up on tinned goods, grabbing armfuls of imperishables, cramming their trolleys with beans and cereal and chunks of pineapple. Everywhere else was shutting up. All across the city, windows were being closed, curtains pulled, doors locked and bolted.

  I experienced symptoms of my own. The earpiece which had been in place ever since Steerforth had put it there, on the night that the Prefects had escaped, suddenly fell out, dropping to the ground like a dead insect, shriveled and useless. On the floor of the taxi, I ground it into slime.

  I took out my mobile and dialed a number. Abbey picked up straightaway and I pictured her beautiful face darkened by a frown of concern.

  “Henry? Darling, are you OK?”

  Even though the world was slipping into nightmare, I felt a pang of pride. It was the first time she’d ever called me by that endearment. By any endearment, come to think of it.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “You?”

  “I’m still in the flat. I didn’t fancy going into work today.”

  “Very wise.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m heading for the hospital. Then I’m coming home.”

  “I’ve got a terrible feeling about all of this. For God’s sake, hurry.”

  In the hospital, there was that same quality of barely suppressed panic — as though an army were approaching and we were all in preparation for a siege. The Machen Ward was empty except for an old man who lay stretched out, his breathing ragged and asthmatic, muttering under his breath. I couldn’t understand exactly what he was saying but it sounded filled with regret, with sadness and self-pity at roads not taken, at the shabby predictability of his choices.

  The usual nurse was standing by the window, watching the sky blot with black. If she heard me enter, she evidently didn’t think it worth a reaction. She must recently have been outside because her shoulders were dappled with black snow.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  Still the woman stared, watching the flakes of black as they curled and pirouetted to earth, shimmying down like goose feathers.

  I tried again. “Hello?”

  She turned around. Her face, formerly hard-lined and rigorous, had softened, the creases in her skin had smoothed out and, endearingly, dimples had materialized upon her cheeks. She seemed dozy but content, sleepily post-coital.

  “I’m looking for my granddad—”

  She smiled. “I know who you’re looking for. And you’re too late. He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, he’s gone? Up until an hour ago, he was in the kind of coma you lot said he’d never come out of.”

  “He discharged himself,” the nurse said blithely, as though comatose septuagenarians had leapt from their beds and bolted for the exit on most days of her working life. “He said he had things to do. But he left you a note. Over there. By the bed.”

  I strode over to the wretched National Health Service cot in which the old bastard had been so long entombed and saw that the nurse was right. There was a message scrawled for me, written on a page ripped from a notepad.

  Dear Henry,

  Go home.

  It was signed in his usual scrawl. Below that, a postscript.

  I am serious. Go home.

  Nothing else. Just that. And to think I was hoping for answers.

  The nurse was speaking again. “You mustn’t worry about him. He’s with friends. I saw them from this window.”

  “Friends? What friends?”

  “Two men in fancy dress. “They were dressed as—”

  I cut her short. “I know what they were dressed as.”

  The woman laughed. There was an undercurrent of naughtiness to it, as though she’d just been unexpectedly tickled somewhere intimate. “You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  Another discomfitingly sensual laugh. “The city is ripe and Leviathan is coming to take it as his own.”

  “What did you say?”

  The door was flung open and someone clattered in behind us. The nurse swiveled away and returned her attention to the gathering dark.

  The new arrival shouted my name and I barely had time to hear the strutting clack of her heels and catch the familiar odor of her perfume before she was upon me and I was enfolded in her fleshy arms.

  “Oh, Henry…”

  “Hello, Mum,” I said.

  She was covered in snow. A thick swathe of the stuff was clinging to her clothes, and although traces of it were still discernible on her hair and eyebrows, the rest must long ago have sunk into her skin.

  “He’s a shit, Henry. I was the latest in a very long line. I was a notch on his bedpost.” She broke off, having finally realized what had happened. “Where is he? Where’s the old bastard?”

  “He’s gone. It would seem he’s defied medical science and made a dash for it.”

  Mom sounded dazed and bewildered. “That can’t be right, can it? That’s not possible.”

  By the window, the nurse turned her head toward us, slowly, as though heavily drugged. “Leviathan is coming.” A look of zealotry burnished her face. “Such a glorious day.”

  For an instant, Mum just stared at her, then she gasped as though she were short of breath, lumbered forward and crashed into a chair, sending it skidding across the floor.

  “Mum? Are you OK?”

  All at once, she seemed terrifyingly old. “I’m OK,” She murmured. “Don’t know what came over me. Just a little turn.”

  “I think we should leave.”

  “So many of them, Henry. All those women. And not just women, either. It’s the only thing he’d talk about. I couldn’t stand it. I—”

  “Let’s go, Mum. I don’t think it’s safe here anymore.”

  “Not safe?” My mother looked afraid. “Why ever isn’t it safe?? Is Gordy here? Is that it?”

  “Come back to the flat. I don’t think you should be on your own.”

  “Then, without warning, my mother was smiling again, a dopey, blissed-out kind of grin. “Have you seen the weather, Henry? Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

  I grunted in reply, took her by the arm and steered her firmly toward t
he door.

  “Leviathan is coming,” Mum said. “Leviathan is coming to earth.”

  “At the sound of these words I felt rancid and sick but I did my best not to show it. “Let’s get out of here,” I said briskly. “Let’s take you home.”

  As we walked from the room, I heard the nurse begin to laugh. An instant later, the old man in the bed joined in. Mum and I left the Machen Ward backed by the stereo laughter of people whose sanity was steaming into the distance and wasn’t even bothering to look back.

  We scurried through the hospital as fast as we could. The beds had emptied out and the patients — even the worst of them, even the most long-term and permanently horizontal — were on their feet, milling in flocks, trailing tubes and splints and bandages. I learnt later that a doctor had returned from a lengthy outdoor cigarette break to open every single window in every single ward, encouraging the black snow to enter in and billow hungrily over all those consigned to the care of St. Chad’s.

  The staff were endeavoring to keep them in line, doing their best to put everything back in its proper place, but the ill, the old and the dying were having none of it and persisted in wriggling free. The scariest thing was that it was becoming hard to tell the professionals from their charges, the keepers from the beasts.

  As we pushed our way past, it felt like I was one of the first to have any idea what was happening, the first to understand the gravity of the situation, like the man who runs to the top deck of the Titanic the moment the lower levels begin to flood only to find the band bickering amongst themselves about what to play next.

  When we reached the exit, Mum didn’t want to come. She seemed to want to stay with the patients, and I had to use some considerable force to rip her out of the door, into the dark and the snow. Behind us, the situation grew worse. I didn’t turn back but I heard scuffling and brawling and wild laughter — the forest-fire spread of insanity.

  The roads were packed, almost completely gridlocked as the population struggled to escape the city. There were horns, raised voices and shaken fists, quarrels and arguments lip-read from behind glass — anger feigned to hide the fizzing surge of panic. For a while, we walked, me half-dragging my mother, as she seemed to luxuriate in the snowfall and shuffled only very reluctantly onward until, miraculously, I saw a taxi drive by, its light still switched on. Warily, the driver stopped for us, but it was only when I brandished a wad of notes that he seemed to even entertain the idea of letting us inside. I gave him everything I had and told him to take us to the flat in Tooting Bec. Mum was still bleating and muttering darkly but I strapped her in and told her, politely and with a lot of love, to shut up and behave herself.