‘Oh that can’t be true! That’s got to be one of those stories!’
‘Perhaps it’s all just a story,’ said the third boy, the quietest of the three, half-hoping this might really be so. ‘Perhaps they don’t do anything but shine.’
‘Well there’s one way to find out, isn’t there?’ said the first boy. ‘So are we going to do this? Or are we just going to sit here and talk?’
~*~
Cold white light shone from shop windows in an empty street in Swindon. It was three in the morning. Nothing was moving and complete silence reigned. A young girl huddled in the doorway of a TV shop. Beneath her black hood, she was inconsequential, almost invisible, in comparison to the sequence of bright images that paraded behind her across the screens: a fighter plane, a reporter, a game show host in a purple tie…
Two police officers appeared on the corner, a man and a woman, and started walking slowly down the street. The girl glanced in their direction, cursed, half stood up, and then gave a gasp, a sharp little gasp as if of pain… and disappeared. The police officers hadn’t even noticed her, but when they reached the TV shop the policewoman stopped and pointed out an image on one of the screens.
‘Look! It’s that escaped puma I was telling you about,’ she said.
They looked in at the brightly-lit images flicking by: a field, a farmer, a big black cat, a reporter in Wellington boots…
There was nothing left of the girl in the black hood, no trace of her at all except for a slight electrical smell. They both noticed, but neither of them knew what it was, and it was too faint to be worthy of comment. Yet the lingering smell awoke in each of them a terrible, overwhelming sense of loss, and at the same time a feeling of vertigo, as if a pit had opened up in front of them and some idiot voice inside their heads was telling them to jump. But, since neither of them had any idea that the feeling was shared between them, they didn’t speak of it – that would just have sounded weird - and they turned from the window and moved on in silence down the street, each one secretly grief-stricken.
‘I sort of like the idea of there being a few dangerous animals on the loose,’ said the policeman, bravely, after a while. ‘Do you know what I mean? It just makes the world seem that little bit more exciting.’
The policewoman nodded.
‘I wish I was a wild animal on the loose,’ she said. ‘I wish I was a puma or something, not just some cop in bloody Swindon.’
‘I know what you mean,’ the policeman said.
They stopped and looked at each other. It was as if they could see each other’s thoughts. And for a moment each of them contemplated seizing hold of the other and engaging in brutal and noisy sex, right there in the middle of the road.
~*~
In Bristol, in Leigh Woods, on the southern side of the Avon Gorge, three young men and three young women stood in a semi-circle around a fire. Facing them were three older men, one a small, almost scholarly figure in glasses and a rumpled suit, one a large fat man with blond hair and soft eyes, the third a thin, cadaverous, vulpine creature, with wiry, supple limbs. Two of the young men were holding a baby goat, its feet tied together. They’d stolen it earlier that day from a petting zoo in Westbury-upon-Trym.
‘Go ahead,’ commanded the scholarly man.
The fat man took the kid from the boys, and pulled back its head to expose the neck. The cadaverous man produced a knife. Its bright blade flashed in the firelight. The goat went into spasm as the knife bit, bucking and writhing and spurting out blood, but the fat man held on tightly and the cadaverous man kept on sawing. On and on he sawed, through windpipe and sinew and bone, until the head was completely severed. Then he impaled it on a spiked stick in front of the fire.
The man in glasses nodded. He dipped two fingers in the blood still flowing from the stump of the animal’s neck and anointed the foreheads of each of the young men and women in turn. He called on Dunner the thunder god and Tew the god of war to give them courage. He called on two-faced Lok to teach them cunning and ruthlessness. He called on big-breasted Frija, and on Freja, who all men desire, to make the men virile and the women fecund. And he called on Dunner’s father, almighty Wod, to choose the women as his shield-maidens and to let the men die fighting, so that they would all come home to him at Valour-hall.
In the darkness beyond the firelight, rain dripped from the trees and, on the far side of the river, a single car with a broken silencer accelerated noisily along the Parkway that ran along the bottom of the gorge.
The fat man opened a large cool-box and passed round cans of beer. The skull-faced man cut pieces of meat from the body of the kid and stuck them on sticks to be scalded in the fire. The meat was still warm, still trembling even, as if the goat’s terror had migrated somehow to every part of its body.
‘Eat and drink,’ said the scholarly man. ‘Eat and drink as you’ll eat and drink one day in Valour-Hall. And then listen for the voices. As soon as you hear them, join hands quickly and wait for the Tree to claim you.’
The young men and the young women ate the meat and drank the beer, talking and laughing loudly, making the weak and over-hearty jokes of people who are trying to cover up their fear.
‘Can you hear it yet?’ asked the fat man after a while.
No, they said, they couldn’t hear anything.
Another car swished down the Parkway towards Avonmouth and the sea.
‘Any voices now?’ asked the skull-faced man after some more time had gone by.
None, they said. The man with the suit smiled thinly.
‘There are, you know,’ he said. ‘You just need to be quiet and listen.’
Reluctantly, they stopped talking and let the silence in. For a moment they just heard the rain, the wind, another unseen car passing on the road on the far side of the gorge. And then the voices came, voices like their own, all around them, talking and laughing as they themselves had been doing only a few moments before.
‘Oh my God, it’s happening!’ cried out one of the women.
‘It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening!’ the voices repeated.
‘Hold hands!’ said a young man. ‘Hold hands quickly!’
‘Hold hands! Quickly quickly quickly.’
‘And now the Tree will take you!’ said the man in the suit.
He stood and watched, and the fat man squatted by the fire and watched, and the cadaverous man leaned on a tree trunk and watched, with the red fire glow in his face, until, all in the same instant, the six young people were gone. The flames guttered and flared as the air rushed into the vacant space.
~*~
Meanwhile, in warmth and electric light, Charles stood in front of the large round frameless mirror that hung over the mantelpiece in his tiny living room. Over the shoulder of his own image looking out at him, he saw the reflection of the back of his head in another mirror on the far side of the room, the back of a head that was itself looking into another mirror and seeing another version of his face. On each side of him still more reflections confronted themselves in still more mirrors, and reflections of mirrors, and reflections of reflections of mirrors, so it was as if he occupied an entire universe consisting only of endless iterations of himself.
And he had a sense of recursion not only in space but also in time. He saw his past selves too, stretching back and back over the years until they reached a small boy alone in a house, his face pressed against the glass, trying to find something new inside the mirror, something that wasn’t simply a copy of the empty grey room and his solitary self.
He had the thought that maybe all the people in the world, all the people in all the worlds, had only ever been a single small solitary being, peering into a maze of mirrors.
Chapter 2
At quarter to nine on Monday morning, Charles parked his car outside a glassy office unit on an industrial estate near the intersection of the two motorways known in that universe, and in many others, as the M4 and the M5. The office unit was called Britannia House, and
the Immigration Service was sandwiched in there between a carrier bag factory and a company that imported mobile phone components from China. His office was open plan. It had a green fitted carpet, white roof tiles and pine desks, forty in all, partitioned off from each other with Perspex screens, each one with its own flat screen monitor and its own desk lamp. In the room as a whole two thirds of the desks were occupied, but in the part of the room where Charles’ own section was accommodated – it was known as the Special Cases Unit – seven out of the eight desks were empty. Only Fran Stevens, a handsome, smartly dressed woman in her late forties, sat typing at her keyboard.
‘Where’s everyone?’ he asked as he put down his briefcase in the cubicle adjoining hers.
‘Hello darling!’ Fran’s tone with Charles was simultaneously maternal and slightly flirtatious. It was a combination he enjoyed. ‘Rees is off on his honeymoon, isn’t he? Ted and Rami are still tied up with that investigation down in Exeter. Mike and James are over at Lockleaze dealing with a new case that came in over the weekend, Judy’s on the way to look at a missing person case in Swindon which looks as if it might be suspicious, and I’m not going to be here for long either because I’ve just been told by our dear leader to pack my bags and drive down to Dorset to deal with a triple disappearance in some posh boarding school. It looks like you’ve got the whole place to yourself.’
‘Well I am not going out today,’ Charles said. ‘Roger has promised me at least two uninterrupted office days to catch up on my paperwork from the past three weeks.’
The two of them glanced across at their boss Roger in his Perspex box beside the water cooler. He was busy on the phone, making conciliatory gestures in the air and pulling regretful facial expressions of the utmost sincerity. It was his characteristic look, his characteristic stance.
‘I must have worked seventy hours at least last week,’ Charles said as he glanced through his e-mails, ‘and the week before. More than that probably.’
‘Well that’s ridiculous.’
‘It is, isn’t it? I went to a party at the weekend and I realised it was the first time I’d really done anything social for months.’
‘It’s terrible the way that slave driver exploits your goodwill,’ Fran said, smiling and looking past Charles’ shoulder. ‘It’s absolutely terrible.’
Roger had come up behind him.
‘Charles, I know how busy you are,’ he said. ‘And I know we’re going to have to do something about our staffing levels, but I’m afraid something’s cropped up and I’m going to have to ask you for your help.’
His face was set to maximum sincerity and regretfulness.
‘Here we go!’ sighed Fran.
‘I’ve just got off the phone with the DSI liaison people,’ Roger said, ‘and they’ve picked up two new cases in the Thurston Meadows Zone. You know I wouldn’t ask you if I had any other option, but I’m afraid I just haven’t got a choice. Could you possibly nip over to Thurston Meadows and do just an initial assessment? I know it’s a pain but it shouldn’t take you too long and with any luck you should be able to get back to your desk by mid-afternoon.’
Fran snorted.
‘Last time you told me I’d be back by mid-afternoon,’ she said, ‘I was out of the office for three weeks solid.’
Roger kept his eyes on Charles.
‘Sorry, Charles, but I just don’t have another alternative.’
Charles sighed. He was genuinely disappointed that his quiet day had been spoiled, but at the same time there was a certain buzz to be had from the endless pressure, the case papers skip-read with a phone propped under his chin, the snatched sandwiches, the car journeys back and forth across the West Country. There was a kind of satisfaction in managing to deal with all this and yet somehow remaining calm and in control. In fact it was something of an addictive drug. His workload was far heavier than Fran’s or anyone else’s but he knew this was because he let it be. He had no home life to protect, no one outside of work to nag him for a share of his time. This had become his life.
‘Okay, give me the papers. But you definitely owe me for this Roger.’
~*~
An hour later he was waiting in his car to go through one of the checkpoints into Thurston Meadows. There were three other drivers ahead of him. In front of the checkpoint was a large sign:
‘Let’s tackle this together!’ Charles repeated to himself, testing out the words, and moving forward to third place in the queue.
He tried it again, this time in a deep, thespian baritone: ‘Let’s tackle this together!’
He was attempting a Jamaican version – ‘Let we tackle dis togeder’ – when the final car in front of him moved off and it was his turn to hand his ID up to the officer on duty.
The plump, middle-aged policeman swiped the card through a reader.
‘Immigration Service, eh?’ he observed with a sly smile. ‘Is this normal immigration work or is this something to do with the… er… unidentified prisoners?’
‘Sorry. No comment,’ Charles said shortly. He hated the cosy indiscreetness that was indulged in by so many of the people he worked with. He hated the little winks and nods, the hints and code words. If a thing was confidential, it was confidential and that was that.
‘Of course,’ said the officer, ‘quite correct. Welcome back to the Meadows, Mr Bowen.’
Charles rolled forward across the Line.
~*~
‘These are not “sink estates”,’ the Secretary of State for Social Inclusion had recently declared in Parliament, ‘and they are not “dreg” estates. This government has spent more than any other government in history on ensuring that the areas designated as Social Inclusion Zones are decent dwelling places for human beings: fellow-citizens in our society who find themselves for whatever reason, outside of the economy…’
Charles hadn’t been here for a while, but he’d visited Thurston Meadows several times before over the years – this was one of the largest of Bristol’s SI Zones – and it was true that this wasn’t on the face of it such an unattractive place. Trees and shrubs screened off homes from the main roads, there were community centres and well-equipped playgrounds, and the modern houses and flats had attractive and playful features like clock-towers and weather-vanes, painted in cheerful nursery colours.
But Charles wasn’t thinking about all that now. He was busy. He was already at work. As he headed towards the administration building he was glancing round with a professional eye, looking out for clues. And it wasn’t long before he spotted one. On a wooden fence surrounding a row of back-yards, a familiar name was painted in white, pink and yellow:
‘DUNNER’
‘Yes!’ he whispered, and a little shiver ran along his spine.
There was more in the same style a few yards further on:
‘FRIJA’
‘WOD’
‘TEW’
And then, in day-glo pink: ‘IGGA’
Two young boys noticed him looking in their direction and grinned at him, defiantly, or so it seemed to him, like pictures he’d seen of children back in the time of the Irish Troubles, grinning at British soldiers who their dads might later kill.
But never mind that. Look what was ahead, just one block further on! The clincher! A branching tree, two storeys high, had been sprayed in gold on the end of a block of flats. Over the image, in blood-red letters a metre high, were daubed the words that he himself had muttered just two nights previously as he looked out over the city from Susan’s back yard, mistakenly thinking he was alone:
‘Endless Worlds!’
He passed what he guessed to be a children’s home of some kind, set back from the road a little way with a DSI sign in front of it reading ‘Asphodel Way Assessment Unit’. A very large Asian woman in jeans and tee-shirt was waddling slowly out from the building to a parked car, followed by a very slight, and startlingly beautiful teenaged girl with straight blonde hair. The girl glanced in his direction. She struck him as quite lovely and quite em
pty. He imagined that, in a few years’ time, men would give anything to try and reach that emptiness inside her – they would tear out their own souls – but they’d always fail.
And then, as he drove on by, a strange conviction suddenly came to him that for her there wouldn’t be ‘a few years’ time’. She wouldn’t be here. The deep well was already opening up in front of her into which, very soon, she would disappear forever.
~*~
In a carpeted airlock inside the entrance, Charles swiped his ID through a reader and waited for clearance.
‘Welcome to Thurston Meadows Central Administration,’ said a recorded female voice: deep, sonorous, and with a faint Caribbean accent. ‘May we remind you that the DSI and its partner agencies are committed to combating racism, sexism, homophobia and discrimination in all its forms and our staff will assertively challenge any use of offensive or discriminatory language.’
The inner door slid open and he was admitted to the Official Visitors’ Reception Area, tastefully decorated with a beige carpet and pale pine furnishings. There was a separate reception area for Zone Residents.
‘Hi, I’m Charles Bowen from the Immigration Service,’ he told the receptionist. ‘I have an appointment with Mrs Richards, the Executive Director.’
He picked up a magazine, turned to ‘24 Sex Tricks that will Wow Your Man in Bed!’ and waited for a secretary to finish whatever job she was in the middle of doing and come down to fetch him. But as it turned out, he hadn’t even got to sex trick number 3 when the Executive Director herself was there to greet him in person. She was brisk, smartly dressed, with elegant short grey hair, and Charles knew perfectly well that someone like her wouldn’t in the normal way of things have even considered making time to come downstairs to meet a minor official like himself.
So this was interesting. It meant she was scared.
‘Mr Bowen? I’m Janet Richards. So good of you to have got here so early.’
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