by Tim Lees
“Made me remember. Not reminded me. I mean, he made me remember. Something when I was young . . .”
“You were there one full minute. Time for not much, I expect.”
“You heard what Shailer thinks. Some kind of fertility god . . .”
“Victims found with trousers down. Plus, penetration sexually in the bodies I have seen. So maybe he is right.”
“I think that’s—kind of a narrow view. I think there’s more to all of it . . .”
“Hm.”
She took a swig of coffee. She was looking past me, a thousand-yard stare.
I said, “You seem preoccupied.”
She pursed her lips, pouted. Then she sighed.
“Fantino,” she said then. “He warns me off from case. Also, I phone him. He talks about his wife.”
“Well—OK . . .”
“Is good thing he is married now, yes? Good thing for him?”
“I hope so. Yeah. Good thing.”
“Good for him, I think. Like I say.” Her eyes stayed on the middle distance. “Not so good for me. You understand?”
Fantino had said it: keep away from airports, trains, and buses. Anywhere with CCTV. A little, whispering anxiety pursued me to the gate, but no one tried to stop me boarding or gave my papers so much as a second glance. Even my brand-new passport raised no eyebrows.
I should have calmed at that. But the anxiety stayed with me, keeping me on edge.
I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to. I hunched down in my plane seat, shut my eyes, tried to ignore the engine roar, the little ping as signs flashed off and on. But nothing worked. Anna watched a movie; in her little headphone-bubble she would give out sudden screams of laughter, and sometimes talk back to the actors in Hungarian. Strangely, and for the first time since I’d known her, she seemed to be enjoying herself.
I was not. My thoughts were circling like a swarm of bees and making less sense all the time. There was the Paddington Station thing—some piece of nonsense, like she’d said, either an urban legend or an all-out fabrication. Yet it stayed with me. That, and Shailer. And what happened in the kitchen. And then Paddington again. And, and . . . And what if it was all much simpler than we’d thought? If everywhere we went, we left a trail, a residue, not just in sacred spots, but everywhere? As if we brought a virus with us, and the virus was called sentience, oozing out of us each place we went, streets and buildings throbbing with remaindered energy, old brickwork veined with castaway emotion, remaking the world, reshaping it into our own image.
Eyes wide, I peered out into nothingness, thoughts spinning, tumbling over one another, feeling the whole world stirring in a blurred facsimile of life.
I am the sharpness where you scratch your itch.
The red, the red. . .
Did we exist before the gods? Were we the ones who sang them into being, built their shrines, their churches? Worshipped them into existence? Drew them out into the world, only to box them up and drain them of their power?
The red, the red, the taste of it.
And bleed for them? Did we do that?
Anna shrieked.
I leapt up in my chair, shot from my reverie, and the seat belt snapped me down again. But she wasn’t hurt. No: she was laughing. Laughing and laughing, shaking, rocking with it, her brief airport malaise a million miles away, as if by simply leaving, she could leave her life behind, and everything that bothered her.
I thought on this awhile.
Below, the clouds were gorgeous, liquid light; but under them it rained, the same way it does every other place on Earth.
CHAPTER 41
BIG COUNTRY
I hired a car for four days. Didn’t think we’d take that long. I kept the reader in the glove compartment. The flask in a pack on the backseat. It’s amazing what they let you take on planes these days, in spite of all the checks.
I didn’t answer the phone.
It kept buzzing, tingling in my pocket.
When I looked at it, I’d clocked up sixteen voice mails and forty-seven texts. I didn’t look at any of them.
I was off the map, and it felt good.
The roads were fine. The land was low, broken by copses and occasional woods, by farmhouses and barns and towering roadside ads for lawyers, dental care, and hair transplants.
“It looks like Hungary,” said Anna presently.
“I was thinking it’s like England. Though . . . I dunno. Not quite.”
“Hungary, if someone tidies up the farm machines. The cars which do not work. Those things. Hungary of the future, maybe.”
“Welcome to the West,” I said.
“You have garbage disposal. Big deal.” She rummaged in her bag. “Stop soon,” she said. “I need more cigarettes.”
We stopped. It was a roadside gas station and diner. We bought coffee, corn dogs, cookies. She bought cigarettes.
The sun was dipping down.
“Think we should stay?” I said. “Like, overnight?”
“No. Go on. Get there.”
“We’ll turn up in the dark. I don’t know what this place is. Or if we’ll even recognize it once we’re there.”
“We recognize. We know.”
The database I’d accessed had just one address in Indiana. Not even a name. Only a code.
GH9.
“Is top-secret base,” she said. “I will know it. I know top-secret base from home.”
“Really?”
“I am joking, Chris. Can you not see?”
She looked at me without even a flicker of a smile.
“Check your e-mail,” she said.
“No.”
“Then read your text. Listen to voice mail. One or other.”
“No.”
“Why not? Perhaps someone has said something. It can be useful.”
“Yes. And if I hear it, I have to answer yes or no. I can’t claim ignorance.”
“Then I will hear messages. Give me phone. Then I will know what is to know.”
“It’s the same, though,” I said. “The same as if I know.”
“You want ignorance?”
“I don’t want anyone trying to warn me off again.”
She sniffed. Perfect contempt.
We passed by fields of corn. We passed by churches. We passed graffiti on a wall that read, “If you lived here, you’d still be nowhere.” We passed through little towns of wooden houses and great stone civic buildings rearing up like temples in the main squares. We passed silos, grain elevators, more cornfields, and barns with tractor pictures cleverly mosaicked into the roof tiles. It was a lovely country as the light softened. I wanted to just stop, stay there, hide out from everyone. I told her so. She contemplated this over another cigarette.
She said, “I am thinking there is part of you still hopes we will find nothing. Part of you hopes this is not anything, not place we want. Is right, yes?”
I didn’t answer for a bit. Then I said, “Why?”
“You said in New York. You said Shailer is correct. Best leave alone, best walk away. Part of you wants this, I think.”
I said, “We’re here as witnesses. That’s what I said.”
“You are afraid of him.”
“No. He’s annoying, he’s dangerous, and I’d like to see him lose his job. I’m not afraid.”
“You are deliberately stupid now, I think.”
“Hm?”
“Not Shailer. Him. Because he kills. Because he looks like you. He is part of you.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I am afraid if I think I am afraid. Thinking is worse than doing, I believe. I have been in places where I am afraid, with people who frighten me very, very much. But afterwards—feeling is good. When they are gone.”
“My job’s not like that
. Not usually.”
“But, when there is problem, and you solve. Good feeling, yes?”
“More like relief. I’m no avenging angel, Anna. I want this over, too, and I suppose I feel responsible, so I want it over even more. But I like nice, safe problems, where there’s no chance people’ll get hurt. Especially me. I’m a coward. That’s the truth. I’ve dealt with bad things in the past, but only ’cause I had to. ’Cause it was easier to deal with them than . . . just to let them go, I suppose.”
“Ha! Same thing. You want this done, like me. You are coward, maybe. No shame. But you must confront this, go through. Because to leave it is more frightening. Leave it, you will always be afraid.”
“Well, I don’t know about that . . .”
“You do,” she said. “You know.”
We drove. For a time we paralleled a freight train that went on and on, car after car, like the Great Wall of China. We passed pylons. We passed factories. The light began to fade. We lost track of where we were; not on the map, but mentally. My mind was wandering. There was a point where I imagined I was on the road to Moira’s. Perhaps something in the landscape triggered it, something that for one brief moment seemed familiar. I expected to see that big house on the hill that marked the start of the village, and then around the corner, past the church. For a moment, it was vivid. Really vivid.
I switched the sat nav on. The roads grew empty, and the fields grew dark around us. Soon there was only black on either side; we drove a strip through nothing. The little spark of houses here and there looked as far off as stars in the void. At intervals a gas station or diner would sail by, like a liner in the night, glowing and briefly huge.
“It must be somewhere here.”
“It will not look like Registry. More like—farm building, or—or underground. Secret bunker. Disguised as factory, or power station. It will fit with landscape. No one will suspect.”
“Military base,” I said.
“Yes. Yes.”
“Church.”
“Maybe. Church where no one goes? Maybe not.”
It was empty country here. The sun was gone, the dark closed over us, on every side. No more cars, no more traffic. Please turn right in twenty yards . . . in fifteen yards . . . in ten . . . The sat nav was annoyingly polite.
I slowed right down. I swung the wheel. Caught something in the headlights. And I stopped.
There was a barrier across the road.
Not just that: two or three other vehicles had fetched up there, as well; a big old camper van, a pickup truck, and a little Toyota farther back, almost hidden in the trees. I sat there for a long while. There was nobody about. The other cars were empty. When I got out, I was surprised how warm the air still was. A summer’s night, buzzing with insects.
I went over to the barrier. Two metal posts buried in the concrete, a bar across, the kind that you can raise, but when I shoved at it, it wouldn’t budge. The paint was coming off it. I felt at the supporting post, searching for a lock, a switch, a clip.
Anna joined me.
“It’s fucking locked.”
“Is old,” said Anna. “Many years. We are in right place?”
“Must be another entrance.”
I checked the ground to either side, thinking we might drive around, but the trees grew thickly, too close to the road.
“Looks like it’s not just us got stuck here,” I said.
She said, “Feels wrong. Wrong entrance. How far to go?”
“A mile. Maybe less.”
“We get in car, we drive. Or we go by foot. By foot, I think, is best.”
“Why?”
“Secret bunker. We do not drive up. We come like spies, unseen and silent. Like spies, we walk, we look, then back to car, perhaps find better entrance. No one sees that we are here, yes?”
“If you want.”
“And we watch—watch everything, you understand?”
“For what?”
“Guards. Secret entrance. All this.” She said, “I am joking when I tell you I know secret bunker. But I am not all joking. There are some things that I do know. You will follow me?”
We spoke in whispers when we spoke at all. We were jumpy. Once a big bird—an owl, perhaps—took flight out of a nearby tree, and we ducked as if we’d been buzzed by a plane. She laughed nervously and lit a cigarette.
I nodded to the little glowing flame. “Isn’t that a giveaway?”
“No,” she said. “Is a necessity.”
A high mesh fence ran beside the road, razor wire on top. Beyond it, everything was dark. But on the other side, between the trees, we started to see lights—not enough to mark a town, or even a large building, just sparks, smudges . . . She stopped, held up her hand.
“Listen.”
The trees were thick with the drone of insects.
“What?”
But in a few more yards, I heard it, too.
A murmur, hissing like surf. Voices. Shouts. And . . . singing, and the throb of a drum.
“Workers’ festival,” she said.
“Out here . . . ?”
Lights flicked between the trees. Glimmered in the dark. The woods opened abruptly on a landscape like a frozen sea.
Tents.
Hundreds of tents.
They stretched before us, wave on wave, higgledy-piggledy; some hung with lanterns, some with little fires beside them, some glowing from within. Here, a family sat for their evening meal. Dancers wafted lazily around a campfire. Further off, a group of four or five struggled to erect what might have been a flagpole.
Anna sniffed.
“Secret bunker? Secret facility? Is music festival, I think. Sat nav is wrong, Chris. We must reset, go back . . .”
Laughter. Talking. Voices everywhere.
And somewhere in the background, to the rhythm of a disco beat, the lonely and persistent wail of prayer.
CHAPTER 42
HAYES
“I saw it.” He helped himself to Anna’s cigarettes. “I saw it in a vision, that’s the truth.” He said his name was Hayes. His hair was gray, crew-cut, and he’d a square, military jaw. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt. He didn’t seem particularly crazy if you didn’t listen to him. “I’ve had visions all my life. Oh yes I have. I saw the bloodshed in the Middle East. I saw it and I knew that I would lose a son to it, and, damn it, that’s the way it went, worst luck. And I saw the banks collapse out of their own greed and the start of the fall of the United States itself. And at the same time, I saw—I saw this.” He gestured with an open hand. “This place, right here.”
“In vision,” Anna said.
“Uh-huh. That’s right.”
“Television,” she said then.
“No, ma’am.” He spoke patiently, missing or ignoring any irony. “A vision. Like Ezekiel: ‘And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a flashin’ fire, surrounded by a radiance, and at the center of it, a gleam as of amber; also at the center were the figures of four livin’ creatures. And this was their appearance: they each had the appearance of a man, and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings, and their feet were’—yadda yadda yadda. And their appearance was like burnin’ coals of fire. See? Burnin’ coals of fire. And like the appearance of lamps. That’s right.” He shut his eyes, hunched his shoulders; then he sighed. “There are forces in this country, ma’am. Forces massing, and they don’t talk about God or Satan ’cause those ain’t those terms they use for it, this day an’ age, but anythin’ you call it, it’s the same, deep down, still the same. An’ here, we’re standin’ at—I guess you’d say it was a fulcrum, yeah? That’s why we’re here. And—ah.” He cocked his head. “There now. There.”
“Where?” said Anna.
He inhaled on the cigarette, and the tip shone like a s
tar.
“Listen!”
He held a finger up. It was as if a hush had fallen on the camp. There was music still, voices . . . Something had changed.
The insects were silent. No crickets, no mosquitoes. Then—
I felt it more than heard it. Deep down in the ground beneath me, a trembling, iron grinding against iron. I felt it in my spine, the bones of my vertebrae grating on each other. I felt it in the base of my skull, like someone ramming a screwdriver into the back of my neck. At once the voices stopped. The whole camp fell silent.
And the trees began to roar.
I hunched down. I put my hands over my head. It was like thunder.But it wasn’t the trees. It was the birds, all taking flight, hundreds and hundreds of them, shaken from their perches, their wings like a whirlwind and their cries filling the sky.
Our host stubbed out his cigarette.
“That’s it,” he said. “Every five, six hours, there it goes.”
“And what is that?” said Anna.
“Oh, I dunno. Hammer of God, could be. Hammer of God upon the forge of Satan. ’Swhat I sometimes think. But I don’t know for sure.” He leaned close, confidingly. “Still waitin’ for a vision about that one, see?”
That night we slept just where we sat. I put my back against a tree. Soon Anna curled up, and I laid my jacket over her. She leaned her head against my chest. It seemed right that she should get some sleep. And when she woke, I thought, I’d take a turn. But I dozed off anyway, and the next thing I knew I was struggling up out of a deep, deep slumber, sure there was some urgent need for it, some danger nearby.
The tent city was gray in the morning light. There was still a sound of prayers being said, a long, low chanting, seemingly incongruous for the time of day. I wiped away the spit that dribbled down my chin. My limbs were stiff. Anna still lay across me, snoring gently, like the purr of a gigantic cat.
The man in the Hawaiian shirt sat opposite us, just as I’d last seen him, tailor-fashion, and his back was ramrod straight. The growing light brought soft, sky blue into his eyes, and when he saw I was awake the faintest welcome smile touched his lips.