Tales From Beyond Tomorrow: Volume One

by Catton John Paul

  Bradley's fate was now sealed.

  *

  James Bradley woke with a start, the name of Jesus on his lips. The squalid little bedsit resounded with his dreams, like the echoes of a shout. Where were they, he thought, rising instantly into panic. Were they watching him? Getting ready to torture him again?

  No. That hadn't happened yet.

  He sat up in bed, rubbing his face with his hands. The sheets were moist with a little blood, but not too much. The room, like the whole building, stank of dirty linen and boiled vegetables. The wallpaper was a faded, floral design in lime green and lilac; the ceiling was in the stippled plaster design that might have been pleasant at the time of the last war. There was almost no furniture. Bradley had been pleased at that. A wooden chair, an aging desk, a lamp, a bed, and his Bible.

  Slowly, he dressed. The tattered remnants of his dreams fluttered through his head and he stopped, frequently, to look at his hands and rub the sore point beneath his ribs. It was the same vision as before, but much more vivid. These things were going to happen to him soon. In the future, perhaps tomorrow – perhaps today. As much as he tried, he could not help seeing their faces before him. No hatred. No passion. Just bored professionalism.

  In T-shirt and jeans, he knelt to pray. He asked the Lord why – with so much yet to be done – he had to be taken away. His forearms on the bed, hands clasped, he whispered prayers and psalms, his eyes squeezed shut. His palms and feet itched, as if in response. On a day such as this, his whole body felt as if it could weep.

  Almost an hour later he left his room in the boarding house, wearing his old trainers and anorak, and quietly closed the door behind him. The landlady was not about to let him go, however; making a pretence of going upstairs on an errand, she greeted him on the landing.

  "Oh, James! I thought you'd already gone out. How are you?" Petit, almost sixty years of age but still with a rich head of hair, Mrs. Nelson clutched her navy blue cardigan around her. She had been more understanding than the others, Bradley thought. In return for his services, she had prepared his meals and offered him free board – and also had a reasonable respect for his privacy.

  Was it only a month ago that he'd healed her cataracts?

  "James, there's something I've been meaning to ask you. A close friend of mine. The family moved down from the north a while ago, from Cumbria. Their daughter…well, the poor lamb, she's nearly five, but she'll never be able to walk properly…it's the bones in her legs, you see, they've gone wrong. I'm sure they'll be very generous…"

  "Leave it to me. Give me their address." To be fair, Mrs. Nelson was more discreet than the others. There had been times, after he had moved into a neighborhood, there had been dozens of them waiting in the hallways of the Brutalist concrete blocks and lingering in the cold, windswept parking lots of the estates, begging him with their inadequacies and eyes like whipped dogs.

  "Mrs. Nelson…" I should tell her, he thought. He should tell someone, because this was the day; if he told someone, it wouldn't have been in vain…

  "Just leave my room as it is," Bradley said quietly. "I'll tidy up later."

  He hurried down the stairs, and into the muggy, yellowish air. He pulled out his respirator and fitted it carefully over his nose and mouth. Faith. He must have faith.

  He walked along the avenue of crumbling Woolwich townhouses, their Victorian facades and dirty front steps gray and somber. Before him lay the hulking concrete estates that stank of home-brewed chemicals and hopelessness, and through the smog, across Silvertown and the Royal Victoria Docks, he could make out the blurred shapes of the Olympic City towers, the new crowding out the old, the skeletal construction cranes like specters at the feast. The stark matt-black twin-trapezoid shape of Tandon Communications, and the giant cigarette-lighter that was the Nissan Tower; seventy floors of refracting glass and steel, filled with hotel rooms and designer boutiques that most of London would never be privileged enough to see. The floor-level security complexes were very, very thorough about that.

  He would walk…north. To the river. He realized in this April heat, he didn't need his anorak.

  Above Bradley, on the lampposts, CCTV cameras turned to follow his progress.

  FOUR

  One month later…

  "Brothers! Sisters!" Howard Hopgood threw up his arms before the congregation, and raised his voice to a joyous wail. "I feel like a new man!"

  The cheers and applause of the crowd swelled and dozens of people got to their feet, weeping in near-hysteria. Hopgood stood on the immense stage of the New Festival Hall, Frankfurt, the shepherd before his flock, basking in the hosannas. Around him the cameras swarmed, in the wings, in the orchestra pit, on jibs high in the ceiling, held in the gloved hands of operators who crouched at either side of the stage.

  Several different channels were screening the comeback concert live worldwide. In the huge GBBC TV Outside Broadcast van parked outside the stadium, half a dozen controllers watched their monitors, muttering instructions into their headset mikes, Styrofoam cups of cheap coffee in their hands.

  "Pull back, camera three." Clive's eyes flicked between the monitor and the transcript of Hopgood's speech. "Now track him across the stage. Awesome…"

  "He's thinking he's Lazarus?" one of the technicians said with a vicious snigger.

  "Might as well be. The kickers are lapping to the max." Harriet, her face slick with sunscreen, lit another Marlboro Slim. "Steadyways, camera five. Hold that shot."

  "One of those little jigs on stage would be sick, when he monologues about Satan. Totally proper," chatted Clive. "Heavy influence of all the old style evangelists – Graham, Bakker, you relate? One of my first OBs was Swaggart's last tour before he totalled."

  "Brothers! Sisters!" Hopgood bellowed. "Let me tell you now, Mankind has created marvelous ways to preserve and restore the body. He can cut the tumor from the brain. He can replace your inner organs. He can burn the cancer out of your bones. But oh my children, he can't take the suffering out of your heart! He can't take the badness out of your soul! There is no operation to take away your sin, and whatever Man can do, he can't postpone the inevitable moment, that eternal moment, when we all meet our maker!"

  Hopgood strode towards the lip of the stage, twirling the cordless microphone like a baton. Most of the audience were on their feet, some leaving their seats and crowding toward the stage, holding out their arms.

  "As the Lord said, all flesh is grass; and all its loveliness is like the flowers of the field…but the word of God stands forever! Our bodies will die, but to live eternally, we must all be born again! Born again, in the love of Jesus Christ our Lord!"

  The cheers and screams were at deafening levels.

  "If we have learned our lesson, if we live our lives justly and in accordance to the Scriptures, we will be given the Ressurrection! Let me tell you…" Hopgood now raised his eyes to the cameras near the ceiling. "When I lay in the hospital bed, between life and death, you know what gave me comfort? Let me tell you what gave me comfort. A small, golden cross. Just an ordinary little cross, that my mother gave to me when I was a child. Now let me tell you what that cross means to me! It was on that cross that Jesus…"

  "This is to go on how much longer?" snapped Harriet.

  "He's ad libbing," said Clive, fluttering the script angrily. "I'm trying to get his PA on the mike, but she's unanswering."

  "Swept upways in the rapture," someone said from the back.

  Harrier rubbed her brow. "I need another coffee, out the door."

  "…Contemplation of something as simple and yet complex as that cross brought me back, and gave me the strength to talk to you, here on stage tonight! For Christ is always with us! You've got to open up your hearts and let him in!"

  Hopgood threw up his arms in a triumphant flourish. "Let him in!"

  At his gesture, bright red drops of fluid splashed down upon Hopgood's face. In reflex, he moved to wipe them off, and hesitated. He stared at the palm of the hand, hi
s smile fading. The clamor of the crown faltered at the sudden change of mood. Turning his hands over and over, he stared at the bright red crimson smears upon the palms.

  He frowned, and the lines of his frown were long gashes upon his sweat-glistening brow. He cried out, incoherently, and the crowd cried with him.

  Clive gaped at his monitor in shock. "That is what?"

  "Camera two, get in close-ish," Harriet snapped. "Camera three – camera three, take a red right now! What do you think this is, a home video? Pull focus!"

  "He's hurt."

  "He's bleeding. Totally no fake?"

  "Clueless, darling, but whatever it is, we are live-ing it. Extreme! It's not every day we facial the Nine o'clock News!"

  "Karyn! Karyn!" In his Bayswater condo, Jonathon Prell was on the edge of his seat. "In here– rush!"

  "What's occurring?" She called from the kitchen. "Jesus made a cameo?"

  "Totally legit, Karyn. It worked. It worked to the extreme! We transplanted the skin of a known stigmatic onto Hopgood's body, and he's now Christ-wounding himself! Self-induced extravasation of blood. Totally fascinating!"

  Karyn entered the living room and gazed coolly at the screen. "Either that, or before the grafts took properly he's ruptured them through over-exertion," she said. "Postponing the live appearance was advised."

  "No fake? Look! The blood's coming fullways through his shirt now. Just under his ribs."

  "Not seen, with all those paramedics crowding the stage." Karyn sat down on the arm of the sofa and ruffled Prell's hair. "Is it really mattered? Hopgood's got his audience, and we've got our 30% commission payways."

  Hopgood's anguished face filled the screen in extreme close-up, blood trickling down his cheeks and nose like tears. "So much blood," murmured Prell. "It flows outways, and outways…darling, if it doesn't stop, then what?"

  It was absurd. Like wax running down a mask covering the face of the sky. Sean Radlett had been looking forward to this experience; Barcelona was one of the essential places for an architect to take a holiday, and his colleagues had often asked why he hadn't been before. When he'd suggested Barcelona for a short post-New Year trip, his wife Alison had agreed, intrigued by the city's history. "My anarchist roots are showing," she said with that smile of hers. Their children Jenny and Michael had shown an interest too, once they'd seen photos of the more outrageous of Gaudi's designs.

  "But there's nothing here at all," Sean now muttered to Alison, once they passed through the entrance of the Nativity Façade into the interior of the Sagrada Familia. They stared around at the blank slabs of porphyry, scaffolding arranged like massive grids of tic-tac-toe, with items of currently unused construction equipment undisturbed beneath them.

  "Well, I'd have thought they could have got around to putting a roof on," she said with mild surprise. "Did you see that cement mixer back there? First thing you spot when you come in."

  "Don't tell me that they're trying to finish this thing off with concrete."

  Later on, he thought, he could ask Alison about all this, headaches permitting. He could ask her whether her blessed feng shui was in harmony with a dog's dinner such as Sagrada Familia had turned out to be. We should have brought some of those spare Christmas lights over, the kids would be happy stringing those up between the scaffolds.

  But for heaven's sake – was this actually meant to be a cathedral? Were those humanoid figures carved out of the clay-coloured stone meant to be prophets? Why did they remind Sean so much of corpses being pulled out of mud?

  And then there were the bloody stairs. Alison knew he suffered from fear of heights – after all, how many years had they been married? But it was Alison who wanted to go up in the elevator and have a look around, even though he pointed out that the elevator didn't make return trips and the stairs were the only way down. The stairs; the blasted spiral passage that corkscrewed down into the earth. They looked so fascinating in pictures, with the dimensions coiling into themselves like the layers of a snail's shell; but when you're holding the camera over the drop and everyone can notice how much your hand is shaking, that's different.

  When they had stood on the bridge between two spires, walking slowly from one dark maw of an entrance to another, little Michael was perhaps the most mature member of the group. Alison picked Jenny up, holding her near – dangerously near, in Sean's opinion – the lip of the wall, to peer over the drab cityscape and slate-grey skies that surrounded them, suspended artificially between Earth and a rather dubious Heaven. Sean himself tried to nudge his family step by uncertain step towards the doorway at the end of the bridge, gently easing them past the mob of retired Japanese couples that chattered and guffawed amongst each other in the midst of the desolation. It had been Michael who spun his video camera around the spires nearby and the trees and the Gothic-looking buildings below them, delivering a steady commentary to his father on how the machine actually worked, with the fierce concentration of youth. Thank you Michael, Sean had thought. That's it, you keep trying to keep my mind off things, like thinking of how high up where we are.

  A gleam of silver in the sky to the west; a plane was on its way to Aeroport del Prat. Sean couldn't stop himself shivering. A new year, a new vacation, he thought, but we can't get away from the ghosts of last September. Even if we stay away from the TV and radio and the constant discussions of 9/11, there was always something to jog the memory and trigger the images of the twin towers collapsing.

  After leaving the perplexing structure, slowly walking past the queue of expectant visitors outside the front entrance on the Casa Marina, Sean noted that the children didn't seem to be disappointed. In fact, it seemed that they'd got more out of it than their parents had. Michael, whose job it was to film the holiday proceedings, was playing back scenes from the dark, vaulted interior in the camera's viewfinder, while Jenny shuffled through the garish souvenirs she'd bought with her pocket money.

  "Jenny, how much was that bookmark? Eleven euros must be over five pounds, dear…"

  "But Leah said she wanted something with stained glass on it, Mummy."

  Alison looked back at Radlett and gave an exasperated sigh. Jenny, when she'd been scolded, had the sort of pout that made her look just like her mother, accentuated by the long, straight blond hair and the spectacles that made her look older than her eight years. A few years from now, and that hair might turn the same shade of auburn as her mother, as if with the changing seasons. The same dimples might also come through, tweaking her mouth into impish smiles.

  As they stood now on the edge of the pavement, watching out for the traffic approaching from the wrong direction, Sean absently drew Michael closer to him and tousled his hair. Michael frowned and glared straight ahead at the small park on the other side of the road. He's ten years old, Sean reminded himself, he's growing out of touchy-feely parents. Around them, the January drizzle threatened to materialize as fully formed rain. The air smelt of petrol and the faint tinge of woodsmoke.

  "So what are we going to do about Edwin? He's still not turned up. Maybe he didn't want to come here after all."

  "Let's have a sit down on that bench under the trees, and I'll call his hotel again."

  A call on Sean's rented mobile, to the hotel where their friend was staying – a coach trip of Spanish OAPs had put paid to Edwin's last-minute plans to join them in the same hotel – awarded them, after some confusion, a message from their Stateside friend. Edwin had come down with some kind of stomach bug, and he would join them later. Go to the Cafe Torino, opposite Sagrada Familia, and he would meet them there.

  "But we don't know how long we have to wait. Why Edwin has got this thing about mobiles, I really don't know," Alison commented. "Isn't it somehow un-American not to have a cell phone these days?"

  "Look, I tell you what, I'll wait here for Edwin. You take the kids off to the next port of call, and we'll all meet up later. At least you and I can contact each other."

  "Excuses, darling. You'd take watching paint dry over going
shopping any day, wouldn't you?"

  "We could always go back in that cathedral, and watch concrete dry."

  Sean entered the Cafe Torino, and was shown to a seat by an unsmiling mustached waiter. The small, square table was covered with a cheap blue tablecloth, almost rubbing legs with the other small, square tables that filled the ungainly, L-shaped cafe. Around him, the other customers conducted conversations that bordered on shouting while busily dispatching huge chunks of grilled steak or chicken, pausing now again to do that habitual Catalonian thing of rubbing halves of raw tomato into their helpings of toasted, salted baguette.

  Radlett sipped a cafe latte, pondering an order of smoked ham, and pulled the Sagrada Familia brochures out of his pocket to stop them from getting too creased. He stared at them as he gingerly rubbed his palms. He had scraped his hands raw coming down that staircase, trying to calm his nerves by feeling the contact with something solid. He had gripped what laughably passed for a railing, and pressed the other hand against the stone wall all the way down, in fact barely taking his hand away from the surface, keeping his arms out straight like he was playing aeroplanes or something. His palms tingled continually now; his arms ached at the elbow.

  "It never ends," said a voice at his shoulder, in an obviously Spanish accent.

  Radlett turned his head to the left to see that, yes, the comment had been aimed at him.

  "People always come to see the Cathedral. Sagrada Familia. How many people would come, I think, if the Cathedral were finished. But the construction never ends."

  The speaker was a swarthy, bearded man in his late thirties or early forties, clad in a dark fisherman's sweater beginning to fray at the turtleneck collar. His hair and beard, unlike Radlett's, refused to let any hint of grey peep through and betray his advancing years. He peered at Radlett with thoughtful blue eyes in a full, round face, framed by the beard, returning his gaze after a few seconds to the dish he was spooning his way through. It looked like profiteroles smothered in steaming chocolate sauce.