Days

by James Lovegrove

  Gordon groans again, stirring. His eyes flutter open. He blinks up at her. Focusing on her face, he braves a smile.

  “Not dead then?” he croaks.

  “Not yet,” Linda says. “But when we get back home, I’m going to kill you.”

  It takes him a moment or two to realise that she is joking.

  37

  Christ on the Cross: during the Crucifixion, Christ spoke seven times.

  2.24 p.m.

  THERE IS NO pain.

  At first, it is a simple statement of fact. Despite the tennis-ball-sized exit cavity in his abdomen, all Edgar can feel down there is an awful, unnatural coldness, a freezing/burning sensation like ice. His breathing is constricted, but miracle of miracles, there is no pain.

  There is no pain. And as he pushes the trolley from Clocks into Stationery, and from Stationery into Newspapers & Periodicals, and as the pins-and-needles coldness creeps upwards into his chest, Edgar tries not to think about the damage inside him, how much of him may have been ruined beyond repair. He tries to ignore the dark stain slicking over the waistband of his trousers down towards his crotch. Above all, he tries to ignore the hole, with its fringe of gore and shredded shirt, but it is hard to resist looking at it. That is him. That is his torn flesh. That bulge of something yellow-pink and glistening peeking out of the wound is one of his internal organs, which he was never supposed to see.

  He is faintly aware of people ahead of him stepping aside, looking perplexed then horrified. He is faintly aware of gasps and little screams arising around him as he goes. But the main thing is that there is no pain.

  And then suddenly there is pain, and Edgar staggers under the sheer stupefying wrongness of it. It feels as though someone has reached inside him and twisted his guts around their fist. His feet become tangled. He nearly falls, but recovers, saved by his grip on the trolley push-bar. Just one department to cross. One department between him and Books. A couple of hundred metres. He can make it.

  There is no pain. Now it becomes a silent incantation, to be repeated by the mouth of the mind through gritted mental teeth. There is no pain, there is no pain. And although there is pain – fearsome pain, sheets and sheets of it sweeping through him like wind-gusted rain – the chant sees to it that there is no pain where it counts: in his head, in the brain that drives the body. For as long as his brain insists that there is no pain, his body will not succumb.

  And there, up ahead, framed in the connecting passageway to Books – there she is. Waiting for him, her arms folded across her chest. Scanning this way, scanning that. Kurt and Oscar beside her. She knew which direction he could be coming from. Of course she did. She is Miss Dalloway.

  Oscar spots him first, and points him out to the others.

  there is no pain there is no pain there is no pain

  And Edgar can already hear the compliments that Miss Dalloway is going to pour over him like honey.

  there is no pain

  And then he sees Oscar’s jowls sag and his double chin become quadruple, and Oscar says something to Miss Dalloway, and Miss Dalloway’s bony hands fly to her mouth.

  thereisnopain

  And Edgar is no longer breathing. He is hiccuping air in, in, in, but none of it seems to be reaching his lungs. He covers the last dozen metres through a vacuum, through silence, through weightlessness, his legs spasming in an autonomous approximation of running.

  There is pain. There is all the agony in the world, and it is concentrated inside him, a vast, white-hot furnace in his belly.

  “I made it,” he wants to tell Miss Dalloway, but there is too much pain.

  His hands slip from the push-bar. His legs cycle through empty space. The carpet looms like a wall. Newspapers & Periodicals revolves around him, as though he has become the still centre of the turning universe. He is lying on the floor, staring up into striplights. Miss Dalloway is near. She takes hold of his hand, and her face appears above him haloed with light. She is by far the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Her usually stern expression has melted into one of such sublime, supreme tenderness that he is convinced that she has been transfigured, that she has become a saint. No, not a saint. An angel. She looks how an angel must look to a soul in hell.

  He hears the sound of every book he has ever read closing.

  And then there really is no pain.

  2.25 p.m.

  MISS DALLOWAY LETS Edgar’s limp hand fall gently to the floor. With the tips of her thumb and index finger, she draws his eyelids down over his empty eyes. With the same index finger she touches his lips, as though to stop any recriminations he might have for her, even in death. Softly shaking her head, she gets to her feet, standing upright but a few sorrow-stooped centimetres short of her full height.

  “Who did this?” Kurt spits out angrily. “Was it the Technoids? Say the word and we’ll get them, Miss Dalloway. We’ll make them pay.”

  “Have no fear, Kurt, the hour of vengeance is at hand,” Miss Dalloway replies, her voice as controlled as a laser beam. “Now, quickly. Go and round up the others. Divide yourselves up into four teams and post one team at each entrance. No one is to enter the department, under any circumstances. Is that clear? No one.”

  “Clear,” says Kurt. “But what–”

  “Just do as I tell you.”

  Kurt turns and hurries back into the department.

  “What is going on, Miss Dalloway?” Oscar asks, looking down in trembling-lipped disbelief at Edgar’s body.

  “The end, Oscar. The bitter end.”

  Miss Dalloway strides over to where the trolley coasted to a halt, propelled by Edgar’s dying fall, a metre inside the connecting passageway. She inventories the contents quickly. Wire and clock, present and correct. Thou good and faithful servant.

  A sob clutches her throat. She forces it down with a hard swallow, takes hold of the trolley push-bar, and orders Oscar to follow her.

  2.25 p.m.

  HANDS HELD OUT in front of him at chest height to fend off against obstacles, Frank lurches through Stationery, looking like a mime pretending to be drunk, or a drunkard attempting mime.

  The department, to his inflamed, streaming eyes, is a kaleidoscope of distorted shapes and smeary colours. It is hard to tell what is near and what is far, what is sharp-edged and what is soft, what is living and what is inanimate. The Eye helps out with a constant running commentary, alternately coaxing and warning – “A row of filing cabinets to your left, that’s it, a customer a few metres ahead, there, that’s good, a ninety-degree turn to the right coming up, you’re doing good, Mr Hubble, you’re doing fine...” – but nonetheless the pursuit of the perpetrator has become a tortuous succession of stops and starts, bumps and knocks, angles and trajectories, corners and rebounds. At one point the screen-jockey refers to Frank as a human pinball in the world’s largest pinball machine, and even Frank cannot be annoyed by the flippancy, because that is exactly how it feels.

  Still he perseveres, still he staggers on, with every banged elbow, every barked shin, his determination to catch his quarry increasing.

  2.28 p.m.

  HER MOVEMENTS URGENT yet precise, hurried yet efficient, Miss Dalloway finishes assembling the bomb. Cutting off four lengths of wire from the spool, she strips a centimetre of the insulating rubber from the end of each with her teeth, then uses two of the lengths to join the contacts of the flashbulb to the stem of one of the alarm clock’s bells and to the striking hammer. Holding the detonator by these wires, she lowers it into the mouth of the keg until the Roman candle is just above the fertiliser-and-paraffin mixture, firing end pointing downwards. Then she screws the cap of the keg back on so that the wires secure the detonator in place.

  The alarm clock is fully wound up and telling the correct time. Miss Dalloway is pleased to note that the Clocks Department’s dedication to temporal accuracy remains undiminished. It is nearly half-past two now. A quarter of an hour should do it. She rotates the alarm-setting control until the alarm hand is pointing to th
e third of the three increments between II and III. Then she tapes the clock tightly to the top of the keg, on its back so that the alarm-setting control cannot be readjusted. The clock ticks softly and steadily.

  Now she takes the remaining two lengths of wire and uses them to link the battery to the striking hammer and the bell stem.

  The bomb is primed. The final minutes of her life are numbered.

  “Oscar?”

  Oscar comes to attention. “Miss Dalloway?”

  Unable to resist the urge to hug him, she wraps her arms around his shoulders. Startled at first, Oscar quickly succumbs to the unwarranted gesture of affection, and reciprocates, slipping his good arm around his head of department’s narrow waist. She presses his fleshy cheek to the sharp ridge of her collarbone. Oscar breathes in the cool, fresh-laundered smell of her jumper.

  “Oh, Oscar,” Miss Dalloway says. “You’ve always been my favourite. You know that, don’t you?”

  Oscar shudders with delight from head to toe.

  “And I’ve always hoped it’ll be you who takes over the reins when the time comes for me to step down.”

  Oscar thinks he is about to faint with joy.

  “Will you do that for me, Oscar? Will you look after my department? Make sure the brothers never try to close it down? Resist them to your last breath?”

  Oscar can barely choke out his assent. “Of course, Miss Dalloway. Of course.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  He tries to raise his head to ask a question, but she simply presses him harder to her chest and starts stroking his hair. If he looks into her eyes, he may realise what her real intentions are. He may try to stop her, talk her out of it.

  “I’ve put in a memo to the brothers exonerating you from all involvement in what I’m about to do, and recommending you as my replacement,” she says. “Whether those philistines pay attention is anyone’s guess, but hope springs eternal.”

  “I’ll do the very best I can, Miss Dalloway. I’ll do you proud. But of course, you’ll always be just a phone-call away, should I need advice. I mean, I can never hope to manage everything by myself, not without your help. I won’t know where to start.”

  Miss Dalloway closes her eyes. No tears. She vowed to herself. No tears.

  “You will, Oscar,” she says. “You will.”

  2.31 p.m.

  OK, YOU’RE NEARLY there. It’s, I’d say twenty metres ahead. You should be able to see it.

  Peering out through his swollen eyelids, Frank can just about make out the rectangular opening of the connecting passageway that joins Newspapers & Periodicals to Books, and through it, rows of bookcases. He can also see, in front of the connecting passageway, a small crowd – bloblike bodies on spindly legs, human-shaped silhouettes merging and overlapping. They are gathered around what seems to be a pile of rags, but as Frank comes closer the pile of rags glimmers into focus and he sees that it is a supine body, and as he comes closer still he recognises, by the clothing more than anything, the perpetrator. He can discern a wound in the young man’s stomach, a dark comet whose tail streaks the front of his shirt and trousers. Frank knows a bullet wound when sees one.

  That’s him, isn’t it? says the screen-jockey. That’s the one we’ve been chasing.

  That’s him, Frank confirms.

  Then you must have...

  Yes.

  It was, Frank supposes, inevitable, although he had hoped that his policy of using his gun only as a last resort would permanently postpone the day. The irony is, another couple of hours and he would have got through a thirty-three-year career without taking a life. Obviously it was not to be, and there is nothing to be gained by dwelling on might-haves and if-onlys.

  More to the point, the gun fired when Frank collided with the customer in Clocks, so the perpetrator’s death can hardly be considered his fault. He is sorry that the young man is dead. He is sorry that anyone has to die violently. But there you go. Perhaps he ought to feel more than a mild sense of regret, and perhaps he will, later, but right now he is simply relieved that the chase is over.

  Mr Hubble? says the Eye. Mr Bloom says to tell you, “Well done.”

  Tell Mr Bloom that I still haven’t changed my mind.

  About what?

  He’ll know what I mean.

  The screen-jockey relays the comment. He says there’s still two and a half hours to go till closing time.

  Frank had a feeling the answer would be something like that. Well, we’ll see. He takes out the handkerchief the woman gave him and has another dab at his face. The excruciating burn of the pepper spray is beginning to subside, to be replaced by an unpleasant but more tolerable itching. He blinks around. The world is foggy and speckled, but getting clearer. Eye, I’m going to check the fellow’s ID. In the meantime, you have a look for that trolley.

  Frank approaches the body, slipping through a gap in the crowd of onlookers. Kneeling down, he takes out his Sphinx and scans its infra-red eye over the perpetrator’s ID-badge barcode. Barely noticing him, the crowd continue to whisper and coo over the corpse.

  A message appears on the Sphinx’s screen:

  WORKING...

  Then a picture appears of a young man with a huge forehead that bulges beneath a crop of wavy black hair and overshadows a pair of sunken, mournful eyes – eyes that seem to have known long in advance of the brutal, miserable fate awaiting their owner.

  Even with his vision blurred, Frank can tell that the living face on the screen matches the dead face in front of him. He hits a key, and the Sphinx lists the employee’s name (Edgar Davenport, as on the badge), number, account status (Silver, and in good order), and the name of the department in which he works.

  Frank frowns at the screen, then glances up at the connecting passageway leading to Books, his frown deepening. Eye? Do you happen to know if one of the brothers came down to sort out the Books/Computers dispute this morning?

  I’ve no idea. I’ll ask Mr Bloom.

  A brief conversation ensues off-mic with Mr Bloom, and then the screen-jockey comes back with the reply. He says the arbitration went ahead. One of the guards detailed to escort Master Sonny told him that Master Sonny said that the Computers Department should keep the extra floorspace. And he says why do you ask?

  The perpetrator’s a Bookworm.

  You think there’s a connection?

  I’m not sure, says Frank, switching off and pocketing his Sphinx.

  Frank knows how notoriously militant the Head of Books, Rebecca Dalloway, is, and he knows, too, that it is almost entirely her fault that the territorial dispute between her department and Computers has dragged on so long and been so acrimonious. Surely, then, it is more than a coincidence that, on the same day that the dispute is resolved (and not in the Books Department’s favour), a Bookworm goes shopping with someone else’s card. And it is hard to believe that a Bookworm would do something like that if his head of department had not instructed him to. A Bookworm doesn’t sneeze without seeking Miss Dalloway’s permission first.

  She is up to something. But what?

  Eye? Run a sweep of Books. I’m betting that the trolley’s in there somewhere.

  2.35 p.m.

  HUNT CALLS UP feeds from the security cameras in the Books Department. One by one the images appear on successive screens: unfrequented alleyways of bookshelves, large tables slabbed with books, the sales counters.

  Mr Bloom peers at the screens. Everything appears to be normal, except... “The sales counters. No one’s staffing the sales counters. Where are they all?”

  “There. Look.” Hunt points to a screen showing one of the entrances to the department, just inside which a group of Bookworms are loitering. “And there.” Another entrance, and another group of Bookworms, all of them carrying thick hardbacks.

  “What are they all standing there for?”

  “Beats me. They look like they’re waiting for someone.”

  As Hunt and Mr Bloom watch, a customer arrives. The Bookworms ga
ther round him, words are exchanged, and the customer, with a puzzled and somewhat irritable gesture, about-faces and walks out again.

  “They’re turning people away,” says Mr Bloom, running a hand over the top of his scalp as though temporarily forgetting that, apart from his foretuft, there is no hair up there. “Why the hell are they turning people away?”

  “Sir?” Hunt points at the screen showing the huge, crescent-shaped stack of books around Miss Dalloway’s desk. “Activity.”

  From behind the stack of books a figure has emerged. The long, bony physique is unmistakably that of Miss Dalloway, and in front of her she is pushing a trolley in which sits a squat grey cylindrical object.

  “What’s that?” says Mr Bloom. “Get a close-up of that.”

  Hunt’s fingers are already at work. The image on the screen expands, blurs, comes into focus again. He toggles the trolley into shot, keeping it there by means of delicate taps on the joystick.

  “Some kind of barrel?” he suggests.

  “Yes, but what’s that on top of it?”

  “Looks to me like a clock.”

  “Coming out of it – are those wires?”

  “Maybe strings.”

  “No, see the way they hang? Definitely wires.”

  Hunt looks at Mr Bloom, Mr Bloom looks at Hunt, each seeing on the other’s face the same expression of disbelief that he knows must be on his own.

  “It can’t be,” says Hunt, in stilled, chilled tones. “It just fucking can’t be.”