Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  “Keep what in the dark?”

  “Don’t be a tit. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Here,” he adds reprovingly, as Mr. Ordinary tries to get up, “no call for that, is there? Don’t be giving me force.” Force is a bad thing. The coffin man reaches down and does something at the open mess which used to house an ear. Mr. Ordinary doubles over and vomits, drily. “So what’s a Hakote, and what do they write about, that this bugger cares so much about it?”

  Night Market instinct: evade. Joe shrugs. “Search me.”

  The coffin man stares, and then starts to laugh. He can barely keep upright, he is laughing so hard.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You are! Bloody hell. Ohhh, bloody hell, that’s too much … You’ve got no more real clue what’s going on than I have, do you? And they knew it, too, but they were giving you the full works, and the more you didn’t tell them the more they were scared you were a real hard case, the more they did, the more you didn’t know … bloody marvellous!”

  Joe stifles the urge to tell the other man that actually, yes, he does indeed know what’s going on and now he knows the one thing these bastards don’t. It’s like being at school. Instead of boasting, he laughs, too.

  The coffin man leans on the desk and knocks over a stack of reference books, which is even funnier, and it appears that Mr. Ordinary is the only person in the room who is not having a good time. When the coffin man notices this, he sobers a bit.

  “Where’s the way out? Come on, now.”

  “Down! Down to the basement!”

  “I don’t think so. That’s where they had me.”

  “It’s a fake! Everything’s upside down! When you go to the basement the lift goes up! The mechanism’s so smooth you can’t tell. It makes everyone sick unless they know! The way out is down there!”

  The coffin man grins at Joe.

  “That’s got the ring of truth in it, for sure. Off you go, then.”

  “Are you coming?”

  The other man glances at him.

  “You really don’t want me to, matey. I’m unpopular out there. I’m not a bad man, as it happens, though I will confess I’m pretty aggravated right about now. I’m of a mind to share my displeasure.” He leans down and does something quick and disgusting to Mr. Ordinary, who makes a dreadful little wheezing noise which suggests he may have torn something and now cannot scream any more. Joe steps back a pace. “Ah. You’re getting it now, aren’t you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “No one. Oh, sure, I was somebody, once. I liked Kenny Lonergan’s plays and Eartha Kitt’s music. I liked … orange juice. Fresh, from the sandwich place at the end of my road. Weekly treat, that was. I was that bloke. Who knows what I am now?”

  “You’re a patient.”

  “That, too. Mind you, that doesn’t make me bad, now, does it?”

  Mr. Ordinary plunges one hand abruptly into his pocket and jams something the size of a mobile telephone sharply against the coffin man’s leg. There’s a strange, sharp noise like a robot blowing a kiss. The coffin man jerks, and smiles.

  “There now,” he says, stuttering slightly, “that’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it?” He rolls his head on his neck and taps his teeth together. Even from this distance, Joe can feel static on his skin. Mr. Ordinary presses the taser again. The coffin man jolts a bit, then steadies.

  “It’s all about p-purpose,” he says. “If you’ve got purpose and you just … nghh … you just hold onto it, these things are a b-b-blast. Like someone ss-s-scratching your back for you, from the inside … ggdah. Still, you can have too much of a good thing, ey?” He leans down and slaps the taser away. There’s a burn on his leg, twin black marks of charred skin.

  “You’ve bollocksed my sock,” the coffin man says, and sticks his thumb sharply into Mr. Ordinary’s eye. Joe can feel his lips coming back around the question, as if he’s going to throw up.

  “Who are you?” But he knows, now, or thinks he does.

  “My name’s Parry,” the coffin man says. “You better call me Vaughn. My friends all do. I think it’s better off we’re friends, you and me.”

  Fuck, yes.

  “Tell you what,” Vaughn Parry says, “I think I was supposed to do for you. I think that was the idea. That other bloke, Ted … they gave him to me to scare him. ‘One for you, Vaughn,’ and all that crap. Ought to know better, I didn’t want anything to do with him, so they had to do it themselves.

  “I think I was going to be your last stop, too, before they put you in the ground. Your destiny, as it were. Think about that for a sec.” Parry turns back to look at Mr. Ordinary again, and the man whimpers. “D’you believe in destiny? Seems to me there’s a thing about destiny. If there’s destiny, then choices don’t mean anything, do they? So I do something bad—” He does, and there’s a hard, flat scream, cut off in a fit of coughing. Mr. Ordinary is vomiting. “If I do something bad, I didn’t choose it. Or rather, I was always going to choose it, never was any way I could be me and not choose it, which amounts to the same thing. So I’m a monster from the day I die all the way back to when I’m born. It’s all one, isn’t it? But the question is, where am I in all of it? If I can’t choose anything, am I just watching? Am I there at all? That’s destiny, for you.” He shrugs. “Best you piss off now, young ’un,” he says, without looking back. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain,” he snarls at Mr. Ordinary sharply, as if this is all his fault, “and I’m going to extend myself a bit.”

  Joe hesitates. Part of him has a natural instinct to stay and assist Mr. Ordinary. Mr. Ordinary has done very horrible things and is clearly a total bastard, but no one deserves what is happening to him. Joe would under other circumstances cheerfully give him a clean kick in the crotch and, say, break his jaw. This seems an appropriate iteration of his personal feelings. But Vaughn Parry, according to popular rumour and the opinion of Billy Friend, is not really a human being. He is something entirely different wearing a sack made of skin and gloating. There is some commonality of human experience, however attenuated, between Joe and Mr. Ordinary. Joe does not wish to feel any such thing with Vaughn Parry, who hears the Screaming and plucks off ears by way of diverting himself.

  And yet, he does. He feels a fierce kinship for him, for his élan, his acquaintanceship with horror. Parry inhabits this world—this new world of professional torture and dark secrets for which a man may be killed—far more elegantly than does Joe the Clockmaker. It makes sense to him. He’s at home in it, in a way Joe absolutely is not. Vaughn Parry belongs here, and is unafraid. That is something Joe greatly envies. In one way or another, he has been afraid his entire life—until a few hours ago, when he found clarity and broke Mr. Ordinary’s nose.

  He is afraid again now. He is terribly afraid of Vaughn Parry. It’s reasonable. Parry is the great bogeyman of the moment, a suburban killing machine with an apt sense of the appalling—and here he is, in living Technicolor, with a man’s face between his tapered fingers and blood on his shoes. Even if Joe wanted to argue with him, he could not. Parry would kill him.

  Or not.

  Joe rolls his shoulders again, for a moment fascinated by the very idea. He could scream and leap. He is a big man and Parry is not. He finds he does not care what happens now. The world is wrong. In fact, it is Parry’s world. Vaughn Parry makes sense, in a world where this can be done to Joe Spork. The gentle clockmaker, now: there’s a fellow who does not understand the way of things. A law-abiding fellow, is Joe. He never considered that the law might not abide by him.

  He could scream, and leap, and things would happen. Either he would destroy Parry and the world would be that much better, or he would die, and his problems would be rather finally resolved.

  Vaughn Parry glances at him, and grins.

  “Not going to, are you?” he says, shaking his head. “Where are you, boy? What does it take to get you out?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe you make more sense tha
n I do.”

  Parry’s eyes open wide for a moment in surprise. “Ey, well, that’s not something I hear often. I suppose you’re right, anywise. I ought to leave this lad alone before I do him a serious harm and regret it. Lead on.”

  With this unexpected sentiment, he shunts Joe out of the room, leaving Mr. Ordinary gasping in relief and misery on the floor.

  Joe hesitates, then extends his hand to Vaughn Parry.

  After a similar pause, Parry takes it awkwardly and shakes. They move quickly back through the building towards the lift. In the cinema, Joe pauses to look at the screen. The Recorded Man is running now, moving, his body strangely clenched as if around an old injury, yet possessed of a familiar, unpleasant fluidity. Joe scowls.

  Parry nods. “This is where they make them,” he says, and goes to leave. Joe lingers.

  “Make who?”

  “Them. The monks. They run current through your head until it’s empty and then they turn you into one of them. With this.” He gestures around. “They tried it with me.”

  “What happened?”

  “A lot of them were damaged beyond repair, is what fucking happened. After that they decided I wasn’t monk material.” Parry grins, eyes sharp and teeth bloody, and Joe hopes devoutly he has bitten his tongue and not eaten part of Mr. Ordinary. “So can we get the fuck out of the burning mental prison, please?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Joe lets Vaughn Parry lead the way to the lift.

  Parry pushes the button for the basement. Now that he knows, Joe can feel the lift rising. Up, up, and away. The doors open, and he sees actual daylight, grim and grey and very wet. English weather. The fire has not reached this floor yet, but the alarm is ringing. He listens to it, curious, and looks at the exit. Perhaps if he tries to cross the threshold, he will feel pain. Perhaps the entire Order of John the Maker is waiting for them. Perhaps there’s a sniper, a crowd of armed police marksmen. Perhaps the bees have come home and everyone has gone mad. Perhaps Polly Cradle really did write that letter.

  He walks forward anyway.

  XIV

  The Secret History of Vaughn Parry;

  the Monte;

  homeward bound.

  His name’s Dalton,” Parry murmurs meditatively in the shady back seats of the night bus. Having paid their way with Mr. Ordinary’s cash, he is examining the credit cards. “Oh. Driving licence. Home address. I wonder if he’s married …” and then, seeing Joe’s look, “Oh ey, for God’s sake, no! I only meant if he’s not we could break in and get some clothes, empty his fridge. No reason to …” He sighs, maligned. Joe stares out into the grey-green landscape of concrete and pathetic little trees in local-council industrial pots.

  Neither of them is entirely sure where the bus is going, because they’re not entirely clear on where they are. Vaughn Parry was all for ducking into the hedgerows, but Joe persuaded him that a city was a better place to hide than a field. They climbed aboard and said “into town.”

  “That business with the lift was clever, turning me upside down. Smart, that is. Your man Brother Sheamus, that’ll be, no? Nasty mind he’s got, I will say.”

  Joe Spork looks at Britain’s most wanted serial killer and wonders if this is professional admiration. Vaughn Parry sees it, and sighs again.

  “I ain’t what you think, Joe. Granted, I’m a bit feral now, but I bin in there a long time and it wasn’t any kind of fun. But I ain’t what you think.”

  “I’m not sure what I think.”

  Parry looks at him, sceptical, then—apparently considering their situation—nods. “You want it from the beginning?”

  “It’s a long drive, evidently.”

  “An hour, he said. Well, then.”

  Parry talks.

  The nursery in the Parry household was decorated in pictures of scarecrows. Vaughn Parry’s first memories are of playing with wooden building blocks in the middle of the red rug, looking around at ten different ghoulish turnip faces and their withered arms, and—being an undertaker’s boy—he deduced at the age of four that all men die, and all women, too. He grew up numb. He disliked the other children, who seemed to be unable to understand what this entailed. If death was coming with such pointed inevitability, of what possible value was the Earth and anything on it? He lived in a darkness he couldn’t penetrate. It lurked at the edge of his vision. He slept with the lights on until his father made him turn them off, and each night they fought like dogs, snarling and snapping at one another. His mother had died already, of pneumonia. He went to the Waiting Game because it was as good a way as any to wait for his own burial.

  “And then they bloody pranked me,” Parry mutters. “Bloody ghastly, ey? Stitched up some fox in a corpse, I don’t know. I passed out on my feet, like. Didn’t remember a sodding thing after, and there’s some old gaffer telling me I’m a monster. I said ‘Bollocks’ and stormed out.”

  He drifted. At some point he got into the make-up trade, an offshoot of what he already knew from undertaking. Dead faces are harder because they’re dead, easier because you can use plaster and putty and actual paint. You can even cut bits off if you have to, but don’t tell anyone.

  And then he was living in a town upcountry, in some old house, when a thin man and a fat man came calling. He was using a false name because he didn’t want anything to do with his family, but they knew who he was anyway, no notion how.

  “This was years ago, mind. Five, six. Don’t know what the bloody date is now.”

  Nor does Joe, in point of fact. How many weeks has he been imprisoned? Or is it months? He has no idea. He’s exhausted, he knows that much.

  “ ‘Mr. Parry,’ says the thin one, ‘there’s a certain task we’d like for you to do. It pays well, but it’s quite secret.’ Well, I did it, didn’t I? Dress a corpse, they said. Make him look respectable. I knew how to do that. A few weeks later there was another, and another. Two thousand quid a time, thank you kindly, and the promise of more work to come. But I was getting a funny feeling, wasn’t I? These lads—they were all lads, thank God, no lasses and no kids, or I couldn’t have stuck it—they had the look of … well. We know now, don’t we? They’d been in that place back there, or somewhere like it, and they hadn’t made it out. Died on the operating table, most like, and here was I covering the tracks. They tried to make me patch up your friend Ted, you know, left me in there with him and some slap and so on. I told ’em to fuck off. Screamed it … God, you get like an animal, don’t you, it doesn’t take long, or much. You get like King Kong in a cage!” He laughs, a strange, unwholesome laugh, like a plague survivor.

  “Ey, so. They noticed me noticing, didn’t they? One day I turn up with my kit and there’s the body, but he’s … fresh. Still warm. I good as pissed myself, and then I heard sirens. Didn’t occur to me until they come in through the front door what was going on. They’d set me up, hadn’t they, to take the fall for the whole lot. For fifty or sixty poor dead bastards … and then there was the back room, wasn’t there?”

  The back room was famous—infamous. Parry had been escalating, according to the story. Serial killers apparently do this. Not content with one expression of their madness, they develop more and more outré, dreadful rituals and appetites until they are stopped.

  In the back room was the latest victim’s family. What was done there had caused one of the investigating detectives to take an overdose. Two more retired from the force.

  “They said it was all me,” Parry reports woodenly. “The mother, the kid. All me. I’m sorry if I can’t cry any more,” he adds, “but I’ve been in for over a year. First in the police nick and then some hospital and then there. I’ve been Vaughn the killer all that time. I’ve got false teeth now, after they kicked them in. I’m … someone I never was, now. It’s what happens, isn’t it? We lose who we are. Become someone else.” He shudders.

  “What about you?” Vaughn Parry says at last. “What’s the deal with you? The way I hear it, they hate you even worse’n me.”
<
br />   Joe sighs, and gives an abbreviated version of recent events, and an even more curtailed description of life in the House of Spork. He doesn’t want Parry inside his life, even if his confession is a true one. The man who was considering giving Mr. Ordinary a taste of his own medicine is not someone he wishes to share intimacies with, more than he must.

  “Mechanical bees,” Vaughn Parry mutters. “And you say it’s big?”

  “Huge, I think. Going-to-war sort of big.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  The road surface changes, the whine of the tyres giving way to a deep grumble.

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” Parry goes on, “I’ve got more to tell you. I s’pose I owe it to you, or to bloody Dalton. Payback. And if it’s that important, too …”

  “What is it?”

  “Your friend Ted … confessed to me, is the only word. Because I was an undertaker once. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t a Waiting Man proper. Didn’t seem to matter much at that point. Not to him, anyway.” Parry’s face flickers with something like horror. “He was all messed up. They’d had at him, then they let him know who I was and brought him to me. They wanted him to be scared of Monstrous Vaughn, you see, but he was past caring. Something was broke in his chest. You could hear it flapping about … he wanted absolution.” Parry sighs. “From me. Of all the people on God’s Earth, he wanted absolution from the man supposed to be the worst bastard ever walked. And I couldn’t give it to ’im because it’s bin so long since anyone even looked at me with anything other than hate I didn’t have the words. I just stared at him and he choked out the ’ole thing and then he died.”

  Vaughn Parry shudders. “You’ve got this thing they want, though?” Vaughn Parry says abruptly. “I mean, it’s not all a complete bloody joke, right? Not a total waste of time?”

  “Yes,” Joe says absently. “I worked it out, in there.”

  “Sholt said you had. It was like a kind of revelation for ’im. Like an angel, he said. But I was—” He stops. “I’m rattling on like a pillock.”