The Unblemished, page 2
Part of Oliver’s leg was protruding from his jeans. Something in the shadows was trying to pull it into privacy, perhaps to finish its meal. Her breath was gone, she wasn’t going to argue with it, or try to defend her lover when there was nothing left to defend. She just wanted to get away. She retreated, keeping her eyes locked on what was left of Oliver, feeling slighted that they had discarded some of his organs. This had been her man. She loved him completely. It was an insult to think that he was not entirely palatable.
Mad laughter shot out of her.
The rain started again, or was it just that what had landed on the uppermost parts of the canopy had percolated through? Heavy drops, pattering on the forest floor. She didn’t feel any wetness on her skin. Shadows loped and reared and tumbled but there was no light to generate them.
Claire was screaming and shouting but she couldn’t understand what. She just wanted to make some kind of noise to confirm her place in a rapidly deteriorating world, to combat the weight of sensations trying to shut her down. She turned and saw shapes rising from where they had dropped from the branches. They were vaguely human, but they all seemed malformed, unfinished. Some of them wore grotesque make-up, the rouge that had been splashed from Oliver’s violated body. They smelled of meat: old meat, fresh meat. They were naked and she could clearly see their ribs shading thin flesh like stripes on a white tiger. They dragged themselves through the mulch towards her, the nubs of what existed of their legs scoring painfully into the ground. They didn’t seem to notice. Hunger, she recognised, would do that to you. Their faces were human, but all humanity was absent.
‘Don’t eat me,’ she whispered.
There were dozens. They kept coming, dropping from the trees. She wondered, crazily, how there could be enough of her to go round. They fell on her. Her screams were muffled, her attempts at batting their arms away futile. But they weren’t biting her, or shredding her flesh with their long nails, the way they had done with Oliver. They tore only at her clothes and when she was naked they moved aside to let something through that resembled the others but was larger and more ponderous. Like her, it was naked, and Claire shuddered at the sight of the thing that swung between its vestigial legs. This creature was blind but it needed no help in seeking her out. What it did to her when it finally found her took her mind away to a remote spot from which it would never fully return.
Part I
RESURGAM
Then I look about me at my fellow-men. And I go in fear. I see faces keen and bright, others dull or dangerous, others unsteady, insincere; none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul.
HG Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau
1. THE HOUSE OF FLIES
THE MAN APPEARED from nowhere, his skin the colour of rum. ‘Buy me a drink, come on, I’m asking you all nice, like,’ he said, although the cut of his clothes suggested he was flush enough to supply his own, and many more. ‘Buy me a drink and there’s secrets in it for you.’
He’d been away, he said (though Bo hadn’t asked), he’d been away for years, but now it was time to come back. A matter of unfinished business, apparently. Bo had been sipping from his pint of lager in front of the log fire, wishing he’d worn something a little less wintry than the cable-knit sweater and suede jacket, heavy denims and big black boots, though he’d be grateful for them later, much later, caught in the teeth of this December night. Sweat peppered his face – the area Keiko, a slave to cosmetic products, referred to as his T-zone forehead, nose and chin. He hadn’t wanted to come out, he hated these congested Friday nights in the city centre, but a colleague was leaving work and it would have appeared churlish to cry off. Now he wished even more that he’d stayed in with a few cans of Guinness and a DVD. Fish and chips with Keiko. A game of chess. A game of Scrabble. Bed, maybe.
‘Buy me a drink, like. Buy me a drink.’
The Princess Louise was typically rammed. The Friday night of a week during which he had hardly put down his camera. At the newspaper offices there were yellow flimsies signifying new jobs piled up on his desk like limp birthday decorations. A week filled with cheque presentations, shivering football teams lining up before meaningless matches, overfed mayors and their cartoonishly coiffured wives standing outside town halls. Smile please. Names please. How do you spell that? Should be in next week’s paper, all being well.
The only photograph he had taken over the past seven days that quickened his blood was of a car crash on the A40(M) – the Westway just as it became elevated from the Marylebone Road: an S-Type Jaguar had torn into the back of a Vauxhall Nova, catapulting it over the edge of the expressway on to the Edgware Road twenty feet below. Six out of seven occupants in both cars dead. The seventh had slammed through the Jag’s windshield and was found crushed into the boot of the Nova. It took the emergency services six hours to release him. He would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, if he made it out of Intensive Care. Bo couldn’t tell if the slick around the mashed vehicles was oil or blood. It was dark, and the pictures were in mono anyway. It was a mystery he was glad not to ponder. The traffic police unit to which he was seconded for the job weren’t too bothered either way.
‘The clothes help to keep you together,’ one fireman had said over double espressos Bo had procured for them both from the nearby Coffee Republic. ‘If it weren’t for the clothes, you’d get the doors open and they’d pour all over the street like jelly. The clothes … contain them.’
For a short time in that crazed zone of blood and lights and sirens he understood what it must be like to be one of the great war photographers. Don McCullin, say, or James Nachtwey. The frisson. The risk. He had been pulled out of himself, become a stillpoint. Taking photographs he did not remember shooting, his heart had belted around his chest, yet he had never felt so calm, so focused. He kept the unpublishable prints in a black folder at home. One of the driver whose jaw had been sheared off and lay in the well beneath the handbrake. His tongue had reached down to his belly. The passenger seat was a froth of blood and hair, a face at the centre of it all reshaped by the window and the dashboard.
That one reminded him of another job he had been on, early in his career, when it seemed he might forge a great career as an edgy, unconventional news photographer. There had been a minor traffic incident at the roundabout at Highbury Corner. A dark-green Peugeot 306 had tonked a Mini Cooper. A rear indicator light had been broken on the Mini, a cracked bumper on the Peugeot. Nothing to burst into tears about. But the driver of the Mini had decided that he didn’t like Peugeot man’s attitude, and had hit him on the side of the head with a tyre spanner. He fell down spurting blood at an alarming rate, too alarming for Mr Mini, who decided to get back in his car and drive off. He drove straight under the front wheels of an articulated lorry swinging into Canonbury Road. Killed instantly. The guy who had been spannered was now in a wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down and making nil progress whatsoever. Bo had arrived ten minutes later, when the emergency services were working with their defib-kits and car-cutting tools. It had been so cold that the blood on the ground shed steam.
A couple of jobs out of what? Two or three hundred? It was getting him down. The shoots that energised him were few and far between and more often than not involved the police. His camera was capturing the type of pictures a novice could achieve, not someone who had the art in his blood, who had gone to college, gravitated towards photographers that strongly attracted him, who spoke directly to him, almost as if they were waiting for him to come along, to deepen their footprints or maybe even veer off on some new track of his own: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Jacob Riis, André Gelpke. Part of him wished, as he relented and bought the stranger his whiskey, that he could escape the freelance life and move on to a more exciting part of town, or foreign parts, somewhere where he didn’t have to bring the art down to a level that became all about the mechanical recovery of money. He needed to be taking pictures for nothing but the love of it. Photography as a marketable skill was crushing him. He needed a project to stretch him, a project that carried a little risk with it. Taking pictures of a school sports day didn’t have anything to do with risk; it was treading water. Taking pictures of cats stuck up trees wasn’t pushing any envelopes; it was drowning in your sleep.
‘They won’t, like … give up,’ said the stranger.
‘Who won’t?’ Bo asked, irritated, still thinking of corpulent mayors, of freezing rain pelting on to soccer pitches. They were standing at the bar, having miraculously found a gap in the human traffic. However, they were standing so close together that Bo felt awkward facing him, and chose instead to observe his companion in the mirror behind the bar.
The man seemed to come to his senses. He laughed, short and sharp, embarrassed almost, and took a large gulp of his whiskey. The spirit seemed to chase off his twitches. He sighed deeply and pressed his lips together, looked down into his glass.
‘My name is Rohan, like,’ the man said. ‘Rohan Vero.’
Bo nodded, impressed. ‘Nice name. Sounds like a writer’s name. What are you? A writer?’
‘I’m wanted,’ he said.
‘By the police?’ Bo asked.
Vero looked up at him with sad, watery eyes. ‘If only,’ he said. And then: ‘Ancestrally, I come from very weak stock. I’m paying for crimes perpetrated by people long dead. Can you believe that, like? Can you believe how unjust that is?’
Starved of the remarkable for such a long time, Bo was happy to go along with any madness Vero uttered. The evening seemed to be picking up.
‘What do you mean?’ Bo asked. ‘This come out of a search for your family tree?’
‘Family tree,’ Vero said, neutrally, neither agreeing with nor scoffing at the words. ‘I have no family tree. Any link to the past, like, whether through bone dust or ashes, all of it has been destroyed. They are slowly erasing me.’
‘Who?’
Vero turned to Bo and smiled, and now he saw how the other man was crying.
‘You don’t, like, want to know,’ Vero said.
‘I, like, do,’ Bo countered, setting his glass down harder than he had intended. How could anybody but himself know what was best for him? All through his childhood he had railed against people giving him orders. It set one up well for the freelance life, he supposed, although it didn’t win him many friends. Everyone had to be told what to do sometimes. Bo could just never swallow it.
Vero appraised him with dark humour in his eyes, and perhaps a little admiration, but he did not convey anything more for a while.
More lager for Bo; more whiskey for Vero. The noise and the heat intensified. English pubs. No ventilation. No air conditioning. Maybe the breweries wanted it this way: when you were hot, you drank more.
Finally, into this sultry clamour, Vero said, ‘I have seen the house of flies.’
‘Really,’ Bo said, his initial enthusiasm on the wane. The guy was a nut. Or rather, Bo was, for furnishing him with booze. ‘Where’s that then?’
‘It’s on the map.’
‘What map?’
‘You have to ask me for it. You have to want it. Really want it, like. It’s the only way I can get … it’s the only way I can pass it on.’
‘Okay,’ Bo said. ‘Give me the fucking map. Let’s have a look.’
Vero’s expression changed. The lines in his face seemed to soften and sink back into his skin, as if they were being rubbed out by an invisible eraser. He licked his lips. His tongue was such a deep red it might have been a corner of liver he was sucking on. ‘You want it? Do you mean that? Do you need it?’
Bo felt fresh tingles of unease. The man was clearly insane, or off his rocker on some kind of drug, but his intensity, the passion for what he was spinning, seemed genuine enough. What if there was a map that led to a house of flies, whatever the hell that was? What about it? What harm could come of it? It might mean a decent photograph, at least. It might give him the chance to slip his bounds and gather together the mess of his career. At the very least it would confirm that Vero was certifiable, and Bo no longer saw that as a pity.
Now it was his turn to lick his lips. ‘Look at us,’ he said, his voice trembling despite his scepticism. ‘A couple of lizards.’
Vero didn’t smile, didn’t say anything. All he did was stare, like an obedient dog waiting to be let off its lead.
‘I want it,’ Bo said, in a voice that didn’t sound anything like his own.
Vero seemed to slump against the bar. ‘Omne vivium ex ovo,’ he said.
‘What?’
Vero looked up. There was sadness in his eyes, as if he had been suddenly bereaved. ‘Every animal is carnivorous, in its first beginnings.’
Bo was shaking his head, frowning, trying to grasp the running water of Vero’s nonsense.
‘The map … it’s yours,’ Vero said, reaching for his glass, closing his eyes. He seemed simultaneously disgusted and relieved. ‘It’s been dry so long, like, that map. It’s been dry for centuries, thank God, but recently. Christ, recently …’ He looked down at his hand, as if seeing it for the first time. He rubbed at it gingerly with his fingertips, then clenched and unclenched it. The sigh that followed this strange little act was something one heard on the lips of a man who has escaped death by millimetres.
Vero’s hands were empty.
Had he actually said anything worth listening to? Or was he just full of uncanny sound bites, stuff that sounded interesting at first, but then proved as insubstantial as the food they sold behind the bar? He was grandstanding, he was the joke at the audition who barely begins his scene before the crook appears to drag him off stage. He was little more than a crackpot with a cute turn of phrase. Rohan Vero. Good name, bad storyteller. If he was a writer, he was stuffed. Bo felt his irritation come back, with interest.
‘You’ve swallowed about eight pounds of my hard-earned, and for what? A couple of cryptic crossword clues? What about these secrets? What about something worth one of those doubles you’ve been sinking?’
Despite his indignation, Bo felt unable to turn and confront the other man. He kept his eyes on Vero in the mirror behind the bar. And then, a change. The sound reduced, as if someone had turned down a volume switch, or someone famous had entered the room. The heat dropped too; Bo felt the sweat on his brow turn cold. The reflected drinkers carried on chatting, laughing, pouring ale down their throats. They hadn’t noticed any such wobble in the status quo.
But Bo was suddenly, acutely aware that things weren’t right. And that he was deeply, almost religiously, afraid. Vero was standing, as Bo was, watching Bo in the mirror. His face was etched with concern as he told his story, yet loosening every second, as if finding peace at finally being able to disburden itself of the facts. And yet. The person standing next to Bo, the figure he saw in his peripheral vision, was not gazing into the mirror. It was turned towards him, eyes filling its head, and its mouth was widening as torrents of hot expletives fell from it. He could smell violence, inches away. The face in the mirror was like something trapped from earlier in the evening. It was benign, becalmed. Innocuous words fell from its lips: ‘… you can get flights to as far away as Sydney these days for next to nothing …’ But beneath this, he heard another message, delivered as if the man had two tongues and the speech that slipped off it possessed stealth, insinuation: You have to go. Please leave. Please. I don’t know. What might happen to you. If you stay. He smelled raw blood, as if Vero had badly bitten his tongue and was breathing its coppery fumes all over him.
And then a sense of time leaving him, or being taken away from him. The drink and the heat and the insanity threatening to knock him senseless. He felt Vero’s hand drop on his own, like some thin, leathery claw, felt his rotten breath rape his nostrils. Vomit rose slowly in his chest. He barged his way outside and sucked in the freezing air. His nausea abated. When he turned back to the pub, it was dead, lights doused, as quiet as sculpture. Through the cracks in the door Bo could make out what seemed like acres of emptiness, after the impossible crush he had been a part of. Ambient light drizzled along chrome and brass. A sour reek of spilled beer and nicotine squeezed through to him. He checked his pockets again, but apart from some spare change, everything – his keys, his wallet – was gone. The bastard was just some pickpocket, a cheap thief with a cheap trick. Maybe he’d spiked Bo’s drinks, given him this weird headache, this numb feeling in his stomach. And there was something wrong with his hand. Bo studied the skin on his left palm. A series of weals, red and broken, like Morse code, studded the flesh.
Frustrated by the locked door of the pub, Bo turned to make his way along High Holborn towards Centre Point where he would be able to flag a cab to take him home. In the turning of his body through one hundred and eighty degrees, he lost sense of himself, and what he was doing. The only glimmer of a clue as to what had happened in the black hole between Vero’s warning and his standing cow-eyed in the cold was a scrap of speech: Vero’s voice, trembling and low, bordering on beseechment:
… him, him, not me, he’s your gateway, him, him …
For a moment it felt as if, as his body turned, his head had remained where it was, pressed against the door of the Princess Louise, in the act of trying to rescue his reality from a night that was now rapidly passing him by.
* * *
High Holborn was dead. The lights were out on the street and in the office buildings crowding him. Even the traffic lights were playing blind. The road itself looked too unstable to have ever carried vehicles. West, the convergence of Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street, and Tottenham Court Road seemed unformed, as if the architect’s designs were mathematically awry. Or maybe it was just the drink that suggested to Bo that the roads didn’t quite meet properly. Everything seemed out of kilter, soft, not right. It had the flawed authenticity of a film set.
