The Unblemished, page 27
His mobile phone was on the floor by his side. Most of his body had been concealed behind a thick weave of matter. His jaw was bruised badly. Some kind of thick parcel tape was wrapped around his chin and traversed the top of his head. He looked like an old cartoon of someone in a dentist’s waiting room, bandaged up with toothache. The depth of the lines in his face were accentuated by the gloom. Bo found it touching to see his tie remained impeccably knotted. One tiny red dot of blood in the centre of his chest spoke of the only discernible wound to his body. Bo couldn’t understand the sudden delineation, a border between carnage and preservation. It was almost as if they were being saved for later. In the coming of the thought was the conviction that he had hit the nail on the head. They would be back, then. Or others would, to raid this drop-in larder.
‘Mr Laurier?’ he said, and his voice fell flat among the webbing as if it had absorbed any hope it might possess.
There was a slight twitching in the cheek. A shivering of eyeballs behind lids thin as tissue paper.
Bo reached out and touched his arm. Laurier’s eyes snapped open, glassy with shock or pain or the trauma of recent memory. His lips parted slightly. He managed to say something that might have been graves or Dreyfuss. The tape was preventing his mouth from properly forming the words.
‘Let me help you,’ Bo said, checking behind him in case this was some form of trap. The corridor was empty. He reached out and picked at the leading edge of tape. Pulling it away produced a strangled sob so he let go and went back to one of the desks, where he found a letter opener. He used it to slice the tape at the gulley to one side of Laurier’s throat and the detective’s jaw popped open, shockingly wide, like that of a snake’s in the moment of its unhinging. Laurier might have yelled, or screamed, but Bo didn’t hear it because he himself was screaming. He scuttled back as dozens of tiny, translucent eggs poured from between Laurier’s lips. Laurier was coughing and choking and groaning with pain; Bo saw now how his jaw had been dislocated to prevent him from chewing the eggs to death. The eggs shivered on the floor and it struck Bo that they were trying to right themselves before crawling back to Laurier’s warmth.
Laurier was staring down at them, wide-eyed, his jaw quivering, hanging off his face, creating a terrible, crocodilian gape. Bo began stamping the eggs into the thin, worn carpet tiles and didn’t stop even after he had finished them all off. He was seeing them everywhere. But gradually he wound in his panic, helped by Laurier making soothing noises. If he could manage that through the level of pain he must have been experiencing, then Bo could grant him some reasonable behaviour.
He began slicing at the rubbery mesh that shackled Laurier, but it took a long time to free him as the knife kept getting trapped in its warp and weft. Laurier was shaking his head. Either at Bo’s cack-handedness or the unacceptable scenario in which he found himself immersed, Bo couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t a great time to ask him.
‘I’m getting you out of here,’ Bo said. When he was able to use his hands on the loose edges of the web, the plasma came away more readily, stripping free of the wall. He helped Laurier step clear of his prison, but had to hold the older man upright because all of his strength was gone. His limbs had turned to rubber. He saw movement under the shirt, and more eggs spilling free of the folds in his clothing. He picked Laurier up, bracing himself against the trickle of any of them into his hair or against his skin, and forged his way towards the office bearing Laurier’s name. Next to it was an incident room. Inside there were three woman wrapped in cocoons, all with tiny red dots on their chests, their jaws strapped up. Their eyes swivelled beseechingly towards him. Torn, ragged documents and files were scattered on the floor and the desks. Maps on the wall had been shredded. Some of the polystyrene tiles in the ceiling were gone, revealing wiring and pipes; broken bits of the stuff lay around like snow.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, backing away. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He retraced his steps to the lift and stepped out into the war zone of the ground floor. He managed to get Laurier to hold on to him while he kicked the bike into action, then they sprinted out of Broadway just as a tide of figures came howling up Petty France brandishing bricks and bottles and pieces of timber.
Bo said: ‘Where do we go?’
If he smiled, his imprecise reflection in the dull steel reminded him of himself, almost.
For as long as he carried the map, he would be known to them, in every kind of way. They only had to wait for him to close his eyes and they would have their own chart leading them to where he slept. If they no longer needed him, he was perhaps more desirable dead than alive, especially as he had resisted conforming to their ideals. What worried him was the sadness, the grief, he had felt as he mashed the life from those grubs into the stained carpet of New Scotland Yard. It spoke of some tough spine of loyalty to this strange people who had invaded his life and wrenched it out of true to a point where he doubted he would be able to reshape it into anything resembling what had gone before. But it was a loyalty forced upon him. He was being coerced. He wanted no part of it. He wanted his old life back, or a facsimile of it; even that would be welcome. As long as Keiko was still involved, nothing mattered.
Laurier was asleep behind him on a deep sofa. Bo was trawling the airwaves on a radio he had found in the kitchen but all of the stations were down. On the short-wave band he had chased a weak signal for twenty minutes, some male voice chattering at a hysterical rate, a pirate transmission he hoped, but it always broke apart into static at the moment he thought he might make sense of it.
They had forced their way into an abandoned house in a well-to-do street in Pimlico where Bo had drawn a hot bath, stripped Laurier and scraped the last of the eggs from his armpits and groin into the toilet. He had bathed the older man like a baby, keeping a hand behind his head so that he would not slip under the water. What Bo had expected to be a tiny scratch on his chest turned out to be an ugly hole, the size of a match-head, which had become infected. The flesh around it was puffy and sickeningly soft, like the skin that has formed on a loose custard. It was coloured black, with arresting green and purple iridescent flashes, reminding him of ham on the turn. He had cleaned it as rigorously as Laurier could stand and applied whatever appropriate creams and sprays he could find in the first aid kit in the bathroom.
Laurier had faded in and out of unconsciousness, and any attempts to speak had been stymied by Bo’s tight bandaging of his ruined jaw. He had attempted to force liquid food through his lips before Laurier drifted off into deep sleep. Soup, milk, honey; he had managed to stomach only a little, but he looked significantly better than when Bo had stumbled upon him back in SW1. Bo considered, briefly, trying some of that simple nourishment on himself, but still his body was not ready for it. However many days he had existed without food was already too many. By rights he should be dead. He had massaged the hard prominence of his ribcage, the hollows creeping into his face. He was a cadaver with vast reservoirs of energy. He was dead on legs that refused to accept it. Maybe when (if) the spell was broken, he would drop into death with uncanny, tasteless speed. Sustaining himself on things found in no conventional recipe book was a taboo he was not prepared to think about. He could not believe that he would take such a route, even in extremis. His appearance suggested he was on some extended fast; that was eminently preferable.
Now Laurier’s shallow breathing provided a strange comfort to Bo, whose short span of lonely nights had nevertheless got to him, depressing him more than he could understand. He had happily spent a large portion of his youth a single man, yet here he was, suffering loneliness for the first time in his life. Context was all, he supposed. He pushed himself away from the radio and perused the bookshelves of this invisible family whose house they had invaded. There were books here that he had read, or at least owned. He saw that kindredness as a tacit green light to the breaking and entering of which he was guilty.
He wondered where the family that once lived here had escaped to, if they had escaped at all. The thought of them still in the house somewhere, in the cellar perhaps, or wadded in the musty corners of the garden shed, bound and gagged, home to thousands of hungry white worms, was too much to deal with; he could not bring himself to confirm it, despite the angelic countenance of the children in the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, the apparent love that streamed between the parents.
He had been the catalyst for all of this. He had incited this city-wide riot. Eight hundred square miles, maybe more beyond the city’s confines, had turned into a morass of missing people and ravaged bodies. If he hadn’t been so stupid, so desperate to inject a little excitement into his life, this would not have happened. There was no fast track to success, only to misery. Or maybe all of this would have happened anyway, just starting with some other poor bastard accepting the map. Bo’s feeble attempts to hunt Vero down now seemed to be even more pointless. Even if he found him and forced him to take back what he had been so quick, so grateful to offload, he didn’t see any quick fix to the ruins that faced him when he looked at what his life had become. He had turned his back on Keiko, no matter how altruistic he believed that act to be, his job was gone, his health was fucked. He had nothing but a bike and a head full of horror.
He had killers on his trail.
He returned to the kitchen and sat down on the stool. The radio spat at him softly. He snapped it off and Laurier’s rasping breath filled the space. Saving the Detective Inspector was a pointless exercise, a token reaction to the badness piling in on Bo’s life, yet he could not have left him there, despite all the other innocent bodies chosen as live incubators. He should have torched the building; death must have been a better option than what they awaited.
His hand twitched and burned. The blood had dried and run across the skin so often that it looked like something from the props department of a horror film. The skin was stained mahogany. It jumped and crawled with black code. It seemed to be more than what he was. He had visions of it growing, feeding off the rest of his body until he was a withered attachment being dragged around. He stared into the complex weave of welts and scratches, as if some route might make itself clear, but all he could see was damage. Blood traced the delicate diamonds of his epidermis. It dimpled every follicle and pore. Veins pulsed wetly, as if psyching themselves for a push into the open. Blood was all his hand had become. It was senseless. Separate. It was so alien to the shape and manner of his right hand that it might have been grafted on to him, taken from something better left unseen.
Laurier’s breathing grew irregular. Bo did not move to be by his side. Laurier was beyond comfort. Bo watched the other man digging at the bandages around his jaw; they loosened. Laurier’s eyes grew fixed and his mouth gaped. Bo saluted him. ‘Help, police,’ he said.
Bo smiled into the burnished steel again. The mangled reflection suggested that a grimace was all he could muster, that humour was now eradicated from his life. You should have stayed alive for this, he thought, and brought the cleaver up and down on to his left wrist in one swift, fluid motion.
Part IV
APPETITIVE BEHAVIOUR
Someone once said that all behaviourism in nature could be referred to hunger. This saying has been repeated thousands of times yet it is false. Hunger itself is pain – the most severe pain in its later stages that the body knows except thirst, which is even worse. Love may be regarded as a hunger, but it is not pain.
Eugène Marais, The Soul of the White Ant
29. MERCY MISSION
SARAH STOOD BY the window to see if the moon was visible tonight. The moon had been a comfort to her as a child. Her own mother used to tell her that the face she could see up there was the face of her father, who had died when she was very young.
‘He had been staring up at the moon, when his illness became too much for him,’ her mother had told her. ‘And when he died, the moon stayed in his eyes, you know, as though his eyes were a camera that had taken a picture. Trapped it for ever. Your father’s face was captured by the moon at the very same moment.’
‘They swapped faces,’ Sarah had said, decisively, she remembered, as if she would believe it even if her mother had said otherwise.
‘That face in the moon, that’s your dad, keeping an eye on you. Keeping you safe.’
She often looked out for the moon now when she felt lost or alone or afraid. It was nonsense, of course, but because her mother had said it, and it had helped her, it wasn’t really nonsense at all. It was as true as God or Santa Claus or insane men screaming towards her from dark corners of the world to try to destroy her. It was true if she wanted it to be.
There was too much cloud cover to see the moon now, but it was up there, a milky heart in the grey. Even that diffuse light was of some comfort.
‘It’s time to go.’
Nick leaped as if stuck with a needle. ‘Now? Can’t we wait till daylight, for Christ’s sake?’
‘You know me well enough to realise that isn’t going to happen. I need to find a doctor. I need to get help.’
‘But you were out there earlier. You saw what happened. You saw what’s going on out there.’
‘Yes I did, but I can see what’s going on in here too.’ She looked at Claire under a blanket, saw her quaking, saw the sweat on her face, the dark rings around her eyes. The blanket was up to her throat. By morning she might need to move it six inches north.
Nick put his hands to his face. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go outside again.’
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Sarah said, soothingly. But she felt her confidence leak quickly out of her. She was aware that she shouldn’t rely on a man she barely knew to put himself in situations he didn’t deserve to be in, but she had blithely assumed he would back her up, especially after what had happened on the beach back in Southwold. Here was a man who had seen too much already. It was unfair to expect him to prolong his exposure to risk; it had gone beyond trying to impress her to get inside her knickers. Deaths were occurring. He didn’t want to join the statistics. There was nothing left on his meter. He was spent. Fair enough.
She turned to Tina. ‘I’ll knock on the door when I get back. One-two. One-two. Okay? So you know it’s me. Let me in quickly, won’t you?’ Tina nodded, and handed her a knife. She was moving her mouth as if trying to say something, but Sarah didn’t want to hear platitudes or rousing speeches of derring-do, especially from a woman who couldn’t back them up with actions of her own. She took the knife that Tina proffered and left abruptly. No good-byes. No last-minute efforts to muster support. She forced her legs to take her down the stairs and into the street before she could persuade herself that this was suicide, that her bravery was an illusion brought on by too little food and not enough sleep and that she should get under that blanket with her daughter upstairs, where it was safe.
Things outside had changed. She had never been in a city where the light was as subdued as this. Some spots of light remained, but too many huge pools of blackness stretched out between them. Nothing moved in those oases, but it wasn’t them she was worried about. The darkness seemed congealed, filled up. It settled against her skin like soot. Keep moving, she thought. Shift yourself.
It was quiet now, but she didn’t feel that was of particular significance because she couldn’t remember if it had been quiet earlier too, when they had set out to confirm Tina’s concerns about her city. It was a city’s size crowbarred into a town or a village’s sensibilities. It was unnerving. Places such as London were rendered pathetic by such anomalies. It had always been a big come-on of a city, used to thundering thoroughfares and clogged pavements. Seeing it weakened like this made her vulnerability more acute. If London couldn’t roll with the punches, how could she be expected to?
She spotted movement on the corner of Charlotte Street and sank back into the deep shadow of awnings near Tina’s entry door, fighting the urge to call out, to confirm to herself that these were normal people in a normal place living normal lives.
She was grateful for her instincts. Keep following those, she told herself. Say how you feel and act on it. No questions. No arguments.
Twenty feet away, two men in charcoal suits drifted along Percy Street like sharks cruising the shallows. One of them was wearing the skin of a woman’s upper torso like a stole. Her boned head hung down over his shoulder, flapping with each step, measuring out the distance they were travelling with her empty black eye sockets. He twisted and twiddled one of her nipples distractedly as he chatted to the other man who toyed with a rosary of teeth and chewed on something too large for his mouth, now and then spitting dark juice into the gutter.
Sarah checked her breathing and moved off once the two men had crossed the road in the direction of Bedford Square. She moved north, quickly, flitting between the pools of shade and never lingering too long, never positioning herself with acres of black space at her shoulder. She couldn’t believe she had given up Southwold for this. Not for the first time, she mulled over the possibility that madness was eating away her brain. These things weren’t real. They couldn’t be real. Which meant that she was deranged. Fine. Everyone was mental these days.
She wedged herself in a doorway to view the road ahead and then made a spiderish dash to the next little sanctuary a few metres further along. In this way she covered the distance between Percy Street and University College Hospital in half an hour. It was frustrating to be able to see her goal throughout the journey, but she knew that to break her cover and run was to invite failure. There was too much riding on this. If she died, Claire was finished. That was all she had to know; then it was easy.
