The Lighthouse at the End of the World, page 9
He read ATHAL, SONDER and XTCH before the ice melted, turning the paper to mulch. Several more settled on him, sailing down out of the clear sky. He sat up.
He was on a broad beach of grey, damp sand. The snow was falling gently all around him, but failing to settle. Deano’s knife was nowhere to be seen. The sea crested white in the distance to his right. Far to his left was an uneven black wall that stretched off to the horizon. A few hundred yards ahead of him was an enormous opening in the ground. He rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was seeing what he was seeing.
All round the hole lay wrecked vehicles: railway carriages, buses and cars piled one on top of another. Tube trains lay like great, silver worms rusting in the sand. A number 11 lay on its side like a felled animal, windows smashed, doors prised open. He staggered to his feet, swaying a little as he accustomed himself to standing and approached them. Fragmentary snowflakes pattered around him, flurrying into his eyes and fizzing as they hit the shallow pools of water nestling amongst the sand bars.
Picking his way around a nest of dead trains, he saw they were of differing shapes, sizes and ages. Each was a twisted metal tube with shattered windows. The nearest was composed of several carriages that snaked back to the enormous hole, as though it had emerged from it like some monolithic metal worm and then crashed back down onto the sand. The blue plush of its seats had been slit and the foam within removed. Anything of value had been taken from the wreckage long ago. Was this some sort of seaside junkyard?
Where the hell was he? And where were the Mannish?
It was as though he was in a dream. The sound of faraway waves lapped in his ears. Could you hear in dreams? Perhaps. But at the very least he didn’t think you could smell, and he was struck by the way the dark sand eddied into pools of stinking black mud. Hang on. There were footprints around him, top-of-the-line trainers by the looks of them, leading away from the sea back towards the hunched mass of the wall. The Mannish must have come this way.
His tattoo burned with bee-sting glee. Then his whole torso flared into agony. He yelled, yanking off his jacket and hoodie and throwing them onto the beach. Gingerly, he prodded at his aching body. The tattoo’s ink looked darker and its edges pulsed an angry red, as though trying to break free and leak into the rest of his skin. Each pulse generated a throb of pain – and then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. When he got back to his manor, he was going to have some serious words with the two-bit joint that inked him up.
But that was the least of his problems. He breathed in, trying to steady himself as he replaced his now damp clothing. Things were weird, but he wasn’t going to wig out. Okay. Work this problem. Keep it simple. Where was he? He’d slipped through a fence with the cops in tow and then woken up on a beach somewhere else. He squinted at the dilapidated wall to his left. Perhaps this was one of those backward Kentish shitholes like Ramsgate or Folkstone? They were just names to him, but the names had enough power to calm him, make him feel like he was at least a little in charge of his fate.
How had he ended up here? Had the Mannish dosed him somehow; carted him out here and left him on the beach just for shits and giggles? What could they have mickeyed him with, though? He’d had a passing acquaintance with most Class A’s in his time, including a very sticky patch with speed back in his teens, but what could they have given him that would take him out for so long? Ketamine? GHB? Maybe something more specialist.
Okay, so I know where I am and I’ve a rough idea of how I might have gotten here. Now, I just have to work out how to get back. Shit. With a sinking sensation, he remembered: the failed dead drop; the cash the Mannish had run off with. He was in it and deep.
But he couldn’t do anything about that right now. With a sigh, he struck out towards the wall, following the Mannish’s footprints. There were no seagulls, not even a single tourist, and apart from the distant lapping of the waves everything was quiet. He listened to the hypnotic sound of his feet as they squelched into the sand with each step, sometimes sinking so deep that he had to stop and pull them out. It was slow progress.
As he approached it, he saw that the sea wall was about twenty feet high and constructed from irregular bits of wood and concrete. Coated with thick black tar, its ramparts were decorated with curls of rusty barbed wire.
He hopped from one dry patch of sand to the next, avoiding water as much as possible. A flurry of snowflakes blew into his eyes and he shivered. The nearby mudflats were strewn with flotsam. There were the bleached metal bones of a pram, dead shoes and fragments of flatpack furniture which the action of the sea had worked into pieces of abstract sculpture.
He walked to a stretch of mud, boasting a mountain of old brick-sized mobiles, ancient printers and shattered laptops. As well as lifting the cash, the Mannish had also run off with the burners, so he was out of contact. He picked up a Nokia 3600, the same model Lucas had had back in the day. He held down the “On” button, but its LCD screen remained blank, so he let it tumble back onto the beach. His stomach gurgled and he winced in discomfort.
There were jumbles of footprints and what looked to be wheel tracks leading over the sand and back towards the wall. A whole bunch of people had been out here recently. Seemed like they had carts with them, or maybe had just dragged the heavier booty left on the beach back with them.
Oyster needed to pee. He stepped behind an unruly tower of office furniture and ragged bicycle frames, unzipped and let rip. The furniture looked like it had fallen straight from the sky rather than being washed up. Whoever had been combing the beach earlier had left this particular treasure. Or maybe it had washed up after they had left.
He finished and zipped up before kneeling to rinse his hands in a pool of sandy water. The snow had stopped. Looking out at the sea as the weather cleared, he saw a pair of long ladders out near the horizon. What was more, there were figures halfway up them. Squinting, they appeared to be painting clouds onto the sky. He looked again, but they were gone.
Then something large, moving out on the sea, caught his attention. At first, Oyster thought it was a boat; but the more he looked at it, the less it seemed like a vessel. For a start, it was the wrong shape, looking more like some sort of massive insect. And then there was the way it moved. It was wading through the waves on long legs rather than riding over them.
As he watched, the thing reached the horizon, then walked up into the sky. A circular window opened in the sky and the thing, whatever it was, disappeared into it, taking the hole with it.
Fuck. I must be seeing things. Whatever I was spiked with is still rattling around inside my head. For a second, the silence became more intense. Oyster swallowed. He needed to get back to civilisation, this beach was doing his nut in.
He sighed and returned to walking in the direction of the sea wall, listening to the rhythmic slurp of his feet in the muddy slurry of the beach. There was a chill breeze, and although he couldn’t see the sun, the sky had reddened. It must be the late afternoon.
He had been walking like this for ten minutes or so – head down, lost in thought – when the silence was rent by a scream. He looked around for its source. Had it come from further along the wall? He heard the cry again, more urgent this time. Instinctively, he ran towards it, knowing it was probably the stupid thing to do but doing it anyway.
Further ahead, along the length of the great, tarred mass of the sea wall, he spotted movement. As he got closer, Oyster saw three people in the midst of some sort of ruck. Two men versus a woman. Of the men, one was tall and thin, the other short and stocky. They were dressed in matching black coats and three-quarter trews that resembled the Mannish Boys’ outfits, but where that crew’s gear had been all styled up, these were subdued black uniforms that made their wearers resemble paramilitary undertakers or priests. Either way, they reeked of authority.
Oyster bristled immediately. Whatever was going down was way off base.
Each man wore a thick belt from which hung metal tongs and a leather bag about the size of a deflated football. Both wielded ebony batons a couple of feet long. Their long jackets and skinny legs made Oyster think of a pair of ill-matched beetles.
The woman was the palest person he’d ever seen. She wore scarlet, side-buttoned trousers, black sixteen-hole Doc Martens and was wrapped in a shabby fake-fur coat.
The two men were trying to outflank the woman, who was crouched low, coiled with defensive energy. In one hand she held a long, tasty-looking bone-handled dagger. Oyster reached into his puffer jacket and slipped out his own blade. It flashed red in the afternoon light.
He sensed there was a standoff here; that his arrival would tip the balance one way or another. They felt it too. The tall man cocked his head to one side, taking in Oyster at a glance, his face as long and glum as a wet Sunday. A pair of thick crimson sunglasses perched on his pinched nose. A raw ‘S’ shape carved into his cheek told Oyster that not only was the knife the woman held pretty tasty-looking, but its owner was no slouch at using it either.
The man arranged his lips into a smile, eyes constantly flicking back to the woman, revealing a mouthful of missing and yellowed teeth. There was a studied air about him, masking an underlying anxiety. Oyster recognised it as the sort of jacked-up calm emitted when you were caught off your home turf.
“Good day,” said the man in an oily voice. “I am Scudder and that is Collier. We are clerks, Section 586. This is City biz. So best be on your way, eh, chitling?”
Oyster nodded. He looked across at the woman. Her face was so pale it was almost translucent; her eyes were odd: the whites a fucked-up dark colour and her irises a colour that matched her hair as though they were both catastrophically bloodshot.
“S’up?” he called. Her gaze remained fixed on the clerks.
“Do as told, squirt, this ain’t your affair,” grunted the stockier man. There was something squat and doglike about him, his tone glinting with the threat of violence. An angry slash across his forehead dripped blood onto his own pair of sunglasses.
“What’s all the heat about?” said Oyster. “You get booted out the Matrix triple-bill?”
“Do not press our patience, bantling,” said Scudder. “Collier, here, will not require much excuse to detach your melon from its wheeze pipe.”
“After I’ve given you a proper basting, gobshite,” added Collier with a hiss.
“I dunno about that,” said Oyster, “from what I see she’s got the measure of you two spods. You might want to rethink your play—”
It all happened really fast then.
The woman leaped at Scudder, aiming a kick at the hand holding the truncheon. The clerk was caught off guard, the momentum of the blow spinning him off-balance and whipping the weapon out of his hand and into a pool of water, where it landed with a kerplunk.
Collier rushed to defend his partner, aiming a blow at the back of the woman’s head. Somehow, she dodged out of its path, but lost her footing in the sand. Oyster charged into the fray, swinging wildly at Collier. His fist connected with the man’s temple, knocking his glasses from his face. Twisting towards Oyster, Collier brought his truncheon down.
Oyster raised an arm to block the blow and lightning flashed up from his elbow. Dizzy, unthinking through the pain, he brought his knee up between the man’s legs. The finisher, Deano had called it.
Collier dropped into the sand groaning, hands cupping his groin. Oyster aimed a couple of kicks at the man’s head for good measure and then jumped over him, aiming to help the woman, but she had already recovered. Scudder retreated, hands raised. The woman feinted at the unarmed clerk’s chest, driving him back towards the wall, near where Collier lay.
“Take yourself and this bottle-head cully back to the metropolis with you,” she said, her voice lilting, musical; accents on all the wrong syllables.
“Very well, very well,” replied Scudder with a supercilious smile. Collier staggered to his feet.
“But we will see you pretty buck-fitches again,” he said.
“Yeah, and I won’t forget you two shits neither,” said Oyster. “Like the woman said, fuck off back to your crib.” His fingertips fizzed and his hairline prickled with adrenaline.
The two scuttled to the wall. They ran along its length for a few yards then disappeared. There was the sound of a bolt being drawn and a door being slammed, and then they were gone.
DERELICT
Once their assailants were gone, Oyster and the woman appraised each other. She stepped back, rising to her full height, several inches taller, observing him dispassionately. Despite the shabbiness of her clothes there was a regal tilt to her chin.
Oyster was amazed once more by just how pale her skin was, so light that he could see the purple veins beneath. There was something else, too, perhaps a very subtle tattoo of an ink he’d never seen, but it hinted at pulsating trails, like strings of fairy lights illuminating her face from within.
She reminded Oyster of some sort of deep-sea creature, comprised in equal parts of anemone and angler fish. Her eyes were a piercing, mesmeric red that was perhaps the result of the fight. A froth of vivid orange hair licked around her face. Her hands were in constant motion, sheathed in black patent leather gloves; they swayed like fronds of seaweed underwater.
“Nice shiv,” he said.
She rolled her bloodshot eyes, gunslingered her dagger back inside her coat, then produced a blue scrunchy to tie her hair back into a tight ponytail.
She sniffed, turned, and set off towards the sea wall.
“Wait up,” said Oyster, taking a few steps after her. He rubbed his numb arm where Collier had struck it. The feeling was gradually returning, but he would have a big-arse bruise on it tomorrow. He was collecting injuries at a pretty high rate.
“Mille grazie for the assist and all,” she said over her shoulder, “but I got vexes of my own with which to deal.” That accent again. Wrong and right at the same time. Her voice was iron and salt, wind and sky.
“Can you at least tell me where I am?” he said. His voice sounded unfamiliar and small; keening. The unease, stowed away inside him ever since he’d woken up, detonated like a slow bomb. The childish fear of being lost surged over him. He couldn’t breathe again; tears welled up in his eyes and he wiped the dried blood and snot from his sore nose with the back of his hand. He sniffed.
Mixed in with the feelings, there was an anger. Anger at what stupid bloody Lucas had done with his crew and his crimes and his need to be the biggest swinging dick in town. He and Cécile had never asked for any of it, yet they had paid. More than Paris. More than anyone. The anger fired him. Drove away the hurt. He sniffed and spat into the water. Fuck this shit. Fuck them all.
The woman was a few hundred yards away now.
“Wail all you like, Captain Hackam, but best bet is to steer out of the black sands double quick,” she called over her shoulder. “Beach should be cheek by jowl right about now.”
“Wasn’t crying,” said Oyster.
“Course you weren’t, honey child.”
“Name’s Oyster,” he called to her, running a few splashing steps through the mud to catch her up.
She nodded.
“Margate? Sheppey?” he said, nodding at the wall.
The woman glanced at him quizzically. “What the feckle is a shippee?”
“Where we are we?” he said. “Kent… by the sea? Or is it Southend? Why are you being so bloody mysterious?”
She stopped, straightened so she could look down on him.
“Talk a lot, don’t you?”
Oyster shrugged.
“Look here, Royston, or whatever asinine moniker you’ve given yourself: being grateful for your abbetence does not obligate me to be your cully-wife. Plus, I’m getting a very fresh-off-the-beach vibe from you and can’t be babysitting. Fam’s in need, gotta speed, and so on.”
She adopted the sort of posture minor members of the Royal Family might when meeting factory workers.
“Thank you. Kind regards. There we go good chap. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” She clapped Oyster on the shoulder with pantomime bonhomie and stormed away.
“Fuck me, you just sped right through the lights there, didn’t you?” said Oyster, anger rising back up inside him. “I was just asking where the fuck we were and who the fuck you are.”
They had reached the wall. Up close, Oyster could see it was a jumble of found objects piled one atop the other and fastened together with bolts, nails and anything else that had come into the hands of its builders. Here and there a few beams protruded, joined together and reinforced with brass couplings, but there was nothing about it that followed any sort of plan. It looked like it had been thrown together hastily, the result of an overwhelming terror of the world beyond it.
The sickly feeling that had been pursuing him for a long time finally materialised. The sticky whisper of fear told him what he had not wanted to accept: he wasn’t anywhere that he knew. There was too much weird shit going on: the snow; the wall; the clerks; the woman; hell, even her eyes fed the creeping suspicion that he wasn’t anywhere he’d ever been before. His head was doing a number on him. Perhaps he was lying in a ditch somewhere in a coma. Or in a car boot, tripping his tits off.
An ear-rending blast of sound from behind him interrupted his thoughts. The noise was so loud his lungs vibrated as though he was at a house party with an 8K rig. He spun around in terror. Out at sea, heaving around the curve of the great wall, was an enormous black-legged something. At first glance, it resembled a curved metal-and-glass skyscraper, slung upon its side and walking on elongated legs. It paused for a second, like a monolithic crane fly, and gave a second foghorn wail before spouting a plume of black smoke.
Oyster recalled the creature he’d seen climb up into the sky earlier. There were similarities, but this one seemed smaller. Even so, close up, this one was huge. It moved again, faster now, shaking the beach with each footfall and sending eddies of water over Oyster’s feet. It was heading straight for them and closing with surprising speed, but his brain was bricked; he was frozen in place, paralysed by the impossibility of what he was seeing.
