‘You can feel proud of yourself,’ Stratten said. ‘For an idiot, you’ve managed to cause me a quite stunning amount of inconvenience. I’ve tried to call on a number of people in this city in the last twenty-four hours, only to see plain clothes cops loitering quietly a little distance away. I had Hammond’s little private hidey-hole cleared out within hours of his death, so I guess the police had to have found out about my business from somewhere else. Judging by the message you sent via Sabrina, I suppose it’s going to have been you.’
‘Top marks,’ I said. ‘And now there’s a cop who knows all about you too.’
‘Knowing means nothing, Mr Thompson. It’s proof that counts. I imagine there is none, or I’d already have heard from him.’
‘He’s a smart guy,’ I said. ‘He’ll get round to it.’
‘Then I’ll have him killed,’ Stratten said mildly. With an upward movement of his head he indicated to the spare goon. He nodded and left the room. I didn’t like the look of that. It made it look like something bad was going to happen.
‘How come you didn’t just come for me at Jamison’s?’ I asked, purely and simply to play for time. It wasn’t clear why I was bothering. There wasn’t any cavalry to arrive. Suddenly the decision not to warn Travis what we were doing seemed like the acme of stupidity.
‘I was busy,’ he said, ‘not least taking the time to dispose of that useless shit Romer. You may be a meddling pain in the ass, but at least you were good at your job. He told me you’d have some little friend along to help you out, as indeed proved to be the case. I wasn’t going to charge into a playing field you’d laid out. I like to arrange matters to my exclusive advantage.’ He pulled a package out his pocket, and threw it onto the sofa beside me.
‘You know that if you kill me the cops are going to come after you?’ The package was a manila envelope, looked like it held some papers and a couple of computer disks.
‘I doubt it,’ Stratten said, ‘and it won’t matter anyhow. Thanks to you, the whole operation here is fucked up beyond recovery. A tactical withdrawal is required, which is a very great shame, because the people in this town have the best secrets and are prepared to pay the most to keep them that way.’
Deck’s eyes swivelled across at me. His face told me he’d worked it out too. A stage was being set. Two scuffling hoods found dead in Hammond’s house, with the original blackmail disks, each killed by a gun which the other held in his hand. Just then the third heavy reappeared in the doorway, carefully holding the carving knife from Romer’s chest. With my prints spread all over it, the picture would be complete.
‘No-one’s going to believe this,’ I said.
‘Wrong,’ Stratten smiled, and pulled out a gun fitted with a silencer. ‘No-one’s going to care.’
‘Let me do it,’ said Monica.
Stratten turned to her, considered, smiled. He beckoned her over and held the gun out for her. Monica took up a position a couple of yards in front of the sofa, looking coyly at me. She took the gun in a two-handed grip, then pointed it straight at my head.
‘Don’t make it too tidy,’ Stratten said, moving to stand behind her. He was smiling broadly, enjoying himself. ‘Remember—think “squalid gun battle”, between two three-time losers who’ve just lost for good.’
Deck stared down at the carpet. He couldn’t move without getting his head blown off, and neither could I. He didn’t want to see what was going to happen next, and I couldn’t blame him.
Monica squinted down the gun, moved it so it pointed at my neck. She giggled, and looked about twenty years younger. Stratten rested his chin on Monica’s shoulder to watch, and his hands slid round her chest to cup her breasts.
The barrel of the gun kept circling, inched down to my chest. Monica smiled as Stratten’s hands caressed and squeezed. A soft glow began to spread across her cheekbones, and the gun finally came to rest pointing at my face one more.
‘Goodbye, asshole,’ Monica said.
There was the sudden crunching sound of a heavy impact.
At first I thought I’d heard myself being shot. Then I saw the goon with the carving knife hurtling across the far end of the room, like he’d been pulled on a rope.
Stratten turned to see what had happened. The Hammonds’ fridge was standing in the doorway, its door swinging shut.
The guy behind me muttered, ‘What the fuck?’ and let his grip slacken for a moment. That was enough.
I launched myself straight at Monica, crouched low, keeping under the line of the gun. I ploughed into her stomach, knocking her and Stratten flying. Monica pulled the trigger as she fell and the gun went off next to my ear, half-deafening me. Meanwhile I saw Deck kicking out viciously behind him, catching his man in the kneecap. In a second he was on his feet, and planted a foot on the man’s face. Deck looked really pissed. If there’s anything he really hates it’s guys jamming guns into his head.
As I hauled myself up out of the tangle of limbs on the carpet, head singing, I heard a muffled scream and tried to work out what the hell was going on. Then I saw the chest freezer run in from the doorway, quickly followed by the washing machine. The fridge had already toppled itself over onto the first goon, and the guy was wriggling like a trapped bug, shouting his head off. I saw the microwave go darting round the end of the sofa, and the noise stopped dead. They’ve got sharp corners, microwaves.
Stratten grabbed the gun off Monica and pointed it straight at Deck, who was busy thumping his goon: but I kicked Stratten in the back and the shot went wild. Meanwhile another bang went off behind me, and I turned to see the man who’d held the gun in my ear firing maniacally at the food processor which was running straight at him. The food processor took a bullet in the control panel and faltered, but by that time the washing machine was coming up fast behind. The man kept backing away into the corner of the room, still firing, and the bullets sang off the metal casing and ricocheted round the room.
Deck was trying to grab hold of Monica. She was kicking and clawing like a wild animal. The fridge advanced on Stratten, blood-streaked door snapping open and shut, and the chest freezer was trying a pincer movement from the other side. But the remaining henchman had regained his composure quickly, and was methodically firing into the fridge’s back panel, trying to find its brain. The sound of glass shattering from behind me said that the washing machine had probably just died as well.
And suddenly I had an idea.
‘Now,’ I panted, to the clock which still sat in my shirt pocket, ‘would be a very good time to wake me up.’
The alarm went off immediately, a piercing siren that almost brought me to my knees. But nobody took any notice, because they couldn’t hear it. Even I couldn’t, not really, though I felt it resonate through all the bones in my neck as the clock hammered out a signal on a wavelength that reinforced the perpetual beacon I carried in my spine.
Stratten and his henchmen were still shooting at the appliances, and Deck and Monica were fighting it out on the floor. It looked to me like Monica was winning, but that was something I never told Deck. It was as if I was watching some curious event on television with the sound turned down: I couldn’t hear any of it.
The alarm got louder and louder, until my entire body seemed to pulse. Stratten fired another shot, then seemed to realize something was happening. He slowly turned away from the fridge, to look at something no-one else could see.
The air in the corners of the room shuddered, like a momentary flicker of horizontal hold.
The henchmen stopped shooting, muscle-bound heads suddenly unsure. Deck stared up at my face, though what he saw there I don’t know.
Monica kept on fighting, oblivious.
The air shuddered again, and then bowed, like melting glass in a strong wind. The furniture and ceiling twisted and dissolved, a tapestry unpicked back to threads which smoked and burned. The ceiling of the room seemed to blow outwards, as if sucked into the sky, and an enormous cloud pushed its way into the world, boiling through the gaps
between atoms and surging around us with a roar like distant thunder. Faces were bleached by a light which seemed to come from nowhere, leaving only staring eyes. At the last minute one of Stratten’s henchmen tried to run, and was instantly vaporized. The other’s head exploded into light, leaving only a body which toppled over, then disappeared. My feet were still on the Earth, but everything else was being pulled into a new stasis. This was somewhere between worlds. We weren’t being taken anywhere.
It was coming to us, like rain out of a cloudless sky.
Where once the outside wall had stood, a vision slowly came into view, coalescing out of moisture and cloud, from noise and emptiness. A line of six men in pale grey appeared, standing implacable like a row of mountains. In front of them a further man, in a dark suit, his face different now. A face that betrayed the ages, a face which was beyond time and yet had its mark upon it.
Seven spirits of the invisible had come down onto the Earth, and I couldn’t tell if it was terror or joy that I felt.
There was a lifetime of quiet.
Stratten stood motionless, staring at the men. Then he abruptly swung his arm up towards me and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He tried again. Another dry click.
‘No,’ said God. ‘Mr Thompson’s one of us. He’s not dying here.’
Stratten ignored him and tried once more, with the same result. In a way I almost admired him.
‘But you,’ God added, his face stony, ‘have truly pissed me off.’
Stratten finally got the picture.
The six angels advanced on him. I saw that their faces weren’t the same after all, but a continually shifting flicker of myriad features, each gone too quickly to focus on. There was no expression you could read there, no sense to be divined. They were beyond anything that could be said, because there was nothing shared in our minds. I understood then why God had so little control over them. They were unknowable.
Stratten recognized them, I think, from dreams of his own which he’d never been able to get out of his head. He knew they were coming for him, and whirled, tried to believe there was somewhere to run. But all of our world had condensed down into one small place, and there was nowhere for him to go.
He clumsily tried to back away, staring horrified at spirits he probably saw very differently from me—for there is no more fearful evil than a good which hates you.
He fell on his knees in front of them.
Something started to happen. I saw it as a physical change, almost as if Stratten was flattening out. I stopped seeing him as a point in space, or a physical being. Instead I perceived a long process, things done and experiences seen. I saw small flickers of some of them, like a memory dump down a bad line. His face began to smear, as if pulled two ways, into both the past and the future. Instead of being caged in a box of visibility, his essence was becoming fluid again, like a river raging in flood and bursting its accustomed banks. His solidity had come from this compression and, I realized, so had all of ours. Now it was leaving him.
I was frozen for a long moment, hypnotized. But then:
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s mine.’
The heads of the angels all turned to me at once, and I wondered how I could ever have seen them as carrying guns, or how people framed them as little grey spacemen or beings with harps and wings. I guess, like some guy once said, if triangles invented a god, the chances are high that it would have three sides. In reality the angels were nothing, in a positive sense, nothing that I or anyone else could ever understand. They were an absence of reference, their bodies burning flames of some new colour no-one had ever seen.
I felt their eyes looking at me, until they blurred and turned into one. What I saw through them was both too large and too small to comprehend. It was like a book, on the one hand neat and contained, but on the other reaching out to touch everything that had ever been. Somebody had made the paper, another laid out the cover, still others designed the typefaces the story was recorded in: all of this happening in different parts of the world, and at different times. Inside, the words, each a solidification of something intangible and fleeting, of objects and thoughts, filtered and shaped through countless generations of minds with a need to frame utterance. Their eyes led to infinity, to all that had ever been. Every thing, no matter how small, is a gate to everything.
There was a pause, and then the angels took a step back. They waited, for once deferring to one who had only ever been first among many.
The man in the dark suit inclined his head to me, and the angels’ eyes went out.
Then they were gone, and we were back in a room littered with injured appliances, the walls flecked with blood and pitted with bullet holes. The heroic fridge lay tilted back against the door frame, door moving feebly now. The food processor sat in the corner, lights flashing out of sync. Monica Hammond was sprawled unconscious across the end of the sofa. I hadn’t even noticed her when we were gone. Maybe she hadn’t been with us. Perhaps that place wouldn’t even suffer her to be present.
Stratten still knelt in the middle of the floor, head bowed, at the heart of an understanding of everything he had been. Time had stopped for him, but I knew him well enough to believe it would start again soon if we weren’t careful.
Deck picked up a gun from the floor, and placed it carefully at the back of Stratten’s skull. ‘As the last two assholes standing,’ he said, ‘shall we share the honour?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’
Twenty-one
Two days later I was sitting outside a coffee shop on the Third Street promenade, when a shadow fell over the table. I looked up to see the man in the dark suit. I’d been watching the passing shoppers, not thinking much, and my coffee had already gone cold. I gestured for him to sit down, ordered two coffees, then waited for the man to speak. In the end he did, and he told me this:
In the beginning, he said, the earth was without form, and void. Past and present were the same, and the visible and invisible were one. New events came into being, like planets born on the surface of a bubbling star, but everything prior to the newness still existed, like an ever-expanding ring into which new jewels were set. Experience accumulated, growing richer and deeper, and we moved amongst it as momentary currents in an ocean. We were far less corporeal then, and communed more widely. We didn’t use words as weapons to bludgeon reality into form, and the spirits of those who had passed were all around us.
It was not a better time, necessarily, just different, and in our hearts most of us know that there are some things that were supposed to be another way. Only in the dark hours, when we consider death and the past and what they do to us, do we get a glimpse of what we have done. A part of every soul still lives in that place, and when we sleep we try to regain a way of being we have lost the ability to comprehend. At other times we feel the presence of those who live there still, and give them names and try to understand them.
Because after a while words came to us, and with them a disjunction. Instead of apprehending the world directly, experience became mediated by thought—for as soon as you catch yourself observing, you come to believe you are separate from that of which you think. We began to nail the past down, to hold it in place through description, through making a distinction between it and now. Time began to run forward. We divided light from darkness, and black from white: took everything from within ourselves and placed it outside. We called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters we called the seas, and we saw that they were different and after that it could not be undone. We created time, and finite durations, and lost the past as a small boat taking to the sea leaves the vast land behind.
At least—some of us did. Some of us chose to give form to space and tame the reality in which we soon found ourselves. Others didn’t, and we became separate strands of the same organism, inhabiting different realms.
We who became visible started to conquer the world. Our pact with corporeality mad
e it possible, like some metaphysical opposable thumb. We built, and explored, and changed our planet and our selves—trapping their fluidity, making them firm and hard. But with firmness came the possibility of malfunction, of damage and mistakes and death. It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually we condensed ourselves into greater mortality, and paid the price. We became capable of death, and once we had died there was no way of coming back, except when those who had once loved us glimpsed us briefly through the veil of recollection.
The invisibles remained immortal, and stepped between the planes. It was a long time before they realized how reality was being subdivided, and by that time the rest of us had forgotten it had ever been another way. The past had become that other country, and once something had gone there it was lost. It became what we call memory, a place we could visit in dreams and quiet moments, but only imperfectly. Past events hardened into splinters of glass untouchably embedded in our minds: foreign bodies which shift and tear, too deeply buried ever to be removed, but still sharp enough to cut through into the present and damage us time and again.
We gained pasts, and secrets, and parts of our souls atrophied and died: like a fine house with a locked room at its centre and a dead bird lying broken on the floor.
With form too came fear, a suspicion that we had blinded ourselves to a part of reality which was no longer our domain. We needed a barrier between us and the unknown, to protect us from the things we no longer understood.
And so we took the invisibles and called them angels and gods.
Deck and I made it to the station with about five minutes to spare. In the meantime we’d been back to Deck’s apartment and made a transferral, before destroying two machines.
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