Snakeskins

by Tim Major

  Spencer’s forehead creased. “I get it now.”

  Russell’s first instinct was that Spencer had seen through him – that he understood, at that moment, Russell wished Nell and Spencer were his family and not Ellis’s. He cleared his throat.

  “What Macbeth said, I mean,” Spencer continued. “The blood. You know. Stepped in so far. There was no going back, even though he knew he was being a twat. So he just carried on.”

  Russell glanced at Nell, unsure how to react to the swear word. She beamed at him.

  “So you have what you need for the essay, do you think?” she asked. Before her son answered, she added, “But I’m warning you, mister. Don’t start with any bollocks about ‘It was all Lady Macbeth’s fault and Macbeth was only a poor victim’. It’s way more complex than that. Right, Russell?”

  Russell bowed his head in agreement. In truth, he hadn’t really thought about whether it was any more complex than that. But Nell was probably right. She seemed bookish.

  Spencer’s fidgeting suggested that their little triangle would soon be broken. Russell realised that he wanted to continue their conversation – any conversation – in order to maintain the illusion.

  “How about ice cream?” he said. He grimaced. He couldn’t sound more like an interloper father if he tried. Currying favour with the potential stepson. “I’m buying,” he added, only making things worse.

  Though Spencer looked hopeful, Nell replied, “Sorry. It’s been lovely, but we should get back, it being a school night and all. It’ll be curfew before long, anyway.”

  “You both stay here, then,” he said, gabbling to mask his disappointment. “I’ll whizz round and get the car. See you out front.”

  Nell smiled. “Another time, though? The ice cream?”

  It wasn’t much, but it was an offer of more of this. Russell left the foyer feeling stupidly happy.

  Gloucester Green was only a few streets away. Russell whistled as he walked. He couldn’t remember the last time he had done that.

  The path dipped to the entrance to the underground car park and was shadowed by trees. The interior of the building was empty and even more badly lit. It was as if the architects had designed its concrete pillars to block any copper-coloured light from the fizzing wall lamps.

  He had no idea where he had parked the car. When they arrived his nervousness had pushed him even further into butler mode, fussing over Nell, helping her out of the car, fetching her coat. She had told him, with great warmth, to piss off.

  “Stop,” a voice said. It came from somewhere to his left, in the shadows. Deep and menacing. “Turn around.”

  Russell did as he was told. It would be just his luck to end a pleasant evening with an unceremonious mugging. He laughed to himself as he realised that the worst thing, if he was beaten up and thrown in the gutter, would be leaving Nell and Spencer in the foyer, wondering what had become of him.

  A figure stood beneath an illuminated green exit sign. Russell peered into the darkness, but the combination of the backlight and the man’s hood made his features invisible. He was tall, though, and well-built. An adult rather than a teenager.

  In his pocket Russell gripped the keys to his Vauxhall Nova. He slipped two fingers through the key ring. Perhaps he could use them as a rudimentary knuckleduster? Or perhaps he could simply offer the keys to the stranger, in exchange for being left unharmed. He cursed himself for his cowardice.

  “What do you want?” he said. His throat was dry and his voice sounded tiny, lost in the empty ocean of the car park.

  The stranger didn’t answer.

  “I have ten pounds in my wallet,” Russell managed to say, finally.

  “I don’t want your money.” The man’s voice was quiet and deep enough that Russell had to strain to hear him. It sounded familiar, all the same.

  Of course. The crackling sound that he had taken to be a bad line was actually a feature of the man’s voice. It was halting but deep, like the voiceover in a trailer for a Pinewood action film.

  “You’re Ixion.”

  “Yes. I don’t want to harm you.”

  “But you’re okay with threatening me?”

  “I require your cooperation.”

  Russell noted the evasion of his question. Even the statement ‘I don’t want to harm you’ carried a perverse implication of violence, however undesired. He must escape and speak to Ellis as soon as possible. Tell him everything and plead ignorance of any conspiracy.

  They were still two or three paces apart. Russell glanced at the exit. If he abandoned the car, he could make it. He’d always been good at cross-country at school. In fact, as motivation to continue running at full speed, he’d often pretended he was being chased.

  He bolted. The man burst into action too, still keeping close to the wall but narrowing the gap to the exit.

  Even though Ixion was no closer to him, Russell arced away, putting more distance between them. He realised he was now heading into the depths of the car park, though not the area containing his Nova.

  He heard a beeping sound from behind him. He turned. His would-be attacker had slowed to a halt. Russell saw a small blue light flicking on and off. A mobile telephone? Some kind of weapon?

  “Stop,” Ixion commanded.

  Hardly understanding why, Russell did as he was told.

  The stranger took a step back. The blue light stopped flashing. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and calm, though it still carried easily across the space between them. “I beg you: watch Ellis Blackwood. Find out his secrets. Watch him carefully and report to me.”

  The mixture of pleading and threats baffled Russell. This wasn’t how things happened in thriller films.

  “If there are rival groups within the government, that’s their business,” Russell said. “These things happen. I’m just doing my job. Nobody’s at risk here – assuming you’re really not going to kneecap me or anything like that. You say you’re close to the heart of government… It sounds like you’re just angling for more power yourself.”

  Ixion’s hood swung from side to side. “No. If Ellis Blackwood’s plan comes to fruition, a great many people will be at risk – both Charmers and ordinary citizens.”

  Russell snorted.

  The stranger fell silent. In a much quieter voice, he said slowly, “Specific people, too.” He let out a sigh, halting and slightly strangled. “Nell Blackwood, for example.”

  Russell froze. “What did you say?”

  Ixion continued, speaking more quickly, his earlier confidence restored. “The most important thing is to record who Minister Blackwood meets face-to-face. His contacts, his colleagues. And I don’t mean those in Westminster. I mean those that work in your building, operating under aliases.”

  Russell flinched as the man took a step towards him and pressed something into his hand. It was a business card, blank other than a scrawled phone number. Ixion’s hood overhung his face almost entirely, casting a visor of shadow.

  Then Ixion turned and strode away. Once again, Russell saw a flash of blue light; the man veered to the left. At the exit to the car park he paused, his square shoulders lit by the street lights. Then he disappeared into the shadows.

  Russell released his held breath. He stumbled to the car, unlocked the door with shaking hands, then dropped the keys into the footwell before he managed to start the engine.

  He pulled up outside the theatre and revved the engine. The foyer was empty other than Nell, Spencer and a few staff filling display stands with leaflets and collecting empty plastic cups. He glanced at the dashboard clock: 22:35. Curfew would start in twenty-five minutes and then the streets would be deserted.

  “Everything all right?” Nell asked as she dropped into the passenger seat.

  Russell shivered. He stared at Nell, scrutinising her for any suggestion of fear. Then he glanced into the mirror to make sure that Spencer was safely strapped in.

  He nodded. “Thank you for a wonderful evening.”

  ***r />
  Gerry gazed down at the tiny village of Ilam, spread beneath her like parts of a model railway set. It had taken her nearly two hours to scale this mountain, and now that she had reached its top she felt nothing but foolish. All she had as a reward was the same pleasant view she’d seen on postcards in the local post office.

  ‘Go back to the source.’ The advice sounded grand in theory. But in practice, what did it actually mean? Ilam may have been where it all began – the precise geographical location where a world with Charmers and Snakeskins became a reality– but that didn’t mean there was information to be gathered here. So much had been written about the Fall over the last two hundred years. Historians, journalists and novelists had already been here, at this precise location, scouring for clues, searching for any titbits that might warrant a new coffee-table book dedicated to the subject. She had visited Ilam herself at the start of the century, though she hadn’t climbed the mountain. Her attention had been focussed on an anti-Charmer protest in the village centre, which ended upon the appearance of several dozen soldiers, along with vehicles with grilles over their blacked-out windows and, mounted on the back of one of them, a water cannon that remained trained on the protesters long after they had abandoned their placards. Gerry had been shocked at the speed of response and the availability of huge numbers of ground troops. She had lobbied for budget to investigate the size of the British Army, but neither Folk nor any other newspaper entertained the idea for a moment. It had been soon after this protest, and a spate of larger ones in various cities, all quashed in a similar manner, that an eleven o’clock curfew had been made law.

  She stood on a grey rock and shouted, “This was a stupid idea, Drew!”

  The wind sped up the mountainside and burrowed beneath her raincoat. Gerry shivered and slumped onto the rock. From her rucksack she retrieved a cling-filmed fist of sandwiches made by the woman who ran the bed and breakfast.

  As she munched, she surveyed the miniature houses in the valley. It was difficult to shake the feeling that she ought to have used this ‘bonus time’, as Drew had put it, quite differently. Even time alone reading or watching films would have been preferable, and better than paying over the odds for a standing-room-only shuddering train journey north, switching carriages regularly to avoid the twin perils of a stag party and a group of wailing toddlers. And now here she was, at the arse-end of the Peak District, freezing to death and eating… what? Fish paste? She rewrapped the sandwiches and dug into the bag for the thickest of the heavy books that she had lugged all the way up here.

  The hardback book, pilfered from her local library in Luton, was almost worthless in terms of its informative content. The only reason she had brought it was due to the colour plate on its first page. She held up the book, clamping the pages to stop them whipping in the wind, to compare the image to the real landscape.

  She must be close. She turned from side to side before locating another rock outcrop, slightly further east. Grunting, she rose to her feet, clambered over to the outcrop, and settled herself again. Now the view and the illustration matched almost perfectly. The only difference was that, in place of cumulus wisps, the illustrated plate showed a bruise-purple sky, crosshatched with dozens of needle-thin streaks of green.

  What would the Fall have looked like, in reality? If she could have sat here on this cold rock on 23 July 1808, what would she have imagined was occurring? Of course, in all likelihood, nobody had been in such a position. The artist who painted this picture would have been nestled in bed, as would all the locals. The image was uncredited, but quite possibly the painter had never even set foot in Ilam until after the Fall, when Ilam had already become the go-to destination for aristocrats and rubberneckers.

  Still. It would have been fucking terrifying, that’s what it would have been.

  Like everyone else, she probably would have assumed that the meteor shower was an omen – that the blazing streaks of green light were a hundred malignant signals of doom. She would have pelted back indoors, along with her neighbours – into her hovel, rather than one of the glorified doll’s houses now situated in the valley – and shuddered at the window with a rough blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She would have reckoned that her death was imminent. And she would have been as far off the mark as anyone could possibly be.

  The owner of the bed and breakfast had talked her through the limited facilities that the village had to offer. They amounted to a public toilet (pristine), the town hall (tiny, abandoned during the mornings, packed with exhausted elderly workers from the local factory in the afternoon) and the visitor centre. The visitor centre had provided barely any information about the Fall, other than a few additional artists’ impressions, though none of them any more useful than the illustration in the library book. Donald, the septuagenarian behind the counter, had given a wan smile when Gerry had asked about the meteor shower. “People don’t come any more,” he had said. “Once, the name Ilam was on everybody’s lips. People these days don’t concern themselves about where they came from. No sense of history.”

  Where they came from.

  Gerry traced the path of an imagined meteor, backwards, upwards, to where the sky shone white. Up there. In a sense, they came from up there.

  She tossed the uneaten half of her sandwich over her shoulder and rose to her feet. It was too cold to drag the visit out. She set off southwards, picking her way along the ridge.

  Twenty minutes later the rock face rose higher to her right, forming a canopy that blocked the still-rising sun. She shivered and pulled her coat tighter around her body. She hurried to pass its sheer face, eager to reach sunlight again. Then something made her pause.

  This was it.

  She edged closer to the rock face. Most of its surface was smooth, weathered by the rain. However, above head height, where most of the surface became flatter, it was pockmarked. She wished she remembered what she had been taught in school about rock types. Igneous and sedimentary, but she couldn’t recall which was which. The rocks here were the rounded type, that much she knew. Grey-white and smooth, like the bare bones of a dinosaur. She clambered up onto a low ledge, then pushed her fingers into the pockmarked divots. There were over a dozen of them, roughly hemispherical, ranging from the size of a golf ball to a fist. The lips of each indentation were smooth enough, but might once have been sharper. It was hard to shake the feeling that something – or rather, some things – had struck the rock, here, long ago. Several of the anti-prosperity newsletters to which she subscribed had referred to these markings, but given their usual conspiracy theories, Gerry had expected them to be less visible, the theory less convincing.

  The official histories – in her library book, and every other published account she’d read – stated that none of the meteors had actually landed. But perhaps they had, here, far above the village. Whereas everybody down in the valley saw the green streaks speckle the sky and then vanish, perhaps up here on the ridge lay a dozen, or a hundred, or more, fizzing balls of space rock.

  Perhaps.

  It wasn’t much. She hopped down onto the ground, landing awkwardly and twisting her ankle a little. She crouched like a cat before a bowl of milk, her nose almost touching the ground.

  It was only due to this peculiar posture that she noticed the faint marks on the ground. She brushed at the tufts of coarse grass that obscured them. Though the lines disappeared every so often where moss had worked its way across, they described a squarish shape spanning almost the entirety of the flat area below the vertical rock face.

  It was the outline of a small building – she was certain of it.

  Someone local must know what had once been up here. She stood, wincing slightly at the pain from her ankle, and turned to look down upon Ilam.

  A large building squatted halfway up the slopes of the mountain at the end of the valley, as though contemplating passing through. Gerry rifled through the pages of the library book. She’d heard mention of the name Ilam Hall, but the building didn’t appe
ar on any of the colour plates. When had it been built? Mid-1800s, judging from the architecture. Well after the Fall. But even so. There might be a library there.

  She sighed with relief at this new sense of purpose, then began her stumbling descent.

  * * *

  “Rights! For!” Caitlin filled her lungs before bellowing the final word. “Charmers!”

  Below her, students milled back and forth in the common area between the classrooms and the canteen. A few of them glanced her way, but only momentarily. Most strode by, smirking. It was as though they had been instructed not to pay her any attention. She wondered whether Jane Rowntree was responsible, or even Evie. The second possibility made her want to pack up and go home immediately.

  No. She had to make a stand. She took a deep breath and shouted again, “Rights for Charmers!”

  A knot in the tree bark had begun to dig into her spine. She wiggled as best she could, but the rope looped around the tree trunk had no more slack in it. She tried to reach up and scratch the itch but the laminated bike chain jangled as its figure-of-eight coil pulled tight against her wrists. There could be no way of getting relief unless she unlocked the chain. So she would have to distract herself instead.

  “Hear me! Hear me!” she shouted. Was that how people started public speeches? “This college is a hotbed of bigots! Who oppress the minorities! Who enslave the weak!” A couple of students turned her way, finally. ‘Enslave’ was completely the wrong word, and Charmers in general were anything but weak, but at least it had got their attention. “Right here, in this very courtyard, a boy was preyed upon, merely because of his genes. This boy, after being severely beaten and having his property destroyed, was sent home. And his attackers, his cold-blooded assailants, were given one measly detention each. Yes – that’s all! And then they were slapped on the back – good job, boys – and everything was forgiven!”

  Two boys stopped beneath the tree, gazing up at her perched on two of the boxlike wooden benches that encircled it. She couldn’t see their faces. She hadn’t counted on the leaves of the lowest branches blocking her vision.