“What’s this?” Falconer was squinting at Mahler’s computer. Derwent could see what looked like a Google Earth view of Slumside, with lines and scribbles superimposed, highlighting where…
“Those are where Atacom’s been working on the estate,” she said automatically. It wasn’t much, but Slumside was still her patch.
Falconer took that in, then stared at Mahler. “That’s it, is it? Fed up of complaining about the lifts? Taking matters into your own hands?”
And Mahler laughed, a high and desperate sound. “Oh fuck, you really think it’s me?”
Derwent’s phone chimed and she clutched for it automatically. Nzeogu had texted her going to hawkins atacm urgent.
She thumbed back not alone also why???
“You think I’m some criminal mastermind?” Mahler laughed again, though it was more like crying. “I’ve been trying to work this out ever since all my fucking friends got eaten at the party.”
Another chime. Nzeogu had sent her a photo, skewed and slightly out of focus. It showed a business card.
Raymond Paoli. Atacom plc. Research and Development.
“You need to get out of here,” Mahler told them. “At least you can take the stairs.”
*
Just about everyone at Atacom had knocked off for the night, by now, except the big cheese himself. When Nzeogu burst into his office, Hawkins was in the middle of packing a briefcase. His expression, caught in the act, was one of utter denial.
“No,” he got out. “No, I need to get to Westminster.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Nzeogu felt just as shaky and washed out as Hawkins looked, but maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe they had an experience in common “I will arrest you if I have to.”
“On what charge?” Hawkins demanded.
“On any damn charge I feel like because I am going to hold onto you until you tell me why Atacom needs an R&D department.” He slung down Paoli’s card.
Hawkins’ face twitched and quivered as though the man he’d once been, before taking on this job, was still trapped inside and trying to get out. “It’s not my fault,” he said faintly. “It’s not what you think.”
Nzeogu lunged forward and shoved him so that he slammed back down into his seat. “I do not even know what I think right now. I just know some guy you used to employ to develop things turns up on the street with some mind-fuck invention that’s also a disintegrator ray or something. I want to know what’s going on.” He could hear his own voice going raw with exhaustion and accumulated trauma. “I want to know what happened to me.”
Hawkins looked convulsively over his shoulder, out of the window at the sprawling eyesore of Slumside. “It’s too late now anyway,” he said, in a small voice. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Sure, sure, Parliamentary enquiry’s going to tear you a new one,” Nzeogu said, unsympathetically. “Look—”
Hawkins’ smile was sickly, awful to behold. “Oh no, that’s going to be just fine. We’re going to hit all our targets.” As though finally resigning himself to Nzeogu’s presence, he settled back in the chair. “Paoli … Paoli thought it was all free love and opening the mind, but really hitting targets is the only thing.”
“Explain,” Nzeogu pushed.
“I had a great-great-uncle. Crawford was his name. He was a genius,” Hawkins told him raggedly. “He invented some-thing – his resonator. And it opens the mind, Paoli was right about that much. It opens the mind so far that anything can get in.”
*
“We’re not going anywhere until you give us some answers,” Falconer told Mahler. “What have you done? What have your people planted here? When’s it going to blow? What about your friend Raymond?”
Mahler looked from him to Derwent and obviously decided that she was the more reasonable of the two. “Raymond was an idiot. He got out of Atacom with their stuff and thought it was like designer drugs. He didn’t believe me about them being dangerous. I mean, a hundred people just gone, and nobody cares. You tell the authorities, they say people disappear in Slumside all the time. But I saw Atacom’s people go over the place, after. That’s when I got onto Raymond, for all the good it did. That’s when I started digging. Because the party I was at wasn’t even one of Paoli’s. That was a test, an official test.” She made an abortive move for her computer, but Falconer was in the way. “I found papers – crackpot science, Fortean stuff, some crazy guy called Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast invented a machine.”
“A machine that makes you hallucinate,” Derwent prompted, because that was what she dearly wanted to believe.
“No,” Mahler said simply. “It lets you see what’s really there, all the time, around us. You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”
“The things from out there,” Derwent said unwillingly.
“Not out there.” Mahler hugged herself. “In here, everywhere, touching us and inhabiting us all the time, except without the resonator we’re irrelevant to each other. All those lights and sounds and sensations that Paoli got high off, they’re the reality. They’re an environment, an ecosystem. And when we’re plugged into it, we’re prey.”
*
“Look out of the window,” Hawkins invited. “Look at it. My legacy. They thought they could make me their scapegoat, you see, but I’ll go before the pen pushers in Westminster and tell them it’s all fine. Working as intended. I hadn’t wanted to start things so soon, but you and your friends, you were asking too many questions. So I pushed the button.” He shuddered, but a tiny giggle escaped him at the same time. “Score one for Uncle Crawford.”
“What have you done?” Nzeogu demanded.
“Just following government policy,” Hawkins said, trying for innocence. “I mean, let’s not fool ourselves here. We both know the whole point behind putting all those people in Slumside is that it’s out of sight, out of mind, yes? And it was obvious the whole temporary housing thing was never going to work. Too many people, too little planning, no budget at all. And then they dump the blame on me because they need someone to blame when it all fails.” Hawkins’ eyes were bloodshot, horrible: a man who had been staring at something terrible for a long time, without even needing a machine to help him see it. “But it won’t fail,” he confided. “Uncle Crawford came through for me. Too many people you see. Too little space. But what if there’s always more space?”
*
“So you’re trying to disrupt Atacom’s works because they killed your friends?” Falconer grasped desperately, jabbing a hand at the map on Mahler’s screen.
But Mahler was gripping the wheels of her chair. “Jesus,” she said, “can you feel it?”
“What?” Falconer hissed, but Derwent could. The room around them seemed to be vibrating at some uncomfortable frequency and her eyes kept finding movement in empty space.
“There’s a resonator,” she got out. “Where is it? Turn it off!” She began running around the flat, opening drawers and scouring shelves to find the machine. Every step saw the walls of the world recede all around her, making space for other things.
“Stand still!” Mahler laughed again, that wretched, despairing sound. “Look at the map, you idiots! Look at what they’ve done!”
Derwent stared at the image, following all the lines and loops where Atacom had been digging up the road, her eyes tracking round and round about the violated streets until she stopped seeing the cramped confines of Slumside and saw instead a simple, familiar arrangement of wiring and structure.
“It’s the whole estate,” she whispered, even as the air around her began to shift and undulate. From beyond the walls of the flat – from beyond the walls of the world – she heard the first screams.
“Don’t move,” Mahler said, calm now the worst had come. “Movement attracts them.”
*
Nzeogu looked out across Slumside and saw it all begin to leap out at him, detail by detail: the things that had always been there in the corner of his eye, but he’d never known to notice them. He
saw their mindless, jellyfish forms blob and bloat through the air, through walls, through each other, trailing helices of tentacles. They devoured and were devoured like the world under a microscope suddenly writ impossible large. He saw the gulfs they swam in falling away in directions he didn’t even have names for.
There were courses cut through that gelatinous sea of overlapping monsters, wakes left by the true killers. The streets were full of people fleeing back and forth, fighting the insubstantial hordes, tearing at their own eyes, but each moment those streets were less full. Nzeogu had held out hope that Paoli and Osalawi and the rest were just … elsewhere, waiting to be restored to the world. Now he knew that they had gone someplace where there was no coming back from.
He got his phone out with the intention of calling someone to cut off the power to all of Slumside, but instead of a dial tone came the echoing sound of the vast, liquid void into which all signals, all energy was vanishing.
Hawkins was at his elbow, staring. “Oh God,” the executive gasped, but Nzeogu didn’t hear horror in his voice, only the near-orgasmic glee of a bureaucrat who is going to hit his targets after all.
Nzeogu didn’t think, really – not about his career, not about what Derwent might say – he just took Hawkins by the shoulder and the belt and threw him hard at the window. The executive burst through it in a radiating pattern of glass shards that seemed to fall away in every direction forever, fractalling into infinity. But then something rose up from the depths of nowhere and intercepted the arc of his body, and there was just an expensive suit gusting empty on the wind.
*
And within the boundless expanse that was Mahler’s flat, three frail people held terribly still and waited to see if the newly-visible world would notice them.
The Play’s the Thing by Keris McDonald
Northern England, 1902
The young man stepped out onto the wet cobbles and watched as the hansom pulled away down the street. The clop of hooves was audible for some time after the cab disappeared from view. Then the silence returned, the silence of a great city heard from its very edge, made up of the distant thrum of foundries and factories. Lights in the broad valley below painted a yellow smudge in the smog-tainted air.
He turned up the collar of his coat. It was drizzling and the deserted suburban road was not a pleasant place to linger, but the gate he sought was only a few paces away. From outside the walled grounds of Lithly House, little was visible except the bare branches of sycamores and the dark and dripping masses of the rhododendron bushes. Once away from the street’s gas-lamps, only the pale glimmer of the crushed limestone drive suggested the route to follow through the darkness. It was clear that the track had not been swept since the start of winter – and clearer still, upon reaching the front of the house, that the place was suffering from some neglect. Ivy sprawled over the terrace and lank grass grew in the rose-beds. But smoke was issuing from two of the three great chimney stacks, and lamplight gleamed from the oriole window. It was a very substantial building with tall windows suggesting high-ceilinged rooms, built of yellowy-dun stone – though that was stained from the city’s coal-smoke. Great black streaks hung down its façade from the eaves like shadowy stalactites.
He mounted the front steps and pulled upon the bell. The door was opened by a butler in an old-fashioned frock coat: a short, wizened man with a white fleece of hair and skin as black as burnt paper. The servant had to look up at the visitor, yet somehow gave the impression of staring down his nose as he enquired, “Yes? May I help you?”
“My name is Mr Arthur Richmond, of Roy and Johns Associates. Mr Thale requested my presence.” So saying, Richmond produced his card for inspection. The butler took it in white-gloved hands and glanced searchingly at its owner, as if he suspected some fraud. What he saw was a young man of inoffensive demeanour and bland countenance, carrying a small leather case, his gold-rimmed spectacles glinting in the light that spilled from the door.
“I shall inform the master that you have arrived. Would you care to step inside, sir?”
Leaving the newcomer in the hall, the butler disappeared into the interior of the house. Richmond clasped his hands behind his back and wandered around the small circumference of light afforded by a single oil-lamp set on a side-table, but found little to rest his attention upon except for an ailing geranium in a Chinese pot and a tapestry depicting Jael about to drive the tent-peg into Sisera’s head. He studied this scene abstractly.
Almost noiselessly, the butler returned. “Mr Thale will see you, sir. Might I take your coat and hat?” The disrobing accomplished, he took up the lamp and led Richmond into the depths of the house. The corridors and antechambers were richly furnished to the point of being cluttered, and only by following closely could the visitor avoid barking his shins upon the heavy furniture that lurked there. At length they came out into a room that was fully lit: the gas-mantles on the walls hissing gently, the huge fireplace occupied by blazing logs. A man of mature years reclined upon the chaise longue nearest the fireplace. Despite the heat and close atmosphere he wore a mustard-coloured dressing gown and his legs were draped in a tartan blanket. He was frowning.
“Mr Arthur Richmond, sir,” said the butler.
Richmond came forward. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr Thale.”
“Richmond?” said the master of Lithly House. “I was expecting Mr Johns. He has always represented your firm in the past.” Thale was a heavy-set man with blunt, handsome features and a fleshy jaw line. He didn’t rise to greet Richmond, and there was an edge of anxiety to his ill humour.
“Mr Johns is my uncle,” said the young man mildly. “He passed on eighteen months ago.”
Thale grunted, looking his visitor up and down while fiddling with the edge of his blanket. “I see. I'm sorry to hear it. But … you’re a bit young, Richmond.”
“I assure you, I am fully conversant with all the work of Roy and Johns Associates, and entirely competent to deal with any eventuality,” he replied – adding after a slight pause: “With, of course, the discretion and care for which that company is renowned.”
Thale gave him a long, considering look and then reached for the brandy glass on the small table at his side. “And are you familiar with the unique circumstances of this house?”
“The … unusual properties of Lithly House have always been of particular interest to me, sir.”
Thale raised one eyebrow. “Very well. Naotalba, fetch a sherry for the young man.”
The butler, who had been waiting motionless with hands folded, dropped a slight bow and flitted from the room.
“Excellent fellow,” Thale muttered, relaxing a little. “Bought him in Havana. Long time ago now, of course.” He didn’t seem to notice his visitor’s studiously blank expression. “Richmond, is it? What do you think of the house, now you've seen it?”
“The exterior is most impressive,” Richmond answered carefully.
“Yes, it does have a picturesque facade. Did you know Mr Atkinson Grimshaw has painted it as one of his 'moonlight' series? He could not be persuaded to take an interest in the rooms within, unfortunately – there was an unhappy disagreement between us on certain matters of taste. However, I understand that he found even the front elevation quite inspirational.”
“Yes, I can imagine that.”
A smile pulled at Thale’s lips. “This house has quite an effect upon the sensitive temperament,” he confided. “I am only an amateur collector of art, but I pride myself that I am an expert collector of artists. I do my best to play host here to those creative souls who will appreciate its special atmosphere. The dear late Mr Beardsley was particularly fond of Lithly House, and was always a favourite of the family – he and his lovely sister. He conceived his Salome pieces during a holiday here, did you realise? Wonderful, aren’t they?”
“I am familiar with the illustrations,” the younger man said guardedly. “They are quite striking.”
“He had to tone down the final prints fo
r public consumption, of course. The original sketches were … unsuitable.” Thale’s tone was casual, but his eyes were fixed upon his guest with a curious gleam.
The object of his scrutiny did not react. “Might I ask,” he said, “the nature of your particular problem on this occasion?”
The older man grunted and regarded the folds of tartan before him with some gloom. “It’s my own fault,” he said. “I went out hunting. I don’t leave the house much, as a rule, but there was a wonderful harvest moon and it was far too tempting an opportunity to miss. Had a splendid time. Unfortunately I took a fall which left me confined to my bed for some weeks.”
At this point Naotalba reappeared bearing a tray with a single glass of sherry. Richmond accepted the drink and sipped it gingerly, still standing.
Thale sighed. “I am still a prisoner of this poor body. There is no prospect that I will be able to walk properly again.” He swirled the brandy in his glass. “So you will understand that I have not been able to fulfil my duties as master of the house properly for some little time. I have not been able to inspect all the rooms, even with servants to carry me. Things have become muddled. I have lost control of some areas. There have been intrusions. That is why I called in your firm; Roy and Johns have dealt well with this family, and I am afraid I will need you to confront this situation for me.”
“Specifically?”
“The Library has gone missing. And some other rooms. The Conservatory and the Clock Room, among others.”
“How many?” Richmond asked, pulling a small notebook from his pocket and starting to make notes with a gilt pencil. His mild voice had become firm.
“Naotalba?”
“Seven, sir.” Naotalba addressed Richmond directly. “There are eighty-one rooms in the house normally. Though some are frequently elusive, Miss Camilla has been trying to track them down in her father’s absence. But there are seven we cannot find.”
“There is normally a reliable route to the Library through the Picture Gallery,” Thale added, “but a harpy seems to have taken up residence there and we cannot make our way past. All the other doors are missing. You may have to establish new routes.”
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 20
