by Jeff Noon
His eyes stared ahead, seeking direction.
Everything was pitch black. In front, behind, to all sides.
Black. No light. None.
The night had no exit, no doors at all, no windows, not a crack of light.
Where could he go?
Darkness, only darkness.
He spat out dust and soot and ash and blood and slivers of flesh torn from his own lips, and grit and soil and bits of enamel from his teeth; he spat out cheap beer and bad whisky and stale air and bile and hatred of all known people; and he spat out last of all the prospect of ever being anything different than what he was, a bad of the lowest degree, a damaged soul adrift in the night and the day, afraid of shadows, made of shadows.
Black air, black earth, all around.
He was blind.
Now he started to run in panic and after only a few strides smashed into a wall, or a concrete post, a parked car, something, he could not see what it was.
He fell. In pain. Sticky blood on his face when he pulled his hand away from the cut where he’d cracked his head. His body folded, curling up tightly for protection, for comfort, to hide himself away from himself and from whatever awaited him here, in the darkness.
It was no good; it could not be hidden away.
The vision came back to him. The girl Eleanor in the grey hotel room, the pillow in his hands, his hands, these hands, these aching, scuffed, bloody hands, the way he felt when the pillow pressed down upon her face. That young life, extinguished. The exultation of the act passing through him like desire, his body sparked with need. The clock ticking. And then his own face in the mirror, and the way he had looked then, without feeling, with no trace of compassion.
No, no! Please. No…
He had killed. He was a killer.
No, not yet, but soon: he would be a killer.
Nuh…
Crying, mumbling, the words just pure sound, pure gibberish.
Nu ah plu ne ahh shh…
His body was shaking a little less, growing quiet, until he was lying still at last, and his eyes slowly opened. His vision was saturated with light, with a strange green light, close up, touching his face, pulsating in time with his own blood beat.
Luminous, blurred, filling his world entirely.
The light moved away slightly, melting from view.
Then back again.
Nyquist held the sight in place, concentrating, until he understood what he was seeing.
The watch.
His new wristwatch, the one he had bought from the street trader. His face was pressing down on the dial, activating the green luminous light.
He concentrated as best he could, willing the time to come into focus.
There it was. A few minutes to twelve. Almost midnight.
Taking great care now, one planned action after another, he got to his feet again and set off walking.
How long had he been knocked out for? He could not tell. All he could remember was the dream, the vision, the girl being killed…
He walked on and on until he felt a little more clearheaded, willing his eyes to adjust themselves to the dark. But the darkness never faded, and when he looked up, the sky was empty of all stars. There was nothing to offer guidance. And Nyquist realised then, that he had entered the region known as Full Dark, the furthest edge of the night, where even the artificial stars and the planets were invisible. It was an area of the city that many feared, and very few visited. Sight was useless. Instead, he stretched out both hands in front of him and shuffled on until his fingers touched at something: rough, crumbling, powdery on top, hard beneath, sharp against the flesh. A wall, a brick wall. He listened, hearing tiny scratching sounds, and the murmur of human voices. He edged along the wall step by step until he saw specks of light somewhere ahead, appearing and disappearing like glow worms. Fluttering colours, sudden flashes, slow fades like a retinal burnout. And somewhere within them, the vision of the girl being murdered, smothered. He waved his hands around frantically, trying to wipe the pictures away. The side of his head ached, the bone tender.
Nyquist moved on through the darkness. Progress was difficult, his legs were too tired, too heavy. Again he looked at his watch, pressing the button to illuminate the dial. It was one minute to midnight. Yet surely many more minutes had passed since he’d last checked? He raised the watch to his face, to his ear, pressing it close, listening: tick tick tick… It was still working, but the mechanism was turning too slowly, the ticks sounding like the heartbeat of a dying animal. Time was moving along as thickly as black sludge here, in this place where the night coagulated. Yet he kept on walking, desperate to escape the feeling of stasis. Seconds going by, a minute, one more. He counted the passage of time in his head, and then he looked again at his watch.
It was ten seconds to twelve.
He carried on, until his fingers lost contact with the wall. He made a few more tentative steps, arms outstretched, fearful of what he might find.
Stop. Stop here.
A movement ahead, black against black.
Nyquist stepped forward.
Another movement. People. Living human beings, those who embraced the darkness completely.
Each one was dressed entirely in black, with no skin visible at any point. Even their faces were covered, their eyes hidden behind strips of cloth. They moved slowly, slowly, one breath at a time. Nyquist stared ahead, where the night seemed darker than it ever was, a deeper shade of black his eyes could not register. Total blindness. He looked away from the darkness. His watch barely glowed, the time a faint smear of colour.
Midnight.
The two main hands meeting at the top of the dial.
The realm of zero. This was a polar region, he realised, where time slowed to a stop. The mechanism of the city revolved around this one point, this singularity. Nyquist cried out to the people closest to him, “Help me please. I can’t… I can’t find my way back. Back to the city. Help me.” They turned to see the stranger. None of them spoke, none replied. They had given up entirely on time, on any notion of moving forward or back. Nyquist could not tell where each person ended and the night began; they were blurred creations, emerging, dissolving, from the darkness, into darkness. “Help me,” he said again, quieter now. He was too weak. The face of the girl loomed before him, his victim, his chosen one. The future had taken over his flesh, his veins, and was seeping through him like a slow river. The night wavered, the people before him seemingly made from vapour, of no substance. They spoke in whispers, the words indecipherable.
If he could only get through to them.
Midnight beckoned. Here. Now. This moment…
…Here… now… shadows across a wall… tick… where the clock and the mirror hang, waiting… the girl moves… fearful… No, keep away! Keep away from me… tick… the killer draws near, holding the pillow… tick… pressing, pressing down… tick, tick… the girl’s face… her breath, fading… tick… the hands clutching at the sheets… until, tick, until…
Nyquist moved forward one more step and then looked at his watch, the only lighted object for miles around. The second hand trembled on the very edge of the figure twelve. One more step and the cloak of midnight surrounded him completely.
Tick…
Tick…
Tick…
Tic…
tic…
ti…
t…
His watch stopped.
Neverness.
His body froze. His heart murmured. His blood slowed. His eyelids barely fluttered. His breath would not have stirred a piece of cotton, nor a moth’s wing. His vision stood still. Nothing moved. Only one thing remained in all this darkness and that was a voice, this voice. Now. Speaking this. This word. Another. One by one by one. These words, this story. His story. Only this: that he was aware of himself as a voice, a mind thinking, an entity. A story. A goddamn story! Somebody alive. A man. A man of shadows. Somebody who deserved to be alive for whatever reasons, good or bad. Somebody w
ith a purpose in life, whatever that purpose might be.
The girl’s face appeared to him. Eleanor’s face.
He had to kill her.
Somebody with a purpose in life…
Of course. It was his destiny, a force that took possession of him.
It was simple; in order to escape – from fear, from his past, his troubles, from himself, from stasis, from darkness – Nyquist had to murder the girl. Only this gave him any reason to move on from this frozen moment. And stirred by this one terrible notion, this task, at last he took a single tiny shuffling step forward, moving out of midnight’s embrace.
Tick…
The people of Full Dark looked to him as he reappeared. One of them came up close; he could not tell for sure, but he imagined that the person was female. Gloved hands hovered around Nyquist’s face, the fingers passing before his eyes gently, gently, slowly, closing them, closing his eyes with a gesture and then letting them come open again. This done, the woman moved off to rejoin her companions; not a word was passed from one to the other. Nyquist looked up at the blank vista of the midnight sky; without any stars to give direction, how could he find his way back to the city? But something happened then; he could barely understand how or why but a calmness came over him, and he brought his left hand up to his temple, pressing his wristwatch against his ear. Tick. It was working again, and he listened carefully to the mechanism as he set off walking. Tick. He took tentative steps in different directions, gauging the liveliness of the ticking sound. Tick, tick. He was thinking: the livelier his wristwatch sounded, the faster the workings ticked, the further he must be from Midnight, and the closer he would be to the city, where the timescales beckoned like the pull of gravity. It took him many wrong turnings before his ears became used to the sound, to the tiny differences that each new direction brought, but soon enough the darkness started to take on a slightly different hue, to become a little less dark. Slowly, slowly, slowly time came back to him, the brain being wound up by some deft, invisible key. His eyes retuned themselves to the dark, allowing a little vision. Now he could actually see the hands of his watch moving. Tick, tick, tick. He could see the second hand in its quickening sweep around the dial. And now the night sky shone with a soft emerald light. When he looked upwards, Nyquist could make out the stars, just faintly. Pinpricks of light, nothing more. It was enough.
There she was, the Swan with Two Necks. It was a well-known constellation, because of its beauty. He had learned the shape by heart at school, as the teacher intoned the famous passage from Lady Margaret Asquith’s “A Children’s Ballad of Stars”.
O swan with two necks,
Most beguiling of patterns,
eleven stars all told, most precious
shining over night’s black lake.
Yes, he was now heading northwards. He knew where he was, at least vaguely. It was enough of a direction. Something to head for, if nothing more. Yet, he still felt strange, washed out, empty, as though all potential but one had trickled away from his body, and when he looked ahead all he could see was the next moment, the next moment after that, the next, and beyond that, the girl dying, dying by his own hand. His eyes closed and he stopped for a moment, until the feelings of dizziness had left him. Then he walked on, and on, and on until his feet stumbled over some obstruction. He looked down to see a road sign, uprooted, and fallen to the ground. The long pole was covered in weeds and the sign itself eaten away by rust, but the sight of something so familiar brought a flood of joy, and recognition; here was his way of escape, surely, back through the night, back towards day. His eyes sparkled with tears.
He knelt down and scraped away the dirt, brambles and slugs from the sign. He had to bend down close to read the several destinations on offer, and to work out as best he could which way the sign would be facing when upright. And then Nyquist set off once more through the darkness, following this new direction along a narrow roadway, one eager step after another until he could see a few welcoming lights ahead, red and green and yellow.
It was a train station.
The Downshadow Train
He stood alone on the platform, waiting. The stars were shivering in the sky. The signalling lamps glowed red then green down the track, and the cold air blowing across the telephone lines made a desolate music, the night playing a tune to itself. Nyquist blew on his hands. He was listening to the sound of the wind, watching as the breeze carried pieces of litter down the track, back towards the pitch black regions, where the train line petered out.
The station was called Starlight’s Edge.
Nyquist searched through his pockets. His wallet was gone, taken by Pearce most probably, along with all his personal effects. He had a few coins, not enough to buy a ticket with.
But he was still alive. Alive! How could that be? He should’ve overdosed, like Sumak. Had Pearce made a mistake, given him too little of the kia? Or had he built up a resistance over the years of abuse? He only knew that his body had fought back for some reason, and was still fighting, still clinging to the shreds of life. He had fallen deep into Midnight, fallen into Neverness and been cleansed, perhaps that was it: something had happened to him, something strange and unknowable and he was alive, set on a course, the future pulling him forwards, forwards, forwards, stronger than the drug, dragging him along a straight and narrow track as surely as a locomotive moves to its next destination. Time itself was catching hold of his body and spirit, carrying him along.
His fingers touched at the empty gun holster, strapped around his chest and stomach. He was unarmed. But what did he care for such things now? There are many different ways of killing people. He removed the holster and threw it over the fence, into the bushes that lined the rear of the platform.
Again, the teenage girl’s stricken face hovered in his sight.
He shook the vision away, looking instead to the station clock. The dial glimmered under a pale lamp, the only light. It was twenty-five past nine. Without any real conscious thought of what he was doing, he adjusted his watch to the same measure.
Something nagged at him, something Pearce had said during the interrogation: You poor sod. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Now what did she mean by that? It worried him. He tried to think, what had led to the remark? Something about Bale, about Patrick Bale’s purpose in all this…
No, he couldn’t remember, not properly.
The train drew up at the platform.
Nyquist chose an empty carriage. A few people got on at subsequent stops, but not many. These were the lonely night passengers, making their way from the dark sky’s lost and lonely perimeter, back to the Central Darkness, or onwards from there, towards daylight. Once he heard a young couple talk to each other of the latest Quicksilver murder.
The darkness of a tunnel silenced them.
Nyquist touched at his injuries, his shoulder, the side of his head, all over his face. Only now was he becoming aware of the damage he had received.
He must look like something evil, bloodied and bruised. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face with it. He stared at the embroidered eye on the linen and thought of love lost, in time, in space. And he was suddenly glad that he’d taken two with him, two handkerchiefs. It was a ridiculous thing to be happy about, but there it was: a small human act of self-kindness in the long desolate night, it was enough to get him smiling and sobbing at the same time.
A family group got on the train at the next station, two adults, two kids. People kept their distance. The children looked at him; they whispered together.
Nyquist didn’t care. He hardly heard them.
He felt that his life had been covered in darkness more or less completely, until one light alone gleamed inside, like the coloured signal at the end of a train line. This light took on shape as he closed his eyes: the room, the hotel room, the clock above the mirror, the girl…
Nyquist trembled. He felt a tingle at the back of his neck. It felt like two bits of loose wire sparki
ng against each other, creating a different kind of light. That was it! He had to kill Eleanor because she was now Quicksilver. In some way she had taken over her father’s role. He remembered her claim, that she could manipulate time, and had done ever since she was a child. If she could cause a clock to move backwards a few minutes, could she also steal time in some way? In this city of warped chronologies, it was definitely a possibility. And she’d already started on this mission: her first victim had already been chosen, and murdered, right here in Nocturna after she’d escaped from the hotel room. He’d heard it on the radio. And she would carry on. Further victims…
He felt the truth move through him. Killing Eleanor wasn’t a future event.
It was future desire.
This is what kia had revealed to him. The drug didn’t predict the future, it predicted a future compulsion of the user. An urge, a need. An impulse strong enough even to allow him to escape from midnight’s clutches.
But what if he escaped the city?
Yes, of course! He would stay on the train, get back to Dayzone, pick up some cash from his office and then catch another train, or a motor coach. Go elsewhere. Anywhere, the furthest distance he could afford. Cross the borderline, find a place to settle down, another city. A place where the clocks moved at one tempo only. Leave this world of distorted time behind him, once and for all. By doing this, he would remove himself from the murderous task, no matter how necessary it might be.
It was simple. He would run away.
This would be his journey.
He settled back in his seat. The train had been travelling for quite a while now and people had got on and off, on and off, at the small towns and villages along the way, and currently only about half a dozen people occupied the carriage.
