The Third Person (New Blood)

by Steve Mosby

  Ten minutes later, anyway, we were on the motorway – doing pretty much the reverse of the journey I’d made that morning, but at roughly twice the speed. Dennison had a fast car, and he was flooring it. I wouldn’t have cared if we crashed. The cars we were passing were like dreams.

  I kept glancing down at the printout on my lap.

  A blank e-mail, sent both to Dennison and my own account, but the header information told me everything that I needed to know. Everything, but it also led to confusion and mystery. The attachment, however, was clearer.

  I said, ‘It has to be her.’

  Well, it had certainly been sent from Amy’s e-mail address: the one that I’d set up for her in the second week we were going out. That address was the only one she ever used. When we first met, she didn’t know much about computers and so I’d said that I’d sort one out for her to save her the bother. Maybe I’d made it out to be slightly more complicated than it was: some stupid attempt to impress her a little. I can’t remember. It wouldn’t surprise me.

  ‘It took me quarter of an hour to explain what pop mail was,’ I said. ‘Even then, I don’t think she really got it.’

  Dennison didn’t say anything. He just concentrated on the road.

  ‘I don’t think I explained it too well.’

  Just show me how to use it, she said.

  It doesn’t matter how it works.

  Do I need to know how the tv works? No.

  Do I need to know how the lightswitch works?

  Sidling up to me, sly grin in place.

  Do I need to know how you work to use you?

  I swallowed the memory. ‘She never changed her password. We used to check each other’s mail all the time. But nobody else knew the password, apart from me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t think she ever told anyone else.’ I shook my head. ‘I mean, why would she have done that?’

  Dennison changed lanes, shifting down a gear. We edged a little faster past a dark grey pickup piled high with the skinned, burned remains of cars. The driver’s arm was resting on the open window-ledge, juddering with the road. I turned to watch him as we passed him. I don’t know why. He looked at me, and then looked away again.

  ‘I don’t know why she would have told anyone else,’ Isaid.

  Dennison didn’t reply.

  I turned back, more decisive now. The road was flying by underneath us.

  ‘I think it really does have to be from her.’

  Dennison moved back into the middle lane and we started to leave the pickup behind us. The first few drops of rain started pattering against the windscreen.

  Five megabytes of compressed video footage. Three different scenes in all, but spliced together into one long clip, which told a story if you knew some background. There were bits missing, but not important bits: if you were trying to get a particular message across, then the message was there: plain to see. There was even a progression to the separate scenes: the first was in the daytime; the second in the evening; the last at night – sort of, anyway. The grainy texture remained the same throughout, even as the scenes cut, and the closer you got to the screen, the more blurred and impossible it became: just smeary movements, like rain pouring over a painted window.

  Scene One.

  A man and a woman on a busy street. The sun is shining, but the traffic roaring past gives an artificial, whooshing undertone to the footage that sounds a lot like a strong breeze, or a downpour. The man and woman are walking along the pavement, away from a large, wide doorway, covered over by a green awning. I didn’t need to be able to see the white lettering on it to figure out that it was the train station in Thiene.

  The man and the woman are walking away from the camera. The woman is wearing a pale blue blouse and a short white skirt, and she’s carrying an over-the-shoulder handbag, which nestles behind her hips slightly. Curly brown hair, tinged with blonde. Slim. She doesn’t seem to be being coerced in any way, and none of the people walking around the pair turn back for a second glance, or seem bothered about them. The man is overweight, with slightly sloping shoulders. I don’t need to see his face to know that it’s Kareem.

  Cut to—

  Early evening, the gloom supplemented by the storm.

  Dennison pulled off the motorway, winding his way into the heart of the city. He neglected to slow down, and the air was suddenly filled with a cacophony of car horns as we shot past a line of semi-stationary traffic and cut in at the head of the queue. It was pouring down with rain, and the windscreen-wipers were squeaking back and forth. Dennison was hunched over the wheel, peering out. The red traffic lights were like two gigantic, bloody stars sparkling through the sheen.

  ‘You’re going to have to tell me where I’m going,’ he said. ‘This town is fucking crazy.’

  The stars exploded in a burst of green and we set off with a screech.

  ‘Head in that direction. That’s the best I can do.’

  The great grey lump of Uptown hung in the distance: a drab big top to our carnival city. Dennison weaved through side streets, slicing puddles apart in a watery spray. He slowed down a little, though, which I thought was good. The motorway was one thing, but three metre wide back alleys were entirely another.

  We turned onto a minor loop road around the shredded face of the outside struts. The buildings that formed the edge of Uptown tended to be derelict and inhospitable: old tenement houses with windows made from nailed-in steel. You imagined them full of mattresses and needles, and stinking of rot. Dennison would drop me off soon. In the meantime, he sped up a little. Maybe he was afraid that – going under fifty – someone might steal his tyres, and if he was then he had a point.

  I looked at the buildings we were passing. No McDonald’s here; no department stores. These were small shops: neighbour-hood grocery stores; shuttered pawnbrokers; greasy bars. There was hardly anyone about. Without much thought, I checked out the pavement by the edge of Downtown, and saw Kareem, walking in the opposite direction. He was wearing a raincoat and a hat, and smoking a sheltered cigarette. I caught a glimpse of him, and flipped around in my seat as we went past.

  ‘What?’ Dennison sounded anxious, but I ignored him.

  Kareem’s wide back, hunched up. Plodding along. Splash splash.

  From behind, he could have been anybody. He didn’t look back, or give any indication that he’d seen me: he was just another dark figure on another dark street, meandering slowly wherever he was going, huddled up against the weather. I kept watching him through the streaky back window, and he seemed to move into a doorway, disappearing into Downtown. But I couldn’t be sure, what with the rain.

  Dennison said again: ‘What?’

  I turned back.

  ‘Nothing.’

  It wasn’t Kareem at all.

  Of course it wasn’t. Just some fat man that looked a little like him.

  It couldn’t have been Kareem because Kareem was dead. Dead is dead. Go ask one of the non-existent vicars in the replica church on Graham’s street, and that’s exactly what he won’t tell you. When you’re dead, you don’t come back.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said again. ‘Thought I recognised someone. I just made a mistake.’

  We travelled about half a mile further on, and then I said, ‘Drop me off up there.’

  Dennison pulled in on the left.

  ‘You know where you’re going?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I think you’re crazy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well you might be right.’

  A last look at the e-mail on my lap, and then I folded it carefully and slipped it into my coat pocket, along with the information from Graham. I’d added a few notes in biro in case I forgot.

  Fairway Street

  ‘I think you’re crazy.’

  Combo’s Deli

  I took the gun out of the glove compartment. If I could have checked for bullets, I would, but I didn’t even know how to open it. All I kn
ew was: two shots down. If it came to it, I was going to point the thing and pull the trigger. And if bullets didn’t come out the end first time then I was going to be fucked.

  I put it in my other pocket and opened the door.

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  The rain was as grey and heavy as the sky itself, making music in the puddles and on the hard, wet surface of the pavement, slashing at the ground and buildings. As I got out, it felt like a hundred fingers tapping on me, demanding impossible attention.

  ‘See you around,’ I said.

  Dennison didn’t reply, so I closed the door and tapped the roof. After a second, he pulled away, white lights trailing off up the street. There were signposts to Uptown every mile or so. He’d be fine.

  I stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of myself as the rain poked and prodded me. Water ran down my face, pooling in my eyes, and when I blinked it away it felt like cold tears. There was a terrible, knotted excitement in my stomach that had as much to do with fear as anything else.

  What I felt was solid. Something real and actual and living. I felt like something that could be injured and die.

  That’s no way to feel in this civilised day and age.

  There were a hundred worm-ways into Downtown, and I was opposite one: an old block of flats with the door kicked in. There’d be a back way out onto the outskirts of the underground, and from there I’d be able to follow abandoned ghost roads past ghost shops – maybe past ghost people – all the way through to the heart of the hidden city.

  I’d never been in there before, and didn’t know what to expect, but I’d heard stories. And now, with the mpeg that Amy seemed to have sent to my e-mail account, I’d heard one more.

  I crossed the street, and made my way in.

  Cut to—

  The second scene came in two parts, but you couldn’t really see the join: the camera didn’t move – it was just that things in the frame jerked into existence. Same scene, different times. In total, it lasted maybe two minutes.

  Amy and Kareem walking towards the camera.

  They start from quite some distance away. You can see them turn a corner, far up at the top of the picture, and then they come strolling down into view.

  Like a gentleman, he’s on the outside. I guess he’s ready to draw his sword and protect her from attackers on horseback. They stop at a building two up from the end of the street and he finds keys in his pocket. Extracts them. Unlocks the door and holds it open for her. They go inside.

  Cut to the second half of the scene.

  A van flicks into view outside the building. White with blackened windows. I can’t read the number plate, although the vehicle looks to be in reasonable condition and I figure it’s fairly new. There’s no sign as to how or when it got there, or how much videotape is missing in the interim. You have time to notice it appear, and then—

  Bang.

  There’s no sound on this part of the video, but you feel the noise just from seeing it: the door on Kareem’s building kicked open from the inside, and out comes one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, carrying Amy, with three men following them out. The big man’s got her around the waist from behind, and she’s fighting, doubling up and lashing out. It was Amy who kicked the door open. One of the other remaining men gets in the back as well; another closes the door and gets into the driver’s seat.

  The third man lights a cigarette, shakes out the match and throws it on the pavement.

  The camera zooms in on him.

  This close, he has a face made out of smeared blocks of colour. You blur your eyes and you get a better impression of him: young – mid thirties; slightly receding hair; narrowish face. Beyond that the details are invisible beneath smudges of colour. The image is badly distorted, both by the man moving his head and by the smoke drifting up from the bright, flaming orange star of the cigarette’s tip, which blurs out a good quarter of the screen.

  He looks like an impressionist painting, on fire in one corner.

  The man moves out of the frame.

  The camera immediately zooms out to catch him climbing into the passenger side of the van. After a second the vehicle pulls away up the street. There are perhaps two seconds of emptiness.

  Cut to—

  Downtown.

  When I was younger – thirteen or fourteen – I’d often go out walking in the middle of the night. My parents never liked it: they thought it was dangerous, but actually they couldn’t have been more wrong. There was never anybody around, dangerous or otherwise, and that was why I enjoyed it so much: if I’d wanted people and bustle, I’d have gone walking during the day, in the fucking sunshine. Instead, I’d walk down the middle of busy main roads, across teeming fields, scrape my shoes over the tarmac of jam-packed playgrounds, and there wouldn’t be anybody else around to spoil it all. The houses all seemed dead. The sky was black: full of blinking stars and wisps of cloud. No cars. Stray animals crossing the roads without noticing you; cats heading quickly from one meeting to the next. It was this whole other world: devastatingly quiet and endlessly different. If you’ve never walked around the streets in the middle of the night, then I don’t think you really know your home town at all.

  Purely aesthetically, that’s what Downtown was like. It was shabby, but you were still walking down streets that were recognisable as streets. A lot of the buildings were boarded up, but the signs were still there, and more than one even seemed tenanted. The proper buildings – the ones still being used from top down – looked like enormous concrete pillars: cemented up to protect the white collar workers inside from what was down here, like supporting struts running down to an ocean bed of sharks.

  Every little sound produced an echo. There were people dotted here and there, making no effort to hide from or approach any others. Some were shambling in the distance; others were talking quietly in abandoned offices, their voices drifting down like a quiet, mumbling word in your ear. You could hear the rush of a breeze, like a distant stream, but you couldn’t feel it, and the air was almost oppressively hot. You’d be able to sleep in a shirt and wake up happy, assuming you woke up at all.

  Twenty or so storeys above street-level was Downtown’s sky: a black patchwork of star-less machinery. Most of the girders and pipes looked rusty and fractured – a support structure in need of some support – and all of it looked dark and shadowy. Water was dripping down everywhere. It was always night down here, and it was always raining: like some kind of quiet, noir Hell. There were occasional lights, but they didn’t seem to work too well, and so even the brightest bits of Downtown were bathed in a kind of dark, steely blue.

  I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, but like all good cities there were signposts to point the way. Most of them were artificial – just daubs on the walls or chalk marks on the streets: more like jottings for residents than a guide for outsiders. My plan was equally vague. I was going to wander around until I recognised a notice for something I’d seen in the video footage – Combo’s Deli or Fairway Street – or until somebody shot me. The odds were probably about even on each.

  I’d reached a vague kind of crossroads when I first heard it. I’d actually stopped, because I was faced with three possible directions. But the two to left and right were named randomly, while the road straight ahead was called Fairway Avenue, so that seemed to be the way to go. If I was in the Fairways, chances are that I was in the right area and I’d find the Street eventually. I started to head off, and was halfway over the crossing when I heard it.

  A tapping noise, far away to the right.

  I turned to look; the sound immediately stopped. But I could see where it had been coming from: there were two figures standing side by side in the centre of the street, about two hundred metres away from where I’d stopped. Blue silhouettes, identities hidden by the pale, sickly backdrop of a streetlight behind them. They weren’t moving, but the left of the two was leaning on a cane.

  Walter Hughes, I thought.

  The figure o
n the right was standing straight, with what looked like an overcoat pulled tightly around him. Broad shoulders. Hands clasped in front.

  But if Kareem was impossible, then this was impossible a hundred times over. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of physics and biology that I hadn’t quite killed Kareem, and that he’d staggered away from the scene after I’d gone. But Hughes was dead. His bodyguard was dead. If they weren’t dead, they would have got up, but the truth was that you just didn’t get up after what had happened to them. After what I’d done to them.

  Although I couldn’t make out their faces, the two figures were very clearly watching me.

  I watched them right back.

  And after a few seconds, they turned and walked into a nearby doorway and were gone. Just like Kareem. The chit of their feet, and the tap of the cane echoed down the empty blue street, and then faded away to nothing.

  It felt like my heart was singing in my chest.

  In the distance, far over on the other side of Downtown, somebody laughed. It was an insane sound: high and long, dying away into a sad moan. There was a moment of silence, and then more voices came, like dogs answering the call. Jeers and laughs and giggles. Somebody barked –whoo whoo whoo – and the sounds seemed to fill the air, circling around me. I knew it was only the sound of people, but it made my hair stand on end.

  Eventually, the calls died down. There were a few quiet noises from the buildings around me: murmurs of conversation; half-contained belly-laughs; the crunch of broken glass being stepped on.

  I began moving down Fairway Avenue, keeping my eye out for any signs I might recognise. A few times, I heard the tapping coming from over to the right, but – try as I might – there was nothing to see. The buildings were implacable, and I didn’t see the two figures again.

  Cut to—

  It’s the entrance to some wasteground. It looks like nighttime, but it’s quite obvious where this scene was filmed: we’re in Downtown, and so for all I know it could be the middle of the day. It feels like night-time, though, and these are certainly night-time activities taking place within the four solid walls of the camera frame. The entrance to the wasteground – a gap in the grey chain-link fence – is situated halfway between two inefficient streetlamps. One is flickering, turning on and off and on and off, while the other has attracted a globe of fluttering insects, in themselves too small to see, but you can detect them in the slightly shifting, blurry fuzz of the brightness.