by Tim Lebbon
“They crucified me!” the street person screamed. She grunted with each footstep, punctuating her speech with regular exclamations of pain. “They nailed me up and cut me open, fed my insides to the birds and the rats. Then they left me there for a while. And they let me see over the desert, across to the golden city where pricks like you were eating and screwing and being oh-so-bloody wonderful.”
Adam put on a spurt of speed and sensed the woman falling behind.
“In the end, they took me from my family for good!” she shouted after him. “They’re happy now, my family. They’re rich and content, and my husband’s fucked by an actress every night, and my son’s in private school. Happy!”
He turned around; he could not help it. The woman was standing in the center of the wide access tunnel, people flowing by on both sides, giving her a wide berth. She had her hands held out as if feigning the crucifixion she claimed to have suffered. Her dark hair was speckled gray with bird shit. The string holding her skirt up was coming loose. Adam was sure he could see things crawling on the floor around her, tiny black shapes that could have been beetles or wood lice or large ants. They all moved away, spreading outward like living ripples from her death-stinking body.
“It’ll happen to you, too!” the bug lady screamed. “This will happen to you! The result is always the same, it’s just the route that’s different!”
Adam turned a corner and gasped in relief. Straight ahead a tube train stood at a platform. He did not know which line it was on, which way it was going, where it would eventually take him. He slipped between the doors nevertheless, watched them slide shut, fell into a seat and rested his head back against the glass. He read the poem facing straight down at him.
Wise is he who heeds his foe,
For what will come? You never know.
The bug lady made it onto the platform just as the train pulled away, waving her hands, screaming, fisting the air as if to fight existence itself.
“Bloody Bible bashers,” said a woman sitting across from Adam. And he began to laugh.
He was still giggling three stations later. Nerves and fear and an overwhelming sense of unreality brought the laughter from him. His shoulders shook and people began to stare at him, and by the fourth station the laughter was more like sobbing.
It was not the near-accident that had shaken him, or the continuing sightings of Amaranth, not even the bug lady and what she had been saying. It was her eyes. Such black, hopeless pits of despondency, lacking even the wish to save herself, let alone the ability to try. He had never seen eyes like it before. Or if he had, they had been too distant to make out. Far across a polluted lake. Heat from fires obscuring any characteristics from view.
In the tunnels faces flashed by, pressing out from the century-old brickwork, lit only by borrowed light from the tube train. They strained forward to look in at Adam, catching only the briefest glimpse of him but seeing all. They were Amaranth. Still watching him— still watching over him.
And if Howards had been right—and Adam could no longer find any reason to doubt him—still viewing him as sport.
The hotel was a smart four-star within a stone’s throw of Leicester Square. His room was spacious and tastefully decorated, with a direct outside telephone, a TV, a luxurious en-suite and a mini-bar charging exorbitant prices for mere dribbles of alcohol. Adam opened three miniatures of whiskey, added some ice he had fetched from the dispenser in the corridor and sat back on the bed, trying not to see those transparent faces in his mind’s eye. Surely they couldn’t be in there as well? On the backs of his eyelids, invading his self as they’d invaded his life? He’d never seen them there, at least….
And really, even if he had, he could feel no anger toward them.
After he had finished the whiskey and his nerves had settled, he picked up the phone and dialed home. His own voice shocked him for a moment, and then he left a message for Alison on the machine telling her he had arrived safely, glancing at his watch as he did so. They were usually giving Jamie his dinner around this time. Maybe she was at the hospital with her mother.
He opened a ridiculously priced can of beer from the fridge and went out to stand on the small balcony. Catching sight of the busy streets seemed to draw their noise to him, and he spent the next few minutes taking in the scenery, watching people go about their business unaware that they were being observed; cars snaking along the road as if bad driving could avoid congestion, paper bags floating on the breeze above all this, pigeons huddled on sills and rooftops, an aircraft passing silently high overhead. He wondered who was on the plane, and whether they had any inkling that they were being watched from the ground at that instant. He looked directly across the street into a third-story office window. A woman was kneeling in front of a photocopier, hands buried in its mechanical guts as she tried unsuccessfully to clear a paper jam. Did she know she was being watched, he wondered? Did the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle, her back tingle? She smacked the machine with the palm of her hand, stood and started to delve into her left nostril with one toner-blackened finger. No, she didn’t know. None of these people knew, not really. A few of them saw him standing up here and walked on, a little more selfconsciously than before, but many were in their own small world.
Most of them did not even know that there was a bigger world out there at all. Much bigger. Way beyond the solid confines of earth, wind, fire and water.
He took another swig of beer and tried to change the way he was looking. He switched viewpoints from observer to observed, seeking to spy out whoever or whatever was watching him. Down in the street the pedestrians all had destinations in mind, and like most city-dwellers they rarely looked higher than their own eye level. Nothing above that height was of interest to them. In the hive of the buildings opposite the hotel, office workers sat tapping at computers, stood by coffee machines, huddled around desks or tables, flirted, never imagining that there was anything worth looking at beyond the air-conditioned confines of their domains.
He was being watched. He knew it. He could feel it. It was a feeling he had become more than used to since Howards had forced him, eventually, to entertain the truth of what was happening to him.
The rooftops were populated by pigeons; no strange faces up there. The street below was a battlefield of business, and if Amaranth were down there, Adam certainly could not pick them out. The small balconies to each side of him were unoccupied. He even turned around and stared back into his own room, fully expecting to find a face pressed through the wall like a wax corpse, or the wardrobe door hanging ajar. But he saw nothing. Wherever they were, they were keeping themselves well hidden for now.
A car tooted angrily and he looked back down over the railing—straight into the eyes of the bug lady. She was standing on the pavement outside the building opposite the hotel, staring up at Adam, her gaze unwavering. Even from this distance, Adam could see the hopelessness therein.
There was little he could do. He went back inside and closed and locked the doors behind him, pulled the curtains, grabbed a miniature of gin from the fridge because the whiskey had run out.
He tried calling Alison again, but his own voice greeted him from the past. He had recorded that message before the flight, before the crash, before Amaranth. He was a different person now. He dialed and listened again, knowing how foolish it was: yes, a different person. He had known so little back then.
“Just sign on the dotted line,” Maggie said. “Then the deal’s done and you’ll have to sleep with me for what I’ve done for you.”
“Mags, I’d sleep with you even if you hadn’t just closed the biggest deal of my life, you know that.” Maggie was close to seventy years old, glamorous in her own way, and Adam was sure she’d never had enough sex in her earlier years. Sometimes, when he really thought about it, he wondered just how serious she was when she joked and flirted.
He picked up the contract and scanned it one more time. Sixth reading now, at least. He hated committing to anything, and
there was little as final and binding as signing a contract. True, the gallery had yet to countersign, but once he’d scrawled his name along the bottom there was little chance to change anything.
And besides, this was too good to be true.
He wondered how Alison and Jamie were. And then he wondered where they were as well.
It’ll happen to you, too, the bug lady had screamed at him, pus dripping from her lips, insects fleeing her body as if they already thought she was dead.
You’ll lose them, Howards had stated plainly.
“Mags…” he muttered, uncertain of exactly what he was about to say. The alcohol had gone to his head, especially after the celebratory champagne Maggie had brought to his room. His aim had been good. The cork had gone flying through the door and out over the street, and he’d used that as an excuse to take another look. The bug lady had gone, but Adam had been left feeling uncomfortable, unsettled.
That, and his missing wife and son.
The contract wavered on the bed in front of him, uncertain, unreal. He held the pen above the line and imagined signing his name, tried to see what effect it would have. Surely this was his own good fortune, not something thrown his way by Amaranth? But he had only been working in fire since the accident…
“Mags, I just need to call Alison.” He put the pen down. “I haven’t told her I’ve arrived safely yet.”
Maggie nodded, eyebrows raised.
Adam dialed and fully expected to hear his own voice once more, but Alison snapped up the line. “Yes?”
“Honey?”
“Oh Adam, you’re there. I got your messages, but I was hoping you’d ring…”
“Anything the matter?”
“No, no… well, Mum’s taken a turn for the worse. They think… she arrested this afternoon.”
“Oh, no.”
“Look, how’s it going? Maggie there with you? Tell her to keep her hands off my husband.”
“Honey, I’ll come home.”
Alison sighed down the phone. “No, you won’t. Just call me, okay? Often? Make it feel like you’re really here and I’ll be fine. But you do what you’ve got to do to make our damn fortune.”
He held the phone between his cheek and shoulder and made small talk with his wife, asked how Jamie was, spoke to his son. And at the same time he signed the three copies of the contract and slid them across the bed to Maggie.
“Love you,” he said at last. Alison loved him too. They left it at that.
“Shall we go out to celebrate?” Maggie asked.
Adam shook his head. “Do you mind if we just stay in the hotel? Have a meal in the restaurant, perhaps? I’m tired and a bit drunk, and…” And I don’t want to go outside in case the bug lady’s there, he thought. I don’t want to hear what she’s telling me.
In the restaurant an ice sculpture was melting slowly beneath the lights, shedding shards of glittering movement as pearls of water slid down its sides. As they sat down Adam thought he saw it twitch, its face twist to watch him, limbs flex. He glanced away and looked again. Still he could not be sure. Well, if Amaranth chose to sit and watch him eat—celebrate his success, his good luck—what could he do about it?
What could he do?
The alcohol and the buzz of signing the deal and the experience of meeting the bug lady, all combined to drive Adam into a sort of dislocated stupor. He heard what Maggie said, he smelled the food, he tasted the wine, but they were all vicarious experiences, as if he were really residing elsewhere for the evening, not inside his own body. Later, he recalled only snippets of conversation, brief glimpses of events. The rest vanished into blankness.
“This will lead to a lot more work,” Maggie said, her words somehow winging their way between the frantic chords of the piano player. “And the gallery says that they normally sell at least half the paintings at any exhibition.”
A man coughed and spat his false teeth onto his table. The restaurant bustled with restrained laughter. The shadows of movement seemed to follow seconds behind.
A waiter kept filling his glass with wine, however much he objected.
The ice sculpture reduced, but the shape within it stayed the same size. Over the course of the evening, one of the Amaranth things was revealed to him. Nobody else seemed to notice.
The ice cream tasted rancid.
Maggie touched his knee beneath the table and suggested they go to his room.
Next, he was alone in his bed. He must have said something to her, something definite and final about the way their relationship should work. He hoped he had not been cruel.
Something floated above his bed, a shadow within shadows. “Do not deny us,” it said inside his head, a cautionary note in its voice. “Believe in us. Do not deny us.” .
Then it was morning, and his head thumped with a killer hangover, and although he remembered the words and the sights of last night, he was sure it had all been a dream.
Adam managed to flag down a taxi as soon as he stepped from the hotel. He was dropped off outside the gallery, and as he crossed the pavement he bumped into an old man hurrying along with his head down. They exchanged apologies and turned to continue on their way, but then stopped. They stared at each other for a moment, frowning, all the points of recognition slotting into place almost visibly as their faces relaxed and the tentative smiles came. “You were on the horse,” Adam said. “The unicorn.”
“You were the disbeliever. You believe now?” The man’s smile was fixed, like a painting overlying his true feelings. There was something in his eyes… something about giving in.
“I do,” Adam said, “but I’ve met some people… a lucky one, and an unlucky one… and I’m beginning to feel scared.” Verbalizing it actually brought it home to him; he was scared.
The man leaned forward and Adam could smell expensive cologne on his skin. “Don’t deny Amaranth,” he said. “You can’t anyway, nobody ever has. But don’t even think about it.”
Adam stepped back as if the man had spat at him. He remembered Howards telling him that he would lose his family, and the bug lady spewing promises darker than that.
He wondered how coincidental his meeting these three people was. “How is your family?” he asked.
The unicorn man averted his gaze. “Not as lucky as me.”
Adam looked up at the imposing facade of the gallery, the artistically wrought modern gargoyles that were never meant for anything other than ornamentation. Maybe they should have been imbued with a power, he thought. Because there really were demons…
He wondered how Molly was, whether she had woken yet. He should telephone Alison to find out, but if he hesitated here any longer he may just turn around and flee back home. Leave all this behind— all this success, this promise, this hope for a comfortable and long sought-after future…
When he looked back down, the man had vanished along the street, disappearing into the crowds. Don’t deny Amaranth, he had said. Adam shook his head. How could anyone?
He stepped through the circular doors and into the air-conditioned vestibule of the gallery building. Marble solidified the area, with only occasional soft oases of comfortable seating breaking it up here and there. Maggie rose from one of these seats, two men standing behind her. The gallery owners, Adam knew. The men who had signed checks ready to give him.
“Adam!” Maggie called across to him.
His mobile phone rang. He flipped it open and answered. “Alison?”
“Adam, your lateness just manages to fall into the league of fashionable,” Maggie cooed.
“Honey. Adam, Mum’s died. She went a few minutes ago. Oh…” Alison broke into tears and Adam wanted to reach through the phone, hug her to him, kiss and squeeze and love her until all of this went away. He glanced up at the men looking expectantly at him, at Maggie chattering away, and he could hear nothing but his wife crying down the phone to him.
“I’ll be home soon,” Adam said. “Alison?”
“Yes.” Very quietly. A plea as well
as a confirmation.
“I’ll be home soon. Is Jamie all right?”
A wet laugh. “Watching Teletubbies. Bless him.”
“Three hours. Give me three hours and I’ll be home.”
“Adam?” Maggie stood before him now. It had taken her this long to see that something was wrong. “What is it?”
“Alison’s mother just died.”
“Oh… oh shit.”
“You got those contracts, Mags?”
She nodded and handed him a paper file.
He looked up at the two men, at their fixed smiles, their money-maker’s suits, the calculating worry lines around their eyes. “This isn’t art,” he said, and he tore the contracts in half.
As he left the building, he reflected that it was probably the most artistic thing he had ever done
.
There was a train due to leave five minutes after he arrived at the station, as he knew there would be. He was lucky like that. Not so his family, of course, his wife, or his wife’s mother. But he was lucky.
He should not have taken the train—he should have denied Amaranth and the conditional luck they had bestowed upon him—but he needed to be with Alison. One more time, he thought. Just this one last time.
They made themselves known in the station. He had been aware of them following him since the gallery, curving in and out of the ground like sea serpents, wending their way through buildings, flying high above him and merging with clouds of pigeons. Sometimes he caught sight of one reflected in a shop window, but whenever he turned around, it was gone.
At the station, the four of them were standing together at the far end of the platform. People passed them by. People walked through them, shuddering and glancing around with startled expressions as if someone had just stepped on their graves. Nobody else seemed to see them.
Adam boarded the train at the nearest end. As he stepped up, he saw Amaranth doing the same several carriages along.
