“Okay. Any history of violent affray?”
“He’s clean—his total police record prior to the incident consisted of two speeding tickets.”
Ramona clears her throat again. “So, let’s see. We have a three-to-one gender profile, which is bad, but balanced against it we have one LGBT and one feminist activist, one ethnic minority, one pensioner, two youths. Which makes it almost but not exactly off-target for the team makeup you were handed by head office, but at least the poor oppressed male trolls won’t have an excuse to go all rage face because it has too many girl cooties. If we can downplay the LGBT, ethnic, and pensioner angles, it’s almost what we’ve been told to procure . . . are we missing anything?”
“No—sorry—no wheelchairs or missing limbs. No religious minorities either.”
“I don’t believe your current Home Secretary will care too much about that,” she says drily.
“Your?”
“Okay, our.” She shrugs. “While I’m on land: after all, you people were good enough to give me a passport, so I suppose that means I’ve got dual nationality . . .”
Mhari makes a cutting gesture. “Ancient history. The point is, they meet our brief for a team, and we can probably tap-dance our way around the diversity angle: it’s hard to form a group as badly balanced as the brief we were given without actually practicing illegal discrimination. At least this bunch look reasonably tractable, leaving us to get on with the heavy lifting in the background. Two super-speed, two super-strength, one pyro, one telekinetic. Can we work with that?”
I lean back and think. “We need to get them into Hendon ASAP,” I say finally. “And devise some training-wheel exercises. Sorting out uniforms is now a higher priority—Ramona, can you take your latest spec and get us some provisional costings on it? Budget to equip eight in the field, three sets of protective kit per person, we’ll worry about some kind of dress uniform later. Then it’s time to get our public relations hat on and work on a media relations strategy.”
“You think?” Mhari asks, with wholly unnecessary (in my opinion) ironic emphasis.
I sit up. “We’re management. Finally we’ve got a superhero team to manage!” Just as long as the job doesn’t nibble their brains into lethal lacework, my inner conscience nags me. “So all we need to do now is sort out training and medical support, then brief the PR firm and the scriptwriters you’ve got lined up and see what they can come up with.”
“Indeed.” Mhari mirrors my mannerism, sitting up and looking attentive.
I can’t always tell when she’s taking the piss, and it’s mildly upsetting—but not enough to justify reprimanding her. “Just remember the first law of management,” I tell them.
“What’s that?” asks Ramona, walking straight into it.
“Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds—and then taking their mess right on the chin.”
* * *
Maybe it’s a full stomach and an emotional unwind after a week of attempted karoshi, or possibly it’s because I park Lecter’s case too damned close to the bed, or perhaps it’s just the phase of the moon: but I go to sleep, perchance to dream, and what I dream is this:
I’m dancing through the ruins of an ancient city.
Two moons ride high and full above me in a cloudless night sky, drenching the scene around me with blue-gray twilight. Beneath my feet, the lime flagstones are worn smooth by the passage of time; to either side, decaying classical frontages and columns rise roofless amidst piles of rubble, like the bones of Whitehall a thousand years after the extinction of London. There are few trees here and less grass, but rose bushes curl thorny tendrils around the tombstone relics of the city. Their flowers are black as velvet night in the gloaming.
I’m wearing a long white tunic, not unlike an ancient Greek chiton; my feet aren’t bare, but my sandals are so thin that I can feel every crack and abrasion on the stones. The music—
—It’s ghostly, it’s wild, and it teeters on the edge of arrhythmia: a skirling mournful howl of tormented strings, the distant moaning of a tied-down giant whose vocal cords are being bowed by malign Lilliputian tormentors, intent on turning his every attempt at spoken communication into a vehicle for an inhuman melody. It keeps me on my toes against my will, even though my muscles are burning and tired—for I anticipate the imminent arrival of the soprano and baritone leads.
As I spin past a half-tumbled wall, I spy a milestone. The word Carcosa is engraved on it in Roman letters, but the number below is indistinct.
I look up, glancing away from the alien moons (one seemingly larger than Earth’s, the other smaller but still showing a visible disk). The stars are bright, but there are too many of them, harsh and pitiless and untwinkling—a smear splashed halfway across the sky like the Milky Way, only far denser and brighter. This isn’t the world of the Sleeper in the Pyramid, unless it’s a view of an earlier time: but that’s no cause for celebration. My feet carry me along a broad curving boulevard. There are side streets through the rubble and wreckage of this magnificent city, and as I pass them I catch glimpses in the distance of a lake, of terraced hillsides looming in the darkness at the edge of town. There is motion on the other boulevards, a swirling of bone-white dancing bodies making their processional way towards a common destination where all roads converge.
Voices rise in unearthly harmony, singing lyrics that blend with the god-voice of the distant strings towards which I am now running:
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.
My avenue of the dead terminates at a huge circular plaza, dominated by the shattered segments of a fallen column of vast proportions. Four plinths surround it, much like Trafalgar Square, but surmounted by unfamiliar statues: heraldic alien monsters, a dragon with a beard (or tentacles?), a cephalopod with baroque spines sprouting from the edges of its shell. The dancers, all clad in white chitons and with skin as pale as chalk or bone, converge on the stage at the bottom of the semicircular amphitheater that lies at the feet of the ruined column. The music comes from a hidden pit at the side of the stage—
***Come quickly! We shall be late for the chorus.***
My hitherto-unseen bone-white dance partner takes my hands and swings me around, redirects me on a breakneck scramble down the worn stone seats of the amphitheater towards the orchestra—the stage—towards which the other dancers are racing. He’s muscular and tall, overlooking me, and when he pulls me tight and lifts me across a huge segment of the column that has crushed half a row of seats into rubble, I seem to recognize his face. “Jim, we can’t—”
***That’s not my name in this place. Quickly! There’s no time to lose!***
We arrive on the stage as the white-draped singers form up in two rows across the middle, standing before the audience of ghosts and memories that overflow the seats. But my partner doesn’t stop and pull me into one of the lines: instead he redirects me towards the side. “Wait, what do you want?” I demand.
***There is no time! Quickly, you must play!***
He picks me up and carries me into the shadows at the edge of the orchestra, then lowers me down into the pit of shadows. The bone-shapes of the half-glimpsed players shift and rattle, making space for me upon a shelf-like bench. Claw-hands tug and worry me into place, fencing me in and handing me a familiar instrument that glimmers in the darkness.
&n
bsp; “But I don’t know the score!” I cry as Lecter settles into my hands like a long-lost bloody secret.
***Yes you do,*** says my dancing partner, wrapping his arms around me from behind. I look round in terror—the kind of terror that wakes one shuddering from a nightmare—and find myself in his arms, for now he is seated and I am straddling my demon lover, legs spread for his bone-white body. Because this is a dream I am simultaneously drawing my bow across his glowing violin strings and riding atop his all-too-human manhood: grasping the instrument, gripped by the instrumentalist.
I feel him pulse in rhythm as the notes flood through him, rising from my crotch to my blood-dripping fingertips in a wave of ecstasy and horror. I can do this, I realize, I can play these fingerings, I can draw sul tasto and bring these notes into existence and soar all the way to heaven—but the music is wrong, corrupting, the implications of its inexorable logic leading to a concluding nightmare. I do not want to play this piece, I realize. “No,” I say, the horror winning out in a race against ecstasy, “no, no—”
I wake up.
I wake up.
Those words are prosaic, inadequate to describe the experience of emerging from that dream: I feel as if I’ve been hit by a truck. I lie atop the sheets, drenched in sweat, and feel shaky and very, very horny. I am simultaneously repelled by my own sensuality and furiously angry.
I roll over to the side of the bed and grab Lecter’s case. “Listen, you fucker,” I hiss: “You will not ever, ever, do that to me again, do you understand?” I shake him: “If you ever try that again I will put you in a weighted box and dump you in the English Channel. Or maybe I will just pick up this crowbar and smash you to pieces. Oversight and Internal Assets can piss up a rope: you will not ever force yourself into my head again or I will destroy you.”
There is a contrite, dread-filled silence in my head, where once might be heard the echo of a sly titter.
Good, I think. I scared the bastard.
I’m still horny. I need a distraction; it’s late, but . . . I open the case, unlocking its evidently ineffective wards. In the real-world moonlight coming through the Velux window overhead, my bone-white violin is still a thing of beauty. Passive, lying still, just an instrument. I’m angry and horny. I pick up bow and body, my grip harsh, over-controlling: let’s see, let me improvise around a theme . . . how about no means no? I make up a harsh little ditty, a discipline song, and work out my anger with a fiddle and a snarl of concentration, sawing and shuddering as I work my will on him, letting him know exactly who’s on top in this relationship. He’s very submissive, very contrite, very compliant. Offering to make good. But I don’t want that: I just want him to know that my dreams are my own, and he has no right to invade and pervert my most intimate fantasies.
Silence is not consent.
When I’m done with my harsh music lesson I put him away, and this time I store him in the wardrobe, sketch reinforcement wards across the violin case, and for good measure seal the major containment ward on the door. Then I go to the bathroom and hunt in the medicine cabinet for a sleeping pill. I take one, head back to bed, and eventually fall into a deep, solitary sleep.
And this time, I do not dream of the King in Yellow.
15.
FRESH MEAT
I avoid the office on Saturday. Instead, I spend the morning trying to catch up on the housework. I manage to put in two hours before I give up in despair: at least I vacuumed the carpets, and the dishes are all clean. Then I goof off for an hour of not-entirely-fruitful internet research on a subject that is close to my heart: ways and means of destroying human bones. But my heart isn’t in it, and I keep checking the clock. Finally I go upstairs and prepare a suitable outfit, something artfully bohemian-casual and utterly not office-appropriate, and go back downstairs to pretend I’m not waiting.
At ten minutes to two the doorbell chimes. I check the peephole, then open it. “Hello?” I ask.
A gawky teenager with skin to die for and inexpertly applied eyeliner looks up at me. “Are you Mo?” she asks, sizing me up with a judgmental eye.
“Yes.” I glance past her and see a Volvo Estate sitting double-parked like a self-propelled roadblock, engine idling. There’s a familiar profile at the wheel, and as I glance back at the girl, I recognize echoes of Jim’s bone structure. “You must be Sally?”
“That’s right,” she says. “Dad says he can’t find anywhere to park—you coming?”
“One minute,” I promise, and retreat back inside to grab my shoulder bag. Then I vacillate violently for a minute over what to do about my violin case. It’s still upstairs in the wardrobe: I ought to take it, I’m responsible for the instrument—but I’m still several steps beyond pissed off at Lecter. I’m furious and not entirely rational, and anyway, from a safety perspective this is a secured safe house, with an alarm system and wards up to the eaves. Lecter is locked in an anonymous-looking wardrobe behind a particularly vicious containment ward, and anyone who breaks in and takes him while I’m gone will regret it for about as long as a cable thief gets to regret grabbing hold of a live high-tension bearer in an electricity substation.
Lecter can look after himself for a few hours. And I really don’t want to touch him right now. What is usually a comforting security reflex currently sets my skin a-crawl. I feel naked without him, but feeling naked in public is less uncomfortable than having to pick up his case and haul him around with me. I was well on my way to learning how to look after myself before they offered me the custody of a really special instrument; I can still look after myself: all I need is to find a new and suitably qualified custodian and I can be done with the White Violin for good.
I suddenly realize that I have turned a hitherto-unseen corner in my own mind.
I lock up, set the alarm, and follow Sally out to the car. After a brief no-you-go-first tap dance she slips into the back, leaving me the front passenger seat. “Afternoon,” Jim says breezily. “Mo, this is Sally. Sally, this is Mo. Please don’t kill each other. Have we got everything?”
“I’ve got my Nexus,” Sally says with the long-suffering air of a teenager who is used to adults trying to organize her, “and my phone and my pen and my class notes,” she adds. Oh dear: do I detect an attitude?
“Forget the notes,” I advise her. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but we’re going to see a farce. Slapstick comedy with music, eighteenth-century style. It has a chunk of romance that was so smutty they had to censor it back in the day, and a sprinkling of pointed political satire that also nearly got it banned—and the music’s by Mozart, which might not be your thing but which is generally considered to be not half bad, which is why they’re still performing it more than two hundred years later. My advice is to sit back and enjoy the music and the costumes and the farce, or whatever takes your fancy, and ignore the notes unless you get hopelessly lost.”
“So it’s a musical,” she says, chin on fist, elbow propped on knee, telegraphing boredom. “The last musical Mum took me to was Chicago.”
“Do you think they’ll still be performing Chicago in the twenty-third century?” I ask lightly.
Jim drives the urban tank sedately, but I’m pretty sure I feel his wince through the steering rack when Sally drops her Broadway bombshell. Or maybe I’m projecting. I glance at him. He’s in weekend casual, chinos and open-necked shirt with a sports jacket—this is an afternoon matinee performance. When he’s not in uniform or a business suit, he looks younger and free-er than the Jim I know from the office; also older and more mature in a family-guy-with-teenage-daughter-in-tow kind of way. “Liz and I have, shall we say, different tastes in music,” he says.
“Yeah, he likes all kinds of crap eighties rock, like Devo and The Fall,” Sally warns me.
“Are we not human?” he asks rhetorically.
“No, we are Devo,” I answer. Devo is fun. Musically unpolished and simple but conceptua
lly ironic fun.
“You see?” Jim says to his daughter.
“No fair!”
There ensues the usual parking-in-central-London ritual, a walk to the Coliseum, soft drinks and strictly no popcorn for Sally, and then a cracking performance of Mozart’s adaptation of Beaumarchais’s stage masterpiece. Sally seems bored at first, or at least expects to be bored, until midway through the first act between the dueling insults and the start of the cross-dressing comedy of mistaken identities. By the end of the first act she’s paying attention, and by the end of the second she’s agog.
After nearly three hours Sally is clearly flagging, but from what I can see out of the corner of my eye, when she looks at her tablet she’s checking up on the plot rather than goofing off on Facebook—a good sign. Jim is clearly enjoying himself, which is also good. As for me, I’m immersed in Mozart’s complexity and richness, with a lush visual extravaganza to keep my eyeballs occupied as I follow the music. A pall of existential fatigue actually seems to fall away from me during the performance: by the Count’s final plea for forgiveness I’m as relaxed as I’ve been in weeks.
Afterwards we take a wander and end up in Wagamama, which is clattery and white and stark, a complete antithesis to the opera. “Did you enjoy that?” Jim asks Sally as she tackles a bowl of yaki udon. She nods, wide-eyed.
“It was different,” she says. “Not stuffy, like I’d imagined.”
The Annihilation Score Page 31
