“Hello stranger,” she said.
“If it isn’t the Good Witch of the South. I was wondering when you’d come back.”“Oh, I’ve been here a few times, haven’t I Tag?”
“Yes,” said Tag and seemed unwilling to say anything else. There was a silence so I put the kettle on. They watched me walk round the room.
“I’m having a day off today,” I said as I waited for the water to boil, “Want to get drunk and test the merchandise?”
“Er, no,” said Tag.
“What? You pop more pills than me, Tag.”
“Er ...” said Tag and looked at Sarah.
“I think what Tag means,” she said, “is that we need everything we have for Joe and his friends.”
“Yeah,” added Tag and looked relieved.
“Come on, it’s not as if they are going to miss a couple. Do you really think they can count to a thousand?”
“You also need to check the machine,” said Sarah calmly. “Tag told me that there was a problem and that he wasn’t sure that he’d dealt with it properly. Isn’t that right Tag?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Tag, getting more into his groove. “You know I’m not so good at the machinery, ‘specially when I’ve been beaten round the head a few times.” He pointed to his forehead. I couldn’t even see a bruise but he did look a bit desperate.
“OK, OK,” I said. “I’ll go and check it over. We didn’t lose much production did we?”
“I dunno,” said Tag. He was supposed to take the finished product into Uni to put it through the pill counting machine. We couldn’t afford one ourselves yet.
“Oh for fuck’s sake! We are a team aren’t we?” I tilted my head and then raised my hand. He hi-fived me.
“Yeah,” we said together.
“Oh, boys,” said Sarah, “I shall leave you to your domestics. I’ll be back soon.” She smiled at us and got up. Tag followed her to the front door and showed her out. When he came back I tried to talk to him about Sarah but he wouldn’t be drawn. For someone who marked his conquests with a row of empty condom wrappers stapled to the ceiling in his room, he was being very coy.
On Saturday, I went to a party but I couldn’t really get into it. I tried to figure Sarah out. She had Tag following her around like a puppy but she kept coming on strong to me. And then there was Joe. He was due round on Monday. I’m sure we’d have enough gear for him, but what about the money? Had our cash cow just dried up? I wasn’t getting anywhere and being round so many happy people wasn’t helping so I just sold a few pills and drank myself into a haze. It didn’t work but I least I didn’t really care anymore. I came back on the night bus, sitting on the top deck with the other drunks, reeking of cigarettes and pewk. About a mile away from home, the bus went past the abbey ruins, its walls tinged orange from the nearby street lights, like old broken teeth. I saw a small group of people, standing in the old shell of the chapel. They had built a fire. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but there was some dancing and, it seemed, through the steamy windows of the bus, that I could make out flesh. I rubbed my sleeve across the window and before we disappeared up the road, I was sure I saw Tag.
The next day, about midday, I was in the kitchen making some tea and Tag came down. I asked him about his night at the abbey. He was non-committal at first.
“It was just a bunch of friends, having a drink,” he said.
“But it was freezing last night. You could have come to the party. It was alright.”
“We didn’t fancy it.” I handed him a mug of tea and leaned against the sink. He sat down and started loading sugars into his cuppa.
“Who’s we then? Your, Sarah’s little group.”
“We’re just friends,” he said.
“God, it’s like drawing teeth. C’mon. We are mates aren’t we? I haven’t done anything to piss you off, have I?”
He looked a bit taken aback at my outburst and thought about it for a bit, cradling his mug in both hands, elbows on the table.
“I guess not.”
“So … hang on, what’s happened here?” I looked round the kitchen. The sink was empty. All the rubbish that had been lying across the fridge, spilling on to the floor—it was gone.
“Have you had a tidy up? Is your Mum coming to visit again?”
“No. I just, I just wanted a change.”
“Did Sarah put you up to this?”
Tag just took a long sip of his tea, and tried not to blush.
“Bloody Hell. She has got her claws into you, hasn’t she?”
Tag slammed his mug down, tea splashed across the newly visible floor. He jumped across the room and I shrank back against the sink.
“Take that back!” he shouted. ‘Take that back.”
“Take that back? What is this, baby school?” Joe stood in the doorway to the hall, laughing. “Are you boys no longer friends? This is not right. Specially if it affect our supply. You shake and make up. You be good boys.” Behind him in the corridor, his two helpers sniggered.
“You’re early,” I said.
“No, you late,” said Joe and stood aside to let his men in. “Show us the stuff.”
“It’s alright,” said Tag, “I bagged it up this morning, when you were asleep.” He motioned to the front room and the duo followed him out. Joe crossed his arms.
“I like your friend,” said Joe. “He good for business. So one tousand no problem for you? Next week, we want two tousand.” And when I started, he added, “Or you make friends with my bat again.” And he turned and walked out. Fuck. There was no way we were going to be able to turn that around, not if we wanted to make any money ourselves. But what else could we do? I was lost in thought when Tag came back into the room.
“That’s that sorted then,” he said. He seemed all together rather too happy with the arrangement.
“We’re fucked.”
“What? No, I had a word. Look.” From his back pocket he pulled out a fat wodge of purplish notes. “They gave me this.” I looked. Tag had a roll of about twenty twenty pound notes. No, they weren’t twenties, they were euros. Five-hundrend euro notes. Ten grand. Ten fucking grand.
“Ten grand,” I said, somehow making two syllables out of the last word. “What? Come on. You’re kidding me, right?”
“Straight up,” he beamed.
“You bloody marvel. Hang on. They gave you ten thousand euros? What, because they liked your smile”
“Sort of. You just have to know how to talk to people. I’ve been learning things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Like I said, how to talk to people. How to get them to do things for you. We won’t have any more trouble from them.” Tag was smiling now. It was scary. He looked like one of those people on the bus who try to tell you how Jesus loves you.
“Tag. You’re just not making sense. That’s not how things happen for Christ’s sake. The last time we saw them they took a baseball bat to your face, by way of introduction. Those kind of people, they don’t … they just don’t.”
“Look,” said Tag, “is this some kind of problem? Would you rather they just beat the shit out of us each week and took our stuff? Would you? Well, would you?” I shook my head. “Well then, this is better isn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“Correct answer! Give the man a great big hand. And now if you don’t mind, She is coming and I’ve got some friends to see.” He counted out half the notes onto the table and then just dumped them all. “Buy yourself something nice,” he said and left.
Tag wasn’t making sense. I ran after him up the hall but he’d already gone, as had Joe. It was all getting out of control. I could make sense of Joe, but not Tag. I went upstairs. There was a short landing halfway up the stairs which lead to Tag’s room over the kitchen. My room was further up, at the front of the house, over the sitting room with the bathroom between us. The carpet was a dirty pale blue, covered in the scorch marks of dropped cigarettes and spilt chemicals. The ecstasy plant was in the bathro
om, packed into the space behind the panelling around the bath. It was a nuisance getting it out each time we wanted to use it but we couldn’t take chances with the landlord, if he ever turned up. I checked over the machinery. It seemed fine. Except, there was something strange in a hopper. The one which contained the bulking agent, usually chalk powder, was packed with ground up bits of dried herb. It had fronds, like the dill you get in pickles but it smelled extremely bitter. This must have been Tag’s doing. It was all getting too much. I just had to find out what going on but each time I talked to Tag, or Sarah, I ended up none the wiser. Perhaps there was something to what Tag had said about knowing how to talk to people.
I walked back down the stairs and stopped outside his door. I wanted to look in but he was my friend, we trusted each other. But he was acting strangely and he needed a friend to keep an eye on him. I pushed the door. It wasn’t locked, or even shut. His bed was along the left hand side of the narrow room with the window at the end and then his cupboard, desk and beloved swivel chair down the right. It was all very clean. He must have even hoovered, and the condoms were gone from the ceiling. Instead there was a poster of one of those swirly fractal things, like a big straggly star. It looked new. It was a funny place to put it. I lay back on the bed. It was one of those pictures where you had to squint to see a dolphin. I squinted. There was no dolphin although there was a strange smell. I rolled over and lifted up the pillow. There was nothing there but the pillow case had a greasy mark on the underside. I looked inside. Instead of the regular issue pillow, there was a tote bag. It was rolled up and filled with more of the same kind of herb I’d found in the bathroom. I pulled the bundle free. Its pungent, acrid smell enveloped me: cut grass, dirt, and, I swear, raw beef. At one end it was tied with red string and glistened with a white liquid, like the stuff Sarah had given Tag that time. I quickly wiped my fingers on the sheets. The odour was getting stronger and my head started to throb. I had to get out. I stuffed the bundle back into the pillow case. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the poster on the ceiling. Where there once was a random mess of colours and lines, now there was a dark hole, stretching up and through, swirling leaves and branches enfolded me, drawing me up, down even, I could no longer tell, into an all-encompassing, pulsating void. I felt my mind, my body reach out to the enormity that existed inside the fractal. Out there, beyond the edge of reality, it pooled massively around me, probing, forcing itself through the opening I had given it. But I was too small to contain it and I had not been made ready for it. I could not, did not know how to give in to it and revolted, fought it, flailing about, grabbing at the sheets, knocking over the chair. The noise was enough to bring me back for a second and I stumbled for the door and collapsed on the landing.
I lay there panting before rushing to the bathroom and, pressing knees against the base of the bowl, threw up in the toilet. Dear God. I felt tainted as if something dirty had been dragged round the inside of my head. I could still feel its tendrils, taste its wrongness in my mouth. Why would anyone want to even know about that thing? I had to find Tag and stop him, whatever he was up to. I went to my room and made some calls, mutual acquaintances from Uni, bar staff who looked the other way, regular users. No one had seen Tag, and then I got lucky. Craig, one of the electronics lab technicians who’d previously supplied me with components, had sold Tag some kit only just that week, an old Olympus MP3 recorder they no longer used. It was a start, but it wasn’t much. I was going to have to look at Tag’s emails. He’d never been security conscious before and I hoped his new found purpose in life hadn’t quite reached that far. It would mean going back into his room but this time I was prepared. I found the scuba mask I’d used last Christmas in Egypt and got the pole we used for opening the attic trapdoor. I wasn’t happy with the idea of touching the poster, but I didn’t want it lurking behind me when I was using Tag’s computer. Bracing myself, I put on the kit and burst into his room. I levered open the window, chucked out the pillow and dragged the poster down from the ceiling. I’d half expected something to jump out from behind it but there was just the old scratchy and yellowing Artex. The poster followed the pillow. And then to business.
As I expected, there was no boot password so once I started up the machine, I was in and straight into Gmail. Tag never used to be this busy. He had been a slacker with a loose sense of legality and a penchant for recreational chemicals but over the past week—no, past month—he’d been corresponding with a load of people I didn’t know. I knew that his acquaintance with Sarah had started before Tag had his head bashed. He’d actually known her for quite a while before that and was in deep with her group, her coterie, her circle as she called it. It sounded like a made up religion, but they weren’t Jedis. There was a lot I didn’t understand written in a kind of code, “Shub-Niggurath fhtagn” seemed to reoccur but it didn’t make much sense. Then I found a mass emailing of an MP3. Tag had sent the same email about twenty times, each to about fifty people, a thousand in all. Apart from the attachment, all it said was “Liverpool St” with a date and time. It was today and in less than an hour. I had to get down there. I sent the email to my phone and ran to the tube station as fast as I could, too fast as it turned out as I didn’t quite have time to download the MP3 before I was underground. It would have to wait.
I wondered about the date and time. Today was October tenth and it seemed like a propitious date to do something. I remembered there had been some joking on the internet about 10/10/10 being Hitchhiker’s day as 101010 was 42 in binary. Ten times ten times ten was a thousand, so what about the time? It had said 4:40pm. It took me until Angel station to get it. 4:40 was 1,000 minutes into the day from midnight. With the number of emails that was three times one thousand. I still didn’t know what it meant but it sounded meaningful. It was the kind of time that might interest those kooks who think the world will end in 2012, the same people who thought their number was up in 2000. Whatever Tag and Sarah were up to, even if they didn’t hurt anyone else, I didn’t want them to do anything stupid. We had a good business going. I didn’t fancy taking a McJob to finish paying off my studies.
The escalators weren’t very busy at Liverpool Street. I ran up two at a time and out on the concourse. It was the usual Sunday scene of passengers reluctantly starting their journeys home, or standing staring at the massive indicator panel which stretched over a cross-walk above the concourse from my side of the station to the platforms. Suddenly there was a surge of people from all directions, up from the Tube or the overground trains or off the buses. The station was packed. There was a strange announcement over the PA, “Would Inspector Sands please report to the operations room immediately.” One of those coded messages for staff, designed not to alarm the public. It was repeated again and then followed by a nervous “Passengers are reminded not to block gates and entrances.” I fought my way to the stairs leading up to street level. I couldn’t see Sarah or Tag anywhere and then I spotted him. Opposite me and above the gates to the platforms there was a row of concessions. Along the front of these was a walkway which connected out to the street at either end of the station. My view was partially blocked by the indicator panel but I could see Tag leaning over and looking down into the concourse. And then the clocks all clicked to 16:40. Instantly many of the passengers, singly or in groups of three or four, stood bolt upright and looked up towards the ceiling, through it and beyond. I looked up too but I couldn’t see what fascinated them. And then I noticed they all were wearing earbuds, or headphones and they were mouthing something, a chant, but not like a hymn. It was more disorganised and quieter, like a hum but rising in volume, slowly gathering intensity as their mouths gradually opened wider and wider.
Across the other side of the station, Tag walked out onto the crosswalk. I ran down my side of the station and wheeled round to face him, fifty yards away. The station announcer asked passengers to evacuate the station but nobody moved. Those involved in the flash-ritual carried on regardless and others waited to see was happening. Tag
had reached the middle and was looking down at his congregation. He was screaming with them, urging them on. Station staff were pointing and shouting but I couldn’t hear them. The air was thickening, lights became dimmer. The chanting was starting to gather, to resemble words. I made out a “fhtagn”, somehow now pronounceable, now redolent with meaning as if from a dream once forgotten and now remembered. I ran forward and leaped at Tag. He started and grabbed the handrail.
“She comes!” he screamed at me, his eyes bulging with intensity, his fists clenched. “We are her children and She comes to suckle us. At last She comes!” He wasn’t making any sense. I punched him, right in the side of the head. He fell to his knees. His cheek caught a stanchion and ripped. Everything stopped.
“Tag! For God’s sake, stop this. Now.”
He looked up at me, blood seeping through the tear in his face. He smiled, pushed his tongue out through this second mouth and head-butted my knee. I pitched forwards and he grabbed my head, pulling it towards his face. I thought he wanted to kiss me. His eyes were gone, Tag was gone. There was something else inside him. I resisted, pulling back, and then snapped forward, my forehead catching him on the bridge of the nose. There was an awful wet sound as the bone gave and the fluids splashed down both of us. He reeled back, but only from the force of the blow. He no longer felt pain. And now, terribly, the whole front of his face had lost its shape, as if it had been smudged in Photoshop. I went cold, then hot. On my staccato breaths I could taste metal and a cloying milky sweetness. There was a vertical gash where Tag’s nose and mouth used to be and in that hole dark things moved, pulling at the flesh, widening the opening, breaking through. I screamed and fled. Down below the chanting continued, more frenzied, the worshippers tore at their clothes and faces, the onlookers now heeding the announcements piled up the stairs and escalators. I ran past Tag and there was Sarah, laughing. Her handbag was still slung in the crook of her arm and from it she pulled handfuls of herbs and rained them down on the crowd below, gesticulating like a conductor. I skidded to a halt in front of her. The chanting from the mob was reaching a crescendo, their words now forming a whole, “Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! Iä!”
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 11
