The Society of Blood

by Mark Morris

  The creaks and thumps were accompanied by other sounds too, none I could easily identify, but which gave me the impression of a kind of metallic shifting. I imagined some long-disused machine slowly stirring into life. A machine that for now was still hidden in the darkness, but that was creeping inexorably closer.

  My eyes ached as I stared into the black. Was it my imagination or could I now see movement: a shape blacker and more solid than the darkness around it? I was staring so hard my eyes started to water. I blinked to clear them, and through the swimming blur of tears I saw the approaching shape suddenly pull free of the shadows, acquire a more definite form.

  It was a huge metal spider – or at least that was my first impression. Its legs, jointed at the knees, resembled curved, upside-down Vs. The creature’s main ‘body’, centred in its mass of clanking, creaking limbs, seemed to ripple and shimmer, as if made of some glossy, net-like material.

  The thing came closer, its legs moving slowly. As it did so I realised it was less a mechanical insect and more a sort of self-propelling sedan chair. Its occupant, perched on a kind of dais in the centre, was draped in what looked like a mosquito net – maybe for protection, or maybe simply because he or she wanted to remain anonymous.

  The machine came to a halt about five metres in front of my chair, and for a few seconds the shrouded figure regarded me – or at least that’s what I imagined it was doing. I stared back, trying to look defiant. Tension brimmed in the air like strange, dark energy. There was a part of me that wanted to jabber to fill the silence, but I kept my mouth shut. As a kid I’d been conditioned not to tell the enemy – which back then had mostly been the police – anything more than I needed to.

  The net-like shroud rustled as the occupant of what I already thought of as the ‘spider-chair’ tilted its head to one side. The movement made me think of a quizzical cat confronted with something new.

  Finally the figure spoke, its voice an ancient rasp, like the whisper of withered leaves blowing across a dusty stone floor.

  ‘Do you know me?’

  My throat felt almost as parched as the figure’s sounded. The croak I dredged from it made me sound like I was trying to imitate it.

  ‘Should I?’

  The thing in the chair paused. I wondered whether it was offended or just gathering strength to speak. Certainly every syllable it uttered sounded like an effort to produce.

  ‘You’ve been… looking for me… for a long time.’

  My heart jolted into thumping life again.

  ‘You’re the Dark Man?’

  The creature sighed; a rattling breath of what sounded like satisfaction. Could this really be him? The man, the creature, which had sent Lyn mad? That had been behind the abduction of Kate?

  Perilous situation or not, rage rushed through me.

  ‘If you’re him… if you…’ I was so furious I could hardly speak. I took a couple of deep breaths and tried again. ‘You ruined my life! What fucking right have you got… what possible fucking motive…?’

  The emotion flowing through me, combined with my dry throat, overwhelmed me again and I began to cough, great hacking barks that doubled me over, wrenching at the muscles in my bound arms and legs, sending hot threads of agony through me. I clenched my teeth, trying to feed on the fury pulsing like hot coals in my head. When I next looked up I felt feverish, as if my skin was sizzling. The dryness in my throat had gone, and suddenly I was all bile and phlegm.

  ‘Answer me!’ I shouted. ‘Fucking answer me, you bastard!’ I remembered the dream (the vision) I’d had just before waking up. My saliva sprayed the air as I screamed at him. ‘What have you done to Clover and Hope? If you’ve hurt them, I’ll fucking kill you!’

  I was in no position to make threats, but I made them all the same – and I meant them too. I would kill this cunt. Somehow I’d find a way.

  I realised the Dark Man was speaking. I tried to still the pounding in my head so I could listen.

  ‘What you saw… was one possible future… a future you can prevent…’

  Despite the rage I felt hope leap inside me.

  ‘Prevent? So Clover and Hope are still safe? Unharmed?’

  ‘For the moment…’

  Fuck your moment! I wanted to scream it at him, but instead I gulped down my rage with an effort. The Dark Man’s words had suggested not only a way out for Clover and Hope, but me too.

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can I change the future?’

  The net-like shroud rustled. For a moment I wondered whether the Dark Man was about to reveal himself. What would I see if he did? The Devil? But what did the Devil look like? Would he have horns and a pointy beard? Perhaps his face would be so terrible that seeing it would drive me mad? Almost unconsciously I found myself gritting my teeth, narrowing my eyes, like a child watching a scary movie, bracing itself for a shock.

  But the Dark Man didn’t reveal himself. Instead his arms rose up behind the veil, his hands coming together. As the net-like material slid away from them I saw that the arms, though human, were as thin as twigs, and that the hands were hideously claw-like, the skin stretched tightly over the bones, the fingernails dark as bruises. In fact, the flesh of the Dark Man’s arms and hands, yellow and wrinkled, was livid with either bruises or patches of rot. Hideous wart-like tumours clung to them like fungi, black and seeping.

  It wasn’t the hands, though, but what was cupped in them that drew my attention. It seemed to be a fossilised egg, black and dusty and scored with countless cracks, ash-like flakes sloughing away from its brittle surface.

  The ‘spider-chair’ creaked a couple of steps closer, the Dark Man extending his scrawny, cancerous arms as though presenting the egg to me like an offering. I wondered if he expected me to dip my head and kiss it. My instinct was to do the opposite: rear back, turn my face aside, like a child refusing a spoonful of food. I was about to tell him to get the filthy thing away from me – and then I saw that the object wasn’t an egg but a carving. My stomach gave a sickening, weighty lurch.

  ‘Oh fuck. Please tell me that’s not…’

  But it was. There was no mistaking it. Cupped in the Dark Man’s hands were the crumbling remains of the obsidian heart.

  I wanted to cry; I wanted to be sick. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t!

  I tore my gaze from the decaying husk in the Dark Man’s hands and stared at where I estimated his eyes would be underneath the shroud.

  ‘That isn’t real. It’s a trick. Tell me it’s a trick. It can’t be real…’

  Even as I pleaded, an inner voice was yammering in my head. Of course it wasn’t real. If the heart was dead, there was no way that Clover and Hawkins could be here. They were here because of a future me – a me who had had the heart. And what about Frank? How could he have rescued me from Tallarian’s army back at Queens Road Cemetery? I hadn’t met him yet, hadn’t brought him back from the dead. So how could he have appeared in my life if I’d never been in his?

  A rasp came from beneath the shroud. ‘No trick.’

  ‘Fuck off!’ I shouted. ‘Of course it’s a trick! I get the heart back! I know I do!’

  But I knew no such thing. I had no idea how time worked. Perhaps we jumped parallel tracks all the time without knowing it. Perhaps, while I’d been unconscious, I’d lurched into a world where Clover was still in the twenty-first century, where Hawkins had been executed for murder, where Private Frank Martin was destined to become one of thousands of white gravestones in a French field. Perhaps my memories of them were false. Perhaps the only reason I still retained those memories was because of my proximity to the heart, or of my previous contact with it.

  Perhaps I’d never see Kate again. Perhaps she was lost forever.

  Bitterness welled up in me. I spat it out in words.

  ‘What the fuck have you done? Why are you showing me this?’

  The Dark Man took a long, rattling breath.

  ‘This heart… was taken from you… centuries ago. There was a pol
iceman… Jensen… my soldier took his form…’

  ‘Your soldier? The shape-shifter?’

  ‘The heart brought you both here… it fell into my possession…’

  I scowled. ‘But that was only three months ago. Not centuries.’

  And then it clicked. If my hands hadn’t been tied behind my back I might even have slapped my forehead in realisation.

  ‘Oh, shit. You’ve been using it to time travel, haven’t you? You’ve used it and used it and now you’ve worn it out. So all the time I was looking for it, it wasn’t here, because you were off on your travels.’ I recalled the effect the heart had had on me on the few occasions that I’d used it. With bitter satisfaction I said, ‘And not only have you worn it out, but it’s worn you out. Well, good. I hope it’s really fucked you up. I hope you’re suffering.’

  ‘I’m dying…’ the Dark Man hissed.

  ‘Even better.’

  Another long, rasping breath. ‘But you will help me…’

  I laughed. I meant it to sound derisory, but it came out shrill, almost hysterical.

  ‘Help you? How can I help you? Why would I even want to? You’ve fucked things up for both of us! Maybe for everyone! God only knows what’ll happen now!’

  I was becoming hysterical. I controlled myself with an effort. The Dark Man waited until I’d slumped into silence, and then he spoke again.

  ‘Somewhere here, in London… is an earlier heart… a younger heart… it is your destiny to find it…’

  An earlier heart? Did he mean another heart? A prototype? And then, as before, I realised what he meant.

  ‘You mean the same heart as that one?’ I nodded at the crumbling thing in his hands. ‘You mean a version of the heart that existed before you stole it? Before McCallum owned it even?’

  I remembered how the old man, McCallum, had appeared to me after his death, having used the heart to travel forward in time from a point before I’d murdered him. On that day he’d been in possession of a heart and so had I. But it had been the same heart. Two versions of the same object existing simultaneously.

  ‘Yes,’ rasped the Dark Man. ‘You will find it…’

  I had a horrible suspicion where this was leading.

  ‘And if I do? When I do? What then?’

  ‘You will bring it to me… and all will be restored…’

  ‘All?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, all?’

  ‘All…’ he repeated, emphasising the word. ‘Your life will be restored to you… you and your companion will be returned to your own time… you will be reunited with your daughter…’

  ‘And Lyn?’ I said. ‘What about Lyn? You drove her mad, you corrupted her mind!’

  ‘She will also be returned just as she was…’

  ‘Before you fucked her up, you mean?’

  Again the Dark Man gave a single nod beneath the veil.

  ‘I will go back through the timelines… withdraw my influence from your lives…’

  ‘Well, that’s fucking big of you. But why did you have to fuck up my life – all our lives – in the first place?’

  ‘It was necessary…’

  ‘Not for me it wasn’t!’

  My voice rang in the vast room. In the shadows around me I heard things creaking and rustling, as though disturbed by my outburst. Again I tried to put a lid on my fury, to clamp it inside myself. What the Dark Man was offering was a golden ticket, a chance to erase the misery and heartbreak of my past. But could it really be that easy? Wouldn’t such an action have consequences? And even if it were that easy, could I trust the Dark Man? He’d already proved himself to be ruthless, murderous. What was to stop him killing me once I’d fulfilled my part of the deal?

  ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘You don’t…’

  ‘So why should I do what you say?’

  ‘Because you have no choice…’

  Something stung the back of my neck. I hissed in pain. An insect? Then I thought of Tallarian, the fire-ravaged muscles and sinews in his limbs enhanced by cogs and levers, by mechanics. I imagined his elongated body folded into the shadows behind me, stretching out an arm, his fingertip peeling back like the petals of a flower, releasing a hypodermic needle.

  All at once I felt woozy, as if I was leaving my physical body behind, drifting away. Hey, no, wait I wanted to say, but I no longer had a mouth or a tongue. And then it didn’t matter; nothing mattered; anxiety, pain, fear, regret, anger, it all sloughed away from me like dead skin.

  The Dark Man shimmered, smeared, was reclaimed by the dark.

  An instant later so was I.

  SIXTEEN

  PRIMAL SOURCES

  I’m walking in the desert. The pure white sun in the heat-bleached sky is so intense it will burn out my eyes if I gaze at it. I’m an insect under the concentrated glare of a magnifying lens. If the rippling, colourless sand beneath my feet were any hotter, it would liquefy to glass.

  I stop and peer about me, turning in a slow circle, but there’s nothing to see for miles. The desert is flat – no wind, and therefore no dunes. I feel as if I’m the only man in the world, and maybe I am, but the thought doesn’t alarm me. On the contrary, I feel calm, unburdened. My mind, for once, is unfettered.

  Even the fact that the sun is beating down mercilessly, and that I have no food or water, is not a problem. I can leave here whenever I like. I don’t know how I know this, but the knowledge reassures me all the same. Although the landscape is featureless, I seem to be walking towards something, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps I’ll know it when I find it, but for now I’m simply enjoying the tightening and relaxing of muscles in my legs as I walk, the sense of freedom. My shadow stretches out long and dark in front of me. Does that mean it’s morning or afternoon? I don’t know, and I don’t really care.

  Then I’m on my knees and I get the feeling I’ve found what I’m looking for. I push my hands into the sand, forcing my fingers in all the way up to the third knuckle – and then deeper still, until both of my hands are engulfed to the wrist.

  I close my eyes and concentrate. Like a plug in a socket, I’m connected to the earth, drawing out its energy. Primal sources are involved here; you might even call it magic, if magic wasn’t simply a power source that we don’t understand, and therefore can’t explain.

  My fingers wiggle beneath the earth, like bait to attract prey. Eventually I have what I need and I grasp it and begin to pull at it, hauling it from the ground.

  It’s wet, and at first it writhes, but as the sun hits it, it transforms, adapting to its surroundings, becoming clay and stone and root matter. But that’s fine, because its energy is in my hands now, and I can forge it, shape it to my will. My fingers move deftly as the heart takes shape beneath them, each valve, each vein rendered in the minutest detail. Once I’ve finished, the heart responds, feeding off my energy and its own, which are now one and the same, adopting yet another disguise, forming a shell around itself.

  A shell of blackest obsidian.

  There’s a gap then, a sense not of time passing, but of nothingness, of oblivion. When I next become aware I’m drifting upwards, or at least I get the impression that I am. There’s a world beyond the surface and I’m rising towards it, I’m being reborn. I feel… regret.

  Someone speaks my name, and I open my eyes.

  I see blurs of light and dark, which my brain tells me is a face. But isn’t that always the way? Aren’t our brains conditioned to – what’s the word? – anthropomorphise the random patterns in trees and clouds and rocks? I remember the curtains in the room in my gran’s house that I sometimes slept in as a kid, whose pattern was a busy psychedelic riot of leaves and flowers, stalks and vines. My mind conjured so many faces from those brightly coloured swirls and shapes that after a while the curtains began to scare me so much I couldn’t look at them. Lying in bed I’d sense all the secret faces peering out, all the eyes staring at me. Sometimes I’d cover my ears to block out the sound of breathing
from the faces in the curtains.

  The dark blur of the mouth in the face hovering above me widens, grows blacker, as it speaks my name again. I blink and suddenly the face comes into focus, and I’m surprised to discover it’s one I recognise.

  ‘Clover,’ I say.

  She smiles. ‘Back with us, are you?’

  SEVENTEEN

  BESIDE MYSELF

  As soon as I heard Clover speak it was as if a line had been drawn, as if all at once I’d been rooted back into a world of rigid rules, hard edges. I stared up at her, trying to put the past few hours together. Where had I been? What had I done? My mind was a fug, my thoughts disconnected.

  ‘Where am I?’ My voice sounded mushy in my ears; the inside of my mouth, my tongue, felt weirdly soft, misshapen. I had the alarming sensation that I was dissolving, melting. I gripped the edges of the bed to anchor myself.

  Clover frowned. ‘What’s the matter, Alex?’

  ‘Coming apart,’ I said, or tried to. ‘Got to hold myself together.’

  She put a hand on my forehead. I flinched, thinking her fingers would sink into doughy flesh, leaving circular depressions.

  ‘You’re fine, Alex,’ she said. ‘They gave you a drug, which is fucking with your perceptions. The Wolves must have brought you home, although nobody saw a thing. All that security and… nothing. Talk about taking the piss. First thing we knew there was a knock on the door, and when we answered it we found you unconscious on the doorstep. You’ve been asleep now for… five hours? Six maybe? What do you remember?’

  I thought about the Dark Man, the crumbling heart, the proposition he had presented to me.

  Maybe the connections took longer than they seemed to, or maybe I looked bewildered, because Clover’s face receded from me as she straightened up.

  ‘Never mind, you can tell me later. For now, I think, you need to rest.’