Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Do you know how much effort it takes to look that hot?’ asks Lex. ‘I bet he gets up at five in the morning to start his workout and conduct some kind of intense moisturising programme. They all have eight-packs now, it’s the new musculature. He’s probably a model or a professional whore, which amounts to the same thing.’

  Here’s the odd thing, thinks Ryan. When you experience extreme beauty, you tend to think of it as otherworldly, but I see the opposite in this man. I’m drawn because he’s completely at ease in his world, entirely connected with it. He is no angel; he smokes and drinks and has a dirty laugh, but there’s something so unknowable and expansive about him that you can’t help but be fascinated.

  The Pursuit

  Something very strange is happening to Ryan, and he knows it. It feels like love but can’t be, surely. He fights against the word ‘obsessed’, but the more he sees, the more he wants to see, and when the beautiful men aren’t there he feels a little more lost, and a little less alive.

  ‘Charisma’ means ‘bearing the gift of divine grace’, and that is what they have, the beautiful men, a calescence that begins to escalate when they enter a room, perhaps not a physical heat but something Ryan perceives to be uncomfortably hot. He begins finding excuses to hang out in their neighbourhood—the bars and restaurants to the east of Avenue Jean Medecin. He starts lying to Lainey about where he is going, but Lex sees him around and clearly decides to keep his counsel.

  Ryan continues to change each time he sees them. He feels a disgust at the way he’s behaved with girls in the past, as if just being in proximity to these demigods somehow has the potential to make him a better person.

  But it is a drug. Each time he sees their leader he wants something more. In the crowded bars of dying summer he can stand quite close, but it still isn’t enough. He tries to hear what the beautiful men are saying to each other, but can never catch the words. Then one night when Lainey has a cold and is staying home, the two men find themselves pressed close together in a scruffy pub behind the flower market. It is the first time Ryan sees him without his friends. He raises his eyes to find his searching gaze returned.

  The effect is one of electrocution.

  Ryan went to a Catholic school and emerged with a tangle of doubts and suspicions he has never bothered to work through, but this man presses against his heart and catches his breath between parted lips, inhaling and returning it to the universe in an act so perversely religious that he almost faints. He shakes his head as if to clear the clouds from it, but the sensation only grows. The man is still staring at him. It’s as if he does not entirely occupy the space in which he stands. The weight of him is slightly blurred, shimmering with dark matter.

  Holding his stare, the man steps back towards the door, and Ryan can only follow.

  Outside a light rain sparkles in yellow squares of light. They walk in silence through the streaming alleyways of the Old Town. Ryan follows, knowing that he would pass through fire to remain this close. He sees how others move out of their way, as if the sight disturbs them in some fundamental manner. They reach the square of Sainte Reparate and slip inside the church. Within the cool grey space, Ryan instantly loses the sights and sounds of the city. Beneath the church’s old wooden roof the man he is following stops in the deserted nave and slowly turns. He watches as Ryan draws closer, and closer still.

  The Admission

  Ryan is suddenly filled with terror. He cannot comprehend what he is doing here. It makes no sense at all, and feels as dangerous as tapping Death on the shoulder. The man he has followed is watching him with a mystifying, silent blankness. Their faces are lit by the guttering penance candles that line the pews.

  Ryan takes a step closer, so that they are but a forearm’s length apart.

  ‘My name is Phosphoros,’ says the man in clear but oddly weighted English. ‘You must not touch me. But you can answer this for me.’

  Ryan stops and waits while Phosphoros, the light bearer, the morning star, taps out a battered cigarette and lights it, the flame streaking his wet face with gold. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Think about your answer very carefully. I must ask again. Why are you here?’

  ‘Because I love you.’ Ryan cannot believe he has said this, and tries to bite back the words.

  ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘I don’t have to. I just know what I feel.’

  ‘It is very dangerous for you.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘You understand what I am.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And you are not afraid.’

  ‘No.’

  It might be Ryan’s imagination, but the beautiful man’s mouth appears to be moving out of synch with his voice, like a poorly dubbed film. The words of Phosphoros resound in Ryan’s head, disorienting him.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Ryan throws the question back.

  Phosphoros sighs. ‘We are the rebels. We believe that people should be told. We will probably be punished when we return.’

  ‘What should we be told?’

  ‘That you cannot be saved.’

  Ryan touches his forefinger to his chest and looks around. ‘You think that’s what I want? To be saved?’

  ‘I do not mean you. I mean the world. You will dissipate to atoms very soon now. All humans will. Do you think it will help to know what is going to happen?’

  Ryan cannot think of an answer. He had not been expecting to trigger some kind of metaphysical debate in a French church. It briefly crosses his mind that the man with whom he has become obsessed is mad or drugged, just another beautiful burnout who’s had too many late nights. But Ryan needs to believe. He wants answers. It is human nature to seek solutions.

  ‘You’re saying the world is going to end? No, it wouldn’t help me to know how. But it would change me.’

  ‘And you want to change.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t like myself. I’m lost. I think most of us are.’

  ‘Then come to me.’ Phosphoros holds out his arms in welcome.

  The Vision

  The pose bothers Ryan, reminding him of a hyperreal life-sized statue of Jesus in the chapel at his old school. Yet he steps into his angel’s embrace without hesitation, and feels his warm arms close like wings about his shoulders.

  Phosphoros flicks aside his cigarette, exhales and kisses Ryan fully and deeply. It should feel like a sacrilegious act, but is the reverse.

  There is a sensation of molten rain in Ryan’s mouth that floods down his throat and into his chest, setting his soul aflame.

  The grey walls of the church fall away and he sees. Truly, he sees.

  It will begin exactly six weeks after this night. The future unfolds in flashes of brilliance that damage his eyes.

  A huge bomb detonates in a Siberian oilfield.

  The Russians blast the most important Sunni temple in the Middle East.

  Saudi Arabia collapses into a state of civil war.

  The oil pipelines are cut. The troops are unable to hold back the crowds.

  The loss of oil stops electricity, and the loss of electricity stops water. America attempts to form alliances, but is rebuffed. China no longer needs its help. Elderly men shout across vast tables. The crowds mill like panicked animals. The buildings fall. The West is left unprotected, and like a card house it collapses.

  The end comes with indecent speed, but the suffering lingers on for years. After-images of cataclysm roll past in a blur of pixels, endlessly looped on the world’s dying television screens. The future screams, then starves, then whimpers, then fades to a nagging soundless pain that reduces everyone to animals, then insects, then microbes.

  The Decision

  Ryan breaks free, severing the circuit. The walls of the church close back in. He blinks and tries to focus. ‘This is why you’re here,’ he says, forming the words with difficulty, as if drunk. ‘You know wh
at’s about to happen. You’re testing us, to see if we should know as well.’

  ‘We’re here to help. You need to tell me. The decision is yours.’

  ‘How many others have you asked?’

  ‘We have only asked the ones who have seen us for what we are. The ones who are drawn to us against their natures. We need to know how you wish to survive, with or without this terrible knowledge.’

  ‘If everything will be gone in just a few passes of the sun,’ Ryan replies, ‘I want to be awake, not asleep. If I can’t survive, I want to live. Please, don’t take the memory away. Leave it inside me.’

  ‘As you wish.’ The angel Phosphoros seizes him by the hair and kisses him with a vicious force, and this time it feels as if some part of his soul is being restored, forcing the fire of life into him, so that even though he is shivering and frozen in the darkened church, every nerve in his body is alive with energy.

  Phosphoros releases him and studies his face to remember it. ‘I should tell you that all the humans we approached reached this consensus,’ he says. ‘You are the last one to be asked. The seven of us were right to come here, right to question. Upon our return we will throw ourselves upon the mercy of our elders, and present the evidence of your strength. If we are successful in our entreaties, we will end the world a few seconds before you yourselves can destroy it, in a vast and sudden conflagration, so loud that it is silent, so bright that it is blackness, and there will be no anguish, no suffering, nothing left at all. I hope this is of consolation to you.’

  ‘I don’t need to be consoled,’ Ryan tells the angel. ‘I feel’—he struggles to find the right word—‘completed.’

  Phosphoros releases him and steps back, to be joined by his six friends, who slowly emerge from the shadows. Ryan follows them outside and watches as they rise up in the rain and become streams of luminescence that burst and glow within the night clouds over the sea, before finally vanishing from sight.

  Ryan finds that he is quite alone. His sense of loss is like a bruise upon his heart. He thinks of Phosphoros soaring away, of the risk he took to prove the strength of man, but the sensation of love is quickly replaced by confusion. He cannot understand what he is doing here. His chest is sore. He feels as if he is recovering from a great sickness. Digging his mobile from his jacket pocket, he is about to call Lainey but changes his mind. All he knows now is that he needs to be by himself. The knowledge he has been given carries an enormous weight, and he must rediscover his spirit.

  In the time that’s left his journey takes him back to his family in London, and then to the shoreline of Nice once more, where he feels most at rest. By the time he returns, America has recalled its citizens and Lainey has gone. Nobody knows where she is. Ryan knows he will never see her again.

  The End

  And now, with just minutes to go before the end of the world, he leans back against the warm stone of the seat, and turns up the music in his headphones. He smiles at the passing pedestrians and looks down at the bay, waiting for the angelic interception, the soundless flare of vermilion light that will tell him they succeeded. He watches as the city goes about its business, tethered to routine, heedless of harm, happy to exist at all.

  Once he was lost and miserable. But now the precise details of the world’s conclusion are burned into his cortex. He understands the fall of angels, the hopes of men, the nature of love. Ryan smiles to himself, truly content for the first and only time in his life.

  He knows that there are others out there who were touched, who are now watching and waiting for the final hour to arrive. He thanks the beautiful men. He knows that joy has the breadth of an atom, and is quickly gone. But while it is here it must be treasured, for there is nothing else that we can do.

  Here it comes.

  BY CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Novels

  Spanky

  Roofworld

  Rune

  Red Bride

  Darkest Day

  Psychoville

  Disturbia

  Soho Black

  Calabash

  Short Stories

  City Jitters

  The Bureau of Lost Souls

  Sharper Knives

  Flesh Wounds

  Personal Demons

  Uncut

  Red Gloves

  Paperboy: A Memoir

  Film Freak

  Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries

  Full Dark House

  The Water Room

  Seventy-Seven Clocks

  Ten Second Staircase

  White Corridor

  The Victoria Vanishes

  Bryant & May on the Loose

  Bryant & May off the Rails

  The Memory of Blood

  The Invisible Code

  Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart

  Bryant & May and the Burning Man

  London’s Glory: The Lost Cases of Bryant & May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit

  Bryant & May: Strange Tide

  About the Author

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER is the acclaimed author of the award-winning Full Dark House and twelve other Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries: The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, Ten Second Staircase, White Corridor, The Victoria Vanishes, Bryant & May on the Loose, Bryant & May off the Rails, The Memory of Blood, The Invisible Code, Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, Bryant & May and the Burning Man, and Bryant & May: Strange Tide. He lives in King’s Cross, London, where he is at work on his next Peculiar Crimes Unit novel.

  christopherfowler.co.uk

  Facebook.com/​chrisfowlerauthor

  Twitter: @Peculiar

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