World's end taom-1

by Mark Chadbourn

"What the hell's going on?" Ruth looked deep into the dregs of her wine. She had drunk too much too quickly, but however much she told herself it was an immature reaction, she couldn't face up to the immensity of what the statue meant and what they had truly seen that night. For someone immersed on a daily basis in the logic and reason of the law, it was both too hard to believe and impossible to deny; the conflict made her feel queasy.

  Church rubbed his tired eyes, at once deflated and lost. "We can't walk away from it-"

  "I know that." There was an edge to her voice. "I never thought one moment could change your life so fundamentally." She walked over to the window and looked out at the lights of the city in the pre-dawn dark. "We're so alone now-nobody knows what we know. It's a joke! How can we tell anybody? We'll end up getting treated like Kraicow."

  "And what do we know? That there's some kind of supernatural creature out there that looks like a man one moment and something too hideous to look at the next?"

  "We know," she said dismally, "that nothing is how we imagined it. That if something like that can exist, anything is possible. What are the rules now, Church? What's going on?"

  Church paused; he had no idea how to answer her question. He drained the remainder of his wine, then played with the glass thoughtfully. "At least we've got each other," he said finally.

  Ruth looked round suddenly, a faint smile sweeping away the darkness in her face. "That's right. You and me against the world, kid."

  Church mused for a moment. "Kraicow must know more. He'd seen something, the same as Gibbons."

  "Then," Ruth said pointedly, "we should pay him another visit."

  Unable to sleep, they arrived at Kraicow's house at first light and sat outside in Church's old Nissan Bluebird until a reasonable hour, dozing fitfully. His niece answered the door, her recognition giving way instantly to anger.

  "Did you two have something to do with it?" she barked. Church and Ruth were taken aback by her fury, their speechlessness answering the woman's question. "He's gone," she snapped.

  Church's puzzlement showed on his face; Kraicow had seemed too weak to move. "Where-"

  "I don't know where, that's the problem!" Anxiously, she looked past them into the empty street. "They came for him in the night. I had the fright of my life when I opened the door."

  "Who was it?" Church asked.

  "I don't know! They didn't tell me!" She back-pedalled, suddenly aware they might judge her for not questioning the men further. "They were coppers," she said unconvincingly. "Looked like a bloody funeral party, all dressed in smart suits and ties. I don't know what the old man's done. He never tells me anything."

  Church and Ruth looked at each other uneasily. "Do you know where they took him?" Ruth said.

  The woman shook her head. "They said they'd let me know. They told me it was in his best interests!" she protested pathetically before slamming the door.

  "What was that all about?" Ruth asked once they were comfortably in heavy traffic heading back into town.

  "Could be the murder squad. They might have linked Kraicow to Maurice Gibbons."

  "Could be." Her voice suggested she didn't believe it. "Seems more like the kind of thing Special Branch would do. Or the security services."

  "What would they want with Kraicow?" The question hung uncomfortably in the air for a moment until Church added, "Let's not get paranoid about this."

  "If this whole episode isn't a case for paranoia, I don't know what is. We haven't got any more leads now. Where do we go from here?"

  They crawled forward through the traffic for another fifteen minutes before Church found an answer. "There's a lot of weird stuff going on around the country just like this. I mean, not people turning into devils, but things that shouldn't be happening." Church explained to her at length about the massive upsurge in supposed paranormal events he had read about on the net. "I don't know …" He shrugged. "It may be nothing. All the nuts coming out of the woodwork at once. But it seems to me too much of a coincidence."

  Ruth sighed heavily and stared out of the passenger window at the dismal street scene; no one seemed happy, their shoulders bowed beneath an invisible weight as they headed to the tube for another dreary day at work. It depressed her even more. "I can't get my head round this at all."

  "Let's just pretend it's not happening," Church snapped, then instantly regretted it; he was tired and sick of nothing in his life making sense.

  Ruth glared at him, then looked back out of the window.

  "Sorry."

  She ignored his apology frostily; Church could see she was tired herself. "Gibbons was killed to prevent him telling what he'd seen," she mused almost to herself. "But what did he see?"

  "I've had some emails from a woman who says she saw something which could throw some light on what's going on," Church ventured. He considered telling her about Laura's mention of Marianne, but thought better of it; he could barely handle the implications himself.

  "You really think all that stuff's linked to what we're dealing with?"

  "Who knows?" he said wearily. "These days, everything's a leap in the dark."

  "So is she going to tell you what she knows?"

  "She wants to do it face to face. I was going to see her anyway, you know, just out of curiosity." He winced inwardly at the lie about his motivations. Ruth didn't deserve it, but how could he tell her he wanted to find out how this woman knew about his dead girlfriend? It sounded a little pathetic, worse, like an obsession.

  "Why the hell not. Where is she?"

  "Bristol."

  Ruth moaned. "Oh well, I've got no job to keep me here. Just give me a couple of hours to pack. Looks like we've got us a road trip."

  Although it had been two years since he had last felt the warmth of her skin, Marianne's presence still reverberated throughout the flat. On the wall of the hall hung the grainy black and white photo of the two of them staggering out of the sea at Bournemouth, fully clothed, laughing; Marianne had had it framed to remind them both how carefree life could be if they ever faced any hardship. In the kitchen, in the glass-fronted cabinet, stood her blue-and-white-hooped mug with the chip out of the side. Church couldn't bear to throw it away. He saw it every day when he made his first cup of tea, and his last. The dog-eared copy of Foucault's Pendulum which they had both read and argued about intensely sat on the shelf in the lounge, next to the pristine edition of Walking on Glass which Marianne had given him and which he had promised her he would read and had never got round to. The paperweight of a plastic heart frozen in glass which they had bought together in Portobello. The indelible stain of Marianne's coffee on the carpet next to her seat. A hundred tiny lies ready to deceive him in every corner of his home. Sometimes he even thought he could smell her perfume.

  With the TV droning in the background and the holdall still half-packed on the bed, Church suddenly found himself taking stock of it all in a way he had not done since the immediate aftermath of her death. For months the reminders had simply been there, like the drip of a distant tap, but as he trailed around the flat, they seemed acute and painfully lucid once more. Perhaps it was the bizarre, disturbing mention of her name in the email, or what he thought he had seen in the street, but he had to visit each one in turn with an imperative which he found disturbing.

  But he was sure he could give it all up, turn back to the future, if he could somehow understand what had driven her to suicide and how he had been so blind to the deep undercurrents that must have been in place months before. He had played over every aspect of their relationship in minute detail until he was sick of it, but the mystery held as strong as ever, trapping him in the misery of notknowing, a limbo where he could not put the past and all its withered, desperate emotions to rest. No wonder he was seeing her ghost; he was surprised it hadn't come sooner, lurching out of his subconscious to drive him completely insane.

  In the lounge, the TV news had made an incongruous link from an account of a bizarre multiple slasher murder in Liverpool to detai
ls of a religious fervour which seemed to be sweeping the country; the Blessed Virgin Mary had allegedly appeared to three young children on wasteland in Huddersfield; a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh had given forth milk in Wolverhampton, and there were numerous reports of the name of Allah spelled out in the seeds of tomatoes and aubergines when they were cut open in Bradford, Bristol and West London. Church watched the item to the end, then switched off the TV and put on a CD. The jaunty sound of Johnny Mercer singing Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive filled the flat as he returned to his packing.

  He picked up Laura's email confirming the details of their meeting and then checked the road atlas. Church hoped his car would make the trip to Bristol. It had seen better days and very few long journeys, but he had bought it with Marianne and hadn't been able to give it up.

  A haze of chill drizzle had descended on the city just after he had dropped Ruth off and by the time he began to load up the car, it seemed to have settled in for the day. The world appeared different somehow; there was a smell in the air which he didn't recognise and the quality of light seemed weird as if it was filtering through glass. Even the people passing by looked subtly changed, in their expressions or the strange, furtive glances which he occasionally glimpsed. He felt oddly out of sorts and apprehensive about what lay ahead.

  When he stepped out of the front gate, a group of children splashing in the gutter across the road stopped instantly and turned to face him as one, their eyes glassy and unfocused. Slowly, eerily, they each raised their left arm and held up the index finger. "One!" they shouted together. Then they splayed out their fingers and thumb. "Of five!" Some stupid catchphrase from a kids' cartoon, Church thought, but he still felt a shiver run down his spine as he hurried up the street to the car.

  As he threw his bag into the boot, he heard the shuffle of feet on the pavement behind him. He whirled, expecting to catch the children preparing to play a prank, only to see a homeless man in a filthy black suit, his long hair and beard flattened by the rain. He walked up to Church, shaking as if he had an ague, and then he leaned forward and snapped his fingers an inch away from Church's face.

  "You have no head," he said. Church felt an icy shadow fall over him, an image of the woman at the riverside; by the time he had recovered the man had wandered away, humming some sixties tune as if he hadn't seen Church at all.

  On his way to Ruth's, Church passed through five green lights and halted at one red. Nearby was a poster of a man selling mobile phones; the top of the poster was torn off and the man's head was missing. Further down the road, he glanced in a clothes shop to see five mannequins; four were fine, one was headless.

  And as he rounded the corner into Ruth's street, a woman looked into the car, caught his eye, then suddenly and inexplicably burst into tears.

  He finally reached Ruth's flat just before 1 p.m. She was ready, with a smart leather holdall and Mulberry rucksack. "I can't help believing all this will have a perfectly reasonable explanation and we'll both end up with egg on our faces. God help me if the people at work find out," she said.

  "Let's hope, eh."

  Church drummed his fingers anxiously on the steering wheel as they sat in the steaming traffic in the bottleneck of Wandsworth High Street. Ruth looked out at the rain-swept street where a man in a business suit hurried, head bent, into the storm with a copy of the FT over his head-as if it could possibly offer any protection. "You know," she mused, "I have the strangest feeling. Like we're leaving one life behind and moving into a different phase."

  "Too much Jack Kerouac." Church's attention was focused on the rearview mirror; he had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling they were being followed.

  "It's frightening, but it's liberating too," Ruth continued. "Everything was set in stone before-my job, where I was going. Now it feels like anything is possible. Isn't that weird? The world has turned on its head and I feel like I'm going on holiday."

  "Sunny Bristol, paradise playground of the beautiful people. I hope you packed your string bikini."

  "Have you got any music in this heap?" Ruth flicked open the glove compartment and ferreted among the tapes, screwing up her nose as she inspected each item. "Sinatra. Crosby. Louis Armstrong. Billie Holiday. Anything from this century?"

  "Old music makes me feel secure." He snatched Come Fly with Me out of her fingers and slipped it into the machine. Sinatra began to sing the title track. "And old films and old books. Top Hat, now there's a great movie. Astaire and Rogers, the perfect partnership, elegance and sexuality. Or A Night at the Opera-"

  "The Marx Brothers. Yeuckk!" Ruth mimed sticking her fingers down her throat.

  "Or It Happened One Night. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Romance, passion, excitement, great clothes, great cars. You can't get better than that."

  Ruth smiled secretly when she saw Church's grin; he didn't do it enough.

  "Life was great back then." He waved his hand dismissively at the jumble of shops on Upper Richmond Road. "Where did it all go wrong? When did style get banned from life?"

  "When they decided big money and vacuous consumption were much more important."

  "We need more magic. That's what life is all about."

  Ruth flicked her seat into the reclining position and closed her eyes while Sinatra serenaded the joys of "Moonlight in Vermont." The traffic crept forward.

  The journey through southwest London was long and laborious. In rain, the capital's archaic transport system ground to a halt, raising clouds of exhaust, steam from hissing engines and tempers. By the time they reached the M4 more than an hour later, Church and Ruth were already tired of travelling. As the planes swooped down in a neverending procession to Heathrow, they agreed to pull in at Heston Services for a coffee before embarking on the monotonous drag along the motorway. By the time they rolled into the near-empty car park, Church's paranoia had reached fever pitch; at various stages on the journey he had been convinced that several different cars had been following them, and when a grey Transit that had been behind them since Barnes proceeded on to the services too, it had taken all of Ruth's calm rationality to keep him from driving off.

  Beneath the miserable grey skies, the services seemed a bleak place. Pools of water puddled near the doors and slickly followed the tramp of feet to the newsagents or toilets where the few travellers who hung around had a uniform expression of irritation; at the weather, at travelling, at life in general.

  As Church and Ruth entered, they could see through the glass wall on their right that the restaurant was nearly empty. They proceeded round to the serving area where a couple of bored assistants waited for custom and bought coffee and Danishes before taking a seat near the window where they could see the spray flying up from the speeding traffic. Through the glass, distant factory towers lay against the grey sheet of sky, while beneath the fluorescent lighting the cafeteria had a listless, melancholy air. Despite the constant drone from the motorway which thrummed like the bleak soundtrack to some French arthouse film, they spoke quietly, although there were only three other travellers in the room and none of them close enough to hear.

  "This is killing me," Church mused. "Every time I look behind I think someone's following us."

  Ruth warmed her hands around her coffee mug; she didn't meet his eyes. "A natural reaction."

  Near the door, a tall, thin man was casting furtive glances in their direction, the hood of his plastic waterproof pulled so tightly around his face that the drawstrings were biting into the flesh. At a table on the other side of the room, an old hippie with wiry, grey hair fastened in a ponytail was also watching them. Church fought his anxiety and turned his attention back to Ruth.

  "When I was a boy this would all have seemed perfectly normal," he said. "You know how it is-you're always convinced the world is stranger than it seems."

  "That just goes to show we lose wisdom as we get older, doesn't it," Ruth replied edgily. "We've obviously been spending all our adult lives lying to ourselves."

  "When I was seven o
r eight I had these bizarre dreams, really colourful and realistic," Church began. "There was a woman in them, and this strange world. They were so powerful I think I had trouble distinguishing between the dreams and reality, and it worried my mother: she dragged me off to the doctor at one point. They faded after I reached puberty, but I know they affected the way I looked at the world. And I'm getting the same kind of feeling now-that all we see around us is some kind of cheap scenery and that the real business is happening behind it." He glanced around; the man in the waterproof had gone, but the hippie was still watching them.

  "I'm finding it hard to deal with, to be honest," Ruth said. "I've always believed this is all there is. I've never had much time for ghosts or God."

  Church nodded. "I always thought there was something there. An instinct, really. You know, you'd look around … sometimes it's hard to believe there's not something behind it all. But these days … I don't have much time for the Church … any churches. After Marianne died, they weren't much help, to say the least."

  Ruth sipped her coffee thoughtfully. "My dad was a member of the Communist Party and a committed atheist. I remember him saying one day, The Bible's a pack of lies, written by a bunch of power-hungry men who wanted their own religion."'

  "Christmas must have been a bundle of fun in your house."

  "No, it was great. It was a really happy, loving home." She smiled wistfully. "He died a couple of years ago."

  "I'm sorry."

  "It was sudden, a heart attack. His brother, my uncle, was murdered and it just destroyed my dad. It was the unfairness of it … the complete randomness. Uncle Jim was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some desperate, pathetic idiot killed him. You know, I work in the law and I see all the motivations for crime, but if I came across that bastard today I'd probably kill him with my bare hands. No jury, no legal arguments." She bit her lip. "Dad just couldn't cope with it. It didn't fit in with the ordered world view, you see. He tore himself apart for a couple of days and then his heart gave out. And in one instant I could understand the need for religion." Emotions flickered across her face. "Of course, by that stage it was too late to suddenly start believing."