I pull my hood over my head, zip up the coat and shake a frisson from my spine. My new clothes are too big around the shoulders, too tight around the waist: business-casual with a touch of consensus-developed street, a middle-class fantasy of criminal cool. Poor funerary clothes, but thieves aren’t allowed to whine, are they?
Brain churning with worst-case hypotheses, I lumber into the station, palming exhaustion from the crevices of my eyes. To say that I have a plan of action would be like saying that the human species is born with foreknowledge of its trajectory through this strange, savage existence, every shining accomplishment and humiliating failure prenatally selected from a cosmic brochure. That said, I do have the barest framework of a plan; which is, depressingly, more than I ordinarily have.
I trot into the mouth of the station. It’s eerie at this time of the morning. Waterloo was obviously constructed to house the masses, and their absence rings like a scream. There is too much space and not enough personality, a hostile sterility that brings to the imagination old horror movies, hospital corridors with nowhere to hide.
What I should be doing right now is putting together a ward, a failsafe, some measure of protection against the shoals of dead dithering through the underground. If London’s spectral demographic follows the same conventions as the rest of the world, they’ll likely be feeling quite rambunctious (adjective: feisty, ferocious, ravenous, man-murdering, inclined towards inflicting eternal torture) right now. But instead, I go on a hunt for a coffee.
“Hello! Welcome to”—yawn—“Costa. What can”—yawn again—“I get you?”
“Flat white for me, and could I buy you a coffee?” I count out coins from a stylish wallet, pausing to flip through a rainbow of cards. Anthony Sebastian Lions, you had a good life.
“Haha! Good one.” My barista, a local named Tom Pritchard, is bearded and squishy, infectiously cheery, with a tuft of aqua-green hair combed into a flaccid fauxhawk. His eyes keep hidden behind massive aviator glasses. “It’s the whole ‘opening the store’”—jazz hands are executed—“‘at four-bloody–a.m. in the morning.’ I’ll be fine. Honest.”
“Sure?” I slide over an inexact amount of money and slot a cautious smile into place, not entirely sure what to do with his exuberance.
“I mean, I probably shouldn’t have stayed up for that premiere, but it was so good. My mates and I were, we were like, whoaaaaah. Marvel movies are fucking awesome. You a comic fan?”
“Sometimes?” I scan the empty café, disoriented. No one is allowed to be this ebullient at this time of day. It’s unnatural.
“Don’t tell me...” He palms his forehead, extends the other hand forward in perfect imitation of your dollar-store psychic. “You’re a Dark Horse guy.”
I guffaw. Probably harder than expected or even should have, body folding, arm over my waist. An espresso machine hisses steam in the background, and the ambient soundtrack changes, switching from elevator music to a syrupy pop song about someone vapid. By the time I recover, Tom’s laving hot milk over a styrofoam cup, grooving in place, head gyrating in rhythm with the command to shake it off, shake it off.
“Here you go, mate. Sure I can’t get you a stroopwafel to—”
“A what now?”
“Stroopwafel.”
“Excuse you?”
“Str-ooo-p waffle,” He repeats, teasing out the syllables like ropes of taffy. “It’s Dutch for ‘small, delicious waffle.’”
I square an incredulous look and Tom chortles merrily, perfectly on beat, so impeccably good-natured that he probably bleeds confetti. I twirl my fingers in three quick circles, a smile crooked at his beaming countenance. “Fine. You win. I’ll take your waffles.”
And then the light flickers, the tiniest aberration, as though every source of illumination breathed in together and held the air caged while something flitted unseen into the room.
“Shit.”
“You okay, mate?”
I unscrunch my eyes, open them to find Tom’s soft face riveted in concern, a bag of miniature waffles held out. My mouth seizes into a rictus before it rearranges into a wincing smile. Just my imagination. Surely. I reach out a palm.
A seam opens in the center of Tom’s forehead, a fine line of claret. It divides his mouth, throat; runs along his tan-colored shirt, past the white apron. I watch, silent, tongue swollen to silence. Gingerly, I pluck the stroopwafels from his grip and take a step back.
The two halves of the late Tom Pritchard shudder once and his eyes roll up as he sighs, long and gustily, somehow serene. The release complicates into a moist, slorping cacophony, like viscera in operation. Something arches beneath his skin, bulging against the side of his neck, the dermis turning rubbery. Briefly, I see the contours of knuckles, a flattened palm.
I chew my fist as he finally wriggles loose, shedding Tom Pritchard like a bad habit, skin puddling onto the ground. The man from the train is exactly as I remember: black leather, brown curls, knife-jawed smile.
“I’m sorry. Did you still want your coffee?”
“I think today might actually be a good day to quit coffee. And coffee shops.” I glance at the stroopwafels and let them fall to the tiles. “Also sugar. And maybe even today.”
The man shrugs. Despite his recent ecdysis, his attire is pristine, artisanally rumpled, not a drop of gore in sight. Tom’s face, slack without its bones, teardrops from the bend of the man’s wrist. Skin tears. The sack of tissue falls, ignored.”Your loss.”
He plucks my flat white from the counter and sips at the surface, painting his upper lip with a foam mustache. I almost laugh at the banality, hysteria bubbling close to the surface, but I bite down on a knuckle again, harder this time, skin pinned between my teeth, and gnaw. “You know? You could have just waited,” I manage not to wail.
“I get impatient.”
“I completely understand that.” T-Swift is effervescing softly about something else now, voice wound slow: cherry lips, a door opening in a beast, breath distilled into a silvery drink. “But I was looking for you. I was literally in the process of going to find you. Did we really have to kill an innocent bystander?”
The man takes another drink of my coffee. “Probably not.”
“Then why do it?”
He doesn’t answer, only props a slim elbow alongside a case lush with confections, condensation dewing in the glass. As I watch, the moisture crystallises into patterns. He grins, his teeth white, a cigarette abruptly smoldering between them. “What did you want from me, Rupert?”
I slip a hand into a pocket, close a grip over Sisyphus’ orphaned coin, the metal scalding in palm. “I want to make a deal.”
A WARM, HUMID smell of urine rises from the underground. Animated billboards fritz like malfunctioning televisions as we go past, and I feel the hairs on my neck rise, the borders of my vision flooding with horrors: wide, white bodies, maggot-soft; a noose of eyeless faces; fingers, spiralling like ferns.
I keep my gaze forward.
“She’s gone, you know?” His voice comes sympathetic, paternal.
I don’t answer. But anyone with eyes could see it’s a gut punch, anyway, the thought smashing my ribs to kindling. When I breathe, all I get is a lungful of shrapnel.
“Your ghoul.” Smoke tendrils indolently from his joint, a blend of marijuana and something sweeter, a suggestion of citrus.
“Minah was a langsuir, thank—”
“They lied to you. We are the shape that we inhabit, an actualization of an idea of self-awareness. The moment we give that up, we disappear.”
“I hate to be that guy, but I should probably point out that we’re currently swimming in ghosts.” Nails trace the back of my arms, the slope of my shoulders.
“But they haven’t given up their identity, have they? Ghosts are concentrated passion. Their very existences pivot on desire. As the madman Descartes might have said, ‘They hunger, therefore they are.’ In contrast, those content enough to surrender to the idea of an idyllic afterlife—�
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“They vanish?”
He says nothing. Skeins of cannabis-fueled vapors trek through the air, writing secrets in an alphabet of forgetting. In between the warping curlicues, apparitions convulse and squirm, defying active scrutiny.
“So, basically, you’re telling me that Hell exists and Heaven actually represents a complete dissolution of self, and we’re all lying to each other?”
The silence textures with smugness.
“You know what? I really didn’t need the exposition. Pass the fucking joint. Please.”
He does. I swallow a toke, clutch the heat as long as I’m able, hoping it’d burn through the grief rising in my ventricles, before I let the smoke leech away. To my vast disappointment, the weed reveals no precocious properties, no ability to instantly elevate my mind, send me soaring into a state of higher numbness. It simply is.
“Well, fuck.”
The man retrieves his blunt and begins to take deep, ruminative puffs. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know if I believe you.”
“That’s entirely fair.”
“I’m pretty certain that I don’t, at any rate.”
“You do you, man.”
I flinch at the colloquial terminology, the ease with which he uses it, the wrongness of the juxtaposition. Entities like him, whatever he actually is, have no right engaging in popular culture, although I suppose it could be argued that, by that logic, they have no right to any form of communication native to sapient life. But then again, does mortal philosophy matter at all in the face of world-shattering consciousnesses?
Minah. Her name repeats beneath my pulse, a knot of sounds like a noose around my throat. It’s hard to breathe.
“So what are you?”
He exhales a single pearlescent word. A locus of glittering syllables, both terrible and haunting, inaccessible by the human larynx, sound and shape and undiluted sensation. The utterance expands into visions: a writhing nebula of tentacles in the center of the universe, suspended among galaxies, singing dumbly to a court of protean dancers; a man at a gate, his shadow crawling with nightmare forms; a worship that will not die; a name, a name, a—
I tear myself from the frenzying hallucinations, images of unnatural architecture seeping from my neurons like sand between my fingers. “That absolutely isn’t an answer.”
He sighs. “Nyarlathotep.”
“Who?”
“Me.” He passes me the joint. “That’s who I am. I am the Crawling Chaos, the God of a Thousand Forms, the Stalker among the Stars, the Faceless God. I am the son of Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God. I am the voice of the Outer Gods, the destruction of humanity, and a happy fabrication of H. P. Lovecraft.”
“You’re a figment of someone else’s imagination?”
“More like an analogy for an irrational fear of the foreign.” His mouth rises in passable mimicry of a smile. Trails of lacy smoke ribbon around his face.
“I guess that makes some amount of sense.” I pause. “Does this mean you’re actually an octopus, then?”
“I—what are you talking about?”
“Lovecraft made Cthulhu, didn’t he? And Cthulhu, if I recall, was a gargantuan beast with a squid for a head. And you can’t deny that he had a marine theme to his works, what with Innsmouth and—” I smack my lips thoughtfully. Maybe the weed was more potent than I thought.
“Exactly how much Lovecraft have you read?”
“About two animes, six movies, and several graphic novels.”
We hit the bottom of the escalator. Taking another drag, I risk a gander behind us, discover a flight of steps practically short enough to jump. About what I’d expected, I suppose. That conversation had far too much time to percolate. I flick the joint against a wall and trot after Nyarlathotep, who is already halfway to the gates, the barrier swinging open before him.
“How does that work, anyway?” I ask after he leads us onto the lip of a darkened platform. The dead keep their distance, eeling restlessly just outside of view. “Being a literary construct and—and whatever you are?”
“Priorities, Rupert.” In the penumbra, his face is garish, a chiaroscuro of flat lines and shadow, a drawing that occasionally stirs to three-dimensionality. His cigarette flickers blue. “You were here to make a deal.”
“Right. Right, I—”
The Necropolis Railway saves me from gibbering my way into an untenable contract with what is either a metaphor for the existential terrors that plague men of relative leisure, or possibly an actual divinity of unthinkable hideousness. The Body Train roars into position, excreting steam, moisture beading on its shuddering flanks. A noxious musk washes over the platform, exhaust and sweat and steel and assorted glandular secretions.
Polyps in its dermis flower into eyes, pupils rolling in my direction. Strangely, the train’s attention doesn’t come across malevolent, only distantly curious, an arthropod’s insouciant interest in the world outside its lifespan.
“Step into my office.” Nyarlathotep gestures at a door, his smile cranked up to used car salesman, all teeth and no authenticity.
“Classy.” I make a face and step through.
“DIU—”
The epithet slips before I can stop myself. There’s someone else in the train. Many someone elses, in fact, if they’re all ostensibly piloted by a single consciousness. Men and women in three-piece suits litter the carriage, some propped up against the walls, others strewn loose-limbed over the seats, marionettes abandoned after a disastrous comedy act.
“What the fuck is Vanquis doing—”
Nyarlathotep flicks a disinterested look at the scattered bodies, their million-dollar smiles still soldered in place. “No idea. You can ask them if they make an appearance.”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with this.”
“Tough.” He drapes himself across a plastic seat, elegant as a lord, ankle perched on a knee. His foot begins to wag, the shoe branded with an anime girl’s puzzled face. “Enough procrastination, Rupert. Present your terms.”
The train jolts into motion. I steady myself against a pole, free hand clasped around the dead king’s gift, the orphaned coin hot against my palm. “So, are you working with Vanquis?”
“Rupert.” A warning skims across his friendly South London voice.
“No. I got to know. Background research, you know what I’m saying? You don’t pick jobs at random. You figure out if you’re capable of jiving with their corporate culture. Vanquis tried to kill me.”
“They did not.”
“They brought”—I enunciate each word slowly, deliberately, and with rising emphasis—“a building down on my head.”
“Collateral.”
Memory strobes: ash in my lungs, intestines smeared across my apron, the ceiling collapsing. “Collateral is a very nice word for what happened.”
“But also an appropriate one, innit?” He twitches fingers and a bar cabinet materializes in the wall, lid popping open with a noise like cracked knuckles. “Whiskey?”
“Pass.”
Nyarlathotep shrugs. He picks a clean tumbler from its casement and a sphere of ice from its box, plops one in the other. A bottle of Laphroaig is uncorked. The air glazes with the smell of kerosene-soaked oak and smoky peat, a faint moting of sea salt. He decants an unreasonable portion of alcohol into his glass.
The Body Train clacks around a corner, whistling to the endless void. “So, what’s your connection to Vanquis?”
“You are a persistent fuck.” Nyarlathotep swirls the whiskey, ice tinkling loudly against the sides; the sound is somehow louder than the noise of the tracks. “Honestly, you were never in any real—look, you can just ask them yourself.”
“I—what—oh, fuck.”
The darkness resolves into the cool, waxy glow of an encroaching platform. As the train begins to slow, the inert suits start to rise, first swaying like newborns, tottering this way and that, before accreting a kind of symphonic grace, every movement harmonized to the notations of
a greater purpose.
“Vanquis.” Nyarlathotep tips his head.
Ssh. Ssh. Sssssh. A shushing noise transfers between throats, white noise-jabbering which slowly crenellates into speech. Twenty pairs of eyes lock on. “You’re heeeeeerrre.”
“I’d really rather not be, if that helps.” I scoot an involuntary step back. “So—”
The nearest vessel presses a finger to its lips, one tintless eye shuttering closed. Behind me, I hear another chink of glass, a splash of alcohol over melting ice. The doors to the Body Train yawn apart and a deluge of souls spumes into the carriage.
There are hundreds of them. Thousands. So many that there is not even standing room for the spirits. Faces overlap, silhouettes combine. Individual identity is pulped together into raw material, deleting any beginning or end, any distinguishing feature. Their fear gusts over me, dull, cow-like, not quite awake enough to process the enormity of the future.
“What’s going on?”
No one replies, preoccupied with the fresh arrivals. Vanquis is, if nothing else, terrifyingly efficient. It segregates the souls along mysterious vectors. Agents queue in parallel lines to coax ghosts into neat configurations, while others box them into unmarked white packages, their motions thoughtlessly industrial. In minutes, Vanquis has organized the milling chaos into symmetrical cardboard stacks. The doors whoosh shut.
“And that makes eight thousand.” Nyarlathotep declares, dusting his hands, as the Body Train jerks forward again. “Compliments to your employer for bringing us up to an even number.”
I whip my head about, a chill attenuating into a knife between my ribs. Of course the Boss would be involved. Why wouldn’t he be? “I’m afraid I didn’t get the memo on that.”
Nyarlathotep bares a grin, hunching forward to rest elbows on spread knees, glass loosely clutched in a hand. “That’s your problem.”
“Fair enough.” A sidelong glance shows Vanquis obsessing again over the arrangement of boxes, moving containers seemingly at random, creating grand forts before disemboweling them to build stubbly hexagons. Isolated from their artillery, this god of low-income terrors seems almost child-like. “Okay.”
Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth Page 14
