“You want me to take his place?”
“Eventually, but not until you’re ready, and not until you’ve seen the nature of our work and decided it’s what you want.”
I thought it over a moment. Whatever it was, it sounded important. “What would I have to do?”
“We begin tonight,” he said. “So your first task will be to leave your home without being noticed. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Good. I’ll be waiting. There’s some traveling to do. I’ll take care of the details.”
“What makes you think I’m right for the job?” I said. “I mean, you hardly know me.”
“I could give you a million reasons,” he said. “But here are just three: because it’s in your nature to help. And because you can see what others can’t, like the three souls you saw in your classroom.”
“You know about that?”
“Of course.”
I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
“And the third reason?”
“I can’t afford to be mistaken. There’s no room for error — none at all. I’ve made a case for you to the Overseers, and I don’t expect you to let me down.” He paused there, watching me with a critical eye. “So, young man, what do you say? Are we set?”
“Yeah, I think . . . I mean, yeah, we are.”
“Very good. Then welcome to the Ministry of Pandemonium, subdepartments of registration and salvage. You’ll soon see for yourself what an honor that is.”
“Pandemonium.” The word stuck in my throat. “Like the message on the blackboard.”
“Yes, the message I wrote for your eyes only,” he said. “No one else could have entered that room and seen what you saw. That’s proof enough of your talent for me.”
“And what does the Ministry do exactly?”
“Everything that matters,” he said. “But essentially we’re in the business of cleaning. Life is short and messy, and we’re there to tidy up when it’s over. We seek out the lost and the soon-departed and show them where to go. We comfort the living. We work with the dead.”
Mr. October’s words clung to me all the way home. He never failed to make an impression on me, but this time he’d put my head in a spin.
The dead were everywhere among the living. I’d seen them for myself: the nameless burned man; the fire children, Mitch and Molly. I’d known they were lost and needed help, and now Mr. October was giving me a chance to help them.
I couldn’t have slept after what he’d told me, so it was just as well that we were to begin on the late shift.
We’d meet at nine, he told me as we parted. I left him standing in the sunshine and ran ahead to the corner. Waiting there for a car to pass, I looked back and saw him step behind a hedge into a house’s front yard. An instant later, with a flurry of feathers and scattered leaves, a raven shot above the hedge and flew up the street in a steeply rising curve.
It could have been the same bird I’d seen a few minutes ago, or another of Mr. October’s disguises. Then again, I thought as I ran toward home, couldn’t it have been both?
Mum came home at six, more sprightly than usual. She had the weekend off. The businessman customer had visited again, leaving another sizeable tip.
“Does he wear mirrored shades?” I asked.
“No idea. Not in the diner,” Mum said.
I wondered if Mr. October had the idea that by helping her he could help me. But Mum was unclear when it came to describing her customer: kind of stylish, kind of OK-looking, neither short nor tall, not the kind of man who’d stand out in a crowd.
It might have been him. It could’ve been anyone.
Apart from when we spoke about the businessman, Mum seemed distracted, nodding as if she were listening to me talk when I knew she wasn’t digesting a word.
“So everyone loved my picture,” I said. “Things were a lot, lot better today.”
“That’s good.”
“And I think the school could be haunted.”
“If you say so, darlin’.”
By eight o’clock she was spread out on the sofa, sleeping with her fists bunched under her chin. Fighting, I thought. Fighting to survive, for us, for me. But with no fight left by the time she finished work each day.
I waited for nine o’clock to come. It took, or seemed to take, forever. I sat in my room, watching the hands on the bedside clock for signs of movement. For half an hour, our downstairs neighbor played drum and bass loud enough to crack the plaster. When it finally stopped, sounds of angry voices and breaking glass drifted up from a nearby street. The start of the weekend. Oh joy. If Mum slept through it, she’d sleep through anything.
I fixed my bed, placing pillows end to end under the blankets to resemble a sleeping figure. It had worked for Frank Morris and the others who’d escaped from Alcatraz in the 1960s, and if Mum came to check on me later on, then she might be fooled as the prison guards were.
The clock’s hands were at two minutes past when I heard it: a soft but rapid beating of wings followed by a solid thud as something touched down on the balcony.
I went to the window, leaned out, and looked down. In the pool of darkness on the floor below there was movement, a small huddled shape slowly inflating itself into something larger. I heard a rattling noise like the scraping together of old dry bones. Then I caught my first sight of Mr. October, raising himself up to full height.
I didn’t wait for him to finish. Dry mouthed, I crept downstairs and past the living room where Mum was still sleeping. Then I let myself out.
There was no moon out, and with the streetlights at his back, Mr. October was nothing more than a silhouette. The raspy sound of his breathing reached me on the air, and I heard the crack of his knuckles at his side. His ragged weather-beaten outline suggested he’d returned to the swarthy pirate guise.
A sudden blast of headlights on Lansdowne Drive caught his shiny stud earring, and one silver tooth gleamed out of the black.
“Good work,” he said. “You’re right on time. You’ve kept your part of the bargain, now I’ll keep mine. Are you ready?”
I nodded, too nervous to speak.
“Then it’s time,” he said. “But before we begin there’s something you simply must see.”
Watching the lights from a roof garden forty-six stories above the city, I felt I was standing on top of the world.
“I’ve only ever seen things like this in photos and films,” I said. “It’s so far away. The lights are like stars.”
“A city of tiny stars, yes.”
“Millions of them.”
If I’d known he was bringing me to this high spot, I might have expected him to do it by magic — to bundle me up and sprout wings and fly. But Mr. October never did the expected thing. Instead we’d traveled by Tube and taken two elevators to the top.
Now he paced slowly around the edge, his ragged clothing flapping in the wind, sweeping his arm in a wide arc that took in the city.
“All this can be yours, son,” Mr. October said. Then he stopped and laughed drily. “Just joking. In fact, none of it will ever be yours, and most of what you do in this life will go unnoticed. But it’s often what’s unseen that matters most.
“I’ve been many things in my time,” he went on. “I’ve traveled far and wide and seen sights beyond your wildest dreams. I’ve been a teacher, a preacher, a salesman, a doctor, a gravedigger, a circus performer, a master magician, a beggar, and a thief. Everything I’ve ever done has led me to this. It’s all been preparation for nights like tonight. There are great things in store for us, Ben, things we’ll never take credit for. But like the atoms in the molecules that make up the tiniest speck of the most infinitesimal part of the smallest bit of your little fingernail, just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
He waved for me to join him at the edge. The barrier was low, less than waist-high, and I was nervous about moving closer. I took a couple of steps towar
d him, and he put out a hand to steady me. There was warmth in the wind, but a sudden gust might yank both of us off into space in a flash.
“Take a look at this,” he said.
He took out a plain white index card and pressed it into my hand. There was nothing on it except a name, Marilyn Jasper, a local address, and below that some kind of reference number: 5821. I handed it back, waiting for an explanation, but he simply tucked it back into his pocket. Then, gripping the barrier with both hands and leaning forward into the wind, he said, “Now listen.”
“For what?”
“Just listen.”
I half closed my eyes, trying to concentrate.
“Listen harder,” he said.
From the dull throb of the city below, I began to pick out separate sounds: a train trundling over a bridge, the blast of a car horn. An aircraft passed over us on its way to Heathrow, drowning everything out for a minute. We waited for it to fade, then listened again.
“Harder,” Mr. October said.
The endless hum of traffic. The whoop of emergency vehicles here, there, and everywhere. Drums and bass in a distant park, a baby’s cry, the night song of blackbirds, a million or more voices whispering in a hundred languages. Then the sudden shocking screech of metal against metal, and something like a small explosion.
“There,” he said, taking my arm. “That’s what we were waiting for. By my calculation it’s central, not far from Oxford Street.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Later. Go call the elevator while I get ready for work.”
I ran across the roof, past the black benches and shrubs and plants, and hit the button above the service shaft. The elevator rose with a deep-sea groan.
At the far side of the roof, Mr. October seemed locked in a strange kind of wrestling match with himself, his whole body quaking, his hands pulling at his face. He stood mostly in shadow, but I knew what was happening: He was flipping through personalities the way I might flip through a deck of collectible superhero cards.
The bell pinged. The elevator doors opened wide.
Mr. October caught up, now in the shape of the old man I’d met in Highgate. He wore the same crumpled off-white suit with a red tie and looked every bit as exhausted as he had the first time. Beads of sweat sparkled across his brow.
“Go,” he said, ushering me inside. “Go go go!”
“Are you OK?”
“I’ll be fine. Sometimes the upheaval of changing takes it out of me.”
The elevator dropped us down so fast, my ears were popping before we were halfway to ground level.
“What did I hear up there?” I asked.
“Something bad,” he said. “Somebody needs us right away.”
“Why the old man?”
“Always the questions. He doesn’t look like much, but you’ll see why when he goes to work. He’s the empathizer, the one who takes the pain away.”
“Always the riddles,” I muttered. “Never a straight answer to a simple question.”
“Some answers to simple questions can be very complex,” he said.
“See what I mean? You did it again.”
We stepped into the service area in the gray dark under-belly of the high-rise, a hallway filled end to end with carts, packing crates, and cleaning equipment. At one end the words EMERGENCY EXIT glowed red above a large metal door. Mr. October strode toward it, mopping his brow. He grabbed the bar with both hands and pushed. The door scraped open and we tumbled out into the street.
“This way,” he said. “We have to hurry before she wanders off.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“Marilyn Jasper, the name on the card?”
“You’re learning, young man. See, I don’t have to explain everything.”
As we rounded the base of the building and crossed the parking lot, I noticed him hobbling. Each step seemed a tremendous effort, and the pain showed clearly on his face.
“Curse these old bones,” he sighed. Without show or commotion, he reached off to his right, closing his fingers around the shaft of a walking stick that hadn’t been there a moment before. The stick was made of polished light wood and had a hooked brass handle. “That’s better.” He stumbled on.
“Why didn’t you change later?” I asked.
“Once we get where we’re going, there won’t be time to change.”
“There’d be time if we got there sooner.”
“Smart kid, but lippy,” he said irritably. “And there’ll be even less time if we spend all evening arguing about it.”
We followed the snare of winding backstreets to Oxford Street. The lights there were overpowering, the noise nearly deafening. The traffic crawled past at walking pace. Pedestrians clogged the sidewalks, gathering around bus stops and bright storefronts. I couldn’t see any way we could go from here in a hurry.
“Well, this is no good,” Mr. October said. “Looks like we’ll need company transport.”
His fingers crept to his earlobe and gave it a tweak.
“There’s a word for this, Ben,” he said, waggling his stick at the traffic. “Pandemonium. But get ready now, here comes our ride.”
Cutting through the sea of jammed vehicles, easing through the tight gaps between them, a young Chinese woman approached, hauling a rickshaw. It wasn’t the usual cycle-driven pedicab you see around town all the time, but the hand-pulled kind with a red and gold canopy over its seat. Ignoring the crowds trying to flag her down from the curb, she cut straight to the corner where we stood, waving us aboard.
“Mr. October,” she called above the noise. “Please come.”
“With pleasure,” he said. “Ben, meet Luna. She also answers to the name of Lu.”
“Hello,” I said.
She nodded stiffly at each of us in turn as we climbed into the seat. Her small oval face had a set, determined expression, and she wore her hair in a shiny black bun. She looked somewhere in her late teens.
We were still settling in, and I was trying to fathom how the small single-seater took the two of us so easily, when she set off into traffic, ducking between stranded taxis and vans whose drivers were leaning full-time on their horns. Steam rose from the streets as if the city were close to boiling point. The air hung thick with the smells escaping the fast-food stalls tucked between touristy shops and department stores.
The rickshaw girl turned onto a side street, picking up the pace through lighter traffic, legs pumping like pistons, feet slapping the ground with a steady rhythm. From the waist up she looked fixed and still, hardly moving. She faced straight ahead, glancing neither right nor left as she went.
“Almost there,” Mr. October said excitedly. “Another two blocks and your education begins.”
We were on Wardour Street now, slipping easily between cars, through spaces that even motorcyclists couldn’t make.
“When we get to the scene,” Mr. October said, “your next task will be to stand and observe. You’re likely to see strange and disturbing things, and it won’t be easy, it won’t be pleasant, but you were made for this, Ben. The Overseers are agreed with me about that.”
I heard sirens nearby, and a woman screaming above the street noise. The buildings towered above us on both sides like dark castle walls, the lights of bars and clubs below washing the pavement red and green.
At the head of the rickshaw, Lu ran on. Farther along she began to slow. Crowds were gathering at the four corners of an intersection. Two cars had collided there, by the looks of it at very high speed. A black Mercedes and a blue Volvo were enmeshed, nose to nose, in a tangle of steaming metal and shattered glass, their hoods raised off the ground where they’d met.
A red-haired woman in her thirties staggered around the street, waving her arms and yelling at the crowd.
“Why don’t you do something?” she cried. “You saw what happened. Don’t just stand there!”
“Here,” Mr. October called to Lu. “This is as far as we go.”
/> She stopped a little way short of the accident, and I climbed out first before helping Mr. October down.
“Shall I wait?” Lu asked.
“No, we can take it from here,” he said.
With a curt little nod, she maneuvered the empty vehicle back and around and returned up the street the way we’d come.
Mr. October guided me into the crowd of onlookers. The woman was still ranting, still pacing up and down. She wore a dark green dress, torn at the elbows and shoulders, and one of her shoes was missing. Her face and hands were darkly smudged, and blood trickled down her nose from a cut on her forehead.
“Won’t any of you speak up?” she said. “It’s obvious what happened. He was speeding the wrong way up a one-way street. There was no way I could avoid him.”
No one reacted. No one replied. Police and paramedics pushed through the crowd, ignoring the woman’s protests and heading straight for the wreck. Stretchers were laid out on the ground, a mangled door was pried open, and the body of a young man was lifted clear by the team.
The man was in bad shape. Blood coated his face and clothes. He moaned and covered his eyes as they lowered him onto a stretcher.
“See him?” the redhead asked no one in particular. “He’s at fault. He’s probably drunk — you should Breathalyze him before anything else.” She stormed to the front of the crowd. “What’s wrong with you people? If all you’re going to do is gape, why not take a photograph too?”
Some police officers were trying to disperse the crowd. Others were setting up road blocks and diverting traffic. The woman had planted herself in front of us, and her voice was becoming so shrill, I had an urge to cover my ears.
“What about me?” she went on. “I’m the victim here. I’m the victim, but they don’t care. I’ll get the blame for this too, just you wait. All my life I’ve been on the wrong end, never had a lucky break. Look, if I’d swerved to get out of his way, I would’ve taken half of you with me. What then?”
Graveyard Shift Page 6
