Graveyard Shift

by Chris Westwood

  “A figure of speech. However, our people in the dispatch office received two coded distress calls from you, logged at 10:18 and 10:23 precisely. You called for help and we answered.”

  I popped a tangerine link into my mouth, bitter and sweet.

  “Even born helpers need help sometimes,” Mr. October said. “You sent the distress calls without knowing it, but that’s only a part of your gift, Ben, the hidden part you’re still learning about — it’s why we took an interest in you from the start.”

  “The girl,” I said. “She’s more than just a thief, isn’t she?”

  He nodded. “Yes. She’s many things.”

  Lu zipped across the water, churning up a trail of foam past a line of brightly painted moored barges.

  Looking back, I saw a slick, dark shape, shiny as an eel, slither into the water near the tunnel.

  “What did it look like, your attacker?” Mr. October said. “Did it look anything like this?”

  He turned away for a second, then looked at me squarely, making a face. When Mr. October made a face, you sat up and took notice. The scarecrow regarded me blankly with the same misplaced red eyes the birds had gouged out.

  “That’s it,” I said through a shudder. “Exactly like that. Except it had bits of straw sticking out of its clothing and fingers with talons.”

  “Curse it,” he said. “Should’ve seen this coming. And what did he say?”

  “It . . . he said I shouldn’t meddle in things I don’t understand. And he threatened to tear my house down and turn my bones to dust. Oh, and he said never to mention your name — that it was the worst thing of all.”

  “He always was a pompous so-and-so.” Mr. October switched faces again, back to the swarthy pirate, then touched the mark on my cheek. “And I suppose he left this message for me?”

  “Yes. What’s it say?”

  “It’s written in a runic alphabet known as Futhorc. It essentially says caution, stay away or face the consequences. The literal translation is, Those who enter do so at their peril — we own the night. As I said, pompous.”

  Next he inspected my damaged shoulder. The nerves sang up and down my arm. Finding bandages and antiseptic lotion in a pocket, he set about tending to the wounds.

  “Sorry to see you in the wars,” he said. “You’ll live, but I should’ve warned you about them. I just didn’t think they’d pick up on you so soon.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The one you met today is known as Synsiter,” Mr. October said.

  At the controls of the speeding boat, Lu tensed her shoulders and spat in the water.

  “Synsiter?” I said.

  “Nathan Synsiter, second in command to Lord Randall Cadaverus, one of Cadaverus’s messengers. Strictly speaking, Cadaverus is no more a lord than I’m a quantum physicist. He worked at the Ministry until, oh, eleven or twelve centuries ago. In those days he went by the much less grand name of Ben Crawley, a name he changed after he defected.”

  This new information whirled through my mind. Houseboats and elegant waterside apartments sailed by. A family of mallards huddled on the bank near the exit at Shepherdess Walk.

  “One day,” Mr. October continued, “it came to the attention of the Overseers that a team of junior clerks, led by Crawley, were misfiling records of the newly deceased. In fact, they were stealing the names of the dead for their own nefarious reasons, working against the salvage department to keep us from carrying out our duties. By the time their plot was uncovered, they’d already formed their splinter group and the damage was done. They were expelled from the Ministry, of course, but they’ve been making our work harder ever since.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re very much like us,” he said. “They share many of our powers, including the ability to change appearances. They can manifest themselves at any time, anywhere. Three of their number were there last night in the crowd. They would’ve stolen Marilyn Jasper away if we hadn’t been there, just as they stole the Willow children, who you saw in your classroom.”

  “Mitch and Molly.” A sickly sensation clutched my stomach. “What would they want with them?”

  “The same thing they’d want from any other strandeds. The more confusion and tribulation and grief they cause, the better it is for them. They thrive on it. They devour it. It adds to their power and enables them to bring yet more disorder and chaos to the world.”

  I chewed another segment of tangerine, but the sweetness had gone and I only tasted the bitterness. I threw the rest of it over the side.

  “You’ve seen them at their worst today,” Mr. October said. “Loud and bombastic, all bad tidings and bile. But make no mistake, they can be extremely subtle too. They might whisper in your ear and put a thought in your head, a thought you mistake for your own. Why not keep the wallet full of cash you find in the gutter even if it hurts someone else? Why bother to help the poor homeless guy lying in the street? He’s probably an addict who put himself there. You see how it works?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “That’s what they did to the Willows on the morning of the fire — just a whisper in the parents’ ears as they bought bread at the café. It couldn’t hurt to spend another ten minutes over coffee, could it? Which was all the time they needed for the building to go up in flames, giving them an opportunity to steal the children away.”

  Taking this in, or as much of it as I could, I felt the start of a headache. My brain was overloading.

  “I was asked to help those kids,” I said.

  “Perhaps you still can, but it’s harder now. They’re not on our radar. They’re hidden.”

  I looked back at the canal, calm and glassy except for the boat’s trail, no sign of the slimy beast I’d seen sliding under the surface. It too could be anywhere now.

  We were slowing. Lu was steering us to the bank at the Angel exit, clucking her tongue at the conversation she’d overheard. As the boat settled and we began climbing out to the towpath, she tapped my arm.

  “The Lords are very bad,” she said. Her small face was pinched and deeply serious, her eyes unblinking. “You take great care, Ben Harvester. Stay away from them. Very bad.”

  “OK.”

  While Mr. October led me up the steep path from the canal, Lu steered the vessel under the bridge and sped away west. We continued up onto Colebrooke Row, then took another slope toward Upper Street.

  “What did she mean?” I asked Mr. October.

  “Lu? Ah, she’s talking about the Lords of Sundown — Randall Cadaverus’s team of outcasts. She lost her entire family to them ten years ago and she’s been with our department ever since.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her parents had a small business in Soho, a Chinese apothecary — well established but not terribly successful. They were always in debt, struggling to make ends meet. One night in a fit of desperation, her father gambled away everything they had in a game of mah-jongg — lost the business, the family home, everything. Next day he drove his family through a railway crossing into the path of a speeding train. He was killed instantly; so were his wife and two sons. Lu was the only survivor. She’s grown up believing that one of Cadaverus’s followers took part in the game that ruined her father. He cheated, of course, the game was rigged, designed to drive the man over the edge. And as Cadaverus well knows, a soul in torment is easily led and easily captured. He scored four souls very cheaply that day.”

  “But couldn’t you have stopped it? Isn’t that what you do?”

  The Y on Mr. October’s forehead deepened. “Let’s be clear about this. Lives would’ve been lost whatever we did. What’s written is written. All we can do is provide safe passage, give families their peace, and deliver the lost to their departure point. The names of Lu’s family were on our list, but the list was leaked from inside the department — by a mean little weasel named Ethan Hill.

  “Hill got his marching orders, but too late to stop Cadaverus getting to Lu’s family first, before
we could. They’re still in the great unknown somewhere; we’re still looking for them, and Lu still hasn’t had a chance to say her farewells.”

  “That’s awful.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Just awful.”

  “Yes. Lu’s very strong and courageous, but she carries a great sadness with her.”

  We turned north onto the noisy hive of Upper Street. It was warmer here than by the canal; I felt the heat rising from the pavement.

  “No wonder she warned me about them,” I said. “But they warned me about you. Synsiter said I should never see you again.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But I do. You’re growing up fast, Ben. You’re smart enough to make up your own mind, and you don’t need to be told what to do. This war has raged for centuries, and the rules have never changed — you can only be on one side or the other. The choice is yours.”

  A large woman waddled ahead of us on the street, taking up most of the sidewalk and paddling her arms as if swimming freestyle. We edged around her, me to the left, Mr. October to the right.

  “Suppose I don’t make a choice?” I said. “Suppose I can’t?”

  “I’m confident you’ll do what’s right.”

  He indicated where we would turn off the main street before stopping me on the corner.

  “Very soon you’ll see the heart of our operation,” he said. “Then you’ll decide for yourself. If you’re with us, the Lords of Sundown will be up in arms. Randall Cadaverus will take it as a personal slight.”

  “And if I’m against you?”

  “Then I would have to kill you,” he said, straight-faced.

  His words hung in the air; the street noise seemed to withdraw. For several seconds an emergency siren, streets away, was the only sound. Then Mr. October held his sides and laughed.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Sorry, son, but after so long in the field, one’s sense of humor does tend toward the morbid. But of course you’re smart to question, and there’s always a third choice, which is to do nothing at all. But then you’d always know what you’re missing — and you’d never take advantage of your natural-born gift.”

  “Mum always talks about my artwork that way.”

  “Well, that’s a worthy talent too. And like any raw talent you’re given, it should be practiced and used. It would be a crime to waste it.”

  He led me onto Camden Passage, a narrow winding thoroughfare of tiny stalls selling trinkets, bead necklaces, many-colored crystals, vintage hardcover books on fly-fishing and pet care and economics, and piles of magazines from the 1950s and ’60s. It was like stepping back in time.

  We picked our way through the crowd, past a group of shoeless children playing dice on the cobblestones, past a man selling pink sweet-smelling cotton candy from a steaming machine. At the far end of the passage was an organ grinder with a performing marmoset wearing a bowler hat. The monkey ran among the shoppers, doffing its hat to collect loose change.

  There was a narrow inlet between two of the shops, a space so tiny and dark, I would’ve walked past without seeing it if Mr. October hadn’t steered me toward it.

  “Quick now,” he said. “While no one’s looking.”

  The walls were so close together, we had to edge sideways between them, noses brushing the brickwork in front of us. There was a sound of dripping water somewhere, not loud but noticeable because suddenly the busy trinket stalls were muted and the barrel organ music faint and far away.

  The light behind us shrank away too. We’d stepped out of the brightness of day into what felt like a cave. Water squelched underfoot. Cool droplets hit the back of my neck, and I shivered and wiped them away as another droplet hit my nose.

  Ahead of me, Mr. October cleared his throat. All I could see of him was a vague silhouette, a shadow among other shadows.

  “Not far to go, Ben. Nearly there.”

  As he spoke, a muddy light bloomed out of the pitch darkness ahead. It appeared artificial, not like daylight at all.

  At the end of the claustrophobic passageway, we came out into a cobbled alley lit by a pair of gas-burning streetlamps, one on either side of the steps rising to the dark blue door of the only building in sight. Lu’s rickshaw was parked in front.

  The house, all solid brown brick, looked old and forgotten, with soft light visible between the shutters at the downstairs windows. The upper windows, like the entire upper half of the building, fell into darkness.

  It was nighttime in the alley, and above us the sky was a deep midnight blue with a frosting of stars. A brass plaque above the main door read PANDEMONIUM HOUSE. Another toward one end of the building read EVENTIDE STREET.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Mr. October said. “Things aren’t quite the same here as they are elsewhere.”

  “So this is the Ministry’s base,” I said, following him to the front door.

  “We’re based everywhere,” he said. “This is only one of a myriad of operations we’re running around the planet.”

  The door opened and three uniformed men filed out. Their serious faces were nearly as gray as their jackets, and each had a silver long-nosed rifle strapped across his chest. They eyed me suspiciously, but saluted when they saw Mr. October.

  “Security,” Mr. October explained. “They’re known as Vigilants here. We’ve increased their numbers threefold since the last information leak. It’s their job to ensure no records of any kind ever leave the premises.”

  “And the weapons?” I asked. I was fascinated by, if more than a little wary of, those rifles.

  “Not really my area of expertise,” Mr. October said, “but I understand they’re some kind of DEW, directed energy weapons, that fire plasma waves or something of the sort. They could stop a rhino in its tracks at a hundred and fifty feet and put it to sleep for ten minutes. Of course, the Vigilants don’t actually kill anyone — that would be against our philosophy. We run a strict shoot-to-stun policy here.”

  I was only now getting a sense of the scale of the Ministry’s operation: There was far more to it than I could’ve imagined. On the opposite side of the alley, the tight space we’d squeezed through to get here was no longer visible. Facing us across the cobbled ground was a dark, unbroken wall.

  “It’s there if you look for it,” Mr. October said. “That is, if you know how to look. See there, and there? From this angle it resembles a wavy hairline crack.”

  “How do you get the rickshaw in and out?”

  “With some difficulty. It’s Lu’s responsibility, but she’s greatly skilled. She was once a contortionist in a circus sideshow — used to fold herself into and out of an overnight bag. One of the strangest sights I ever saw, and I’ve seen very many strange sights.”

  At last he led me indoors, through a darkened hall and up a flight of creaky wooden stairs. The place had an ancient, sealed-up smell with an undertone of stale furniture polish that reminded me of Mercy Road School.

  The stairs led us to a long candlelit corridor lined with windowless doors, all firmly shut. There was a muffled tapping coming from somewhere and a constant hum of wind, like a draft trapped in the gutters.

  “This way,” Mr. October said.

  The candlelight in the corridor shivered and twisted as we started along it. As we passed the first few doors, I noted the brass nameplates fixed to each one: SALVAGE, DISPATCH, RECORDS, CONFERENCE ROOM, CLEANING UTENSILS, WAITING ROOM.

  Mr. October stopped at a door marked RECEIPTS. He turned toward me, his features reshaping themselves in the flickering light.

  “Just think,” he said. “Little more than a fortnight ago, you hadn’t a clue. You were looking for something, but you didn’t know what. And see how far you’ve come now. On the other side of this door are the answers to all your questions, and once we open it, there’s no going back. Do you follow?”

  “Yes.” I swallowed nervously. “Yes I do.”
/>   “Then open your eyes, Ben Harvester. Your life is about to change.”

  And with a flourish, Mr. October opened the door.

  The only light source in the room was a candle in an alcove, its shuddery light falling across a small mahogany desk, on which an old typewriter sat, and the swivel chair drawn up in front of it.

  I’d seen typewriters in films and photographs, and one in the window of a Stoke Newington thrift shop, but I’d never been up close to one. It was a small but solid-looking model with a pistachio green metal body, glossy black keys, and a single red key on its right-hand side. Above the keypad were the words LETTERA 22. On the desk beside the typewriter was a rack of blank index cards, the same size as the one Mr. October had shown me on the roof garden.

  On a shelf near the desk was another ancient metallic machine, even older than the typewriter, with a scratched and battered silver body and sides of burnished brass. A cogwheel at the rear fed paper from a roll down through it and out the front. I was puzzling over what it could be when the contraption sprang to life.

  It began with a bang like a muffled gunshot, then rattled and groaned as the paper edged slowly through it and out the front. The machine rocked so violently on its shelf that the entire room trembled with it. There was a burning smell like engine oil, and white smoke puffed from the joints in its casing.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “And what’s it doing?”

  “It’s delivering a message,” Mr. October said, “which means bad news for someone. It only ever brings bad news. It’s an 1873 Stern & Grimwald electric telegraph, a relatively primitive form of communication — but this is a telegraph of a very special kind. It delivers the most delicate and important data there is.”

  I stepped back, afraid it was about to explode.

  “It’s noisy,” I said. “And it looks like it’s working too hard.”

  “You should see it on busier days when it goes into overload.”

  For all its crashing and moaning, the machine was incredibly slow, pushing out its paper only a fraction at a time. We waited more than a minute for it to finish. Then, with a final loud crack that sent orange and blue sparks leaping around its body, the telegraph came to a grinding halt and sat silent.