What I Tell You In the Dark

by John Samuel

  ‘Make me,’ he says.

  Even before the words have left his mouth I can feel myself starting to panic. Something in the set of his body tells me he has sniffed me out. He knows I couldn’t use this gun, not on him, not on anyone. And for an awful moment I think perhaps he has realised it is empty, or worse, is about to snatch it from me. So I panic. Before I’ve realised what is happening, I’ve raised my hand above my head and cracked the butt of the gun down on his cheek. It sends him sprawling off the side of his chair.

  I’ve never hit anyone before and I find myself paralysed in the moments after, the gun dangling loosely at my side. Adrenaline is emptying out of me like water down a plughole. But he is in no state to take advantage, he is kneeling on the floor with his face in his hands. A smear of blood at the side of his cupped palm turns my stomach and brings me sharply back to my senses.

  When I return to my station opposite Stella, my outstretched arm is shaking so badly I have to hold it at the elbow. But no one else appears to mind what has happened. They almost seem relieved that Abaddon has been put to the ground and is now hunched there, at the foot of the table, like a dog. In a strange way, his presence was becoming more chaotic than my own. Order has been restored.

  And when Stella resumes it is with an even greater clarity. Each phrase is turned to crisp perfection, no words are wasted. Previously, under the intensity of Abaddon’s stare, she had taken to diluting her narrative with it is possible that or it would appear that, but now each revelation is couched directly – we know, we have been aware for some time. She uses a matter-of-fact, sometimes even rueful tone. She has a good instinct for knowing what people want to hear and she is now delivering it without impediment.

  She explains how InviraCorp’s assets are settled into the Jersey trust, how shares in unknown companies are used to keep people from seeing the Vatican’s finances coiled deep inside there – the serpent in the woodpile. From time to time, I feed her extra information that I have acquired myself – names, account numbers, that sort of thing. She does not resist.

  She even manages to bring an almost lightsome touch to her delivery, stripping it of the po-faced ambiguity that has become the hallmark of her trade. It feels real. So much so that I begin to wonder, as she rests her hands on the table in front of her, and says, simply, cleanly, That’s it, that’s all I know, whether in fact this darkness had not been festering inside her too. Perhaps there has been some measure of relief in having it extracted like this, brutally and suddenly. A non-elective procedure beyond her control.

  ‘Good job,’ I tell her. ‘Now, I’m sorry to say, comes the painful part. You,’ I say to Alex, ‘are going to tell Gregory here how to access Abelwood’s Twitter account.’

  ‘I knew it,’ says Stella, slumping forward in her seat.

  ‘I need the bathroom,’ says Alex, wriggling around in his.

  ‘No one leaves the room,’ I tell him.

  ‘It can’t wait.’

  His lack of substance is particularly repellent in this moment, in the wake of Stella’s bravura performance. For him I have no respect, no pity. I say some of this as I’m walking.

  ‘Just do what I ask,’ I conclude, more confidentially, as I arrive at his side.

  Gregory is staring at us in the slow-witted way that some children stare at equations on blackboards.

  ‘You do know how to upload video to Twitter, Gregory?’ I ask, perhaps not as kindly as I could. It’s Abaddon, he is unnerving me. He is back in his chair and has resumed his hostile staring. There is blood smeared on his face.

  Gregory looks a bit flustered but he manages to nod, kind of.

  ‘Of course you do,’ I say to him, more gently. ‘It’s easy. Anyway, this one,’ I give Alex a chummy shake of the shoulder, ‘will help you. Right?’ Alex groans and holds his stomach.

  ‘None of you,’ I say to the rest of them as an aside while Alex continues to groan, ‘are here without reason. You have each, quite deliberately, rooted yourselves in a God-shaped hole,’ I remind them (because, by the look of them, they need reminding). ‘I shall now leave you to ponder that, without speaking or moving please – except for you,’ I look charitably at Alex. ‘You may use the bin over there for whatever it is you need to do.’

  He doesn’t wait to be told twice. He hurries over there, drops on all fours and retches over the wastepaper basket like a cat.

  ‘Better?’ I ask as he staggers back to his seat. ‘Good. Now will you please get over there and help Gregory with what he needs to do.’

  The next few steps need to be closely choreographed. First, Alex must be persuaded to let me change the administrator password for his company’s Twitter account.

  ‘Why?’ he asks me even though he knows the answer.

  ‘Because we wouldn’t want the little scamps back at your office tearing down my messages the moment they appear.’ I look at Stella, ‘Would we?’

  She smiles thinly. Abaddon contemplates her with weary malevolence. Like all the old school types, he is a committed misogynist. From Eve onwards, as far as they’re concerned, the story can be told with weak, capitulating women at its centre. It is just one more reason to despise him.

  ‘I can’t,’ Alex tells me.

  Encouraged by this show of resistance, Abaddon finds his tongue again.

  ‘You’re right, Alex.’ He is trying to show some solidarity, like they’re all in this together, but as ever, he cannot quite manage to iron out the disdain from his voice. ‘If you allow this to be published, which is what you would be doing, you would be committing a crime,’ he tells him.

  But in the end the wordless adjudication of my Glock wins the argument and Alex declares to Stella that he has no choice. He says nothing to Abaddon, who I am pleased to see is now almost on the verge of ranting. He is bandying around phrases like corporate accountability.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Stella tells him, ‘just let him do it. The first priority is that no one gets hurt.’ She then turns to Abaddon and says, ‘I am not quite sure what any of this has to do with you, Mr Saint-Clair. These are our clients and our responsibility.’

  From the look on his face, Abaddon appears to be ruing the passing of an era, a Golden Age he would no doubt consider it, when he was able to simply murder people who had the temerity to question his jurisdiction.

  Alex inputs a long sequence of letters and numbers into the password field and hands the phone back to Gregory.

  ‘Now get on and upload this video,’ I tell him. And because Abaddon is looking at the device with something approaching intent, I add, ‘Come over here, behind me, and do it.’

  I speak amiably to Stella while this is going on. I even see fit to lower my gun and take a seat. The other two, silent for all this time, also look as though they may emerge from their trauma, perhaps even say something. And from the rise and fall of his jacket, I would say that Nicholas, who is now lying on his side, is resting comfortably. A kind of peace has descended on us.

  I explain to her why it was necessary to make her the revelator of this conspiracy. I share with her my observation that the whistleblowers, the corporate heretics of the digital age, have a single flaw in common: they make themselves the focus of the story. It eclipses the issue at hand, the very message they were trying to impart. In the end, we hear only about them, how mad they were, how bad, how demented.

  ‘But,’ I look at them all, ‘what if the truth were to come from the culprits themselves? What if the perpetrators could be made to confess? That,’ I say, ‘was my vision of a modern miracle.’

  I am about to say more. I am about to tell them that all of these photos and videos and tweets that are uploaded second by second to the internet are the substance of a history that is being written and documented in real time. This huge sprawling composite is a picture of life on earth, and emerging from this picture every so often are certain key moments, moments that can alter the course of history (I can’t help but think of my own words spoken on the Mount, or my private gri
ef, also caught in the amber of history). This, right now, I want to tell them, is just such a moment. But there’s no time for ceremony. Gregory has finished the task at hand and is standing quietly at my side, waiting to be noticed.

  ‘Okay, good,’ I tell him when I’ve had a look. ‘Now would you please send it out to everyone? I would do it myself but …’ I’m making reference to the fact that I have had to stand and move back across the room towards Abaddon, who was looking a moment ago like he might be thinking of putting a last-minute stop to all this.

  ‘By the way,’ I say, eyes glued to Abaddon, ‘how many followers do you have?’

  ‘Nearly ten thousand,’ Alex tells me miserably.

  ‘And how many of them are journalists?’

  ‘Hundreds.’

  I smile, thinking of Natalie. Stella sighs.

  ‘Right then, Greg, type this, if you’d be so kind: He that hath ears to hear, comma, let him hear. Got that? Good, now attach the video and …’ I have arrived next to Abaddon ‘… send.’

  It’s just a moment’s inattention, less than a moment, a second, as I wait for the sound of the phone, that magic tone to say the message has been sent. But it’s enough. Abaddon springs from his chair and grabs my wrist. Prising the gun from my hand, he turns to Gregory and starts striding towards him, the Glock held out in front. Click-crack, click-crack goes the mechanism as Abaddon pumps the trigger and racks the slide, searching for rounds that are not there. I have no choice now but to run. I heard the message go, I’m certain of that, which means there’s nothing left for me here. Abaddon will want to seal this in blood, and I have no appetite for violence, never have had. It was always said to be my great failing, after the last time – a recrimination that has rung in my ears for millennia. Too soft. Too weak to guide them.

  As I move towards the door I see Abaddon’s back, and Gregory and Alex recoiling before him. I see Stella, pushed back from the table, hands up at her face, shouting at him to stop. The other two, lunged forwards out of the line of fire, are silent. Their heads are bent down between their knees, like passengers braced for a crash.

  Nobody hears me leave.

  20

  Fleur and the others look cowed and panicked as I pass by, suggesting that news of this morning’s events has already broken loose. I’d like to think that Stella was the one brave and resourceful enough to have made the call. Goes to show, though, that you really do have to be going some to travel faster than bad news, and my progress has been faltering at best. The compression of that room has left me weaker than ever before. But this would be a bad time to rest. There is a security guard of some kind, or at least a well-built employee of the hotel, who for the time being has decided, or has perhaps been told, to keep his distance, which tells me that more serious people are already on their way.

  Outside I keep to the smaller, less conspicuous streets but even they are teeming with people. Everyone is heading to work. Some seem to want to go, others look less happy at the prospect, but one thing they all have in common is the desire to be nowhere near me. And who can blame them? Every now and then I catch sight of Will, stooped and crazed in snippets of reflections, and even I am startled by it. I try to carry myself better, to measure out my steps but I am too exhausted to make it work. The state of neurotic alert into which I have forced this body has reached its end. This is not a decision, it is a fact. It comes from an ancient place, one of the few secrets that still remain balled up in that fist of reptilian brain.

  It’s amazing, in many ways, that I have lasted this long. My kind will always make short work of a body. We’re too accelerated, too condensed to be housed in such flimsy form. In no time at all the frame begins to buckle and grumble just as this one has, like some jalopy that’s been thrashed in a race, rattling up the final hills, grinding dangerously at every corner. It was the same way last time. Or at least I think it was… It’s a funny thing, but my memories have kind of taken a step back in these past few days, into the dimmer light of something not quite my own. It’s as if the pictures I once held in my mind, images of last time, of Jesus, have been stolen from someone else, or from books or paintings, lurid composites of things only glimpsed or imagined. They lack substance, I guess, is what I’m saying. Even my darling Maryam has become flat and unseeing, as dead as a board-painted icon. Why, I don’t know. I assume it to be an effect of body-life, an inevitability of the downsizing I have suffered. It’s stupid to be upset about it, and yet I can’t help feeling as if I have lost more than I have gained. My own existence has now all but faded, leaving me to be troubled by the spikes and prickles of Will’s past, a cuckoo in the thatch of another bird’s home.

  I have arrived in a smart little square with porticoed buildings whose shut, gloss-painted doors tell me that I have no business to be lingering here. But I can go no further. There is a tidy garden in the middle of the square, fenced off by black railings. I will take refuge there. I circle it once, slowly, pausing here and there to catch my breath and peer through the thick shrubbery that has been planted like a secondary perimeter just inside the railings – or perhaps it was there first, the vestige of a time when boundaries were softer, when people were better drilled on where they should and should not be. On completing my circuit, I have learned that there are only two entrances to this sanctuary, tall gates on opposite sides, and both are locked. Up and over is the only option.

  I haul myself on to the roof of a parked car, to get a better view of entry points. It immediately starts to squawk and flash beneath me. I’d like to say that I feel like one of those characters the Greeks were so fond of, who always seemed to be leaping on to the backs of wildly complaining beasts. But it just seems a little sad to me now, all this. I’m struggling to see the point in any of it, to be honest. In fact, if I’m really honest, I’m wondering if I did actually hear that message get sent, and if I really did see Abaddon firing that gun, or if he wasn’t simply snatching it away from me and hurrying over to join the rest of them. I don’t know, I can’t think, especially not with this car alarm screaming in my ears. I slide back down to the pavement. Just as I am about to start climbing, an indignant woman with a yapping dog approaches me and asks what in God’s name I think I’m doing. It’s a well-phrased question, given the circumstances, but it’s not one I have time to answer.

  Instead, I begin to hoist myself over the railings. She does not stay to watch. It’s hard work. At first just one knee finds the right purchase, on an agonising little nub of bone-to-metal contact, but the pain soon spurs me on to hook my free foot on the sign that is bolted to the stanchions and I propel myself upwards. I then ease myself in a kind of tender slow motion over the spearing railing tops and roll down through the shrubbery into thick, bosky undergrowth. I lie face down for a while, breathing in the earth. It is as damp and cool as a well.

  Eventually the car alarm stops and I am able to hear the sound of the birds and the rustle of my shoes in the grass as I walk. I have the garden to myself. That’s not to say that those who are watching from upper-storey windows will not have called this in, of course they will, but for the moment at least, I am alone. Like the panting hart, I find myself saying, spent from the chase. Will’s words, not my own, but this time I am glad of their comfort.

  I settle myself at the foot of a large yew tree. The whorls and knots of its bark make smiling faces, encouraging me to rest. I allow my eyes to close. When I open them again a child is walking towards me, across the sunlit grass. As he gets closer, I see that in fact he is not a child at all but a fully grown man, just slight in his build and with an unusual lightness to his step. He is wearing something I can’t quite describe except to say that it is familiar to me in some way. He stops just in front of me, his hands hanging at his side, smooth and fine-boned as a boy’s.

  ‘Why are you lying here?’ he asks me.

  I am looking up at him, up into the sun. His face is indistinct, curiously unmemorable.

  ‘I am resting.’

  ‘Are y
ou tired?’

  ‘I am very tired.’

  He thinks about this.

  ‘It has been a long time,’ he says at last.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it has.’

  We are both silent for a while.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why are you saying that to me?’

  ‘I feel like I know you.’ I squint at him; he seems to be shifting around.

  ‘You do not remember?’

  ‘Not really.’ I hang my head.

  ‘I have failed them,’ I say, when it is clear that he is not going to explain himself.

  I feel his hand stroke my head, and yet when I look back up at him he does not seem to have moved. He is still standing a few steps away from me. I get the sense that he is looking beyond me, into the distance.

  ‘It is nearly time,’ he tells me.

  I look around. I see no one else.

  ‘You cannot fail them,’ he adds softly, ‘because they are not looking at you. You never did understand that. They see only themselves.’

  ‘But last time …’

  He shushes me. ‘Last time you just happened to be there. That is all.’

  It is hard to focus on what he is saying. His voice is too like my own. His words seem to become lost in mine.

  ‘They have forgotten the true meaning of our love,’ one of us says.

  ‘They will see it again. They always have.’

  There is a loud noise behind me. I look round to see men in black uniforms flowing through the open gate.

  ‘I’m tired of this,’ I tell him.

  But he has gone.

  The men are yelling at me to put my hands in the air. I shuffle round on my knees to face them. They close in on me in a fast creep, the stocks of their guns tucked into their shoulders, looking at me down the sights, shouting, ‘Armed police! Armed police! Armed police!’