Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  Besides, who was to say that cattle couldn’t be dangerous? Tell that to someone trapped in the path of a stampede.

  “It seems to be a property of civilization. Once population and technology reach a certain level, it’s only a matter of time before society tears itself apart. A tricky subject to study, given the vast amounts of time and huge volumes of data to process, but our computer models suggest it’s something to do with the nature of consciousness en masse. Revolution is nature’s way of resetting the civilization clock, cutting the population back, emptying the gene pool and starting again. We can’t allow that.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I had no doubt that what the Cadaver was saying was true. There was an undertone to his voice that forbade disbelief. He’d have made a marvellous politician. I wondered why he’d chosen to bury himself so deeply in the bowels of the civil service instead.

  “Our control of this phenomenon started shortly after World War Two. Students of history could see that the revolutions and the rise of extremism of one stripe or another was the beginning of the end. If we weren’t careful our two thousand-year-old civilisation was going to start tearing itself apart in a pointless war. People needed something else to get angry about. Something other than their own governments.

  “For a while they used other governments or ideologies as an external threat, but that never really worked. For every five people who swallowed the line about the Soviets there were five more who’d decide to join them. Even when they dismantled that particular structure and chose groups such as Al-Qaida instead there was always the danger that people would see them as an attractive alternative. After a while these organisations became far more popular than they otherwise would have.”

  “But surely that’s quite recent?” I was confused, “Have you only just changed your mind?”

  “Ah no, forgive me” the Cadaver raised a skeletal hand in apology. “That was the external wing of the ministry, in liaison with similar ministries all over the world. But the internal office has been active just as long and with a greater degree of success I would say. You see, whilst there is always a possibility that external threats could divide the people we want to unite, what we’ve been doing is finding enemies within; enemies that no one in their right mind would want to support.

  “We made some mistakes at first, of course. In the fifties and sixties we thought that drugs and the counterculture would be suitable candidates for demonization but they proved more attractive than repulsive. We hadn’t taken the Beatles into account. They were a real wildcard.

  “So we turned our hand to declawing popular music—although one operative thought we just needed to get the right angle on it. He tried again in 1976 and nearly succeeded but even a phenomenon as nihilistic as punk was attractive to some. So we had to find something else. We stripped drugs of their glamour and introduced cheap heroin into the country. This seemed to work for a while. You may remember?”

  “Heroin screws you up,” I smiled, “Those scary public information films were one of the reasons I wanted to go into advertising in the first place.”

  “I can see we’ve picked the right man.” The Cadaver smiled and I felt good. Why did I find his approval so pleasing? Perhaps he was adept at speaking a very reassuring dialect of body language.

  “After a while it became clear that even though it was an effective enemy to have chosen and one that did frighten people, it didn’t make them angry. And bleeding off the anger was central to maintaining the control we required. Fear wasn’t enough.

  “Then we discovered the ideal demon. The paedophile, the kiddy-fiddler, the molester. Even vague rumours of such monsters were enough to whip the voters into a massive frenzy of anger. Have a look at this expression.” With a gesture the Cadaver brought the close-up of the angry woman’s face back into focus on the screen. “Can you see any empathy or sadness here? Is she thinking of the child she believes has been abused and killed? Absolutely not. She is revelling in the knowledge that she has been allowed to hate. Allowed to express violent, sadistic urges in an arena where none would dare censure her.

  “For our purposes it’s the perfect stimulus. If paedophiles didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent them. The appetite for such bile is staggering.

  “And it’s not just paedophiles that are useful. Anything that drives self-styled right-thinking individuals to subhuman mob frenzy can be used. Pensioners mugged for twenty pee. Happy slappers.

  “If you come across a news story that makes you wonder how human beings are able to sink lower that you ever thought possible—you’re probably right. They didn’t. We crafted the story to syphon off negative energy. If you’ve ever wondered why some crimes remain unsolved it’s because they never happened in the first place. Handcrafting a solution as well as the crime would take far too much effort when all we need is the outrage.”

  “I see,” I replied. I was excited, as if a curtain had been lifted and I was seeing the ropes and pulleys back stage. This was how the world worked. It made sense. People were incapable of committing heinous enough crimes and yet not intelligent enough to realise that if they couldn’t then only the most deranged could.

  “It takes artistry and a certain kind of imagination. We have software to predict where and when the pressure needs to be relieved, but how to release that pressure… Well, that’s where individuals such as yourself come in. Artists. Creatives. Art is a lie—and the best lies are ones that people believe. People are becoming cynical about advertising, but most of them still believe what they hear on the news. The ultimate commission for a true artist. Are you in?” The Cadaver stood up and reached out a hand. As if he needed to ask. Of course I was in.

  “Absolutely.” I shook his hand.

  “Welcome to the team.” From the expression on his face the Cadaver had never been in any doubt as to the result of my recruitment.

  * * *

  I had developed an almost symbiotic relationship with the NewsMill software. Like the brush in a painter’s hand, it was the tool of my trade, an extension of my brain. It was connected to a government database somewhere, but I had no idea from where this database obtained its information.

  Every morning I studied a colour coded map of the United Kingdom. Red indicated the hotspots: the regions to which I should pay the most attention, the regions where intervention was needed, the regions where anger engineering was required.

  Drilling down into the details for a particular area, I had access to an array of supporting variables with intriguing names like Strategic Social Spectrum, End-means Coefficient and Political Mobility Rate. It had taken a while, but I now had an instinctive feel for what kind of intervention was needed when I looked at the pattern of the numbers. On this particular morning I noted that a red spot down in Brighton and Hove required a medium sized media intervention. A newspaper report or a few lines on a website would not be enough; we’d need to fake some footage.

  The eggheads over at the ministry were working on NewsMill 3.0 which would automatically generate the footage using CGI. This would save time. I had worried that my own skills might one day be superseded, but the Cadaver had reassured me that this wasn’t the case. They’d tried automatically generating the stories in response to the figures but had ended up with nonsense—one scenario suggested by the computer was that a gang of toddlers had terrorised a war veteran with a syringe full of HIV positive blood.

  No, for the stories to retain the ring of truth and to be palatable enough for the masses to swallow them, human creativity was required. Artistry. I was, above everything else, an artist. I took pride in my work. I was, in many ways, an auteur—a director whose artistic vision and deft hand imprinted his work with his own personal stamp—and was free to dream up and implement scenarios that fitted perfectly to the societies for which they had been designed.

  I hoped one day to be put in charge of a major project with national scope. These events happened every year or so; the population as a whole required
checks and balances to be applied. I’d advised and worked on smaller areas of bigger national campaigns, but had yet to be given one of my own. I lived in hope. It was only a matter of time; I already knew that individuals higher up the chain of command than the Cadaver had begun to notice me.

  There was a risk with the bigger jobs of course. The terse manuals I’d read containing the history of such ministries worldwide mentioned their widespread failure in Eastern Europe at the close of the nineteen eighties. The last thing we needed was for that to happen here—and it was a risky business. One push in the wrong direction, a misjudgement of the mood of the people and we could have a revolution on our hands, no matter how many jubilees, Olympics, or royal weddings we threw at them.

  I looked into the Brighton and Hove case. A three-minute news slot on BBC South Today (with associated web coverage) would suffice. Sneaking something onto the BBC was often the best thing to do as many other news agencies stole from them. We had contacts in all the regions, people working for the police and media who would do whatever was required of them without question.

  With the control we had over the way the people saw the news we could have brought down governments if we’d wished. But there was no need. The government and the ministry were synonymous, even though they were officially unaware of us. It was all about plausible deniability.

  We had our own artisans and actors. Our professional liars. They’d all signed the Official Secrets Act and were paid very well. Furthermore they’d been informed, without having to spell it out to them, that to blow the whistle on the ministry would have ended their lives—literally. But why would they? Our employees had to work at most a couple of months a year and were able to live like celebrities on the results. Any kudos that running to WikiLeaks would have given them was far outweighed by the loss of everything up to and including their brain function.

  Besides, we had WikiLeaks in our pocket. An illusion of press freedom was very important. As long as the public believed there was someone digging out the secrets that governments preferred to keep hidden then they wouldn’t go looking for anything themselves.

  It wasn’t perfect. Some of the higher profile public performances had serious continuity problems if you looked closely enough, and I was aware that on occasion heads had rolled in the higher echelons of the ministry and its foreign equivalents.

  I wouldn’t have to arrange anything on a national scale this time. For what I had in mind I’d need one actor—preferably an elderly lady—and a makeup artist. Our agents in the BBC and local police would do all the rest.

  I typed the requirements into NewsMill using the usual terse abbreviations and went for a coffee. It wasn’t required for me to be on the spot, but I preferred to oversee things, albeit from the shadows. Besides, I needed to indulge myself occasionally in order to flex my creative and intellectual muscles, to make sure my manipulative skills were finely honed and that I remained at the top of my game.

  It wouldn’t do for my work to fall below par. I didn’t know what happened to people when they no longer were of any use to the ministry but imagined that there wasn’t much room for promotion; I’d filled a very large pair of shoes, but what had happened to their original owner I had no idea. People went so far out of their way to avoid mentioning him—I was absolutely sure it had been a man—that there was a person shaped hole in my knowledge. It was a hole of such precise location and dimensions. If I looked hard enough I’d be able to find out not only his name and address but what his favourite film was, and where he went for breakfast the day before he died.

  He was dead. Of that I had no doubt.

  I had no intention of ending up dead. I had confidence in my artistic ability to produce reams of convincing reality substitute for decades to come. By the time I was ready to move on, no doubt death would have claimed some of the head honchos and I’d be able to step into the smart suit and shoes vacated by, say, the Cadaver himself. It would be a fitting way to spend my twilight years, inducting and teaching those like me so that my philosophy and mindset would live on.

  Our methods were a small price to pay for security.

  * * *

  The makeup artist had done a sterling job. Half of the frail old woman’s face was discoloured with a frightening bruise, brown and purple. They’d even managed to redden the whites of her eyes. A memo had gone around about the use of CGI instead of makeup, but I was sceptical. The verisimilitude of these reports could only be damaged by post-production; many of the people involved—including the camera operator—were unaware of the fact that they were taking part in an elaborate fabrication and it was best to keep things that way.

  The woman stood at the bottom of Adelaide Crescent, the wide sweep of Georgian Terraces forming an impressive background, and told in a shaking voice how an assailant wearing a hood had mugged her on the doorstep of her flat. Thankfully he hadn’t got hold of her door keys—which she wore on a lanyard around her neck—but had snatched her handbag and given her a kicking before running off. The ironic thing, she said, was that she had less than two pounds in cash on her and nothing else of any real value in there.

  What was the world coming to?

  Once the filming had wrapped up, the star of our piece was whisked away in a private cab, not to the imaginary flat in Adelaide Crescent but to a large property at an undisclosed location somewhere in the mid-Sussex countryside. The BBC packed up their equipment and drove off leaving me standing on the seafront.

  I began walking towards the city centre and my hotel, setting sun at my back. I wasn’t staying anywhere ostentatious, just a small family run hotel down in Regency Square, somewhere the ministry always took its business when in the area. A hotel with an exclusive private bar.

  After three or more hours alone in the bar I was bored. Despite how much I’d downed I didn’t feel in the slightest bit drunk. Alcohol never affected me that much, especially when I had other urges to satisfy.

  I marched downstairs and out into the night.

  It had been a warm enough day but the air was now beginning to cool. I checked my watch. It was one AM, the ideal time for this kind of thing. I turned one way then another, trying to lose myself in the narrow maze of residential streets along the sea front. My hand clutched at the object in my coat pocket, the object I always carried with me when out and about, just in case the opportunity presented itself.

  And then I saw him. An old man, shuffling uphill along a narrow street. I sped up and within seconds was only a few yards behind him. I glanced about. There were no CCTV cameras in range.

  I reached forward and grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him round, making sure he was fully aware of the tyre iron I clutched in my other hand before I brought it crashing down on his skull.

  The expression on his face was worth it. That delicate balance between confusion and terror. It was perfect—as was the way his skull split and he collapsed to the floor, a stream of thick arterial blood trickling across the pavement and into the gutter.

  I was an artist and while I employed my skills in the service of my job, there was nothing quite like the thrill of working with genuine materials. Faking it was only so satisfying; eventually you had to express yourself for real.

  The thrill faded and I dropped the tyre iron back into my coat pocket. The lining was waterproof; I’d be able to remove all trace of the event later. I turned away and began walking back down the street when a figure stepped out from behind a parked van. My heart stopped. At first I could only see the silhouette, but then its identity became clear.

  It was the Cadaver.

  My life was over. I had become a liability and was sure that he was going to remove all trace of me either now or at some point over the next twenty-four hours. There was no escape.

  And then he smiled, removed one of his gloves and held out his hand for me to shake.

  “Welcome to the next level,” he said.

  Maid of Bone

  Toby Bennett

  The teeth in Allie�
��s pocket were chattering with the cold. She slipped cautiously between the crooked rows of stone lining the mist choked graves. With only stars to light her way, progress was difficult but she was careful never to put a foot out of line; it was unthinkable that she might step over a verge and disturb what slept so lightly in the looser earth.

  Keep to the path. Keep to the path.

  The words clacked like ticker tape in her head. Not just anyone could approach the ossuary; there was a prescribed way to do things, if you wanted to be received—if you wanted to be able to leave once you got there.

  Each footfall mattered; you had to be soft and quiet and come when the night was darkest. No one had ever directly told her these rules, she relied on dreams and omens. The sudden flight of birds, the turn of wrinkled cards, the way sediment lay in old cups; like all love affairs it came down to murmurs and instinct.

  She would not deviate from her path, could not put a step wrong for fear of the consequences. Consequences she could only vaguely imagine. Horrors that were whispered to her from the moonless sky; warnings that slipped between her legs, on the stray vapours of the mist, caressing her with a chill that tightened her belly into a hard knot.

  Allie could smell the dank moss, the not quite dead vegetation that rotted close to the small spring trickling from the hillside with winter’s wash. She was getting closer, almost there now. The teeth rattled in anticipation. The screech of insects answered the sound from the darkness.

  She had had her first kiss in the shadow of the ossuary, her back pushed hard against the torn breast of a saint, watched by the stone devils that plagued him. She never knew who had kissed her, she’d kept her eyes firmly shut just as she’d been told—it was the only time her love had ever talked to her directly.