by Giselle Ava
It’s a pulley system. We’re going down.
Shit. My hand reaches for a pistol but there’s nothing there.
Shit. I plant my palm against the door and gently push but there’s no give. Probably not a good idea anyway, is what I tell myself before taking in a deep breath and waiting. This could be a trap. Where’s Frederick? Where are the others? I don’t know who the hell Alan Piper is working for. And I’m wondering why I decided to trust him.
The bottom of the wardrobe smacks a hard surface and my knees buckle. The door swings open and my first thought is, I can hear a child laughing.
The place underneath Room 203 is a wide-open chasm of concrete walls and lights. It’s a town where it’s always night. Lamps that glow green and red hang from the low ceiling and occasionally flicker. There’s a road that goes from where I’m standing to a point in the distance, and between us lies scattered houses made of tarps and tents with minimal decoration. The place underneath Room 203 is a square of maybe two hundred feet each way.
I step out of the wardrobe and it goes up with moderate trouble.
There are three kids playing around a castle of wooden crates to my right. They glance at me and stop playing, one of them rushing inside one of the makeshift houses. There are others. People my age, people a lot older. The place underneath Room 203 is the same city as the one above, except different. There’s no war. There’s no fighting.
What the hell is this place?
I’m walking deeper and deeper through the encampment, avoiding tents and firepits and crates that rise to waist-height. People glance at me but they don’t stare. What catches my eye is a statue in the centre of the plaza, a stick-figure woman made out of twisted pieces of scrap metal, draped over with a raggedy coat of red fabric. I get the impression of a leader, her arm raised skyward, and entwined in her tin fingers, the spoke of a flag.
The red flag bears a golden, upside-down V.
Somebody grabs my shoulder.
“You looking for something, pal?”
I look sideways and find myself staring at a woman’s chest. My head falls back. Red light washes her, scattering across her dark skin and afro hair. She wears a crimson coat, buttoned up to her chin, and her eyes observe me as eyes do when they’ve seen betrayal.
I put a few feet between us.
She knows what I am. She can see the scarring left from Alan Piper’s reconstruction. She sees how my eyes don’t quite sit right anymore. She knows that my arm isn’t my own.
“I’m looking for my friend,” I say.
“Well you won’t find him staring at that thing,” she tells me. “Come with me.”
I do as I’m told. As I follow her, I notice the large pistol she wears from her belt, which swings from side-to-side when she walks. I notice her hands, and one of them is made of metal. We arrive at a large tent, a green tarp held by various holsters, lamps sitting on boxes. There’s a desk covered in papers and ledgers, and a man sitting behind the desk with his head down. Sitting opposite this man is Frederick Hardy. He notices me and rises to his feet.
“You made it,” he says.
“What’s going on here?” I ask.
The shadow of the tall woman splashes across the tent as she stands in front of a red light and throws a copper coin onto the desk. The man behind the desk catches the coin before it flies straight off onto the floor, then looks up at her, Frederick, then me.
The introductions go like this.
The man steeples his fingers against his pointed, clean-shaven chin and says, “You’ve already met Vanessa. My name is Thomas, I’m in charge around here.” The man who must be Thomas Cobbe picks up a pile of papers and straightens them against the tabletop. A pen flies between his fingertips and he grabs it, poising it over one of the pages. “Your name?”
“Arthur,” I respond.
The ink tip scratches the surface of the paper.
I carefully observe Thomas. He must be mid-thirties at most, his hair the colour of old book pages, his skin lighter than most, a soft yet robotic dialect, a considerate pair of eyes. His handwriting leaves much to be desired. He files the papers and motions to the seat. Frederick steps aside and I take it, now sitting across from Thomas at eye-level.
“Your name precedes you, Arthur,” says Thomas, showing a hint of a smile. “Now, people don’t often stay here very long. Consider it a crossroads. With that said, I’m happy to let you stay for as long as you need. These are hard times, hard times indeed.”
“Thanks,” I respond, eyeing the man sceptically. Thomas stares back at me and he’s no longer smiling, and there’s something behind his eyes, something he’s not showing me.
I know Thomas Cobbe. I know the name.
Why is he looking at me like that?
Where have I heard that name before?
“I should let you be on your way, then,” Thomas says, looking from me to Frederick. Frederick gives a nod and exits the tent. Slowly, I stand up and the chair squeaks. I have never met Thomas Cobbe before, but his name is familiar to me. And he knows me, or he knows my name. I glance back at him as I follow Frederick.
Who is he?
I hear a whisper in my ear.
He knew Mildred.
We all knew Mildred.
You could say he knew her the most.
I’m staring at Thomas Cobbe and he knows what I know. Maybe we have met before? No, Thomas would’ve told me if we had. Or would he?
Frederick leads me back outside.
“Who is he?” I ask.
Frederick waits until we’re out of earshot and there’s nobody else around except somebody playing a guitar outside their tent, and a teenage girl hanging clothes on a line above a heater that glows red. “He’s the most powerful man in the revolution now,” Frederick says. Then he lowers his voice and avoids my eye. “He worked with Mildred. He’s a pacifist.”
“Have I met him before?” I ask.
Frederick looks me in the eye now. “How am I supposed to know?” With this vague but honest response, Frederick turns around and continues walking through the place underneath Room 203, and all I can do is stare after him, feeling something clicking in my brain, but I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s just those mechanical gears. Maybe it’s something else.
I’m here at the Crossroads and something is happening.
Communication Trouble
“Fortescue Plaza has gone dark,” says a bald man called Walter Milne, his voice reverberating in the watery depths of his glass of beer. He slurps it, froth gathering on his top lip as he stares at me across the table. “We went there under Cobbe’s orders. He’s getting nervous. See,”—he thumps his glass back down on the tabletop, shaking it—“a man like Cobbe has the city at his fingertips, even some of the guys in Fortescue Plaza, but he’s just lost all of it. No communications in. No communications out. The whole district: darkness.”
I’m not drinking. I just watch them with my arms folded, sitting in the spot where the light doesn’t touch. Frederick’s on my left but he hasn’t said much in the time we’ve been here. Walter Milne is the one who likes to talk. Leslie Barrow, a black man with a buzz cut, likes to sing. He was singing when we walked into the drinking den, and he’s humming now. Humming softly, a quiet melody behind Walter’s talking and drinking.
“Cobbe’s scared,” Walter says.
“We heard they were building a death camp,” Frederick says.
“That could be it. It could be something else. The point is, we’re now in the dark. We go in assuming they know what we’re planning, that they have spies among us, that’s why Cobbe doesn’t tell us what’s going on half the time. We tend to have an idea of what they’re doing. We have spies on the inside too. We now know nothing.”
“Just that they keep on killing us,” Leslie says joyfully in an almost sing-song voice. I study the man. He looks at me with a touch of a smile on his lips. You can’t tell he’s one of us just by looking at him. Leslie didn’t fight in the war. He opens his hand a
nd a glass full of beer flies into it. Leslie didn’t fight in the war and he never became one of us, but he is one.
Or are we different, the ones with metal in them and the ones with flesh? They call Us mechanicals. They call Them the Unkindly—this is what you are when you’re just a little bit off. A man who can make things move with his mind here and there. A woman who can walk with the storm. You look human enough. People, they don’t fear the Unkindly so much.
If they’re calling you Unkindly, it’s because you didn’t fight in the war.
Walter fought in the war. You can tell by his face, eroded on one side and repaired with fake skin and motors. That’s what happened to us when they made us fight their war. We lost the human part of ourselves. When people like Peter, in the schoolyard, make us rip out their arm and break their neck, we lose a part of ourselves. Our skin melts. Our muscles rot. When you’re fighting a war on the frontlines, this is happening every day.
Walter drinks and nobody says a word.
“Gentlemen,” says a woman in an ill-fitting brown coat and ill-fitting pants. She throws herself into a seat, slapping a very large journal between our beers. This woman has shoulder-length hair and freckles to match. There’s a cigarette jutting out the corner of her mouth and she sprays the drinking hole with smoke as she surveys us.
“Yes, Marianne?” says Walter.
Her name is Marianne Hopkins. She floats around the various revolutionary groups but centres herself at the Crossroads. Everybody knows her and she knows everybody.
This is what I learn very early on.
“Something disastrous happened to Neville’s crew,” Marianne Hopkins says, sliding a piece of paper across the table. Walter takes it, scrutinizing its typewritten contents. “They’d been hiding out, making frequent reports regarding, well, you know all about the reports. Over the past few days, these reports began to, well, I’ll let you see for yourself.”
Walter lowers the piece of paper and takes a drink. My eyes find the typewritten text printed across that single sheet of paper, and I can’t read it all, but I get the gist of it. They were seeing things. They were forced to kill one of their own in fear that they were going insane, that they would expose the location of the Crossroads. Then the others began going insane, too.
Walter folds up the piece of paper and I meet his eye. “Odd.”
“We know they were stationed here,” Marianne says, passing Walter a white card across the table. He catches it between his fingers and glances at it.
“What do you think it is?” I ask.
Marianne eyes me with curiosity. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Walter stands up, downing the rest of his beer and nearly tripping over his own chair. “I suppose I’ll take a look into it then. You wanna ride, Arthur?”
I nod and my chair flies back across the floorboards. Frederick watches me but doesn’t say a word, just leans back in his seat and takes a sip of beer.
“Leslie,” Walter says. “Tell my wife I’m heading out.”
“Will do,” Leslie says in a sing-song voice.
We’re halfway across the drinking hole to the door when Walter stops and spins on one heel, eyeing the men still sitting round our table. “If you don’t hear from us by nightfall,” he says in a slightly-drunk voice, “do send help.”
He claps my shoulder and we leave. Back to the wardrobe with the pulley system, back by the moustached man—his name is Willcocks and to some people he’s a Sir Willcocks but most say it’s just a self-given title, or maybe that’s just Walter’s opinion—and, at last, back to Room 203 and out the doors to the grim streets of London.
We stand on the edge of a road waiting for a car.
Walter pulls out a cigarette and offers it to me. I shake my head and so he sticks it into his mouth and strikes a match against a box, setting it alight. “Heard you shot Bernard Craxton in the mouth, blew his whole face off. The pretentious prick deserved it.”
I look at him. “Hmm.”
“I do feel for his daughter.” Walter blows smoke into the smoky air, makes contemplative gestures with his cigarette, like painting figures in the sky. “She hasn’t been seen since it happened, and believe me, we would know.”
What do we make of that? inquires the whine.
I remember that scream she gave off, but anything that happened after that is a blur, and then I was lying on that bench in Alan Piper’s garage.
“I had no choice,” is what I say.
“No. People like Bernard Craxton have to die if we’re to end this war. And, you know, Charles Fortescue needs to die too, eventually. London’s not big enough for the both of us. They sure won’t stop killing us until we’re all dead, so why should we stop killing them? I know you, Arthur. Not you but I know that look in your eyes. What did they do to you?”
I taste dirt on my tongue. My body aches.
I’m on the battlefield and there are people screaming in every direction. There are bodies on the ground, mangled, their limps popping out at odd angles, their heads twisted in horrifying grimaces. This is what we could do. I don’t feel it anymore, not like I used to. I probably couldn’t even move a coin from one side of a table to the other. This is how fragile my body has become. But it doesn’t matter to them.
Why am I fighting?
Because you hate them.
Why do I hate them?
Because they did you wrong.
They were scared.
Fear is no excuse.
A taxi pulls up at the curb and Walter sighs, throwing his cigarette to the sidewalk and crushing it with his boot. The window flies down and Walter leans inside, flashing a white card. The man inside the car, possibly in his sixties with a beret, nods and throws open the door. Walter slides into the front and I’m in the back.
“Gentlemen,” says the cockney driver.
“Arthur, this is Basil Weir. He’s a driver.”
“Glad to be at your service,” Basil says in a pinched voice. “I’ve been driving these here streets for thirty years, since I was as young as yourselves, and they haven’t changed much proper. I didn’t fight in the war, though I was keen to. How do you do, Arthur?”
“Fine,” I respond.
“Lavish,” says Basil. He’s watching me in the rear-view mirror. Does he know who I am? Does he know what I’ve done? It’s only after an extraordinary amount of consideration that his eyes return to the road ahead, the windscreen wipers clearing the constant trickle of ash from the windows. “There’s been a song on the breeze these past few days,” Basil says, staring straight ahead, but I know he’s talking to me. “It’s one I’ve heard before, but where before it was wrong, this time I sense a difference. There’s change a-coming.”
He’s looking at me again.
“Just bloody drive,” Walter says.
It’s early evening when we reach the abandoned church. I step out of the car onto the sidewalk, eaten up by grass and weeds, staring at the old wooden structure. Nobody comes down here. You can tell by the rusted metal fences dividing rundown housing, by the toppled trashcans that roll in the breeze, by the smell of sewage that seems to be emanating from somewhere nearby, a smell which, if people had lived here, would have been quickly doused by complaints. No, there’s nothing here except the abandoned church.
Walter slams the door shut as he joins me outside. Basil jumps onto the bonnet of the car and lights a cigarette. “I’ll be waiting just here,” Basil says.
“Please,” Walter says as he draws his pistol.
I draw mine and we’re walking up the stone path to the church entrance. An arched doorway made of wood stands in our way. Walter presses his ear to it and listens. Then he knocks. No response. I’m watching his eyes, which dart towards me, then the crack in the door as he gently forces it open. A beam of light washes over the church interior.
“So you’re married,” I say as we walk inside, guns poised. “I don’t think I ever could do that.” There’s nobody inside here. The pews are
dirty and empty. The walls are typical church décor, rose-glass retellings of religious history. I’ve never been one to care for gods, and I don’t think I’d get along with one if they happened to cross my path.
Walter closes the door. “Been married six years.” The light vanishes like when you shut a book, dust fizzling in its wake. Evening light streams from overhead, split apart by the crisscrossing rafters. In one puddle, you can make out the marks of a cobweb, bristling in the breeze. There’s a communications setup ahead, antennae and radios and a mess of copper wires.
“What’s Leslie do?” I ask him.
“The musician? Plays music.”
“Makes sense.”
A rat scurries out from a toppled cardboard box. I press my boot against the edge of the box and flip it upwards to expose the contents. Papers. Kneeling down, I tear one from the pile and glance at the print. The light splashes across it. “Transcripts of communications.”
“What sort?” Walter says, examining the radios.
Names. Descriptions. The ones on this page range from surnames beginning with G and surnames beginning with H. These aren’t names I know.
Except. Hardy.
“Frederick,” I murmur. My eyes scan down the list. I grab the next sheet and my eyes fly down to Marianne Hopkins. “They’ve been keeping track of us.”
“As expected,” Walter says.
There’s nothing on Frederick I don’t already know. He fought in the war for a couple of years. Was discharged. Lived a relatively calm life. Worked for a living. Joined the revolution like we all did. I compare it to the Hopkins woman. There’s very little on her. She didn’t fight in the war but she’s one of us, twenty years of age, too young to have fought.
I slip another sheet out. It’s a dialogue between two names, Duff and Macready. Something about a transport moving between two locations. “Munitions. It must have been from the fighting.” I glance at the date and nod to myself. Recently, too. “A guy called Duff, he must be the one who was located here. There’s another guy called Macready.” My eyes scan the sheet. Macready was from another group on the other side of the city.
