Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

  “But he was not. He was not bad. He was not. He loved. He loved his son. He loved his wife. He wanted above all to love his mother. My Frankie. His Frankie, that he barely knew. I believe he loved even me. Even though I failed him. Every day, I failed. I am so sorry that I could not. I could not.” Daniel stops again. Whatever, exactly, he could not, Joshua Joseph will never learn, because his grandfather must gather himself and go around it, or he will not recapture himself, will fail this one last time, and that is something Daniel Spork will not permit. The spring must unwind all the way.

  “He was not bad. He was not. He was intemperate. Angry. Lawless. Not dishonest. Although sometimes the truth could not—like many of us, could not—could not keep up with him.

  “And in this last thing, he is revealed. That he knew he was. He knew. He was not long. That he was. Dying. He got out of prison. To see his son and say ‘goodbye.’ He did not tell me he was coming. I could kill him.”

  And this, impossibly, makes them laugh, not bitterly, but wholeheartedly. Yes. Mathew Spork, in going to his grave, is as infuriating as he ever was, and as stupidly, stubbornly heroic about it.

  “So grieve. Please. Today, let it out. For me. Scream. Weep. Drink too much and be unwise. Be like him. Let go. Because I cannot. I do not know how.

  “Fathers should not bury their sons.”

  Outside, they lower the coffin into the ground. For some reason, the hole is decked out in AstroTurf. Joshua Joseph had imagined the soil would be loamy and soft, and that he would be able to scatter it, but London is built on clay, and so instead he hefts a great mustard-coloured clod into the hole and it makes a muffled, hollow thudding as it lands. He worries he may have chipped the varnish, and then feels stupid, because no one will ever know, or reproach him if they did.

  The burial goes on and on.

  Until, nearly an hour later and the box buried safe and sound, Joshua Joseph stands with his grandfather looking out across a little road. For five minutes they have stood thus, the old man boiling with whatever self-reproaches he has not voiced, and the boy seeking by instinct the one person equally responsible for Mathew Spork in life and death. Together, they watch—but do not watch—a red double-decker bus, the first of two, draw up to the stop across the street. After a moment, it pulls away again, revealing a single figure in mourner’s black, gaunt and straight against the newsagent’s window.

  Joshua Joseph has a brief impression of grey hair cut in a severe bob, a scrawny neck like a silver birch tree, and two knobbled, arthritic hands clutching at a pair of severe black trousers. Very slowly, very deliberately, she raises the left in a gesture of greeting, and Joshua Joseph can see, even at this distance, that she has been crying. By her shudders, he deduces that she is crying still. He wonders dimly whom she mourns, and if she comes here every day, or every week, or if there is another funeral following on the heels of this one, and then his dawning realisation finds voice in his grandfather’s appalled, desperate shout, as the old man lurches forward, one hand outflung as if reaching from an icy sea for one last chance at the lifeboat’s ladder.

  “Frankie!” he shrieks, “Frankie, Frankie, please!” as he flings himself, heedless of his gammy knees and his spindly ankles, towards the East Gate. “Frankie! My Frankie!”

  And she responds. She does. Her face lights up at this unlooked-for, unimagined blessing; that even now, even in this cruellest moment, his love remains. The waving hand extends towards him as if blown by a breeze. And then, sharply, the open door slams shut. She is not yet done. She is not ready. She snatches back her hand and begins to turn away, and the second bus draws a temporary curtain between them. Daniel struggles with the catch on the gate, his grandson torn along in his wake, as desperate—almost—as the old man himself. The gate swings open—but when the bus moves off again, Joshua Joseph knows already what he will see. Sure enough, the bus stop is empty.

  Daniel stares without understanding, and then whips around to follow with his eyes the departing double-decker, and sees—they both see—that narrow figure clasping tight to the silver pole at the back. Her face is turned away from them even as her body and her heart refuse to complete entirely the abandonment, and she remains rooted to the running board, standing full square as if she will embrace them both even as the bus carries her away and turns a corner, and she is gone.

  They find Joe’s resistance—his unresistant resistance—curious and frustrating. They shut him in his little white room and a moment later the box seems to detach from the building and hurl him around, up, down, around. It occurs to him, as he hangs suspended, watching one side of the box retreat and knowing that the other must be rushing up behind him, that if he is moving at fifteen miles an hour—not unlikely—and the box at fifteen as well in an opposing direction, then he will strike with a total force of thirty miles an hour and quite possibly die.

  He spreads his arms out and tries to slow himself. He does not die, or even suffer serious injury—although he suspects he may have dislocated a thumb and cracked some ribs, and wonders at the change in circumstances which causes him to see this as minor—and when they are finished, they let him out. He staggers and weaves and empties his stomach onto the white floor. They hold him, and he thanks them.

  Mr. Ordinary smiles.

  Instead of taking him back to his box (he struggles with himself to avoid identifying it as “home”) they put him into another room just next to it. There is a man inside, smelling of rubber boots, mud and seaweed, and his body is a mass of burns and scabs.

  “We’re down in the ivy,” Ted Sholt says.

  Joe, looking down at this silvered head and the man he suspects is dying, feels a strong familiarity.

  They have done something strange to Ted Sholt, something odd and clever and very terrible. He is shaking, but not like a man who is cold or tired or afraid. He is shaking as if his muscles are coming away from his bones, and his skin has a strange, stretched look, as if the fat of his body is pooling in places where it should not.

  “Ivy inside,” Sholt says hoarsely. His eyes are searching, but not finding, and Joe realises that he cannot see. “Ivy in the blood. Ted’s head’s full and Ted’s a fool, God’s a figment, devils rule.”

  “It’s me, Ted,” Joe says softly. There’s no need to shout. They are pressed against one another like lovers. They can have something approaching privacy only if one of them stands. “It’s Spork the Clock.”

  “You can’t let him go through with it,” Ted says vaguely. He tries to lift his body with his stomach muscles, and something makes a gristle noise. He moans.

  “Ted … I don’t think there’s anything I can do. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Brother Sheamus. Frankie’s machine.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what they want from me. I don’t know anything. I’m just the idiot who turned the key. You were there, Ted.”

  Sholt tries to speak, and then screams again, and this time when he arches his back he crackles, as if his bones are breaking. “What cart will Frankie’s engine pull? Science has many faces, each mouth whispers to the world in different ways. Frankie’s gone, her blade will cut in all directions. Whose hand holds the knife? Sheamus, of course. Always Sheamus. Bastards.” He shudders, and Joe feels something move inside the other man’s body, something which a profound instinct tells him should stay in one place.

  “Ted, please. Stay still.”

  “She said it was salvation. She said too much truth turns us to ice and we shatter, so she set it all perfectly. But Sheamus … he wants more than that. Wants a reckoning with God. Wants to reset the machine. See all the truths at once. He’ll kill the world.”

  “But he can’t do that without the calibration drum, and he doesn’t have it, does he? Of course, he doesn’t. Because Frankie wasn’t an idiot. She gave it to someone she could trust.”

  Oh, shit. Daniel. She gave Daniel the keys to the apocalypse. Of course, she did. Who else do you give something w
hich can destroy the world, which will be hunted by monsters and thugs, except the father of your child who still loves you even after you’ve played hide and seek with his heart for thirty years?

  Daniel, and hence, Joe.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  If Joe has it, he does not know. If they took it when they raided the warehouse, they also do not know. Therefore it is concealed. It is hidden, of course, hidden by Daniel against this very day. Hidden too well. Perhaps it was in Daniel’s lost effects. Perhaps Mathew, all unknowing, sold the ignition key to the most dangerous object in the world for the price of a meal at Cecconi’s.

  Shit.

  Ted Sholt is rattling on. “But Sheamus just wants to know his score. Wants to know if he won or lost. Stupidity is a symptom of enormous power, they say.” And then: “You must stop him. You must! Go to the Lovelace. Where I left her.”

  “Don’t tell me, Ted. Not here. I can’t keep it secret from them.” They will have it from me. What they did not get from you, I will give up. I cannot keep it inside.

  Sholt stares right at him, into him, madman’s fox-eyes seen briefly in the dark. He lifts his head, and something gristles softly in his stomach, something broken. He snarls. “Yes, you can! You must!” and he is going to tell, without question.

  Joe bends his neck, and Sholt whispers directly into his ear barely any sound at all: “She’s under the hill at Station Y.” He slumps back.

  Joe shakes his head, relieved. “Ted, I don’t know where that is.”

  “Matter of public record. Obscure, but simple. No: listen! I can tell you how … Stand on the box and see the hill, down the tunnel into the dark. Open the door with Lizzie’s birthday. And you’re in. Now! Garble it, in your head! Mix the letters and remember the jumble. Say it: Matron Fry. Nation’s Eye. God loves sinners, patients cry. See? That way you can always choose whether to say it aloud or not. You can scream it, if you have to. Shout the answer at them and let them figure it out. Tell the truth, but keep it from them. You must, Joe! You must!” He wheezes and shuts his eyes tight. “It’s all in there. Do anything. But stop him.”

  Ted gasps and squirms, and more things crackle inside him. Joe wonders whether, if he banged on the door and offered to talk, he could get Ted a doctor.

  Probably not.

  So he lies instead, mercifully:

  “I will, Ted. I will.”

  Later, when they use the water, Joe dies for two minutes and eighteen seconds.

  The water is cold and fresh against his face, but tastes of salt and chemicals. It is a special preparation, Mr. Ordinary explains, to reduce the risk of fatality. Joe thinks, objectively, as it worms into his lungs, that it does not work very well.

  He starts to drown. One of the Ruskinites is next to him, very close, listening to the sound of his choking. It turns its head, listening for the sound of water in his lungs. It has experience. It is a craftsman. It can tell by the noise his body makes when it is time to stop.

  He wonders when he stopped thinking of the Ruskinites as people. He wonders whether they ever thought of him that way.

  Part of him cannot help but notice that they have not asked him any questions recently. Perhaps they do not intend to. Perhaps they are just going to kill him.

  The idea is horrible, and he starts to struggle. He struggles until he cannot continue, and inhales a great deal of water, and the listener holds up his hand. A crash cart barrels in, orderlies and doctors shouting.

  They have to resuscitate him, which they do with a machine, because—when one of them goes to give him mouth-to-mouth—Mr. Ordinary warns that he is dangerous and may bite their lips off, also that they have no idea whether he carries any diseases.

  Joe wonders why on Earth they haven’t checked for that. It seems so obvious. While they struggle to force him not to die, he debates whether to cooperate. He suspects he could just depart now, and be gone. But death does not seem much of an answer, and he has things to do. People are depending on him.

  He has always avoided thinking too much about death. The whole idea appals him, and always has. Damn Daniel’s Death Clock, commended to his special attention. He wonders why it seems important, here, now: a wretchedly gloomy bit of Victorian tat. And why would Daniel be so keen on it, when he loved life so much?

  He decides to give Daniel the benefit of the doubt. He won’t die just yet.

  When his heart is beating again, Mr. Ordinary declares it’s time he had a break.

  In pale yellow scrubs and with his throat still sore from tubes and retching, Joe sits in a room with window boxes and wishes himself a thousand miles away, wishes himself someone else, wishes he had never met Billy Friend, never chosen to follow his grandfather into the dying world of clockwork. Wishes his father had forced him to be a lawyer, which at one stage was very much Mathew’s intention, until Harriet’s tears pried him away from it.

  So now he’s playing Snakes & Ladders with a woman inmate and watching the clock. In twenty minutes it will be eleven a.m. He wonders whether they will come for him then because it’s a round number.

  Not all of the staff here are Ruskinites. Many of them are, as far as he can tell, conventional medical personnel. He is in a Ruskinite hospital for the mentally ill. One of the nurses—a pretty, roundish sort of woman called Gemma—told him in confidential tones that he is receiving the best possible care and will be all better soon. He responded that he was sure that was true, and she dimpled.

  All the same, she would not reveal to him the name of the hospital (“I’m not allowed”) or get in touch with anyone for him (“You just think about getting better, all right?”) or give him any news from outside—about golden bees, for example, or whether they have yet provoked a war.

  He has christened the place Happy Acres. The other patients—not all of them, he’s fairly sure, are prisoners—are mostly silent and bewildered. One man sings the first bars of a pop song over and over in the corner. A woman whimpers.

  At five minutes to the hour, seven men walk into the room and clear a space for a sort of coffin. It is like the board which Joe was strapped to during the waterboarding (“saline disclosure therapy,” Nurse Gemma said reprovingly), but it appears to be made to measure and is more absolute in its restraint. The man inside is almost entirely cased in nylon straps and rubber. He is older than Joe but younger than Mathew when he died, and he has wild hair and a full beard and tanned, working man’s skin, pale beneath the restraints. Even when this man is outside, he is in his coffin.

  At last. Someone they hate more than me.

  They put the coffin man by the window so that the inmate can see the flowers, and he makes a rough, gargling noise, which Joe eventually realises is the man saying a polite “good morning.”

  After a moment, they take Joe to stand in front of the coffin. All he can see of the man inside is one brown eye and one blue, staring back at him unblinking. Joe realises the man probably never gets to see anyone’s face for very long. He looks past the coffin and sees Mr. Ordinary watching him intently, reads the warning: There are worse places than the one you are in, lad.

  “Hello,” he says to the prisoner, “my name’s Joe. What’s yours?”

  He wonders briefly why they all laugh at him, even the man in the coffin.

  They do not take him back to his cell. He can feel the little room behind him, not much bigger than his body, waiting to embrace him again. He stares at the white light from the windows and commits it to memory.

  He plays draughts with the coffin man. They have to use an electronic board. The coffin man has a remote control, like the ones used by paraplegics. One of his fingers is released to operate a little joystick, one click at a time. Forward. Sideways. Forward. Sideways. Apparently it doesn’t do diagonal.

  Joe wins. At the last minute, though, the coffin man gives him a scare with a rampaging king. It menaces, threatens, and bullies Joe out of position, captures a few pieces by sheer force of threat before he can corner it. In the midst of his pieces, the king
is not at bay. Rather, it is surrounded by targets.

  The coffin man says something around his bite plate. It’s hard to decipher. He hawks and plays with the thing in his mouth, curls his lips. Spittle glistens. He says it again.

  “That’s how it’s done.”

  And then he laughs.

  When Joe asks why they don’t just let the coffin man speak his instructions, everyone laughs again. A tall orderly rolls up his sleeve and shows a scar on his arm, a long pale strip of grafted flesh. He doesn’t seem to resent the coffin man at all. The orderly seems to feel they’re all in this together. The coffin man gargles cordially.

  Later, Joe is given a meal. They feed him, because he is shaking too much to do it himself. While they do this, someone else gives the coffin man an intravenous feed. At some point they make a mistake, and the coffin man opens a long, rich cut across a man’s face with his joystick hand. He snarls something. It is muffled, but somehow quite clear.

  That’s how it’s done.

  The coffin man howls, an incredibly loud, appalling noise. They taser him, which is utterly pointless because he is already restrained, and he starts to choke. A moment later he turns purple and slumps, and they call a crash team. When they try to resuscitate him, he casually claws across a woman’s eyes. He glowers, bright and angry, and finds Joe.

  It is a question of focus, Joe realises. Of intensity. It is the thing Mathew must have had but which he never allowed his son to see, because it was only for emergencies, and in Mathew’s world—the version he allowed his son to know about—emergencies were forbidden: everything which happened happened to the advancement of the House of Spork. But when your back was to the wall and someone else had the knife, there was, in the end, a simple decision: They are not the monster. I am.

  You can’t care about consequences. Every second becomes an end in itself. That’s how it’s done.

  They beat the coffin man down, and he laughs the entire time. Joe abruptly realises what has just happened.