Tuition.
He stares at the wild, angry eyes, and feels comradeship. Then the orderlies drag the coffin man away.
“State of the nation,” Mr. Ordinary says regretfully from behind him. “I see you’ve made a new friend.”
“Crazy man. I don’t know his name.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mr. Ordinary ponders. “Huh,” he says. And then break time is over.
“I wanted to show you this myself,” Mr. Ordinary says, “because I’m very much responsible for it. I had to work hard to make this happen. No one is coming for you.”
The letter is very plain, written on an expensive vellum. It is addressed to Joe, care of Rodney Titwhistle.
Dear Mr. Spork,
We regret to inform you that in view of your involvement in activities against the interests of the United Kingdom, specifically the terrorist murders of various persons and associated crimes, we can no longer act on your behalf. The protection of Cradle Noblewhite is withdrawn from you as of this moment, and we would appreciate settlement of our outstanding bill for services rendered in the usual 28 days.
Yours sincerely,
Mercer Cradle
There is a PS, in Mercer’s execrable handwriting: I’m sorry, Joe. It turns out they punch harder than we do.
The letter is countersigned by all the partners.
Mr. Ordinary smiles. “There’s one from your mother, too.”
He seems to think that’s a victory for his side, which shows a pleasing lack of information about Harriet.
They leave the door to Joe’s cell open. He steps towards it, wondering. A shaft of light beckons him, and any moment he will hear Mercer’s voice. It is all a stratagem. He is free.
When his foot touches the ground outside the cell, it is like stepping on nails, except that he feels the pain through his entire body. He leaps back into the cell, and the door slams.
It opens again, and he doesn’t bother to step through. He realises, a moment later, that they have trained him to imprison himself.
They collect him and strap him on a trolley, then leave him in a different room. It is large and cold, and filled with people on gurneys, just like him, except that they are not restrained.
It takes him ages to realise that the others are not restrained because they are corpses, and even longer to recognise Ted Sholt, slack and waxy, alongside him. Sholt’s head is turned all the way around on his neck.
In the moment after he finally understands, Joe pictures Ted on the chariot of Daniel’s Death Clock, a wild rebel beating the Reaper with a sandal and demanding to be released back to his greenhouse. He smiles. Yes. That’s how it should be.
Except it isn’t. There’s just Ted, and Ted is dead.
Mr. Ordinary has another letter to show him. He seems particularly pleased with himself.
Dear Joe,
I’m very sorry. It’s been months now and I don’t know where you are. I really like you, but I can’t wait for ever. A man called Peter is taking me to dinner tonight. I’m moving on. Please don’t hate me. Polly x
Joe lies on his back and refuses to say anything, and they take him to his tiny white room and cram him in and shock him over and over until he is one solid convulsing muscle. He starts to laugh at them for being so predictable. The pain just makes him laugh more, even when the electrodes run too hot and burn him, but then abruptly he wants it to stop more than he can remember wanting anything, ever. He wants not to laugh at the smell of his own burning skin. He wants not to go mad. Not to join Ted Sholt on the wheel of Daniel’s ridiculous, horrible clock.
Your special attention.
Daniel, who held the keys to the world.
Special.
Attention.
He knows where to find the calibration drum.
He feels something stretch in his chest and then suddenly release, and hears the crash warning. A strange peace is in him, cold and odd, and he realises he cannot hear his heart.
And then, abruptly, he is not in the cell.
It is as if someone has turned on the lights, and all the shadows have disappeared. The white room is gone. He feels fine. Good, even. A bit bored.
He knows, objectively, that he is experiencing some kind of break. It does not seem a bad thing. He looks down, wondering if there will be grass. When you are held in a cell and your mind snaps, surely you should get grass, and trees, and birds.
“You’re an idiot,” Polly Cradle says.
He stares at her. She wears the clothes in which he first met her, right down to her fishnet-and-varnish toes.
“They showed me your letter.”
“Poppycock. They showed you a letter. I certainly didn’t write it.”
“You might have.”
“They lied to you. That is what they do. Joe, look at me. Look at me right now. Look at my face. My eyes.” He does. “I will not leave you. You may try to send me away. But I will not leave, ever. I. Will. Not.”
“Oh.”
“So now you know.”
And even when he goes back to the cell and everything hurts again, it doesn’t matter.
He realises he has begun to say “I’ll tell you.” But things are different now.
You lie. You lie like a bald man in a fur hat. You lie like a rug. You lie, you lie, you lie. You went too far. I see you now. I see all of you.
You should have said she was dead. Or captive, like me. That she was here. You should have said anything but that.
You lie. It is what you are.
You lie.
Something inside him is burning.
When they come to take him away, he goes placidly, then thinks of the coffin man. The coffin man, who had been completely restrained and yet had somehow been able to hurt them. Who rode out the taser and whatever drugs they give him and was still so dangerous they had to keep him strapped down, and even then could not control him. The coffin man is captive, but he is not imprisoned. And he is an ally.
Joe reaches out sharply and breaks Mr. Ordinary’s nose with his right hand. He hangs on, twists, feeling gristle between his fingers, and blood. Mr. Ordinary screams at him.
“That’s how it’s done,” he tells Mr. Ordinary. “That’s how! That’s how it’s done!”
It takes five orderlies to hold him down so that a sixth can sedate him.
As grey rushes in from the edges of the world, he sees that they are afraid.
He wakes, and the aches and bruises are like balm. Up is down and the torturers fear the victim, and that is exactly the world as he wants it. The world of misrule.
He grins to himself and, tasting blood on a split lip, grins wider. There’s a curious beauty in the white walls of his cell: the textureless tiles are fascinating, the dry, tasteless air is a feast on his tongue. He flexes his legs and arms, feels himself, acutely aware of each muscle and its strength, its tolerances, its limits. He scents his own body, feels his ribs and knows that the layer of fat which has rested there for years has gone. He has not broken. He has actually, medically died here. Perhaps more than once, he isn’t sure. And yet he lives. He is more himself than he has ever been. He is the refined essence of himself.
He looks at his life, and sighs at it. There’s a pathos in seeing how foolish he has been, how he has fallen into an obvious trap of bad personal logic, but it’s still a cause for regret. So much wasted time … He follows the track of his error, just to be sure.
Daniel Spork always said that Mathew was no good, that there was never a time when his son was not on the make. He said Mathew was unrestful as a child, and then again as a man. He made no space for the possibility that Mathew’s badness was not a quality which inhered in him, but rather the outcome of a learning process which began when he was quite small.
Looking down from his new mountaintop, Joe can trace the path quite easily. Mathew was a refugee. Mathew came into a world which was immediately broken. He was without his mother from almost before he could say her name, a
nd when she returned she did so in a strange, half-hearted way, and she—like him—knew that everything about the world he inhabited was wrong at the most basic level. Fundamentally, Mathew could not believe the pleasant fictions which make life within the law palatable to others. He saw a world in a constant state of war. His father was losing money and losing his shop, which was the external manifestation of his self, because he did exactly what society said he should and society was a cheat. Daniel spent much of his life creating more and more wonderful things, a cargo cultist desperately seeking to achieve something so beautiful that his goddess could not resist. Mathew knew better. He watched, and learned, and saw that she came only in response to things most horribly broken.
So he cheated back. He abandoned Daniel’s world in order to preserve it, and from that lesson drew his entire life. He broke laws, cracked safes, smashed windows and shattered the public peace, and from destruction he drew consolation. The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Mathew Spork was free.
As his mother was free. And as his son, now, in this white cell which no longer frightens him, is free.
Outside in the corridor, Joe can hear footsteps. The Ruskinites are coming. Mr. Ordinary, perhaps. They will expect him to be cowed, as he has been before. They will expect him to wait and gather his strength. But his strength now is a thing made from opposition. If he backs down, he knows, it will ebb, and he will lose track of this spectacular certainty. That is not something he can afford. Beyond this, he has nothing left.
Which leaves open war. Each time the door opens, he will fight them with everything he has. He will no longer be restrained. He will drive himself against them until they shatter, or he does.
The door opens, and he moves.
He goes to meet them with a growl in his teeth which becomes a roar, and since his mouth is open he bites the hand which unwisely comes close to his face. He keeps going until he feels something crunch and hears a ghastly howling, but is too busy with his hands to worry very much about that. His left grips and his right hammers downwards, once, twice, like a copper pounding on a door. When the weight on his left hand increases, he lets it open, and instantly uses his left elbow on someone else, a scything downward spiral which opens the man’s forehead to the bone. He bowls on, barging and lunging, and suddenly they are all on the ground and he stamps and kicks, wading through the tangle as through a garden full of leaves. He keeps going and going and going, and he gets stronger rather than weaker with each blow.
Abruptly, he stops, because there’s nothing left to do. There are five men on the ground. Two are moaning softly. Three are quite unconscious.
It had not occurred to him that he might win this fight. Winning a fight, in his mind, is associated with some sort of skill. He had not realised that you could win by just doing the worst things you could possibly imagine, one after another, until your enemies fell over. There’s even a sort of cycle to it, like a very dangerous, very angry clock: grab, rake, gouge; twist, pummel, drop. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
But now here he is, and—within certain limits—free. Not likely to remain so, perhaps. But he can wreak havoc while he’s out. Do some damage to the machine which has hurt him. That has considerable appeal.
He kicks the nearest of his gaolers once more in the spine and gets no reaction. He searches the man and finds a keycard, repeats the process until he has several more. He considers pushing the men into his cell, but there are too many of them and it’s too much like hard work. Instead, he takes a shroud from the biggest man and drapes it over himself. On hemmed-in ground, use subterfuge. Billy Friend had been a devotee of Sun Tzu, though mostly in relation to women.
He walks away down the corridor, trying the cards on anything he can see. Doors click. He doesn’t bother to look inside. If there are inmates, they will either come out or they won’t. Behind him, he hears strange voices and cries, so he assumes there are at least a few. He hopes they are as angry as he is. Or mad in some horrible way. That would be fine.
He reaches a different sort of door, a double door, and when it opens, he realises it’s a lift. He goes in. Naturally, he will try to escape. They will know by now that he is out. Therefore they will expect him to go up. Up and out. They will be waiting.
So he goes down.
As soon as the lift doors open, he smells smoke.
There are red lights set into the walls on this floor, and they’re shining brightly. Somewhere there’s a klaxon going off. A crowd of Ruskinites slither past him, single-minded. He remembers at the last minute to bob his head in an approximation of their sinuous weave, but they don’t pay any attention.
He can’t assume it will last. There must be surveillance. They will in any case shortly realise he is wearing this rather minimal disguise, and they must have ways of knowing one another.
He walks on. A security door requires a different card, a blue one, from the deck in his hand. He steps through. The smell of smoke is much stronger.
In his head, he realises, he has a sort of ragged notion of how this place is laid out. It is a pyramid or ziggurat, of which the uppermost level is the garden and the common room. Below that is the standard accommodation for patients, and below that is his level: the holding cells for inconvenient people to be tortured, and a selection of actual torture chambers. This level, being below that one, must be more secret or more important in some way.
He rounds a corner, and finds himself in a cinema.
Or not. There is a screen, and there are chairs and speakers, yes. But there is also a species of stage or platform, and each seat has what appears to be a set of electrodes attached. The walls are covered in grey foam moulded in geometric patterns, like a sound studio.
“If an ordinary man were to wake with Napoleon’s memories, men would call him mad.” A vast face fills the screen, elegant, lean and cruel. A man in early middle years, his skin very clear and tanned, his features an indefinable blend of cultures. His mouth quirks. “But what if he woke with demonstrably accurate memories which were recorded nowhere else? What if he woke with the face of Napoleon as well? And finally, how, if this man arose from his bed with no mind of his own? What if John Smith ceased to be, and in his place was a perfect replica of the Emperor in body and memory? At what point would we acknowledge that he was identical with that first Napoleon? That he was not merely a copy, but an actual regenesis? What if the pattern of the mind itself could be measured and found to be identical?”
The camera draws back. The man lies on a plush, opulent bed, and his body is festooned with wires and sensors. Almost, he hangs in the bed, so many cables are affixed to his skin. More cameras are visible around him, recording him from every angle. He gestures off to one side, to a circular screen—Joe guesses it must be green—showing an oscillating pattern. A wave.
“This is my mind. This is my body. Make my history your own. Match it perfectly, and become part of me. Part of God.”
Joe Spork stares for a moment at the lean, evil face of Brother Sheamus. There is an intensity to him, a power, which is both alien and familiar. It reminds him of someone. And then he hears the screaming.
The screaming is very hoarse, very desperate. It’s a man, or a very big woman, because it’s deep. It’s not horror-movie screaming, designed to rattle the chandelier. It’s something else entirely, a mammalian noise. Alarm. Alert. There are tigers. I am taken. I am down.
Joe has recently made the same sound himself.
Around a corner, through a door, another door, and then:
Two men. One of them is Mr. Ordinary.
Mr. Ordinary stares up from his chair at another person, an altogether different sort of person. A tiger.
The tiger is smiling. He has a thick beard and greying hair tied back with a piece of orange string. His skin is pale, but leathery. Good teeth, a little snaggled at each corner of the mouth; you can see it in the line of his face. Wide lips.
Joe does not recognise him; not h
is movements, nor his face, nor even his eyes, until a glance at Mr. Ordinary shows an appalling, absolute despair, and then—as the torturer glimpses Joe in his Ruskinite shroud—the desperate hope of rescue.
There’s really only one person here who makes anyone that afraid. And now that he looks, he recognises the eyes, too.
The coffin man bends down in front of Mr. Ordinary, gets his head close to the other’s face.
“Where’s the way out, boy?” His voice is thick and he lisps. Those snaggles at the corner of his mouth: the bite plate has deformed his teeth, and he’s not used to not wearing it yet, can’t compensate. He’ll need practice, and a good dentist. All the same, there’s something about the voice: “buuwoy.” A fisherman’s voice.
“It’s down!”
“Is it bollocks.” Plymouth, with a taste of London, maybe. The coffin man shrugs, and lays his hand gently across Mr. Ordinary’s face. When he withdraws it, he is mysteriously holding something wobbly, and Mr. Ordinary is screaming again, this time sharply, and Joe realises it is an ear. The coffin man tosses it aside. Then he speaks again.
“Seen you.” He glances over at Joe. “You, I’m talking to.” He shrugs. “You ain’t what you look like, I know that.”
Joe realises he is still wearing the shroud. He pulls it off.
“Thought so,” the coffin man nods. “Trick of the walk, maybe.”
“How did you get out?”
“Well, some bugger poked the anthill, didn’t he? Set off all the alarum bells and what have you. Someone got careless. That don’t pay with me. I got him, and his friends, and I set ’em on fire. Doesn’t pay to show me disrespect. I keep trying to tell ’em. You look like you’ve come of age, though.”
“I’ve what?”
The older man shrugs. “All that strength. You walk through everything as if you’re afraid of breaking it. Keep it all down in the dark. Or you did, maybe.”
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