Graveyard Shift (10 page)

It was nighttime in the alley, and above us the sky was a deep midnight blue with a frosting of stars. A brass plaque above the main door read P
ANDEMONIUM
H
OUSE
. Another toward one end of the building read E
VENTIDE
S
TREET
.

“You'll get used to it,” Mr. October said. “Things aren't quite the same here as they are elsewhere.”

“So this is the Ministry's base,” I said, following him to the front door.

“We're based everywhere,” he said. “This is only one of a myriad of operations we're running around the planet.”

The door opened and three uniformed men filed out. Their serious faces were nearly as gray as their jackets, and each had a silver long-nosed rifle strapped across his chest. They eyed me suspiciously, but saluted when they saw Mr. October.

“Security,” Mr. October explained. “They're known as Vigilants here. We've increased their numbers threefold
since the last information leak. It's their job to ensure no records of any kind ever leave the premises.”

“And the weapons?” I asked. I was fascinated by, if more than a little wary of, those rifles.

“Not really my area of expertise,” Mr. October said, “but I understand they're some kind of DEW, directed energy weapons, that fire plasma waves or something of the sort. They could stop a rhino in its tracks at a hundred and fifty feet and put it to sleep for ten minutes. Of course, the Vigilants don't actually kill anyone — that would be against our philosophy. We run a strict shoot-to-stun policy here.”

I was only now getting a sense of the scale of the Ministry's operation: There was far more to it than I could've imagined. On the opposite side of the alley, the tight space we'd squeezed through to get here was no longer visible. Facing us across the cobbled ground was a dark, unbroken wall.

“It's there if you look for it,” Mr. October said. “That is, if you know how to look. See there, and there? From this angle it resembles a wavy hairline crack.”

“How do you get the rickshaw in and out?”

“With some difficulty. It's Lu's responsibility, but she's greatly skilled. She was once a contortionist in a circus sideshow — used to fold herself into and out of an overnight bag. One of the strangest sights I ever saw, and I've seen very many strange sights.”

At last he led me indoors, through a darkened hall and up a flight of creaky wooden stairs. The place had an ancient,
sealed-up smell with an undertone of stale furniture polish that reminded me of Mercy Road School.

The stairs led us to a long candlelit corridor lined with windowless doors, all firmly shut. There was a muffled tapping coming from somewhere and a constant hum of wind, like a draft trapped in the gutters.

“This way,” Mr. October said.

The candlelight in the corridor shivered and twisted as we started along it. As we passed the first few doors, I noted the brass nameplates fixed to each one:
SALVAGE, DISPATCH, RECORDS, CONFERENCE ROOM, CLEANING UTENSILS, WAITING ROOM
.

Mr. October stopped at a door marked
RECEIPTS
. He turned toward me, his features reshaping themselves in the flickering light.

“Just think,” he said. “Little more than a fortnight ago, you hadn't a clue. You were looking for something, but you didn't know what. And see how far you've come now. On the other side of this door are the answers to all your questions, and once we open it, there's no going back. Do you follow?”

“Yes.” I swallowed nervously. “Yes I do.”

“Then open your eyes, Ben Harvester. Your life is about to change.”

And with a flourish, Mr. October opened the door.

T
he only light source in the room was a candle in an alcove, its shuddery light falling across a small mahogany desk, on which an old typewriter sat, and the swivel chair drawn up in front of it.

I'd seen typewriters in films and photographs, and one in the window of a Stoke Newington thrift shop, but I'd never been up close to one. It was a small but solid-looking model with a pistachio green metal body, glossy black keys, and a single red key on its right-hand side. Above the keypad were the words L
ETTERA
22. On the desk beside the typewriter was a rack of blank index cards, the same size as the one Mr. October had shown me on the roof garden.

On a shelf near the desk was another ancient metallic machine, even older than the typewriter, with a scratched and battered silver body and sides of burnished brass. A cogwheel at the rear fed paper from a roll down through it and
out the front. I was puzzling over what it could be when the contraption sprang to life.

It began with a bang like a muffled gunshot, then rattled and groaned as the paper edged slowly through it and out the front. The machine rocked so violently on its shelf that the entire room trembled with it. There was a burning smell like engine oil, and white smoke puffed from the joints in its casing.

“What's that?” I asked. “And what's it doing?”

“It's delivering a message,” Mr. October said, “which means bad news for someone. It only ever brings bad news. It's an 1873 Stern & Grimwald electric telegraph, a relatively primitive form of communication — but this is a telegraph of a very special kind. It delivers the most delicate and important data there is.”

I stepped back, afraid it was about to explode.

“It's noisy,” I said. “And it looks like it's working too hard.”

“You should see it on busier days when it goes into overload.”

For all its crashing and moaning, the machine was incredibly slow, pushing out its paper only a fraction at a time. We waited more than a minute for it to finish. Then, with a final loud crack that sent orange and blue sparks leaping around its body, the telegraph came to a grinding halt and sat silent.

Mr. October tore out the sheet and brought it to the desk, spreading it out beside the typewriter.

“There,” he said. “The latest list.”

I had to strain to see in the candlelight. A column of names ran from top to bottom of the page, each with some kind of coded reference number.

Mr. October ran a hand back through his hair, then tapped the page near the top of the list.

“The names and addresses speak for themselves. These are the soon-departed, the ones who're about to die.”

“About to?” I looked at him, openmouthed.

“Some may have an hour or two if they're lucky, but more likely it'll be a matter of minutes or even seconds.”

I clasped my hands behind my head, nursing a throbbing pain. “But there's nothing you can do to stop it . . . because it's written.”

“Precisely. Their numbers are up. We can't interfere in any way, and we never have long to prepare.”

“My Aunt Carrie's name was on a list like this, wasn't it?” I said. “That's how you knew, the first time we met. You knew before the family did because you had the list before she'd even gone.”

“Yes.”

“And the same thing with Marilyn Jasper last night. You had her name before we went to the roof, before we even heard the crash.”

“Yes.”

I fell into the chair at the desk, letting it all sink in. Candlelight played across the typewriter's keys, orange and white.

“So what do the reference numbers mean?”

“They describe the exact cause and nature of death. Here, you see . . .” He leaned over the sheet, tracing each record with a forefinger. “Here's reference 5821, the same as Marilyn. Car crash caused by a drunk driver. And this one, 8847, means natural causes: nonspecific. There are three of those here. Very sad, but not as sad as 10176 — run over by an ambulance while returning from a hospital appointment. The patient had just received scan test results after six months of treatment and the prognosis was good.”

“God, that's unlucky.”

“No, it's written. It's not about luck. And here's another, 43765 — we don't see many of these. Man packages himself up in a cardboard box and mails himself to his fiancée as a surprise birthday present. Fiancée opens it carelessly with a pair of scissors . . . very unpleasant.”

“How did he put the stamps on the box?”

Mr. October shrugged. “It doesn't say.”

We fell silent a moment out of respect for the soon-departed.

Then Mr. October said, “Now here's what we do. We have to record these details on the cards, two copies of each, one for our files and one for the field.”

“The field?”

“That would be me, or any other operative doing what I do. Have you used a typewriter before?”

I shook my head no.

“Then I'll explain,” he said, and took me through it step-by-step: what the various parts were called and what they
did, which key or lever to press for which function. The black roller thing was a platen. The single red key was for tabs. The two linked keys on the left were for caps and caps lock.

He rolled the first card into the machine.

“Type it exactly as you see it,” he said. “Any mistakes and you'll have to start over. Never file a card until you're a hundred percent certain it's accurate, otherwise all bets are off. If the wrong name goes to records, it gets very messy. The telegraph never makes a mistake, but clerks have been known to.”

“And where do they come from, these names?” I said.

Mr. October shook his head, a faraway look in his eyes. “Only the Overseers know that.”

It gave me a chill to sit there, preparing to add the first name to the first card. But when I hit the first key — nothing happened at all.

“Leverage,” Mr. October said. “Elbow grease. You'll get a feel for it with practice.”

After mistyping the first card three times, I began to get the hang of it, and the fourth attempt looked passable. I offered it to Mr. October, who compared it to the printed list before giving me an approving nod.

“Fine. Now the rest.”

A few minutes later we had two piles of typed cards on the desk, and I was warming to the typewriter's
click-clack
sound and the
ping
of its return carriage bell. Mr. October pocketed one set of cards and handed me the other.

“Whenever you're alone here, this is what you'll do,” he said. “Monitor the lists as they arrive, add the names and numbers to the cards, then file one set of cards only. The second set is for me, or for dispatch if I'm away. At other times you'll maintain the telegraph — oil, dry lubricant, and
User's Quick-Start Guide
are all on the shelf. Can you do that?”

“Think so,” I said.

But he saw that I still had doubts.

“Something wrong?”

“It's just the thought of sitting here knowing every time the telegraph makes a sound it means someone's about to . . . about to die.”

“I know.” He ruffled my hair. “It's never easy. It isn't supposed to be.”

As we left the room, the telegraph woke again, chugging away behind us. Mr. October shook his head ruefully and closed the door on it, leading me away up the hall.

Next he took me to the records office. The sight of it stole my breath. The space was impossibly huge, far too big for the building to contain it. White walls rose up as far as the eye could see, floor after floor stacked to the heights with towering filing cabinets. A spiral staircase connected the many levels, and on each floor workers in dark blue overalls perched on rolling stepladders as tall as the tallest cabinets. They moved from one cabinet to another, opening drawers, filing cards, then rolling along to the next.

“Like drones,” I said.

Mr. October smiled.

If the place had a ceiling, I couldn't see it. All I could see in the rafters, miles above, was a mass of slowly swirling white mist with tiny winged creatures, possibly bats, circling through it. The room seemed to shimmer as I looked, as if everything inside it was constantly moving.

“It's a living thing,” Mr. October explained. “The room is actually alive. The names we keep here go back through eternity. There's a record for everyone who ever lived. And new names are being added all the time, so it can never be still — it's always evolving and expanding.”

“Amazing. From the outside you'd never expect anything like this.”

“Some of us call it the infinite room, even though officially it's ‘records.'”

He set off across the white marble floor, heading for a blocky gray rectangular shape in the distance.

“The room's expanding so fast,” Mr. October said, “you'll find it takes ten seconds longer to walk back than to walk where we're going. Soon we'll need transportation to cross it. And new floors are being added every day.”

We went on, surrounded by the echoes of opening and closing cabinets, rolling ladders, and the endless groaning wind, louder here than elsewhere in the building.

Closer to the far side of the room, I could see where we were heading. A small booth, jammed between two skyscraper cabinets, was occupied by a round-faced elderly woman with a perm and pince-nez spectacles. A thick ledger
lay open on the counter in front of her, and her plump fingers held a pencil at the ready. Some of the drones, having filed their cards, were coming down the ladders and lining up at her booth for more. For each in turn, she reached under the counter and brought out a new stack of cards, then recorded the batch in her ledger.

The workers lowered their heads respectfully as Mr. October approached, but the woman looked far from pleased to see him, screwing up her face as if she tasted something bitter. Nearer to the booth I noticed her hair and clothing were covered with cobwebs. A multitude of spiders flitted about her, weaving with impunity. I guessed she hadn't left the booth in some time.

“Afternoon, Miss Webster,” Mr. October said brightly. “More soon-departeds for your books. Ben, please give Miss Webster the cards.”

I slid them across the counter. Miss Webster glared at them through her thick lenses, her eyes large and owl-like.

“Meet Ben Harvester,” Mr. October said. “Our newest recruit and a rare talent. You'll see much more of him from now on.”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “That's more work for me, then, isn't it? Welcome, young man.”

She sounded so disdainful, I looked the other way, saying nothing.

“So I suppose you'll be out in the field together,” Miss Webster said. “All right for some. I haven't seen daylight in thirty-six years.”

“Nothing we do would be possible without you,” Mr. October reassured her.

“Fiddlesticks.” She leaned over the counter, signaling the first worker in the queue. “Next!”

“Well, enjoy your day,” Mr. October said.

“What's to enjoy? They're all the same.”

“Nice meeting you,” I said as we started away. “By the way, you've got spiders in your hair.”

“I know,” she said tiredly, waving us off with the back of her hand. She must've heard it many times before.

“Absolutely hates her job,” Mr. October said when we were out of earshot. “But that's understandable. It's thankless work and very long hours. Whereas the workers, the drones, don't even think of it. They're paper chasers and pencil pushers who don't know anything else. Be glad, Ben, you won't go through life like one of them.”

We crossed the vast records room, arriving at the exit some time later. I didn't count the steps we took and I couldn't be sure the room had grown while we'd been inside. But when I looked up, the mist seemed slightly higher than before and the flying creatures even tinier, like specks of dust.

 

Before the afternoon's salvage began, Mr. October took me to the dispatch room, where in the future I'd bring the second set of cards if he wasn't there to collect them.

The cramped room had ten partitioned desks shoehorned together with two officers seated at each. They wore crisp tan
uniforms and bulky headphone sets that must've weighed several pounds apiece, and they chattered away like telemarketers into desktop microphones, reading from the stacks of cards in front of them.

“5963 in NW5.”

“Do you read me? That's SE6, repeat SE6. 8847.”

“11763 in WC1. Urgent. 11763.”

None of them paid us any attention. When Mr. October tried to introduce me, two of the staff adjusted their headsets to listen, but they didn't react and quickly went back to work.

“They'll know you next time,” Mr. October said, eyeing a muted TV monitor on one wall. “Don't take it personally if they seem to ignore you. They're always this busy. They take calls from all over the city.”

The TV was showing news footage. Two buses had collided on Blackfriars Road, and text scrolled across the bottom of the screen describing the damage: twelve injured passengers, one driver in critical condition.

Mr. October checked his pockets for the duplicate cards and showed me the first.

“See here,” he said. “7696. Bus crash fatality.”

“7696!” a dispatch girl called from the back of the room. “London Bridge Hospital!”

“I'm on it,” Mr. October said. “That's us, Ben. Let's get there before Cadaverus's agents do.”