Last Days (51 page)

He looked down. Angled his wrist and the torchlight followed. He nearly threw up on his boots.

How did something that thin have so much strength?

Its weight was behind the door and it pushed from outside with all its might. Tried to force more and more of the trapped arm through. He could hear sharp feet outside, tearing at the carpet for purchase. The terrible hand inside the door stabbed about like a Japanese spider crab in some lightless ocean niche. Long fingers blackened by old skin, 451

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curled around the edge of the door, higher up, and far too close to his groin.

Somehow, Kyle got the latch chain on, then turned and fled deeper inside the trap of his flat. His thoughts came and went like confetti in a wind tunnel. Should he lock himself in the bathroom and scream? Face it in the lounge and try to get a hammer blow into that dead-skin face? The window?

He tore across the dark lounge. The torch beam lit his path. All around his head his breath was asthmatic-loud. He stuffed the hammer into his belt, the torch in his back pocket.

Climbed over the window sill. Was halfway through, his face and chest pressed against the outside of the sash window, when he heard the front door blow in.

Shuffling to the side of the ledge, his hands snatched for purchase around the window frame. From the thin, ambient street lights, he received the impression of a thing that raced into the dark room on the other side of the sash window, but as low to the floor as a dog. And once it was inside, it went into a frenzy he heard more than saw. Long arms raked and trawled for him. Surfaces were swept clean. His laptop and whisky bottle clattered to the floor. A dozen books hit a wall.

Kyle looked down, beyond the heels of his engineer boots.

And knew he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t jump.

Behind him, his DVD collection became an avalanche. He crouched and moved his legs and hips over the ledge. Gripped the cold stone edge with both hands, like he was about to slip into a pool feet first.

It heard him and the dim scarecrow silhouette paused in its frenzy. Then came at the window, low to the floor. It was sniffing. It was too dark for him to see it properly, and for 452

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that he thanked God. And then let his body drop from the ledge.

How they materialized, or what limits were imposed on a visit, he had no idea. Max said something about them need-ing to feed to remain, but he didn’t dwell on that detail.

He guessed
it
never stayed long in his flat. Perhaps it could not and returned to that other place, from where its kind reigned for four centuries, over a kingdom of dust and dead birds.

He’d landed upon the refuse sacks, and cut his calf muscles on the only bag filled with garden waste that had been out front for so long the sticks had petrified into spikes.

And then hobbled and whimpered into the street before he ran as fast as possible in the direction of the Finchley Road.

Behind him, the noises of the destruction of his home had become fainter, and then stopped.

Shivering against the cold glass doors of Waitrose on the main road, he’d fallen asleep; curled into a foetal position around the hammer, on a sheet of cardboard. It hadn’t been possible for him to run any further, or even to stand up any longer. The escape from the flat had emptied the last of his batteries.

Curiously, no one bothered him as he lay in the street. The supermarket was visible from the road, so a police patrol car may have passed at some point in the two hours he shuddered fitfully upon the sheet of cardboard. Perhaps he was becoming a familiar sight, all over again, in the new economic downturn.

He awoke just after seven. No one in the street even looked at him. He stood up to let the early shift into the 453

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supermarket, and then just marvelled for a few minutes that he was still alive.

His wallet was still inside the flat, but his door keys were attached to his belt chain. As he brushed grime from the sleeves of his leather jacket, an Indian man in a Waitrose uniform brought a bin bag out of the store; it was filled with yesterday’s pastries and bagels. Kyle followed him to the rubbish collection point and helped himself to the booty. He walked back to the flat in the blessed grey light of dawn while he ate four plain bagels and one apple turnover. It was the best food he’d ever eaten.

The sash window was wide open, as he’d left it. He looked up for a long time, but nothing looked down. On his way back inside the building, he inspected the fuse box. Raking hands had managed to pull all of the switches down and smash the plastic mounting; the door of the cabinet was on the floor. The hallway stank of effluence and the places under houses where small things crawl to die. Upon the ceiling, he saw the stain, placed two fingers under his nose, and struggled to keep the bagels down.

Jane’s door was still shut. Dithering outside, he wondered if he should wake her, check on the cat. A white van parked up outside and distracted him. Kyle turned to watch a courier driver jump down from the cabin.

‘Kyle Freeman?’ the driver called at the open door. Kyle nodded.

‘Package for ya.’

Kyle signed for it and walked upstairs, a long heavy box under his arm. And as he sat amongst the wreckage of his life, he opened the envelope adhered to the side of the box.

It was from Max.

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Dear Kyle,

I sincerely hope you are still around to receive this.

Through my faith in your ability to survive, I
have taken the liberty to check you in online: first
class to San Diego via LAX at midday from

Heathrow. Someone will meet you at the airport this
side. Please accept the camera as a further token of
my appreciation. It will suffice to record the last
chapter of our film.

Fondest Regards,

Maximillian Solomon

Revelation Productions

455

THE TEMPLE OF THE

LAST DAYS

‘Among us! Among us!’

Sister Katherine, Arizona 1973

Irvine Levine,
Last Days

TWENTY-NINE

the oasis motel, san diego.

25 june 2011. 7 p.m.

‘I want to tell you a story.’

Lying on his bed, Kyle groaned and rubbed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

With his takeout order came a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and Coca Cola so cold it burned his tongue. He planned to eat his burger, drink as much of the whisky as possible, then fall asleep while Max and Jed kept watch. Tonight, he was going to be the ‘talent’, and felt as hard done by, and put out, and irritable as the talent usually did on a shoot.

The American Airlines sleeping mask would see some action too; three portable lights Max brought with him from England had turned the motel room into the desert at midday.

The sight of three beds in the room had irritated Kyle on arrival. Another sign of Max’s confidence that Kyle would agree to all the little man wanted, eventually. But here he was: exhausted, nervous, frightened, out of his depth, but somehow still a player. Nothing had changed. The other two beds were piled high with the other men’s gear, as if they had no intention of using them for their true purpose. The room must have been designed for a family, groups of young 459

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travellers, or an FBI detail on stakeout. Max and Jed had saved the bed by the window for him. On which he immediately slumped.

Kyle surreptitiously eye-balled Jed again. Innately self-assured and hearty, dressed in the innocuous uniform of a portly tourist, Jed had met him in Arrivals and introduced himself with a handshake that caused pain. Jed then drove him to the motel in silence, where a somewhat revitalized Max waited to show off a big grin of satisfaction. The execu -

tive producer’s ear was still a muff of gauze, and the scratches on his cheek were now entirely concealed with tape and cotton-wool pads. It made him look like a plastic-surgery victim.

After a round of insincere greetings from the executive producer, there followed a second embellished introduction to Jed, who even referred to himself as ‘Maximillian’s special forces’, before Max and Jed resumed their seats on the chairs beside a small table under the wall-mounted television.

Back to business and you don’t need to join us, seemed to be the tone.

Max thought highly of Jed. Jed had found the children of the mine. Jed had put Chet’s mansion under surveillance for three months. Jed had tracked down everyone Kyle and Dan interviewed in the States. Jed got things done and Jed had guns. But Jed made Kyle nervous.

On his way into the room, Kyle had only glanced at the table the two men had been using. It was covered in aerial photos of Chet Regal’s mansion, a draughtsman’s blueprint, a street map, and three black handles poking out of holsters that he didn’t want in the same building as himself, let alone in his tomorrow. Whatever criminal actions these signs of 460

LAST DAYS

preparation suggested, he refused to think about: desperate acts he was going to have to assist, perform, or film, the following day with one total stranger, and one virtual stranger he didn’t trust at all. Nor did he want his thoughts to confront what had taken Dan, and nearly killed Kyle himself the last time it was dark outside. There would be time enough for terror tomorrow, because whatever he’d brushed against in London was going to be much worse inside Sister Katherine’s mansion. Nothing was going to convince him otherwise. Merciful sleep needed to take him away from this room and the unnatural light blazing inside it.

At San Diego International, a stewardess had woken him while doing her best to soften the mask of distaste that was her face, at the sight of him, unshaven for weeks and unwashed for days, sprawled out in a recliner in first class.

He slept straight through the last seven hours of the ten-hour flight, without dreaming. To emerge, with a headache from what felt like a coma, in California; arriving with one change of clothes in a rucksack and a brand-new camera. But the moment his back touched the bed in the motel room, he wanted to sleep again. For a week. At the thought of a monologue from Max, Kyle said, ‘Not now, Max. I just want to get messed up enough to fall asleep.’

Max smiled. ‘Tonight, my friends, I think we are in need of some context. Quite naturally, your reason may still persist in rejecting what we will be forced to confront and endure tomorrow. And I would be worried about you, had you merely accepted my word as the truth, in the matter of what Chet Regal has been a host to, for most of his life. So on the eve of battle, I do believe Katherine’s endgame requires embellishment.’

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‘I’m done, Max. I’m sorry. Just done.’ Kyle covered his face against the harsh light emitting from one of Max’s portable lamps, situated on the nightstand between the end and middle beds. ‘There’s only a few hours until sun-up.’ It amazed him that one of the others wasn’t already shoring up his strength with a nap.

‘Go on, Max,’ Jed said, and winked at Kyle. ‘I’ll listen. I could listen to you all night. Spielberg will come round.’

‘Spielberg?’

Jed laughed. Kyle glared.

Max bowed his head. Held up two small hands for silence.

‘I want to take you back to the Soviet Union on July 1st, 1941. A night when Molotov and the political elite of Soviet Russia literally trembled, and not from the winter cold, as they walked to Stalin’s Dacha.

‘An incongruous story you may think? But perhaps it is not. You see, the Soviet elite were on their way to deliver terrible news to their leader. News of the German invasion of Russia. They believed the receipt of this information would be the end of them. It hardly seemed possible for their country to survive the German war machine, now that it was active upon Mother Russia’s soil. And as messengers, there was now the additional matter of surviving Stalin’s wrath.

‘You see, Stalin had made a terrible error of judgement.

He trusted Hitler, and signed a non-aggression pact with the Führer in 1938. To avoid war with Germany. And to serve his desire for greater power through an alliance with the Nazis.

‘Stalin’s sadistic tyranny had already blighted the country for twelve years. By the night of 1 July 1941, his collectivism had been responsible for the death of nine million peasants.

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Another ten million men and women sent to prisons and labour camps for political reasons had also died. By the time Stalin expired in 1953, his final death toll is estimated at around the twenty million mark.

‘Inconceivable. An amount that is beyond our imagination.

It is so great, it is stupefying to even try and comprehend the industrial scale of his destruction of humanity. And no one died easily. Not one of the twenty million. Their suffering was monumental. So when Russia was betrayed by Hitler, Stalin assumed his political elite were visiting his Dacha as an execution party.

‘If only it had been. But even Stalin had underestimated the terror he had successfully instilled with his pathological behaviour, inside each and every Russian. He misunderstood the intentions of Molotov. Like abused children, they’d nor-malized abuse. They were incapable of resistance. Incapable.

His dominance of them was total.

‘And, Jed, let me tell you, they missed one of the twentieth century’s most important opportunities. Instead, they helped him gather his wits to regroup their country’s defences. They encouraged him to actually lead them, for once, in something other than the maelstrom of his revolting paranoia, his in -

humanity, and his indecency. That never stopped, of course, but he took this opportunity. The opportunity, ultimately, for his own survival and longevity.

‘As a devil, he was immaculate. Immaculately Satanic. And tomorrow, we too will face a will as indomitably Satanic. But unlike Molotov in 1941, we must choose a different course of action. In the forefront of our minds, we must think of the consequences of our
not
acting.’

Jed was frowning, looking down at his hands. ‘But what 463