The Crooked Letter (9 page)

‘Yes,’ Pukje’s voice came out of the darkness, ‘it’s here, underground. Now, I’m showing you this because you need to see it. You’re walking around in a daze, and that’s dangerous. This isn’t a dream, or a game, or something that will just blow over. The fate of at least two worlds depends on what you do next. And on what we prevent our enemies from doing.’

‘By our enemies, do you mean Lascowicz? Or Locyta? Or someone else entirely?’

‘It’s hard to tell sometimes.’

‘Whose side are
you
on?’

Pukje tugged on the handle, and Hadrian braced himself for the stench of spoiled food. The effort was meaningless. Something far worse awaited him.

* * * *

‘Oh, Jesus.’

A voice startled him awake. He blinked and tried to sit up. Knots in his neck, back and shoulders tightened.

‘Have you been there the whole time?’

Soft hands touched him out of the darkness, helped him to his feet. He smelt Ellis all around him. Ellis as he had come to know her in the weeks she’d travelled with him and his brother; not freshly scrubbed and perfumed, but between showers, redolent with her own earthy smell. The quarters they’d rented in Amsterdam didn’t have a separate bathroom, just two primitive bedrooms with an adjoining door. It was that door against which he had fallen asleep.

His muscles were fiercely resistant to moving, once freed from their awkward positions. She whispered to him, guiding him. He felt her next to him as she helped him to one of the empty beds. She was warm where he was cold. He wanted to put an arm around her and hold her against him, to embrace her vitality. His heart, which had turned to stone at the start of that long night, began to beat again.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked, her breath stale but sweet against his cheek. ‘I’m so sorry. I assumed you’d gone to bed. I didn’t know you were still there. I feel terrible.’

He shook his head; in denial of what, he wasn’t sure. That he would respond, perhaps. That he was still bound up in the rules of her stupid game.

‘Will you forgive me?’

He could forgive her anything, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

He felt her stiffen beside him. ‘Oh, the game! The fucking game. Are you trying to make a point or something?’

He shrugged. Silence filled the gulf between them. The room was utterly dark; it could have contained anything. She seemed enormously large to the feelers of his emotional radar. He felt like a collapsing star in comparison to her, shrinking steadily down into a cold, black hole.

She got off the bed, and he thought then that he had pushed her too far. That he was being the stupid one now. They were all stupid, tangled up in games too complex to name.

She walked across the room to the adjoining door. He heard it close, and he let himself sag back on the bed.
Why?
he asked himself. Why did he let them get to him? Why did they do it?

He gasped with fright when her hands came down on either side of his shoulders. She was suddenly leaning over him, so close her hair brushed his left ear and her breath was hot on his face. He imagined that he could see her eyes and teeth shining in the dark.

And then ...

* * * *

He flinched violently as the door was flung open. Horror struck him full in the face and he recoiled blindly into a wall. Bouncing off it, he staggered through the darkness, not caring where he was going as long as it was away. He tripped over the stack of milk crates and they clattered noisily across the floor. He went down too, vomiting before he hit the ground. The hot, acid bile burned in his throat and on his hands, and washed away some of the horror of what he had seen — but it wasn’t enough. The night was full of it, rolling out of the open door in hot, horrible waves.

He didn’t hear the click of the cool-room door shutting behind him, or Pukje’s soft
pad-pad
across the concrete floor. He did feel the hands under his armpits, lifting him to his feet and guiding him to a bathroom. There, using water from the cistern, Hadrian washed his face. The coolness of the water forced the images out of his mind for a second or two. He could forget the staring eyes, the limbs in tangles, the reaching hands, the ripped throats ...

‘Sorry about that,’ whispered Pukje, ‘but you wouldn’t have believed me if I’d just told you.’

‘How many are there?’ he asked when he could speak without fear of vomiting again.

‘I don’t know,’ Pukje said. ‘Here — dozens, scores, a lot. Elsewhere —’

‘There are more?’

‘Millions, Hadrian. Everyone in the city, all sacrificed to fuel the invasion.’

‘I don’t understand.’ The fragile shell of his shock crumbled, exposing him to the raw horror of the situation. Of his situation. ‘Sacrificed how? What invasion?’

‘It spread like madness through the streets.’ Pukje’s voice and eyes were sepulchral. ‘Like a tide of deadly gas, it swept up everyone in its path. None could escape it; none were immune. The city turned inward upon itself, became cannibal, autophage, suicidal. The few who stood and fought were slaughtered by the rest. None were spared. All are interred now, breathing dark life into the bones of the city.’

Hadrian remembered his fantasies of a post-apocalyptic bonfire and rescue.

‘The
city
was attacked?’ he asked, trying to make sense of it.

‘Not just the city. The world. This realm we inhabit.’

Hadrian brushed aside the gibberish Pukje had spouted earlier. ‘Attacked by whom? Why?’

‘At the moment, I fear you couldn’t grasp the answer to either of those questions.’

‘Try me,’ he hissed, grabbing the front of Pukje’s mossy garments and pulling him close. ‘Is it World War Three? The Chinese? Who?’

Pukje slithered free, leaving Hadrian’s fingers greasy, and backed up against the door to the bathroom.

‘Can’t you feel it?’ The little man’s eyes were intense.

‘Feel what?’

‘Things changing around us. Around
you.’

‘No.’ Hadrian shook his head, hearing Lascowicz’s voice in the boiler room:
Many things are changing around you. Do you have the slightest idea what happened to you and your brother?
‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not lying!’ He lashed out at an insubstantial conspiracy of lunatics. One crazy cop and a deformed street dweller didn’t carry much weight, but there was a cool-room of dead people and an abandoned city to think about. ‘This can’t be happening!’

‘It
is
happening, Hadrian. And there’s more on the way. You need to wake up or you’re not going to last long.’

Hadrian wept openly, not caring if the whole world saw. ‘Leave me alone.’

A small hand gripped his shoulder. ‘Your brother is alive, Hadrian. If you only hear one thing I’m saying, hear that.’   

‘Get away from me!’ He brushed the little man aside with the back of his arm. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

Pukje landed on his feet, like a cat. His eyes narrowed. ‘Before, you asked me not to leave.’

‘I don’t know what I want. Just leave me alone!’

‘All right,’ Pukje said, softening, ‘but you’ll know soon enough. And when you do, I’ll be back. That’s a promise.’

Pukje’s soft footfalls faded away into silence, and Hadrian sobbed in the darkness for what felt like an eternity.

When he finally ran out of tears, the awareness of what lay just metres from him became too much to endure. He staggered out of the restaurant and ran blindly through the streets. They carried him forever, or so it felt, but he saw nothing familiar. He saw no living thing — human, plant or animal. Just endless rows of buildings, lined up like dominoes for a god to knock down. The suggestion that there might be many more such caches of bodies made him feel like running, but there was no way out of the city. He was hopelessly lost.

Your brother is dead.

Your brother is alive.

His mind told him that Lascowicz and his own eyes were right. His heart disagreed. He had tried to hide the sensation by keeping Pukje close at hand and telling himself that he had to be mistaken, but there was no hiding it now.

He still felt Seth nearby — and admitting to that sensation was the same thing as owning up to madness.

When the events of the day — fear, murder, desperation — finally claimed him, he found a niche out of sight in a hotel foyer, tucked down beside a brown, desiccated fern and a defunct Coke machine, and gave in to exhaustion, mental and physical.

And he dreamed.

* * * *

He dreamed that Seth was calling to him, or trying to. A voice came to him as though from a great distance. He strained to listen but could make out no words. He couldn’t even tell if it actually was Seth’s voice. The more he reached for it, the further it retreated. A deep hum rose up and swamped everything. As the voice faded into the hum, he was left wondering if he had heard it at all.

There were other whispers, though. Whispers from times past, male and female. A game called Jinx ...

On the floor of the empty hotel in a deserted city, brotherless, afraid and alone, Hadrian stirred. Even in the grip of the dream, he had the wherewithal to question what it was. Memory or imagination? Recollection or wish fulfilment? Had Ellis really kissed him then, with his brother just one room away, after tormenting him with the sounds of their lovemaking? Had she slid across him until they were lying body to body on the skinny mattress — her breasts soft against his chest; her thighs on either side of his hips — and moved against him with such languid, liquid heat that he had gasped aloud?

Had the hand come down on his mouth then, and her voice hiss in his ear: ‘Not a sound, Hadrian Castillo, or he’ll hear.’?

He had his name, and his freedom to speak returned with it — but if he did speak he would lose her. It was galling. All the things he had to tell her would remain unsaid.

But was that really what had happened? Had she really kissed him hungrily, and ground down upon him, and helped him garment by garment out of his clothes so their hot skins slid and pressed together, and taken him fast and furtively in the darkness, with a wild tangle of limbs and breath that came so fast he couldn’t tell whose was whose — until, all too soon, he felt as though the darkness was alive with light, and millions of imaginary photons went off in his head at the thought and feel of her with him, him in her, at long last?

His dream dissolved into fragments: of Ellis sliding away from him and melting into the darkness; of heat turning to chill as the wintry night crept back in; of voices whispering through the closed door. There was a certain degree of confusion over whether the whispers were new or the same as they had been before. He could have been listening to Ellis and Seth talking again, or it could have been an entirely new conversation.

But his brother was calling. He was certain of that. Through bone or spirit, voice or no voice, words or no words, Seth was nearby — and he had something very important he needed to tell him,
right now ...

* * * *

PART TWO

AMENTI

‘Tombs aren’t empty. Humans have always told

stories of vampires, ghosts and zombies because

we know that sepulchres are as alive with

possibility as any womb. There we give birth to

our fears
—
which, like our desires, are not

always pure, or entirely what they seem.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
EXEGESIS 17:2

o you think about home much, El Dorado?’ Seth and Ellis were strolling past a cinema complex in Copenhagen, taking in the chilly autumn day while Hadrian bought postcards from a museum shop. ‘Do you ever wonder what your friends and family are doing without you?’

‘Never,’ she said. ‘They’re a million miles away, a million years ago.’

‘What if one of them died? Would you regret being here, with us?’

‘Why would I do that?’ She took his hand in hers, and swung it as though they were children. ‘If I worried about that sort of thing, I’d be like my brother. I’d never leave the cave.’

This was the first time she had mentioned a brother. ‘Doesn’t get out much?’

‘A real computer nerd. Smart as anything but people-stupid, if you know what I mean. He wrote me a birthday card in Klingon, for crying out loud.’ She laughed, and it warmed him more than the weak sun.

Taking the opportunity, he pulled her to him and kissed her. Her lips were soft. She smelled of the perfume she’d tested in a department store that morning: unseasonably floral and summery.

‘Hadrian says he might have Asperger’s Syndrome,’ she said when they separated.

Seth felt a slight twinge. How had Hadrian come to diagnose this person that, until just a minute ago, Seth hadn’t even known existed?

‘Yes, well, Hadrian would know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Obsessive, dependent, socially inept —’

‘You’re too hard on him,’ she said. ‘He’s not like that.’

‘No? You should try living with him.’