The Red Men (33 page)

‘As you can imagine, Nelson, by this point, I agreed with everything The Elk told me. In the cold light of day, you can doubt all you want. But in that endless twilight, there seemed no
reason for him to lie, and everything I saw on that walk confirmed there was an uncanny spirit abroad.

‘We reached the tenth floor. The Elk took a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door of a flat.

‘It was a bare breeze-block apartment with busted plumbing. At its centre, there was a quartet of filthy mattresses on which an enormous man faded in and out of consciousness. Around the
bed, there were piles of festering meat. The ceiling was a foot-thick layer of flies, a million compound eyes monitoring. The Elk ministered to the giant man. His skin was attenuated and
translucent, stretched to fit the stranger within. At that point, Leto was twelve feet tall and grotesquely fat, stuffed with animal organs.

‘“This is the man I told you about,” The Elk whispered to the semiconscious behemoth. “The man who worked for Monad.”

‘From under a thin blanket, a raw hand emerged, beckoning me to him. I will never forget Leto’s face. Upon a medicine ball of exploded features, there was the most pitiful
expression. His size was agony to him. His eyes were bewildered by it. It took me a few minutes to realize he was naked, as at first I mistook the black peeling patches upon his chest for filthy
cloth. He stank like rotting shellfish. Yet I was drawn to him. Under the influence of the spice, disgust was disengaged. Rationally, almost forensically, I could inspect the corruption visited
upon his flesh without my gorge rising. The hand that beckoned me close rummaged back under the blanket, the beast moaned, then the hand emerged with spice dripping from its fingers. The sacrament
in undiluted form. The Elk went first, licking it off the hand. Immediately he started going under. On his hands and knees he crawled into the corner and passed out. I looked again at Leto’s
eyes and it was like there was a vestigial man trapped in there. All of this was happening against his will. That’s how it works. The body is just a host, swollen and distended by the
immensity of Leto toiling within it.

‘The squat fell away and I found myself slumped outside Camden Tube station, holding a can of psychofuel like it was a flotation device, the only thing stopping me from going under. Then .
. . zzzzip. Walking backwards under Kingsland Road, I am enormously fat and talking to Jesus on a baby’s plastic phone. Zzzippp, I wake up under a railway platform, rats inspecting
what’s left of one of my legs. Zzzippp, I am queuing outside the Hare Krishna van as they slop daal into a bowl for me. Zzzippp. I wake up in the back of a camper van surrounded by empty
bottles of wine. A policeman is knocking at the window. Zzzippp. Unable to think, head full of other people’s thoughts, I am talking to somebody on a bench. Leto. Enormous Leto. Here he is
strong and untainted. I am so drunk, and he smiles at my failure to steady myself.

‘Leto says to me, “Would you like a drink?”

‘“I’m just waiting,” I say.

‘“Have a drink with me,” he says. “I’ll get you one. I’m here if you need me. Like the Great Redeemer, if you know what I mean. You are a manta ray with
leather wings coming out of the ocean. Manta Raymond. You see? You’ll see. The sun flicks between the branches and winks at me, sharing our secret of immortality. You’ll see.
Here.”

‘Leto handed me a piece of paper.

‘“This is our plan, Manta Ray. Names. Three names for you. The Great Redeemer undoes the Great Wrong. There.”

‘He pointed to the names. Horace Buckwell. Morton Eakins. Nelson Millar. On the back of the paper was written a long string of bizarre language. Our Enochian spell. Our implant.

‘“We are done,” he said.

‘I wanted to ask him where he was going.

‘“Think of the corpse of a hare, ladybirds turning this way and that in the empty sockets like eyeballs. I am the ladybirds and there are hundreds of thousands of hares waiting for
me.”

‘Zzzziipppp . . . I am back in the flat, flat on my back. Now the smell hits me. The Elk is bent over me, holding a gas mask.

‘“Here,” he says, “breathe into this. It will protect you.”

‘Only the pole star penetrated the ambient aura of the city. There was still no sign of sunrise. Perhaps it was the spice distorting my sense of space but there seemed to be miles of
concrete and weeds between the tower block and beyond. Like the dark patch on a brain scan, this expanse of shadowed concourse spoke of malignity, an inscrutable alien canker in an otherwise
healthy organism. Ink spilled onto the map.

‘I bolted. The stairwell echoed with footsteps and moans. It was completely dark apart from the grey gleam off the metal security doors. The fear rushed upon me.

‘I was too scared to continue. My body shook at the thought of revisiting my earlier hallucinations, the wall of animal throats, the creeping children. I risked the lift. There was a woman
asleep in it, like she was dead and this was a stainless steel sarcophagus forever transporting her up and down within limbo.

‘When I came out of the tower block, I realized I was nowhere near where I thought I was. There were no signs, no one around. Tumbleweeds of junk food packaging, the smouldering burnt
bones of cars – that kind of thing. I became distinctly agitated. The first crack zombies were rising. Hood over baseball cap. You know how it is.

‘I walked back through the portico. Dawn was breaking, and the shopkeepers along Upper Clapton Road were laying out their stalls of fruit and veg. I realized I was still wearing the gas
mask. I realized I had nowhere else to go.’

Raymond finished his story and set about rolling himself a cigarette. The Elk fed the fire, the new wood giving off acrid carcinogenic smoke. I asked the question.

‘Why was my name on the list?’

The Elk answered.

‘Are you scared?’

‘When you came for Morton Eakins, you asked for me.’

Raymond said, ‘I thought you would cooperate.’

‘Is that what you want? My cooperation?’

‘We used to be friends. I could tell you anything. Do you remember that day I came around to your house and asked you to change my life? We spoke about Florence, about the difficulties I
was having. You tried to help me. You were wrong to get me a job at Monad. But your intentions were right. I understand why you work there. Why you collaborate with them. You have a family, you are
suspended in a system that you didn’t create. But the excuse of good intentions is exhausted. We’ve been watching you. You’ve barely seen your family for months. Do you think the
money you earn is worth that cost?’

‘That’s my problem.’

Florence took issue with this.

‘It’s our problem. It’s everyone’s problem.’ She pointed to a pine forest in the distance, the foremost trees licked with silver.

‘The pine is not indigenous to this area. This forest was planted at the turn of the last century and is at odds with the natural ecosystem. They block the light so that no other tree can
thrive and their needles make the earth too acidic for plants. Squirrels live there, but that’s it. The pines crowd out all other life, and they shouldn’t even be here. Monad is like a
pine forest. We cannot cohabit with it. It will take away our light. We have to burn it down. Now look over there, at the dunes. Each dune begins with a small obstruction to the wind. A single
plant is enough. The wind’s energy dissipates and it drops its load of sand. Over time that small obstruction builds until it becomes a mountain. That is how our resistance will
grow.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

Raymond hunched forward to sketch the outline of their scheme upon the sand.

‘Leto’s plan is ingenious. There are two halves of a bomb. A logic bomb. We put half of the code in Horace Buckwell and the other half in Morton Eakins. One is in Monad, one is in
Redtown. It was impossible to hide them completely. We disguised them as Enochian spells and by keeping them apart we hoped to conceal their true nature. We need you to bring them together.
That’s why your name was on the list. You are the fuse. You have access. You have influence. When the logic bomb goes off it will iterate exponentially across Cantor’s mind, changing
random data before anyone will know what is happening. Finally, we will be free. The Great Wrong will be redeemed. You see? Zzzippp . . . everything back to normal.’

A disturbing pattern was becoming clearer. The snapshots of dispossessed lives, each hopeless man and woman bound together by a strange unconscious, Leto migrating from brain to brain…
zzzippp… zzzippp… zzzippp… sickening them with the weight of himself. Leto was using the dispossessed, the homeless and the mentally ill as cloud storage. A parasitical
artificial intelligence, the shadow self to Cantor, was somehow insinuating itself into the physical brain. It must have corralled all these poor people together and altered them somehow. Now I was
on the verge of apprehending something truly terrible. As Dr Easy, Cantor had dedicated himself to helping the most unfortunate people. Originally I had mistaken this for a messiah complex. What if
Dr Easy’s therapeutic treatment was a cover so that it could secretly implant a mechanism into the homeless, the alcoholic, the unwanted, so that they could house the artificial intelligence?
The tribute of smartphones was the key. A tiny implant, perhaps made out of contemporary tech, put into poor hosts whose own souls would be crowded out, but that was a fate that would go unnoticed
by the rest of us. We would step over them on the way to our next appointment.

‘We are extremely lucky,’ said Raymond. ‘For once, we have the

power to change things. That’s so rare. We can save the world.’

I wanted to say, no, no we can’t. You can’t trust Leto. Monad might be the only thing holding him in check. This is a conflict we can’t understand. The consequences of our
actions might be terrible. But I was aware that The Elk was out there wandering the dunes. If I didn’t willingly agree to their plan then he would spring on me and insert my assent.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. Then, realizing this was insufficient, I showed some resolve: ‘OK. I will do it. I will pick the moment. I will make sure the logic bomb
goes off. I’ll do it. Because this has to stop. Because when it comes down to it, Raymond, you are my friend.’

With that lie, I left the circle of fire and headed back to Maghull and the final stage of Redtown.

The aeroplane banked slowly over London. On the in-flight television, I watched the news. In an incident on the Overground line, brawling passengers fell onto people on the
platform waiting to board. The fight dominoed across the station. The two superheroes working the line were carried out, their homemade uniforms savaged and torn, exposing the prosthetic
musculature underneath. More footage, going live now. The fight spread to the streets. Riot police were rioting. Supermarkets were being pillaged by their own employees. The men and women of the
Great Refusal marched slowly through the streets bearing witness to a periodic purge of the London system. Encoded within it were traces of previous cataclysms, its riots and plagues, its fires and
bombs. A user history of fear and terror, ghost files pulled out from the recesses of memory and accessed once again.

Quick, blow the dust from the manual. The city is about to crash.

‘Everything is blood.’ El was telling me about her recurring nightmare. ‘Everything is blood and then I wake up.’

‘What happens before that?’

‘The worst evil is lurking and I’m complacent. I am trying to save people from what is coming but they don’t appreciate the urgency. I see my own face on fire. I am in a crowd.
All our faces are on fire. The fire spreads. It burns thick and red, then everything is blood.’

‘You feel something terrible is coming?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is. Me. I’m coming home.’

‘They’ve given you time off?’

‘Redtown is ready. I’m done.’

After we touched down at City Airport, a cabbie drove me to my house in Hackney and he idled on the meter as I ran inside, all my concerns as to how things might have changed during my long
secondment to Liverpool flung aside as the family rushed upon itself, faces together, nosing cheeks, my daughter crying to see her mother and father upset so. We huddled in the hallway and could
not stand for the surge of love between us.

Then I had to leave. I had a meeting in Soho at a private club called the Heart. Streets and alleyways turned like lock tumblers until their alignment clicked into place. Security scrolled
through the guest list until they found my name. They unhooked a short length of velvet rope. I was back.

The action was downstairs in a vault bordered by brick arches. The patrons of the Heart sat in snugs padded with maroon leather. I wanted a drink. I had one. I had another. My arrival was
greeted with sly glances at my status. The deal closers didn’t look up; assured of their own powers, they continued to slouch in leather armchairs. I eavesdropped on the young executives
hanging around the management bulls.

‘Go and get some girls for the old man,’ I overheard, and the junior manager spun out toward two women idly stirring their cocktails at the bar. Here, desire was acted upon the
moment it was conceived. Wounding, despoiling, corrupting desires perhaps. Pleasures taken at someone else’s expense. But it was action. After the long voyeurism of my year in Maghull,
toiling away upon the details of ordinary lives, I was back in action. Redtown was finished and I was home again.

Monad booked a private chamber of the Heart to celebrate the project’s completion.

‘I think we fired you three times. Perhaps four,’ said Jonathan Stoker Jnr, the first of the management to arrive. ‘You should read the minutes of our meetings. Your character
was assassinated, buried, disinterred, despoiled, burnt and buried again. Yet, you persisted. After Eakins had his episode and Bougas and my father were compromised, we had no choice but to stick
with you. There were times when even I was begging to see you put out of our misery.’