The Sleepless (62 page)

Michael was taking Jason down the stone steps outside the lighthouse when Thomas came out and said, ‘Michael! Can you spare me a moment?’ 

Michael gave Jason a kiss, and said, ‘Look after your mom, would you?’ Then, to the policewoman standing at the foot of the steps, ‘Take him across to the ambulance, would you please?’ 

Jason said, ‘You won’t be long, will you?’ 

‘No,’ smiled Michael, and kissed him. ‘I won’t be long.’ 

He went back into the library. Thomas and Megan and Matthew were standing by the fireplace, looking serious. Thomas said, in a low voice, ‘Matthew has suggested something.’ 

‘Oh, yes? What?’ 

‘He says that the lily-white boys are probably going to get away with this, unscathed. They’re immortal, to all intents and purposes. You can’t kill them, you can’t really hurt them. Even if we manage to get them into court, they have far too many friends in high places. They’ll walk.’ 

‘So? What do you suggest?’ 

Matthew said, ‘I suggest we try to hypnotize them – put them to sleep.’ 

‘But if we do that, they’ll shrivel up, won’t they? That’s what you said.’ 

Matthew nodded. 

Michael looked at Thomas. ‘What’s your position on that? Aren’t we infringing their legal rights? I mean, if we kill them, aren’t we going to be guilty of homicide, too?’ 

Matthew said, ‘They’re not human, in the normal sense. They’re just
things,
they’re just a disease. A virus doesn’t have no legal rights, and neither do they.’ 

Michael looked down at Megan. ‘What do you think?’ 

She shrugged. ‘You saw what we did on the beach. The three of us, all joined together. We made you fly. We could do it again, with the lily-white boys. After all, it isn’t a crime to put somebody to sleep.’ 

‘It is if you know it’s going to kill them.’ 

Thomas said, ‘You want to be rid of them as much as I do, don’t you?’ 

‘More,’ said Michael. ‘But we’re not vigilantes; and we’re not murderers, either.’ 

Thomas checked his watch. ‘Then think of it this way. You’ve got ten minutes to put these characters to sleep. Do it in memory of Elaine Parker. Do it for Sissy O’Brien. Do it for Victor, and for all of those people who died at Rocky Woods.’ 

Megan reached up and took hold of Michael’s hand. ‘I think we have a duty, Michael. I really do.’ 

‘All right,’ Michael agreed. ‘Let’s try it.’ 

Thomas left the library, and his officers reluctantly followed him. One of them said, before he closed the door, ‘Any funny business – anything – you just yell out.’ 

Michael stood up, and walked across to Joseph, who was standing with his hands clasped behind him, and an expression of patient resignation on his face. 

‘This is the end, then,’ said Michael. 

Joseph shrugged. ‘The end? This isn’t the end. This isn’t even the beginning of the end. We are very few. There are hundreds more of us. You will recognize us time and time again.’ 

‘You know what we’re going to do, don’t you?’ said Michael. 

Joseph nodded. ‘Yes, of course. And we shall welcome it. None of us have ever known what it is to sleep.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘You shouldn’t look so surprised. The desire for rest is just as strong as any other desire: lust, hunger, greed, revenge.’ 

‘Revenge’, said Michael. ‘Why do I feel that revenge is something I’m being cheated of?’ 

‘Because revenge is a punishment that you impose on somebody who has wronged you. What you’re going to do us now – that’s not a punishment. It’s a natural consequence of everything that’s happened, and we accept it. We could have escaped, you know. Your guns couldn’t have stopped us.
We
decide when our lives are over, not you. And even if you had managed to restrain us, your prisons couldn’t have held us – that’s if any of your judges would have been willing to convict. “Mr Hillary” may be gone, Michael ... but the influence of the Seirim will last for all eternity.’ 

Michael looked at Joseph narrowly. Joseph was taunting him, trying to devalue what he had done. In fact, Michael could sense a deep weariness within him, and an even deeper despair. The death of Azazel had taken away the whole meaning of their strange existence. They had lost their leader, their mentor and their inspiration, the being within whose body the sins of the world had burned like blazing tar. Without him, without Azazel, what was left in the modern world for a pack of vicious, anachronistic strays? 

‘I know why you didn’t escape,’ he told Joseph, in a voice so quiet that nobody else could hear him. ‘You didn’t escape because there’s nothing for you to escape
to.
No purpose, no future. No apocalypse. Nothing.’ 

Joseph continued to smile at him. ‘You’re more complicated than you look, aren’t you, Michael?’ 

‘I am now,’ Michael replied. 

He limped into the middle of the library and held up the zinc-and-copper disc, so that all of the lily-white boys could see it clearly. 

‘Look at this,’ he ordered, and it winked and shone in the sunlight. ‘Look at this, and think of sleep. You’ve never slept, any of you ... but think of it now. Think of resting, think of peace. Think of darkness bathing your eyes.’ 

He paced up and down, holding up the disc so that all of them could see it. 

‘You’re going to sleep now, after months and years and centuries of wakefulness. You’re going to sleep now, and rest for ever ... You’re feeling tired, you’re going to sleep. You’re feeling tired, you’re going to sleep ... ‘ 

As he recited the monotonous words, an extraordinary shiver passed through the library. Books rustled, dust blew from long-undusted shelves. There was a strong, dry aroma of desert in the air, of endless salt flats and sun-beaten pools. There was a dazzling tingle of sunlight, and desiccation. 

Michael felt himself sliding into the darkness of a deep hypnotic trance. As he did so, he felt Matthew close beside him. He could sense his character, proud and primitive and strong. He could sense Megan, too. Softer, but equally determined. The three of them plunged deeper and deeper into their trance – and, as they did so, their auras flickered pinkish-white. It was their combined aura, a high-powered charge of etheric electricity. It danced and dazzled from one to the other, and then gradually died away. Darkness supervened – cold, submarine darkness, in which their auras sank silent and transparent as jellyfish. 

Michael found himself walking along the beach. The sun was blinding but the sky was black. Brilliant white seagulls were nailed motionless in mid-air. His feet made a soft, sugary sound in the sand,
pith – pith – pith.
 

Amongst the dunes lay hundreds of scattered bodies, their torn clothes flapping in the sea breeze. They were the bodies of all of those people who had fallen victim to the lily-white boys – politicians and diplomats, doctors and lawmakers, men of peace and women of devotion, generation after generation. 

Michael discovered that he was weeping, that tears were running freely down his cheeks, and that his throat was constricted with grief. For the first time, he saw the scale of the tragedy. The lily-white boys had ruthlessly killed anybody who had striven to bring people together, anybody who had striven to bring calm and understanding to the world. At the same time, they had also slaughtered thousands and thousands of innocent people, too. All in the name of chaos – all in the name of strife, and jealousy, and cruelty, and war. 

He became aware that Matthew was walking beside him, and then – on the other side – Megan. They exchanged looks but they didn’t speak. They continued to walk toward the shoreline, across the dry, ribbed sand – and in the distance they could see the black, heat-wavered outlines of the lily-white boys. 

They weren’t walking across a beach at all, they were walking across a vast, blinding desert. The sea had somehow shrunk away, and the sand was flat and hard. The sun was thumping down on Michael’s head, and as he walked he began to feel weaker and weaker, and his mouth grew drier and drier. 

The sky remained black. The seagulls remained white and motionless. But somehow Michael felt that the desert was stretching, wider and wider, and that they would never reach the end of it alive. They walked and they walked, saying nothing; but gradually the images of the lily-white boys began to dwindle in the distance, and then they vanished. 

‘We’ve lost them,’ said Megan, in Michael’s head. 

‘They’re playing us for fools,’ said Matthew. ‘They’re stronger than we are ... they’re pulling us away.’ 

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Megan, anxiously. 

‘We don’t have any choice,’ said Michael. ‘We’re here now, we have to go after them.’ 

Matthew made a sign with his left hand, an odd, complicated sign that had been used by Olduvai tribesmen to protect them from the evil eye. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We don’t have no choice. This is our destiny. This is the path we have to walk.’ 

They walked for hours. Yet no time passed. The sun remained fixed in the same position. The seagulls remained frozen. Eventually, however, they saw smoke on the far horizon. A thick black smudge, against a black sky. They saw sparks whirling, and people running and dancing. With unnatural quickness, they found themselves walking through crowds of men and women, all of them dressed in tunics and turbans and djellabas – dull, simple clothes. 

‘Biblical times,’ said Matthew. ‘They’ve taken us back to the days of Aaron.’ 

They walked on, through smoke and dust and dancing people, until they reached a huge crude statue of a goat, made out of mud and straw and painted gold. It had been constructed on a brick plinth, and towered thirty or forty feet into the jet-black sky. Its eyes were two tarry fires, pouring out smoke and sparks. Its horns were curled, and hung with hundreds of human skulls – adult and children’s. They knocked and rattled in the desert wind. 

The lily-white boys were standing on the plinth, silent, waiting, their eyes blood-red, their faces white as kaolin. 

Joseph stepped to the edge of the plinth. ‘You thought that you could defeat us. You thought that we had given up. But we are timeless. We are indestructible. It is you, now, who are going to become ashes. It is you, now, who are going to meet your Maker.’ 

He lifted both hands, and a huge, orgiastic roar went up from the crowds of Levites. Michael turned around, and saw them ripping off each other’s clothes, and tearing at each other. He saw a naked man gouging out a woman’s eyes with his fingers, and cramming them into his mouth, and dancing an obscene, triumphant, hopping dance. He saw six men force a young girl onto the sand, and force themselves into her, all six of them, while she kicked and thrashed and clawed at them. 

Drums thundered, trumpets screamed, and dust rose thickly over the desert, mingling with the tarry smoke of the goat-idol’s eyes. 

‘It is you!’ screamed Joseph. ‘It is you who are going to meet your Maker!’ 

The ground trembled. The screaming grew louder. Through the smoke and the dust, Michael saw rapes and stabbings and stranglings. Blood flew through the air in a fine, sticky shower. 

He closed his eyes in desperation.
They won’t sleep
he
told Megan and Matthew.
They simply won’t sleep.
 

The lily-white boys came down the steps at the side of the plinth, and each of them was carrying two thin metal tubes. They tapped them together in a steady, insistent rhythm. 

They’re going to torture us,
said Megan.
They’re going to suck us dry.
 

Michael turned around, but the orgiastic crowd was pressing too closely for them to escape – just like the crowd in his nightmare. The lily-white boys came closer and closer, tapping their tubes, smiling, their faces as white as fright, their eyes shining red and sleepless and full of revenge. 

Joseph approached Michael and prodded his chest with one of his metal tubes. ‘You really thought that you could make us sleep so easily? You are far too sinful – and so is this woman, with whom you sinned – and so is this man, Matthew. Sinners can never overcome sinners.’ 

The lily-white boys gathered around them, and they rustled and whispered and Michael was so frightened of what they were going to do that he couldn’t even open his mouth. 

The drumming grew louder. The screaming was almost unbearable. Michael saw a woman with her hair on fire, rolling over and over, and a man, castrated, shrieking in pain and desperation. 

The oily smoke rolled over them, and hid them. 

And out of the oily smoke came the brightest of lights. A brilliant incandescence that Michael could scarcely bear to look at. 

At first he thought,
This is it, this is their aura, this is where they kill us.
But then he realized that the lily-white boys were dropping to their knees, one by one, and trying to shield their eyes. Even Joseph finally covered his face, and knelt on the sand, and pressed his forehead against it. 

The light hovered over them, dazzling them all, and then a clear young voice said,
Sleep – you have to sleep.