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Leyland Perree  Synopsis  Tide of Endings

TIDE OF ENDINGS

By

Leyland Perree

PART ONE

Boris Pasternak 1890-1960: Doctor Zhivago (1958)

CHAPTER 1

1

THERE WAS A FEELING OF WEIGHTLESSNESS, of displacement, a sensation akin to falling upwards. The sharp, chemical tang of whiskey and ginger in the back of his throat brought him once again to the brink of nausea. The air reeked of ammonia and cheap aftershave, its combined smell overpowering and sickly sweet. Despite the washroom stink, the air had adopted a tangible quality, resonant with the steady bass beats that came thumping from the nightclub amps beyond the closed door.

The too-bright washroom scrolled upward in his vision like the picture on a faulty television set – ceiling turning into wall, wall into floor – and unable to recover his balance he fell forward. His cheek struck hard upon a cold surface that he assumed was the tiled floor. Opening his eyes a crack, he was surprised to find his own eyes staring back at him from the washroom’s high-fidelity mirror.

Hands had slid up under his arms without him noticing, and he was hauled back into a swaying, uneasy stance.

‘Solomon? You okay?’

Despite the ringing in his ears, and the muted quality of the air, he was able to match a face with the voice. His good friend, Tobias Paulson.

A warm sensation spread across his tongue and the roof of his mouth, along with the bright taste of copper. Blood. He swallowed it back before speaking.

‘M’okay, Paulie. Jus’ got to... sit down.’

‘For God’s sake. You’re bleeding, man.’

He stared at the face that swam before him, the image melding and replicating like cells on a laboratory slide.

‘No, I’m not,’ he protested, and swallowed another mouthful of blood. All evidence gone. He grinned, shook his head and promptly fell down again. A greying man wearing a Bahamas shirt stepped over him, zipping up the fly of his khaki chinos on his way out.

Through the gap in the door, Paulson saw their mutual friend, Maxine, standing just outside the men’s washroom beneath the fronds of a fibreglass banana tree. She peered at Paulson over the rim of her glass. Paulson shrugged and rolled his eyes.

After months of promising, but never accomplishing, the trio of friends had at last hit the clubs together mid-week, purely for the merriment and to let off steam. Now, as he watched his recumbent friend discolour before him, Paulson began to regret ever suggesting the idea. He had known Solomon Finch for over a decade. They had come through college together, found their first jobs together and occasionally they had double-dated at the Reel-Wurld Movie House much to the pique of their respective dates. Therefore he was no stranger to the moment. He ran through the drill he had performed countless times before, hefting Solomon’s debilitated form to his feet and walking him, awkwardly, into the nearest bathroom stall. Then, fighting his friend’s feeble protestations, he managed to force him to his knees with his head over the toilet bowl.

‘I’ll be right here if you need me,’ said Paulson, closing the cubicle door. ‘Let me know when you’re done. Try to throw something up. Trust me, you’ll feel a lot better.’

Soon enough the groaning started. After the brief, but memorable cacophony of nausea, the stall fell to silence.

‘Sol? You done?’ said Paulson, rapping on the stall door.

A low moan emanated from within, followed by the sound of spitting. ‘Yeah...I think so.’

A hearty belch and more spitting, then, ‘Okay, I’m done. Just let me...sit here...for a while.’

Paulson sighed. ‘Okay buddy, you just get yourself together. We’ll have to be going soon though. How do you think you’ll be in five minutes?’

‘Right as rain, Paulie...No problemo.’

Paulson heard the sound of the cubicle latch being drawn across. He rested with his back against the cubicle door, and heaved a heavy sigh. It was a secret concern of his that Solomon couldn’t handle his drink, despite having eaten well enough before the three of them had entered the nightclub. He was pretty much fit and healthy, and enjoyed a drink with fair regularity. Yet it took less than a full hour of casual drinking before Solomon’s cool sobriety degenerated into an abnormal and embarrassing disposition. Different people had different constitutions, he supposed, and therefore different tolerance levels to toxins such as drink or recreational drugs (not that Solomon had ever mounted that particular rodeo bull. If his intolerance to alcohol were anything to go by, he was sure to be tossed and gored before leaving the rodeo pen).

Paulson slipped out of the washroom for a moment, and approached Maxine – the third of their number – who was still waiting for them outside.

‘How is he?’ she asked.

‘Drunk as hell. Let’s just hope he can find painkillers in the house tomorrow morning.’

‘How much did he have to drink, for God’s sake?’

‘Not a lot, Maxi. I matched him drink for drink. But you know what he’s like. Man can’t take the pace.’

Maxine sighed. ‘Let’s go home, Paulie. I’ve had enough for this evening too.’

‘I hear you, babe. Let me just go grab Sunshine before he falls asleep with his head down the bowl.’

Paulson backed through the washroom door, returning once more to the realm of painful light; an ersatz sun scorching a desert of white tile that stank of vomit and urinal cakes.

Why did they have to have the light so bright in there anyhow? He mused. It’s a washroom not a frigging art gallery.

Paulson pressed his ear to the stall door and listened for faint sounds of slumber within. Nothing.

‘Hey, Solomon – how are you doing in there?’ He banged on the door with his fist. ‘Sollie, wake up! It’s time to go.’

Still there was nothing. A dreadful thought entered his head. What if he’d choked? He tried to push open the door, but sure enough it was locked from the inside.

‘Solomon - open up, you cheap drunk!’ he said, hammering hard on the door.

Panic cast aside the evening’s consumption in one sobering instant. Paulson hurled aside the door of the adjoining cubicle and climbed up onto the toilet seat, slipping once in his haste and getting a shoe-full of piss-water for his efforts. Finally, grabbing hold of the top edge of the dividing wall, he pulled himself up just enough that he was able to peer down over the other side.

The stall next door was empty.

2

SUNLIGHT FILTERED THROUGH the lush, green canopy of the Amazon, bathing the banks of a shallow, lazy river in shafts of ethereal light. A swarm of flying insects milled in the air above the clearing, tracing their dance of geometric choreography in the heavy air; a stark contrast against the constant, drifting swell that tugged gently at the shoreline of fallen branches and fertile river-mud.

The dreamy whine of insects and the burbling river water lapping at the bank was interrupted by a rustling as the foliage at the end of the clearing spread slowly open. A dark-faced male - a huntsman of an indigenous tribe - raised his face from the safety of the dense undergrowth. His quick, bright eyes scanned the banks of the river for danger. All was still, all was safe. He overstepped a fallen limb stripped bare of bark by rot and herbaceous jungle-life, delivering, as he did so, a chatter of soft dialect, and holding aside the greenery for the man who followed close behind.

The second man was of larger build than the small, compact huntsman. He was tall and thicker-muscled, and sported the flamboyant decoration, markings and spiritual charms of the Saman; a Tungus term for the performer of healing rituals, referred to in the Western Hemisphere as the Shaman.

The huntsman stepped out into the clearing, his bare feet leaving shallow prints upon the soft earth of the Amazon Basin. The Saman followed closely, loosening the tie of a hide pouch slung around his neck. The two walked side by side to the edge of the river, where insects swarmed over a body; a third tribesman - the man they had come to find.

The huntsman spoke in his native tongue and gestured back at the route they had taken; the Saman flapped his hand dismissing the guide and, saying nothing, he crouched by the slumped body. The man had been alive when the Saman had first been summoned. It was said that he had been possessed by spirits, and unresponsive to sight, sound or touch. He was catatonic, but alive nonetheless. But it had taken time to get here from the village, and it was time neither the Saman nor the dying man had. Now it was too late for this one, that much was clear. The jungle had already tried to claim the body back. The facial features were torn and the tip of the nose was missing; a tasty morsel for the scavengers that patrolled shady regions beneath the immense canopy of green. One foot was dangling in the water and was in danger of becoming Piranha-exclusive Guppy-Chow.

The huntsman padded back across the clearing into the fuller shade of the trees, and stood there awhile, gazing back upon the body, lying limp against the trunk of a tree like a stringless puppet.

The Saman waved the huntsman away for a second time and watched as the native disappeared into the dense cover of leafy ferns before setting about the burial preparations. He would do this alone, just as the ritual demanded. Removing a pinch of silver ash from the pouch hanging at his breast, the Saman daubed a smeared cross on his own forehead. This he repeated for the corpse. He then took a wooden handled knife with a wicked curved blade and opened the back of the dead mans hand letting the dark blood fall into a small guano bowl that he had set on the rich soil. He proceeded to finger-paint tribal markings in blood upon the semi-naked body, covering the torso in swirls, spots and sweeping strokes of deep crimson. The rustling of the retreating huntsman subsided, and eventually became silent. He was gone. The healer cast about the clearing and, once satisfied he was alone, he tossed the bowl and its coagulating contents into the river.

‘Goddamnit!’ he said, rubbing the ash from his brow with the back of one hand and flicking the cold, dead blood from his fingers. ‘Talk about not taking the hint!’

He stood, put his hands to his hips, and sighed. ‘Another one lost. Damned primitive cultures, would it not hurt to have some form of transport. Four-by-four? Even a damn raft would have done.’

He let the air out from between his pursed lips in a serpentine hiss, and began to drag the body into the river where the water had started to boil with the activity of unseen flesh-eating fish, eager for more than a little blood and a bowl made from bat-shit.

On second thoughts, he concluded, maybe going by river wouldn't have been such a good idea.

A muffled ringing emanated from his loins. He reached beneath the furred wrap, which barely concealed his manhood, withdrew a small bundle of tan hide, and unwrapped it. The telephone was small, about the same size as a conventional cellular telephone, except no cellular signal could have hoped to reach him so far into the jungle. Satellite phones were for the most part huge, cumbersome devices, the smallest of which was comparable to a standard notebook computer. His was state-of-the-art, developed by his own company, or to be more truthful, the company for which he had inherited co-ownership: Hamill-Harding Logistics & Research.

The musical tone increased in volume. Having no need to check the caller display (there was no doubt in his mind as to whom it could be) Harding unfolded the handset, and answered.

‘I thought I told you not to call me here... No, no. We were too late. Okay, if you want to split hairs, I was too late. I got held up back there. You have to form a trust with these people. They’re very suspicious of new faces, even people masquerading as one of their own.’

He listened to the voice and interrupted, rolling his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, but what can you do? I’m here in the middle of Eden’s backlot, with nothing but a cell-phone and a free-swinging cock. Look, this one’s gone all stiff ’n’ stinky. Of course I mean the body! Yeah - but listen: I may be going out on a limb here, but I say he’s fertiliser, in which case I’m outta here.’

The voice broke through loud and sharp, crackling through the small handset.

Harding replied, ‘What? Another one? So where is it now, some frozen icebox at the edge of the world, or maybe you’d have me dodging .38 hollow tips in Detroit’s graffiti ganglands?’

He theatrically smacked the palm of one hand against his forehead. ‘Oh no, wait, we’ve done that already haven’t we? So where then?’

He raised his eyebrows and nodded, the phone still pressed against his ear. ‘Well, doesn’t that sound nice. Of course, I’ll set off first thing tomorrow.’

Folding the SatPhone back together, he clipped it to the waistband of his dignity.

The calls were becoming more frequent, each one more urgent than the last, and he was beginning to tire of the whole raw deal. He had never met the man who fed to him the information he required to do his bidding, but had so far remained faithful to his cause, which added yet another mysterious slant to the deal; he had never been given any sort of reason as to why he was required to hunt down these stricken souls from the most obscure and often inaccessible of the planet’s regions. Nevertheless, due to the constant financial support and the comfortable lifestyle he was able to maintain, he never questioned it either. This latest escapade - or perhaps it was the heat - had made him somewhat irritable, and for the first time he entertained the thought: WHY?

‘Well, my friend,’ he said gazing at the body lying before him. ‘It looks like this is goodbye. Civilisation beckons with all its miracles and wonders.’

Harding hunkered down and grabbed the deceased’s bottom jaw, with his forefinger circling the chin and his thumb pressed against the wattle. He rattled it up and down, in a morose parody of a ventriloquist’s dummy, the two rows of teeth clicking together as the head lolled on its narrow trunk of a neck.

‘Your choice, ugly.’

The sunlight, weaving through the forest canopy, caught something embedded in the ravaged face of the dead tribesman as it flopped around like a balloon on a stick. The dark man bent closer to the raw mess, which had taken on the visage of a skull; noseless, eyes rolled back, the remains of the lips were shrivelled and dry. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand.

Again there was a glint of silver from the farthest reaches of the nasal cavity. He tilted back the dead weight of the man’s head and located the source. It was small and held the appearance of a bright silver sequin, but was slightly convex and lens-like.

Harding thrust his hand into the pouch of ash he wore around his neck, causing the fine powder to spill out and patter to the ground like milky rain. He pulled forth from the ash a single polythene baggie, and once more took up the sabre-bladed dagger. Then, pausing only to wipe the perspiration from his eyes, he proceeded to remove the object from the man’s skull. The small slippery stud seemed stuck firmly in place within the heat shrivelled flesh, but with perseverance and a barrage of expletives, it came away with a loud snap, dragging with it a trailing loop of bloody mucus. Triumphant, Harding held the prize aloft, examining it in the sunlight. ‘Amen’, he muttered to himself and flicked the goop from the silver pellet with his forefinger. Something small fell from the item to land on the moist earth between his feet. He crouched and poked at it with one sticky finger. It appeared to be the remains of some kind of larvae, now dried to a husk by the unforgiving sun. It crumbled away when he tried to pick it up. No matter, he had found what he had come looking for. He consigned the knife to the river, and zip-sealed the item into the plastic bag, concealing it once again inside the hide pouch with a scattering of "sacred" ash.

Today wasn’t a total loss after all, he mused. At least I’ve got something to work with now, and a cushy assignment to look forward to.

Harding grunted as he tipped the body from the bank and into the shallows, and used a stout branch torn from the undergrowth to push the body out into deeper waters; a gift to the Amazon. A pink indefinable shape spread out like bat-wings from the dark smudge of the body, as the finned scavengers tore at their free meal. Harding smiled to himself as he watched the body sink into the reddening river.

See ya. Wouldn’t wanna be ya.

He made his way back into the dark, humid confines of the rainforest, thoughts of fortune and glory turning over in his mind.

He was tired of trail walking, the heat and moisture drained him, as did the constant façade he was forced to perform in order to gain the trust of the natives. It definitely put the sham in Shaman. He felt glad to be returning to civilisation, along with its many forms of underwear. All that running around without testicular support really tugged at his balls.

He yanked hard at the string of charms that he wore around his right arm, snapping the thong, and releasing the small bone carvings and animal teeth in a shower of ivory upon the forest floor. One tiny effigy remained in his hand, its fanged maw grinning inanely from a distinctly feline face.

Ah yes, the jaguar. The familiar of the Shaman, he recollected. It is, in many ways, like myself. Cunning, smart, an opportunist.

He paused, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

Yet unlike you, my inanimate friend, I’m no indolent fat-cat. This next one will not slip through my fingers, I’ll make sure of that.

He considered tossing the carving into the bushes, and then after a moment’s hesitation he closed his fingers over it.

A keepsake, he thought. For luck.

Whistling a fine rendition of Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, Damon Harding forced his way through the wet and leafy ferns into the jungle beyond. Another job done. Then as the river water calmed once more to lap gently at the bank, and the drowsy insects resumed their avionics, his tuneful epitaph faded out to become one with the whisperings of the Amazon Basin.

3

NEW DENTON CITY, COASTLINE OF CENTRAL EUROPE 08.42AM

A soft, warbling chime eased Solomon Finch from his heavy slumber. His aching brain spasmed into life, struggling as it tried to separate his conscious from his subconscious. Yolk from white; two sides of the same coin. Propping himself up on one elbow, he shook the remnants of dreams from his head. The throb in his skull transformed into a stabbing white-hot needle as he pried open his sleep-sticky eyes. Wincing, he squinted past the shaft of sunlight which streamed in from between the curtains. The infernal compulsive tone continued to vibrate from somewhere within the room. He traced the irritating noise to a red plastic telephone, rigged to the wall by a single carpenter’s nail. Beneath the telephone was his alarm clock, ticking happily away atop a small three-drawer dresser. He stared for a few seconds at the clock face trying to outmanoeuvre the floating bacterium image swimming lazily across the surface of his eyes.

‘Uh? Wah? Shid nuh!’

McConaughy was the Section Supervisor in the department of the office where Solomon worked...where he was supposed to be sitting at his terminal in approximately eighteen minutes and counting.

He rolled out of the inflatable armchair in which he found himself, and landed on his hands and knees amongst a necropolis of crumpled beer cans. Picking himself up from the floor, he stumbled with leaden feet across the threadbare carpet to the telephone. He coughed, clearing his throat, ran his waxen tongue over lips that felt as if they had once belonged to a professional street-fighter, and picked up.

‘Yeah...Hello?’ There was no answer. In his drowsy state it took him a moment before he realised that the telephone had kept on ringing. Solomon hung up and still it continued to sound. He picked up the receiver again, and again there was no difference.

Darned thing’s busted, he thought. Sod it. I have neither the time nor the energy to deal with shit like this right now.

He reset the receiver and staggered out of the bedroom doorway.

4

‘PICK UP, FINCH.’

Paulson drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of the shiny new BMW coupé he had hired for the job interview that morning. He had no experience of working the stock market, and his history of employment to date consisted of a meagre handful of "dead-enders". However, on this occasion he was quietly confident; a friend of his father had put in a good word, so on that basis he figured the job for a dead cert. And if he scored at the interview, then scoring with Jacqueline would only be a matter of time.

For Paulson, every other technique and trick he’d employed to get with Maxine’s stunning work-friend had crashed and burned in the most unflattering of ways. It was no secret that Jacqueline was impressed, indeed seduced, by the flashier cars, the bigger house, the more successful man. Paulson’s car was rented, true, but if it was all he needed to successfully bluff his way through one poxy interview, and into Jacqueline’s bed, then more power to him.

But then there was the intellectual factor to consider. According to Maxine, Jacqueline almost always fell for the smart-type; men who could hold a conversation without having to rely on crass humour to fill the silences; men whose attention never faltered, whose eyes never wandered; men who didn’t talk to one’s breasts.

Paulson had been indulging his intellectual side for the last two weeks, and he really thought he had that sucker screwed to the wall. He had watched the movie Fight Club four times in as many days, and by the third viewing he started to see things in a sobering light. The gloves were off. Now he thought about stuff that was way beyond his former comprehension.

He figured that image was everything in the stockbroker’s market; the more expensive the car was, the more shrewd a businessman the driver had to be. Credentials meant nothing to a financial war machine fuelled by consumerism, lubricated by the assumption of its own tenacity. A company-wide workforce of six thousand employees in twelve cities across the country, and half of them had started their first day of work parking up in a car inferior to that which they drove to their initial interview. The other half actually owned their flash-looking, hot-waxed penis extensions, and not just rented them for Interview Day.

Consumerism; the invisible cancer gnawing into the gut of the planet, sending out little nervous shocks in the form of trends. Fashion, music, entertainment, the high-life made affordable to the lowlifes, the low made fashionable for the high; heroin-chic; the current trend of sexual abstinence versus the returning trend of Sixties free-love; derms of Novocain for people with an aversion to needles, acupuncture for those with a penchant for them; adopt your very own star; give a powerful multinational corporation a home this Christmas; a rugged man standing thirty feet tall on a city billboard can do so with pride because he wears one-hundred percent pure unbleached cotton briefs; the ravaged thumbs of the Playstation Generation; txt mssgng ;-) ; ribbed for all our pleasures. Consumerism.

But forget that for a moment – oh man, did she have a fantastic rack, or what?

Paulson cancelled the call and switched off his phone. It was possible that Solomon may have left for work already, but he doubted it from the state his friend was in the night before.

It was a miracle that they found him when they did, slumped against the railings of the club’s rear fire escape. There had been spots of fresh blood on his collar and caked around his nose, probably from when he fell in the club washroom. How on earth Solomon got out there without him noticing, Paulson could not hope to guess.

Both himself and Maxine were just glad to have found him at the time, having lost their drunken friend for almost three-quarters of an hour.

Paulson had carried him out of the club, and caught a taxicab back to the small house Solomon had inherited from his late grandfather. Paulson wished he had stayed with him now, but the interview...

Still, no use in worrying now. He would have to get hold of Maxine after his appointment. If by lunchtime neither of them had heard from Solomon, then they could worry. The trouble was, by that time it might take something stronger than some time-proven malodorous hangover remedy to wake him. A cardio-defibrillator may even have as little success.

Paulson looked at his watch. It was precisely eight-fifty. He got out of the car, noticing with relish that, as he did so, the slatted blinds of several of the building’s windows opened a little. Spy holes for inquisitive eyes. The Beemer was working a treat.

How do you do? My name is Paulson, Tobias Paulson. I’m here for the nine-o’clock with Mr Bradley Lovemeet. If he could get through the interview without breaking into a smirk every time he heard the name Lovemeet it would be a miracle indeed.

5

ONE DENIM JACKET and three expressos later, Solomon stepped out into the amber morning sun, pulling the door closed behind him. He tugged on his coat as he hurried down the path. He didn't really need it for it was a beautiful morning, but his coat was more a vast receptacle for the various wallets, cardholders, keys and general flotsam that he carried around with him. He patted his right breast pocket, and stopped in his tracks.

It was too late. The door-lock had already clicked firmly into place. Solomon shut his eyes and sighed. He patted his trouser pockets; change jangled in the right. Solomon pulled it forth and counted it, sifting out buds of lint, and receipts for milk and chocolate.

No use going by road, he thought. The holiday season traffic was bad enough, but the annual carnival was due in town today. He couldn’t have picked a worse day to be late if he’d tried.

So, fifteen minutes into his day, his nerves ablaze with stress and the peppery hit of caffeine, Solomon Finch swept his way down the path that led from his house to meet the spruce-lined cul-de-sac in which he lived.

6

THE SUMMER SUN was riding its trajectory through the morning haze. Despite the morning’s mild temperature, a steady jog from his home to the outskirts of the New Denton suburbs brought a sheen of perspiration to Solomon's face and neck. He unfastened the top two buttons of his shirt, relishing the ventilation. By the time he had turned the corner into Adelaide Avenue, the necktie was off, balled up and crammed into one trouser pocket.

While the Avenue itself was crawling with Carnival Day traffic, the pavements were rush hour multiplied to the Nth power. As far as he could see along the wide, straight stretch, an ocean of heads, bobbing and rippling like one great organic carpet, reached on up the two-mile gentle incline into the centre of the city. Ulcer-ridden businessmen flit like bewildered moths, zigzagging across his path in the relentless stream of nameless faces and novelty ties. Their female counterparts - mantis-faced, painted and dressed to empower - stalked them with calculated finesse. The avenue’s kerb-stones served as emotive sluice gates; their purpose, to channel and contain the gnawing worry and misguided sexual tension exuded from the countless passing bodies in swirls and eddies like some poisonous, creeping pheromone. The street was essentially a killing jar. Merciless. Subtle. Final.

Solomon ejected himself from the critical flow and ducked into a stairwell leading down to the echoing subway. Pausing at the top of the flight, he wiped his eyes on the bend of his wrist - the day was going to be another scorcher that was for sure. Then he descended the gum-spotted steps into the humming subterranean sprawl of the station.

The clutter of the underground was a pale reflection of the heaving traffic that dominated the streets above, but without the endless gridlock, the impatient revving of motors and the greasy aftertaste of perspiration and monoxide fume. By day the station existed as a single platform, which supported the daily hustle and bustle of commuters, but at night it was sanctuary to the infernal; the tramp whose only solace was the pain in his stomach – the only constant of his uncertain future; the station whore, stalked by her omnipresent pimp; and the strung-out insomniac, incapable of sleep, but too weary to do anything but worry about his flagging business and apathetic family - his restless nights haunted by impotent musings, like whether to catch the horizon-bound dawn train, forever to leave behind his decaying life, or instead to embrace that growing, nagging urge and succumb to the lure of the tracks, beckoning siren-like from their bed of loose stones.

Daylight chases away much more than shadows, Solomon thought to himself, as he joined the short queue at the ticket booth. Behind the glass sat a man of well-defined features and a flawless composure.

‘One return to Oaklands, please’ Solomon requested when his turn came around.

‘Oaklands Depot? Two-ninety. Thank y'sir.’

A mechanical screech heralded the imprinting of the ticket, and the booth operator tore the stub from the machine, where it emerged as a paper tongue. Solomon palmed it. The train he had heard as he entered the station was docked at the platform and people still clamoured around the carriages; some eager to enter while others were glad to exit. Solomon glanced down at the ticket. This was his train. No time to dally. He joined the masses on the platform of Adelaide Avenue Underground and boarded the carriage.

7

SeatING HIMSELF beside a window, Solomon tried to relax, at least for the moment, as the journey to work would now be in the hands of the train’s driver. He let his head fall back against the foam headrest and allowed the tension to disperse slowly out of his body. The train moved off and gained momentum. Even in his state of forced relaxation, he could feel his heart pounding sorely against his ribs; the three cups of Caribbean Black percolating in his bloodstream. He was twitching like road-kill.

Solomon adjusted his position so that he could look out of the window. There wasn't much to see at first, as the train had only just pulled out of the station and into the floodlit tunnels. Soon enough the light show started. As the train gained speed and rattled down the underground tubes, it passed beneath the tunnel’s fluorescent lights, illuminating the carriages in flashes of anaemic ice blue. Always in three's. Flashflashflash.

Solomon shivered. An unsettling feeling scuttled insect-like across the back of his neck. A notion struck him that in the intermittent darkness he was being watched. He cast about the carriage. A man sat across the aisle from him, on the diagonal opposite, his face a silver mask, painted by the oppressed light. He looked a little like an extra from a string-and-matchbox science fiction film, face powdered with glittering moon-dust.

Flashflashflash.

Two rows down an old woman had died in her seat, the colour and life drained from her with the expulsion of the warm spectrum. However dead she might have first appeared, dead she was not. A tightening of her hands upon her purse followed a nervous facial tick, as she flinched under scrutiny.

Flashflashflash.

Solomon caught a glimpse of something moving at the edge of his vision, coasting in spasmodic stop-motion away from the blue-flash as the tunnel lighting sped down the length of the train. He jerked his head up. It was gone, lost in the shadows and kinetic brilliance. Yet, there it was again, at the top of the aisle, moving with liquid grace. And again it was gone. Solomon frowned and stepped into the aisle. He looked up and down the length of the carriage. Nothing, except for the cargo of commuters and luggage, lit in cold blue, silver and black. Solomon picked his way up the aisle, negotiating ill-placed luggage and straying legs, towards the door that led to the next compartment. He looked back down the length of the carriage. No, whoever it was had definitely come this way. He turned back and peered through the pane in the carriage door.

And a porcelain face stared back at him.

Solomom jumped back, drawing a sharp intake of breath, gagging on his own tongue for an instant, then recovering quickly he slapped at the door button. As the partition moved aside, his head had started to thump again, echoing every second thud of his quickening heart. Light flooded in from the next carriage in a blinding, golden cascade. Solomon averted his eyes away from the brightness, eager for them to adjust, and it was with the return of his sight that he noticed a figure, a silhouette standing just beyond the doorway. Solomon felt the urge to scream.

The figure was unmoving, standing patiently in front of him. Waiting. Expectant. It was through a medium of gradual understanding, rather than through the aural sense that Solomon realised that a response was expected of him.

‘Wh-what? What do you want?’

‘Are yer gettin' off here?’ the train staff repeated his question. ‘Oaklands Depot. In't that what’s on yer ticket?’

Solomon looked around. Both the carriage he had just left and the one he could see past the uniformed man were deserted. The docking lights were lit, and through the hand-smudged window to his left he could see the ceramic-tiled pillars of Oaklands Station, with its colourful gallery of billposters and graffiti.

‘Eh? Oh, yes. Thank you,’ Solomon stammered as his mind attempted to search for the reason why he hadn’t heard the man first speak, and why it had only seemed like minutes since he had stepped on board the train. The carriage had returned to the amber of station lighting and was deserted. Stranger still why, when he had peered through the pane of glass in the partitioning door, had there been darkness cloaking the pale face, obscuring the feminine doll-like features from absolute definition, and none of the blinding fluorescent light that now illuminated the entire train?

The train had arrived at the station and all the passengers had already disembarked, leaving the impression that the train had in fact been stationed for several minutes. But how could he not have noticed? There were no discernible announcements or the judder of deceleration, and he had even gazed from the train window at the speeding tunnel walls only moments before.

Solomon struggled to make sense of the unease that gripped him as he stepped from the carriage to the desolate platform. Had he experimented with hallucinogens in his youth he could expect blackspots of this kind. But all the while his former friends had been tracing each others elastic faces across the walls of the University Library, he had managed to cast off their efforts to include him in their so-called "fun" and had turned his attention to his studies. His education, as far as he had been concerned back then, would provide him with all the stimulation he would ever need, and could in theory pay for more chemicals than his friends could ever dream of. And yet here he was, late for a job he hated and for which he could not care less, while his former college buddies worked in bigger companies, in bigger cities, and still - for all he knew - took bigger amounts of those substances he dared not touch those few years earlier.

Solomon sighed. One day, he told himself, something will change.

He had by this time wandered, still a little shaken, over to the foot of the exit stairwell when movement from the shadows caught his eye. In an instant, the uneasy recognition of what he had witnessed finally hit home with all the subtlety of a nail-bomb. That face! The one he had stared into just moments ago through the partition door glass - it resembled Maxine. And that same face now studied him from the shadows beneath the stairwell, with dark ringed eyes and a predatory smile.

Maxine was a long-time friend and one of Solomon's present work colleagues. He had known her since his college graduation and since then they had come to be close friends. Twice they had almost got together. Both of those occasions were at New Years Eve parties on two consecutive years, and on the night of second year they had slept together, and afterwards remained friends.

Solomon was the first to admit, albeit to himself, that she was a fair looker, but not exactly beautiful. Her body was athletic and wiry, slim but not dainty. Scars left over from an ugly bout of teenage acne speckled her jaw line and forehead. Her hazel eyes were obliquely set endowing her with a feline air, as did her nose, small and rounded, and slightly upturned. The whole collaboration of the rugged and the fine threw her aesthetic appearance open to question: Supermodel-pretty or bulldog ugly?

Yet the sum of the many unpretty things that contributed to her unique image, Solomon thought, produced a quality in her that was at least best described as attractive. Her bittersweet personality contributed to the mix. Maxine was down-to-earth in her attitude as well as her looks, and her deadpan humour made Solomon laugh, which counted for a lot. Somehow the ability to make him laugh seemed to stifle those few attributes that were less than comely.

Solomon realised that he was staring. He cleared his throat.

‘Maxine? What are you doing here? We should both be in work. I-’

She emerged from beneath the stairwell. Now it was not Maxine. The streetwalker - a fatigued forty-something dressed in a black-feathered coat - stepped out into the flickering yellow light of the station’s fluorescent tubes. She looked him up and down and smiled a painted charade.

‘Weelll, I kind of AM at work, hunnybun,’ she crowed.

‘I-I'm sorry. I thought you were somebody else,’ stuttered Solomon.

He hurried up the steps towards the glare of natural light, laying her echoing laughter to rest in the empty subway.

Minutes later, as he strode along Oaklands Boulevard, something bothered him much more than the whore and her empty laugh, and that was the fact that he still could not fathom what had happened back in the train carriage. It was Maxine he had seen, he was sure of it now. Even before the whore has stepped out from the shadow of the steps, he would have bet his job on it being Maxine who had peered out from between the treads. Yes, it was...but then it wasn't. And when he closed his eyes and tried to replay the train journey, to locate amongst the madness some shred of understanding, there was blackness. Blackness, and within it glowed the tiniest point of shimmering white like a distant star, beckoning for him to gaze upon it, but when he did, it too was swallowed up by the lurid dark. And then, in the void between sight and thought, he was alone.

8

MAXINE DRANK her mineral water with deep and thirsty gulps. The heat of the day’s first quarter was nibbling away at her concentration and the numbers on the screen made little sense any more. She let her gaze drift across the spacious office to the clock on the far wall. The time was seventeen minutes past ten o’clock. She glanced back at the computer terminal. The yellow corporate logo, CERBERUS BUSINESS SOLUTIONS INC, throbbed at her through the anti-glare filter from where it nested in the top-right corner of her screen.

Screw this, she thought. Solomon would be able to make sense of the Aston-Kline account - nonsensical piece of shit. She dialled an extension on the internal line. Ominous tones pulsed through the telephone speaker.

‘C'mon Solomon. Pick up.’

Silence followed tone, followed silence, followed tone.

‘Shit.’ Maxine hung up, quick-saved and logged out. Then she got up out of her chair, and walked out of the office.

In the outside corridor she depressed the call-button to summon the elevator car. The distant rumblings of the elevator motor hauling a hundred feet of steel cable came floating up out of the shaft. It was not long before the car had risen to her level and the doors opened. Maxine stepped inside, and pushed the button for the floor below.

Moments later she stepped out onto the emerald green carpet of the third floor, and made her way with quick steps to office 17h.

Peering through the glass before trying the handle, she saw the unoccupied desk and dormant computer terminal of Solomon Finch. Maxine pushed the door and poked her head in, scanning the busy office; the copier, fax, and stationary rack. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘Hey,’ she called to an office junior, who was tentatively laminating an official-looking document, ‘Has Mr. Finch been in at all today?’

‘Not that I know of. I haven't seen him all morning.’

His concentration broken, the young man did not notice the document catching on the lip of the laminator’s casing and wrapping back around the roller inside. Maxine did, and thought she had better make her exit quickly.

‘Okay,’ she smiled, hurrying out of the room. ‘Not to worry. If you see him can you tell him to ring me on extension 313? Thanks.’

She pulled the door behind her, not waiting for a reply, and strolled back to the lift. It had risen, having been summoned two floors up. From the inside of office 17h came a yell of surprise followed by a barrage of panicked obscenities.

‘Oops,’ said Maxine, as she took to the stairs.

Ascending the flight, she began to feel uneasy about her friend’s failure to turn up for work. How bad a hangover can one man get from just two hours of drinking? And where the hell had he been for that last elusive forty minutes of the previous evening?

As for this morning, maybe Solomon had just overslept, and if he was running late - which was not unusual for Solomon - she might be making things considerably worse for him by making inquiries into his whereabouts. No, she would drop by his house at the end of the day, just to quiet her concern, if he didn’t show up in the meantime.

Muffled fanfare and the hazy compositions of a brass band, drifted on the breeze along with the city dust, and the indistinct tones barely reached the edge of Maxine's hearing. She cocked her head to one side, listening, and hurried up the remaining steps to the floor above.

‘It's here!’ she announced to a room of blank faces, as she entered the office and made her way back to her terminal.

‘Carnival Day?’ she said, as if the name itself explained everything. ‘And on Carnival Day it's not unusual for the carnival to come to town. Look!’

She tilted open the nearest window. The music wafted in like a vapour, accompanied by the strong stench of diesel. In the distance she could see the procession snaking a winding path down the middle of the street, flying their flags and waving banners. Large papier-mâché heads in the image of clowns, dragons and the stereotypical mockery of devils, bobbing and turning as they soaked in the attention of the people lining the streets.

Carnival Day came around every year and every year the public fell for the merchandise, double-priced consumables and over-priced junk. Children raced and played in the streets with painted faces, and sticky hands grasping silver balloons and cheap plastic windmills - the fruits of their constant tugging on the sleeves of their parents, grandparents or weekend fathers.

It was a different world out there. A world that - at least for Maxine, who was stuck in a stuffy office, looking down upon the streets of colour, music and magical lure - she resented with illogical envy. She didn't even enjoy Carnival Day that much; it was more of a kid’s thing. But the feeling of exclusion was something that festered within her, releasing spores of resentment for her employers and those who embraced the freedom to enjoy the event.

Maxine cast the thought aside, her mind turning once more to her friend and colleague, Solomon Finch. She glanced again at the clock. She had by this time been logged out for twelve minutes, and really needed to get back to the loathsome account. Solomon was over an hour late. It troubled her deeply - he had never been this tardy before - so it was a given that she would call by his house after work.

With an effort, both begrudging and resolute, Maxine focused her attention on her computer terminal and tapped in her password.

9

‘THIS IS INCREDIBLE,’ Harding murmured as he peered down the eyepiece of a high-powered portable microscope. He sat at a makeshift bench in a rundown one-room shack, located in a backwoods South American township. The structure, which barely qualified as a building, was known by the locals as "Plaza Roach", and was used by outlanders for various nefarious dealings, spanning everything from gunrunning to making snuff films. In places the torn floorboards were stained as dark and dubious as the Roach’s history.

Harding had arrived back in good time and, as instructed, the fourteen-year old local boy had been waiting for him at the appointed location; a foot-track - no more than a ravaged patch of land - where the forest thinned out to scrub and grasses. He had been carrying a change of clothes and a canteen half-filled with warm, stale water meant for drinking. Harding had paid the boy what he had promised and stayed to watch him rattle his way out of sight along the uneven trail, upon a bicycle that had seen better days. The water he fed to the vegetation; he kept a fresh supply in a cooler back at the rundown shack.

Since his return Harding had washed and dressed, ate a little food and quenched his thirst with safe bottled water, chilled and refreshing. That taken care of, he set himself to work on more important issues.

The thing was held in place beneath the magnifier lens with a small piece of chewing gum; in such a place a person had to use whatever he could find.

It was about the size of a popcorn kernel, oyster-shaped, with a polished chrome-like surface. But beyond the human eye it was much, much more. Through the magnificence of technology the degree of craftsmanship became majestically apparent. Even when viewed under the highest magnification setting the surface was perfectly smooth. However, it was not finished in chromium. Nor was it any other material of a similar nature, as all would have shown up as peaks and valleys under the microscope’s uncompromising eye. There were no seams, joins, or fastenings, nor was there any evidence of cast moulding. The only marked features were two small openings at the "hinge-end" of the device. If, indeed, it was a device.

The openings were tiny apertures set within twin chutes cut with immaculate precision into the mirrored shell.

Harding was intrigued, but infuriated, as he possessed neither the time nor the technology to investigate the object further. For the moment it would remain a conundrum, its purpose elusive, and yet right within his grasp. That, however, was only a matter of time.

He removed the device from the slide and placed it in a portable icebox, packing soft bladders of ice-crystal around it. On top of this he placed a rack of corked phials containing a range of coloured liquids. The microscope he dismantled with expertise and stored in a polystyrene packing crate.

He glanced at his watch. His flight would be leaving in two hours and its eventual destination was a place Harding felt sure he had some connection with. Whether by time, event or person, the coastal metropolis was a postcard from his colourful past. But why? Then it came to him. Good. There was time enough to make some additional arrangements - to call in a favour. Namely from one entrepreneurial chemist of Hispanic blood, William Charles Rodriguez, who operated a chain of small pharmaceutical stores scattered throughout Europe, one of which was in this named city. Harding had done him favours in the past, and now the time had come to call them in.

He dialled the number from memory.

‘Billy? Yes, it’s Damon Harding.’

There was a pause. Harding thought he could hear the man’s stuttering pulse through the telephone receiver. Finally, there came the confirmation of understanding.

‘Good,’ said Harding. ‘You remember. Okay, I need you to do something for me. You still got the place on the coast?’ Another pause.

‘That’s great, Billy.’ He paused. ‘I’ll be arriving in about, say, eighteen hours. That should be an hour before midday tomorrow. You’ll be there? Good.’

Harding paused thoughtfully.

‘Oh...and Billy? This business is to be kept private, you understand. I’ll see you then.’

He hung up. Being of a superstitious nature since his early childhood, he touched the ivory jaguar charm he now wore on a chain beneath his shirt. Lady Luck and he had dated unsuccessfully in these most recent days, and although this latest development hinted at a turning of the tide, now was not a good time for the relationship to go stale.

For Harding, tomorrow couldn’t come around soon enough, though he knew that Rodriguez would have put it off indefinitely, had he not been so terrified of the consequences. Failing to return a favour often carried a severe penalty, especially where Damon Harding was concerned. Rodriguez was already familiar with that concept.

A vehicle horn sounded outside, splitting the air with its rusty herald. His ride was here.

Harding gathered together his belongings and carried them out to the waiting cattle truck. A much more comfortable climate awaited his arrival; a coastal town where the chauffeurs did not chew tobacco and the limousines were devoid of cow-dung.

The city was called New Denton.

10

SOLOMON NEGOTIATED the thickening crowd, making gradual progress by way of graceful strategy in favour of physical force; side step, give-way, proceed into the space. An intermittent push, shove and whispered apology was an occasional necessity. Half the city's population, it seemed, were out enjoying the rising heat of summer, watching the brightly coloured floats drift along Carnival Row with their cargo of dancers, jugglers and people in exceptional fancy dress.

He returned his attention to the downhill haul that would eventually lead him to work, and recommenced pushing his way through the masses. Between the CBS office block and the breach in the crowd through which he slipped was a seemingly impassable expanse of slothful human traffic that followed the procession like rats to the hypnotic tune of the fabled Hamlin piper.

The other side of the street was less overrun, so Solomon decided to cross over. He waited for an approaching float to pass before he made his short dash. As it rolled past him he allowed himself to marvel at the work and creative thought that had gone into its construction; stark white fibreboard gave shape to the plinth and formed the basis of the scenery that appeared to be an interpretation of the Pearly Gates. Tinsel, paper-shapes and white lace hung like frosted vines and a huge hand-painted banner spanned the length of the platform, and sported the words, THE NEW DENTON WOMEN’S GUILD CHORAL CLUB in a flowing, romantic script.

The choir stood erect in neat formation atop the float, in rows of staggered heights. Except for their lips they were inanimate, and singing more from memory than from their song sheets. In stark comparison, the children of the NDWG "Tackers" (aged between six and twelve) danced upon the rolling stage that followed, dressed in white shorts and tee-shirts, and wheeling silver ribbons through the air in watery arcs. They span and dipped and leapt about in the manner befitting junior cheerleaders, or auditioners for a Broadway dance troupe, and all the while the choir sang on, themselves almost a fixture of the scenery, yet empowered by the charismatic acapella of traditional folksong.

‘I am the Lord of the Dance, said He,’ the choir sang and the children whirled past like pocket ice storms. Solomon seized his chance and pushed his way through a gap in the crowd and darted, quick and low, across the road toward the other side. Past the far rear corner of the Fellowship float, he spotted a fluctuating gap between an ancient couple whose hair was far richer in colour than their senior years would have naturally decreed.

Solomon stepped out and, in hurried after-thought, glanced quickly left-right for road traffic. The Row was closed to civilian vehicles, with both lanes having been reserved for the single flow of the carnival. Not a part of the Carnival procession, but admitted access nonetheless, was a small silver van with speakers mounted in even rows above the windshield. It travelled quickly up the road, slipping past the floats in order to take its place at the head of the procession. The speakers honked their distorted message of promotion for Edgar Blake, a local entrepreneur who was running for Mayor for the second term in a row. The small bespectacled man, who had a string of failed relationships and successful businesses (and one might speculate that each was responsible for the other), was seated in the passenger seat with his fat, pink hands wrapped around a microphone into which he proclaimed his worth to the denizens of New Denton.

Solomon discovered, too late, that he'd committed himself to a fateful, superfluous step. He tried to back up but his weight had already shifted to his leading leg. And so it happened.

When the van’s bumper contacted with him, he did not feel pain, but pressure as the impact forced him down, spread-eagled, upon the freshly waxed bonnet. A dreamy realisation - a comprehension of the impossible given form by the crushing impact - penetrated the cobwebs of his disbelief, as inertia flung him from the bonnet.

Then, as the summer sky scrolled slowly across his field of vision – a blue heaven framed by the skyline of sun-bronzed buildings - a peace unlike anything he had ever felt flowed through him like a cleansing gel, inducing a state of surreal lethargy. The body of Solomon Finch crashed to earth twenty feet from point of impact, bounced and rolled for a further twenty, then stopped. There he lay in comfortable silence staring up into the lure of the blue. As he descended into the desensitising nausea of shock he was aware of the summer sun radiating hot and heavy upon his forehead.

Oh dear God, he thought, I'm going to sunburn. Please don't let them leave me here to burn.

Then, spellbound with shock-logic he thought of peeling, a vague memory of irritable itching. And then nothing.

11

SOLOMON LAY in the street for some time before the clouds that inhibited his fluidity of thought dispelled. He suffered no pain, and was thankful for there was no loss of feeling, and it dawned on him that he felt relatively normal. With small, cautious efforts he attempted to move, contrary to the little information he could recall that had even the most vague bearing on first aid procedure. Solomon curled his toes, then he moved his fingers. He felt the familiar sensation of motion.

Okay, that's good, he told himself, and rolled his eyes downward.

He could see - by the straining of his vision - the contoured landscape of his body. His hips and stomach obscured the view of his legs, but he could still see the scuffed toes of his shoes and, further down the road, the vehicle that had hit him.

It was evident that the procession had stopped in view of what had happened; what he had caused. Solomon cringed at the thought of being the centre of so much resentful attention; lying in the street with the many onlookers gawking at him from either side, gawking at the man who caused the procession to grind to a halt.

He turned his head and chanced a look at the crowd - no pain in his neck or back. That was good. He recognised the two old-timers towards whom he had been heading. Solomon frowned. He had no idea how long he had been lying there in a suppressed state of consciousness. The couple didn’t seem at all concerned about the incident. In fact, they weren't even looking in his direction - instead, they stood side-by-side, ludicrous grinning mannequins pointing toward the motionless floats.

Solomon turned his head to the other side. The impact had thrown him up the street in the direction of travel of the float carrying the banner of the Women’s Guild, so now he lay beside it a little past its centre, his denim jacket splayed out around him on the baking asphalt. The choir, lips parted and the glistening tips of tongues visible just beyond, were frozen in the same inanimate fashion.

Solomon pushed himself up into a sitting position, the weight of his body supported on one arm while he checked for lumps or cuts on the back of his head with the other hand. Then slowly he stood up.

Weird. As it turned out he was fine, unscathed, and not even so much as sore from the accident. It was as if he had walked into the centre of the road and lay down. But it did not concern him so much as the abnormality of everything else around him. He stared about in utter disbelief. The entire procession - the floats, performers and even the onlookers - was frozen in the exact same manner.

Panic gripped him, forcing icy fingers deep into his bones. ‘Oh, this is bad,’ he murmured, ‘This is very, very bad.’ He floundered away on trembling legs, stumbling this way and that among the motionless floats and city folk. Not one person or vehicle moved, and amongst the frigid cityscape Solomon caught the occasional glimpse of the horrific; that which was normally benign and did not raise question or defy expectation; the small, everyday things, usually taken for granted, or those that fell beneath our self-determined parameters for warranted attention. Everything that was deemed normal and indistinct, and as such was subsequently noted and verified as acceptable, now stuck out like a sore thumb - alien, unnerving and coarse.

A small girl in a pretty white dress, face transfixed in reverent awe, gripped in her tiny fist the ribbon of a helium-filled balloon. The silver bubble hung on a fixed point in time and space, and the yellow ribbon, slackened in mid-bob, bridged the space with a golden arc. Her hair, richly red in the sunshine, had been blown across her features by a breeze now gone, and formed a rusty claw that threatened to rake the innocence from her face.

Two floats further up, a juggler, her face a mask of concentration and siphoned dry of intelligence, was fixed in an unnatural poise somewhere between calculation and manipulation of the torches she tossed.

Two of the batons marked the air with luminous trails, which flowed from their amber crowns; one on an ascension to glory while the other embraced the fate of Icarus, trailing behind it a wake of flame, not feathers, as it reached for the plotted junction of hand and shaft.

The flames streamed from the fuel-soaked torch-heads in static, convoluted sheets of light. Fire-children played in the torch’s wake but never strayed far from the parent flame, and tiny sparks rested on the air like catatonic fireflies.

A third torch levitated in the near-grip of the juggler’s right hand, the moment gravid with anticipation that the flesh would close around its shaft and complete the artistic cycle. Alas that moment was never to come.

Solomon approached the performer, circling her, mesmerised by the beauty of the static tongues of flame, staring up at the fire-show with the same fearful wonder as he would a spectacular electrical storm. He had almost completed his circuit, returning to the spot in front of her when he let out a yelp of pain. Withdrawing his hand he located the injury. A small score-line marked the blade of his hand, across the fleshy part between palm and smallest finger. A cauterised channel approximately a millimetre wide and ran across the thickness of his hand. It appeared as if he had been branded using a small, thin wire.

Solomon looked around seeking out the cause of the injury. One of the larger embers, fixed as if on an invisible backdrop, glowed in the air near his hip, it’s heat and colour unfading. Under normal circumstances such contact with the skin would have absorbed the heat energy in an instant before it could cause damage, but then again all this was hardly normal.

Solomon held his hand near the trail of flame that flowed upwards from the performer’s elusive torch. He could feel the heat rising from it and the closer he held his hand, the hotter it felt. At least that was normal. Solomon moved his hand quickly through the air, designing to pass through the flame but the fire seemed to expel a gravity - a repellence like the negative field of two opposing magnets - and his hand stopped upon contact with the non-substance of the flame. The fine hairs on his hand curled in the heat and he drew his arm back at once cursing, blowing to cool his injured flesh.

It was as if the conflict of natural law and this unnatural occurrence of stasis had spawned a fail-safe to substitute an overlap of the two opposing laws. Had the flame not been hot and the repulsion less intense, could he have not passed his hand through the flame? And if so would the static flame have parted giving passage to his hand, or would the flame have passed through his hand instantly replacing his flesh and bone with its own destructive energy, consuming matter indiscriminately? Flame or flesh; something would have to give and perhaps this was the reason behind the anomaly. But if that were true, what was behind the reason? Even chaos had to conform to its own rules, so why was it that the wind of insanity had breathed upon everything except him?

Everything there was lifeless, moveless. He was not. Or maybe that was a matter of perspective; the van; the profound sense of peace and the disjointed laws of between-time.

A discomforting thought spearheaded through the multitudinous others. He was in a world that had shed him like the garment, only the question of his return was as much in limbo as himself. He was a castaway, alone and divorced from a city bustling with life.

‘Oh my God,’ Solomon breathed in stunned revelation.

He was alone, but not only that, he was also dead.

CHAPTER 2

1

THE TWO MEN met in an alley at the back of a small delicatessen situated in central New Denton. The odour of raw pork seemed delightful in comparison to the putrid fruity smell of chicken blood, which emanated from a nearby refuse bin.

‘Malzekiel, how are you?’ said the blonde-haired man, offering his hand to the other. ‘It’s, uh, it’s been a while.’

‘Yes, it has,’ the other man grinned, setting an old and battered jerry can down by his feet. ‘Hello, Gabe.’

The two shook hands, and afterwards stepped back to take in each other’s appearance. Both men were tall, and dressed in city business togs; white cotton shirts, neckties, trousers, and both wore lengthy overcoats. The blonde’s was a rich brown that complemented his golden locks. The other man was attired in a flowing jacket of stormy grey that matched the flashes of silver that dominated his otherwise dark, close-cropped hair.

It was this older man who broke the ice, examining his acquaintance with questing eyes.

‘So how’d you find me, Gabrael?’

‘It wasn’t difficult. Not for us anyhow. You don’t cover your trail too well, besides-’

‘Us, Gabe?’

The younger man called Gabrael, nodded. ‘Malzekiel, I was sent to find you.’

Malzekiel took a step away from him.

‘Find me?’ he quizzed. ‘What do you mean "find me"? What are you talking about?’

‘It’s okay, Maz. They need us, you and me. They sent me because they need your help.’

‘And who are "they"?’

‘Who do you think, Maz,’ said Gabrael closing the space between them once more. ‘The Unity sent me. It seems they have a problem.’

Although Gabrael’s diction was soft and his manner calm, Malzekiel thought he detected an unnerving quaver in the young man’s voice that he really did not care for.

‘Sounds important, Gabe’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t believe.’

Malzekiel shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘Try me,’ he said.

2

NEW DENTON CITY PULSATED with the heat of the day. To some it was a welcome change, yet many thought that Mother Nature was going overkill in her making amends for the preceding harsh winter.

Across its expanse of grey towers and narrow web of streets and alleys, the afternoon sun gently played, casting shadows into corners populated by people eager to seek the sanctuary of the dark.

Others took cover from the sun under parasols, while the brave or brainless revelled in its glorious radiation. Rush hour traffic queues linked the rural coastal outskirts to the less densely populated border-towns in continuous chains. The holiday season had arrived bringing with it a mass rush for the beaches and resorts that dotted the city outskirts. Those who were wiser stayed in town to witness the annual carnival from the shade of shop canopies or street-front cafés, such as Maisie’s Coffee House on Rue de Jardin...

‘Here you go. Take a deep breath and dive in.’

Maxine peered up over the oversized iced thick-shake that her co-worker, Jacqueline – less a friend than a tolerated acquaintance if the truth be told - had placed before her. In her hand an unsmoked cigarette smouldered halfway to the butt.

‘Thanks.’

‘For God's sake drop the frown, Em. You've a face like a bulldog chewing on a wasp,’ said Jacqueline.

The phrase never failed to delight Maxine, although on this occasion the smile that crept across her lips was due to a mental image of Maxine’s own floating, disembodied fist connecting sharply with the other’s delicately powdered nose, squashing it flat against the pretty mask of sick European skin. Maxine’s thin smile widened. The lines that carved across her forehead melted away leaving only a trace of pale, blood-starved scores. Elsewhere on her face they re-appeared; at the corners of her mouth and eyes, in pleats of golden tone. The same physical effect produced by an alternate and opposite emotional response.

Of course, she could see what Paulson saw in Jacqueline, but she was surprised that he failed to see how vain and shallow the girl actually was. Like most men, he was blinded from her sucky personality by looks that could drive a monk to penance. But then, Paulson never tried to conceal his own depthlessness, in fact, she had an idea that he revelled in it, using it as an excuse to be as coarse and socially impotent as possible. Which, as it turned out, was one of the reasons why Maxine liked him, and why Jacqueline, despite all Paulson’s ill-fated efforts, could not stand the man.

Jacqueline took a noisy slurp from her own huge glass, lacing her thin lips and the tip of her nose with chocolate-speckled froth. Her tight bottle-blonde curls framed her doughy face with a halo of bronze ringlets.

‘The trouble with you,’ she continued their earlier conversation, ‘is that you concern yourself too much with other people's problems, and not enough with your own. You act selflessly and therefore are selfish towards yourself. So if you're going to be selfish, be selfish for the right reasons.’

‘Your point being?’

‘The point being you've got to do things for yourself sometimes. Generally, people take without consideration and give little in return. If you ask me, if a person can retain the strength of will to be selfish, then we’ll succeed in being exactly what we are meant to be: parasites with store cards.’

Maxine churned inside, a primal scream threatening to erupt. Conversations with Jacqueline often went this way, turning from a casual chitchat into some great psyche-trip that, quite frankly, bored the crap out of her. If that wasn’t bad enough, Jacqueline, who thrived on fostered intelligence, was embarrassingly shallow, and her social skills transformed in a most laughable way from snobbish superiority to ditsy baby-talk whenever the male of the species arrived at the scene, especially if it was someone she liked.

Maxine took another sip and returned her fragmented attention to her colleague, who was still yammering away.

‘... and you retain the human aspect. YOU need YOU much more than your colleagues. More than your family and friends. More so than-’

‘Solomon?’ Maxine could see where the conversation was leading. ‘Solomon is taking it pretty badly, you know. He tries not to let it show, Jackie, but you can see it in his eyes.’

‘Yeah well, give him time. He'll get over it. Everybody does.’

She paused. Another noisy slurp to wet the lips. ‘Time heals.’

Time heals? Did she actually know, or for that matter care, what had happened to him? To his family?

Maxine shuddered as she recalled the event, sprawled irreverently across the pages of unholy tabloids.

It had happened ten days after Solomon visited his grandfather for the last time. Ten days since the old man’s eighty-sixth birthday. To this day nobody could fathom how Silas Martin Finch had managed to keep his plans so concealed from his family, the weekly day-care home visits, and excluded from his drivelling sleep-talk.

The service revolver was something of an antique; he had kept it in mint condition and, despite his limited dexterity, kept it maintained on a regular basis in preparation for the day he would hold it for one last time. The "jittery old fart", as Solomon affectionately referred to him, had attempted to take his own life.

Silas Finch had suffered from paralysis agitans, or Parkinsonism for several years. He sometimes shook so violently that Solomon swore he could hear his fillings rattling within his skull. He was also a widower and Solomon's only living relative, and had abated by degrees into mild senility.

The forensics team drew the investigation to a close concluding that the injury was self-inflicted. The cause of death consisted of a single shot through the underside of the lower jaw, supposedly targeting the brain. The round had missed its intended target, routing the bullet out through the back of the neck instead. The shot had ruptured the tangle of nerves that ran from the brain stem down through the vertebral canal. Silas Finch had lain on the cellar floor, below the family house Solomon was soon to inherit, paralysed although conscious, and bleeding abundantly from the throat. He died within the hour, and the body was discovered a week later, three days after the first of the local cats.

Never one to turn away the needy, the old man kept the rag-tag company accustomed to a daily breakfast of scraps from the previous night’s supper. It was a practice he seldom overlooked and every morning the cats – strays and owned alike – would crowd around the basement window until Silas let them in to feast upon the day’s offerings. He had obliged the cats unerringly up until his death. Monday came around, as did the cats, only to find their routine broken by the absence of the usual scraps, and their complaints were left unheard. They returned instead on the next day, and the next after that. By the Thursday, several of the many failed to show, but the heavy scent that had been building up within the basement once more drew the faithful to a broken ventilation grille around the side of the house. Silas had stuffed the hole with newspaper to keep out the rain and chill of the past winter, but the makeshift repair was no match for eager paws.

Once inside the basement, the temptation became too much for them to bear. They began to feed upon the only plentiful source.

Solomon - whose own beloved mog, Melrose, had been one of the many to feast that day - had called by on the Sunday, and discovered the body. Despite the wear and tear it was still recognisable, the cats had only fed upon the delicacies; the lips, ear lobes, eyes, the fleshy hang of wattle and the cooked flesh around the shot wound.

Solomon had held it together just long enough to dial the number for the police. When the voice broke through on the other end, he had thrown up, then fainted dead away.

When the police arrived, they performed a search of the basement. An old typewriter was found near to the body, loaded with a plea of forgiveness that Silas had left unfinished. The sheet of type was barely legible due to the worn hammers of the common vowels; there was little distinction between the lowercase e's, o's and a's. Grandson Solomon had been allowed to keep a copy of this, once all the necessary red tape had been run. Aside from the quaint house where he had lived as a child, and now occupied as the new owner, it was the only thing Solomon Finch had left, a remnant of what had been, at one time, his family.

Maxine chased the thought from her mind.

Well, you may not care about anyone but yourself, but I do, she thought, glancing at her wristwatch. It was a quarter to six. She took a long drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in a tin ashtray on the next table. ‘Jacqueline, I've got to go’, she said. ‘I'd stay and chat, but there's something I need to do. Thanks for the drink.’ Getting up from the table, she shot Jacqueline a look of disdain, before shouldering her bag and leaving the blonde in the shade of the street-side café.

Maxine didn't feel guilty for abandoning the bitch. After all, she wouldn't be alone. She had her lack of empathy and her froth.

3

‘THAT'S SOME HEAVY SHIT.’

‘To say the least,’ agreed Gabrael. The savage aroma of the back alley had forced the two men into the more breathable atmosphere of a popular picturesque coffee-house, where they continued their discussion over cappuccinos.

‘So this comes from the top, huh, Gabe?’

Gabrael nodded, a stray lock of his limp blonde hair flopped over his brow. He brushed it out of his eyes as his old friend continued.

‘And they need me why?’

‘Because you will provide the necessary balance. Remember, this situation, if it is allowed to get out of control, will affect both our peoples.’

‘Yes, but why me?’

Gabrael averted his gaze, staring instead out through the coffee-house window. Outside, the sun was an angry orange ball hanging low in the west. Nearby, a woman, young and pretty, hurried between the tables and chairs set out on the pavement, her aura dark with worry and grave frustration. Gabrael frowned.

‘Hello? Anyone home?’

He turned back and addressed Malzekiel, who was staring at him intently.

‘I’m sorry, Maz. I was distracted there for a second...They chose you because of me.’

‘Because of you?’

He nodded. ‘That’s right. My only request was that it would be you I worked with. Nobody up there opposed it.’

Malzekiel leaned forward across the table, his fingers bridged. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘For company? Certainly not for my good nature.’

‘For your talents, Maz. We work well together, you know it and I know it. And so, it seems, do the Unity.’

‘Well I don’t need their charity,’ said Malzekiel getting up to leave. ‘Tell them to find you another partner.’

‘Malzekiel, wait.’

Gabrael stood up, grabbing the older man by the shoulder.

‘You want to take your hand off me, Gabe?’

‘I’ll let go, but you have to listen. It’s important.’

Malzekiel stared at him, long and hard. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘The deal is non-negotiable, Maz. You have heard what is at stake. We need to do the job, and we need to succeed.’

‘Ah, the old "failure is not an option" cliché.’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Gabrael released his grip.

Malzekiel breathed heavily, shaking his head. ‘What is it we have to do?’

Beckoning his friend closer, Gabrael explained in hushed tones the scant outline of their assignment.

‘And that’s all? One man?’

Gabrael nodded.

‘Okay,’ said Malzekiel. ‘I’m in. You never know, it might be fun.’

Somehow I doubt that, Gabrael thought as he stood up. Leaving a handful of change to cover the drinks he slipped out of the door.

Malzekiel watched him go. One man, he thought. How can one single, lonely man bring about the fall of everything? How easy is this assignment really going to be?

He pocketed the coins that Gabrael left in payment and rose, the legs of his chair screeching on the tiled floor. Then, shielding his eyes against the sun, he hurried out after the retreating silhouette.

4

IT HAD TAKEN SOLOMON the greater part of an hour to reach the third junction along Carnival Row. The half-mile trek had initially been difficult, especially around the head of the procession where the crowds were at their thickest. When there was nowhere else for him to go, Solomon had clambered over and around the flamboyant floats to avoid the obstructing crowd of unyielding, living statues. Further on up the Row the numbers began to lessen and eventually they thinned out altogether, but even after putting a little distance between himself and the bewitched forest of bodies, it became apparent that there were dangers difficult to perceive. He had almost put his eye out on a large flying beetle that hung pinned on empty air like a butterfly in a display case; its black-veined wings spread wide, frozen in mid-beat, legs bunched beneath the fat body like a twist of rusted wire. He did not see it until the final second where it loomed close in his vision as if it were the grim cadaver of a ghost-ship drifting soundlessly out of a freezing winter fog.

He stopped in his tracks, the insect’s compound eye on a level with his own, suffering within himself a skewed perspective of the survival instinct. In this world of stillness and silence, he was a danger to himself.

‘So much for Hollywood,’ he had said aloud. The reality of this spiritual plane meant there was no passing through matter, no floating above the ground, no rattling of chains. Those clichés were born of fantasy, pure and simple. In this reality he walked, talked and thought as one who was living. One thing that did differ, to Solomon’s unease, was the silence. But it was more than silence, it was silence multiplied a thousand-fold and then divided into nothingness. White noise in a vacuum. Even still, he could hear his own footsteps, his voice and any other sound he chose to make, but the background void was always present, sapping, sucking the sound from him without returning any depth of echo or vibration.

He continued walking the route, turning at the third junction into an alley behind the theatre complex that housed PAOS (The New Denton Performance Arts and Operatic Society), the Reel-Wurld movie-house, a large video library and an ice-cream parlour called Sundae Worship. The alley provided the shortest route to the station. Solomon realised that although he had not started walking with a destination in mind, he soon enough found himself trudging, as if on auto-pilot, back in the direction of his home. Moreover, he now felt compelled to get there, as if his meagre dwelling could atone for the discomfort of wandering alone through the cadaverous city. That aside, there wasn't really anything else he could do, no place he could go that would lead to an improvement of the situation. Or was there?

He pushed away an insane notion about seeking eternal refuge in the graveyard at Mayfield Spires, where his grandfather lay next to his father Jack, and mother Sarah. Maybe he would visit there later and reunite himself with the family, but until then...home. Besides, unless they wield shovels and belonged to a union, there was something kind of iffy about grown men who liked to hang about in graveyards.

Maybe later. Yes, much, MUCH later.

The back wall of the complex seemed to lean in on the narrow lane, its south-facing wall adorned with sun-bleached billposters and peeling scarlet paint.

A romantic drama was running through its second season onstage, whilst next door the projection screens flamed with a back-to-back vintage sci-fi multi-play, and the Reel-Wurld weekly classic from the current Hitchcock season; a film that starred a great many birds. It was must-see movie for ornithologists everywhere. Solomon disliked birds, and the irony generated from his name was a topic of constant delight to his close circle of friends.

He continued trudging up the lane, dragging his heels now, just to fill the soundless void. His nerves stuttered as something edged into his field of vision. Concealed within the fire-exit of the cinema building, an elderly pair was coupled in infinite embrace. Solomon approached them, and as he did so he felt the Love.

The two would have been a century and a half old had their ages been combined, although the energy that permeated them, binding them together, seemed young, electric, and yet timeless.

Solomon's heart - or the memory of his heart - wrenched with blissful texture. He had found, unmistakably, in this barren, lifeless landscape, a pocket – a membraneless bubble – of pure, holy and perpetual love.

Solomon was aware of his heart racing, flipping, and leaping off the walls of his chest. He felt gloriously ill, a sensation the lovesick abhor and the loveless desire.

Drawing closer now, and stepping in behind the balding gent, Solomon stared over the man’s sloped shoulder into the eyes of his elderly sweetheart. Into the face of his timeless Love. Standing in a litter-strewn back-alley, behind the theatre, staring into eyes of the purest ocean-blue, Solomon had never felt so close to anybody in his whole life than he did at that moment. Those moist, shimmering eyes, framed by soft almond-coloured folds of fallen skin, emanated a lifetime of adoration, charged from the heart and focused into unseen, penetrating beams.

The eyes are the windows to the soul. Solomon had no doubt now that the saying was true. He reached out to touch her, then hesitated.

He backed out of her line of vision trying in vain to suppress his urge to caress her face. He told himself that he shouldn’t, that it was commensurate with rape, but he could do nothing to fight the exhilarating lure. The yielding softness of her pale, papery skin was calling him, drawing him in, spellbinding and sumptuous.

Solomon leaned over and brushed her powdered cheek. At once he pulled back with a hard knot of shock forming in his belly. The touch was as disturbing as it was deceptive. It was sickening and alien, contoured like leather and yet as hard as glass. And cold, not frozen, but an absolute omission of warmth. Just like everything else in the façade, the countenance of the living was as forged as the stage play beyond the PAOS footlights. Except the sudden, bestial shift from one extreme to the other, from deep-felt love to withering disgust, was somehow worse.

It betrayed the senses, violated his very essence. Solomon shuddered and stepped away, slow at first, and then with panic rising in him like some black, vaporous eel, he stumbled and ran with his own scream ringing out, feeding the ravenous void.

5

GABRAEL LIFTED A FINGER in silent warning as Malzekiel approached scuffing his booted heels on the kerb. He was waiting on the street corner, peering around a tidy growth of evergreen that sprouted from behind a low red-brick wall.

‘Is this the house?’ enquired Malzekiel.

‘Shhh. Yes.’

Malzekiel unfastened something from beneath his greatcoat with a 'pop' and pulled forth a compact firearm fashioned in brushed steel. He snapped the safety catch back with a soft click.

‘Maz, what the hell are you doing?’

‘Playing with myself - what the blazes do you think I’m doing?’

‘Put that away right now. It’s still broad daylight for crying out loud. Besides, it is unwise to rush such delicate matters.’ Gabrael cast his gaze over the front of the house as if he could read the life-energies the stone had absorbed over the years. ‘We wait,’ he said.

‘Gabe, if what you told me is even a fraction of the whole truth, then I really don't think that time is our ally. Not on this one.’

Gabrael placed a restraining hand on Malzekiel's arm. ‘Trust me. Caution is our best policy here.’

‘Caution was never my best policy,’ said Malzekiel, immobilising his weapon and tucking it back into his waistband of his trousers. ‘But maybe you’re right. So who else is playing this little game?’

‘As far as I know it’s just the two of us, plus the man we are here for. The details came direct from the Unity.’

‘Uh-huh. Wrong. Some of the details came direct from the Unity. You know they never disclose everything.’

‘Maz, this is just your common all-important assignment, not an untucked corner of some divine conspiracy. It’s a simple preventative measure, that’s all. The best way to counter an effect is to remove the cause. That’s why we’re here.’

‘I know that. What I don’t understand is why we’re crouched here with our thumbs up our asses, waiting for the Rapture.’

‘What? Are you suggesting we just walk in there and blow the poor guy away?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.’

‘Maz, I’m disappointed in you. And I thought you were in it for the fun.’

‘You don’t think that’ll be fun?’

‘Not as much fun as my way,’ said Gabrael grinning. He enjoyed teasing his former peer.

‘What way? Which way? Just sitting and watching? You tell me where’s the fun in that?’

‘I was kind of hoping that you’d bring a little something to the relationship.’

Malzekiel smiled weakly back at Gabrael. ‘You mean...’

Gabrael nodded. ‘Stakeout.’

Malzekiel’s smile widened.

6

GABRAEL WAS SITTING ON A SWING in a small park near the corner of Spruce Walk, where the junction divided the Dagwood stretch into Dagwood East and West. He had made the suggestion to Malzekiel that they needed a base of operations to perform a proper stakeout, one that was mobile, functional and above all discreet. Malzekiel’s face had lit up, and after assuring Gabrael that he could fulfil the request, he hurried off back toward the city centre on foot. Now, after half an hour of waiting Gabrael was beginning to wonder if trusting Malzekiel with a task of such weight had been a wise decision. Presently, he looked up at the sound of an approaching vehicle.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he groaned.

Malzekiel pulled up in a small, reconditioned school bus that looked as if it had been patched together by blind war veterans on day release from the Locksley Retirement Village; an exuberant and self-sufficient community for rich wrinklies located two hundred miles further south along the coast. If Doctor Frankenstein had ever thought to provide the fruit of his labours with a worthwhile education, the present monstrosity could have been its school ride. The metal skin was a matrix of uneven panels and untidy welds, hand-painted in a garish shade of sulphur-yellow.

Gabrael stood up from the swing seat and walked to the kerbside outside of the park’s chicken-wire enclosure.

‘What on earth is this?’ he yelled above the thrumming of the engine.

‘Not bad, eh?’ said Malzekiel. He was grinning from ear to ear. ‘It don’t look much from the bodywork, but the engine’s got more poke than a monkey on Viagra!’

Now there’s an image. Gabrael shuddered. ‘It doesn’t have a bodywork, Maz. More like body parts!

‘Hey-hey, Mister Ingrate! Don’t knock it. I got it from a guy at real short notice.’

‘Yeah, who? Ed Gein?’

Malzekiel snorted. ‘I know it’s not what you had in mind, but beggars can’t be...er, you know.’

‘Losers?’

‘No, trusted.’ Malzekiel grimaced. ‘I got it from an old contact of mine. Ex-carny. Short fella, but hard as nails. He’s the car-jacker’s equivalent of Robin Hood but, like, 1/16th scale or something. Sleeps rough in the reclamation yard in the downtown territories. Anyway, he’s a veritable legend in auto-security, if you catch my meaning. And he promised to come through this time, Gabe. Promised.’

Malzekiel clicked off the ignition and the engine died with a final exasperating belch. ‘I tell you, Gabe; never trust a man who collects spare change in the hubcap of a vintage ‘53 Ford.’

Gabrael wagged his finger in wordless reproach.

‘Never mind,’ Malzekiel shrugged. ‘At least it’s a runner. Come on up, I’ve got goodies.’

Gabrael climbed stiffly onboard. After the snug fit of the child’s swing seat - never once taking his eyes off the house at the end of the abutting street - the feeling had drained from his legs and buttocks. He checked out the interior.

‘Well, I’m just glad its not upholstered with human scalps,’ he joked. ‘Okay, so what have you got to show me?’

‘It’s in the back.’ Malzekiel gestured toward a half dozen cardboard cartons that lay in the aisle between the rows of seats. Each was filled to the brim with polystyrene packing chips.

Gabrael selected the nearest one and pitched in, the white, spongy shapes swirling and squeaking around his forearm. ‘It’s like a lucky dip,’ he said smiling. His fingers brushed against something hard and cold. ‘And what have we got?’

He pulled the object out, spilling a few of the chips onto the worn vinyl floor. ‘And what have we got?’ Gabrael repeated, puzzling over the smooth black cylinder.

‘Telephoto lens, Gabe. To go with this.’ Malzekiel plunged his arm into the same box and withdrew a large handheld camera.

‘35mm SLR. Lots of film.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A bit.’

Gabrael watched as Malzekiel upturned several cartons, spilling the white chips on the floor and seats; some lodged in the turn-ups of his trousers.

‘Mini super Hi-Res TV and VCR, videotape editing suite,’ Malzekiel named each piece as it was unearthed. ‘Auto-focus binoculars, Hi-8 video camera, tripod and monitor. Hold on, aha, here we are... Infrared nite-sight... handheld lasers, two of-’

‘Lasers? What do we need lasers for?’ interrupted Gabrael. They sounded dangerous.

‘Signalling devices. You know, flash-flash, like a code. What this? Oh, yeah. Motion detector, notebook computer, VR system, handcuffs-’

‘... one pair of flashlights; hi-beam, low-consumption. VHF wireless transmitter and receiver set. One more carton...’ Malzekiel slung aside the empty boxes, which slid towards Gabrael upon a layer of squeaking surf.

‘Ah, here’s the good stuff.’

Gabrael looked worried.

‘Parabolic mic complete with earphones, zipgun-deliverable split-frequency transmitters plus tracking module, 2.4 GHz high-gain antenna, infrared illuminator, thermal imager, mount and monitor, lockpicks, and this, in case we get bored during the stakeout.’ He tossed Gabrael a small rectangular box, the size of a cigarette packet.

‘A deck of playing cards.’ announced Gabrael.

‘Turn it over.’

‘Wha- oh, I stand corrected. A deck of Jungle Vixens playing cards. With pictures. Very tasteful.’ He passed the box back.

‘Where on God’s green earth did you get all this stuff, Maz? No, on second thoughts I really don’t think I want you to answer that.’

Malzekiel shuffled under Gabrael’s icy stare. ‘Favours owed,’ he said trying to avoid eye-contact, ‘You know how it is.’

‘You realise that if we get caught with all this... stuff, the Unity is going to, as you would so eloquently put it, "take it out on both our asses."’

‘Then we won’t get caught, okay? Don’t worry, what can go wrong?’ smiled Malzekiel.

Gabrael wasn’t convinced. ‘With you,’ he muttered, ‘what can’t go wrong?’

Malzekiel started picking up the empty boxes and kicking the polystyrene chips beneath the seats. ‘C’mon, let’s get set up. If you like I’ll go and get some eats. Cantonese?’

‘Not for me,’ Gabrael replied. ‘But I could sure go another coffee.’

‘I think I passed a roadside Café, not so far back. The food smelled like shit, but the toxic brew should be safe enough.’

‘Fine. You go get. I’ll park up.’

‘You still take it white, like your ethics?’ jibed Malzekiel.

Gabrael glanced at him sidelong, failing to suppress a wry smile. ‘Nah, I’ll have it black,’ he replied, ‘like my mood.’

Malzekiel grinned back. ‘Black it is. I’ll be right back.’

Gabrael watched him step down from the vehicle. ‘Maz, answer me this one thing, just before you go.’

‘Sure. What’s on your mind?’

Gabrael’s brow furrowed as he looked over the spill of overturned cartons and white chips that littered the floor of the bus.

‘The surveillance equipment I’m cool with; the rest of this stuff, even the porno cards, I can understand, but Maz...handcuffs?’

Malzekiel closed the driver’s side door, and not saying a single word winked back at him through the glass.

7

THE STATION was just as Solomon had left it, with the notable exception of its resident prostitute. The empty train was docked at the platform, windows dark but its doors wide open, waiting for him. There was no driver, but Solomon felt that somehow there was no need for one. His head was, by this time, a raging maelstrom of ice and razorblades.

‘That's it,’ he told himself, ‘From now on I'm cutting back on the caffeine.’

He strolled across the vacant platform and stepped aboard. Inside, the carriage was dark and empty. Solomon felt ill. He glanced down the carriage seeking out the seat he had used before, and found it. It might actually help him make sense of things, to sit as before and remember.

Weary, he sank down into the foam seat, clutching the back of his skull with both hands. His head hurt like hell. This was no caffeine migraine. Despite the pain, he had to think, but all he could remember of the train journey was that pulsing tunnel lighting, and the way it had made everything seem unreal, somehow false.

It was no use. He couldn’t concentrate. The pressure in his sinuses was incredible; his nose felt about to explode in a cloud of bloody cartilage. His eyes had started to sting and water, and the surrounding compartment blurred crazily, as if some deranged optician had plucked his eye from its socket and proceeded to slowly crush it between forefinger and thumb. Through a dark, swirling vignette he could barely make out a thing, some shining, indistinguishable appendage from an unseen body, extending, reaching toward him, warped by the dysfunctional perspective of his ruined sight.

Then the world faded to blackness and somewhere far, far away he thought he heard himself scream.

8

HARDING LET THE curtain fall back into place. The bus was still there. It had been parked on the opposite side of the road for the last twenty minutes and its presence there on a mid-summer evening, when school had been broken for close to a month, made Harding nervous. He left the front bedroom and walked to the room at the rear of the house, where he stood before the haggard form slouched in its chair, taking in its pallid appearance. The eyes were half-lidded and glazed. A single white track of dried spittle crusted the line of the jaw, which was hanging slightly askew. Harding guessed the man to be in his early thirties, but the greying stubble on his face and neck aged him considerably.

With a sterile cloth he wiped the light smear of blood from a silver probe and returned it to its leather case. Having completed his precursory inspection of the body, Harding was satisfied that he could sustain its life long enough to indulge in a more convoluted examination back at his laboratory. As always, his employer had been correct. The victim had been modified, as had the many before him. The same device resided deep in the man’s brain. The blood that clogged one nostril and the man’s detached stare told Harding all he needed to know. He had seen it before, but never had he been so lucky. Harding had tracked down each and every one of them from all across the globe, but his efforts had always culminated in failure. This time it was different. This one was still alive. Barely.

Harding bent close and peered into the man’s unseeing eyes. Eyes that had showed the vaguest glimmer of response, just a moment ago.

Harding grabbed a handful of greasy hair from the man’s crown and pulled his head over to one side. ‘Where are you, you pitiful wretch?’ He whispered into the exposed ear. ‘What can you see that I cannot?’

Harding waited. The man’s expression remained impassive.

‘Hmmph.’ Harding bent closer, his lips so close as to brush against the lobe. ‘Don’t you worry though, I’ll get it out of you in the end,’ he said. ‘Just give me a little more time.’

9

‘SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?’ said Malzekiel, handing a polystyrene cup to his colleague. ‘Any movement in the soon-to-be murder house?’

‘It’s not murder, Maz. It’s a-‘

‘Yeah, I know. A preventative measure to counter an undesired effect, blah-blah-blah. The Unity can dress it up how they like, but for your average tax-paying, wind-breaking citizen it all amounts to the same thing. They don’t have the benefit of knowledge. Hell, we don’t even have the benefit of knowledge, but at least we are in a position to understand. All they’ll see is another corpse with a bullet hole in its skull for no reason this deadbeat city can give.’

‘Maz, we are doing this for the good of them all.’

‘Are we? I’m not so sure.’ Malzekiel looked up at the house through the grubby windshield. ‘So, have you seen anything yet?’

‘No, not a thing, but he is in there. I used the mic while you were gone. It sounded like he was talking to someone, but I can only sense the one in there.’

‘He might have been talking to himself. What was he saying?’

‘Dunno. It wasn’t clear enough for me to make out.’

‘It wasn’t clear enough for you to make out? Gabe, that mic’s state-of-the-art in eavesdropping technology! If you point it at your balls you can listen in on your sperms’ pre-intercourse pep-talk.’

‘Well, I couldn’t get the hang of the damn thing, and the guy must have been moving around. I think you’re right. One of us needs to go in.’

‘Just how I like it,’ said Malzekiel. ‘Up close and personal.’

‘But we do it by the book, and that means be on your guard,’ Gabrael warned.

‘So what are you waiting for? Wire me up,’ said Malzekiel excitedly. Gabrael refused him.

‘No, Maz. I’m going. I need you to stay and monitor the house from outside. I don’t have much luck with this junk anyway, so I’ll be counting on you to cover my back.’

‘Always the bridesmaid,’ Malzekiel sighed. ‘Okay, consider it covered. Now let’s get you rigged.’

CHAPTER 3

1

WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ was never one for promises. He was one of those people who never learned from by their mistakes, and was often landing himself in the deepest of troubles. The fact that the psychotic Damon Harding had already removed one of his digits with a pair of gardening secateurs - insurance against any future insurrections - eluded him as he hurriedly stuffed a bundle of clothes in a travel holdall and grabbed his passport from the desk drawer where it lay under an old and tattered Dungeons & Dragons Rulebook.

The last time he had used both, he had flown to a D&D convention in Alabama where he played until dawn, got blind drunk and wound up in jail nursing a sore head, and as a consequence he had missed his flight back home. That was way back in ‘84, he realised with a shock. Another such pleasure jaunt was well overdue. He closed the drawer, leaving the Dragons to sleep in their Dungeons.

Unzipping the waist pocket of his leather jacket, he pulled out his wallet and checked the contents - not much, but this "super-mineral" was sure to change that. By winter he would be a millionaire.

Doctor Harding had arrived earlier in the day to drop off the consignment, and left again soon after for what he had called as "an unmissable engagement" somewhere within the city confines. Rodriguez figured that it must have had something to do with the sample the Doc had entrusted to his care. He absently rubbed the ridge of scar on his left hand where his thumb used to be.

The sample was, as Harding had explained, nothing short of incredible. Sixty percent silicon-based, with traces of salt and magnesium. The remaining near-thirty percent neither Harding nor Rodriguez could account for. Even when using the lab’s powerful gamma scanner, the reading they got back disappeared off the scale. Thirty percent unknown materials equalled one hundred percent money-spinner.

The sample had resisted all attempts of dissection. It seemed impervious to applied heat, abrasion or acids. He had even jammed it in a vice and tried to puncture the surface using diamond-tipped drills. It dulled the bits and the drill motor itself had burned out emitting from its air-intake a shower of sparks that had set fire to an untidy spill of computer printout. That was an hour ago.

Rodriguez finished packing and gathered up the bundles of vital papers that lay strewn around the disorganised laboratory. There was a place he could go where he could lay low for a while, relax and await his fame and, more importantly, his fortune. Mercenary, yes, but then again Harding had made it clear from the start that he did not hire for personality, but for skill. At first Rodriguez had dismissed this paltry tit-bit until, on one memorable occasion, he met another of Harding’s "hired hands" - an albino Brit whose name he never caught. A man whose manner was as cold and sterile as his appearance. The memory of the white man sent chills up Rodriguez’s spine, so he shrugged off the Cloak of Reminiscing Bullshit and instead concentrated on packing his Enchanted Holdall of Impending Fortune.

Whatever the thing was - whatever it was made of - it seemed indestructible. He was no fool. Somewhere out there was a market for such a discovery. As far as he was concerned Harding could go hang.

Finally, he mused. Thief conquers Barbarian, and there’s not a twelve-sided die in sight.

2

GABRAEL ENTERED THROUGH the back door. He did not have to force his entry into the house – that had already been done for him. He stood still next to the breakfast bar and tried to focus on the energy that pulsed from somewhere on the floor above. His hand wandered to the inside of his greatcoat, and he pulled his own pistol from a shoulder holster. Something was not right, and the broken lock on the back door was just a part of it. The feeling he was getting from the man upstairs - the man they had been sent to kill – was one of darkness and danger. The target was supposed to be non-threatening, in the mortal sense of the word, and not like this.

‘Maz, I’m inside, but I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ he whispered, walking softly to the living room doorway. He stopped, listened, and then opened it carefully. The room was empty and dark. The curtains were drawn across the bay window. Gabrael crossed the room and peered out between them at the bus across the street.

‘Peek-a-boo,’ he whispered. In his ear, Malzekiel chuckled.

The shortfall in Malzekiel’s technological bounty meant that there was just the one transmitter/receiver set between the two of them. By skilful use of the parabolic microphone, Malzekiel could pick up on Gabrael’s softly spoken words, and in turn Gabrael could hear Malzekiel communications via the VHF receiver screwed into his right ear.

‘Okay, Maz. Aside from the entrance hall, which I’ll do next, the ground floor looks sound. I’ll do another visual check-in with you when I get upstairs. Until then I’ll keep a gag on.’

‘Go nuts, man. And bring me back a souvenir.’

‘Souvenir, you asshole,’ Gabrael muttered under his breath.

‘I heard that,’ Malzekiel replied.

Gabrael opened the door to the hallway and stepped through. Dusk’s melancholy fire streamed in through the fanlight, illuminating a scattering of the morning’s post that still lay unopened upon welcome mat. A clock on the wall showed that seven o’clock had come and gone. As the sun began its dip into the ocean, the light of its slow burn threw long shadows across the hall carpet and up each and every wall. Suddenly, the house seemed very small indeed.

Gabrael could hear footsteps shuffling on the other side of the ceiling, and he wondered if he had misinterpreted the Unity’s instructions. As far as he was concerned, the target was expected to be insensible before the act, and dead afterwards.

The first stair-board creaked gently beneath his foot. Gabrael froze. Upstairs the footsteps stopped also, and through the sensory vibrations that carried through the house more clearly than any sound, Gabrael felt a sudden upsurge in the man’s anxieties. Not only was the man awake and potentially dangerous, he was also aware that he was no longer alone.

3

GABRAEL PUSHED AT the bedroom door, which swung open on well-oiled hinges. The room, like the downstairs, was enshrouded in gloom. Heavy curtains blocked out the light all through the daytime, keeping the room in an enduring state of twilight. Something stank.

A crack of amber light traced the outline of a body seated in an armchair in the far corner of the room, its features too shaded to make out. Gabrael walked slowly toward it with his gun drawn. The figure made no effort to run. It did not even look up. Even as he crossed the floor Gabrael became aware of a faint and unpleasant under-buzz that emanated from the body in the chair, and it was different to the stronger signature he had felt before. Unless he was mistaken, there were now two to contend with; one from the body, and the other one, the first, coming from...

Gabrael began to back towards the door. ‘Maz, get in here now,’ he hissed, keeping his voice as low and urgent as possible. ‘We’ve got a problem. I have two in here, not one!’

4

‘ACTUALLY, WE’VE GOT THREE,’ Malzekiel replied. The girl gave the bus an unconcerned glance as she turned into the path and walked towards the front door of number 42, Spruce Walk. Malzekiel pretended not to notice, but surreptitiously he watched her where she stood at the lower window of the tidy little house. Her hair, a tinted claret shot through with bronze highlights that complemented the pale mustard colour of her trouser-suit, hung to her collar in a fashionably rough crop. He checked out her form. Not bad, no tits, but still...

‘Maz? Three? What do you mean three?’ Gabrael’s voice was loud and clear coming from the parabolic’s earphones.

Malzekiel held down the TALK button on the VHF, and lifted to his mouth the button mic pinned to his collar. ‘I got female company out here. Small, white, late-twenties. And inquisitive.’ Malzekiel continued to watch her with growing interest.

Cupping her hands to give shade to her eyes, Maxine peered in through the window. Unable to see anything beyond the closed curtains, she turned back to the door, took hold of the large brass knocker and rapped hard three times. Then she waited.

‘Maz, I need you in here,’ urged Gabrael. ‘Things have just got a lot more complicated.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Malzekiel replied.

So he waited to see what she would do.

Maxine glanced at her watch. It was ten minutes past seven in the evening. Later than she had hoped. The inner-city traffic had choked up the more popular routes, and Maxine had ended up diverting to her own home to drop off the car and complete the short journey on foot. The long wait in the sticky heat had made her irritable, but the walk had cooled her off, turning her irritability back to anxiety.

‘Damn you, Sollie,’ she hissed through gritted teeth. ‘You’d better be seriously ill.’

Maxine tried the knocker once more, and then took to the path that trailed around the side of the house. She walked on past a wooden gate which smelled of fresh creosote, and into a compact garden into which the previous occupant had somehow managed to cram a small pitched-roof shed, and a sizeable pond of drab freshwater fish.

Back in the bus, Malzekiel cursed. He had hoped the girl would have given up and gone away by now, but no such luck. It appeared she was there to stay for a while longer.

‘Gabe, I think she might be familiar with our target.’

‘What? You can’t know that.’

‘No? Well it looks like she’s on her way around to the back of the house. Gabe, please tell me you locked the back door after you.’

Silence. Then: ‘Oh shite.’

‘Gabe, hold on there, man. I’m coming.’

Malzekiel opened the passenger’s door and leaped down into the street.

5

HARDING SQUINTED OUT through the horizontal slats in the closet door, his pistol trained on the man in the long, brown trenchcoat. His reflexes had been sharp, honed as much by experience as by the alarm bells that had begun to ring when he spotted the unusual vehicle parked out front. The moment his ears picked up the soft creak of the stair, he knew he was not alone.

Harding watched the intruder with the calm amusement of a cat that watches its prey struggle to free itself from beneath the weighty, velvet paw. The man was less than ten feet away. Even through the wooden door, a single shot would be enough to mortally wound him, but Harding just watched and waited. He was interested to know who the stranger was, and more importantly, what it was he wanted with the body in the chair.

The man moved across the room, turning his back on the closet door, and stood before the chair in the corner. He was holding a gun in his hand, and its end was raising, pointing towards...

NO! thought Harding, and his finger tightened on the trigger of his own pistol, but before he could fire, the man stiffened suddenly, then quickly retreated to the safety of the landing. Harding relaxed his hand, but his heart thudded hard in his chest. It had almost come to failure once again.

And it still might, he reminded himself. Unless I get rid of the snoop. Sneak up on him. Happy birthday, fucker.

He strained his ears as the man withdrew a little further down the hallway. The closet was beginning to get stuffy. A small bead of sweat trickled down Harding’s nose.

Then he heard a series of loud noises at the front door. Three consecutive knocks, followed by a singular fourth.

Good, thought Harding. The more the merrier. That puts us more or less on equal ground, only as it turns out, I’m more equal than he. As far as I can make out, he doesn’t know I’m here.

6

GABRAEL ENTERED through a door at the end of the landing to find himself in a tidy study, which overlooked the road at the front of the house. He moved closer to the window and the grubby yellow bus bobbed into frame. There was no sign of Malzekiel seated inside.

The girl was inside the house already. He could feel her more prominently than the other two. The bite of her angst was well-remembered, pouring through the glass of a coffee-shop window as easily as the drinks that flowed within.

Gabrael retreated to the landing hallway and turned left into the front bedroom, homing in on the familiar tremor. It was a task made surprisingly difficult by the proximity of the other two persons, whose auras combined made a sensory soup that was not easy to read. Gabrael managed as best he could, sifting out the girl, focusing on her contained hysteria.

He stood in the centre of the room, at the foot of the single bed, and concentrated. She was in the room below him. He heard the television come on downstairs, and then she was moving quickly toward the front hall area. She...

Without warning the image was swamped out by the sensation of growing danger. Gabrael acted on impulse and ducked down behind the bed, just as a shadowy figure crept past the doorway toward the study where Gabrael himself had been just moments before. The wickedness it left in its wake was potent, almost overwhelming. Gabrael tiptoed over to the door and listened. At the end of the hall, a doorknob turned ever so slowly and orange evening light painted a bright stripe across the landing carpet, punctuated only by the shadow of a man.

Gabrael read murder in the man’s heart. He knew that once the stranger was satisfied by his scouring of the study, then he would logically proceed to the next room on the level; the front bedroom.

Gabrael knew he could not afford to be found there. He tiptoed out of the doorway, and down the dusk-lit hall, treading at times upon the shadow of the dark man himself.

Just as he reached the door of the rear-facing bedroom, he heard the telltale creak of a foot upon the lower stairs.

7

MAXINE TOLD HERSELF not to worry. The forced door lock could be explained away. It was Paulson’s doing. Yes, Paulie had seen to it that Solomon was taken home safe and sound from last night’s indulgence. It was therefore within reason that Paulie could not locate the house keys on Solomon’s comatose body, and had to resort to an illegal alternative around the back of the house. It was exactly the stupid, inconsiderate, vaguely responsible thing Tobias Paulson would have done, so with that in mind Maxine urged herself once again not to worry.

But worry she did. Worry was why she was there, and not sleeping off a VDU migraine courtesy of Cerberus Business Solution Inc. Worry was why she walked through the open back door into the gloomy dining room, drawing the curtains and switching on the kitchen light. It was worry that moved her feet in slow, sluggish motion into the living room, and made her grab the remote from the armchair seat, punching the television from lifeless stand-by into full Technicolor gaiety.

The sound of the set was soothing, and Maxine laughed inwardly at herself for succumbing to such an illogical attack of the jitters. Solomon was upstairs and sound asleep, soon to be shaken roughly awake into a place where he would feel like the world’s biggest dollop of bear-shit. It was a hangover well-deserved, and Maxine hoped it would be a stonker.

Serves you right for freaking me out, Sol, thought Maxine as she walked out of the living room and into the front hall. She stopped at the foot of the stairs, cocking her head to one side. She could have sworn that she heard movement coming from above, but it had stopped almost at once. She smirked, shook her head and began to climb the stairs.

8

MALZEKIEL RUSHED up to the front door with a roll of grubby cloth under one arm, the parabolic set still in his hand and headphones slung about his neck. He spread open the cloth wrap on the doorstep, and goggled at the array of shining lockpicks with no clue in the world of how to use them. Some were long and straight, others short and hooked. There was no instruction manual to be seen. It didn’t take him long to work out what to do.

Malzekiel kicked the tools and the rag into the bushes and placed the palm of his hand against the door lock. The brass plate burned against his skin as he concentrated. Pressing hard, he twisted his palm counter-clockwise. There was a mechanical click from inside the lock itself, and the door swung inwards.

‘There,’ he congratulated himself. ‘Easy when you know how.’

He stepped over a scattering of letters and circulars that looked as if it had plans to migrate down the hall to the kitchen. He gently closed the door behind him. The house was quiet.

He lifted the headphones from around his neck and placed the foam pads over his ears. A soft noise crackled through when he swept the sensitive parabolic pickup across the ceiling directly above his head. He heard metal grinding upon metal; a door bolt being drawn back or a handle turned. Then it was followed by slow, creeping footsteps. If anything followed, it was drowned out by a sudden blast of fanfare of music and commentary from the room next to him. Malzekiel jumped and flattened his back against the wall beside the door. Just in time too, as the very next second the door opened outward and a girl came out of the living room.

From where he stood, obscured from view by the door itself, Malzekiel could hear the girl’s breathing, quick and shallow, picked up by the parabolic. Then she strode on past him to the foot of the stairs, paused with a strange smile on her face, and then continued on up. The first board creaked under her foot, and in his ears the noise was like the roar of a tigress. He waited until she had gone to the very top of the flight before he skirted around the door and into the living room.

If either Gabrael or himself were detected in the house, the whole deal would be up in a flash. No more fun, and one more reason for the Unity to despise him. Still, there was no point going on up after the girl. He would have to draw her off another way.

He looked around the living room. The television was showing a live update on the New Denton Annual Carnival that had by now proceeded to the city’s northern belt. The TV remote lay just where Maxine had left it, on the top of the set. Malzekiel had an idea. If he turned the volume all the way up, she would certainly hear it, as would half the neighbourhood. After all, she hadn’t been invited into the house, but had come in through the back way. It was his experience that uninvited guests often preferred to avoid detection. Yes, that could work.

He strode confidently up to the television and reached for the remote control with his free hand. A loud shriek of feedback split his ears. Falling back from the television set, he let out a startled yell and clapped his hand over his mouth. The shrill sound abated to a static crackle, but the damage had already been done. The girl’s light footsteps could be heard coming quickly down the stairs. He knew what had happened without having to give it much thought. Feedback from the TV, amplified to full volume. To angle the pickup away from the TV speaker would have been wise, but hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing.

The diversion was not quite what he had in mind, but providing he was not caught out, it could still be turned to his advantage, and that depended entirely on his actions over the following few seconds.

There was one thing he could do that sprung immediately to mind. One that would enforce a positive outcome.

He legged it.

9

GABRAEL STOOD with his back to the door, willing the girl to leave. The close proximity of the three persons was playing havoc with his preternatural radar; the girl on the other side of the door, a mere two inches away; and the wicked intruder to Gabrael’s left, lurking behind a division of plaster and wood. Then there was the man in the chair in the corner. The man he had been sent to eliminate. His aura was a streaming constant, a soft drone in the background nowhere near as strong as the others, as if the wayward soul was calling from a distant place. Gabrael had never felt anything like it before in his boundless lifetime.

The handle of the door turned a fraction, and Gabrael held his breath. Then, from down the stairs and through the earpiece there came a simultaneous blast of noise - a thin screech that made the hairs at the nape of his neck stand on end. He thought he detected Malzekiel’s gruff tone, buried within the din with a fractional delay. In its wake, the household returned to absolute stillness.

The door handle moved back into position and Gabrael felt and heard the girl’s retreat down to the lower rooms.

It has to be Maz, he thought. Whatever grace he had before, he has certainly lost that edge. That had to be the least cautious diversion ever staged in history, but he had said it himself: caution never was his best policy.

Despite the limited success of Malzekiel’s ear-splitting tactic, the commissioned execution was - for now - an impossibility, but the diversion had at least allotted them a few precious seconds more.

Gabrael crossed the room to the far corner where the man lay low down, slumped between the arms of the bubble-chair. He looked terrible; bedraggled and pale. His shrivelled lips were drawn tight and grey across his teeth in a ghastly grimace. He wasn’t dead, but Gabrael was sure that death was not far off. If whatever caused him to become like that wasn’t going to kill him, then the passage of time would. By Gabrael’s reckoning he didn’t have long either way.

Gabrael could think of no answer, but continued to check him over. His nose was swollen and lined with a crust of dry blood. A few spots that had dripped onto his shirt collar had dried into a stain the colour of rust. There was a pair of leather shoes lying at his feet. One of them lay tipped on its side, some kind of pale powder was visible within, a mellow silver-grey against the tan rawhide. Gabrael picked up the shoe and tipped the contents into his hand.

‘Sand?’ he said, quite astonished. ‘Where on earth have you been to get sand in your shoes? The beach has to be a dozen miles away, at least.’

He checked the other, and it was the same. He found a lot more in the folds and pockets of the clothes the man was wearing. A sizeable deposit lay concealed in the turned up ankles of his trousers.

A sharp tapping at the window made Gabrael jump. He stood bolt upright and cautiously drew aside the curtain a crack to see Malzekiel’s anxious face leering back in at him. Gabrael swept the curtain aside and opened the window.

Malzekiel floated inside.

‘Maz, are you brain-dead?’ scolded Gabrael. ‘Levitating in public? What the heck were you thinking?’

Malzekiel settled upon the floor and brushed the wrinkles out of his clothes. ‘You think I should have brought a ladder? Come on, Gabe. It’s not as if I used my wings. I call levitation a compromise. Besides, it’s coming in dark, and I did scope out the other gardens. Trust me, there’s no-one around to witness, and even if they did...trick of the shadows.’

‘Even so...’ said Gabrael. He let the sentence hang in the air like a declaration of guilt.

Time was wasting away, as was the man in the chair. Malzekiel broke eye contact with Gabrael to take his first good look at the body, and the smugness drained from his face.

‘Stone me, he looks like shit. Any idea what happened?’

‘Haven’t a clue. But we can’t do a thing here right now. We’d better...’

Gabrael snapped his head towards the door. A darkness had descended suddenly upon his heart.

‘Hide!’ he rasped and shoved Malzekiel towards the first viable space he could see.

A second later the door swung open.

10

IMPOSSIBLE! Harding had thought when the study door opened upon an empty room. Empty that was albeit from the small desk, a green glass banker’s lamp and a small reference library that took up a single shelf along the stud wall; nothing that could conceal a grown man from view. Of course, the slender blonde-haired man in the three-quarter-length coat could always have hid out in the adjacent front bedroom, but Harding had his doubts. He had a sharp mind and keener senses. He would have heard the footsteps come back down the corridor, just as he had picked up the telltale squeak of the study door. Besides, he had taken a brief glance into the room as he passed. It was clean.

Harding leaned across the desk and drew the curtain aside. The western sky shone like a furnace. In the street, the school bus had not moved, so the newcomer, whoever he was – for Harding had no doubt now that his prior intuition had proved correct – was still around...somewhere.

Harding was considering giving the front bedroom another, more comprehensive sweep, when the murmur of voices and music came floating up the stairs. It sounded like a television was on in the living room, and that meant that the visitor who had come calling by was now inside the house. Soon enough, the sound was joined by another as the visitor moved from the living room to the hallway, and began to come up the stairs.

Harding turned toward the source of the sound and saw his own shadow stretching all the way across the floor to the far end of the landing. If he could see it, then so could the visitor once he (or she) had got more than halfway up the flight. Harding was just about to shut the study door, killing off his own shadow, when he was reminded of his chances of concealment if the visitor were to come into the room. Slim to none were not good odds. The next room offered a greater advantage.

He left the study, pulling the door to behind him, and cautiously entered the front bedroom. He was right, there was no-one there. Somehow the blonde man had given him the slip. Such a thing was rare, but not unheard of. And those who succeeded never did so a second time.

Harding stepped behind the door just as the feet on the stairs thudded up the final few. He stood with his ear to the back wall, looking out through the crack between the door and the jamb. He could see nothing except a narrow sliver of landing that overlooked the stairway. One hand was jammed inside his jacket pocket, the metal of the gun deadly cold against his palm. He waited.

As it turned out, Harding did not have to wait too long. Just as the visitor reached the bottom end of the landing, a raucous din erupted from downstairs. The visitor retreated at once, and it was through his blinkered refuge that Harding glimpsed her. He smiled. A young woman. The charms were working a treat; his usual downturn in luck seemed to have changed for the better. Getting rid of the girl would be a simple matter, but the man remained an unknown variable.

Harding waited until he heard the creak of the loose stair before coming out from behind the door. He looked over the banister rail. She was gone, but he figured not for long.

He tiptoed back to the door of the rear bedroom, pushed it open, and slipped inside. The body still adorned its air-filled throne, lording inanely over the bedroom realm. The room was just how he had left it. All except for the window, which was now wide open.

So that’s where he got out, thought Harding. Well, at least that takes care of the wild card in the pack, and that just leaves the girl.

Who at that moment was on her way back up the stairs.

11

MAXINE PUSHED the OFF button on the remote, and watched the New Denton Annual Carnival reduce to a fading white spot. Her heart pounded triple time in her chest. She had been so sure of the voice, but in all likelihood, what she had heard had come from an over-stimulated denizen of the city, amplified by that blaring malfunction. That sure had scared her. When Solomon was awake and clear-headed, in about an hour’s time by her reckoning, she would urge him to get the set repaired. There was no way she could live through that again.

Just to make ease her mind, Maxine took a look around downstairs; the dining area; the kitchen; a brief cast around the garden through the kitchen window; and then back through the living room to the hallway. The house was still and quiet. The mail still lay on the mat in an undivided muddle.

She walked back up to the landing and stood outside Solomon’s bedroom, her shadow dividing the sombre cone of light that pitched in from the study window. Although the house was his - an outright gift from beyond the grave, she shivered – for a reason best known to Solomon himself, he never moved into the master bedroom at the front of the house, always instead preferring the rear room; the room he had occupied through all the terrible years of his childhood. It was sweet, but in a way, sad also. That was Solomon all over. Dear sweet, sad Solomon. Sweet, sad, pissed Solomon, who was in danger of losing his job.

Maxine rapped twice on the door and when she heard nothing, she walked on inside. Sure enough, there he was asleep in his favourite hideous chair, just as she suspected all along. Maxine wrinkled her nose up in disgust.

‘Ugh, Solomon. You stink! I’ll get some air in here.’

Her heart leapt and caught in her throat like fish bones when she saw movement from the corner of the room. The curtains billowed again, dark and foreboding spirits born of night and of loom, animated by the breeze rolling in from the partially opened window.

‘Bloody hell!’ she gasped. Then she laughed a little out of relief. She yanked the curtains aside, just to make sure. The evening breeze was strong and cool, dissipating the heat of the day with its every breath. Beneath the window the garden conifers rustled, swaying gently. Murky water rippled and sloshed against the fishpond’s edge, the aquatic plants that stood protruding from the deep waters listed back and forth to the will of the tide. It was the wind and nothing more.

‘Well, Sollie, you’ve outdone yourself this time,’ Maxine scolded, as she drew breath after calming breath of sweet twilight air. ‘A whole day late for work. If I were you, I’d start working on a good excuse right about now.’ She drew the curtains all the way back to the wall on either side.

‘Come on, Solomon,’ she said in a flat, tired voice. ‘Get up, babe. I’ll go put the kettle on.’

She turned, and was about to shake him gently by the shoulder when she realised that something was wrong. Under the half-light of dusk, which lay like a cobweb on his skin, she knew that he was not sleeping.

She knew this because his eyes were open.

12

MALZEKIEL CREPT from the house while above him the girl continued to scream. He had managed to conceal himself just as the tall dark-skinned man snuck into the back bedroom, a brief moment before the girl. Looking out from between the slats of the closet door, he had watched the dark man cast around the room with a similar intent, and there had been a pivotal moment when Malzekiel was sure to be discovered. The dark man had made for the closet, only to reconsider his options at the last second, and slide himself instead beneath the stricken man’s bed. The last thing Malzekiel had seen of Gabrael, was a panicked fluttering as Gabrael drew the heavy curtains over himself just as the dark man had entered. When the girl drew them back a few seconds later, he was gone.

Malzekiel, having descended unnoticed down through the closet floor and the ceiling of the dining area – a trick both Gabrael and his precious Unity would have upbraided him for – now traded shadowed recess for enshrouding vegetation in the search for his friend. He moved with practised silence through the garden, keeping close to the cover of the shed and the border hedge. Then from out of the gloom something small hit him squarely between the shoulder blades. Startled, Malzekiel threw himself sideways, performing a practised duck and roll, and in the second it took for him to right himself, flat on his stomach upon the turf, his pistol was already drawn and armed. Malzekiel scanned the garden, sensing someone but seeing nothing. His gaze kept returning to a solitary glistening pebble that lay nestled in the grass beneath his nose.

‘Maz,’ a voice trailed in from the centre of the garden, ‘Put your gun away. It’s me.’

‘Gabe? Where are you?’ Malzekiel replied. He looked in the direction of the voice. There was just grass and the pond, and the ebbing blood-red glow of the setting sun.

‘Lower your voice. I’m down here.’

The greenery around the perimeter of the fishpond rustled and parted, and a wet hand, water trailing from a soaked sleeve beckoned him over.

Malzekiel walked over to the pond and with wry amusement looked down between the reeds at the figure that lay almost fully submerged in the freezing, murky waters. He could not help but give a small chuckle.

‘Hi,’ said Gabrael, miserably. ‘Well, we blew it.’

‘It couldn’t be helped, Gabe,’ said Malzekiel, offering his friend a hand. ‘But we may yet get another chance.’

‘It will be difficult now, you realise. It seems our man has become something of a common interest.’ Gabrael took hold of Malzekiel’s arm and pulled himself from the water.

‘So I noticed. Who the hell was the black guy?’

‘I don’t know. Listen, Maz. Don’t you go getting any of your ideas. There’s something not right about him.’

‘Because he’s black?’

‘Because he’s dangerous.’

‘And what about the girlfriend?’

Gabrael nodded. ‘Girlfriend sounds about right. I got that vibe from her. She was angry, but also worried. And scared, so very scared.’

‘I take it you didn’t get to finish the job?’ asked Malzekiel.

‘Did you, Maz?’ Gabrael replied, shaking his head. Droplets flew from his matted hair.

Malzekiel took a step back out of range. ‘Didn’t get the chance with those two in the room.’

‘The scream. Was that for the black guy or the body?’

‘The body, I guess. For what it’s worth, our plans are not the only ones to have gone awry tonight. Our dangerous friend will have to lay low for a while, whatever it is he’s there for. And the girl? Heh, she really freaked.’

‘I know. I heard her’ said Gabrael. He waggled his finger in his ear, then cocked his head to one side. ‘It’s all gone quiet. Do you think-’

Suddenly the garden was bathed in a synthetic pale light that cascaded from the house, pouring out of the windows of the entire ground floor.

The two looked at each other, then back at the house and finally at the girl who was standing at the back door, squinting out into the shadowy garden.

‘Uh-oh’ said Malzekiel and Gabrael together.

13

ONLY After THE EMERGENCY SWITCHBOARD connected her call to the New Denton community hospital, did Maxine burst into tears. She left the sympathetic telephonist with Solomon’s name and address, and then hung up. While she waited for the ambulance to arrive, she kept herself busy by securing all the doors and windows in the house, switching off appliances, and making the place presentable for when Solomon would return home, one day soon and fighting fit.

Maxine was sliding the kitchen door deadbolt into place when, through the window, she thought she glimpsed movement in the twilight garden beyond. She threw on the downstairs lights and squinted out into the night, her eyes reluctant to adjust to the light differential. She could see nothing but flickering shadows. She waited for a moment to be sure, then once satisfied that all was well, she turned her back and walked back through the rooms of the lower floor, killing the lights as she went.

14

PONDWEED DRIFTED APART as two heads broke the surface of the water. Malzekiel rose to his feet, pond water trickling from the end of his nose, his long coat spread out over the water’s surface like an oil slick. Gabrael started to laugh.

‘Yes, yes. Very funny,’ he spluttered, ‘but, at least we weren’t spotted.’

‘Come on, Maz, let’s leave the swimming to the fishes shall we?’ suggested Gabrael, who was already climbing out of the pool on his hands and knees.

Malzekiel snorted in agreement, and followed close behind.

15

MAXINE LOOKED ON as the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, hooking Solomon’s body up to a range of drips and electrical apparatus held inside. One of the men glanced over at Maxine and aroused the attention of the other who was busy checking the patient’s restraints. He looked too.

She was staring past the men into the back of the ambulance, chewing absently at her split fingernails.

‘Excuse me, Miss?’

‘Huh?’ Maxine snapped out of her trance, and focused on the stocky ambulance hand who had spoken. ‘I-I’m sorry?’

‘Come on, love. I’m sure he’ll be all right.’ His voice was warm and reassuring.

‘Yes, of course he will.’ Maxine said doggedly. Then she broke down and sobbed.

The paramedic put his arm around her. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘hop in. You can hold his hand on the way if you like.’

His colleague had finished securing Solomon in place, and had already climbed into the driver’s seat. He leaned out of the door craning his head round to face Maxine. ‘And they do a cracking cup of tea at the hospital,’ he added with a wink.

‘Th-thank you,’ Maxine sniffed, blinking back the tears. ‘I’d like that very much.’

16

‘WHAT’S GOING ON? What can you see?’

While Malzekiel was ringing out his heavy coat into the gravel at the side of the house, Gabrael was lying on the ground and peeking around the wall with one eye. The street was illuminated with the dancing disco flash of red and blue as the ambulance pulled away from the house.

‘You would not believe how much trouble we’ve made for ourselves, Maz,’ said Gabrael.

Malzekiel looked up from pouring pond-water out of the barrel of his gun. ‘Like it was going to be so easy before.’

‘Come on,’ said Gabrael, as he started to squelch across the front garden. ‘We’ve got to follow them.’

Malzekiel, rolling his eyes, went with him back across the road to where Gabrael had parked the beat-up yellow bus.

17

HARDING LAY COMPLETELY STILL on the floor beneath the bed while he contemplated his next move. His eyes were closed but he was awake, and aware of everything that had happened. And despite the major upset of his plans, he was calm.

Medical men had arrived, and had taken the body to the city hospital, where it would be examined and treated accordingly. He could not allow that to happen. Furthermore, there were others involved now – two men, not just the one – who had some stake on his private claim. An unfortunate predicament indeed.

There was something about the men, though. Something familiar that put him instantly on edge. It made him think of his employer who had apparently failed to foresee this. Or if that was not the case, Harding had simply been left out of the loop. Neither option inspired confidence.

The one advantage of the body winging its way to hospital, was that on its arrival it would no doubt receive the utmost care to prolong the man’s life. And that could be of immense benefit to him, and his employer. After all, it was in his interest that the body was kept alive. It appeared those other men had wanted it dead. Preparation was the key to success, and success was the key to the future. For his own preparations, Harding needed to know who they were, and why they had come.

As if in answer to his thoughts, his cellular telephone bleeped with a delivered voice-mail.

18

Solomon opened his eyes to a carriage immersed in perfect darkness. The train itself was not moving - and why should it? he thought. There was no driver after all.

The idea he’d had that something of notable import was awaiting him aboard the subway shuttle was laughable in hindsight. He didn’t know what he had expected to happen, and as far as he was concerned, nothing did. Solomon barely recalled boarding the train and finding his seat. He didn’t remember passing out in the carriage, but a shadow of the ache in his head still throbbed there like a mental bruise.

A little woozy, Solomon struggled up the aisle and managed to locate the exit. He opened the door and stepped out into a momentary void. The platform was no longer there, a detail that, in the breath-space it took for him to resume his relationship with the ground, was both imminent and painfully obvious. He pitched forward onto the damp chippings next to the set of rails on which, ordinarily, the train thundered along, more or less on the hour.

All around him was the gloomy darkness of a subterranean rail tunnel, a conclusion confirmed by the rank smell of oil and stagnant rainwater that had filtered down through soil and rock from the streets above. The only shape he could clearly define was the carriage from which he had emerged. Everything else was lost in the matte black shadow that stretched away in all directions. Even the tunnel ceiling had been swallowed up by the gloom.

The persistent tingling notion that was drawing him homeward continued to do so (and if anything it had increased since the dreamless blackout). Picking himself up, he set off into the darkness in the direction, he hoped, of Adelaide Avenue Station, all the while blindly feeling his way along the string of carriages.

Solomon soon reached the front cabin where the curvature of the metal shell arced away to nothing. One step further would take him into an agoraphobic nightmare. Leaning forward he could feel the emptiness press in on him like a smothering shroud. His fingers left the cool metal, and instantly the feeling of isolation snapped home. Panicking, Solomon groped behind him for the driver’s cabin, but found only empty air ahead of him and around him. The entire train had vanished.

Around him the darkness flourished, a ghoul of impossible blackness nurtured by his own primordial fears. Solomon did the only thing he could with his heart beating double-time and a cold sweat prickling on his brow.

He began to walk.

19

The NEW DENTON lab was deserted. His tip-off had been correct. The evidence of a hurried departure lay strewn about the floor, benches and worktops. Harding kicked his way through the scattered paperwork and plastic racks of broken test tubes. A computer workstation dominated a desk at the far side of the room, away from the disarray.

He surveyed the clutter with searching, purposeful eyes. The large pink packing crate was open and on its side, the contents spilled out onto the floor. The sample was missing.

‘Rodriguez,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘when are you ever going to learn?’

20

SOLOMON was tired and afraid. He had been walking for God knew how long. For all he knew it could have been ten minutes, or an hour. One thing he was sure of, however, was that the ground beneath his feet had changed. Initially, it had consisted of small brittle stones and the occasional chunk of broken brick, but way back it had began to alter. Now it was a much smoother trek, softer, with the occasional small, hard object that he could feel through the sole of his shoe. Just like compacted earth. And the rails had gone too, having receded back down beneath the level of the ground with every blind step.

Solomon was more concerned, however, at the faint glow which had just appeared up ahead, illuminating the slick tunnel with a powdery white light. A rumbling accompanied the light as it drove pools of shadow back across the roughened walls, and reflected off the small rivulets of water that trickled down the brickwork in silver ribbons. The low frequency made his eardrums rattle.

Solomon could now see that the tunnel curved gently off to the left, for the light was illuminating the outer wall of the bend more so than the inner. He could also make out the twin-rails that followed the course parallel to the walls - rails that somehow in the clamouring darkness had managed to evade his questing feet. The light also appeared to be moving towards him at a rapid pace and its accompanying lowly growl was getting louder all the time. In darkened rail tunnels such as this, the equation Light plus Sound plus Resonance almost always equated to Train.

Solomon stumbled to the left, desperate to evade the oncoming glare of reflected light that washed around the tunnel bend. His legs impacted against a hidden barrier, trapping him. He raised a leg to climb over it, but with a blast of sound that raked through his body, and that intolerable, unforgiving glare of intense white, the oncoming train was upon him.

Light and sound penetrated him as if his body were nothing more than a cloud of weightless gas, and in turn his body penetrated the train, passing through the metal shell with its bundles of wires and cold curves of glass, through the living flesh and bones of the driver, and down the trailing umbilical of carriages. The interior of the cars was an inferno of artificial light and streaming colour. Smudged, indefinable shadows trailed past in a medley of heights and masses. He caught a glimpse of a blurred face when he snapped his gaze to the left. Male or female, he hadn’t a clue; all detail was lost at the skin-stripping velocity at which it passed. A suggestion of eyes. A mouth open in laughter, stretched to infinity. Now long gone. Shapes and colours screamed past him, through him, in a pulsing, violent hurricane of sound and light.

Through him? But of course, what else could he expect. As a spirit clinging to a world of palpable matter, he could no more cling to the physical than he could the elusive specifics of a deep-sleep dream. However, his acceptance of the extra-physical form seemed almost palatable until he witnessed the train passing by him from the outside now – and at right angles to himself. It flashed from left to right, from darkness to darkness. The illuminated windows were but a blur of frames and faces lit in pale gold...

Now he hovered above the roof of the train, just feet away as it thundered beneath him with the ferocity of a passing tornado. The final carriage tore past and the snarling engine rattled away into the darkness.

Solomon was still gripping the top of the barricade with tight, balled fists. What he held onto felt soft and spongy, and each of his fingers had sunk almost up to the knuckle in the yielding material. He looked down. A faint light from somewhere ahead of him revealed the object that had blocked his escape. He released his grip from the upholstery. Looking around him he could make out a large number of identical seats, arranged in tiered rows, leading all the way down to the front...

Perspective snapped home, as if it had been waiting on the brink of his perception for this very moment. The faint light was coming from a large projection screen across which a picture was being broadcast in flickering, jumping shafts, beamed from the projector room at the back of the theatre.

Popcorn crunched beneath his feet. Solomon was standing in the centre of a large room tiered with banks of seats, all of which were folded and empty. The projection ended abruptly, filling the theatre with a grey, strobing glare as the end of the reel played through the projector. A green exit sign flickered to life at the top corner of the aisle.

Somehow he was inside a cinema theatre. The Reel-Wurld Movie-House.

Stunned, Solomon wandered through the flickering gloom with uncertainty, crushing spilled junk food underfoot and kicking over a carton of soft drink that lay abandoned in the shadows beneath one of the seats. The familiar jostle of ice against ice broke through the tikka-tikka of the film reel, and the sobering reality of the sound somehow restored a little comfort to him.

Emerald green letters blazed through the half-light, their composition and arrangement restoring more life to Solomon’s torn and eviscerated self. EXIT. The electricity hummed and pulsed through it, as though singing its name.

Solomon stood beneath the sign, bathed in jade and gradients of black. He was scared, terrified to open the door beneath the sign - the door directly in front of him - in case it wasn’t real. He touched it. It felt real.

‘Ex-IT... Exit...eXIt’, hummed the sign.

Solomon pushed the handle home, and heard a click as the bolt slid back. The door groaned as it opened.

The sign buzzed once, flickered through each of its letters in order and went mostly dark, a soft buzz still emanating from it. The X remained lit for a few seconds further then went out with a pop.

Solomon walked through the open doorway.

21

The outside of the theatre was almost as dark as the inside. Night had fallen suddenly. Solomon peered out cautiously into an alley that, although initially appeared alien and rife with shadows, he recognised only too well. It was the alley behind the theatre complex where he had stumbled across the old woman and her husband. On this occasion - and he breathed a sign of relief for the small mercy - the alley looked to be empty. Solomon stepped out and glanced about. It was then that he noticed that his assumption had been rash. The alley was almost empty, for there, perched upon the weather-beaten frame of a discarded bicycle, like some ruffled gargoyle, and regarding him with beady, intelligent eyes, was the only living, moving thing that he had seen for quite some time.

And for a moment Solomon could do nothing but stare straight back at it.

22

THE SHUTTERS MOVED back and forth in the night breeze, knocking against the sill with sporadic blows, some soft, others hard enough to rattle the glass in the warped wooden frame. The noise was enough to wake Rodriguez who had been having trouble sleeping that night, and was anxious for the sun to rise so that he could be on his way. He hated using the hideaway place - a crumbling out-of-town motel - but it was well-isolated and the rooms were cheap. The manager, a large man with a buzz-cut and a lazy eye, was a permanent fixture to the seedy establishment, always turning his good eye away from the prostitutes and rent boys who frequented the motel along with their middle-class clientele. He blindsided the junkies, allowing them to get high, sweating out their crack-nightmares into the lice-ridden bedding and stained mattresses. He sold moonshine gin to the winos for extortionate prices, knowing that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay, just so he had an excuse to redeem his losses by beating the shit out of them the next morning as a warm up to his daily round of golf. He joked that it was the perfect hangover remedy. You soon forget about the jackhammer in your brain, when an angry man wielding a carbon-fibre driver goes for fifty-above-par across the backs of your legs.

Rodriguez avoided all possible contact with the man. He had paid him up front for the room, even slipping him a generous twenty-percent sweetener for services unrendered.

Soon the sun would rise, endowing Rodriguez with a fresh start to his miserable life, but until then the cool breeze continued to blow, carrying on its drafts the sound of a thousand insects’ moonlight chorus, and the persistent noise of the shutters banging against the sill, lifting tiny ghosts from the pale road dust that had collected in the corners of the frame. The shutters flapped loose on the outside of a split-pane window, the bottom half of which had been raised up and propped open by a wooden strut, jammed into one corner of the frame. Each time the shutters slammed back against the sill, the fixed upper panes quivered with the impact.

Rodriguez lay for a while on the low cot trying to blot out the noisy shutters, but found himself listening instead to the sounds of the room; mice under the floor; the stirring of the eaves; plaintive moans of the poor lost soul in the adjacent room filtering through the wall.

He shifted position on the lumpy mattress, trying to find a comfortable spot. He folded his pillow in half, rested his head upon it, shuffled again, then picked up the pillow and threw it across the room, groaning in exasperation of the sleep that would not come.

Now he needed to pee.

Rolling off the bunk he walked across the worn carpet into the bathroom, groping blindly for the heater switch. Since he was here last the pull-cord for the bathroom light had frayed and snapped, and had not since been replaced, so the only source of light was the sullen red glow of the infrared electric wall heater, an inefficient and undesirable choice on such a muggy midsummer night. It wasn’t long before he began to sweat. It was both ridiculous and uncomfortable peeing by firelight. He cursed the surly motel manager under his breath.

Rodriguez finished, and washed his hands. The shutter was still banging away in the other room, more violent than before - a sure sign that the wind outside was picking up. He jumped at the sound of splintering glass; the window had shattered, for which he would have to pay.

Returning to the bedroom, he could clearly see the glass that had showered over the bed and carpet from the top half of the window, moonlight glittering off the smaller shards. After slipping on his shoes, he kicked the greater pieces into a corner, then reached out beneath the broken window and pulled the loose shutter closed. The metal catch was broken and hanging loose, but he managed to effect a temporary fix by using the laces out of his shoes to tie the shutter catch to its fitting on the sill. The wind tugged at the shutter from outside, but the mend held together.

In the meantime his ingenuity had hushed that incessant banging, and perhaps now he could get some much-needed rest. Except now that the wind had picked up, it slipped in through the gaps in the shutter making a ghastly shrieking noise. Shutting down the window would have quieted the noise had it not been for the fact that the glass in the upper pane had shattered right out of the frame. If he could stuff the empty frames with a jacket or towel, it might just dampen the sound enough, but first he needed to lower the bottom pane out of the way. Not a desirable option on a night as muggy as this.

Outside the wind had built into a steady gale, whipping the slender trees across the way, and stirring up leaves and dust from the roadside in a swirling frenzy. A storm was coming.

Rodriguez removed the wooden prop from the frame, and pushed gently at the mobile lower half of the window. It did not move, so he leaned his arm on the top of it. Still nothing – the window was sticking in its runners, warped by the recent heatwave, no doubt.

Rodriguez gripped the frame at the bottom and yanked down with force. It gave a little before the rotten lower part of the frame came away in his hands, exposing the fragile edge of glass held within. The applied force caused him to smash his knuckles on the sill beneath, and he swore aloud, tossing the worm-ridden spur aside in frustration. Outside, the wind howled like a wayward banshee, rattling the secured shutters. Small beads of blood seeped from his grazed skin, black and shiny in the moonlight. He sucked the wound clean, and then leaning hard on the top of the frame with the heel of his left palm, and gripping the naked pane with the fingers and thumb of his right, he tugged hard.

The window came unstuck and guillotined down to the sill. The glass fractured upon impact with the painted wood, while at the same time Rodriguez’s makeshift bindings came loose and the wind ripped open the shutters once more.

Then Rodriguez became aware of the deep ache in his hand, and he stared in disbelief at the four pale, severed digits, which rolled noiselessly off the sill and into the night. The glistening stubs that remained on his right hand vented a pulsing ebony geyser into the air, spattering the sill, the cracked pane, and his own naked form with hot, dark droplets.

Rodriguez stuffed his mutilated paw into the pit of his left arm, and roared. The door to the shabby room blew open with a crash, letting in the wind’s own angry voice that drowned out his agonised cries. Leaves and road-dust swelled up inside choking the air. And there in the doorway, silhouetted against the colourless night, was a figure, dressed from head to toe in black as if clothed of the night itself, eyes glittering out from the darkness like dying embers.

‘Tut-tut, Billy,’ Harding growled. ‘Stealing from your employer? It seems I need to reconsider your worth to me, after all.’