Dave Hutchinson

Sleeps With Angels

An Introduction

I just checked, and I discovered that it’s a little over ten years since my last collection, As The Crow Flies, which came as a bit of a surprise. Where does the time go?

There was a time when I wrote nothing but short stories. A friend of mine, faced with my first novel, The Villages, said, “You know, you’re really a short story writer.” I’m still not certain what he meant by that. Anyway, the stories got longer and longer and fewer and fewer. Where I would once have been happy to wind up a story in two thousand words, I started to find there wasn’t enough room unless I had at least ten thousand to play with.

Sleeps With Angels is a collection of the previously uncollected. Some of the stories were published by the late and very much lamented SciFiction, others as part of anthologies and collections with other writers, one was self-published as an ebook, and one, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”, has never seen the light of day until now, apart from as a word file being sent to anyone who wanted to read it. It’s interesting that once upon a time all of these stories would have been in print at some point, but at least two of them have only ever existed in electronic form before this.

Publishing is changing, of course. Self-publishing, notably with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing programme, seems to me to have finally democratised the process. It’s now possible for anyone to publish a novel — or even a standalone short story — for free, and make some money out of it. This of course has led to a tidal wave of spam on social media from Indie Authors, many of whom have read Internet Marketing 101 books and not realised that spam is intensely annoying.

One of the interesting things this change in publishing has done is remove, for a large number of authors, the traditional checks and balances which once stood between the writer and the reader. Editors, for example. I have a suspicion — and I’m not going to do the research to back this up because it would only make me angry — that there is an awful lot of very badly-edited self-published stuff out there. Self-edited, which is often not the best of ideas. First-drafty, which is even worse.

On the bright side, nobody needs to read the stuff. It doesn’t take up any room anywhere, doesn’t consume any resources, there’s often a chance to preview it before you buy. It’s possible that as time goes by a kind of natural selection will come into play; the really crap stuff will sink without trace while the good stuff rises. Just like in ‘normal’ publishing, right?

I’m fond of telling people that the internet is still, really, in its infancy, still shaking itself down and finding its feet. Which is largely meaningless, but sounds sort of wise if you don’t think about it too hard. I think this new age in publishing is much the same; still young, still finding its feet. I’m still not convinced that it won’t go the way of Betamax and MiniDisc. I’m told that sales of the Kindle have been falling, although that’s probably because more people are reading books on their tablets now. Probably.

I have a Kindle and I’ve been surprised by how easily I’ve taken to it. I expected the experience to be weird and alienating, but it wasn’t at all. I find that I read more quickly, and retain more, using the Kindle than when reading a conventional book. While I’m not about to give up reading paper books entirely — the few books I did actually manage to read last year were all printed versions — the Kindle is a handy alternative, and we have to remember that an increasing number of books never see existence in print and that e-readers, whether in the form of an app or a discrete physical device, are the only way to access them. Personally, I don’t enjoy using a Kindle any less than I enjoy using a paper book.

I’ll end this ramble with a small observation. While I was writing this, I looked up Ben Bova’s 1989 novel Cyberbooks, which some say predicted ebooks. As far as I can tell, there is no Kindle version of it…

Dave Hutchinson

London

January 2015

The Fortunate Isles

A television is playing in the corner of the room, a big LCD flatscreen model, maybe thirty years old, its picture speckled with malfunctioning pixels. The sound is turned down, but the screen is showing a reality programme, this one involving fifteen celebrities — including, improbably, the last surviving and very aged member of U2 — locked in a decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine on the floor of the Arctic Ocean off Novaya Zemlya. The show’s been airing for a couple of weeks now, and the participants are starting to look bored and listless.

The two men ignore the television and continue walking around the room.

They’re walking in opposite directions, facing outward along the wall, unhurriedly, looking at everything, taking photographs with their phones. The wall is covered with lining paper and painted what was probably once quite a sunny lemon yellow that the years have rendered a sort of shabby nicotine colour. The light switch has been plumbed in by running a cable down from the ceiling and stapling it to the wall. Neither of the men touches the light switch.

When they cross over by the door they go round again, covering each other’s ground, taking more photographs, bending down to examine marks on the skirting, looking up at where the wall meets the high ceiling, checking under the furniture.

“I think I’m coming down with a cold,” says Paweł.

“You should be so lucky,” says Daniel, who is beginning to be annoyed by the smell in the room.

“There’s a lot of it about,” says Paweł, a tall, sandy-haired young man who looks as though he could manage a walk-on part in one of those new World War Two epics — Third Nazi From The Left (the one who gets his throat slit by a British commando during the daring raid on the German radar station in Occupied France.)

Daniel takes some more photographs of the mess on the wall behind the armchair. “Ready?”

“Just a moment.” Paweł leans forward until his nose is almost touching the wallpaper. Leans back. “Okay.”

The two men turn and face the room.

It’s not a big room and there’s not a lot in it. Shabby armchair and sofa upholstered in green velour, to which a grey long-haired cat has added its own touches. Low coffee table in some cheap wood, with a scratched glass top. Television attached to a number of add-on boxes by a cat’s cradle of mismatched cabling. Paweł and Daniel go around the room again, clockwise and counterclockwise, looking under the furniture, looking at the bottle of whiskey and two glasses and the scatter of magazine printouts on the coffee table. They ignore the dead man in the armchair. They go around again, taking photographs.

Daniel’s phone hums. He looks at the screen and touches the answer icon. “It’s yourself, Gard Lockhart,” he says with all the Biblical opprobrium he can load into his voice.

As responding officer, it was Gard Lockhart’s job to secure the scene until Daniel and Paweł arrived, but in a fit of compassion Gard Lockhart felt it necessary to accompany the hysterical widow to the local hospital, and now Daniel and Paweł have to assume the scene is contaminated even if it’s not, which means they’ll have to regard any evidence they find as suspect, because any future defence counsel will certainly tell the jury about it.

“No, Gard,” says Daniel after listening to Lockhart’s explanation for longer than strictly necessary considering how angry he is. “Go back to Ballymena Street. Go into my office and sit down. Don’t stop off in the canteen for a coffee and a chat. Go into my office, close the door behind you, and sit down and wait for me. And don’t touch anything.” He listens again. “No, Gard,” he replies, “it will not appear on your overtime sheet. Not even if you have to wait for me until the end of time. And if, at the end of time, I do finally turn up, and I discover that you’ve fucked off again, I will find you and I will do things to you that will entirely change your outlook on life. Now repeat what I just said.” He listens. Then he hangs up without saying goodbye.

“Bit wordy,” Paweł comments.

“Wordy is the least of Gard Lockhart’s problems,” says Daniel.

“You could go straight home from here and leave him in your office overnight,” Paweł suggests.

Daniel thinks about it. It does appeal, for a moment. He shakes his head. “So,” he says.

“Mm,” says Paweł, and they both walk over to stand in front of the dead man.

He’s sitting in the armchair, white male, in his eighties. He’s wearing a brown pair of corduroy trousers, a white shirt and a tatty grey cardigan. His legs are sprawled out in front of him and his arms are resting on the chair’s armrests. His head is tilted back until he’s looking at the ceiling with an expression of calm puzzlement, slightly cross-eyed, as if he’s trying to focus on the neat little hole in the centre of his forehead. On the wall behind him are a large proportion of the contents of his head. There are blood-spatters all over the armchair and the carpet. Daniel steps forward and palpates the fingers. Rigor hasn’t set in yet, the eyes are still moist, there’s a stench of blood and cordite and voided bowel in the room but no smell of decomposition. All of which unscientific testing appears to mesh with the facts as he knows them. The widow called the police at half past three this morning, about an hour ago, saying that she had gone up to bed and then heard a gunshot and when she came back downstairs she found her husband like this. The widow is, of course, the prime suspect at the moment — the only suspect at the moment — and it’s annoying that she’s now at the hospital under sedation and unable to answer questions. Daniel adds another black mark against Gard Lockhart’s eternal soul.

“I don’t recognise him,” Daniel says, stepping back and lifting his phone to take more photographs. It’s not exactly a fatuous statement; this is a small city, but it’s certainly big enough for one person not to know everybody. A disproportionate number of murder victims tend to come from the criminal classes, though, which is handy because they come attached to priors and files and known associates and probable motives, and Daniel knows most of them personally.

“According to the wife, this is Mr Glenroy Walken,” says Paweł. “And that’s about all Lockhart managed to get out of her before he took her to the hospital.”

“Glenroy.” Daniel moves to one side of the body and takes more photographs. “Well, good morning, Mr Walken. I’m Detective Inspector Snow and this is Detective Sergeant Cybulski and we’ll be your investigating officers for today.” He takes more photographs. “What do you think?”

Paweł stands in the middle of the room and looks at Mr Glenroy Walken, his head tipped to one side. “No sign of a struggle. No sign of forced entry. Drink and glasses on the table.” He looks at the sofa, snaps a couple more photos of it. “We should bag this.”

“So he’s entertaining a friend,” Daniel says. “And at some point around half past three this morning the friend pulls out a handgun and shoots him in the head and then lets themselves out before the widow comes downstairs.”

“Works for me,” says Paweł.

“Or he’s been drinking with his wife all night and about half past three in the morning she just gets sick of listening to him and pulls out a handgun and shoots him in the head.”

“Works for me too,” says Paweł.

Daniel sighs. He rubs his face, says, “All right —” and there’s a commotion outside the room. The door opens and a tall white-haired man wearing a rumpled suit walks in, followed by a flustered-looking Gard Kennedy.

“Snow?” says the white-haired man, walking confidently towards Daniel and Paweł. “What have we here, then?”

Detective Superintendent Tweed, well beyond retirement age and famously insomniac, drives around the city through his endless nights looking for something to occupy his mind. Over the years, Daniel has developed a kind of Zen calm regarding his superior’s habit of striding unbidden into the heart of crime scenes. It’s an attitude Gard Kennedy, who Daniel stationed outside the door in the stead of the disgraced Gard Lockwood, has not had time to cultivate, and he’s mugging and rolling his eyes behind Tweed’s back like a Kabuki performer. Daniel waves him back outside.

“Sir,” he says sternly to Tweed. “You really shouldn’t be — sir, please.” Tweed has gone over to Mr Walken, seized his hand, and is repeating Daniel’s unscientific test for rigor. Daniel grabs the Superintendent by the shoulders and steers him back into the middle of the room, where Paweł has switched off his phone and put it in his pocket and is standing looking up into the corner of the ceiling so that one day, if a canny defence barrister ever questions the security of the scene he can say, quite truthfully, “No, sir, I never saw Superintendent Tweed enter the room.”

“Sir,” Daniel says to Tweed. “We’ve spoken about this before.” He lowers his voice until he’s barely whispering. “Uncle Billy, please.”

Tweed is a legend, a myth, a story told in hushed voices in canteens and locker rooms in police stations all the way up and down the West Coast of Ireland, an Olympian policeman, the yardstick against which generations of detectives have measured themselves and found themselves wanting. On his good days he’s still as good as he ever was, but the good days are getting further and further apart, and he’s taking on the aspect of a ruined monument. Daniel doesn’t know what pursues him out of sleep, but he has an idea that after more than forty years as a policeman the inside of Tweed’s head must be a terrible place.

“Sir,” he says more gently. “I must ask you to —” and the door opens again. This time Wee Rab O’Connell, all done up in his sterile white romper suit, is standing in the doorway. Daniel blinks. “Doctor O’Connell,” he says. “Join the party.”

O’Connell, Chief Forensic Officer, gives the room the once-over and Daniel sees his shoulders slump, although his face maintains its usual deadpan. He sighs fractionally.

“Sergeant,” Daniel says to Paweł, “would you show Superintendent Tweed back to his car, please? And then go and see how we’re doing with the door-to-door.”

Paweł comes out of his testimony-protecting trance (“No, sir, I didn’t notice the presence of Superintendent Tweed on the scene until after Doctor O’Connell was in attendance.”) and gently walks the unprotesting Tweed out of the room.

O’Connell remains blocking the doorway. “A moment, Sergeant,” he says, taking out a phone and aiming at the white plastic overshoes Paweł’s wearing. The phone scans the overshoes’ barcodes and logs them into the evidence database. O’Connell looks at Tweed’s brogues for a moment, then scans them too. He sucks his teeth and moves out of the way to let Paweł and the Superintendent pass.

“Don’t say a word,” Daniel warns when they’re gone.

O’Connell thinks about it, then says, “What have we got?”

“White male, seventies or eighties. Single gunshot wound to the head. No signs of a struggle.” Daniel tries to be deliberately vague, to let O’Connell come to his own conclusions from the evidence. “We’ll want everything in here bagged and blitzed, but concentrate on the sofa and the bottle and the two glasses. Check the bathroom in case the shooter used the loo. And dust the lock on the inside of the front door and the button on the doorbell.”

O’Connell bends over until his nose is inches from Mr Walken’s. He sniffs the wound in the forehead and then straightens up and looks at the mess on the wall. He looks at the sofa and nods. He looks at Daniel, starts to say something, thinks better of it, and goes back into the hallway to unpack his gear. Daniel hears the sounds of scenes-of-crime officers arriving, O’Connell bollocking them for taking so long to get to the scene. He looks at the serene corpse of Mr Glenroy Walken, takes a deep breath, and lets himself fall into the familiar rhythms of a murder investigation professionally conducted. It feels like coming home.

There’s an old joke. Little Jewish chap’s walking through one of the insanely-sectarian parts of Belfast — doesn’t matter which one — and he comes upon this group of paramilitary hard men — Republican, Loyalist, it doesn’t matter.

“So,” says one of the hard men, “are you a Catholic or a Protestant?”

“I’m Jewish,” says the Jewish lad.

The hard man thinks about it for a while, then he says, “Yes, but are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

Okay, so not very funny. The funniest thing about it is that someone actually once asked Daniel the very same question, in all seriousness. Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?

Some years later, it occurred to Daniel that if he’d had his wits about him he would have told the truth, which is that he’s not really any kind of Jew. Judaism descends through the maternal line, and his mother, the sainted Siobhan, for whom his father threw aside a promising career with the Metropolitan Police in order to relocate to this little city in the West of Ireland, was a Humanist who had left instructions in her will that she was to be buried in the back garden of their house in a biodegradable wicker coffin.

Big Sam Snow wasn’t having any of that. He loved his wife to the fringes of insanity, but there was no way he was putting her in the ground in a laundry basket.

This immediately posed the problem of where exactly the interment would take place. Siobhan had been raised a Catholic, but she had spent the latter years of her life politely but gleefully alienating any priest who came within earshot. The local priest, a man who knew how to nurture a grudge, dolefully informed Sam that it would be impossible for Siobhan to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. Sam tried a number of parishes — some of them tens of miles away — but everywhere he went Siobhan Snow’s lonely battle against Catholicism had been waged there ahead of him.

Eventually, Sam found a Protestant vicar some miles from the city who was prepared to perform the ceremony and allow his wife to be buried in his cemetery, but after the service the vicar posed to Sam a question which he had been too busy to think about: how was the boy to be brought up now?

To be truthful, neither Big Sam nor Siobhan had given it much thought. Daniel had been baptised a Catholic, but that was where his involvement with organised religion had stalled. His parents had thought that perhaps they’d cross that bridge when he was old enough for school, but now Sam, the polite refusals of the priests still ringing in his ears, decided it was time to take the bull by the horns.

So, one day shortly before his fifth birthday, Daniel accompanied his father on the train to Dublin, there to visit a mohel of Sam’s acquaintance.

Returning three days later, bemused, in quite a lot of pain and a fraction of a gramme lighter, Daniel listened to his father telling him that he wasn’t really Irish. He was actually descended from a race of people whose history went back to some awful distant vanishing point and involved a great deal of fighting and slavery and wandering in deserts.

When he got old enough for it to matter Daniel found it in his heart to hate his father for the decision he’d made. His religion initially confused and then enraged his schoolmates and the bullying dogged him all through his schooldays. His father’s cack-handed attempts to keep a kosher kitchen only lasted a couple of years, and by the time he went to university in Manchester they were both ordering Chinese takeaways heavy on the pork dishes with barely a twinge of guilt. They were, Big Sam told him, Jews. But they weren’t orthodox. You had, Big Sam said, to be adaptable. Daniel remembers a conversation with his Rabbi around the time he left for university where the issue of adaptability had almost resulted in physical violence.

But he went to Manchester, where he had his eyes opened in too many ways to count. And then, his father’s son, he went into the Metropolitan Police. And then, after a few years, he went home, this English-Irish-Jewish-Catholic-Humanist copper, to find his father and his Sergeant, the nearly-occult Billy Tweed, more or less running Ballymena Street nick as a private fiefdom.

In truth, it wasn’t an onerous job. The Traveller Wars, the biggest thing that had ever happened to the area, were long finished. In the early years of the century two traveller families, the Mitchells and the Copes, had squared off over control of the local drugs trade, which any rational person would have realised was barely worth fighting about. For a very brief period the city resembled one of those lawless towns in the Old West, and questions were asked in the Dáil about whether the local Garda were up to the task of keeping order. And then the Mitchells surprised everybody by providing their very own solution to the problem.

At some point the Mitchells came upon a paramilitary arms cache — doesn’t matter from which side — long forgotten in the white heat of Decommissioning. The passage of time had in fact rendered a lot of the weaponry beyond use, but enough of it remained operational — including a number of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles once meant to be introduced to Brit helicopters — for the Mitchells to mount what they obviously conceived as a mighty hammer-blow against their opponents.

The problem for the Mitchells was that the paramilitaries had not forgotten about the arms cache at all, and now they were in government in the North its deployment became something of an embarrassment. An embarrassment which they resolved with elegant simplicity by erasing the Mitchell family.

In the aftermath, nobody could ever prove anything, which was as intended. And the police didn’t fall over themselves to investigate the deaths and disappearances associated with what became, in local legend, The Massacre. It was hardly a shining moment in law enforcement, but as far as they were concerned, Big Sam once told Daniel, the problem was resolving itself and they weren’t going to interfere. When it was over the Mitchells were broken and the Copes, taking the hint, moved on to pastures new.

Since then the city has been like pretty much any city in impoverished, financially-bruised Western Europe. It has a small but muscular drugs scene, several protection rackets, some rather half-hearted prostitution, and its share of gangs and cowboys, all seeking ‘respect’ and periodically becoming enraged when nobody gives them it.

And today it has one more murder.

Daniel gets back to Ballymena Street around seven o’clock in the morning, after almost four hours watching O’Connell’s men logging the scene and bagging up various bits of furniture for later trace evidence examination, and when he walks into his office he finds Gard Lockhart sitting fast asleep in his visitor chair. He feels a faint and entirely transitory pang of guilt for having forgotten about the young Gard, but he can’t raise the energy to bawl him out.

“Oh, fuck off home, Lockhart,” he mutters, settling himself in his chair behind his desk. “Don’t do it again.” And as Lockhart, still half asleep, stumbles out of the office, Daniel docks his phone so it can upload its pictures of the Walken crime scene to the nick’s expert system, which will stitch them together, along with Paweł’s photos and the pictures O’Connell’s team took, into a zoomable three-hundred-and-sixty degree walkthrough for future reference. “Get me a coffee before you go,” he tells Lockhart’s gratefully-retreating back. “Black. Put all the sugar you can find in it.”

And he turns to his keyboard and starts writing his report of the night’s events. After about fifteen minutes, he stops, and the members of the morning relief in the outer office, shrugging off their coats and quarrelling over who gets the canteen croissants and who gets the Danishes, hear him shout, “Fuck! What day is it?”

Big Sam Snow lives a mostly blameless life these days. Early on there were episodes of wandering, sobbing, begging, attempts to negotiate with the nurses and perhaps even God Himself, and on one notable occasion the hurling of a chair through a window and Sam’s attempt to follow it into the Great Outdoors. But those days are long gone. Now Big Sam exists in two states — asleep and awake. And the awake state is divided into two positions — in bed and in his chair.

Today is a Chair Day. “He had a good night,” says Helen, the nurse who looks after Sam and the thirty or so long-term cases on the ward. A good night for Helen is one where only a third of her charges were doubly incontinent. She’s in her early forties, attractive but entirely worn out, and in an alternative universe she and Daniel would have established a Relationship. He’d have started by maybe giving her flowers now and again, and it would have progressed to little presents and then a trip to the cinema to see a thriller, which he would have scoffingly but charmingly deconstructed afterward over dinner. Eventually there would have been Affection, two similarly-afflicted souls living outside normal diurnal existence. Later would have come an Understanding, and after that maybe Love.

But this is not an alternative universe. Helen is a nurse overworked beyond the point of exhaustion, and when Daniel visits the hospital he’s usually running on caffeine overdrive. Every time they see each other it’s like the meeting of two distantly-related species and the idea of a relationship, if it ever crosses their minds, is entirely ridiculous. All they have in common is Big Sam, and, all respect to Big Sam, it’s not enough.

The hospital has seen better days. Back at the turn of the century, in the time of the Celtic Tiger, it was very nearly state-of-the-art. But the Celtic Tiger stumbled, got to its feet, then stumbled again and went down for good as economies across the world blew away on the wind. Since then, investment in public services has been thin indeed. Big Sam’s pension and health insurance barely covers his upkeep; it’s nowhere near enough to pay for private care.

So here he is, the Big Man, sitting in a threadbare armchair beside his threadbare bed at the far end of the threadbare long-term ward. As usual, Daniel tries not to look at the other patients as he makes his way with Helen to Sam’s bedside. Hard though it might be to credit, there are people here worse-off than his father.

The worst thing is that he doesn’t look ill. He looks… thoughtful. Distracted, sometimes. He sits in his chair by the window and looks out over the city. The ward is high enough in the building that you can see the hard sheen of the Atlantic beyond the clustering rooftops, and sometimes you might think Sam is looking out at the horizon and imagining the endless miles between here and America. But the odds are against it.

He’s neat and clean in his pyjamas and dressing gown, freshly-shaved and hair combed. Helen says to him, “Look who’s here, Sam, Daniel’s come to see you,” but he doesn’t pause in his examination of the horizon.

Daniel thanks Helen and pulls up a visitor’s chair beside his father. “Well,” he begins. “That was an interesting evening.”

The sad thing is that the only thing Daniel and his father really have in common is The Job. If any of the other patients were able to pay attention, they would hear Daniel on his visits giving Sam chapter and verse on his latest cases, in nitpicking detail because Sam used to be a nitpicking sort of policeman. So Daniel tells Sam about the callout this morning, about Glenroy Walken and his unusual living arrangements.

It turns out that Mr Glenroy Walken was not really Mr Glenroy Walken. There’s no record of a national ID card in that name, no passport, no National Insurance Number. His fingerprints are still making their weary way through the National Fingerprint Database, and it’ll be days — weeks, probably — before there are any results from his DNA. A quick google brought the news that ‘Glenroy Walken’ was a character in The West Wing, a turn-of-the-century American television drama.

Whether this is relevant or not, nobody knows, and it’s impractical to ask the widow because about an hour after Gard Lockhart brought her to the hospital she suffered a massive heart attack and is now in a coma in the intensive therapy unit four floors below Sam’s chair. ‘Widow,’ indeed, is a misleading term because, while Mrs Ellen Wright is certainly a widow, she is not Mr Walken’s widow. The late Mr Wright died of cancer fourteen years ago, and since then Mrs Wright has lived alone. According to statements by neighbours, Mr Walken is a new addition to Mrs Wright’s life. He’s been living at her house for between two and six weeks and he didn’t go out much. So far a search of the house has not turned up any documents belonging to or pertaining to him.

Daniel tells his father this much, tries out a few half-formed theories on him, but Sam just sits looking into the West like a character from some old story, and when it comes time for Daniel to leave there’s no sign that his father ever knew he was there.

On his way out of the hospital, Daniel stops off in ITU and checks on Mrs Wright. There’s a Gard stationed beside her bed in case she comes out of the coma and makes a statement, but so far the old woman’s condition is unchanged. Daniel stands by her bed for a few moments looking at her, a bone-thin old lady with long white hair and the blue smudges of old tattoos up both arms. What was it with her generation and tattoos? These days it’s rare to find young people indulging in any form of body modification more extreme than earrings, but Daniel has seen the bodies of old folk adorned with sometimes astonishing decorations. He remembers a local councillor who died of a heart attack aged seventy-five, a staid and upright citizen and a figure of great probity. There was a brief question about the cause of death, and the body was given the once-over at Antrim Road mortuary and, once undressed, turned out to be an alien landscape of piercings and jaw-dropping old decorative scarification. That was the day Daniel first encountered the phrase ‘Prince Albert.’

Standing there, a thought occurs to Daniel. He takes out his phone and takes a couple of snaps of Mrs Wright’s tattoos. It’s a long shot, but anything they can learn about her would be useful.

Outside in the late afternoon sunshine, he stops and takes stock. He can’t think of anything else they could be doing in the Walken investigation. He’s visited his father. He’s managed some shopping. What else? Oh, yes. Sleep. Ought to make time for some sleep.

A week on, and no one is any the wiser about the Walken killing. Mrs Wright remains in a coma and things are not looking so hopeful for her. Mr Walken remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma, although like Mrs Wright he has many tattoos and a number of the designs are similar to the old lady’s. Cause of death was indeed the single gunshot to the head; a bullet dug out of the wall behind the armchair has turned out to be a.38, but too damaged to provide reliable comparison evidence, even if they do find the murder weapon. Local CCTV has proved inconclusive, mainly because budget cuts have eaten into the camera network’s maintenance and only a third of it is currently in operation, none of it in the area of Mrs Wright’s house. Daniel takes on new cases, visits Sam in hospital, returns to his flat above Ballymena Street nick, cooks himself solitary meals, works works works.

And then one morning Wee Rab O’Connell knocks on the door of Daniel’s office and comes in with a briefcase in his hand and a smile on his face.

“Have a win on the Lottery?” Daniel asks over the top of his monitor.

“Not far off,” O’Connell admits, sitting down on the other side of the desk. “We got an identification on Glenroy Walken.”

Daniel sits back in his chair. “Do tell?”

“The DNA results came back about an hour ago. It turns out Mr Walken’s on the database under the name of Mitchell. Alan Mitchell.”

Daniel thinks about it. “You know, that rings a bell.”

“It should. Mad Dog Mitchell. The Traveller Wars?”

Daniel sighs. If only he had a euro for every hard man who styled himself ‘Mad Dog.’ But that isn’t what’s ringing the bell. “You think that’s started again? After, what, sixty years?”

O’Connell shrugs. “I don’t know. All I know is that Alan Mitchell went missing during The Massacre. At which time he was sixty-two years of age.”

Daniel raises an eyebrow. Then the bell rings again and he starts pulling up the Walken file from the expert system.

“We also got DNA off one of the glasses you found in the living room,” O’Connell continues, “and that also was in the database. We have a positive identification of one Gordon Cope.”

Daniel opens another window on his monitor. Cope, Gordon. One previous arrest for joyriding fifty years ago, which is when his DNA went into the database. He’s in his early seventies now, lives in one of the grim little estates over on the northern edge of the city. Daniel shouts, “Paweł!”

Paweł comes to the door of the office. “Boss?”

“Get a car from the pool. We’re going for a drive.”

Paweł nods and goes back through the office.

Daniel looks at the Walken file again. Yes, there’s that little ringing bell. Mrs Ellen Wright, née Ellen Mitchell. “They’re related,” he says.

O’Connell can’t see the screen, but he knows exactly what Daniel’s talking about. “We took DNA from her at the hospital, for elimination purposes. We need more careful tests, but off the record I’d say she’s his daughter.”

Daniel sits back again and tries to rearrange all of this in his head to make a meaningful narrative. O’Connell’s phone rings. He takes it out of his pocket and says, “Yes?” Then a puzzled expression crosses his face. “I didn’t authorise that.” He listens again. “Who did they say they were?” He listens again. Looks at Daniel and says, “Did you order the Walken body moved?”

“Me?” Daniel asks in surprise.

“No,” O’Connell says to the phone, “he didn’t either. How long ago was this?” He listens, nods, and hangs up without saying goodbye. “Someone’s stolen the body,” he says to Daniel.

When O’Connell and Daniel get to the mortuary it’s strangely difficult to get a straight story out of anybody, even allowing for the fact that nobody wants to be blamed for the mess. It seems that no one can exactly remember what happened, but it looks as though, while O’Connell was on his way to Ballymena Street, a police officer arrived with documents signed by Daniel authorising the removal of Alan ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell’s body. The body was loaded into a police van and the Gard drove away.

Except nobody can agree what the Gard looked like, and at least one member of O’Connell’s staff has a feeling it wasn’t a police van at all. Another, who was there through the whole thing, can’t remember anything about it. The supposed documentation signed by Daniel turns out to be a blank sheet of paper torn from a notebook. O’Connell looks at it and starts shouting at people. Daniel takes out his phone and puts out a crash bulletin for vans — all vans — travelling around the city.

Two hours later, fifteen miles south of the city, a patrol unit pulls over an unmarked blue van. Inside is a driver and a biodegradable plastic utility coffin containing the earthly remains of Alan ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell, latterly Mr Glenroy Walken.

A veteran of police interviews, Daniel used to think he’d more or less seen it all. He’s seen suspects in tears, he’s had suspects attack him. He’s had them deny everything, he’s had them confess the moment he sat down across the table from them, he’s had them feign heart attacks. Once, a suspect got down on their knees and prayed to him. Not to God or Jesus or Allah, but to him, which was an experience that stayed with him for some time afterward.

But the moment he steps into the interview room at Ballymena Street nick this evening he knows that this is something new.

Sitting at the table is the van’s driver, a man who has only given the name ‘Rhuari.’ Rhuari is almost a cartoon of a Black Irishman. Black curly hair, handsome smiling face, twinkling blue eyes, devil-may-care air. He’s wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt, a denim jacket and battered workboots and he’s sitting there as if he not only owns the interview room but the police station and the entire city. His self-confidence is so intense that it’s almost a physical thing. Beside him, Mr Spode, the duty solicitor, is sitting quietly writing on a notepad.

Daniel takes a breath and walks over to the table and sits down, Paweł beside him. Paweł fiddles with the recorder while Daniel takes a moment to consult his notes.

Rhuari, however, chooses to occupy the silence. “We’re getting short of time, Inspector.” His voice is low and musical and as twinkly as his eyes.

Daniel looks up. “Oh?”

Rhuari grins. “Well, you are,” he says. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

Daniel clasps his hands on the table before him and looks levelly at Rhuari. “Perhaps we should hurry, then.”

Rhuari sits back and beams at Daniel. “I have a story for you, Inspector.”

“Good.”

“It’s a story about a place. A place a long, long way away. And then again, it’s not a place. It’s more of a metaphor for a place.”

Daniel sighs. “I think I’d prefer it if you told me why you stole a corpse from a Government mortuary.”

“Well,” Rhuari says with a shrug, “we’ll get to that. May I go on?”

Daniel spreads his hands in assent.

“This place isn’t on any maps and no one will ever find it by accident, and that’s where my employers live.”

“Your… employers,” says Daniel, bemused.

“It’s an old place, you see,” Rhuari continues. “Almost as old as… well, everything. My employers have been living there for a very, very long time and they’re quite content to keep themselves to themselves. But on occasion they find it appropriate to interact with the outside world.”

Daniel stares at him. “This is bollocks, son,” he says finally. “Why did you steal the body?” Actually, the question is just as much how he stole the body. According to O’Connell, nobody at the mortuary now remembers the body ever being there in the first place. And when Daniel spoke to him a couple of minutes ago even O’Connell sounded as if he was struggling to recall the details.

“When my employers need to interact with the outside world,” Rhuari continues as if Daniel hadn’t spoken, “they prefer to do it at arms’ length. They prefer, in fact, for people like me to do the work for them.” He grins again. “It’s a dirty job, Inspector, but someone’s got to do it.”

“You steal bodies for them?”

“Now, I have to admit, Inspector, this was a first for me. But I’ve done stranger things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, stuff I can’t tell you about.”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re with Intelligence?” says Daniel. “You’re a secret agent or something?”

Rhuari thinks about it. “Well, yes,” he allows. “And then again, no.”

Daniel stands up. “I think we’ll continue this conversation when you’ve decided to stop telling fairy stories.”

Rhuari grimaces. “Ah, sit yourself down and stop interrupting, Inspector,” he says amiably, and Daniel finds himself sitting down again without the slightest memory of having done it. He stares at the young man on the other side of the table.

“Now then,” Rhuari muses, “where were we? Oh, right. Yes. Fairy stories. Well, there are times when it’s useful for my employers to send me and my friends to do a job here. But to be honest with you, it’d be counterproductive to have us stay here all the time. We’re sort of high-maintenance. No, for the everyday stuff, the meat-and-potatoes stuff, the occasional odd-job, they like to recruit native talent. And that’s where Mr Mitchell comes in.”

It has become very still in the interview room. Spode is writing on his notepad… No, now Daniel looks more closely, Spode is doodling on his notepad, like an absent-minded professor sitting in on a particularly dull lecture. Daniel glances at Paweł, who is staring at the wall above Rhuari’s head with a faraway thoughtful expression on his face. Neither Paweł nor Spode seems interested in the conversation. Or even aware that a conversation is going on. Daniel feels a prickle of apprehension in his stomach.

“Mr Mitchell was a bad man,” Rhuari continues. “But my employers, well, their general rule of thumb is that morality’s just something that happens to other people. Over the years, Mr Mitchell did some useful work for them. So when he had his little contretemps a few years ago and asked my employers for asylum, they agreed to grant it him.” He leans forward a little and lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Actually, between you and me and the gatepost, he paid them for it. My employers aren’t stupid. And they’re easily as venal as the next man.” He sits back again. “What you have to keep in mind is that time in the place where my employers live isn’t quite the same as it is here. You could live there forever and always be young. Yes, Inspector, you’ve heard of that place, haven’t you? People still tell stories about it and sing songs, and that really is rather sweet, you know?”

Rhuari’s musical voice, the rhythm of his story, the strange sense that some of the details of the case — the dead man’s address, for example — are starting to get hazy, are all combining into a strange, soothing state of mind. It does not occur to Daniel to disbelieve anything Rhuari is telling him.

He makes an effort and says, “His daughter.”

“Well, yes.” For a moment, Rhuari looks disapproving. “Mr Mitchell thought of himself as a feudal warlord, really. And he thought his association with my employers made him superhuman. Which it did in the end, I suppose. All he thought about was his own survival. He never even asked for asylum for the rest of his family. Not that my employers would have granted it. But he never even asked.”

“He came back,” says Daniel.

Rhuari nods. “And we may never know why. Someone else, I would have said he had second thoughts or he wanted to see his daughter, but as I said, Mr Mitchell wasn’t wired that way. Possibly there was something here that he wanted.” He shrugs. “He was warned what would happen if he came back. My employers told him that as soon as he was here the years would catch up with him very quickly.”

“They don’t seem to be catching up with you,” Daniel says dreamily.

Rhuari nods. “Yes, well, I’m a lot younger than Mr Mitchell,” he says. “And of course, I’m not human, strictly speaking.”

Daniel makes another effort. “No one is ever going to believe this,” he says.

Rhuari shrugs again. “By this time tomorrow there won’t be anything for them to believe.” He glances at Spode, looks at Paweł, both of them lost in their own reveries. Away with the fairies, Big Sam used to say when Daniel was daydreaming as a boy. Rhuari looks at Daniel and smiles. “People don’t want to remember, in general. It’s an effort — so much stuff to try and keep track of, some of it not very nice. Much easier to forget.”

“Particularly if someone helps.”

Rhuari sighs. “Sometimes there are situations which need… tidying up. Things which might be problematical for my employers but don’t warrant their direct intervention. Direct intervention is rare — and really you ought to be grateful for that. Most of the time, it falls to people like me to tuck in the loose ends.”

“There are documents,” says Daniel. “Computer files.”

Rhuari holds up his hands and wiggles his fingers. “We always move with the times.”

Daniel looks at Paweł and Spode and wonders what’s going on in their heads at the moment. He says, “Why are you telling me all this?”

Rhuari grins. “Because I have something you need.”

“You’ve got nothing I need.”

“Ah, now.” Rhuari leans forward. “Think about that a little, Inspector.”

“So who killed him?” Daniel asks.

“Who?” says Rhuari.

Daniel jerks his thumb towards the back of the van.

“Oh.” Rhuari smiles. “Well, from what I can gather, Mr Mitchell was admirably circumspect for the first couple of weeks after he came back. My employers told him where to find his daughter, and he moved in with her and kept his head down. But Mr Mitchell was not the sort of man to hide himself away. He wanted to have a look at his old kingdom, and while he was out and about someone recognised him.”

“Gordon Cope.”

Rhuari takes his hands off the steering wheel and claps, and while he does so the van slows down, brakes, waits to let an oncoming bus pass, and then makes a right turn, all on its own. It’s not actually a van at all, Rhuari told him when they left Ballymena Street. It’s more of a metaphor for a van. Daniel has decided, in order to maintain his sanity, that he’s going to keep thinking of it as a van.

“So the old man let Cope into the house? Why would he do that?”

Rhuari takes hold of the steering wheel again. “I think you’re going to have to resign yourself to never solving this case, Inspector,” he says. “One of the people involved is dead, and the other one can’t remember anything about it. This time tomorrow it’ll be as if it never happened.”

“What about the daughter? Have you visited her?”

Rhuari looks sad. “I’m afraid Mrs Wright isn’t going to regain consciousness.” He glances at Daniel. “No, that doesn’t have anything to do with me, Inspector. That’s just life.”

They’re having this conversation around Big Sam Snow, who’s sitting between them in the front seat of the van staring out through the windscreen with the same look of distant concentration with which he used to look out of the window of his ward.

Daniel looks at his father and says, “We’re Jewish.”

“Ah,” Rhuari says with a wink, “but are you Catholic Jews or Protestant Jews?” He chuckles and shakes his head. “Why do you think it matters?”

“Aren’t we the wrong religion or something?”

Rhuari gives an astonished little bark of laughter. “At least you believe in something, Inspector. Your average little fecker these days can’t even be bothered.” He looks out through the windscreen. The buildings are thinning out now; they’re passing through one of the city’s modest little suburbs. Tidy houses with tidy gardens. “You’re an outsider, Inspector, and we work best with outsiders. You’re a policeman, you’re Jewish, your Dad’s a Brit, you’re not married. All you do is work and sleep, and if you’ll excuse me saying so, I don’t think you sleep a lot. I wasn’t sent here to recruit people, I was sent to tidy up the mess Mr Mitchell left behind. But I made a command decision; we don’t often interact with people in your position and you might come in handy. Don’t let yourself think we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. You will wind up paying for this, one day.” He glances over at Daniel. “Ach, don’t look like that, Inspector. We do you a favour, you do us a favour. How can that hurt?”

Daniel looks at his father. “And he’ll be better?” he asks.

“Good as new,” Rhuari promises, looking out of the driver’s side window, where the view has given way to fields, the road curving west towards the coast. “Better than better.”

“He’s going to be angry when he finds out what we’ve done.”

Rhuari laughs. “He’ll learn to live with it, Inspector. I promise you.”

A loud snore sounds from the back of the van, where Superintendent Billy Tweed is stretched out, fast asleep, alongside the coffin containing the earthly remains of ‘Mad Dog’ Mitchell. Rhuari sucks his teeth.

“You know,” he says, not quite so amused any longer, “it was well within my operational boundaries to recruit you and bring your father back. But this…” he jerks his head backward. “I had to bring in backup to cover this guy’s tracks.”

“He and my Dad were inseparable,” says Daniel. “Snow and Tweed, supercops. After Mum died, he… He was a big man and he helped us get through it, and in a year or so he’s going to be…” He gestures at Big Sam. “My Uncle Billy. You want my help, you help him too.” He adds, “How can it hurt?”

Rhuari looks over at him and grins, as if Daniel has suddenly learned how to play a complicated game and has managed to take some points off him at the first try. They have passed through the city in a storm of forgetting, Daniel facilitating the second theft of Alan Mitchell’s body, spiriting Big Sam out of the hospital, leaving in their wake people who can’t remember any of it ever happening. Rhuari and people like him have already made all the evidence of the Mitchell murder disappear. The same people have erased the recent memories of Superintendent Tweed, tampered with records, done some other things. Billy Tweed truly has passed into legend.

The van pulls to a halt at the side of the road. “That’s us, then,” says Rhuari.

Daniel looks at him, at his father. He opens the passenger door and climbs down, stands there looking into the van. “Dad?” he says, but Big Sam just sits looking through the windscreen. Daniel says to Rhuari, “You take care of him.”

“As if he was one of my own,” says Rhuari, and Daniel can’t suppress a shiver. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Look after yourself, Dad,” he says, and he slams the door shut and steps away as the van pulls out into the road and drives off into the West. As it gets further down the road it starts to look sort of vague, and the sound of its engine could be the sound of horses’ hooves, or the sound of the ocean lapping against the side of a wooden ship. Daniel wipes a tear away and the van’s gone.

He sniffs and puts his hands in his pockets and looks around him, registering for the first time where he is.

“You could at least have dropped me off on a bus route, you gobshite,” he mutters, and starts to trudge his way home.

•

This was written for Gerard Brennan and Michael Stone’s anthology of Irish-legend-inflected crime stories Requiems For The Departed. I was reading David Simon’s monumental Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets at the time, and I fancied having a go at a police procedural. The supernatural bit of the story comes from the tale of Oisin and Niamh, which I’ve been very partial to down the years.

Sugar Engines

The Household Cavalry had set up their own country on Oxford Street. It wasn’t a very big country, but it was pretty wealthy. Even after fifteen years the stores on London’s main shopping street were still packed with goods for trade.

They had created their country by the simple expedient of parking buses across each end of Oxford Street and then blocking all the side streets with various vehicles. As countries went, they weren’t too bad — the Sangatte Republic had been much worse — but Oxford Street was the most direct route to Hyde Park and the Household Cavalry had recently begun to require visas from anyone who wanted to pass through their territory.

“I’m starting to get sick of this,” Willem muttered from the front seat of the Espace.

“They’re just frightened,” Rae said. “They only want somewhere to call home.”

Willem snorted. “This is their home. England. What do they want to create another country for?”

Rae closed her eyes and leaned the side of her head against the window. It was a bright summer’s day and the glass was warm. The sunlight hurt her eyes and the heat was making her nauseous and her mouth tasted as though she had been chewing a wet dog. “We could always go round them,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose we could,” Willem said in a hectoring tone of voice. “But I don’t see why we should have to.”

“At least they’re not shooting at us.” Rae sighed and opened her eyes. The convoy had come to a stop at the junction between New Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road. Ahead of them, two Routemasters had been parked nose-to-tail across the entrance to Oxford Street. Rae remembered when the Routemasters, the iconic London Buses with the open platforms at the back that you could hop on and off of, had been taken out of service because they didn’t conform to European Union rules about disabled access. A few had been left running on heritage routes for the tourists, but Rae had to admit they made a handy barricade as well.

She opened the door and got out of the Espace, stood stretching and looking about. Apart from the unusually-parked buses — and of course the total lack of pedestrian or vehicular traffic on what had been one of the busiest junctions in London — everything looked completely normal. No signs of rioting or looting, no bodies, no crashed cars. It looked like a particularly easy `what’s wrong with this picture’ scene. What’s wrong with this picture? No people, that’s what.

“Still there?” Willem asked from inside the car.

Rae tilted her head back and shielded her eyes with her hand, wincing as the sunlight burned into her head. If she squinted against the light she could see, far far above her, a tiny figure, wings beating periodically as it soared in and out of the thermals rising from London’s buildings.

“Still there,” she agreed, lowering her head and blinking away purple afterimages. She wiped her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said. “I mean, it’s done what it was sent to do. Why keep following us?”

“Because it still has something else to do, dear?” Rae suggested.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said again, stubbornly.

“What doesn’t he understand?” asked Mikhail, climbing down from his mini-bus.

Rae pointed at the sky.

Mikhail looked up. “Oh,” he said. “Still there, then.”

“We’ve all been together too long,” Willem said from the driver’s seat of the Espace. “We’ve run out of things to say to each other.”

“Been a long time, that’s true,” Mikhail nodded.

Rae took off her cap, brushed her hair back off her forehead, put her cap back on. She’d found the cap in a gift shop at the Eurostar terminal in Calais. It had the stylised image of a Chunnel train on the front. She looked back along the street at her little convoy: half a dozen people movers and SUVs and a Polish paramedics’ ambulance, all of them dusty and battered. She’d warned everyone to stay in their vehicles, but they’d been parked here almost an hour and people were starting to get out and stretch their legs, and she couldn’t blame them. They’d had a long trip. She waved and a couple of people waved back.

“What do you think everyone’s going to do now?” she asked.

“Company,” Willem called.

Rae looked round. Two figures were emerging from the narrow gap between the Routemaster barricade. Even without zooming her viewpoint, it was easy to tell that one was Eddy Colorado, with his foot-high orange coxcomb and his baggy green clown’s pantaloons. She had to concentrate more to make out the other figure properly. It wore British Army battle order (Northern Europe) and was carrying an SLR across its chest on a webbing sling. Rae started to walk back along the convoy towards the junction.

Willem had got out of the Espace. “Is this good news or bad news?”

“If we didn’t have bad news, we wouldn’t have any news at all,” Rae said as she walked past him and out into the middle of the junction. Behind her, she heard Willem reach into the back of the car for his rifle. She looked over her shoulder and called, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’ve been doing stupid things ever since I met you,” he called back. Rae shook her head and went to meet Eddy Colorado and the English soldier.

The soldier was in his early thirties and he towered at least a foot and a half over little Eddy Colorado. His uniform was clean and neatly-pressed and in addition to the automatic rifle slung against his chest he had an automatic pistol in a holster at his hip, and a combat knife strapped to each calf. Beside him, Eddy Colorado was carrying his Italian shotgun and grinning. He winked at Rae as they approached.

Rae blinked and her hangover went away. She smiled at the soldier, put out her hand, and said, “Hello.”

The soldier ignored the hand. “Captain Gottlieb, Household Cavalry,” he said.

“Captain Gottlieb,” Rae said, “you have a German name.”

“My Grandfather, ma’am,” Gottlieb answered without missing a beat or betraying any emotion at all except smooth efficiency.

Rae waited a moment to see if any more details of Gottlieb’s antecedents were forthcoming. When they were not, she said, “Okay.”

“Are you Mrs Peterson?” Gottlieb asked.

“Miss.”

The distinction just bounced right off Gottlieb. “I understand you have a sick child.”

“That’s right.”

“Could I see her, please?”

“Are you in a position to help us?” Rae inquired mildly.

“I am,” said Gottlieb. “May I see the casualty, please?”

Rae thought about it for a moment or two, then she turned and indicated the convoy. “Of course. She’s back here.”

Elżbieta was in the back of the ambulance. Marta and Beata, the nuns who had driven her all the way from Poznań, had got out of the vehicle and were standing watching Gottlieb distrustfully.

“It’s all right,” Rae reassured them. “Open the door, please.”

Beata looked at the Captain for a few seconds, then went round to the back of the ambulance, turned the handle, and pulled the door open. She stepped back while Rae and Gottlieb clambered into the back of the vehicle, where a sheet-covered bundle lay writhing gently on a stretcher.

Rae lifted the sheet. To Gottlieb’s credit, he didn’t flinch. Rae thought his expression may have softened slightly, but it might have been her imagination.

Gottlieb climbed out of the ambulance and straightened up. Willem appeared in the doorway beside him, holding his rifle. Gottlieb ignored him and looked at Rae. “I understand you can talk to the Dust,” he said.

Rae got out of the ambulance and glanced around, but Eddy Colorado was nowhere to be seen. She sighed.

“Perhaps you could demonstrate, please?” asked Gottlieb.

Rae looked at him for a few moments. “Perhaps we could give you some beads and a couple of mirrors and be on our way, Captain,” she said evenly.

That finally got a smile out of Gottlieb. Thin and wry, perhaps, but a real smile. For the first time, Rae noticed how tired the soldier looked beneath that shell of smoothly-pressed efficiency. “A quick demonstration would do,” he said.

Rae lifted her arm and snapped her fingers and all of a sudden she was holding a wizard’s staff. It was just a bit of wood, not much more than a broom handle — she could do this kind of thing in her sleep — but it was topped with a crown of thorns cupping a tiny bright light. Rae had always found that this impressed the post-Lord Of The Rings generation.

Gottlieb, on the other hand, did not seem unduly impressed. Perhaps he’d never got into Tolkien. He looked levelly at the staff and he said, “Could you come with me, please?”

Rae looked across at Willem, who suddenly looked concerned. “Where?”

“Not far,” Gottlieb replied. “We have…” Suddenly, and charmingly, he seemed rather embarrassed. “We have a little problem you may be able to help us with.”

Rae made the staff go away. “What kind of little problem?”

“It really would be easier to show you,” he admitted.

“I’ll go with you,” said Willem.

Rae looked at the two men and sighed. “Mikhail?” she called.

Mikhail appeared around the side of the ambulance, bushy eyebrows raised. “Can I come too?”

“No, Mikhail, you can’t come too,” she said patiently. “Make sure everybody stays near the vehicles. We won’t be long.” She looked at Gottlieb and said, “Will we be long?”

Gottlieb shrugged.

“We won’t be long,” she told Mikhail. “Try to stop people wandering off.”

He said, “What about Eddy Colorado?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She rubbed her eyes. “Try to stop everybody else wandering off. Use your common sense, Mikhail, please.”

“We have food,” Gottlieb suggested.

“Well so do we,” Rae snapped at him. She closed her eyes and took a breath. Opened her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, and she genuinely was. “We probably look rather unorthodox to you, but we’re actually quite well-organised.”

Gottlieb looked levelly at her. “I haven’t seen anything that looked orthodox for about fifteen years, ma’am.”

“That much is probably true,” Mikhail said. He and Gottlieb looked at each other. Willem rolled his eyes, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and put his hands in his pockets.

“Eddy Colorado will come back when he feels like it,” Rae told Mikhail. “Just keep an eye on everybody else.”

Gottlieb led them a little way up the Tottenham Court Road, where a black cab was waiting, its motor running and a uniformed sergeant sitting behind the wheel.

“You’re joking,” said Rae.

“You’d rather we travelled around in humvees and half-tracks, Miss?” Gottlieb asked, holding one of the passenger doors open for them.

“Good point,” Willem allowed.

“And it certainly contributes to the local colour,” Rae added.

The sergeant drove north a little way, then turned the cab onto Mortimer Street, then into the maze of little one-way streets in Fitzrovia. Rae sat looking out of the window, watching the BT Tower go by. Everything seemed neat and tidy; the Household Cavalry had been busy, clearing the streets of cars, using them to block off side-roads. All the buildings were clean and undamaged; there was no sense of abandonment here, more the feeling of a particularly quiet Sunday afternoon. The cab turned up Portland Place, not far from Broadcasting House, where a stripped-down version of the BBC was still putting out a few hours of music and news every day, and negotiated a tricky roadblock of skips and buses on Park Crescent to turn onto the Marylebone Road.

“How many people are here?” Rae asked Gottlieb.

Sitting on the fold-down seat with his back to the driver and his rifle cradled in his arms, Gottlieb shrugged. “On Oxford Street we’ve got almost a thousand,” he said. “In Greater London? We don’t know for certain. Not very many.” He paused and then said, “May I ask a personal question?”

Rae was so touched that, in a situation like this he had asked permission, that she beamed at him. “Of course, Captain.”

“What language were you speaking to that gentleman back there by the ambulance?”

“Lithuanian. Mikhail’s Lithuanian.”

“And I noticed you spoke Polish to the two young ladies.”

Rae nodded.

“You sounded fairly fluent in both languages.”

Rae nodded again.

“How many languages do you speak?”

“All of them.” She smiled at him again.

The cab stopped outside Madame Tussaud’s and the driver said, “Here we are, guv. That’ll be six-fifty. Cash or account?”

Gottlieb opened the door. “Yes, thank you, Sergeant Nutt,” he said in the tone of voice of a man who has heard an old joke one too many times. “Wait for us here, would you?”

“Right you are, guv.”

“Sergeant Nutt was a cabbie in Civvy Street,” Gottlieb said sotto voce as they stood on the pavement. “He’s very handy for getting around London, but he won’t go south of the River. Anyway…” He looked at Rae and Willem and then gestured towards the front doors of Madame Tussaud’s. “Shall we?”

Rae remembered a school trip to the wax museum years ago. She supposed she must have been eight or ten years old, and she remembered that apart from the figures of The Beatles she hadn’t recognised a single one of the exhibits. It was hard to imagine quite why Gottlieb had brought them here, or what he wanted her to see, but the moment the captain pushed the doors open she heard music inside and her legs suddenly gave way and she stumbled against Willem.

“Hey,” he said, putting an arm round her waist. “Are you okay?”

For a moment, her head swam and she thought she was going to be sick. She hung on Willem’s arm while Gottlieb stood just inside the doorway with a quizzical expression on his face. Rae took a deep breath and stood up. “I’m all right,” she said. “Really. Must be the heat.”

“You sure?” asked Willem.

“Yes, really.” She patted his shoulder and swallowed. “I’m fine.” She looked at Gottlieb. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Later, when she looked back on it, Rae thought the short walk from the foyer to the museum’s main exhibition space might have been one of the bravest things she had ever done. At the time, all she could do was grip Willem’s arm and drive herself onward, step after step after step, because being strong had become a habit and she wasn’t about to fail now. Willem and Gottlieb kept glancing at her with concerned looks on their faces, but she kept shaking her head and urging them on through the music, trying to disguise her fear with a show of irritation.

Madame Tussaud’s, as Rae remembered it, had been laid out in a series of themed rooms. Sports, politics, music, and so on. You moved from one to the other and looked at the waxwork tableaux, and it had all been rather cosy, if a little puzzling for a schoolgirl.

The intervening years, it seemed, had seen a radical rethink about display policy. Now all the exhibits stood around the edge of a single huge room, a great atrium with a curving glass roof that owed more than a little to envy of the roof of the British Museum’s Great Court. The room was divided into segments by waist-high movable barriers, arranged so that visitors could pass in an orderly manner from one to another, and in each segment were a dozen or so interactive tables so that visitors could learn more about the wax models of the celebrities standing in ranks before them.

Rae didn’t recognise many of the waxworks. She spotted a couple of American Presidents she thought she knew, a Prime Minister or two. The King and Queen. Lord and Lady Beckham. The last surviving member of U2. Pretty much all the models were strangers to her. But they were all singing. Like a bizarre frozen choir, only their mouths moving, they were all singing — quite heartily — ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ Rae felt her knees sag again for a moment before she somehow found the strength to stand up.

Gottlieb looked at her with what she thought might have been trepidation. “They’ve been doing this ever since we got here,” he said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the singing. “It bothers the men.”

Rae almost burst out laughing. It bothers the men. “You can’t hear it from outside, Captain.”

Gottlieb inclined his head. “But they know it’s happening,” he said. “They know these things are singing. All the time.”

“Maybe they only sing when you come in here,” Willem said, and Rae hugged him for saying it. “Maybe they don’t do anything when nobody’s present.”

Gottlieb nodded. “Well, we did think of that,” he said. “That would have been worse, really. But we set up recorders. These things sing all the time, regardless of whether anyone’s here or not. We put the recorders in here eleven years ago and they haven’t stopped for a moment. And I’m reliably informed they’re all singing in Bobby McFerrin’s voice.” He looked about him, at the hundreds of singing waxworks, and shook his head. “I have to admit, it’s bloody spooky.”

“And you want me to stop it,” said Rae.

Gottlieb looked at her. “Could you?” he asked.

“Oh, Christ yes,” said Rae, and she sent the kill codes and a sudden silence fell on Madame Tussaud’s. It was like a weight rising from her shoulders. She stood up straight and let go of Willem’s elbow and rubbed sweat from her eyes. She wondered just how terrible she must look. She said, “Do I pass?”

Willem, who was used to her everyday miracles, just stood there. Solid, watchful, reliable. Gottlieb turned slowly in place, looking at the waxworks with an expression of wonder on his face. Finally he looked at her, and she thought he was a little afraid of her. “There’s a gentleman who would like to speak with you,” he said.

“Well, that should be an experience, Captain,” said Rae. “I haven’t spoken with a gentleman for quite a while. Lead the way.”

“He’s not here right now,” said Gottlieb. “He’s on his way, though. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

Now the song was gone, she felt stronger. “And where is this gentleman coming from?”

“He’s in Berlin,” Gottlieb told her. “But he’s on his way. I’m to offer you and your party every courtesy while you wait.”

Rae felt Willem tense up beside her and she said, “We would really rather not wait, Captain. We’d like to be on our way.”

Gottlieb nodded. “I do appreciate that, Miss Peterson. But I’m obliged to ask you to wait until the gentleman arrives.”

“Are you going to try to stop us?” Willem asked.

Gottlieb looked at him and tipped his head to one side for a moment. “I promise you, we are better armed than you are,” he said. “And the groups controlling all the other routes to… your destination are not as well-disposed towards strangers as we are.”

Willem started to say something, but Rae squeezed his arm. “We’ll be delighted to accept your hospitality, Captain,” she told Gottlieb. “To be honest, I think we could all use a shower and a decent meal. Isn’t that right, Willem?”

Willem never took his eyes off Gottlieb. “Yes,” he said finally. “Creature comforts. Yum yum.”

Gottlieb seemed relieved. “And we have some of the best creature comforts in London.” He gave the silent ranks of waxworks a last glance, and Rae had a sudden malicious impulse to start them singing again. “Perhaps we could go now?” Gottlieb said. “Sergeant Nutt will have kept the meter running. It’s his little joke.”

The Household Cavalry’s territory extended a kind of pseudopod south and east from the Tottenham Court Road into Covent Garden and down towards Leicester Square. Gottlieb led the convoy to a hotel on one of the streets off Seven Dials. It was one of those hotels that used to be called ‘boutique,’ for no good reason Rae could ever understand; the sort of place where wealthy tourists and visiting film stars and musicians used to stay while in London, discreet and quiet and unfussy. A couple of Gottlieb’s men showed them up to their rooms, and for about fifteen minutes the corridor rang with voices expressing delight in several European languages.

Rae and Willem wound up in adjoining rooms; it wasn’t planned that way, but Rae wasn’t surprised and Willem probably didn’t even give it a second thought.

She had met Peter at university in Nottingham. She was doing English Literature, he was studying nanotechnology. “We complement each other perfectly,” he joked, and in a strange way he was right. After they graduated, he got a job with a little nanotech startup in Eindhoven and she followed him to the Netherlands, finding a job teaching English at a local school, and she stayed there until she retired forty years later. The little startup became one of the powerhouses of the European nanotechnology revolution, and Peter became a senior vice president in charge of research. He was still there when La Silence descended on the world. They never married, never had children, and they were about as happy as two people can be. And then, one weekend in October, he was gone.

It happened quickly but without any fuss. Peter went into the office on Saturday morning, just like he always did, to catch up on the administrative stuff he never seemed able to clear during the week. Rae went shopping at the local market, bought some food for a dinner party they were having that evening, came home about lunchtime, and decided to have a nap before she started to prepare for the party.

Sometime later, she had a dreadful nightmare. She dreamed that she woke up and the bedroom was full of smoke and the smoke was alive. It was surging back and forth across the bedroom in waves, sometimes coalescing into complex solid geometrical shapes, sometimes forming faces. It was buzzing, far far down at the bottom limit of her hearing. It smelled like jacaranda and when she breathed it in it tasted of pear drops and made her go back to sleep.

She opened her eyes and bright autumn sunshine was streaming into the room. She felt better than she had in years.

She got up and went downstairs. Someone was moving around in the kitchen. It sounded as if they were opening and closing cupboards and drawers, as if they were looking for something. Peter was always doing that, trying to find something he had mislaid.

“Pete?” she called. “What have you lost now?” She got to the kitchen doorway and stopped, suddenly frozen.

It was Peter in the kitchen, going through the drawers and cupboards looking for some lost thing. But it was Peter with a full head of brown hair, Peter as she remembered him from the first time she’d met him, young again.

“Pete…?” she said, so quietly even she barely heard it.

Peter looked at her and smiled, and suddenly the air was full of music, a bouncy half-familiar tune, and Peter opened his mouth and started to sing in a gorgeous baritone completely unlike his usual scratchy off-key voice, “Don’t worry, be happy…”

Rae didn’t hear the rest of the song because she had started to scream, and she kept on screaming, and for quite a long time after that the world had to get by without her.

Gottlieb hadn’t been kidding. The Household Cavalry’s pocket nation was very well-stocked, and the hotel was in beautiful condition. The dining rooms were oak-panelled, the furniture heavy and solid, the beds — even if she hadn’t spent the past five days sleeping in the car — deliriously comfortable. The food was among the best she had ever tasted.

“We have three Michelin-starred chefs,” Gottlieb told her at dinner that evening. “Fresh produce from farms in Hertfordshire. Fish is a bit scarce, though. We don’t get any sea-fish at all.”

“There are fishermen on the French coast,” Willem said.

The Captain raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know that. Do you think they’d be up to trading with us?”

“They’re a bit… cliquey, Captain,” Rae said.

“That’s an understatement.” Willem sipped what had turned out to be a truly excellent burgundy. The Household Cavalry had access to some of the best wine cellars in the country. “They have their own country too. La Republique Sangatte, they call it. We wanted to ask them if they could bring us across the Channel, but they shot at us. We shot back.” He shook his head. “Not a good outcome.”

Rae reached out and squeezed his forearm gently. “They trade a bit, up and down the coast, but I don’t think their hearts are in it, really. They’re still trying to come to terms with what happened.”

“As are we all,” Gottlieb said soberly.

“How was it here?” Rae asked.

Gottlieb sat back and looked at the remains of his steak and kidney pie. He sighed. “We were on a night exercise on Salisbury Plain,” he said. “We bivvied down, and the next morning two-thirds of us were gone.” He looked out of the window. Beyond the glass, the street was gently sinking into a buttery golden twilight, perfectly peaceful. “We couldn’t raise anyone on the R/T, couldn’t pick up anything on the battlefield net. Nothing.” He looked at her and shrugged. “I expect it was much the same for you two.”

Willem nodded. Rae said, “It does sound familiar, Captain.”

“Yes. Well, we marched to the rendezvous point and there was nobody for us to rendezvous with. We went into the nearest village and there wasn’t a soul about. The telephones were working, but nobody answered. Electricity was on, but there was nothing on television and the internet was down. We borrowed a few vehicles and drove to our assembly point and our vehicles were there but…” He shrugged again. “No people. So we transferred to our vehicles and drove up here. All the way back up the A303, then down the Westway into central London. Nobody. No other vehicles. We stopped off in a couple of villages on the way, but they were all the same.”

“And so you set… this place up?”

“Some of the men wanted to try and find their families. We let them go. Most of them came back after a while, without their families. We needed somewhere to live, somewhere to… cope. My commanding officer decided to fortify Oxford Street.” Gottlieb smiled. “I gather he was very fond of Selfridges.”

Willem said, “Your commanding officer…?”

Gottlieb shook his head. “Not here any longer, I’m afraid.” He drained his own wine glass. “We have made contact, over the years, with other countries — although not with North America. I rather think there isn’t a living soul in North America. Our best guess is that only a fraction of a percent of Humanity is still here.” He put his glass down. “The gentleman who’s coming will tell you more about what we’ve found.” He stood and looked at them. “Ms Peterson, Mr Van Rijn, I have an early start in the morning. If you need anything, just dial zero on any of the house phones and one of my men will answer.” He bowed fractionally. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

After the Captain had left, Willem and Rae sat drinking their wine in silence. Finally Willem turned to Rae and said, “I think —” and Eddy Colorado chose that moment to toddle into the dining room and walk up to the table.

“Eddy,” Rae said, ignoring Willem’s tight-lipped expression of annoyance. “How can we help you?”

The little Belgian looked awkward and out of place in his brightly-coloured clothes. He said in the fractured English of which he was insanely proud, “Mrs Rae, I must visit the Emirates.”

Some nuns found her wandering near Eindhoven. She was entirely out of her mind and suffering from borderline malnutrition. The nuns took her in and fed her and bathed her, and to their great credit they didn’t throw her out when, in her madness and thinking it was what they wanted, she made Jesus appear briefly among them.

Gradually she got well, or at least learned to fake normality, she was never sure. She got used to the idea that, somehow during her wanderings, she appeared to have shed thirty years. Her hair was long and dark again, her wrinkles were gone. Her periods had started again. The liver-spots had disappeared from the backs of her hands, to be replaced by a single tiny black dot, the size of a pinhead, on each fingertip. She wondered about all this for quite a while.

Getting used to what she still thought of as her superpower took a little longer. Obviously, she had somehow developed a talent for manipulating the nanotechnology which by now must be infesting the Earth the way dust infests some homes. She experimented, learned its uses and limitations, and eventually found that it could be used for healing.

Word of the miracle worker of Eindhoven spread out into the deserted countryside and cities of Europe, and people started to turn up at the nunnery, most with simple illnesses and ailments that could be cured by a straightforward command to machines so small they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Others were afflicted with changes caused by the nano itself, and these were more tricky to fix.

From Peter, she knew that there were whole bewildering ecologies of nanotechnology, some industrial, some medical. Some of it powered itself by catalysing atmospheric pollutants; other types got their energy from blood sugar or the electrical potential of muscle fibres. All of it had, apparently, been reproducing unchecked and undirected in the fifteen years since La Silence, and some of it had begun to do unusual things.

Willem was one of those stricken by nano. A second, fully-functioning, head had grown from his waist. It was the head of a young man and it talked, on and on, all the time.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Willem said amiably, “but it just won’t shut up.”

Rae and the nuns discussed Willem. He didn’t know how much they discussed him. The nuns contended that the head was a sentient being and therefore had a soul, so it would be a sin to cure Willem. Rae argued that it was just an artefact of nanotechnology, a thing made by little machines that had spent far too long with no outside commands and had started doing things for themselves.

In the end, Rae prevailed. The nuns were still in awe of her. She healed Willem. The head withered and fell off and then dried up and crumbled. “Thank Christ,” he said. “Now maybe I can get some fucking sleep.”

He didn’t leave, though. He hung around the nunnery, doing odd-jobs for the Sisters. Some of the nuns were afraid of him — he was a spare, hatchet-faced whiplash of a man who made no secret of the fact that he had once been an enforcer for one of Amsterdam’s criminal families — but he refused to leave.

“I have nowhere to go,” he confided to Rae one day, walking in the nunnery’s physic garden. “I might as well make myself useful here.”

“You scare the Sisters, you know,” she told him.

“Rae,” he said with great seriousness, “you have no idea how scary they can be.”

And she laughed, and that was it. They were never intimate, but down the years they became close. He appointed himself her protector and confessor, and when two Polish nuns drove a battered ambulance up to the front door of the nunnery four weeks ago, there was never any question of him not going with her.

The stadium was beautiful. It sat in a kind of urban wasteland right next to the West Coast main line out of King’s Cross Station, all red and white and glass and steel in the morning sunshine. Sergeant Nutt drove them, along with a couple of Gottlieb’s men. He parked at the bottom of the steps and let them out. “That’ll be twenty-nine fifty,” he said, and guffawed.

“Keep the meter running, Sergeant Nutt,” Rae told him.

He laughed. “Will do, Miss,” he said.

Rae looked at Eddy Colorado, standing beside her on the pavement. “Ready?”

He swallowed, nodded.

She looked up at the stadium. The word ‘Emirates’ was painted in colossal red letters on the side of the huge building. “Well, let’s try and find a way in, shall we?”

There were those people who everybody knew by their first names alone, like Elvis and Madonna, and there were those people for whom you only ever used their full name, and Eddy Colorado was one of the latter. Nobody ever called him ‘Eddy’ or even ‘Mr Colorado.’ It was always ‘Eddy Colorado.’ Eddy Red.

He said he was ex-Belgian Special Forces, although he also said he had been Feyenoord’s reserve goalkeeper. They’d found him sitting at the roadside not far from Antwerp, a rucksack the size of a steamer trunk on one side of him and Tommiboy, a huge dirty-white Tisza, a Polish mountain dog, on the other. Tommiboy had not, it turned out, wanted to leave Continental Europe. While they were waiting in Boulogne for Willem to find them a ride across the Channel the dog had just wandered off and never came back. Eddy Colorado had spent a couple of days looking, but Tommiboy was nowhere to be found and eventually they had to move on. For a moment, Rae had thought Eddy Colorado was going to stay in France and try to find his dog, but as the convoy moved out the little Belgian threw his rucksack into one of the cars and climbed in after it. He’d been quiet for a few days after that, but he seemed to snap out of it after they left Folkestone.

Rae had never found out why he wanted to visit London. She’d assumed that once they arrived he would just wander off, like Tommiboy, and they would never see him again. It had never occurred to her that he might need her help.

They passed down corridors and up stairways and down stairways and along more corridors, and finally they came out into the sunshine halfway up a great raked sweep of seating overlooking a football pitch. A small flock of sheep was grazing in the middle of the pitch. Eddy Colorado looked about him and took a deep breath, let it out noisily.

Rae looked at him. “You okay?”

Eddy Colorado thought about it for a while. Finally he said, “My brother-in-law, I love that guy. Great athlete, really great guy. He was Arsenal’s reserve goalkeeper, before La Silence.”

Rae looked around the stadium. “Oh,” she said in a quiet voice.

“My sister died,” he went on. “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The club were great, they really were. The best specialists, the best treatment.” He shook his head. “All for nothing. They gave my brother-in-law a leave of absence. He’d just come back when…” He raised his hands gently to the sky. He looked at her. “What happened, Mrs Rae?”

Rae had found that you could tell a lot about a person from what they called the catastrophe that had overtaken Humanity. There were those who called it Rapture, and they were the ones who believed that God had taken His flock home to Paradise and left behind the unbelievers. God’s flock had turned out to be a lot bigger than anyone expected, and being Left Behind was actually rather pleasant.

Then there were those who said Singularity, and mostly they were the ones who believed that one or both of the world’s experimental quantum supercomputers had suddenly achieved sentience, bootstrapped themselves to godhood, and ascended to a higher plane of existence, taking with them the greater proportion of Mankind and a large number of Earth’s animals. Rae had thought about this and could see no substantive difference between it and the Rapture.

Aliens, said others, and Rae had mentally filed them away with the Rapture and Singularity people because they were, at bottom, all the same thing.

There were those who said nano, and they believed that Mankind had suffered a nanotechnological apocalypse, that the tiny machines had turned against the human race and almost destroyed it. That was harder to argue against, because nano was obviously involved somewhere along the line.

Then there had been that man in Eindhoven who believed that the universe had somehow split in two, like a document being copied, but most of the people had stayed in the original.

And there were those who believed that they were really dead, that this was Hell, or at least Purgatory.

She said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I really don’t.” They stood a while longer in silence. Rae asked, “You didn’t really think your brother-in-law would be here, did you?”

Eddy Colorado nodded. “The angel told me he would.”

The angel had arrived two days after the Polish nuns and their patient. Rae was still trying to work out what to do with Elżbieta; obviously she was afflicted with a form of nano, but Rae had never seen anything like it before. It wouldn’t respond to any of her commands. She’d even taken a trip to Peter’s company and accessed the secure servers to see if there were any kill-codes she didn’t know. She’d never needed to see the codes before, she’d always known instinctively what they were, but she was completely out of ideas. Nothing worked.

She was sitting in her room considering this one morning when she heard a commotion in the gardens outside. She looked out of the window and saw three nuns running for their lives through the flower beds, which was an unusual enough sight in itself for her to stand there watching them for a while without wondering what they were running from.

There was a knock on the door and Willem looked in as she turned to face the sound. “Someone’s asking to see you,” he said calmly.

“Who?”

“It’s probably best if you just come and see,” he told her.

The angel was standing in the middle of the physic garden. Its body was skeleton-thin and it had enormous white-feathered wings. From the cuffs of its jeans protruded big clawed feet, absurdly like the feet of a budgerigar. Naked from the waist up, the angel’s skin was tanned a wonderful golden-brown, it had long blond hair, and its face was the most beautiful Rae had ever seen. Like something from a collaboration by Breughel and Raphael.

“Well,” Rae said, “this is new.”

“It wants to talk to you,” said Willem.

“To me?”

“Asked for you by name.” He smiled. “You have interesting friends.”

Rae glanced about her. All the nuns had fled. “We’re being awfully calm about this, aren’t we?”

“You are,” he said. “I just wet myself.”

The angel looked at them. “Rae,” it said. The voice was like a heavenly choir and it carried effortlessly across the distance between them.

“I’m not coming any closer,” she said. “We’ll have to talk from here.”

The angel looked at her. It looked at Willem. “Okay.”

“Who are you?” Rae asked.

“I’ve got a message for you,” said the angel. “Just you.”

“I have no secrets from Willem,” she told the creature. “Who sent you?”

The angel thought about it. “I don’t know.” It held up a slender, beautiful hand as Rae started to protest. “I really don’t. It’s no use asking me, because I don’t know. I just know I have a message for you.”

Rae and Willem looked at each other. She shrugged. “I don’t know either,” she said. She looked at the angel. “Well, you’d better give me the message, then.”

The angel nodded. “You will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London,” it told her. “Someone there will cure her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London. Someone there will cure her.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Shall I repeat the message again?”

“No, thank you. I heard you the first time. I just don’t understand. Who wants us to go to London? Who’s going to be there? How will they cure the little girl?”

“I don’t know. You will repeat the message.”

“Sorry?”

“I have to hear you repeat the message, or I have to stand here saying it over and over again.”

No, Rae thought, the world is obviously not surreal enough already. She said, “I will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London. Someone there will cure her.”

The angel nodded. “Thank you,” it said. “Have a nice day.” And with a single great clap of wings it sprang into the sky. A moment later it was just a tiny dot against the clouds.

“You know,” said Willem, craning his neck to watch the creature soaring across the sky, “I really didn’t think there were any surprises left in the world.”

“You’re not serious,” Willem said.

“He says the angel appeared in front of him a couple of days before we passed through Antwerp,” Rae said. “It told him to sit by the side of the road at a certain time and someone would come along and take him to Arsenal’s football ground to find his brother-in-law.”

“Little bastard,” Willem said wonderingly. “He might have mentioned this.”

“Don’t say anything to him, Willem,” she said. “He’s upset enough as it is.” The little man had cursed the angel through tears all the way back from North London, inconsolable. He’d stormed off when they got back to the hotel and she hadn’t seen him since.

“No sign of the brother-in-law, then.”

“No sign of anybody.”

“Which does call into question just how reliable the angel is.”

“Yes, dear, that had occurred to me,” Rae said irritably. They were sitting in the hotel’s bar, drinking mineral water. Outside, a clear, lambent summer evening’s light was settling over London. Members of the convoy periodically passed through the bar and waved hello. Rae waved back to them all, even though she had actually begun to tire of all these people looking to her for guidance. It had been bad enough back in Eindhoven, but at least there the people who needed her were really ill. These people had just… attached themselves to her as she and Willem and Marta and Beata drove towards the French coast. Mikhail and his caravan of Lithuanian expats, the Leclerc Sisters, Bongo Fry and his common-law wife Theresa, Eddy Colorado. You’re going to London? That sounds like fun; can we come along with you? Oh, and while you’re at it, will you lead us and make all the decisions for us and make sure we’re fed and happy? She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired.”

“We’ve come a long way,” Willem said. “Of course you’re tired.”

“It’s not that far, Willem,” she said mildly. “Before La Silence you could do Eindhoven to London in less than a day.”

He put his glass down and steered it in a little circle on the tabletop. “Listen, Rae —” he began.

“I know, Willem.” She sighed. “You told me so.”

He gestured at the ceiling. “We don’t know what that thing is —”

“It’s nano.” Willem raised an eyebrow. “Trust me, I know. It’s some kind of construct. An avatar built out of nano.”

Willem nodded slowly. “And you waited this long to tell me because…?”

She rubbed her face. Lowered her hands and looked at the little black dots on her fingertips. Careful examination had revealed them to be graphite, the tips of some kind of structure that extended back into her fingers. She had a shrewd idea what they were, but their presence made no sense.

“I couldn’t just ignore it and leave Elżbieta like that, Willem. I was out of ideas; I couldn’t help her on my own.” She thought about what she was about to say, then took a breath and said it all in a rush. “Suppose I created the angel. Suppose my subconscious came up with a solution, something I didn’t consciously remember, and it built the angel to pass the message on.”

Willem thought about it. “And you think this solution might be here? In Hyde Park?”

She raised her hands in a helpless shrug. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. You could be right; it might just be a wild goose chase. But I didn’t dare take the chance.”

He looked past her. “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said.

Rae turned in her seat. Gottlieb was standing in the doorway. “Ms Peterson, Mr van Rijn,” he said. “The gentleman’s arrived. He’ll see you now.”

They drove from Seven Dials to an office building near the Western end of Oxford Street. Sergeant Nutt must have been busy elsewhere, because Gottlieb drove them himself in a Hummer.

He led them into the foyer of the building and took them five floors up in the lift, then led them down a corridor and knocked at a door. Without waiting for a response, he opened the door and stood aside to let them through.

There were two men sitting at the conference table in the room. One was huge and bulky; he was wearing threadbare flying coveralls, his chestnut-coloured hair was awry, and he was clutching a small stuffed panda toy in one huge fist.

The other man was small and neat and wearing chinos and a black polo shirt. He had a chicken under one arm. For a moment Rae thought she had been ushered into the presence of lunatics, that Gottlieb had finally decided to reveal his true colours and murder them all, then the man with the chicken was out of his chair and holding out his free hand, smiling. Rae noticed he was wearing kidskin gloves.

“Ms Peterson,” he said. “Mr van Rijn. I’m delighted to finally meet you; please accept my apologies for not being here in person to greet you.”

Rae found her gaze drifting to the huge man in the coveralls.

“This is Flight Lieutenant Oak,” said the small man. “He probably won’t want to shake hands. But then again, he might. You never know with Flight Lieutenant Oak. I’m Henry Pargeter. Everyone calls me Harry.”

“I’ve heard of you,” said Willem. “Everyone calls you ‘The Last Spy.’”

Pargeter beamed at them as if genuinely delighted that someone had heard of him. “Well,” he said, “I think lost is more accurate than last, and I was never a spy, but yes, I believe I am the only remaining member of His Majesty’s Security Service.”

Rae looked at Willem. “This is the one with the helicopter,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked at Lieutenant Oak. “Oh,” she said again.

“The helicopter,” Pargeter said. “Just so, yes.” He rubbed his gloved hands together. “Well, I’m told you want to see Hyde Park, is that right?”

“That was our…plan,” Rae said carefully.

“Then see Hyde Park you shall.” He beamed at them again and indicated the door. “Shall we?”

They went back down the corridor, back down in the lift, back through the foyer, and out into the growing dusk, Rae becoming more and more baffled with every step. Pargeter and Gottlieb didn’t say a word as they walked the short distance to the end of Oxford Street.

As they reached Marble Arch, Rae became aware of a humming in the air, a minor chord, not unpleasant, hanging just above the level of normal hearing. It wasn’t loud, but it was everywhere.

“The Household Cavalry call this the Hum,” Pargeter said, shifting his hands to get a better grip on the chicken. “It was here when they arrived, but they didn’t know what it was, and there were… casualties.”

“My commanding officer and his driver,” Gottlieb put in. “Brave men.”

Pargeter snorted. “Yes. Brave. Quite so.”

They crossed the road at Marble Arch and Pargeter stopped them in the middle of the southbound carriageways of Park Lane. A few yards away there was a central reservation dividing the northbound and southbound carriageways, and beyond the northbound were the trees and lawns of Hyde Park. Rae looked down at her feet. A few inches from her toes a thick red line had been sprayed on the road. It ran away, none too straight, down towards Hyde Park Corner in one direction, and cut across the complex traffic junction at Marble Arch and off towards Bayswater in the other.

“Captain Gottlieb’s boys call it the Deadline,” Pargeter said. “They painted it after Major Burton and his driver tried to drive into Hyde Park.” He grabbed the chicken by the feet, drew his arm back, and pitched the squawking bird underarm across the road. Flapping and tumbling helplessly, the bird crossed the red line and exploded like a silent supernova made of smoke, a sudden off-white puff of vapour. Rae and Willem flinched back. Pargeter looked at the cloud of smoke. “Sic transit, Major Burton and…?” He looked at Gottlieb.

“Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Gottlieb said.

“And Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Pargeter agreed. He brushed his hands together. “It goes all the way around the Park. There’s no break and no way through it; anything that tries is, um, explosively disassembled. Captain Gottlieb’s men mapped it before I got here. They didn’t use chickens, they just walked along holding out sticks. The Household Cavalry are pretty good at thinking out of the box; they found a shop that had a stock of those Chinese lanterns — you know, the little paper balloon things you fly up into the sky with a candle inside? They released hundreds of them and let the wind carry them out over the Park, to see how high the barrier goes.” He looked into the Park. “Not the most scientific way of measuring things, but we think it’s a dome.”

“Over the whole Park?” asked Willem.

“Over the whole Park,” Pargeter agreed. He looked at Rae. “We think there’s something inside. And we think it may be waiting for you.”

Rae couldn’t stop thinking of the way the chicken had just burst in a puff of smoke. “Me?”

“You were told to come here, weren’t you?”

Told by an angel, possibly from her subconscious. “I have no idea,” Rae said. “I really don’t know what to do next.”

There was a story that had come to the nunnery with the procession of ill people. It was the story of an Englishman who, in the months immediately following La Silence, had flown a helicopter right around the world. Rae had dismissed it; there were too many wild stories going around to keep track of. And here she was, sitting in a London office with the man in the story.

“I was on an aeroplane,” he said. “I was coming back from a security conference in Jakarta. We landed at Heathrow, we taxied to the terminal, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was the only person on the aeroplane.” He sat back on his chair. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to get off a transcontinental airliner if nobody’s rolled the jetway up to the door. I had to make a rope out of blankets.”

Rae smiled, picturing the little man climbing down a blanket rope like an escaping prisoner. “What was London like?”

Pargeter thought about that. He thought about it for so long that Rae thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. But he said finally, “Ms Peterson, it was lovely.”

Captain Gottlieb himself had served sandwiches and coffee. Lieutenant Oak had not partaken of the meal; he just sat there at the end of the table, staring at nothing.

“You have no idea how difficult it was to find a car with its keys in the ignition,” Pargeter went on, picking up the plate with the last of the ham sandwiches on it and offering it to Rae and Willem. They both shook their heads, so he put the plate down and took the sandwich for himself. He still hadn’t taken his gloves off. “Eventually I found a bicycle and I cycled into town.” He took a bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “The whole place was deserted. I went to the office, tried to raise someone, anyone, and there was no answer. So I cycled out to Permanent Joint Headquarters — the big military base at Northwood? I found some people there. Half a dozen of the Fleet Protection Marines detachment, and Lieutenant Oak and his colleagues Lieutenant Birch and Flight Sergeant Holly.”

Rae parsed this part of the story. Pargeter made it sound like an innocent Sunday morning’s jolly, but what he had done was cycle quite a considerable distance across the capital in the first hours after the apocalypse. She glanced over at Lieutenant Oak, sitting impassively at the table holding his stuffed panda.

“Northwood was simply packed with aircraft,” Pargeter went on. “So we borrowed a Puma and we flew off to see what we could see.”

“You just flew off,” Rae said. “And I presume air traffic control was…”

Pargeter waved air traffic control away.

“That could have been a short trip,” Willem said.

Pargeter thought about it and smiled. “Well,” he said.

Rae leaned forward, fascinated. “How far did you go?”

Pargeter scratched his head. “Well, we did a tour of the country, but to be honest there wasn’t very much to see here so we flew over to France and looked around there for a while. Then we did Spain and Portugal. Germany. Poland — Poland was very interesting. Did you know it’s the most populous nation in Europe now?”

Rae nodded. The Poles, the ones who believed in the Rapture at any rate, were not best pleased at having been left behind. They had harnessed this displeasure and invaded Germany, which had been more or less entirely depopulated.

“Anyway, we flew down through the Balkans, into Turkey, the Middle East. Jordan, Israel.”

“Anyone there?” asked Willem.

“Not a soul,” said Pargeter. “All gone. We found some people in Cairo but they shot at us and we had to leave.”

“Mr Pargeter,” said Rae, “how far did you go?”

“Oh, we wound up in Kazakhstan,” Pargeter said brightly. “Lieutenant Oak wanted to visit Baikonur.”

“Jesus.” Rae sat back on her chair. Pargeter and Lieutenant Oak had flown a Puma helicopter all the way into Central Asia and back again. Even before La Silence it would have been a tough trip, involving many permissions and much technical support. These days, it was nothing short of epic.

“Was there anything at Baikonur?” asked Willem, as if he was enquiring about a day-trip to Brighton.

Pargeter shrugged. “Rockets,” he said. “Lots of concrete. Lieutenant Oak was disappointed, weren’t you, Lieutenant Oak?”

Rae watched Lieutenant Oak’s fist close on the panda and then relax. No wonder he was crazy. If he was crazy. She said, “Someone ought to compose a song about that.”

Pargeter said, “What? Oh. No, I don’t think so, somehow. Somebody had to take a look around, get the lay of the land. Just doing one’s job, really.” He looked at the windows. It was dark outside. They’d been talking for almost four hours. First it had been Rae’s story. Then it had been Willem’s. Then it had been Pargeter’s turn. He said to Willem, “I think I need to speak with Ms Peterson in private.”

“We don’t have any secrets,” said Willem.

“That’s true,” said Rae.

Pargeter smiled. “But there may be some personal things we have to talk about.” He looked at Rae and raised his eyebrows, and Rae understood.

“He’s right,” she said. “Go and see how everyone’s doing, would you?”

“Okay,” said Willem, and he got up, picked up his rifle, and left the room.

When Willem had gone, Pargeter said, “Now there’s a useful talent to have.”

Rae nodded at Lieutenant Oak.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Pargeter. “Yes. Why don’t you go with him, Lieutenant? Stop him getting lost.”

Without a word, Lieutenant Oak got up from the table, still carrying his panda, and followed Willem.

“If you don’t mind me saying, he’s rather scary,” said Rae.

Pargeter smiled. “Lieutenant Oak? Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Never trusted anyone more than I’ve trusted Lieutenant Oak.”

“Was he like that before..?” she mimed a swooping helicopter with her hand.

“It was a long journey,” said Pargeter, and Rae wondered what their journey a quarter of the way around the world had done to him. Although he hadn’t been doing the flying, the slightest mechanical failure could have stranded them thousands of miles from home, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. “We lost Birch and Holly, I’m sorry to say. In Moscow, on the way back.” He shuddered slightly. “There aren’t very many Muscovites, but let’s hope they don’t decide to move West. Anyway.” He smiled at her. “Could I see your hands, please?”

“My hands?”

“Don’t be coy, Ms Peterson.” He took off his gloves and laid them on the table. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” He performed a brief and rather awkward jazz hands routine, and Rae saw that there were little black dots on his fingertips too.

She shifted her chair over until they were sitting almost knee-to-knee, and held out her hands, palms turned upward. Pargeter leaned forward slightly and looked at them, but didn’t touch them.

“I’ve only seen this once before,” he said. “There was a chap in Kabul. Well, I say chap, he was about twelve years old. He had marks on his hands like this, and he could work miracles. The locals told me he was a god, or a demon; they weren’t sure, so they thought it was safest to worship him.”

“The locals told you?”

“I have some Pashto.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Pargeter inclined his head. “I finally gained an audience with this god, or demon, and he was just a little boy doing magic tricks.” He clicked his fingers and suddenly there was an egg in his palm. Clicked them again and there was a live chick standing there, looking around bemusedly. Clicked them again and his palm was empty. “Do you know what those little dots are?”

“Graphite,” she said. She scribbled a fingertip through the air. “Handy for writing notes when you can’t find a pencil.”

“Graphite radio antennae,” Pargeter said. “That’s how you communicate with the Dust. Have you had a scan?”

She shook her head. She hadn’t dared.

“Well, I have, and if you’re the same as me you have a network of the stuff all through your body. You’re a little radio station, Ms Peterson. While we were asleep, you and I were rewritten.”

“Although not quite as radically as Lieutenant Oak,” Rae said.

Pargeter smiled bashfully. “I wondered whether you’d notice that.”

“What is he?”

“Lieutenant Oak?” Pargeter looked surprised. “I’d have thought the name would give it away. He’s a tree.” He reconsidered for a moment. “Although I suppose the technical term would be golem. An avatar created by rewriting a tree.”

“A tree.”

“A tree.”

“A tree that can pilot a helicopter.”

Pargeter spread his hands. “I needed a pilot, and Lieutenant Oak turned up. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“About what?”

Pargeter got up and walked over to the wall. He reached out and flicked the light switch up. The lights went out. Rae heard a click as Pargeter flicked the switch back down, and the lights came on again. He stood there smiling. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Yes, Mr Pargeter,” she said. “I had noticed that there is still electricity.”

Pargeter came over and sat down again. “After fifteen years, there is still electricity,” he agreed. “And not a soul making it happen. Lieutenant Oak and I took a trip out to the big power station at Didcot, to see where the electricity’s coming from, and you know what? It’s not coming from anywhere. All the equipment’s gone, as if it was never there. The buildings are empty. We flew up to Nottingham, there’s another big power station there. Same story.”

“All right,” said Rae. If she could believe in helicopter-flying trees, disappearing power stations were hardly out of the ordinary at all.

Pargeter got to his feet again and started to pace. “Hasn’t it struck you that there’s something incredibly English about this catastrophe?” he asked. “Doesn’t it all seem very cosy? Not a single aircraft crashed during the Silence. No fires caused by people suddenly disappearing and leaving the cooker on. No car crashes. The countryside’s starting to look a bit scruffy, but after fifteen years it should be wildly overgrown. The cities are in good order. We still have water and gas. The toilets still work.”

“Someone’s running things,” said Rae.

“Someone’s running things for us,” Pargeter corrected. “If you leave aside the fact that almost the entire human race isn’t here any more, things are actually jolly nice now.”

“Lieutenant Oak,” she said.

“I needed him, and he was given to me,” Pargeter said. “He was given to me by someone.” He rubbed his face. “Tell me about nanotechnology.”

“I’m not an expert, Mr Pargeter. My partner was an expert; I’m an English teacher.”

Pargeter inclined his head. “But you lived for a very long time with an expert; that makes you the closest thing to an expert that we have. You and your partner must have spoken about his work.”

“Well, yes, but twenty minutes on Google would tell you as much as I know about nano.”

Pargeter smiled. “You may have noticed that Google is unavailable. Whatever is helping keep civilisation running has not decided to extend its goodwill to the internet.”

“Mm. Good point.” She thought about it for a few moments. “All right. Well, Pete once told me that, at a basic level, all ‘nanotechnology’ means is ‘technology at a nanoscale,’” she said. “That could be anything from weather control to particle coatings on clothes to make them resist dirt. But what everyone means when they say ‘nanotechnology’ is nanocytes, and there are really only two types of them — effectors and assemblers. Effectors are the little machines that do the work; assemblers do just what it says on the tin — they sit there patiently putting molecules together to build stuff, including effectors. Assemblers have a short shelf-life, and they are never programmed to make more assemblers. That’s just a basic fail-safe.”

“Except the fail-safe seems to have failed,” Pargeter observed.

She nodded. “Certainly after fifteen years all the assemblers should have stopped working. No assemblers, no more effectors. Nanocytes are fragile; the effectors should all have become inert by now.”

“So how do you get assemblers in the first place?”

“They’re factory-made. You run off a batch, test a sample, then set them loose to make effectors.”

“The production lines could still be running, then.”

Rae thought about that. “They could,” she allowed. “That never occurred to me. But assemblers were made in secure conditions — there was a lot of very tight legislation; people were terrified of Grey Goo. And an assembler won’t do anything until it’s tasked. It doesn’t matter whether the labs are still running; without orders the assemblers would just hang around doing nothing until they degraded.”

“Perhaps someone is giving orders.”

“Yes, and perhaps Elvis will tour again one day.” She sighed. “If you’re one of the people who thinks this is The Rapture, I’m afraid this conversation is over, Mr Pargeter.”

“No.” Pargeter smiled sadly and shook his head. “No, I don’t believe in The Rapture. I think I may have some idea about bits of what happened, but not all of it.”

Rae looked at the little Englishman. “Well, we all have some idea about what happened.”

Pargeter tipped his head to one side. “Do you?”

Rae pulled a sour face. “All right. Fair point.”

“But you must have come to some conclusions, surely. Otherwise all this…” he waved a hand to include the room, the building, Oxford Street, London, Europe, the world, “…is just meaningless. Beyond meaningless.”

“That is pretty much the way I look at it, yes.”

Pargeter raised an eyebrow. “You’re an extraordinary woman, Ms Peterson.”

“I’ve never responded particularly well to flattery, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said tiredly.

“No, really. It’s human nature to look for reasons when outside events suddenly change our lives. That’s how we get conspiracy theories. It’s rare to find someone who just regards life as… chaos.”

“I would have thought it was the only sane way to respond to what’s happened.”

Pargeter leaned forward in his chair. “But what has happened? Let’s take that as our starting point, shall we?”

Rae shrugged.

“A large proportion of the human race — very nearly all of the human race — and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has simply disappeared. I think we can agree on that, can’t we?”

“I think I’d find it difficult to argue with you on that point, Mister Pargeter.”

“And if a very large proportion of the human race and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has disappeared, there must be a reason. Musn’t there?”

Rae rubbed her face. “Mister Pargeter,” she said, “I fell asleep fifteen years ago, and when I woke up I could do this.” She clicked her fingers and a motorcycle appeared in the corner of the room. A heavily-customised Harley-Davidson she had once seen on a television lifestyle show. She clicked her fingers and it disappeared again. “It’s taken a great deal of my attention since then just to deal with that, and I haven’t always done terribly well. I haven’t had the luxury of being able to look for reasons.”

Pargeter looked at the space where the motorcycle had been. “Have you ever wondered how you do that?” he asked.

“I do it by talking to the Dust,” Rae said. She raised her hands in front of her face and made tiger-claws at him. “With my radio fingers.”

Pargeter smiled. “What was that motorbike made of?” he asked, turning back to face her.

“The Dust. Nanoassembled molecules. Oh.” She stopped and thought about it. “You know, that never occurred to me before.” She remembered the big experimental assembly chamber at Peter’s company, filled with a solid fog of effectors and gaseous feedstock. It took hours to produce simple shapes like chairs and tables, days for more complex forms, with a dozen supercomputers running constantly to send instructions to the effectors. Nanoassembly had been a constantly-refining technique, but it had never been instantaneous. She’d just got used to it.

“We think that, to create something like that,” Pargeter waved at the corner, “the effectors must be working at close to lightspeed. Faster than lightspeed, possibly. This isn’t the Dust that your husband was developing, this is something quite different. And it must use a colossal amount of energy. Where does that come from? Where does it go?”

Rae looked at the corner and said nothing.

“There’s also the question of how you know how to build a motorbike,” Pargeter went on. “You just think ‘motorbike’ and click your fingers, and there it is, and I’m willing to bet that if we tried it the engine would work and we could just ride it down the street. How do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He clicked his fingers and there was the chick again, sitting in his palm, looking calmly around. “This is a real living thing, Ms Peterson,” he said. “Right down below the cellular level. I’ve lost count of how many of these little chaps we’ve autopsied, and there is literally no way to tell them from the real thing. They’re not automata. They even have DNA. Here.” He bent forward and let the chick step off his palm onto the floor. “There you go, little one. Off you go.” He made gentle shooing motions and the chick wandered off until it found something interesting on the floor to peck at. Pargeter sat up and clasped his hands in his lap and looked very seriously at Rae. “I’m classically-educated, Ms Peterson. Winchester, Oxford. I read Greek and Latin. What I know about biology you could write on the back of a postage stamp; I have no more idea of how to build a chick than I have about the interior processes of a star. So how could I do that?” He nodded at the chick, which was gradually pecking its way in little circles away from them. “How can I instruct the effectors if I don’t know what instructions to send?”

Rae scowled. She’d been taking it for granted all these years…

“The way I see it,” Pargeter continued, “there are two possibilities. Either you and I have been changed far more drastically than we imagined, and we’ve somehow been loaded, on a subconscious level, with unimaginably-detailed templates for all the things we create. Or we’re not giving the orders, we’re accessing a database of all possible templates.”

Rae shook her head.

“The world, Ms Peterson, has become a lot stranger than we thought. We have become a lot stranger than we thought.” He reached out and tapped Rae on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to show you something.”

Rae stood and followed Pargeter out of the room and up a couple of flights of stairs. At the top of the stairs, Pargeter opened a door and Rae felt a gust of cool air billow past her down the stairwell.

The door opened onto the roof of the building and an extraordinary view over London. Most of the buildings were dark, but the streetlights were on, a higgledy-piggledy gridwork of light that draped itself over the heights of Highgate and Hampstead to the north, out towards Heathrow to the west, to the River in the south and away to the City in the east.

A telescope had been set up near the centre of the roof, and Rae knew what Pargeter wanted to show her. She said, “I don’t need that, Mr Pargeter. And neither do you.” And she looked up at the gloriously star-strewn sky and zoomed her view.

It had been obscurely comforting for Rae to discover that her eyesight had its limitations. Her eyes were simply too small to receive enough light to resolve things like exoplanets or the details of distant galaxies, but if she stood on a tall enough mountain she’d have been able to see people halfway round the world, and all the planets of the Solar System appeared larger than a full Moon. All except one. She looked around for a few moments, and there it was, a glittering shield the shape of a car windscreen hanging motionless in space. She’d looked at it many times in Holland and had never been able to make out much more than its oddly granular structure.

“Do you know what it is?” Pargeter asked, standing beside her with his head tipped back.

“There’s a fogbank off the Dutch coast,” she said. “The Hook Shield, they call it. The fishermen won’t go anywhere near it; it just hangs there, never moving, never changing. It’s the same shape.” Except the Hook Shield was composed of billions of nanoparticles, each one hanging motionless in the air, a condensation nucleus for water droplets. This thing in space, whatever it was, was colossal.

“Have you tried counting the planets?” he asked.

All of a sudden, Rae was tired of Pargeter’s cute little conversational strategies. “I have noticed that Mars is no longer there, Mr Pargeter,” she said. “Thank you.”

Pargeter noticed the tone of her voice and looked at her. “We have some very bright people living here, Ms Peterson,” he told her. “They’re not the brightest people who have ever lived in Britain, but they’re almost certainly the brightest people living here now. And they believe that Mars has been… dismantled. Disassembled. And reassembled to make…” he gestured at the sky. “… that.”

“And that is…?”

Pargeter scratched his head. “Our people are of the opinion that that is where the human race, whatever it is now, is living.”

Rae blinked her vision back to normal and looked at him.

“It’s an enormous solar collector,” he went on. “The concave face is always turned towards the Sun; it’s absorbing an extraordinary amount of energy, and it’s using that energy to power something. Some of it is providing electricity for us, but we don’t know how and it’s only a tiny fraction of what it’s absorbing anyway. My bright people have theorised that the rest of it is being used to power some kind of hive mind composed of every person who disappeared during the Silence. And probably most of the animals, too.”

Rae thought about it. She thought about it for quite a while. Finally, she said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way anything could build something like that in fifteen years.”

Pargeter nodded. “Well, yes, that’s what I thought, too,” he said. “But we looked at the stars. Have you looked at the stars?”

Rae’s patience snapped. “Mr Pargeter!” she said.

Pargeter raised his hands in apology. “Our people compared the positions of the stars on the day before the Silence to their positions now, and they believe that it’s actually been a little over one thousand seven hundred years since the Event.”

Rae shook her head. “No, no, no.”

“Our people think that none of us survived the Silence,” Pargeter said. “We were all… disassembled while… whatever it is did whatever it needed to do. Then the world was put back exactly the way it was on the day of the Event, and some of us were put back into it.”

Rae thought of clouds of animated smoke surging back and forth across her bedroom, of Pete singing in the kitchen. “No,” she said in a small voice.

“Ever since I got back from the continent, I’ve been collecting every scientist and expert and theorist I can lay my hands on,” Pargeter said. “I’ve sent scouting groups as far as Korea. We have quite a lot of clever people here now. And if you sit a lot of very clever people down for fifteen years and ask them to think about a problem, they come up with all manner of strange ideas. But eventually they boil all those strange ideas down.” He turned from the telescope and started to walk back to the stairway. “I’m told that there aren’t a lot of explanations — even very strange ones — for what seems to have happened to the stars. Earth hasn’t been moved; it’s in just the right place, if seventeen hundred years have passed. The stars haven’t been moved, because, well, that’s just impossible. I’m sorry, but this is the best explanation we can come up with.”

“Your theorists are wrong, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said.

“Possibly. Yes, quite possibly.” He stopped at the doorway to the stairs and turned to look at her. “I think your angel may have been sent by…” he waved a languid hand at the sky, at the great artefact that had replaced Mars. “If it told you to come to Hyde Park, there must be something important here. And I need to know what it is.”

She barked out an astonished laugh. “You want me to spy for you?”

Pargeter looked abashed. “One hates to revert to type,” he said. “But, you know, it was one’s job. For the past fifteen years we’ve been scrabbling about trying to understand what has happened to the world, and why, Ms Peterson. I think you’re about to be given a chance to find out. We might not get another one.”

Unable to sleep, she went downstairs and sat in the bar. No one else was about, but through the window she could see two of Gottlieb’s men on guard outside the front door. He’d told her that they were there to protect the hotel and its guests from other groups of survivors, who sometimes carried out raids into Household Cavalry territory, but right now they looked to her like armed guards.

She got up and went into Reception, where another soldier was standing behind the desk. She walked right past him without saying a word, and opened the door.

The two guards turned when they heard the noise behind them. One was a corporal named McKie; the other, she didn’t know. “I’m going for a walk,” she said to McKie.

“With respect, miss, I wouldn’t advise it,” the corporal said smoothly and professionally. Everyone here was calm and matter-of-fact and professional, she thought.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m perfectly safe.”

McKie considered for a second or so. “If you’ll just wait a moment, Miss, I’ll call it in and then I’ll be delighted to accompany you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Willem said, seeming to materialise soundlessly at her shoulder. “I’ll be taking the air with Ms Peterson.”

McKie said, “With respect, sir —”

“Enough respect,” Willem said. “I was fighting the Chechen Mafia when you were still being toilet-trained. Have you ever fought the Chechen Mafia?”

“No, sir,” McKie said, in a baffled tone of voice.

“If you had, you’d know there is nothing here I am afraid of,” Willem went on. “And I am armed.” He held up his rifle.

“Me too,” said Rae. She held her hands out and all of a sudden she was holding a futuristic-looking rifle, matt-black, with many strange buttons and modules and a parabolic reflector at the end of its barrel. “Phased plasma rifle,” she said. “Fifty kilowatt range.”

The other soldier took a step back, but McKie stood his ground. “I’ll still have to call it in,” he said finally.

“Fine,” she said. “Call it in. We’re not going far.”

She and Willem left the two soldiers standing there outside the hotel. They walked up towards Shaftesbury Avenue, then turned up the Charing Cross Road, their footsteps echoing in the great silence of London. Not all of the streetlights were working, Rae noticed. Power was certainly coming from somewhere, but the bulbs still burned out. She assumed Gottlieb’s men replaced them, but she also assumed he couldn’t spare the manpower to replace them all.

“Does that thing work?” Willem asked after a while, nodding at the gun she was carrying.

She lifted it up. “This? Of course it works.” She raised it to her shoulder, sighted up the road at the front of a building, and squeezed the trigger. The gun made a modulated beeping sound, LEDs flashed on its sides, and a stream of soap bubbles emerged from a hole in the middle of the parabolic antenna. She looked bashfully at Willem, and they both laughed, but she wondered. She had wanted a toy gun, and a toy gun had been created. What would have happened if she had really wanted a futuristic particle beam weapon? Would she have got one of those?

“Can I ask you a question?” she said a few minutes later, as they wandered through the little streets and squares of Soho.

“Of course.”

“What you told Corporal McKie about the Chechen Mafia. Was that true?”

He nodded. He had never spoken in any great detail about his former life. He’d never hidden the fact that he had been a gangster, a killer, but he had never volunteered any stories about it, and she had respected that, all these years.

“Were they bad? The Chechens?”

He shrugged. “Any man who kills you is bad,” he mused. “The Chechens were ruthless and tough, but they were honourable men, by their own lights. Not everyone was so honourable.”

“I still find it hard to imagine you, living that life.”

“I’m not.” He smiled briefly at her. “That life’s over.”

“Why did you do it, though?”

He thought about that for a while. “I was good at it,” he said finally.

They walked on for a while in silence, until they reached a set of streets blocked by parked cars and lorries — the southern edge of the Household Cavalry’s little nation. They turned north and found themselves at Oxford Circus.

“Pargeter’s experts tell him it hasn’t been fifteen years since La Silence,” she said. “They say it’s been almost two thousand years.”

“And why do they say that?” he asked.

“They have computer programs that can show you the positions of the stars from any time since the Crucifixion to, oh, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years into the future. They just ran it and compared the results with the positions of the stars.”

Willem thought about it. “I don’t feel two thousand years old,” he said.

“Me neither. I remember those computer programs, though. They’re supposed to be pretty accurate.” She turned and started to walk back eastward along Oxford Street. “Do you remember I told you about Mars?”

“I remember you told me it isn’t there any more. I remember you said there was something in its place. You didn’t know what it was.”

“Pargeter thinks that’s where everyone is,” she said. “He thinks the human race became some kind of group mind, dismantled Mars, and built this thing to live in. He thinks that’s where the electricity’s coming from.”

“You keep saying thinks,” Willem pointed out. “I presume he doesn’t have a pretty accurate computer program to tell him these things.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, he doesn’t. It’s all conjecture.”

“Does it matter?”

Rae looked at him, walking softly and alert beside her. “Of course it does. Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“I used to. Now? No, I don’t think so. Would knowing change anything? Would it bring everyone back? Would I even want everyone back?”

She was surprised. She’d never heard him talk like this. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“My old life, it wasn’t much of a life, to be honest,” he said. “The lifestyle of the organised criminal is over-rated. Always wondering when someone would ambush you and cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the slit. I have another life now.”

“I can’t just let it go like that,” she told him. “I have to know, if I can.”

“Do you think there’s an answer in Hyde Park?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Pargeter thinks so. He wants me to spy for him.”

Willem said, “Pargeter this, Pargeter that,” and made a rude noise. “Suppose there is no answer? Suppose this is just something the universe does, for no conscious reason? Suppose it just… whips away the tablecloth from underneath us every few million years? Suppose it’s just part of the way things are?”

“That’s a scary thought,” Rae said.

“Scarier than Pargeter’s hive mind?”

“Yes,” she said. “Much scarier.”

They cut south again, around Soho Square and back down the Charing Cross Road towards Seven Dials.

As they approached the hotel, Willem stopped and turned to face her. “You came here to cure a little girl, Rae,” he said. “Or to try, anyway. Forget the big questions, for a while at least. Try to concentrate on the things you can understand.”

“But I don’t understand,” and she felt small and helpless and lost. “I don’t understand any of it.”

He nodded. “Neither do I. But Elżbieta needs you; you’re no good to her if your mind’s full of Pargeter’s cosmic madness. Okay?”

Rae rubbed her eyes and nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re tired. Go to bed.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Willem.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “And I think you can get rid of that gun now.”

Breakfast the next morning was bacon and egg and sausage and fried potatoes and hash browns and baked beans and croissants and fried mushrooms and devilled kidneys and kedgeree and cereal and muesli and coffee and tea and a rainbow of fruit juices, and everyone was very happy. Rae surprised herself by being ravenously hungry, and piled up her plate. She didn’t even mind when people kept drifting across to her table and interrupting her breakfast to ask advice or settle little disputes. My people, she thought. They had come with her for no other reason than that she was coming here, and she felt rather proud of them, and rather ashamed of being so grumpy the previous evening. She wondered what they would all do when this was over. She wondered where Eddy Colorado was.

She was just finishing her second cup of coffee when Mikhail came into the dining room. “It’s here,” he said, and everyone rushed to the windows to look out into the street, where the angel was standing, rather uncomfortably, on its great clawed feet.

Rae put down her cup and dabbed her lips with the linen napkin. “Marta, Beata,” she called. “Bring Elżbieta down and put her in the ambulance, please.” And while the nuns went upstairs to their suite, she went outside.

The angel wasn’t alone. A small group of people had gathered at a respectful distance. Most of them were from the convoy, but she spotted Pargeter and Gottlieb and a handful of soldiers among them. She took a deep breath and walked out into the street.

She stopped a few feet from the angel and said, “Hello.”

“Rae,” said the angel. It was looking shabby; the nano that made up its body was obviously starting to fail. Its wings were threadbare, there were tatty holes in its jeans, big clumps of its hair had fallen out, and patches of dead white had appeared on its skin. It was on its last legs, its mission almost complete. “You got here, then.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rae saw Beata and Marta carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle out of the hotel. She said to the angel, “Well, I’m rea —” and the window of the hotel dining room shattered and fell into the street. There was a moment of utter silence, and Rae found herself looking in wonderment at the little hole in the middle of the angel’s forehead. The angel itself was trying hard to focus on it, which made it comically cross-eyed. It looked at her for a moment, seemed to sigh, and then exploded into a huge cloud of smoke. And then everyone started screaming.

Rae looked over her shoulder and saw someone moving in a fourth-floor window of one of the buildings just down the street, and she stepped into the room behind the window and found herself in a little office. Eddy Colorado was making for the door, a long-barrelled rifle with a silencer and a sophisticated-looking sniperscope cradled in his arms.

He skidded to a stop when Rae appeared in front of him. “It lied to me, Mrs Rae!” he protested. “Harry gave me the gun!”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Rae, and suddenly Eddy Colorado was a rapidly-expanding cloud of smoke, just like the angel. The rifle thudded to the floor.

Dust to dust, Rae thought, and stepped back into the street, where everyone was screaming and shouting and running about. She took Elżbieta from Beata and Marta’s unresisting hands. Wrapped in her blanket, the girl seemed to weigh nothing at all. Rae pivoted on the balls of her feet and advanced on Pargeter, who was backing away holding his hands up in a placatory gesture. Gottlieb, to his credit, hadn’t moved an inch.

“I wanted to provoke a response!” Pargeter shouted. “That’s all!”

“If you try to follow me, or if any of my friends are harmed in any way, I’ll give you a response, Mr Pargeter!” Rae yelled.

She turned away from the little spy and found Willem standing in front of her. “Didn’t know you could do that,” he said calmly.

“Me neither,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “Look after things here. We’ll be back.” And she took a deep breath, gathered herself, and stepped into Hyde Park.

There was a serpent in The Serpentine. It was wearing a Tam O’Shanter and its breathing sounded like bagpipes. Rae stood watching it, Elżbieta in her arms, and after a moment or two it slipped away beneath the surface.

The serpent wasn’t alone. Hyde Park had been transformed into an opium eater’s idea of Fairyland. There were lions and tigers bounding across the grass, and monkeys in the trees, and little things with arms and legs and wings flying through the air, and extravagantly-armoured knights riding along the horse-paths on warhorses the size of armoured cars. There were unicorns and manticores and gryphons and princesses and warty dwarves and minotaurs and hobbits and at least one Darth Vader. Gauzy three-dimensional geometric figures danced in the hot, humid, heavy air, forming and reforming and suddenly darting away across the park. It smelled like the inside of a circus tent. It was a madhouse.

She found a tree and laid Elżbieta down gently beneath it. Then she sat beside the blanket-wrapped bundle.

“I have the kill-codes for everything here,” she told the tropical air quite calmly. “I’m going to count to ten and then I’m going to use them. Your turn. One. Two. Three.”

“My,” said a voice behind her. “Aren’t we the feisty one all of a sudden.”

Rae looked over her shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been afraid it would be Peter; she couldn’t have stood that, she’d have just broken. But it wasn’t Peter. It was a little girl, maybe seven or eight, plump in the face and with her hair in ringlets. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress with petticoats and an apron. Tenniel’s Alice.

“Pargeter killed the angel,” Rae said.

“I know,” Alice said. “He wanted to provoke me into doing something. Silly fucker.” The little girl walked over to the blanket bundle. “Is this her?”

“Yes,” said Rae.

Alice lifted a corner of the blanket. There was nothing underneath that resembled a human being. There was nothing but a mass of hands, linked together by short lengths of arm and wrist, writhing and spasming in constant motion, the fingers wiggling and opening and closing. Alice shook her head and said, “What a fucking mess.”

“Little girls shouldn’t swear,” Rae told her.

“Fuck off. I’m really pissed off about what you did to that nasty little fucker Eddy Colorado. I’ll reinitialise him in Belgium; he won’t remember any of this, but it’s a pain in the arse having to do it all the same. I should kick you both out and send you on your way.”

“The angel promised she’d be cured,” said Rae. “I don’t care what happens to me. Just so long as she’s cured. Whatever you are, if you can’t keep your promises you’re not worth my time.”

Alice dropped the blanket and snorted. “Piece of cake. Tell you what, you’ve got lots of questions. So you can have four questions, then I’ll fix her, then you go.”

“Why just four?”

“Because I make the fucking rules and I fucking say so,” Alice said irritably. “And that was your first question.”

“That’s not fair!”

“You don’t like the rules? Fuck off out of here, and take…” she nudged the mass of hands with the toe of a silver-buckled shoe, “…this with you.” She looked at Rae. “Three questions left. Ask me anything. Go on, take your best shot.”

Who are you? Am I real?

“What the hell has all this been about?”

“I’m interested in Pargeter,” said Alice. “I wanted to see what he’d do when he met you and the angel. Turns out he’s a bit of a bastard. That might come in handy. And no, I won’t tell you why. But I’ll save you a question and tell you that yes, I set up Eddy Colorado, and I set you up. It was up to Pargeter what he did with the situation. Call it an experiment in free will. Oh, and yes, I do enjoy being a deus ex machina thank you very much. Next?”

What happened? Has it really been one thousand seven hundred years? Are you where Mars was…?

Rae said, “Is Pete there?”

Alice regarded her levelly. “Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

What are we here for? What do we do now? Will we be able to speak with you again…?

“Is he happy?”

Alice’s round face crinkled into a sad, beatific smile. “Yes, he is.” She looked at Rae for a moment longer, then she turned and walked away. “All fixed,” she said without looking back. “Now fuck off.”

There was a little girl lying on the blanket in front of Rae. She was about five years old and she had long auburn hair. She blinked at Rae. “Am I in heaven?” she asked.

Rae smiled at her through tears. “Could be,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name’s Rae.”

“I was in the sky,” Elżbieta said.

Rae wiped her eyes and looked for Alice, but she was nowhere to be seen. All the other lunatic avatars seemed to have gone, too. As she sat there, she felt a cool breeze brush her cheek, a breeze from the River blowing away the mad greenhouse air as the invisible shield over Hyde Park lifted away into nothing.

“I was in the sky,” Elżbieta said again. “And a beautiful lady was there.”

“I’m sure there was, my sweet.”

“Are you an angel?”

Rae laughed. “No. No, I’m not.” She stood and took Elżbieta’s hand and helped her to her feet. “But I met an angel once. Would you like me to tell you about it?”

The little girl nodded, a look of almost comical seriousness on her face. Rae draped the blanket over her shoulders and round her body and took her hand again. “It’s a long story,” she began, “and it started a very long time ago. Or perhaps it didn’t…”

They walked away, hand in hand, and as they walked tiny white flowers blossomed in their footsteps.

v

As with a lot of my stories the title came first, and the idea of nanotechnology which powers itself by metabolising blood sugar sort of popped up out of that. I’d always wanted to tackle a ‘cosy catastrophe’ story. It’s also the only story of mine, off the top of my head, that has a female protagonist. As a bit of an experiment, I self-published it as an ebook on Amazon along with another story, and eventually, after a couple of years, was rewarded with a cheque for twenty-five quid, which I regard as a bit of a win.

Dalí’s Clocks

I was living in Gdansk back then, in a newish block of flats overlooking the harbour just outside the Old Town. In the mornings I could sit on my balcony and eat breakfast while the fake pirate boats took tourists downriver to take photographs of the old fortifications at Westerplatte. Evenings, I could wander through Hanseatic splendour, take my pick of hundreds of remarkably fine restaurants, walk the short distance to the concert hall to attend a performance by the Baltic Philharmonic, visit art galleries, catch a film. Good times, and I took it all for granted.

These days, I don’t really live anywhere. Or rather, I seem to live everywhere. In every town I visit, every city, every one-horse hamlet, a welcome is waiting for me. Hotels throw their doors open to me, private citizens unroll the red carpet. I haven’t had to pay for a meal or a night’s lodging in almost eight years. The clothes I wear, the car I drive, the cigarettes I smoke and the beer I drink are all gifts, pressed on me by a populace either eager to curry favour or to express its gratitude. You’d think it would become wearying, but you’d be wrong; there is nothing in this world better than never having to pay for anything ever again. And trust me, having people hanging on your every word, your every opinion, never ever gets old.

On the other hand, I’m on the road all the time. I have no choice. If I didn’t go to them, they would come to me, and that would become wearying.

Back then, I had a little architects’ practice. The first wave of post-Communist rebuilding in Poland had crested, and a lot of ambitious, hungry little firms were following it up. There were a lot of neo-Hadid public buildings going up, and down in Kraków it seemed as if every other office block had been presided over by the spirit of Norman Foster.

In Gdansk we were, I thought, a little more original, although there was a fashion for Baltic Baroque, bits of architecture looted from up and down the coast. I’d designed some of those buildings myself, and been paid handsomely for them. And when I drove past them I knew those hungry, ambitious little firms were already planning for the next wave, because that was what I was doing too.

I don’t design buildings any more. The world is full of architects these days, most of them completely talentless but all of them supremely enthusiastic. And that… that does become wearying.

Ten years ago, on the morning that Marcin walked into my office and invited me to the party, I was working fourteen-hour and sometimes eighteen-hour days in order to get ahead and stay ahead. I was still young. I reasoned I could maintain this for a few years, build myself a healthy bank balance and a healthy reputation, then take my foot off the accelerator a little and enjoy my life.

It was ten to eight in the morning and I had already been in the office for more than an hour when I looked up from whatever it was that I was doing — I’ve forgotten what — and saw a familiar bulky figure with tousled sandy hair talking to Agnieszka, our receptionist.

I got up from my desk and walked across the office, and as I approached the figure looked up from speaking to Agnieszka and grinned at me. “Hey, Jarek,” he called when I was still only halfway across the office. “Want to go to a party tonight?”

At school, Marcin had been one of those big soft boys who seem designed by Nature for the express purpose of attracting bullies. The first time I ever saw him he was eleven years old and two thirteen-year-olds were beating him up in the playground for no other reason than it was fun. I was on my way to a history lesson and I was two days short of my fourteenth birthday and this unknown fat boy’s plight was nothing to do with me and I kept on walking.

And then I stopped. I stood listening for a few moments as the two boys slapped the fat boy and I have no idea why I did what I did next.

I turned and said, “Leave him alone.”

One of the bullies, a nascent football hooligan named Franek, looked me up and down and said, “Fuck off, Jarek.”

I turned to face them properly. Franek’s companion was a near-imbecile named Piotr who had only just been allowed back to school after being excluded for beating up another boy. I said, “Leave him alone,” again, and Piotr gave me a ghastly expectant grin.

I wish this little tale had a happy ending, but I spent the next three nights in hospital with broken ribs and a suspected concussion. On the other hand, Franek and Piotr were never seen at school again and the day I left hospital Marcin was waiting for me outside with a shopping bag for me full of CDs and DVDs he’d pirated from the internet.

“You work too hard,” Marcin told me.

“What?” I said.

“I said you work too hard!” he said in a loud voice that I could barely hear over the party’s sound system.

I shook my head. “It’s only for a little while.”

“What?” he said.

“Oh, for —” I grabbed him by the elbow and steered him through the people crammed into the flat. The flat wasn’t very large, but a surprising number of people seemed to be here. The sound system was pumping out death metal and someone had filled the bath with ice and bottles of beer and vodka and the party was full of people like… well, like me, actually. Young professionals, comfortably-off, letting off steam. Parties like this were called ‘hit-and-runs’; many of Gdansk’s elderly Soviet-era blocks were almost empty, the residents moved to other developments and the buildings awaiting demolition. A shell company took out a short-term lease on a flat, enormous amounts of alcohol and recreational drugs were moved in, and for one night only it was party, party, party. If anyone bothered to complain about the noise and the police bothered to turn up it would transpire that no one at the party actually lived at the flat, and further investigation would reveal that the shell company which had rented it had already been dissolved and its principals had never existed anyway.

I dragged Marcin through the mass of heaving bodies towards the front door, which was not easy to do for two reasons: firstly, there were a lot of heaving bodies, and secondly, he was a big man. He wasn’t fat any more, but he was tall and bulky, like an amiable bear. He was wearing designer jeans and a white shirt and a jerkin of butter-soft leather. After university, he’d gone to work for a little biotechnology company in Belgium, and from his clothes it looked as if they were doing well.

Finally, we reached the door and stepped out onto the landing, where we could finally hear each other.

“Do you know whose party this is?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“It was your idea to come here,” I said.

“You know how these things work,” he said. “Anonymized emails, posts on bulletin boards. Nobody ever knows whose parties they are.”

There was shrieking behind us. We looked round and two topless girls were standing side by side in the doorway. “Hey, Marcin!” shouted one. “Great party!”

Marcin grinned and waved hello and the girls turned and plunged back into the flat.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s my party. But don’t tell anybody.”

I was staring at the naked backs of the two girls as they half-walked, half-swam through the press of bodies. I was fairly certain that I had last seen one of them in the newspapers, receiving an award as Young Polish Entrepreneur of the Year.

“I’ve got something for you,” Marcin said.

I smiled. Marcin’s company developed what used to be called ‘designer drugs,’ and down the years he had been a fairly reliable source of pre-release medications. Most of them had been of limited use to me, but he had been responsible for several evenings of chemically-induced enjoyment. He didn’t come home all that often these days, but when he did he usually had a present for me, a successor to those CDs and DVDs he’d given me when I left the hospital.

He reached into a pocket of his jerkin and took out a little plastic envelope and handed it to me. “There you go,” he said. “A taste of the future.”

“What does it do?” I asked, turning the little envelope over in my fingers.

The sound system emitted a single huge chord that reverberated through the building as he said, “It’s paint medication,” he said.

“I’m not in pain,” I told him.

“No,” he said a little louder. “Not pain, paint. Paint medication.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He sighed. “Do you want it or not?”

I thought about it. He had never brought me anything harmful. I tore the edge off the envelope and tipped its contents into my palm. It was an odd-looking tablet. Round and thin, a couple of centimetres across, and made of some gelatine substance. It was floppy, which in my experience was an unusual attribute for a medication.

I put the floppy tablet in my mouth and it melted on my tongue. It tasted very faintly of kiwi fruit. I looked at Marcin and raised my eyebrows.

He grinned. “There you go,” he said and he put his arm around my shoulders and started to steer me back into the party. “Now, let’s see if there’s anything left in the bath…”

I regained consciousness the next morning and my phone was ringing. I lay where I was, eyes closed, for quite a while waiting for the ringing to stop, but it didn’t. Finally, without opening my eyes, I reached out to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and after some fumbling located the little button that turned it off. Then I lost consciousness again.

Some time later I became aware that the entryphone by the front door was buzzing. I didn’t know how long I’d been awake; it seemed, at the moment, that I had been listening to that buzzing noise all my life.

I waited for the buzzing noise to stop. I waited a long time. It stopped. Some time passed. The buzzing started again. I opened my eyes as far as they would go, which wasn’t very far at all. Down in the harbour, a speedboat went by and it felt as if the noise was scalping me. I became aware that something awful had happened in my mouth over the past few hours, and now all my taste-buds were misfiring. Meanwhile, the buzzing went on and on and on.

I closed one eye again, which made things a little more bearable, although not by much, and rolled off the futon onto the floor, where I briefly fell asleep again until the buzzing brought me round.

Slowly, I rolled over onto my stomach, and from there managed to lever myself up onto my hands and knees, and in that position it was a crawl of only a couple of light-years to the front door, where I slapped at the button to open the downstairs door.

A minute or so later, there was a knock on my door. From where I was sitting, I pawed at the lock until it clicked. “Open,” I managed to say, and then I was sick in my lap.

The door opened and Marcin stepped into the hallway. He saw me sitting slumped against the wall and he shook his head. “And you call yourself a Pole,” he said. He looked almost painfully bright and clean. He knelt down beside me. “Here,” he said, holding something out between his thumb and forefinger and pressing it to my lips. “Take this.”

Whatever he was holding made it between my lips and I swallowed reflexively.

I’m not sure I can describe what happened next without it sounding like a hallucination, but a sensation began at the soles of my feet and travelled like a wavefront up my body. It was as if all the crap and pain and poison and illness and fatigue was carried ahead of the wave, and when it reached the crown of my head it fountained up into the air and I was crystal-clear sober again. As far as I could judge, the whole thing took less than five minutes.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked.

“Can’t say, I’m afraid,” Marcin said, reaching a hand down to me. “There are copyright issues. You need a shower.”

I looked down at my lap. “Hm,” I said.

It was, as it turned out, the most extraordinary shower I had ever taken. It was as if my skin was a drumhead; I felt every individual drop of water hitting my body. I could smell each ingredient of the shower gel I used. I became fascinated by the grout between the tiles of the shower because I could see the way its surface had crystallised as it set. Everything was pin-sharp, as if a gale had howled through my head and blown away a fog.

Stepping out of the shower, I smelled coffee. Marcin had obviously decided to make himself at home.

“Coffee,” I said, walking into the kitchen towelling my hair.

Marcin was sitting at the table, a steaming mug in front of him. “You don’t want to drink coffee after what I just gave you,” he said. “Your heart couldn’t take it.”

“I just want to taste it,” I said, and I picked up his mug and took a sip and it was the most extraordinary thing I had ever tasted. I didn’t have the language to describe the experience.

I put the mug down and sat across the table from him, draping the towel around my neck. “How long is this going to last?”

He shrugged. “Different subjects metabolise it differently. If you’re in the median, you’ve got another hour and a half or so, then you’ll be back to normal, but without the hangover. In about twelve hours you’ll crash and sleep like a baby.”

“Have you got any more?”

He looked levelly at me. “What I just gave you is at least five years away from human trials. I could go to prison for the rest of my life just for giving you that one tab. And you ask me if I’ve got any more.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Human trials?”

“We’ve just started testing it on lab animals,” he said.

“You’re giving it to monkeys.”

“Primates next year. So far we’ve been giving it to rats.” He shook his head at the expression on my face. “Did it work?”

“Hell, yes,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, and took a drink of coffee. He put the mug back down on the table. “I’ve been taking it for the past six months, on and off. I know it’s not dangerous.”

I was appalled, which with my current clarity of mind was even worse than it might normally have been. “You had no right to do that,” I said. “But thank you.”

He inclined his head.

“And thanks for cleaning up.” I could smell the individual ingredients of the soap and disinfectant he’d used to clean the mess I’d made.

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

I said, “If you’ve been taking it for six months, you must have a steady supply.”

“Jarek,” he said, “stop it. That was your last dose until it goes into production. I only brought a couple of tabs out of the lab, and that was my last one. You’ll have to be patient.”

I looked around the flat. It seemed as if I had never looked at it properly before. “This is genuine doors of perception stuff, isn’t it,” I said wonderingly.

“Jarek,” he said. “Jarek. Look at me, Jarek.”

I looked at him.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel marvellous,” I told him. “I thought we’d established that.”

He shook his head irritably. “No, no. Do you have any urges? Do you feel as if you have to capture how you feel in verse or prose? Do you need to draw something? Is there a tune going through your head?”

I shrugged. “No.”

“No urge to jot down some brilliant ideas for new houses?”

I shook my head.

Marcin scowled and drank some more coffee.

“What?” I said. “I’ve never felt so well in my entire life, you tell me it’s only going to last another…” I looked at the clock on the microwave “…hour and a quarter, and I’m wasting it answering stupid questions. I should be…” I stood up. “Fuck you, Marcin. I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.”

Down the years, I have blamed Marcin for many things, with justification. But I will always thank him for that hour and a quarter, because the city of my birth had never looked as beautiful as it did on that autumn morning.

We walked along the river for a while, then turned through the gateway into the Long Market. It was a miracle we made it that far; I couldn’t stop smelling the air and looking at things and touching things, rejoicing in the pure sensory signals. Imagine suffering a minor eye problem all your life, something you could easily overcome in your everyday life, and then one day you have surgery to correct it and for the first time you see the world properly. That’s what it was like, for all my senses. I was torn between standing very still and looking very carefully at everything I could see, and rampaging along ulica Mariacka and looking at everything.

In the end, I compromised. We went up Mariacka towards the Cathedral and I couldn’t stop smiling. The designs of the old Hanseatic buildings made sense to me in a way they never had before, and they sparked off a cascade of ideas for new designs. It was the loveliest day.

All the time, Marcin was talking, but I was barely listening. I checked my watch. “Restaurant,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“Restaurant. I’ve only got forty minutes left.” I looked around me. Crowds of tourists from all over northern Europe, tall old buildings, stall after stall selling amber jewellery and knickknacks, coffee bars.

Marcin sighed. “Have you been listening to me?” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and grabbed me by the sleeve. “Here,” he said, and he dragged me down a side street.

“No,” I said, realising where we were going. “That’s a terrible place. No, I’ve got a better idea.”

As it turned out, my better idea was closed for renovations, so we wound up in a little Ukrainian restaurant on a square just beside the Cathedral. The place was dark and quiet and down two flights of stairs and to me it felt like descending into a warm, velvety bath of sensory impression, intense cooking smells, buttery lamplight shining off porcelain and silverware, the weave of the tablecloth under my fingertips. I could have sat there all day, but instead I ordered quickly for both of us and then I sat drumming my fingers on the table top and checking my watch waiting for the food to arrive.

Marcin sat watching me with a sour look on his face. “You know,” he said, “I wish I’d never given you that stuff.”

“I don’t,” I told him. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me in… oh, ever such a long time. When are you going to put it on the market?”

“It probably won’t be all that widely available,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Have you any idea how much it cost to develop that tab?” he asked. “No, you don’t, and you’d never be able to guess. It’s not meant to be a hangover tablet. It’s a cognitive enhancer; it’s meant for fighter pilots, battlefield troops, astronauts. The hangover thing’s a side-effect, that’s all.”

“I think your employers need some tips on marketing,” I told him.

He shrugged. Then he leaned forward slightly and said, “Have you ever wondered where creativity comes from?”

I was looking at my watch again. “Sorry?”

He sat back. “Am I going to have to come over to that side of the table and shake you by the ears, Jarek?”

I put on an attentive expression.

Marcin started to say something, thought again, started to say something else, closed his mouth. Then he said. “You remember Mirosław Sierpiński?”

“Mirek? Sure.” Mirek Sierpiński had been in the same year as me at school. “Hey, did you hear he’s up for a Pulitzer Prize?”

Marcin rubbed his eyes. “He won the Pulitzer Prize, Jarek. Last year. Don’t you read the papers?”

“Last year was really busy for us,” I said.

“Admit it. You didn’t even know he’d gone to New York until you heard he’d been nominated for the Pulitzer.” He shook his head. “I despair of you, Jarek. I know where every one of my classmates is right now, and what they’re doing. I have done ever since I left school. How many of yours have you seen in the past fifteen years?”

I put my hands up in surrender. “Point taken. Okay.”

He shook his head again. “Mirek’s dad was a fitter at the shipyard. His mum cleans offices. Both of them barely finished school; I don’t think either of them ever wrote anything more complicated than a shopping list.”

“Mirek’s dad wasn’t stupid,” I told him. “Big union man, very smart. I went to his funeral,” I added, to make a point. “Lots of old Solidarity guys were there.”

Marcin was nodding. “Fine, fine. He was well-respected. But not a literary giant, I think we can agree.”

It was impossible to argue with that. “Okay,” I said.

“And nobody else in the family ever showed the slightest inclination to write, or paint, or play the piano.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is what I’ve been doing, Jarek,” he said in an exasperated voice. “I’ve been researching the nature of creativity — and if you’ve just opened your mouth to tell me you thought I was working on a hangover cure, I swear to God I’ll come round there and put my fist down your throat.”

I closed my mouth.

Marcin put a hand to his forehead and muttered, “Jesus Maria.” He took a breath. “Okay. So we have Mirek’s family, who are not creative at all. And we have Mirek, who is being talked about, quite seriously, as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. How does that happen?”

I shrugged.

“And then there’s Kasia Gadomska and Andrzej Chlebowski, what does their daughter call herself?”

“Tutu,” I said.

“Tutu,” he repeated sourly. “Whose only talent seems to be attending parties and getting falling-over drunk.”

“There was the chat-show,” I said.

“Tutu Talks, yes. Possibly the worst chat-show ever seen on European television — and there’s an awful lot of competition. How can it happen that two people with no apparent creative talent at all can produce a son who writes novels of exquisite beauty, while two of the greatest actors this country has ever seen — from families with an acting tradition that goes back generations — have a daughter with no artistic talent at all?”

I shrugged. “Beats me.”

He said, “It’s genetic,” and all of a sudden, without any warning at all, a veil fell upon the world. Marcin must have seen it in my face, because he sighed and said, “What?”

I looked at my watch. “I’m supposed to have another half an hour,” I told him in a pathetic little voice.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “It’s neurochemistry, Jarek. It isn’t rocket science, okay?”

I looked round the restaurant. Everything was dull. Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. Everything. Like listening to a concert while wearing earplugs. I sighed.

Marcin got up and tossed his napkin on the table. “Fine,” he said. “We’re not hungry,” he told the waiter, who was approaching with our starters, and he headed for the exit.

“Something came up,” I said to the waiter. I dropped some euros on the table and followed Marcin up the stairs.

Outside, everything was disappointing. Ordinary. I caught up with Marcin at the Cathedral and said, “Genetics.”

He shook his head irritably. “It doesn’t matter, Jarek. You’re not interested, and you seem to be immune anyway. So no big thing, yes? Forget it.”

“The hangover pill.”

“It’s not —”

“A hangover pill, I know, I know. But you know when you give it to rats?”

He sighed. “Yes?”

“How do you know it’s working?”

Marcin thought about it for a while. “The rats smile.” He looked up at the great brick edifice of the Cathedral. “Have you ever seen a rat smile?”

“Not so far as I’m aware, no.”

He grinned, and there was something otherworldly about that grin. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The most beautiful thing you ever saw.”

I moped around the flat for the rest of the weekend, watched television, sat on the balcony and looked at the boats in the harbour and the tourists on the other side heading for the Old Town. Everything was dull, flat, uninspired. Uninspiring. Marcin phoned a couple of times to ask how I was feeling, and by Sunday night I was able to report that I had a banging headache and a sore throat.

“If your fucking pill has given me the flu, I’ll kill you,” I told him.

“Hm,” he said. “It’s probably nothing. Take some paracetamol and drink plenty of fluids.” And he hung up.

Monday morning I felt vaguely achy and feverish, but we were in the middle of a big commission for an American bank so I went to the office and sat feeling miserable.

Tuesday was more of the same, with added shivering and a blocked nose. I tried to call Marcin at the hotel where he’d been staying on his visit, but they said he’d checked out.

I barely made it in to the office on Wednesday. I had a Skype conference with a man in Chicago and a man in New Jersey and when it was over I had no idea what we had been talking about. I was sweating and my eyes felt as though they’d been lightly sandpapered. Tomek, one of the partners, helped me home in the afternoon, told me he really enjoyed working with me but no way was he going to get me undressed and help me into bed, and left me on the sofa.

And then the rest of the week just… went away.

It was the following Tuesday before I felt well enough to go back to work, but I still didn’t feel up to doing much apart from contemplating firing Tomek for his failure to come to his boss’s aid in his hour of need. Nobody else seemed to be in the mood for work, either. Tomek and his wife Hania were sitting at one of our big draughting tables, sketching. Agnieszka was doing some embroidery. All the momentum had gone out of the office.

At one point, Agnieszka brought me a coffee and then held up the piece of cloth she’d been working on. I looked at it. Then I looked at her.

“What?” I said.

“What do you think of it?” she asked.

It was an embroidered image of some species of rustic scene. Not very well embroidered. “Very nice,” I told her. I raised my voice. “Everybody?”

The rest of the office raised their heads from whatever they’d been doing. Bartek Kowalski appeared to have been sculpting something from a chunk of styrofoam packing block

“Go home,” I told them. “We’re not getting anything useful done. Go and get this out of your system and let’s come back tomorrow with our minds on the job, please. Okay? Now go.”

Everyone started to get up and gather their things together and get their coats. Agnieszka stayed where she was. “Did you mean it?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Go home. Get some sleep. Whatever.”

“No,” she said, holding up the piece of embroidery. “Do you really like it?”

“It’s lovely,” I assured her. “Now go. Get out of here. I’ll lock up.”

After everyone had gone I sat in the office for a while, feet up on my desk, head tilted against the back of my chair. The German ergonomicists, who I had been assured by the salesman had developed this model of chair, had not countenanced anyone treating their furniture in quite this way, so it was more than a little uncomfortable and after a while I took my feet down off the desk and got up and wandered through the office. I had not, I realised, yet shaken off the sense of loss I’d felt when Marcin’s hangover tablet — cognitive enhancer, whatever — wore off. Which was rather alarming. My history of recreational drug use had never been very illustrious or — Marcin’s occasional little gifts apart — adventurous. It had never affected me like this before. I felt vaguely heartbroken.

I locked up the office and went to the cinema and watched Wajda’s Katyn again. It suited my mood. After the film, I bumped into a couple of designers I knew in the foyer and we went to a restaurant, where I tried to work up some enthusiasm for the food, and afterward we went on to a party. Not a hit-and-run but a civilised drinks party, responsible professionals, canapés, darkwave playing quietly on the Bang & Oluffson so as not to disturb the neighbours. The host and hostess, whom I knew slightly, were showing their guests some quite spectacularly-bad watercolours they’d done, and when they asked me what I thought of the paintings I smiled and nodded and said, “Very nice.”

The hostess looked critically at me. “You don’t look very happy, Jarek,” she said.

“I’m fine, Iwona,” I told her. “I’ve had flu.”

“Ah,” she said. “You should try one of these.” And she took from her pocket a familiar-looking little plastic envelope and handed it to me.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“At the university,” she said. “One of the Sociology Faculty was handing them out. He said it was some kind of experiment. You know, something about whether you’d take drugs from a stranger.” She laughed. “Of course, he’s not a stranger so I didn’t count, but he gave me a few anyway. Try it. He said it was just vitamins.”

I opened the envelope and tipped its contents into the palm of my hand. It was a round, floppy tablet just like the one Marcin had given me, but someone had printed a clock face on this one. The hands of the clock stood at five to midnight.

I smiled at Iwona and put the pill back in the envelope. “I already tried one, thanks,” I said.

When I arrived at the office the next morning, there was a styrofoam sculpture of a cat sitting on my desk.

The weeks went by and we rolled into October and then November. It rained. Gales blew in off the Baltic. Then it snowed. In the office, the staff and partners managed to curb their collective artistic urges and we got our heads down and did some serious work on our outstanding projects. I managed to become so engrossed in my work that I hardly ever thought about Marcin’s hangover pill.

It was somewhat harder to forget about the floppy pill, though, because it was on the news. People were calling them, reasonably enough considering what was printed on them, ‘clocks,’ and they were everywhere. Nobody seemed to have the slightest idea where they were coming from, but they were turning up all over Poland and Germany and the Low Countries and even in London. The authorities — who still hadn’t managed to get hold of one for analysis — were warning people not to take them. There were stories of people holding clock parties. One op-ed piece in a magazine ventured the utterly charming theory that the clocks were in fact completely harmless and part of a huge sociological experiment into the way new drugs spread through a society. There was said to be a mild euphoric effect after taking them, but this could be ascribed to the latent suggestibility of the human mind. It was actually charming enough to be plausible.

I seemed, meanwhile, to have gained a minor reputation as some kind of critic, because Tomek’s sister and Hania’s father and half a dozen other family members and friends of the staff and partners had taken to visiting the office and leaving me paintings and poems and CDs of music and strange pottery shapes for my opinion, which was baffling but ever so slightly gratifying. As the weeks went on, more and more of this stuff arrived, along with their penitential amateur artists, until one morning around the beginning of December I quipped to Tomek something along the lines that I hadn’t realised my colleagues had so many relatives and he answered that it had been some weeks since he or anyone else in the office had recognised any of the artists.

“We all thought you knew them,” he said.

That was when I phoned Marcin’s employers to try and find out where he was. They told me he was on a sabbatical, but a few days later I was visited by a very polite young man who said he worked for the Ministry of Public Health and was interested in speaking with anyone Marcin had been in contact with while he was in Poland. We talked for a very long time about generalities — did Marcin seem ill, at all? Was anyone with him? Did Marcin, perhaps, use any medication while he was with me?

I answered the polite young man’s questions as truthfully as I could, short of mentioning the hangover pill and the clock. Did Marcin, perhaps, discuss his work at all? He certainly did. Did Marcin, perhaps, express any strong anti-social opinions? He did not. Did Marcin, perhaps, express any strong religious views?

At this point I stood up and told the polite young man that I didn’t see what Marcin’s religious views had to do with the Ministry of Public Health, and the polite young man agreed that they didn’t and proceeded to arrest me.

I’m very well-connected these days. I can open my phone and speed-dial the chiefs-of-staff of half a dozen European prime ministers and presidents (including the President of the European Union and his wife) and be put through immediately. Except the President of Albania, who took personally my description of his latest novel as ‘infantile.’ But he’ll be back. They always come back.

A few years ago, I was not nearly as well-connected. But I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone, and there was a cascade of favours owed and favours paid and I have no idea how it all worked out for the individuals involved, but at the end of it all I was sitting in a white room in a prison just outside Antwerp, where Marcin was just beginning a forty-year sentence on terrorism charges, with a side-order of industrial espionage.

“My lawyer’s going to drive a fucking truck through this,” he told me. “They’ve totally misused the anti-terror legislation.”

“Who’d have thought the Belgians would have been so vindictive about you stealing their patents and handing out their drugs on the street?” I deadpanned.

Marcin glowered at me. He was sitting across the table from me, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit of the kind made infamous by Guantanamo inmates. He was also wearing a complicated chain-and-handcuffs arrangement which meant that he had to walk in a kind of hunched-over shuffle and couldn’t raise his hands above his waist. I thought the chains were overkill, but maybe the Belgians still hadn’t finished making their point.

“Genetics,” I said.

“Oh, you want to talk about it now, do you?” he said. He looked at the large guard who had accompanied him into the room and then taken up impassive station in the corner. “And you can fuck off,” he told the guard. The guard ignored him. Marcin tried to rub his eyes, but the chains pulled his hands up short. “Fuck,” he said.

“Genetics,” I said again. “I’m serious, Marcin. What have you done?”

He looked at me. His hair was longer than I remembered, and it was crumpled up on one side as if he’d been asleep when they came to bring him to the white room and they hadn’t given him any time to comb it. His eyes were red-rimmed and his nose was running.

“Mirek Sierpiński,” I said. “Tutu.”

He sighed and seemed to crumple a little in his jumpsuit. “Where does creativity come from?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well,” he said. He sighed again. “The science is complicated.”

“Don’t you dare patronise me,” I warned.

He shrugged. “There’s a genetic mutation which, basically, codes for creativity. A few years ago it was thought that about fifty percent of people carried it, but it turns out the figure’s a lot higher than that. Somewhere in the ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent. Everyone’s carrying the mutation. Pretty much.”

He paused, and I leaned forward slightly. “Marcin,” I said again, “what have you done?”

“Okay.” He tried to rub his eyes again, got pulled up short by the chains again, shook his head. He looked at me. “So everyone has the creative mutation — which also causes schizophrenia and psychosis in some cases, by the way — but the world isn’t flooded with artists. Why is that? Why didn’t Tutu’s parents pass the mutation on to her? Well, God help them, they did. But Tutu has another genetic mutation which…” He looked at me. “This next bit’s a little vague.”

“It’s better than nothing,” I told him.

He thought about it for a few moments. “There’s a mutation of another gene which makes people want to be creative.” He watched the look on my face. “I know, it doesn’t seem like a distinction at all, does it? But it’s an important one. Tutu, if we’re taking her as our model, has the mutation which makes her creative, like almost everybody, but she lacks the mutation which makes her want to do anything about it.”

“She’s been writing poetry,” I said. “It’s been in the papers.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Any good?”

“It’s some of the worst poetry I ever read.”

He looked at me strangely and, I thought, rather slyly. “Well, there you go,” he said. “Talent remains an unquantifiable thing, a complete mystery. Nobody’s found the mutation for that yet. But the impulse is there. I’ll bet you… oh, a lot of money that she doesn’t go to quite so many parties from now on. Have you got any paper?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Paper. Oh, never mind.” He looked at the guard. “Could I have some paper, please?”

The guard went over to a cupboard in the corner of the room, unlocked the door, and took out a pad of scrap paper, with which he returned to the table. Marcin’s chains just about allowed him to reach the tabletop and tear a sheet off the pad.

“What did you give me?” I asked.

He was folding the sheet of paper corner-to-corner and smoothing the crease down with his thumbnail. “Eh? Oh, the active ingredient was MDMA.”

“You gave me Ecstasy?”

“A mild dose. But very pure.” He unfolded the paper, folded the opposite corners across, and creased them down. “A really mild dose. Nobody would want to take it if it didn’t make them feel good. But the payload, the thing that gives the clocks their gong fu, is a virus.”

I was not even remotely unprepared for this. After the polite young man arrested me I had been taken to a rather grim building on the outskirts of town, not far from the airport, where I was told to sit in a room not unlike this one and I was questioned for almost fifty hours, singly and in groups of anything up to five, by a large number of people who were not polite at all. None of them actually came out and said it, but by putting all their individual questions and accusations together it seemed to me that they believed Marcin was guilty of releasing some kind of biological weapon and was now on the run.

Finally — I suspect they had found Marcin and arrested him, because we had not even begun to scratch the surface of places I might think he was hiding — I was led out of the room, down a corridor, out of the building and into a waiting taxi, which took me home. No one said goodbye or thank you or ‘don’t even think of going to the media about this,’ from which I gathered they were either very excited or very nervous now they had Marcin.

When the taxi delivered me at my building, there was a small crowd of artists and writers waiting around the front entrance.

“The virus rewrites your genome,” he went on. “It inserts the mutation which predisposes people to want to be creative.”

“You absolute bastard,” I said. “How dare you do that.”

He looked up from the sheet of paper, which had ceased to be rectangular and was now a frantically-complicated landscape of pleats and folds. “I thought it was worth a try,” he said.

“You thought it was ‘worth a try’?” I yelled with enough violence to make the guard shuffle his feet.

Marcin went back to the sheet of paper. “Do you know what the problem is with modern society?”

“Too many fucking scientists?” I said in a very loud voice.

He sniffled and shook his head. “Too much time on our hands. The human race is, on the whole, all right.” He looked at me. “We’re fine, Jarek. Nice people. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, most of us. But there’s a tiny percentage of people who are not fine. The world is not full of assholes, but the assholes run the world. They need something else to do.” He folded a corner of the thing he was working on into a pocket formed by two other folds and smoothed it down. “I’ve given them something else to do.”

“Hitler was a painter,” I said.

“Hitler was a maniac. He didn’t have the second mutation. He didn’t want to paint enough to stop him being a maniac.”

I glared at him. I kept glaring at him until he noticed and looked up from whatever he was doing with the sheet of paper.

“I had flu,” I said.

“That wasn’t really flu. That was your immune system trying to reach an accommodation with the virus,” he said. “You’ll have been fanatically infectious for the four or five days before your symptoms presented.”

“Bastard,” I said.

He smiled sunnily. “Relax,” he told me. “You were never in any danger. You’re quite unusual, having that reaction. Most people won’t even realise they’ve been infected until they start being creative.”

“I don’t feel creative,” I said.

His fingers paused in their manipulation of what I had long since ceased to regard as a simple sheet of paper. “That, Jarek, is because you’re immune,” he said. “You’re among a vanishingly-small percentage of the population who don’t have the original creative mutation.” He smiled at me. “I know, I know. You’ve done good work, good creative work. But you’ve done it despite being entirely undisposed to creativity. You’ve done it, effectively, by being a very good manager. Now, you think back and try and remember how much of that work actually originated with you, and how much originated with other people.”

I thought of none of those things. I just stared at him and thought of murder.

“I’ll bet,” he said, making another fold, “that if you think back far enough, you’ll remember that people were always coming to you with poems and paintings and photographs and asking what you thought of them. Because people with the mutations subconsciously recognise the people without them and realise they can give an objective valuation. I don’t know why that happens. Pheromones, maybe. Or body language. Hard to see how it could have evolved, but there you go. Nature, eh?”

“Is there a cure?”

He shook his head, then stopped himself. “Well, yes, theoretically. Gene therapy to repair the mutation introduced by the virus, but it’s tricky and you don’t want to release it into the population until you’re sure how it’ll work in the wild.”

“Like you did.”

“I was as sure as I could be.” He finished whatever he had been doing to the sheet of paper and held it up between his finger and thumb, a ridged little pill of paper the size of a pea and the shape of a grain of rice. “It could take years to develop the right gene therapy, and in six months nobody will care any more. The world’s going to be full of artists, Jarek.” He grinned at me and relaxed his thumb and forefinger, and the pill of paper sprang gently open as its fibres were released and it bloomed into the figure of an armoured knight on horseback, all rendered in fabulously-complex folds. Brave new world. “What do you think?”

“What’s going to happen to the people who aren’t affected by the virus?” I said.

He looked a little cross. “You could always become critics,” he said, gesturing with the origami knight. “What do you think?”

Marcin’s trial was held in camera and the details were never made public. What else I know comes from patient work down the years, from favours called in and contacts made, from hundreds of manuscripts read and plays watched and arias listened to in return for snippets of information.

The original purpose of the virus had been for occupational therapy — it was meant to be used on accident victims and the survivors of serious trauma, making them want to take part in creative activities as part of their recovery. Paint medication. Medication that makes you want to paint.

But viruses are fiddly things to work with and you can’t always get them to do quite what you want, and by the time Marcin and his colleagues stepped back and looked at what they had created they realised it was incredibly virulent. A doctor infecting a trauma patient with it would wind up infected himself, as would nurses and other nurses and other doctors and other patients and their families and people on public transport… and so on.

Marcin’s team decided it was just too contagious to release and they put it away and went off to think about what to do next. But Marcin — and I can’t know this for sure but in my imagination it’s the only way it could have happened — Marcin didn’t go away. He stood and looked at the jar or the vial or the box or whatever the hell they locked the virus up in, and he tipped his head to one side and he saw possibilities.

The lab Marcin worked in was very well-designed. It was, actually, impossible for someone to infect themselves, by accident or deliberately, without setting off alarms, but you can have the best security system in the world and it’s still only built by people, and nothing built by people is ever perfect.

He got the virus out of the lab by infecting himself, then he took a holiday. In a lock-up garage in Ghent, which he’d kitted out with equipment bought from various medical and scientific supply houses around Europe, he isolated the virus from his blood. Then while he was still contagious, he set off on a five-day tour of Europe’s major airports.

He shook a lot of hands and bought a lot of airport coffee with coins and banknotes liberally smeared with his sweat. He sneezed on a lot of duty-free bottles of perfume and alcohol and squeezed a lot of those fluffy toys you get in airport gift shops and checked a lot of souvenir T-shirts to see if they were his size. I’ve seen some of the security video of him at Heathrow and Schiphol and Orly, and when you look at it all together it’s rather comical, until you remember what he was doing.

He was very sly; he knew a small percentage of infected people would present with flu symptoms, so he timed his five-day excursion so that the symptoms would be lost in the general seasonal flu. In the Southern Hemisphere, outside flu season, they caused brief alarm but nothing more.

Finally, not infectious any more, he returned to Ghent, where he started to manufacture clocks as another way to spread the virus. A member of the Belgian Secret Service said they had no idea how many clocks he’d finally been able to make, but checking back with the suppliers who sold him his raw materials the number could have been in the tens of thousands. By the time they finally caught up with him in Biarritz, it was already too late.

And one thing Marcin said was absolutely right. By the time I had assembled the full story, nobody cared any more. Virtually everyone on Earth had been exposed to the virus.

And by then I was on the road. The trickle of people wanting my opinion of their work, by word of mouth or pheromones or body language or God only knows what else — had become a torrent. I was besieged at home. I was getting letters and emails and phone calls from people all over Europe, promising me unholy riches if I’d only come and see their play or read their book or sit through their operetta.

The only way to stay sane, I thought, was to go to them.

Sometimes, we bump into each other. In Eindhoven or Alençon or Cologne or Madrid or one of the little towns in between. You’ll be sitting in the restaurant of another free hotel, eating another free meal, and you’ll raise your head and there across the dining room you’ll see someone else with weary, haunted eyes from too many hours watching the roads unwind, too many hours spent giving their honest opinion of oil paintings and watercolours and sculptures and happenings and films in too many genres to list properly. And they’ll raise their head too and your eyes will meet, and you’ll nod to each other.

Surprisingly often, that’s as far as it gets. You’ll nod to each other, then go back to your meals, there in the dining room with walls covered with execrable oil paintings done by the manager or the waitress, and you’ll go back to your rooms afterward, and in the morning you’ll tell the manager or the waitress what you think of their paintings. And then you’ll leave, separately, without ever having exchanged a word.

Sometimes, though, we do speak. In Basle I met an English girl named Caroline, who had been a bond trader in London, back in the days before her friends started bringing their drawings into the office and asking her what she thought of them.

Caroline and I travelled together for a while. We drove down into Italy, visited Florence, where she told me about Stendhal Syndrome, a condition which apparently affects visitors to the city, the sheer beauty of the place simply overwhelming them, making them giddy. Neither of us experienced any symptoms, which I thought pretty much said it all.

In Turin, we had an argument over the relative merits of an enormous landscaped garden in the grounds of a villa belonging to a man who was rumoured to be a Capo di tutti capi. He had apparently abandoned his other activities in order to concentrate on his garden. I thought the result was utterly laughable, a fatal collision of styles from ancient Rome to Capability Brown. Caroline was entranced. Later, at our hotel, we argued violently, and the next morning Caroline drove off in a brand-new Mercedes provided by the alleged Capo. I found a Peugeot dealer who was composing enormous, bombastic rock operas. I told him his latest magnum opus was marvellous, and left in a new car. I sometimes check out Caroline’s blog, where she delights in spreading poison and lies about me.

How many are we, those of us lacking the mutation for creativity? More than Marcin thought, but less than you might expect. In Europe there are probably a couple of thousand. Enough to fill a village, say. Around the world, maybe a couple of million. A lot of us blog, although I do not.

It’s not such a bad world, this world of clocks. There is, in truth, much art that is astonishing. Some of it is breathtaking. Generals are writing novels that, before the clocks, would have gone down in literary history. Shopgirls are producing art that challenges Leonardo and Titian and Hirst. In Caen I sat through an oratorio by a ten-year-old schoolboy which had tears running down my cheeks.

As Marcin said, all these works were already there, in a sense, in the minds of their creators. Clocks don’t make someone a great artist; what they do is unlock the impulse, conquer the writer’s block, provide the enthusiasm. They’ve rewritten our genome so that we want to be artists.

We — I should say they — don’t want to be artists to the exclusion of all else. That would be a world out of a nightmare. Everyone carries on with their normal lives and jobs; they just want to spend their free time creating art.

This has had some interesting side-effects. On the whole, people have better things to do with their free time than hating each other or worrying about geopolitics, and warfare around the globe has dwindled away to almost nothing. I say ‘on the whole’ and ‘almost nothing,’ because there is a small civil war going on in the Czech Republic between two groups of Dadaists over an invisibly-fine splitting of hairs about the direction of the movement, and an entirely incomprehensible insurgency in Britain which seems to revolve around the definition of science fiction. That one may be running down; a number of us posted an announcement online to the effect that we would boycott Britain until things calmed down, and calm of a kind appears to be returning. At any rate, it’s been several weeks since there were fatalities.

In odd moments, on autobahns and motorways and autostrada and in the first-class lounges of airliners, I think about Marcin and his brave new world. He said he thought that humanity as a whole was not so bad, that it was only the occasional asshole who gave us a bad name, and now and then, when I’m not listening to someone’s symphony or reviewing a novel or trying to work out whether an hallucinogenically-Turneresque watercolour has actually been hung the right way up, I do wonder whether he hasn’t been largely successful. And if he has, it occurs to me that we, the critics, are the most dangerous people on Earth, because we are not distracted by the imperative to create. If we wanted, we could rule the world. And then it usually occurs to me that we do rule the world, in a way. And yes, it’s very very nice, thanks.

It is still not a perfect world. But it is, by any stretch of the imagination, a beautiful one. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get some sleep. Tomorrow I have to drive to Barcelona and tell a surrealist sculptor what I think about his new work, which in photographs appears to be made entirely from human toenail clippings.

v

Sometimes, things just come together out of nowhere. This story was written for Jetse de Vries’ anthology of optimistic science fiction Shine. It didn’t make it into the book, but it did appear in the Shine project’s online magazine, Daybreak. I’m often accused — with some justification — of being a bit of a gloomy sod, so it was nice to have a go at something optimistic. Again, the title was floating around for a while looking for a story to bolt itself onto. The story itself was inspired by a typo. A friend posted something online about her ‘paint meds’ — meaning, of course, her pain meds — and I riffed on that. The setting came from a recent visit to Gdansk, and basically the story wrote itself, which is unusual for me. I am very pleased with the way this one turned out, which is, again, unusual for me.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Rowland hated driving on the motorway, so we made our way out of London on various A-roads that left us at the mercy of roadworks, traffic jams, traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and idiots on mopeds and scooters. By the time we were on the A303 it was almost lunchtime, the very tenuous sense of humour with which I had left home had entirely evaporated, and a colossal wall of what appeared to be almost pure black had begun to rise out of the Western horizon.

“Weather looks bad,” Rowland said.

“Mm,” I said.

“I hope they’ve got the site properly secured,” he said.

“Mm,” I said.

“People just don’t realise how much damage rain can do to a newly-exposed floor,” he went on, shaking his head. “These things were laid down when acid rain was just some awful possibility.”

“Mm,” I said.

He looked at me. “Do you have a hangover?”

“No.”

“You sound as though you have a hangover.”

“Do I?”

“You’re very taciturn.”

“Oh?”

He nodded. “You always get very taciturn when you have a hangover.” He looked back out of the windscreen at the great bank of black cloud we were driving toward. “You always did. I could always tell how much you’d had to drink the night before by how much you said in tutorials.”

“Could you?”

“Oh yes.” He nodded to himself. “Some of your other tutors used to comment on it. ‘Jim was very laconic today,’ they’d say, and I’d know you’d been out on the piss the night before.”

I glanced over at him. “That is so much bullshit.”

Rowland shook his head. “Of course, they meant it as a compliment. You were quite highly thought-of among the staff for your laconic sense of humour.”

“It didn’t make them give me better grades.”

He snorted. “Of course not. I knew you weren’t being laconic. You were just hungover.”

I reached into the little well under the radio, took out a packet of cigarettes, removed one, and lit it one-handed. Even after all this time, it was still a surprisingly difficult operation while trying to keep my eyes on the road.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I don’t mind you smoking — how you choose to die is up to you — but you could easily lose control of the car while you’re lighting your cigarette.”

“Oh, shut up, Rowland,” I said.

It was tempting to compare Rowland to a force of nature, but that wasn’t a very good comparison. Most forces of nature these days arrive with some kind of warning, but Rowland always arrived out of a clear blue sky, wanting you to track down some source in the British Library or copy-edit the manuscript of some paper or take photographs of one of the milecastles on Hadrian’s Wall or get samples of Roman concrete from a godforsaken bit of masonry on the Welsh Marches. Didn’t matter how inconvenient it was for you. Rowland wanted it, and it had to be done.

There was no way to predict Rowland, no handy early warning. He’d just be there on your doorstep, usually leaning casually on the doorbell at some ungodly hour of the morning, wanting.

I’d begun to pay more attention to the literature than I ever had when I was at university — not to keep up to speed with the subject, but to try and detect Rowland’s enthusiasms, give myself a little lead-time on that early-morning doorbell. It never worked. You couldn’t guess what would attract his attention. The bell would ring, there would be a phone call or an email or — very rarely, when he didn’t think there was much urgency — a letter. Do this, do that, I need this, I need that.

There was just no way to say no. Rowland used neurolinguistic programming or something; he could talk anyone into doing anything. He had, of course, never learned how to drive. Why bother? He had an endless supply of former students who had fallen under his spell and were just waiting for him to turn up, “Oh, hello, Jim, I have to go out to the West Country today and I know you’re not busy right now…” Rowland wasn’t a force of nature; he was a curse, and sometimes I thought he was my own personal curse.

We ran into the rain somewhere around Andover. One moment we were driving towards that great wall of cloud, the next the view out of the windscreen was like looking into a stormy aquarium. The line of traffic slowed to a crawl, apart from one arsehole in a Jeep Grand Cherokee who decided he needed to overtake everyone else and whose rear lights rapidly vanished into the rainy dusk ahead of us.

“I imagine we’ll be seeing him again,” Rowland said smugly. “Probably in the back of a hearse.” Like almost every non-driver I had ever encountered, Rowland was a terrible passenger.

“Fuck this thing in particular,” I muttered, and a couple of minutes later when a sign that said ‘Services’ loomed up out of the watery half-dark, I pulled off the road.

I blamed the internet. In days gone by, Rowland would have had to subscribe to dozens of journals and newsletters, and the theories and rumours and suppositions would have come to him in an orderly progression hindered only by the Royal Mail. These days, wild stuff came to him direct down his broadband connection. All he had to do was type a couple of words into Google and the world flooded into his cramped and musty little flat behind Holborn. He spent hours and hours, usually long after midnight, sifting through it all, saving some stuff onto memory sticks he got cheap from a former student who worked at PC World, printing other stuff out and filing it in great stacks of A4, keeping some things on his hard drive so he could drag it into Word and cut and paste until it took on a pleasing configuration. Then he’d jam half a ream of paper into his ageing Hewlett-Packard printer and out would come this… stuff…

“What is this?”

“Beg pardon?”

“This.” Rowland was pointing at his plate, on which rested a fried plaice fillet in breadcrumbs, about two dozen shoestring fries, a wilted scrap of lettuce, half a tomato with its cut surface carved into uneven serrations, a small forest of mustard cress, and thumbnail-sized splots of tomato ketchup and tartare sauce.

“It’s fish and chips, Rowland,” I said.

He looked down at his meal. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” I said. I pointed. “Look. Fish there, and chips there.”

He poked the fried plaice with his fork. “That’s not funny.”

“No, it isn’t. But it’s fish and chips.”

“And all this…?” Indicating the lettuce and stuff.

“Garnish. It’s garnish.” I saw the look on his face and put down my knife and fork. “Look, you didn’t pay for it, so I think it’s pretty fucking rude to complain about it, actually.”

Rowland sat back on the slippery plastic-upholstered banquette and lowered his chin. “I didn’t want to stop anyway,” he muttered into his chest like a sulky six-year-old.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake…” I rubbed my face and sat back and looked around the restaurant. The A-roads of Britain do not, as a rule, have the same dining facilities as the motorways. Travel on a motorway, and every half an hour or so there will be a service station where you can buy petrol and a weird and eclectic selection of newspapers, books, magazines, CDs, audio cassettes, soft toys, sweets, soft drinks, bunches of flowers and packets of crisps. These service stations will always have a restaurant. Back when I left school and spent a year, before going to university, working as a chef in a service station kitchen, they would have their own restaurants, with their own food. These days, they’ve mostly surrendered to the chains, and if you want something to eat you have a choice, depending on where you stop, of burgers or fried chicken or some obscure brand of pie.

On an A-road, on the other hand, the stops come at irregular intervals, if at all. There is usually petrol, but not often newspapers and magazines. And the restaurants are another thing altogether.

The one we had stopped at seemed to have been overlooked by the march of Civilisation, like the home of some undiscovered South American tribe. The orange carpet had the texture of a saucepan-scourer, the walls were panelled with vanishingly-thin strips of wood veneer, and the furniture looked like a 1970s low-budget film-maker’s idea of the seating on a passenger space vehicle. The food had been abused so much that it was barely food any longer, more an outdated ideal of food from the days when British situation comedies had found Afro-Caribbean accents amusing.

I was actually appalled that I had stopped here, but I needed large amounts of caffeine and sugar and I needed to be off the road while the storm was going on, two things this restaurant actually did very well. Rowland, on the other hand, had decided that he wanted lunch too. And then he had discovered that he had left home without his wallet.

I said, “I needed a break, Rowland.”

He didn’t bother to raise his head, but he did shrug.

“You can’t just turn up on someone’s doorstep at nine o’clock in the morning without any warning and expect them to be all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and waiting to drive you to the West Country,” I said.

Rowland looked at me from under his great badgery eyebrows. “You were lucky to get a degree at all, you know,” he said in a low voice.

“Oh, Rowland,” I groaned.

“The Faculty thought — quite accurately, I might add — that your coursework was of poor quality,” he went on, and as if gaining strength from his words he managed to spear a fry and pop it into his mouth. “I, of course, thought differently.” He chewed the fry and swallowed.

“Rowland,” I said. “Not now.”

“I went into Cunningham’s office and stood up for you, Jim,” he told me, and he magically managed to lift his head and sit up. “I told him I thought you had some worth.”

I drank some coffee.

By now his anger had enabled him to cut a small portion off his fried plaice. He swiped it through the ketchup and the tartare sauce. “I forced Cunningham to see that you had some promise.” He actually twinkled at me as he ate the piece of fish. “I got you that degree, Jim.”

I drank more coffee.

“And what did you do with that degree, Jim? Hm?” I watched his fork range around the oval platter his meal rested on, picking up fish, fries, a bit of lettuce, some cress. He put them all in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “What exactly did you do with that degree I put my career on the line for? Hm?”

“You didn’t put your career on the line for me, you mad old tosser,” I said. It was such a ludicrous concept that I almost laughed out loud. “You never put anybody else before yourself in your life.”

By now, he was industriously clearing his platter. “Whatever else you’ve managed to piss away up a wall in the meantime, I got you that degree,” he told me with enormous confidence. “You owe me, Jim.”

“I don’t owe you anything at all,” I said, but we both knew I was lying. He really had gone to Cunningham and argued in my favour. Of course, he’d done it knowing that he was storing up favours for the future. But he’d still done it.

“All I want you to do is drive me somewhere,” he said. “How hard can that be?”

I looked out of the windows. “I think the rain’s easing off,” I said.

I couldn’t even remember now why I had applied for the course, apart from it being relatively easy to get on to and promising a certain amount of work in the open air. And, at the beginning, I had been absolutely illuminated with enthusiasm. I had, in fact, been enthusiastic about it for a little over two thirds of my time at university. Then I simply realised that I had never been cut out to be an archaeologist. I had a moment of epiphany at the bottom of a trench just outside Cirencester when I stood up, looked at the trowel I was holding, and thought, hang on, what on Earth is this all about? And right there and then I lost the faith, and I never got it back.

Certainly, there were little moments later, on rainy digs in fields from Wiltshire to Northumbria, when my trowel turned up a piece of pottery thrown just a hundred years or so after the birth of Christ. and I remembered that I had once seen the point of it all, and I did sort of do enough to finish the course and kind of get a degree. But mostly it was just unrewarding backbreaking toil, and anything of interest I found was subsumed uncited into papers published by my tutors — usually Rowland, who loved fieldwork. I was a nobody, a little ant scraping away at the soil. And that was how I was going to stay.

I did, however, have some small talent for writing, and in my final year at university, having finally realised that I had wasted the previous two years, I began to make approaches to various national newspapers, and was finally offered a post as a journalist at the London office of a regional newspaper publisher. When I graduated, I fled to Fleet Street. At much the same time that every other newspaper was quitting the Street for offices in Docklands or Kensington.

I managed to last twenty years on Fleet Street, something which still astounded me when I considered how much of my time had been spent writing stories about self-help gurus, fading soap stars and little boys whose kittens had somehow managed to secrete themselves in tumble driers. Then one day I lost the faith again. Something snapped and I freelanced a couple of thousand words to a listings magazine about an up-and-coming author’s new novel. The novel went on to the Booker shortlist, though it didn’t win, and I was invited onto a couple of television arts programmes to talk about it, and that led to various irregular gigs writing pieces for magazines and newspapers and occasional appearances on arts shows. Engorged with my new-found status as a prophet of the zeitgeist, which was really annoying my employers, I tendered my resignation and officially went freelance.

At which point, of course, all my commissions dried up. Prophets have a short shelf-life. I wrote stuff, and no one wanted it. I was reduced to doing lifestyle pieces for the Observer and the Times. After a while even that stopped and I wound up doing speculative stuff for the Evening Standard’s Friday magazine.

Rowland knew all this, of course; he kept a careful watch on his graduates, ranking them according to how bright they were and how handy they were likely to be in an emergency. Some of the more forward-thinking of his former students had attempted to eliminate themselves from the equation by moving to Canada, Australia and the United States, but I had wound up not only living in London but with increasing amounts of free time on my hands, which was why he had been on my doorstep this morning, “I mean, it’s not as if you have anything better to do today, is it, Jim..?”

About half an hour west of Stonehenge, we encountered some complicated business involving junctions and roundabouts and traffic lights which Rowland navigated me through by saying, “Left,” “Right” and “Straight on” at the relevant points. He wasn’t consulting a road map at the time, which might have been faintly scary, but if he was the world’s worst passenger Rowland was at least a navigator next to none. The rain eased up, the clouds parted, and Rowland kept us on the road. None of this was particularly surprising. He knew where he wanted to go, and nothing was going to get in his way.

When I first met Rowland he had been in his late forties, a short, stocky man with stumpy legs, long fair hair and dirt under his fingernails. He’d walked into the lecture room at the university, looked at the pile of books on the table before him, and then out and up at us, sitting there with our pens poised waiting to write down everything he said.

What he said was, “Put your bloody pens down and listen for a minute.”

We put our pens down. Well, some of us did. I noticed some people making surreptitious notes, as if they thought he was trying to trick us.

He went on, “At some point in the next three years, you’re going to be holding in your hands something that was made a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years after the birth of Christ. Some of you will find the remains of someone who died hundreds of years before Christ was born. These were real people. As real as you or me. What they were not is just like us. They didn’t think like us, and over the next three years I hope you’re going to learn why.”

The main thesis of Rowland’s life was that historians down the ages had made a single glaring mistake: they had assumed that the people they had written about were just like them, only without modern conveniences. It was a bigotry which had been reinforced by countless movies about the Romans and the Egyptians; modern screenwriters had written scripts about gladiators or slaves or whatever, and the roles they had written had been acted by modern actors for modern audiences. The characters all had modern motivations, they spoke recognisably modern English, and everyone who watched those films could identify with them.

Wrong, said Rowland. We could no more identify with a Second Century Roman gladiator or a Bronze Age artisan than we could identify with a squid. Nobody would want to go and see a film that accurately depicted the way those people really saw the world, we just couldn’t get our heads around it. They were not like us, and we were not like them. It all had to do with evolution, with the way the brain learned to interact with its environment. The Bronze Age peoples were only a few generations away from the development of language itself, and they had not yet learned to identify with the ‘thought I,’ said Rowland. They hadn’t yet figured out that if you had an idea, it came from you. They simply assumed it was the word of God. Music was an aspect of divinity, a magical thing. The Celts believed, in the same way we believe that when we push a button on a pedestrian crossing the little red man will eventually turn green and let us cross the road, that gods lived in the rocks and the rivers and the streams. It was real, not even an article of faith. We couldn’t imagine how they saw their world of gods and goddesses. It was simply beyond us. They were not like us.

I was hooked. This wasn’t archaeology the way I had imagined it. Rowland wasn’t talking about digging up the artefacts and remains of people who had been just like us, apart from the obvious handicaps of not having electricity and computers and Woody Allen films. He was describing a discipline which ought, if it were done properly, to be about examining truly alien cultures and trying to understand them. I loved it. From then on, right up until that moment in the trench outside Cirencester, I was a wild-eyed acolyte. And Rowland, with his patient predator’s eye, marked me down as a useful future asset.

“Here. Take a left here. No, not here, past this junction. Here.”

I sighed and turned the wheel. The car bumped off the road and onto a narrow track between two fields. The track was muddy from the passage of many vehicles and the recent rain, and it was dotted with potholes full of water. I felt the car’s suspension bottom a couple of times, and thought I heard the exhaust scrape a groove in the ground.

We were just outside a village called Stafford Bishop, about ten miles east and north of Gloucester, not far from the part of the Cotswold Hills which had once been dubbed the ‘Haute Cotswolds’ because of its wealthy inhabitants. Where we were was not haute anything. It was a big muddy field surrounded by scrappy hedges and the occasional tree. The ruts in the track fought the steering wheel and it was hard to keep the car from bumping off into the field. Not that it mattered, particularly. It looked as if the farmer to whom the field belonged had been growing mainly weeds and grass. Maybe there was an EU weeds and grass subsidy you could claim.

Rowland was getting excited, leaning forward against his seatbelt and looking out through the windscreen. “He’s here,’’ he kept saying. “I can feel him. He’s here.”

At the end of the track was a little collection of caravans and mobile homes belonging to Bristol University and a couple of West Country archaeological groups. I parked us beside one of the caravans and we got out and stood beside the car. The air smelled wet and fresh and earthy. I lit a cigarette and rubbed my face and wondered how my life had managed to come so far off its tracks as to deliver me here today.

Half the field had been dug up. A little yellow excavator sat on its caterpillar tracks off to one side, next to a huge pile of earth. Beyond it was an enormous shallow pit, crisscrossed with duckboards and dotted with markers, in which dozens of people were moving slowly and with great purpose, scraping away at the dirt exposed by the bucket of the excavator. One of the figures in the excavation, noticing our arrival, had climbed out of the pit and was coming towards us. My heart began to sink all over again.

Lew King had been a year below me at the University, a rotund little Yorkshireman already starting to go bald. Where I had been galvanised by Rowland’s vision of alien cultures buried beneath our feet, Lew had bought into it entirely. He worshipped Rowland. He had picked up Rowland’s torch when Rowland retired five years ago, although in all the important respects Rowland had never retired at all.

“Professor Gibson,” Lew said as he approached us, hand outstretched. “Welcome. Such a great day.”

“Doctor King,” Rowland said solemnly, shaking his hand. He turned and indicated me. “You’ll remember Jim.”

Lew looked at me and I looked at Lew. No hearty handshakes for Lew and me. We regarded each other the way two attack dogs might regard each other. For a long time I had been Rowland’s spear-carrier, in spite of my disillusionment about the fieldwork. When I had betrayed the faith, Lew had picked up the spear, had become the New Improved Jim. I was conscious of looking at a faster, more streamlined version of myself, the tool which Rowland had shaped to use as the front end of his obsession, the person who actually dug things up. The digging life had slimmed Lew down; he was whiplash thin now, and his skin was tanned like old leather from his years spent out in the wind and the rain and the sun as Rowland’s avatar. His hair was gone completely, and he was wearing a huge pair of wire-framed John Lennon spectacles. His clothes were saturated with mud and dirt, and he was holding a filthy baseball cap in one hand.

“Lewis,” I said.

“James,” he said.

“Keeping busy?” he asked.

“Keeping busy,” I agreed. “How’s Fiona?”

“She’s fine. How’s Christina?”

“If it wasn’t for alimony, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time,” I said.

Lew blinked at me.

“My life’s a train-wreck,” I told him. “How’s yours?”

He blinked at me again. Lew, bless him, had always been an unsophisticated organism. Dig and record, that was all he did. The news of his marriage had come as something of a surprise. The news of his divorce had been something less than a surprise. Although possibly more of a surprise than my own divorce.

Rowland was watching us the way an owner might watch two dangerous animals he had grown rather tired of. “Gentlemen,” he muttered. “Might we save this for another time, please?”

“If I’m lucky, there might not be another time,” I told him, but I backed off a fraction and Lew backed off a fraction and Rowland shook his head.

“Doctor King,” he said. “I understand you have something to show me.”

I watched Lew put me to the back of his mind. “It’s over here,” he told Rowland, gesturing across the field. “You were right all along, of course. It’s a marvellous thing.”

He led us out across the field towards the excavation, and as we walked I spotted people I knew working around the site, people who had been in my year at university, or a year above or below me. All of them Rowland’s former students. It was possible that the only two other organisations as adept at placing moles and sleepers in useful positions were the CIA and the East German foreign intelligence service. Rowland didn’t actually have to be physically present at a dig any more; wherever a spade went into the soil anywhere in Britain there would be someone who reported directly or indirectly back to him. I thought about that for a moment, while we walked beside Lew, and thought it was more than a little scary.

Lew had been rehearsing; you could see it in his body language. He walked us to the edge of the dig and he stopped, and he swept his arm across the thing that he and his team had uncovered, and he said, “Professor Gibson, may I present the home of Lucius Claudius Setibogius.”

We looked. “Oh, fucking hell,” I said.

Lucius was a Second Century spiv. Rowland said that we weren’t supposed to think of the people of antiquity in modern terms, but I’d found that I couldn’t think of Lucius in any other way. We had never managed to find out what he looked like, but I always imagined that he was like the Flash Harry character George Cole played in those old St Trinians movies. Pencil moustache, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, long overcoat with the collar turned up, trilby tilted down over his eyes, that strange stiff rapid walk, that was Lucius. If he was alive today he’d be making his living hawking dodgy postcards around the harbour in Naples, asking likely-looking tourists if they wanted to meet his sister.

He was actually a Romano-Brit, and a Roman citizen to boot. We never established how he managed to get his name, but I had my theories. In those days it was fairly common practice when a non-Roman was granted citizenship for him to pick a first name more or less at random, take as his middle name the name of the person to whom he owed his citizenship — often a local governor or a general — and keep his original native name as a surname. I thought Lucius got his citizenship, and his name, because he had done a favour for someone called Claudius. Lucius was good at favours. They had made him colossally wealthy.

They do say that you never forget your first love, and Lucius was Rowland’s. Rowland had first come across him when he was an undergraduate, going through some documents at the British Museum which nobody had looked at since they had been dug up in Rome in the late 1800s. Rowland, for all his faults, had an infallible eye. He spotted Lucius immediately, the way he’d spotted me, knowing that he’d struck gold. Lucius popped up periodically out of the documentation, doing deals, sending letters, being rude to contractors, refusing to pay bills to merchants because he claimed their goods were substandard. He’d lived in Rome for a while, and there was a letter from a fish merchant which mentioned that complete bastard Lucius Claudius Setibogius. Lucius had never conquered a country or won a famous legal case, but he was extraordinary. Lucius was nouveau-riche, he was fast-track, he was a man of the future. His descendants were probably still here, doing deals, fucking somebody over for a percentage, driving the latest model car, living in rancho-style homes in Chigwell with permatanned wives and daughters with belly-button jewellery and big hair.

All of which was deeply interesting to Rowland. But his attention really began to focus when archaeologists working at Vindolanda, one of the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, turned up a huge haul of letters. The letters were in the form of flat pieces of wood about the size of postcards, hinged together with leather thongs. A person would write on these, tie them up with the thongs, and send them off. And there was one signed Lucius Claudius Setibogius.

I could guess what effect this had on Rowland — mainly because I had seen an enormous blown-up photograph of the letter blu-tacked to his living room wall. All those years trying to follow Lucius through bits of documents and things other people had said about him, and here was Rowland finally looking at the man’s handwriting. It was, I thought, rather florid and childish handwriting, the kind of handwriting an eager country boy on the make might have.

Only fragments of the letter survived. We had the salutation at the beginning, to somebody called Marcus — presumably someone stationed at Vindolanda — and we had the signature. And in the middle, where the faint ink-scratched words hadn’t been rotted or faded away, we had a few sentences about a visit Lucius had made to the Colosseum.

You needed a bit of background for this part. The Colosseum was not all gladiators knocking seven shades of shit out of each other. The Romans loved pitting people against animals, staging hunts in the arena that must have been like bloodier versions of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They brought megatons of animals to Rome from all over the Empire for this purpose. I forget how many animals were killed when the Colosseum was dedicated, but I once heard a figure that ran into the thousands. Lions, cheetahs, bears. If it had claws and teeth and an attitude, the Romans were happy.

Lucius’s letter to his friend Marcus bemoaned his life now he was living in Britain again. He recalled his days in Rome, in particular an afternoon spent at the Colosseum watching gladiators fight animals. More specifically, some animals he called homunculi.

“They were very small,’’ he told Marcus, “but very quick and hard to kill.’’

Most commentators thought Lucius was referring to chimpanzees here. Most commentators dismissed as pure fantasy Lucius’s next comment, which translated as, “One had been taught to speak Latin, and I conversed with it. It told me its home was much warmer than Rome.’’

Rowland was not most commentators. He really did wonder about that line. Lucius was not given to flights of fancy. He was money-driven. He was the world’s most prosaic man. Rowland thought he really was remembering talking to a small creature, regarded by the Romans as an animal, which nonetheless was capable of speaking Latin. “I am told,” Lucius wrote, “that they lived in a bronze house.”

Rowland wondered. Lucius said the homunculi had been found in the great braided area of deltas and marshes where the Danube enters the Black Sea. Rowland put all his data about Lucius and the Colosseum and Roman ‘hunts’ and stories of mythical animals into his PC and he juggled them around and for years and years he wondered.

Archaeology never stands still. There’s always somebody digging something up somewhere. Fragments of letters, for instance, from an unidentified inhabitant of Lincoln to an unidentified inhabitant of Rome talking about money lent to Lucius Claudius Setibogius for a villa. A letter from one Caecilius, an apparently much sought-after mosaic artist, to his sister, bemoaning the fact that he had to travel all the way to Britain to work for someone called Luci Cl S (the rest of the name had faded away) and that his employer wanted to include much eye-witness detail in his work. Rowland looked at all this stuff, and he did wonder, oh yes he did.

And then, about six months ago, a farmer in the Cotswolds was given a metal detector for his birthday. He took it out into one of his fields, just to try it out, and it went berserk the moment he switched it on. He dug a hole in the field and came up with a dozen Roman coins, thirty assorted silver ornaments and a hundredweight of roof-tiles, and then he called the local archaeological society, who dug around a bit and called the nearest university, who dug around a bit and called Lew, who called Rowland. Who turned up on my doorstep.

And here we were, almost two thousand years after the death of Lucius Claudius Setibogius, standing in a muddy field in Gloucestershire, looking down from the edge of a huge hole at the mosaic floor of the largest Roman villa ever discovered in Britain.

Rowland’s first words were, I thought, marvellously restrained under the circumstances. He said, “Are you certain it’s him?”

“There’s no doubt,” Lew said smugly. “There are inscriptions praising him all over the site. His name’s everywhere.”

I couldn’t stop staring at the floor.

“You know,” Rowland said, looking around the site as if the idea had only just occurred to him, “do you think he might actually be buried around here somewhere?”

The floor was a wonder.

“There’s a cemetery just over there,” Lew said, pointing. “We’ve only just opened it up, but we’re turning up burials with extraordinary grave goods.”

I took a step forward.

“My god,” Rowland said quietly. Then he yelled, “What on Earth are you doing?”

I walked out across the floor, across the mosaic tiles in which Lucius had instructed Caecilius to record his life’s story. Caecilius was a genius; this was the best mosaic work I had ever seen. It must have cost Lucius a fortune to bring him out here from Rome. He had added representations of the gods and goddesses in various places, but really what I was standing on was a biography, a monument to the ego of one man. I walked with my head bent forward, looking at the pictures. Here was Lucius’s early life in what appeared to be a pretty standard British hovel circa the Second Century. Here he was driving a little herd of goats. Here he was selling the goats. Here he was buying some sheep. Here he was selling wool to somebody else…

I turned and looked at Rowland. “Caecilius was working from life,” I said. I pointed at the representations of Lucius beneath my feet. “This is what he looked like.”

Rowland had his mouth open ready to yell at me for walking on the floor. He closed his mouth with a little gulp and looked at all the figures.

I presumed that Caecilius was no fool; he’d idealised his patron, but even so Lucius looked disappointingly ordinary. He didn’t look like Flash Harry in a toga. He had a Roman haircut that had grown out a bit, and he had a mean little mouth and what looked like a bit of a beergut, but really he could have been anybody.

The winner always writes the history. Okay. So here was Lucius turning his little herd of sheep bit by bit into a mighty trading empire. He shook hands with clients. He didn’t cheat anyone or make shady deals. He married his wife, whose name we still didn’t know but Caecilius had given her a J-Lo arse and a penchant for playing stringed instruments. Later on there was a son, as cute as you could make a mosaic representation. I wandered back and forth across the floor, picking up details. Here he went to Rome. Here he visited the Colosseum. Here…

I stopped and looked at the figures beneath my feet.

“Rowland,” I said, “they’re red.”

Rowland’s most recent obsession was with a discovery made by archaeologists in Indonesia, of small primate skeletons which possibly represented a parallel branch of evolution. The media had dubbed them ‘Hobbits,’ but Rowland’s mind had gone back to the homunculi Lucius claimed to have seen in Rome. Could some of them, he wondered, have been captured in Indonesia and been passed westward, from owner to owner, until they arrived on the Black Sea coast, where they had been swept up by the Empire and brought to Rome, only to die in the arena? There were, apparently, local stories of the little primates surviving into historical times. It wasn’t impossible that they might have wound up in Rome. Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible, and Rowland’s mind was deliriously at home in that tiny area labelled not impossible. Theories came and went about the nature of Homo floresiensis. Rowland ignored them all, snuggled himself up to not impossible, and came up with his own narrative.

Lucius was Rowland’s greatest prize, and fitting the villa and the information it contained into what he already knew would complete his life’s work. But he thought that once, nearly two millennia ago, Lucius had spoken with a cousin of the human race, and he thought that Lucius, with his enormous ego, would record it somehow at his home. He thought that it would prove not only that H. floresiensis had survived into the Second Century, but that it was capable of language and sophisticated thought. One of them had been taught Latin. Lucius had spoken with it. And then it had died in the Colosseum.

But.

We had all been taking that word homunculi a little bit too seriously. I looked down at the figures in the tiles. These were not H. floresiensis, or at least not H. floresiensis as they had been depicted by the people who do artists’ impressions for newspapers and television news organisations. They did not look like little hairy apes walking upright. They did not, in fact, look much like primates at all.

There were five of them, standing in line abreast, and behind them was a section of wall that looked as though it could have been part of the Colosseum. If the figures of gladiators standing a little over to the right, menacing them with swords and nets and tridents, were any guide, none of the homunculi was more than five feet tall. They were all bright red, as if they had been tandooried, and they were all wearing bits and pieces of clothing, some of it Roman, most of it not. One was wearing boots; another was wearing big padded-looking gloves.

I knelt down on the floor at the feet of the figures. I heard Rowland step down onto the mosaic and start walking towards me, and a moment later I heard Lew do the same. Lew was recovering quickly. “Yes, perhaps it was remiss of me not to mention them,” he was saying. “But surely they’re representations of household gods? Figures from myth? Deities Setibogius may have felt protected him?”

I tried to imagine Lucius dragging Caecilius all the way from Rome to do this. I thought of him standing over Caecilius, dictating every bit of the design like a mugging victim working with a police artist. I thought of Caecilius shaking his head as he tried to get the faces right, wondering what the hell his employer had been drinking.

They all had flat faces. Their eyes were narrow and tilted, their mouths parted in lipless slashes that exposed rows of needle-like teeth. They had the huge, flat noses of leaf-nosed bats, and enormous ears. They had horns. Great backward-curving horns.

On Rowland’s orders, Lew cleared the site and sent everybody home for the day. The three of us covered the floor with plastic sheeting and went and sat around a table in one of the portakabins, where nobody said a word for quite a while.

Finally, Lew said, “I assumed —”

“Shut up, Lewis,” said Rowland. Lewis reddened and looked out through the window. It had started to rain again. Rowland looked at me.

I raised my hands. “I’m only the chauffeur,” I said.

Rowland glared at me.

I sighed. “Lucius said he met them. He said he talked to one of them. He wrote that letter to Marcus, what, ten, fifteen years before he had this place built? If he was lying, he kept it going for a hell of a long time.”

“Why would he lie about something like that? What would he have to gain?”

“I don’t know.” I spread my hands. “The Romans weren’t like us.”

Rowland glared at me again.

“But they don’t appear anywhere else in the literature,” Lew protested.

“I told you to shut up, Lewis,” Rowland said again without bothering to take his eyes off me.

“I bet they do, though,” I said. “I bet somewhere, in some document nobody’s found yet, maybe something that’s been sitting in a drawer since the Eighteenth Century, there’s another description of them. There were only five of them; it’s not like they were some army that the Empire defeated, something that got celebrated in song and poetry and sculpture.” I sat back and thought of the five creatures. Maybe there had been more of them; maybe some had died when a Roman patrol out on the far fringe of the Empire had come across them and overwhelmed them. Maybe some more had died on the journey back to the capital. It must have been a hell of a trip; one of them, at least, had had time to learn Latin. I am told they lived in a bronze house.

Rowland blinked at me, and I knew he had just had the same thought, and my heart sank.

“Call me when you get there,” Rowland told me.

“This isn’t fair, Rowland,” I said. “I have a life of my own.”

He smiled and watched the crowds circulate around us in Terminal Two at Heathrow. “Imagine the story you’ll be able to sell, Jim,” he said.

“It’s no good appealing to my venal side,” I said, but it was pointless. I looked over at Lew, who was sitting miserably a few feet away with our cabin baggage piled around him. Lew was being sent with me as punishment for not telling Rowland about the red figures immediately. He didn’t look like a man who was in on the ground floor of one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in history. But then, I supposed, neither did I.

“What are you going to be doing while we’re poking around in the Danube delta?” I asked Rowland.

“You’re right about the literature,” he said. “There has to be some corroboration somewhere. It might be in a pile of documents nobody’s ever read. It might be in a private collection. Someone’s got to look for it.”

“And it’s not as though you’d ever have to leave your armchair to do it, right?” I said sourly.

“And it never occurred to you to wonder what happened to the homunculi after they had been killed in the arena,” he noted.

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again.

“Somewhere in Rome,” Rowland said with a smug grin on his face, “there is a midden full of bones and little horned skulls. You mark my words.”

“Probably a hundred feet under an office building,” I said.

“Still there, all the same.” He looked at his watch. “I’m booked on the half past six flight to Rome. We’ll see.”

I checked my own watch. “We’d better go and check in.” I stood up and nudged Lew, and he half-heartedly began to gather our bags together. “You don’t think we’re being just a little bit too enthusiastic, do you?” I asked Rowland. “Lucius could have made it all up.”

Rowland shook his head. “He wasn’t the type. He couldn’t be bothered to be creative unless money or prestige were involved. What did he have to gain? Who was he going to impress with a story like that? He could show his guests the pictures on his floor. Who would care?”

“He wasn’t like us, Rowland,” I said, wanting to shake him. “We don’t know what he thought was important. Telling his friends that he’d met a bunch of aliens might have made him everybody’s favourite neighbour.”

Rowland sighed. We’d gone over and over this argument in the portakabin at Stafford Bishop, while the rain poured down and Lew sat sulkily in a corner. Lucius hadn’t known what the homunculi were, and he hadn’t cared, particularly. The little red men with the horns had been oddities, a good story to tell his mates, and once they were dead there hadn’t been any more of them and they’d just dropped straight out of history — unless Rowland was right and someone else had used them as their model for the classical image of the Devil. Maybe a skull had turned up in Rome decades later. A horned skull. That might have got people’s attention, particularly if the records of the homunculi had been lost. Somehow, over a series of increasingly fraught calls on my mobile — one of which had actually involved yelling — Rowland had managed to convince, cajole and variously blackmail a number of people into giving us quite a lot of money to fund our separate investigations. I didn’t want to know the details. I did know that a large sum of cash had suddenly appeared in my bank account, which was interesting.

“You really think Lucius sat in a holding cage in the Colosseum and had a conversation with the Devil?” I said. “And then the Devil and his friends went upstairs and were slaughtered for the entertainment of a few thousand Romans?”

“Is that any more outlandish than believing that they landed on the Black Sea coast in a bronze starship?”

“Oh, quite possibly,” I said.

“Not the Devil, Jim,” he reminded me. “Something which became the model for the representation of the Devil.” He shrugged. “Myself, I think they’ll still turn out to be a branch of Homo sapiens. A completely unknown branch of Homo sapiens. There’s a very strong chance that we’re about to make history.”

“I have a very strong urge to punch you,” I told him.

“And if you do turn out to be right, and there are starship remains in Romania, you and Lewis are going to be the most famous men on Earth.”

We looked at Lewis. Lewis, I felt, was not going to be very good company. “I still have a very strong urge to punch you.” I also had a very strong urge to punch Lewis.

Rowland glanced up the departure boards. “They’re calling my flight.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Have a nice time in Italy.”

He picked up his carry-on bag, which in typical Rowland fashion was almost the size of a normal person’s suitcase, but that didn’t matter because he’d be able to talk the cabin staff into letting him take it onto the plane.

“Stay in touch,” he told me as he started to walk towards his gate. “We have to coordinate things. If Romania turns out to be a dead end, you can join me in Rome.”

“All right,” I said. “Good luck.”

“You too,” he said.

I watched him walk away through the crowds of holidaymakers and business people in the terminal, a stout little pensioner moving with a great and terrible purpose, setting out to rewrite human history.

“And you never know,” he called over his shoulder. “It might really have been the Devil.”

v

Stories start with a lot of things — a word or a phrase or a line of dialogue or a place. This one started with the description of Rowland eating his fish and chips, I have no idea why. A lot of the time, the idea cooks for a while and doesn’t go anywhere, but this one had legs. Putting a story together, for me anyway, is just an exercise in answering questions. Jim and Rowland are in the restaurant for some reason. What is it? Jim’s driving Rowland somewhere. Why? Where? You answer questions like this, and other questions come up, and you answer them too, and at some point the story’s finished. I’m a ferociously idle writer; I find it very hard work, and this one was hard to get right. I’m still not sure I’ve managed it.

All The News, All The Time, From Everywhere

On the first of August, Rex killed the pig.

He didn’t do it willingly, but none of us was really sorry to see it go. It was an enormous, bad-tempered bastard that we’d been keeping in a shed around the back of the office for months, feeding it on an outrageous stinking swill that Harry kept going in a big pot with scraps and garbage begged and borrowed from some of the schools in the area.

If it had been left to us, the pig would have starved to death, because it smelled like a sewer and attacked anything that moved, but Rex made us draw up a feeding rota, and every four days it fell to me to approach the shed with two buckets of swill, gingerly open the door, and pitch the buckets inside before slamming the door shut again. For such a big animal, with such little legs, the pig was colossally quick, and it had jaws like bolt cutters.

Rex was ashamed of the pig. It was the living, breathing, grunting embodiment of just how badly the Globe was doing. The yard behind the office was choked with empty cages and wire boxes and wooden stalls, where once there had been a thriving menagerie of goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigeons and even the odd badger or two. Now they were all gone, and all we had was the pig.

Still, he put off killing it as long as he could. He and Harry went out onto the moors and trapped crows. Local poachers sometimes brought in foxes or rabbits. Ben produced his astrological charts. Lucie examined the interior of everyone’s teacup. And in this way the Globe continued to bring the news to our particular little corner of Derbyshire. It wasn’t very exciting news, but considering what we had to work with it was a miracle we got a paper out at all.

But it wasn’t enough. The advertisers started to fall away, leaving us with great gaping holes in the paper, which I was sent out to fill with microscopically-nitpicking accounts of Women’s Institute meetings, weddings and funerals. I went to so many weddings and funerals that the vicar only half-jokingly suggested I might like to stand in for him sometimes.

And it still wasn’t enough. Rex watched the paper haemorrhaging money, looked bankruptcy in the face, and killed the pig.

He did it in the afternoon, when the Summer heat had built up enough in the newsroom to make the air stand still despite the fans, and the staff were quietly nodding off over their typewriters.

My fan had just run down again, and I’d got up to wind its clockwork when there was this incredible unearthly screech from outside and everyone in the office sat bolt upright.

We all looked at each other, and that awful noise came again. It was the sound of every nightmare HP Lovecraft ever had coming to destroy civilisation. It was the sound of a man discovering that his entire family had been wiped out in a gas explosion. It was the sound of a thousand young children being hurled into the whirling blades of a combine harvester.

It stopped.

I looked at Ben and raised an eyebrow. He said, “You don’t suppose he’s…” and Lucie shrieked as the back door of the office opened and an awful apparition stepped through.

Rex was covered in blood from head to toe. It was dripping from his nose and his earlobes and the point of the foot-long butcher’s knife he was holding in his hand. He was breathing hard but his eyes were shining.

“Biggest one-day fall in the Dow for two years,” he panted, pointing the knife at me. “Forest fires threaten Malibu. Government troops clash with logging company employees in Borneo. Russia devalues the ruble for the third time this year. Moon Sagan and Buff Rodney say, ‘This time it’s the real thing’.” He took a ragged breath. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “If we’re going out, we’re going out in style. Type, you bastards!”

At the desk behind me, Harry heaved a huge sigh. “That’ll be pork chops all round, then,” he said.

The Globe’s favourite watering hole was the Royal Oak, by virtue of the fact that the paper’s offices were right next door, but I preferred the Duke Of York, which was half a mile away on the other side of the village but had the advantage of being half a mile away from the nearest newspaper office.

This early in the evening, the Duke was almost empty. Before The Crash, it had done a roaring trade in the summer from tourists visiting the local caves and hard-core walkers setting off on the notorious Gilbert Dyke Walk, which managed to take in some of the most inhospitable scenery in Northern England between here and Hadrian’s Wall. These days, the pub got by on a deal with a microbrewery in Castleton and some quite staggering customer loyalty among the locals, although tourists were starting to drift back again.

This evening, however, the only occupants of the place were Seth the landlord, and Liam Goodkind, editor and proprietor of the Chronicle, Belton’s other newspaper.

I stood in the doorway for a few moments, sensing disaster, but both Seth and Liam noticed me at the same time and nodded hello. Liam waved me over to his corner table as well, and by then it would just have looked rude to turn round and walk out again, so I went over and sat down.

“I don’t want any trouble, Liam,” I said.

“Well, me neither, old son,” he told me. Raising his voice, he said, “Seth, get this boy a drink.” He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Lager and lime,” I said, feeling miserable.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He slapped me on the knee. “Rex won’t sack you for having a drink with me.”

“You sacked Robbie Whittaker for having a drink with Rex.”

“Robbie was a bad lad.” Liam lifted his glass and took a thoughtful sip of whisky. “He was robbing me blind. And he couldn’t write to save his life. Had to go.”

Seth came over with my pint glass of lager and lime on a tray. He was a little bald man with a port-wine stain down the right side of his face. He’d been the Duke’s landlord for about twenty years but most of the locals still regarded him as a newcomer. I hadn’t been in Belton nearly as long as he had, and it was faintly depressing to know that I still had several decades ahead of me before I was regarded as anything but That Bloke from London.

“Anything else, gents?” Seth asked us, and Liam shooed him back behind the bar with a languid wave of his hand.

When Seth was more or less out of earshot, Liam said, “I heard about the pig.”

“I told you, I don’t want any trouble.”

He looked offended. “How can this be trouble? Two newspapermen discussing business over a drink. How can it be trouble?”

“It can be trouble in all sorts of ways, Liam. You know that.” I took a mouthful of my drink and became nostalgic for the days of refrigeration, the days when you could just put your hand into one of those plastic bar-top buckets and scoop up a handful of ice cubes and drop them into your lager and lime.

“You’re too suspicious,” Liam told me. His attire today was Country Gentleman In Summer: white flannels, checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows to show muscular forearms dotted with freckles and hazed with fine sandy hair, a pair of battered old brogues and a Guards tie, even though the nearest he had ever been to the military was when he sold fifteen hundred acres of his land to the Ministry of Defence to use as a firing range. He looked every inch the Gentleman Farmer, but he had once been managing editor of a newspaper in Manchester, until the death of his universally-disliked father had brought him back to the village.

“I’m not going to tell you what we got,” I said. “You’ll have to read it in the paper.”

“Well, of course I will.” He smiled and took a tin of small cigars and a lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m a big fan of the Globe. I’m going to miss it.”

I shook my head and took another drink.

He lit a cigar and blew out smoke. “Look, old son.” He put tin and lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s not beat around the bush, eh? The pig’s gone. Now Rex will have to rely on local news.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Maybe Rex will be able to get his hands on some scabby sheep off the moors,” he went on. “The odd rabbit. How’s that going to help you? No national or international news, the advertisers are going to abandon ship.”

It was, unfortunately, a perfectly accurate summing-up of the Globe’s prospects. I drank some more of my lager and lime and wished I’d gone straight home.

“So how about you come and work for me?”

I snorted beer down my nose. Liam watched me with detached interest while I coughed and gasped for breath, then he said, “You’re a good lad. I’ve always liked your style. There’s a deputy’s chair waiting for you at the Chronicle.”

I mopped my face with my hankie. “I’d rather have my balls bitten off by a horse, Liam,” I said, half-laughing with surprise at the offer. “I wouldn’t work under you if you were the last editor on Earth.”

He didn’t get angry. He just became very still. “You won’t remember what you were like when you arrived here,” he told me calmly. “You were lucky we didn’t just take you out onto the Manchester Road and leave you there.”

I looked at him, trying to decide whether to punch him or not.

“You weren’t even human when Lenny Hammond found you out on the moors,” he went on. “Just an animal dressed in rags.”

I stood up.

“You want to try and work out which side of your bread the butter’s on,” Liam continued. “We’ve been good to you. Rex has been good to you. But you’re a good journalist and you owe this place more than staying with the Globe as it goes down.”

I turned to go.

“I’m trying to turn this village into the centre of news-gathering for the whole North of England,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, give us a lot of clout. And you could help me do that. I’m offering you a chance to do that.”

I took a single halting step. Then another one. The next one came easier, and the next, and by the time I was through the door and out on the pavement it was no trouble at all to walk away from Liam’s offer. He was like a radio station; the further away from him you were, the weaker his message became, until finally you couldn’t hear him at all.

Liam and Rex were locked in a duel to the death. They pretended it was about who ran the better paper, but it was really about Alice, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t been for the Crash.

I had missed the Crash. Those who saw it said it was like a swarm of tiny black flies on their monitor screens, or a driving hailstorm, or a slowly-blossoming flower. Nobody knew where it came from, or who had written it, but the Crash blew through every firewall on Earth as if they weren’t there. It took down economies, destroyed telecommunications networks, and effectively ended the War, all in about twenty minutes.

There was chaos, of course, and I missed all that too. When I finally came round, that day in Rex’s office, the elves had already come out of their millennia-long exile and had simply taken over the country.

Well, no. That’s not exactly true; they didn’t simply take over the country. They put the country to the sword. They killed hundreds of thousands of people; they laid waste to towns and cities. They forbade us to have internal combustion and mains electricity and telecommunications and a Government and, for reasons which escaped everyone, a music industry. The Crash and the chaos that attended the end of the War brought us to our knees, and they were never going to let us get to our feet again.

We waited for the rest of the world to notice our plight and come to our rescue, but the rest of the world had its own problems. The United States were no longer united; California was just the wealthiest nation in a continent of intermittently-warring countries. It was going to be another decade at least before Continental Europe emerged from what, by all accounts, was a bizarre Dark Age. Australia and New Zealand had come through the Crash pretty well, but only a die-hard optimist would have held their breath waiting for help from that quarter. We were all alone, trapped on an island with countless twitchy sylvan psychopaths.

Bizarrely, there were some compensations. For instance, it turned out that magic actually worked.

Well, maybe not magic per se, but all that weird fringe stuff like crystal ball-gazing and tealeaf-reading and palmistry and astrology and cutting open animals and reading the future in their entrails.

It turned out, in those days following the elvish Occupation, that these things always had worked. They just never worked as ways of foretelling the future. What no one had ever cottoned on to was that they all told you what was happening, or what had happened, somewhere in the world. This of course was useless, unless you were a journalist, where explaining what’s happening or what has already happened is part of the art.

The elves thought it was really funny that we had got it so wrong for so many years. They thought it was so funny that it was the only form of communication they allowed us to use. You could find yourself flayed to death for trying to start a local postal service, but the elves smiled benignly on you if you started reading animal entrails.

It was one of those fields of endeavour where size really does matter. The interior of a rabbit, read by an expert, might, at a pinch, tell you what was going on in London. A pig would give you access to some random gossip and hard news from across the Atlantic. Cut open a cow, however, and the world was your oyster. The guts of an oyster might, if you were lucky, give you a clue to where you left your favourite socks.

That was how the Chronicle had scored over us, over and over again. After years and years as a national newspaperman, Liam had inherited a farm so enormous that it seemed obscene to describe it as a smallholding. He had access to hundreds of cattle, seemingly thousands of pigs, and uncountable numbers of chickens. Liam’s animals gave the Chronicle access to news the Globe could only dream about.

Some people were better at it than others. Rex wasn’t bad, but only the best-intentioned critic would have described him as an expert at reading the entrails of recently-deceased animals.

Alice, on the other hand, was an absolute star. When Alice left Rex and moved in with Liam, the Chronicle became, in its way, as well-informed as any national newspaper had been in the days before the Crash. Alice could slaughter a chicken and ask it any question you wanted, and the geometries of its guts would tell you the answer.

And that, in the end, was what this stupid little war was about. Rex wanted Alice back, and he thought that if he just kept going she would, in time, realise she’d made a mistake and had gone off with the wrong bloke. It wasn’t the most bizarre situation I had ever seen, but it was up there in the Top Five.

“Liam just tried to sign me up,” I said.

Rex looked up from his desk. He’d had a bath and changed his clothes and slapped on some aftershave to try and cover the residual smell of pig’s blood, but if I was a betting man I would have been putting money on him scrubbing himself raw for the next week to get rid of the stink.

“Liam’s always trying to sign up my staff,” he said, going back to the page of copy he’d been reading when I came in. “He tried to sign up Harry last month.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Harry threatened to kill him if he ever did it again.”

“I just thought you should know.”

He looked up at me again, a fearsome-looking little gnome of a man with the sweetest nature of anyone I’d ever met. He sighed and pointed at the chair he kept for visitors. “Sit down.”

I sat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I was tempted.”

He thought about this confession for a few moments. “I can’t offer you any more money.” He clasped his hands in front of him on top of Harry’s copy. I knew it was Harry’s, even reading it upside-down, because it was full of commas. Harry put commas in everywhere; he just couldn’t help himself

“It’s not the money, Rex,” I said. “Why do you carry on? He’s got half the livestock in the county, he’s got thirty-odd journalists, he’s got that sodding steam-powered press, he’s got that witch —” I stopped. “Sorry.” ‘That witch’ was Alice.

He shrugged. “I’m not going to give up,” he told me. “Despite what I said earlier, we are going to keep on reporting the news until we absolutely cannot report the news any more. Even if we have to exist solely on local stories.”

“If we do that we’ll last about a fortnight,” I told him. “The advertisers will just go over to the Chronicle.”

He leaned forward. “If I have to pay for this paper out of my own pocket,” he said calmly, “this paper will continue to be published every Thursday.” He sat back. “We got some useful copy out of the pig; I think if we’re creative we can spin it out for another three or four issues. What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy, if you want the honest truth,” I told him. “You and Liam.”

He chuckled. “Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’m doing Ernie Hazlewright’s funeral in the morning.”

Rex looked sadly at me and propped his chin on his hand. “I’m going to miss old Ernie,” he said. “He was a proper old lad. Fought in the Falklands. You make sure you do a good job on Ernie.”

I sat and looked at him and I felt my shoulders start to slump, the way they always did when we had conversations like this. The Globe was like a black hole; I could get out far enough to peek over the event horizon, but I couldn’t escape the gravity of its impending doom. Rex was going to ride the paper as it went down the tubes, and I was going to be sitting alongside him in the front seat.

It was a lovely Spring morning, fresh and cool. I could smell the dew-damp earth of the fields on either side of the road.

There were fifteen of us in the journalists’ pool, riding through the French countryside with a column of Alliance armour. The War was in its third year and it hadn’t gone nuclear yet, apart from places like Kiev and Istanbul. The Alliance was finally making some headway against the Union forces. Everyone felt pretty good.

A black and white road sign went past our humvee. On it was the name Ste. Ursule du Lac.

Only an optimist would have called this a village. It was just half a dozen houses and a school grouped around the Norman church of St Ursula. It was deserted.

The Union had something they called police battalions. They came in behind the fighting units, and when an area had been pacified, they were supposed to stay behind and make sure that law and order were restored.

That happened, sometimes. More often, the police battalions were just a euphemistic way of solving the knotty problem of what to do with an occupied and presumably annoyed civilian population. As the Union advance pressed westward to the Atlantic, they had left hundreds of empty villages in their wake. We’d been on the trail of this one particular battalion for a couple of days now.

Nobody was under any illusion that the Alliance forces were any better than the Union; there had been atrocity on both sides. But as journalists we knew which side our bread was buttered on. We were travelling with the Alliance; we were hardly going to file stories accusing them of human rights violations.

We pulled up in St Ursula’s little village square and dismounted from our various vehicles, stretching our legs. The Alliance had already come through here a few hours earlier and pronounced the coast clear, but soldiers fanned out to search the buildings while we journalists stood around smoking and chatting and doing pieces to camera. Someone unpacked a portable catalytic stove and brewed coffee. The smell drifted on the breeze.

I wandered away from the main group. None of the buildings in the village seemed to be damaged. There was no sign that the War had come this way at all. But there were no villagers. There wasn’t even a stray dog.

The school was a little way up the single street from the square. I lit a cigarette and put my hands in my pockets and walked up to it. It was white, and there was a little black bell mounted on a swivel over the front door. I walked up the steps. Someone behind me was shouting.

I looked over my shoulder. One of the Alliance officers was running towards the school, shouting something and waving his arms. It was the little ginger-haired major from New Brunswick, the one who claimed he’d worked on the Chicago Tribune before the War. We all thought he was a dickhead, and did our best to ignore him.

I turned back to the door, turned the handle, and pushed.

“Anyway,’ said the ugly little man on the other side of the desk, “it’s not very much, but it’s something.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’ll keep you off the streets.”

I looked around me and blinked hard. I said, “Did you just offer me a job?”

Somewhere, between pushing open the door of St Ursula’s school and waking up in Rex’s office, three years had passed. I didn’t know how I had returned from France. I didn’t know the War was over. I didn’t know the elves had taken control of Britain.

I had turned up in the village a week or so earlier, an animal dressed in rags, as Liam put it. The village council didn’t know quite what to do with this raving madman. They’d cleaned me up and fed me and, when I didn’t seem too dangerous, Rex offered to give me a job at the Globe’s offices, sweeping up and moving rubbish and stuff.

I didn’t know why I came out of it when I did. Maybe Rex said something that brought me back from wherever I had gone to hide.

I didn’t know what I saw when that school door swung open, but late at night, when I was lying in bed, terrible things beat on the thin walls of sleep, looking for me.

I opened my eyes.

There was a smell of burning in my bedroom.

I sat up. The light of a full moon was flooding in through the windows and falling on an elf which was sitting on the end of my bed smoking a spliff.

I shouted something and flopped back onto my pillows.

“You’re looking well,” said the elf. “Newspaper work obviously agrees with you.”

I said, “Did anyone see you come in?” Elves were not the most popular people in Britain. If anyone had seen this one enter my house the most optimistic thing I could look forward to would be a vigorous lynching.

It took a huge toke on the joint and blew out a stream of smoke that was silver in the moonlight. “It’s half past three in the morning,” it said. “Anyone out at this hour isn’t going to believe they saw me, even if they did. Which they didn’t.”

I sat up again and mashed the pillows down behind my back. The elf called itself 56K Modem. That wasn’t its real name, of course. The elves took whatever pleased them, including their names. Modem once told me its real name. It sounded like snow settling on a frosty road.

“What do you want?”

Modem tapped ash onto the floor. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

“Do you want one?”

“No. But I’m rather hurt you didn’t offer.”

Modem was wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans. Its feet were bare and its fine grey hair was bound into a metre-long rope. I rubbed my face to try and wake myself up. “What do you want?”

“I heard that Rex killed the pig.”

“Everyone else knows about it. Why shouldn’t you?”

“It’s an interesting situation, don’t you think?”

“It’s a fascinating situation, but I really need to get some sleep so I’d appreciate it if you’d come to the point.” Modem had been visiting me, on and off, for a couple of years now. The first time, I had tried to run away screaming, but these days I was almost blasé about it, as if I wasn’t sitting in the same room with one of the most dangerous predators on the planet. I could even do small-talk with it.

On the other hand, I had never found out why Modem visited. It usually spent the time taking the piss out of us, telling me how pathetic we were and how brilliant the elves were. I had a feeling — and this was nothing more than a feeling — that, somewhere in the black hole of memory between St Ursula and Belton, I had done something for the elves, or been forced to do something for them. It was a prospect that brought me out in a cold sweat.

Modem looked at me and tipped its head to one side. The moonlight made it look ethereally beautiful. “We were wondering if you’d like us to intervene.”

“No. Can I get some sleep now?”

Modem looked hurt. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The elves hated mankind, of course. They had been masters of the world for uncountable centuries. And then we had come along with our technologies and we had cut down the forests that were their natural habitats, driving them back and back until all they could do was watch as our cities were built and wait until we were vulnerable.

“We’re quite interested in Rex Preston,” Modem said.

I felt ice touch my heart. “Oh?”

The elf uncrossed its legs, recrossed them, brushed a piece of lint off the thigh of its jeans. “Actually, I’m interested in what you think of Rex Preston.”

I looked at it. “Why?”

Modem thought about it for a moment. “Professional curiosity?”

“He’s a newspaper editor. How on Earth can you be professionally curious about a newspaper editor?” The first rule about the elves was: you didn’t annoy the elves. That was the only rule, really, but I’d learned that there was some latitude. You could annoy some of them more than others; it was just impossible to tell which ones. You had to wing it.

“His paper is on its knees. His wife works for his competitor. He just killed his last animal. But he won’t give up.” Modem tipped its head to one side. “Personally, I find that kind of…devotion interesting. I’ve noticed something similar in the Resistance.”

I burst out laughing. The Resistance was a largely theoretical thing, armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge from the days when the Alliance was based in Southern England. They killed elves here and there — on the orders, legend said, of an ex-New Zealand Special Forces Colonel who had found himself stuck here just after the War. For every Resistance success, the elves destroyed a village or a town. Popular opinion had it that the Resistance had caused more loss of life than the elves themselves.

“Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said. “It would get in the way of putting the paper out.”

56K Modem looked at me and pursed its lips. “All the same,” it said, “perhaps he would bear watching.”

The elves had something roughly analogous to MI5. They called it the Library, and among other things it was charged with dealing with the Resistance. They hunted down ham radio operators and ham TV operators, they hunted down people who put together kit-cars in their garages or played guitars and sang to each other late at night. I thought this must be a pretty thankless task, but Modem seemed to find it fulfilling.

“Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said again.

“Harry Burns is.”

More ice around my heart. “Harry’s not with the Resistance either.”

“He’s at a meeting right now,” Modem told me. “Over on the outskirts of Sheffield. There are five of them in a house in Dore. They’re planning an assassination. We disapprove of assassinations.”

I shook my head. “Not Harry.”

“Harry’s ex-SAS. Good with munitions.” Modem blew gently on the burning coal at the end of the spliff. “An absolute star. No end to the things Harry can do with a few ounces of plastic explosive.”

“What do you want?” I shouted.

Modem looked taken aback. “It’s just this situation with Rex and Liam…”

“Yes!” I yelled. “Intervene! Do whatever you fucking well want!” We sat looking at each other from either end of the bed. “Are you happy now?”

Modem stood up. “I’m never what you’d call happy,” it told me.

Every village has a character. Sometimes, if the village is big enough or unfortunate enough, it might have more than one. Ernie Hazlewright was ours, a big, permanently-annoyed old man who lived just down the road from me. He was a legendary drinker and a brawler of some note, and he’d been barred from all three of the pubs in the area more times than anyone could remember.

By rights, he should have gone down fighting in a punch-up in the street, but he’d actually fallen into the river while walking home pissed out of his mind one night and drowned. I supposed it was a rather sad way for a Falklands veteran to go, but I wasn’t going to miss him.

Still, it was rather a good turnout in the little cemetery down by the river. About thirty people turned up, mostly Ernie’s old drinking buddies. I managed to get a few words from each of them.

The mourners had all gone off to the pub and I was chatting to the vicar when I saw Rex coming down the gravel path from the church. He stopped by Ernie’s grave and stood looking down at the coffin. I went over to him.

“He wasn’t a bad old lad really,” he said. “Just drank too much.”

“He was an absolute nightmare,” I said. “Coming home legless at all hours of the day and night, beating up his wife. You didn’t have to live near him.”

Rex nodded. “That’s true.”

“He smashed all my front windows once.”

“You haven’t been in to the office yet, have you,” he said.

I shook my head. “I came straight here.”

“So you won’t have seen what we found in the yard when we came to work this morning.”

“No, of course not.”

“So the animals didn’t have anything to do with you, then.”

I frowned and felt my stomach start to contract. “What animals?”

Rex shrugged. “Well, I left Harry counting them, but it looked like fifteen or so chickens, half a dozen goats and four pigs. Three sows and a boar.”

I stared at him.

“Anything to do with your source, do you think?”

I had never kept anything from Rex. I had told him everything about myself, at least everything I could remember. He was the only person I had told about 56K Modem and its visits, and I thought it was probably the bravest thing I had ever done. Rex, of course, was an old-fashioned sort of newspaperman. A contact with the elves was literally beyond price, even if it might be morally suspect, and a good journalist always protects his sources.

“Modem came to see me last night,” I said. “It asked me if I wanted them to do something about this thing with you and Liam.”

Rex frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s a game with them, Rex. They think we’re funny. They watch us like we’re some kind of soap opera or something.”

He scratched his head. “Well.” He turned and started to walk up the gravel path towards the entrance to the churchyard. I followed. “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or not.”

“Best not.”

“Aye, maybe you’re right.”

“Someone had better mention to Harry that the elves are on to him as well,” I said.

He glanced at me. “Did your source tell you that as well?” I nodded and he shook his head. “Why don’t they just pick him up then?”

“I told you, they love to play games. Modem said Harry was in Sheffield last night meeting with a Resistance cell.”

Rex put back his head and laughed. “Either your source was playing games, or it’s not as well-informed as we thought. Harry was nowhere near Sheffield last night.”

“Oh?” I was rather hurt. “Where was he then?”

“He was with me, burning down the Chronicle’s office.”

I stood still. Nobody I had spoken to this morning had mentioned anything about a fire, but I supposed they’d all had other things on their minds, like mourning Ernie and getting to the pub for opening time.

Rex walked a few more steps, then he turned and looked at me. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,” he said. “He’d have done it to us.”

That was fair comment, I supposed. “You’ll never get away with it. He’ll know who it was.”

He smiled cheerily. “There’s knowing,” he said, “and there’s proving.”

I caught up with him. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Rex looked thoughtful. “No,” he said finally. “No, neither did I.” He looked about him, then started walking again. “We didn’t put him out of action permanently, anyway. Just sort of charred the office a bit. He’ll be up and running again in a couple of weeks. It’s actually rather funny.”

“How on Earth is trying to burn down your competitor’s office funny, Rex?”

He chuckled. “It’s just that Harry and I spend most of the night skulking around the Chronicle’s office, trying to put Liam out of action for a while so some of the advertisers will sign up with us, and this morning we find the back yard full of livestock, courtesy of your friends.” He shook his head. “I just found it funny, that’s all.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. I knew there would be some kind of price to pay, but there was no way of telling what it would be. Or what would happen when the elves didn’t find us amusing any longer.

“One of us ought to go over to the Chronicle’s office and do some kind of story,” Rex said.

I grinned. “You cheeky old sod.”

“It’d look suspicious if we didn’t. And it’s good copy anyway. ‘Local Newspaper Burns Down.’” He nodded to himself. “Good local copy. The cornerstone of a good local paper.” He looked at me. “Would you like to do that?”

“It would make my day,” I told him.

He nodded again. “Good lad. And if you see Alice, give her my regards.” And he walked away, head up, back straight, whistling a little tune, the happiest editor in Derbyshire.

v

This was written for the Lou Anders anthology Live Without A Net, the premise of which was that all the stories took place in worlds where the internet either did not exist or had been lost. There was a lot of good stuff in that book, and it’s worth tracking down, not least for the stories by Adam Roberts, John Meaney, and John Grant.

Lou gave me a space of about 6,000 words to fit my story into. I’ve never been quite happy with the pacing of this one; I’ve always thought it needs to be two or three thousand words longer. I occasionally take the MS out and read it and fiddle with the idea of doing a sort of Director’s Cut, but I always wind up putting it away again untouched. Maybe one day.

The Incredible Exploding Man

From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

The young lieutenant sitting across from me looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter — the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. I sometimes wondered why we were bothering to keep it secret; if we waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

I leaned forward and raised my voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

The lieutenant just looked blankly at me. Beside him, I saw Former Corporal Fenwick roll his eyes.

“Just trying to make conversation,” I said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who I was — or rather, he had been told I was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the Site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the Site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion — it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a colonel I had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the Lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, I thought I could see my old house. The city had been evacuated shortly after the Accident. It had taken weeks to clear the place out; even after dire stories of death and disaster, even with the cloud hanging over the Site, there were people who refused to leave. The fact that the skies by then were full of military helicopters, some of them black, hadn’t helped. The Government had handled the whole thing poorly, and there had been a couple of armed standoffs between householders and the military. Then a bunch of asshole militiamen had turned up from the wilds of Montana, vowing to oppose the Zionist World Government or the Bilderberg Group or whoever the hell they believed was running the world. I was glad I’d missed the whole thing.

Further out, I could see the buildings of the Collider in the distance. From here, all looked peaceful. Apart from the cloud, towering over everything, it was as if nothing had ever happened here.

The pilot eventually got permission to make final approach and we landed in a park on the edge of Sioux Crossing. The park was ringed by prefabricated buildings stacked four high, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages surrounding a big white ‘H’ sprayed on the ground. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last I saw of him was his back as he strode away from us towards the control centre.

“Talkative fucker,” Former Corporal Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside me.

I sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards us from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.

“Welcoming committee,” said Fenwick. “Nice. I approve.”

“Shut up, Fenwick,” I muttered.

The figure was the base commander, Colonel Newton J Kettering. He marched up to us and saluted. Fenwick returned the salute sloppily, as usual. I didn’t bother.

“Sir,” Kettering said smartly. “Welcome to Camp Batavia.”

“Well thank you kindly, Colonel,” Fenwick said. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship here.”

“Sir. Thank you, sir.” Unlike the lieutenant, Kettering didn’t look tired and ill. He looked alert and bright-eyed. He looked alert and bright-eyed to the point of madness. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d done three tours here, and I didn’t want to spend a minute longer in his company than I had to.

I said to Fenwick, “I’d better supervise the unloading.”

Fenwick gave me his big shit-eating grin. “I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mr Dolan.” I wanted to punch him. “Perhaps Colonel Kettering could give me the guided tour while you’re doing that thing.”

“Sir, I was hoping you could join me in the Officers’ Club,” Kettering said. “We have a luncheon prepared.”

Fenwick’s grin widened. “Colonel, I would love to.”

“We need to get onto the Site as soon as possible,” I said to them both, but mainly to Fenwick. Kettering regarded me with a keen look of hostility. Fenwick pouted; he hated to miss a free meal. I said, “Colonel, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to unload my gear — ”

“Hell,” Fenwick put in amiably. “That’s plenty of time for luncheon. Right, Colonel?”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” Kettering gave me that hostile look again. I had already ruined his carefully-groomed routine; he wasn’t about to let me ruin lunch too. Neither was Fenwick.

I looked at them both. “Half an hour,” I said. “No longer.”

Fenwick and Kettering exchanged a knowing glance. Civilians. Then Fenwick clapped Kettering on the back and said, “Lead the way, Colonel,” and they walked off. A few yards away, Fenwick looked over his shoulder and called, “Would you like us to send a plate out for you, Mr Dolan?”

I shook my head. “No thank you, General, I’ll be fine,” I called back. Fenwick flipped me the bird surreptitiously and turned back to Kettering. The two of them, deep in conversation, walked towards the wall of prefabs.

I watched them go for a few moments, then went back to the helicopter, where, in the style of bored baggage handlers and cargo men the world over, half a dozen Marines were throwing my metal transport cases out onto the grass.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Careful with those things! They’re delicate scientific instruments!”

Actually, the cases were full of old telephone directories, for weight, but I had to keep up the charade.

I had been in a foul mood when I arrived for work that morning. I drove the short distance from home to the facility, stopped briefly at the gate to show my ID, then drove to the building housing the small control room Professor Delahaye and his team were using.

Most of them were already there ahead of me. Delahaye was over to one side of the room, conferring with half a dozen of his colleagues and grad students. Others were busily typing at consoles and peering at monitors. Nowhere, though, could I see the shock of white hair that I was looking for.

Delahaye spotted me and walked over. “What are you doing here, Dolan?” he asked. “Surely you’ve got enough material by now?”

“I need a conclusion,” I said, still looking around the room. “Just a last bit of colour.”

“Well, try not to get in the way will you? There’s a good chap.” Delahaye was a small, agitated Londoner who couldn’t see why a journalist had been foisted on him and his experiment.

“I don’t see Larry,” I said. “Is he coming in today?”

Delahaye looked around him. “Maybe. Who knows? The experiment’s almost over, he doesn’t need to be here. Is it important?”

Is it important? No, maybe not to you, Professor. I said, “I just wanted a quick word, that’s all.”

Delahaye nodded irritably. “All right. But just —“

“Try not to get in the way. Yes, Professor, I know. I’ll just stand over there in the corner.” As if I was going to reach over and press some important big red button, or fall into a piece of machinery. Nothing I did here was going to make the slightest bit of difference to the enormous energies being generated, nanoseconds at a time, far below our feet in the tunnels of the Collider. And even if I did manage to screw something up, it wouldn’t affect the experiment all that much; all the results were in, Delahaye was just using up his allotted time with a last couple of shots.

The Professor gave me a last admonitory glare and went back to the little group across the room. There was nothing world-shaking going on here; the Collider was brand new — the offices still smelled of fresh paint. Delahaye was just running warm-up tests, calibrating instruments, the high-energy physics equivalent of running-in a new car. I’d been there two months, working on an article about the new facility for Time. I thought the article was shaping up to be interesting and informative. The worst thing about the whole fucking business was that it had brought Larry into my life.

Andy Chen came over and we shook hands. “Been fun having you around, man,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Right.”

“Nah, really,” he insisted. “You piss old man Delahaye off mightily. It’s been beautiful to watch.”

Despite being beyond pissed off myself, I smiled. “You’re welcome. What’s for you now? Back to MIT?”

He shook his head. “Been offered a job at JPL.”

“Hey, excellent, man. Congratulations.”

“Ah, we’ll see. It’s not pure research, but at least it gets me away from that monstrous old fart.” He looked over at Professor Delahaye, who was regaling some students with some tale or other. Andy snorted. “Brits,” he said. “Who knows?” He looked over to where a small commotion had begun around the door. “Well, we can get the party started now.”

I looked towards the door and saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of the others in the room, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “Andy,” I said, “I need to have a quick word with Larry.” We shook hands again and I launched myself through the crowd. “Great news about JPL, man. Really.”

Larry was drunk again. That much was obvious even before I got to him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was clutching a tattered sheaf of paper in one hand and a shrink-wrapped six pack of Dr Pepper in the other. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.

“Larry,” I said as I reached him.

The mirrored lenses turned towards me. “Hey. Alex. Dude.” There was a powerful aura of Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars around him, and when he grinned at me his teeth were yellow and uneven.

Rolling Stone had called him ‘Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin.’ One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a legend at the age of 24. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of Harvard for an incident involving a home-made railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage TransAm, but that was just part of his mystique, and pretty much every other university on Earth had offered him a place. His doctoral thesis was titled Why All Leptons Look Like Joey Ramone But Smell Like Lady Gaga, and it was generally agreed that it would have been embarrassing if it had won him the Nobel Prize. Bad enough that it was shortlisted. His postdoc research had been a mixture of the mundane and the wildly exotic; he cherry-picked his way through some of the wilder outlands of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, came up with a brand new theory of stellar evolution, published a paper which not only challenged the Big Bang but made it seem rather dull and simple-minded. Larry Day. Brilliant physicist. Brilliant drunk. Brilliant serial womaniser. He and I had visited all the bars in Sioux Crossing, and been thrown out of most of them.

“I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.

He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”

I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”

In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”

“Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “’Ah. Okay’?”

He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”

Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.

“… Three… two…” said Delahaye.

“You fucking bastard!” I screamed into Larry’s face.

“… One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.

I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the Colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a civilian specialist. To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA, which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.

“How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the wheel.

I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”

Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “General.”

I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a General than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.

There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an ‘up’ and a ‘down.’ Or maybe it was a ‘down’ and an ‘up.’ I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was… I was…

It took me a long time to get my bearings. Or maybe I never did, maybe it was all an accident. I walked. Travelled, anyway. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t be sure that I was seeing it. I wanted to curl up and die, and I did in fact try that a couple of times, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even curl up, in the sense that I understood it. I held my hands up and looked at them. They were… they were…

At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred million years, I came upon a… structure. Too small and too large to see, all at once. It looked like… there’s no way I can describe what it looked like, but I touched it and I reached down and I curled around it and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”

I turned my head, astonished that I still remembered how. A soldier was standing a few feet from me, illuminated by moonlight, pointing an automatic weapon at me.

“Who are you?” I asked, and almost choked myself because I was still trying to speak as I might have when I was there. I coughed and retched, and at some point I realised I was naked and freezing cold. I said again, “Who are you?”

“Who are you?” shouted the soldier.

“Dolan,” I said, and this time I managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”

There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He claims there’s been an accident.”

At ground level, fifteen years of abandonment were more obvious. There were Green Berets stationed at the gate, and they spent a good half-hour checking our documents and establishing our bona-fides before letting us through. As well as animals, the world’s Press were always trying to sneak through the fence. Nobody had made it yet. Nobody we knew about, anyway.

The buildings were weathered and dirty, the grass waist-high, despite regular helicopter inundations of herbicides, and it was starting to encroach on the cracked asphalt of the roadways.

I drove until we were a few hundred feet from the control room building, directly under the slowly-twisting spiral cloud. Unable to hush the cloud up, the Government had admitted that there had been an accident at the Collider, explaining it as an electromagnetic effect. Scientists — Government-sponsored and otherwise — were still arguing about this.

Fenwick looked up at the white helix and curled his lips. He was a man of many attributes, very few of them admirable, but he was not a coward. He had been told that there was no danger in him coming this close to Point Zero, and he believed that. It had never occurred to him that a significant fraction of the Defence Budget was devoted to stopping animals getting this close to Point Zero.

There had been much discussion about what to do about him after I appeared out of thin air in front of him. A quick look at his file suggested that appealing to his patriotic instincts would be pointless, and that giving him large amounts of money would be counterproductive and fruitless. A working-group of thirty very very bright men and women had been convened simply to study the problem of What To Do About Corporal Robert E Lee Fenwick, who one night while out on patrol at Fort Bragg had seen me appear from a direction that no one in the universe had ever seen before.

Their solution was elegant and, I thought, unusually humane. Corporal Fenwick was a simple organism, geared mainly to self-gratification, and his loyalty — and his silence — had been bought by the simple expedient of promoting him to the rank of three-star general. What fascinated me was that Fenwick never showed the slightest gratitude for this. It was as if the alternative never even occurred to him. He seemed totally oblivious to the concept that it would have been simpler, and far more cost-effective, to simply kill him.

“Here we are, then,” Fenwick said.

“Yes,” I said. “Here we are. I cannot argue with that.” I looked at the cloud, looked at the buildings around us. Fenwick had surprised everyone by taking to his new rank like a duck to water. He was still in the Army, but he was no longer of the Army. He had no duties to speak of, apart from the duties that involved me. His General’s pay had been backdated for a decade, and he had bought his parents a new house in West Virginia and his brother a new car, and he lived with his child bride Roselynne and their half-dozen squalling brats in a magnificent mansion in Alexandria, Virginia. The kids went to the best schools, and in moments of despair I hung onto that. The eldest girl, Bobbi-Sue, was starting at Princeton next year. Because of what had happened to me the Fenwick boys would not work all their lives in the local coal mines; the Fenwick girls would not marry the high school jock only to see him become a drunken wife-beater. They would be lawyers and doctors and Congressmen and Senators, and maybe even Presidents. In my darkest moments I looked at Former Corporal Fenwick, and I almost thought this was all worth it. Almost.

“How long do we have?” he asked. He always asked that.

I shrugged. “Minutes?” I always said that, too. “Days?” I opened the door and got out of the Hummer. Fenwick got out too, and together we unloaded the transport cases. We carried them into one of the other buildings a little way from the control room, and emptied them of their telephone books. Then we put them back into the Humvee and dumped my gear on the ground beside the vehicle.

Fenwick checked his watch. “Better be getting back,” he said.

I nodded. In a couple of hours there would be an overflight. An unmarked black helicopter without an ID transponder would pass overhead, ignoring local traffic control until the last moment, when it would transmit a brief and curt series of digits that identified it as belonging to the NSA. It would dip down below the radar cover, hover for a few moments, and then lift up and fly off again. And that would be me, leaving. “This is stupid. Someone’s going to work it out one day,” I said.

Fenwick shrugged. “Not my problem.” He put out his hand and I shook it. When I first met him he had been rangy and fidgety. Now he was calm and plump and sleek, and in my heart I couldn’t grudge him that. “Happy trails, Alex,” he said.

“You too, Bobby Lee. See you soon.”

“Let’s fucking hope, right?”

I smiled. “Yes. Let’s.”

Fenwick got back into the Hummer, gave me a wave, and drove off back towards the gate, where he would tell the Green Berets that the civilian specialist had arranged a separate means of departure. Which would, in its own way, be true.

I watched the Humvee disappear into the distance. When it was gone, I picked up my stuff and carried it into one of the nearby buildings. I dumped it in an empty office, unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor, wheeled a chair over to the window, and sat down.

The room was small and windowless and the only furniture in it was a table and a single folding plastic chair. The captain was using the chair. I was standing on the other side of the table from him, flanked by two armed soldiers.

“Now, all I need to know, son, is your name and how you managed to get onto this base bare-ass naked without anybody seeing you,” the captain said. He’d said it a number of times.

“My name is Alexander Dolan,” I said. “I’m a journalist. I was in the control room with Professor Delahaye’s group. I think there’s been an accident.” I’d said this a number of times, too.

The captain smiled and shook his head. He was base security, or maybe Intelligence, I didn’t know. He was the image of reasonableness. We could, he seemed to be saying, keep doing this all day and all night until I told him what he wanted to know.

“Go and find Professor Delahaye,” I said. “He’ll vouch for me.” I couldn’t understand what the military were doing at the Collider; maybe the accident had been much worse than I thought. Which would make it truly world-shaking.

“I don’t know any Professor Delahaye, son,” the captain said. “Did he help you break in here?”

I sighed and shook my head. “No. He’s supervising the startup experiments. Look, if he was hurt, maybe one of the others can come here. Doctor Chen or Doctor Morley, maybe. Everyone knows me.”

“I don’t know any of these people, Mr Dolan,” said the captain. “What I want to know is who you are, and how in the name of blue blazes you managed to break into Fort Bragg without a stitch of clothing.”

“Fort Bragg?”

The captain gave me a wry, long-suffering, don’t-bullshit-me-son sort of look.

I looked around the room. There was only one door. It looked solid and it had big locks on it. But looking around the room again, I noticed that if I looked at it a certain way, it was not a locked room at all. It was just planes of mass that didn’t even butt up against each other. It was actually wide open.

“I thought this was the Sioux Crossing Collider,” I told the captain.

He blinked. “The what?”

I said, “I don’t like it here,” and I stepped outside the room, went back there.

I had brought with me a gallon jug of water, a little solid-fuel camping stove, some basic camping cookware, and half a dozen MREs. I took the first package and opened it. Meals Ready to Eat. But only if you were desperate or not particularly fussy. The package contained beef ravioli in meat sauce, chipotle snack bread, a cookie, cheese spread, beef snacks, caffeine mints, candy, coffee, sugar, salt, gum, some dried fruit and some other bits and pieces. I’d heard that the French Army’s MREs came with a pouch of red wine. If only The Accident had happened at CERN…

I became aware of… something. If a solid object could have the equivalent of a negative image, this was it. A kind of negative tornado, turned inside-out. I stepped towards it…

And found myself standing at the SCC, outside the building where I had last seen Professor Delahaye and his team and Larry Day.

Above me towered a colossal sculptured pillar of cloud, rotating slowly in the sky. I tilted my head back and looked up at it, my mouth dropping open.

And all of a sudden I was writhing on the ground in agony, my muscles cramping and spasming. I tried to step away, but I was in too much pain to be able to focus.

And that was how they caught me the second time, lying in wait because they half-expected me to return to the Collider, and then tasering me half to death. Someone walked up to me and thumped his fist down on my thigh. When he took his hand away there was a thin plastic tube sticking out of my leg and then there was a wild roaring in my head and a wave of blackness broke over me and washed me away.

They tried the same trick on the captain and the two guards as they had on Former Corporal Fenwick. I was beginning to think that I was travelling across the world leaving generals in my wake. They showered them with money and promotions, and for some reason it didn’t work with them the way it had worked with Fenwick. They blabbed their stories, and eventually the government had to make them all disappear. The officers were in solitary confinement in Leavenworth and the people they blabbed to were sequestered somewhere.

I finished my dinner and sat by the window drinking coffee and smoking a small cigar. The cigar was from a tin I’d found in my rucksack; a little gift from Fenwick. I’d heard the helicopter fly over while I was eating; it had dipped down momentarily a few hundred metres from Point Zero — which was actually an act of insane bravery on the part of its pilot in order to maintain what I considered the fatuous and transparent fiction of my ‘departure’ — and then lifted away again to the West. Now everything was quiet and night was falling.

I remembered when this whole place had been busy and bustling. All abandoned now, the surviving staff scattered to other facilities. I thought about Delahaye and Andy Chen and Caitlin Morley and all the others who had been in that room with me on the day of The Accident. Delahaye had been an uptight asshole and Larry had been having an affair with my wife, but I’d liked the others; they were good, calm, professional people and it had been good to know them.

I was resting my arm on the windowsill. As I looked at it, the hairs on my forearm began to stir slowly and stand up.

This time, it was a general opposite me, and I was sitting down. To one side of the general were two middle-aged men in suits; on the other side was a youngish man with thinning hair and an eager expression.

“You tasered me and drugged me,” I told them. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

“We apologise for that, Mr Dolan,” said one of the middle-aged men. “We couldn’t risk you… leaving again. Put yourself in our position.”

I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous — or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully — the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.

“I would love to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”

“It’s only a precaution, Mr Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”

I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.

“We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”

“Something?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”

I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife. “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was…” I looked at them. “Sorry. I won’t image it.”

“Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

“Where do you… go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere.”

The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”

I leaned forward.

“A day after your first, um, appearance there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

A terrible thought occurred to me. “That might have been me.”

The other middle-aged man shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened again yesterday in Nevada. While you were unconscious here. A small town called Spicerville was totally destroyed. Eight hundred people dead.”

“We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” the general said. “The Egyptians say theirs was a meteorite strike. But we think it’s… someone like you.”

“Whatever happened at the SCC, it changed you,” said the younger man with what I thought was admirable understatement. “We think it changed this other person too, whoever they are. But where you seem to have found a way to…cope with your…situation, the other person has not.”

“I haven’t found a way to cope at all,” I told them. I looked at the table between us. It was a rather cheap-looking conference table, the kind of thing the government bought in huge amounts from cut-rate office supply stores. It seemed that I had never looked at things properly before; now I could see how the table was constructed, from the subatomic level upward.

“Obviously this…person is dangerous,” one of the middle-aged men said. “Any help you could give us would be very much appreciated.”

I sighed. I took the table to pieces and put it back together in a shape that I found rather pleasing. Nobody else in the room found it pleasing at all, though, judging by the way they all jumped up and ran screaming for the door. I slipped away from the manacles and went back there.

I went outside and stood in front of the building with my hands in my pockets. About seven hours ago I had been sitting in a briefing room in a White House basement with the President and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spear-point of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The cross-hairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

“Well,” said the President when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a very strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr Dolan.”

I looked into the sky. The Moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows from the buildings. There was an electrical expectancy in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards from me, looking about him and making strange noises. I sighed.

“Larry,” I called.

Larry looked round, saw me, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

Larry didn’t remember The Accident, which was good. And he didn’t remember what came after, which was even better. But he was surprisingly adaptable, and I couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

I walked over and stood looking at him. He looked like part of a comic strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in Frame One, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely-distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart. And that was Larry, a man impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about twice normal size.

“There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

“How long?” asked that eerie voice.

“Fifteen years.”

Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye…”

“All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me. “You seem to be doing all right, though.”

I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

“That’s an… unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.

Larry sighed. “You’d think I’d get X-ray vision or something. Not…” he waved his not-quite-hands at me, “… this.”

“Larry,” I said, “you need help.”

Larry laughed. “Oh? You think? Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

“Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was… everything was the wrong… shape…”

I took a step forward and said, “Larry…”

“And before that… I was here, and we were having this conversation…”

“It’s just déjà vu,” I told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

I shook my head. “Too fucking many,” I said, and I plunged my hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled us both back into Hell.

I still wasn’t sure why I went back after escaping the second time. Maybe I just wanted to know what had happened to me and there was no way to find out on my own. Maybe I was afraid that if I spent too long there I would forget what it was like to be human.

The general and his three friends were unavailable. I later discovered that they had been in hospital ever since they saw what I turned the table into; one of them never recovered. In their place, I was assigned two more generals — one from the Air Force and one from the Army — and an admiral, and a team of eager young scientists, all looked after by quiet, efficient people from the CIA and the NSA.

I was questioned, over and over and over again, and the answers I was able to give them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked me, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all I could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

We were unprepared. We knew too little, and that was why he nearly got me that first time. I knew that Point Zero was like a beacon there, a great solid negative tornado, and one of the few useful pieces of advice I was able to contribute was to keep a watch on the SCC for any manifestations. I went back to our old house in Sioux Crossing to wait, because I knew. I knew he was looking for a landmark, a reference point, because that was what I had done. When the manifestations began, I was bustled in great secrecy to the Site, and I saw him appear for the first time. Heard him speak for the first time. Thought, not for the last time, Of course. It had to be Larry.

He was confused, frightened, angry, but he recovered quickly. I told him what had happened — what we understood, anyway — and he seemed to pull his exploding form together a little. He looked about him and said, This must be what God feels like, and my blood ran cold. And then I felt him try to take me apart and remake me, the way I had remade the table.

I did the first thing that crossed my mind. I grabbed him and went back there with him, and I let him go and came back here.

The second time he came back, it was the same thing. A few random manifestations, some baffling but relatively minor destruction. Then he found his way to Point Zero, confused, amnesiac. But he came to the same conclusion. This must be what God feels like. And I had to take him back there.

And again. And again. And again.

I walked an unimaginable distance. It took me an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but there were structures, colossal things that were almost too small to see: the remains of Professor Delahaye and the other victims of The Accident. There were also the remains of a specially-trained SEAL team, sent in here by the President — not the present one but her predecessor — when he thought he could create a group of all-American superheroes. I, and pretty much every scientist involved in investigating The Accident, argued against that, but when the President says jump you just ask what altitude he wants, so the SEALs remain. There is no Life or Death there, only Existence, so Professor Delahaye and the others exist in a Schrödinger not-quite-state, trying to make sense of what and where they are. If they ever succeed, I’m going to be busy.

The scientists call this ‘Calabi-Yau space,’ or, if they’re trying to be particularly mysterious, ‘The Manifold.’ Which it may or may not be, nobody knows. The String Theorists, overwhelmed with joy at having eyewitness evidence of another space, named it, even though I could give them little in the way of confirmatory testimony. Calabi-Yau space exists a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what I used to think of as ‘normal’ space, but it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon between them.

Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that won’t be imaged. Someone once told me that the odds of The Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only Either/Or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.

Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the ‘real’ world, really is like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods HP Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the Human Race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatised to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him there screws him up all over again while I can cross back and forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains Humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet — and we’ve done this particular little pantomime twenty-two times so far — he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back there. I’ll have to fight him here, and it’ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/Or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.

Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before The Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.

And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larry is not even the Nightmare Scenario. The Nightmare Scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way here. If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.

Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone here would recognise. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came here. People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

“Mr Dolan,” said the President.

“Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

“We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpiński. “The others?”

“I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”

Sierpiński shrugged. We don’t know. Maybe we should make that our Company Song.

“You look tired,” said the President.

“I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I was tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby balding middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey, Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I really want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.

I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.

“Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.

v

Ah, ‘Exploding Man.’ This one was fun. A few years ago I did an online writing course run by my friend Jeremy C Shipp, who writes extremely accomplished bizarro fiction. It was a great experience, and one of the exercises was to write a short story for critiquing by the rest of the group, then rewrite it and have it critiqued again. So I wrote this. I have no idea where the idea came from, or the characters; I just sat down and wrote it.

The first draft was dreadful, it took its lumps in the first critiquing, and I went away and instead of tweaking it I more or less took it apart and rewrote it completely over the course of a few days, and it was better-received the second time round.

Some time later, the sainted Ian Whates was putting together his first Solaris Rising anthology, and asked me if I had anything I could submit, so I sent him what was, at the time, called “The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man.” Ian liked the story, which made it into the book, but Peter Hamilton already had a piece in there with “The Return of…” in the title, so that had to go.

Some time after that, there was a signing of the book at Forbidden Planet, which I kind of gate-crashed — I love signing books; I’d sign other people’s if I was asked — and at that I met mighty Solaris editor Ben Smith, who asked me if I was working on anything else, and I mentioned I’d been working on a novel for some time.

About a year later, Ben got back in touch. ‘Just wondering if you’d finished that novel you told me about…’

And, long story short, that’s how Europe In Autumn came to be published. Just goes to show, you never can tell.

About the Author

Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield in 1960. After reading American Studies at the University of Nottingham, he moved into journalism. He is the author of five collections of short stories, most recently As the Crow Flies (Bewrite, 2004), the novels The Villages (Cosmos Books, 2001) and Europe in Autumn (Solaris, 2014), and the novella The Push (NewCon Press, 2009). Both The Push and Europe in Autumn have been shortlisted for BSFA awards. His next novel, Community, which is a spin-off from Europe in Autumn though not a direct sequel, is due from Solaris in 2016. Dave currently lives in London.

Content

Dave Hutchinson
Sleeps With Angels

An Introduction

The Fortunate Isles

Sugar Engines

Dalí’s Clocks

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

All The News, All The Time, From Everywhere

The Incredible Exploding Man

About the Author