HOW DID THIS chewing bastard finger him? What was going on? He felt a twinge of regret at even opening his online email package. All he had come in here for was a chance to track down Rohan Vero, an act that had led him up so many dead ends that he doubted he’d ever be able to manoeuvre himself back out into the real world. He had sworn to himself to cut all links, which was why he had discarded his mobile phone. But he wanted to see if Keiko was trying to contact him. He had felt tartly irritated to discover she had not.
Where had this freak picked up his email address? Bo was no geek, although he had taken computer studies in his final few years at school – and failed it spectacularly – when the Sinclair ZX-81 was still making jaws drop. He’d got his parents to fork out for a Spectrum. He’d sold his dad on it by telling him that it contained more sophisticated circuitry than was used on any of NASA’s Apollo missions. He’d spent three fucking hours on Christmas morning keying in a couple of hundred lines of Basic from the user’s manual in order to display a Union Jack on the TV screen.
All he ever used it for was to play Jet Set Willy. Or, oh the hilarity:
10 WRITE ‘Jacko is a spastic’
20 GO TO 10
RUN
He pulled the lapels of his denim jacket closer around his throat and touched the edges of the black beanie rammed on to his head. Keiko always found his wearing of woollen hats sexy, she said, because his longish, dark-brown hair would curl under them. It works for me, she’d explain, when he gave her a confused look. Now it worked for him because it made him feel concealed, no matter how demonstrably untrue that was.
Maybe I should just give in, he thought, suddenly. Let them have me. But an internal instinct kicked out at him. He could not, would not allow that to happen. This wasn’t the cosy seduction of something like vampirism. You didn’t get a couple of cool bite marks on the neck and a fashionably pale look. You didn’t get to join the ranks of the immortal and drink salty Shiraz for the rest of your days. You died. You died horribly.
He emailed a friend, a long-suffering guy who was hot on Apple Macintosh computers and who more often than not received emails and phone calls that began: Hi Mike, how are you – we’ve got to get out for a beer again soon. By the way … I’m having trouble with my Mac, and asked him how his address could have become available to the public domain.
Mike replied within ten minutes:
LMAO
Which was how, spam-filtering system or not, Bo learned it was a stupid question.
He felt the occasional jab of adrenaline threaten to shred his stomach as a person walked by the window, looking in on the intent ranks of webheads, but it was not as acute a feeling as his journey on the tube. He found himself casting nervous glances around the room nevertheless, and jumping whenever somebody walked behind his chair. But it was better than venturing out at night. The people, Christ, some of the people in this city after dark, it was as if they had been injected with a kind of intensity drug. They didn’t gaze benignly around them as they pottered about their evening activities. They stared with a blatant ferocity that threatened to scorch the skin off you if it fell your way.
He pulled up Google and entered chewingman. There were no relevant entries, unless the figure shadowing Bo was a cunnilingus expert working on porn films out of Venice Beach, California. The Yahoo! profile for chewingman was similarly fruitless, devoid of any details. Bo rubbed his eyes and wondered if he should contact Detective Inspector Laurier and tell him of the email. Yahoo! would presumably have to divulge chewingman’s whereabouts if the police came knocking, but Bo had the feeling that any given address would be bogus or, if it wasn’t, then chewingman certainly wouldn’t be sitting on the sofa with his feet up when the feds piled through the door.
He made fists of his hands, squeezed until the knuckles were sore, and his nails were digging into the meat of his palms, and then he replied.
From: saycheese@mac.com
To: chewingman@yahoo.co.uk
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:07
Subject: Re: progress
Who are you?
A few seconds after he sent the message, his inbox indicated a new arrival.
From: chewingman@yahoo.co.uk
To: saycheese@mac.com
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:07
Subject: Re: Re: progress
dnt mtr wh i am. jst knw this. we wl bry u in pces if u dnt flfl yr role in our rsrectn. lt th mp thru. lt yr veins b r roads. lt yr skn b th rf ovr r hds. lt ths hapn. b th mp or die
Bo slid back sharply on his chair, creating a shriek on the linoleum floor that brought hisses and shouts of rebuke from his fellow browsers.
This isn’t a fucking library, he wanted to yell at them, but he was too afraid of how hysterical his voice might sound. That first sentence
dnt mtr wh i am.
It was not so obvious, once you read it a couple of times, that the wh meant who. It appalled Bo to be thinking more that perhaps it meant what. And rsrectn. What did that mean? He knew it was the skeletonised remains of resurrection – he had taken his NCTJ course in Teeline shorthand and, though he never used it any more, he remembered the basic idea of reducing any word mostly to its consonants – but whose resurrection? How could he have a hand in it if he didn’t know what he was supposed to do?
Almost immediately, he felt a strong, molten pain run through the centre of his head. He closed his eyes and put out a hand to steady himself. His hand slid over the surface of the table, skidding off the edge, almost spilling him from his chair as his fulcrum was suddenly, severely shifted. A woman’s voice said: Oh Jesus. Oh my God.
He snapped his eyes open and saw a long bloody smear running half the length of his desk. The woman was sitting next to him, leaning away, her face white. A man had shot out of his seat and was screaming for the management, pointing a wavering forefinger at Bo and his mess, his face etched with naked aggression suggesting that bleeding wounds, along with chewing gum and dogs, ought to be left out on the street.
Bo tried to say something, to explain it away as an accident with scissors, but by then pandemonium was close to breaking out, and his attention was being drawn away by the strange thing he had seen when he closed his eyes.
A woman was shouting don’t touch him, don’t touch him, you don’t know what he’s got. Two men came out of an office at the back of the cyber café, and Bo decided it was time to make himself scarce.
He had the sense to quickly sign out of his Internet account, and then he marched straight out of the café, his damaged left hand tucked into his right armpit.
The traffic on Victoria Street was a slap to the face. It roused him more effectively than any number of the coffees he’d been downing. The strange grid that had overlaid the iridescent mud of his interior vision flashed back, as if it had been trapped there, like a neon sign that remains for some time after it has disappeared from view. It resembled some poorly rendered street map, all uneven lines, grunge patterns, something created by a child with a crayon. He closed his eyes again to improve its definition, and pondered the section that was – he struggled for a word to describe it – bruised. It was less bright that the other sections, and some of its lines were incomplete.
Bo heard a car horn and swung his head towards the sound, his eyes still closed. The grid turned on an invisible axis. Sudden excitement leaped inside him. It was a map. And now he saw how to decipher its codes. The leading edge, that part at the bottom of his vision, was where he was standing. All that was missing was a large red arrow and the words YOU ARE HERE.
The spoilt part of the map was away to the right, high up. If he opened his eyes while looking at it, he would resemble somebody trying to recall an important fact, or delving for an answer to a tricky question. All he had to do to reach that section was keep his own position locked to the base and follow the lines that angled their way to it. The novelty of the task almost inured him to its bizarreness, its inherent threat. Part of him again wondered, almost disconnectedly, if this was some symptom of cancer, a tumour inoperably deep within his brain.
Before he knew it, he had carved a route deep into Pimlico, following a vaguely southeast direction. He bypassed many people and tried to keep his mind on the task so that the brilliant, fiery suggestion of their organs, embedded in the darker flesh of bodies being exposed to him, would be quelled. He tried to ignore the pangs in his belly when these little knots of tissue were made known. He swallowed the saliva that suddenly seemed too copious for his mouth. The way his teeth felt larger than normal, clenching together as if of their own accord they had developed a need to bite something, was a factor he ought not to dwell upon, for now.
Other people were unreadable, to him, as if their clothes were made from lead to defeat his X-ray capabilities. All of these, without exception, assessed him with a passion he noticed peripherally. As on the tube train, whenever he returned their gaze, their focus was elsewhere. The heat in their eyes remained disguised; he was no clearer as to whether it was born of hostility or admiration. At least in daylight, he felt able to withstand that concentration of curiosity. At night-time, the fear of it was crippling.
He turned and strode, strode and turned, moving through streets and alleyways as if on the end of a cable that was being wound in. The grid behind his eyelids shifted liquidly as he changed direction, as though on a gyroscope. That strange, bruised area drew nearer.
He faltered when he began to consider what that decayed chunk of the map might represent. It occurred to him that it might be a trap or, less grand but no less worrying, a wild goose chase, and that the object of his search would be nothing he could relate to this violated, organic reference point. He had to go on in order to prove his sanity was intact.
He opened his eyes and saw someone staring straight at him, unashamed, unaffected by the niceties the other Bo-watchers were affording him. This man locked eyes with his own in an unspoken challenge. Here it is, Bo thought, here’s where things come to a head. But the man remained still, eyeing Bo as if waiting for him to make the first move. He was Bo’s height, with longish hair, straggly and unwashed, plastered against his scalp like something painted on. His clothes were besmirched, hanging off his frame. When Bo opened his mouth to ask what the fuck the other guy’s problem was, the other guy opened his mouth too.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Bo said, and the guy mouthed the same words. He stepped back and realised he was standing before his reflected image in a shop window. He couldn’t get over the bug-out weirdness of his eyeballs. It was as if they were on the verge of prolapse.
It’s because my vision is deteriorating … it’s because I’m becoming like them …
He broke into a trot, forcing himself to close his Mussolini eyes, his Rasputin eyes, and read the map, get back to what it was he needed to do. A sinuous voice rose up, like something trapped for too long in stagnant water: What will it mean to be like them?
Nothing good. Nothing good.
His feet were hurting. He was mildly astonished that he had not yet bumped into another pedestrian, or a lamp post, or walked out in front of traffic, even though he was spending more than half the time with his eyes shut. The corroded part of the grid suddenly meshed with the point at which he was standing. He opened his eyes.
Battersea Dogs’ Home.
He had been expecting something more … dynamic, more apocalyptic. What, exactly, he didn’t know, but a look to his left, where the iconic, disused power station stood, like a giant table that has been upended, gave him some measure.
He waited at the entrance, listening to the yelps and whines of the inhabitants, wondering when exactly the treasure he had been tracking would yield itself. Nervously, he licked his lips. A defining moment lay ahead, he felt. Something that would seal his involvement with the London that was dissolving around him. Either that, or abject disappointment, a return to square one.
There was nobody sitting in the reception area behind the entrance, and no signs of human life deeper into the building, as he passed through doors marked STAFF ONLY. The smell of dog food, dog shit, and dog was everywhere. He turned a corner and found a corridor that looked to have been partially painted with blood, before its decorator got bored, or distracted, or the thing that was providing the colour ran out of product.
More streaks meandered across the floor further along, leading to a pair of swing doors. Bo marched grimly up to them and forced them open, trying to avoid the soft impact marks where whatever it was had been unceremoniously dragged through into the next room. What greeted him seemed suddenly so commonplace as to confuse him regarding its nature. It was like walking in on a bunch of staff performing stock-taking duties; it was a scene so pathetic, so repellent, that it inspired only pity in him, rather than shock or fright.
The middle-aged man on the floor was naked from the chest up, his body spattered and slathered with blood from the six or seven dog corpses lying around him. All of their bellies had been rent apart, their ribcages gleaming jaggedly. The man was still plucking at fragments of meat poking from the torn hides, jabbing them absently between his teeth while he gazed at the far wall, in the same way a compulsive eater will burrow into a bag of chocolates or chipsticks. Bo watched the man occasionally dabble his fingers into the wounds he had created, or press a faded eyeball, his expression frozen into childish wonder at death’s accommodating nature; no indignity was too great. Even when he realised Bo was in the room with him, his lassitude was too pronounced to impinge on his meal. He looked like a glutton who had reached bursting point.
Bo squatted next to him and tried to understand what it was he had to do.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
The other man blinked at him, docilely, bovinely, and said: ‘Shand. I think.’
‘Shand. What are you doing?’
Shand surveyed the carnage around him as if it were the aftermath of a child’s session with a stack of building blocks.
‘I was hungry,’ he said. ‘I wanted to eat, but I wasn’t … I’m not strong enough to take what I’m really hungry for.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s been so long. I forgot how. I’m weak. We’re all weak. We’re all grubbing. Surviving. Sleeping … it’s made us so weak.’
Bo spread his hands. The dog nearest to him, a German Shepherd puppy that had been scooped clean as though ready for the taxidermist’s magic, moved its leg suddenly, violently, and was still. Bo tried not to flinch, was in fact trying supremely not to flee the corridor, screaming, begging for help.
‘Where is everyone?’ he asked. ‘Where are all the staff?’
Shand seemed unable to comprehend.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Bo asked.
Shand blinked at him, suddenly resembling a lost little boy. His skin, those parts of it that weren’t painted with canine blood, was almost lambently clean and tight, free of wrinkles. His eyes were clear, no hint of shadows or blood. When Shand talked, the glint of brilliant, even teeth drew Bo’s attention to his mouth. There was something else about him that gave Bo the creeps, but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was.
‘What are you supposed to do?’ Shand asked. ‘What are WE supposed to do? You tell us. YOU TELL US!’
Bo tried to step back from the sudden tirade, flashing his hands up to ward off the flecks of dog and saliva being scattered his way. He skidded on blood, or piss, or faeces, and went down hard on his backside. He scuttled back, alarmed by Shand’s electrifying change of mood, abruptly afraid that his hunger might not yet be sated and he’d take a swipe for the soft parts of his own body.
‘I don’t know,’ Bo said, finally. ‘I’ve not been … taught how to.’ As he said the words, Shand seemed to withdraw all his spikes. He studied Bo’s face as if it had suddenly changed into something new, something that commanded attention and respect. He wiped away the blood bracketing his lips, and pushed away the remains of all the lost puppies who had found a warm home in his gut. He stood up, his cheap slip-on shoes struggling to gain purchase in the slick of mongrel effluvia. He nodded, though Bo was no longer saying anything. He regarded his right hand, which he clenched and relaxed a few times, as if surprised by the dexterity he could see there. And then he left, quickly, facing Bo as he backed towards the doors, bowing slightly, his eyes reverentially averted.
Bo left soon after, eager not to be discovered standing in the middle of a pack of obliterated animals, but could not see where the man had gone. A flurry of movement up ahead suggested that someone was hurrying away on the overland rail tracks, but Bo was not up for a pursuit. He didn’t know what he might say if he caught up with Shand. He decided that he didn’t want to know where he was going, especially if he was still hungry.
As the sun touched the rooftops, darkening to the colour of melted butter, Bo made his way back to his bolthole on foot – too wary to take any form of public transport that might have somebody else’s face inches away from his – and locked himself away with the forgotten paperbacks, reading until he was distracted enough to be able to fall asleep. He had heard of books saving lives before, but never in such fraught circumstances.
In the shimmering seconds before actual sleep received him, he heard noises on the street that suggested the onset of a dream, or a nightmare. Awful, carnal, carnivorous sounds. Death in full cry. Terror’s song. Out of those black notes, another map composed itself, red and unruly, just behind his eyelids. His body clenched involuntarily as it struck him that somehow he was playing a part, a crucial part, in that discordant opus.