MANSER MOVED AT night. He moved slowly. He avoided main roads back into the heart of the city. It was difficult to find a time when quiet dominated, but after 3 a.m., most of London seemed to be tucked away indoors. He knew there were likely to be more people about the closer he got to the river, but for now the anonymity, the desertion helped. A few hours at a time was all he could manage anyway. When the thickness of the night became loosened, the sun still a good two hours away from putting in an appearance, he melted from the street. He found an unalarmed scaffold in Walm Lane; a loose corner of tarp covering a skip in Sherriff Road; a child’s tent in an Abbey Road garden. He slept fitfully, if at all. Pain held his hand like a concerned parent throughout, never letting him out of its sight.
He grew to appreciate the pain as it ate through what remained of his face. He crunched on painkillers almost continuously, relishing the bitter taste on his tongue, the slightest distraction from the monumental suffering that threatened to take him out of himself to the point where he might decide to climb a pylon or jump from a tower block or hurl himself in front of a train. The pain he knew he must best if he was ever to entertain the thought of loving his stumps again in the future. How could he be tender to the dying if he thought for a second that they were too engrossed with their own private agonies to be able to enjoy his passion? He had to cling to that belief that there was a future. It was all he had.
But that wasn’t strictly true. There was Salavaria. He was a good reason, a great reason to stay alive. Manser realised he, himself, might be a bad man, in the classic, villainous sense of the word, but at least he was honourable. He loved his friends. He was loyal. He couldn’t abide, couldn’t understand, the betrayals that occurred so frequently within the underworld he inhabited. If that was naive, then guilty as charged. He believed in honour and trust. He was solid, dependable. He was The Ton. Mister 100 per cent. And what had it brought him?
He gingerly touched his face, wincing at the crisp/sodden mess of it. It worried him that he could not feel certain parts despite his fingers sinking into a spongy mass that ought to have had his flesh singing. Dead nerve endings. Dead. The thought that it was in him, death, even in this limited way, traumatised him to the point where, if his tear ducts weren’t melted shut, he might have cried himself into a coma. And yet it was other things too: emboldening, chastening. He understood a little bit more about the enormous forces needed, both physically and psychologically, to introduce death to a living thing. The body was fragile: there were many ways you could kill, many ways to die, but the body was also strong, ferociously strong. It did not receive death easily, and once it was in the vicinity, the body fought like fury to repel it.
Sunlight. He had been so enraptured by his fantasies of how he might ruin Gyorsi Salavaria that he had forgotten the cramp in his legs and the grief lacing his chest, neck and head. White fire lanced his eyeballs, despite it being only the palest cream of pre-dawn. He had to retire from the day, before it became blinding, before his body rebelled and put him into a state from which he would not recover. He’d have put on his beloved sunglasses if his ears hadn’t been burned away.
Patience was all. At the end of the road, Salavaria would be there. The cunt would be taught some regal lessons. It didn’t matter how far the road was, or how long it took for him to travel it. It was unimportant what state he was in when he got there. He would get there.
‘Jez, you dumb bastard,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You traitor. You fair-weather friend. I thought you were loyal. I thought we were mates. Jesus.’
Things were changing as he snaked towards St John’s Wood. The houses seemed to be hunched in towards each other, as if in a conspiratorial huddle or quaking before some unimaginable fate. Every window seemed to have been punched in or blown out; glass teeth were bared at him as he trudged further south. He sought shelter in a car showroom just before the main road turned into an ugly collision of shops, fast-food joints and piddling side roads. He searched for sleep in the back seat of a Mercedes, his face turned in to the soft leather upholstery. He could hear nothing. London was a grave waiting to be filled.
Sleep, or an approximation of it – a troubled, fevered greying of consciousness – greeted him with fantasies of soil. He was grabbing fists of earth and ramming them into Gyorsi Salavaria’s mouth, which was as wide open as it could be without splitting from the strain. Staples were punched into that rigid O of his lips, attached to chains snapped tight against the confines of his dream. Salavaria’s teeth were sharp and vulpine, stained plum from the decades of blood he had supped upon. His eyes were wide with terror. It was almost too much to take and he shied from the face, confused by his feelings. It didn’t seem right that a man such as Salavaria, a monster, a strong man in every sense, could be reduced like this, brought down to the point where he was a snivelling, abject wreck, even in the context of a dream, a fantasy.
I fear him, he thought, and the soil in the packed throat trickled out as the lips somehow managed to curl into a smile. The staples bit deeper and blood traversed the shining rim of his mouth. Salavaria was the ultimate survivor. Would Manser, had he been in the same situation, have been able to put his head down, banish himself from society, hide in a hole for thirty years? Thirty years. His patience was utter. His devotion to his beliefs unshakeable. How could he hope to knock him off course? He didn’t have a shred of that drive, that hunger.
He woke sweating, shaking with cold. Salavaria was climbing out the hole of his dream, the staples straining against his lips, tearing through them, turning his mouth to a pulp of blood and mud.
‘He works alone, Jez,’ he said, shakily. ‘You never stood a chance.’
Manser moaned and struggled upright, his legs squeaking against the plush interior of the car, and the sound was enough to banish the dream completely. He slid out of the back seat and walked shakily across the road to a petrol station. The small shop annexed to it had been raided, its windows shattered, produce looted. Most of the shelves were bare, but he found a loaf of bread that was relatively free of mould and a partially consumed pack of dried fruit. He sucked gingerly at the bread, the apricots, wincing as his face came alive with reminders of what had happened to it, until he had a paste he could swallow. He sipped at a bottle of dandelion and burdock. The food brought him back. He found his mind clearing, his confidence returning. It prodded and played with Salavaria again, diminishing him, breaking him down into what, essentially, he was: old. Yesterday’s man. Come on, Manser. You’re The Ton, not him. He’s ready for his slippers. He’s ready for his liquid meals and free bus pass. You were his crutch, his meal ticket. He’s rusty. He’s been talking to trees for a generation.
It was late afternoon. The sunlight was a dim, dusky red falling on the south-facing rooftops and Manser imagined them as fading reflections of the atrocities he would stumble upon within the next few hours. That colour was all he could think of as he traipsed the final few miles along past Lord’s cricket ground, into Lisson Grove and the heart of Marylebone. There were fewer people around than he had expected, although he reasoned that he was now the kind of person people went out of their way to avoid. He walked into an empty pub on Harcourt Road and poured himself a lager from the tap, sipped it through the cracked blisters of his lips while staring at the pale Swedish church across the way. He drew a little peace, a little strength from that simple building. He rested. Music played from a CD unit behind the bar. Louis Armstrong on permanent loop. What a Wonderful World. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Mack the Knife.
When the shark bites, with his teeth, dear, scarlet billows start to spread …
He managed to eat some peanuts and climbed the stairs at the back of the pub to the catering quarters. A dumb waiter was stuffed full of corpses to the extent that he couldn’t tell how many bodies were inside, or whose limbs belonged to which abject expression.
A counter looked out on a tiny beer garden inhabited by blood-drenched picnic tables and parasols. Beyond that, a block of flats rose four storeys, white-painted brickwork tigered here and there with deep scarlet. A man was sitting on his balcony looking north towards Regent’s Park with a pair of binoculars, his long hair prancing about in the stiff wind. Against his chair rested some kind of decorative sword. A few balconies along, a woman was tying a rope ladder to the railings. Shouts were coming from somewhere, alternately reasoning and incomprehensible, furious. Manser filled his pockets with short, sharp steak knives. He moved across the landing to the bathroom where he found a small tub of painkillers. He popped two in his mouth and crunched them and moved towards the front of the living quarters. A TV was on, spilling white noise across a carpet rioting with beige paisley. A woman was on her knees, collapsed into the sofa, her back peeled open along the spine. A younger woman, perhaps her daughter, lay with a pair of headphones on, staring up at the ceiling, her face blue. There was no obvious damage to her body. He leaned over her and was mildly shocked to see her eyes following him. He reached out and tweaked the skin of her collarbone. No reaction. Breath very shallow, hardly there at all. She had been left for dead.
He found more rushed murders as he walked down to Baker Street, more bodies put through the agonies of death without actually meeting it. A traffic warden was sitting back against the large window of a charity shop, making slack, whale-like noises, his head jerking and twisting as if on the end of an inebriated puppet-master’s strings. He had vomited down his luminescent yellow singlet. His face was bruised and swollen where someone had beaten him; Manser was able to discern cleat marks from the sole of a boot in the scuffed, torn skin of his forehead. Some effort had been made to cut part of him away – the heavy serge material on his arm had been scissored open, the exposed flesh gouged – but it was a rushed job. It was as if whatever had attacked him didn’t have the time to finish it off. Manser felt his gorge rise at the thought of being left brain-damaged, alone. He, at least, had some idea of who he was and what he had to do. His mind had not been switched off, although, at the height of the pain, he wished that were an option.
He waded through bodies in the chemist’s for a handful of energy tablets and more hardcore analgesics. He suffered a bolt of pain as he reached the junction of Baker Street and had to wrench himself back out of sight; a swarm of people, perhaps as many as two dozen, were striding up Paddington Street, their hands full of bats and hammers. He was certain one of them had hold of a chef’s blowtorch. He could do without any more of that.
They would surely see him if he didn’t get out of the way immediately; he could hear their footfalls. They were so close he thought he could hear the ticking of watches on their wrists. He flattened himself against the doors of the cinema, the Screen on Baker Street. One of them swung back; there was nobody in the booth. He hurried down the stairs, the loose flesh on his face screaming at him as it struggled to part itself at the red juncture with those hard, carbonised remains; and looked back up to the street, where shadows were already coalescing, shapes smearing up against the glass door, which had only just settled back into position. He saw the top of the head of the last man in the crowd turn his way, perhaps alerted by the tiny shiver of the door as it came to rest.
Manser sank further. The bar at the bottom of the stairs was deserted. Glasses were smashed and a popcorn machine had overflowed; the stink of burning sugar came at him from all angles. A fug of tan smoke riffled around the ceiling. Postcards were scattered all across the floor. He received a brief, almost nostalgic twang of excitement at the sight of a female cinema attendant whose foot had been separated from her ankle. She had died in an awkward position, half-kneeling, half-lying on a box of carpet cleaner in a staff room she was presumably trying to get into to hide at the critical moment. Whoever had taken her foot had discarded it almost immediately.
A change in the air pressure. A corner of a newspaper on the counter lifted and sank. Manser panthered across the bar to the swing doors of the screen room. He eased them open, tensing himself against the creak of oil-shy hinges, a noisy breath of stale, inner air, but it never came. He moved inside and helped the doors close, his eye on the landing as a shadow grew into the wall and a hand landed on the banister’s curve where it swept into the last section of stairwell.
Manser allowed the door to seal itself and turned to the auditorium. Heavy velvet curtains obscured the screen. Every seat was occupied, every head angled forwards to catch a performance that would not be delivered. Manser shot a look at the projectionist’s booth; the window was smeared. He moved down the central aisle, the hairs on his skin rising as he felt the empty gaze of dead people drilling into his back.
He heard the jolt of a hand on the door and he jinked left, dragging a young boy from his chair and ramming him into the foot well, taking his place as a parallelogram of light raced across the walls and two bobbing shadows moved into the theatre. Impossibly large, they bled across the acoustic panelling and on to the velvet before the door closed and ushered them into the gloom. Manser kept his eyes riveted to the curtains and began to see patterns squirming there. Pain was beginning to filter through the screen he had erected with those painkillers; he wished he had necked a few more before this eminently avoidable situation had transpired. All he had to do was play dead, and he was halfway there anyway. He could feel baubles of sweat begin to decorate his face.
The velvet twitched. In his periphery he saw a figure step into line with him and stop. A mealy smell assaulted him, of raw meat, of offal. He felt something squirm across his thigh but could not look down without giving away his position. The boy under his feet bucked twice, as if trying to get up. Fear took up the sport of his blood, ripping through his veins with something that was so hot or so cold there was no difference in it. The thing on his thigh dug in, as if testing the plumpness of his muscle. It felt like a crab had gripped him. He wanted to cry out, to brush it away. The figure to his right proceeded with his leisurely pursuit, sweeping his gaze this way and that along the sallow ranks. His mate was just behind him, the thin waterproof material of his coat shushing and hissing, sheened with plaques of dried blood. Like the man ahead of him, he stopped level with Manser and placed a finger against the blackened wasteland of his temples. What felt like an electric bolt flashed down the side of Manser’s head.
‘No fresh here,’ the man said. ‘No fresh.’
They stood at the foot of the theatre and looked back at the audience, then trawled slowly back towards the exit door. Manser was fighting black, lazy slaps of unconsciousness now, his face so slicked with sweat he thought it must surely be his undoing. He risked a look at the man at his side. He was sitting bolt upright, his neck cricked violently to one side. His eyelids and lips were gone, his cheeks scraped from his face like the flesh of a mango from its skin. He might have been viewing a film after all, a comedy, or a high-octane thriller. Here comes the car chase. Here’s fun. I can’t bear to watch.
He dug his fingernails deeper into Manser’s thigh. He was trying to breathe but could manage little more than a series of short, thin gasps through the dried-out tablets of his clenched teeth. Manser slapped his hand away and risked a look back up the aisle. The two men were at the door, conversing. The boy continued to buck under Manser’s feet. He had to close his eyes to the thought that he was convulsing, suffering a heart attack, maybe. Dying.
The men finally finished their discussion and returned to the bar. Once the doors were closed again, Manser levered himself out of the chair and helped the boy back to his seat. It was too late. It was too late for any of them. He looked around at the ravaged faces, some in suffocated agony like the man seated next to him, some in grey, silent fugues where the fluttering of eyelids was the only indication of life continuing. Others were trying to get away, squirming on the floor ineffectually. Manser tried to imagine what had happened here. A mighty attack had taken place, a smothering of some kind. The occupants of the cinema seemed brain-damaged, starved of oxygen to the point of death and then let off the hook. Inexpert murder, or the behaviour of sick ghouls. It was hideous. It was monstrous. And it reminded him of himself.
Nauseated, he moved back up the aisle, listening carefully at the doors before easing them open a crack. Seven figures were in the bar now. One of them was gnawing at the foot of the dead staff member.
Manser returned to the screen, intending to find an alternative way up to the street via the fire escape. He missed the lean athleticism that he had once had, now robbed from him with the shriek of nerve endings whenever he so much as tried to blink. He reasoned that the pain must mean that he had not suffered any infection. He remembered relatives cooing over the cuts and scrapes on his knees and elbows when he was a boy, telling him that a sting when ointment was applied was a good thing. Pain was a friend to us.
‘Oh yes,’ he whispered. ‘My best fucking mate, pain.’
It had become so acute that at times he felt it had formed its own rendering of him: a vague Manser shape, an homunculus, that was connected to the corporeal version like a shadow. It had its own blood supply, its own organs. He felt as though he could turn around and touch it, it was so vibratingly real, a sensation somehow beyond normal experience, beyond emotion. Once, he had cried when he was hurt. Now it was as if tears were too flimsy a reaction for what he was feeling. Death was too flimsy for this.
He paused regularly on his climb back up the stairs, giving half a mind to torching the cinema to put the poor bastards out of their misery. But fire was not something he felt able to be near any more.
Baker Street was deserted again, the baying pack having moved on, perhaps to the nearby Hilton Metropole or the Landmark, hotels where there were doubtless potential victims holed up in their rooms, plenty of ‘fresh’ for them to be getting on with. He thought he could see little oases in the upper floors of the banks at this busy junction, and further along Paddington Street, in the office blocks and high-rise residential flats; coy movement at skyscraping windows. But it could just have been the shift of clouds in the glass, or the mopping up of survivors by those monsters perspicacious enough to realise that there was more going on in the streets of London than merely at ground level.
Salavaria’s stink was all over this.
The mistake he had made, he realised now, was to listen so much to Salavaria over all that time he had visited him in the forest, but never take anything in. All this froth about suitability to his people, of the flavour of blood, of destiny and promise; he had thought it the controlled ravings of a man thirty years lost to society. He had taken his eye off the ball. London was his wake-up call, in more ways than one.
He had to stop and lean against the railings of a park. At its far end, a children’s playground sat forlorn and empty, its gate wailing as it swung on its hinges. The reflection of the polished slide was not a colour he felt comfortable with. He was violently sick, from the little touches of unpleasantness revealing themselves to him or the visions of Salavaria, he wasn’t sure. He watched his brown vomit collect pathetically around his shoes. Peanuts and beer. He needed to get some proper sustenance inside him, if there was a fight to be had at some point.
He staggered the two hundred metres to Marylebone High Street and walked south along it, until he found the road he needed, a little avenue off the main street. He did not know if he would find the address turned into a pastiche of an abattoir. He was steeled for some measure of red; it was in his blood, one could say.
He thought he saw the man in the window of the flat but by this time he was failing fast. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing any more. The light was slicing into his eyes; he had spent more hours than ever before on his feet, plodding that last leg into London proper. A rest was on the cards, but it was touch and go as to whether it would involve soft pillows or a mouthful of cold hard kerb.
He rang the buzzer. A shape appeared through the frosted glass of the door, might have said something, shouted something in shock. Manser might have spoken in return. And then he was falling hard against the man, who smelled right, even if he could not make out any features. That smell. Kind of chemical. Kind of biological. Kind of fucked. He was home. He was safe.