Angelmaker (58 page)

“Where are we going?” Harriet demands.

“It’s your convent,” Edie replies.

“This goes to … the kitchen garden.”

“That’s what I thought, yes.”

“There’s no way out. The garden is walled off, and there’s no gate.”

“There will be shortly.”

“What?”

Edie Banister doesn’t answer—she just cocks her head in a way which states eloquently that answers are a luxury and time is pressing, and nuns are supposed to be a bit more placid and a bit less lippy.

Harriet nods. Joe has never seen her cave in so quickly, and suspects that in Edie Banister he is in the presence of a master. Mind you, the eyeless dog is an unfair advantage; the potty-old-bat equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

That his mother’s acquiescence might have something to do with the danger he personally is in, or that this must be weirdly familiar to her from half a dozen heady escapes with his father back in the day, occurs to him only as they reach the foot of the stairs.

The garden door is a bit rotted and decrepit. A large selection of wellington boots, in various sizes for assorted nuns, stands arrayed along the wall. Bastion whiffles curiously at the enticing smell, and there is a noise behind them like a hydraulic press: a very soft, very powerful sound of escaping air.

There is a Ruskinite one flight up. He has jumped or fallen from the fourth floor and landed on his feet. His arms are spread as if ready to grasp something, and his head is rocking to and fro on his
shoulders as if he is sniffing. A second later, Joe actually sees another one slump ungracefully through the air like an empty sack and land next to the first. It seems to hit the ground all at once, as if it is just a bundle of clothes with sticks inside, but seconds later it’s upright, rolling its shoulders and briefly touching the first one in a strange, physical recognition. Not a human gesture at all; arachnoid, or lizardy. Then both of them spread their arms in that same wrestler’s crouch, and their heads turn towards him. In unison, they lurch for the stairs.

Edie Banister grasps Joe by the hand and hauls him bodily out into the garden. Harriet is a few steps ahead, but going slowly even at full stretch. He lifts her as he catches up, and is nearly rewarded with a bony elbow in the eye for his trouble before she realises who he is. Edie nods approvingly and skitters past, spry as a sheepdog. Joe glances back and sees the Ruskinites coming out of the door, virtually on top of one another. They stop still, and a moment later are joined by a third. They touch again, that same strange spiderhug and bob, and then spring forward, fast, strong, and eerily silent. He jerks Harriet up onto his chest and runs like hell.

The garden at Samson At The Temple is a retreat within a retreat, a twisting, mazelike place of concealed meditation spots and beds of roses, dead ends and alcoves. It’s a place where a girl can get away from all the noise of a dozen Trappists playing ping-pong and appreciate the wonder of the creation. Edie Banister ducks down into a sunken garden, through and out the other side, doubles back along an avenue of laurel and then through a narrow gap behind a greenhouse and in front of a potting shed. Always, always, she is heading for the outer wall. Always, she puts turns and forks between them and their pursuers, forces the enemy to guess, to hesitate. When Joe pauses to catch his breath and look over his shoulder, she grabs him again, draws him on up another laurel path, this one winding and wild, and suddenly they’re hard against the back wall, high red brick topped with unchristian spikes, three-pointed stars on an axle, sharp-edged and aggressively private.

She hands the dog to Harriet and dips her hand into her bag, then slaps a small Tupperware box against the wall. It sticks.

“Come on,” she says, ducking behind a small stone chapel, and when Joe hesitates, she slaps him on the back of his head to get his attention and takes advantage of his utter amazement to get him where she wants him. As he ducks, he sees with horror the Ruskinite
hunters surge through the laurel bushes, huge black shapes swooping and lunging, appallingly boneless. They wheel around one another, then jointly focus their attention on the chapel. The nearest one takes a loping step forward. Edie pulls Joe down and sticks her fingers in her ears.

The world is a bass drum, and the conductor has just given the percussionist the biggest nod of his career.

The sky is white.

Joe’s nose is bleeding. There’s dust in his eyes.

When he looks around the corner, the outer wall is gone. So are the Ruskinites. In their place, a crater, black and charred, and the smell of phosphorus and saltpetre, Guy Fawkes Night come early.

“Home-made,” Edie Banister says happily, a soon-to-be-novagenarian with a bad attitude and a fine knowledge of exothermic reactions. “I think I may have over-egged the nitro and gone a bit heavy on the toluene. However, nothing succeeds like excess, ey?”

The garden of Samson At The Temple is breached.

They make it as far as the car Edie Banister has stolen. Team Spork—Harriet and Joe and their new friend—are making the escape of the decade, a corker in the annals of derring-do with added points for age, infirmity and spontaneity. Edie considers the thing something of a masterclass, and hopes someone, somewhere, will take note and teach it to the young. Classics in survival, evasion, resistance and escape: the Banister Exemplar.

And then, from nowhere, the street is filled with skittering, scuttling figures, ragged in their shrouding black, like a plague of spiders. They pour through the doors of surrounding houses and out of parked cars, five, ten, twenty, a myriad bobbing heads and grasping hands. Joe Spork stares at them, takes a step forward in front of Harriet and Edie, and sees them all, every last one, turn their eyes to him. He freezes under their gaze. He can feel the spotlights and the great salvo of bullets, the awful
splink
as his heart ruptures. He sways. The Ruskinites rush forward.

The first wave tries to grab Harriet, but Edie Banister menaces them with her trusty side arm and they fade away, parting in the line of fire. The second wave approaches from the north and seeks to cut them off from the car, a ghostly interdictory line. Joe recovers himself enough to raise his arms to a sort of fighting posture and forces them to reckon with him. They hesitate and draw back, but before he can
be pleasantly surprised, wave three cuts across perpendicular to wave two and sweeps him up and away, iron-banded fingers and corded muscle clamping down on his limbs and lifting him into the back of a van. Behind him, he can see his mother’s placid face turn rapidly to something like a figure from a nightmare, a sudden flash of fury such as he has never seen on her, and she hurtles forward and clutches at the van, screaming like a banshee and demanding him back, give him back, he’s not yours, he’s my son.

Joe Spork struggles, like Gulliver beset by tiny men. They have him in a grip at every corner, and all he can manage now is a sort of billowing. On the other hand, if he can get a hand free he can do some damage. He twists, and feels the grip on one wrist slacken. It hurts, but he does it again, and again, and the vise skids over his arteries, tearing away some skin, and that hand is free.

What’s soft?

Eyes are soft. Throats. Noses and lips. Genitals, too, but many layers of linen make them hard to find, and men and women both learn early to move those parts fast.

He rips at someone’s face, feels flesh and eyes under the cowl, hears a cry, feels them reel away, sees someone guided forward, wide-shouldered and heavy on his feet. A blind wrestler? He rips again at this new enemy, and the Ruskinite slaps at his hand, hard. It hurts, the way it hurts to bang your shin on a glass table. He doesn’t care, reaches again.
Come on, then! Let’s go! Let’s do this. Come on, you bastard
. He is clinging to the man now, feeling huge, solid limbs, his fingers seeking soft parts, vulnerable flesh. A black linen mask tears free, and he shouts with fierce delight, then feels the war cry freeze in his mouth.

Joe Spork stares up into a face made of gold.

An eyeless face, with a snapping turtle’s jaw and the merest suggestion of features on the burnished plate.

Not a mask.

A face.

An un-face. An un-man.

The Ruskinites close in. They have him, and they are taking him. He screams.

That’s all he knows, because someone clamps something cold over his mouth and he inhales.

T
he room is very small. In the centre of each wall, and in the centre of the floor and ceiling, there is a circle of transparent stuff with a light bulb behind it. The bulbs are always on. Behind or in the walls—Joe isn’t sure—there are speakers. Sometimes they blare out instructions. Sometimes they play music, very loud. Sometimes they just shriek, electronic wails of protest.

He’s not sure how long ago it was that he tried to go to sleep, or how long they have kept him awake. He thought he knew roughly, because there’s only enough stubble on his chin to indicate a day or so, but when he finally did sleep—he realises he has slept many times since he arrived, but he doesn’t know for how long—he woke to find a ghost face very close to his own and a razor moving very precisely over his cheek. He jerked away, or rather, he tried, but found he was restrained. When he kept trying, someone pressed a cold thing against his neck and his world was fizzy and bright and he screamed a lot. He assumes the cold thing was a taser. The linen face peered at him, as if wondering why he was upset. He wondered whether it was human or not, whether it was like the one he’d seen. He wondered whether he’d dreamed that part.

When he came back to himself after the taser, he was inexplicably and appallingly aroused. He wondered if they had drugged him, and then wondered why they would. Then he realised that this kind of
dialogue about himself was probably what this was all intended to achieve. They are asserting ownership of him. They own his sense of time, his captivity, his sleep. They have his body entirely; it’s not relevant whether they have drugged him. It is only relevant that they could. The one thing he can preserve from them is his mind—and that is what they want. They cannot approach it directly, so they are holding his body to ransom.

He remembers reading about a man who had been tortured. The man said the worst part was when they played the same music over and over and over until he thought he would go mad. He said even the razors were not as bad as the sense of losing himself. Joe is greatly concerned that he has very little self to lose, and so this will not take long.

He shouts out something, and regrets it instantly. He does not want their attention. Mr. Ordinary comes, anyway.

Mr. Ordinary has a face like a country vet’s. He is not a Ruskinite. He is apparently a specialist, brought in for the occasion. When he speaks, he has a mellow baritone, suited to explaining that Rover has the canine pox or that Tiddles will do better on a more varied diet.

He asks questions. It doesn’t seem to matter what Joe says in answer to these questions, so he begins to make up jokes. Mr. Ordinary is apparently of the opinion that funny jokes merit a reduction in discomfort. Silence is punished mightily. Mr. Ordinary is kind enough to explain this on the first occasion that Joe becomes mute.

“By all means, lie. Lying is fine. Or if you have no notion what I’m talking about, you should feel free to babble, make stuff up. That’s fine, too. Mulishness, however … I take that as a sign of disrespect.”

When Joe obstinately clamps his lips closed, Mr. Ordinary sighs, and directs operations with a sort of genial competence. They put Joe into strange positions and make him stay that way. The pain arrives quickly and he accepts that, was expecting it. It becomes blinding much later, when he has become used to the aches, and thinks he’s doing quite well. Mr. Ordinary listens to him screaming, and does not appear to react at all. Joe starts to speak, randomly selecting the price list for repairs to self-winders, hoping that compliance, however belated, will yield mercy.

It does not.

He loses track of everything, but at some point the man with the hate-filled eyes sits in front of him and listens to him screaming.

Brother Sheamus moves with the same alarming fluidity he displayed that day in Joe’s shop. It is as if his bones are articulated in more places than they should be. His head moves smoothly to follow Joe’s eyes, to peer into his face. Blank, black-linen monster. Eggshell face. Mask. And yet, somehow, not expressionless. Whether his emotions are carried in his body, or whether they are so strong that Joe is catching the lines of the face through the shroud, the way he feels is quite apparent in the tiny room.

He hates Joe Spork. He hates him as you hate someone you have known your entire life and whom you cannot stand. Whose existence in the world offends you in your bones. Every line of his liquid body aches with it.

Joe has no idea what he can have done to inspire such wrath. He is not old enough to have hurt Brother Sheamus in that way, and would surely know if he had inflicted an injury of that kind on his fellow man. He has, after all, dedicated his life to being mild.