Angelmaker (63 page)

So he cheated back. He abandoned Daniel’s world in order to preserve it, and from that lesson drew his entire life. He broke laws, cracked safes, smashed windows and shattered the public peace, and from destruction he drew consolation. The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Mathew Spork was free.

As his mother was free. And as his son, now, in this white cell which no longer frightens him, is free.

Outside in the corridor, Joe can hear footsteps. The Ruskinites are coming. Mr. Ordinary, perhaps. They will expect him to be cowed, as he has been before. They will expect him to wait and gather his strength. But his strength now is a thing made from opposition. If he backs down, he knows, it will ebb, and he will lose track of this spectacular certainty. That is not something he can afford. Beyond this, he has nothing left.

Which leaves open war. Each time the door opens, he will fight them with everything he has. He will no longer be restrained. He will drive himself against them until they shatter, or he does.

The door opens, and he moves.

He goes to meet them with a growl in his teeth which becomes a roar, and since his mouth is open he bites the hand which unwisely comes close to his face. He keeps going until he feels something crunch and hears a ghastly howling, but is too busy with his hands to worry very much about that. His left grips and his right hammers downwards, once, twice, like a copper pounding on a door. When the weight on his left hand increases, he lets it open, and instantly uses his left elbow on someone else, a scything downward spiral which opens the man’s forehead to the bone. He bowls on, barging and lunging, and suddenly they are all on the ground and he stamps and kicks, wading through the tangle as through a garden full of leaves. He keeps going and going and going, and he gets stronger rather than weaker with each blow.

Abruptly, he stops, because there’s nothing left to do. There are five men on the ground. Two are moaning softly. Three are quite unconscious.

It had not occurred to him that he might win this fight. Winning a fight, in his mind, is associated with some sort of skill. He had not realised that you could win by just doing the worst things you could possibly imagine, one after another, until your enemies fell over. There’s even a sort of cycle to it, like a very dangerous, very angry clock: grab, rake, gouge; twist, pummel, drop. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

But now here he is, and—within certain limits—free. Not likely to remain so, perhaps. But he can wreak havoc while he’s out. Do some damage to the machine which has hurt him. That has considerable appeal.

He kicks the nearest of his gaolers once more in the spine and gets no reaction. He searches the man and finds a keycard, repeats the process until he has several more. He considers pushing the men into his cell, but there are too many of them and it’s too much like hard work. Instead, he takes a shroud from the biggest man and drapes it over himself.
On hemmed-in ground, use subterfuge
. Billy Friend had been a devotee of Sun Tzu, though mostly in relation to women.

He walks away down the corridor, trying the cards on anything he can see. Doors click. He doesn’t bother to look inside. If there are inmates, they will either come out or they won’t. Behind him, he hears strange voices and cries, so he assumes there are at least a few. He hopes they are as angry as he is. Or mad in some horrible way. That would be fine.

He reaches a different sort of door, a double door, and when it opens, he realises it’s a lift. He goes in. Naturally, he will try to escape. They will know by now that he is out. Therefore they will expect him to go up. Up and out. They will be waiting.

So he goes down.

As soon as the lift doors open, he smells smoke.

There are red lights set into the walls on this floor, and they’re shining brightly. Somewhere there’s a klaxon going off. A crowd of Ruskinites slither past him, single-minded. He remembers at the last minute to bob his head in an approximation of their sinuous weave, but they don’t pay any attention.

He can’t assume it will last. There must be surveillance. They will in any case shortly realise he is wearing this rather minimal disguise, and they must have ways of knowing one another.

He walks on. A security door requires a different card, a blue one, from the deck in his hand. He steps through. The smell of smoke is much stronger.

In his head, he realises, he has a sort of ragged notion of how this place is laid out. It is a pyramid or ziggurat, of which the uppermost level is the garden and the common room. Below that is the standard accommodation for patients, and below that is his level: the holding cells for inconvenient people to be tortured, and a selection of actual torture chambers. This level, being below that one, must be more secret or more important in some way.

He rounds a corner, and finds himself in a cinema.

Or not. There is a screen, and there are chairs and speakers, yes. But there is also a species of stage or platform, and each seat has what appears to be a set of electrodes attached. The walls are covered in grey foam moulded in geometric patterns, like a sound studio.

“If an ordinary man were to wake with Napoleon’s memories, men would call him mad.” A vast face fills the screen, elegant, lean and cruel. A man in early middle years, his skin very clear and tanned, his features an indefinable blend of cultures. His mouth quirks. “But what if he woke with demonstrably accurate memories which were recorded nowhere else? What if he woke with the face of Napoleon as well? And finally, how, if this man arose from his bed with no mind of his
own? What if John Smith ceased to be, and in his place was a perfect replica of the Emperor in body and memory? At what point would we acknowledge that he was identical with that first Napoleon? That he was not merely a copy, but an actual regenesis? What if the pattern of the mind itself could be measured and found to be identical?”

The camera draws back. The man lies on a plush, opulent bed, and his body is festooned with wires and sensors. Almost, he hangs in the bed, so many cables are affixed to his skin. More cameras are visible around him, recording him from every angle. He gestures off to one side, to a circular screen—Joe guesses it must be green—showing an oscillating pattern. A wave.

“This is my mind. This is my body. Make my history your own. Match it perfectly, and become part of me. Part of God.”

Joe Spork stares for a moment at the lean, evil face of Brother Sheamus. There is an intensity to him, a power, which is both alien and familiar. It reminds him of someone. And then he hears the screaming.

The screaming is very hoarse, very desperate. It’s a man, or a very big woman, because it’s deep. It’s not horror-movie screaming, designed to rattle the chandelier. It’s something else entirely, a mammalian noise.
Alarm. Alert. There are tigers. I am taken. I am down
.

Joe has recently made the same sound himself.

Around a corner, through a door, another door, and then:

Two men. One of them is Mr. Ordinary.

Mr. Ordinary stares up from his chair at another person, an altogether different sort of person. A tiger.

The tiger is smiling. He has a thick beard and greying hair tied back with a piece of orange string. His skin is pale, but leathery. Good teeth, a little snaggled at each corner of the mouth; you can see it in the line of his face. Wide lips.

Joe does not recognise him; not his movements, nor his face, nor even his eyes, until a glance at Mr. Ordinary shows an appalling, absolute despair, and then—as the torturer glimpses Joe in his Ruskinite shroud—the desperate hope of rescue.

There’s really only one person here who makes anyone that afraid. And now that he looks, he recognises the eyes, too.

The coffin man bends down in front of Mr. Ordinary, gets his head close to the other’s face.

“Where’s the way out, boy?” His voice is thick and he lisps. Those snaggles at the corner of his mouth: the bite plate has deformed his teeth, and he’s not used to not wearing it yet, can’t compensate. He’ll need practice, and a good dentist. All the same, there’s something about the voice: “buuwoy.” A fisherman’s voice.

“It’s down!”

“Is it bollocks.” Plymouth, with a taste of London, maybe. The coffin man shrugs, and lays his hand gently across Mr. Ordinary’s face. When he withdraws it, he is mysteriously holding something wobbly, and Mr. Ordinary is screaming again, this time sharply, and Joe realises it is an ear. The coffin man tosses it aside. Then he speaks again.

“Seen you.” He glances over at Joe. “You, I’m talking to.” He shrugs. “You ain’t what you look like, I know that.”

Joe realises he is still wearing the shroud. He pulls it off.

“Thought so,” the coffin man nods. “Trick of the walk, maybe.”

“How did you get out?”

“Well, some bugger poked the anthill, didn’t he? Set off all the alarum bells and what have you. Someone got careless. That don’t pay with me. I got him, and his friends, and I set ’em on fire. Doesn’t pay to show me disrespect. I keep trying to tell ’em. You look like you’ve come of age, though.”

“I’ve what?”

The older man shrugs. “All that strength. You walk through everything as if you’re afraid of breaking it. Keep it all down in the dark. Or you did, maybe.”

“Keep what in the dark?”

“Don’t be a tit. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Here,” he adds reprovingly, as Mr. Ordinary tries to get up, “no call for that, is there? Don’t be giving me force.” Force is a bad thing. The coffin man reaches down and does something at the open mess which used to house an ear. Mr. Ordinary doubles over and vomits, drily. “So what’s a Hakote, and what do they write about, that this bugger cares so much about it?”

Night Market instinct:
evade
. Joe shrugs. “Search me.”

The coffin man stares, and then starts to laugh. He can barely keep upright, he is laughing so hard.

“What’s funny?”

“You are! Bloody hell. Ohhh, bloody hell, that’s too much … You’ve got no more real clue what’s going on than I have, do you? And they knew it, too, but they were giving you the full works, and the more you didn’t tell them the more they were scared you were a real hard case, the more they did, the more you didn’t know … bloody marvellous!”

Joe stifles the urge to tell the other man that actually, yes, he does indeed know what’s going on and now he knows the one thing these bastards don’t. It’s like being at school. Instead of boasting, he laughs, too.

The coffin man leans on the desk and knocks over a stack of reference books, which is even funnier, and it appears that Mr. Ordinary is the only person in the room who is not having a good time. When the coffin man notices this, he sobers a bit.

“Where’s the way out? Come on, now.”

“Down! Down to the basement!”

“I don’t think so. That’s where they had me.”

“It’s a fake! Everything’s upside down! When you go to the basement the lift goes up! The mechanism’s so smooth you can’t tell. It makes everyone sick unless they know! The way out is down there!”

The coffin man grins at Joe.