Falls the Shadow (18 page)

That was a good argument. The best, in fact. But Cranleigh’s nature rebelled. It knew the consequences of such an action and it held him back.

‘No,’ he said softly.

‘Will you do it for me?’ Sandra’s dying eyes were imploring.

‘No,’ Cranleigh insisted. ‘We, I, will never do anything for you again.’

The woman in the corner. Bernice –
remember her name, Bernice
– was rising to her feet, eyes fixed on him. Existential terror seized Cranleigh by the lungs. He felt dwarfed in comparison to the vision before him.

‘Would you do it for me?’ asked Laura.

Cranleigh gazed at her for a moment, his lips parted.

‘Give it here,’ he said to Ace.

He took the pyramid from her unresisting hands.

Gabriel and Tanith lay together on the double bed in the room once occupied by Jeremy and Jennifer Winterdawn. They had chosen this place specifically. This room had been preserved by Winterdawn. This room had been transformed through grief into a shrine. It was a place of sanctity. Gabriel and Tanith enjoyed the sensation of violating this place. Breaking the taboos, tearing down the holy of holies.

They had been lying on the bed for so long that their bodies had left an imprint on the sheets. Their bodies were locked into an embrace, but not a passionate one. They had been lying still… Still and silent.

Gabriel put an end to it, whispering into his sister’s ear.

‘Do you see what they’re doing?’

‘I see,’ Tanith replied. ‘Pointless. They won’t gain anything.’

‘They won’t, but it worries me.’

‘Yes, they’re beginning to rationalize.’

‘I think we need to unbalance things again.’

‘A wild card?’

‘Quite so.’

‘I know the very person.’

Cranleigh sat prone, eyes closed, legs crossed, the tetrahedron a glowing shape before him. He excluded all else from his consciousness. There was Cranleigh and there was the pyramid.

He felt that he should be humming something religious.

Then the world turned inside out and he was staring at his mind.

I am Justin Cranleigh (Harry Truman).

I am I.

The I in the Pyramid.

The universe warped around the inside of his mind.

He lay in bed beside Sandra, two weeks after they’d first met. He was deeply impressed by how young his lover looked. She lay on her side, a cigarette in her mouth, the bedclothes pulled up below her breasts.

Cranleigh fumbled at her crucifix. Apart from this she was naked, but Cranleigh found this last decoration clawing for his attention.

‘Can’t you take this off?’ he asked. ‘It’s distracting me.’

‘No.’ Sandra snatched it from his grasp, pressing it to her chest. ‘My dad likes me to wear it.’

‘Bible‐
basher, eh?’

‘No.’ Sandra shifted in bed defensively, pulling the sheets up. ‘He’s a Christian Socialist.’

‘Doesn’t he know they’re both dead?’ Cranleigh quipped.

‘He’s also a quantum physicist so I assume he’s got a fair grasp of how the universe works.’

‘Ah.’ Cranleigh leant back, trying to think of something witty.

‘He was on the Grosvenor Square march, you know, the big one in the sixties. That’s how he met my mum,’ Sandra shrugged, pulling the sheets down again. ‘He’s always going on about bloody Vietnam.’

‘I’ve slept with the daughter of a religious fundamentalist ageing hippy leftie? Shit! Any other skeletons?’

The world changed again.

The girl was not familiar. Not attractive, either. She was frumpy in a baggy shirt and jeans. Dark‐
haired and dark‐
eyed, wavering around Cranleigh’s age. He didn’t know her.

‘Laura?’ he asked, innocently. No that was wrong.

‘I am as dead as she.’ She edged into the light and Cranleigh saw that her eyes were hollow black sockets. ‘My name is Nancy.’

‘Oh, hello.’ Cranleigh blinked again. ‘You’re my sister?’

‘As I might have been. Don’t worry, you didn’t kill me. It was a simple case of negligence. One of
millions
!’ Nancy spat. ‘As it usually is. Three days eh, what a long run. One of us had to survive. Don’t worry,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I’m not real.’

Cranleigh nodded sagely.

‘Oh piss off!’ Nancy screamed at him. ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re disgusting and I hate you. So there.’

A figure, no more than a shadow, stood behind Nancy. He was tall and gaunt and grey, but Cranleigh caught a fleeting glimpse of him.

‘This is really crap for a baring of your subconscious soul,’ Nancy decided. ‘Where are the weird camera angles and shifting psychedelic backdrops? Where is the strange muzak and the bizarre fantasies?’

Something changed in Nancy’s face. The callous angles in her eyes softened. She held out a hand to her brother, wearing a mask of desperation.

‘You know more about Gabriel and Tanith than you are aware. Truman was their creation and he is now lodged in your brain. Listen to me. I am a figment of your imagination. I am not part of what they’re up to. There aren’t that many potentials in which I survived. I am beyond their reach. Thank God. Oh thank you God.’

The figure of his dead sister shrivelled up into an embryo.

Cranleigh found himself kissing Laura, still a naïve teenager. He gazed on her face but her features eluded him. She did, he supposed, look something like Bernice Summerfield.

‘Don’t let me go!’ Tears ran down his face. ‘Please don’t ever let me go!’ He pressed his face into hers and let her warm dark hair bury him.

‘Sorry Justin,’ the pure, long‐
forgotten voice whispered, ‘time to die.’

There was a burst of white pain in his mind and body simultaneously. Some detached part of his consciousness watched, casually noting the wave of pain sweeping away nervous gates, memory traces, synapses, cerebral paths, DNA and molecular structures, shattering them into incoherence.

Cranleigh clung ferociously to the last fragment of his sanity.

His name. His wonderful name.

‘My name,’ he told himself again and again, ‘is Harry Truman.’

Then that was gone and he was a shapeless thing without mind or memory. Three women stood over him, their faces ablaze with terror and concern. The thing recognized none of them, nor did it care. Its world was empty save for a chorus whose gentle whisper bounced on the inside of its skull.

Slowly mastering the functions of his lips, he began to slur the words.

‘We live! We live! We live!’ Cranleigh was raving. Sandra was kneeling beside him in concern. She clasped one of his hands between her own, but he tugged it away from her, drawing it to his chest. He shook and giggled and chanted.

‘He’s having a fit,’ Ace said, not coldly.

‘No,’ Benny said. ‘We’ve destroyed his mind.’

Sandra’s face was bland and empty. Too numb for hysteria, Benny felt. They’d done something really stupid this time hadn’t they? And which bimbo had got down on her knees and pleaded with Cranleigh to stick his head in the blender in the first place? Benny bit her lip out of self‐
disgust. She glared at Ace, tears welling in the corners of her eyes.

‘We did this,’ she scowled. ‘We’ve blown him away.’

Ace wasn’t looking at her though. She stared past Cranleigh, past Sandra, past Benny. There was an abstract quality in her eyes and, given Cranleigh’s condition, the effect was surreal. And not a little sick.

Sandra was rising, edging backwards slowly.

Irritated, Benny turned from the man she’d killed, jerking round to stare at the doorway.

Not three feet from her head was a vicious stump of metal; a thin, hollow tube erupted phallically from its end. A glove‐
covered finger stroked its trigger. It was a beautiful piece of weaponry, Benny was certain, capable of shattering the human skull like an egg – a fact that robbed it of its beauty. It was aimed, reassuringly, just above her left ear.

The gun was the possession of a singularly familiar woman in a black coat.

Jane Page was smiling, her mouth a humourless crescent.

‘I should warn you that I am capable of killing everyone in this room before you could reach me.’ Her voice was monotonous, flat with contempt.

‘Don’t worry, we could guess,’ Benny snapped as she raised her arms. She might have made a joke of it if there hadn’t been a gibbering wreck of a man lying at her feet. The world had lost its sense of humour.

‘Oh yes. You staged a remarkable recovery last time we met,’ Page sneered. ‘What happened to the little weirdo?’

‘He’s dead,’ Benny said before anyone else got a chance to reply.

‘Good, good.’ Page smiled again. This time it was genuine, designed to make Benny feel worse. It worked.

‘Your name is Jane Page, isn’t it? Computer analyst,’ Benny continued, innocently. ‘Good pay? Nice hours?’

‘You found my card.’ Page continued, blandly and accurately. Something passed across her face, something akin to doubt. She clutched her gun closer to her. ‘Why didn’t you take…?’

Benny stared blankly. She hadn’t found the gun when she’d searched Page. You wouldn’t think you could hide something that bulky from even the briefest body search. She started to back away, but found a hand locked around her ankle. Cranleigh clutched at her, his other hand flailing wildly. Trying to sit up, Benny thought, and forgetting how.

‘We live!’ Cranleigh howled, as if it was the most important thing in the world. Benny glanced at the pistol and realized that it was. ‘We live!’

‘Not for much longer if you don’t shut up,’ Page laughed. Benny managed a weak grin. She stared at a woman who was totally sincere. She meant that as a joke. A sick mind, but not a mad one. There was something deeply rational about Page’s behaviour which set Benny’s teeth screaming.

‘Who exactly,’ Ace began – a polite sentence spoken pointedly, ‘are you?’

Page freed a hand to scratch behind her ear.

‘I don’t think there’ll be much harm in telling you,’ she announced. ‘No one’s going to believe you, even if I let you live.’

She was afflicted with an artificial cough, after which she continued.

‘I work for the Cabinet Office, for a counter‐
espionage agency which takes orders directly from the Prime Minister. Republican Security Intelligence. Plebs call it DI5.’

‘You’re mad,’ Ace said coldly. It wasn’t an opinion.

‘Not mad, simply a patriot. Britain must be defended from those who seek to despoil it. My colleagues and I provide that defence. You must understand the need for purity. The imperative to keep the island free.’

‘Free from what?’ Benny asked. ‘The living?’

‘Those who do not hold to the democratic principles of the Charter, those who despise their country, those who oppose Fundamental Humanism. Disturbed people, who would be considerably helped were they to be terminally re‐
educated… No,’ she cut herself off. ‘I hate euphemisms. I kill people. I kill the people who deserve it.’

‘Like us?’ Ace again, sailing too close to the wind for Benny’s liking.

‘Like Winterdawn. For the most terrible crimes,’ Page rattled on, relishing the exposition. ‘Sedition, subversion, sabotage, alliteration. A naughty boy. Very naughty. How’s that?’ She grinned expansively at Ace.

Her concentration on the most obviously aggressive woman was, Benny realized, a mistake. Page had let her guard waver, and Sandra took the opportunity of the lapse to jump on her. In that second, Winterdawn’s daughter lost any semblance of human shape. She was a mass, an aggressive shapeless thing with a million blurred limbs. Claws tore at Page’s face and hair and clothes. She clung to Page’s body, burying the assassin under her own flailing mass. There was something sleek and deadly and uniquely violent about Sandra in a fury. She was working off her anger at a world that was doing its best to spite her.

It had to be that, Benny reflected, tentatively slipping forwards to help, you wouldn’t get me leaping on a trained killer unless I was really pissed off.

Sandra was screaming. The only word Benny caught was ‘father’. The rest seemed to be nothing more than a long, slurred mix of swearing and abuse.

The scream found an accompaniment – a chorus with one, harsh note. It cracked suddenly against the far wall. Further disharmonious bursts smashed into the ceiling. Ace had already hurled herself onto the floor and Benny followed. The chorus burst into full song – a dull rattle of gunfire, drowning Sandra’s solo, driving metal across the room and into the fixtures. Gunfire exploded randomly across the room. The floor‐
boards a foot from Benny’s face cracked and splintered as a number of bullets panned across them. Benny looked up wildly and saw Page trying to twist the pistol round to aim at Sandra, without much success. Sandra had a firm grip on the assassin’s wrist and was shaking it wildly.

Page emitted an effort‐
filled howl and Sandra was no longer writhing on her back. She had been sent flying, hitting the ground with a dull thump. She sprawled on the floor, moaning in hysteria and pain.

The gunfire stopped. Page – less the cool and emotionless killer, more dishevelled and primally violent – sprang forward. She planted her boots onto Sandra’s face and chest and between her legs. Despite the crude, brute violence there wasn’t much real power there. She wasn’t trying to break anything. She was just trying to cause pain.

Judging from Sandra’s shrieks, she was succeeding.

Benny forced herself to her feet, aware that her pain was dull and flat from hitting the floor too fast – not the sharp pain of a bullet. Ace was already up and springing at Page. Instantly she found the muzzle of Page’s gun before her – a dark, hollow eye staring like death into her own. She stopped and backed away, hands raised pointedly. Benny shared the gesture.

‘This must be Winterdawn’s daughter.’ Page retained her calm. There was blood on her face and she kept as cool as ever. The kicking must have sated her blood‐
lust. Her coat was stained with blood, making it seem blacker than ever. It was like a funeral shroud, the robes of a dark angel.

The Angel of Death leant down and tore open Sandra’s shirt. She clutched downward and wrenched. Sandra shrieked again.

Page held up Sandra’s crucifix like a trophy. Blood seeped down her arm, smothering the icon.