Suspended In Dusk (14 page)

With the control we had over the way the people saw the news we could have brought down governments if we’d wished. But there was no need. The government and the ministry were synonymous, even though they were officially unaware of us. It was all about plausible deniability.

We had our own artisans and actors. Our professional liars. They’d all signed the Official Secrets Act and were paid very well. Furthermore they’d been informed, without having to spell it out to them, that to blow the whistle on the ministry would have ended their lives—literally. But why would they? Our employees had to work at most a couple of months a year and were able to live like celebrities on the results. Any kudos that running to WikiLeaks would have given them was far outweighed by the loss of everything up to and including their brain function.

Besides, we had WikiLeaks in our pocket. An illusion of press freedom was very important. As long as the public believed there was someone digging out the secrets that governments preferred to keep hidden then they wouldn’t go looking for anything themselves.

It wasn’t perfect. Some of the higher profile public performances had serious continuity problems if you looked closely enough, and I was aware that on occasion heads had rolled in the higher echelons of the ministry and its foreign equivalents.

I wouldn’t have to arrange anything on a national scale this time. For what I had in mind I’d need one actor—preferably an elderly lady—and a makeup artist. Our agents in the BBC and local police would do all the rest.

I typed the requirements into NewsMill using the usual terse abbreviations and went for a coffee. It wasn’t required for me to be on the spot, but I preferred to oversee things, albeit from the shadows. Besides, I needed to indulge myself occasionally in order to flex my creative and intellectual muscles, to make sure my manipulative skills were finely honed and that I remained at the top of my game.

It wouldn’t do for my work to fall below par. I didn’t know what happened to people when they no longer were of any use to the ministry but imagined that there wasn’t much room for promotion; I’d filled a very large pair of shoes, but what had happened to their original owner I had no idea. People went so far out of their way to avoid mentioning him—I was absolutely sure it had been a man—that there was a person shaped hole in my knowledge. It was a hole of such precise location and dimensions. If I looked hard enough I’d be able to find out not only his name and address but what his favourite film was, and where he went for breakfast the day before he died.

He was dead. Of that I had no doubt.

I had no intention of ending up dead. I had confidence in my artistic ability to produce reams of convincing reality substitute for decades to come. By the time I was ready to move on, no doubt death would have claimed some of the head honchos and I’d be able to step into the smart suit and shoes vacated by, say, the Cadaver himself. It would be a fitting way to spend my twilight years, inducting and teaching those like me so that my philosophy and mindset would live on.

Our methods were a small price to pay for security.

* * *

The makeup artist had done a sterling job. Half of the frail old woman’s face was discoloured with a frightening bruise, brown and purple. They’d even managed to redden the whites of her eyes. A memo had gone around about the use of CGI instead of makeup, but I was sceptical. The verisimilitude of these reports could only be damaged by post-production; many of the people involved—including the camera operator—were unaware of the fact that they were taking part in an elaborate fabrication and it was best to keep things that way.

The woman stood at the bottom of Adelaide Crescent, the wide sweep of Georgian Terraces forming an impressive background, and told in a shaking voice how an assailant wearing a hood had mugged her on the doorstep of her flat. Thankfully he hadn’t got hold of her door keys—which she wore on a lanyard around her neck—but had snatched her handbag and given her a kicking before running off. The ironic thing, she said, was that she had less than two pounds in cash on her and nothing else of any real value in there.

What was the world coming to?

Once the filming had wrapped up, the star of our piece was whisked away in a private cab, not to the imaginary flat in Adelaide Crescent but to a large property at an undisclosed location somewhere in the mid-Sussex countryside. The BBC packed up their equipment and drove off leaving me standing on the seafront.

I began walking towards the city centre and my hotel, setting sun at my back. I wasn’t staying anywhere ostentatious, just a small family run hotel down in Regency Square, somewhere the ministry always took its business when in the area. A hotel with an exclusive private bar.

After three or more hours alone in the bar I was bored. Despite how much I’d downed I didn’t feel in the slightest bit drunk. Alcohol never affected me that much, especially when I had other urges to satisfy.

I marched downstairs and out into the night.

It had been a warm enough day but the air was now beginning to cool. I checked my watch. It was one AM, the ideal time for this kind of thing. I turned one way then another, trying to lose myself in the narrow maze of residential streets along the sea front. My hand clutched at the object in my coat pocket, the object I always carried with me when out and about, just in case the opportunity presented itself.

And then I saw him. An old man, shuffling uphill along a narrow street. I sped up and within seconds was only a few yards behind him. I glanced about. There were no CCTV cameras in range.

I reached forward and grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him round, making sure he was fully aware of the tyre iron I clutched in my other hand before I brought it crashing down on his skull.

The expression on his face was worth it. That delicate balance between confusion and terror. It was perfect—as was the way his skull split and he collapsed to the floor, a stream of thick arterial blood trickling across the pavement and into the gutter.

I was an artist and while I employed my skills in the service of my job, there was nothing quite like the thrill of working with genuine materials. Faking it was only so satisfying; eventually you had to express yourself for real.

The thrill faded and I dropped the tyre iron back into my coat pocket. The lining was waterproof; I’d be able to remove all trace of the event later. I turned away and began walking back down the street when a figure stepped out from behind a parked van. My heart stopped. At first I could only see the silhouette, but then its identity became clear.

It was the Cadaver.

My life was over. I had become a liability and was sure that he was going to remove all trace of me either now or at some point over the next twenty-four hours. There was no escape.

And then he smiled, removed one of his gloves and held out his hand for me to shake.

“Welcome to the next level,” he said.

Maid of Bone

Toby Bennett

The teeth in Allie’s pocket were chattering with the cold. She slipped cautiously between the crooked rows of stone lining the mist choked graves. With only stars to light her way, progress was difficult but she was careful never to put a foot out of line; it was unthinkable that she might step over a verge and disturb what slept so lightly in the looser earth.

Keep to the path. Keep to the path.

The words clacked like ticker tape in her head. Not just anyone could approach the ossuary; there was a prescribed way to do things, if you wanted to be received—if you wanted to be able to leave once you got there.

Each footfall mattered; you had to be soft and quiet and come when the night was darkest. No one had ever directly told her these rules, she relied on dreams and omens. The sudden flight of birds, the turn of wrinkled cards, the way sediment lay in old cups; like all love affairs it came down to murmurs and instinct.

She would not deviate from her path, could not put a step wrong for fear of the consequences. Consequences she could only vaguely imagine. Horrors that were whispered to her from the moonless sky; warnings that slipped between her legs, on the stray vapours of the mist, caressing her with a chill that tightened her belly into a hard knot.

Allie could smell the dank moss, the not quite dead vegetation that rotted close to the small spring trickling from the hillside with winter’s wash. She was getting closer, almost there now. The teeth rattled in anticipation. The screech of insects answered the sound from the darkness.

She had had her first kiss in the shadow of the ossuary, her back pushed hard against the torn breast of a saint, watched by the stone devils that plagued him. She never knew who had kissed her, she’d kept her eyes firmly shut just as she’d been told—it was the only time her love had ever talked to her directly.

The memory of that encounter called her back, especially on the cold nights, laden with offerings and ready to make wild promises, anything to be free of the fear she felt beyond the cemetery walls. Allie knew she would be allowed to stay, one day, when she had laid enough before the iron bound doors. Yellow ivory, white bone, things both new and long dead; things made clean by worms, kept hidden from the sun until ripe.

Her betrothed craved sacrifice, but what lover didn’t?

Her worn boots began to squelch in the deepening mud and a few drops of icy water flew up to soak through threadbare skirts.

A shiver ran through her so reminiscent of the touch she yearned for. A moment dimly remembered, pain and fear, a weight against her. Was it wrong to promise yourself to a stranger in the dark? Allie didn’t have an answer, all she knew was that she would keep making offerings until her love returned. Right and wrong, smart or stupid didn’t matter, it wasn’t like she’d been given a choice. The wind was rising, chasing away the low mist and whipping her dark hair into streaming chaos. She ground her teeth and mashed her hands deep into her pockets.

Allie had spent so long getting herself to look just so, it wasn’t fair. Her beloved never saw her as she wanted to be seen. The wind seemed to push against her, as if to drive her back from the brooding mausoleums ahead of her.

I will not be denied.

She reached out and took support from the crooked angel that stood over the sunken and forgotten grave of Thomas Rilley, nineteen thirteen to nineteen sixty-three.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the angel. The cracked stone stayed expressionless but she knew that she had done the right thing to speak. Angels could be vengeful—standing alone for so long bred spite.

“Sorry to disturb you, Tom,” she added as an afterthought.

An owl hooted its approval of her manners, winking at her from the velvet night with lambent eyes that missed nothing. Before too long the wind blew itself out, the owl returned to the hunt and she could move forward once more. She felt a growing warmth, an eagerness to her stride as she stepped into the shadows of the taller monuments that snaked over the older, moister parts of the graveyard.

Here a century had spilt its favoured children, holding them close in clinging clay. The shadows were long and stubborn here. Great horses rose above old generals and cherubs squatted like vultures over the tombs of babes. Each chisel stroke upon the weathered stone spoke of agony, ground into marble and granite with grim resolve; so that those who stole new years from their betters might remember. Lost brothers, wives and mothers, scattered in the darkness, hidden from the sun.

None knew all the secret names now. Allie only knew a few.

No one risked the cold or dared to walk between the frozen watchers for long. The statues set to guard old secrets, all better left buried.

The ground rose, becoming drier and now her damp feet sounded on bared paving stones, scoured by the sulking wind that made the grave dust dance in tiny, ever decreasing circles. She smoothed her hair, her fingers catching in the knots that unseen fingers had tied as she walked the path. The dead would have their little jokes.

The ossuary stood on the top of the hill. Her heart was pounding—a rhythm to prick up the ears of all but the most sated of night time wanderers.

A row of trees had once adorned the last sweep up towards the low building that squatted at the top of the hill but, like teeth in an old man’s mouth. Many had fallen leaving the avenue ragged.

The bleached bodies of the trees had never been removed, just shifted to the side of the path where their splintered bodies lay half buried, holding back the coiled brambles and darting thistles that had long harboured designs on the pale stones that lead to the house of bones.

Before she knew it, Allie stood before the great doors. The saint and his demons stared at her with hollow, deep carved eyes. They watched as she reached into her pocket and began to lay out her gifts before the door.

A bird’s skull, small and light. The feet of the cat that had killed it.

Last of all, she laid out the teeth, still alive with the aching cold. Gold glinted from one of the molars as she set it in a fan-like pattern over the pale bones that she had spent so long picking clean; that was a special prize, gold for her love as precious as the moments they would share soon when she was heard, when the door groaned open and she was taken below.

Allie was so lost in making everything just so that she almost didn’t hear the approach of the night watchman. At the last moment she noticed the scrape of boots and the muted glow of his approaching light.