The Black Tattoo (40 page)
Authors: Sam Enthoven
"Monitors?" barked the radio.
"Sorry sir?" said Number 27.
"Anything on the
monitors?
" repeated Number 2.
"Nothing sir," said Number 27.
"Except — wait."
"Yes?"
"There's something coming up the stairs.
No... No, not coming
up
the stairs."
There was a pause.
"What?" asked Number 2.
Number 27 just sat back and rubbed his eyes.
But when he looked again, he could see that what was happening was, unfortunately, still happening.
"Twenty-seven, I'm waiting."
"It's going
through
them, sir," said Number 27.
"Whatever it is, it's coming through the walls!"
"Put the whole team on full alert."
Number 27 didn't need telling twice.
On the landing outside the butterfly room, Charlie paused, frowning.
He'd set off the intruder alarm almost a minute ago now, and still no one had appeared to try and stop him.
What sort of response time did they call this?
Tutting exaggeratedly, he set off for Esme's room.
Rather than have to bother with all the stairs and corners, he went straight through the walls.
Charlie had been doing this a lot lately, back in the palace in Hell.
The novelty of the sensation — the sudden damp feeling of the cold, old stone as it passed through him even as he passed through it — had worn off quite quickly.
Scaring the pants off the people in the rooms beyond, though:
that, he found, was the fun bit.
There had to be about twenty of these goons camped out in each room, packed like sardines in their little rows of sleeping bags.
The effect of his appearance on them as he rose up through the floor, letting his cloak ripple about him and fill the room with a flood of crackling darkness, was, Charlie found, very satisfactory indeed.
Grinning to himself, he slid through the ceiling, leaving chaos and screams in his wake.
Once inside Esme's room, however, he stopped and frowned again.
He looked around the room, pointlessly checking all its cushion-covered surfaces.
It was dark in there, but that wasn't a problem for him.
The problem was, the room was empty.
Hmm
.
He opened the door and stepped out onto the landing outside, just as some five or six Sons of the Scorpion Flail finally got there to intercept him.
He was greeted by a chorus of ratcheting safety catches, orders for him to freeze, and so forth.
It was so like something off the telly, it was really very funny.
"You," said Charlie to the one standing nearest him, who hadn't even managed to get his gas mask on properly yet.
"Where is she?"
"Er, wh-who?" stammered Number 16.
"The girl, stupid," said Charlie, reaching into the man's mind when he didn't answer straightaway. "Thank you," he added, when he'd got what he wanted, and with (though he said it to himself) a pretty credible burst of manic baddie cackling, he whirled his cloak about himself and vanished, reappearing at Esme's bedside.
He looked down at her.
She looked awful.
It wasn't just that she was tied to the bed with a frankly bewildering array of straps, buckles, and (now) chains holding her in place.
It wasn't even that she was attached to an intravenous drip full of (Charlie noted with a superhuman glance) enough tranquilizers to stun a whale.
Her eyes were scrunched up like she was in pain.
Her arms were covered in long clawed scratches that she'd obviously done herself.
Her hands, strapped down to either side of her, were bunched into small fists.
She was pale and sick looking and desperately, desperately sad.
For the first time in a while, Charlie felt a pang of something a little like regret.
But it was okay, he told himself, because that was why he'd come.
He'd been in the room perhaps three seconds at most.
The ceiling and the walls rang with the impact of boots as the Sons ran down to catch up with him:
it was time to do what he'd come to do.
He reached up and took off the pigeon sword, sliding the strap from his shoulders.
Gently, carefully, he laid it by Esme's right side and closed her fingers around the hilt.
Her hand was warm, and he held it for a fraction of a second longer than he needed to.
"There you go," he said quietly.
Instantly, Esme stirred.
Her eyelids fluttered — and Charlie stood back, watching her uncertainly.
Suddenly, he realized, she was holding the sword for herself, clasping it to her chest in both hands now, until her knuckles bulged white against the dark wood of its scabbard.
The Sons were battering at the door.
Great heavy blows threatened to knock it off its hinges — yet the small and uncontrollable shiver that Charlie gave as he watched Esme begin to wake was nothing to do with them.
The door bust open—
—but Charlie was gone.
*
*
*
*
*
For a long, delicious moment, Charlie soared through the orange-tinged sky over the West End.
His cloak of liquid darkness rippled about him, and he laughed with delight as the wind of his passing grew hot on his face.
He vanished again and reappeared standing in his room.
It was his bedroom, in the house in Stoke Newington — the place where he'd grown up.
All his stuff — his games, his comics, his film collection — was all exactly as he'd left it.
After everything that had happened, Charlie found this inexplicably annoying.
How lame and paltry it all looked now, especially with the thin layer of dust that had already started to form over all of it.
When he'd thought about this moment before, he'd imagined he'd be tempted to take something as a keepsake, despite the risk that it might be noticed.
Now he was here, he wasn't tempted in the least.
There was nothing worth coming back for, noting compared to what was waiting for him in Hell.
Sneering, he sank through the floor.
He appeared in his parents' room, by their big four-poster bed.
Like Esme's room had been, it was empty.
Charlie frowned and sank through another floor, ending up in the passage that led to the sitting room.
Now, at last, he could see light, escaping round the gaps at the edges of the door.
He stood outside in the passage for a moment.
Then he took a deep breath, held it, and slid through.
The wood of the door was old and hard and had what must have been about forty different layers of paint on it.
The way his eyes were now, he could even see the little lines that his parents had marked off on the doorway over the years, to show how much he'd grown.
He'd found her.
His mum was asleep on the sofa.
Charlie just stood there and looked at her.
She didn't look good either.
She was pale, her lipstick was smeared, her mouth was open, and her head was lying at an angle that would obviously give her a very sore neck in the morning.
The floor surrounding the sofa was covered in scrunched-up tissues; there was an empty glass and a half-drunk bottle of white wine on the table in front of her, and the TV had been left switched on, though very quietly.
Across the floor stretched a long cord that led to the telephone, which lay at her side on the cushions, under her hand.
She'd fallen asleep waiting for it to ring:
waiting for him, Charlie, to call.
Charlie felt bad then.
For a long second the bad feeling ran all the way through him like a slow electric charge, and all he could do was stand there.
But then, after a moment, another urge too hold of him, the urge to get out.
He had a way to fix everything, quickly and — he reckoned — cleanly.
He was going to leave the whole mess, everything, behind him.
He could do that.
He was going to do that.
He
had
to do that.
"Bye, Mum," he said quietly.
Then he vanished again.
*
*
*
*
*
This time, he reappeared outside Blackhorse Road Underground Station.
His father had moved into a flat near here with his new... "girlfriend," as Charlie supposed he had to call her (he grimaced).
This was where his dad had been living since leaving Charlie's mum.
Charlie could remember this address all right:
the problem was that since he'd never been there before, he didn't know how to find his way there.
Tutting slightly, because it was annoying that even a superhuman like himself still had to stop for directions, Charlie looked closely at the local map that was outside the station.
There.
That was where it was.
Moments later, he was outside the building.
Floating smoothly upward through the summer night air, he began to look in through the windows.
On the south-facing side, the side where he'd materialized, all of them were dark except one.
Luckily (or unluckily), that turned out to be the one he'd been looking for.
Six floors up off the ground, Charlie froze.
They were standing n the middle of the kitchen:
his dad and the woman Charlie hardly knew.
They were hugging each other.
It wasn't the kind of hug he'd ever seen his dad and his mum give each other:
Charlie knew that straightaway.
His dad's face was pressed deep into the side of the woman's neck.
The woman was running her hands very slowly across Charlie's dad's back, high up, up near his shoulders.
The kitchen looked bright and new and amazingly clean, as if it had never been used before.
The glare of the bare strip light on the kitchen ceiling gave the place a harsh, antiseptic appearance.
Outside, staring in from the darkness, watching them, Charlie felt his stomach knotting into icy twists of loathing and disgust.
Charlie remembered what his dad had told him that time in the Chinese restaurant:
When the chance cam up for me to be really happy, I had to take it
.
He smiled fiercely.
Maybe the two people he was looking at thought they were happy now.
Maybe they were even right.
But it wasn't going to last.
Soon they'd be sorry.
When they found out about what he was about to do, they'd be sorry for the rest of their lives.
And that, Charlie decided, was fine by him.
"God, Sandra," said Mr. Farnsworth finally, lifting his head to look at her.
His eyes were red and puffy.
"What if he's done something stupid?
What am I going to do?
I just wish he'd call."
"I know," said the woman doggedly.
"I know."
But Charlie didn't hear this.
He was long gone.
*
*
*
*
*
This time, he reappeared on
Of all London's bridges across the Thames, this was Charlie's favorite.
From
Charlie looked down at the black, silent Thames moving below him, cold and deep and merciless, and for a second he felt that the bridge — the whole city with him on it — was moving, and that the river itself was still.
Then he pulled himself together.
Dawn was on its way now.
If he was going to finish what he'd come to do, he had to act fast.
He took a step back from the railing and began his magic.
Even at that time of night, there were still a few people on the bridge.
His first priority, therefore, was to prevent anyone from seeing him and what he was about to do.
Charlie frowned, and the space around him began to shimmer:
for the next few minutes, until he was ready, the eyes of anybody who looked would simply slide past him as if he weren't there.
Now he was free to get on with the real business at hand.
The air started to thicken and go hot as Charlie coaxed it into giving him what he wanted.
The trunk came first — an ugly, solid clump that he massaged into shape with a grimace of disgust, smoothing it with his fingers.
With quick, careful movements, he extended the arms and legs, focusing his concentration on the bones, the sinews, and the blood vessels as they whispered into being behind the delicate layers of skin.
Next, still frowning, he looked at the gap between the shoulders — and it began to glisten and bulge.
In another moment it was inflating:
swelling as it filled with bone and blood and, finally, brain.
Still Charlie concentrated, smoothing and whittling and working at the surfaces until at last his hands fell to his sides, and he stood back and looked at his handiwork.