The Devil in Green (106 page)

'Did you get it?' Stevens barked at Mallory the moment he stepped through the steamed-up glass door of the cafe. He was sitting at his usual table in the corner, smoking a cheap cigar, while his hard-eyed cronies sat around, laughing at his jokes.

'Yes.' Mallory was shaking. He dropped the haversack on the table.

Stevens chuckled, looking around at his dismal associates. 'The only good bitch—' He paused mid-sentence, his eyes growing wider, the familiar fury rising in his face. Suddenly he grabbed Mallory's wrist. 'Is that blood?' he snapped. Mallory snatched his hand back, letting the sleeve of his leather jacket obscure the tell-tale sign. 'Go and wash it off, you fucking idiot.'

As he headed towards the toilets at the back, Sylvie caught his eye. She was carrying a plate of egg and chips destined for a Geordie man in his eighties who always sat at the window smoking roll-ups. 'You didn't do it?' she hissed with a condemnatory expression that he'd hoped he'd never live to see. She looked tired, her face made hard by too much work for not enough money.

'I didn't have a choice.'

'Everybody has a choice, Mallory.'

She barged past him in a way that suggested she'd finally written him off.

He had to get out. Filled with despair, he stepped through the door into the toilets.

Mallory skidded down a pile of rubble from a wall that had collapsed from great age, tumbling into a vast vault whose extremities were lost to the gloom. At the bottom, yellow bones protruded from a shattered crypt.

Stefan's footsteps echoed like gunfire, but they were now accompanied by a pathetic whimpering; he knew he'd never get away. Mallory picked up a chipped thigh bone as he ran and hurled it with force into the dark. Stefan's cry came back sharp and sweet.

'I'm going to get you, you bastard!' he yelled, though strangely he couldn't remember who he was trying to get; or, indeed, who he was. He had a name - Mallory - but that was all he knew. It probably didn't matter.

He sprinted across the dusty floor, bones flying right and left. The air smelled of chalk and damp, and was as cold as the grave.

The sound of tumbling rocks behind him snapped his attention back. Hipgrave was at the top of the rubbled slope, all sense gone from his eyes; the beast ruled him completely now. As Mallory watched, horns burst through his skull in a circle around his head at forehead height, became knives, then retracted.

Obliquely, Mallory realised that Hipgrave was closer: he was catching

up.

He leaped forwards, plunging into the dark.

'You can't trust Stevens,' Mueller said with surprising insight. He never looked as though he was paying attention to anything.

They sat on the balcony watching the crew, under the guidance of Denny, setting up the sound system near where the altar would have been. The pale wintry sunshine still brought a dazzle of cascading colour from the stained-glass windows.

'Whose stupid idea was it to turn an old church into a club? It was a crappy idea back in the eighties when the Limelight set up shop,' Mallory said.

'Did you hear me?' Mueller turned to him, then slowly relented. 'The Devil has all the best tunes.'

'I know. It's a metaphor.' Mallory plucked the ice cube from his glass, placed it in his mouth and began to crunch it up. 'Stevens thinks he's smart, but he's not. He's a thug, an East End barrow boy made bad. He's no match for my educated, wily ways.'

'Educated? You dropped out,' Mueller said. 'But he's got one thing you haven't. He believes in what he's doing. You watch yourself, Mallory.'

'You're such a moaner, Mueller. Moan, moan, moan.' The engineer checked the balance by playing an oldie on Mallory's decks. 'Beth Orton remixed by the Chemical Brothers,' he noted. 'Good taste for a monkey.' There was a plaintive element to the song that made him introspective. 'Do you ever get the feeling that the world isn't the way it should be?' he said, lost to his thoughts.

'What do you mean?'

'Which word don't you understand?'

Mueller sipped his drink quietly. He'd been here so many times over the years, he knew better than to get riled by anything Mallory said.

When Mallory saw that he wasn't going to bite, he made a face and continued, 'Look at it - what a sour, miserable existence. If there is a God, is this the best He can do? A place where people like Stevens thrive.' He grew introspective again. 'Sometimes I think this is all an
illusion ... a mess ...
and there's a better world somewhere behind it. Sometimes, if you catch this world sleeping, you can look at it just right and see straight through it to that good place on the other side.'

'Sylvie's addled your mind, Mallory.' Mueller tittered.

'Shut up, Mueller. You never did have any sense. I don't know why I ever took you on board.'

Doors opened on to rooms that vaguely resembled ones he had passed through before, though each had a slight difference - a carving, a gargoyle, a column. There was stone and shadows, and dust, steeped in antiquity and quiet centuries of deep reverence, where no words were uttered but thoughts were offered up to the heart of Existence. There were chapels and vaults, tombs and halls, galleries and corridors, places of sanctity and places that felt alien and unwelcoming.

Mallory crashed through them all, knowing that if he slowed Hipgrave would be behind him, but never quite managing to lessen the distance between him and Stefan. He had the unnerving feeling that sooner or later he would forget the reason for running, that it would simply be something he did, like eating and breathing.

And each new doorway provided a new room, a new sensation, a new way of looking at life, and each time he lost a little bit more of who he was.

'You do it,' Stevens said, 'or that little waitress you like gets taken out back by my boys, done over, then popped in the head and dumped in the river. Do you hear me, you little fucker?'

Mallory picked himself up off the floor. His ribs felt as if someone had stuffed a firework in them. 'You really think I'd do something like that?'

Stevens smiled slyly. 'Well, I don't really know. I suppose we'll see, won't we? I mean, I'm just a thick boy from Bow - what do I know? You're the one with the good education. I expect you'll be putting me straight sometime soon.'

'Irony works best in a single sentence. You spoil the effect when you drag it out.' Mallory wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; it left a dark smear.

Stevens didn't have to retaliate for the attitude; he knew he had Mallory between a rock and a hard place. He simply watched and smiled, relishing his position of absolute power.

'You've got to be joking,' Mallory said, starting to realise with mounting horror that Stevens wasn't.

Stevens shrugged. 'Well, bang goes your bitch - in more ways than one.'

Mallory began to back-pedal. 'Now, look—'

'No. Let's not look. Let's deal with the offer on the table. It's simple - even I can understand it. You can do
this ...
or this.'

'I'll do anything else. You wanted a cut of the takings-

Stevens made a dismissive hand gesture. 'That's all gone now. This is what's happening.'

'But ... but ...
it doesn't make any sense. You don't get anything out of this—'

'Well, that's where you're wrong, my son.' His expression told Mallory everything: what he got was the brutish satisfaction of seeing Mallory torn apart by a choice no one could ever make without being destroyed.

'What you want me to do - it's inhuman.'

'Yes, it is, isn't it?'

Mallory felt as if he was drowning.

'A couple of other things while you . . . ruminate . . . that's a word, isn't it? You try to run, the waitress gets it. You do anything at all apart from what I've asked you and she gets it. Anything at all. But you do what I ask and everything'!! be sweet.'

Mallory's mouth was dry. He couldn't see Stevens any more, just the horrendous images playing across his own internal screen. 'How do I know you won't kill Sylvie anyway?' he said, dazed.

'I'm an honourable man, Mallory. I stand by old-fashioned values - I'm not a slippery, fast-talking fucking intellectual like you. When I give my word, that's it. I believe in die things that made this country great. The world now, it's gone to pot. Being honourable, that's all we've got to hold everything together.'

The irony would have been funny if Mallory hadn't felt like being sick.

Things changed as he emerged from a tiny door into a room that contained an enormous subterranean reservoir. Echoes of lapping water bounced off the walls, while light from an unidentified source provided shimmerings in the gloom. Walkways crisscrossed the stone tank, but they were barely wider than a man and it would be impossible to run along them without slipping into the black water of unknown depth.

Stefan was making his way cautiously across the network of paths, unbalanced by the box he was carrying. If Mallory was careful he would be able to make up lost ground.

Watching his feet, he stepped out on to the nearest walkway and moved as quickly as he could. Where the shadows were thickest the water looked like oil. But in some places, where the mysterious light fell across it, he had a perception of depth, and he had the unnerving sensation that things were moving in it. Stefan, too, appeared to have noticed the same thing, for he regularly cast worried glances into the water on either side.

As he passed the first crossway, he realised he was indeed closing on Stefan, who was edging forwards very slowly, as much for fear of what might lie in the water as of falling in. Mallory's growing confidence was shattered when he glanced to his left and saw, floating an inch or so below the water, a woman who appeared maddeningly familiar yet had no place in his life as he knew it. He was overcome with a feeling of affection, even love, but the woman's eyes were wide and accusing.

Other bodies drifted silently nearby, and although he thought of them as
bodies,
another part of him was convinced they were alive in some way he couldn't explain. They, too, were at the same time recognisable and not.

The shock of seeing them there like dead fish almost made him lose his footing, and he feared what would happen if he fell in amongst them. He was only distracted from his uneasy thoughts when he realised there was a disturbance in the water around Stefan. Rising on every side were the cowled figures of the dead clerics from the ossuary.