The Minority Council (49 page)

I rang the bell, and heard a musical ding-dong from inside.

No answer.

I rang again.

Then knocked on the big brass knocker in the shape of a swan’s head.

Still no reply.

I ran my hand over the warm wood of the door, push
ing my mind between the cracks, testing for any form of magical defence, and for a moment heard

this is all your fault all your fault all

for fuck’s sake Mum it’s not like you can stop me!

you don’t talk to me like that how dare you

It was faint, heard far off, but turn our head to the side and listen,
listen
, and there it was, the gentle background beating of the culicidae’s heart, rage and confusion in a fistful of fiery heat.

I couldn’t sense any wards.

But, this close to the countryside, I considered there might be other defences, spells woven, not from coils of wire but from the roots within the earth. I knocked one more time, and when there was no answer I headed to the back of the house.

There, a curving glass wall looked out on a patio with an ornamental pool, teak garden furniture and a mothballed barbecue. Inside was a spacious living room of plush sofas, and fitted carpet deep enough to take footprints. I smashed a French window with a rock stolen from the ornamental pool, bashed away a few splinters left from the frame, and unlocked the door from inside.

The house was silent.

Except perhaps for…

You never listen you don’t care you never understand!

when I was your age we knew how to behave

you call this acceptable behaviour, young man?

“Mr Caughey?” I called out.

My voice was dulled amid heavy looped curtains and engulfing upholstery.

“Templeman betrayed you,” I declared, turning to climb the wide stairs. “He betrayed everyone.”

A corridor on the first floor, long and white, doors on every side, fresh paint shining on panelled walls. A wall table on the landing held thick clean towels and a vase of coppery glycerine-dried beech twigs.

“It’s over,” I went on, trying a door that opened into a bathroom, a dozen kinds of shower gel made from honey and mint, tea tree and strawberry, arranged along the side of an oversized bath. “There’s no salvaging the Minority Council after this. You’ve screwed up. You screwed up the culicidae, you screwed up with the dusthouses and now Templeman has screwed you for good. All anyone’s going to say when they think of the Minority Council is ‘Hey, weren’t those the guys who got played by a traitor?’ Because you were. We all were. Templeman played us like a fiddle.”

A door at the end of the corridor, white like the rest; locked.

I could feel a warmth on my skin, a tingling in my fingers, as I tried the handle. I knocked, and thought I heard something move in the room beyond; tasted bitterness at the back of my mouth.

“He took Penny,” I said, barely aware that I was saying the words. “He took Penny and told me she was dead. Used me. Us. But he can’t have done it alone.”

Silence.

No—not quite silence.

Not entirely.

I pressed my ear to the door. I could hear a gentle sound that might have been wind against a window-pane, might have been breath after suffocation, might have been whispered frantic words.

Listened.

“… told them told them told them told them fuck! Fuck fuck they never why would they never hate them hate them he wouldn’t have he wouldn’t have done to me
FUCK OFF
hate them hate them hate them don’t understand don’t understand don’t understand why
didn’t they understand…!”

I stepped back, considered my options, then gave a good kick.

It probably hurt my foot more than the door, but I heard something splinter, and kicked again.

The door bounced open, revealing a room with one small window, one small bed, one small, unused jogging machine, one small, unplugged TV; and one not very large man, huddled around a small box.

The box was insulated, the kind of thing well-organised mothers use for taking ice cream to a picnic. It was encased within the form of a man dressed all in black. His face was flushed, his salt-and-pepper hair was wild, revealing how thin it was beneath its comb-over; his black suit was rumpled. As he knelt, arms wrapped around the box, his eyes darted to and fro almost as fast as the words tumbled from his mouth:

“Fuckers! Fuck fuck fuck bitch bitch never understood never understood I don’t need it why should I care don’t care don’t care it’s always them them telling me what they want me to be not what I want they don’t understand what I want don’t listen don’t fucking listen…”

I squatted down in front of him.

His eyes swerved to me then away, his body tightening around the cool-box. At the base of the box, the carpet was smoking, and a brown-black stain was spreading from beneath it. The air was heat-hazed, smelling faintly of tar, and where Caughey’s cheek rested against the
plastic of the box, blisters were emerging, yellow-white on a roaring-red background.

“Cecil Caughey,” I murmured, balancing painfully in front of him on my haunches.

His eyes darted to me again, and were gone as quickly. “If they loved me they wouldn’t have left me left me left me left me no one fucking loves me and that’s fine that’s fine I’m okay with that because why the fuck should I care anyway about those stupid bitches who don’t fucking love me they’re all going to go to hell anyway shit!”

“Mr Caughey, Chairman of the Minority Council,” I breathed, “did you read the health and safety leaflet that comes with this thing?”

I tapped the edge of the plastic box with a fingertip. The box itself was burning, a thin sticky layer beginning to form on its surface like syrup on a pancake.

“You take everything!” he wailed. “I didn’t mean it I didn’t I didn’t mean it you always make it out like it’s my fault my fault my fault when it wasn’t it wasn’t why the fuck would you listen to those fucking cunts anyway they don’t know anything they don’t fucking care it’s just a job to them but this is my life!”

I stood up, dragging in breath as fire surged through my ribs. Tearing the sheets from the bed into strips, I wrapped them like fat gloves around my hands. I squatted back down in front of him, took the box in my sheet-swathed hands and tried to pull it free. Anger flared in his eyes; he wrapped his arms tighter around the box, the black fibres of his jacket starting to smoke at the increased contact.

“Mine!” he screamed. “It’s mine it’s mine it’s mine! Fuck off!”

I hesitated, let go of the box, watched him huddle closer to it.

Then I said, “You probably won’t recover, but if there is something in there which can hear this, I reason you should know. I’m going to take the culicidae’s heart now. I’m going to use it to destroy the dusthouses. Not because I think I can win, that this war can ever be won. Not because of Penny. Or Templeman, or Hugo and the bloodhounds, or Oscar bloody Kramb. Their time will come. Not even for Meera, not any more. I’m going to do it because, at this stage, I have nothing else left to do. I have nothing that is mine. I have no one that I… there is nothing left of me but this. Nothing to do but finish it.”

I seized the box again, and pulled it free with a single tug. Caughey cried out and fell onto the floor; scrambled after me with blistered broken hands, one side of his face oozing blood and clear fluids.

“Mine mine mine!” he screamed. “Give it back to me give it back to me bitch bastard slut cunt I hate you I hate you I hate you why did you give birth to me why did you if you didn’t love me why why why…?”

I stood up quickly, stepping aside as he collapsed in sobs at my feet. Even through the padding of the sheets I could feel the heat from the culicidae’s heart, hear its beating in my ears, a relentless pulse that longed to be heard, fed on rage and loneliness and despair.

“We ought to kill you,” we explained to Caughey as he beat on the floor with his fists. “Templeman cannot have done everything alone. But we realise now that death… it is not sorrow or grief or despair. It is not guilt and retribution, it is not justice and the cries of the lost. Is merely a not-ending. A stopping of all things. A blackness without
feeling. We could kill you, and by now…” We grimaced at the thought. “By now we are so washed in blood that your life would run off our skin like spray off the surface of the ocean. You would never be on our conscience.”

Caughey’s thrashing about grew less; he wrapped his head in his hands, words trickling out with animal sounds between his lips, body shaking, tears mixing with blood on his face.

“Please please please,” he whispered. “Please please why don’t you listen to me why don’t you ever listen I’m just a kid okay? I’M JUST A KID!”

We backed off into the doorway, cradling the burning box that held the mosquito’s heart. Between sobs he was scratching at the raw places on his face. “This,” we said, “is much better.”

We walked away.

The strips of sheet I’d used as protection from the culicidae’s heart were already blackening and turning crisp by the time I got downstairs.

A set of car keys sat on a table by the door.

They unlocked a silver hybrid car parked in the drive outside. I put the box in the back.

It had been a long time since I last drove, and I struggled to work out which complex part of the dash related to what. Even the indicator stick came with options, from turning on the radio to warming the driver’s seat.

Suburban driving was a mixture of wide open roads where 70 mph was allowed but not recommended, and busy roundabouts where all things merged to a 4 mph slog. I could smell the back seat beginning to burn and, through the sharp stench of it, there was the inescapable beating of the culicidae’s heart.

why didn’t you

it’s not fair!

she said she would never

i hate you!

time to grow up

I knew where I needed to go. It wasn’t far.

I headed for the river.

Travel through London up the river and you see the Thames change its nature very quickly. Above the wide muddy estuary, it ebbs and flows in a controlled torrent of controlled water between tall stone embankments, sliced by the central bridges of the city. Further west, the banks are lower, and by the old riverside mansions of Chiswick and Richmond, where the cyclists and dog-walkers throng, the towpath is frequently flooded by the tides. Up towards Hampton Court Palace the water curls past more lazily: swans glide on its current, herons nest in tall trees, and small pleasure boats are moored at the end of long waterside gardens. “Private” signs abound.

I parked on a dirt path between two walled-off white houses, where a sign said “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted,” and unloaded my smoking treasure. One side of the lid was starting to melt; inside, drops of dirty plastic had fallen onto my rosy-tinted prize: the culicidae’s heart. Seeing it only increased its pressure against my own mind; for a moment I tasted that bitter taste, that rush of adrenaline, in the mouth of all its victims as the culicidae had descended out of darkness to feast on their anger and rage, to drain them of all the furies of youth and leave them as hollow shells.

Between me and the river stood a wrought-iron gate
fastened by an electromagnetic lock with a keypad. I snatched the electricity from the lock, holding it in the palm of my hand before shaking it away; the gate swung ajar.

Well-trimmed grass ran down to wet mud and the water’s edge. A pencil-thin skiff, rowed by three men in matching orange sweatshirts, skimmed across the water. A cormorant, surfacing between dives, rode up and down on the boat’s wake. I carried the box into the shallows, and let the water wash over my knees. Carefully, I lowered the box until the water slipped over its edge, and filled it.

Immediately it touched the heart, the water began to hiss and steam. I stepped in deeper, up to my hips, and pressed the box downwards until it was almost full, the culicidae’s heart floating inside a bubbling mass. I unwrapped the sheets from my hands, pressed my fingers into the river mud, coating them with grey-brown sludge, then reached into the box of hissing water, pulled out the culicidae’s heart, and plunged it into the river.

Heat.

Not just any kind of high temperature, but the burning sickly heat of feeling and disease. It was the fire a scream might have made, if it could burn; it was the fury of an ocean unable to tear apart the rocks; it was the stomach bursting from the inside out, the heart cloven in two, the eyes blinded by fatigue, the mind popping asunder under the weight of thoughts it could not comprehend. The water bubbled and boiled, steam rising up to sting my eyes and scald my skin, the heat running straight through my fingers and into the marrow of my bones, scorching out all other sense. And then came the rest of it.

Not just the fire, but the thing that made it burn. Our body arched as claws gouged our back, and our mind surged with a shrilling sound that went straight through the brain like an earthquake’s roar through antique glass, and our nose bled and our ears bled and something ruptured in the thinking part of us and, for an instant that lasted forever, we looked up and saw the shadow of a creature etched in darkness, its jaws opening to feed. Above, as a lance longer than my body emerged from the pit of its spinning-glass throat, it moved with infinite slowness over less than a second, balanced for a moment between our eyes, and thrust straight through.