Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

I walked outside, where Jasper was leaning against what had been my desk, talking animatedly to Barbara. She was giggling in reply, stroking her hair, placing her fingertip in the side of her mouth and generally playing the coquette.

Jasper grinned at the sight of me. “There you are!”

Barbara, curiosity emboldened, kissed me on the cheek. “Good luck, Henry.”

I stood mute and motionless as a shop-window dummy as Jasper thrust the box into my hands. “There you go. We’d better get a move on.”

“Now?” I asked.

Jasper nodded.

Barbara squeezed my arm. “Well done,” she hissed. “Good luck.”

Nervously, I cleared my throat. “Well, goodbye everyone,” I announced to the office at large. “It’s been great working with you all. I’ve enjoyed myself. But it looks like I’m moving on.” My colleagues ignored me, my only answer the tap of keyboards, the drone of telephones, the lazy burr of the photocopier. Somewhere, inevitably, someone was crunching their way laboriously through a packet of crisps. Cheese and onion, I think. I could smell it.

As soon as we were outside, Jasper grabbed my cardboard box and heaved it into the nearest bin.

“What did you do that for?” I asked, trying not to sound too wheedlingly plaintive.

“Where we’re going…” The man was striding off ahead. “Take it from me, you’re not going to need a potted plant.”

I trotted next to him, struggling to keep up. We walked along the South Bank beside the river, past the National Theatre, the restaurants, bookstalls and pavement caricaturists, past the Big Issue sellers and skateboarders and the men in furry coats roasting chestnuts, heading toward the great, gleaming edifice of the Eye.

“Where’s your department?” I asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“By the way,” Jasper snapped, “I think you should get a new suit. You can’t wear that thing anymore. Wouldn’t be respectful.”

“Oh.”

“That girl in your office… Barbara, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you happen to know if she’s attached?” Jasper’s tone had switched from understated menace to something approaching chumminess.

“What?” I asked.

“I mean does she have a boyfriend? Someone special in her life?”

Nonplussed: “I’ve no idea.”

“Hmm. I wonder.” He appeared to savor some sort of mental image before exclaiming: “Perfect, Mr. Lamb. That girl was perfect!”

“What are you talking about?” I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of office prank, if for the purposes of someone else’s entertainment I’d been yoked to a lunatic for the day. Surreptitiously, I looked around for hidden cameras.

Jasper stopped short. “We’re here.”

Baffled, I looked up. “But this is the Eye.”

“Come inside.”

There were dozens of tourists shuffling patiently in line, tortoising forward a few inches at a time. Jasper barged past them all to get to the front of the queue, and the curious fact was that none of them seemed to object, almost as though they hadn’t notice we were there at all. I observed, too, that for all his bravado and swagger Jasper seemed to be inspecting each of them carefully, like he was searching for someone he knew. More than once, I noticed him turn and nervously scan the line behind us.

“Looking for someone?” I asked.

“The enemy, Mr. Lamb. The enemy are always watching.”

“Enemy?” I said, feeling even now that this was most likely to turn out to be some insanely elaborate practical joke.

We reached the front of the queue, pushed past a ticket inspector who offered not the slightest objection to our presence and stood before an open pod filled with a group of Japanese tourists, all of them bristling with guidebooks and cameras, totally oblivious to the two of us.

Jasper gestured into the pod. “After you.”

The tourists were still ignoring us.

“But it’s packed.”

“Trust me.”

I didn’t move.

“Mr. Lamb, what you’re about to see is above top secret. Breathe the merest word of what you see here today and the most extreme measures will be set in motion against you. Is that understood?”

I nodded, feeling oddly light-headed — like I was in a dream and knew it, that my actions would have no real effect in the waking world.

“Well then. Walk on.”

“I can’t. It’s full.”

Jasper seemed to lose patience. “Just go.” He pushed me forward and I stumbled into the pod.

To my amazement, I seemed to pass through the ranks of tourists as though they were no more substantial than mist — will-’o-the-wisps clutching souvenirs, digital cameras and laminated maps of the city.

Jasper stepped smartly in behind me. “Smoke and mirrors…,” he murmured, in the kind of tone you might adopt trying to soothe a child woken in the night by bad dreams.

Inside, it was darker and larger than I had expected. Dimly, I heard the door hiss shut and the pod begin its smooth ascent. There was a smell in there which seemed tuggingly familiar, redolent of floating bandages and verrucas. It took me a moment to pinpoint. It was chlorine — the smell of a public swimming pool.

Our view of London was obscured by what appeared to be a large tank of water which took up almost half of the pod, as though we had somehow entered an aquarium by mistake. Through it, I could see the landmarks of the city, distended and made strange by refraction — St. Paul’s elongated and obscene, the Houses of Parliament shimmering and fragile, the spires of Canary Wharf stretched out and distorted, its citadels of commerce glimpsed as though through the bottom of a clouded glass.

More disconcertingly even than this was what floated in the tank. It was a man, evidently at the extremity of old age, his skin wrinkled and puckered, wattled, creased and liver-spotted. He was naked save for a pair of faded orange swimming trunks and seemed to be floating underwater, his ancient body, backlit by the sun, bathed in a halo of yellow light.

I wondered how he could possibly breathe inside that tank, before dismissing the notion that he could actually be alive as absurd.

Then, impossible though I knew it had to be, the old man spoke. His lips moved underwater yet I heard him as clearly as if he were standing beside me. His was a deep, old, sad voice, full of strange inflections.

“Welcome, Henry Lamb!” he said — and he said it warmly, as though he knew me, like we went back years together, he and I. “My name is Dedlock. This is the Directorate. And you’ve just been conscripted.”

“At the Directorate, we don’t deal in volunteers.” The man called Dedlock was grinning at me, bobbing up and down with a grisly vigor which belied his age. “You’re one of us now.”

I opened my mouth to say something but not a single word would come. Instead, I found myself staring at the old man’s torso, fascinated by a progression of creases that seemed to strafe his skin, flaps of flesh which throbbed and pulsated as though with independent life.

Gills?

Surely this man couldn’t have gills?

Dedlock was glaring. “You find us in the midst of war. And I’m rather afraid we’re losing.”

For several minutes my mouth had been too dry to speak. Now, at last, I squeezed out a sentence. “War? Who’s at war?”

The old man dealt the side of the tank a ferocious blow. Jasper and I flinched backward and I wondered what would happen if the glass were to shatter and the water gush out, whether Dedlock would flail and flop on the ground like a beached carp. “Secret civil war has been waged in this country for half a dozen generations. This organization is all that stands between the British people and their oblivion.”