Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

Steerforth walked over to the portrait, pulled out a two-pronged metal tube identical to a device I’d seen Jasper wave at Granddad and pointed it at the picture. There was an electronic whine, a subtle click, and the painting swung backward. No, not a painting, I saw now. A door.

A halogen light flickered on to reveal the smooth steel walls of an elevator.

Steerforth stepped inside and asked me to follow.

Numbly, wondering why the madness of this life no longer seemed to affect me, I did as I was told.

Steerforth pressed a button, the door hissed shut and I heard the painting snap back into place. Smoothly, the lift began to descend.

“Is there any point in asking where you’re taking me?”

The man said nothing.

“Steerforth?”

The lift came to a halt, the doors swept backward and Steerforth led me into another long corridor. Two guards, both armed, greeted us with grim nods.

On either side of us were glass windows fronting small rooms or cells, as if we were passing through the reptile house at the zoo. It was completely silent save for our footsteps and the shuffles of the guards. As I followed, I saw that there were people in each cell and that every one of them was naked. All seemed ill but their actions careered between the extremes of human behavior. One raged and gibbered at the sight of us. Another placed his hands imploringly upon the glass, tears curving down his plump cheeks. Another still seemed quite oblivious to us, curled up in a fetal ball, his flabby body quivering in despair. There was even a man who seemed faintly familiar. He let fly a thick stream of urine as we passed before crouching down and enthusiastically licking it up.

“Don’t I recognize him?”

Steerforth grunted. “Health secretary. Last but one, I think.”

“You’re not serious.”

We reached the end of the corridor, the final room, which, in contrast to the rest, lay in total darkness. Another guard stood outside, another machine gun slung around his neck. He sported an eye-popping look of the kind of state-sponsored sociopath who’d not only kill without a minute’s hesitation but would probably be looking forward to it.

“We never meant for you to see this,” Steerforth said softly. “But your grandfather’s left us no choice. You’ve got to go inside.”

“You’re not coming in with me?”

A hesitation. “Please,” he said, and his voice seemed to tremble.

“Steerforth? What’s the matter?”

The big man sounded as though he were about to cry.

“People think I don’t get frightened. But what’s in there…” His voice grew husky and he began to shake, like an alcoholic about to admit in front of his support group that he has a problem. “They scare me.”

“Oh, but you don’t mind sending me in?”

“You’ll be perfectly safe,” he said, although it was obvious he didn’t believe it. “They can’t leave the circle. Stay outside the circle and I promise you’ll be fine.”

The glass door glided noiselessly open and Steerforth looked away. “They’re waiting for you,” he said, and it was impossible not to notice the dark stain that had begun to spread across his combat trousers, snailing down his left leg and toward his shoes. “Go inside,” he said miserably.

“Please. At least tell me what to expect.”

But the pit bull of the Directorate couldn’t even meet my eye.

“Fine,” I said. As I walked into the dark, the door slid sleekly shut behind me.

I addressed the blackness, my voice trembling with fear. “My name is Henry Lamb. I’m from the Directorate.”

For a terrible moment, there was nothing. Then — light. Blazing, piercing light, almost intolerably bright, making spots of color jig before my eyes, forcing me to blink fiercely before I became accustomed to the glare. A spotlight picked out a large circular space in the middle of the room, its parameters marked out with white chalk. At the center of the circle, perched on garishly colored deckchairs as though they were settling down for an afternoon nap on Brighton beach, were two of the oddest people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

Two grown men, well into middle age — one thick necked and ginger, the other slight and thin faced with a cowlick of dark hair. Both (and this was most bizarre of all) were dressed as old-fashioned schoolboys, kitted out in matching blue blazers and itchy gray shorts. The smaller one wore a little striped cap.

They beamed at the sight of me.

“Hullo!” said the larger man. “I’m Hawker, sir. He’s Boon.”

His companion winked in my direction and that alone was enough to set every nerve in my body jangling. “You can call us the Prefects.”

Henry Lamb is a liar. Take nothing he says on trust. He is spinning you lines, sugaring the truth, telling you what he thinks you want to hear. Henry is no innocent. The lily-white Lamb has blood on his hands.

Mercifully for him, we have little interest in simply blackening his name. He has only a short time before his consciousness is irrevocably snuffed out, an eventuality which renders catcalls and finger-pointing superfluously petty. Instead, we intend to while away these last few days by telling you a story of our own, and you have our unimpeachable word for it that, in shaming contrast to Henry’s own self-serving memoir, every syllable shall be the truth.

Brace yourself for a move away from Lamb’s quotidian universe of office girls and landladies and the morning commute. Prepare for an Olympian leap from dewy-eyed sentiment about the aged and pubescent longing for the girl next door. This is the story that matters. This, the story of the war, of the last prince, of the fall of the House of Windsor.

I expect you shall find it a good deal more to your taste.

At around the time that Henry the liar was making the acquaintance of Hawker and Boon, the future king of England was listening to a roomful of people who were paid to adore him sing a rousing “Happy Birthday” in his honor.

His Royal Highness Prince Arthur Aelfric Vortigern Windsor was the kind of man whose appearance might generously be described as unusual — not for him the privileged complexions and arrogant cheekbones of most of his ancestors and a good many of that swarming mass of male relations to which he referred, in that long-suffering tone which the nation had come to find faintly irritating, as “the brood.” Lugubriously proportioned, thin lipped and pharaoh nosed, Windsor was a man profoundly ill at ease with the twenty-first century. He despised the vulgarities of its culture, the vapid light shows of its television, the unmelodic jabberings of its music, but above all else he hated the manner in which his family, once the most influential bloodline in Europe, had degenerated into a national laughing stock.

This particular day was special, not only because Arthur was celebrating his sixtieth birthday, a milestone in a life which seemed to him increasingly without compass, but also because it was the day on which he finally accepted a miserable truth. His wife — beloved by her subjects as a radiant philanthropist, sylphlike humanitarian and dispenser of hugs on an industrial scale — no longer fancied him. Naturally, he hoped that she still cared for him, that she at least felt some residual dregs of affection, but it was painfully clear that she no longer incubated the slightest scintilla of physical desire, meeting every one of his advances with barely concealed distaste. Arthur had realized it that morning when, upon his suggestion of a birthday roll around the marital bed, Laetitia had sighed and looked away, a small, darting, sideways glance which confirmed his every fear. In the end she had acquiesced, though wearily, and as she lay dutifully beneath him Arthur noticed her stifled yawns, surreptitious inspections of her nails and regular stolen glances toward the clock.