Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

He smiled.

“Good morning,” he said, although the voice did not sound altogether like that of a child. “Greetings to you all.”

The Queen’s left hand hovered near her mouth in a posture of girlish excitement. “Leviathan?”

The boys lips twitched upward. “I am here, Your Majesty.”

“Then everything was true?”

“All true. All quite true.”

Dedlock approached the child. “Leviathan?”

“You must be Mr. Dedlock,” said the boy. “The doubter. The cynic. Not that Dedlock is your real name. Why not tell us the name you were born with, sir? Surely it is not a thing of which to be ashamed?”

“What are you?” Dedlock asked.

“A higher being, sir. One who moves amongst the angels. One who hears the music of the spheres.”

“You’re not human?”

“I am a creature of air and starlight, Dedlock. A thing of clouds and moonbeam.”

“What is it you want? What do you want with London?”

The boy turned toward the Queen. “Shall we tell him, Your Majesty?”

She giggled. “The excellent firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath has drawn up our contract.”

The Scotsman stepped forward. “All above board,” he purred, his voice full of Caledonian pride for a really well-crafted legal document.

“Ma’am?” Dedlock’s voice bristled with barely suppressed fury. “Surely you cannot be ready to sign away the city to this monstrosity?”

Behind them, the boy was laughing, blood and mucus in his throat conspiring to lend the sound the quality of a struggling cistern. Raising himself to his feet, the child clip-clopped over to the monarch.

Dedlock looked as though he was going to throw up. “Majesty?”

The boy reached the desk and placed a hand on top of it. Blood oozed around the inkwell, spread fast across the blotter, seeping scarlet into the walnut wood below. “Dear lady. Please sign. Feel at liberty to use my blood.”

The Queen took out a pen and dipped it in front of him. “So kind.”

“No!” Dedlock was so close to the monarch that, for a moment, it seemed as though he might strike her.

“Leviathan wishes only to guide us,” said the Queen. “This is simply his due.”

The boy squirmed over the desk. “Sign, Your Majesty!”

“Ma’am,” said Dedlock. “I implore you not to sign that paper. And I tell you again that this being is not what he claims. What god has need of signatures and contracts?”

“Time grows short,” wheedled the boy. “Sign the paper.”

“Ma’am!”

The child smiled. “Without my help, by the end of the century, this country will be overrun. Foreigners everywhere! Savages in the gates! The streets crimson with the blood of innocents! Sign, Your Majesty! Sign!”

Dedlock was near to begging. “Majesty, please. What does the creature want with London? What will it do with the city?”

“My mind is made up, Mr. Dedlock,” she said — and the Queen of all that is pink on the map scrawled her sanguinary signature.

“Ma’am!” Dedlock was distraught. “I cannot — will not — tolerate this.”

A royal glare. “You have little choice, sir.”

“On the contrary, I will devote every fiber of my being to stopping you. I will dedicate the whole of my life to bringing this Leviathan to justice. I shall pit every resource of my organization against your house of malice.”

“You would declare civil war? War between crown and state?”

“It grieves me to say so, ma’am, but you have left me with little choice.”

Just as Mr. Dedlock strode from the room, self-righteous wrath in every strutting step, the boy toppled forward, face-down, onto a floor sticky with blood, the last flicker of life in him extinguished.

It was over. Streater stuck his hands together, the room blazed with light and the outlines of the spirits faded into dust and sunshine once again.

Arthur, his eyes stinging from the glare, craned his head to look at his mother’s messenger with piteous confusion in his face. “Is this the truth?” he asked.

Streater grinned. “All true, chief. All true. But the really juicy question is — what happens next?”

When I was summoned the following morning, into the presence of Mr. Dedlock, I found him to be quite unlike his usual self — pensive, melancholy, consumed by a bleak nostalgia.

“I chose to be stationed here,” he began, apropos of nothing in particular. “Did you know that?”

The day was bright with the cruel sunshine of winter and as our pod neared the apex of its revolution we were granted a view of the Houses of Parliament at their most ingratiatingly picturesque.

“The Directorate could have been headquartered anywhere. But I chose the Eye. Why? Because I wanted to see what we’re fighting for. You understand? I love democracy.”

I wondered where this was heading.

“Sleep does not come easily to me. Not any more. But here, a stone’s throw from the cradle of democracy, here at least my dreams are not so black.” He gargled meditatively. “Can you guess what I’m going to ask you to do for me?”

“I expect you’ll want me to see the Prefects again.”

Dedlock observed me gravely through the glass.

I chose my words as tactfully as I could. “I’m not sure they’re going to help us. And when I see them…”

“Yes?”

“I feel like weeping.”

“I understand how you feel, Mr. Lamb. I’ve met them once myself, a long time ago and a world away.” He sighed. “They are the ones who did this to me. Did you know that? They gave me these.” Tenderly, his fingers brushed the sides of his torso, sliding over those strange flaps of skin which I had taken to be gills. “You’re surprised? Of course I wasn’t born this way. They made me like this. They turned me into their idea of a joke.”

“I hadn’t realized…”

“I know better than anyone what they’re capable of. But we need to find Estella and it seems that you are still the only man they’ll talk to.”

“They told me terrible things…”

Dedlock swam to the edge of the tank. “I’ll explain everything, I promise. But for now — go back to the Prefects. Find Estella.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, although even the thought of returning to the hideous subterranean of Downing Street sent a liquid tremor through my bowels.

“You’ll do better than that, Henry Lamb. You’ll have to. The war’s in your hands now.”

In the daytime, Downing Street seemed a different place — almost friendly, peopled with flocks of policy makers and power brokers, think-tankers, politicos and wonks, but the illusion vanished as I descended underground, past the bottled ranks of madmen, who simpered, scowled and wept at the sight of me.

The guard outside the Prefect’s cell let me pass with a nod of recognition. Inside, the television was gone but the circle was tilled with a vast amount of food — trifle, liquorice, sausages on sticks, eclairs, green jelly, slabs of Neapolitan, currant buns, biscuits in the shapes of jungle animals, cans of Tizer and sherbet dip.

My tormentors waved.

“What ho, Mr. L!”

“Hello, sir!”

“Hawker,” I muttered stoically. “Boon.”

The ginger-haired man thrust a teetering spoonful of trifle into his mouth. Some of the cream and at least one of the cherries splattered down his shirt and tie.