Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

Boon had his penknife drawn in anticipation of the coup de grace. “You silly sausage.”

At 9:15 A.M., we found them, crouched above her like starving dogs over a savaged rabbit. I’ll always be able to remember the sight of it, the degradations they put that woman through at the end. There are some things it’s impossible to ever truly forget — they imprint themselves on your retina and stay there, refusing to budge, like a ghost image on an old computer monitor.

At the sight of me, the Prefects beamed. “Henry!”

“Lamb chop!”

“What have you done?” I shouted.

Boon laughed, his hands extravagantly dripping blood onto the carpet tiles. “Just having a bit of fun, old fruit.”

“Just larking about.”

“Where’s Estella?” Barbara strode toward the Prefects, as coldly implacable as ever and apparently unaffected by the death of Miss Morning. Certainly, she stepped over her corpse as though it was of no more significance to her than a sandbag.

Hawker and Boon seemed not in the least intimidated, although I noticed something unexpected in their reaction, an expression on their faces I’d never seen there before and which I suppose I’d thought I never would. It was curiosity.

“I say,” said Hawker, as Boon let out an amused whistle. “What the Dickens are you?”

Barbara glared. “Where’s Estella?”

“No idea,” said Boon. “The old man only gave us the address. But come here anyway, you wonderful thing. We ought to have a bit of a chinwag.”

Warily, Barbara walked over to him. He whispered something in her ear, some poisonous lie or vicious half-truth, some dangerous arrangement of words.

I knelt beside the mutilated body of Miss Morning. Although she was dead, her eyes hadn’t stopped staring wildly toward the ceiling and her pupils still seemed engorged with fear. The only thing I could think of to do was to close them and, beneath my breath, murmur something halfway between an apology and a benediction.

“Henry?”

Barbara was shouting at me and the Prefects were gone.

“What did they want?” I stumbled to my feet. “What did they whisper to you?”

“Not now, Henry.” Remarkably, she smiled. “I’ve been a fool. I know where Estella is.”

Barbara ran from the room and I had no choice but to follow and abandon poor Miss Morning where she lay.

Only then did I realize where we were heading and who would be waiting for us. Certain things were starting to become clear. We were running toward the basement, you see. Running toward the mail room.

I had begun to appreciate the complexity of my grandfather’s design. How carefully he had arranged my life! With what diligence had he nudged the playing pieces of my existence into place. Now I understood why, in those long chats in his lounge, as both of us sat rapt over the newspapers, he had been so adamant that I should look at the flat in Tooting Bec, why he had encouraged me with such avidity to apply to the Civil Service Archive Unit.

I finally understood who was waiting for us in the basement and why the old bastard had sent me here to watch over her. I had even begun to chew over the significance of those operations that he had paid for me to undergo as a child.

But I saw also that his plans had not, in his absence, unrolled themselves altogether smoothly. There had been unanticipated flaws, human errors, problems it would have been impossible for him to have foreseen.

Problems like Peter-Hickey-Brown.

The building was completely empty now and the terrified employees of the Archive Unit had fled into the streets. There was only one exception, one loyal worker still at her post. The fat woman, the sweaty one. When we reached the mail room, she was exactly where she always was, sorting through files with her usual sluggish roboticism. At the sight of us, she grunted in greeting.

I walked over and looked into her sweaty blancmange of a face, her features swollen and distended by decades of overeating — and at last I saw the truth of it.

“Estella?” I asked.

The woman was in pain. Something was inside her, pushing and tugging and clawing to get out. Something trapped — like a genie in a bottle. Like a spider in a jar.

The door opened behind us and there was an unexpected voice at the far end of the room. “Hello, Henry. Hello, Barbara.”

It was Peter Hickey-Brown — dazed, hoarse and uncharacteristically emotional. “I knew you’d be coming for me,” he breathed.

Barbara seemed curiously unflummoxed even by this latest contortion of events. “Do you know, I thought it might be you?”

Hickey-Brown walked across the room, heading for the woman.

“Stay away,” Barbara warned.

“Please,” Peter wheedled. “Please. Just let me touch her one more time.”

“Did you enjoy touching her?”

“Of course,” said my old boss. “Of course, I did.”

“I have a… sympathy with this woman,” Barbara said. “I know you got off on it.”

“Hey,” said Hickey-Brown. “Am I denying it?” He giggled. “Oh, but she tasted so fine. Finger-licking good .”

I cleared my throat. “Would there be any chance of an explanation?”

“Leviathan has been engineering its own escape,” Barbara said. “The beast has been changing this woman’s body, tampering with her DNA. It’s done something to her sweat — given it the properties of a hallucinogen. Ever since Hickey-Brown discovered this he’s been harvesting it, replicating it, selling it on. He’s been dealing in Estella’s sweat and calling it ampersand.”

My former line manager shrugged. “I go to a lot of gigs.”

I stared at him. “How the hell did you manage that? I mean, what on earth were you doing to discover it in the first place?”

“She was so delicious,” he said simply. “I couldn’t resist.”

Unable to restrain himself, like a pastry addict passing a trolley of cream buns, he made a dash across the room, his fingers outstretched, clawing at the air, grasping for the prize. I suppose he wanted to touch Estella again, one last time. The need, the hunger in him, outpaced all rationality, any last remaining strand of common sense.

He was nowhere near the woman when Barbara flung him aside with as little effort as it takes you or me to bat away a wasp with one of the Sunday supplements. Hickey-Brown crashed to the floor and I heard a loud, final crack as his neck broke, his gig-going days gone for good.

Barbara’s attention shifted to the fat woman — the original Estella, the mold from which she was made. She strode over to her, crouched down and, in a weirdly maternal set of gestures, stroked her cheek, smoothed back her hair and cooed.

Estella gazed up at this weird, impossible reflection of herself with utter bewilderment in her sunken eyes.

“What have they done to us?” Barbara asked. “What the hell have they done?”

Estella began to cough. It started as a simple clearing of her throat and graduated to something hacking and painful before becoming a terrible convulsion as all the phlegm and mucus within her rattled toward an exit.

“Barbara?” We both of us just stood there, watching the beast inside tear that unfortunate woman apart.

Barbara was in shock. “You have to kill her,” she said slowly.

“Me?”

“If you don’t, then Leviathan will get loose. The city will be overrun. The casualties will be without number.”

The woman coughed and wheezed and spluttered. She shuddered and shook and she was rent apart.

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t do it.”

Barbara produced a slender knife, tailor-made for gutting, and thrust its handle into my hand, not saying a word.

Then — something extraordinary. Something impossible and fantastic in a day already characterized by both.