Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

What came first was the smell (so pungent that it drowned even the stale sock odor of the basement), the sudden scent of fireworks coupled with the lingering aftertaste of sherbet dip. It was followed by a violent disturbance in the air, a bewildering rush of colors — blue, pink, brown and black.

Finally, impossibly, the Prefects rippled into existence, materializing on either side of Estella.

Boon pursed his lips and tutted. “Nasty cough.”

“Sounds like she’s got a frog in her throat,” said Hawker.

“Awfully big frog!”

“More like a toad!”

They cackled deliriously.

Hawker slapped Estella on the back. “Come on, old thing, let it out!”

She groaned but he slapped her again anyway and Boon joined in too, until they were both hitting her, smacking her hard and enjoying it, sniggering as they competed for who could strike the woman with the greater ferocity.

I gripped my fingers tight around the handle of the knife and stepped forward, knowing what I had to do. I still have no idea whether I would have been capable of it. I strongly suspect, in the end, that I wouldn’t have.

Estella was coughing so hard that she had begun to exhaust herself. She lolled back in her chair, helpless against the sedition of her own body. Her jaw dangled open, her mouth was agape and she was staring fixedly toward the ceiling.

She shuddered and cried out — not a cough now but a great and terrible wail of agony. I watched, spasming with nausea, as something streamed from her mouth. Liquid and fleshy, it forced its way out of her in something like a beam of pulp and skin — like a laser made of meat.

Given the volume of matter which was expelled from her body it must have been quite impossible for it ever to have been fully contained inside her. But I was growing well used now to impossibilities.

As it left her body, the beam punched a neat, surgical hole through the ceiling, cutting through the masonry of 125 Fitzgibbon Street and rising through the eleven levels of the Archive Unit as easily as a bullet would pass through paper. It blazed out to the sky beyond and disappeared.

“Barbara?” I asked in a very quiet voice. “What do we do now?”

But the woman was gone.

The last of the beam escaped Estella’s body and she slid to the floor.

When I looked again, the Prefects had vanished and I was left alone with the fat woman.

Flakes of plaster drifted onto my head, debris from where the roof had been punctured. The building bellowed and groaned, its structure finally weakened by the hole stamped through its center, its dignity in tatters thanks to that mutinous jab from its bowels.

“Henry?” The woman was still alive and better able to speak now that the beast was gone.

I wiped away the black sludge which still lingered at the corners of her mouth and asked: “You know who I am?”

“Of course. Of course I do.” She reached up and tugged at my sleeve. “Give my regards to your grandfather.”

I promised that I would but I’m not sure she even heard me.

“Having Leviathan inside you…,” she said. “It brings out your true self. Shows the world what you really are.” An ominous splintering sound came from the roof. “I’ve failed.”

I squeezed her hand, trying to reassure her.

“Leviathan is loose,” she said. “It’s called for reinforcements. They will not make the same mistake a second time.”

Another cracking sound from overhead, a second flurry of plaster and dust, another encore of debris.

Estella grimaced. “You’d better get out of here.”

I struggled to lift her up, pawed at her shoulders, tried to get purchase on her blubber. I did my best to save her.

“Go,” Estella wheezed after a minute or so of this gruesome tango. “Just go.”

As the building began to shake in rehearsal for its downfall, I set the woman back onto the floor and tried to make her as comfortable as I could. Her eyelids fluttered shut and her face relaxed. I kissed her twice on the forehead.

But I’m afraid that I left her there all the same and, as the place started to crash down around me, ran for the final time from 125 Fitzgibbon Street and the offices of the Civil Service Archive Unit (Storage and Record Retrieval).

Outside, it had begun to snow. But this was not like snow which anyone had ever seen before. It was beetle black, sticky to the touch and subtly unnatural. As I emerged onto the street, a crowd had gathered, their attention split between the collapse of the building and the arrival of the snowstorm.

They were catching flakes of it in their hands, speculating about what it might mean. A man in a suit, standing apart from the rest at the edge of the pavement, was laughing at the sight of it. Just laughing and laughing and laughing until he exhausted himself with his own hysteria.

Behind us, with a volcanic rumble, the building crumpled, cracked and fell in upon itself, burying the woman who had kept Leviathan beneath eleven stories’ worth of paperwork and filing.

In the Eye, Dedlock watched the snow fall, looking helplessly on as the sky grew black, failing to fend off a gnawing suspicion that what he had been afraid of for most of his long life had finally come to pass.

A woman stepped into his pod. She had vengeance in her eyes, murder in her heart and something terrible clasped in both hands.

“Who’s there?”

Flakes of black snow flung themselves at the pod window and dribbled downward, smearing the pane with ebony.

“Who’s there?” Dedlock asked again. “What do you want?”

Barbara trod forward into the light, and although she was smiling there was no true amusement on her lips.

“Hello, sweetheart,” she said.

Two and a half miles away, in the Machen Ward of St. Chad’s Hospital, my granddad was busy defying medical science.

At the very instant that the snow began to fall, his life support gave a squeal of cacophonous dismay, he sat upright in his bed and his eyes flickered impatiently open.

Although it was barely ten A.M., the view from his window was darkening and spotted with black.

I wonder what he thought when he saw it. I wonder what went through his mind. And I wonder if he knew, even then, that it was already too late for all of us.

What follows is my transcript of a recording which I have been able to retrieve from the remains of the London Eye — a black-box recorder salvaged from the scrap metal of the city’s premier attraction.

When these events took place, my grandfather had just regained consciousness and the snow had been falling for about ten minutes.

As Barbara strolled into the light and Dedlock saw what she had clasped in her hands, he felt fear — real, irrefutable, bowel-quaking fear — for the first time in more than a century.

“Think, my dear,” he hissed, his voice already acquiring that wheedling plausibility which had sent generations of Directorate agents to their extinction. “Don’t do something you might regret.”

Barbara strolled closer, all smiley now, twinkling, light on her feet, like a party hostess greeting the first of her guests. She positioned a forefinger in front of her lips. “Shh,” she said and called him by a name I’d never heard before.

In his tank, the old man hissed in anger. “No one’s called me that for a long time.”

“And why is that, I wonder?”

“Nobody’s dared.”

“You prefer Dedlock?” Barbara said airily, still sounding as though she was merely making polite conversation with acquaintances she barely knew. “I always thought these code names made us seem so silly.”

“You think so? Well, if anyone’s left alive after today, I’ll be sure to look into it.”