Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

Barbara merely smiled, slightly blankly, like she was handing out canapes.

The old goat in the tank, that impossibility, that living affront to the laws of science, was playing for time. Even as he spoke, he was wondering if he might not be able to contact someone on the outside, weighing up the odds of his raising the alarm before it was too late. Desperate for a distraction, he clenched his fists and behind him a map of London shimmered into existence, street after street of it smudged with black, eclipsed with the taint of Leviathan. “What are you doing here? Where are the Prefects? Where’s Henry Lamb?”

When she spoke again, Barbara’s voice was leeched of all emotion. “You know what’s happening. Leviathan is on the loose. All we ever did was stave off the inevitable for a few years. The blink of an eye for a creature like that.”

“Don’t say that,” Dedlock said. “I never give in. If there’s one thing you can say about my long life, it’s that I’ve never given in. Not once.”

Barbara yawned. “Your life. Your long, long life. Do you have any idea how tired everyone is of hearing about that? One hundred and seventy-five years of anecdotes and tall tales.”

“If It hadn’t been for me, this city would be a slave colony by now. You’d have been born into chains.”

“You know, a lot of stuff’s been coming back to me this morning. There’s a lot of Estella in this strange body that Jasper fashioned for me. In the last few hours, her memories have been flooding back. You asked me what I was doing here…”

“Yes?”

“I’ve come to ask you a question.”

“Fine time for questions when the world is shattering around us.”

“Why me? Why did you choose me to imprison Leviathan?” You must have known you were handing me a life sentence.”

Dedlock swam close to the glass of his tank. “It wasn’t a choice I made lightly. God knows, I’ve had to live with it.”

“You’ve had to live with it? You?” Barbara blazed in fury, her face lit up with rage, like Moses when he first set eyes upon the golden calf. For an instant, she held what was in her hands high in the air. Then, recognizing her equilibrium, she lowered it. “I’ve seen what you allowed Estella to become. A mute in a basement, pawed at by a greasy little man. Harvested for my sweat.”

“Blame loverboy for that. It was he who hid you from us. And anyway we didn’t have much choice. You were the only one strong enough to hold the beast in thrall. And things were a little pressing at the time. Tell me, my dear, what would you have done?”

“I know the real reason you chose me.”

“Do tell.”

“You said you loved me once. Do you remember that?”

An uneasy splash. “Perhaps. I might have experienced a momentary spurt of affection. I might once have believed myself to have feelings-”

“You never had feelings for me. You certainly never loved me. You wanted to possess me.”

“What’s the difference?” Those last words emerged as a snarl. Dedlock paused and tried to compose himself, and when he spoke again it was in more collected tones, intended to mollify, to soothe, placate and appease. “But you were so beautiful, my dear.”

Barbara was unmoved. “Beautiful, yes. And young. And trusting.”

“But you were attracted to me. That was real. I could taste it.”

“What could I have possibly wanted with you? You used me. Worse than that, I let myself be used.”

“I’m not proud of what we did. But — oh! — you were magnificent. You were always at your most beguiling with a blade in your hand.”

“You’re sick. And getting sicker by the hour. Look what you’ve done. Hijacked the body of this poor girl.”

Dedlock rallied to his own defense. “That girl should thank us! We’ve made her beautiful! She was only a filing clerk before she came under the influence of the Directorate.”

“She was happy before!” Barbara shouted, the, checking herself: “I was happy before.”

“You can’t have been.”

“Do you understand what your man’s done to me? The alterations he inflicted with his wretched pill?”

“Mr. Jasper didn’t wish to trouble me with specifics.”

“I’ll just be he didn’t. So allow me to enlighten you. I don’t sweat anymore. I only need to breathe three times an hour. I’ve tried my best but I no longer eat or drink or shit. And I’ve been neutered. What was between my legs has been fused shut.”

“Like an angel,” the old man murmured.

“Like a monster! A parody of a woman!”

“We need you,” Dedlock said quietly. “The city needs you.”

Barbara shook her head in pity. “Oh, sweetheart. Have you not realized it yet? The city is lost.”

She raised the ax which she grasped in her hands high above her head and brought it savagely down against the glass of Dedlock’s tank.

First, the old man whimpered.

Next, he leaked fat, tadpole tears which dripped down his cheeks like rain.

Then, at last, he begged.

But he did not apologize, nor did he show the merest shred of remorse for his actions, and so in consequence Barbara merely continued her assault. The part of her which was Estella had dreamt for years of this moment, had spent decades in the basement plotting and scheming toward this man’s comeuppance, and so, even in the face of his wailing pleas for pity, she simply struck again, and struck harder, redoubling her efforts as the old man thrashed and squirmed and wailed. Cracks appeared in the glass, turned into fractures and fissures, widened into fault lines until the contents of the tank began to gush forth, geysering into the room. A final blow shattered the tank entirely, evacuating everything into the pod. London washed out with hit, the city sluicing across the floor.

Barbara winced as Dedlock flailed and flopped upon the ground, helpless as a beached carp, gasping and wheezing for air as the gills on his sides trembled in pitiful failure. He looked up at her pleadingly but there was no clemency in her eyes.

“This is what they planned,” she said. “This is how the Domino Men wanted you to die.”

“Would you…” Poor Dedlock, struggling to breathe, drowning on dry land. “Would you believe me if I said I was sorry?”

Barbara bent over his trembling form, and for the first time since her poisoning at the hands of Mr. Jasper, she seemed to show a filament of compassion. She stroked his hair. She kissed him chastely on the cheek.

“Too late,” she said as she sat cross-legged beside the body of her tormentor, gazed out of the window at the gathering snowstorm and settled down to watch the end of the world.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t snow. It looked the same, of course. There were superficial similarities and for a second — if you were indoors, say, and looking out at it — you might even have been fooled. But once you’d touched the snow, once you’d held it in your palm and felt it close to your skin — then you wouldn’t be fooled any longer.

It settled thickly, dense and compacted, on the ground, on rooftops and car hoods, like it wasn’t planning on budging, as though it was here for the long haul. It didn’t seem at all prepared to melt, not even in the center of the city where real snow rarely lasts beyond the hour.

The only time it did what it was supposed to do was when it landed on human skin. There it melted straightaway, seeping past the epidermis, snuffling down into the pores. Oh yes, it was happy enough then. This stuff — it loved the human body and we were all sponges to it, as blotters are to ink.

Apart from me, strangely. That stuff slid off my skin in seconds as though it couldn’t find a way in.

The snow had just begun to fall when the hospital phoned to tell me the news.