Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to St. Chad’s. On the way, I asked the driver to pull over by an ATM, where I withdrew a couple of hundred pounds. I felt oddly certain I’d be needing it.

As I passed through the streets, I saw that the panic had already started. People left work early, before it was even lunchtime, and headed wordlessly home to their families. The supermarkets were packed with hysterics stocking up on tinned goods, grabbing armfuls of imperishables, cramming their trolleys with beans and cereal and chunks of pineapple. Everywhere else was shutting up. All across the city, windows were being closed, curtains pulled, doors locked and bolted.

I experienced symptoms of my own. The earpiece which had been in place ever since Steerforth had put it there, on the night that the Prefects had escaped, suddenly fell out, dropping to the ground like a dead insect, shriveled and useless. On the floor of the taxi, I ground it into slime.

I took out my mobile and dialed a number. Abbey picked up straightaway and I pictured her beautiful face darkened by a frown of concern.

“Henry? Darling, are you OK?”

Even though the world was slipping into nightmare, I felt a pang of pride. It was the first time she’d ever called me by that endearment. By any endearment, come to think of it.

“I’m fine,” I said. “You?”

“I’m still in the flat. I didn’t fancy going into work today.”

“Very wise.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m heading for the hospital. Then I’m coming home.”

“I’ve got a terrible feeling about all of this. For God’s sake, hurry.”

In the hospital, there was that same quality of barely suppressed panic — as though an army were approaching and we were all in preparation for a siege. The Machen Ward was empty except for an old man who lay stretched out, his breathing ragged and asthmatic, muttering under his breath. I couldn’t understand exactly what he was saying but it sounded filled with regret, with sadness and self-pity at roads not taken, at the shabby predictability of his choices.

The usual nurse was standing by the window, watching the sky blot with black. If she heard me enter, she evidently didn’t think it worth a reaction. She must recently have been outside because her shoulders were dappled with black snow.

“Excuse me?” I said.

Still the woman stared, watching the flakes of black as they curled and pirouetted to earth, shimmying down like goose feathers.

I tried again. “Hello?”

She turned around. Her face, formerly hard-lined and rigorous, had softened, the creases in her skin had smoothed out and, endearingly, dimples had materialized upon her cheeks. She seemed dozy but content, sleepily post-coital.

“I’m looking for my granddad-”

She smiled. “I know who you’re looking for. And you’re too late. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, he’s gone? Up until an hour ago, he was in the kind of coma you lot said he’d never come out of.”

“He discharged himself,” the nurse said blithely, as though comatose septuagenarians had leapt from their beds and bolted for the exit on most days of her working life. “He said he had things to do. But he left you a note. Over there. By the bed.”

I strode over to the wretched National Health Service cot in which the old bastard had been so long entombed and saw that the nurse was right. There was a message scrawled for me, written on a page ripped from a notepad.

Dear Henry,

Go home.

It was signed in his usual scrawl. Below that, a postscript.

I am serious. Go home .

Nothing else. Just that. And to think I was hoping for answers.

The nurse was speaking again. “You mustn’t worry about him. He’s with friends. I saw them from this window.”

“Friends? What friends?”

“Two men in fancy dress. “They were dressed as-”

I cut her short. “I know what they were dressed as.”

The woman laughed. There was an undercurrent of naughtiness to it, as though she’d just been unexpectedly tickled somewhere intimate. “You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

“What?”

Another discomfitingly sensual laugh. “The city is ripe and Leviathan is coming to take it as his own.”

“What did you say?”

The door was flung open and someone clattered in behind us. The nurse swiveled away and returned her attention to the gathering dark.

The new arrival shouted my name and I barely had time to hear the strutting clack of her heels and catch the familiar odor of her perfume before she was upon me and I was enfolded in her fleshy arms.

“Oh, Henry…”

“Hello, Mum,” I said.

She was covered in snow. A thick swathe of the stuff was clinging to her clothes, and although traces of it were still discernible on her hair and eyebrows, the rest must long ago have sunk into her skin.

“He’s a shit, Henry. I was the latest in a very long line. I was a notch on his bedpost.” She broke off, having finally realized what had happened. “Where is he? Where’s the old bastard?”

“He’s gone. It would seem he’s defied medical science and made a dash for it.”

Mom sounded dazed and bewildered. “That can’t be right, can it? That’s not possible.”

By the window, the nurse turned her head toward us, slowly, as though heavily drugged. “Leviathan is coming.” A look of zealotry burnished her face. “Such a glorious day.”

For an instant, Mum just stared at her, then she gasped as though she were short of breath, lumbered forward and crashed into a chair, sending it skidding across the floor.

“Mum? Are you OK?”

All at once, she seemed terrifyingly old. “I’m OK,” She murmured. “Don’t know what came over me. Just a little turn.”

“I think we should leave.”

“So many of them, Henry. All those women. And not just women, either. It’s the only thing he’d talk about. I couldn’t stand it. I-”

“Let’s go, Mum. I don’t think it’s safe here anymore.”

“Not safe?” My mother looked afraid. “Why ever isn’t it safe?? Is Gordy here? Is that it?”

“Come back to the flat. I don’t think you should be on your own.”

“Then, without warning, my mother was smiling again, a dopey, blissed-out kind of grin. “Have you seen the weather, Henry? Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

I grunted in reply, took her by the arm and steered her firmly toward the door.

“Leviathan is coming,” Mum said. “Leviathan is coming to earth.”

“At the sound of these words I felt rancid and sick but I did my best not to show it. “Let’s get out of here,” I said briskly. “Let’s take you home.”

As we walked from the room, I heard the nurse begin to laugh. An instant later, the old man in the bed joined in. Mum and I left the Machen Ward backed by the stereo laughter of people whose sanity was steaming into the distance and wasn’t even bothering to look back.

We scurried through the hospital as fast as we could. The beds had emptied out and the patients — even the worst of them, even the most long-term and permanently horizontal — were on their feet, milling in flocks, trailing tubes and splints and bandages. I learnt later that a doctor had returned from a lengthy outdoor cigarette break to open every single window in every single ward, encouraging the black snow to enter in and billow hungrily over all those consigned to the care of St. Chad’s.

The staff were endeavoring to keep them in line, doing their best to put everything back in its proper place, but the ill, the old and the dying were having none of it and persisted in wriggling free. The scariest thing was that it was becoming hard to tell the professionals from their charges, the keepers from the beasts.