Mark Chadbourn - The Hounds of Avalon

Sophie’s attention was caught by a cleaner making his way slowly across the floor, unnoticed by anyone else. He had a handsome face, though he occasionally let his long hair fall across it, as if embarrassed. He looked beaten and dejected, like a badly fitting shoe.

Mallory briefly met Sophie’s gaze. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his subconscious, something stirred: a hint of recognition so vague that it was almost a shiver across his synapses, there then gone. Crazy, he thought. No details surfaced because there weren’t any. His kind and hers would never meet. It just wasn’t done; better keep his mind on the work if he wanted to hold on to his job. There were the toilets on this floor to clean, then the two floors above, then back to this floor. An endless cycle, never to be broken.

The dying part of Mallory knew that he would see Sophie every day as he crossed that room; their eyes would meet in vague, uncomfortable recognition, but it would never be reconciled. They would never meet. They would never speak.

Five burgers sizzled in pools of grease. Laura DuSantiago watched them, oddly captivated by something she didn’t quite comprehend. How many had she cooked that day in the fast-food joint stinking of stale fat down a dingy side street not far from Northampton’s main drag? How many tomorrow and the endless days after? Why was she so unaccountably queasy? It was a job; she should be thankful.

On the other side of the counter, a queue of dead-eyed people shuffled and waited, most of them overweight, heading for a heart attack sooner rather than later, clad in ugly, cheap leisurewear and knock-off trainers from the market.

Laura flipped the burgers. Five, she thought. Why was she so ill at ease? Get a grip. This is it, this is your life.

Caitlin sat in a traffic jam, listening to a Radio I DJ trying to get listeners excited about some kind of event that weekend. The cars snaked on for eight miles ahead of her and another four behind. They hadn’t moved for the last five minutes; she knew because she’d watched the clock tick around on the dashboard.

She should have been at the beautician’s in Gateshead fifteen minutes ago. In the boot, the boxes of samples sat, pretty pinks and russets, hair products that had been ‘scientifically tested’, that could make you into someone else. Really. Truly.

And of course, if she was late for the Gateshead appointment, how was she supposed to get down to Middlesbrough on time?

She thought about this for a second, then shrugged. Who cared? Who cared about anything, really? The thought made a lot of sense to her, but she still couldn’t explain the grating feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach. She turned up the radio so that she didn’t have to think.

Shavi sat at his desk in the accountancy office of Gibson and Layton and wondered why he’d absently doodled the number five on his pad. He didn’t have time to spend daydreaming. Mr Gibson had just brought in the file for some property developer, ‘a personal friend’, and Shavi had a few hours to locate every possible loophole and find every creative way to lie, cheat and deceive so that the income-tax liability was as close to zero as possible.

As Shavi opened the box file, he wondered why he felt such an abiding sense of despair.

Ruth Gallagher broke off from her shift in the old people’s home to sneak outside for a little cry. The owners salted away most of the vast amounts of cash paid by the loving relatives and left the poor occupants to survive — or not — on a subsistence diet, drugged up with Valium, staring vacantly at daytime TV.

Another one had died that morning, and it had been Ruth’s job to clean the bedroom. She was always cleaning bedrooms. They came and went with remarkable regularity, a production line shipping them to the afterlife. No point getting to know them; they were too drugged for any conversation. The relatives didn’t really care; it made the visits so much easier.

Ruth dried her eyes. No point being miserable. It was a life, wasn’t it?

And Hunter sat in the briefing, overcome with a strange feeling of deja vu. The map on the wall showed the former Yugoslavia, little flags signifying the rebel forces threatening to break the fragile peace.

‘OK,’ he said wearily, ‘who do you want me to kill this time?’ while entertaining an odd thought of a world where he was a force for life, not death.

In a quiet, dusty room in Brasenose, Hal huddled against a door, wondering why he was such a failure. He grew tense as footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, then rigid when they stopped at the door.

‘Open up.’ A familiar woman’s voice.

Hal flinched. He could pretend that the room was empty, but what good would it do? She’d come in anyway. He’d been caught, might as well own up. After all, there was nowhere left to run.

When he opened the door, Catherine Manning stood there, swathed in her expensive furs. ‘Ms Manning,’ Hal stuttered. ‘Were you looking for me?’ He caught himself when he saw Manning’s glassy eyes and the disturbing waxy sheen across her face; she looked oddly like a marionette.

Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and when a sound finally did come out it was no longer her voice. ‘The strain has been too much for this form. It cannot hold.’

Hal took a step backwards at the eeriness of a man’s voice emanating from Manning’s full, feminine lips.

Suddenly Manning collapsed, and as she fell to the floor she wasn’t like a flesh and blood woman at all. Her body appeared to be made of paper, or perhaps just skin, folding up on itself. What was left of her lay on the floor, flat and wrinkled and twisted, like a discarded set of clothes.

And where she had been, someone else now stood. At first, the face appeared to swim before Hal’s eyes and he had fleeting images of people he thought he knew and probably disliked, before the visage settled down to that of a stern-faced man dressed in flowing scarlet robes.

‘Who are you?’ Hal gasped.

‘In the time of the tribes, I was known as Dian Cecht of the Court of the Final Word, wise man, healer, now the last of the Tuatha De Danann.’ The bitterness in his voice made Hal wince.

‘Ms Manning-’

‘She thought she could use me for her ends. I was using her for mine. I rode her body and her mind through these Fixed Lands, avoiding the notice of the Devourer of All Things, preparing for this moment.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Hal knew that he sounded like an idiot, but he didn’t know what else to say.

‘Your kind have long been an interest of mine,’ Dian Cecht said in a manner that on the surface appeared quite unassuming, but Hal found distinctly menacing. ‘I know how you work. Inside and out. Down to the smallest particle. Though many of my kind had a strange affection for Fragile Creatures, I was not one of them. I saw in you something else: a chance for the Golden Ones to survive in a place that had grown tired of them.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ Hal said weakly.

‘In you lies the last hope of my people, and the last hope of your own. Are you ready for the task that lies before you?’

Hal stared blankly at Dian Cecht for a moment, then nodded.

‘Then come.’ Dian Cecht led Hal out into the corridor. ‘You are a strange people,’ Dian Cecht continued. ‘I told a Sister of Dragons what was planned. I needed her to be there, at the end, so that the Devourer of All Things would not suspect. And she kept the secret well, even though it meant her suffering.’ Dian Cecht clearly could not understand Sophie’s sacrifice.

Several feet away, a shimmering wall of blue ran from wall to wall.

‘What’s that?’ Hal asked.

‘Though it took all my abilities, I have closed this small space off from Existence. It lies beyond the world on the other side of the wall, yet is still a part of it. But only for a short while. And here the Devourer of All Things has no power to see.’ Dian Cecht strode ahead, so that Hal had to skip to keep up.