Guy Adams - The Clown Service

Just smoke? Fuck you .

Shining had staggered backwards, his knee either dislocated or broken. He fell against the far wall, just managing to support himself.

‘That won’t do,’ he informed me, through gritted teeth. ‘He was dead already. It’ll take more than a broken neck to stop him.’

I looked over to where the radio had fallen. Jamie was now kicking at it. A few of his blows did damage, a dial snapping off here, a plastic fascia cracking there. But most just passed through ineffectually. I think Jamie was so panicked that he was losing the focus required to retain any solidity.

On the floor was a semi-automatic pistol, spilled from the table along with the radio.

‘The gun!’ I cried to Jamie. ‘Pick up the gun!’

Krishnin was rising up behind me, his head hanging at a sickening angle on his broken neck.

Jamie reached down for the gun and snatched it up, only for it to fall through his fingers, clattering back to the floor between us. I jumped for it and actually felt Krishnin do the same, the weight of his body passing through me, his heavy hand pushing through mine and grabbing hold of the weapon.

As he turned to face me I fought to rise above him, desperate to find enough strength in my ghost hands to hold him down. We struggled, his head lolling freakishly, hideously.

I could hear Shining behind me, shuffling forward, trying to help.

Krishnin turned the gun on me and fired.

Good luck with that , I thought. There was no way his bullets were going to stop me.

With one last surge, I managed to push down on him, twisting the gun from his hand. I snatched it and focused hard to keep hold of it. It seemed to writhe in my fingers, constantly almost slipping free. I got up and turned the gun on him. Which is when I noticed he wasn’t fighting anymore. He just lay there. Smiling.

‘I can’t imagine what you’ve got to be so happy about,’ I spluttered, for now resisting the urge to empty the rest of the gun’s clip into him.

‘Tim!’

I looked at Jamie, who was staring over my shoulder.

The gunshots. They couldn’t hurt me. I was insubstantial. They just passed right through… right through and into…

I turned to see Shining flat on his back on the floor, two bloody wounds spreading across his shirt.

I couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d done.

I moved to his side, hoping desperately there was something I could do. Was it possible for me to push these ghost hands into him? Try to remove the bullets? It didn’t take long to see that August was beyond such help.

‘Ludwig,’ he said, his face rigid but determined, biting back on the pain. ‘This is so important,’ he said. ‘You did brilliantly. No need to worry. We stopped him. We did the job. Whatever else happens I want you to remember that. The rest doesn’t matter. It wasn’t your fault .’

And then he died.

I looked up at Jamie. He just stood there, staring, not knowing what to do or say.

Krishnin was lying still. Staring up at the patchy roof. That ghastly smirk still on his face. ‘He’s wrong, you know,’ he gloated. ‘All this never mattered. I sent the signal already. Black Earth is underway and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.’

a) Emergency Call Centre, Metropolitan Police, London

The first call comes in at four minutes past nine on the evening of the 30th. The call is routed through to Nigel Rogers, who has been manning his post at the ECC without break for six hours and wants nothing more than to clock off, go home and sleep. It has been a stressful shift thanks to violence kicking off at a second-division football match and what seems like a whole asylum-full of the usual line-hoggers. His faith in humankind, already worn thin by his few months in the job, has all but vanished entirely by the time the automated system queues up the fateful call.

‘It’s…’ the voice splutters through his earpiece, ‘I think he’s dead. He was in the grave. He dug himself out…’

‘Can you give me your location, please?’ asks Nigel, quite convinced he’s dealing with a joker. ‘Tell me where you are.’

‘He looks like he’s screaming, but there’s no noise… Oh God… I think he’s going to kill me… he’s—’

The phone cuts off. Nigel is already checking the location. You can’t be precise with a mobile, not without spending a lot of time and money, but you can get within spitting distance. He fully intends to report it: these time-wasters need to learn – it isn’t funny, it’s dangerous. They have more than enough on their hands without idiots like this adding to the load.

Within an hour the switchboard will be jammed by similar calls. Eventually the staff will concede they might be real.

b) City of London Cemetery, Manor Park, London

Cemeteries are like cities – they fill up over time. However much you try to expand you are always fighting against one unchanging problem: people keep dying.

The City of London Cemetery and Crematorium is the largest in the country, a plot of land that has grown and grown in the hundred and sixty years since it was established. It holds something in the region of a million bodies. That number is about to drop.

Cathy Gates is a woman who relishes space. She lives with her mother in a house that drips resentment and arguments. ‘I didn’t have a child so that I could end up in a home,’ her mother says. ‘It’s about time you paid me back the loving care I showered on you all those years.’

If pressed to identify the love, Cathy would struggle. Yet she can’t abandon her remaining parent, however much she might wish to when the old woman’s voice becomes raised and the demands increase. And so her life is one of duty and remorse. Sadness over a life lost, sacrificed in the care of an unloving mother.

She stays out when she can. To get some fresh air. Be at peace. She walks. She tends the grave of her father, a man who escaped that oppressive house ten years earlier, struck down by a heart attack in the middle of a work shift at the bakery.

‘I shouldn’t feel jealous,’ Cathy says, looking down at her father’s headstone, ‘but some days I wish my heart was as weak as yours.’

What a terrible thing to say , she thinks, brushing away embarrassed tears and making her way back towards the South Gate. What a horrible, horrible person I am .

The grass is wet with that morning’s rain and Cathy tries to find beauty in her surroundings. Something sweet to lighten the bitterness.

To her left she can see someone kneeling at another grave. They are clearly overcome with emotion, she thinks, to have fallen to their knees. She feels embarrassed to have noticed them but can’t help but watch as the distant silhouette appears to be waving its arms about, as though beating away attackers.

Maybe they’re in pain , she thinks, her mind going back to her father and the mental image she has always had of him, spreadeagled on the flour-dusted floor of the bakery, clutching at the air as his heart pounds and clenches in his chest. I should probably check …

She leaves the path, cutting through the rows of burial plots, her eyes fixed on the figure ahead of her. She doesn’t notice, for the moment, the movement elsewhere. She doesn’t hear the scattering of earth and the shifting of rocks.

‘Head in the clouds,’ her mother often moaned, ‘that’s your problem – always dreaming.’

As Cathy gets nearer she realises this is no mourner. The ground is dug up around the grave, piles of dirt and scattered clumps of turf. They must be relocating some of the graves , she thinks. She’s heard that the council have to shift bodies now and then, though why anyone would move this one, stuck at the heart of the cemetery, she can’t imagine.