Конрад Уильямс - Decay Inevitable

If de Fleche was still near, Will could not feel him. He suspected that he was in the background, assessing his position, biding his time before the balance of power shifted and he could make himself known again. Revenge , he had said, Will recalled vaguely. Revenge against whom?

It didn’t matter, for now. What did matter was the hell that was being raised around him, not six feet from where he stood. Blood was being spilled as generously as red wine from a sot’s glass. The thin men were systematically wasting anything that stood in the way of the food they craved. Hunger tickled Will’s belly too, but not to the extent that he was ready to take life for it. Why was that? What was so different about him that brought on this moralistic stance? He thought of the man he had killed at the caravan site. Was that it? That he had broken the neck of some evil swine and had marked his own card by that action? There was no compulsion to add to the body count here because he had been blooded and could take on a supervisory role? The deferential way in which his colleagues treated him seemed to support that suspicion. And as soon as the seed was sown, he backed off, recoiled from it.

“Well then, are you hungry?” Fidget boy was pointing at a small girl holding a plastic doll with no head. He reached out, for God knows what purpose, and Will stood in his way, clamping a hand around his arm.

“Leave her alone.”

Fidget regarded him uncomprehendingly. His tongue stuck out from between pock-marked lips and ranged dryly around. “Hungry?” he whispered.

A bell rang, a tiny bell jang-jang-janging. Everyone turned to watch as the sit-up-and-beg bicycle wobbled through the throng. The man on the seat flapped his hands at people to get out of the way. His hair flew out behind him in grey streamers. His tongue lolled and dribbled against his cheek. When people recognised de Fleche, they cringed and sank into the shadows.

“Will, this simply won’t do,” he said. His tone was that of a prissy director at an am-dram rehearsal. He rode the bicycle round and around Will, rubbing his chin, while Fidget asked for a croissant, a pot of Müller Rice, shit mate, anything .

De Fleche clenched the brakes and skidded to a halt. He touched the little girl on the forehead with his thumb and she imploded. All that was left of her was a scrap of her skirt and the plastic doll, black, molten, and disfigured.

“Well that was fucking charming,” Will said, and pushed de Fleche off his bike. He was sickened that his ability to be shocked by anything had been closed down, as neatly and as finally as the switch on a life-support machine. A groan rose from the thin men behind him. De Fleche stood up and brushed himself off. He was laughing, but there was something unpleasant about the laugh. An edge.

“I haven’t the time for this, Will. What is it, do you think you’re too precious to be part of this revolution?”

“I don’t want a part of this. I want to be left alone.”

“You signed up.”

“You tricked me. You used Catriona as bait.”

“I did nothing of the sort.” He smiled and clapped Will on the shoulder. Will flinched, thinking of the way the girl had winked out of existence. “Some tatty little book I came across and you went all Bambi-eyed over it. I could have spread you on my toast at that moment. It was all rather sweet.”

Will said again, “You tricked me.”

De Fleche sighed and looked around him. “This is going on all over the shop, you know. Pretty small potatoes for the time being, but there’s some big King Edwards waiting to be pulled out. It’s in these places, Warrington and the like, where the grand changes, the new dawning will come into its own. Not London or Paris or Sydney. Warrington. Landevant. Beecroft. Places I know, but you’d be hard-pushed to find on a map. Out of acorns, and all that flim-flam.”

“Jesus,” Will said, and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw ideograms of colour dancing there. Not a bad trick, he considered, for a dead man. “Why?” he asked.

“Will, I’m not prepared to build a little campfire and have all you owl-faced cub scouts sit around listening to Uncle Peter telling stories while—”

“You said something about revenge,” Will cut in. “Revenge for what?”

De Fleche nodded, gravely. “Okay,” he said. “All right.” He put a fatherly arm around Will and led him away from the impasse. He said, “Three is the magic number. Three wise men. Three stooges. Three coins in a fountain. Three for the price of two at Boots. The Godfather trilogy. And then there’s me, and a man called Leonard Butterby and a man called Thomas Lousher.” He stopped and turned to Will, brought his other arm up to Will’s shoulder, and massaged them both gently. “I’m telling you this because you have promise. Also, because you have nothing else. Eternity without a bag of marbles to play with is like a Widnes prostitute with a corrugated gob. It sucks bad-style.”

“I don’t want anything to do with you, or your sick fantasies.”

“You will, once your dead brain kicks in. Once the maggots down south have reamed out your Willishness. Once you’ve become a puppet for me, like these other gawps.”

Will could hear something else nagging him above de Fleche’s hubristic spiel. Something clunkingly mechanical approaching from the end of the street where de Fleche himself had appeared.

“I worked with those two men for maybe ten years. They were attracted to me for my natural beauty, my collection of Japanese stamps, and, I suppose, my ability to sniff out the odd Negstream. They were impressed that I could track down ways into this place. They paid me to do research into it. We thought we could make a fortune by using the doorways into different levels of consciousness for all kinds of stuff. Sponsors might want to use it to advertise. Imagine. Go to sleep, we switch on, and people all over the world wake up wanting a bag of KP nuts, or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. It was naughty, but who was going to stop us? Bollocks to the standards agencies. How are they going to find out? How do you control something that you can’t touch? We were going to talk to film and TV bigwigs. Get people to pay us a subscription so that they could have films shown straight into their heads. Or football matches. Or porn. Or 24/7 news.”

It was a black cab, turning into the street. De Fleche was too caught up in his own reverie to notice.

De Fleche said, “Problem was, I couldn’t get in. Because once you get in, you can’t get out the same way. So we were a bit stuck. But those pricks, they were small-time idiots. They picked up some measly five-figure financial package from a company who were interested in backing them as long as they were guaranteed front-end mentions once the system was up and running. What did they do? Filled their nappies that they had so much money for the sweet shop that they pushed me through a Negstream and fucked off with the dosh.”

“Trapping you in here?”

“Only for the past twenty years. As I say, a Negstream is like a condom. You only use it once. You have to find your own way back. I couldn’t.”

“So what makes you think you can get back now?”

“You know the answer to that, Will. You, the great, white disaster hunter. Chasing tragedy all over the country when you could have done what I’m doing, and create your own. I’ve worked hard to get some influence. It’s here, in front of you, the fruits of all that labour. Enough deaths and I’ll have a Negstream of my own to step through. And then we’ll see what kind of influence I really have. Soon now. So soon that I probably wouldn’t have the time to soft-boil an egg. I can taste it. Life, that is,” he said with a grin, “not the egg.”