Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I stopped dead in my tracks. A splash of white light on the wall diagonally opposite could only come from a car headlamp. I crouched in a doorway and waited. The car turned into the street where I was hiding. I didn’t know if it was police or the dubious Giff and his associates. Either way I preferred my own company. The car crawled closer and I curled into a ball. Peeping out I saw the driver — wearing a black boiler suit bristling with badges — switch on a spotlight and angle it manually at the doorways on the other side of the street. He swept the beam back and forth while his colleague in the passenger seat had a good look. In a moment he’d swap to my side of the street and that would be my short cut to the even closer haircut and the open-topped bus.

The car crept forward. He switched the light across.

A matter of inches.

Had the car been travelling two miles an hour more slowly the beam would have caught me. Instead it hit the brickwork six inches to my right. Consequently I was plunged into deeper shadow and they never saw me. But they could almost have heard the thump of my heart or my sigh of relief. Only when the car had turned right at the end of the street did I uncurl my long body, stretch painfully and dart to the junction. I looked right and saw the police car turning right again. I went left and ran like a bastard.

I didn’t know how I was going to get into the hospital. Maybe I was relying on there being some wall to climb, a window to lever open.

King’s Hospital was a fortress. Floodlights bathed the front entrance on the main road, so I trotted down the smaller road at the side. There was a wall all right, but it was twice my height and offered few footholds. I ran on, asking myself if this was a stupid idea. I reached the end of the wall. It turned left and seemed to extend without a break into the night. I ran along it at a crouch. There were no openings. Then I noticed a section of railing on the other side of the street and went across to take a look. It was a canal. I leap-frogged the railing and scrambled down a muddy slope to the tow-path. There was just enough width and height to make it under the road. I bent down and crawled into the tunnel. It was dark and stank of sewage but if I was lucky it might just yield a stage door entrance to the hospital.

After twenty-five yards the ceiling lifted and I was able to proceed at full height. There was a soft phosphorescent glow hovering over the water, by which I could make out where to place my feet without tripping. A large opening came into view on my side. I guessed it was a waste outlet coming from the hospital. Looking ahead, there were no more breaks in the wall as far as I could see, which admittedly wasn’t very far but I was in a hurry. So I ducked into the waste pipe. The stench was nauseating but I held my insides together by force of will and splashed through the trickle of canal-bound effluent, humming ‘Watching You Dance’. I held my breath as the pipe became steeper for a few yards and then levelled out and the ceiling disappeared. I peered over the side. This section of the pipe ran through a yard at the back of the hospital, uncovered perhaps to allow extra waste to be tipped in by hand.

I clambered up into the yard and walked over to a rickety-looking door. It opened at my touch and I stiffened. Far off I could hear a buzz of talk and the clang of instruments or cutlery in a sink. I walked away from these sounds to the first intersection of passageways and looked down a long, unpainted corridor lit by a string of bare off-white bulbs. I crept down the corridor, glancing in at every window in every door I passed. I saw rooms full of lockers and dissection tables, rows of lecture-room desks and chairs, pigeon-holes stuffed with files and notes. No sign of any staff and no noise, save the odd dripping tap.

I reached a turning signposted Haematology and Secure Unit. I turned down the new corridor and when another junction pointed left to the Secure Unit I went that way.

Maybe I’d gained access the back way and comers from other directions would face tighter security, or the Secure Unit was not quite as described. I walked straight into a long, drab ward with beds down both sides, most unoccupied, a few curtained off and billowing with shadows. Something told me to keep going through the ward and into a second, L-shaped room. The walls were whitewashed, temperature and lighting kept low. I walked silently towards the corner and hugged the wall, waiting for my breathing to steady, listening for any sound coming from around the corner.

All was quiet.

Slowly I slid along the wall and angled my head to see around the corner.

There was a bed, a hard-looking chair and a tall man.

The man was standing up looking out of the window, his back to me. I stepped into his territory, my boot heel clicking on the wooden floor.

‘Who are you?’ the man asked without looking around. I focused on his reflection and realised he had been watching me in the window. Disarmed, I came to a halt.

‘My name is Carl,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me. Are you Gledhill?’ My heart was hammering. Although my gut feeling about the man was good, it was still possible he was one of theirs. Or, if he was insane as it was claimed, he could be dangerous. Alternatively, if he felt threatened he probably only had to call and help would come running.

‘What do you want, Carl?’ He turned from the window and looked at me with sad, dark eyes. I moved forward two steps and he went to lie down on the bed, offering me the chair with a casual gesture. I lowered myself onto the chair without taking my eyes off him. His face had once been handsome but the left side was now somewhat twisted out of true and his mouth didn’t close properly.

‘It’s not safe for you here, you know,’ he said, looking away from me and fixing his gaze on the ceiling. ‘They come and see me at irregular intervals. I haven’t had a visit for six hours at least. You haven’t got long.’

I sensed a terrible sadness, an emptiness that was the antithesis of my urgent need to flee the City. He had the aura of a man who had tried everything and failed. Being in his company depressed me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him, keeping my senses alert to the approach of hospital staff.

‘I went too far,’ he said in a flat voice.

‘You mean the Dark?’ I asked in a whisper.

He winced and turned onto his side. He was a lean man, his skin displaying an unhealthy mustardy pallor. If he was more prisoner than patient, however, why was he left unguarded in an unlocked room?

I got up and walked around to the other side of the bed so I could see his face. ‘How did you come to the City?’ I asked him.

‘I went too far,’ he repeated, his lips barely moving. ‘Too fast.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I did what they said couldn’t be done.’

My stomach tightened. ‘What?’

‘I ran a mile in three and a half minutes. I collapsed at the tape and woke up here.’

‘You mean the City?’

He suddenly shot out a hand and gripped my arm. His grip was pitiful.

‘Go now,’ he ordered.

‘I have to know about the Dark,’ I said, leaning closer to him.

‘Stay away.’

What did he mean? From him or the Dark? ‘I have to get out of the City. Getting into the Dark seems to be the only way. I need to know where it is. How do I get there?’

‘It’s all around us.’

A ring around the City like Stella had said? ‘I just walk outwards from the City in any direction?’

He tightened his grip on my arm and drew me right up to his face. His eyes frightened me. The pupils were too big. What had he seen, this athlete? What horrors? ‘I ran out of the Dark,’ he said, ‘just like I ran into it. It’s everywhere and nowhere.’ With his free hand he reached up and touched my forehead. His fingertips were ice-cold. ‘It’s in here.’