Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I ran for about two miles until I simply couldn’t go another step and I collapsed on the canal tow path in a tangle of long dewy grass and dead broken branches. I buried my head and cried until it hurt. Soon the longed-for oblivion came and I blacked out.

A white-haired man out walking his dog found me and took me to the nearby police station because he couldn’t get any sense out of me. They took me home. I eyed the flung-open garage doors with terror. My mother had found him. I hadn’t warned her. I hadn’t done the one thing my father would have wanted me to do.

The engine had stopped because it had run out of petrol. Despite the open doors there was still a nauseating stench. The policemen covered their faces with handkerchiefs before picking their way past the lawnmower and gardening implements.

There was a length of garden hose running from the exhaust pipe into the car via the back window, which was still wound up almost to the top. The driver’s door was open and my father’s blackened hand hung out of it. I didn’t get to see his face again because a policeman turned me around and led me outside. We found my mother in the back garden tearing clumps of bindweed out of the earth. One of the policemen approached from the side very carefully and reached out to touch her shoulder. She twisted away from him and raked her fingers through the soil, digging up more strands of bindweed. The trouble had always been that no matter how many individual strands she pulled up, the roots remained. It always grew back.

The policeman tried to get a grip and she snapped her arm like a whip, showering him with soil and grit. Then she saw me standing there with the other policeman and that was when she started screaming.

I felt myself moving slowly, rising through clouds of black, star-flecked matter towards a glimmer of light that grew dimmer as I neared it. My body felt paradoxically weightless and tethered; either way I had little control over it. The sounds of small dogs and children playing together in some distant park seemed like a trick of memory.

I woke up in the children’s ward, a bare bulb dispensing a sickly yellowish glow above the end of my bed. When I tried to sit up I found myself unable to. I had been strapped in like the crossbreed children in the beds on my left and opposite. Next to my bed sitting upright with his legs crossed and wearing a white coat was Gledhill.

I gave up struggling against the straps and lay back. For the time being the runaway train that was my escape from the City had been shunted into a siding.

The Gledhill thing didn’t dismay me as much as it might have done; I was merely puzzled as to who was betraying me this time. Was it Stella? And had she set up the trap at Maxi’s dental surgery? Or had Stella been telling what she believed was the truth when she passed on the name of Gledhill? Had the authorities somehow received intelligence that I was coming looking for the ex-Dark wanderer?

For now, Gledhill just sat and watched me. I wondered what his brief was. Guard or professional observer? I heard footsteps approaching the bed. It was White Coat, eyebrows twitching. He exchanged a few words quietly with Gledhill then stepped closer to the bed and loomed over me.

‘How’s our King killer then?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Enjoy your little sojourn in the Dark, did you?’

I hesitated for a moment. I had been waiting a long time for this, since the first time I encountered the Thin Controller.

‘Cunt.’

‘Security are on their way. You’ll soon change your tune then,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a fucking holiday camp, you know.’

I thought about answering him back but there was no point. I’d made my gambit.

‘In the meantime,’ he continued, ‘we are responsible for your comfort.’ He turned half an inch in Gledhill’s direction. ‘Make sure he’s comfortable please, Doctor Gledhill.’ With that he turned and walked out of my field of vision. Gledhill got up from his seat. The paralysed look to the left side of his face had not been an act, though in this new context it twisted his mouth into a snarl.

He bent down and I felt him grab hold of something and pull. The broad leather strap across my chest tightened and I gasped for air. He tugged on the other straps that restrained my arms and legs and I made no show of resistance. There was no point at this stage. I closed my eyes but although sleep beckoned I didn’t want to be sucked back into the Dark.

I had an idea and turned to face Gledhill.

‘I want to make a telephone call,’ I said.

He appeared unmoved by my request.

‘You have to allow me a phone call, Doctor,’ I pressed him. ‘Ask him if you have to.’

He got up and walked over to the door in the far corner. I was left alone with the crossbreeds whose cacophony continued unabated. After some minutes Gledhill reappeared wheeling a trolley. White Coat was two steps behind him. Gledhill brought the trolley to the side of my bed. An old-fashioned black telephone sat on it. There was a long flex which Gledhill bent down to plug in behind the bed. He lifted the handset and, finger poised, looked at me.

‘Number?’ he said.

‘I’ll do it myself.’

Gledhill looked at White Coat, who signalled his assent. The necessary straps were loosened and I took the telephone down from the trolley, dialling the first few digits of Annie Risk’s number quickly and in the shadow of the trolley so they couldn’t follow it. I heard the ringing tone at the other end and swopped the phone over to the left side of the bed. White Coat and Gledhill stayed where they were. The ringing tone ceased and I heard Annie’s voice through a squizzle of interference.

‘Hello?’

‘Can you hear me?’ I said.

‘Hello?’

I tried again, shouting, but she couldn’t hear.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ she said and was silent for a moment, then: ‘Carl, is that you?’

‘Yes,’ I shouted.

‘Carl, if that’s you’ — her voice sounded anxious — ‘come back, you’ve got to get back. We’re in terrible trouble. Awful things are happening. People are disappearing. You’ve got to come back. Come back and help us, Carl. We need you.’

‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’

The line went dead. Gledhill stood up straight, the plug dangling from his hand.

‘She can’t hear you, King killer,’ White Coat said with a sneer. ‘You can hear them but they can’t hear you. That’s how it works. All those wrong numbers you used to get, picking up the phone and there’s no one there, that’s people calling out of the City. Just to listen to your confused babble because they know you won’t be able to hear them. Or maybe like you they want to ask for help, but they soon realise there’s no escape, and what links there are only go one way.

‘She’s right though,’ he continued. ‘Terrible things are happening over there. Our influence is spreading thanks to you.’

I frowned.

‘Yes, you, assassin,’ he said. ‘Our agents of darkness are slipping through into your world via the gap you so conveniently left in the side of the City when you walked in off the motorway.’

‘Your lot have been around in our world longer than that,’ I said, remembering what Stella had told me — how she was snatched from beside the railway line on her way home after jumping a quintuple salchow at the local rink.

‘But we could only maintain a small presence and only along the canals and railways and in the grey areas,’ said Gledhill, clearly getting over-enthusiastic. White Coat cracked a sharp look at him that caused him to shut up and withdraw like a whipped dog.

‘What he means,’ White Coat said, taking up the story, ‘is that now we can put more ambitious campaigns into action. All thanks to you. Your friend was right: people are disappearing. We have infiltrated the police and their dog handlers with some of our own security and our own dogs. Well, you can imagine the rest.’