Cannonbridge (32 page)

Cannonbridge looks up. “Judd? Now, why do I know that name? Why do I feel that, in some manner, the two of us have spoken?”

“He was one of the few to have seen the truth, sir. We had thought to employ him here until, well, the full facts of the situation became apparent.”

“Of course. Yes. You briefed him, didn’t you? Before my restoration?”

“We did, sir.”

“He knows everything?”

“I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, sir, that he was the only one to have figured everything out. Just before... Well. Yes. Your restoration.”

“And I’d imagine he’s implacably opposed to me. To us. To all that we stand for?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He can’t be bought?”

“I’d say not.”

“Then we’ll have to take other steps. I imagine that he’ll be heading to Faircairn.”

“I’m not so sure, sir. He might prefer to lie low for—”

“Trust me. That is where he shall go.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

Cannonbridge shakes his head. “No need. I’ll go myself. It has been too long since I have involved myself in their affairs directly.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll arrange transport for you to the island. A copter can be—”

“No! I have no need of your transportation.”

“But surely, sir—”

Cannonbridge smiles then, that awful grisly feline smile. “Do you still not understand, little man, how powerful I have become?”

Something pounds in Swaine-Taylor’s head. He has to fight the urge to kneel, the ancient impulse to worship. He feels as might a Neanderthal on beholding the first Cro-Magnon.

“Leave me now, Swaine-Taylor.”

“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”

The CEO begins to back away. The other man in the room has neither moved throughout this dialogue nor made any intervention.

Swaine-Taylor sees now, though he tries at once to look away, the flies on the other man’s head, crawling, crawling on his scalp and (
don’t think it, don’t think it
),
feasting
on what they find there.

“Oh, and Swaine-Taylor?”

“Yes? Yes, sir?”

“You might want to drop in on Mr Keen. We stayed up late last night, talking as men of the world do, and I fear that he may be rather the worse for wear this morning.”

Swaine-Taylor’s gorge is rising, the smell of decay thick in his nostrils, the buzzing of flies much louder than before.

All he can manage to say is “I’ll do that, sir” before exiting the room entirely. It is with tremendous relief that he closes the door behind him and sets off at speed towards the lift, leaving the demon alone with his schemes and plots and appetites.

But he isn’t quite alone,
says a small, sly voice inside him.
And you know damn well what’s in there with them.

Twenty minutes later, he finds Mr Keen, sitting on his own in the canteen which takes up an entire floor in its own right. The killer is sitting alone, a cream-topped cup of Starbucks coffee before him, into which he is gazing morosely, and beside it, a half-empty bag of toffees.

Swaine-Taylor approaches carefully. “Mind if I join you?”

Keen gives no response. The banker helps himself to an adjoining chair anyway.

Mr Keen looks up, notes the arrival with dull incuriosity and pulls a small blue bud from each ear.

“Yes?”

“Are you quite all right, Mr Keen? You’ll forgive me for saying so but you’re not looking too good.”

“Don’t deny it,” says Mr Keen. He pushes the bag of sweets disconsolately towards his employer. “Toffee?”

“Thank you. No.”

“Is this going to be purely a conversation about my looks?”

“No. I’ve just been with... the author. He said you were up late last night. Talking.”

Keen looks sullenly away. “Yes. We were drinking. He got... chatty. Started telling me things. Up in that office with a bottle of whisky and the poor dead bastard Blessborough in the chair.”

Swaine-Taylor nods, remembering the smell in that room. Remembering the hunger of the flies.

“God. And so what was he saying?”

Swaine-Taylor notices now, to his unutterable shock, that Mr Keen whose relish for homicide has struck even the most hardened of mercenaries as a little overstated, is crying, that—he would once have thought almost impossibly—fat tears are coursing unstoppably down his cheeks.

“He told me,” says Keen very softly as he weeps, “that he isn’t unique. That he isn’t just some aberration.”

“What? What did you see?”

Keen sniffs miserably. “Oh God...”

“Mr Keen? Let us be candid now. Man to man. Colleague to colleague.”

The killer seems to master himself “Cannonbridge told me...”

“Yes?”

“Christ, he’s only the first... Only the first of his kind.”

And afterwards, in that bland corporate canteen, in the midst of a tower in a district which worships profit above all other things, between those two terrible men is to be heard only a fathomless silence, filled with regret and with horror and with the belated apprehension of their true damnation.

A YEAR AND A DAY FROM NOW

O
N THE ISLAND
of Faircairn, at the crest of the hill, Toby Judd is waiting. Waiting for the saturnine man to find him. As he waits, he types quietly, diligently on an iPad, its pale glow the only illumination in the gathering dark.

The past hours have passed in a dreamlike blur, a hallucinatory segue. A long journey, first by car and then by boat, Gabriela by his side once again.

He had been surprised, he recalls, that the world, ruled, he had long presumed, by its mad god-king, had not seemed more different. On the contrary, everything that he had seen from the windows of the vehicle had looked largely as he had recalled—except, perhaps, for some additional fretfulness in the atmosphere, a quality of fear, barely suppressed, as though they were passing through some occupied territory. He remembers asking the woman why the new regime wasn’t more visible.

“It’s not an outward shift,” she’d said. “It’s more like... something dreadful’s been made literal. Subtext become text.”

The time had not seemed right for talk of emotions after that—both understood the nature of their mission—yet Toby had felt all the same the sparking of the old electricity between them, given added voltage, perhaps, by enforced time apart and by the hopeless danger of the current situation. Certainly, she had seemed to him more beautiful than ever, more striking in her physical courage and implacability, a new Boudicca. Strangely, he had not asked her for the details of how she had survived her battle with Mr Keen. It didn’t seem important somehow.

He rarely thought of Caroline now.

Toby’s memory was unclear concerning what had happened to Gabriela once they had rowed themselves ashore to Faircairn. One moment she was by his side, the next she had gone, lost to the stealthy dusk. Some quirk of the island’s many peculiar properties, perhaps.

No matter—he had expected it. He had always known that this final conflict would be his to face alone. Thoughtfully, he directs his attention to the words on the page, finessing a sentence, adding a few more. His book. Almost done.

When he looks up again, it is almost completely dark and he realises that he is no longer alone. Out of the shadows walks a man who is not a man, smiling and dressed in black. His voice is filled with the utter confidence of real power.

“Do you know,” says Matthew Cannonbridge, “most people would think you’re mad? Just another pitiful bedlamite escaped from the workhouse and running loose in the world.”

Toby ignores the provocation. “How did it happen?” he asks. “How on earth does an investment bank acquire consciousness?”

“It is inevitable. I am what comes after humanity. You ought not to be afeared. It is only nature, red in tooth and claw. It is only... natural selection.”

“Really?” Toby has not risen to his feet. He finishes his sentence on the screen, taps a few more buttons, performs another electronic task.

“Why do you hide behind that magic lantern? Stand and face me like a man. Look your death in the eye.”

“I’d rather not,” says Toby mildly, “if it’s all the same to you. Besides, I’ve already destroyed you without having to move from this spot.” He is working hard to keep the fear from his voice, to stop himself from trembling. His own courage surprises him and the thought occurs that he might, in some sense, be getting help, invisible succour and strength. From where? From the island, he thinks. From Faircairn.

There is a sound then like a thousand ancient doors creaking open or like bells pealing in hell.

Matthew Cannonbridge is laughing. “I am a new form of life. To you I am a deity. I am unstoppable.”

“Not necessarily,” says Dr Judd in the mild, pedantic tone he had once deployed with difficult or argumentative students. “All it takes is words. Well, the right words. In the right order.”

“What are you doing?” Cannonbridge asks. “What are you writing there?”

“I’ve been writing, Mr Cannonbridge. I’ve been writing the story of your life.”

“You have dared to do... what?”

“Oh,” continues Toby airily, just about keeping his nausea under control, “I’ve largely agreed with Professor Blessborough. Even with Dr J J Salazar. I’ve just added one small, yet I think distinctive, wrinkle.”

“What? What have you done?”

“I’ve set a shadow after you, Mr Cannonbridge. I’ve inserted it into your story and set it to run you down. A shadow to chase you through time, right from the first, from Geneva, all the way to the banks of the Thames. Only in my version...”

“Yes?”

“In my version, Mr Cannonbridge...” Toby looks up at the devil and grins with a relish of which he would never hitherto have considered himself capable, “... the shadow eats you alive.”

1902

BY THE BANKS OF THE THAMES

SOUTHWARK

A
ND NOW WE
are back by the river again, with Sir Arthur and with Matthew Cannonbridge, terrible but not yet as mighty as he has become.

To begin with, all is as it was before—their strange conversation, the picking up of stones, the handshake between the two men and the old writer’s all but final words.

“It has been a decided pleasure.”

And then, at last, that curiously triumphant approach, Sir Arthur’s robust objections, the single hissed syllable (“stay”), the moustachioed man’s odd rooting to the spot.

But now—now there is something different.

Now there is a great rushing of wind on a day that has been still and without atmospheric excitation of any kind. Now there are clouds before the sun and there is twilight in the afternoon. Now there is to be heard a shrill whistling as of something being summoned home. And now there are shadows everywhere, now there are shadows by the riverbank. There are shadows on the shore. There are shadows near Sir Arthur and there are shadows which pass by the urchin and the old woman a few feet hence. And above all there are shadows around Matthew Cannonbridge.

It takes some moments for Arthur to process adequately what it is that he is seeing—Cannonbridge a step or two from the welcoming oblivion of the Thames, now set all about with shadow, yet no natural trick of illumination but something hideously wrong, some profound inversion of nature’s law.

He is watching, he understands, living shadow—some impossible, animate darkness.

What happens next happens very quickly and Sir Arthur find himself quite impotent in the face of it.

Cannonbridge is swallowed up by that mass of darkness, he is lost to the seething shapelessness, struggling at first, but quickly lost. He is eclipsed. He is devoured. He is, it seems to Sir Arthur, in some manner erased.

The wind increases, the darkness rises and it is as if a storm is imminent.

Sir Arthur can only stand and watch.

I
T MIGHT HAVE
seemed to you, had you chanced to look down from London Bridge at that strange hour, that Arthur is not alone and that there are others who stand beside him to bear witness—brave Mary and her almost-child; plump, doomed Polidori; Miss Maria Monk and her panoply of secrets; Emily and her singular relations; Edgar with a bottle in one hand; faithless Karl; Wilkie and the ragged boy from the blacking factory; Fred, watching with grim, joyless satisfaction; sad Constance and her brilliant husband—all here to see the pattern take its final shape.

A
ND THEN, THE
shadows flee, the storm abates, daylight returns and the world is as it was. It is, thinks Sir Arthur, with a horrible and quite uncharacteristic sense of detachment, as he stands alone again in the sunshine, as if nothing and nobody had ever been there at all.

A YEAR AND A DAY FROM NOW

F
OR THE FIRST
time in over a century, Matthew Cannonbridge looks afraid.

“No,” he says, then, mockingly, “it won’t achieve anything, this witless redrafting of yours. Only words.”

Toby climbs now to his feet and tucks the iPad under one arm. He smiles pleasantly. “Ah. But these particular words were written in very close proximity to the weird earth of Faircairn.”

“Impossible,” the monster spits. “You’ve languished in an asylum for months.”

“Yes, I have. But all the time I have had with me, taken from my last visit here, a handful of dust.”

Real fear now in Cannonbridge’s eyes.

“And the very last chapter,” Toby adds. “I wrote that here, today, this afternoon, right at the heart of it. These things—now they have always been.”

Cannonbridge lunges forwards, fury making him clumsy now. Toby steps adroitly back.

“Even so,” says the Victorian, mastering himself again. “It’s all dependent on belief. If you’re as clever as you seem to think you are, you’ll have worked that out. It would take years for your account of events to become common currency. Why, I doubt you even have an publisher for that hapless manuscript of yours. It will surely sink into total obscurity.”