The dark confides, p.21
The Dark Confides, page 21
The plane landed and he was led down the steps into a climate colder than the one he’d come from and on to another tarmac airstrip and into another vehicle of soft redolent leather. A deep purring engine. He guessed a luxury saloon. They drove for another hour, during which the radio came on, stations switched, songs he didn’t recognise, foreign DJs talking in a language he couldn’t place but which sounded Nordic. The radio was switched off and Blood on the Tracks came back on, songs skipping until it picked back up where it’d left off on ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’.
Grace came to him. He’d opened his eyes to her in the hospital after his beating at the nuclear power station. She was smiling and holding his hand without realising that she was holding his heart. He remembered ‘Looking Glass’ by the La’s playing during a traffic jam in the rain and Grace crying but saying they were happy tears. His whole body strained at the thought of the dead weight hanging nameless in her belly. He felt something sinking down his own torso like a cold meteoric nugget. Dead in the dead, dark in the dark. He was whelmed by a penitent yearning to make things right for everyone he’d hurt. He couldn’t understand why Grace and his ex-wife ruled his thoughts more than Wren. Maybe it was some kind of coping mechanism.
The car stopped and everyone got out leaving him sitting there alone. The only sound came from the gusting wind rocking the car and the shutoff engine ticking like a dying clock. The air was furring up, becoming stagnant, unbreathable. A creeping sense that he was not alone in the car swept through him and his skin tightened. He said hello but no one replied. He said it again and the door opened and he was taken by his elbow and led out across frozen soil and through knee-high grass.
A cold and blustery night. Wind riffling and lashing that hunched and cuffed figure headless in his sack. Soon the ground became deep gravel and the wind died down. A light came on with a deep mechanical thunk and he was stopped, the hands gripping his elbows releasing him. His guides’ footsteps in the gravel faded and then their footsteps in the grass faded. Car doors closed and an engine started. He turned to face the sound and saw only the faint smudge of headlights through the sack and soon the light was fading too. He listened to the car’s engine rumbling in the wind until all he could hear was the wind, the wind and nothing more.
He turned blindly on the spot and then raised his hands and loosened the drawstring around his neck, pulled the sack off his head. He squinted in the migrainous blaze of a floodlight fixed above the raw wood door of a big two storey house. A double-fronted cuboid building of dark concrete walls and many windows, some lit, some not. An unfinished house that looked abandoned during construction. He turned and looked from where he’d come, saw he was standing within the high ramparted walls of a courtyard that appeared to run the perimeter of the house, detaining the moat of gravel in which he was standing. The perimeter walls, dark concrete like the house, stood the height of the house and were crowned with coils of razor wire.
Out the opening he’d come through, tall grass swayed in the wind and the dark shapes of trees shaded off into blackness. His open jacket snapped in the amphoric wind trapped in the narrow courtyard. There was salt in that wind. He was at a coast. The briny smell dredged up an image of his mother standing silhouetted against a pale sun wreathed in the weathers of the past. She was knee-deep in the torpid waves of some dark beach, gazing into the last light of another closing day. Little shorebirds stepped about the glistening mudflats sucking up lugworms. Great quivering masses of dirty grey spume lay about like beached jellyfish in agony. Crows lifted off and dropped oysters on the black and barnacled rocks to crack the deckled shells. A cold rain started to fall and mottle the sand but she didn’t seem to notice. The last time he’d seen her. He turned back to the house.
The front door was open and a man was standing there watching him, his head bent slightly under the lintel. Alcott raised his cuffed hands to block the floodlight. Through the loop of his arms, he looked at the man. Seven feet tall, easily. Skeletal yet broad-shouldered. Stubbled skull and a dark wash of stubble across his mouth, throat and cheeks. A straight nose set Grecian that continued the line of his forehead without dip. He wore black cargo trousers, black boots and a ragged black sweater with a wide round neck that hung loosely from the gaunt and spindly frame of his ossature. The emaciated giant measured up his manacled visitor with red-rimmed eyes and when the floodlight went out, he turned and walked back into the house without delivering his verdict. The door was left hanging open.
Alcott looked around the squally dark. The sky over the house cold and clear, aswarm with constellations he could not name. A flight of birds passed silently before a crescent moon whose rotund entirety hung dimly visible with earthshine. The slayings of Margot and her daughter set to the score of Wren’s mournful pleas began running in shocking colour through the convolutions of his brain. A horror show staged by imagineers from a dark outside dark where teeth gnash and hot winds weep. The floodlight thunked back on when he crossed the gravelled moat and went up the wide stone steps. He entered the house and the front door closed. Soon the light would go out.
‘We’re the revenants of men who never existed,’ Carney said. ‘Stand-in ghosts conjured to haunt the living.’
They sat at opposites on riven log benches at a table of unplaned wood. White plaster walls like the surface of the moon. Dusty stone floor and uncovered timber-frame ceiling. Buckets of rain at the far end of the room. Through a large square picture window lay a view of a curved coastline and the slash of a surging black ocean beyond. Outside—wind, darkness.
‘You’re not the first they sent,’ he said.
A small black and white cat lay on the windowsill, squinting with little interest at the men. Another cat, black and long, lay on the table between them amid the cutlery and the crockery, the seafood.
‘I know,’ Alcott said.
The black cat rose and stretched, splaying its forepaws, and then poured itself into Carney’s lap. ‘And you wonder why I walked away from these people.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t wonder about you at all. You’re just another power-hungry nut with connections and money.’
‘Stop it. You sound like police.’
‘I am police. Just like you.’
‘Police is neither a job nor a career. It’s a state of mind and you don’t have it. You pretend to, just like I did.’ Footsteps somewhere above them in the house, a door closing. Carney pointed towards the sound. ‘Just like Scanlon did. But you don’t. You’re wondering now if you ever did. The orders, difficult to take, aren’t they, when you know they’re being made from afar by court dwarfs and jesters?’ He stroked the black cat’s little conic ears and they sprang back. The pelt of its sleek skull slid loose about the holes cut out for its lime-rind eyes. ‘This moggie, it emits heat but my lap doesn’t warm.’
‘You’re the one barking orders from your compound in wherever-the-fuck-we-are.’
Carney smiled at the cat. ‘How’s Mervyn keeping these days, the old rascal?’
‘Waters? I haven’t seen him in two years.’
‘It’s regrettable that he hasn’t been able to move on. Quite sad.’ He scratched the cat’s cheek and it shut its eyes, blissed out. ‘He sent you to what, arrest me, kill me?’ He appeared to be speaking to the cat.
‘Something like that.’
‘Is that all you can do, kill your own kind?’
Alcott breathed slowly, watching the wasted goliath before him. The cat like a kitten in those great hands.
‘Your little slasher film is quite interesting,’ Carney said. ‘Full of sound and fury. But does it signify anything?’
‘Do you know who took the oil?’
‘What oil?’
‘What oil?’ Alcott sneered. ‘The tanker. Do you know who took it?’
‘Oh. I believe that was little Anton. It was only a sample.’
‘And you’re letting him get away with it? He’s laughing at you. He’s been playing you all along. He’s been playing all of us.’
‘He hasn’t got away with anything. I know where the tanker is. I have additional transponders fitted to all my vessels. Why wouldn’t I? We’ll be catching up with him and rest assured, constable, his punishment will be fabled. Anyway, Anton is another story altogether. He’s not your story.’
He raised his hand and the cat reached up with its forepaw and hit it. He was no longer the hulking figure Alcott had read about, had dreamed about for the past two years. He looked terminal.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Alcott said. ‘You sick?’
‘Oh yes, very. Incurably so. Death has become something of a preoccupation of mine since I was told. It’s quite the distraction. I’ve since come to understand that we don’t die but absorb death.’
‘We absorb death.’
‘Our own death and the deaths of others. Do you blame yourself for what happened to the activist?’
‘Do you blame yourself for what happened to your wife?’
‘Of course. And you?’
‘There’s no one else to blame. I shouldn’t have got involved with her. I should have … I should have shown restraint.’
‘But you’ve taken the guilt and made it work for you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How much guilt can a man carry? A life? Two lives? A world?’
‘You tell me.’
‘In my first undercover operation for the force … force, such a brutal word. Police a force, government a party. Is it any wonder they’re despised, with their dull Procrustean standards? Anyway, after they’d cannibalised the identity of a dead child and given it me, I was deployed as a procurer of children for paedophiles. We see the headlines and we read the stories, imagining the acts to a point before our minds start reeling backward in horror and shame. We like to believe it’s because we’re incapable of visiting such places, but it’s not. It’s because we’re monsters and with our unfettered imaginations we find it all too easy to go there, and this terrifies us almost more than the acts themselves.’
He left his thumb in the cat’s mouth and allowed it to gnaw.
‘Eight men in a guesthouse. Think about that. Eight men. Think about the savage groupthink occurring among that many men who are morally degenerate beyond use. You must know that these men wore suits and had expensive educations and outwardly respectable lives. In fact, most of them still do. Now, drop into this pack two ten-year-old orphans lost in the system. Abuse parties, they called them. Imagine the fierce lust of the pack, its hot excitement. Imagine the amount of fluid involved. Just imagine that. I’m not being crass. Imagine the flow of fluid involved in satisfying those perversions. The ale and the cum, the blood and the piss, the sweat, the breaths, the tears. Rivers of filth. Pipes and channels of prelingual slurry. The hydraulics of depravity is a complex mechanical system.’
The monochrome cat in the window sat up and began grooming itself, the hooked papillae of its little pink tongue rasping against its pelt. While Carney watched this gentle felid procedure, Alcott set his hands on the tabletop. When a door closed somewhere in the house, somewhere below them, Carney turned back and Alcott withdrew his hands.
‘Did you stop them?’ Alcott said.
‘We arrested them all. One was given four years, got out after two. He’s now on the board of a pharmaceutical multinational. Two were sent down for three years each. The rest walked right back into their respectable lives as judges and politicians and celebrities. Police. The children were the highest commodity but the case was buried, evidence went missing, no one wanted to touch it. Those at the top threw it all away. No doubt some have since burrowed deep to get back to that place where the floors are warm with rot. Probably well off the radar by now. Serbia. Cambodia. Vatican City. The White House.’ He grinned a sly grin. ‘By any means, right? Did Mervyn tell you that too?’
He picked up a large scallop and one of the paring knives and shuck the scallop, slit the meaty white adductor muscle and ate it, carved up the red roe and ate this too and wiped his mouth on the hand still holding the knife.
‘You’re not the only one struggling to digest a stomachful of guilt,’ he said. ‘The endless bellyache. We need fresh air.’
They sat at a brick firepit behind the house in the black sand of a cold basaltic beach that curved between two black mountains. The firepit raged like a blowhole to the inferno or a lava scrying pool portending the great fire to come. After a fierce coughing fit had doubled him, Carney regained his poise and went on.
‘The first cause appears to have been set in motion by a prime mover so indifferent, so insensate, that when it finally puked life into the void, all it could think of instilling in it, out of a sphere of unlimited options, was the bloodlust to rip itself apart. Look at what we’ve created. Unbounded visions of hell and more angry gods than we know what to do with.’
Stars fell the whole way down the domed black vault to the ocean, where blackened sea stacks rose through the water like the decaying steeples of an Atlantean city.
‘Why do you do it?’ Alcott said. ‘Greed?’
‘Greed. That’s a good one. I do it out of hate. I hate human life. I despise it. I believe we should be the final generation to inhabit this state-sponsored bedlam. “Be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.” Nobler words were never writ.’ He paused and then went on, ‘And like everyone else, I do what I do to distract myself from the shadow of Damocles’ sword swinging across my skull. Or I used to. Some drink, some jog, some write poetry. Others still become police and steal earth blood to vend to the highest bidder. It’s all just distraction, misdirection. But once the door’s open and the physician tells you there’s no shutting it, you befriend the hounds and give them each a bowl of blood. You think you won’t, but you will. They were roused with your scent at your creation, his bony hand holding the soaked rag to their muzzles, and they’ve been casting behind you since, snarling and panting. They’re in need of a strong toddy, the hounds. Might as well kick them a bowl or two across the floor and watch them lap till their chops are dripping and their bellies are full.’ He paused again and drifted. ‘It’s their eyes, their sleepless eyes, they never leave you.’
‘We’re here to protect.’
Carney turned his head slightly and narrowed his ochre eyes at the cuffed man sitting cross-legged beside him in the blackly lambent sand.
‘Police are not here to quell bedlam and you know it. They’re here to wield it and implement it systematically for those who straddle the pyramid. They side with the governments, with the corporations, with the eaters of the living.’
‘Like you.’
‘I’m my own regime.’
‘You’re nothing special.’
‘That last sentence was one word too long. Now that I’d agree with, that I’d agree with. If only more people shared my opinion of themselves and swallowed the hemlock, it’d all come crashing down a lot sooner.’
‘Not everyone’s a manic-depressive psychotic.’
‘You really do sound like them. That surprises me.’ He eyed Alcott suspiciously, wavering flames curving across the menisci of his corneas. ‘I’m heavy with hate and disgust but I’m no longer angry like I was. The anger now runs so deep it’s calmed into a freezing indifference towards all except humanity. We need to have the decency to stop breeding and go extinct. Damnatio memoriae. There’s little I disrespect more than parents. The boundless arrogance of their belief that their DNA is worth replicating astounds me. Astounds me. I wouldn’t inflict life on my worst enemy.’
He coughed and hawked and spat phlegmy blood into the fire and the flames shivered and hissed like a goaded animal.
‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better. Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better. Every day, in every way …’ He trailed off and chuckled thickly. ‘Meliorism is false. We need to step aside and give another organism time to evolve and create its own wheel, its own fire, discover its own reasons to die. Do you believe the hells it would create would be any more terrifying than our own? This is the unavoidable burden of intelligence. Once the error of consciousness has unfolded into existence and the organism starts asking questions yet receives no answers, futility destroys any carefully constructed wall behind which hid the quivering intellect and ego. It realises that nothing it does can help it avoid death, no matter how much purpose it has or how many spawn, no matter the grandeur of the work it leaves behind. Like comets germinating planets, we are sperm moving towards an egg and that egg is death. In death we grow into a form incomprehensible. Death, the next stage in an endless gestation. In death we swim a dark ocean towards another strange egg and another, and so on. Death being all that matters. Young, old—irrelevant. All energy is a progression into its next form. As complex as we are to sperm, in death we are to this. An eternity of progression. Perfection is not the goal. Modification is the goal and perfection in itself. Do you understand?’
‘No.’
‘Yes you do, Proteus. Every day you shape-shift into to a new form, a new situation, a new way of seeing the world, of walking through it, and death and beyond its horizon is no different. Death does not exist how we imagine. Why would it? What would be its use? How would energy transmit itself through such a plane of oblivion? We question life and death but these are the wrong questions. The questions to ask are what is the use of life? What is the use of death? Life is energy’s way of transmitting itself with greater efficiency, but ultimately life is a torch dropped spinning down a well. So what is death’s use? I’ve long dreamed of being informed of its conditions by an occupant of the next region.’ He looked at the sky. ‘I am in thrall to death.’
