The society of unknowabl.., p.14
The Society of Unknowable Objects, page 14
Owen found his target through the third doorway along the corridor, in a room that was illuminated by a blade of moonlight slicing in through the open shutters. A figure was lying on a mattress on the bare floorboards, surrounded by discarded and empty vodka bottles. The man’s face was all angles and holes in the moonlight, the face of a corpse beneath an untidy mop of grey hair. He was gazing out of the window, like he was dreaming or dead, but some change in the atmosphere, or some sense, alerted him to Owen’s presence, and the man turned his head on his pillow, wide eyes staring. Owen expected a scream or a shout of anger, but instead the corpse’s mouth spread into a rictus grin, and a thin cackle trickled out between his lips.
‘Who are you, then?’ he asked, between giggles.
Owen stepped into the room and ran his eyes around the dark space. There was a door on the left, a sour smell revealing that it was a toilet, and an old, cracked mirror leaning against the wall opposite the bed, reflecting the diagonal streak of moonlight. Owen felt the warm night air of Cairo drifting in from the open shutters, but it did nothing for the lingering smell of sweat and urine and stale alcohol.
‘Oh, I see,’ the man said, his laugh drying up as he drew some conclusion. ‘Come to off me, is it? Scared I might reveal what I know?’
Owen took the opportunity to study the man’s face and decided he didn’t recognize the target. But the man had been handsome at one time, before whatever addiction now held him in his grip. Owen detested the man, despite knowing nothing about him. He was a living example of weakness, of indiscipline. Just like his own father had been, this man was an addict.
‘I suppose one has become a liability,’ the man reflected, turning his face back to the window. ‘Only to be expected. They don’t like me taking money from the Iranians, do they? Well, I wouldn’t have to if they paid me what I was due.’
Owen approached the bed, floorboards creaking beneath his weight, considering whether he could simply lift the man and toss him out of the window to the cobbles below. But it was entirely possible that such a fall might not kill him. Better to be sure. He contemplated smothering the man instead. He stepped closer to the bed, wondering about the thin pillow beneath his head.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ the man pleaded, moving quickly to throw a hand up in front of him, his eyes suddenly bulging with panic. Owen hesitated, surprised by the speed of the man’s movement, the sudden power of his fear. ‘I’ll make you a deal,’ the man gasped, words spilling out of him. ‘Let me live … and I’ll give you the most valuable thing in the world.’
‘The most valuable thing in the world?’ Owen asked quietly, playing along, indulging the man at the end of his life.
The man pushed himself into a sitting position, reaching a hand towards Owen, grabbing the fabric of his trousers like a beggar pleading for scraps.
‘Magic,’ the man said, his tone hushed and his eyes wide and wild. ‘Magic is real. And I can give you a magical item.’
Owen stared down at his victim, unimpressed.
The man lifted a chain that hung around his neck, pulling a small silver flask from beneath his ragged shirt. ‘This!’ he said, whispering hoarsely. ‘This is it – it’s magic!’
Owen stared at the flask – a shot flask, a tiny silver vessel on a chain with volume enough for no more than one or two mouthfuls of liquid.
‘Watch!’ the man begged. ‘Just wait, please.’ With shaking, frantic hands, he unscrewed the lid on the flask, the chain clanking lightly against the silver, and then he upturned the vessel, letting the contents spill out on to the mattress. The fluid was clear and made a light pattering sound as it fell between his thighs. Owen watched, waiting for the flow to reduce to a trickle, to stop. But the liquid kept coming, a steady clear stream, showing no signs of running dry.
After thirty seconds Owen felt himself frown. The man on the bed smiled, and now his eyes seemed calculating to Owen, less terrified than they had been moments earlier. ‘See,’ he said, and there was something of a triumphant I told you so in his tone. ‘Magic.’
Owen stared at the steady stream of liquid, his mind falling unusually quiet. What he was witnessing wasn’t possible. It had to be a trick of some kind.
‘No matter how much you drink, it never runs out,’ the man explained. ‘But when you drink … oh, when you drink …’ His eyes closed briefly, like a man in a moment of ecstasy. ‘All of your senses are opened. You can feel things you would never otherwise feel. You can see things you can’t otherwise see. With this flask, you can do amazing things. You can see truth and lies … you can be powerful. And you can have it, my friend … all you have to do is let me live.’
Owen watched as the liquid continued to tumble from the tiny flask. It simply made no sense. It was impossible.
He stooped down and snatched the flask. The man gave it up easily, scuttling backwards on the mattress until he hit the wall. Owen inspected the item, looking for the trick. Because it had to be a trick, didn’t it? The flask was heavier than he would have expected, and felt strange in his hand, somehow solid and dense and unsettling to look upon in a way he couldn’t quite grasp. He lifted the flask to his nose and sniffed the contents but there was no scent. He stepped away from the filthy mattress, into the moonlight, and upturned the flask once more, pouring liquid on to the dusty floorboards. He watched silently as a yawning chasm of astonishment opened in his mind.
How was this possible? How could a flask be endlessly full of liquid?
‘Where did you get it?’ Owen asked the man, so rocked by what he was experiencing that he forgot to whisper.
‘It’s been in my family for years,’ the man answered. Owen glanced over to the mattress and saw that the man’s eyes were fixed on the stream of liquid. ‘Bit of a secret. I’m the only one left now.’
The man met Owen’s gaze, and a smile stretched across his face, revealing uneven, stained teeth. ‘You should drink it,’ he said. It was a dare, a challenge. ‘It’s magic.’
‘Poison?’ Owen suggested. ‘You think I’m stupid enough to drink it?’
The man sighed, closing his eyes as if defeated. ‘Yes, that’s right, you stupid man. It’s a magic flask of poison. That’s what I ruined my life over.’
Owen bristled inwardly. In his scorn, he saw some remnant of who this man had once been, the authority and power he had once held.
‘Kill me if you want,’ the man muttered. ‘I genuinely don’t fucking care any more.’
Owen was unsettled – by the flask and its impossible liquid, by this man on his piss-stained mattress thinking he was better than him. So he took a sip of the liquid, tossing his head back and swallowing a mouthful. It was cool on his lips and silky like oil as it passed over his tongue.
On the mattress, the man smiled again. ‘Good for you,’ he murmured. ‘Everything changes now.’
Nothing happened, and Owen was about to toss the flask aside and be done with it, but then everything changed, suddenly, like a firework going off on a dark and silent night.
His senses erupted, impossible colours filling his vision and the sounds of the city suddenly like an orchestra in his ears. It was as if the volume and the brightness on a TV set had suddenly been turned up to full. Owen gasped in shock and stumbled backwards a step, arms thrown out to steady himself. When he looked at the man on the mattress he could feel everything the man was thinking and fearing. He could see his panic, his desperate desire to hang on to the pitiful remains of his life, but also his tiredness at what he had become, and his sorrow at the life he had lost. Owen could see all of this in vivid colours swirling behind the man, like the wings of an exotic butterfly, iridescent but as thin as tissue. It was beautiful.
‘Fuck me,’ Owen murmured, and his own voice was visible, curling through the air and across the room, as if he could see the sound waves disrupting the darkness.
Owen turned on the spot and looked at himself in the tall mirror propped against the wall. He saw his own wings behind him, the complex, shifting textures and tones, like a kaleidoscope, glowing brilliantly in the gloom and sparkling where they touched the moonlight. He saw every colour he had ever known and some he had never seen before.
‘You can see the wings, can’t you?’ the man whispered. ‘Everyone has wings. I think it’s your soul. The flask lets you see your soul. Everyone’s soul.’
Owen watched the many colours swirling like smoke in his wings, his mouth hanging open at the beauty of it all. He saw dense, dark spots – deep reds and blacks and purples – and he knew that these were all the people he had killed, the marks on his soul from all the deaths he was responsible for. He knew it in the same way he knew how to see and how to hear; it was a sense he now had, a sense that the flask’s water had opened in him.
‘Seeing with opened eyes … it’s addictive,’ the man cooed from the bed, and Owen watched him in the mirror. The old man’s wings were much thinner and less vibrant than Owen’s. ‘When you drink from the flask, the joys of life are amplified. Try eating, or drinking or fucking with a mouthful of this in your belly …’ A reedy giggle escaped him again. ‘You will never know pleasure like it!’
Owen reached backwards, watching in the mirror as he passed a hand through the rainbow that trailed behind him, like dragging his fingers through shallow water. ‘Unbelievable,’ he murmured, and he heard the music of his own human voice, saw again the sound waves curl through the air.
Owen passed the chain of the flask over his head, taking possession of the item. He wanted to drink from it again. He wanted to see what life was like with opened eyes, with this new sense.
‘Yes!’ the man on the bed whispered, and Owen saw pleasure or relief ripple through the man’s wings. ‘Take it! It’s yours!’ He clapped his hands twice like an excited child.
Owen had been told to make it look like an accident, but in that moment he didn’t care about his instructions. In that moment he wanted to see what would happen, what he would experience with his new senses. He marched over to the mattress and grabbed the man by his hair, pulling his head roughly back. There was a burst of confusion in the man’s eyes, and a corresponding ripple of colours across his wings, then startling, terrifying realization, eyes like car headlights in the darkness as Owen pulled out his flick knife and sliced it across the old man’s throat.
Owen danced back quickly, avoiding as much as he could of the resultant spray, as life pumped from the wound in viscous red spurts. The man gurgled, one bony hand on his neck, and slumped down on the mattress, twitching in a puddle of his own blood until he was still.
Owen watched and waited and finally life left the man’s eyes. Almost immediately the wings behind him winked out of existence. A second later there was an explosion of light in the air above the body, a brilliant, vibrant fountain that was more beautiful than anything Owen had ever seen. An awed ‘Oh!’ escaped his lips as he watched, then he felt his own butterfly wings flash and pulse, and when he looked over his shoulder to the mirror he saw them flicker rapidly like the lights of a fairground.
The fountain of colours above the corpse separated and dimmed, as the man’s soul went to where it was going, but some of that fountain, some of that colour, merged with Owen’s wings – another soul, another memory in his collection.
Owen moaned audibly as his whole body shivered with pleasure.
When Owen met Waverly Weir at a brasserie in Paris a week later, to debrief on the job, he took a drink from the flask before Weir arrived.
‘You look strange,’ Weir announced, as he flapped out the napkin to lay it on his lap. Owen inclined his head and studied the man’s wings.
‘Do I?’ he answered. With his heightened senses he saw Weir better than he had ever seen him before. He saw the lies and cowardice as shades of cold blue and white in Weir’s wings, colours that trembled like a fearful child waiting to be struck. He was a man who couldn’t be trusted, a man who was using Owen while knowing his usefulness would come to an end. Owen could see that plans were forming in Weir’s mind, shown by complex lines of black and grey, like veins running across Weir’s wings. Those lines were shifting and connecting, schemes forming, even as Owen watched.
Weir spoke to him about Egypt, expressing displeasure at the murder that hadn’t been made to look like an accident, and Owen saw the strength of the man’s unhappiness in his wings if not on his face.
‘Sorry about that,’ Owen said, tilting his head to watch Weir’s wings as the man buttered a bread roll. ‘I’ll make it up to you next time, I promise. We still have a long, productive partnership ahead of us, plenty of time to make amends.’
Weir smiled. ‘That’s right,’ he said, concentrating on his roll. ‘Long, productive partnership.’ His wings shimmered violet with deception, and Owen knew the partnership was over.
The next time Owen met Weir, in a car park in central London, Weir wasn’t expecting him, and Owen added the man to the wings of colour he carried with him.
Then Owen Maddox moved across an ocean to escape the government that had employed him for so long. For ten years he sold his services and every victim he took was added to the colours he carried with him, painting his butterfly wings. With his senses awakened by the flask, every killing became a work of art, the finest meal, or the most exquisite piece of music.
When he thought about the man in Cairo, which he found he did often, usually when his mind wasn’t occupied with tasks or plans, Owen was able to see why he had ended up the way he had. The flask was addictive. It made every experience as sweet as the most powerful drug. It made it impossible not to have the flask with him always. But he knew that the difference between himself and other people – such as the man in Cairo, or Waverly Weir with his cigarettes, or even Owen’s own father with his alcohol – was willpower and discipline. Owen refused to be weak; he was determined not to end his days alone and delirious in a dirty room. He refused to succumb to temptation, so he restricted his use of the flask to when he was working, when he was dispatching someone to their next life, his butterfly wings unfurled at his back. He didn’t need to use the flask constantly, as long as he could savour its contents occasionally.
And that was fine, until the day the flask was stolen from him, by a man who couldn’t die, and Owen could no longer see nor feel his beautiful butterfly wings.
The Society of Unknowable Objects Meets
Magda stood in front of the Clockwork Cabinet admiring the craftsmanship of the piece. The grain of the polished wood was beautiful, like the back of an expensive violin, and the fine gold numbering on the drawers winked at her where they reflected the light. Whoever had built the Cabinet must have known its purpose; they surely were aware that it was more than just a piece of furniture. This Cabinet was intended to contain miracles.
But does it?
Magda shook her head, uncertain of the answer.
Coming to the meeting that evening had felt different. Normally Magda would head to the meetings of the Society with a skip in her step, bursting with excitement at the secrets she knew. That day her heart had been heavy, her mood soured by the memory of the discussion with Frank earlier in the day, by what he had done with the chess piece. When she had arrived at Bell Street Books, Frank had been talking to a customer, smiling and nodding as he stood behind his desk with his arms folded, so Magda had managed to avoid any conversation for a few minutes more. She had given him a quick nod and headed straight to the door to the stairs.
In the basement, she had made herself a tea, questions swirling in her mind just as the kettle steam swirled in the air, and then she had sat for a while at the table, just waiting for the meeting to start. She’d found herself thinking again of James and their few hours together, and the man who’d shot him. Her fear of that man had subsided as the hours had passed, but it still lay there, a low background hum like the noise of a car engine on a long journey.
What if he’s watching you? What if he’s waiting for you to come out from the shop later and he shoots you?
She tried to wrangle her fears into submission. The man didn’t know her name and had no way of knowing where she lived. He was on the other side of the planet.
When her nervous energy got the better of her, she stood up from the table and strolled over to the bookcase in front of the hidden recess. She opened it to face the Clockwork Cabinet for the first time in a number of years. She had only seen the Cabinet opened once, during her very first meeting, but she had unlocked the hidden recess to admire the Cabinet on a few occasions since then, dreaming about what she had thought lay within.
‘Beautiful, but are you empty?’ she asked the Cabinet. The Cabinet didn’t answer, keeping its proud silence.
She sighed heavily and glanced at the clock on one of the shelves. It was ten minutes past the time the meeting was supposed to begin, and Will hadn’t arrived. That wasn’t like him. Magda worried about what it meant. And disappointment – if not surprise – hung heavily from her heart as she concluded that Henrietta wasn’t coming either. She’d held out such hope. She shook her head and sipped her tea and then heard Frank shuffling down the stairs.
The old man stepped into the basement and stood at the doorway for a minute, looking down at his phone. ‘Will’s not coming,’ he said finally.
‘What?’ Magda asked. She was shocked at the news, but also relieved that Will had been in touch. Her fertile imagination had been conjuring all manner of awful things that might have happened.
Frank closed the door to the stairs and walked over to join her at the table. ‘He replied to my message about the meeting.’ He handed her his phone.
Magda read the text exchange: the usual message from Frank about the meeting, and then Will’s reply, which had come in only fifteen minutes earlier.
