The shadow people, p.25
The Shadow People, page 25
Linda turned to Sek, but he simply smiled and nodded and gave a gruff little noise that sounded like encouragement.
Stammer poured out half a cupful of calla dew and held it out to her. She hesitated, but during every second she hesitated the sounds of hammering and screaming continued, and if anything convinced her that she had no alternative but to drink it, those sounds did. She took the cup in both hands, trying to keep them from shaking. Hedda was staring at her and Sek was staring at her and Stammer was wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
She drank the calla dew, all in one gulp. At first it had quite a pleasant liquorice flavour, but as she handed the empty cup back she began to taste metal, and some acidic chemical.
‘Now you need to sleep for a while, so that the calla dew can creep into your mind and change you into one of us,’ said Hedda, although Linda still thought that she was growling. ‘Sek – take her back to your room. Laurel Eye, you go with them and make sure that she settles down to sleep. The sooner she understands us, the sooner she can help Sowber Sek to find Mody.’
She looked around. Between the door and the end of the room, where all their previous victims had been nailed, the wall was now completely taken up with eight of Mody’s blind and naked men, with their arms spread wide. Faust was now pinning another man onto the wall beside the window.
‘Faust! You won’t have enough wall for them all!’ Hedda called out to him.
Faust banged the last nail into a young black man’s kneecap. ‘Don’t worry!’ he called back, standing up straight and swinging his hammer like a bandmaster’s baton. ‘There’s plenty of space on the floor!’
Linda could hear a singing noise in her ears and she was beginning to feel strangely detached from all the hooded and smelly men and women who were crowding around her, as if she were dreaming about them. Apart from the hammering and the screaming there was a constant undertone of growling and the rustling of padded nylon jackets as they circulated around the room and rubbed up against each other.
She swayed, and closed her eyes. Laurel Eye took hold of her arm and said to Sek, ‘Come on, we need to take Muh-muh upstairs. She’ll feel better when she’s had some sleep.’
Linda took one staggering step forward. ‘Jerry,’ she whispered.
‘What?’ said Sek. ‘What does “Jerry” mean?’
*
She was woken up by a high voice, singing. It was a song like no other song she had ever heard before, rising up and dipping down like a wind blowing through a valley. Yet she managed to catch some of the words, and she lay for a while watching the candlelight flickering on the ceiling, trying to follow what the singer was saying.
‘You walked off… into the shadows… you walked off… you never turned around…’
She sat up. It was Laurel Eye who was singing. She was sitting on the floor opposite Sek, who was leaning with his back against the wall, picking his nose and smoking a cigarette at the same time.
‘You vanished… into the shadows… into the darkness… which way did you go?’
As soon as she saw that Linda was awake, Laurel Eye stopped singing, and smiled, and said, ‘Aha! Welcome back! You must have been having a nightmare, the way you were shouting!’
‘Was I?’ said Linda. ‘Where am I?’
‘In your bedroom, with me and your wonderful magical son Sowber Sek.’
Linda blinked at Sek. His blond curly hair was sticky and tangled and smoke was leaking out of both of his nostrils.
‘You’re my son?’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know I had a son. I didn’t know I had any children, boys or girls.’
Sek stood up and came across the room to plonk himself down on the mattress next to her. He grinned and pressed his cheek against her shoulder and said, ‘Mummy. You’re only saying that to tease me.’
‘He believes that you’re his mother,’ said Laurel Eye. ‘He’s the Sowber Sek, so who are we to deny it?’
‘He’s the Sowber Sek?’ said Linda. She actually knew that ‘Sowber’ meant ‘Magic’ and that ‘Sek’ meant ‘Second’. ‘But he’s so young!’
‘You don’t need to be grown up to work magic, do you? I’ve seen babies coming straight out of the womb and striking men dead.’
Linda carefully but firmly loosened Sek’s grip on her arm and stood up. She crossed over to the desk first because her attention had been caught by the candle burning, and she found it fascinating. After a few moments she reached out and tried to pick up the flame, but she immediately said, ‘Ahh!’ and whipped her hand away.
‘It’s hot!’
Laurel Eye got up too, and stood next to her. ‘I’m sorry, that’s my fault. I should have warned you. There are some things that you won’t remember from the time before you took the calla dew, like this candle.’
‘Is that what it’s called? A “candle”? Have I seen one before?’
Laurel Eye stroked Linda’s cheek. ‘Some things you won’t have forgotten, and some things you’ll know more about than you did before. But most of the things that you don’t remember will come back to you, little by little, or else you’ll learn about them all over again. We need candles because it doesn’t matter if it’s dark outside or if it’s light, we have to keep the curtains drawn in the front windows in case the comelings see us.’
Linda nodded. She knew that ‘comelings’ was a word for ‘weaklings’, although she couldn’t imagine why they should be afraid of weaklings.
She bent down to look at the candle more closely, and as she did so she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror at the back of the desk. She reached out beside her and tightly gripped Laurel Eye’s hand.
‘Who’s that?’ she whispered. ‘There’s a woman looking at me through that hole.’
Laurel Eye tapped the mirror with her knuckle. ‘That’s you. This is what we call a self-see. It looks like there’s two candles, doesn’t it, but there’s only one. And it looks like there’s two of you, and two of me, but there’s only one of each of us. And – look behind you – there’s another Sek!’
Linda stared at herself for a long time in the mirror. ‘Is that really me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I have candles in my eyes.’
‘Yes. Your eyes are self-sees too.’
‘It’s nearly the ninth dark,’ Sek piped up. ‘We should go down and see if they’ve finished the nailing. And it’ll be time to eat soon. Not that we’ll have much to eat tonight, because of Mody.’
‘You’re right,’ said Laurel Eye. ‘Are you ready to come downstairs, Muh-muh?’
‘Are you really going to call me that?’
‘You’re Sek’s mother. What else should we call you?’
Linda thought hard. She was sure that she had a name. She could imagine it. But it was like a tune that she had forgotten, and even when it came to tunes she could only think of the song that Laurel Eye had been singing.
‘You walked off… into the shadows… you walked off… you never turned around…’
‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said, as she followed Sek and Laurel Eye along the corridor to the staircase. ‘This place is so dusty and I must have been sleeping with my mouth open because it’s all gone down my throat.’
They could hear the tribe shouting and singing, even from two floors up.
‘Don’t worry,’ Laurel Eye assured her. ‘The women went out this afternoon to gather bread and milk and vegetables and drinks. There won’t be much opfer meat but there’ll be plenty of everything else.’
When they walked into the room with the great one painted on the wall, the noise was deafening. The men and women of the tribe were dancing around with bottles of wine and gin and some of them were already so drunk that they had fallen, laughing, onto the floor. One woman was leaning against the wall at the end of the room, splattering yellow vomit beneath the bare feet of one of the blinded men who was nailed there.
Linda was pushed into the centre of the room, so she could see that every other wall was taken up with eleven of Mody’s blinded men, all nailed up in a row with their arms held out wide. The remaining eight had been nailed to the floor underneath the window, and Hedda was circling around them, with a half-empty bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigar in the other. Every now and then she swung one of her worn-down boots and gave them a vicious kick in their ribs or the side of their head.
‘Sowber Sek!’ she called out. ‘Come and see the failures! And Muh-muh! You’re awake! Can you follow what I’m saying now, woman?’
Hedda had drunk so much vodka that she was lurching as she paced around and slurring her words, but Linda found that she could clearly understand her. She vaguely remembered having seen Hedda earlier, before she had fallen asleep, but she hadn’t realised then how impressive she was, how commanding, with her two wide-brimmed hats perched on top of her head, and her shawl, and her layers of coats and jackets and sweaters. She was the voice of the great one, after all, the one who could hear Ba-Abla murmuring in the shadows, so that she could tell the tribe what Ba-Abla advised, and what Ba-Abla demanded.
‘See these drivelling failures? Hedda repeated, taking a swig from her bottle of vodka and then trying to puff at her cigar, although it had gone out.
Linda went to join her, and looked down at the naked men nailed to the carpet. All of the bandages had been torn off their faces, so their eyes were nothing but sagging holes. She found the sight of their flaccid penises quite arousing, an arousal that was heightened by the fact that she could stare at them for as long as she wanted, but none of them could see her.
Sek called, ‘Muh-muh! Muh-muh!’ and beckoned her.
He was standing in the corner of the room, jiggling up and down with excitement. Lying at his feet, nailed to the carpet, was Edward. He was unconscious, his lips pale blue, and he was breathing only in tiny gasps.
When she first saw him, Linda had a wave of feeling that she couldn’t qualify. For some reason she felt that she wanted to pull out the nails that were keeping his hands and knees stuck to the floor, and pick him up, and carry him away in her arms. Almost at once, though, that feeling faded away like a distant train whistle, and she saw how jubilant Sek was. She gave him a hug, lifting him off his feet.
‘He’s going to be mine – all mine!’ Sek told her, as she put him down. ‘He’s going to be my dinner tomorrow, when we find Mody! I’m going to eat his crunchy ears!’
Linda’s mind was still a jumble, but she suddenly remembered something serious. Over the singing and shouting, she leaned close to Sek and said, ‘We have to find Mody first, Sek! If we don’t find Mody, they’re going to be eating us!’
29
Jerry couldn’t sleep that night. He was exhausted, and he lay on his crumpled bed too tired to get up and make himself a cup of tea. He couldn’t stop thinking about Linda, and seeing pictures of her in his mind’s eye laughing as she ran across Tooting Bec Common, or sitting on the sofa by the fire, her knees drawn up, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, painting her toenails. The fire had been reflected in her eyes like two candle flames.
Occasionally, cars drove up Crowborough Road, and he saw their headlights swivel across the ceiling. Apart from Linda, it was painful for him to think of Nora too, and the way in which she had been killed downstairs in her living room. How can an elderly widow have lived a quiet and harmless life, taking care of her husband and bringing up three children, eventually to settle down with her crochet and her television and her weekly bingo club, only to be smashed and beaten and crushed to death against the walls of her own house?
He wondered if Linda were dead now too, and if she had been killed with the same brutality. It was beginning to seem increasingly likely that she had been abducted by the same gang of homeless squatters who had taken PC Bone and murdered DC Malik and incinerated that poor woman at the Charles Babbage school in Peckham, as well as taking hostages at Lambeth Cemetery. If it had been them, he had to doubt if there was anything but the slimmest chance of her still being alive.
Jerry was not one for crying. The last time he had been forced to wipe his eyes was when his father had died of prostate cancer five years ago at the Royal Marsden Hospital. But as he lay in bed thinking of Linda and what might have happened to her, he felt a cold tear slide from each eye and onto the pillow.
He couldn’t even pray to God to protect her. He had seen too much violence and too much cruelty in his nine years as a detective to believe that there could possibly be a God. What kind of a God allows millions of his worshippers to die of pandemics, and his beloved only son to be nailed to a cross?
*
He managed to doze off for about an hour as it began to grow light. When he woke up, he could hear the rain gurgling in the gutter outside his window. He swung himself out of bed and went through to his kitchenette to fill up his kettle. He suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to feed his ryukin goldfish. He had christened it Quasimodo because ryukins have hunched backs.
‘It’s God’s fault, isn’t it, Quaz?’ he said, as he sprinkled dried flakes onto the surface of his fish tank, and the ryukin rose to nibble at them. ‘He didn’t make man and the Devil of equal strength.’
That was Jerry’s favourite quote, from The Hunchback of Nôtre Dame. In fact, it was the only quote he could remember from school. The only other quote he remembered came from The Sweeney, that 1970s’ TV police series. ‘If you’re going to get hitched, make sure it’s either a 9 or a 3. A stunner or a shitter.’
He was about to pour himself a mug of tea when his phone rang. It was Jamila, and she sounded as tired as he felt.
‘Jerry? I’ve had a call from Professor Walmsley. Tosh passed her on to me.’
‘Bit bloody early, isn’t it? What time is it?’
‘Half past seven. But she told me she’s been up all night, working on that recording from Moe Dee.’
‘Can’t say I’ve had that much kip myself. Did she get anywhere with it?’
‘Apparently, yes. She told me that she listened to it again and again at different speeds, and then she suddenly had a Damascene moment.’
‘Oh yeah? What’s one of them, then? Like the menopause?’
‘A moment of sudden enlightenment, Jerry. Like Saul on the road to Damascus.’
‘Sorry, you know me. I’m not very biblical. What was it, this moment?’
‘When she played the recording back at a very slow speed, she could distinctly hear elements and phrases of two separate languages. These homeless people seem to have their own dialect – but she said it’s not at all like Cockney or Shelta, the Irish traveller language. It hasn’t been developed by the homeless people themselves for their own protection, over the years, like those two languages.’
‘Don’t tell me there’s a night school, where you can go and learn growling.’
‘No. Professor Walmsley is almost sure that it is down to the opioid that these people have been taking. Tosh and Dr Seshadri both agree that it affects the speech centres in their brains, but Professor Walmsley believes it is rather like a chemical version of Google Translate. She admits that she needs to make more recordings to support her theory, but she seems very confident about it.’
‘So all that wuffing and barking, that all makes some kind of sense?’
‘It does if you’ve taken a dose of this particular drug, and you can listen at a third of the normal speed.’
‘These two languages – does she have any idea what they are?’
‘She said that she could only hazard a guess at the main language. It was a highly educated guess, of course, because she is an expert in evolutionary linguistics. But she thinks that its roots date almost as far back as the Stone Age, from forty-three thousand BC or even before – a language called Pre-Indo-European. What really surprised her, though, was that apart from that, she thought she picked up quite a few phrases and words in modern German. And not just “Erst” and “Sek” either.’
‘So these buggers are German, just like we thought they might be. But that still doesn’t explain them talking like cavemen and worshipping some Pakistani devil, does it?’
‘Listen – Professor Walmsley wants to make more recordings of this Moe Dee character, so that she can build up a decent vocabulary. If she does that, we should be able to persuade him to tell us where the rest of those homeless people are hiding out. That woman with two hats, for example, that Edward Willow drew for us.’
‘Baggy Nell? I’m almost glad I didn’t have a decent night’s sleep last night. I would have had nightmares about her.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘I hope to God that Edward’s all right.’
‘I thought you were not biblical.’
‘I’m not. But who else can I pray to? Ronald McDonald?’
‘Anyway,’ said Jamila. ‘I have agreed that we should go to St George’s at eleven-thirty and meet up with Professor Walmsley. DCI Saunders has arranged for Moe Dee to be moved to a room next to the ophthalmic ward in the Lanesborough Wing and he has an armed guard.’
‘Okay. I’ll meet you there. You don’t have any of those kheema patties left, do you? Fetch a few along if you do. I know I’ll be starving by lunchtime.’
Jerry hung up. He stood for a long time watching his ryukin nibbling its fish food. He was doing everything he could to act normally, as if he were in charge of everything, like a detective should be. Instead, he felt like a helpless passenger on a roller coaster, whirling and dipping and spinning, not strapped in, and only just managing to cling on.
He picked up Linda’s scarf from where she had left it draped over the back of the armchair, and pressed it to his nose so that he could smell her.
‘Linda,’ he whispered. But the only response was a pigeon landing with a scrabbling sound on the gutter outside the living-room window, and starting its repetitive mating call.
*
Dr Seshadri met Jamila and Jerry and Professor Walmsley when they arrived at the Lanesborough Wing and he showed them up to Moe Dee’s room on the second floor.
