The presence or presences-they shifted between unity and plurality-slipped out of sensibility, out of the room. fuckin bleedin ell, Collingswood heard. whats coming to him.
“Alright,” she said, as they went, and the smell of burnt crap and blown-out televisions, no longer clotted to them, began to fill the room. “Bring him in. Don’t… you know. You’ve got to bring the little sod in. Need to ask him a few questions.”
MARGE WENT EVERYWHERE SHE COULD IMAGINE THAT MIGHT HAVE connections with Leon or Billy, and put up photocopied posters. An hour and a half on her laptop, two jpegs and a basic layout, Have You Seen These Men? She gave their names, and the number of a mobile phone that she had bought specifically, dedicated purely to this hunt.
She stapled them to trees, put the posters on newsagent notice boards, taped them to the sides of postboxes. For a day or two, she would have said that she was approaching her situation as normally as she, as anyone, could in the circumstances. She would have said that while, yes, of course, losing her lover in this bewildering way, and then of course being menaced by those terrifying figures, was horrendous, sometimes horrendous things did happen.
Marge stopped telling herself that when, after a day then another day, she did not go to the police to tell them of her encounter. Because-and here it became difficult to find words. Because something was different in the world.
Those police. They had been keen to get answers from her, fascinated in her as a specimen, but she had felt not a scrap of personal concern from any of them. It was obvious that they had an urgent task to do. She was also, she realised, pretty certain that task had nothing to do with keeping her safe.
What was all this? What the hell, she thought, is going on?
She felt caught up, as if in fabric getting stretched. Work came through a filter. At home, nothing was working quite right. The water when it came from her taps spattered, interrupted by air bubbles. The wind seemed determined to slap her walls and windows worse than usual. At night her television reception was bad, and the streetlamp outside her house went on and off, ridiculously bust and imperfect.
Marginalia spent more than one evening walking from sofa to window, sofa to window, and looking out, as if Leon-or Billy, who appeared more than once in these, what were they, reveries-might be just outside, leaning on the lamppost, waiting. But there were only the passersby, the night-light of the nearby grocery, and the lamp unleaned-on.
It was after many hours of blackout-lightup, a theatrical effect through her curtains, one night, that in her exasperation at it Marge paid the streetlight some attention, and realised with a physical jolt, an epiphany that had her momentarily staggering and holding herself up against the walls, that the illumination’s vagaries were not random.
She detected the loop. She sat still for minutes, watching, counting, and at last and reluctantly, as if to do so would grant something she did not want to grant, she started to make notes. The streetlamp fizzed in, fizzed out. Spark spark. Quick, slow, a lengthier glow. On off on-on-on off on off on off, and then a fuzzing fade and another little pattern.
What else could it be? Long-short in careful combinations. The lamppost was spitting out its light at her in Morse code.
She found the code online. The lamppost was saying LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD.
MARGE MADE IT TELL HER THAT REPEATEDLY, MANY TIMES. SHE DID not think, during all those long minutes, about how she felt. “Leon’s dead,” she whispered. Tried not to think its meaning, only ensuring that she had translated the dot-dash glimmers correctly.
She sat back. There was aghastness, of course, at the bad absurdity, the how of that message; and the words themselves, their content, their explanation of Leon’s disappearance, she could not unhear, keep out. Marge realised she was weeping. She cried long, near-silently, in shock.
Attuned as she had become to the light’s rhythm, she was immediately aware of a last, sudden change. She grabbed for the Morse code legend and dripped tears on it. This last phrase the streetlamp repeated only twice. STAY, she read, AWAY.
Whickering with miserable breaths, moving as if through viscous stuff, Marge went to her computer and began to research. It did not occur to her for any time at all to obey the last injunction.
Chapter Thirty-Five
PAPER DRIFTED ABOVE LONDON.
It was night. Scraps spread out from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf. A woman stood at the tip of the rooftop pyramid, the apex of that nasty dick of a building. It would have been easier for her to gain access to BT Tower, but here she was forty-seven metres higher. Knack-topography was complicated.
BT Tower’s time had passed. There was a point she could remember when the minaret with its ring of dishes and transmitters had kept London pinned down. For months it had kept occult energies tethered in place when bad forces had wanted to disperse them. The energies of six of London’s most powerful knack-users-combined with the thoughts of comrades in Krakow, Mumbai and the questionable township of Magogville-had been focused along the shaft of the tower and shot in a tight burst that had evaporated the most powerful UnPlaced threat for seventy-seven years.
And had the building had any thanks? Well yes, but only from those very few who knew what it had done. BT Tower was an outdated weapon now.
Canary Wharf had been born dying: that was the source of its unpleasant powers. In those bankrupt nineties when its upper floors had been empty, their lucred desolation had provided a powerful place for realitysmithing. When at last developers moved in, they were bewildered by the remains of sigils, candle-burns and bloodstains resistant to bleaching that would be found again if the unbelievably fucking ugly carpets were ever lifted.
The woman stood by the always-blinking light-eye on the tower’s point. She swayed in the wind without fear. She was buffeted, blinked away tears of chill. She reached into her bag and brought out paper aeroplanes.
She threw them over the edge. They arced, their folds aerodynamicking them through the dark, streets lighting them from below. The planes caught thermals. Busy little things. They rose toward the moon like moths. The planes went hunting, above the level of the buses, dipping into the lampshine.
They went on whims-London hunches. Turning at turnings, round roundabouts, going one way up one-way streets. By the West-way one corkscrewed over-under-over the great raised road in what could not be anything but pleasure.
Many were lost. A miscalculated pitch and one might come to a sudden stop in a chain-link fence. An attack by a confused London owl, paper released to fall in scrap to the pavements. One by one, eventually, they turned over the roofs, lighting out for the territories-not from where they had come, but for their home.
By then the woman who had sent them out was there for them. She had crossed the city herself, more quickly and by quotidian means, and she waited. She caught them, one by one, over hours. She took a blade to each, scraping, or cutting from it, as closely as she could, the message on it. She gathered a pile of words. Unpapered writing lay beside her in strange chains.
THE PLANES THAT DID NOT MAKE IT HOME ACCELERATED THEIR own decomposition in gutters, but they could not make it instantaneous. There was arcane litter.
“Hello Vardy.” Collingswood entered the poky FSRC office. “Where’s Baron? Bastard’s not answering his phone. What you doing?” He was making notes by his computer. “Vardy, you reading lolcats?” She peered over the edge of his computer screen. He looked at her without warmth. “‘I can has squid back?’” she said. “Noooo! They be stealin my squid!”