The Domino Men

Chapter 25

Three days was all it took for London to run into the arms of chaos. The city embraced it willingly, all too eager to swap her staid old suitors of simmering calm and disgruntled order for this fresh admirer, this master swordsman of panic, anarchy and fear.

We arrived back at the flat late that afternoon. Several times during the journey the driver had come close to turfing us out his cab. He was going to make a break for it, he said, get the hell out of the city before catastrophe struck. It was only by stopping at another ATM and clearing out all that was left in my account that I was able to persuade him to take us home at all.

On the long drive Mum had got much worse, alternately enraged over old mistakes and infidelities, and weeping over what was hiding in the snow. By the time I got her to the flat, she’d grown almost delirious and Abbey, who, I noted with a warm glow of affection, was working hard to batten down her own panic and disquiet, had to help me put her into my bed, swinging Mum’s legs indecorously onto the mattress, stripping off most of her clothes, settling her down and doing our best to make her comfortable.

I’m sure it was wrong of me to think about such things at a time like that, but I realized, with a tingly thrill, that this unexpected houseguest would mean I’d have no choice but to share Abbey’s bed that night.

I brought Mum a glass of water, persuaded her to drink and, as she seemed finally to swim back to lucidity, introduced her to Abbey.

“You two an item?” she asked, as I wiped a strand of spittle from her lips. “I always thought you were gay.” She gurgled, spumes of spittle dripping from the corners of her mouth. “Never saw you with a woman. Assumed you were a woofter.”

“What’s happening?” Abbey asked when I came back into the sitting room and, frightened, we held one another just a little too tightly on the sofa. “Henry, what’s happening?”

“The worst thing you can imagine,” I said. “That’s what’s happening. The absolute worst thing you can imagine.”

“No,” she snapped. “I’m fed up with all these secrets. I want to know exactly what’s going on. I want you to tell me the truth.”

So I took her in my arms and, as gently as I could, I told her everything — from what had happened on the day that Granddad collapsed, to my history with the Prefects, to all that I knew about the snow. When I’d finished, she just nodded, thanked me for my honesty and reached for the TV remote.

On the tiny screen of Abbey’s portable television (rescued from the attic after Miss Morning had smashed up its predecessor) we watched the news as the terror began. The hoofbeats of disaster were there in every story — an epidemic of suicide; the churches, synagogues and mosques filled beyond capacity; neighbor turning upon neighbor; violence on the streets, widespread, indiscriminate and hysterical. Bewilderment led to confusion, confusion to fear, fear to panic — panic, ineluctably, to death.

At six P.M., the prime minister called an emergency session of Parliament. One hour later, the government was advising everyone to stay in their homes, exhorting us not to venture outside. At eight P.M., we heard that the hospitals were overloaded, filled with manically gibbering patients (many of them former members of staff). At nine P.M., the telephone rang in our lounge.

I was checking on Mum when it happened. She seemed to be sinking into some kind of delirium, muttering about something coming out of space to swallow London whole. The strange thing was that when she spoke about it, it was with a pronounced lilt in her voice, an intonation of delight, as though she was actually looking forward to the death of the city.

When I got into the sitting room, Abbey was staring at the phone, gazing at it warily, like it was about to jump up and bite her. I asked her why she hadn’t answered.

She bit her lip. “I’m scared.”

I seized the receiver. “Hello?”

I didn’t recognize the voice. It was a man, about my own age. “Is Abbey there?” he asked.

I said nothing.

“I need to speak to Abbey.”

“Who is this?”

Now the voice had an undercurrent of belligerence, barely disguised. “This is Joe. Who’re you?”

“I’m Henry Lamb,” I said, and slammed the phone down hard.

Abbey looked at me, wide eyed and shaky. “Who was that?”

“Wrong number,” I said, and the way she stared at me it was like she knew that I was lying.

I took a glass of water to Mum and got her to struggle up and take a couple of sips before she sank back onto the mattress again.

“It’s all happening so fast,” she murmured.

“Don’t, Mum,” I said. “Don’t try to speak.”

She groaned softly. “Didn’t think it would end quite like this…”

Her eyelids fluttered shut. I kissed her once on the forehead, made sure the duvet was tight around her and left her alone.

Next door, Abbey was already in bed, dressed in a man-sized T-shirt, tense, fidgety and chewing on her fingernails. Self-consciously, I stripped to my boxers and climbed in beside her.

“How’s your mum?” she asked.

“Not sure,” I said. “A bit shaky.”

We both knew that I was ready yet to admit the truth of it. At least not aloud.

“She seems nice,” Abbey said. “From what I could tell.”

“Well, you’re probably not meeting her at her best,”

“Probably not.”

There was a moment’s awkward silence.

“Henry? Do you think we’re safe here?”

“Yes, I think we are,” I said. “My granddad told me to go home.”

“I did a bit of research on this house once,” Abbey said, suddenly eager for a chat. “It’s been here longer than you’d think.”

“Really?” I said, grateful for the shift in conversation, happy for any old nonsense to be spoken as long as it filled the silence.

“Back in the last century, before this place was divided into flats, there was a psychic who lived here.”

“A psychic?”

“A spiritualist, yeah.” She giggled, and that giggle, it was wonderful to hear. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

“I think a lot of dark stuff’s happened here in the past,” I said softly. “I don’t believe anything’s been an accident in my life. Not even this place.”

The moment of good humor had passed.

Abbey sighed, rolled over and switched off the light.

Later, as we lay together in the dark, she said: “I can’t believe I’ve found you. You’re my second chance, Henry. I always wanted to do something worthwhile with my life. Something that makes a difference. With you, p’raps I finally can.”

I squeezed her hand and she squeezed mine as outside the snow continued to fall, covering the city in a second skin, in a carapace of jealousy and spite.

In the night, there were strange sounds — shouts and moans and smashing glass. Once, just after midnight, we heard a whispered invitation at the letterbox. Certain promises were made, certain boons offered in exchange for services rendered, for a number of small concessions.

But we held one another close and tried to stop our ears against it, knowing that this was our haven and that to leave the flat could mean the end for either one of us.

I suppose there might be some bitter kind of irony in the fact that the next day was Christmas Eve. In all that had happened, I’d started to forget that there was supposed to be anything festive going on at all.

When I woke, Abbey’s side of the bed was empty and cool. I wrapped a dressing gown around myself and walked through to the lounge to find her on the couch watching television, a mug of something hot cupped between her hands, riveted by the cataclysms unfolding on-screen.

She didn’t even look up. “The city’s in lockdown,” she said. “They’ve set up checkpoints at the edge of London. People’ve seen soldiers. They’re saying they’re shooting to kill.”

I sat beside her on the sofa and hugged her close.

“Everyone’s gone mad,” she said. “They’ve all gone mad.”

I kissed her gently on the forehead, smoothed back her hair and whispered something treacly and cloying.

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled.

“I need to check on Mum.”

She nodded distractedly. “Henry?”

“Yes?”

“What can we do?”

“We stay here,” I said firmly. “We stay in this flat and we wait it out. As long as we’re together — as long as we’re in here — then nothing can touch us.”

“But there are people outside I care about. What about them?”

“Everything I care about’s right here.” I sounded perhaps a little colder than I had intended.

“You think your granddad’s dead, don’t you?” she said.

I walked away.

Of course, I blame myself.

Mum was fine when I checked on her. Her breathing was shallow and she was still murmuring and moaning to herself, but she didn’t have a temperature and seemed, if anything, to be slightly calmer than before. I did what I could, gave her water, mopped her brow and, just before lunch, helped her lurch uncertainly into the bathroom, even cleaning up the subsequent mess.

I’m not a bad son, that’s what I’m saying. I did my best.

Abbey and I were having lunch, eking out the last of our bread and fruit, when we heard the scream.

In the bedroom Mum was on her feet and almost fully dressed, lacing up her shoes with jerky, robotic motions, muttering endlessly about the snow.

She’d managed to tear out some of the fitted carpet, peeling it back to reveal old floorboards underneath. Here she’d uncovered something extraordinary — painted markings, sigils, signs and symbols daubed in red upon the wood.

“Mum?” I said, moving warily toward her and trying not to think too hard about what I’d seen on the floor. “What’s all this, Mum?”

“He sold your father. Did you know that? For the sake of his putrid little war he bargained away your dad. And you know what scares me now? I think he’s sold you, too.”

“Are you talking about Granddad?” I asked.

“That man,” she rasped. “That vicious man. It was always his idea.”

“What was?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“The telly… Your father and I never wanted it for you. And then — those operations. He paid for them. Oh, Henry. Incisions to the brain.”

I edged closer. “Mum?”

Then I made my mistake. I placed my hand on her shoulder. It was the gentlest restraint, the kindest holding-back, but that was not how my mother saw it. She gave a roar of outrage and pain. Until then, I don’t suppose I’d ever thought her capable of making such a sound. If I hadn’t snatched my hand away as quickly as I did, I honestly believe she might have bitten it.

My voice trembled. “Mum, what are you doing? Please, Get back into bed.”

She bared her teeth and hissed. “Leviathan is coming. We must all go out to meet him.”

Hunched forward, simian in motion, she pushed past me and sped toward the front door. Abbey appeared and stepped uncertainly in her path but Mum just slapped her out of the way. Abbey squealed in shock and I saw that my mother had drawn blood on her cheek.

Mum reached the door and unlocked it, suddenly, helplessly desperate to be outside.

Stupidly, I touched her arm again and she snarled back something terrible. Even now, I am unable to bring myself to set down those words.

She wrenched open the door and I saw the scene outside, a window onto what the city had become. Chaos, smoke, endless snowfall. Dozens of men and women in the same condition as my mother, loping through the snow, all of them streaming in the same direction.

They no longer seemed like people at all. Drones. That was how I thought of them now. Just drones.

Mum stepped into the street and sniffed the air.

“Don’t go!” I shouted.

But she paid me no attention. Mum gave another cry of fury and triumph, and ran into the street to join the others, into that exodus of the damned.

“Mum!”

She didn’t turn back. I stood on the threshold, wondering what to do, uncertain whether to give chase, knowing that she wouldn’t thank me for it. A few seconds more and she was lost to the snow and my decision had been made for me.

I stepped back inside and snapped shut the door, just as Abbey emerged from the bathroom, clutching a wad of tissue to the side of her face.

“She’s gone,” I said.

At five o’clock that afternoon, the television went black. With the exception of half an hour of the test card on BBC1, there was nothing on any channel except static and interference. Snow outside, snow inside, blackness crept all over London. A few hours later, the lights went out as well and we lost power for good.

Abbey and I went to bed, too scared to sit up in the dark, not brave enough to pay any heed to the strange sounds we heard from outside, the rustlings and stampings, the whinnies of terror, the orgiastic cries.

Much later, as we lay close to one another, we heard the same hissing at the letterbox as the night before, the same whispered invitation. But we held each other tight and stopped our ears against it.

As I’m writing this, I feel a flicker of hope. You know what I’m talking about. You must have noticed it yourself.

The other handwriting, that other story, has gone and there have been no more interpolations, no more intrusions, for days.

Maybe everything’s going to be OK. Maybe there’ll be no need for that journey I thought I had to make, for that appointment of ours in the wilderness. Perhaps at last I’m really free.

As Abbey and I tried to sleep, outside an old man was running. I didn’t know it at the time but he was very near to us, almost in sight of our door.

His flight had not gone unnoticed. He was being tracked, although not with any subtlety or grace as he could hear them blundering behind him, wheezing and squealing in weird pleasure. There was a whole tribe of them, dumb but implacable, tireless, without morality, the new face of mankind.

The old man was growing weary and out of breath, his years of active service in the Directorate long behind him, weakened by his days in a hospital bed and ground down by the spectacle of his darkest fears become reality. No one would have blamed him for giving up. Thousands would have done just that, long ago. In medical terms, he shouldn’t even have been on his feet. But he didn’t give up. He kept going, forcing his ancient body onward through the snow and the dark, pushing himself far beyond endurance just to try to reach me before the end.

He was less than a street away when they found him, the herd driven mad by the snow, inflamed by the ampersand in their systems.

Every breath felt like fire. Each step was an ordeal. He could feel them at his back. Determined not to slow down, at the last instant he tripped, fell forward, grazing old hands, bruising old skin, until at last he righted himself and turned to face the mob, courageous and unflinching.

He would have fought, I know that. He would have fought tooth and nail to the end.

Sentimental nonsense. The old man had his wrinkled cock in his hand when they came for him. They cut him down mid-dribble, his body made unrecognizable, battered by a thousand boot-heels, stamped into the snow by an army of our commuters.

Even this, of course, was very much more than he deserved.

Abby and I woke with the dawn, too distraught and too scared to kid ourselves that we were going to get much sleep.

I managed a wan sort of smile. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas, Henry.”

We hugged, and I was clambering out of bed to get us some tea when Abbey reminded me that the power had gone. No tea, then. No heat, either, and the pair of us lost no time in wrapping ourselves in multiple shirts and jumpers, self-insulating in worn vests, old cardigans and favorite sweatshirts.

We had been up for a couple of hours, in which time we’d scraped together a meager breakfast, held one another tightly and swapped tender pledges of devotion, when there came a knock at the door — a sharp, brisk tap, all business.

I ran to open it. “Granddad?”

A stranger stood at the threshold. A man not much older than me, slim, blond and sharp featured, his hair cajoled into slick, brash spikes.

“You must be Henry Lamb,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked, although I think by then I’d already guessed the answer.

“I’m Joe,” he said, sardonically extending his hand. “Joe Streater.”

You hoped that we had gone?

We were only resting. We were relaxing, taking a little downtime, stepping back to gain a better perspective on all that has been laid before us to date. It is of vital importance (Leviathan has always said so) to maintain an equal balance between leisure and our working lives. But now our lunch hour is over and we have returned to work with a revitalized sense of purpose and a determination to succeed that I think you will find to be steelier and more implacable than ever.

We thought it might be of interest to adumbrate something of what occupied Arthur Windsor whilst the execrable young Henry Lamb was barricaded into his flat in Tooting Bec, crying into his pillow and quivering in the arms of his landlady.

Details follow, and as ever, unflinching accuracy is guaranteed.

As the prince slept upon the floor of his palace, a small, gray cat trod softly through his dreams. He told Arthur the truth about the war, he told him about the innumerable clashes between Dedlock’s men and the House of Windsor — a secret history of the British Isles which had run beneath the surface of public life for more than one hundred and fifty years. He spoke of the Process, of Estella’s sacrifice and of the dark miracle of Tooting Bec. He spoke of the one who had been prepared to take Estella’s place, a boy groomed almost from birth to contain Leviathan and who now needed only to remember a simple formula, an incantation to activate the Process and close the ancient trap. And the small, gray cat spoke, too, of the prince’s part in it all, his responsibility to deliver the boy into the belly of the beast. If the boy is the bullet, said the cat, then you, Your Highness, you are the gun.

When Arthur opened his eyes again, he was at once aware that something had changed, that something had tipped and shifted in the balance of the world which meant that no day would ever seem quite the same ever again. As he rose, awkwardly and painfully, to his feet, something of what had happened came back to him and, with it, certain details of his peculiarly troubling dream. But the prince tried to shake it off, stretching, yawning, attempting to persuade his eyes to focus, forcing himself back into wakefulness.

He looked around for the cat, but if it had ever been there at all, it had long since vanished. Only then did he notice what was happening outside. Snow. Jet-black, ebony snow, hurtling toward the earth.

He felt a strong compulsion to go outside — to run, not walk — to stand and luxuriate in that snow, to roll in it and, gawping happily into the sky, catch flakes in his mouth. But something else, some quieter impulse, persuaded him to stay indoors. It cannot have been later than lunchtime, yet it already looked dark outside. The prince walked up to the windowpane and it seemed to him that there were figures moving in the unseasonal gloom and that he recognized many of their faces — staff, servants, even one or two that he might have been moved to call friends. They were standing in the snow, allowing it to land upon their clothes and settle onto their skin, and they were laughing, all of them, gazing upward toward the heavens, emitting loose peals of demented laughter.

Remembering more now of what had taken place, Arthur’s thoughts returned to the well-being of his wife and he hurried into his quarters. There she was, mercifully safe and sleeping as soundly as before, although the prince wondered if her slumber didn’t seem alarmingly deep. How can she not have been woken by the ruckus outside?

Gently, he pulled side the covers. Lovingly, he brushed his fingers against her face. “Laetitia?” he whispered. “Laetitia, it’s me.”

No reaction. Not a murmur or a flickering of the eyelashes or even (how grateful he would the prince have been to hear this) a tiny, indecorous snore.

“Laetitia?” The prince shook her, carefully at first, then with increasing vigor. “Laetitia!”

She was breathing, at least. Leaning closer, he could detect an unfamiliar smell on her breath, and as he arranged his wife upon the bed, tucking her in with almost maternal concern, he concluded with a guilty kind of sadness that she must have been drugged. In this, if in pitifully little else in his almost entirely useless life, Arthur Windsor was correct.

He picked up the telephone and dialed Mr. Silverman’s number. It rang for an eternity without reply. He slapped at the cradle then dialed down to the switchboard. Whoever picked it up said nothing.

“Hello?” said the prince.

There was a low burbling sound at the other end of the line which might almost have been a laugh.

“Who’s there? Speak up!”

The same sound again — wet and gurgling. “Good afternoon, sir. This is Beth speaking.”

“Beth? We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? Good God, that seems a lifetime ago now. Listen, I’m trying to get through to Mr. Silverman.”

“I’m afraid that will be quite impossible.” Her voice sounded distant, flat and almost robotically toneless.

‘Impossible? Why the devil will it be impossible?”

“The playing piece named Silverman has been removed from the board.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

The girl called Beth seemed not to have heard the question. “Have you been outside yet? Into the snow? You really ought to, you know. It’s so pretty, sir. Like ashes from the sky.”

“Now listen here, young lady-” the prince began, but the woman interrupted him without a thought.

“It’s coming, sir,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? It’s almost here. And the time has come for you to pick a side.”

“I’ve chosen my side,” the prince said firmly.

Beth just laughed at this, that same moist chuckle, before there was a tutting click and the line went dead.

Suddenly, as though all the fight in him had been used up in his conversation, the prince felt overcome by great waves of nausea and exhaustion. Something inside of his spasmed once, twice, three times, each more urgent than the last. It was all he could do to stumble into the corridor, where he was copiously sick. This done, he wiped his mouth, retreated back into the bedroom and closed the door (just managing to bolt and lock it) before he collapsed onto the bed beside his wife and passed out.

It was dark when he awoke. He was flat on his back, a hand was on his shoulder and a familiar voice was swimming hazily into view.

“Arthur?”

The prince blinked, tried to sit up, winced. “Darling? Darling, is that you?” The prince attempted a rueful grin but discovered that smiling seemed to hurt him now, that it cost him dearly.

“Arthur? Are you going to tell me what’s been going on? I’ve heard the most fearful noises.”

“Leviathan…” Arthur tried to push himself up. “I think Leviathan must be here.” The prince was in the most relentless, unstinting kind of pain. He wanted to say more, to explain as much as he could, wanted more than anything, to beg Laetitia’s forgiveness, to throw himself upon her mercy and plead for the balm of her understanding, for her sweet clemency. But he found himself unable to speak a single word — his throat tight and dry, his innards churning and swirling in a tempest of gastric distress, his head pounding with a fusillade of thunderclaps.

Just before he sank back into unconsciousness and the horrified face of his wife vanished first to a distant point of light and then into absolute nothingness, Arthur Windsor was granted clear and unambiguous knowledge of what was happening to him. These are withdrawal symptoms, he thought, having attended several lectures on the subject as part of the work that he did for a spectrum of young people’s charities. I am in withdrawal from ampersand.

Shortly before he went under, he managed to croak out a few words. “Stay in here. Promise me that you’ll stay in this room.”

But by then he was already sliding into unconsciousness and he never heard his wife’s reply.

The next twenty-four hours were a study in pain and terror. There were moments of relative lucidity when he saw Laetitia and heard her voice quite clearly, moments when he sensed that she held him in her arms, rocking him gently as a mother would a child, even (although this may have been an auditory hallucination) that she was singing to him, some old melody part-remembered from his childhood. Once when he awoke, she persuaded him to drink a little water. On another occasion, when he emerged momentarily from the deep mists of his mind, he discovered her seated before him on the bed eating the most peculiar combination of food — peanut butter ladled directly from the jar, gherkins, pork scratchings, sardines. For some time afterward he believed (quite erroneously) that this had simply been some overheated imagining of his. Certainly, it grew almost impossible for the prince to tell what was real and what were merely tricks, snares and booby-traps laid by that ampersand which still fought for a foothold in his system. There were the sounds that he heard from outdoors, the screeches and whisperings, the savage cries of triumph. More than once, he discovered himself clutching at Laetitia’s arm and imploring her not to leave him. The shutters were down, so he could not see outside, but there existed not the slightest doubt in his mind that it was still snowing. He even believed that he could hear it, the ceaseless patter of the snow, the unending fall of ampersand from the sky, and as he lay in this febrile state, he was visited by memories of old sins. He saw the woman at the station explode all over again, as though in slow motion. He even thought that he heard the laughter of Virtue and Mercy, although he never saw them, their power fading, perhaps, even then. But whilst he longed for it, the small, gray cat never visited him again. Something in the prince told him that the animal’s strength was very weak now, if, indeed, it had not been extinguished altogether.

The future king of England slept and dreamed and sweated. His wife lay beside him, doing everything that she could to ignore the terrible roars and shouts from outside, noises strangely echoed beside her as her husband swam in and out of consciousness, calling out unfamiliar names and screaming for forgiveness, his body a battleground for forces beyond her comprehension.

And so it went for a day and a night until, early in the dawn of the third day, as the prince seemed at last to be coming back to her, Laetitia heard a firm, decisive knock upon the door.

“Who’s there?” she cried out, shaking her husband hard to stir him. “Arthur? Someone’s at the door.”

The prince groaned, stirred and clutched at his forehead in a theatrical gesture which Laetitia had hitherto believed to be confined to stage drunks.

Then it came again — the same solemn tapping.

Laetitia looked around for something with which she might defend herself. Although the room lay in sepulchral gloom (the power having gone out almost forty-eight hours earlier and the emergency generator secreted beneath Clarence House failing only a very few minutes thereafter), it was still possible to see that the place was tastefully studded with objects of breezily incalculable wealth — several immensely rare vases, pottery fragments which were believed to predate Christ, a glass case of butterflies, all extinct — but none of them looked as though they might prove of much use as a weapon.

Arthur was at least sitting up now and had taken to rubbing his eyes, with hands clenched into fists like a child woken in the night. Laetitia was about to urge him into action when, from the other side of the door, she heard just about the most welcome voice in the world.

“Ma’am? Are you all right?”

Relief gushed into her voice. “Silverman?”

Behind her, Arthur, on his feet and searching for something on the floor by the bed, started to mumble a warning, but Laetitia ignored him and opened the door onto an old friend.

It was a friend, however, sadly changed. Mr. Silverman stood upon the threshold, badly bruised, stained in mud, grease and blood, his left hand horribly mangled as though he had dipped it, for some inebriate dare, into the spinning rotors of an uncompromisingly efficient piece of farming equipment.

“Silverman! My God!” The prince, leaning against the end of the bed, seemed to be stowing something into his trouser pocket. “What the devil have they done to you?”

The equerry stepped inside, closed the door and began to speak, briskly, urgently, but without obvious emotion, like a junior officer returned alone to HQ to deliver news of some catastrophic rout. “Mr. Streater took out some of his frustrations upon my person, sir. Shortly before imprisoning me in one of the wine cellars.”

“But you escaped?” Laetitia asked.

“Indeed, ma’am.”

Arthur gestured toward the gory remnants of Silverman’s hand. “But not, it seems, without some cost to yourself.”

“This is nothing, sir.” The man looked hideously pale, his skin taut and glossy with sweat, but it was still possible to discern a blush. “It’s a scratch.”

“Can you tell us what’s going on out there?”

Silverman appeared to sway slightly on his feet. “I think you might be able to teach us something about that, sir.” There was a trace of recrimination in his voice — not obvious and probably invisible to anyone who did not know him but to Arthur and Laetitia strikingly and uncomfortably apparent.

“I’ve made some mistakes, I know-” Arthur began.

Silverman cut him off with a gesture. “No time for that, sir. The city’s being eaten alive.”

“What?”

“It’s the snow, sir. It’s driven everybody mad.”

“And Streater? What happened to him?”

“He’s gone, sir. Took one of the Jaguars. He said that he had to look up an old friend. Although he was good enough to stop by the cellar for a few words. He seems to believe that he’ll actually be rewarded for what he’s done.”

The prince straightened up, mopped his forehead, pushed back his shoulders, cleared his throat, and despite his evident exhaustion, the unkempt brush of his hair and the wildness which capered in his eyes, he looked, just for an instant, unmistakably a king. Then his shoulders slumped, his posture sagged and he was only Arthur again. “I want you both to listen to me. This is what is going to happen. Silverman. I need you to stay here to look after Laetitia. His wife began to object but Arthur waved away her protestations. “I’m going outside,” he said. “There is somebody I need to find.”

Silverman sank gratefully onto the bed and nodded in grave approval.

“Good luck, sir.”

But if you’re going outside, the snow-”

Arthur shook his head. “Something tells me I’ve built up a resistance.” He bent down and kissed his wife on her forehead.

“Be careful,” she said.

The prince reached into his pocket and pulled out the gun that Mr. Streater had given him what felt like a small eternity ago. “I have this,” he said.

He nodded once, then, without saying goodbye, opened the door and stepped outside.

The house had been comprehensively ravaged and despoiled, as though an all-night party exclusively attended by vandals, incontinents and graffiti specialists had only recently moved on. Steeling himself against the sight of it, Arthur stepped through rubble and rubbish, over broken glass and furniture reduced to matchsticks, skirted around slicks of blood and trails of indescribable fluids before, at last, he emerged into the open air.

If anything, the devastation was even more advanced out here. Several vehicles were gutted and aflame and there were at least two bodies, which he tried not to examine too closely. As memories of what the cat had told him moved to the forefront of his brain and a more exact notion of what it was that he had to do began to form, he searched around for some means of transport.

When he saw it, he laughed out loud (a bitter, caustic sound). The only remaining car which seemed remotely roadworthy was an old Vauxhall Nova, effluent brown, the stink of Mr. Streater’s treachery still boiling off it. Swallowing his laughter, Arthur Windsor strode across to the car of his enemy, wondering if the man had actually been arrogant enough to leave his keys in the ignition.

And there, for the present, we shall leave him. For all that he believed himself capable of some species of Dunkirk’s courage, the Prince of Wales was undeniably a coward, a milksop and a fool, stepping dumbly into the role suggested by a small gray cat, whose owner, we are very glad to be able to report, was at that time either dying (slowly, with great and exacting pain) or else already dead.

The tragedy of it all — the sheer, mindless folly of these people’s actions — is brought home by the knowledge that we were only ever trying to help. However unfairly we may have been represented in these pages, you may be absolutely certain of the fact that Leviathan is here for one purpose only — we are here to tell you the good news.