The Domino Men

Chapter 29

My first thought was that this might be purgatory.

It took me a moment to identify my overriding emotion. It was boredom — enervating, brain-sapping, debilitating boredom.

Inexplicably, I appeared to be sitting at a desk in an office, warm, dry and apparently back to normal. There was a computer in front of me, switched on and displaying a spreadsheet. There was a telephone, a drawer filled with stationery products and a stack of dun-colored folders. The place was crowded with the usual sounds — the faint hum of computers, the chuntering whine of the photocopier, the persistent insectoid buzz of ringing phones. Somewhere, inevitably, there was the endless gnashing of crisps.

I craned my head to see who was with me, whom I instinctively thought of as my colleagues, but couldn’t get a good look at any of them. Their faces were obscured by screens, blurred by distance or masked by shadows.

Unsure of my next move, I resorted to what I’d done on so many afternoons at work: slumped back in my chair and stared at the computer. Not that I could make any sense of the spreadsheet, of its alien letters, its repulsive alphabet and baffling strings of digits.

Just as I felt close to screaming (that quarter-to-three-on-a-Wednesday feeling magnified to an intolerable degree) the phone on my desk jingled to life.

And you know what I’m like with ringing telephones.

“Hello?” I said.

“Top o’ the morning ter you, sir.” The man’s accent sounded like he was putting me on.

“Who is this?”

There was another voice on the line, another accent. “Could you come intae the office, laddie? There’s a were matter needs clearing up.”

“Where-?”

I was swiftly interrupted by a third voice, crisper than the rest. “We’re at the end of the corridor, my friend. Second door on the right.”

I set the receiver gently back down and got to my feet. Still unable to make out the faces of my colleagues, I moved cautiously toward the door. As I walked, I realized with a twitch of disgust that the walls and floors and ceiling of this place were constructed not from concrete or brick but from some soft, hot, spongy substance. Despite my very best efforts to forget, I remember this — walking through those corridors was like trying to escape from a bouncy castle made of meat.

As I walked, I had a sudden image of what Leviathan must look like in full, of how it must appear in motion — in flight. I saw the beast in all its grisly majesty, gliding through the infinite nightmare of space, and in a sickening flash of vision, I knew how many worlds it had consumed. I heard the pitiful wails of its victims, saw the inhabitants of unimaginable places look up when the shadow of Leviathan passed over their lands, and like them, I knew with a terrible certainty that the end had surely come.

Ah, the glorious peripatetic offices of Leviathan! Soaring over world after world — utilizing raw materials in a responsible and sustainable manner without ever losing sight of the economic imperative. Ignore the words of Henry Lamb — a hopeless naif who never understood the necessities of business. One would find very few indeed in our stretch of the universe who would say a word to impugn the working practices of Leviathan. Or, indeed, given the litigious humor of our attorneys, who would dare.

I reached the end of the corridor. On the door to which I had been directed, there was a corporate logo — a circle of color — and, beneath it, the name of the company in whose headquarters I stood.

LEVIATHAN

But it was what was written below, those four horrific words, which really sent volts of panic shooting through me.

STORAGE AND RECORD RETRIEVAL

When Arthur Windsor opened his eyes, he too was sitting down, clean, warm, dry and comfortable — if slightly bored.

Not that there should be anything surprising in most of this. We have always prided ourselves on our unimpeachably high standards of hospitality — although we remain disappointed that our guests continually fail to appreciate quite what fascinating work we do here at Leviathan.

The prince was sitting at a long trestle table in a clammy, strip-lit room, devoid of natural light. There was a fat woman next to him, sorting with mechanical efficiency through teetering stacks of folders.

Given the considerable pounds she had acquired since their last meeting, it took a second or two for Arthur to recognize her.

“Mother?”

“I was wondering what kept you,” said the Queen, without troubling to look up from her work.

“Mother,” said the prince again, “what is this place?”

The monarch smiled and Arthur recognized in that expression of satiated giddiness something of the terrible elation he had seen rising behind the eyes of his ancestor. “Why,” she said, “this is Leviathan. We’re part of the beast now.” She shoved a stack of files into his arms. “Make yourself useful, will you, and sort these into alphabetical order.”

Arthur stared forlornly at what he’d been given, at what seemed to him to be alien hieroglyphics. “Mother, I don’t recognize this alphabet.”

The Queen tutted. “Then learn.”

“Why are we going along with this? Why are we collaborating with this monster?”

“Leviathan is the future, Arthur. He will guide us, keep us, protect us. Our empire will flourish. He will keep our borders safe and render us inviolate against invasion.”

“No.” Arthur stumbled up. “This is all wrong.”

“Wrong? How can this possibly be wrong?”

“Look what it’s doing to our people.”

“As I understand it, Leviathan is merely giving a little structure to their lives. Lord knows, most of them need it. I think of it as a kind of return to National Service. And you know how fervently I approved of that.”

“For God’s sake!”

“Very well then. Don’t just take your mother’s word for it. See the manager if you must. He’s a reasonable creature. His door is always open. Sixth floor, end of the corridor, second door on the right.”

“Perhaps I shall. I am the gun, after all, and he is the bullet.”

The Queen squinted suspiciously. “What’s that?”

Arthur pushed back his chair. “Mother?”

“Yes, dear?”

“You set this up, didn’t you? That business with Mr. Streater. Trying to make me a slave to ampersand.”

“What of it?”

“Did you want me to kill Laetitia? Why would you want that?”

The Queen smiled simperingly. “Are you sure you want to know?”

Of course, Arthur said that he did.

“Your wife is with child. I’m afraid I simply couldn’t bear the thought of any heir of mine being born to that fraudulent bitch.”

“Is that true?” Arthur said wonderingly. “A baby?”

“I believe that she was keeping it from you until she was absolutely certain. Such a shame you lacked the courage to finish her. But then, failure is what we’ve come to expect of you.” She hiccoughed and her face was stained a deep shade of ampersand pink.

Arthur got up and strode away from his mother, blocking out the sound of her jibes, past trestle tables filled with workers whose faces were perpetually out of focus. He called back over his shoulder as he reached the exit. “The war ends tonight.”

The Queen cackled. “Oh, Arthur.”

Her face was a bright purple now and it seemed to the prince that something was moving beneath her skin, that sores and boils were rising to the surface with unnatural speed. She started to laugh and Arthur was reminded of the sickening death of the woman from the Eurostar, the doomed mule who had expired before his eyes with the sound of the hearty impact of a water balloon on a hot summer’s day.

The Queen’s face had begun to bloat and bulge and postulate with an excess of ampersand. Arthur could not bear to be in the same room as her. He had a horrible suspicion that he knew precisely what was going to happen next.

“Oh, my dear boy.” His mother giggled, her body racked with some unendurable internal pressure. “Don’t you see?” She whinnied in hysterical laughter. “The war’s already won.”

I knocked on the door and three voices called out from within — “Come!”

It was a small office, its centerpiece a long ebony desk at which sat three men in Victorian black. Behind them was a jade-green door — and what lay beyond that door, I wished fervently never to know. Just at the sight of it, I knew that I’d give absolutely anything never to have to pass beyond it.

But I wasn’t the only visitor. Sitting with his back to me, hunched and chastened, slouched in his chair and sipping miserably at a cup of tea, was Joe Streater.

The first of the men looked up as I came in. He spoke with a cut-glass English accent, like an aristocrat in a comedy sketch. “Who are you exactly?”

“Oh, I’m nobody special.”

The man next to him looked up at me. When he spoke it was with an Irish lilt. “But who are yer?”

“Just a filing clerk.”

When a third man spoke it was in a thick Scots brogue. “Ye don’t seem tae be affected by the snow.”

“I want some answers,” I said, trying to be bullish. “People are dying out there and I need to understand what’s going on.”

“We’re a transparent organization,” said the Englishman. “Ask us anything you wish.”

“Why is this place an office?”

“Naturally, we’re an office. Peripatetic, perhaps, but an office nonetheless. It was only a branch which was trapped on Earth. On its release, Head Office was summoned and I’m delighted to report that they’ve arrived most promptly.”

“I’ve waited years tae see this place,” said the Scotsman, “and I have tae say I’m not disappointed.”

“It’s an office,” I said again, redundantly. “Leviathan’s a bloody office.”

The Irishman shrugged. “What were yer expecting?”

“I was expecting something monstrous.”

“Ah, but we are monstrous.” The Irishman laughed. “Monstrously successful.”

The Scotsman glowered in my direction. “Leviathan Corporation is by far the largest and most successful archive and storage business in the knoon universe.”

“Archive and storage?” I said. “You’re not serious?”

“Storage is a universal problem, laddie.”

“So?”

The Englishman smiled. “Leviathan offers the solution. We find a planet with the right kind of environment, where the indigenous population has physiognomies capable of sustaining our kind of information, and we simply download it into their systems. Most planets in this part of the galaxy are annexed to the needs of Leviathan.”

I stared at them in horrified disbelief. “That’s what all this has been about? You’re storing information in people? You’re using human beings as living files?”

The Englishman smiled. “You hew down trees for paper. The principle is the same.”

“How can you be a party to this? You’re the same as us. You’re human beings.”

The Scotsman shrugged. “Just between you and me, Mr. Lamb, there’s nae much of us that you could really call human any more.”

Why should we apologize? We were simply supplying a need. If we had not offered the service, if we had not transformed planets into filing cabinets, then you may be sure that someone else would have done the same, and almost certainly at considerably less reasonable rates. Such are the demands of business.

For the first time since I had entered the room, Joe Streater spoke up, his voice weedy and pathetic. “You said you’d make me a hero. You promised me you’d set me up amongst the gods.”

I couldn’t help myself at this, couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

Joe turned his sharp little face in my direction. “What’s so funny?”

“You won’t be a god,” I gasped. “You’ll be a filing clerk.”

The Scotsman shook his head. “You’ve let us doon, Joseph. The prince has nae been persuaded tae our way of thinkin’.”

“He was getting help!” Streater protested. “Course I see that now.”

Just to add to the sense that this was a peculiar dream, packed with people you haven’t thought about in years and face you half recognize from the telly, the door behind me was thrown open and the heir to the throne strode thunderously in.

The Englishman spread his hands in oleaginous welcome. “Good afternoon, sir. We’re delighted you could join us.”

The prince scarcely looked at the men behind the desk. His wrath was directed toward an old friend. “Streater!”

“All right, chief?” For an instant, there was a flash of the old Joe, a little of the cocky opportunist who must once have dazzled my poor Abbey.

Never yours, Henry Lamb. Have you still not understood that? She was never yours.

A surge of pink crossed Streater’s face, a flush of scarlet. He dropped the teacup, which splintered on the floor.

The Scotsman looked up at him. “We’re going to have to let ye go, son.”

Streater squealed. “Come on, lads. Fair’s fair. I don’t deserve this. I’ve served you faithfully.”

He was evidently in a great deal of pain and I strongly suspected that he was soon to be in receipt of a good deal more. The floor around his feet began to liquefy, melting into sludge around his shoes. He looked up at us with horror in his eyes.

“Please…” he stuttered. “Please help me.”

I stared at him, appalled, immobile. But the prince was actually shaking his head.

“No,” he said. “Not any more. Got a bit of steel in me now.”

Joe looked imploringly at the prince and let out a feeble moan.

“Finally,” Arthur purred. “I’ve been blooded.”

A tentacle, bristling with protuberances, slithered out of the wall, clamped itself against Streater’s mouth and forced its way inside — wriggling into his throat, pumping him with alien words and figures, filling him up with an unbearable volume of information. Streater’s eyes seemed impossibly large. Bucking against the horror of it all, his mind snapped.

The floor around his feet had opened like a quagmire. It sucked at poor Joe’s legs, heaved at his thighs, genitals and torso, dragging him down, still screaming into the depths.

Arthur barely seemed to have noticed all this. He turned to the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. “I wish to revoke the deal made by my great-great-great-grandmother.”

“Terribly sorry,” said the Englishman. “Afraid that can’t be done. We drew up the contract, after all. Naturally, it’s absolutely watertight.”

“I refuse to parlay with footmen. Fetch me the manager.”

The Irishman: “You want ter speak to the boss?”

Arthur nodded.

The Scotsman grinned and gestured toward the jade door. “Through that duir, sairr, if you’d like a were wuid.”

The Irishman reached across the desk and pressed a button on his intercom. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but is dare nay chance of the prince havin’ a quick ward?”

The sound that came from that machine was wholly indecipherable. It had no business being heard on Earth. An awful, piercing roar, the ululating cry of something born billions of light years from the South Bank.

Our manager, as it happens. The most successful CEO Leviathan has ever been lucky enough to have at its helm. Lamb should feel honored even to have been allowed an audience.

“He says you can go in now,” the Englishman said smoothly, evidently long fluent in whatever evil language that creature spoke. “I don’t recommend you dilly-dally. I know from painful experience that he doesn’t care to be kept waiting.”

“May I bring my friend?” Arthur asked nonchalantly.

The Scotsman shrugged. “Yuid better get a move on.”

The prince approached the jade door and beckoned for me to follow.

“You want me to go with you?” I asked, hoping more than anything that he’d say no. The prince nodded. Reluctantly, I drew near.

From the other side of the door we could hear the movements of the CEO. We could hear its creeps and slithers, the rattling hiss of its breath, the swish of its tails, the wheezing, sipping noise it made in preparation for our arrival.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t make me go inside.”

“You have to.”

Everything within me screamed at me not to go beyond that door — the same atavistic fear of the Neanderthal who stares into the dark as, behind him, his fire gutters and dies.

“I can’t.”

“Henry, this is what you were born for.”

Behind us, the Englishman stood up. “Wait a moment. May I ask the name of that young man?”

“Aye.” The Scotsman rose to his feet. “Guid question.”

Inevitably, the Irishman did the same. “Tell us.”

Slowly, the prince turned to face them, his arm outstretched to protect me. “Go,” he snapped. Smiling, he addressed himself to the legal firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath, to those wretched refugees from a joke my granddad never finished. “His name is Henry Lamb,” he said. “And he is the engine of your destruction.”

Suddenly, the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman were upon us, moving faster than any human being should be able, hissing out their rage, teeth ripping, nails rending, reaching past the prince and toward me like hounds deprived of their kill.

The Scotsman had been right — there was very little left of those creatures which anyone would call human anymore.

A little changed, perhaps. A few pro bono augmentations.

But make no mistake — those men were grateful to us, happy to be employed in the service of Leviathan, all too eager for the perks and bonuses which come with long and faithful service.

“Go!” shouted the prince, as he grappled with the Englishman. “For God’s sake, do what you have to!”

My hand touched the door handle but I felt fingers pulling at my shirt, the Irishman and the Scotsman dragging me backward into the melee. But I knew what was required of me and so I struggled free.

Too late for them to stop me now; I stepped inside and for a shaving of a second-

— I was back in 1986, eight years old again and walking onto set to deliver the laugh line. I could feel the heat of the studio lights, see the camera crew, glimpse Granddad patiently looking on, willing me to say the words he’d written.

Then the fiction fell away and it was just me and the CEO — a mass of teeth, tentacles and claws, its great eye, milky white, scored as though by chisel marks — Miss Morning’s vision made flesh.

I wanted to scream. All rational thought fled my mind and I felt faint, as close to passing out as I had on the day that I first met Dedlock. But somehow I stood firm. Somehow I managed to say something, the only sentence I could think of — a daft old joke nobody understood, written for me years ago and which had followed me around ever since. My line. The old line. The incantation at the heart of the Process.

“Don’t blame me…”

The creature, aware, too late, of what was happening, began to fight back, pitting its vast intelligence against my own puny equivalent. I could hear the blood pounding through my head as I channeled my last remaining strength into the final line…

“Blame Grandpa.”

The Process did its work — bending time, compressing matter, and I saw, as though from a great distance, my past laid out like train tracks beneath me, all leading to a single destination, a terminus chosen for me long ago. The Process had hollowed me out, reformed me for a single purpose — to hold the genie in the bottle, the spider in the jar.

I can only explain what happened next as a kind of drawing in, a sucking, an inhalation. I felt the beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads, struggle against me, thrash and flail furiously against my gravity until at last I pulled it into me and bound it, deep inside, where my soul ought to have been.