She no longer knew us and staggered away to join the others, disappearing back into the city, gibbering and weeping, consumed by inexplicable purpose.
The girl should have been grateful. After all, she had finally made herself useful. At long last, she was doing something worthwhile with her life.
I didn’t need to think anymore but just launched myself at Joe Streater. Shocked by the ferocity of my assault, he staggered backward and we scuffled incompetently together by the banks of the Thames, exchanging feeble blows and girly punches, close enough to the creature to hear its hisses of pleasure, its oozing exhalations of joy and repellent coos of victory.
I pulled on Streater’s shoulder, spun him around and kicked him in the stomach. Although the impact hurt my foot, the traitor slid backward, slipping in the slush and water which lapped along the pavement. Behind him, most of the railing had been peeled away by some surge of the crowd, so when I kicked him again there was no way to stop him toppling into the water. He tried to save himself by clinging onto the last strip of railing with his fingers. To my astonishment, it looked as though there might be tears in his eyes.
“That shouldn’t have happened. They said she’d be safe.”
“They lied to you,” I said. “Of course they lied to you.”
“You don’t understand.” I saw now that I’d been right and that the man really did have tears seeping from his eyes. “I only did this for her. I wanted to win her back. I wanted to give it another go.”
He looked pathetic — the great Joe Streater, Iago to the crown, Quisling to the beast — now just another sap clinging on to life at any cost, another loser, another opportunist who’s taken a wrong turn. Mephistopheles reduced to a charity case.
I suppose the kindest thing, the most honorable and decent thing to have done would have been to bend down, offer him my hand and help him up. Indeed, if either of us had been players in a Hollywood movie where character arcs and life lessons come as standard, then that’s exactly what would have happened.
It wasn’t, however, what took place that day by the banks of the river.
I kicked Joe Streater in the face, and I have to say — the wicket-crack his front teeth made when they shattered was one of the most satisfying sounds I’ve ever heard. He spat out the bone and wailed up at me in rage and despair, pleading pitifully for mercy.
So I stamped hard on his fingers.
With a final whine, he let go and plopped miserably into the river. I was just dreaming up an amusingly appropriate quip when two hundred pounds of royal bulk slammed into the side of me, delivering us both into the churning water.
For a moment, this was how I thought it was going to end — the prince, Joe Streater and me, all floundering in the Thames, our arms flailing, gasping at the col, struggling impotently against the tide — but then I became aware of something slick and ropey feeling its way toward me and I knew that this wasn’t the end. Not quite yet.
I think I may even have tried to scream but my mouth was choked with river water. Something slithered around the back of my neck, wound itself around my shoulders and pulled tight about my chest. The last thing I remember is a sensation of movement, of being pulled fast through the river water, tugged deep into the belly of the beast, into the black heart of Leviathan.
What lay in the Thames that afternoon was a thing of beauty and wonder. Henry Lamb should have welcomed it with hymns of praise and thanksgiving. He should have kissed it. He should have bowed down before it and worshipped it as a living god.
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.