‘No.’
‘No matter. Did you know that there’s a power station not far from Kiev?’
‘I should imagine there are power stations not far from most large cities. Cities need power, after all.’
‘The one near Kiev is called Chernobyl. Have you heard of it?’
‘I never did well,’ I said, ‘in my Memorising the Names of Soviet Power Stations class at school.’
‘Well well,’ he said. ‘Quite. Chernobyl, anyway, means [wormwood], in English.’
‘Chernobyl,’ I repeated.
‘[Wormwood,]’ he said, speaking English now, [is in the Bible. It’s in the Book of Revelation. Do you know it?]
‘[The Apocalypse of St John,]’ I said. ‘[The end of the world, and so on.]’
‘[Precisely! Wormwood — the Bible says that a bomb will fall like a gleaming star, and destroy millions of lives, at—]’
Then things happened very suddenly. Trying to remember the sequence of events afterwards I was struck by how staged it seemed, right from the start. This may have been because the first thing to happen was the sudden glare of an arc lamp directed down upon us, as if we were indeed inside a theatre and not out on a cold dark Moscow street in the middle of the night. I heard the click of the light being switched on, and the fizz (I’m sure) of its filament heating up. I was blinded, of course; the light was sudden and intense. It was also from directly above, as if somebody had leaned out of a top-floor window and shone a lamp downwards. I felt a weird twist in my stomach. Light, light, light. Buzz, buzz. I blinked. Coyne had cried something out, in his surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. His bony hand darted out, like a cobra-strike, and seized my shoulder. I blinked. I blinked again. Out of the ammonium wash of the sudden light, the shape of the building to my left was starting to become discernible.
The sense grew stronger of a fizzing sound, or a sub-rumble, or some strange almost inaudible yet powerful and unmistakable sound. It made the watery marrow inside my bones tremble, whatever it was. It made the hairs on my skin shiver upwards. I didn’t know what it was.
I blinked.
Then there was a second sound, and this one was unambiguous: a high-pitched whistle, or soprano songnote, like tinnitus.
I was screwing my eyes up. I could see Coyne standing next to me, the colours of his clothing bleached by the ferocity of the light. I squinnied some more, and his face became visible. He was not standing, his feet were not on the ground. His head was floating. I looked again, and saw that his whole body was above his head; and that his head was upside down, on a level with mine. His face looked — alarmed. I daresay mine did too.
His arm was out and his hand was gripping my shoulder, such that when his body jerked upwards and made as if to fly into the sky, it was this grip that, initially, held him back, though it nearly hauled me off my feet. His face was still level with mine, although now bulging and red, but his feet were ten feet up in the air. His fingers clawed at the fabric of my coat. There was a heave, and his grip failed and then he was gone.
I stumbled. I looked up, but looking up stung my eyes and I could see very little; except that, there in the very heart of the glare, was a wriggling figure.
It was a very impressive show.
The tinnitus-whistle grew in volume, and the rumbling sub-bass seemed to grow too; my stomach swirled and swirled, and my scrotum tightened so hard it was painful. I felt a sensation I had not experienced since I was a child immediately before Christmas. It was partly excitement, and the numinous sense that something extraordinary was about to happen; but this feeling — you know it, of course; the feeling I’m talking about — it is in the nature of this feeling that it was also flavoured with alarm. Or terror.
Something snapped.
Afterwards, when trying to explain it to the Militia, that was the phrase that came back to me. It was not quite the sound of something snapping; not a rope giving way for instance. It may actually, on reflection, have been an absence rather than a presence; not the sound of something giving way, but the consciousness that the sub-bass thrum had ceased, the apprehension that a sound was lacking.
I started to breathe in. You know that kind of breath. It is a breath of wonder. Quite a show! Really, quite a show!
The breath was a third drawn when the whistling stopped, and the light changed quality. I heard a new noise: a rapidly crescendoing whiffling sound, and I had the sense that something was coming down. And with a heavy crunch Coyne landed on the pavement directly in front of me. He came down head first, and a long snake curled down through the air after him to tumble onto his body.
I jumped back, startled, but even as I jumped I understood what had happened. So having jumped onto my left foot I launched forward again, and went down on one knee beside him.
He was still breathing, and still capable of movement. He had fallen on his front, but he was using his fingers, scraping them against the ground and drawing them back into a fist, and scraping them outwards again, to push a sheet of dark paper out from underneath him and to slide it along the pavement. But it wasn’t paper, it was fluid. He had fallen on top of, and broken open, a bottle of artist’s ink, and that was now spreading its stain along the floor. His head was turned to the left.
Coiled on his back was a silver rope. I reached forward and touched it, and it felt warm. It was no thicker than a finger. It coiled and coiled, and it was tethered to Coyne’s ankle.
There was no rope.
‘Coyne,’ I said, leaning over his ear. He wasn’t moving. His back was not rising or falling. Of course it was not ink, spilling out from underneath him. I wanted to say something to him, but my mind was perfectly empty. I had no idea what to say. What could I say? What ought I to do?
Coyne spoke. ‘React!’ he told me, in a raspy voice.
And the whole unrealness of the experience burst pressed itself upon me. Of course it was a show! A show for my benefit! Of course I ought not to be frozen there. I ought to react. When you put on a show, you expect your audience to react.
‘What?’
‘React!’ he ordered.
‘I don’t understand what you want me to do. Laugh? Clap?’
He rolled his eyes.
‘You want me to, what?’ I said, growing angry, and conscious for the first time of how rapidly my heart was beating. ‘What, burst into applause?’
He seemed to be nodding. ‘Or—’ he started to say, his lips working as if he were chewing the pavement.
‘Or what?’ I snapped at him. My startlement was converting itself into anger. How dare he scare me like this? ‘Or how else am I supposed to react to such an absurd performance? Or what will you do, exactly?’
As abruptly as it had switched on, the light went out. The darkness was everywhere. I blinked and blinked, and only very slowly did his body start to become visible to me again. There was a sudden movement of the rope, a repeat of the whiffling sound — or perhaps it was a broken, gaspy breath from Coyne’s lungs, squeezed from his broken ribcage. In fact, the more I consider it, I wonder whether this wasn’t exactly the sound of the death rattle. I had read about such a thing as a death rattle, though I had never heard one in life before. I leant further forward, pulling off my right glove to place a finger on the artery in his throat. Touching his neck was an uncanny thing, and not pleasant. His felt like a sack of knucklebones from a butcher’s, not a neck. There was no pulse at all. The last of his breath whiffled out of him.