Of course it wasn’t. Just some fat man that looked a little like him.
It couldn’t have been Kareem because Kareem was dead. Dead is dead. Go ask one of the non-existent vicars in the replica church on Graham’s street, and that’s exactly what he won’t tell you. When you’re dead, you don’t come back.
‘Nothing,’ I said again. ‘Thought I recognised someone. I just made a mistake.’
We travelled about half a mile further on, and then I said, ‘Drop me off up there.’
Dennison pulled in on the left.
‘You know where you’re going?’
I shook my head.
‘Not really.’
‘I think you’re crazy.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well you might be right.’
A last look at the e-mail on my lap, and then I folded it carefully and slipped it into my coat pocket, along with the information from Graham. I’d added a few notes in biro in case I forgot.
‘I think you’re crazy.’
I took the gun out of the glove compartment. If I could have checked for bullets, I would, but I didn’t even know how to open it. All I knew was: two shots down. If it came to it, I was going to point the thing and pull the trigger. And if bullets didn’t come out the end first time then I was going to be fucked.
I put it in my other pocket and opened the door.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
The rain was as grey and heavy as the sky itself, making music in the puddles and on the hard, wet surface of the pavement, slashing at the ground and buildings. As I got out, it felt like a hundred fingers tapping on me, demanding impossible attention.
‘See you around,’ I said.
Dennison didn’t reply, so I closed the door and tapped the roof. After a second, he pulled away, white lights trailing off up the street. There were signposts to Uptown every mile or so. He’d be fine.
I stood there for a moment, feeling the weight of myself as the rain poked and prodded me. Water ran down my face, pooling in my eyes, and when I blinked it away it felt like cold tears. There was a terrible, knotted excitement in my stomach that had as much to do with fear as anything else.
What I felt was
That’s no way to feel in this civilised day and age.
There were a hundred worm-ways into Downtown, and I was opposite one: an old block of flats with the door kicked in. There’d be a back way out onto the outskirts of the underground, and from there I’d be able to follow abandoned ghost roads past ghost shops – maybe past ghost people – all the way through to the heart of the hidden city.
I’d never been in there before, and didn’t know what to expect, but I’d heard stories. And now, with the mpeg that Amy seemed to have sent to my e-mail account, I’d heard one more.
I crossed the street, and made my way in.
Cut to-
The second scene came in two parts, but you couldn’t really see the join: the camera didn’t move – it was just that things in the frame jerked into existence. Same scene, different times. In total, it lasted maybe two minutes.
Amy and Kareem walking towards the camera.
They start from quite some distance away. You can see them turn a corner, far up at the top of the picture, and then they come strolling down into view.
Like a gentleman, he’s on the outside. I guess he’s ready to draw his sword and protect her from attackers on horseback. They stop at a building two up from the end of the street and he finds keys in his pocket. Extracts them. Unlocks the door and holds it open for her. They go inside.
Cut to the second half of the scene.
A van flicks into view outside the building. White with blackened windows. I can’t read the number plate, although the vehicle looks to be in reasonable condition and I figure it’s fairly new. There’s no sign as to how or when it got there, or how much videotape is missing in the interim. You have time to notice it appear, and then-
Bang.
There’s no sound on this part of the video, but you feel the noise just from seeing it: the door on Kareem’s building kicked open from the inside, and out comes one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, carrying Amy, with three men following them out. The big man’s got her around the waist from behind, and she’s fighting, doubling up and lashing out. It was Amy who kicked the door open. One of the other remaining men gets in the back as well; another closes the door and gets into the driver’s seat.
The third man lights a cigarette, shakes out the match and throws it on the pavement.
The camera zooms in on him.
This close, he has a face made out of smeared blocks of colour. You blur your eyes and you get a better impression of him: young – mid thirties; slightly receding hair; narrowish face. Beyond that the details are invisible beneath smudges of colour. The image is badly distorted, both by the man moving his head and by the smoke drifting up from the bright, flaming orange star of the cigarette’s tip, which blurs out a good quarter of the screen.
He looks like an impressionist painting, on fire in one corner.
The man moves out of the frame.
The camera immediately zooms out to catch him climbing into the passenger side of the van. After a second the vehicle pulls away up the street. There are perhaps two seconds of emptiness.
Cut to-
Downtown.
When I was younger – thirteen or fourteen – I’d often go out walking in the middle of the night. My parents never liked it: they thought it was dangerous, but actually they couldn’t have been more wrong. There was never anybody around, dangerous or otherwise, and that was why I enjoyed it so much: if I’d wanted people and bustle, I’d have gone walking during the day, in the fucking sunshine. Instead, I’d walk down the middle of busy main roads, across teeming fields, scrape my shoes over the tarmac of jam-packed playgrounds, and there wouldn’t be anybody else around to spoil it all. The houses all seemed dead. The sky was black: full of blinking stars and wisps of cloud. No cars. Stray animals crossing the roads without noticing you; cats heading quickly from one meeting to the next. It was this whole other world: devastatingly quiet and endlessly different. If you’ve never walked around the streets in the middle of the night, then I don’t think you really know your home town at all.
Purely aesthetically, that’s what Downtown was like. It was shabby, but you were still walking down streets that were recognisable as streets. A lot of the buildings were boarded up, but the signs were still there, and more than one even seemed tenanted. The proper buildings – the ones still being used from top down – looked like enormous concrete pillars: cemented up to protect the white collar workers inside from what was down here, like supporting struts running down to an ocean bed of sharks.
Every little sound produced an echo. There were people dotted here and there, making no effort to hide from or approach any others. Some were shambling in the distance; others were talking quietly in abandoned offices, their voices drifting down like a quiet, mumbling word in your ear. You could hear the rush of a breeze, like a distant stream, but you couldn’t feel it, and the air was almost oppressively hot. You’d be able to sleep in a shirt and wake up happy, assuming you woke up at all.
Twenty or so storeys above street-level was Downtown’s sky: a black patchwork of star-less machinery. Most of the girders and pipes looked rusty and fractured – a support structure in need of some support – and all of it looked dark and shadowy. Water was dripping down everywhere. It was always night down here, and it was always raining: like some kind of quiet, noir Hell. There were occasional lights, but they didn’t seem to work too well, and so even the brightest bits of Downtown were bathed in a kind of dark, steely blue.
