35
The lawyer Eldritch turned the key and opened the door to the basement. The light came on automatically, a piece of electrical engineering that never ceased to give him pleasure, and not a little relief, for the truth was that Eldritch was afraid of the dark.
After all, he knew what the dark concealed.
He carefully made his way down the stairs, one hand on the wooden banister rail, the other trailing along the cool wall. He kept a close watch on his footsteps, taking each step slowly and firmly. Eldritch was no longer a young man; in fact, he could barely remember a time when he was other than he was now. Childhood was a dream, early adulthood a blur, the memories of another man somehow adopted as his own, fragments of love and loss; sepia- tinted, as though soaked in tea and faded by sunlight.
He reached the final step and let out an involuntary sigh of satisfaction: another series of obstacles negotiated without incident, his fragile bones still intact. Five years earlier he had stumbled on the sidewalk and broken his hip: the first serious injury or illness of his senior years. The damage had necessitated a full replacement, and now he was acutely conscious of his own vulnerability. His confidence had been badly shaken.
But more than the pain, and the inconvenience of the long period of convalescence, he remembered the dread of the anesthetic, his unwillingness to surrender himself to the void, his struggle against the fluids that coursed through his body when the anesthetist inserted the needle. Darkness: shadows, and more-than-shadows. He recalled his relief when he awoke in the recovery ward, and his gratitude that he had almost no memory of what had occurred while he slept. Not in relation to the operation itself, of course: that was a separate, purely physical reality, a surrender of the body to the ministrations of the surgeon. No, the phantom images that returned with consciousness were of another realm of existence entirely. The surgeon had told him that he would not dream, but this was a lie. There were always dreams, remembered or unremembered, and Eldritch dreamed more than most, if what he experienced when the need for rest overcame him could truly be termed dreams. It was also why he slept less than most, preferring a low-level lassitude to the torments of night.
And so he had returned to this world with pain in his lower body, dulled greatly by the medication but still terrible to him, a nurse with skin of alabaster translucence asking him how he felt, assuring him that he was fine and all had gone well, and he had tried to smile even as frayed threads of memories caught upon the splinters of another realm.
Hands: that was what he remembered. Hands with hooked claws for nails, tugging at him as the anesthetic wore off, trying to pull him down to the place in which they lay; and above them the Hollow Men, soulless wraiths burning with rage at what had been done to them by Eldritch and his client, desperate to see him punished just as they were being punished. Later, once it was clear that the operation had been a complete success and he was out of danger, the surgeon had admitted to Eldritch that there had been a problem when the final stitches were being put in place. Strange, he had said: most patients emerged easily from the anesthetic as its effects wore off, but for almost two minutes it had seemed as if Eldritch were moving deeper into sleep, and they had feared that he was about to lapse into a coma. Then, in a startling reversal, his heart rate had increased to such a degree that they thought he might be about to go into cardiac arrest.
‘You gave us quite a scare,’ said the surgeon, patting Eldritch on the shoulder, and his touch had caused the old lawyer to tense with unease, for the pressure on his skin reminded him uncomfortably of those clawed fingers.
And throughout his period of recovery, both inside and outside the hospital, the Collector had kept watch over him, for Eldritch’s vulnerability was also his own, and their existences were mutually dependent. Eldritch would wake to find the Collector sitting in the soft light of the bedside lamp, his fingers twitching uneasily, his body temporarily deprived of the nicotine that seemed perpetually to fuel it. The lawyer was never entirely sure how the Collector managed to be omnipresent during those early days, for the hospital, so very private and so very expensive, still had certain rules about the appropriateness of visiting times. But in Eldritch’s experience people tended to avoid confrontations with the Collector. He trailed unease just as he trailed the stink and smoke of his cigarettes. That smell: how prevalent it was, how insidious, and how grateful they all should have been for it, for the foul nicotine taint masked a different odor. Even without the cigarettes, the Collector brought with him the smell of the charnel house.
Sometimes, Eldritch himself almost feared him. The Collector was entirely without mercy, entirely committed to his mission in this world. Eldritch was still human enough to have doubts; the Collector was not. There was no humanity left in him; Eldritch wondered if there ever had been. He suspected that the Collector had simply come into the world that way, and his true nature had become more obvious over time.
How strange, thought Eldritch, that a man should fear one to whom he was so closely bound: a client; a source of income; a protector.
A son.
Eldritch had come down to the basement for two reasons. The first was to check the fusebox: there had been two brief interruptions to the power supply that afternoon, and such occurrences were always a source of concern. There was so much information here, so much knowledge, and although it was well secured, there would always be concerns about potential vulnerabilities. Eldritch opened the box and checked it by the beam of a flashlight, but as far as he could tell all appeared to be well. Tomorrow, though, he would contact Bowden, who took care of such things for him. Eldritch trusted Bowden.
His movements on the basement floor had triggered the next set of overhead lights, illuminating shelf upon shelf of files. Some were so old that he was reluctant even to touch them for fear that they would crumble to dust, but the necessity of reaching for them rarely arose. For the most part, these were the closed cases. Judgement had been passed and they had been found wanting.
Someone had once pointed out to him a distinction, real or imagined, between ‘judgement’ and ‘judgment’, although to the old man it was largely a matter of preference, the former having more heft and substantiality in his view.
‘“Judgment”,’ the man had said, his voice booming in the confines of the parquet-floored Washington hotel room, ‘refers to human justice, but
‘Really?’ Eldritch had replied. ‘That is fascinating, although my understanding is that the King James Bible favors “judgment”.’
‘This is not true,’ said the man, with the unalloyed confidence of the truly ignorant. ‘I tell you this so you will understand: I will not be judged by a human court but by the Lord God, and He will smile upon me for what I was forced to do to His enemies. They were animals. They were bad men.’
‘And women?’ added Eldritch. ‘And children? Were they all bad? How unfortunate for them.’
The man bristled.
‘I told you: I do recognize or accept these allegations. My enemies continue to spread lies about me, to vilify me, but I am not guilty of the accusations made against me. If I were, the International Court of Justice in the Hague would have taken action against me, but it has not. This tells the world that I have no case to answer.’
That was not entirely true. The International Court of Justice was in the process of assembling a dossier on this man, but its progress was being hampered by the ongoing deaths of crucial witnesses, both outside the nation in which he had conducted a genocidal guerilla war for over a decade, and within it, where there were those now in power who had utilized this man and his forces for their own ends, and would have preferred it if the more embarrassing details of the past were forgotten in the rush to embrace something like democracy. Even in the US, there were politicians who had embraced this butcher, this rapist, as an ally in the fight against Islamic terrorists. He was, in every way, an embarrassment and a disgrace: to his allies, to his enemies, and to the entire human race.
‘So you see, Mr Eldritch, I do not understand why you have chosen to believe the lies of these men, and to
