“It’s down!”
“Is it bollocks.” Plymouth, with a taste of London, maybe. The coffin man shrugs, and lays his hand gently across Mr. Ordinary’s face. When he withdraws it, he is mysteriously holding something wobbly, and Mr. Ordinary is screaming again, this time sharply, and Joe realises it is an ear. The coffin man tosses it aside. Then he speaks again.
“Seen you.” He glances over at Joe. “You, I’m talking to.” He shrugs. “You ain’t what you look like, I know that.”
Joe realises he is still wearing the shroud. He pulls it off.
“Thought so,” the coffin man nods. “Trick of the walk, maybe.”
“How did you get out?”
“Well, some bugger poked the anthill, didn’t he? Set off all the alarum bells and what have you. Someone got careless. That don’t pay with me. I got him, and his friends, and I set ’em on fire. Doesn’t pay to show me disrespect. I keep trying to tell ’em. You look like you’ve come of age, though.”
“I’ve what?”
The older man shrugs. “All that strength. You walk through everything as if you’re afraid of breaking it. Keep it all down in the dark. Or you did, maybe.”
“Keep what in the dark?”
“Don’t be a tit. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Here,” he adds reprovingly, as Mr. Ordinary tries to get up, “no call for that, is there? Don’t be giving me force.” Force is a bad thing. The coffin man reaches down and does something at the open mess which used to house an ear. Mr. Ordinary doubles over and vomits, drily. “So what’s a Hakote, and what do they write about, that this bugger cares so much about it?”
Night Market instinct: evade. Joe shrugs. “Search me.”
The coffin man stares, and then starts to laugh. He can barely keep upright, he is laughing so hard.
“What’s funny?”
“You are! Bloody hell. Ohhh, bloody hell, that’s too much… You’ve got no more real clue what’s going on than I have, do you? And they knew it, too, but they were giving you the full works, and the more you didn’t tell them the more they were scared you were a real hard case, the more they did, the more you didn’t know… bloody marvellous!”
Joe stifles the urge to tell the other man that actually, yes, he does indeed know what’s going on and now he knows the one thing these bastards don’t. It’s like being at school. Instead of boasting, he laughs, too.
The coffin man leans on the desk and knocks over a stack of reference books, which is even funnier, and it appears that Mr. Ordinary is the only person in the room who is not having a good time. When the coffin man notices this, he sobers a bit.
“Where’s the way out? Come on, now.”
“Down! Down to the basement!”
“I don’t think so. That’s where they had me.”
“It’s a fake! Everything’s upside down! When you go to the basement the lift goes up! The mechanism’s so smooth you can’t tell. It makes everyone sick unless they know! The way out is down there!”
The coffin man grins at Joe.
“That’s got the ring of truth in it, for sure. Off you go, then.”
“Are you coming?”
The other man glances at him.
“You really don’t want me to, matey. I’m unpopular out there. I’m not a bad man, as it happens, though I will confess I’m pretty aggravated right about now. I’m of a mind to share my displeasure.” He leans down and does something quick and disgusting to Mr. Ordinary, who makes a dreadful little wheezing noise which suggests he may have torn something and now cannot scream any more. Joe steps back a pace. “Ah. You’re getting it now, aren’t you?”
“Who are you?”
“No one. Oh, sure, I was somebody, once. I liked Kenny Lonergan’s plays and Eartha Kitt’s music. I liked… orange juice. Fresh, from the sandwich place at the end of my road. Weekly treat, that was. I was that bloke. Who knows what I am now?”
“You’re a patient.”
“That, too. Mind you, that doesn’t make me bad, now, does it?”
Mr. Ordinary plunges one hand abruptly into his pocket and jams something the size of a mobile telephone sharply against the coffin man’s leg. There’s a strange, sharp noise like a robot blowing a kiss. The coffin man jerks, and smiles.
“There now,” he says, stuttering slightly, “that’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it?” He rolls his head on his neck and taps his teeth together. Even from this distance, Joe can feel static on his skin. Mr. Ordinary presses the taser again. The coffin man jolts a bit, then steadies.
“It’s all about p-purpose,” he says. “If you’ve got purpose and you just… nghh… you just hold onto it, these things are a b-b-blast. Like someone ss-s-scratching your back for you, from the inside… ggdah. Still, you can have too much of a good thing, ey?” He leans down and slaps the taser away. There’s a burn on his leg, twin black marks of charred skin.
“You’ve bollocksed my sock,” the coffin man says, and sticks his thumb sharply into Mr. Ordinary’s eye. Joe can feel his lips coming back around the question, as if he’s going to throw up.
“Who are you?” But he knows, now, or thinks he does.
“My name’s Parry,” the coffin man says. “You better call me Vaughn. My friends all do. I think it’s better off we’re friends, you and me.”
Fuck, yes.
“Tell you what,” Vaughn Parry says, “I think I was supposed to do for you. I think that was the idea. That other bloke, Ted… they gave him to me to scare him. ‘One for you, Vaughn,’ and all that crap. Ought to know better, I didn’t want anything to do with him, so they had to do it themselves.
“I think I was going to be your last stop, too, before they put you in the ground. Your destiny, as it were. Think about that for a sec.” Parry turns back to look at Mr. Ordinary again, and the man whimpers. “D’you believe in destiny? Seems to me there’s a thing about destiny. If there’s destiny, then choices don’t mean anything, do they? So I do something bad—” He does, and there’s a hard, flat scream, cut off in a fit of coughing. Mr. Ordinary is vomiting. “If I do something bad, I didn’t choose it. Or rather, I was always going to choose it, never was any way I could be me and not choose it, which amounts to the same thing. So I’m a monster from the day I die all the way back to when I’m born. It’s all one, isn’t it? But the question is, where am I in all of it? If I can’t choose anything, am I just watching? Am I there at all? That’s destiny, for you.” He shrugs. “Best you piss off now, young ’un,” he says, without looking back. “I’ve got a reputation to maintain,” he snarls at Mr. Ordinary sharply, as if this is all his fault, “and I’m going to extend myself a bit.”
Joe hesitates. Part of him has a natural instinct to stay and assist Mr. Ordinary. Mr. Ordinary has done very horrible things and is clearly a total bastard, but no one deserves what is happening to him. Joe would under other circumstances cheerfully give him a clean kick in the crotch and, say, break his jaw. This seems an appropriate iteration of his personal feelings. But Vaughn Parry, according to popular rumour and the opinion of Billy Friend, is not really a human being. He is something entirely different wearing a sack made of skin and gloating. There is some commonality of human experience, however attenuated, between Joe and Mr. Ordinary. Joe does not wish to feel any such thing with Vaughn Parry, who hears the Screaming and plucks off ears by way of diverting himself.
And yet, he does. He feels a fierce kinship for him, for his élan, his acquaintanceship with horror. Parry inhabits this world—this new world of professional torture and dark secrets for which a man may be killed—far more elegantly than does Joe the Clockmaker. It makes sense to him. He’s at home in it, in a way Joe absolutely is not. Vaughn Parry belongs here, and is unafraid. That is something Joe greatly envies. In one way or another, he has been afraid his entire life—until a few hours ago, when he found clarity and broke Mr. Ordinary’s nose.