He is afraid again now. He is terribly afraid of Vaughn Parry. It’s reasonable. Parry is the great bogeyman of the moment, a suburban killing machine with an apt sense of the appalling—and here he is, in living Technicolor, with a man’s face between his tapered fingers and blood on his shoes. Even if Joe wanted to argue with him, he could not. Parry would kill him.
Or not.
Joe rolls his shoulders again, for a moment fascinated by the very idea. He could scream and leap. He is a big man and Parry is not. He finds he does not care what happens now. The world is wrong. In fact, it is Parry’s world. Vaughn Parry makes sense, in a world where this can be done to Joe Spork. The gentle clockmaker, now: there’s a fellow who does not understand the way of things. A law-abiding fellow, is Joe. He never considered that the law might not abide by him.
He could scream, and leap, and things would happen. Either he would destroy Parry and the world would be that much better, or he would die, and his problems would be rather finally resolved.
Vaughn Parry glances at him, and grins.
“Not going to, are you?” he says, shaking his head. “Where are you, boy? What does it take to get you out?”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe you make more sense than I do.”
Parry’s eyes open wide for a moment in surprise. “Ey, well, that’s not something I hear often. I suppose you’re right, anywise. I ought to leave this lad alone before I do him a serious harm and regret it. Lead on.”
With this unexpected sentiment, he shunts Joe out of the room, leaving Mr. Ordinary gasping in relief and misery on the floor.
Joe hesitates, then extends his hand to Vaughn Parry.
After a similar pause, Parry takes it awkwardly and shakes. They move quickly back through the building towards the lift. In the cinema, Joe pauses to look at the screen. The Recorded Man is running now, moving, his body strangely clenched as if around an old injury, yet possessed of a familiar, unpleasant fluidity. Joe scowls.
Parry nods. “This is where they make them,” he says, and goes to leave. Joe lingers.
“Make who?”
“Them. The monks. They run current through your head until it’s empty and then they turn you into one of them. With this.” He gestures around. “They tried it with me.”
“What happened?”
“A lot of them were damaged beyond repair, is what fucking happened. After that they decided I wasn’t monk material.” Parry grins, eyes sharp and teeth bloody, and Joe hopes devoutly he has bitten his tongue and not eaten part of Mr. Ordinary. “So can we get the fuck out of the burning mental prison, please?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Joe lets Vaughn Parry lead the way to the lift.
Parry pushes the button for the basement. Now that he knows, Joe can feel the lift rising. Up, up, and away. The doors open, and he sees actual daylight, grim and grey and very wet. English weather. The fire has not reached this floor yet, but the alarm is ringing. He listens to it, curious, and looks at the exit. Perhaps if he tries to cross the threshold, he will feel pain. Perhaps the entire Order of John the Maker is waiting for them. Perhaps there’s a sniper, a crowd of armed police marksmen. Perhaps the bees have come home and everyone has gone mad. Perhaps Polly Cradle really did write that letter.
He walks forward anyway.
XIV
The Secret History of Vaughn Parry;
the Monte;
homeward bound.
His name’s Dalton,” Parry murmurs meditatively in the shady back seats of the night bus. Having paid their way with Mr. Ordinary’s cash, he is examining the credit cards. “Oh. Driving licence. Home address. I wonder if he’s married…” and then, seeing Joe’s look, “Oh ey, for God’s sake, no! I only meant if he’s not we could break in and get some clothes, empty his fridge. No reason to…” He sighs, maligned. Joe stares out into the grey-green landscape of concrete and pathetic little trees in local-council industrial pots.
Neither of them is entirely sure where the bus is going, because they’re not entirely clear on where they are. Vaughn Parry was all for ducking into the hedgerows, but Joe persuaded him that a city was a better place to hide than a field. They climbed aboard and said “into town.”
“That business with the lift was clever, turning me upside down. Smart, that is. Your man Brother Sheamus, that’ll be, no? Nasty mind he’s got, I will say.”
Joe Spork looks at Britain’s most wanted serial killer and wonders if this is professional admiration. Vaughn Parry sees it, and sighs again.
“I ain’t what you think, Joe. Granted, I’m a bit feral now, but I bin in there a long time and it wasn’t any kind of fun. But I ain’t what you think.”
“I’m not sure what I think.”
Parry looks at him, sceptical, then—apparently considering their situation—nods. “You want it from the beginning?”
“It’s a long drive, evidently.”
“An hour, he said. Well, then.”
Parry talks.
The nursery in the Parry household was decorated in pictures of scarecrows. Vaughn Parry’s first memories are of playing with wooden building blocks in the middle of the red rug, looking around at ten different ghoulish turnip faces and their withered arms, and—being an undertaker’s boy—he deduced at the age of four that all men die, and all women, too. He grew up numb. He disliked the other children, who seemed to be unable to understand what this entailed. If death was coming with such pointed inevitability, of what possible value was the Earth and anything on it? He lived in a darkness he couldn’t penetrate. It lurked at the edge of his vision. He slept with the lights on until his father made him turn them off, and each night they fought like dogs, snarling and snapping at one another. His mother had died already, of pneumonia. He went to the Waiting Game because it was as good a way as any to wait for his own burial.
“And then they bloody pranked me,” Parry mutters. “Bloody ghastly, ey? Stitched up some fox in a corpse, I don’t know. I passed out on my feet, like. Didn’t remember a sodding thing after, and there’s some old gaffer telling me I’m a monster. I said ‘Bollocks’ and stormed out.”
He drifted. At some point he got into the make-up trade, an offshoot of what he already knew from undertaking. Dead faces are harder because they’re dead, easier because you can use plaster and putty and actual paint. You can even cut bits off if you have to, but don’t tell anyone.
And then he was living in a town upcountry, in some old house, when a thin man and a fat man came calling. He was using a false name because he didn’t want anything to do with his family, but they knew who he was anyway, no notion how.
“This was years ago, mind. Five, six. Don’t know what the bloody date is now.”
Nor does Joe, in point of fact. How many weeks has he been imprisoned? Or is it months? He has no idea. He’s exhausted, he knows that much.
“‘Mr. Parry,’ says the thin one, ‘there’s a certain task we’d like for you to do. It pays well, but it’s quite secret.’ Well, I did it, didn’t I? Dress a corpse, they said. Make him look respectable. I knew how to do that. A few weeks later there was another, and another. Two thousand quid a time, thank you kindly, and the promise of more work to come. But I was getting a funny feeling, wasn’t I? These lads—they were all lads, thank God, no lasses and no kids, or I couldn’t have stuck it—they had the look of… well. We know now, don’t we? They’d been in that place back there, or somewhere like it, and they hadn’t made it out. Died on the operating table, most like, and here was I covering the tracks. They tried to make me patch up your friend Ted, you know, left me in there with him and some slap and so on. I told ’em to fuck off. Screamed it… God, you get like an animal, don’t you, it doesn’t take long, or much. You get like King Kong in a cage!” He laughs, a strange, unwholesome laugh, like a plague survivor.