Graveyard Shift Read online

  He stroked his white-whiskered chin, his face inscrutable. I shivered, sensing a change in the air. It was cooler now. The shadows of privet hedges and garden shrubs were stretching across the street.

  Were these the reinforcements he meant? If the Lords of Sundown could take any shape, suppose they were inside these shadows, hiding and ready to spring?

  “Look there.” I gave Mr. October a nudge.

  “Shush, I’m still thinking.”

  “Think faster, then. It looks like they’re here.”

  The black shapes crossing the ground suddenly looked more like spindly fingers than tree branches. One reached for my feet and I jumped across the curb with a yelp. Another twitched toward Mr. October, though he didn’t acknowledge it. At the intersection where the fireball had detonated, a host of new shapes squirmed out from the shade beneath the stone wall.

  “What will I do?” Bob Fletcher said. “What’s the wife gonna do when she finds out she’ll never see me again? And the kids . . . oh God, what a mess. What’ll I do?”

  A light came on in Mr. October’s eyes.

  “Listen,” he said. “Bob, will you trust me?”

  “Why should I? I trusted that girl and you blew her to bits.”

  “Only because I had to. She would’ve chewed you up and spat you out if you’d gone with her. You’d be a darn sight worse off than you are now.”

  “You’re mad. I’m not listening to you.”

  “I’m all you’ve got,” Mr. October said. “What happened to you was tragic, but also inevitable. If it hadn’t been an ambulance, it would’ve been something else, a truck or a taxi or falling masonry. Your time is up, and the sooner you let go, the easier it will be.”

  The shadows were snapping at our heels. I hopped around the pavement, dodging them. All along the street they were tearing themselves from walls and fences, creeping out from under parked cars.

  “Mr. October,” I said, close to panicking.

  But he ignored me, resting a hand on Fletcher’s busted shoulder and speaking to him in low, soothing tones.

  “Trust me and I’ll take the pain away, and the anger too. I’ll make sure you see your wife one more time, give you a chance to say what you need to.”

  Fletcher’s anguished face softened. “You can really do that?”

  “I really can.”

  The shadows stopped in their tracks. Very slowly they began to withdraw, snaking back from the pavement where we stood. I watched them shrinking across the street until they were only shadows again, stirring gently over the asphalt in the breeze.

  Bob Fletcher never even saw them. He had no idea what he’d done. Now I knew what Mr. October had meant when he’d said they fed on people’s grief and rage. The smell of it had lured them out of the dark, but Fletcher’s change of mood had sent them straight back.

  “I’d give anything for that chance,” he said, “even if it’s only a few minutes. Sorry for carrying on before. I must be in shock.”

  “No apology necessary,” Mr. October replied. “But we’d best be off. As you say, she’s expecting you.”

  It was a big art deco house on leafy Brim Hill, a pleasant and peaceful place until they broke the news and Mrs. Fletcher began to scream. I had decided to wait outside.

  I stood in the driveway, watching the house, tired and hungry, wondering how Mr. October coped with this all the time, every day. The screaming stopped and a silence drew out, and all I heard then was birdsong, a distant lawn mower, an occasional car rushing by.

  Finally the thing I’d been waiting for came: an explosion of light behind a downstairs window, startlingly bright as a camera flash. Seconds later, Mr. October came hobbling down the driveway, looking drained but flushing with pride.

  “Sometimes I surprise myself, I’m that good,” he said. “That was hard work, but rewarding. Anyway, it’s over now. He’s gone to where Cadaverus can’t reach him.”

  “But Cadaverus nearly did.”

  “Yes, he came close. You handled yourself very well, young man.”

  We turned off the driveway and onto the street, heading to our next call in Belsize Park.

  “How did you do it?” I had to ask. “The ball of fire was incredible.”

  “Thought you’d appreciate the fireworks. Actually, it’s mostly for show, and the Overseers don’t encourage anything that’s for show. They frown on pyrotechnics. Still, it does tend to give the enemy a bit of a fright.”

  “Could I do that?”

  “Not yet. Only at the appointed time, and even then only with practice. And please don’t try it at home.” He checked the next card, the last on our list. “Ah. Another difficult case.”

  “What language was it that you spoke to the girl?” I asked. It seemed to me the words he’d used had done even more damage than the fire.

  “Ministry dialect.” He felt around inside his jacket. “Apocalypti slang, a form of ancientspeak only demons and field agents understand. Here, see for yourself.”

  He took out a pocket-size book, The Pandemonium Guide to Apocalypti Idioms & Phrases, a slim volume that felt weightier in my hand than it should.

  “Hardly a catchy title,” he said, “but its audience is limited because it’s a near-impossible language to learn. Look inside and you’ll see why.”

  Opening the book at random, I could see he wasn’t kidding. The print quivered around the page like grubs, the letters scurrying in all directions to form new words, then breaking apart to form even newer words.

  “Like the records office,” Mr. October said. “The book is alive and constantly changing. It takes enormous skill and concentration to master it.”

  I turned to another page. More moving, scuttling text. It looked like the book had been colonized by ants.

  “Don’t strain,” he said. “You’ll never be able to read it until you’re ready. And when you’re ready, be extremely careful how you use it. There’s nothing more destructive than a few choice words of ancientspeak used in the wrong way. You could build new worlds with the right words, or just as easily tear worlds apart.”

  I closed the phrase book, fascinated but somehow afraid of its power, and offered it back.

  “Keep it for that time,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  “OK.”

  I pocketed the book, amazed by the idea that these words could be like guns or bombs in the wrong hands. There was something awesome about that, something scary. Then again, I realized I may never be able to learn it. I couldn’t until the words stopped moving, anyway.

  The last stop on the shift, at Belsize Grove, proved to be the strangest of all.

  In order to give Mr. October’s legs a rest, we’d taken the Tube from East Finchley and twenty minutes later came out onto Haverstock Hill. Now we were standing on a quiet sunlit sidewalk beside an herb garden that overlooked the curved steps leading down to a basement apartment. Mr. October rechecked the name and reference on the card — Andy Cale, 43765 — and I remembered the unusual circumstances of the death.

  “It’s the parcel bloke,” I said. “He mailed himself to his fiancée.”

  “The very same.”

  He started down the steps, testing each one with his stick as he went.

  “Some people do the oddest things, Ben. In all my time, I’ve only seen two other cases like this, both equally grim. Why they don’t think these things through I’ll never know. It beggars belief, it’s so idiotic.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “Well, some cases break my heart, and then some, like this . . . they’re just wasteful. However, it’s foretold — it’s meant to be — so what can I do?”

  At the bottom of the steps, the apartment’s front door was slightly ajar. Blue-and-white-check curtains were drawn behind the window beside it, so there wasn’t much to see without going inside.

  “Anyone home?” Mr. October called, pushing the door all the way open. “Hello there. Coming through.”

  Ahead of us was a dim hallway and a wash of brig
hter light farther on. A chilly draft blew through from the far side of the apartment. At the end of the hall, we came to an open-plan living area, all comfy seating and plump cushions, and a small study space with a desk to one side. Sliding patio doors at one end of the room faced out on a long country garden bordered by willowy trees and wispy shrubs.

  The doors were wide open; the draft came from there. A woman was leaning against them, looking out. Her back was turned to us, but I could tell by the way her body was shaking that something bad had happened here. Something you could feel in the still of the room.

  Hearing us there, she spun around but didn’t seem surprised to see us; if anything she looked relieved. Her mousy hair was matted about her forehead and her face had been pulled out of shape by shock. There were red fingerprints like rose petals trailing down the front of her floral print dress, which wafted around her in the breeze.

  On the varnished floor at her feet, an open medicine bottle lay among a scattering of tiny white pills. Outside on the pink and white slabs was a pair of scissors and a shredded cardboard box the size of a packing crate. Her fiancé was slumped against it, motionless, his face and clothing spattered with blood.

  “What was he thinking?” the woman sobbed. “He must’ve been out of his mind. He was always a practical joker, a silly little boy, but this is just too much. Why couldn’t he have sent flowers instead?”

  “It’s all right,” Mr. October said, though I didn’t see how it could be.

  She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of a hand.

  “He didn’t think about me, though, did he? It was a gag, a stupid joke. He didn’t think how I’d be affected, what it would do to me.” She showed us her hands, the tacky red palms. “See what he’s done? I know how it looks, but this wasn’t my fault.”

  “He didn’t know about your condition,” Mr. October said.

  “What condition?” I asked, but he lifted a hand, telling me to be quiet.

  The woman padded to an armchair and collapsed into it, staring at the floor near the sofa.

  “Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. I told him not long after we met. That’s the thing I can’t forgive. He just didn’t think. Anything for a laugh — the big kid.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  The woman didn’t look up. “The doorbell rang and there were these two deliverymen waiting outside with the parcel. It took both of them to heft the thing, and I had them take it to the patio where I could get at it — I don’t have the floor space in here. It was so well sealed; I suppose he’d had his buddies help him out — one brain between the lot of them. So I brought the scissors and started to open it, and I suppose I must’ve cut too deeply because I heard this muffled cry from inside, and then I saw the blood, and then Colin came flying out of there like a big red jack-in-the-box.”

  “Colin?” I said.

  Mr. October shushed me. “Let her explain.”

  “But I thought his name was Andy.”

  Andy was what the card said, and the telegraph never lied.

  I looked out at the man propped against the box. His arms were at his sides and the fingers of his right hand were flexing. Then I looked at the pills and the medicine bottle at my feet.

  “I’m Andy,” the woman said. “The pills are for my heart condition. I just couldn’t get to them in time. I know he didn’t mean to scare me, and he had to jump out before I could cut him again, but when he did, the shock was too great. I could see in his eyes he knew what he’d done, what a mistake he’d made, but it was too late to stop it. Now the bloody fool has to live with it, and I suppose I’m going with you.”

  She was still staring at something on the floor I couldn’t see from where we stood. But I already knew what it was before I moved farther inside the room.

  Andy Cale’s body lay on its side behind the sofa, one hand at her chest, her legs crossed at the ankles. She’d fallen with her back toward us, and I was almost glad about that: I didn’t want to see her face. The floor around her sat in deep shadow, but I didn’t feel the presence of anything or anyone else. The enemy weren’t here.

  “Well, there’s one birthday I won’t forget in a hurry,” Andy’s ghost said. “So what happens next? Where do we go from here?”

  “I’ll show you,” Mr. October said, offering his hand.

  She took it, and fine bolts of light encircled their fingers as he helped her out of the chair. While he walked her from the room, I lingered behind, watching the patio.

  Her fiancé had found a cell phone and was speaking into it in a dull monotone that made him sound half asleep. He was on the line to emergency services, trying to explain what had happened. Too late for her, though. They’d patch him up, but it was too late for her.

  “Ben?”

  I hurried down the hall. Mr. October and Andy were at the door, waiting. He gave me a nod and I fell in behind them, following them up the stone steps toward the light. It was a glorious day up there.

  As soon as we finished at Belsize Grove, Mr. October was seized by a coughing fit. The color drained from his cheeks and he sank to his knees, so I caught him under both arms and helped him to a bench on Haverstock Hill.

  He held a handkerchief to his mouth until the coughing died down, and we sat quietly watching the traffic and the crowds at the Tube station across the street.

  When he felt able to move again, he excused himself to a public phone box, returning a minute later as the ragamuffin, the persona I’d come to think of as the pirate.

  “There’s a downside to helping people,” Mr. October said. “When you truly care, it’s like giving parts of yourself away, a little at a time, parts you never get back. I’m tired of that cranky old body, but it’s all I have for such occasions.”

  “Couldn’t you go as you are?”

  “Not likely.” His eyes glinted darkly; his silver tooth sparkled. “Imagine a soul in torment seeing me like this. They’d take one look and run a mile!”

  “But the old guy’s getting worse,” I said. “Carry on like this and you’ll need more than a walking stick to get around.”

  “Well, that’s my burden. I’d be better off with a desk job, but that would be wasting my gift, and you know how I feel about that.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now you’re going home. You’ve seen enough for one day — more than most mortals could stand. As for me, it’s back to HQ for the next list.”

  “There are always more lists.”

  “Always.”

  “OK. Just be careful.”

  “Of course.”

  He smiled. He knew what I meant, though. I meant he should watch out for Randall Cadaverus’s masses, the demons from the dark. In spite of the sunlight, I felt a chill. If I hadn’t already made an enemy of them before today, I surely had now.

  Sunday went the same way. The telegraph worked overtime and we took calls to all quarters of town.

  We had our second drowning of the weekend, a fall down stairs, three more natural causes, and a drive-by gangland shooting before lunch. The afternoon brought us cases of liver sclerosis, asphyxiation caused by a faulty gas appliance, a heart attack, another natural causes, then a false alarm when a suicidal man jumped onto railway tracks at Brondesbury Park only to find the line was closed for maintenance.

  At least, I thought it was a false alarm. But the telegraph couldn’t be wrong.

  The man had mangled his legs on the track. As he limped up from the station, he lost his footing at the top of Salusbury Road and stumbled into the path of a driver who’d chosen that exact moment to overtake a slow-moving road sweeper in the brand-new Ford Focus RS he’d stolen five minutes earlier from Paddington Recreation Ground.

  When the man wandered into the road in front of him, the driver floored the brakes, tore at the wheel, and went into a swerve, veering across the street and straight through the facade of a small grocery shop. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. That, explained Mr. October, was why his was the name on the
card, not that of the suicide case who’d shuffled away up the street long before the first ambulance came.

  “The one who got away, won’t he try something else?” I asked.

  “Not if he’s not on the list.”

  “And if that man hadn’t stolen the car?”

  “Lightning strikes wherever it will. It would’ve found him one way or another.” He looked at me, amused. “Always the questions. Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “Don’t you?”

  I was sure by now that Mr. October never slept. He never stopped. One case followed the next, day after day, and again he returned to work from Brondesbury Park while I went home shattered.

  Before I left, we agreed that I’d join him at the Ministry or in the field every day after school. He wouldn’t pressure me, he said. It was up to me. But I knew what I wanted. Life at home and school looked gray and mundane compared to this. Out here with Mr. October, I’d started to see a world of many other colors, a world not many others could see.

  I belonged to this world, and it filled my mind whenever I wasn’t taking part in it. What I didn’t know, though, standing there on Salusbury Road with Mr. October, was how much I’d been missing while fooling myself I could see everything.

  What I’d missed was important, and it had been staring me in the face all along.

  As soon as I got home, unlocked the door, and stepped in, Mum appeared at the kitchen door. She looked like a ghost of herself, with sunken eyes and messed-up hair, still in her dressing gown and slippers. Her lower lip puckered.

  “Where were you all day?”

  “Oh, out and about. With friends.”

  “New friends from school?”

  “New friends not from school.”

  “That’s good. I hardly know what’s going on with you lately. I’m almost never here for you.”

  “That’s all right. You’ve been tired.”

  She stared at something past my shoulder, not quite able to make eye contact.

  “But you’re happier now,” she said. “You’re settling in.”

  “Yeah. Things are better now.”