Wolfhound Century

13


It was almost midnight when Lom arrived, bruised, soaked and chilled to the core, at Vishnik’s address. Pelican Quay turned out to be a canal-side row of houses, one among many such streets on Big Side, north of the river. The rain had paused. A damp and cave-like smell on the air and the heavy iron bollards and railings on the far side of the road betrayed the invisible night presence of the canal. Number 231 was a tall flat-fronted tenement squeezed between neighbouring buildings, the kind of house once built for grander families but partitioned now into many smaller, boxy apartments for the accommodation of tailors, locksmiths, cooks, civil servants of the lower ranks. Many pairs of eyes were observing him: although it was late, the dvorniks were out, each hunched in a folding chair under his own dim lamp in the lea of his domain. The dvornik of number 231 was drinking from a tin mug. His face gleamed moonily. His cheeks had collapsed to form loose jowls at the level of his chin.

‘Raku Vishnik,’ said Lom. ‘Apartment 4.’

‘No visitors after nine.’

‘He’s expecting me. He keeps late hours.’

The dvornik looked at Lom’s scruffy valise. His sodden clothes. His dripping hair.

‘No overnights.’

Lom fumbled in his pocket. ‘I appreciate the inconvenience. Twenty kopeks should cover it’

‘A hundred.’

‘Fifty.’

The dvornik grunted and held out a hand. He wore thick fingerless woollen gloves: even in the sparse lamplight they looked in need of a wash.

‘Second floor. Don’t use the lift and don’t turn on the lights.’

The stairs were dark and narrow, lit by street light falling through high small windows. Stale cooking smells. A thin carpet in the corridor. The bell of Number 4 sounded faint and toy-like, like it was made of tin.

Lom waited. Nobody came. He stood there, dripping, in the dark passageway. He realised that he was shaking, and not just with cold and hunger and the fatigue of carrying his case through the empty streets. The taste of the living rain was in his mouth. The smell of it on his face and his clothes. He had heard of such things, the possibilities of them. You didn’t live at the edge of the forest without being sometimes aware of the wakefulness of the wilder things: the life of the wind, the sentience of the watchful trees. The memory of the damp, living earth. But not in Mirgorod. He had not expected to find such things here: Mirgorod was the capital of solidity, the Founder’s Strength, the Vlast of the One Truth.

He needed Vishnik to open up. He rang the bell again. Nothing happened. Maybe Vishnik was already in bed. He rang twice more and banged on the door. There was a muffled sound of movement within, and it opened slowly. A pale, drawn face appeared. Dark eyes, blank and unfocused, looked into his own.

‘Yes?’

‘Raku?’

The dark eyes looked past him to see if someone else was in the corridor. Vishnik was dressed to go out: an unbuttoned gabardine draped from his shoulders, a small overnight bag in his hand. He was taller than Lom remembered, but the same glossy fringe of black hair flopped across his forehead. The same dark brown eyes behind rimless circular lenses. But the eyes were glassy with fear.

‘Raku. It’s me. Vissarion.’

Vishnik’s hands were balled in tight fists. He was shaking with anger. ‘F*ck,’ he said. ‘F*ck. What the f*ck are you doing.’

‘Raku? Didn’t you get my telegram?’

‘No I didn’t get any f*cking telegram. Shit. What are you doing? I don’t see you for half a lifetime and then you’re hammering on my door in the middle of the night.’

‘I wired. Five, six days ago. I said I would be coming. I said it would be late.’

Vishnik held up his bag. Shoved it at Lom. ‘See this? What’s this? Clothes. Bread. So I don’t have to go in my pyjamas when they come. How did you get in here anyway? The dvornik shouldn’t have—’

‘I gave him fifty kopeks.’

‘Fifty? That’s not enough. He has to report visitors to the police.’

‘What’s he going to report? I am the police.’

‘Some f*cking policeman. Look at you. Dripping on the carpet.’ He looked at Lom’s valise. ‘You got dry things in there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait.’

Vishnik disappeared. Rain seeped out of Lom’s hair and down his face. Rain dripped from the hem of his cloak and spilled from his trouser cuffs.

Vishnik came back carrying a towel.

‘There’s a bathroom at the end of the corridor.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Yeah. Shit. Well, get dry.’

Lom tucked the towel under his arm, picked up the valise and started down the corridor.

‘Oh, and Vissarion.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s good to see you. I thought I never would.’


Fifteen minutes later Lom was sitting on Vishnik’s couch with a glass of aquavit. There was food on the table. Solyanka with cabbage and lamb. Thick black bread. He leaned back and let the room wrap itself around him. Heavy velvet curtains of a faded brick colour hung across the window. Electric table lamps cast warm shadows. A paraffin heater burned in the corner. Bookshelves everywhere. More books piled on the floor and stacked on the desk. And on a side table, carefully arranged, a strange assemblage of objects: a broken red lacquer tea caddy; a grey and blue mocha mug with no handle; a china dog; a piece of stained wood, stuck through with bent and rusting nails; broken shards of ceramic and glass; a feather; a bowl of damp black earth. Odd things that could have been picked up in the street. Set out like the ritual items of a shaman of the city.

But it was the collection of art that made the room extraordinary. In plain dark frames, squeezed in between the bookshelves, hung in corners and high up near the ceiling, the paintings were like none Lom had seen before. They were of shapes and colours only. Sharp angular quadrilaterals of red and blue and green, smashed against a background of dark grey that reminded him of city buildings at twilight, but falling. Collapsing. Black lines slashed across jumbled boxes of faded terracotta. Thick, unfinished scrapes of paint – midnight blue – burnt earth – colours of rain and steel. Mad, childish clouds and curlicues and watery rivers of purple and gold and acidic, medicinal green. As Lom looked he began to see that there were objects in them – sometimes – or at least suggestions of objects. Bits and pieces of objects. A bicycle wheel. A bottle-cork. A bridge reflected in a river, exploded by sunset. A horse. The spout of a jug. Sometimes there was writing – typographic fragments, scrawled vowels, tumbled alphabets, but never a whole word.

Vishnik was sitting at the desk nursing a glass. He looked thin, almost gaunt. His hands were still trembling, but his eyes were warmer now, filled with the dark familiar ardour, missing nothing. It was the same clear serious face, illuminated with an intense intelligence. There was something wild and sad there, which hadn’t been there when they were young. But this was Raku Vishnik still.

‘You gave me a fright, my friend,’ Vishnik was saying. ‘I was ungracious. I apologise. I spend too much time alone these days. One becomes a little strung out, shall we say.’

‘What about your work?’ said Lom. ‘The university.’

Lom had gone with Vishnik to see him onto the boat, the day he left Podchornok for Mirgorod. Vishnik was going to study history at the university, while Lom was to stay in Podchornok and join the police. Vishnik had dressed flamboyantly then. Wide-brimmed hats and bright bow ties. The fringe longer and floppier. They’d exchanged letters full of cleverness and joking and the futures that awaited them both in their chosen professions. Vishnik was going to become a professor, and he had. But the correspondence dwindled over the years and finally stopped. Lom had settled into the routine of the Provinciate Investigations Department.

‘The university?’ said Vishnik. ‘Ah. Now they, they are f*ckers. They don’t let me teach any more. My background became known. My family. Someone let the bloody secret out. Aristocrats. Nobility. Former persons. Some of the darling students complained. And then of course there was the matter of my connections with the artists. The poets. The cabaret clubs. I used to write about all that. Did you know? Of course not. Criticism. Essays. Journalism. The magazines could never afford to pay me, but sometimes they gave me a painting.’ He waved clumsily at the walls. ‘But that’s all over. It appears I became an embarrassment to the authorities. The hardliners run the show now, on matters of aesthetics like everything else. These pictures are degenerate. F*ck. They closed the galleries and the magazines. The painters are forbidden to paint. They still do, of course. But it’s dangerous now. And I am silenced. Forbidden to publish. Forbidden to teach.’

He emptied his glass and filled it again. Poured one for Lom.

‘That’s tough,’ said Lom. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was lucky. Not completely cast into the outermost darkness. I think some of my f*cker colleagues did have the grace to feel a little ashamed. They have made me the official historian of Mirgorod, no less. In that august capacity I sit here before you now. There’s even a small stipend. I can afford to eat. Not that anyone wants a history of Mirgorod. I doubt it will ever be published. I’m not spoken to, Vissarion, not any more. And I’m watched. I’m on the list. My time will come. I thought it had, when you came banging at the f*cking door. They always come in the night. Never the f*cking morning. Never f*cking lunchtime. Always the f*cking middle of the f*cking night.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think—’

‘F*ck it. F*ck them, Vissarion. Tell me that you haven’t changed.’

‘I haven’t changed.’

Vishnik raised his glass.

‘To friendship, then. Welcome to Mirgorod.’

Archangel studies his planet, his prison, his cage. He assembles the fragments, the minds he has sifted and collected, and comes to understand it better. The planet has a history, and history is a voice. The people of the planet serve their history as photons serve light, as agglomerations of massiveness serve gravity. The voice of history is a dark force.

And Archangel comes to understand that the voice of this planet’s history is broken. In the future that is coming and has already been, the future that re-imagines its own antecedence, a catastrophic mistake is made.

And he learns something else, which is a danger to him. Cruel and immediate danger. Somewhere nearby there still exists a well of old possibility. The vestige of an older voice. The lost story that can no longer speak is tucked away somewhere in silent obscurity. It does not exist in the world but it is there. Beside it. In potential. A seed dormant. A storage cell untapped.

And this encapsulation of failed futurity is ripening, and breaking, and beginning to leak. It is beginning to wonder: maybe what is done will yet be undone?

Archangel roars.

‘THAT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!’

Archangel must return to the space between the stars, which is his birthright and his stolen domain. Not merely return to it, but seize it, consume it, become it. Become the stars. Become the galaxies. Better than before. He sees how it can be done. This planet can do it for him.

‘Let the voice of the planet be my voice. Let the voice of its history be mine. A fear voice. A power voice. Make the voice of history be my larynx. Retell the broken story in a new way. Make the expression of the world unfolding be the planning, cunning, conscious, necessary, unequivocal expression of me, Archangel, voice of the future, voice of the world, speaking through all people always everywhere.

‘Let the people take flight from this one planet to all the stars, all the galaxies, all the intergalactic immensities everywhere always – and let them speak me! A billion billion billion people always everywhere in glittering crimson ships across the black-red-gold recurving energy-mass-time seething scattered shouting me. The perpetual unfolding flowering of the voice of me. All filled with the angelness of me.

‘So it will be.

‘But first, for this to happen, that fatal other source – the fracturing egg of other possibilities that impossibly continues – must be destroyed.’

This then is the first syllable of the first word of the first phrase of the first sentence of the voice of Archangel.

‘DESTROY THE POLLANDORE!’





14


Lom woke early the next morning. As the first greying of the dawn filtered through the gaps in the curtains in Vishnik’s study, he lay on his back on the couch, turning the question of Kantor over in his mind. How to find him. How to even begin. Krogh had told him he would have no help, no resources, no official support from the immense intelligence machine of the Vlast. Krogh’s private secretary would fix him an access pass for the Lodka, and an office there, under cover of some suitably bland pretext to account for his presence, but that was all.

He had read Krogh’s file of clippings on Kantor late into the night. It was an accumulation of robberies, bombings, assassinations. There was no pattern that he could find. The targets were indiscriminate, the victims seemingly random: for every senior official of the Vlast or prominent soldier or policeman killed, there were dozens of innocent passers-by caught in appalling eruptions of destructive violence. There was no clear purpose: responsibility for each attack was claimed by a different obscure and transient dissident grouping, or by none, and none of the perpetrators had ever been taken alive.

He had spent a long time staring at the photograph of the young Josef Kantor that Krogh had given him. He tried to find in that face the lineaments of calculating cruelty that could drive such a murderous campaign. But it was just a face: long and narrow, scarred by the pockmarks of some childhood illness, but handsome. Kantor looked into the camera with dark, interested eyes from under a thick mop of dark hair, uncombed. Although the picture must have been taken in an interrogation cell, there was the hint of a smile in the turn of his wide mouth. This was a confident, intelligent young man, a man you could like, even admire. A man you would want to like you.

Of course, the photograph had been taken two decades ago. Twenty years at Vig would change anyone. Because of this man, an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust and lurking incipient panic had settled on Mirgorod. Lom felt it in the newspaper accounts. He noticed also how in recent months, alongside the official condemnation of the atrocities, there was a growing tendency to criticise the authorities for failing to stem the tide of fear. And this criticism, though it was couched in carefully imprecise language, was increasingly directed towards the Novozhd himself. The hints were there: the Novozhd was old, he was weak, he was indecisive. Was he not, perhaps, even deliberately letting the terror campaign continue, as a means to shore up his own failing authority? These attacks on the Novozhd were always anonymous, but – in the light of Krogh’s accusations – Lom felt he could sense the presence of an organising, directing hand behind them.

One thing was certain. Lying on the couch thinking about it would get him nowhere. He pushed his blanket aside. He need to move. He needed to start.


In Vishnik’s bathroom the plumbing groaned and and clanked and delivered a trickle of cold brown water into the basin. Lom shaved with his old cut-throat razor. Through a small high casement came the sounds of Mirgorod beginning its day: the rumble of an early tramcar, the klaxon of a canal boat, the clatter of grilles and shutters opening. He breathed the city air seeping in through the window, mingling diesel fumes, coal-smoke, canal water and wet pavements with the scent of his shaving soap. The city prickled and trembled with energy, humming at a frequency just too low to be audible, but tangible enough to put him on edge.

He dried his face on the threadbare corner of a towel and went back down the corridor to Vishnik’s room. Vishnik was sitting at his desk. He had the newspaper spread open – the Mirgorod Lamp – but he was looking out of the window, sipping from the blue and white mug, his left hand fidgeting restlessly, tapping a jumpy rhythm with slender fingers.

Lom had laid his uniform out ready on the couch: black serge, silver epaulettes, buttons of polished antler. He pulled on his boots, also black, shined, smelling richly of leather. He stripped and cleaned his gun. It was a beautiful thing, a black-handled top-break Zorn service side-arm: .455 black powder cartridges in half-moon clips; overall length, 11.25 inches; weight 2.5 pounds unloaded; muzzle velocity, 620 feet per second; effective range, fifty yards. Like most things in Podchornok, it was thirty years out of date, but he liked it. He worked carefully and with a certain simple pleasure. Vishnik watched him.

‘Vissarion?’ he said at last. ‘Just what the f*ck is it that you are doing here, my friend?’

‘Ever hear of Josef Kantor?’

‘Kantor? Of course. That was a name to remember, once. A Lezarye intellectual, a polemicist, young, but he had a following. He knew how to please a crowd. A fine way with words. But he was silenced decades ago. Exiled. I assume he’s dead now.’

‘He isn’t dead. He’s in Mirgorod.’ Lom told Vishnik what Krogh had said.

‘There’ve always been sects and cabals in the Lodka,’ said Vishnik. ‘The White Sea Group. Opus Omnium Consummationis. The Iron Guard. Bagrationites. Gruodists. Some wanting to liberalise, some to purify. But why are you telling me this?’

‘You asked.’

‘Sure, but—’

‘I need help, Raku. Someone who knows the city, because I don’t. And I need somewhere to stay.’

‘That’s a lot to ask. A very f*ck of a lot to ask, if I may say so.’

Lom reassembled the gun, put it in the shoulder holster and strapped it on.

‘I know.’

‘So,’ said Vishnik eventually. ‘OK. Sure. You are my friend. So why not. Where do you start?’

‘I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. Find a thread and pull on it. See where it takes me.’

He picked up Vishnik’s paper. It was that morning’s edition. Idly he turned the pages, skimming the headlines.

GUNBOATS POUND SUMBER. ARCHIPELAGO ADVANCE STALLED OUTSIDE HANSIG. BACKGAMMON CHAMPION ASSASSINATED: LEZARYE SEPARATISTS CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY: LODKA PROMISES REPRISALS.

TRAITORS MUST BE SMASHED BY FORCE! the editorial thundered.


The verminous souks and ghettos where these vile criminals are nurtured must be cleaned up once and for all. Our leaders have been too soft for too long. Yes, we are a civilised folk, but these evil elements trample on our forbearance and spit on our decency. They are a disease, but we know the cure. We applaud the recent speech by Commander Lavrentina Chazia at the Armoury Parade Ground. Hers is the attitude our capital needs more of. We urge…


Like Krogh’s file of clippings, the paper was filled with traces of terror, of war, of Kantor and the nameless forces working against the Novozhd. But there was other stuff as well. Other voices, other threads, omitted from Krogh’s selective collection.

An inside spread described new plans for massive monumental ossuaries to hold the corpses of the fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Archipelago War: ‘On the rocky coast of the Cetic Ocean there will grow up grandiose structures… Massive towers stretching high in the eastern plains will rise as symbols of the subduing of the chaotic forces of the outcast islands through the disciplined might of the Vlast.’ They were to be called Castles of the Dead. There were artist’s impressions, with tiny, lost-looking stick families wandering in the grounds, inserted for scale.

MOTHER MURDERS LITTLE ONES. A lawyer, Afonka Voscovec, had suffocated her three children with a pillow and hanged herself. She’d left a note. ‘The floors keep opening,’ she’d written. ‘Will no one stop it?’

Lom was about to throw the paper aside when he noticed a small piece in the social columns. A photograph of an officer of the militia shaking hands with the Commissioner of the Mirgorod Bank of Foreign Commerce. ‘Major Artyom Safran, whose brave action defended the bank in Levrovskaya Square against a frontal terrorist assault, receives the congratulations of a grateful Olland Nett. Major Safran is a mudjhik handler.’ Levrovskaya Square was, according to Krogh, Kantor’s most recent atrocity. If this Major Safran had been there, that meant he had seen Kantor or at least his people. It was a connection.

Lom studied the photograph carefully. The legs and belly of the mudjhik could just be made out in shadow behind the Major's head. And in his head, in the middle of his brow, was a seal of angel flesh, the twin of Lom’s own.

He stood up. It was time to go.


He took the lift down to the exit. The dvornik was in his cubbyhole. If the uniform impressed him, he didn’t let it show. There was a cork board behind his head, with notices pinned to it: the address of the local advice bureau, details of winter relief collections, blackout exercises, changes to social insurance, a soap rationing scheme.

‘Yes? What?’

‘I’m going to be staying here for a few days. With Professor Vishnik.’ Lom showed his warrant card. The dvornik glanced at it. Still not impressed. ‘My presence here is authorised. By me. The Professor is under my protection. You are to report nothing. To no one. The fact that I am here – when I come – when I go – that’s up to me. You notice nothing. You say nothing. You remember nothing.’

The dvornik had his tin cup in his hand. He took a sip from it and shrugged. Barely. Perhaps.

‘Understand?’

‘Whatever you say, General.’





15


Lom found the office Krogh’s private secretary had fixed for him at the Lodka. One office among thousands, a windowless box on an upper floor among storerooms, filing rooms, cleaning cupboards, boilers. It took him half an hour wandering corridors and stairways to track it down. There was a freshly typed card in the slot by the door handle: INVESTIGATOR V Y LOM. PODCHORNOK OBLAST. PROVINCIAL LIAISON REVIEW SECRETARIAT.

In the office there was a chair, a coat rack, a desk. Lom went through the drawers: stationery lint; a lidless, dried-up bottle of ink. Somebody had hung a placard on the wall.


Citizens! Let us all march faster

Through what remains of our days!

You might forget the fruitful summers

When the wombs of the mothers swelled

But you’ll never forget the Vlast you hungered and bled for

When enemies gathered and winter came.


He laid out his notepad and sharpened his pencils. He gave the room two more minutes. It felt about a minute and a half too long. Do something. Do anything. Make a start.

Lom left the office behind and set himself adrift in the mazy corridors of the Lodka. There were floor plans posted at intersections, but they were no help: the room numbers and abbreviations in small print, amended in manuscript, bore little relationship to the labels on doors and stairwells. He knew that the place he wanted would be down. Such places were always near the root of things. Tucked away. Like death always was.

He came into a more crowded part of the building: secretaries in groups, carrying folders of letters, talking; porters wheeling trolleys of files and loose papers; policemen, uniformed and not; civil servants arguing quota and precedent, trading the currency of acronyms. The placards on committee room doors were syllables in a mysterious language. Hints and signs.

CENTGEN.

COMPOLIT.

GENCOM.

INTPOP.

POLITCENT.

He half expected someone to stop him and ask him what he was doing there, so he prepared a line about the urgent need to improve liaison with the Eastern Provinciates. He found he had a lot to say on the subject: it was an issue that actually did need attention. He began to think of improvements that could be made to the committee structure and lines of command. Perhaps he should write a memo for Krogh? He started to take out his notebook to write some thoughts down.

What the f*ck am I doing?

He put the notebook back in his pocket. The Lodka was getting under his skin already, releasing the inner bureaucrat. Doors, wedged open, showed glimpses of desks, bowed concentrating heads, pencils poised over lists. Empty conference tables, waiting. The quiet music of distant telephone bells and typewriter clatter. The smell of polished linoleum and paper dust. Stairs and corridors without end. The Lodka cruised on the surface of the city like an immense ship, and like a ship it had no relationship with the depths over which it sailed, except to trawl for what lived there.

He let these thoughts drift on, preoccupying the surface layers of his mind, while the Lodka carried him forward, floating him though its labyrinths on a current you could only perceive if you didn’t look for it too hard. This was a technique that always worked for him in office buildings: they were alive and efficient, and knew where you needed to go; if you trusted them and kept an open mind, they took you there.

On the ground floor he followed his nose, tracing the faint scent of sweetness and corruption down a narrow stairwell to its source. A sign on the swing doors said MORTUARY. And beyond the door, a corridor floored with linoleum, brick-red to hide the stains. The attendant led him to an elevator and closed the metal grille with a crash. They descended.

‘You’re in luck. We burn them after a week. You’re just in time. They’ll be a bit ripe though, your friends.’

The attendant gave him a cigarette. It wasn’t because of the dead – they weren’t so bad – it was the sickly sweetness of the formaldehyde, the sting of disinfectant in your lungs. That was worse. The harshness of the smoke took Lom by surprise: it scoured his throat and clenched his lungs. He coughed.

‘You going to puke?’

‘Let’s get on with it.’

The Cold Room was tiled in white and lit to a bright, gleaming harshness. Their breath flowered ghosts on the stark air.

‘Anyone else been to see them?’

The attendant ran his finger down a column in a book on the desk by the door.

‘Nope. Wait here.’

Lom dragged hard on the cigarette. Two, three, four times. It burned too quickly. A precarious length of ash built up, its core still burning. The cardboard was too thick.

The attendant came back pushing a steel trolley. A mounded shape lay on it, muffled by a thin, stained sheet.

‘You’ll have to help me with the giant,’ he said. ‘They’re heavy bastards.’

Lom let his cigarette drop half-finished on the white-tiled floor, ground it out with his boot, and followed the attendant between heavy rubber curtains into the refrigerator room. Many bodies on trolleys were parked along the walls, but there was no mistaking the bulk of the giant on its flatbed truck. Lom took the head end and pushed.

‘You can leave me,’ he said when they were done. ‘I’ll let you know when I’m finished.’

Sheets pulled back, the two cadavers lay side by side, like father and son. What was he hoping to find? A clue. That’s what detectives did. Dead bodies told you things. But these bodies were simply dead. Very.

He checked the record sheets. The man had been identified as Akaki Serov. ‘Male. Hair red. Dyed brown. Age app. 30–35.’ The face had matched a photograph on a file somewhere: there was a serial number, a reference to the Gaukh Archive. The face on the trolley was unmarked apart from a few small cuts and puncture wounds, but nobody would recognise it now. The flesh was discoloured and collapsed, the lips withdrawn from the teeth in the speechless grin of death. The torso was swollen tight like a balloon. The blood had drained down to settle in his back and his buttocks. A wound in his neck was lipped with darkened, crusted ooze – a nether mouth, also speechless. There were no legs.

Lom hesitated. He should take fingerprints. He should prise the jaws open to check for secreted… what?… secrets. In life, he could have worked with him. Serov dyed his hair: he was vain, then. Or trying to change his appearance. Human things. Things Lom could use. Serov might have felt a grudge against someone. Taken a bribe. Feared pain. Something. That was how Lom interrogated people: seducing, cajoling, threatening, building a relationship, coming to a conclusion. But the dead told you nothing. It was their defining characteristic, the only thing that remained to them: being dead.

He turned to the other corpse.

The giant had been found by the empty strong-car. There was no name for this one, no photograph to match his face on a file, not much face left to match. His flesh was hard and waxy white. Bloodless. Between his legs, where his lower belly and genitals and thighs should have been, there was nothing. A gouged-out hollow. Ragged. Burned. Vacant. The front of his body was seared and puckered. Flash burns. And there was a gunshot wound in his face that had exploded the back of his skull.

The bullet was a puzzle. He must have been dying already – the entire middle part of his body blown to mush – but someone had taken the trouble to shoot him anyway. Why? A kindness? A silencing? A message for others to read? There were too many stories here. Too many possibilities were the same as none. They took you nowhere. The dead, being dead, were of no help.

Lom put his hands in his pockets, trying to warm them. The cold of the room was beginning to numb his face. He needed to get out of there.

Do something else. Pull on another thread.