Michael

Michael stopped as he reached the shopping centre.  It was a late-70s concrete horror of a place; there was a squat, dirty rectangular block of a building set into an unnatural declivity, and clustered around the base was a street-market of some kind.  There was a strong smell of urine, probably because after the market closed and darkness fell it gave urinators the kind of privacy that they required to empty their bladders and then carry on home.  Michael wouldn’t have been entirely surprised though to find that one of the stalls was selling used clothing that had only been urinated on once or twice, squire.  And undoubtedly only by the upper class or landed gentry, so that it was, in some mysterious way, desirable piss.

He coughed, trying to expel the miasma from his nostrils, and then looked about him.  No-one was paying any attention, as they either headed down to the market, over the concrete footbridge to the shopping centre, or avoided the monstrosity altogether.  He flexed his fingers experimentally, and when they didn’t complain, moved through a simple tactus.  Immediately a fresh, cool stream of air began to blow beneath his nostrils, filling them with the scent of pine forestry.  He walked on, heading over the footbridge (drawbridge, he thought as he crossed it) and into the shopping centre.

He’d barely taken three steps through the automatic doors when a security guard stepped away from his post at the balcony’s edge and started walking towards him.  The shopping centre was on several levels and had an open central section.  Each of the higher levels had an edged balcony that jutted out into that space and allowed bored shoppers to look down and contemplate suicide.  Michael had no idea how many of them had actually taken the drop up on its offer, but he was sure that there must have been some.  He stopped, looking at the security guard.  The guard, a middle-aged man with broad shoulders that looked more muscular than fat and a hint of salt-and-pepper to his brown hair, made eye-contact and frowned.  He had thick brown eyebrows with stray hairs sticking up and out, this way and that, making them both look like tiny, well-used doormats.  Michael wondered for a moment what kind of thing would pause at the top of your face to wipe its feet before carrying on, and decided that he’d rather not find out.

“Is there a problem?” he asked as the guard stopped in front of him, about a footstep too close, inside his personal space.

“You’re using magic,” said the guard.  “That’s forbidden inside the centre, along with hoodies, skateboards and open containers of alcohol.”

Michael let his concentration relax and felt the cool breeze stop.  He raised an eyebrow, neatly manicured, back at the guard.

“Thank-you,” said the guard in a bland way that implied that he wasn’t grateful at all.  “Where do you have business today then, sir?”  There was a tiny amount of emphasis on the sir at the end, just enough to suggest sarcasm.

“I’m seeing Charles Asciugimento,” said Michael, noting with pleasure that the guard’s face went suddenly very wooden.  “Head of Building Security, I’m given to believe.”

“Your beliefs are your own matter, sir,” said the guard.  Even his voice had become flat and lifeless.

“Could you escort me?” asked Michael, smiling now.

“No, sir.”  Michael twitched his eyebrow again, and got no response.

“No?” he asked finally.

“No,” said the guard.

“Why not?” asked Michael, sighing as he asked.  He was sure that the guard was doing this deliberately.

“Security of the building is important,” said the guard.  “Were I to leave my post to escort you, that would endanger the building.  I can provide you with directions if you’d care to listen, sir.”

“I suppose that will do,” said Michael, trying to hide his disappointment.  He had been rather looking forward to the look on Charles’s face if he turned up with an unauthorised escort.  He pretended to listen to what the guard was saying, and then smiled falsely, uttered insincere thanks, and walked off, heading towards the elevators.  The guard had probably told him to take the escalators as the elevators were locked to certain floors in the building, but Michael knew ways around that.  Which, he thought, the guard had just told him were forbidden in here, so it would be interesting finding out if they actually worked still.

Where Rosa died

The rental car smelled of pine air freshener and stale cigarette smoke, strongly enough for both of them that Michael had to roll down the windows as soon as he got in.  The smell was still horrible, but it was more bearable when the sluggish breeze outside moved it around a little.  He’d not been able to work out where the scent of pine was coming from; he’d thrown the pine-tree-shaped air-freshener that had dangled from the rear-view mirror away when he first got in the car, and he’d checked beneath the seats and in the glove-box and behind the sun-visors but he could find no trace of whatever was renewing the scent.  The smoke was more obvious: the car’s upholstery was some kind of artificial suede and had clearly been with the car for as long as people had been smoking.  When he got out of the car anything white he’d been wearing that came in contact with the upholstery came away with nicotine smudges, and he was sure that it was on the rest of his clothes as well, just not showing up as well against charcoal greys and navy blues.  He found it ironic that the rental agent had been insistent on him signing a piece of paper that promised he wouldn’t smoke in the vehicle and had listed all the most recent cleaning dates for the interior of the car.

The car started when he turned the key though, and he counted that in its favour.  You never knew when you might need to leave somewhere quickly.  He put the air-conditioning on in the forlorn hopes that it might do something to quench the stenches, and checked his phone again.  The signal was still there, and his email had downloaded now.  He scrolled quickly through the list, which was short and all new.  He practised Inbox-zero techniques, though he wasn’t going to delete and organise messages now; he was just looking for the detail on Rosa.

The email was third from the end, suggesting that it had been sent just before he entered the House of Whispers.  He wondered if he’d have got the mail if he’d been a little later to the meeting, or if they’d waited for him to enter the grounds before hitting Send.  He suspected the latter from the stories that were told about the office.  He opened it, noting that it was all in text with no attachments.  The virus checker on the server had given the once-over anyway, and a little box appeared at the top of the email to tell him that nothing intrusive had been found.  He ignored it; the people who ran the House of Whispers were probably capable of writing an undetectable virus if they wanted to, and they would be unlikely to want to infect his phone when he was working for them.  He pushed away the uncomfortable thought that some people like to make sure every contingency is covered, and read through the email.  It didn’t take long.

He put the address given at the end of the email into his phone’s map application and then had to zoom out a little in order to bring his current location into view.  It wasn’t that far, perhaps 20 minutes or so depending on traffic.  He tapped on the screen until it recognised that he wanted it to provide directions, set the phone on the dashboard and checked that the volume was turned up, and put his seatbelt on.  He wanted to keep the windows down, but it was a little too cold for normal people to be doing that, and he wanted to appear just like any other person as he drove.  He pushed the button to wind them up, his nose wrinkling in disgust as the air was trapped in the car and he got a sudden whiff of pine-scented cigarette smoke, and then pulled out onto the quiet street.  His phone immediately told him to turn round, and he cursed softly under his breath for not having thought to check that first.

Whisperers

When he walked outside the building he pulled his smartphone from his pocket to check his email.  The House of Whispers might be forty years behind the times, but the agencies that it employed were firm believers in taking every advantage that could be found.  He unlocked it with a quick motion of his thumb, and it vibrated very slightly in his hand to let him know that the unlock pattern had been recognised.  He looked down at it while he walked to the gate, selecting the email icon.  A few moments passed, and then No signal flashed up on the screen.  He swore, and checked the top of the display.  Sure enough, the signal strength metre there was showing that the area was devoid of phone signals.

He stopped walking at that point and looked around.  The House was set back from the road, and a head-height wall surrounded a well-kept lawn.  The wall was painted terracotta as though to suggest that this was a more mediterranean place than the Unreal City, and there were a few temperate-climate trees struggling to survive in the wetter, cooler climate that prevailed here.  Behind him was the House, off to the sides were other properties with equally defensive-looking walls around them.  There was nothing that would visibly prevent a phone signal from entering the area.  He looked up anyway, checking that there wasn’t a roof that he wasn’t aware of; if there was then it was invisible to him.  He considered for a moment that there might be invisible roofing technology now, and then dismissed it as a stupid idea.  He considered for a few moments longer the idea that he might have been hypnotised at some point into ignoring such roofs were he to see them, and then dismissed that idea as well.  Finally he started walking again, his eyes switching between the signal strength metre on his phone and the path across the lawn, mere paving stones set slightly further apart than was comfortable for him.  Only when he pushed open the heavy, wrought-iron gate and stepped through did his phone beep suddenly, indicating that the signal had come back.  He frowned now, but looked around the street before poking at his phone and bringing up his email.  Did they jam signals in the grounds and the House?  Had his phone had a signal in the House?  He wished he’d looked at it now and noticed then.

He walked off down the street towards where his rental car, hired from the Agency’s preferred contractor that morning, was parked.  He left, unaware that a camera was set into the wall next to him, observing.

Back inside the House of Whispers the man at the desk set down the tablet that he was using to view Michael’s departure on and leaned back in his chair.  He relaxed, staring up at the ceiling.  After thirty seconds, the entire side wall of the office slid sideways, increasing the size of the room threefold.  In the larger part was a round wooden table draped with a white tablecloth and set with a steel candelabra holding unlit red candles and place settings for two people.  Two people were sat at the table, but neither looked hungry.  They were both wearing grey suits and simple white masks, one smiling and one frowning, like a personification of the theatre.

“Well?” asked the smiling mask.

“Not good,” said the man staring at the ceiling.  He didn’t adjust his position now that the office was open, nor did he look over at the others.  “He didn’t try and find out what else might be on this floor.  He didn’t stray out of bounds while he was in the House at all.  He noticed that he had no signal, but he barely looked around to find out why.  And he never considered where the cameras might be, or what they might be looking for.  On the whole, gentlemen, a failure.”

“So shall we terminate him?” asked the smiling mask.  There was a flat, emotionless quality to the voice, as though it weren’t actually a human speaking.

“No.”  The word came after a short pause, as though a decision were being taken.

“No?”

“He will do what the Thrones want and probably do it very well,” said the man staring at the ceiling.  “That what they want is the wrong thing is neither here nor there as far as his employment goes.  Let him deliver what he’s capable of and let the Thrones see their mistake for themselves.  We cannot teach those who will not learn, and I am sick and tired of running in front of them and clearing their way so they can blunder about like elephants in the corral.”

“They won’t like it when they realise what you’ve done,” said the smiling mask.  The frowning mask nodded.

“They can dislike it all they please,” said the man.  “They can replace me if they please, too.  But there is no way forward if they won’t grow up.”

There was another pause.  Then, “No-one is thinking of replacing you,” said the smiling mask.  The frowning mask nodded again.

“More’s the pity,” said the man staring at the ceiling.  “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this now?  A promotion would be nice.  Or a pay-rise.”

“You should terminate Michael,” said the smiling mask.  “We should do the job that needs doing, not the one that has been asked for.”

“Sometimes,” said the man staring at the ceiling, “the job that needs doing is exactly the one that’s been asked for.”

the House of Whispers

The corridor was long and had no doors on either side of it to break up the grey-green walls.  The only window was at the end where the staircase arrived; it looked out onto a narrow expanse of grass and then a security fence.  The steel mesh of the fence was too dense to see through, and the barbed wire coils atop it were rumoured to be electrified.  No birds landed there, or perched and cheeped; no rabbits ran on the grass, even at night.  The window had been painted shut years ago, and then painted and repainted ever since, until there wasn’t even a crack between the sill and the frame to show where they had once been separate parts.  The glass was warped and dirty, and there seemed little hope of anyone coming up here to clean it.  People coming up here had other things on their mind.

The floor of the corridor was tiled in a red-and-blue diamond pattern, and the sound of shoes on it were hollow and echoing.  Michael walked along it, wondering if the sound carried into the office at the end of the corridor, if this was how a visitor was forced to announce their presence.  He castigated himself mentally for thinking like that, that was old school.  That might have been true in the days when he first learned this craft, before technology took over and consumed the world.  Now it was taken for granted that any visitors were seen by camera when they approached the doors to the building, and were probably tracked the entire time that they were inside.  Microphones small enough to be disguised as buttons in your clothing, or the centres of flowers in floral arrangements could pick up whispered conversations and convey them back to computers with Terabyte sized hard-drives on which to record them, ready for playback to you with just a simple search command.  Doors could be remotely operated, and speakers and screens could pass messages to you without ever allowing you close to the person who was giving instructions.  Hell, they didn’t even have to be in the same building as you; you could be discreetly delivered to a death-chamber and you’d sit there placidly listening to the voice explaining to you what you’d done wrong while the air filled with lethal gas that gently overwhelmed you.  Then it was down to the clean-up teams to come in and deposit your body where the message it sent would be understood by everybody.

So why was he in this building, walking down this corridor?

At the end of the corridor was a wooden door.  There was a circular handle for it, chipped.  It looked as though it was made of plastic, bakelite perhaps.  Another anachronism in an age where steel and glass were the norm.  He reached for the handle and then hesitated.  His hand clenched into a fist, and he knocked on the door instead.

“Come in,” said a voice from beyond the door immediately.  Michael almost looked around for a speaker, but his brain kicked in and pointed out that the voice had definitely been attenuated by the door in the way.  Strange.

The handle turned loosely as though the screws holding it in place were starting to slip, but the door opened and beyond it he saw a tiny office, barely big enough for the desk and three chairs that were in there.  The desk reached to the whitewashed wall on one side, and left a gap for a thin man to sidle round on the other.  The two chairs on Michael’s side were pulled slightly out from the desk, and the arc of the door only just missed hitting them.  There were no bookcases, no pictures on the wall, no carpet on the floor, and no signs of human comforts at all.  The desk was chipped like the door-handle, revealing chipboard underneath a thin, plasticky veneer, and there were papers laid in an orderly fashion across it  All of them had been turned upside down so that he couldn’t see what was written on them.

Behind the desk, watching him through unrimmed glasses with golden arms, was a man who looked as though he might be in his late fifties or sixties.  His hair was mostly gone, with just tufts at the sides above his ears still remaining.  They were trimmed but bushy, as though kept as a memory of what the full head of hair might once have been.  The face was lined, the lips were thin and white, and the nose was long, sloping, and had flaring nostrils.  The eyes were hard to make out; whatever lenses were in the glasses, they were blurring the eyes beyond them.  Michael was sure that this was deliberate.  The man was wearing a pinstriped suit, the kind that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an accountant or banker, and a high-collared white shirt with a tie that had the muddy colours and broad stripes suggesting that it was a sign to people having the same academic background.  Michael didn’t recognise it.

“Michael,” said the man.  “Come in and sit down please.”  His voice was papery and crackly, as though he hadn’t spoken much for a while.  Michael’s eyes looked over the desk again; there was no sign of a glass of water or cup of coffee.  He closed the door and sat down in the closest chair.  It squeaked a little and shifted slightly, suggesting that the bolts holding it together were loose.

“Welcome to the House of Whispers,” said the man.  Michael stiffened slightly, and the man nodded.  “This has been known, unofficially, as such for over eighty years,” he said.  “I called it the same thing when I was… not what I am now.  No shame attains.”

That’s an odd thing to say, thought Michael, but he said nothing.  He sat still in his chair, his handed folded in his lap, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his eyes on the man on the other side of the desk.

“You have been sent here for a briefing,” continued the man.  “But you have not been told what the briefing will be about, or why you are receiving it, or why you had to come here.”  Michael nodded, but the man wasn’t looking at him.  Instead he was looking down at his desk and opening a drawer.  “You are probably wondering why, given the technology available to us, we aren’t doing this via anonymised video conference,” he continued.  “This is only because such signals can be intercepted and copied, and though encryption technologies are excellent, the best encryption is the one you never have to use.”  He opened a drawer and Michael noticed that the desk was so cheap that it wobbled as that happened.  The man took a single sheet of white A4 paper out and passed it over to Michael.  There were boxes and lines drawn on it, and names written inside the boxes.

“That is the organisation chart,” said the man.  “You will recognise some of the names on there, I expect.  Do not tell me which you recognise.”  He waited while Michael read the paper, and when Michael’s eyes started going over it a second time he spoke again.

“The name I want you to pay attention to is in the third row,” he said.  “Rosa Lindenbaum.  You can see what her role is from there.  Rosa died yesterday.  The official report is that she had a heart attack while on her way to her job and that she collapsed and died in the lift as she was ascending to the floor that she worked on.”

Michael looked up from the paper, his gaze now sharp.  The man behind the desk met his eyes with ease.  “The official story is so much bullshit,” he said, and Michael found himself surprised that the man would swear.  “Your first task,” said the man, “is to find out how she died.  Once we understand this, there may be further work for you.  You may keep that piece of paper provided you keep it securely.”  The man dropped his gaze and his hands moved across the desk, twitching pieces of paper, seemingly looking for something.  Michael stood, recognising that he was dismissed, and opened the door to the office.  As it closed behind him, it was a relief to be out of there.  He resisted the urge to turn suddenly and open the door again and see what the office looked like when no-one was expecting him and he set off down the long corridor again.

It was only as he reached the stairs to go down that he paused and looked back, and wondered what else was on this floor of the building, given that there were no doors from this corridor or the office he’d been in.

Beaconfield park

Alex walked out of the office and through a concrete car-park.  It was filled with cars, their states of cleanliness and relative newness indicating the areas belonging to the various ranks in the office.  By far the majority of the car-park was filled with cars at least five years old, usually unwashed but dusty rather than muddy, and they often had stuffed toys on the back windowsill, or a box of wet-wipes, or something else that suggested to the trained eye that the owner had children.  Closest to the building were the most expensive cars, parked in the reserved bays.  Here were the Jaguars and Aston Martins, large black or navy blue cars with just enough chrome trim to be ostentatious without drawing too much attention to themselves.  I have more money than you, the cars proclaimed, but they had a sense about them that they were being watched and keying them, however casually, would not go unseen.  There were small pockets of Range Rovers and SUVs, and they were all immaculately turned out as though they’d been freshly through a car-wash.  They clustered together like schoolgirls wanting to talk about the others behind their backs.  They annoyed Alex, but more because he didn’t know anyone who drove one.  And finally, as he was leaving the car-park, there were the bike lockers and the motorcycle bays, pushed out on the edge where their owners doubtless enjoyed being.  Alex had tried cycling once and decided that he simply wasn’t sanctimonious enough for it and had sold the bike to a neighbour who lived three doors down and had the weather-abraded skin of a cycling addict.  He’d never seen the bike again, and hadn’t regretted it for a moment.

Outside the car-park was a quiet road that joined two suburban streets together.  All around the area was mostly housing, with the occasional children’s playground and a small park.  The office building here was nondescript, and deliberate so, and was where Spyte was headquartered, though no sign announced its  presence.  Spyte was the government’s latest solution to the problems of a failing civil service; they’d outsourced much of their intelligence gathering activity to people who did it better.  GCHQ provided Spyte with a thick cable down which prodigious amounts of data gleaned from all over the world gushed, and Spyte brought together analysts and cryptographers and big-data manipulators to tame the flow and turn it into dossiers and catalogues and Power-Point presentation decks that could bore a politician into an agreeable stupor in under half an hour.

Spyte also provided a small capacity for actual agents, people trained in the cold-war arts of espionage, of shepherding foreign nationals with valuable information through customs points and across geographical boundaries in places where all you could see was the sky and the earth, one far above and one too far below.  They handled wet tasks, where actual people were needed, sometimes to observe, sometimes to enable, and sometimes, very rarely, to disable or even kill.  They were known as White Agents, for the Carte Blanche they were given to carry out their activities, on the understanding that if they were caught then they’d been acting alone and without authorisation.  There was never any budget for rectifying mistakes or retrieving lost agents.

Alex walked down the street as though he was heading for the high road, where the two sandwich shops vied for the title of worst sandwich provider.  Currently in the lead was Macmillans, who’d managed to make a sandwich with lettuce and mouse-droppings the last time Alex had dared to eat there, completely forgetting the salami that had been the point and the name of the food.  As he neared the high road though, he turned off down a cul-de-sac, and then used a narrow little alley that appeared to dead-end to find a waist high wall that he vaulted agilely over.  He landed, both feet, in a freshly dug flower bed in Beaconfield park, and trudged across a newly mown lawn to an ornate and uncomfortable cast-iron bench.  As he sat down he looked ruefully at his shoes, which looked as though they’d been turfed themselves, and wondered how long it would take to get them clean that evening.

“Well, well, if it isn’t David Attenborough,” said a high-pitched, almost girlish little voice.  A man with thick-lensed black plastic glasses and a paunch that spilled two inches over the waistband of his trousers sat down on the bench next to Alex.  He looked a little like Jarvis Cocker might if he gained ten stone and drank his evening meal in the form of six pints of Real Ale.  “Did you find anything fun in the undergrowth?”

“Only orchids,” said Alex, letting bitterness tinge his words a little.  He stamped his feet one at a time on the ground, dislodging some lumps of mud and not enough of the grass.  “I have some numbers for you.”

“Yes, yes,” said the man.  They exchange code numbers, both affecting not to listen or care, and both mentally checking the numbers against the ones they’d been given on the phone call.  Only when they were both happy that the exchange was correct did their conversation actually start.

“Rosa Lindenbaum,” said the fat man.  “Her details are being emailed to you.”

“You want me to find her?”

“We know where she is, she’s dead,” said the fat man.  “We want you to find out how she died.  Not where she died, or when she died, but how.  And if there was anyone there with her.”

“Won’t the Coroner tell you that?”

“He’s told us already, and we don’t believe it.”

Alex stood up.  “Thanks,” he said.  The fat man nodded, and pointed to the gate.

“There’s less mud that way,” he said.

Alex

It was too hot in the office.  The modern trend for open-plan had seized the minds of Facilities two years ago and they’d removed interior walls and partitions so that every desk was part of a ‘pod’ of four or six desks, and there was little privacy.  The sightlines across the office were nearly perfect, except for the pillars needed for structural soundness, and there were rumours that memos existed from the Facilities team asking that they could be knocked down, or at least punched through to improve sight through the office.  Alex had no idea who it was that needed to be able to see directly from one end of the floor to the other, but presumably they now could.  Around the edges, and on occasion in isolated cubes in the middle of the floor, were meeting rooms, to restore some of the privacy and noise-reduction that getting rid of the walls and partitions had obliterated, so naturally enough they were near-permanently booked with people trying to escape from their neighbours, the smell of food bought in from outside or brought in from home, or just attempting to hear themselves think for long enough to file a report.  Each meeting room had a thermostat, and playing with the thermostats caused the air-conditioning to break.  Facilities would send three or four threatening emails per quarter telling people not to touch the thermostats because the open-plan nature of the office meant that cooling one small part down adversely affected the rest of the office, but no-one heeded them.  And so eight times a year the air-conditioning broke down for up to three weeks a time.  Now was one of those times.

Alex tapped a key on the keyboard of his computer and the cursor on the screen moved sluggishly to the right, depositing a letter behind it.  The computer was overheating, and the software was playing up as the machine struggled to provide enough CPU cycles for things as mundane as typing.  Alex waited a second, and then pressed the next key, knowing that swearing at the machine would only make him hotter and more annoyed, and have no noticeable effect on it at all.  Unless it chose to crash.

The phone on his desk rang suddenly, buzzing like a bluebottle freshly trapped in a jam jar.  On the left-hand side of the phone unit was a collection of tiny rectangular LED lights arranged like a ladder.  The third from the top illuminated, a soft blue glow that persisted instead of flashing in time with the buzzing.  Alex frowned momentarily and then ignored it, as per protocol.  He pressed another key on the keyboard and waited for the letter to appear on the screen, during which time the phone stopped ringing.  He laid his finger on top of the next key and tried not to sigh.

His phone rang again, and this time he picked the received up immediately and listened.  A voice on the other end, made fuzzy and tinny by some kind of vocoder device recited a string of six digits, which he dutifully repeated back and then hung up.  Then he locked the computer, wondering if the machine would overheat when the screensaver kicked in and lose his report in the ensuing crash, and stood up.

“I’m going for lunch,” he said to the other person on his four man pod, a young man sat diagonally opposite him who’d been there for three weeks and looked like he’d been out of university for no longer.

“Right,” said the man.  Alex hadn’t bothered to learn his name as people rotated in and out of the desks so often that he assumed that unless they’d been there for three months that they were just passing through. 

“If my phone rings, don’t answer it,” he said.  He thought it should have gone without saying, but he’d already been hauled up twice before the Approbations Committee to explain why an unauthorised person was using his phone when he was away from his desk.

“Right,” said the young man.  He looked away, and Alex wondered if he was sweating from the heat of the office or because Alex was talking to him.

“I mean it,” said Alex.  “If you answer my phone again I’m handing you over to the Committee.  You can answer their questions.”

“What committee?”

Alex opened his mouth and then closed it again.  “You probably don’t want to find out,” he said.  “I know I didn’t.”

The lift

The lift door was opening for her when the blonde-haired man stood up suddenly and crossed the lobby.  As she stepped inside he was right behind her, his body creating warmth against her back and giving her no opportunity to stop or step backwards.  When she did halt, in the middle of the lift-floor, he placed a large, spatulate hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward so that he could clear the doors and let them close behind him.  In the confined space she could smell sweat, acrid and horsey, thinly veneered with a spicy aftershave scent, and another more floral scent that she thought might be hair-wax or creme of some kind.  She turned, annoyance forming words on her lips, and then stared silently at him.

His lips were moving silently and his eyes were rolled up into his head so that only the whites were showing.  His hands, huge, like those of a lifelong manual labourer, scarred on the back across the knuckles and calloused on the palms where the fingers joined, twitched spasmodically but somehow in time with some of the unheard words that he was mouthing.  His chest fell and rose rhythmically as though he were breathing especially deeply.  And as she watched, Rosa was transported in an instant back to her childhood and a red-brick church on the corner of a busy crossroads with huge brown doors that swung open at the lightest touch.  The memory of her mother was at her back, hands on her shoulders pressing her forwards against her resisting footsteps.  There was a sudden pictorial memory, a black leather shoe with a little strap across the top of her white-socked foot to hold it on while she walked, slightly scuffed at the toe which her mother had been telling her off for until they entered the church when she’d fallen silent.  As they walked into the body of the church the priest was stood behind the altar, facing them, his eyes rolled up back in to his head and his arms stretched wide, his hands held out in supplication.  Blood dripped from the wounds in his hands; stigmata her mother told her later.

She shook the memory away and forced herself to look at the hands of the man in the lift, but they were unwounded, whole and pink.  His lips continued to move, and as though he were finding his voice for the first time, his words began to whisper into the lift, ragged and hoarse.  She didn’t want to listen but she had no choice, so, with her eyes firmly fixed on the digital floor counter, already a glowing green 2, she heard him beseeching a God that she thought she’d left behind her.

The memory seized again, unwanted.  The priest was whispering, but loud enough that they could hear his words from their pew in the middle.  Her mother always took this pew when they attended church, even when it meant forcing her way onto the end, pushing and elbowing pinch-faced, red-scrubbed women, nudging aside men in threadbare black suits with the holes artfully darned with the wrong colour thread.  There was always the smell of carbolic soap about them, and their eyes seemed like little holes into a world of meanness, where every last grain of salt was counted and weighed against your soul.  The priest’s whispers were like the roar of a cataract and she could hear him admonishing the Lord, begging the great and good God to visit him and show him the way, to bring the full stigmata upon him and anoint him a warrior in the faith.  Words that she’d long thought obliterated from memory came rushing back, and without knowing what she was doing she whispered along with the blonde-haired man, joining him in his litany of hate and zealotry, perverting the intent of prayer.

She opened her eyes, wondering what had happened, and saw the green digit of the floor counter, a glowing number 3.  The lift wasn’t moving any more and there was a dull whine.  The floor jerked, and then stopped.  The whine faded, then returned, and the floor jerked again, then stopped.  The blonde-haired man seemed to relax momentarily and his eyes returned to their normal place in their sockets.  She noted that they were a vivid shade of green, almost unnatural in their intensity, and that around the irises the whites seemed jaundiced.  She knew without having to ask that he’d done something to the lift to hold it here, trapped between floors, struggling to move, and she opened her mouth to ask him what he wanted.  Before she could speak though, his hands came to rest gently about her throat, and they squeezed, cutting off her breath and cutting off her words.  She reached up, marvelling at just how large his hands seemed, unable to panic, and tugged at them.  They didn’t move, and the pressure against her throat seemed to increase slightly.  Now she felt a sense of urgency, and she dug her nails in to his skin and flesh, raking backwards with him to try and make him let go.  His eyes rolled back up and he began whispering again.  Her vision started to fade at the edges, darkening from the outside in, narrowing down into a dull little tunnel with barely any light at the end.  She pulled harder on his hands, and then tried beating hers against them, but her arms felt heavy and distant, almost not hers, and her lungs were starting to spasm as she tried to breath.  She felt for a moment as though she were hiccuping, and then everything went dark and there was just a burning sensation in her throat, moving slowly down to her chest.  She was sure that she didn’t want it to reach her chest, but even as she tried to stop it she seemed to fall forwards into the darkness, knowing that somewhere beyond it a priest was waiting.

The lift doors finally opened on the fourth floor and Rosa’s lifeless body fell out and sprawled across the tiles of the lobby, unseen by anyone working beyond the glass doors that led into the call-centre.  The doors tried to close so the lift could return to the ground floor but her legs were in the way, and the doors opened and attempted to close several times before giving up and triggering an alarm.  By the time Larry had got up to the fourth floor to see what all the fuss was about, the blonde-haired man had walked quietly through the ground-floor lobby and left the building, leaving behind him only a blurred CCTV image that could have been almost anyone.