Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [24]
“Why?”
“To teach them.”
In the end I don’t know which of us won—whether I’d convinced Ratchet with my initial inarticulate outburst, or he blackmailed me into colluding in some bizarre impossible idea that had seeped into my mind while it teetered on the edge of slipping forever beneath deep water. Maybe Ratchet was Jesus all along, and I was just his fucked-up John the Baptist.
Either way, I kicked Rapt over the next eight months, and life within the Farm began to change.
I woke the next morning from dreams which had been confused and bitter. When my eyes blinked open and I found myself lying stiffly on the floor with my head on a balled-up coat I was seized for a moment with weary dread, the kind you get when you find yourself somewhere you have no recollection of going, somewhere you can’t even understand, and all you know is a churning confidence that you have done something wrong which you don’t even remember.
Then I realized where I was, lying on the floor of Howie’s storeroom, and fragments of dreams danced in front of my eyes. Trees, alive with flame, blackening leaves flicking back and forth with faces which were not there. Then real faces, faces ruptured with fear, studded with eyes which wore terror like milky cataracts. A smell, like the worst of the tunnels, but with a downward slope toward death, a stench which had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with a final dissolution. A flock of mad, happy orange birds, disappearing behind a hut.
I screwed my eyes up and pushed my fists into them, morphing the flames into geometric patterns which swirled and jumped. Then I let go and they disappeared. I sat up, reaching for a cigarette, and looked around.
Suej was still asleep. After Howie and I had finished I carried her through and laid her on the sacks which looked softest. She woke and we had a talk, mainly about David and where he might be. It felt different, being with her. She was just one person in the world now. After years of being there for her and the spares all the time, I’d started to go away. Maybe it wasn’t my fault. Perhaps it was just an inevitable consequence of returning here, like my increasing desire for Rapt. Ratchet once told me that you remember things best in the state that you learned them in the first place. Being back in New Richmond and trying to remember how to behave while straight was like trying to balance a chain saw on my chin while bombed out of my mind.
I’d lain, on the floor thinking of Rapt the previous night, thinking of it for hours. Thinking of how the worst addictions are the easiest to get hold of. Like alcohol. There it is, in stores, in bars, in people’s homes. It’s right there. You can see it, reach out for it, fall into it. People don’t have Rapt in their drinks cabinets, but it’s not too hard to get hold of it if you know where to go, and I knew.
I could hear the sound of revelry from the bar, and checked my watch. Seven a.m. The first shift. I watched the smoke from my cigarette curl into the air, and wondered what I was going to do. Just about every part of my mind knew that I shouldn’t be here, that I should take Howie’s advice and get out. I’d had no right to bring the spares into this in the first place, into a city they didn’t know and problems they couldn’t understand. Now the city had stolen them, and at three a.m. there’d still been no word on where they might be.
I was finding it increasingly hard to believe it was SafetyNet who’d taken them. Before we’d gone to sleep I’d pressed Suej hard on exactly what happened when the men came to Mal’s apartment. There was something about the way she described events that made me wonder if they hadn’t been bargaining on finding the spares. I was also intrigued by the fact they’d blundered round the apartment before they went. I’m not a small guy—it would have been fairly evident if I’d have been standing there, not least because I would have been firing a gun. Finally, only leaving one guy to finish me off: why not two, or more?
Maybe it was