Till You Drop by Mat Coward
"Trains are fun," said Orlandus, as their otherwise empty carriage clattered down to Kent. "Wish you'd let me bring some beer, though. No buffet car."
Lanto grunted. "Trains are all right," he said. "They're just slow."
"We're not in such a hurry, are we? It's a pleasant day. Not too sunny for you, Cousin, I trust?"
Lanto said nothing. More miles passed.
Orlandus sighed, and put down his newspaper. "All right then," he said. "Tell me. What have you got against stumblers?"
"I have nothing against greymen," Lanto replied, primly.
"You just didn't expect to find one running the Union?" said Orlandus.
"I have nothing against greymen," Lanto repeated. "Nothing. Now please drop the matter."
Orlandus gave up - he had never understood the petty bigotries which divided the Nighthood. We're all monsters, aren't we? he thought, and then went back to his newspaper.
***
"You know that old saying, 'Nothing's too good for the workers'?" Josie's mother asked her on the phone that night.
"Yeah, Dad used to come out with that all the time.
"Well, that's why they won't even let us have nothing at all," said her mother. "Because they reckon it's too good for us."
***
"Is it how you remembered it?" said Orlandus, as they stood outside the station entrance in Tunbridge Wells.
"Not entirely," said Lanto. "I don't suppose I've been here in seventy years. Now it's all roads and cars and - what do you call those things?"
Orlandus followed his cousin's pointing finger. "Charity shops," he said.
"Charity shops," said Lanto. "It used to be very pretty. Very old."
Even older, now, thought Orlandus, but what he said out loud was: "What next? Taxi?"
"We'll walk. It can't be far, this isn't a big town."
"Didn't used to be, you mean," said Orlandus, hurrying to catch up with his friend's longer stride.
Lanto found the Frant Road without difficulty, and they marched up its gradient, until, after many minutes, they arrived at a junction.
"Much further?" said Orlandus. He did not pant - bloodtakers are not prone to breathlessness - but he did think that panting was something he might feel like doing at that moment, if he knew how.
"About two-thirds of the way along this road, I think," Lanto replied. "I dwelled here for a while, once. During the last big war."
"World War Two?"
"That is what the Fearful call it, I believe," Lanto allowed. "With their customary disregard for historical accuracy. It was a large house. Not a mansion, but considerably bigger than the boxes they all inhabit these days, and at that time I had it all to myself."
"I wonder if it's still there? We could call in."
"It isn't," said Lanto, shortly, and it was clear that he considered the subject closed.
In silence they walked onwards along the broad, tree-lined road. On each side, bushes of rhododendron and privet guarded the privacy of houses briefly visible through gravel driveways. The air was light green. Time moved thickly here.
"There's a wood on the other side, a little further down," said Lanto, after a while. "Big. Miles of trees, and ferns and fields. Part of some great private estate. Used to be, I should say, I expect it's all charity shops now. Full of moonhowlers, when I knew it. It was to have been a centre of futile sacrifice if Hitler had invaded. There were tunnels - "
"A centre of what?" Orlandus interrupted.
"What I said: resistance."
"Resistance isn't always futile, Lo," began Orlandus.
Lanto's temper flared in an instant. "Blood of hell, boy! Do you think I don't know that? What do you think we're doing here, tramping round the provinces, looking for a bloody ... looking for a greyman?"
Orlandus had a strong intuition that his cousin had been about to use a vulgar term, a Fearful term, in place of "greyman." This shocked him; not because he himself was a stranger to profane language, but because to hear Lanto utter such words wobbled his view of the world and its ways.
It was time, he decided, for another change of subject. "Is that where we're going? The woods?"
For a few seconds Lanto didn't answer, and Orlandus feared that this was because he couldn't answer, couldn't swallow his anger to clear his throat. But then the older bloodtaker said, "No. We have a house number."
"A house?" said Orlandus. "A greyman in a house?"
"Well," Lanto replied, with an obvious effort to restore a better mood to their fellowship, "this is Royal Tunbridge Wells after all. Very refined town, you know. Brings out the best in people."
Orlandus laughed generously at this - perhaps more generously than was strictly necessary, but in all truth, it was a funny image: a greyman taking elocution lessons, learning to eat with the right knife and fork, studying wine appreciation by correspondence course.
"No," said Lanto, "I don't really imagine we'll find Cousin Ngggg at the house." There was a hint of satire in the mockingly correct way he pronounced Cousin Ngggg that bothered Orlandus.
"Where then? And why the house number?"
"All the houses in this road used to have quite long gardens, which backed onto bushland. There must be one or two of them left. Like this one, for instance."
Lanto had stopped beside a pair of white stone pillars, almost lost amid an untended privet hedge. A short, curved drive led down to a large, yellowing house, with boarded doors and windows partly obscured by rhododendron bushes which had long ago escaped their bournes.
Orlandus approved. "Well spooky," he said.
If the front of the property was unkempt, the back garden was little short of a jungle. As the bloodtakers battled through the grasses and bushes and brambles, thorns ripping at their clothing, flesh and hair, Orlandus asked: "You have some idea what we expect to find here?"
"You know greymen," Lanto replied.
"Only by reputation, really."
"Well," said Lanto, putting his shoulder to what appeared almost a solid wall of some kind of wild vine, and bursting through it into a small hollow beyond, "they tend to live down to their reputation without noticeable effort, in my experience."
They were in a low tunnel, just broad enough for them to stand abreast, its walls and ceiling composed of a variety of densely-packed vegetation. "Let's see where this goes, shall we?" said Lanto.
"I have a feeling you already know."
"Well, we'll soon see."
The soil beneath their feet was quite firm, as if well-trodden. The tunnel slanted downwards slightly, and away from the house; it was more or less straight, though the sight line disappeared in a gentle curve about fifty yards ahead.
Orlandus, though no countryman, became aware of an absence of sounds he would have expected to hear: no birds sang to warn of the cousins' arrival, no creatures large or small disturbed the undergrowth around them. The colours were brown and green, exclusively: there were no flowers of any type.
"This feels right," said Lanto, quietly. "Don't you think?"
"It would feel better," Orlandus whispered back, "if it were a nature programme on television, and we were watching it comfortably at home."
As they rounded the curve, the scene suddenly changed. The tunnel gave way to a brief clearing, which in turn gave way to a thicket of slim, upright plants. There was more light here.
It reminded Orlandus of something; something he'd seen on television, probably. "That's what it is," he said, still whispering, though he wasn't sure why. "A plantation."
Lanto nodded. "Yes, indeed," he said. "Though these canes are not sugar, but bamboo. The next best thing, I suppose, under the circumstances."
Orlandus was about to ask what circumstances Lanto was referring to, when a rhythmic thudding noise, emanating from the midst of the "plantation," silenced him. The noise - their host? - was getting closer. Orlandus waited for Lanto to speak, and only when it became clear that Lanto was not going to do so, did he himself say: "Good Night, Cousin."
A thick, sinewy arm parted the tall grasses. Another moment of stillness slid by, before the arm was followed by a bald, oval head like a lump of beaten clay, a trunk of leg, an expanse of dead-meat torso, another leg - and another arm, the hand of which clutched a huge, rusted axe.
The four eyes of the bloodtakers were at first fixed on the axe, which swung carelessly at the level of the greyman's knees. But slowly, their gaze climbed, to encompass the whole of the being which stood impassively a few feet away.
Its blue-grey, hairless skin was naked except for a ragged loincloth, so close in colour to the flesh it barely covered as to be virtually invisible.
"Do zom- " Orlandus began, then stopped, and started again. "They have two sexes, don't they, like us?"
"It is male," Lanto replied softly, without taking his eyes from the creature's face. "The females are shorter, rarely above six feet."
The greyman stared at his visitors, as they stared at him. His face held no expression; it could not even be said to be blank, for that is, in itself, an expression of a kind. His eyes scarcely counted as eyes: they comprised whites alone - milky, shallow whites, utterly motionless, devoid of lashes. His flattened nose and bunched ears seemed made of the same clay as the head upon which they had been thoughtlessly stuck. His mouth, a short, ragged cut, was tightly furled. And sown shut, with ugly, inexpert stitches.
The axe continued to swing slightly, under its own momentum, but otherwise there was no action in the clearing at all.
"Say something, Lo," said Orlandus. "This is, I presume, who we've been looking for."
"You have already given the greeting," Lanto replied, glancing sideways at his friend. "If the greeting is given and not returned ... I am at a loss."
"Bugger etiquette!" said Orlandus, loudly. "We could be here all - "
"Look!" cried Lanto, but Orlandus had already seen: the greyman's attention was focussed on their lips, his forehead wrinkling.
"Hell's bells," said Lanto. "He's deaf."
Orlandus quickly drew a handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans, and pressed it to his mouth as if to mop up the deeply inappropriate giggles which oozed determinedly from between his clenched lips. "Well," he said finally, "I suppose we're none of us getting any younger."
"Not deaf," said the greyman, his voice somewhere between a grunt and a growl, his sutured mouth jerking with the tortured effort of each syllable. "Not deaf. Hard of hearing." His tone was monotonous, every flat word equidistantly discrete from its predecessor and successor. His lightless eyes looked hard at Orlandus and then at Lanto. "Good Night, Cousins," he said.
"You are Ngggg?" said Lanto. The greyman nodded, once. "I am Lanto. This is my Cousin, Orlandus. We wish you the night."
"And all that is in it," said Ngggg. He uncurled the fingers of his right hand, one after the other, and the axe slid slowly to the ground.
***
Chapter Two
Under fairness-at-work legislation, all days off (including weekends and annual leave) were subject to the exigencies of the business. This was because it would plainly be unfair to go on holiday and leave your colleagues to carry the slack, and it would be unfair to your employer (who had been fair enough to grant you minimum leave) if you took a day off just when he needed you most; and, of course, under global fairness rules, it would be obscenely unfair for, say, European workers to have more holidays than American ones - because we are, after all, all human, all equal, and nobody deserves more than anyone else.
A feminist Cabinet minister had also pointed out that days off were unfair to women, since women tended to spend them carrying out domestic duties, so that keeping women at work was the fairest way of liberating them from sexist expectations in the home.
This meant that although, in theory, Josie was legally entitled to a minimum number of rest days per month, and a minimum number of days holiday per year, in practice she had had three complete days off in the last seven months. And she was still doing better than many people she knew.
Which meant that although she realised that what was happening at Aloon's with the Restart victims was weird, horrible and bizarre - and significant, of course - it was a realisation that she only really had room for in the background of her mind. It was a realisation confined to smoke breaks and pee breaks and the commute. It wasn't something she had time - amid work, and domestic duties, and all the rest - to actually think about. The guilt that nagged her for not finding time to think about it, itself just took up time she might have spent thinking about it. But then, that was the way these things worked.
***
"Not quite what you're used to, Cousins, I'm sure," said Ngggg. "But it suits me."
The greyman's hut, hidden deep within the deep bamboo thicket, was crudely made of stacked logs, with a brushwood door and only the occasional, random gap in its ceiling and walls to provide illumination. It was unfurnished; the two bloodtakers sat cross-legged on the mud floor, while Ngggg stood, very still, in the shadow of one corner.
"We are city-dwellers, Cousin," said Orlandus. "The simple tranquillity of the country is, as you say, unfamiliar to us. But we are most grateful to you for your hospitality."
His host grunted, and looked at Lanto, who had been silent since their first meeting. "We do not eat, we do not drink, we do not seek company, we do not sit, and we lie down only when we are no longer able to stand. If this is hospitality, you are welcome to it."
Orlandus waited for his two Cousins to break their eye-lock; waited for the conversation to begin; waited for the meeting's shape to emerge. And then he grew tired of waiting, and spoke again. "Cousin Ngggg," he began, and the greyman's scrutiny returned to the young bloodtaker's lips. "We are here about the Union."
"The Union," said Ngggg.
"The Monsters’ Union, that is," said Orlandus. "We hope that you might - "
"The International Brotherhood of Fright and Dread," Ngggg intoned, in his rumbling deadpan.
This time, Orlandus did not attempt to hide his amusement. "The Brotherhood of what?" he laughed.
"Ah," said the greyman. "You possess a sense of the ridiculous." He did not add So unusual in one of your kind, but the words filled the cramped hut even so.
Lanto stirred, and shifted his legs beneath him - not for comfort, but to attract Ngggg's attention. "I have never heard that name before, Cousin," he said. "It strikes me that I - that both of us, most of us - know so little of the Union's history. If it would not impose unduly on your generosity - "
"You wish to hear the story of the Monsters’ Union," said Ngggg. "Very well. You have come far; you have delivered the greeting. You are entitled." The greyman stared now at a point above and beyond their heads, his milky eyes seeming to grow milkier still. And he began the telling.
"There was a time, while the century before last was still young and full of plans, when the landless majority of the Fearful began to organise themselves into great combinations of toiling men and women, for mutual advancement and protection."
On hearing this sonorous introduction, Orlandus resigned himself to enduring a long narrative. He wondered briefly if he might light a cigarette; but decided that the combination of fire, greyman, and enclosed space might not be an entirely enjoyable one.
"And it was at this time, too," Ngggg continued, "that the International Brotherhood was created. Though it was never a brotherhood, other than in name, and was international chiefly in the sense that the Nighthood has never taken much notice of states and their wandering boundaries. While, in this industrial age, the unions of the Fearful arose from the necessary solidarity of a dispossessed class, the union of monsters took its inspiration from an earlier model. The Brotherhood was founded by your own kind, Cousins, for their own purposes. It was - and was always intended to be - not
"I suspected as much," said Lanto, suddenly. He looked hard into the greyman's eyes. "I hope you will believe me, Cousin, when I tell you that I feared as much."
Ngggg stared intently back for a long moment, and then, apparently having arrived at a decision, slowly shrugged his great, grey shoulders. "If that is what you say, Cousin Lanto, then that is what I hear. My words are bitter; my heart is not."
Is that what all this has been about? thought Orlandus, looking from one to the other. All this prickly formality, the staring contests, the snide hints?
Aloud, he said: "I am young, Cousin Ngggg, and, through my own dilatoriness, ill-versed. I wish to be sure I understand this now. Are you saying that the bloodtakers of that generation formed the Monsters’ Union because - well, in a spirit not of unity, but of 'We are all monsters, but some are more monster than others'?"
The greyman clapped his dead hands together, once, twice, three times. It took Orlandus a few seconds to realise that this was not an ironic gesture, but rather the method by which a creature with a sown-shut mouth expresses laughter.
"Ill-versed you may be, Little Cousin, but not lacking in wit. You describe the matter succinctly; and, it must be said, with considerably more candour than your forefathers. There was never unity in this union. Flappers against stumblers; man-mades against shitters - moonhowlers, that is, Little Cousin, so-called for the filth that mats in the long hair around their arses."
Orlandus nodded his understanding. Lanto stiffened a little at the offensive language, but saw its purpose was not malicious, and remained silent.
"The bloodtakers of that time," said Ngggg, "those who established the Brotherhood, considered themselves, as Cousin Orlandus has said, to be true monsters. True fear-givers ... unlike the rest of us. What is so frightening, after all, about a zombie, a stumbler? A coarse, slow, shambling miscreation. Scarcely a monster at all, closer kin to the Fearful's beasts of burden than to the elite of the Nighthood. They formed their union, not to forge from their cousins a single blade - but to protect their craft from the pollution of inferior creatures."
In the brief quiet that then fell, Lanto stood and placed one hand on the greyman's stone-like forearm. "That is not our view," he said, solemnly. "You have told us of the past, but those of the past do not speak for your Cousins here in this place, now."