15
VENGEANCE MADE MANIFEST
He never puts his bloody tools away,’ Clive the chief electrician complained as he rolled up the heavy red plastic cables and kicked them across the floor. He checked his watch: 7:45 p.m. The place had been deserted since one minute past six. They couldn’t have cleared the decks of the Titanic this quickly, he thought. That was the trouble with the lazy sods that management was hiring these days. No pride in their workmanship. It was a bloody disgrace. It was a matter of principle in Clive’s family to work hard and joylessly until the day you dropped dead.
‘From Essex, isn’t he, your friend?’ said Constantin, his trainee.
‘What’s that got to bloody do with it?’
‘They are all cowboys, the ones from Essex.’
‘What do you know? You’re from bloody Romania.’
‘We are a hardworking people. When you have so little, it makes you work. Your friend has too much, I think.’
‘Can you stop calling him my bloody friend?’ The two electricians were clearing up for the night. The central block of the building that would eventually become the shopping mall now had power. Three of the floors were temporarily lit, dimmed at night for the sake of the council flats opposite. Constantin unplugged the extension cords and carefully set them aside. Clive cut the remaining spotlights, and the floor was suddenly darker than the surrounding land, so that they had to be careful reaching the open staircase to the site exit.
Two hundred and seventy men and women were currently working full-time on the Royal Midland Quadrangle, a retail complex being constructed around a raised concrete platform that would form the centrepiece of the new town to the north of King’s Cross station. Tonight, apart from two security guards, Clive and Constantin were the only workers still left on site.
When Constantin stepped outside and found himself facing the railway embankment, he was aware of another human presence standing nearby. He could feel someone watching him. He scanned the dug-up fields, the park for the earthmovers, the construction-site cabins, but nothing moved in them.
When he turned back to the embankment, it seemed that his worst childhood fear had sprung to life. A great half-human creature rose on its spread haunches against the deepening orange skyline. It slowly raised its glinting antlered head until it seemed to be staring directly at him. The electrician let out a groan of fear and backed away.
‘Hey, Dinu,’ Clive called, using the diminutive version of Constantin’s name, ‘look where you’re going.’ But it was too late. The Romanian boy was so entranced by the creature standing on the ridge of earth before him that he did not remember the newly dug basement at his back, and fell into darkness.
Ten thirty-five p.m. Another night, another party.
Izabella and Piotr had been going out for over three months, and had never slept together. Izabella had no idea what had gone wrong, but they had passed the point where they might have fallen into bed, and had now drifted into a limbo world of friendship. She still fancied him, craved him even, but it was difficult to bring the subject back now that it had gone. She was Polish and smart and thought too much about what boys wanted. He was a dirt-common Russian from the suburbs, weighed down with his father’s new money, and he enjoyed playing the field.
On that night, they too saw the horned man. He was draped in deerskins and wearing metallic stag antlers that shone in the streetlamps. He stood against the low wall of the bridge across the canal, sometimes moving out of sight when a car pulled up at the traffic lights.
They were picking their way over the field from Battlebridge Road to York Way, going for a drink before heading for the Keys club, and the stag-man was handing out flyers; several had been tossed aside and were tumbling away toward the embankment. Izabella had thought nothing of it. So many flyers were handed out, usually at the end of the night. She picked one up and tried to read it in the dim light: a horned skull and some kind of poem. The printing was poor and she could only catch the last four lines.
Long have two springs in dull stagnation slept,
But taught at length by subtle art to flow,
They rise; forth from oblivion’s bed they rise;
And manifest their vengeance to mankind.
What was it advertising, a Goth pub? There was nothing printed on the back. The stag-man was still there when they left the Keys several hours later, and this time his appearance was more memorable, perhaps because he stood out in stark silhouette against the electric darkness. From the way he was weaving about beside the bridge, he appeared to have been drinking.
She recalled thinking that the sky was strange, a sickly ochre reflection of the radiant city beneath. The air was cold and gritty, and left a cuprous tang in the mouth, like being near a steelworks or in the proximity of blood. The night was not right. They had argued over something ridiculous—a spilled drink—and left. A lone girl was tottering ahead of them, fawn-thin legs in a too-short dress. She looked awkward, frozen and friendless, as if, leached of life and colour, she might fall over and expire at any moment.
Izabella was still sniping at Piotr on their way to the night bus stop, a hectoring banter they had evolved when they were feeling frazzled and fractious. She saw the thin girl approaching the bridge from the corner of her eye, saw her long black hair whip up around her dark eyes, and then the stag-man was there as well, towering over her. Backlit by the canal lamps behind the bridge, Izabella saw his antlers glitter and fracture the light. She heard the girl scream or laugh hysterically, but the sound was snatched away by the wind. She watched in shock as he lifted her up, placing her under one arm, and seemed to drop beneath the bridge.
By the time Izabella reached the spot with Piotr, there was no sign of either of them. No ripple on the petrol-iridescent surface of the canal, only the cold breeze from the tunnel and a fading sigh in the trees, as if the pair had evaporated into the thickening mist like a pair of exorcised ghosts.