The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘Terms like “supplanted” don’t fit. Or “anathema”.’

‘Couple clever words don’t make it a work of genius. They could have been copied straight out of something.’

‘Every single apostrophe is in the right place, Bobby. Plenty of people out there who’d take this as the word of God. Militia guys, for a start. Could even be them behind it.’

He laughed. ‘I doubt that. You know what they’re like. Grey-haired vets and kids who’ve seen so many straight-to-videos about ’Nam they half-believe they were there, too. They build a camp in the woods and polish their hardware and fight over the womenfolk.’

‘Not all of these people are cavemen. Or stupid.’

‘Of course not. But we’re talking guys who devour Soldier of Fortune cover to cover and buy books telling you how to cook napalm and build man-traps in your backyard. People who took a bath over hoarding supplies for the millennium – and were actually disappointed when it all came to nothing and civilization shambled on. They put on fatigues and yack up how the world’s gone to shit and the Jews and the Hispanics are to blame, not to mention Capitol Hill and Saddam Hussein. You’d be better off worrying about the blacks in the inner cities, like the guy says. The homeboys are really pissed, and some of those fly motherfuckers have whacked someone before they’ve been laid.’

‘It’s the same thing. People who’ve never felt part of any community except the one that’s small enough that they know everybody by name.’

‘You’re making me weep, Ward.’

‘Fuck you. You put your trust in a country, love it as much as it tells you to, and then you find out it was just a stroke to keep you quiet and what it really meant was “Anyone can have everything, apart from you guys. When it comes to you, we didn’t mean it.” It’s cultural abuse. How are you going to react to that?’

‘Okay, Ward. There’s genuine sentiment there and the overall IQ probably isn’t much lower than in the House of fucking Representatives, and I’ll admit that some of them have sometimes got a point. What I sure as hell don’t believe is that they coordinate. Most of these outfits have trouble keeping thirty people pointed in the same direction, never mind agreeing aims and objectives with some other group – much less groups – living hundreds or thousands of miles away. Maybe out there in the big bad world. But not here.’

‘Before the Internet,’ I said.

‘There’s stuff there,’ he admitted. ‘Enough manifested psychosis to blow the mind of every therapist in the country. Hate groups, end-of-the-worlders, the illuminati burning effigies of owls in Bohemia Grove – and the face on Mars is a missile base for social control and the nukes are all pointing right at you. But I spend my entire time looking at that shit and trust me – any worldwide movement ain’t run by these guys. These people hate everybody who isn’t them. Put them in a room together and they’d just combust.’

‘You can’t find every file on every server,’ I said. ‘You only see what’s been left to be found. There could be some whole other Web, using the same computers and the same phone lines and hard disks, full of killers and killing and a plan for the future – and unless you knew where to look, you wouldn’t even find the contents page.’ Bobby rolled his eyes, irritating me. ‘Fucking listen to me. That’s what we’re like. Don’t you know that? Academics created the Net in their spare time so they could trade facts and while away tenure in role-playing Star Trek. Next thing you know you can’t log on without people spamming you to death and every shoeshine concession has its own domain. Even before that it’s wall-to-wall pornography and ordinary men and women sitting in darkened rooms writing each other about how they’d like to dress up like Shirley Temple and be whipped until they bleed. That’s what the Net will become – a way of hiding behind anonymity so you can stop pretending you’re Mr and Mrs Good Neighbour and be how you really are: so we can stop pretending we give a shit about some global village when our Christmas-card lists are about the size of a small prehistoric tribe and we feel like cutting half of them.’

‘Nice to see someone so proud of his fellow earthlings. You sound like you’re ready to join the cause.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Ward, this could be just some guy out on his own weird limb.’

‘Bullshit. We got here from a bookmark on the computer of a man who shot a few minutes of video in which he referred to “The Straw Men”. That man and his wife are dead, along with someone they knew a long time ago. A threat sent to the place shown in the video caused a house and a hotel to be bombed less than two hours later. Christ, even the architecture of The Halls fits in. They’re making million-dollar caves for hunter-gatherers.’

‘Okay,’ Bobby said, holding his hands up. ‘I hear what you’re saying. So what now?’

‘We’ve found this. What are we supposed to do next? There are no links, no email address, nothing. What’s the point of this thing, unless it leads somewhere?’

Bobby turned the laptop towards him and pressed a key combination. The screen changed to a view that revealed the page’s naked HTML, the hidden multiplatform Web language used to display the page to whatever kind of operating system tried to access it. He scrolled slowly down through the lines.

Then he stopped. ‘Hang on.’

He toggled the view back to normal again, and flipped down to the very end of the document. ‘Okay,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘It’s not much, but there’s something.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘You see anything there? Below the text?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Because there is something. A few words, but they’ve been set to appear exactly the same colour as the background. You’re only going to know they’re there if you look at the code or print it out.’

‘If this strikes some kind of chord, in other words. So what are the words?’

He flipped to HTML again, and selected a short section right at the bottom. Hidden amongst the gibberish was:

font colour=“#339966”

The Upright Man

/font

‘The Upright Man,’ I said. ‘Who the hell is that?’

Part 3 (#ulink_af5e30e8-2c53-50d6-80a2-13b4e7757b12)

History is on our heels,

following us like our shadows, like death.

Marc Augé

Non-places: Introduction toan Anthropology of Supermodernity

Chapter 22 (#ulink_4d9c9868-9588-5d30-b41b-14cc3ee3f608)

Sarah didn’t remember the first time she thought she’d heard him. A day or two ago, maybe. He was coming slowly, biding his time. He’d come in the night before, she believed, fading away again as soon as he knew that she’d realized something was afoot. She’d wondered if she might be sensing him during the day, too, but back then her head had been clearer and she’d been able to convince herself that she was just being fanciful. Then late one afternoon she heard him above her, and she knew that if he was coming in the daytime then things had to be getting worse.

The psycho had visited a couple of hours before it happened. He had talked for quite a long time. He had just talked and talked and talked. Some of it was about scavenging. Some of it was about a plague. Some of it was about some place called Castenedolo in Italy, which sounded like a place you’d go on holiday and drink nice drinks and maybe have some food like spaghetti or salami or steak or squid or soup but obviously wasn’t. Instead it was a place where they’d found some guy buried and where he was found proved he was made out of Plasticine or Pliocene and at least two million years old and what did she think of that?

Sarah didn’t really think much about it either way. She tried very hard to concentrate on what she was being told but over the last day or so had started to feel very ill for much of the time. She had given up asking for food, and wasn’t especially hungry any more. She just made noises, little grunting sounds, when the man stopped talking for long enough that it seemed like he was expecting something of her. In general she thought his methods of instruction, if that was what they were supposed to be, were probably quite effective – and something her teachers at school could benefit from. Half her friends never seemed to learn anything, but regarded school as something halfway between a social club and a catwalk. Boarding them up under a floor and just talking at them for ever, she thought, might rearrange their priorities. Could be that all that Spanish vocab would just slip right in. Maybe she’d get Mom to suggest it at the next PTA. But really you had to be given something to eat every now and then or you stopped being able to pay attention.

He waited patiently while she went through a coughing fit that seemed to last about an hour. And then he started talking again. This time it was about Stonehenge and so she listened for a while, because Stonehenge was in England and though they hadn’t gone there she knew she liked England. England was cool and it had good bands. But when he started on how Stonehenge was only partly an observatory, and mainly a map of human DNA as it was supposed to be, she allowed her attention to drift.

At the end he gave her some more water. The phase during which she had rejected it hadn’t lasted very long. Even if she had wished to keep up the defiance, her body simply wouldn’t have allowed it. On the third occasion her mouth had opened without her mind having anything to do with it. The water tasted clean and pure and good. She remembered that once it had tasted different from what she was used to. That had been a long time ago.

‘Good girl,’ the man had said. ‘See – you’re not being badly treated. I could have pissed on you then and you’d still have had to drink it. Listen to your body. Listen to what’s inside.’

‘There’s nothing inside,’ she croaked. And then, for the last time, she had pleaded with him: ‘Please. Anything. Even just vegetables. Carrots or cabbage or capers.’

‘Still you ask?’

‘Please,’ she said, her temples feeling as if they were turning to mist. ‘I don’t feel well and you have to feed me or I’m going to die.’

‘You’re persistent,’ he said. ‘It’s the one thing that still gives me hope.’ He hadn’t explicitly denied the request, simply talked about vegetarianism, explaining how it was wrong because human beings had omnivorous dentition and how not eating meat was a result of people spending too much time in their minds, which were infected, and not enough listening to their bodies. Sarah let him drone on. Whatever. Personally, vegetarians bugged her, too, mainly because the ones she knew seemed so superior, like Yasmin Di Planu, who made a big fuss about animal rights the whole time but had the finest collection of shoes in the whole school, the vast majority of them made out of things that had once been able to move about under their own steam and not just because they were strapped around her pretty little feet.

After he’d let her drink this time, he replaced the cover again and went away. During the following two hours Sarah had been completely lucid, which was one of the things that worried her about what had happened next. She knew she had been lucid because she had been thinking about escaping. Not thinking about actually doing it. She seldom imagined that any more, although for a while it had occupied most of her waking thoughts. At first she had pictured suddenly finding the strength to burst up from beneath the floor, like some person who’d been buried too soon and was real pissed at everyone. Then it had been the idea of talking to the man, charming him – she was charming, she knew that; there were boys at school, had been boys, who hung on her every word, not to mention the waiter in the Broadway Deli they’d had one time who came back to the table to check on them, like, far more often than had been strictly necessary, and on this occasion, for once, it hadn’t been Sian Williams’s attention that one of the penis people was trying to catch – or discussing it rationally with him, or finally even just ordering him to let her out. Each of these had been tried and proved laughably ineffective. In the end it had been fantasies of her father just coming and finding her. She still thought about this sometimes, but not as often as she once had.

Anyway, then she had heard something coming into the room above her. At first she thought it was the man, but then she realized it could not be. It had far too many feet. These feet had walked round and round the room and crisscrossed back and forth directly over her head. Then they had stopped directly above her. There had been sounds like laughter, high-pitched sometimes, but also deep and ragged. It moved back and forth for a while, making unpleasant noises, like grunting and a strange bark, and bits of its body had thudded and other parts had slid with a kind of heavy rasp. Finally a moan, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from just one throat, but from several at once, as if the creature had more than one mouth.

It had been still for a while after that, and then it had gone.

Sarah lay with her eyes wide open. This, she knew, was a bad development. Very bad. That had not been the man, or if it had, then he had changed into something. The thing she had heard was what she had most feared, and now it had come in daylight and was no longer biding its time. There could be no doubt.

It had to have been Nokkon Wud himself.

Chapter 23 (#ulink_a03cb805-c14b-594e-992f-54d78f1cb6fb)