Chapter Text
I’m so sick of this.
Those were the words looping through Tim’s head as the train chuntered from Clapham Junction to Croydon, bound for an abandoned shopping centre where – according to a statement Martin had unearthed – someone had dropped a Leitner belonging to the Circus.
Another day. Another tedious nightmare.
He might get to smash a window this time, at least. Blow off a little steam.
I’m so sick of this.
That was what Gerard hissed under his breath as he jimmied the lock on the maintenance door. It was the fifth sketchy break-in he’d been sent on in as many weeks, and like the four that came before it, he expected to find nothing here. He didn’t know if it was the erratic nature of her binding, giving her some sort of spiritual dementia, or if it was sheer desperation, but his mum seemed to be losing her touch when it came to sniffing out leads.
Her barbs weren’t losing their sting, though. Nor was her slap. So here he was.
The door came open with a pop, shedding flakes of rust. Inside, newspapers whispered on the floor, excited by the fresh current of air. He slipped through the gap he’d made and drew it shut behind him. Here went
nothing
prepared Tim for the state the shopping centre was in.
Some of it was normal. Orange plastic buckets had been set out to collect drips, long-overflowing now. The public loos had been fenced off with caution tape. A rat made a break from the shelter of an old Krispy Kreme counter as he passed by, its brown body shooting out across the grubby white expanse of tile and disappearing into what had once been an HMV.
The rest was distinctly less normal. Plastic garden chairs, the kind with easily-snappable legs, had been arranged in random concentric circles, facing nothing. Mannequins had been left – or had perhaps left themselves – where there shouldn’t have been mannequins. Two of them were locked in an approximation of a hug on the picnic benches. One, hunched over an old, dry drinking fountain. A stiff white hand saluted from inside a gachapon by the lifts. Puddles of melted silly-string were dotted all over, like radioactive waste, untouched by any of the feral animals living here, and faded flyers had been plastered everywhere – literally everywhere – on every shopfront, every pillar. All of them advertising the Circus of the Other.
Tim took it all in with contempt and rolled his
eyes
on the shadows, Gerard picked his way through an abandoned clothing outlet, using the clothing rails for cover. There were still clothes hanging from them, limp and musty and moth-eaten now, though they would have been fine when the shop first closed. A stupid waste, he thought, of money, of time.
Just like this was a waste of his time.
He knew where the Leitner was supposed to be. One floor up, in the kids’ soft-play area, because naturally. It would be quicker and easier for him to just stroll up there, forego all the sneaking around, but he had to take these stupid precautions because he knew from prior fuckups that the one time he didn’t would be the time he got the shit kicked out of him.
Once he’d made it through the clothing outlet, things got trickier. He needed to get to the escalators, but there was no cover between here and there: just a stretch of tile, lit white by the skylight above. (To say nothing for the escalators themselves: great hulking towers of vulnerability.) He crouched behind a stack of shopping baskets and studied the terrain, watching for signs of movement, of threat. He’d just have to book it, he knew. But he didn’t want to. Not when there were so many mannequins around.
He almost flinched when he heard footfalls, ringing out across the wide empty space. Someone was walking, walking recklessly, and not just walking but
whistling
calmed Tim’s nerves as he made his way towards the escalators. They weren’t moving, and clearly weren’t operational anymore; rust had crept into the grooves of each sharp step. He ascended at a bound, clanks echoing out across the expanse. He didn’t care about making noise. Six months ago, he would have, maybe. But he found it harder and harder to care about things, these days. Least of all what happened to him. The only thing keeping him going was the Circus – the itch for revenge – but if something took him out before he scratched that itch…
Well. Either way, the itching would stop.
Upstairs was the food court, where the bulk of the restaurants were congregated. Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Five Guys, Chopstix – all of them shuttered, pasted over with those fucking flyers. Martin’s statement had suggested he would find what he was after in the soft-play area. Specifically the ball pit, which might not have a bottom. Don’t actually go into the ball pit, Tim, Martin had warned him. Not everyone comes back out.
He was already planning on ignoring that advice. How he was meant to fish a Leitner out without doing some diving, he didn’t know. He would just have to risk it.
As he approached, he ceased his whistling. And froze. Someone else was
there
had, thankfully, been an emergency stairwell across the way, which had granted Gerard passage up to the food court without using the escalators. If he had been wary of them before – when he’d thought himself the only trespasser on-site – his reservations had quadrupled at the arrival of the man with the Hawaiian shirt. He hadn’t – from Gerard’s vantage point in the clothing outlet – looked like an avatar, though one could never be too sure. More likely, he was here for the Leitner as well. Whatever the case, he wasn’t a friend.
Quietly, he’d crept round to the door by the lifts that indicated the stairs. Once he was through, he sprinted up them. They let him out right next to the soft-play area, which was lucky. Now that there was a rival Leitner hunter in the building, he needed to be fast.
He cast about. It didn’t take long to spot the colourful shirt. The man had stopped by the escalators, and was staring at him from thirty paces off, his cheerful whistling veneer all gone. He stared back, shifting to stand at an angle that made obvious the glint of the hunting knife at his belt. He didn’t like to intimidate people, but sometimes that was the only thing for it. He just had to hope it was
enough
had happened to Tim since his start at the Magnus Institute that the sight of a stranger with a knife didn’t rattle him as much as it should have. He was a tall man, thin and scruffy, with a dark shock of dyed hair and a long leather coat that made him look like he’d taken a wrong turn out of a ‘90s vampire flick. Possibly, he was an urbexer, here to take artsy photos of the abandoned shopping centre. But Tim didn’t think so. When he squinted, he saw a tattooed eye in the hollow of the stranger’s throat and his suspicions were confirmed: this was Gerard Keay.
There was a thrill in the realisation. He had come here chasing leads down his own research rabbit hole, and now here he was, face-to-face with Jon’s white whale. Jon had spoken about Gerard so much over the years – and with such zeal – that when they’d been on better terms, Tim had teased him about having a crush. He still thought that might be the case.
“Now, I know you’re not that smart,” Gerard said laconically, “charging up here, making all that noise. But if you know what’s good for you, then you’ll piss off.”
His voice was less gruff than Tim had expected it to be. But just as condescending.
“Or what?” he asked, taking a step closer.
Gerard sighed. “Or I’ll kick your teeth in.”
He didn’t look like he was gearing up to kick someone’s teeth in. He was pinching the bridge of his nose, for a start, like he was nursing the beginning of a headache. He looked as put-upon as Jon did when one of them jammed the copier. Thinking about Jon, in this moment, made Tim’s blood feel hot.
It had been months, now, since they’d had a conversation that hadn’t devolved into a fight. Tim avoided the archives as much as his predicament allowed, keeping his hours short and his conversations with his colleagues shorter. But he’d come here figuring Jon would want a statement afterwards, there being a supposed Leitner and all. The price of finding what he needed.
Now, in a vindictive way, he was glad. He wanted to see Jon’s face when he told him he had met his special interest and punched his lights
out
of habit, Gerard had learned to stand with his legs a shoulder-width apart; the best posture for staying up in the face of a sudden attack. But he hadn’t actually been expecting this man to attack him. The rugby-tackle caught him round the waist and sent them both into the ball pit.
Mary had warned him not to go into the ball pit.
Plastic cracked under him, horribly soft, with lots of give. He grabbed a handful of Hawaiian shirt and yanked it back, trying to leverage the guy off before they both started to sink. He needed to warn him: this wasn’t a normal children’s play area. The pit here was bottomless. A rare spot where the Stranger and the Buried intersected. Bones had been found here. Bones and worse.
But there was no chance to talk as Hawaiian Shirt wrestled him down. Before he knew what was what, his left hand was pinned to his side by a knee – which trapped his knife as well – and there were hands at his throat, driving him deeper. Brightly-coloured plastic balls crowded his vision, their smell dusty. He couldn’t see a fucking thing.
He couldn’t breathe, either.
Blindly, he tried for the guy’s face. His fingers grazed a nose and searched for eyes they could claw at, but Hawaiian Shirt reared back, turned his head, just out of reach. For a moment, panic rose up in his chest like a bubble trapped by the squeezing pressure on his windpipe. He thrashed, catching at the guy’s shirt collar. But then his brain switched back on and he remembered what you did when someone had you by the throat.
He found the guy’s hands, laced tight, pressing. Scrabbled at them until he pried away a finger. Just one. It wasn’t enough to break the grip, yet. But it would be.
With all his strength, he wrenched it
back
when he had worked in Research, Tim had liked to imagine himself as the protagonist of an action movie. Their work lent itself to the fantasy, sort of: Sasha at her desk, finagling her way into systems she wasn’t supposed to access, and him in the field, saying the right things to the right person so they would open the right door. They were like a little heist crew, him, Sasha and Jon. Jon was the moody one they would relegate to the getaway van, passing them instructions and heads-ups through crackling radio static. Sasha would trick her way into an IT area and upload some crazy virus that disabled the alarms. “I’m in.” On Sasha’s signal, he would descend from a skylight like a cat burglar and usually this was the part of the spiel where Jon would smack him with a Manila folder and tell him to finish the statement follow-up he’d promised to send over that morning.
Now Sasha was gone and Jon was slipping too, and he didn’t think he knew himself anymore, either. In all those dumb heist movie fantasies, he had been the good guy. They had all been the good guys. The ones who stopped the conglomerates, repatriated the jewels.
Now he was strangling someone in a ball pit over a fucking book.
And the worst part was, he couldn’t not – because if he didn’t make it away with the Leitner, Gerard would, and Gerard would give it to Mary, and their problems with the Circus would get a whole lot more complicated. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but there was no option where you didn’t hurt anyone. Not in this world. Not anymore.
It was almost a relief when Gerard broke his hand. He felt like he was outside of his body for a moment, only half-able to feel it as he curled in on himself, gasping curses. He fell onto his side in the ball pit – he thought he’d been closer to the edge of it, but apparently not – and the balls rushed in to cradle his body and it would’ve all been kind of funny if he weren’t so desperately, impotently furious.
“—have to get out,” he heard Gerard half-yell.
A hand found his shoulder. Instinctually, he threw a punch. It was his right hand that was broken, leaving only the weaker left to swing with. He missed. Gerard caught his wrist and twisted it until he felt the bones shriek.
“Let go of me, you fuck—”
“Come on, then! Get up! We have to get out!”
With Gerard still holding him half-bent back in a wrist lock, he found his feet, and they sloshed and staggered to the edge of the ball pit. The balls went up to their thighs now, though they should barely have been knee-deep. Underfoot, Tim felt the ground shifting. But of course, it wasn’t ground, really. Just more balls. Martin had been right. He tried to stay upright: a mean feat when he was also trying not to move in a way that snapped his wrist, his already-broken hand dangling useless at his side.
They almost made it. Almost.
But then he saw it. They both saw it, at the same
time
seemed to slow down when Gerard spotted the page sticking up like a flag from the middle of the ball pit. The Leitner – the one that made this whole place into Stranger territory – looked, as many Leitners did, completely ordinary. A scuffed paperback that might have been bought from a WHSmith and passed around six or seven charity shops before it found its way here. Hawaiian Shirt had seen it, too. It didn’t look like it was far away from them. Four or five wading steps, at most. But dimensions didn’t work right in the ball pit, Mary had explained. You could get halfway to the book and it would still look just as far, while the way out shrank into the distance behind you.
He cut a glance at Hawaiian Shirt, trying to wordlessly convey, don’t you dare be that stupid.
But Hawaiian Shirt was that stupid. Even with his wrist in a lock, his only good hand broken.
He acted well, crawling out of the pit with Gerard’s help and flopping down on the other side in visible relief. He even offered Gerard his good hand, which Gerard had had to let out of the lock in order to haul himself up onto the ledge. But then, as Gerard was just climbing over, he used that hand to yank on Gerard’s arm and send him stumbling, jaw-first into a nearby table.
He tasted
blood
left a red smudge on the metal table-edge where Gerard’s face collided with it. Tim saw the bright firework burst and didn’t linger to assess the damage, turning and flinging himself into the ball pit before his opponent could stagger up and stop him.
He felt guilty, but there wasn’t time for that.
What mattered was the book.
It was just ahead of him, half-submerged in plastic
balls
rolled loose across the floor, taunting Gerard as he clutched his jaw and swore. He hadn’t lost a tooth – he’d been lucky – but he’d bitten through his lip and possibly broken his nose. His mouth was all liquid inside, welling up. He spat red flecks and turned – too late. Hawaiian Shirt had gone.
Fuck.
He could cut his losses. Mary would be furious with him for losing the Leitner – she always was – but she would see his busted face and know, at least, that he had tried. The smart thing to do right now would be to turn and leave. Let this stupid man drown in the ball pit; let the Stranger hollow him out and make him into one of its shells. It served him right, for tackling this whole thing like a moron. Of course, there was a chance Hawaiian Shirt would survive. If he made it out with the Leitner – if he changed because of the Leitner – that would spell a lot of shit. But it wasn’t Gerard’s problem. Not his monkey, not his circus. He should go. Let Mary knock him about a little. Put some ice on it, move on.
He didn’t, though. His legs wouldn’t carry him back towards the fire escape. He didn’t know whether it was compassion that made him stay – for this stupid reckless man he didn’t know – or cowardice, at the thought of what Mary would do if he came back empty-handed. Not that it mattered.
He spat another mouthful of blood. Wiped his stinging face on his shirt. Climbed back up on the ledge, swaying. A better-prepared Gerard would have brought rope with him on this trip. Something he could tie around his waist, use as an anchor. But he hadn’t brought a rope, and while there was probably a sporting goods shop somewhere on the lower floor, he didn’t know where to find it. There was no time to wait. Hawaiian Shirt was almost
submerged
up to his shoulders in the ball pit, his broken finger shooting pain along his arm, it occurred to Tim that he might actually die today. The thought came abstractly, as he watched the white page in the distance flutter out of view. He might die today. In a ball pit.
He and Sasha would’ve laughed at this, he thought, if they’d read it in a statement back in the day. He couldn’t remember her face anymore. Her voice. But he had a sense. He hoped it was a real one.
If he did die here, he realised, there wouldn’t be a statement on it for anyone to laugh at. There was no-one here to give one except Gerard, who never had before – so far as Jon had found – and Gerard had no reason to start now. He might die in this ball pit. Probably would. And it would go unrecorded.
But then – he thought with a small laugh – so what?
Jon wouldn’t give a shit. Or maybe he would, but not in any way that mattered; it wouldn’t change anything for anyone; it would only make him wriggle harder in the web. Elias might get a chuckle out of this, but he probably Knew what was happening already – he didn’t have to read about it.
All considered… it might actually be better this way. At least it would be private.
He stopped struggling as the swell of plastic balls rose to devour him. Maybe it worked like quicksand. Maybe it would stop. Maybe it wouldn’t – did it matter? He’d gone into this knowing he wouldn’t be careful. Apathy was a heavy, prickling feeling, like pins-and-needles in a limb: it weighed him down; it stopped his legs from kicking. He leant in.
The ceiling of the children’s play area had been painted a dingy mustard-yellow, flaking now; while he waited to die or not die, he stared up at it and made Rorschach patterns in the flakes.
There was no
fear