The Clown Service Read online

  ‘And he lives a couple of doors away from one of your agents?’

  Shining smiled. ‘I was the one who handled his defection. When I saw the flat was on the market I requisitioned it. Makes it easier to keep an eye on him – two birds with one train ticket. Why waste shoe-leather?’

  Shining knocked on the door of number sixty-three. It was opened in no time at all by a man in the most exceptionally bright floral dress Toby had ever seen.

  ‘My God,’ the man shouted, ‘you took your time!’

  He stepped back inside to let them both in.

  ‘Keith,’ said Shining, throwing a random cover name at Toby, ‘this is Alasdair – white witch, music blogger and the best female impersonator north of the river.’

  From this angle, Toby had a definite issue with that bold claim but he was willing to accept that maybe Alasdair was having an off day. Certainly he was stressed beyond words.

  ‘Oh, Tim, I’ve been climbing up the walls. He’s been unconscious for hours,’ Alasdair was saying. ‘I popped my head in this morning to find him out for the count in a lump behind the sofa. The cat’s beside herself.’

  The flat was dark and cosy, filled with wood and red fabric, the sort of place Edwardians liked to read improving books in.

  They walked straight into the kitchen where Alasdair began wrestling with a kettle in an attempt to beat some drinks out of it. The kettle stood fast.

  The kitchen cupboards were covered in small blackboards with scribbled grocery lists, doodles and threats to cut off tuna supply to the cat unless ‘it learned to keep a civil tongue in its pernicious head’.

  ‘Look!’ said Alasdair, taking a breather from the arduous battle with the kettle. ‘He left me a message at some point in the night, God knows when – he gets up at all hours, wandering around the place like a burglar. Though there’s nothing worth stealing unless you like Cava and Dorothy L. Sayers paperbacks.’ He grabbed hold of the worktop and sighed, a sudden burst of stressed panic dissipating into genuine fear and despair. ‘I can’t bear it,’ he said quietly. ‘Every time this happens I think he’s never coming back and it tears the very fucking heart out of me.’

  Toby looked at a chalk-written message: ‘Gone fishing. Call Tim if I’m not back by the time you get here.’

  Shining put a gentle hand on Alasdair’s shoulder. ‘Leave it to us,’ he said. ‘Tea for four in five minutes. I’ve never let you down yet.’

  Alasdair nodded and Shining gestured for Toby to follow him into the lounge.

  ‘Tim?’ Toby asked. ‘Keith?’

  ‘Oh, you know what it’s like with names in this business,’ said Shining.

  The lounge was a room filled with books and the ghosts of winter fires. A large sofa weighed down with shed cat hair and cushions that had given up the fight was pulled out at an angle. On the floorboards behind it lay a man who might have been dead. His bearded face was slack, mouth open and eyes half-hooded.

  Toby felt they needed to call for help – a doctor, an ambulance, people who knew what you did with someone who had collapsed. Instead he was guided to sit on the floor on one side of the fallen man, while Shining, with the first concession to his age Toby had seen, threw down a cushion and lowered himself on to it.

  Toby reached for the fallen man but Shining held out a hand to stop him. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Jamie has a special skill and I need to explain it to you before we begin. You won’t believe it, not until you experience it, but you need to know nonetheless.’

  The old man straightened his legs as much as the limited space would allow. ‘Jamie is skilled in Astral Projection, which means he sends his consciousness out into a place that is not quite our world. A place that lies just above it. In that state he is open to things: signals, knowledge, impressions that we could not experience here in the hubbub and noise of the real world. Quite simply, he is the best Listener on the books.’

  Toby fought the urge to comment. Shining had been right: he didn’t believe what he was being told. After all, you could not simply leave your body and travel elsewhere. Not really. You could dream. And perhaps you could fool yourself into thinking you were doing something more. Something magical. God, Toby wondered, is this bloke having a seizure while we just look on? Again he began to panic. They had to be doing something more constructive than this. He nearly insisted as much but Shining was talking again.

  ‘More than that,’ he was saying, ‘Jamie can share that journey. He can bring someone else with him. And sometimes that’s what you have to do to get him back. Because the Astral Plane is a dangerous and disorientating place. It’s a shadow of our world and there are things in there, unnerving things, that will do their best to waylay travellers.’

  ‘Things?’ Toby was struggling terribly now. The natural authority that Shining had held over him, the sense that he was not as mad as his beliefs would suggest … was rapidly diminishing. His words were too momentous for Toby to swallow.

  ‘Bad things,’ Shining said. ‘But no more than we can handle. Now take his hand.’

  Toby reached forward and did so, Shining taking the other.

  And then they were somewhere else entirely.

  f) Astral Plane, Another London

  They were still sat in the flat, but Toby knew he had moved. It wasn’t just the light, as tangibly different as England had felt after his months in the Middle East, but also the smell, or more precisely the lack of it. Perhaps you only become truly aware of your senses when you lose them. The smell of soft furnishings, old books and dust, the ash of the fire grate, the faint tang of disinfectant and the lingering odours of last night’s meal. A tapestry of smells that had clung to the flat, now all gone. The air was empty.

  There was no noise either, no distant traffic, no clattering of Alasdair preparing tea in the kitchen.

  This was a place where there was nothing. Nothing but the images of familiar things, washed out and turned grey by the light that fell weakly through a window that must look out on another country entirely. A country that, despite all his travels, Toby knew he had never set foot in.

  ‘Can you feel the shift?’ Shining asked. ‘The change in plane?’

  The panic that had been a constant companion to Toby over the last few weeks – perhaps, if he was honest, years – returned in full. He was being forced to accept things he could not understand. All his control stripped away. It terrified him.

  He let go of Jamie Goss’ hand and suddenly felt the real world crash back in on him. The sounds and smells had come back tripled after their momentary absence, and he was hit by the abrasive nature of a reality he had always previously taken for granted.

  Toby began to hyperventilate and struggled to get to his feet. His heels slipped on the floorboards and he fell backwards, his head colliding with the bookcase and knocking a handful of John Dickson Carr mysteries down onto him.

  ‘No…’ he gasped through the panicked loss of breath. ‘… Concussion. Something wrong.’

  Shining was there, his hands placed gently on Toby’s shoulders, his aged, gentle face insisting its way into his line of sight.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he said, ‘you can do this. You are able. Able to do anything. Relax and go with it.’

  I don’t want to go with it! But on the tail end of that thought was the voice of his father. A dismissive sneer. ‘Typical Toby,’ it said, ‘panicking at the first sign of trouble.’ But could you blame me? Toby thought. In his mind’s eye all he could see was his father, shaking his head slowly and dismissively.

  Damn it, but he couldn’t have that.

  His breathing slowed and he nodded at Shining. He wasn’t saying he believed him, but he wasn’t going to panic in front of him either.

  ‘Let’s do it again,’ said the old man, ‘and this time you’ll be ready. Take his hand and keep hold.’

  With clenched teeth, Toby did as he was told.

  And they were back in the foreign country that, according to his new Section Chief, lay just above the one h
e had always known.

  He looked around, disorientated by the way that the edges of things blurred as his head swayed from side to side, as if the focus couldn’t hold when he moved too fast for it.

  ‘You’re in control. This is nothing you can’t do.’ The fact that Shining didn’t phrase it as a question meant the world to Toby.

  ‘You OK then?’ Shining asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘Well, maybe not fine exactly but … I’m OK. It’s OK.’

  ‘Good. Now what we need to do is get up and walk around. Can you feel Jamie’s hand?’

  ‘Of course.’ Toby looked down and only now did he realise that Jamie Goss was not lying between them. Nobody was. And yet he could feel the man’s hand firmly held in his own. ‘Where … ?’

  ‘He’s travelling,’ said Shining, ‘we’re still connected to his physical body, and through that we are still connected to our plane. Fix on it in your mind. It’s not a physical sensation, it’s not really there in your hand, but mentally, you mustn’t let go. Once we’ve begun to move around here that’s what keeps you grounded.’

  Toby nodded, unable to trust himself to speak coherently, not when faced with impossibility after impossibility.

  ‘So,’ continued Shining, ‘we keep a hold of his hand, but we get up and move around. That’s easy; the hand will stay with us, its mental weight anchoring our palms wherever we go. Try it.’

  Toby did so. Getting awkwardly to his feet he walked the length of the lounge and found that his superior was quite right. He could still feel that invisible hand holding his. He could stretch his own hand, move it, even clench it into a fist but the impression of that other hand stayed with him.

  ‘This is mental,’ he said, ‘utterly, utterly mental.’ Maybe I hit my head harder than I thought. Maybe this is a concussion and right now I’m poleaxed next to Goss in the middle of the floor.

  And yet, however logical the explanation felt to him, however comforting, he also knew it wasn’t true.

  Shining had also stood up and was looking out of the window, his lined face barely lit by the insipid light that fell through it in this watery world.

  ‘We have to be quick,’ he said. ‘Time moves slower here and we don’t know what’s happened to him. He won’t have gone far – he’s no idiot – but something has derailed him.’

  Outside the window, Toby could see the playground and the drug dealers that used it as their outdoor office. Everything looked just as it should, but, at the same time, wrong, as if seen through a refracting glass.

  ‘We need to go outside?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Shining replied.

  They moved out of the lounge and Toby saw Alasdair, his back to them as he stood in front of the kitchen cupboards.

  ‘Alasdair?’ Toby asked, but Shining pulled him back.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not the Alasdair we know. A shadow of him, yes, but not someone you want to meet.’

  As he talked the Shadow Alasdair extended a finger to the black board and Toby could see the glint of exposed finger bone as it began to write. No hope, it scribbled across the blurred remains of old shopping lists, Lost forever.

  ‘Come on,’ Shining insisted, taking hold of Toby with his free hand and guiding him to the front door and out onto the balcony.

  Outside, the difference between the two worlds was even more pronounced. The silence had the close, dead feel of an empty room rather than the open air. Toby felt that if he were to drop a coin on the stone beneath his feet it would not rebound from the soft, lifeless ground.

  Shining led them around to the stairs and they descended to ground level.

  ‘Ignore the kids,’ Shining said as they moved past the playground. ‘Don’t even look at them.’

  Toby couldn’t help but do so. And as he looked at one boy, swinging slowly on his swing, the boy looked up at him and the face within the shadow of the hoodie he wore had the cold, wet look of dead skin. There were no features, just the smooth white, sagging flesh of a blister.

  ‘I told you not to look,’ said Shining. ‘It’s important.’

  So Toby focused on his feet.

  ‘If you don’t see them,’ said Shining, ‘they don’t see you. Their attention is elsewhere; we’re the ghosts here and we can float by unnoticed as long as we don’t draw attention.’

  ‘And what happens if we do?’ asked Toby. ‘Draw attention, that is.’

  ‘You don’t want that,’ Shining replied, ‘the creatures you find here, the shadows; they can be dangerous. They will try to keep you here. However they can. Remember your training and go grey.’

  ‘Going grey’ in training had simply meant walking unnoticed in a crowd. Toby couldn’t help but feel this was a step further. Toby tried not to imagine the hooded youth rising from his swing and walking towards the wire mesh of his cage. Tried not to imagine that the two of them were now being watched by the whole group as they walked across the terrace towards the communal bins.

  He could see a pair of stockinged feet sticking out as they passed. He tried not to look, but nevertheless glimpsed the red mess that was the old lady’s head thanks to the attentions of the tabby cat now busy feeding.

  He looked at his shoes again. Felt a wave of nausea building. ‘How do we find him?’ he asked, focusing on the feel of the warm, invisible hand he held. ‘He could be anywhere.’

  ‘He’s close,’ Shining answered, ‘I know him well enough. I can feel him nearby. Once you get used to doing this you gain an instinct for it, a sixth sense that tells you when a living traveller is there.’

  They found him by the gate. Sat on the ground, face pressed against the iron.

  ‘What are you doing stuck here?’ Shining asked, squatting down and turning Goss’ face towards his. ‘You need to come home.’

  For a moment Toby thought this version of the dreamer was as vacant as the one whose hand he held, but then Jamie Goss’ face lit up and he began to speak.

  ‘I’d like to,’ he said, ‘but there’s something wrong here, something disturbed. I felt it when I first arrived. A contamination. It made me lose my way.’ The man’s eyes went past Shining and Toby, looking towards a darkness massing at the far side of the courtyard – an almost tangible blackness that curled and bubbled within the pale ivy leaves that lined the walls. ‘And now there’s that …’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it before,’ said Shining, turning to look. ‘Some kind of force …’ He looked to Jamie. ‘What is it?’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘It appeared the same time you did. I can feel it. It’s powerful. Dangerous. It wants to swallow us whole.’

  Shining shook his head and looked to Toby. ‘We’re going to have to do something risky,’ he said. ‘Are you up for it?’

  Bizarrely, the old man smiled, as if with anticipation.

  ‘To hell with it,’ responded Toby. ‘I don’t believe a bit of this so I’m up for anything.’

  Shining nodded. ‘Then take Jamie’s hand – this Jamie – in your spare hand and then, when I say run … we run back to the flat. Got it?’

  ‘And that’s risky, is it?’ said Toby. ‘Am I going to be somewhere else again when I touch him?’

  ‘No, but the more aggressive our actions here, the more we draw attention to ourselves.’

  Toby glanced at the black mass that seemed to be deepening the more they talked. ‘That stuff seems aware enough as it is.’

  Shining nodded. ‘You’re probably right, so the only thing we can do is hope we can outrun it. Got that?’

  Toby nodded and took Goss’ hand. Oddly, it did not feel real. It had none of the solidity and warmth of the invisible hand he was already gripping. He stared at it and squeezed the fingers. ‘It’s as if there’s nothing there,’ he said.

  ‘There’s not much,’ Shining admitted. ‘We have the very least of him here until we can drag him back. But it’s enough. Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Then run!’

  They sprinted back
the way they had come and Toby was aware that the black mass was seething after them as they crossed the courtyard. There was a feline screech and the cat that had been dining on its owner jumped onto the lid of one of the bins and hissed at them as they raced by.

  ‘Keep going!’ Shining shouted. ‘Don’t let anything slow you down!’

  Don’t worry, Toby thought, I don’t intend to.

  But the sight of the drug dealers, hurling themselves at the chain-link mesh of the play area nearly made him falter. They were like wild animals in a cage, desperate to break free so they could rip and tear at the enemy that was passing by them.

  Toby looked away. If he couldn’t see them, then they weren’t there, he decided. Hitting the stairway they began to climb upwards. None of this is real, Toby insisted to himself, even as the pale light began to darken around them. The black mass that wanted to swallow them whole, to turn them to ice in its cold, dark belly, reared up behind them, drawing closer and closer.

  They reached the balcony and Toby nearly fell as his leather soles skidded on the smooth surface of the floor.

  ‘Careful!’ Shining shouted, ‘we’re almost there!’

  They crashed into the flat and Shining slammed the front door behind them. The glass immediately became dark as the blackness struck. It was like sudden nightfall.

  ‘Just a few more steps,’ said Shining, pulling them through the hall as the Shadow Alasdair appeared in the kitchen doorway, a mess of hair and a pitiful howling circle of a mouth that rippled and billowed across the whole of its face.

  They entered the lounge and, suddenly, Goss appeared on the floor, opening his eyes and reaching up to them.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Shining. ‘You can let go!’

  g) 63 Sampson Court, King’s Cross, London

  They were back in the real world. A dazed but altogether more conscious Jamie Goss sat up between his rescuers.

  Alasdair appeared in the doorway, a tea tray in his hand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘five minutes my arse – an hour more like. I’ve reboiled the kettle twice. I hope you appreciate what I’ve been through waiting for you. The way I suffer …’