The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
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:
‘The Upright Man,’ I said. ‘Who the hell is that?’
History is on our heels,
following us like our shadows, like death.
Marc Augé
Non-places: Introduction toan Anthropology of Supermodernity
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.