The day the word appeared to him again, Kieran Whyteleafe was woken by the sound of the wind. He realised he was awake for a good minute before he opened his eyes; enough time to convince himself that his frightening dream had not been real.
His bedroom was orange. The streetlight outside was shining through a gap in the curtains casting a vertical beam of light on the far wall. It was still dark, and the swaying leaves on the tree in the front garden cast oscillating shadows in the gloom.
The wind outside was fierce and blustery, the gale whipping up and whistling around the house. Kieran could hear the leaves outside swishing along the street, undoing the work of the children who had built piles of them on the way home from school the day before.
The sash window rattled in its frame.
Kieran’s face was cold. The heating hadn’t come on yet. He was cosy under the covers as long as he didn’t move to a colder part of the bed. He twisted his head to look at the clock radio.
4:33
In his dream, he had been confined to a police cell. He was awaiting trial for committing a terrible murder, and to his own horror, he knew he had actually done the dreadful deed. He had known he was guilty and had signed a full confession. In his dream, Kieran had thrown his life away, for the sake of one single act of brutality. And now he was going to hang for it.
He didn’t even know who he had murdered, or even how and why. But often in dreams, the fine details of the picture didn’t matter. It was the broad strokes, the basic lines and framework; the initial sweeps of the brush on the canvas that forged the emotions that he would carry through to the waking world.
Kieran got out of bed, opened the bedroom door and made his way through the flat to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, which he sipped slowly whilst standing at the window, smoking a cigarette and watching the apple tree at the end of the garden sway back and forth in the relentless gale.
~
Not surprisingly, later that morning, Kieran woke up late for work. He checked the alarm. He’d forgotten to set it.
He hurriedly showered, ironed his shirt and fed the cat. There would be no time for breakfast for himself though.
He was still putting on his tie as he ran for the underground station, and he was totally out of breath when he punched his card in at work
‘Sorry I’m late. My alarm didn’t go off.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Mr Cray, who was the postal supervisor for the office block. Mr Cray sat in his high chair behind his high desk up by the mail entrance, looking down at all the ant workers in the mailroom and signing courier packages in and out. He liked to shout at his subordinates. ‘I think you slept through it.’
‘It’s the God’s honest truth,’ said Kieran.
‘I don’t care whose it is,’ Mr Cray added, ‘Anyway I got Taylor to do your round for you. Lots of boxes. Lucky you missed it. I suggest you buy him a beer.’
‘I will,’ said Kieran as he ambled across the empty post room past the vacant pigeonholes over to the rest area. He sat down and picked up a newspaper off the coffee table.
‘Uh, uh, uh. No. Kieran!’ said Mr Cray, clicking his fingers as though he was summoning a waiter. ‘Just because you missed the mail round, doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done.’
Kieran sighed and dropped the paper back on the table.
Mr Cray was pointing at three storage boxes stacked against the back wall of the post room. ‘They need to go into one of the cages in the sub-basement. You can take them down.’
Kieran looked at the boxes. The name on the side of each was Edward Gosnell, along with a code, “R14”, which indicated the sub-basement location where Mr Gosnell had requested that the boxes be taken. Aisle R, cage 14. The boxes would probably contain his old documents for the last year, ready for archive. Kieran knew a fair bit about the psychology of data archiving, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr Gosnell would never need to look at those files again. But Kieran wouldn’t be the one ticking the box marked “Incinerate”, so he went to find himself a trolley.
Stepping out of the post room into the main corridor was a little like jumping into a fast-running stream. Even down here in the basement of the huge office building, there were scores of people hurrying along looking like they had been burdened with the most important piece of news ever bestowed upon a messenger. Then Kieran remembered that the subsidised coffee shop was in the basement, and it was about that sort of time when the hordes had dropped off their coats and bags at their desks, switched on their PC’s and had a brief natter to the person at the next desk about the weekend they’d just had. Then it’s “I think I need a Lattucino”, before they go rummaging in their handbags and wallets for the small change they’d emptied the 20p jar out for last night.
Kieran walked against the flow of the river to the next door along; to the room where they kept the trolleys.
‘Morning Kieran. Shouldn’t you be doing your mail round right about now?’
Tim sat behind the desk by the door in the tiny room. He had a wide grin on his face. There was a radio on the windowsill, playing “Blue Roses” by Prefab Sprout.
Kieran smiled, ‘I’ve worked out a way of getting out of it. I shall name it “waking up late”.’
Tim laughed and rocked back in his chair, tapping his pencil on the desk, ‘I bet he gave you an earful for that,’
‘Well, he let me know it had been noticed. Now I’ve got to take some flipping boxes to the sub-basement. Can I get a trolley?’
‘Over there,’ Tim pointed to the corner where a few upright and flatbed trolleys sat. On the radio, Nik Kershaw began to sing "Your Brave Face".
Kieran took the handle of a flatbed and wheeled it towards the door. Tim’s phone began to ring.
‘I’ll have it back in half an hour,’ said Kieran. Tim nodded absently as he reached for the phone.
~
The lift door opened to reveal the sub-basement corridor. Kieran pushed the box-laden flatbed out into the semi-darkness. The corridor was ugly, with its whitewashed walls and tasteless brown carpet tiles, some of which had been pulled up, making the going hard for the trolley. A fluorescent bulb was blinking on and off erratically further down the corridor and another was fully on, but most of them weren’t. It created a gloomy atmosphere that seemed to fit perfectly well with the musty damp smell that filled the air, and the muffled sound of traffic noise from the street above, filtered through metallic vents and pipes. The smell was familiar to most sub basements in London town. Kieran thought of that smell as the smell of History. Going into a basement or a cellar was like going into the past. It seemed appropriate that he was towing a stack of boxes that were nothing but history as far as their owner was concerned.
At the end of the corridor was a set of swing doors, which opened easily when Kieran pushed the flatbed into them. The storeroom beyond was long and deep, but with a low ceiling. Lined up along one wall were parts of desks, dismantled long ago and left there just in case they might be needed again. Their only crime was to look out-of-date, and now they had been replaced by newer, sleeker, more computer friendly models. Along the other wall was a sink, dusty and unused, and a notice board, with a laminated Health and Safety poster from two years ago, and a couple of rolodex cards pinned up. One trying to sell an inkjet printer for fifty pounds, the other simply had the word “Lucy”. Someone had tallied a score of 8 next to her name.
Kieran flicked on the lights and the room danced into life. The storeroom was silent, but for the humming of fluorescent light. The place smelled of recently smoked cigarettes.
He pushed the flatbed trolley around a pile of dexion and rolled it on towards aisle R. He had started at A by the door so it was a good way down. Fifty metres or so further along the lights had not come on, but he could see enough in the gloom to make out aisle R, so he manoeuvered the flatbed round the corner and pushed it to the end, where he found cage 14.
He threw the bolt on the door of the steel cage and swung it open. It squealed horribly in protest, as though it was an old creaking joint that hadn’t been used for years. There was plenty of space inside to lay the boxes down, and that was what he did, swinging his arms and body back and forth metronomically as he pulled each box off the flatbed and placed it in the rear of the cage.
After the last box, Kieran stopped and listened. He could no longer hear the noise from the street. In the silence it was hard to believe that he was in an office block of three thousand employees. From the sound, or lack of it, Kieran could easily have been in a sub-basement at the end of time, where he was the only man left alive, doomed to live amongst the archive material and the boxed-up discarded history for the rest of his days.
He sat for a moment on the flatbed, pushing and pulling his legs to roll the trolley forwards and backwards under him. He could sit there for a few more minutes and he wouldn’t be missed, probably even have a smoke. He looked at the ceiling. No smoke alarms. Handy, though a little stupid considering the amount of paper and cardboard down here. If this place caught fire… well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Still, the cigarette was a good idea. He pulled one straight out of the box in his pocket and lit it with a lighter from the other. The first inhalation was always the best. For that tiny moment, the rest of the world ceased to exist.
Then Kieran saw something behind the cage. He saw it through the chicken-wire mesh that backed onto the cage in aisle Q. The thing that he saw triggered something else in his mind. It was a strange sort of something deep in the part of his memory that he rarely accessed. If his subconscious was divided up into aisles, like a sub-basement in the office block of his life, this aisle would be labelled “Nostalgia”, and the cage would be called… it would be called “Unsolved”.
Kieran stood up to take a closer look at the thing he saw.
Cage 14 - which now contained the boxes he'd brought down - was at the end of the aisle, and along the side of the cage was a thin walkway that ran along the back of the aisles, but it was barely wide enough for someone to squeeze through.
Just a little further along the walkway was a window. Next to the window was a door that led into an old unused office. Through the window Kieran could see that the lights were off. Perhaps sometime in the past someone running the storeroom would have used the office. But now the only way to get to the door was to squeeze along the tiny walkway that led from the back of aisle R.
No, nobody used that office anymore. The dexion cages had been built in front of it since then.
But it wasn’t the office itself that had captured Kieran's attention. It wasn’t the beaten up door that was probably locked. No, it was the window that interested him; the window that provided a view out into the storeroom for whoever in the past sat within that office.
On the window was a layer of dust, just like everywhere else in this basement. In the dust, someone had written a word, using a finger as a pen, like a child who writes his name in the condensation on the inside of a car window, or like the rear doors of a van that hadn’t seen a sponge and soapy water for a good while, where someone has written “Clean me”.
Just like those things, someone had written a word on the window.
The word was “Spireclaw”, and he’d seen that word somewhere before.
