Terminal World Read Online Free Page B

happen. It only took a tiny nudge to set him off, but from that point on the only option open to him was to gather momentum, rumbling and roaring towards some cataclysmic, landscape-altering event.
    Quillon replaced the handset, walked to the front of the store and threw a handful of coins onto the counter.
    ‘Thanks,’ he said.
    ‘Cheer up,’ the shopkeeper said, scratching at the roll of fat under his chin. ‘Might never happen.’
    He took the car off the slot, parked it at the kerb and reached over to the passenger seat for his bag. It had travelled with him all the way from the morgue. The bag was finished in black leather, scuffed to a fleshy brown at the edges. It had a black leather handle, a label marked Doctor M. Quillon. It was secured by a gold clasp and opened like a concertina, disclosing an assortment of padded pockets and receptacles. He locked the car and adjusted his hat. Fifth was a bad neighbourhood and it was getting late. He wondered if he’d see the car again.
    The Pink Peacock was easily missed. It lay at the end of a blind alley that terminated in the rising black wall of Spearpoint’s underlying fabric, a cliff that soared into the heavens, rising ever higher until it jogged back to form the next shelf. Bracketed on one side by a fleapit hotel and on the other by the derelict offices of a failed taxi business, there was little to identify the nature of the premises. A metal fixture marked where the peppermint-green neon illumination used to hang, until Malkin gave up having it repaired. Metal bars fenced the outside windows, the glass so grimed by dirt and cigarette smoke that it was difficult to tell if the lights were on inside. Posters and graffiti covered the walls in layers of archaeological thickness.
    Quillon walked to the end of the alley and knocked on the door. It opened a crack, a fan of pink-red light spilling across the asphalt.
    ‘Here to see Fray.’
    ‘You’re the cutter?’
    Quillon nodded, though the dismissive term repulsed him. The doorman - it wasn’t the usual one - grunted and let him in. Inside, the sudden humidity fogged over Quillon’s small, round, blue-tinted spectacles. He took them off and rubbed the flat lenses on his sleeve before slipping the glasses back onto the narrow ridge of his nose. The lights were turned down, but that was the way Malkin and most of his customers preferred it.
    Malkin himself was behind the bar, polishing glasses while he kept one eye on the fight that was still playing out on the television. He was rake-thin and mean-looking, with cryptic tattoos on his forearms, all smudged purples and liver-reds. They looked like they’d been done with a piece of scrap metal and a bottle of low-grade transmission oil. Malkin wore a yellowing vest and a towel draped around his shoulders, the vest showing off his scrawny, leathery-skinned neck with the thin circumferential scar where - Quillon could only assume - Malkin had survived being garrotted. Certainly there had been some damage to his larynx, because when he opened his mouth all he could produce was a croaking noise, a sustained guttural rasp that forced his clients to lean in close when they wanted to understand.
    ‘That time of year again?’ Malkin asked. ‘Must be getting punchy, because I could have sworn it wasn’t long since your last visit. When was it, June, June Prime?’
    ‘August. And that’s not why I’ve come.’
    ‘Always welcome to drop by, you know that.’ Malkin reached for a bottle behind the bar. ‘Your usual?’
    ‘No ice.’
    Malkin poured out a measure of Red Eye. ‘How’s life down in the morgue, anyway? Cut open anything interesting lately?’
    ‘This and that.’
    Malkin put the bottle back on the shelf. ‘You know, we could always use a man with a steady hand on the blade. A man who knows his way around anatomy, so to speak. What to cut and what not to cut, if you get my drift. What you can live with for a few hours and what you