What I Tell You In the Dark Read Online Free

everywhere. Particle physics, cellular robotics, ants, birds, fish, people. Not me, though. I just push right past them and sit down at my desk. No one else is moving. They’re juststaring at me. I should probably make an effort to seem a little more professional. I pick up the phone and look as though I am about to make an important call. But before I can think of a number to dial, Alex comes over and hovers at my side.
    He is a sorry excuse for a young man (which is what he is – no more than Will’s age, possibly even younger). His flaccid, unexercised body presses against his shirt. His face, with its quick, piggy eyes, is that of a sly old spinster or a murdering nurse.
    The others hang back in their headless diamond, watching for his cues.
    â€˜Hello, Will,’ he says, in a voice that makes me instantly dislike him. ‘Is everything okay?’
    â€˜This isn’t really a good time, Alex.’ I show him the phone, which unhelpfully starts to make that dim honking noise phones make when you’ve been holding them for too long. We both look at it. I put it back in its cradle.
    He says, ‘Why don’t we head into my office for a chat?’
    â€˜Do I have to?’
    â€˜No, of course you don’t have to,’ he lies, then immediately trumps it with an even bigger lie, ‘I’m just worried about you. I’d like us to talk things through – I want to make sure that you’re taking all the time you need to help you recover from…’ he peters out here, suddenly aware of the watching eyes and listening ears and the fact that he doesn’t have a convenient euphemism to describe what happened this morning. ‘To recover,’ he corrects himself, deciding to snip it off there.
    I shrug and rise to my feet. Dissembling serpent. I will tear your house to the ground .
    â€˜Thanks,’ I say to him, ‘I appreciate that.’
    It’s the only way to tackle these people, whose livelihood is untruth – by telling lies of your own. The curse of the modern world, if you ask me: lies, lies and more lies. Truth has lost itsvalue. Time was, you could have gone in hard with something like this and come straight at them, swords swinging, trumpets cracking the heavens. And they’d have had no doubt that it was God’s righteous anger they were seeing. People were more open to us back then – maybe because they were closer to it all, the deaths and the births, the blood and the spit – they felt the rhythms more. My kind used to stun their souls to the surface just by showing up. It was like fishing with dynamite. A sight to behold. But not anymore. We just don’t have that kind of presence now – modern societies are far too busy being amazed at themselves, it’s side-lined us. These days if we want to get something done, we have to do it remotely – the touch behind the touch – just like you with your drones and your fourth-generation warfare. No one bothers with jump-ins or any of that old school stuff anymore – it’s just not worth it. No one, that is, except for throwbacks like me.
    As I follow Alex to his office I feel an almost overwhelming urge to smite him down, to slap the lies clean out of his mouth. There’s something so profoundly callous about the back of him, the uniform pinstripe of his suit, the perfectly squared off hairline. I can barely contain my ire. Will’s spirit was crushed into dust by these people and their banal, workaday evil, and yet on they go into further iniquity. My eyes bore into the rounded hump of his shoulders.
    Will understood it – he saw how avarice is choking this world. And as his understanding grew, his panic mounted. The briar of greed everywhere around him, rooted in every crevice and corner – he simply couldn’t cope with it. A blinding swarm – that’s how he saw it – the swarm intelligence of countless moneychangers, the flit and