The Happier Dead Read Free Page A

rounded point. At its uppermost limit, the great red beacon on the top was so close to the rainclouds that the light illuminated them from beneath with a cherry-red glow, giving the sky above the spa the look of a vast special effect, a stage show for the passing motorists. Down the sides of the dome there trooped long lines of maintenance ladders studded with blue lights. Around the circumference where the dome met the earth was a chain link fence which must have been thirty feet high, though, beneath the rise of the dome, it looked like a toy; a spot of detailing on a model prison.
    The chain link fence was supplemented with guard towers at hundred metre intervals, their eyes turned outwards on the world. Beyond this, green fields stretched away to the M25 on one side and the edges of the east London suburbs on the other. They were illuminated in the glare of stadium lights erected around the building’s edge, so that the residents on the London side spent their nights in a perpetual false dawn.
    The second part of the structure consisted of two giant tubes snaking away from the dome, extending half a mile in either direction. Along the sides of these were a series of buildings accessible from the outside of the structure, and Oates guessed that these were maintenance buildings and accommodation for staff. The whole edifice was so grossly out of proportion with the world around it that rather than being part of the landscape, it seemed to alter the dimensions of the sky and the earth to accommodate its own needs. Oates had the queasy impression that the whole scene existed not on the land, but deep beneath the ocean, and the Great Spa was not an artificial thing, but organic, a vast anemone spotted with bioluminescence, drawing in men and women like curious amoebae across the fields and motorways.
    The purpose of the giant construction was not so much mysterious as vague. They didn’t administer the Treatment in there, that much everyone agreed. The Treatment was handled in a single Nottingham Biosciences clinic in Harley Street. They had been performing it for years before the Great Spa was even talked about. But you had to have had the Treatment to stay there. Nottingham had originally called it a health spa, a place its clients could de-stress, and it was that description which had given birth to the nickname that was now so universal that most people would have been hard pushed to remember the official one – Avalon.
    Oates thought being eternally young and rich would have been enough on their own to massage the stress out of most men, but apparently not, as the Great Spa had been hoovering up footballers, potentates and billionaires since the day it opened its doors if the press were to be believed. He knew as much from Lori’s gossip magazines. He never read them, but she left them on the bedside table and beside the bath, and somehow just having the damned things in the house stimulated a kind of gossip osmosis.
    He saw the signs for the exit from the A13 onto the road that led to the spa, and he found that as the distance closed with the dome the effect of its size receded, as the height and width of it wasted their energies beyond the edges of his windscreen. At the exit itself there was a huge billboard bearing the name of the spa, and the slogan of Nottingham Biosciences picked out in bright cursive lettering: Don’t fear the reaper. Above the tagline, a woman’s smiling face, youthful and bright, was illuminated in a spotlight. Someone had drawn a penis on her forehead, and in the lower right corner, the letters ‘M.R.’ were scrawled in red spraypaint. It was a tag he had seen going up all over London in the past few months.
    Apart from himself, the road was bare of traffic. He switched off the radio and drove with the hum of the heater, and the tapping of the rain on the roof. The metronome of the windscreen wipers kept a quick time.
    An avenue of high wattage streetlights set on either side of the