Buggery buggery bugger youth today! Buggery arseholes when
I
was young but no no no they dont listen, moving with the phones, jazz, bling, ting, zing! Fucking pigeons! Shit wheres me oranges? Oranges oranges oranges gun oranges two pairs of nylons oranges
Hunger whispered, Sorcery.
I said, You have no idea.
The voice replied, Show respect you imbecilic nit toad flea insectoid wart! Rattling along in front of her on three wheels, her trolley heaved with ancient plastic bags as Old Madam Dorie bounced her way into Paternoster Square.
There is a story of the Bag Lady.
She isnt simply a bag lady a lady who carries plastic bags full of the strangest scrounged items she can get her hands on she is
The Bag Lady
, the queen of all those who scuttle in the night, gibbering to themselves, and the voices only they can hear. She is the mistress of the mad old women in their slippers who ride the buses from terminal to terminal, she is the patron of the scrapyard girls who play with the rats, she is the lady of all dirty puddles. She has been in the city since the first old woman left alone in the dark decided to tell the dark why she was crying, and she is, of course, myth, and no one believes a word of it, including me.
However, when the pigeons were nested for the night, it was to the Bag Lady that my gran would always offer her prayers.
Dorie looked at me, she looked at the shadow, she looked back to me and said, All right, you stupid bastard, piss off out of here!
I said, What the bloody hell are you doing here?
Fucking trailing you, fucker! she shrilled. You dense like the kids say?
We didnt see you, we complained.
Thats because youve got all the brains of a concussed cod! she shrilled, flapping her pink fingerless woollen gloves furiously in the air. Shit, and youre supposed to be a saving fucking grace?
You smell of
nothing, hissed Hunger, head twisted on one side, his attention momentarily diverted. You taste of
nothing.
You going to smell shit in the sewer? she asked, glaring straight into Hungers empty eyes without even blinking. Oi, sorcerer?
What, me?
You want to be someone else?
Its complicated.
Fucking run already, nit!
I began feebly, turning in Hungers direction. Evil creature, essence of darkness and undying hunger
Already I felt like I was losing momentum overall.
Dories attention flashed to me in an instant, and for a moment her eyes were the colour of the pigeons, yellow-orange, intense, bright, alert. She said, in a voice as sane as I had ever heard it from her lips, I only do this for you once, blue electric sorcerer. Next time, youll burn.
And with that, she leant over her trolley, and opened the plastic bags.
Out of the first came the twitching nose of a rat, climbing up and over the edge of the trolley before landing with a big flop in the middle of its body onto the pavement of the square and looking round with confused, blinking eyes. Then came another rat, and another, and another, half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen; they swarmed out of the battered old Sainsburys bag in a writhing mass of black bodies, streaming down the sides of the trolley, flopping onto the ground into a teeming, twitching mass, spreading out from her like a pool of black blood, scuttling and scampering, and still they kept coming, a hundred, two, more than I could count, crawling across the pavement, along the walls, up Dories legs, her middle, until her whole body was covered in rats and there wasnt a body there at all, just a heaving tower of blackness and there were more rats in the bag than could get out, a hill of rats building up around the half-obscured hub of the trolley, spilling towards me, towards Hunger.
That was one bag.
The second bag released the pigeons. They exploded upwards in a shower of feathers, one, half a dozen, two dozen, the same crowding and swiftness as the rats, and whirled overhead, and level too, the sky somehow not big enough for them, flying across my face, obscuring Dorie from my sight in moments. It snowed feathers, blinding me with the touch, smell, taste of dirt-grease pigeon as their wings beat at me, their claws scraped my shoulders, their feathers brushed my nose; while at my ankles the rats scuttled, flowing round me like I was an island in their black sea.
From the last bag came the other creatures. A swarm of big black bluebottle flies, the skulking ginger bodies of young foxes, a scampering contingent of mice that ran easily across the backs of the ratty mass like pebbles skimming the sea. Sinuous stray cats, missing a tail or half an ear, teeth bared, cruel, fur in tufts; the black feathers of crows, brown sparrows, flashing yellow breasts of a flock of great tits, even the curved necks of a pair of herons, hopping mottled frogs, the swooping shapes of swallows, the coiling gleam of a snake, teeming gleaming shells of the cockroaches, the long, arched back of a deer. They scrambled, flew, writhed, twisted, leapt, lurked or scuttled out of Dories bags, out of the trolley, until the world was so full of moving creatures that it was as if the sky had become a solid mass, or we were trapped in a tornado, lost in a spinning torment of feather, flesh and fur.
Dorie was lost to sight in a matter of seconds; so was Hunger. Instinctively I ducked the whirling mass of birdlife, crawling on all fours while the rats flowed up my back and across my head, and dropped down around my face like beads of fat living sweat. Little tiny pink claws bit into me and released; twitching noses snuffled through my hair, whiskers tickled over my skin, fat hairy bodies pressed down across my back. I was grateful that I had already been sick; there was nothing left inside for any worse horror. We couldnt
we couldnt
couldnt
so I did. I closed my eyes and felt the creatures around me, on hands and knees following their swirl of life which, all the powers have mercy, parted around me. Where I put my hands down, the creatures moved aside, hurried out of my way, so there was no breaking of tiny mouse bones as I pulled myself along, no squishing of snakes tail; a path opened up in front of me, its end obscured by the hurricane of creatures, but still distinctly a path. I crawled along it; then pulled back sharply, spilling a snake off my shoulder as a shadow loomed across my path: for a moment a corpse-white hand solidified out of the blackness of the paving stones, its fingers reaching up and becoming flesh, before they were swamped by the scurrying mass of creatures, that bit and scratched at the hand even before it was entirely there, until it collapsed back into whirling obscurity among the animals. I risked raising myself up and realised that, if I did not flinch from the birds swooping around my head, they would not actually hit me. At this, I straightened up and, scattering the odd clinging mouse and dripping with inky water, I ran.
I didnt know how far, nor where, they led me, until I was actually there: Ludgate Circus, where Fleet Street, Blackfriars Bridge, and Farringdon Road all run into a whirlpool of people, lights, cars, taxis and buses. Blinking, I staggered from the creatures embrace into the sudden light of the street. The birds swooped skywards as if theyd only just discovered that up as well as sideways existed, while the land animals were halfway into the bins, drains and gutters, and the narrow places between buildings and under doors before I even realised that my escort was melting away.
I stood, alone and confused, an inky soaking figure, looking somewhere between a woad warrior and a clown; pigeon feathers stuck to my head, and tufts of fur clung to my coat. Self-consciously I picked off the worst and, as I did, felt a stirring in my coat pocket that, to my shame, made me jump. Reaching in with an imagination full of teeth, I found a small white mouse. Contentedly sitting in the palm of my hand, it was the only proof now left apart from the general state of my appearance and smell of the tide of vermin that had probably saved me from whatever untimely fate Hunger had had in mind.
Of Dorie, there was no sign; nor did my shadow bend. I got down on one knee and put the mouse down on the pavement. It scampered away, unconcerned, down the street towards a bus stop where, as ordinary, boring and mundane as anything we could have wished to see, a night bus was pulling up.
The driver said, Youve got to be kidding.
Im paying, arent I?
You smell like the zoo, he replied. And youre covered in feathers. I cant let you on this bus.
We leant forward so he could see into our eyes and said, Weve not had our most successful evening. Are you going to make it worse?
He let us ride his bus and, content in the security of the back seat on the upper deck, we let it carry us wherever it would, and curled up in our wet clothes, and didnt sleep.
The bus terminated in Streatham, a suburb between nowhere in particular and somewhere less than distinct.
I walked through the sleeping streets of large terraced houses and wide pavements, neat and repetitive, until I found a small office building with a red fire hydrant sticking out of a side wall. I coaxed the end off, and the water on, with a little magic and a lot of hitting, stripped off my coat and shirt and knelt under the force of its pressurised gout of ice-cold water until I thought my skin would turn to stone.
I still looked like Id been involved in an industrial accident, and was grateful that my hair was dark already so that it hid the streaks of colour running through it, although my face still resembled a tattoo job gone wrong.
I found a small area of scuffed grass with a couple of giant plane trees round the back of a vast, shed-like Homebase, stole a metal dust-bin from a nearby house, emptied out its bulging black bags, put in as much old newspaper as I could carry from the local recycling bin and a few odd twigs from beneath the plane trees, and lit a fire. I huddled by it until it burnt down to nothing just before dawn, feeling the heat dry out my clothes and burn some of the ice out of my flesh. Perhaps we slept; we could not tell.
We had failed San Khay, and we were still no nearer to killing the shadow.
But perhaps we were closer to killing Bakker; and that, I felt, might well become the same thing.
As the sun rose across south London, my thoughts began to turn towards Mr Guy Lee.
Part 2: The Allies of the Kingsway Exchange
In which allies are made, enemies revealed, trains taken at late hours of the night, and an unusual use suggested for paint.
In the morning I managed, through much sweet persuasion and a hefty amount of money, to get myself into a small hotel in Merton a place that I had always regarded as something of a fiction spread by the enemies of London and was surprised to find so real and large.
I had another shower, and scrubbed until my skin was raw and not a trace of ink or dye remained, I rubbed at my scalp until the shampoo sluicing down across my face was no longer tinted blue.
Then, at least, I felt less dirty. I went out and bought new clothes; the old ones I abandoned in a recycling bin. Even wearing my old clothes to the charity shop made me feel unclean again, their smell of rat so strong that the scrupulously polite girl behind the counter cringed at it.
I took my coat to the dry-cleaner, who offered to scrap it for free, but in the end accepted twelve pounds fifty to do a rush job on a repair. When it came back, the colour was faded and still splotched across the shoulders and cuffs irredeemably so, the manager told me but when I put it on again the fabric was warm and smelled clean, and for the first time that morning I felt just a bit human.
The days headlines blamed the Amiltech stalker for the brutal murder of San Khay, but the papers made no mention of how hed died, nor of the inks that covered his skin. I didnt know if that was the police being careful, or the Tower covering its tracks. Perhaps it was arrogant not to care, but at that moment we didnt want to think about it.
We decided to take the rest of the day off.
We had croissants, hot chocolate, coffee, jam, bread rolls and fruit salad for breakfast, and went to the cinema. We had never been to the cinema before. The plot was something about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave. It wasnt my thing. We were enthralled, and staggered out blinking from the cinema two and a half hours later with our mind full of pounding noise and our eyes aching from the overwhelming brightness, resolved to see more films as often as possible. During school hours we sneaked into an empty playground and rode the swings, so high we thought wed fall off, then spinning on the roundabout until the world was a blur; sliding down the silver slide while trying not to whoop with glee; letting the sand in the pit trail through our fingers and, finally, resting to catch our breath at the very top of a roped climbing frame, from which we could see across a wide common of mown grass, great trees and dog walkers, all the way to the big old houses beyond the railway line. I hoped no one would see me.
We went to a bookshop, and sat reading graphic novels, fascinated by the style, the strange inhuman faces that were nevertheless so readable, the worlds in those pages made up of strange, twisted things, the buildings all out of proportion, the bright colours too bright, the dark sweeps of shade too deep and yet, for all their fantastical properties, the pictures that we saw were somehow recognisable, and provoked in us feelings that matched the creatures in those pages.
When we were asked to move on, we took a train into the centre of the city, found a ticket booth and joined the queue. We bought a ticket for the first thing that was available, which turned out to be a musical. Still not really my thing, but we were determined to give it, anything, everything a try and while we waited for the hour of its performance, we wandered into Chinatown and ate crispy duck with pancakes, and drank green tea and listened to the waiters chattering in Cantonese. We found that, without consciously translating, we could understand what they were saying: an unexpected side effect of our resurrection.
