Un Lun Dun
Authors: China Mieville
Contents
Chapter 4: The Watcher in the Night
Chapter 13: Encounters on a Bus
Chapter 14: Attack of the Manky Insect
Chapter 15: A Sort of Delivery
Chapter 19: The Evasive Bridge
Chapter 21: An Unlikely Place of Work
Chapter 23: The Meaning of the Trail
Chapter 24: An Interruption in the Process
Chapter 25: The Addicted Enemy
Chapter 26: Folders and Unfolders
Chapter 27: A Wall of Cloth and Steel
Chapter 29: Hope Hiding with a Cauldron
PART III: London, or UnUnLondon
Chapter 33: The Powerful Resurgence of the Everyday
Chapter 34: Curiosity and Its Fruits
Chapter 35: Conversation and Revelation
Chapter 38: Class-Marks All the Way Down
Chapter 41: Monsters of the Urban Savannah
Chapter 43: Flickering Streets
Chapter 44: Postmortem Bureaucracy
Chapter 48: Spilling Certain Beans
Chapter 50: Malevolent Breather
Chapter 52: Skeptical Authorities
Chapter 53: A Hasty Leave-Taking
Chapter 55: Insulting Classification
Chapter 57: The Quiet Talklands
Chapter 59: Despotic Logorrhea
Chapter 60: Insurgent Verbiage
Chapter 63: The Source of the River
Chapter 66: Skipping Historical Stages
Chapter 68: The Functionary’s Tireless Hunt
Chapter 69: The Balance of Forces
Chapter 70: The Gossamer Edifice
Chapter 72: The Truth about Windows
Chapter 73: An Unusual Social Ecology
Chapter 76: Dwellers in the Smoke
Chapter 79: Constructive Munitions
Chapter 81: A Special Boat Service
Chapter 86: The Unintended Attacker
To Oscar
Acknowledgments
With huge thanks to Talya Baker, Mark Bould, Lauren Buckland, Mic Cheetham, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Claudia Lightfoot, Tim Mak, Farah Mendlesohn, Jemima Miéville, David Moench, Jonathan Riddell of London’s Transport Museum, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, Jesse Soodalter, Harriet Wilson, Paul Witcover, and everyone at Del Rey and Macmillan.
As always, I’m indebted to too many writers to list, but particularly important to this book are Joan Aiken, Clive Barker, Lewis Carroll, Michael de Larrabeiti, Tanith Lee, Walter Moers, and Beatrix Potter. Particular thanks are due Neil Gaiman, for generous encouragement and for his indispensable contributions to London phantasmagoria, especially
Neverwhere.
Note to Reader
People speaking British English and people speaking American English mostly understand each other fine. But there are a few words we use in Britain that you might not recognize, or that we use differently from you. Should you encounter a strange or difficult word in the story, please flip to the short glossary, which is located in the back of this book.
In an unremarkable room, in a nondescript building, a man sat working on very non-nondescript theories.
The man was surrounded by bright chemicals in bottles and flasks, charts and gauges, and piles of books like battlements around him. He propped them open on each other. He cross-referred them, seeming to read several at the same time; he pondered, made notes, crossed the notes out, went hunting for facts of history, chemistry, and geography.
He was quiet but for the scuttling of his pen and his occasional murmurs of revelation. He was obviously working on something very difficult. From his mutters and the exclamation marks he scrawled, though, he was slowly making progress.
The man had traveled a very long way to do the work he was doing. He was so engrossed it took him a long time to notice that the light around him was fading, unnaturally fast.
Some sort of darkness was closing in on the windows. Some sort of silence—more than the absence of noise, the
presence
of a predatory quiet—was settling around him.
The man looked up at last. Slowly, he put down his pen and turned around in his chair.
“Hello?” he said. “Professor? Is that you? Is the minister here…?”
There was no answer. The light from the corridor still faded. Through the smoked glass of the door, the man could see darkness taking shape. He stood, slowly. He sniffed, and his eyes widened.
Fingers of smoke were wafting under the door, entering the room. They uncoiled from the crack like feelers.
“So…” the man whispered. “So, it’s you.”
There was no answer, but beyond the door came a very faint rumble that might just have been laughter.
The man swallowed, and stepped back. But he set his face. He watched as the smoke came more thickly around the edges of the door, eddying towards him. He reached for his notes. He moved quickly, dragging a chair as quietly as he could into place below a high ventilation duct. He looked afraid but determined—or determined but afraid.
The smoke kept coming. Before he had a chance to climb, there was another rumble-laugh-noise. The man faced the door.
1
The Respectful Fox
There was no doubt about it: there was a fox behind the climbing frame. And it was watching.
“It is, isn’t it?”
The playground was full of children, their gray uniforms flapping as they ran and kicked balls into makeshift goals. Amid the shouting and the games, a few girls were watching the fox.
“It definitely is. It’s just watching us,” a tall blond girl said. She could see the animal clearly behind a fringe of grass and thistle. “Why isn’t it moving?” She walked slowly towards it.
At first the friends had thought the animal was a dog, and had started ambling towards it while they chatted. But halfway across the tarmac they had realized it was a fox.
It was a cold cloudless autumn morning and the sun was bright. None of them could quite believe what they were seeing. The fox kept standing still as they approached.
“I saw one once before,” whispered Kath, shifting her bag from shoulder to shoulder. “I was with my dad by the canal. He told me there’s loads in London now, but you don’t normally see them.”
“It should be running,” said Keisha, anxiously. “I’m staying here. That’s got teeth.”
“All the better to eat you with,” said Deeba.
“That was a wolf,” said Kath.
Kath and Keisha held back: Zanna, the blond girl, slowly approached the fox, with Deeba, as usual, by her side. They got closer, expecting it to arch into one of those beautiful curves of animal panic, and duck under the fence. It kept not doing so.
The girls had never seen any animal so still. It wasn’t that it wasn’t moving: it was furiously
not-moving.
By the time they got close to the climbing frame they were creeping exaggeratedly, like cartoon hunters.
The fox eyed Zanna’s outstretched hand politely. Deeba frowned.
“Yeah, it is watching,” Deeba said. “But not
us.
It’s watching
you.
”
Zanna—she hated her name Susanna, and she hated “Sue” even more—had moved to the estate about a year ago, and quickly made friends with Kath and Keisha and Becks and others. Especially Deeba. On her way to Kilburn Comprehensive, on her first day, Deeba had made Zanna laugh, which not many people could do. Since then, where Zanna was, Deeba tended to be, too. There was something about Zanna that drew attention. She was decent-to-good at things like sports, schoolwork, dancing, whatever, but that wasn’t it: she did well enough to do well, but never enough to stand out. She was tall and striking, but she never played that up either: if anything, she seemed to try to stay in the background. But she never quite could. If she hadn’t been easy to get on with, that could have caused her trouble.
Sometimes even her mates were a little bit wary of Zanna, as if they weren’t quite sure how to deal with her. Even Deeba herself had to admit that Zanna could be a bit dreamy. Sometimes she would sort of zone out, staring skywards or losing the thread of what she was saying.
Just at that moment, however, she was concentrating hard on what Deeba had just said.
Zanna put her hands on her hips, and even her sudden movement didn’t make the fox jump.
“It’s true,” said Deeba. “It hasn’t taken its eyes off you.”
Zanna met the fox’s gentle vulpine gaze. All the girls watching, and the animal, seemed to get lost in something.
…Until their attention was interrupted by the bell for the end of break. The girls looked at each other, blinking.
The fox finally moved. Still looking at Zanna, it bowed its head. It did it once, then leapt up and was gone.
Deeba watched Zanna, and muttered, “This is just getting weird.”
