China Miéville - Looking for Jake and Other Stories

You kept coming, and coming, into our unlit place. They would not touch you.

I was made to watch. I was not synchronised with this. I was like a toothless cog, turning in an engine but not gripping, not cohering. They would not touch you, and it affronted me. I asked and asked them why in little whispers, in our own language, in your language, and whichever sibling I asked responded with a faint wordless evasion.

They would not tell me why, because I should know why.

For a long time, I thought I could not touch you, as they could not. And then as you reached our basement and began to swing inelegantly at us (what did you want? what were you trying to find?) I felt an energy come through me, like nothing so much as the energy that came to me when I saw the mirror burst and the fear of the thing that mocked me, and I knew that it was not that we could not touch you, but that my siblings would not, and that I would.

They did not like it. They would not stop me but they did not like it, and they watched uneasily, but I was too angry not to, you coming here as if you were not about to die.

A slippery trick had you on me, blinding me and hurting this dreadful head that I hate, that traps me. I was not humiliated—I am not like you and your brief and contingent victory means nothing at all, less than nothing, means as little as air. I was not humiliated but I was afraid, and not of you (what would you do but just perhaps kill me, which would only be something new?) but of my siblings, and not of them but of their sudden new fact, the fact that they would not touch you.

They watched me touching you, one two, fingers closing on your throat, but they would not join me.

They only waited, for you to go. It was an unpleasantness.

I could not parse the expression that you took when I told you what you wanted to know. I have remembered it many times. I have seen it, I have thought it through. I have reconstructed it, and made my siblings mimic it so that I can see it again. It is very unclear to me. I do not know what you are thinking.

Your face, the expression you took seems to me to hold delight, but also—is that horror? Fear of course (there is always that whenever I see you feeling anything) but I am sure that is horror I see, too.

What will you do? I wonder what it is that you will do.

I still wish I knew why they would not touch you, and why I would.

We spent a very few minutes together, and I hated you for all of them, but I wish you were here again. I would try to find out why they will not touch you.

Sometimes I imagine trying to see what of you my siblings would touch.

If I opened you to them, would they touch you then? Is your skin the barrier? If I took that for them—because I will touch your skin—would they touch the red core of you? Would they touch your inner places, the fragile palpitating things that make you?

But you would not last that, and though I hate you, I truly want to know the limits. So I would keep you whole, and keep asking my question. One of my people will tell me, would tell me, some time. Why they will not touch.

They do not shrink from me. I have watched and listened for any sign, for any sign. When I could tell, when I saw how it was, how it was going, I watched for it, but they do not shrink from me.

Since you came here and I touched you and they would not, I have gone farther and farther away. I feel something closing. It is closing around me. I have been part of something, I thought, but one by one I feel the bridges that link me breaking. I have felt myself more and more, have been more and more in myself, of myself, stuck more than ever within my constraints of skin. My light was part of a constellation, I thought, and in slow turn I have seen the other stars go out until I am alone in my universe, and I am frightened.

They are still by me and with me, my siblings, my others, but a connection has gone, and I’m alone. I thought that it must be them. I watched to see them judge me and punish me for my ill-thought, arrogant declaration to you. They must have cut me out, I thought, but they did not. They do not shrink from me: they are as they ever were, and in body I’m part of this company. We do and speak to each other as we did.

It is not they who have closed but I. I’ve cut myself away. I’m alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I’ve not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?

Now then. Now then now then. What’s all this, then? How long has this been going on?

Snips of your moron culture fill me. At inappropriate times. At all times, really. I resent my emotions—which are worthy of the word, which aren’t the little bubbles of whim that you call feelings—I resent that my emotions remind me of the detritus from your entertainments or your mannered interactions.

I’m thinking that I have been alone. That I wasn’t part of all this. They don’t shrink from me but I don’t think I can come back in. I still don’t know how this happened. I can’t think about it for very long. I am afraid of how alone I will be.

There is an escape. Down, to where the cold rails are. I walked in the same place as once did little grey mice so filthy they were like animate dust. They have been taken now by the fauna of mirrors. I am used to the darkness, it’s like something physical. I smacked the walls and the rail with my stick, to make sure there was nothing—no stalled train, no bodies, no fallen bricks—in my way.

I walked north on the train lines. Very slowly, as if to leave the city.

I’ll go for a time, I said, to see what it is in me that’s closed the doors. When I decided, lying on the platform’s edge, in the darkness under Hampstead, I wondered how to take my leave, and that brought with it, that query, a wave of horror at the fact that I did not know the answer. That such a question occurred.

What do I know? Where shall I go? Will I be alone? How long have I been so?

I’ll go away, for a time. I think of you often. Your gun and light, your obvious fear as you stumbled into us. The questions you asked, that could do you no good, that I answered for you in arrogance. I hated you then and I hate you now, but I remember you. Why would they not touch you?

When he came back to the Heath, and rejoined the camp, the celebrations—the joy—caught Sholl up easily. He arrived, batted side to side by the jeep, to see all the soldiers lined up and waiting. As the vehicle jounced through trees, they cheered. Sholl saw their officer clench his fists with passion that was unfeigned and incredulous.

They partied that night, turning up the volume on their cheap stereos and churning the earth into mud with dancing, and Sholl partied with them, high on their enthusiasm. There was a paradox to his own pleasure, though, which he became aware of. He had been truly delighted that the soldiers had appeared, that they had been sent. He had thought he was alone, but they had followed him, out of sight, and watched him cross the junction, and enter the station to the vampires’ lair. They had sent back word of what they had seen, and waited for all the hours it took for Sholl to reemerge, and then they had risked their lives to fetch him, because of what they saw him do.

The soldiers were proficient. He had not known he was being tracked, that he was in their sights all the time he walked. The CO was too intelligent, too cautious a man to throw himself in with strangers, no matter how they talked. But Sholl had communicated something, not the authority he had intended but something, that had given the officer pause enough to send soldiers after him, to learn. And when they saw what he could do—struggling through their awe—they came in to save him.