China Miéville - King Rat

Fingers stopped short, waited for her to come to him.

She was approaching with an odd gait, he realized, a peculiar hybrid, at once arrogant sashay and aimless wander. He noticed that she was wearing a walkman, as was the guy next to her, Fabian. Fingers had met him once before. He was as dressed up as Natasha, and walking in the same half-lost manner. It suddenly occurred to Fingers that the two of them might be high, and he gritted his teeth. If she was fucked up and couldn’t perform…

The tall man reached him first and proffered a hand, which Fingers stared at, then shook perfunctorily. Fuck knew where Natasha had picked this one up, he thought. An embarrassing grin, his blond hair enticed into a ponytail it clearly resented, and clothes that proclaimed his indifference to fashion. Incongruously, his face was covered in thin, half-healed scratches. If he hadn’t been with Natasha, he would never have got past the bouncers. ‘You must be Fingers,’ he said. ‘I’m Pete.’

Fingers nodded briefly and turned to Natasha. He was about to harass her about her late arrival but, as he opened his mouth, her face passed from shadow into the dim glow of a street lamp and his complaints died unsaid.

Her make-up was immaculate and excessive, vampish, but it could not disguise how thin and pale she looked. She looked up at him with eyes that did not properly focus, smiled abstractedly. Drugs for sure, he thought again.

‘Tash, man,’ he said uneasily, ‘are you OK?’

Behind him the thumping beats of the warehouse were audible, a backdrop to his conversation.

She cocked her head, pulled the headphone from one ear. He repeated his question.

‘For sure, man,’ she said, and he was a little reassured. Her voice sounded firm and controlled. ‘We’re ready to go.’

Fingers realized that Fabian was nodding his head slightly, in time to the beat passing through his headphones, his eyes unfocused.

Natasha followed Fingers gaze. ‘You’ll be hearing that later,’ she said softly. ‘You can join in. I swear you’ll love it. Have you got a DAT player in there? Pete brought mine, in case.’ She paused and gave another wan smile. ‘You have to hear what I’ve been doing. It’s special, Fingers.’

There was a silence Fingers did not know how to fill. Eventually he inclined his head for them to follow him, turned and walked back towards the warehouse.

It felt like a long way.

As he walked, he heard a brief sound, a snatch of billowing and snapping like a sheet being shaken out. He turned, but saw nothing. Pete was looking into the sky, smiling.

Giddy with excitement and terror, Loplop spun in circles in the air, passing through narrow passages between buildings, searching for Anansi. He caught a glimpse of his nude torso tucked under the eaves of a building. Loplop hovered before him like a humming-bird, screeching incoherently. Anansi understood. He glowered and mouthed something.

He’s here. The Piper’s here.

Loplop nodded, shrieked, disappeared.

Anansi whispered into his hand, released the tiny spider held therein. It scuttled away from him down the side of the building, to the bottom of the drainpipe, where another five comrades awaited it. They caressed the newcomer with their long, powerful legs, leaned in close and gazed into one another’s eyes. Then all six turned and disappeared, their paths forming an expanding asterisk, until each spider met others of its kind, waiting, and there was another brief conference, and more messengers joined the throng, exponentially, faster and faster, and word spread among the spiders like contagion.

Directly opposite the warehouse rose a high red wall, the boundary of a long-gone factory. Behind it was a small area of urban scrub, and beyond that a thickset tower block, fabricated from grey slabs, that overlooked the warehouse and its courtyard.

On the top of the block’s flat roof, something moved under a pile of old cardboard. Stealthy hands with filthy nails crept gingerly out from underneath and gently cleared a small space. Two indistinct eyes peered out as Natasha, Fabian and Pete followed Fingers up the stairs of the warehouse, past the bouncers and into the building.

The cardboard rose, then fell away as Saul stood.

He was still for a moment, breathing deeply, calming himself, slowing his heart.

His old clothes, stolen from the prison, fluttered around him.

He closed his eyes briefly, rocked on his heels, then snapped to attention, scanned the air for any signs of Loplop coming for him.

It was partly in case of such an attack that he had concealed himself, but there was more and less to it than that. He could not speak, could not talk to Anansi, could not make any more plans. He gave an empty smile. As if they had come up with any plans.

This was the night when it would all happen. This was the night when he would free himself, or the night he would die. And he wanted to be alone in London, using the city as his climbing frame, asserting himself alone, before the night came for him.

And as he had known it would, the night had come.

It was time to move.

Saul leant forward, grasped the gutter with both hands, shook it vigorously, testing its strength.

His legs bent a little for leverage, he paused, then vaulted over the edge of the building.

Saul swung round in mid-air, his hands leapfrogging over each other as he renewed his grip, tugged himself out of his acrobatic arc and into a sharp sideways movement, curtailing his curving passage and slithering along the gutter to the drainpipe.

He slipped down it as if it were a firefighter’s pole, his hands and feet moving imperceptibly fast to avoid the bolts that tethered it to the wall.

He touched down on the desiccated earth and moved through the desultory patches of dandelions and grass into the shadow of the wall.

Saul clicked his fingers imperiously. Immediately a dozen little brown heads poked up from hiding places behind old bricks, from holes in the earth, cavities in the wall. The rats watched him, twitching in excitement and fear.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Tell everyone to get ready. I’ll see you in there.’ He paused, and spoke his final words with a flat excitement, a fatalistic thrill. ‘In you go-’

The rats bolted.

Saul ran with them. He overtook them, ran through them like a symbol of victory. He slunk along the top of the wall, invisible. He crossed the road unseen, now in the shade of a car, now flattened against a building, now as a passer-by; into the gutter and out, over the wall and along the side of the warehouse, past the waiting crowds without giving them a second glance. The air was thick with the taste of alcohol and scent, but Saul held his nose through that.

He kept his nose clean to smell his troops.

Up a low garage and across its collapsed skylight, a ramp onto the crumbling brick walls of the venue, clinging to forgotten nails and the undersides of heavy old windows. He gripped the edge of the gently sloping roof and bent his legs against the wall. He could feel the bricks vibrate with bass. Then, just as King Rat had done so long ago, on Saul’s first night among the beasts, before he had eaten their food, when he was still human, Saul pushed out with his legs and swung around in a perfect circle, landing solidly on the warehouse roof.

He slithered quickly up the slates towards the massive skylights. They were cracked all over, a few seconds work to pry open and push aside, opening the way to an attic space, a dusty wooden floor that jumped with the bass from below, as if the building itself was eager to dance to the music in its bowels.

Saul paused. He could taste a mass movement in the air. He could sense the migration of the compact little bodies, was aware of the exodus of his troops from the streets and sewers and scrub, towards the glowing building. He could feel the scratch of claws on concrete, the feverish searching for causeways and flaws in brick.