China Miéville: King Rat

A long way off to the south, somewhere in the heart of the city, a siren sounded mournfully. The smell of smoke still clung faintly to the air. It mingled with exhaust fumes and the whiff of rubbish, all made chill and even refreshing by the night.

Above the black bags and deserted streets rose the walls of North London; above the walls the slate roofs; and, above the slates, two figures: one standing astride the apex of the police station roof like a mountain climber, the other crouching in the shadow of the aerials.

Saul wrapped his arms tightly around himself. The unlikely figure of his saviour loomed above him. He was sore. His borrowed clothes had rubbed against concrete many times during his escape, till his skin was scraped raw and bleeding, imprinted with a has relief of cotton weave.

Somewhere in the guts of the building under his feet was the cell he had recently vacated. He supposed that the police had discovered him missing by now.

He imagined them scurrying about frantically, searching for him, looking out of windows and filling the area with cars.

Back in that cell, the grotesque figure calling itself King Rat had impaled Saul with his grandiloquent and preposterous declamations, taking his breath away and rendering him dumb. Then he had paused again, and hunched those bony shoulders defensively. And again that invitation, as casual as from a bored lover at a party.

‘Shall we go?’

Saul had hovered, his heart shaking his body, eager to follow instructions. King Rat had sidled up to the door and gently tugged it open, silent this time. In a sudden movement he had poked his head into the tight crack between door and frame, and twisted his head exaggeratedly in both directions, then reached hand behind him without looking back and beckoned to Saul. Something magic had come to take him away and Saul had crept forward with guilt and hope and excitement.

King Rat had briefly turned as he approached and without warning, swept him up over his shoulder in fireman’s lift. Saul had let out a bark of surprise before King Rat crushed his body against him, driving the from him and hissing: ‘Shut it.’

Saul lay still as King Rat stalked forward with ease. He jounced up and down as the stinking figure pace out of the room. Saul listened.

His head was flat against the other’s back. The smell of dirt and animal suffused him. He heard a very faint whine as the door was pushed further open. He closed his eyes. The light of the police-station corridor shone red through his eyelids.

King Rat’s thin shoulder dug into Saul’s stomach.

Through the flesh of his belly he felt King Rat pause, then pad forward without the slightest sound. Saul kept his eyes shut tight. His breath came in starts. He could hear the low hubbub of people nearby. He felt the wall press into him. King Rat was hugging the shadows.

From somewhere in front of them came footsteps, brisk and inexorable. The wall scraped along Saul’s side as King Rat swiftly sank into a crouch and froze. Saul held his breath. The footsteps came closer and closer. Saul wanted to shriek his guilt, his presence, anything to break the unbearable tension.

With a tiny breeze and a moment of warmth, the footsteps passed by.

The grey shape moved on, one arm coiled tight around Saul’s legs. King Rat was weighed down under Saul’s motionless body like a grave-robber.

King Rat and his cargo passed silently through the halls. Again and again footsteps approached, voices, laughing. Each time Saul held his breath, King Rat was still, as people passed by impossibly close, near enough to touch, without seeing him or his burden.

Saul kept his eyes closed. Through his lids he could see changes in darkness and light. Unbidden, his mind drew a map of the station, rendering it a land of the stark and sudden oppositions. Here be monsters, thought, and felt ridiculously close to giggling. He became acutely aware of sounds. The echoes he head aided his helpless cartography, waxing and waning the rooms and corridors through which he was carried grew and shrank. Another door creaked open, and Saul was held still.

The echoes hollowed out, changed direction. The bobbing of his body increased. He felt himself born upwards.

Saul opened his eyes. They were on a narrow flight of grey stairs, musty and sterile and badly lit. Muffled sounds came from above and below. His rescue carried him up several flights, past floor after floor, filthy windows and doors, eventually coming to rest and ducking his body for Saul to dismount. Saw struggled off the bony shoulder and looked about him.

They had reached the top of the building. On his left was a white door through which the tapping of keyboard could be heard. There was nowhere else to go. On all other sides was dirty wall.

Saul turned to his companion. ‘What now?’ he whispered.

King Rat turned back to face the stairs. Directly in front of him was a big greasy window, high above the little entresol where the stairs had changed direction.

As Saul stared, the grey figure cocked his head, sniffed the expanse of air between himself and the window ten feet away. In a burst of feverish motion he locked his hands onto the banister and sprang astride it, right foot planted below the left, perfectly still and poised on the sloping plastic. He seemed to bunch up his shoulders, contracting muscles and sinews relentlessly one by one. He paused for a moment, the sharp, obscure face contorted in a grin or a grimace, then he burst forward in a silent flurry of limbs, for a moment filling the gap between mezzanine and ceiling. He flew through the air, grasped the handles of the window and set his feet on the edge of the tiny sill. And as suddenly as he had moved he was quite still, a bizarre shape spreadeagled on the glass. His trenchcoat was the only thing in motion, swinging gently.

Saul gasped, clapped his hand over his mouth, glanced fearfully over his shoulder at the nearby door.

King Rat was sinuously unwinding. His long limbs disentangled and his left hand scrabbled quietly at the window lock. With a click and a gust of cold, the window opened. His right hand still poised on the sill, the weird apparition twisted his body, pulling it bit by bit out of the narrow opening. He made himself impossibly thin as he squeezed through the vertical strip of darkness that was all the window was built to admit. His passage was as enchanted as that of a genie from a lamp, clinging as tight to the outside frame as he had within, poised on a few centimetres of wood five stories above the earth, until those unclear eyes were staring at Saul from beyond the filthy glass.

Only King Rat’s right hand remained inside the police station. It beckoned to Saul. Outside the dark figure breathed mist onto the pane, then wrote with the index finger of his left hand. He wrote in looking glass script so the words appeared the right way round to Saul.

‘now you’ he wrote, and waited.

Saul tried to clamber onto the banister. He scrabbled ineffectually as his legs slid towards the floor. He clung desperately and started to haul himself up again, but the weight of his body tugged at him. He was beginning to pant.

He stared up at the thin figure in the window. That bony hand still stretched out towards him. Saul descended to the mezzanine. Flattening his body as low as it would go on the window-ledge, the other swung his hand down, following Saul, reaching towards the floor. Saul looked up at the tiny opening under the window-frame: it was no more than nine inches wide. He looked down at himself. He was broad, a little fleshy. He spread his hands about his girth, looked up at the window again, looked at the thing waiting for him outside, shook his head.

The hand stretched towards him clawed the air impatiently, clutched fitfully at nothing. It would not take no for an answer. Somewhere below them in the building, a door slammed and two voices entered the stairwell. Saul stared over the banister, saw feet and the tops of heads two floors below. He jumped back out of sight. The men were rising towards him. The hand still clutched at him; outside, that shady face was twisted.