Guy Adams - The Clown Service

Finally, it must have decided it was alone. The heads closed up like flowers in the evening and it continued on its way, moving along the path away from us and vanishing between the buildings.

As Jamie relaxed, so did I.

‘What was that?’

‘The things that live here take all sorts of forms, some recognisable, some not, some in-between… If this is a Ghost Universe, perhaps they are the Ghost Population – the people that might have been, the lives shed as their owners took a different path. They’re hungry – you can sense that much. Maybe they’ve become so insubstantial that they need to feed on something real.’

‘We’re not real though, are we?’ I said. ‘Our bodies aren’t here, after all, just our minds.’

‘And it’s those they feed on. What’s the body but a vehicle? It’s the indefinable energy at the heart of us they want. Thoughts and emotions, they’re the things that define sentience. The rest is just meat. We need to move carefully. Imagine you’re stood in the middle of a field of sleeping lions. In order to get to the other side you go slowly, tread carefully.’

‘We wouldn’t want to wake the lions.’

‘You’ve got it.’

I looked over my shoulder at the river. Its surface was rippled as if by winds and tides and yet those ripples were static. Like everything else it seemed to be an approximation of the real thing, an illustration of a river.

As I watched, something moved beneath its surface and I was reminded of the shadow that had passed over us when we first arrived.

‘The bigger shapes,’ I asked. ‘Are they like the thing I saw when Tim and I saved you, that wave of darkness?’

‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’d never seen anything like that before. Maybe it was an after-effect of Krishnin being here. Something new. You get shadows sometimes, shapes that move around the edges, but I’ve never seen them actually manifest themselves as that did. I always thought the shadows were just grey areas, you know? Undefined space shifting at the edge of your perception. This version of reality catching up with your presence. Like streaming video buffering on a slow connection.’ He shrugged. ‘That was my guess anyway. Just because I can travel here doesn’t make me an expert. I can get on a budget flight to Poland. Doesn’t mean I know the first thing about the place.’ He began to walk along the promenade. ‘Except that they make exceptionally fine plumbers – I call mine at every opportunity. It’s worth every penny just to see those arms of his…’

He carried on in this vein for a while, discussing the varied muscular qualities of everyone from the people he saw at the gym (‘It’s like belonging to a strip club that tries to hurt you’) to the surly nature of the owner of his local corner shop (‘If he can’t handle my manners when I’m at my lowest ebb, he shouldn’t sell me cheap wine and marshmallow teacakes at three in the morning’).

We moved at a slow pace, frequently stopping whenever we caught a glimpse of movement elsewhere.

‘This place is packed with them,’ I said after we had been forced to stop again just around the corner from the warehouse. They came in all manner of shapes, from faux pedestrians to vehicles – cars that slid along the road to the tinny sound of recorded engines. As Jamie had said, they all seemed to be approximations of real things. Creature-things wearing bad disguises trying to blend in.

‘Whatever’s going on here must be antagonising them,’ Jamie said. ‘Think how sensitive they are to our presence. Imagine what it must be like to have actual physical presences here. As our charming Russian neighbour said – and I really must thank you for introducing us to him, so lovely that the FSB now has my postal address and can pop along and shoot me while I’m sleeping – this plane cannot bear physical intrusion. Krishnin will be like a fleck of dirt in its eye. A constant irritation it will feel desperate to scratch.’

Perhaps that also explained the shifting geography we had encountered. When Shining and I had visited here before, travelling through the approximation of Sampson Court, the place had at least looked like the real world it lay alongside. Here the roads stretched into new shapes, the landscape losing sight of the original it was supposed to be based on. In the distance, Tower Bridge reached high into the dull sky, a savage arc of metal and stone that looked like an upturned grin sculpted by a lunatic. If it carried traffic on its back, I had no desire to catch sight of it.

‘So what would happen to us,’ I asked, ‘if one of those creatures caught us? Nothing physical, I guess, because our bodies aren’t even here.’

‘I can’t speak from experience,’ said Jamie, ‘obviously, because I’m far too brilliant and careful. But there are travellers who have been attacked here, and all there is to show for it are the empty shells they leave behind. The majority of our minds are here. If we lose those, then we’ve lost everything.’

‘As good as dead then? Brilliant.’

‘Maybe worse,’ he replied, damn him. ‘I think I’d rather be dead than catatonic. I mean, there must be some brain function left behind, mustn’t there? Some trace element of our psyches still rattling inside. Imagine what it would be like to be trapped in our bodies forever, not able to do anything more than just lie there, breathing.’

‘No, thank you. I don’t think I will imagine that. I don’t think it would help.’

‘Fair enough. Let’s just agree that at the first sign of trouble we leg it back to the van.’

‘If Derek moves the van in the real world…’

‘It won’t matter. Our van is symbolic. It’s our exit point; as long as we get back to where we started before we jump back out, we’ll be fine.’

‘I wish he’d parked it a bit closer.’

We continued to make our way along Shad Thames. The buildings either side of us were strange reflections of those I had walked past the day before with Shining. On one, the glass of its windows billowed like a sail on a ship. On another, the mortar between the bricks steamed as if to vent some terrible pressure from within.

We turned the corner and the warehouse was in view.

‘Oh,’ said Jamie, ‘that’s going to make things a bit difficult for sure.’

The building was surrounded by the strange wraiths that populated this place. Every variation on the form, all swarming on the pavement around the sealed double-doors.

Jamie pulled me back, the pair of us pressed against the wall of what had been an apartment block in our world. I could feel the wall undulating behind me, as if quivering at our touch.

‘How do we get past them?’ I asked, speaking as quietly as I could.

‘We don’t,’ he replied. ‘It’s one thing staying still and hoping they don’t register you’re there, but there’s no way we can start pushing them out of the way to get to the door.’

‘We can’t just give up,’ I insisted. ‘There’s too much riding on this. Maybe we can get to it from the rear.’

‘Maybe,’ he said doubtfully.

Before we could try, the wraiths shifted. They moved as one, all stiffening as if sensing something close. I was reminded of the way a cat moves when it senses possible prey. The way it becomes static, completely tense. Its awareness utterly heightened, the cat becomes a statue, not wanting to tip off the possible prey with even a flicker of movement. The wraiths held that position. I made out a woman, her hair bolt upright as if she were hanging upside down, her face a perfect, hungry hole. Near ‘her’, what might have been a bicycle, its tyres pinched and hooked like the claws of a preying mantis. A pack of dogs, each bleeding into the next, one shifting mass of hair, claws and teeth.