Tom Pollock: The City's son

I’m hunting. The sun sits low over Battersea, its rays streaking the brickwork like warpaint as I pad through the railway tunnels. My prey can’t be far ahead now: there’s a bitter, burnt stench in the air, and every few yards I find another charred bundle that used to be a rat.

I pick up the pace, racing eagerly over the tracks with my bare feet. Sweeping my spear in a low arc, I feel for the electricity in her trail — divining for the monster.

Around me, the city is oblivious. Under the brick arches, people are walking in and out of the newsagent’s and the off-licence; a couple of schoolkids are chatting, swapping tall stories about some girl they fancy. And then, over their laughter, the moan of evening traffic, the bass from distant music and all the other sounds of the city, I hear her wild, shrieking brake cry.

My heart clenches. They have no idea of the danger they’re in, none of them, not now she’s loose — now she’s awake.

In Mater Viae’s name, she’s awake.

I’d picked up her trail at King’s Cross, in the nest of interwoven steel north of the station. She’d left her train, a big freight engine, paralysed without her spirit to animate it. The driver had just sat there stupefied, no clue what was wrong with his machine. Other trains tailed back from the obstruction in strings of brightly lit windows, their passengers grumbling, playing with their phones and wondering what the hell the hold-up was.

I’ve pursued her doggedly since then: the relentless hunter.

Well… almost relentless.

Once, I let her go — I had to. Her trail led through the St Paul’s construction sites, past the Cathedral, right under the claw-like shadows of Reach’s cranes.

Reach — the Crane King. Even I can’t trespass on his territory. I swear I could feel his metal-strutted fingers stretching out to claim me as I turned to run.

I found the trail again easily enough. The dead boy made it hard to miss. He lay tangled across the tracks under a burnt-out signal box. Judging by his size, he’d been about fifteen, maybe only a few months younger than me, but the damage to his face made it hard to be sure: the dried-out skin was cracked and blackened, and empty sockets gaped where the eyeballs had boiled away. Only the metal spraycan in his right hand had survived the voltage intact.

It wasn’t the body that made me hesitate — sad to say, I’ve seen uglier corpses. It was the bloody wheel-print bisecting the boy’s chest, at right angles to the rails, running across the tracks. For a moment I struggled to make sense of it. Then I saw the hole smashed through the bricks in the viaduct wall and a prickle of disbelief ran up the back of my neck.

She’d escaped the railway. She’d got out.

How in Thames’ name-?

It was then that I started to doubt: if she was that powerful, would I really be able to bring her down?

Out across the city the streetlights were starting to shine as the Sodiumite dancers woke, stretching and warming their limbs to a glow inside their glass bulbs. I slid my fingers into the cracks in the brickwork and pushed myself over the edge of the viaduct, easing myself down to the pavement below. Then, nimble, in the gathering gloom, I slipped into the streets.

Now I’m waiting in a dead-end alley, listening to the steady drip of water from a rusting pipe. I calm myself, letting the tap of the water become the rhythm of my heartbeat. My stance is open, my spear ready.

This is where her trail ends.

Thrum-clatter-clatter, thrum-clatter-clatter…

I can feel her vibration through the ground. A fox squirms out from behind a couple of steel bins and runs for the road, trailing stink. I let my breath stream out in a slow hiss.

Thrum-clatter-clatter…

The concrete shale on the ground starts to shift and a breeze picks up, spattering rain against my cheek. The burnt smell is emanating from the wall at the end of the alley, breathing out of the pores in the brick itself.

A high-pitched wail fills the air: steel shrieking on steel like screaming horses. The clatter grows louder and the bins clang as they are shaken to the ground.

I hear the ghost of a steam-whistle, her mournful, obsolete battle-cry, and I hunker down low. Light starts to bleed through the mortar ahead of me, outlining two glaring, full-beam eyes. I hear the clash of her wheels, stampeding towards me on a path of lighting. The scream rises out of my throat to greet her, cursing her by all of her names: Loco Motive, Bahngeist, Railwraith -

— and as she roars out at me, I leap sideways and strike.

‘Beth, come on,’ Pencil whispered, ‘we need to go.’

Beth studied the picture she’d sprayed on the tarmac of the playground. She flipped her aerosol over a couple of times in her hand.

‘ Beth…’

‘It’s not finished yet, Pen,’ Beth said. In the dim backwash from the lights nearby she could just make out the Pakistani girl’s fingers worrying at her headscarf. ‘Don’t be chicken.’

Pencil paced fretfully back and forth. ‘ Chicken? What are we, like ten? Have you been sniffing your own paints? I’m not kidding, B. If someone comes, this will get us expelled. ’

Beth started shaking the spray can up. ‘Pen,’ she said, ‘it’s four a.m. School’s locked up. Even the rats have given up and gone home. We covered our faces from the cameras when we jumped the wall, but there’s sod all light there anyway. There’s no one around and we can’t be ID’d so what exactly are you worried about?’ Beth kept her voice calm, but there was a taut knot of excitement in her chest. She swept her torch over the picture at her feet. Her portrait of Dr Julian Salt, Frostfield High’s Head of Maths, was coming out well, better than she’d expected, especially for a rush job in the dark. She’d got his frowning eyebrows down perfectly, and the hollow cheeks and the opaque, threatening glasses. The weeds bursting through the tarmac added to the effect, looking like unkempt nasal hair.

In fairness, Beth had also given him necrotic peeling skin and a twelve-foot-long forked tongue, so she was obviously using some artistic licence, but still…

It’s unmistakably you, you shit.

‘Beth, look!’ Pen hissed, making Beth jump.

‘What?’

‘Up there-’ Pen pointed. ‘A light…’

Beth glanced up. One of the windows in the estate overlooking the school was glowing a soft, menacing orange. She exhaled irritably. ‘It’s probably just some old biddy going for a midnight wizz.’

‘We can be seen from there,’ Pen insisted.

‘Why would anyone even care?’ Beth muttered. She turned back to the picture. Everyone in year 12 at Frostfield knew she and Salt were enemies, but that was just the usual teacher-versus-student aggro, and it wasn’t why she was here. It was the way Salt treated Pen that demanded this retribution.

She didn’t know why, but he seemed to derive this vicious delight from humiliating her best friend. Salt had put Pen in half the number of detentions he’d sentenced Beth to, but she was always on the verge of tears when she came out of them. And in Monday’s maths lesson, when Pen had asked to go to the toilet, Salt had point-blank refused. He’d gone on talking about quadratic equations, but he hadn’t taken his eyes from Pen. There’d been this smile on his face as though he was daring her to defy him — as though he knew that she couldn’t. Pen’d kept her hand raised, but after a while her arm had started to shake. When she’d doubled-over with the pain of holding it in, Beth had dragged her bodily her from her chair and bundled her out of the room. As they ran down the corridor, they’d heard the laughter start.