“Tell me about Saul’s life,” he said without looking up.
Kay talked about Saul’s father, the fat socialist they had all laughed at; about Saul’s brief, disastrous attempt to move in with a girlfriend; his return home, temporary he said, always temporary for the next two years. Kay kept talking, about Saul’s friends, about his social life, Jungle, the clubs, and as Kay spoke tears rolled down his cheeks. He was pathetically eager to please. He whimpered with each breath. He had no more to say and he was afraid, because Pete seemed pleased with him when he told him about Saul, and all Kay could think of was that he must keep Pete happy. But he truly had no more to say.
Pete sighed and put the pad in his pocket. He glanced at his watch.
“Thanks, Kay,” he said. “I guess you’re wondering what this all means, what I’m up to. I’m afraid I won’t tell you that. But you’ve helped me a lot. The sewers, huh? I thought as much, but you don’t really want to go wading around in shit unless you’re quite sure you have to, do you? It’s not really my turf, know what I mean? I’ll have to get him out.” He grimaced lightheartedly.
“Maybe…maybe…you…can…let…me…go…” Kay forced the words out past chattering teeth. His body was shaking with little sobs, and every word of Pete’s chilled him.
Pete looked at him and smiled.
“No,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t think so.”
Kay’s screams began again, went shooting off down the tunnel he faced, bounced around him. He threatened, cajoled, pleaded, and Pete ignored him, and continued speaking in his conversational tone.
“You don’t know me, Kay. I can do a trick.” He pulled the flute from his belt. “See this?” Kay continued begging. “I can play this, make anything I want come to me. Play the right notes and I can get you the cockroaches around us, the mice, anything close enough to hear. And it feels so good to make them come to me.” He crooned the last sentence, and at the sound of that cloying wetness, that fucked-up sugary tone, Kay retched.
“And I was looking at these tunnels and thinking how much they looked like wormholes,” Pete continued. “If I played this, what do you think I might call?”
Pete put the flute to his lips and began to play, a strange, droning tune, a hypnotic dirge that wailed flatly over Kay’s garbled exhortations.
Kay gazed into the mouth of the tunnel.
Behind him the melody continued, and Kay could hear the slap of feet as Pete danced to his own tune.
The wind jerked around Kay, pushed into his face from somewhere far off.
Deep in the darkness before him something growled.
Kay hung like an obscene toy, nude and chubby in the yawning darkness of the underground.
The wind pushed on with more resolve, and the growl sounded again. Kay shrieked in despair, felt himself relax in terror, sag in his bonds, felt piss run down his legs. The tune continued.
There was a sound like steel whiplashing as the tracks buckled and moved under the oncoming weight. The wind began to hit Kay now, began to push his hair out of his face. Scraps of paper and dirt came whirling out of the blackness, surrounding him, sticking to him; grit filled his eyes and mouth and he fought and spat to clear himself of debris, consumed by a ghastly desperation to see.
The growling ebbed and flowed, became a clattering, began to drown out the disinterested flute. A great presence rushed towards him.
Lights had appeared in the distance, two dirty white lights that seemed to crawl towards him, seemed determined never to arrive. It was only the wind and noise that moved at speed, he reasoned desperately, but even as he decided that, he saw how much closer those lights suddenly were, and Kay wriggled and fought and screamed prayers to God and Jesus.
He was in a tornado now as the lights suddenly rushed towards him. The howl and rumble echoed around the tube with a strange raging melancholy, an empty roar. The track was visible as glistening threads illuminated by those lights. The filthy off-white of the first Northern Line train of the day became evident before him, the driver’s glass front still a black slit. He must see me, thought Kay. He’ll stop! But the great flat surface moved ineluctably forward at a horrible speed, pushing the air out, clogging the wind with dirt. The speed was intolerable, thought Kay, just stop, but the lights kept coming, there was no let-up, the howl of the tunnel had become a charnel roar, the lights were dazzling, they blinded him, he looked up as he screamed, still hearing the flute, always the flute behind him, he looked up at the reflections varnished onto the windscreen, caught a glimpse of his ridiculous little body spreadeagled like a medical specimen, then saw through that, through the wide-open mouth of his reflection, into the incredulous gaze of the driver who bore down on him, disbelief and horror smeared across his face, those eyes aghast, Kay could see the whites of the other man’s eyes…
The glass front of the train burst open like a vast blood-blister. The first Northern Line train of the day arrived at Mornington Crescent station and ploughed to an unscheduled halt, dripping.
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Days came and went in the city. In the sewers, on the rooftops, under the canal bridges, in all the cramped spaces of London, King Rat and his comrades held councils of war.
Saul would sit and listen as the three unlikely figures murmured together.
Much of what they said made no sense to him references to people and places and occurrences that he could not fathom. But he understood enough of the growled discussion to know that, despite their grandiose declarations of hostilities, neither King Rat nor Loplop nor Anansi had any idea how to proceed.
The prosaic truth was that they were afraid. Sometimes the arguments became heated, and accusations of cowardice would flurry between the three. These accusations were true. The circular discussions, the half-plans, the protestations of anger and pugnacity, all were stymied by the fact that the three knew that in any confrontation one of them would be doomed.
As soon as the Piper got his flute to his lips, or even pursed his lips to whistle, or perhaps even hummed, one of them would be commandeered, one of them would be taken over to the other side. His eyes would glaze and he would start to fight against his allies, his ears stuffed with the enticing sounds of food and sex and freedom.
Anansi would hear sluggish fat flies blundering near his mouth, and the skittering of lovelorn feet approaching him over towering webs to mate. That was what he had heard in Baghdad, as the Piper had thrashed him mercilessly.
Loplop knew that he would hear the snapping of threadlike filaments as the roots of grass were pushed aside and juicy worms groped blindly into the light, towards his bill. He would hear the rush of air as he felt himself swoop above the city, the come-hither calls of the most beautiful birds of paradise.
And King Rat would once again hear the doors of the pantries in hell swinging open.
None of the three wanted to die. It was a mission which involved certain destruction for one. The sheer force of animal self-preservation seemed to preclude their willingness even to risk the odds of one in three. There was to be no sentimental self-sacrifice in this fight.
Saul was vaguely aware that he was a vital component in this argument, that ultimately he was the weapon which would have to be deployed. It did not yet frighten him, as he could not begin to take it seriously.
Some days, Loplop and Anansi would disappear. Saul remained with King Rat.
Every time he walked or climbed or ate, he felt stronger. He would look down over London as he scaled the side of a gas tower and think How did I get up here? with exhilaration. Their journeys across London became rarer, more sporadic. Saul was frustrated. He was moving faster and more quietly. He wanted to roam, to make his mark—
literally, sometimes, as he had discovered the pleasure of pissing his strong-smelling piss against walls and knowing that that corner was now his. His piss was changing, just like his voice.
King Rat was always there when Saul woke. After the initial exhilaration of a new existence at right angles to the world of people he had left behind, Saul was disheartened by the speed with which his days blurred. Life as a rat was dull.
The individual moments still thrilled him with adrenaline, but those moments no longer coalesced.
He knew King Rat was waiting. His ferocious whispered arguments with his comrades became the focal point of Saul’s life. In gravelly hisses and fluting tones the three bickered furiously over whether Anansi’s webs would hold the Piper, and how best to wrest his flute away from him, and whether spiders or birds would constitute better cover. King Rat grew furious. He was alone; he could contribute no troops to any battle. The rats had snubbed him and ignored his commands.
Saul became quieter, learning more about the three creatures who constituted his circle.
He was alone on a roof, one night, sitting with his back to an air-conditioning vent, while King Rat scoured the alley below for food, when Anansi crept over the side of the building before him. Saul was still in his shadows and Anansi looked straight at him for a moment, then cast his eyes around the roof.
I’m getting better at this, thought Saul, with idle pride. Even he can’t see me now.
Anansi sneaked forward under dark red clouds which rolled around each other, belching themselves into and out of existence. They threatened rain. Anansi squatted on the roof, stripped to the waist, as always, despite the cold. He reached into his pocket and drew out a glittering handful, a shifting mass of little buzzing bodies. He smeared the insects into his mouth.
Saul’s eyes widened in fascination, even as he grimaced. He was not surprised by what he saw. He thought he could hear the humming of mother-of-pearl wings obscured by Anansi’s cheeks, till those cheeks tensed and he saw Anansi suck hard, not chewing, but pursing his lips and working his mouth as if he sucked the juice from a big gobstopper.
There was the faintest of crunching sounds.
Anansi opened his mouth and poked out a tongue rolled into a tight U. He exhaled sharply, as if through a blowpipe, and a cascade of chitin shot out across the roof, scattering near Saul’s feet; the desiccated body parts of flies and woodlice and ants.
Saul rose to his feet and Anansi started a little, his eyes widening momentarily.
“Wha’appen, pickney,” he said evenly, gazing at Saul. “The never see you there. You a quiet lickle bwoy.”
Loplop was harder to surprise. He would appear suddenly from behind chimney stacks and rubbish bins, ruffling his foppish coat behind him. His passage was always invisible. Occasionally he would look up and yell “Oy!” into the firmament, and a pigeon, or a flock of starlings, or a thrush, would wheel suddenly out of the clouds, obeying his call, and perch nervously on his wrist.
He would peer at the bird, then briefly up at Saul or whoever observed him, and smile in satisfaction. He would glance back at the bird, imperious suddenly, and bark a command at it, upon which it would seem to cringe and give obeisance, bobbing its head and bowing. And then Loplop would become a good and just king all of a sudden, with no time for such puerile displays of power, and he would murmur reassuringly to his subject, and jettison it, watching it disappear with a look of noble benediction.
Saul believed that Loplop was still a little mad.
And King Rat, King Rat was the same: cantankerous and cockney and irritable and otherworldly.
Kay did not reappear with Natasha’s keys, and she was forced to wake her downstairs neighbor, with whom she left a spare set.
It was just like Kay to meander off and forget that he had them, and she waited for him to call with his cheerful apology. He did not call. After a couple of days she tried his number, and his flatmates said they had not seen him for ages. Natasha was heartily pissed off. After another couple of days she had a new set cut and resolved to charge him when he re-emerged.
The police did seek her out. She was taken to the station and interviewed by a quiet man named Crowley, who asked her several times in several different ways if she had seen Saul since his disappearance. He asked her if she thought Saul capable of murder. He asked her what she had thought of Saul’s father, whom she had never met, and what Saul thought of him. He asked her what Saul thought of the police. He asked what she thought of the police.
When they let her go she returned home seething, to discover a note on her door from Fabian, who was waiting for her in the pub. She fetched him back to her house where they smoked a joint and, to the sound of Fabian’s abrupt giggles, composed a Jungle track on her sequencer using loads of samples from The Bill. They christened the song Fuck You Mister Policeman Sir!.
Pete was coming around more and more. Natasha was waiting for him to make a move on her, something which seemed to happen with the majority of blokes she hung out with for any length of time. He did not, which was a relief to her, as she was completely uninterested and did not want to have to deal with his embarrassment.
He was listening to more and more Drum and Bass, was making comments that were more and more astute. She sampled his flute and wove it into her tunes. She liked the sound it made; there was a breath of the organic about it. Normally, for the main sounds at the top end she would simply create something with her digital powers, but the soullessness those noises possessed, a quality she often revelled in, was beginning to alienate her. She enjoyed the sounds of his flute, the tiny pauses for breath, the hint of vibration when she slowed it down, the infinitesimal imperfections that were the hallmark of the human animal. She sent the bass to follow the flute track.
She was still experimenting, still laying plenty of tracks without him. After a time she focused her flute experimentation on one track. Sometimes they would play together, she snapping down a drum track, a bass line, some interjections, and he would improvise over the top. She recorded these sessions for ideas, and a notion formed in her mind of how they could play together: a session of Jazz Jungle, the newest and most controversial twist to the Drum and Bass canon.
But for now she concentrated on the track she had christened Wind City. She returned to it day on day, tweaking it, adding layers to the low end, tickling the flute, looping it back on itself.
She had a clear idea of the feeling she sought, the neurotic beats of Public Enemy, especially on Fear Of A Black Planet, the sense of a treble constantly looking over its own shoulder. She took the harmony of the flute and stretched it. Repetition makes listeners wary of a statement, and Natasha made the flute protest too much, coming back in and back in and back in on its purest note, till that purity became a testimony of paranoia, no sweet sound of innocence.
Pete loved what she was doing.
She would not let him hear the track until it was finished, but occasionally she would give in to his pesterings and play him a snippet, a fifteen-second phrase. The truth was that although she feigned exasperation, she enjoyed his rapturous reception.
“Oh, Natasha,” he said as he listened, “you really understand me. More than I think you think you do.”
Crowley was still haunted by the scene of the Mornington Crescent murder.
There had been something of a news blackout, a halfway house of secrecy whereby the unknown victim’s death had been reported but the intricacies withheld. There was a vain and desperate hope that by mulling over the unbelievable facts in private, by containing them, they could be understood.
Crowley did not believe it would work.
The crime was not connected to his own investigation, but Crowley had come to examine the scene. The unearthly circumstances surrounding the murder reminded him of the peculiarities of Saul’s disappearance and the murder of the two police officers.
Crowley had stood on the platform, the train still waiting there some hours after a hysterical driver had reported somethin
g which made no sense. A brief examination of the scene told the police that the driver’s “floating man” had been suspended by rope to the tunnel entrance. Frayed cord dangled from the brick. The few passengers had been cleared out and the driver was with a counsellor elsewhere in the station.
The front of the train was encrusted with blood. There was very little of the body left to identify. Dental records had been rendered useless by the crushing, inexorable onrush of metal and glass onto the victim’s face.
There was no escaping this crime, it lay all around him, on the platform, spattering the walls, carbonized on the live rail, smeared by gravity the length of the first carriage. No cameras had recorded the passing of criminal or victim. They had come and gone invisibly. It was as if the metal stakes and bloodied stubs of rope, the ruined flesh, had been conjured up spontaneously out of the dark tunnels.
Crowley exchanged words with the investigating detective, a man whose hands still shook since his first arrival at the scene an hour or more previously. Crowley had only tenuous reasons to connect the crime to his own investigations. Even the savagery was wrong. The murder of the policemen had seemed an act of huge rage, but a spontaneous act, brutally efficient. This was an imaginative piece of sadism, ritualistic, like a sacrifice to some dangerous god. It was designed to strip the victim of dignity and any vestige of power. And as he thought that, Crowley wondered if the man—they had found flesh that told them it was a man—had been awake and conscious as the train had arrived, and he screwed up his face, felt briefly sick with horror.
And yet, and yet, despite the differences, Crowley felt himself linking the crimes in his mind.
There was something in the infernal ease with which life had been taken, a sense of power which seemed to permeate the murder sites, the sure and absolute knowledge that none of these victims, for so much as one second, had the slightest chance of escape.