King Rat

  If any of the assembled had looked up they might have caught a glimpse of something lurching across the sky, seemingly out of control. A bundle of rags as big as a man, buffeted through the air. It was not at the mercy of the wind: no wind changed direction as violently or as fast as the shapeless mass, no wind could carry such bulk.

  Loplop, the Bird Superior, arced and wheeled above the streets, staring down at the dirty map below him, staring up into the night stained orange by diffuse light, falling, rising, his ears filled with ringing.

  He could not hear the city. He could not hear the predatory grunting of the cars. He could not hear the thud thud thud emanating from the warehouse. The intricate hairs and bones in his ears had burst, and the canals were blocked with dry blood.

  Loplop had only his eyes, and he searched as best he could, weaving silently between buildings, perching on weathervanes and springing into the sky.

  The air was slowly thickening with birds. The few that had been awake as Loplop sped by had cried out, pledged their fealty, but he had not heard them. Confused, they had risen from the eaves and the branches of trees, had followed him, screaming out to him, frightened by his wild flight and his ignoring of them. Huge ponderous crows circled him. Loplop saw them and shouted wordlessly, clutching at the authority he had lost.

  The birds wove elegantly around each other, their numbers growing. Their eyes darted from side to side in confusion. In the midst of their slow wheeling, Loplop rose and sped and zigzagged and fell—a wild card.

  The birds could not obey their general.

  Elsewhere in London, other armies were also massing.

  The walls and corners of houses were emptying out. From crevices and holes all over the city, the spiders streamed. They scuttled in their millions, little smudges racing across dirty floors and through gardens, descending on threads from building tops. They crawled over each other, a sudden, nervous mass of blacks and browns.

  Here and there their squadrons were seen. In children’s bedrooms and backstreets, the night was punctuated by sudden screams.

  Many died. Crushed, eaten, lost. Ruined chitin and smeared bodies marked their passing.

  Something sparked deep in the spiders tiny brains. A sensation that was not the hunger or fear or nothingness that were previously their lot. Trepidation? Excitement? Vindication?

  The city lights glinted minutely on the spiders’ multiple eyes. Close set and impenetrable, as cold and disinterested as a shark’s…except tonight…

  The spiders trembled.

  In the wilds of South London, Anansi watched from rooftops. He could feel the air shifting. He could taste the presence of his troops.

  The sewers boiled with rats, incited to a frenzy.

  Their Crown Prince had passed among them. Saul had spread the word. He had commanded them, controlled them, sent them forth.

  The rats surged through the tunnels like a flash flood. Smaller tributaries streamed into the main branch, bodies on bodies, fat and fast.

  They poured under the streets and over the skyline. Up in the canopy of the city, in the thin air, rats bounded over walls and between partitions, scrabbled along slates and behind chimneys.

  The river was no obstacle: they found their way across almost without pause.

  Different dirt, different packs, a hundred different smells…all the tribes in London running for the south, gnawing on forgotten filth and shaking with adrenaline, ready for battle. An enormous sense of wrong had been encoded in their genes for years, eating them alive like a cancer, and for the first time they could smell a cure.

  Rats spewed out of a hundred thousand holes and converged on the wastelands of South London, a scratching, biting mass, hungry and scared, trying to be brave.

  Insidiously, furtively, the rats gathered round the warehouse, and waited.

  The warehouse was a spark plug. It crackled with energy. It was surrounded by invisible circles, waves and cadres of rats and spiders, crowned with confused, wheeling birds, penetrated by people.

  It was a magnet.

  Loplop still watched from above.

  Anansi scanned the rooftops.

  “Where the fuck is she at?”

  Three Fingers, wiry and cantankerous, addressed his question to one of the bouncers. The huge man shook his head. Fingers danced from side to side in frustration. The wet thumping of basslines and beats welled up behind him. He felt as if he could lean backwards on the sound without falling, cushioned, held in the air.

  He stood at the entrance to the warehouse, gazing out at the crowd assembled in the forecourt. He had been on the top step for some minutes, waiting for Natasha. All the other DJs had arrived. Fingers had already had to rearrange his running order a little, in case Natasha did not appear. He trotted down the stairs into the courtyard, strode out to the split in the wire-mesh fence and looked up and down the street.

  Swaggering dancers were still appearing from all over, converging on the warehouse. Looking absurdly drab in their midst, a few locals passed by, staring at Fingers and glancing uneasily at the warehouse lit up and pounding, monstrous in the dull light.

  A tall figure rounded the corner and bore down on him. Close behind him appeared two figures, a slim black man and a short woman. Fingers started, looked hard. It was Natasha.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” shouted Fingers, smiling tightly, amiable but pissed off. He strode off down the street towards Natasha and her escorts.

  She looked amazing. Her hair was pulled up into a high, coiling ponytail. Her body was sheathed in a tiny bra-top, reflective red, and her trousers were so tight they looked painted onto her legs. She wore no jacket, nothing on her thin arms or midriff. She must be freezing, Fingers thought. He shrugged: no surrender to comfort in the style war. But he was surprised. Whenever he had seen her DJ before, S Natasha had resolutely dressed down, in clothes that were baggy and comfortable and nondescript. But not tonight. Gold glinted in her ears and around her neck.

  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.

  There were a million little holes in the warehouse walls. There were passages and faultlines beneath the guttering, there were missing panes in rear windows. The building was imperfectly sealed.

  Loplop circled it uneasily, seeing all the places where he could go in. He would flit toward one suddenly, ready to make his entrance, ready to attack—and then as the edifice loomed close he would balk and shy violently away, to circle again.

  He cried out in anguish. A few miserable birds answered him, but they were unheard.

  Loplop could lead a flock, could be the knife-point of an attacking cloud, pushed on by his ranks. With a nation behind him his fear was irrelevant.

  But now he was deaf and powerless and quite alone.

  He tried once more to penetrate the walls, failed again and recoiled in misery. His mind brimmed with his defeats at the Piper’s hands. He remembered the stench of bedlam and the ragged pain of bursting ears, the soulless empty joy of the Piper’s thrall.

  With an army behind him, he might have entered. Anger and resolve might have won out as he called his troops to attention, basking in the power of command and kin.

  But alone, trapped in his skull, isolated in the surge of his own blood and terror, surrounded by birds he could not command, Loplop deserted. He wailed once in miserable betrayal and arced suddenly away in a quick, shameful flight across the city, north, over the river, out of danger and into the larger night.

  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 gray 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 leaned 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.

  The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s night lands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.

  The wooden boards drummed under Saul’s feet: the dust motes would not settle but hovered instead in an indistinct mist around his ankles. He crept the length of the long attic. In the corner of the great dark space there was a trapdoor.

  Saul flattened himself against the floor and tugged at it very gently, raising it slowly away from the surrounding boards. Music and colored light and the smell of dancers spilled through the slit to which he put his eye.

  The lights below spun and changed colors, illuminating and obscuring, bouncing off suspended globes and dissipating throughout the hall. Th
ey cut through the darkness, confusing as much as they elucidated.

  A long way below him was the dancefloor. It was a hallucinogenic vision, shimmering and metamorphosing like a fractal pattern, feverish bodies moving in a thousand different ways. In the corners lurked the bad boys, nodding their heads, no more than that, no reaction to the overwhelming music. On the floor the hard-steppers, swinging their arms, loose-limbed and syncopated; and those on speed and coke, ludicrously trying to keep up with the BPM, shifting their feet like lunatics; the rudegirls, arms spread wide, winding their hips slowly to the bassline, a barrage of colors and clothes and undress. The dancefloor was tight packed, thronging with bodies, decadent and vibrant, thrilling, communal and brutal.

  As he watched, a strobe light kicked in, transforming the room momentarily into a series of frozen tableaux. Saul could investigate individuals almost at his leisure. He was struck by the multiplicity of expressions on the faces below.

  The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.

  A little below him an iron walkway described the edge of the hall. It was deserted. There was a ladder in one corner, tucked up under the walkway and secured with chains. It was designed to swing down to another, similar ledge further down. This lower level was crowded with bodies, people looking down on the dancers ten feet below.

  Saul cast his eyes around the hall. There was a tiny movement in the corner opposite him.

  Red and green lights swirled around a black shape suspended from the ceiling. Anansi swung gently from one of his ropes. His arms and legs were tucked up impossibly tight. His knuckles were just visible, motionless, and stretched taut from grasping.

  He swayed from side to side, buffeted by sonic vibrations. Saul knew that Anansi’s army was with him, around them both, invisible and ready.

  Directly below Anansi, Saul saw the stage raised above the dancefloor. His breath quickened a little: there, framed by two colossal speakers, were the decks.