King Rat

by China Miéville

  Saul felt dizzy, swallowed spit made thick with phlegm by the atmosphere. He did not, he did not understand what was happening.

  “Who are you?” Saul hissed. “Are you police? Where’s Crowley?”

  The man jerked his head in what might have been dismissal, shock, or a laugh.

  “How did you get in?” demanded Saul.

  “I crept past all the little boys in blue on tippy-toe slid hugger-mugger under the counter and I sneaked my way to your little queer ken. Do you know where you’re here?”

  Saul nodded dumbly.

  “They think…”

  “The constables think you killed your daddy, but you didn’t, I know that. Granted, you’ll have a fine time getting them to Adam and Eve that…but I do.”

  Saul was shaking. He sank onto the bunk. The stench which had entered with the man was over powering. The voice continued, relentless. “I’ve been watching you carefully, you know. Keeping tabs. We’ve a lot to talk about, you know. I can…do you a favor.”

  Saul was utterly bewildered. Was this some casualty off the streets? Someone ill in his head, too full alcohol or voices to make any sense? The air was still taut like a bowstring. What did this man know about his father?

  “I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he star slowly. “And I don’t know how you got in…”

  “You don’t understand.” The whisper became a little harsher. “Listen, matey. We’re out of that world now. Two more people and no more people things, get it? Look at you,” the voice harsh with disgust. “Sitting there in your borrowed duds like a fool, waiting patiently to get took before the Barnaby. Think they’ll take kindly to your whids? They’ll bang you up till you rot, foolish boy.” There was a long pause. “And then I appear, like a bloody angel of mercy. I spring your jigger, no problem. This is where I live, get it? This is the city where I live. It shares all the points of yours and theirs, but none of its properties. I go where I want. And I’m here to tell you how it is with you. Welcome to my home.”

  The voice filled the small room, it would not give Saul space or time to think.

  The shadowy face bore down on Saul. The man was coming nearer. He moved in little spurts, his chest and shoulders still tight, he approached from the side, zigzagged a little, came a little closer from another direction, his demeanor at once furtive and aggressive.

  Saul swallowed. His head was light, his mouth dry. He fought for spit. The air was arid and so full of tension he could almost hear it, a faint keening as if the sound of the door hinge had never died away. He could not think, he could only listen.

  The stinking apparition before him moved a little out of the shadows. The filthy trenchcoat was open, and Saul caught sudden sight of a lighter gray shirt underneath, decorated with rows of black arrows pointing up, convict chic.

  The angle of the man’s head was proud, the shoulders skulking.

  “There’s nothing I don’t know about Rome-vill you see. Nor Gay Paree, nor Cairo, nor Berlin, nor no city, but London’s special to me, has been for a long time. Stop looking at me and wondering, boy. You’re not going to get it. I’ve crept through these brick when they were barns, then mills, then factories and banks. You’re not looking at people, boy. You should count yourself lucky I’m interested in you. Because I’m doing you a big favor.” The man’s snarling monologue paused theatrically.

  This was madness, Saul knew. His head spun. None of this meant anything; it was meaningless words, ludicrous, he should laugh, but something in the curdled air held his tongue. He could not speak, he could not mock. He realized he was crying, or perhaps his eyes were just watering in the stagnant atmosphere of the room.

  His tears seemed to annoy the intruder.

  “Stop moaning on about your fat dad,” he spat “That’s all over, and you’ve more important things to worry about.”

  He paused again.

  “Shall we go?”

  Saul looked up sharply. He reached his voice at last.

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” He was whispering.

  “Shall we go? I said. It’s time to scarper, it’s time to split, to quit, to take our leave.” The man looked about him conspiratorially, and hid his mouth behind the back of his hand in a melodramatic stage whisper. “I’m Breaking you out.” He straightened up a little and nodded his head, that indistinct face bobbing enthusiastically. “Let’s just say your path and mine cross at this point. It’s darkmans outside already, I can smell it, and it looks like they’ve forgot about you. No Tommy Tucker for you, it seems, so let’s bow out gracefully. You and I’ve got business together, and this is no place to conduct it. And if we wait much longer they’ll have banged you up as a member of the parenticide club and eaten the key. There’s no justice there, I know. So let me ask you one more time…shall we go?”

  He could do it, Saul realized. With a terrified amazement he realized he was going to go with this creature, was going to follow this man whose face he could not see into the police station, and the two of them would escape.

  “Who…what…are you?”

  “I’ll tell you that.”

  The voice filled Saul up and made him faint. The thin face was inches from his, silhouetted by the bare bulb. He tried to see through the obfuscating darkness and discern clear features, but the shadows were stubborn and subtle. The words mesmerized him like a spell, as hypnotic as dance music.

  “You’re in the presence of royalty, mate. I go where my subjects go, and my subjects are everywhere. And here in the cities there’re a million crevices for my kingdom. I fill all the spaces in-between.”

  “Let me tell you about me.”

  “I can hear the things left unsaid.”

  “I know the secret life of houses and the social life of things. I can read the writing on the wall.”

  “I live in old London town.”

  “Let me tell you who I am.”

  “I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief, I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my piss. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king.”

  In one sudden movement he turned to face the door and sloughed the coat from his shoulders, unveiling the name stencilled crudely in black on the back of shirt, between the rows of arrows.

  “I’m King Rat.”

  T

  H

  R

  E

  E

  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 savior 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 gray 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 gray 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 gray 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 centimeters 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.

  Saul positioned himself underneath the hand, stretched his arms up and leapt.

  Strong fingers caught him around his left wrist, locked tight, dug into his flesh. He opened his mouth to cry out, caught himself, hissed. He was hauled silently through the air, all thirteen stone of blood and flesh and clothes. Another hand slid around his body, a booted foot locked efficiently underneath him. How was his sinewy benefactor holding on? Saul twisted through the air, saw the window approach him. He turned his head to one side, felt his shoulders and chest lock in the tight space. Hands slid over his body, finding purchase, easing his passage into the outside world. He was slipping through the window now, his stomach pressing painfully against the lock fixed on the frame, but moving much too smoothly through that narrow gash and out into the shock of cold air.

  Impossibly, he was delivered.

  Wind buffeted him. Warm breath tickled his neck.

  “Cling on,” came the hissed order, as Saul was pulled into the air. Saul clung. He wrapped his legs around King Rat’s thin waist and threw his arms over those bony shoulders.

  King Rat stood on the tiny ledge, his boots clinging precariously to the paint. Saul, who was much the bigger, perched on his back, frosty with terror. King Rat’s right hand held the window-frame; his left hand was locked into an absurdly tiny crack above his head. Over them rose an expanse of sheer brickwork four or five feet high crowned with a strip of plastic guttering. Above that the roof, its slates too steep to be seen.

  Saul turned his head. His stomach pitched like an anchor. Five floors
below him was the rubbish-strewn concrete of a freezing alley. The shock of vertigo made Saul feel sick. His mind shrieked at him to put his feet on ground. He can’t possibly hold on! he thought. He can’t possibly hold on! He felt the lithe body shift under him and he nearly screamed.

  Dimly Saul heard the voices from the stairwell approach the window, but they suddenly receded as he felt himself moving again.

  King Rat lifted his right hand from the window frame, and reached up to wrap his fingers around a nail rusted into the wall, its purpose long forgotten. His left hand moved now, creeping swiftly along invisible paths in the brick and mortar to stop suddenly and grip at a seemingly arbitrary spot in the surface. Those fingers were acute to unseen clues and potentials in the architecture.

  The booted feet stepped free of the ledge. Saul was twisted to one side as King Rat swung his right foot up above his shoulder, suspending himself and his burden from only clenched white knuckles. His feet scraped at the wall, investigating like octopus tentacles, till they found purchase and locked on some minor aberration, some imperfection of the brick.

  King Rat reached up with his right hand, grasping; then his left, then his right, this time gripping the rim of the black plastic gutter that marked the border between brick and slate. It creaked dolefully but, unperturbed, he tugged at it with both hands. He pulled his knees up into his stomach, his feet planted firmly against the brick, hung poised for a moment, then pushed out with his thighs like a swimmer.

  Saul and King Rat somersaulted through the air. Saul heard himself wail as the wall, the alley below, the lights of buildings, streetlamps and stars spun around his head. The guttering cracked as King Rat clung to it, his hands the centre of the circle his body described. He released his grip, his feet met the sloping roof slates, he bent low to muffle the sound and, twisting his body, flung himself flat on the roof itself. Hardly pausing, he scrambled on up the tiles like a spider, with Saul holding so tight to him it felt as if he would never come loose.