King Rat

by China Miéville

  Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street. The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.

  Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.

  She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.

  She did not feel tethered at all.

  She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.

  Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.

  A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fucking stupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.

  He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?

  To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.

  She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes of sound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until she found and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here she hinted at it.

  The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came around several times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in the music. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and a sound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronic orchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.

  And then the bassline.

  A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause, another, longer pause…double thud and back to the beginning. And underneath it all she began to make those snatches of radio static a little longer, and longer still, and looping them more and more randomly, until it was a constant, shifting refrain under the beat. A chunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break out of white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it by finding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that the peaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager to make contact, and failing…or they could have just been static.

  The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it had gone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and the people could not reclaim the city.

  Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She sped through the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings, everything gray, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into the track, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.

  And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone, Natasha brought on the Wind.

  A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost speaking of the static, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich album—God knew where she had heard that—where he made violins mimic human voices. The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless piano rolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudder into existence behind it for a moment, a shrill echo, and then it would disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Then again. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear, overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophony of simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral, artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped it contemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up from behind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing the effect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks and troughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The piano goes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a single note like a slow metronome passing time. Then that, too, disappears. The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great single wind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and bassline, stretching off for a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.

  This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. The boulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken, expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.

  This was Wind City, the title that made Fabian laugh.

  She could not talk to him after he had made his joke.

  Pete really understood. In fact, when he heard pieces of the track, he told her that it was she who understood, that she really understood him.

  Pete loved the track with an extraordinary passion. She supposed it appealed to him, the notion of the whole world possessed by the Wind.

  The little flat in Willesden had become the setting for Crowley’s dreams. He was no longer fooled by its nondescript architecture. This flat was a dynamo. It had been turned into a generator of horrors.

  He was on his haunches, looking down at another ruined face.

  The little flat was becoming steeped in violence. It contained some vast attractive force luring people in to violent and bloody mayhem. Crowley felt trapped in some ghastly time-slip. Here we are again, he thought, gazing at the destroyed and bloody mask beneath him.

  There had been the first time, when he had seen Saul’s father shattered on the lawn. Not systematically pulped like this, it was true. Maybe he had been running from the flat. Maybe that was why his injuries were less severe; he had tasted it in the air, he had known that had he stayed he would not just die but be crushed. He had not wanted to die like an insect, so he had hurled himself instead from the window, eage
r for a human death.

  Crowley shook his head. His edge was blunting, he could not help it. Here we are again.

  Then Barker, another one whose face was destroyed, and Page, looking over his own shoulder, impossible.

  And now another had been broken on this sacrificial altar. The girl lay on her back, the floor around her was vile with blood. Her face was bent inwards as if on a hinge. Crowley glanced up at the door-frame. That patch of wood there, with radial explosions of blood and saliva and mucus bursting out from it on all sides, that section of the frame there, that was where her face had been thrust.

  Crowley vaguely remembered the sense of duty which pushed him into the dark corridors at night, as he lay sleeping. He would stand in the sitting-room, where he was now, looking behind him, again, again, like a dog chasing its tail, unable to stand still because he knew that if he did something would come and smash his face…

  He never saw Saul, in his dreams.

  Bailey entered, pushing through the perplexed knot of uniforms.

  “No sign of anything anywhere else, sir. Just this, just here.”

  “Has Herrin got anything?” he said.

  “He’s still talking to the uniform who got called to the bus station this morning. A load of the buses are smashed up; and the guard, they reckon it wasn’t the glass in his eye that killed him. He was hit over the head with a long, thin stick.”

  “Our unusual club, again,” mused Crowley. “Too thin for most people’s taste; they like something that packs a wallop. Of course, if you’re as strong as our murderer seems to be, the thinner the better. Less surface area, more pressure.”

  “Our murderer, sir?”

  Crowley looked at him. Bailey seemed confused, and even accusatory. Crowley could tell that he thought his superior was losing it. The extraordinary nature of the crimes had affected Bailey in the opposite way from Crowley. He had been thrust towards an aggressive, dogmatic common sense, determined to bring Saul to heel, refusing to be overawed or surprised by the carnage he saw.

  “What?” demanded Crowley.

  “You sound unsure, sir. Have you got some reason for thinking it’s not Garamond?”

  Crowley shook his head as if at a mosquito, irritated, brushing the air. Bailey withdrew.

  Yes, I have ample reason, thought Crowley, because I interviewed him and saw him. I mean Jesus look at him, he did not do this. And if he did, then something happened to change him in that night after I interviewed him, and he changed so much he is no longer what I saw, in which case I am still right, Saul Garamond did not do this, and I don’t give a shit what you and Herrin think, you lumbering great pricks.

  Nothing added up. The dead guard at Westbourne Grove was clearly the victim of the same man as had killed the two policemen, and this girl here lying ruined in blood and bone. But the police had been called to the bus station minutes after the inhabitants of Terragon Mansions had reported violent shouts and bumps from upstairs. And Westbourne Park was simply too far from Willesden to be reached in that time. So whoever was shattering all that glass in those buses and pushing it in that poor man’s eye could not be the same one who had destroyed this woman.

  Of course, Herrin and Bailey saw no problem with this. Someone had been confused about the time. The people in Willesden must be half an hour or so out. Or the people in Westbourne Grove were, or both were fifteen minutes out, or something. And the fact that so many were out by the same amount, well, what did you think happened then, sir? If not that?

  And of course Crowley had no answer.

  He was intrigued by reports of music coming from the garage at the time Saul—or whoever—was destroying it. The reports were vague, but seemed to indicate a high-pitched sound like a recorder or a flute or pipes, or something. Saul was no musician, Crowley knew that, though he was apparently something of an aficionado of Dance music, the kind that his taciturn friend Natasha played. So what of the pipes?

  Crowley could see the scenario being created for Saul. Saul had become a serial killer. And Saul therefore needed rituals, such as the return to this, the site of his first murder, that had unhinged him. And the playing of music at the site of a murder, such as the one at the bus station, what was this but ritualized? Perhaps he had played music also at the death of the as yet unidentified man in the underground, a crime Crowley was still sure was part of the same rampage. The public-transport connection only strengthened his conviction.

  So, why was Saul no longer into Dance music? Why had he started playing what most of those who had heard it described as Folk music? None of this was airtight, of course, of course…

  But Crowley could not help thinking it might be another who had played the music in the bus station. Why not? Why must it be Saul? What if it was another who mocked him with this music so utterly different to Saul’s own taste?

  Crowley straightened up suddenly. A long, thin, light club. Made of metal: the impact was clear about that. Something the murderer hung on to, used more than once. Took from crime to crime. Where he played music, it seemed.

  “Bailey!” Crowley yelled.

  The big man appeared, still impatient, still exasperated with his boss.

  He all but rolled his eyes at Crowley’s new question.

  “Bailey, do any of Saul’s mates play the flute?”

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  Deep underneath London, King Rat skulked and ferreted in the darkness.

  He clutched a stash of food, carried it slung over one shoulder like a swag bag. His strides were long A and left no sign. He stalked silently through the water of the sewers.

  The rats ran as he approached. The braver souls stayed a little to spit at him and provoke him. His smell was deeply ingrained in their nervous system, and they had been taught to despise it. King Rat ignored them. Walked on. His eyes were dark.

  He passed like a thief in the night. Unclear. Minimal. Dirty. Subaltern. His motives were opaque.

  He reached under the dirty stream to dislodge the plug to his throne-room, slid through the murk into the great teardrop chamber. He shook the water from him, and stamped into the room.

  Saul came from behind him. He clutched a broken chair leg which he swung at an incredible speed and cracked against the back of King Rat’s skull.

  King Rat flew forward and flung his arms out with a sudden shrill bark of pain. He sprawled, rolled, clutching his head, regained his footing.

  Food spread across the sodden floor.

  Saul was upon him, quivering, his jaw set hard and tight. He swung the chair leg again and again.

  King Rat was as pliable as quicksilver. He slid impossibly out of Saul’s flurry of blows and scampered away, hissing, clutching his bleeding head.

  He spun to face Saul.

  Saul’s face was a mosaic of bruises and blood and puffy flesh. King Rat was quite still. He eyed Saul with his hidden eyes. His teeth were bared and glinted with dirty yellow light. His breath came hard. His hands were crooked into eager claws.

  But Saul hit him again, before those claws could move. Saul’s hands and club came at him hard, but King Rat ripped up with his clawed hands and drew lines on Saul’s stomach, below his ruined shirt.

  Saul spoke, muttering in time to the blows he attempted to land.

  “So what the fuck was Loplop doing there, unh?” Slam.

  King Rat slipped outside the club’s arc. It hit the floor loudly.

  “Tell him to follow me, unh?” Slam. “What was he going to do—report back?” Slam. This time the wood connected and King Rat yelled in rage.

  King Rat growled and slashed at Saul with those claws, and Saul bellowed and swung the club wit renewed venom. The two of them skittered around the dark room, slipping on mold and food, moving now on two limbs, now on four. Saul and King Rat moved like liminal figures, hovering between evolutionary strata, bestial
and knowing.

  “So was Loplop going to send a message, unh? bird? Little bird going to let slip where I was, then?”

  Again the attacks came, again King Rat moved, refusing to engage in battle, content to draw blood and slip away, his teeth still visible and wicked.

  “What if Loplop had accidentally told someone else where I was, unh? Was I fucking bait?” King Rat caught the club with his right hand and bit at it suddenly and savagely, and it dissolved in a burst of splinters. Saul did not pause, but grasped King Rat’s filthy lapels and carried him down into the muck, straddling him.

  “Well you needn’t have bothered, you fucking shit because the Piper was there and look what he did to me, you shit. You just weren’t ready, you and Nans so poor old Loplop had to take him on his own.” Saul pinioned King Rat’s arms to the brick floor and began systematically to punch his face. But even trapped lit that King Rat writhed and slipped under him, many of the heavy blows did not land.

  Saul thrust his face right up to King Rat, and stare through the shadows on his eyes.

  “I know you wouldn’t give a fuck if I’d died, as long as I took Piper-man with me,” he hissed. “And I know you killed my dad, you fucking shithead rapist, you piece of crud—not the fucking Piper…”

  “No.” King Rat shouted the word out and convulsed, throwing Saul from him and sliding in a single movement until he stood in characteristic pose by the throne, skulking and aggrandizing, but this time with his claws bared and his teeth dangerous, coated in slaver like a wild animal. Saul moved backwards in the dirt, fought to right himself.

  King Rat spoke again. “I never bumped off your dad, stupid. I killed the Usurper.”