King Rat

by China Miéville

  Rewind.

  “You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr. Morris?”

  With an agony of numb fingers Fabian fast forwarded, found the number Crowley gave. He punched it into the phone. Why does he want to know that? why that? his mind kept begging.

  The number was busy, and a pleasant female voice told him he was in a queue.

  “Motherfucker!” Fabian yelled and threw the receiver at the cradle. It bounced and hung from its cord, the dial tone just audible.

  Fabian was trembling violently. He tugged at his bike, wrestled it through the constricted entrance hall and hurled it ready for him into the street. He slammed the door behind him. Adrenaline and terror made him feel sick. He lurched into the road and sped towards Natasha’s house.

  No sociability now. He wove in and out of cars, leaving a cacophony of horns and curses in his wake. He twisted around corners at sharp, sharp angles, leaving pedestrians leaping out of his way.

  Jesus Christ Jesus Christ, he thought, why does he want to know that? What has he found out? What has a man who plays the flute done?

  He was over the river now, Jesus God knew how, he realized he was risking his life at every second. He seemed to be in and out of fugues, he had no recollection at all of passing through the intervening streets before the bridge.

  Blood poured through Fabian’s veins. He felt giddy. The cold air woke him, slapped him in the face.

  He saw a clump of phone boxes speeding into view before him. He was struck with a sudden realization of his isolation, again. He tugged at his brakes and pulled his bike up short, letting it fall to the ground and breaking into a run before it had stopped moving. The nearest box was empty, and he ransacked his pockets for money, pulled out a fifty-pence piece. He dialed Crowley’s number.

  Dial 999 you stupid fucker! he suddenly admonished himself, but this time Crowley’s phone was ringing.

  “Crowley.”

  “Crowley, it’s Fabian.” He could hardly speak; the words swallowed each other up in their eagerness. “Crowley, go to Natasha’s house now. I’ll see you there.”

  “Now, hold on, Fabian. What’s this all about?”

  “Just be there, motherfucker! The flute, the fucking flute!” He hung up.

  What’s he doing to her? Fabian thought as he ran to his bike. Its pedals still spun slightly where it lay. That weird fucker who just appeared, Jesus! He had thought she was having an affair with him, that this explained her weird behavior, and the obscure challenge Fabian always sensed from Pete. But what if…what if that was not the whole story? What did Crowley know?

  He was nearly there now, speeding towards Natasha’s house. London light surrounded him. He could not hear the traffic at all, he relied only on his eyes to stay alive.

  Another sharp turn and there was Ladbroke Grove. He realized briefly that he was drenched in sweat. The day was overcast and cold, and his wet skin was frozen. Fabian felt like crying. He felt utterly out of control, as if he could have no effect on the world.

  He turned, and was in Natasha’s street. It was as deserted as usual. The ringing in his ears dispersed and there was the Drum and Bass, the soundtrack to Natasha’s house. Dreamy and washed out, a very bleak song. He could feel it creeping into him behind his eyes.

  He stepped free of his bike, letting it fall beside her door.

  Fabian rang the bell. He put his finger on the button and did not release it until he saw a form approach behind the smoked-glass door.

  Natasha opened the door to him.

  Fabian wondered for a moment if she was stoned she looked so vague, her eyes so clouded. But he saw how white she looked, how thin, and he knew that this was more than dope.

  She smiled when she saw him, and looked up at him with unfocused eyes.

  “Hey, Fabe, man, how’s it going?” She sounded tired, but she raised her hand to touch fists.

  Fabian took her hand. She looked at him in mild surprise. He put his lips close to her ear.

  His voice, when he spoke, was unsteady.

  “Tash, man, is Pete here?”

  She looked up at him, creased her face quizzically, nodded.

  “Yeah. We’re practicing. For Junglist Terror.”

  Fabian began to tug at her.

  “Tash, we have to go. I want you to come with me. I promise I’ll explain, but come with me now…”

  “Oh, no.” She did not sound angry or perturbed. But she pulled away from him gently and began to close the door. “I’ve got to play some tracks with him.”

  Fabian pushed the door open and grabbed her. He held her mouth closed with his right hand. She struggled, her eyes suddenly wide, but he dragged her towards the door.

  His eyes were prickling, and he whispered to her. “Tash please you don’t understand he’s something to do with it all we have to get away…”

  “Hi, Fabian! How’s it going?”

  Pete had appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked down at them both, his body poised in mid stride. He grinned amiably.

  Fabian froze, as did Natasha, in his arms.

  Fabian stared at Pete’s face. It was white, crisscrossed with vicious, half-healed scratches, bloody and intricate. He affected his usual cheerful expression but his eyes were giving him away now, open a little too wide, staring a little too hard.

  Fabian realized that he was very frightened of Pete. Fabian wondered how long before Crowley would be there.

  “Hey, Pete, man…” he muttered. “Uh… I was wanting…me and Tash might split for a bit…uh…”

  Pete shook his head, looking amused and rueful.

  “Oh, Fabian, you mustn’t go. Come hear what we’ve been playing.”

  Fabian shook his head and stumbled backwards a little more.

  “Natasha?” said Pete, and turned to her. He whistled something very quickly. Instantly Natasha spun in Fabian’s arms and twisted her leg, taking his feet from under him and kicking the door closed behind him in one motion. She stood to one side as he fell against the door. He stared at her, and her eyes clicked back into the focus that had momentarily deserted her.

  Fabian fumbled behind him for the latch, his mouth open, his legs wobbling as he stood.

  “Look, Fabe,” said Pete reasonably, descending towards him. “It’s simple.” Natasha stood still and gazed at him as he approached. “I don’t know quite what you’ve worked out or how, and I’m impressed, really I am, but now what? What to do with you? I could kill you, like I did Kay, but I think I’ve got a better idea.”

  An angry, frightened little noise issued from Fabian’s throat. Kay…what had happened to him?

  “So anyway, the first thing I think is that you should come upstairs.” Pete motioned to the room above them, and the faint strains of Jungle that had been filtering down the stairs seemed to swell, the plaintive song that he had caught from outside was suddenly filling Fabian’s head. And it was such a beautiful song, it completely took him away…

  It made him think of so many things…

  He was on the stairs, he realized, and then he was in the bedroom, but he wasn’t really bothered about that, because what was important was that he should hear this song. There was something about it…

  It stopped and he caught his breath, stumbled, felt as if he was choking.

  The room was silent. Pete had one hand by the on off switch on the sequencer. Natasha stood next to him, her arms by her side, the same free-floating look in her eyes. With his left hand Pete held a kitchen knife to her throat. She obligingly held her head up.

  Fabian opened his mouth in horror and gesticulated towards the two of them, frozen like a waxwork scene of the moment of murder. He emitted inchoate sounds.

  “Yes yes yes, Fabian. Answer or I slit her throat.” Pete’s voice was still measured, urbane. “Is anyone else coming?”

  Fabian’s eyes flitted around the room as he tried to gauge the situation. He shrieked as Pete pressed the knife to her throat, and blood welled up around it.

  “Yes! Yes! T
he police are coming!” Fabian screamed. “And they’re going to fucking take you, you motherfucker…”

  “Nope,” said Pete. “Nope, they won’t.”

  He released Natasha and she touched her neck experimentally, screwing up her face, perturbed and confused by the blood. She picked up her pillow and pressed it to the side of her neck, watched it stain red.

  Pete kept his eyes on Fabian. He fumbled on the top of the keyboard and gathered up some DATs which sat there.

  “Tash?” he said. “Grab your record bag and a few twelve-inches. We’re going to go to mine until Junglist Terror.” He smiled at Fabian.

  Fabian bolted for the door. He heard a faint whispering and his left calf burst into agony. He screamed as he fell. The kitchen knife was embedded deep in the muscle of his lower leg. He fumbled at it with bloody fingers and screamed when he had the breath.

  “See,” said Pete, sounding amused. “I can make you dance to my tune, but fuck it, sometimes other methods do the job.” He stood over Fabian.

  Fabian closed his eyes and laid his head on the floor. He was fainting.

  “You will come to Junglist Terror, won’t you, Fabe?” said Pete. Behind him Natasha quietly gathered some things. “You may not feel like dancing now, but I promise you will. And you can do me a favor.”

  The faint percussive thump of the Drum and Bass beat which wafted into Bassett Street was washed out, rendered nothing by the sirens. Two police cars slid to a stop outside the house. Uniformed men and women leapt out and raced to the door. Crowley stood beside one of the cars. Behind him, the residents peered out of their doors and windows.

  “Have you come about all that screaming? That was quick,” said an old man approvingly to Crowley.

  Crowley looked away as his stomach yawned. He felt sick with foreboding.

  Next to the door a bicycle lay on the pavement. Crowley stared at it as the battering ram took care of the door. The police swept up the stairs in a confused mass. Crowley saw the guns at the ready.

  There was a sound of heavy feet in the house, audible in the street outside. The faint Jungle beat jerked to an abrupt halt. Crowley strode after the advance party into the hallway. He jogged up the steps and waited by the front door to the flat.

  A short woman in a flak jacket approached him.

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Nothing?”

  “They’re gone, sir. Not a sign. I think you should see this.”

  She led him into the flat. It was thick with heavy bodies. The air was full of authoritative voices, the sounds of searching.

  Crowley looked around him at the bare walls of the sitting-room. By the entrance to the room was a pool of blood, still slick and sticky. One of the white pillows on the futon was stained deep red.

  The keyboard, the stereo, a handbag…everything was untouched. Crowley strode over to the turntable. A twelve-inch single rested on it. The needle had skipped, pushed off course by the vibration of the heavy police boots. Crowley swore.

  When he raised his voice it dripped bile.

  “I don’t suppose anyone saw how far through the record we were? No?”

  Everyone stared at him in incomprehension.

  “Because that way we could have told how long ago they left.”

  They looked away, surly. Next time you try rushing a fucking lunatic and stopping to take notes, sir, they said with every look and gesture.

  To hell with them, thought Crowley, furious. To fucking hell with them. He looked at the blood on the floor and the pillow. He looked out of the window. The constables held back the growing crowds. The bicycle lay alone, ignored.

  Fabian, Fabian… thought Crowley. I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you. You were my lead, Fabian, and now you’ve gone.

  He leant down and rested his head on his arms, there on the windowsill.

  Fabian, Natasha, where have you gone? he thought. And with whom?

  T

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  Scrawled notes were appearing on walls.

  In a hand at once gothic and subliterate, they entreated Saul to a peace. They were etched into the brick, scribbled in pencil, sprayed with aerosol.

  The first, Saul found on the side of a chimney stack he had decided to sleep in.

  LISTEN SONNY, it read. WERE BLOOD AND BLOOD STICKS SO LETS US LET BYGONES BE. TWOS BETTER NOR ONE YOU KNOW AND IN FACT TWO CAN BE THE DEVIL.

  Saul had run his fingers over the thin scratches and looked around the roof. The stench of King Rat was on the air, he could smell it clearly. The rats with him had bristled, and been ready to bite or run. He was never alone now, always surrounded by a group whose number was unchanging even as the individuals who formed it came and went.

  Saul and his entourage had crouched on the roof and sniffed the air. He had not slept in the chimneys that morning.

  The next evening he had woken in the corner of the sewer he had found, and painted above his head was another message. This was in white paint, paint that had dripped and slid down the walls into the dirty water, leaving the words only just legible.

  LOOK YOU AINT DOING NOONE ANY favorS CEPT THE PIPER.

  It had been written while he slept. King Rat was stalking him, afraid to speak but desperate for reconciliation.

  Saul was angry. The ease with which King Rat was still able to sneak past him rankled. He realized that he was just a baby, a little ratling.

  He could not think about whether or not King Rat was right. It was irrelevant to him. He had had enough of compromise. King Rat the rapist and murderer, destroyer of his family, had no right to his collaboration. King Rat had released the Piper, King Rat had made Saul what he was. He had released him, but only into his new prison.

  So fuck King Rat, thought Saul. He had had it with being bait. He knew that King Rat could not be trusted.

  So instead he thought about what he could do for himself.

  For all that he felt liberated, for all that he felt powerful, Saul did not know what to do. He did not know where the Piper lived. He did not know when the Piper would attack. He knew nothing at all except that he himself was not safe.

  Saul began to think more and more about his friends. He spent a lot of time speaking to the rats, but they were only cunning, not clever, and their stupidity alienated him. He remembered his thoughts on the night he had left King Rat, the realization that it was his decision whether or not his world would cross those of Fabian and others.

  He wanted to see Fabian more than anything.

  So one evening he bade the rats leave him alone. They obeyed immediately, disappearing in a sudden flurry. Saul began to cross the city, alone again.

  He wondered if King Rat was with him, was watching him. As long as the fucker kept his distance, Saul decided, he did not care.

  Saul crossed the river under Tower Bridge. He swung like an ape along the girders which festooned its underside, convoluted thickets of vast wires and pipes. In the middle, just at the point where the bridge could split and open for tall ships, he stopped and hung by his hands, swaying slightly.

  The sky was taken from him; the great mass of the bridge above him was all he could see at eye-level and above. At the very edge of his sight, buildings appeared again over the river. But for the most part the city was inverted and refracted in the Thames, a sinuous shattered mirror. Lights glinted on the water, dark shapes punctuated with hundreds of points of light, the towers of the city, the far-off lights of the South Bank Centre, far more real for him then than their counterparts in the air above.

  He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part…but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin v
eneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold.

  Saul held on to that. He resisted the poetics of the city.

  Saul walked fast, making the passers-by ignore him, being nothing to them. He strode the streets like a cipher, invisible. Sometimes he stopped quite still and listened, to see if he was being followed. He could see no one, but he was not so naive as to think that was conclusive.

  He approached Brixton from the backstreets, not wanting to run the gamut of its light and crowds. His pulse was up. He was nervous. He had not spoken to Fabian for so long, he was afraid they would no longer understand each other. How would he sound to Fabian now? Would he sound strange, would he sound ratty?

  He reached Fabian’s street. An old woman walked past him, bent into herself, and he was alone.

  Something was wrong. The air tasted charged. People moved behind the white curtains of Fabian’s room. Saul stood quite still. He stared at the window, saw the vague movements of men and women within. They milled uncertainly, investigating. With a growing horror, Saul pictured those within opening drawers, examining books, looking at Fabian’s artwork. He knew who moved like that.

  Saul’s demeanor changed. One moment his shoulders were hunched, he was tightened into a drab stance, something to see but not notice, his disguise for the streets. Now he uncurled and sank towards the pavement. He bent in a sudden snap of motion, sidling simultaneously against the low wall. He crept through the thin strip of garden, the desultory tiny patios.

  He was truly invisible now. He could sense it in himself.

  He sidled along the wall, sudden bursts of motion interspersed with unearthly stillness. His nose twitched. He smelt the air.

  Saul stood before Fabian’s house. Soundlessly he vaulted the low wall and landed in a crouch below the window. He placed his ear to the wall.

  Architecture betrayed those within. Bluff voices seeped out through cracks and rivulets between bricks.

  “…don’t like that bloody picture, though…”

  “…know that the DI’s totally losing it over this. I mean he’s fucking well lost it…”

  “…geezer Morris, why have a go at him?…thought he was a mate”

  The police talked in an endless stream of banalities, clichés and pointless verbiage. Their speech served no purpose, thought Saul in despair, no fucking purpose at all. He ached for conversation, for communication, and to hear words wasted like this…he felt like crying.