After two of these ridiculous games he was distracted by tiredness, and he crossed the junction toward the ruins of an estate agent’s office, sat heavily in its shadow. For some seconds Sholl could hear nothing except his own breath. He huddled and tried to regain his strength. He could not think about what he had yet to do.
The snare of rapid-fire weapons woke him out of sudden sleep with a sucking gasp. He rose and turned. A jeep had burst from a side street and pulled up in front of the Tube, the woman behind the wheel keeping the engine running. Two of the Heath soldiers were tearing across the road toward him. There were three others behind them, standing poised together a little way in front of their vehicle before Hampstead Station, pouring fire into its entrance. Bullets burst tiles and bricks and tore the edges of the metal gratings ragged.
From inside came howls as vampires were wounded or perhaps killed. They emerged in ones and twos, riddled with bullet-holes and blood, moving in reptilian bursts, trying to close in on the men attacking them, held back only by the rate of fire. Their faces were immobile and their hands crooked into hard claws, even where they held in innards torn loose by the onslaught. They circled the soldiers with obvious murderous intent, despite their injuries, and the men backed slowly toward Sholl, making sure that they did not reload simultaneously, that there were no moments without gunfire pushing back the vampires. The soldiers were retreating in controlled panic. They could not hold off the vampires for long, and they knew what would happen when they failed.
Their two comrades ran low toward Sholl, keeping their profiles small, trained to avoid bullets that were not what would kill them here. They held out their arms and screamed at him to come. He fell into them, yelling wordlessly, buoyed by their presence, let them drag him, throw him across the back seat and leap in after him. The others came in then (everyone landing untidy across one another and fighting their way into seats), screaming go go go, and the jeep spasmed forward and roared.
Sholl was laughing. For many yards the vampires followed them, their passage audible as they chittered, and things broke in their wake. But the driver was a virtuoso, and slowly the vampires were left behind. Sholl supposed himself to be in some kind of shock, but his euphoria did not feel at all pathological to him. The soldiers had come for him. They had come back and waited.
He lay back and listened to them, as the jeep hurtled north, toward the safety of the open ground. affirmative I fucking told you and did you see? did you? and couldn’t go near, like they were scared.
Sholl could see the edges of trees. Sholl could feel the texture change under the tires. They were on earth, on grass, by water, out in the cool air, and the soldiers had come for him.
They would not touch you. You came into our nest, and my siblings would not touch you. I do not understand.
When they pulled me away from you I was dazed, until in a dread in the sightless black where they brought me to safety, laid gently on the sleepers by the cold rails, I remembered what I had told you. I felt shame, I feel shame, but none of my people has yet told me I was wrong.
What can you do? What can you do, you insane man that came here, that came down here, in our deeps? You can’t touch the Fish of the Mirror. How could you harm it? Did I do wrong?
Why would they not touch you?
There I was in darkness, at the bottom of the world, with the others, we patchogues in our nest, until we heard you. We felt you. Descending. We felt you descending and we came to meet you, and I was eager to have you succumb to us. I will not tolerate your kind. I will not allow any of you to live, after what you did. And when you came—I was not surprised or impressed with what you must have thought your bravery, the dangerous ramblings of an animal with stunted instinct—I waited. But you were not touched.
You kept coming, and coming, into our unlit place. They would not touch you.
I was made to watch. I was not synchronised with this. I was like a toothless cog, turning in an engine but not gripping, not cohering. They would not touch you, and it affronted me. I asked and asked them why in little whispers, in our own language, in your language, and whichever sibling I asked responded with a faint wordless evasion.
They would not tell me why, because I should know why.
For a long time, I thought I could not touch you, as they could not. And then as you reached our basement and began to swing inelegantly at us (what did you want? what were you trying to find?) I felt an energy come through me, like nothing so much as the energy that came to me when I saw the mirror burst and the fear of the thing that mocked me, and I knew that it was not that we could not touch you, but that my siblings would not, and that I would.
They did not like it. They would not stop me but they did not like it, and they watched uneasily, but I was too angry not to, you coming here as if you were not about to die.
A slippery trick had you on me, blinding me and hurting this dreadful head that I hate, that traps me. I was not humiliated—I am not like you and your brief and contingent victory means nothing at all, less than nothing, means as little as air. I was not humiliated but I was afraid, and not of you (what would you do but just perhaps kill me, which would only be something new?) but of my siblings, and not of them but of their sudden new fact, the fact that they would not touch you.
They watched me touching you, one two, fingers closing on your throat, but they would not join me. They only waited, for you to go. It was an unpleasantness.
I could not parse the expression that you took when I told you what you wanted to know. I have remembered it many times. I have seen it, I have thought it through. I have reconstructed it, and made my siblings mimic it so that I can see it again. It is very unclear to me. I do not know what you are thinking. Your face, the expression you took seems to me to hold delight, but also—is that horror? Fear of course (there is always that whenever I see you feeling anything) but I am sure that is horror I see, too.
What will you do? I wonder what it is that you will do.
I still wish I knew why they would not touch you, and why I would.
We spent a very few minutes together, and I hated you for all of them, but I wish you were here again. I would try to find out why they will not touch you.
Sometimes I imagine trying to see what of you my siblings would touch.
If I opened you to them, would they touch you then? Is your skin the barrier? If I took that for them—because I will touch your skin—would they touch the red core of you? Would they touch your inner places, the fragile palpitating things that make you?
But you would not last that, and though I hate you, I truly want to know the limits. So I would keep you whole, and keep asking my question. One of my people will tell me, would tell me, some time. Why they will not touch.
They do not shrink from me. I have watched and listened for any sign, for any sign. When I could tell, when I saw how it was, how it was going, I watched for it, but they do not shrink from me.
Since you came here and I touched you and they would not, I have gone farther and farther away. I feel something closing. It is closing around me. I have been part of something, I thought, but one by one I feel the bridges that link me breaking. I have felt myself more and more, have been more and more in myself, of myself, stuck more than ever within my constraints of skin. My light was part of a constellation, I thought, and in slow turn I have seen the other stars go out until I am alone in my universe, and I am frightened.
They are still by me and with me, my siblings, my others, but a connection has gone, and I’m alone. I thought that it must be them. I watched to see them judge me and punish me for my ill-thought, arrogant declaration to you. They must have cut me out, I thought, but they did not. They do not shrink from me: they are as they ever were, and in body I’m part of this company. We do and speak to each other as we did.
It is not they who have closed but I. I’ve cut myself away. I’m alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I’ve not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that
I was, already. How long has that been going on?
Now then. Now then now then. What’s all this, then? How long has this been going on?
Snips of your moron culture fill me. At inappropriate times. At all times, really. I resent my emotions—which are worthy of the word, which aren’t the little bubbles of whim that you call feelings—I resent that my emotions remind me of the detritus from your entertainments or your mannered interactions.
I’m thinking that I have been alone. That I wasn’t part of all this. They don’t shrink from me but I don’t think I can come back in. I still don’t know how this happened. I can’t think about it for very long. I am afraid of how alone I will be.
There is an escape. Down, to where the cold rails are. I walked in the same place as once did little grey mice so filthy they were like animate dust. They have been taken now by the fauna of mirrors. I am used to the darkness, it’s like something physical. I smacked the walls and the rail with my stick, to make sure there was nothing—no stalled train, no bodies, no fallen bricks—in my way.
I walked north on the train lines. Very slowly, as if to leave the city.
I’ll go for a time, I said, to see what it is in me that’s closed the doors. When I decided, lying on the platform’s edge, in the darkness under Hampstead, I wondered how to take my leave, and that brought with it, that query, a wave of horror at the fact that I did not know the answer. That such a question occurred.
What do I know? Where shall I go? Will I be alone? How long have I been so?
I’ll go away, for a time. I think of you often. Your gun and light, your obvious fear as you stumbled into us. The questions you asked, that could do you no good, that I answered for you in arrogance. I hated you then and I hate you now, but I remember you. Why would they not touch you?
When he came back to the Heath, and rejoined the camp, the celebrations—the joy—caught Sholl up easily. He arrived, batted side to side by the jeep, to see all the soldiers lined up and waiting. As the vehicle jounced through trees, they cheered. Sholl saw their officer clench his fists with passion that was unfeigned and incredulous.
They partied that night, turning up the volume on their cheap stereos and churning the earth into mud with dancing, and Sholl partied with them, high on their enthusiasm. There was a paradox to his own pleasure, though, which he became aware of. He had been truly delighted that the soldiers had appeared, that they had been sent. He had thought he was alone, but they had followed him, out of sight, and watched him cross the junction, and enter the station to the vampires’ lair. They had sent back word of what they had seen, and waited for all the hours it took for Sholl to reemerge, and then they had risked their lives to fetch him, because of what they saw him do.
The soldiers were proficient. He had not known he was being tracked, that he was in their sights all the time he walked. The CO was too intelligent, too cautious a man to throw himself in with strangers, no matter how they talked. But Sholl had communicated something, not the authority he had intended but something, that had given the officer pause enough to send soldiers after him, to learn. And when they saw what he could do—struggling through their awe—they came in to save him.
But they had not saved him, of course. He had not been in danger, unlike them. And what came to Sholl was that forcing him to go—as he had thought—alone, had proved to him that he could, which he had not been sure of, at all. He had not wanted to test it, but had been given no choice. And now that he knew he did not need the soldiers, they wanted him.
What—would he turn them away, now? Of course not.
Thinking about what had yet to be done (as he turned absentmindedly on his toes, with a beer and sandwich in his hands, dancing with one of the women) Sholl considered that he did not know everything he would face. The piratical last Londoners themselves, let alone the imagos. And perhaps whatever it was that kept him safe would ebb. Perhaps there would be imagos he had never faced before, that would touch him.
There were other thoughts, too, other reasons that he felt he needed the company to be with him, but they were very faint and hard to read, and he did not consider them deeply. All around, he could hear conversations about himself.
“Motherfucker went for them and they ran!”
“He wasn’t scared, they were scared!”
“. . . wouldn’t touch him . . .
“. . . fucking straight past them . . .
“They wouldn’t touch him.”
Sholl knew what was happening to him, in the eyes of the soldiers; he could see the transformation. They tried not to stare. They looked at him obliquely, but he could see their expressions. They were jealous—some so much that it was all they could feel. But for most of them, their awe was more powerful.
He did not like it, and became all the more profane in his words and his louche dancing, but he knew that he could not erase the feeling in them, that it was too formless and wordless to be countered (they would deny anything put to them, that came close to stating it). And besides, he needed it. He had counted on it. But that did not make it good to bear.
Sholl could command the army unit now, and they would obey him. He knew he should not tell them too much, that unspoken and secret things were important to their construction of him, but his discomfort with their barely hidden reverence made him talkative.
He told the CO that they would go south, loud enough for the soldiers to hear. He used tones that could just have been suggestive, so that the officer himself could turn around and make the orders. Sholl pretended to think himself only an advisor. Everyone was complicit in this.
They never asked him how he knew where to go. He had gone into the underworld, and come out bloodied, with the knowledge. He grimaced at the theatrics of it.
Sholl never explicitly announced their goal, but by inexorable rumour, it was less than a day before all the soldiers had some half-understanding, some inchoate knowledge of where they were going and why. They knew that something waited for them, and that they were coming for it, as guerrillas. Sholl did not try to find out what they thought they would find. Their excitement was enough for him. He had them doing something, and they were giddy on it.
They knew that the journey they were about to make was deadly, and that some of them would likely die. They were heading toward London’s terrible heartlands, into the streets. They would set off early, and if they made Camden Town, just over two miles south, by nightfall, Sholl would be satisfied. That would be halfway. Then the same the next day, and they would find their target, and enter by darkness. That was the plan.
Beyond a certain number they would be a liability, but the process of elimination was difficult. There were too many volunteers for the mission, and men and women designated to stay, to care for refugees and keep camp, were livid, and would not listen to mollifying nonsense about it being the most important job of all. But eventually—Sholl stayed away from the process—the unit was chosen. Three vehicles, each carrying six soldiers. Some tripod-mounted guns, a rocket launcher, a handful of grenades. Sholl, the commander, twelve men and four women. Most had been professional soldiers, and the others were young and tough. It was an elite unit. Strapped in what body armour and weapons they had. With a nameless emotion, Sholl decided he would not learn their names.
The jeeps set out at six in the morning, breaking out of the trees, with the whole camp lined up to wave them off. Sholl had watched carefully and unobtrusively, while he gathered the things he had brought: almost none of those who were coming made long good-byes. They patted friends and lovers brusquely, as if they were on another quick recce.
When it came to Sholl to take his leave, he turned and took in the mucky clearing, with its washing and cooking, its dingy tents, the refugees, the soldiers ersatz and trained. They were all watching him. He raised his hand very slowly, turning to take in every face he saw. You will not see me again, he thought. He could tell that they knew.
That first day, Sholl saw that his escort was perhaps indispensable a
fter all. The route they had picked out was dangerous. The alternatives were worse: Primrose Hill was continually tunnelled through by some great maggoty imago; Kentish Town was a wasteland of heat and burnt-out houses that smouldered endlessly, in some arcane transmirror pyrosis. But Camden, where they had to go, was the running ground of apocalypse scum, the worst spivs from the dead market’s stall-holders, the least politicised of its punks. They had fetishised their own brutalisation, exaggerating their piercings and their outlandish hair and giving themselves mock-tribal names out of Mad Max 2.
The tension was hard as Sholl’s troop penetrated the city. The little convoy of jeeps made slow way, flanked by guards on foot, tersely yelling information to one another, watching the upper windows. It took them hours to pass through the tight streets. Each major junction was scouted, each possible lair investigated and secured.
Twice they saw imagos: once a thing that momentarily took a form reminiscent of a flock of birds; the other a glowering point of precision on the ground. The birds-thing watched them, unafraid but uninterested, from the end of a long crescent, before stalking away with childish, clumsy steps. The other circled them (they scouring the ground frantically to watch it, trying to track the spot where they could see too clearly), coming closer in a predatory motion. Sholl was steeling himself to walk into its path, banking on his power, but with flawless aim the officer blew up the point of road where the thing manifested, and mercifully it dissipated.
They came to Camden ready for human trouble. With depressing predictability (the soldiers had been miming readiness to one another for many yards) the Camden gang burst out at them from below the bridge over the canal. The soldiers met them with careful bursts of fire. Sholl was in the leading vehicle, and he saw all of the brief fight. The rabble of punks fired crossbows and shotguns, but they were murdered without effort.
When several of them had fallen, the rest gave up and ran, abseiling from the bridge into waiting barges, which moved away sedately enough for the leading soldiers to drop grenades into them almost at leisure. When two of the barges had been destroyed, the CO looked up anxiously at the sky, for doves or airborne imagos, and yelled sharply over the shrieks of dying raiders, telling his soldiers to stop and to move on. Sholl was sure he was motivated as much by pity as urgency.
Looking for Jake: Stories Page 22
