The Wanderer

by Timothy J. Jarvis

  Crossing the plains of erstwhile Central Europe, I found that place, which had once been strewn with cities thronging with folk, but had been left a concrete, steel, and glass desert with civilization’s end, again teemed with life, had been overrun by plants and animals that had busted out of the parks and zoological gardens where they’d been penned, or had returned from elsewhere. Herds of fierce aurochs and wall-eyed wisents roamed, grazing vast tracts of grassland, hunted by tribes of burly simple folk who rode swine and slept in hide tents; thickset rodents swam in lakes and rivers, flashing orange incisors; boars crashed through the thickets of forested swathes; beetles blundered through the grass underfoot, flowering bushes thrummed with wasps, bees, and hummingmoths, and midges harried at dusk. And the skies were also flocked with life. Geese, swans, crows, starlings, thrushes, hawks, buzzards, finches, gulls, magpies, and shrikes. And stranger kinds too. Once, though, when passing by a dead oak at sunset, I heard a loud ‘oop-oop-oop’ and, looking over, saw a hoopoe perched on one black bough, sickle beak darting this way and that, vivid crest lost against the lurid glow in the western sky. Another time a bearded vulture kept pace with me a stretch, wheeling overhead, till, feeling it an ill omen and a sign that might give me away, I killed a sheep and laid out its carcass; last I saw of that carrion bird, it soared on an updraft, dropping mutton bones on to a pitted concrete slab, remnant of a road or runway, to crack them open, get at the marrow.

  One evening, while making a fire to dry my clothes after crossing a wide river, once, I think, the Rhine, wading and swimming, I looked to the east and saw a man on horseback stark against the waning light there. I broke camp, pressed on, into the sunset and through the night, garments wet and clammy, risking a chill, ensuring I left as few tokens of my passage as I could, seeking a place of refuge. Hazard favoured, and, the following morning, as a red stain spread across the sky at my back, I came across, and nearly tumbled into, a shaft sunk into the ground. A ladder, rungs still holding firm, was bolted to one concrete wall. I clambered into the pit, reached the foot of the ladder. A little of the dawn light filtered down through ventilation ducts, and, once my eyes were accustomed to the gloom, I explored the place. It was dank, cramped, empty, bar a few metal chairs, and, strewn about, food tins long since bloated by the rot of contents. I climbed out, tore down a knot of ivy and briar from a tree that stood near, dragged it back, and, descending the ladder again, pulled this tangle over the hole after me. I was four days hiding in the bunker. On the second, hooves drummed by overhead, and, listening at one of the grilles, I was sure I scented pipe smoke. I stood with my ear pressed to the vent, seized by dread, many hours, but the rider did not return.

  I reached the English Channel without further event, waded into the water. Sad at heart, it had served me well, I abandoned my lance. After a long wearying swim, I saw, looming out of the sea mist ahead, hoary cliffs and recalled, with sorrow, Colin Elton’s fate. I found a cove, pulled myself up on the beach, and lay a while, getting my breath back. Then I made for the place once known as London, drawn there because I couldn’t conceive beginning this memoir elsewhere, and by a feeling that, if there was to be a final fray, the spirit of the place might give me an edge. And I wished to see how it had changed. Perhaps, too, my compulsion to return was influenced by the cosmology of the peoples of the Himalayas among whom I’d lived so long.

  My first sight of the city since I’d fled, aeons before, was from a hill just to the south-east. Though, doubtless, it had been razed and rebuilt, again and again, in the ages between my leaving and its eventual desolation, the place I knew could still be discerned in it. The river wended west to east, as in my day, though its meanders had shifted, I could no longer read its scrawl, and I doubted any had called it the Thames for a long, long time. The tallest structures were, as then, mostly to the east, foundations sunk into the marshland there, though they dwarfed even the skyscrapers of my era, actually scraped the sky, gored the soft underbelly of the mass of cloud that hunkered over the city. Under the pall of that lowering smother, a vast glass dome near the centre of the place looked a whited blister. Around the central core, the husks of the great edifices, low dwellings clustered, the suburbs, scavengers about carrion, or ring within ring of wizard stones circling a place of sacrifice, the whole one grey temple of an awful rite. Then, with shock, I sighted a building I knew in the midst of the place: St Paul’s, just as I recalled it, but with dome staved. As the masonry of the original would have long been dust, I supposed this to be the ruin of a later replica.

  I’d reckoned on a throb in my chest, seeing that place again, after so long, but I felt nothing; my heart’s calcified.

  As I’ve written, civilization has fallen and risen again, many times over, but this time it seems the cities have been abandoned for good. Why, I don’t know. It was neither dire cataclysm nor scourging plague, and the weapons of humankind’s darkest invention remain on their launchpads, listing, mouldering. Perhaps the call of the wild – a lure ever since humankind first, weary of wandering, of hunting and foraging, settled the land, penned and raised beasts for slaughter, tilled the soil – finally grew too loud. Though, for centuries after the final desolation, folk were still drawn to the cities now and again, to wonder, to scavenge, to loot, and, finally, merely to lay waste, in the end, even the vandals stayed away; for the last few millennia the former founts of civilization have been left alone to the ravages of time and the elements.

  I walked down into the ruins. The streets of the place once known as London were as the streets of the Earth’s other derelict cities: littered with dross, strewn with debris, and vacant save scurrying rats.

  As I wished to see again the region I’d once lived in, I headed north. I walked residential streets a long time, then through a slum, then an industrial district, shadows of chimneys and cooling towers striping the roadway. I couldn’t make out any of the writing I saw, on signs, fascia, and the ilk; it only vaguely resembled Latin script.

  Then, after passing through an alley running between scarps of riven masonry, with rubble underfoot, so that, eyes narrowed, I could believe myself not in the city at all, but in the mountains, walking a dry gorge, I reached the river. I sought a place to cross, but the bridges that had once spanned it had fallen, the only remnants, piers, jutting up like bones of giant folk buried too shallow and part disinterred by heavy rain; I had to swim. The river was frigid, I shivered as I waded in. Halfway across, treading water a moment to get my breath back, I looked down, saw beneath me a shoal of sprat scattering before a pike.

  Arriving at what had once been known as Highgate Hill, I discovered it was girded by a high wall. I walked along it till I came to an opening, went in. The entrance hall of some attraction, a row of ticket booths, most windows gone, two still in their frames, clouded with age, sightless eyes. Dust lay so thick, I was slowed to a trudge. After clambering over the wreck of a turnstile, going outside again, I went on, found myself on a cobbled street that climbed the hill. I walked up it, thought of Dick Whittington, fairy-tale hero and thrice Lord Mayor, and William Powell, early lottery casualty and pauper visionary, walked past: a roundhouse, wattle-and-daub walls, thatched roof; a half-timbered dwelling, jettied upper-floors beetling; a geodesic dome, dark, glassy obsidian; a foursquare townhouse, pale masonry, portico with fluted columns; and a stark tower block, dingy concrete. Entering this high-rise, I found it choked with mouldering draff, its dank walls daubed with graffiti, gaudy hues, armoured vehicles, folk in strange garb, fierce chimera, crude filth, excessive twisted acts, twisted excessive anatomies, priapic voluptuous monstrous contortions, jagged scrawl.

  At the top of the hill, I came across a museum housed in a subterranean complex. It was pitchy inside; I was only able to explore as I found, just inside the entrance, an old electric torch that weirdly still worked. Most of the display cabinets had been smashed, contents taken or wrecked, but there were some smaller chambers further below ground that hadn’t been plundered. In these, I discovered, in sea
led cases, along with many artefacts whose use I couldn’t fathom, my typewriter, a spare ribbon spool, two reams of paper, a ballpoint pen, and my banjo. And, in a store room of some kind, I found a cupboard, also shut tight, holding staff uniforms, dust sheets, a little mildewed, but otherwise fine, which I pilfered to replace my ragged clothing and linen, and, beside the cupboard, a hand-barrow, once used, I supposed, for moving exhibition pieces, that, made from plastic, had survived intact. This I took to cart my things in.

  Then I returned to the centre of the derelict city to seek out the site where, in my day, the British Library had stood. I hoped a place of learning might have endured there, that mining might unearth riches. The area had been laid waste, but, delving in the ruins, found I’d not hoped in vain, discovered a hatch from which, once the seal was broken, a musty redolence of old paper, ink, and leather bindings wafted. Underground stacks; lodes of lore, seams of stories. I spent a short while wandering the shelves reading titles by the light of my torch. In the end, I took only one sole volume with me, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket;8 for I was tired and hungry then, intended to return the following day, rested, sated, to spend more time browsing, carry off as many volumes as I could pile into the barrow, leaving just room for my meagre few things.

  After, I entered the vast glass dome, found a shopping district inside. I explored, seeking retailers where I could outfit myself for the weeks ahead. Beneath the vault it was stifling: in former times, huge fans would have circulated the air. I wandered the arcades, foraging, seeking supplies. But it was a dispiriting and profitless endeavour; sacked millennia before, the place was miserable testament to folk’s urge to mar. Most lasting items had been wrecked. Had they been thieved to make use of, I could have understood, but they’d simply been rent, smashed, crushed, shivered, and left. Amid the junk, though, in a cookware shop, I did find a carving knife, a steel, to bring it to keenness with, and a skillet.

  All perishable goods had long since mouldered, but their rot had spored a fetid riotous life. A stinking mess lay deep in the aisles of the victuallers’, and strange flora grew in it: gaudy orchids, giant pitcher-plants, and creepers, which twined about the struts of the shelving, and whose white flowers reeked cloying, charnel.

  Surrounded by this evidence of the wanton vandalism of folk (and the lush wantonness of nature), my thoughts turned to those social contracts that, for all their seeming permanence, are always torn up at the first hint of threat. Thinkers have proposed divers theories of civilization: some have been positive, argued it’s the apotheosis of humankind’s condition, a waypoint on the journey to enlightenment, or the foundation stone of a divine city; others, neutral, mechanistic, claimed it’s simply one stage in the cycle of history, or the most natural response to folk’s being in the world; and a few have flayed it, called it malign, an institution enabling oppression and exploitation, or a decadent way of living, a fall from an innate state of grace and innocence. I’m perhaps better placed to speculate than any philosopher, due to my diuturnity; it troubles me to offer my theory, though, for it’s bleak. Civilization seems to me only a filmy shroud laid over the seething rot that’s the true way of things.

  Strange to relate, but while thinking these dark thoughts I felt loneliness more keenly than I’d done for an age. I tried to envision the precinct as it would have been on a busy Saturday, before the exodus, but my imagination failed me. Then, overwhelmed by the heat and stench, I ran to find an exit. Outside, I hunkered down and retched.

  Once recovered from my bout of nausea, I got to my feet. I’d fled the dome without securing any provisions, save the knife and skillet, which I still clutched, but nothing could have induced me to re-enter that place.

  Standing there, feeling lorn, in the sun, in the empty dead air of that street, which would have once been noisy, bustling, I conceived a wayward need to return to the place where I’d been damned.

  Deciding to wait till the next day, I spent the night in the lobby of a dilapidated hotel in the central part of the city. After a frugal repast, I slept fitfully on a mildewed couch.

  I set out just after sunrise. To cross the Thames, I was again forced to swim. Reaching the south bank, I stretched myself out on the stony beach there – the tide was at low ebb – to rest, steam in the sun. Lying down, I disturbed a small crab, and it scuttled away across the shingle, clacking its claws as it fled.

  Once I’d my breath back and had dried off a bit, I got to my feet, entered the warren of streets south of the river, headed roughly in the direction of the place I sought. Dun concrete warehouses wreathed in sallow mist loomed overhead. The only living things were rats; they scurried after me.

  After wandering lost a while, I came across a block of masonry in a glass case. Knapped flint and chequered stonework; I couldn’t, of course, read the label, but recognized the exhibit as a chunk from the tower of Southwark Cathedral. I was stunned, time which antiquates antiquities, and has an art to making dust of all things, had yet spared this fragment. I presumed it must have been excavated from the ground somewhere nearby, and that I was close to the site on which the church had stood. The Nightingale had lain only a short distance to the south-east of the cathedral, so I pressed on into the dawn glow.

  A few moments later, I came out into a large square. Once, perhaps, it had been a bright, airy place of restaurants, cafés, bars, but now was a gloomy grove of yews, the first perhaps sprouted from a seed carried there in the guts of a bird, or in mud caked in the tread of boot or frog of a hoof. I knew, somehow, it was the site on which the Nightingale had stood.

  I went down some steps, entered the murk beneath the writhen boughs. Every sinew of my body resisted, but I felt compelled. Ten paces or so in, I saw a dark form on the ground. Standing stock still, holding my breath, I waited for my eyes to adjust. Once they had, I saw a corpse laid out on the flagstones.

  I knelt down, put my hand to his cheek, felt a faint warmth; he was but recently dead. He lay on his back, dressed in a dishevelled, threadbare suit, shirt torn open, feet bare. He was wan, starveling; shadows pooled in his hollowed cheeks, dark as bruises against his pale skin. He’d been hobbled with duct tape; his arms were outflung, but red marks on his wrists showed they’d been likewise bound; the remainder of the roll of tape, whose origins I couldn’t guess at, and several used scraps, lay on the ground beside his body; traces of glue adhering to the skin around his mouth and nose, and a patchiness to the beard growth there, told the use the scraps had been put to. His torso was pocked with small burn lesions, and many cigarette butts haloed his head, painstakingly arranged. Round his neck had been knotted a serpent, still alive, if sluggish, with a pair of tiny diaphanous wings, taken, perhaps, from a child’s toy, tied on, just behind its head, with ribbon. The snake, it seemed, had been striking repeatedly at the dead man’s face; his cheeks and forehead were lacerated and flecked with venom. Most grisly of all, in each eye a cigarette had been stubbed; slow, the heat of the ember boring a hole through cornea, aqueous humour, iris, and lens, and into the vitreous body, end left jutting.

  I choked a howl, anguish born in part of what had been inflicted, and in part of the fate it foreshadowed for me; the dead man was William Adams.

  There was a deep wound to the region of the heart – the death blow. As far as I knew, there was only one weapon on Earth that could have dealt it, and it was held by the evil being who’d cursed William, and myself, and others, with immortality in the first place. Once I’d ceased to reel, I crushed the snake’s head with my boot heel, walked away, left poor William’s carcass to rot in the dismal spinney. In a way, I envied him his death, if not the manner of it.

  I headed back toward the hotel, where I’d left my possessions. Knowing the demon who hunted me was close at hand, I intended to quit London that afternoon, but I lost my way, and it was only after several frantic hours that I finally found the place. By then dusk approached, and I thought it probably safer to spend the night holed up, that my enemy might steal up on me
in the dark were I to set out then.

  Over a grim supper of the last of some smoked mutton, grey, a fur of mould to scrape off, I thought about what I’d seen that day. It was all too easy to reconstruct what had happened to William; I quailed, realized what foul glee a victim who feels pain but cannot die offered cruel evil. Only one aspect puzzled me at first: that William’s mouth and nose had been taped up. After all, there was no one to hear him cry out, no one who could help him if they did. It was not till later, lying awake between snatches of sleep on the damp sofa, I understood. To me it seems the most repellent aspect of the brutalization, a worse outrage even than what was done to his eyes. He’d been made to pull deeply on cigarettes, then his lips and nostrils had been sealed, preventing him from exhaling the acrid smoke till his persecutor willed it. How many times this was repeated, and how long William was left to suffer each time, I did not wish to contemplate. But there were a lot of cigarettes arrayed about his head.

  The following morning I rose before sunrise, went outside. I’d slept poorly, woken twice in terror, sure I’d see Punch leering down at me. During the night there’d been a heavy downpour, and, as the drains were blocked with dead leaves and rubbish, there was standing water in the street. Under the hotel’s portico, though, the ground was still dry, and I hunkered down there to breathe deep, dispel the lingering wraiths of my nightmares. But then, just as I was starting to calm, a small rodent scurried past and, following it with my eyes, I saw something that set my heart fluttering against my ribs like a trapped bird. On the paving, not far from where I sat, was a scattering of ash and a clump of dottle.