London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  ‘The Pusher,’ Troake said. ‘He wanted me to give – ’

  I stood up and launched the glass at the fat man. It caught him behind the ear but did not break. It ricocheted backwards and smashed against the bar. A woman shrieked. Obviously not a regular. I moved out from behind the table and shoved it back against Troake as he tried to rise. Then I drove my fist into his face and vaulted over the bar. Lots of pushing going on now, around the fat man. I saw the girl he was with back off, concern shutting her face down. Someone swore. Someone raised half a snooker cue and brought it down hard. The barmaid was at my back asking me just what the fuck I thought I was doing. I ignored her and nipped out into a private corridor. Boxes of crisps, piles of cardboard peanut displays. I could hear footsteps on a set of carpeted internal stairs, hurrying down to start ejecting people before the police arrived. By the toilets was a door leading into a yard. A generator was droning. Pale blue skips, like high-sided bath tubs, were lined up by the door, ready for closing time, and the empty bottles. The gate out to the street was locked, but I climbed it easily enough, driven by the adrenaline flushing through my veins. Seeds of black sowed themselves across my vision. The taste of wet earth filled my mouth. Something had crunched when I punched him, but fear wasn’t allowing me to feel any pain. I hoped it had been his nose, and not my fingers. I took off and didn’t stop running until I had put a good mile, and a lot of twists, turns and streets between me and the pub. I waited for a while on the corner of Stoke Newington Road, watching the traffic, waiting for him, and then began to jog north.

  By the time I arrived at where I wanted to be, I felt lost, which also felt right. What wasn’t right was the lack of warmth, something I couldn’t just attribute to my panic. A mist slithered into the streets; through it I could make out dark lumps on the pavement but something about the fresh constrictions around me – in the air, the buildings, the shut-in movements behind curtain and door, and somehow inside me – warned me that they might not be anything as innocent as litter. The deeper I went into the narrowing thoroughfares, the broader the canvases of urban decay: boarded windows; stultifying graffiti; shivering, sunken-eyed dogs. The café should have appeared by now. But there was only a wall where the turning should have been. No smells of hot chocolate or the pleasant sound of tomatoes being chopped on a wooden block. No Sam Cooke. The place reeked of Troake. The bastard. He’d followed Iain here, in his search for me. He had infected the oasis.

  Now I could hear the Jag crunching through low gears as it nosed this way and that in the streets behind me, sniffing me out. It wouldn’t take him long to catch up, what with this disorientation sitting fat in my mind.

  Gastric flu. Iain didn’t have anything of the kind. I imagined him turning to pulp behind closed curtains, a failing light bulb sending gleams along the wet lengths of his limbs… It didn’t for one moment strike me that the disease, the damage they were causing themselves, was as likely to exist as the Crescent itself, that it might all be a confection produced by the narcolepsy. I had to continue as if this was real, because somewhere, at some level, things were real. I just didn’t know what, where and who any more. As long as I kept doing the right thing, something somewhere would heal itself and at some point in the future I might level out and find it.

  Me. I’m real. I’m real. Keep hold of that, if nothing else. I’m real. I am.

  I headed west, crossing Green Lanes into Brownswood Road, heading roughly for the Tube station at Arsenal. I was almost at Gillespie Road, the bull’s-eye sign for the Tube station a target within reach, when his Jag drew up alongside me.

  ‘Jump in,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You’ve got me all wrong, Adam. I’m trying to protect you. Get in the car. It’s warm. And Iain needs us. He’s in trouble.’

  I stopped. His face was edged with pale yellow from the dashboard. Smoke leapt from the open window as if the interior was on fire. He turned off the engine and got out. Spread his arms as if to show he was harmless. He walked around the Jag, and I mirrored him, but in the other direction, keeping the car between us. He retrieved a long metal rod with a curved spike from his coat and inserted it into the slots of a manhole cover. With a grunt, he lifted it clear.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s really not so bad. We could use a good man like you. Come now, and there’ll be no threat to you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Steam rose from the manhole and laced him. He was flexing his fingers, one by one. I slowly moved away.

  ‘Walk, and we will find you, Adam. Monck. You’ll not bring us down. You won’t bring him down. I won’t allow it.’

  But I could no longer hear him. I might have created those final words in my own thoughts as I sprinted to the Tube entrance, the wind in my ears, scouring his entreaties away.

  Chapter 12

  Chain reaction

  It knows this dark. It knows its moods and vicissitudes. It knows its geography; It knows that the dark can be mapped. It isn’t something to get lost in. Panic gets you lost. The roads, the streets, the tunnels are all the same in the dark. People. You get lost in people. You lose yourself to people. People are different in the dark. And in the middle of the brightest day, all people are in the dark. Blind. Stumbling. It knows this as deeply, as intuitively, as It knows the constellations of glass studded into the ceilings of the chambers It moves through. It knows this, as It knows the city. Its people, its histories, its crimes, its failings.

  In a short while It will go and find the woman. She is in the dark too. She is lost in panic. But first It needs to spend time here. It needs to spend a little time here, every day.

  It reaches out and touches Him. He is all around, but He is here most of all. It can see Him in the dark. It is His dark, as well as Its. More so. He made this dark. He breathed it. Fed it. Enlarged it. His blood and sweat and piss steamed in this dark. His teeth gritted in it, for it. His muscles bunched in it, under it, against it. His seed was nourished by this dark. By extension, so was It.

  In the dark, Its fingers trace the flat contours of His face. In a time of happiness, of hope. Before his face was taken from him. Before He became a part of the dark.

  I stepped off at St Paul’s and took the escalators up to the exit. Outside, I felt the same lurching sense of diminishment I felt whenever I exited the Tube. Down there was all about suffocation, enclosure; the compression of air, time and space. Then suddenly you found yourself thrown into the space of the big city, with the sky jetting off in every direction above you. I also felt slightly sick. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. The crush. The people breathing on you. The weight on the tunnels. One day it will all pile in. It will all collapse. I can see it. I experience it every time I’m down there. The underground knew about death. And I knew about death on the underground.

  In 1999 54 people had been crushed in a stampede into an access tunnel at Nyamiha station in Minsk. Rush hour on a February morning, 1975, Platform Nine, the southbound terminus at Moorgate station, a train failed to stop and slammed into a dead wall, killing 43. Ninety-seven dead at Malbone Street, New York, 1918, when a driver lost control of his train. Line two of the Paris Metro, 1903, 80 killed in an electrical fire that started in a driver’s cab. This year, last week, fifteen dead when a train was derailed in the tunnel between Hampstead and Belsize Park. Death queued up with everyone else at the ticket booths. It hung around the platforms like a busker without any tunes to play. Sometimes it picked a train to travel on, with no particular destination in mind.

  The dark seemed pegged back by the street lights; that enhanced my feelings of disorientation for a few moments, until I gathered myself and skipped up the steps of Panyer Alley, which formed the entrance to the ghost complex of St Paul’s Shopping Centre. Almost instantly, the sound of traffic behind me was sealed off, as if I’d pierced a bubble and was now protected from the outside world. And I knew something was intrinsically wrong, although I couldn’t understand what. The black, chipboard barriers of
condemned shops pressed in from the walkway. From the sodium lights that worked, only a thin, grainy relief was offered. Ahead, ravaged shrubs in perishing rubber pots rustled as breaths of wind swept into the open air sections of the complex. A figure wrapped in black clothes stepped out of nowhere, making me flinch. As she passed by, I saw her glance at me and pause as if to say something, but I didn’t pay her too much attention, not when her face glistened like that.

  I hurried on into a space adjacent to Paternoster Square. Although I felt smothered by the proximity of so much featureless concrete, the sky reared away from me, a paradox that made me feel even more desperate. A pub – The Master Gunner – sat squat and ugly to my right. Smeared shapes moved beyond the windows. I couldn’t make out any faces that might have been watching for mine. I could smell piss and stale roast beef. One sign was left on the deserted shop fronts, grimly informing anybody who could be bothered that Stage Door of Drury Lane had once done business here. I was trying to work out if the shop was a hairdresser’s or a florist’s when I heard footsteps – a woman’s footsteps ringing shrilly on the paved expanse beyond this last section of Panyer Alley.

  I moved forward, bothered more than I should have been by the bulky swaddles of blankets tucked into the corners of landings on brief flights of stairs that seemed to go nowhere, or wadded beneath benches. To my left, one of the large panelled doors of St Paul’s Cathedral was rendered chalky and indistinct by spotlights. Bells in the clock tower pealed the hour. I felt utterly alone and exposed as I stepped into Paternoster Square. The owner of those determined footsteps was nowhere to be seen. The square was host only to a few tired pigeons settling down to roost and one or two couples, too far off for closer inspection, heading towards the main streets, perhaps for a late after-work drink. Because I’d been striding so purposefully since disembarking, the lack of any discernible object to project my attentions upon – the necessity of waiting – made me realise the dislocation of my surroundings. I didn’t know what to do. The cathedral was awash with ice blue light that seemed to peg back the night. Considering it was such a major London landmark its influence on my bearings meant little now. The square was a no-man’s land bleached by arc lights. Beneath my feet, as silence crept through the courtyard, trains rumbled. It proved little comfort. I checked the note in my pocket. 8.30 p.m., Paternoster Square. I tried to remember where the note had come from, but my thoughts were too glassy. Every time I thought I was settling on something, it reflected my scrutiny back at me. Something wasn’t right.

  ‘Something isn’t right,’ I confirmed to myself, and started to back away. The empty, black panels of glass that gave Bancroft House a punched in, drained appearance took up the dead light from the globes scattered around the square. Denuded coppery nets hung limply from their posts on a dismal netball court that didn’t seem capable of supporting the fun of fourteen laughing girls. It made me think of gallows. It made me think of bodies in abattoirs being opened up and left to bleed. A blue polythene bag rustled, trapped high in winter branches.

  ‘I don’t want to die here,’ I whispered to myself, as the top of a head became visible on the steps leading up from the cobbled path of St Paul’s Churchyard. For a lunatic split second I thought it must be a clergyman with his rosary beads, reciting the Paternoster Prayer. The head had been turned black by the backdrop of light. Hair created a wild halo that fussed with motes. As the arms cleared the top edge of the steps, I cleared my throat. ‘Nuala?’ I whispered, hopefully. But of course it wasn’t her. Nuala wouldn’t mean to visit harm upon me. Nuala wouldn’t be naked from the waist up, her breasts gleaming as if they carried their own light source. Nuala wouldn’t be carrying a long, thick coil of chain. It couldn’t be her.

  I ran.

  Clattering down the steps, I almost collided with a car – it wouldn’t stop for me; there were no taxis or buses. I chanced a look back and found that she wasn’t around, but I didn’t want to wait to discover whether or not I’d imagined her. Across Newgate, I headed towards the gutted remains of Christchurch and crouched, hoping that I’d be invisible in the pool of dark between two rows of lights studded in the mulch by the pergolas.

  When she appeared, a fluid spine of moving night, trickling down the steps towards me, my nerve broke and I backed away, stepping through the archway that brought me out on to a small path by the side of the Post Office. I thought about making a break for it, into open air, and just legging it down the main drag till I found life, hoping she wouldn’t be able to catch me. Instead, not knowing where she might be approaching from – I didn’t want to find myself sprinting into a mouthful of whipped steel – I slunk back into the shadows tucked beneath the church’s tower, folding myself into the spaces between moss-covered chunks of carved stone that had long been separated from their parent building. I hid my face. She came. I wondered who she was.

  At one point, I could hear, along with the jangle of those chains against her scuffed leather trousers, her breathing. It seemed too even and self-conscious, almost as if it were regulated by something other than flesh and blood. I chanced a look just as a blur of black silver thrashed into the masonry by the side of my face. I saw sparks, felt a hot bite against my jawbone, and as she raised her hand again to take surer aim, I dived beneath her arm, scrabbling to my feet, at any moment expecting the full weight of that deadly loop to come crashing down on my skull. I glanced back as I moved away, which saved my life. I was able to move my face away from the strike, though the links bit into my shoulder, turning the entire top right quarter of my body into a fiery mass and dragging a yell out of me. Her grip on the chain relaxed and it coiled at my feet. The space in front of my eyes fogged over and I thought I was going to faint. I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was that she was painted with oil, or grease, her hair plastered back from her head so that it resembled a helmet. I managed to stagger away, accelerating as my vision cleared, until I reached a corner of shade. She was collecting the chain into great swatches, swinging it lightly, giving it a rhythm that made me feel ill. It thumped against her thigh. I saw her crouch and put her hands against the ground, her face rearing back to look at the sky. Her breasts were covered with sweat or water and something else, tribal signs, swirls, something I didn’t know, something utterly alien. Christ. It looked like she was sniffing the air for me.

  Slowly, slowly, I crept from my corner of shadow and disappeared down the path up which she’d originally come. I started running, ducking into the entrance to the Post Office sorting bays and crossing into the car park next to St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

  I hit Giltspur Street at full tilt, bearing down on Smithfield Market with an unbidden image in my mind of flayed red corpses twisting on their hooks, their shrieks and the squeal of chains cancelling each other out. I didn’t stop till I’d reached Farringdon Tube. Passing through the ticket barrier and feeling drawn down into that musty warmth, I closed my eyes and imagined I was insubstantial as smoke, inhaled into lungs, where I lost my shape and colour and just became a part of something greater. The comfort I sustained from this depth surprised me, although something about it unnerved me too.

  I didn’t look at anyone else. I tried to think about the flowers at the stall but like them, my thoughts wouldn’t bloom. Nearing Camden I started to get edgy so I got off and stood at the fork in the road that separated the routes to High Barnet and Edgware. Going home seemed too dangerous.

  She answered on the third ring.

  ‘Will you meet me?’

  ‘Sure, Adam. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Camden. You know Le Piaf? The wine bar?’

  ‘On Pratt Street. For sure.’

  ‘There. Come quickly.’

  ‘But Adam… what’s wro – ’

  I hung up.

  Le Piaf’s was cold and unwelcoming, almost empty. The light was subdued; a few tourists, Americans I guessed by their shell-suits, pristine white trainers, cameras and perfect teeth, chewed the cud over halves of lager. A barman with a
pony-tail checked his face in the mirror once or twice a second and ran a cloth over the spotless bar, tidied a small column of beer mats, shook peanuts into dishes. On the odd occasion that somebody approached him for a drink, he looked utterly out of his depth, as if he’d been casually asked to perform a tracheotomy. I decided to screw him up completely and complained about the floaters in my glass of wine. While he was dithering over whether or not to talk to the manager or pour me a fresh glass on his own initiative, Nuala walked in.

  ‘Make that two,’ she called out, which threw him even further. I had to laugh, but it had too much of an edge to it. Nuala didn’t know me – or rather, didn’t know my laugh well enough – to pick up on it.

  ‘Hark at you. On the phone you sounded like someone had been holding a blowtorch to your groin. Or is that just your charming telephone manner?’

  ‘I need to talk to you. To a friendly face.’ Now she recognised the strain in my voice and all the mischief in hers vanished. We took our drinks back to my table, which was as far away from the other drinkers as possible. Maybe it was this distance, or the state of my voice (and my appearance too – in the bar’s mirror I looked as pale as the mayonnaise that came with the chips here) that triggered her questions. I held my hand up to stem their dizzying flow. I answered the last one before going on with my story.

  ‘No, I’m not sick. Someone tried to kill me tonight.’

  ‘You are joking, of course.’ Her own expression answered that one for her.

  I told her everything.