London Revenant

by Williams, Conrad

  Why was I Monck? How could things come to this?

  But hadn’t I always suspected, or feared, that I might be someone else? Doesn’t everyone suffer the occasional gap in their memory? A lacuna that can be sourced back to drink, or drugs, or madness, if it can be sourced at all. Lonely people, or mad people, or sane people even, trying to gee themselves up… sometimes we talk to ourselves as we would to another person. We might be single creatures, but our minds don’t think that way. The physical, tangible parts of us contained a symmetry; why not the mental, the untouchable parts of us too?

  It was momentarily heartening to consider these questions because perhaps it meant that Nuala was all right, that she too had the capacity to withdraw into another zone of being and was now drifting, like me, through the city, trying to find somewhere or someone solid enough to cling to.

  On the tramp’s face, the previous day’s Evening Standard riffled in the wind. I leaned over and perused the front page, more to help nail me back into reality than anything else. There wouldn’t be a Standard today, even though there was one heck of a lead story. Thoughts of dual personalities dissipated. The weirdness went away from me, for a while. What could be more normal than resting a while, on a bench by the Thames, reading the newspaper?

  The headline: PUSHER RAISES STAKES. Apparently he and his cronies had upped the ante in recent days and were forcing up to a dozen people a day on to the rails despite the huge increase in security cameras and guards on the platforms. They had varied their methods a lot, changing lines and causing huge delays. The extra security outfits were unable to pin anybody down because The Pusher and his team vanished into the tunnels as soon as they had committed their crimes. They were opting to strike the busier central stations now that the number of Tube travellers was dwindling rapidly. The best surveillance equipment in the world and a crack team of security guards wasn’t going to catch anyone when a couple of hundred civilians were stampeding for the exits. Still, there would be no more pushing, because there was no more Underground. The Underground was overground now. In a day, the Pusher had been made redundant. Then again, I thought with a jolt, so had I. I had been charged with the task of finding Blore, before the world beneath ground was exposed. And I had failed. The authorities would be swarming through the tunnels as soon as the disaster scene had been made as safe as possible. Odessa, Vane, and the rest of them would be under the glare of the media spotlight within days. There was nothing they, or I, could do about it.

  Something about the report I had just read bothered me.

  The tramp was making glottal noises that percolated through the newspaper and the hood concealing his face. I thought he might wake up, or shift and spill the newspaper, but he settled down again. I pored over the reports once more.

  The story continued to guard its secret from me. I read testaments from some of the witnesses who had claimed to see The Pusher at close quarters:

  He smelled of diesel, said one.

  Who didn’t? My own clothes were streaked with the stuff.

  He moved through the crowds like he wasn’t there. Like smoke.

  Something wasn’t right. I stared at the accompanying photograph, a grainy shot taken by the closed-circuit TV on a platform at Victoria. It showed a shadowy figure leaping into the mouth of the tunnel, clothes flapping about him like strange wings. A stationary train and a gaggle of commuters, faces twisted with shock. One woman with her hands at her face, howling.

  A dozen victims a day.

  ‘He knew the quake was going to happen,’ I said.

  A tear in the newspaper filled with colour. One brilliant blue eye swivelling in its black socket: a burnished claw clutching a jewel. And then a shift of movement and a great hole of black was opening behind my eyes. Any panic was swiftly doused by pain and oblivion tried to pull me down. I bit down hard on my cheek and reality swung back into focus. Reality was the tramp, a great snake of large-link chain unfurling from his cuff, wading in to give me another crack.

  I hunched forward, my head butting against his stomach as his arm came crashing down. He still managed to strike me but, his weight transferred, all the power was gone. I took a light knock against the small of my back and scooted out from under him, shocked by the way he repositioned himself so quickly. Before I was upright he was coming for me again. He shrugged away his coat: a skin sloughed off. His hood too peeled back and I barked a syllable of shock. I recognised him, though he had done everything he could to rid his face of features. His nose was gone: a ragged pair of black holes were punched into the centre of his face. His skin had been pared away from his face. Dust clung to it like a bizarre beard. His eyes seemed sunken into his head; an absence of eyelids and brows made him appear startled. But the mouth was worst – what was left of it. The teeth were gritted at me, a white curve of enamel. His face seemed trapped in a constant rictus of pain. Perhaps it was.

  ‘H.,’ I said.

  It smiles despite the pain, relishing the pain. It smiles into the pain, liking the look of shock. The shock says: I met my match here. The shock says: I might die. And then the shock is eclipsed by a gamut of expressions, chasing each other across the bruised angles of his face: anger, hate, determination. That’s good too. No fight worth its salt was ever conducted without a bit of passion.

  And he comes for It, more powerful than It expected, raining blows upon Its head as the faces of the dead swim up in the mirrors of Its eyes.

  It’s trying to manipulate him back towards the river. Perhaps, if It gets him off guard, It can push him into the mud, where he’ll become stuck. It can finish him off at Its leisure then, or wait for the tide to take him.

  Where’s Laura?

  ‘Safe… for now,’ It purrs, ducking under his arm as he tries to thrust his fingers into Its throat.

  Why did you do this? What’s the point?

  ‘Why do anything? What’s the point of anything?’

  He’s moving backwards, to the shattered railings that guard the walkway from the drop to the river. The ferocity of his attack is waning. He’s tired. He wants an explanation more than he wants blood on his hands. That will be his undoing.

  But all the people you’ve killed… mutilated. What does it all mean?

  ‘Well exactly. What does it mean? Not a great deal. But then, what does it mean for the sheep that have spent years yo-yoing from home to work, doing the same tasks every day? All those jobs, those lunches, those briefings and pre-meetings and meetings and post-meetings. What are they worth now?’

  Didn’t you ever consider that people might want that? Might rely on it?

  ‘People don’t know what they want. They need to be shocked out of themselves, into new selves. Shock is what we need.’

  Dead people… you can’t shock someone who’s dead.

  ‘I never intended to kill anyone. Death isn’t the point to all this. Life is. One woman I pushed, she lost an arm. I read about her. She was a data inputter for a law firm in the City. She was suffering from RSI, she was paying through the nose for a tiny flat in Holborn. Now she’s looking after sheep on an island in the Hebrides. She’s happier now than she ever was.’

  Maybe. But how can you be sure she isn’t still waking up at all hours of the night, seeing that train carve her up on the tracks.

  ‘That’s so negative. She sees the train as an emblem of her new life. She’s no longer a slave.’

  And what about Greg? Why did you kill Greg?

  ‘Because he got too close. As you have done.’

  We were gasping at each other, exhausted by our physical and verbal exchanges. Both of my arms had been torn by the chain. I was holding my blade and it was smeared with his blood. Stab wounds on his hip and shoulder made the oily stains on his clothes seem darker.

  Behind H., I could sense movement, as of a group of people milling. When I dared to confirm this feeling, my jaw almost fell off. Surely there was only so much I could take before my brain packed up and could deal only with my scrawling on rubber wal
ls with crayons.

  Spilling out of the rent in the earth came a torrent of naked, malformed bodies. Picked out by the sun, they were anaemic, pathetic figures, so thin that I could see the flutter of their organs through transparent skin. H. was distracted enough by my expression to join me in this viewing. We stood there, drained, as these phantoms staggered around, their faces upturned, smelling the air, their useless eyes merely darkish nubs in their heads. Some were too weak to continue their trek beyond the rim of a world they believed they would never see again. Undernourished, but muscular, their limbs deformed or stunted, they panted on all fours, too exhausted or frightened to move. They were free. They were back in the city they had once known. But everyone of them was still missing. Would they ever truly return?

  H. was away, shambling along the embankment. I took off after him, trying to ignore the hairless, pale forms streaming along the roads on the other side of the river.

  Just before H. dashed into a pleat in the ground, he turned to me and drenched himself with liquid from a bottle he’d slipped from the depths of his trousers. ‘Here’s fun, Monck! I’ll set fire to myself unless you follow. If I die, you’ll never know if Laura is dead or alive! Come now, sharpish! We’re at play!’

  When I reached the spot, fuel vapours hung in the air, the shimmers of which seemed to contain his shape, his ravaged face, the petrol blue of his eyes.

  Chapter 19

  Depth charge

  He led me a merry dance, that harlequin. That H. That Blore.

  I chased his ghosts all under London, in the stinking, moist darkness of its souterrains, a feverish tour of the dead zones of the capital. Along the exposed banks of the Fleet, the Westbourne, the Effra, Counters Creek… Lost ministerial bunkers, cellars and safes. The deep-level bomb shelters, the sewers, Kingsway’s underground tramway, The Rotundas in SW1, all the forgotten labyrinths that punctured London’s bowels. His bloody fingerprints were on the rheostats and fuse boxes in the Plant room at Belsize Park’s deep level air-raid shelter; his sour body odour pervaded the air at the bottom of the Down Street lift shaft. And everywhere was the smell of petrol, and the hideous cackling that was Blore’s teasing laughter, always ahead of me, leading me on, leading me deeper. Sweat and the gasping of my breath as it fell in stitches from my burning throat. Footsteps ringing and gritting and splashing. Monstrous shadows slashing across walls furred with salt bleeding from bone-dry rocks.

  Occasionally I happened upon more of those ravaged, deracinated souls as they drifted like smoke through the ruins of the city. They shrank from me, into the shadows, and I was grateful. I was too tired to fight anyone else. Part of me hoped and feared that I might come across my mother, that she hadn’t actually died, but was merely lost. She was missing from my life. That was enough to fill me with optimism.

  Nausea beat ceaselessly at me, and not just because the odour of petrol was even more overpowering in the tunnels. She might still be alive, but I couldn’t help feeling that I’d let Laura down, that I was in some way responsible for what had happened. I could have prevented her abduction. And what about Nuala? She had obviously fallen under Blore’s spell; she wanted his child, for God’s sake! If she had survived the catastrophe, how would she react when she discovered that the man she loved was a monster?

  After countless hours of scurrying, I started to get seriously worried. Not only was I unsure as to how I would overpower Blore when I caught up with him, but I was also entering territory that I didn’t know so well. It was colder here; lighter too, but what light there was contained a pale green tint. I couldn’t trust my feet as well as I had previously. Pieces of machinery were beginning to mount up at the edges of the wall: cogs, gears and pistons; broken, scavenged engines wounded with rust. I heard laughter up ahead, spinning around the caverns, mad, unfettered.

  I stopped when I became aware of my feet splashing through puddles that weren’t made of water. The petrol. The petrol was everywhere.

  He’d led me to a graveyard. Great hulking carcasses of dead engines were twisted upon each other. The mess of rolling stock resembled a crash. This was where the trains came to die. We must have been fairly close to the surface, for slivers of natural light were slicing into the main cave. I had no idea where we were, whether we were in London’s centre, or on its periphery. The inner compass in me had been cracked by so much flitting about. My legs ached, my arms and back were swollen with chain marks, my chest was on fire. I needed a bath, a beer and bed.

  I could hear water. And motors on the water. I could also hear the low, steady thrum of traffic, and the occasional trundling weight of a train, but not a Tube train. An overland express, a 125. There were voices too, and music: the thump of bass from ghetto blasters. Bhangra, hip-hop, jungle.

  I sidled up to the first of the carriages, my blade slippery in my hands, and crept inside. The seats shrank away from me. Graffiti formed thick black webs that clung to the glass and fabric that had managed to escape the punishment of time. I walked the central aisle, listing slightly against the slanted position of the train, waiting for something to lunge for me from the shadows. At the end of the aisle, I slipped the catch on the interlocking doors and passed into the next carriage. The damage here was more extensive, and twenty feet along a rent almost separated the carriage into two parts. Rats had made a nest by the fracture; they teemed through it like a steady stream of oil.

  I edged past them, feeling my skin bristle when, as one, they halted and turned their glistening eyes upon me, as if Blore was somehow controlling them. Into the next car, and the next. I could sense Blore nearby and wondered if he too was stalking me now that his bait had proved successful. I had to abandon my carriage when I was halfway through the train. The gangway had tilted too far to enable me to walk stealthily and the adjoining door wasn’t going to open anyway, as it had become mangled within its frame. I slid out through one of the gaping windows and dropped softly on to the ground. More trains were stacked before me, rolled and wrecked, their snouts cracked and bludgeoned and covered in soot. I moved among them, growing more confident – or rather, reckless – as I proceeded. I wanted this over. I wanted Blore finished and I wanted Laura safe at home where we could both start trying on new lives for size. I wanted –

  The sound of metal against stone. The shift of rubble underfoot.

  I angled back towards the sound, the black windows of parallel trains flanking me like hellish paintings in an art gallery.

  Up ahead, partly revealed by one of the slashes of light, a figure knelt. Its head was consumed by the dark. It straightened, almost languidly, as a thin blue ripple in the air wrapped itself around its shoulders.

  ‘Blore?’ I said. ‘H.?’

  As I neared, I could see that it wasn’t H. The figure was much slighter. But my study was interrupted as it jack-knifed, a muffled scream turning to a dull reverb that moved flatly around the cave. The blue ripple flared orange as it consumed the figure. I lunged forward but the flames were spreading, folding over each other in plumes in their eagerness to find other fuel. The air was burning.

  I dug my heel into the dirt and spun around, scrabbling to gain purchase on the uneven ground so that I might be able to launch myself into a sprint. I felt heat on the nape of my neck and the hairs there start to curl. I was never going to make it, and it struck me that maybe that was okay because it meant I would never have to fret over who it was I had watched being torched.

  Flames danced at my ears. I felt my clothes singeing, my skin begin to catch and melt. A frame of brilliant yellow closed in on my vision as I rushed towards the network of tunnels that had brought me here. My breath burned in my chest as I pulled on air that was itself on fire. And then –

  ‘ – Monck! Quick, in here. Quick!’

  I could barely see her, my eyes were so tightly squeezed against the heat. But she was there, her shaggy pile of dirty blonde hair thrusting from a fissure in the tunnel. Coin.

  ‘Down here. Hurry!’

  I don't know h
ow I managed it. I dived and slid and scrambled, collapsing through the rupture in the wall just as the full force of the fire went howling down the tunnel behind me. Coin was on top of me in a moment, slapping at my clothes and hair, trying to stop me from going up in a blaze of my own.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said, after a while, without knowing if I really was. I just wanted her to stop slapping me. I got hold of her and hugged her. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You aren’t going to scamper off and leave me again, are you?’ I said, as she led me by the hand deeper into the maze. I was hopelessly lost.

  ‘Don’t fret your noggin, dear, I won’t leave you,’ she said, looking up with a smile on her face. When her eyes met mine, her smile faltered. I must have looked pretty rough. I needed medical attention pretty badly; I could no longer feel my face, there were blackspots of numbness there. Pain had left me as easily as if I had turned on a tap to let it out of my body. I didn’t dare look at my hands.

  ‘You’re in shock,’ she said.

  The following hours dissolved into a feverish no-time. Sometimes I was convinced we were still walking, Coin and me, through the labyrinth of the underground, her forging ahead, hand buried in mine, tugging me onward. But other times I would blink and shake my head and be looking up at the shivering ceiling of a cave, lit by candles, as I lay on a rough bed of recovered Tube train seats. The bitter, tallowy smell of the candles was relaxing, as was the fluting of distant winds over the cracks and shafts that joined this world with the outer. The seats were slashed, lumpy and stained, but even razor blades would have been comfortable. Coin would dart around like a hummingbird, hovering long enough to trickle some water from the corner of a soaked cloth, or a few morsels of soft meat, between my cracked, blistered lips. I tried to ask her what the food was but my throat was too swollen and sore.