Andy nodded.
‘Now imagine that someone takes several large tipper trucks loaded with boulders, and dumps those boulders into the river. What happens?’
‘The water flows around them, I suppose.’
‘Ah, no, not the water – the river. They are two very different things.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘The water doesn’t change. It gets where it’s going just the same – reaches the sea, evaporates, precipitates and so on. Circle of life. Hakuna matata.’
‘Gasundheit,’ said Bex.
‘But on the way there, the river is distorted completely beyond recognition. It fragments into a hundred smaller streams, forms eddies, back-currents, whirlpools, rapids and doldrums. It might crest over one boulder in a great standing wave and dive below another, undermining the stream-bed and scouring down through the land’s old bones.
‘What do you think happens when a ley, running unimpeded for hundreds of miles across open countryside, hits a city, with its hundreds of huge tower blocks of reinforced concrete rooted deep in the body of the earth?’
‘It fragments.’
‘Exactly. It splits, it flows apart, going in countless contradictory directions, diving and resurfacing, but always taking the path of least resistance.’
‘And that’s what the Narrows are!’ he said, excited, finally getting it. ‘Turbulence!’
‘Yes.’
Andy was only half-listening however, and his excitement was half unease. Walter’s description of buildings rooted in the earth’s flesh had stirred memories of the nightmare which had driven him from the flat and onto Gramma’s narrowboat. Coincidence. The air felt thick with Pattern. Suddenly it was difficult to breathe.
‘The leys still exist in fragments, though very few people recognise them for what they are. Most cities have them, whether they’re called twittens, ginnels, snickleways, whatever. They’re the places where middle-aged office workers walk their dogs on Sunday mornings, where teenagers drink alcopops and snog each other on Friday nights. They’re also the Green Roads where off-road bog racers drive their huge four-by-fours and churn fields into muddy, lunar landscapes, and the holloways where farmers lose their sheep. Sometimes the roads follow the leys, and sometimes the earth’s ch’i flows into where our centuries of footsteps have worn through the skin of the world, because we are the land and the land is us.’
Bex was singing sarcastically under her breath: ‘We are the world, we are the children…’ but both men ignored her.
‘And you use the graffiti to navigate.’
‘To navigate, yes, because the Narrows drift. As buildings rise and fall, streets are demolished and shopping malls grow like tumors in the suburbs, the Narrows twist away from their established courses and we have to keep track of them.’
‘I get it.’
Walter smiled patiently. It was a smile which said No you don’t. You don’t remotely get it.
‘Here’s where it gets complicated.’
‘It’s been simple so far?’
‘Relatively. The next question is: when you’re travelling through a Narrow, where exactly are you?’ He fished a pickled onion out of his stew and sliced it open on the table across its width. ‘Consider reality as structured basically very much like an onion. It’s not a particularly new idea. Everybody from the ancient Egyptians through to the great Renaissance thinkers have modelled the cosmos as a concentric layering of heavens, hells, electron orbits, you name it. Everything in the world as you understand it inhabits just one of these layers. Now imagine somebody getting a pin and sticking it at a shallow angle through the skin of the onion, piercing several layers, and coming out on the other side. That, in effect, is what you do when you travel through one of the Narrows.’
‘Sort of like a parallel world thing.’
‘Almost, but ‘parallel’ implies something made out of straight lines running alongside each other and never meeting except at infinity. We are talking about circles here, which might seem like geometrical nit-picking, but it’s important because the shorter the cut, the deeper you go.’
‘Yes! The first time I went into one I tried to go back but I just kept getting deeper and deeper.’
‘You tried to go against the flow. You got yourself caught in an undertow, so to speak.’
An undertow. That was exactly what it had felt like.
‘And your next question is…?’
‘What’s at the centre?’
Walter threw his hands wide. ‘I have no idea. No-one does. Some believe that it holds the source of all Creation. Others, that there’s nothing except an absolute crushing depth, like a black hole. Do you want to know what I think?’
Andy nodded, even though his head was starting to feel uncomfortably full.
‘The Narrows are a land of husks and rinds, the destination of all that is broken, lost or worn-out in our world. Nothing exists there except crumbling fragments of the city from previous centuries, preserved in the backwater eddies of contorted ley-lines, forever sifting downwards like ocean debris falling from the riot of life and colour in the warm, bright upper shallows and down into unfathomable darkness, where the only living things are pale, blind creatures. I suspect that if you could get to the centre of it all, the only thing you’d find would be a frozen singularity which would crush your soul instantaneously and absolutely.’
People had paused in their conversations and meals to listen to him, and when he stopped talking, the room was filled with a tense, expectant silence.
‘You’d better show him,’ said Bex to Andy.
Reluctantly, as if it were some kind of admission, Andy brought out the iron stake from under the table and laid it on the table in front of Walter. ‘I think somebody is deliberately interfering with the Narrows,’ he ventured. ‘I’ve seen them twice now. We both have,’ he added, with a nod towards Bex.
Walter stared at the stake as it lay gleaming on the table, and Andy could feel the man’s dismay radiating from him in chilly waves.
‘Wha-at?’ Andy enquired slowly. ‘What have I done now?’ The feeling that somehow, somewhere he’d messed up again began to grow like a hollow stone in his throat.
‘Andy,’ replied Walter, ‘just out of curiosity – just to humour an old man – please tell me: was it your idea to pull this from the ground?’
Bex bristled. ‘Of course it bloody was!’ she retorted. ‘And I know exactly what you’re on about, so why don’t you drop the act and speak to me straight?’
‘Very well then.’ Walter turned the full face of his regard upon her, and she raised her chin defiantly. ‘I congratulate you. You’ve proven yourself right. There is some unknown agency out there deliberately interfering with the Narrows. I was wrong.’ He sounded far from apologetic, however.
‘Well. Uh. Good!’ she said, trying to be self-righteous and succeeding only at sounding petulant. ‘That’s good, then.’
‘Clearly, whoever can do this is extremely dangerous, possessed of abilities we cannot understand and using them for purposes of which we remain ignorant.’
‘Exactly! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! The disappearances, the closures – they’re all linked. We’ve got to do something!’
‘Something, yes. Something like, perhaps, alerting this person to the fact that not only are we aware of his existence, but that we also,’ and here he pointed directly at Andy, ‘have the ability to undo his work?’
Andy gulped. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he protested. ‘We? Who we? I’m not part of this.’
‘You are now, boy. You became part of it the moment you took this wretched thing,’ and he prodded the stake with disgust. ‘Whoever put it there knows for certain now that his activities have been discovered and that they can be countered. He’s going to come after you
with everything he has. Your only bit of good luck, Andy, is that he probably doesn’t know who you are, but the consequence of that is he’s going to come after the rest of us with everything he has instead. He’ll assume that you’re one of the Narrowfolk. It will never occur to him that you’re nothing more than an ignorant suburbanite who lacks the basic wit to avoid meddling with things he doesn’t understand.’
‘Hey, I…’
‘Quiet, boy. Your lot has been thrown in with ours, whether you like it or not. You’re one of the Narrowfolk now, and you’re in my house, so stop wittering and start learning to deal with the consequences of your actions.
‘As for you,’ he rounded back on Bex. ‘Do you think me blind, girl? Do you think that I cannot keep this place and my people safe for more years than you have existed without knowing something of what passes in my city? Do you think I and those close to me have not heard the same rumours that you have and tried to uncover as much of the truth as we can? And do you not think, Bex,’ as she tried to interrupt, ‘that we might be just a bit better at it than you are?’
He glared at them both and rose to leave. ‘Laying Up will commence at first light,’ he announced curtly to the whole room. ‘I appreciate that this is several days early and doesn’t leave you as much time as you’d like – nevertheless, make what arrangements you can.’
He left, and the wave of dumbstruck silence collapsed into roaring breakers of consternation as everybody began to talk at once.
***
Moon Grove did not have a telephone landline, but after dinner Andy was introduced to Phil the Phone, a grinning man of indeterminate east-European origin who had earned a permanent place at the Grove by his ability to provide free, untraceable phone calls and internet access, very discreet and no questions asked.
‘You call international, long distance, or local?’
‘It’s just a local call. Just a quick one.’
‘You need email? Text? Video maybe?’
‘No – just a straightforward phone call. You know.’
‘Okay.’ Phil the Phone rummaged through the various pockets of a huge, multicoloured puffer jacket, examining and discarding half a dozen handsets – some of which were so old they actually had aerials – before settling on one and handing it to Andy with a toothy grin. Whatever the economic deficiencies of the emergent post-Soviet democracies, they apparently had some shit-hot dentists. ‘This one is good for you, I think.’
‘Why this one in particular?’
‘It has screensaver of naked lady.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘You phone fiancée, yes?’
‘Oh, and by the way, how is it exactly that everybody seems to know everything about me already?’
‘She tell me,’ Phil the Phone waved to Bex, who was suddenly very busy testing the bulbs on a string of fairy lights. ‘You phone fiancée to say you lose your job and not coming home tonight; you have dirty picture to cheer you up while she chews off your balls.’
‘That’s not what I was… oh never mind, just give me the bloody thing.’ The assumption was alarming. Regardless of what Walter had said about his lot being thrown in with theirs, he had no intention of staying here any longer than a few hours.
He tried the flat first, not expecting anything, and was unsurprised to hear the long whine of a disconnected signal. He called her mobile and found that it was switched off. He tried his own mobile – he could visualise it clearly, in the inside pocket of his thick walking jacket which was hanging pointlessly on the back of the front door – and was a little worried to find that disconnected too. He supposed it must have fallen out in the chaos and been broken. Finally, feeling like he’d been putting off an unpleasant chore, he called Laura’s parents. If she weren’t there, she would certainly have contacted them. The phone rang longer than it should have done before the answering machine kicked in, and he tried to feel disappointed but all he could manage was a kind of guilty relief.
‘Face it, my friend,’ drawled Aston Stirchley the Third, drifting past in a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, ‘tonight you’re going nowhere fast, just like the rest of us. Be where you are and try to enjoy it for what it is.’
Bex linked her arm with his, and this time he didn’t protest. ‘Come on, misery-guts,’ she said. ‘You’re going to help us with the decorations.’
***
They gave him some drawing pins and a big cardboard box full of holly sprigs and set him to pinning one above each of the windows. Afterwards – as he and Stirchley enjoyed an after-dinner spliff which, all told, he felt was thoroughly deserved – he asked about it.
‘What’s with the holly over the windows? I thought it was supposed to be mistletoe.’
‘Ah,’ said Stirchley, as if Andy had just made a highly cogent point in a complex argument. ‘That is to keep out the fairies.’
Andy thought carefully about this – which in itself was a measure of just how stoned he was becoming. ‘But wouldn’t you want the fairies to come in?’ he said eventually. ‘Aren’t they supposed to do favours and odd-jobs for people – like mending shoes and stuff?’
‘You’re thinking of elves. No – fairies, we definitely do not want.’
‘But why?’
‘Okay. You know fairies are basically tied to nature, yes? Forest glades, running streams, that sort of thing?’
‘Ye-es…’
‘So. Do you have any idea what a couple hundred years of living in an urban industrialised environment does to a fairy? All the toxins, the chemicals – not to mention the etheric pollution of all that frustrated, claustrophobic humanity jammed together generation after generation?’ He shook his head and took a long toke, continuing nasally: ‘You know how polar bears get after they’ve been in the zoo too long?’ He shook his head again and expelled a long stream of smoke. ‘Urban fairies. Fuckin’ psychos, man.’
They were sitting in a high-ceilinged living room full of slumbering sofas, listening to the small tribe of Moon Grove children being told a bedtime story in front of a huge open fire. It was a tale he’d never heard before: the story of the Holly King and the Oak King and of their competition to win the love of the White Lady of the Woods who held the Forest Crown as her prize.
It was evident that this was one in a long series of tales because the children already knew the names of the characters and their catch-phrases, joining in so loudly and exuberantly that he couldn’t imagine these kids hunched in front of games consoles or school desks. The Oak King transformed himself into a wren, and the Holly King turned into a robin, and they chased and tricked each other through the forest in their quest for a magical eight-pointed egg.
‘Eggs don’t have points,’ objected one sceptical seven-year old. This was greeted with a chorus of general objection, and in order to save face, he added ‘Well what kind of bird lays an eight-pointed egg, then?’
The storyteller – a slender young woman who herself looked rather birdlike – replied gravely: ‘One with a very sore bottom,’ whereupon story time degenerated into wild shrieks and giggles. The children were packed off to one of the upstairs dorms and the storyteller – who was introduced to Andy as Lark – settled herself back with the adults.
‘That was a great story,’ he said.
‘Thanks. It helps them understand what this time of year is all about, but without stuffing it down their throats.’
‘You mean Christmas?’
Lark smiled. ‘Sort of. The solstice – midwinter. It’s a very old tale, much older than the Nativity. Do you know why we Lay Up for the solstice?’
‘To be honest, I was afraid to ask. It’s not going to have anything to do with the uttermost depths of existence, is it?’
She laughed easily. ‘Not really. The Oak King is summer, and the Holly King is winter. Their fight
is the year-long battle between the two. As the days get shorter and colder the power of the Holly King grows until it reaches its strongest on the midwinter solstice – but at that moment he is defeated by the Oak King who gradually grows in power until midsummer, when the Holly King defeats him in turn and so on. It’s a metaphor for the eternal cycle, the round of the seasons.
‘The midwinter solstice is a dangerous time for the Narrowfolk to be abroad. The leys are supercharged with energy, and the Narrows become dangerously unpredictable. Anybody unwise enough to travel at this time of year risks terrible consequences. Some get lost, sucked in too deep to ever find their way back to the surface world. Others claim to have seen strange things spewed out of the depths – terrible things that make skavags look like kittens.
‘So we lay up food, water and fuel against the Holly King’s strength, and hide for nine days and nine nights – four either side of the solstice. Just long enough to let things calm down again. We cut ourselves out of the circles of the world for a little while, singing songs and telling tales, and come out the other side on Christmas Day.’
‘Strung out and starving,’ added Stirchley with a nasal giggle.
‘Not to mention stinky,’ chimed in Bex.
‘Fat,’ contributed someone else.
‘Bloated more like.’
‘Stir crazy and completely fed up with the sight of each other.’
‘Just like any ordinary family Christmas, then,’ Andy concluded.
Their laughter broke Lark’s story-spell, but in its place grew a looser, warmer enchantment of simple fellowship which carried Andy through to the early hours, when they made their goodnights. When Bex had told him that she lived in a squat, his imagination had conjured up a vision of splintered floorboards, overflowing bin-bags, and gaunt, grey smack addicts heating tins of baked beans over naked candle-flames. In no way had it prepared him for the warmth, noise, and homely chaos which had enveloped him over the last few hours.
The Narrows Page 12
