Sholl began to run back toward him. He was not surprised by the soldiers’ decision, and he felt shame.
They were still approaching him when he saw their faces change. Their expressions were blasted suddenly wide, staring at what was emerging from the museum. Sholl heard something bursting out behind him, but he did not turn back. His run faltered as forces overtook him. He came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and spread out his arms as if he would hold back a tide, but the imagos swept past him, in a frenzy like he had never seen, and descended on the soldiers.
The imagos were dressed in a flickering, a strobing sequence of forms, of people, of the people throughout history, staccato aggregates of their own oppression. They were a wind of flint-axe chippers, of pharaohs, of samurai, of American shamans and Phoenicians and Byzantines, helmets with placid faces and splinted armour, and tooth necklaces and shrouds and gold. They came down in a vengeful swarm, and the soldiers fired with tough and stupid bravery, ripping apart moments of flesh and blood that only folded in and refocused and became again. The bodies of the imagos were shredded endlessly as they came but these were not vampires—these were the unfettered fauna of mirrors, for which meat was an affectation.
No one could have expected this. It was like nothing imaginable. It would have been reasonable for the soldiers to pass the museum’s threshold thinking they had at least a chance of retreat. They screamed as the imagos reached them. Stop! screamed Sholl, but the imagos did not obey him. They would only not touch him. They ignored him and continued. Stop! Stop!
One by one the soldiers were taken. After five, six of them had died in blood, or been pushed into space that was folded away to nothing, or frozen and made gone, Sholl turned away. It was not callousness that made him walk stolidly back up the steps, with the massacre going on behind him. He could not turn round, he could not watch what he could not stop, for shame.
He had not been shocked to turn and see the soldiers there. Guilt blasted him. Why did you let them come? it spoke. Company? Protection? Sacrifice?
Sholl shook his head violently and tried very hard not to think of what was happening. He was trembling almost too much to stand. He pushed at the museum’s half-open door, and the motion was timed precisely with a wet screech behind him, that sounded like the commander. Sholl hovered at the museum’s threshold. I didn’t know. I told them not to come, he said inside him. He had been right not to learn their names.
His face creased as he walked into the darkness, leaving the gunfire behind him, and the imagos playing.
It was not far, through the dark. In the echoes of his footsteps, and the faint sounds from the fight outside. He knew where the Fish of the Mirror must be.
He passed the south stairs to his left, crossing into the enormous pillared hall, where signs for toilets and cafés were still intact on the walls. Sholl discovered he was crying. It was just here, now, he was here, ready to face the power of the imago forces, the controller, the Fish of the Mirror. He drew breath, focused on his plan. The Reading Room was ahead, and after deep breaths, Sholl entered.
The Reading Room. The round chamber that had been at the heart of the British Library, and then remade into a pointless focus for the museum. Its dome was way overhead. Most of its shelves had long ago been stripped: they housed only ghost books. The massive room was lit by the moon through the skylight, but that was not how Sholl could see every edge of everything, every curlicue of detail in the chamber. It was all etched in shadow on shadow, and he could see it all, in the black sunlight that poured out of the presence hanging in the room’s centre, like a darkling star, invisible but utterly compelling, evading deliberation, not quite seen, insinuating its own parameters, patrolling the moiling cylindrical space with feline, piscene ease. The Tiger. The Fish of the Mirror.
Its vast, unsympathetic attention turned slowly to Sholl. He felt himself becoming more precise as it considered him, more exact. He bristled from its thoughtful application.
He could not breathe.
Will you touch me? he thought.
Enough. It was like pushing through ice, but he made himself move. Step forward through his awe. This was what it came to. He had not come here, unarmed, to stare. He had a plan.
They must have known. Without any doubt, they must have known the truth. So was it a game? Did they not mind me?
For a long time after the jailing of the imagos, their world was nothing like yours. Except where there was water, things were shaped in very different ways, in other dimensions. For a very long time. But the imperialism of the tain, earth’s specularisation, meant less and less space for the other world to be other.
Places of imago aesthetics grew smaller and fewer. The mimicked land spread.
Ways were found to minimise the hurt. When one woman tilted one looking glass in Rome, must the whole imago universe pitch like an unstable ship? Where one man faces thirty windows, did thirty imagos have to be lashed powerless? Solutions were found. There are strategies, even in prison.
Let the mirrors, the tains themselves, let them move, pitch between the worlds. Let them bend space, so that one imago may seem fractured, but will always match one of you. From caprice to precision.
The prison’s rule went from one of great freedom with occasional, arbitrary and greatly cruel punishment, to one of structure and limitations and no freedom at all. With the imperialism of mirrors, all this became necessary. I see this now. I’ve understood it. I didn’t know, before. Faced with the mindless dynamism of the mirror, a new strategy was found, and it gave the imago world a certain shape.
When I came through, I burst through the tain, and hurled onto steep slopes. I rolled with momentum, afraid that gravity would take me back across, and leave me bobbing in the water back on the other side.
I stopped and breathed mirror air. I shook.
I made my way up a path, amazed by the feel of earth underneath me, by the colour of the night sky, by
the trees. I walked very slowly. I was afraid of what I might find. I gripped the ground with my feet, I listened to the wind. I emerged from the woods and set out for the city, Right is left, here, and left right, so the signs say
and
but the city is in every other way the
same. There was no tiny part of the world that was safe from mirrors, so the imagos finally gave in, and made a reflection.
I held my breath for so long when I came here—when I came back, I want to say, though that would be wrong. It is as if London has been blotted, and I walk in the paper.
I wander through Islington—it gets tedious to always give it its mirror name—and along the railway lines toward Kensal Rise. The sun rises behind me, on the wrong side of the sky. I suppose I have come home.
This place is more like London than London now: there are no changes here, no imago exudations, no signs of the war. It is like London was. There are no fires. There is only the grey, silent city, abandoned, on the wrong side of the mirror. A vacant likeness. Very often, my feet make the only sound.
The imagos, all giddy with freedom, are gone, through the open doors, for revenge and emancipation’s sake. The fauna of mirrors have gone. There are no birds here: there never were, only little shards of imago-matter made to copy them. No rats. No urban foxes, no insects. But strangely, the city is not quite empty.
I am not the first here. Others have made their way through. I have caught glimpses, at the edges of streets, or climbing in the reflected trees. Only a very few, here and there: men and women, gone feral in ragged wool and fur, running through the streets, but not as if they are streets. I do not know if they are rebel imagos, or escaped humans. Some vampires must hate being meatbound too much to live with their siblings, and any human would find this place a sanctuary now.
These are my fellow citizens. They are frightened—I am too, I think—but we are all safe here. There is nothing here that wants to kill us. I am not a danger any more. We can walk these empty, mirrored streets, retracing favourite routes in
looking-glass script, as if unwinding our memories. We can get on with being alone.
The glass of the mirror ruptured, tearing apart my face, when the patchogue burst out of the tain, but I was very quick. I met it, my own snarling face. I wasn’t subdued or driven out of my mind by it. I had never trusted that image anyway. That was why it found me where it did, in the toilet of a hospital, near my ward of melancholics and hysterics.
We rolled and choked each other in the debris of its passing. We struggled below the urinal, smashing open the doors of empty cubicles. Though we—they, I mean, the vampires—are strong and hard to kill, I managed it, with long edged bludgeons of mirrored glass. I stabbed and sawed, scoring my fingers, and felt my muscles tremble with the effort, but after long minutes I lay in blood more its than mine, and my doppelganger’s head was taken off, and it was dead, and I was exhilarated and terrified. But without reflection.
Afterward, I tried to tell. But I came out all wet with blood and the patients, my old cohorts, screamed murder, and then they saw that I’d nothing in the tain, and they screamed that I’d become a monster.
They called me vampire. My friends. They stared at me all bloody, at the emptiness in the glass, with terror so frantic I ran.
I’ve lived a long time. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s our imagos that kill us. Even trapped in mimicry, maybe their hatred reached past the glass and slowly throttled us, after our scores of years and ten. Only I killed mine, so I kept not dying. I’ve lived a long time, alone. For years, and years, not knowing what I was, more afraid of all of you than I’d ever been before, and resenting you more, a tide of it, bitter and growing, and alone.
This is my first time beyond the mirror, but I know all the imago histories by heart. I have had them told to me. Whispered through cold glass. All the stories of old Venice. I’d have loved to have been there. All the stories of the Yellow Emperor. I’ve mopped floors and disinfected stalls for years, in all manner of places, so I could work close to my siblings in the mirrors, and whisper to them when you weren’t about, when the shop closed or the train arrived. It’s perversely safe in those places. No one noticed me to notice I had no image.
There are strategies, to not being seen being unseen, to having no reflection. A way of moving, little dances of avoidance. They’re hard to learn, and a master recognises another. When I saw her, the woman in the station, I made her my new sister instantly, as I watched her bobbing elegantly away from glazed walls and windows. I sat her down in the café and made her teach me what she was, what I would be. For a very long time she’d say nothing. When finally she realised that I wouldn’t betray her, when she saw the tremor in me, the excitement, this making sense, this community, she told me enough—what I needed to know.
I went turncoat without regret. I was sick of you all. That night I uncovered the mirror in my lodgings, pressed up close to its empty face, and whispered into its glass, what would you have me do?
I’ve been a spy for a long time. Living days in your toilets, nights sleeping with my ear to the glass, hearing stories. They must—I don’t believe that they could not—have known what I was, that I wasn’t as other vampires. But they rewarded me when they came through, letting me live as one of their crippled scouts. I’ve seen them, the imagos, killing every human they see, and they have always left me. I lived among them. They saved me. From the man they wouldn’t touch, whom I touched. Showed myself up.
And now I have turned away, and run, and hidden from them.
After long years of feeling nothing, I find that I feel shame. And I swear that I don’t know for whom: I don’t know which of my betrayals makes me ashamed. Am I a bad man, or a bad imago? Which is it that hurts me?
I find a comfort in this nearly empty city. Now that the illusion, the silly little game I played (myself as monster) is over, I find a comfort being simply alone.
There’s nothing unique about me now. On the other side, no person has a reflection now. But if I went back to be as them, that would make me prey. I don’t find myself frightened by that—more indifferent.
I’m disposed to stay here, in this city where I can be alone.
I wonder who he was, that man my siblings, the imagos, wouldn’t touch. I wonder why they wouldn’t, and what he’ll do.
I like it in this nearly empty London. The air’s cool. There is food—tins and bottles in all the deserted stores, their wares printed in mirror-writing.
I’ve taken to climbing towers, and looking out—when light’s waxing and waning—looking out over the inverted horizon, tracking the river, that curves the wrong way, and the skyscrapers, on the wrong side of the city. It’s calming. The city all unlit and coursed through with wind, like a natural formation. Glass bows fractionally, in window frames, in the bluster. From up high, I sometimes see the other citizens, the escapees from all the chaos on the other side. I recognise some of them: we pass each other once or twice a day, at opposite ends of the street, and I know they recognise me.
We don’t smile, our eyes don’t meet, but we know each other. We are quite safe here: we don’t fear each other.
Sometimes I stare into puddles (I’m careful not to tread on them), try to see through the obscurity. I wonder what is happening in London Prime.
One of the refugees to my quiet city does the same. I’ve seen him, standing over the water, hands on hips, squatting and watching. A man bearded through lack of care, wrapped in what was once an expensive coat. I’ve watched him, and seen him see me, but we haven’t yet spoken. We stand at opposite ends of the street, staring intermittently each into his own water, and it is as if we are in the same room, about to meet.
The sun is going down over my quiet London, over in the east.
This is a surrender, Sholl thought. That’s how this should be told.
Refraction is the change in direction of a wave—like light—when it passes into a new substance. There was nothing we could do, thought Sholl. We had nothing. We have to change direction.
The Fish of the Mirror listened to him.
We surrender, Sholl told it again. That had always been his intention.
Is that it? Is that the plan?
Sholl did not know whose voice it was he gave the words to. The question was stark.
What would you have me do? he thought.
He did not tell himself that he had not lied to the soldiers, that he had promised them nothing about his plan: he had told them nothing, but he knew that he had lied.
The Fish of the Mirror turned and came closer, expanding, unlight passing through it. It listened without comment. It granted him audience, and heard his petition.
I won’t let us be destroyed, he thought. We can do this. They listen to me. He did not know if that was true. He knew only that they would not kill him, and that therefore he could make his offer, and his request.
No one else could get close enough, for long enough, to try. This was the only chance they had. No one else could possibly have even been heard.
He did not debase himself, did not plead, nor bluster. There was no trick. He came, the self-appointed general of London, spokesperson for humanity, recognising the fact that his side had lost the war, and asking for peace, as a conquered people.
You don’t need to kill us any more, he thought. You win.
It was the sobbing of the Liverpudlian officer into his radio that had put the idea in Sholl’s head. He had stood in the corridor beyond the radio room after midnight, stricken, listening to the man cry and scan the static for a sound. The relentless white noise wore down on Sholl.
What if everyone was waiting, he thought, to make contact, to hear their commands, and there was no way for word to come through? Perhaps the government still sat, in exile, in a bunker underground, making decisions completely without meaning, or perhaps they were all dead. It made no difference.
They couldn’t speak to their troops. There was no one to make decisions. Soldiers are paid to fight, and so the dispersed troops tried to, in bandit raids, b
eing slaughtered when the imagos bothered. But fighting was not all that soldiers did: sometimes they surrendered.
Their job, now, Sholl became certain, was to surrender. What if the imagos were not carrying out a meaningless slaughter, but were fighting the war because no one had declared it over? Just like the soldiers. Waiting. For a decision that no one could take, and an order that could not be given.
What if there was no one left to give the order to stop? Would the war continue until stilled by entropy, or until the last human was dead?
Until that descent into Hampstead Tube, Sholl had not known for certain that the imagos would not touch him, but for weeks it had been clear to him that he had lived much longer than he should. He had made less and less effort to hide, and the fauna of mirrors, imagos and scavengers, always avoided him, shied away from him, without respect or fear, but as if noting something.
What is this? Sholl had thought. Aghast, he had decided that he was chosen for something. For this. He granted himself authority to speak for his people. To surrender. Judas-messiah.
He made no demands, but he offered terms that seemed reasonable: the terms of abject but dignified surrender. An end to hostilities. Tribute, in kind or obedience, in prayer if the Fish of the Mirror required.
Whatever was necessary. And in return, humans could live.
Perhaps we’ll be nomads, he thought. Or farmers, or serfs, ploughing up London’s ruins. A little colony of the imago empire. A backwater, eventually, with the freedom granted to those who are no trouble. We could make plans then— but Sholl stopped himself. That was not why he was here.
This was not strategy or double-bluff; it could not be. This was a surrender.
Am I Pétain? Collaborator? Will children use my name as a curse? But there will be children.
We’ll live, we’ll spread the word that we’ve lost, and we’ll live, in ghettos if we have to, but we’ll live. A new history. What will we be? But we will be.
Someone had to decide. It was this, or die, like we’re dying.
Looking for Jake and Other Stories Page 24
