‘We’ll all look for them,’ Jules says, and takes the man’s arm.
Morag doesn’t yet feel panic: after all, the little girl and her brother can’t have wandered far. But then the young, shaven-headed UFO watcher looms out of the mist and says, ‘They’ve got them,’ and points out towards the dumps and starts to laugh.
Morag and Jules exchange glances and run, leaving the man stumbling amongst the shacks, bawling his children’s names, shouting back at people who shout at him.
As she runs, Morag casts her torch wide, sending the beam dancing over furrows and piles of compacted trash in which bits of glass and metal glint and glitter like fugitive stars. She glimpses a shuffle of shadows, swings the torch back and sees small, far-off figures dart into darkness and smoke.
Jules is already running towards them. Morag follows, calling the little girl’s name. Her long hair has come loose from its French braid, and whips around her face.
Although the trash has been compacted by bulldozers and tipper trucks, it is a treacherous, uneven surface. Morag flounders through shifting seams of rubbish, skids on a drift of loose plastic bags and tumbles into a soggy hollow that exhales a choking methane stench when she lands heavily on her back. She pushes up, hands sinking in something wet, flings greasy droplets from her fingertips. Ahead, two, four, six figures run in front of the glow cast by a heap of smouldering tyres. Then acrid black smoke whips around them and they’re gone.
Jules says smugly, ‘Need a hand?’
‘Thanks,’ Morag says, and grins when he recoils from her clammy grip.
‘I saw them,’ Jules says.
‘Me too.’
‘They could be trouble.’
‘They have the children, Jules. Come on.’
There’s a wire fence at the edge of the dumps, but Jules quickly finds a place where a section of mesh has been removed. Morag squeezes through ahead of Jules, and stumbles down the steep slope on to railway tracks.
It is the old RER line into the Magic Kingdom. Morag steps as quickly as she can between the concrete sleepers, swinging the torch-beam across two sets of gleaming rails. Ahead, the railway runs into a tunnel.
Morag waits until Jules catches up with her, and says, ‘Perhaps they didn’t come down here after all.’
‘Perhaps we should call the cops.’
‘Would they come for a couple of homeless kids, Jules?’
‘What have we got to lose? Besides, a train is coming. Feel the breeze?’
A cold wind is blowing out of the tunnel. It smells of oil and electricity. Morag and Jules have actually turned to go back when they hear the scream. It is high and horrible. It doesn’t sound human at all.
Morag starts to run towards it, into the tunnel. Jules is behind her. The light of her torch dances crazily over the litter-strewn tracks and greasy cables bundled along the tunnel’s curving wall. Little mice run from the light, scurrying across yellow scraps of newspaper and wads of soggy leaves. A Coke can shines like a jewel.
Morag is running into a rising wind. Scraps of paper spin around her feet and whirl away. Jules catches her shoulder and pushes her against the wall as the train bursts out of the darkness, briefly lighting the tableau in the middle of the other track.
The train roars past, roars and roars in an endless flicker of empty lighted windows that tears away Morag’s breath. She is screaming into its roar.
Noise unravels into mere wind. The train is gone.
Jules snaps on his own torch in time to catch the figures scattering from a bundle lying between the rails. Half a dozen children, and a man running after them. The children run with an odd hunched scampering gait. The man turns, his face white in the torchlight. Then there’s a flat snap and something strikes sparks from a rail and whoops away down the tunnel.
Morag has heard enough gunfire to know what it is, and throws herself to the oily gravel between the tracks. Jules crouches beside her. He has switched off his torch. There’s another shot, then a long silence.
‘Nine millimetre semi,’ whispers Jules, who grew up in La Gouette d’Or, in the middle of the block wars between gangs of the established Algerian population and the new wave of Algerian refugees fleeing the Jihad.
‘We have to go and see,’ Morag whispers back.
The bundle discarded between the rails is the body of the little girl. She’s been stripped, and lies as if flung carelessly beneath a symbol daubed in white on the grimy concrete of the tunnel wall. For a long moment this symbol holds Morag’s attention. It’s a kind of blot-shaped spider, an intricate collision between a pair of jagged mandalas that seems to swirl, contracting in on itself.
Morag forces herself to look away. The little girl’s blanket is thrown over her head, and there’s a bloody flower on her naked belly. Blood is spreading under her body, shiny and black in the semi-dark.
Jules starts in at heart massage and artificial respiration. Morag leaves him there under the spidery white sign and runs on. Her phone yields a crackling dial tone when she comes out of the far end of the tunnel. Breathlessly, she informs Dr Science about what’s happened, gives him the location and tells him to call the cops.
The towers of the Magic Kingdom’s fairytale castle claw the neon orange sky on one side of the railway line; on the other, the Interface is a curtain wall of light. Warm yellow rectangles of hotel windows, the jerky swarming pastels of corporate ads, the ghostlight of holographic logos. As she stumbles along the track, Morag can hear the distant screeching of dozens of competing sound systems and the continuous whitenoise roar of the huge blowers which create an air curtain screening the Interface from the Magic Kingdom’s infested atmosphere.
Someone shouts at Morag. She pushes hair from her face and looks around, sees a man gesturing at her from the top of the embankment. As she climbs up the slope of long, wet grass, she shouts back, asking if he’s seen people coming this way.
‘With a little boy? You saw them?’
‘I’ve been busy.’ He’s a tall skinny teenager, his face mostly hidden by a black mask and bulky goggles. He wears leather jeans and a black puffer jacket that makes him look like an unexploded hand grenade. A computer hooked to his belt is wired into his goggles. He’s some kind of penetration jockey or perimeter peeper, a kid using stealth remotes to pry the fairies’ defences, looking for a thrill, or for information he can sell on. Plenty try it, but none have made more than a hundred metres into the Magic Kingdom, not even the jockeys who work for the corporations. He peers at Morag through his goggles and says suspiciously, ‘You security?’
‘I’m looking for a little boy. Someone took him.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. I was pretty far in, bearing past Big Thunder when I was trashed. Didn’t see what hit, just this flash-over—’
‘You didn’t see anyone with your gizmo?’
‘I based it on the last generation of Mars rovers. It’s way smaller, of course, but it can tackle forty degree slopes, can move fast on the flat, and has cockroach wiring for random evasion of moving shadows. Not fast enough, it turns out.’
Morag wants to shake him. ‘But did anyone get through the perimeter?’
‘No one can get through the perimeter, that’s the point. Hey, you know, you shouldn’t be here without a mask. Fembots drift over all the time, you could get your mind changed in an instant.’ The peeper’s goggles film over, like little mirrors, then clear. He says, ‘Death Star guards on the way,’ and runs off towards the lights of the Interface.
The security force intercepts Morag as she is making her way back down the slope. There are half a dozen of them, all masked like the peeper. They wear a variety of quasi-uniform tunics or jumpers and are armed with semi-automatics, tasers, gas canisters and tangletape aerosols, but don’t possess a single identifying logo or insignia between them.
Morag flashes her paramedic identification and tries to explain that she’s chasing fairies who have taken a little boy, but the guards aren’t interested. They know all about it,
they say. The police are on the way and the best she can do is go back and tell them her story. Morag, beside herself with frustration and anger, says that they should be looking for the fairies and not hassling her, and the only female guard says that she can walk back by herself or be taken in and held overnight, it’s her choice.
Morag stares at the guards, one after the other. ‘I’ll know you again,’ she says, ‘despite those silly masks.’
‘You get yourself scanned when you get home,’ the woman guard tells her. ‘There’s all sorts of strange shit loose in the air here. Maybe you even just thought you saw all this.’
‘There’s a little girl lying dead on the railway tracks, you fascist bitch.’
‘Bleeding heart liberal cunt. Fuck off home.’
It’s a stand-off. The guards watch Morag walk back into the tunnel. Jules is spreadeagled on the track with an armed cop standing over him, and a second cop is taking the dead little girl’s fingerprints.
4 – The Nest
The little boy wants to go home. He wants his father. He wants to know where his sister is.
‘She isn’t here,’ Armand says, for what feels like the fiftieth time. ‘Don’t worry about her. Look at all the pretty horses!’
The little boy doesn’t care. He says that he hates horses, and anyway, those things aren’t real horses.
‘You’re right,’ Armand says. He feels so weak that he might at any moment pitch forward on his face. He tells the boy, in a desperate attempt to catch his interest and distract him from this situation, ‘They’re not horses at all. You see, they’re unicorns!’
‘They stink,’ the little boy says. ‘This whole place stinks. It stinks and it’s cold. I want to go home.’
He sits down on the artificial grass and won’t be moved. He seems to have the ability to increase his weight at will, and sits as stubbornly as a limpet. He is four years old, a chubby boy with shiny black skin, dressed in filthy corduroy trousers and a baggy jumper that falls to his knees. A transparent, filmy scarf is layered around his neck. His name is Gabriel. Armand took him away from the nest when he came out of Mister Mike’s dreams, with blood under his fingernails and the smell of propellant on his fingers and a deep, bad, black sense that something awful happened last night. For the second time in two days, he is hiding from the Twins.
The little boy says, ‘It’s stinky and it’s cold here. And I saw a rat.’
Armand feels sweat stand out on the skin of his face. ‘No. No, you didn’t’
The only rats left in the Magic Kingdom are spies. The Folk dealt with the wild population, along with the feral cats that lived on them.
‘I did,’ the little boy says, and starts to cry. Armand tries to comfort him, but the little boy just cries louder, and says that he wants to go home.
‘There, there,’ Armand says hopelessly. ‘There, there.’
They are in a fairyland glade, at the end of the It’s a Small World ride. Fairyland is the last in a chain of fake landscapes stretching from Australia (a gum tree with some kind of grey stuffed bear clinging to it standing in front of a painting of a clamshell building in a harbour, and black-skinned puppets carrying spears and boomerangs) to the USA (the Statue of Liberty, a boy puppet in baseball uniform, a girl puppet in cheerleader uniform). The place has seen better days. The unicorns are waterstained, and peek forlornly from a thicket of dusty plastic vegetation. Most of the stars have fallen from the dark blue vault of the roof, and someone has uprooted the bright red toadstools and set fire to the fairies that hang above the flower-strewn astroturf, perhaps the same person who lit a fire in the litter-choked canal through which chain-driven pleasure boats once rode.
Armand sits down beside the little boy. He is so very weak. Saliva keeps flooding his mouth, and he keeps swallowing. His stomach is swollen with saliva. The wrecked glade is dimly lit by a blade of grey light that pries through a crack in the roof. Things seem to Armand to keep turning into their own shadows. He has to watch everything carefully, and his head hurts from the effort of preventing reality from betraying him. Even the air seems grey and gritty, heavy on his skin.
The boy, Gabriel, looks at Armand. He says, ‘I have a headache.’
It will be an after-effect of the drug the Folk give changelings to keep them docile. Now it is wearing off.
Armand says, ‘It means you’re getting better.’
‘My father gives me water, with this fizzy stuff in it.’
‘Aspirin,’ Armand says.
‘That’s what I want.’
‘I don’t have any.’
‘You’re no good. You don’t know how to look after your guests. A good person,’ the little boy says self-righteously, ‘would do what a guest asks.’ With the delicate dignity of a dowager in a drawing room, he uses the end of his filmy scarf to wipe a bubble of snot from his nose.
‘I am looking after you,’ Armand says, ‘Be quiet, or they’ll find you.’
‘Who?’
‘Monsters,’ Armand says.
‘What kind?’
Gabriel doesn’t remember how he was taken. Nor does Armand, of course. All Armand knows is that Mister Mike came out, and that something bad happened. He says, ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re after you. They’ll hurt you.’
Gabriel doesn’t believe Armand, and tells him so in a loud voice. Then he remembers where he is and starts to cry again.
Armand lets the little boy cry himself to sleep. In one part of his mind, he believes that after dark he’ll find some way of getting Gabriel out of the Magic Kingdom, then say he escaped. In another, he knows that it isn’t possible. He’ll go without the soma as long as he can, then face the music. But he has to try. Armand is lonely. He misses Hassan. He misses human company, and the little boy is still human.
Armand falls into a kind of stupor, jerks awake when he hears the sound of goblins squabbling somewhere outside. He creeps to the end of the ride and peeks out at the cold grey afternoon. Low clouds sag over decaying buildings and snag the jagged sharp peaks of Big Thunder. No sign of goblins, no sign of anything at all, but when Armand gets back to the little fairyland grotto the boy is gone.
With a sick weariness, Armand realizes who took the little boy, and knows that he must go back underground. An open hatchway behind the tattered scenery of the grotto leads into the tunnels that run everywhere under the Magic Kingdom. The tunnels are wide enough to drive a runabout through. Luminescent brackets of fungi, growing on bits of wood jammed into the pipes and cables, shed a cold blue glow. Rooms where employees once changed into their costumes are as quiet as tombs.
Armand goes as stealthily as he knows how, but the Folk soon find him. The first is a tracker. Its eyes are like little white stones under the shelf of its brow, but sight is the least important sense underground. Its snout is enlarged, and folded in a maze of wrinkles; little maggots live in the folds of blue skin. It comes straight for him, making a wet snuffling sound. Armand stands still and allows it to pat his face with its long cold fingers.
Two more of the Folk emerge from the gloom. They are naked, their slight bodies marked in swirling patterns of raised welts. One puts a finger in Armand’s mouth, and its nail painfully scrapes his swollen tongue. It sticks the same finger in its own mouth, and grins. It can taste his need.
Armand’s hands are taken. With one of the Folk on either side of him, he is led deeper into the maze. A warm moist wind blows in his face, rich in pheromones. There’s a tunnel where the bodies of worker dolls hang from racks, webbed with plastic tubes through which a clear pinkish goo slowly pulses. Their bellies are enormously distended by the controlled malignancies which secrete soma. Other worker dolls ceaselessly clean these living vats with darting tongues, permanently high on the traces of raw soma secreted in their sweat. The air is thick with its piercingly sweet scent.
The air grows warmer. The cracked seams of the tunnel are so crammed with fragments of rotting wood that the cold glow seems as bright as day. Armand knows where he is now
. The tunnel ends in the chamber at the heart of the nest.
When the Magic Kingdom was operational, it had its own emergency powerplant. It could have kept running while all of Paris was blacked out, its amniotronic robots moving through their routines, the elevators in the four hotels rising and falling, the billion lightbulbs and neon tubes glowing. The gas turbines were stripped out after the park went out of business, and when the Queen brought the Folk here, they made their nest where the turbines once lay.
Armand is led out on to a catwalk that runs across the middle of the flooded chamber. The ends of the struts which once supported four locomotive-sized turbines rise like paired fins out of the black water. Cables dangle from the ceiling like jungle vines. One of the Folk escorting Armand suddenly jumps to the rail of the catwalk, catches a cable with hands and feet and pushes off, hooting as it swings from cable to cable and disappears into a duct at the far side of the chamber.
Armand can taste the traces of processed soma in the moist air. His tongue tinglingly swells in anticipation, like a moist pillow cushioned between his teeth. Phosphenes scribble writhing lines across his sight, dispersing and reforming every time he blinks. He aches with need, has almost forgotten why he is here. His escort makes him climb down a ladder, pats at his face and turns him around.
The Twins grin at him.
‘You’ve been a silly boy—’
‘—a very bad silly boy.’
They are lounging on a pile of foam insulation stripped from coolant pipes. The little boy is lying at their feet, sleeping with his thumb in his mouth. Slabs of concrete shelve down into black water, and a dozen of the Folk lie tangled there, slowly moving over each other. One looks up at Armand, its face blind with rapture. Beyond, a bloated doll lounges in the shallows. Its laborious breathing whistles. Plastic tubing juts from crusted wounds in its belly. It is ripe with soma, and the clear viscous fluid dribbles from the tubes, streaking the swollen blue skin of the doll’s flanks. Armand’s mouth fills with saliva at the sight.
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