Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  It was a harum-scarum tumble, half sprint, half fall. She tripped over steps and bounced off walls. Her balance was shot, her vision doubled, but somehow she managed to keep her feet under her. She was panting, and oily spit dribbled from the corner of her mouth.

  Concrete fingers burst from the wall and she slashed at them with her railing-spear, slicing them off at the knuckle. Hot liquid spattered onto her cheeks as she crashed past. Inside Beth’s hood, Oscar hissed and snapped in frustration; the stairwell was too cramped for him to fly.

  A head broke through the step beneath her and a mouth full of rubble-teeth snapped at her foot. She stamped as hard as she could on the bridge of the thing’s nose, but a pair of arms breached beside the head and tripped her legs. Acid rose up her throat as she flew headlong down the stairs. She ploughed into the next landing face-first, and the impact juddered her spine. Her face felt hot and puffy, flayed by the friction. She tried to rise, but she was muggy and confused; she couldn’t work out where up was. She twisted, looking out from under her own armpit as another hand burst through the floor just an inch from her, its fingers crooked like claws. Beth’s breath stalled. The tower-block crown on the inside of the thing’s grey wrist filled her whole world.

  ‘Beth!’

  The crown mark exploded from the inside out and dust and blood and fragments of bone sprayed everywhere. A flickering wire, snake-tongue fast, skimmed the water on Beth’s eyeball, then recoiled, lashed around her ankle and dragged her down the stairs.

  Three seconds and two flights later she hit the floor amidst a mess of running legs. Hands dragged her bodily to her feet and shoved her onwards.

  ‘Go!’ It was Pen’s voice, frantic, but somehow Beth couldn’t see her; she couldn’t see anything except a jumble of mossy stone shoulders and the backs of glass heads. Every joint and every muscle was screaming at her, but somehow she managed to shove her way to the front.

  She ran.

  The light ahead of her dimmed; the walls thronged with too many shadows. Dozens of soft explosions blotted out all other sound as the claylings crawled from the ceiling, the walls, the ground beneath their feet. Grey limbs choked the narrow space like spiderweb strands and they hacked and shoved their way through them. A Sodiumite girl next to Beth slowed slightly, trying to coordinate her feet in a dance, but as she took the second step, a grey hand seized her fibre-optic hair and swung her bodily at the wall. She flared a brief, brilliant, terrified white and then shattered into razor-edged shrapnel.

  Beth slashed and head-butted and spat. Wires lashed from behind her in angry tentacles, but missed as much as they hit. Beth glanced back and glimpsed Pen between the bodies, her scarred face haggard. Her dad was supporting her as she ran. A Masonry Man burst full-bodied from the wall ahead, eager hands poised to grab them, but Beth jumped and ploughed right into it, pinning it to the wall. She felt it convulse on her spear, its clay skin hot beside her cheek. Her dad and Pen blew past her, gasping.

  She dragged the railing free and tore after them.

  The stairwell was a heaving tunnel of grey skin. She felt the panic build in her chest. They were hopelessly outnumbered. She almost relaxed the muscles in the soles of her feet, to try one last time to summon claylings of her own to even the odds, but the memory of the heat from Oxford Street hit like a hammer and she stopped. These were Fever Streets now, and they’d kill her instantly.

  ‘Lady!’

  A familiar voice, a cry from behind her. An angel-winged statue was the only figure not in motion. He stood with his wings half furled, the stricken shape of his body utterly at odds with his serenely carved face. A dripping grey arm emerged from the wall and plunged seamlessly into Ezekiel’s chest.

  ‘La—’

  The tendons flexed beneath the grey skin like piano wires and Ezekiel’s voice choked off.

  Beth’s heart clenched, but she didn’t stop. To stop was to die.

  She choked on clayling dust and fragments of bone. She tried to close her ears and her nose to the sounds and the smells in that charnel trench, and she ran, down and down. An eternity of seconds passed until a sign with a green running man above it materialised like a miracle on her right.

  She barrelled through the exit shoulder-first, stumbled and fell, pushed herself up off the floor and staggered onwards. In the dim light of the sub-basement she could make out a handful of stone and bronze figures flickering as they threw themselves against the far wall. The impact of their bodies thudded through the space. Beth searched frantically, and relief surged through her as she caught sight of wire coiling in the air. She rounded a corner and there they were, Pen and her dad, almost hidden by the dust cloud the Pavement Priests were raising. Her dad had his hand clapped to his head and he was squinting at her like he couldn’t see properly. Something glistened on his neck.

  ‘Beth?’ he yelped. ‘Beth!’

  ‘Dad—’

  A sound like a chainsaw made her look back in time to see Gutterglass bursting through from the stairwell amidst a buzzing cloud of beetles. She’d sprouted six extra pairs of arms and was using them to shelter the two glass figures who ran, hunched over, beside her. Beth kept looking as the seconds stretched out long and lonely around her, but no matter how hard she stared at the doorway, no one else came through it.

  ‘My Lady. Gutterglass.’ Petris’ rough bark emerged from the cluster of labouring stoneskins. ‘A little help would be fantastic right now.’

  Beth turned and ran over to him, Glas on her heels. The Pavement Priests were attacking a section of wall between a blue car and a graffiti’d emergency phone. Their stone shoulders had succeeded in buckling the wall, hammering a six-foot crater, but there was no hole into the tube tunnels – no way out. Gutterglass swarmed and morphed into a giant garbage fist and began to punch into the wall again and again. Beth threw herself forward too, gouging with her spear. She looked to her left, and then to her right, disbelief making her nauseous. Eight Pavement Priests, two Lampfolk, Glas, Pen, her dad – was that all? Could that really be everyone?

  ‘Zeke,’ she gasped as she worked, but Petris didn’t reply; it was obvious in every inch of the heavyset stone monk that he already knew.

  The floor below them began to tremble. Beth seized the Sodiumite girl and the Blankleit boy by their glass shoulders and spun them around to face her. She blinked frantically at them, semaphoring with the lights in her eyes. They didn’t waste time nodding their understanding; they just took each other’s arms and began to dance, turning faster and faster, whirling each other with total abandon. They blazed as they orbited one another, bright as quasar stars.

  The tiny cable hairs on the back of Beth’s neck pricked up.

  As they finished the last steps of their dance and collapsed onto the floor, Beth could feel the charge they’d built up shudder through the ground beneath them. With a sound like a building being torn in half, a crack opened up in the concrete: a twelve-foot-wide trench that ran from wall to wall, bisecting the car park. On the side where Beth and the others stood, the tremor subsided.

  Spindly figures burst up from the ground on the far side, casting long shadows in the low light. Beth gazed, appalled by their numbers, as more and more emerged, rank upon rank of them. Oscar chittered and Beth could feel him straining to attack. Desperately, she tried to calm him – the ceiling was still too low, the front rank of claylings already too close. If the little Sewermander panicked and ignited in here, the explosion would swallow them all.

  Clayling figures toed the trench, but it seemed to baffle them. Then, to Beth’s utter horror, one of them just stepped over the edge.

  She glimpsed its grin an instant before it passed into shadow. For long seconds there was no sound, then she heard the smack of its impact echoing up from below. Another clayling jumped, then another, each one utterly silent. Beth could trace their progress by the muffled thuds as their falls broke, and by the way those thuds drew closer. For every grey figure that jumped, another clawed its way out of the earth on
the far side of the trench to replace him. Beth watched the concrete dripping off their tower-block-crown scars, then she gazed at the one on her own wrist. She thought of the face of the Goddess that sign belonged to and her heart shrank.

  Dear Thames – dear God … how powerful are You?

  Wire strands whined like flies through the air, slashing down clayling after clayling. They slipped and slid on the cement blood of their fellows, but there were always more. The two Lampfolk were on their knees beside Beth, exhausted, their filaments dull.

  Now when the Masonry Men jumped into the trench there was all but no pause until she heard them land. Beth stared as a grey hand crept up over the edge. She slashed straight through the fingers with her spear. Her heart pounded hard in her ears and she was shivering, though she was drenched in sweat. Out of the corner of her eye she saw more fingers curling over the lip of the trench. She saw them brace to pull their owners up and she tried to turn, to get there, but her feet went from under her and her spear clanged loud in her ears as she dropped it. The air was thick, the world slow. Petris was yelling instructions to his stoneskins, but Beth couldn’t make out the words. Pen was shouting. Her dad was calling to her. But she had no idea what anyone was saying. Gaunt silhouettes pulled themselves up over the edge.

  They were out of time.

  She tried to stand, but failed. Her muscles wouldn’t respond. As she shifted, something in her pocket clinked and numbly she fumbled for it. A glass flask sat in her palm.

  Childhood outlooks, proclivities and memories.

  She looked up, searching for Pen, but she couldn’t see anything but dark grey bodies. I’m so sorry, Pen – she forgot herself and tried to say it with her mouth, but no sound came out.

  Claw-like fingers reached for her in the half-light. She batted at them weakly, but they slapped her hand away. She reached for her spear, but it was too far away. She twisted onto her back. Hands clasped her ankles and her elbows and tugged at her clothes. Grey figures leaned over her, pushing her down, and grey figures below her pulled her in. The ground softened like mud under her back – she could feel it pooling in the folds of her clothes; feel the weight that was about to bear her under. The flask was cold in her hand. She didn’t want to die alone.

  She jerked and thrashed her head and managed to tilt it upwards. She bit the stopper, yanked it out and spat it away, then closed her eyes and tipped the flask to her lips. The glass rattled on her church-spire teeth. The liquid that flowed into her mouth was freezing. She swallowed and it burned all the way down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I can’t see.

  I can’t breathe.

  I can’t open my eyes.

  There’s a weight on my chest and hands on my throat.

  Where in Thames’ name is Naphtha?

  … there’s something …

  My dreamless sleep clings to me like river mud. I panic, pulling against it, desperately fighting to wake up. My spear is in my hand and I lash out on instinct, laying about myself with it, not caring what I hit.

  … there’s something else …

  The floor smells of concrete, but I can’t feel it. I reach out for it to sense its pulse, but I’m sealed off from it somehow. My spear-point connects with something solid and I can feel it grating along bone. The hands gripping me come loose and I lever myself to my feet, gasping.

  Why can’t I open my eyes? My eyelids won’t answer me, won’t respond to my brain. There’s something else – some … other influence … It’s holding them shut. My skin feels wrong, like my whole body’s too small and too heavy. The rhythm of my pulse is too complex …

  There’s something else in my head, I think.

  I reach for it, trying to remember, but it flees me like the memory of a dream.

  At last my eyes flicker open. I gape around me at carnage.

  There are Masonry Men everywhere, squirming and bleeding at my feet, swarming over flickering statues and glass-skinned bodies – I can see the glow is ebbing from their filaments. I stare but I can’t make sense of it …

  The Masonry Men are attacking us.

  I don’t understand. I can taste the panic in the back of my throat. I hold my hands in front of my face and they’re riddled with streets and scaled in rooftops; they’re washed in green light.

  In the stories, this was how my Mother’s hands looked.

  Screams jar the air and someone’s bellowing frantic instructions. My ears find a familiar sound in the cacophony: Petris’ voice.

  ‘My Lady!’ he’s calling. ‘Lady Bradley!’

  Beth? Her sullen face under messy hair fills my mind. Is she here? I cast around, but I can’t see her. I see the squirming, scrapping mass of clayling bodies on the floor and my heart clenches at the thought of her suffocating under them.

  Beth! I yell, in case she can hear me. Beth! Beth! – but no sound comes out. My lips are shaping the syllable; I can feel the air moving past my teeth, but no voice emerges.

  There’s something else in my head …

  I can feel it on the edge of my consciousness, a knot of memory. I touch it, and it unravels inside my mind.

  For an instant, I reel, nauseous and terrified – I have no sense of who or where I am – and then my awareness rushes into all the little crevices of memory like water flooding a cave and I remember—

  —I remember where and how and whose body this is.

  There’s something else in my head.

  No, someone.

  I can feel Beth in here with me. I can remember everything she remembers; I know everything she knows. I hear myself counting to three and never getting there. A surge of regretful longing fills me, but there’s no time. I can’t let myself think. Instead, I move on instinct, my legs feeling numb underneath me as I force them into motion. They’re sick – I’m sick. The effort of the first few steps makes me dizzy. This body is exhausted and it responds sluggishly, but it does still respond. Beth’s consciousness gives way to mine in a way that terrifies me, but I run. I can still run. There’s a concrete wall in front of me, a blue car to my left and a bashed-up phone to my right, and I remember …

  I remember why I have no voice.

  I seize the handset and almost yank the flex out of the box in my haste. Grey hands tug almost pleadingly at me.

  Please, I pray, please.

  A dial tone fills my ear. I hear clicks and buzzing static.

  Somewhere in the manifold streets of this body, a phone exchange clicks in response.

  I hear a crunch and a scream as a Pavement Priest falls somewhere to my left. From behind me, there’s a soft thud and a gust of decaying scent – Gutterglass? It must be.

  And then a polite voice comes out of the receiver. Hello? Hissing and static. Hello? Other voices join it, a buzzing chorus, getting louder and louder and closer and closer, rushing towards us at the speed of electricity. We’re coming do you hear us hold tight we’re coming—

  We love you.

  I feel them before I see them. A prickling sensation ripples over the hands that are holding the receiver, and then, spilling from the mouthpiece and down onto the floor, fizzing like static and glittering like fibreglass, run thousands and thousands of tiny spiders.

  We love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you we love you …

  They pour into the gaps between clayling bodies. The Masonry Men swat at them but there are far too many of them. I see Petris, an instant before his stone monk’s habit is obscured by thousands of arachnid bodies. The spiders are crawling over a stocky man – Beth’s dad? What’s he doing here? – and tracking through the blood that cakes his face. They crawl over Pen and her eye widens as it catc
hes mine; has some instinct told her that it’s not her best friend looking back her? There is motion behind me and in the corner of my eye I see Gutterglass. Minuscule spiders are spilling from her eggshells.

  It’s like a punch in the chest, remembering for the first time how she lied to me.

  The buzzing in the air rises to fever pitch and then the next instant it cuts out. I blink. The spiders have vanished, and so has everyone who was in contact with their needle-pointed feet.

  The Masonry Men turn towards me: they’ve been robbed of their quarry. I can hear their dry, rasping breath, and one of them snarls and runs at me, his teeth bared. Another wave of dizziness hits me. The green light ahead of me flickers and darkness creeps in at the edges of my vision. I can’t even lift my spear. The muscles in the clayling’s legs tense as he prepares to spring.

  We love you, a voice whispers in my ear, and then the world dissolves in static.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Beth, up here.’

  Beth climbed the fire escape onto the roof and there he was, sitting cross-legged on the slabs. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees so that shadows filled the arched hollows of his ribcage. He smiled at her and pushed his dusty fringe out of his eyes. Behind him, the rhino etched in shadows and black paint loomed out of the side of a warehouse, its blank eyes watchful.

  Beth crossed the roof to him. Her feet felt like they’d give way and pitch her over at any moment, and her hands were shaking as she reached out to take his face in them. He stilled her trembling fingers with his own. The concrete-and-rain smell of him rose up to her. She was almost crying.

  ‘Is it really you?’ she asked.

  His smile didn’t change. It was only from this angle, with his face tilted up at her, that she realised how sad he looked. He stood and kissed her fiercely, one hand on the small of her back, the wiry strength of him pulling her in.