by Tom Pollock
‘At least you can recognise her. This isn’t as easy as it looks, you know. ’sides,’ Beth put a slight edge in her tone, ‘it’s what’s inside that counts.’
Fil’s grin vanished as he recognised the quote. He slumped against a wall. ‘What is it, Beth?‘ he asked plaintively. ‘What it is you’ve been wanting to say?’
Beth sat beside him, feeling the bricks graze her spine. She opened her mouth three times before concluding there was no tactful way to put this. ‘Look, it’s like this… You’re all right — I mean, I like you. I owe you.’ She hesitated. ‘And I trust you, too. But this mum — this Goddess of yours? Her, I’m not so sure about.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Mater Viae’s my blood; we’re the same.’
‘Are you?’ Beth asked. ‘Would you have made Pylon Spiders that had to prey on people? Would you have done that?’ She pointed at her painting of Petris. ‘Really? You would’ve buried them alive?’
‘They are guilty of the crimes they’re being punished for.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
He was silent.
‘There was a kid there, Filius!’
‘Yeah, well, he’d lived other lives before this one — so has Petris. Neither of them are pure as the rain-washed marble, know what I mean? They know what they’ve done, even if you don’t. Look.’ He twisted to face her, and his gaze was fierce. ‘Reach is a monster. Maybe my mother is too, but at least she kept him in check.’
Beth was about to protest, but he just stared the words right back down her throat.
‘What?’ he demanded, ‘what is it you think you can say to me? You’ve met Mater Viae’s priesthood one time and now you’re some kind of expert? You wanna see the alternative? ’cause Reach has a priestess too: the Wire Mistress, we call her, the Demolition Clergy.’ He snorted. ‘She’s a parasite: a barbed-wire fluke. She kidnaps whole families, for convenience, to use as hosts. She takes them one by one, the oldest first, always saving the ones with the most legs in ’em for later. And so the kids get to see their possessed mums and dads rip their own bodies to shreds.’ Anger tinted his cheeks basalt-black. ‘They’re kids too, Beth. This is war, and there are kids everywhere.’
The anger ran out of him and he slumped down. ‘“Do more than run.” That’s what you told me. This is me trying, all right? So if you trust me like you say you do, if you believe in me, then believe in Mater Viae, like I — like I have to, ’cause for me it’s not faith. It’s family.’
The car-horns and train-rattles and distant shouts that passed for silence outside in the city reigned for a moment.
Beth’s heart clenched, but she had to say it. ‘I do believe in her, Fil, but I don’t know if I like what I believe.’
Fil stared at the ground. She couldn’t tell if he was ashamed or angry. Then he stood up and seized his spear. ‘Come on.’
Beth stuffed her chalks into her backpack. ‘Where are we going now?’
He was already at the mouth of the alley, silhouetted in pizza-shop neon. ‘To show you what we’re up against.’
The street was empty. Black spaces gaped in the terraced houses where windows should have been. A hundred yards back, traffic spilled light and noise down the Woolwich Road, but neither penetrated as far as these pavements. Beth read the sign: Herringbone Way. It felt like a street in exile, like London had forgotten about it.
Fil stalked in front of her. He’d led her on a perilous route, tiptoeing like a night-time acrobat over brick viaducts. In his temper, he’d even crept right through the shadow of one of the cranes which frightened him so much.
He was acting up; it was obvious. She did it, for God’s sake, so she recognised it in him. He was like a little kid sneaking towards a haunted house, everything about him screaming, See? I’m not scared! I’m bloody not, and you can’t prove I am!
Of course, if he was posturing, then what was she doing, shinning awkwardly up rain-slicked drainpipes like the risk of shattering her bones into splinters hadn’t even occurred to her.
‘Oi!’ His voice drifted down from above her. ‘Up here.’ He was squatting in a glassless first-floor window frame, black against slightly paler black. A fast blink earlier, he’d been on the pavement.
‘Coming?’ he enquired. He gave his forelock a mock tug, took a step backwards and dropped out of sight.
Beth couldn’t help but smile. ‘Show off,’ she muttered.
Two grazed elbows and a lot of choice curses later, she hit the ground on the other side. ‘Damn it, Phyllis, why can’t you use a front door? Ow!’
She straightened slowly, taking it all in.
The terrace was a facade. The street-facing wall still stood, but it was a brick veil concealing the ugliness of the demolition site behind, where everything had been torn down.
Dominating the space was a corkscrew-drill, rising fifty feet into the air, and collapsed at the drill’s caterpillar-tracked base: rust-eaten and magnificent…
… was a crane.
An uncomfortable tension pricked under Beth’s ribs as she walked towards it. The crane exuded a kind of dormant menace, like an unexploded bomb. Fil sat on a slab on the far side of the waste ground, watching her carefully.
‘I don’t get it,’ Beth said. She laid a hand on the crane’s pitted metal. ‘These must have cost a fuck-load, but they look like they’ve been here for decades. Why didn’t the owner take them back?’
Fil’s voice echoed back off the derelict house-fronts. ‘The owner was in kind of a hurry to go. A crusading army whose one and only commandment is to rip your guts out will have that effect, know what I’m saying?’
‘Not even remotely.’
‘You’ll see,’ he promised her. His tone was oddly solemn. ‘Look, Beth: look around you and you’ll see.’
Dutifully Beth looked, but in the darkness the heaps and valleys of rubble were just so much crenellated shadow. She frowned and rummaged in her bag for her torch.
‘No!’ His shout froze her. His eyes were pale in the night. ‘We don’t bring light here, Beth. Not ever. Out of respect.’
Beth muttered imprecations under her breath but she dropped her torch back into the bag. She squatted and brushed the dirt off a jagged hunk of brickwork. She thought she could see some kind shape on it, but it was vague in the darkness, just a shadow of a shadow. She strained her eyes, trying to see it better, until, bit by bit, it became more defined.
What are-? she wondered. And then she realised what she was looking at. And her shocked cry pierced the night.
Staring vacantly out at her was a face, rippling the surface of the masonry like a brickwork fossil. Through busted mortar teeth it screamed silently back.
Beth recoiled and turned away, but it was too late: her eyes had adjusted and the bodies The bodies were everywhere.
They were withered like mummies, with stark ribs protruding from the surfaces of the broken brickwork. She could even see the outlines of blood vessels where limbs had been sheared away.
She cupped her hands over her mouth as if trying to catch the tiny noises of distress coming out of it. Her eye was drawn to one figure hunched over, hugging its knees. Eyes and mouth gaped wide between its legs. Its neck was utterly broken.
Beth reeled. She tripped and sprawled, her hands clutching dead things, and she yanked them away and curled them into fists. She shrank into a foetal ball and lay there amongst the brick corpses, gasping for breath.
And then he was there, hugging her, as she whispered, ‘ Who-? ’ She could barely speak. The dust of the rubble sat in her lungs like blood. ‘Who are they?’
‘Women in the Walls and Masonry Men,’ he said sadly. ‘They’re just people, Beth: people who made their homes here.’
Women in the Walls. Beth couldn’t help but imagine the huddled figure trying to flee, turning and turning and turning in panic as the wrecking balls crushed it and crushed it again, into an ever-smaller fragment of brick.
Slowly her body unclenched an
d she made herself look. A fat bore-hole blossomed from a boy’s chest, the ribs splintered around the edges. She looked at the drill and knew it was the murder weapon.
‘ What is this place? ’
When he answered, the shakiness in Fil’s voice told Beth that he’d been here many times, and that it never got any easier. ‘We call them the Demolition Fields. In the last war, this was the furthest Reach got from St Paul’s. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘It’s also the smallest. There are others, closer to where we started, but… I brought you here because it’s the easiest one to take.’
Beth turned on him, her eyes gritty in her skull. ‘ Why? ’
‘You needed to understand,’ he said sadly. ‘You needed to get it. He is murderous, Beth: he’s the city’s own greed, killing itself in its haste to grow. He’s reborn, generation after generation, and every time he comes back stronger and we get weaker, like a cancer. I needed you to realise that all those pretty little towers he builds out of glass and steel’ — he spread his arms over the mass grave — ‘it’s all built on that.’ His gaze was open, his voice pleading.
And then Beth understood why he kept coming back here: it reminded him of who he was. Despite his hunts and his streetlamp dances and his scrambling runs across the night-city, he knew this was what he’d have to face in the end.
And he needs your help to face it, Bradley, so get up off your arse.
Beth stood up unsteadily, shrugging off his attempts to help her. Horror made her giddy — she felt like a ghost, drifting over the broken dead. There was nowhere to step that was not on them. Something cowardly in her wanted them to recede into the rubble, to disappear; she wanted to close her eyes and forget she’d ever seen this. She shoved the impulse angrily aside and instead, forced herself look at the bodies curled around their children, because inadequate though it was, it was both the least, and all she could do.
‘How did you do it before?’ she demanded harshly. Her anger was mounting; there was a corrosive feeling in her gut. ‘How did you kill Reach before?’
He barked a short laugh. ‘ Kill him? Mostly we try and make sure he kills us a little slower.’
Beth glared at him and his forced humour fell away. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so once, my mother almost snuffed Reach for good: she burned him with a fire hotter than — well, than anything. The Great Fire, we called it.’
There was a moment while Beth took this in, then, ‘ The Great Fire?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Of London? That was your mother? That was-? Jesus Christ, that was a weapon?’
Fil’s answer was a sing-song nursery rhyme: ‘London’s burning, London’s burning; pour on water, pour on water. Fire, fire; fire, fire: wash the blood of the streets from Pudding Lane.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘September, sixteen sixty-six: the baker’s shop was her tinderbox, but the fuel was all hers. Yeah, Beth, it was a weapon — her greatest weapon; some’d say her greatest power, because sometimes it’s the power to destroy that keeps all the other powers safe.’
He raised his chin proudly. ‘The city burned for three days and nights, but not one hair on a human child was harmed. Remember that, next time you call my mother a monster.
‘Gutterglass said that for the longest time they thought Reach had gone, but deep underground, some germ of him must’ve remained.’
The anger was in Beth’s mouth now, making her want to spit it, but where did it come from? She didn’t know these people; she hadn’t even known there were people like this, so why was she trembling with an urge to avenge them?
The answer came to her fast, borne on a wave of fury: these were her streets, London was her place, and if it had a people, then they were her people. The city was alive, and she’d always known that inside.
She hadn’t run away from home. This was her home: her home, her people.
Her people, her fight.
She looked at Fil. His face reflected the same anger back to her.
‘We should go,’ Beth said quietly. ‘We’ve got an army to rally.’
He looked at her gratefully, then the gratitude on his face gave way to an expression Beth recognised, though it looked out of place on his cocky face. It was the same look Pen used to have before she followed Beth on some stupid stunt: an appeal for courage. Please, it said, make me brave enough for this.
Then he was off, scrambling hand over hand up the length of the dead drill until he was standing precariously on the hydraulics at its summit: a skinny shadow swaying against the clouds.
‘Reach!’ he yelled, wild and inarticulate. He shouted his defiance across the sleeping city, to the cranes on the dark horizon, repeating, over and over, ‘Reach! Reach! ’
At last he climbed down and staggered over to her, his eyes wide, and she folded him up in her arms and held him tight until he stopped shaking.
CHAPTER 16
‘So, where to now, guv?’ Beth perched on a bollard and ripped open the greaseproof paper on her bacon sandwich. The smell of bacon and hot melting butter drifted into the chilly air.
A few hours after leaving the Demolition Fields Beth found that she could no longer remember exactly how it had felt to be there. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything much at all: it was as though her emotions had blown a fuse and shut down, leaving just a basic awareness of her own body, the cold, the pressure of urine in her bladder, the ache of tired muscles…
Beth took a big bite. Suddenly she was ravenously hungry.
‘You want a bit of this?’ she mumbled around the mouthful of bread and bacon.
Fil declined with a smirk. ‘Don’t need it.’
Beth swallowed. ‘Oh yeah, your weird synthesis thing. Don’t you ever just eat? You know, ’cause it tastes good?’
‘Sure, a good bit of tarmac-cake or a few petrolberries, when I get time. Nothing like that. ’ He eyed Beth’s sandwich with a mix of curiosity and intense distrust. ‘Speakin’ of which, what time is it?’ he asked.
She glanced at her G-Shock. ‘Six twenty-three in the a.m.’
‘Then we can relax; the people we’re going to see won’t be up for a bit.’
Darkness still covered the street behind Waterloo Station where they sat, but besuited office workers bustled to and fro. The news kiosks were manned and the headlines fresh. Cars and buses hissed over the asphalt.
‘What I don’t get,’ Beth said, ‘is why you think we’re going to have trouble getting people on our side. I mean, Reach is blatantly dangerous, so why aren’t your mum’s worshippers queuing round the block to have him got rid of?’
He looked at her like she was a prize-winning idiot. ‘You’re kidding, right? Because he’s blatantly dangerous. We’ve never had do anything like this before. Mater Viae always gathered the army, and she always led it herself, before Reach grew too strong to kill.’ He looked grim. ‘My mother’s left us right in the lurch. With her around, people got scared, and so they acted. Without her, they get scared and pretend it’s not their problem. They draw boundaries: “Let Reach stay in the Square Mile,” they say, “and we’ll live and let live.” And when he breaks those borders, they give him new ones: north of the river, east of the park, stuff like that.’
He picked dirt from under his fingernails and flicked it absentmindedly at a nearby pigeon. ‘And the longer they leave it, the stronger Reach gets, and the stronger he gets, the scareder they get, and so they leave it even longer. It’s a vicious cycle: stupid, but that’s how it works.’
Well, this is a carnival of bloody optimism, Beth thought. ‘But those people,’ she insisted, ‘those people, from last night — the men and Women in the Walls. Don’t they have friends, families?’
‘Sure they do,’ Fil sighed, ‘but for every man or woman demanding vengeance for their murdered brother, there’re three more who’ll curl up in a corner and beg you not to hurt them too.’
He squirmed under Beth’s appalled gaze. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which way I’d go myself yet. And despite what you’re thinking, I bet you do
n’t either.’
Beth wondered what had happened to the brash kid who’d declared: I’m the most dangerous thing on the street. He was sloughing off layers of bravado at a rate that frightened her.
When sunlight began to spear from behind the horizon’s taller buildings, he stretched and slung his spear over his shoulder. ‘Come on, finish your munching. We need to get moving.’
They threaded through the early morning crowds. A few people looked askance at the pavement-skinned teenager, shirtless in the cold, but only a few — after all, if you didn’t inspect him too closely there were dozens of weirder performers working London’s streets.
They ducked off the main drag and hopped a fence with a diamond-shaped yellow sign warning: High Voltage: Danger of Death. Fil climbed up a fire escape onto a roof and walked towards a pair of towering pipes that were belching out air-con vapour. He leaned on the nearest pipe and paused, pursing his lips in thought. ‘Okay, Beth,’ he said, ‘the people we’re about to meet are uppity, arrogant and excruciatingly bloody irritating, i.e. they’re nobility. I’m warning you in advance, because we have to be polite to ’em, and because-’
‘Because I have a big mouth?’
He nodded emphatically.
‘Okay,’ Beth said, ‘but I don’t know what you’re worried about. I can control myself, you know. Just now, when you said “arrogant, uppity and irritating”, I didn’t say a word about pots, kettles and being bla-’
He gave her a playful shove. ‘ Walk. And take off your watch, I don’t want the glass reflecting somebody’s eyeball and causing a diplomatic incident.’
Beth considered asking him what on earth he was talking about, but she was rapidly giving that particular question up as a waste of breath. She slipped the G-shock into her pocket.
When they rounded the pipes they were confronted by a rectangular shape draped in black fabric, about the height and width of a shipping container. He yanked away the cloth to reveal a frameless slab of mirrored glass.
Beth studied her own reflection in the mirror. She’d lost weight in the days she’d been on the streets. Her cheekbones jutted out now, and her skin was dirty. She looked rough, sleep-deprived.
