Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  ‘I’ve … I’ve got him,’ Pen gasped.

  ‘Where is he?’ Almost palpable relief bled through the engines and speakers and car-horns of Beth’s voice.

  ‘Underground.’ The stone was flowing from right to left across his body. She could feel it tugging at the hairs on his skin. She fought to remember the orientation of his body before the clayling had dragged him under. ‘Heading east.’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Gutterglass murmured with satisfaction.

  Paul? Pen thought urgently, Paul, are you still with me? She could feel him there, concentrating hard on something, but she couldn’t tell what.

  At last he responded, Here.

  You okay? She felt absurd even asking the question.

  No.

  What’s wrong?

  Can’t breathe. Trying not to vomit – don’t think it would be good in this little space. Too much bloody Toblerone. A little weak humour bled into her sense of him and it filled her with relief. Picked a really good time to find out I’m claustrophobic, huh?

  Your timing’s impeccable, she agreed. She could feel the tide of nausea sloshing at the base of her own throat and she swallowed it down. His panic crawled like pins and needles up the inside of her skin.

  An idea struck her. I’m going to try something.

  She returned her attention to her own body, safe in the kitchen under Selfridges.

  Don’t leave me! Paul’s anguished cry almost buckled her knees.

  I’m not, she reassured him. I’m not, I promise. I’m still here. Stick with me. Concentrate on the feeling of me breathing – there: can you feel that?

  He flailed, not understanding what she meant – they hadn’t practised this. She could feel his mind thrashing around for something to hold and she reached out to him, guiding him gently to her sense of her own body, the sensation of air filling her lungs, of oxygen rushing through her. He clung to it greedily and she felt his panic and nausea subside. She knew he was feeling the ghost of her breath in his lungs and pretending it was his.

  Just stay with me. She reached across herself and squeezed her own hand. I’m here.

  It was all she could offer him: that she was with him in the dark.

  And then, quite suddenly and shockingly, the dark was gone. Light hammered painfully on his screwed-up eyelids. The pressure on his body slacked off and chilly air burst over him. His feet discovered solid ground under them and he managed a couple of steps before collapsing onto it. His cheek slammed into something with the texture of pavement, and Pen tasted metal as he spat blood.

  He curled into a foetal ball and lay there, his body tensed as though anticipating a kick. A roaring torrent filled his ears, like millions of gallons of rushing water. A smell as sour as death and as close as a blackout hood rushed down his throat and punched Pen in the gut.

  Okay, Paul. Pen swallowed against her rising fear. Open your eyes.

  He didn’t answer her.

  Paul? She opened herself up a little more to him, but all she got back was a mess of impressions and an airless, crushing dark – he was reliving the passage.

  It’s okay, she said, trying to soothe him. I’m there with you. You made it. But you have to open your eyes now.

  His refusal was like a slap, felt rather than heard: a primal wordless shriek: — can’t—

  Paul …

  He pulled his knees tighter into his chest. He was shaking terribly. The cold deepened as the sunlight was blocked from his skin: a figure was bending over him. The asthmatic rasp of a Masonry Man breathing was loud in his ear.

  Paul, please open your eyes.

  Thin fingers closed on his upper arm, but Paul stayed mute as he was hauled onto his feet, his eyes still tightly shut. His head shuddered back and forth in denial. He was too afraid to look.

  Blindfolded by Paul’s eyelids, Pen fought to listen. At first the roar of the water seemed to be all around her, but then she managed to get a fix on it: it was directly in front of Paul, a few dozen feet away. Gradually she discerned other sounds, footsteps crunching gravel, a clink like glass on stone. Everything echoed in the space around her in a way that put her in mind of a chasm: a vast, steep-sided space. A voice was speaking, the words muffled by the torrent. There was something familiar about it and she fought to make it out, but the water was too loud.

  Paul, please …

  The grip on Paul’s arm tightened. She felt him dragged sideways, felt his eyelids squeeze together. He must have been pulled into the lee of some object because the water sound was sharply deadened and now she could make out the voice.

  ‘… sssolution hasss become insssipid. The sssun hasss denatured the sssequenssing agent fassster than antissipated …’

  Paul! Pen all but shrieked his name inside her head. Just below Paul’s collar, the barbed worm bit deeper, and at last his eyelids flickered open.

  ‘… sssix, sssseven more at the mosst, then reblending will be required,’ Johnny Naphtha concluded. He stood twenty feet away, on the edge of a pool that had been sunk into a pit of ripped-up concrete. He was holding up a test tube in his oil-slicked fingers and peering into it with one oil-slicked eye. The four other members of the Chemical Synod flanked him with their inkblot symmetry. Crude oil smoothed every line of their immaculately fitted suits.

  Johnny Naphtha lowered the test tube and stared directly at Paul. There were rings of petroleum-rainbow where his irises ought to have been. His black-toothed grin was nightmarish. He held Paul’s gaze thoughtfully.

  Paul was paralysed and a dozen miles away, Pen was paralysed too, reliving his memory along with him:

  The wreckage of the Demolition Fields at St Paul’s on the day the Crane King fell. Scaffwolves snapping and baying; Pavement Priests fighting and dying, and Filius Viae’s concrete-coloured body lying broken in the rubble. The synod stalk calmly through the chaos, and just for a heartbeat, for a fleeting instant, the ever-smiling Johnny Naphtha catches Paul Bradley’s eye.

  ‘Come now, Naphtha,’ the oil-soaked man all but purred it to himself, ‘you ssssubssisst on your recollectionss.’

  Pen held her breath as Paul sucked air in frantically through his nose, his jaw clenched in a petrified rictus. Five pairs of petrol-coated eyes studied him. Then, as one, they shrugged, their shoulders rising a little too high around their heads, so that for a moment they resembled hunching crows.

  Paul’s abductor seemed to take this as a signal. It seized his collar and yanked him backwards. Paul’s feet went from under him and his heels trailed in the dust. He looked around him like a man coming out of a trance. The ruined hulks of buildings rose on all sides, casting long, broken shadows across a desolate space.

  Paul let his eyes travel up the length of the one tower that had been spared the destruction and now reared up behind the Chemical Synod and their pool. Even as Pen recognised Canada Tower, and even though she knew what lay at the apex, she still gasped when she saw the high-backed throne carved into the skyscraper’s pyramidal roof.

  A figure, human-sized and all-but-human-shaped, sat gripping the arms of that throne. The eyes that glimmered in the shadowed face were a shockingly familiar shade of green. The spokes of Her crown glittered like a city skyline at night. The Estuary-waters of Her skirts poured in an endless torrent down the sheer side of the tower that enthroned Her and crashed into the pool at its base.

  Above Her, a pair of Sewermanders circled, the flames of their flapping wings barely visible in the daylight.

  Paul was dragged further back and more of what was left of Canada Square came into view. It was a ravaged mess. Voices filtered across to him from missing windowpanes – human voices. People, Pen thought. Paul let his head loll back and she saw them through his eyes, peeking at him from behind twisted girders, their clothes and skin covered in dust. Great rents gaped in the fabric of the tower where they hunched, and Pen could see daylight coming through from the other side. None of these openings were guarded. Paul was dragged close by a doorway to one of the building
s and a sour, dead smell wafted out, strong enough to make Pen’s stomach flip over.

  Why aren’t you running? she wondered.

  Something on the floor caught the light: broken glass, presumably from the missing windows; it had been scattered in a glittering field in front of the doorway. Pen glimpsed a woman just inside. She wore a dusty pinstripe suit, but no shoes. Perhaps they were all barefoot inside, Pen thought, but that couldn’t be all that was keeping them there, could it? A little broken glass?

  Paul let his head sag across his neck as though in a gesture of defeat. The slow arc of his gaze showed Pen the entire site.

  What am I looking for, Parva? he thought to her. The thought was ragged but coherent and Pen felt a bolt of relief. He was back with her.

  I’m not sure. I’m hoping I’ll know it when we see it. It’s so empty, she marvelled. Where are all Her claylings? Her soldiers?

  Underground, Paul thought back to her. Look at this one. He tilted his head slowly back to look up at the gaunt, grey-skinned face of his captor. It was squinting and wincing at the sunlight. Doesn’t look too happy to be topside, does he?

  Paul! Pen’s startled thought had the force of a snap. There was something – something she’d seen as he’d tilted his head back. There, she directed, straight ahead and a little right.

  He looked where she told him. The angle of their path across the square had shifted their perspective on the main skyscraper and now she could see them: a long queue of people stretching back around the corner of Canada Tower and into the distance. The queue began just yards from the synod and their pool.

  And this lot in the queue were guarded: predatory grey figures stalked up and down the line like hyenas, looking for the weakest to pick off. Pen was trying to puzzle out the significance of this when the synod beckoned peremptorily and a Masonry Man grabbed the man who was first in line. He didn’t struggle as he was pulled towards the pool, and the woman behind him stepped forward to take his place with an eerie placidity. Pen wondered if the synod had brewed up something to make them docile.

  The man was walked towards the waiting grins of the synod, and when he reached the pool the Masonry Man escorting him put an arm around his shoulder, like they were old friends. It walked with him down the slope towards the water, its head crooked as though whispering into the man’s ear.

  When the man entered the pool, Pen felt herself tense, expecting him to explode or transform into a flock of bats or simply fall down dead, but he just waded in up to his armpits and stood there beside his clayling minder. Above them, the Sewermanders beat their wings and Mater Viae gazed down from Her throne.

  After a few seconds, the man was walked out of the other side of the pool. Pen thought he was a little paler, walking a little less steadily, but at this distance it was hard to be sure. He leaned on the Masonry Man for support as they approached the broken building on the square’s east side. When they reached the layer of broken glass, the clayling put an arm around his waist and lifted him bodily, its feet crunching the glass into even smaller bits, and disappeared with him inside the hulk. It emerged a few seconds later with the man’s shoes in its hands.

  The synod gestured to the woman who was next in the queue, and another Masonry Man stepped forward and seized her.

  It’s a production line, Pen thought, like a factory. We have to find out what’s in that pool. Hey, wait a—

  Pen lost her view as Paul twisted around, looking back over his shoulder. Finally she saw where he was being dragged to: the old supermarket on the south side of the square. Figures were visible through its windows. It was some sort of holding area.

  Pen felt the anxiety in Paul deepen, and the thoughts flickered through his head almost too fast to follow.

  A holding area. He had no idea what was in there, or how long he’d be in there with it. ‘Sssseven more,’ Johnny Naphtha had said. Seven more and they’d need to recess. For what – for reblending? How long might that take? I have to get out of here. Seven more. We have to find out what’s in that pool. What if Naphtha remembers me? Seven. I have to get out …

  Seven, and they’re on number three.

  He let his right hand drop and palmed a pebble as they passed it.

  Paul? Pen thought urgently. What are you doing?

  Trust me, he thought back. Then he twisted sharply and threw the stone right at the Masonry Man’s face.

  Pen heard a plink as the rock bounced harmlessly off the clayling’s stony skin, but Paul got what he wanted. The thing flinched, and for a fraction of a second its grip loosened. Paul erupted from its hands like a greyhound from a trap, huffing as he hauled his middle-aged bulk across the square.

  ‘Look where I’m going.’ He muttered it aloud, and Pen knew he wasn’t talking to her but to the clayling. ‘Don’t come after me, don’t follow; no need to come after me, just look.’

  Pen felt herself tense as she waited moment by moment for the concrete hand to slap down on Paul’s shoulder, but it never came. When Paul looked up, she saw why: he was heading straight for the front of the queue by the synod’s pool. The oil-slicked figures watched him curiously, then, perfectly synchronised, they each held up their right hand to forestall Paul’s captor.

  The thunder of the waterfall grew louder with every step.

  ‘Stephanie!’ Paul roared, wrapping the startled woman who headed the line-up in a bear-hug. ‘I was so worried about you!’ The woman, a black lady in a cream jacket looked at him like he was mad, which was wholly understandable since Paul had never clapped eyes on her in his life.

  ‘It’s my old friend Stephanie,’ he shouted at the Masonry Men guarding the queue. ‘In all the hullabaloo recently I’d completely lost track of her.’

  The claylings eyed him with total disinterest, but now Paul was standing at the head of the queue and none of them were moving to pull him away from it again. It wasn’t that they’d been taken in by his little cabaret act, Pen realised; just that they didn’t care. This was an assembly line, and he was as a good a component as anyone else.

  You wanted a closer look at the pool, he thought to her. Well, this is as close as we’re going to get.

  The synod’s symmetrical hands gestured him forward. A Masonry Man took him by the arm and walked him around the corner.

  Pen made a decision, Paul. I’m getting you out.

  Not until we get what we came for, he retorted.

  You cannot get into that water – we have no idea what it’ll do to you.

  Well, there’s one way to find out.

  Paul!

  The synod stood spread before him on the far side of the pool like a welcome committee. A gentle slope led down into the water and this close, Pen could see the oily sheen on the surface. Pipes and cables burst in ragged profusion from the broken earth at its edge and spilled down into the pool, drinking from it like thirsty roots.

  Pen shook herself. She tried to ease her attention away from Paul’s mind.

  Don’t you dare leave me, Pen.

  She could feel the fright and the determination crashing through him in alternating waves.

  I have to get to the wires ready.

  Wait! he ordered.

  She felt an arm come around Paul’s shoulder, heavy as concrete. A voice as dry as brick dust whispered in his ear, ‘Don’t cry out.’ The Masonry Man hissed it in a flat monotone, reciting a script it didn’t appear to understand. ‘It will hurt, but you’ll survive it. But if you scream I will break your neck.’

  Paul—

  Wait!

  And God help her, she waited.

  He was on the downslope now. There was something almost hungry in the way the water lapped towards him. He walked down to it with big, confident strides that Pen knew were utterly at odds with the terror in his heart. She could feel that fear like a spike in her own chest.

  The roar of the waterfall drowned out any sound he made as he broke the surface.

  Pen felt the cold seep in and close around his foot. His shoe grew sudden
ly heavy with liquid. Pen flinched, an instinctive hesitation, but Paul couldn’t pause; the weight of the Masonry Man behind his shoulders already bearing him forward.

  He splashed into the water and stood, immersed to his armpits, his arms floating slightly away from his body. He was stiff with cold and fright. Miles away, buried in Selfridges’ kitchen, Pen mimicked his pose. They waited for pain; for a searing burn, a bolt of sickness or a flash of hallucinatory glee. Pen felt their heartbeats fall into rhythm. Their lips shivered at the same frequency.

  Nothing happened.

  Pen furrowed her brow, puzzled but relieved. Paul? Are you okay?

  Yeah. I’m—

  The thought broke off.

  Paul?

  There was a moment’s total blankness in his mind: an instant where he wasn’t thinking anything at all.

  Pen’s breath stalled. Paul?

  She got no reply, heartbeats passed, and then—

  PARVA!

  Paul’s psychic shriek nearly split her head apart. Nauseous waves of fear rocked her and every muscle in her body clenched in spasm. She gritted her teeth as mindless panic flooded Paul’s mind and she reeled as she felt his sense of sudden, terrible loss. She fought to get a grip, to understand, but she couldn’t – she couldn’t tell what was wrong.

  What’s happening? She threw the question into the teeth of the gale coming out of his mind, but he didn’t answer; he just kept screaming her name, over and over again.

  PARVA! PARVA! PARVA!