As I limped along the main road past the waterfront I heard shouts and breaking glass. Among the skyscrapers the top of Starview Tower stretched wide as though to haul the vacant sky lower still. Before I came in sight of the entrance to the tower I saw police directing traffic away from that stretch of the road. Perhaps I looked too purposeful, since the policeman diverting the traffic gave me a glance sharp enough to suggest he meant to redirect me too. Even when I was well past him I felt watched, although all the visible spectators were intent on developments at Starview Tower.
Beyond the tower a policeman was rerouting traffic at a junction, leaving several hundred yards of the wide road clear. At least a dozen police vehicles—cars and large vans—were parked near the tower. An audience had gathered on the pavement opposite, above which offices were full of watchers. Just now Denny Muldoon was entertaining them. “These are people,” I heard her shout. “They’re as much people as you are.”
The glass doors of Starview Tower had been shattered. Police, some of them in riot gear, were leading pickets and squatters to the vans. Most of those in custody appeared to be miming resignation, but there was the odd flurry of a struggle and a disorganised chant of “Homes not cells.” The pavement was strewn with placards, more of which were propped on flimsy shafts against the tower, and as I ventured closer I made out slogans: GIVE THEM A HOUSE, ACELERATE ACOMODATION FOR ALL, DONT LEAVE THEM FLAT WITH NO FLAT… I couldn’t locate Denny Muldoon until she gave another shout. “He started it. That’s him.”
She was at an open office window just above the entrance, and she was pointing at me. As any number of police and captives turned their heads in my direction I protested “This is nothing to do with me.”
My voice sounded smaller than hers, shrunken not just by the looming overcast but by a nervous suspicion that I’d told less than the truth. Did I have my call to Inspector Deacon in mind? I couldn’t see her anywhere, and in any case I had an inkling that I was somehow otherwise responsible. “You tried to get rid of our people,” Denny Muldoon was shouting. “You wanted us gone.”
“Only from up there. I don’t mean to deny anyone a home.”
I wished I could stop responding, since everything I called out made me feel more watched. Of course there were dozens if not hundreds of observers, but I had a sense of an altogether more unwelcome presence that had yet to be revealed. I was pathetically glad when two policemen wrestled Denny Muldoon away from the window, except that the sight infuriated many of her supporters. “Get your fucking hands off her, you cunts,” a woman yelled.
The possibility of violence brought me close to an undefined panic. My mouth grew dry and my breaths faltered while I waited for Denny Muldoon and her captors to appear. When they emerged from a lift, each policeman grasping one of her arms, she looked composed enough. As they stepped out of Starview Tower a glass shard splintered underfoot, but otherwise there was a silence that paralysed my breath. The police were escorting Denny Muldoon towards the vehicles when the woman who had shouted on her behalf wrenched herself free of the officer holding her arm and ran to grab a placard on a pole. Before anyone could intervene she set about bludgeoning Denny Muldoon’s captors, and I was terrified, however imprecisely, where this might lead. “Don’t,” I cried.
All her supporters who weren’t already in the vans tried to surge towards her as the police formed a cordon. A pair of riot officers disarmed the woman with the placard, and as they dragged her to a van I made for Denny Muldoon, hoping desperately that I could persuade her to forbid any further mayhem near Starview Tower. I was almost sure its shadow was expanding, not with any movement of the sun, which was hidden by the congealed sky. Was the unnatural gloom why Denny Muldoon’s hands looked wrong? She’d clenched her fists, but I could easily have thought her hands had atrophied, reverting to foetal lumps of flesh. I wasn’t close enough to address her except by shouting when a policeman barred my way. “If you aren’t involved here, sir, please move on.”
This sounded like more than one compacted threat, but it wasn’t why I recoiled. I had an outlandish impression that he was poised to tower over me—to turn scrawny as he sprouted taller, elongating and narrowing his head. “I’ve gone,” I blurted and backed away, striving to hold the sight of him unchanged. When he extended a hand, presumably to speed me onwards, I fancied that I glimpsed the fingers growing not just longer but of equal length, the thumb as well. I was afraid that I was somehow causing the transformation. If it was illusory, as I fervently hoped it was, this still meant I was the focus. I forced myself to turn away and fled.
I felt as if the shadow of the tower was keeping pace with me. When I glanced back a swollen blemish was taking shape on the sky above the roof. Surely it was just a mass of dark clouds and wholly unrelated to the tower. It might be a sign of an imminent storm, which was another reason to hurry home. Perhaps it explained why there were so few people or vehicles on the wide main road, though I supposed they could have been sent away by the policeman who was diverting traffic. I couldn’t recall having passed him on my return, and when I looked back there was no sign of him.
The alteration of the sky didn’t much resemble storm clouds, despite its slaty gloom. As it swelled above the tower I could have thought the patch of sky was taking on more substance. I was tempted to point it out to the very few pedestrians I encountered, but they were hastening faster than me, heads bent as if they were determined to ignore the spectacle. The faces looked so downcast that I had to fend off a impression that they were about to dangle lower, and I no longer wanted to speak.
The area around the Pier Head was entirely untypically deserted. The open space enclosed by buildings both old and aggressively new intensified my sense that the sky had been invaded. Hundreds of office windows reflected the expanding mass, which made the buildings look abandoned. Here and there a face peered out, so surreptitiously that I wondered what they were looking for. Across the river I could see where the Nobles’ house had been. The gap between the houses looked as dark as the activity overhead, though surely less substantial.
A few people stood in the long glass shelters of the bus station. Presumably they were watching for buses, but I felt inexplicably glad when they didn’t turn to me, even if some movement on their part might have been welcome; I was close to concluding they preferred not to be noticed. Nobody was waiting at my stop, and no buses had arrived by the time I grew acutely aware of the sky above the glass roof. I thought it was swelling downwards as it darkened, and when I stepped into the open, hoping to see my mistake, I couldn’t help observing that it had begun to writhe as if it contained some element that was about to grow livelier. The sight reminded me far too much of the vision of the devastated city I’d had as a child and in adulthood too. It left me feeling not just vulnerable but potentially responsible, as though my fears could let the future in. I was afraid that staying out beneath the sky might do so. In a sudden panic that gave me little chance to think, I retreated into the shelter, only to rediscover that the roof didn’t obscure the view of the sky. I dashed out of the bus station with my head down, no longer caring where I went so long as it provided a refuge.
A deserted shopping plaza brought me to a department store with its glass doors open wide, and I hurried in. Once I recovered from the sight of the unnaturally bloated sky—better still, put it out of my mind—I meant to call a taxi and wait in the entrance until it showed up. I was anxious to shut myself in at home, to leave Starview Tower behind along with the events it had provoked. I could only hope my house was sufficiently distant to free me of its influence—of the threat of invoking the future I’d foreseen. The ground floor of the shop was an extensive labyrinth of counters and displays. Merchandise surrounded me in no order I could grasp: perfumes, kitchen utensils, crockery, electrical equipment, televisions by the dozen… Some items I could scarcely make out, given the unhelpful dimness. I might have enquired why the place was so poorly lit if I’d seen anyone to ask, or were my eyes or my mind to bl
ame? I headed for the televisions, which ought to lend me some illumination while I waited to feel equal to venturing outside again. All of them were silenced, and every one was showing footage of a film about a war zone if not a city devastated by some other disaster. A subtitle was gliding off the screens, but I caught the single word WORLDWIDE. I was growing uneasier than I cared to define when I noticed a man, presumably a sales assistant, in the furthest aisle of screens. “Excuse me,” I called, “what’s happening there, do you know?”
He was turning towards me when I began to wish he would do nothing of the kind. Far from growing more prominent as it came, his profile appeared to be shrinking, the long sharp nose and outthrust chin dwindling by the instant. On the whole I was glad of the dimness, which prevented me to some extent from seeing his face. If only this had been the solitary reason that I couldn’t make it out—but as he confronted me across the screens displaying desolation I saw his face implode, sucked inwards like a rubber mask turned inside out. Before the features disappeared into the bulb of flesh perched on the neck he thrust out a hand, if very little of one. As the fingers swiftly atrophied I realised he was pointing the rudimentary lump at the end of his arm at me.
The sight was just a vision, I tried to tell myself: some kind of obscure omen that my question had called up. If the gesture was an answer, I didn’t want to understand. Surely the spectacle was at worst a symptom of the influence the Nobles still exerted over me, a depiction of the primal state they wished upon humanity for their own occult purposes. The virtually featureless shape in a suit began to grope its way along the far aisle, halting in confusion as a screen toppled to the floor and shaking its remnant of a head as though desperate to bring its face back to the surface. I couldn’t bear its blind approach, let alone the threat of being touched by those worse than embryonic hands, and I fled.
The nearest exit was on the opposite side of the store from the way I’d come in. As I limped between the screens and their catastrophic vistas, I saw that the gloom wasn’t simply dimness. It was crawling up the walls and across the floor like accelerated lichen, coating any lights that it hadn’t extinguished. I was nowhere near the exit when the walls began to crumble with an insidious whisper of pulverised concrete. I felt as if the future I’d envisioned was racing to engulf the present, and had a dreadful notion that I’d attracted it somehow. It made me desperate, however irrationally, to be in the open once more. I was terrified that the increasing darkness might leave me no less blind than the follower I heard blundering along an aisle behind me. Even the exit doors had grown so grimy that I couldn’t see through them. I had to wrench them apart, bruising my fingers, in order to struggle between them. I was so relieved to be outside, away from the pursuer in the dark, that for a moment I didn’t grasp what I was seeing, and then I gave a cry that used up all my breath.
Most of the city was gone. The jagged lower storeys of collapsed buildings as incomplete as tree-stumps huddled under an engorged sky. The streets and the spaces between buildings were strewn with blackened rubble. I was striving to convince myself all this was no more than a vision when the store I’d just left began to sag and groan. As I retreated the walls crumpled, falling away from me but filling my nostrils with brick dust. The screech of tortured metal, peals of glass, huge thumps of chunks of concrete deafened me. The spectacle seemed far too vivid for the vision I yearned to believe it was, and so did the rubble that caught at my feet as I staggered backwards. I was surrounded by desolation with no idea where I could go. It stretched out of sight on every side, and I had no reason to assume it ended at the horizon. As I stared about in utter desperation I caught sight of movement across the river.
The destruction of the city gave me a direct view of the site of the Nobles’ house. The gap was no longer all its neighbours framed. A crouching shape reared up as though my attention had brought it to life. At that distance it resembled a malformed spider, which scuttled down the slope to the promenade and leapt over the railings onto the beach. In a moment it was bounding with all its limbs across the river at a speed that suggested a determination to move too fast to sink.
I tried to stand my ground, even if only out of hopelessness. I didn’t know what the Nobles could do to me that they hadn’t already done, or to the world. The shape vanished before scrambling up the sea wall, and then it sprang onto the ravaged waterfront and rushed towards me as though to overwhelm its enemy if not to greet an old acquaintance. Its three faces swelled wide as they merged, and all its eyes crawled in and out of one another while its mouths combined to produce an enormous parody of a grin. I managed not to waver until it extended a spindly limb that might have been about to caress my head or penetrate my skull. Either prospect was more than I could stand, and I fled towards the only refuge I could see, the solitary intact building: Starview Tower.
No doubt I should have realised that the presence at my back was herding me towards the tower. Perhaps the mouths had separated, since a trio of voices was repeating the occult name I’d originally heard at the Trinity Church of the Spirit. They crowded into my brain, overlapping and transmuting the syllables into a form beyond definition, which drove out of my head the last of my ability to think. I could only concentrate on keeping my balance while I dodged through the rubble that was strewn across the desolate road all the way to Starview Tower.
The entrance was still doorless. As I limped towards it I glanced back. My pursuer was dancing on all its attenuated limbs and thrusting out its heads on a trinity of necks. The features had found their heads, but with an awful haphazardness that distributed the eyes unequally and dislocated the exultant mouths. When the heads snaked at me, weaving patterns in the air, I fled into the tower.
Was there any point in continuing to flee? No doubt the Nobles would follow wherever I went, to my death if not beyond. My dread outdistanced any thoughts of this land, indeed any thoughts at all, and I stumbled to the lifts. Perhaps only confusion led me to expect them to be functioning, but when I jabbed a button, the indicator light responded. As soon as a lift opened I lurched in. I was prodding the topmost button when the misshapen mass of flesh scampered across the lobby, waving its heads in glee while the mismatched sets of eyes bulged unequally wide to feast on my plight. I was glad that the doors shut out its approach, but I should have known nothing in their world would hinder the Nobles. The lift had scarcely begun its ascent when I heard a large object land on the cable and clamber upwards, making the lift quiver. I saw all my reflections hug themselves as if they were trying to shrink into invisibility, and then I heard the voices of my shepherds. “Go and see.”
If even worse was to be seen, I didn’t want to know. I poked frantically at the buttons for every floor I had yet to reach and the ones I’d passed, but the lift didn’t hesitate. It didn’t even halt at the highest floor, instead continuing to rise until it came to rest in an enclosure on the roof. I retreated from the doors as they crept open, and attempted to hide among my unhelpful reflections in a corner. Beyond the doors I saw only the unnaturally active sky, and I was hoping to see no worse when I heard an object squeeze against the wall behind me and extend its limbs on every side. It felt as if a flattened but hideously vital spider was about to close itself around me. However senseless my panic was, it drove me out onto the roof.
The high place showed me everything I’d feared. As far as I could see in all directions, the world was a ruin. No building stood more than a few floors high, and very few had roofs. Whatever event had demolished them appeared to have erased most of the vegetation. Here and there I saw a withered drooping clump of trees, and had a sense that they were composed of little more than ash or dust, clinging together to sketch a recollection of their outlines—that they might collapse if this dead world weren’t so breathlessly devoid of wind. The change that had begun above the tower was at least as wide as the horizon now. The entire sky had grown as lurid as the preamble to a storm, and was swelling like a mass of eggs about to hatch. I felt my skin start to cr
awl and twitch in sympathy, and I might have sought refuge in the lift if my monstrous guide hadn’t squeezed out of the concrete box to sprawl on the roof of the tower, bloating plump in instants and rearing up to gesture at me with its trinity of heads. “Ready,” said all the mouths in unison.
I didn’t know whether it was referring to itself or me, but the word sounded like an invitation to a dreadful game. The composite monstrosity was blocking my way to the lift, which in any case was no more than an illusion of escape. Just the same, my only way out was down, and perhaps I knew what that had to mean. I stumbled across the roof to the parapet, which was no higher than my waist. I would fall on some of the jagged rubble that was scattered all around the tower, which made the prospect seem more painful. Even if this was as craven as it was ridiculous—it only mattered that the fall should be fatal—did I really believe my bid to end the nightmare would be final? Perhaps the shape towering at my back was the triple-headed guardian of the afterlife, eager to conduct me into its version of the underworld. If I could never escape it, what reason did I have to hesitate? I was about to climb onto the parapet if my worn-out body would let me, though it might be more efficient to lean out too far, when I glimpsed movement at the edge of the world.
Had a remnant of the mundane survived after all? At the far edge of the bay lanky windmills were still active, though the sky hung so close to them that the motion of their vanes was apparent only as a disturbance within the gloomily luminous clouds. I was about to embrace this inconsequential shred of reassurance that the world hadn’t entirely changed when I saw my mistake. The clouds weren’t obscuring any vanes, and the activity above the rim of the bay belonged to none. It was just an aspect of the restlessness that had infected the whole of the sky, and the thin shafts buried in its substance weren’t windmills. I was struggling to cling to misperception—at any rate to believe that I was only suffering another vision—when the presence that had usurped the sky lifted itself on the shafts and the rest of Its myriad limbs that rose all around the horizon. At least they were in the distance, which might have left me some pathetic comfort if they hadn’t set about groping towards me from every side of the dead landscape.
The Way Of The Worm Page 29
