Part 10 (2/2)

They are taunting me.

That other city came back last night. I have avoided the study for two days, and I do not know what happened beyond that window. Let it come and go, I thought. Like tides changing outside a seaside house. No need for me to care.

* * * I woke in the night, at some unspecified dark hour. I lay for a long time in bed, trying to work out what had disturbed me.

Eventually I heard it. A faint hiss. A whispering.

A voice was coming through the wall. From the study.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I lay there numb and cold with my eyes open. It came irregularly, furtive and insistent.

I sat up and pulled the top cover around me like a cloak. Mute and fearful I shuffled from my room and stood outside the study door. The sound was louder here, sliding insidiously through the wood.

I knew that I would not sleep again. I set my jaw, reached out, and opened the door.

The room was bathed again in that ghastly moonlight. It made my books and shelves look ancient and insubstantial. Everything was motionless, basking with the stillness of a dead thing.

The moonlight extended from the old pane in a ca.n.a.l of dusty luminescence.

Through the rest of the window I saw scudding clouds, but it was a clear night in that other city.

And as I stood there on the threshold of that freezing room, I heard that voice again.

O I M ISTER.

It was a child's voice.

It was whispered, but it filled the room with ease. It resonated in weird dimensions.

I heard a thin t.i.ttering and a shus.h.i.+ng noise.

There was cold outside me and inside me.

O I M ISTER.

I heard it again. I inched forward into that terrible dark room. The desk was where I had left it.

There was nothing between me and the coldly s.h.i.+ning window.

There was another sound: a sharp tapping on the gla.s.s. I heard it again, and this time I saw a handful of little dark shapes appear from nowhere in the bottom of the old pane and rattle against it.

Someone, I realised, was throwing stones.

I crossed the floor in slow, tiny steps and picked up the chair, which lay where it had fallen. I mounted it and looked down as steeply as I could.

There was a quick, furtive motion in the shadows of the alley. Fear chilled me and blurred my eyes. I could see almost nothing in that great trench of darkness, but I made out the shapes of figures pus.h.i.+ng themselves quickly flat against the wall directly below me, so that I could not see them.

And one of them spoke again.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville O I M ISTER YOU OLD c.u.n.t. And there was a chorus of malignant giggles.

Another stone was thrown, much harder this time. I felt it through the gla.s.s, and stumbled back.

I kept my footing. I screamed at them in my fear.

”What d'you want? Leave me alone!” I shouted, and was greeted with raucous and stifled laughter.

One by one little shapes pulled themselves from the wall and emerged into my line of sight.

They were little more than shadows in that profound darkness. But I could see that they were children.

Unbelieving, I pulled myself down for a moment to stare through one of my other windows, but nothing had changed. I was fifty feet up, and the only wakeful thing this side of the horizon. I was staring out over little urban hillocks and clots of gra.s.s moving fitfully in the wind, and the endless maze of hunched houses all unlit and silent.

But up there in the other nightland that uncanny gang was hurling stones at my window, and hissing vicious abuse in spectral voices, and calling me old man, old man.

Quite suddenly I truly realised what was happening. For the first time that night I was fully aware that I was being taunted by phantoms, by delinquent ghosts. I seemed to wake, to feel the chill air and hear the rat-tat-tat of stones and the cruel words from a pack of children who couldnot be there. And I stepped off the chair as horror clotted in my gorge and I felt my legs nearly fold, and I walked as steady as I could to the light and turned it on, and when that did nothing to stem the flow of vitriol from the ghost city I slammed the door three times.

And when I turned back, thank G.o.d, thank G.o.d, it had all gone.

I do not know if the children fled in fear or if they are still there, waiting wherever the city has gone.

11 October I went back to the shop from where the window came.

As I foresaw, the woman knew nothing, remembered nothing, could tell me nothing. She had had the window for months, part of a lot from somewhere she did not recall.

She looked at me, concerned by my manner. She asked if there was something wrong. I could not stop a fleeting, hysterical laugh at that, an incredulous grin. It must have been the most horrible rictus.

I was possessed by some unclear, nebulous emotions that I cannot define. A sense of urgency and isolation. A deep feeling that the past was done, that it was the present that should concern Looking for Jake, By China Mieville me.

What is the nature of that place?

I think of it in so many ways.

The window remembers what it used to see. That is clear. I do not know where I look out or when, but it must be the older view from that cracked pane (more cracked now, I realise, after last night's little broadside).

So am I living in a window's memory? Is this nothing but a repeat of the pointless brutality directed at some old man like me, who first lived behind that sunburst window? Perhaps this window looks out onto some imbecilic, repet.i.tive Hades like a stuck record.

Or perhaps this time it is different. Perhaps those little roughnecks want to finish something off.

13 October The little tykes. Ragam.u.f.fins. I imagine fat boys smoking and thin-faced girls. Dead eyes. Little ruffians.

The little terrors.

The terrors.

They will not leave me. They croon at me and mock my shuffling old-man walk. They scribble obscenities on the wall opposite, and on the bricks of my house, my other house that I cannot see. They p.i.s.s and hurl stones.

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