Part 17 (2/2)

Before the station, the crossroads was full of moving things. Through the shadows Sholl saw that the station itself thronged with them, and they spilt into the open air, foraging in the ruins.

The mindless animals of the war, the residue of the fighting. Like rats in trenches, they were overrunning. For centuries they had been sp.a.w.ned in thousands, little resonances of reflection, shed by pa.s.sion in makeup compacts, dresser mirror triptychs, glazed gym walls. Imago spoor, they had lived fleetingly and been destroyed within moments, an endless pell-mell life cycle.

But when reflection became a door they were set free; they could live. They could breed. They Looking for Jake, By China Mieville were the detritus of reflection. Vanity's castoffs, the snippets of human forms thrown up and ignored in the echoes between mirrors.

Human hands clutched and unclutched along the gutter. They picked their way through the mud, leaving tracks of fingerprints. Up the hill, Sholl saw a mouldering human corpse. Several of the hands picked their way across it with fingertip grace, and settled on its flesh, lowering themselves and gnawing at it with their nails. They were grazing.

There were little clouds of colour-smeared lips like plump b.u.t.terflies, that ebbed through the air, each motion with the exaggerated kiss-pout of someone applying lipstick. Eyes, human eyes, spasmed into existence and out again, moving through folded s.p.a.ce, winking stupidly as they went.

There were teeth in big horse-grins, that Sholl half saw. With a peristaltic wave a biceps clenched and unclenched through the centre of the junction. Like aggregates of spiderwebs, the imagos of hair drooled from windowsills, billowing, against the wind. There were doves overhead, flapping their fingers energetically.

These were mindless scavengers, that had come in the aftermath of the fighting, and their numbers had increased. They spilt out of the mirrors and did not die. Ignored images and afterimages, gone feral.

Men and women walked among them, unperturbed by the stranger presences. Their clothes seemed extraordinary-suits, jeans and s.h.i.+rts, drab everyday wear, exactly as it would have been before the war. They were vampires, imagos in human form. They did not speak to one another. Sholl pressed himself against the wall beside him, watched from behind the brick.

Each vampire concentrated, moving in its own shuffling path, tracing repeating patterns with autistic precision, ignoring its siblings completely. The vampires muttered to themselves.

The men and women moved in gradually changing patterns, like clockwork winding down, and the vermin, the refracted glimmerings of people, fluttered and crept by them. Sholl watched.

Way overhead, just below cloud, a sudden point of focus came into clarity and was gone. An imago, a full imago, in its own barely perceivable form. Miles to the south, Sholl heard a huge ripping sound.

Sholl was very afraid. He had never yet deliberately faced the imagos. And though the vampires were the most comprehensible, and the weakest of them, they were still stronger and more savage than any human. And they hunted. When vampires moved into an area, the surviving humans moved out or died.

He sighed, his breath quivering. He felt in his pockets for his torch and ammunition, his cuffs; then he hefted his shotgun and stepped into view.

There was a tiny increase in the sound of the vampires. They did not stop their motion, but simultaneously, they looked sidelong at Sholl, watching him with what looked like unease.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville He levelled his gun at one of them, a vampire in a clean baker's smock. It winced, and tried to shrink away, but continued in its monotonous circuit. Sholl pulled the trigger.

The gun seemed to sound for a long time. The baker-thing was lifted, was hurled high in an arc of blood. It squealed very high like a pig. All the vampires made the same noise.

When the baker landed, it drummed its feet and hands on the pavement like a child having a tantrum, spattering blood around it. There was a cave in its chest from the shot. Its shoes scrabbled on concrete. It shook its head hyperactively, keening through gritted teeth.

Sholl reloaded, watching the vampires. They were grimacing, emitting a grating sound. They moved back and forward on their heels, staring at him. Their faces were screwed up with concentration. Sholl stepped forward.

His heart was striking hard. He felt very cold. His fear was so strong it was as if he could not breathe.

As he approached the closest of the vampires, he forced himself not to slow. It backed away. It was a woman in a frumpy, blousy dress. It dropped to all fours and moved from him with animal motion.

Sholl leaped forward and made a grab for the woman's arm. It screeched and jumped, floral fabric billowing. It landed on a windowsill, six or seven feet up, and crouched, hissing.

Quick with adrenaline, Sholl spun. Every second, every split second, he expected a vampire blow to take him down. He twisted, to see what was behind him, and behind him, and behind him, holding his breath with fear. But the vampires were paralysed, were staring at him with an unreadable expression.

Shaking, Sholl went forward again, for the next nearest vampire, reaching out to grasp it. The wildlife, the shards of human forms, scattered, fleeing the crossroads too fast to see. And the vampires, now, bolted. Loping four-limbed at a sped-up pace, scrambling up strange angles of wall, snapping back into the darkness of Hampstead Underground Station, howling and growling, so that in a fraction of a second, only Sholl and the wounded baker-vampire were in the road.

The baker snapped its limbs and was suddenly reeling on its feet. Sholl came for it and it wailed in what sounded like terror and ran, backward, much faster than any man could move, facing Sholl all the time. Matter jostled loose in gouts from its terrible wound, and it left blood and shredded viscera on the road.

Sholl watched it disappear. He was elated. He turned, pirouetting alone in the middle of the road. Sounds of triumph and survival came out of him, delighted sounds he could not control.

They had not touched him.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville He fired his gun into the air and whooped. London swallowed the noise, denied him an echo.

Sholl still had to do what he had come here to do. He had to get what he needed. He stared into the entrance to the station, into the eyes of the vampires still watching him, just visible as shadows. Sholl's fear came back to him. He swallowed. What does it matter? he thought. If thevery worst happens, what does it truly matter?

He stepped forward, toward the tiled steps, toward the darkness, where many of the vampires and the fauna of mirrors had fled.

As he entered the station there was a collective whine from the things within. The hands scuffed through the dust and hid in the darkness of holes and corners, the eyes and lips winked and kissed out of sight.

The vampires howled and swung, simian, into the lift-shafts and away to the caverns in the station's end, toward the stairs. The chamber was ghosted with echoes. The cables still holding the ruined lifts sounded like huge instruments as the vampires grabbed them and clambered out of reach and sight.

Sholl walked into the stillness. He stepped over the skeleton of a London Underground employee, still coated in the rags of its blue uniform. Sholl stood by the electronic gates, and listened.

He needed to move fast. He could still feel his own fear. It was undiminished, as if his sudden bravado did not replace it but overlaid it.

Like a fare evader, Sholl vaulted the gates and stepped to the back of the dark station. It was very cool. He stood in front of the jimmied lift doors, listening to drips, strange sounds of steel.

There was rubbish on the floor, a scattering of discarded tickets. Sholl headed toward the back of the station, toward the staircase.

The spot from his torch foraged like an animal, like a guide dog picking out a path for him between the broken metal and obscure imago detritus-unidentifiable rotting things, organic constructs spun out of nothing. The station floor was sticky. Sholl made the only sound, walking into the darkest part of the corridor, descending a little preliminary flight of ten steps, in absolute blackness now, approaching the shaft and the black iron of the spiral stairs, the scuffed paint of its handrail curling close to the cylindrical wall, clockwise down and out of sight.

A pillar of pipe- and rust-scarred metal threaded through the centre of the coiling stairway. Sholl stood on the top step, and angled his torch down through the thin gap between the right-hand rail and the pillar. The light met more stairs, and he moved it till it pushed past the handrail directly below him, and then again, and then it died, three coils of the stairs down, long before it touched the bottom. Nothing moved in the beam. Nothing sounded.

I saw them come this way, thought Sholl.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville He set his foot on the second step down. It made a little noise. He waited, and then continued.

Sholl descended slowly. He brought both feet together on each step, and paused before moving on. He listened to his breath come fast. He was suspended. The steps rose rapidly behind him into darkness. He shone his torch back the way he had come, fearful that he was being followed.

He became uneasy about the dark pillar beside him. He imagined that something was hiding behind it, a few steps below him, moving at his pace, keeping just out of his sight. Sholl moved left, until he was touching the shaft's curving wall, straining himself to see as far down ahead as possible.

He went like that, skirting the wall, lower and lower toward the cold train tunnels, quite cosseted by darkness. His pace lulled him, the slow spiralling descent became hypnotic. There were tiny sounds at the edges of things, as the feral imagos, the little ripped images of hands and eyes and genitals, crawled away from him. Perhaps they were other things, too: the last of the rats or mice, hiding from the predatory reflections.

The light that bobbed from step to step suddenly touched something that moved. The shock of it made Sholl cry out, and flail with the torch as if it were a sword, until its light picked out a face, a line of faces, a ma.s.s of them, lips thinned and resolute, eyes distended, and fixed on him.

Soundlessly, the vampires clogged the stairs. He could not count them-twenty at least, in their incongruous clothes, standing still, waiting for him. They watched him as he moved the torch from one face to the other. The constriction of each pair of pupils, in turn, was their only motion.

Sholl breathed fast with his heartbeat. He waited for the vampires to attack him, but they did not come closer. Nothing moved in the shaft for a long time. Finally, Sholl descended one step.

The vampires responded in perfect time, like a macabre dance troupe, s.h.i.+fting backward together, staying out of his reach. He came forward again, and they moved back in time with him, and they began to make a sound, a faint humming, an anxious and unpleasant noise.

Anger rose in Sholl. He pointed his gun into the ma.s.s, but he did not shoot. He approached them more quickly, and they increased their own pace, their soundtrack becoming louder.

With a sudden lurch, Sholl almost threw himself down the stairs at the human figures, letting his shotgun swing back on its sling. He s.n.a.t.c.hed out so quickly that his hand closed around the lapel of the nearest vampire. The creature screeched and moved away, yanking free of Sholl's grasp and scuttling past him up the stairs. Sholl's momentum took him on, and he had to fight to keep his feet, hurtling down, the torchlight swinging from wall to wall, showing the coldly set features of the vampires. Sholl s.n.a.t.c.hed as he ran, and felt cloth and even flesh and bone in his grasp, but again and again it was pulled free.

He swung his shotgun. It clattered against the wall.

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