Part 18 (2/2)

”Why don't they touch me?” he whispered. He hated his plaintive voice. ”None of them. No imago in London. And why do you?”

He looked back down at the chained creature below him, and let out a cry as he saw that one patchogue braver than the rest had crept closer, close enough to touch, and that it was reaching out now and grasping the handcuffs. Sholl stepped backward and levelled the shotgun, but he was too slow: the vampire had burst its comrade's chains and it ululated briefly as it hauled the bloodied captive onto its shoulders and rescued it, loping at ridiculous speed into the dark corridors.

Sholl fired into the shadows, and in the brief hot light he saw the pellets tear open several of the vampires, sending them screaming into one another, but he knew that he had missed his attacker and its rescuer. They had gone much quicker than he could follow, becoming invisible in their siblings and the dark.

The smell of sulphur was rank on him. After their first screech, even the wounded vampires were silent. The ranks closed, and all that had changed was that now the faces closest to his, staring at him, were splashed with their neighbours' blood.

In the darkness under the earth, Sholl stared at them, and waited for them to come at him, but still they did not.

It took Sholl less time to come up than it had to descend. Then he had walked in terror of where he was going-now he wanted pa.s.sionately to get out.

He took the stairs at a slow jog, stopping every few score feet and taking his breath. Every time, he would turn and look behind him, and even after what he had just seen and done, the ranks of silent faces following him still made his stomach pitch, the blood-messed vampires in their everyday clothes like an honour guard. They kept their distance precisely, wordlessly trailing him, making sure he was going.

They came with him as far as the station's entrance, gathering just inside the building. They stared at Sholl as he stumbled into the early evening, spreading himself wide as if even that Looking for Jake, By China Mieville waning light energised him. Behind him the patchogues touched each other nervously now and then, in absentminded social behaviour unlike anything human.

Sholl stood exhausted in the junction beyond the Tube entrance. The imagos did not follow him, and the vermin of mirrors had not returned. The crossroads was empty.

Tottering, Sholl turned back toward the station. He rubbed his face as if just waking, and gazed at the wide-eyed vampires that waited for him finally to go, hating him from the shadows. Sholl was elated. He had gone in and he had come out. He had gone down and come back up, and he had brought with him what he wanted, the knowledge. He knew where he had to go.

He raised his arms like a scarecrow and staggered a few steps back the way he had come, back toward the vampires, running at them as if he were trying to mock-scare a child. They bolted away too fast to see. Sholl rushed them and laughed when they hid, waited a few seconds until one or two heads began to reemerge, then repeated his wild charge, disappearing them again.

After two of these ridiculous games he was distracted by tiredness, and he crossed the junction toward the ruins of an estate agent's office, sat heavily in its shadow. For some seconds Sholl could hear nothing except his own breath. He huddled and tried to regain his strength. He could not think about what he had yet to do.

The snare of rapid-fire weapons woke him out of sudden sleep with a sucking gasp. He rose and turned. A jeep had burst from a side street and pulled up in front of the Tube, the woman behind the wheel keeping the engine running. Two of the Heath soldiers were tearing across the road toward him. There were three others behind them, standing poised together a little way in front of their vehicle before Hampstead Station, pouring fire into its entrance. Bullets burst tiles and bricks and tore the edges of the metal gratings ragged.

From inside came howls as vampires were wounded or perhaps killed. They emerged in ones and twos, riddled with bullet-holes and blood, moving in reptilian bursts, trying to close in on the men attacking them, held back only by the rate of fire. Their faces were immobile and their hands crooked into hard claws, even where they held in innards torn loose by the onslaught.

They circled the soldiers with obvious murderous intent, despite their injuries, and the men backed slowly toward Sholl, making sure that they did not reload simultaneously, that there were no moments without gunfire pus.h.i.+ng back the vampires. The soldiers were retreating in controlled panic. They could not hold off the vampires for long, and they knew what would happen when they failed.

Their two comrades ran low toward Sholl, keeping their profiles small, trained to avoid bullets that were not what would kill them here. They held out their arms and screamed at him to come. He fell into them, yelling wordlessly, buoyed by their presence, let them drag him, throw him across the back seat and leap in after him. The others came in then (everyone landing untidy across one another and fighting their way into seats), screaming go go go, and the jeep spasmed forward and roared.

Sholl was laughing. For many yards the vampires followed them, their pa.s.sage audible as they Looking for Jake, By China Mieville chittered, and things broke in their wake. But the driver was a virtuoso, and slowly the vampires were left behind. Sholl supposed himself to be in some kind of shock, but his euphoria did not feel at all pathological to him. The soldiers had come for him. They had come back and waited.

He lay back and listened to them, as the jeep hurtled north, toward the safety of the open ground. affirmative I f.u.c.king told you and did you see? did you? and couldn't go near, like they were scared .

Sholl could see the edges of trees. Sholl could feel the texture change under the tires. They were on earth, on gra.s.s, by water, out in the cool air, and the soldiers had come for him.

They would not touch you. You came into our nest, and my siblings would not touch you. I do not understand.

When they pulled me away from you I was dazed, until in a dread in the sightless black where they brought me to safety, laid gently on the sleepers by the cold rails, I remembered what I had told you. I felt shame, I feel shame, but none of my people has yet told me I was wrong.

What can you do? What can you do, you insane man that came here, that came down here, in our deeps? You can't touch the Fish of the Mirror. How could you harm it? Did I do wrong?

Why would they not touch you?

There I was in darkness, at the bottom of the world, with the others, we patchogues in our nest, until we heard you. We felt you. Descending. We felt you descending and we came to meet you, and I was eager to have you succ.u.mb to us. I will not tolerate your kind. I will not allow any of you to live, after what you did. And when you came-I was not surprised or impressed with what you must have thought your bravery, the dangerous ramblings of an animal with stunted instinct-I waited. But you were not touched.

You kept coming, and coming, into our unlit place. They would not touch you.

I was made to watch. I was not synchronised with this. I was like a toothless cog, turning in an engine but not gripping, not cohering. They would not touch you, and it affronted me. I asked and asked them why in little whispers, in our own language, in your language, and whichever sibling I asked responded with a faint wordless evasion.

They would not tell me why, because I should know why.

For a long time, I thought I could not touch you, as they could not. And then as you reached our bas.e.m.e.nt and began to swing inelegantly at us (what did you want? what were you trying to find?) I felt an energy come through me, like nothing so much as the energy that came to me when I saw the mirror burst and the fear of the thing that mocked me, and I knew that it was not that we could not touch you, but that my siblings would not, and that I would.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville They did not like it. They would not stop me but they did not like it, and they watched uneasily, but I was too angry not to, you coming here as if you were not about to die.

A slippery trick had you on me, blinding me and hurting this dreadful head that I hate, that traps me. I was not humiliated-I am not like you and your brief and contingent victory means nothing at all, less than nothing, means as little as air. I was not humiliated but I was afraid, and not of you (what would you do but just perhaps kill me, which would only be something new?) but of my siblings, and not of them but of their sudden new fact, the fact that they would not touch you.

They watched me touching you, one two, fingers closing on your throat, but they would not join me. They only waited, for you to go. It was an unpleasantness.

I could not pa.r.s.e the expression that you took when I told you what you wanted to know. I have remembered it many times. I have seen it, I have thought it through. I have reconstructed it, and made my siblings mimic it so that I can see it again. It is very unclear to me. I do not know what you are thinking. Your face, the expression you took seems to me to hold delight, but also -is that horror? Fear of course (there is always that whenever I see you feeling anything) but I am sure that is horror I see, too.

What will you do? I wonder what it is that you will do.

I still wish I knew why they would not touch you, and why I would.

We spent a very few minutes together, and I hated you for all of them, but I wish you were here again. I would try to find out why they will not touch you.

Sometimes I imagine trying to see what of you my siblings would touch.

If I opened you to them, would they touch you then? Is your skin the barrier? If I took that for them-because I will touch your skin-would they touch the red core of you? Would they touch your inner places, the fragile palpitating things that make you?

But you would not last that, and though I hate you, I truly want to know the limits. So I would keep you whole, and keep asking my question. One of my people will tell me, would tell me, some time. Why they will not touch.

They do not shrink from me. I have watched and listened for any sign, for any sign. When I could tell, when I saw how it was, how it was going, I watched for it, but they do not shrink from me.

Since you came here and I touched you and they would not, I have gone farther and farther away. I feel something closing. It is closing around me. I have been part of something, I thought, but one by one I feel the bridges that link me breaking. I have felt myself more and more, have been more and more in myself, of myself, stuck more than ever within my constraints of skin. My light was part of a constellation, I thought, and in slow turn I have seen Looking for Jake, By China Mieville the other stars go out until I am alone in my universe, and I am frightened.

They are still by me and with me, my siblings, my others, but a connection has gone, and I'm alone. I thought that it must be them. I watched to see them judge me and punish me for my ill-thought, arrogant declaration to you. They must have cut me out, I thought, but they did not.

They do not shrink from me: they are as they ever were, and in body I'm part of this company.

We do and speak to each other as we did.

It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?

Now then. Now then now then. What's all this, then? How long has this been going on?

Snips of your moron culture fill me. At inappropriate times. At all times, really. I resent my emotions-which are worthy of the word, which aren't the little bubbles of whim that you call feelings-I resent that my emotions remind me of the detritus from your entertainments or your mannered interactions.

I'm thinking that I have been alone. That I wasn't part of all this. They don't shrink from me but I don't think I can come back in. I still don't know how this happened. I can't think about it for very long. I am afraid of how alone I will be.

There is an escape. Down, to where the cold rails are. I walked in the same place as once did little grey mice so filthy they were like animate dust. They have been taken now by the fauna of mirrors. I am used to the darkness, it's like something physical. I smacked the walls and the rail with my stick, to make sure there was nothing-no stalled train, no bodies, no fallen bricks-in my way.

I walked north on the train lines. Very slowly, as if to leave the city.

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