City of Shadows

Chapter 66

2043, the ruins of Piccadilly Circus, London

The dog, a small, virtually hairless thing that might, once upon a time, have been mistaken for a Jack Russell, chased the rodent through a dark maze of creaking wooden tables and desks — furniture that for many a year had held true until a decade ago a portion of the building’s roof had finally caved in. Ten years of wet summers and freezing winters had done its work and damp was rotting the wood.

The dog scurried between chair legs and desk legs in a desperate, ravenous pursuit. The rat was a good-sized one and yet fast. Its small feet skittered across a long-forgotten floor covered in grit and plaster; moistened by the damp, it was almost soil and in several places clumps of weed and moss thrived.

Out of the maze of the long-dead office, the rat scampered up a slanted fallen roof timber, on to a chair and over a stick-dry bundle of bones in rags slumped across the grit-covered surface of a service counter. Its body and beady dark eyes reflected all but briefly in a mildew-spotted oval of magnified glass. Along the counter now, it found a dark corner behind a rusting box spewing corroded wires.

A moment later the dog scampered past the counter in hot pursuit, out into a large hall of round wooden benches and long tables. As with the counter, there were other bundles of white bones and tufts of hair wrapped up in decaying fibres of clothing to be seen: lying along the benches, slumped on the reading tables, spread out on the floor. Shards of sunlight speared down into this place through the collapsed domed roof of the building, and a cheerful, welcoming blue sky was visible beyond, framed by the broken fingers of iron spars and crumbling masonry.

The balding dog sensed it had lost its prey and wandered over to an opening that led out into the warmth of a pleasant summer’s afternoon. It emerged into the sunlight, blinking back the brightness of the sun, sat on its haunches and panted. It decided to rest and recover for a while before returning inside to sniff out another rodent. The pickings were too rich in this building to give up yet.

Its pink tongue darted out and slapped its muzzle. Skinny flanks heaved with the rapid in-out in-out in-out of hot breath being expelled and oxygen pulled in.

And dark beady eyes looked out impassively on a crowded vista that meant nothing to it. A place once upon a time known as Piccadilly Circus.

Tall grass and nettles grew waist-high here, a sea of gently swaying ochre-green giving way here and there to hummocky islands of rust-red vehicle roofs. Lost to sight, but certainly down there where the wild grass and the tall weeds spread their roots, was a rich compost of decaying clothing fibres and bleached bones still able to leak some goodness into the forming soil.

In the middle of this shifting grassland was a circular plinth topped by a still-recognizable human form with wings. Eros. Its bronze base was now a peppermint green, the statue itself — aluminium — was a marble-like pattern of rust spots and algal growth.

Everywhere a pleasing prairie sound. The gentle murmur of breeze haunting the skeletons of dead buildings. The grass whispering a soothing white noise. Crickets chirruping in chorus. Far away another dog barks to find its pack. And slowly the late-afternoon sun eased across a cloudless sky towards a craggy horizon of falling buildings. Eventually that same horizon would be shallow humps beneath a blanket of vegetation. Eventually that horizon would be flat grassland or a wood or something in between.

Peaceful.

But life goes on. Big bugs eat small bugs. Rats eat bugs. Dogs eat rats. A dozen crows circle overhead prepared to eat anything. Life continues despite a gradually decreasing background level of radiation that might still give concern to a radiologist.

Just over four decades ago, it wasn’t peaceful here. Just over four decades ago, there was a period of horror and panic. The sound of wailing sirens filled the air.

Screams.

Prayers.

This same blue sky was criss-crossed with several hair-thin lines of vapour: the approaching and departing vectors of missiles. A day in which the skies all over Earth looked largely the same. Vapour trails and mushroom clouds.

But that’s all long ago. Forgotten now. Silly, vain, stupid, violent humans are history and in a couple of hundred years the last visible remnants of their buildings will be too.

Peaceful, except for a tiny disturbance now. Minute — the size of a mere pinhead. If one knew precisely where to look, you would see nothing more than a spot of darkness floating six feet above the ground. Like an errant pixel on a computer display, grain on an old photograph, the tiniest freckle on porcelain-fair skin.

There for a second, gone the next.

15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, london

They stared at the low-resolution image on the computer screen for a long, silent minute before Liam finally spoke.

‘That’s Piccadilly Circus, is it?’

No answer. In his own Liam way he was being rhetorical. ‘Well now, that’s not looking very good, is it?’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Maddy. ‘Not good. Not good at all. I think it’s safe to say we don’t want this future.’

‘That means we have to make it right,’ said Sal. ‘Jack the Ripper has to kill this Kelly lady?’

‘And get away… never to be identified.’ Maddy nodded. ‘Kinda sucks, but yeah. That’s how it has to be.’