King Rat

Chapter Twenty

Fabian shook his head, scrunched up his dreadlocks into vicious little bunches. His head ached terribly. He lay on his bed and pulled faces at the mirror just visible on his desk.

Lying some way off was his ‘work in progress’, as his tutor insisted on calling it. The left two-thirds of the huge canvas were a garish panoply of metallic spray-paints and bright, flat acrylic; the right third was covered in ghost letters, faint pencil lines and charcoal. He had lost motivation for the project, though he still felt a certain pride in it as he stared at it again.

It was an illuminated manuscript for the 1990s, the letters a careful synthesis of mediaeval calligraphy and graffiti lettering. The whole screen, six feet by eight, consisted of just three lines: Sometimes I want to lose myself in faith and Jungle is the only thing I can turn to, because in Drum an’ Bass I know my place…

He had thought of a phrase which started with an ‘S’ because it was such a pleasing letter to illuminate.

It was very large, contained in a box, and surrounded by ganja leaves and sound-system speakers and modern serfs, rudebwoys and gyals, an intricate parody, the expressionless zombies of monastic art executed by Keith Haring or one of the New York Subway Artists. The rest of the writing was mostly dark, but not matt-black, shot through with neon strips and encased in gaudy integuments. In the corner below the writing lurked the police, like devils: The Man. But these days the sloganeering had to be ironic. Fabian knew the rules and couldn’t be bothered to disobey them, so the devils coming up from the pit were ridiculous, the worst nightmares of St Anthony and Sweet Sweetback combined.

And up in the top right, though not yet drawn, would be the dancers, the worshippers who’ve found their way out of the slough of urban despond, a drab maze of greys in the centre of the piece, to Drum and Bass heaven. The dancing was fierce, but he had been careful to make these faces more than ever like those in the old pictures he was mimicking: placid, stupid, expressionless. Because individualism, he remembered explaining earnestly to his lecturer, had no more place in a Jungle club than in a thirteenth-century church. That was why he loved it and why it frustrated him and sometimes frightened him. That was why the ambiguous text as well.

He was always on at Natasha to cut a really political track, and she demurred, claiming not to be interested, which irritated him. So until someone would do it, he would keep on with his loving chiding. Hence the Middle Ages, he had explained. The necessary displays of opulence and style at the clubs were as grandiose and vapid as any display of courtly etiquette, and the awe in which DJs were held was positively feudal.

At first, his tutor had hummed and hawed, and sounded unconvinced at the project, until Fabian had hinted that he did not appreciate the importance of Jungle in modern pop culture, and that had given it the seal of approval. All the lecturers at his art college would rather have died than admit that there were any gaps in their knowledge of youth.

But he was unable to concentrate on ‘Jungle Liturgy’, even though he was quite proud of it.

He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circumstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.

And now it seemed as if he might be losings Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She was excited about the music she was making with Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.

It was Saul’s departure, he thought, which had precipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian’s friendships together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.

He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her fucking sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.

And Saul — Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul’s life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge — vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian’s mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and God-knew-what — and that he had been routinely eliminated.

Often that seemed the likeliest explanation, the only thing that could explain the deaths of the police and Saul’s escape, but Fabian could not believe he would have known nothing about his friend’s involvement. It seemed unbelievable. And then he was forced to consider the possibility that Saul had killed those men — and his father, which he did not believe, definitely — but then… what was happening?

Fabian stared around him at his room, a tip of paint and record covers and clothes and CDs and posters and cups and wrappers and dirt and paper and books and pads and pens and canvas and bits of glass for sculptures and plates and postcards and peeling wallpaper. He was lonely and pissed off.

The view was so familiar Natasha did not see it. It was a tabula rasa to her, a white space on which she could impose her tunes. She had gazed out at it for so many hours and days, especially since Saul disappeared and Pete appeared, that she had achieved a Zen-like transcendence of it. She transcribed its features into her mind as nothingness.

First the net curtains, a tawdry throwback to the previous occupant that she had never bothered to get rid of. They moved slightly, a constant whiteness with flickering edges. Through this veil the trees, just at the level where the boughs thrust outward from the body. Stripped by winter, black branches clutching. So a film of curtain, then the twisted knots of wood, dark and intricate, a random lattice of twigs and thick limbs. Beyond that a street lamp.

After dark when it had rained, she would sit at her window and poke her head out from under the net curtains and stare at that lamp through the tree outside. Its rays would pass through the thicket, lighting up the inside of each branch, surrounding the streetlight with thin circles of illuminated wood, composites of a thousand tiny wet sections reflecting the light. As Natasha moved her head, the streetlight’s halo moved with it behind the tree. The lamp sat like a fat spider in the centre of a wooden web.

Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street. The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.

Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.

She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.

She did not feel tethered at all.

She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.

Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.

A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fucking stupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.

He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?

To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.

She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes of sound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until she found and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here she hinted at it.

The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came around several times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in the music. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and a sound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronic orchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.

And then the bassline.

A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause, another, longer pause… double thud and back to the beginning. And underneath it all she began to make those snatches of radio static a little longer, and longer still, and looping them more and more randomly, until it was a constant, shifting refrain under the beat. A chunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break out of white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it by finding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that the peaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager to make contact, and failing… or they could have just been static.

The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it had gone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and the people could not reclaim the city.

Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She sped through the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings, everything grey, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into the track, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.

And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone, Natasha brought on the Wind.

A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost speaking of the static, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich album — God knew where she had heard that — where he made violins mimic human voices. The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless piano rolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudder into existence behind it for a moment, a shrill echo, and then it would disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Then again. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear, overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophony of simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral, artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped it contemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up from behind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing the effect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks and troughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The piano goes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a single note like a slow metronome passing time. Then that, too, disappears. The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great single wind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and bassline, stretching off for a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.

This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. The boulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken, expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.

This was Wind City, the title that made Fabian laugh.

She could not talk to him after he had made his joke.

Pete really understood. In fact, when he heard pieces of the track, he told her that it was she who understood, that she really understood him.

Pete loved the track with an extraordinary passion. She supposed it appealed to him, the notion of the whole world possessed by the Wind.

The little flat in Willesden had become the setting for Crowley’s dreams. He was no longer fooled by its nondescript architecture. This flat was a dynamo. It had been turned into a generator of horrors.

He was on his haunches, looking down at another ruined face.

The little flat was becoming steeped in violence. It contained some vast attractive force luring people in to violent and bloody mayhem. Crowley felt trapped in some ghastly time-slip. Here we are again, he thought, gazing at the destroyed and bloody mask beneath him.

There had been the first time, when he had seen Saul’s father shattered on the lawn. Not systematically pulped like this, it was true. Maybe he had been running from the flat. Maybe that was why his injuries were less severe; he had tasted it in the air, he had known that had he stayed he would not just die but be crushed. He had not wanted to die like an insect, so he had hurled himself instead from the window, eager for a human death.

Crowley shook his head. His edge was blunting, he could not help it. Here we are again.

Then Barker, another one whose face was destroyed, and Page, looking over his own shoulder, impossible.

And now another had been broken on this sacrificial altar. The girl lay on her back, the floor around her was vile with blood. Her face was bent inwards as if on a hinge. Crowley glanced up at the door-frame. That patch of wood there, with radial explosions of blood and saliva and mucus bursting out from it on all sides, that section of the frame there, that was where her face had been thrust.

Crowley vaguely remembered the sense of duty which pushed him into the dark corridors at night, as he lay sleeping. He would stand in the sitting-room, where he was now, looking behind him, again, again, like a dog chasing its tail, unable to stand still because he knew that if he did something would come and smash his face…

He never saw Saul, in his dreams.

Bailey entered, pushing through the perplexed knot of uniforms.

‘No sign of anything anywhere else, sir. Just this, just here.’

‘Has Herrin got anything?’ he said.

‘He’s still talking to the uniform who got called to the bus station this morning. A load of the buses are smashed up; and the guard, they reckon it wasn’t the glass in his eye that killed him. He was hit over the head with a long, thin stick.’

‘Our unusual club, again,’ mused Crowley. ‘Too thin for most people’s taste; they like something that packs a wallop. Of course, if you’re as strong as our murderer seems to be, the thinner the better. Less surface area, more pressure.’

‘Our murderer, sir?’

Crowley looked at him. Bailey seemed confused, and even accusatory. Crowley could tell that he thought his superior was losing it. The extraordinary nature of the crimes had affected Bailey in the opposite way from Crowley. He had been thrust towards an aggressive, dogmatic common sense, determined to bring Saul to heel, refusing to be overawed or surprised by the carnage he saw.

‘What?’ demanded Crowley.

‘You sound unsure, sir. Have you got some reason for thinking it’s not Garamond?’

Crowley shook his head as if at a mosquito, irritated, brushing the air. Bailey withdrew.

Yes, I have ample reason, thought Crowley, because I interviewed him and saw him. I mean Jesus look at him, he did not do this. And if he did, then something happened to change him in that night after I interviewed him, and he changed so much he is no longer what I saw, in which case I am still right, Saul Garamond did not do this, and I don’t give a shit what you and Herrin think, you lumbering great pricks.

Nothing added up. The dead guard at Westbourne Grove was clearly the victim of the same man as had killed the two policemen, and this girl here lying ruined in blood and bone. But the police had been called to the bus station minutes after the inhabitants of Terragon Mansions had reported violent shouts and bumps from upstairs. And Westbourne Park was simply too far from Willesden to be reached in that time. So whoever was shattering all that glass in those buses and pushing it in that poor man’s eye could not be the same one who had destroyed this woman.

Of course, Herrin and Bailey saw no problem with this. Someone had been confused about the time. The people in Willesden must be half an hour or so out. Or the people in Westbourne Grove were, or both were fifteen minutes out, or something. And the fact that so many were out by the same amount, well, what did you think happened then, sir? If not that?

And of course Crowley had no answer.

He was intrigued by reports of music coming from the garage at the time Saul — or whoever — was destroying it. The reports were vague, but seemed to indicate a high-pitched sound like a recorder or a flute or pipes, or something. Saul was no musician, Crowley knew that, though he was apparently something of an aficionado of Dance music, the kind that his taciturn friend Natasha played. So what of the pipes?

Crowley could see the scenario being created for Saul. Saul had become a serial killer. And Saul therefore needed rituals, such as the return to this, the site of his first murder, that had unhinged him. And the playing of music at the site of a murder, such as the one at the bus station, what was this but ritualized? Perhaps he had played music also at the death of the as yet unidentified man in the underground, a crime Crowley was still sure was part of the same rampage. The public-transport connection only strengthened his conviction.

So, why was Saul no longer into Dance music? Why had he started playing what most of those who had heard it described as Folk music? None of this was airtight, of course, of course…

But Crowley could not help thinking it might be another who had played the music in the bus station. Why not? Why must it be Saul? What if it was another who mocked him with this music so utterly different to Saul’s own taste?

Crowley straightened up suddenly. A long, thin, light club. Made of metal: the impact was clear about that. Something the murderer hung on to, used more than once. Took from crime to crime. Where he played music, it seemed.

‘Bailey!’ Crowley yelled.

The big man appeared, still impatient, still exasperated with his boss.

He all but rolled his eyes at Crowley’s new question.

‘Bailey, do any of Saul’s mates play the flute?’

Chapter Twenty-One

Deep underneath London, King Rat skulked and ferreted in the darkness.

He clutched a stash of food, carried it slung over one shoulder like a swag bag. His strides were long A and left no sign. He stalked silently through the water of the sewers.

The rats ran as he approached. The braver souls stayed a little to spit at him and provoke him. His smell was deeply ingrained in their nervous system, and they had been taught to despise it. King Rat ignored them. Walked on. His eyes were dark.

He passed like a thief in the night. Unclear. Minimal. Dirty. Subaltern. His motives were opaque.

He reached under the dirty stream to dislodge the plug to his throne-room, slid through the murk into the great teardrop chamber. He shook the water from him, and stamped into the room.

Saul came from behind him. He clutched a broken chair leg which he swung at an incredible speed and cracked against the back of King Rat’s skull.

King Rat flew forward and flung his arms out with a sudden shrill bark of pain. He sprawled, rolled, clutching his head, regained his footing.

Food spread across the sodden floor.

Saul was upon him, quivering, his jaw set hard and tight. He swung the chair leg again and again.

King Rat was as pliable as quicksilver. He slid impossibly out of Saul’s flurry of blows and scampered away, hissing, clutching his bleeding head.

He spun to face Saul.

Saul’s face was a mosaic of bruises and blood and puffy flesh. King Rat was quite still. He eyed Saul with his hidden eyes. His teeth were bared and glinted with dirty yellow light. His breath came hard. His hands were crooked into eager claws.

But Saul hit him again, before those claws could move. Saul’s hands and club came at him hard, but King Rat ripped up with his clawed hands and drew lines on Saul’s stomach, below his ruined shirt.

Saul spoke, muttering in time to the blows he attempted to land.

‘So what the fuck was Loplop doing there, unh?’ Slam.

King Rat slipped outside the club’s arc. It hit the floor loudly.

‘Tell him to follow me, unh?’ Slam. ‘What was he going to do — report back?’ Slam. This time the wood connected and King Rat yelled in rage.

King Rat growled and slashed at Saul with those claws, and Saul bellowed and swung the club wit renewed venom. The two of them skittered around the dark room, slipping on mould and food, moving now on two limbs, now on four. Saul and King Rat moved like liminal figures, hovering between evolutionary strata, bestial and knowing.

‘So was Loplop going to send a message, unh? bird? Little bird going to let slip where I was, then?’

Again the attacks came, again King Rat moved, refusing to engage in battle, content to draw blood and slip away, his teeth still visible and wicked.

‘What if Loplop had accidentally told someone else where I was, unh? Was I fucking bait?’ King Rat caught the club with his right hand and bit at it suddenly and savagely, and it dissolved in a burst of splinters. Saul did not pause, but grasped King Rat’s filthy lapels and carried him down into the muck, straddling him.

‘Well you needn’t have bothered, you fucking shit because the Piper was there and look what he did to me, you shit. You just weren’t ready, you and Nans so poor old Loplop had to take him on his own.’ Saul pinioned King Rat’s arms to the brick floor and began systematically to punch his face. But even trapped lit that King Rat writhed and slipped under him, many of the heavy blows did not land.

Saul thrust his face right up to King Rat, and stare through the shadows on his eyes.

‘I know you wouldn’t give a fuck if I’d died, as long as I took Piper-man with me,’ he hissed. ‘And I know you killed my dad, you fucking shithead rapist, you piece of crud — not the fucking Piper…’

‘We.’ King Rat shouted the word out and convulsed, throwing Saul from him and sliding in a single movement until he stood in characteristic pose by the throne, skulking and aggrandizing, but this time with his claws bared and his teeth dangerous, coated in slaver like a wild animal. Saul moved backwards in the dirt, fought to right himself.

King Rat spoke again. ‘I never bumped off your dad, stupid. I killed the Usurper.’

The word stayed in the air after he had spoken it.

King Rat spoke again.

‘I’m your dad…’

‘No you fucking aren’t, you weird old fucked-up spiritual degenerate,’ replied Saul instantly. ‘I might have your blood in my veins, you fucking rapist bastard, but you aren’t shit to me.’

Saul smacked himself on the forehead, laughing bitterly.

‘I mean, hello? "Your mother was a rat, and I’m your uncle." Jesus, nice one — playing me like a fucking idiot! And…’ Saul paused and jerked his finger viciously at King Rat, ‘and, that goddamn fucking lunatic Piper who wants me dead only knows about me because of you.’

Saul sat down hard and held his head in his hands. King Rat watched him.

‘I mean, I keep saying I’ve sorted it out, right?’ Saul murmured. ‘And I just can’t stop thinking about it. You killed my father, you rapist shit, and when you did that you let some fucking spirit of darkness out after me, you gave him my fucking address, and, what, I’m supposed to go "Daddy!"?’ Saul shook his head in disgust. He felt his gut twist with contempt and hatred. ‘You can fuck off. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘So what’re you after, an apology?’

King Rat was scornful. He moved towards Saul.

‘What do you want? We’re blood. It was half an age since I left, since you were a little Godfer in the fat man’s arms. I could clock you getting flabby. It was time to join your old dad, the cutpurse king. We’re blood.’

Saul stared up at him.

‘No, fucker, I don’t want shit from you.’ Saul stood. ‘What I want is out.’ He moved off behind the throne, turned to face King Rat. ‘You can deal with the Piper on your own. He only wants me because of you, you know? You’ve been bragging about me, you stupid shit. You don’t give a fuck about family. You raped my mum so you could have your weapon. The Piper knows it; he called me the secret weapon, know what I mean to you. I know I’m a good way on getting at him, because he can’t control me.’

‘But he only wants me dead because of you. So, tell you what.’

Saul moved backwards as he spoke, towards the room’s peculiar exit.

‘Tell you what. You deal with the Piper as best you can, and I’ll look after myself. Agreed?’

And Saul looked King Rat in the eye, those eyes he could still not see, and he left the room.

Up above the sewers: in the sky, over the slate. Out in the air. Saul fingered the skin over his bruises and felt it stretched out taut and split. He gazed at London, spread out before him, unfolding, the underworld threatening to burst through, to rupture its surface tension. It was dark; his life was always dark now. He was becoming a night creature.

His body hurt. His head ached, his arms were scratched and stretched, his muscles burned with deep bruises. But he could not stay still. He felt a desperate eagerness to work through it, to burn the pain out of his body. He swung meaninglessly around girders and antennae, loose-limbed and elegant like a gibbon. He was suddenly very hungry, but he remained on the roofs for a while, running and jumping over low walls and skylights. He straddled the intricacies of St Pancras station, and sped along the spine of roofs which jutted out behind it like a dinosaur’s tail.

This was the realm of the arches. Weird little businesses waged a battle against empty space, cramming into the unlikely hollows below the railway lines. They proclaimed themselves with crude signs.

OFFICE EQUIPMENT CHEAP.

WE DELIVER.

Saul descended to street level. He was fighting to channel the force of elation which had flooded through him at his renunciation of King Rat. He was fragile, ready to burst into tears or hysterics. He was captivated by London.

Someone approached him from around a corner: a woman in heels, he could hear, a brave soul walking this area alone at night. He did not want to scare her; so he slumped against a wall and slid down to the floor, just a comatose drunk.

The associations of homelessness struck him and, as the heels clicked by him unseen, he thought of Deborah and he felt his throat catch. And then it was easy to think of his father.

But Saul did not have time for this, he decided. He leapt up and followed his nose to the dustbins of this odd realm, a world where the streets were empty off houses, where the only things that surrounded him were the peculiar businesses, Victorian throwbacks.

The bins were not rich in pickings. Without domestic rubbish there was little to them. Saul crept back towards King’s Cross. He found his way to the dumping grounds of the all-night eateries, and amassed a huge pile of food. He played games with himself, refusing to allow himself to eat a mouthful until he had collected everything he wanted.

He sat in the shade of a skip in a cul-de-sac by a Chinese take-away and fondled the food he had collected, chunks of greasy meat and noodles.

Saul gorged himself. He ate as he had not for days. He ate to fill all the cavities inside him, to drive out anything that had been left behind.

King Rat had used him as bait, but the plan had gone wrong. The Piper had pre-empted his plan.

As Saul stuffed himself, he felt an echo of that surge of strength that had coursed through him the first time he ate reclaimed food, found food, rat food.

The Piper still wanted him dead, of course, now more than ever. He did not think he would have to wait too long before the Piper came for him.

It was a new chapter, he reflected. Away from King Rat. Out of the sewer. He ate until his belly felt dangerously taut, and then resumed his position in the skyline.

Saul felt as if he would burst, not from food but from something that had been released inside him. I should be mad, he thought suddenly, and I’m not. I haven’t gone mad.

He could hear sounds from all over London, a murmuring. And as he listened, it resolved itself into its components, cars and arguments and music. He felt as if the music was everywhere, all around him, a hundred different rhythms in counterpoint, a tapestry being woven underneath him. The towers of the city were needles, and they caught at the threads of music and wound them together, tightened them around Saul. He was a still point, a peg, a hook on which to wind the music. It grew louder and louder, Rap and Classical and Soul and House and Techno and Opera and Folk and Jazz and Jungle, always Jungle, all the music built on drum and bass, ultimately.

He had not listened to music for weeks, not since King Rat had come for him, and he had forgotten it. Saul stretched as if waking from a sleep. He heard the music with new ears.

He realized that he had defeated the city. He crouched on the roof (of what building he did not know) and looked out over London at an angle from which the city was never meant to be seen. He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements. These monolithic products of human hands had turned on their creators, and defeated them with common sense, quietly installed themselves as rulers. They were as insubordinate as Frankenstein’s monster, but they had waged a more subtle campaign, a war of position more effective by far.

Saul kicked carelessly off and stalked across the roofs and walls of London.

He could not put off thinking for ever.

Tentatively, he considered his position.

King Rat was no longer with him. Anansi was his own man, would do whatever made him and his kingdom safest. Loplop was mad and deaf and maybe dead.

The Piper wanted to kill them all.

Saul was on his own. He realized that he had no plan, and felt a curious peace. There was nothing he could do. He was waiting for the Piper to come to him. Until then he could go underground, could investigate London, could find his friends…

He was afraid of them now. When he let himself think of them, he missed them so much it made him ache, but he was not made of the same stuff as them any more, and he was afraid that he did not know how to be their friend. What could he say to them, now that he lived in a different world?

But perhaps he didn’t live in a different world. He lived where he wanted, he thought suddenly, furiously. Wasn’t that what King Rat had told him, all that time ago? He lived wherever he wanted, and even if he didn’t live in the same world as them any more, he could visit, couldn’t he?

Saul realized how much he wanted to see Fabian.

And he remembered as well that the Piper wanted to kill him precisely because he could move between the worlds. He felt a fleeting sense of loneliness as he thought about the Piper, and then he realized that the smell of rat was all around him, was always all around him. He stood slowly.

He realized that the smell of London was the smell of rat.

He began to hiss for attention, and lithe heads poked out of piles of rubbish. He barked a quick order and the ranks began to approach him, tentatively at first and then with eagerness. He shouted for reinforcements and seething waves of filthy brown bodies boiled over the lip of the roof, and from chimneys and fire escapes and hidden corners, like a film of spilt liquid running backwards, they congealed around him, tightly wound, an explosion frozen at the flashpoint, hovering with suppressed violence, hanging on his words.

He would not face the Piper alone, he realized. He would have all the rats in London on his side.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sometimes, between putting food in her mouth and sleeping and then Jungle, seeing Pete, Natasha remembered other things.

She remembered something; she had a sense of being needed for something. She could not be sure what it was until somebody called her. She fumbled with the phone, confused.

‘To yo Tasha!’

The voice was bizarre, muted and enthusiastic. She did not recognize it at all.

‘Tash man, you there? It’s Fingers. I got your message about Terror and, yeah, that’s no problem. We’re going to stick you on the poster, make out like you’re famous. No one’s gonna admit they haven’t heard of you.’ The man on the telephone yelled with laughter.

Natasha muttered that she did not understand.

There was a long pause.

‘Look, Tash, you faxed me, man — told me you wanted to spin some at Junglist Terror… you know, couple of weeks time? Well, that’s fine. I wanted to know what name you’re under, because we’re chucking out some last-minute posters. Going to do a blitz down Camden, down your way too.’

What name? Natasha gathered herself, played the phone call by ear, pretended she understood what was happening.

‘Tut me in as Rudegirl K.’

That was a name she used. Was that what he wanted, the man? Gradually she began to remember, and to understand. Junglist Terror, near the Elephant and Castle. It came back. She smiled delightedly. Had she asked for an opportunity to play? She could not remember that, but she could play Wind City, she didn’t mind…

Fingers rang off. He seemed perturbed, but Natasha only promised to come on the date he told her, and agreed that she would spread the word. She held the receiver against her ear for a little bit too long after he had rung off. The buzz confused her again, until gentle hands reached around her head and disentangled her from the machine.

Pete was there, she realized with a jolt of pleasure. He put the receiver down, turned her to look at him. She wondered how long he had been with her. She looked up at him, smiled beatifically.

‘I forgot to tell you that, Natasha,’ he said. ‘I thought we should take the opportunity to show the world what we’ve been doing. So we’re going to play Wind City. OK?’

Natasha nodded and smiled.

Pete smiled back. His face; Natasha saw his face. It seemed hurt, she saw long thin scabs adorning it, but she did not really notice them somehow, he grinned so happily. His face was very pale, but he smiled at her with the same wide-eyed pleasure she always associated with him. Such a sweetie, she thought, so green. She smiled.

Pete backed away from her, holding her hand until he was out of reach.

‘Let’s play some music, Natasha,’ he suggested.

‘Oh yes,’ she breathed. That would be excellent. A little Drum and Bass. She could lose herself in that, take the tunes apart in her mind, see how they fitted together. Maybe they could play Wind City.

All of Saul’s friends were accounted for, apart from the man Kay. As he considered the piece of paper he held, the queasy foreboding in Crowley’s stomach grew. He was afraid he knew exactly where Kay was.

He felt ridiculous, like a cop from some American TV show, operating on hunches, responding to preposterous gut feelings. He had sought to cross-refer the data that had been gathered on the ruined body in the tube with the information they had on Saul’s friend Kay, who had been missing now for a couple of weeks.

For a while, Crowley had played with the idea that Kay could be behind all this. It would be so much easier to attribute the carnage he had seen to the other missing man. He kept his conjectures to himself. His unwillingness to see Saul as the killer made no sense to those around him, and he could understand why. There was just something, there was just something… the thoughts went around and around in his head… it did not work; he had seen Saul; there was something else happening.

He jeopardized control of the investigation with his disquiet. He was reduced to scribbled notes to himself, exchanging favours with laboratory technicians, the usual channels too risky for his ideas. He could not sit with his men and women and brainstorm, bouncing possibilities back and forth, because they knew full well who they were looking for. His name was Saul Garamond, he was an escaped prisoner and a dangerous man.

So Crowley was cut off from discussion, the medium in which his best work was done. He was afraid that without it his notions were stunted, half truths, soiled with the muck of his own mind that no one could brush off for him. But he had no choice; he was atomized.

Kay as killer. That was one of the ideas that he must dispense with. Kay was peripheral, not close to any of the main protagonists in this drama. He had even less motive than Saul for any of these actions. He was even less physically impressive than Saul.

And besides, his blood group matched that which had covered the walls of Mornington Crescent station.

The fragments of jaw that could be analysed seemed to match Kay’s.

Nothing was certain, not with a body as destroyed as that had been. But Crowley believed he knew who they had found.

And he still, he still, could not believe that it was Saul they wanted.

But he could talk to no one about this.

Nor could he share the pity he felt, a pity which was welling up inside him more with every day, a pity which was threatening to dwarf his horror, his anger, his disgust, his fear, his confusion. A growing pity for Saul. Because if he was right, if Saul was not the one responsible for all the things Crowley had seen, then Saul was right in the middle of something horrendous, a kaleidoscope of bizarre and bloody murder. And Crowley might feel isolated, might feel cut off from those around him, but if he was right, then Saul… Saul was truly alone.

Fabian returned to his room and immediately felt bad again. The only time now that he did not feel oppressed by isolation was when he got on his bike and rode around London. He was spending more and more of his time on the road these days, burning up the junk calories he got from the crap he was eating. He was a wiry man, and his hours and hours on the road were stripping the final ounces of excess flesh from him. He was being pared down to skin and muscle.

He had ridden for miles in the cold and his skin blushed with the change of temperature. He sweated unpleasantly from his exertions, his perspiration cold on him.

Straight south he had ridden, down Brixton Hill, past the prison, through Streatham, down towards Mitcham. Real suburbia, houses flattening down, shopping districts becoming more and more flat and soulless. He had ridden up and down and around a roundabouts and along sidestreets: he needed to cross traffic, to wait his turn on the road, to look behind him and indicate brief thanks to someone letting him in, he needed to cut in front of that Porsche and ignore the fact that he had pissed them off…

This was Fabian’s social life now. He interacted on the fucking tarmac, communicated with people passing him in their cars. This was as close as he came to relationships now. He did not know what was happening.

So he rode around and around, stopped to buy crisps and chocolate, orange-juice maybe, ate on the saddle, standing outside the poky little groceries and newsagents he now frequented, balancing his bike next to the faded boards advertising ice-cream and cheap photocopying.

And then back out onto the road, back into the cursory conversations of the roadways, his dangerous flirtations with cars and lorries. There was no such thing as society, not any more, not for him. He had been stripped of it, reduced to begging for social scraps like signalling and brake lights, the rudenesses and courtesies of transport. These were the only times now that anyone took notice of him, modified their behaviour because of him.

Fabian was so lonely it made him ache.

His answering machine blinked at him. He pressed play and the policeman Crowley’s voice jerked into life. He sounded forlorn, and Fabian did not think it was just the medium which was having that effect. Fabian listened with the contempt and exasperation he always felt when he dealt with the police.

‘… pector Crowley here, Mr Morris. Ummm… I was wondering if you might be able to help me again with a couple of questions. I wanted to talk to you about your friend Kay and… well… perhaps you could call me.’

There was a pause.

‘You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris? Would you or Saul have known anyone who does?’

Fabian froze. He did not hear what else Crowley said. The voice continued for a minute and stopped.

A wave of gooseflesh engulfed him briefly and was gone. He fumbled, stabbed at the rewind button.

‘… ould call me. You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris?’

Rewind.

‘You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris?’

With an agony of numb fingers Fabian fast forwarded, found the number Crowley gave. He punched it into the phone. Why does he want to know that? why that? his mind kept begging.

The number was busy, and a pleasant female voice told him he was in a queue.

‘Mother/wc&er!’ Fabian yelled and threw the receiver at the cradle. It bounced and hung from its cord, the dial tone just audible.

Fabian was trembling violently. He tugged at his bike, wrestled it through the constricted entrance hall and hurled it ready for him into the street. He slammed the door behind him. Adrenaline and terror made him feel sick. He lurched into the road and sped towards Natasha’s house.

No sociability now. He wove in and out of cars, leaving a cacophony of horns and curses in his wake. He twisted around corners at sharp, sharp angles, leaving pedestrians leaping out of his way.

Jesus Christ Jesus Christ, he thought, why does he want to know that? What has he found out? What has a man who plays the flute done?

He was over the river now, Jesus God knew how, he realized he was risking his life at every second. He seemed to be in and out of fugues, he had no recollection at all of passing through the intervening streets before the bridge.

Blood poured through Fabian’s veins. He felt giddy. The cold air woke him, slapped him in the face.

He saw a clump of phone boxes speeding into view before him. He was struck with a sudden realization of his isolation, again. He tugged at his brakes and pulled his bike up short, letting it fall to the ground and breaking into a run before it had stopped moving. The nearest box was empty, and he ransacked his pockets for money, pulled out a fifty-pence piece. He dialled Crowley’s number.

Dial 999 you stupid fucker! he suddenly admonished himself, but this time Crowley’s phone was ringing.

‘Crowley.’

‘Crowley, it’s Fabian.’ He could hardly speak; the words swallowed each other up in their eagerness. ‘Crowley, go to Natasha’s house now. I’ll see you there.’

‘Now, hold on, Fabian. What’s this all about?’

‘Just be there, motherfucker! The flute, the fucking flute!’ He hung up.

What’s he doing to her? Fabian thought as he ran to his bike. Its pedals still spun slightly where it lay. That weird fucker who just appeared, Jesus! He had thought she was having an affair with him, that this explained her weird behaviour, and the obscure challenge Fabian always sensed from Pete. But what if… what if that was not the whole story? What did Crowley know?

He was nearly there now, speeding towards Natasha’s house. London light surrounded him. He could not hear the traffic at all, he relied only on his eyes to stay alive.

Another sharp turn and there was Ladbroke Grove. He realized briefly that he was drenched in sweat. The day was overcast and cold, and his wet skin was frozen. Fabian felt like crying. He felt utterly out of control, as if he could have no effect on the world.

He turned, and was in Natasha’s street. It was as deserted as usual. The ringing in his ears dispersed and there was the Drum and Bass, the soundtrack to Natasha’s house. Dreamy and washed out, a very bleak song. He could feel it creeping into him behind his eyes.

He stepped free of his bike, letting it fall beside her door.

Fabian rang the bell. He put his finger on the button and did not release it until he saw a form approach behind the smoked-glass door.

Natasha opened the door to him.

Fabian wondered for a moment if she was stoned she looked so vague, her eyes so clouded. But he saw how white she looked, how thin, and he knew that this was more than dope.

She smiled when she saw him, and looked up at him with unfocused eyes.

‘Hey, Fabe, man, how’s it going?’ She sounded tired, but she raised her hand to touch fists.

Fabian took her hand. She looked at him in mild surprise. He put his lips close to her ear.

His voice, when he spoke, was unsteady.

‘Tash, man, is Pete here?’

She looked up at him, creased her face quizzically, nodded.

‘Yeah. We’re practising. For Junglist Terror.’

Fabian began to tug at her.

‘Tash, we have to go. I want you to come with me. I promise I’ll explain, but come with me now…’

‘Oh, no.’ She did not sound angry or perturbed. But she pulled away from him gently and began to close the door. ‘I’ve got to play some tracks with him.’

Fabian pushed the door open and grabbed her. He held her mouth closed with his right hand. She struggled, her eyes suddenly wide, but he dragged her towards the door.

His eyes were prickling, and he whispered to her. ‘Tash please you don’t understand he’s something to do with it all we have to get away…’

‘Hi, Fabian! How’s it going?’

Pete had appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked down at them both, his body poised in mid stride. He grinned amiably.

Fabian froze, as did Natasha, in his arms.

Fabian stared at Pete’s face. It was white, crisscrossed with vicious, half-healed scratches, bloody and intricate. He affected his usual cheerful expression but his eyes were giving him away now, open a little too wide, staring a little too hard.

Fabian realized that he was very frightened of Pete. Fabian wondered how long before Crowley would be there.

‘Hey, Pete, man…’ he muttered. ‘Uh… I was wanting… me and Tash might split for a bit… uh…’

Pete shook his head, looking amused and rueful.

‘Oh, Fabian, you mustn’t go. Come hear what we’ve been playing.’

Fabian shook his head and stumbled backwards a little more.

‘Natasha?’ said Pete, and turned to her. He whistled something very quickly. Instantly Natasha spun in Fabian’s arms and twisted her leg, taking his feet from under him and kicking the door closed behind him in one motion. She stood to one side as he fell against the door. He stared at her, and her eyes clicked back into the focus that had momentarily deserted her.

Fabian fumbled behind him for the latch, his mouth open, his legs wobbling as he stood.

‘Look, Fabe,’ said Pete reasonably, descending towards him. ‘It’s simple.’ Natasha stood still and gazed at him as he approached. ‘I don’t know quite what you’ve worked out or how, and I’m impressed, really I am, but now what? What to do with you? I could kill you, like I did Kay, but I think I’ve got a better idea.’

An angry, frightened little noise issued from Fabian’s throat. Kay… what had happened to him?

‘So anyway, the first thing I think is that you should come upstairs.’ Pete motioned to the room above them, and the faint strains of Jungle that had been filtering down the stairs seemed to swell, the plaintive song that he had caught from outside was suddenly filling Fabian’s head. And it was such a beautiful song, it completely took him away…

It made him think of so many things…

He was on the stairs, he realized, and then he was in the bedroom, but he wasn’t really bothered about that, because what was important was that he should hear this song. There was something about it…

It stopped and he caught his breath, stumbled, felt as if he was choking.

The room was silent. Pete had one hand by the on off switch on the sequencer. Natasha stood next to him, her arms by her side, the same free-floating look in her eyes. With his left hand Pete held a kitchen knife to her throat. She obligingly held her head up.

Fabian opened his mouth in horror and gesticulated towards the two of them, frozen like a waxwork scene of the moment of murder. He emitted inchoate sounds.

‘Yes yes yes, Fabian. Answer or I slit her throat.’ Pete’s voice was still measured, urbane. ‘Is anyone else coming?’

Fabian’s eyes flitted around the room as he tried to gauge the situation. He shrieked as Pete pressed the knife to her throat, and blood welled up around it.

‘Yes! Yes! The police are coming!’ Fabian screamed. ‘And they’re going to fucking take you, you motherfucker…’

‘Nope,’ said Pete. ‘Nope, they won’t.’

He released Natasha and she touched her neck experimentally, screwing up her face, perturbed and confused by the blood. She picked up her pillow and pressed it to the side of her neck, watched it stain red.

Pete kept his eyes on Fabian. He fumbled on the top of the keyboard and gathered up some DATs which sat there.

‘Tash?’ he said. ‘Grab your record bag and a few twelve-inches. We’re going to go to mine until Junglist Terror.’ He smiled at Fabian.

Fabian bolted for the door. He heard a faint whispering and his left calf burst into agony. He screamed as he fell. The kitchen knife was embedded deep in the muscle of his lower leg. He fumbled at it with bloody fingers and screamed when he had the breath.

‘See,’ said Pete, sounding amused. ‘I can make you dance to my tune, but fuck it, sometimes other methods do the job.’ He stood over Fabian.

Fabian closed his eyes and laid his head on the floor. He was fainting.

‘You will come to Junglist Terror, won’t you, Fabe?’ said Pete. Behind him Natasha quietly gathered some things. ‘You may not feel like dancing now, but I promise you will. And you can do me a favour.’

The faint percussive thump of the Drum and Bass beat which wafted into Bassett Street was washed out, rendered nothing by the sirens. Two police cars slid to a stop outside the house. Uniformed men and women leapt out and raced to the door. Crowley stood beside one of the cars. Behind him, the residents peered out of their doors and windows.

‘Have you come about all that screaming? That was quick,’ said an old man approvingly to Crowley.

Crowley looked away as his stomach yawned. He felt sick with foreboding.

Next to the door a bicycle lay on the pavement. Crowley stared at it as the battering ram took care of the door. The police swept up the stairs in a confused mass. Crowley saw the guns at the ready.

There was a sound of heavy feet in the house, audible in the street outside. The faint Jungle beat jerked to an abrupt halt. Crowley strode after the advance party into the hallway. He jogged up the steps and waited by the front door to the flat.

A short woman in a flak jacket approached him.

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nothing?’

‘They’re gone, sir. Not a sign. I think you should see this.’

She led him into the flat. It was thick with heavy bodies. The air was full of authoritative voices, the sounds of searching.

Crowley looked around him at the bare walls of the sitting-room. By the entrance to the room was a pool of blood, still slick and sticky. One of the white pillows on the futon was stained deep red.

The keyboard, the stereo, a handbag… everything was untouched. Crowley strode over to the turntable. A twelve-inch single rested on it. The needle had skipped, pushed off course by the vibration of the heavy police boots. Crowley swore.

When he raised his voice it dripped bile.

‘I don’t suppose anyone saw how far through the record we were? No?’

Everyone stared at him in incomprehension.

‘Because that way we could have told how long ago they left.’

They looked away, surly. Next time you try rushing a fucking lunatic and stopping to take notes, sir, they said with every look and gesture.

To hell with them, thought Crowley, furious. To fucking hell with them. He looked at the blood on the floor and the pillow. He looked out of the window. The constables held back the growing crowds. The bicycle lay alone, ignored.

Fabian, Fabian… thought Crowley. I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you. You were my lead, Fabian, and now you’ve gone.

He leant down and rested his head on his arms, there on the windowsill.

Fabian, Natasha, where have you gone? he thought. And with whom?

Chapter Twenty-Three

Scrawled notes were appearing on walls.

In a hand at once gothic and subliterate, they entreated Saul to a peace. They were etched into the brick, scribbled in pencil, sprayed with aerosol.

The first, Saul found on the side of a chimney stack he had decided to sleep in.

listen sonny, it read. were blood and blood

STICKS SO LETS US LET BYGONES BE. TWOS BETTER NOR ONE YOU KNOW AND IN FACT TWO CAN BE THE DEVIL.

Saul had run his fingers over the thin scratches and looked around the roof. The stench of King Rat was on the air, he could smell it clearly. The rats with him had bristled, and been ready to bite or run. He was never alone now, always surrounded by a group whose number was unchanging even as the individuals who formed it came and went.

Saul and his entourage had crouched on the roof and sniffed the air. He had not slept in the chimneys that morning.

The next evening he had woken in the corner of the sewer he had found, and painted above his head was another message. This was in white paint, paint that had dripped and slid down the walls into the dirty water, leaving the words only just legible.

LOOK YOU AINT DOING NOONE ANY FAVOURS CEPT THE PIPER.

It had been written while he slept. King Rat was stalking him, afraid to speak but desperate for reconciliation.

Saul was angry. The ease with which King Rat was still able to sneak past him rankled. He realized that he was just a baby, a little ratling.

He could not think about whether or not King Rat was right. It was irrelevant to him. He had had enough of compromise. King Rat the rapist and murderer, destroyer of his family, had no right to his collaboration. King Rat had released the Piper, King Rat had made Saul what he was. He had released him, but only into his new prison.

So fuck King Rat, thought Saul. He had had it with being bait. He knew that King Rat could not be trusted.

So instead he thought about what he could do for himself.

For all that he felt liberated, for all that he felt powerful, Saul did not know what to do. He did not know where the Piper lived. He did not know when the Piper would attack. He knew nothing at all except that he himself was not safe.

Saul began to think more and more about his friends. He spent a lot of time speaking to the rats, but they were only cunning, not clever, and their stupidity alienated him. He remembered his thoughts on the night he had left King Rat, the realization that it was his decision whether or not his world would cross those of Fabian and others.

He wanted to see Fabian more than anything.

So one evening he bade the rats leave him alone. They obeyed immediately, disappearing in a sudden flurry. Saul began to cross the city, alone again.

He wondered if King Rat was with him, was watching him. As long as the fucker kept his distance, Saul decided, he did not care.

Saul crossed the river under Tower Bridge. He swung like an ape along the girders which festooned its underside, convoluted thickets of vast wires and pipes. In the middle, just at the point where the bridge could split and open for tall ships, he stopped and hung by his hands, swaying slightly.

The sky was taken from him; the great mass of the bridge above him was all he could see at eye-level and above. At the very edge of his sight, buildings appeared again over the river. But for the most part the city was inverted and refracted in the Thames, a sinuous shattered mirror. Lights glinted on the water, dark shapes punctuated with hundreds of points of light, the towers of the city, the far-off lights of the South Bank Centre, far more real for him then than their counterparts in the air above.

He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part… but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin veneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold.

Saul held on to that. He resisted the poetics of the city .

Saul walked fast, making the passers-by ignore him, being nothing to them. He strode the streets like a cipher, invisible. Sometimes he stopped quite still and listened, to see if he was being followed. He could see no one, but he was not so naive as to think that was conclusive.

He approached Brixton from the backstreets, not wanting to run the gamut of its light and crowds. His pulse was up. He was nervous. He had not spoken to Fabian for so long, he was afraid they would no longer understand each other. How would he sound to Fabian now? Would he sound strange, would he sound ratty?

He reached Fabian’s street. An old woman walked past him, bent into herself, and he was alone.

Something was wrong. The air tasted charged. People moved behind the white curtains of Fabian’s room. Saul stood quite still. He stared at the window, saw the vague movements of men and women within. They milled uncertainly, investigating. With a growing horror, Saul pictured those within opening drawers, examining books, looking at Fabian’s artwork. He knew who moved like that.

Saul’s demeanour changed. One moment his shoulders were hunched, he was tightened into a drab stance, something to see but not notice, his disguise for the streets. Now he uncurled and sank towards the pavement. He bent in a sudden snap of motion, sidling simultaneously against the low wall. He crept through the thin strip of garden, the desultory tiny patios.

He was truly invisible now. He could sense it in himself.

He sidled along the wall, sudden bursts of motion interspersed with unearthly stillness. His nose twitched. He smelt the air.

Saul stood before Fabian’s house. Soundlessly he vaulted the low wall and landed in a crouch below the window. He placed his ear to the wall.

Architecture betrayed those within. Bluff voices seeped out through cracks and rivulets between bricks.

‘… don’t like that bloody picture, though…’

‘… know that the DFs totally losing it over this. I mean he’s fucking well lost it…’

‘… geezer Morris, why have a go at him?… thought he was a mate’

The police talked in an endless stream of banalities, cliches and pointless verbiage. Their speech served no purpose, thought Saul in despair, no fucking purpose at all. He ached for conversation, for communication, and to hear words wasted like this… he felt like crying.

He had lost Fabian. He put his head in his hands.

‘Him gone, bwoy. Him with the Badman now.’

Anansi’s voice was soft and very near.

Saul rubbed his eyes without opening them. He breathed deeply. Finally he looked up.

Anansi’s face hovered just in front of his, suspended before him upside-down. His strange eyes were very close, staring right into Saul’s.

Saul looked at him calmly, held his gaze. Then he let his eyes slide casually up, investigating Anansi’s position.

Anansi was hanging from one of his ropes, suspended from the roof. He grasped it with both hands, effortlessly suspended his weight, his naked feet intertwined with the thin white rope. As Saul watched, Anansi’s legs uncoupled from the fibres and swivelled slowly and soundlessly through the air. His eyes held Saul’s, even as his face turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

His feet touched the concrete with a tiny pat.

‘You damn good now, you know, pickney. Not easy keep track of you, these days.’

‘Why did you bother? Daddy send you?’ Saul’s voice was withering.

Anansi laughed without sound. He smiled lazily, predatory — the big spider-man.

‘Come now. Me want fe talk.’ Anansi pointed with a long finger, straight up. Then hand over hand he seemed to fall up the rope, which was tugged peremptorily from view.

Saul slid silently to the corner of the building and gripped it on both sides. He hauled himself away from the earth.

Anansi was waiting. He sat cross-legged on the flat roof. His mouth worked as if he were preparing to say something unpleasant. He nodded a greeting to Saul and indicated with a nod that he should sit opposite him.

Instead, Saul interlaced his fingers behind his head and turned away. He looked out over Brixton.

There were noises all around them from the streets.

‘Mr Rattymon going crazy waiting for you now.’ Anansi spoke quietly.

‘Motherfucker shouldn’t have used me as bait, then,’ said Saul evenly. ‘Rapist motherfucker shouldn’t have killed my dad.’

‘Rattymon you dad.’

Saul did not answer. He waited.

Anansi spoke again.

‘Loplop come back and him crazy mad at you. Him want you dead fe true.’

Saul turned, incredulous.

‘What the fuck has he got to be angry with me for?’

‘You make him deaf, you know, and you done also make him mad again, mad in him head.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ spat Saul. ‘We were both about to be killed. He was about to kill me and get fucking taken apart himself. I think the fucking Piper’s done playing with us, you know? I think he just wants us all dead now, all the kings. Loplop would’ve fucking died, I saved his life…’

‘Yeah, man, but him save you. Could’ve watch while the Piperman done kill you, but him try to save you, and you fuck up him ear…’

‘That’s a load of crap, Anansi. Loplop tried to save me because you all… you all… know the Piper can’t hold me, and you all know I’m the only thing that can stop him.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well, Loplop him mad, anyway. Don’t be getting too close to him now.’

‘Fine,’ said Saul.

Again, a long pause.

‘What do you want, Anansi? And what do you know about Fabian?’

Anansi sucked his teeth in disgust.

‘You still green, bwoy, fe true. You sure got all the rats dem upon you side, but you don’t know what fe do with them. Rats everywhere, bwoy. Spiders everywhere. Them you eyes, the rats. My lickle spiders tell me what the Badman do with you friends. You ain’t never ask. You not care till now.’

‘Friends?’

Anansi screwed up his face and looked at Saul disdainfully.

‘Him have kill the fat bwoy.’ Saul’s hands fluttered about his face. His mouth stayed shut, but it quivered. ‘Him have take the black bwoy and the lickle DJ woman.’

‘Natasha,’ breathed Saul. ‘What does he want with her…? How does he know who they are…? How is he getting inside me?’ Saul grabbed his head with both hands, began to thump himself in despair. Kay, he thought, Natasha, he hit himself more, what was happening?

Anansi was on him. Strong hands gripped his wrists.

‘Stop now!’ Anansi was horrified.

Animals do not hurt themselves, Saul realized. There was still human inside him, then. He shook himself and stopped.

‘We have to get them back. We have to find them’

‘How, bwoy? Be real.’

Saul’s head spun. ‘What did he do to Kay?’ Anansi pursed his lips. ‘Him took the bwoy apart.’

They ran for a while, then there was a short scurrying climb, and they stood on Brixton Rec, the sports centre. They could hear the faint thump of MTV from the weights room below. Saul stood at the very edge of the roof, a little way forward from Anansi. He pushed his hands in his pockets.

‘You could have told me, you know…’ he said. He heard himself, and hated his plaintive tone. He half turned, glanced at Anansi, who stood quite still, his arms folded over his bare chest.

Anansi sucked his teeth in contempt.

‘Cha, bwoy, you still full to the brim with rubbish. You talk about how the Rattymon him you father? What for me want tell you that?’

Saul looked at him. Anansi was insistent.

‘What for me want tell you? Hmmm? Listen, bwoy, pickney, hear me now. Me one bigass spider, understand? The Rattymon, him a rat. Loplop him the bird, the Bird Superior. Now you, you some strange half ting, fe true, but what for we gwan tell you ting like that? Me tell you just what me want you fe know. Always, there you have a promise. No more hypocrisy now, you see, bwoy? No need. Animal like me no need for such ting. You leave that behind. You can trust me to be just so trustworthy, never no more, but never no less. Y’understand?’

Saul said nothing. He watched a train arrive at Brixton station and trundle away again.

‘Was Loplop going to tell the Piper where I was? Were you all going to come for him when he tried to take me?’ he asked finally.

Anansi shrugged, almost imperceptibly.

They sidled along the side of the railway, the British Rail line which rose above the market and the streets. They slid along without speaking, heading for Camberwell. Saul appreciated the company, he realized, though it was hardly what he had hoped for when setting out this evening.

‘How could he find my friends?’ said Saul. They sat on the climbing frame in a nondescript schoolyard.

‘Him search all you books an tings. Him find some address tings fe sure.’

Of course, thought Saul. My fault.

He was numbed. If he was still human, he realized, he would be in shock. But he was not, not any more; he was half rat, and he felt inured.

Anansi was very silent. He made no attempt to persuade Saul to return to King Rat, or to do anything, for that matter.

Saul looked at him curiously.

‘Does King Rat know you’re here?’ he asked.

Anansi nodded.

‘Has he asked you to say anything? Get me back?’

Anansi shrugged. ‘Him want you back, sure. You useful, y’know? But him know you can’t be told nothing you don’t want. You know what him want. If you want come back, you will come.’

‘Do you… do you understand why I won’t come back to him?’

Anansi looked at his eyes. Gently, he shook his head.

‘No, bwoy, not at all. You can survive better with him, with us, fe true. And you are rat. You should go back. But I know you don’t think like that. I don’t know what you are, bwoy. You can’t be rat, you can’t be man. I don’t understand you at all, but that’s alright, because I know now that I will never understand you, nor will you me. We are not the same.’

In the small hours, after they had eaten, they stood together at an entrance to the sewers. Anansi looked behind him, planning his route up the side of the warehouse beside them. He looked back at Saul.

Saul stuck out his hand. Anansi grasped it.

‘You are the only hope, bwoy. Come back to us.’

Saul shook his head, twisted, uncomfortable before the sudden intensity.

Anansi nodded and dropped his hand.

‘See you around.’

He turned and slung one of his ropes over an overhang, disappeared at speed over the vertical bricks.

Saul watched him go. He turned and examined where he was. The grille in a yard littered with hulking pieces of machinery. They loomed solemnly in the dark, looking vaguely pathetic. There were no roads visible from here, and Saul enjoyed the moment of solitude. Then he reached down without looking and pulled the grille from the earth.

He hesitated.

He knew there was little point searching for Natasha and Fabian. The city was so large, the Piper’s powers so prodigious, it would not be hard for him to hide two humans. But he knew also that he could not bear to leave them in his power. He knew he had to search, if only to prove that he was still half human. Because he was disquieted by his passivity, his acceptance, the speed with which he had conceptualized their absence as inevitable, as done, as a done thing. He was becoming dulled. Kay’s death was utterly unreal to him, but that was a human reaction. More disturbing to him was his reaction to the Piper’s abduction of his two closest friends.

The acceptance of the unacceptable was a kind of reactionary stoicism, a dynamic that dulled his feelings for these others. He could feel it within him, a growing cunning, a hyper-real focus on the here and now. It frightened him. He could not battle it head on, he could not decide what to feel and what not to feel, but he could challenge it with his actions. He could change it by refusing to behave as if it were how he felt. He abhorred his own reaction, his own feeling. It was an animal trait.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Saul could tell something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the sewers.

The sounds, the sounds he had become accustomed to walking into, were absent. As his feet hit the trickling water, he dropped into a crouch, suddenly full of feral energy. His ears twitched. He knew what was missing. He should walk into the sewers into a barely audible network of scratching and skittering, the noises of his people. He should hear them at the very edge of his rat-hearing, and subsume them within him, make them part of him, use them to define his time in the darkness.

The sounds were missing. There were no rats around him.

He lowered himself effortlessly, sliding into the organic muck. He was utterly silent, his ears twitching. He was trembling.

He could hear the constant soft drip of the tunnels, the thick trickle of viscous water, the mournful soughing of warm subterranean winds, but his people were gone.

Saul closed his eyes, stilled himself from his toes up. His joints ceased to work over each other; he banished the sound of his blood, slowed his heart, dispensed with all the tiny noises of his body. He became part of the sewer floor, and he listened.

The quiet of the tunnels appalled him.

He rested one ear gently against the floor. He could feel vibrations from all around the city.

A long way off, something sounded.

A high-pitched sound.

Saul snapped to his feet. He was sweating and trembling violently.

The Piper had come here? Was he in the sewers?

Saul raced through the tunnels. He did not know where he was running. He ran to kill the shuddering of his legs, the terror he felt.

What was he doing here?

He sped past a ladder. Maybe he should leave, maybe it was time he left the sewers and ran for it through the streets above, he thought, but damn it, this was his space, his safe haven… he could not have it taken from him.

He stopped still suddenly and cocked his head, listening again.

The sound of the flute was a little closer now, and he could hear a scratching around it, the sound of claws on brick.

The flute slid violently up and down the scale, a cacophony of quavers chasing each other in mad directions. The flute and the claws were strangely static. They did not grow nearer or further away.

There was something strange, Saul realized, about the sound. He listened. Unconsciously he braced himself against the tunnel walls, spread his arms, one above him, one to his side, his legs slightly parted, each climbing the gentle incline of the cylindrical tunnel. He was framed by the passageway.

The flute trilled on, and now Saul could hear something else, a voice raised in anguish.

Loplop. Squawking, emitting meaningless, despairing cries.

Saul moved forward, tracking the sounds through the labyrinth. They remained where they were. He wound his way through the dark towards them. Loplop still shrieked intermittently, but his cries were not pained, not tortured, but miserable. Loplop’s voice rose above the scrabbling — an orderly scrabbling, Saul realized, an unearthly timed scratching.

The sounds were separated from him now only by thin walls, and he knew he was there, around the corner from the congregation. The tremors had returned to Saul’s body. He fought to control himself. Terror held him hard. He remembered the numbing speed with which the Piper moved, the power of his blows. The pain in his body, the pain he had managed to forget, to ignore, reawakened and coursed through him.

Saul did not want to die.

But there was something not right about this sound.

Saul pressed himself hard against the wall and swallowed several times. He edged forward, to the junction with the tunnel which contained the sounds. He was very afraid. The mad piping, Loplop’s random cries, and above all the constant, orderly scrabbling against brick — everything continued as it had for minutes. It was loud, and so close it appalled him.

He looked around. He did not know where he was. Deep somewhere, buried in the vastness of the sewer system.

He steeled himself, drew his head slowly, silently around the edge of the brick.

At first, all he could discern were the rats.

A field of rats, millions of rats; a mass that started a few feet from the entrance to the tunnel and multiplied, bodies piling upon bodies, rat upon rat, a sharp gradient of hot little bellies and chests and legs. A moving mountain, replacing those that fell with new blood, defeating the urge of gravity to level its impossibly steep sides. The rats boiled over each other.

They moved in time, they moved together.

All together they pushed down with their right forefoot, then all together with their left. Then the back legs, again in time. They clawed each other, ripped each other’s skin, trampled on the young and dying — but they were one unit. They moved together, in time to the hideous music.

The Piper was nowhere. On the other side of the rat mountain Saul could see King Rat. Saul could not see his face. But his body moved on the same beat as those of his rebellious people, and he danced with the same disinterested intensity, his body stiff and spasming in perfect time.

Loplop cried again and again, and Saul glimpsed him, a desperate figure before King Rat, his fists flailing against King Rat’s chest. He pushed King Rat, tried to move him back, but King Rat continued with his stiff zombie dance.

And behind them all, something hanging from the ceiling… something emerging, Saul saw, from a shaft to the pavements above. A black box, dangling at a ridiculous angle, its handle tied to a dirty rope…

A ghetto-blaster.

Saul’s eyes widened in astonishment.

The fucker doesn’t even have to be here, he thought.

He stumbled into the tunnel and approached the seething mass. The flute was ghastly, loud and fast and insane like an Irish jig played in Hell. Saul edged forward. He began to pass straggling rats. The ghetto-blaster swayed slightly. Saul waded into the mass of rats. So many already, all around him, and he had at least six feet to walk. It seemed as if every rat in the sewer had found its way here; monstrous foot-long beasts and mewling babies, dark and brown, crushing each other, killing each other in their eagerness to reach the music. Saul pushed forward, feeling the bodies squirm around him. A thousand claws ripped at him, never in antagonism, only in the ecstasy of the dance. Under the rats he could see were layers that moved sluggishly, tired and dying; and below them were rats who did not move at all. Saul walked knee deep in the dead.

King Rat did not turn, stayed where he was, dancing at the head of his people once again. Loplop saw Saul. He shrieked and pushed past King Rat, launched himself through the living wall towards Saul.

He was ruined. His suit was filthy, and in tatters. His face contorted, rage and confusion fleeting across it.

He waded forward two, three steps, then stumbled under the weight of enthralled bodies. He went under, drowning in the seething mass. Saul ignored him, contemptuous of him, disgusted.

But he too found it difficult to move; he pushed through the rats, killing, he was sure, with each step, unwillingly but inevitably. He swayed, regained his balance. The cacophonous flute was utterly deafening. Saul went down suddenly on one knee and the rats used him as a springboard, leapt from him, tried to fly to the dangling stereo.

Saul swore, struggled to regain his feet, went under again. He became enraged, surged to his feet, spilling rats as he rose. A few feet away he could see the pitiful sight of Loplop’s body bobbing below the surface of the rats, trying and failing to stand.

Saul shook himself and brown bodies spun through the air. He could not reach the boombox. He tugged hard with his feet, which seemed stuck as firmly as in quicksand. He roared, suddenly livid, pulled inexorably through the mass of rats, stumbled again, yanked and forced his way through, past King Rat, to the point where the rats thinned out and the stereo hung six feet from the floor.

He reached up to it, and saw King Rat. He stopped moving, shocked.

King Rat stood in thrall, his face slack, his limbs swinging vaguely, stripped of dignity, a string of drool stretching and snapping from his lower jaw. Saul stared, fascinated and horrified.

He hated King Rat, hated what he had done, but something in him was appalled at seeing him so shorn of power.

Saul turned and grasped the swinging box, pulled hard, snapping the rope.

He smashed it hard against the wall.

The music stopped at the instant of impact. Metal and plastic spattered out of the broken casing. He slammed it twice more against the brick. Its speakers burst out of their housing. A tape flew from the ruined cassette deck.

Saul turned and looked at the assembled multitude.

They stood still, confused.

Understanding and recollection seemed to well over them all simultaneously. In a panic, a terrified flurry, the rats emitted a communal hiss and disappeared, scampering over each other, made clumsy by the fallen.

The mountain crumbled and disappeared. Lame and ruined rats tried to follow their fellows. The first wave was gone; then the second wave, limping after them; and the third wave, the dying, hauled themselves away, sliding on blood.

The ground was covered with bodies. Corpses lay two, three thick. Loplop crawled into a corner. King Rat stared at Saul. Saul looked back at him for a moment, then returned his attention to the ruined stereo. He fumbled in the mud until he found the tape.

He wiped it, examined the label.

Flute 1, it said. It was handwritten. It was Natasha’s writing.

‘Oh fuck,’ Saul shouted and pushed his head into the crook of his arm. ‘Oh fuck, oh leave them alone, you fucker,’ he breathed.

He heard King Rat move forward. Saul looked up sharply. King Rat looked uneasy. He moved with a deferential cast to his limbs, resentment curling his mouth. He was intimidated, Saul realized.

Saul nodded.

‘It’s just noise to me,’ he whispered. He nodded again, saw King Rat’s eyes widen. ‘Just noise.’

With a shriek Loplop saw Saul, ran towards him flapping his rags and his arms, stumbled as he ran.

King Rat started. Saul stepped smartly out of Loplop’s way and watched as the Bird Superior slipped in mud, went over in a half-controlled fall and banged his head against the wall.

Saul gesticulated at King Rat, danced back a few steps.

‘Keep that motherfucker under control!’ he shouted.

Loplop still shouted, still yelled his incoherent cries as he tried to stand. King Rat strode to where Loplop slithered in mud, and gripped his collar. He tugged him, pulled him along the slippery sewer bottom. Loplop struggled and whimpered. At the entrance to the tunnel King Rat crouched before him, held his finger before Loplop’s face. Saul could not tell if he was speaking to Loplop, or merely holding him still, with those eyes. Some kind of communication passed between them.

Loplop stared past King Rat at Saul. He looked afraid and enraged. King Rat regained his gaze and seemed to say something, gesticulated. Loplop’s eyes returned to Saul, and the same rage filled him as before, but he backed away, moved away through the tunnels, disappeared.

King Rat turned back to Saul.

As he walked back through the bodies of the rats, Saul saw that King Rat had regained his furtive swagger. He had composed himself.

‘Back, then?’ King Rat asked casually.

Saul ignored him. He looked up into the shaft from which he had pulled the stereo. Several feet above, a grille was visible, and above it the drab orange-shot black of the city night. Something was affixed to the inside of the narrow shaft.

‘So what you here for, then, chal?’ asked King Rat, his insouciance wearing and affected.

‘Fuck you,’ replied Saul quietly. He stood on tiptoe, reached up into the vertical tunnel. He could feel a corner of paper flapping in wind. He gripped it, pulled gently, but succeeded only in tearing the corner away.

He looked down briefly. King Rat stood near him, his hands held uncertainly to his chest.

Saul looked around him at the corpses.

‘Another fine display of leadership skills, then, Dad.’

‘Fuck you, you pissing little half-breed, I’ll kill you…’

‘Oh give it a rest, old man,’ said Saul, disgusted. ‘You need me, you know it, I know it, so shut up with your stupid threats.’ He returned his attention to the tunnel. He jumped up and grabbed the top of the paper, pulled it down with him when he fell.

It came away in his hands. He spread it out.

It was a poster.

It was designed by someone with Adobe Illustrator, a sixth-form aesthetic and too much time. Garish and jumbled, a confusion of fonts and point sizes, information crowding itself out and details fighting for space.

A line drawing took up most of the sheet: a grotesquely muscled man in sunglasses standing impassive behind a twin-deck turntable. He stood with his arms folded, as the chaotic writing exploded around him.

junglist terror!!! it exclaimed.

One night of Extreme Drum an’ Bass Badness!

10 pounds entry, it exclaimed, and gave the address of a a club in the Elephant and Castle, in the badlands of South London; and a date, a Saturday night in early December.

Featuring da Cream of da Crop, Three Fingers, Manta, Ray Wired, Rudegirl K, Natty Funkah…

Rudegirl K. That was Natasha.

Saul let out a little cry. He bent slightly, his breath pushed from him.

‘He’s telling us,’ he hissed to King Rat. ‘He’s inviting us.’

Something was scrawled on the bottom of the poster, an addendum in a strange ornate hand. Also featuring a special guest! it proclaimed. Fabe M!

Jesus he was pathetic! Saul thought. He sank slowly back against the wall as he grasped the paper. Fabe M! Look, he’s trying to play games, thought Saul, but this isn’t his environment, he doesn’t know what to do, he can’t play with these words…

It made him feel obscurely comforted. Even in the misery of knowing that his friends were in the hands of this creature, this monster, this avaricious spirit, he felt a triumph in the ineptitude with which his foe stumbled on jargon. He was trying for nonchalance, scribbling an addition in Drum and Bass style, but the language was unfamiliar and he had stumbled. Fabe M! It sounded stupid and contrived. He wanted Saul to know that he had Fabian, that Fabian would be at the club, but he was not on his home ground, and his clumsy affectation showed that.

Saul found himself chuckling, almost ruefully.

‘Bastard can’t play no more.’ He crushed the paper and threw it at King Rat, who had been hovering nervously, resentfully. King Rat snatched it out of the air. ‘Fucker’s telling us to come and get them,’ said Saul, as King Rat opened out the sheet.

Saul pushed past King Rat, kicked his way through the bodies of the rat dead.

‘He’s operating like a fucking Bond villain,’ he said. ‘He wants me. Knows I’ll come for him if he dangles my friends in front of me.’

‘So what’s a rat to do?’ said King Rat.

Saul turned and stared at him. He knew, quite suddenly, that his eyes were as hidden to King Rat as King Rat’s were to him.

‘What am I going to do?’ Saul said slowly. ‘A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge. I’m going to go, of course. I’m going to Junglist Terror. To rescue my friends.’ He could feel that sentiment within him which had disturbed him before, a part of him saying fuck it, don’t go, it’s not your problem any more.

That was King Rat’s blood. Saul would not listen to it. I am what I do, he thought, furiously.

There was a long silence between the two of them.

‘You know what?’ said Saul finally. ‘I think you should come too. I think you will.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Squadrons of rats spread out across London. Saul harangued them in foetid alleys, behind great plastic bins. He raged to them about the Piper, told them that their day had come.

The massed ranks of the rats stood quivering, inspired. Their noses twitched; they could smell victory. Saul’s words broke over them like tides, swept them up. He communicated with them by his tone; they knew they were being commanded, and after centuries of furtive skulking they became brave, puffed up with millennial fervour.

Saul ordered them to prepare. He ordered them to search out the Piper, to bring Saul information, to find his friends. He described them, the black man and the short woman being kept hostage by the Piper. The rats did not care about the people being held. They represented nothing except a task set by Saul.

‘You are rats,’ Saul told them, sticking out his lower lip and jerking his head back like Mussolini. They gazed at him, a shifting mass of followers, peering out from all the nooks and crannies of the building site which they had congregated. ‘You’re the sneakers, the creepers, the rat-burglars. Don’t come to me afraid of being seen, don’t come to me with fears of the Piper’s revenge. Why will he see you? You’re rats… if he sees you you’re a failure to your species. Stay hidden creep in the spaces in between, and find him, and tell me where he is.’

The rats were inspired. They longed to follow him. He dismissed them with a wave and they scattered hr short-lived bravado.

Saul knew that beyond the range of his voice, the rats’ fear would quickly return. He knew that they would hesitate. He knew they would slow down as they scaled walls, look around anxiously for him to shout them on, and that they would fail. He knew: they would slink back to the sewers and hide until he found them and urged them out again.

But maybe one would be brave or lucky. Maybe one of his rats would scale the walls that divided the Piper’s sanctuary from the outside, and pick a way through the barbed wire, scamper along the pipes and the cables, cross the wasteland, and find him.

Somewhere, squeezed into the air-conditioning housing on the top of a financial building in the heart of the City, or in a bitumen-sealed hole under a sub-urban railway bridge, or in a room with no windows in an empty hospital beyond Neasden, or in the high tech vaults of a bank to the west of Hammersmith, or in the attic above a bingo hall in Tooting, the Piper was holding Natasha and Fabian, waiting out the week before Junglist Terror.

Saul suspected that the Piper would avoid the gaze of rats and spiders and birds. He was not afraid of his adversaries, but there was no point advertising his presence. He had issued his challenge, had told them the night that they would die. The Piper had issued them with invitations to their own executions.

It might be that he was only concerned with Saul, with the half-and-half, the rat-man he could not control, but he must suspect that Anansi would be there, too, and King Rat, and Loplop. They were not brave or proud. They were not ashamed to turn down challenges. But they knew that Saul was the only thing that the Piper could not control, that Saul was the only chance they had, and they knew they must be there to help him. If he did not survive, they could not.

The rats spread throughout London.

Saul was alone amidst the rubble and the scaffolding.

He stood in the centre of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen.

On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’ underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their facades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that spilt at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed.

This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Evens as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt it square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down.

He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city’s bonds; and he had known then that he had made off it an enemy. The windows which loomed over reminded him of that.

In the corner of the square lurked obscure building machines, piles of materials and pickaxes, bags of cement covered with blue plastic sheeting. The looked defensive and overwhelmed. Just in front them stood the remnants of the building that had been pulled down. All that remained was a section of its front, a veneer one brick deep, with gaping, glassless holes where windows had been. It seemed miraculous that it could stand. Saul walked over the broken ground towards it.

There were lights on in a few of the rooms that overlooked him and, as he walked silently, Saul even caught sight of movement here and there. He was not afraid. He did not believe that anyone would see him; he had rat blood in his veins. And if they did, they might be surprised to see a man striding by lamplight in the forbidden space of a nascent building, but who would they tell? And if someone were, unbelievably, to call the police, Saul could simply climb and be gone. He had rat blood in his veins. Tell the police to call Rentokil, he thought. They might have a better chance.

He stood under the free-standing facade. He stretched his arms up, prepared to scramble over the city himself, to join his emissaries in their search. He did not believe that he would find Fabian or Natasha or the Piper, but he could not fail to look for them. To acquiesce in the Piper’s plans would be to abrogate his own power, to become collaborator. If he were to meet the Piper on the ground the Piper had specified, he would be dragged there, he would be unwilling. He would be angry.

He heard a noise above him. A figure swung into view in one of the empty window-frames. Saul was still. It was King Rat.

Saul was not surprised. King Rat followed him often, waited until the rats had left, then poured scorn on his efforts, ridiculed him in agonized contumely, incoherent with rage at the behaviour of the rats who had once obeyed him.

King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand. He crouched, his left arm dangling down between his legs, his head lowered towards his knees. Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero Batman or Daredevil. Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of an epic graphic novel.

‘What do you want?’ Saul said finally.

In a sinewy sliding movement King Rat emerged, from the window and landed at Saul’s feet. He bent his knees on landing, then rose slowly just before him.

His face twisted.

‘So what silly buggers are you playing now, cove?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Saul and turned away.

King Rat grabbed him and swung him back to face him. Saul slapped the other’s hands down, his eyes wide and outraged. There was a horrible unease moment as Saul and King Rat stared at each other their shoulders wide, their fists ready to strike. Slow and deliberately, Saul reached up and pushed King on the chest, shoved him slightly back.

His anger boiled up in him and he shoved King Rat again, growled and tried to make him fall. He punched him suddenly, hard, and images of his father raced through his mind. He felt a desperate desire to kill King Rat. It shocked him how fast the hatred could overtake him.

King Rat was stumbling slightly on the uneven ground, and Saul reached down to snatch up a half brick. He bore down on King Rat, flailing brutally with his weapon.

He swung it at King Rat’s head, connecting and sending his opponent sprawling, but King Rat hissed with rage as he fell. He rolled painfully across the shattered ground and swung his legs up at Saul, taking him down. The fight became a violent blur, a flurry of arms and legs, nails and fists. Saul did not aim, did not plan; he flailed in rage, feeling blows and scratches bruise him and rip his skin.

Blood exploded from a vicious strike below his eye and his head rocked. He slammed his brick down again but King Rat was not there, and the brick struck stone and burst into dust.

The two rolled and grappled. King Rat slid from Saul’s grip and hovered like a gadfly, ripping him open with a hundred cruel scratches and dancing out of the range of retaliation.

Saul’s frustration overwhelmed him. He suddenly broke off his frenzied attack with a shouted curse. He stalked away across the rubble.

Another vicious half-fight. He could not kill him.

King Rat was too fast, too strong, and he would not engage Saul properly, he would not risk killing Saul, King Rat wanted Saul alive, for all that he was growing to hate him for his following among the rats, for his refusal to obey him.

King Rat shouted scornfully after him. Saul could not even hear what he said.

He felt blood well from the deep scratches on his face and he wiped himself as he began to run, surefooted despite the terrain. He threw himself at one of the walls which overlooked him, scrambled up its tender surface, slipping by those unadorned windows, leaving a long smear of blood and dirt on his way up the bricks.

He stared briefly behind him. King Rat sat forlornly on the hulking piles of cement. Saul turned away from him and set out over the top of London. He looked around him as he moved, and sometimes he stopped and was still.

On the top of a school, somewhere behind Paddington, he saw harsh security lights catching on billowing cobweb suspended below the railings topped the building. The fragile thing was empty an long deserted, but he lowered himself to the ground and stared around him. There were other, smaller webs below it, still inhabited, less visible without the accumulated dust of days.

He lowered his lips to these webs and spoke in a voice he knew sounded removed and intimate, like King Rat’s. The spiders were quite still.

‘I need you to do what I say, now,’ he whispered. ‘I need you to find Anansi, find your boss. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Tell him I need to see him.’

The little creatures were still for a long time. They seemed to hesitate. Saul lowered himself again.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘spread the word.’

There was another moment’s hesitation, then the spiders, six or seven of them, tiny and fierce, took off at the same moment. They left their webs together, on long threads, little abseiling special forces, disappearing down the side of the building.

Fabian drifted on waves.

He was stuck very deep in his own head. His body made itself felt occasionally, with a fart or a pain or an itch, but for the most part he could forget it was even there. He was conscious of almost nothing except perpetual motion, a tireless pitch and yaw. He was not sure if it was his body or only his mind which was lulled by the liquid movement.

There was a Drum and Bass backdrop to the hypnagogic rolling. The soundtrack never stopped, the same bleak, washed-out track that he had heard from Natasha’s stairs.

Sometimes he saw her face. She would lean over him, nodding gently in time to the beat, her eyes unfocused. Sometimes it was Pete’s face. He felt soup trickle down his throat and around his mouth, and he swallowed obligingly.

Most of the time he lay back and surrendered to the rocking motion in his skull. He could see almost anything when he just lay back and listened to the Jungle filtering from somewhere close by, twisting around him in a tiny dark room, oppressive, stinking of rot.

He spent a lot of time looking at his artwork in progress. He was not always sure it was there, but when he thought of it and relaxed into the beat, it invariably appeared, and then he would make plans, scribble charcoal additions in each corner. Changing this canvas was so easy. He could never quite remember the moment when he drew, but the changes appeared, bright and perfect.

He became more and more ambitious in his changes, going over old ground, rewriting the text at the centre of his piece. In no time at all it was changed beyond recognition, as smooth and perfect as computer graphics, and he stared at the legend he could not quite remember choosing. Wind City, it said.

Fabian swallowed the food he found in his mouth and listened to the music.

Natasha spent most of her time with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to open them at all. Her fingers knew every inch of her keyboard, and she spent her time playing Wind City, tweaking it, changing it in slight and subtle ways, to fit the exigencies of her mood.

Occasionally she would open her eyes and see with surprise that she stood in unfamiliar environs, that she was in the centre of a dim, stinking space, that Fabian danced horizontally, lying down nearby, food drying on his face, and that her keyboard was not in front of her after all. But when she tweaked Wind City, it changed anyway, it did what she wanted, so she closed her eyes and continued, her fingers flying over the keys.

Sometimes Pete would come and feed her, and she would play him what she had done, still with her eyes closed.

The rats had given up in fear and confusion. The great cadres that had set out earlier in the night had dried up, had slunk home to the sewers, but here and there the braver souls continued the search, as Saul had hoped they would.

In the streets of Camberwell they searched the catacombs of old churches. On the Isle of Dogs they ran past Blackwall Basin and scoured the decrepit business park. The rats worked their way along the great slit of the Jubilee Line extension, past vast hulking machines that tunnelled through the earth.

Their numbers dwindled. As the night wound on, more and more gave in to hunger and fear and forgetfulness. They could not work out why they were running so hard. They could no longer remember what their quarries looked like. One by one they slipped back into the sewers. Some fell prey to dogs and cars.

Soon there were only a very few rats left searching.

‘Little bird tell me you want talk to me, bwoy.’

Saul looked up.

Anansi descended from the bough of a tree above him. He moved elegantly, belying his size and weight, slipping smoothly down one of his ropes, utterly controlled.

Saul leaned back. He felt the cold weight of the gravestone behind him.

He was sitting quietly in a small cemetery in Acton. It was a tiny space that straddled the overland train line, tucked behind a small industrial estate. It was overlooked on all sides by ugly functionality, a set of grotesque flattened factories and suburban warehouses, uncomfortable in this residential zone.

Saul had wandered West London for a time and entered the graveyard to eat and rest, here amid the crammed urban dead.

The stones were nondescript, apologetic.

Anansi came to the ground silently a few feet from him, stalked past the low grey markers and crouched beside him.

Saul glanced at him, nodded in greeting. He did not offer Anansi any of the old fruit he had scavenged. He knew he would not take it.

Saul sat and ate. ‘Now was it really a little bird, Nansi?’ he asked mildly. ‘How is Loplop?’

Anansi jerked his head.

‘Him still screaming angry, bwoy. Him mad, too. Them can’t understand him, the birds dem. Him have lost a kingdom again, think you take it from him.’ Anansi shrugged. ‘So we no have no birds. Just my little spiders and the rats, and you and me.’

Saul bit into his bruised apple.

‘And Loplop?’ he asked, and paused. ‘And King Rat? They going to be there with us? They going to be there when we take him?’

Anansi shrugged again. ‘Loplop is nothing, whether him there or not. King Rat? You tell me, bwoy. He’s your daddy…’

‘He’ll be there,’ said Saul quietly.

The two sat for a while. Anansi rose presently and walked to the railing in front of them, looked over at the train-line below.

‘I’ve sent the rats to find the Piper,’ said Saul, ‘but they’ll fail. They’re probably all sitting stuffing their bellies right now. They’ve probably forgotten what it is I wanted them to do…’ He smiled humourlessly. ‘We’re going to face him on his terms.’

Anansi said nothing. Saul knew what he was thinking.

Anansi had to come to the Junglist Terror, because Saul would be there. Saul was the only chance he had to defeat the Piper, but he knew it was a tiny chance; he knew that he was walking into a trap, that by being there he was doing exactly what the Piper wanted. But he had no choice. Because if he were not there, Saul’s chances of defeating the Piper were even smaller, and if Saul failed, the Piper would have them all, the Piper would hunt Anansi down and kill him.

It was paradoxical. Anansi, King Rat, they were animals. Preserve yourself, that was the whole of their law. And that law would compel them to go to Junglist Terror. To their almost certain death. Because Saul had to go, because of his human friends, because Saul was refusing to act as an animal.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.

They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father’s son.

Anansi looked back at Saul and shook his head slightly.

Saul returned his gaze.

‘Let’s talk about what we’re going to do, Nansi,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a few plans… let’s not let everything go this fucker’s way.’

They had spiders, they had rats… they had Saul.

The Piper would have to make a choice. One of the armies would be defeated as soon as they all entered the fray, but the Piper had to make a choice. Anansi and his troops had half a chance of remaining free from the Piper’s thrall. And so did the rats.

A handful of rats still scoured London for… something…

They could not remember exactly what.

These were the pride of the nation. These were the bravest, the fattest and strongest and sleekest, the leaders of the pack.

As smooth as seals through the water they roamed.

One raced like a chubby bullet along the Albert Embankment.

It had come up from the kitchens of St Thomas’s Hospital, next to Waterloo, there on the South Bank of the river. It had snatched food to fortify itself, had searched the attic spaces and cellars. It had run like a ghost through the hospital, leaving its footprints in thick dust, dirtying obscure and forgotten diagnostic machinery.

It had passed through others territories, but it was a great big animal, and it was on royal business. They did not challenge it.

It had found nothing. It made its way out of the building.

In the open space it scampered along the bank of the river towards the medical school.

The Thames glinted balefully beside it, oozing fatly through the city. On the opposite bank stood Westminster Palace, London’s absurdly crenellated seat of power. Its many lights flickered on the river’s skin.

The rat stopped.

Lambeth Bridge loomed up over the water before it, darkening the muck of the Thames.

An indistinct shape bobbed sullenly in the water beside it. An ancient barge, one of the various hulks that littered the river, untended and ignored. It heaved gently to and fro in the current, little waves slapping its greasy boards like petulant children. The corpse of a boat, its black wood leprous and decaying, a vast tarpaulin slung across it like a shroud.

The rat moved forward nervously, stopped, uncertain.

It strained its ears. It could hear something, faint and sinister. Sounds emanating from under the heavy waterproof cloth.

The barge rocked back and forth. The water was digesting it. But in the meantime, before the wood splintered and dissolved into the Thames, someone was on the vessel, desecrating it, interrupting its long death.

Two old ropes still tethered it to the bank. One dipped in an elegant curve below the surface of the water, but the other was nearly taut. Tentative, the rat stepped onto the mooring. Like a tightrope walker it scurried over the water.

It slowed as it approached the boat. Foreboding flooded its tiny brain, and it would have turned to run if it could, but the rope was too narrow. The rat was stuck with its choice, its impetuous courage.

The rope was strung like a necklace, with huge lumpy beads designed to impede a rat’s progress. But unable to turn back, and dreading the water, the rat was tenacious. It hauled itself over the impediments until only a few feet of rope remained.

Stealthy now, silent, the rat continued. The sound from the barge was clearer now, a low repeated thump, a thin, plaintive wailing, the creaking of wood under moving bodies. With the lightest of touches the rat set foot on the barge.

It crept around to the side, seeking a gap in the tarpaulin. It could feel vibrations in the wood that were nothing to do with the water.

Slinking below the boat’s lip, the rat found a place where the material was rucked up, where it could creep through tunnels left between folds in the heavy canvas.

It made its way through this maze until it could hear soft murmurings. It could feel the tarpaulin opening up around it.

With a nose twitching maniacally, the rat crept forward, peered furtively up into the barge.

There was an incredible stink. A mixture of decay, food, bodies and old, old tar. The tarpaulin was stretched out on a frame to make the barge a floating tent. The rat could see by the weak light of a torch suspended from the frame. It pointed directly down and its ambient light was poor, so everything in the room was glimpsed, half-seen, noticed briefly as the motion of the boat swung the torch one way, then lost as its oscillations took it away again.

A low, very quiet bass thump pervaded the tiny space.

In one corner a man lay on the floor. He looked feverish, moved his arms and legs as if he were dancing, his face thrashing uneasily from side to side.

A woman stood nearby, facing away from him. Her eyes were closed. She nodded her head and moved her hands in abstract, exact patterns in front of her, her fingers flying, tracing intricate motions.

Their clothes were dirty. Their faces were thin.

The rat stared at them briefly. Saul’s descriptions were muddled in its mind, but it knew that these two were important, it knew that it had to tell Saul what it had found. It turned to run.

A foot slammed down on its escape route, closing off the way through the cloth.

The rat bolted in terror.

It ran around and around the room, everything a dark blur, between the legs of the standing woman, under the arms of the lying man, scratching madly at the cloth all around in a frenzy of fear.

Then suddenly it heard a quick whistling, a jaunty marching tune, and it stopped running, filled with wonder and amazement. The whistling segued gently into the sounds of sex, and the slopping of rich, fatty food falling to the ground, and the rat turned and marched in the direction of the sound, eager to find all these good things.

Then the whistling stopped.

The rat was staring into a man’s eyes. Its body was held fast. Frantic, it bit down, drew blood, savaged the fingers which gripped it, but they did not relax.

The eyes gazed at it with a lunatic intensity. The rat began to scream in terror.

There was a brief and sudden motion.

The Piper slammed the rat’s head against the wooden floor again and again, until it had lost its definition, become just a flaccid, indistinct appendage.

He held the little corpse up to his face, pursed his lips.

He reached down for the small ghetto-blaster on the floor, and lowered the volume still further. Wind City could still be heard, but now it was almost subliminal.

Fabian and Natasha turned simultaneously, looked at him in confusion and surprise.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, mollifying. ‘You’ll have to listen really hard. I have to turn it down a bit. We’re attracting attention. We don’t want to do that yet, right?’ He smiled. ‘Save that for the club. Right?’

He moved the ghetto-blaster closer with his foot. Spent batteries lay all around it, moving uneasily with the current.

Natasha and Fabian subsided into their previous poses.

Fabian sank back and began to paint.

Natasha continued to play Wind City. They both strained their ears a little, and heard what they were looking for.

Warily, the Piper lifted a corner of the cloth. His pale eyes scanned the darkness around the boat.

No one was passing by on Albert Embankment; Pete saw by the lights of the Houses of Parliament.

He reached out and dropped the rat’s body into the Thames.

It circled, one speck of dirty darkness among many in the water. The current pulled it slowly, tugging it beyond Westminster, carrying the little cadaver way out to the east.