The Drowned World

CHAPTER 11 "The Ballad of Mistah Bones"

Half an hour later Beatrice, Kerans and Dr. Bodkin were able to walk out into the streets. Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks, but fortunately the escaping waters had cut long pathways through them.

Strangman at their head, racing along in his white suit, firing star-shells into the dark streets, the crew charged off in a bellowing pack, those in front balancing a rum keg on their upturned palms, the others brandishing an assortment of bottles, machetes and guitars. A few derisive shouts of 'Mistah Bones!' faded around Kerans as he helped Beatrice down off the gangway, and then the trio were left alone in the silence of the huge stranded paddle-ship.

Glancing up uncertainly at the high distant ring of the jungle looming out of the darkness like the encircling lip of an extinct volcanic cone, Kerans led the way across the pavement to the nearest buildings. They stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchins and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor, sand dollars flowering in the former ticket booth.

Beatrice gathered her skirt in one hand, and they moved slowly down the line of cinemas, past cafes and amusement arcades, patronised now only by the bivalves and molluscs. At the first corner they turned away from the sounds of revelry coming from the other side of the square, and walked westwards down the dim dripping canyons. A few star-shells continued to explode overhead, and the delicate glass sponges in the doorways glowed softly as they reflected the pink and blue light.

" Coventry Street, Haymarket…" Kerans read off the rusting Street signs. They stepped quickly into a doorway as Strangman and his pack charged back across the square in a blaze of light and noise, machetes slashing at the rotting boards over the shop-fronts.

"Let's hope they find something that satisfies them," Bodkin murmured. He searched the crowded skyline, as if looking for the deep black water that had once covered the buildings.

For several hours they wandered like forlorn elegant ghosts through the narrow streets, occasionally meeting one of the roistering crew, ambling drunkenly along the centre of the roadway with the remains of some fading garment in one hand, a machete in the other. A few small fires had been started in the centre of the street junctions, groups of two or three men warming themselves over the flaring tinder.

Avoiding these, the trio made their way across the nexus of streets to the south shore of the sometime lagoon, where Beatrice's apartment house rose up into the darkness, the penthouse lost among the stars.

"You'll have to walk the first ten storeys," Kerans told Beatrice. He pointed to the deep bank of silt which reached upwards in a damp concave slope to the fifth floor windows, part of an immense massif of coagulated loam which, as Strangman had described, now encircled the lagoon and formed an impenetrable dyke against the encroaching sea. Down the side-streets they could see the great viscous mass lifting over the rooftops, flowing through the gutted buildings which in turn helped to rigidify them.

Here and there the perimeter of the dyke moored itself to a heavier obstruction-a church or government office-and diverged from its circular path around the lagoon. One of these evaginations followed the route they had taken on their way to the diving party, and Kerans felt his step quicken as they approached the planetarium. He waited impatiently as the others idled in front of the empty display windows of the old department stores, or gazed at the black slime oozing down the escalators below the office blocks into sluggish pools across the street.

Even the smallest of the buildings had been barricaded before being abandoned, and a makeshift clutter of steel screens and grilles collapsed across the doorways, hiding whatever might lie behind them. Everything was covered with a fine coating of silt, smothering whatever grace and character had once distinguished the streets, so that the entire city seemed to Kerans to have been resurrected from its own sewers. Were the Day of Judgement to come, the armies of the dead would probably rise clothed in the same filthy mantle.

"Robert." Bodkin held his arm, pointing down the darkened street ahead of them. Fifty yards away, its metal dome outlined faintly in the fragmentary light of the distant signal rockets, stood the sombre, shadow-draped hull of the planetarium. Kerans stopped, recognising the orientation of the surrounding roadway, the sidewalks and street lamps, then walked forward, half uncertain, half curious, towards this pantheon which held so many of his terrors and enigmas.

Sponges and red kelp sagged limply across the sidewalk outside the entrance as they approached, picking their way carefully over the banks of mud that lined the street. The groves of wraith-like fucus which had wreathed the dome now flopped limply over the portico, their long draining fronds hanging over the entrance like a ragged awning. Kerans reached up and pushed aside the fronds, then peered cautiously into the interior of the darkened foyer. Thick black mud, hissing faintly as its contained marine life expired in a slow deflation of air-bladders and buoyancy sacs, lay everywhere, over the ticket booths and the stairway to the mezzanine, across the walls and door-panels. No longer the velvet mantle he remembered from his descent, it was now a fragmenting cloak of rotting organic forms, like the vestments of the grave. The once translucent threshold of the womb had vanished, its place taken by the gateway to a sewer.

Kerans began to walk forwards across the foyer, remembering the deep twilight bower of the auditorium and its strange zodiac. Then he felt the dark fluid tilling out across the mud between his feet, like the leaking blood-stream of a whale.

Quickly he took Beatrice's arm, and retraced their steps down the street. "I'm afraid the magic has gone," he remarked flatly. He forced a laugh. "I suppose Strangman would say that the suicide should never return to the scene of his crime."

Attempting to take a shorter route, they blundered into a winding cul de sac, managed to step back in time as a small caiman lunged at them from a shallow pool. Darting between the rusting shells of cars, they regained the open street, the alligator racing behind them. It paused by a lamp post on the edge of the sidewalk, tail whipping slowly, jaws flexing, and Kerans pulled Beatrice after him. They broke into a run and had covered ten yards when Bodkin slipped and fell heavily into a bank of silt.

"Alan! Hurry!" Kerans started to go back for him, the caiman's head pivoting towards them. Marooned behind in the lagoon, it seemed bewildered and ready to attack anything.

Suddenly there was a roar of gunfire, the flames stabbing across the roadway. Flares held above their heads, a group of men appeared around a corner. In front of them was the white-faced figure of Strangman, followed by the Admiral and Big Caesar, shotguns at their shoulders.

Strangman's eyes glittered in the flare light. He made a small bow towards Beatrice, then saluted Kerans. Its spine shattered, the alligator thrashed impotently in the gutter, revealing its yellow underbelly, and Big Caesar drew his machete and began to hack at its head.

Strangman watched it with evil pleasure. "Loathsome brute," he commented, then pulled from his pocket a huge rhinestone necklace, still encrusted with algae, and held it out to Beatrice.

"For you, my dear." Deftly, he strung the strands around her neck, regarding the effect with pleasure. The entwined weeds among the sparkling stones against the white skin of her breast made her look like some naiad of the deep. "And all the other jewels of this dead sea."

With a flourish he was off again, the flares vanishing in the darkness with the shouts of his men, leaving them alone in the silence with the white jewels and the decapitated alligator.

During the next days events proceeded to even greater madness. Increasingly disorientated, Kerans would wander alone through the dark streets at night-by day it became unbearably hot in the labyrinth of alleyways-unable to tear himself away from his mem ories of the old lagoon, yet at the same time locked fast to the empty streets and gutted buildings.

After his first surprise at seeing the drained lagoon he began to sink rapidly into a state of dulled inertia, from which he tried helplessly to rouse himself. Dimly he realised that the lagoon had represented a complex of neuronic needs that were impossible to satisfy by any other means. This blunting lethargy deepened, unbroken by the violence around him, and more and more he felt like a man marooned in a time sea, hemmed in by a mass of dissonant realities millions of years apart.

The great sun beating in his mind almost drowned out the sounds of the looting and revelry, the roars of explosives and shotguns. Like a blind man he stumbled in and out of the old arcades and entrances, his white dinner Suit stained and grimy, jeered at by the sailors as they charged by him, playfully buffeting his shoulders. At midnight he would wander through the roistering singers in the square and sit beside Strangman at his parties, hiding back under the shadow of the paddle-ship, watching the dancing and listening to the beat of the drums and guitars, overlayed in his mind by the insistent pounding of the black sun.

He abandoned any attempt to return to the hotel-the creek was blocked by the two pumping scows and the intervening lagoon seethed with alligators-and during the day either slept in Beatrice's apartment on the sofa or sat numbly in a quiet alcove on the gaming deck 0f the depot ship. Most of the crew would be asleep among the crates or arguing over their spoils, waiting with surly impatience for the dusk, and they left him alone. By an inversion of logic it was safer to stay close to Strangman than to try to continue his previous separate regimen. Bodkin attempted this, withdrawing in a growing state of shock to the testing station-now reached by a precipitous climb up a dilapidated fire escape-but on one of his midnight forays out into the streets of the university quarter behind the planetarium he had been seized by a group of sailors and roughly manhandled. By attaching himself to Strangman's entourage Kerans had at last conceded his absolute authority over the lagoons.

Once he managed to force himself to visit Bodkin, found him resting quietly in his bunk, cooled by a homemade fan and the fading air-conditioner. Like himself, Bodkin seemed to be isolated on a small spur of reality in the centre of the time sea.

"Robert," he murmured through his swollen lips, "get away from here. Take her, the girl-" here he searched for the name "-Beatrice, and find another lagoon."

Kerans nodded, hunching himself inside the narrow cone of cool air projected by the air-conditioner. "I know, Alan, Strangman's insane and dangerous, but for some reason I can't leave yet. I don't know why, but there's something here-those naked streets." He gave up cloudily. "What is it? There's a strange incubus on my mind, I must lift it first."

Bodkin managed to sit up weakly. "Kerans, listen. Take her and go. Tonight. Time doesn't exist here now."

In the laboratory below a pallid brown scum was draped over the great semi-circle of progress charts, Bodkin's dismembered neuronic zodiac, and veiled the stranded benches and fume cupboards. Kerans made a half-hearted attempt to replace the charts that had fallen to the floor, then gave up and spent the next hour washing his silk dinner jacket in a pool of water left behind in one of the sinks.

Perhaps in imitation of himself, several of the crew now also sported tuxedos and black ties. A pantechnicon full of evening wear sealed inside water-tight envelopes had been found in one of the warehouses. Egged on by Strangman, half a dozen of the sailors dressed themselves up, bow ties around their bare necks, and pranced through the streets in tremendous glee, tails flaring and knees high-kicking, like a troupe of lunatic waiters at a dervish carnival.

After the initial abandon, the looting began to take on a more serious note. Whatever his private reasons, Strangman was solely interested in objets d'art, and after a careful reconnaissance identified one of the city's principal museums. But, to his annoyance, the building had been stripped, and his only salvage was a large mosaic which his men removed tile by tile from the entrance hail and laid out like a vast jig-saw on the observation deck of the depot ship.

This disappointment prompted Kerans to warn Bodkin that Strangman might try to vent his spleen on him, but when he climbed up to the testing station early the next evening he found that Bodkin had gone. The air-conditioner had exhausted its fuel, and Bodkin, deliberately it seemed, had opened the windows before he left, so that the entire station steamed like a cauldron.

Curiously, Bodkin's disappearance gave Kerans little concern. Immersed in himself, he merely assumed that the biologist had followed his own advice and moved out to one of the lagoons to the south.

Beatrice, however, was still there. Like Kerans, she had sunk into a private reverie. Kerans rarely saw her during the day, when she would be locked into her bedroom, but at midnight, when it became cool, she would always come down from her penthouse among the stars and join Strangman at his parties. She sat numbly beside him in her blue evening dress, her hair studded with three or four of the tiaras Strangman had looted from the old jewellery vaults, her breasts smothered under a mass of glittering chains and crescents, like a mad queen in a horror drama.

Strangman treated her with a strange deference, not unmarked by a polite hostility, almost as if she were a tribal totem, a deity whose power was responsible for their continued good fortune but nonetheless resented. Kerans tried to stay near her, within her orbit of protection, and the evening after Bodkin's disappearance leaned across the cushions to say: "Alan's gone. Old Bodkin. Did he see you before he left?"

But Beatrice stared out over the fires burning in the square, without looking at him said in a vague voice: "Listen to the drumming, Robert. How many suns are there, do you think?"

Wilder now than Kerans had ever seen him, Strangman danced about the camp fires, sometimes forcing Kerans to join him, inciting the bongo drummers to ever faster rhythms. Then, exhausted, he would slump back on his divan, his thin white face like blue chalk.

Leaning on one elbow, he stared sombrely at Kerans, squatting on a cushion behind him.

"Do you know why they fear me, Kerans? The Admiral, Big Caesar and the others. Let me tell you my secret." Then, in a whisper: "Because they think I'm dead."

In a spasm of laughter, he rocked back into the divan, shaking helplessly. "Oh, my God, Kerans! What's the matter with you two. Come out of that trance." He looked up as Big Caesar approached, doffing the dried alligator's head which he wore like a hood over his own. "Yes, what is it? A special song for Doctor Kerans? Capital! Did you hear that, Doctor? Let's go then, with _The Ballad of Mistah Bones!_"

Clearing his throat, with much prancing and gesticulation, the big negro began, his voice deep and guttural.

With a sudden shout, Strangman leapt from the divan, raced past Big Caesar into the centre of the square, pointing up at the perimeter wall of the lagoon high above them. Outlined against the setting sky was the small square figure of Dr. Bodkin, picking his way slowly across the wooden barrage that held back the creek waters outside. Unaware that he had been spotted by the party below, he carried a small wooden box in one hand, a faint light fizzing from a trailing wire.

Wide awake, Strangman bellowed: "Admiral, Big Caesar! Get him, he's got a bomb!"

In a wild scramble the party dissolved, with the exception of Beatrice and Kerans everyone raced off across the square. Shotguns slammed left and right, and Bodkin paused uncertainly, the fuse wire sparking about his legs. Then he turned and began to edge. back along the barrage.

Kerans jumped to his feet and ran after the others. As he reached the perimeter wall star-shells were bursting into the air, spitting magnesium fragments across the roadway. Strangman and the Admiral were leaping up a fire escape, Big Caesar's shotgun slamming out over their heads. Bodkin had left the bomb in the centre of the dam and was racing away over the rooftops.

Straddling the final ledge, Strangman leapt up on to the barrage, in a dozen strides reached the bomb and kicked it out into the centre of the creek. As the splash died away a cheer of approval went up from those below. Catching his breath, Strangman buttoned his jacket, then slipped a short-barrelled.38 from his shoulder holster. A thin smile glittered on his face. Whipping on the cries of his followers, he set out after Bodkin as he scaled his way painfully up the pontoon of the testing station.

Kerans listened numbly to the final shots, remembering Bodkin's warning and the necessity, for which he bore him no grudge as he had chosen to ignore it, of being swept away himself with Strangman and his crew. He walked slowly back to the square, where Beatrice still sat on the heap of cushions, the alligator head on the ground in front of her. As he reached her he heard the footsteps behind him slowing menacingly, a strange silence fall over the pack.

He swung around to see Strangman saunter forward, a smirk twisting his lips. Big Caesar and the Admiral were at his shoulder, their shotguns exchanged for machetes. The rest of the crew fanned out in a loose semi-circle, watching expectantly, obviously pleased to see Kerans, the aloof medicine-man of a rival juju, get his just deserts.

"That was rather stupid of Bodkin, don't you think, Doctor? Dangerous too, as a matter of fact. We could damn nearly have all been drowned." Strangman paused a few feet from Kerans, eyeing him moodily. "You knew Bodkin pretty well, I'm surprised you didn't anticipate that. I don't know whether I should take any more chances with mad biologists."

He was about to gesture to Big Caesar when Beatrice jumped to her feet and rushed over to Strangman.

"Strangman! For heaven's sake, one's enough. Stop it, we won't hurt you! Look, you can have all these!"

With a wrench she unclasped the mass of necklaces, tore the tiaras from her hair and flung them at Strangman. Snarling with anger, Strangman kicked them into the gutter, and Big Caesar stepped past her, the machete swinging upward.

"Strangman!" Beatrice threw herself at Strangman, stumbled and almost dragged him to the ground by his lapels. "You white devil, can't you leave us alone?"

Strangman twisted her away, breath seething through his clenched teeth. He gazed wildly at the dishevelled woman down on her knees among the jewels, and was about to wave Big Caesar on when a sudden intention tremor flickered across his right cheek. He slapped at it with his open hand, trying to brush it away like a fly, then flexed his facial muscles in an ugly grimace, unable to master the spasm. For a moment his face was twisted in a grotesque gape, like a man struggling in lock-jaw. Aware of his master's indecision, Big Caesar hesitated, and Kerans moved backwards into the shadows under the depot ship.

"All right! God, what a…!" Strangman muttered something thickly to himself and straightened his jacket, the point grudgingly conceded. The tic had faded. He nodded slowly at Beatrice, as if warning her that any future intercessions would be ignored, then barked sharply at Big Caesar. The machetes were tossed aside, but before Beatrice could protest again the entire pack threw itself on Kerans with a series of whoops and yells, hands flailing and clapping.

Kerans tried to sidestep them, uncertain from the circle of grinning faces whether this was merely some elaborate form of horseplay intended to discharge the tension that Bodkin's murder had generated, and at the same time administer a salutary reproof. He skipped around Strangman's divan as the pack closed in, found his escape blocked by the Admiral, who was feinting from side to side in his white tennis shoes like a dancer. Suddenly he sprang forwards and kicked Kerans' feet from under him. Kerans sat down heavily on the divan, and a dozen, oily brown-skinned arms seized him around the neck and shoulders and somersaulted him backwards onto the cobbled ground. He struggled helplessly to free himself, had a glimpse through the panting bodies of Strangman and Beatrice watching from the distance. Taking her arm, Strangman drew her firmly towards the gangway.

Then a large silk cushion was stuffed into Kerans' face, and hard palms began to pound a drum-beat across the back of his neck.