The Severed Streets (40 page)

The tunnel that had formed inside his eyes matched, actually, with a tunnel in London that his body was walking into, a railway tunnel.

He looked down.
His bare feet were on gravel.
Beside them was a rail.
The rail was vibrating with the rotary pulse he could also feel from London behind him.
He looked up from it.
There were golden lights ahead, reflecting on the silver of the rail.

He was afraid.

Good.

He pushed reality, which was trying to assert itself, back down inside himself again.
He just had to step forward.
Although there was a roaring up ahead.
Although it was roaring directly at him now to get out of the way.

He had to believe there was more to himself and the universe than what was being roared at him.
Jimmy Quill had taken the longest journey for what he stood for.
Sefton had to do the same.

He stepped into the tunnel and marched quickly towards the light that was coming much more quickly towards him.
There was, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.

All the signifiers he’d seen came together for him, and he was sure he was on the cusp of understanding everything about the universe and his place within it.

That was when the train hit him.

*   *   *

‘No, stop, all right, got you.’

Sefton looked around as hands grabbed him and pulled him aside.
For a terrible moment he thought he must be awake on the dance floor, having been dragged back to life.
For another awful second he was certain he could feel a train rushing past him, feel the air pummelling him, close to his clothes.

Then he looked round.
He saw that he was somewhere new.
Somewhere divorced from both those things and from anything real.
He was in what looked like a cave … no, some of the walls were rock, but some of them were polished, tiled, like an underground station.
Only this wasn’t a real tube station, but something like a stage set, with stark, powerful lights above … or was that him still being back at the club?
He could hear the music still pounding up there, muffled.
There was a hint of the railway tunnel about the arches above too.
He could hear something through the wall, rattling past, carriage after carriage.
He looked away from that; it felt as if death was very near.
There were escalators at the back of the room that seemed to loop back on each other, in an infinite recursion.
The floor looked to be made of newspapers, the headlines and type and photos changing as he looked at them, squirming out of his vision.
He himself was standing on a slight rise, on a pile of objects.
He shifted his weight as if he was still dancing, and some of them rolled down by his feet: a rotted gas mask; a banner for a coronation; a Victorian cartoon of someone he didn’t recognize wearing a sash saying something he didn’t understand; a skull with what looked like a spear point through it.

Someone was still holding him, he realized.
He turned and looked, and the firm pair of hands released him, apparently now convinced he wouldn’t fall.
The Rat King stood there, looking bemused at Sefton.
‘You have my attention,’ he said.
‘You’ve fallen here as so many other things have.
You showed yourself willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.
So I thought I’d do the decent thing: take you one step back in time and save your life.
You’re welcome.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sefton.
He had to sit down on the rubbish.
He was shivering, breathing hard from the close call with death that a few moments ago he’d barely been aware of.
‘Where is this?’
he managed to say after a moment.

‘My home.
Where all the detritus of London comes to rest.
Where what was once significant,’ he held up one of the newspapers, ‘becomes mere panto.’

Sefton didn’t know what to say.
He felt lost and desperate.
He might have reached one of the ‘outer boroughs’, but this ‘Rat King’ had told him back in the bar that he didn’t know the answer to his most urgent question.
He’d almost killed himself to get here – he could feel his body still suffering somewhere – and now it seemed that it all might be for nothing.
‘I-I was hoping to see—’

‘You were after someone else?
Well, tough.
You’ve got me.
Cuppa?’

Sefton looked up and was handed a cup of tea, by … it was the barmaid with no face from the Goat and Compasses.
She now wore a thin, bloody bandage across where her eyes presumably still were not, together with a crown made of a cornflakes packet, and she carried a sword and scales strapped to a belt around what looked to have once been a Fifties party dress.
Her pale masklike face made her look like a statue.
‘Hello Kevin,’ she said.
‘Good luck.
We love you.’

The Rat King rolled his eyes.
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

‘How’s your friend doing?’

‘You mean Ross?
I wish I knew.’

The Rat King put a hand to his mouth in a stage whisper as he took his own cup from her.
‘I don’t know why I took her on.
She breaks all my cups.’

‘Please,’ said Sefton, not drinking his tea, ‘do you know
anything
that could help us find the Ripper?’

The Rat King snickered into the tea.
‘Oh, I’m afraid not.
The major players know to stay away from
me;
they can’t stand that I can read their intentions like a cheap and nasty book.’

‘Well, then, okay, can you take me to Brutus?’

‘What, the Roman bloke?
Et tu Brute
and all that?’

Sefton wanted to kick something.
‘He’s who I met the last time I visited somewhere like this.’

The Rat King sighed theatrically.
‘I don’t
know
everyone who isn’t real.
There isn’t a
phone book.
’ He suddenly seemed to recall, holding up a finger.
‘Wait.
Was there nobody about in his London?
Big, empty place, with just him in it?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’
Sefton found hope springing up inside him again.
Maybe the Rat King was meant to show him the path that led to the object of his quest.

‘Oh.
Right.
You can’t get there from here.’
The Rat King saw the defeated expression on Sefton’s face and laughed again.
‘I know him by one of his many other names.
You didn’t go on the right path today to get to him.
If you haven’t seen him, I should think he’s still got his back to you.
You should be careful of him.
He can be very
demanding.
’

‘So you know what he is?’

‘It’s not for me to share the meanings of the others.
I am only in charge of my own.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘Listen to this policeman!’
The Rat King grinned at the woman with no face, revealing gaps in his stained teeth.
‘Most of those who come here ask mystical questions full of allusions and get a lot of bollocks in return.’

‘He seeks the truth,’ the woman said.
‘He should get it.’

‘You’re right.
He should.’
He reached down and hauled Sefton to his feet, finished his own cup of tea, then threw it down to smash on the pile of rubbish.
‘I am for rebellion.
I stand against order.
I don’t build anything.
I criticize what’s been built.
I am never
satisfied.
I look for you people to
try harder.
A lot of people think of me as a villain.
I often am.’

‘So … are you what’s making the riots happen?’
Sefton suddenly wondered if he’d been trapped by an enemy.

The Rat King looked at him as if he was a foolish child.
‘I don’t make things happen.
Too much like hard work.
I am what those who are not satisfied look to; I am what they have in the back of their minds, pray to, sort of.
I intercede with the power of London and send some of it their way.
If I’ve a mind to.
In roundabout ways.
If I can be bothered.’
He looked again to the woman.
‘I didn’t really like saying all that.
Bit too concrete for me.’

‘So you’re … a god?’
Sefton had been an atheist all his life, but he didn’t know any other way to say it.

‘There are no gods.
But that’s what all the gods say.’
He looked again to the woman.
‘That’s better.
More cryptic.’

‘If that’s what you stand for, why did you save me?’

‘Because, while I don’t know much about your case, I do know that things up there –’ he pointed to the roof again – ‘might be about to get a lot more orderly.
This is the way the British do things, you see: too much chaos, then too much order, swinging from one extreme to the other, always giving them something to complain about.
They say they want a happy medium.
They really don’t.
If you lot manage to nick the Ripper, then things will continue to tick along, with chaos in the mixture.
If you don’t, then…’

‘You’re talking about the extreme right taking power?’

‘The British always love to flirt with that nice Mr Hitler, but they’ve never quite decided to take him home.
Yet.
’ The Rat King stared his off-kilter stare at Sefton, and he got the feeling that his mind was being searched again.
There was no sensation to it at all, and for some reason, what was terrifying and intrusive in dreams was fine here.
‘Yes, you’ve had similar suspicions.
Someone is waiting in the wings to save you all.
Someone likes chaos only up to a certain point, the point where they can march in and make it all better.’

‘Who?’

The Rat King shrugged.
‘I don’t know.
You’re the policeman.’

‘What’s the Smiling Man’s part in all this?’

‘Ah, you’ve met the new boy?’

Sefton was startled at that word.
‘New?’

‘Most of us go back to before you lot could stand upright.
He’s just a kid, relatively speaking.
But he’s made himself very powerful, very quickly.’

‘I always sort of thought he was, you know, the Devil.’

The Rat King burst out into a staccato laugh that became a wheezing cough.
‘Oh, no, dear me, no – the delusions of a child.’
He threw an arm theatrically around Sefton’s shoulders.
‘Everyone you’ve met or heard about during this case has had good and bad sides to them, correct?
That’s one thing that’s getting in the way of your search for meaning: that these days everything’s got a bit mixed up.
Anything seems to be able to mean anything; all the signifiers have been thrown into a barrel and are being picked out at random and assigned to just about anything, and the choice of what means what, as always, seems to be down to those with money and power.
You despair about making accurate judgements about anyone.
Well, I’m here to tell you, boy, it was always thus.
And that
doubt
of yours is the first sign of wisdom.
I liked it when you pondered, on the dance floor, the loveliness of Barry Keel, not that I myself share that opinion.
That doubt of yours must be why Brutus picked you.’

‘He “picked” me?’
Even though it had surprised him to hear it said, Sefton sort of knew it to be true

‘My point is that what you call the Smiling Man isn’t “a force for evil”.
He’s a bloke who’s not real, like me, with his own aims and plans and maybe even a good side.’
The Rat King considered for a moment.
‘Maybe.
I don’t know if the shape he’s made in lets him have one.’

‘The shape he’s made in?’

‘By you lot.
Don’t look so startled.
You people make all of us.
And that’s all you’re going to get about him.
I’ve already said more than I’m allowed.
But the shape I’m made in allows me always to do more than I’m allowed.’
He sniggered at his own cleverness.
‘Oh dear, since you have walked this path and unfortunately found only me, I am obliged to offer help.
What would you like for Christmas?
No, wrong holiday.’
He started to look in the pile of rubbish, throwing aside items which ranged from things that looked rotten to things that looked like precious jewels.
‘This is the rubbish of London,’ he said.
‘It all descends to my level.
Ah, here we are.’
He pulled out a water-stained police notebook, which Sefton saw was one of the ‘special’ notebooks Quill had set aside for the work of his team that a judge might find unbelievable.

Then he realized.
It was Quill’s own notebook.

Sefton put down his tea, took the notebook, opened it, recognized Quill’s handwriting.
He flipped to the most recent page.
He looked to the Rat King again, amazed.
‘This is brilliant.’

‘Glad to be of service.
You haven’t drunk your tea.’

Sefton felt a little abashed as he put the notebook inside his jacket pocket.
‘In everything I’ve read, if you go somewhere outside of the real world, you’re not supposed to eat or drink anything that’s given to you.
Sorry.’

The Rat King laughed.
‘Clever fucker.
I nearly had you obliged to serve me.
See, you made a judgement call.
You can do it.
Even in this horrible new world you people have made.
Bye then.’

Sefton looked in puzzlement between the Rat King and the woman, both of whom were now bowing to him as if this was the end of a play.
‘What—?’

The Rat King clicked his fingers and the lights above them suddenly went out.

TWENTY-THREE

Sefton woke up.
He looked around.
It was early evening.
He was sitting on the pavement, just along from a bus shelter.
People were walking past him without looking at him.
He sniffed.
He’d pissed himself.
So much sweat as well.
He realized he knew this place.
This was exactly where he’d come back last time he’d taken a trip to the outer boroughs; he was near Cannon Street tube.
Why this place?
He had no idea.

He remembered what had happened and urgently looked inside his jacket.
There was Quill’s notebook.
Incredibly.
He’d brought back evidence from outside the world.
Somehow.
He was exhausted, beyond fatigue, but he’d done it.
He’d done it.
He felt … too tired to come to any conclusions about how he felt, but there was a kind of level playing field in his head now.
He had sorted something out inside himself.
He reached for his phone, but his fingers were too numb to dial.
He felt his throat and was sure he wouldn’t be able to say anything if he could.

A car pulled up beside him.
The window slid down, and to his surprise, there was Superintendent Lofthouse.
‘Get in,’ she said.
‘I put some newspaper on the seats.’
She sniffed.
‘Now I realize why.’