‘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.