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.
Part Six. Junglist Terror
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jungle night.
It was in the air. The sharp-dressed youth who congregated on the Elephant and Castle could taste it.
The clouds were low and moving very fast, ruddy with street lamp light, billowing up from behind the skyline. London looked like a city on fire.
Police cars swirled ephemeral through the streets, streaking past those other cars that prowled towards Lambeth, stereos pumping. The strains of Dancehall and Rap, blunted and languorous, and everywhere Drum and Bass, febrile and poised, savage and impenetrable.
The drivers leaned their arms out of open windows, nodded lazily in time to the music. These cars were full, bursting with designer clothes and basslines. For the cruisers, the evening kicked in at the zebra crossings and red lights, when they could stop, engine idling, beats pounding, visible in all their finery. They drove from junction to junction, searching for places to be still.
A hundred slogans boomed out of a hundred car windows, the samples and shouted declarations of the classic tracks being played, a hundred preludes to the evening.
Mr Loverman, came the shouts, and Check yo’self. Gangsta.Jump. Fight the Power. There is a Darkside.
I could just kill a man.
Six million ways to die.
They only had eyes for each other that night. They drove and walked the streets like conquistadors in Karl Kani, Calvin Klein and Kangols. In wafts of cologne the homeboys and rudegirls, the posses and massives claimed the streets south of Waterloo, striding past the intimidated natives as though they were shades.
Touching fists and kissing their teeth, the massed ranks moved in on the venue. Irish boys and Caribbean girls, smooth Pakistani kids, gangstas in huge coats muttering into mobile phones, DJs with record bags, precocious kids aping the studied nonchalance of the elders…
They made their way into the Jungle.
Here and there the police lurked in corners. Sometimes they were judged worthy of a contemptuous glance, a sneer, before the lights changed and the drivers moved on. The police watched them, whispered to their radios in garbled code. The air teemed with their electronic hisses, warnings and prophecies, unheard by the gathering, swamped by urban breakbeats.
The night was fraught, full of looks held too long.
In the dark streets the warehouse shone. Light spilled from its crevices as if it were a church.
Lines stretched out before the entrance. The bouncers, vast men in bomber jackets, stood with arms folded like grotesque gargoyles. Feudal hierarchies asserted themselves: the serfs in line, clamouring at the gates, staring enviously at the DJs and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers of the Drum and Bass scene, who sauntered casually past them and murmured to the guards. For the noblest of them, even checking the guest list was unnecessary.
Roy Kray and DJ Boom, Nuttah and Deep Cover, familiar from a hundred CD covers and posters, were waved in without demur. Even the preposterously proportioned bouncers showed their obeisance, as their impassivity became momentarily more studied. Droit de seigneur was alive and kicking in the Elephant and Castle that night.
If any of the assembled had looked up they might have caught a glimpse of something lurching across the sky, seemingly out of control. A bundle of rags as big as a man, buffeted through the air. It was not at the mercy of the wind: no wind changed direction as violently or as fast as the shapeless mass, no wind could carry such bulk.
Loplop, the Bird Superior, arced and wheeled above the streets, staring down at the dirty map below him, staring up into the night stained orange by diffuse light, falling, rising, his ears filled with ringing.
He could not hear the city. He could not hear the predatory grunting of the cars. He could not hear the thud thud thud emanating from the warehouse. The intricate hairs and bones in his ears had burst, and the canals were blocked with dry blood.
Loplop had only his eyes, and he searched as best he could, weaving silently between buildings, perching on weathervanes and springing into the sky.
The air was slowly thickening with birds. The few that had been awake as Loplop sped by had cried out, pledged their fealty, but he had not heard them. Confused, they had risen from the eaves and the branches of trees, had followed him, screaming out to him, frightened by his wild flight and his ignoring of them. Huge ponderous crows circled him. Loplop saw them and shouted wordlessly, clutching at the authority he had lost.
The birds wove elegantly around each other, their numbers growing. Their eyes darted from side to side in confusion. In the midst of their slow wheeling, Loplop rose and sped and zigzagged and fell — a wild card.
The birds could not obey their general.
Elsewhere in London, other armies were also massing.
The walls and corners of houses were emptying out. From crevices and holes all over the city, the spiders streamed. They scuttled in their millions, little smudges racing across dirty floors and through gardens, descending on threads from building tops. They crawled over each other, a sudden, nervous mass of blacks and browns.
Here and there their squadrons were seen. In children’s bedrooms and backstreets, the night was punctuated by sudden screams.
Many died. Crushed, eaten, lost. Ruined chitin and smeared bodies marked their passing.
Something sparked deep in the spiders tiny brains. A sensation that was not the hunger or fear or nothingness that were previously their lot. Trepidation? Excitement? Vindication?
The city lights glinted minutely on the spiders multiple eyes. Close set and impenetrable, as cold and disinterested as a shark’s… except tonight…
The spiders trembled.
In the wilds of South London, Anansi watched from rooftops. He could feel the air shifting. He could taste the presence of his troops.
The sewers boiled with rats, incited to a frenzy.
Their Crown Prince had passed among them. Saul had spread the word. He had commanded them, controlled them, sent them forth.
The rats surged through the tunnels like a flash flood. Smaller tributaries streamed into the main branch, bodies on bodies, fat and fast.
They poured under the streets and over the skyline. Up in the canopy of the city, in the thin air, rats bounded over walls and between partitions, scrabbled along slates and behind chimneys.
The river was no obstacle: they found their way across almost without pause.
Different dirt, different packs, a hundred different smells… all the tribes in London running for the south, gnawing on forgotten filth and shaking with adrenaline, ready for battle. An enormous sense of wrong had been encoded in their genes for years, eating them alive like a cancer, and for the first time they could smell a cure.
Rats spewed out of a hundred thousand holes and converged on the wastelands of South London, a scratching, biting mass, hungry and scared, trying to be brave.
Insidiously, furtively, the rats gathered round the warehouse, and waited.