Since the soldiers had taken Sholl from Hampstead Tube, and installed him, unspoken, at their head, there had been several nights. Celebrations and preparations, and now this, their last night together. Sholl knew it, and he wondered who else did.
They built a fire. Sholl pushed it with a stick, watched its sparks.
When the light fell and they finished eating, Sholl started them telling stories. Everyone alive had the kind of story he wanted: set just before the war broke out, as things began to turn, the shocks of knowledge.
The moment the reflections went wrong.
“First time,” said one man, interspersing his words with smoking, taking his time, “I knew first time. You think something like that, something so insane, you’ll think you’re mad, you’ll think of excuses, but I knew first time that it was the world that was wrong, not me. I was all covered in shaving foam, and I look down to rinse it, and when I look up again my reflection was waiting for me. It hadn’t looked down at all. It had pulled the razor sideways, was bleeding all across its foam, staring at me. I didn’t even check for blood on my cheek. I knew it wasn’t me anymore.”
“I heard noises,” said a woman. “It kept on mirroring me, but I could hear noises. Coming from in my makeup mirror. I can’t believe it. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. So all slowly, I put my ear up to it.
For ages there’s nothing, and then, totally far off, and echoing, like it’s at the other end of a long corridor, I can hear the sound of a knife being sharpened.”
A man had stood in front of the mirror in his morning nudity, and had seen aghast that where he was detumesced, his reflection was erect. Another’s reflection had spit at him, the gob sliding down the wrong side of the glass. And it was not always their own reflections. One woman told in a voice still hollow at the memory how she had spent long disbelieving minutes at breakfast looking to the mirror beside her husband and back at him, watching his reflection meet her eye—not the eye of her reflection but her own eye—and mouth obscenities at her, calling her cunt cunt cunt while her husband read his newspaper, and now and then glanced up and smiled.
Eventually they asked Sholl what he had seen, how he had known. He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he told them. “Nothing ever changed. It never disobeyed me. I just woke up one day, and it had gone.”
Very soon after that, all the reflections had all gone. Some had come out in the shape of their last mimicking, some had taken hybrid forms, but they had all come out, and nothing was left visible behind the mirrors.
The second day was easier than the first. They moved in little starts. They did not go direct: Sholl had heard rumours about what was in Euston Station. To avoid it, they continued down to where St. Pancras and King’s Cross met in a wedge. There were a surprising number of people in that once-unsalubrious zone. It had become a little commune, perhaps fifty people living together in what had been the WHSmith in King’s Cross Station. There were more, Sholl knew, camped out across the fanning train lines at the back of the station: a tent town had arisen among the brick piles and sheds, adrift in weeds in that open cut in the city.
The soldiers spoke briefly to the locals, bartered cans of soft drink and alcohol from them, examined the little hand-signed notes they used as currency. The people here were nervous, but not terrified. There was something in the angles between Pancras Road and York Way that the imagos did not like, that kept that zone relatively clean. Sholl breathed it in deep, and wished he could stay.
There were nomads from Clerkenwell in the area, the locals said. Men and women were eager to follow mystics, and one such group was nearby, and the soldiers had better be careful. They cut down south, moving cautiously, determined not to be lulled, until they reached the stepped concrete of the Brunswick Centre. They waited there for two hours, in the courtyard at its heart, but the cult they had been warned of did not appear.
The soldiers prepared themselves. This close to their target, they lost their heart, they became afraid to go on, to bring the mission to an end. Though he did not want to, Sholl kept considering the patchogue that had told him where to go. He wondered why it alone had touched him.
Sholl and his soldiers waited, for as long as they could, savouring the little journey they had shared: and when they could not put it off any more, they went on. Past the uprooted trees of Russell Square: down Bedford Place, become an avenue of statues, that the imagos had uprooted from around the city and placed there at regular intervals, their features and outlines changed—Nelson, torn from his column,
laughing hysterically, “Bomber” Harris urinating—and then right, toward their target.
I didn’t think I would be gone so long, or so far. Or is that true? Did I?
I thought—I think I thought—that I’d travel far enough to get away from those of my siblings that know me and knew me, and find others, and see things in this reconfigured city, at its outskirts, and make sense. Of everything. And be in it again, open my doors. And I have seen my people at every place, in all their forms, the patchogues—the patchogues like me—all trapped in their prison uniforms, the other imagos in whatever they wish. It isn’t quite fair, is it, that we who came through, with that strength, who were the first agents in the war, benefit less than those weaker.
Like the Fish of the Mirror. It’s general now, but it was weaker, I suppose, than we who came through.
Everywhere I go, I’m with my people. I see you, too. At the corners of things, scurrying where we’ve not yet met you and destroyed you. I feel the hatred I always do. But I am not sure now where it stops, where I am, where that hatred is and where I begin.
I discover that I do not want the society of kin. I want to be alone.
I want to be alone.
The rails have taken me out of the underworld, into the opened-up flat city of the big sky, the ring of London where buildings sprawl low and uneasy and it is not like a city but like a found landscape, not like a suburb but like an accident, like spillage on the hills. I’ve kept walking. I have continued to walk.
There’s smoke in the sky behind me from the heart of the town. Here the backs of houses that abut my railway line, the synagogues and warehouses, cemeteries and other things look only momentarily emptied—everyone here, all of you, have just stepped out for one second (there are cold lights burning in many houses, I do not know how). Where I see you now you do not belong, you are as much intruder as me. You’re creeping. These are no longer your houses, and you don’t know how to be in them. You would rather hide in a basement, in a cellar, in a broken cinema where the signs are shattered, because that way you know that you are hiding. From me.
Neither of us knows what to do with the city anymore.
I come to the end of the line, and it is dark, and London has lowered itself to the night. There are woods. There are woods here.
Still north, barefoot on the tar roads. Past open-doored cars sleeping like cats. The trees come up to shroud me. Over the biggest road (what am I looking for?) and on to green. Forests at the border.
Deserted schools and playing fields, and through trees that tussle together not as if to block my path but as if it is a game.
The moon’s up—I can hear my siblings in the south, playing. Like whales. I can hear them but I can’t see them, and it is a relief.