Jane was grateful for the air filters he had used since day one. He was low-risk. What moved in him was little more than the juices of fear.
Jane hurried along Camden Road, one long thoroughfare of orange marks, one of the few places in London where he felt safe despite the road being topped and tailed by white areas: Camden to the south and north, Holloway. Perhaps it was a subconscious alertness to do with this new job; he always felt energised by some new task. Now he felt a tingle in the small of his back at the sight of the petrol station. He had passed this way so many times before without a pause, but now it radiated danger, or at last its potential. Jane tried to see where the threat was emanating. Like many buildings – especially one whose structure was a cheap amalgam of plastic and neon – this one had suffered from the initial blast and subsequent weathering; the shop was little more than a collapsed cabin, the forecourt a black scree of exploded fuel, glass and vehicles.
It took a while to work out why he felt so jumpy, but then he saw the service hatch in the ground; it was off-kilter, no longer flush with its housing. The explosion might have caused it to come off, but if it had it would have turned it into a weapon, flinging it a great distance through the air. This was a lid replaced by someone who didn’t want something to be found, or dragged back into position by someone hiding inside. That thought loosened him a little, and he crouched, trying to quell the melting feeling in his bowels, knowing that to shit or piss here was to bang a dinner gong.
He had to check it. What if it was as he had first thought, a cover for something meant to remain secret? That could only mean food. He would take a bite, just a little to keep him going, and leave a message for whoever had secreted it, telling of a safe place where resources were pooled and a resistance was being established. Maybe the people who used this den were dead and he’d find a treasure trove that he could later lay claim to. If he didn’t, someone else would.
Jane scanned the road north and south again, and peered at the houses of Tufnell Park that rose behind the petrol station. He held his breath so that he could hear more acutely over the suck and blow of his breath in the bicycle mask. No movement. Fear opened up in him like a black flower in poor soil. He picked a way through the rubble of bricks and concrete. Rain fell like something forced through an atomiser, adding faint noise to the picture before him. A hand went to his chest. The wound here that the man down at the lake had inflicted with that sword of his was healed as well as it ever would, but adrenaline was like a wormhole to that moment, opening him up with the memory of pain.
Jane thought of the letter he had begun, years ago, in reply to his son. He had yet to end it and knew that it would never come to Take care, all my love. He kept the latest pages on him, along with a supply of fresh sheets, so that he could add more whenever he was faced with a long wait or a sleepless night. When he felt lonely, or afraid, he found that it helped to shape the part he was working on. Stanley became his distraction and his saviour, although there was really no ‘became’ about it. He had always played this role.
Where was he up to? The delivery room. He had been describing the moment of Stanley’s birth.
Hey Stan, you know, your mummy burst into tears when I told her you were OK, and that you were a boy. I cried myself when the midwife put you in my arms. I sat with you while they took care of Mummy and even then, minutes old, you had your own little characteristics, your own set of expressions. I had to shade your eyes because the sunlight was streaming into the delivery room. I held your tiny hand in mine, and smelled the miraculous scent that was rising from your head. I will never forget that moment for as long as I live. I loved you all through Mummy’s pregnancy, even though I didn’t know what you looked like or how you might behave. In the second when you were born, I knew that I would do anything in my power to protect you from harm.
You will discover music, books and art, things that will sometimes move you to tears with their beauty. There will be friends of your own, and people you will love. There will be great happiness, and some sadness too, but even that is a good thing, an important thing to experience. I can’t wait until you are old enough so that I can play football with you, and laugh and joke with you, and show you all the amazing things there are to see. I’ll take you diving on the Great Barrier Reef. You won’t believe it.
Jane had his fingers under the edge of the hatch, lifting it, thinking of moon wrasse and morwong and blue puller, when he realised that its cack-handed replacement was nothing of the sort. It was a deadly come-on, the bait filaments jangling on a devil fish’s head.
He heard something lurching within and he felt himself hoping it was just his own limbs readjusting to cope with the weight of the hatch, but the sound was all wrong, too deep, too fast, too out of rhythm with what he was doing. He was stepping back, feeling his back give with the strain, about to drop the hatch and run, when a ragged, striped cuff shot out of the shadow, peeling back to reveal a claw, giraffe-tongue purple, each curved tip as sharp as a ceremonial blade thinned almost to invisibility on a whetstone.
Jane felt it grip him and jerk him towards the place of his death.
17. STALL WARNING
Fear made Jane laugh and vomit. He ran hard for maybe two miles, until he was so shattered he could barely stand and had to drop to his knees in order to breathe. He was shaking violently; he could still feel the claws on him squeezing as though to assess his tenderness. He wasn’t sure where he was; he hadn’t really paid any attention to direction. Away was good enough. Now that adrenaline was draining from his muscles he began to become aware of his surroundings. It wasn’t exactly the fire after the frying pan, but it was close. He was on the fringes of Hampstead Heath, the southern tip, where part of Gospel Oak train station, including the railway bridge, had collapsed into what had once been known as Mansfield Road.
They liked to congregate in this great park. Maybe something in its wintered desolation called to them. The desiccated trees against the sky like black fractures in unclean ice, agonised, all the sap bubbled out of them and rehardened like angry amber boils. The scorched, stubbled acreage of earth. The ponds filled with bodies: huge bowls of chilled consommé for them to guzzle. They crisscrossed the heath – Jane had watched them from the safety of a Highgate rooftop with his binoculars – like mendicants folded into their rags, deep in thought. Sometimes they dragged partially denuded victims along behind them by the hair, or a limb, to be stowed in the earth on Parliament Hill, or around the Vale of Health, for consumption later.
Jane struggled to think. The cold was freezing his head, turning him sluggish. It was a constant ache in his temples and nape; it had burrowed under his shoulder blades where it burned in his muscles like a slow blue fire. He remembered there was a bolt-hole in Belsize Park. Ten or fifteen minutes from here. It would mean cutting up by the Royal Free Hospital – hospitals were other places where they liked to bed down – but he had to get inside. The Skinner had gripped him so hard he was worried that the skin might be broken.
He ran up through Pond Street to Haverstock Hill and up past the hospital. There was no sign of anybody. Come night-time, though, this car park, this forecourt and street would be a scrum of bodies. He couldn’t bring himself to think what the hospital interior must be like. Belsize Park, once a desirable enclave of London, with its beautiful Georgian houses and broad leafy lanes, was now a demilitarised zone. The smell of copper was in the air; buildings were thickly painted with blood. Whatever fighting had happened here had been intensely one-sided. Bins rolled around, pushed by the ceaseless fingers of the wind. Glass teeth ringed grimacing black jaws in every single window along the parade of shops. He hurried as best he could through the obstacle course of felled lamp-posts and telegraph wires. Until he reached England’s Lane. At the top of this street was a pub that had been gutted by fire. Inside he saw figures hunched against each other in a corner, under a leaning beam of wood that was mackerel-striped with deep burns. He left them alone. He knew from bitter experience that sometimes such quaking, craven types were really Skinners trying to trick you into coming closer. Sometimes the figures were human, and not as shy or fear-beaten as they seemed. It was best to leave well alone or suffer a preemptive attack. Nobody wanted any comfort any more. Another trait that made humans who they were gradually erased from the banks of race memory.