There were now more rats than humans, approximately three for every man, woman and child, and the odds kept growing in their favour. They grew bolder each day, and had become quite brazen about their battle for occupancy. It had been said that in a city as crowded as London you were never more than fifteen feet away from a rat. Scientists warned that when the distance between rodent and human lowered to just seven feet, conditions would be perfect for the return of the plague. The flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, sucked up diseased rat blood and transported it to humans with shocking efficiency.
A great black patch shimmered across the road like a boiling oil slick, splitting and vanishing between the buildings. Without realising it, he found himself gripping the sweat-slick wheel so tightly that his nails were digging into his palms.
Rattus rattus. No one knew where the black rat had originated, so their Latin name was suitably unrevealing. The brown ones — the English ones, Rattus norvegicus — lived in burrows and came from China. They grew to nearly a foot and a half, and ate anything at all. They could chew their way through brick and concrete; they had to keep chewing to stop their incisors from growing back into their skulls. The black ones were smaller, with larger ears, and lived off the ground in round nests. Edward had woken in the middle of the night two weeks ago and found a dozen of them in his kitchen, feeding from a waste bin. He had run at them with a broom, but they had simply skittered up the curtains and through a hole they had made in the ceiling to the drainpipes outside. The black ones were acrobats; they loved heights. Although they were less aggressive, they seemed to be outnumbering their brown cousins. At least, he saw more of them each day.
He fumigated the furniture and carpets for ticks and fleas, but still developed clusters of painful red welts on his ankles, his arms, his back. He was glad that Gill was no longer here, but missed her terribly. She had slipped away from him, her mind distracted by a future she could not imagine or tolerate.
Damon and Matthew lived with their father above offices in Hoxton, having bought the building at the height of the area’s property boom. These had once been the homes of well-to-do Edwardian families, but more than half a century of neglect had followed, until the district had been rediscovered by newly wealthy artists. That bubble had burst too, and now the houses were in fast decline as thousands of rats scampered into the basements.
As Edward climbed the steps, spotlights clicked on. He could hear movement all around him. He looked up and saw the old man through a haze of white light. Gill’s father was silently watching him from an open upstairs window.
There was no bell. Edward slapped his hand against the front door glass and waited. Matthew answered the door. What was it about the over-religious that made them keep their hair so neat? Matthew’s blond fringe formed a perfect wave above his smooth scrubbed face. He smiled and shook Edward’s hand.
“I’m glad you could make it,” he said, as though he’d invited Edward to dinner. “We don’t get many visitors.” He led the way upstairs, then along a bare white hall into an undecorated space that served as their living quarters. There were no personal effects of any kind on display. A stripped-oak table and four chairs stood in the centre of the bright room. Damon rose to shake his hand. Edward had forgotten how alike the brothers were. They had the eyes of zealots, bright and black and dead. They spoke with great intensity, weighing their words, watching him as they spoke.
“Tell me what happened,” Edward instructed, seating himself. He didn’t want to be here any longer than was strictly necessary.
“Father can’t get around any more, so we moved him from his quarters at the top of the house and cleaned it out for Gillian. We thought if we couldn’t cure her we should at least make her feel secure, so we put her up there. But the black rats…”
“They’re good climbers.”
“That’s right. They came up the drainpipes and burrowed in through the attic, so we had to move her. The only place we could think where she’d be safe was within our congregation.” Ah yes, thought Edward, the Church of Latter-Day Nutters. I remember all too well. Gill had fallen out with her father over religion. He had raised his sons in a far-right Christian offshoot that came with more rules than the Highway Code. Quite how he had fetched up in this biblical backwater was a mystery, but Gill was having none of it. Her brothers had proven more susceptible, and when the plague rats moved in the two of them had adopted an insufferably smug attitude that drove the children further apart. Matthew was the father of three immaculately coiffed children whom Edward had christened “the Midwich Cuckoos”. Damon’s wife was the whitest woman Edward had ever met, someone who encouraged knitting as stress therapy at Christian coffee mornings. He didn’t like them, their politics or their religion, but was forced to admit that they had at least been helpful to his wife. He doubted their motives, however, suspecting that they were more concerned with restoring the family to a complete unit and turning Gill back into a surrogate mother.
“We took her to our church,” Matthew explained. “It was built in 1860. The walls are three feet thick. There are no electrical cables, no drainpipes, nothing the smallest rat could wriggle its way into. The vestry doors are wooden, and some of the stained-glass windows are shaky, but it’s always been a place of safety.”
Edward had to admit that it was a smart idea. Gill’s condition was untreatable without access to a psychiatrist and medication, and right now the hospitals were nightmarish no-go areas where rats went to feast on the helpless sick.
Matthew seated himself opposite. “Gillian settled into the church, and we hoped she was starting to find some comfort in the protection of the Lord. Then some members of our congregation started spending their nights there, and she began to worry that they were bringing in plague fleas, even though we fumigated them before entering. We couldn’t bear to see her suffer so we built her a special room, right there in the middle of the apse-”
“-We made her as comfortable as we could,” Damon interrupted. “Ten feet by twelve. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor, a lockable door and a ventilation grille constructed from strong fine mesh.” He looked as sheepish as a schoolboy describing a woodwork project. “Father directed the operation because he’d had some experience in carpentry. We moved her bed in there, and her books, and she was finally able to get some sleep. She even stopped taking the sleeping pills you used to give her.” The pills to which she had become addicted when we lived together, thought Edward bitterly. The habit I was blamed for creating.
“I don’t understand,” he said aloud. “What happened?”
“I think we’d better go over to the church,” said Matthew gently.
It wasn’t far from the house, smaller than he’d imagined, slim and plain, without buttresses or arches, very little tracery. The former Welsh presbytery was sandwiched between two taller glass buildings, commerce dominating religion, darkening the streets with the inevitability of London rain.
Outside its single door sat a barrel-chested black man who would have passed for a nightclub bouncer if it weren’t for the cricket pads strapped on his legs. He lumbered aside as Damon and Matthew approached. The small church was afire with the light of a thousand coloured candles looted from luxury stores. Many were shaped like popular cartoon characters: Batman, Pokemon and Daffy Duck burned irreverently along the altar and apse. The pews had been removed and stacked against a wall. In the centre of the aisle stood an oblong wooden box bolted into the stone floor and propped with planks, like the back of a film set. A small door was inset in a wall of the cube, and that was guarded by an elderly woman who sat reading in a high-backed armchair. In the nave, a dozen family friends were talking quietly on orange plastic chairs that surrounded a low oak table. They fell silent with suspicion as Edward passed them. Matthew withdrew a key from his jacket and unlocked the door of the box, pushing it open and clicking on a light.