TWO NIGHTS AGO
Quill had felt all the signifiers, all the meanings of the world collapse at the moment of his death. For just an instant, it had been a relief, an end to the terrifying pain. He saw his old life fall away below him with his body, and suddenly it had been like when he was dying in Mora Losley’s attic, except now there was nothing to hold him back from speeding higher and higher towards … what? To somewhere where mind and matter existed together in a different way.
He felt the heat and closed his eyes. He had hoped for Heaven. Hadn’t he been good? But he already knew that the supernatural in London wasn’t about good and evil.
Sarah and Jessica — the thought of them made him panic and try helplessly to shove himself back down towards his body. They would hear what had happened to him. The hurt they would suffer. He couldn’t help them. It was too much to bear. He pushed such thoughts away and tried to control his non-existent breathing and concentrated on the now.
He was looking at a sign. He was passing under it. He was being forced to read it. He hated what it said. Could what it said be true? No, it mustn’t be, it mustn’t be. That lie was surely meant to be the first step towards breaking him.
Then he woke up. That’s what it felt like. It took him a few moments to process what he was seeing. He was, bizarrely, standing up. He was standing on a muddy, paved street with dung piled in the gutters, between rows of houses that looked Gothic, imperious. He looked around. There were people in all directions, people and horses! Carriages and carts and cabs. He took a step forwards and a man in a cap carrying a tray of apples on his shoulder shoved him out of the way … then looked at him, afraid, doffed his cap and hurried on. He was in London, he realized. He heard the chimes of Big Ben somewhere in the distance. They sounded weird, echoing. It was hard to hear over the clatter of hooves and people, so many people, many more than in the London he knew. This was, what, Victorian? Was he in Victorian times? No, it didn’t feel real, somehow. Certainly, this was nothing like the glimpse of Hell that Costain had reported, but had he really seen anything past what Quill had seen in those first moments? He saw his reflection in a shop window; he was dressed in bowler hat and waistcoat and long coat with tails. He put his hands on his clothes; he could feel. He had a body, but it felt odd, like after a visit to the dentist. There was a small pain in his arm. For some reason it reminded him of being in hospital. Then he noticed: there was something on his arm, where the pain was. He reached to touch it and found his fingers went through something that was only sort of there. He pulled his sleeve round to see. It was a kind of tag that hovered in the air. It was attached right through the fabric, to his flesh, by — he winced as he tugged at it — something like an intravenous connection. Gingerly, he pulled on it, then harder, tried to pull it out-
He reeled and fell against the window, suddenly full of sickening pain.
He waited until the pain left him. It took its time. The people continued to walk past him, amused by him, some afraid of him.
He looked again at the tag. On it was a tiny clock face, a segment of it ticking down to something, along with his name, and … it said he had a job. He was ‘a police detective’. What was this game? It was almost comforting, being immediately given a function. He was sure it wasn’t meant to be reassuring. He thought again of Sarah and Jessica and wondered how far away he was from where they were. It felt as if they were a billion miles away, or rather, an impossible distance; you couldn’t get there from here. There was something, he thought, looking around again, about the squalor of here that said, implicitly, that one would never leave. It was one of many messages written into the shape of the buildings, the air he was breathing. This was a different state from being awake or dreaming. Who he was had been squeezed into a space that was too small. The shape of it was made to limit and control him and make him afraid. There was none of the comforting pantomime of a dream, the ever-present knowledge one could escape.
This was Hell. He knew it. It was telling him what it was.
Suddenly, he coughed. He’d been tasting the air, and the muck of it had slowly built up in his mouth: it was harder to breathe than it should be. He looked around once more and saw that many of those in the street had cloths or scarves across their faces. He could taste industrial smoke on his tongue, see the fog of it in the distance. The faces of some of the children who passed were spattered, as if they had freckles of tar.
There were children in Hell? He looked up and saw a mother carrying a baby. There were babies here? He shouldn’t be shocked. This wasn’t about good and evil. He knew that now. But it meant that the terrible words written on the sign over the gate might actually be true.
There came the sound of a scream. Behind the window he was looking in, there were … children, naked children, and they were being … oh, God! He went to the door, tried to get in, shouted he was police, and knew in that second that he’d done that out of habit but in doing so had submitted to the label this world had given him. The door was locked, so he tried to smash the window, but nothing would break it. The gentlemen inside looked out at him with smiling bemusement as they continued their abuse. Quill looked back to the street. He saw a uniformed policeman and ran to him. He started yelling, pointing out what was going on. The man was extremely deferential. ‘I see that, sir. There’s nothing we can do, I’m afraid, sir. Would you like to take it out on me instead, sir?’
Quill stopped at the look of genuine fear on the face of the officer. He backed away. He went back to the window. He kicked at it a few times. ‘I’ll be back for you,’ he said, impotently. Those inside hardly registered his presence.
He looked away. He walked off. He stumbled across the street.
He’d been shown that because he was a parent. Hell now made him acutely aware that he was walking away and leaving those children to their fate. He tried to find some mental posture that allowed him to feel more comfortable about that. He could not. He thought about Jessica. Hell laughed at him doing that.
The throngs with their top hats and waistcoats and gloves and pith helmets and spats passed, and he started to see it everywhere now, such horror. Child prostitutes in lewd costumes pulled at the trousers of the men and were kicked away or had their hands grabbed and were led away. Beggars with horrifying ailments were lying in the horse shit, some of them just a head and an arm sticking helplessly up out of it, a hopeful expression on their gnawed-away faces.
Quill tried to haul one up out of it, dodging as carts rushed to and fro, but the beggar was screaming and complaining, urging him not to do it. Quill finally managed to heave him out onto the road surface, such as it was, both of them covered in mud, and found he’d rescued just the smallest part of a chest, with arm and head still attached. ‘What did you go and do that for?’ the beggar asked, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Quill pulled him to the side of the road, with the beggar all the while screaming, ‘Put me back!’
He sat the man up against a lamp post. ‘I’ll find you something to eat,’ he said.
‘Fucking newcomers, trying to make themselves feel better! Fuck you!’ The end of the sentence was cut off as a boot from a passerby sent the beggar tumbling into the street once more.
Quill watched as the beggar was run over by the wheels of a cart and, still alive and screaming, was ground back into the muddy centre of the road. He wondered how deep it was there, if there were layers of them down there, some sort of peace to be found.
You couldn’t die here, he realized.
He moved on. What else could he do? He had to see. Hell noted that he had to see. It would therefore enjoy showing him.
He saw the body of a child being thrown out of a house, covered in soot. Other children ran to the door, pounding on it, demanding to be given the work that had … killed … the boy. The boy’s chest started to heave, and he began to cough, black tar bursting from his mouth and nostrils.