Quill moved on.
What could money mean here? Why did people need it? Quill started to realize that there was a pecking order here and, oh, the pecks were precise and they went deep.
In every window, in every building, at the end of every alley, there was something else that made him sick. By the time he’d fought his way to the end of just this street it felt as if he’d been here for days; he was tired to the core, moving through so many people. That would continue forever, said Hell, with interludes where things would get horrifyingly worse. When would one of those happen? Unexpectedly. By surprise.
He heard what sounded like a distant barking, coming from overhead, and looked up. There was something odd in the sky. It was hard to see, past the smog, but there it was, a band of something, as if he was standing on a planet that had rings. Now he was listening for it, he could hear all sorts of animal noises from up there, and Hell, whispering in his mind, told him that was nothing but animals, that that was where most of them were kept. Quill remembered all the times they’d heard about animals being sacrificed, that those who’d done that thought they were making sacrifice to London itself. But what they killed ended up here. He wondered if the foundations of this place were made of all the teeth and fingers and blood that people had cut from themselves in return for power on earth.
He realized that Hell was telling him things in the place in his head where he normally had the Sight, that the Sight had gone from him now. He had no greater feeling for anything. He found he missed it as if it was armour he no longer wore. The lack of it was another thing that added to his complete vulnerability. He moved on. Ahead, there was a building with red curtains at its windows, looking a bit like somewhere official, a post office or something. People with no expression on their faces, looking as if they’d been here a long time, were trudging tiredly into it. Here came someone who was fighting, being dragged into the building by his fellow citizens, shouting and bellowing, and ripping at their clothing. Quill felt a surge of pride and fellow feeling to see someone putting up a fight, but already he knew that the emotion was only there to be pulled away from him, already he was flinching from the blow that was about to come, and he had been here minutes, and would be here forever.
The people going into the building had something in common: the tags on their arms were flashing like Belisha beacons. Their time, Quill realized, was up. What did that mean? What happened in there? Hell felt his animal fear, the way his new body — which was somehow more compromised and pathetic than his old body, as if all the worrying signs of age that Quill had ever felt were packed into it at once — reacted to the smell of the slaughterhouse. Quill felt something inside him start begging and squealing, and he had to clench his teeth to stop terrible pathetic sounds coming from his mouth. This was in the first few minutes, and he had forever ahead of him. Since the end of the Losley case, he had been blissfully without the depression that had occasionally beset him. He’d fooled himself into thinking that his new awareness of a greater purpose to his work had rid him of his ‘black dog’, but here he knew he still had that darkness in him, here he knew it would be forced back into him.
He turned the corner at the end of the street, at a point where many roads met, where the volume of sound actually increased, and he saw the other side of the red-curtained building, the back door, where people stumbled out again, their tags no longer flashing. They had on their faces expressions of new hope, of shattered emptiness, of howling, sobbing pain, sobbing like laughter. He stopped one of them and started asking questions. ‘Ticking down to the next time,’ the woman said, ‘going to get a drink.’ She shouldered past him.
Quill tried to look at his own tag, but he couldn’t now quite bend his shoulder and neck to see how long he’d got. He’d been able to see it before. Things changed arbitrarily, said Hell. He needed to know the clock was there so he’d be afraid of time running out. But he couldn’t see how much time he had left. He could ask others to look, of course, but that would take a negotiation. He would never know if they were telling the truth. That might be why there was money here, because of that horrifying force underneath this … he didn’t want to think of it as a civilization; it was a continuing parody of one.
He walked on. He had nothing else to do. He couldn’t quite believe he still existed. Why was all this here, instead of just simple death? Why cruelty instead of nothingness? He remembered Sefton speculating that the memories of the dead contributed to London ‘remembering’ a powerful being or location. Maybe that was why so many people had been shoved together in such a small space, to increase that effect. He’d got used to the idea of death as part of nature, or he’d got used to it more than he ever could this. He walked and he walked. He needed to see everything. As if, said Hell, seeing it all would make it better. He covered a lot of ground. Day became night, which meant the sky had just become a little darker.
He found that there were versions of buildings he recognized. The dome of Saint Paul’s was now a basin, filled with steaming water. The Houses of Parliament were like a leaning row of dominoes against the tidal bashing of the Thames, over which bridges covered in shops — shops that were actually falling off — swung dangerously, everyone nevertheless swarming over them, having to get to wherever they had to go.
He’d noticed it earlier, and now he saw it in every detaiclass="underline" the people were fighting over every scrap because they needed to pay others to increase the time on their clocks, or even to see the clocks. It was an economy of fear.
His ‘job’ allowed him to explore, he realized. His ‘job’ let him see everything. Was he going to perform his ‘job’? To do so would be another submission. How could it do any good? He decided to go along with it for now, to wait and see if it could. Hell was pleased at his acceptance and indicated that it was sure he was keeping some part of himself apart from it. It could wait. In an eternity of time, he would become the thing it had labelled him.
A street trader was standing outside a grand circular building, a comedy theatre, it seemed, judging by the mocking masks hanging from its over-decorated pillars. In a battered carpet bag behind him were a pile of the tags, and the crowd all around him were jostling for them, fighting for them, showing him how much money they had. ‘Now then, lads and lasses. Everything’s for sale here, and we’ve got all the time in the world! I don’t want your money, little lady, it’s a question, is it not, of what else you have for me?’
Quill moved on, wanting to make an arrest, but already wondering what use that would be, wanting to smash heads, but already seeing how meaningless that would be, wanting to keep a part of himself separate from all this still, undemeaned.
People talked about ‘them’ a lot. How ‘they’ would come, about what ‘they’ would do to them. It was ‘they’, he soon realized, who you saw when your time ran out. He was aware he’d been here for some time now and kept thinking that it had to be any moment now, kept feeling that fear, suppressing it, wondering if there was any attitude, anything he could do that would give him any control over this process, apart from participating in this terrifying market of time. He knew that everything about this place told him there was nothing he could do. His time would come. He would eventually have to go into one of the buildings with the red curtains. He couldn’t think about that. He had to be strong. Didn’t he? What did that even mean here? What would that be for?
He used his authority — hating to do it, because Hell underlined how it compromised him — to stop people and talk to them. He asked them what year they were from. Some of them said the year had been twenty-something when they died, some said fifteen-something. The earliest was twelve-something. Not all of them wanted to admit they had died. Some of them had strange explanations, weird cosmologies of their own. Some, particularly the children it took all his courage to question, expected to wake up. The sheer completeness of it was a new horror to Quilclass="underline" it meant that the sign above the gate that he’d seen when he came in, that he kept trying not to think about, this also meant that it might be true. There were more people from later times, of course, because more people had been alive then. To some of these people, this was a futuristic city they were suffering in. For most, it was a vision of the past. It didn’t change, he heard. Or he found nobody who remembered it being different.