I started seeing Ji’s emblem on walls about a third of a mile earlier than the last time I’d been in Red. Clearly the two brothers were proving a bit too much for the other gangs to handle. A lot of the new territory was heavily damaged, the street in places all but impassable with shell craters and the street lighting even patchier than normal.
Once I was definitely in Ji’s patch I got my Gun out and carried it loosely, making sure that the emblem on it was visible. The streets were more crowded here, and noisy with the sound of fighting and occasional recreational gunfire. Prostitutes lined the pavements so thickly I had to walk in the road. The area looked like a perverted boom town, which I guess it was: the stronghold of the most dangerous bastards in a dangerous Neighbourhood.
BarJi was thumping with life, the rock music pumping out of it deafening from a hundred yards away. The street outside was the most crowded yet, and I had to shoulder my way through it, waving the Gun at anyone who got uppity. The combination of that and the set of my face, which was probably pretty grim, got me through.
I pushed my way into the bar and looked around for signs of Ji or Snedd. I couldn’t see them at first because the bar was packed wall-to-wall with ranks of sweating Dopaz-drones swaying in the orange light, goading the stage performers on with guttural obscenities. Someone threw a broken bottle at the stage and it caught one of the girls across the face. As always, the girl had long black hair, black hair like a flood. She staggered and fell, but then got up again, blood streaming out of a cut on her forehead. The crowd cheered.
Then I saw them, sitting bulkily at a table across the other side. Fyd and another bodyguard sat at a table behind the two brothers. They were keeping a careful eye on the proceedings. Crunt launchers within reach just in case things got even further out of hand. I edged round the walls of the room towards the table. A drone snarled at me as I obscured his view of the stage, and shoved me hard against the wall, but I pushed the muzzle of the gun into his neck hard, finger squeezing the trigger, and he got the message.
‘Stark, hey, what the fuck are you doing here?’ shouted Snedd cheerily.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Ji, getting the picture instantly.
‘Can we go upstairs?’
Ji waved at Fyd to stay where he was, and I followed Ji and Snedd to the back of the room, the two brothers cutting through the crowd like a chainsaw through butter.
It was a little quieter upstairs, but not much. A good deal of the music from downstairs filtered up through the floor, and the volume was topped up by the regular screams of people having bad Dopaz rides in the rooms down the corridor. One of the screamers got louder and louder and when he reached a pitch there was the sound of a shot and then the noise cut off with a gurgle. A member of Ji’s staff came out of the room a moment later carrying the body and tossed it down the chute which would dump it in the street round the back of the bar. The screams continued from the room he’d left and he went back in, raising his eyebrows at us in passing.
Snedd shut the door behind us and Ji passed me a jug of alcohol. I took a long, long drink and passed it back.
‘So,’ Ji said, seriously. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Before I get into that, what did you try to talk to me about?’
‘To warn you. Someone’s looking for you.’
‘Who?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Snedd. ‘That babe you worked for called Ji a couple of days ago, after you’d got Alkland out.’
‘Where was she calling from?’
‘The Centre.’
‘Did she sound all right?’
‘Yeah, in a can-do kind of way. Said you guys had kind of an exciting time in Colour.’
‘We did.’ I grinned, relieved to hear that at least Zenda had got home safely.
‘She told us the deal with Alkland. Heavy.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where’s he now?’ asked Ji.
‘Wait: what’s this about someone looking for me?’
‘That’s it. Just that. When we levelled Shen Chryz’s territory we brought him back here, in case he had any stray information we should know about.’
‘Did he?’
‘Nan. Just that someone had been trying to find out where you were.’
‘Something else, Stark,’ said Snedd. ‘You remember when I saw you last, I said someone had been trying to find out how to get back into Stable?’
‘Yeah’
‘Can’t have been Alkland, can it?’
‘No,’ I said. I’d already realised that. With his computer trick up his sleeve there was no reason for Alkland to have kicked around in Red trying to find a way in.
‘So someone else is looking for both of you.’
‘Yeah’
‘Do you know who it is?’
‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Well who the fuck is it?’ Ji barked impatiently.
‘Rafe.’
Ji stared at me incredulously for a long moment.
‘Don’t be a moron, Stark. Rafe’s dead.’
‘I know,’ I said.
The room was very quiet for at least a minute. The music still filtered up from downstairs, but it seemed distant, dry and faded. I lit a cigarette in the pause and took a long pull on it, feeling it burn in what was left of my lungs. I was smoking too much. I didn’t blame me.
Ji and Snedd just carried on looking at me, eyes wide, both unconsciously rubbing their upper lips in exactly the same way. It would have been funny if the whole thing weren’t so terrible. But it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.
Ji broken the silence first.
‘Tell us,’ he said.
‘Alkland’s in Jeamland,’ I said. ‘Do you know what happened? I fell awake.’
Ji stared.
‘You did what?’
‘Exactly. I was in a castle. We were about to take a rest after having a pretty bad time, and then I just went. I had the whole “left something behind” thing, “I’ll be back in time”, the works. I should have known then, really. Shit, I should have known days ago. I think I did know, really, but I kept letting myself explain it away.’
‘Knew what?’ Ji took one of my cigarettes and lit it absently.
‘I took Alkland in because he was having nightmares. Bad ones. At first I just clocked the fact, assumed it was just random, that a Something was running around in Jeamland looking for someone to fuck up, and found him.
‘When I found out that Alkland hadn’t been stolen, that he’d run on his own, and why, I took it a bit more seriously. He was starting to look pretty ill by then, getting worse more quickly than he should have done. It also struck me as kind of a coincidence that he should go on the run from the Centre and start having Something trouble at the same time.
‘So I took him in. We did not have a fun time on the way. I dreamed about Rafe, and Alkland saw the babies.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah. That should have been a pointer, but on the other hand, what the hell, sometimes it happens. Anyway, at first it was okay. We got fed, we slept, we got to where we were going—which was a jungle. By that time Alkland was starting to look like shit, and I was starting to wonder exactly what was going on. It was beginning to look almost as if someone had set a Something on him deliberately. Apart from me, there shouldn’t have been anyone who could do that. Then we saw a tiger.’
‘We saw one once, d’you remember that?’ Ji asked, his tone wistful.
‘Yes,’ I said, remembering. It was a long time ago.
‘It was cool. It turned into a kitten.’
‘This one didn’t,’ I said. ‘It exploded. And then it turned into a monster.’
‘Whose?’
‘Alkland’s.’
‘Bad?’
‘I’ve seen worse. But not often, and not recently. Not for eight years, in fact.’ I looked at Ji. He looked back at me, face tense. Nothing in this world frightens Ji. But we were talking about Jeamland, and things are different there. He remember
s how.
‘We got to the castle. Standard stuff, people dressed in silk banging on about witches and dead queens and all that shit. We were just about to get showers when it happened. I had no idea what I was going back for, or where I was going. But I went, and I fell awake. Woke up in Colour, and boy was I pissed.’
I paused and lit another cigarette. Between the three of us we looked like a crack squad of smoke-signallers on an important mission. Snedd passed the alcohol and I took another long pull. I wasn’t surprised to find that my hands were shaking.
‘Now I think I should have realised for sure then. I mean, come on: falling awake? Falling for that? But I didn’t.
‘I did some digging on Alkland, tried to find out what his monster might be. I couldn’t find much, but I got a lead on someone who might know. So I went to Natsci to talk to him.’
‘Who was he?’
His name was Spock Bellrip. He went straight through school with Alkland. He’s dead. That’s why I came here.’
‘Dead how?’ shrugged Snedd. As you may have gathered, death per se is no huge deal to him.
‘Dead in pieces. Dead all over the walls. Dead with a punch-hole out the back of his skull.’
‘Oh shit, no,’ said Ji, standing up. ‘Oh fuck. Shit on that.’
Snedd, startled, looked at his brother for a moment, then turned to me.
‘What?’ he said.
I have to do a tiny bit of backtracking here. It’s overdue, I suspect.
Ji and I have known each other pretty well for a long while. He’s been to Jeamland. I took him there to help him out, pulled a thorn from his lion’s paw. In return he helped me in something very big. He understands what I do better than anyone, better even than Zenda. He knows about the babies, he knows about the Somethings, and he knows about the monsters, too. Does he ever.
Snedd has never been there. I met him just after the last time Ji came into Jeamland, but he wasn’t part of the main action, and he wasn’t really told what went on. Only three people know. Ji and Zenda and me. So though what I’d been saying meant something to him, he didn’t understand the impact of it. He didn’t understand how the thought of someone with a punch-hole in his skull could make his brother, make Ji, reel round the room swearing and trembling helplessly.
Like I said, Jeamland is what you make it, and Ji grew up in the blackest hole in Turn Neighbourhood. Ji is a hard bastard now, a very dangerous man, a ganglord who scares the shit out of other ganglords. But like everyone else, Ji was a child once. Before they were a good man or a bad one, before they were a saint or a psychotic, before they were the person people think they know, everyone was a child.
Take me, for example. I take things as they come. I try to be laid back, and I go round doing things which I probably still haven’t made very clear. But before all that, before I spoke the way I do, thought the way I do, before I had all my scars, I was a child too. Hard to believe, but true.
Do you remember that? Do you remember being a child?
The answer is no, I’m afraid. You may think you can. But you can’t. All you can remember of those dim intense days are the bits that have helped to make you what you are now. You remember the times when you felt alive, a few snapshots of special days and chance impressions: but those are a part of you anyway. You can’t remember the rest. You can’t remember actually being a child, when that was all you knew.
Except in Jeamland.
In Jeamland you can remember what it was like to be stupidly happy, when happiness wasn’t something you had to search for, when it knew where to find you by itself. You can remember how an object can be a talisman that you needed to hold close, how that new toy had to be kept on the bedside table so that it would be there when you awoke. You can remember how it felt to have your mother’s arms around you when she was hugging you just because she loved you, and you weren’t too old to be embarrassed. You can remember why you used to run just for the sake of it, how it felt to have all the energy in the world, how it was to know that you would do the same things tomorrow, and the same the day after that, that nothing would ever change except for the better and that there was nothing that couldn’t be put right. For a little while you can feel yourself whole, feel all of your years, feel the child and the adult in you suddenly join hands and stand together, gripping each other so tightly that they melt into one.
And that feels so very good because the child is always there inside in you: but it’s locked away in some deep dark cell where it can’t see any light, where it has nothing to do and no one to talk to. This isn’t some ‘inner child’ psychobabble I’m giving you. This is literally the way it is. The child sits there alone, in the damp and the cold, thousands of miles away inside you, still hoping that one day you’ll come for it, take its hand and lead it out into the light, out to some stream where you can play together. And you never do.
What do you think the important things in your life are about, the things that make you happy? Like loving someone, loving them so much that you reach out your arms to hold and be held. Like eating good food, and savouring every mouthful. Those aren’t biological imperatives. You don’t have to love to fuck, and you can eat anything that isn’t made of metal. Biological imperatives are yesterday’s cattle prods, were obsolete once we stopped climbing trees and learnt how to swivel gravity round instead. Nature knows we’re out of its hands now, and leaves us pretty well alone. It potters around with the bugs and plants, contenting itself with flicking a virus across every now and then, just to remind us it’s still around.
You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.
Jeamland holds that window open, jams it wide, and lets the child escape. That’s where it got its name. Imagine you were four years old, and trying to say the word ‘Dreamland’.
But that isn’t all you can remember there. Being a child was not all wonderful, not all light and sweetness. Some of it was dull, some of it was confusing. And some of it was terrifying.
Maybe you woke in the night and knew that someone was leaning over you, and knew what they were going to do. Maybe, like Ji, you grew up in a nightmare where your psychotic mother killed your father in front of you and kept the body in the room until it was little more than a bulky stain on the floor. Maybe everything you do, everything you feel, is touched by something terrible that you don’t want to remember. Out of things said or not said, things that did or didn’t happen, out of all those tiny fragments something coalesces for a Bad Thing to breathe dark life into. That’s what monsters are, and why they can never really die: because they are the distinctive part of you, the shadows behind your eyes that make you different to other people.
When you’re born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you’re lucky as you travel forward through time, you’ll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onwards, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it’s alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.
In Jeamland, you may remember, and things may never be the
same again. You’ll meet that younger person, and realise how angry they were at being abandoned, how much hatred they have for you now. It’s no use telling them it wasn’t your fault. They hurt too much to hear.
I was quite lucky as a child. I saved most of my fuckups for later. Maybe you did too. But perhaps you saw something else. Maybe when you were small you saw something which you couldn’t tell anyone about, because they wouldn’t believe you. Something that was impossible. Something you would never remember when you grew up because it simply didn’t fit into the world, and yet something which would be part of you for ever.
Did something like that happen to you? You’ll never know, because you’ll never remember. Most people don’t.
I did.
Ji calmed down slowly, stopped shaking so violently. He waved his hand and the door almost immediately opened. Fyd entered carrying more alcohol. I thought that was kind of spooky until I realised the room was probably on closed circuit video.
‘Okay,’ said Snedd, when he’d got the picture. ‘But what’s the deal with the punched skull? Why is that such big news?’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘we know someone who used to kill like that, don’t we, Ji?’
Ji nodded, but didn’t seem disposed to speak.
‘Jeamland has a history,’ I continued, ‘and that person is part of it. That person can do more harm than a thousand Somethings put together.’
‘And this is Rafe?’
‘Was,’ I said. ‘Rafe is dead.’
‘How do you know?’
Ji looked up at me, and we stared into each other’s eyes as he answered his brother.
‘Because we killed him,’ he said.
‘What are we going to do?’
I looked at Ji, and thought for a moment.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. There was another pause, while I tried to think what we should do, how we could cope with this. The two brothers sat and waited. Snedd knew that for once he was out of his depth, and Ji has always deferred to me on matters concerning Jeamland. He has to, really.
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