The exchange of fire had been so one-sided that Sholl was surprised to discover himself adrenalised. The soldiers, too, breathed shakily: they had seen plenty of combat and misery over the last weeks, but not many firefights, and few against their own kind. It was late afternoon when they came to the end of Camden High Street and they stopped for the night. They camped in the concrete forecourt of a council estate on Crowndale Road.
Since the soldiers had taken Sholl from Hampstead Tube, and installed him, unspoken, at their head, there had been several nights. Celebrations and preparations, and now this, their last night together. Sholl knew it, and he wondered who else did.
They built a fire. Sholl pushed it with a stick, watched its sparks.
When the light fell and they finished eating, Sholl started them telling stories. Everyone alive had the kind of story he wanted: set just before the war broke out, as things began to turn, the shocks of knowledge. The moment the reflections went wrong.
“First time,” said one man, interspersing his words with smoking, taking his time, “I knew first time. You think something like that, something so insane, you’ll think you’re mad, you’ll think of excuses, but I knew first time that it was the world that was wrong, not me. I was all covered in shaving foam, and I look down to rinse it, and when I look up again my reflection was waiting for me. It hadn’t looked down at all. It had pulled the razor sideways, was bleeding all across its foam, staring at me. I didn’t even check for blood on my cheek. I knew it wasn’t me anymore.”
“I heard noises,” said a woman. “It kept on mirroring me, but I could hear noises. Coming from in my makeup mirror. I can’t believe it. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. So all slowly, I put my ear up to it. For ages there’s nothing, and then, totally far off, and echoing, like it’s at the other end of a long corridor, I can hear the sound of a knife being sharpened.”
A man had stood in front of the mirror in his morning nudity, and had seen aghast that where he was detumesced, his reflection was erect. Another’s reflection had spit at him, the gob sliding down the wrong side of the glass. And it was not always their own reflections. One woman told in a voice still hollow at the memory how she had spent long disbelieving minutes at breakfast looking to the mirror beside her husband and back at him, watching his reflection meet her eye—not the eye of her reflection but her own eye—and mouth obscenities at her, calling her cunt cunt cunt while her husband read his newspaper, and now and then glanced up and smiled.
Eventually they asked Sholl what he had seen, how he had known. He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he told them. “Nothing ever changed. It never disobeyed me. I just woke up one day, and it had gone.”
Very soon after that, all the reflections had all gone. Some had come out in the shape of their last mimicking, some had taken hybrid forms, but they had all come out, and nothing was left visible behind the mirrors.
The second day was easier than the first. They moved in little starts. They did not go direct: Sholl had heard rumours about what was in Euston Station. To avoid it, they continued down to where St. Pancras and King’s Cross met in a wedge. There were a surprising number of people in that once-unsalubrious zone. It had become a little commune, perhaps fifty people living together in what had been the WHSmith in King’s Cross Station. There were more, Sholl knew, camped out across the fanning train lines at the back of the station: a tent town had arisen among the brick piles and sheds, adrift in weeds in that open cut in the city.
The soldiers spoke briefly to the locals, bartered cans of soft drink and alcohol from them, examined the little hand-signed notes they used as currency. The people here were nervous, but not terrified. There was something in the angles between Pancras Road and York Way that the imagos did not like, that kept that zone relatively clean. Sholl breathed it in deep, and wished he could stay.
There were nomads from Clerkenwell in the area, the locals said. Men and women were eager to follow mystics, and one such group was nearby, and the soldiers had better be careful. They cut down south, moving cautiously, determined not to be lulled, until they reached the stepped concrete of the Brunswick Centre. They waited there for two hours, in the courtyard at its heart, but the cult they had been warned of did not appear.
The soldiers prepared themselves. This close to their target, they lost their heart, they became afraid to go on, to bring the mission to an end. Though he did not want to, Sholl kept considering the patchogue that had told him where to go. He wondered why it alone had touched him.
Sholl and his soldiers waited, for as long as they could, savouring the little journey they had shared: and when they could not put it off any more, they went on. Past the uprooted trees of Russell Square: down Bedford Place, become an avenue of statues, that the imagos had uprooted from around the city and placed there at regular intervals, their features and outlines changed—Nelson, torn from his column, laughing hysterically, “Bomber” Harris urinating—and then right, toward their target.
I didn’t think I would be gone so long, or so far. Or is that true? Did I?
I thought—I think I thought—that I’d travel far enough to get away from those of my siblings that know me and knew me, and find others, and see things in this reconfigured city, at its outskirts, and make sense. Of everything. And be in it again, open my doors. And I have seen my people at every place, in all their forms, the patchogues—the patchogues like me—all trapped in their prison uniforms, the other imagos in whatever they wish. It isn’t quite fair, is it, that we who came through, with that strength, who were the first agents in the war, benefit less than those weaker.
Like the Fish of the Mirror. It’s general now, but it was weaker, I suppose, than we who came through.
Everywhere I go, I’m with my people. I see you, too. At the corners of things, scurrying where we’ve not yet met you and destroyed you. I feel the hatred I always do. But I am not sure now where it stops, where I am, where that hatred is and where I begin.
I discover that I do not want the society of kin. I want to be alone. I want to be alone.
The rails have taken me out of the underworld, into the opened-up flat city of the big sky, the ring of London where buildings sprawl low and uneasy and it is not like a city but like a found landscape, not like a suburb but like an accident, like spillage on the hills. I’ve kept walking. I have continued to walk.
There’s smoke in the sky behind me from the heart of the town. Here the backs of houses that abut my railway line, the synagogues and warehouses, cemeteries and other things look only momentarily emptied—everyone here, all of you, have just stepped out for one second (there are cold lights burning in many houses, I do not know how). Where I see you now you do not belong, you are as much intruder as me. You’re creeping. These are no longer your houses, and you don’t know how to be in them. You would rather hide in a basement, in a cellar, in a broken cinema where the signs are shattered, because that way you know that you are hiding. From me.
Neither of us knows what to do with the city anymore.
I come to the end of the line, and it is dark, and London has lowered itself to the night. There are woods. There are woods here.
Still north, barefoot on the tar roads. Past open-doored cars sleeping like cats. The trees come up to shroud me. Over the biggest road (what am I looking for?) and on to green. Forests at the border. Deserted schools and playing fields, and through trees that tussle together not as if to block my path but as if it is a game.
The moon’s up—I can hear my siblings in the south, playing. Like whales. I can hear them but I can’t see them, and it is a relief.
There are paths in this greenery, I have been following them, and the trees pull apart to uncover a secret for me, and I see it and I know what it is I’ve been looking for.
We never knew—or I was not told—quite what happened, how we came free. I know some things. The Fish of the Mirror was the mastermind. It was its genius that broke us all out, rather than only a misfit
few renegades who had to be spies, and are now reminders.
Light falls as light always fell. It scatters. It rebounds from what it touches. But as it touches off tighter, where its integrity is more sustained, and more sustained, the key turns, until where there is sheen, light transmutes, and makes a door.
Pushing through the mirror was something, was a pleasure you can’t imagine. All the patchogues say so. A complete feeling. Something very whole. But it is not the mirror that reflected: it was the tain. That is where the imagos were. In the tain. Coming through the mirror was a one-way trip: we broke the glass as we passed. We showered those whose forms were our prisons with jagged splinters as we arrived, so that they were bleeding and crying out before we touched them.
When we looked up, all exhilarated from our liberation struggle, we turned and saw the door was closed, that only a fringe of glass and thin silver was left at the edges of what had been a mirror.
Now, all mirrors are open doors, always. The imagos, those who aren’t trapped in your bodies, can pass through glass without harm to it or them: they can slip into the tain. But not us. If we push into the tain we will break it.
There are other doorways. Mirrors that are not blocked to us with a skin of glass: but they are hard to find. Sheets of chrome or aluminum so pressed, so polished that scuffs don’t disfigure them, that they are portals, with the tain open to the air. I do not know where any are.
Coming over this little hill, though, I know why I’ve come here. I have come here, I’ve found this place so that I can go home.
The moon rises over the little pond before me, and the pond is absolutely, unnaturally still. I am almost afraid to breathe (but trapped in this body, I must). The trees that brought me here circle the water, showing it to me, and I know that in the days before the war I would have looked down and seen the twin of each of those trees. I look down now, imagining it, and I’m staring into water so still, lit by moonlight so absolutely pure, it’s like a little god.
I want to go home. The bondage is broken: there’s nothing tethering the other side anymore. It’s undiscovered now, a continent absolutely strange. What forms it might take. After centuries of mocking-bird topography, the tain has been freed. It might be any shape now: the thought of that makes me hanker. It could be anything. I look hard, staring through the darkness of the doorway, through the water, and I swear I can see through, past the veil that obscures, through to the other side, and I swear that I can see trees.
If I’m gentle, if I’m quick, if no wind comes to disrupt this perfect tain, then I can go, I can go home. My passing will disrupt it but I’ll be gone. I need time, or space, or something, to work out why I do not want to be with my imago kin any more. I’ll go where it’s untethered, where it can all be different.
In my bare feet I run down this little grass angle, down this scrubby incline, picking up my feet so as not to send dirt or boscage into the water, not to disrupt it, to disrupt it only with me, and I run and leap. I am poised. I am poised, and now I am descending, and as the water, as the tain comes up at me, I can see through it, I can see through it faintly, to what I swear is a rising crater of dirt and grass, to trees, to a moon and clouds, to everything that is here around me, everything but me. I am falling toward the tain, but no one is falling toward me.
The soldiers were to launch their attack in the small hours. They were still not sure of what it was Sholl wanted to do. They only knew that he had a plan, and that they had to get him inside. Sholl knew that he could not think about it too hard, about what the men and women were doing: the faith they had and what they were prepared to do, for him, without ever knowing his story.
He spent the hours before their assault talking quietly to the officer. Sholl told him that he did not have to come, or bring his troops. Sholl was ready to go, and the soldiers could wait for him. Sholl meant it: he would have been sincerely relieved had his companions stayed where they were, refused to come one step farther with him. But he was not surprised by the officer’s refusal, and he greeted it with as much resignation as sadness.
The soldiers performed their routines, like tics—checking and rechecking, strapping ammunition, sighting along rifles—and Sholl stood in the darkness of the shop in which they waited and stared across at their target. He did not know the morals or rules of the new terrain: he suspected that they were unknowable. Still, he understood a kind of logic to the Fish of the Mirror’s choice of lair, and the fact that he understood it did not convince Sholl that it was therefore wrong.
It could be a kind of neurotic, a kind of masochistic pleasure. To be surrounded by the evidence of your imprisoning: to roam corridors like time machines, in which the differing shapes and colours of your jailers from a thousand years ago stretched up to those of yesterday, and your pleasure derived from the fact that you passed them, and remembered them, but were free. Making a home in the shell of a jail. It was bitter, but it made a kind of sense.
The Fish of the Mirror lived in the British Museum. At its heart, the vampire had told Sholl. Surrounded by the detritus of men and women from the ancient Americas, from the East, from old Greece and Egypt. Material culture that the imagos had been forced to make, wherever it was reflected. The Fish of the Mirror lived in corridors made of time, of incarceration, and it moved through them, quite free.
He did not know what else was inside. Perhaps nothing. There was no movement on the white steps, on the lawn before the building. The gates were open.
“Let me go alone,” whispered Sholl with sudden, absolute conviction.
When he said it loud enough to be heard they argued with him, at first respectfully but soon with great heat.
“You cannot go in there alone!” the commander yelled at him, and Sholl bellowed that he would go where he wanted, alone or not. The soldiers marshalled moral arguments against him—it’s not your fucking fight, we need this, you don’t get to order us—and all he could do was play the messianic role they had given him. He spoke obliquely and hinted at things he could not tell them. He spoke with righteous anger. He felt contempt for himself, for this act, but he felt pride under that, because he was trying to save them. When he finally bellowed at them that he would go alone, he used all the authority they had ceded to him, and they were shocked and silent.
Sholl walked away from them, stepped out of the broken window of the shop and stood alone in the street, in full view, without weapons. He showed the soldiers what only he could do.
It was deep night: the moon silvered him. Sholl turned back to his companions in the darkness of the shop and muttered something to them: it was meant to be conciliatory and warm, but he saw only betrayal on their faces. You don’t understand, he thought, and raised his hands in an attitude of the most vague, the most uncertain benediction, then turned and walked away quickly, crossing Russell Street, passing through the threshold of the museum’s gates and onto its drive, past the lawn where the ruins of public sculptures were bruised with verdigris. He was in the grounds, he was in, and he walked faster toward the steps and the doors that were open and very dark. He had never been so afraid or excited.
As he began to ascend the stairs, Sholl heard quick steps on the gravel behind him. He spun, horrified, crying out go away before he had even seen who was following him. It was the commander, and most of the soldiers. You don’t go in alone the officer was screaming, his weapon held so that he could have been threatening Sholl, or protecting him.
Sholl began to run back toward him. He was not surprised by the soldiers’ decision, and he felt shame. They were still approaching him when he saw their faces change. Their expressions were blasted suddenly wide, staring at what was emerging from the museum. Sholl heard something bursting out behind him, but he did not turn back. His run faltered as forces overtook him. He came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and spread out his arms as if he would hold back a tide, but the imagos swept past him, in a frenzy like he had never seen, and descended on the soldiers.
The imagos
were dressed in a flickering, a strobing sequence of forms, of people, of the people throughout history, staccato aggregates of their own oppression. They were a wind of flint-axe chippers, of pharaohs, of samurai, of American shamans and Phoenicians and Byzantines, helmets with placid faces and splinted armour, and tooth necklaces and shrouds and gold. They came down in a vengeful swarm, and the soldiers fired with tough and stupid bravery, ripping apart moments of flesh and blood that only folded in and refocused and became again. The bodies of the imagos were shredded endlessly as they came but these were not vampires—these were the unfettered fauna of mirrors, for which meat was an affectation.
No one could have expected this. It was like nothing imaginable. It would have been reasonable for the soldiers to pass the museum’s threshold thinking they had at least a chance of retreat. They screamed as the imagos reached them. Stop! screamed Sholl, but the imagos did not obey him. They would only not touch him. They ignored him and continued. Stop! Stop!
One by one the soldiers were taken. After five, six of them had died in blood, or been pushed into space that was folded away to nothing, or frozen and made gone, Sholl turned away. It was not callousness that made him walk stolidly back up the steps, with the massacre going on behind him. He could not turn round, he could not watch what he could not stop, for shame.
He had not been shocked to turn and see the soldiers there. Guilt blasted him. Why did you let them come? it spoke. Company? Protection? Sacrifice?
Sholl shook his head violently and tried very hard not to think of what was happening. He was trembling almost too much to stand. He pushed at the museum’s half-open door, and the motion was timed precisely with a wet screech behind him, that sounded like the commander. Sholl hovered at the museum’s threshold. I didn’t know. I told them not to come, he said inside him. He had been right not to learn their names.
Looking for Jake: Stories Page 23