The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  I stopped, sucking in air like I’d just been saved from drowning. “And he’s gone, he keeps leaving and every time I think it’s the last time. You think heroin is a drug?” I jabbed Gryffin with my finger and he flinched. “Quinn’s a fucking drug and if he’s dead I’m dead, too.”

  Gryffin stared at me, let his breath out in a low whoosh. “But he’s not dead, Cass. And Quinn’s not a drug. He’s just a person, a screwed-up person, and you’re letting him screw you up.”

  I shook my head. “He’s keeping me alive. He’s—”

  I lurched to my feet and stumbled over to Lyla by the door. “Who’s Erik? Do you know? Does she know him? Tindra?”

  “I lost my signal before I could check.”

  Lyla stared stonily at an ad for cheap flights to Spain. I continued without pausing for breath.

  “And someone killed her dog—that’s fucked up, right? Why would she agree to meet someone who’d kill her dog? I don’t get it. Is she, like, a secret Nazi? Is it even safe for you and your brother to be at this rally?”

  Lyla looked at me like I was something she’d peeled from her shoe. “What, you think a colored girl shouldn’t walk into a Nazi parade?”

  “I mean, yeah.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you mean.”

  “Yeah, okay, I get it, I totally get it. Stupid white American. But this guy Erik, do you have any idea who he might be?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, but not someone good, right?” I felt my face flush, my rant morphing into amphetamine rage. “Someone bad. Fucking Nazis. Maybe that’s who killed Harold, fucking Nazis—”

  “You freak, you’re so spun you can’t even see straight,” she murmured, and stepped on my foot, hard. She stared pointedly at two white couples sitting across from us, the women wearing ankle boots and puffer coats, the men in flannel shirts and barn jackets. All sported buttons that featured a red oak leaf intersected by a lightning bolt. Svarlight.

  One of the women saw me looking at her. She pushed a lock of brown hair behind her ear, glanced at Lyla, then turned to whisper something to the man beside her. He said something under his breath and they both laughed. Beside me I felt Lyla stiffen. I clenched my hands into fists. Neither of us spoke again.

  Chapter 29

  Mile End station was in the East End, north of the river. As the train slowed, Lyla pulled up the hood of her anorak to hide her face. Gryffin shoved his hands in his pockets and made a point of not meeting anyone’s gaze. I stared back defiantly and wild-eyed at anyone who glanced my way.

  “Stop it,” Gryffin said nervously. “You look like one of them.”

  “Good,” I snapped. “Maybe they won’t fuck with us.”

  As we exited the station, a steady stream of people filed onto the escalators, nearly all white. Boisterous young men sporting shaved heads and motocross jackets, older people who would have fit right into the audience at a midwestern NPR fundraiser. A few small groups displayed the Svarlight logo, though they were outnumbered by guys supporting DOA, Defenders of Albion, or other UK groups. Several families had kids in tow, which made it look less like a nationalist march than a Waldorf school picnic, without the angst.

  A lot of people carried hand-lettered signs with messages like MY JOB WENT TO EU, BRING IT BACK!, or ADJUNCT = NO FUTURE. There were counterdemonstrators, too, flaunting slogans like NO TO FASCISM, HOPE NOT HATE, and DOA IS DOA. For the moment, the two factions kept a safe distance from each other.

  A tall black woman strode past us, murmuring an invective. “Great,” Gryffin said. “They really do think you’re one of them.”

  Lyla whirled to poke him with a gloved finger. “No one told you to come. Keep your mouth shut or fuck off, both of you. I mean it.”

  I met Gryffin’s gaze, willing him to leave. He was nothing but deadweight; Lyla might lead me to Tindra. But Gryffin just jammed his hands in his pockets and walked on.

  A greenway had been constructed around Mile End, incorporating a retired overpass and landscaped with leafless birches and plume grass. It reminded me of the High Line, only with the Regent’s Canal running alongside it. Despite the greasy fog and chill wind, children’s playgrounds lent the scene a festive air, as did the sounds of distant laughter and an occasional burst of applause.

  Lyla headed toward the canal towpath. After fifteen minutes, we left the path for a well-trodden stretch that led to a busy street. On the other side was a vast expanse of green lawns and plane trees, benches lining a broad walkway.

  I ran to catch up with Lyla, who was scanning her mobile.

  “She’s done something to her mobile, or he has—I can’t track her. And I still have no signal.” She glanced at a helicopter hovering in the near distance. “Might be they’re jamming the signals for crowd control. But you were right…”

  She indicated two blond guys sporting Svarlight’s oak leaf and lightning bolt on their shirts. “If this Erik is connected with them, maybe he won’t be that hard to find. He might be one of the speakers.”

  “Hiding in plain sight?” I shot her a dubious look.

  “I don’t know. Maybe my brother’s already found her. That’s what I hope.”

  We crossed the street and joined the crowd entering Victoria Park.

  The explosive exhilaration I’d felt with the first few hits of crank had settled into a steady, shining buzz. I craved more but needed to pace myself. Gryffin walked ahead of us, messenger bag slung over one shoulder, his tall frame stooped like a disconsolate commuter’s. Lyla remained focused on her mobile.

  “Any news?” I asked after a few minutes.

  “No.” Her hood slipped back, and I saw her eyes were red. “It was so fucking stupid of her to come here. She knew Tommy would go after her. She knows it’s not safe for him.”

  “‘Safe’?”

  “Since Afghanistan? He has issues. Tindra hoped her app would help him. That was one of the reasons she developed it.”

  “Ludus Mentis?” I felt a bolt of panic. “He hasn’t tried it, has he?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  It might, I thought. A lot. But I said nothing.

  The park was so big that, once inside, the demonstrators hardly seemed an organized crowd, just scattered groups making the best of a dreary afternoon. There were definitely many more cops here. Many more scary-looking people, too, including a lot of heavily tattooed, booted men who chanted and carried signs with that distinctive white flag with a red cross.

  JOBS-FIRST!

  3,000,000 ISLAMISTS IN ENGLAND

  100%

  TAKE BACK CONTROL

  WHITE GENOCIDE

  I looked at Lyla. She’d drawn the hood back around her face so that she resembled a huge black bird. “What’s ‘one hundred percent’ mean?”

  “One hundred percent white.”

  “What about the red-and-white flag?”

  “Saint George’s flag. It symbolizes England, as opposed to the United Kingdom. The right wing’s made it a racist thing. Him and the dragon…”

  She gestured at two teenagers carrying a banner that displayed a knight in red armor thrusting a sword into a dragon emblazoned with a crescent moon. “ISIS talks about Crusaders, and they play right into it.”

  I sidestepped an elderly woman who glared furiously at the teenagers. “Tindra told me what happened to her when she was a girl.”

  Lyla drew up short. “What did she tell you?”

  “That she was assaulted by a family friend, and her father did nothing. Is that who Erik is? Her father?”

  “No.” Lyla’s tone was adamant. “She would never have agreed to see her father. She despises him. A Swedish Democrat—a white supremacist, though he never called himself that.”

  “Isn’t everyone in Sweden white?”

  “It’s not funny.”

  I glanced over and saw Gryffin waiting for us beneath a tree. Lyla began to walk again. “He’s on HNN,” she said. “Her father. She can see him anytime she wants.”


  “What’s HNN?”

  “White supremacist website, biggest in the world after Stormfront. Herla Network News. He has a regular podcast, Valî’s Hour.”

  “I thought they shut down Stormfront.”

  “They did. HNN, too. But they just find another server that doesn’t mind taking Nazi money. I mean, your fucking FBI claims it lost its records on Stormfront. So the white supremacists just burrow into the Dark Web. You can find anything there—Nazi propaganda, how to make bombs. HNN pretends to be a site for heathens, but that’s just a front. That mosque firebombed in Berlin? They were behind that. And those murders at that crèche in Denmark.”

  “So Tindra’s father is a Nazi?”

  “Of course not.” She laughed bitterly. “Just a good Swede promoting free speech and northern European folk culture. Like them.” She gestured at the people around us.

  “You think he’s here?”

  “I sincerely doubt that.”

  We caught up with Gryffin, his shoulders hunched against the wind as he hurried toward us.

  “Hey, what took you so long?” He pointed to the crowd gathered around a monument a few hundred yards off. “That seems to be the main event. Any idea what this Erik looks like?”

  Lyla shook her head. She withdrew a pair of compact binoculars from her backpack and focused them on the crowd. I heard her curse softly.

  Hundreds of people had assembled here, along with police in riot gear who stood watching them impassively, arms behind their backs. A large group of men marched in orderly formation toward the monument, two by two, close enough that I caught whiffs of their aftershave. All wore identical white polo shirts and brown khaki pants. Most had close-cropped hair, and their ages ran from older teenagers to white-haired men well past seventy.

  There must have been a hundred of them. A few carried homemade cardboard shields crisscrossed with black duct tape that formed crude lightning bolts and symbols like deconstructed swastikas. The shields resembled something a kid would make for a school project, which only made them more disturbing.

  “Jesus.” Gryffin shuddered. “It’s Oswald Mosley’s grandchildren.”

  I watched, nervously zipping and unzipping my leather jacket. My skin felt brittle, as though I’d shatter if someone touched me. Finding Tindra or Tommy or an unknown Erik here seemed as likely as finding my long-lost photos of Quinn. The police observed but made no move to intervene as the white shirts headed toward the front of the crowd. I ran my tongue across my cracked lips, fighting the urge to run.

  After the last of the white shirts passed, Lyla lowered her binoculars. “We need to split up. If you see Tindra or my brother, text me if you can get a signal. Otherwise we’ll meet back here in half an hour.”

  As Gryffin nodded and started toward the monument, Lyla turned to me. “You’ll want to keep an eye on that,” she said, indicating my bag. “And don’t take off, right?”

  It was as much a plea as a warning. I zipped up my jacket and walked away without looking back. I didn’t intend to see either one of them again.

  Chapter 30

  Immediately I lost sight of Lyla and Gryffin. Wherever I looked, I saw angry white people waving signs. WHITE GENOCIDE, ENGLAND FIRST, BAN THE BURKA. Union Jacks, Saint George’s flags, a good number of Svarlight followers, a few news crews. An amplified male voice rang out to cheers, his words too garbled for me to catch. The crowd had grown to perhaps a thousand or more, and the counterdemonstrators were far outnumbered. I saw no evidence of Antifa or other aggressive anti-fascist organizations. I couldn’t decide if that was a good or bad thing.

  Another group marched by in formation, smaller than the first, bearing green-and-white flags superimposed with an upward-pointing black arrow. A few people cheered as they passed. Most quickly looked away. Nazism cloaked as free speech was okay; more overt displays, not so much.

  Clutching my bag, I pushed my way toward the monument, scanning all those white faces for a young white woman with a blue dreadlock. Tommy, a brown-skinned man, would have been easier to spot, but I saw no sign of him, either. He was a war vet: he’d know to keep a low profile. Or maybe he’d been smart enough not to come here in the first place.

  Or to leave. I hoped Lyla would do the same.

  The crank gave everything a gray blistered shimmer, like an old black-and-white TV on the fritz. Cold wind bore the dank smell of crushed grass and mud churned up by countless feet. Fifty yards away, the monument’s stone spire poked above the throng like a ship’s mast. I elbowed past a knot of men arguing about soccer and a woman who cradled a yapping Jack Russell terrier, finally halted near a half-dozen kids huddled together. They looked like college students, the guys with curated beards and long hair, the girls’ faces shiny with sweat.

  “I don’t think they’re here,” one of the girls announced. Beneath a rain jacket she wore a red STOP RACISM T-shirt. She checked her mobile and stood on tiptoe, craning her neck. “I still can’t get reception. But there’s a gazebo or something—I think that’s where they went.”

  A wave of feedback washed over the crowd. The college kids began pushing their way out. I moved into the spot they’d vacated and angled myself to get a better look at the action, trying not to get knocked over in the process.

  “Sorry!” a middle-aged woman exclaimed, and smiled in apology. There were deep grooves beside her mouth, and her graying hair hung in a long braid down her back. “Wild, isn’t it? I haven’t done this since the Greenham Common Peace Camp.”

  I shifted my bag to my other shoulder and cocked a thumb at the monument. “Who’s talking?”

  “Ronald Morton. I heard him in Sheffield last month. I don’t agree with everything he says, but…” She gave a rueful shrug. “We have to start somewhere, right? Put the wheels back on the bus.”

  “What about someone named Erik? Is he one of the speakers?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of him, sorry.”

  A helicopter momentarily drowned out her voice and everyone else’s. I kept going in hopes of getting a look at Ronald Morton.

  After a few minutes I succeeded. A nondescript man stood on a dais in front of the monument. He looked just shy of forty, with thin brown hair, wearing an overcoat with a large Union Jack pin on the lapel. He spoke into a wireless mike as he scanned the crowd, occasionally grinning and giving a wave when he recognized a face. But he never broke his stream of talk.

  “…not that we don’t want them here. They don’t want to be here. No human being wants to feel unwelcome! No one wants to be torn away from their own roots, their own culture and family and history and identity.”

  He had a bland mid-Atlantic accent, with a trace of a country burr. He paused often, to let his words echo out into the crowd and stare pointedly at one of the TV cameras focused on him.

  “They’re right to want a home. But not here. Not amongst folk who aren’t their own kind, hardworking folk whose roots go back a thousand years, folk who are watching their way of life inundated by unfamiliar languages and beliefs…”

  The crowd erupted into cheers and chanting. Morton grinned and lifted his hands.

  “Ronnie!”

  “Ron-nee, Ron-nee…”

  As people surged toward the monument, I stood my ground, ignoring shoves and muttered expletives. Another blat of feedback reduced Morton’s speech to word confetti.

  “…every day…new opportunity…restore our…”

  A burly man placed his hands on my shoulders to push me out of his way. Instinctively I turned and kicked him, and he collapsed. I started to kick him again, then realized people were staring at me.

  “What the fuck you doing?” someone yelled.

  I turned and bolted.

  Chapter 31

  People started to shout, hurtling in every direction. I froze as the ground seemed to tilt. The drone of voices became a chain-saw scream. Many screams. Something struck me in the stomach, a fist or boot. I doubled over, gagging, finally looked up again.
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  The demonstration had exploded into a riot. Everywhere people ran, or tried to, pushing others to the ground and trampling them as lines of helmeted figures, black and neon green, raced from behind the monument, wielding riot shields. A man shrieked, a child’s thin wail grew abruptly silent as a woman screamed. I stumbled backward, turning to flee in another direction.

  But there was no other direction, no up or down or left or right; only a heaving ocean of limbs and faces.

  The crank’s quicksilver halo fragmented into a world like a damaged negative, eyes, mouths, faces all obliterated. The ground seemed to shiver, as though a huge hive hummed furiously beneath my feet. Blurred hands, gaping mouths, a thicket of jerking knees and feet and the stink of vomit. It was like falling into hell’s own mosh pit. I choked, tasting blood where I’d bitten my lip. Snatches of robotic-sounding speech echoed as a helicopter circled overhead, its rotors sending up waves of grit and mud.

  If they start kettling, get the hell out.

  I pressed my bag against my face, in case someone lobbed a tear gas canister; kept my head down and zigzagged through the mob. Not far away, a woman with a Union Jack painted on her face screamed obscenities at a cop. Beside her, a heavyset man swung a DOA sign like a battle-ax. A mounted policeman wheeled and galloped toward him, people fleeing from the horse as though it were a tank. My inchoate terror dissolved into a more practical fear: not of tear gas but getting arrested.

  I lurched toward a break in the crowd, finally halting in a patch of grass. Gasping, I lowered my bag. The crowd was sparser here, mostly people like myself struggling to catch their breath. A few onlookers ran toward the melee, mobiles held up to record the event. Four old black women followed them with arms linked, their hair hidden beneath brightly colored turbans. A loudspeaker blared a warning as sirens sounded in the distance.