The Narrows

by James Brogden

  It never even reached him. Before it was halfway there, it splintered into a dozen weak streamers and was grounded harmlessly by the building’s superstructure.

  Three more times Andy hurled bolts of blue fire, with increasingly desperate ferocity, as Barber stood inviolate amidst a tempest of St Elmo’s fire which crawled impotently about him and dissipated, leaving the air smelling scorched and Andy on his knees retching for breath.

  ‘Well,’ Barber commented, when the echoes had faded, and all that was left was the sound of ragged gasps and the indifferent wind singing in high-tension wires. ‘That was imaginative, now wasn’t it?’

  ‘Barber,’ he begged. ‘Please. Don’t do this.’

  ‘NO!’ Barber lashed back with sudden fury. ‘You would have done well to beg before! You beg nothing, do you understand? Nothing!’ With a savage sweep of one arm, he compelled Andy straight up into the air and held him suspended a dozen feet above the roof, as if examining an insect. Andy held his breath and waited for a killing stroke which never came.

  ‘Neither will you provoke me with such tantrums,’ Barber added coldly. ‘You will die with everyone else at the appointed time.’

  Midday crept closer, and the solstice was nearly upon them. Both men could feel its slow turning in worlds up and down the universe, the tumblers of a vast combination lock aligning with the inevitability of continental drift. Andy knew that if he looked with wide enough senses, he would be able to see, low down in the sky, an eastward-trailing arc of suns, each chasing the one before it to superimpose themselves on one another at the height of their journey. The ch’i energy of all creation trembled in its network of leys as it plunged towards crisis, a rollercoaster gathering speed at the bottom of the ride. The Narrowfolk were right to Lay Up at such a time. Sane people hid themselves away and prayed, in whatever form it took, for the roller coaster to continue upwards again, for light and life to return to the world, for the death of the Holly King. Only madmen stood up and actually opposed him. It was He that held Andy up to scrutiny, with eyes that promised everlasting winter.

  ‘Then…’ Andy struggled for breath against the vice-like force constricting his chest, ‘then let me help you.’

  ‘Andy, no!’ Bex’s voice was a hollow shell. She was sitting where he’d left her, propped against the lower roof’s circumference rail, seemingly too weak to stand. Black tears were streaming down her cheeks and along her arms. It was a sight so profoundly and unexpectedly weird – even after everything so far – that he almost lost his resolve, because what could possibly be more important than answering her distress?

  ‘You can’t!’ she begged. ‘After everything he’s done! After what you said! You can’t do this – you can’t help him!’

  Barber’s expression was amused and puzzled. ‘Indeed, you can’t possibly help me after all of this. Why?’

  ‘Because you’re about to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and it doesn’t have to go that way. I can give you all the power you need without anybody having to die – you know I can; you’ve seen it. You’ve already proved that I can’t hurt you – you would be in charge, you can direct the energy exactly how you like, just use me as a – as a conduit. Because I’m unfixed. It’s how you made me.’

  ‘You are nothing more than a failed experiment, boy. An aberration.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter – I am this because of what you did. What did you intend me for if not for this, or something like it? What better purpose can I serve now but to help fulfil your ambition?’

  Bex was moaning softly, helplessly. He couldn’t look at her.

  Barber laughed in his face, and it was like being stabbed with icicles. ‘And you think to sway me from my course just like that? The prodigal son returns to be reunited with his father at the time of his death? Please. There are no circles to be completed here and no Pattern to give meaning to this futile gesture. Oh yes, I know all about your anile philosophy, as if a grubby little suburban shop boy like you could ever come close to conceptualising the nature of the universe. There is no Pattern, no grain in the structure of the world. There never was one. There is only power. The coincidences which you set such store by were the power of your own unfixed nature manipulating reality around you. The only thing you have been following all these years has been yourself, like a dog mindlessly chasing its own tail. The people you wish to save are still doomed, ultimately.’

  ‘Everybody is, ultimately. I can’t do anything about that. I can’t save the world – I understand that now. But if I can give a few of them one more day, or an hour, or whatever, that’ll be enough for me.’

  ‘You’re absolutely certain of this. Of something. Finally. You will die knowing that you did what you could, hopeless though it was, and that will be enough for you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re wrong. Dead wrong.’

  ‘You’ll never convince me of that. Think about it – what better way to destroy the world than by an act of hopeless self-sacrifice?’

  This was met with glacial silence, and Andy knew that he had Barber then. Despite all his work over all those years, in the end he simply wasn’t able to resist the delicious, black irony of it all.

  At length Barber replied. ‘So be it. But your arrogance in presuming to alter my plans, however marginally, will not go unpunished. I had intended to grant you the mercy of a swift death – you, and all the world. Now it will not be so. You will have your wish, and when I have obtained the Omphalos, you will remain by my side and watch in helpless despair as I unravel creation by slow degrees. The leys will die, and parents will watch as their children inherit a world incapable of sustaining them. In their desperation, they will unleash fire and plague on one another, and when the survivors emerge sobbing from the wreckage, they will find that chaos was nothing compared to what happens when the walls between the worlds themselves begin to fall and the urdrog come forth.

  ‘But here, boy, I will allow your precious few thousand to remain protected and besieged, watching the world around them falling apart and knowing that it is all at their expense. What will they do, I wonder, as the world burns? Debauch themselves in guilt? Or try to follow your fine example and save others? What fun it will be for you to watch.

  ‘At the last, these walls will fall too, and your special few will be devoured by the darkness, cursing your name for having inflicted this on them, and when it is just you and I alone in the void, the last thing you will do before I snuff out your soul will be to tell me whether you thought that was enough for you.’

  Then the solstices converged, the suns shone as one at their height, and Bex hid her face as Barber used Andy to tear the life-energy out of the world.

  He didn’t require the use of needles. They were beyond such things now. Barber’s meridian points burst into life all over his body, and from them lanced out thousands of glowing tendrils which found their counterparts in Andy’s flesh and began to feed.

  The energy drain was manageable at first, but it increased exponentially, threatening to tear the very fibres of his body apart. The seven multipetalled hubs of Barber’s chakras spun faster and brighter as they became supercharged with plundered ch’i. The Rotunda, and its interconnected network of lethal gates whose creation had taken such a toll of years and lives, remained mercifully inert as Barber took all the energy he required through Andy instead, fashioned it anew, and directed it out again, straight at the low-hanging midwinter sun. At this time, as at no other, the circles of the world overlapped so closely that the barriers between them were whisper-thin, and Barber’s stolen power began to burn through them one after another.

  Gradually, the sun darkened. In the bright washed-out blue of the sky, a black hole irised open, as if the sun had become an enormous eye.

  Andy struggled to meet the demands being placed on his system. When he’d been attack
ed by the dog and the skavags, his body had reacted instinctively, drawing a relatively tiny amount of energy from his immediate surroundings to deliver a single sharp retaliatory slap, and then afterwards to heal himself. At Holly End, he’d been on the receiving end and dumping into the earth the energy with which Barber had been trying to fry his brain. Even the bolts of raw earth-ch’i which he’d thrown at Barber just now had been simple, short-lived exercises of power. This, however, was something entirely different. Although the amount of energy which Barber demanded of him – which half a million souls would have satisfied – was an infinitesimally small drain on the earth’s resources – the question was whether or not a single human being could channel it all and survive. He felt stretched to the point of invisibility – a mannequin of molten glass with neon tubes for bones, sparks spitting from the marrow.

  The hole in the sun quickly spread out to its full circumference, and then further, filling half the sky, and in another of those eye-watering twists of perspective, it wasn’t far away in the heavens but right beside them: a wind-blown tunnel wide enough for a man to step into, had it been stable enough.

  It twisted and whiplashed unpredictably as reality fought the power which was tearing it open, but in brief moments of calm, there could be glimpsed at its furthest end – the points where all parallel lines converged, and from which all concentric circles spread – the glint of something golden.

  The Omphalos.

  He couldn’t see it clearly. He knew instinctively that to comprehend it fully would be the same as possessing it, or inhabiting it, but through the buffeting squalls of energy which wracked his body, he could hear it singing. It was the music that underlay the whine of blood in the ear, or rain on endless plains of grass, or the white noise of city traffic. It was wordless, mindless, not the voice of God or anything with a sentient purpose. It demanded and promised nothing. It didn’t ask to be rescued or worshipped or obeyed or possessed; it didn’t offer answers or healing or hope or love. It was nothing more or less than the song of all life, and the pulse of light at its centre was a human heartbeat. It made his every cell and nerve-ending thrill in resonant sympathy, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt the glorious, expansive relief of having nothing expected of him. There was no destiny. Barber was right – there wasn’t even any Pattern to follow or ignore. The uncertainties of his future were as irrelevant as the accidental circumstances of his past. There was only the glorious, singing Now, in which he was unfixed and free at last of considerations of what he was supposed to do next, because there was nothing and nobody to suppose anything about him except himself.

  As revelations went, he was afraid that it was too little and too late, because Barber had stepped into the tunnel. He drove his copper staff into the threshold to anchor it and rammed Andy’s power into the fluctuating portal to subdue its wild contortions. From the sweat pouring down his face and the set rigidity of his limbs, Andy saw that it was costing him an inhuman level of control.

  A thin hope began to form in what little of his mind could still think coherently. Andy had felt a shadow of that monstrous arrogance on the moor, when he’d goosed Bex to her feet, knowing that it would offend her but not caring. If that had come to him through their connection at the Kiftsgate stone, what, he wondered, had been exchanged?

  Less than a hope – little more than an uncertainty. He had almost no time to act because the pulse of the Omphalos was slowing to match Barber’s heartbeat, and the umbilical tunnel through reality was steadying with each measured footstep which Barber took. He was already halfway there.

  ‘Barber!’ he shouted. ‘You know what your problem is? You can’t leave anything to chance! You had to know, and you had to get into my head to do it. You had to be certain, didn’t you?’

  Unable to spare him a fraction of his concentration, Barber continued steadily, half a dozen paces from the Omphalos, its light gilding his fingertips. Five paces.

  ‘So here’s that back at you: I know you’re going to fail, and I’m going to enjoy watching it, you arrogant shit. You know how I know?’

  Four paces. Three.

  ‘Because you’re not up to this! You never were!’ Andy’s voice was hoarse and ragged with desperation, trying to pluck at the tiny worm of uncertainty which he prayed that Barber had picked up from him in return. ‘How could you ever think this would work? I mean really?’ All the questions that he’d never been able to answer about himself. ‘What if you’re unfixed too?’

  Two.

  Barber hesitated. He frowned slightly.

  For a fraction of a second he lost control over the energy flow, and the tunnel spasmed in violent reaction. The infinitely thin layers of reality which comprised its walls scissored together in every direction simultaneously, slicing him apart so suddenly and completely that it seemed like he’d simply exploded in a cloud of red mist.

  The lacunae in the air around the Rotunda’s roof winked out of existence, and the gates to which they had been linked imploded, shattering windows all down the building’s length and creating in turn a scribbled chain-reaction as the suddenly untethered Narrows became free to find their original courses, like hundreds of miniature versions of the Ryknild Street ley. All over the city, there were stuttering power cuts and electrical surges, scores of minor road accidents as traffic lights went haywire, small earth-tremors localised on single streets or even individual houses, lights in the sky, random snow flurries, and eruptions of static electricity. Deep within the sandstone bed-rock of the Birmingham Fault, the Rotunda’s concrete-sheathed copper core split along its length, propagating a series of seismic shocks which were detected as far away as Cardiff. They caused serious damage to most of New Street Station’s platforms and subsequent chaos on the national rail network from London to Glasgow. Ripples spreading ever outward. However, none of this was as inexplicable as the appearance of an unpredicted solar eclipse over the city.

  Ted saw it as he cradled Edris’ body. The urdrog had been sucked back into the collapsing gate, but he couldn’t move the big warrior, and he didn’t know how to stop the lights in his torc and amulets from guttering towards extinction, so he simply held him and moaned, ‘Please, oh please,’ over and over again to the hole in the sky.

  Laura Bishop saw it from her mother’s conservatory as she sat with her lunch and the property lettings pages of the local paper open in front of her. It occurred to her to wonder whether Andy could see the eclipse from wherever he was – but she found, with a kind of guilty relief – that she didn’t actually care.

  Bruna watched it gleaming darkly between the stones of the Rollright Circle, and, unsure of what it portended, huddled closer to her fire.

  A man in expensive Italian shoes wrapped his car around a lamppost when his hands-free exploded with a shriek of feedback and deafened him permanently on that side.

  And when the lights went out in the Tap and Spile, Aston Stirchley the Third raised his pint of Bombardier to the sky in salute and simply said ‘Get in there, my son.’

  Meanwhile, the Omphalos hung in the centre of the black-hole sun: golden, singing, inviolate.

  ***

  ‘Mine,’ said Andy, reaching out his hand.

  And after all, why not?

  Didn’t he deserve it, after everything he’d been through? After everything that had been done to him and to others on his behalf? Wasn’t he morally obliged to make amends, to repair the damage now that the power to do so was within his reach?

  He could find the scattered communities of Moon Grove and Holly End, bring them back together and find them new homes. He could repair the Narrows, and heal the wounds inflicted on the nature of his own world – all worlds. He didn’t subscribe to the notion that such power was too much for a mere mortal to cope with. Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Why? Who was to decide what he did or did not deserve? He’d had no
thing asked of him, been promised nothing, expected no reward, and earned no punishment. Everything he’d done had been motivated by necessity and the promptings of his own conscience, and if that had been enough to save the world, then it should be enough now.

  The earth-ch’i continued to pour through him, but it was his to control now, and he knew better than to try and dominate it as Barber had done. He was unfixed; he would slide through the gaps and take by stealth what his creator could not by force.

  Then Bex was in front of him – he cursed himself for having completely overlooked her – throwing a double handful of black vitriol in his face, and he went down, blinded and screaming.

  ‘…never!…’ she gasped, ‘…kill you first…’ and fell where he lay writhing.

  With his concentration broken, the earth-chi slipped from his control. The moment of the solstice passed, and the hole in the sun closed irrevocably, leaving them both stark on the empty rooftop, under the pale midwinter sun.

  6 The Last Gate

  Three days later, in the early evening of Christmas Eve, a perfectly ordinary terraced house in Ladywood was burgled in reverse.