The London Pride

by Charlie Fletcher

  Because of this, what happened next was, for Jo, a series of snapshots, not a continuous memory.

  The drop to the rails was further than she expected. Her leg hurt.

  She looked back towards the platform, a slice of light between the curved train side and the wall of the tunnel.

  Only ten feet away.

  Something large and dark was on the platform. Moving.

  Something small and gold and rat-shaped ran ahead of it and peered down the track at them.

  It would have no trouble fitting through the curved slice of space and chasing after them.

  She was running.

  The golden rat stared down the gap between the train and the tunnel mouth, watching the circle of light made by Jo’s torch get smaller and smaller as they sprinted off into the cavernous maw of the Underground.

  Behind it on the platform a second huge bronze lion roared in frustration.

  Then the rat turned. The other lion, the one that had been crawling up the inside of the train, began to back awkwardly out of the doors. It came bottom first, belly to the ground as it squeezed itself free. It was definitely an undignified exit for something that thought of itself as king of the jungle, and perhaps because of this it did not roar, but just hissed with a sound like a steam-escape valve letting pressure out of a boiler that was about to explode.

  The rat scampered away from the tunnel mouth, moving fast. Although it was a metal rat, it had a real rat’s habit of keeping to the angle of the wall where possible, so it raced along the edge of the platform further from the rails, and then followed it as it right-angled to an exit. It chicaned round the frozen commuters and leapt up onto the rubber handrail of the escalator. It flowed uphill at speed, jumping over the hands of the unmoving passengers with a series of sinuous lollops that didn’t slow its progress at all.

  Reaching the level of the street it hurled itself to the floor and skittered out.

  Outside, it slid to a stop, the water on the pavement spraying the bird who was waiting for it.

  The rat looked up into the beady stone eye of Horus the hawk, transfixed by the blue radiating from it like a searchlight.

  In the museum Bast perched on the edge of the sarcophagus, staring at the surface of the blue light that filled it like a heavy liquid. And at the centre of it she saw what Horus saw, as if the stone hawk was a television camera and the sarcophagus a screen.

  The rat chittered at her.

  THE TUNNELS, YOU SAY, said the cat.

  The rat chittered some more.

  NO, said the cat. NOT A JOB FOR LIONS THEN.

  GO BACK, said the cat. I WILL GIVE YOU THE ARMY YOU REQUEST. IT IS IN MY POWER. WHAT MAGIC I MAKE, I CAN UNMAKE. I AM BAST.

  The rat bobbed in what was almost a curtsey, and doubled back into the Underground station.

  On the edge of the sarcophagus Bast reached a paw down and lazily stirred the surface of the light. The view from Horus’s eye disappeared and the blue light seemed to bulge upwards towards the cat’s face as if it was alive. Alive and hungry.

  The cat snarled at it, showing its fangs. The light slapped back and became flat and glassy. The cat leaned over and stared at itself in the now obedient and mirror-smooth surface.

  WHAT FLESH MOVES BY FOUR LEGS UNDER THE GROUND I RELEASE FROM THE CURSE OF STILLNESS TO DO MY WILL …

  20

  Wolfie’s weapon

  The echo of Filax’s warning bark was still resonating in the night air as Will rolled sideways so that his back was against the bus.

  He looked over at the dog. His first instinct was to shush it. Then he saw the intensity with which Filax was staring at something above him, and he ditched the first instinct and went straight to instinct number two: which was to follow the dog’s gaze.

  He looked straight upwards. Right into the eyes of a huge bronze lion that had been lying in wait four metres overhead, on the open top of the tourist bus, biding its time.

  As it snarled and launched itself, he rolled sideways, hit the sharp edge of the back step and without thought threw himself inside the bus. What saved him were two things. One was not thinking and just reacting. The second was that it was an old Routemaster bus, one of the kind that had an open platform on the back corner for getting in and out.

  As the lion hit the pavement and Tragedy rolled left and Wolfie leapt right to avoid getting squashed flat, Will hurled himself into the stairwell to the upper floor. The lion was a big one, and now he was momentarily safe he had time for one thought, which was that it would not be able to get inside the narrow space in which he was now hiding.

  As the lion regained its balance and spun to spring after Will, Wolfie leapt inside the bus and jammed in with him.

  Tragedy didn’t move fast enough.

  The lion backed him up against a taxi.

  Will saw a fragmented view of what happened next through the rain-spattered window of the bus.

  Tragedy saw he had nowhere to go. So he grinned as convincingly as he could and reached out a hand.

  ‘Here, kitty kitty,’ he said. ‘Who’s a nice kitty then, eh?’

  The lion cocked its head.

  ‘You two get out of here,’ said Tragedy out of the side of his mouth, without breaking eye contact with the lion. ‘I got kitty here, don’t I, nice old soppy moggy that you are, ain’tcha?’

  The lion cocked its head on the other side.

  For a moment Will thought it was, impossibly, going to be OK.

  And then the lion roared, blowing Tragedy’s hair back off his forehead with the force of it, and leapt at him.

  Filax T-boned the lion in mid-air, ramming into its side like a snarling marble missile. Because the lion was airborne, and the dog had timed his attack to hit it as soon as its paws left the ground, it had no way of resisting the force and direction of the impact. Filax knocked the lion sideways so that it missed Tragedy and hit the traffic light on the pedestrian island in the middle of the road with a loud BONG that both stunned it and bent the metal pole ten degrees off vertical.

  Tragedy didn’t hang around to see what happened next, because another lion came bounding down the road, closing at speed. Filax saw it and disappeared as Tragedy scrambled onto the bus.

  ‘Up!’ he said. ‘UP. That little bleeder will get in here easy!’

  They tumbled upwards onto the open deck. The sight it gave them of the street was certainly scenic but not at all cheerful. There was movement all around as animal shapes raced towards them from the south and east and west.

  ‘We’re not safe up here,’ said Will, looking down at the stunned lion, who was trying groggily to get to its feet. ‘That one got up here once; it looks like it’ll have no problem in repeating the trick … and then we’re toast.’

  Tragedy nodded. ‘No worries. We got a secret weapon, remember?’

  Will stared at him and the grinning boy in the wig and fooffy shirt.

  ‘Tradge,’ he said, feeling the bitter taste of defeat beginning to sour his mouth as he spoke. ‘You were brave as hell down there, calling the lion “kitty”, but you’ve got a screw loose if you think a violin’s going to stop anything.’

  ‘Not a violin, dummy,’ said Wolfie. ‘A wunderkind!’

  And then, as if there was some hidden conductor in the sky watching for his cue, there was a flash of lighting, and a crash of thunder that made Wolfie throw back his head and roar with delighted laughter. He stepped up onto the seats and stood with one leg cocked on the railing of the bus, looking all round him at the approaching animals as he slipped the violin under his chin and began to work his bow across the strings, sending raindrops flying into a fine mist as he played with dizzying speed.

  And as he played, Will understood. The secret weapon wasn’t Wolfie or the violin: it was his music. It was extraordinary and exciting and moving and familiar and unexpected and magical. It was complicated and it was simple. It was all that and many more contradictory things, but most of all, despite all its spellbinding intricacy, the thought
came to Will that it was pure: it was as pure as the clean, cold water from the original well that all the greatest music comes from. He shook his head. That wasn’t the kind of thought he normally had, but then this wasn’t the kind of music he normally liked; except now he was under a spell, like the animals that had slowed and begun to gather tamely in front of the bus, looking up at the wild boy making the enchanted bow fly across the strings of his violin.

  Even the stunned lion looked happy as it came and sat calmly beneath the bus, looking up.

  ‘Wow,’ said Will.

  ‘Secret weapon,’ said Tragedy.

  ‘How did you know?’ said Will.

  ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,’ said Tragedy. ‘One of the things Old Black says.’

  He nodded at the growing crowd of lions and cats gathering on the south-east corner of the bus, like a well-ordered audience at an impromptu concert.

  ‘And you don’t get more savage breasts than that of a lion, I can tell you that. I nearly widdled myself down there.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ said Will. ‘You were braver than the lion.’

  Tragedy nodded and looked at Will with a face that, despite the rain, for just a short moment shone like the sun. Will realised once more how starved of praise and affection the small statue must be.

  Tragedy found his normal face again. He beckoned Will to the back of the bus, away from the southern edge. He looked over the railing to the north. Will was surprised and cheered to see Filax back in the alleyway, wagging his tail at him. Dogs can’t speak, but his look was definitely saying, ‘Let’s GO!’

  ‘While Wolfie’s got ’em all calmed up over there, let’s scarper,’ said Tragedy. ‘If we get split up, we’ll meet you at Coram’s Fields. OK?’

  Once more it was time to move, not think. Will nodded. He squeezed Tragedy’s shoulder and then slipped over the side of the bus and hung down.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Tragedy, and took hold of his wrist, leaning over and lowering him a bit further so the drop would be easier. Their eyes met. Will nodded. Tragedy winked and let him go.

  Will hit the ground softly and turned. Tragedy was already after him. Will caught him as he dropped, and put him on his feet. Then they ran as low and as silently as they could to join Filax. Will glanced back for one last quick look at Wolfie, who now bestrode the front of the bus as if it were a ship and he was some wild and elemental figurehead, his arm shuttling back and forwards as the music worked its glamour on the watching beasts.

  As Will turned and ran north with Filax and Tragedy he felt like he had to physically tug himself from the magnetic pull of the music step by step. As the distance increased, the pull became easier to escape, but for the first few hundred metres it was only the competing tug drawing him towards his sister that allowed him to move at all.

  Will had felt a lot of things in his life. He had felt bad. He had felt guilty. He had felt pain and he had felt fear, huge fear that sucked his mind away and left a howling echo-chamber of dread in its place. He had felt of lot of all those things especially intensely in the time since the world had stopped and trapped him and Jo in this living nightmare. But he had never, ever felt the thing he now felt jarring through him with every step he ran: he felt fractured – dangerously, terrifyingly fractured, like a thin crack was spreading through the very core of him, of what made him Will.

  If she was not at Coram’s Fields, he didn’t know what he would do. But he began to dread that he would break. Break, shatter and go mad. Or worse.

  21

  Rat run

  Jo must have switched on the torch by reflex, because it bounced a ring of light on the soot-blackened tunnel ahead of them as they ran.

  Ribbed sections of tube blurred past.

  Dark cables of all sizes, thick to thin, accompanied their flight, making looped swags along the tunnel walls like carefully draped intestines.

  It was as if they’d escaped into the belly of a much darker and bigger beast than the train.

  They ran close to the side of the tunnel, keeping clear of the fourth rail as well as the third electrified rail in the middle and to the side of the two regular ones on which the train’s wheels ran. You could see the electrified ones because they were mounted on white china insulating pads.

  Jo didn’t know if both electric rails would kill you. She thought for some reason it was only the middle one. But she was not going to take any chances.

  The gravel and clinker base of the tunnel crunched as they ran, and for a while, after they’d escaped the angry roars of frustration from the lions, who had been unable to squeeze past the train and get into the tunnel behind them, there was no other noise.

  As her eyes adjusted to the light, Jo noticed patches of bluish light on the ground ahead and all around them. It was the same frozen light that covered the people and the soldier-statues. She looked more closely at the next patch as she approached it. At first she thought it was a pair of shoes. It was about the same shape and size, but then, as she focused the beam of the torch on it, she realised with a shudder that it was a pair of rats.

  She hated rats.

  She knew the tube was full of them. She’d once stood close to the edge of a platform and looked down at the grubby floor between the tracks and seen three large black rats scuttling unconcernedly back and forth, just a few short feet from the unsuspecting crowd of commuters above. Her dad had pulled her back. It was the time that he had explained why getting close to the edge was so dangerous, not just because a train might come and squash you, but because of the electric rails. He’d pointed them out to her. She’d asked how the rats didn’t get electrocuted; he’d said rats were pretty clever. He’d sounded quite impressed. He said he’d seen a lot of bad places in the world, and that rats always survived.

  It had given her nightmares, all those black furry shapes with their long naked tails, scurrying about unseen, just beneath the skin of the city, in the walls and under the floors. That’s where her fear of rats had begun. But, on the plus side, that was when she’d got wised up about the lethal rails, so that was good.

  She wished her dad was with her now, and thinking of him led her to think of her mum, frozen and alone in the empty city. At least wherever he was he was surrounded by his fellow soldiers. They’d left her mum alone and open to the elements and anything bad that decided to drop out of the sky on her. And that started her thinking of Will, and that didn’t help anything. She clenched her jaw and ran on.

  ‘I am not ordinary,’ said Ariel eventually, as they rounded a long curve and saw the lights of a distant platform beckoning them.

  She sounded out of breath and angry.

  ‘And I do not like running,’ she added. ‘It is much more tiring than flying.’

  ‘I was just trying to snap you out of it,’ said Jo. She was running lopsidedly, her leg screaming at her to stop and rest. She ignored it. ‘You went into a funk.’

  ‘A funk?’ said Ariel. ‘What is a “funk”?’

  ‘You slowed down. You got frozen in the headlights. You stopped thinking.’

  Ariel snorted dismissively. But she didn’t have a ready reply. Maybe, like Jo, she needed every bit of breath to keep moving.

  They crunched grimly onwards towards the light, which didn’t seem to be getting any closer. And then Jo’s knee gave way and she gasped and fell, her hand reaching out instinctively, trying to steady herself.

  She fell straight towards the electric rail.

  Snatching her hand back, she tried to corkscrew out of the way, but with only one leg it was hopeless. Her eyes screwed shut on reflex and then her arm was wrenched out of its socket and she stopped moving.

  She opened her eyes. And saw the electric rail an inch from her nose.

  Ariel pulled her slowly backwards, away from the danger.

  ‘That was close …’ Jo gasped. ‘Much too close. Thank you …’

  Ariel smiled. ‘It wasn’t just close,’ she said. ‘It was extraordinary. The speed of my ref
lexes? Extraordinary … rather like me, no?’

  The old Ariel was back. Conceited. Vain. Boastful.

  Jo was surprised to find she had missed her. Then Ariel did a remarkable thing. She smiled and punched Jo on the arm.

  ‘I’m joking, fool.’

  ‘What?’ said Jo.

  ‘I’m saying thank you for snapping me out of it back there.’

  This was new. Ariel sounded almost … normal.

  ‘I don’t work properly down here. You saw me crash-land on the escalator.’

  ‘I felt it,’ said Jo. ‘Remember?’

  Ariel smiled grimly.

  ‘Well, I’ve never not worked before. I’ve always been able to fly. But I think that because I was made as a spirit of the air, I don’t work if I go back into the ground.’

  ‘I’m made of metal,’ she added in explanation. ‘Where does metal come from?’

  ‘Underground,’ said Jo. ‘OK. I get it.’

  ‘And me not being able to fly. Well, that’s like you not being able to walk,’ said Ariel. ‘You can’t imagine how that feels.’

  ‘Actually I can,’ said Jo. And without thinking why she was doing it she stopped, bent down and hiked up the leg of her jeans, shining the torch on the scars. ‘I couldn’t walk for quite a while. That’s why I run funny.’

  Ariel peered at her knee. She opened her mouth to say something, and then her eyes shifted.

  ‘Jo,’ she said, and even as Jo got a small prick of pleasure from the fact that she had used her name for the first time, she got a bigger stab of alarm from the look that suddenly washed over Ariel’s face.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Look,’ said Ariel. ‘The lights are going out.’

  For a moment Jo did not see what she meant. The lights on the distant platform were strong as ever. Her torch was unwavering. And then she saw what Ariel was referring to.