He was running through an old industrial district, blown to smithereens and never fully rebuilt. The ruins of factories, where city larks would strip the copper and any other salvage to sell to those who needed it. Warehouses with gaping windows, the smashed glass like the grinning teeth of the thing Harrier had glimpsed last night. What had Vincent Harrier seen in a back alley in Mile End? A being of shadow and lines, its eyes weeping blue pits. He was not a man frightened of the world; and this thing had frightened him.
This part of the city, east London, was still a raw wound. Harrier grimaced, feeling the ghostly ache of the bullet wound in his leg. Healed long ago, the result of an Irgun sniper whose comrades had hung up his friend Trev like a piece of overripe fruit. For a second, he stumbled, his mind full of exploding hotels, the endless blue skies in the lonely desert, a Palestinian olive grove on fire and the air rippling in a greasy heat haze.
But that was then. He was still alive, and this was now.
Harrier had to catch this man who ran from him; this thief, this abductor of children, provider of victims for the wealthy elites. Elites that had hidden in luxury while the working people of London were bombed, their homes obliterated, their city ablaze. The people who now denied the returning soldiers a home, who forced them to self-house, to squat the margins of the city. The rich in their homes on the hills looking down on the rest of London.
The war, Harrier reflected, had made something of a Marxist of him.
He had taken this job on for nothing. He had heard the whispers of course, but had never had conclusive proof, until now. The streets of post-war London kept him busy as it was, dealing with the terrors of the damaged and shell-shocked city. But then a wife and husband came to him, his name now carrying weight in the underground currents of the city. Vincent Harrier, a man who could get things done – but not at any price. He had to believe what you asked of him was right, that it would in some small way make this unbearable world more tolerable. This husband and wife from Stepney Green, they clutched each other and attempted to look stoic, but revealed their son was gone. Taken. Disappeared. They had heard rumours of children disappearing, and worse rumours as to why, and now the unthinkable had happened. Their little baby boy (well, he’s a toddler now, said the husband) swallowed up by the darkness.
‘The night they took my Bobby,’ said the wife, choking back her emotion, ‘I saw the strangest thing. I was bringing the washing in from the garden – I say garden, it’s a strip of grass basically, but it’s ours – and I see this thing at the back, where our fence meets the alley, where the cats and foxes screech all night. It looked like a man, but it weren’t. Like a shadow, too thin to be a person. It looked like it was grinning at me. Taking the mickey, almost.
‘But then I looked again. It was gone, and I thought I’d imagined it. Not enough sleep, too much work, you know. But then Bobby disappeared that night.’
Harrier’s quarry accelerated, and tried to duck across the road and down a side street running next to an abandoned textile factory. Harrier already had his pistol in his hand, fired his weapon with precision, clipped the guy on the back of his left Achilles tendon. He screamed. Harrier noticed pigeons shooting up into the air, and a wary tortoiseshell cat bolt into the shadows at the shrieking noise.
The few other people on the street silently melted away. They knew not to get involved.
The man, this abductor of the lonely and unloved, sobbed and whimpered and tried to haul himself to safety as Harrier approached, calm and collected.
What must he see thought Harrier. An ageing man, scarred, stubbled, grim. A man who once had a sense of humour and now has none. A man who has seen too much. A man who never needed the stories of the judderman, never needed to see those spectral cats the self-housers were babbling about. You cannot unsee, and you cannot forget.
But you can end things.
He would provide this sobbing man with a kind of ending.
The man, gritting his teeth in pain, pulled a knife and brandished it at Harrier as he approached. Harrier paused, almost smiled, shot the man in the wrist. More screaming. Blood flowed, thick like syrup. Harrier could see through the hole he had made , flaps of shredded flesh, splinters of bone and tendon. He’d seen worse.
‘You’re all over now,’ said Harrier, pointing the gun at his victim’s head.
One shot, a crack like a leviathan’s spine breaking.
Blood pooled around the man’s shattered skull. Grey matter formed a filthy paste in the dust of the city. Harrier looked at this mess that had once been human, and felt nothing.
He rooted around inside the corpse’s pockets, locating the piece of paper he knew the man would be carrying. Now he could find Bobby. Now he could bring him back, bring some light back with him to the streets of Stepney Green.
He looked around him, at the skeletal remains of a once thriving part of his city.
‘London, your architect is a degenerate,’ he growled, and spat on the asphalt.
He lit a cigarette.
From Daniel Eider’s journal
The weather was strange last night. The skies over the reservoirs of Woodberry Down were the colour of a bruise, yellow and purple with a sense of faded injury. I could smell stagnant water, the kind that wriggles with larval life and turns the stomach. You could feel that autumn was coming and with it a storm. I hoped for a storm strong enough to scour all that was ill in the city away; I knew it would not.
I walked home past families of orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill, the men with plastic shopping bags stretched over their furred hats to stave off the coming rain.
I stared at the swollen sky, and I grinned as the first drops of rain splashed on my dirty skin. I felt the drops trickle down my face and gather in my beard.
The city could be so beautiful. A Routemaster passed me slowly as I made my way along Amhurst Park and the sight of the passengers on the bus making their journeys that would always be unknown to me made my heart feel fit to burst. My people.
A beggar begged at the Stamford Hill Broadway. I saw fruit and vegetables from one of the many grocery shops spilled and ruined on the ground we all walked. An Indian man swept up the detritus and it was beautiful. I flipped a few coins into the beggar’s hat. He replied in an accent I couldn’t place. Irish or cockney, perhaps.
The rain intensified, making London a city of water, a drowned land, deluging it and trying to wash away its dirt and sins. But the problems were too ingrained. We didn’t believe in baptisms.
I entered Springfield Park as the downpour continued, a man alone now, and I sat on the sodden grass and watched the oak leaves bend under the weight of water, and it was in that park that looked out over the Lea Valley and north east London that I felt at peace and knew what I had to do. There were Canada geese floating on the Lee navigation, and a blackbird braved the rain to take advantage of worms summoned to the surface by the water’s insistent tattoo.
I hope these words make sense. I once hoped I would turn all of this into a book but I see that is no longer possible, that the thing of shadow I pursue is now ready to meet me on my own terms, so these scraps of writing that form my journal and diaries will have to suffice. And I hope someone can one day make sense of them. My brother Gary, perhaps, or even Yaxley and his lunatic followers. I no longer dream of the Malachite Press.
I fear the book will never see the light of day. At least I hope these words convey my feelings towards this city that I love and fear, even if what I have seen can never truly be pinned down on paper.
In the end, Gary never found his brother. Danny Eider was gone and all that was left were the scraps of his journals for the freaks and occultists and hippies like Yaxley to pore over. Perhaps that is what Danny had wanted, never to be truly known, but to be one of those whispered undercurrents of London’s alternative and subterranean cultures. A passing reference and a sly in-joke for Jenny Duro and her crew. A phantom, as insubstantial as the spectral cats that had terrorised the blitz victims, as mythic a
s the black bears faced down by Vincent Harrier. A cult figure for the cult of London Incognita.
But Gary did find the judderman. The jagged figure of lines stared back at him with eyes like leaking, stagnant rockpools, from a cracked and smeared mirror in a cold public toilet on Finsbury Park, a place where deals were made and men came for quick handjobs in the cubicles.
Gary didn’t know what had led him to this spot; he had been wandering for hours, drunk on a bottle of cheap vodka, his clothes stinking and people avoiding eye contact with him, or spitting on him, telling him he was a fucking disgrace, pull yourself together mate, get a fucking job, there’s kids around here, you stink you cunt, and so on. He must have been ranting, raving, saying the following things:
London Incognita (can’t you see it?)
the mammoth is our destroyer or maybe it was once
an emperor worm will rise as the emperor of Nematoda!
Danny where are you mate? You left me
the tunnel-tribes they’re down there and they’re real and they’re alright actually, little child-sized things, they hand poke tattoos and speak to me in their lost London dialect
Lisa’s alabaster skin god I miss it
Jenny Duro I always liked Jenny Duro she’s as sound as a pound – what a lark!
the Barghest and its milky white eye what does it see?
there are disappeared children and tortured innocents and grinning men on the television do not trust them what hides behind the smiles will destroy us
Irish bombs will it ever end will there be peace in our time, though I do see the Republicans’ point (don’t hit me)
swastika tattoos are inked deep in your shitty pink skins and you have nothing to be proud of
shrapnel embedded in flesh sleeps like the grubs of a vile parasite (I can be poetic, see)
disfigured harlequins sip their liquor on a hollow shore but for what reason
creased sepia photographs what did Danny want with them all?
skinned sea mink, sea mink pelts, a stuffed sea mink sitting somewhere unloved maybe the Horniman museum down south near Forest Hill
gairfowl, littlewing, great auk, my parallel penguin of the deep north, one of the forgotten fauna and part of the supporting caste, you know what I mean or maybe you don’t
old paperbacks, their spines are broken, and paper decays
Malachite is a green deep green stone
who is Ashman???
Vincent fucking Harrier.
This would explain why his nose was dribbling blood, clotting in his beard. A group of sharply dressed skins on the Holloway Road had found his shambling form worthy of violence, and who could blame them? They’d put the boot in hard. Bruises were blooming like approaching stormclouds across his skin. There was a lump like a snooker ball coming up on the back of his head, throbbing and sharp. He limped a little from where his ankle had been kicked hard by a steel toe-capped boot. Gary imagined his own body as shattered architecture, a derelict building falling apart, a relic to be torn down and moved out of the way in the name of progress.
Gary was all over, a walking ruin. His limping cousin now said he couldn’t stand to be around him (you stink mate, you’re mental) and they no longer went to The Sovereign together. His mum and dad, wilfully oblivious as they were, withdrew even further into themselves and let their last living son slip into oblivion. Lisa was long gone, and good for her. Sometimes Gary would sit on a wall near his house, watching Fen and the Barghest pass him on their way to the pub.
He spent nights awake on coffee and amphetamine reading over his brother’s papers, flicking through his boxes of ancient photographs, trying to find clues in the Vincent Harrier novels. His days he spent floating on a sea of vodka and whiskey and occasionally the white spirit handed to him as he stood warming himself by a fire on a patch of waste ground. He spent more time now with the old men and the destitute drinkers under the bridges and railways. He enjoyed it. Felt solidarity with them. They had so many varied, colourful stories, of the judderman and the emperor worm and so much more; and he was more than willing to listen. His favourite spots with his drinkers were around Manor House, Stamford Hill, and the Tottenham Marshes where he liked to watch the kestrels hover as they hunted rodents in the long grasses.
But how he came to be in this bloodied state in this piss-stinking building in Finsbury Park he didn’t know. He must have been walking, shouting his obsessions to the people he passed in the street, his blood a cocktail of alcohol and amphetamines, chain smoking unfiltered cigarettes as he tottered along canal towpaths, staggered through the estates of Woodberry Down, harassed the commuters at Arsenal tube, insulted the skinheads in Holloway.
He listened to the drip of water in the cisterns. The soothing low hum of the traffic on Seven Sisters Road.
He recalled a fond memory of him and his brother together. It was the day Gary and Daniel Eider finally mustered up their courage and descended into the tunnels beneath the city and found the abandoned underground station they were seeking. The lost tunnels and forgotten connections that snaked and wormed beneath the city.
Gary recalled how Danny held his torch and the look on his brother’s face when that beam of light landed on the beings that they had come down here to seek but never truly believed existed. The troglodyte tribes down in the tunnels were real living breathing beings. They existed. Wrinkled, pale skinned, and child-sized, something amphibian to their movements and appearance. Salvagers, with their own salvage songs sung in an obscure London dialect, shanties built from the rubbish of the city above. The tunnel tribes’ world was built with the discontinued styles of the world above. An eclectic, retro style, Danny said, and laughed at his own comment.
In a way, Danny said later, they were larks like Jenny and her crew. Gary remembered the troglodytes’ inquisitive features and their frog-like eyes, their hand-poked tattoos of the emperor worm and the giant bear, and how his brother squatted on his haunches, supplicating himself in a way, offering them things he believed might endear them to him. Silver jewellery, a Marathon bar, a bottle of strong West Indian stout. The encounter with the tunnel tribes affirmed the power and reality of London Incognita, and the brothers realised that all the stories, it seemed, were true. Things were never really the same after that. In the months after Danny’s disappearance, Gary had enjoyed looking at the sketches, taken from life , his brother had made of the tunnel-tribes. Danny gave each sketch a title – Gary’s favourite was The Chthonic Tribes of the Tunnels that Wind and Writhe Beneath our Feet.
It had been a good day.
But now, in a cold, wet, dripping public toilet, the walls beaded with moisture, Gary looked into a cracked mirror and saw the judderman staring back at him and Gary dissolved into the bloodstream of the city, merging with its pain and its psychosis, and he became a thing of shadow, a man of lines and harsh edges, a story for all the lost and scared of London to talk about through the cold dark nights of the winter that was gripping the city.
I hope it never lets go, Gary thought.
You’re all over now.
Join the Society
The Eden Book Society is an ongoing book subscription brought to you by Dead Ink Books. Each book is written by a different author under a pseudonym and each year we select a different year from the society’s history to reproduce. There’s even a secret newsletter for subscribers only from our resident archivist digging through the Eden family records.
The 1972 books are written by: Andrew Michael Hurley; Alison Moore; Aliya Whiteley; Jenn Ashworth and Richard V. Hirst; Gary Budden; and Sam Mills.
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The 1972 Subscribers
In 1972 the subscribers to the Eden Book Society were...
Adam Lowe
Adam Rains
Adam Sparshott
Adrienne Ou
Agnes Bookbinder
Aki Schilz
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sp; Alan Gregory
Alexandra Dimou
Alice Leuenberger
Alison Moore
Aliya Whiteley
Amanda Faye
Amanda Nixon
Andrew Pattenden
Andy Banks
Andy Haigh
Anna Vaught
Anne Cooper
Anthony Craig Senatore
Ashley Stokes
Audrey Meade
Austin Bowers
Barney Carroll
Becky Lea
Ben Gwalchmai
Ben Nichols
Ben Webster
Benjamin Achrén
Benjamin Myers
Blair Rose
blutac318
Brian Lavelle
C Geoffrey Taylor
C. D. Rose
Catherine Fearns
Catherine Spooner
Cato Vandrare
Chris Adolph and Erika Steiskal
Chris Kerr
Chris Naylor-Ballesteros
Chris Salt
Christopher Ian Smith
Clare Law
Colette
Conor Griffin
Damian Fuller
Dan Coxon
Daniel Ross
Dave Roberts
David Harris
David Hartley
David Hebblethwaite
Debbie Phillips
Dennis Troyer
Derek Devereaux Smith
Edward S Lavery
Elizabeth Nicole Dillon Christjansen
Elizabeth Smith
Eloise Millar
Emily Oram
Eric Damon Walters
Erik Bergstrom
Erin C
Ex Somnia Press
Fat Roland
Françoise Harvey
Gareth E. Rees
Gemma Sharpe
Gia Mancini McCormick
Gina R. Collia
Green Hand Bookshop, Portland, ME
Gregory Martin
Hannah allan
Harry Gallon
Hayley Hart
Heather Askwith
Helen de Búrca
Judderman Page 6