Proffit returned to the screen.
—I don’t believe he sold any, though I believe he tried. He told me he was working on a globe clasped in the grip of a world-spanning city at war with itself. Fire-breathing demons flew over every size and type of conflict, aligning with neither one side or another, but feeding on terror and death—
And not exactly fattening on it, Proffit thought, recalling the grey-shanked zephyrs.
In the park a figure lay on the ground close to where the old man had been. Figures approached, nobody anxious to get there first. Proffit drew a chair up to the window; with tea and toast in hand he had the best seat in the house. It was looking bad. Was that something sticking out of the old boy? A police car and an ambulance entered through the park gates.
Mid-afternoon, Proffit made his way by back streets beneath the grey dunes of the clouds. Muffled cries of pain or pleasure came from a wheel-less, curtained van. A fire was barely contained in the cauldron of a backyard. A crash of glass released from a high room a violent argument, in a language Proffit didn’t recognize. Sirens seemed like calls to arms. Sat on a far chimney stack, a misplaced gargoyle hugged its knees. It turned on its axis, a chunky weather-cock – then it was no such thing as it became airborne. A bird, Proffit was determined to believe, and not as substantial as it appeared to be.
In the city library, Proffit searched the microfilm of the Harrowby Messenger for 1937. It was an hour before he found that which he hardly could have wanted to find.
COAL ROW FIRE MYSTERY
A police spokesman said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the fire at Coal Row, and made no comment on the claims of Mr Ernest Purbright who was one of the first at the scene.
“We couldn’t get no further than the hallway. The place was falling apart with smoke and flames everywhere. I saw something at the top of the stairs. I thought it was a monkey, but my workmate said it was a big bird. Whatever it was seemed buoyed up on the smoke; it seemed to have a little pot-belly and weedy arms and legs.”
It is believed the body found in the cellar of the house is that of Mr Albert Lostock. The investigation continues.
Proffit returned home on busier streets. It was early evening and street lamps leaked orange; others flickered weakly, or remained unlit in smashed casings. Eyes glanced anxiously or were filled with a furtive hate. Pockets surely bulged with more than the hands they contained. There were scuffles in side-streets.
Glad to be inside again, Proffit looked out. How dense would the clouds need to be before they blocked out daylight completely? A spur of the park looked in danger of being chewed by adjacent office blocks, like blackened tombstone teeth. Tree foliage was the dense coiling black of smoking tyres. Around the crater of the sandpit, grass was grey stubble. Proffit drew the curtains.
Later he opened them again, onto a city like a coastline of black rocks strewn with lit bulbs. Something caught his eye, something so massive the streets it moved along could barely accommodate it. The vehicle, or the load it carried, had a curved upper portion that overlooked roof and chimney. Switchback-style it moved up and down the streets; no deceleration, let alone stops, for road junctions, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights. The monstrous size of the thing must have activated some special dispensation. Proffit would have thought it lost were there not purposefulness in its unhesitating progress. Not so much lost in the city as determined to explore every yard of its network of streets. As if to map it.
As troubling as the vehicle’s smooth, almost floating motion, was its disappearance. Either it had gone behind the castellated heights of the city council buildings, or sank into the deep adjacent streets. The city seemed to have darkened while he watched, and fewer street lamps appeared lit than was usual at this time of the evening. The darkest streets seemed the ones the vehicle had passed along – as if it had sucked the dull orange sodium light away leaving black trenches in its wake. The more likely theory soothed a little; those blackened lengths were affected by localized power cuts. Suppose they should spread here? Proffit drew the curtains and searched for candles. He found none, but his dread of sudden darkness receded as the evening progressed, with not a flicker of the living room ceiling light.
There was a message in his e-mail account. He wondered how long this one-sided communication would continue.
My dear Mr Proffit,
I’ve had a brilliant wheeze. I’ve decided to bring forward some business I have to do in the north. I feel an examination based on photographic evidence alone will be limited in its usefulness. Look, I won’t hear of you making the trip down to the south coast, and I wouldn’t countenance the transportation of such a fragile object by even the most ruthlessly efficient mailing company (of which I know of fewer than one). So I suggest a meeting in Harrowby. I have booked into the Railway Hotel for tonight and the night after. This sounds like a fait accompli but you’re under no obligation. However I think you can be under no illusion regarding the seriousness with which I take the news of your recent acquisition. No promises, but considerable sums of money are not inconceivable. Don’t hesitate to ring the mobile number below. You may of course call. I’ll be in room 408.
In anticipation,
Humph.
Darkness, abrupt and shocking. After a death-like instant Proffit’s feet were again in touch with the floor. He moved carefully to the curtains and opened them. The computer screen was an impenetrable black; he could hardly believe it had ever been lit up with words. Bed seemed the safest place.
He doubted he was the only one lying awake. Beckoning, urging voices in the street. A vehicle accelerated, skidded; an impact. A sharp tang of sound as a window fragmented.
When he pressed the light switch, Proffit found the power hadn’t returned. He got up and felt his way out of the room.
The view from the living room window; he was becoming addicted to it. Discreet crimson glows around the city; flitting figures below. Gun shot barked. Moonlight was painted meanly on the trees of the park. The open space beyond the gates seemed a great blister rather than flat. Was the curve not apparent in daylight because of all the attendant distractions? As he stared, the rise seemed more pronounced. Before the darkness could make it a mound, Proffit closed the curtains against it. The duvet soon covering him was another barrier.
He only drowsed. Where sleep should have taken him there was a shadowed floor; it swelled higher and higher, until it freed itself, and, like a black balloon, floated as free as the walls of his head would allow.
He got up and fetched his portable radio. He desperately wanted its sounds. Re-tuning right across the dial produced coughs and hisses like a premonition of nuclear fallout. He returned to bed.
Dread awoke him, taunted that sleep had been his and was no more. He reached for his alarm clock, squinting to make out the hands. The quality of the light suggested a much earlier hour. But in the dim living room the mantle-piece clock confirmed eight-twenty in the morning. Still no power, so no television, no tea, no toast. He tried the radio but soon switched off the sequence of cracked syllables that were like the calls thrown to the clouds and beyond the other night. The fact that Proffit was experiencing part of a wider privation was of little comfort. Was the Railway Hotel affected? If Humphries had been true to his word, he must be finding Harrowby a poor substitute for the sunny south.
With no allowances for the early hour, the city’s repertoire of turmoil was already establishing itself. Esther might retract her complacent words about cities should he be crass enough to remind her of them. He’d drop in; their amicable estrangement was an example to the rest of the city. Besides, wasn’t mutual support between friends, ex-lovers, neighbours, desirable, if not essential in these times? Unless the opposite state of affairs was endemic. There was little contact, let alone neighbourliness, between Proffit and his fellow residents. In the passage outside his flat the three other doors might have opened into closets, such was the silence.
Furtive as a spy, Proffit left the buildi
ng. A harsh chemical in the air hit the back of his nose, and at least had the virtue of waking him fully. Passing cars assisted, blasting their horns at him for no obvious reason. Other cars’ wheel-less state left them part-immersed in broken tarmac. On an otherwise dead van a windscreen wiper wagged No.
The canal was a ribbon of black gloss paint. On its rubble beach a dummy, or body, lounged. Two crows flop-fluttered together, hopelessly entangled. Rats scampered, busy as clerks preparing for an inspection.
The door of number seven Canal Terrace opened to the limit of the chain. A terrible falling off if this was Esther’s new paramour. A sign of the times that such a vested hulk should cower behind a door. Murky the hallway; an odour of over-used cooking oil. A television whisper-hissed.
“Hello – it’s Trevor. Esther’s ‘ex’.”
Glimpsing an arm in a sling, a drooping gut, Proffit was appalled.
“’Stheroo?”
Alternatives; Esther and this one, a couple; Esther in the back tied to a chair, the attentions of the vested-one temporarily interrupted; Esther living elsewhere, having moved out at short notice without bothering to tell Proffit. He couldn’t believe any of these possibilities. Esther was simply gone, profoundly so.
“’Ckoff,” the man said. The door banged shut, lid tight. Proffit returned home.
As if taking advantage of his absence the house had succumbed to the madness. From the five top-floor windows, his included, gargantuan black ropes of smoke rose to flatten against the undersides of the clouds. A dry sob was painful in his throat. Packed into his few rooms was the only future he could envisage. Dentists and patients had vacated the surgery next door and grin-grimaced orange teeth at the show. The insurers had evacuated their building too, and looked hungry, though not, Proffit judged, for the business the fire might have represented. Fellow residents didn’t acknowledge him: their fire-lit faces were aghast or elated as at a burning god. Proffit’s eyes watered copiously. There was no going in, though he doubted anyone would have tried to stop him.
A rumble of collapsing floors. Perversely, considering the past twenty-four hours or so, no sirens. A suitable end, to walk in, cloth himself in flames, burn to nothing the burden of confusion and dread. But an end for a braver man, and maybe a less curious one. He’d see this through and begin again, as he had only months before. But his thoughts had no emotional impulse. He felt hollow – as eaten away as the inside as the house. But when the metallic sniggering began, anger moved into the void.
The smoke formed a low ceiling over the furnace. A round face, a grimed, grinning urchin’s, poked through. There was no way of apprehending that fellow. The fun was his to be had.
Proffit had to tell someone, and only one would understand – Humphries, if he hadn’t already vacated his room at the hotel. After Humphries, Proffit would renew contacts with friends and former colleagues. In lieu of the authorities mastering the situation, they’d discuss, exchange information. Abandonment of the city might be the sanest response to the challenges it presented. His own sanity might be questioned if he implicated an old globe in the chaos. No, he’d save talk of the globe for Humphries. The globe would confirm Proffit’s identity, and then the expert could take possession of it. Damp and damaged it would be worth pennies – and then only in other cities, not Harrowby, that’s if other cities weren’t themselves being infected by this one.
Proffit felt the heat of tropical lands as he skirted the building. Amongst the crumbling walls at the back, lidless dustbins on their sides disgorged rubbish. Lids, ideal for shields, Proffit found himself thinking dispassionately.
He found the globe. It was a dead thing. With his fingers encased in the great north south rent, it was like a huge boxing glove.
The street was littered with the detritus of once tepid, routine-driven lives. Broken chairs, bottles, de-limbed dolls, half-consumed packages of fast food, were tokens of lives changed perhaps forever.
Water frothed from a burst water main and pooled in the road. A van passing at speed sprouted great white wings of water. One caught Proffit but he cared little at the drenching.
Viewing the smoking wreck of a car, Proffit wondered how much safer he’d be conveyed on four wheels.
Here was a car, a black one. It might be a cab. And couldn’t anything be anything now in this city where the rulebook had been tossed aside? There seemed an intention in the air to return to first principles – or no principles.
The car/cab stopped at his raised hand. Proffit recognized the driver.
“By yourself this time?” the man said. “Should have charged extra for whatever was in that black bag.” Wry words, but glaring eyes in the rear-view mirror. He may have been thinking of the omitted tip. Proffit was glad that in the general gloom the cabby hadn’t noticed the misshapen globe.
“Railway Hotel,” Proffit instructed. “ ‘Please’” was a nicety, a sign of weakness, he wouldn’t display.
A swerving, halting progress along many diversions. Gaps in railings seemed emblematic of iron bars and spears in use elsewhere. A cast-off manhole cover suggested misrule spread to the underside of the city. Birds flew haphazardly, as if the clouds were an unprecedented environment to fly in. Something larger passed over the cab with more purpose. Proffit shrank in his seat as if the metal roof were insufficient protection from the grating giggler. The thing alighted on a skeletal tree to which it, or someone, assigned a bright blazing foliage, an instant before the thing flew off again.
The clamour of approaching sirens shook Proffit to his bones. The muttering driver edged the cab grudgingly left, and two battered ambulances overtook, neck-and-neck, as likely to create emergencies as attend any. People ran in every direction, faces fearful or crazily happy. The red rose emblem on the face of City Hall was being painted black by a man on a rickety platform; he needn’t have bothered, as the darkening atmosphere beneath the smoke-fouled clouds was painting quicker.
On the seat next to Proffit the globe felt like a heft of dead flesh.
They passed the university hospital. Horseplay on the top floor. The cabby laughed, hands batting the steering wheel. “Bloody students!” he shouted over his shoulder. Proffit supposed the white-coated, jeering figure might be one, and he was bloody indeed. So was his colleague. Each held an ankle of a dangling, squirming third. Below, laughing ambulance men tautened a blanket between them and manoeuvred it drunkenly. Proffit turned from the plummeting scream.
A pitched battle on the silvery swirl of lines feeding the railway station. A shape swept overhead; its stubby wings looked barely adequate for the job of keeping aloft the bundle of limbs. Ahead was the Railway Hotel.
The cab braked hard to a rocking sudden standstill. Proffit got out and went around to the driver’s door. The driver viewed Proffit’s handful of change with contempt, then relented as Proffit thought he might. “Go on then – though I’m thinking money’s heading to be a game like everything else.”
The façade of the hotel was as lightless as a cliff. The canopy before the entrance hung in rags. Backing away, a cat spat at Proffit. From a high window opposite the hotel, a child chuckled hoarsely. Proffit’s shoes ground glass on the steps rising up to the foyer.
The entrance hall was deserted. Slashed sofas grinned foam. Clothes were frozen in mid-clamber from an abandoned suitcase. There was an opened-out road map with an alternative network of bloodstains. Proffit went to the reception desk and leafed through the visitors’ book. The large windows, most divested of their glass, let in sounds of a tumult that appeared to have passed through here – and, Proffit feared, might yet return. The light was gilded with an unnatural sunset.
Here was H. HUMPHRIES, neatly written amongst the previous two days’ arrivals.
With each step, the soles of Proffit’s shoes peeled away audibly from the sticky carpet. Alcohol fumes sweetened his way past the black mouths of the lifts to a grand switchback stairway.
An anticipatory apprehension invigorated him as he climbed the stairs. Woul
d Humphries be here, and if he were, what could Proffit say when the city was speaking so madly for itself? The globe was an irrelevance. I’m leaving the city, he’d said to Esther, floating an idea he’d not seriously intended to act upon. He felt differently now. From a rural retreat he could have watched the city, or cities, totter in TV news items, and ended the conflict with the OFF on his remote control. But the more he thought of it, the more fantastical seemed any place of repose and peace.
He began to hope Humphries might provide a more balanced perspective. Here was the fourth floor. Past a right-angle another long corridor. All doors were open onto wrecked rooms. How was that avuncular persona, from another world, dealing with this one?
Well enough, Proffit had to concede. Ahead a voice, a plummy, equal-to-anything, voice. Open your eyes Humphries. Proffit ran. It sounded like Humphries was alone and talking into a telephone.
Room 408 coming up. Proffit swung around the door, “Here’s the damned . . .”
No lights were on but he could see adequately. It was a large room with two tall windows; one had a single mountain peak of glass. Outside a flash underlit the clouds; a moment later a dull explosion.
No sign of Humphries, though he sounded only a yard or so away.
And he was, in a sense. Profit dropped the globe.
There was a dressing table with a three-leafed mirror. Someone had pulled it away from the wall. In the large central glass Humphries stood bathed in a sunny afternoon. The white hair was a radiant oval frame, from high forehead to chin. No wonder Humphries didn’t have a care in the world, for he wasn’t exactly in this one. Proffit’s hands clasped his mouth; it felt real enough to confirm the reality of everything else. Light spilled from the mirror to the plush patterned carpet; Proffit went to stand in it and face the mirror.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 60