Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Well, I’ll be…hey, you up there!’ called Robert. The girl looked down, her large eyes growing in astonishment.

  ‘Really subtle, Robert,’ said Rose from the side of her mouth.

  ‘Your name’s Spice, isn’t it? Listen, we have to speak to Zalian,’ he continued to bellow. ‘Somebody’s tried to kill us twice so far today!’ Behind them in the street a pair of elderly American tourists turned around and looked up. The man unsnapped the lens cap of his camera. Horrified, the girl ran around the dome to its back and dropped flat to the narrow ledge. Robert ran after her, following around the curve of the building.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, do you want to get us all killed?’ she hissed furiously, gripping the ledge in her hands and pulling herself forward to talk with him. ‘Bloody amateurs.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ called Robert, ‘but we’ve got to see Zalian.’ She could run off right now, he thought, she could dash away across the rooftops and maybe we’ll never find any of them again.

  Above, Spice remained hesitant, eyeing them with suspicion. ‘I can’t take you to Nathaniel,’ she said. ‘It’s too dangerous. Besides, you don’t know how to travel in daylight without being seen.’

  ‘Oh, is that a separate skill?’ asked Robert, cocking an eyebrow. ‘I like the day uniform, by the way. Very spiffy.’

  ‘We can help him if you’ll let us,’ said Rose. ‘We’re prepared to search the entire city until we find Sarah.’

  Spice pulled herself back from the ledge, remaining silent.

  ‘We gave Zalian the notebook as a sign of good faith, didn’t we?’ said Robert. ‘And we’ve managed to secure the second half of it. We just want to deliver it to him in person. Come on, we’ve done his dirty work, the least he can do is see us.’

  Spice hesitated, considering this, then rose to a crouching position.

  ‘All right, if you want to meet up with Nathaniel, be here at nine tonight.’ She turned to go.

  ‘Wonderful,’ muttered Rose. ‘We have to find a way of staying alive for another six hours.’

  ‘By the way,’ called Robert, ‘that was a neat trick with the roof door. You can’t see it from down here. How does it work?’ Spice stopped in her tracks, nonplussed.

  ‘False panel,’ she shrugged. ‘Same as all the other buildings.’ She turned and darted off around the other side of the dome.

  ‘Great, thank you. I’ll remember to give you guys a ring when I need cupboards put up.’ He turned to Rose.

  Rose grabbed his collar and pulled him around to face her. ‘Robert, I think you’d better try closing your mouth now, before you blow the whole deal.’ Her eyes widened as he grabbed the padded shoulders of her jacket, pulled her forward and kissed her hard on the lips. Rose’s response to this, after a brief moment of shock, was to fetch him a resounding smack on the side of the head. Robert fell back against a poster advertising the Laserium light show. ‘I think you’ve loosened a filling,’ he moaned, clutching his face in pain.

  ‘Don’t you ever try something like that again. You’re lucky these jeans are too tight for me to get my knee up as far as your groin.’ She spun on her heel and headed off along the Marylebone Road in the direction of the tube station. Thirty yards on, she stopped and waited.

  Gratefully Robert ran and caught up with her and together they plunged into the sluggish river of traffic.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have done that but…I thought maybe you wanted me to.’

  ‘Well, you misread your signals, Robert.’ Rose turned to him. ‘I like you, but like is as far as it goes and if you can’t keep it on that level, then we go separate ways, understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ he reluctantly agreed. What a dumb thing to have done. At least she seemed willing to continue with him. Maybe he had just picked his time badly.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, hastily initiating a change of subject, ‘you don’t suppose it’s all a game, do you? Like one of those role-playing games where everyone takes an identity and follows a planned scenario.’ He jumped back on the curb to avoid a taxi. ‘I mean, they spend their time charging around above the city at night having some kind of a war. You’ve got to admit it’s pretty unstable behaviour for a group of adults.’

  The main Baker Street intersection was gorged with cars and buses. Pedestrians dashed between them, climbing over chugging exhausts to reach the comparative safety of the traffic islands.

  ‘There are other lifestyles apart from your own, Robert,’ said Rose, watching for a break in the traffic. ‘I’m assuming, of course, that you have one. Anyway, it would have to be a pretty serious kind of a game that involved killing people for real.’

  ‘Yes, but has anyone been killed for real?’ Robert persisted. ‘We only have Zalian’s word that those razor-coin things are poisoned. Perhaps Charlotte Endsleigh’s death really was accidental.’

  ‘What are you saying? That somehow they’re staging this just for us? This is real life, Robert, not a Zen parable. We saw someone die up there. That was no fake, kiddo.’

  ‘Well, I’m not entirely convinced.’

  ‘I bet you believe what you read in the Sunday papers and yet you don’t accept the evidence of your own eyes.’ Rose grabbed his hand and steered him between two shuddering trucks. ‘Tell me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you believe the story about the Hitler diaries?’

  ‘Yes,’ Robert admitted sheepishly.

  ‘Then you’re in no position to talk.’ Her bronze eyes narrowed and mocked him. ‘Perhaps we’ll see something that will convince you tonight,’ she said. ‘Although I really hope we don’t.’

  ‘Where do you want to spend the rest of the day?’ he shouted back over the noise of revving engines.

  ‘I don’t mind so long as it’s somewhere peaceful and clean and, above all, safe.’

  ‘How about the underground?’ Robert suggested. ‘One out of three ain’t bad.’

  Together they ran down the litter-strewn steps into the comparative safety of Baker Street station.

  Chapter 28

  Night Sight

  Stan Cutts may have filed some pretty dumb stories in his time, but he was no fool. When his informant, Nick, failed to reappear in the arcade the previous night, he had begun to sense that something was seriously wrong.

  Stan had long suspected that something strange was going on above the heads of the populace. At first he had just been able to pick out the odd word or phrase from the groundswell of arcade conversation. Within the swaggering machismo, the wheeling of drug deals and the sexual hustling was a new topic of conversation, one filled with whispered threats and hidden meanings. Hargreave may have called him a ‘gutter journo’, but Stan could still smell a powerful story in the making. It had taken time and money—and even a couple of drug purchases—to ingratiate himself with the arcade’s residents, but the ploy had paid off. He had been introduced to the sometime members of the 7N Krewe and in particular to Nick, who had the body of a sickly child and the mind of a forty-year-old cardsharp.

  Nick was greedy for money. You could see it in his eyes. And he’d been getting enough of it, every time he had offered Stan information. He had provided tip-offs about the murders, but remained reluctant to discuss their perpetrators. The last time Stan had seen the boy there had been a new look in his eyes, a look of fear that had outstripped even his desire for money. And now Nick had vanished, possibly to join the growing number of corpses that appeared to be raining from the night skies.

  As he walked home along a deserted Fleet Street, Stan wondered if he was also in danger. After all, his face had become well known in what were rapidly turning out to be the wrong circles. He would have to stay away from the arcade for a while, change his tactics by attacking the case from another angle. Perhaps he could run a profile on Hargreave, highlighting his past incompetence, or even submit a story suggesting that his mystery informant had now been placed in a life-threatening situation.

 
Stan looked back along the empty pavements at the newspaper building beyond. It was virtually the only one remaining in the street now that the others had shifted to areas which were better suited for housing their new technology. He sighed and pulled his scarf tighter to his throat. Here it was, almost Christmas and the once-great street was dead. How he would love to have seen it in the time of Queen Anne, filled with freaks and fire-eaters, elephants and dancing dwarves. He had no doubt that it would survive in some new incarnation, but things would not be the same without the newspapers….

  As he made his slow and pensive way towards Holborn, Stan failed to see the huge loop of nylon cord dropping down behind him from the rooftop of the now-abandoned Daily Express. Sweeping forward, it lowered beneath his arms and suddenly rose again, scooping him from the ground and up past the glistening windows to the roof where he landed before even having a chance to struggle free from its grip. Wiping the grit from grazed palms and untangling the cord from beneath his burning armpits, the shocked journalist looked around him. Arranged on the flat roof ahead was a strange sight indeed, but before he had a chance to take it in, hands were on him, gagging his mouth and tying his wrists together in front of him. Helpless, he looked on at the people who had just reeled him so effortlessly from his own safe, familiar world.

  The skinhead’s name was Reese. It was tattooed on his neck and he was reading aloud from a tattered library book in a thin, halting voice:

  ‘ “Quod est inferius, est sicutid quod est superius,

  et quod est superius, est sicutid quod est inferius,

  ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.” ’

  He briefly ceased reciting to step back and create an opening from the broad rooftop to the next, much narrower and older one. Here, at the end of a filthy, steeply slated valley sat the one they called Chymes, his cloak spread loosely across the brickwork around him. He was listening intently to the recital, his steel hand resting lightly on one knee. In addition to his two shavenheaded helpers and the gasping, dyspeptic hack there was another person on the roof, a girl—young, and terrified.

  ‘Bring her forward, Dag.’

  The other skinhead obeyed, pulling the rope which bound his victim a little tighter, encouraging her to move forward along the slim lead gutter. Stan brought his hands to his face, unable to make sense of the scene unfolding before him.

  Pale eyes glittered from within the shadow of Chymes’ hood. His metal hand whipped up and caught the struggling girl by a bony arm. Dag continued to hold her by the other, as Reese stumbled on through the recital for the pleasure of his master:

  ‘ “Pater ejus est Sol, mater ejus Luna:

  portavit illud ventus in ventre suo:

  nutrix ejus terra est.” ’

  As the girl bucked and heaved in their grasp, Dag and Reese tore at her clothes until she was naked. Her mascara had smeared in broad streaks over her terrified face like some ancient tribal marking. Just an hour earlier, she had been walking home through the empty backstreets of the West End. Then two men had dropped like shadows out of the sky and snatched her back up into the clouded night. Chymes sighed and rose, his hands sliding over her shivering breasts. ‘Tie her hands, then leave us.’

  The skinheads quickly obeyed, ignoring the journalist as he rose unsteadily to his feet ahead of them, and turned to their master expectantly, as if awaiting a tip. Casually, Dag gave the girl a malicious push with his elbow, watching as she toppled and fell to the ground.

  ‘Here, you’ve done well.’ Chymes threw them a small packet, twisted in foil. ‘Don’t use too much. I need you to be alert tonight.’

  They knew better than to stay around any longer. Silently, the skinheads padded off across the roof, to be lost in the maze of chimneys crowning the slender, ancient dwellings which still backed onto the ancient thoroughfare.

  Stan looked on, horrified, as the girl rolled over on her stomach, trying to hide her naked body from view, ashamed and disgusted that the tall hooded figure before her should be able to see her like this.

  ‘Come, come, my love, I think it’s a little late for modesty,’ said Chymes. For the first time, he acknowledged the presence of the journalist. ‘You should feel honoured, Mr Cutts. Tonight we prepare for our greatest battle and it is from this young lady that I will draw my strength. I am about to baptize her in the name of darkness.’

  He reached out his hands and caught her shoulders, slowly forcing them down to the ground so that she was exposed to him once more. Above her gag, her eyes searched frantically for a clue to her attacker’s identity, but his face was lost within the darkened folds of the hood.

  ‘It is time for the fourth step, the Conjunction,’ murmured Chymes, his voice heavy with desire. ‘So it is that sulphur and mercury are now joined together, for what has been separated must once more unite completely.’

  As he released one hand to reach into his cloak, fumbling with sexual excitement, the girl suddenly swung her leg and caught him squarely in the groin, causing him to fall back with a shout against the angled roof. She pulled herself upright and, with her hands still tied behind her back, ran as fast as she could down the narrow gulley formed by the rooftops of the two terraced buildings.

  Ahead, the gulley dropped down a series of tarred steps into a bricked-in area of total darkness. Crawling far into one of the corners formed by so many crazy angles of brick and slate she waited, heart thudding agonizingly within her chest.

  Stan looked on at the bizarre tableau, a forgotten presence in the unfolding game between Chymes and his victim, whom he could no longer pick out among the blackened chimneystacks.

  The girl attempted to gauge the passing of a minute, then another. Her eyes adjusted slightly, but all she could make out was a wall of darkness against the tough leather-black edges of the winter sky. Far below, a car hooted, an echo from a distant world. Up here all was silence as the wind moaned softly over aerials and through cables, stirring whorls of soot on the terraces of slate.

  Her senses, heightened with fear, could detect nothing in the all-surrounding velvet pitch. Oblivious to the cold and the cramp setting in at the backs of her legs, she prayed for only one thing, that this obscene madman would not be able to find her. Hardly daring to exhale, she leaned against the wall at her back and released a low breath. Perhaps he had gone. There was only the sighing softness of the night breeze to be heard, a lonely sound more suited to the country than a metropolis.

  With a guttural scream he plucked her into the sky, icy hands suddenly slipping beneath her sweating armpits to haul her back into the scouring wind. The gag slipped from her mouth and now, knowing her fate, she screamed too. He waited, waited until there was no voice left to scream before he addressed her.

  ‘You can’t hide from me,’ he said, his voice a gentle hiss, dangling the doll-like figure before him, ‘didn’t they tell you? That’s how I knew I was chosen to lead. My eyes can pierce the vale of darkness. Satan has given me the power of night sight.’ He stared at the girl with interest, still refusing to let her feet touch the ground.

  ‘And so we must begin,’ he said, setting her down at last, but still holding tightly on to her arms. ‘The time has come for us to merge, you and I, and create the power that is needed for absolute victory.’ As he descended upon the screaming girl, his cloak blotted her pale skin, enfolding them within the bonded brickwork of the city horizon. Withdrawing a slim pearl-handled blade, he gently pushed it into flesh and slit her open from throat to groin. As he pressed his body into hers, hot blood cascaded like a geyser, enveloping him in wave after spraying wave of ecstatic release.

  Stan screamed into the gag until it was hot with spittle, until he had no voice. When next he dared to raise his eyes, he saw Chymes still towering above the spent steaming body, his bare head turned to the sky, the hood having fallen back on his shoulders. His opened hands, fingers of steel and flesh spread wide apart, dripped crimson. An age seemed to pass before he returned his attention to the terrified journalist. At
length he approached and began to speak. ‘I suppose I should thank you for giving us our first taste of publicity,’ he said evenly. ‘Unfortunately your timing was wrong. We are not yet ready to be seen by the world below.’

  Stan struggled to release his hands from their binding, knowing now that Nick was dead and that his death was sure to follow suit.

  ‘It’s a shame that you won’t live to see tomorrow’s newspapers. They’re bound to run the story of your informant’s grisly end. With colour pictures, probably.’ Chymes pulled his cloak across his chest, covering the torrent of blood which had drenched him.

  ‘Sadly, you are not the only hindrance to my victory and to the progression of the New Age,’ he continued. ‘The fool Nathaniel Zalian persists in holding on to what little territory remains his and it seems he will continue to plague us until we discover his whereabouts. And then there are a pair of Insects, the little nigger girl and her friend, making trouble for us on the ground, carrying our secrets around with them as if it were all some game. I’d like to be able to send you down and let them see just how much of a game it is.’

  Stan fervently hoped that he’d be safely released back to the ground as well, but having witnessed the atrocity which had just occurred before him, he held out little hope. Even in his darkest moment, he could not help thinking what a great story he would get to file if Chymes decided to set him free after all.

  ‘Unfortunately you must die without knowing my plans,’ said Chymes with a chuckle. ‘I’ve seen too many films wherein the villain embarks on a full explanation before dispatching his prey. I also know that you must never turn away from your victim’s impending death, or they will attempt to escape until the last. No, you must stand over them and watch until the final breath escapes from their lips.’ He drew closer to Stan, who began to back away towards the edge of the roof.