Looking for Jake Part 19

I'll go for a time, I said, to see what it is in me that's closed the doors. When I decided, lying on the platform's edge, in the darkness under Hampstead, I wondered how to take my leave, and that brought with it, that query, a wave of horror at the fact that I did not know the answer.

That such a question occurred.

What do I know? Where shall I go? Will I be alone? How long have I been so?

I'll go away, for a time. I think of you often. Your gun and light, your obvious fear as you stumbled into us. The questions you asked, that could do you no good, that I answered for you in arrogance. I hated you then and I hate you now, but I remember you. Why would they not touch you?

When he came back to the Heath, and rejoined the camp, the celebrations-the joy-caught Sholl up easily. He arrived, batted side to side by the jeep, to see all the soldiers lined up and waiting. As the vehicle jounced through trees, they cheered. Sholl saw their officer clench his Looking for Jake, By China Mieville fists with pa.s.sion that was unfeigned and incredulous.

They partied that night, turning up the volume on their cheap stereos and churning the earth into mud with dancing, and Sholl partied with them, high on their enthusiasm. There was a paradox to his own pleasure, though, which he became aware of. He had been truly delighted that the soldiers had appeared, that they had been sent. He had thought he was alone, but they had followed him, out of sight, and watched him cross the junction, and enter the station to the vampires' lair. They had sent back word of what they had seen, and waited for all the hours it took for Sholl to reemerge, and then they had risked their lives to fetch him, because of what they saw him do.

The soldiers were proficient. He had not known he was being tracked, that he was in their sights all the time he walked. The CO was too intelligent, too cautious a man to throw himself in with strangers, no matter how they talked. But Sholl had communicated something, not the authority he had intended but something, that had given the officer pause enough to send soldiers after him, to learn. And when they saw what he could do-struggling through their awe-they came in to save him.

But they had not saved him, of course. He had not been in danger, unlike them. And what came to Sholl was that forcing him to go-as he had thought-alone, had proved to him that he could, which he had not been sure of, at all. He had not wanted to test it, but had been given no choice. And now that he knew he did not need the soldiers, they wanted him.

What-would he turn them away, now? Of course not.

Thinking about what had yet to be done (as he turned absentmindedly on his toes, with a beer and sandwich in his hands, dancing with one of the women) Sholl considered that he did not know everything he would face. The piratical last Londoners themselves, let alone the imagos.

And perhaps whatever it was that kept him safe would ebb. Perhaps there would be imagos he had never faced before, that would touch him.

There were other thoughts, too, other reasons that he felt he needed the company to be with him, but they were very faint and hard to read, and he did not consider them deeply. All around, he could hear conversations about himself.

"Motherf.u.c.ker went for them and they ran!"

"He wasn't scared, they were scared! "

"...wouldn't touch him...

"...f.u.c.king straight past them...

"They wouldn't touch him."

Sholl knew what was happening to him, in the eyes of the soldiers; he could see the Looking for Jake, By China Mieville transformation. They tried not to stare. They looked at him obliquely, but he could see their expressions. They were jealous-some so much that it was all they could feel. But for most of them, their awe was more powerful.

He did not like it, and became all the more profane in his words and his louche dancing, but he knew that he could not erase the feeling in them, that it was too formless and wordless to be countered (they would deny anything put to them, that came close to stating it). And besides, he needed it. He had counted on it. But that did not make it good to bear.

Sholl could command the army unit now, and they would obey him. He knew he should not tell them too much, that unspoken and secret things were important to their construction of him, but his discomfort with their barely hidden reverence made him talkative.

He told the CO that they would go south, loud enough for the soldiers to hear. He used tones that could just have been suggestive, so that the officer himself could turn around and make the orders. Sholl pretended to think himself only an advisor. Everyone was complicit in this.

They never asked him how he knew where to go. He had gone into the underworld, and come out bloodied, with the knowledge. He grimaced at the theatrics of it.

Sholl never explicitly announced their goal, but by inexorable rumour, it was less than a day before all the soldiers had some half-understanding, some inchoate knowledge of where they were going and why. They knew that something waited for them, and that they were coming for it, as guerrillas. Sholl did not try to find out what they thought they would find. Their excitement was enough for him. He had them doing something, and they were giddy on it.

They knew that the journey they were about to make was deadly, and that some of them would likely die. They were heading toward London's terrible heartlands, into the streets. They would set off early, and if they made Camden Town, just over two miles south, by nightfall, Sholl would be satisfied. That would be halfway. Then the same the next day, and they would find their target, and enter by darkness. That was the plan.

Beyond a certain number they would be a liability, but the process of elimination was difficult.

There were too many volunteers for the mission, and men and women designated to stay, to care for refugees and keep camp, were livid, and would not listen to mollifying nonsense about it being the most important job of all. But eventually-Sholl stayed away from the process-the unit was chosen. Three vehicles, each carrying six soldiers. Some tripod-mounted guns, a rocket launcher, a handful of grenades. Sholl, the commander, twelve men and four women. Most had been professional soldiers, and the others were young and tough. It was an elite unit. Strapped in what body armour and weapons they had. With a nameless emotion, Sholl decided he would not learn their names.

The jeeps set out at six in the morning, breaking out of the trees, with the whole camp lined up to wave them off. Sholl had watched carefully and un.o.btrusively, while he gathered the things he had brought: almost none of those who were coming made long good-byes. They patted friends and lovers brusquely, as if they were on another quick recce.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville When it came to Sholl to take his leave, he turned and took in the mucky clearing, with its was.h.i.+ng and cooking, its dingy tents, the refugees, the soldiers ersatz and trained. They were all watching him. He raised his hand very slowly, turning to take in every face he saw. You willnot see me again, he thought. He could tell that they knew.

That first day, Sholl saw that his escort was perhaps indispensable after all. The route they had picked out was dangerous. The alternatives were worse: Primrose Hill was continually tunnelled through by some great maggoty imago; Kentish Town was a wasteland of heat and burnt-out houses that smouldered endlessly, in some arcane transmirror pyrosis. But Camden, where they had to go, was the running ground of apocalypse sc.u.m, the worst spivs from the dead market's stall-holders, the least politicised of its punks. They had fetis.h.i.+sed their own brutalisation, exaggerating their piercings and their outlandish hair and giving themselves mock-tribal names out of Mad Max 2.

The tension was hard as Sholl's troop penetrated the city. The little convoy of jeeps made slow way, flanked by guards on foot, tersely yelling information to one another, watching the upper windows. It took them hours to pa.s.s through the tight streets. Each major junction was scouted, each possible lair investigated and secured.

Twice they saw imagos: once a thing that momentarily took a form reminiscent of a flock of birds; the other a glowering point of precision on the ground. The birds-thing watched them, unafraid but uninterested, from the end of a long crescent, before stalking away with childish, clumsy steps. The other circled them (they scouring the ground frantically to watch it, trying to track the spot where they could see too clearly), coming closer in a predatory motion. Sholl was steeling himself to walk into its path, banking on his power, but with flawless aim the officer blew up the point of road where the thing manifested, and mercifully it dissipated.

They came to Camden ready for human trouble. With depressing predictability (the soldiers had been miming readiness to one another for many yards) the Camden gang burst out at them from below the bridge over the ca.n.a.l. The soldiers met them with careful bursts of fire. Sholl was in the leading vehicle, and he saw all of the brief fight. The rabble of punks fired crossbows and shotguns, but they were murdered without effort.

When several of them had fallen, the rest gave up and ran, abseiling from the bridge into waiting barges, which moved away sedately enough for the leading soldiers to drop grenades into them almost at leisure. When two of the barges had been destroyed, the CO looked up anxiously at the sky, for doves or airborne imagos, and yelled sharply over the shrieks of dying raiders, telling his soldiers to stop and to move on. Sholl was sure he was motivated as much by pity as urgency.

The exchange of fire had been so one-sided that Sholl was surprised to discover himself adrenalised. The soldiers, too, breathed shakily: they had seen plenty of combat and misery over the last weeks, but not many firefights, and few against their own kind. It was late afternoon when they came to the end of Camden High Street and they stopped for the night. They camped in the concrete forecourt of a council estate on Crowndale Road.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville Since the soldiers had taken Sholl from Hampstead Tube, and installed him, unspoken, at their head, there had been several nights. Celebrations and preparations, and now this, their last night together. Sholl knew it, and he wondered who else did.

They built a fire. Sholl pushed it with a stick, watched its sparks.

When the light fell and they finished eating, Sholl started them telling stories. Everyone alive had the kind of story he wanted: set just before the war broke out, as things began to turn, the shocks of knowledge. The moment the reflections went wrong.

"First time," said one man, interspersing his words with smoking, taking his time, "I knew first time. You think something like that, something so insane, you'll think you're mad, you'll think of excuses, but I knew first time that it was the world that was wrong, not me. I was all covered in shaving foam, and I look down to rinse it, and when I look up again my reflection was waiting for me. It hadn't looked down at all. It had pulled the razor sideways, was bleeding all across its foam, staring at me. I didn't even check for blood on my cheek. I knew it wasn't me anymore."

"I heard noises," said a woman. "It kept on mirroring me, but I could hear noises. Coming from in my makeup mirror. I can't believe it. I don't believe what I'm hearing. So all slowly, I put my ear up to it. For ages there's nothing, and then, totally far off, and echoing, like it's at the other end of a long corridor, I can hear the sound of a knife being sharpened."

A man had stood in front of the mirror in his morning nudity, and had seen aghast that where he was detumesced, his reflection was erect. Another's reflection had spit at him, the gob sliding down the wrong side of the gla.s.s. And it was not always their own reflections. One woman told in a voice still hollow at the memory how she had spent long disbelieving minutes at breakfast looking to the mirror beside her husband and back at him, watching his reflection meet her eye -not the eye of her reflection but her own eye-and mouth obscenities at her, calling her c.u.n.tc.u.n.t c.u.n.t while her husband read his newspaper, and now and then glanced up and smiled.

Eventually they asked Sholl what he had seen, how he had known. He shook his head.

"Nothing," he told them. "Nothing ever changed. It never disobeyed me. I just woke up one day, and it had gone."

Very soon after that, all the reflections had all gone. Some had come out in the shape of their last mimicking, some had taken hybrid forms, but they had all come out, and nothing was left visible behind the mirrors.

The second day was easier than the first. They moved in little starts. They did not go direct: Sholl had heard rumours about what was in Euston Station. To avoid it, they continued down to where St. Pancras and King's Cross met in a wedge. There were a surprising number of people in that once-unsalubrious zone. It had become a little commune, perhaps fifty people living together in what had been the WHSmith in King's Cross Station. There were more, Sholl knew, Looking for Jake, By China Mieville camped out across the fanning train lines at the back of the station: a tent town had arisen among the brick piles and sheds, adrift in weeds in that open cut in the city.

The soldiers spoke briefly to the locals, bartered cans of soft drink and alcohol from them, examined the little hand-signed notes they used as currency. The people here were nervous, but not terrified. There was something in the angles between Pancras Road and York Way that the imagos did not like, that kept that zone relatively clean. Sholl breathed it in deep, and wished he could stay.

There were nomads from Clerkenwell in the area, the locals said. Men and women were eager to follow mystics, and one such group was nearby, and the soldiers had better be careful. They cut down south, moving cautiously, determined not to be lulled, until they reached the stepped concrete of the Brunswick Centre. They waited there for two hours, in the courtyard at its heart, but the cult they had been warned of did not appear.

The soldiers prepared themselves. This close to their target, they lost their heart, they became afraid to go on, to bring the mission to an end. Though he did not want to, Sholl kept considering the patchogue that had told him where to go. He wondered why it alone had touched him.

Sholl and his soldiers waited, for as long as they could, savouring the little journey they had shared: and when they could not put it off any more, they went on. Past the uprooted trees of Russell Square: down Bedford Place, become an avenue of statues, that the imagos had uprooted from around the city and placed there at regular intervals, their features and outlines changed- Nelson, torn from his column, laughing hysterically, "Bomber" Harris urinating-and then right, toward their target.

I didn't think I would be gone so long, or so far. Or is that true? Did I?

I thought-I think I thought-that I'd travel far enough to get away from those of my siblings that know me and knew me, and find others, and see things in this reconfigured city, at its outskirts, and make sense. Of everything. And be in it again, open my doors. And I have seen my people at every place, in all their forms, the patchogues-the patchogues like me-all trapped in their prison uniforms, the other imagos in whatever they wish. It isn't quite fair, is it, that we who came through, with that strength, who were the first agents in the war, benefit less than those weaker.

Like the Fish of the Mirror. It's general now, but it was weaker, I suppose, than we who came through.

Everywhere I go, I'm with my people. I see you, too. At the corners of things, scurrying where we've not yet met you and destroyed you. I feel the hatred I always do. But I am not sure now where it stops, where I am, where that hatred is and where I begin.

I discover that I do not want the society of kin. I want to be alone.

I want to be Looking for Jake, By China Mieville alone.

The rails have taken me out of the underworld, into the opened-up flat city of the big sky, the ring of London where buildings sprawl low and uneasy and it is not like a city but like a found landscape, not like a suburb but like an accident, like spillage on the hills. I've kept walking. I have continued to walk.

There's smoke in the sky behind me from the heart of the town. Here the backs of houses that abut my railway line, the synagogues and warehouses, cemeteries and other things look only momentarily emptied-everyone here, all of you, have just stepped out for one second (there are cold lights burning in many houses, I do not know how). Where I see you now you do not belong, you are as much intruder as me. You're creeping. These are no longer your houses, and you don't know how to be in them. You would rather hide in a bas.e.m.e.nt, in a cellar, in a broken cinema where the signs are shattered, because that way you know that you are hiding.

From me.

Neither of us knows what to do with the city anymore.

I come to the end of the line, and it is dark, and London has lowered itself to the night. There are woods. There are woods here.

Still north, barefoot on the tar roads. Past open-doored cars sleeping like cats. The trees come up to shroud me. Over the biggest road (what am I looking for?) and on to green. Forests at the border. Deserted schools and playing fields, and through trees that tussle together not as if to block my path but as if it is a game.

The moon's up-I can hear my siblings in the south, playing. Like whales. I can hear them but I can't see them, and it is a relief.

There are paths in this greenery, I have been following them, and the trees pull apart to uncover a secret for me, and I see it and I know what it is I've been looking for.

We never knew-or I was not told-quite what happened, how we came free. I know some things. The Fish of the Mirror was the mastermind. It was its genius that broke us all out, rather than only a misfit few renegades who had to be spies, and are now reminders.

Light falls as light always fell. It scatters. It rebounds from what it touches. But as it touches off tighter, where its integrity is more sustained, and more sustained, the key turns, until where there is sheen, light trans.m.u.tes, and makes a door.

Pus.h.i.+ng through the mirror was something, was a pleasure you can't imagine. All the patchogues say so. A complete feeling. Something very whole. But it is not the mirror that reflected: it was the tain. That is where the imagos were. In the tain. Coming through the mirror was a one-way trip: we broke the gla.s.s as we pa.s.sed. We showered those whose forms were our prisons with jagged splinters as we arrived, so that they were bleeding and crying out before we touched them.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville When we looked up, all exhilarated from our liberation struggle, we turned and saw the door was closed, that only a fringe of gla.s.s and thin silver was left at the edges of what had been a mirror.

Now, all mirrors are open doors, always. The imagos, those who aren't trapped in your bodies, can pa.s.s through gla.s.s without harm to it or them: they can slip into the tain. But not us. If we push into the tain we will break it.

There are other doorways. Mirrors that are not blocked to us with a skin of gla.s.s: but they are hard to find. Sheets of chrome or aluminum so pressed, so polished that scuffs don't disfigure them, that they are portals, with the tain open to the air. I do not know where any are.

Coming over this little hill, though, I know why I've come here. I have come here, I've found this place so that I can go home.

The moon rises over the little pond before me, and the pond is absolutely, unnaturally still. I am almost afraid to breathe (but trapped in this body, I must). The trees that brought me here circle the water, showing it to me, and I know that in the days before the war I would have looked down and seen the twin of each of those trees. I look down now, imagining it, and I'm staring into water so still, lit by moonlight so absolutely pure, it's like a little G.o.d.

I want to go home. The bondage is broken: there's nothing tethering the other side anymore. It's undiscovered now, a continent absolutely strange. What forms it might take. After centuries of mocking-bird topography, the tain has been freed. It might be any shape now: the thought of that makes me hanker. It could be anything. I look hard, staring through the darkness of the doorway, through the water, and I swear I can see through, past the veil that obscures, through to the other side, and I swear that I can see trees.

If I'm gentle, if I'm quick, if no wind comes to disrupt this perfect tain, then I can go, I can go home. My pa.s.sing will disrupt it but I'll be gone. I need time, or s.p.a.ce, or something, to work out why I do not want to be with my imago kin any more. I'll go where it's untethered, where it can all be different.

In my bare feet I run down this little gra.s.s angle, down this scrubby incline, picking up my feet so as not to send dirt or boscage into the water, not to disrupt it, to disrupt it only with me, and I run and leap. I am poised. I am poised, and now I am descending, and as the water, as the tain comes up at me, I can see through it, I can see through it faintly, to what I swear is a rising crater of dirt and gra.s.s, to trees, to a moon and clouds, to everything that is here around me, everything but me. I am falling toward the tain, but no one is falling toward me.

The soldiers were to launch their attack in the small hours. They were still not sure of what it was Sholl wanted to do. They only knew that he had a plan, and that they had to get him inside.

Sholl knew that he could not think about it too hard, about what the men and women were doing: the faith they had and what they were prepared to do, for him, without ever knowing his Looking for Jake, By China Mieville story.

He spent the hours before their a.s.sault talking quietly to the officer. Sholl told him that he did not have to come, or bring his troops. Sholl was ready to go, and the soldiers could wait for him. Sholl meant it: he would have been sincerely relieved had his companions stayed where they were, refused to come one step farther with him. But he was not surprised by the officer's refusal, and he greeted it with as much resignation as sadness.

The soldiers performed their routines, like tics-checking and rechecking, strapping ammunition, sighting along rifles-and Sholl stood in the darkness of the shop in which they waited and stared across at their target. He did not know the morals or rules of the new terrain: he suspected that they were unknowable. Still, he understood a kind of logic to the Fish of the Mirror's choice of lair, and the fact that he understood it did not convince Sholl that it was therefore wrong.

It could be a kind of neurotic, a kind of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic pleasure. To be surrounded by the evidence of your imprisoning: to roam corridors like time machines, in which the differing shapes and colours of your jailers from a thousand years ago stretched up to those of yesterday, and your pleasure derived from the fact that you pa.s.sed them, and remembered them, but were free.

Making a home in the sh.e.l.l of a jail. It was bitter, but it made a kind of sense.

The Fish of the Mirror lived in the British Museum. At its heart, the vampire had told Sholl.

Surrounded by the detritus of men and women from the ancient Americas, from the East, from old Greece and Egypt. Material culture that the imagos had been forced to make, wherever it was reflected. The Fish of the Mirror lived in corridors made of time, of incarceration, and it moved through them, quite free.

He did not know what else was inside. Perhaps nothing. There was no movement on the white steps, on the lawn before the building. The gates were open.

"Let me go alone," whispered Sholl with sudden, absolute conviction.

When he said it loud enough to be heard they argued with him, at first respectfully but soon with great heat.

"You cannot go in there alone!" the commander yelled at him, and Sholl bellowed that he would go where he wanted, alone or not. The soldiers marshalled moral arguments against him -it'snot your f.u.c.king fight, we need this, you don't get to order us- and all he could do was play the messianic role they had given him. He spoke obliquely and hinted at things he could not tell them. He spoke with righteous anger. He felt contempt for himself, for this act, but he felt pride under that, because he was trying to save them. When he finally bellowed at them that he would go alone, he used all the authority they had ceded to him, and they were shocked and silent.

Sholl walked away from them, stepped out of the broken window of the shop and stood alone in the street, in full view, without weapons. He showed the soldiers what only he could do.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville It was deep night: the moon silvered him. Sholl turned back to his companions in the darkness of the shop and muttered something to them: it was meant to be conciliatory and warm, but he saw only betrayal on their faces. You don't understand, he thought, and raised his hands in an att.i.tude of the most vague, the most uncertain benediction, then turned and walked away quickly, crossing Russell Street, pa.s.sing through the threshold of the museum's gates and onto its drive, past the lawn where the ruins of public sculptures were bruised with verdigris. He was in the grounds, he was in, and he walked faster toward the steps and the doors that were open and very dark. He had never been so afraid or excited.

As he began to ascend the stairs, Sholl heard quick steps on the gravel behind him. He spun, horrified, crying out go away before he had even seen who was following him. It was the commander, and most of the soldiers. You don't go in alone the officer was screaming, his weapon held so that he could have been threatening Sholl, or protecting him.

Sholl began to run back toward him. He was not surprised by the soldiers' decision, and he felt shame. They were still approaching him when he saw their faces change. Their expressions were blasted suddenly wide, staring at what was emerging from the museum. Sholl heard something bursting out behind him, but he did not turn back. His run faltered as forces overtook him. He came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and spread out his arms as if he would hold back a tide, but the imagos swept past him, in a frenzy like he had never seen, and descended on the soldiers.

The imagos were dressed in a flickering, a strobing sequence of forms, of people, of the people throughout history, staccato aggregates of their own oppression. They were a wind of flint-axe chippers, of pharaohs, of samurai, of American shamans and Phoenicians and Byzantines, helmets with placid faces and splinted armour, and tooth necklaces and shrouds and gold. They came down in a vengeful swarm, and the soldiers fired with tough and stupid bravery, ripping apart moments of flesh and blood that only folded in and refocused and became again. The bodies of the imagos were shredded endlessly as they came but these were not vampires-these were the unfettered fauna of mirrors, for which meat was an affectation.

No one could have expected this. It was like nothing imaginable. It would have been reasonable for the soldiers to pa.s.s the museum's threshold thinking they had at least a chance of retreat.

They screamed as the imagos reached them. Stop! screamed Sholl, but the imagos did not obey him. They would only not touch him. They ignored him and continued. Stop! Stop!

One by one the soldiers were taken. After five, six of them had died in blood, or been pushed into s.p.a.ce that was folded away to nothing, or frozen and made gone, Sholl turned away. It was not callousness that made him walk stolidly back up the steps, with the ma.s.sacre going on behind him. He could not turn round, he could not watch what he could not stop, for shame.

He had not been shocked to turn and see the soldiers there. Guilt blasted him. Why did you letthem come? it spoke. Company? Protection? Sacrifice?

Sholl shook his head violently and tried very hard not to think of what was happening. He was trembling almost too much to stand. He pushed at the museum's half-open door, and the motion Looking for Jake, By China Mieville was timed precisely with a wet screech behind him, that sounded like the commander. Sholl hovered at the museum's threshold. I didn't know. I told them not to come, he said inside him.

He had been right not to learn their names.

His face creased as he walked into the darkness, leaving the gunfire behind him, and the imagos playing.

It was not far, through the dark. In the echoes of his footsteps, and the faint sounds from the fight outside. He knew where the Fish of the Mirror must be.

He pa.s.sed the south stairs to his left, crossing into the enormous pillared hall, where signs for toilets and cafes were still intact on the walls. Sholl discovered he was crying. It was just here, now, he was here, ready to face the power of the imago forces, the controller, the Fish of the Mirror. He drew breath, focused on his plan. The Reading Room was ahead, and after deep breaths, Sholl entered.

The Reading Room. The round chamber that had been at the heart of the British Library, and then remade into a pointless focus for the museum. Its dome was way overhead. Most of its shelves had long ago been stripped: they housed only ghost books. The ma.s.sive room was lit by the moon through the skylight, but that was not how Sholl could see every edge of everything, every curlicue of detail in the chamber. It was all etched in shadow on shadow, and he could see it all, in the black sunlight that poured out of the presence hanging in the room's centre, like a darkling star, invisible but utterly compelling, evading deliberation, not quite seen, insinuating its own parameters, patrolling the moiling cylindrical s.p.a.ce with feline, piscene ease. The Tiger.