King Rat (22 page)

Loplop shrieked and snapped up, arcing his back, his hands quivering. Saul’s rat-strength had driven air deep into those aural cavities, shattering the delicate membranes and sending bubbles rushing in like acid through the ruptured flesh. Loplop shook in agony.

Saul rolled out from under him. The Piper was upon him again, and he wielded the flute like a club. Saul could only roll a little out of his way and feel it crush his shoulder rather than his face. He dodged again and this time his chest was struck, and the pain took his breath away.

Behind him Loplop stumbled away from the wall, fumbled blindly, as if his other senses had gone with his hearing.

The Piper gripped the flute in both hands, straddled Saul and pinned his arms to the floor with his knees, raised the flute like a ceremonial dagger, ready to drive the stubby object into Saul’s chest. Saul screamed in terror.

Loplop still shrieked, and his voice mixed with Saul’s. The dissonance made the air shake and something in the vibrations made Loplop turn and kick the flute from the Piper’s clenched hands. The Piper bellowed in rage and reached for it. Loplop pulled Saul from under the tall man’s legs, and hauled him to the window. Still Loplop shrieked, and the sound did not stop as he leapt onto the sill of the ruined window. He was still shrieking as he grabbed Saul with his right hand and stepped out into darkness.

Saul could not hear his own despairing yell through Loplop’s incessant keening. He closed his eyes and felt air swirl around him, waited for the ground, which did not come. He opened his eyes a little and saw a confusion of lights, moving very fast. He was falling still... the only sound was Loplop’s wail.

He opened his eyes fully and he saw that the constriction around his chest was not terror but Loplop’s legs, and that the ground was shooting not towards him but parallel to him, and that he was not falling but flying.

His head faced backwards, so he could not see Loplop as they flew. The Bird Superior’s legs, elegant in Savile Row tailory, wrapped around him below his armpits. Terragon Mansions receded behind them.

Saul saw a thin figure standing in the punctured plastic shadow of his father’s flat, somehow heard a faint whistling over Loplop’s cries.

In Willesden’s dirty darkness the trees were obscure, a tangle of fractal silhouettes from which there now burst pigeons and sparrows and starlings, startled out of their sleep by the compulsion of the Piper’s spell. They swirled like rubbish for a moment, and then their movements became as precise and sudden
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as a mathematical simulation.

They converged on the Piper, imploding from all sectors of the sky towards his hunched shoulders, and then en masse they rose again, suddenly clumsy, trying to fly in concert, dragging the Piper’s body through the air with them.

‘The fucker’s following us!’ Saul screeched in fright. He realized as he spoke that Loplop could not hear him, that all that stopped Loplop from joining his subjects in transporting the Piper was the fact that Saul had deafened him.

Saul rocked alarmingly in Loplop’s tight embrace. The streets lurched below them. They oscillated uncertainly between the skies and the freezing earth. Loplop’s wails were now turning to moans; he crooned to comfort himself. Behind them a writhing clot of birds dragged the Piper through the air after them. As birds fell away, exhausted or crushed, others rushed to their place, dug their claws into the Piper’s clothes and flesh, pulling against each other, bearing him on in a butterfly’s drunken rush.

The Piper was gaining on them.

The moon glinted briefly on water and railway tracks far below.

Loplop began to spiral out of the sky.

Saul shook the legs that held him, shouted at him to continue, but Loplop was close to fainting, and the screaming in his head was all he could hear. Saul caught glimpses of a vast roadway and an undulating red plain below them, but they were snatched from his field of vision as Loplop’s body spun. The Piper was closing in, shedding his entourage like a ragged man shedding clothes.

They fell. Saul caught glimpses of a network of railtracks spreading out like a fan, and then that red field again, the tight-packed roofs of a hundred red buses. They were spiralling towards Westbourne Park station, where bus routes and railways converged on a hill, under the yawning gloom of the Westway.

They swept into that shade and crashed to the ground. Saul was thrown from Loplop’s grasp. He rolled over and over, came to a stop, covered in dust and dirt. Loplop lay some feet away, hunched up in a strange position, his arms wrapped around his head, his arse thrust into the air, his knees on the ground.

They were beside the dark entrance to the bus terminus. A little way off was the yard, full of the buses Saul had seen from the air. In the cavernous building before him were hundreds more. They were packed tight, an intricate puzzle set up and solved day after day; there was a strict order in which they could leave the garage. Each was surrounded by its fellows, no more than two feet away on any side, a maze of the ridiculous-looking vehicles.

Loplop’s suit was muddy and ruined.

Moving unsteadily through the sky came the Piper. Saul stumbled across the threshold into the vaulted chamber, dragging Loplop behind him. He ducked out of sight behind the nearest bus, which constituted one of the red labyrinth’s external walls. He shook Loplop’s leg, pulled him towards him. Loplop flopped a little and lay still. He breathed heavily. Saul looked around frantically. He could hear the storm of wings which heralded the Piper’s arrival, and above it the thin whistle of the Lord of the Dance himself. There was a gust of air as the Piper was swept down into the cold hall, spewing feathers in his wake.

The whistling stopped. Instantly the birds dispersed in panic, and Saul heard a thud as the Piper landed
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on the roof of a nearby vehicle. For a minute, there was no sound apart from the escaping birds, then footsteps approached across the buses’ roofs.

Saul let go of Loplop’s legs and flattened himself against the bus beside him. He crawled sidewise, striving for quietness. He felt feral instincts awaken in him. He was dead silent.

The bus was an old Routemaster, with an open platform at the back. Saul made his way silently into this opening, as the footsteps above him grew nearer. They moved slowly, up and down over the roofs, punctuated by little leaps as the Piper crossed the ravine between two vehicles.

Saul backed slowly up the stairs without a sound as the footsteps approached. Then again there was a jump, and the landing made him shudder with the vibration as the Piper leapt onto Saul’s bus and strode across its roof.

The bus was in darkness. Saul moved backwards continually, his hands reaching out to touch the rows of seats on either side. He grasped the steel poles as if the bus was moving, steadying himself. His mouth hung open stupidly. He gazed at the ceiling, his eyes following the steps above. They crossed in a long diagonal, towards where he and Loplop had landed. Then they reached the edge and Saul’s heart lurched into his mouth as the Piper’s body flew past a window on his left. He froze, but nothing happened. The Piper had not seen him. Saul crouched silently, crept forward, came up from underneath the window frame, pushed just enough of his head into the open to see, his hands framing his face, his eyes big, like a Chad graffitied on a wall.

Below him, the Piper was leaning over Loplop. He was touching him with one hand, his stance like a concerned bystander who finds someone sitting in the street and crying. The Piper’s clothes were shredded from all the tiny bird claws, and they ran red.

Saul waited. But the Piper did not attack Loplop, just left him in his misery and bloody silence. He stood and slowly turned. Saul ducked down and held himself quite still. His mind suddenly began to replay the grotesque two-step he had seen the Piper perform with Deborah and he felt weak and enraged, and disgusted with himself, and scared. He breathed fast and urgent, with his face down on his knees, hunched on the top floor of the bus, in the dark.

And then he heard a whistling, and it came from the passenger entrance below. He felt the enormous welling of energy in his arms and legs that fear gave him.

The Piper’s voice called up to him, as amiable and relaxed as ever.

‘Don’t forget I can smell you, little ratling.’ Feet began to mount the stairs and Saul scuttled backwards towards the front of the bus. ‘What, do you think you can live and sleep and eat in a sewer and I wouldn’t smell you? Honestly, Saul...’

A dark figure appeared at the top of the stairs.

Saul rose to his feet.

‘I’m the Lord of the Dance, Saul. You still don’t get it, do you? You really think you’re going to get away from me? You’re dead, Saul, because you just will not dance to my tune.’

There was fury in his voice as he said that. The Piper stepped forward, and the weak light of the garage hit him. It was enough for Saul’s rat eyes.

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The Piper’s face was a ghastly white, ruthlessly stripped of colour. His hair had been tugged from its neat ponytail by a thousand frantic little claws, and it swept around his face and under his chin and around his throat as if it would strangle him. His clothes were pulled and stripped and tugged and unravelled and stretched in all directions, a collectivity of tiny injuries, and everywhere blood spattered him, streaked his milky face. His expression belied his ruined skin. He stared at Saul with the same relaxed, amiable gaze he had first levelled, the same banal I cheerfulness with which he had greeted Saul, dispatched Deborah, the calm which had only disappeared for one moment when he could not make Saul dance.

‘Saul,’ he said, in greeting, and held out his hands.

He walked forward.

‘I’m not a sadist, Saul,’ he said, smiling. He held out his hand as he walked, and when it touched one of the steel poles that rose between seat and ceiling, he gripped it, then grasped it with his other hand. He began to twist it, his body straining and shaking violently with the effort, and the steel slowly bent and tried to stretch, snapped loudly. He did not take his eyes from Saul, nor did his expression change, even as he strained. He yanked at the broken end and the pole broke again, came away in his hand, a twisted cudgel of shining metal.

‘I’m not eager to hurt you,’ he continued, resuming his pace. ‘But you are going to die, because you won’t dance when I tell you to. So you’re going to die now.’ The slender club swung down with a flash like an electric arc, and Saul hissed as he saw it move, jerked under the shining thing with a rodent’s nervous grace. The club tore great gouts of stuffing into the air as it eviscerated a seat with its ragged tip.

The Piper’s strength was awesome and unstoppable, dwarfing the tight rat muscles that reclaimed food had awoken in Saul, his new power that he was so proud of. He rolled away from the club and scuttled backwards to the front end of the bus. He thought of Deborah and rage choked him. His rat side and his humanity oscillated violently, buffeted by the great storm of his anger. He wanted to bite out the Piper’s throat and then he wanted to beat him, to smash his head, pummel him methodically with his fists and then he wanted to claw at his stomach, he wanted to gut him with his sharp claws. And he could do none of these things, because he was not strong enough, and the Piper would kill him.

The Piper straightened a little, paused and grinned at Saul. ‘Enough,’ he said and lunged straight forward, his weapon held like a spear. Saul screeched in fear and rage and frustration as his bestial reflexes carried him to the side of the brutal thrust.

There was no way past the Piper, that was clear as he jumped, and he pulled his legs up tight under him and brought them down on the seat beside him, and he drove them up again like pistons, kicking hard away from the seat, out to the side, punching at the glass next to him, stretching his body out like a diver, feeling the window fall around him in a million pieces, taking bits of his skin with it as it fell.

He flew through the air between the bus and its neighbour, another of the same route, that had preceded it into the maze. Saul’s body passed fifteen feet above the ground, and then another wall of glass disintegrated under his ferocious rat fists and his arms and shoulders disappeared into the next bus before his feet had even left the last one, and the explosive collapse of the first window, still loud in his ears, segued into the next, and he was through, rolling off the seat, glass shards showering him like confetti.

He could still hear a spattering sound from outside, as little nuggets of glass hit the ground. He stood, shaking, ignored his ripped skin and deep bruises. He ran for the stairs at the back of the bus. From behind him he heard a strange sound, a roar of irritation, exasperation raised to the point of rage. There
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was a further loud crashing, and in the curved mirror at the top of the stairs he saw another window shatter, saw the Piper burst the glass feet-first and land sitting on a seat, his head craned to watch Saul.

He swung up immediately, no more talk, and raced after Saul.

Saul careened down the stairs and out of the rear of the bus, running through the dark alleys between the sides of the great red vehicles, losing himself in the maze. He stopped, crouching, and held his breath.

From a way away he heard feet running, and a voice shouting, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Oh Christ, thought Saul. The fucking guard. Saul’s heart was beating like a Jungle bassline.

He could hear the guard’s leaden steps somewhere close by, and he could clearly hear the man’s wheezing and panting. Saul stood quite still, tried to listen beyond the sounds of the guard, to hear any movement the Piper might make.

There was nothing.

An overweight, middle-aged man in a grey uniform emerged suddenly into the gap between buses in which Saul stood. The two men stood still for a moment, gazing stupidly at each other. They moved simultaneously. The guard approached with a truncheon raised, opened his mouth to shout, but Saul was on him, underneath the sluggish truncheon, pushing it out of his opponent’s hand. He pinned the man’s arm behind him, held his mouth closed and hissed in his ear.