King Rat (34 page)

Saul slithered across the floor towards the decks, the DAT player, the source of the music. Instantly Natasha turned and stamped on his hand with her long heel. He screeched in pain, slithered away again, tried to get past her, but she stamped again and again, faster and faster, until it seemed impossible that she remain standing.

Someone behind Saul grabbed him and pulled him up and with a sudden surge of righteous anger he elbowed them in the face. The head snapped back and lolled, the body staggering but somehow kept standing by the music. Saul turned, his hands claws, and his rage dissipated in horror. His assailant was about seventeen, a chubby Asian boy dressed in his Jungling best, now spattered with blood. His nose was a mess in the middle of his face and still he tried to keep time to the beat.

Saul pushed him away hard, out of the fight.

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He realized that the dancers were slowly approaching the stage, fighting and scratching, hurling rats and spiders against the walls, ripping at them with their teeth, all the while cocking their heads thoughtfully to hear the notes of Wind City. The fucking flute!

It was multilayered, alienating, frightening, a cacophonous backdrop.

More and more dancers leapt onto the stage, their clothes clogged with blood, rat and human, with fragments of fur, their faces shredded by tiny claws. Saul could taste the rat blood on the air. It flooded him with adrenaline.

Spiders and rats covered the stage, swarmed up the legs of Fabian and the dancers. Fabian tugged at the fat bodies of rats and slammed them underfoot where their legs and spines and skulls cracked and they crawled off to die. He slapped at himself and danced from leg to leg, smearing spiders into the wood.

Saul could hear Anansi bellowing.

Saul turned and made for the decks again. Fabian kicked him in the crotch from behind and Natasha stamped at his shoulder. He moved, avoided being impaled, but hands grasped his legs and tugged him violently across a floor slippery with rat blood and crushed spiders, slid him away from Natasha and the DAT player, slammed him into a wall. Bodies fell across him, inhumanly strong knees crushed his back, he was pinioned by a score of arms and legs.

Saul could hear Anansi shrieking.

He looked up, saw the Piper bent over Anansi, the spider-man held down by several dancers. With his head low against the boards, all Saul could see of the dancefloor was the bobbing heads of the dancers.

It was a vision of hell, rats and spiders and blood swarming over the damned.

Fabian stumbled into his view, and Saul looked up at him and back at Natasha. They were invisible beneath a second skin of spiders, a thick skittering mass. The tide of spiders spilled towards the Piper.

Anansi kept shrieking.

The Piper looked up, caught Saul’s eye, and looked briefly at the spiders approaching him.

‘Shall I show you my new party trick?’ he said. His voice sounded close and intimate in Saul’s ear, whispered through the Jungle and the flute.

The Piper flickered his eyes briefly at the decks.

Something changed in the flute.

The samples were looped and laid one on top of the other, and as he listened Saul realized that one of the layers was soaring, changing, becoming staccato and breathless. Anansi was suddenly silent.

As it reached the Piper’s feet, the tide of spiders stopped dead.

He’s changing the music! He’s changing his choice! thought Saul.

He’s going for the spiders instead!

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But the dancers kept dancing, even as the spiders began to move together, incredibly, undulating with the beat. The circle of spiders around the Piper’s feet expanded, gave him space.

Still the dancers did not stop dancing. The spiders coating the bodies of the dancers dripped off them and scuttled onto the stage. Natasha and Fabian were uncovered, their skin covered in tiny welts and sores, dead spiders dropping from their clothes and mouths. They resumed their war against the rats.

The Piper began to leap, higher and higher, from one foot to the other, without taking his eyes from Saul’s. Saul looked down at the Piper’s feet. As he jumped, a little group of spiders would dance out, in time to the music, and stand below him, arranging themselves into the shape of the underside of each shoe. They would wait patiently as he plunged through the air and destroyed them exactly, the carnage of each step preempted by the spiders themselves, queuing up to die.

‘You see, Saul?’ whispered the Piper across the slick, stained stage. ‘That’s the joy of Jungle. All those layers ... I can play my flute as many times as I want, all at once ...’

The dancers kept dancing, and the spiders still waited to die.

Anansi sat up, his eyes glazed with delight at the spider music in Wind City. An idiot’s grin spread across his face. His left arm was missing at the shoulder, his side awash with blood, his shoulder a mass of ruined flesh and bone.

The Piper watched Saul’s face.

‘Yes, cruel, I know, to pull the legs off spiders, but this one had caused me no end of trouble.’

He pushed Anansi’s head back to the stage.

Saul’s shout was drowned in the Drum and Bass and flute. He struggled violently, but was held fast by the dancers. He could feel them move slightly with the beat as they leant on him.

The Piper leapt up, pulled his legs up hard and stamped down with all his strength.

Bones crunched and split in Anansi’s head.

Saul collapsed with a howl.

The wood of the stage heaved and buckled. Something burst through the boards in front of the Piper.

Saul caught a momentary glimpse of a back, of wiry arms snapping out like whipcord and grasping the Piper’s ankles, then tugging sharply and disappearing back under the stage.

The Piper was gone. The music still blared, Saul was still pinioned, the rats still fought and bit and scratched, the dancers still fought back and massacred rats and danced, but the Piper was gone.

Saul could feel the vibrations of some huge battle being waged under him. He tugged at the arms holding him. They were obscenely strong but quite still. They held him tight but did not punish him for his pointless struggles.

The wood under his stomach lurched as something was thrust against it. A little to one side of him he heard a systematic pounding, something slammed again and again into the wood. Splinters of wood that
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fringed the hole in the stage spilled gently into the darkness below.

Spiders poured into the hole, and Saul saw the back of a nearby dancer lowering himself into the dark.

Saul pounded suddenly at the wood under his body, thrust his fingers into the tiny gap between two planks, ignoring the skin he left behind. He had no leverage, this was the wrong angle, but adrenaline gave him strength, and he tugged and ripped at the boards beneath him. His fingers shoved into the small cavity and scrabbled for purchase. He was straining, shoving upwards, feeling the board resist, then relax as old nails sprang from their moorings and the board went flying away.

He stuck his head into the darkness.

There, rolling in the dirt, his eyes frenzied and livid, his veins bulging with fury, was the Piper. And clinging to him like a limpet, the heel of his right hand shoved hard into the Piper’s mouth, his teeth bared and snapping at any of the Piper’s limbs in reach, his claws scratching, his old coat wrapping around the two bodies like a living thing, was King Rat.

His hand streamed with blood from where the Piper gnawed at him, but he would not release the Piper’s mouth. He swarmed with spiders. Behind him the dim shape of a dancer, bent double under the stage, flailed at him with his arms. King Rat rolled from side to side to avoid him, desperate to stay out of reach.

King Rat stared up at Saul. His eyes begged for help.

Saul saw the dancer’s arms wind around King Rat’s neck, begin to bend inexorably backwards.

He tugged desperately at the hands holding him, straining against them with all his strength, arching his back. They pushed him down so he suddenly acquiesced, rolling slightly and squeezing himself through the thin slit in the wood, being shoved through to freedom by those trying to constrain him, until he dropped suddenly and landed across the Piper’s feet.

He yelled with triumph, and turned.

‘Help me,’ hissed King Rat between clenched teeth. His head was pulled back at a grotesque angle, his arms were losing their grip on the Piper, his hand having to strain harder and harder to block the Piper’s mouth. The man behind him was slowly defeating him, made preternaturally strong by the music which surrounded them.

Saul stormed through swathes of dancing spiders and punched hard at the face of the man holding King Rat.

He saw that it was Fabian just as his fist connected.

Saul had hit him hard, with all his rat-strength, and Fabian’s head rolled on his shoulders dangerously fast, teeth splintered in his mouth, but he retained his grip on King Rat, and continued to pull.

The Piper was pulling free, his teeth ripping at King Rat’s hand, a growl of triumph bubbling bloodily out from behind it.

‘Help me,’ repeated King Rat. Desperately Saul grabbed at Fabian, shoved him this way and that, with all his strength, but the flute had entered Fabian’s soul and nothing would move him. If that punch did not do the job, Saul knew he would have to kill Fabian to get him off.

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‘Help me,’ said King Rat once more.

But Saul had hesitated too long and Fabian pulled King Rat free of the Piper.

‘Yes!’ The Piper was standing before Saul, filthy, scratched and quivering, spilling spiders in all directions. He grabbed Saul’s collar, heaved him with those insanely strong arms, sent him flying through the hole in the stage back out into the heat and noise and blood of the club.

Saul landed awkwardly, skidded across the splintered wood.

The Piper rose behind him, dragging King Rat by the hair.

Wind City was looping, again and again. Saul was sure it covered the whole DAT, perhaps an hour long.

‘ You lose!’ the Piper shouted to Saul. ‘You and your daddy and uncle spider and the birdman, you lose, because I can play my flute as often as I want now. Your friend showed me how, Saul...’ He waved his hands at the walls where the spiders were dancing in little circles. He gesticulated at the dancefloor where the dancers jumped up and down to Wind City, drenched in blood, stamping on dying rats.

He released King Rat into the arms of the dancers on the stage.

King Rat sagged with weakness and defeat.

Saul was exhausted. He felt more hands grab him. The Piper sauntered towards him and crouched in front of him, just out of reach.

‘See, Saul,’ he whispered, ‘I’m not just going to kill you. Before you die, Saul, I’m going to make you dance for me. You think you’re so special, don’t you? Well, I’m the Lord of the Dance, Saul, and before you die you’re going to dance for me. Why do you think I let your pathetic little army fight to the last gasp?’ He indicated the dancefloor, where lacklustre little battles were still continuing, where the routed rats were being systematically destroyed as the dance continued.

‘You see, I wanted to explain to you, Saul. You see how I can make the people dance and the spiders?

See how I did that? Well, I can make the rats dance, too, Saul. And you’re the famous half and half, aren’t you? Eh? The rat-boy? Eh? Well, I’m already playing for the people, Saul, so half of you is dancing, even if you can’t feel it. So when I start playing for the rats, Saul, then I’m playing for both your sides. See? See, you little fucker? I didn’t know what I’d found when I checked your address book, tried to find you. Just turned up at the one with stuff scrawled next to it... and see what I found.

Your friend Natasha, who showed me how to make my flute multiply

...’

The Piper grinned and patted Saul’s face gently, then backed away towards the decks. Behind him stood Natasha, her clothes ruined, her face coated in blood as thick as oil.

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The dancefloor still surged, but an odd calm had settled on the stage.

‘I’m going to play for both your halves, Saul,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make you dance.’

He looked up, raised his finger like a conductor and the music changed again.

The beat was sustained, the bassline unchanged, the static and the hesitant piano continued... but the flute soared.

Across the top of the mellifluous and pointillist flute lines that seduced the dancers and the spiders, a third level of sound sprang into being. An unsettling, crawling democracy of semitones and minor chords, pauses punctuated by surreal bursts of noise, music to make the skin crawl. Rat-music.

All across the dancefloor, the rats that had not fled or died were suddenly still.

Out of the corner of his eye Saul saw King Rat stiffen, his eyes glaze and focus on something just out of sight. And as he saw that, Saul felt himself jerk upright, listened to the music, heard it with a wave of amazement, stared wide-eyed at the bursts of light around him, saw through the speakers and the walls, felt his mind open up.

A long long way away he heard a high-pitched laugh, saw the Piper lying back, being borne around the room on the raised arms of the dancers, but that didn’t bother him now. The hands that held him were gone. Saul stood and paced to the centre of the stage. All he could concentrate on was the music.

There was something just out of his reach ...

Just out of his reach ... there was beautiful food ...

He could smell it... he could taste it on the air, and sex, he felt his cock stiffen, his mouth was watering, his feet propelled him, he did not need to think of where to walk, the responsibility had been taken from him, he obeyed the music, two tunes at once, the rat and the man, the mellow and the frenzied, spilling around each other, filling his mind.

Beside him, he was dimly aware of King Rat, pacing from side to side, his feet ponderous but enthusiastic.

‘Dance!’ The command came from across the floor, where the Piper rode the arms of the crowd like a sportsman, a hero, a dictator.