King Rat (35 page)

Obedience came easily to Saul. He danced.

Hardstepping.

With the fighting stopped, everyone in the hall could dance, the people and the spiders and rats that were still alive, all moving in time, getting down as one, as the Piper laughed delightedly. Saul was vaguely aware of being pleased, moving in a tight circle, eager for the food and the sex and the music, proud to be part of this hall, this great gestalt.

The Piper had ridden the tops of the dancers all around the hall in his triumph, a lap of honour, and through a blissful haze Saul saw the tall figure step smoothly back onto the stage.

Page 172

Saul danced for joy, opened his arms wide. This was his epiphany, he was filled with music, two strains of music, his mind relaxed and floating, his feet revelling in the dance, gazing up and around at the bobbing bodies on all sides of him, the faces of the worshippers ... Saul was ecstatic.

The Piper smiled, and Saul smiled back.

He was vaguely aware of words being spoken, felt his feet propel him forward, across the big stage, towards the Piper, who waited for him, something long and glinting in his hand.

‘... to me...’ Saul heard between beats. ‘... dance for me ... come ...’

He stepped forward, shifting in time to the two tunes he could hear, eager to dance.

But something was wrong.

There was a disturbed moment. Saul hesitated.

The two flutelines were dissonant.

Saul put his foot on the stage and tried to dance, but a shadow had crossed his mind.

The flutes jarred with each other. .

He was suddenly aware of their raucous discord. His hunger and desire burned as strong as ever, but he could not see, he was blind, pulled in different directions, shaken by the aesthetic antiphase of the two flutes.

And as he listened, standing suddenly outside the music, looking in, desperate to get back, he sensed the great cavity between the flutes.

And pushing its way through the gap, vibrating in his gut, ever-present, the foundation of the music, the beginning and the end-point of Jungle, there came the bass.

Saul stood poised, immobile, centre stage.

The flute and the bass surged inside him.

The flutelines swirled around him, inveigling their way past his defences, seducing him, urging him to dance, teasing his rat-mind and his humanity in turn. But something inside him had hardened. Saul was straining for something else. He was listening for the bass.

The words of a hundred slogans raced through his mind, the endlessly sampled Hip Hop and Jungle paeans to the low end.

DJ! Where’s the bass?

Bass! How low can you go?

R-r-r-roll the bass. . .

Da bass too dark .. .

Page 173

Here’s the bass.

Here’s how low the bass can go.

I... I’ll roll with the bass.

Because the bass too dark .. .

Because the bass is too dark for this, thought Saul suddenly, with shocking clarity, the bass is too dark to suffer this, the insubordinate treble, fuck the treble, fuck the ephemera, fuck the high end, fuck the flute, and as he thought this the flutelines faded in his mind, became nothing more than thin, clashing cacophonies, fuck the treble, he thought, because when you dance to Jungle what you follow is the bass

...

Saul rediscovered himself. He knew who he was. He danced again.

This was different. He was fierce, swinging his arms and legs like weapons. He danced with the bassline, rolled over the beats ... ignored the flutes.

It was the bass that set the agenda. It was the bass that made the song. It was the bass that united the Junglists, that cemented their community, that built a room full of dancers, something far stronger than this hive mind.

The Piper was still waiting for him. Saul saw a renewed smile spread across his face. He had seen Saul falter. You wanted me to dance, didn’t you? thought Saul. Had to have me dance my way over to you, waltz to my death ... and now I’m dancing, you think your treble won, don’t you?

Saul danced closer and closer to the Piper. The Piper held his flute close, flush with his body like a Samurai sword. The Piper’s arms were tense.

Two flutes aren’t enough, thought Saul, giddy with power. He danced on, approaching his enemy. The Piper smiled and raised his right hand, the hand holding the flute, held it high, quivering, ready to strike.

Saul came close enough to touch.

‘Now dance on the spot, ratling,’ said the Piper softly.

He swung the flute.

The strike was cocky, cavalier and ill-timed, the Piper waiting for his prey to walk into the path of the wicked silver club.

Instead, Saul stepped inside the killing blow.

He moved in a blur of rat-speed, channelling all his frenetic panic and power, burning calories from old food. He turned as he stepped forward and reached up with his right hand, grabbing the flute and twisting, spinning round in a full circle, tugging at the cold metal, ripping it out of the Piper’s too-confident fingers and bringing his left arm up and around, looking over his left shoulder as he spun, and slamming his elbow into the Piper’s throat.

Page 174

The Piper staggered backwards. His eyes bulged and stared at Saul in disbelief. He retched, clutched at his throat, sucked at the air. Saul stalked towards him, holding the flute. The Drum and Bass was pounding in his ears. It wasn’t the Piper’s song any more; it was the drums he heard, the drums and the bass.

‘One plus one equals one, motherfucker,’ he said, and brought the flute up hard under the Piper’s jaw.

The Piper staggered back but did not fall. ‘I’m not rat plus man, get it? I’m bigger than either one and I’m bigger than the two. I’m a new thing. You can’t make me dance.’ He slammed the flute against the Piper’s temple, sending the tall figure spinning across the stage in a spray of blood, towards where King Rat still danced.

The Piper twirled an ugly pirouette but still did not fall.

Saul advanced on him, hitting him again and again with the flute, brutal and unforgiving. He punctuated his assault with proclamations.

‘Should’ve just killed me. You’re too strong for me, but you had to get cocky. Well, I’m the new blood, motherfucker. I’m more than the sum of my parts.

You can’t play my fucking tune, and your flute means nothing to me.’

With the last strike, the Piper went down in the shadow of King Rat. His legs folded and he sat down hard on the floor, his back to the brick wall. He stared up at Saul, horrified and broken. His face was crushed and spoilt. Blood slid over the silver of the flute. The Piper’s eyes were glazed with agony and with affront, with outrage at this man who would not dance to his tune.

His breath rattled grotesquely in his throat. He fought to speak, failed.

Saul looked up. The dancing figures that filled the room were slowing down. The flute was mutating, folding in on itself. It could not sustain itself without the Piper’s will. People’s faces were confused, their heads lolling as if in uneasy sleep. The rats and spiders were twitching pathologically as the flutelines that held them imploded.

King Rat fell to the floor and twisted in agony, pulling himself out of the spell.

Always the strongest, thought Saul.

He looked back at the Piper, collapsed on the floor. With puffy lips and bloody teeth, the Piper smiled.

Saul held the flute like a dagger, raised it over his head.

There was a Stygian rumble deep in the walls. The stage shook.

Saul staggered.

‘What the fuck...?’he said.

The floor lurched, shook violently. Saul fell backwards.

Above the Piper’s head a split appeared in the wall, thin and unnaturally straight as if scored with a vast razor. The stage shook until all the dancers had fallen. It was only because it was on DAT, safe from the
Page 175

caprice of styluses and shocks, that Wind City did not falter.

The split widened and spread downwards, opening the bricks behind the Piper’s back. The rent in the wall opened onto a sheer darkness.

The Piper fixed Saul with his little smile.

The darkness widened and sucked at the air in the room. As if a window on an aeroplane had burst, papers and clothes and fragments of spider corpses whirled through the air into the black.

He opened a mountain once before, thought Saul urgently, he can open up a wall. He’s heading for home.

The Piper was quite still as the split pulled itself open behind him, the eye in a tornado of detritus that filled the room. Saul planted his feet wide and got to his knees, adamant that the Piper would not escape out of the world.

Then, as he steadied himself and gripped the flute once more, ready to strike, he heard a thin, desperate keening from the pit that was opening.

A child’s voice.

Saul froze, aghast. The Piper was still. He did not release Saul’s gaze. He did not stop smiling. The split behind his back was a foot wide now, and he began to wriggle his way into it, holding Saul’s eyes all the time. The pathetic wail stopped abruptly.

And just as abruptly a chorus of terror welled out of the darkness, hundreds of tiny voices screaming, stripped raw, mad with fear.

The lost children of Hamelin could see the light.

Saul fell back in a paralysis of horror.

His mouth was stretched wide but only tiny noises burst out. He reached out to the split in the wall, powerless, useless.

The Piper saw him crumple, and winked.

Later, he mouthed, and put his hands to each side of the split, gave a little wave.

A growling thing shoved into Saul at a fierce speed and tore the flute from his hands.

King Rat gripped the flute with both hands and leapt at an impossible angle from Saul’s lap to the Piper’s side. His teeth were clenched, his feral roar barely contained. His overcoat whipped in the vortex of wind. The Piper looked up at him, stupid and confused.

King Rat’s growl burst, became a frenzied bark, he drew back his arms, holding the flute like a spear.

He punched it into the Piper’s body with an animal strength.

The Piper gave a shout of amazement, ludicrously bathetic with the music and the wails of the children
Page 176

behind him.

The flute punctured him like a balloon, shoved deep into his belly. His face went white under the blood, and he gripped King Rat’s arms, clinging to them with all his might, holding the hands that held the flute close to him, staring into King Rat’s eyes.

Everything was poised, for a moment. Everything hung in the balance.

The Piper fell backwards into the dark.

King Rat fell with him.

All Saul could see was the curve of King Rat’s back, which lurched forwards and stopped abruptly. The slit was suddenly closing around him; the voices of the children were more and more plaintive and distant.

King Rat’s back wriggled and his arms emerged above his head, holding the great rent open for half a second more as he braced himself and shoved back from the brink, falling across Saul.

The two sides of the rip met and resealed with a faint crunch.

The Piper had gone. The cries of the children had gone.

Only the Drum and Bass could be heard.

Saul lay still, exhausted, listening to King Rat breathe.

He rolled away, crawled across the stage. He surveyed the room.

The disco lights still spun and stuttered pointlessly. The wreckage of the hall did not seem real. It was a carnage of blood and sweat, dead rats, crushed spiders, collapsed dancers. The walls were foul with a thousand different stains. The floor was slippery and vile. The dancers shuffled like revivified corpses from side to side, ruined, their eyes closed, shifting their weight from foot to foot, as the beat of Wind City droned on, and the flute continued to degrade. All over the hall dancers were falling.

Saul stumbled across to the decks and ripped the lead from the DAT player. The speakers went dead.

Instantly, all around the room, the dancers dropped, fainting where they stood, as still as the dead. It looked like the aftermath of a massacre.

The spiders and rats still dancing when the music stopped were still for a moment, then bolted. They quit the hall and disappeared into the London night.

Saul looked around the hall, searching for his friends.

Page 177

There, under the heavy body of a huge dancer, lay Natasha. He tugged her free, crooning.

‘Tash, Tash,’ he whispered, wiping the blood from her face. She was scratched and ripped, her skin welted with the poison of a million tiny spiders, covered with bruises and ratbites, but she was breathing.

He hugged her very hard as she lay there, and squeezed his eyes tight closed.

It had been so long since he had held one of his friends.

He put her gently down, searched for Fabian.

Saul found him lolling out of the hole King Rat had pushed through the stage. He almost wept to see him.

He was badly damaged, his face crushed and broken, his skin as ruined as Natasha’s.

‘He’ll live.’

Saul looked up sharply at King Rat’s harsh voice.

King Rat stood over him, taking his weight on his left leg, regarding Saul’s ministrations to Fabian.

Saul looked back down at his friend.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘His heart’s beating. He’s breathing.’

It was difficult to talk. His throat was constricted with emotion.

He looked up at King Rat, gesticulated at the wall.

‘The children ...’ he couldn’t say any more.

King Rat nodded sharply. ‘The little fuckers whose parents clapped us out of town,’ he spat.

Saul’s face twisted. He could not speak, could not look at King Rat. He shook with anger and disgust, clenched his fists. He could still hear the pathetic cries echoing up from the dark.

‘Fabian,’ he whispered. ‘Can you hear me, man?’

Fabian moved gently but did not respond. It’s better, thought Saul suddenly. I can’t talk to him now, here, I can’t explain all this. He needs to be out of this. He mustn’t see this. Saul could not bear the loneliness. He wanted his friend so much, but he knew that he must wait.