King Rat

Chapter Fourteen

Days came and went in the city. In the sewers, on the rooftops, under the canal bridges, in all the cramped spaces of London, King Rat and his comrades held councils of war.

Saul would sit and listen as the three unlikely figures murmured together.

Much of what they said made no sense to him references to people and places and occurrences that he could not fathom. But he understood enough of the growled discussion to know that, despite their grandiose declarations of hostilities, neither King Rat nor Loplop nor Anansi had any idea how to proceed.

The prosaic truth was that they were afraid. Sometimes the arguments became heated, and accusations of cowardice would flurry between the three. These accusations were true. The circular discussions, the half-plans, the protestations of anger and pugnacity, all were stymied by the fact that the three knew that in any confrontation one of them would be doomed.

As soon as the Piper got his flute to his lips, or even pursed his lips to whistle, or perhaps even hummed, one of them would be commandeered, one of them would be taken over to the other side. His eyes would glaze and he would start to fight against his allies, his ears stuffed with the enticing sounds of food and sex and freedom.

Anansi would hear sluggish fat flies blundering near his mouth, and the skittering of lovelorn feet approaching him over towering webs to mate. That was what he had heard in Baghdad, as the Piper had thrashed him mercilessly.

Loplop knew that he would hear the snapping of threadlike filaments as the roots of grass were pushed aside and juicy worms groped blindly into the light, towards his bill. He would hear the rush of air as he felt himself swoop above the city, the come-hither calls of the most beautiful birds of paradise.

And King Rat would once again hear the doors of the pantries in hell swinging open.

None of the three wanted to die. It was a mission which involved certain destruction for one. The sheer force of animal self-preservation seemed to preclude their willingness even to risk the odds of one in three. There was to be no sentimental self-sacrifice in this fight.

Saul was vaguely aware that he was a vital component in this argument, that ultimately he was the weapon which would have to be deployed. It did not yet frighten him, as he could not begin to take it seriously.

Some days, Loplop and Anansi would disappear. Saul remained with King Rat.

Every time he walked or climbed or ate, he felt stronger. He would look down over London as he scaled the side of a gas tower and think How did I get up here? with exhilaration. Their journeys across London became rarer, more sporadic. Saul was frustrated. He was moving faster and more quietly. He wanted to roam, to make his mark — literally, sometimes, as he had discovered the pleasure of pissing his strong-smelling piss against walls and knowing that that corner was now his. His piss was changing, just like his voice.

King Rat was always there when Saul woke. After the initial exhilaration of a new existence at right angles to the world of people he had left behind, Saul was disheartened by the speed with which his days blurred. Life as a rat was dull.

The individual moments still thrilled him with adrenaline, but those moments no longer coalesced.

He knew King Rat was waiting. His ferocious whispered arguments with his comrades became the focal point of Saul’s life. In gravelly hisses and fluting tones the three bickered furiously over whether Anansi’s webs would hold the Piper, and how best to wrest his flute away from him, and whether spiders or birds would constitute better cover. King Rat grew furious. He was alone; he could contribute no troops to any battle. The rats had snubbed him and ignored his commands.

Saul became quieter, learning more about the three creatures who constituted his circle.

He was alone on a roof, one night, sitting with his back to an air-conditioning vent, while King Rat scoured the alley below for food, when Anansi crept over the side of the building before him. Saul was still in his shadows and Anansi looked straight at him for a moment, then cast his eyes around the roof.

I’m getting better at this, thought Saul, with idle pride. Even he can’t see me now.

Anansi sneaked forward under dark red clouds which rolled around each other, belching themselves into and out of existence. They threatened rain. Anansi squatted on the roof, stripped to the waist, as always, despite the cold. He reached into his pocket and drew out a glittering handful, a shifting mass of little buzzing bodies. He smeared the insects into his mouth.

Saul’s eyes widened in fascination, even as he grimaced. He was not surprised by what he saw. He thought he could hear the humming of mother-of pearl wings obscured by Anansi’s cheeks, till those cheeks tensed and he saw Anansi suck hard, not chewing, but pursing his lips and working his mouth as if he sucked the juice from a big gobstopper.

There was the faintest of crunching sounds.

Anansi opened his mouth and poked out a tongue rolled into a tight U. He exhaled sharply, as if through a blowpipe, and a cascade of chitin shot out across the roof, scattering near Saul’s feet; the desiccated body parts of flies and woodlice and ants.

Saul rose to his feet and Anansi started a little, his eyes widening momentarily.

‘Wha’appen, pickney,’ he said evenly, gazing at Saul. ‘The never see you there. You a quiet lickle bwoy.’

Loplop was harder to surprise. He would appear suddenly from behind chimney stacks and rubbish bins, ruffling his foppish coat behind him. His passage was always invisible. Occasionally he would look up and yell ‘Oy!’ into the firmament, and a pigeon, or a flock of starlings, or a thrush, would wheel suddenly out of the clouds, obeying his call, and perch nervously on his wrist.

He would peer at the bird, then briefly up at Saul or whoever observed him, and smile in satisfaction. He would glance back at the bird, imperious suddenly, and bark a command at it, upon which it would seem to cringe and give obeisance, bobbing its head and bowing. And then Loplop would become a good and just king all of a sudden, with no time for such puerile displays of power, and he would murmur reassuringly to his subject, and jettison it, watching it disappear with a look of noble benediction.

Saul believed that Loplop was still a little mad.

And King Rat, King Rat was the same: cantankerous and cockney and irritable and otherworldly.

Kay did not reappear with Natasha’s keys, and she was forced to wake her downstairs neighbour, with whom she left a spare set.

It was just like Kay to meander off and forget that he had them, and she waited for him to call with his cheerful apology. He did not call. After a couple of days she tried his number, and his flatmates said they had not seen him for ages. Natasha was heartily pissed off. After another couple of days she had a new set cut and resolved to charge him when he re-emerged.

The police did seek her out. She was taken to the station and interviewed by a quiet man named Crowley, who asked her several times in several different ways if she had seen Saul since his disappearance. He asked her if she thought Saul capable of murder. He asked her what she had thought of Saul’s father, whom she had never met, and what Saul thought of him. He asked her what Saul thought of the police. He asked what she thought of the police.

When they let her go she returned home seething, to discover a note on her door from Fabian, who was waiting for her in the pub. She fetched him back to her house where they smoked a joint and, to the sound of Fabian’s abrupt giggles, composed a Jungle track on her sequencer using loads of samples from The Bill. They christened the song Fuck You Mister Policeman Sir!.

Pete was coming around more and more. Natasha was waiting for him to make a move on her, something which seemed to happen with the majority of blokes she hung out with for any length of time. He did not, which was a relief to her, as she was completely uninterested and did not want to have to deal with his embarrassment.

He was listening to more and more Drum and Bass, was making comments that were more and more astute. She sampled his flute and wove it into her tunes. She liked the sound it made; there was a breath of the organic about it. Normally, for the main sounds at the top end she would simply create something with her digital powers, but the soullessness those noises possessed, a quality she often revelled in, was beginning to alienate her. She enjoyed the sounds of his flute, the tiny pauses for breath, the hint of vibration when she slowed it down, the infinitesimal imperfections that were the hallmark of the human animal. She sent the bass to follow the flute track.

She was still experimenting, still laying plenty of tracks without him. After a time she focused her flute experimentation on one track. Sometimes they would play together, she snapping down a drum track, a bass line, some interjections, and he would improvise over the top. She recorded these sessions for ideas, and a notion formed in her mind of how they could play together: a session of Jazz Jungle, the newest and most controversial twist to the Drum and Bass canon.

But for now she concentrated on the track she had christened Wind City. She returned to it day on day, tweaking it, adding layers to the low end, tickling the flute, looping it back on itself.

She had a clear idea of the feeling she sought, the neurotic beats of Public Enemy, especially on Fear Of A Black Planet, the sense of a treble constantly looking over its own shoulder. She took the harmony of the flute and stretched it. Repetition makes listeners wary of a statement, and Natasha made the flute protest too much, coming back in and back in and back in on its purest note, till that purity became a testimony of paranoia, no sweet sound of innocence.

Pete loved what she was doing.

She would not let him hear the track until it was finished, but occasionally she would give in to his pesterings and play him a snippet, a fifteen-second phrase. The truth was that although she feigned exasperation, she enjoyed his rapturous reception.

‘Oh, Natasha,’ he said as he listened, ‘you really understand me. More than I think you think you do.’

Crowley was still haunted by the scene of the Mornington Crescent murder.

There had been something of a news blackout, a halfway house of secrecy whereby the unknown victim’s death had been reported but the intricacies withheld. There was a vain and desperate hope that by mulling over the unbelievable facts in private, by containing them, they could be understood.

Crowley did not believe it would work.

The crime was not connected to his own investigation, but Crowley had come to examine the scene. The unearthly circumstances surrounding the murder reminded him of the peculiarities of Saul’s disappearance and the murder of the two police officers.

Crowley had stood on the platform, the train still waiting there some hours after a hysterical driver had reported something which made no sense. A brief examination of the scene told the police that the driver’s ‘floating man’ had been suspended by rope to the tunnel entrance. Frayed cord dangled from the brick. The few passengers had been cleared out and the driver was with a counsellor elsewhere in the station.

The front of the train was encrusted with blood. There was very little of the body left to identify.

Dental records had been rendered useless by the crushing, inexorable onrush of metal and glass onto the victim’s face.

There was no escaping this crime, it lay all around him, on the platform, spattering the walls, carbonized on the live rail, smeared by gravity the length of the first carriage. No cameras had recorded the passing of criminal or victim. They had come and gone invisibly. It was as if the metal stakes and bloodied stubs of rope, the ruined flesh, had been conjured up spontaneously out of the dark tunnels.

Crowley exchanged words with the investigating detective, a man whose hands still shook since his first arrival at the scene an hour or more previously. Crowley had only tenuous reasons to connect the crime to his own investigations. Even the savagery was wrong. The murder of the policemen had seemed an act of huge rage, but a spontaneous act, brutally efficient. This was an imaginative piece of sadism, ritualistic, like a sacrifice to some dangerous god. It was designed to strip the victim of dignity and any vestige of power. And as he thought that, Crowley wondered if the man — they had found flesh that told them it was a man — had been awake and conscious as the train had arrived, and he screwed up his face, felt briefly sick with horror.

And yet, and yet, despite the differences, Crowley felt himself linking the crimes in his mind.

There was something in the infernal ease with which life had been taken, a sense of power which seemed to permeate the murder sites, the sure and absolute knowledge that none of these victims, for so much as one second, had the slightest chance of escape.

He asked the shaking Camden detective to contact him were there any developments at all, hinting at the connections he might be able to make.

Now, days later, Crowley still visited Mornington Crescent when he slept, its walls chaotically re sprayed, abattoir chic, the red carpet laid down, ghastly organic decor.

He was convinced that the three (four?) murders he investigated contained secrets. There was more to the story, there was much more than they knew. The facts were damning, but still he wanted to believe that Saul had not committed the crimes. He sought refuge in a firm if nebulous belief that something big was going on, something as yet unexplained, and that whatever Saul was doing, he was not somehow responsible. Whether being absolved by the sudden onset of madness, or another’s control, or whatever, Crowley did not know.

Chapter Fifteen

For a long time Pete had been asking Natasha to take him to a Jungle club. She found his pesterings irritating, and asked why he could not just go by himself, but he made noises about being a newcomer, being intimidated (which was, in all fairness, entirely reasonable given the atmosphere at many clubs). His hectoring stayed just on the right side of whining.

He made one or two good excuses. He did not know where to go, and if he were to follow Time Out’s appalling recommendations, he would end up a lonely figure at a hardcore Techno evening or some such fate. Natasha, by contrast, knew the scene, and could walk into any of the choicest evenings in London without paying. Just cashing in favours, calling in accounts set up in the early days of the music, by knowing the names and the faces, talking the talk.

Something was rumbling in the Elephant and Castle. The AWOL posse were getting together with Style FM in a warehouse near the railway line.

Everyone was going to be there, she started to hear. A DJ she knew called Three Fingers phoned her and asked her to come along, bring a tune or two; he’d play them. She could spin a few if she wanted.

She wasn’t going to take him up on that, but maybe just turning up wasn’t such a bad idea. It was a month since she’d last been out on a serious night, and Pete’s clamouring made for a decent excuse to move. Three Fingers put her ‘plus whoever’ on his guest list.

Fabian immediately said he would come. He seemed pathetically grateful for the idea. Kay remained incommunicado and, for the first time since he had disappeared a week or more previously, Natasha and Fabian felt the beginnings of trepidation. But for the moment that was forgotten as they made preparations for the foray into South London.

Pete was ecstatic.

‘Yes yes yes! Fantastic! I’ve been waiting for this forages!’

Natasha’s spirit sank as she saw herself being shoehorned into the role of Junglist Nanny.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to disappoint you or anything, Pete, but so long as you know I’m not looking after you there or anything. Alright? We get there, I listen, you dance, you leave when you want, I’m leaving when I want. I’m not there to show you around, d’you know what I’m saying?’

He looked at her strangely.

‘Of course.’ His brow furrowed. ‘You’ve got some odd ideas about me, Natasha. I don’t want to cadge off you all evening, and I’m not going to… to leach any of your cool, OK?’

Natasha shook her head, irritated and embarrassed. She was concerned that having a pencil-necked, white bread geek padding after her was going to do her credentials as an up-and-coming Drum and Bass figure no good at all. She had only been vaguely conscious of the thought, and having it pointed out with frank good humour made her defensive and snappy.

Pete was grinning at her.

‘Natasha, I’m going because I’ve found a new kind of music I never knew existed, and it’s one which — for all I don’t look the part — I think I can use, and I think I can probably make. And I presume so do you, because you haven’t stopped recording me yet.’

‘So don’t worry about me making you look less than funky in front of your mates. I’m just going to hear the music and see the scene.’

After the last bout of arguing, Anansi had disappeared. Loplop had remained in the area for another day or two, but had ultimately followed the spider into obscurity.

King Rat had slumped into a foul mood.

Saul hauled himself into the sewers, careful not to spill the bag of food he carried. He picked his way through the tunnels. It was raining in the streets above, a steady dribble of filthy, acid-saturated water which raced into the tunnels, swirled around Saul’s legs, tried to pull him down, a stream nearly two feet high, fast-moving and dilute, the usual warm compost smell mostly dissipated.

King Rat had done nothing about finding food, and Saul, impatient with his self-pity, had left the throne room and gone scavenging. King Rat’s leash on him was loosening. The neurotic hold he had kept for so long was almost gone. As his mood grew worse, his determination to keep Saul in his sights weakened.

Saul knew what this meant. His worth for King Rat was not measured by blood. He had not been rescued because he was a nephew, but because he was useful; because his peculiar birthright meant he was a threat to the power of the Piper. As the campaign against the Piper dissolved in petty fights and squabbles, cowardice and fear, Saul’s existence meant less and less to King Rat. Without a plan of attack, how could he deploy his chosen weapon?

As Saul picked his way through the saturated tunnels he heard a sound. In a crevice in the concrete stood a waterlogged rat, her babies blind and squealing in the darkness behind her.

She stood uncertainly on the grey lip, overlooking the rush of water. She was only six inches or so above the rising stream, and the comfortable hollow in which she lived was on the verge of becoming a water sealed tomb. She looked up across the tunnel. On the far side from where she stood was another hole, an accidental passageway slanting up away from the depths.

The rat raised herself on her hind legs when she smelt Saul, and she let forth a peculiar cry.

She bobbed up and down in the darkness, avoiding looking him in the face, yet clearly aware of his presence. Again the she-rat made a sound, a lengthy screech, purged of the sneer which usually coloured rats’ voices.

He stopped just before her and hoisted his plastic bag over his shoulder.

The rat was pleading with him.

She was begging him for help.

The tone of the squeal was beseeching, and Saul was reminded of the profusion of rats who had followed him a fortnight previously, rats which had seemed animated by hunger and desperation, and which had been eager to show him respect.

Not here, was the sentiment pouring out of the bedraggled rat as she cringed below him. Not here, not here!

Saul reached out to her and she hopped onto his hand. A cacophony of infantile rat squeaks poured out of the holes in the concrete, and Saul plunged his hand further into the depths of the rotting stone. Little bodies were pushed onto his hand, where they lay squirming. He closed his fingers gently into a protective cage and drew out his hand, on which the little family lay shivering as the water level rose.

He crossed the tunnel and placed them on the ledge where the mother could pull the babies out of danger. She backed away from him bobbing her head, the pitch of her sounds changed, her fear gone.

Boss, she said to him, Boss, before turning and pulling her family out of sight into the darkness.

Saul leaned against the soaking wall.

He knew what was happening. He knew what the rats wanted. He did not think King Rat would like it.

By the time he arrived at the entrance to the throne room, the water was moving faster and the level kept on rising. He fumbled under the surface for the brick plug hiding the chute, pulled it open with a sudden explosive burp of air, and slipped through the cascade of water into the dark room below, pulling the door closed behind him.

He landed in the pool, splashed briefly onto his arse, before standing and walking onto the dry bricks. Behind him water dribbled into the room and down the wall from the imperfectly fitting brick entrance, but the chamber was so large and the hidden sluices so efficient that the moat around the room’s central island of raised brickwork became only a little fatter. It would take days of ceaseless rain truly to threaten the air in the throne-room.

King Rat sat brooding on his grandiose brick seat.

Saul glared at him. He delved into the plastic bags.

‘Here,’ he said, and threw a paper package across the room. King Rat caught it in one hand, without looking up. ‘Bit of falafel,’ said Saul, ‘bit of cake, bit of bread, bit of fruit. Fit for a king,’ he added provocatively, but King Rat ignored him.

Saul sat cross-legged at the base of the throne. His own package contained much the same as King Rat’s, with the emphasis skewed towards the sugary components of the meal. Saul’s sweet tooth had survived his passage to rat-hood. The extra richness which rot lent to fruit was a pleasure he was still indulging in as often as possible.

He dug into the bag and pulled out a peach whose surface was one seamless bruise. He ate, gazing all the time at the morose King Rat.

‘I’m fucking sick of this,’ he finally snapped. ‘What is up with you?’

King Rat turned to stare at him.

‘Shut your trap. You don’t know buggery about it.’

‘You stink of self-pity, you know that?’ Saul gave a sudden laugh. ‘You don’t see me acting up like this, and if anyone’s got reason to be… moody… it’s me. First off, you rip me out of my life and turn it into some kind of fucking… bad dream… So fuck it, alright, I’ll do that, and I did a decent enough job didn’t I? And now, just when I’ve got to grips with the rules of my life as Saul, Prince Rat, you get all morose and change the channel. What the fuck is going on? You… galvanize me, get me ready, for fuck knows what, and then you just slump. What am I supposed to do?’

King Rat was staring at him contemptuously, ill at ease.

‘You’ve no clue what you’re spouting, you little gobshit…’

‘Don’t tell me that! Jesus! What the fuck do you want me to do? Is my role here to fucking get you spurred again? Am I supposed to shake you up? Get you going again? Well fuck off! If you want to sit there on your rat arse and mope, then fine. And spider-features and Loplop can join you, you’re as bad as each other. But I’m fucking off!’

‘Got any suggestions, you mouthy little cunt?’ hissed King Rat.

`Yeah, I have. You fuckers have got to be less chicken. That’s what this is about. You’re all scared, and you’re scared because you all want a plan which makes sure your own arse isn’t on the line. Well, it’s not going to happen! You all reckon the Piper is such a bad fucker that you’ve got to take him, that this is the Final Battle — so long as none of you does the actual fighting. And while we’re on that subject, I get the distinct fucking impression that it was me who was supposed to do the fighting for you, but you’re all still chickenshit because you can’t quite work out how to deploy me without any danger of recoil or whatever.

Well count me the fuck out!' Saul had worked his way into a righteous anger.

‘The Piper wants you dead too!’ hissed King Rat.

‘Yeah, so you say. Well, unlike you, maybe I’m going to do something about it!’ There was a long silence. Saul waited a moment, then spoke again.

‘The rats want me to take over.’

There was a long silence as King Rat slowly swung his head to look at him.

‘What?’

‘The rats. In the sewers. Sometimes in the streets, or wherever. Whenever you’re not around. They come to me, hover, kow-tow, and they squeak, and I’m beginning to make sense of what they’re on about. They want me to take over. They want me to be the boss.’

King Rat was rising, standing on the throne.

‘You little ingrate. You little Tea-Leaf… you little shit, you bastard, I’ll tan your hide, it’s mine, mine, you understand, mine…’

‘So take a stand, you fucking has-been!’ Saul was standing, glaring at him, his face just below King Rat’s, their spittle forming a crossfire. ‘They don’t want you back. And they’re not going to have you back until you… redeem yourself. That seems to be the morality of this fucking terrain.’

Saul turned and stormed to the exit. ‘I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I don’t expect you to care, because you don’t think you can use me at the moment. While I’m gone I recommend you think carefully about doing something. Use Loplop, use Anansi, get hold of them and track the motherfucker down. When you’re willing to get off your arse, maybe we can talk.’ He turned to face King Rat. ‘Oh, and don’t worry about your Magic Kingdom. I don’t want to be Rat King, not now, not ever, so I wouldn’t stress it. I’m going to find my mates or something. I’m bored of you.’

Saul turned and swung out of the room, was briefly coated in filthy water, and passed into the sewers.

While Saul stalked through the subterranean realms above him, King Rat stood quivering with rage, his hands tugging fitfully at his overcoat. Eventually his motions ceased and he seated himself.

He brooded.

He jumped up again, purposeful for the first time in days.

‘OK, sonny, point taken. So let’s talk about bait,’ he murmured to himself.

He rushed out of the room, suddenly moving as he had when Saul first saw him, sinuous and mysterious, fast and chaotic.

He passed quickly, silently through the layers of the earth, while Saul still struggled to find his bearings. King Rat emerged into a dark street. On the other side, figures passed in and out of the puddle of lacklustre lamplight, keeping their eyes fixed in front of them.

He stood quite still, his hidden eyes twitching imperceptibly. He looked around him. His eyes crawled up the wall before him. He stalked forward, one foot rising in a slow arch, curving back down to earth in an exaggerated parabola, his upper body bobbing slightly. He looked up, spread his arms wide, gripped the brick wall like a lover. Silently, he scaled the side of the building, his boots finding impossible purchase, his hands gripping invisible imperfections. He drew his hands back, contracting the muscles of his arms, fixing his attention on the dark below the eaves.

His arms uncoiled, shot out. Something fluttered desperately and a family of dirty pigeons burst from the shadow, disturbed from their sleep. They disappeared into the air behind him. He withdrew his hand and brought with it one of the birds, caught and held tight, its wings trying to stretch open, unable to escape him.

King Rat lowered his face towards his captive. It stopped struggling as he brought his face closer. He held it very tight to him, stared deep into its eye.

‘You don’t have Jack to fear from me, little cove,’ he hissed. The bird was still, waiting. ‘I want you to do me a favour. Go find your boss-man, spread the word. King Rat wants Loplop. Have him track me down.’

King Rat released his scout. It lurched into the air, wheeled and swept off over London. King Rat watched it go. When he couldn’t see it any more, he turned his back and disappeared into the dark city.

Chapter Sixteen

It was the first time since his solo stroll along the Westway that Saul had been alone for so long. His are was dwindling, threatening to snuff out, and he fed it carefully, maintained it. It gave him a righteous rush.

He wanted out of the claustrophobic sewers, wanted a taste of cold air. Judging by the ebb of water around his legs, the rain outside had let up. He wanted to emerge before it had fully dissipated.

Saul trusted to instinct in his rambles through the brick underworld. The rules of the sewers were different, the distinctions and boundaries between areas blurred. Above ground he knew where he was, and decided where he was going. Under the pavement he felt only a vague tugging to move from one part of the tunnel network to another, a buzzing of the troglodytic radar apparently lodged in his skull, and he would follow his nose. He did not know if he had visited any particular patch of sewer before; it was irrelevant. He knew it all. It was only the environs of the throne-room which were particular, and all roads in the underworld seemed to lead there eventually.

He ducked under low bricks, pushed his way through tight tunnels.

Saul heard the patter of feet around him, isolated squeals of excited rats. He saw a hundred little brown heads peeking from chinks in the bricks.

‘Hi, rats,’ he hissed as he moved.

Ahead of him he saw the ruined metal of a ladder, old and corroded, dribbling its constituent parts into the stream of rainwater. He grasped it, felt it crumble beneath him, scrambled up it before it disintegrated entirely. He pushed at the cover, to poke his head into Edgware Road.

It was the end of twilight. The street was busy with Lebanese patisseries, mini-cab firms and cut-price electrical repair shops, dirty video stores and clothing warehouses with hand-drawn signs advertising their wares. Saul looked over the top of a building site across the road. Away in the west the fringe of the sky was still a beautiful bright blue, shading to black. At the base of the skyline the edges of the buildings looked unnaturally sharp.

Saul slid gently through the hole in the pavement, nonchalant in the knowledge that he could move without being seen or heard, so long as he kept in the shadows, obeyed the rules. Subtly he oozed through the opening, waiting for a gap in the flow of pedestrians, arching his eyebrows, rolling out of the hole in the ground with the smell.

He reached back to replace the manhole cover, and heard a mass of hisses. Peering over the edge, Saul looked into the eyes of dozens of rats, perched precariously on the rotting ladder.

He regarded them. They gazed at him.

He grunted and pulled the cover over the opening, but not fully, leaving a slit of darkness, to which he put his mouth and whispered, ‘Meet me over by the bins.’

In a quick, odd motion Saul bobbed to his feet. He stuck his hands in his pockets, sauntered along the street past the clumps of people. They noticed him suddenly, moved aside and apart for him, frowning at his smell. Behind him a brown bolt shot out of the sewers, followed by another, then a sudden mass. One of the proprietors noticed and shrieked, and all attention focused on the manhole. By then the flow had almost finished and the rats had melted into the interstices of the city, made themselves invisible.

Saul continued walking at the same pace as the street erupted into pandemonium behind him. People snatched themselves away from the hole in the ground.

‘Who the fuck left that open?’ came one yell, along with a mass of Arabic.

Saul slid into the darkness at the edge of the street.

The rats had disappeared now and public-spirited citizens were gingerly shoving the metal cover back into position. Saul turned slowly and leaned against a wall, ostentatious, if only for his own benefit. He inspected his nails.

A few feet away to his right was a mass of bins, some tumbling into each other and spilling bags, the whole smelling faintly of baklava, sullied of course by filth. There was a rustling from the bags. A honey stained head poked up from the black plastic mass. More heads appeared around it.

‘Got yourself some food, then?’ hissed Saul out of the corner of his mouth. ‘That’s good.’

There was a faint screeching from the bins in reply.

A few feet away, in the world of the patisseries, those who had collaborated on resealing the sewers were laughing, unsettled. They were sharing cigarettes and looking around nervously, in case the rats came back.

Saul moved over to the dustbins.

‘Alright, squad,’ he said quietly. ‘Show me what you can do. First alley on the left, quick march, quiet as… mice? Fuck it, I suppose so. Rank yourselves nice for me.’

There was a sudden explosive burst and a hundred brown torpedoes bolted from cover. Saul watched as they disappeared up drains, behind walls, into the darkness which dribbled down from the eaves of the buildings, into the holes between bricks. The bins were suddenly vacant and still.

Saul turned slowly on one heel in a deliberate motion. He dragged his feet, picking them up, dropping them, walking ponderously along the street. He looked down at his chest as he moved. Saul was thinking.

He felt as if he had lost all capacity for urgency.

Saul wondered what he was trying to achieve. Was this revenge? Boredom? A dare?

He was becoming King Rat. Was he? Was that what he was doing? He was not sure at all. He had not asked the rats to follow him, but he wanted to see what he could do with them.

He was aware that he should fear the Piper, that he should think, form a plan, but he could not, not now. He felt untrustworthy, confused, full of betrayal. He would show King Rat. King Rat who had not chased him, not tried to stop him, not urged him to come back.

He did not know what he was about to do, he did not know where he would go, when he would return. But then the very emptiness he felt was a liberation. For a long time he had felt full of guilt about his father, full of his father’s disappointment. Then he had been full of King Rat, full of trepidation and amazement.

Now he was empty, all of a sudden. He felt very alone. He felt light, as if he might evade gravity with every step. As if he had pissed after a day holding it in, or had put down a massive burden he had forgotten he carried. He felt he could blow away in the wind, and he had to keep moving. And each movement, for the first time he could remember, the first time ever, was entirely his own.

There was a screaming from the alley just ahead of him, and he swore and rushed to the corner. He swung around the edge of brick and stared into the shadows. A few feet from the Edgware Road a young woman was lying in the delivery entrance of a shop. She had a dirty face and dirty brown hair. She sat huddled in a greasy blue sleeping-bag, pulling it up tight around her. Her face was shot through with horror, her mouth stretched as if it would split her cheeks. Her voice had run dry. She did not see Saul. She could not take her eyes from the wall before her.

A cascade of rats spewed and bubbled over the edge. The stream was almost soundless, marked only by a low white noise of scratching.

The sleeping-bag slipped slowly from the woman’s hands, and they stayed as they were, frozen, framing her face. Rats simmered around her, looked up at Saul, made sounds of supplication, sought approval. They parted as he strode towards the terror-stricken woman.

She did not look at him, still unable to look anywhere except at the deluge of scuttling bodies. There were more rats there than Saul had seen in the sewers. They had been joined by compatriots from the houses around them. Saul glanced up at them, then turned to the woman.

‘Hey, hey,’ he said gently, and kneeled before her. ‘Don’t panic, shhhhh…’

The woman’s eyes flickered briefly to him and she found her voice.

‘Oh my God do you see them they’re coming for me Jesus Christ…’

She spoke in a strangled screech. It sounded as if there were no air in her lungs, as if it were only fear that was giving her a voice.

Saul grabbed her face in both hands and forced her to look at him. Her eyes were green and open very wide.

‘Listen to me. You won’t understand this, but don’t worry. Shhh, shhh, these rats are mine. They won’t hurt you, do you understand?’

‘But the rats are here to get me and they’re going to get me and…’

‘Shut up!’ There was silence, for a second. ‘Now watch.’ Saul held her head still and slowly moved his aside, until the woman could see the rats which waited in the shadows and, as her eyes widened again and the muscles around her mouth went taut, Saul threw his head back briefly and hissed, ‘Disappear!’

There was a flurry of feet and tails. The rats vanished.

The alley was silent.

Bewilderment crept into the creases on the woman’s face. She looked from side to side as Saul moved away from her. She craned her neck and peered nervously around her. Saul sank to his haunches next to her, sat back against the door. He looked to his right and saw the lights of Edgware Road, only ten feet away. Again he thought: these things take place so close to the real city, and no one can see them. They take place ten feet away, somewhere in another world.

Next to him the woman turned. Her voice quivered.

‘How did you do that?’ She spoke too loudly still.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘They’re my rats. They’ll do what I tell them.’

‘Is it like a trick? Like trained rats? Don’t they scare you?’

As she spoke her eyes wavered from side to side. Her voice was unnaturally loud and abrupt. Her panic was over too quickly. She spoke to him as though she were a child. Saul suddenly understood that this woman was probably mentally ill.

Don’t treat her like a child, he thought warily. Don’t patronize her.

‘The rats don’t scare me, no,’ he said carefully. ‘I understand them.’

‘They frightened the shit out of me. I thought they were out to get me!’

‘Yeah, well I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know anyone was here when I sent them into the alley.’

‘It’s amazing that you can do that, I mean make rats do what you want!’ She grinned quickly.

There was silence. Saul looked around him but the rats remained hidden. He turned back to his companion. Her eyes were darting around like flies.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Deborah.’

‘I’m Saul.’ They smiled at each other. ‘Now that you know the rats are mine,’ he said slowly, ‘would you still be scared of them?’

She looked at him questioningly. Saul sighed for a long time. He did not know what would happen next. He did not really know what he was doing. He was enjoying his words, rolling every one around his mouth. It was the first time since meeting Kay that he had spoken to a human being. He revelled in every sentence. He did not want the conversation to end.

‘I mean, I could bring them out again.’

‘I don’t know, I mean, aren’t they dirty and stuff?’

‘Not my lot. And if I tell them not to, they won’t touch you.’

Deborah twisted her face up. She was grinning, a sickly frightened grin.

‘Oh you know I don’t know I mean I don’t know…’

‘Don’t be scared, now. Look. I’ll call them out, and show you they do what I want.’ He turned his head slightly. He could smell the rats. They waited just out of sight, quivering. ‘Heads up,’ he said firmly, ‘heads only.’

There was a stirring in the debris and a hundred little heads poked up, like seals in the waves, sleek skulls under greased-back fur.

Deborah shrieked and put her hand over her mouth. Her head shook, and Saul saw that she was laughing.

‘It’s amazing…’ she said through her fingers.

‘Down,’ said Saul, and the heads disappeared.

Deborah laughed delightedly.

‘How do you do it?’

‘They have to do what I say,’ said Saul. ‘I’m the boss, as far as they’re concerned. I’m their prince.’ She looked at him in consternation. Saul felt irresponsible. He wondered if he was damaging her further. What she needs is reality, he thought, but the realization came firmly to him that this was reality, whether anyone liked it or not. And he wanted to keep talking to her.

‘Are you hungry, Deborah?’ She nodded. ‘Well, why don’t I get you some food?’ He jumped up and crept into Edgware Road, returned some seconds later with two pastries, intricate things encrusted with pistachios and icing sugar, which he put in Deborah’s lap.

She bit into one, licked her lips. She was obviously hungry.

‘I was asleep,’ she said, honey muffling her voice. ‘I heard the rats in my sleep and they woke me up. Oh, it’s OK. I’m glad I’m awake. I wasn’t sleeping very well, actually, I was dreaming horrible things.’

‘Wasn’t waking to a plague of rats a horrible thing?’

She laughed jerkily.

‘Only at first,’ she said. ‘Now I know they do what you tell them I don’t mind so much. It’s very cold.’ She had finished the pastries. She had eaten very fast.

There was a faint scratching. The rats were becoming impatient. Saul barked a brief order to be quiet and the sound ceased. It feels so easy, he thought, so simple to take control like this. It didn’t even excite him.

‘Do you want to go to sleep, Deborah?’

‘What do you mean? Her voice was suddenly suspicious, even afraid. She almost whined in her trepidation, and bundled herself up into her sleeping bag. Saul reached out to reassure her and she shrank away from him in horror and he realized with a sinking feeling that she had heard such a line before, but spoken with different intent.’

Saul knew that the streets were brutal.

He wondered how often she had been raped.

He moved his hands away, held them up in surrender.

‘I’m sorry, Deborah, I didn’t mean anything. I’m just not tired. I’m lonely, and I thought we could go for a wander.’ She still looked at him with terrified eyes. ‘The won’t… I’ll go, if you want.’ He did not want to leave. ‘I want to show you around. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’

‘I don’t know I don’t know what you want to do…’ she moaned.

‘Don’t you want to do something?’ he said desperately. ‘Aren’t you bored? I swear I won’t touch you, won’t do anything, I just want some company…’

He looked at her and saw her wavering. He put on a silly expression, a clownish sad face, sniffed theatrically, nauseating himself.

Deborah laughed nervously.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

‘Oh… OK…’ She looked pleased, even though nervous.

He grinned at her reassuringly.

He felt ill at ease, shockingly clumsy. Even the simplest mannerism cost him huge effort. He was relieved that he had not frightened her away.

‘I’ll take you up to the roofs, if you want, Deborah, and I’ll show you the quick way of getting around London on foot. Can I…’ He paused. ‘Can I bring the rats?’

Chapter Seventeen

Bring them, bring the rats, she said, after a little persuasion. It was obvious that, despite her fear, she was fascinated. Saul gave a long whistle and the rats appeared again, eager to show willing.

He did not know how it was he commanded them. It seemed to make no difference what words he used, or if he whistled, or gave a brief shout. He could not think an order for it to be obeyed, he had to make a sound, but the rats seemed to understand him through an empathy, not through language. He invested the sound he made with the spirit of an order for it to be obeyed.

He made the rats line up in rows, to Deborah’s delight. He made them move forward and backwards. When he had shown off and made the rats ridiculous, taking away Deborah’s fear, she would even touch one. She stroked it nervously as Saul murmured deep in his throat, held the rat in thrall so it would not panic, bite or run.

‘No offence or anything, Saul, but you smell, you know,’ she said.

‘It’s where I live. Smell it again; it’s not as bad as you think at first.’

She leaned over and sniffed him, wrinkled up her nose and shook her head apologetically.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said.

When she had lost her fear he suggested that they move. She looked nervous again, but nodded.

‘Which way?’ she said.

‘Do you trust me?’ Saul said.

‘I think so…’

‘Then hold on to me. We’re going up, straight up the walls.’

She did not understand at first, and when she did she was terrified, refused to believe that Saul could carry her. He reached out to her gently, slowly so as not to intimidate her, and when he was sure she did not mind being touched, he lifted her easily, held her with his arms outstretched, feeling his muscles snap hard with rat-strength. She laughed delightedly.

He felt like a superhero.

Ratman, he thought as he held her. Doing good with his bizarre rat-powers. Helping the mentally ill. Carrying them around London faster than shit through a sewer. He sneered at himself.

‘See. I told you I could carry you. Let me put you on my back.’

‘Mnnnn…’ Deborah swung her face from side to side like a flattered child, smiling a little. ‘MnnnnOK.’

‘Great. Let’s go.’ The rats scampered a little closer, hearing the dynamism in Saul’s voice.

Deborah still looked at them nervously every time they moved, but she had forgotten most of her fear.

Saul bent down and offered her his back. She stepped out of the sleeping-bag.

‘Shall I take this?’ she said, and Saul shook his head.

‘Just hide it. I’ll bring you back here.’

Deborah gingerly clambered onto Saul’s back, and he was struck once again by the fact that it was only her tenuous grip on reality that meant she would do as he suggested. Approach most people with the offer to piggyback them across the roofs and he would not have met with such a willing response.

The irony, of course, being that she was right to trust him.

He rose to his feet and she shrieked as if she was on a fairground ride.

‘Gentle, gentle!’ she yelled, and he hissed at her to keep her voice down.

He strode into the passage, and all around him he heard the pattering of hundreds of rat feet. This is bow I changed worlds, he thought, carried to my new city on the back of a rat. What goes around comes around.

He stopped below a window, its sill nine feet above the pavement.

‘See you up top,’ he hissed at the rats, who disappeared in a flurry, as before. He heard the scrape of claws on brick.

Saul jumped up and grasped the window, and Deborah shouted, a yell which did not die away but ballooned in terror as her fingers fought for purchase on his back. His feet swung above the ground, the toes of his prison-issue shoes scraping the wall.

He called for her to shut up, but she would not, and words began to form in her protest.

‘Stopstopstop,’ she wailed and Saul, mindful of discovery, hauled himself at speed up into the space by the window, flattened himself against the glass, reached up again, determined to pull Deborah out of earshot before she could order him down.

He scrambled up the building. Not yet as fast as King Rat, but so smooth, he thought to himself as he climbed. Terror had stopped Deborah’s voice. I know that feeling, thought Saul, and smiled. He would bring this to a close as fast as he could.

Her weight on his back was only a minor irritation. This was not a hard wall to climb. It was festooned with windows and cracks and protuberances and drainpipes. But Saul knew that to Deborah it was just so much unbreachable brick. This building had a flat roof contained by rails, one of which he grasped now and tugged at, raising himself and his cargo up onto the skyline.

He deposited Deborah on the concrete. She clawed at it, her breath ragged.

‘Oh now, Deborah, I’m sorry to scare you,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me if I told you what I was going to do, but I swear to you, you were safe, always. I wouldn’t put you in danger.’

She mumbled incoherently. He dropped to her side and gently put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and turned to him. He was surprised at her face. She was quivering, but she did not look horrified.

‘How can you do that?’ she breathed. All around them on the roof the concrete began to swarm with rats, struggling to prove their eager devotion. Saul picked Deborah off her side and put her on her feet. He tugged at her sleeve. She did not take her eyes from him but allowed herself to be pulled over to the railing around the roof. The light was entirely leached from the sky by now.

They were not so very high; all around them hotels and apartment blocks looked down on them, and they looked down on as many again. They stood at the midpoint of the undulations in the skyline. Black tangles of branches poked into their field of vision, over in Regent’s Park. The graffiti were thinner up here, but not dissipated. Here and there extravagant tags marked the sides of buildings, badges pinned in the most inaccessible places. I’m not the first to be here, thought Saul, and the others weren’t rats. He admired them hugely, their idiot territorial bravery. To scale that wall and spray boomboy!!! just there, where the bricks ran out, that was a courageous act.

It’s not brave of me, he thought. I know I can do it, I’m a rat.

Deborah was looking at him. From time to time her eyes flitted away towards the view, but it was him she was conscious of. She looked at him with amazement. He looked back at her. He was awash with gratitude. It was so good, so nice to talk to someone who was not a rat, or a bird, or a spider.

‘It must be amazing to be able to do what all the rats do,’ she said, studying their massed ranks. They stood a little way behind, quiet and attentive, fidgeting a little when unobserved but hushing when Saul turned to gaze at them.

Saul laughed at what she said.

‘Amazing? I don’t fucking think so.’ He could not resist bitching, even though she would not understand. ‘Let me tell you about rats,’ he said. ‘Rats do nothing. All day. They eat any old crap they can find, run around pissing against walls, they shag occasionally — or so I’m led to believe — and they fight over who gets to sleep in which patch of sewer. Sure, they think they’re the reason the world was invented. But they’re nothing.’

‘Sounds like people!’ said Deborah and laughed delightedly as if she had said something clever. She repeated it.

‘They’re nothing like people,’ Saul said quietly. ‘That’s a tired old myth.’

He asked her about herself and she was vague about her situation. She would not explain her homelessness, muttering darkly about not being able to handle something. Saul felt guilty but he was not that interested. Not that he did not care: he did, he was appalled at her state and, even alienated from her city as he was, he felt the old fury against the government so assiduously trained into him by his father. He cared deeply. But at that moment he wanted to talk to her not for herself particularly but because she was a person. Any person. As long as she kept talking and listening, he was not concerned about what she might say. And he asked her about herself because he was hungry for her company.

He heard a sudden sound of flapping, something like heavy cloth. He felt a brief gust of wind in his face. He looked up, but there was nothing.

‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Never mind rats being amazing. Do you want to come back to my house?’

She wrinkled her nose again.

‘The one that smells like that?’

‘No. I was thinking of going back to my real place for a bit.’ He sounded calm, but his breath came short and fast at the thought of returning. Something in her remarks about rats had reminded him of where he came from. Cut off from King Rat, he wanted to return, touch base.

He missed his dad.

Deborah was happy to visit his house. Saul put her on his back again and set off, with the rats in tow, across the face of London, across a terrain that had quickly become familiar to him.

Sometimes Deborah buried her face in his shoulder, sometimes she leaned back alarmingly and laughed. Saul shifted with her to maintain his balance.

His progress was not as rapid as King Rat’s or Anansi’s, but he moved fast. He stayed high, loath to touch the ground, a vague rule he remembered from a children’s game. Sometimes the platform of roofs stopped short and he had no option but to plunge down the brick, by fire escape or drain or broken wall, and scurry across a short space of pavement before scrambling up above the streets again.

Everywhere around him he heard the sound of the rats. They kept up with him, moving by their own routes, disappearing and reappearing, boiling in and out of his field of vision, anticipating him and following him. There was something else, a presence he was vaguely aware of: the source of that flapping sound. Time and again he sensed it, a faint flurry of wind or wings brushing his face. His momentum was up and he did not stop, but he nursed the vague sense that something kept up with him.

Periodically he would pause for breath and look around him. His passage was quick. He followed a map of lights, keeping parallel to Edgware Road, shadowing it as it became Maida Vale. He followed the route of the 98 bus, passed landmarks he knew well, like the tower with an integument of red girders which jutted out above its roof, making a cage.

The buildings around them began to level out; the spaces between towers grew larger. Saul knew where they were: in the stretch of deceptively suburban housing just before Kilburn High Road. Terra cognita, thought Saul. Home ground.

He crossed to the other side of the road so fast that Deborah was hardly aware of it. Saul took off into the dark between main roads, bridging the gap between Kilburn and Willesden, eager to return home.

They stood before Terragon Mansions. Saul was afraid.

He felt fraught, short of breath. He listened to the stillness, realized that the escort of rats had evaporated soundlessly. He was alone with Deborah.

His eyes crawled up the dull brick, weaving between windows, many now dark, a few lit behind net curtains. There at the top, the hole through which his father had plummeted. Still not fixed, pending more police investigation, he supposed, though now the absence was disguised by transparent plastic sheets. The tiny fringe of ragged glass was still just visible in the window-frame.

‘I had to leave here in a hurry,’ he whispered to Deborah. ‘My dad fell out of that window and they reckon I pushed him.’

She gazed at him in horror.

‘Did you?’ she squeaked, but his face silenced her.

He walked quietly to the front door. She stood behind him, hugging herself against the chill, looking nervously about. He caressed the door, effortlessly and silently slipping the lock. Saul wandered onto the stairs. His feet made no sound. He moved as if dazed. Behind him came Deborah, in fits and starts, her ebullience gone with his. She dragged her feet as if she were whining, but she made no sound.

The door to his apartment was criss-crossed with blue tape. Saul stared at it and considered how it made him feel. Not violated or outraged, as he would have supposed. He felt oddly reassured, as if this tape secured his house from outsiders, sealing it like a time capsule.

He tugged gently at it. It came away in his hand, airy and ineffectual, as if it had been waiting for him, eager to give itself up. He pushed the door open and stepped into the darkness where his father had died.

Chapter Eighteen

It was cold, as cold as the night when the police had arrived. He did not turn on the lights. What filtered up from the streets was enough for him. He did not waste time, pushed open the door of the sitting-room and entered.

The room was bare, had been stripped of possessions, but he noticed that only in passing. He stared at the jagged window full on. He dared it to unsettle him, to sap his strength. It was just a hole, he thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just a hole? The plastic billowed back and forth with a noise like whips cracking.

‘Saul, I’m scared…’

He realized belatedly that Deborah could hardly see. She stood at the threshold to the room, hesitant. He knew what she could see, his obscure form against the dark orange of the distant streetlamps. Saul shook himself in anger. He had been using her with such ease he had forgotten that she was real. He strode across the room and hugged her.

He wrapped himself around her with an affection she poured back into him. It was not sexual, though he sensed that she expected it to be, and might not have minded. But he would have felt manipulative and foul and he liked her and pitied her and was so, so grateful to her. They held each other and he realized that he was trembling as much as she. Not all rat yet, then, he thought ruefully. She’s afraid of the dark, he thought. What’s my excuse?

There was a book in the middle of the floor.

He saw it suddenly over her shoulder. She felt him stiffen and nearly shrieked in terror, twisting to see whatever had shocked him. He hurriedly hushed her, apologized. She could not see the book in the dark.

It was the only thing in the room. There was no furniture, no pictures, no telephone, no other books, only that.

It was not coincidence, Saul thought. They had not missed that when they cleared out the flat. Saul recognized it. An ancient, very fat red-bound A4 notebook, with snatches of paper bursting from its pages; it was his father’s scrapbook.

It had appeared regularly throughout Saul’s life. Every so often his father would drag it out from wherever he hid it and carefully cut some article from the paper, murmuring. He would glue it into the book, and as often as not write in red biro in the margin. At other times there was no article at all; he would just write. Often Saul knew these bouts were brought on by some political occurrence, something his father wanted to record his pontifications on, but at other times there was no spur that Saul could fathom.

When he was little the book had fascinated him, and he had wanted to read it. His father would let him see some things, articles on wars and strikes, and the neat red notes surrounding them. But it was a private book, he explained, and he would not let Saul examine it all. Some of it’s personal, he explained patiently. Some of it’s private. Some of it’s just for me.

Saul removed himself from Deborah and picked it up. He opened it from the back. Amazingly, there were still a very few pages not yet full. He flicked backwards slowly, coming to the last page that his father had filled. A light-hearted story from the local paper about a Conservative Party fundraising event which had suffered a catalogue of disaster: failing electricity, a double booking and food poisoning. Next to it, in his father’s carefully printed letters, Saul read, ‘There is a God after all!!!’

Before that, a story about the long-running strike at the Liverpool docks, and in his father’s hand: ‘A morsel of information breaches the carefully maintained Wall of Silence! Why the TUG so ineffectual?!’

Saul turned the page backwards, grinned delightedly as he realized that his father had been pondering his Desert Island Discs selection. At the top of the page was a list of old Jazz tunes, all with careful question-marks, and below was the tentative list. ‘One: Ella Fitzgerald. Which one??? Two: "Strange Fruit". Three: "All The Time In The World", Satchmo. Four: Sarah Vaughan, "Lullaby of Birdland". Five: Thelonius? Basic? Six: Bessie Smith. Seven: Armstrong again, "Mack the Knife". Eight: "Internationale". Why Not? Books: Shakespeare, don’t want the Bloody Bible! Capital? Com. Manifesto? Luxury: Telescope? Microscope?’

Deborah knelt beside Saul.

‘This was my dad’s notebook,’ he explained. ‘Look, it’s really sweet…’

‘How come it’s here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. He kept turning the pages as he spoke, past more cuttings, mostly political, but here and there simply something which had caught his father’s eye.

He saw small tales about Egyptian tomb-robbers, giant trees in New Zealand, the growth of the Internet.

Saul began to pull back clumps of pages now, going back years at a time. There was more writing in the earlier years.

7/7/88: Trade Unions. Must read old arguments! Had a long argument with David at work about Union today. He going on and on about ineffectual and etc. etc. and I rather letting myself down, just seemed to sit there saying Yes but solidarity vital! He wasn’t having any of it. Must reread Engels on Trade Unions. Have vague memories of being rather impressed but could be fooling myself. Saul still very sulky. Don’t know what’s going on there at all. Remember seeing book about Teenagers and Problems, though can’t remember where. Must track it down.

Saul felt awash with the same hopeless love he had felt when he had shown Fabian the book his father had bought him. He was going about it all wrong, the old man, but all he wanted to do was understand. Maybe there was no right way to do it. I was wrong too, he thought.

Back, back, he moved through the years. Deborah cuddled into him for warmth.

He read about the time his father had had an argument with one of his history teachers over the best way to present Cromwell.

No, fair enough, maybe can’t be talking about Bourgeoisie to group of ten-year-olds but shouldn’t be glossing over him! Terrible man, yes (Ireland, and etc. etc.) but must make clear nature of Revolution!

He read a reference to one of his father’s girlfriends — ‘M.’ He could not remember her at all. He knew his father had kept such affairs out of the house. He did not think his father had had any romantic involvement at all in the last six or seven years of his life.

He read about his own fifth birthday party. He remembered it: he had been given two Indian head-dresses, and in retrospect a thrill of worry had passed around the adults, concerned at his reaction, but he had been elated. To have not one but two of the beautiful feathered things… He remembered the joy. Saul was seeking the first reference to himself, maybe a mention of his dead mother, who had been carefully excised from his father’s ruminations. A date caught his eye: 8/2/72, the only entry from the year of his birth, the birth itself apparently not recorded. There was no cutting attached to the entry. Saul’s brow furrowed as he read the first few words.

We are a few weeks on now from the attack, which I don’t really want to talk about. E. is very strong, Thank God. Many fears, of course, alleys and etc. etc., but overall she is getting better daily. Kept asking her was she sure, I thought we should go to the Police. Don’t you want him caught? I asked her and she said No I just don’t want to see him again. Can’t help thinking this is a mistake but it must be her decision of course. Am trying to be what she needs but God Knows it is hard. Worst at night, of course. Don’t know whether better to comfort/cuddle or not touch and she doesn’t seem to know either. Definitely the worst times, tears etc. Am beating about the bush. Fact is, E. had test and is pregnant. Can’t be sure of course but have looked at timing carefully and looks very likely that it is his. Discussed abortion but E. can’t face it. So after long hard talks have decided to go ahead. No record, so no one need know. Hope everything turns out alright. I’ll admit, I’m afraid for child. Haven’t yet worked out my own reaction. Must be strong for E.’s sake.

Saul’s chest had gone quite hollow.

Somewhere Deborah was saying something to him.

Oh, he felt stupid.

He saw what he had lost.

Stupid, stupid boy, he thought, and at the same time he was thinking: You needn’t have worried, Dad. You were strong as fuck.

Tears came cold to his eyes and he heard Deborah again.

Look at what you lost, he thought. She died! he thought suddenly. She died, and still he did right by me. How could he? I killed her, I killed his wife! Every time he looked at me, wasn’t he looking at the rape? Wasn’t he looking at the thing that killed his wife?

Stupid boy, he thought. Uncle Rat? When were you going to think that one through? he thought.

But more than anything he could not stop wondering at the man who had raised him, had tried to understand him, and had given him books to help him understand the world. Because when he had looked at Saul, somehow he did not see murder, or his lost wife, or the brutality in the alley (and Saul knew just how that attacker had appeared, as if from nowhere, out of the bricks, as he himself moved). Somehow, when he looked at Saul he looked at his son, and even when the air between them had poisoned and Saul had exercised all his studied teenage insouciance not to care, the fat man had still looked at him and seen his son, and had tried to understand what was wrong between them. He had had no truck with the awful, bloody vulgarity of genes. He had built fatherhood with his actions.

Saul did not sob, but his cheeks were wet. Wasn’t it odd and sad, he thought a little hysterically, that it was only on learning that his father was not his father, that he realized how completely his father he had been?

There’s a dialectic for you, Dad, he thought, and grinned fleetingly.

It was only in losing him that he regained him, finally, after so many dry years.

He remembered being carried on those broad shoulders to see his mother’s stone. He had killed her, he had killed his father’s wife, and his father had set him down gently and given him flowers to put on her grave. He wept for his father, who had been given his wife’s murderer, the child of her rapist, and who had decided to love him dearly, and had set out to do it, and had succeeded.

And somewhere he kept telling himself how stupid a boy he was. A new thought was occurring to him. If King Rat lied about this, he reflected, and the thought trailed off like a sequence of dots…

If he lied about this, the thought said, what else did he lie about?

Who killed Dad?

He remembered something King Rat had said, a long time ago, at the end of Saul’s first life. ‘I’m the intruder,’ he had said. ‘I killed the usurper.’

In the succession of words the sense had been drowned, had been another surreal boast, a crowing, bullish aggrandizement without meaning. But Saul could see differently now. A cold stone of fury settled in his gut and he realized how much he hated King Rat.

His father, King Rat.

Chapter Nineteen

The door to the flat opened.

Saul and Deborah had been huddled together on the floor, she murmuring nervous words of support. They looked up at the same moment, at the gentle creak of hinges.

Saul scrambled silently to his feet. He was still clutching the book. Deborah rocked herself, tried to rise. A face peered around the rim of the door.

Deborah clung to Saul and gave a tiny whimper of fear. Saul was primed like an explosive, but as his eyes made light of the darkness his tension ebbed a little, and he stood confused.

The face in the doorway was beaming delightedly, long blond hair falling in untidy clumps around a mouth stretched wide in childish joy. The man stepped forward into the room. He looked like a buffoon.

‘The thought I heard someone, I thought so!’ he exclaimed. Saul straightened a little more, his brow furrowed. ‘I’ve been waiting here night after night, saying no, go home, it’s ridiculous, he won’t come here, of all places, and now here you are!’ He glanced at the book in Saul’s hand. ‘You found my reading material, then. I wanted to know all about you. I thought that might tell me a bit.’

He looked a little closer at Saul’s red eyes and his own face widened.

‘You didn’t know, did you?’ His smile of pleasure was broader than ever. ‘Well. That does explain a few things. I thought you were rather quick to join your so-called father’s murderer.’ Saul’s eyes flickered. Of course, he thought, giddy with grief, of course. The man was eyeing him. ‘I thought blood must have been thicker than water but, of course, why on Earth should he have told you?’ He rocked back on his heels, stuck his hands in his pockets.

‘I’ve needed to talk to you for a long time. The rumours have been flying about you, you know! You’ve been famous for years! So many places, so many leads, so many possibilities… I’ve been all over, chasing impossible crime… You know, any time I heard about some weird break-in, some murder, something that doesn’t fit the bill, something people couldn’t have done, I’d run to investigate. The police can be very helpful with information.’ He grinned. ‘So many dead ends! And then I came here…’ The man grinned again. ‘I could just smell him, and I knew I’d found you, Saul.’

‘Who are you?’ Saul finally breathed.

The man smiled pleasantly at him but did not answer. He seemed to see Deborah for the first time.

‘Hi! My God, what a night you must be having!’ He strolled forward as he laughed. Deborah clung still to Saul. She gazed at the man with guarded eyes. ‘Anyway,’ he continued easily, reaching out his hand towards her, ‘I’m afraid I’m not interested in you.’

He snatched her wrist and wrenched her out of Saul’s grasp. Too late, Saul realized that the urbane man had taken her, his head moved slowly down to look where she had been even as his mind screamed at him to look up, to move.

He dragged his head up through the thick air.

He saw the man close his left hand in Deborah’s hair, Saul reached out in horror, determined to intervene, but the man who was still smiling broadly glanced down at her briefly and sent his other fist slamming into the underside of her chin just as she opened her mouth to scream, and the impact split the skin and bone of her jaw and snapped her mouth closed so fast that blood spurted out from between her lips where she bit deep into her tongue. The scream died before it appeared, mutating into a wet exhalation. Even as Saul’s slow, slow feet took him towards her the man swivelled on his toes and pulled her body around from the nape of the neck where he held her, built up momentum, spun fast and buried her face in the side of the door-frame.

He released her and turned back to Saul.

Saul shrieked in anguish and disbelief, stared past the man at Deborah’s carcass, which slid down the door-frame and tumbled back into the room. It was twitching as nerve endings died. Her flattened and distorted face stared blindly up at Saul as she danced in a posthumous fit, her heels pattering on the floor like a monsoon, blood and air bubbling out of her exploded mouth.

Saul bellowed and flung himself at the man with all his rat-strength.

‘I’ll eat your fucking heart!’ he screamed.

The tall man sidestepped the flurry of blows easily, still grinning broadly. He pulled his fist back leisurely and sent it into Saul’s face.

Saul saw the blow coming and moved away from it, but he was not fast enough and it snapped into the side of his skull, sending him reeling. He spun round, hit the floor hard. A shrill sound hurt his head. He turned to look at the man, who stood with his lips pursed, whistling a jaunty, repetitive air. He glared at Saul and his eyes flickered dangerously. Without pause, the tune he was whistling changed, became less organized, more insidious. Saul ignored him, tried to crawl away. The whistling stopped short.

‘So it’s true,’ the Piper hissed, and his urbane voice had metamorphosed into something unstable. He looked as if he was about to be sick, and he looked enraged. ‘Dammit, neither man nor rat, can’t shift you. How dare you how dare you…’ His eyes were wild and sick-looking.

‘I can’t believe how stupid you are coming here, rat-boy,’ said the Piper as he approached him. He shook with effort and his voice righted itself. ‘Now I’m going to kill you and string your body up in the sewers for your father to find, and then I’m going to play for him and make him dance and dance, and eventually when he’s really tired I’m going to kill him.’

Saul pulled himself up, stumbled out of his way, sent a lumbering kick at the Piper’s balls. The Piper grabbed his foot, pulled up very fast, sending him thumping onto his back and pushing the wind out of him. All the while he kept talking, amiable and animated.

‘I’m the Lord of the Dance, I’m the Voice, and when I say jump, people jump. Except you. And I have you here about to die. You’re a fucking abortion. If you don’t dance to my tune, you don’t belong in this world. Twenty-five years in the planning, and here’s the rat’s secret weapon, the supergun, the half and-half.’ He shook his head and wrinkled his nose sympathetically. He kneeled next to Saul who struggled for breath, tried to hold his head up.

‘I’m going to kill you now.’

A high-pitched screech made them both look up. Something burst the plastic sheet shrouding the window with an improbable pop, shot through the tattered window of the flat, a figure, careering through the air towards the Piper, shoving into his body with an impact that took him flying away from Saul’s supine body. Saul struggled up, saw an immaculately suited man trying to strangle the Piper, who convulsed, sending his adversary flying back across the room.

It was Loplop, with terror in his eyes, screaming at Saul to come on, grabbing him and running for the window, until a short clear sound stopped him cold. Saul turned and saw the Piper’s puckered lips as he rose, whistling. A liquid tune, repetitive and simple. Loplop was stiff. Saul saw a look of wonder cross his face as he turned to face the Piper, his eyes alive and ecstatic.

Saul backed away, felt the wall behind him. He could see Deborah’s corpse behind Loplop, see the stain of blood oozing liberally onto the floor. To his left was the Piper, moving forward now, still whistling. Before him was Loplop, stepping towards him, his eyes not seeing, his arms outstretched, his feet moving in rhythm to the Piper’s bird song.

Saul tried to get past Loplop, could not, felt his throat underneath those fingers. The Bird Superior fell on him and began to squeeze the air out of him, all the while holding his own entranced face up to catch the music. He was not heavy but his body was as stiff as metal. Saul beat at him, twisted, tugged at his fingers. Loplop was impervious, unaware. As blackness began to creep in at the edges of his vision, Saul saw the Piper in the corner of the room, rubbing his throat, and the rage pushed blood back into Saul’s face, even past Loplop’s cruel talons, and he spread his arms wide, cupped his hands exactly as his father had warned him not to in the swimming pool, even if you’re just playing, Saul, and he slammed his hands down, clapping with all his strength, around Loplop’s ears.

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 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 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.

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 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.

‘There is a very bad man in here. He will kill you. Leave right now.’

The guard’s eyes were blinking violently.

‘Do you understand?’ hissed Saul.

The guard nodded vehemently. He was looking around frantically for his truncheon, deeply scared by the ease with which he had been disarmed.

Saul released him and the man bolted. But as he reached the end of the little bus-street, the sound of the flute pierced the air around them and he froze. Instantly Saul ran to him, slapped his face hard twice, pushed him, but the man’s eyes were now ecstatic, fixed with a quizzical, overjoyed look over Saul’s, shoulder.

He moved suddenly, pushing Saul aside with a strength he should not possess, and skipped like an excited child deep into the red maze.

‘Oh fuck, no!’ breathed Saul, and overtook him, shoved him back, but the man kept moving, simply pushing past Saul without once looking at him. The flute was closer now, and Saul grabbed him in a bear hug, held him, tried to block his ears, but the man, impossibly strong, elbowed him in the groin and punched him expertly in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of Saul and doubling him over in a crippling reflex prison. He could only stare desperately, willing himself to breathe, as the man disappeared.

Saul pulled himself up and hobbled after him.

In the heart of the bus maze was an empty space. It was a strange little room of red metal and glass, a monk’s hole barely six feet square. Saul found his way towards the centre, rounded a corner and was there, at the outskirts of the square.

Before him stood the Piper, flute to his lips, staring at Saul over the shoulder of the guard, who pranced ridiculously to the shrillness of the flute.

Saul grabbed the man’s shoulders from behind, and hauled him away from the Piper. But the guard spun around and Saul saw that a shard of glass was embedded deep in one of his eyes and thick blood had welled all over his face. Saul shrieked and the Piper’s playing stopped dead. The guard’s expression took on a puzzled cast; he shook his head, raised his hand experimentally towards his face. Before he could touch his eye, silver flashed behind him and he dropped like a stone. A pool as dark and thick as tar began to spread very quickly from his broken head.

Saul was quite still.

The Piper stood before him, wiping his flute clean.

‘I had to let you know, Saul, what I can do.’ He spoke quietly and did not look up, like a teacher who is very disappointed but is trying not to shout. ‘You see, I feel that you don’t really believe what I can do. I feel that you think because you won’t listen to me, no one else will. I wanted to show you quite how hard they listen, see? I wanted you to know. Before you die.’

Saul leapt straight up.

Even the Piper stared, momentarily stupid with amazement, as Saul grabbed one of the surrounding buses’ big wing-mirrors, pivoted in his flight, and swung his feet through the top front window. Then the Piper was there behind him, his flute thrust aggressively into his belt. No attempt to hide this time, Saul just hurled himself through windows again, leaping the gap to the next bus, bursting into its top deck. He picked himself up and leapt again, refusing to hear his screaming limbs and skin. Again and again always followed, always hearing the Piper behind him, the two of them pushing through layer after layer of glass, littering the ground below, a fantastically fast and violent passage through the air, Saul desperate reach the edge of the maze, eager to take this into opened ground.

And then there it was. As he girded himself to leap through another window, he realized that what he could see through it was not just a bus two feet, beyond, that he was looking out at a window in the garage wall itself, and through that at a house, a long way off. He smashed free of the last bus and leapt onto the window-ledge, halfway up the bricks. Between him and that house a gash was cut through London soil, a wide chasm filled with railway lines. And between Saul and those railway lines was nothing but a high fence of steel slats and a long drop.

Saul could hear the Piper still following him, great heavy crashes and vibrations rocking the massed ranks of buses. Saul kicked out the final window. He braced himself, jumped out and clutched at the dull metal barrier below. He landed across it, his weight shaking it violently. He clung to it tight, let his balance adjust. Scuttled a little forward, looked back at the ripped out window. The Piper appeared, looked out. He had stopped grinning. Saul fled down the sheer metal, his descent something between an exercise in rat agility, a controlled slide, and a fall.

He looked up momentarily and saw the Piper trying to follow. But it was too far for him: he could not grasp that fence, he could not crawl like a rat can crawl.

‘Fuck it!’ he screamed, and snatched his flute to his lips. And as he played, all the birds began to return. They flocked once again to his shoulders.

The railway lines curved out of sight in both directions. Above him Saul could see buildings which seemed to jut out over the valley, seemed to loom over him. He ran, following the tracks to the east. He snatched a glimpse behind him, and saw the birds settling on the dark figure who stood in the window frame. Saul lurched hopelessly on, and nearly sobbed with delight when he heard a tight metallic snap, a restrained rattling, and he knew that a train was approaching. He looked behind him and saw its lights.

He moved sideways a little, making room, running alongside the tracks. Come on! he willed it, as the two lights he could not help but think of as eyes slowly drew nearer. Above them he saw the scarecrow figure of the Piper approaching him.

But now the train was nearby and Saul was smiling as he ran, as his sores and his ripped skin pulled against each other. Even as the Piper swung close enough for Saul to see his face, the tube train hurtled past Saul and he accelerated as it slowed for a bend, and as it passed him he threw himself at the back the final carriage, grappling with it like a judo wrestle jostling for position, thrusting his fingers deep into crevices and under extrusions of metal.

He pulled himself to the top and spread his arm wide, clinging tight to the edges of the roof as train began to increase its speed. Saul swivelled on stomach until he faced backwards, stretched his neck and looked up into the Piper’s enraged face, bobbed up and down in the air, contorted even as he continue to play, borne aloft by a canopy of dying birds in slit through the city, this roofless tunnel — but there was nothing the Piper could do to catch Saul now.

And as the train pulled away even faster, Saul saw him become a flying ragdoll, and then a speck, and then he couldn’t see him any more, and he looked instead at the buildings around him.

He saw light and motion inside them, and he realized that people were alive that night, making tea and writing reports and having sex and reading books and watching TV and fighting and expiring quietly in bed, and that the city had not cared that he had been about to die, that he had discovered the secret of his ancestry, that a murderous force armed with a flute was preparing to kill the King of the Rats.

The buildings above him were beautiful and impassive. Saul realized that he was very tired and bleeding and in shock, and that he had seen two people die that night, killed by a power that didn’t care if they lived or died. And he felt a disturbance in the air behind him, and he put his head down and let his breath out in a great sob as the approaching tunnel swept up rubbish and sucked it in behind the train, as a sudden warm wind hit him like a boxer’s glove, and all the diffuse city light went out and he disappeared into the earth.