King Rat

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jungle night.

It was in the air. The sharp-dressed youth who congregated on the Elephant and Castle could taste it.

The clouds were low and moving very fast, ruddy with street lamp light, billowing up from behind the skyline. London looked like a city on fire.

Police cars swirled ephemeral through the streets, streaking past those other cars that prowled towards Lambeth, stereos pumping. The strains of Dancehall and Rap, blunted and languorous, and everywhere Drum and Bass, febrile and poised, savage and impenetrable.

The drivers leaned their arms out of open windows, nodded lazily in time to the music. These cars were full, bursting with designer clothes and basslines. For the cruisers, the evening kicked in at the zebra crossings and red lights, when they could stop, engine idling, beats pounding, visible in all their finery. They drove from junction to junction, searching for places to be still.

A hundred slogans boomed out of a hundred car windows, the samples and shouted declarations of the classic tracks being played, a hundred preludes to the evening.

Mr Loverman, came the shouts, and Check yo’self. Gangsta.Jump. Fight the Power. There is a Darkside.

I could just kill a man.

Six million ways to die.

They only had eyes for each other that night. They drove and walked the streets like conquistadors in Karl Kani, Calvin Klein and Kangols. In wafts of cologne the homeboys and rudegirls, the posses and massives claimed the streets south of Waterloo, striding past the intimidated natives as though they were shades.

Touching fists and kissing their teeth, the massed ranks moved in on the venue. Irish boys and Caribbean girls, smooth Pakistani kids, gangstas in huge coats muttering into mobile phones, DJs with record bags, precocious kids aping the studied nonchalance of the elders…

They made their way into the Jungle.

Here and there the police lurked in corners. Sometimes they were judged worthy of a contemptuous glance, a sneer, before the lights changed and the drivers moved on. The police watched them, whispered to their radios in garbled code. The air teemed with their electronic hisses, warnings and prophecies, unheard by the gathering, swamped by urban breakbeats.

The night was fraught, full of looks held too long.

In the dark streets the warehouse shone. Light spilled from its crevices as if it were a church.

Lines stretched out before the entrance. The bouncers, vast men in bomber jackets, stood with arms folded like grotesque gargoyles. Feudal hierarchies asserted themselves: the serfs in line, clamouring at the gates, staring enviously at the DJs and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers of the Drum and Bass scene, who sauntered casually past them and murmured to the guards. For the noblest of them, even checking the guest list was unnecessary.

Roy Kray and DJ Boom, Nuttah and Deep Cover, familiar from a hundred CD covers and posters, were waved in without demur. Even the preposterously proportioned bouncers showed their obeisance, as their impassivity became momentarily more studied. Droit de seigneur was alive and kicking in the Elephant and Castle that night.

If any of the assembled had looked up they might have caught a glimpse of something lurching across the sky, seemingly out of control. A bundle of rags as big as a man, buffeted through the air. It was not at the mercy of the wind: no wind changed direction as violently or as fast as the shapeless mass, no wind could carry such bulk.

Loplop, the Bird Superior, arced and wheeled above the streets, staring down at the dirty map below him, staring up into the night stained orange by diffuse light, falling, rising, his ears filled with ringing.

He could not hear the city. He could not hear the predatory grunting of the cars. He could not hear the thud thud thud emanating from the warehouse. The intricate hairs and bones in his ears had burst, and the canals were blocked with dry blood.

Loplop had only his eyes, and he searched as best he could, weaving silently between buildings, perching on weathervanes and springing into the sky.

The air was slowly thickening with birds. The few that had been awake as Loplop sped by had cried out, pledged their fealty, but he had not heard them. Confused, they had risen from the eaves and the branches of trees, had followed him, screaming out to him, frightened by his wild flight and his ignoring of them. Huge ponderous crows circled him. Loplop saw them and shouted wordlessly, clutching at the authority he had lost.

The birds wove elegantly around each other, their numbers growing. Their eyes darted from side to side in confusion. In the midst of their slow wheeling, Loplop rose and sped and zigzagged and fell — a wild card.

The birds could not obey their general.

Elsewhere in London, other armies were also massing.

The walls and corners of houses were emptying out. From crevices and holes all over the city, the spiders streamed. They scuttled in their millions, little smudges racing across dirty floors and through gardens, descending on threads from building tops. They crawled over each other, a sudden, nervous mass of blacks and browns.

Here and there their squadrons were seen. In children’s bedrooms and backstreets, the night was punctuated by sudden screams.

Many died. Crushed, eaten, lost. Ruined chitin and smeared bodies marked their passing.

Something sparked deep in the spiders tiny brains. A sensation that was not the hunger or fear or nothingness that were previously their lot. Trepidation? Excitement? Vindication?

The city lights glinted minutely on the spiders multiple eyes. Close set and impenetrable, as cold and disinterested as a shark’s… except tonight…

The spiders trembled.

In the wilds of South London, Anansi watched from rooftops. He could feel the air shifting. He could taste the presence of his troops.

The sewers boiled with rats, incited to a frenzy.

Their Crown Prince had passed among them. Saul had spread the word. He had commanded them, controlled them, sent them forth.

The rats surged through the tunnels like a flash flood. Smaller tributaries streamed into the main branch, bodies on bodies, fat and fast.

They poured under the streets and over the skyline. Up in the canopy of the city, in the thin air, rats bounded over walls and between partitions, scrabbled along slates and behind chimneys.

The river was no obstacle: they found their way across almost without pause.

Different dirt, different packs, a hundred different smells… all the tribes in London running for the south, gnawing on forgotten filth and shaking with adrenaline, ready for battle. An enormous sense of wrong had been encoded in their genes for years, eating them alive like a cancer, and for the first time they could smell a cure.

Rats spewed out of a hundred thousand holes and converged on the wastelands of South London, a scratching, biting mass, hungry and scared, trying to be brave.

Insidiously, furtively, the rats gathered round the warehouse, and waited.

The warehouse was a spark plug. It crackled with energy. It was surrounded by invisible circles, waves and cadres of rats and spiders, crowned with confused, wheeling birds, penetrated by people.

It was a magnet.

Loplop still watched from above.

Anansi scanned the rooftops.

‘Where the fuck is she at?’

Three Fingers, wiry and cantankerous, addressed his question to one of the bouncers. The huge man shook his head. Fingers danced from side to side in frustration. The wet thumping of basslines and beats welled up behind him. He felt as if he could lean backwards on the sound without falling, cushioned, held in the air.

He stood at the entrance to the warehouse, gazing out at the crowd assembled in the forecourt. He had been on the top step for some minutes, waiting for Natasha. All the other DJs had arrived. Fingers had already had to rearrange his running order a little, in case Natasha did not appear. He trotted down the stairs into the courtyard, strode out to the split in the wire-mesh fence and looked up and down the street.

Swaggering dancers were still appearing from all over, converging on the warehouse. Looking absurdly drab in their midst, a few locals passed by, staring at Fingers and glancing uneasily at the warehouse lit up and pounding, monstrous in the dull light.

A tall figure rounded the corner and bore down on him. Close behind him appeared two figures, a slim black man and a short woman. Fingers started, looked hard. It was Natasha.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ shouted Fingers, smiling tightly, amiable but pissed off. He strode off down the street towards Natasha and her escorts.

She looked amazing. Her hair was pulled up into a high, coiling ponytail. Her body was sheathed in a tiny bra-top, reflective red, and her trousers were so tight they looked painted onto her legs. She wore no jacket, nothing on her thin arms or midriff. She must be freezing, Fingers thought. He shrugged: no surrender to comfort in the style war. But he was surprised. Whenever he had seen her DJ before, S Natasha had resolutely dressed down, in clothes that were baggy and comfortable and nondescript. But not tonight. Gold glinted in her ears and around her neck.

Fingers stopped short, waited for her to come to him.

She was approaching with an odd gait, he realized, a peculiar hybrid, at once arrogant sashay and aimless wander. He noticed that she was wearing a walkman, as was the guy next to her, Fabian. Fingers had met him once before. He was as dressed up as Natasha, and walking in the same half-lost manner. It suddenly occurred to Fingers that the two of them might be high, and he gritted his teeth. If she was fucked up and couldn’t perform…

The tall man reached him first and proffered a hand, which Fingers stared at, then shook perfunctorily. Fuck knew where Natasha had picked this one up, he thought. An embarrassing grin, his blond hair enticed into a ponytail it clearly resented, and clothes that proclaimed his indifference to fashion. Incongruously, his face was covered in thin, half-healed scratches. If he hadn’t been with Natasha, he would never have got past the bouncers. ‘You must be Fingers,’ he said. ‘I’m Pete.’

Fingers nodded briefly and turned to Natasha. He was about to harass her about her late arrival but, as he opened his mouth, her face passed from shadow into the dim glow of a street lamp and his complaints died unsaid.

Her make-up was immaculate and excessive, vampish, but it could not disguise how thin and pale she looked. She looked up at him with eyes that did not properly focus, smiled abstractedly. Drugs for sure, he thought again.

‘Tash, man,’ he said uneasily, ‘are you OK?’

Behind him the thumping beats of the warehouse were audible, a backdrop to his conversation.

She cocked her head, pulled the headphone from one ear. He repeated his question.

‘For sure, man,’ she said, and he was a little reassured. Her voice sounded firm and controlled. ‘We’re ready to go.’

Fingers realized that Fabian was nodding his head slightly, in time to the beat passing through his headphones, his eyes unfocused.

Natasha followed Fingers gaze. ‘You’ll be hearing that later,’ she said softly. ‘You can join in. I swear you’ll love it. Have you got a DAT player in there? Pete brought mine, in case.’ She paused and gave another wan smile. ‘You have to hear what I’ve been doing. It’s special, Fingers.’

There was a silence Fingers did not know how to fill. Eventually he inclined his head for them to follow him, turned and walked back towards the warehouse.

It felt like a long way.

As he walked, he heard a brief sound, a snatch of billowing and snapping like a sheet being shaken out. He turned, but saw nothing. Pete was looking into the sky, smiling.

Giddy with excitement and terror, Loplop spun in circles in the air, passing through narrow passages between buildings, searching for Anansi. He caught a glimpse of his nude torso tucked under the eaves of a building. Loplop hovered before him like a humming-bird, screeching incoherently. Anansi understood. He glowered and mouthed something.

He’s here. The Piper’s here.

Loplop nodded, shrieked, disappeared.

Anansi whispered into his hand, released the tiny spider held therein. It scuttled away from him down the side of the building, to the bottom of the drainpipe, where another five comrades awaited it. They caressed the newcomer with their long, powerful legs, leaned in close and gazed into one another’s eyes. Then all six turned and disappeared, their paths forming an expanding asterisk, until each spider met others of its kind, waiting, and there was another brief conference, and more messengers joined the throng, exponentially, faster and faster, and word spread among the spiders like contagion.

Directly opposite the warehouse rose a high red wall, the boundary of a long-gone factory. Behind it was a small area of urban scrub, and beyond that a thickset tower block, fabricated from grey slabs, that overlooked the warehouse and its courtyard.

On the top of the block’s flat roof, something moved under a pile of old cardboard. Stealthy hands with filthy nails crept gingerly out from underneath and gently cleared a small space. Two indistinct eyes peered out as Natasha, Fabian and Pete followed Fingers up the stairs of the warehouse, past the bouncers and into the building.

The cardboard rose, then fell away as Saul stood.

He was still for a moment, breathing deeply, calming himself, slowing his heart.

His old clothes, stolen from the prison, fluttered around him.

He closed his eyes briefly, rocked on his heels, then snapped to attention, scanned the air for any signs of Loplop coming for him.

It was partly in case of such an attack that he had concealed himself, but there was more and less to it than that. He could not speak, could not talk to Anansi, could not make any more plans. He gave an empty smile. As if they had come up with any plans.

This was the night when it would all happen. This was the night when he would free himself, or the night he would die. And he wanted to be alone in London, using the city as his climbing frame, asserting himself alone, before the night came for him.

And as he had known it would, the night had come.

It was time to move.

Saul leant forward, grasped the gutter with both hands, shook it vigorously, testing its strength.

His legs bent a little for leverage, he paused, then vaulted over the edge of the building.

Saul swung round in mid-air, his hands leapfrogging over each other as he renewed his grip, tugged himself out of his acrobatic arc and into a sharp sideways movement, curtailing his curving passage and slithering along the gutter to the drainpipe.

He slipped down it as if it were a firefighter’s pole, his hands and feet moving imperceptibly fast to avoid the bolts that tethered it to the wall.

He touched down on the desiccated earth and moved through the desultory patches of dandelions and grass into the shadow of the wall.

Saul clicked his fingers imperiously. Immediately a dozen little brown heads poked up from hiding places behind old bricks, from holes in the earth, cavities in the wall. The rats watched him, twitching in excitement and fear.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Tell everyone to get ready. I’ll see you in there.’ He paused, and spoke his final words with a flat excitement, a fatalistic thrill. ‘In you go-’

The rats bolted.

Saul ran with them. He overtook them, ran through them like a symbol of victory. He slunk along the top of the wall, invisible. He crossed the road unseen, now in the shade of a car, now flattened against a building, now as a passer-by; into the gutter and out, over the wall and along the side of the warehouse, past the waiting crowds without giving them a second glance. The air was thick with the taste of alcohol and scent, but Saul held his nose through that.

He kept his nose clean to smell his troops.

Up a low garage and across its collapsed skylight, a ramp onto the crumbling brick walls of the venue, clinging to forgotten nails and the undersides of heavy old windows. He gripped the edge of the gently sloping roof and bent his legs against the wall. He could feel the bricks vibrate with bass. Then, just as King Rat had done so long ago, on Saul’s first night among the beasts, before he had eaten their food, when he was still human, Saul pushed out with his legs and swung around in a perfect circle, landing solidly on the warehouse roof.

He slithered quickly up the slates towards the massive skylights. They were cracked all over, a few seconds work to pry open and push aside, opening the way to an attic space, a dusty wooden floor that jumped with the bass from below, as if the building itself was eager to dance to the music in its bowels.

Saul paused. He could taste a mass movement in the air. He could sense the migration of the compact little bodies, was aware of the exodus of his troops from the streets and sewers and scrub, towards the glowing building. He could feel the scratch of claws on concrete, the feverish searching for causeways and flaws in brick.

The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.

The wooden boards drummed under Saul’s feet: the dust motes would not settle but hovered instead in an indistinct mist around his ankles. He crept the length of the long attic. In the corner of the great dark space there was a trapdoor.

Saul flattened himself against the floor and tugged at it very gently, raising it slowly away from the surrounding boards. Music and coloured light and the smell of dancers spilled through the slit to which he put his eye.

The lights below spun and changed colours, illuminating and obscuring, bouncing off suspended globes and dissipating throughout the hall. They cut through the darkness, confusing as much as they elucidated.

A long way below him was the dancefloor. It was a hallucinogenic vision, shimmering and metamorphosing like a fractal pattern, feverish bodies moving in a thousand different ways. In the corners lurked the bad boys, nodding their heads, no more than that, no reaction to the overwhelming music. On the floor the hard-steppers, swinging their arms, loose-limbed and syncopated; and those on speed and coke, ludicrously trying to keep up with the BPM, shifting their feet like lunatics; the rudegirls, arms spread wide, winding their hips slowly to the bassline, a barrage of colours and clothes and undress. The dancefloor was tight packed, thronging with bodies, decadent and vibrant, thrilling, communal and brutal.

As he watched, a strobe light kicked in, transforming the room momentarily into a series of frozen tableaux. Saul could investigate individuals almost at his leisure. He was struck by the multiplicity of expressions on the faces below.

The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.

A little below him an iron walkway described the edge of the hall. It was deserted. There was a ladder in one corner, tucked up under the walkway and secured with chains. It was designed to swing down to another, similar ledge further down. This lower level was crowded with bodies, people looking down on the dancers ten feet below.

Saul cast his eyes around the hall. There was a tiny movement in the corner opposite him.

Red and green lights swirled around a black shape suspended from the ceiling. Anansi swung gently from one of his ropes. His arms and legs were tucked up impossibly tight. His knuckles were just visible, motionless, and stretched taut from grasping.

He swayed from side to side, buffeted by sonic vibrations. Saul knew that Anansi’s army was with him, around them both, invisible and ready.

Directly below Anansi, Saul saw the stage raised above the dancefloor. His breath quickened a little: there, framed by two colossal speakers, were the decks.

Behind the stage a huge graffito was hung: the same grotesque DJ who had adorned the poster, and the legend Junglist Terror!!! was writ very large. Dwarfed by the unlikely figure on the canvas, the DJ labouring behind the decks paced quickly to and from his record box, a bulky pair of earphones tucked against one ear. He moved with a controlled, feverish energy. Saul did not recognize him. As he watched, the man deftly segued between two tracks. He was good.

Behind him, Saul felt the tentative lick of a rat tongue on his hand. He was no longer alone.

‘Alright,’ he whispered, and stroked the little head without looking backwards. ‘Alright.’

Saul opened the trapdoor. He poked his head upside-down into the hall, breaking the surface tension of the music and immersing himself in it. He lowered himself gently to the iron grille below. The beats were overwhelming. They crept into every crevice of the room. He felt as if he was moving underwater. He was almost afraid to breathe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Anansi notice him, and he raised his hand.

It was sweltering in the hall, as humid and heavy as a rainforest. The condensed heat of the dancers enveloped him. He pulled off his shirt. Oily dirt coated him. He realized that it was weeks since he had seen his own body. The shirt had become his fur.

He remembered the touch of the rat above, and he reached up to wedge one sleeve of his shirt under the open trapdoor’s hinge. He pulled at the other sleeve until it was stretched taut, tied it to the railing which enclosed the walkway. Almost immediately, two rats scurried along this greasy canvas bridge and leapt onto the iron.

Others would be joining them, thought Saul as he watched them race away along the rampart, finding their way down.

Sweat trickled down his body, cutting channels in the grime which covered him. He felt no shame. His standards had changed.

Saul flattened himself against the wall and crept forward towards the decks, keeping his eyes fixed on the stage below him. He lowered himself as he advanced. By the time he had covered half the length of the wall, he was slithering along the cold iron like a snake. He pushed his face to the gaps in the grille, his eyes darting urgently from side to side. He crawled slowly forward.

Even through the pervasive clouds of cologne and sweat and drugs and sex, Saul could taste rat. The troops were arriving in force, waiting for his signal.

He glanced up. Anansi flickered in and out of existence in the quickfiring lights.

A door opened at the back of the stage.

Saul stiffened. Natasha emerged from the depths of the building, into the sound and fury. Saul caught his breath. He gripped the grille on which he crawled until his fingers hurt. She looked breathtaking. But she was thin, much too thin, and she moved as if she was in a dream.

Where was the Piper? Was she here of her free will? Saul stared at her in consternation. He saw headphones on her ears and was momentarily confused how could she listen to a walkman in the middle of a club? — before he understood. He caught his breath, watching her bob her head, moving to a different rhythm from the rest of the dancers. He knew what she was listening to, he knew whose music it was.

In one hand she held a case full of records, in the other a squat box, some piece of electronics, trailing wires. He could not see what it was. Natasha tapped the DJ on the shoulder. He turned and touched fists with her, shouting animatedly into her ears. As he spoke she busied herself plugging the box into the sound system, nodding occasionally, whether in answer or in response to the music in her ears Saul could not tell.

The DJ removed his huge earphones and placed them over Natasha’s ears, hesitating for her to remove her small walkman earpieces. When she did not, he shrugged and placed the larger ones over the top of them and laughed. He disappeared into the door from which Natasha had emerged.

Natasha rifled through the records she had brought, pulled something out, twirled it elegantly and blew dust from it. She placed it on the turntable and hunched over, spinning it, smoothing it back with her fingers, listening through the tune on her walkman, mixing the beats, until she stood straight, with her fingers poised, and let a burst of piano spill over from the twelve-inch she had selected into the tune now coming to an end.

It was impossible to tell where one started and the other ended, the mixing was seamless. She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline.

She stood back without a trace of a smile on her lips.

Saul knew that he had to get down to her, had to take the phones from her head and make her understand the danger she was in. But this must be exactly what the Piper had in mind for him. The cheese in his trap.

The door opened again and two more figures appeared. The first was Fabian. Saul was appalled, nearly leapt to his feet. Fabian was even more emaciated and exhausted-looking than Natasha. His finery could not disguise that. He was limping. Like Natasha, he wore walkman headphones. It was that beat, the tune that only he could hear, that propelled Fabian forward.

Behind him was the Piper.

As he entered the room he stopped, breathed in deeply, gave a huge smile. He spread his arms wide as if he would embrace all the dancers below him.

Fabian stayed very close to him.

Saul looked up at Anansi. He was oscillating on his rope, his sudden tension communicated violently through his body.

Rush him?

Should we rush him? thought Saul frantically.

What is to be done?

Anansi and Saul were paralysed, caught in the gaze of a snake. And the Piper could not even see them.

Natasha turned and saw her two companions. She held out her hand and the Piper pulled something out of his pocket, tossed it across the stage to her. As it curved through the air it was transfixed for a moment in a beam of white light. It seemed to freeze, letting Saul examine it at his leisure. It glinted, a small plastic case, like a cassette but smaller, squarer…

A DAT.

A Digital Audio Tape. Natasha used them to record her tracks.

He screamed and leapt to his feet as Natasha’s hand closed around the tape.

The cavernous space was full of sound, there was no room for his paltry screech. He could not even hear it himself in the cacophony of beats and basslines. The dancers danced on, unperturbed, Natasha turned towards the decks, Fabian continued his shambling little rotations… but the Piper turned his head sharply at the imperceptible sound, stared up, through the cat’s cradle of light beams, past the too-cool bodies on the lower walkway, up into the shadow of the roof, gazing directly into Saul’s eyes.

The Piper gave a jaunty wave, and grinned. He was burning with triumphalism.

Saul propelled himself along the gantry while the Piper laughed on the stage. The dancers were oblivious. The beats seemed to slow down, everything was slow, Saul could see the mass of bodies below him sink and rise ponderously.

He pounded along the iron towards the corner where Anansi hung, paralysed. He stared through the floor at Natasha walking slowly towards the DAT player she had plugged in, reaching out with the hand holding the tape. Saul looked up as he drew near Anansi, who swung from side to side, around and around, a useless pendulum.

Saul had not stopped shouting. He was ululating appallingly as he ran. Anansi looked up at him. As Natasha slipped the tape into the deck and crooked one of the headphones against her shoulder, Saul grabbed the rail with his left hand and vaulted up high, moving so slowly he could stare at the faces below him, all the individuals that made up the bouncing mass. He brought his feet down together on the railing, bent down and leapt out, sending himself through the air, flying above the dancers like a superhero.

Anansi’s eyes widened as Saul surged towards him, his arms flailing, legs tucked up in front of him like a long-jumper. Saul spread his arms and legs wide, and crashed into Anansi forty feet above the stage.

He clutched at Anansi, hugged himself to him. He felt himself lurching crazily back and forth through the air, heard Anansi yelling something at him. The rope holding the two bodies was vibrating, dangerously taut. Saul was screaming into Anansi’s ears.

‘Down!’ he screamed. ‘Go down now!’

Saul felt himself drop and his stomach lurched. His descent smoothened out as Anansi manipulated the fibres in his hand. Smoother than any abseiler, the spider-man and his cargo sank swiftly towards the stage.

As they plummeted, Saul and Anansi spun around their centre of gravity, and the room whirled around them. Saul caught glimpse after glimpse of the dancers, frozen, gazing at the men dropping out of the air. Some looked aghast or confused, but most were laughing, enrapt at this new entertainment.

‘Run! Get the fuck out!’ screamed Saul, but the Jungle was remorseless, and no one heard him except Anansi.

Saul looked down, eight feet from the stage, relaxed his grip and dropped from Anansi like a bomb.

He was rigid, his quarry dead in his line of flight. Even over the Drum and Bass beats, Saul thought he heard a collective gasp. His face set as he fell, his legs straightened, but the Piper had been watching and he danced nimbly to one side, away from Saul’s punishing boots, leaving Saul to slam into the wooden stage.

He staggered but remained on his feet. The decks were so well supported that the record playing did not even skip at his arrival. Saul looked on in horror as Natasha’s hand tightened on the DAT player’s volume control, her face furrowed over the headphones as she prepared to mix from the record to the tape, waiting for the right moment in the beat.

Saul leapt towards her, prepared to throw her away from the decks, to hurt her if need be, rage and fear filling him, but as he neared her something slammed into him from behind and he went sprawling, flying off to the side of the stage. Natasha did not even look round.

Saul rolled on the floor, twisted, and pulled himself back up.

Fabian was bearing down on him.

His friend was not looking at him, was focusing over Saul’s shoulder, just as Loplop had done that night in the flat. He moved towards Saul without pausing, his arms outstretched like a cinematic zombie.

Behind Fabian, Saul saw Anansi touch the stage, only for the Piper immediately to smack him hard in the mouth, sending him sprawling. But Saul’s attention was taken by the tiniest of motions: Natasha’s hand turning the volume slowly up.

Saul barrelled into Fabian, trying to run through him, overpower him, and his friend held him fast, twisted as Saul tried to run past him. The two came crashing down, Saul’s hand outstretched, an inch from Natasha’s shoe.

She nodded in satisfaction and turned up the DAT.

Everything froze.

There was a sublime moment. Everyone was utterly still: the dancers, the men who had jumped on stage to break up the rights they saw there, Saul, rigid with despair.

The beats that slid insidiously from the speakers were all at the high end, cymbals, no bassline. A tiny snatch of piano cried out plaintively.

But it was the flute which held the attention.

A sudden burst had heralded the song, a trill that had erupted into the room’s collective consciousness and cleared the minds of the listeners. As Saul watched, Natasha removed her headphones and her walkman. No need for them now. This was the song she had been listening to. Behind him Fabian rose and followed suit.

The snatch of flute had shocked the dancers into submission, and now it faded, leaving only echoes and the sounds of radio static, the ghosts of dead stations rolling over the beat and the soulless piano. Still there was no bassline. Saul could not get up. He saw the dancers begin to shake their heads and extricate themselves from the snares of the flute, and then another burst exploded into the room and with comically precise timing, the assembled throng all snapped back upright, their eyes rapt.

And then again. Again.

The Piper stared at Saul, the amiable cast of his face belied by his ghastly wide eyes, ferocious with pleasure.

‘You lose,’ he mouthed to Saul.

Saul glared balefully at the Piper. He raised his arm theatrically, and caught Anansi’s eye as he struggled to his feet. Shaking, Anansi imitated him.

Together, they brought their arms down.

‘Now!’ Saul shrieked.

Floorboards and pipes boiled over with rats. Saul’s crack troops exploded into the room, racing voraciously through the frozen legs of the dancers towards the stage. The walls erupted as spiders burst from the pores of the building and spilled like liquid towards the Piper.

At that moment, the bassline of Wind City burst into the room, pared down and simple. And riding it, sailing over the troughs and peaks of beat and bass, was the flute.

The dancers moved as one.

They moved in time, dancing again, an incredible piece of choreography, every right foot raised together, coming down, then every left, a strange languorous hardstep, arms swinging, legs rigid, up and down in time to the beat, obeying the Piper’s flute. And every step aimed at a rat.

This was war.

The rats were righting now, leaping onto bodies and backs. The dancers unearthly unity slowly dissolved as they fought their small, vicious enemies without that dislocated look ever leaving their eyes.

The spiders had reached the stage now, with the vanguard of the rats, and both armies swarmed towards the Piper. Anansi rose behind him and lurched forward, slamming his arms into the Piper’s back, but his power was diminished by the men who leapt forward to hold him. They did not look at him. They held their heads to the side to hear the music, and they did what the music told them. With a strength that was not theirs they hurled Anansi backwards into the wall. He shouted at his troops, gesticulated.

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

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

Saul pushed him away hard, out of the fight.

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

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

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

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

Saul could hear Anansi bellowing.

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

Saul could hear Anansi shrieking.

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

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

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

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

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

The Piper flickered his eyes briefly at the decks.

Something changed in the flute.

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

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

He’s changing the music! He’s changing his choice! thought Saul. He’s going for the spiders instead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Piper watched Saul’s face.

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

He pushed Anansi’s head back to the stage.

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

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

Bones crunched and split in Anansi’s head.

Saul collapsed with a howl.

The wood of the stage heaved and buckled. Something burst through the boards in front of the Piper. Saul caught a momentary glimpse of a back, of wiry arms snapping out like whipcord and grasping the Piper’s ankles, then tugging sharply and disappearing back under the stage.

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

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

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

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

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

He stuck his head into the darkness.

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

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

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

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

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

He yelled with triumph, and turned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Help me,’ said King Rat once more.

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

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

Saul landed awkwardly, skidded across the splintered wood.

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

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

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

He released King Rat into the arms of the dancers on the stage. King Rat sagged with weakness and defeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was something just out of his reach…

Just out of his reach… there was beautiful food…

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

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

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

Obedience came easily to Saul. He danced.

Hardstepping.

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

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

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

The Piper smiled, and Saul smiled back.

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

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

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

But something was wrong.

There was a disturbed moment. Saul hesitated.

The two flutelines were dissonant.

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

The flutes jarred with each other. .

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

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

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

Saul stood poised, immobile, centre stage.

The flute and the bass surged inside him.

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

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

DJ! Where’s the bass?

Bass! How low can you go?

R-r-r-roll the bass…

Da bass too dark…

Here’s the bass.

Here’s how low the bass can go.

I… I’ll roll with the bass.

Because the bass too dark…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saul came close enough to touch.

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

He swung the flute.

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

Instead, Saul stepped inside the killing blow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always the strongest, thought Saul.

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

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

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

`What the fuck…?'he said.

The floor lurched, shook violently. Saul fell backwards.

Above the Piper’s head a split appeared in the wall, thin and unnaturally straight as if scored with a vast razor. The stage shook until all the dancers had fallen. It was only because it was on DAT, safe from the caprice of styluses and shocks, that Wind City did not falter.

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

The Piper fixed Saul with his little smile.

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

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

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

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

A child’s voice.

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

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

The lost children of Hamelin could see the light.

Saul fell back in a paralysis of horror.

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

The Piper saw him crumple, and winked.

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

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

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

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

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

The Piper gave a shout of amazement, ludicrously bathetic with the music and the wails of the children behind him.

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

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

The Piper fell backwards into the dark.

King Rat fell with him.

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

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

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

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

Only the Drum and Bass could be heard.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

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

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

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

Saul stumbled across to the decks and ripped the lead from the DAT player. The speakers went dead. Instantly, all around the room, the dancers dropped, fainting where they stood, as still as the dead. It looked like the aftermath of a massacre.

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

Saul looked around the hall, searching for his friends.

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

‘Tash, Tash,’ he whispered, wiping the blood from her face. She was scratched and ripped, her skin welted with the poison of a million tiny spiders, covered with bruises and rat-bites, but she was breathing. He hugged her very hard as she lay there, and squeezed his eyes tight closed.

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

He put her gently down, searched for Fabian.

Saul found him lolling out of the hole King Rat had pushed through the stage. He almost wept to see him. He was badly damaged, his face crushed and broken, his skin as ruined as Natasha’s.

‘He’ll live.’

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

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

Saul looked back down at his friend.

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

It was difficult to talk. His throat was constricted with emotion. He looked up at King Rat, gesticulated at the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

Time enough soon, he thought and tried to be brave.

He stood, limped his way to King Rat. The two looked warily at each other, then fell forward, catching each other’s forearms, gripping each other. It was a long way from an embrace or a reconciliation, but it was a moment of connection. Like exhausted boxers leaning on each other, still enemies, but each granting the other a moment’s respite, and each grateful.

Saul breathed deep, stepped back.

‘Did you kill him?’ he said.

King Rat was silent. He turned away.

‘Did you?’

‘I don’t know…’ The words lingered in the silence of the hall. ‘I think so… the flute was deep inside him, his throat was crushed… I don’t know…’

Saul ran his hands through his hair, looked down at his heavy torso, smeared with the muck of combat. He felt winded by anticlimax and uncertainty. But, then, he thought suddenly, it doesn’t matter to me. He can’t touch me. He’s dead, or dying, or fucked and wounded, and if he ever comes back, I’ll be whatever I am now, only infinitely more so. He can’t touch me.

‘He can’t touch you,’ said King Rat and licked his lips.

Anansi’s body had gone. King Rat was unsurprised. He looked from side to side at the carpet of crushed spiders on the stage and the dancefloor.

‘You’ll never find him,’ he mused.

Saul looked at him and stared around the room. He was trembling violently. The stench of rat-blood was heavy in the air, and with every step Saul walked on the bodies of Anansi’s dead. Some of the dancers were beginning to stir.

Blood decorated the walls like abstract art.

‘I have to get out of here,’ Saul whispered.

Without words Saul and King Rat climbed to the attic. King Rat went before him. Saul untied his prison shirt and draped it across his back before jumping and grasping the edges of the hatchway, hauling himself up and out.

He looked back once, stuck his head into the huge, silent room.

Red and green and blue lights spun on intricate axes, flashing at random now that the beats had gone. The floor was littered with bodies, a few twitching gently. Saul looked at the stage where he had arranged Fabian and Natasha. They looked as if they were sleeping peacefully side by side. Natasha moved her arm dreamily and it fell across Fabian’s chest.

Saul’s breath caught. He could not look on any more.

He followed King Rat, emerged blinking from the skylight, sucked at the cold fresh air. It seemed days ago that he had entered by this route, but the sky was still dark and the streets as deserted as they ever were.

It was the small hours, the small hours of the same night. London slept, fat and dangerous and blithely unaware of what had happened in the Elephant and Castle. The crisp ignorance of the city refreshed him. It carried on whatever, he thought. There was a great comfort in that.

King Rat and he were eager to leave these bricks behind. They moved as fast as they could, hauling themselves across the roofs, trailing their bruised limbs and wincing with pain, but high and exhilarated. When they had put some houses between them and the warehouse, Saul stopped.

He was going to call for help for those left behind in the club. God knew how many broken bones and punctured lungs and so on were lying in that hall, and he was very afraid of what they might contract from his troops. He could not contemplate that any would die. Not after that night. To live through that, crazed, possessed and dancing, only to die of ratbite in bed… he could not bear to think of that.

He stood a little way off from King Rat, on the flat roof of a bookie’s shop. Nondescript low-rise housing surrounded them. Saul revelled in the banality of the view, the slate grey, the lacklustre billboard ads, peeling and out of date, the obscure graffiti. He could hear a train pass by somewhere not far away.

King Rat faced him.

‘You off, then?’ he said.

Saul burst out laughing at the absurd understatement of the parting.

‘Yeah.’ He nodded.

King Rat nodded back. He seemed very distracted.

‘I killed him, you know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I took him out. Not you, you froze up. You’d have let him do a bunk, but not me! I sprung up with my sharp Hampsteads and took the ruffian out!’ Saul said nothing. King Rat stared at him, his excitement ebbing. ‘But nary a rat was there to get a shufti,’ he said slowly. ‘None of my boys and girls. They saw nowt, all dancing, out of it, dead and dying.’

There was a long silence.

King Rat pointed briefly at Saul.

‘They’ll think you done it.’

Saul nodded.

King Rat began to quiver. He fought to control himself, shoved his hands into his mouth, beat his sides, but he could not contain the anguish and excitement.

He grabbed Saul’s arms, his hands shaking.

‘Tell them,’ he begged. ‘They’ll believe you. Tell them what I did.’

Saul stared at that dark, dirty figure. From where he stood, nothing of London was visible behind King Rat. That wiry, ill-defined face was all he could see, surrounded by nothing but the sky, the faint stars and oily clouds. King Rat was an island in his field of vision, operating under his own rules. The dark spaces in which those eyes hid were fervent, would not release him. The clouds behind King Rat’s head were tinged with red, stained by the city.

King Rat begged for absolution. He wanted his kingdom back.

Saul did not want it. He did not want to be Crown Prince of rats. He was not a rat any more than he was a man.

But as he stared at King Rat’s face he saw a sordid brutality in an alley. He saw a fat old man who loved him falling out of the sky in a deadly rain of glass.

Saul closed his eyes and remembered his father. He wanted him. He wanted to talk to him so much.

He would never ever speak to him again.

He spoke very slowly, without opening his eyes.

‘I’m going to tell my troops,’ he said, ‘about how you cowered and begged the Piper for your life, and promised him all the rats he could kill, and how it would have worked if I hadn’t fought past you bravely and shoved him into hell impaled on his flute.’

‘I’ll tell them all what a craven lying coward Judas you were.’

He opened his eyes as King Rat began to screech.

‘Give me my Kingdom,’ he shrieked, and clawed at Saul’s face. ‘You little cunt I’ll kill you…’

Saul stumbled back from the flailing claws, and pushed King Rat in the chest.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he hissed. ‘You going to kill me? Because you know what? I’m not sure you killed the Piper! And if he ever comes back he’ll kill you dead like fucking vermin, and he’ll make you dance and beg for it before you die, but he can’t kill me…’

King Rat slowed down, his frantic flailings subsided. He backed away from Saul, his shoulders slumped, broken.

‘See? He can’t touch me…’ Saul hissed. He jabbed a finger at King Rat’s chest. ‘You dragged me into this world, murderer, rapist, Dad, you killed my father, unleashed the Piper on me… I can’t kill you, but you can sing for your fucking Kingdom. It’s mine, and you need me in case he ever comes back. You can’t kill me, just in case.’ Saul laughed unpleasantly. ‘I know how you work, you fucking animal. Self fiber alles. Kill me and you might be killing yourself. So what do you want to do? Eh?’

Saul stepped back and spread his arms wide. He closed his eyes.

‘Kill me. Take your best shot.’

He waited, listening to King Rat breathe.

Eventually he opened his eyes and saw King Rat skulking, moving back and forth, towards him and away again, clenching and unclenching his fists.

‘You little bastard,’ he hissed despairingly.

Saul laughed again, bitter and tired. He turned his back on King Rat and walked to the edge of the roof. As he began his descent, King Rat whispered to him again.

‘Watch your back, you shit,’ he hissed. ‘Watch your back.’

Saul climbed down a curving line of old bricks and disappeared into the labyrinth behind a skip, wound his way along a tiny alley and emerged into South London.

He scoured the streets until he found a darkened arcade of kebab vendors and newsagents and shoe shops, and there at the end a mercifully unvandalized phone box. He dialled 999 and sent the police and ambulances to the warehouse. God knew, he thought, what they would make of the scene awaiting them.

When he had made that call, Saul held the receiver to his chin for a long time, trying to decide whether to act on his instinct. He wanted to make one more call.

He called directory enquiries and got the number for the Willesden police station. He called the operator and told her that his pound coin had stuck in the phone box and he had to make an urgent call. The operator acquiesced with a bored voice designed to let Saul know that she knew he was lying.

The phone was answered by a crotchety sergeant on the graveyard shift.

Saul didn’t suppose that DI Crowley was available. At this time? Was Saul mad? Anything urgent the sergeant could help with?

Saul asked to be put through to Crowley’s answering machine. He stiffened with déjà vu at the sound of Crowley’s measured tones. He had not heard them since his rebirth, the night after his father’s murder.

He cleared his throat.

‘Crowley, this is Saul Garamond. By now you’ll know about the fucking carnage in the Elephant and Castle. This is just to let you know that I was there, and to tell you not to bother asking anyone there what happened, because none of them know. I don’t know how you’ll end up writing it up… Fuck it, say it was a performance art piece that went horribly wrong. I don’t know. Anyway, I was calling to tell you that I did not kill my father. I didn’t kill your policemen. I didn’t kill the bus guard, I didn’t kill Deborah, and I didn’t kill my friend Kay.’

‘I wanted to tell you that the main culprit is gone.’

‘I don’t think we’ll see him again.’

‘There’s one more culprit for part of this, Crowley, and I can’t get rid of him, not yet. But I’ll be keeping my eye on him. I promise you that.’

‘I want to come back, Crowley, but I know I can’t. Leave Fabian and Natasha alone. They don’t know anything, and they haven’t seen me. I did everyone a favour tonight, Crowley. You’ll never know the half of it.’

‘If we’re both lucky that’s the last we’ll hear of each other.’

‘Good luck, Crowley.’

He hung up.

Tell me about your father, Crowley had suggested, all those weeks ago. Ah, Crowley, thought Saul, that’s just what I can’t do.

You wouldn’t understand.

He walked into the dark streets, heading for home.