The Severed Streets

TWENTY-TWO

Kev Sefton had stood at the door of the Portakabin watching Costain’s car roar off down the road. He felt, in that moment, too angry to breathe.

What was he supposed to do? Carry on on his own? What could he do?

Nothing. He was meaningless and had now been utterly deserted. Was all this happening to him because he’d taken a life? He’d felt wrong ever since. Was that why Brutus was still rejecting him, why his source and … patron, he supposed, wasn’t allowing him access? He had no idea how Brutus felt about death. Or about anything, really.

He sat down on the floor. He let his head drop back against the wall. He felt desperately that he wanted to fall asleep, but he couldn’t let that happen. He felt a dream welling up in his head, making strange sense of his thoughts, and fought it off. He wouldn’t close his eyes.

He closed his eyes. He was on the verge of sleep. He was on the verge of giving in. ‘Help,’ he said, with no power in his voice.

Something moved over the Portakabin. The light against his eyes changed. He heard a distant sound. Distant music. Dance music. It was like a hand on his face. It was an echo of the joy that he and Brutus had shared in a kiss. Dance music that took him back to happier times.

The music offered him a way forward. A terrible way.

He opened his eyes again. Everything around him was normal. There was a moment when he didn’t believe anything strange had just happened. He was stressed out and grieving and exhausted. But what was he if not someone who did mad things because of something that might be a dream? That was a definition of what he had to be if he was going to go any further into knowing the power of London.

Slowly he got to his feet. He contemplated what was being asked of him. It would be a sacrifice. It seemed to hold the potential to wash him clean of Barry Keel’s blood. It seemed to hold the possibility of doing due honour to Quill. It was something right for him and how he lived. Finally, he had a way forward in his hands. He looked up, then down, because he wasn’t sure where Brutus’ ‘outer borough’ could be said to be. He said thank you, silently.

He went to his holdall, intending to see what defences he could take with him on his journey. As he looked through it, he realized there was something missing — several things. He emptied the bag out onto the floor, and found that a bunch of items he’d kept because of their potential as protective devices: a box of London-made matches with what seemed to be occult symbols in the trademark, some salt from an ancient source actually within the metropolis, a horseshoe used in the Trooping the Colour … they were all gone.

He looked around the Portakabin, wondering what could get in and do that. The same thing, presumably, that had entered their dreams.

He put down the holdall and understood that he should do this without help. He headed for the door. He knew where he was going. He wanted to call Joe, but, no, he decided, he didn’t want to frighten him.

* * *

Sefton had known there were dance clubs in London that kept going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but he’d never been to one before. He found it in Vauxhall, a small dark dance floor in the basement of a club, the ethos of which was all concrete warehouse and the smell of poppers. Even at this hour, on a weekday, it was packed with men, dancing and occasionally snogging, when, for fuck’s sake, London was falling apart. He himself hadn’t come here to escape, but to find something. He couldn’t really look down on this lot, though, could he? There’d been a time when he’d have been up for this. The flavour of music was trance, shading into pounding industrial — the kind of music that had sounded distantly in his head back in the Portakabin. Not that he knew one style of dance music from another. He and Joe had once laughed their arses off at a club flier offering ‘intelligent handbag’. There was nothing of the Sight about this place. Nobody here had any strange weight about them.

He’d turned down a covert offer of ‘speed, trips or e’ near the door, but now he wondered if he should have taken them up on that. His reading had told him about mystics who’d made risky attempts to connect with something beyond themselves by pushing their minds into an altered state of consciousness. Doing that by drugs, or at least by street drugs, seemed too easy and would involve someone else’s designs for one’s brain. This had to be his sacrifice. It had occurred to him that he could have gone to a gym and worked his way into the state he wanted to achieve, but there there’d be someone to stop him.

He walked into the middle of the floor, closed his eyes and started to dance.

* * *

He danced for what he was sure was hours. He had his phone switched off; there was no clock visible from the dance floor. His body didn’t know what time it was. There were no clues from the light. He stopped only for visits to the water station, which he’d do at speed, throw it down, throw it over himself, go back.

At first he tried to concentrate on several repetitive phrases that he ran around his head, trying to switch off his thoughts, but found he couldn’t. He let his mind wander. He found all the different muscle groups in his legs, in his arms, his stomach, all starting to ache, so he’d shift a little when they did, and work something else. He let the euphoric breaks lift him, keep him going, then knuckled down to work hard again as the bass slammed back in. Every now and then he’d become aware of a man deliberately dancing near him, and he’d turn away.

He got exhausted and pushed through it, found new energy from somewhere, then burned that away too. He started to feel the aches from where he’d been thrown from the bus. He started to feel that he had to be absolutely weak and helpless to get where he wanted to go. That wasn’t going to be hard. He kept thinking of Jimmy, of how Sarah would be feeling now, of how he’d given Jimmy such useless things with which to protect himself, of how it didn’t feel like an investigation now, but as if they were all just children stumbling towards something terrible and huge that could pick them off when it liked. He thought of Barry Keel, that the man must have had friends, relatives, people who thought he was decent and kind and who loved him.

Was he just hurting himself? That was a deceitful, seductive thought whispering in his ear. He was harming himself in order to let himself feel better about Jimmy, in order to feel that he was working, doing something to take his mind off Jimmy’s death. No, he told himself, these were weasel words, to make him stop dancing. He needed more water. This time he ignored the thirst. He burned the doubt out of himself by keeping going. He needed to rip up all these signifiers of what he was, all these words, and find what was under them, what was real. To do that, he needed to break himself.

He kept dancing.

It began as a pain up his back and chest and into his neck, a pain he feared as the start of something serious, a stroke or heart attack. He’d been told he had to face fear to get to wherever he was going, so he embraced it, pushed at the pain, letting it rack him. He felt his teeth clench and his breath start to come in gasps, felt the air was entering him in a different way now.

He kept dancing.

The pain came properly; it was all through his body, and there were disturbances in his vision, like the start of a firework display inside his eyes.

He kept dancing. He felt a shadow fall over him. He realized he couldn’t see clearly now but he could still see the lights dancing inside his head.

Soon he didn’t know what his body was doing; he was only distantly associated with it. It would continue being alive or it wouldn’t. The pain could be ignored now, because it was only happening to that distant body.

Perhaps he was lying on the dance floor having some sort of fit. An enormous smell rushed into his head. It reminded him of childhood, but he couldn’t place it. It felt somehow like death too.

The lights in his eyes turned and resolved into one shape and locked into place.

They formed a tunnel. A smooth spin of vision showed him that it led straight down. There was a hole in the world. Oh. He was on top of it.

Sefton laughed in joy as he fell down it.

He fell into a wide open space. He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it. His giddy joy turned to fear. He had to reach out into the darkness with his senses, not with his body. He had to find a way to do that or he’d keep falling in darkness, forever. He was aware, distantly, of his real body, still moving, perhaps doing something different to dancing now, not as warm. In fact it was cold. He concentrated on the pain and the cold, solidified himself around grief and fear.

He felt his way into London and saw it slowly resolve into vision all around him. He felt all the people who made it. The buildings were incidental to the people. The buildings were like a bouncing line on a mixing desk, flying up and down according to the needs and wishes and secrets of the people who pushed and pushed at the metropolis around them. The people made the buildings. He stepped out into what they’d made. He walked along a thousand balconies, hopped from one to another, ran along a line he was making as he went, association to association, along a tightrope across libraries and post offices and spires, the line springing to the beat that he felt all around him. He stopped and looked down at the metropolis around him and felt the compass points, from the big to the small, to the infinity of minuscule ones in between them. He felt how roundabouts and temples of all kinds produced eddies, how big malls created deluges, all to the unconscious will of the people, all manipulated deliberately by those who knew how.

He could feel the orbits of the outer boroughs. He looked up and decided to see them. He found he could. There were lots of them, up and out of the plane of the M25, and down below it, all swinging about Centre Point at their different angles.

The Centre Point building itself wasn’t at the centre, but a little off it, so the wheel of London turned with a continual pulse beat thump around that hub. It was turning the wrong way. Anticlockwise. It was turning as if it had been set in motion with one big push. It wasn’t going in the direction it was meant to roll.

Sefton tried, just for a moment, to set his strength against it, becoming a chalk hill figure on the South Downs and heaving at it, but only for a terrifying instant before he realized that its accumulated momentum would crush him utterly if he tried.

He came out of that and steadied himself. He saw a new hopeful direction, walked the back gardens down by the railway, walked beside every train coming into every station. He felt the flow of people in and out of London. He heard on his own personal soundtrack a speeded-up version of one of those pieces of Fifties ‘bustling people’ music.

He felt for the pain and the cold and called for the patterns to form inside his eyes again. He breathed in the right way and found the fireworks starting to go off. It was like being able to see his own brain working. The lights wanted to form their pit again, but this time he wouldn’t let them. He made them form in front of him, made the lights into a tunnel he could walk into. He felt his real body walking too, distantly, not dancing any more, but outside, somewhere cold.

The tunnel that had formed inside his eyes matched, actually, with a tunnel in London that his body was walking into, a railway tunnel.

He looked down. His bare feet were on gravel. Beside them was a rail. The rail was vibrating with the rotary pulse he could also feel from London behind him. He looked up from it. There were golden lights ahead, reflecting on the silver of the rail.

He was afraid.

Good.

He pushed reality, which was trying to assert itself, back down inside himself again. He just had to step forward. Although there was a roaring up ahead. Although it was roaring directly at him now to get out of the way.

He had to believe there was more to himself and the universe than what was being roared at him. Jimmy Quill had taken the longest journey for what he stood for. Sefton had to do the same.

He stepped into the tunnel and marched quickly towards the light that was coming much more quickly towards him. There was, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.

All the signifiers he’d seen came together for him, and he was sure he was on the cusp of understanding everything about the universe and his place within it.

That was when the train hit him.

* * *

‘No, stop, all right, got you.’

Sefton looked around as hands grabbed him and pulled him aside. For a terrible moment he thought he must be awake on the dance floor, having been dragged back to life. For another awful second he was certain he could feel a train rushing past him, feel the air pummelling him, close to his clothes.

Then he looked round. He saw that he was somewhere new. Somewhere divorced from both those things and from anything real. He was in what looked like a cave … no, some of the walls were rock, but some of them were polished, tiled, like an underground station. Only this wasn’t a real tube station, but something like a stage set, with stark, powerful lights above … or was that him still being back at the club? He could hear the music still pounding up there, muffled. There was a hint of the railway tunnel about the arches above too. He could hear something through the wall, rattling past, carriage after carriage. He looked away from that; it felt as if death was very near. There were escalators at the back of the room that seemed to loop back on each other, in an infinite recursion. The floor looked to be made of newspapers, the headlines and type and photos changing as he looked at them, squirming out of his vision. He himself was standing on a slight rise, on a pile of objects. He shifted his weight as if he was still dancing, and some of them rolled down by his feet: a rotted gas mask; a banner for a coronation; a Victorian cartoon of someone he didn’t recognize wearing a sash saying something he didn’t understand; a skull with what looked like a spear point through it.

Someone was still holding him, he realized. He turned and looked, and the firm pair of hands released him, apparently now convinced he wouldn’t fall. The Rat King stood there, looking bemused at Sefton. ‘You have my attention,’ he said. ‘You’ve fallen here as so many other things have. You showed yourself willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. So I thought I’d do the decent thing: take you one step back in time and save your life. You’re welcome.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sefton. He had to sit down on the rubbish. He was shivering, breathing hard from the close call with death that a few moments ago he’d barely been aware of. ‘Where is this?’ he managed to say after a moment.

‘My home. Where all the detritus of London comes to rest. Where what was once significant,’ he held up one of the newspapers, ‘becomes mere panto.’

Sefton didn’t know what to say. He felt lost and desperate. He might have reached one of the ‘outer boroughs’, but this ‘Rat King’ had told him back in the bar that he didn’t know the answer to his most urgent question. He’d almost killed himself to get here — he could feel his body still suffering somewhere — and now it seemed that it all might be for nothing. ‘I–I was hoping to see-’

‘You were after someone else? Well, tough. You’ve got me. Cuppa?’

Sefton looked up and was handed a cup of tea, by … it was the barmaid with no face from the Goat and Compasses. She now wore a thin, bloody bandage across where her eyes presumably still were not, together with a crown made of a cornflakes packet, and she carried a sword and scales strapped to a belt around what looked to have once been a Fifties party dress. Her pale masklike face made her look like a statue. ‘Hello Kevin,’ she said. ‘Good luck. We love you.’

The Rat King rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

‘How’s your friend doing?’

‘You mean Ross? I wish I knew.’

The Rat King put a hand to his mouth in a stage whisper as he took his own cup from her. ‘I don’t know why I took her on. She breaks all my cups.’

‘Please,’ said Sefton, not drinking his tea, ‘do you know anything that could help us find the Ripper?’

The Rat King snickered into the tea. ‘Oh, I’m afraid not. The major players know to stay away from me; they can’t stand that I can read their intentions like a cheap and nasty book.’

‘Well, then, okay, can you take me to Brutus?’

‘What, the Roman bloke? Et tu Brute and all that?’

Sefton wanted to kick something. ‘He’s who I met the last time I visited somewhere like this.’

The Rat King sighed theatrically. ‘I don’t know everyone who isn’t real. There isn’t a phone book.’ He suddenly seemed to recall, holding up a finger. ‘Wait. Was there nobody about in his London? Big, empty place, with just him in it?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’ Sefton found hope springing up inside him again. Maybe the Rat King was meant to show him the path that led to the object of his quest.

‘Oh. Right. You can’t get there from here.’ The Rat King saw the defeated expression on Sefton’s face and laughed again. ‘I know him by one of his many other names. You didn’t go on the right path today to get to him. If you haven’t seen him, I should think he’s still got his back to you. You should be careful of him. He can be very demanding.’

‘So you know what he is?’

‘It’s not for me to share the meanings of the others. I am only in charge of my own.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘Listen to this policeman!’ The Rat King grinned at the woman with no face, revealing gaps in his stained teeth. ‘Most of those who come here ask mystical questions full of allusions and get a lot of bollocks in return.’

‘He seeks the truth,’ the woman said. ‘He should get it.’

‘You’re right. He should.’ He reached down and hauled Sefton to his feet, finished his own cup of tea, then threw it down to smash on the pile of rubbish. ‘I am for rebellion. I stand against order. I don’t build anything. I criticize what’s been built. I am never satisfied. I look for you people to try harder. A lot of people think of me as a villain. I often am.’

‘So … are you what’s making the riots happen?’ Sefton suddenly wondered if he’d been trapped by an enemy.

The Rat King looked at him as if he was a foolish child. ‘I don’t make things happen. Too much like hard work. I am what those who are not satisfied look to; I am what they have in the back of their minds, pray to, sort of. I intercede with the power of London and send some of it their way. If I’ve a mind to. In roundabout ways. If I can be bothered.’ He looked again to the woman. ‘I didn’t really like saying all that. Bit too concrete for me.’

‘So you’re … a god?’ Sefton had been an atheist all his life, but he didn’t know any other way to say it.

‘There are no gods. But that’s what all the gods say.’ He looked again to the woman. ‘That’s better. More cryptic.’

‘If that’s what you stand for, why did you save me?’

‘Because, while I don’t know much about your case, I do know that things up there — ’ he pointed to the roof again — ‘might be about to get a lot more orderly. This is the way the British do things, you see: too much chaos, then too much order, swinging from one extreme to the other, always giving them something to complain about. They say they want a happy medium. They really don’t. If you lot manage to nick the Ripper, then things will continue to tick along, with chaos in the mixture. If you don’t, then…’

‘You’re talking about the extreme right taking power?’

‘The British always love to flirt with that nice Mr Hitler, but they’ve never quite decided to take him home. Yet.’ The Rat King stared his off-kilter stare at Sefton, and he got the feeling that his mind was being searched again. There was no sensation to it at all, and for some reason, what was terrifying and intrusive in dreams was fine here. ‘Yes, you’ve had similar suspicions. Someone is waiting in the wings to save you all. Someone likes chaos only up to a certain point, the point where they can march in and make it all better.’

‘Who?’

The Rat King shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You’re the policeman.’

‘What’s the Smiling Man’s part in all this?’

‘Ah, you’ve met the new boy?’

Sefton was startled at that word. ‘New?’

‘Most of us go back to before you lot could stand upright. He’s just a kid, relatively speaking. But he’s made himself very powerful, very quickly.’

‘I always sort of thought he was, you know, the Devil.’

The Rat King burst out into a staccato laugh that became a wheezing cough. ‘Oh, no, dear me, no — the delusions of a child.’ He threw an arm theatrically around Sefton’s shoulders. ‘Everyone you’ve met or heard about during this case has had good and bad sides to them, correct? That’s one thing that’s getting in the way of your search for meaning: that these days everything’s got a bit mixed up. Anything seems to be able to mean anything; all the signifiers have been thrown into a barrel and are being picked out at random and assigned to just about anything, and the choice of what means what, as always, seems to be down to those with money and power. You despair about making accurate judgements about anyone. Well, I’m here to tell you, boy, it was always thus. And that doubt of yours is the first sign of wisdom. I liked it when you pondered, on the dance floor, the loveliness of Barry Keel, not that I myself share that opinion. That doubt of yours must be why Brutus picked you.’

‘He “picked” me?’ Even though it had surprised him to hear it said, Sefton sort of knew it to be true

‘My point is that what you call the Smiling Man isn’t “a force for evil”. He’s a bloke who’s not real, like me, with his own aims and plans and maybe even a good side.’ The Rat King considered for a moment. ‘Maybe. I don’t know if the shape he’s made in lets him have one.’

‘The shape he’s made in?’

‘By you lot. Don’t look so startled. You people make all of us. And that’s all you’re going to get about him. I’ve already said more than I’m allowed. But the shape I’m made in allows me always to do more than I’m allowed.’ He sniggered at his own cleverness. ‘Oh dear, since you have walked this path and unfortunately found only me, I am obliged to offer help. What would you like for Christmas? No, wrong holiday.’ He started to look in the pile of rubbish, throwing aside items which ranged from things that looked rotten to things that looked like precious jewels. ‘This is the rubbish of London,’ he said. ‘It all descends to my level. Ah, here we are.’ He pulled out a water-stained police notebook, which Sefton saw was one of the ‘special’ notebooks Quill had set aside for the work of his team that a judge might find unbelievable.

Then he realized. It was Quill’s own notebook.

Sefton put down his tea, took the notebook, opened it, recognized Quill’s handwriting. He flipped to the most recent page. He looked to the Rat King again, amazed. ‘This is brilliant.’

‘Glad to be of service. You haven’t drunk your tea.’

Sefton felt a little abashed as he put the notebook inside his jacket pocket. ‘In everything I’ve read, if you go somewhere outside of the real world, you’re not supposed to eat or drink anything that’s given to you. Sorry.’

The Rat King laughed. ‘Clever fucker. I nearly had you obliged to serve me. See, you made a judgement call. You can do it. Even in this horrible new world you people have made. Bye then.’

Sefton looked in puzzlement between the Rat King and the woman, both of whom were now bowing to him as if this was the end of a play. ‘What-?’

The Rat King clicked his fingers and the lights above them suddenly went out.