Un Lun Dun

76. Dwellers in the Smoke

Deeba listlessly played with the remains of her food.

After she had come to, her friends clucking frantically around her, they had agreed it was exhaustion and stress that had knocked her out. She seemed to have no ill effects.

The bishops had fetched food, chairs, and a table from an emptish house nearby, and they had sat down to eat in front of the abbey. It was the first hot meal Deeba had had for a long time, and though it was a bizarre, mixed-up picnic— eggs, potatoes, salad, curry, chocolate, fruit, olives, and spaghetti— it made her feel better, at least physically.

There was no improving her temper, however, nor that of her friends. The realization that after all they’d gone through to get the UnGun, they were missing a vital component, had put them all in terrible and argumentative moods.

“We have to go back,” Jones repeated, glowering over the remains of supper.

“Are you crazy?” said Obaday. “We don’t even know where the bullets are.”

“They must be in same room as the UnGun,” Jones said. “Stands to reason.”

“That makes perfect sense,” said Bishop Bon, just as Bishop Bastor said, “We can’t assume any such thing.” They stared at each other.

“Deeba is not going back in there,” said Hemi.

“No one’s asking her to,” said Jones. “I’ll go.”

“It’s too risky,” said Obaday.

“The bloody gun’s pointless without them!” said Jones.

“How are we supposed to get the window back?” said Hemi.

“It’s an insect, not a philosopher!” Jones shouted. “We’ll just trap it the same way again.”

And on and on, around the argument went, repeating itself in loops. Deeba sat in surly silence, as she had since the beginning, playing aimlessly with the UnGun. Spiders aren’t insects, she thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t imagine the correction would go down well just then.

She rubbed the UnGun’s smooth handle, opened the revolving cylinder as Jones had shown her, and stared for what felt like the thousandth time into the six empty chambers. Yet again, Deeba tried to remember if she had seen any bullets— or anything else at all— in the room behind the Black Window.

Yet again, she had to admit that her memory of that time was hazy, and that she couldn’t be sure. But she didn’t think she’d seen anything.

The loon shone onto the midnight meal and the billowing silk. In its gray light, Deeba saw a little caravan of ants crossing the table, passing morsels of food back along the line, rummaging among the remnants.

Her friends kept arguing. Deeba ignored them.

She tried to work out how the pistol was loaded. Deeba picked up a big grape pip and idly dropped it into one of the slots. She jumped when she saw that an ant was on her fingers.

It trotted off, following the trail of juice clockwise around the rim of the cylinder, crawled busily into one of the holes.

“Get out of there,” Deeba muttered, and shook the UnGun. From her pocket she took a scrap of paper, twisted it, and poked it gently after the ant.

The paper wedged in the chamber, just as the ant crawled out from under it, and straight in to the next hole along. Deeba swore.

She tried to entice the insect out with a pinch of sugar from the table, sprinkling it on the edge of the cylinder. Then with a sudden suspicion, she licked her finger. The grains were not sugar but salt.

Deeba swore again, and laughed without any humor. Things were just not going her way.

Her friends continued their bad-tempered exchange. Deeba picked up one of the broken bricks from when they had made their bait window, which lay discarded and redundant. She carved her initials in the brick with her fork, sending little chips of it onto the table around her, and into the UnGun.

The arguments were exasperating her. She sighed, wound a hair around her finger and plucked it out to fiddle with it, huffily scrunched it into a little matted wad, and dropped it into the mechanism. With a sniff of impatience she closed the cylinder, the ant still inside it, and spun it, watched it whir, then slapped it still.

“There’s no point to this,” she announced. They were all quiet. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“We should do something quick,” said Jones.

“What are we going to do?” said Deeba. She turned the UnGun over and over in her hand. “We’re knackered. You’re right— this stupid thing’s useless without bullets. But the rest of you’re right too— we can’t go back now.”

“Propheseers and Unbrellissimo are going to track us down soon,” said Hemi.

“I know, but what can we do?” said Deeba, meaning I’m too knackered. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll have to take the bus back to the Talklands and I’ll call my mum and dad again, and buy us a bit of time with the phlegm effect, and we’ll come back then, or something.”

She fiddled with the UnGun’s cylinder, to empty it of the rubbish inside.

It wouldn’t budge.

She frowned, and tried again, without success.

“Jones,” she said. “Could you open this please?”

“What did you do?” he said grumpily, struggling with it. “It’s jammed.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Deeba said, then hesitated. “I was seeing how it worked.”

Jones pulled and twisted at it, but it stayed firmly shut. He eyed her.

“What did you put in this?” he said. Everyone looked at Deeba.

“Nothing. Just…stuff,” said Deeba. “I was seeing how it worked. Give me that.” She grabbed it back, and tried again and failed again to open it herself.

“Well, that solves that,” snapped Hemi. “There’s no point trying to get bullets when the UnGun’s broken.”

“I can fix it!” said Deeba desperately. “Just give me a minute.”

“Deeba,” said Obaday Fing gently, and laid his hand on the pistol’s barrel. “Stop.”

She stared at him, and her grip faltered. At that moment, there was a scream.

Something rushed overhead, with a noise like a flock of heavy wings. Several voices cried out maniacally together from the sky. In almost the same instant, Deeba heard the words “Boss,” “Message,” “In,” “From,” “Go,” and “You,” shouted in different, but similar voices.

“What’s that?” she said as crazy laughter and the sound of rushing diminished above her. There was a creaking, the noise of heavy thumping.

“What is that?” Jones said.

“Can that have been—” Bishop Bon said.

“— the Hex?” said Bastor. They stared at each other.

“Passing something on?” said Bon.

“ ‘Message from Boss…’ ” said Bastor.

“ ‘In you go.’ Who are they talking to?” said Bon.

There was another scream.

Lights came on in houses, and sleepy people of all shapes peered out.

Panicked UnLondoners came running into view. They wore pajamas or nighties, or T-shirts and boxer shorts, or nothing at all. They ran, children, adults, and the elderly; animals and people and the halfway things of the abcity.

“What’s happening?” shouted Bishop Bon.

From behind a corner at the edge of the square, from the darkness beyond the trembling edges of Webminster Abbey, an enormous shape came lumbering out of the night.

It was clammy-looking and sickly pale. It padded like a clumsy cat. Its body was a pudgy hairless lion’s, but its head was that of an enormous, blindly groping earthworm. It nosed into the bricks and concrete and tar, turning them by some chemical exudations into mulch.

Behind it were other grub-white figures, herding terrified locals before them. They seemed to drag darkness behind them. Deeba realized that they were walking in a bank of spreading, dirty smoke.

“Smoglodytes!” she said.

These were very different from the ones that had paid court to the Unstible-thing when it threatened her. Those had been small and tentative, living in the shallows of the poison. These, now, were mutants from the deeps of the Smog, and they were huge.

Behind the lionworm was a presence like a noseless man’s face on stumpy caterpillar legs; something flying on one bat’s wing and one vulture’s; a gorilla with enormous whiteless eyes in its chest; and others, an impossible variety of impossible shapes. All were colorless. All had either large eyes or no eyes, and bulky filter-noses or huge nostrils or none.

The smoglodytes gnawed and clawed or suckered or whatever at buildings, and even, Deeba saw in horror, at a few UnLondoners too slow to get out of their way, who, with horrified wails, were pulled into the rolling Smog and disappeared.

“They’re claiming the neighborhood!” Hemi said. Locals fled desperately past them, carrying what few possessions they had grabbed. Several gripped unbrellas, opening them in terror, and holding them like shields.

“Everyone move!” shouted Jones. Deeba grabbed one old man’s bags, helped him to the edge of the square. Skool picked up a fallen escapee under each arm, and hauled them out of the road. Deeba and her friends struggled to help the UnLondoners away.

“We have to get out of here!” Hemi shouted. The smoglodytes and the thick Smog they breathed came ominously fast. The outer fringes of the Smog had reached the web, which shook strangely. From a couple of the dark funnels wooden jointed legs twitched.

They’re going to come out, thought Deeba. When the Smog gets inside, they won’t be able to breathe. Any moment, as well as predatory monstrosities and choking fumes, the streets would be full of panicking spider-windows. There was no way the locals would get away.

There was no way she would get away.

“Deeba!” Hemi shouted. A smoglodytic tentacled goat-thing was bearing down on her faster than she could run. With a despairing cry, she raised her hands.