Chapter Eleven

Saul saw the fat pillars of the Westway loom out at him again.

He turned right, skirting the great dark thoroughfare, wandering slowly west. He did not know where to turn. He turned his eyes to the ground, seeking a manhole. Perhaps he should hide himself from view, seek out King Rat again. He did not know if he could find his way back through the sewers to the throne room. He did not want to see the rats. They had unnerved him with their pleading. They wanted something of him.

A few late walkers passed him by. Saul wanted to stop, to sit and think for a while, to eat. He was not tired. He thought suddenly of the policemen who had died in his flat, and he winced.

He was gravitating towards the tangled concrete of the Westway’s mid-air junction, a confusion of sweeping curves which hung above the earth like an imminent threat. Below the skeins of steel and tarmac the council had provided enclosures for basketball and football, a climbing wall and chin-up bars. During the day the area was full of the shouts of young players oblivious to the concrete above and around them, swooping in all directions with functional grandeur, a found stadium occluding direct light, obscuring the sky.

Saul wandered into the darkness between the pitches. He looked up at the underside of the Westway itself. The traffic above sounded very far away.

He meandered into the passageways between chain-link fences and football fields. The wind was stilled under the roadway. He stood and listened to it buffet the edges of the secluded ground.

There was another sound.

A faint, quick scampering echoed quietly between the pillars.

Saul turned and moved his head sharply as something circled him. He backed away. Panic bubbled up inside him. The Ratcatcher! he thought, and ran for the faint glow of the streetlamps.

He spun around on his heel, desperately looking for a way out of the darkness. Something flitted across his vision, a black body that swung down from the shadows above him, from the crevices in the underside of the Westway. It swung around him, too quick for his eye to follow, free of gravity’s constraints, moving in all directions through the air. Saul’s breath came fast as he turned and ran.

Something sailed out of the air above him and flew overhead in a perfect parabola, with a grace and speed that eclipsed any gymnast or circus performer alive. The dark mass curved over the Earth and came to rest, landing lightly twenty feet in front of him. The crouching form sprang upright, splaying legs and arms suddenly like a jack-in-the-box.

A tall, fat man swayed before Saul, his arms and legs spread wide as if anticipating an embrace.

Saul braked and backed away, turning suddenly and running back into the darkness from which he had come. He tried to remember to hide, to become a rat, but terror had frozen his cunning.

As he ducked behind a tennis court, the fleeting shape passed, flying over the net, and the man was there before him again, arms outstretched. A thin cord suspended from somewhere above recoiled from the swing, and brushed against Saul as it returned along its flight path.

Saul changed direction and disappeared behind a climbing frame. He heard something hissing behind him. Saul gasped as he ran, his rat-strength pushing him faster than he had ever moved before. His skin crawled with fear. Ahead of him he glimpsed threadbare trees. There was a thin gap between two of the wire fences, beyond which was the garden to a housing estate.

He raced for the slit and careered along it, making very little sound, when something caught his ankle and he swung like a felled tree towards the concrete.

He was yanked away from the ground before he hit and he hung for a moment in the air. Thin ropes were stretched across his path, tied to the chain links on either side. One had swept away his foot, and another had caught him across the chest. He cursed frantically and struggled to stand, tugging at the rope which had somehow entangled itself around his ankle. He ploughed forward and saw spindly shapes before him more ropes, a thicket of them across his path. How had he not seen them before?

He struggled to climb over them, but they confused him; some tied so loosely they came away in his hand and wrapped themselves around him, others so tight they vibrated like a bass string as they repulsed him. He fell again, caught in this cat’s cradle. He could not move. He hung suspended at a forty-five-degree angle, head downwards, four feet from the ground.

Saul heard a footstep behind him. He jerked his head, disentangling himself frantically, swivelled in the midst of his mesh to face the way he had come, his back to the morose shrubs he had sought.

The man stood at the entrance to the little passageway.

Light from the far-off lamps struggled to illuminate him, glinting faintly on his skin. He wore nothing but a pair of black cut-off shorts on his lanky legs. He seemed unaffected by the cold. The man had very dark skin and a massive belly jutting over his belt, but arms and legs that were ridiculously long and thin, every muscle standing firm with every movement. His stomach was distended, globular but taut as a bubble. It hardly rippled as he moved slowly towards Saul. Saul saw a thick coil of filthy white rope wound around his left shoulder.

‘Don’t give me no more trouble, pickney, or me gwan mash you up.’

The voice was scratchy and sharp, vibrant with Caribbean intonation. It sounded close in his ear, as King Rat’s did.

The man moved in little bursts. He paced quickly forward a few feet, then stopped to investigate Saul, moved forward again. As he approached, he unwound the rope from his shoulder.

Saul shook violently to free himself from the tangles of rope, seemed only to pull them tighter around him. He began to screech.

The man was upon him, fetched him a vicious slap across the cheek that stopped Saul’s cry instantly. His head rocked. He was dizzy and his face throbbed.

‘He tell you to shut your mouth, bwoy!’ The man kissed his teeth.

Saul’s head wobbled forward and he blinked hard. The man was bending over him. Saul was deeply afraid. He put up his hands, tried to push them through the ropes to ward off the attack he was sure was coming. He thrashed in his bonds and opened his mouth to scream again.

The man reached down as fast as a snake and pushed his fingers into Saul’s mouth. Saul tried to bite down, but the man spread his fingers and with inhuman strength forced Saul’s mouth open. Saul’s captor tugged at the rope draped over his shoulder with his free hand. He wound it around Saul’s head once, twice, stuffed it into his mouth like a gag.

He muttered to himself in patois.

As he spoke, the man yanked the rope tight and wound it expertly around Saul’s head again, obscuring the lower half of his face. Saul mewed frantically from behind this mask as his eyes darted from side to side.

The man pulled at Saul’s arms, twisting the rope around them and pulling tight, securing them behind Saul’s back. He tugged Saul free of the little alley. Saul stumbled and ran forward till his feet were jerked out from under him and he fell. He had reached the end of the rope which bound him. He slid back across the concrete. The man was reeling him in.

Saul was pulled to his feet and turned to face his captor. With his mouth blocked, Saul breathed frantically through his nose, sputtering flecks of snot onto his bindings. Black eyes stared into his own, which were wet with fear.

‘You come with me fe see ratty. There some bad obeah loose now.’

He twirled the rope suddenly over Saul’s head like a film cowboy. The coils slid down through the air and wound around Saul’s body. The man spun him on the spot, tightening the bonds, letting out slack to constrict him like a top. He bent and ran the rope on down Saul’s legs, until his whole body was obscured in a shroud of grubby white cord.