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

The guard’s eyes were blinking violently.

‘Do you understand?’ hissed Saul.

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

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

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

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

Saul pulled himself up and hobbled after him.

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

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

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

Saul was quite still.

The Piper stood before him, wiping his flute clean.

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

Saul leapt straight up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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