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.