‘Run! Get the fuck out!’ screamed Saul, but the Jungle was remorseless, and no one heard him except Anansi.

Saul looked down, eight feet from the stage, relaxed his grip and dropped from Anansi like a bomb.

He was rigid, his quarry dead in his line of flight. Even over the Drum and Bass beats, Saul thought he heard a collective gasp. His face set as he fell, his legs straightened, but the Piper had been watching and he danced nimbly to one side, away from Saul’s punishing boots, leaving Saul to slam into the wooden stage.

He staggered but remained on his feet. The decks were so well supported that the record playing did not even skip at his arrival. Saul looked on in horror as Natasha’s hand tightened on the DAT player’s volume control, her face furrowed over the headphones as she prepared to mix from the record to the tape, waiting for the right moment in the beat.

Saul leapt towards her, prepared to throw her away from the decks, to hurt her if need be, rage and fear filling him, but as he neared her something slammed into him from behind and he went sprawling, flying off to the side of the stage. Natasha did not even look round.

Saul rolled on the floor, twisted, and pulled himself back up.

Fabian was bearing down on him.

His friend was not looking at him, was focusing over Saul’s shoulder, just as Loplop had done that night in the flat. He moved towards Saul without pausing, his arms outstretched like a cinematic zombie.

Behind Fabian, Saul saw Anansi touch the stage, only for the Piper immediately to smack him hard in the mouth, sending him sprawling. But Saul’s attention was taken by the tiniest of motions: Natasha’s hand turning the volume slowly up.

Saul barrelled into Fabian, trying to run through him, overpower him, and his friend held him fast, twisted as Saul tried to run past him. The two came crashing down, Saul’s hand outstretched, an inch from Natasha’s shoe.

She nodded in satisfaction and turned up the DAT.

Everything froze.

There was a sublime moment. Everyone was utterly still: the dancers, the men who had jumped on stage to break up the rights they saw there, Saul, rigid with despair.

The beats that slid insidiously from the speakers were all at the high end, cymbals, no bassline. A tiny snatch of piano cried out plaintively.

But it was the flute which held the attention.

A sudden burst had heralded the song, a trill that had erupted into the room’s collective consciousness and cleared the minds of the listeners. As Saul watched, Natasha removed her headphones and her walkman. No need for them now. This was the song she had been listening to. Behind him Fabian rose and followed suit.

The snatch of flute had shocked the dancers into submission, and now it faded, leaving only echoes and the sounds of radio static, the ghosts of dead stations rolling over the beat and the soulless piano. Still there was no bassline. Saul could not get up. He saw the dancers begin to shake their heads and extricate themselves from the snares of the flute, and then another burst exploded into the room and with comically precise timing, the assembled throng all snapped back upright, their eyes rapt.

And then again. Again.

The Piper stared at Saul, the amiable cast of his face belied by his ghastly wide eyes, ferocious with pleasure.

‘You lose,’ he mouthed to Saul.

Saul glared balefully at the Piper. He raised his arm theatrically, and caught Anansi’s eye as he struggled to his feet. Shaking, Anansi imitated him.

Together, they brought their arms down.

‘Now!’ Saul shrieked.

Floorboards and pipes boiled over with rats. Saul’s crack troops exploded into the room, racing voraciously through the frozen legs of the dancers towards the stage. The walls erupted as spiders burst from the pores of the building and spilled like liquid towards the Piper.

At that moment, the bassline of Wind City burst into the room, pared down and simple. And riding it, sailing over the troughs and peaks of beat and bass, was the flute.

The dancers moved as one.

They moved in time, dancing again, an incredible piece of choreography, every right foot raised together, coming down, then every left, a strange languorous hardstep, arms swinging, legs rigid, up and down in time to the beat, obeying the Piper’s flute. And every step aimed at a rat.

This was war.

The rats were righting now, leaping onto bodies and backs. The dancers unearthly unity slowly dissolved as they fought their small, vicious enemies without that dislocated look ever leaving their eyes.

The spiders had reached the stage now, with the vanguard of the rats, and both armies swarmed towards the Piper. Anansi rose behind him and lurched forward, slamming his arms into the Piper’s back, but his power was diminished by the men who leapt forward to hold him. They did not look at him. They held their heads to the side to hear the music, and they did what the music told them. With a strength that was not theirs they hurled Anansi backwards into the wall. He shouted at his troops, gesticulated.

Saul slithered across the floor towards the decks, the DAT player, the source of the music. Instantly Natasha turned and stamped on his hand with her long heel. He screeched in pain, slithered away again, tried to get past her, but she stamped again and again, faster and faster, until it seemed impossible that she remain standing.

Someone behind Saul grabbed him and pulled him up and with a sudden surge of righteous anger he elbowed them in the face. The head snapped back and lolled, the body staggering but somehow kept standing by the music. Saul turned, his hands claws, and his rage dissipated in horror. His assailant was about seventeen, a chubby Asian boy dressed in his Jungling best, now spattered with blood. His nose was a mess in the middle of his face and still he tried to keep time to the beat.

Saul pushed him away hard, out of the fight.

He realized that the dancers were slowly approaching the stage, fighting and scratching, hurling rats and spiders against the walls, ripping at them with their teeth, all the while cocking their heads thoughtfully to hear the notes of Wind City. The fucking flute!

It was multilayered, alienating, frightening, a cacophonous backdrop.

More and more dancers leapt onto the stage, their clothes clogged with blood, rat and human, with fragments of fur, their faces shredded by tiny claws. Saul could taste the rat blood on the air. It flooded him with adrenaline.

Spiders and rats covered the stage, swarmed up the legs of Fabian and the dancers. Fabian tugged at the fat bodies of rats and slammed them underfoot where their legs and spines and skulls cracked and they crawled off to die. He slapped at himself and danced from leg to leg, smearing spiders into the wood.

Saul could hear Anansi bellowing.

Saul turned and made for the decks again. Fabian kicked him in the crotch from behind and Natasha stamped at his shoulder. He moved, avoided being impaled, but hands grasped his legs and tugged him violently across a floor slippery with rat blood and crushed spiders, slid him away from Natasha and the DAT player, slammed him into a wall. Bodies fell across him, inhumanly strong knees crushed his back, he was pinioned by a score of arms and legs.

Saul could hear Anansi shrieking.

He looked up, saw the Piper bent over Anansi, the spider-man held down by several dancers. With his head low against the boards, all Saul could see of the dancefloor was the bobbing heads of the dancers.

It was a vision of hell, rats and spiders and blood swarming over the damned.

Fabian stumbled into his view, and Saul looked up at him and back at Natasha. They were invisible beneath a second skin of spiders, a thick skittering mass. The tide of spiders spilled towards the Piper. Anansi kept shrieking.