DANE AND BILLY TREATED FENCES AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN barriers, walls as stairways, roofs as uneven floors. Billy wondered if his angel of memory would be where they went, how it might move across this terrain.
Around the lit-up trenches of streets, where police were. As they came closer to where rumour said the event or events would be, at the limits of vision, Billy glimpsed other of London’s occult citizens-its, what, unhabitants? Word of the locus had spread among the cognoscenti, by whispers, text message and flyer, as if the ends-of-the-world were an illegal rave.
A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turp-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads.
“We have to keep out of sight,” Dane whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on, check who this is.” Wati muttered to him, coming and going from their pockets.
Seers were on the roofs. Billy saw them, silhouettes sitting with their backs to chimneys. He saw the fuddled air where some made themselves not visible. Dane and Billy clung to service ladders on flyovers’ undersides. They dangled, while cars and lorries illuminated the wasteland. “Be ready,” Dane said, “to get out of here.”
“COLLINGSWOOD, I MAY NOT FORCE YOU TO ALPHA LIMA FOXTROT, but if I ask you if you’re receiving me and you are I expect a bloody answer. I can hear you breathing.”
Collingswood made an on and on motion to the unhappy young officer in the car next to her. “Alright, Barone.” She said Bah Roany. She flicked the earpiece. No lapel radios. She, and the few officers seconded to the FSRC that night, were in mufti. She sat slouched in a beat-up car near the gathering ground. “Yes, coming through, big up to the Metropolitan Massive. Rewind. How’s it your end?”
“We can see some predictable players pitching up,” Baron’s crackling voice said. “Nothing from our lost boys yet. You not heard from Vardy, then?” Collingswood shucked as if his plaintiveness were a mosquito in her ear.
“Nah. Said he had to go see a professor. I told him he was one already, but apparently that wouldn’t do.” She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passersby passed by whether they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about the sort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.
“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.
She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumours to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid. She had been happy to cede that to him. She liked the tinkering, but the strategic overview he was welcome to.
Her own enquiries, in venues less epochally inclined than those where Vardy did his musings, closer to that everyday border between religion and murder, proceeded slowly. It was the gunfarmers she was trying to track down. No matter how bloody monkish they were, ultimately they got paid to kill people, and that meant, in some form or other be they ever so abstracted and magic, receipts. And where there was that sort of trail, there would be chatter, a smidge of which, slow though it still was, was wending into her shell-likes.
Collingswood kept only the most vague tabs on who Vardy was manipulating how: she simply did not care enough. Perhaps a part of her thought that wasn’t sensible, that she’d do well to learn that game, but, she thought, she would always be happy to subcontract to the Machiavellis of this city. What she liked doing was what she was good at. And what clues she had sowed about the questionable ends she and Vardy had cooked up were eminently, obviously persuasive. Soon, perhaps, she might do some arresting.
Collingswood said nothing to Baron. She could hear him keeping the connection open as if she would.
MARGE FINGERED HER CRUCIFIX AND IGNORED THE HUMMING tunes from her iPod, like the singing of a young child. Every few minutes people passed her, or she walked a little farther and passed them, talking into their phones and walking quickly, paying no attention to the scrubby afterthought waste where whatever it was was due to happen. Marge was watching the space, she would have said all alone, when a woman emerged from behind a lamppost too narrow to have hidden her.
Hey, the woman’s mouth shaped, but Marge could not hear her. The woman was in late middle age, in a stylish dark coat. Her face was sharp, her long hair styled, and all sorts of oddness about her. You’re here for this, she mouthed, and was abruptly much closer than she should have been with so few steps.
Marge turned up her iPod in fear. The tuneless singing enveloped her. Wait, the woman said, but the voice in the iPod made its way through “Eye of the Tiger” and it gusted Marge away, a London motion sped up and strange. It was all a bit unclear, but within moments she was in another place and the woman had gone. Marge gawped. She stroked her iPod thank you. She looked around and took up watch again.
WAS IT STARTLING THAT TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NOT ONLY SHARE their last night, but commence the unravelling in the same spot? There had been repeated insistences of where the ends might occur, competing declarations, prophecies “examined more closely,” the venues growing closer until they met.
Representatives of many factions were near. Cult collectors took bets on the outcome; the vagrant magicians of London, many with familiars come crawling and defeated back as the strike entered its endgame, were ready to scavenge for shreds of power and energy that would be given off. “Oh no,” said Wati from Billy’s pocket, seeing his shamefaced members. “I have to… I need to make some rounds.”
It was depressing, Wati agust from figure to brickwork figure, whispering, cajoling, begging and blackmailing, pleading with members to stay away. His bodiless self was buffeted on such an excitable night. Gusty aether blew him into the wrong bodies. He circled the arena very fast. From the eyes of a discarded pencil-top robot Wati watched a woman shift with knacked escapology away from a collector. There was an air about her that drew him, and he would have gone closer, or into the figure she wore around her neck, but something started to happen.
“FUCKSNOT,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. SHE LEANED FORWARD. A WOMAN continued her slow circumnavigation of the space. Collingswood made a little motion as if prying curtains a touch apart. A shaft of the night between them and the approaching woman grew momentarily lighter, a clearer line of sight. Collingswood peered and sighed and released her fingers and the dark came back.
The man beside Collingswood gawked at her. She did not look at him.
“Boss,” she said as if to air. “… Nah, boss, no sign of them, but I’m pretty sure who I did just see. Remember Leon’s lurve interest? She’s pitched up… Fuck should I know?… Well it’s her stupid fault, innit?” But as she said that last she was sighing, she was tugging on her plainclothes jacket and opening the door.
She pointed at her temporary partner. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” She was gone, turning up her collar, and he could hear her muttering as she approached the nervous-looking woman.