It's getting through, Proffit thought, stepping back. A tiny movement in a join between gores. The end of something sharp protruded minutely, in time with the scratches. No beetle this. Bits of paint and paper fluttered to the floor. Proffit wasn't going to wait for the creature inside to discover him.
He opened the front door of his flat. Back in the living room he warily picked up the globe. Leaving the flat he wondered if the globe were heavier now than when he'd carried it from the shop. Near the stairwell was a small back window. Proffit worked quickly. The talon, for he was convinced that was what it was, had sliced a slit between gores. A bird? That conjecture alone was enough to have him flinching from a desperate flourish of wings. He was a planet himself the way the core of him thudded. The window swung outward from hinges running along the top. Not wasting another second he squeezed the globe through the gap.
It plummeted, a dark star. The night obscured it, cushioning to a soft crumple its impact with the ground. Proffit strained to see it — then it rolled, minus its brass stand and meridian half-circle, into a wedge of moonlight between the dustbin enclosure and a decrepit bench.
The globe and Proffit were as still as each other. A flickering hope in Proffit was doused as the globe shuddered. The jabbing action was evident again, the thing inside seemingly energized in anticipation of the completion of the task it had set itself.
And something broke through. A dark sinewy growth from the seed of the globe. At the end of the growth, cilia waved, then scrabbled blindly on the broken concrete, then became still. Proffit gasped at the sight of the little hand. Suddenly, from this anchorage, the globe moved in a series of fast wide arcs.
The rent in the globe widened. The birth continued with the bulb of a head, narrow shoulders. The globe was shook wildly back and forth for several more seconds, before flying off from the body it had contained.
Bad dream: any moment now the black night would collapse on him, reduce him to nothingness until morning. Or he'd awake. The cold window ledge, the grit on it, defied his wish.
He looked down again. A creature snuffled the ground as if searching for a scent. Proffit dreaded whose. He was still — an insect in amber. Below a face rose, pinched, snub-nosed. It was looking at the sky, not for him. It grinned with satisfaction. Then the grin vanished, focus in the eyes, business to see too. Baby-like, it toddled rapidly away on all-fours into the shadows.
Proffit quietly closed the window. The creature must have been folded like linked playing cards to fit inside the globe. Diminutive, simian in the cast of its bony limbs, and those pale wedges of flesh flopping at its shoulders…
Proffit was alert for its reappearance. When he detected renewed movement, out in the darkness, it was at eye level.
Beyond a crumbling wall and a wide dingy plot of broken bricks and weeds was a towering black edifice, daubed with graffiti, its window apertures all brick-filled. Something moved fitfully up the black geometry of the superfluous fire escape. Such was the nimble-ness of its ascent, it seemed barely in contact with the steps. Higher and higher until the top-most portion of the fire escape forced a halt. Proffit had room for a new trajectory of astonishment as the figure bobbed out from the protection of the fire escape to cling to adjacent brickwork. And then it rose again, finding adequate handholds in the interstices of the blackened and mouldering brick courses, yet seeming hardly to require them, for the rapid folding in and out of the appendages at its shoulders seemed as necessary in keeping the mite aloft. Wings, Proffit thought, why prevaricate? The narrow summit of the building had an overhang; the child-thing, as unthinkingly as an insect, fluttered out and ascended, as if assisted by a current of air, to finally stand on the small platform of flat roof.
And there, from the way its arms reached skywards, it aspired to greater heights.
The window buzzed faintly. Proffit put his ear to the glass. Cold thrilled through him, further evidence that he wasn't in some outpost of dreamland.
Words caused the sympathetic vibration in the glass. Proffit pushed open the window the better to hear.
Instantly, he flung himself against the adjacent wall. The window crashed back into its frame. Had the thing heard? After several moments Proffit dared to look again.
Still there. The noise hadn't distracted it. Too bad he'd let that high, rusty and oddly demanding voice, unmediated by glass, assault his ears. A summoning and an entreaty, directed at the pale tumours of the clouds, or whatever they might conceal.
Proffit returned to his flat. He didn't sleep, unless the blackness he stared into for an eternity was that condition. Maybe he had slept, and the voice was the leavings of a dream. He wished it would stop; he wished its alien, implacable words, heard through so many thicknesses of bricks and mortar, were unintelligible to him.
Morning: a threadbare light. On the coffee table were a bowl of crisp crumbs and a smeared whisky glass — but no globe.
The computer's querulous hums voiced Proffit's reluctance to face the day. The waiting message scotched Proffit's hopeless hope that the globe had been nothing more than the presiding artefact of an extended dream.
The provenance of the globe no longer concerned Proffit. It was out there, like a piece of damp rotting fruit; he only hoped some instinct didn't compel the midget thing to remain near it.
He opened the curtains and the dull light provoked a token squint. With too many clouds to fit comfortably into the sky, some bulged low to blend with the city's misty morning attire. Leached of its colour, a bus passing below seemed like a portion of the road afloat. Two successive shrieks came from the park gates, opened by the keeper.
With the city behaving like its usual self, an interpretation of the night's events came forth.
Ten minutes later the clouds weren't letting him appreciate the vast freedom of the park; they seemed as inert and solid as a plaster ceiling. A tramp shouted at them, or the chisel-marks that were birds, moving his fist in a stirring motion. Proffit headed to an outlying border of trees and a path that deposited him in narrow streets choked with traffic. Horns were territorial, like bird calls; behind windshields a limited sign-language of waved fists and jabbing fingers. Proffit couldn't see the cause of the gridlock, or why it should provoke this particular ire. There was little to choose between parkland and city pavement; Proffit thought anywhere might feed his tension.
He ate in a cafe window. Outside a skinhead pulled at the tie of a schoolboy, and feinted with his other fist. Passers-by were better placed to intervene, and maybe one did, or said something, for the youth and the boy abruptly ran off in different directions.
Proffit left the cafe and waited with a group at a crossing.
'It's coming,' a voice said behind him. All knees and wrist bones, the man sat against the brick division between two shops. The bowed peaked-capped head nodded lower —
The green man twittered and flashed, legs scissoring. Proffit went with the crossing band, impatience at the man like heartburn.
He paid his bill in the Post Office, then looked at rustic cottages in an estate agent's window. He moved on,
