Too many shorts at someone's lunchtime leaving do in the pub behind the school. Proffit staggering into the classroom like he'd been bayoneted. Class 3C primed and waiting.
It was a history he wasn't going to allude to for their entertainment.
'Who are we fighting?' Proffit was readying himself for scorn.
'The enemy,' she said, 'And they're everywhere.' Proffit noted with distaste, black deposits at the corners of her eyes. Soap and water wouldn't come amiss, young miss. Had they rolled out of bed only minutes before he had? Puffy faces, pinkly imprinted beneath the dirt, as if they'd slept with their heads on pillows stuffed with cutlery. Proffit felt unnerved as the youth fingered a Swiss army knife hanging from his belt. Finding words to conclude the encounter was suddenly beyond him. Then he thought of one.
Proffit switched on the computer. It was no surprise, the message waiting for him.
Proffit clicked on the icon.
Albert was a character. His shop was tiny, the catalogue in his head enormous. No kind of businessman, he made a living, though his manner hardly encouraged regular customers. He rather despised humanity en masse. He often opined the world was heading for rack and ruin. In fact he seemed to relish the sorry end he predicted for civilization. He collected, and I fear read, books of a «specialist» nature bearing on the occult. Over a few too many gins one evening he told me of his strange and vivid dreams. He spoke of «flying» over these bizarre and terrible realms. Albert would record them in his notebook on waking. He said that making maps, and latterly globes, of these places was the only means he had of purging them from his head-
Proffit had been aware of the barking for several moments before it became intolerable. He went to the window.
Baz and Ann were with an old man who was walking head down. The old man's dog strained at the end of its lead and yammered at the couple. She was talking as Baz swished at the grass with a long stick.
Proffit returned to the screen.
— I don't believe he sold any, though I believe he tried. He told me he was working on a globe clasped in the grip of a world-spanning city at war with itself. Fire-breathing demons flew over every size and type of conflict, aligning with neither one side or another, but feeding on terror and death-
And not exactly fattening on it, Proffit thought, recalling the grey-shanked zephyrs.
In the park a figure lay on the ground close to where the old man had been. Figures approached, nobody anxious to get there first. Proffit drew a chair up to the window; with tea and toast in hand he had the best seat in the house. It was looking bad. Was that something sticking out of the old boy? A police car and an ambulance entered through the park gates.
Mid-afternoon, Proffit made his way by back streets beneath the grey dunes of the clouds. Muffled cries of pain or pleasure came from a wheel-less, curtained van. A fire was barely contained in the cauldron of a backyard. A crash of glass released from a high room a violent argument, in a language Proffit didn't recognize. Sirens seemed like calls to arms. Sat on a far chimney stack, a misplaced gargoyle hugged its knees. It turned on its axis, a chunky weathercock — then it was no such thing as it became airborne. A bird, Proffit was determined to believe, and not as substantial as it appeared to be.
In the city library, Proffit searched the microfilm of the
COAL ROW FIRE MYSTERY
A police spokesman said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the fire at Coal Row, and made no comment on the claims of Mr Ernest Purbright who was one of the first at the scene.
'We couldn't get no further than the hallway. The place was falling apart with smoke and flames everywhere. I saw something at the top of the stairs. I thought it was a monkey, but my workmate said it was a big bird. Whatever it was seemed buoyed up on the smoke; it seemed to have a little pot-belly and weedy arms and legs.'
It is believed the body found in the cellar of the house is that of Mr Albert Lostock. The investigation continues.
Proffit returned home on busier streets. It was early evening and street lamps leaked orange; others flickered weakly, or remained unlit in smashed casings. Eyes glanced anxiously or were filled with a furtive hate. Pockets surely bulged with more than the hands they contained. There were scuffles in side-streets.
Glad to be inside again, Proffit looked out. How dense would the clouds need to be before they blocked out daylight completely? A spur of the park looked in danger of being chewed by adjacent office blocks, like blackened tombstone teeth. Tree foliage was the dense coiling black of smoking tyres. Around the crater of the sandpit, grass was grey stubble. Proffit drew the curtains.
Later he opened them again, onto a city like a coastline of black rocks strewn with lit bulbs. Something caught his eye, something so massive the streets it moved along could barely accommodate it. The vehicle, or the load it carried, had a curved upper portion that overlooked roof and chimney. Switchback-style it moved up and down the streets; no deceleration, let alone stops, for road junctions, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights. The monstrous size of the thing must have activated some special dispensation. Proffit would have thought it lost were there not purposefulness in its unhesitating progress. Not so much lost in the city as determined to explore every yard of its network of streets. As if to map it.
As troubling as the vehicle's smooth, almost floating motion, was its disappearance. Either it had gone behind the castellated heights of the city council buildings, or sank into the deep adjacent streets. The city seemed to have darkened while he watched, and fewer street lamps appeared lit than was usual at this time of the evening. The darkest streets seemed the ones the vehicle had passed along — as if it had sucked the dull orange sodium light away leaving black trenches in its wake. The more likely theory soothed a little; those blackened lengths were affected by localized power cuts. Suppose they should spread here? Proffit drew the curtains and searched for candles. He found none, but his dread of sudden darkness receded as the evening progressed, with not a flicker of the living room ceiling light.
There was a message in his e-mail account. He wondered how long this one-sided communication would continue.
