Darkness, abrupt and shocking. After a death-like instant Proffit's feet were again in touch with the floor. He moved carefully to the curtains and opened them. The computer screen was an impenetrable black; he could hardly believe it had ever been lit up with words. Bed seemed the safest place.
He doubted he was the only one lying awake. Beckoning, urging voices in the street. A vehicle accelerated, skidded; an impact. A sharp tang of sound as a window fragmented.
When he pressed the light switch, Proffit found the power hadn't returned. He got up and felt his way out of the room.
The view from the living room window; he was becoming addicted to it. Discreet crimson glows around the city; flitting figures below. Gun shot barked. Moonlight was painted meanly on the trees of the park. The open space beyond the gates seemed a great blister rather than flat. Was the curve not apparent in daylight because of all the attendant distractions? As he stared, the rise seemed more pronounced. Before the darkness could make it a mound, Proffit closed the curtains against it. The duvet soon covering him was another barrier.
He only drowsed. Where sleep should have taken him there was a shadowed floor; it swelled higher and higher, until it freed itself, and, like a black balloon, floated as free as the walls of his head would allow.
He got up and fetched his portable radio. He desperately wanted its sounds. Re-tuning right across the dial produced coughs and hisses like a premonition of nuclear fallout. He returned to bed.
Dread awoke him, taunted that sleep had been his and was no more. He reached for his alarm clock, squinting to make out the hands. The quality of the light suggested a much earlier hour. But in the dim living room the mantle-piece clock confirmed eight-twenty in the morning. Still no power, so no television, no tea, no toast. He tried the radio but soon switched off the sequence of cracked syllables that were like the calls thrown to the clouds and beyond the other night. The fact that Proffit was experiencing part of a wider privation was of little comfort. Was the Railway Hotel affected? If Humphries had been true to his word, he must be finding Harrowby a poor substitute for the sunny south.
With no allowances for the early hour, the city's repertoire of turmoil was already establishing itself. Esther might retract her complacent words about cities should he be crass enough to remind her of them. He'd drop in; their amicable estrangement was an example to the rest of the city. Besides, wasn't mutual support between friends, ex-lovers, neighbours, desirable, if not essential in these times? Unless the opposite state of affairs was endemic. There was little contact, let alone neighbourliness, between Proffit and his fellow residents. In the passage outside his flat the three other doors might have opened into closets, such was the silence.
Furtive as a spy, Proffit left the building. A harsh chemical in the air hit the back of his nose, and at least had the virtue of waking him fully. Passing cars assisted, blasting their horns at him for no obvious reason. Other cars' wheel-less state left them part-immersed in broken tarmac. On an otherwise dead van a windscreen wiper wagged No.
The canal was a ribbon of black gloss paint. On its rubble beach a dummy, or body, lounged. Two crows flop-fluttered together, hopelessly entangled. Rats scampered, busy as clerks preparing for an inspection.
The door of number seven Canal Terrace opened to the limit of the chain. A terrible falling off if this was Esther's new paramour. A sign of the times that such a vested hulk should cower behind a door. Murky the hallway; an odour of over-used cooking oil. A television whisper-hissed.
'Hello — it's Trevor. Esther's 'ex'.'
Glimpsing an arm in a sling, a drooping gut, Proffit was appalled.
''Stheroo?'
Alternatives; Esther and this one, a couple; Esther in the back tied to a chair, the attentions of the vested- one temporarily interrupted; Esther living elsewhere, having moved out at short notice without bothering to tell Proffit. He couldn't believe any of these possibilities. Esther was simply gone, profoundly so.
''Ckoff,' the man said. The door banged shut, lid tight. Proffit returned home.
As if taking advantage of his absence the house had succumbed to the madness. From the five top-floor windows, his included, gargantuan black ropes of smoke rose to flatten against the undersides of the clouds. A dry sob was painful in his throat. Packed into his few rooms was the only future he could envisage. Dentists and patients had vacated the surgery next door and grin-grimaced orange teeth at the show. The insurers had evacuated their building too, and looked hungry, though not, Proffit judged, for the business the fire might have represented. Fellow residents didn't acknowledge him: their fire-lit faces were aghast or elated as at a burning god. Proffit's eyes watered copiously. There was no going in, though he doubted anyone would have tried to stop him.
A rumble of collapsing floors. Perversely, considering the past twenty-four hours or so, no sirens. A suitable end, to walk in, cloth himself in flames, burn to nothing the burden of confusion and dread. But an end for a braver man, and maybe a less curious one. He'd see this through and begin again, as he had only months before. But his thoughts had no emotional impulse. He felt hollow — as eaten away as the inside as the house. But when the metallic sniggering began, anger moved into the void.
The smoke formed a low ceiling over the furnace. A round face, a grimed, grinning urchin's, poked through. There was no way of apprehending that fellow. The fun was his to be had.
Proffit had to tell someone, and only one would understand — Humphries, if he hadn't already vacated his room at the hotel. After Humphries, Proffit would renew contacts with friends and former colleagues. In lieu of the authorities mastering the situation, they'd discuss, exchange information. Abandonment of the city might be the sanest response to the challenges it presented. His own sanity might be questioned if he implicated an old globe in the chaos. No, he'd save talk of the globe for Humphries. The globe would confirm Proffit's identity, and then the expert could take possession of it. Damp and damaged it would be worth pennies — and then only in other cities, not Harrowby, that's if other cities weren't themselves being infected by this one.
Proffit felt the heat of tropical lands as he skirted the building. Amongst the crumbling walls at the back, lidless dustbins on their sides disgorged rubbish. Lids, ideal for shields, Proffit found himself thinking dispassionately.
He found the globe. It was a dead thing. With his fingers encased in the great north south rent, it was like a huge boxing glove.
The street was littered with the detritus of once tepid, routine-driven lives. Broken chairs, bottles, de-limbed dolls, half-consumed packages of fast food, were tokens of lives changed perhaps forever.
Water frothed from a burst water main and pooled in the road. A van passing at speed sprouted great white wings of water. One caught Proffit but he cared little at the drenching.
Viewing the smoking wreck of a car, Proffit wondered how much safer he'd be conveyed on four wheels.
Here was a car, a black one. It might be a cab. And couldn't anything be anything now in this city where the rulebook had been tossed aside? There seemed an intention in the air to return to first principles — or no principles.
The car/cab stopped at his raised hand. Proffit recognized the driver.
'By yourself this time?' the man said. 'Should have charged extra for whatever was in that black bag.' Wry words, but glaring eyes in the rear-view mirror. He may have been thinking of the omitted tip. Proffit was glad that in the general gloom the cabby hadn't noticed the misshapen globe?
'Railway Hotel,' Proffit instructed. ' 'Please'' was a nicety, a sign of weakness, he wouldn't display.
A swerving, halting progress along many diversions. Gaps in railings seemed emblematic of iron bars and spears in use elsewhere. A cast-off manhole cover suggested misrule spread to the underside of the city. Birds flew haphazardly, as if the clouds were an unprecedented environment to fly in. Something larger passed over the cab with more purpose. Proffit shrank in his seat as if the metal roof were insufficient protection from the grating giggler. The thing alighted on a skeletal tree to which it, or someone, assigned a bright blazing foliage, an instant before the thing flew off again.
The clamour of approaching sirens shook Proffit to his bones. The muttering driver edged the cab grudgingly left, and two battered ambulances overtook, neck-and-neck, as likely to create emergencies as attend any. People ran in every direction, faces fearful orcrazily happy. The red rose emblem on the face of City Hall was being painted black by a man on a rickety platform; he needn't have bothered, as the darkening atmosphere beneath the
