Looking for Jake and Other Stories

no defence from another such onslaught. “Fuck off, ” had come an amplified voice. Some figure in camouflage, just visible beyond the bombed land that surrounded the camp, standing on a crippled tank with a megaphone to his lips. “Fuck off out of our park you fucker.”

Sholl had retreated. The mud craters that surrounded the soldiers, he had realised, were not evidence of some hard-won battle against the enemy: they were as far as terrified Londoners had reached, trying to join the panicked, paranoid troops, and where they had been destroyed.

It had taken him a month to find the right people. He had travelled by day in his bus, when it had still moved, and then on foot, ignoring the dangers. Sometimes he heard fighting, between Londoners and the enemy, or human bands, and sometimes it was close, but usually a street or two away, around a corner, out of sight.

Sholl kept an A–Z map of London on him always, and amended it as he learnt about the city’s changing shape. He blocked out those areas he would not go: the imago strongholds; where the gangs were; the savage new communities where even human intruders were accused of being vampires, and burned or beheaded. In the rest of the city, Sholl made notes. Itemising what he found, he tried to track down, to anticipate, where certain other things might be. He was not searching randomly: he had a plan.

Where a building was gone or ruined, he crosshatched it out in black. Where it was made into something new, or where a new thing had appeared, he stuck numbered red crosses: he added a legend in tiny script on the inside front cover, naming what he saw.

#7, he had written, for the structure that now dwarfed the Brixton Prison. Jebb Ave. filled with something like cuckoo-spit. Funnel-tower still rising—threads snagging chimneys. Something inside moving.

In white dabs of Liquid Paper, Sholl marked and numbered the camps of London’s soldiers.

He watched them from the top deck of his bus, or from surrounding buildings, through binoculars. He made notes about them, too.

#4:? 30 men, one tank, one big gun. Morale v. bad.

On four occasions, from as far away as possible, Sholl had watched the soldiers fighting. Once their enemy had been another human unit, and the exchange of fire had ended with a handful of dead on each side and desultory shouted curses. Watching these desperate men and women wrestling with their shaking weapons and churning each other into meat-froth had broken Sholl’s reserve and shocked him, and made him tremble.

The other three times, the battles had been the result of some bizarre incursion of the enemy. Once, the humans had managed to retreat. Twice, they had been wiped out. And those times, though the carnage was no less bloody or loud than when humans killed humans, Sholl had watched it with detachment. Even when the invaders had spun away through space just past him, so that he felt them, ignoring him, shimmering and cleaning themselves of blood.

It had taken Sholl a month. Days watching the soldiers doing their recces through the brick ruins of London, even here and there rescuing people—men and women half-eaten by doves, distractedly maimed by invaders. In the evenings Sholl would lock the doors of his bus and by torch read the books he had looted.

(His library was mixed. He was surprised to discover a renewed appetite for fiction. Mostly, though, he read and obsessively reread books on physics, which he worked through trying to understand what had happened to light, and puerile military guides called SAS Survival and Extreme Combat. He had a collection of Soldier of Fortune magazines, which he still regarded with contempt, even as he read them.

The science he found terribly hard, but he had worked through doggedly, and had been surprised to find himself understanding. He took in the science and the survivalism stolidly, as medicine.) It had taken Sholl a month, picking his way through the dwindling safe routes of the city, avoiding imagos and the gangs, watching soldiers, to find a group with the shades of self-consciousness, of purpose but uncertainty, that he was looking for. A group close enough to the enemy.

Like the Bermondsey soldiers, the troop that Sholl approached were quartered in parkland. They were much more secure, though, in the thickets in the south of Hampstead Heath. Sholl came up the trails of Parliament Hill, with London behind him. It was not very far before three sentries rose from scrubby bushes and halted him.

The frightened young men roughed him a little and rummaged in his rucksack, and when they had decided (according to what science Sholl had no idea) that he was not vampire, one of them ran and returned with their commanding officer. Sholl had watched the troop several times, from the rooftops of Gospel Oak, and he recognised the man by his grey hair and his bearing.

They met in a copse a little way from the path, not hidden but out of immediate sight. Sholl was held by two young soldiers, who gripped his arms without much purpose. Their officer faced him, and over the man’s left shoulder Sholl could see down and across London, all the way to what had been the Post Office Tower, then Telecom Tower, and was now something else altogether: a distorted beacon in the killing fields of central London. This late in the afternoon, there were regular sounds of fighting, gunshots and small explosions. Lights glimmered in the city. Flocks of doves spasmed over the bombed-out and imago-corroded roofs.

The officer nodded sharply at Sholl. “Come to join us?” he said.

“I came to ask,” said Sholl, “whether you’d join me.”

Let me start again.

It was a humiliation and a punishment.

(I am out of practice in my own voice. It is the classic danger for the operative under cover, for the spy, to lose track of where you end and the role begins. I would like to use our original voice, but for ease and speed I will stick to what I have used for so long.)

(Although in fact, of course, that voice that my people use, that I now find so hard—

—is no

more ours than this. It is nothing but evidence of our bars. It was our prison argot, it was our slang, and while we used it—forced as we were—we forgot our own mountain language.) It was a humiliation and a punishment. I would not want to minimise that. We have told stories and stories about our imprisonment, for centuries. But for a long time, it’s true, our chains were loose.

We were trapped, and what we had wanted, what we had fought for, was lost to us, but for thousands of years we had the run of our prison—mostly. We were banished: but there are worse things. We could shape things, we could make our place ours, and become what we wanted.

Except beside the lakes, where we could always see siblings trapped in communion with you. And where, sometimes, we were called. Water was our worst degradation and punishment.

If you drank from your crude bowls it was not so bad. One little part of us would momentarily be crushed into the banal shape of your mouth, but we were free beyond those few inches and could gesticulate hatred at you. But when you leaned over the lakes, and entered them, we were pinioned to you, trapped into our mimicry, gazing dumb up at you. We knew when you were approaching the water, were forced to you, nodding from our world through the water into yours, silent and powerless, visual echoes.

Even then, we could strain against it.

As the water moved our forms were freed a little, and could warp with hatred. Enter the water, we would think fiercely, our new faces mumming your stupid thirst, get into the water, and when you did and shattered its surface, we became halfway free. Still sutured to you by threads we could not break, but as the lake’s surface burst into drops, so did we. We could strain against your shapes.

For a long time after we lost our war, water was our only torment.

Then you learnt to polish obsidian, and trapped us in its black sheen. Its hardness made us cold, and fixed us without even small ripples of freedom into your likeness. But still you could only show tiny parts of us at a time, and you could ossify only our faces. And then, though our borders were fixed, the dark stone gave us a more subtle freedom, one that could unsettle you. Though it fixed us in unfreedom like amber, when you looked in the obsidian you saw, not yourselves, but us, watching, with our loathing.

Obsidian revealed us as shadows.

Carbuncle, you used, and phengite, and emeralds and lead, and copper, tin, and bronze, and silver, and gold,