Looking for Jake and Other Stories

it would be forthcoming. He had not come to them like the other frightened Londoners; he had not arrived as a refugee to be made safe. He had brought them something.

The change in the camp was not overt, but it was clear. The soldiers were expectant. The soldiers watched Sholl as if he were a Jesus, with nervous, hopeful interest, and scepticism and excitement.

Sholl’s mouth was dry. He was not sure what to do. The officer approached him.

“Mr. Sholl,” he said. “Would you like to talk to us? Would you like to tell us why you’re here?”

Sholl had thought it would take a little time to come to this. He had wanted a day to feel for the mood of the camp, before he spoke. He had expected to be interrogated by the commander alone, or perhaps with a few lieutenants. He had prepared himself to persuade that audience. He had not thought that with the breakdown of structures, primitive democracy would assert itself.

The CO knew he was in charge by nothing but the approval of his troops. He was not a stupid man; he understood that “need to know” had become a dangerous condescension. There was no one to court-martial the insubordinate, and there never would be any more. He needed his women and men to agree with his orders.

He sat with them and leaned against a tree and smoked. They did not look at him. They were still turned to Sholl.

Sholl sat. The legs of the chair sank an inch into the wet earth. Sholl put his head in his hands and tried to make himself ready. He tried to turn the confrontation into a discussion. He started by asking questions.

“We try to get messages to other units. We’re still scanning for word from the government, or top brass or whateverthefuck.” The commander’s voice failed for a second. The idiocy of the statement was obvious. Everyone knew that there was no government, and no one in charge of the army’s ragged remains. Sholl nodded as if the remark made sense, not needing to press the point.

His questions were answered. Messianism still clung to him—not sought, but useful—and the soldiers told him what he wanted to know guardedly, and waited, knowing that soon he would tell them why he was there.

“So you’re trying to get your orders, I understand that,” said Sholl. “But what do you do day to day?”

They patrolled the edges of the Heath. Unlike the maddened Bermondsey renegades (of whom they had heard, and at whom they were disgusted—“We should go fucking sort them out, never mind the fucking imagos,” someone shouted) they welcomed what few civilians made it to join them. There were very few.

There were no children. No one had seen any children for weeks.

They patrolled the Heath, and when they saw the enemy harassing or murdering humans, they tried, where they could, to intervene. They made some minor incursions into the streets that were roamed by murderous imagos, trying to find survivors. “We know where there are some—in a school up by the hill, we think—but we can’t get to them. There’s a nest of vamps in the tube station.” That, Sholl already knew.

The vampires and other imagos had not come up onto the grassland, and so the troops were still alive, but that was just contingent. They might come any time. The soldiers patrolled and waited and scanned the airwaves with their crappy radios, and waited.

“What happened? ”

The question came at Sholl suddenly, breaking through his own queries about the soldiers’ habits—how many, how often, where, why. The man who asked it had no reason to expect an answer from Sholl—a drab-faced newcomer sat among soldiers—but he asked it again, and others echoed him, and Sholl knew he had to answer.

“What happened? Where did they come from? What happened?”

Sholl shook his head.

“From the mirrors,” he said, telling them what they already knew. “From the tain.”

He used the language he had stolen from his physics books, a language of laws and propositions named after the living and dead who had formulated them, and made it seem as if he spoke it fluently. A cheap shot. He told them (regretting the jargon instantly) that en one sine theta one still equals en two sine theta two. Except in certain circumstances.

Except in the case where en one equals minus en two. Except for reflection.

There is something called the Phong Model, Sholl said. It’s a graph. It’s a model to show how light moves. The shinier the surface, the more precise and bright the reflected light, the narrower the range in which it can be seen. The model used to describe how light bounced off concrete and paper and metal and glass, its angle of specular reflection narrowing, approximating the angle of incidence, its bright spot brightening, as the surfaces became more mirrored.

But something happened, and now Phong describes a turning key.

It used to be a sliding scale. Asymptotic. An endless approximation to infinity or zero. It’s become a threshold. As the reflected brightness grows more precise, as its angle of exit narrows to more closely mimic its entry, it’s approaching an edge, it is becoming a change of state, he said. Until a critical moment is reached: until light meets the sheen of a gloss surface, and everything alters, and the light unlocks a door, and what was a mirror becomes a gate.

Mirrors became gates, and something came through.

“We know that,” one of the men shouted. “We know that already. Tell us what happened. Tell us how it happened.”

That, Sholl could not do. He could tell them nothing they had not heard from the vampires that taunted them sometimes: they were the most comprehensible of the imagos.

The soldiers stayed, though, still watching him. They wanted him to be special: they were anxious to forgive him. They asked him questions that allowed him to be circuitous, to seem vaguely wise. He had travelled through London’s ruins, that they only looked out over. He could tell them much more about the city than they could learn from their cautious and pointless sorties.

“I want your help,” Sholl told them suddenly. Many of them looked away from him. The officer held Sholl’s eyes. “I’ve got a plan. I can end this. But I need you to help me.”

Still the men and women waited. There was no revelation in this. Sholl could only stumble on. He started to tell them what it was he wanted to find, where he wanted to go, and with that, finally, he provoked a few gasps from them. Some of them expostulated. He told them what he wanted them to do, what he wanted them to achieve, and where they must go.

Even now that he had roused them, there was very little of the discussion Sholl had expected. The soldiers on the heath wanted to be convinced. But they were not suicidal. They needed more than his exhortation.

He spoke in elegant insinuations, avoiding details but giving them enough to entice them. He was afraid to proceed alone, and he whispered at them, secrets, things he had heard, things that only he could do.

He waited for them to be intrigued, and to join him.

To his astonishment, and dismay, they did not.

You made us hurt each other, and ourselves. You made us blood each other, when you fought in front of your looking glasses. You ignored them, and us, but we could not resist. When you conducted your knifings, your shootings dead. When you slit your own throats and watched the blood leak out of you, and out of us. We stabbed each other, for your vainglorious whims, and accompanied you in suicide. And where your mortuaries were glazed, you trapped us there, and made us rot with you.

We fought you. There were ways.

Your world mirrored, and caught us in more webs of light. We had to make your houses, your clothes.

Where you had animals we had to make them too, moulding the matter of our world into the cowed shapes of your dogs and cats, animating them, dandling them like marionettes as your pets snuffed mindlessly and licked the mirrors. Exhausting and humiliating. But vastly worse was when you looked at yourselves. Then, we could only make puppets of us. Your sentience demanded it, our presence, unknowingly.

The bonds and boundaries were not stable. In the beginning, when reflection was rare, each event was a trauma, and we had no strategies. Where there were two mirrors or more they pulled chains of us together and locked us all into identical mimicry, in recursive tunnels of only one of you. As the tain spread, we learnt to fold our space, so fewer of us were snared.

Where tiny parts of you were fleetingly reflected, the snippets of us that took your shapes were almost disengaged, almost independently born. There were never fast-fixed rules, hard lines: we learnt strategies.