Forty years later he tells the story and Gillman laughs as if it’s just another yarn, another little story outrageously embroidered, but the old man thinks — the old man
Above him, as he sleeps, the city roars turbulently on.
There was a faint scent about Mr. Cribb that Moon had never noticed before — not altogether unpleasant, not the smell of perspiration or the musky stink of an unwashed body but something altogether more unusual, comforting, redolent of age and must and damp. He smelt like leaves in October, Moon realized. Of Autumn.
They had walked some distance from the hotel before either of them noticed they were being followed.
“Friend of yours?” the ugly man asked, nodding discreetly toward a stolid gray-suited gentleman skulking half a street behind them.
“My valet,” Moon explained. “My keeper. Skimpole won’t let me out without him.”
Cribb waved with his left, four-fingered hand and, rather sheepishly, the man touched the brim of his bowler in reply.
“How are you finding Mr. Skimpole?”
Moon grimaced.
“I promise you. By the time this is all over, you’ll have come to respect him.”
Moon surprised himself by laughing. “I suppose you’ve seen it all before. In the future.”
“Never forget,” Cribb insisted, comically grave, “I know the plot.”
The detective rolled his eyes.
“Of course, there are rules about this kind of thing, but I can tell you this: Skimpole does not die happy.”
“Shame,” said Moon, sounding anything but upset, at which Cribb unexpectedly roused himself to the albino’s defense.
“He’s not an evil man. He acts from what he believes to be honorable motives.”
The corners of Moon’s mouth turned themselves up into a sneer. “Monsters always do.”
“He’s not a monster.”
Moon looked about him and saw that he was lost. The familiar streets had slipped away, the alien and unknown reared up in their place. “Where are we going?”
“Docklands,” Cribb said, striding on. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Is there a good reason why we can’t hail a cab?
“To understand the city you need to feel her soil beneath your feet, to breathe her air, to sample her infinite variety.”
“You know you’re a remarkably irritating man.”
“It has been mentioned, yes.”
They walked on, oddly content in one another’s company, though dogged the whole time by Mr. Skimpole’s familiar.
“What’s your earliest memory?” Cribb asked at length.
Moon looked sharply at the loping, lopsided figure hunched beside him, this gawky Virgil to his reluctant Dante. “Why?”
“It may be important.”
“My father,” Moon said, “waking me in the night, shaking me awake to tell me my mother had gone.”
Cribb all but rubbed his hands together in glee. “Wonderful!” he chuckled.
“And you?” asked Moon, fairly irritated by his companion’s reaction. “Your earliest memory?”
Cribb frowned. “I sincerely doubt you’ll believe me.”
“Please.”
“I remember the streets in flames. The city visited again by pestilence and fire. The great stone cracked. I am old and I am dying.”
“You’re
“It’s… complicated.”
“I’ve just realized,” Moon said with a start.
“Yes?”
“You really believe all this, don’t you?”
Cribb would only smile in reply, and they walked on.
“I imagine you’ll have met Madame Innocenti by now,” he said a while later.
“Who told you that?”
Cribb brushed the question aside with a languorous wave. “I’m not in league with the Directorate if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It had crossed my mind.”
“Well, banish it forever. What did you make of her?”
Moon’s throat felt itchy and dry and he swallowed, unwilling to reply.
“You spoke to the Fly, didn’t you?”
“Truthfully? I’m not entirely sure who I spoke to. It was uncanny.”
“You’ll see her again,” Cribb said firmly. “And next time you’ll know the truth of it.”
“How much further?” Moon glanced behind him. “I think our friend’s getting tired.”
“Almost there.”
As they strolled on, the familiar turrets of Tower Bridge loomed into view and beyond them the wharves, warehouses and shipyards of the docklands. They seemed to Moon to resemble some industrial Baghdad, with its blackened spires, its grimy ziggurats and its smog-choked minarets. The Thames threaded her way amongst them, a discarded ribbon, dirty gray, strewn across the landscape.
“Walk closer.”
Ignoring a legion of forbidding notices and signs and heaving themselves over innumerable gates and fences, they eventually clambered down beside the river. Moon wrinkled his nose at the omnipresent smell of decay, treading as carefully as he could along the bank as the filth and muck of the Thames oozed over his shoes.
“Mud,” Cribb said, sounding just as he had on London Bridge, as though in the midst of delivering a sermon. “Glorious mud-”
“Have you got a light?” Moon asked, fumbling unsuccessfully in his pockets for a cigarette.
Cribb ignored him. “We’ve passed through the city’s bowels. Now we walk the span of her intestine.”
“Charming metaphor.”
“A century from now all this will be torn down, this testament to industry, toil and sweat. In its place great temples are built, monuments to wealth and avarice and power.”
Moon gazed in front of him, not really listening. A gull screamed overhead.
Cribb chattered on. “London is an inhibitor. You understand? She trammels and diminishes her inhabitants. The city is a trap.”
“What’s happening there?” Moon asked, pointing to what appeared to be a large marquee perched incongruously a few feet from the riverbank.
“Really, Edward. You can be infuriating at times. I’m trying to tell you something important.”
Cribb tutted in irritation but Moon had already left him and he was forced to break into a run to catch up. He was amused to note Skimpole’s man struggling along behind them, his shoes and trousers already sodden with the slimy jetsam of the river.
Moon reached the tent. Its canopy flapped noisily in the wind as though some great bird were trapped beneath the canvas, cyclopean wings beating frantically in an effort to escape. He peered inside and saw that the ground within had been thoroughly excavated, the soil potholed, cratered and covered with little marker flags, the earth itemized and ordered. What caught his attention, however, was a group of men — grubbily genteel, their clothes stained by silt and mud — gathered around a large spherical object placed on a table in the center of the tent. Moon moved closer and it took a moment to acclimatize himself to the sheer peculiarity of the sight, to accept that what he was seeing was real.
He was looking at what appeared to be an enormous stone head, too large and unwieldy for one man to lift unaided, caked in dirt and river mud but otherwise intact. Giggling and chattering like schoolchildren abandoned by their teachers and left to run riot in the classroom, the men were all far too excited to take much notice of his
