Skulk (20 page)

I head-butted her affectionately in the neck. “Yeah, we’re OK. We’d better get going, if I’m going to sort this mess out before Christmas. I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”

“Tomorrow, midnight, in the Skulk meeting place. I’ll get everyone. Take care of yourself, Bugnuts,” she said, and turned and ran off towards the river.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The
Saracen
squatted on Hammersmith Road with a pawn shop on one side and a porn shop on the other. For a pub it was a thin, cramped-looking building. It had once had glossy black fake-Tudor beams painted on it, but the paint was flaking away. All the windows were shut up, sealed over with those grey metal shutters the council put up to stop people actually using derelict buildings for illicit activities like
living
. Peeling posters dotted the walls and there was a strong stench of urine and musty sweat around the doorway. I couldn’t pick up any of the skittery spider-scent I’d smelled on Angel through the general funk.

I hugged the edge of the pavement to the end of the street and slipped down the alley behind the shops. Gravelly dirt crunched under my paws as I made my way past the back doors of the shops, under vans, between towering rubbish bins and in and out of a maze of old bits of fencing. A door creaked open as I passed, throwing a warm spike of yellow light across my face. I froze as a shape moved into the light. It was a human, carrying a large bag that rustled... and then the scent hit me, the most delicious salty, fatty, bready smell, with a far distant echo of slippery, glass-eyed things.

Fish and chips. My stomach rumbled. I was about to sneak up to the bin, to see if I could break into that bag when the man had dumped it, but then a barking shout broke me out of my trance. The man snatched up a stick and ran at me, slashing it through the air in my direction.

“Garn! Get out! Vermin!” he yelled. I cringed away, and he stopped coming after me. He put the bag into a plastic wheeley bin and slammed the lid down. I turned tail and ran on along the alley, before he came at me with that stick, and tried to ignore the awakened rumblings in my belly.

It suddenly occurred to me as I slipped in and out of the shadows that I didn’t know if I’d be able to figure out which of the buildings was the
Saracen
from the back. The dim brickwork all looked the same and more than one of the buildings had its windows covered over. If it had been a working pub, I probably could’ve picked it out a mile away – but now that I was looking for traces of alcohol, I started finding it in every bin I passed, splashed up against fences and even pooled underneath an old car. The warm tang of it was everywhere. I passed a homeless man, huddled in about four different coats, cuddling a bottle as if it were a child. When he saw me he muttered something in what I thought might be Spanish, but didn’t move to chase me away.

In the end, it was easy to spot the back door to the
Saracen
.

I just followed the smell of death.

There were metal shutters on the ground floor windows, but not on the door. I peered up at one of the top windows and could just make out that one of the shutters had been pulled away, just a little. That room was where the scent was coming from – a foul tang that was almost sweet, that made my skin creep up and down my spine. It wasn’t the recent, crimson scent of blood, not like at the school. This was something different. A long exhale. Decay.

I head-butted the door and it shifted a little, enough for me to squeeze through.

Inside, the darkness settled over me like a warm, mouldy blanket. I sniffed my way forwards, dust clouding up around my paws, scented with years of stale beer, mice... and something fresher, more human.

A cramped, carpeted stairwell led up to my right, and I hesitated for a second, wondering if I really needed to know. I could draw my own conclusions. The Cluster had been here, and now there was nothing but death.

I drew in a deep breath of cool, stale air, and began to slowly climb the twisting stairs.

Something scuttled away from me in the darkness. I froze, sensing the movement of many-legged things.

“Hello?” I tried to bark, though it came out as more of a whine. “I’m – I’m from the Skulk. I’m here to see the Cluster. Is anyone there?”

Silence, except for the faintest sense of vibrating air. I sniffed, and there was a definite scent mixed in among the dust and decay – it wasn’t quite like Angel’s, but it was definitely insectlike.

I cringed back, imagining a thousand spiders rubbing their legs together, rushing towards me in a tide of skittering, biting
things...
but nothing happened.

The black walls loomed over me and I caught my claws on the worn, patchy fabric as I moved forward, following the death-scent to the top of the stairs. It was coming from a gap underneath a door, like invisible wisps of smoke.

There was a little more light here. A spattering of dim yellow spotlights hit the carpet at the other end of the landing, where a shuttered window would have looked out onto the street.

There were spiders. Lots of them, hanging in great drooping webs from the ceiling, scuttling along the edge of the carpet. One huge one, its body the size of my paw, picked its way slowly up the wall beside me, putting one thick, hairy leg unhurriedly in front of the others. It was so close I could see its shiny black eyes, like globes full of nothing but void on the top of its head.

I froze again, but the spiders didn’t seem to care that I was trespassing in their house. This wasn’t the Cluster. They were all just normal spiders, getting on with their spidery business while I caught my breath.

I followed the path of a tiny black spot, almost so quick and small I couldn’t even make out its legs moving, up the side of the stairs and over something that gleamed and caught my eye. I peered up, sniffing. It was a metal chair, attached to a thin rail that ran down the stairs. I could still taste a faint tang of old electricity, like a ghost haunting the place where it was plugged into the wall.

This place was never going to pass an accessibility inspection. I wondered who’d felt the need to put in a stairlift.

I padded carefully across the patchy carpet, my hackles rising with every step, and put my head down against the old wooden door. I could feel my fur bristling all over my body, from my brush to my nose. I flattened my ears against my head and gave the door a firm shove. It shivered open and the scent reached out and curled around me like a pair of loving, decaying arms.

I could barely make out the naked human shapes of the three bodies on the floor of the room. The forest of spiderwebs was so thick it was like peering through cloud. Cloud with a thousand black specs hanging suspended in it, as if they were floating in the air.

I didn’t need to go inside. I didn’t need to do more than glance into the room, and then I turned tail and bolted, whining, scrabbling my way back down the stairs, my ears pinned to the back of my head. The dark walls banged around me, twisting, like I was running through a hall of mirrors, and I longed for the wide outdoors, for scents other than death and decay, and sounds other than the buzzing of flies.

There were three bodies. That is... I’d seen three torsos. I assumed there were six arms, six legs. But I hadn’t stayed to find them all.

The three people in that room had been dead a while, and the circle of life was in full, disgusting flow: maggots had turned into flies, had fed the spiders, had laid their eggs right next to the next generation of maggots. I couldn’t even see them – it had just been a clear scent of something
tiny
and
blind
and
hungry
, a sense of wriggling at the ends of the Cluster’s torn, scattered limbs.

I sprang out of the back door of the
Saracen
and sucked in breath after breath of cool, grubby air. The dim light in the alley seemed like bright daylight after the claustrophobic darkness inside, and I turned my muzzle to the open sky, letting the faint breeze shift the fur on my neck.

Then something moved, a little crawling something in the fur on my back, and my whole body twitched. I jumped and rolled until I saw the spider drop off and shoot under a pile of bricks, and then pranced a couple of steps sideways, my whole body revolting against the idea of touching anything, ever again. I stumbled against the rough wood of one of the broken-down fences and sprang away again.

I let out a long whine.

It was too late for the Cluster. At least for four of the six. These three, and Angel… What had happened to the other two? And what about their replacements? When they’d died, others must have been chosen, people who happened to be close by. But by now they could be anybody, anywhere. Did they even have any idea what they were, what they’d been sucked into?

For a second I wondered what could’ve torn the Cluster’s arms and legs from their bodies. But then it hit me, and I shut my eyes, trying and failing not to visualise the pigeons swooping in unannounced, catching the Cluster in their spider form, pecking and tearing, and then the bloody blossoming of flesh as they transformed at the point of death...

Is this it?
I wondered, my breath hitching in my chest as I walked away.
Is this all I’m going to find, more pointless death? Has she already destroyed the Horde, and the Rabble too?

I stumbled to a halt.

Has she already destroyed the Skulk?

What if she’s already found out where they live? What if she’s sending the fog there right now?

What if I’ve sent Addie to her death?

I turned on the spot, my paws dancing in an agitated circle, and then forced myself down onto my haunches and scratched at the back of my ear until my skin stopped trying to crawl in all directions.

I had to be practical about this. It wasn’t as if I had a choice, unless you counted lying down right here and waiting for Victoria to find and kill me as a choice, and somehow, despite everything, that was becoming less and less attractive. I didn’t know where Addie had gone. But I did know where the Horde and the Rabble were supposed to meet. If any of them were still alive, then maybe they could help me, and if they were all dead... at least I’d know.

I set off for Aldwych Tube Station under a spreading cloud, my paws feeling heavier with almost every step. Maybe the Horde would be OK. Maybe they’d have their stone and it would be safe and everything would be fine.

But the odds seemed to shrink the closer I came.

Aldwych is an abandoned station just around the corner from Somerset House, near to the Victoria Embankment and Temple tube – and yet, it didn’t occur to me until I was standing right underneath Waterloo Bridge, that I was going to pass the very place I’d escaped Victoria that afternoon.

Had it only been that afternoon?

I imagined for a split second, as I passed under the shadow of the bridge, that she would still be there, waiting, somehow knowing I would come back to this spot. I thought she might lunge out of the shadows towards me, the pigeons that were my parents flapping at her Leboutin heels.

I stopped on the far side and looked up. The side of the bridge was fuzzy to my fox eyes, but I could make out the scent of aerosol paints and the faint, shining swish and curl of the graffiti high overhead. E3’s latest, the Icarus figure falling through the clouds.

I ought to keep moving. I certainly shouldn’t linger here, where I’d only escaped death by the skin of my teeth a couple of hours ago, looking at the pretty pictures.

Except there had to be room in my life for this, because I was probably going to die soon. The knowledge felt innate, like if you cut me open you’d find it written through my bones like a stick of Brighton rock, but it came with a steely certainty that if there wasn’t time for this, there was no point trying to find the Horde or the Rabble, and I should throw myself into the Thames right now and have done with it.

I crossed the road and looked out over the river for a few minutes, as if by staring at the deep black waters I could wash my memory clean, like a palate-cleanser. I could make myself ready for whatever flavour of horror was waiting for me up the hill at the disused Tube station. The cold flowed off the water and I sucked in a few hard breaths.

I was getting tired. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but it had to be after 2am, and I’d spent most of the night running. My paw pads glowed with exhaustion. I really wanted to stop, to lie down here and let the gentle lapping of the Thames and the roar of traffic sing me to sleep.

I walked on towards Aldwych.

The station had been closed for decades, but it still had the iconic Tube entrance with its huge oxblood-red bricks, and the words STRAND STATION in black and white letters under the arched window.

I’d actually been inside once, two or three years ago. Transport for London rent it out to people who want to film in a tube station. They were making that film with Carey Mulligan, and Dad’s company was putting up part of the finance, so we went along on a family outing to watch the pivotal scene where she thinks about throwing herself in front of a train. By the end of the day Dad had made so many inane suggestions to the film crew, and Mum had made so many jibes about how many of Carey Mulligan I weighed, that I wished it was a working station so I could leap onto the tracks myself.

As I passed the side entrance on Surrey Street, heading for the main entrance on the Strand, I stopped dead and took a deep sniff.

I’d suddenly caught a strong, fresh smell of rat, as if out of nowhere. But then it had gone again. I snuffled all around the station, trying to figure out where it was coming from. High above my head I could make out more big black letters: ENTRANCE written over a metal concertina gate, and EXIT over two brown wooden doors with a modern lock. But the rat scent wasn’t near either of them. I retraced my steps, and there it was again, as I passed the front door of the next-door building.

Apart from the station, Surrey Street was lined with thin, tall Georgian town houses. Each one had an area – a deep ditch in front of the house that let light into the basement and allowed servants to take deliveries straight into the kitchen, so the lower class never had to come to the front door. Mum has a similar arrangement with the back gate and the Ocado man. Or... she had.