I dragged my fingers out of the pavement, trailing loose chips of black tarmac. Wet dirt, grey, the colour of clay, clung to the length of my arm as I pulled myself free. When my fingertips finally came away, there was a broad tear in the earth, and the air above it wriggled like a desert mirage. The smell of gas is artificially pumped into it at the factory, a dry stink that makes itself known in every part of the nostrils and tickles at the back of the throat. I scrambled to my feet and let it rise around me, watched it spill out around my feet and ankles and, raising my hands, dragged more of it higher even as the red paint I had sprayed onto the ground began to melt, dribble, lose its shape. As the shimmering on the air spread around me, bringing tears to my eyes and making my lungs hurt, I reached into my satchel, digging deep for a much-used lighter that had never lit a cigarette. I slotted it into my bandaged right hand, drawing my coat up around my face and hunching my shoulders to present as small a target as possible.
When the ward broke, it did so fast. The third spectre, Mr
Boom boom boom boom-te-boom
, was still a few yards away. The paint bubbling at my feet gave way, turned black and peeled like dead skin off a corpse.
Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi
put his full weight on his blade, making it jerk forwards and down in an arc meant for my neck. I closed my eyes, and spun the wheel of the cigarette lighter.
I was aware of pain in the vicinity of my left collarbone, but it wasn’t the moment to care. Though my eyes were pressed tight, the flash from the ignition burnt to the back of my retinas like a full summer’s sun. Even with my coat wrapped around me and all the will I could spare focused on keeping the flames away, the heat dried up every inch of my lungs, burnt the inside of my nose, turned my tongue to leather, singed my eyebrows and caused black smoke to dribble from my hair. It was the
thump-hiss
of all igniting gas stoves, and it spread out around from me in a pool of shimmering leakage from deep below the streets, a bright blue centre spitting out a circle of yellow flame. Those windows close by that hadn’t been broken by the spectre’s cry were now blasted inwards, shredding curtains, and embedding glass in every wall. The bins lined up at the recycling point were blasted open and their contents set instantly alight.
It faded quickly, leaving just a
hiss-whine
as the gas still trickling up from the pavement burnt at my feet like a candle, smothered to a tiny core by the falling rain. Every sound I still heard had to seep through a background
whumph
in my ears; every sight seemed dimmer, full of spinning whiteness that followed the movement of my eyeballs. Steam rose in tropical illusion from my hair and coat. The soles of my shoes, their laces charred, ripped away from the tarmac, leaving their impression on the hot earth.
The spectres had been thrown back from the blast, and two of them were still aflame. They staggered in the rain, trying to douse the fires eating through their clothing, revealing the nothingness beneath shreds of sleeve and blackened baggy trousers. Their headphones were still playing the relentless rhythms that marked out each one. A blast that would have stopped an angry mammoth had barely singed these creatures, and bought me not nearly as much time as I’d wanted. I cursed from the bottom of my soul. Feet hissing as my hot soles met the cold, rain-soaked tarmac, I ran.
I was two streets away before breathlessness and a burning in every muscle forced me to slow to an uneasy lope. My mind caught up with the rest of me, and reported another, new sensation - a hot, itchy dribble from just below my left shoulder. I kept walking, tugging my scarf and coat aside to see the problem, and found my shirt stained pink from a mixture of rainwater and blood. A spectre’s knife, though wide of its target, had certainly found something. The bloody gash ran from just below my collarbone to deep beneath my left armpit. With each step I took it opened and shut like it was telling some obscene joke. Turning our face away, we pressed our bandaged hand over the injury, and smothered it from sight. Not too far behind, we heard the spectres’ screams again and the crack of fractured glass. We tried to run, but only managed a few undignified paces before the pain throughout our limbs announced that death was preferable to haste.
A street corner brought me to a road lined with shops, the kind above which sat the owner’s home, lights dimmed and curtains drawn. These were the strange, unlikely businesses driven from the centre of town years ago: discount stores selling nothing but plastic boxes and drying racks, hairdressers specialising in dreadlocks, wholesalers of Jamaican spice, cobblers who cut keys and sold raincoats as well, suspicious computer shops offering 5p-per-minute calls to Zambia. Strange, anorexic mannequins, creatures with waists as thick as my neck, stared out from bargain clothes shops, with scornful eyes. Inside a darkened pub, the bingo machine rippled all the colours of the rainbow, promising a £20 jackpot on only a £1 investment and the spinning of three cherries. From overflowing council bins spilt free newspapers, and takeaway boxes, their contents snuffled out by a prowling, falafel-addicted fox. Cars were only one a minute, and the traffic lights phased red-amber-green-amber-red at nothing except me and the rain.
I could hear . . .
. . . still a long way behind, but no denying what I could hear, I was past the point where imagination lied . . .
Dumdumdumdumdumdumdum
Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi
Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom
Shhhshhhshhhshhha shhhshhhshhhshhha shhhshhhshhhshhha
Spectres always hunted in packs. Four or five was the average, but I’d read an article that reported as many as twelve in some cities.
I staggered down the street, snatching hot neon light from the streetlamps as I went, and bundling it into my clenched fists, bringing its comforting sodium glow close to my face and chest to wash away the fear and the cold, until my skin shone with orange-pink illumination. To my right, a primary school, gates locked, wall high and covered with anti-climb paint. A mosaic by the children, demonstrating that drugs were bad and superheroes were about family. A doctor’s clinic, set back beyond sodden grass turned to mud, blinds drawn, a padlock sealed over the entrance. Launderette on my left, orange plastic chairs set in front of great, sleeping machines; vinyl store, rare enough now to be guaranteed a nerdy audience; locked metal door down to a snooker club; locked wooden door up to a discreet acupuncture clinic; shut post office selling kids’ toys and birthday cards; pharmacy promising YOU a better body; billboards, advertising action movies with strutting heroes, and perfumes worn by women with an elegant naked back.
My own back might end up with a knife in it before the evening was out.
Shhhshhshhhshhha shhhshhhshhhshhha shhhshhhshhh
. . .
When I saw him, it was almost too late. He stepped out of the doorway without a sound, driving his knife up towards my ribs. We caught it by reflex, snatching his wrist and twisting. But all that twisted in response was an empty sleeve; there wasn’t any flesh beneath it to hurt. And still the knife kept coming. I stepped aside - and realised the futility of all my usual responses. There was nothing to kick, no flesh to hurt, nothing to shock nor batter nor damage. I looked into the spectre’s face. It rippled for a moment, then spat hot ash and black exhaust straight back at me. We covered our face, felt the ash burn our sleeves and thick dirt blacken our skin, tripped as we staggered back, half blinded by heat and dust, and sprawled useless in the gutter. Through rising tears, the spectre was a blur coming towards me. I raised my hands and, just this once, the pain helped, gave focus and determination to what must be done. The pavement ticked like metal expanding under a summer sun, cracked, and broke apart. Grey wires sprouted like ivy from the earth. I dragged them up, fuelling their growth with will and fear even as I crawled away from the gutter into the middle of the street. The wires grew, divided, rippled, grew again, wildlife photography speeded up a thousand times; they spread, and uncoiled a flower of barbs. I flung the wires up from beneath the spectre’s feet and ordered them to dig deep into his feet, his legs, crawl up his ankles and wrap around his knees.
The spectre ignored them, his trousers tearing with a slow crunch as he kept on coming, revealing the nothing beneath. But his shoes were a harder proposition: the barbs caught deep and wound down into his trendy trainers, tangling with the shoelaces, which strained but did not tear with the spectre’s uneven lurches towards me. I rolled onto my hands and knees, then got up on my feet; and once more the spectre, trapped by his feet, raised his head to scream, and I was bending beneath the sound and covering my ears, then running down the street at the sound of a thousand brakes locking against old metal casings.
A beggar sleeping in the door of a church looked up as I passed by, somewhere between running and falling. I snapped, “Get out of here!” and kept on going. He just stared. A light came on in a window overhead and a woman’s voice shouted, “What the fuc . . .”
I skirted a small grassy rubbish dump that the council called a “community green space” and turned onto a road overhung by old trees. A maintenance truck was parked ahead, its orange platform raised up high to a broken streetlamp that one guy in a neon jacket was replacing, cold and miserable in the rain. I ran past it, and he ignored me, knowing better than to ask questions of bleeding strangers running through the night.
They were behind me; I didn’t need to look to know. The pain below my collarbone that shock had kept off now began to make itself known. With every step I could feel my flesh open and close like the regular gulp of a goldfish. It was oddly electrifying, as if our body were not our own, but something we carried with us, and our distress someone else’s that we experienced at a remove, like secondary smoking. Given time, that would change, and the thought of what was to come only weakened us further, made our stomach ripple. I saw a square of light off to my right, ignored it, then looked again, and could have laughed or cried.
The place was called “Qwickstop” in bright orange letters on a garish green background. Set out front of its lit-up window was a graveyard of unlikely vegetables and fruit, from the standard bruised apple to fossilised butternut squash, all overhung by a limp awning that dribbled unevenly onto the pavement. On the door a variety of signs advertised such a multitude of wonders, it was incredible that such a small shop could do so much - it was an off-licence, a ticket stop, a mobile phone top-up shop, a member of Neighbourhood Watch, an affiliate of Crimestoppers, an advertising centre for local messages and bulletins, a vendor of the
Evening Standard
, a vendor of the
Willesden Enquirer
, a profferer of fair trade and halal products and finally, most important and stuck up in flashing LEDs in the window, it was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I staggered inside this place of miracles.
There was a man behind the counter, listening to a local pirate station broadcasting in Urdu. He had a salt-and-pepper moustache with its own ecosystem, a bald patch as sterile and reflective as the moon, and a darkish skin, like wax that had dried unevenly across his scalp. He looked at me and decided I was trouble. I smiled as nicely as I could and wiped some of the soot and dust off my face with the corner of my soggy sleeve. He smiled back, like the expression had been sewn into his skin. Struggling to breathe normally, I staggered over to a large glass-fronted refrigerator and pulled out four bottles of the cheapest beer I could find. With my prize I hobbled back to the counter and said, “Pack of fags, please.”
“What kind, sir?” he asked. Always be polite to possible murderers: that was the twenty-four-hour-shopping philosophy.
“Cheapest you’ve got. And the strongest painkillers in the shop.”
The least expensive pack of cigarettes was £5.99. On the back it had a picture of a blackened pair of cancerous lungs. The painkillers’ selling point seemed to be how luminously green and futuristic they were, rather than their chemical content.
“And your Sellotape,” I said.
“What?”
“Sellotape.” A roll of the stuff sat by the till, in a plastic device for easy tearing off.
“This isn’t for sale, sir.”
I leant across the counter. The action set my neck on fire and made my hip tremble. “I’ll give you twenty quid for the Sellotape.”
He answered on instinct. When an offer that good comes along, even the innocent suspect a con. “I’m sorry sir, it’s . . .”
“If you do not give us the Sellotape,” we said through gritted teeth, “you will die. The only question will be whether
they
kill you, or
we
do.”
He looked into our eyes. Once upon a time my eyes had been the same darkish brown as my hair. That had been then. They were now the bright blue of a summer sky, and reflective like the eyes of a cat. He pushed the Sellotape across the counter. I pulled out my wallet, and saw that a line of blood had run down my arm and over my fingers. I counted out forty pounds in stained notes, pushed them towards him, scooped up my beer, cigarettes, drugs and Sellotape, and staggered back out into the night. Behind me, he dialled 999. Forty quid doesn’t buy you much these days.
What I needed now was a quiet place to work. I found a narrow alley, that had been transformed into the local recycling station. I sat on top of the plastic jaw of a wheelie-bin and prised the lid off each beer bottle. We took a swig from one, just to make sure it was all right, then upended each bottle and let the contents dribble away. It wouldn’t be long before the spectres smelt it, even in the rain. I set down the emptied bottles and from the cigarette packet I slid out four white sheaths, carefully lighting each one. The flame flickered and spat in the rain, but these things were designed to catch in any weather, and soon gave a dull glow. I dropped a cigarette into each bottle, watching the smoke fill it. The Sellotape I put in my jacket pocket, the end sticking out ready to be peeled and drawn like a gunslinger’s pistol. Then I waited.