Un Lun Dun (37 page)

75

The Room Nowhere

“It’s really not happy, is it?” said Obaday Fing.

It was early night, and the stars moved above them. Deeba and her companions examined their captive in the almost-full loon, and the faint glow from windows at the edges of the square. The cobweb curves of the huge abbey moved gently in the wind.

“I simply can’t believe it,” said Bishop Bon.

“I’m terribly impressed,” said Bastor.

The window rattled and shook, still pinned to the bait. Skool kept the cord attached to its bonds taut.

“Let’s get on with it,” Jones said. “This bloody thing’s strong.”

They looked down through the glass.

In the room behind the window, the bulb dangled horizontally, and the wall the pistol was attached to looked like a floor below them. Next to it was a closed wooden door. It was only about six feet away.

“So that’s the UnGun,” said Hemi.

It was a very big, heavy revolver, like the ones Deeba had seen in cowboy films. She leaned close to the glass, and the window opened and slammed like teeth. They all jumped back.

“Right, so we get a rope with a hook, and we dangle it inside, and grab it,” said Obaday.

Hemi wedged a hefty plank of wood in the window’s opening, to its obvious fury. Its snared legs were twitching. Skool struggled to hold it.

“Come on!” said Jones.

“Here we are, here we are,” said Obaday. But when he dangled a hook of bent piping on his spider-silk rope through the open window on the pavement, something strange happened. As soon as the rope passed through the window’s opening, it immediately changed direction, and fell sideways.

Obaday stood with a rather stupid expression on his face. The rope dangled in an L-shape, down to the window, then inside at a right angle.

“It’s ’cause down’s a different direction there,” Deeba said. “That’s not a floor below us, it’s a wall. We need something stiff.”

They tried with the bishop’s staffs, but they couldn’t reach the UnGun.

“Whatever you’re going to do,” said Jones, watching Skool struggle, “may I ask you to speed up?” Deeba heard creaking from the wood keeping the Black Window open.

Everyone looked at each other.

“I knew it,” Deeba said, and before she had time to reconsider, she sighed and stepped into the open window.

Deeba heard her friends’ appalled shrieks as she slipped through.

She experienced a very peculiar fall, changing direction beyond the glass. She twisted, and rolled on the floor of the little room.

“Deeba!” she heard. “Get out of there!”

She looked out the window at her friends. They were looking down at her, from her angle seeming to jut straight out of a wall beyond the glass. Hemi was reaching urgently through the window.

“One second,” she said.

Opposite her on the wall was the UnGun.

Deeba walked across the concrete floor, her friends urging her to hurry. She felt unnaturally sensitive, noticing the cracks beneath her feet and on the walls around her. She heard the lightbulb buzzing.

When she closed her hand around the wooden grip of the UnGun on the wall, she braced herself, expecting to be hardly able to pick it up. She lifted it.

It was lighter than she had expected. She hefted it in her hand, examined it.

It was battered and mottled with rust. She flicked the bullet compartment in the middle. It spun.

Deeba could still hear buzzing, but she wasn’t sure it came from the lightbulb now. She stood very still, and listened. She closed her eyes.
I could fall asleep,
she thought.

The noise was coming from behind the door. She put a hand on the wood. There were unclear sounds in the room, or corridor, or whatever was beyond it.
I could open it and go exploring,
she thought.
If this place has the UnGun in it…what else might be here? Maybe there’s a garden. Or a bedroom. Or a phone…I could call home again!

She put her hand slowly to the handle.

Something was bothering her. She paused and wondered what it might be. She couldn’t think what was wrong.

“Deeba,” she heard, for what she realized was the second time. “Turn around.”

She did so, curiously, and there were her friends, staring down, sideways, through the window, beckoning.

The view beyond the window was shaking violently, and Deeba realized that the window must have nearly pulled itself free. With a cold rush, she woke back into herself. She had been in some kind of dream.

“Come on!” shouted Hemi. “Let go of the door!”

Even as he spoke, Deeba saw one of the Black Window’s legs swing up into view, free of its bonds. It pulled the wedge of wood out from under its sash.

The window slammed shut.

Deeba saw the horror on her friends’ faces, but she could no longer hear them. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Deeba raised her arm, and hurled the UnGun as hard as she could.

The big pistol spun in the air, crossing the room, straight into the very center of one of the panes. The glass exploded into hundreds of pieces, and the window spasmed.

Deeba ran.

She watched Hemi, then Obaday, then Jones and the utterlings try to grab the pistol as it passed into UnLondon. It was traveling straight
up
to them, and at the end of its trajectory, it would pause and come back at her.

She was halfway to the broken window, and she saw another of its legs pull free.

The UnGun had reversed direction. She and it were racing towards each other. As she reached the jagged edge of glass, she saw one of the bishops’ crooks reach out of nowhere, hook the pistol through the trigger guard, and yank it out of sight.

Deeba put her hands in front of her face, screamed, and dived through the broken window.

She felt her hair brush at fringes of glass still in the frame. She kept her eyes closed. As she passed through the window, gravity twitched around her again, and suddenly she was rising, not diving, and was grabbed by helpful hands.

“Deeba! Deeba! You’re alright! You’re back!” Her friends crowded around her, and she opened her eyes.

“What happened?” said Hemi. “You went all weird!”

“I dunno,” she said. “I was sort of dreaming. It was something in that room, it…Where’s the window?” she shouted.

“Gone,” said Jones.

It was several feet away, where Skool had kicked it as she leapt free. The wounded spider-window was pulling itself away from the ruined bait. It limped back into the shadows around Webminster Abbey. Deeba let her heartbeat slow.

“I almost,” Deeba said, “
almost
feel a bit sorry for it.” She hugged each of her friends in turn, including, to their obvious delight, the bishops. Dangling on the end of Bon’s staff was the pistol. He twirled it ostentatiously.

“We
got
it,” Deeba said.

They crowded around the UnGun.

“It’s amazing,” said Hemi.

“It looks ancient,” said Obaday.

“Someone actually managed to bring something back,” said Bon.

“A successful ’naut. I never thought I’d see it,” said Bastor.

“It’s not loaded,” said Jones. “Where are the bullets?”

Silence settled on them.

“Pardon?” said Deeba.

“I…it’s…” Jones said, hesitant under her stare. He pointed at it. “…unloaded…Bullets?”

“Ammo,” said Deeba. “Right.” And fainted.

76

Dwellers in the Smoke

Deeba listlessly played with the remains of her food.

After she had come to, her friends clucking frantically around her, they had agreed it was exhaustion and stress that had knocked her out. She seemed to have no ill effects.

The bishops had fetched food, chairs, and a table from an emptish house nearby, and they had sat down to eat in front of the abbey. It was the first hot meal Deeba had had for a long time, and though it was a bizarre, mixed-up picnic—eggs, potatoes, salad, curry, chocolate, fruit, olives, and spaghetti—it made her feel better, at least physically.

There was no improving her temper, however, nor that of her friends. The realization that after all they’d gone through to get the UnGun, they were missing a vital component, had put them all in terrible and argumentative moods.

“We have to go back,” Jones repeated, glowering over the remains of supper.

“Are you crazy?” said Obaday. “We don’t even know where the bullets are.”

“They must be in same room as the UnGun,” Jones said. “Stands to reason.”

“That makes perfect sense,” said Bishop Bon, just as Bishop Bastor said, “We can’t assume any such thing.” They stared at each other.

“Deeba is not going back in there,” said Hemi.

“No one’s asking her to,” said Jones. “I’ll go.”

“It’s too risky,” said Obaday.

“The bloody gun’s pointless without them!” said Jones.

“How are we supposed to get the window back?” said Hemi.

“It’s an insect, not a philosopher!” Jones shouted. “We’ll just trap it the same way again.”

And on and on, around the argument went, repeating itself in loops. Deeba sat in surly silence, as she had since the beginning, playing aimlessly with the UnGun.
Spiders aren’t insects,
she thought, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t imagine the correction would go down well just then.

She rubbed the UnGun’s smooth handle, opened the revolving cylinder as Jones had shown her, and stared for what felt like the thousandth time into the six empty chambers. Yet again, Deeba tried to remember if she had seen any bullets—or anything else at all—in the room behind the Black Window.

Yet again, she had to admit that her memory of that time was hazy, and that she couldn’t be sure. But she didn’t think she’d seen anything.

The loon shone onto the midnight meal and the billowing silk. In its gray light, Deeba saw a little caravan of ants crossing the table, passing morsels of food back along the line, rummaging among the remnants.

Her friends kept arguing. Deeba ignored them.

She tried to work out how the pistol was loaded. Deeba picked up a big grape pip and idly dropped it into one of the slots. She jumped when she saw that an ant was on her fingers.

It trotted off, following the trail of juice clockwise around the rim of the cylinder, crawled busily into one of the holes.

“Get out of there,” Deeba muttered, and shook the UnGun. From her pocket she took a scrap of paper, twisted it, and poked it gently after the ant.

The paper wedged in the chamber, just as the ant crawled out from under it, and straight in to the next hole along. Deeba swore.

She tried to entice the insect out with a pinch of sugar from the table, sprinkling it on the edge of the cylinder. Then with a sudden suspicion, she licked her finger. The grains were not sugar but salt.

Deeba swore again, and laughed without any humor. Things were just not going her way.

Her friends continued their bad-tempered exchange. Deeba picked up one of the broken bricks from when they had made their bait window, which lay discarded and redundant. She carved her initials in the brick with her fork, sending little chips of it onto the table around her, and into the UnGun.

The arguments were exasperating her. She sighed, wound a hair around her finger and plucked it out to fiddle with it, huffily scrunched it into a little matted wad, and dropped it into the mechanism. With a sniff of impatience she closed the cylinder, the ant still inside it, and spun it, watched it whir, then slapped it still.

“There’s no point to this,” she announced. They were all quiet. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“We should do something quick,” said Jones.

“What are we going to do?” said Deeba. She turned the UnGun over and over in her hand. “We’re knackered. You’re right—this stupid thing’s useless without bullets. But the rest of you’re right too—we can’t go back now.”

“Propheseers and Unbrellissimo are going to track us down soon,” said Hemi.

“I know, but what can we do?” said Deeba, meaning
I’m too knackered.
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll have to take the bus back to the Talklands and I’ll call my mum and dad again, and buy us a bit of time with the phlegm effect, and we’ll come back then, or something.”

She fiddled with the UnGun’s cylinder, to empty it of the rubbish inside.

It wouldn’t budge.

She frowned, and tried again, without success.

“Jones,” she said. “Could you open this please?”

“What did you do?” he said grumpily, struggling with it. “It’s jammed.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Deeba said, then hesitated. “I was seeing how it worked.”

Jones pulled and twisted at it, but it stayed firmly shut. He eyed her.

“What did you put in this?” he said. Everyone looked at Deeba.

“Nothing. Just…stuff,” said Deeba. “I was seeing how it worked. Give me that.” She grabbed it back, and tried again and failed again to open it herself.

“Well, that solves that,” snapped Hemi. “There’s no point trying to get bullets when the UnGun’s broken.”

“I can fix it!” said Deeba desperately. “Just give me a minute.”

“Deeba,” said Obaday Fing gently, and laid his hand on the pistol’s barrel. “Stop.”

She stared at him, and her grip faltered. At that moment, there was a scream.

Something rushed overhead, with a noise like a flock of heavy wings. Several voices cried out maniacally together from the sky. In almost the same instant, Deeba heard the words “Boss,” “Message,” “In,” “From,” “Go,” and “You,” shouted in different, but similar voices.

“What’s that?” she said as crazy laughter and the sound of rushing diminished above her. There was a creaking, the noise of heavy thumping.

“What
is
that?” Jones said.

“Can that have been—” Bishop Bon said.

“—the Hex?” said Bastor. They stared at each other.

“Passing something on?” said Bon.

“‘Message from Boss…’” said Bastor.

“‘In you go.’ Who are they talking to?” said Bon.

There was another scream.

Lights came on in houses, and sleepy people of all shapes peered out.

Panicked UnLondoners came running into view. They wore pajamas or nighties, or T-shirts and boxer shorts, or nothing at all. They ran, children, adults, and the elderly; animals and people and the halfway things of the abcity.

“What’s happening?” shouted Bishop Bon.

From behind a corner at the edge of the square, from the darkness beyond the trembling edges of Webminster Abbey, an enormous shape came lumbering out of the night.

It was clammy-looking and sickly pale. It padded like a clumsy cat. Its body was a pudgy hairless lion’s, but its head was that of an enormous, blindly groping earthworm. It nosed into the bricks and concrete and tar, turning them by some chemical exudations into mulch.

Behind it were other grub-white figures, herding terrified locals before them. They seemed to drag darkness behind them. Deeba realized that they were walking in a bank of spreading, dirty smoke.

“Smoglodytes!” she said.

These were very different from the ones that had paid court to the Unstible-thing when it threatened her. Those had been small and tentative, living in the shallows of the poison. These, now, were mutants from the deeps of the Smog, and they were huge.

Behind the lionworm was a presence like a noseless man’s face on stumpy caterpillar legs; something flying on one bat’s wing and one vulture’s; a gorilla with enormous whiteless eyes in its chest; and others, an impossible variety of impossible shapes. All were colorless. All had either large eyes or no eyes, and bulky filter-noses or huge nostrils or none.

The smoglodytes gnawed and clawed or suckered or whatever at buildings, and even, Deeba saw in horror, at a few UnLondoners too slow to get out of their way, who, with horrified wails, were pulled into the rolling Smog and disappeared.

“They’re claiming the neighborhood!” Hemi said. Locals fled desperately past them, carrying what few possessions they had grabbed. Several gripped unbrellas, opening them in terror, and holding them like shields.

“Everyone move!” shouted Jones. Deeba grabbed one old man’s bags, helped him to the edge of the square. Skool picked up a fallen escapee under each arm, and hauled them out of the road. Deeba and her friends struggled to help the UnLondoners away.

“We have to get out of here!” Hemi shouted. The smoglodytes and the thick Smog they breathed came ominously fast. The outer fringes of the Smog had reached the web, which shook strangely. From a couple of the dark funnels wooden jointed legs twitched.

They’re going to come out,
thought Deeba.
When the Smog gets inside, they won’t be able to breathe.
Any moment, as well as predatory monstrosities and choking fumes, the streets would be full of panicking spider-windows. There was no way the locals would get away.

There was no way
she
would get away.

“Deeba!” Hemi shouted. A smoglodytic tentacled goat-thing was bearing down on her faster than she could run. With a despairing cry, she raised her hands.