Creatures of the Pool (33 page)

Where are my customers hiding? Perhaps they’re sheltering in the Moat House at the corner of the square. It’s the
oldest building, a mid-nineteenth-century bank that is now a hotel. Because it was built over a stretch of the moat the cellars are unusually deep, and I’d prefer not to think that anyone feels at home down there. I pace around the giant tenant of the dome to find that the bunches of pillars don’t afford much protection from the downpour. The orb in Victoria’s hand drips like a treasure she has just found in the river or an internal organ she’s offering to Whitechapel and the Pool, and she gazes towards the crossroads as if she’s mocking my fruitless search for customers. One plodding circuit around the hem of her bronze robes shows me only drenched deserted streets. I wouldn’t blame anyone for failing to show up, perhaps on the assumption that I won’t. I’m huddling behind the queen’s massive skirts, the best in the way of shelter that the monument can offer, when a jagged lurid rip appears in the black sky above the river.

The buildings around me seem to lurch forward as though they’re eager to be photographed by the flash, and I glimpse a movement that’s more real. For some reason it puts me in mind of a creature retreating beneath a stone. As the untimely twilight returns with a crash as vast as the sky there’s another movement—more than one. Someone’s wielding an umbrella at the near end of Lord Street, and somebody else is holding one outside a pub on the corner of James Street, among tables and chairs spitting rain.

For a moment I wonder if the newcomers are associated with the Histrionic History troupe. It isn’t just that they’ve grown so theatrically still; their costumes could well be described as historical. Indeed, the outfits look not just so haphazard that they might have been chosen in pitch darkness but positively ancient, close to mouldering, certainly glistening with moisture. However much of that is rain, it’s hardly reassuring. Despite the downpour, the loiterers aren’t holding their umbrellas up. They’re leaning on them.

I’m reminded of the photograph of Joseph Williamson gripping his stick like a blind man. Their motley clothes are
reminiscent of his shabby crumpled garb. I can’t distinguish much else about the watchers in the twilight veiled with rain, and perhaps I’m glad. Though their large round greyish heads are bald, this doesn’t seem to guarantee their gender. Surely the outlines of their wide-mouthed expressionless faces are unstable only with streams of rain, but in spite of the downpour their big eyes don’t blink. I’ll feel less threatened if I wait in the entrance to the law courts. Before I can head that way there’s another vicious flash.

I see what made me think of creatures beneath stones. The umbrellas jerk up to fend off the lightning, inevitably not fast enough. I’m facing the watcher in Lord Street. Its eyes don’t simply wince at the light—they don’t even close so much as shrivel, retreating into the head. The umbrella hides the figure from its rudimentary neck up, but not until I’ve glimpsed two wrinkled indentations in the pallid rubbery flesh where the eyes were. The sight seems as paralysing as the worst nightmare, but I have to move while I’m not being watched. I stumble around the monument towards the law courts, only to lean against the statue like a child clutching at his mother’s skirt. The rain outside the courts seems unnaturally amplified, and now I see why. The drumming lessens as two figures in faded voluminous dresses lower their umbrellas and raise their hairless globular heads to the rain.

Can’t I shout for help? The police may be deep in the courtroom building by now, and I don’t know who else would respond, let alone what may have happened by the time they do. I twist around and wish I hadn’t, though ignorance might be even worse. A fifth watcher has appeared on the corner by the Moat House, and another is crouching over an umbrella on the opposite corner of Castle Street. I’m surrounded, and I have a sense that there’s more of the gang I’ve yet to locate.

If I can see just one person as human as myself I’ll cry for help or even company or perhaps no more than their awareness, which ought to let me make my escape—surely my captors won’t risk being noticed by anyone else. I cling to
this hope until several figures in yellow jackets cross the far end of Lord Street from Paradise Street to Whitechapel. They’re too distant for me to determine whether they’re workmen or police, and suppose they’re neither? So many people wear that sort of item these days it’s no longer a uniform, and how easy is it to obtain? The figures don’t seem bothered by the downpour, and could they hear me at that distance? Before I can find out they vanish into Whitechapel.

While I was preoccupied with them, reinforcements have arrived. Two newcomers in crumpled sodden dungarees are leaning on miniature umbrellas in the gloomy corner between the law courts and the concrete offices at the top of Lord Street. The smallness of the figures is no comfort. They’re too squat, and the lower sections of their unnecessarily large heads are sunk in the unbuttoned collars of their ragged shirts as if they’re neckless. Even if they’re children, this suggests they belong to the family I was lured here to meet. What do they all want of me? In the midst of my panic, which has made me dry-mouthed and so breathless that it feels like drowning in the storm, I wonder if they only mean to keep me here, since they aren’t closing in—if they’re preventing me from going somewhere else. Then, as though my fancy was an inadvertent summons, the watcher on Lord Street advances at a slithery pace.

Every one of its companions follows suit. Half of them I only hear, but the sounds are unpleasantly detailed. The figures take another lopsided step like the next move in a sluggish hopping dance, a ritual rooted in the history of the place, and then they falter. As the umbrellas jerk up in unison, spraying raindrops, I could imagine that I’m watching some nightmarish musical number. The lightning has already faded, and in a few seconds the umbrellas droop, revealing that some faces have eyes again while others are less immediately venturesome. The spectacle pins me where I am, one hand clutching at the queen’s chilly metal robes and finding no hint of security. I’m appalled to realise that
however briefly the cordon was halted, I might have had time to dodge through it. I flinch at a belated peal of thunder, which seems to have used the delay to gather extra violence and which the loose circle of figures takes as a cue to advance in various ways as grotesque as they’re inexorable. The one outside the pub crouches over its umbrella to drag itself forward, which makes its misshapen approach seem even more determined. The scrape of the ferrule on the pavement as the ring of figures closes in sounds like eagerness rendered solid. It ceases as the umbrella swings up, and I hear a dilapidated flapping all around me. The noise makes me think of reptiles stirring in a cave as I bolt down the steps of the monument.

The umbrellas have sunk again, and their bearers have started to peer out of hiding, by the time I reach the top of James Street. The crash of thunder feels like an insubstantial pursuer leaping on my back. The pursuit is altogether more substantial, and I seem to hear at least one participant bounding after me. I’m dashing downhill and across the flooded road to the station when I realise how horribly wrong I’ve gone because of panic. Underground is the last place I want to be.

Nothing would be more welcome than an exodus of passengers, but there’s nobody in sight ahead. Mustn’t there be staff inside the building? As I sprint for it I skid on the streaming pavement and almost collide with the first of a rank of bus shelters, but the leaps behind me don’t hesitate—indeed, I think they’re growing longer. I’ve just regained my balance when a bus swings uphill from the Strand.

Its headlights don’t quite touch me, and by the sound of it they don’t slow down my pursuers. All the same, the bus is a refuge—must be. I stumble around the shelter and thrust my arm out as far as it will stretch, but the bus doesn’t lose any speed. I’m at the wrong stop—I need the lower one. I dash for it, waving my arms, and as the outsize wipers flail the rain they seem to be imitating me or gesturing me away. Before I
reach the middle shelter the bus is past the lowest. I’m almost desperate enough to stagger in front of the vehicle, hoping I’m less of a blur to the driver than he is to me. Instead I lurch at it as it speeds alongside. I’m about to pound on the doors when they fold inwards. “Slow down, pal,” the driver says. “I didn’t want you getting any wetter than you are, that’s all.”

I clamber on the platform and am immediately afraid of being followed by a final leap. “Shut them, then,” I gasp, “or you’ll let it in.”

His wide but low forehead breaks into furrows that appear to squeeze his eyes small. Perhaps he’s offended by being told how to do his job, and I’m close to renewing my demand by the time he shuts the doors. As I fumble for money I croak “Did you see all that?”

“Just saw you, pal,” he says and sends the bus uphill.

The bus is climbing James Street when the driver says “Good one.” He’s enthusing about the latest flash. As far as I can distinguish through the sweeps of the wipers and the constant renewal of rain on the windscreen, the square around the monument and all the roads that lead to it are utterly deserted. Has the lightning sent the creatures back where they came from? Traffic lights halt the bus at the corner of the square, and the driver stares at me until I wonder if he expects me to go back under the dome. I retreat in confusion and return in more of it once he says “Don’t forget your change, pal.”

I grab it from the metal trough beneath his window as the bus turns along Castle Street. Another glare of lightning displays figures huddled in doorways of offices and banks and restaurants. Quite a few are clutching dormant umbrellas, but they all look reasonably normal. “Some that strive to quit the darkness are indistinguishable from the mundane mob, even to their own eyes.” Did I read that among my father’s extracts from John Strong, or did my mother read it to me? I feel as if I dreamed it, and I want to believe that’s the case with my encounter at the monument, because my mind does seem unable to escape some kind of underlying darkness. I don’t think it’s only the gloom of the storm.

I perch on the edge of the front seat, brushing trickles of water out of my eyes again and again. The bus swings into Cook Street and speeds downhill to Victoria Street, where buildings of Victoria’s vintage seem to blanch at my approach.
An onslaught of thunder backs up the lightning and sets car alarms twittering in Mathew Street, alongside the musical cellars. I wish I were hearing my blackbird, however much night it evokes; how long will the Frugone salesman take? The headlights of the disturbed cars blink a warning, which I feel I’ve understood once the bus turns down Sir Thomas Street to Whitechapel.

Yet again I’m back where I saw whatever I saw. I could imagine that I’m compelled to keep retracing the past—not only mine. The city is exerting the compulsion through its layout and the smallness of its original boundaries, but how reassuring is that? The entrance to the underground parking gapes like a cave as the bus swerves up Roe Street, where passengers crowd out of a shelter. I scrutinise every wet face, especially those that widen their eyes at me. Do they think I’m as irrational as I’ve begun to feel? I have to struggle not to look back at them once they sit behind me, so close together that they might all know one another. The bus climbs past the site of the Fall Well and turns along Lime Street, and I’m at my stop.

The moment I alight between two stone lions that stream as if they’ve just risen from the well, the bus shuts its doors and moves off with a swish of water. Have all the passengers turned their waterlogged heads to observe me? Of course they look drowned because the windows are. I dash across the flagged plateau to shelter beneath the portico of St George’s Hall, which revives the chattering of history in my head. The first building on the site was an infirmary that housed a lunatic asylum, close to the location of the courtroom in the Hall—the courtroom where Judge Fitzjames Stephen lost his mind. What may have entered his head overnight that turned him from sympathising with Florence Maybrick to condemning her as a poisoner? He used opium, and perhaps he dreamed of her curious comment that “James took arsenic not to pale his skin”—which Victorians often did—“but to excuse his inhuman pallor.” How could this have driven
the judge mad? A flash of lightning urges me onwards, and so does a sense of the railway underfoot. While I didn’t use the underground, that needn’t mean nothing else did.

As I sprint around the side of the Hall I blink at St John’s Gardens. The only figures I can see are the dripping greenish statues on their plinths, and so I’m pursued just by the thought of the sentries with halberds who used to guard the entrance to the courtroom. What aspect of the past were they meant to conjure up? “All rites have their inception in terror,” John Strong must have written. “The mob enacts them daily, never glimpsing their significance. The more their ancient meanings are forgotten, the more the ignorant shall be compelled to perform the rites.” I feel beset by history or a dream of it, whatever the difference may be, and it’s a relief to leave the Victorian evocations of a bygone era behind at the library entrance.

A guard frowns at me from behind his counter. With my unkempt hair and stubbly face and sodden crumpled clothes I must look little better than homeless. No doubt I leave wet footprints on my way to the lift. As it bears me to the fourth floor I run my hands through my even wetter hair and shake rain from my fingers, spattering the close grey metal walls. A prolonged muffled rumble seems to reverberate beneath me, but the foundations aren’t subsiding into the heath. The absence of lightning before the thunder reminds me how cut off from daylight I am.

Two more frowns greet me across the local history desk. “Sorry about last time,” I say, though only to head off any threat to call security, and then I notice that both women are wearing the badge that says WAD under a hovering drip. “What’s that all about?” I’m determined to discover.