Time's Mistress (13 page)

London on the Brink of Never

The fog was like a thick not-quite black veil shrouding a widow’s face. It was a fitting analogy, Draydon Meer thought as he walked along the blind streets of the grieving city. London, mother of infinite sadness, mistress of melancholy, was as seductive as the gentle sway of a doxy’s hips as she flattered to deceive the coin from lusty fools. London, Goddess of the Smog.

He had been born here, had lived and loved and lied here, and when the time came he would die here in this loneliest of places. He had a stone heart that beat to the rhythms of the city. Brougham carriages and Hansom cabs rattled unseeing and unseen across the cobbled streets, the whinny of the horses and the crack of the whips like blood in his veins. It was a two way relationship, the city gave him life, but he cherished hers and in cherishing it he became her memory—the stones didn’t hold on to their past glories, there was no passion play of ghosts to bring it all back night after night no matter how much the Spiritualists might have wished it otherwise. It was people like Draydon Meer that kept London alive.

He tapped the steel tip of his wolf’s head cane against the cobbles, feeling the street out. He walked with confidence despite the fact that the thick fog made it impossible to see more than a foot in front of his face. The hoi polloi talked about the fog as a good thing, a sign of progress, of industry taking root and mankind flourishing against all the odds. The simple minded fools didn’t dare remember what it was like before the fog came. Meer remembered. It was all he could think about. But then he has lost so much more than the others knew precisely because he remembered.

He bought a punnet of roasted chestnuts from a vendor on the corner of Courtney Place and juggled the hot nuts for a mile, crunching and listening to the ethereal strains of conversation he happened upon. People talked about curious things when they didn’t think there was anyone close enough to overhear. He smiled at the fog-masked lover’s promises and puzzled over the nefarious schemes of no-goods. What was beautiful about both of them was that neither had even the vaguest inkling that the city was dying. Draydon Meer knew it was so because he had lived through it more than once before, and he remembered what it was like back before the smog came. His life had been simple then—there was peace in ignorance. Now he walked with the demons and the devils staring back at him through the plate glass windows of the stores that promised an array of unearthly delights and sweet deceits because he knew things only the dead should know.

He knew what was on the other side of the fog. He knew why the quality of the air itself was changing and it wasn’t what any one of them believed—but that was hardly surprising as they still believed in a god that had long since abandoned them. That was the extent of their science; the options of the world were infinite because their deity’s influence was equally limitless. Odd then, Meer thought, that the fool still insisted on using their faith as both armour to protect them from the worst, and paradoxically, as a sword to lance deep wounds into others who didn’t share their blind faith. It could hardly come as a surprise then that there was so much suffering in the city. No, the air was changing because it was no longer theirs to breathe. That was the truth of it.

It had begun with peculiar lights in the sky, and then the fog had come rising up from the Thames to roll out across the city. It had been nothing more than peculiar temperature inversion, hot and cold thermals reversed, trapping the moisture in the air, but it had become something much more sinister as it spread—it had become a malaise that choked the life out of the weak, the emphysemic, the asthmatic, the bronchial and those who were just plain old. It robbed the city of its vitality lung by wheezing lung.

This wasn’t the London he had grown up in, it was the London of his imagination, as it might have been in another place and another time, all towering gothic spires, brooding gargoyles, shadows and sinister shapes, leeched of all colour by the choking pea-souper. It amused Meer no end that they hadn’t been able to separate the fact from the fiction when they resurrected it to taunt him. Instead of his own personal Hell they had given him something almost magical, recreating all of these wonderful childhood fictions for him and him alone. Because there was no doubt he was alone, even with all of the disembodied voices floating out there just a single step beyond the veil of fog—always that one single step away from him.

It was all about the fog, or rather what lay beyond the fog: nothing. The denizens of the city shuffled about their every day, doing laundry, fighting over fish scraps down at the market, arguing over hard bread and rotten fruit and kicking rats as the vermin spilled out of the gutters to feed on the scraps they dropped during the fighting. They did it every day, caught in a time-loop, playing out the same arguments, flirting with the same whores and wives, offering the same chancer’s smiles and never seeing beyond it. It had become so ingrained within Draydon Meer he could walk the streets with his eyes closed, counting out the paces, twists and swerves to negotiate the crowds without every bumping in to a soul. He had lived this day that many times now the seemingly random acts of life were stamped indelibly on his mind.

Did that make them ghosts?

He walked down streets that would never know the moon falling silver across them, by windows that would never reflect midnight.

Meer still hadn’t worked out why he continued to do this to himself. It was as though his life had become one of those elaborate Chinese finger puzzles—no matter how hard he pulled and worried at it, life only clung on all the more stubbornly. Always and forever was such a long and lonely time. That was the first lesson he had learned. He had thought that perhaps it was even more like a puzzle than he had guessed, that there was some trip or trigger or lesson he had to complete to move on to the next level and slip out of this Hell on earth. That would have given some sort of meaning to the meaningless, but there were no meanings, profound or otherwise. This memory of London was nothing more than existence flashing across the mind of a dying man, that instant of the bullet piercing the temple slowed down to a crawl.

Was that even possible?

Could there be a grain of truth in that old cliché of life flashing before your eyes?

He shook his head. No. There was no truth in it. That much he knew for sure and certain. He had thought for a while that perhaps it was time itself that was broken. Meer remembered the scientists talking about time as a spiral and space as a curve and the way it all rolled out from some central point, the universe expanding until it reached that elastic breaking point and snapped back on itself, everything that had happened rolling back toward the beginning—life in reverse. But even that didn’t work, because that would only mean living through the same day twice, once clockwise, once counter.

On the corner of Piccadilly and Regent Street he saw them. He had walked here in another life. It had been his boy’s favourite place because of the noise and the people and the bright lights and glass buildings of the Trocadero filled with amusement arcades. But of course, that was just another way in which this remembered city was wrong—the post war fog from before the Clean Air Bill juxtaposed with the bright shiny dome of an entertainment pavilion that wouldn’t be built for another fifty years. These were all just fragments of the London of his life.

He reached out instinctively with his left hand to grasp his boy’s smaller one, and lifted him up into his arms. He weighed less than nothing. Meer hugged him fiercely, as though it might be the last time he could. This place had long since stopped being peculiar to Draydon Meer, but that he could simply think about his boy and reach out knowing Jonas would be there despite the fact that two paving slabs earlier he had been alone, well that kind of magic could never become common place.

Meer felt their presence then. It was as familiar as it was vile. He shuddered at the first glimpse of them. He had come to think of them as gargoyles for all that they resembled the gothic stone guardians that watched over the city, but they were more than merely watchers. Across certain parts of the city they scoured the rooftops, the skittering of their claws on the slate tiles an ever-present, like the ruffling of starling feathers and the
caw-caw
of pigeons. They crawled through the high guttering, traversing the city unseen by those below. They weren’t gargoyles though; they were manifestations of his Id. The dark subconscious given wretched form. What that said about the inside of Draydon Meer’s head did not bear thinking about.

They were always lurking around Eros, as though the blind love statue somehow drew them to it. Perhaps it did. They moaned; a low ululating sound that infused the fog with grief. At first they were no more substantial than the other shapes in the mist, but this time as he neared they did not dissipate but rather took on solid form, scuttling forward on hands and knees menacingly. Their grossly malformed heads twisted left and right, nostrils flaring as they breathed in the cloying smog. As one their eyes came around to stare balefully at his boy.

Fight or flight was what it always came down to. The gargoyles clawed their way relentlessly forward, stony eyes fixed on Jonas. The slow drag of their talons on the pavement grated on his nerves. They fixated on the boy because he wasn’t meant to be here. He was wrong. Time was like that, it tried again and again to heal itself. It didn’t take a genius to understand it. Some things were meant to happen and the world would do its damnedest to make sure they did. Jonas’ death was one of those things.

December 9th, 1952. The day was etched onto his soul. It was right in the middle of the worst of the great smogs that had smothered the post-war city. Guys and the other hospitals were overflowing, cars and busses abandoned in the middle of the road. Ambulances led by the drivers holding blazing torches took five hours to carry the sick to the emergency rooms, becoming hearses along the way. Jonas had asthma. His windpipe had closed up as panic closed in, choking the life out of his rag doll body. Meer had held him in his arms, screaming for the ambulance. He leaned up against the metal railings, part of him struck by the irony that those same railings had once been a part of stretchers used to carry the wounded and the dying during the war. When it had finally arrived there had been no oxygen left and seven other people dead and dying inside. The ambulance men had laid Jonas on his side on the floor, not even on a pallet, and told him they had two more pick-ups to make. Meer realised sickly that he had wasted three precious hours that he could never get back and killed his own son in the process. Had he carried him in his arms the five miles across the city he might have made it.

There hadn’t been any gargoyles that day, at least none that crawled and slithered through the fog.

They had barely moved at one mile an hour, the driver too frightened of what he might hit in the fog. Jonas died in his arms, a sad, wheezing, frightened death looking up at him begging Meer to do something to save him.

And now every day he relived December 9
^th
, 1952, he tried to find another way to save his son. He checked his watch, taking the gold fob from his pocket and studying it. Twelve minutes past nine. Jonas had lived eighteen minutes longer than the last time they had walked this way. They had made it this long before. He knew what would happen next. On the stroke of the quarter hour Menlough would appear. Menlough was worse than the gargoyles of his Id by far. Menlough was a reaper. Emaciated and unreasonably tall, Menlough was a clockwork golem, constructed from rusted iron and tarnished brass. Where the wind blew back the tails of his coats it exposed his green heart of cogs and staves instead of flesh and bones. Meer didn’t know where Menlough came from, but the significance of the mechanisms was painfully clear. Time, time, time. They had had too long together, Jonas had to go.

He let go of his son’s hand, knowing it was the last time he would feel its tiny warm presence before their time ran out. The next time he held it that hand would be cold.

“Go! No, not that way, there!” Meer pointed down one of the narrow alleyways that disappeared toward Soho. He had tried saving his son in a hundred different ways, some he had forgotten, and he had tried a thousand variants, clutching the boy to his chest, carrying him through the fog, his sadness salty on his cheek. He had tried to fight Menlough and his kind off but they were remorseless. He had tried to hide, hoping the world would end around him, but then the first bird had fallen from the sky. It had been a sign of the creeping death. He had watched the starling fall. It was always the first. Other birds fell in their hundreds and thousands to turn the street to feather and bone, but the starling was always the first. The tiny creature lay twisted. Its wings were broken. The bird’s blind eyes gazed up at the sky dreaming of avian angels come to carry them home. It had taken him a dozen failures to realise the gargoyles were responsible—and it took him a moment more to realise that he was looking down at one of the wretched creatures now. The end was closing in on them.

He heard the soft flutter of another bird falling and then the flurry of frightened wings and the distant drum of carcass after carcass coming down. He couldn’t see them because of the fog but that didn’t make the sounds any less horrific.

He stumbled forward, trying to draw Menlough away from his boy. “Here! Come here!” Meer flapped his arms, making a show of himself. The creature inclined its mechanical head, the sound of the gears grating loudly. The clockwork man wasn’t alone. Out of the mists eight more of his brethren glided, their feet barely seeming to move as they closed in on Meer. He knew each and every one of them and had come to think of Menlough and his brothers as the Infernals, each somehow representing another Dantesque level to this hell of his. Menlough’s twin Kai Seda, was elemental where his brother was elegant, his fine cogs and gears moving in their intricate dance as he emerged from the smog. Fire blazed in the heart of Arak Shai, the one he thought of as the torturer. He had good reason. A thousand times he had found her leaning down over his boy, the oil of her mechanisms dripping like acid onto Jonas’ grey face. Her silks followed the contours of her body, rippling with the turgid breeze. They moved silently, like ghosts. Footfalls would have been a blessed relief. There was none of the coarseness of Kai Seda or disfiguration of Kor Luca. Her body was perfect in its grotesqueness. The others drifted into the square, taking up positions around the statue. They were the demons of this place.