Time's Mistress (14 page)

None of them moved to stop Jonas as he ran between them.

They never did.

Meer had tried killing himself but that didn’t help. He slid the knife in, eyes flaring as it fell through his fingers because even as they glazed over the smog began to clear and the pain began to fade. The knife never hit the floor. It simply ceased to be in this city fantastique of his mind, this personal hell he confined himself to.

That was what it was, he knew—or at least some detached part of his sub-conscious did. He was in hell, his own personal hell. It wasn’t brimstone and flame for him, no ice, there was merely too little time and a dying boy. There didn’t need to be any more than that to make it unbearable. What could be worse than walking empty fog-wreathed streets clutching his dying boy? Hell did not need the gribblies or the sabre-toothed gwars. It didn’t need anything—because nothing was so much more frightening.

Above him he heard the crackle of static as speakers mounted into the walls crackled into life. They made him jump every time. And the damned whistling! Meer turned round and around again, trying to see where the whistling came from. It was an old war melody being whistled off-key. A moment later he heard the singing, a dry old voice telling him that: “While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style.” It was just another peculiarity of this London he had conjured … a song from fifty years ago meant to keep the spirits of the troops up while shells and shrapnel rained down on them. Here, now, it was anything but inspiring. The refrain ate away at him with its demand that he smile, smile, smile, knowing as he did that there was nothing left to smile about.

The Infernals never spoke—they had no means of projecting words, only the ceaseless tick tock tick tock of their mechanisms. The singer had to be human or at least more mundane than gargoyles or tin pot demons.

“Where are you?” Meer yelled, earning himself those same seven lines over and over again. “What’s the use of worrying?” It taunted, and then up close, so close he could feel the prickle of breath in his ear, “Just smile, smile, smile.”

He lurched forward a stumbling step and spun around.

There was no one there.

There never was.

A part of Draydon Meer suspected he was the mysterious singer—or just another part of him was. No matter how desperately he wanted there to be another being of flesh and blood trapped in this hellish rendition of London with him, he knew he was alone.

He plunged headlong into the fog, running away from the singer, away from the Infernals, toward nowhere, because sometimes nowhere was the best place to be.

He ran down into the ground, staggering down the steps into the Underground. Immediately the quality of the air changed. It was dead air down here, stale and deoxygenated. He thought he saw shadow shapes moving in front of him. He struggled to hear the slap of footsteps on the cold tiles of the tunnel’s floor. The old wooden escalators groaned and wheezed as they lumbered up and down the steep descent. The air smelled of … yesterday. That was the only way he could think of it. “Jonas? Jonas is that you?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Meer took his fop watch out of his pocket again and checked the time. Only four minutes had past. Two hundred and forty seconds. Next to no time, and yet … too much time. Old posters for cigarettes and alcohol lined the sides of the tunnel. The white tiles were smeared black with soot where the creative bill-stickers hadn’t already glued up their adverts.

He heard the whistle of the train—a long, low lament that echoed mournfully down the tracks. He had never seen the train. He heard the steel wheels driving over the track. Heard the screech of the iron breaks and the blare of the horn, but he never saw the train.

He was always too late.

Not today, he promised himself.

“Run, Jonas! Get on the train! Don’t wait for me!” He yelled, hoping the boy would do as he was told, and knowing even as he yelled that the increased exertion from all of the running and the poor quality of the air was going to kill his son. He wouldn’t even reach the platform before he stumbled and fell, wheezing and unable to catch his breath as panic choked the life out of him.

He looked over his shoulder. There were no signs of any of the Infernals. They, like the gargoyles, belonged to London above, not London below. Down here was the realm of the Disenfranchised—the Lost Boys and Girls of London—though they were anything but the gang of Pan’s delinquents the name suggested. The city was every bit as harsh a place as it was fantastic. The Disenfranchised were truly that, lost, spiritually and physically. They were the closest things to ghosts the city had to offer. They were invisible to polite society, wretched souls that clung to the dark places, hiding out in the shadows. Meer ran hard, arms and legs pumping. His feet slipped on the slick floor tiles, his head filled with that damned order to smile, smile, smile. They would be here in less than a minute.

He careened around the bend, grasping the banister and taking the stairs worn smooth by the shuffle of countless feet three and four at a time before he jumped the rest of the way to the bottom.

There was no sign of Jonas.

The silver shell of the train however was nestled up against the platform, its doors open invitingly.

It was less than fifty feet from where he was to the safety of the train. Safety: that was how he thought of the train. It wasn’t a part of the city. It rumbled eternally on beneath it, going to places beyond the fog. Outside. That was all he could think about—that was all his world came down to— getting the boy outside of the city. The fog would be receding already five miles outside of the Square Mile, the East End and the River. It rose from the river first and slipped and slithered through the still-dreaming streets, and when it finally relinquished its choking hold the streets around the riverbanks were always the last to be freed. That was the way of it. Southwalk, Rotherhithe, Wapping and Mill Pond would be the last bastions of the fog. The train would carry them out beyond that, to breathable air.

Breathing hard he ran for it.

Behind him he heard the sighs of the Disenfranchised freeing themselves of their prisons.

A valve hissed somewhere and the doors slid closed. He hit them full on, trying to pry them open with his fingers as the carriage lurched away from the platform. He ran alongside it, pulling at the door but the mechanism refused to give. For ten feet more the train dragged him along the platform, his shoes slipping and sliding across the ceramic floor, and then it spat him out and he went sprawling. He hit the ground hard and lay there gasping.

He saw Jonas’ face pressed up against the glass window, his boy being carried away from him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Meer lay on his side, gasping.

The Disenfranchised gathered around him, clawing at his clothes, at his pockets and at his face and hands, looking to take from him everything he had. He didn’t care. They could not reach the one thing he cared about. He watched the back of the train disappear slowly into the dark tunnel as they stripped him.

He didn’t care what they did to him. They could kill him—strip the flesh from his bones with their filed-down teeth if they wanted to, Jonas was free. He would be out beyond the reach of the fog in air he could breathe and there was nothing any of them, not the Infernals, the gargoyles, the Disenfranchised or even the whistler could do to prevent that.

For once Meer did smile.

Then a sliver of fear wormed its way into his mind as he heard the fabric tear beneath grubby fingers. What if he died? Would it all reset? Would he find himself back out there on the foggy streets looking for a way to save his son? Would death snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or would the world end with Jonas free and alive anyway? Because what father wouldn’t sacrifice himself for his own boy if that was what it came down to?

Their faces were weird, as though they were plastered with the advertising bills, crusted images of pin-up models, lipstick girls and cigarette smoking heroes forming the features of damned. He had never seen them up close before. As he struggled to roll over onto his stomach and stand he saw more of them pushing their way out of the tunnel walls. The tiles cracked and the posters tore as the Disenfranchised tore themselves free of the physical stuff of the city—the very dirt of the place—and shuffled toward the tunnels to block his exit. Low ululating moans escaped their chipped and brittle lips as they swayed, arms outstretched, grasping.

Draydon Meer scrambled to his feet, pushing them away from him. There was nowhere to run, not along the tracks after the train or back up the tunnels toward the surface.

He was trapped.

He roared with frustration, lashing out at them, pushing the creatures—because they weren’t human, not anymore, they were all the things he had lost during his long and lonely life, his innocence, his hope, friends, loves, all of the things he had taken for granted and that had been wrenched away from him—back toward the walls, trying to force them back into the very earth they bled out of.

He drove them back, slamming the flats of his hands into their hard shells. Each impact jarred some vague memory or guilt free as he pounded them with the full force of his fists, desperate to be free. And then a gap opened up among them and he ran without looking back. He saw blood on his clenched fists as he pumped his arms. He didn’t dare risk the mechanical escalator or the lift to the surface. He took the winding stair. One thousand and twenty three steps to the world above and then he was out, beyond the ticket barriers and into the street again.

If anything the fog was worse now.

He looked down at his open hand, half-expecting Jonas to take shape out of the thick grey stuff of the air and it all to begin again, another failure played out, but he didn’t.

He didn’t know what to do. He had never made it this far. He didn’t know whether to walk or run, to hide or to try and find away over one of the bridges. It was growing increasingly difficult to breathe. The fog was choking the life out of him.

He heard the damned whistling again, mocking him now.

“He’s gone,” Meer cried out. “You can’t reach him now. He doesn’t have to move, doesn’t have to run. The train is taking him out beyond the fog. He isn’t going to die this time.”

“Yes he is,” the whistler said. Somehow the man had come up right behind him without Meer hearing so much as a footstep through the broken bodies of the dead birds. They had stopped falling, he realised. The silence was somehow worse. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. No last minute heroics. No salvation. He’ll die this time like every other time because outside of this place he is already dead. That monkey’s gone to heaven.”

“No,” Meer said, denying the man. He didn’t say anything else.

He felt rather than saw the whistler move. The man walked slowly around to face him, his footsteps measured and slow. He was carrying Meer’s wolf’s-head cane. He hadn’t even realised he has lost it. Meer looked up to see his own eyes and lips and hair and everything else looking back at him—but they weren’t the same, not quite. The whistler was in negative, the sunken hollows of his eyes darker than dark, the planes of his brow and ridge of his nose whiter than white—so much so they disappeared within the smog making the whistler look as though he were melting. “But then, so are you,” the whistler said. “This isn’t some fantastic place, some great blue heaven. This is in here,” he tapped at his temple. “None of it is real; it’s a construction, a fabrication, an illusion—all fancy words for the truth: it is a lie. Why do you think there is so much fog? Because there’s nothing beyond it. We’re standing in London on the brink of never—you’ve just sent your boy out into nothing. That, my ignorant friend, is what Hell is. Failing your boy again and again and again and having to live through it for all eternity because you keep thinking you can win. You can’t.”

“That’s not true,” he said, but the words whispered away insidiously inside his mind. Could it be true?

“Why do you think we always let the boy go? Why do you think we never try and stop you, only follow you?”

He didn’t know.

“Yes you do,” the whistler said, party to his thoughts as they raced. “I could try every door in this street and it wouldn’t open, but you, you just have to reach out and the stuff of hell forms behind it. That’s the nature of the Dreamer. You fashion. You move on, it ceases to be. We
have
to follow.”

But if that were true … all he had to do was reach Jonas before he reached the end and disappeared into never.

“You won’t find him, he’s gone, the train only goes so far down the tunnel then it simply ceases to be. He was on the train. That means he’s gone.”

“Is this my punishment? My life dragging out slowly before my eyes while I … what? Die?”

“You’re already dead. I told you.”

“And this is hell?”

“For you.”

“There has to be a way out. Through the fog. Under it,” he looked up to the sky, “over it. I can’t go on watching him die. There has to be a way … ”

“To win? No,” the whistler shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, look down.”

He did. He hadn’t realised that he was clutching Jonas’ warm small hand so tightly. The boy looked up at him with his big trusting eyes.

He wanted to scream.

He picked the wheezing boy up, clutching him close to his chest. He was shaking. They both were. He looked up. The gargoyles were already there, starting to move along the gutters. He looked about frantically for an open door, pushing them as he moved down the street, working his way toward St. Martin’s in the Field, one of the oldest churches with a bell tower in the city.

Time, he thought. Time. Looking up at the face of the huge clock on the side of the church, and seeing the tears in the sky where the gargoyles clawed their way through into this reality.

There was nowhere to run where they could not find him. He knew that, and still he ran.

He didn’t know where he was going until he was climbing the stairs of the old bell tower, his son clutched close to his chest, smothering up against his coat. The wind was fierce as he pushed open the door. For a moment he just stood there, stunned as the fog roiled beneath him. He strained to see beyond its tendrils, out over the rooftops and the river, but there was nothing to see.