Our Lady of the Streets Page 2
Behind her, Pen instinctively gripped the edge of the skylight. ‘I thought these were Blank Streets,’ she protested, ‘not Fever Streets.’
‘Except for the one behind us, looks like. By the feel of it, it’s running at about four hundred degrees. Losing your footing would be—’
‘—uncomfortable?’ Pen proposed.
‘I was going to go with crispy.’
A tearing sound echoed through the morning air, and on a hillside a few miles away a twelve-storey tower block erupted through the pavement like a compound fracture breaking skin. There were many more hills in London these days, where muscles of cable and piping and earth had gone into spasm under its surface, rucking the city up on top of it. In some places the buildings leaned at crazy angles; in others, they toppled from decayed roots like rotten teeth.
Ever since Mater Viae had stepped through from London-Under-Glass the city had been sickening. It was racked with fevers and sweats and the strange brick cataracts they called Blank Streets, but the convulsions were the worst. London was twisting like a tortured man away from a knife, putting Ealing in the east and Norwood in the north and splitting the river into oxbow lakes and pipework waterfalls.
Beth folded her arms and eyed her city’s new skyline.
Canary Wharf reared up from what was now London’s very heart, the only tower still standing true. The Square Mile’s skyscrapers had crashed down around it creating a labyrinth of shattered steel and glass. At night, the aircraft-warning beacon still blinked on and off, and Mater Viae’s Sewermanders went flapping around it like moths at a light bulb.
‘Think she’s at home?’ Pen asked, following Beth’s gaze.
‘Bitch has just got back from a lifetime’s exile,’ Beth replied. ‘I don’t reckon she’s ever planning on leaving home again.’
‘Well, she’d better,’ Pen said, edging cautiously to stand at Beth’s shoulder. ‘I need things back to normal. I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with Primrose Hill right next door to me – no decent clothes shops and everyone’s got a bloody baby.’
Beth grinned. ‘Well, maybe you should explain it to her, just that way.’ She unslung her rucksack and pulled out some chalks and some spray-paints, then knelt and began to sketch on the bricks of the chimneystack. Pen peered over her shoulder, watching the picture emerge. When Beth glanced up, she could see her friend’s scarred lips moving as she tried out lines in her head.
The sun climbed steadily behind Beth as she worked. Eventually, she paused and stood back, stretching out the stiffness in her calves. The partially shaded outlines of herself, Pen and her dad stood out on the bricks. There was a fourth outline too, vaguer than the others: a skinny, barechested boy holding the same railing that was now thrust under Beth’s bag strap. All of them were smiling.
‘Those are good, B – bit tame for you, though, no?’
Beth shrugged. ‘I’d draw you a couple of monsters, but my stuff can’t compete with the real thing.’
Pen laughed.
‘But your picture of me can? Thanks.’
‘No, ’course not … but it’s not supposed to be a portrait so much as a …’ The city-sounds from her body went silent for a second as she searched for the right words. At last she said, ‘It’s like a coin in a wishing-well, you know?’
Pen pursed her lips and stepped up to the picture. Her fingers traced Fil’s outline and then drifted wider and sketched a fifth, invisible, figure on the brick.
She snapped the lid off her marker and wrote:
Out of sight, but not of mind: the shapes of those we’ve left behind
The floors and flaws beneath our feet. The storeys here on our home street.
Beth appraised it slowly. ‘Nice.’
‘You too, B. You been practising? The one of Fil’s pretty much perfect.’ It was too. So was the one of Pen. The only one that was a little off, a little hazy, was Beth’s own.
‘You know me, Pen. It’s how I vent a little—’
She’d been about to say ‘pressure’ but she was cut off by a human scream.
It came from behind them. It was close, maybe two streets away, and Pen was already running before Beth had even turned around, slipping and sliding on the tiles, throwing out her arms for balance. Beth’s heart clamped up in her chest as she tore off after Pen. They crossed the end of a narrow alley, a cul-de-sac where the roofs had a steep rake. Ahead, Pen dropped to all fours and scuttled along the ridge, grasping at it with her hands and feet. It was only then that Beth noticed Pen had shed her shoes and socks for better grip.
Did you learn that trick from your steeplejill? Beth wondered with a pang of mixed jealousy and pride as she followed.
The screaming grew clearer as they crested the peak of the next roof. While Pen scrambled down a drainpipe to the street Beth followed her instinct and jumped – but she landed badly and had to roll. She levered herself up with the spear, careful to avoid putting her hand flat to the pavement. She breathed in as shallowly as she could; the air was burning in her lungs and all her joints felt rusted.
This street was Blank. The walls were unbroken, the houses delineated only by striations of white paint and bare brick. The screaming stopped briefly, breaking into shuddering gasps, and then it began again: high-pitched and young, a girl’s voice, coming from the last house in the terrace.
Beth and Pen looked at each other uncertainly. This was the first human sound to emerge from a Blank Street in months. Pen went to the wall and pressed her hands to the bricks.
‘It’s okay,’ she called into a crack in the mortar like it was an intercom, ‘we’re here. We’ll help you.’
If the screamer heard Pen, she gave no sign of it. This wasn’t a cry in hope of help, not any more. Now it was just sheer animal terror.
Pen looked back over her shoulder at Beth.
Beth knew what she needed to do. She braced herself and approached the wall, clenching the tiny muscles in her feet to close her pores, to keep the street out of her. Yet again she felt the urge to reach out with her consciousness, to probe for what awaited her there, but she couldn’t risk it: she couldn’t trust these pavements. She reversed her grip on her spear.
‘If you can, get back from the wall.’ Beth’s turbine-growl made the bricks vibrate, but the girl trapped inside the terrace didn’t respond.
The first blow almost crippled her. She sucked up the last dregs of energy from her muscles and slammed the base of her spear against the bricks, hard enough to make the whole wall shudder. A hacking cough ripped out of her. Under her feet, the pulse of the street thrummed, enticing her, but she shook her head. She would not feed.
‘Beth?’ Pen asked in alarm, but Beth had already raised the spear and rammed it down again, spraying mortar and dust everywhere. This time the brick shifted inwards and she hurriedly spun the railing around and jammed its point into the gap, worrying at the mortar, wiggling and scraping, digging and hacking. The scream came louder, then multiplied, becoming a dozen screams from a dozen directions. Beth’s arms burned as she levered bits from the wall and smashed at the edges of the hole she’d made to widen it. She felt a breeze as fresh air rushed into the wound in the wall. Next to her, Pen coughed in the dust.
Beth stepped forward, the green wash from her eyes illuminating the darkness inside.
‘Shit.’ Her head swam. The inside of the house was a labyrinth. Passageways opened at bizarre angles onto dusty corridors that stretched for miles into the distance. Stairways looped in mad, tangled curls, climbing beyond the light cast by Beth’s eyes, far above where the roof of the terrace should have bounded them. Doors hung open on hinges set into nothingness; windows lay on the floor, their sashes jammed open onto limitless depths. It looked like every exit stolen from this terrace was here, and the same little girl’s scream came from every one of them.
Pen came to Beth’s shoulder. Beth heard her breath hiss out, then she said, ‘Beth.’ She pointed.
Running from the corner of one of the windows,
like drool from a mouth, was a trickle of drying blood. Beth gazed around the inside of the blank house: every doorway and window frame had similar obscene markings.
Pen set her hands inside the gap and stiffened, ready to lever herself inside, but Beth stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.
‘No.’
‘We have to help her,’
‘There’s no one to help,’ Beth countered hurriedly. ‘She’s already dead.’
‘Beth, I can hear her screaming.’
‘The scream’s all that’s left. It’s just coming from a really long way away. Wherever she is, she’s gone.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do.’
Beth looked at her best friend and prayed that the strange make-up of her voice would hide how uncertain she was; that Pen wouldn’t realise she was only guessing. All she knew for certain was that Pen couldn’t go in there. If she did, she would never find her way out.
Pen shook her head stubbornly. ‘We still have to try.’
‘Pen—’ She broke off. The screaming had ceased.
Something glimmered inside the labyrinth: a light that wasn’t Beth’s own. A smell like burning hair stung her nostrils. She stepped back and looked up. Every single chimney on the terrace had black smoke seeping from it. A roaring sound drew her eyes back to the hole in the wall. Her ears popped as air rushed into the terrace: in every passageway a wall of orange flame stormed up to meet her.
‘Pen—’ Beth said as the ground began to shudder under her, ‘run!’
CHAPTER THREE
Beth relaxed the unseen muscles in her feet and let the city’s essence flow up into her. A wave of dizziness struck and she staggered sideways. Bile boiled up into her throat and she gasped past it, but poisoned as it was, it was still energy. Deep under her skin, urbosynthetic cells fired. It took her one step to recover her balance, and then she accelerated hard.
Beth grabbed Pen around the chest, lifted her bodily off the ground and raced back the way they’d come, Oscar screeching angrily inside her hood. The terrace shook, and shuddered. Tiles clattered from gables and cracks zigzagged between Beth’s feet, but she didn’t break stride. Her breath burned like chemicals in her lungs. Her railing-spear was ready in her right hand; Pen, bundled over her shoulder and shouting incomprehensible obscenities, occupied her left. She looked back as they hit the bottom of the hill and felt something heavy drop into the pit of her gut.
With a low groan, the entire terrace of the Blank Street shook itself free of its foundations and reared up, bunching into coils like a vast, blunt-nosed snake. Chimneystacks rose from its back like dorsal spines, gouting foul black smoke. Fire and rolling smog spumed from the wound Beth had made in its side.
Beth tried to summon more power from the street, more speed, but she was drawing in too many toxins and she staggered. Sweat pricked her brow and a shiver raced under her skin.
Pen was hammering on her back. ‘Beth, put me down!’ Beth ignored her; she had to get Pen away. Oscar was still stirring inside her hood, reacting to her fear. The air whipping past her began to twist into strange geometries. A manhole cover leapt into the air and clanged down hard on the pavement as the Sewermander summoned methane from tunnels below.
Beth couldn’t breathe. She felt sick. Every step was sapping her. A long, blunt-nose shadow bled over her and she looked up to see the Street-Serpent rearing in the air above her. Nestled amongst the ripped foundations and pipes and clods of earth that clung to its belly she saw a design: tower blocks arranged into the spokes of a crown.
With an angry hiss, Oscar flew from Beth’s hood, straight at the beast. He banked hard a moment before he hit the Street-Serpent and Beth saw his metal tongue glint.
Blue fire ignited in the air: a vast gas flame in the shape of a dragon. Oscar’s tiny reptilian body was black at the core of the ghostly blue form. The Sewermander beat his methane wings and shot down the length of the Street-Serpent, bathing it in fire. When he reached the end of it, he wheeled around to see his handiwork, but he screeched in dismay: the Serpent was covered in soot, but otherwise Oscar’s heat hadn’t marked it at all.
A crack split the end of the terrace, right under the peak of the snake’s tiled roof. Beth ran and ran, but she couldn’t get out from under it. She looked up as the crack widened, following the line of the bricks as it broke open into a massive, blunt-toothed mouth. Inside, for just an instant, Beth glimpsed banks of rolling flame consuming banisters and wardrobes and still-living bodies: the fuel the Blank Street had been saving up. It was a creature of fire already; it had no cause to fear Oscar’s.
As the maw came crashing down over her, a voice out of her memory cried, For Thames’ sake! Get the fuck out of the way!
Beth danced sideways as the flaming masonry piled into the asphalt beside her and her world shuddered. She stumbled and fell to her knees, levered herself up and staggered on.
A thin trickle of blood was running from Pen’s ear but she was still hammering on Beth’s arm and shouting, ‘Let me go, Beth!’
Beth shook her head dumbly. No way was she leaving Pen behind here.
‘I’m not suicidal,’ Pen shouted. ‘I’ve got an idea. Just bloody well trust me, all right?’
Startled, Beth released her. Pen reeled a little, but hit the ground running. Beth was shocked to find she didn’t have to brake for her friend to keep pace with her.
Christ, she thought, how slow have I got?
With a grinding roar, the terrace reared back into the air behind them. Brick scraped deafeningly over stone. The Street-Serpent followed, bending stiffly where its houses joined as it undulated after them in sidewinder coils.
Pen reached out and threaded her fingers between Beth’s own. ‘Follow where I lead,’ she gasped. She was half a pace ahead now, her head ducked like a greyhound’s.
Pen dragged and Beth followed. They jinked left down an alleyway. Beth didn’t even see the skip before they were scrambling up over the side of it. They clambered over sodden cardboard and builders’ rubble and then out into the street beyond. Pen hared right between abandoned houses. A wooden gate reared up in front of them but she let go of Beth and threw her shoulder at it and the bolt flew off in a spray of splinters. Beth staggered after her into a garden. Pen dropped to one knee beside the back fence and held her linked hands out in front of her.
‘All those special powers, you didn’t think to grow a couple of inches?’ Pen muttered as Beth stepped into the boost. Pen smiled tightly between the sweat-soaked strands of hair that had escaped her hijab.
Beth hit the road on the other side, and Pen followed an instant later. There was a shockingly loud churning sound behind them, like a garbage compactor filled with rocks. Beth pulled herself far enough back up the fence to see over. Now she understood.
Pen had led them through narrow gaps into each of three parallel roads, and the Street-Serpent was trying to follow. It hurled itself sidelong against the buildings in its path, which gave way with dizzying concussions, but the collapsed masonry was building up against its flanks, slowing it. Beth couldn’t be positive, but it seemed to be moving more sluggishly. She watched as it gathered itself, preparing to throw itself against the next row of houses in its path.
‘That’s inspired, Pen,’ Beth managed. ‘You slowed it down.’
Pen’s reply was a hiss of frustration. ‘I was kind of hoping to stop it. Keep running.’
They turned and ran on, pelting along the pavement, past abandoned cars and empty houses. A viaduct plunged them briefly into darkness as they raced under it, then the sun broke over them again. They came racing up hard on a T-junction. The heat of the day made the air shimmer over the asphalt in the distance.
‘Left at the end,’ Pen gasped between strides. ‘There’s a canal – a way into the sewers, we’ll … lose – hey—!’
Beth had snagged Pen’s jacket and she reeled back, flailing, then skidded onto her arse on the pavement. ‘Ow! B! What th—?’
; She stopped abruptly, staring as Beth pointed at the glimmering heat distortion on the road in front of them. She picked herself up and tried to go on, but after a few steps she threw her arm across her face and turned back. Even from where Beth stood, she could feel the radiation from the Fever Street like a hot wind on her face. When the fevers had first flared, months ago, they’d melted cars and incinerated anyone unlucky enough to be caught walking on them, and it didn’t feel like they’d cooled any.
Pen cast about them for an escape route, but the houses on either side were unbroken terraces with no ways through and no way to climb over. There was nowhere for them to go.
With a whummph of burning wings, Oscar banked and circled over them, calling forlornly to Beth with his quiet fire-crackle voice.
‘Won’t work, buddy,’ Beth replied.
‘What won’t?’ Pen asked urgently. The houses were tall enough to block out the sight of the Street-Serpent, but they could hear it and feel it through the ground, rumbling towards them. ‘Because I’m prepared to consider pretty much anything right now.’
‘He’s saying we should climb on and he’ll carry us out of here.’
‘Oh.’ Pen stared up at the flaming form of the Sewermander. ‘Not to be all “me me me” about it,’ she said tightly, ‘but I think I might find that a little too toasty.’
The grind of masonry on asphalt swelled until Beth thought her eardrums would burst. Behind them, the houses at the far end of the road burst apart in a shower of bricks as the Street-Serpent bulldozed its way through. Its blunt head swayed towards them, just inches from the ground. It slithered down the confined street, wrapped in its own oily smoke.
‘Beth?’
‘What?’ Beth didn’t take her eyes from the thing; she felt like she couldn’t – like the eyeless snake had hypnotised her.
‘Oscar’s right.’
‘What?’
‘Get on him.’ Pen’s voice was quiet, but there was no hesitation in it. ‘Fly away.’
‘Pen?’
‘Yeah.’