The Lighthouse at the End of the World, page 10
The woman bolted the remaining distance to the wall and scuttled up it fluidly, her silver skin seeming to prickle with actual light. The smell of the thing behind him hit Oyster: a cross between burning engine oil and stale dog; a stench so overpowering, it was a like a slap in the face. He regained control of his legs.
With a step and a hop, he grabbed the nearest of the joints with his left hand. The wood was damp, and his fingers dislodged a rain of salt crystals that peppered his eyes. His arms ached and his fingers were slipping. Swinging his arm up, he grabbed onto the beam with his other hand. Oyster’s feet scrabbled for a foothold as he pulled himself up. He hung for a second from both hands until the tip of his left toe found a knothole which supported his weight. He felt around overhead for another handhold.
Above him, the woman had climbed almost to the top of the wall. She tugged open a small door and wriggled into it.
“Hey there,” he shouted, but the woman had already disappeared as far as her knees.
Oyster fumbled for his next bit of purchase. He cursed. It was just out of reach. The woman was almost through the wall. If she shut the door behind her, he was royally fucked. He looked down and the ground welled up beneath him. He was sliding sideways. He closed his eyes and exhaled. Standing on tiptoes, he tried to lever himself up far enough to grab the next handhold with his fingertips. Above him, all he could see now was the woman’s booted ankles.
There was nothing for it, thought Oyster: he’d have to do something desperate. He breathed in again and shut his eyes. Then, bracing himself as much as he could, he jumped up with his hands outstretched.
The fingers of one hand closed around another joist and he hung on for dear life. His feet swung like pendulums, scrabbling against the slick patch of wood beneath them. His fingers cracked and his stomach lurched as he glanced down.
Above, the woman’s boots disappeared into the tunnel, kicking free a shower of pebbles that pelted him in the face. Behind him, the pursuing creature gave another cataclysmic bellow. The sound was so deafening he thought the creature must be on top of them. With a heave, he got his other hand onto the joist, and with a shoulder-cracking strain placed his feet on the protruding lip of a wooden beam. He sighed. The door above him was still open. He worked along the wooden ledge and tiptoed to another handhold before levering himself into the passageway.
He glanced back. From this higher vantage point, the creature looked like an office block had mated with a giant cockroach. Black smoke spouted from row upon row of tubes that curled from its flanks. Steam gushed into the sky from vertical slits, pulsing like gills near its head. He looked in vain for joints or bearings, anything that would give away how the legs worked or how it was propelled. In any event, its movement, a monolithic slow-motion scuttle, made him doubt that it was entirely mechanical or animal.
The beast hooted again and there was the sound of a whipcrack. The wall was pounded by a long, leathery tentacle, sending splinters of wood and rock flying in all directions. The thing was trying to shake them loose from the wall. Oyster slammed the trapdoor shut behind him and slithered deep into the safety of the passage, heart pounding.
“We need to shift,” came the woman’s voice. “Almost night.”
Oyster started. He was surprised to see her still waiting there, her strange lights twinkling suddenly in the blackness.
“This really isn’t Kent, is it,” puffed Oyster between breaths.
In answer, she turned tail and crawled through the tunnel. Oyster followed, edging himself further into the wall’s interior.
GREATER LONDON
The passage was narrow, about twenty feet long and full of an assortment of objects: protruding chair legs, tabletops and bicycle pedals. Far from being a part of the wall’s original design, the tunnel appeared to have been hollowed out over a period of days, months or even years. It smelled like a rubbish tip, and he had to take care to avoid cuts and splinters from its uneven surface.
The pounding stopped. The creature had given up trying to catch them. In the silence, Oyster wondered what on earth he was doing. Assuming he could even catch up with the Mannish and get his things back, what would he do then? How would he get back to London?
Ahead of him, the woman opened a small wooden door and slipped over the passage’s lip with practised ease. Oyster followed, blinking in the dim light. Almost plunging into thin air, he pulled himself back inside the tunnel with a yelp.
“Move it, lickyspit,” hissed the girl from below. “Down’s easier than up, innit. Shickle your arse.”
Oyster poked his head out. She was right. Footholds and handholds protruded from all over the wall’s surface. He swung his legs out over the edge and gasped.
Below him and beyond him stretched row after row of buildings in a giddy jumble of styles. Some were simple red-brick two-up two-downs that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Tooting, others were exotic concoctions of enormous bones and dried mud.
In the distance, an oily river snaked through the city’s centre, crisscrossed by ramshackle bridges, each one piled high with structures in a confusion of styles and shapes. Some had lower storeys of wattle and daub, twisting upward into wild golden minarets. Others combined the sombre spires of churches with cranes and derricks that reached down to the river and the paddle boats that ploughed up and down it.
On the river’s far side were buildings of enormous size in marble and gold. One had more monolithic Grecian columns than Oyster could count. Next to it was an enormous semi-spherical red-brick monument. Atop it sat a golden pyramid, a fire at its apex spouting white smoke. The building’s true scale was only revealed when Oyster realised that the dots promenading along its outermost balcony were people.
Nearer his vantage point, the structures were distinctly worn down and built on a much more human scale. Many were constructed from reclaimed materials that Oyster presumed must have been collected from the beach. A nearby pub hung its sign from a repurposed television aerial, while a neighbouring cottage was built entirely from car doors and featured a roof thatched with plastic drinking straws.
“Where the hell am I?” asked Oyster. The question slipped out, not even consciously directed at his companion. This was not like any city he’d ever seen before. Fuck, this wasn’t even like any country he’d ever seen before.
Clouds streaked the greenish-blue above his head, but there was something far too regular about them. It was only then that he realised what he was looking at was actually an enormous dome, decorated to look like the sky. It arched over the entire city, encompassing the beach and the sea beyond it. His head swam with vertigo, and he shut his eyes to steady himself. He felt dizzy and sick.
A cold red sun hung bloody and low on the artificial horizon. His body told him it was still only morning, but here inside the dome, he guessed, it could be any time. Oyster shivered. For an instant, he had the distinct sensation that the sun was looking back at him.
The woman clambered to the ground at speed. She looked like a moth in the dying light, her coat flapping about her like a pair of furry wings. Oyster followed her down.
As he neared the ground, a briny smell assaulted his nostrils. He coughed a little and spat, trying to rid himself of the city’s taste.
Touching down at the bottom of the wall, the ground crackled underfoot. It was littered with thousands of fish bones, some whole, some just tiny skeletal fragments. The woman waited for him in the shadows.
She wrapped herself in her coat and pulled a battered-looking powdered wig over her hair. She stared at him with her marmalade eyes.
“New to Greater London, aren’t you?” she said.
“But this isn’t London.” His words were a whisper.
The woman chuckled.
“Well, it’s the one you happen to be in right now, so you may as well get used to it. Might want to stop walking around with your mouth open, as well.”
Oyster nodded. He swallowed. Whatever had happened to him – crack on the head, drug-induced coma, whatever – he should just roll with it. If he played along with the whole thing, maybe he could pull his head out from between his own buttocks long enough to find a way back home.
“What was that thing, back there?” he said, taking a few crunching steps away from the wall.
“Company looüt,” she replied. “A derelict, I reckon; crew long dead or worse. Looked like she was in heat, too. Probably what scared all the combers off the beach.”
Oyster nodded again. He was trying his best not to freak out. If he was going to make any progress here, he would have to just accept what he saw.
“I thought I saw one of those things disappearing through a sort of hole earlier, in the sky.”
“Yeah,” said the woman. “That’s where they go. Sailing on the outerside of the lid. Fishing trips. Merchanting. Commerce. Profiteering. Taking what they don’t own and selling it for what they don’t spend. Doing whatever turns a gelt out there in the black.”
Oyster nodded, trying to absorb what she was saying while ignoring the lingering feeling that if he’d been a proper ginnals, like Lucas, he’d have taken this all in his stride. He missed Cécile, too. He was sure she’d have been much better at coping with all of this.
The woman gazed at him, unblinking.
“Alright, in any case, we’re just about done for here and now.” She gave him a mocking salute. “Wishing you a good night and all that.” And she turned to walk away.
“Wait up,” said Oyster, running after her. “You can’t leave me here.”
“You do like telling a woman what she can and can’t do, don’t you?”
Oyster reddened.
“It’s not that. It’s just… do you know where I can find the Mannish Boys?”
The woman turned back to him.
“That name’s trouble and I’m just about up to my nubbin already, sweets.”
“You owe me,” said Oyster. “I helped you out. Back on the beach.” He pointed back to the wall with his thumb. He knew it was a dick move, but as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he was desperate. If this woman left him, he’d be totally untethered in this strange, new place.
She snorted.
“I see. That’s how it’s gonna be, is it?”
She leaned towards him and grabbed the neck of his T-shirt, pulling him towards her. Oyster was hypnotised for a moment by the traceries of golden light that trickled around her skin; they glowed brighter for a second.
“Look, Man-Friday,” she continued in a whisper. “You and I both know I could’ve basted that pair of jackdaws with or without your assist.”
Oyster shrugged.
“I don’t know how I got here,” he replied. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is. For all I know, I’m lying in a bed somewhere with one of those beep-beep-beep machines in the corner and a pipe down my neck feeding me baby food.”
The woman shook her head.
“That is both a sorry and totally incomprehensible story all at once. Even so, it’s not my habit to be adopting opaque strays. Not my problem,” she said.
“But I need to get home,” said Oyster. “I gotta look out for my sis. I’m all she’s got. Please.”
The word didn’t come naturally to Oyster. As soon as he said it, part of him despised himself for having to use it. He hated the notion of having to plead, of throwing himself on someone else’s mercy.
The woman’s cheeks and neck shimmered as though sewn with golden thread. She regarded him with a mixture of disdain and curiosity.
“Well, I suppose that is the magic word,” she replied, thinking for a moment. “Lookee, I got errands to run, Man-Friday,” she said, “but I suppose you can follow me into town.”
The light from the sickening sun had faded now and Oyster followed her along the foot of the wall, past a row of darkened houses built from crumbling brick. The air was suddenly alive with the sound of hundreds of flapping wings, and Oyster looked up to see it throbbing with what looked like bats. He shivered. This place really was doing a number on him.
Everything had happened so quickly, his brain hadn’t had time to catch up with the pace of events: the beach, the clerks, the creature. It was all so dreamlike and yet, as the pain in his arm and bruised face confirmed, all so undoubtedly real. And then there was his tattoo. The way it was acting up. It was all connected somehow. It had to be.
Night fell quickly, and he sensed rather than saw how they were penned in on one side by the great black wall and a row of silent, deserted houses on the other. The woman led them to a stretch of scrub strewn with bushes. She bent down to pull at something and promptly disappeared.
Oyster ran after her, fearing she had deserted him once more, but the woman was perched on a rusted metal ladder leading down into a tunnel. She looked up at him with no great enthusiasm.
“What do you call yourself, anyway?” he said.
“Call me Nonesuch, Dry Bob,” she replied before disappearing into the gloom.
POST OFFICE
Nonesuch emitted a low wattage trickle of fairy light, illuminating the way underground. Oyster was fascinated and, if he was honest, slightly repulsed by the way she was able to do this, but he’d already exceeded his quota of questions for the day.
Although there was just enough height for Oyster to stand in the passageway, Nonesuch had to hunch over for the duration of the journey. After an age, they climbed up a passage braced with barrel hoops and emerged into the darkness above. Nonesuch plugged the tunnel’s mouth with a circular piece of tin and disguised it beneath a covering of rocks and fishbones.
They were in a deserted patch of scrubland surrounded by inverted, empty buildings whose unfurnished insides appeared to be on their outsides. The internal radar that helped him recognise and avoid threats was seriously on the fritz in this place.
He wondered idly about the drop money that he’d lost. Then he wondered about Broadsides, hoping his friend had made it away from the cops safe and sound. He pushed the thoughts away. One problem at a time.
And then he thought of Cécile. He hoped she wasn’t fretting about him too much. She was used to him fading for a day or two occasionally, and she had enough green to keep things ticking over for a week or two, maybe more.
“Where is everybody?” he said.
“Curfew,” answered Nonesuch.
They arrived at a modest brick building that superficially resembled the sort of dwelling often converted into post offices or corner shops back in Oyster’s London. It even boasted a broad, wire-reinforced front window.
The house’s walls were coated in overlapping fist-sized bumps. Each one a deep, glossy black, spiralled with blue and green petrol whorls. Oyster prodded one and jumped back with a yelp as it sprouted eight skeletal legs and a tiny red mouth, lined with rows of needle teeth. The creature’s curved back cracked open and iridescent wings fluttered out.
As Oyster watched, two more of the animals descended to settle on the house’s walls. These were the flying creatures he’d mistaken for bats. Nonesuch flicked back the lapel of her coat and exposed a white linen shirt and an expanse of gossamer shoulder beneath. At the top of her arm was a tiny black nipple. Her skin rippled with lightning and one of the creatures flew from its resting place on the wall to suckle at her shoulder. She cooed in response.
“Nuajin here are mostly retired, but this one’s my boy, Bamyasi,” she said, stroking the creature with her other hand. It crawled up to her throat and nuzzled against Nonesuch’s ears.
She turned and whispered something to it that Oyster could not quite make out. The nuajin chittered in return and its wing casings flicked open. With a buzz it flew away into the dark.
“Did you just use that thing to send a message?” he said.
Nonesuch nodded. “Well, the lights are on in there after all, Dry Bob.” She tapped his forehead. “Even if your skin’s too thick and ugly to see.”
“I guess it beats having to find three-bar coverage,” Oyster said.
“My crib,” said Nonesuch, pushing the door open and stepping inside.
She stooped, struck a match and lit an old brass lamp which she passed to Oyster. Long shadows leaped around the room. Rusted metal shelving ran along the walls that flanked the shop window, and at the rear was a counter which had clearly once hosted a cash register.
Nonesuch hustled them to an upstairs room. It was unfurnished except for an out-of-place dirty glass chandelier which hung crookedly from the ceiling. The walls were decorated with peeling, gold-striped wallpaper. An empty gilt frame hung from a far wall. It smelled of mould. Scattered around the carpet were a pair of bedrolls that had been unceremoniously upended and disembowelled, their contents spread across the floor like ersatz snow. In the corner stood a large jug surrounded by a mismatched set of mugs and chipped china cups.
Nonesuch sighed as she surveyed the mess.
“Apologies for the caca-fuego. Clerks have been here too,” she said.
She picked her away across the rubbish-strewn floor to kneel in the corner of the room. She cleared some of the floorboards and whistled into a large knothole at the end of one of them. A staccato crackle came from beneath it. She pressed the end of the floorboard and it upended.
With a twitter, a larger nuajin emerged from under the floor.
“She’s my bro’s,” said Nonesuch by way of explanation. “What they were after, but never found.”
The beetle shone like polished coal. She flew up into the air, making straight for Oyster, who lost his footing and fell over backwards. The nuajin landed on his chest and scuttled towards his face. He yelled, trying to swipe her away.
“Step off,” said Nonesuch. “Nothing to be scared of. And speaking frank, she’s worth more to me than you are.”
The nuajin scuttled under Oyster’s elbow to rest beneath his right armpit.
“Get it off me,” said Oyster, his voice rising in panic. The creature squirmed beneath his arm.
