In the doorway stands a faceless figure swathed in black linen.
Witch. Vampire. Leper.
He opens his mouth to speak. The Ruskinite steps through the door and peers at him. At least, he assumes it is peering at him. It tilts its head slowly, one way, then the other. Then it ignores him, and goes around him to the shelves.
Jesus. It’s blind.
But no, that’s not true. It steps smoothly around him, around the clutter on the floor, seasick steps.
It’s not interested in him.
He stands in the middle of the tiny storeroom, very still, wondering what to do. Then, very slowly, he moves towards the door.
The Ruskinite lunges forward, hands shooting out in a straight line towards him. The linen makes a sharp crack as it whips against itself. Joe jerks his face and neck out of danger, but the hands—gloved hands swaddled in cloth, bony hands, fleshless under the linen—are reaching for his arms to pin him, and they are ludicrously strong. Narrow fingers like handcuffs and immovable muscles lock him in place. The featureless face seeking his own, but under the cowl there must be a mask; the head pressed against his as they struggle is hard. He tries to punch: no give. He tries to separate his arms. The cloth-covered face snakes towards him again, very fast. He moves his head and hears a mouth snap shut like a beak. There’s a solidity to the bite, like the door of an expensive car closing. Sharp teeth. Jesus. He hears a rasping sound he hopes is breathing. There is a fear growing in him, deep in the gut and powerfully strange, that this is not a man at all.
Flee. Fight. Survive.
His entire life has been about flight for so long that his instincts for fight are rusty, but here, in this tight little space with the river on one side and the dark passages of London’s past on the other, there is nowhere to run to. The monster has come, and the retreat is closed off. Clumsily, he gathers his legs and surges upwards. It’s… oddly easy. He’s strong. Stronger than he usually thinks about. At the same time, he has a sense that the Ruskinite is trying to restrain him rather than kill him. Perhaps they have orders regarding Joe Spork.
Not reassuring, actually.
He lifts the Ruskinite into the air and slams him against a wall, using his enemy as a cushion. No response. Not even a gasp. He does it again, and feels the grip on his right hand loosen slightly. He lifts and surges again. And again. They grapple, winding around one another. Joe moves closer, forearm braced under the other’s chin so it doesn’t bite, his shoulder grinding into the enemy’s armpit to take that hand out of the fight. All the time, the head is reaching for him, a constant, jerking, snake-strike motion which is somehow very wrong, and very frightening. Joe yells something wordless which means get off! and shoves his enemy back, hard. It’s an explosion from the heels, through the hips, into the hands: the whole of his weight and muscle going into the other’s chest.
The Ruskinite flies back into the old, metal-braced shelves, and hangs there, jerking sharply and rasping as if stuck on something. Joe edges around him, and peers.
One of the struts has come away from the wall and the shelf. The sharp, pointed metal end comes to a halt in the shoulder of Joe’s enemy, and he hangs there, pinned like a butterfly. From his mouth emerges a low, rasping hiss. After a moment, he begins to inch his way forward off the spike.
Joe Spork turns and runs for the door, slamming it behind him. Polly Cradle is just bringing the whaler into the dock.
“Get us the fuck out of here!” he shouts, then, rather embarrassed, appends a more Joe-ish “please,” but Polly has already spun the whaler in a tight arc and twisted the throttle, and the little boat is virtually standing on its end.
“Are you okay?” she yells back.
“Yes.” And then on sober reflection, because it seems in retrospect that he has just impaled a man on a shelving unit, “No. I hurt someone. I don’t know what that means.”
“It means he didn’t hurt you,” she says firmly, and reaches out to poke him, making sure he’s all still there.
They leave the whaler with Griff Watson and tell him to take his family to France for a long holiday. When Griff opens his mouth to explain that he can’t, Polly Cradle assures him money will appear in his account to cover the cost. It’s just to be on the safe side, she says, and she knows a hotel where they’ll spoil them rotten. There will also be work for him and Abbie when they return, to whatever extent they want it. Positions will be found, educational bursaries made available for the children. Things will be arranged so that none of these blessings place the Watsons in the clutches of the system. The Cradle umbrella has opened over their heads as of this moment.
Joe Spork watches her tread the narrow line between charity and bribery without ruffling Griff’s feathers. He says nothing, admiring her skill and fearful that his big, clumping feet in the conversation will ruin what she has done. Then they get back in the car and head off, away from the warehouse and into the wilds of Hackney, on a road running along the side of a bizarrely rural scene of cows and a purple sunset.
“I couldn’t have done that,” he tells her, watching the cows. “I couldn’t have found the words.”
But when Polly proposes that one adventure is enough, Joe becomes obstinate, and persuades her—she is afterwards absolutely unable to say how—to make one more stop before they go home.
IX
Women of Consequence;
the Treasure of Mansura;
Habakuk.
Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life. She realises she had no idea what she was expecting, but if she had been expecting anything it wasn’t this. Dotty Catty’s bedroom is papered in a very fine rose and green vertical stripe. There’s a picture rail, and a lot of tables with doilies. A china cow sits on the mantel, the base declaring it a present from Salisbury, and a red baize card table is covered in writing paper, all weighted down with a metal model of the Westminster Clock Tower.
And yet, this is not the Dotty Catty she saw at dinner, or even the author of the letter which brought her here; the affronted trout is gone, and the waffly old broad and former socialite is not in res. This is Dowager-Khatun Dalan, wearing a simple white robe and gown and with her aged hands trembling ever so slightly in her lap. There is a smear of soot on her left thumb—lighting her own lamps?—and she looks as if she’s just run a marathon. Not surprising, in context. This is something of a big moment for her. Softly, softly, lest the old dear take fright and this mission be for naught.
“My son murdered my husband and his brother, Commander Banister.”
“Yes,” Edie says. “I know.” Because what the Hell else do you say to a statement like that? She stays on the windowsill, her hands flat on the stone, legs dangling like a child’s.
“He burned my grandson in an iron box.”
“Yes.”
“He is still my son,” the Dowager-Khatun says. “What can I do? He is still my son. I should not love him any more. I hate him. But he is still my son. So I hate him, and when I hate him the most, I see him when he was very young and I remember the way he looked at me, and I wonder what it was that I did so very, very badly that he became this man. This perfect, awful man. This Opium Khan of Addeh Sikkim, that all the world knows is a monster. That makes me a monster’s mother. Grendels modor. Wretched hag… But am I also aglœc-wif? That’s the question…” And, seeing Edie’s blank look, “Have you read Beowulf?”