Saul heard the patter of feet around him, isolated squeals of excited rats. He saw a hundred little brown heads peeking from chinks in the bricks.
‘Hi, rats,’ he hissed as he moved.
Ahead of him he saw the ruined metal of a ladder, old and corroded, dribbling its constituent parts into the stream of rainwater. He grasped it, felt it crumble beneath him, scrambled up it before it disintegrated entirely. He pushed at the cover, to poke his head into Edgware Road.
It was the end of twilight. The street was busy with Lebanese patisseries, mini-cab firms and cut-price electrical repair shops, dirty video stores and clothing warehouses with hand-drawn signs advertising their wares. Saul looked over the top of a building site across the road. Away in the west the fringe of the sky was still a beautiful bright blue, shading to black. At the base of the skyline the edges of the buildings looked unnaturally sharp.
Saul slid gently through the hole in the pavement, nonchalant in the knowledge that he could move without being seen or heard, so long as he kept in the shadows, obeyed the rules. Subtly he oozed through the opening, waiting for a gap in the flow of pedestrians, arching his eyebrows, rolling out of the hole in the ground with the smell.
He reached back to replace the manhole cover, and heard a mass of hisses. Peering over the edge, Saul looked into the eyes of dozens of rats, perched precariously on the rotting ladder.
He regarded them. They gazed at him.
He grunted and pulled the cover over the opening, but not fully, leaving a slit of darkness, to which he put his mouth and whispered, ‘Meet me over by the bins.’
In a quick, odd motion Saul bobbed to his feet. He stuck his hands in his pockets, sauntered along the street past the clumps of people. They noticed him suddenly, moved aside and apart for him, frowning at his smell. Behind him a brown bolt shot out of the sewers, followed by another, then a sudden mass. One of the proprietors noticed and shrieked, and all attention focused on the manhole. By then the flow had almost finished and the rats had melted into the interstices of the city, made themselves invisible.
Saul continued walking at the same pace as the street erupted into pandemonium behind him. People snatched themselves away from the hole in the ground.
‘Who the fuck left that open?’ came one yell, along with a mass of Arabic.
Saul slid into the darkness at the edge of the street.
The rats had disappeared now and public-spirited citizens were gingerly shoving the metal cover back into position. Saul turned slowly and leaned against a wall, ostentatious, if only for his own benefit. He inspected his nails.
A few feet away to his right was a mass of bins, some tumbling into each other and spilling bags, the whole smelling faintly of baklava, sullied of course by filth. There was a rustling from the bags. A honey stained head poked up from the black plastic mass. More heads appeared around it.
‘Got yourself some food, then?’ hissed Saul out of the corner of his mouth. ‘That’s good.’
There was a faint screeching from the bins in reply.
A few feet away, in the world of the patisseries, those who had collaborated on resealing the sewers were laughing, unsettled. They were sharing cigarettes and looking around nervously, in case the rats came back.
Saul moved over to the dustbins.
‘Alright, squad,’ he said quietly. ‘Show me what you can do. First alley on the left, quick march, quiet as… mice? Fuck it, I suppose so. Rank yourselves nice for me.’
There was a sudden explosive burst and a hundred brown torpedoes bolted from cover. Saul watched as they disappeared up drains, behind walls, into the darkness which dribbled down from the eaves of the buildings, into the holes between bricks. The bins were suddenly vacant and still.
Saul turned slowly on one heel in a deliberate motion. He dragged his feet, picking them up, dropping them, walking ponderously along the street. He looked down at his chest as he moved. Saul was thinking.
He felt as if he had lost all capacity for urgency.
Saul wondered what he was trying to achieve. Was this revenge? Boredom? A dare?
He was becoming King Rat. Was he? Was that what he was doing? He was not sure at all. He had not asked the rats to follow him, but he wanted to see what he could do with them.
He was aware that he should fear the Piper, that he should think, form a plan, but he could not, not now. He felt untrustworthy, confused, full of betrayal. He would show King Rat. King Rat who had not chased him, not tried to stop him, not urged him to come back.
He did not know what he was about to do, he did not know where he would go, when he would return. But then the very emptiness he felt was a liberation. For a long time he had felt full of guilt about his father, full of his father’s disappointment. Then he had been full of King Rat, full of trepidation and amazement.
Now he was empty, all of a sudden. He felt very alone. He felt light, as if he might evade gravity with every step. As if he had pissed after a day holding it in, or had put down a massive burden he had forgotten he carried. He felt he could blow away in the wind, and he had to keep moving. And each movement, for the first time he could remember, the first time ever, was entirely his own.
There was a screaming from the alley just ahead of him, and he swore and rushed to the corner. He swung around the edge of brick and stared into the shadows. A few feet from the Edgware Road a young woman was lying in the delivery entrance of a shop. She had a dirty face and dirty brown hair. She sat huddled in a greasy blue sleeping-bag, pulling it up tight around her. Her face was shot through with horror, her mouth stretched as if it would split her cheeks. Her voice had run dry. She did not see Saul. She could not take her eyes from the wall before her.
A cascade of rats spewed and bubbled over the edge. The stream was almost soundless, marked only by a low white noise of scratching.
The sleeping-bag slipped slowly from the woman’s hands, and they stayed as they were, frozen, framing her face. Rats simmered around her, looked up at Saul, made sounds of supplication, sought approval. They parted as he strode towards the terror-stricken woman.
She did not look at him, still unable to look anywhere except at the deluge of scuttling bodies. There were more rats there than Saul had seen in the sewers. They had been joined by compatriots from the houses around them. Saul glanced up at them, then turned to the woman.
‘Hey, hey,’ he said gently, and kneeled before her. ‘Don’t panic, shhhhh…’
The woman’s eyes flickered briefly to him and she found her voice.
‘Oh my God do you see them they’re coming for me Jesus Christ…’
She spoke in a strangled screech. It sounded as if there were no air in her lungs, as if it were only fear that was giving her a voice.
Saul grabbed her face in both hands and forced her to look at him. Her eyes were green and open very wide.
‘Listen to me. You won’t understand this, but don’t worry. Shhh, shhh, these rats are mine. They won’t hurt you, do you understand?’
‘But the rats are here to get me and they’re going to get me and…’
‘Shut up!’ There was silence, for a second. ‘Now watch.’ Saul held her head still and slowly moved his aside, until the woman could see the rats which waited in the shadows and, as her eyes widened again and the muscles around her mouth went taut, Saul threw his head back briefly and hissed, ‘Disappear!’
There was a flurry of feet and tails. The rats vanished.
The alley was silent.
Bewilderment crept into the creases on the woman’s face. She looked from side to side as Saul moved away from her. She craned her neck and peered nervously around her. Saul sank to his haunches next to her, sat back against the door. He looked to his right and saw the lights of Edgware Road, only ten feet away. Again he thought: these things take place so close to the real city, and no one can see them. They take place ten feet away, somewhere in another world.