‘What am I supposed to do?’ Sophie asked.
‘Don’t think. Just feel.’
Mallory was surprised to see that Church was now oblivious to the threat of the spiders. He had returned the sword to a scabbard strapped across his back and was standing with his hands pressed against the glass, looking out over the Thames and the lights of the City.
Mallory kicked out at the nearest spiders. The toe of his boot soon hung ragged where it had made contact with them. ‘A little help here, maybe?’
‘I am helping,’ Church said quietly. ‘You need to lighten up.’
Behind the skyscrapers of the financial quarter, lightning illuminated the clouds. ‘Okay,’ Church said to Ruth. ‘Do your stuff.’
Ruth bowed her head, her hair falling across her face. The stale air of the stairwell suddenly took on the freshness of the seaside and the advancing spiders came to a hesitant stop. All movement in the stairwell ceased. Outside, a distant rumble of thunder; another flash of lightning.
Sophie stiffened, her eyelids fluttering as a flush coloured her cheeks. The hand Mallory still held was limp and unresponsive.
‘Now would be good,’ Church said.
Ruth threw her head back and said a single word. Mallory was brought to his knees by a force that came from nowhere. In an eerie silence, the windows blew out, glass shards glittering as they fell to the railway far below. Standing on the brink, Church was oblivious to the powerfully gusting wind that raged inside, threatening to pluck them all out.
Sophie staggered, shook her head. ‘What the hell happened there?’ As she came to her senses, she noticed a curious thing: the spiders had moved back several feet. ‘They’re scared,’ she said, puzzled. ‘Of us.’
‘It’ll pass.’ Ruth grasped Church’s shoulder and he slid his arm around her waist; automatic, familiar gestures in which Mallory recognised tenderness. ‘This would not be a good time to screw up.’
‘Don’t worry. Look.’
Mallory followed Church’s pointing arm to a strange motion in the sky far away over the City. The lights of the Lloyd’s Building were briefly obscured before reappearing.
‘The spiders are moving again,’ Sophie warned.
Mallory was fascinated by the shifting patterns of shadow and light outside. Gold and red flared briefly against the towering structures. Deep in the dark at the back of his head, where his true self had been locked away for too long, memories stirred: feelings of danger, awe and wonder.
Church saw the thoughts play across Mallory’s face. ‘The world doesn’t have to be like this,’ he said.
‘Church, we can’t wait any longer.’ The urgency in Ruth’s voice jolted them both from their reflection.
The spiders inched forward, gaining confidence.
‘Whatever you did … can’t you do it again?’ Mallory asked.
‘It doesn’t work like that.’ An edge of weariness sharpened Ruth’s words. She pressed Sophie back towards Mallory and Church at the window.
Another strong gust. Mallory grabbed the window jamb to stop himself being pulled out. He had a brief, head-spinning view down the vast expanse of the tower to the railway line so far below it was barely visible.
‘Okay, out there,’ Church said decisively. He motioned to a thin ledge that ran around the outside of the tower just below the window.
‘You’re joking!’ Mallory saw that Church wasn’t.
‘Come up with a better plan, you get to be king.’ Steeling himself, Church stepped out of the window, pressing his back against the smooth wall of the tower. Mallory could see the strain in his face as he forced himself not to look down. The wind gusted, a deafening roar.
A surge of spiders drove Mallory, Sophie and Ruth out after him. Sophie gave a small cry, her face drained of blood, and Mallory grabbed her and pressed her back as she almost lurched over the edge.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Mallory yelled to Church over the wind. ‘There’s nowhere to go from here! Why did I ever come with you?’
‘Because you chose life.’
Mallory’s ironic laugh was stolen from his lips by the raging wind. He could barely hold on. Closing his eyes, he thought he was going to be sick.
‘Keep moving,’ Ruth shouted. ‘The spiders are still coming.’
‘This is pointless!’ Mallory yelled. ‘We’re all dead!’
‘I’m trying to buy us some time.’ Church edged further along the ledge.
Eyes screwed shut, Sophie was paralysed, barely even breathing. Closing his own eyes so he didn’t have to see the drop, Mallory squeezed her hand and urged her to match him step for step along the ledge. The wind tugged at his feet, slipped behind his back and lifted him away from the wall. He forced himself against it, gasping. ‘Nowhere to go,’ he said to himself.
‘Yes, there is,’ Church shouted. ‘Look!’
Above the Thames, whatever Mallory had spied earlier was moving closer. Occasionally it was caught in the spotlights illuminating the new buildings that lined the river, and then it gleamed like something jewel-encrusted. It was still a silhouette against the city’s lights, but Mallory could tell it was the size of an airliner. A burst of fire erupted from the front with a roar, and in its glare Mallory saw burning eyes and a serpentine tail, and the billowing wings that carried it on the currents that surged amongst the skyscrapers.
Gaping, he almost forgot where he was. It was a dream, of the city, of his own troubled, imprisoned mind. Behind him, the spiders swarmed along the side of the building, many plucked off by the wind and sent spiralling into the dark gulf, forgotten now in the face of approaching wonder.
‘Is that …?’ Sophie had opened her eyes as though she had sensed what was coming.
‘Yes,’ Mallory said, ‘it is.’ He was puzzled why he wasn’t more surprised. He saw Church smiling and that didn’t surprise him either.
The Fabulous Beast caught the thermals and soared over the Thames.
‘Come on!’ Ruth urged. ‘I’ve got spiders nibbling at my fingers!’
‘You’re summoning it?’ Mallory asked.
His eyes glassy, Church didn’t respond.
The Beast glided languorously around the towers of Docklands, the beat of its enormous wings echoing louder than the wind.
As it neared, Church came alive. ‘When it passes beneath us, jump.’
Mallory and Sophie looked at him with horror.
Before they could protest, Ruth placed one hand in the small of Sophie’s back and propelled her off the ledge. Church did the same with Mallory.
The wind tore at Mallory as he fell, kicking. Two seconds of plummeting stretched to an age, and then he hit the back of the Beast, winding himself. He slid, grabbed a bony tine along its spine, felt the others land nearby. The wings thundered with a steady, deafening beat and they rose higher, and higher still. Mallory watched the lights of the towers fall away as he clung on for dear life.
He realised he must have been wearing an odd expression, for Church was looking at him curiously. ‘Scared?’ Church asked.
‘No,’ Mallory replied, baffled. ‘I just had the strangest feeling of deja vu.’
2
England sleeps, England dreams. Across the rolling landscape beyond the capital, chill in the late spring, there is no peaceful darkness. Sodium lights burn brightly everywhere. There is no silence. The arterial roads still throb with traffic.
In the north-west of England, on the edge of the wild but beautiful country that runs down to the Lake District, Caitlin Shepherd sits in her car outside the Tebay motorway service station. The lights are bright, but all is still. Soon it will open for the first visitors of the day, the lonely few for whom travel is life. But not travel in the sense of mind-altering, character-enriching experience. Back and forth travel, mundane travel, a relentless round with no final destination. Perpetual motion with no meaning is Caitlin’s lot, shipping samples of beauty products to shops that will consider stocking them, or perhaps not, and, like Caitlin, will not give it a second thought the moment the decision has been made.