“Petty, you’re going to make it. You’re going to be fine. If you don’t die, I’ll take you with me when I go back to London. I promise. And you’ll have all the food you want and all the dancing you want and enough clean knickers to stretch from here to Sausalito.”
There was still no response. Josh leaned over her and gave her one last kiss of life – and then gave her a kiss. “I’m sorry, baby. I did what I could. Take care of yourself, wherever you’re going. I love you.”
He stood up, reaching for the handrail to steady himself. As he did so, he thought he heard movement. A slight shifting, nothing more.
“I was waiting for you to say that,” said Petty, her voice clogged with dust. “Those are the magic words.”
Feeling around in the darkness, Josh managed to find her arm, and then her shoulders, and lift her on to her feet. “I’m OK,” she said. “I was knocked out, that’s all. That was a bloody close one, wasn’t it? Must have hit the building next door.”
“We need some light,” said Josh.
“That’s all right. I’ve got loads of candles. Under the basin, there’s a whole box of them. Christ, my head. I feel like somebody’s been sitting on it.”
Josh groped his way around the room until he located the sink. Underneath it, he found a brown-paper package filled with candles. He took out two to light up the cellar, but he also took another six, cramming them into his coat pockets, just in case he needed to cross through any of the doors, looking for the London he had left behind. In the darkness, he damned Nancy’s independent spirit. He loved her, and he was proud of her, but where had it got them both? He didn’t even like to think what she was doing right now, while he was trapped in this bombed-out cellar with Petty.
He flicked his butane lighter and lit one of the candles. Petty looked like a ghost, a voodoo duppy, her face white and her eyes black and her lips blood-red where Josh had been kissing them. Her hair had turned into dreadlocks, crammed with dust and debris, but glittering with glass. She had a crimson lump on her forehead, and superficial cuts and bruises, but no serious injuries. The blood that was criss-crossed all over her naked body was Josh’s.
Josh looked down at his own hand. The cut was L-shaped, deep in the muscle just below his thumb. He picked up a tea-towel from the kitchen floor, snapped it in the air to shake off the dust, and wrapped it tightly around his wound.
Petty managed to climb to her feet. Josh helped her across to the bedroom area and sat her on the bed. She coughed and spat dust, and sat with her shoulders hunched, wheezing like an asthmatic, trying to get her breath back. But at last she reached for her bra and her dress, and painfully began to dress herself.
Josh heard an ominous lurching sound from the ceiling. “We have to get out of here, Petty. It sounds like the whole goddamn house is coming down.”
Petty nodded, but she was too choked up with dust to say anything. Holding the candle high, Josh led her back across to the stairs, and the two of them climbed up together, until they reached the door. Josh took hold of the door handle and tugged it, but the door was jammed solid.
Not only that, they could both hear the deep droning noise of another wave of approaching bombers.
“Oh shit,” said Petty. “They’re really going to give us a pasting tonight.”
Josh gave the door another tug. It might be more dangerous outside, with fires raging all across London’s West End, but he couldn’t stay buried in this cellar any longer. He was beginning to hyperventilate already.
“We’ll be safer here,” said Petty, but he shook his head. He didn’t want to admit to his rising panic.
He heard more bombs falling, only a few streets away, and that gave him the strength to wrench at the door again and again, until he had pulled it half-open. Outside, the hallway was blocked with debris. The staircase had collapsed, and the banisters covered the cellar like a fence. Huge blocks of broken brick were piled on top of each other, some of them still plastered and wallpapered.
“We’re going to have to move some of this stuff if we’re going to get out,” said Josh. “Come on up here and give me a hand.”
He managed to twist three uprights out of the banisters, backward and forward, until they eventually came free, and toss them out of the way. Crouching down like Quasimodo, he climbed out of the cellar, underneath the banister rail, and into the hallway itself. His shoes slid down a heap of pulverized dust and glass and broken china. He saw half a willow-pattern teacup and a doll’s face with staring blue eyes, as well as a vegetable-strainer and a diary with all of its pages singed at the edges.
“Come on, Petty,” he insisted. “You too.”
Awkwardly, she climbed out after him. “God, look what the bastards have done to my house!” she wept. “This is my house, this is where I live! What right have they got to come and smash it all to pieces? What right? I don’t care if they’re part of the bloody Empire or not!”
Outside, the sky was growing lighter.
They looked around, in that gray hallucinatory light just before the sun comes over the horizon, and they could have been standing in a stage set, meant to depict the end of the world. Drury Lane was nothing more than two parallel heaps of bricks, with fires burning everywhere. It wasn’t even recognizable as the same street that Josh had been walking up earlier this morning. The theaters had gone, the shops had gone, the houses had gone. There was nothing but rubble and slates and broken chimney pots and twisted fire escapes and skeletal roof timbers. And fires everywhere, and acrid smoke.
“Are you OK?” he asked Petty.
Petty was shivering, but she nodded. “I’m all right. I wish it was over, that’s all.”
Josh put his arm around her. “Cocks and chocolate?”
She managed a smile. “That’s right. Cocks and chocolate.”
“I guess we’d better find ourselves someplace to hole up.”
“What about your friend? The one you came here to find?”
“John Farbelow? I’m not sure that he even exists in this London. Even if he does, he may not even be the same guy.”
“Well, we’ve got to do something. Can’t we go back to your London?”
“We can. Well, I hope we can. But not yet. We have to wait until one o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, wonderful. And what do we do in the meantime?”
Josh stopped, and listened. “Do you hear something?” he asked her.
She wrinkled up her nose. “Like what?”
“Like a sort of drumming noise.”
“Don’t ask me. I can’t hardly hear nothing after that last bomb went off.”
Josh listened even harder, gripping Petty’s wrist so that she was sure to stand still. They could hear fire engines racing around London, their bells frantically ringing. They could hear the diminishing drone of scores of heavy bombers, circling around East London on their way back to their bases in Normandy. But they could hear something else, too. They could hear drumming. Ratta-tat-tatt! Ratta-tat-tatt! And they could hear barking, and the piercing whistles of dog-handlers.
“Oh God,” said Josh. “I don’t believe it. It’s the Hooded Men.”
“The Hooded Men? Who the hell are the Hooded Men?”
“Ask me later. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
He grasped Petty’s hand and started to jog northward, up toward High Holborn, where automobiles were burning. But Petty said, “I can’t, Josh. I can’t go any further.”
“You have to. Don’t you realize what these people can do to you?”
She slowed down to a walk. “I don’t care what they do to me. I’m not going to run any further. I can’t.”