He felt for the pain and the cold and called for the patterns to form inside his eyes again. He breathed in the right way and found the fireworks starting to go off. It was like being able to see his own brain working. The lights wanted to form their pit again, but this time he wouldn’t let them. He made them form in front of him, made the lights into a tunnel he could walk into. He felt his real body walking too, distantly, not dancing any more, but outside, somewhere cold.
The tunnel that had formed inside his eyes matched, actually, with a tunnel in London that his body was walking into, a railway tunnel.
He looked down. His bare feet were on gravel. Beside them was a rail. The rail was vibrating with the rotary pulse he could also feel from London behind him. He looked up from it. There were golden lights ahead, reflecting on the silver of the rail.
He was afraid.
Good.
He pushed reality, which was trying to assert itself, back down inside himself again. He just had to step forward. Although there was a roaring up ahead. Although it was roaring directly at him now to get out of the way.
He had to believe there was more to himself and the universe than what was being roared at him. Jimmy Quill had taken the longest journey for what he stood for. Sefton had to do the same.
He stepped into the tunnel and marched quickly towards the light that was coming much more quickly towards him. There was, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.
All the signifiers he’d seen came together for him, and he was sure he was on the cusp of understanding everything about the universe and his place within it.
That was when the train hit him.
* * *
‘No, stop, all right, got you.’
Sefton looked around as hands grabbed him and pulled him aside. For a terrible moment he thought he must be awake on the dance floor, having been dragged back to life. For another awful second he was certain he could feel a train rushing past him, feel the air pummelling him, close to his clothes.
Then he looked round. He saw that he was somewhere new. Somewhere divorced from both those things and from anything real. He was in what looked like a cave … no, some of the walls were rock, but some of them were polished, tiled, like an underground station. Only this wasn’t a real tube station, but something like a stage set, with stark, powerful lights above … or was that him still being back at the club? He could hear the music still pounding up there, muffled. There was a hint of the railway tunnel about the arches above too. He could hear something through the wall, rattling past, carriage after carriage. He looked away from that; it felt as if death was very near. There were escalators at the back of the room that seemed to loop back on each other, in an infinite recursion. The floor looked to be made of newspapers, the headlines and type and photos changing as he looked at them, squirming out of his vision. He himself was standing on a slight rise, on a pile of objects. He shifted his weight as if he was still dancing, and some of them rolled down by his feet: a rotted gas mask; a banner for a coronation; a Victorian cartoon of someone he didn’t recognize wearing a sash saying something he didn’t understand; a skull with what looked like a spear point through it.
Someone was still holding him, he realized. He turned and looked, and the firm pair of hands released him, apparently now convinced he wouldn’t fall. The Rat King stood there, looking bemused at Sefton. ‘You have my attention,’ he said. ‘You’ve fallen here as so many other things have. You showed yourself willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. So I thought I’d do the decent thing: take you one step back in time and save your life. You’re welcome.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sefton. He had to sit down on the rubbish. He was shivering, breathing hard from the close call with death that a few moments ago he’d barely been aware of. ‘Where is this?’ he managed to say after a moment.
‘My home. Where all the detritus of London comes to rest. Where what was once significant,’ he held up one of the newspapers, ‘becomes mere panto.’
Sefton didn’t know what to say. He felt lost and desperate. He might have reached one of the ‘outer boroughs’, but this ‘Rat King’ had told him back in the bar that he didn’t know the answer to his most urgent question. He’d almost killed himself to get here — he could feel his body still suffering somewhere — and now it seemed that it all might be for nothing. ‘I–I was hoping to see-’
‘You were after someone else? Well, tough. You’ve got me. Cuppa?’
Sefton looked up and was handed a cup of tea, by … it was the barmaid with no face from the Goat and Compasses. She now wore a thin, bloody bandage across where her eyes presumably still were not, together with a crown made of a cornflakes packet, and she carried a sword and scales strapped to a belt around what looked to have once been a Fifties party dress. Her pale masklike face made her look like a statue. ‘Hello Kevin,’ she said. ‘Good luck. We love you.’
The Rat King rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
‘How’s your friend doing?’
‘You mean Ross? I wish I knew.’
The Rat King put a hand to his mouth in a stage whisper as he took his own cup from her. ‘I don’t know why I took her on. She breaks all my cups.’
‘Please,’ said Sefton, not drinking his tea, ‘do you know anything that could help us find the Ripper?’
The Rat King snickered into the tea. ‘Oh, I’m afraid not. The major players know to stay away from me; they can’t stand that I can read their intentions like a cheap and nasty book.’
‘Well, then, okay, can you take me to Brutus?’
‘What, the Roman bloke? Et tu Brute and all that?’
Sefton wanted to kick something. ‘He’s who I met the last time I visited somewhere like this.’
The Rat King sighed theatrically. ‘I don’t know everyone who isn’t real. There isn’t a phone book.’ He suddenly seemed to recall, holding up a finger. ‘Wait. Was there nobody about in his London? Big, empty place, with just him in it?’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’ Sefton found hope springing up inside him again. Maybe the Rat King was meant to show him the path that led to the object of his quest.
‘Oh. Right. You can’t get there from here.’ The Rat King saw the defeated expression on Sefton’s face and laughed again. ‘I know him by one of his many other names. You didn’t go on the right path today to get to him. If you haven’t seen him, I should think he’s still got his back to you. You should be careful of him. He can be very demanding.’
‘So you know what he is?’
‘It’s not for me to share the meanings of the others. I am only in charge of my own.’
‘Then what are you?’
‘Listen to this policeman!’ The Rat King grinned at the woman with no face, revealing gaps in his stained teeth. ‘Most of those who come here ask mystical questions full of allusions and get a lot of bollocks in return.’
‘He seeks the truth,’ the woman said. ‘He should get it.’
‘You’re right. He should.’ He reached down and hauled Sefton to his feet, finished his own cup of tea, then threw it down to smash on the pile of rubbish. ‘I am for rebellion. I stand against order. I don’t build anything. I criticize what’s been built. I am never satisfied. I look for you people to try harder. A lot of people think of me as a villain. I often am.’
‘So … are you what’s making the riots happen?’ Sefton suddenly wondered if he’d been trapped by an enemy.
The Rat King looked at him as if he was a foolish child. ‘I don’t make things happen. Too much like hard work. I am what those who are not satisfied look to; I am what they have in the back of their minds, pray to, sort of. I intercede with the power of London and send some of it their way. If I’ve a mind to. In roundabout ways. If I can be bothered.’ He looked again to the woman. ‘I didn’t really like saying all that. Bit too concrete for me.’