Dream Paris (9 page)

“Snipers?”

“They…”

He jerked to a sudden halt, staggered backwards a couple of steps, arms flung forward for balance. I turned and saw a group of monkeys holding onto the wire. They laughed as they saw us and gave the wire another yank before darting towards the closest terrace, scrambling up the vines to safety.

“How long are you going to wear that pack for?” I asked. “It seems a bit ridiculous, trailing a wire behind you.”

“I have my orders,” said Francis. “I’m to map out as much territory as possible.”

“You’re not going to map out much territory with the monkeys tugging you back.”

“I can deal with the monkeys.”

As he said that a plum splattered on the pavement, just by his feet. Red juice splashed outwards. Three more plums followed it, the last hitting him square on the face.

“Excellent monkey handling skills,” I observed.

“Come on.”

We continued down the street, the monkeys keeping pace on the rooftops, occasionally sending fruit spattering down onto the pavement near us. And then we heard the voice.

“
Help me! Please, please help me!
”

The sound of the monkeys stopped immediately. We stood, listening, in the afternoon stillness. The voice sounded again.

“
Help me! Please, please help me!
”

“She sounds terrified,” said Francis.

“It sounds odd. Could it be a trap?”

“
Help me! Please, please help me!
”

Francis nodded. He raised a finger to his lips for silence.

We crept down the suddenly silent road. My body was still damp from the waist down with canal water, above the waist I was drenched with sweat.

“
Help me! Please, please help me!
”

The voice came from a dark doorway yawning in the middle of the never-ending red terrace. Francis gestured to me to help him out of the backpack.

“If this looks too dangerous, we’re not going in. It’s more important that I get you to Dream Paris.”

“I get to Dream Paris anyway. Haven’t you read my fortune?”

Francis entered the doorway. I followed him into the cracked hallway of the abandoned house. Grass grew on the carpet, vines sprouted from the ceiling, choking the light bulb. A picture of a crying girl hung on the wall.

There was a doorway at the end of the hallway. A creaking noise came from beyond.

“
Help me! Please, please –
”

Francis leaped through the door.

Almost immediately, he flung himself backward, crashing into me. Dark metal jaws snapped shut just inside the room.

“What the…” I began. It looked like the jaws of a mantrap, but much much bigger.

“Run!”

Francis pushed me onwards, the snapping noise of metal close behind. Out from the gloom into the butterscotch daylight. Out across the rubble-strewn road. There was a shriek of scraping metal. Francis and I turned to see something made from dark iron half-emerge from the doorway to the house. A brass speaker horn hanging underneath the shape whistled and then spoke once last time.

“
Please, please help me!
”

The shape withdrew back into the shadows of the house. There was a slow clicking as the trap was reset.

In the desperate silence that followed I found myself longing even for the chatter of the monkeys. Sat in that street, the endless red terrace running by us, I became aware of a tremendous emptiness. This was a dead city.

Eventually, Francis found his voice.

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, close to tears. “They didn’t have them in Dream London that I remember!”

“It looked like a crocodile!”

I don’t think he was quite right. To my eyes, it looked more like a printing press.

As he spoke we heard a faint call from half way down the street.

“
Help me! Please, please help me!
”

“What? Another one?”

Francis began pulling on his backpack.

“We can’t stay here,” he said. “We need to get out of this part of the city.”

I looked at the wire trailing behind him. It didn’t look like wire anymore. What did it remind me of? Whatever it was, it made me feel uncomfortable.

“Really Francis, shouldn’t we dump the backpack?”

“I have my orders,” he said stubbornly.

W
E WALKED ON
through the city.

“The monkeys are plotting something,” said Francis. “They’re following us.”

“How on earth do they keep picking up our trail?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

The canal ran alongside us, pushing through overgrown buildings of the city, occasionally shouldered aside by the hillocks that pushed their way up from the earth, lime green butterflies fluttering over their grassy surfaces. Always, the endless red terrace ran alongside us, empty windows and open doors reminding us of the people who had once lived there. Caught between the terrace and the canal, I felt like a little ball bearing in one those plastic mazes that children play with. Tilt the maze, send the ball running along, trapped in its path, all that movement to no end, lost in dull repetition.

And then we rounded another hillock and something jolted us out of our reverie.

“What the hell…”

Francis had come face to face with a life size china doll, had almost walked into its arms. He took a step back, shook his head, regained his composure.

“My fault,” he apologised. “I wasn’t concentrating. Not good. I’m supposed to be on guard…”

“It’s this place. It gets to you.”

The doll stood in the middle of the path. I stepped forward to take a closer look. It was made in the shape of a young woman, frozen in the act of walking down the street.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking at the figure’s face. It was made of porcelain, delicately painted with rosebud lips, pink cheeks and blue eyes that gazed at nothing. Its clothes were made of batiste, beautifully stitched.

“Did you have these in Dream London?”

“I heard rumours of dolls like this living in Chinatown. I never went there. It was at the edge of the strangeness.”

“The strangeness?” he said, deadpan.

I ignored him.

“She looks as if she was searching for something.”

He opened his mouth to reply, and then we heard the voices calling.

“Mister! Mister!”

We turned around, suspecting another trap. I relaxed a little as I saw the two children approaching. A boy and a girl. I’m not good with children or their ages, but Francis later said he thought they were around ten or eleven years old. They ran towards us, following the wire. They were both filthy, dressed in ragged Dream London clothes, the girl in a torn and faded dress, the boy in grey trousers and a waistcoat. They both looked half starved and half scared to death. They were both shouting to us.

“Mister! Miss! Run! They’re coming for you!”

EMILY AND OLIVER

T
HE CHILDREN WERE
called Emily and Oliver. Francis’s calm manner only seemed to make them more frantic.

“Cut through the houses! The back gardens join on to the next street!”

“And take off your pack! The clowns are following the wire!”

“What clowns?” I asked.

“The clowns!” Oliver’s eyes were wide with terror. “The monkeys lead them to new clients. The clowns pay the monkeys in fruit and cats.”

“The monkeys torture the cats,” said Emily, matter-of-factly.

“I don’t know anything about clowns,” I said, in answer to Francis’s unasked question.

Oliver was becoming frantic. “Look, we need to move! Please!”

“I’m not taking my pack off!”

“We’ll cut through the houses anyway,” said Emily. “The clowns are very particular about where they walk. There are some places they don’t go.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know! Come on!”

The children chose a doorway and led us through the long hallway and out into the even longer garden behind it. Flowers and shrubs grew wild, narrowing the central lawn to a dark, leaf-walled passageway.

“Hurry!” called Emily.

Francis pushed his way in front of me. I didn’t mind so much, imagining more printing press crocodiles waiting for us up ahead.

A woven wooden fence separated our garden from the next. Francis shoulder charged it and we found ourselves pushing through another garden and another house before emerging into another street, sandwiched between two long red rows of terraced houses. This street was quieter than the one we’d left. Something loomed over the rooftops, and I shuddered to see the burnt, twisted remains of the Eiffel Tower, now a lot closer than before. Oddly, it still seemed to be looking at me.

“Tell me about the clowns!” said Francis. “Quickly! We need to know!”

Oliver was crying. Emily took his hand.

“They turned up after all the fighting was over!” said Emily. “After Angel Tower exploded. They seemed friendly enough at first. They said they were here to help.”

“Help? How?”

“They set up tables in empty buildings, laid them out with food and drink. They invited people in to eat. I remember looking in through the doorway once. There were hams, and mashed potatoes, great piles of sausages…”

“… and gravy and roast lamb, and bowls of peas with butter melting on them,” said Oliver, wistfully.

“And there were drinks. The adults had beer and whisky, and there were bottles of red and yellow wine. There was lemonade and ginger beer and even Coke, like you used to get before the changes.”

Ah, Coke. I remembered that. I still hadn’t had it, not even in Mundane London.

“You said you only looked through the door. Didn’t you eat there?”

“No,” said Emily. “My mum wouldn’t let me. She said she didn’t trust them. She was right, too.”

“They came for Mr Edwards next door,” said Oliver. “Two clowns. I heard them. They said his family had eaten at their table, and now they owed the clowns a favour. They said they needed them to help in return.”

“What did Mr Edwards do?”

“He said fair enough. He and his family got dressed up and off they went with the clowns. I watched Louise go off with them. I used to play with her.” Oliver was shivering. “They marched them off out of the gates. I never saw them again.”

“And then the word got round,” said Emily. “About people not coming back. Anyone who’d eaten at the clown’s table, or accepted a gift from them…”

“What sort of gift?”

“Like clothes or money, or maybe medicine or materials to mend their house. All the people who had accepted a gift were suddenly very frightened. They pretended to be out when the clowns called round. But the clowns began to knock doors down, to pull people from their houses…”

Francis was frowning. I was thinking about what Emily had said.

“Oliver, you said the clowns marched the Edwards family out of the gates. What gates?”

Oliver shuddered. “The city gates.”

“I don’t remember any city gates,”

“Where have you come from?” asked Emily. “You don’t know about the clowns. You don’t know about the city gates. You must have seen them, when you entered the city. How did you get past the city walls?”

“We didn’t pass any walls. We came here from the real London. From Mundane London.”

The children looked at us, open-mouthed.

“You came here from London? From before the changes?”

“From after the changes. When Angel Tower was destroyed, the old London came back. Everything went back to normal.”

Oliver whimpered and took hold of Emily. He wiped the corner of his eye with a filthy hand. Emily held onto him as she replied.

“Back to normal? No! Everything got worse! There was a huge flash, and then everything jerked to the side. The colours changed. And then everything started to move even faster. The grass rolled into the city, the plants started to grow. And the clowns appeared…”

“I don’t like the clowns,” said Oliver.

The children were looking up and down the street. They kept glancing back through the house, back down the long hallway we’d just come down.

“Mister, we have to go!” said Oliver, urgently. “Take off your pack, or the clowns will follow the wire and catch you.”

Francis became very gentle at this point. Very gentle, but very assured.

“Oliver, I can’t take this pack off,” he said. “But listen, there’s an important reason for that. I’m here to help people. People like you.”

He squatted down so that his eyes were level with Emily and Oliver.

“You know where that wire goes?” He reached back, took hold of a length of it, gave it a tug. I saw the frown that briefly flickered across his face. The wire hadn’t felt right. It couldn’t have done, it no longer looked like metal, more like spun cloud. Francis didn’t let that bother him. “This wire is the route back home, back to the real London. If you follow that wire, it will lead you down the street and into a canal. Jump into the canal and follow the wire under a white bridge, through the tunnel. When you come out of the tunnel, you’ll be back in London. Real London.”

The children looked at each other, hope and fear battling it out on their faces.

“Come with us, mister. Take us home!”