Dream London (22 page)

“Who’s we?”

“The Americans. The French. The rest of the fucking world. Do you know what it’s like out there? Do you think that life is going on as normal now that London has vanished into another place? People out there are terrified. The whole world is scared, and what do people do when they’re scared?”

“Go into denial?” I said.

“Yeah, they do that. Or they get angry. They get violent. People want this city destroyed, you asshole.”

I was shocked. She was right. I’d never really thought about it that way.

“Okay,” I said. “I take your point. But you’re wasting your time. There’s no point me going back to the Writing Floor in Angel Tower. I need to get to the Contract Floor.”

“The Contract Floor?” said Bill. “What’s that?”

“It’s where the unchanging documents are kept. The Writing Floor is where the changes are happening. There are people there who are writing the future.”

“Then surely that’s where we need to go,” said Bill. She nodded. “Yes. We could get them to change things back to how they were.”

I shook my head.

“That won’t work. Someone could just write it back again. All of this...”

I waved my arm around the room. “All of this is rooted in the land that was originally sold to... whoever. We need to get those deeds of ownership back.”

“Well, duh,” said Bill. “How do you suggest we do that?”

“By getting to the Contract Floor,” I said. “That’s where the deeds are kept.”

She stared at me for a moment, thinking.

I waved my hand in front of her face.

“Stop that,” she said.

“Hey, I’m surprised you didn’t figure that out for yourself,” I said.

“I’ve only been here a few days,” said Bill. “But you’re right, someone should have figured this out before.”

She lapsed into silence again.

I looked around the room, at the obscene pictures. Finally, Bill spoke.

“How long until this Truth Script wears off?” she said.

“About ten minutes,” I said. That was a lie. I had no idea how long it lasted for.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re going out.”

“Going out?” I said. “Why?”

“We’re going to ask for help. Oh, and James...”

“Yes?”

“You understand that I’m still under the influence of the script?”

“Yes.”

She leant closer to me and her eyes were so, so hard.

“If you ever do that to me again, I will kill you.”

She smiled as she said the words.

“Do you believe me?”

EIGHT

THE SPIRAL

W
E LEFT THE
Laughing Dog and hurried towards the railway station.

“Where are we going?” I asked Bill.

“The Spiral,” she replied.

“Why there?”

“It’s being watched.”

“Watched? By who?”

“By my superiors.”

“The ones who want to bomb Angel Tower?”

“Yep.”

I shook my head as we walked.

“You’ve not been up there,” I said. “I don’t think bombs will work. All the old machinery is warped into something else in Dream London.” I frowned as I looked at the railway line, soaring above the streets on its green embankment. “You know, the numbers don’t work. People get lost when they try to leave. I wonder if it’s connected?”

Bill said nothing, moving through the Egg Market with a determined stride.

“Is there a something in science where you don’t know where you are?” I wondered aloud. “Where you know where you’re moving to, but you can’t figure out your position? That’s what it’s like riding the railways in Dream London.”

We were approaching the steps to the station now.

A green alligator train slid into the station. I saw the huge bulk of two men, staring out of the windows.

“On second thoughts, we’ll walk,” I said.

“No way,” said Bill. “We need to get a move on.”

“There are two of the Daddio’s Quantifiers on there,” I said. “Do you feel as if you could fight them?”

“No,” she said, perfectly truthfully. “We’ll take a taxi, then,”

We turned and began to walk away. Somewhere behind me I could hear the voice of Miss Elizabeth Baines calling after me.

“Captain Wedderburn! Oh, Captain! Stop! It’s urgent!”

“Not her too,” I said.

“Who is that woman?” asked Bill as I hurried her along.

“That’s Miss Elizabeth Baines. She’s mad. She thinks I’m going to marry her.”

“She sounds pretty upset.”

“Of course she’s upset,” I replied. “She thinks I’d make a suitable husband. Wouldn’t the thought of marrying me upset you? Like I said, she’s mad. Just like everyone else in this city.”

There were two pedalcabs and one hansom cab waiting outside the station.

“Not the horse,” said Bill.

“Okay.”

We climbed into the first pedal cab. The driver was a young woman barely five feet tall. She stood on the pedals above a mountain of silver cogs and gears, her legs like young trees.

“The Spiral, please!” called Bill.

“Twenty minutes,” replied our driver and she let out a huge grunt and began to pedal. Slowly the cab began to move. A scatter of filigree-patterned starlings erupted around the cab as we glided down a side street, and then we were rolling down the ramp onto the Kingsway. A flight of bright green parakeets arrowed alongside the road, heading for the docks and passage to other lands.

“You talked about the Numbers Floor,” said Bill, suddenly. “Did you hear about the mathematicians, James?”

“No? What about them?”

“They committed suicide. All the ones remaining in Dream London. At least, it looked like suicide.”

“It’ll have been suicide,” I said, thinking of the Numbers Floor. “Trust me.”

T
HE
S
PIRAL HAD
begun in Piccadilly Circus, back when Piccadilly Circus still lay at the end of Regent Street, back before it had spun off to its current stamping ground.

Now the electric displays had crackled and died, and the buildings had pulled back into the distance, a grey horizon of broken teeth, a broken Stonehenge. The ground had crumbled and turned over itself and slipped downwards in a wide concrete spiral. The spiral formed a path lined with two queues of Dream Londoners. One queue of eager observers descended to look through the hole at the bottom of the Spiral, the second ascended in stunned silence.

Barrows and stalls had been set up all around the perimeter, selling ice creams and coffee, flowers and jewelled beetles.

“Look at the statues,” said Bill, pointing beyond the stalls. “What are they supposed to be?”

“I don’t know,” I said, squinting. “They don’t quite make sense... Why are we here, Bill?”

“To send a signal. Stop asking me questions. Don’t make me tell you anything else. Now, take my arm. Let’s look as if we’re enjoying ourselves.”

I did as I was told. I was past arguing. The brightly dressed people walked amongst the broken forest of stone that rose from the concrete ground, and I peered closer.

“They’re people,” I said, and I suddenly smiled, despite myself. “They’re hugging!” I said.

“They’re not just hugging,” said Bill.

Now I knew what I was looking at the statues resolved themselves into figures of men and women in various erotic positions. Sometimes alone, more often in pairs or threes or fours.

“And parents bring their children to this place?” said Bill in amazement, watching as a young girl skipped by, her hair in curls. I shuddered. The girl reminded me of Honey Peppers.

“Look at that one,” said Bill.

We walked around the edge of the stalls to see the statue that stood at the top of the Spiral. Women in white crinoline, men in striped blazers, children in sailor suits: no one could pass it by without stopping a moment to stare.

The figures on this statue were still uncompleted, still half focused, but the meaning of the tableaux was obvious. Two women, five men and some shorter figures, all engaged in group sex. The two women in particular were enjoying themselves immensely, the half formed expressions on their faces caught between joy and ecstasy.

“Why?” said Bill. “What does it mean?”

“It means there’s more sex than love in Dream London,” I said. “Or hadn’t you picked up on that?”

“There’s diminishing amounts of sex, according to what the other girls tell me,” said Bill. “More and more of the men seem to just want to tell the girls about their problems then burst into tears.”

She flashed a look at me. “Is that what’s happening to the girls at Belltower End?”

“Not my girls,” I said. “You wouldn’t waste what they had to offer by crying into their bosom.”

“You’re loathsome,” said Bill.

I was rather hurt. I wasn’t being serious, but Bill was. She was speaking the truth.

“Tell me now, what are we doing here?” I demanded.

“Sending a signal.” She jabbed me in the side with her fingers. I don’t know what she hit, but I doubled up in incredible pain. She bent over and hissed in my ear. “I told you, don’t demand answers from me when I’m like this.”

We joined the thinning evening queue and began the slow descent. The crowd shuffled forward bit by bit as those at the front took their turn looking through the hole.

“Have you been here before?” asked Bill.

I said nothing. Two could play at her game.

“Stop acting like a child. Have you been here before?”

“A couple of times,” I said, grudgingly. “The Spiral gets deeper all the time. The hole gets wider.”

“What do you think is down there?”

“Another world,” I replied.

“Do you really think that it could be Pandemonium?”

“I don’t believe in Pandemonium.”

Bill looked up into the violet sky. “Which reminds me...” she said.

She pulled a mirror from somewhere within her dress and pointed it to the sky. She began to flick it this way and that.

“Heliography?” I said. “You’re flashing messages?”

“The spy satellites can still pick up the reflections,” she said. “Dream London hasn’t managed to reach up high enough to affect them yet.”

“Give it time,” I said.

“What’re you doing, darling?” asked the man behind us in the queue.

“She’s trying to do her make-up,” I said.

“There’s no need,” said the man. “Pretty girl like you.” His girlfriend elbowed him in the ribs.

We shuffled forward down the Spiral. From where we stood we could look over the heads of three spiral turns of people, all waiting their turn to look down the hole. It was like queuing for the rides at an old theme park. There was the same air of expectation, the same sense of carnival. Still we shuffled on until, just as evening was falling, we reached the front of the queue.

The hole lay at the dead centre of the Spiral. It was the size of a manhole, just big enough for someone to climb through. A woman in a peaked cap stood nearby, keeping order.

“No more than two at once,” she said to us. “Take your time. You don’t want to fall in, do you?”

Bill and I got down on our hands and knees and crept forward to the edge of the hole. I looked down and saw a patchwork of green fields, far, far below.

“It
is
another world,” I said.

You could make out cities in the middle of the fields, irregular grey blobs.

“There’s a city directly below us,” said Bill, in awe.

“Is it directly below?” I wondered aloud, looking down. “I’m sure it used to be more off centre...”

“It’s below,” she said. “And look. Look at the shadow.”

“Where?”

“Look to the centre of the city. A shadow. Cast by that tower in the middle. The tower is foreshortened at this angle, the shadow gives it away.”

I looked again. I couldn’t see anything.

“Are those cranes down there?” said Bill. “They must be building the tower...”

“Time’s up, sir and madam. Let someone else have a look.”

We crawled back from the hole and got to our feet, brushing off our knees as we did so.

“It’s incredible,” I said.

“I know,” said the attendant. “And it gets a little closer every day.”

“Do you know there is a tower in the middle?” said Bill. “I think it’s growing towards this hole.”

The attendant agreed. “Professor Humphrey brings his telescope here in the early morning to take measurements.”

“I think the tower will join to this hole,” said Bill. “And when it does, I think something will climb up it and come through.”

The attendant laughed.

“Madam! Let’s not frighten the other customers.”

W
E WALKED BACK
up the ramp away from the hole and crossed the wide space around the Spiral.

“I have to get back to the Laughing Dog,” said Bill.

“I’m not sure where I’m going,” I said.

“You need to get back to the Poison Yews.”

“Why? The place is a madhouse. Margaret keeps making passes at me. Alan is under the spell of Shaqeel...”

“Shaqeel,” said Bill. “I wish we could do something about him... I’m sure he’s working alone, just another guy out for himself...”

“The only sensible one there is Anna,” I said, wistfully.