The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (23 page)

What was strange about it was seeing such an immediately familiar place looking so unfamiliar. There was the ticket office, still open for ticket sales, but looking sombre and beleaguered and wishing it was closed.
There was the W.H.Smith, closed for the night. No one would be needing any further newspapers or magazines tonight, except for purposes of accommodation, and old ones would do just as well for sleeping under.
The pimps and hookers, drug-pushers and hamburger salesmen were all outside in the streets and in the hamburger bars. If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a hamburger, that was where you went to get it.
Here were the people that nobody wanted anything from at all. This was where they gathered for shelter until they were periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted from them, in fact - their absence. That was in hot demand, but not easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere.
Dirk looked from one to another of the men and women shuffling round or sitting hunched in seats or struggling to try and sleep across benches that were specifically designed to prevent them from doing exactly that.
"Got a fag, mate?"
"What? No, I'm sorry. No, I haven't got one," replied Dirk, awkwardly patting his coat pockets in embarrassment, as if to suggest the making of a search which he knew would be fruitless. He was startled to be summoned out of his reverie like this.
"Here you are, then." The old man offered him a beat-up one from a beat-up packet.
"What? Oh. Oh - thanks. Thank you " Momentarily taken aback by the offer, Dirk nevertheless accepted the cigarette gratefully, and took a light from the tip of the cigarette the old man was smoking himself.
"What you come hene for then?" asked the old man - not challenging, just curious.
Dirk tried to look at him without making it seem as if he was looking him up and down. The man was wildly bereft of teeth, had startled and matted hair, and his old clothes were well mulched down around him, but the eyes which sagged out of his face were fairly calm. He wasn't expecting anything worse than he could deal with to happen to him.
"Well, just this in fact," said Dirt, twiddling the cigarette. "Thanks. Couldn't find one anywhere."
"Oh ah," said the old man.
"Got this mad bird at home," said Dirk. "Kept attacking me."
"Oh ah," said the man, nodding resignedly.
"I mean an actual bird," said Dirk, "an eagle."
"Oh ah."
"With great wings."
"Oh ah."
"Got hold of me with one of its talons through the letter-box."
"Oh ah."
Dirk wondered if it was worth pursuing the conversation much further. He lapsed into silence and looked around.
"You're lucky it didn't slash at you with its beak as well," said the old man after a while. "An eagle will do that when roused."
"It did!" said Dirk. "It did! Look, right here on my nose. That was through the letter-box as well. You'd scarcely believe it! Talk about grip! Talk about reach! Look at what it did to my hand!"
He held it out for sympathy. The old man gave it an appraising look.
"Oh ah," he said at last, and retreated into his own thoughts.
Dirk drew his injured hand back.
"Know a lot about eagles, then, do you?"
The man didn't answer, but seemed instead to retreat still further.
"Lot of people here tonight," Dirk ventured again, after a while.
The man shrugged. He took a long drag on his cigarette, half closing his eyes against the smoke.
"Is it always like this? I mean, are there always so many people here at night?"
The man merely looked down, slowly releasing the smoke from his mouth and nostrils.
Yet again, Dirk looked around. A man a few feet away, not so old-looking as Dirk's companion but wildly deranged in his demeanour, had sat nodding hectically over a bottle of cooking brandy all this time. He slowly stopped his nodding, screwed with difficulty a cap on to the bottle, and slipped it into the pocket of his ragged old coat. An old fat woman who had been fitfully browsing through the bulging black bin liner of her possessions began to twist the top of it together and fold it.
"You'd almost think that something was about to happen," said Dirk.
"Oh ah," said his companion. He put his hands on his knees, bent forward and raised himself painfully to his feet. Though he was bent and slow, and though his clothes were dirt-ridden and tattered, there was some little power and authority there in his bearing.
The air which he unsettted as he stood, which flowed out from the folds of his skin and ctothes, was richly pungent even to Dirk's numbed nostrils. It was a smell that never stopped coming at you - just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it struck on upwards with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that his very brain would vaporise.
He tried not to choke, indeed he tried to smile courteously without allowing his eyes to run as the man turned to him and said, "Infuse some blossom of the bitter orange. Add some sprinklings of sage while it is still warm. This is very good for eagle wounds. There are those who will add apricot and almond oil and even, the heavens defend us, sedra. But then there are always those that will overdo things. And sometimes we have need of them. Oh ah."
With that he turned away once more and joined the growing stream of pathetic, hunched and abused bodies that were heading for the front exit from the station. In all about two, maybe three dozen were leaving. Each seemed to be leaving separatety, each for his or her entirely independent reasons, and not following too fast the one upon the other, and yet it was not hard to tell, for anyone who cared to watch these people that no one cared to watch or see, that they were leaving together and in a stream.
Dirk carefulty nursed his cigarette for a minute or so and watched them intently as one by one they left. Once he was certain that there were no more to go, and that the last two or three of them were at the door, he dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel. Then he noticed that the old man had left behind his crumpled cigarette packet. Dirk looked inside and saw that there were still two bedraggled cigarettes left. He pocketed it, stood up, and quietly followed at a distance that he thought was properly respectful.
Outside on the Euston Road the night air was grumbling and unsettled. He loitered idly by the doorway, watching which way they went - to the west. He took one of the cigarettes out and lit it and then idled off westwards himself, around the taxi rank and towards St Pancras Street.
On the west side of St Pancras Street, just a few yards north of the Euston Road, a flight of steps leads up to the forecourt of the old Midland Grand Hotel, the huge, dark gothic fantasy of a building which stands, empty and desolate, across the front of St Pancras railway station.
Over the top of the steps, picked out in gold letters on wrought-iron-work, stands the name of the station. Taking his time, Dirk followed the last of the band of old tramps and derelicts up these steps, which emerged just to the side of a small, squat, brick building which was used as a car-park. To the right, the great dark hulk of the old hotel spread off into the night, its roofline a vast assortment of wild turrets, gnarled spires and pinnacles which seemed to prod at and goad the night sky.
High in the dim darkness, silent stone figures stood guard behind long shields, grouped around pilasters behind wroughtiron railings. Carved dragons crouched gaping at the sky as Dirk Gently, in his flapping leather coat, approached the great iron portals which led to the hotel, and to the great vaulted train shed of St Pancras station. Stone figures of winged dogs crouched down from the top of pillars.
Here, in the bridged area between the hotel entrance and the station booking hall, was parked a large unmarked grey Mercedes van. A quick glance at the front of it was enough to tell Dirk that it was the same one which had nearly forced him off the road several hours earlier in the Cotswolds.
Dirk walked into the booking hall, a large space with great panelled walls along which were spaced fat marble columns in the form of tonch holders.
At this time of night the ticket office was closed - trains do not run all night from St Pancras - and beyond it the vast chamber of the station itself, the great Victorian train shed, was shrouded in darkness and shadow.
Dirk stood quietly secluded in the entrance to the booking hall and watched as the old tramps and bag tadies, who had entered the station by the main entrance from the forecourt, mingled together in the dimness. There were now many more than two dozen of them, perhaps as many as a hundred, and there seemed to be about them an air of repressed excitement and tension.
As they moved about it seemed to Dirk after a while that, though he had been surprised at how many of them there had been when he first arrived, there seemed now to be fewer and fewer of them. He peered into the gloom trying to make out what was happening. He detached himself from his seclusion in the entrance to the booking hall and entered the main vault, but kept himself nevertheless as close to the side wall as possible as he ventured in towards them.
There were definitely fewer still of them now, a mere handful left. He had a distinct sense of people slipping away into the shadows and not re-emerging from them.
He frowned at them.
The shadows were deep but they weren't that deep. He began to hurry forward, and quickly threw all caution aside to reach the small remaining group. But by the time he reached the centre of the concourse where they had been gathered there were none remaining at all and he was left whirling round in confusion in the middle of the great, dark, empty railway station.
Chapter 26
The only thing which prevented Kate screaming was the sheer pressure of air rushing into her lungs as she hurtled into the sky.
When, a few seconds later, the blinding acceleration eased a little, she found she was gulping and choking, her eyes were stinging and streaming to the extent that she could hardly see, and there was hardly a muscle in her body which wasn't gibbering with shock as waves of air pummelled past her, tearing at her hair and clothes and making her knees, knuckles and teeth batter at each other.
She had to struggle with herself to suppress her urge to struggle. On the one hand she absolutely certainly did not want to be let go of. Insofar as she had any understanding at all of what was happening to her she knew that she did not want to be let go of. On the other hand the physical shock of it was facing some stiff competition from her sheer affronted rage at being suddenly hauled into the sky without warning. The result of this was that she struggled rather feebly and was angry at herself for doing so. She ended up clinging to Thor's arm in the most abject and undignified way.
The night was dark, and the blessing of this, she supposed, was that she could not see the ground. The lights she had seen dotted here and there in the distance now swung sickeningly away beneath her, but her instincts would not identify them as representing ground. Already the flickering beacons which shone from the insanely turreted building she had glimpsed seconds before this outrage occurred were swaying away behind her now at an increasing distance.
They were still ascending.
She could not struggle, she could not speak. She could probably, if she tried, bite the stupid brute's arm, but she contented herself with the idea of this rather than the actual deed.
The air was bad and rasped in her lungs. Her nose and eyes were streaming, and this made it impossible for her to look forward. When she did try it, just once, she caught a momentary blurred glimpse of the head of the hammer streaking out through the dark air of them, of Thor's arm grasping its stunted handle and being pulled forward by it. His other arm was gripped around her waist. The strength of him defied her imagination but did not make her any the less angry.
She got the feeling that they were now skimming along just beneath the clouds. Every now and then they would be buffeted by damp clamminess, and breathing would become yet harder and more noxious. The wet air tasted bitter, and deadly cold, and her streaming wet hair lashed and slammed about her face.
She decided that the cold was definitely going to kill her, and after a while was convinced that she was beginning to lose consciousness. In fact she realised she was actually trying to lose consciousness but she couldn't. Time slipped into a greyness though, and she was less aware of how much of it was passing.
At last she began to sense that they were slowing and that they were beginning to curve back downwards. This precipitated fresh waves of nausea and disorientation in her, and she felt that her stomach was being slowly turned through a mangle.
The air was, if anything, getting worse. It smelled worse, tasted more acrid and seemed to be getting a great deal more turbulent. They were definitely slowing now, and the going was becoming more and more difficult. The hammer was clearly pointing downwards now, and finding its way along rather than surging ahead.
Down still further they went, battling through the thickening clouds that swirled round them till it seemed that they must now reach all the way down to the ground.
Their speed had dropped to the point where Kate felt able to look ahead now, though the acridity of the air was such that she was only able to manage a very brief glance. In the moment that she glanced, Thor released the hammer. She couldn't believe it. He released it only for a fraction of a second, just to change his grip on the thing, so that they were now hanging from the shaft as it flew slowly forward, rather than being pulled along by it. As he redistributed his weight into this new posture he hoisted Kate firmly upwards as if pulling up a sock. Down they went, and down further and further.
There was now a roaring crashing sound borne in on them by the wind from up ahead, and suddenly Thor was running, leaping over rocky, sandy scrubland, dancing through the knotted tussocks, and finally pounding and drumming his feet to a halt.
They stood still at last, swaying, but the ground on which they stood was solid.
Kate breathed for a few seconds, bending over to catch her breath. She then pulled herself up to her full height and was about to deliver a full account of her feelings concerning these events at the top of her voice, when she suddenly got an alarming sense of where she was standing.
Though the night was dark, the wind whipping at her and the pungent smell of it told her that some kind of sea was very close by. The sound of wild crashing breakers told her that in fact it was more or less beneath her, that they were standing very near to the edge of a cliff. She gripped the arm of the insufferable god who had brought her here and hoped, vainly, that it hurt him.