Looking for Jake Part 10

It was dark outside. Not a clear, starlit dark either, but a cloudy shadow. It was a drab night.

Desultory sodium-light from the streetlamps before and below me, that was all. No moon.

But the red gla.s.s at the centre of my window was s.h.i.+ning.

It sent icy scarlet light onto the desk below, and onto me. I swear that was the source of the raised hair on my neck.

I gaped up at it. My mouth must have been slack. All the impurities and the scratches on the inside of that central panel were etched and vivid. It seemed to have a hundred shapes, all of a sudden, to look momentarily like a huddled embryo and a red whirlpool and a bloodshot eye.

I must have been staring at it for no more than three or four seconds when it stopped. I did not see it happen. I was not conscious of any light going out, anywhere. Perhaps it was extinguished as I blinked. All I know is that one moment it shone, and then it did not. My retinas retained no afterimage.

Perhaps it was an isolated light from some aeroplane or somesuch, that happened to s.h.i.+ne directly and strangely through my window. I am thinking much more clearly now than when I started to write, and that seems the only possibility. Looked at like that, I do not know why I bothered to record this.

Except that when the room was lit up with that light, something felt very strange in the air. Very wrong. It was only three seconds, but I swear it made me cold, deep down.

8 October (Night. Small hours) There is something beyond the window.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I am afraid.

I am no longer bemused or concerned or intrigued but truly afraid.

I must write this quickly.

When I came home in the evening (having thought all day about what happened last night, even when I denied that that was what I was doing) I felt a peculiar disinclination to enter my study.

When I finally conquered it, of course, there was nothing untoward in there.

I looked nonchalantly enough up at the window and saw the sky through it, just as I should.

Pitted and cracked by the old gla.s.s, but there was nothing out of place.

I dismissed my nerves and pottered around for a few hours, but I never relaxed. I think I was mulling over the odd light of the previous evening. I was waiting for something. That was not quite clear to me at first, but as the evening grew older and the sunlight was smothered, I found myself looking up more and more through the sitting room windows. I was thinking of what to do.

Eventually, when the day was quite gone, I decided to go into the study again. Just to read, of course. That's what I told myself, in my head, loudly. In case, I suppose, anything was listening.

I settled down in the armchair and leafed through Charlie's tedious book, that I am labouring to finish.

I glanced up at the window, now and then, and it behaved as gla.s.s should. I had turned off the main light, was reading by a little lamp to reduce the reflections. Beyond the window I could make out the occasional intermittent lights of some aeroplane pa.s.sing from the left-hand windowpane through that central, much older one, and out again. They ballooned briefly as they slid behind old bubbles in the gla.s.s.

I read and watched for at least an hour, and then I must have fallen asleep.

I woke suddenly, very cold. I could only just make out my watch-it was a little after two in the morning.

I was huddled like some pathetic child in the armchair, in darkness. The bulb of the lamp must have blown, I remember thinking. I stood shakily and heard the book fall from my lap. I looked around, confused and s.h.i.+vering.

I think the white noise of rain was what woke me. It was coming down hard. I saw the dull s.h.i.+ne of the streetlights glint and move slightly through the slick of water on the windowpanes.

I fumbled, trying to gather myself, and saw the room by red moonlight pa.s.sing through that central pane. As I turned, I saw the moon briefly.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I stopped suddenly. My throat caught. I looked back at the window.

The old pane was dry.

Dirty rain was pounding against its neighbours, but not a drop spattered against it.

The moon was s.h.i.+ning full in my face through the gla.s.s, distorted by its impurities. I was quite still.

After a moment I walked closer to the old window. All around me was the low, mindless sound of rain. I stopped just in front of the desk and looked up at that moon. As far as I could see through the buckled gla.s.s, it was in a clear, dark sky. I could see stars around it.

The sky visible through the rain in the other windows was a ma.s.s of cloud.

I moved my head slowly to one side, watching the moon. It moved slowly out of the old starburst window and past the dividing frame. It did not appear in the right-hand pane. When I moved my head quickly back, it returned, to vanish again on the opposite side.

The new panes and the old looked out over different skies.

I pulled the desk quickly out of my path and stood directly in front of the intricate frame. I put my hands to it, trembling, and brought my face up to it, and looked out.

I stared through the gla.s.s and the moonlight, and then with a flash of fear that made me sick I saw the top of a wall. Through the greenish gla.s.s below the red centrepiece, in the light of some ghost moon, I saw old bricks and crumbling mortar only a few feet before me, topped with broken gla.s.s.

Beyond that wall there was a low, angled roof sloping away into the darkness. I looked right, pressing my face against gla.s.s which was colder than the other panes. The wall stretched off as far as I could make out.

I fumbled behind me for the desk chair, pulled it over, and stood on it carefully without taking my eyes from the view. I looked down through the old window, tracing the black bricks below me. And there, perhaps six feet below the gla.s.s, was the ground.

I rocked with disorientation. Sure enough, to either side of me, the windowpanes still looked out over the London night, over the stretch of scrub and the dark slates fifty feet below.

But the patterned gla.s.s in the centre overlooked an alley, only a little way from the pavement.

Sc.r.a.ps of rubbish skittered soundless across the cement.

With my ear pressed against the old gla.s.s, the silence that seeped through was greater than the pathetic puttering of the rain. My heart was beating so hard it shook me. I took in the dim sight Looking for Jake, By China Mieville in front of me with a numb foreboding that grew worse every second.

It became terror when I turned my head slowly, and saw that I was watched.

* * * I saw them for less than half a second, the clutch of dark figures that stood motionless in the entrance to the alley. But in that moment I knew that their glowering unlit eyes were all on me.

I cried out and stumbled, tottering and falling.

I landed heavily and fell, then writhed until I could stand, and then I ran for the door, moaning, and I slapped the light switch and turned and the moon had gone.

The old window admitted the same view as all the others. Like its fellows, it was wet with rain.

It is nearly morning, now, and I do not know what to do.

I thought at first of telling somebody: Charlie, or Sam, or someone. But then I hear the same story told to me by a seventy-one-year-old, and I know what I would think: Alzheimer's, old-timers'. Or madness. Or blindness. Or a simple lie.

At best I would think I was being told a story in that irritatingly fey metaphorical register that some people adopt in their dotage (in which "I think often of my long-dead husband" becomes "I have lovely chats with your father").

I could only tell someone if they would come, and see it. And it might not happen again, or not while they were there, and then I would be left with their pity. I will not have that.

10 October They are children.

They are taunting me.

That other city came back last night. I have avoided the study for two days, and I do not know what happened beyond that window. Let it come and go, I thought. Like tides changing outside a seaside house. No need for me to care.

* * * I woke in the night, at some unspecified dark hour. I lay for a long time in bed, trying to work out what had disturbed me.

Eventually I heard it. A faint hiss. A whispering.

A voice was coming through the wall. From the study.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville I lay there numb and cold with my eyes open. It came irregularly, furtive and insistent.

I sat up and pulled the top cover around me like a cloak. Mute and fearful I shuffled from my room and stood outside the study door. The sound was louder here, sliding insidiously through the wood.

I knew that I would not sleep again. I set my jaw, reached out, and opened the door.

The room was bathed again in that ghastly moonlight. It made my books and shelves look ancient and insubstantial. Everything was motionless, basking with the stillness of a dead thing.

The moonlight extended from the old pane in a ca.n.a.l of dusty luminescence.

Through the rest of the window I saw scudding clouds, but it was a clear night in that other city.

And as I stood there on the threshold of that freezing room, I heard that voice again.

O I M ISTER.

It was a child's voice.

It was whispered, but it filled the room with ease. It resonated in weird dimensions.

I heard a thin t.i.ttering and a shus.h.i.+ng noise.

There was cold outside me and inside me.

O I M ISTER.

I heard it again. I inched forward into that terrible dark room. The desk was where I had left it.

There was nothing between me and the coldly s.h.i.+ning window.

There was another sound: a sharp tapping on the gla.s.s. I heard it again, and this time I saw a handful of little dark shapes appear from nowhere in the bottom of the old pane and rattle against it.

Someone, I realised, was throwing stones.

I crossed the floor in slow, tiny steps and picked up the chair, which lay where it had fallen. I mounted it and looked down as steeply as I could.

There was a quick, furtive motion in the shadows of the alley. Fear chilled me and blurred my eyes. I could see almost nothing in that great trench of darkness, but I made out the shapes of figures pus.h.i.+ng themselves quickly flat against the wall directly below me, so that I could not see them.

And one of them spoke again.

Looking for Jake, By China Mieville O I M ISTER YOU OLD c.u.n.t. And there was a chorus of malignant giggles.

Another stone was thrown, much harder this time. I felt it through the gla.s.s, and stumbled back.

I kept my footing. I screamed at them in my fear.

"What d'you want? Leave me alone!" I shouted, and was greeted with raucous and stifled laughter.

One by one little shapes pulled themselves from the wall and emerged into my line of sight.

They were little more than shadows in that profound darkness. But I could see that they were children.

Unbelieving, I pulled myself down for a moment to stare through one of my other windows, but nothing had changed. I was fifty feet up, and the only wakeful thing this side of the horizon. I was staring out over little urban hillocks and clots of gra.s.s moving fitfully in the wind, and the endless maze of hunched houses all unlit and silent.

But up there in the other nightland that uncanny gang was hurling stones at my window, and hissing vicious abuse in spectral voices, and calling me old man, old man.

Quite suddenly I truly realised what was happening. For the first time that night I was fully aware that I was being taunted by phantoms, by delinquent ghosts. I seemed to wake, to feel the chill air and hear the rat-tat-tat of stones and the cruel words from a pack of children who couldnot be there. And I stepped off the chair as horror clotted in my gorge and I felt my legs nearly fold, and I walked as steady as I could to the light and turned it on, and when that did nothing to stem the flow of vitriol from the ghost city I slammed the door three times.

And when I turned back, thank G.o.d, thank G.o.d, it had all gone.

I do not know if the children fled in fear or if they are still there, waiting wherever the city has gone.

11 October I went back to the shop from where the window came.

As I foresaw, the woman knew nothing, remembered nothing, could tell me nothing. She had had the window for months, part of a lot from somewhere she did not recall.

She looked at me, concerned by my manner. She asked if there was something wrong. I could not stop a fleeting, hysterical laugh at that, an incredulous grin. It must have been the most horrible rictus.

I was possessed by some unclear, nebulous emotions that I cannot define. A sense of urgency and isolation. A deep feeling that the past was done, that it was the present that should concern Looking for Jake, By China Mieville me.

What is the nature of that place?

I think of it in so many ways.

The window remembers what it used to see. That is clear. I do not know where I look out or when, but it must be the older view from that cracked pane (more cracked now, I realise, after last night's little broadside).

So am I living in a window's memory? Is this nothing but a repeat of the pointless brutality directed at some old man like me, who first lived behind that sunburst window? Perhaps this window looks out onto some imbecilic, repet.i.tive Hades like a stuck record.

Or perhaps this time it is different. Perhaps those little roughnecks want to finish something off.

13 October The little tykes. Ragam.u.f.fins. I imagine fat boys smoking and thin-faced girls. Dead eyes. Little ruffians.

The little terrors.

The terrors.

They will not leave me. They croon at me and mock my shuffling old-man walk. They scribble obscenities on the wall opposite, and on the bricks of my house, my other house that I cannot see. They p.i.s.s and hurl stones.