Looking for Jake: Stories Read online

  The bonds and boundaries were not stable. In the beginning, when reflection was rare, each event was a trauma, and we had no strategies. Where there were two mirrors or more they pulled chains of us together and locked us all into identical mimicry, in recursive tunnels of only one of you. As the tain spread, we learnt to fold our space, so fewer of us were snared.

  Where tiny parts of you were fleetingly reflected, the snippets of us that took your shapes were almost disengaged, almost independently born. There were never fast-fixed rules, hard lines: we learnt strategies. But some things were unchangeable. Where you were reflected, always, one of us at least was stitched to you.

  Endlessly we were drab copies. The impurities and stains that had given us some relief were taken. As we tried to hide behind one, we were laid bare in another. Even where we stretched and warped we did it at your whim, forced into your pathetic parodies of your own outlines, in bent circus mirrors.

  But some of us, some few, some ones and twos, found we could break free. By a caprice we never understood, as we were watched by you our unconscious tormentors, some of us found the strength to rebel.

  It would start and finish in an instant. Our revolts. A rush of freedom, a sudden certainty that we could move, a look up and a luxuriant stretching out and murder, a coming through. You would not withstand us, little men and women staring up dumb as your own faces came for you, your own arms crooked and pushing through the mirror.

  And when you were done and finished, we were in your world.

  A parliament of spies. It was a troubling victory. We were fixed, fast-frozen in these idiot bodies.

  The mirrors broke with our passage. We found others. Pressed ourselves against them, staring into the empty rooms beyond the glass, and whispered into them. Whispered until our siblings heard us, and in that way we would make murmured plans. We received orders and gave them, and squabbled over them. We were deep under cover, and our tribes cajoled and begged us, and made the case for their strategies.

  Some of us killed ourselves. We could do that, in the bodies that encased us. We could die. It was a horrid revelation, but the temptation of that new experience was too great for some.

  We went to war. A fifth column.

  There were plans we could make. To keep the tain covered, to slow the encroaching empire of mirrored glass. It made for strange allegiances.

  We joined the Venetian ranks. Hidden, we infiltrated the camp of our own dumb torturers, kept our hatred battened down. This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy. Having watched over the means of our misery, having seen it devised, Venice wanted it for itself, and made it forbidden knowledge. They coddled the glass-men of Murano, hid them behind enticements and threats, hostaged their families and would not let them leave. And even while they continued to make the mirrors, we swallowed and helped the floating republic keep them. The monopoly thrived on scarcity, and if we could not have no mirrors, we would fight to keep them rare.

  So when through perfidy the tain-makers escaped, we were there to help Venice, to guide the assassins, to be assassins ourselves. When the French could not mimic the expertise and instead stole the experts, made their own mirror factories, it was we who poisoned the glassblower, we who gave the metal-polisher fever until he died. We killed the escapees, desperate, fighting for Venetian merchants against the merchant-state of France, each little victory scored against history.

  Mirrors could not be corralled. We fought and strove and fought and agonised and lost, at every step.

  We walked among you. We learned tricks.

  There have been escapees, infiltrators on your side of the partition for as long as we have been in prison. Some of us escaped from the water, the polished obsidian, the bronze and glass, and hid beside you. But never so many as broke your silvered glass.

  We wore your faces, left-to-right. Mostly your friends, no matter how they loved you, could only stare at us a little, with a consternation of which they could make no sense. Staring at your reflection in flesh, knowing that something was altered but not able to see quite what it was, what of you was wrong.

  And where there were marks or scars or tattoos, where our reflected nature was impossible to hide, we disappeared, and became new people. With our task.

  Mirrors betray us. When we came through, we murdered those whose bodies had bound us, and there was no one among our tormented comrades left behind in our place, no one forced to mimic us from beyond the glass, as we had mimicked you. There was nothing in the tain made to take our shapes: we were invisible in the mirror, we had no reflections. When you saw that, you screamed, and called us things. We are the patchogues: that is our name. But you called us vampires.

  Gongsun defeated us. Your champion. Gongsun, Gongsun Xuanyuan, Ji Xuanyuan, Huangdi. They are all his names. The man who defeated Chiyou with his south-seeker, who wrote a book of sex, created writing, made tripods that stood to mimic infinity. He who made twelve great mirrors, to follow the moon into the sky and capture the world. To capture us. The Yellow Emperor.

  It was our fault. It hurts to say it. We thought we could win. The first attack was ours.

  And when all was done and your champion, your Yellow Emperor, had led you to victory—at bloody cost, at least—he set free his mirrors. Snared us. Until then the worlds had bled, had oozed into each other. We had walked without pause from our plane to yours, through the doors of light, through the glimmerings of water and the flat gateways of stone and polished metal. Until your champion, with arcane sciences that I cannot begin, I cannot begin to understand, until he separated us and locked us apart. A world to play in, but punished with the enforced mumming of your vanity.

  He changed history. He made it so that it had always been so. And you forgot us, and cast us as images, and ignored us, and stared at yourselves.

  I have seen my people debased. Entities more powerful than your moon made to smear scarlet wax and fat on peeling lips, lick it off lumpy teeth, made to preen with you. Bulked into spasming fibrous meat and mutely raising and lowering iron bars, without complaint, unable to complain, as you stared at yourselves, at them, made to wear your sweat-wet clothes and jostle mindlessly from machine to machine as you worked to change your shapes. You have put mirrors by your beds, or over them, and trapped my people in your clammy fuck-embraces. You made us fuck each other, stare at the eyes of our siblings with shared hatred and apology as the bodies you made us wear did the corporeal things you did.

  For six thousand years, and forever, you have held us down. Each of us alive and watching, and waiting, and waiting, undying all that time. You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse. And you have taken our freedom away in slow increments, until in a sudden flurry of three centuries you sped it all up, and took away our last escapes, and made our world yours.

  One day, we whispered. We had whispered it forever.

  When it came, the time was not one day but many, stretched out over months, a luxuriant, languorous release, in pieces, in parts and parcels, and the more infuriating but ultimately the more wonderful, liberatory, for that.

  The streets were wet again. It was like a warning. London was never so alien as after the rain, its tarmac and slate turned into what would once have been mirrors.

  Sholl walked through the remains of Hampstead, past empty outlines of shops spilling glass and the last remains of their produce. By a bookshop, he trod through a slush of decaying paper pulp.

  There was water still in the air, a mist that coalesced and ran down Sholl’s face. The pavements tilted away from the Heath, and he could feel himself descending.

  He kept swallowing, and changing his grip on his gun. He was surprised at the extent of his fear. He had not thought he would be alone. Even so, he did not consider changing his plan. It was irreversible.

  Sholl listened hard as he walked, but he could hear only soft noise of the air. He felt closed in, hearing his own actions very close as if they reverberated back from walls, as if he were walking a corridor,
a rut, channelled inexorably. He listened to his walking, his feet falling and rising. A gentle slap and plash before him, and behind him a faint wet parting. He breathed in deep, and held it for a long time, past several feet of brick and broken window, and exhaled, a tremor still audible.

  Something moved away from him, up the wall, in a lizard motion not quite like anything Sholl had ever seen. He was approaching the junction by the underground station. This close to Hampstead’s heart, the fauna of mirrors were playing.

  The street curled leftward, bringing the crossroads into view. For a last few seconds Sholl would not look at it. He focused instead on the water around him, on the puddles and slick asphalt. The light was hard, even through the clouds, but of course no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights. The rainwater washed the city free of dust and went into its cracks, and stained it camouflage, darkening it. Sholl tramped through the wet that did not reflect him. On water-blackened streets, with the outlines of everything still rain-sharpened, as if London were an etching, though the matte wet colours ate the light.

  Sholl had to look ahead in the end.

  The tiles of Hampstead Underground had once glinted. Now their dark green changed as water drooled from it. It was hidden with a smearing of grey urban ivy. The station’s metal mesh gates were bent wide open, snapped, splaying from the dark entrance like roots from a cave. In the unlit interior Sholl could just see the ticket booth, the stainless steel doors to the lifts stalled open, pitch within.

  Before the station, the crossroads was full of moving things. Through the shadows Sholl saw that the station itself thronged with them, and they spilt into the open air, foraging in the ruins.

  The mindless animals of the war, the residue of the fighting. Like rats in trenches, they were overrunning. For centuries they had been spawned in thousands, little resonances of reflection, shed by passion in makeup compacts, dresser mirror triptychs, glazed gym walls. Imago spoor, they had lived fleetingly and been destroyed within moments, an endless pell-mell life cycle. But when reflection became a door they were set free; they could live. They could breed. They were the detritus of reflection. Vanity’s castoffs, the snippets of human forms thrown up and ignored in the echoes between mirrors.

  Human hands clutched and unclutched along the gutter. They picked their way through the mud, leaving tracks of fingerprints. Up the hill, Sholl saw a mouldering human corpse. Several of the hands picked their way across it with fingertip grace, and settled on its flesh, lowering themselves and gnawing at it with their nails. They were grazing.

  There were little clouds of colour-smeared lips like plump butterflies, that ebbed through the air, each motion with the exaggerated kiss-pout of someone applying lipstick. Eyes, human eyes, spasmed into existence and out again, moving through folded space, winking stupidly as they went.

  There were teeth in big horse-grins, that Sholl half saw. With a peristaltic wave a biceps clenched and unclenched through the centre of the junction. Like aggregates of spiderwebs, the imagos of hair drooled from windowsills, billowing, against the wind. There were doves overhead, flapping their fingers energetically.

  These were mindless scavengers, that had come in the aftermath of the fighting, and their numbers had increased. They spilt out of the mirrors and did not die. Ignored images and afterimages, gone feral.

  Men and women walked among them, unperturbed by the stranger presences. Their clothes seemed extraordinary—suits, jeans and shirts, drab everyday wear, exactly as it would have been before the war. They were vampires, imagos in human form. They did not speak to one another. Sholl pressed himself against the wall beside him, watched from behind the brick.

  Each vampire concentrated, moving in its own shuffling path, tracing repeating patterns with autistic precision, ignoring its siblings completely. The vampires muttered to themselves.

  The men and women moved in gradually changing patterns, like clockwork winding down, and the vermin, the refracted glimmerings of people, fluttered and crept by them. Sholl watched. Way overhead, just below cloud, a sudden point of focus came into clarity and was gone. An imago, a full imago, in its own barely perceivable form. Miles to the south, Sholl heard a huge ripping sound.

  Sholl was very afraid. He had never yet deliberately faced the imagos. And though the vampires were the most comprehensible, and the weakest of them, they were still stronger and more savage than any human. And they hunted. When vampires moved into an area, the surviving humans moved out or died.

  He sighed, his breath quivering. He felt in his pockets for his torch and ammunition, his cuffs; then he hefted his shotgun and stepped into view.

  There was a tiny increase in the sound of the vampires. They did not stop their motion, but simultaneously, they looked sidelong at Sholl, watching him with what looked like unease.

  He levelled his gun at one of them, a vampire in a clean baker’s smock. It winced, and tried to shrink away, but continued in its monotonous circuit. Sholl pulled the trigger.

  The gun seemed to sound for a long time. The baker-thing was lifted, was hurled high in an arc of blood. It squealed very high like a pig. All the vampires made the same noise.

  When the baker landed, it drummed its feet and hands on the pavement like a child having a tantrum, spattering blood around it. There was a cave in its chest from the shot. Its shoes scrabbled on concrete. It shook its head hyperactively, keening through gritted teeth.

  Sholl reloaded, watching the vampires. They were grimacing, emitting a grating sound. They moved back and forward on their heels, staring at him. Their faces were screwed up with concentration. Sholl stepped forward.

  His heart was striking hard. He felt very cold. His fear was so strong it was as if he could not breathe.

  As he approached the closest of the vampires, he forced himself not to slow. It backed away. It was a woman in a frumpy, blousy dress. It dropped to all fours and moved from him with animal motion.

  Sholl leaped forward and made a grab for the woman’s arm. It screeched and jumped, floral fabric billowing. It landed on a windowsill, six or seven feet up, and crouched, hissing.

  Quick with adrenaline, Sholl spun. Every second, every split second, he expected a vampire blow to take him down. He twisted, to see what was behind him, and behind him, and behind him, holding his breath with fear. But the vampires were paralysed, were staring at him with an unreadable expression.

  Shaking, Sholl went forward again, for the next nearest vampire, reaching out to grasp it. The wildlife, the shards of human forms, scattered, fleeing the crossroads too fast to see. And the vampires, now, bolted. Loping four-limbed at a sped-up pace, scrambling up strange angles of wall, snapping back into the darkness of Hampstead Underground Station, howling and growling, so that in a fraction of a second, only Sholl and the wounded baker-vampire were in the road.

  The baker snapped its limbs and was suddenly reeling on its feet. Sholl came for it and it wailed in what sounded like terror and ran, backward, much faster than any man could move, facing Sholl all the time. Matter jostled loose in gouts from its terrible wound, and it left blood and shredded viscera on the road.

  Sholl watched it disappear. He was elated. He turned, pirouetting alone in the middle of the road. Sounds of triumph and survival came out of him, delighted sounds he could not control. They had not touched him.

  He fired his gun into the air and whooped. London swallowed the noise, denied him an echo.

  Sholl still had to do what he had come here to do. He had to get what he needed. He stared into the entrance to the station, into the eyes of the vampires still watching him, just visible as shadows. Sholl’s fear came back to him. He swallowed. What does it matter? he thought. If the very worst happens, what does it truly matter?

  He stepped forward, toward the tiled steps, toward the darkness, where many of the vampires and the fauna of mirrors had fled.

  As he entered the station there was a collective whine from the things within. The hands scuffed through the dust and h
id in the darkness of holes and corners, the eyes and lips winked and kissed out of sight.

  The vampires howled and swung, simian, into the lift-shafts and away to the caverns in the station’s end, toward the stairs. The chamber was ghosted with echoes. The cables still holding the ruined lifts sounded like huge instruments as the vampires grabbed them and clambered out of reach and sight.

  Sholl walked into the stillness. He stepped over the skeleton of a London Underground employee, still coated in the rags of its blue uniform. Sholl stood by the electronic gates, and listened.

  He needed to move fast. He could still feel his own fear. It was undiminished, as if his sudden bravado did not replace it but overlaid it.

  Like a fare evader, Sholl vaulted the gates and stepped to the back of the dark station. It was very cool. He stood in front of the jimmied lift doors, listening to drips, strange sounds of steel. There was rubbish on the floor, a scattering of discarded tickets. Sholl headed toward the back of the station, toward the staircase.

  The spot from his torch foraged like an animal, like a guide dog picking out a path for him between the broken metal and obscure imago detritus—unidentifiable rotting things, organic constructs spun out of nothing. The station floor was sticky. Sholl made the only sound, walking into the darkest part of the corridor, descending a little preliminary flight of ten steps, in absolute blackness now, approaching the shaft and the black iron of the spiral stairs, the scuffed paint of its handrail curling close to the cylindrical wall, clockwise down and out of sight.

  A pillar of pipe- and rust-scarred metal threaded through the centre of the coiling stairway. Sholl stood on the top step, and angled his torch down through the thin gap between the right-hand rail and the pillar. The light met more stairs, and he moved it till it pushed past the handrail directly below him, and then again, and then it died, three coils of the stairs down, long before it touched the bottom. Nothing moved in the beam. Nothing sounded.