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Writer's pictureChronicler of the Gog

Part 1.2: A Game

Looking back on it later, Saul would be ashamed to realise that for the rest of that night, with all its ups and terrifying downs, he wanted more than anything just to go home. For it to be over - or better yet, a dream, something imagined, dreamt up out of the persistent (but, it turned out, completely inaccurate) feeling he always carried around with him that he wanted a more exciting life. He wanted to be back in bed, warm, sleepy, staring at the ceiling wishing for adventure, instead of being handed real, cold, wet adventure on a plate he couldn’t say no to.


The rocking and the jerking seemed to go on for hours, but it must have been seconds at most. To his further shame, Nate spent all of that time sat in the seat next to him laughing, his face alight with excitement.


When the movement subsided, and the lorry made it obvious that it wasn’t going to sink, it settled down to a very gentle side-to-side rocking that was almost relaxing. Saul undid his seatbelt and scrambled forward to the space between the two front seats. Careful of the many incomprehensible buttons and levers that filled that front space, he stood on tiptoe and leant over the dashboard. Down there in the dark the water churned and frothed, but it was now well below the bottom of the door. From the sideways drift of the cab, he could tell that the lorry was floating. Out the side widow, there was the pale outline of the boathouse, smudged by rain. Out the other side, the looming, indistinct shapes of a few huge trees, and beyond them the open blackness of the marshes. Unaccountably, still, the lorry didn’t sink.


Clearly the tall man could read his mind. “I told you,” he said, with a fierce smile. “This is the Gog.” He pulled a brass lever on the dashboard.


There was a juddering beneath them and the floor bucked and shook. Gaia stood up from her seat and gently pushed Saul out of her way and towards the back of the cab. It wasn’t a wall behind the seats, as he’d thought, but a thick, heavy black curtain. Gaia drew it to one side and secured it with a thick rope.


Whatever Saul might have expected to see behind it—a wall with a few controls and dials, maybe, or a window into a big space full of compacted rubbish—it wasn’t that.


The space behind them was a room, and it was one of the most beautiful and chaotic things Saul had ever seen.


It was a long, low space with walls of golden wood that shone softly in the light from small, round, brass-rimmed lamps set into the walls. A long, thin desk was built into the wall all down one side of the room. It was made of polished dark wood that gleamed in the lamplight, darker than the floor, and looked like an old-fashioned writing desk stretched out to many times its normal length, with a green leather writing surface the length of the wall. Above it, along along the wall to the back of the room, was a half metre-high cliff of drawers and alcoves and tiny cupboards. Many of them hung open. Some of the drawers had fallen out. The lamps threw warm pools of light on all manner of fascinating rubbish thrown across the desk and the floor: piles of books, papers and more maps; small model vehicles and buildings; a Metro newspaper from yesterday; pencils, pens, brushes; a box of chocolates; a long knife in a leather sheath; a Punch mask; three or four little doll-like creatures; an empty, upturned fruit bowl carved from spalted beech, and – in every corner of the floor – countless small, red-green apples, the kind that look bad but taste wonderful. Under all this, Saul could see the occasional glimpse of a golden wood floor covered in tiny, complex patterns.


The back wall was a huge map. Saul recognised the shape of London from the blue line that wound across the middle; but the curves of the river aside, the rest was unfamiliar. The whole thing was covered in lines and symbols that had nothing to do with any London map Saul had ever seen. Pins stuck out here and there, and little flags, and other things he couldn’t make out. Fluorescent post-it notes were scattered across the surface, covered in black writing, or that strange red scrawl he had seen earlier on the tall man’s borrowed map.


“Damn,” said Gaia. “We forgot to close the desk again.”


“We?” Said the Tall Man, flicking another small switch. Small, white blinds along the walls lifted slowly, revealing a series of small rectangular portholes. Beyond them, Saul knew, must be the river bank, the canal barges, the empty park; but in that small, impossible space it felt like they could have looked out to anywhere in the universe.


On the opposite side of the room to the desk were one or two small, separate consoles fixed to the walls, complicated looking controls Saul didn’t recognise. Between those were a couple of battered, comfortable-looking armchairs and a small round coffee table. On one corner at the very back wasa tiny corner kitchen, with a sink and a small sideboard and a white plastic kettle plugged into a weirdly normal looking plastic wall socket.


Now the tall man was pressing switches and pulling things under the steering column, and the dials and gauges on the dashboard were changing. Simple, familiar speedometers and rev counters were giving way to more complex displays. The Gog had stopped rocking. The Tall Man pushed a lever slowly forward, and, with a deep humming, the nose of the cab lifted. Outside the window the boat house started to slide away. The lorry, or boat, or whatever this thing was, was headed south: down into London, down towards the hungry throat of the Thames.



* * *


“Where are the others?” The Tall Man said.


“The island, I think,” said Gaia. The Tall Man pressed some buttons, pushed a couple of levers, then lifted his arms and stretched slowly, like a cat. Quiet little cracks and pops squeezed out from one end of his long body to the other, as if every joint from ankle to neck was going off at once, a faraway string of Chinese firecrackers. Unfolding his long legs and arms carefully , he got up and stepped into the back, stooping as he crossed the threshold from the cab. “Come,” he said, “I show you around.”


“What about the boat?” said Nate. So it was a boat now.


“She knows where we’re going,” said the Tall Man.


“Might depend on you though,” said Gaia, looking at Saul. She was sat at the desk now, munching an apple. She threw another at the Tall Man, who caught it one-handed, then gestured at the floor: “Help yourself.” There was another under the desk, close by his foot, so Saul got on all fours to reach for it. It wasn’t as roomy down there as he expected: the space under the desk was reduced by dozens, maybe hundreds more tiny drawers and cabinets, some no bigger than a football card. Some of the patterns on the floor were raised up from the smooth surface, so he could trace their shapes with his fingertips. He was about to ask about them, but his thoughts were interrupted by a rustling of paper above him. Apple in hand, he crawled back out.


Gaia was unrolling a large piece of paper onto the soft leather. It was another map. A normal looking map, this time.


Gaia traced a long, curving line that ran down from the top half of the map before separating into several other, twistier lines. “Look here—where it splits. You see?” The boys followed her finger down the line—clearly a river—to a point where a long, thin piece of land that poked into the river like a green finger and broke it in two. On one side it flowed onwards, in a straighter line down and off the bottom of the picture, which he supposed was the south. On the other side, it broke into a series of twists and steps and curves, most of which ran off the side of the map.


“We’re on this river now,” said Gaia, indicating a spot on the map, “just coming down to here—” she tapped the split—“where it forks. That straighter bit there is the canal where the boats go, down past the Olympic Park. Here, though—” pointing to the twistier blue line to the north—“this is the Old Lea. The river more like it used to be. And just here—” she pointed to an unremarkable spot— “is an island. Just a small one.”


“Where?” Saul couldn’t see anything.


“Here. But it’s not on maps.”


That couldn’t be true.


“We have a little spot on that island,” said Gaia. “Where we store stuff. Sometimes we stay there. You can’t see it from outside, and you can’t get there without crossing water.” Saul thought of the cold of the canal and grimaced.


“Oh,” said Gaia, “you’d be surprised.” She rummaged in another drawer and pulled out a crumpled piece of A4 paper. “Now,” she said, with the air of a magician: “look at this.”


“Hang on,” said Saul as she unfolded the paper, “Isn’t that—”


“Yup.”


There in front of them, now spread on the desk, was a familiar picture. It was a map Saul himself had made, in blue and green, and as he realised what it was, he was taken right back to the moment he did it: hunched beneath the window in their bedroom, the paper on a hardback book on his knees, as the autumn sky behind him turned slowly from clear blue to black one evening after school, the smell of dinner coming up from the kitchen and the wind hissing in the trees on the railway embankment. He remembered imagining a great old city, older than the memories of the people who lived in it; broad avenues and vague shapes, dark borders looming up and over; a central point of light, and a sense of movement somewhere that made him add fast, flowing lines around the sides. All this came to him when he put the pen in his hand, like it always did—like it must do when anybody used their imagination, to draw a picture or write a story or sing a song. It didn’t mean anything.


“Maybe tomorrow we meet the others there,” said the Tall Man.


“The others?” said Nate.


“You didn’t think it was just us?” Gaia smiled at him. “Now,” she continued, “watch this.” Her eyes narrowed in quick mischief and something curious moved in Saul as she lifted the first map—the real map—up to one of the lamps. The light shone through from behind, illuminating colours, bringing life to the city’s veins and bones. Then she picked up Saul’s casual drawing—the thrown-away work of a bored afternoon—with her other hand, and held it over the top.


Saul’s mouth fell open like he was a caught fish. Nate giggled gleefully. Gaia grinned. It was a great grin, all awkward teeth and excitement.


“You see?” She said.


Of course, they weren’t exactly the same: but it was obvious that the splits and byways of Saul’s avenues matched the rivers and bridges and paths on the map behind. And not just the natural features, but the human ones too: here, a housing estate on the real map was fenced by a casual rectangle he’d drawn just to fill a gap; there, a bridge roughly matched a thick line across the paper; and there, a casual, sweeping cross mirrored a convergence of railway lines. It was astonishing. It must be a trick, but it was a good one. He wondered how they had done it.


“See this wider part, here?” said Gaia. She indicated a broad section of the river, bordered on one side by parkland, on the other by brush and the back of an industrial zone. Saul nodded. “Right. Well… just here—” she pointed precisely with the end of a pencil—“that’s the island.”


And there, right under the tip of her hovering pen, weeks ago, Saul had drawn a great red ‘X.’


* * *




“Tonight we don’t go there,” said the Tall Man, who seemed unsurprised by any of this, “No time. We’re going Isle of Dogs.”


“Isle of what?”


He adopted a strange voice and unnatural expression, as if mimicking somebody else. “‘Where you buy frankfurters in the supermarket?’” he asked the room in general. If it was an impression, it was nobody Saul recognised. If it was a real question, he had no idea what the man was on about.


“The aisle of dogs.” The tall man sighed. ”I did not solve it. The word puzzle, I never get it. Micky did it.”


“What?”


“Hot dogs. Sometimes the clues are stupid.”


This was insane. Nate might be having a great time, but Saul was not: he didn’t understand any of this, and not understanding was not just uncomfortable, it was humiliating. He really just wanted to go home. It must have been obvious in his face. Gaia reached out tentatively and and touched his arm.


“It’s a game we play,” she said, looking into his face as if it was very important that he understand. “And this is how it works.” She handed him a dirty piece of paper that looked like it had been cut from a sheet of A4 printer paper, like the stuff Saul did most of his drawing on. Sure enough, printed across it was the single question, all in capitals:


WHERE DO YOU BUY FRANKFURTERS IN THE SUPERMARKET


“We get puzzles. Usually they’re clues that tell us where to go, like this. When we get there, if we got it right, sometimes we find another puzzle that tells us where to look or what to look for, or maybe it sends us somewhere else. Sometimes there’s nothing there at all, and we have to trust we’re in the right place and we just guess. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother with puzzles, he just tells us everyone where to go. I think he thinks it’s funny when we race.”


“Who’s ‘he’?”


“Jack,” said Gaia. “He runs the game. People call him Springheel—”


“We do not,” interrupted the Tall Man, his voice suddenly cold. “We don’t call him that. That is not his name. That name is something different.”


Gaia was unbothered. “Jack is in charge. He judges. He gives prizes. We have to go to the right place and find the most… Londony things we can find, then we bring them back, and he judges them. And give out points.”


‘Londony?’ What does that mean? Judges them how?”


“I don’t know. Nobody does exactly. We guess. He says he wants ‘the soul of the city.’” She did the same mimicry, the same odd voice. “He says it all the time: ‘the soul of the city.’ I don’t know what he means. Each round of the game, you have to bring him things from the right place. If you go to the wrong place, he’ll take it, but usually you get nothing. He likes old things, or things that are part of something bigger, or things that mean something to somebody. Or did once. He’s a strange man. He’s…. not very nice. But he’s in charge. So.”


“But why do you do it? Why not just stop?”


“The winners get money. A lot of money. And some of us —”


The Tall Man put a hand on her shoulder.


“After a while it makes a kind of sense. When you find something good, you know. Pieces of the city.”


“London things,” said Nate.


The Tall man picked a slim letter knife off the desk and held it out towards Saul, the blade pinched between his finger and thumb. It was an odd shape: the blade had been sharpened so many times the cutting edge was concave, thin and delicate in the middle, ready to break. The Tall Man held the handle towards Saul and nodded at it. Saul took it.


The handle was made of an unremarkable dark wood, smooth with use, the grain visible. Two copper rivets held the wood around the blade, and a thin copper collar ran around the top of the handle. The copper shone in the warm light of the desk lamps, but the blade was dull. It had a comfortable quality in his hand, as if he had held it before. It felt warm.


“Wood from a fire barge,” said the Tall Man. “Used to go up and down the river putting out fires. None of them are left now. This wood, used to be a boat. Should have given it to him, but I liked it.”


“This boat,” said Gaia, waving her hands to the in the room around them. “Used to be a rubbish lorry.”


“You,” said the Tall Man, looking directly at Saul. “You used to be a normal boy. But now you draw pictures that are maps. You close your eyes and you see real places, and you don’t even know.”


Before Saul could think of an answer to that, Nate dug in his coat pocket and held out an unremarkable lump of reddish brick, about the size of a walnut. Gaia took it and held it gently in the palm of her hand, her eyebrows raised in a question. Nate turned to Saul. “Paul’s house,” he said.

Paul used to be their neighbour. He had lived next door for nearly 50 years; he was born in his house. But the house wasn’t his, he rented it, like his mum and dad had done. His brothers and sisters moved out, his parents died, he stayed. When Saul was about three, he started asking his Dad every now and then if he could go over the fence to Paul’s; and if Dad said yes, he’d lift him over, and Saul would spend an afternoon eating biscuits and watching more TV than he would at home. When Nate was bigger they both went. For a couple of years it was a great place to be: it wasn’t a flat like theirs, it was still a single, enormous house, unchanged in its basic design in over a century, with high ceilings, dim rooms, old mirrors and dark staircases up four floors. When TV got boring, they played hide and seek and anything else they could think of, bombing up and down the stairs and corridors and hiding in cupboards and alcoves and old cold fireplaces. Sometimes Paul or one of his always-changing crowd of lodgers would join in, sometimes they wouldn’t. You’d think it might be a scary place, but it wasn’t, because it was a place where people lived. There was always someone in the kitchen to talk to or watch TV with or beg snacks off, or barbecuing in the garden, or fixing up some party of the crumbling facade, and people came and went and slept and worked.


But while they were playing, somebody bought Paul’s house.


A landlord he’d never met became another landlord he’d never met, and at first Paul didn’t even know it had happened. But then one day he got a letter in the post telling him he had to move out. It was badly written, Paul said, no better than he’d expect from a kid like Saul (his wink suggested he’d hold Saul to higher standards), and was just a simple, hostile demand to leave. Nothing more. Incoherent sentences trying to sound official and failing; vague threats. Paul ignored it. But more letters came, and they started to tighten up. The writing job had been passed to someone who could spell better and sounded more serious. Because the new landlord wanted “his” house free of Paul. He said Paul had no right to be there. That house was worth a lot of money.


Paul resisted nearly two years, but it was a struggle. This new landlord bought and sold houses and flats and sent letters every day. He’d spend as much money as Paul could make in a year on a lawyer to write those better letters and that was no problem for him, because the house he was emptying was worth sixty or a hundred times that.


Paul fought because he was stubborn. But he couldn’t win. He couldn’t afford his own expensive lawyer. It wasn’t a fair fight, so he lost, and he had to go. No more house for Paul and no more lost afternoons for Saul and Nate, who cried when Paul drove the last van load of his stuff away down the road, including the biscuit tin and the TV.


That was a couple years ago. The house had been empty since. Maybe the new landlord wasn’t quite as good at selling houses as he thought. The garden was getting shabbier and slimier and the red bricks up the front were crumbling around the edges. There were no more companionable noises drifting through the bedroom walls at night as they fell asleep. The extra plates of grilled chops and sausages handed over the top of the fence were things of the past.


Nate turned the fragment of brick over in his hands, looked up. Gaia and the Tall Man stared at him. They didn’t know Paul, or what he was to them, or where he lived, but they got it. Saul saw that they got it. Maybe he did too.


“So what do you do with it?”


“Jack judges. He gives points. And at the end of every round, like I said, whoever has most points gets money.”


“How much?”


“A thousand pounds.” Her face was grim. That was more money than Saul could imagine. “It used to be fun, now it’s not. When he made the prize big, the game changed. The people who play, now they’re mostly people who need money. There’s not many of the old players left.”


“Do you—”


“We need money too, of course we do, but not like that. We just don’t want to stop. This tradition goes back years, it doesn’t belong to Jack, it’s older than me—”


“Maybe older than me,” said the tall man.


“—but we were thinking about stopping. Us, we can make money in other ways.”


“But then we found your map,” muttered the Tall Man.


“It was an accident,” said Gaia. “We were clearing the rubbish from your flat and a bag wasn’t tied properly. One fell out. I picked it up and it… I liked it.” A shadow passed briefly over her face. “I wanted to keep it.”


“Then Micky noticed it,” said the Tall Man.


“She said it looked like Regent’s Park,” Gaia said. “You know, with the circles in the middle. Just a comment. Then Cedric saw that too, and… Cedric has these ideas. He got the map out, and he saw the same shapes.”


“Not just shapes,” said the Tall Man.


“You’d drawn these marks, and they were in the same places as real things. The zoo, the canal… even the Café.”


“And the changing rooms in the middle.” The Tall Man was rummaging through a drawer. He straightened up with a piece of paper in one hand and a small book in the other, open to a map of Regents Park. The paper was Saul’s picture, and he could see it too: the same shapes, the same relationships between their constituent parts. They were clearly, when you looked at them together, describing the same space; but while the map was rigid and roadbound, his was fluid, with lines and patterns contradicting or complementing the shapes beneath. It wasn’t a copy of a map, that was obvious. And, of course, like all of them: it had the X.


“What was there?” he asked, pointing at the X.


“It was in the canal by the zoo. By the big nets.” Saul knew what she meant. The old aviary. It was on the other side of the canal from the rest of the zoo, linked by a bridge. Because it was out on the edge, it was quiet. He liked it.


“So we went up the water, in the middle of the night. We found nothing. We all though Cedric was being Cedric, a bit crazy. He was saying, ‘don’t worry, it was just an idea,’ and he was gonna throw the map away. I felt bad for him, so I said, why don’t we see what’s under the water—”


Nate smiled.


“—and we checked along the bottom.”


“How?”


“We dragged it,” she said with a smile, and patted the wall fondly, as you might pat a dog. “You’ll see. It was a mess. Mud and slime and bags and bones and… horrible things. But in the mud, we found a little wooden statue.” She looked at Saul like she’d just given him a present.


“Wouldn’t that float?” asked Saul. All the things he wanted to ask, and this came out.


“Micky says some woods don’t float. It was ebony. It had sunk right down to the bottom, years ago—it was under the mud. Micky said it was a strange because ebony is not from England. When we cleaned it , parts of it were worn smooth. The face was nearly flat from touching. It was a little carving, a little girl, from a long time ago. Not fancy. It wasn’t even that good.”


“Good enough,” said the Tall Man. “We won.”


“Why?” asked Saul. “Was it valuable?”


The Tall Man shrugged. “Don’t think so. It was old. Rare wood, but not well made.”


“Because somebody loved it,” said Gaia quietly.


“But it was at the bottom of the canal.”


“He likes things that make you ask questions.”


“Can I see it?” asked Saul.


“No,” said the Tall Man.


“He keeps it all,” said Gaia.


The Tall Man cut in. “If we find things we love, or things we need, and if we can spare them, sometimes we keep them.” He waved at a scratched, faded life buoy hanging from a brass hook by the door. “But we needed money.”


“I wanted to keep her,” said Gaia sadly. “Someone cared for her, once. It was wrong to give it to him. But we had nothing else.”


“Anyway,” said the Tall Man, “your map worked.” He stared at Saul for a moment, sucking at his teeth. His long thin body was a flagpole, his face a pirate skull looking down from the top. The shadows were black in the dim cabin light, and his cheeks looked like holes in his face. But then he smiled, and the lines on his face broke up. He sighed slowly, looked thoughtful, turned and disappeared into the cab.


“Micky was pleased,” said Gaia quietly. “She’s been locking herself away with maps and old books ever since, coming out less and less. Probably reading now.” She paused and picked up her empty cup, swirling it round as if hoping she had missed a bit. “It could have been a coincidence. But we do your bags every week. So next time we had a proper look. Most of the maps that week, we couldn’t see anything. But one of them, Micky said there was a bit that looked like Tottenham Hale. So we went up there. They were working on the station. Right where your ‘X’ was, there was a skip outside. Full of rubbish. But there were old station signs in there. Like, really old, from behind the walls, covered in plaster. They must have thrown them without realising, because I think they were worth something.”


She looked up at Saul as if to say, ‘see?’


But he didn’t see. None of this made any sense at all. She was standing there looking at him as if she expected something back. The water was lapping in his ears and the smell of mud was creeping up his nostrils and it was obviously a trick but he didn’t understand the trick and he felt trapped. Something was demanded from him, and he didn’t know what it was. He was going to let everybody down, so soon and so easily: this hopeful girl, the Tall Man, Nate, himself. And worse, when he did—and he would—he wouldn’t even know he was doing it.


The warm wooden walls didn’t feel cosy any more. They pressed in on him; it was a small space, tight and uncomfortable. He was a long way from home. His parents were asleep in their beds. What if they woke up? They’d go mad. They didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how to get back. He felt sick and claustrophobic. This was a mistake. It was nonsense, he wanted no part of it. He had no powers, no special insight; the idea this all meant something was mad. He was about to draw breath to say as much, to apologise for leading everyone on, to ask to be driven home, or sailed home, or whatever crazy thing it would be, when a small hand found his and squeezed.


He looked down into his brother’s face and saw something there that he didn’t understand. Nate was the little one, the one he was supposed to look after. But there was something in his face that looked so certain, so sure, that Saul couldn’t possibly take him home. It would break his heart. The words wouldn’t come.


* * *


They drifted after that, for what seemed like a long time. Even in the gloom, the river showed them a different London, a city away from roads. New things slipped by in the half-dark: miniature forests and hulking warehouses; a huge stadium, a twisted red tower; small-hours canal walkers and night riders skittling along the uneven towpath; breweries and murals; cosy houseboats with round windows shining dim lights in the mist; brightly lit floating bars full of young men and women wrapped against the cold, warmed as much by one another’s faces as by their scarves and the great gas heaters above their heads. Then, finally, once they had passed through a harbour full of rich people’s boats—some like floating castles, some like pretty weapons—once they had passed under bridges and round corners and negotiated a few tricky and potentially expensive gaps—after all that, they reached the Thames.


And the Thames was different.


Saul had almost forgotten he was floating—he was comfortable with it, because it was comfortable. It was warm and cozy inside and the chairs were soft. But the canal was, after all, narrow, and its water was flat and well behaved, and the banks were never more than a few metres away. He also knew that it was shallow, to the point where he had decided to ask how that worked, because it was difficult to see how the bottom of the Gog cleared the canal floor at times. But the Thames was a real river. To Saul, who was not normally a boat-going boy, it might as well have been the sea.


As soon as they pulled out into the river proper and turned east, the Gog began to pitch and roll a little more, and the water became an active partner in their journey, not just a medium for it. Larger vessels passed them, pushing up bow waves that rocked them from side to side; the riverbanks drew away to an unswimmable distance; great illuminated cliffs of office buildings reared up on either side, windows lit in bright random patterns. They were sailing the city’s jugular now, pulsing with the rhythm of a thousand tributaries, and it felt far less controlled.


For all that, Gaia and the Tall Man were untroubled, and that was a comfort. They set the Gog to pilot itself, and they came back into the main room, where everybody crowded round the desk. With Saul’s permission, they opened his folder. In a warm pool of light under a desk lamp, his pictures took life: the colours were brighter, the edges sharper, the curves more confident. Trying to take this seriously, he looked for potential meaning in everything, even the creases from where he had forced them into their plastic covers.


The others seemed drunk on possibility, but they were methodical. They worked through the pictures one by one, front to back, taking their time. In those drawers and cupboards they had all kind of maps: maps of the river and the Docklands; railway and road maps; engineering plans for docks and stations and the Thames Barrier, even the cable car. They had overhead plans of huge buildings, satellite photos, maps of river currents and tidal charts. Some were great big folding things, others looked like cheap print-outs off the internet. Others were hand drawn pictures. One particularly handsome one, a great glossy black thing that the tall man pulled carefully from a long cardboard tube, was criss-crossed with lines and scribbles that made no logical sense. It was not a road map or a train map, but a mass of smaller markings that held London’s rough shape, that familiar curve a binding thread through the chaos. Gaia said it was map of what was underground: not just built things, but other things too—rivers, trees turned stone and great graves of plague skeletons. Thousands of them, chucked into together, long bones poking through one another in the mud. Saul didn’t believe it.


“They died by hundreds,” she said. “They threw them all in together.”


“Yeah,” said Nate. Saul looked at him, but he was looking at the map, smiling.


* * *


The tide was low and there were muddy beaches at the bottom of the embankments. At high tide, the water would be right up near the top, far higher than where it was now; but at this moment the walls’ wet brick was exposed down to the bottom, where shapeless black things glistened in the mud. The Tall man ran the Gog gently aground in the lee of an old, pitted buttress that sheltered them in darkness. They slid to a stop with a great squelch and a sucking they could hear through the hull. The engine stopped and silence fell.


Only, really, it wasn’t silence. It was the the gentle lapping of river water against the hull and the sighing wind reaching for something round the wet edges of the brick. It was the bassline hiss of traffic on the embankment up above their heads and the hum of an anonymous plane banking through low cloud. It was the imagined voices of the people still up in those bright office windows, and the low whispering of other, older noises Saul didn’t recognise. It was the quiet of the city.


Gaia thought maybe she had found something.


They had chosen a painted map. It was colourful and messy, and one end was covered with fingerprints. Saul remembered making it: it was quite recent, one of the last, and he had kept it in his folder because he liked the colours. Nate had knocked the paint pots over and onto the paper, but instead of getting angry Saul let it be, let the paint run across the sheet in great thick shining pools. Once it stopped moving, he used the wrong end of the paint brush to pull lines of different colours together and through one another, til he had something on the paper that looked like a great rainbow-coloured heart, a shining wet mess of veins and channels. He remembered he hadn’t been sure of it, but as it had dried—and it took a long time to dry, even once he had moved it to balance carefully on top of the radiator—it cracked as the thick shell of paint dried and pulled apart, and he liked the way the straight lines and corners of the cracks were so jagged, so different from the smooth, washing curves of colour he had made. The effect was tiny roads and bridges built over gentle hills and rivers, two different and separate things jammed together in one space, colourful and a bit mad. As he put it in the folder—with extra care, because it was delicate and the paint was already flaking off, leaving flecks of coloured dust everywhere—he thought that maybe it looked a bit out of place among all the other treasure maps, which were more obviously map-like; so he had marked it with a couple of felt tip X’s as an afterthought.


Well, he was wrong about the hills and the rivers, for a start. Turned out his great coloured blob was almost exactly the same shape as the Isle of Dogs, which hadn’t been gentle forest for a long time. But it fit: the docks across the top of Gaia’s map — this one a battered old A to Z — corresponded almost exactly to where the paint had run off the paper’s straight edge and Saul’s picture stopped. The Thames encircled the Isle along the same curves the paint had taken as he pushed it back and forth with his paintbrush handle. One of the X’s was bang in the middle of a public park, an unremarkable patch of grass that ran to the edge of the water. The other was a little way into a system of docks—the Millwall docs, the Tall Man said—and seemed to sit on the water, close to a building he said was a fish market. “The park is close,” said the Tall Man, emerging from the front.


“We’ll use your map,” Gaia said to Saul. “You show us where to go. I’ll show you how it works.” Her voice was bright and brittle.


She spread the map out on the table. Now he knew where they were, and the bends of the river were clear in his mind, it made a kind of sense to Saul. The river’s edge was a sharp, clear line that reflected his picture, just there. His ‘X’ was clean and clear near the edge, towards the southern end of a coloured blob that now he could see was the park. It sat above a thick line that showed how the grassy play space on the bank above them was ringed with trees. The Gog was bumping gently against the river wall pretty much right in the middle of that casual, throwaway X. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, they were in the space that he had conjured up. He supposed they ought at least to go outside.


But as they put the other maps away, and as the Tall Man opened a hatch in the middle of the roof and pushed up a ladder that had been hanging on hooks beneath the desk, and as Gaia wrapped a scarf round her neck, and as Nate, literally shook with excitement, his fingers clenching and unclenching, Saul felt afraid. He felt like the moment he set foot on that ladder, his life would shift and crack, and he wouldn’t be able to put them back. He wasn’t ready for that. He needed to say something, to stop this and go home.


As he drew breath to speak, Gaia touched his arm lightly and said, “ready?” He looked at her, and she looked back, and Nate laughed quietly behind him.



They climbed up the ladder and onto the riverbank.



* * *



There was nothing magic about it. Granted, they were in a park in the middle of the night, which was unusual. But it wasn’t even that dark. Street lamps on the other side of the trees winked in and out through the branches as they moved, and the clouds leaked that same dull orange. The background glow of the city washed across the grass. You could have read a book in it.


Saul looked about. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for—strange statues, lost relics, signs and symbols, ancient ruins… but there was nothing there. Just a park. He drew breath to ask for help, but he never got to speak.


The silence shattered as a grinding, rusty shriek cut like broken glass through the gloom. His chest kicked horribly and the ends of his fingers tingled in fright. He spun round. It came again: a nasty grinding scream, like the voice of an ancient thing lifting itself from the river mud to reclaim its city. But it moved on the breeze, and he couldn’t tell where it came from until it sounded again, a third time. Over on the edge of the grass was a clutch of bright coloured lines, just visible in the gloom. A playground. A small black shape zipped back and forth through the darkness, appearing and disappearing. A mad cackle burst from the shadows and tripped across the grass towards them.


Saul’s heart climbed its way back down his throat. He sighed.


Nate was on the swings. The swings needed oiling.


“Leave him,” he said to Gaia, embarrassed. “He’s having fun.” He looked around the empty park. The wind was loud. His ears were cold. “Show me what we’re looking for.”


“We do different things,” said Gaia. “Ceddy knows the city, he’s always been here. He uses that. He doesn’t really know what to look for, but if he figures out before what kind of thing he wants, or if someone tells him, he can usually find something. Micky knows about history, so she looks for special things. Me, I just…wander around.” She shrugged. “This isn’t my home. But some of the things I find… I can tell if they meant something. I mean, to someone. Jack seems to like that.” She swallowed. “It’s hard to explain. Let’s just walk.”


So they did.


The middle of this park was uninteresting, just an open grassy space. They crossed it to the other side. It ended at a small fence and a pavement, like most London parks. A small, metal fence and a few small rusty gates, just big enough for a pram, like most London parks. A ripe smell on the breeze suggested dogs used it like most London parks. They followed the fence for a while. He felt nothing. Nothing moved in his mind, his heart or anywhere else. Slowly, he made his way back to the river’s edge. Gaia followed him without a word.


Nate had finished on the swings and was coming towards them. “Have you finished your walk?” He asked. Saul tried to smile but he was struggling. He felt like he’d let them all down, just like he knew he was going to. But also, deep within himself, too deep to admit, he was disappointed. He was tired.


Nate didn’t seem to notice. “Are you ready yet?” He asked. “It’s over there.”


* * *




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Prologue

3 comentarios


thomas_nunn
06 sept 2022

Isle of Dogs appears as an example of the game, but they also go there, maybe change one of them to mix it up, move one of them to later in the book maybe?

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thomas_nunn
06 sept 2022

Nate was on the swings. The swings needed oiling.


Maybe "Nate was on the swings, they needed oiling"?

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Laurence Read
Laurence Read
03 may 2022

London by river at night cant be bettered. Is the economy of language in the narration too similar to that of capt of the gog? Does one of them need more fluidity to offset again st each other and Nate's narration? Plots brilliant and Nate's nerves add a real layer

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