Part 1.3: A Find and a Fall

Nate was waving back towards the playground. They followed him down the path towards the river to a point just before the embankment where it was blocked by temporary fencing and plastic tape. Behind the makeshift barriers, the rough tarmac of the path was dug up into a trench. At the bottom Saul could see an exposed length of piping, clay and brick lumps and a tangle of cables - the usual London fundamentals. But this hole was unusual in that the trench ran all the way to the edge of the riverbank, where it took a chunk out of the stone coping along the top of the embankment. It looked very like an enthusiastic digger had gone too close to the edge with a jackhammer and loosened the old stones of the embankment a little too much, so a big chunk had fallen away into the river.

“There,” he was saying. “Look!”

At first, Saul saw nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. He stared harder in the dim light, trying to make out patterns in the mud, but it didn’t help. Nate put a hand on his arm with weirdly adult patience. “No,” he said gently. “There!” He was pointing to the end of the trench, to the jagged edge of the hole left where the bank had fallen away. It took another few moments before Saul saw it.

At the bottom of the accidental ‘V’ shaped gash in the bank, amid the rubble and chunks of displaced mortar, something was pushing up through the mud. It was rounded and smooth, pale and sick-looking, dirty but with a vague sheen like gone off meat. Intruding into the pipes and wires of a more modern city it looked old and alien, a forgotten excrescence of a different reality. Beside him, Gaia, so calm up to now, gasped. He couldn’t tell it was surprise, or shock, or disgust.

It was probably that which caused Saul to move. Before he had time to think about what he was doing he had ducked under the plastic tape and jumped to the bottom of the hole. It was a bit deeper than he had judged in the poor light, and he landed awkwardly, the lip of the cavity about shoulder height. Dirt smeared his trousers and his jacket as he fell against the side of the trench for support. The clay was damp, cold and slimy, slipping beneath his fingers as he pushed himself upright. The wet chill was that of a dead thing, but the consistency felt like something alive.

He crouched uncomfortably in the tight, dirty space and tried to pick up the object, but it was held fast by the ground. Now that he was closer it was clear that they had seen only a small part of it from above, and there was much more of the object beneath the ground. With difficulty, he bent lower and scraped away at the sticky mud, trying to free it. The ground was cold and rough and the rough stone fragments in the clay clawed at his nails and his skin. He soon lost sensation in his fingers, but he was possessed now. Everyone watched in silence. He could feel the weight of their gathered expectations - whatever they really were - pushing him down from the lip of the hole. He had to release this thing. In the edge of his vision he was vaguely aware of Gaia waving back down towards the water, and he heard a quiet rumble as the tall man fired up the engine. He straightened briefly to release the tension in his back and saw the Gog easing its way along the water towards them, still a metre or so below the edge of the bank, though the tide was rising now.

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed at the bottom, scrabbling away. It must have been a good while, because the next morning when he woke he was stiff and sore and his nails were cracked and bleeding. The others watched him work – there was no way they could join him in that tight space. Nobody offered to swap, nobody said anything to him, as if there was somehow a shared understanding that this task was his by right. Gaia fidgeted in silhouette, and every time he straightened he saw the tall man’s sharp face looking up from the river with tense worry. Only Nate seemed calm, as if all this were natural. All of them focussed their attention on him, on his digging, and on the fish-coloured, sickly-looking surface of the thing that was emerging slowly from the mud as he wore down the ends of his fingers and the sweat gathered in streams beneath his jacket, and ran down his dirty forehead into his eyes.

As more of the thing became visible, the smooth hump that had caught Nate’s attention began to seem more and more like the hunched the back of a vaguely human figure. Once he had dug down around one side of it, he revealed what looked like an arm, bent at the elbow, hand on its hip. The material it was made from was smooth, oddly warm to the touch despite the chill of the earth around it. It was large, this thing, solid and substantial, way bigger than he had thought. He worried away a little more at the mud around the arm – definitely an arm, now – then took hold of the crook of its elbow in both hands, braced his feet against the slippery floor of the trench, and heaved. At first, nothing happened, and for a moment his unearthly concentration lifted with the sudden realisation of how ridiculous he must look, covered in mud at the bottom of this hole, grunting like an animal and tugging in vain at this immovable thing. But the embarrassment gave him strength to pull harder, his back groaning in protest, his shoulders firing electric bolts down to his fingertips, his thighs burning with the effort. But then… with a weird, intimate sucking sound, the thing shifted in the slime, turned a little towards him. Half a face emerged from the mud, the one eye somehow clean, looking at him like it was laughing. He locked his legs again and pulled til his back felt like it would fold in half and his arms would come right off, til suddenly, with a pop and an ejaculation of mud and grit, the thing came free. Saul braced with the weight of it. Staggering a little for balance, he lifted it up above his head for the others to see, holding it like a trophy.

It was big, really big, as long as one of his legs. Heavy, too. A naked human figure, one hand on a cocked hip, the other holding a spear. Small undulations in its back and chest suggested scales, or armour, or disease, and it shone with that rotten gleam like food left out too long. Muscular but pot-bellied, it had the chest and the beard of a man but no private parts. The lack was not for politeness, though, because the figure was obscene. There was an animal immodesty in the way the hand rested on the hip, the legs cocked out, the mouth leered in lascivious hunger and that one eye stayed locked on yours. One eye only, because half of the head was missing: the skull was sheared clean down the middle from woolly crown to Adam’s apple. Most of the mouth remained, suggestive even in mutilation, but the nose was gone. Saul held it up in the dirty orange light and all four of them just stared at it, excited and appalled.

This complete focus that meant they were taken completely by surprise. Gaia opened her mouth to say something, but Saul never heard it.

A dark red light moved in the corner of his eye, arcing towards him out of the clouds. He turned towards it but it was too late. Whatever it was, it was hard and dense and moving fast, and it struck him across the ridge of bone just above his left eye. The pain was sharp and cold and dizzying. His mind opened up like a flower and his brain rang like a glass bell, a long, clear chime without end. Vaguely, somewhere in the background, his eye began to sting. His face was hot and wet. A sour chemical smell filled his nose. He blinked frantically as his legs wobbled, suddenly out of his control, threatening to collapse. Red smoke exploded from beneath his feet, boiling up around his knees as if pulling out the statue had opened a door to hell and something was coming to take it back down, and him with it. He blinked to clear his vision and he couldn’t. Above him, the silhouettes of Gaia and Nate were indistinct, fuzzy, frantic movements lost in the rising red smoke. A bitter taste caught in the back of his throat. The ends of his fingers were suddenly warm now, which was nice, and he supposed that at least hell was warm, and that was nice too. The thought that hell might be nice was funny, and he giggled, and once he had opened that door he couldn’t close it. He began to laugh uncontrollably, taking deep, racking breaths of burning red smoke that made him cough and retch, and that made him laugh even more. This was all so silly. The idea that he had to hold this heavy statue above his head was impossible nonsense, it was far too heavy, so he did the obvious thing and let go if it. It struck him on the top of the head, heavy and hard, and fell away behind him. With that second impact he felt suddenly tired, so he thought he might snuggle down in the earth and have a short nap. Or maybe a long one.

He stepped back, only he didn’t, because there was no longer any ground beneath his feet, because, hilariously, he was now in mid air, falling, and he remembered that the river was behind him, and he wondered, when he had thought of it before like it was a throat, maybe it really was one, and might it now swallow him? What might that be like, to be eaten by —

* * *

For the rest of his life Saul was never properly able to recall the next few hours. Not so that he could fully trust the memories. Despite what happened over the following days, and years, and everything that changed in his life and the lives of those around him, and how incredibly weird it got at times - even with all that, when he tried to think back on that first night, it still felt too strange to be true.

Some of it must have been true, though. He fell in the river, that certainly happened. Thankfully the tide had risen enough by then that the water cushioned him a little, and he didn’t fall backwards onto the exposed riverbed at the foot of the embankment, which would have broken bones, or worse.

The next part he could only ever recall as a nightmare: a mess of cold and wet, frantic, half-blind movement and cold burning deep in his chest. It was all so vague he might well have made those memories himself later, to give the moment shape. The one thing he did remember, a sensation as clear as watching a film if he ever let himself think of it, was water pushing into him viciously, like a huge predator with a mind and a purpose: the river water not just running into his open mouth but forcing itself in, pushing his teeth and jaws aside, forcing back his tongue, fragments of God knows what filth washing across his gums as it shoved its way into his belly and his lungs, to eat him from the inside out. Then, nothing. Just cold, blank, dark.

Well - maybe one other thing. If he let himself remember it. With that horrifying thrust of water and the laying open of his mouth and nose and lungs to the water came the inexplicable and horrifying sensation of things moving inside him, wriggling around his mouth, then exploring his throat, and then – thankfully – darkness.

These were never memories he wanted to revisit.

The rest of it, and what happened immediately after, he only ever heard about from others. Gaia didn’t like to talk about it. Nate told the story with an infuriating casualness, as if it was all in a normal night’s work. The tall man’s account was typically sparse. But from the three of them he pieced together the following facts.

Another crew had seen them digging. They had a boat too, a small, fast dinghy, nimble and far quicker than the Gog. Saul’s intense focus on his discovery, and the fascination of the others, meant these others could coast right up to the bank unnoticed. They had thrown a smoke grenade up towards Saul to distract them all so that, in the confusion, they could take what he had found. God knows how they got hold of one of those. It was the hard metal casing of the grenade that had first hit him on the head. Maybe that was intentional. Maybe it wasn’t.

He had stumbled, stepped back for balance, missed his footing on the edge, dropped the heavy statue on his own head and then back behind him and into the water, then followed it down himself.

The next part was the part that made Gaia the most uncomfortable in the telling. Saul had not just fallen in the water, but fallen into the small gap between the Gog – loosely tethered to the iron railing at the top of the embankment with a single rope – and the river wall itself. For the next few seconds, while everybody took their time to realise what was happening, it was only the random luck of the slow Thames ebb and flow that the huge weight of the Gog had not rocked back towards land and crushed him to death against the stone.

When he fell, the tall man clambered out of the window of the cab and up not the roof of the Gog, then along to where he had hit that water. Saul moving slowly by this point, floundering in the water, dazed from two impacts to the head. “You looked like seaweed,” is how Nate put it.

The tall man had leant his impossibly long body forward and braced against the wall, holding the Gog away from the bank with nothing more than the strength of those long legs and arms. When Saul had had time to process this, he realised this had probably saved his life. He was never able, not once, to get the tall man to accept his thanks.

While the tall man braced himself Gaia leapt from the riverbank to the roof of the Gog - a dangerous enough act in itself - and shot down the ceiling hatch, emerging again seconds later holding a long wooden pole with a brass hook on the end. Together, while Nate watched, she hooked this pole around the back of Saul’s trousers and dragged him – a still, wet lump, by this point – along the side of the Gog and round the back, from where they could fish him out of the water.

The tall man pumped the water out of his throat and lungs.

Once he had woken and vomited, again and again, til the last traces of the water and whatever it bore were out of his lungs, they brought him inside, stripped off his clothes and wrapped him in rough wool blankets. The tall man turned up the heating. Saul remembered the planks of the floor becoming warm, and in his dazed state he felt like there was a golden glow coming off them that was spreading up through the should of his feet and deep into his insides, cleaning him out. He sat there staring at the floor, Nate sitting beside him unworried, head resting on Saul’s shoulder while he hummed a little tune under his breath while Gaia made mugs of instant hot chocolate with water from the kettle.

All this, Saul learnt from the others.

After this point, he must have started to recover from the impacts to his head – maybe it was the hot chocolate – because the rest of the night he could remember, if only in flashes. The memories were like watching the scenes of a film in the wrong order: they didn’t fit, and he had to impose sense on them himself, afterwards. This meant, over time, that he was never quite sure if all of them had actually happened or not. In fact, he wondered for the rest of his life whether his brain ever fully recovered from the blows, and the drowning, and the unconsciousness, and however long he had floated in the water. It couldn’t have been for very long, but there was a moment as his brain shut down and the lights went out that it felt like it would be forever. He certainly divided his life into two chapters after that night - the before and the after. Of course, that could have been for lots of reasons, because a lot of things happened as a consequence of that one night. But it’s so hard to tell from inside your own brain whether it’s working or not.

This is what he remembered:

For some reason, the Gog’s inside lights were all switched off. His eyes struggled to adjust to a faint glow from a red bulb in the roof of the cabin.

The portholes were black circles looking onto nothing. They were in the shadow of the river wall, pressed right up against the stone.

The huge map had gone. There was a doorway behind it. Through it he saw the air outside change colour, dull red-orange, getting lighter.

The kettle whispered and whined. Saul smelled apples. Nothing moved but the water. Outside the back door, open to the night, spots of light winked in and out of existence as the river’s thick surface shifted to reflect the sky.

A soft hissing outside and another faint smell, something like fireworks.

A thin layer of smoke stretched thin tendrils around the edges of the doorway, feeling gently for something, pushing deeper and deeper in to the Gog.

Gaia moved to the door, stood in silhouette. The smoke refracted dim red light around her legs. She stood up straight, framed against the clouds, for some reason still holding the boathook in one hand. Or was that a memory of the statue, its spear, its casual aggression? Maybe that part was him. But he remembered her face, for certain: she was looking at something out along the river, chin raised to punctuate an angry gesture Saul couldn’t properly recall. Her face was fierce and aggressive. The planes and angles of her nose and cheeks drew dark red lines in the weird light. A statue, adorning a temple to the River God.

Smells of iron and mud now. Noises drifting down from upriver, rough shouts on the wind. Gaia moving to the door, hawking deep in the back of her throat, spitting an impressive bogey out into the night. A clear “plop” as it hit the water.

Cold coming off the water, following the smoke into the cab like the last breath of a dying thing.

The Gog shaking as the engine fired. Somehow, suddenly, Nate and Gaia were sat in the chairs, all of them with the warm cups of sweet hot chocolate cradled in their hands. The Tall Man calling something from the front.

The Gog shuddering beneath them as the engines bit at the water. The deck tickling the soles of Saul’s feet. Exhaustion, and pain, and a deep, sickly feeling of excitement, and the vague memory of just managing to put his cup down safely before everything went black again.

* * *

He woke again later, when they were nearly home, his mind clearer for having rested a little. Gaia made him another drink, and he took it and slurped at it gratefully. He was fearsomely hungry now.

Nate was dozing in one of the comfy chairs.

Gaia stood on the other side of the room, just looking at him. She looked like there were things she wanted to say, but something was holding her back. The tension made him uncomfortable, so he took another gulp of his drink. He was careless and the hot liquid nearly scalded his throat, already tender and painful from grit, river water and vomit. A coughing fit swept through him, tensing his body painfully. His ribs and stomach were already stiff and sore, and by the time he got the hacking under control they burned like someone had laid bars of white hot iron across his chest. Gaia was behind him now, patting his back, waiting for it to pass. When he was done, he sat back, eyes weeping, willing his core muscles to relax, catching his breath in shaky gasps as his diaphragm tensed and he struggled not to throw up his hot chocolate. She was rubbing his back now, in circles, like his Dad used to do to Nate when he was a baby. He looked up. All she could say was, “some of us still try to play like it’s a game.”

For a moment, she was no longer that fearsome, impressive presence he had looked to all night for guidance, just a child. Like she must really be. She fell awkwardly into the chair next to him.

“The game is good…” He voice was uncertain. “The hunting, the puzzles.” She needed him to understand. “Not knowing what you’re looking for. Figuring out clues, putting stories together so it makes sense… telling those stories so other people understand, so they see value in things…” She prodded the floor with the end of her shoe, then kicked harder, as if all the floorboards were in the wrong place and she could fix it with violence. “But most of the people who play are like us.” She waved towards the cabin. “Not like you.”

He wanted to ask what he meant but his throat was burning. He coughed again. She waved back the way they had come, back down the canal. “I know them. Those boys. Never saw them in a boat before though, that’s our thing. They probably stole it.” She sipped at her own mug, shy and quick like a bird. ”I don’t think they wanted to hurt you.”

In Saul’s mind, stealing boats was a children’s story, with ladders and cutlasses and people swinging from ropes, daggers gripped hard between their teeth. He didn’t know how you would steal a boat in real life. It’d probably be easier than stealing a car. Now that was something that happened in real life. You’d have to know how to start the engine. If was a motorboat. Maybe you could bring your own engine. A little outboard one, he’d seen those. He wondered how heavy —

Gaia’s fingers clicked in front of his face. “Hey!”

He was so tired. He tried to smile.

“The point is, most people used to play because it was a chance to have some fun. Otherwise, most of them, they’re hiding, running…” She raised a hand, let it fall. “Me, I’m… lucky. More than most. To have the Gog. The others. You’ll meet them, later… we look after each other. It’s a…” She stumbled over the words.

“A family?” asked Saul.

She just stared at him, eyes dark.

He looked down into his cup.

Up front, a soft rustling as the Tall Man moved around the cabin, adjusting things. His long limbs made the space look small. Saul thought of a giant insect in a dark zoo hothouse.

“He looks after us,” Gaia said, nodding towards the cabin. “The money is nice when we win, but we don’t need it. Not like they do.” She waved downstream, back the way they had come. “All of us have… other things we need to do. Other things in our lives. We play because we like it.” She kicked the floor again. “But some of them have to. A thousand, it’s….” She made a vague, expansive gesture with her hands.

“Obviously.”

She looked at Saul, critically, but not unkind. “Do your mum and dad have jobs?”

He nodded.

“Do you go on holiday sometimes?”

He nodded again.

“Do you… do you know what your house cost?”

He just looked at her, confused.

“Those guys who threw that thing at you. They live up the river, in tents.”

“Tents?”

“Old, small tents. Last time I saw them they put them in spaces they cut out inside big blackberry bushes by the train line. In a corner of the marshes away from the paths.” She noticed his obvious confusion. Her mouth smiled, but her eyes were serious. It embarrassed him. “It’s not unusual. You can hide in lots of places. I knew who a guy who dug a little cave under Hampstead Heath. He lived there for months before they found him. But, you’re not supposed to. So anyone who lives in a tent could come back from work at any time—” she looked at him again, as if challenging him. “They can have jobs.”

Saul nodded.

“They could come back from work, and their tents are gone. All their stuff thrown away. Because they’re illegal. Or they’re on private land. Or someone did it just to annoy them.”

”How do they get their stuff back?”

“They don’t get their stuff back.”

“Can’t they go tell the police?”

“How old do you think I am?” She was irritated now, gazing at his blank face like she wanted more from him. In that moment, he really didn’t want to disappoint her. But he was way out of his depth. He didn’t answer, for fear of saying the wrong thing. She snorted. “Not old enough to live on my own. Not legally. Most of the time I live on an island in the Lea. In a treehouse. I can’t talk to the police.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it.

“Those guys? Maybe they’re not in tents any more. Maybe they’re somewhere else now. If they don’t win money in the game, they’ll probably rob somebody. After dark, they’ll cover their faces and wait for a runner, or a bike, somewhere along the canal. Maybe with knives. I don’t know. They’ll take the bike. Or a phone. Or cash if they’re lucky. They probably won’t do anything worse than that, maybe push someone in, but… I don’t think they meant to hurt you, either.” she shrugged. “Many of the people who play now don’t have money, but they have very important needs, so they want money a lot. And since the prizes got big, they’re tempted. To do many things.” She wrinkled her mouth to spit, but stopped herself and swallowed. “I swear… you know, that’s why Jack makes the prize so big. He likes that it makes people desperate.”

The Gog twitched beneath their feet as the tall man adjusted something. she put her cup down on the table, then stood up and stretched. She stepped through the door at the back and stood gazing over the balcony space, back down the river.

It was cold, but Saul followed her outside. Their movement roused Nate, who toddled after him, his stiff sleepy gait taking a couple of years off his age. Gaia turned and picked him up. Astonishingly, he welcomed it, lifted his arms to her then wrapped them round her neck and rested his head on her shoulder. In a moment, he was asleep again. Though she was small, smaller than Saul, she held him easily, one hip pushed out to take his weight. His legs twitched and he mumbled something, half-words, ill-formed. His sleeping face looked sad. She kissed the top of his head softly and whispered in his ear, and he fell quiet again, and she did it automatically, without thinking, as if she didn’t know. Her eyes were shining in the dark.

Saul envied her, but he couldn’t have said why. He tried to take in the view as they moved upriver, to enjoy new angles on the city, but again and again his eyes fell back to her. Once, she caught him looking, raised her eyebrows in a question. He looked away, his cheeks burning with the cold.

The river swung broadly round to the left, carrying the Gog with it. Crumbling warehouses along the towpath gave way to a line of trees, then a patch of open space, the air above it cold and empty. The banks started to look familiar and Saul knew they were nearly home - none too soon, for the sky was starting to change colour over on the other side of the river, and their parents would be up and moving soon enough. The Gog shifted beneath him, making him stumble, and began to nose gently towards the riverbank. Gaia touched his shoulder softly and they went inside. She put Nate gently down into one of the big chairs. He wriggled and grumbled but didn’t wake.

“Cedric says community’s dying anyway,” she said quietly.

Saul didn’t know what she meant, but he had made himself look like an idiot too much already, so he said nothing.

* * *