twisted tower!’ he’d yelp like a dog. But he was harmless except to himself, and it was all he did until they gagged him to stop all his noise. Then his heart gave out and he died with the froth of madness drying on his lips … ”
“You talk too much and too loudly,” I told him. “And if I really should be as afraid of this place as you make out, then what in God’s name are you doing here?” Before he could answer, I shook another Marlboro from its pack, lit it, took a drag and handed it to him. I had no reason to antagonize the old boy.
“God’s name?” He turned his head and stared at me where we sat amidst the rubble, on the remains of a toppled brick wall; stared at me with his bloodshot eyes—his sunken, crying eyes that he’d rubbed until they were a rough, raw red—before accepting and sucking on that second cigarette. And: “Oh, I have my reasons for being here” he said. “Nothing to do with God, however. Not the God we used to pray to, anyway … not unless I’m here as His agent, sort of working for Him without really knowing it—in which case He might have chosen a better way to set things up!”
“You’re not making a lot of sense,” I told him, “and you’re still much too noisy. Won’t they hear you? Don’t they sometimes patrol outside the Bgg’ha Zone? I’ve heard they do.”
“Patrols?” He took a deep drag, handed my smoke back to me, and went on: “You mean hunters? And do you know what they hunt? They hunt us! We’re it! Meat!”
Then, after another drag and a sly, sidelong glance at me, from eyes still bloodshot but narrowed now: “Anyway, and like I said, I have a good reason for being here. A damn good reason!” And he balanced a small, battered old suitcase on his knees and hugged it to him, but not too tightly. It looked very heavy for its size.
“So then,” he nodded again. “I reckon it’s your turn now to tell why you are here. I never saw you before and I don’t think you’re from the SSR … so?”
“The SSR?”
“The South Side Resistance, for what they’re worth—huh!” he answered; but I was watching his veined right hand moving to rest on the gun at his bony hip. And again he asked, “So?”
“I stay live by moving around,” I told him. “I don’t stay too long in any one place, and I live however I can. I go where there’s food, when and where I can find it, and cigarettes, and on rare occasions a little booze.”
“The old grocery stores? The shattered shops?”
“Yes, of course.” My turn to nod. “Where else? The supermarkets that were. Those that aren’t already completely looted out. In the lighter hours—the few short hours of partial daylight, when those things sleep, if they sleep—I dig among the ruins; but stuff is getting very hard to find. Day by day, week by week, it’s harder all the time. Landed here just a couple of days ago. Least I think it was days; you never can tell in this perpetual dusk. I haven’t seen the sun for quite some time now, and even then it was very low down on the horizon, right at the beginning of this … this—”
“—This long last night?” he helped me out. “The long last night of the human race, and certainly of Henry Chattaway.”
Then he sobbed, and only just managed to catch it before it leaked out of him, but I heard it, anyway. And: “My God, how and why did this bloody mess happen to us?” And craning his neck he looked up to where black wisps of cloud scudded across the sky, as if searching for an answer there … from God, perhaps.
“So—er, Henry?—in fact you are a believer,” I said, standing up from the broken wall and dropping my smoke before it could burn my fingers. “So, are we sinners, do you reckon?” And I stepped on the glowing tobacco embers, crushing them out in the powdered, brick-red dust.
Controlling his breathing, his sobbing, the old man said, “Do you mean are we being punished? I don’t know—probably. Come with me and I’ll show you something.” And getting creakingly to his feet, he went hobbling to a more open area close by, once the corner of a street—more properly a function of twisted blackened ruins and rubble now—where the scattered, shattered debris lay more thinly on the river ground, and only the vaguest outlines of any actual street remained. Of course, this was hardly unusual; for all I knew the entire city—and probably every city in the world—would look pretty much the same right now.
The old man tugged on the sleeve of my parka where I stood glancing here and there, aware that at this once-crossroads we would be plainly visible from all four directions. But my companion was pointing toward the northeast; so that even before my eyes followed the bearing indicated by his scrawny arm, his trembling finger, I knew what I would see. And:
“Look at that!” He uttered a husky whisper, almost a whimper. And once again, “Look!” as he tugged more insistently on my arm. “Now tell me: isn’t it obvious where at least one of those names comes from?”
He was talking about the twisted tower—a “mile-high monstrosity,” he’d called it –where it stood, leaned or seemed to stagger, perhaps a mile away, or a mile and a half at most. But matching it in ugliness was its almost obscene height … not a mile high, no, but not far short; with its teetering spire stabbing up through the disc of cloud that had been drawn there and now circled it like a whirlpool of the debris of doomed plants round the sucking well of a vast black hole. It was built of the wreckage, the ravaged soul of the crushed city; of gutted high-rises; of several miles of railway carriages twined around its fat base and rising in a spiral, like the thread of a gigantic screw, to a fifth of the tower’s height; of bridges and wharves torn from their anchorages; of a great round clock face, recognizable even at this distance as that of Big Ben; of a jutting tube concrete and glass that had once stood in the heart of the city where it had been called Centrepoint … all of these things and many more, all parts now of this twisted tower. But it wasn’t really twisted; it was just that its design and composition were so utterly alien that they didn’t conform to the mundane Euclidean geometry that a human eye or brain would automatically accept as the shapes of a genuine structure, observing them as authentic, without feeling sick and dizzy.
And though I had seen it often enough before, still I took a stumbling step backwards before tearing my eyes away from it. Those crazy angles, which at first seemed convex before concertinaing down to concavities … only to bulge forth again like gigantic boils on the trunk of a monster. “That mile-high monstrosity,” yes; but I had seen it before, if not from this angle, and I’d known what effect it would have on me; so I’d been far more interested in what stood—seeming almost to teeter—in front of it, as if in some kind of obeisance:
It leaned there close to that colossal, warped dunce’s cap, out of true at an angle of maybe twenty degrees, only a hundred yards of so in the tower’s foreground; and instead of the proud dome that it had been, it now looked like half of a blackened, broken egg, or the shattered skull of some unimaginable giant, lying there in the uneven dirt of a vast, desecrated graveyard: the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral.
“Horrible, horrible,” the old man said and shuddered uncontrollably—then gave a start when, from somewhere not very far behind us, came a dismal baying or hooting call; forlorn-sounding, true, but in the otherwise silence of the ruins terrifying to any vulnerable man or beast. And starting again—violently this time as more hooting sounded, but closer and from a different direction—the old man said, “The hounds! That howling is how they’ve learned to triangulate. We’ve got to get away from here!”
“But how?” I said. “The howling’s from the south, while to the northeast … we’re on the verge of the Bgg’ha Zone!”
“Come with
