Looking for Jake and Other Stories by China Miéville

Author:China Miéville [Miéville, China]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: New
ISBN: 9781405048309
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2005-09-02T06:00:00+00:00

10 October

They are children.

They are taunting me.

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

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

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

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

I lay there numb and cold with my eyes open. It came irregularly, furtive and insistent.

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

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

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

Through the rest of the window I saw scudding clouds, but it was a clear night in that other city. And as I stood there on the threshold of that freezing room, I heard that voice again.

O I M ISTER.

It was a child’s voice.

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

I heard a thin tittering and a shushing noise.

There was cold outside me and inside me.

O I M ISTER.

I heard it again. I inched forward into that terrible dark room. The desk was where I had left it. There was nothing between me and the coldly shining window.

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

Someone, I realised, was throwing stones.

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

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

And one of them spoke again.

O I M ISTER YOU OLD CUNT.And there was a chorus of malignant giggles.

Another stone was thrown, much harder this time. I felt it through the glass, and stumbled back. I kept my footing. I screamed at them in my fear.

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

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

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