“We’re here.”
Victor and I seemed to be staring into a misty abyss. The heavy rainfall had mixed with the smoke and the scorched remains of the coat shop at the opposite end of Newburgh Street, where it met Fouberts Place at the T-junction where I so nearly suffered the terrifying humiliation of capture, to create a grey barricade through which the rest of the world was nothing more than an invisible blur. The windows of the shops around us were covered in dewy condensation formed as the waters of the sky vaporised in the sauna-like conditions created by the coat shop’s rocky, red-hot remains struck the cold, inanimate, ghostly glass which looked upon the rubble.
I took the first step into the mist and the smoke. Although my eyes were swiftly made redundant by the lack of visibility, my feet, covered only with shoes with the thinnest of soles, told my brain more than my eyes ever could. I could feel every single fragment of brick, every wooden beam and every sharp dagger of metal below me as I walked tenuously from one end of Newburgh Street to the other. Victor followed me about twenty seconds after I set off, but he had a far harder time navigating the jagged undulations of the invisible alleyway.
“How much further, Nox?” asked Victor as he wobbled his way over a particularly high peak of rubble.
“Oh, it’s not a long street, Victor,” I replied encouragingly. “We should see the silhouette any minute now.”
Unfortunately, as I reached the T-junction with Fouberts Place and the rather gigantic hole I’d created in the row of buildings which unveiled themselves in front of me, the silhouette that had been secretly burning its image into my head for the last few hours of my life was nowhere to be seen. I dived into the mess of wooden beams and rubble filling the floor of the shop, but no matter where I looked, or how many singed coats I slung out of my way, nothing of human form could be seen.
“Nox!” yelled Victor from the cocktail of mist and smoke behind me. “Is everything okay?”
“There’s nobody in here,” I replied with genuine concern and fear. “I swear I saw the silhouette stooped in the corner here,” I continued, pointing at a corner of the open-fronted room covered in burnt wallpaper before realising that he wouldn’t be able to see my hand anyway. “It must be in here somewhere.”
Victor’s dust-covered face poked itself through the white and grey purgatory a few moments later. He was spluttering a little, but thankfully still perfectly healthy. “What exactly did you see after you blew this place up?” he asked, stifling a small cough which had probably been waiting to burst from his lungs ever since entering the bleak abyss. He stared around the room looking for the source of the silhouette, making a comparatively half-hearted effort considering the rather animated fashion in which I was thrusting aside random rubble.
“I saw a silhouette crouching in the corner of the room,” I replied. “That’s all I saw. I had to leave quickly. There was still a chance of another ambush and besides, I needed to meet the two boys back at Centre Point.” I turned back to my work. “I should have attempted a rescue when I had the chance,” I muttered to myself.
“Nox!”
“What is it, Victor?” I asked with an aggravated yell as I attempted to filter some of the dust from a mound of quickly disintegrating leather coats. “You know, you could at least give me a little help here instead of just standing around out there. Start shifting this rubble,” I commanded. “Someone’s trapped in here, you know!”
“Well, that’s just the thing, Nox,” he responded calmly, standing rooted to the spot just on the other side of the uneven, jagged archway which used to contain the rubble which had been blown outwards onto the T-junction. “What if...”
“What if what, Victor,” I interrupted, still frantically sifting through the remains of the upper floor of the shop.
“What if there wasn’t anyone here in the first place?”
I entertained the thought for about a second, if that, and then resumed my erratic activity. I know what I saw. It wasn’t as if I had just managed to catch some random blackened blur out of the corner of my eye as I swung my head around mid-stride. As much as reaching Centre Point was my utmost priority in the few agonising moments after escaping the chase, I was stood facing the T-junction – and the silhouette – for enough time for my eyes to tell me that what I saw was indeed human.
“Nox, just hear me out for a second...”
“What if we leave here and later find out that someone was trapped in the rubble, Victor. Even if the person I saw is now dead, at least I’ll feel a little less guilty about myself.”
That outburst seemed to keep him quiet for quite some time. Being able to concentrate all of my attention on the search for the silhouette wasn’t paying off, however. The derelict old coat shop was only a few square metres in size, and within the last few minutes I’d managed to turn the entire place upside-down and found no signs of life. Therefore, rather worryingly, I’d have to give a little consideration to Victor’s suggestion. Had the silhouette really existed? Is there a possibility that it could have been a show of the last signs of life of one of the pursuers?
“Still nothing, Nox?” asked Victor, still standing pensively in the coagulating mists.
“You may have had a point, Victor,” I replied as I began to walk back across the smouldering embers and broken rubble. “The adrenalin rush must have created the image in my he...”
I couldn’t finish my sentence. My foot plunged through a thin, unstable film of debris, flinging the rest of my body forward into a tiny pit and lobbing me head-over-heels into the tiny cavern. My eyes couldn’t figure out an image from the circular blur of black and grey. Telling upwards and downwards apart became an almighty struggle for the final remnants of my senses. The unstoppable descent felt like an infinite suspension in a haunting limbo that would never, ever end.
Thankfully, it did.
“NOX!” cried a concerned Victor. He no longer had a clue where I was. Come to think of it, I no longer had a clue where I was.
I coughed and spluttered and rubbed my eyes in a desperate attempt to revive my battered, unconscious senses. Dust particles emerged from my mouth in gigantic globules, leaving my parched throat cavity gasping for even the tiniest drop of water. My eyes began to resume their duties, and formed an image of a surprisingly large, brick-lined cellar which, despite a few patches of dust lining the walls and a small barricade of debris covering the exit, was almost intact. There was, however, only one solitary source of light for miles around – a small lamp swung itself ominously from a hair-like strand of wire in the back of the cellar into which I had plummeted, swinging like a pendulum; left, right, left, right. Small it may have been, but it lit the entire room with an eerie white glow, a white glow not of comfort but of danger; danger posed by the potential risk of the building collapsing into an ignoble heap of stone, copper wire, glass and waxed leather and danger posed by the Faceless, for it must not be forgotten that not only did they control the streets on which I stood but also the nearest Underground stations, Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, stripped from our plucky Brigade boys yesterday evening, not five hours ago. There was still a little hope circulating through my head that this may have been the silhouette’s little hideout, but yet still there were no apparent signs of life. I rose up to my feet again and began to look around. My feet crunched down upon a shard of glass.
“PLEASE, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!”
The shriek had no obvious source. I glanced as swiftly as possible from side to side but could not see the source of the shriek for myself.
“Why do they have to keep finding me? Why am I always tangled up in the battlefield? Why can’t the world just leave me to live my life? Either kill me or let me live in safety. One or the other. One or the other.” The moans, all coming from the same person in the same place, dissolved into inaudible, deranged mutterings. I dwelled for a few moments, trying to distinguish the tangled web of words filling the miniscule cellar then, having failed to pick up a single word, began to rummage through the rubble yet again.
A shrill scream shot through the room. My hand had come to rest upon a small lump of torn, cut skin barely covered by a shredded T-shirt. As I began to tug the cinder-covered remains of the half-destroyed building away from the lump, I spotted the thin, chalky face of a young boy dipped inside a crevice created by the mounds of debris upon the floor, sporting protruding, perfectly round pearls for eyes and a dusty nose which was struggling to retain its button shape. As his large, watery eyes hit mine he gave out yet another scream.
“Why? Why? Why? Why couldn’t I have a peaceful life too? Why can’t the world just leave me alone? Why?”
“It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “I won’t hurt you. We’re the only ones here. There’s no-one here who wants to harm you.” The young boy raised his head a little further from its little crevice in the broken brickwork as if he was ready to talk in a voice which was a little less erratic.
“Nox?”
The young boy’s head immediately darted back into its hiding place as Victor’s voice echoed about the cellar. I’d almost forgotten he was out here with me this morning. “I’ve found him,” I yelled back upstairs. “There’s a cellar down here!”
I made an attempt to coax the boy out of his crevice, but he seemed far less willing to oblige now that he knew that we were not alone. “Listen,” I said softly. “We won’t hurt you. The man upstairs is just a friend of mine. We’ve come to take you to safety.”
The reaction of the boy wasn’t instantaneous but it did, after an awkwardly tense period, come. Once again he lifted his head so that his eyes met mine, giving me the kind of look that long-time friends would give each other in a time of severe crisis despite the fact that we’d met only a few minutes ago. Strangely, though, I felt as if I recognised his eyes as soon as I looked into them as if I, too, had known them for years. “Where are you going to take me?” he asked after an almost unbearable amount of time.
“There’s an Underground station about a mile from here at a place called Holborn,” I replied. “There’s no chance of you ever coming under attack again once we set you up with a bed there.”
“I-I hope so,” said the young boy, lifting himself up to sit upright on a pile of coats so that his skin wouldn’t be rubbed raw by the protrusions and the jagged edges of the rubble. “I haven’t been able to get a wink of proper sleep in months. It seems that I have to move almost every other day in order to find safety. I would’ve moved on tonight after the explosion, but I was just too worn out to move, not to mention the fact that I was afraid of another attack.” His eyes hit mine for the first time since he’d sat down. “Did you know anything about the explosion?”
I stuttered. I really did not want to tell him that I’d caused the explosion that had injured him so badly, but I felt that I had no choice. He needed to know the truth.
“I did know,” I sighed. “I was there when it happened. I...” I stopped. I really couldn’t go on, and would have left it there if it wasn’t for the voice in my head saying ‘Keep going, Nox.’
“I caused the explosion,” I wept. I tried not to cry. I really did. I’d been at war for almost three years now. The veterans of wars in times gone by always tried to claim that you tended to desensitise in order to cope with the painful emotional experiences of battle – but now, of course, I knew that that wasn’t true. I’d been trying to desensitise for a while now, just to supress the torture I endured day after day, but every time I tried, an event would occur that would bring the emotions flooding back.
He looked a little shaken at the news. “What you have to understand,” I continued, taking him by the knee, “is that I had to blow this place up to save myself.” I don’t think my words had overly reassured him; he still looked a little shaken. “I was being chased. I-It was the only way I could escape.”
There was a pause. The thick, choking air lay still once again, not making a single noise. Everything around us – the dust, the rubble – began to settle a little, as did the nerves of the young boy staring deeply into my eyes. Finally, he broke the silence descending around us; “They were here?”
He understood my problem. His fear had quickly been replaced by concern, which showed more in his mouth than his protruding little eyes, unchanged since I’d first seen them.
“You’re well aware of the threat, then,” I said.
“Of course,” his high-pitched voice replied. “I’ve been running from them too.” He stopped for breath. “Are they still near?”
“There’s no chance of us coming under any sort of attack,” I reassured him. “I’ve already walked all the way here from Holborn, and I think that, so long as we stick to the main roads on the way back, you will be completely safe.”
We stared at each other silently as the lamp, which was still swinging from left to right like an illuminated pendulum, fully lit up our faces every second or so. There was a strange mutuality between us, yet I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.
“Nox!” Victor called from the ground floor.
“What is it, Victor?”
“We’ve only got about an hour and a half until sunrise,” he replied hastily. “We’ll have to move. If anyone realises we’re missing, or that we’re trying to move an unknown outsider into the base, we’ll be screwed!”
I addressed the young boy again who, throughout my short exchange with Victor, had kept his gaze firmly on my face. “He’s right,” I told him. “We’ll have to move soon; otherwise we’ll be in big trouble.”
Keeping his widened eyes locked firmly in my pitch-black pupils, the young boy rose to his feet without uttering a single word, gathered up a few obscure, singed pieces of yellow paper from the floor and, still trembling a little, walked across the small, brown mounds which smothered the cellar floor and led me up the stairs which I’d plunged down a few moments previously; visibly and audibly shaken by the night’s events as he had been, he was surprising calm when called into making any sort of action. He greeted Victor as if he was an old friend after poking his head from the top of the splintered stairs, and walked with him back into the mists of Newburgh Street. They were all but obscured by the time I reached the arch of destruction at the front of the shop, but as we came to the other end of the street we materialised alongside each other, ready for the walk back to Holborn: this time, via New Oxford Street rather than via the killing fields of Cambridge Circus.
"You know," I half-whispered to the boy as Victor walked onwards through the mazy streets of Soho in search of a route back to Holborn, "I almost forgot to introduce myself."
"You're called Nox," he said innocently. "Your friend mentioned it a few times. Strangely, though, I think I've heard your name before."
"Really?"
"Yes," he replied in the same secure, but nevertheless sweet voice. "It's been dwellling in the back of my head for years now, though I can never remember why. There's no image. The memory is made of little more than a young man's voice yelling your name; Nox, Nox."
I tried to piece his memory together by picking through the archives of my own life but with every passing moment the memories lost more and more substance; like dust in the riverside winds, the last few images I could remember of my old life were being sprinkled to the far corners of the Earth. Nowhere in the tiny bank of memories that remained in my head from the time before I was forced into battle could I find a memory fitting the boy's description, though no doubt such a memory did exist within my head. I needed more information.
I turned back to the young boy just as Victor re-emerged from a side street a few hundred feet away. "What's your name?" I asked. Well, it was a start.
The boy stood next to me, creating an awkward, offputting silence broken only by the sound of Victor's boots upon the flagstone pavements as he rounded the thin strands of streets. "You must have a name," I said, a little jokingly. My mood changed pretty quickly, though, when I realised that the young boy, still standing next to me with a neutral expression on his face, was not willing to answer my question. Victor's boots beat ever louder onto the concrete pavements. "You - You do have a name, don't you?"
"They didn't call us anything," he replied hurriedly, cutting me off. "They didn't have any way of distinguishing us. To them, we were a unit. One and the same."
I stared towards the bland, grey, expressionless expanses of the building in front of us, confused and unable to force my throat into a reply to the disjointed chain of sentences that had just hit my ears. Before I could say anything, though, the young boy had piped up again; "The answer to your question is 'No.'"
So, a young boy has just crashed into my train-wreck of a life, claiming to have some distant memory of me despite not having a clue about his own identity.
Strange...