فصل چهاردهم

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The One Who Walks Behind

The woman in the red raincoat pulled it a little tighter around her neck and hurried through the light drizzle toward Cannon Street station. All around her, people swerved and stutter-stepped past each other on the pavement. The traffic was moving slowly enough for some of them to walk on the edge of the road instead, and all of them had, in some way, the same thought: home.

These were the professional commuters, London’s foot soldiers, each determinedly plowing their own way homeward in the way they had done yesterday, and the way they would tomorrow. Almost all walked on autopilot. People with trains to catch walked faster than those who just needed to take the tube. People who needed a bus walked irritably between stops, gauging their speed with one eye constantly darting back over their shoulders in case a red double-decker should unexpectedly materialize where there had been none a moment before.

The only ones displaying any kind of self-consciousness were the ones looking for a taxi. They were the only ones looking at the other pedestrians too, in case someone darted ahead of them and pulled a cab from under their noses.

The woman in the red raincoat had no thought of a taxi on her mind. She was looking forward to the Northern Line and twenty-five minutes—she hoped seated—head down over the paperback now bumping on her hip in the pocket of her coat.

And then, like a deer in the forest when it catches a sound or unexpected smell, her head came up. She felt something behind her. She turned, not knowing why, and saw no one. Or rather, she saw everyone but nobody in particular, nobody looking at her.

Except, someone was looking at her. In the city someone is almost always looking at you, even when you think you’re alone. And when you think you’re most alone—say, on a dark street, late at night, when everyone honest and sober is safe in bed—and you get that prickle between your shoulder blades that tells you someone is watching you, and you turn quickly and see no one, and you sigh with relief—don’t kid yourself: there’s always someone there. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The walker behind the woman in the red coat had had a long time to perfect not being seen. He had had a long time to perfect his walking too, and if you had the knack of seeing him, of noticing him even though he was making sure that no one saw him, you might notice that he was never actually still—he never stopped walking. Even when he looked like he might be standing still, he rocked from foot to foot, walking on the spot. Sometimes he walked on the spot, so slowly and deliberately he looked like an animal pawing the ground just before it springs on its prey. If you were able to keep him centered in your eyes and, perhaps more important, your mind, then you might begin to see that this perpetual motion hung on him like a curse.

And if you thought that, you might be more right than you knew.

He walked tall, a long once-green tweed overcoat flapping at his heels. His face was hard to see, as he wore an old green hoodie with the hood turned up. Long tendrils of gray and black hair escaped into the night breeze. The coat partially obscured the yellow outline of a prancing stag leaping across the front of the grimy sweatshirt, below a John Deere logo. The faintly hippy-ish atmosphere about him was enhanced by the jewelry he wore around his neck—a rough stone hanging from a thick silver chain, worn tight as a choker—so tight that the stone bobbed up and down in sync with his Adam’s apple.

The Walker felt the thing that had pulled him from his normal meandering passage through the city tug insistently at him from the side of the building across the road, like a dark magnet. His tongue made a rare appearance and flicked over dry lips. It was the sinister pull dragging at him with a renewed intensity that made him forget to prevent the woman from seeing him. She looked around a second time and gasped to find this tall, ominous figure so close behind her.

The dry lips parted in something like the almost-forgotten memory of a smile. His hand reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder.

“It’s not all right,” he said gently, as if comforting her. Her eyes widened. His voice was like the dry rustle of leaves blown across a tombstone.

“It’s not all right at all. None of it. And it never will be.”

And because she had heard him and because he had allowed her to see him, she started to scream. She dropped her bag and opened her mouth and screamed: not at him—because being instantly forgotten was another skill he had—but at everything else.

As he walked across the street toward an undistinguished office building, the woman in the red coat continued screaming, her high voice cutting sharply through the endless growl of the traffic. The crowd eddied and parted around her as the commuters noticed and avoided another lone street-crazy howling at the city in the growing darkness.

The Walker crouched in front of a low wrought iron grille set into the side of the building. He reached his hand through and rocked slightly, his feet flexing beneath his bent legs, as if trying to push the building. He stared intensely through the grille, listening. He nodded.

I see.

He listened some more.

“If the taints fail again. I will bring him. We will bring him.”

His hand jerked out from behind the grille—and it was hard to tell if it was being spat out or he was just relieved to get it back—and he rocked up onto his feet and started walking north. As he did so, he tugged at the bulging hood around his head. A large black bird hopped free and shook its wings out, perching firmly on the green tweed shoulder of his coat.

“Go and find the ones that failed.”

The bird clacked its beak and lofted into the sky, sideslipping between two tall buildings, and was almost immediately lost to sight.

Back on the street, the Walker waited unnoticed in a phalanx of uninterested pedestrians for the lights to change, before striding off to the north. As they waited, a police car sirened past and stopped farther down the road, where a screaming woman in a red coat was being helped by two other women who were finding it impossible to calm her, or discover what it was that had filled her with such deep horror.

The lights changed and the Walker paced until he found someone heading in his direction to follow. And then they were gone as the swirl of humanity closed in behind them.