A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Three: Half an Hour at the Heart of the Matter

He woke up with cobblestones pressing into his back. For one horrible, lurching moment, he thought he was back in Radcliffe Square, and it was that night, and he was going to find her dead all over again. But when his eyes shot open, there was grey daylight above him, and no Oxford spires prodding at the sky. 

He rolled over and almost fell into a canal. For a few seconds, he stared down at the grey, oily water slipping and sloshing against the keels of the passing boats. Cobblestones next to a canal. You didn't get that anywhere in Oxford. Besides, the air tasted different – less oppressive but more polluted. Nothing could feel as thick and stifling as Oxford air, but this place did its best. There were even flakes of soot drifting down to the cobbles like snow. 

Very cautiously, he sat up and inspected the boats oozing past him on their way to the lock downstream. They were mostly cargo barges, stacked high with crates, but there was the occasional, bright-painted longboat, its colours fighting a valiant battle with the film of soot that lay over every object in sight.

And there was a girl watching him. She must have been about six or seven. She had wandered off from a game off hopscotch, which was still going on without her. None of the other skipping girls glanced at him. Nobody else glanced at him at all, not even to check whether he was dead and go through his pockets for loose change.

But he knew this place. Or something like it. The soot-blackened houses – everything looking mildly charred, as though there had been a fire – the oily, coaly smells of the canal, the children's rhymes – they were all so familiar to him. This wasn't the area where he'd grown up, but it was close enough to make his flesh creep with nostalgia.

He could see a pub sign down the road – the Old Mother Redcap – which, in conjunction with the canal, meant that this was Camden High Street. And the girl was clearly half-Indian. But equally clearly, she was not Ellini. Her skin was slightly darker, her nose blunter, than Ellini's. In fact, it was a pretty little snub-nose which combined with her dark plaits to give the impression of a pert tomboy.

Jack stood up, and somebody walked through him. It didn't hurt, but it changed the way he looked at the scene, and it certainly changed the way the little girl was looking at him.

She wandered closer, swung her arms a few times as if she was uncertain about something, and then said, "Are you a ghost?"

"I don't know yet," said Jack absently, dusting down his clothes. "Why, what are you?"

"A living girl, thank you very much!"

"You must be very proud."

He turned back to the canal-path. A few crates of apples had been dumped there by one of the barge-hands, who presumably had his hands full hauling on ropes, or whistling commands, or whatever it was that barge-hands did with such inexplicable enthusiasm.

Jack concentrated, reached out his hand, and prodded the crates. They were solid. He seemed to be able to touch things, but not people. He supposed that made sense, since he wasn't currently sinking through the ground to the centre of the earth, but it was still peculiar. This didn't feel like a dream. Or perhaps it felt like the jigsaw-puzzle dreams – a little hazy around the edges, but with a core of tantalising solidity.

"This is London, isn't it?" he asked, turning back to the girl.

She swung her arms again. "You ever see another place that looked like London?"

"No," said Jack, in a faraway voice. "Venice on a hot day sort of smelled like London, but no, I never saw another place that looked like London."