Episode 06
The good coats
They came on the Saturday, at ten past two in the afternoon, which I have decided is not a coincidence and which nobody has ever been able to explain to me.
Bob had said two days. It was four. He was furious about that afterwards, in the way he is furious about things, which is quietly and for a long time, and I told him that being wrong by two days about a thing nobody else saw coming at all is not a failure.
"It is when you're the one who counts," said Bob.
Here is what we had. A hospital in Wedding, fourth floor, one room. Kappa, who had asked to be told everything tomorrow and had come in that morning to sit with her anyway. Ricky in the corridor because he could not sit still. Rose in the chair by the window with the sunglasses off. Bob in the doorway. Nine kobolds in the walls and thirty-one more under the car park, who had walked four days from the Harz and come up through a drain overnight without one person noticing, because nobody looks at drains. Marguerite downstairs at reception, saying no to somebody in three languages. Ilse on a bench in the garden, day four of the furious week, not speaking to anybody.
And me, on the window sill, in a shoebox with the lid off, being told to stop narrating out loud.
Here is what they had. Nine people in good coats, and the fact that not one of us could see them coming.
Rose has explained her blind spot to me four times and I still only have it by the edges.
Two days out, always. She sees what is going to be there the way you see a word on the next line. And the thing about the good coats, the thing that took us a year and a bomb and twenty-two people to learn, is that they are not going to be anywhere. They came through a door eight thousand years ago out of a place with no shape, and they do not have a next line. When Rose looks two days ahead at a room they will be standing in, she sees the room, correctly, in every detail, with a gap in it that her mind kindly fills with furniture.
She sat in that chair for four days seeing an empty corridor.
The first thing any of us knew was Bob's head coming up.
"Down," he said.
And the floor of the fourth floor of a hospital in Wedding went wet.
It came up through the lino like writing coming up through paper: a net of it, lines that crossed and pulled tight, the same script that had come up the ramp at Grand Central and across the floor of a school on Canal Street, but not wearing a body of wet stone this time. Just the writing. Older, cleaner, going everywhere at once, and pulling in exactly one direction, which was the bed.
Then the doors at the end of the corridor opened and they walked in over it as if it were a carpet laid for them.
Good coats. Ordinary faces. One of them had a lanyard on, as if she had come from an office, and she looked down the corridor at Ricky and said, in a perfectly reasonable voice:
"We're not here for the woman. She's finished anyway. We're here for the man and the compass and we would very much rather do it without a scene in a building full of ill people."
"You put a bomb in a foyer," said Ricky.
"Yes," said the woman with the lanyard. "And you noticed what came out of the walls, which was the point, and now we know, and we've brought enough." She looked at the net spreading past her feet. "Nothing personal. It's what we are."
I'm going to tell the next four minutes in order, because when I tell it out of order people think it was longer.
The kobolds came up first. Nine out of the walls of that corridor, three out of the floor of the room itself, and the rest up four storeys through the structure of the building at a speed that took the tiles off two bathrooms. They made a ring around the bed facing out, as they had at the end of a runway in Toronto, and Bob stood at the head of it with his hands out at his sides and said the only thing he said in the whole of it:
"You don't come past me. You never have."
And that was true, and they knew it, and so they did not try.
Because they weren't there for Kappa. Not really. That was the second thing we learned that afternoon and it cost us the most: they had come nine-strong to a hospital in a European capital, in daylight, to make us put every single thing we had in a ring around one bed.
Ricky changed shape in a corridor. I want that recorded properly too, because he has never forgiven himself for it and he was right to do it. There is a rule and it is absolute and Ilse Varga wrote it: never in public, never near ordinary people, never where it can be filmed. And there was a woman in a good coat walking towards a room with a dying woman and a frightened man in it, and a nurse at the far end with a trolley and her mouth open, and Ricky went down onto his hands and became fifteen feet of the wrong thing in a space built for beds, and the ceiling tiles came down, and the woman with the lanyard stopped walking.
"That's better," she said. "That's the honest version."
And then Kappa, on the edge of the bed, holding his grandmother's hand, did the thing he'd done to a dragon in an ambulance bay.
He didn't mean to. He has said that to me perhaps forty times. He was frightened and he wanted them to stop, and something in him that has never had a name simply withdrew the arrangement between nine people and the floor they were standing on, and they went down, all nine, like buildings sitting.
For about six seconds it was over. I want you to know that. For six seconds we had won, and Rose was already moving, and Ricky had his weight on the net, and Bob was laughing.
Then the tenth one came in through the fire door behind us, walked past a ring of kobolds who were all facing the wrong way, past a dragon whose whole attention was in front of him, past a girl who could not see her coming, and picked up a shoebox off a window sill.
I have thought a great deal about what I did in that moment, and the honest answer is: nothing.
I was fifteen days old. A hand came down on the sill and I looked up at it. I could feel where Kappa was, six feet away, the way you feel your own hand in the dark, and I could feel the good coat around me the way you feel a hole in a tooth, and I did not scream, or bite, or point, or do any of the four things I have since worked out I could have done. I sat in a shoebox and let a woman put the lid on, because nobody had ever told me that anything could want me.
The last thing I heard through the cardboard was Leni.
She had not spoken for four minutes. She had been lying in a bed at the centre of a ring of small angry creatures, with her grandson holding her hand, doing nothing at all. And then, as the fire door swung, she said one word.
It was not in German, or in English, or in any language that has a name now. Ricky says it went through the floor. Bob says it went through him. Rose says that for one second she could see everything, everywhere, two days out and four and eleven, all the rooms at once, and then it stopped and she was on the floor being sick.
What it did was this. The net of writing went still, all of it, everywhere in that building, in one moment, the way a drum stops when you put your hand flat on the skin. Nine people in good coats stopped being able to get up. Every window on the eastern side of the fourth floor came out of its frame at once and went outward, and a car alarm went off, and a woman with a lanyard who had reached the stairwell was thrown down half a flight and got up with her arm at a bad angle and kept going anyway.
And she got out. With me.
They lost eight of the nine in the corridor. Ilse's people came up from the garden, the kobolds held them, Marguerite made a phone call, and by evening there were eight people in good coats in a place I have never been told the location of. The ninth went out through the roof. The tenth had a two-minute start and a stairwell and a shoebox, and by the time Ricky got a shape that fitted through a fire door she was in a car, and by the time Rose could stand she was on a road out of the city, and by the time the kobolds got into the ground under the ring road she was a long way east and going faster.
And in the room, on the bed, Leni had gone grey.
"Oma. Oma."
"I'm here." Her hand was in his and it had nothing in it. "That was the last one, my darling. That was the last of the quiet. There isn't any more."
"That's fine. That's fine, that doesn't matter—"
"It matters, it was marvellous," said Leni, with enormous satisfaction, and coughed, and something in the machines beside her began to make a noise that a nurse came running for.
Ricky was a person again, on his knees in ceiling tiles, with his hands flat on lino that had stopped being a net. Rose was against the wall. Bob was in the doorway with his back to the room, facing out, and did not turn round for a very long time, and when he did his boot face was wet.
"They took the small one," he said.
"I know."
"They took the small one."
"I know, Bob."
And Leni, who had four days and had just spent three of them, said, from the pillow, in a voice with almost nothing left in it:
"Then it's tomorrow, isn't it. Everybody come at nine. I'll tell you the whole thing and then you'll go and get him back."