CHAPTER 43
Amman, Jordan
There was no discussion. Sally pulled the door open and pushed Tallis through it first, then followed with two coats snatched from the hallway pegs, and then they were running down the stairs—along with at least ten other people from other flats.
Everyone was silent, everyone was trying to run with as little weight as possible, and everyone was sending scared glances back at the huge, bearded man carrying a tiny baby in a Moses basket.
She hesitated at the outside door to see which way the man and the baby went, then pulled Sally in the opposite direction, back down the steep, dark hill. Behind them, someone shrieked.
“We need to go to the mosque,” Sally said tightly. They were running again. Despite what must have been a fog of salt light in the air, it was cold now, the desert night dry and cloudless and biting. He threw a coat to her. “Maybe someone there knows what to do.”
“Some random parish imam is going to know bugger all except how to advertise the charity bowls match for the elderly,” Tallis said, coughing, because the air tasted of salt again, and gulping it in while they ran was as bad as swallowing seawater. “We need a—Christ alive—lab.”
He pushed his hand over his face as they slowed down for the darkest part of the passageway. Neither of them had any light, but some girls up ahead had lamps. “The Grand Mosque then. Tallis . . . I think you might feel something there, I think you might—see a way to believing. Please come with me.”
She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but then her tired brain caught up. Only believers could be saved. He was trying to help.
She held his elbows. “Okay. But you have to promise that nobody is going to be offended if I fall asleep on the floor. I’m so tired now. Mosques have carpets, don’t they? It’s such an error, it’s inviting people to get too comfortable.”
He scooped her into a sudden hug. She froze for a whole second, then put her arms around his waist. His ribs fluttered, and she felt an old packet of cigarettes crush flat in his pocket. She pressed her teeth together and rubbed his back. She probably reminded him of his mother.
Without streetlamps, the dark was deep and rich, and cold.
Tallis had never been in darkness like it inside a city.
It felt old, as if it had rolled in from the desert, having bided its time for a hundred years, waiting for the failure of electrons in their wires to reclaim everything from the light.
They walked close together, as quickly as they could, looking dead ahead to keep from staring towards the graveyard.
At sharp corners, other people clapped or whistled low, because there was no other way to know someone else was coming the other way.
Her eyes kept flickering of their own accord to the sides of buildings and deep-shadowed balconies, always half convinced something was there, but it seemed, at least, that they had left the dead behind for now.
People weren’t panicking here. Here and there were little fires, from gas canisters or wood, and people were sitting outside on flimsy mismatched chairs, eyes glinting.
It was surprisingly calm. Mostly, they were just cooking, or trying to keep warm.
A family with tiny twin boys was playing a board game by the firelight, or trying to.
“You’re cheating!” one of the boys exclaimed. “It’s always landing on six!”
“I’m not!” his brother squeaked, but he sounded delighted. Their parents looked bewildered.
Just like the coins were landing on heads. Failure of randomness. Hence the banks.
If randomness didn’t decide how coins and dice fell, or how lightning struck, or the thousand other things it usually determined . . . what did decide, now?
She couldn’t think. Half her mind was still staring back at the thing on Sally’s balcony.
Nothing had followed, even though the part of her trained on films expected an unearthly shriek and a fasting-moving horde. The only things moving were people, shadows, and stray cats. Nothing was climbing the gutters or the telegraph poles; nothing crawled from the corners.
She let her breath out in intervals, a third, two thirds, all the way.
“Typical,” said Sally. “The apocalypse happens, and half of Amman sets up a market stall. You can’t say people aren’t practical.” He sounded incredulous and halfway to proud at the same time. “Existential panic? No, ma’am, just buy one get one free.”
Because she had been thinking about dice and the dead, Tallis hadn’t seen that on the narrow way ahead of them, there were at least a dozen brightly coloured market stalls, all hung about with lamps, the kind with rainbow glass and intricate metalwork.
Hand-painted signs hung above them, sometimes banners, sometimes written on paper lanterns. She couldn’t read any.
“Fortune-telling,” Sally said, pointing at one. “Coffee reading. Your Fate in the Poetry of Fal-e Hafez. The Science of the Sand.” He looked confused. “They’re . . . all like that.”
As Tallis watched, someone scattered a handful of sand over a bronze tray, and three girls leaned close to see. There were some exclamations she didn’t understand, and she couldn’t see the sand past them, but it was doing something unexpected.
“All of that needs some element of randomness, doesn’t it,” she said, more to the world generally than to Sally.
“Coffee reading is like reading tea leaves. The poetry thing is a random selection of lines. Sand reading is about—random lines and dots.” She stared at the middle distance.
There was something in that. “I Ching is sticks thrown at random. Tarot cards have to be shuffled; random.”
“Sorry?” said Sally, distracted, because somebody had just stepped out in front of him, smiling, to show him a glass cup full of old coffee grounds. “No, thank you . . .”
Tallis looked into the cup.
It showed figures like the one in the dosimetry image. Something like people, but attached to a chaos of wheels and eyes, eagle wings, lion faces, whipping tails, and fabric.
When she brushed his arm, Sally looked too, and she saw his expression open from impatience to helpless perplexity.
Some quality of that image, though, felt like the memory of seeing much more than seeing.
Just like the figures in the graveyard. Every instinct Tallis had trained to recognise a hallucination was shouting that although, yes, the coffee grounds were really forming shapes .
. . it wasn’t real. The image was like a hallucination that had made its way into coffee.
“You should get out of here,” Sally said to the fortune teller. “There are—back there, people are coming out of graves.”
“God be praised,” the fortune teller said primly, nodding to the red moon.
As they passed away from the residential streets, the almost cosy feel of the night changed, and hardened.
The fires were soon in the middle of the road.
Abandoned cars stood askew everywhere. An ambulance with its doors ominously slung open.
Shadowy figures ran at the edges of the way.
Sometimes distant, sometimes right in front of them, windows smashed.
Tallis had always imagined looting was done by angry young men, but the person holding the baseball bat now was a scared-looking girl with a baby strapped to her chest.
When they passed a group of men in some kind of uniform, Sally caught her hand and gripped it, but the men ignored them. They seemed intent on going elsewhere.
Tallis had to crush down a panic that was opening its rows and rows of gun ports, ready to fire chain shot right into the part of her mind that was clinging hard to common sense and clarity.
It would have been disconcerting enough to see the world crumble in a part of it she knew well, where she understood every word and knew its codes of dress and manners, but here: she only understood one phrase in ten, and she couldn’t read people’s clothes or accents, or even all the road signs, or any of the other thousand tiny things you could know only if you belonged.
Everyone was being shipwrecked now, but she was much further out to sea than most.
It was all right. She had Sally. She had Sally.
From a minaret a long way off, the call to prayer echoed eerie through the night.
Sensible, Tallis thought. Get people off the streets and inside, and tell them what to do, even if it was just making sandwiches or something, and all this would go a lot better.
She wondered suddenly what was happening at home.
Were the church bells ringing? Had the banks failed there too, or was it localised?
When she made it back, would the windows in her flat be smashed in, because someone desperate had wanted to raid her kitchen for canned food?
In the middle of the road was a person on fire.
Flames covered them wholly, but they seemed not to feel it. They were just standing still, head tilted, watching. The proportions weren’t right. The arms were too long, the knees too low, and . . . she couldn’t tell in the smoke that poured from them, but there was something wrong with the face.
Another figure burned out of the shadows, crawling, trailing embers.
Sally gripped her arm. “Turn around. We need to go back.”
Tallis didn’t move.
Failure of randomness in salt light. Instead you got . . . what? Coins always landing on heads, dice on six, coffee grounds and sand making shapes . . .
In a deep-down way she couldn’t trace yet, she was certain that that was the same as the red moon, the dead rising, and jinn burning in the street. All of it was too . . . too something.
One of the burning figures began to walk towards them. Like she had at the hospital, she felt as if she were watching it on a screen. This wasn’t her country, and these weren’t her jinn.
And exactly like those figures in the graveyard, seeing it felt much more like the memory of seeing, not real seeing. It was an echo.
She snapped her fingers in front of her face. It was a sudden enough, sharp enough sound to startle her occipital lobe. She saw moths.
“Oh—God, where did those come from?” Sally coughed, hunching forward and covering his mouth and nose.
What?
She swung around. “Can you see moths?”
“Of course I can see moths! Come on!” Sally pulled her hand and dragged her into a side alley. It was so dark it was impossible to see even a few inches ahead, but they plunged down it anyway.
There was a clang and a gasp right in front of her, and then she bumped into Sally. Sally had walked straight into a fence. It crossed the whole alley. There was no gate, and no way to see how high it was.
The thing on fire had followed them. The flames began to catch on a pile of old cardboard boxes.
The boxes were so dry that the fire engulfed them straightaway, the top layer withering to show the wavy pattern of the next, crumbling and distorting into an ashy mass. Sparks landed on Tallis’s sleeves.
Failure of randomness. Coins. Dice. Coffee grounds.
Red moon. Resurrection. Jinn.
Moths.
“It’s the salt light,” she said. “This didn’t start until the salt light blew in over the city.”
“What?” Sally croaked.
“It’s making . . .” She couldn’t get her fingernails over it, but some instinct she couldn’t name made her brush him behind her.
“Tallis, don’t . . .”
The burning thing had almost reached her. She could feel the heat off it. But the heat was the same as that artificial joy before. It was fake. Even the flames on the cardboard—they were flames, the cardboard was burning, but it wasn’t right.
“It’s not real,” she said aloud, at the same time as she understood.
The flames stopped. The burning thing just . . . came apart, crumbling to embers that blew away in a breath of sparks and charcoal back down the alleyway.