The Other Tony
“NUH!” HE JOLTED awake, eyes snapping open. For a fraction of an instant, the space around him seemed to tremble, and he thought he was right back where that awful dream had begun: floating in midair, surrounded by nothing. Then in the desert of his chest, his heart convulsed with a great shiver. But what surged through his veins was icy and black as a remorseless tide, and he thought, God, it’s the rot; it’s the squirmers; I’m infected; they’re eating me alive!
“Tony?” A hand, wet and dripping, spidered over his face. “Tony, what …?”
With a strangled sob, he lashed out, sweeping a wild fist. He felt the moment of impact and heard a gasp, the sound of something—someone—falling. The darkness before his eyes dissolved to a ruddy, pulsing glow, and in the dim and unnatural light, he saw a shape—girl … no, the woman!—in a tangle of worn cotton ticking. Kill her, stop her! Swarming over rags and burlap and rough brick, he pinned her, facedown. She let out a pained gasp and then a small cry as he knotted a fist in her hair.
No more nightmares. Baring his teeth, cocking a fist, he flipped her onto her back. No more black visits, no more infection; kill her before she kills me, kill her before—
“T-Tony.” Her hands closed over his balled knuckles. “Tony, d-don’t. Wake up. It’s me, it’s …”
“Rima?” Stupefied, he stared. Loosed from its braid, her hair was a tangled cloud around her head, and her eyes, so dark, were huge in her thin, pinched face. Through the gloom—because it’s night; we’re above the retort; everyone’s asleep—he saw the darker blush of a new bruise on her cheek. A second later, he felt the warm seep over his lips and down his chin and realized he was bleeding from his nose again, too.
“Oh God.” Shame swept his chest. Moaning, he sagged from her body, suddenly weaker than a kitten, his eyes springing hot. He cupped a hand to his streaming nose. The taste, brackish and dank, coated his throat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I never …”
“Shhh, shhh, Tony, it’s fine. I startled you. Of course you’d lash out. It’s my fault. Here, let’s stop that bleeding.” Pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand, she pressed a rough cloth to his streaming nostrils. “Relax, Tony, the nightmare’s over.”
“Leave it.” His voice was nasal and stuffed. He brushed her hand aside. “I can do this.” He was getting worse. So were the dreams, each nightmare building on the other, growing more detailed and ever more horrifying. His eyes drifted right to a dull orange gleam of reflected light: a squared-off and wicked-sharp ten-inch steel blade set in a worn bone mount, dangling from its peg. He’d hung it that way on purpose, so there would always be that split second where he would have to sit up and reach for the blade—and thank God. If he hadn’t, he might have buried his chopper in her skull.
“Rima, I’m sorry.” I’m a monster. Might have killed her. Gulping around a stone of fear, he said, “I d-didn’t know …”
“Shhh, Tony, you’ll wake the others. It’s all right. Let’s just … hold on.” She ducked around a ramshackle barrier he’d constructed of the broken slates of a rotted crate. With no privacy other than what he could make, he’d used these as a screen between him and the hundred other children crammed, cheek by jowl, like pilchards in a tin. Rima slept alongside in her own nest of threadbare burlap. He heard a slight rasp of metal, followed by a muted gurgle. In another moment, she was back, a small, sloshing cast-iron Dutch pot scavenged from a dustheap hooked over one hand.
“Here.” Kneeling, she wrung out a cloth and began cleaning blood from his face and neck. “Let’s put you to rights.”
He forced even, methodical breaths, one after the other, through his mouth as she worked. The air was a mélange, heavy with the odor of soot, hot brick, musty burlap, clothes that hadn’t seen a proper wash in months—and another, more peculiar, almost sweet aroma that anyone, if he didn’t know better, might mistake for a roast pig on a spit, dripping molten fat. But he did know better.
“Try to relax.” Laying a gentle hand over the fist bunched at his chest, she swabbed at his bloodstained palm. Wringing out her cloth, she touched the back of the hand that still held pressure on his nose. “Let’s have this one now.”
He let her. “What happened?” he asked, still in a whisper. Although this room above the retort was warm enough for them all to shed coats and mittens for sleeping, he was shivering. His skin was clammy with fear-sweat. His heart boomed in his chest, muting the chuff of a persistent roar from the furnace below. The gasworks had several retorts—gargantuan iron vessels in which coal or other fuels were carbonized to release gas—although only two furnaces still operated this side of the Thames because there were no more shipments of coal. No trains either, for that matter, and what this part of the city had left had to last until … well, no one was exactly sure. So they were forced to use a very different species of fuel now. “Did I shout?”
“No. I heard you moaning. When I checked, you were burning up, so I got a wet cloth for your forehead and …”
“Wait.” He snagged her wrist. “You touched me? You didn’t try to …”
“Quiet. Not so loud.” She half-turned as, from beyond Tony’s nook and the murky depths of the room, someone shifted in a rustle of burlap and straw. This place, with its demon’s light and heat, was where he and the other rats—children with nowhere to go, who were desperate enough to do a job no one else would—lived when they weren’t out collecting bodies to strip bare and then feed to the furnace as fuel. After another moment, there was a small mewling noise, like a contented kitten, and then a mutter as whoever that was settled back into sleep. Looking back, Rima gave the wrist he still held a pointed look. “No, I didn’t. You made me promise, remember? I only felt for a fever. Now, if I might have my hand back?”
He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he did as she asked. Did she try? Pressing a palm to his chest, he tried to reach beyond the thump of his heart. Normally, he could tell when she drew out sickness. Hard to describe, but the sensation was like a clearing in his soul, as if this black blight in his center was only soot that could be scrubbed clean with the right hand and good soap. For a little while at least, when Rima drew from him, he was stronger, stable, and more himself.
Now, though, he simply couldn’t tell if she had, most likely because he was still so unsettled, his mind mired in the thick mud of that dream. That other boy—himself—had appeared in other nightmares, but only fleetingly. This time, though …
Bathroom. Was that a kind of indoor privy? The sink and spigot, he recognized; when the toffs cleared out of London months before, him and the others had ransacked their houses. Being rich, the high-class types had taken their nice threads and jewels. (Stupid. You couldn’t eat diamonds, and how many clothes did one body need?) Furniture and paintings made for very good fuel, though. But he remembered the first couple houses he went through, round Regent’s Park and further north in the very posh Crouch End. There, the houses had indoor plumbing, which meant sinks and spigots and separate water closets. Nothing worked, of course; without a reliable source of fuel, the pumping stations couldn’t function. Light was much more important than being able to flush a toilet. There were plenty of public privies. Or you just dropped your drawers wherever. No one was paying much attention to the niceties these days.
So if he’d seen a sink and spigot in his nightmare, then this other Tony must be rich, a real toff. Indoor plumbing, toilet in the same room, and a shower, too. What else? Crest. What was that? Surely not the crest of a wave; he hadn’t heard water running. And a comic book? Hadn’t looked like any volume he’d ever seen. What wavered before his mind’s eye was closer to a pamphlet but smaller, with odd writing that didn’t look like proper printing. The drawings were wrong, too: in color and very crude, nothing as fine as anything by Doré or Cruikshank. In the drawing, the lieutenant? Or sergeant? He couldn’t remember, but what the figure wore looked like a kind of bowler. The soldier had a rifle, too, though it wasn’t a Henry; he was pretty certain of that. And foxhole? What’s that? Why would soldiers be out on a foxhunt?
There was something else, too, that was very strange. An animal … come on, what was it? Right. He felt that muzzy sense dissipate, and now the image firmed. That queer red-roofed house with a gigantic dog and … what’s an electric toothbrush? He knew what a toothbrush was, but his had a bone handle and the bristles were a threadbare splay of macerated hog’s hair. But electric? Like lightning?
“What?” Rima said. “Electric toothbrush? What’s that?”
Startled—he hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud—he said, “Something I saw in the nightmare. In that other T-Tony’s bathroom.” God, that felt so strange in his mouth. She listened as he stammered out the rest, the entire sequence from beginning to end, and then she said, “So you got a good look this time.”
“At him? Yes. I think it’s because something happened to really scare him.”
“Like what?”
“Not sure. I want to say”—he could feel the word poised on the tip of his tongue—“that he had a nightmare, too. As if we both had one at the same time. He just felt different this time.”
“Not like someone you’d read about,” she said. They’d talked about this before, when the dreams had begun. Back then, the other Tony had seemed like a boy in a fairy tale or serial: something flat as paper, with no more substance than a thin character in a bad novel. Yet with each dream, this other Tony had drawn closer, in the same way that the fog, so relentless, crept ever nearer. “He was fleshed out. A person.”
“Yeah, and I think he noticed it, too, because he did something. Changed things up somehow.” Mirror—the word popped into his brain on a thrill—that’s it. “He’s always been hazy; can’t quite ever make him out. But this time, he wiped away mist or fog or something like that from a mirror, and then, all of a sudden, I could see out of his eyes. I wasn’t able to do that before and …”
“What?” she said when he broke off. “Tony?”
“What in God’s name are we talking about?” I’m sick; I’m going mad, that’s it. He pressed the heel of a hand to his forehead. “Rima, there is no other Tony. This has to be the rot. I’m infected. It’s burrowed into my brain.”
“No. Tony, the last time you let me draw, I could tell. Rot feels different.”
“How many rotters you actually drawn from? Two? Three? No more than a half dozen before you realized you couldn’t help. Checking for squirmers doesn’t count.” So far, they’d been lucky enough to avoid a rotter with a bellyful. Oh, but the day is coming. Eventually, our luck’s going to run out. “Maybe, in me, the rot’s up to something new.”
Perhaps the rot had taken root in his brain, and this was how it would be: he going slowly insane as squirmers wriggled and munched and hollowed him at his core. Even worse, what if he didn’t snap out of it next time? He might kill her without meaning to. I should leave, take myself away while there’s still time.
He felt movement, heard the Dutch pot slosh, and then she was stretching out alongside, careful not to touch. Eyes still shuttered, arm over his face, he said, “You shouldn’t.”
“Be quiet. Don’t tell me what I ought and ought not do. Aren’t things bad enough?”
“Yes.” There was something strangely comforting about speaking into the dark before his eyes. “But they’ll get worse, and you know it. Forget the rot and the fog. Horses are all gone. There are no more dogs, no cats. No one’s seen a bird since the Peculiar made it to the Tower.” The raid on the zoo, with its turtles and snakes, gazelles and hippos, an elephant, had been well before the toffs and Parliament and their good King Eddie decided to abscond in the middle of the night. None such as him had so much as a mouthful; the price for a quarter pound of civet had been three pounds, sixpence, which was more scratch than he’d seen in his entire life. Only those families with money, and there were plenty in those days, actually supped on zebra in raisin sauce, or a duck-and-hippo cassoulet, which he’d gathered was some fancy name for bean stew. Although he’d heard that the toffs complained about elephant. Said it was tough and too greasy, so much bowwow mutton. While a few animals had been spared—the lions, a few tigers, several monkeys, and a great black bear—that was only because some scientists thought monkeys were too close to people, and killing lions was too difficult. And where were those poor creatures now? Starved to death, still in their cages, behind a dense milky shroud? Or had they somehow become fog?
No one knew. Once the fog lowered, not a soul came out again, and no one was stupid enough to wander in.
“All that’s left is what vermin we can catch and what hordes we find. But how many more of those, you think?” Deep in his heart, he also thought they weren’t very far from consuming the dead. (In another, even more inaccessible part he didn’t let himself stare at for long, he thought some people were already there. Meat was meat.) But then it was a choice between heat and food, wasn’t it? Freeze to death with full bellies, or starve away to skin and bones on a warm brick floor. He moved a shoulder in a shrug. “Can’t be limitless. Soon there won’t be food to be had for love or money. It’ll be whoever’s left, and the Peculiar boxing us in on all sides.”
“Well, until then, we do the best we can,” Rima said. “That day may be a long while off. It’s been like this for as long as any of us can remember. Who’s to say this won’t go on forever?”
What she said was true. Everyone’s memory held the same black absence at the core. No one could recall a time before the coming of this weird, suffocating fog—the Peculiar—that was denser than any London Particular before it. (Pea-soup thick, a nauseating mixture of coal soot and smoke and fog, the Particulars had been bad enough, like to choke a fellow or turn spit brown and stain garments piss-yellow. But this fog was peculiar, like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the name stuck because it was so apt.) The doctors thought the Peculiar was responsible for all the holes in their memories, too. Noxious fumes and debilitating miasmas was what they said, fancy words that said nothing at all but carried weight and felt important.
There were days, in fact, when Tony was convinced that he’d only just now come alive; that this was the first day of his life. He had a history, of sorts. Well … as much of one as any foundling left in swaddling clothes on Coram’s doorstep. He knew things. Staffers from the orphanage, for example. That Coram’s cutlery had lambs stamped into the metal, and they got roast instead of boiled beef on Sundays. He remembered a book he and Rima loved, all about the Isle of Mull off Scotland; they would take turns, spinning a future in words of high cliffs and a blue sea and a cottage with a good stone croft for sheep and always snow for Christmas; of the monster in its deep, dark cathedral cave on Staffa and how they might listen to it roar at night. He could recall the summer one boy, Chad, had gotten it into his head to take a dip in the Thames round the old Battersea Bridge, only to be pulled under by the current.
He recalled all that—the book, the talk of a future, that boy—or thought he did. But damme if there weren’t days when his past felt flat and as insubstantial as air: no real feeling or true memories. That was what the Peculiar was doing to them all.
Yet, so far as he knew, he was the only person with nightmares. (These days, the least little bit of news rippled through Lambeth like lightning, so he’d have heard if anyone else had them.) Was that the fog’s doing? He wasn’t sure, but he felt a deep foreboding. Something’s about to happen, and whatever it is, I think it’s nearly here.
Then what? He should leave. Protect Rima. Yes, but go where? As far south or east or west as he could, until he reached the fog’s edge? Or go to Westminster or Tower, any of the bridges, and walk into the Peculiar, let it take me? Just the thought froze his blood. Who knew what waited inside all that?
“Rima, this is getting out of control. This other Tony … it feels like he’s bleeding into me.” And yet even that wasn’t quite right. Not bleeding: stealing from me, emptying me out. The image of some parasite, latched on his mind, sent another stab of cold terror through his heart. “How long before he takes over and I don’t wake up as me anymore? Or what if he hollows me out, and I don’t ever wake again? What if I”—his throat tried to fist—“if I really h-hurt you? K-kill …”
“Stop.” A light flutter of her fingers over his lips. “Don’t blame yourself for what you can’t help. You were having a nightmare, Tony, and that is all.”
“But your dreams aren’t like mine.” When she didn’t respond right away, he drew his arm from his eyes. Shadows swarmed over her features, though her eyes were somehow even deeper and more limitless than before. “Rima? Are they?”
“No.” She didn’t say it cautiously. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have bad ones. Sometimes, I think it’s the fog trying to … to talk to us, perhaps. Or maybe it’s only reaching a finger into our minds, trying to decide if …”
“What?” When she said nothing, he skimmed a tentative thumb over her chin. A brief touch, nothing more, and still a clean, clear arrow of desire—more potent even than his fear—struck his heart through. Stop. Swallowing, the taste of dying blood still strong on his tongue, he took his hand back. Surrender to that and you’ll kill her for sure. “What do you mean about the Peculiar talking to you?”
She sighed. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m just …” Her hand slid onto his chest, and he gasped as he felt her—oh so fleeting—reach beyond the shell of his skin. “Please, Tony, let me help you. Just a little. I promise,” she whispered, though he could barely hear her over the groan that her touch pulled from his throat, “I won’t draw too much. Only enough to strengthen you. Please let me do this for you, please.”
For a second, he wanted to surrender. So good, so good … better than a moist cloth or cool drink of water. He couldn’t describe what she truly did, but when she laid on hands and drew out sickness, it felt the way he imagined the sun would over high cliffs edging the sea: a burst of warmth that bathed his face and chest and body and left him as languid and drowsy as a lizard. For a time—shorter and shorter these days—nothing hurt, and he wasn’t afraid and allowed himself to see a future when there would be enough food and no fog and sweet relief and their cottage with its stone croft and … Rima, Rima, he heard himself moan again … Rima, there’s only Rima, please take it, draw it out, draw as much as you can bear and …
“S-s-stop.” The word came out ragged and rough. Clasping her wrists, he pulled her fingers from his chest. “I c-can’t let you, Rima. I won’t. You can’t possibly take it all away, and it only makes you weaker and … no.” He tightened his grip when her mouth opened in protest. “Don’t. Don’t tell me that you’ll take just a bit and stop yourself before it’s too late. You want to help me now?” It took all of his self-control not to crush her to him. Instead, he turned and showed her his back. “Go away. Get some sleep, Rima. It’ll be morning soon, and always more work.” More bodies for us rats to gather. “And promise me, Rima, you have to give me your word: don’t touch me while I sleep. Don’t try to draw this sickness or whatever it is from me.”
“It is my choice. This is mine to give.”
“And mine to refuse. Rima …” He could hear his voice try to break, and he swallowed. “Rima, it will kill you. I will.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t want to find out, because if that happens … I might as well slit my throat right now. I won’t be responsible for that. You can’t ask me to.”
For a long moment, she was silent. She also didn’t move. He waited, eyes staring, his ears tingling as the others slept and, beneath, the furnace chuffed and thrummed like a gigantic hidden heart.
Finally, there came a stir of fabric and then the slash of her breath across his jaw. “Damn you, Tony.” And he thought she really was crying this time. “Damn you to hell.”
“That’s not a promise.”
“No,” she said, “it’s not.” But she went back to her side.