Read Online Looking for Jake by China Miéville - Free Book Online Page A

of the certain events that will not stop worrying at me.
] When the group returned to Rippolson Road at 11:53 p.m., to their great frustration, Varmin Way had unoccurred.
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Two monochrome pictures end the piece. They have no explanatory notes or legend. They are both taken in daylight. On the left is a photograph of two houses, on either side of a small street of low century-old houses which curves sharply to the right, it looks like, quickly unclear with distance. The right-hand picture is the two facades again, but this time the houses — recognisably the same from a window’s crack, from a smear of paint below a sash, from the scrawny front gardens and the distinct unkempt buddleia bush — are closed up together. They are no longer semidetached. There is no street between them.
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So.
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    I stopped for a bit. I had to stop. And then I had to read on again.
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    A single sheet of paper. Typewritten again apart from the name, now on an electronic machine.
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    Could you see it, Charles? The damage, halfway down Varmin Way? It’s there, it’s visible in the picture in that report. [
This must mean the picture on the left. I stared at it hard, with the naked eye and through a magnifying glass. I couldn’t make out anything
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] It’s like the slates from Scry Pass, the ones I showed you in the collection. You could see it in the striae and the marks, even if none of the bloody curators did. Varmin Way wasn’t just passing through, it was resting , it was recovering , it had been attacked. I am right.
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    Edgar
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I kept reading.
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    Though it’s not signed, judging by the font, what follows are a couple of pages of another typed letter from Edgar.
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    earliest occurrence I can find of it is in the early 1700s (you’ll hear 1790 or ’91 or something — nonsense, that’s just the official position based on the archives — this one isn’t verified but believe me it’s correct). Only a handful of years after the Glorious Revolution we find Antonia Chesterfield referring in her diaries to ‘a right rat of a street, ascamper betwixt Waterloo and the Mall, a veritable Vermin, in name as well as kind. Beware — Touch a rat and he will bite, as others have found, of our own and of the Vermin’s vagrant tribe’. That’s a reference to Varmin Way — Mrs Chesterfield was in the Brotherhood’s precursor (and you’d not have heard her complaining about that name either — Fiona take note!).
    Â Â You see what she’s getting at, and I think she was the first. I don’t know, Charles, correlation is so terribly hard, but look at some of the other candidates. Shuck Road; Caul Street; Stang Street; Teratologue Avenue (this last I think is fairly voracious); et al. So far as I can work it out, Varmin Way and Stang Street were highly antagonistic at that stage, but now they’re almost certainly noncombative. No surprise: Sole Den Road is the big enemy these days — remember 1987?
    Â Â (Incidentally, talking of that first Varmin occurrence, did you ever read all the early cryptolit I sent you?
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    Â Â The Clerk entered into a Snickelway
    Â Â That then was gone again by close of day
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    Â Â Fourteenth century, imagine. I’ll bet you a pound there are letters from disgruntled Britannic procurators complaining about errant alleyways around the Temple of Mithras. But there’s not much discussion of the hostilities until Mrs Chesterfield.)
    Â Â Anyway, you see my point. It’s the only way one can make sense of it all, of all this that I’ve been going on about for so long. The Viae are fighting, and I think they always have.
    Â Â And there’s no idiot nationalism here either, as
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And here is the end of the page. And there is another message added, clearly referring to this letter, from CM’s nameless