Roofworld Read online

  Roofworld is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2017 Hydra Ebook Edition

  Copyright © 1988, 2016 by Christopher Fowler

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in a print edition by Century Hutchinson Limited, London, in 1988 and in a digital edition by Transworld Digital, a division of Penguin Random House UK, London, in 2016.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180422

  Cover art: Martin Butterworth

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Sunday 14 December

  Chapter 1: Primal Material

  Monday 15 December

  Chapter 2: The Newgate Legacy

  Chapter 3: Icarus

  Chapter 4: Charlotte

  Chapter 5: Rose

  Chapter 6: The Toad

  Tuesday 16 December

  Chapter 7: Confluence

  Chapter 8: Asleep

  Chapter 9: Anubis

  Chapter 10: Notes

  Chapter 11: The Swan

  Chapter 12: Contact

  Chapter 13: St Katharine Docks

  Chapter 14: Assailant

  Chapter 15: Awake

  Wednesday 17 December

  Chapter 16: New Blood

  Chapter 17: Simon

  Chapter 18: Heights

  Chapter 19: Butterworth

  Chapter 20: The Skelter Run

  Chapter 21: Keelhauled

  Chapter 22: Zalian

  Chapter 23: Attack

  Thursday 18 December

  Chapter 24: Morgue

  Chapter 25: Trash

  Chapter 26: Freewheeling

  Chapter 27: Planetarium

  Chapter 28: Night Sight

  Chapter 29: Spice

  Chapter 30: New Age

  Chapter 31: Beneath the Bridge

  Friday 19 December

  Chapter 32: Search Parties

  Chapter 33: Roofworld

  Chapter 34: Lair

  Chapter 35: Late Night Shopping

  Chapter 36: Into Darkness

  Chapter 37: Escaping

  Chapter 38: Imperator Rex

  Saturday 20 December

  Chapter 39: Illumination

  Chapter 40: Into Focus

  Chapter 41: Police Manœuvres

  Chapter 42: Unmasked

  Chapter 43: Turning Point

  Chapter 44: Homing In

  Sunday 21 December

  Chapter 45: Night Duty

  Chapter 46: Dream State

  Chapter 47: Flight to the Tower

  Chapter 48: Aurora

  Wednesday 24 December

  Chapter 49: Butterworth Reports

  Chapter 50: Back to Earth

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  By Christopher Fowler

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Your first novel sticks to you for ever. I’ll go to my grave being described as ‘the author of Roofworld’. In fact, it was the fourth book I had written, but the first that came with expectations and a decent publicity budget. I had the idea for it after thieves broke into my Soho office by running along the terraced rooftops and dropping down through skylights. Then I noticed that although the ground floors of all the London buildings around me changed, the upper floors remained the same through the decades. Extrapolating this into a novel, I imagined rival gangs of disenfranchised youths secretly living on the rooftops of London, fighting arcane battles while the city sleeps. Rose, a young photographer, enters their world and becomes embroiled in their fight for survival, which climaxes on top of the Telecom Tower. If I was writing it now, I suppose it would take place on the Shard.

  The book was very difficult to research as I couldn’t gain access to any tall buildings. The Telecom Tower had been the target of an IRA bomb and security was still tight more than a decade later. After the novel appeared, the Sunday Times got me access to the top of it—a great experience, but it came too late. I was disappointed to find that the rotating part was now a very suburban-looking cafeteria.

  Initially the novel wasn’t as successful as the publisher hoped—an ill-advised cinema campaign went wrong after a very expensive commercial was filmed, in which we fired a stuntman across Charing Cross Road on a cable in a rainstorm. I kept thinking, What if he gets hit by lightning? Will it damage the sales of the book? Wayne, the stuntman, used to climb up elevator cables bare-chested for Sure deodorant commercials, and went on to do stunt work for James Bond, where I ran into him again.

  Through no fault of ours, the finished Roofworld commercial went out with the flop movie The Fly 2—bad move. There was another problem: many readers didn’t know where to look for the book—was it SF? Horror? Crime? Satire even? Or just an adventure? At least the reviews were favourable. Critics started calling to take me out for a beer.

  Readers often have an illogical idea that all writers they discover must be read from their debut novels in chronological order. In an old Hancock’s Half Hour, Tony Hancock is told, ‘We thought you were at your peak five years ago. You were very funny in those days.’ That attitude still exists. It’s generally assumed that your first work must be your best. Books are read chronologically so that readers can understand the shape of your career, which is meant to go something like this:

  Early success (thanks to controversial subject matter); the big hit novel; an attempt to follow the big hit that flops; a collection of short stories (barely reviewed); the wilderness years; a meltdown after critics say they loved your first book and you’ve been going downhill ever since; a late rally that sees the same critics describing you as a veteran and a national treasure; then a lonely and tragic early death, followed five years later by the rediscovery of your backlist. Finally you come out of copyright and are hailed as a genius. Or forgotten.

  It’s a curse of the job. As your writing becomes more refined, you disappoint those readers who were simply enjoying your plainly worded genre romps. And now here you are with your heavy themes and big ideas and strange new words, and all they want is your early stuff. It’s you who changed, not them.

  Thus it was with Roofworld. I went from a nobody to a name overnight, but it didn’t faze me because I was more concerned about my day job, running my own film-marketing company. The book was sold to the USA and Europe and Russia and appeared in many different editions. I was photographed looking moody on the tops of tall buildings, like Batman. The film option was picked up by Paramount and passed through the hands of a dozen different directors, eventually existing in scores of script versions, but as a film it remains in limbo.

  I would have loved to rewrite the book using the Shard, but one of the things I discovered is that the method of travel used in the book (zip wire) is pretty lethal in practice; when we sent Wayne across the road on a cable he got up such velocity that it very nearly killed him.

  When I finally got to a great height above the city, I realized something that I hadn’t noticed at ground level: London’s on a slope. It would have affected the logistics of the book.

  I still have great affection for the novel. When Rose jumped off a building, I jumped off too—out into a new career as a writer of fantastical
fiction. Now the ebook has brought back memories of that leap, and I’m glad you’re taking it this time, not me.

  —Christopher Fowler, 2016

  ‘An ever-muttering prisoned storm,

  The heart of London beating warm.’

  —Davidson

  Sunday 14 December

  Chapter 1

  Primal Material

  Getting him into the bell tower proved to be a laborious business. The door at the top of the narrow stone steps had been securely padlocked, so that they had to stand with the boy propped between them, waiting for Chymes to suggest some way of gaining entry.

  ‘It will have to be broken open from the inside.’ The passionless voice flattened within the curved brickwork of the corridor, as if the stones themselves had absorbed his words.

  ‘Which of us will go?’

  Inevitably, it was Dag who was sent to scale the outside of the church in the pouring rain. He was the most loyal, the most foolhardy—and the most expendable.

  Gripping the slippery keel moulding above his head, he inched around the parapet at the top of the building and kicked the wire mesh from the nearest arched window. Then he carefully lowered himself into the small square bell tower. Beneath the incessant drumming of water on the roof and the purr of sheltering pigeons he could hear the others scuffling impatiently beyond the sealed door.

  ‘Stand away,’ Dag shouted, raising his right boot at the lock.

  ‘For fuck’s sake get a move on,’ came a muffled reply. ‘He’s starting to wake up.’

  Dag kicked at the lock once, then again. On his third thrust the wood splintered and the door burst open, revealing Imperator Chymes, his two hierophants and the prisoner. Dragging their captive to the middle of the room, they loosened his bonds and forced him to kneel while Chymes dug into his cloak and produced a small leather pouch.

  ‘Tear his shirt open.’ Chymes unthreaded the drawstring of the pouch and tipped its contents over the boy’s head. The black powder cascaded like a fall of soot, clinging wherever it touched.

  ‘Thus we destroy the outward form of the Primal Material,’ Chymes intoned as the boy at his feet spluttered and coughed, ‘to remove from this base matter the impurities of the soul. First must come the sublimation, then the calcination of the outward form, to pulverize the matter by fire. Through powder the volatile spirit is fixed and made permanent. Only then can it flower and bear fruit.’

  Dag and the others shuffled uncomfortably and kept their eyes downcast, unsure of the etiquette required for such a moment. Chymes reached down and raised the boy’s chin with almost loving concern, as if addressing his own son.

  ‘It is time for the Rebirth. Winged Mercurius sits guarded by the sun and moon. You are in safe hands at last.’ The boy was barely able to react. He swayed to one side, hardly conscious of his surroundings.

  ‘Now take him over to the window.’ Chymes gestured to the others. ‘We must wait until the height of the storm.’

  So they sat in the vaulted red-brick bell tower of St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church (Cantonese and Spanish services on Sundays), watching the rain lash the slated rooftops of the buildings below, waiting for the appointed time of execution.

  As the prisoner slowly came to his senses, he found that he had been perched on the very edge of the chamfered stone sill with his thin long legs dangling out over Soho Square. Firm hands clamped his shoulders to prevent him from falling. The knees of his jeans darkened as water poured from the eaves above his head and mixed with the powder covering his body. His mouth seemed full of the sour black mud, but the muscles of his face were beyond his control and he was unable to spit it out. The drugs he had been forced to ingest in a sheltered corner of the church half an hour earlier were beginning to bristle and knot his body.

  Gingerly he leaned forward and looked down. The drop was a considerable one, some hundred and fifty feet he guessed. Of course, it was nothing compared to the height of the old Centre Point run, which now stood abandoned and neglected after so many near fatal accidents….

  ‘I feel that it is very nearly time,’ said the voice behind him.

  The boy refused to turn about and confront his captors. His face, patched in black and white, loomed eerily from the darkness of the tower, like some half-glimpsed gothic spectre. His bony hands clutched the wet outward edge of the parapet as he prepared himself for his death. The storm was reaching its peak. It may have been the effect of the drugs, but he was no longer afraid. Still, he knew that if he hesitated, one of them would come forward and throw him into the square below. There was no longer any choice. If he failed to act bravely, Chymes and his men would refuse him any dignity in dying. For them, humiliation had become an essential element in any death ritual. Slowly he leaned his body out once more.

  He could no longer feel the bitterness of the wind as it swept around the tower, flapping the cable which led from one of the piers off into the drizzling darkness beyond. The lights of the London streets seemed blurred and muted by the falling rain, all sound muffled beneath the angry rush of air and electrical static. He had never intended it to end like this, bound and drugged far above the city, unwilling and unable to go on with the others. The rain plastered his lank fair hair across his forehead, the wind corpsing his skin with cold, but all he felt was the tingling of his nerves and the heightened pulsing of his engorged heart.

  He closed his eyes and listened below; a taxi cab’s insistent horn, the throb of a bus engine, faint sounds which grew clearer as the thunder died down. He leaned forward and tested the nylon cable with his fist. It was taut but slippery, thrumming in the storm gale, flicking wavelets of water along its length each time it shook, like pegs being tossed from a wash line. Behind him, Chymes released a sad sigh.

  ‘It is time for you to leave us, brother.’ He stepped forward from the darkness, watching his prisoner intently.

  The boy peered out into the night and tried to see the far end of the cable, although he knew all too well where it led. This was a run constructed like no other, created for this moment alone. Now that the time had come to use it, he felt a growing elation uprooting his fear. It seemed that he had been seated in the tower for an age and, as he rose shakily to his feet on the parapet, the joints of his knees creaked in protest.

  Tensing with excitement, the others moved forward. This was the storm they had been waiting for, one which would cleanse the city and bring with it a new beginning.

  Carefully he grasped the cable with both hands and tightened the muscles in his arms, as he had done a million times before. Further along, huddling against the abutment of the arch, half a dozen bedraggled pigeons watched disinterestedly as he clipped himself to the metal sleeve and attached it to the line.

  Counting to ten, he drew a deep, slow breath.

  Perfectly timed thunder rolled deafeningly over the city. It appealed to his sense of drama. He released an angry bellow of a battle cry and, with a mighty push, his plimsolled feet pressing hard against the ledge, launched himself from the arch and out above the streets of London. The blast of icy wind around his body, carrying with it great slews of rain, smacked his senses into crystal-sharp alertness. He watched the greenery of the park square passing between his feet far below and felt that, had he been able to slow his speed, the microscopic markings of each branch and leaf would become indelibly clear to him.

  Back in the bell tower, Chymes had run forward to the window in order to study the boy’s descent across the city. He and his men stood watching until the figure on the line had vanished into the rain.

  The soaked orange brick of the bank on the corner of Greek Street loomed close and slid past the boy on his right side. His speed slowed as the angle of the cable between his hands decreased and he approached a junction point, rather like a cable-car station, mounted on the roof of the Prince Edward Theatre in Old Compton Street. Below, smart couples alighted from taxis and made their way across neon-streaked pavements toward the steamed windows of Chinatown restaurants.
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  The cable hissed beneath the metal sleeve, the tiny inner rollers of the sleeve vibrating in his hands as he swung across Soho to the roof of a bank near the bottom of Regent Street. The muscles in his arms, unused to working without his brace, began to cramp and sting as he neared his final destination. Sweeping over the Air Street junction point mounted from the roof of the Regent Hotel, he noted with surprise that he was considerably further from the ground than when he started. It was a run he would have been proud to have built himself, for the drops and inclines had been carefully planned so that they would steadily increase his height and speed throughout the journey.

  As he shot out from between the buildings over Piccadilly Circus he glimpsed people halting in mid-stride and looking up, aware of something moving above their heads. Ahead of him a vast wall of pulsing light grew until it filled his field of vision. He screamed his terror into the sky and prepared for impact, raising his legs as if this futile gesture would somehow help to lessen the force of the coming collision. Finally the gigantic red and white Coca-Cola sign which covered the north side of the Circus loomed large before him, blotting all else from his mind.

  He hit it like a bug on a windshield, dead centre, at just over sixty miles an hour. For a moment, his form was imprinted in the flickering neon strips which made up the football-pitch-sized sign. Then, silhouetted against bursting light, his body pulled away from the wall as the tubes exploded and broke loose, cascading to the pavement like jagged drops of luminous rain. He fell like a burning comet, his body ablaze with electrical fire, to be extinguished with a hiss as he hit the rain-bloated gutter of the city street below.