Free Looking for Jake by China Miéville Page A

imagine Edgar going metric? What kind of a homage is this?’] We proceeded slowly. [
Here another insertion:
‘Ugh. Change of person.’
By now I was increasingly irritated with these interruptions. I never felt I could ignore them, but they broke the flow of my reading. There was something vaguely passive-aggressive in their cheer, and I felt as if Charles Melville would have been similarly angered by them. In an effort to retain the flow I’ll start this sentence again.
]
    We proceeded slowly. We walked along the unpainted tar in the middle of Varmin Way, equidistant from the rows of streetlamps. These lamps are indistinguishable from those in the neighbouring streets. There are houses to either side, all of them with all their windows unlit, looking like low workers’ cottages of Victorian vintage (though the earliest documented reports of Varmin Way date from 1792 — this apparent aging of form gives credence
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To my intense frustration, several pages are missing, and this is where the report therefore ends. There are, however, several photographs in an envelope, stuffed in among the pages. There are four. They are dreadful shots, taken with a flash too close or too far, so that their subject is either effaced by light or peering out from a cowl of dark. Nonetheless they can just be made out.
    The first is a wall of crumbling brick, the mortar fallen away in scabs. Askew across the print, taken from above, is a street sign.
Varmin Way,
it says, in an antiquated iron font. Written in biro on the photograph’s back is: The Sigil.
    The second is a shot along the length of the street. Almost nothing is visible in this, except perspective lines sketched in dark on dark. None of the houses has a front garden: their doors open directly onto the pavement. They are implacably closed, whether for centuries or only moments it is of course impossible to tell. The lack of a no-man’s-land between house and Walker makes the doors loom. Written on the back of this image is: The Way.
    The third is of the front of one of the houses. It is damaged. Its dark windows are broken, its brick stained, crumbling where the roof is fallen in. On the back is written: The Wound.
    The last picture is of an end of rope and a climbing buckle, held in a young man’s hands. The rope is frayed and splayed: the metal clip bent in a strange corkscrew. On the back of the photograph is nothing.
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And then comes the last piece in the envelope. It is undated. It is in a different hand to the others.
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    What did you do? How did you do it? What did you do, you bastard?
    Â Â I saw what happened. Edgar was right, I saw where Varmin Way had been hurt. But you know that, don’t you?
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What did you do to Varmin Way to make it do that? What did you do to Edgar?
    Â Â Do you think you’ll get away with it?
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    That was everything. When I’d finished, I was frantic to find Charles Melville.
    I think the ban on telephone conversations must extend to email and web pages. I searched online, of course, for BWVF, ‘wild streets’, ‘feral streets’, ‘Viae Ferae’, and so on. I got nothing. BWVF got references to cars or technical parts. I tried ‘Brotherhood of Witnesses to/Watchers of the Viae Ferae’ without any luck. ‘Wild streets’ of course got thousands: articles about New Orleans Mardi Gras, hard-boiled ramblings, references to an old computer game, and an article about the Cold War. Nothing relevant.
    I visited each of the sites described in the scraps of literature, the places where all the occurrences occurred. For several weekends I wandered in scraggy arse-end streets in north or south London, or sometimes in sedate avenues, even once (following Unthinker Road) walking through the centre of Soho. Inevitably, I suppose, I kept returning to Plumstead.
    I would hold the before-and-after pictures up and look at the same houses of