Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [149]
After a moment, he spoke again.
“I’ll do the talking. I’ve dealt with it before.” He was unsure himself whether that was an advantage or a disadvantage.
The corridor had come to an end, terminating in a thick door of iron-banded oak. The man at the head of the militia unit slid a huge key into the lock and turned it smoothly. He tugged the door open, bracing himself at its weight, and trooped into the dark room beyond. He was well trained. His discipline was like steel. He must, after all, have been extremely frightened.
The rest of the officers followed him, then Rescue and Stem-Fulcher, and finally Bentham Rudgutter. He pulled the door closed behind them.
As they passed into the room, all felt a moment of dislocation, a wispy unease that prickled across their skin with a quasi-physical momentum. Long threads, invisible filaments of spun æther and emotion, were draped in intricate patterns around the room, and were rippling and sticking to the intruders.
Rudgutter twitched. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed threads that folded out of existence when he looked them full on.
The room was as obscure as if it were shrouded in cobwebs. On every wall, scissors were attached in bizarre designs. Scissors chased each other like predatory fish; they sported on the ceiling; they coiled around and through each other in convoluted, unsettling geometric designs.
The militia and their charges stood still against one wall of the room. No sources of light were visible, but they could still see. The atmosphere in the room seemed monochrome, or disturbed in some way, the light etiolated and cowed.
They stood still for a long time. There were no sounds.
Slowly and silently, Bentham Rudgutter reached into the bag he carried and brought out the large grey scissors he had had an aide buy in an ironmonger’s on the lowest commercial concourse of Perdido Street Station.
He parted the scissors without a noise, held them up in the cloying air.
Rudgutter brought the razor edges together. The room reverberated with the unmistakable sound of blade sliding along sharpened blade, and snapping shut with an inexorable division.
The echoes trembled like flies in a funnelweb. They slid into a dark dimension at the room’s heart.
A gust of cold sent gooseflesh dancing across the backs of those congregated.
The echoes of the scissors came back.
As they returned and crept up from below the threshold of hearing, they metamorphosed, becoming words, a voice, melodious and melancholy, that first whispered and then grew more bold, spinning itself into existence out of the scissor-echoes. It was not quite describable, heartbreaking and frightening, it tugged the listener close; and it sounded not in the ears but deeper inside, in the blood and bone, in the nerve-clusters.
. . . FLESHSCAPE INTO THE FOLDING INTO THE FLESHSCAPE TO SPEAK A GREETING IN THIS THE SCISSORED REALM I WILL RECEIVE AND BE RECEIVED . . .
In the fearful silence, Rudgutter gesticulated at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue, until they understood, and they raised their scissors as he had done, opened and sharply shut them, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound. He joined in, the three of them opening and closing their blades in macabre applause.
At the sound of that snapping susurration, the unearthly voice resonated into the room again. It moaned with an obscene pleasure. Each time it spoke, it was as if what faded into audibility was only a snatch of an unceasing monologue.