Un Lun Dun - China Mieville [8]
In the middle of the room was a pillar of pipes, where needles jerked up and down on gauges, and pressure was channeled by fat iron taps. In the dead center was an ancient, heavy-looking one the size of a steering wheel. It looked like it would open an airlock in a submarine.
“Let’s go,” whispered Deeba. “This place is scary.”
But, slowly, Zanna shuffled forward. She looked like a sleepwalker.
“Zanna!” Deeba moved back towards the door. “We’re alone in a cellar. And no one knows we’re here. Come on!”
“There’s more oil,” Zanna said. “That thing…that umbrella, was here.”
She touched the big spigot experimentally.
“‘…when the wheel turns,’” she said.
“What?” said Deeba. “Come on. You coming?” She turned her back. Zanna gripped the wheel, and began to turn it.
It moved slowly at first. She had to strain. It squeaked against rust.
As it went, something happened to the light.
Deeba froze. Zanna hesitated, then turned the wheel a few more degrees.
The light began to change. It was flickering. All the sound in the room was ebbing. Deeba turned back.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
Zanna tugged, and with each motion the light and noise faltered a moment, and the wheel turned a little farther.
“No,” said Deeba. “Stop. Please.”
Zanna turned the valve another few inches, and the sound and light shifted. All the bulbs in the room flared, and so, impossibly, did the sound of the cars outside.
The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker.
“You’re turning off the electricity,” Deeba said, but then she was silent, as she and Zanna looked up and realized that the lamplight shining through the windows from outside was also dimming.
As the light lessened, so did the sound.
Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder.
Zanna spun the handle as if it were oiled. The noise of cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny, like a recording, or as if it came from a television in the next room. The sound of the vehicles faded with the glow of the main road.
Zanna was turning off the traffic. The spigot turned off all the cars, and turned off the lamps.
It was turning off London.
6
The Trashpack
The wheel spun; the light changed; the sound changed.
The glow from outside went from the dim of streetlights, down to darkness, then slowly back up to something luminous but odd. The last of the car engines sounded very far away, and then was gone. At last the wheel slowed and stopped.
Deeba stood, frozen, her hands to her mouth, in the strange not-dark. Zanna blinked several times, as if waking. The two looked at each other, and around at the room, all different in the bizarre light, full of impossible shadows.
“Quick! Undo it!” Deeba said at last. She grabbed the wheel and tried to turn it backwards. It was wedged stubbornly, as if it hadn’t moved for years. “Help!” she said, and Zanna added her strength to Deeba’s, and with a burst of effort they made the metal move.
But the wheel just spun free. It wasn’t catching on anything. It whirred heavily around, but the light didn’t change, and the noise of traffic didn’t return.
London didn’t come back on.
“Zanna,” said Deeba. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Zanna. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Deeba said. Zanna grabbed her arm and they ran back into the corridor.
The peculiar light was shining around the edges of the doorway they had come in by, as if a giant black-and-white television were playing just outside. Deeba and Zanna went for it full-tilt, and shoved it open.
They stumbled out. And stopped. And looked around. And let their mouths hang open.
It was not night anymore, and they were not in the estate. They were somewhere very else.
Just as it had when they entered,