Looking for Jake by China Miéville Page A

the long silence the familiar looked the man up and down. It remembered him, too.
    â€œNeed you to get back to things. Job to finish.”
    The familiar’s interest wandered. It picked at a stone, looked down at it, sent out veins and made it a nail. It forgot the man was there, until his voice surprised it.
    â€œCould feel you all the time, you know.” The witch laughed without pleasure. “How we found you, isn’t it?” Glanced back at the woman out of the familiar’s sight. “Like following me nose. Me gut.”
    Sun baked them all.
    â€œLooking well.”
    The familiar watched him. It was inquisitive. It felt things. The witch moved back. There was a purr of summer insects. The woman was at the edge of the clearing of cars.
    â€œLooking well,” the witch said again.
    The familiar had made itself the shape of a man. Its flesh centre was several stone of spread-out muscle. Its feet were boulders again, its hands bones on bricks. It would stand eight feet tall. There was too much stuff in it and on it to itemise. On its head were books, grafted in spine-first, their pages constantly riffling as if in wind. Blood vessels saturated their pages, and engorged to let out heat. The books sweated. The familiar’s dog eyes focused on the witch, then the gently cooking wrecks.
    â€œOh Jesus.”
    The witch was staring at the bottom of the familiar’s face, half pointing.
    â€œOh Jesus what you
do?
”
    The familiar opened and closed the man-jaw it had taken from its opponent and made its own mouth. It grinned with third-hand teeth.
    â€œWhat you fucking
do
Jesus
Christ.
Oh shit man. Oh no.”
    The familiar cooled itself with its page-hair.
    â€œYou got to come back. We need you again.” Pointing vaguely at the woman, who was motionless and still shining. “Ain’t done. She ain’t finished. You got to come back.
    â€œI can’t
do it
on my own. Ain’t got it. She ain’t paying me no more. She’s fucking
ruining me.
” That last he screamed in anger directed backwards, but the woman did not flinch. She reached out her hand to the familiar, waved a clutch of mouldering dead snakes. “Come back,” said the witch.
    The familiar noticed the man again and remembered him. It smiled.
    The man waited. “Come
back,
” he said. “Got to come
back,
fucking
back.
” He was crying. The familiar was fascinated. “Come
back.
” The witch tore off his shirt. “You been
growing.
You been fucking
growing
you won’t stop, and I can’t do nothing without you now and you’re
killing
me.”
    The woman with the snakes glowed. The familiar could see her through the witch’s chest. The man’s body was faded away in random holes. There was no blood. Two handspans of sternum, inches of belly, slivers of arm-meat all faded to nothing, as if the flesh had given up existing. Entropic wounds. The familiar looked in interest at the gaps. He saw into the witch’s stomach, where hoops of gut ended where they met the hole, where the spine became hard to notice and did not exist for a space of several vertebrae. The man took off his trousers. His thighs were punctuated by the voids, his scrotum gone.
    â€œYou got to come back,” he whispered. “I can’t do nothing without you, and you’re killing me. Bring me back.”
    The familiar touched itself. It pointed at the man with a chicken-bone finger, and smiled again.
    â€œCome
back,
” the witch said. “She wants you; I need you. You fucking
have
to come back. Have to
help
me.” He stood cruciform. The sun shone through the cavities in him, breaking up his shadow with light.
    The familiar looked down at black ants labouring by a cigarette end, up at the man’s creased face, at the impassive old woman holding her dead snakes like a bouquet. It smiled without cruelty.
    â€œThen
finish,
” the witch screamed at it.