Lies Sleeping

11 Against the Dark

In the end we broke up the bell.

Dr Conyard’s lads did it with sledgehammers under his grim supervision while Nightingale watched for any supernatural funny business. It hadn’t been an easy decision to destroy something so special, whatever its true purpose. We considered bringing it into the Folly for safekeeping, but even the non-classically educated among us were thinking Trojan horse.

I suggested the British Museum, not least because it’s possible to lose just about anything in their storage area. They’re still looking for a mummy that went missing in 1933 – staff believe it was stolen but Nightingale said he’d always had a sneaking suspicion that it got bored one day and walked away.

‘I don’t think we want to expose the museum to the risk,’ he said.

There were any number of army bases and security installations we might have called, but they had even less experience with the uncanny than the British Museum. We’d also considered leaving it in place and using it as bait, but decided the risk to members of the public was too great.

So, smashed it was. And the scrap pieces transported to the Folly to be distributed widely to randomly selected scrap metal recycling companies across the Midlands. We weren’t going to take any chances with it being reassembled on the sly.

The bell sang with the first hammer and screamed with the second. And within the scream I heard a familiar laugh and the jingle of merry bells.

What do you want, you hook-nosed bastard? I asked in my head, but the third blow cracked the bell and Mister Punch fell silent. I turned away to find Nightingale watching me.

‘What did you hear?’ he asked.

‘Mr Punch,’ I said, and asked Nightingale if he hadn’t heard anything. He shook his head.

Oh, me and Punch go way back, I thought. We have a special relationship.

Kimberley Reynolds skyped me from the States to save money and to make the NSA work for their intercept. Behind her I could see a wood veneer headboard and horrible magnolia painted walls – so I guessed she was sitting on a hotel bed. Eating doughnuts, as it turned out.

‘Cleveland PD gifted them,’ she said, taking a bite.

The local police being caught up in a Department of Justice investigation into their tendency to shoot people first and make up answers second. All Kimberley had to do, she said, was roll her eyes and make it clear that if it were up to her they could shoot as many people as they liked.

‘I used to be a straight arrow,’ she said. ‘This is your bad influence.’

‘What was that whole unauthorised operation in our sewers, then?’

‘That,’ said Kimberley, waving half a chocolate frosted doughnut at the camera, ‘was me being patriotic and can-do under difficult foreign circumstances.’

‘So, did you find out about our John Chapman, then?’

‘Oh, you really don’t want him to be your John Chapman,’ said Reynolds. ‘I had a professor like him in college.’

Kimberley’s low opinion of Chapman was shared by his colleagues and most of his students. Sexually harassing his female students and failing to turn up for lectures was bad enough. But worse, according to his faculty colleagues, he was a snob and put on airs.

‘Acted like he was better than them,’ said Kimberley. ‘Refused to socialise.’

Never invited people round to his home, not even the gullible coeds. They had all been shocked by his violent death, of course, but had managed to get on with their lives regardless.

Kimberley had interviewed a lot of the students. A few had ended up in one of several economically priced motels – never more than twice. The general consensus among those so blessed was that John Chapman had given the impression that he was enjoying the experience even less than they were.

Six months following his death, Chapman’s rented apartment had been re-let and redecorated and nobody was sure where his personal effects had disappeared to. Luckily, Cleveland PD had recovered the contents of his car. Including his laptop.

‘Want to guess why that was a waste of their time?’ asked Kimberley.

I said I was all agog, but I wasn’t surprised when it turned out that the microprocessors had inexplicably been turned to sand. As had those in the gas station pumps, the cash register, the CCTV camera and the phone recovered off Chapman’s body.

‘And you remember the thing I told you about when I was last over?’ asked Kimberley. ‘The thing with the bear.’

That had been Kimberley’s first probable encounter with vestigia. And I knew from experience that once you knew what you were looking for, separating vestigia from the brain’s own random background noise got easier with practice.

‘You sensed something?’ I asked.

She had – although she wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Just something,’ she said.

I’d liked to have asked whether Kimberley could make it over the Pond for a bit of training. But we were still waiting for a determination from the Commissioner as to whether we could offer our newly minted vestigia awareness course to non-UK nationals.

Still, I trusted she had enough experience to at least know it when she felt it.

‘Would there really be a trace after six months?’ she asked.

I explained that concrete retained vestigia almost as well as stone or brick.

‘But the initial incident must have been significant,’ I said. ‘For you to sense it over such a wide area.’

My recent experience trying to explain magic to people who really would rather it didn’t exist has given me an arsenal of euphemisms. I’m particularly proud of ‘initial incident’ although ‘subjective perception threshold’ runs a close second.

‘Still, there were a couple of flash drives among his effects,’ said Kimberley.

USB drives can survive fairly heavy doses of magic providing they’re not plugged into a powered slot at the time. I asked if any data had been recovered.

‘Just a lot of unmarked essays and what looks like a TV script.’

‘What’s the title?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

‘Against the Dark,’ said Kimberley. ‘You interested?’

I’d never read a film script all the way through before, so I bounced off it a couple of times before I got used to the conventions. I got the distinct impression that there were two separate voices involved, one more concerned with historical accuracy than the other. Or at least it read that way. But what did I know of sixth-century London — except it didn’t really exist as such. At least not inside the Roman walls. I emailed a copy to Postmartin to see what he thought of it.

While the Saxon king Sæberht and his court spoke in that strange stilted non-contracted English that indicates the writer is trying to take his period seriously, Aedan, our intrepid Irish hero, and Cyrus, his black sidekick, spoke modern vernacular, cracked wise and were generally hip and groovy.

Straight to Netflix, I thought, if it ever got made at all.

And the three people listed on the front cover were all suspiciously brown bread.

In the script itself, something was killing locals that strayed within the London walls after dark. King Sæberht believes it to be an evil spirit, Oswyn his advisor says dangerous wild animal, while Mellitus, the papal emissary, agrees with the king but might just be saying that to get him into the baptismal font. Aedan and Cyrus, with the aid of the phenomenally strong yet stupid Henric and the major babe Hilda – it actually said that in the scene directions, MAJOR BABE – track down the mysterious killer.

It went all the places I expected it to go, although the set piece in the trap-infested maze inside the abandoned Temple of Mithras probably would have been exciting with the right director. The revelation that it was, in fact, an evil spirit rather than a creature, came at page seventy-six, shortly after Cyrus, to nobody’s surprise, copped it in a suitably heroic way. They trace the spirit to its lair atop the highest hill in ancient Londinium amid the ruins of the old Roman amphitheatre. There it turns out to have been created by the last of the Romans through mass human sacrifice in an attempt to repel the invading Saxons.

The revenant animates the zombified remains of both the sacrifice victims and the Roman legionaries buried conveniently nearby. There is a major boss battle at the end of which Aedan plunges a sword, sanctified by Mellitus or something like that, into the heart of the spirit after he takes over the body of Henric, thus making himself inexplicably vulnerable. He is aided by a glowing light thingy that is either the power of God (Mellitus’ explanation), the spirit of Cyrus (Aedan’s explanation) or Cyrus having been transformed into an angelic manifestation of God’s will – Hilda’s explanation.

Mellitus declares that he will build a cathedral over the cursed amphitheatre to ensure the evil spirit can never return and baptises King Sæberht on that very spot. There’s a brief flash forward to the present day where it’s made clear that this is, in fact, St Paul’s Cathedral. The credits roll, we dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy.

Except that John Chapman, Gabriel Tate and Richard Williams didn’t – did they?

Martin Chorley was a Dark Ages enthusiast. It was possible that this script so offended him that he offed two of the writers out of sheer critical outrage. This seemed unlikely – even for a dangerously unstable psychopath like him.

More likely there was something contained in the script that he really didn’t want anyone to know about. I wrote up an email for the inside inquiry team and attached the script, with the caveat that I’d refine the correlation keywords once I had the report by Postmartin.

That report arrived during practice the next morning and I read it in the Tech Cave so I could put any notes on the system direct.

‘There is sign of some scholarship,’ wrote Postmartin. ‘Aedan is a perfectly feasible name for a 6th Century Irishman and likewise naming his companion Cyrus shows an understanding of the Hellenic character of Egypt, particularly Alexandria, at that time – the rise of Islam and the Arab conquests of the region having not yet begun. Henric, Oswyn and Hilda are all identifiably Anglo-Saxon names and, indeed, all can be found in Bede’s A History of the English Church and People. But also, I note, by typing ‘Anglo-saxon name’ into Google. Still other details in the script indicate that at least one of the authors paid more attention to historical veracity than is usual in the film industry. King Sæberht of Essex is also in Bede and is considered to be a real historical figure, as is Mellitus, who is indeed credited with the founding of St Paul’s.

‘The Mithraeum on the Walbrook really existed, although its excitingly labyrinthine interior is a complete invention. There isn’t and has never been any evidence to suggest that a Roman amphitheatre occupied the site of St Paul’s and given that a verified amphitheatre has been located under the Guildhall Museum some 600 yards to the north-east I think it unlikely there were two such even in Londinium at its most glorious.

‘Why the Anglo-Saxons didn’t occupy the interior of Roman London, with its defensive walls and plentiful supply of building materials, is one of the great historical mysteries. The idea of a terrible cursed revenant preventing them is as good a theory as any other. Incidentally a sword of distinctive Saxon manufacture was reportedly recovered by the famous 18th C. antiquarian Winston William Galt from a cellar in Paternoster Row so that would explain where the blessed sword went, wouldn’t it?

‘On an interesting side note, the Anglo-Saxons used the same metal-folding technique as the medieval Japanese and would often create beautiful weapons that would be ‘sacrificed’ by throwing them into sacred streams and lakes. Some think that the legend of the Lady of the Lake could derive from this custom since any aspiring British warrior might see such deposits as a handy source of high quality weaponry.’

I thanked Postmartin by email and asked if he knew the present whereabouts of the Paternoster Sword. What with the Lady of the Lake bollocks, it sounded like the sort of thing Martin Chorley might be interested in. Then I added Excalibur, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Temple of Mithras to the list of HOLMES keywords. This got me an irritable note from Sergeant Wainscrow, who pointed out that overuse of key words can be counterproductive. I said we could discuss this at the briefing on Monday morning, but of course by that time my choices had been vindicated – well, sort of.