London Falling

TEN

‘You are Alfred Toshack’s daughter,’ said Mora Losley. She pointed to Ross’ nose. ‘I made that. It could have been any accident, across the course of your life, but it was me. I am the mother of your face.’

The fear gripped Ross now. That smell! It had taken her back to when she’d been terribly hurt. It made her feel very small. This was what she had always imagined she would sometime see again.

As she studied Ross, Losley inclined her head sideways, like a predatory bird, moving her hands in a strangely elegant gesture as she did so. ‘The disobedient child, a policeman and two blackamoors, one of them a sodomite.’

Ross couldn’t begin to process that.

‘And yet somehow they have a “protocol” on them. What is it?’ The woman took a step towards her. It took an effort, but Ross made herself stay where she was. ‘Did you make sacrifice and then touch my mistress’ blessed soil deliberately, so as to gain the Sight? You? Or is this an accident?’

Ross could feel the power of her. Even the force of her shadow on the floor was making the air between them ripple with heat. The fact she had questions was the only thing now saving them. There were so many people downstairs: all she had to do was yell and they’d come running. But they wouldn’t see the old woman. They’d be blind to the danger.

‘Are you privileged?’ Losley barked. ‘Do you make sacrifice, or are you remembered?’ Her accent had slid suddenly upwards, into something resonating with privilege. Even as Ross distantly wondered what any of those words meant, her mind obeying her training even as it reeled in shock, she was ridiculously reminded of Keith Richards. ‘Answer me!’

‘How. . how did my uncle employ you?’

Losley stopped. She looked suspicious again, as if this question had revealed some hint of worrying knowledge. ‘I am not employed. He merely knew of me from the football club.’ She put a hand to her heart and then to her brow, a kind of benediction. She had said ‘football club’ very precisely, as if she’d learned those words once and kept them carefully enunciated like that. ‘He made a good sacrifice. My lord of the pleasant face assigned me to his service.’

Ross felt very small again. Toshack hadn’t even bothered to send this thing after her when she’d run. She couldn’t quite believe that. But she’d discovered it now, out of some horrible accident or of some destiny that was going to destroy her. She managed to make herself speak again. ‘So why did you kill Toshack?’ She was aware of Quill looking towards her, still in shock but urging her on.

‘When my service ended, my lord of the pleasant face would not hear his pleas, so he offered me sacrifice to continue!’ She shook her head, looking at Ross with a terrible aloofness, as if all this were her fault by association. ‘Modern rubbish. The rules are not written down! When I ignored that fucking cunt of a criminal, he tried to tell this watchman’ — she pointed at Quill — ‘my name!’

Quill stepped forward until he was alongside Ross, breathing heavily. She realized he was going to do it, this absurd, futile thing. She felt admiration and fear for him. ‘Mora Losley,’ he said, and he clearly had to pause and gather himself together before he continued quickly, ‘you are under arrest for the murder of Robert Toshack and several others. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence-’

She raised a hand and screamed.

The sound made them stagger. They fell to the ground. And still it continued, battering them from every angle of the attic. Ross put her hands over her ears, and she was properly back there now, sobbing in the dark, with the hugeness looming over her and blow after blow. . But no. No. She would not go back there. She would not.

She hauled herself to her feet. The room swayed in front of her, all in red. Blood in her eyes. Blows still reflecting off the walls. But there was the witch, her mouth slowly closing around the mere sound that had beaten them all to their knees, looking so hugely affronted, so vastly above any of their lives that for them to try to bring her down to their level had made her bellow thus in horror at the insult.

Ross would not go through this again. She had to fight. It was more important than staying alive. She ran at Losley, her hands reaching in front of her face. She got further than her feet expected to, swinging her balance at the last second to throw a punch straight at-

Losley made another gesture.

Ross felt something precious drop out of her head. And then she was looking upwards as her body flew away from her, like some aircraft she was falling from, and was soaring up towards the ceiling, impossibly. She twisted frantically, to see what was below her. Hot black entwined darkness was hurtling up at her from out of the floor.

Quill had seen what Ross was about to do and had staggered to his feet, a second ahead of the other two. He was having trouble controlling his bladder, which made him feel like a child in the face of this thing. He had been about to shout something. To yell that they should get out. . that they had walked into a situation they weren’t expecting. .

He had no idea what he had been about to shout.

But then his brain had fallen through his shoes, and his body was blasted up out of him like a rocket, and he was a falling ghost with no visible self, nothing to him but his own awareness of himself.

He remembered, as he fell and fell an impossible distance, beyond the height of the room, that look on Toshack’s face in the interview room. He remembered how his own eyes had hurt at what had been happening, how his brain had failed to understand it. And he realized that Toshack hadn’t been slammed up against the wall, as he’d thought at the time. It had been the ceiling he’d been staring down from. And he imagined Losley standing there, invisible, doing to Toshack then what she was doing to them now. With that terrible ancient nurse’s face, revealing her sad certainty of pain.

Sefton saw his body flying away from him, and was rigid with fury in the nothingness that was now himself. It had all been taken from him with such ease, like something stolen and thrown over his head. She had all power over him. The word she’d used: ‘sodomite’ indeed! The distaste in her voice as she looked at him and judged him. There was power all around him, and he couldn’t get his hands on it. He couldn’t speak. Just as always, he couldn’t change anything. Just as always, he needed to understand it in order to use it, but for now he had to hide from it, and there wasn’t time, because it had him in its grasp.

Costain turned as he fell, and saw what he was falling towards, and he started scrabbling to grab purchase on air and, when he couldn’t, he started to scream.

Quill looked down, too, when he heard the screaming, and saw the nothingness below him. It was a void that seemed to stretch in impossible directions, beyond the ability of his eyes to encompass it. The floor warped into it at its outer fringes. Something that felt hot and dangerous, like an invisible fire, streamed up from this void, and he was aware of a terrible gravity to it, as if he was in a nightmare and this was the mouth that would finally eat him, no matter what he did.

He looked up again, and was startled to realize that he was seeing his own body now as it bumped up against the ceiling; that he really was outside that body; that there was somehow more to him than had been contained in that same body.

It was so far away from him now. He didn’t know how he could get back to it. He desperately needed to.

He remembered Toshack heating up in that interview room, and he felt himself heating up now — saw his body up there starting to glow with it. What had happened to Toshack then, what he hadn’t been able to comprehend properly back then: that was what was happening to him now.

But that was weird, wasn’t it? He was still feeling the heat, though it was his body way up there that was being heated up. The same thing was happening to both entities, and he now doubted that some sort of hole in the floor had really opened up underneath him, whatever ‘really’ meant in these circumstances. No, this was all inside his brain: this was him sort of seeing what was going on, him being pulled out of his body. And that extraction wasn’t over yet, because there was the heat thing going on for both of them, so there must still be some sort of connection between the two.

He did it without thinking: shifted mentally from one foot to the other, a copper trying to quickly find his balance-

And he was back inside his body, with a sickening feeling of his heart or his guts now stretching away below him, and an immediate horrifyingly painful sensation that he really was about to explode. And that nearly made him step out again, but-

He could see with his real eyes now, the real room below him, and he remembered what she’d said about having to clean the soil, and he wasn’t going to be able to hold it in much longer, anyway, and he knew nothing about how any of this worked, but-

He reached down, his fingers feeling huge, inflamed. He could hear the screams of the members of his unit around him. There were only seconds left before they hit whatever it was way down there, and then their blood would erupt from them volcanically, as it had erupted out of Toshack. That thing that was Losley had turned its back on them, was walking back towards her red door, the cat following at her feet, as if they didn’t matter any more, not even the exultation in killing them. He managed to grab his zip and pull. He managed to tug his dick out of his trousers. ‘Here, Mora!’ he bellowed, with every ounce of London in him. ‘I piss on your West Ham!’

And he let fly onto the soil.

Ross cried out as she flew back into her body. She had a second to grab hopelessly for a ceiling joist, and then she fell again, and had a moment to gauge how far it was before she landed, managing to take the brunt of it on her legs. The others dropped like fruit around her, shouting wildly as they landed, bouncing and rolling on the thick furs. She lay there in pain, but adrenalin was already shouting at her to get up. For a moment she wondered if this nightmare was over, if they’d look around now to find that that thing was gone.

But, no, there she was, turned to look at them, her mouth open, staring at them in horror. Ross roared inside to see it. The bitch was surprised.

Meanwhile, thunderclouds were boiling their way out of that pile of soil, like special effects in forties Technicolor.

Quill hauled himself to his feet, and zipped himself up. ‘Mora Losley. .’ he began again, and this time he was yelling it.

He had to yell it because now, rising from all around them, there came an enormous rumbling noise. Was this her power falling apart?

‘Modern. . children!’ she bellowed. ‘Who allows you this? You have no privilege! You have no idea! This is not how things are done!’

‘Fuck you!’ yelled Costain.

She made a gesture and they all flinched, and just for a second Quill was sure that something had hit him, but then he saw that all her gesture had done was to grab the cat up into her arms. ‘I am not limited by such as you!’ she shouted above the noise. ‘I have more soil! I will live as I have always lived. I will do as I have always done. In the past it has been my pleasure sometimes to show mercy, but now you must be taught! I will continue to support my football club! I will kill any player who scores three against them! Try to find me, try to change the way things have always been, and my lord will have you!’

She and the cat somehow folded together. .

And vanished on a dark wing that roared away through Quill’s head. And rushed out though that impossible door.

He looked round at the others. They’d all felt it. They were looking around them desperately, afraid of their own fear, not quite believing they’d escaped, still aware of that enormous noise around them. A shout from Sefton made Quill look up again. Something odd had started to happen to the walls: they were buckling inwards. The pieces of furniture were shoving themselves up against each other. It was all starting to fall towards that red door, which still lay open, like the plughole which the room was starting to revolve around, as it began to suck everything inside it, downwards into. .

Quill looked to the trapdoor.

Even as he looked, it warped and slowly started to spin its way up the wall.

‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ he yelled to the others. ‘Leg it!’

To Quill’s enormous relief, they did.

They threw themselves down through the trapdoor, and landed hard on the floor below. ‘Out!’ shouted Quill to the forensics shift. ‘Out!’ So now others were running with them, uniforms and forensics in crime scene suits, like a bomb was about to go off. They ran for the stairs, which were folding in on themselves, and were even harder to see and understand now, and they fell down them and rolled, and the uniforms helped them up and rushed down around them, nimbly navigating all the impossibilities.

The child’s head fixed on the top of the banister was screaming, and the shape of it was starting to peel off into a long ribbon of flesh that led back up into the twisting, knotting building. Up ahead there was the front door. .

. . racing away from them. Receding into the far distance at the end of an impossible corridor, as space stretched under this strange new gravity. Uniforms were running out through it, receding with it. This trap was intended just for the four of them.

Quill turned on his heel, grabbed a fur from the floor, wrapped it around him. He made sure the other three saw what he intended, then he flung himself at the nearest window.

The crashing glass expanded slowly outwards. They were escaping something dreamlike and hugely gravitational which was trying to haul them back inside. They burst out of the house as if it was a dying universe, slowly, slowly, reaching the limit of where it could hold on to them. .

And they were in the frosty night air, above the passage running along one side of the house, and everything was real again.

They heard the distant slam of that impossible door. The entire contents of the house had now fled through it.

And they fell and hit the ground hard, again, and lay there together, gasping, and the window threw itself back together, and the house vanished towards a point that hurt their eyes.

And then it was gone, heading somewhere into the fine structure of the night.

As they lay there, Quill realized he was still holding a scrap of dirty carpet. It evaporated a moment later into a billow of dust.

Slowly, they picked themselves up. A uniform peered around the corner of a wall. ‘The evacuation’s complete, sir. How far back should I set the perimeter, sir?’ Urgency and disbelief were fighting on his face. Behind him, Quill could see the big lights of the TV crews coming back on.

Quill turned round to look at what they had just escaped from.

Where a moment before there had been a sort of vacuum, an ordinary house had reappeared. Ordinary to his eyes now, too.

From which all the weight and horror had vanished.