London Falling

TWENTY

The sensation of falling turned out to be what it was like to be holding tightly on to someone when they vanished with their house all around them.

Ross fell as the wave went through her and over her head. She was aware of the others falling beside her. Again! She’d done it to them again! The house was folding up past them this time, separating itself from them, not trying to take them with it. It was rolling back towards that red door into which it had all rushed the last time.

But right in front of her-

Ross dived for the shape she’d glimpsed, seen across a space which she didn’t understand. She got her fingers around it and pulled it to her, and held on against a force that was trying desperately to haul it away from her.

Beside her, Quill slid across the floor. He was heading for the door, which was now swinging shut, having stayed open, Ross realized, only because of what she held in her hands. He recklessly jammed his hand into the gap between the door and the frame, then pulled his fingers out at the last second-

— leaving a wedge in place. The door thudded against it and held.

A terrible creaking noise filled the air. The others covered their ears, but Ross wouldn’t let go of what she was holding, and the others looked to be in as much pain as she was. It was as if reality itself was cracking. Quill began to stagger towards the doorway. The air in Ross’ lungs had got too large, somehow, too hot; it felt as if she was going to burst. Ross sensed the gravity on what she held increase to a point where she was sure it was going to haul her towards the door unless she let go. But she would not.

Something gave way. Something cracked.

The door slammed with a concussion that made them fall over.

They slowly got to their feet. The room had vanished. Ross looked over to where the soil had been. This time, she’d taken it with her. No more supply dumps, now that they were on her case.

Quill hauled himself over to where the door had been and looked down at something steaming on the floor. It was the perfectly flattened remains of a rubber door wedge. ‘Glad I didn’t get my fingers in there,’ he said.

Ross suddenly remembered what she was holding, something that was struggling and spitting and very real. She suddenly felt perversely furious at it.

‘So last time was deliberate,’ Costain was saying, not having noticed yet what she’d got. ‘She was trying to take us with her, disorient us, then take us out.’

‘Or she didn’t have the energy this time,’ said Sefton.

‘We saved the kids,’ said Quill. ‘We stopped her.’

‘Hoi,’ said Ross, ‘look what I’ve got.’ They all turned to see that she was clutching in her arms the mangy black cat.

‘Now,’ the animal began, ‘wait a moment-’

Costain grabbed a sack from the floor and flung the cat inside. Then he tied the opening in a knot. Inside the bag, the cat hissed and spun around. ‘We have an accomplice in custody,’ he declared.

‘Tell that to a judge,’ muttered Quill.

Ross swallowed an urge to laugh. She could feel them all giddy with it, the incredible feeling of having saved the kids, of having survived! Then she started to hear the screams from outside.

They jumped down from the loft and raced down the stairs, back to normal now.

They got out of the door to where the noise was coming from, aware of the increasing shouts. People were staring out of the windows of their houses, more and more of them. ‘Get back inside!’ Cartwright was yelling. Two uniforms were lying on the pavement, their blood pooling around them. Others were tending to them, too late.

They stopped. They stared. Dead coppers. What they’d done had produced dead coppers.

‘She’s heading towards the railway!’ a woman shouted from a top window. ‘I can still see her!’ She was pointing along the road.

‘We stopped her bailing out!’ yelled Quill. ‘She only managed a short hop, and she can’t have much power left! Come on!’

Costain shoved the sack into Cartwright’s arms. ‘Get that back to the nick,’ he said. ‘Hold on to it.’

Then the four of them raced off after Mora Losley.

It felt good to Ross to be in hot pursuit, to feel the pounding of blood inside her. She and Costain and Sefton, who all kept themselves very fit, soon pulled ahead of Quill. Sefton was still running with his holdall, but they were all pushing themselves as hard as they could go. Because there she was! There was a thin shape darting ahead, pausing, hauling herself along again. They nearly had her! She turned the corner. More and more people were coming out of their houses, into their gardens, pointing and shouting. ‘Get back!’ Quill was yelling to them as he ran.

Ross knew Cartwright would have called it in. There’d be cars coming in from all directions. One sped past them now, siren blaring, making Quill yell for it to go on, my son!

Dead coppers.

Ross saw the lights of the vehicle turn left ahead-

And there was some sort of explosion, a ball of purple light that rose up high over the houses, though nobody could see it but them. They got to the end of the street and saw the marked car in pieces, two officers thankfully staggering out of it, because that was all she could manage now, all that was left to her! They were pointing down a road that ran alongside a railway cutting, as a train roared past behind the houses, sounding its horn as if all of London was joining in on this chase, the city alerted to the thing amidst it which claimed to be part of it. Ross felt good about the city: it was on their side, surely it was!

And there she was again, off in the distance, impossibly already at the end of the street. And she’d turned again, right this time, some sort of bridge over the railway-

Quill was on his Airwave radio, yelling a description of where the suspect was heading.

They sprinted after her.

She led them through one suburban street after another, past houses, and garages on the corners with metal shutters, and pet shops and schools. She was loping, slowing down, as were they. The network of cars and coppers on foot must be closing on her now. Ross could almost hear the running footsteps echoing from other streets. She could feel this like some medieval hue and cry. Up ahead there were ever more shouts as people spotted Losley — her off the telly — and they’d be phoning each other now, Tweeting each other to come to the window and see, as Losley became a trending topic, as the whole city converged on her.

Straight above them roared a helicopter without a police logo. ‘Frigging TV news team!’ yelled Quill.

They came to a halt at a corner, and got the TV news displayed on Sefton’s phone. There she was: a dark shape, like a target in a foreign war, running past people’s gardens. Heading straight for a fence. . and going right through it, as if it wasn’t there, with a flare of white light that Ross was sure only they saw.

‘There are some sports pitches, or a school playing field ahead-’ began Sefton.

Quill heard from Cartwright on his radio. ‘She’s going straight across the pitch. We’ve got people coming out of their houses all over. We are attempting an intercept with multiple cars along Ivydale Road. Stay at location. Pick up’s on its way.’

A marked car arrived a minute later, and took them at high speed, blues and twos blaring, through the crowds of people that now lined the roads, straight to Ivydale Road, where the crowds were even larger. Quill saw that some of them had makeshift weapons now: tools and cricket bats. But they were holding back, leaping aside to let through the multiple police cars that were racing down the road towards an intercept point.

‘How’s she doing this?’ the driver was yelling.

Quill’s team jumped out of the car without anyone answering her. They rushed towards where the other vehicles were converging-

Just as Losley burst through, from a gap between houses that shouldn’t have been there. She spun and looked round with fury on her face, and with a terrible fear that Ross sensed in that second: the hunted animal who would do anything to escape. The crowd roared at her and heaved forward, except at the front, where the people were pushing back, terrified at the sight of her. Terrified but excited and caught up in it.

Losley looked around at them, at the masses of people and police closing on her from all directions. She looked across the road, from one row of suburban houses to another. She looked at the mob and hissed at them.

The people in her way broke and scattered.

She hurled across the road. She went straight through the uniforms. Screams and explosions of blood, and coppers were shouting, She’s got a gun, she’s got a gun. Coppers fell bloodied and injured and crying out but, again, not dead, as if her power was waning at every moment. The crowd began screaming and some of them started running.

Quill’s team followed, slamming their way through and around members of the public. They were right behind her again. She was running towards a house. She rushed into the garden. She leaped at its front windows, with television light flickering behind them. The glass caved in, and there were shouts from inside, and then screams.

Quill got to the door and hammered on it. ‘Police!’ he bellowed. ‘Police!’

A woman opened it. ‘She’s- she’s-!’

He burst past her. The others followed.

She was already through the house, and out a back door, now just seconds ahead of them. They could almost lay hands on her. Ross felt her hands clutching at the thought of it.

Mora ran straight down the thin back garden. They sprinted after her, ducking past a rotary washing line and crazy paving and gnomes and a rotten wooden fence, and at the bottom of the garden there was-

A high stone wall. And beyond it an expanse of trees. Thick, even with only the bare bones of winter, a black mass against very distant lights.

With an impossible leap and two upward scuttles like a spider, hand over hand, Mora was over the wall.

They themselves slammed against it. ‘Where?’ Quill yelled, turning as the family whose house this was came stumbling outside. She hadn’t had a chance to hurt them.

‘That’s Nunhead cemetery,’ the woman said.

‘Tonight, somewhere in this 250-year-old, thirty-acre cemetery, reopened less than a decade ago and still partly a ruin, the police think Mora Losley has gone to ground. Attempts to seal the site have proved futile, as groups of people have formed and ventured into the cemetery, guided by their phones and portable devices, taking along torches and improvised weapons. They say there’s safety in numbers, but look at them here, as our helicopter shot captures it: all those lights down there are ordinary people taking the law into their own hands. More and more of them doing so as our coverage has continued, though the latest to arrive are being turned away by what’s now an enormous police presence. Our camera crew is there with one. . I nearly called him a protestor.’

‘We’re all of us parents, and we’ve come down here to ensure-’

‘Find her! Find her and make sure she doesn’t get away with it!’

‘You seem to have weapons with you?’

‘The police better hope they get to her before we do. I’ve got kids!’

‘Burn the witch! Burn the witch!’ Half laughter in the young voices, but half meaning it.

‘I wish they’d stop calling her a witch. I’m down here to point out to people that this ancient and peaceful tradition. .’

‘It’s absolutely unprecedented. Police have sealed off several roads to stop people from other parts of London heading to the cemetery. Tonight the capital is gripped by anger and fear, and it’s all focused on this one woman. I have here a police statement which says she remains only a suspect, she is not to be approached, but I’m hearing. . is she even still in the cemetery? We’re getting reports in. . Now we can go to a map, as we’re getting reports of sightings of Mora Losley in Kentish Town, in Clapham, in Brixton. .’

Quill and his team looked out over the expanse of the ancient cemetery. Between the trees flickered torches, everywhere they looked. The landscape of graves and vaults and distant buildings rippled with a strange heat amid the cold of winter. The first place they’d headed had been somewhere Sefton had found on his phone in the Wikipedia description of this place: a restored chapel. They weren’t the first to have that thought. Quill had to yell at crowds of angry people with torches, some of them literally old-style flaming torches, all of whom felt they had a perfect right to be here, who wanted to tell him that if he did his job better, that if he knew what it was like to raise kids in London, with paedophiles on the streets, and now a frigging witch-!

That was when she’d lunged out at them.

Costain had lashed out, the others had jumped back. But it had just been a sudden vision of her, a hallucination that immediately faded. A trick, Ross had thought, with sudden hope, something she was trying out to put them off the scent. But as they trudged out of the chapel, they started to see that she was everywhere, near every cluster of people. A sudden vision of her here, a glancing visual impact of something like her there. She kept the crowds yelling that there was something over there, in the darkness. All of them, they were chasing shadows and thus. . making her be here. Ross leaned against a tree, feeling something so hugely despairing lodging in her lungs and head that she felt it could kill her.

‘She’s become remembered,’ said Sefton. ‘The masses have got hold of her. These visions aren’t really her. These are people’s ideas of her. She’s-’

‘Everywhere,’ said Quill, looking up from his phone. ‘She’s all over London. There are people in Shoreditch who swear they’ve seen her. . coppers on the street there who say they nearly grabbed her. And meanwhile the real her. . she could be anywhere!’

‘Do you think she did this deliberately?’ said Ross. ‘Or that she knew it’d happen?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Sefton. ‘Not the way she was running.’

They finally found a pile of glowing soil behind the building. Losley, with the crowd seeing her everywhere, must have laid down some soil she’d carried with her, on top of the local variety, and used it to vanish again.

Ross felt the others slump. There had been victories tonight — rescuing the kids, catching the cat — but at such a cost. Dead coppers. She could see it on the faces of the other three. It felt to them that their own selfish problem, their speciality, had reached out and slaughtered their brother officers.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Costain to Sefton. Ross saw the accusation evident on his face, about himself as much as them. ‘This is what being remembered looks like. “Do you make sacrifice, or are you remembered,” that’s what she said. You’re either someone who boils your kills in a pot, or you’re someone London remembers. Well, now she’s made a big enough splash for all of London to do that. Now she’s got hold of both sources of energy. Now she’s got all the power she needs. And we gave it to her!’

‘The bloody general public gave it to her!’ said Sefton. ‘They’re what we’re really fighting.’

‘No change there for coppers,’ sighed Quill. His phone rang at that moment. He listened for a few moments, then gave a few curt instructions. ‘I told them it was okay for them to move Ballackti,’ he said. ‘The match finished two-nil.’