London Falling

EIGHT

Quill was surprised that Costain was the first to arrive at the all-night cafe on Willesden High Road. ‘I hadn’t gone home,’ Quill admitted.

‘Why?’

Quill just shook his head. This was going to be the hardest bit. He had been drinking black coffee ferociously, and now he couldn’t quite tell the difference between drunk, buzzed, and this new weird stuff. But he knew what he was after. He remembered that feeling that had passed among them when he’d touched the soil, and now he needed to find out if the other three were seeing stuff, too, and get them to admit it. They might think they’d been drugged or something, and maybe they had been, but if they were all seeing the same thing. .

‘Listen-’ he began.

‘You can frigging see it too!’ a voice interrupted. They looked up to see Sefton marching in. He dropped into a chair beside them, and stared at them challengingly. ‘Don’t tell me you frigging can’t, because I’ve had my head full of this frigging stuff!’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Quill reprimanded him, quickly and gently.

‘Sorry, guv. . sir.’ Sefton looked so suddenly lost again that Quill almost felt sorry he’d said it. He’d quite liked that sudden show of fierceness from the quiet one.

Costain looked between them, and gave in. ‘All right, I can see it, too. What is it?’

They looked up at the sound of someone else entering, very quietly. Ross walked unsteadily towards them, and sat down beside them. She looked as if she didn’t know what to say.

‘We’re seeing it, too,’ said Costain quickly.

Ross bit her lip and looked away. ‘I went to the psychiatric hospital,’ she confessed. ‘There was. . a lot of. .’

They sat there awkwardly, as she kept a distance between herself and them. They waited for her to finish that sentence. But she didn’t.

‘You’re not going mad,’ said Quill. ‘This is real.’

‘Oh, that makes it so much better,’ said Ross sarcastically.

‘I’ll ignore that remark, but I don’t want to hear anything like that again — from any of you.’

Ross looked up, shocked, as if she’d been slapped. But the others were looking almost relieved. And now so was she. There was a time for informality, which was most of the time, and there was a time for this.

‘Guv,’ they all concurred, grateful to him while resenting it too. He didn’t want to keep handling them like that, but it’d do for right now.

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he began.

They stood in front of the Losley house, but Sefton couldn’t make himself look at it for too long. His thoughts flicked back to Joe in the pub where he’d quickly led him after the incident in the street.

‘What was that?’ Joe had said. ‘What happened to you there?’

‘Just. . some kind of fit, I suppose. I ought to get myself checked out. .’

‘Is it still going on?’

Sefton had glanced over to where there was something spindly standing at the bottom of the stairs. And then he’d known he had to get away. Away from things like that, and from where there were so many people, all of whom seemed to be contributing to the weirdness. It had been like the way he felt normally about the general public, but pumped up to eleven. They made him want to hide. He had asked for Joe’s number, written it on a beermat, and got out of there. He’d still been able to feel huge things moving about outside that relatively modern bar. So this wasn’t all about ancient stuff. He’d edged his way through the people on the pavement, feeling all their expectations and fears, not individually as in telepathy or something, but as one great terrifying mass; feeling what might be looming in the distance. He hadn’t questioned this feeling, because he wasn’t able to. This wasn’t some medical condition; he was in the middle of a new reality. The phone call from Quill had come as a relief. He’d known from the DI’s tone of voice that he was feeling it too.

The crime scene didn’t look like a normal house any longer. It was a haunted negative of a building, with black windows that were looking into Sefton, challenging him, making him think that, at any second, he’d glimpse something terrible up there. It was entirely different from the buildings on either side of it. ‘The witch’s house,’ he said. And this time he wasn’t making jokes about fairytales.

‘Right,’ said Quill, ‘so let’s-’

But Ross had already set off across the road, heading straight for the front door.

Ross hardly registered showing her pass to the uniform on the doorstep. She had to be first in, had to be in control of this. But, as she walked into the hall of the Losley house, her courage failed her. Rich tapestries hung where the windows should be. The thin carpet was replaced by fur rugs. The writing and the diagrams were still on the walls, but now they shone. There was something chitinous about the colours of the walls, the filthy carapace of a giant insect. As they came in behind her, Ross saw the other three stop and react to it, too. The new forensics shift was making its way through all this, none the wiser, not seeing what was all around them.

Ross felt her comrades draw closer. They had unconsciously formed a square now, their backs to each other, each of them looking in one of the directions trouble might come from, braced like coppers, with legs apart and weight tilted backwards; Ross found that she was doing the same, while the room swirled with horror around them.

The stairs, right in front of her, were particularly challenging. It was as if you could see underneath the stairwell and yet up it at the same time. The up-and-down pattern of the stairs seemed to be overlaid on the surface of your eyes. But it was still contained within a discrete space. It was like a Picasso painting of a stairway.

It took her a moment to see what was now perched on top of the newel post at the far end of the banister. Not a skull any more, but an entire child’s head. Its neck was like an automaton’s, skin hanging around a spinal column which looked to have been screwed into the wood. It had golden curls like a cherub, and bright blue eyes looking straight at them. It blinked, as if it was surprised.

‘Oh,’ it said, ‘you can see me.’ And then it started to yell, louder and louder. ‘Strangers! Strangers!’

Ross didn’t want to acknowledge it. She didn’t want it to be real. She looked back at the others. They didn’t seem to want it to be real either. It was as if they were still in a dream. The forensics team had already started looking at them questioningly. They obviously couldn’t hear the child shouting. Ross took the lead again, and headed up the stairs. She had to do it through sheer physical memory because, if she looked, she couldn’t see where her feet were going. It occurred to her that getting down again would be even harder.

Sefton was looking all around him as they went, letting it soak in. This felt different to what he’d encountered in the street, and had been aware of ever since. The green thing. . Jack. . just. . was. . grown out of something naturally. And that way had felt the same for just about everything he’d felt the distant presence of. This was more like that old bloke who’d stepped out of Jack’s way. This was. . deliberate, something that someone had made. It was like his mum had always said, that there was another world underneath ours. Someone — the suspect Mora Losley — seemed to have been taking advantage of it.

They carefully made it onto the upper landing, and stared around them at what was now a polluted palace, medievally regal, adorned with deep furs and tapestries. There was nobody up here, or in the loft either, from the sound of it. The ladder that led up was now glowing in a low light coming from above. Ross made to go up it, but Quill stopped her, and he went up first.

The loft was even more extraordinary. The beams of the ceiling overhead were brilliantly polished, but also stained with time. They now looked like ancient ribs of wood. The roof was alive with a suffused light, like the sparks in a bonfire, as if the smoke of generations was up here. The room was now lined with previously unperceived chests and chairs and other pieces of furniture. The pile of soil was glittering, twitching with stringy golden light, like scribbled lines of writing or of music. Sefton couldn’t look at it, because it confused his eyes. But he still found himself wanting to get to grips with it, for that would be the only way you could cope. It was only frightening because he didn’t know enough. This stuff had been. . hiding. It was a language of hidden things and of people. . people like Mora Losley.

Costain was also gazing around, sizing the place up. Too much to cope with. He’d made a deal with himself about that as he’d headed back into the city and only seen more and more mad shit. He knew what the boundaries were, and what the way out was, so he was in. It was more the case that there was just too much evidence here, meaning it was the opposite of Goodfellow. . oh! ‘This is where all the Goodfellow juice was,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t see certain things about Rob’s life, ’cos they were. . hidden from us, literally.’

‘And now we’re wallowing in it,’ muttered Quill.

‘Trouble is, we can’t show it to anyone else.’

‘Maybe we should get other coppers to touch that soil?’

‘That Scene of Crime Officer said she had, and she was her usual cynical self. I don’t think she was seeing this.’

‘So what’s so special about us?’

Costain saw that Ross reacted to that, with a sharp little look of fear. But she kept her silence. He turned, as they all did, at a sudden noise from the darkness over against the far wall. A noise and a movement in the shadows, only a small movement. A rat? No. .

A black cat came stepping cautiously towards them. It had rough, matted hair, stained with something sticky and dark. Its eyes were green, and they seemed bigger than a cat’s eyes ever should be. It was also looking at them in a way which didn’t seem to be how cats normally looked at things.

‘What’s happened?’ it said. It had an extraordinarily upper-class accent, like some radio announcer from the past.

They stared at it.

‘What are you doing here?’ it went on.

They continued to stare at it. Costain couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He was struggling just to stop himself from running. What was stopping him was the thought that that would be seen as a terrified rout, a shaming of himself, and putting a target on his back as he went. And the fact that what had sent him running was merely a cat.

‘Wait here,’ said the cat. ‘I’ll get her.’ It scampered back through the hole it had emerged from.

Costain heard what sounded like enormous, distant doors opening, the sound echoing down impossible corridors. Where had it gone anyway? To the house next door? No, they’d seen who lived next door. There was nothing beyond this attic. But there’d been nothing inside this attic either, the first time.

And then there was a different kind of distant echo. It was the sound of something moving. Something disturbing the air. Something moving back along that hole towards them. And the smell that started coming out of the hole, before it-

It was coming. Costain realized, and he sensed the others recognize with him the horrible, terminal mistake they had all made. The end of the horror movie was here now, and they were the victims. They had assumed this house was empty, when all the time. . she was still at home.

Fast footsteps now, marching along, echoing from out of that small darkness. The darkness got bigger, changed shape. . unfolded itself until it fitted neatly into the entire corner.

Costain took a step back, as he looked to Quill for guidance. The others were doing the same. There were fellow coppers downstairs, loads of them to provide a world of back-up. But they wouldn’t be able to see this.

Quill knew he was hesitating, and hesitating terribly. He was thinking that, actually, no matter what this was, he wanted to see it, he wanted to get line of sight on a suspect, make a positive identification. But that was just copper arrogance, wasn’t it, that whatever you knew about you could deal with? Was he about to get his team killed? Through lack of intel. . a staggering lack of intel. Through him getting pissed. They should get out of here now, ’cos they were blown, exposed. He started to say that-

But suddenly there was a door there. A real door forming out of nothing. It glistened red. The door that he had spotted over there only as a transitory glimpse before. It now stayed there, silent, for a moment, then it swung slowly open.

And something impossible yet also obviously the woman called Mora Losley stepped into the room. But she didn’t look like that photo of her. She wasn’t like anything Quill had ever seen. She was wearing her real face now.

They all cried out. Just like that. They cried out like children at the sight of her.

Quill thought she looked older than it was possible for anyone to be. The skin of her face and arms was blackened as if she was bruised all over, where blotches of blood had flowed together. She was almost bald, with only tiny wisps of hair. Her skin was wrinkled as much as any human skin could be. Every angle of her jutted, every bone seemed mis-set. Her lips were cracked. Her teeth were pointed. Animating all that was simple power. Muscles like pistons. Fingers that looked strong enough to pull flesh from bone. Fingers that pinched together in the air. And yet there was something sickly sweet about her, too, a sense of. . familiarity. She was like something terrible found in a comfortable old library, and it felt like a horrible lure, that sense of comfort — the rosy apple of the past. Her eyes were milky and bitter, but also sullen and hurt like a teenager’s.

The cat had come back out too, staying behind her.

She took two precise steps towards them, like a dinosaur in an old film. She didn’t seem to be in any pain from all those lesions and sores. Instead, she pushed the pain outwards all around her, so as to make everyone else feel it. Her shadow, Quill realized, made the floor steam, killed something in the rugs with every step, contributed to the fug rising to the ceiling. The smell hit him then: cut grass made into compost, polish and sewerage, wine on the edge of becoming vinegar.

She was eyeing at them, considering them. They had surprised her, he understood, for she wasn’t used to being seen.

To his own surprise, he found his voice. ‘Are you Mora Losley?’

She looked at him as if it was astonishing and humiliating to hear her name coming from him. She laughed, and it was a witch’s laugh. Not like witches did in children’s television. That was only a distant, safe memory of this. Her laugh sounded like small bones caught in an old throat. As if she was on the verge of choking, only she wasn’t feeling the threat of that — only you were. ‘You touched the soil,’ she said, as if she’d just worked it out. ‘My mistress’ blessed soil. I will now have to clean it. And you have a “protocol” on you. It’s reacted.’ She sounded like a profoundly deaf person, and the shape of her mouth was doing violence to the words. Whatever ‘protocol’ meant, she was holding it at arm’s length, as if the word was as unfamiliar to her as it was to Quill. Her accent was strange. It sounded very London, but not from anywhere that Quill could pin down. There was something almost American about it, except America was new, and this was. . old beyond old. ‘You have the Sight now.’ Quill was about to try to frame a question about what that meant in terms of them seeing stuff, when her eyes narrowed. ‘I know you.’

Quill looked over his shoulder to see who she was looking at.

Lisa Ross had met her gaze, seeming extraordinarily calm now. Calm because she looked to have finally encountered the thing she most feared. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We’ve met.’