The Severed Streets

SIX

Quill noted Costain’s arrival. Now all his unit were two floors below street level. Exactly what they had gone down into was another question. At first sight, this bar looked like the one immediately above it, but many of the details were different, and, with the Sight suddenly putting a queasy feeling of gravity in his gut, those details seemed drastically important. He felt as if he was already deep under the earth, as if rescue was a long way off, far above. When he first got down here he’d had to stop himself from going over to Ross and indicating they should both pull out immediately. But there was no operational reason for him to feel like that. Ross had walked straight over to a barwoman who looked a degree more specialized again than the one in the bar above, with a distinctly old-fashioned touch to her uniform, curls to her hair that looked to be from some era he couldn’t pin down, and, startlingly, white pancake make-up that made her look like a mime artist. The dress code for those who’d got down here was clearly older, poorer, often specifically London in nature. There were remnants of uniform: London transport; real cavalry jackets; what Quill realized was a zookeeper, even. The look was distinctive, but hardly impressive in the way of a fashion show. They also showed signs of harm: the odd missing finger; bruises and cuts displayed proudly. There was something else about them now: their voices were hushed, they kept glancing towards the door. This lot were in their familiar place, obviously used to being here … but tonight they were afraid of what remained above. To get out of what had started to feel like a footie boozer with a bunch of away fans in it hadn’t eased the pressure very much.

In the far corner, in the same place as on the floor above, was a different tweedy bloke with a beard, sitting guarding yet another downward stairwell. As above, so below. So there was another level beneath this. Of course.

Quill went over to the juke box, in exactly the same place as in the bar above. This one was an old-fashioned job with vinyl singles, and the selections were all songs about London: the Kinks; Blur; the Small Faces. To play one cost only twenty pence. But he didn’t feel like being the first to select a track. He went to a table and picked up a menu. These cocktails had names like the Lambeth Walk, the Ally Sloper, the Black Shock. That last name made something echo in his head. Like déjà vu for something that hadn’t yet happened. Quill didn’t know one bottle of champers from another, but the top of the range down here was considerably cheaper than upstairs. He went to check out the paintings on the walls. These were all portraits of individuals, their names underneath, nothing spooky about them. Though, wait a sec, Aleister Crowley — there was a name he recognized: fat bloke, a sort of coked-up mania about him, half performance, half something a bit more worrying. Beside him: Dion Fortune; Austin Osman Spare; Gerald Gardner … There were many more — a complete circuit of them on the walls — and in between the portraits were what seemed to be action scenes, or at least metaphorical versions of such. Here were a group of figures under the searchlights and blimps of wartime London, their arms arranged in stark stick-figure angles, protesting against or attacking what was surely the threatening shape of a falling V2 rocket. Here was a parting of the ways, a splitting, as many figures walked many different paths, some falling off into nothingness, into a sunlit map of London.

So someone in this community knew at least a bit about the history of it. Looking around, though, Quill decided that even the punters down here seemed about as useless as the general public he was used to.

* * *

Ross looked into the white face of the barmaid. ‘What can I get you, my darling?’ said the woman, her mask of make-up not equalling the welcome of her broad East End accent. The mask was extraordinary, now she was up close. Some of it, around the eyes, was obviously cosmetics on the surface of skin, but some of it was absolutely smooth, blank, as if there was only the artificial colour of the cosmetics and nothing underneath. If she wiped it all off, the woman looked as if she might be just eyes and what was around them and a mouth floating in mid-air.

Ross realized that she was staring and ordered a glass of red she had no intention of drinking. The barmaid gave it to her. Ross could see fine old cuts in almost every inch of the skin of her hands, making it look like a map on vellum. Her fingernails were cut to the quick. ‘And how are you going to pay for that?’

Ross made a decision based on what she’d seen at the New Age fair. ‘Not with money.’

‘Good. Were they upstairs already? Are they going to come down here?’

‘Who?’

‘Well, that’s even better, you going the right way about things without knowing what’s going on. All right, what have you got to offer?’

What had the fortune-teller at the New Age fair lost? Fingers, teeth … ‘Blood?’

The woman laughed. ‘Bit much, my dear. Never met anyone before who opened with that. Tell you what, I’ll start a slate for you, and eventually you can make a donation. Blimey, I can’t get over it, a first-timer who actually wants to follow the form. You came here wanting something, I take it?’

Did she know?

The barmaid obviously read the expression on her face. ‘I haven’t just rifled through your drawers, love. It’s why most people come here.’

* * *

Sefton followed the abusive young woman to a group of people seemingly familiar to her, hoping they’d take him for an acquaintance of hers and that would give him a way in. But the woman looked sidelong at him as soon as he got there, like a bird of prey needing to alter the angle of its vision to get perspective on its target. Perhaps, Sefton thought nervously, that was exactly what she was doing. He was among power, of varying degrees, and who knew who was hiding theirs? The users of it were all looking at him, and at Costain, now he turned to look, as if the two of them were a terrible development. He should think of this lot, as he did when he was in a gang, as being armed and dangerous. ‘Fucking poser jacket,’ said the abusive woman, actually raising her voice so he’d be sure to hear. ‘How did you get down here, when you look like a complete fuckwit?’

Sefton was too intrigued now to get in her face again. Besides, a character shouldn’t be one note. Her straightforward aggression was a relief after the chill coming from the rest of this lot. Also, she’d chosen a non-racial approach this time. Presumably she’d exhausted that material. ‘I’m a complete fuckwit.’

Sudden mocking laughter erupted from behind Sefton. It sounded almost like a voice saying ‘ha ha ha’, in an extraordinarily cynical, almost self-critical way. ‘At least someone here knows themselves.’

Sefton turned to see that an extraordinary figure had joined the group. He looked middle-aged, with a face that made him look as if he had some sort of wasting disease, a skull that, under a shock of bright red hair, boasted handsome cheekbones and eyes that seemed continuously challenging, rolling and staring. Those eyes knew everything about him, in a moment. Sefton found the undercover part of him reacting, certain he’d been recognized, that somehow this man he’d never seen before knew who he really was. He had to stop himself from marching for the door, telling himself there was no logical reason to do so, that this still might just be a feeling. Besides, the look of the man had stopped him in his tracks. His jacket was made of newspaper, from enormous edifices of Victoriana to brash red-top headlines, flowing and changing. The pattern on the man’s trousers was a grid that resembled tartan, but it flexed like a topographical map. The man’s grin was increasing as he took in what Sefton was now absolutely bloody certain he’d learned about him. Never mind walking out; in a moment, Sefton might have to sprint.

‘Don’t mind me,’ the man said, ‘I’m not real.’

‘What do you mean?’

The man shook his head, impatient with the wrong tack being taken. ‘Don’t like that question. I’m going to answer a different one. Yes, I know all about you. Fortunately, I don’t care.’ Sefton kept his fear in check, making himself look calm once more. But still, this lot would now know there was something dodgy about him. ‘I might know anything about anyone,’ the man continued, ‘with just one look. All the information of this world flows down to me.’ He poked a finger into Sefton’s jacket, and Sefton felt the vanes in his breast pocket jerk at the contact, trying to point towards the gravity of the man. The group had all turned to look at the new arrival, he realized, as if he was some sort of touchstone for them. ‘You’re all right, you are. He’s all right, everybody!’ That had been a call with no expectation that it would have any result, an irony at the man’s own lack of influence, but Sefton could see that it had actually had some effect. ‘Oh, it’s all going pear-shaped tonight,’ the man continued, looking back to Sefton. ‘Our barmaid over there,’ he indicated, ‘I know her name but I will not share it; she made the mistake of continuing with the old ways, of not allowing coin to stay in her palm. The Keel brothers did not like that. The penalty was the loss of her face. Les yeux sans visage, as some pretender once said. The Keels would like her to continue working here, to please the old clientele even as they begin to fleece them. They have promised to give her face back if she’s a good girl. But tonight we’ll see.’ He looked Sefton up and down, an arrogant and yet somehow self-mocking smirk on his face. ‘We all love our masks, don’t we? It’s the only option when a circle has to fit inside a square. When one song has to be sung to the tune of another. The distortion continues. Ever feel you’re being bent out of shape?’ He whirled a finger in the air as if sampling the oppressive quality of the air, and then licked it, seeming to be entertained by the taste. He pointed downwards. ‘The things I have to crawl up through to attend these soirées now. The things you people put up with. The things you allow.’ Now his gaze was fixed again on Sefton. ‘But still we get new arrivals. Oh, sorry, I said the N word — ’ he made a quick, scathing glance at the gathering — ‘sorry.’ He suddenly held out his hand to Sefton. ‘I am John, and I was born in London. They call me the Rat King. When they call me anything at all.’

Sefton understood that that was a hell of a thing. In a company of people who kept their names like hoarded treasure, here he was being offered one for free. From someone who apparently knew who and what he was. He felt himself trusting this man with his own real identity because of that single surprising gesture. He shook the hand. ‘The fuckers of this culture,’ said the Rat King, ‘are going to be troubled by what you might bring to their community.’ He enunciated every syllable, underlining their meaning and put an entire landscape of irony between himself and that last word. ‘So I am delighted to see you.’ He leaned closer to whisper in Sefton’s ear. ‘But I am afraid I don’t know the thing you most want to find out.’

His meaningful glance made Sefton certain that the Rat King was talking about the Ripper.

* * *

Costain, meanwhile, aware of the looks he was getting and not wanting to be seen as coming on too strong, had been looking for differences between this bar and the ones above. He was now inspecting one of several large cracks in the plaster of the walls. Were these walls under pressure from being underground? Pretty rubbish construction, if so. There was something … he leaned closer to the wall and saw something sparkling inside one of the cracks, something … silver. He could feel it on his face: the material in the crack was freezing cold. Yeah, here was that silver goo again. Only this time it seemed to be being used to hold this place together.

* * *

Quill managed to overhear a few conversations that expressed horror or wonder at the activities of the Ripper. Some of this lot had definitely, having seen the news on TV, noted the glowing figure leaving the crime scene, but apart from that, not a thing suggested that this community was better informed on the subject than the wider public. Also, nobody had said anything about a smiling man. He’d heard a couple of conversations where people had talked about making ‘sacrifices to London’, as if the metropolis was the thing this lot worshipped. Whatever plan the Smiling Man had used Rob Toshack to hint obliquely about to Quill’s team, this group didn’t seem to be in on it. Quill was backing up, trying to move round to join the fringes of another conversation, when he hit something with the back of his thighs.

He turned round and saw that he’d encountered the long legs of a man in black jeans, black T-shirt and black leather jacket who was sitting in a discreet corner of the bar, his mobile phone in his hand. He had a long face, caring, slightly sad, with a worried look around his mouth, and a shock of dark hair. He was looking as if Quill had disturbed him in the middle of a thought.

Quill realized, to his surprise, that he recognized this man. He didn’t quite know from where, but he had a feeling that it wasn’t in a police context.

‘Can I help you?’ said the man.

Quill became aware that he had been staring, and at the same moment knew where he’d seen this guy before. It had been on the inside flap of a book he’d read to Jessica, and on another that Sarah had been reading in bed, and he’d been surprised that the same bloke had written both. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘aren’t you that writer?’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Children’s books?’

‘All sorts of books.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘It’s usually pretty quiet, and I can write, sometimes.’

‘I mean, so you’ve got, I mean you must have … to get down those stairs…’ Quill pointed to his own eyes.

‘The Sight? Of course.’

‘Of course. Of course. Myself, I got it when I touched a pile of soil. But of course it’s not … always that. Is it?’ Arrgh. Why couldn’t he just talk normally to this bloke?

The man paused as if wondering whether or not he should answer, then went ahead, possibly thinking it was the quickest way out of the conversation. ‘Someone handed me an object at a signing. They said they hoped it would give me “inspiration”. It gave me a headache and a bunch of terrible visions on the way to the airport. And, as it turned out, every time I visited London. So the inspiration it gave me was mostly to live abroad.’

‘And you got to the Goat…?’

‘When I got used to the idea of London being horrifying, I did a bit of exploring and found a few places. This bar has been relatively friendly, but I worry about the new management.’

‘Have you been further downstairs?’

‘No. But…’ He considered for a moment and was absolutely silent, looking aside as if weighing up a few different possibilities. Quill found himself wanting to interrupt, but was too interested in what the man was about to say. ‘No,’ the man finally said again, as if it was a decision. Then he smiled broadly at Quill. ‘Good to meet you.’

Quill understood he was being politely dismissed. ‘And you. I’ll let you get back to…’ He gestured in the abstract direction of whatever the man had been looking at on his phone. ‘Cheers.’

He headed off, kicking himself for asking a lot of bloody copper interview questions, completely ignoring his own rules, all because he’d run into someone who was, presumably, famous.

He realized there was something else he really should have said. He stopped. He headed back.

The man looked up again at his arrival, the look on his face now a little tired.

‘My wife’s a big fan of yours,’ said Quill.

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘Okay, bye.’ He headed off again, knowing that for just a moment there he had sounded like Columbo and that his next move should really be to reveal the man’s guilt in some extraordinary crime.

Then he realized again, stopped again. Damn it. He headed back.

This time the man looked up with only a slight raise of his eyebrows. Oh, come on now.

‘Sorry, just checking, your name would in actual fact be…?’

‘Neil Gaiman.’

‘Great. Thanks.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay. Bye.’ Quill walked quickly off into the crowd again, mentally rolling his eyes at his own gaucheness. When he told the others about it, it would be a tale of him getting loads of juice through his clever undercover teasing out of a conversation.

Something was happening ahead now: raised voices, people moving swiftly away from the doors. He made his way through the crowd to see as two powerfully built forty-something males, balding, pot bellies, facial hair, six foot one or so, marched into the room. They wore black vest-tops, shiny leather trousers and immaculate long black coats that didn’t look like they’d be comfortable in summer. Lots of pockets, possibility of concealed weapons. The Keel brothers, Quill presumed, Barry and Terry. He recognized one of them from the New Age fair, but they hadn’t spoken; he doubted the man had got a good look at him. He let out a breath of relief. Aggro he could handle. Famous people? Not so much.

Barry Keel was looking around the room as if he’d just walked in on an unexpected orgy. ‘What the fuck,’ he said, ‘is going on here?’

* * *

Ross examined the new arrivals. No lieutenants in their wake, no entourage. Nobody in the crowd had stepped forward to answer them. The weird new bloke who’d been hanging around near Sefton was looking alternately angry and almost gleeful, anticipating trouble, scampering about, trying to get the best view. The barmaid had tensed and taken a step back from the bar.

‘You!’ Barry Keel went over to the bloke sitting by the stairs that led downwards. ‘I’ll say to you what I said to the one up there: You gatekeepers still aren’t letting all our customers come down here. Today was the deadline. When are you lot going to get it?’ He looked around, addressing the group in general. ‘This is our place now. We bought it.’ His accent, Ross noted, was a lot more modern London than the ones she’d heard from this crowd. ‘So you lot are going to let paying customers enter, let the cleansing breath of the outside world clean up this outsider culture of yours a bit, and you — ’ he pointed to the barmaid — ‘are going to take the coin of the realm, and stop with all this self-harming sacrifice barter shit. Or I’ll take something else off you, right?’ He made a gesture with his hand that had something showy and kung fu about it, but it was also obviously a genuine threat.

The barmaid stayed where she was, but Ross could see that she was breathing deeply, terrified. ‘I thought I’d have a bit longer,’ she said. ‘But fuck it.’ She raised her voice. ‘You can keep my face,’ she shouted. ‘I’ve been here since before you were born, and I’m not keeping filthy coin in my hand.’ She looked around the group, hoping desperately for support, and Ross could see a few nodding heads. But there were no voices raised in support. This lot didn’t have it in them to stand up for anything. The woman looked suddenly, horribly, alone. Ross looked over to Costain and found that he was making eye contact with her. A tiny shake of the head.

Ross made herself step back from the bar.

Barry was looking at the barmaid with what seemed to be genuine sadness and frustration. ‘You try and make a deal,’ he said, ‘you try and do this nicely.’ He made his sudden gesture again, and this time Ross felt a slam of weight behind it.

The woman screamed. She slapped her palms to her face. She held them there for a moment as the crowd stared at her. Then, as if realizing she wasn’t actually in any pain, she lowered them.

There were spaces where her eyes had been. Ross could see right through her head.

‘I can’t see,’ she said, gently. She put a finger to where her eye had been … and then straight through it.

The Rat King stepped forwards, glaring, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Come with me,’ he said. He glowered as he led her towards the stairwell. ‘You had your chance,’ he said bleakly to the rest of the crowd, who were gaping in horror at what had been done to her. ‘Well done. Love your “community”. Turns out it’s not a good idea to crowd surf when there isn’t a safety net.’

Ross glanced back to Costain and was surprised to find that he had stepped behind the bar. As she watched, he stepped back out again, without looking at her. He’d obviously taken a quick look to see if there was anything important back there. She was the only one who’d thought to look in that direction.

‘Wait,’ said the barmaid, ‘the new girl.’ Ross realized she meant her. She looked back and saw that the barmaid had blindly stretched out a hand and the Rat King had paused to let her do this. Ross went to her, let her take her hand. The barmaid, with surprising strength, pulled her close, almost into an embrace that smelt of lavender and mothballs. Keeping hold of Ross’ hand, she quickly felt for her own pocket, concealed somewhere inside her uniform, and shoved something into Ross’ grasp. It was a business card. ‘You followed the traditions,’ she said. ‘You wanted to barter. You deserve something in return. Listen. I got a strong feeling about you and what you were after. Whatever it is, I think it’s going to be there, at the next auction.’

Ross looked at the card. There was just a bare date, and a map that seemed to swirl before her gaze, like a view down through a hole in the middle of the card. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You stay alive,’ said the barmaid.

Then the Rat King hustled her off and led her carefully down the stairwell. The gatekeeper there stood up, glaring at the Keel brothers, as if daring them to interfere.

* * *

Costain had seen Ross take something from the barmaid. Now he noted which pocket she put it into. Interesting. Then he turned back to observe the Keel brothers. He was in an enclosed space with deadly weapons, and these two were between him and the door; otherwise he’d have already given the signal for everyone to abort.

‘From now on,’ Barry was saying to the crowd, ‘no exceptions. Money will be taken. You may have noticed we’ve started to advertise this pub, only in the right places. We have produced actual fliers. The new punters, the people who’ve got interested in this stuff in the last few years, they’re young and have spare cash, they have certain expectations about their social occasions. You will follow the dress code.’ He grabbed a young woman near him and threw her to the ground. ‘Smart! Casual! The weird fashions don’t add anything, you stupid fuckers — they just mean nobody normal’s going to want to hang around in a bar with you and drink our premium lager while you sip on your glasses of warm tap water!’

Terry, in contrast, had his hands raised, trying to be the voice of reason. ‘Ever since whatever changed a few years back to make it easier for us all to openly use the power that comes from a deep knowledge of the shape of London…’ He seemed to react to mutterings from the crowd. ‘Yes, I’m saying all this out loud. Look. No bolt of lightning from above. No punishment for talking clearly, not in gobbledegook. Me and the bro, in modern gear, speaking like real people, paying hard cash for objects with London history’ — and stealing some of them, thought Costain, if their convictions were anything to go by — ‘we have got ourselves a lot of knowledge and a lot of power. We didn’t need to do all the accents and costumes, we didn’t see ourselves as poor noble outsiders, we didn’t need to wait for some gatekeeper to give us the nod and say we were allowed. We proved that money can be used to shape the power of London too, whether London likes it or not.’ Costain remembered what Sefton had said about the price tags feeling weirdly out of place on those objects in the shop. ‘Still, we played nice with the culture we found: you lot, who assumed you owned this town, just because you did all the things that had always been done. We were cajoling, we extended the hand of friendship. You paid no bloody attention. But now we are in the middle of what we modern people call a double-dip recession. We need to monetize this place. So you lot will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the eighteenth century.’ No voices were raised to contradict him, but Costain saw people looking angry, heard whispers. ‘Listen, a lot of you at least keep a toe in the real world; you know it doesn’t have to be so hard for us now. When the big change — whatever it was — happened, it was like the people who can do what we do … it was like we won. So why are you lot still hiding?’

‘Cut to the chase, Tezzer,’ said Barry.

‘The point is, whatever you think of us, we are like you. Our brand identity for this pub will embrace the essentials of what the Goat and Compasses has always been about. But from now on, on the special nights, for downstairs, we’ll be charging admission.’

There were yells of protest from the crowd. ‘This is the last night of the Goat, then,’ someone said.

‘Pair of fucking faggots,’ said a woman with dark hair whom Costain had seen with Sefton. She meant the Keel brothers.

Terry turned to her, and flicked a sudden gesture that he seemed to think better of before it did her harm. The crowd flinched anyway. ‘I am also fed up with you insulting our customers. You’re barred.’

‘Who’s barred?’

‘… whoever you are!’

‘You don’t even know my name! Your brand doesn’t have much hold over someone without a brand of her own, cocksucker!’

‘I’ll brand you-!’ He raised a hand to do it.

Ross stepped in front of her.

Costain saw Sefton react, minutely. The two of them had a responsibility to their non-undercover colleagues. They had to do something to move this conflict around and let themselves and their colleagues head for the door. But before either of them could do anything, Terry Keel lowered his hand.

‘You tell her, love,’ he said to Ross. ‘She can stay tonight, but she’d better not come back.’ He turned to the others and deliberately didn’t hear the woman’s next comment. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’ll just be a fiver or something. It’s not like you lot have actual rules that you need to vote on or something. You just have traditions. An unwritten constitution, not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s not as if you’re institutionally racist, for instance.’ He underlined the words with irony. ‘But your “we like old-timey stuff” policy has successfully kept away potential customers.’

Barry took up the narration, nodding pleasantly to Costain and Sefton. ‘Like these two modern and affluent-looking young gentlemen. Who are entirely conversant with a bit of the old-’ He made the checking hand gesture, and Costain automatically now threw what Sefton had called a blanket over his thoughts. Even as he did so, he noticed something very worrying: that gesture … hadn’t it been just a tiny bit … different?

Costain heard his phone beep at the same instant Sefton’s did. The two undercovers looked at each other. Well, okay, Costain reasoned, so they were carrying modern tech, they could just say sorry and-

But a look of horror had come over the face of Barry Keel. An expression that Costain recognized from his nightmares of being caught while undercover. ‘You fuckers,’ he said. ‘You’re-’

Costain leaped forward and punched the man in the stomach.

* * *

Terry Keel lunged at Sefton. The man looked as if he knew how to fight. Low centre of gravity. He was probably packing gestures like his brother’s, which could cause harm above and beyond whatever he could do with his fists. Barry had somehow used that gesture to read their phones. Their own phones, which were full of police-related numbers.

Sefton ducked the first two blows, then hit Terry one-two on the body, and winced at the pain in his knuckles as the man fell. He wasn’t used to doing this without gloves. He took a moment to look around, to try to find Quill and Ross, to see if they could get to the door.

He could only find where Barry Keel was lying near Costain, clutching his abdomen. He was craning his neck painfully to bellow at the ceiling. ‘Marlon!’

Something fell from the roof.

It was a figure, Sefton saw in that second. He managed to leap out of the way, and it landed with a crash where he had been. Sefton turned to see that it was the bouncer from upstairs, who was even now looking to Barry Keel for orders. The leather-coated man gestured to both Sefton and Costain. ‘Rip them apart.’

As both Barry and Terry got to their feet, Sefton looked to Costain, found only a shared disinclination to be here, looked back. The bouncer was advancing swiftly.

There were screams and shouts from the crowd, many of whom — with Quill and Ross among them, he hoped — were now finding the space to run for the door.

The bouncer was herding himself and Costain, Sefton realized, back towards a corner, away from the door and the stairwell. Sefton reached into his pocket, and pulled out the vanes. He waved them purposefully towards the bouncer, as if he had any idea how to use them to attack, in the way their last owner had used them on Quill. But the bouncer paid no attention. He made little grasping movements with his hands, waiting for his chance to grab and rend. As soon as they reached the corner, neither of them would be able to get away.

This was the sort of moment, thought Sefton, where, in his former life, there would have been a horde of uniforms outside, ready to race in and bust heads on his behalf.

Now there was nobody. He and Costain were just going to have to run at the same moment and hope desperately that one or both would make it out. Sefton prepared himself to sprint for his life.

‘Hoi! Mush!’ The bouncer turned at the shout.

Quill leaped from the crowd and smashed the bouncer across the head with a champagne bottle he must have nicked from the bar.

The bouncer spun as if to grab Quill. Quill jumped away from him. Sefton and Costain ran for the stairs. Sefton had the feeling that Quill had started running at that moment too.

Ahead of them was a mass of people falling over each other to get upstairs. They were going to have to push their way through. Sefton glimpsed Ross up ahead, shoving to stay out of the crowd as it tried to take her with it.

Something grabbed Sefton from behind and threw him backwards. He was aware, in that second, of the same thing happening to Costain.

Barry and Terry Keel stood over them, Barry in front of Terry. He made a complicated gesture and suddenly something bright was burning in his hand. The bar was emptying. Sefton couldn’t see where his colleagues had gone. He hoped they’d got out. He scrambled backwards and managed to get to his feet. Costain did the same, putting the length of the room between himself and the Keels. The bouncer moved to join the brothers, flexing its fingers once more. Sefton remembered it had been ordered to rip them apart.

Barry Keel drew back his hand, ready to throw his fire.

Sefton had a sudden thought. Just playground stuff: rock, paper, scissors. They had fire but he had-

He grabbed the freezing phial from his pocket. At the instant Barry Keel threw his heat, Sefton threw what he only thought of as pure cold.

Sefton didn’t understand what happened next. He was somehow in the air. Heat was all around. He was breathing in heat. Then suddenly a wall came flying up behind him and it was going to hit him so hard-

* * *

Someone was yelling at him.

Sefton opened his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. The weight on his chest. There was nothing on his chest! No, no, he could breathe, just little breaths. Control it. Just little breaths. What was he looking at? He was looking at the tweedy man who’d been sitting by the stairs leading downwards. The tweedy man was walking quickly down those same stairs, which, a moment later, vanished, leaving a smooth wooden floor.

Oh. What was this stuff all over him? He looked down. That was … silver goo. But now it wasn’t cold. It was sizzling, evaporating. There were gold bits too, streamers of them. Amongst it … the remains of a bouncer’s bow tie.

The bouncer had exploded. Why had the bouncer exploded?

There was a smell of smoke. It was everywhere. There was heat, there was fire … all around him there was fire.

‘Kev!’ That’s who was yelling at him, that was Quill’s voice. ‘Kev, don’t move!’

He slowly got to his feet. His head was ringing. His body ached everywhere. He took a step forward …

With a yell, Costain grabbed him and hauled him back, inches from a dirty great hole in the floor of the bar. A chasm. On the other side of it were Quill and Ross, and there was …

A pile of ashes. A pile of ashes and bones with fragments of a leather coat. The remains of Barry Keel.

He’d done that. He’d had the offhand thought that the cold of the silver he’d thrown would somehow counteract the heat of what Keel was about to throw. But he’d been wrong. He’d been horribly, horribly wrong. What if the silver goo was like … fuel? Something you could store to make the power of London work if you didn’t want to keep on making hand gestures, something that could keep things in place without continual work. The remains of the bouncer, which he was now covered with, were full of it. Presumably the killer they were looking for ran on it, was leaking it.

If that was the case, then Barry Keel had used one of his gestures to call up destructive fire into his hand, and Sefton had literally thrown petrol onto it. The resulting explosion, which had killed Keel, had made the bouncer combust too. Sefton could only hope that, since it had been made of something other than flesh, it couldn’t actually be called a person, that he wasn’t responsible for two deaths tonight.

That felt too big to cope with right now. He put it aside and let himself deal instead with his current situation.

He was standing on the edge of an abyss. The floor of the bar had largely vanished. All that remained of it, apart from the corner where they stood, were … scraps … not the jutting planks and disintegrating concrete you might expect, but ragged edges of wood, sticking out into space from the walls. A couple of narrow ragged strips of carpet still lay, impossibly, across the gap. It was like the aftermath not of a real-world explosion, but of something that had happened in a video game. Sefton supposed that this floor of the bar hadn’t been made of real-world materials any more than the bouncer had been, that they’d disintegrated for the same reason. What Sefton assumed had been lower floors were gone completely. He could only imagine that the gatekeeper he’d seen walking calmly down into them had … somehow taken them away with him. Those thoughts was pushed immediately from his mind by what he saw down there in the void.

What had been revealed beneath it all was wondrous, horrifying, something of passion, not some part of a game designer’s pixelated imagination.

He was looking into a pit of absolute darkness, at the bottom of which … Sefton’s eyes struggled to understand it. Even with the Sight, it was difficult. He dropped to his knees, half to take a closer look, half in awe. He was aware that, beside him, Costain was looking downwards too.

It was a contortion of twisting silver, like the aurora borealis. It was a river of silver, and Sefton instantly understood that this was the same silver as at the Ripper crime scenes, the same silver that was covering him. It shone. The silver was dotted with tiny golden lights, and now Sefton looked closer he could see that they were threads, golden traceries that were spun all through the silver, as they were through the remains of the bouncer. The whole ribbon flexed in silence. He could feel an enormous coldness radiating from it. If he and Costain fell, they would fall into it, and the cold alone would be enough to destroy them. He glanced up at Costain. ‘Can you see…?’

‘Yeah.’ His voice held as much wonder as Sefton had ever heard from Costain.

Sefton sniffed. A smell was rising from the river of silver. It was very subtle. You’d need that much of this stuff together in order for the smell to register at all. It reminded him of … something very old, something ungraspable, always just out of reach, as one’s own earliest experiences were out of reach. It was immensely beautiful, epic, touching him in ways familiar and grand that made him immediately love it. He wondered if Costain felt the same way about what he was seeing. You could just as easily fear this thing. It was outside their time and space, maybe in an ‘outer borough’ like the London of Brutus that he’d visited had been. It was … what was underneath everything, where the power was, the source, the great river. The void it was in … He wondered if this is what they would have seen if, when they’d been in the tunnels Losley had made between all her different houses, they’d knocked a hole in the wall. This void was what everything was sitting in, the bigger cosmos, again outside normal time and space.

Beside his foot, a bit of floor detached itself and fell away into that darkness.

Costain suddenly grabbed him and wrenched him to his feet, dragging him back from the brink.

Sefton gasped. He’d been … kind of transfixed by this thing. He made himself wake up and looked to the room again. The dirty great hole in the middle of the floor had slowly started to increase in size, the floor crumbling away into it on the other side too, the paths across the middle getting thinner by the second. Quill and Ross were stepping back from their edge.

‘What happened to the other Keel brother?’ Costain yelled to them.

‘Escaped,’ called Quill, moving away as another bit of floor dropped away. ‘You two get over here! Now!’

Sefton forced himself not to hesitate, ignored the tightness in his lungs, the bruises and the injuries, and stepped quickly out onto one of the strips of carpet that lay across the gap, didn’t think of what was below, aware the floor might give way under him at any moment. He clung to the thought of Joe, of getting home to him. Costain had taken the other strip of carpet, moving quickly beside him.

‘It’s going!’ yelled Ross.

Sefton broke into a run. He felt the material falling away at his heels. It was crumbling to the left. He ran right, veering away from Quill and Ross. He leaped and in the same moment he heard Costain yell too. He daren’t look to see what had happened to him.

Sefton hit the far wall at a corner by the crumbling edge where Ross and Quill stood. His hands scrabbled desperately. He just got one hand around the frame of one of the paintings, then swung to grab it with the other. He managed to hang on.

The picture held, impossibly. He swung in the void, his forearms in agony, his legs scrambling for a purchase they couldn’t find.

Ross had Costain, he saw. She’d thrown herself to the edge of the crumbling floor, had grabbed Costain’s hands. Quill had taken a step back, realizing that in a moment he might have to try and haul both of them back at once. Wondering if he could, if he was going to have to leave Costain to fall.

Sefton knew he had to do this or die. With one huge effort, all he had, he hauled himself up the painting. There was something extraordinary holding this thing on to the wall. The mad-looking fat man depicted in the portrait glared balefully at him. He started to swing from side to side, wondering about making the leap. ‘Jimmy!’ he shouted. ‘It has to be now!’

‘Okay!’ bellowed Quill. He got to the edge of the remaining carpet, squatting, his hands out awkwardly.

Sefton flung himself sideways. He hit something. Quill had missed him! His hands grasped air. He was going to fall! He got about half his body onto the crumbling edge. He felt it giving beneath him. He’d got so far-

Quill grabbed him under the armpits and heaved and rolled. He was up, and out. They were on solid ground and both stumbling quickly to their feet as they felt it start to give way too.

* * *

‘Don’t bloody let go!’ Costain bellowed at Ross.

‘Like I’d do that!’ She only had a few seconds before her arms gave out, a few seconds until the crumbling edge in front of her broke away and his weight dragged her with him. She should let him go. But she wouldn’t.

She heaved upwards, thinking only that she was giving her life for no good reason when she couldn’t actually save a colleague.

Then she felt Quill and Sefton join in. They grabbed Costain around the wrists and pulled too. The three of them managed to haul him up. They staggered upright. They dashed for the doors as the floor continued to vanish from under their feet. They burst through them together and the carpeted hallway disintegrated as they ran. They raced up the stairs, which fell away behind them too, until they were standing once more, safe, in an empty, evacuated, normal bar. They all looked back to the entrance to the staircase. It all suddenly fell away in one moment, leaving a gap in the floor which, with a slam, replaced itself with the same wooden flooring as the bar had.

They stood there, panting.

‘This level must be the last one that’s, you know, real,’ said Costain.

‘I think everyone else got out,’ said Quill, ‘including Neil Gaiman.’

‘Neil Gaiman was down there?’ said Ross. ‘The writer?’

‘Yeah,’ said Quill. He looked around. He found a sign that said ‘private function’. He put it where the stairwell had been. ‘Nice guy.’

* * *

There was nobody in the bar upstairs either. Ross felt tremendous relief. ‘I think Terry Keel must have got everyone out,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he knew where the damage would stop.’

‘Hell of a lawsuit,’ said Quill, ‘collapse of reality.’

‘Shall we put out the call for him?’ asked Ross. She found she had to sit down, and dropped onto a bar stool. She looked at the floor and concentrated on the conversation. She sensed them all doing that, all willing each other to come up with the next useful sentence.

‘Complicated. Do you fancy lying to a court about the exact circumstances of him assaulting a police officer?’

‘Or his brother being assaulted by a police officer,’ said Costain.

‘You what?!’ said Sefton. Ross glanced up at him. He had a pent-up, angry look on his face.

‘I meant me,’ said Costain quickly, ‘I meant me thumping him, all right? I wasn’t thinking of-’

‘In the circumstances,’ said Quill quickly, stepping between them, ‘I think you were acting to protect yourself and your colleagues, Tony. And you, Kev … well, I don’t know what happened down there. Did you know that was going to happen?’

Sefton shook his head.

‘As your superior officer, I’m not going to be calling any of that to anyone’s attention, not even Lofthouse’s, so the fault’s now mine, all right?’

Sefton remained silent.

‘So, no, I don’t think we should send the hue and cry after him. The other reason is that he still doesn’t know who me and Ross are, and he might well assume that you two died down there, and — unless his brother somehow got the word to him before he copped it — he still doesn’t know anyone there was a police officer. He could just go back to his normal routine. We know where to find him. We know he’s a good source of juice and we might need him later. Let’s not give him a reason to run.’ He moved a touch unsteadily towards the door. ‘Now, given all that’s happened, may I suggest a pint or two on the way home? Only not here, eh?’

* * *

Outside, breathing deeply of an evening that was still light, with curious passers-by looking at their charred clothes and obvious injuries, Ross felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up to see Costain looking seriously at her, holding her back a little distance from the other two.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘listen-’

‘It’s okay.’

‘What?’

‘I know what you’re going to say. I saved your life-’

‘Well, yeah, and thank you, but so did those two, that’s not what I was … Listen, do you want to go out for a drink?’

‘Yeah, bloody right now-’

‘No, I mean … I … think … okay this is what I texted you about.’ His gaze was darting all over her face. He looked so shaken. He was determined to get the words out. ‘Would you like to go out for a … drink. For dinner, maybe. With me. Tomorrow. That being Friday.’

Oh.

Oh no. Oh no. Absolutely not.

He was looking so seriously at her. There was something lost about it, something honest, as if he’d been shaken to the core and needed to tell her this. She knew she couldn’t trust how he looked.

But she found that she was smiling. On the verge of a laugh. Against her will. Sort of. She was shaken too. She was still, actually, shaking. This was the worst possible thing that she could do. She was laughing at herself.

But … she could still hold on to her secrets, couldn’t she? What, did she think she’d just tell him all he might want to know, just because they were on a date? She didn’t even know if he did want anything from her, besides the obvious. To think that was to think the worst of him.

Damn it. She wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted to hear him in private. She wanted to hear him try to get close to her. She wanted to have some closeness in her life, wanted to be able to choose whether or not to hold it off.

She was flattered. He was beautiful. She would stay in control. She would not tell him those things it would be disastrous for him to hear.

She would find out if he was indeed hoping to discover those things.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Okay.’