Vanished

CHAPTER 19

My hotel proved to have a rear courtyard and several service doors. As soon as I was sure there were no more watchers—at least none I could detect—I changed into more casual clothes and snuck off to the streets. I felt a little naked without my usual paraphernalia, but guns and my pocketknife were blatantly illegal in England for someone like me, and I’d left them in Seattle. I was at a distinct disadvantage against anything corporeal since I didn’t know the lay of the land or have anything but my brains and my fists if I got into a jam. The wiser course was to case the streets and find routes in and out of the area as well as places I could disappear to if the hotel became untenable.

I moved away from the open areas along the river where dallying crowds were not always enough to hide in. A couple of blocks up I crossed the Strand, pausing on a curious island in the stream of traffic where a small church of weathered white stone stood under a rippling canopy of leafy branches. There was a sign with something on it about the RAF, but I didn’t pause to read it so much as to catch my breath before I plunged back into the press of early summer tourists. An incredible range of voices and accents rang a complex peal on the air, and I was a little startled to notice how ethnically mixed the busy business folks and goggling tourists were. I had that American expectation that England was mainly peopled by white Anglo-Saxons, but London at least was more in the melting-pot mode. The city—its sounds, sights, smells—and the rippling effect of a thousand years’ worth of ghosts made me dizzy and I had to concentrate to stay on task.

It took a bit of looking to find a newsagent. The shops were narrow and varied wildly, from specialists in arcane materials and curious arts that had been in business since William and Mary, to bustling little food stands selling everything from spicy kebabs and curry to bacon sandwiches and cups of steaming tea. There were also lots of pubs with contingents of smokers relegated to the sidewalks with their cigarettes in one hand and their pints in the other, talking nonstop and blocking the pavement, unable to hear my “excuse me” over the roar of traffic and the babble of voices.

I finally found what I was looking for. The small shop sat next to a post office and advertised newspapers, magazines, books, and maps on its sign. Like many of the small, street-level businesses I’d already passed, it was more like a deep stall than anything else and empty of people except me and the cashier. Local maps and other aids for travelers were prominently racked near the front, so I went in and bought several as well as a small bottle of water and an energy bar. I asked the very young woman behind the counter about the address Edward had given me for his missing agent, John Purcell.

She squinted, her brow creasing crookedly where a piercing had been removed, and tilted her mouth to one side as she thought. Her hair was patchwork brown over a previous dye job that had left it a bit brittle. Green and blue glints shot through her aura like tiny shy fish. If someone had asked, I’d have guessed she was coming out of a broken relationship with a bad boy and a bad crowd. Her accent was decidedly less posh than those I’d heard at my hotel and her demeanor a little nervous.

“Jerusalem Passage? Not sure. Here, let’s look.” She flipped open the map book I’d just purchased and riffled through the street index until she found it. Then she flipped back to the appropriate page. “Oh, that’s Clerkenwell. Must be just north of the old priory gate. See,” she added, pointing to a convoluted quirk of streets near Clerkenwell Road and St. John Street, about half a mile northeast of where we stood.

I peered at the page and had difficulty picking out the narrow wiggling line of Jerusalem Passage. “It must be a very narrow street,” I thought aloud.

“It’s not a proper street,” the shopgirl said. “It’s a passage.”

I didn’t know the difference. “Is that like an alley?” I asked.

“Sort of, but not. It’s, umm. it’s a walkway. Not a promenade—not wide like that—and not like a regular pavement on the edge of a road. Just a footpath, not very wide, say. three people wide—or two fat German tourists.” She looked startled at what she’d said and lowered her head back to the map with a blush.

She studied the book for a moment and flipped it over to the Underground system map on the back before adding, “Not sure about the bus. The closest Tube station would be Farringdon, but you’d have to take the Circle line all the way round past Aldgate. Bloody pain that is.” She winced a little and glanced at me to see if I’d noticed before going on. “Much shorter to walk if you don’t mind it.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Good. Weather’s nice for it. Here, now. what’s the best way.?” she pondered.

Between us we worked out a route that was easy but not too ugly. “If you’ve a mind to, you could go up Hatton Garden to Clerkenwell Road instead of Charterhouse to St. John’s. It’s not so direct, but the jewelers are worth a glance.”

I looked at the map again. Purcell’s home was within a few minutes’ walk of a lot of “points of interest,” according to the map. Of course that was true for a lot of London addresses, but this one was old and close to a lot of economically important businesses that had been around since the city was young: the jewelers, the meat markets, the old business districts for cloth makers and brewers, and the hospital and medical school at St. Bartholomew’s among others. An ideal place for a vampire who managed the long-term investments of other vampires.

Of course, if Purcell was there, he wasn’t likely to be awake for hours, but he’d have to have some kind of daylight assistant I could track down. And if not, I’d look for records.

“Oh,” I started, “where would I find records of titles and deeds and things like that?”

“For Clerkenwell? Parish records to start, maybe at Clerkenwell Heritage Centre if it’s something old. They’d tell you where to go after that.”

I thanked her and headed out toward Fleet Street and Clerkenwell.

I’d read a lot of British mystery novels in my time, but I didn’t expect to see much that recalled the worlds of Christie or Sayers or Conan Doyle. But between the occasional high-rises, the roads were lined with buildings that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years, and the routes blazed with a millennium of coming and going worn deep into the ground but still shining upward. And the city sang.

The Grey makes a noise composed of the murmuring of ghosts and the vibration of power. Each city sounds different: Seattle mutters and rattles; Mexico City hums like feedback. London raised a mighty chorus over the bass drone of the river Thames. The power lines of the Grey were not laid in a neat grid, like Seattle’s wire-frame world, but in wild-hare directions and labyrinthine meanders that came together in knots of brilliant colored light. I couldn’t see them all, but I knew there were layers of history as thick and striated as sandstone beneath my feet, just as they were at the street level. The ghosts of buildings glistened over the surfaces of present structures, and phantom traffic choked the streets with oxcarts, horses, trams, and pedestrians. Most of the visions were from the eighteenth century onward, after the city had recovered from its own Great Fire, but promontories of older times and buildings long gone thrust up from below or floated slightly displaced by the actions of history and nature. Glimpses of fire caught my eye again and again. I shied the first time I heard the whistle of a falling bomb from the city’s memory of World War II.

I did not, in fact, dawdle through Hatton Garden, but took the more direct and higher-traffic way along Charterhouse to St. John, passing Smithfield Market’s painted iron arcades where meat and poultry were still sold fresh in huge loads. From the outside it reminded me a bit of the cliffside buildings at Pike Place Market, though Seattle’s famous produce markets didn’t hold a candle to the meat markets of Smithfield’s imposing quarter mile of whitewashed iron, brick, and glass, gleaming in the early summer sunshine. I turned up St. John, dodging cars, trucks, pedestrians apparently bent on suicide, and phantom herds of cattle swarming toward their historical demise. As I diverged from the hectic intersection into the upper part of St. John’s Lane, the noise and traffic dropped to a distant babble.

Looking around as I walked, I thought Clerkenwell must have been a much quieter town before it was eaten by London. It was tall and narrow and had the feeling of age, layered as it was with phantom monks and people in rich, ancient clothes, struggling against a tide of newer ghosts from the rise of the Victorian middle class and the bombings during the Second World War, all threading through the busy spectral streets. If I’d thought the area I’d walked through earlier had a lot of pubs, lower Clerkenwell had it beat hollow, and the ghostly crowds of muscular men that gathered around the present pub doors were thick and well-worn into the neighborhood’s history. As I walked up the road, getting closer to the dark squares on my map marked ST. JOHN’S PRIORY, the shades of history grew more pastoral and the dominance of the church felt like the chill of an open crypt.

The old priory gate at the top of St. John’s Lane was a yellow brick and stone structure of arches and squat, square towers that cut across the road as if it might have once held massive turnstiles to control the traffic of people and beasts coming down from the fields to the north. The uprights and plaza stones of the gate glowed with a soft, red energy that rose from the ground like fog—vampires must have been in the neighborhood for a long time but without raising much notice, judging by the unusual form of the magical residue. That was interesting.

I passed a tall, narrow arch neatly wedged between two tall, thin buildings nearby. The words PASSING ALLEY were carved into the white plaster, and from the corner of my eye I caught the same colorless glitter I’d spotted near Temple Underground Station. I turned my head away, as if checking the address on the nearest building. Then I looked back, peering down the alley as my gaze passed over it. A bit of white floated back into the distant murk of the covered alleyway, but the shadows were persistent and the Grey remained a smear of silvery mist curiously impenetrable. Not a vampire, but there was something there—or more to the point, something pretending not to be there.

I turned and went on as if I’d noticed nothing. Whatever it was would have to come out into the sun and follow me through the open squares on each side of the priory gate if it wanted to keep up.

As I went through the arch of the old church, I pulled out my cell phone and held down the button that activated the camera in video mode. Keeping my hand down, I pointed the tiny lens behind me and kept walking through the narrowest part of the gate and across the square. I crossed Clerkenwell Road and stopped in a sunny plaza paved in bright white stone—some kind of marble maybe—with a dark circle laid around the edge as if there used to be some small building there that had long since vanished and left only its footprint in the road. A tall, dim hole in the old brick wall on the north of the open area was identified as JERUSALEM PASSAGE by a neat, tin sign. I brought the phone up to my face and took a quick look at the video capture.

The figure was difficult to see, not because of the low quality of the video but because it wasn’t entirely present in the normal realm. It was also black and white where everything else was color and very vague around the edges. But there wasn’t any doubt that the eerie thing was following me. I wasn’t sure if anyone aside from myself could see it and I wondered what it would do once I entered the narrow confines of the walkway ahead. I didn’t want to turn and confront it just yet. This was far too open and public a place for that to be wise if the thing wasn’t corporeal.

Tense with anticipation, I entered Jerusalem Passage. But even turning back when I came to an unlighted corner, I saw and felt nothing behind me. I walked on, uphill through the twisted route. Occasional slashes of light came down through breaks between the overhanging roofs, spotlighting the low-ceilinged shops and tiny cafés tucked into the buildings along the narrow route.

Just at the bottom of a flight of stone steps, I found the address I was looking for. A bronze bellpull on a chain hung from a bracket beside the small, dark green door, which was adorned with a complementary knocker in the shape of a swan. The light was dim enough that looking round for trouble wouldn’t seem strange, so I did. Still no sign of the glittering thing.

I used the knocker on the tarnished bronze plate attached to the door. Something rustled on the other side and the upper part of a phantom face pushed through the surface. It was unthreatening to me, just taking a look, and I took it for some kind of ghost-powered alarm or majordomo. Then it sank back, leaving a tiny ripple on the door’s lingering Grey surface.

Clanking and scraping sounds came from inside, and in a moment, the door creaked open. I had to stoop to see into the low, dark opening. An odor like old gym socks and unwashed dishes wafted out. I clamped my teeth over an urge to gag and tried to smile.

A thin man with his back and shoulders permanently bent into a crouch peered out at me. His face was unlined, yet he seemed old, and the energy colors around him were scarlet and muddy blue-green.

“Whatcher want?” he demanded, his voice like the shrieking of unoiled iron hinges.

“I’m looking for John Purcell.”

“Master Purcell’s gone out.” He pronounced the name “PURSE-el.”

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know.”

“Then, when did he leave?”

“What business is it of yourn?” he snapped, narrowing his eyes and showing sharp, yellow teeth.

“I have some business with Mr. Purcell on behalf of a friend in the US.”

“We’re not in trade with colonials,” he declared, and moved to slam the door.

I ducked and put my shoulder into the opening, levering my weight against the carved planks and feeling the alarm-ghost imprisoned in the wood writhe away from the contact. The crooked man on the other side pushed back with considerable strength, but I dug in and shoved, forcing my body through the gap and bulling my way inside. The thin man plunged against my absence, unable to correct his drive to close the door, and ended up slamming it shut behind me. The bolts and latches clanked into place, locking me in the room with him.

The building must have dated from a time when anyone my height was a giant, and I could feel cobwebs from the ceiling snatching at my hair. The room was dark as the inside of Jonah’s whale. But I had no time to study it before the man leapt at me, snarling.