Vanished

CHAPTER 30

He turned and started briskly out of the boat basin, his white cane out but obviously more for show than use. I followed and caught up quickly with my long stride.

We went around the railroad tracks and under part of the new train station and came up in front of a broad flight of steps that led to an elaborate iron and gilt gate with a small church visible through its arch. SP had been worked into the black-painted iron filigree above the locked gates and picked out in gold leaf. A plaque mounted beside them identified the building beyond as ST. PANCRAS OLD CHURCH. Marsden stopped close to the gates. Then he shimmered, went thin, and walked through.

“Come in, girl. They’ll be waking up soon to do their own dirty work.”

I looked into the graveyard. The shadows were growing long as dusk fell, but the cemetery in my sight was a field of colored lights, close packed and spiking upward like searchlights reaching for the sky while a tangle of Grey power lines surged beneath it. For a place of the dead, it was one of the liveliest in London. Reluctant, I sank into the Grey and found a temporacline where the gates stood open and rusted. I stepped through and pulled back from the Grey.

The churchyard was busy with ghosts. They pressed in closer than the rush-hour commuters on the Tube had. Marsden led me deeper into the cemetery to a large stone tomb that stood in its own little oval of lawn behind its own iron fence. Marsden slipped through it and crossed the lawn toward the tomb, which looked a lot like an oversized stone phone booth with a tiny Grecian temple in it and a big stone block inside that. Feeling like a trespasser, I followed him until we were both standing beside the memorial stone of one Sir John Soane, an architect with rather odd taste in monuments, and his family. The silence under the stone roof was profound—even the Grey chorus of the city was distant—and it was empty of everything but the two of us.

“Hundred years ago,” Marsden started in a low voice, “this churchyard was three times the size it is now. Reached near to the Euston Road. Then they built a railroad and exhumed the bodies—well, some of ’em. They moved the stones from the lower churchyard to the inner churchyard. There weren’t enough room for ’em all, and a lot of the coffins was rotten or they had none to begin with, so they lined ’em up in trenches or mass excavations or just dumped ’em all in one big hole and made the memorial stones look as nice as they could. Some of them dead was nigh to fifteen hundred years in the ground, and they did not take well to the move. They’re restless. Just look out there; look at ’em movin’ about. You see how they’re clustered like prisoners round that tree and up that rise? Them’s the places that fool Hardy stuck ’em, pilin’ up the ghosts in batteries that could light half of England. This fella here, he wanted his rest quiet. So he built this. Grand and mad, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I doubt he quite knew what he was doing, but the way he had it made and the way it’s laid, the shape of it as it lies across the leys, makes a sort of eddy in the Grey. We’re surrounded by a fence of the supernatural but immune to its touch until we step out. The ghosts don’t even know we’re here, so they can’t grass on us to any snooping mages or sorcerers. So, what made Edward send you?”

“I don’t breach client confidentiality without a damned good reason.”

“Don’t play games with me, girl.”

“I think a game is exactly what you want. You keep alluding to my father and to answers, but you’re not giving any. What game are you up to? You show up from nowhere and you know too much. Then you vanish and suddenly there are demi-vamps on my tail.”

“’Twasn’t my work as done that.”

“Really? How did you know where to find me today? Or yesterday?”

“I told you—I had a premonition. That’s one of my particular talents. Yours seems to be giving offense.”

“And here I thought it was attracting pains in the ass like you.”

Marsden’s pale, eyeless face was smooth and cool as the stones we stood on. For once I couldn’t see someone grinding ideas and lies into a response, but he was thinking. After a moment, he spoke again, chuckling a bit.

“He’s lost his control.”

“Excuse me?”

“Edward. He sent you to Purcell. But Purcell’s not there. The empire is failing—he’s been pulling strings in London for a dog’s age, but they’ve been cut, haven’t they? Edward’s panicking. He hasn’t any more idea what’s going on than you do.”

“And you do?”

“In no wise.”

“Then how do you propose to help me?”

He laughed. “I’m not here to help you, girl. I’m here to stop you.”