London Falling (25 page)

None of them could.

‘We didn’t believe it when we came in here,’ he said. ‘Or we thought it’d be easy. If it was as easy as that, we’d be fine.’

They heard a noise in the darkness, and they all fell silent. And there it was again. A footstep on the stairs.

‘Sometime in the 1870s,’ said Sefton, ‘and this is just what a short story from the 1930s says, there were these . . . these two penniless sailors who’d heard all the previous stories, only they were too poor to care, and they—’

The footstep again, closer now. That door they couldn’t see would soon open.

‘—they broke in here, ’cos it was empty, and they stayed the night. They lit a fire. They fell asleep. And one of them woke up and he heard—’

Another step.

‘That’s what he heard: something on the stairs. But, of us, it was just me that knew that. So you don’t need to know about this to experience it, so apparitions aren’t about what the people who see them believe—’

‘You should have told us all this,’ said Quill, ‘before we entered.’

‘Would that have made a difference?’ whispered Ross.

The sound of the door opening. Something stepped slowly towards them. It felt huge, but not focused in one place. Instead, it seemed to be all around them. Costain could sense it trying the air around the circle, pushing at it, trying his eyes too at the same time, testing his skin, trying to find any way in. Costain’s eyes strained to discern it in the absolute darkness. But it felt like it was all darkness at once, unknown and unknowable. Was this the smiling man? How would he react if it was him? Was the man coming for him now?

‘As long as the circle isn’t broken,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re fine. Believe that, ’cos it’s true. We can stand here all night if we have—’

Their phone text alerts all went off.

They all jumped simultaneously at the sudden noise. Costain let out a relieved breath. The tension was broken. Whoever that was was from
their
world, from the world of forms to fill out and warrant cards and cups of tea. It was probably the news about the DNA searches they’d been waiting for. It was like a torch they could hold up against the dark. Something
modern
. He took out his phone and defiantly hit the text from an unfamiliar number. He expected to see a proud announcement of success, of hope he could use to hold off this dark, even to hold up the screen and yell at whatever it was that they were closing in on it.

He stared at what the text actually said:

Any communication breaks the circle.

Costain looked down on hearing a sudden noise, and the others looked too. The circle had roared into a sudden, consuming flame.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Sefton.

The circle evaporated. The darkness rushed in.

Costain ran.

Behind him, he could hear shouting. He didn’t make it to the door.

As the darkness swept over him, Sefton bellowed in despair and threw himself flat. And then there was silence . . .

He waited. He raised his head slightly. He saw that his hand had landed across what remained of the circle. An ache in his palm told him that he’d snuffed out the fire on a small section of the ink line. And so he was still connected to it. Careful to keep his hand where it was, he looked around. Beside him, still as statues, caught in the act of shouting, stood Ross and Quill. Halfway across the room was Costain, frozen in mid-sprint. That was what had happened to the two sailors. One had run, the other had stayed, and been driven out of his mind to the point where he’d thrown himself out of the window.

As Sefton watched, he saw a tiny movement of Costain’s arm. Time was still going, then. Sefton was just experiencing it a lot more quickly than the others.
Nothing special about me. Must be because I’m still touching the circle. They’ve been caught by whatever this is.
He moved his hand a little, and saw the edge of it. He slid his knee up, until it was touching the line too. Then he lifted his hand quickly, ready to slam it down again.
Still fine.
He put one foot down on the ink by his knee, and managed to stand.
Okay.
He looked out into the darkness that had infested every inch of the space, like a darkened theatre around a bare stage set. The most haunted house in London. And he himself had led them here. Costain had been right about that:
Arrogance. You start to take a bit of charge of your life, and you go mad with it. You’re not used to it.
The Sight was now worked up to a pitch inside his head, pulsing out of everything around him. The darkness had bloody texted them! Had that been his fault, had him saying it made it happen? No, otherwise they could have
believed
their way out of it. It was the mass of opinion that mattered, he was sure of that now, unless you were one of those people who could surf that with words and gestures – or something like Losley’s lord, whose opinion seemed to matter more than other people’s. Oh, very British.

But not many people in London right now would know about the details concerning this place . . .
Oh. It must be the memories of the dead, too.
Somehow. That would suggest they were somehow still around, lingering in an . . . afterlife. But he didn’t want to credit that, because it went against everything he believed in, and what he believed was even more important now. Perhaps the dead also existed only as some sort of reservoir of memory held around London. He remembered the rising fear among his team as he’d told his story. It was as if they’d summoned something here, by using the Sight, in a chain reaction between what they expected and what collective opinion said about this place, and what they could see, which had then reached a moment when it went off the scale and kind of . . . shorted them out. If he hadn’t been touching the last bit of the circle, what would have happened to all of them?
People vanish in London all the time.
With his fumbling ‘experiment’, he’d brought them to the edge of that. So he had to get them out of it.
How?

He stared out into the dark, let himself get a flavour of it.

The roar of the engine underneath . . . a school bus. His school bus. Children, pressed all around, holding him down, his face against the floor, singing taunts round and round, batty boy posh boy homo, all in that accent he hated that was also him that time they’d made him eat fag ends, the walls of the bus locked around him, and the doors will never open—!

He stumbled, nearly fell off balance from where he was standing on the line, so had to take a mental leap back. He found his feet again, breathing hard. Okay, so when he looked into it, it was about himself. That was probably what the others were experiencing too. Costain would be getting another taste of what he’d decided was Hell. One way to muller a copper: take them off the grid. This was just fear pushed to the maximum. It was like being trapped under the surface of a frozen lake. It was what he’d felt inside Jack, but far worse. This was the perfection of the weight and terror of the crowd.
Just as well I’ve got freedom of thought, it’d really be hell if I couldn’t step out of it. The kind of stress that’d give you a heart attack. The others haven’t got long. I can’t walk into that, so what can I do?
At least it could only kill him. He didn’t think there was anything beyond death to be threatened with, and he felt that conviction was a strength here.

So this was
remembering.
The force of it was huge, like continents. It was older than everything. It flowed through everything. He wanted to utter something brave at it, to make a joke at it. He couldn’t, not just now.
What would it take to make it forget instead of remember?
He felt the answer emerge: to make something
forgotten
would take an enormous effort, a continuous effort during every moment. To do that was way beyond him. But instead of forgetting . . . what about trying to create a different version of what was remembered here, to remember not this horror but some of the other things this place had been or was meant to have been? Those memories wouldn’t be as powerful as the fear, for fear was always so strong, but . . . his research had also said this house was a den of criminals, counterfeiters, who used that fear as a cover. Okay, so they wouldn’t still be here as ‘ghosts’, because there was no legend, no memory of that; besides, he had to get rid of even the idea that there were ghosts here. He imagined instead the remains of coins discovered in the gaps in the floorboards, an exhibit commemorating it, maybe, a plaque on the wall outside, this place as a historical building, the infamous counterfeiter gang, with modern actors playing the roles, that manager downstairs laughing about how they get the crime tours coming through here . . . He made himself see the details—

And, for the first time, he felt the Sight pushing back against this world he’d found himself in. He could see these fragile things in his eyes now. Light had expanded from where he was, making a vulnerable space on the stage set. Knowledge was power, literally, in this city. He stopped himself from celebrating, because he knew this would last only seconds. He dared to step off the marker line. He grabbed Quill and Ross by one hand each. He started to drag them towards the door, pushing against the nightmares that confined them. Their faces were looking at things beyond him, their feet dragging along like reluctant toddlers. He pushed them into Costain, sent him, also, stumbling towards the door.

Four of them? They could have made their own circle, he realized, with a part of his mind he associated with deduction – with UC thoughts about what OCN shape was like. Only five would be better than four, the shape of the organization of five would be strong. Thoughts like these were being formed inside him by the sheer pressure around him, he suddenly understood: natural defences in operation, his persona finding a way.

But the fear was strong. The fear had more force. The fear had been thrown back and now was . . . going to come crashing in on them again!

He gathered them all with him, and
shoved
them at the door. They rushed through it together. They got over onto the other side. They fell in a heap. The door swung shut with a bang.

And suddenly the light in the corridor was again provided by a bulb. The four of them were just lying there, staring up at the bulb in its dusty lampshade. Sefton thought they must look like something from an old painting, with their clothes and their hands flung out in glorious abandon. He started to laugh, but then he bit down on it. He didn’t like the feel of where that reaction might take him. He was panting too hard, so he put a hand over his mouth and took smaller breaths. He felt aware of his own failure that had led him to this knowledge.

The others started to sit up, to look at him and each other. They were shaken to the core. Costain had his hands covering his face. Footsteps approached.
Footsteps on the stairs.
But no, no . . . not now.

The startled manager was peering at them. Slowly they got to their feet. Quill just nodded to her, no funny line appearing on his lips. Sefton just about managed to get himself down the stairs. The others stumbled down around him.

Costain found he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. He reached out to Ross for support, and appreciated that strong shoulder. He felt as if he was going to burst into tears or else throw up. Doing either would feel like death. He had seen it again. It had nearly had him again.

They went back to the pub. Costain put his hands on his pint but didn’t trust himself to lift it. He didn’t feel able to look at Sefton, even though the man had saved him. That was wrong. He looked at the other two, who were shaking as much as he was. ‘Headless fucking ghosts. As if!’ he said. ‘We had no idea. We’re not even rookies. We’re just . . . kids!’

‘We . . . we learned something.’ That was Sefton, looking angry and defensive. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; it’s what people believe, and—’

‘Shut the fuck up.’ And then the crushing limitations descended again. ‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘It’s okay—’ Quill began.

‘It’s
not
okay! We’re playing . . . cops and robbers because it
comforts
us. That’s all there is to it!’

Ross took Costain’s hands in hers. ‘What did we all see?’ she said. ‘I saw . . . my dad, over and over.’

‘I saw a lot . . . of fuckwittery concerning myself,’ said Quill, ‘about which I feel like suing someone. Pity, then, that it was all true.’

‘Complicated.’ Sefton shook his head. ‘I need to think about it.’

Ross looked back to Costain. ‘So what about you?’

He didn’t want to answer, but . . . this was still going to come out. It was beyond his control, and he hated that too. ‘I saw it again . . . what I saw in Losley’s attic. The place I’m . . . I’m going to.’

‘Hell,’ suggested Sefton, sounding like he wanted to say it out loud, but also sounding like he didn’t bloody believe it.

‘Back in the attic, you lot were being
sent
there, so maybe it appeared differently for you. I was just . . . getting there early, so I saw all the details. And I saw them again just now.’

‘No,’ said Quill, ‘we don’t do theology—’

‘Jimmy, we have to,’ said Ross.

‘That smiling bastard was there, too. And down there he felt like . . . like one of those gang enforcers who have done the really bad shit, the ones where you can see it in their faces that they can’t surprise themselves with how far they’d go, because there
is
no limit to . . .’ He had to stop. He was shaking so hard, it took him a moment to continue. ‘The sort that put blowtorches to informers’ feet. Every UC . . . we
think
about those guys, about ending up in the hands of one of them.’

‘Yeah,’ whispered Sefton.

‘He’s the biggest version going of one of those terrifying sods. He knew all about me, so I had no secrets I could give up to spare myself anything. He’s waiting for me when I die. I know he is, it’s just obvious. Does nobody get that?’

Sefton again nodded, grudgingly. ‘Yeah.’

‘And with him . . . there was this informer. Sammy Cliff, his name was.’ They were silent now, listening carefully. ‘He kept pretending he didn’t want my money. This is years before Goodfellow. He kept saying he was “on the side of the police”; that’s the catchphrase we joked about with him. Fucking little bike boy, user, dirty fucking hair, burns . . . that smell on his skin.’ He saw from their faces that they’d all known similar. ‘He kept saying how he was nothing, a pile of shit on the pavement; that’s what he once told me he was. When it became clear we weren’t going to get his boss, best we could do for him was not nick him. And it was bloody obvious to the gang, by the end, who the informer was. They can’t run anywhere, not kids like that. Their idea of running is going to a different mattress. He ended up with one of
those
blokes. They burned his feet off, worked upwards from there. They made a party of it, there were cans and condoms all over the warehouse. We heard all the details. So there he was, Sammy Cliff, waiting for me. He didn’t even look pleased. All he was there for was to wait his chance to see what had been done to him also being done to me. Forever.’