The Unblemished (18 page)

You? A moderate?

– Don't bait me, Malcolm. I won't rise to it. I did what I had to do
to gain attention. They know who I am. They know of my dedication
and my wish to subjugate myself to the new Egg-layer. I will be with
my Queen and together we will oversee the coming of a new generation.
London will be our spawning ground, and may the shit that
survives know what it means to scrabble in the sewers for a living for
centuries to come.

The new Queen. Where is she? Who is she?

– Oh, come, come, we both know the girl who is hosting her. I
know you've taken a shine to her.

You mean it's growing inside her? Inside Cl–?

– Names mean nothing to me. She is who she is. We are who we
are. Names are for dinner parties. She will be with me.

But ...

– There are no more lines for you to recite. The final curtain is
there for you to take. The audience is on its feet for you.

I don't want to leave.

– The Thames will run red, Malcolm. The infamy that is English
litter will be replaced by scraps of rotting bodies. Skeletons will adorn
the high street shops like Christmas decorations. It will be a festival
for the carnivores. For our spurned people. We return. We rise
again. And this time there will be no inferno, no scourge, to stop us.
They're like the plague
bacillus
, Malcolm. And there's irony for you.
Hiding in old, unknowable places. If you disturb it, it will come
again. You can't. You won't be a part of it.

I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE. I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE. I
DON'T WANT TO LEAVE.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 21:01

Subject: a wrnng 2 th wse

1 of us is cmng 4 u. b wtchfl

London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and irksome banishment;
Yet since call'd back; henceforward let me be,
O native country, repossess'd by thee!
For, rather than I'll to the west return,
I'll beg of thee first here to have mine urn.
Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall;
Give thou my sacred relics burial.

Robert Herrick,
His Returne to London

A violet sky, the colour of which seemed to be leaking out of the
corner of Bo's eyes, flapped and shivered like the mainsail of a
ghost ship. The smell of fire, or its sour aftermath, clung to his
nostrils. He felt he might be dying. Let that happen, please God, if
this was the map taking hold, digging the colour of its roads into his
veins and arteries. He couldn't settle on anything else. Even his
obsession to find Vero was distracted by the map as it displayed its
forgotten corners to him. It was like hunger. It drove away any other
thought. He gave himself to the visions in the middle of thinking how
he might combat them. He was swamped by the map's need to
disburden itself to him of great reams of information. He couldn't
receive it all, never mind process it. His nose began to bleed now as
he was shown a place of staggering shadows, a place so vast that he
could not quite see its ceiling. What he thought he saw when the
light swelled enough to suggest glimpses of architecture made him
wish for utter dark. He felt the concept of time dissolve around and
into him. He became what he was looking for. He became the dust
and sap that filtered down from that unholy roof. The map forced
him to look.

Masons chisel the freestone freshly quarried, it being easier to
work then, before the air hardens it. The stone responds well to the
labourers' tools; freestone will not split into layers. The masons dress
it into ashlar with scappling irons and carry the blocks countless miles
to the site where stone and bone shall be melded. They built the
sexapartite ribbed vault from the bones of bodies, the same people
who had begged the ancient breed for help to fight the pestilence in
their city and then spurned them. There are many men here at this
secret cathedral. They catch oysters from the riverbanks and use the
shells, along with splintered chunks from their victims, to pack the
gaps between the ashlar skins as the walls rise. The men stand on
withies, adding to the scaffold as the muscles of the cathedral are put
in place. Nobody speaks. The air is too thick with dread. They want
the job finished so they can go back to the quarry, where life is a
known quantity, and there are no shadows cast where men do not
walk, nor whispers where there are no mouths to bear them. The
labourers have been sworn to secrecy at their task, and threatened
with the removal of tongues if they should wag. The money is good.
The masons keep quiet. But some of them cannot bear the strain of
working under such conditions. The sound of bone splitting, of
people tearing open under unspeakable pressures and stresses, gets to
some of them. They whisper prayers into the putlocks ranged across
the walls, as if the scaffolds that will plug into them might lock away
their secrets and grant them reprieve from nightmares.

The sound of screaming men being bent and twisted into position
high above the baying choir had been like angelsong to the ears of the
breed ravaged by the Great Fire; it encouraged them to work faster, to
hasten the day of their return, their revenge. And their work was lost
under the weight of so much other industry. Churches were returning
to London's skyline. This was just one more spire, one more
reparation.

The roof was secured by great brackets that were joined to a series
of cogs and wheels that were turned to take up the slack as the bodies
spoiled and fragmented. The sound of moist bone grinding as the
buttresses cosied up to it was satisfying to the breed. Now that the
dead could no longer scream, they mimicked the sounds of their
distress as they were bolted and strapped against the beams, their
heads forced into gaps half their size, their spines wrenched out of
their bodies as racks ratcheted them into tiny crevices: live wadding
to seal any fissures. Others were trapped in giant vices and had their
femurs removed: they were forced to watch, forced to stay awake,
until the macerated network of veins and arteries around that large
bone had flooded the area with life. The breed ran around beneath
these human materials, mouths open to catch the red rain that pelted
from their opened bodies. They fashioned a crude organ from the
bones they harvested and danced and fucked to its dire melodies.

None of the replacement cathedrals and churches built in the
capital after the ash had been swept away and the smoke had cleared
were perfectly square or symmetrical; Londoners were desperate for
services to continue and prayed while the walls were unfinished. So
the new walls were built around the old, which were taken down
later, making it impossible to provide direct measurements. Work
always began in the east of the building because the choir was based
there, and this was the part of the church used by the clergy. Their
money made these areas things of rare beauty. The nave belonged to
the townspeople and was left as it had been, or refitted at a much
later date, and more modestly, if at all. Some places of worship do not
even have a nave.

The Black Cathedral has no nave. It has no choir. No transept. It
has a crypt, where its dead lie, and those who survived nestled against
them to sleep. A train of wet, putrescent vertebrae provide hood
moulds over the top of the windows. Unknown, unknowable ymagers
have carved profane riots of physical depravity into the columns,
padding through the church at bleak hours when all were sleeping, or
struggling with dreams. Blood has been trodden into the floor for so
long that it is the colour of mahogany.

Come aestivation, the cathedral was ready, its guardians in place.
Having gorged, they dispersed like the clock seeds from dandelions
opening in the capital where the cleansing fires had spawned rich,
fertile ground. They slept, and the fury turned to mud in their veins.

It would still be there when they wakened, centuries later.

The weather worsened. It became difficult to know when daylight
began or ended because the skies were so close and grey, so
loaded with rain, and lasted until true dark. Winter moved through
the air like a dog in mist.

Bo listened to the cries outside the window and tried to immerse
himself in a paperback, shivering as the cold penetrated the shop, his
bones. He was wrapped in his own clothes, his biker jacket and the
sleeping bag, but it didn't really help. It was as if the cold was
emanating from within him. He felt sleepy, at times hollowed out, at
times filled with sharp wires. The words swarmed like disgruntled
insects on the page.

He wondered about Sammy, whether he was now dead. How pale
he had been. Blood had settled in his foot, bloating it slightly, turning
it the colour of ripe Victoria plums. His hair had turned the colour of
snow. He imagined Sammy's heart turned to chalk in his chest. The
lid had come off Sammy Dyer's little box of private terrors and he
could find no way of slapping it back on. Since the appearance of
Charles Bolton in Sammy's flat, there had been a steady diminishing
in the man. No wonder, since he'd been forced to accept that a
breathing corpse had been sharing what he believed was a bachelor
pad for so many years.

The words he was trying to read shifted again, as though still in the
process of being written. A sentence leaped out at him. He read:
He is
here
, before it morphed into something far less threatening. Something
about toast and honey and strawberry-coloured light on a porch.

There was the unmistakeable sound of the rotten wooden door being
tested. He heard it moving against its makeshift barricade a couple of
times and then splitting as whoever it was sought ingress. Bo put down
his book and moved to the staircase. He slipped up to the first floor,
checking out of the landing window on the way, but the yard was
already empty. Now Bo felt his nerves come alive. Whoever it was knew
what he wanted. He had purpose. This was not some random break-in.

He hoped it might be Laurier, come to save him and God knew
who else, from himself. A police cell was an attractive proposition. It
would be nice to go to bed at night and know that he wouldn't be
able to do anything in his sleep beyond crack his head against the
locked door. But Laurier would not come on his own. There would
be police cars. It would be early in the morning. There would be an
almighty racket when they slammed the doors down.

This someone was here to kill him.

He is here ...

1 of us is cmng 4 u. b wtchfl.

He was not ready for this. He was barely able to look after himself
in the day-to-day grind of staying alive, let alone defend himself. 'Be
watchful'. He had been anything but. He thought that by closing the
door he could close off any involvement, oblique or direct, with
whatever was being marshalled in London's streets. Burying himself
in fiction might mean that what was building out there wasn't real.

He heard footsteps gritting through the narrow corridor that
connected the front of the shop with the rooms at the rear. He heard
something grinding that reminded him of uneven layers of iron
wound too quickly into a vice in his old metalwork classes at school.
Pages fluttered. He imagined the figure feeling the residual heat of
Bo's fingers on the jacket of the book he had been reading and
knowing he was in the building. He was taking his time, aware that
he had Bo cornered.

Eventually, footsteps came up the stairs. Bo readied himself. He
understood, at a strange level, that the person approaching him was
part of who Bo was becoming.

'London is a weak city,' came a voice, and it was nothing like Bo
had imagined. It was muffled, wet, tortuous. He was put in mind of
John Hurt's voice for John Merrick in
The Elephant Man.

'It has endured for centuries,' the voice continued, 'but it's all
husk, all wrapper and tinsel. The foundations of the place are as light
and crumbly as old bone. This city is diseased, blind, burned. She's
suffered pox, plague, cholera, leprosy. She's been bombed to fuck.
She's made so many comebacks she doesn't know which way to face.
She doesn't know when to call it a day.

'"When Trinovantum is on its knees, a new Queen shall come
forward." This was to be our call to arms, the moment we could rise
up and take our revenge on the city that betrayed us.'

The voice had become strong, cocky even, but Bo sensed an uncertainty
behind the delivery. The other man was fearful of him, to some
degree. Otherwise why wasn't he up here now, spilling blood?

'You know all this, deep within you. You feel it. You will take us
into that promised land because you are the only one who can see
where its borders begin. We shall follow you.'

He said the word 'follow' slowly, and Bo could almost see
the sneer on his lips as he did so. They were thick, cruel lips, he
decided, like those of various villains in the old James Bond novels he
had read as a teenager. Grey, liverish, with gravestone teeth behind
them.

'But I follow
nobody
,' the voice went on. And it was closer now.
And Bo realised he had been mistaken. He had been tricking himself
into thinking that he held some clout in this strange shadowline
between worlds, that being in possession of the map gave him the
kind of leverage that might stave off his death. But no such luck. This
man, coming for him, was no more afraid of Bo than Bo was afraid
of hot drinks. He was so certain of his superiority that he was
comfortable about exposing his position. Stealth did not matter. He
could, and would, do the job nakedly.

Bo's focus ranged around the room as he desperately sought a
weapon or a way out. The window was double-glazed, and locked
with an Allen key; it had not been left next to the lock for future
residents. Then it must be downstairs, perhaps in a saucer in the
kitchen, or in the cutlery drawer; the usual places where such
paraphernalia ended up.

'There's no point in trying to run,
Messiah.
Even if you could
outpace me, you give yourself away at every turn just because of who
you are. It is now in your nature. You are as readable, as accessible,
as that map you carry. I'm here to rip it from you, like an organ from
its cradle of tissue. You are not deserving, and I do not acknowledge
you.'

No weapons. Nothing to hide in or behind or under. No hatch into
the attic. No secret door. Bo stole to the window and tried it. Locked.
The Ninja was like some fabled green steed, nosing for the gate,
achingly beyond reach.

A curtain rail offered the only possible weapon. He wrenched it
from the wall and, as he did so, it dragged against the lintel, and what
was resting upon it.

He heard the creak of the floorboard outside the door as he was
working the Allen key into its special little hole. Bo slammed the heel
of his hand into the frame and the window popped open. He was
dangling from the ledge, preparing himself for the shock of the drop,
but unable to let go until he had glimpsed the other man, fixed him
in his thoughts.

The figure bested the black slab of the open door and swung his
gaze towards Bo. A scarf was wrapped around his lower jaw. A pair
of narrow oblong sunglasses obscured his eyes. He was lean, wolfish.
His head was close cropped to the extent that Bo could see the
beautiful shadows of its planes and angles, like something sculpted.
His skin was as smooth and as flawless as China silk.

It was the symmetry of that face, rather than the iron in Bo's will,
that sent him spinning off the ledge.

He landed hard, awkwardly, his left foot folding back under his
leg as he spilled to the cracked concrete flagstones. He drew himself
upright, gritting his teeth to the jags of pain that were trying to daub
black grains behind his eyes, and fished in his pocket for the Ninja's
keys.

'Where will you run to,
Messiah
? I'll stand here and admire the
view, and I'll know. I'll always know.'

Bo kick-started the Kawasaki, almost fainting as his leg turned to
fire. He slumped against the bike and, if it hadn't been for the cold
slap of metal against his face, he thought he might have slipped off
the bike and given himself to whatever the scarf-man wanted to do to
him.

But the engine roared and, for the first time since he bought it, he
was grateful for its insane acceleration. He snapped a look up to the
window as he trundled the bike out into the alley. The strange figure
was insouciantly waving him good-bye, leaning over the ledge like a
neighbour having a chat.

Bo blew him a kiss and ramped up the throttle, left him behind in
a cloud of angry black litter and dust.