London Falling Page 13

  Sefton saw his body flying away from him, and was rigid with fury in the nothingness that was now himself. It had all been taken from him with such ease, like something stolen and thrown over his head. She had all power over him. The word she’d used: ‘sodomite’ indeed! The distaste in her voice as she looked at him and judged him. There was power all around him, and he couldn’t get his hands on it. He couldn’t speak. Just as always, he couldn’t change anything. Just as always, he needed to understand it in order to use it, but for now he had to hide from it, and there wasn’t time, because it had him in its grasp.

  Costain turned as he fell, and saw what he was falling towards, and he started scrabbling to grab purchase on air and, when he couldn’t, he started to scream.

  Quill looked down, too, when he heard the screaming, and saw the nothingness below him. It was a void that seemed to stretch in impossible directions, beyond the ability of his eyes to encompass it. The floor warped into it at its outer fringes. Something that felt hot and dangerous, like an invisible fire, streamed up from this void, and he was aware of a terrible gravity to it, as if he was in a nightmare and this was the mouth that would finally eat him, no matter what he did.

  He looked up again, and was startled to realize that he was seeing his own body now as it bumped up against the ceiling; that he really was outside that body; that there was somehow more to him than had been contained in that same body.

  It was so far away from him now. He didn’t know how he could get back to it. He desperately needed to.

  He remembered Toshack heating up in that interview room, and he felt himself heating up now – saw his body up there starting to glow with it. What had happened to Toshack then, what he hadn’t been able to comprehend properly back then: that was what was happening to him now.

  But that was weird, wasn’t it? He was still feeling the heat, though it was his body way up there that was being heated up. The same thing was happening to both entities, and he now doubted that some sort of hole in the floor had really opened up underneath him, whatever ‘really’ meant in these circumstances. No, this was all inside his brain: this was him sort of seeing what was going on, him being pulled out of his body. And that extraction wasn’t over yet, because there was the heat thing going on for both of them, so there must still be some sort of connection between the two.

  He did it without thinking: shifted mentally from one foot to the other, a copper trying to quickly find his balance—

  And he was back inside his body, with a sickening feeling of his heart or his guts now stretching away below him, and an immediate horrifyingly painful sensation that he really was about to explode. And that nearly made him step out again, but—

  He could see with his real eyes now, the real room below him, and he remembered what she’d said about having to clean the soil, and he wasn’t going to be able to hold it in much longer, anyway, and he knew nothing about how any of this worked, but—

  He reached down, his fingers feeling huge, inflamed. He could hear the screams of the members of his unit around him. There were only seconds left before they hit whatever it was way down there, and then their blood would erupt from them volcanically, as it had erupted out of Toshack. That thing that was Losley had turned its back on them, was walking back towards her red door, the cat following at her feet, as if they didn’t matter any more, not even the exultation in killing them. He managed to grab his zip and pull. He managed to tug his dick out of his trousers. ‘Here, Mora!’ he bellowed, with every ounce of London in him. ‘I piss on your West Ham!’

  And he let fly onto the soil.

  Ross cried out as she flew back into her body. She had a second to grab hopelessly for a ceiling joist, and then she fell again, and had a moment to gauge how far it was before she landed, managing to take the brunt of it on her legs. The others dropped like fruit around her, shouting wildly as they landed, bouncing and rolling on the thick furs. She lay there in pain, but adrenalin was already shouting at her to get up. For a moment she wondered if this nightmare was over, if they’d look around now to find that that thing was gone.

  But, no, there she was, turned to look at them, her mouth open, staring at them in horror. Ross roared inside to see it. The bitch was surprised.

  Meanwhile, thunderclouds were boiling their way out of that pile of soil, like special effects in forties Technicolor.

  Quill hauled himself to his feet, and zipped himself up. ‘Mora Losley . . .’ he began again, and this time he was yelling it.

  He had to yell it because now, rising from all around them, there came an enormous rumbling noise. Was this her power falling apart?

  ‘Modern . . . children!’ she bellowed. ‘Who allows you this? You have no privilege! You have no idea! This is not how things are done!’

  ‘Fuck you!’ yelled Costain.

  She made a gesture and they all flinched, and just for a second Quill was sure that something had hit him, but then he saw that all her gesture had done was to grab the cat up into her arms. ‘I am not limited by such as you!’ she shouted above the noise. ‘I have more soil! I will live as I have always lived. I will do as I have always done. In the past it has been my pleasure sometimes to show mercy, but now you must be taught! I will continue to support my football club! I will kill any player who scores three against them! Try to find me, try to change the way things have always been, and my lord will have you!’

  She and the cat somehow folded together . . .

  And vanished on a dark wing that roared away through Quill’s head. And rushed out though that impossible door.

  He looked round at the others. They’d all felt it. They were looking around them desperately, afraid of their own fear, not quite believing they’d escaped, still aware of that enormous noise around them. A shout from Sefton made Quill look up again. Something odd had started to happen to the walls: they were buckling inwards. The pieces of furniture were shoving themselves up against each other. It was all starting to fall towards that red door, which still lay open, like the plughole which the room was starting to revolve around, as it began to suck everything inside it, downwards into . . .

  Quill looked to the trapdoor.

  Even as he looked, it warped and slowly started to spin its way up the wall.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ he yelled to the others. ‘Leg it!’

  To Quill’s enormous relief, they did.

  They threw themselves down through the trapdoor, and landed hard on the floor below. ‘Out!’ shouted Quill to the forensics shift. ‘Out!’ So now others were running with them, uniforms and forensics in crime scene suits, like a bomb was about to go off. They ran for the stairs, which were folding in on themselves, and were even harder to see and understand now, and they fell down them and rolled, and the uniforms helped them up and rushed down around them, nimbly navigating all the impossibilities.

  The child’s head fixed on the top of the banister was screaming, and the shape of it was starting to peel off into a long ribbon of flesh that led back up into the twisting, knotting building. Up ahead there was the front door . . .

  . . . racing away from them. Receding into the far distance at the end of an impossible corridor, as space stretched under this strange new gravity. Uniforms were running out through it, receding with it. This trap was intended just for the four of them.

  Quill turned on his heel, grabbed a fur from the floor, wrapped it around him. He made sure the other three saw what he intended, then he flung himself at the nearest window.

  The crashing glass expanded slowly outwards. They were escaping something dreamlike and hugely gravitational which was trying to haul them back inside. They burst out of the house as if it was a dying universe, slowly, slowly, reaching the limit of where it could hold on to them . . .

  And they were in the frosty night air, above the passage running along one side of the house, and everything was real again.

  They heard the distant slam of that impossible door. The entire contents of the h
ouse had now fled through it.

  And they fell and hit the ground hard, again, and lay there together, gasping, and the window threw itself back together, and the house vanished towards a point that hurt their eyes.

  And then it was gone, heading somewhere into the fine structure of the night.

  As they lay there, Quill realized he was still holding a scrap of dirty carpet. It evaporated a moment later into a billow of dust.

  Slowly, they picked themselves up. A uniform peered around the corner of a wall. ‘The evacuation’s complete, sir. How far back should I set the perimeter, sir?’ Urgency and disbelief were fighting on his face. Behind him, Quill could see the big lights of the TV crews coming back on.

  Quill turned round to look at what they had just escaped from.

  Where a moment before there had been a sort of vacuum, an ordinary house had reappeared. Ordinary to his eyes now, too.

  From which all the weight and horror had vanished.

  ELEVEN

  Quill led them back into the house. The skull was still there on the newel post, but it wasn’t a head any more. It looked perversely dull in comparison, simply mundane. So did the soil upstairs. Perhaps this ‘Sight’ had now left them all? He hoped that was the case.

  She had been in this house all the while it was searched, hiding behind a door that existed only for her. They had then made her retreat, through mere instinct and accident.

  He shut down all these questions and allowed the forensics shift immediately back into the house. Emergency over. His mistake. He was aware of the forensics shift and the uniforms looking startled to the point of laughter: what had all that been about? He couldn’t satisfactorily answer them, so he bundled his team into a marked car and they got the hell out of there.

  An hour later, Quill stood again outside the Portakabin, and listened on his mobile to his home phone ringing. He thought he could see dawn approaching, or maybe that was just something weird over there towards the east. Because the drive here had shown them that they most definitely all still had the Sight, whatever that meant. His hands were shaking.

  The world was much more terrifying than anyone had known – and it had been pretty terrifying before. He had called Sarah intending to . . . what? Warn her? Tell her not just ghosts actually, love, witches too? Nobody would believe them. She wouldn’t believe him either.

  Just in the moment before he switched off the connection, he thought maybe he heard the phone being picked up, but she didn’t call him back.

  The others were sitting in the Portakabin, drinking strong sweet tea, not speaking, not looking at each other. In the car they’d kept their eyes closed, pretending they were trying to sleep. Quill felt the same great tiredness, but knew no sleep would come. He’d suffered from shock before. He sat down alongside them.

  ‘“Sodomite”?’ said Costain, as if it had just occurred to him, looking at Sefton.

  Sefton looked long and hard at him. ‘You didn’t know?’

  Costain shook his head. Sefton kept the look going.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Sefton finally and looked away.

  Quill had known it, actually, but he didn’t think now would be a great time to chime in. He went over to a cupboard and found some blankets, and put them round everyone’s shoulders. He pulled a blanket around himself as well. They all fell silent again.

  After a while, Quill realized that he could see something from across the room. See something with the Sight he still possessed. The realization made him tense again, in a horrible way. But no . . . no, it was just something inside here, not her walking through the wall. It was something on the Ops Board. He got up, feeling cold inside his stomach, and went to see. It was Losley’s photo, passport-sized. It now showed her as she . . . he hesitated to think the word, but no . . . as she really was. He made himself examine that face. Good to be able to do that, with the real Mora Losley. She didn’t actually administer poison or have burly nephews. He went to get a file from the table serving as his desk, and he pulled out the season-ticket records. The date of her first registration, 1955, now glowed dully, completely obscuring another date beneath it. It suddenly came to him that there might be a similar type of glowing covering all those missing council tax and utility bills. This was a woman who could edit the world.

  He went back to look at the Ops Board. He hated the way it looked now, not just that it had her real face on it. It was lying to him. ‘This is what’s true,’ he said, without really knowing who he was talking to. Maybe to the board itself. He picked up a spool of black thread, and tacked a solid association line between Losley and a photo of Rob Toshack. And then he added a red victim thread as well, because she had also admitted to being his killer. Everything else, all the bullshit that they’d thought might have something to do with this case, he unpinned. He was left with just the prime suspect and those two strands of relationship. He looked up to find that the other three had stood up and joined him, also staring at the board as if it had betrayed them.

  ‘That’s not all we know,’ ventured Ross.

  Quill nodded to her to go ahead.

  Her hands shaking, she drew three wobbly stick figures in red on a piece of paper, inside a sketch of a cauldron. She pinned that below Losley, and connected them to her with a red victim thread. She wrote a heading ‘footballers and others’, and attached those to Losley as victims too, ready for the further detail to be filled in.

  ‘She said that Toshack made a sacrifice.’ Quill attached a victim thread from Toshack to a blank piece of card, and wrote a question mark on it. ‘More kids, like in the cauldron?’

  Ross stopped for a moment, taking that onboard. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘he was capable of that.’

  Costain stepped forward, too. He was looking the most stricken of any of them, and his whole body was shaking. He took the black thread, wrote ‘cat’ on a piece of paper, and connected Losley to that also. Then he did the same for ‘mistress’, and placed it above her. He looked as if he was doing this on autopilot.

  ‘“My mistress’ blessed soil”,’ noted Quill, doing his best to sound approving.

  ‘Who owns West Ham?’ asked Ross.

  Quill looked it up. Mostly a bank in Iceland. No women on the list.

  ‘What about that . . . head . . . on the stairs?’ said Sefton.

  ‘We’re listing pets,’ said Quill, ‘so why not furniture?’ He pinned up another heading and threaded the connection. Just seeing the board filling up like this, he realized, was making him feel slightly better. Mora Losley was the missing element that connected all the outlying oddities of their investigation, as Ross had perceived it. Losley had been all the ‘freelancers’ Rob Toshack required to make his firm function. She was the suspect that all those murders stretching way back spoke of.

  Costain took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said, then used another black thread to connect Losley to yet another card above her. ‘Lord,’ he wrote on it. And on the card beneath it, he added ‘pleasant face’ as a description.

  ‘“My lord will have you”,’ said Quill.

  ‘I reckon that’s what she was trying to do at the house,’ said Costain. ‘To sacrifice us. Give us to her lord. What did you lot see below you, when our bodies were . . .?’ He gestured, seeming to have reached the end of his ability to talk about it.

  ‘Like . . . something out of The Sky at Night,’ suggested Quill. ‘My own personal black hole.’ He looked to the others, and they nodded.

  ‘I saw . . . a lot more than that. I think I might have even got a sight of her lord. There was a bloke looking . . . happy. And she’d just “given” me to him. And . . .’ Costain stopped again. Then he walked quickly for the door, went out and closed it behind him. Through the window, Quill could see his silhouette still standing outside.

  ‘We need to know,’ said Ross.

  ‘He knows that. But nobody bloody ask him, clear?’ They both affirmed agreement.

  ‘Why,’ enquired Ross, ‘was it just
him?’

  ‘I think he’s now asking himself that.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ said Sefton, ‘who do witches have as their lord? Is that what he’s wondering?’

  Quill sighed. ‘I’m way ahead of you two right now, aren’t I? Makes a bloody change.’ He banged his fist on the table, making them both start, and regretted doing it instantly. He felt the terrible chill as much as either of them. ‘But we don’t know, do we? It could just as well be some sort of . . . bigger version of one of those things out there.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sefton, looking almost angry at the idea it could be anything else.

  He gave it five minutes, during which he made them another cup of tea, then marched over to the door and opened it, to find Costain leaning against the wall of the Portakabin. ‘In,’ he said firmly.

  He turned to all three of them, gathered in front of an Ops Board that was now looking healthier, all with cuppas in their hands. ‘We don’t speculate,’ he said. ‘We don’t do theology. All there is,’ he pointed to the board, ‘is that.’

  They all turned back to the board again. ‘Listen—’ he said. And he started to tell them about what had happened in the interview room, and about Harry and everything else.

  They all told their stories in turn. Ross about the drive across London, and then, haltingly, about her first meeting with Losley. Sefton saw all that pain concealed behind her poker face, and held himself back from taking her hands in his. He himself – with several meaningful omissions, because he wasn’t going to mention Joe to this lot – talked about his encounter with ‘Jack’, and about the man that had stepped aside from it. Costain seemed to consider what the others had said, and then quickly filled them in on his journey away from London, about how he saw that the effect was limited to the metropolis. They waited for him to say more but, for the moment, that was obviously it.

  ‘Just London?’ said Sefton. ‘So we can get away from this shit by just getting on the train to Brighton?’ And then he felt immediately guilty at having been the one to say it.