by Tim Lebbon
The Tube journey had been short but hot, but at least at the end of it she hoped she’d find something definitive, good or bad. Good might be that he’d been working hard to pay for this second place, in the hope that maybe she’d live with him there, when the time came to reveal it. That seemed unlikely, but she clung to the idea, nevertheless.
Bad… she could think of plenty of bad. The two notes she kept crumpled in her pocket evidenced that.
She passed shops, restaurants, and pubs, listening to the stew of languages that defined London’s diverse population. People stood chatting outside some establishments, and restaurant pavement tables were taken up with diners just finishing a late lunch. Many of them were drinking. Angela always wondered at that, but here she guessed that many of the drinkers didn’t work at all. She spied expensive jewelry, designer clothes, and half-empty bottles of wine that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe.
She reached Cranley Mews and turned left. Any one of the cars parked along the road could have paid for her three years of study. Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, Bentleys, a couple of Rolls Royces, and two Lamborghinis and a Ferrari with personalised plates that could only belong to the same family. She felt intensely out of place. The street seemed quieter, too, as if the hustle of London couldn’t reach this far, and she looked around for security cameras.
This might be the most foolish thing she’d ever done, yet she couldn’t deny the tingle of excitement that heightened her senses. Years of study, and she couldn’t actually think of a time when she’d used some of the tricks or talents she had read about. Until now. She’d bought a box of paperclips and a nail file from a newsagent at South Kensington station, and she was ready to go.
She reached the address written on the Post-it note and walked straight to the front door. It was a two-story building and there were two doors, each with a bell and speaker. Apartment B—Vince’s upstairs apartment—had no name next to its bell.
The door lock was a traditional type. If it had been an electronic lock, she’d have been out of luck. As it was, she had to be quick, because any stranger seen hanging around in an upmarket area like this was likely to draw attention.
She slipped the nail file into the bottom of the keyhole and turned gently left and right. Holding it to the left, she kept slight tension on it as she slipped a straightened paperclip into the top of the hole. Breathing slowly, trying to calm her sprinting heart, she raked the paperclip back and forth a few times, feeling the pins move up and down. Then she pushed it all the way in and gingerly felt around until the first pin clicked up.
A car passed along the street behind her. Someone shouted a name, perhaps calling to a child. A dog barked, and an ambulance dopplered its way along Old Brompton Road. She resisted the inclination to look around and make sure no one was watching her. As it was now, she was someone fumbling with a key. If she glanced around, she’d start to look suspicious.
The remaining pins clicked up into place and she turned the nail file, gasping in delight when the lock clicked and the door opened inward. She tucked the makeshift tools into her pocket and entered, turning to close the door and only then glancing quickly out into the street.
An old woman walked a small dog along the opposite pavement. A postman pushed a cart, sweating in the mid-morning heat. The siren had receded into the distance, and there was no indication that anyone had seen her.
She clicked the door closed and rested her forehead against it. Taking in a deep breath, her relief at not being seen was overshadowed by a sudden nervous anticipation.
She didn’t know what she was about to find.
The staircase was wide and clean, the walls bare. At the top there was another heavy door that led into the apartment, but this one wasn’t locked. She turned the handle and entered, and Vince’s private life opened up before her.
At first what she saw pleased her. The large, open-plan space wasn’t lived in. The sitting area at the front consisted of three modern-looking sofas forming a U-shape, its open edge facing the two large windows that let in radiant sunlight. One expanse of wall was bare brick, while the others were plastered and painted the lightest shade of gray. A few pictures hung here and there, none of them particularly inspiring. They were the sorts of prints selected for their blandness, designed to go unseen.
The combined kitchen and dining area was part of the open-plan space, set at the rear and lit by three ornamental light-wells, each reaching up through the roof and drawing in an impressive amount of sunlight. The kitchen was expensive and stark, surfaces gleaming, with no clutter. It looked clean and unused.
There was a large flat-screen television affixed to one wall, and she could see that its trailing plug hung loose, not connected anywhere. Timber fans hung heavy from the ceiling, and a circular staircase led to a mezzanine level. Up there, past the glass balustrading, she could see a couple of modern chairs and a spread of book shelving, all but empty. She was willing to bet that the few volumes she could make out weren’t the sort of books Vince might read.
He might never have been up there to see the titles.
The whole place felt like that. Unlived-in, untouched, and unloved. Her brief flush of relief at not seeing things of comfort and homeliness soon gave way to an edge of disquiet. Beyond the fact that the cost of this place must be way beyond what she believed he earned, why would Vince even have a place like this?
Was it just a fuck pad?
She tried to imagine the love of her life screwing a woman on one of the sofas, on the lush rug beneath the TV, bent over the modern dining table, and none of it made sense. The idea seemed so unlikely that it didn’t even upset her.
“This isn’t somewhere to fuck someone,” she whispered. Her words echoed in the lifeless space. There was nothing there to dampen them. No books, no jackets hung over the backs of chairs, no clutter of existence. This was a plain, lifeless space.
She moved through the room quickly, smelling dust and must and nothing of Vince. In the far corner a door opened into a small hallway. There were two more doors, both closed, and she chose the left one first.
It opened into a large double bedroom, and the rush of sensory input froze her in place.
Vince’s clothes lay scattered across the bed, some jeans and a couple of tee shirts also on the floor. She recognised them all. The smell of his favorite deodorant wafted through the open door, a George R. R. Martin book lay propped open on the bed, an empty shortbread packet had spilled crumbs across the carpet, and on the bedside table were several cola cans. She told him that shit was bad for him, but he still enjoyed a can now and then. It appeared that here in his secret bolthole, he indulged his habit more often.
Angela felt angry, and scared. Nothing here made sense. The bed was neatly made, its surface dimpled and creased from someone sitting up against the headboard. Vince never made the bed. He said it was a waste of time.
She moved into the room and saw the photo frame above the bed. It contained six pictures, all of places they had been together. Polperro in Cornwall, Chester, a couple of pictures of the Welsh mountains, Brighton Pier. She recognised the snaps from their own electronic album, but quickly noticed that the pictures were all scenery. None of them contained him… or her.
Though the photos warmed her a little, she was more troubled than ever, and as she turned around something caught her eye. The wardrobe door was ajar and stuff was piled inside. She opened the door and it spilled out.
Boots. A rucksack. Waterproof trousers and jacket. Base layers. A coiled rope, a couple of sheathed knives, a heavy torch. A bound cloth roll hit the floor and unwound a little, and she finished the job with her foot. It was a tool roll, containing all manner of implements she couldn’t identify, some of them pointed and sharp, others blunt-edged and hammer-like.
Just what the fuck?
She’d read about places like this. Safe-houses, crash pads, they were places where criminals came to hide away from the world. Acquiring property also allowed a criminal organ
isation to launder and invest its ill-gotten gains. She reckoned this place must be worth two million.
Moving quickly, she stalked back through the hallway to the other door. This must be the bathroom. Flinging the door open, the first things she saw were the packages in the dry bathtub. Wrapped in cloth, carefully tied, three of them were set carefully in the bottom, like presents ready to be handed out.
Checking the rest of the bathroom, she found nothing else unusual. She moved closer to the bath and looked down at the packages.
Something weird, she thought, hairs on her neck tingling.
Lifting one shape out, she was surprised at how light it felt. The string around it was knotted tight, so she darted back into the bedroom to fetch one of the sheathed knives, then returned to the bathroom, kneeling on the floor.
One stroke and the string parted.
She started unwrapping the package, and it was Lucy’s voice that spoke to her.
Just what the hell are you doing? the voice said. This has nothing to do with you.
“It is to do with me,” she said aloud. “It is!” Louder, and she found that speaking made her feel less afraid. Less secretive. This was to do with her, because Vince was hers and this place was his, and she had to know the truth. If he was into something criminal and perhaps dangerous, she needed to know. With what she knew already, there was no way she could just go back.
She closed her eyes and couldn’t help the flood of terrible images that came at her.
I’ll open this and it’ll be full of drugs. Vince has gone. I can’t reach him, and maybe he’s dead at the bottom of some canal or in a sewer, throat sliced and balls cut off and stuffed into his mouth. She knew how some of these gangs worked. She’d been studying them long enough.
She thought the notes in her back pocket were in his handwriting, but maybe she’d just wished that on them. Maybe they were the only warnings she’d get from whoever had done something terrible.
Opening the package, she sat back on the floor, looking down at the contents. It was a strange moment. To begin with she felt nothing, as if her mind was insulating her against the reaction that must surely come. Reaching out, considering that it might be some sort of joke, at the same time part of her knew it was not. Everything was too serious for this to be a prank.
The head was the size of a large potato. The skin was parchment dry, hair fine and knotted, teeth bared where the lips had drawn back over time. The incisors were much too long and still sharp.
One eye, closed, in the middle of the forehead.
One eye, Angela thought. She shook her head, trying to work out exactly what she was looking at. Alongside the head was a small business card. Its surface was dusted with—
—old skin, real skin, falling from this thing with one eye in the middle of its forehead, and creatures with one eye are called… were called—
—and Angela was all too familiar with the name and place printed there.
Courtesy of
FREDERICK MELOY
The Slaughterhouse
Frederick Meloy, also known as Fat Frederick, was one of the most dangerous crime lords in London. He ran a place called The Slaughterhouse Bar. She’d probed about him once for a research paper, and she’d been quickly warned off by someone from SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency. He relished the title Fat Frederick, but there were rumors about what he’d done to someone who once shortened his name to Fat Freddie. That story came back to her now and made her skin crawl.
She picked up the card and stared at the name.
“Slaughterhouse, Freddie?” she said aloud. “Talk about hiding in plain sight.”
The relic on the floor stared at her with its single dusty eye. She reached out to touch it, then drew her hand back. She was afraid it might blink.
Instead, she took three quick pictures with her phone.
In a daze, Angela wandered back into the sterile apartment, the business card clutched in one hand. She approached the window and gazed out between the blinds.
“Cyclops,” she whispered.
Down in the street, a man and woman stood together on the opposite pavement, staring up.
5
The food made Vince feel a little better, for a time. Yet however much he fought to stay awake, however scared he was for Angela, he still drifted in and out of consciousness. He tried pacing the room’s diagonals and counting scratches on the walls, but in the end there was always troubled, restless sleep.
He had no way to judge how long each period of wakefulness or unconsciousness lasted, because he had no watch or phone, nor any view of the outside. The door had no keyhole. The walls were solid. His knowledge of what he’d seen past the strange woman’s shoulder—the whole of strange, exotic, terrible London laid out around them, lights twinkling in the night—did nothing to take away the sense of solidity that surrounded him.
If they decided to never open the door again, he would be trapped here forever.
He had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the more he thought about that fact, the more the walls closed in. He tried not to panic. His head pulsed with each heartbeat, and he wondered whether his skull had been fractured. His vision blurred with every white-hot, clanging ring of pain. It was as if the wound was being dealt afresh every time.
Between moments of pacing and wincing and panicking, he would lean against a wall and slide to the floor, and before he came to rest he was—
—somewhere darker, damper, and deeper, cheek pressed against smooth cracked tiles, unidentifiable sounds echoing in an empty chamber, and then something slammed against his head and he groaned, slipping down toward the ground. On a wall a dozen steps from him, across a debris-strewn floor, he could see a faded poster advertising something he’d never heard of, the smiling woman so time-worn that she might have been a ghost.
His head rang. Vision swam red.
He knew that if he didn’t move, the next impact might crack his skull and spill him across the ground. He let himself fall and then rolled, looking up and back at the two people who were attacking him. He knew their faces, and hated them. Both of them. The man was huge and brutal, grimacing in delight as he stepped forward to beat and pummel and kill. The woman was slim and severe, her silver hair in pigtails, age indecipherable. Blades glimmered in both of her hands, yet she seemed content to let her gorilla finish the job with brute force.
Beyond them, between the beast’s legs and past the woman’s hips, Vince saw a shape huddled against the wall. A shape he was protecting, because if he didn’t then they would kill it. Butcher it.
The blades weren’t for him.
Even though the memory suddenly slowed to a crawl, the big man was always in the way as Vince tried to make out who or what the shape was. Weak light shone from the blades and confused his vision. The memory paused, but the more he tried to see, the less clear everything became.
Then the big man surged at him again, and—
“How are you feeling?” The voice jarred Vince awake.
I never remember more than that, he thought. Maybe because it was too traumatic, and the recollection of having his skull battered was too much. Perhaps he was protecting himself.
“No,” he whispered, “it was something else.” He thought of that huddled figure, and how something about it—the size, the shape, the buried knowledge he must have—seemed so strange.
“Vince?” The woman was kneeling beside him, the door closed behind her. He hadn’t heard her enter. He looked up at her and smiled, and everything about his troubled memories seemed to vanish into her aura. She smelled of sunlight and summer showers.
“I feel like shit,” he said.
She smiled and handed him a drink. “This should help.” It looked like water in a glass, but when he sipped it tasted of something he could not quite define.
“What is it?”
“It’s good for you.” She sat cross-legged on the floor, not quite close enough to touch. She was assessing him, one corner of her mout
h still turned up in half a smile.
His heart ached with desire. It wasn’t only a base sexual urge, but a soulful yearning, physical and warm and all-encompassing. He thought of Angela but did not feel guilty, because his carnal thoughts toward this woman felt so pure and innocent.
“Who are you?” he whispered, and her smile lit up his life.
“My name is Lilou. I have other names, but you…” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand them.”
“Try me.”
She laughed, then, this strange woman whose name was Lilou. The sound filled the room and pushed away some of the darkness, but there were also shadows to her laughter, and shades giving her expression darker contours. Vince had always thought that sad smiles were the most affecting.
“You’re not quite human,” he said, never able to hold her gaze but hating to look away. He’d glance aside and feel an instant sinking sensation in his stomach, as if he’d forever lost something precious. Finding it again took only a flicker of his eyes.
“Your world has opened up,” Lilou said, touching his face and urging him to look at her. “Your memories and understanding are struggling to catch up, but you’ll be there soon.” She smiled and was beauty personified—deep eyes filled with promise, sensual lips slightly parted, hinting at more. The sweep of her cheek, the fall of her hair. He had seen women and felt lust at first sight many times, but never like this. Never love. Where her finger still touched his face his skin burned, and he lifted his hand to press hers to his cheek. Still in pain, confused, scared at what was happening… for a moment everything was swept away.
He throbbed with passion for her. Though it was wrong it felt so right. He imagined her stripping him and washing him, bathing his wounds. He imagined her slipping out of her own clothes in this grim cell that might have been a forest glade, the sounds of a breeze in the trees and a flowing stream mimicking her cry as she lowered herself gently down onto him.
Vince sighed heavily and kissed her hand, tracing the lines on her palm with the tip of his tongue. She tasted of every good thing. He reached for Lilou with his free hand, fingertips brushing against her breast, holding, squeezing softly. She gasped. He moved closer, inhaling her scent and feeling an unbearable pressure in his groin. He pressed his mouth to the side of her neck and tasted her again, and with his other hand he worked at his belt, desperate to release himself, yearning for her touch and—