by Tim Lebbon
Her senses and awareness were all hers.
“It took me a while to discover what it was. I carried it with me, and a few days later a tramp stopped me and told me I had a unicorn’s horn in my pocket. Simple as that, and I believed him. Simple as that. Old guy called Dean. I’ve seen him once or twice since then. He’s a relic hunter, too, and has been for a while. But he’s mad.”
“Madder than you?” Angela asked, because nothing about this seemed even remotely sane. He didn’t answer, but gripped her arm and urged her toward the next case. Even though his touch made her skin crawl, she let him, because there was no reason to fight. I agreed to come down here, she thought again. Everything that happens from here is of my own design.
In the next case lay a cast of a set of footprints, cracked and uneven but fixed together with pins.
“Jesus’s footprints?” she asked.
“Don’t be daft,” Frederick said. “These are the prints of a woman from Atlantis. See the webbing between the toes?”
“That could be anything.”
“It’s what I say,” he replied without a hint of defensiveness. “Here. Look at this.” He moved along to the next exhibit and left Angela staring at the print casts for a moment longer. There were what looked like webbed areas between the toes. The feet were longer and thinner than usual, and the toes longer, as well. She tried to imagine who had made the footprints and when, and experienced a frisson of wonder. There was nothing to prove how these marks had been made, yet the idea was amazing.
“Angela,” he urged. She went to him. He was already looking down into the next case. “I acquired this in my twenties, just after my mother died. Can you tell me what it is?”
“What, so now it’s a quiz?”
He smiled. He was enjoying this, and she could see that it really was his passion. This was the real Frederick Meloy, literally and metaphorically buried deep beneath the front he needed to project up above.
It didn’t make her fear him any less.
She looked down into the case. At first she didn’t think there was anything in there, and she felt like one of those people in an aquarium, staring into an empty tank in the hope of seeing something amazing.
“There’s nothing,” she said.
“Look closer.”
She did as he said, bending down close to the display case, holding her breath so as not to obscure the glass. She saw her own reflection and the haze of Meloy’s face behind her, then she shifted her focus and looked deeper.
Something moved. It was like haze above a hot road on a summer’s day, except more graceful, slower, even more fluid.
“What is it?” she asked, trying to keep the sense of wonder from her voice. She didn’t want him to think she was enjoying this. She needed to maintain her projection of doubt.
“A witch’s flying ointment,” he said.
“At least, the essence of some. A dreg. I’m not sure it would even be effective anymore, but—”
“Flying ointment?” Angela stood back from the case, and away from Frederick, pressing her back to the opposite wall. It felt cold and solid, the weight of the world behind it. “A unicorn horn? A woman from Atlantis? What fucking bullshit!”
Meloy blinked at her as if slapped.
He skinned someone alive for calling him Fat Freddie, she thought, and her legs were suddenly weak with terror, her bones fluid and ready to spill her to the floor. Just what the hell was she doing? Down in a basement, locked in with a murderer who was plainly mad, allowing herself to be fooled and led.
But he looked like a little boy right then, not a gang leader and murderer. He looked like someone who had just been told that everything he believed was a lie.
“You’re just having trouble believing,” he said.
“Damn right I am!” she replied in spite of herself. “I don’t believe in the supernatural.”
“It’s only supernatural if nature doesn’t allow it,” he said. He looked away from her, along the long room and toward another door at the far end.
“I’m leaving,” Angela said. “All this, whatever it is, has nothing to do with Vince. It won’t help me find him, and I should have never…”
Fat Frederick turned back to her, and his expression had changed. Not hardened, exactly, but settled. He looked calmer and more at peace with how things were. It didn’t matter to him whether or not she believed, but there was something that did matter.
“It’s too late,” he said. “I’ve shown you now. You’ve seen things that are dangerous, and rare, and which people would kill for.” He blinked slowly and let the ghost of a smile soften his eyes. “Which people have killed for. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, you’ll meet me, Cliff, and a vodka bottle.”
“You wanted to show me!” Angela said. Fear blurred her vision.
Fat Frederick only shrugged.
“Let me go.”
“Don’t you want to see the rest?”
“No,” she said, and she really didn’t. This was weird, and combined with Vince’s disappearance it was just too much. Her whole world had been thrown aslant. “You know I won’t tell anyone. You’re already having me followed, and until I find Vince—”
“I’m not having you followed.”
“Harry and Claudette.” She sounded much brasher, braver than she felt. Sweat tickled her sides, her armpits. Fear pulsed behind her eyes.
“Not mine,” Fat Frederick said, but he knew who she was talking about, and she saw something flicker behind his eyes. She didn’t quite know what it was. Each question inspired three more.
“I need to go. To find Vince.” She craved Lucy’s company, her garden, a glass of wine, a silent and friendly nod of greeting from her neighbours. She wanted normality, yet she was afraid that after today, that might be more difficult to find than ever before.
“Let me show you my angel,” he said, and he walked toward the end of the room.
She could offer no argument. There was no sense that it could end at this point, either. Him bringing her down here had started something, and behind that door at the end of this strange basement, she might find its end.
So she followed the big man past display cases that she struggled not to look at, but had to.
One of them contained a smooth dome that might have been an egg, or a skull. Another was bare, apart from a small metal cup at its center, the surface of its dark contents reflecting the low lighting with an oily sheen. Angela thought one long case contained a snake of some kind, but as she passed it she saw the powdery, old shapes of suckers.
“This is the one relic I can never sell,” Fat Frederick said, standing beside the door set in the basement’s end wall. He smiled. “My precious.” A coded electronic lock was fixed there. He reached for it, then glanced back.
His face was soft again, all pretense gone, all the self-awareness giving way to an expression of sheer delight. This was his reason for living and his drive, and he was about to share something very special with her.
Angela didn’t want it at all, but Fat Frederick rapidly tapped in a code, the door whispered open, and she smelled the thing that lay beyond. Choice had long since been taken from her.
“Come on,” he said. “I like to keep the door closed, even when I’m inside.”
“Why?” Angela asked.
“Makes it feel more alive.”
They entered the room, and for a few seconds Meloy obscured her view of what that small space contained. Then he reached back past her to press a button that brought the door closed again.
And she saw his angel.
It lay on a waist-high platform in the center of the small room. There was just enough space all around for one person to walk. Lights were fixed in the ceiling and hung from the plain white walls, casting a soft glow across that strange, impossible form.
Any doubts that Angela had retained—at the flying ointment, the unicorn horn, footprints and tentacle and oily blood—instantly vanished. The creature that lay before her was so ali
en, unreal, and unbelievable that she had no option other than to believe.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Frederick breathed.
Angela stayed close to him. His presence was a comfort. Whatever else he was, Frederick Meloy was still human.
“It looks…” Angela began, then she frowned. She couldn’t say it aloud.
Alive.
The angel was the size of a young teenager, laid stretched out on its side with left arm extended, left leg bent at the knee and protruding slightly as if in mid-step. Its head rested on its upper arm. It was naked, with no sign of sexual organs. Its face was strange, eyes open, and as Angela tipped her head to one side its expression manifested. It was in pain.
“It looks alive,” she said, so softly, afraid to wake this sleeping thing.
“I know,” Frederick said.
“But it’s… dead.”
“Of course,” he said. “All these things are dead. They have been for thousands of years.”
“It looks so soft. So recent.”
“There’s no decay. Nothing to show that it’s dead, other than…” He moved around the dais and signaled her to follow.
The angel’s back was a scene of ruin. She hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but as the word wings whispered across her mind, so she set eyes on where those objects of angelic legend should have been. The wounds glistened as if still fresh. Nubs of bone glimmered white in the artificial light, broken and splintered from the huge trauma perpetrated on this wondrous creature. The skin and flesh of its back was parted in several places, torn rather than cut, the exposed meat still appearing wet. A single white feather, the size of her little finger, was stuck in a splash of blood at the base of its spine, its ivory hue speckled red.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “No history, no name. No clues about where it lived, or even when, nor what happened to it. It’s like owning a billion-year-old fossil that you knew was once alive, but its life is so remote from you that it seems almost impossible.”
“It looks like if you touched it, it might wake,” she said, and she shivered.
“I’ve thought that.” Meloy reached out and held his hand above the angel’s head for a moment, looking Angela in the eye before resting his hand on its skin. Sadness painted his features. Tears formed, and his mouth screwed up, as if he was experiencing the greatest sorrow of his life. It shocked her to see him like this, and she wondered at a man like him letting down so many barriers.
“Try,” he said.
Everything told her not to do it, but before she could question her actions she had reached out and placed her hand on the prone creature’s bare arm.
Its skin was cold and as hard as marble.
An awful sadness filled her, and she felt her whole body slump as the weight of unbelievable grief pressed her down. She sobbed, and in those distorting tears she caught sight of Vince’s face.
He was also crying.
Stepping back, banging into the wall, Angela struggled to compose herself. The feeling of deep melancholy evaporated as quickly as it had arrived, but like a dream it left dregs of itself behind.
I’ll never get over that, she thought. But also like a dream—or like severe, crippling pain—she was already forgetting the details of what she had felt.
“Now can I leave?” she asked softly.
“A minute,” Fat Frederick said. “You’ll want another minute, just to look and wonder.”
He was right.
10
Vince had never felt so exposed. So hunted. Everyone was looking at him.
Out on the streets he was the center of attention, even though the London hustle and bustle was as familiar as his lover’s kiss. He walked with his head down, but not seeing gave him no comfort. They could creep up on him at any moment. So he lifted his head, watched where he was going, and met people’s eyes, jigging aside to let them pass, glancing behind to make sure they didn’t look back at him. Any one of them could have worked for Mary Rock. Any one of them might have a blade ready to slide in between his ribs, or a bullet for the back of his head once they dragged him into an alley, body destined to rot in a plastic bin until the garbage collectors came and found him.
Everyone he saw wanted to kill him, but Angela was in danger, and it was all his fault. He couldn’t think of himself, only her. She was his focus. Everyone else could go to hell.
He never should have been lured by Mary Rock’s promise of wealth. He should have remained working exclusively for Fat Frederick. He knew where he was with Meloy, at least, and he understood the big man’s passion. Mary Rock… she was something else. He’d known that from the start. If only he’d listened to his inner voice before getting involved, he wouldn’t be where he was now.
It only took him a few minutes to orient himself. He knew London like the back of his hand, and once he hit a main street his location was easy to pin down. Shoreditch. A way from home, but at least he knew where he had to go. His phone was lost or stolen, and anyway, he couldn’t risk calling her. They might be listening and watching. They’d know that to find him they had to come through her.
He never believed it could have gone this bad so quickly.
The Tube would be fastest, but there was no way he was taking the Underground, not after what had happened. The flashbacks still surged, reddening the late afternoon light.
Someone bumped into him.
“Sorry, mate,” the man said.
Vince looked at him and the man backed away. Vince hoped he saw only a scruffy, dirty figure, unwashed for a while, hungry and stinking and scared. Yet perhaps that look of sudden disquiet in the stranger’s eyes was because of something deeper.
There was always something deeper.
* * *
When Angela emerged from The Slaughterhouse, it was into a whole new world.
She blinked at the bright sunlight, confused at what time of day it was, what time of year, and whether she was anywhere real at all. Mundane sights shocked her with their normalcy—a man tripping as he stepped onto a pavement and grabbing a lamp post for support; two young women walking side by side and chatting, eyes glued to their mobile phones; an old woman pushing a shopping trolley overflowing with tins of baked beans.
She crossed the street quickly and looked back at the door. Innocuous, innocent, it stood open a little way, and she could see Cliff’s shadow inside. He was watching her and she let him, not caring. Maybe he wanted to see if her first reaction upon leaving was to reach for her phone, and if it had been, perhaps he would have been listening to her call. They must have a way. People like that would have a way to do anything.
A distant police siren sounded, and just along the busy road a man sang opera, voice merging with the tinkling of loose change and the growl of motors crawling along the street.
Angela stared back at the club’s entrance until the door slowly closed.
Normal life continued, and that surprised her, considering all she had seen down in that basement. Surely people would know? Shouldn’t the whole of London be stock-still with shock, amazement, and terror? She’d felt a similar disconnect several years ago when she’d had a health scare. That was pre-Vince, at a time when she was between relationships, and Lucy had been her angel.
“Angel,” she whispered. She smiled at the irony, but the memory of that corpse thing quickly wiped the smile from her face. Its dead, staring eyes. Cool skin. The trauma of its back where wings had once been.
It had been a cancer scare, a lump in her breast that quickly started causing her concern and which her GP had recommended she get tested immediately. An MRI and a biopsy later and she had been pronounced clear, but for those few days, during which she had managed to convince herself that she had cancer, her whole outlook had changed. Some of it had felt like jealousy. While she waited for a life-changing diagnosis, others continued with their normal lives, oblivious to how hers might change. In her darkest moments she had even resented Lucy.
You’re born alone and you di
e alone. That was the saying she’d remembered, and for a while she had never felt more lonely. Then the all-clear, and she’d called home to tell her parents, and leaving that dark time behind had felt like being born again.
Just twenty feet below this street lay an angel. She closed her eyes and remembered Fat Frederick’s final words to her, before they had emerged into the bar area again.
“Don’t forget what I said. You can’t tell anyone, and I’ll know if you do. Find Vince for me. But all that aside… isn’t it just amazing?”
Angela turned her back on The Slaughterhouse and started walking. She was confused and unnerved and seeking something familiar, and the sight of a Costa welcomed her in. She glanced around as she entered, suddenly certain that Claudette and Harry would be sitting waiting for her, knowing exactly where she’d be, and when. But the café was filled with people she didn’t know. She ordered a coffee, took a seat at the back, and it was only as she went to sit down that she started to shake.
Biting her lip, trying not to collapse, she drew the chair in beneath her and dropped down into it, resting her head against the wall.
“Tough day, eh?” a voice asked.
Angela looked at the guy who’d spoken. Good-looking, a lot younger than her, sitting with an open MacBook on his lap and a coffee on the table beside him. He tried a smile and it faltered when she didn’t smile back. Embarrassed, he looked down at his computer and took a swig of coffee.
“Yeah,” she said. “Need my caffeine.”
He smiled and nodded, but said no more. She guessed her expression was enough to tell him she didn’t want company.
Everything she’d seen remained with her. It was as if she was still down there with Fat Frederick, looking at those things, not back in the real world where unicorns, angels, and people from Atlantis were figments of the imagination. It made her question her perception of reality, and whether everything around her was as real as she had always believed.