Relics

by Tim Lebbon

  “Fucking stink,” Cliff said. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

  “So puke,” Angela said. She was watching Lilou, shocked at the change. Grief had drawn her down, hunching her over as she skirted the pool’s edge and headed for the deep end.

  It was there that the true horrors lay.

  “Vince.” It was little more than a whisper, but Angela’s voice carried. Several birds took flight high above, their flapping wings startling her. They were out of sight, high in the shadowy roof space.

  Recovering her balance, she followed Lilou. The nymph was standing directly over the deep end now, staring down into the black stew of sickness gathered there. It might have been water, once, but now it was more like oil, thick and heavy and sprouting shapes and shadows from its surface.

  “That’s a wing,” Meloy said from the shallow end. “With a claw on it. A big one. I’ve never seen…”

  Angela reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. Tentative at first, worrying what the woman might do. Then Lilou leaned in and she held her tight.

  “What’s got a leg like that?” Fat Frederick’s voice went higher, all pretense stripped away. He knew what he was looking at by now. He had to. Maybe he was still having trouble believing. He’d spent his whole life dealing in old dead things. To suddenly discover that many of them still lived…

  “Lilou,” Angela began, but she didn’t know what else to say. She was looking for something she recognised in the pool—clothing, hair, a face—and desperate not to see it.

  “He’s not there,” Lilou said. “Not Vince. But…”

  “I’m sorry,” Angela said.

  “An ear. A horn.” Fat Frederick was crouched over something, reaching out and not quite making contact. He moved his hand back and forth above the slick, dark object, as if scared to touch.

  “He’s not here,” Angela said, loud enough for them all to hear. She looked at those scratched lines again, where they disappeared through a doorway past the pool’s rancid deep end.

  “Yes, there,” Lilou said. “Ballus has gone deeper. He must have a way out, a way down, to escape from this.”

  Try as she might, Angela couldn’t estimate how many dead were down there. Probably not that many, but there were no whole bodies, only parts. Most of the parts were difficult to identify. For that she was glad.

  “Why?” Angela asked.

  “Because he’s mad, and he wants to be the last of us,” Lilou said. “There. I think that foot might have been Devalle’s. She was a shapeshifter. I first met her in Persia. She was harrying a warlord and his warriors, teasing them, playing with them. She always liked to toy with the humans, but she was harmless. A lover, not a fighter. I’m not sure she ever hurt anyone. She’s been missing for a while. Maybe others who have gone missing are down there, as well. In that.” She pointed. “And over there. One of the Seven, ripped in two. He was a wise old fox.” She smiled sadly at private memories.

  “I’m sorry,” Angela said.

  “Follow me,” Lilou said suddenly. “All of you.”

  Shocked and amazed as he was, even Meloy stood up straight, climbed out of the pool, and followed the nymph. She strode toward the door at the deep end, and though small and slight, she looked formidable.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said as he drew close to Angela. “When I showed you my angel, why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t know,” she replied. “Not then.”

  “But Vince?”

  “I think he only discovered the truth when he agreed to do a job for Mary Rock. He killed two of her people to stop them slaughtering her.” She nodded toward Lilou. She was standing close to the doorway, staring through as she waited for the others to catch up.

  “Who is she?” the gangster asked.

  “A nymph.”

  “All my life, I’ve wondered.”

  Angela took a final look around the baths. It was a scene from hell.

  “Welcome to the truth,” she said.

  “He’s not far,” Lilou said. “I can smell the murdering bastard.” She disappeared through the door, and Angela was the first to follow.

  * * *

  There was a rat sitting on his knee. It was cleaning its whiskers, because it had been nibbling at a wound in his thigh, lapping at the blood that flowed freely after it chewed away the scab. His blood, on its whiskers. He shivered and shook from the pain, and from fury. The fear was mostly gone. Ballus had battered, beaten, and cut that away.

  He would live or he would die, but all his rage was now directed at the mad thing that had done this to him.

  Vince shook his leg again, jarring it against the tight bindings, and the rat jumped away.

  “A rat’s got to eat,” Ballus said from somewhere in the darkness.

  Vince didn’t reply. He did not want to give the satyr the satisfaction. Besides, he was too busy assessing his wounds, trying to figure out just how badly he’d been hurt. His body was one big agony now, and to narrow it down to individual wounds took concentration and focus.

  His shoulders and arms were completely numb, wrists and forearms bound to the back of the chair. He tried to flex his fingers, but couldn’t tell whether they even moved. He worried about lack of circulation and the potential for dead flesh. The front of his shoulders burned, and perhaps that was a good sign. His legs were partially numb, but he was able to move them and keep the circulation going.

  He clenched and unclenched his toes, tensed his thighs, pressed his calves back against the chair legs. The pain was excruciating, but at least that meant his legs were still alive, and might even work.

  His right eye was swollen almost shut. It pulsed with every heartbeat, feeling like it was going to pop. When he closed his left eye, he could still see a blurred, narrowed view through the right, so at least he still had some vision there. His nose was broken, lips mashed, and one of his lower front teeth was splintered, gritty beneath his tongue. The jaw around it had gone numb. His ears felt hot.

  He tried counting the cuts and abrasions, but there were too many, and he was too worried about what had caused them—the old, fractured bones that Ballus had used to beat him. There was no saying how long they’d been rotting down there, nor what diseases they carried. If the injuries and blood loss didn’t kill him, the infections probably would. He wondered how long it took for blood poisoning to take hold, or gangrene, or hepatitis.

  Still tied to the chair, waiting, Vince started to put every shred of his strength and effort into loosening his bonds. If the chance came to fight he would take it.

  The satyr’s flashlight cast a low gleam across the strange place where they’d come to rest. It seemed to have been carved from the earth and rock beneath London, hacked and hewn over time until the area was the size of a squash court. Walls were smeared with strange patterns and decorated with handprints that weren’t human. The designs extended outward and upward in all directions, beyond where the beam gave way to shadows. There were several tunnels leading off from the subterranean room. All of them were dark and silent.

  The floor was home to a carpet of rats. Sometimes a few would stir and scuttle into one of the tunnels, or a group would appear from another tunnel and join their cousins. The stench of piss was almost overwhelming.

  In the corners, where light barely reached, were the dregs.

  Vince had tried to make them out, but looking at them was too disturbing. It felt like trying to see an unknown colour. To begin with he’d believed they were Kin of a kind he could not place, but now he thought not. Ballus used these things, and he had either created them, or drawn them from somewhere no living thing should be. They were like holes in the world.

  After what seemed like hours in the room, Ballus had barely moved. He sat against the wall, sometimes snoring, sometimes muttering or singing to himself. On several occasions he shrieked, a mad laugh or cry that almost scared Vince to death. The echoes lasted for some time. Vince wished he could follow the echoes and flee.

&nbs
p; He thought he would probably die down here, and he so wished he had said goodbye to Angela. She might never know what had become of him. Perhaps that would not be a bad thing.

  But he hated the idea that she was in danger from Mary Rock.

  A shadow moved, a breeze whispered through the cave, the rats shifted and parted as a dreg drifted in from one of the tunnels. It hunkered down close to Ballus and the satyr leaned to the side, head tilted as if listening.

  Vince heard nothing, but whatever the creature said infuriated the satyr. He stood and roared, stomping on rats, bursting them beneath his hooves. Others quickly dashed in to eat the dead.

  “No!” he raged. “They should all be coming! Mallian’s a weak, frightened fool.” He stormed over and pressed his face so close that Vince couldn’t focus on him. “But all’s not lost,” he said. “There’s one with them, at least, and she’s bringing fresh meat.”

  Ballus turned away, whistled and whispered, and the rats and dregs flowed quickly from the room. He and Vince were left alone, and the satyr paced the perimeter, hooves clopping on bare rock. He scooped up the flashlight, causing shadows to dance.

  “Who’s coming?” Vince asked.

  “Friend of yours,” Ballus said, distracted. “And an old friend of mine.”

  Angela, Vince thought, fear eclipsing the pain. He closed his eyes and wished her away. She had no idea what she would find.

  “Don’t need you anymore,” Ballus said. He skipped across the room, his sudden activity alarming. “But I’ll let you live ’til they’re all dead. Then maybe I’ll leave you down here. In the dark.”

  The flashlight flicked off, and Vince had never experienced such darkness. Eyes open or closed, it enveloped him completely. Somewhere in that darkness he heard the soft, low grumble of Ballus’s breathing.

  He focused on tensing and relaxing his muscles where he could, working against his bindings. His right hand might have been coming loose. It gave him a spark of hope in the blackness.

  From far along one of the tunnels, someone or something screamed.

  22

  The rats came first. A river of them, flowing along the corridor and washing against their feet. Billy and Cliff carried heavy flashlights and wielded them like clubs, sweeping them back and forth and throwing rats against the walls. They stamped. They jumped. They cursed. Shadows danced and deformed, giving the whole scene a sense of constant movement.

  Angela watched Lilou, because now they were in her domain, her world of shadows and strangeness. Fat Frederick and his men were surprised and shocked by the rats, but Angela knew there would be much worse to come.

  Lilou simply walked forward. If a rat jumped at her she swatted it aside, but otherwise she waded ahead as if through water, and they parted around her boots. Angela did the same, kicking out, keeping calm, moving in her wake.

  “Follow us!” the nymph said to the men, raising her voice above the squeaks and the sounds of horror and disgust. Fat Frederick seemed unconcerned, but Cliff was on the verge of hysteria. He aimed his gun here and there, but did not fire. He knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  They followed. Meloy caught Angela’s arm and walked with her, and Angela realised that he thought he was protecting her. It was a ridiculous gesture, but she said nothing.

  The flow of rats paused for a moment, the animals suddenly growing still. The only sound remaining in the corridor came from Billy and Cliff, muttering in disgust.

  “There,” Lilou said. She pointed at a shadow ahead, an uneven hole in the corridor’s block wall. As if responding to a signal, the rats reversed their direction of travel and rushed back that way, pouring through the hole as if part of a wriggling sheet that was being withdrawn.

  “What is it?” Fat Frederick asked. He still sounded like an excited child.

  “That’s where Ballus is. They’ll tell him we’re coming.”

  “They?” Cliff asked.

  “The rats, stupid,” Fat Frederick said.

  Angela looked at Lilou for confirmation, but the nymph was staring at the hole, frowning.

  “We need weapons,” she said. She glanced back at the men. “Metal bars. Clubs. Blades.”

  “Guys, find what you can,” Fat Frederick said.

  Angela shoved a jammed door open and peered inside a small room, using her phone as a light. It was a bathroom. There was a towel rail on one wall, an end rusted free of its fixings. A good tug tore it away, and then she was outside again, standing with Lilou where she stared at the hole in the wall. The metal bar felt good and solid in her hands.

  “He’s gone deeper,” Lilou said. “There’s a whole world beneath London. He might be miles away by now. Except…”

  “Except he isn’t.”

  “No. He’s probably waiting for us.”

  “Why?”

  “He intended to lure the Kin after him. He wants to be the last one.”

  “That’s why he’s killing them?”

  Lilou nodded.

  “That’s… sick,” Angela said.

  “That’s Ballus,” she replied. “Come on.”

  The hole had been punched through a solid concrete block wall. Beyond was a narrow space, and to the left a tunnel led gently downward. It was old, lined with slimy bricks, and the floor was a sunken water channel, dry now but showing signs of decades of abrasion.

  “One of you, with the flashlights,” Lilou said. Billy moved to the front, crouched down to avoid the ceiling, aiming his light directly ahead. He moved slowly. Several rats skittered from view, and Angela thought, lookouts. It was a weird, unsettling idea, but no stranger than anything else that had happened since Vince vanished.

  They moved forward and down, and Angela used the light on her phone to examine the rough floor. Two uneven lines were scratched into the slime, the same distance apart as the ones in the swimming pool. Something had been dragged down here recently.

  “Junction,” Billy said. He paused, and Lilou grabbed his flashlight and moved ahead. Angela went with her.

  Before long they reached a chamber that was small and dry. Three other tunnels led off from it.

  “That way,” Angela said. The scratched lines disappeared along the tunnel to their right.

  “You go first,” Fat Frederick said to Billy. The frightened man grabbed his torch and took the lead, and the nymph did not object.

  They moved forward cautiously for twenty minutes. The tunnels changed from brick-lined to hacked into rock, and back again. Angela thought some of them were old sewers, but other routes they followed looked different, their purpose purely for hidden movement. She wondered how old they were and who had made them.

  The rats were always there, sometimes fleeting shadows, more often revealing themselves brazenly to the questing torches before scampering away. Angela felt like they were being drawn on and down rather than making their own way. She went to mention this to Lilou several times, but the nymph surely knew what she was doing.

  Lilou grew even quieter and more serious. Try as she did, Angela couldn’t hear her making a single footfall, a single breath. She was hardly there at all.

  Just ahead of her, Billy still led the way. He became more confident, moving faster and kicking out at any rats that waited too long to move. He never quite touched them. Fat Frederick followed behind Angela, and Cliff brought up the rear. She heard Cliff mumbling a few times, and Meloy’s whispered, urgent replies. They were nervous. She could hardly blame them.

  When the shadows came alive, it was Billy they struck first.

  Everything changed so quickly. Angela had believed herself ready and alert, but she stood in shock as she watched the shapes manifest before them, swirling around Billy’s head, swallowing the torchlight and then driving him to the ground.

  He screamed.

  Lilou grabbed her arm and pulled her back and down.

  Fat Frederick and Cliff began shouting, edging ahead toward their fallen friend. Meloy swung a length of wood he’d picked up somewhere, shouting when his arm j
arred with the impact. Something hissed, but the shadow remained curled around Billy’s throat.

  “What is it?” Angela shouted.

  “Dregs,” Lilou said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry?”

  “They can’t last for long. They’re just trying to scare us.”

  “Shit, it’s working!”

  Billy was thrashing on the ground, splashing through puddles and releasing the stink of them, striking his head on the wall.

  “Keep still,” Lilou called, but not too loud.

  Cliff stepped forward and Angela saw what was about to happen. Her stomach lurched, and she only managed to shout as the gunshot flashed and echoed along the tunnel.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. Because everything stopped.

  The shadows melted away. The remnants were gone, but Billy kept moving. He was writhing now, squirming like a toy winding down. Cliff stood several feet from him, stooped to prevent his head from touching the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” Cliff said. Billy said nothing.

  Angela dashed to the fallen man. He had dropped his torch and it lay propped against the tunnel wall, casting its light up and out. It splayed shadows across his face, but they didn’t hide his pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Cliff said again.

  “You shot Billy,” Fat Frederick said.

  “I’m sorry, boss.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  As Angela knelt by the wounded man, she was dimly aware of the two others standing a few feet away, swapping words and a gun while their friend lay wounded in the muck.

  No, not wounded. Dying. She saw that even as she felt slick water seeping through to her knees. Blood was pulsing from the side of his head and across his neck. The water touching her knees wasn’t as cold as it should have been.

  He stopped moving. Stopped breathing.

  She had never seen someone die before.

  “How is he?” Fat Frederick asked.

  “Gone,” Lilou said, stepping past Angela and the now motionless Billy.