by Tim Lebbon
“It’s too late,” Lilou whispered, lowering her head. Beyond her, beyond Angela, past where the man in the tunnel was spitting blood, a huge shape was pulling itself out through the opening and back into the tunnel.
By the light of a discarded torch, Vince saw a limb smeared with gore.
23
Dean made sure he remained hidden as he spied on the man behind the swimming pool building. He’d seen thugs like this before. Brash, hard, they were bullies who made London their playground. He knew well enough not to confront him, and because the man was there, Dean also knew that he had come to the right place.
He had to get inside. Lilou was in there with the others, including the woman who had lost her boyfriend. Something was happening. Maybe at last Lilou would reveal herself, show him who or what she really was. She had been teasing him for long enough. Playing him. Now it was time to call her hand.
He should have been more afraid, but excitement overruled that. Perhaps Dean was too old to be truly scared. He had been searching for so long. A long while ago it had been about finding proof of the creatures’ existence so that he could reveal them to the world, find fame and fortune. Be someone who other people looked up to, and admired. Then, as his old life had receded into a dim haze of disgrace and mockery, the search for proof transformed into a personal quest, and an intimate need. An obsession, some might have said, and he would not have argued.
“I always knew there was something, Lilou,” he whispered. “I always knew you were something. A fairy? An elf?” Old he might be, but he recognised her unnatural beauty and allure, more so for the fact that she attempted to hide it. “We’ll find out.”
He took a last look at the bearded man leaning against the building’s rear wall, then ducked down the alley running alongside the dilapidated structure. He had no wish to meet a man like that, and he wouldn’t have to. For this was Dean’s world. In years of searching, stalking, and sleeping in forgotten rooms, he knew that there was always more than one way in or out.
It took some climbing to find it. He was getting on in years, but fit, and his constant meanderings through the city kept his muscles supple and his bones strong. He shimmied up an old metal drainpipe, crossed a gently sloping roof, then climbed a rusted roof ladder toward a higher ridge. This had a raised structure that had once been glazed, but most of the glass was smashed away now, and plants had taken hold in muck collected across the roof over the decades of abandonment and neglect.
A stink rose from inside. He was used to the stench of hidden places—piss, shit, refuse and rats, things dead and dying—but this was an amalgamation of reeks, rich and heavy in his throat.
The drop down to the old pool below was long, so he edged along to the opposite end of the roof ridge. Where the roof ended, an access ladder was bolted to the gable’s outer face, ending on a small flat roof below. It was difficult to see from this high angle, but he thought there might be a maintenance door down there.
He climbed down, smiling when he found the door. Its old metal was painted green, rusted in great swathes like lichen on rock. It creaked open just wide enough for him to slip through.
The room inside was dark, but Dean always carried a torch.
It might once have been an office, but many of the trappings of business and bureaucracy had been torn and smashed up, then used for a fire in the corner. Though it had been contained well enough, there were great blackened scars where two walls met. The smell of damp ashes hung in the air, and among the cinders were the remnants of old beer cans. That was one thing Dean had never been drawn to. He might be a man of the streets, but he needed his mind clear and sharp.
An interior door had been smashed from its hinges to add fuel to the fire, and on the other side he headed down a curving staircase to what might have once been the reception area. Now it was dark and empty, with fading posters on the damp walls casting echoes of older times. The air stank—the same sickly scent he’d caught up on the roof. Something had died and rotted in here, perhaps a few things. Dean had encountered human corpses before, and others.
Never what he sought, though.
He paused at the center of this larger space and listened, breathing softly through his mouth. He was just about to head through one of the changing rooms and into the main swimming hall when he heard a noise.
A scraping. Metal on concrete, perhaps. It didn’t repeat, so it wasn’t likely a loose flap of metal blown in a breeze. He moved quickly into the shadows at the far edge of the lobby, and behind a door he heard another noise.
A voice.
Dean held his breath. It had been a man’s voice, words indecipherable. He’d expected Lilou and the other woman, but they had recruited help.
Of course they had. If Lilou sought a satyr, they’d need all the help they could get.
He had to temper his excitement. He checked the small camera he always carried, made sure his phone’s charge was decent, then felt in his coat pocket for the comforting weight of his gardening knife.
He had attempted to follow Lilou before, but she had always lost him. Not today. She had more urgent things on her mind.
Camera in hand, he shoved the door. It opened onto a long, narrow corridor, and just as he peered through he saw a flicker of torchlight disappearing halfway along. He followed, slow and cautious to begin with, then speeding up. He didn’t want to lose them. This moment felt loaded with possibilities.
The movement led him into an old sewer. In the past it might have been the flushing point for the pool, but now it was clear, and relatively clean. Dean kept his torch turned off, and eventually the others came into view. In a deeper, longer tunnel, he saw them. There were three men with Lilou and the woman, probably compatriots of the man left guarding the entrance. Danger came off them in waves, but they put themselves in a pool of light, deepening the darkness around him.
He fixed his camera to a headband he had adapted, and started filming.
Moments later came the shouting, screaming, a flashing of lights. Dean ducked down, trying to make out what was happening. Someone fell. Their lights were lessened somehow, as if smothered in fog.
As the shouting and panic faded a little, a gunshot blasted along the tunnel.
Dean gasped and dropped, pressing himself to the junction of floor and wall, remaining there even when a flood of rats swept past and over him. Some of them jumped onto his head and skittered along his body. He was used to rats. He didn’t like them, but his attention was focused ahead.
There was more shouting, and then a quieter voice. Lilou. She was stern but calming. Torches were picked up and the group moved on.
Dean followed, and found the body.
It was a shock. Not the death itself—he had seen bodies before, and witnessed death several times—but the casual way the others had left the fallen man behind. Dean checked that he really was dead, and a selfish part of him hoped he’d find no pulse. If he did, he’d have to get help. He might lose their trail.
No pulse. The man was dead.
The vague light from the torches receded ahead of him, and he hurried on before he was left behind. Passing junctions in the old tunnel, he found himself in a passageway hewn from rock. Dean had been in places like this before. There were warrens beneath London, networks known and used, and many more long-forgotten. He possessed maps and accounts of certain areas, but none of them were complete or accurate. Their edges and extents were always uncertain. Tunnels continued on into mystery. He often wished he were a younger man, stronger and more capable of the endurance required to explore properly.
But there were people who had disappeared down here.
At last they stopped again, and Dean was glad for the rest. He sank down into the tunnel and watched, motionless and silent. The four of them stood close, aiming their torches at an opening that seemed to swallow light. He smelled something strange, different from the stench he’d detected up in the main hall. This was the musk of an animal. It wasn’t a rat smell, either. It was lik
e the warm aroma of a wet dog, mixed with a lifetime of filth.
He lifted his head and inhaled again, trying to concentrate and sense past the familiar smell of the underground.
And then violence erupted, fast and furious.
It startled him, but he hunkered down.
Stay low, keep quiet, pretend you’re not really there. Make yourself invisible.
The torches swung and danced, throwing staccato shadows back in his direction. They flitted across ceiling and walls, elongated and inhuman, and Dean drank in the sights, searching for some indication that he had been right. He had followed them all the way down here, certain they were coming for something unknown. One of the Kin.
If this was just gangland activity…
The gun fired again. More shouting. A loud, exuberant shriek that set his balls tingling and hairs standing up across his body. He hoped his camera was picking this up. He didn’t want to miss anything.
There came the sounds of close fighting. Grunts, shouts, the dull impacts of something heavy hitting flesh. There were voices in there, too, confused and lost amid the chaos. That awful shriek came again, and he realised that it was laughter.
Another gunshot, and then he saw a shadow growing wider in the tunnel as someone or something ran toward him.
He kept low and still. A weak torch jumped left and right, and then he saw a tall man approaching at speed.
He’ll see me! Dean thought, but there was nothing to do.
If the man did see him, he paid no heed. Dean caught only a glimpse of his face, cast in a rictus of terror.
His feet slapped along the tunnel and away, seeking the relative safety of daylight, but Dean wasn’t sure there was anything like safety up there, in that old pool building. The stench of death hung about the place. Whatever had caused it might now be down here.
He crawled along the tunnel floor, keeping low, edging forward slowly. He had long suspected that the Kin hid behind a veil of fear, whether they were dangerous or not. Hiding in London made sense, because the larger the concentration of people, the more they kept to themselves. Anything out of the ordinary was invariably someone else’s business, and a sense of danger would ensure that the Kin were left alone by all but the most determined of hunters.
People like him.
There seemed to be a pause in the violence, but it was loaded.
“Move again and I’ll shoot!” the woman shouted. Then that awful laughter.
Nothing human, Dean thought, and his skin crawled. “That’s nothing human,” he said softly so that the camera’s microphone could pick up his voice. His excitement rose. He imagined a million people viewing this footage, then ten million, and then the scientists and naturalists, all clamoring to quiz him about amazing discoveries.
Yet fame felt distant and hollow.
He craved the truth for himself, to disprove that niggling yet insistent voice that constantly whispered in the darkest hours, You’re just old and mad.
As he prepared to stand and run toward the altercation, he felt something approach from behind.
It was a sensation unlike anything he had experienced before. Dean believed in the idea of a sixth sense—of knowing when someone was watching you or creeping close—but he had never been so hideously aware of it as he was now. It exerted a terrible gravity on his consciousness. It drove a warm breeze before it, something rare in such places but common in tube tunnels. This air carried no diesel, however, no burnt tang of electronics. It was the aroma of something that should never be known.
Dean felt himself melting, flowing lower into the ground in his attempt to hide. He wished he could close his eyes and not see, hold his ears and never hear. I don’t want to know, he thought, and years of curiosity suddenly felt ignorant and immature.
There were some things best left unknown.
As he heard the impossible footsteps, he craved the innocent comfort of the small bedsit that he called home.
It drew close… and then stopped.
Dean feared his heart would fail. The awful presence demanded something in complete silence. Nothing was said, no invitation made, but the sudden stillness felt like the instant before a lightning strike.
There was very little light, but even that was too much.
The figure was hunched over in the tunnel, too tall, yet still full of grace. It regarded Dean, eyes filled with humour or delight. Its head was too large, body too tall, limbs too long, and Dean’s only reaction was to think, I’m far too small.
“You see me,” the creature whispered. It moved on without saying more. Dean knew that those words would stay with him forever, an echo that would never fade.
“You see me.”
He watched it go, terrified and enraptured. He feared that he would never again be able to move, speak, or function as a human being. Finally grabbing the camera on his head strap, he unclipped it and checked that it had been filming. He paused, skipped back, then froze the image on that huge, amazing face. Proof, recorded and beyond doubt. An inhuman shape projecting human features, yet like nothing he had ever seen or known before.
Huge, naked, unbelievable, and unknown.
Yet as this long-sought moment arrived, the delight he had always expected was tempered with fear. His blood ran cold. If a creature such as this did not mind being seen, what did that mean?
As it swept along the tunnel with the promise of more violence, Dean fled that terrible place.
24
It wasn’t Ballus emerging from the subterranean room. It was that other beast, huge and spattered with the satyr’s blood.
That didn’t make Angela feel any safer, but she had Vince back with her now. Though her world had gone insane, she could ride out the storm of change if she was with her love.
Deep down, she had always known that he was a good man.
Sometimes bad things happened to good people.
She supported him, helped him walk as Lilou and the other thing—
—angel? Demon?—
—followed behind them, whispering unknown words and drawing shadows in their wake. She felt the weight of the creature behind her. Behind them all. Only once did she try to glance back, but none of the torchlight dared touch him. Even so, unseen and barely there, he remained the center of attention.
Angela still remembered the darkness that had enveloped her, the dreg, and how it had pushed everything around her into a vague distance. Although it had disgusted her, she still felt pangs at its passing, like a junkie craving a fix.
Fat Frederick lurched ahead of them. He hadn’t spoken a word since the burst of shattering violence. His ears were bleeding, and she wondered whether his eardrums had been ruptured by Ballus’s assault. When they reached Billy’s corpse, he stopped and hefted it over one shoulder, staggering beneath the dead weight.
Finally they emerged into the pool’s main hall.
“Not here,” Vince said, groaning and leaning even heavier against her. “Anywhere but here.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. She steered them toward a doorway and they passed through into a lobby area. It was dark, windows and doors boarded over. Fat Frederick followed them, slumping to the floor and easing Billy down beside him.
Angela helped Vince sit down against a wall. Then she held him. She could smell him, a rich odour of sweat and blood and fear, and she liked that. It proved to her that he was real.
“I thought I’d lost you forever,” he said. “I thought Ballus was going to kill me.”
“He was,” Lilou said. “Mallian saved you. He saved us all.” She stood in the doorway looking at the humans, and Angela could tell from her stance what was happening. She was leaving them, here in this place of death and rot and torture. Behind the nymph, still in the main hall, a deeper shadow moved in the gloom.
“Don’t go,” Angela said.
A sound rose, a voice like the rocks of the earth grinding together. The nymph tilted her head without looking back, then nodded almost imperceptibly.
“W
hat?” Angela asked. She was afraid again. After all that had occurred, would the thing that had come to save his Kin dare to leave witnesses?
“You should get away from here,” Lilou said. “It’s a sick place. Haunted.”
“But Ballus is dead,” Vince said.
“Mallian took him to pieces, as Ballus did to others of our kind, yet what he did here will scar.”
The voice again, throaty and deep, its words mysterious. Angela frowned, trying to make sense. It didn’t sound like a different language—more like an arcane use of words she should have known. Meaning tickled at her ears, but eluded her.
“I’m coming,” Lilou said, again without looking back. She stared at Vince for a moment, and Angela wasn’t sure whether something passed between them. Or perhaps what she sensed was a connection between them giving way.
“Don’t go,” Vince whispered through split lips.
“Thank you, Vince,” Lilou said.
“Are you just going to abandon—?” Angela began.
“Of course not!” Lilou snapped. “But Mallian can’t be seen. He can’t be noticed.”
From the cavernous baths behind her, heavy with the stink of rotting Kin, the creature
said something more.
It sounded like, “Not yet.”
“Go with him,” Lilou said, nodding toward Fat Frederick. “Accept his protection. I have to tend my own, and give the dead a proper resting place. But I’ll be in touch again later.”
“Home?” Angela said, a one-word question. Vince squeezed her hand as she spoke.
Lilou did not even reply. She glanced around the lobby one more time, then backed through the door and let it drift shut.
Angela heard the clomp of impossible feet. They reminded her of Ballus’s terrible hooves, but while these were softer, the impacts were far greater.
What did I see? she wondered. What the hell is Mallian? Then she let it go. Only one thing really mattered.