“There’s our ghoul,” Crott muttered suddenly, pointing.
They saw it then, slouching along the central aisle, their lamplight splashing across the left side of its body and showing it up in translucent white. Rags and tatters clothed it; a bony hand showed through a torn sleeve. Its head was half-fleshed, a white eggshell of skull showing through behind its eye socket, and its lips were withered to nothing, showing a skeleton smile beneath a collapsed nose and lidless eyes that stared endlessly. Half corpse, half skeleton, it managed to be neither. The portions of its form that were lit seemed to hang in the air, flat pictures supported by nothing, for its unlit parts were invisible.
It seemed not to have noticed them; rather, it was dragging itself slowly along and looking ahead, instead of to its left where they were.
“Does it know we are here?” Alaizabel asked.
“It knows,” said Thaniel. “Do not be fooled. Keep walking. Slowly. It may let us by if we do not alarm it.” They did so, none daring to take their eyes off the thing. It was perhaps five metres away, with only the length of a pew dividing them.
None of them had been above ground for a considerable time and, despite the rain, none were truly aware that there was a fully fledged storm raging until it decided to announce itself with a blinding flash and a simultaneous bellow of thunder loud enough to make Armand shriek and Alaizabel duck.
Crott swore. “It’s gone!” he said, and he was right. The Hallow Ghoul, for one second illuminated all over by the lightning, had disappeared in the dazzling aftermath.
The brightness faded, leaving them in an empty church. The air prickled with tension. Their enemy had been bad enough when they could see it; now that they had no idea where it was, it was worse.
“We have the incense,” said Thaniel. “Keep going.”
Cathaline held her burner up high, swinging it around a little wider, sending the maudlin scent all around them. Carver did the same, and the others moved in closer around him. They were perhaps halfway along the length of the church.
Cathaline was considering making a run for the final stretch when a terrible shriek ripped through the cloisters, and from behind one of the thick pillars the Hallow Ghoul lunged at them, claws reaching for Alaizabel. She cried out and threw herself back against the wall; but the ghoul pulled up short as it encountered the fumes of the incense burner. Crott’s pistol was out instinctively, firing a round into the rotting thing. The creature was already recoiling, pulling back with a hiss, and Crott’s shot passed directly through it and through the great stained-glass window on the facade of the church. The glass shattered and came tumbling down in a riot of colour and sound, a disastrous waterfall of accidental destruction.
The Hallow Ghoul shrieked, appalled at the damage to its home. The noise sliced through them like blades, making them cringe as it turned its one good eye on Crott. It lunged again, thrusting its claw into Crott’s chest, reaching inside and grasping his heart as if it were an apple in a basket. The Beggar Lord screamed, a noise higher than anyone would have thought could have come from the scar-faced man, and then suddenly Thaniel was there, a charm-string snaking towards the ghostly thing. Lightning flashed once more, shattering thunder bursting through the air, and then there was only the sound of the charm-string clattering to the ground and a disappearing wail as the Hallow Ghoul went to rest at last.
Everyone was shouting at once. Crott was collapsing into Armand, still screaming; Alaizabel was crying out in horror; Armand had joined his master by setting up an idiot wail of distress; Carver and Thaniel were shouting instructions, Cathaline, too. Only the Devil-boy stood quiet.
“Stand back!” Cathaline commanded, her voice rising above all the others. “Lay him down, Armand! Stand back, all of you!
Crott was like a wounded rabbit, wild-eyed and thrashing. He had run out of breath and had stopped screaming, and gaped instead, mouthing nothing. Armand lowered him to the ground. Cathaline shoved Carver aside, who was attempting to take control of the situation in his policeman’s way, despite not knowing what he was doing. She tore Crott’s shirt open while Armand knelt at his head and held it, a surprisingly intelligent move.
“Why didn’t the incense work?” Carver demanded of the room in general.
“This fool made it angry,” Cathaline said, pressing a hand to Crott’s chest. It had gone grey where the ghoul had touched it. She held out a hand and opened her mouth to speak, but Thaniel was already handing her the golden incense globe. She tipped it into her hand, pouring burning hot ash on to her skin, and threw the globe aside before rubbing the ash vigorously into Crott’s chest. Crott was still gasping for air, twitching and coughing.
“It should not have been able to...” Thaniel said.
“The wych-kins time is at hand,” Devil-boy Jack said. “They are more powerful than before.” He walked over to the charm-string and picked it up, apparently unconcerned with his Lord. He studied it. Two Wards were smoking, having flared and burned out on contact with the ghoul. “Now we know how to deal with them next time,” he said, holding the object out to Thaniel.
There was a heavy thump as Cathaline linked her fists and brought them down on Crott’s chest, and the Beggar Lord gasped and coughed and then lay back, breathing heavily. Cathaline sighed and looked over her shoulder.
“He will live. For now. He needs to be treated. He needs a proper Rite. You can take him back, Devil-boy. You can perform the—”
“No,” Jack rasped. “That is not the way. We go as the scrying stones ordained.”
“You will take him back as I say!” Cathaline ordered.
The Devil-boys soulless, sewn-up eyes showed nothing. “I have seen in the stones how this will end. If all goes as it should, we will be victorious. If we deviate from the pattern set, we change the course of the future. I will not jeopardize the world for Crott.”
“The other stones, the ones you said were useless; they told you things, did they not?” Thaniel demanded.
“Who lives, and who dies, and where,” Jack replied. “And in one case, how.”
“You cannot keep that from us!” Thaniel said.
“I must,” came the guttural reply. “I must, for if we change what we were to do, so we change the outcome. I could save one of your lives, and the rest would then die and that person would die later anyway and we would fail!” He barked the last word, making Alaizabel jump. “We have been set a path. How strange, don’t you think, that both my stones and Detective Carver independently arrived at the same plan? A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back.”
“There is no higher power, Devil-boy!” Thaniel said angrily. He got to his feet. “And I am no-one’s pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of.”
“I do not speak of entities,” Jack said. “I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of as. It is a way. It is the way.”
Carver was the first one to speak. “Who are you, Devil-boy?”
“I am a vessel, just like Alaizabel was,” he replied. “I have glimpsed the way ahead, and I must accompany you on it. That is the pattern. Pick up Lord Crott; he will not die yet.” Armand lifted him up, and Crott stood shakily. He looked grey, and his chest was smeared with a dark, foul
stain. He glared at Thaniel, and then at the Devil-boy.
“I can go on,” he said. “I can go on.”
There was nothing more that could be said. They had a task, and they set to it.
CALEDONIAN ROAD
BENEATH THE CITY
AN OLD ENEMY RETURNS 23
Caledonian Road station was a ruin, as if crushed under the weight of the pummelling downpour. It had taken a square hit from an airship-dropped bomb twenty years ago and the wound had never healed; yet astonishingly, its superstructure was still largely intact, and the bulk of the station was still standing. The low, square building that squatted among the terraced derelicts bowed inward in the centre, having slumped in the aftermath of the explosion. Tears in the brickwork spewed rainwater out on to the pavement, and the broken roof seethed with a mist of wet impacts.
The hunters and their companions were soaked to the bone within a minute of leaving the Hallow Ghouls lair, but they counted themselves lucky that they had come across nothing more threatening than a scared cat on the short journey between the church and the Underground station. And at least the rain had driven off the cursed fog. Crott’s breathing was raspy and erratic, and he walked with Armand’s massive arm around his shoulder, bearing him up. The hunters and the Detective held their pistols at the ready, and the Devil-boy hurried with Alaizabel at the centre of the protective circle.
A dark pall had settled on the group in the wake of Jack’s announcement. One thing they had all divined was that some of them were to die. None of them were comfortable with the idea that their actions were following a plan that decided who should be sacrificed and who should not. Hadn’t the Devil-boy already ruined the pattern by telling them what he had? Or was that a part of what he saw in the scrying-stones? Was he supposed to tell them? In their minds, each was second-guessing frantically, and no conclusions were drawn. Hateful glances were thrown at the blind child, the instrument of their manipulator. Was it possible that he was simply lying to be sure that they did what he said? And would they dare to go against him, to take that chance?
He had them snared, that was for sure. But whether he spoke the truth or if it was he alone who was playing them for puppets, there was no way to tell.
They approached the broken building, a crumbling gateway to the abyss beneath their feet. They had long become accustomed to the idea of the Underground being impassable at night, when the wych-kin came to take the tunnels. Most Underground stations were like fortresses, to keep the unwelcome visitors in at night and stop them spilling on to the streets. But Caledonian Road had been bombed during the Vernichtung, when the wych-kin were only just emerging and, fortunately for the wych-hunters, it had never benefitted from those defences, so it was easy to get in and out of. Wych-kin did not usually travel so far up the Piccadilly line anyway. At least, they had not in previous times. The stirring rose of blood over the Old Quarter had emboldened the wych-kin like never before, and the people of the city did not know what they might expect now.
Thaniel led the way into the station, through a deep crack in the brickwork that had grown over with straggling ivy. Inside, the station was a great hollow cave, echoing with the drum and plink and splash and gurgle of the rain. Thin waterfalls puttered through cracks in the ceiling, and gushed from the great, jagged hole at the centre of it all, carpeting the stone floor in a thin layer of water, running around their boots and out to the street or into the indented chasm that sundered the tiles of the hall. It was tomb-dark inside, shapes visible only by the tiny shimmer of light on rippling liquid. The moonless night had sharpened their night-vision considerably on the journey, but it was still impossible to see adequately.
Cathaline lit her lantern and the others followed suit, the damp air filling with the dry scent of burning oil. The glow spread across tumbled pillars, slopes of rubble, and dark doorways. The ticketing foyer was wide and low-roofed. Once it had been a spacious, open hall, but now the fallen stone and shattered tiles made it cluttered and crowded. The bomb had dropped directly on to the roof above, caving it in and exploding, blowing a great dent in the floor and splitting it open to the darkness beneath.
“Over there,” said Alaizabel, pointing to where a doorway stood with the word TRAINS picked out in a mock-gold mosaic arch above it.
Cathaline threw an enquiring look at Thaniel, who shook his head, indicating that he felt nothing from his wych-sense. She knew to rely on him; he was ever the more sensitive of the two of them.
They trod carefully across the ruined foyer, skirting the bomb-crater in the centre, stepping over fallen girders and stone supports. None quite trusted where their feet were, as if the floor might fall in beneath them at any moment and pitch them into the dark. But it held, sturdy as ever, and they passed through the archway into a long, stone tunnel that plunged downward, a staircase at their feet.
Alaizabel felt the clawing touch of claustrophobia as they descended, darkness before and behind them and only the shield of their lantern light against utter blindness. With no end in sight and no beginning either, it was easy to imagine them walking for ever downward, the steps endlessly marching up to meet them, the tiles rolling by in identical sequence until their lights ran down and they were claimed. She felt tiny, useless—terribly vulnerable now that she was no longer carrying Thatch with her. The wych-kin would not spare her now.
Thaniel, as if hearing her thoughts, looked back at her over his shoulder and smiled reassuringly She smiled back.
Finally, the stairs ended, and the tunnel levelled out. Faded signs pointed the way to the tracks, two routes running parallel, one east and north to Finsbury Park and one west and south to Flammersmith. No trains ran here now.
“We should take this way,” Thaniel said.
A low growl echoed down the tunnel after them, freezing them all where they stood. They looked back as one in the direction from which they had come. In the blackness, three pairs of eyes were watching them, dipping and growing with each soft, padded footstep that approached.
Cathaline levelled her pistol and fired a shot, the noise deafening them temporarily in the close confines of the station. Armand wailed and slapped his ears as if to massage life back into them, or to drive out the loud whine that followed after his hearing had returned.
The eyes had disappeared.
“They will be back,” said Cathaline. “They will not stay scared for long.”
Alaizabel glared at her reproachfully, wishing that she had warned them before firing. Crott shushed Armand, who slowly quieted. The Beggar Lord was looking weaker now. The grey stain on the skin of his chest was spreading slowly. It remained to be seen if he could hold out long enough to get him help.
Damn what the Devil-boy says, Thaniel thought. When we get to the airstrip at Finsbury Park, I will see to Crott. I will do the Rite myself if I have to.
It was bravado; he was not sure whether he knew how to drive out the infection caused by the touch of the ghoul, or whether the trauma to Crott’s heart was already too great to save him. But he needed to say something to make him feel strong inside, for they now walked on to the Underground platform, and there was the mouth of the train tunnel, picked out in lantern-light, beckoning them onwards.
They accepted the invitation. They were too deeply committed now to even hesitate. They had gone beyond the point of turning back, and they were driven by the desire to get out of the darkness that had swallowed them.
They trod between the rusted tracks, gravel crunching and shifting beneath their boot heels. It was mortally cold here, and their sodden clothes chilled them further until their teeth began to chatter. They tramped into the mouth of the tunnel, walking down the throat of the Underground, and soon their light had passed away and was gone, leaving Caledonian Road alone once more with its ghosts and memories.
Alaizabel’s world descended into a frozen misery of plodding, one step and then the next, unable to think of anything but the terrible November temperature and how it was even worse underground. Her
experience outside Redford Acres had left her with a healthy dread of the cold, so she had wrapped up warm as they left Crott’s chambers; but the elements had conspired to wet her through and then turn her to ice.
Thaniel walked alongside her. She clung to him, seeking his body warmth, but he did not hold her to him as she wanted. She could feel him shuddering as well, struggling to conceal his own discomfort. And it seemed almost to be getting colder as they walked, their body temperatures falling as if their very blood was becoming cool.
Low growlings and snufflings dogged their footsteps. Their pursuers were not far behind, and even another shot from Cathaline only deterred them for a few minutes. They stayed out of the light, glimpses only of low, sloping things that skirted the edges of their world. They gave out no warning to the senses of either the hunters or the Devil-boy, leading them to presume that it was wolves who hunted them.
“Wolves,” Crott said with forced humour. “At last, some God-honest thing that will die when I shoot it.”
They came upon Holloway Road station without warning, for the tunnel suddenly fell back and they were faced with the blank, flat eyes of an Underground train. It had died in the station, never to move again. No current flowed through the tracks to power it, and it had long since rusted, its windows broken, a gutted hulk looming up before them.
Thaniel raised his lantern higher, splashing the light across the platform that ran alongside the tracks.
They climbed off the tracks and on to the platform, alongside the silent shape of the train. There was barely enough space between the sides of the tunnel and the front of the train to squeeze through; the bomb-shaken walls had sagged inward with time. Behind them, a wolf bayed a low howl that slid through the tunnels like the mourning of a phantom. Armand looked about nervously, his teeth chattering.
“They are coming,” said Cathaline suddenly, and as if in reply, a multitude of answering howls echoed down the tunnel in a jumble.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray Page 21