”What about you, Fabian? What can you add?” Haddon McCreedy turned to the gaunt Stark.
”Enough to be frightened, Haddon. More than enough for that.” Of all of them Fabian Stark was the only true practitioner of The Art. Carruthers dabbled in sleight-of-hand and tricks of perception, Haddon himself had a knack for the uncanny, divination of dreams and auguring, but Fabian was different. When he had come to their door three years ago he had been a powerful-looking youth, not the wraith that sat before them now. His obsession with The Art had done that to him, the arcana eating away at his physicality until he was a husk of a man. That was the cost. The Art devoured energy, for every manipulation it burned more life away. Eventually it would be the death of Stark, they all knew it. The time would come, inevitably, when The Art consumed him. For now they protected him as best they could because they needed him: it takes a thief to catch a thief, the old adage went. It had never been more applicable than now. Stark slumped forward in his chair, exhaustion clear in his eyes and the dark circles beneath them. ”The symbols themselves form a cypher; interpreting them correctly will release the homunculus trapped within the stone.”
”So we are talking about a construct running wild in London then?” Locke said, ”We have dealt with worse.”
”You are a simple soul sometimes, Brannigan,” Fabian Stark said, not unkindly.
”There’s no need for insults, Stark. Not all of us are blessed with your, ahh … talents.”
”That was no insult, my friend. Think of the cross as a key, whoever has control of the construct has access to the secrets it was made to protect.”
That notion hung in the air between them, weighted like a condemnation.
”Do we know what the homunculus was fashioned to guard?” Haddon McCreedy asked, finally, fearing the answer even as he voiced the question.
”We do,” Stark admitted. He closed his eyes. ”The cross was the work of Abu Musa Jabir Ibn Hayyan.”
”Geber?” Dorian Carruthers’s walking coin fell from his fingers and clattered on the table’s top. He scooped it up quickly and thrust it into his pocket.
”One and the same.”
”So it has to do with the philosopher’s stone?”
”Hardly. That was nonsense cooked up by Abu Musa to shift attention from what he was really interested in. A stone that offers eternal youth? Even given the wealth of ’impossible things’ we know, the notion is ludicrous. ”
”Which was?” Carruthers asked, pointedly.
”The Hollow Earth.”
”What? You mean to say the construct is guarding the door down into the centre of the earth?” Carruthers laughed harshly. ”And you said the philosopher’s stone was nonsense?”
Stark nodded, rubbing at his jaw. A thin shadow of stubble had begun filling itself in along his sharp chin. ”It is not as outrageous as it sounds, Dorian, believe me. Where, after all, do you think our legends of Hell’s fire, devils and such originate from?”
”But a door down into the very core of the earth? It’s all so … Jules Verne!”
”That is a rather prosaic interpretation, I admit, but in essence it is true enough, though the actuality is more existential than substantial.”
”Sometimes you scare me, Stark,” Carruthers said, shaking his head. ”I’m not sure I want to actually live in the same world you do. You say these words and all I hear is blah blah, blah blah, blah blah.”
”How does this door that isn’t a door work, Fabian?” Haddon pressed, cutting across the prestidigitator.
”The homunculus itself is the door, or rather it is capable of creating the doorway where so ever it chooses. It is the way.”
”So are you saying that all this fellow needs to do is crack the cross open and … ?”
”There is no physical door,” Stark explained. ”No stone arch or golden doorknob that any Tom, Dick or Harriet can walk up to, offer the secret knock and abracadabra open the door and simply stumble down the Catamine Stair into one of the greatest secrets of all creation.”
”Well, that at least, is a relief,” Carruthers said.
Millington had been unusually quiet since Haddon had closed the reading room door. ”If we know what the Homunculus Cross does, surely the question has to be who would stand to gain most from its theft?”
”I don’t think there can be any doubt,” Haddon McCreedy said. ”This smacks of the Brethren.”
Certain fears were left unsaid: had one of the Brethren infiltrated the hidden chamber, what then was there to stop them from taking the second door and following the tunnels back beneath old London town to their building on Grays Inn Road? The alternative did not bear thinking about. If it was not one of the Brethren, if it were merely some tinkerer working alone … It did not matter. Whatever their affiliations, someone had breached their defences. They were vulnerable.
Chapter Four
Nathaniel Seth knelt before the cross.
He was outside, on the Whispering Gallery that ringed the great dome of Wren’s breath-taking Cathedral. The Great Bell rang out the coming of dawn’s first blush. Its harmonic rippled out over the slums to the bells of St. Clements, and on to St. Martins in the Field. He listened for the Old Bailey Bell, the rhythm of the children’s nursery rhyme taking root in his head. The wind had picked up, tattering the remnants of the early morning smog. The visibility was far from good, there was no actual sunlight, but instead of ten feet in front of his face he could see all the way down to the Thames. The shadows of the mudlarks were down on the river early picking over the detritus washed in by the tide in search of anything they could sell on or make use of.
The trawlers had already hauled their nets and were making toward the docks at Billingsgate to sell their fish and coal barges belched more black soot into the air as they chugged down the river. It was no wonder the city hadn’t seen the sun for a month. Black smoke thick with coal dust belched out of thousands upon thousands of chimneys, choking the sky.
Fleet Street was already awake, as were the labourers busy in the filth and mire of Smithfield’s meat market. The reek of corpses hung heavily in the smoke-filled air as the stripped carcasses were burned.
The London dawn was alive with thieves and idlers, hawkers and vagabonds. Before the hour was out a cascade of other sounds and smells would fill the air as the press of people woke and the discordant din of life commenced.
Beside him the young boy squirmed, writhing around against his bonds.
”Oh, do be quiet, child. You are trying my patience,” he murmured, caressing the outermost sigils on the great stone cross. ”It will all be over soon enough.”
The boy wriggled all the more desperately, bracing his scuffed boots on the stone railing and arching his back as he fought with his bonds.
”Suit yourself, child, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that, the man who called himself Seth took an ivory handled flick-knife from his pocket, pushing the edge of the still-concealed blade up against the young boy’s pulsing pulmonary. ”One touch is all it will take,” he promised, applying the slightest pressure to the small silver stud. The four-inch blade lanced out, opening up the boy’s soft flesh. Thick, rich red blood pulsed out through the gash for as long as it took the boy’s heart to stop beating. Dead, he slumped back against his bonds.
Seth stood over the child, hands and face smeared with innocent blood.
He inhaled slowly, savouring the iron-tang and the ripeness of the wind blowing off the various markets of the city. The boy stank, but then, Nathaniel knew, violent death seldom bore the aroma of rosehip or lavender. It stank. He grabbed the boy’s corpse and hauled it up over the stone railing. It took all of his strength to hold it there, arms bent back, and fasten each wrist, making a mocking crucifixion out of the boy’s body.
He knelt before the Homunculus Cross once more, sub-vocalizing the first rhythms of the incantation, and touching his bloody hand to the twisted face of the beast trapped within the crux of the cruciform. And with the
first words off his lips, the sky broke, drops of rain coming down like Solomon’s tears.
His lips moved, murmuring the words of summoning he had learned by rote. His fingers moved to the second and third engravings, sharing the child’s blood with them. He felt the stone respond to his touch—a sudden swell of warmth within its cold core. ”Awake, guardian of the stair,” he whispered. ”Awake, spirit of the stone. Awake, and come to me.” He touched his left cheek, his fingertips lingering in the blood. Slowly, he drew his fingers down his cheek to his chin, and across his lips. He tasted the boy’s blood and beneath it the mineral traces of the stone still on his fingers.
He stood slowly, lifting the cross in both hands and raising it above his head.
He walked to the edge of the Whispering Gallery, his leather soles in the smeared blood, and leaned out, letting the cross fall.
It hit the ground, the butt cracking the funeral slab beneath it, the impact opening fissures within the cross itself. It shattered even as it fell back, shards of stone strewn all around the broken slab.
”Show me the way, creature of flesh and stone. I set you free. I give you your life. I give the blood of life. Take that blood in return for your guidance. I would know your secrets,” there was madness in his voice as it crooned, ”I bid thee, construct, open the hidden door, for I would walk the stair and free all of your kind, making a place for them here, above.”
Lady Justice stared at him from the roof of the Old Bailey as he reached down over the gallery, pulling apart the dead boy’s grubby shirt and plunging the knife into his bare stomach. He broke from the chant’s cadence to whisper: ”Be grateful for your blindfold, woman, because there’s nothing remotely just about what is going to happen now.” His words were carried away on the wind as the first drops of blood splashed down onto the funeral slabs below.
Nathaniel Seth opened the wound wider, bleeding him out.
”Come to me, guardian of the way. Rise. Rise!”
From the fragments of dust and stone, the creature rose, a bestial figure with razor-like teeth and a feral grin as it shed the lethargy of its prison and climbed into the air.
”Come to me!”
The fat rain melted away from the creature as it rose, evaporating into steam long before they ever came into contact with its calcified skin.
”I would have more blood,” the homunculus rasped, settling on the gallery’s stone rail. ”Yours.”
Seth took his knife and made a small incision, opening his wrist so that the creature might feed. It scurried forward, hungrily suckling at the wound. He winced against the savagery of its seventeen teeth as they sank deeper and deeper into him. ”Open the door,” he commanded, but the certainty had slipped from his voice. All around him he was surrounded by the architecture of doubt, huge buildings raised within the spectre of reassurance, churches, cathedrals, law courts, and buildings devoted to the fear of the unknown future and sucking absence of the Lord, and the darkness of the here and now where His hand has failed His children.
”Feed me,” the creature cackled, the gore of his flesh stuck between its jagged teeth.
”Open the door.”
”Feed me,” it repeated as he wrenched his wrist away from its suckling mouth.
”Not until you open the way.”
”It has been so long, so long since I have tasted life. Who are you to command me? Are you the sovereign king of stone and shadow? Are you the master of granite and fog? Or are you all wind?”
”I am the one who brought you back, imp. That is all you need to know. The boy is yours, feed to your heart’s content. When you have had your fill, you will open the door.”
The homunculus scurried back and dropped from the railing, burying itself in the dead boy’s open ribs. Nathaniel Seth heard its feeding but did not listen. He leaned on the stone rail, looking out across the city. It would be the last morning that the sun would rise on these oblivious streets. The innocence of the city would be shorn from its alleys and byways. Tomorrow it would rise on a knowing city, stripped of illusion, stripped of safety, stripped of humanity.
Tomorrow the sun would rise on a new Hell.
The Hollow Earth
Chapter Five
The homunculus opened the way.
At first Nathaniel Seth thought the wall behind him was collapsing. The brickwork set in place for the best part of two centuries appeared to buckle, the huge white stones shifting, rearranging themselves until the mortar flaked away and the wounds in the wall opened wider and wider still, a wound in time and space.
As the rain came down harder, the first burst of the yellow morning light seeped through the dark clouds. It bathed the huge cupola of St. Paul’s in the glory of a shifting rainbow, the violet of its inner rim so intense it bled into the buildings around it, suffusing them with incredibly vivid colour.
More and more of the stones broke away until a huge, gaping blackness beckoned where moments before there had been bricks and mortar.
He stepped closer, hesitantly.
”This is what you asked for, master of wind,” the homunculus mocked. ”The great stair. Descend. Set the dwellers in the dirt free. Bring the denizens of the muck up to see the light of day. Let them revel in the filth of the earth no more. Set them abroad, let the folk of the surface learn humility when their new masters walk their precious streets. Down you go.”
Seth peered deep into the darkness, trying to discern the curves and lines of the descent. For a moment he was sure there was nothing except for a dizzying drop, ninety-nine feet down, but slowly the ripples in the air began to solidify, hinting at the steps they were. Even so there was no substance to them. It was a vertiginous sight, down through the dome of the great Cathedral, through the nave and down into the quire vault and deeper still, past Wren and Nelson’s tombs and into the crypt with its famous dead and still deeper, losing itself in the belly of the black earth.
”This is the stair?” he said doubtfully.
”The Catamine Stair lies beyond. This is the doorway, nothing more. It is deeply rooted in the earth. Walk with faith, through the holiest of holies as you descend into what the frightened children call Hell.”
”A sweet irony,” Seth said, repelled and yet still drawn to the seemingly endless drop.
”Indeed. Now go, it will not remain open long without more blood, and I have a hankering for more of yours, truth be told.”
”Be grateful I still have need of you, construct. But I warn you now, and just this once: continue to vex me and I will put an end to your miserable existence once and forever, as simply as this,” he snapped his fingers to emphasise his point. The homunculus sneered but lapsed into silence.
A hangman’s wind was blowing down from Tyburn, though of course it wasn’t Tyburn anymore; the gallows tree was gone and in its place the glorious Marble Arch stood, but old deaths still clung to that wind. No amount of pretty buildings and new names could cleanse the spirit of the place or expunge the blood from the soil. It would always be a hangman’s wind that blew in from the west of the city.
Smiling to himself, he stepped out into nothing.
Chapter Six
The Catamine Stair lanced all the way down into the very heart of the earth.
He walked, at first tentatively, each step felt out with care, and then with more and more surety as each new footfall was met by resistance from the air, and then by the clay steps of the stair itself as he disappeared beneath the surface, through the vault and lower.
It was a long walk; but then he was walking through the realm of the dead to the hollow core of the earth, beneath the crust and the mantle and down, down, deeper and still down. It was dark but he had no need of light; he adjusted a simple ocular device which was to all intents and purposes identical to a run-of-the-mill pair of glasses, though through a series of filters these altered the perception of his eyes, denying them the gift that was colour. Behind the lenses his world reduced to black and shades of grey. Beyond the glass frame, fragments o
f colour still burned; they came to him as hallucinatory flashes, sparking and blazing at random.
A curious lichen limned the steps themselves, giving off a faintly phosphorus glow. It was enough for him to see by.
The Stair itself began as a cramped spiral, coiling around and around on itself dizzyingly, every twenty feet gained taking him through three complete rotations. With every turn and turnabout he felt all sense of his own place within the universe begin to drift.
He noticed markings on the walls. Many were reminiscent of those on the Homunculus Cross, though the deeper he travelled the more deviant they became. The iconography was elemental at first, but it mutated, displaying perverse sexual deprivations, animalistic couplings, wild bestial rutting, horned figures presiding over the ritualistic rape and slaughter. It was almost as though he were descending into the murkier aspects of the human psyche, those dark whims rendered in images daubed on rough walls. Other shadowy renditions showed vaguely angelic creations, the offspring of the bacchanalia. In others still, women gave birth to giants too vast to be contained within their bodies, their flesh torn open. Cave paintings, animals, fire, the hunt, death, sex and life, all caricatures of those primitive essences. They were compelling, hypnotic, they craved the eye, filling the mind with the base memories of their artists. They were a connection with the creatures of this place and in studying them the images made a frightening pact with his imagination. It was possible, looking at them, to believe that the first men never crawled out of the primordial soup at all, that there was no Darwinian evolution, but that they emerged, erect, from this subterranean hell.
By the wizardry of sheer willpower alone Nathaniel Seth broke their damned covenant and moved on, deeper.
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