Seeing them now, motionless, it was impossible not to recognise them as Landseer’s lions from Trafalgar Square—but being here like this defied every reasonable explanation … unless, he thought suddenly, Stark’s transmogrification had somehow released them. One turned to stone, one set free? Was that possible?
When Carruthers returned from the Reading Room clutching one of Stark’s journals a few minutes later he confirmed everything Millington feared.
”’I have left one last protection, a re-animation on the lions of Trafalgar,’” he quoted, slumping into the soft leather of his chair. ”’At the time of the city’s greatest need will be born beyond stone and stand as last guardians of the great peace. God help us all, each and every one of us, should this last magic come to pass because then surely the end is near and the wards between the world above and the world below are crumbling.’” He closed the book. ”A little melodramatic for my personal taste, but I think Fabian’s message is plain enough.”
”What the hell is going on out there?” McCreedy grunted. It was a rhetorical question. They knew what was happening. All hell was breaking loose.
Mason coughed politely into his starched-white glove. ”If there will be nothing else, masters, might I suggest that I go and investigate the curious behaviour of the birds?”
”Good idea, old man,” McCreedy said. ”No risks though. We’re not about to lose another one of us tonight.”
”Of course, sir,” the chamberlain said. ”Losing one is unfortunate, but two, losing two is downright careless.”
”Was that a joke, Mason?” McCreedy asked.
”I wouldn’t have thought so, sir,” the chamberlain said, bowing slightly as he backed out of the room.
Our Mutual Friend
Chapter Twenty
Mason drew his collar up against the cold and stepped out onto the street. Landseer’s lions turned their huge heads ponderously. Their manes ruffled in the breeze with the sound of stone grinding against stone. He patted one of the great beasts on the head and ruffled its fur affectionately. There was a bond between them. Like him the granite lion was made to serve.
He looked up at the sky, doing his best to orientate himself. The birds flew in a wide circle that spanned perhaps a dozen streets but there was a noticeable epicentre. If he had his distances right it fell somewhere within Whitechapel, give or take a few streets. It wasn’t easy to tell from the ground but he felt confident in his spatial awareness. It was a long walk at the best of times. The inclement weather made the prospect of schlepping through the night city positively foul.
The peasouper had broken some time after the thirteenth bell sounded, which was both a relief and disturbing in and of itself. Mason knew the smogs better than most and had expected it to linger for days but something in Fabian Stark’s sorcery had blown through it, scattering the smog quite literally to the four winds. But already the coal dust was starting to gather again. That was the nature of winter in the city. People needed warmth to stay alive so they lit their coal fires, burning the coals down to cinder and coughing more and more thick black dust into the sky, blocking out the sun. This was the worst it had been in his lifetime. It had been a full month since he had last seen the sun. Properly seen it shining down, not caught a glimpse of it through the tatters of smog. He would gratefully accept this little respite for what it was, a gift. The smog would be impenetrable soon enough.
He would miss Stark’s calming presence. The young man might well have been the most peculiar of them all, but there was an undeniable sense of decency about the fellow. There were precious few people like him left in the world as it careened toward the new century.
Mason passed the last of the lions as he followed Grays Inn Road down toward Holborn. He walked with his head high, staring up at the wondrous vortex of feathers rather than the mundane street life he walked through. He heard the gentle clip-clop of hooves striking the cobbles and looked around to see a Hansom Cab rolling slowly toward him.
”Need a ride, Guv?” the driver called down from his sprung seat at the rear of the cab. ”Ah, Mister Mason!” he exclaimed, recognizing the chamberlain as he turned to face him. ”I thought it was you down there. Mighty peculiar, them birds, eh?” He gestured toward the swirl of pigeons with the tip of his whip.
”That it is, Winston, that it is,” Mason agreed readily.
”So, where can I take you, Mister M? Buckshee, of course.”
”I don’t know exactly where I am headed,” the chamberlain said, ”but I suppose it is somewhere in the middle of Whitechapel.” He looked up at the birds again to confirm his guess, and this time the driver followed the direction of his gaze and his knowledge of the streets shuffled understanding into place.
”Whitechapel it is, Mister M. Climb onto the board if you want, better to keep an eye on them birds from out here rather than sitting in the cab. We’ll see if we can’t get you there double quick, shall we?”
Mason joined him up on the sprung seat. ”Good man. Much appreciated.”
”Well it ain’t like I’m rushed off my feet. The damned city’s dead tonight.”
”Never a truer word spoken,” Mason agreed.
They rode most of the way in companionable silence, each man wrapped up in his own thoughts as they stared up at the sky. The steady clatter of the hooves provided a sharp counterpoint to the steel wheel rims jouncing over the cobbles. The buildings around them went from the north-end marble richness to the red-brick of east-end squalor in less than ten minutes of travelling. That was one of the many marvels of London proper. Each district had so much personality and each personality was utterly unique if you took the time to get to know it. The Eastenders were ’salt-of-the-earth’ souls: hard-working lower classes, not the toffs of the inner wall. They had calloused hands and bleeding knuckles, smelled like a day spent labouring down in the docks and were never short of a cheeky grin to share with a pretty lady or a handsome fella. He’d rather one Eastender at his side in a scrap than a dozen of those Bloomsbury boys any day. They were the kind of people who would fight all the way to Hell, and back. If Stark’s grim prediction was right those were exactly the sorts they needed to enlist.
As Mason studied the giant animus of black birds he recalled Master McCreedy’s unanswered question ”Is this an Anafanta?” It was possible. More than possible, the chamberlain thought, but it would be an almost unheard of manifestation if it was. An Anafanta was, quite literally, the beast within, the primal animal spirit that linked humanity to all of their collective pasts. That spirit went back and back and back all the way to the soul of the soil. It was, in effect, the spirit of eternity. He had met one man capable of releasing his own Anafanta, and that man was Haddon McCreedy. Though the beast within McCreedy was no mere pigeon. The man was a therianthrope; part man, part beast. The literal translation was wild animal. His other aspect, shared soul, was a ravenous wolf. Unleashed it was almost unstoppable. Its potential for damage and destruction was awesome. It struck Mason as appropriate that McCreedy would recognise the manifestation for what it was. But who on earth—or what, Mason thought sharply—could command a soul of a thousand parts?
That bothered the chamberlain more than anything else.
The implications of it were huge.
The Gentlemen may have looked upon Mason as merely a manservant at times but none of them forgot his roots, or his father, Eustace Mason. Mason senior had served the group more than thirty years before his boy came into their service. Eustace Mason was the Mason of Mason’s Emporium, connoisseur of curios, and curator of rare and exquisite goods. The old man had scoured the globe in search of curiosities. He hadn’t merely traipsed the highways and byways, he had sought out the secret paths. He had found Hy Brasil following the Northwest Passage. He had delved into the deeps of Atlantis, the drowned necropolis, weighing anchor beyond the teeth of the Mediterranean and submerging himself in a one-man bathyscaphe of his own design. There was nowhere old man Mason hadn’t been, and he returned from
each impossible place laden down with staggeringly tall tales that made him the life and soul of every alehouse between Perivale and Bethnal Green. Those stories had lit a fire within young Mason junior, kindling an interest in the other side of this life, the oddities and impossibilities, ensuring that he followed in his old man’s footsteps.
When Eustace died, Mason took over the Emporium, turning it into a cabinet of curiosities and charging a red penny to get through the door. The punters came. They loved the entertainment. He employed card readers and spiritualists turning the place into a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of otherworldly fun. He didn’t take it seriously and it kept him well. Carruthers, McCreedy, and the others could just as easily have been waiting on him had he so wished, but he had made a promise to his old man: he would serve the city. That meant serving the men who protected her. He was more than just a bat man, though. He was the grease that kept the cogs turning.
Mason looked across at the familiar façades of house after house, imagining all of the lives going on behind the drawn curtains. And for just a moment he would have traded places with any one of them. Oh to be blissfully ignorant, he thought. But in truth there was nothing he hated more in this life. Ignorance was the root of every manmade evil he had ever encountered. Mason needed the truth. He needed to know it. He was driven to understand. It was just how he was made. He was not one for burying his head in his hands and hoping the world would just march on by.
He had learned a lot from Fabian Stark. At first the more peculiar things the man dabbled in just washed over him, but unlike Landseer’s lions he wasn’t made of stone. Slowly he began to absorb things, and those things led to him understanding more things, until he had a rudimentary grasp of The Art. He was by no means an Adept, and he might never excel to the extent of his unwitting teacher, but he most certainly knew enough to dabble. And with The Art a little went a long way.
They turned onto Commercial Street and cantered through Spitalfields. On the junction with Whitechapel Road he saw lights flickering in the windows of the Ten Bells despite it being well after closing. Across the street was the white marvel of the chapel itself.
”This’ll do fine, Winston,” he said, tapping the driver on the arm. He passed the man a shilling and waved away his objections. He knew it was far too much, but if his old man had taught him anything it was that men like them had to stick together. ”Keep it. Go treat yourself to a jar or two,” he nodded toward the Ten Bells. ”When I’m done I’ll come and find you. You can give me a ride home. How does that sound?”
”Bloody marvellous, Mister M. Bloody marvellous.” The driver palmed the coin and pocketed it without another word.
Mason hopped down from the sprung seat onto the baseboard and then down another step onto the ground. Inclining his head, he tipped the brim of his hat to the driver. ”Shouldn’t be more than an hour or so.”
The driver nodded, and making a clicking sound with his tongue as he geed the horse into motion. The cab lurched forward a few feet, coming closer to the roadside. Winston hopped down and, one foot on the baseboard the other out behind him as he leaned out toward the lamp post, tied off the reins and secured the cab so that he might go partake in those jars Mason had suggested. It was as close as he would come to heaven in London Town.
Mason was about to come a lot closer, though.
He was close to the epicentre of the pigeons’ peculiar flocking pattern. It couldn’t be more than a couple of streets away. He looked around, fixing his bearings, and set off at a brisk pace. By the time he reached the corner of Osborne Street his skin was crawling. It was almost as though his body was reacting to some unseen menace. He sniffed the air. There was a faint tang of brimstone to it. It wasn’t the street lamps. It was stronger than that. There was something unnatural about the fragrance. The fine filament hairs in his nose shrivelled as his nostrils flared.
Mason reached into his pocket for, of all things, two handfuls of birdseed. He made a gentle cooing sound, calling the birds down. At first they seemed naturally suspicious of him, but the chamberlain began slowly mumbling the same words over and over, barely vocalizing them. Instead of being scared the pigeons appeared soothed, and beyond that, curious. One landed on his upturned palm and started to feed, and then two more joined it, then three. He kept his voice steady and his body steadier still until both of his outstretched arms were weighed down by dozens of birds and more settled on his shoulders and on his scalp. Gently, so as not to startle them, Mason teased a few loose feathers from the soft down of their breasts, then with the seed gone, fell silent and broke the enchantment that had held them spellbound.
The birds erupted in a flurry of wings and feathers, climbing frantically into the sky. Mason was left clutching nothing more than a few tufts of feather. He ground them between his fingers, getting a sense of the lives the birds had lived and trying to sift through the flood of images that threatened to overwhelm him, and then he saw it, that last, strongest image: a woman on the ground, beaten and bleeding. She wasn’t dead but she was dying. He could feel her lifeforce slipping away. He couldn’t tell what had been done to her but he knew that he had to find her, and find her fast otherwise it wouldn’t matter.
He didn’t recognise where she was, not exactly, but that wasn’t a surprise. He didn’t know the ins and outs of the backstreets of Whitechapel. He looked up as he started to run. One by one the birds broke away from the flock and swooped down, diving toward the same mark over and over. They were showing him where she was.
Arms and legs pumping furiously as his leather-soled shoes slapped off the street, Mason ran for her life.
Chapter Twenty-One
In the end she wasn’t difficult to find.
She lay half-slumped, half-wedged in the doorway of a two-up, two-down red-brick tenement. She was bleeding, which was good. Dead people don’t bleed. Without the heart to pump it the blood just settles into the lowest veins and turns the corpse blue. He crouched down beside her. He didn’t know where to touch her because every inch of her seemed to be battered, bruised and bloody.
She mumbled something but Mason couldn’t quite make it out so he leaned in closer, until his ear was right up against her lips but the only sounds he could make out were the wet suckling rasps of her breathing so he focused on that.
”It’s all right, it’s all right,” he promised over and over, knowing that it wasn’t.
He wasn’t sure if he could move her without making things ten times worse. He looked up and down the empty street hoping, miraculously, someone else might appear, drawn by the birds. He needed to get her back to the cab and get her to the nearest hospital, somewhere she would stand a chance. Out here her fate was written. She was going to slip deeper into shock, from there blood loss would lead to unconsciousness, and she would never wake up again.
There was nothing else for it. Mason gathered her into his arms and struggled to stand. He walked toward the white church. It shone out like a beacon in the black night. He started yelling blue murder, hoping to draw help out from any one of the houses. In this part of town the curtains might twitch but no one was going to come down to help. They were good at minding their own business.
Halfway down Osborne Road his thighs were burning with the strain.
She was no lightweight, more of a big busty Botticelli portrait of a lady, but the sheer physical toll of carrying her took was disproportionate to her bulk. She was a good threefold heavier than she looked, weighed down by dense bones. For a few laboured steps he wondered if she wasn’t actually made of stone and somehow brought to life like the lions. And even as the thought took hold his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Perspiration beaded and trickled down his neck and back, soaking into his shirt. Gritting his teeth, Mason forced himself back to his feet.
And then he heard her.
One line.
Three words.
”Heaven’s on fire.”
That shook him.
The birds were all around them now. They had
settled on the flaking window ledges and the rusted guttering and stared down with their beady eyes.
”Help me!” Mason yelled, the urgency of his cry burning his throat hoarse. No one was coming to save the woman. No knight on a white charger. Mason bit back his anger. He was her shining one. He had to be. He forced himself forward step by laboured step. Every muscle sang beneath his skin, effort playing every tensed chord like a violin.
And then he heard the sound of a carriage coming.
”Help me!” he yelled again.
The woman’s blood soaked into his clothes transforming him from saviour into some night crawler. To anyone who might have seen him, Mason looked more like a bloody daemon clutching his victim to his chest. To the devil the spoils.
As the black cab turned into the street the horse shied, frightening by the reek of blood in the air. It kicked high, rearing onto its hind legs, and bolted, charging straight toward Mason as he staggered down the middle of the road.
Up on the sprung seat Winston wrestled with the reins. He struggled manfully to calm the frightened mare before she trampled Mason into the cobbles. ”Whoa, girl! Easy. Easy. Easy there.” The driver cried, doing everything he could to slow the horse.
Mason didn’t move.
It was all he could do to stand still and not drop his burden. He stared the runaway mare down and barked a single sharp command, the word backed by The Art. The horse stopped dead in its tracks. Swearing and gasping between the string of oaths, Winston looked down at him. ”I don’t know how the bloody hell you did that, Mister M., and I ain’t sure as I wanna know, neither.”
”Probably wise not to ask then,” Mason grunted, struggling beneath the weight of the woman. ”Give me a hand here, she weighs a ton.”
London Macabre Page 7