London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  The wolf recoiled from its tormentor’s touch, rearing back. Its claws scrabbled on the blood-slick ground, desperately trying to get some kind of purchase. It kicked and slipped and slid but couldn’t tear itself free of the burning hands. Then, with its teeth still embedded in the muscle and tendon of the dead man’s neck, the wolf’s bite finally snapped through the delicate bones there, the sheer force of its panic tearing them free.

  This time the wolf’s howls were desperate.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Millington found a safe place on the second story of the bonded warehouse, making a den amid the cargo stacked and waiting to be loaded. He did his best to make Dor comfortable, taking off his coat and draping it over his friend and making a pillow out of his waistcoat, not that he would notice never mind appreciate the effort. He checked the time on his pocket watch. It was almost four in the morning. In an hour the city would return to life, but for now it remained under the spell of night.

  Moonlight streamed in through a soot-smeared window, painting a silver dagger across the rough floorboards.

  He walked into the light.

  The wolf’s pitiful howls drew him to the window.

  Bracing himself on the chipped and flaking paint of the wainscoting, Millington looked out through the glass. The other side of the glass felt like a world away. He looked down upon that other world as McCreedy’s wolf collapsed, whimpering and pawing at the cobblestones. He saw Mason, soaked to the skin, frozen in indecision, a huge sword in one hand like some mad Crusader, a peculiar gun in the other. He brandished the sword toward the black-cloaked Brethren, while the barrel of the gun was pointed at the girl, Emily, or rather at the ice of the entity that encrusted her like some rare and precious jewel. She was on one knee in a curious parody of a proposal. It was a reversal of roles, but even so, there was no way of interpreting the scene that involved her asking for the chamberlain’s hand. Not with the strange pistol aimed squarely at her chest. She was begging for her life. It only added to the vulnerable beauty of the girl beneath the ice.

  He urged Mason to move, to do something, but the man just stood there.

  He was talking, Millington realised, not to the queen, nor the lion at her feet, but to the man beside her. Millington recognised him: Napier. There was something different about the way he carried himself when he was around the Ice Queen, Millington realised. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before. Napier was … subservient. His body language fairly screamed it. Mason’s body language on the other hand only went so far as to betray the fact he was shouting. What he was shouting was anyone’s guess. Millington was too far away to hear, and the angle meant he couldn’t read the chamberlain’s lips. But he had never seen Mason shout at one of them. Ever. The man was always, at the very least, deferential. Millington’s hands lifted from the wooden sill to press against the glass. It was like ice beneath his fingers. Once that chill found its way into his body it quickly raced all the way to his heart.

  The bronze lion, he noticed, stared intently at Napier. The tension in its body was obvious, even from afar he could see that it was poised to pounce.

  More was happening down there than he could read into what he saw.

  He was sure of it.

  But their shadow-drama was nothing against the massive iron calf of the Golem, Father London, and the huge foot that emerged slowly from the Thames. The thick detritus of the deep clung to the great metal foot. Dirty water dripped from the enormous toes, coming down like rain.

  Millington felt the dizziness swell up within himself and was forced to grip the windowsill to stop himself from falling. The horizon tilted. He could almost taste the coal dust in the air, despite the layer of glass between them. Between the Golem’s strides he saw the skeletal bascule and suspension cables of one of the towers of the incomplete Tower Bridge, and all the way down to the concrete pier that supported it. Beyond the tower, he could see part of the dome of Saint Paul’s. The great cathedral was bathed in moonlight and the afterglow of the fire. It seemed almost like a beacon in the night. He couldn’t bear to look at it, not because of some misplaced religious objection, but because he didn’t see a house of God, there was no glory. All he saw was the place where his friend had died.

  Guilt hit him hard.

  So much had happened so quickly he hadn’t had the time to mourn Stark, neither had he had the time to think about how he had failed his friend.

  And he had, they all had.

  When that thing had come crawling up the staircase from hell, they’d panicked. They’d let Stark dictate things, trusting him without realizing that he must have intended to sacrifice himself. It was obvious now. He didn’t know how he felt about it. Used? Tricked? Betrayed?

  The guilt he felt quickly transformed to helplessness. He was watching another friend die; another friend sacrificing himself to give them a chance. And here he was hiding while he did so. But what could he do? He stared at the birds flapping ineffectually against the iron limbs of the Golem. What was the point? He wasn’t a fighter. He couldn’t rain down fire from the skies or crack the earth open or make the seas rise up. His only gift was empathic. He could commune with the creatures of the earth and sky. He couldn’t even bend them to his will. Millington slumped forward, resting his forehead against the dirty glass.

  The chill of the glass took him out of himself for a moment. He closed his eyes, reducing his world to that single sensation: cold.

  There was calm in the cold.

  He gave himself to the calm, fighting down the waves of helplessness that had threatened to overwhelm him. He breathed deeply, holding each inhalation for a silent count of eleven, then let the breath leak out of his nostrils to fog the glass. On the sixth breath, a silent count of sixty-six, Anthony Millington opened his eyes and opened his mind.

  ”Talk to them,” he didn’t know if he had thought the words or said them aloud, or if someone else had whispered them to him.

  All his life he had shared a conduit with the creatures. He was connected to them, and they were connected to him. His skin crawled. He felt his consciousness slide over the mind of every bug and spider in the room around him, his fear transferring to them immediately. They scuttled about in the shadows looking for nooks to hide in. As the conduit widened so too did its reach, and he felt his mind brush against the rats in the walls and then outside. He felt the pain of McCreedy’s wolf and shied away from it, sinking instead into the water to the turbulent minds of the rats that swum there.

  They felt his fear, just as the insects and spiders before them had, and they responded to it, coming up over the embankment, their sleek bodies glistening in the moonlight as they scurried over one and other, first a few, then more, until hundreds of them streamed out of the river. Their whiskers twitched, eyes red from the reflected iron of the Golem’s legs as they rose up out of the water.

  Hundreds became thousands of them, as they descended from the walls and came up out of the sewers and storm drains to spill across the embankment, drawn toward Millington like some sort of Pied Piper.

  For every person in the city there it was said there was a rat beneath the streets, meaning hundreds of thousands of them lived beneath the city.

  And Millington’s fear called out to them, drawing them to him.

  Down below, he watched as the rats caught the scent of blood and mated it with the fear that clouded their minds. They scurried toward the corpse of Lucius Amun and the helpless wolf, agitated by blood spilled across the ground. They licked at it, lapping it up hungrily, and then set about Amun. Millington watched, torn between horror and fascination, from his vantage point as the rats chewed at the man’s flesh, opening more and more wounds in a matter of seconds. They stripped him down to the bones with ruthless efficiency in a matter of minute, no more.

  But there were so many rats there wasn’t enough room at the body for all of them to feed on Amun, so the ones that couldn’t get close turned in search of fresh meat, driven into a feeding frenzy by t
he overwhelming stench of blood and meat. They swarmed first toward the helpless wolf, much to Millington’s horror, and then as he forced his will upon them, toward the men standing around it. He focussed on the faces of Ra, Hathor and the sisters, Thoth and Osiris and felt no pity as he mouthed the word, ”Feed.”

  His breath steamed the glass.

  Down below him, the four remaining Brethren stamped and kicked frantically at the rats as they started crawling up their legs, biting and clawing and chewing while Millington watched.

  He wasn’t helpless after all.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Mason stood in the shadows.

  Watching.

  Waiting.

  He had worked his way back around through the docks, skirting the tall ship laid up in the dry dock for repairs and the iron-hulled beast moored in the wet dock, stepping over guide ropes and blocks, ducking under scaffolding and between wooden staithes until he found a narrow passage that brought him back to the riverside. The passageway was actually more like a crack in the side of the old building, but it served the same purpose as far as he was concerned. It brought him out on the other side of the waiting Brethren, a short distance from where McCreedy’s wolf lay whimpering and shivering.

  Instinct demanded he intercede, go toe-to-toe with the enemy, but instinct was hardly trustworthy at the best of times. And these were not the best of times. Caution kept him back in the shadows a second longer, despite being subjected to the wolf’s pitiful whimpers.

  He cradled the sword in one hand and the Distillator in the other. The sharp edge of Mercy rested against his cheek.

  He felt his heartbeat quicken against his ribcage.

  He waited a moment longer, evaluating the situation waiting for him. The Ice Queen stared up at the Golem, that unnatural lion from Trafalgar hunkered down at her side like some pet hound. Napier walked toward her, talking rapidly, his voice too low for the words to carry.

  It took Mason a moment longer to realise what was wrong with the picture: Eugene Napier was a sneak, he didn’t stride about in broad daylight—or nightlight—when he could cling to the shadows and blend in to the point of invisibility. That was the nature of his gift. Just as Master McCreedy was the wolfman, Master Napier was the invisible man. There was something very wrong about seeing him stride boldly toward the Ice Queen, no thought for stealth.

  And Mason wasn’t the only one to be unnerved by the man’s transformation; the bronze lion turned slowly, watching the man every step of the way. It took Mason a moment to realise the low growl he heard wasn’t from the engines of one of the coal barges on the river but rather from deep inside the lion. It pawed at the cobbles beneath it, claws digging in for purchase that shouldn’t have been there. Mason saw the tension in its body. The beast was poised to strike, but not at the enemy, not at the Brethren or the massive construct, but at the gentleman in his topcoat and top hat. The nature of its growl changed, becoming all the more threatening.

  The Ice Queen, imperious and impervious, stroked the great beast’s mane.

  ”My queen, my queen,” and now Napier’s words carried to Mason’s hiding place. He said the same two words over and over, like a prayer. ”My queen, my queen, my queen.” Stripped of all confidence and slyness, Mason barely recognised the man’s voice. It was as though an entirely different man wore Napier’s skin. The thought sent a shiver right down to Mason’s core.

  Gritting his teeth, he steeled himself and stepped into the light, putting himself between the Ice Queen and her subject.

  ”Stop right there!” He said it with more confidence than he felt. He was grateful his voice didn’t quiver. He couldn’t afford for something so simple to betray his fear.

  The queen turned to stare at him and he felt himself wither beneath the intensity of her gaze. ”Who do you think you are to command a queen?” She demanded. Her voice could have petrified a lesser man—or a greater man—on the spot, but Mason ignored her, raising the Blondel Distillator to aim squarely at the centre of her chest.

  ”I said stop right there,” he repeated, a calmness slipping into his tone that was every bit as lethal as the weapons he held. ”And that means both of you.” He brandished Mercy in Napier’s general direction.

  ”What do you intend to do, servant? Fight us all?”

  ”If I have to.”

  ”How wonderful to inspire such loyalty,” her gaze shifted from him to the whimpering shape of McCreedy’s red-furred wolf shivering on the ground a few feet beyond her, at Lucius Amun’s bloody corpse, and to the two men and two women standing over it. ”A pity he is in no state to appreciate it.”

  She was right, of course. He couldn’t fight them all.

  He couldn’t tie chains around the Golem’s ankles and bring it down, the devastation that would cause was unthinkable.

  But he didn’t have to.

  This time as the Golem’s massive foot came down, sending tremors through the very ground the city was built upon, Mason was expecting it. The Ice Queen wasn’t. She stumbled, falling to one knee as though about to propose. Napier moved instinctively to help her but caught himself when the tip of Mercy lowered a fraction. Whatever else he was, Eugene Napier was still flesh and blood, and flesh and blood cut and bled. The threat of the great sword was enough to hold him at bay.

  For the second time in as many days he found himself watching a flock of birds wondering if they were some sort of fractured Anafanta, with one mind driving hundreds of souls, or if it was something more. He saw his answer in the window of the bonded warehouse behind the Ice Queen: Millington. The Master stood, face unreadable in the half-dark, with his hands pressed against the glass. The concentration on his features betrayed him as the mind behind the birds. And not only the birds, Mason realised, as behind him the black surface of the Thames rippled and roiled with motion, the water agitated by the rats emerging from the river. They swarmed up onto the bank in a chittering, writhing mass of soaking bodies. They surged toward the Ice Queen and then, like the birds above them, veered away toward the fallen wolf and the people standing over it. Their claws scratched the cobbles. Their eyes reflected the red glow of the moon on the rusted iron legs of the Golem.

  As Mason watched the rats swarmed over Amun’s corpse, stripping it to glistening, blood-slicked bone in a matter of a minute, no more.

  And in that minute no one dared move. No one made a sound.

  That wasn’t completely true, Mason realised. For all the Ice Queen’s surface calm, the girl beneath was screaming and fighting against her prison. Her face contorted as her mouth stretched wide, only for the ice to swell and slide down her throat. Nothing escaped the ice, giving the illusion of cold serenity.

  He wiped the back of his gun-hand across his face to get his soaking wet hair out of his eyes. His saturated clothes clung uncomfortably to his skin. The material had soaked up so much water, they weighed down on his frame like dumbbells.

  His mind raced. He couldn’t fight all of them. That was the truth and it didn’t change no matter how many times he told himself he didn’t need to.

  The muscles up and down his sword arm quivered, causing the broken point of the blade to twitch.

  Napier stared at it, seemingly hypnotised by the unsteady dance.

  ”Don’t make me hurt you, sir,” Mason urged. ”There’s no need for this to turn ugly.”

  The Ice Queen’s smile was anything but benign. Plastered across the girl’s fear the ice-features a mask of vindictive glee. ”You still don’t understand do you? You really are rather simple …”

  ”Understand?” Mason didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of it. He felt as though he were caught between the Devil and the deep blue Thames.

  ”This isn’t your man,” she continued, smile widening and eyes brightening. ”This is my man, aren’t you, dear?”

  Napier nodded. ”My queen,” he said, like some lickspittle.

  Mason felt sick.

  ”What have you done to him?”

  ”W
hat have I done to him? Why, nothing. He was made this way. He adores me. He lives to serve, rather like you. Without me his life has no meaning.”

  Mason took a single step forward, bringing the muzzle of the Distillator up so that it aimed squarely at the kneeling woman’s head.

  ”They are mine,” she inclined her head toward the Brethren, ”Father London is mine.”

  But he couldn’t pull the trigger.

  Not when the girl, Emily Sheridan, was underneath the ice, trapped inside the monster. The Distillator wouldn’t differentiate between her water molecules and those of the Ice Queen. It would leech out both equally. There was no way she could survive that. But perhaps that would be a mercy? He felt the weight of the sword in his other hand, and the impotence of its broken point.

  Mercy or murder?

  Could one ever be the other?

  A mercy killing?

  He felt his finger tighten around the trigger, but stop short of actually squeezing it. Pulling the trigger would be the same as murdering the girl, plain and simple. As much as he wanted to banish the Ice Queen, to do so at the cost of the girl’s life was unconscionable. He was many things, but murderer was not one of them. The Ice Queen knew that. More, she banked on it. She had his measure.

  Mason breathed in slowly, holding it before letting it leak out between clenched teeth. And again. He didn’t move. He looked beyond the ice to the girl beneath, willing her to somehow understand that he had no choice, willing her to give him permission to pull the trigger.

  If she could read his mind she gave no sign of it.

  He looked away, unable to hold her desperate gaze.

  He looked at the traitor, Napier. He didn’t understand how it had happened, but the Ice Queen spoke the truth, he was her man to the core. The way he looked at her, like some lost dog looking for affection, was sickening.

  He looked at the rats as they moved from Amun’s corpse toward the others, Toth, and her black-hearted sister, Osiris, Ra, and Hathor as they kicked at the rats swarming around them. The rodents climbed over each other and over each other and over each other in their eagerness to get at the Brethren. There was no mistaking the mind behind their urgency. He couldn’t look at them any longer. It was only going to be slaughter.