Ghosts of Empire

by George Mann

  “Alright, smart alec. I meant the smell. It’s… disgusting.”

  “It’s been abandoned for years,” he said. “God knows what people have left down there to rot.” He stepped over the threshold, drawing the gun that Rutherford had provided him with the previous night. Flora came in behind him, waving the beam of the flashlight back and forth so they could get their bearings.

  It was a small station, tiled in the same manner as many of the others he’d seen since his arrival here. A small window in the left-hand wall had once served as a ticket booth, and on the right, a flight of stairs led down to the platforms below. Dust, animal droppings and broken tiles littered the floor, and as the beam of the flashlight stabbed into the corners, he could see no evidence that anyone had passed this way for years.

  He moved slowly across the ticket hall, Flora just behind him. Their footsteps stirred plumes of dust, which swirled and danced with their passing, picked out by the beam of the torch.

  “Are we going down to the platforms?” whispered Flora.

  Donovan nodded, leading the way toward the steps. Down below was a sea of inky blackness, and the stench here was even worse. It was a thick, cloying odor that seemed to lodge in the back of his throat, threatening to make him retch. It reminded him of nothing so much as the stink of rotting vegetation—but surely here, deep underground, where there was no light and no water, nothing could be growing in the tunnels? He considered turning back, feeling suddenly overcome by uncertainty. Was he doing the right thing, ignoring the others, coming down here with Flora? He tried to shake the feeling, knowing that he had to press on. He was here now, and he was seeing it through.

  Cautiously they crept forward, steadily making their way down the steps toward the gloom below. The beam of Flora’s flashlight picked out signs warning them to “keep left”, or listing the stations accessible from each of the two platforms.

  “Which way?”

  “Left,” said Donovan, following his gut. That was where the worst of the stench seemed to be coming from, and every fiber of his being was crying out to him that there was something wrong about that smell.

  They reached the bottom of the steps and took a left, passing under a low archway and out onto the platform. Here, the gloom seemed even more eerie and oppressive. The tunnel wall loomed over them, disappearing into yawning chasms at either end of the short platform. Below, mice skittered about beneath the tracks, anxious to get out of the sudden, piercing light.

  Donovan glanced at Flora, but all he could discern in the reflected torchlight was her silhouette, and her bright, shining eyes. “I’m going down there,” he said, indicating one of the tunnel mouths.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” said Flora.

  “There are no trains, if that’s what you mean. Haven’t been for years. But there has to be some reason the Russians are interested in this place.” He jumped down in-between the tracks, landing with a thud.

  “Alright. Help me down,” said Flora. She placed the flashlight on the edge of the platform and extended both arms, so that he could take her hands. She jumped down, narrowly avoiding catching her ankle on one of the rails.

  “Careful!” he hissed.

  She ignored him, reaching for the flashlight. Donovan knew that the thought of rodents scuttling around her boots would be absolute anathema to her, but he had to give her credit—she seemed to be taking it all in her stride. Clearly it’d been unfair of him to be so protective of her over the years. Not that he was about to start letting her battle mobsters, automatons and all the other weird stuff that he and Gabriel found themselves battling in New York. But perhaps he’d start teaching her how to defend herself. With the Reaper waiting to cash in his debt when they returned, he’d certainly feel a lot safer if Flora knew how to handle herself.

  “What do we do if we find something down here?” she said.

  “We either put a stop to it, or we get the hell out of here and come back with reinforcements.”

  Flora made a noncommittal sound, and waved the flashlight beam back and forth across the tunnel mouth. “There’s something there, on the ceiling.”

  “Hold the torch beam still. I can’t see where you’re looking.”

  She pointed the beam up at the ceiling, holding it steady. There, just above them, the tunnel roof was clad in a thick, vegetative mass. It looked like a kind of algae or slick moss, oozing with a clear, viscous fluid, which dripped ponderously in bulbous droplets, spattering on the tracks below. Clearly, this was the source of the sickening stench.

  “Oh, God,” said Flora. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Donovan. “But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s natural.” As he watched, the substance seemed to quiver and move, sliding slowly to consume another few inches of the tunnel walls. “Come on. We’d better go a little further.”

  They trudged along the tunnel, careful to avoid the glistening puddles on the ground. As they worked their way deeper, the effect—and the stink—became increasingly pronounced. Here, the strange substance had spread to cover the walls as well as the ceiling, coating the entire tunnel. Up ahead, it was beginning to creep onto the tracks. The smell was starting to make Donovan feel dizzy.

  “Alright, that’s enough. We should turn back. We don’t know what this stuff is doing to our lungs. We should find the others. Whatever the Russians are doing down here, it can’t be good.”

  Something sounded in the tunnel behind him—the crackle of an electrical discharge—and he turned, expecting to see some of the fluid had dripped onto an exposed cable and caused it to spark.

  Instead, however, the sight of four floating circles of light greeted him, spitting and fizzing as they formed in the air, as if traced by an invisible finger.

  “Umm, Felix…” said Flora, edging closer, the beam of the flashlight now trailing uselessly across the floor.

  “Get behind me,” he said, “And if you get chance to run, then take it.”

  As he watched, smaller symbols began to form inside the circles, forming what looked like symbols or pictograms. And then the light started to bend, as if reality itself were warping, and five hooded figures were standing before them in the tunnel, strange blue light crackling at their fingertips.

  “Goddammit,” said Donovan, and he pulled the trigger on his gun.

  FOURTEEN

  “Shhh.”

  Regina shot Hargreaves an exasperated look. If he didn’t stop moving, he was going to give them away. A single scuff of his boot and he risked drawing the attention of the gathered crowd.

  In response, he frowned, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and returned to peering down through a gap in the wooden railing at the scene unfolding below.

  She, too, was growing stiff, and she rubbed at her aching back where the metal wrench had been pressing uncomfortably for the last hour, tucked into the waistband of her culottes. Absently, she hoped she hadn’t got bloodstains on her blouse.

  After leaving the cottage, they’d emerged into the drawing room of a country estate, still furnished in the trappings of the previous century, but left to molder and decay. The once-plush sofas were now infested with rodents, their white stuffing scatted over the dusty floorboards like so much dirty snow. They’d passed through a library that smelled of festering damp and into a dining room, the table of which was still set for a dinner that had never happened, a ghostly imprint of a time now lost, a path that had never been trodden.

  Here, they’d encountered not only a choice of two marked doors through which to continue their bizarre journey, but a hooded Russian, who had recognized them immediately as trespassers and set about raising the alarm. Regina was the quickest off the mark, battering him across the side of the head with the wrench, resulting in a harrowing crack of splintering bone and a sudden gush of vivid red blood. He’d gone down instantly, his jaw still working soundlessly as she’d stood over him and put him out of his misery with a second determined blow.

  Hargreaves had wa
tched with a mixture of admiration and abject horror as she’d wiped the weapon on the dead man’s robes, before telling him to hurry up and select which door to open as the next portal.

  She knew that, when all of this was over and she was once again sitting alone in her living room, she’d be haunted by the expression on that young man’s face: the appalled realization that it was already too late, the pleading look in his eyes as he’d searched her face for the slightest hint of mercy. A death like that—it was brutal and personal. You had to look your victim in the eye. She’d killed people before—more than she cared to remember—but it had always been at one remove, with a gun; the sudden punch of the recoil, the jerk of the victim, and then go. That was how she’d been trained to do it. Quick and efficient, then move on before you were seen—or before you had time to think about what you’d just done. This, though… she was going to remember this.

  Hargreaves had chosen the door on the left, and with fingers still oily with spilled blood, she’d traced the runic symbols and caused the circle to ignite.

  The door had exited onto a cobbled lane, slick with rainwater, somewhere—she’d been certain—in the outskirts of London. Here, the sky had been a brooding canopy of gray, smudged clouds divesting themselves upon the rooftops of the city. Hargreaves had suggested they quit while they were ahead—to make a run for it, find their way back to Absalom and report in. Regina, on the other hand, had argued that they had to press on, to keep opening doors until they found some answers.

  They hadn’t yet established the purpose of the network of doors, or been able to find out anything more about the Russians’ plans in London. These men had evidently been moving unseen throughout London—and farther afield—for some time, co-opting abandoned properties, and establishing a series of temporary bases. Yet only now had they had shown their hand, brazenly attacking the van the previous night, demonstrating their considerable power, and perhaps even more telling, allowing survivors to flee the scene. That suggested their plans were in motion, and perhaps even close to completion—and so Regina had convinced Hargreaves to continue.

  They’d found another marked door in the alleyway, ostensibly the rear entrance to a baker’s shop, and had passed through, finding themselves here, in a small chapel in what looked, to Regina, to be somewhere deep in the remote Scottish highlands.

  Now, they were crouched upon a small balcony above the main vestry, peering down at an assembly of men—and, to a lesser extent, women—in hooded robes. Regina had counted eighteen of them, standing in a circle around a large table, which was covered in an array of technical documents and blueprints. As far as she’d been able to ascertain from her slightly dubious vantage point, they all appeared to relate to the London Underground system. There were maps of the tunnels and schematics of the stations, and they looked as if they’d been heavily annotated in a scrawl that was illegible from this distance. Although she suspected that, even with a pair of binoculars, she wouldn’t have been able to make much sense of the documents—neither engineering nor the Russian language had ever been particular strong points for her.

  Hargreaves was shifting again, trying to discern the faces of the people below. They’d clearly stumbled upon a meeting of the Russian coven, and below, a bearded man appeared to be in the process of disseminating his plan to his followers. She’d been able to understand little save for the occasional word, but she was certain that whatever they had in mind, it involved some sort of takeover of the Underground, using the tunnels and stations for a malign purpose which was, as yet, not entirely clear.

  Not for the first time, she wondered if these people were state sanctioned. Could the Tsarina really be plotting to move against the Queen? It seemed unconscionable that two such mighty nations would risk all-out war, but then the British Empire was not what it once was under Victoria, and Alberta had a habit of making enemies abroad. Perhaps the Tsarina had seen her opportunity and sent these agents in to attempt to weaken the Queen’s position, in advance of an all-out assault.

  Or perhaps it was simply another cult, armed with esoteric rites and arcane knowledge, come to destroy the world in order to give rise to their new order. She’d dealt with plenty of those in her time, too. The one thing they’d all had in common, however, is that they were small, and disorganized, and too reliant on their faith. This, on the other hand, appeared to be something else entirely. This was organized, efficient, and dangerous.

  The Underground was the heart of London’s transport system, a warren of deep tunnels beneath the city that served as arteries connecting all the major hubs, right across the city. If the Russians were planning to bring it to a standstill, there’d be pandemonium. Worse, if they were planning to somehow sabotage the tunnel system itself—a distinct possibility, given the extensive blueprints they’d acquired—then there was a chance they could endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, causing the tunnel system to collapse, and bringing much of London down on top of it.

  She considered their options. They had one handgun and a wrench. There was no way they could take down eighteen men and women, even if they weren’t highly trained and capable of performing unnatural feats. Additionally, there was no way of knowing if the people below represented just one cell of the wider Russian operation—a situation she considered likely, given the size and scale of their network, and the sheer number of combatants they’d faced the previous night. Worse, there was every chance that one of them would get away, disappearing through a marked door or conjuring up one of their iridescent portals, in order to warn the others. If she and Hargreaves were to make a move now, they risked hastening the Russians’ plans. Not to mention the fact they’d most likely end up dead.

  No, the better option was to move on, find a way back to London and warn Absalom. Now that they had something to go on, the Service could deploy agents to all of the Underground stations, make preparations against a suspected attack, and begin raiding the Russian safe houses she and Hargreaves had already uncovered.

  She beckoned to Hargreaves, indicating the stairwell at the end of the balcony. They’d come this way earlier, and knew that it led to a small antechamber off the main hall. From here, they could find another of the marked doors and make good their escape.

  Hargreaves nodded his assent, and together, inching painfully slowly on their hands and knees, the two of them crossed to the mouth of the stairwell. Below, a Russian voice continued to drone on in deep baritone, punctuated only by the occasional murmur of consensus from his audience.

  Regina got to her feet, drew the wrench from the back of her culottes and slowly descended the spiral steps, keeping her back to the wall as she did so. Hargreaves followed behind, weapon still drawn.

  The chamber at the bottom was empty, but they were now only a few yards away from the proceedings they’d been observing from above. She could see the hooded figures from where she was standing. If any one of them turned around now…

  She edged a little further along the wall toward the door.

  Directly opposite was another chamber of similar size and shape. The door was hanging open, and inside she could see two other doors on the far wall, both of them marked with the symbols that would allow her to open another portal.

  The only problem was that they’d have to cross in the open to get to it. It was only about three steps, but all it would take was one of the hooded figures to spot them, and the game would be up. She glanced at Hargreaves, and she could see from the uncertain expression on his face that he’d come to the same realization. They had no choice. They had to make a break for it.

  Her heart was hammering in her chest. She could feel sweat beading on her brow. She swallowed, took one final glance at Hargreaves, and then lurched out into the open.

  One step.

  She tried to remain focused on the goal. She didn’t turn her head, didn’t even look at the Russians only a few feet away from her.

  Two steps.

  She was in the shadow of the doorway now.
If only she could make the next step…

  Three steps.

  She ducked inside the chamber and fell back against the wall in relief, gasping for air. No one had raised the alarm. She hadn’t been seen.

  She caught her breath. Now it was Hargreaves’s turn.

  She peered across at him. He was standing just inside the doorway, gun raised, looking flustered. He was watching the Russians, waiting for his window of opportunity.

  She risked a glance. The meeting appeared to be coming to an end. The leader had finished speaking, and now the others were beginning to mill about, conversing. They had only moments before they were discovered, and Hargreaves still had to make it across unseen.

  She glanced back, and he met her eye. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. Was he considering something drastic? He had a determined look in his eye. Surely he wasn’t going to open fire? He seemed to be tightening his grip on his gun.

  Time was running out. She could hear the Russians laughing and joking. It was now or never.

  “Now,” she mouthed, waving for him to make a run for it. All he had to do was make it across. Even if they saw him, there was every chance she could open the portal in time for them to escape.

  Hargreaves worked his jaw. She saw him swallow. And then suddenly he was running, charging toward her, head down.

  The seconds seemed to stretch as he lurched toward her. She expected the cry of alarm at any moment.

  And then he was in the room with her, panting for breath, red-faced and anxious.

  Out in the hall, the Russians were still laughing. She allowed herself a brief sigh of relief.

  While Hargreaves covered the doorway she approached the marked door on the right, tracing the now familiar pattern with the tip of her index finger. As before, the sigils began to crackle with power, fizzing and sparking with unnatural light.

  She opened the door and stepped forward, right into the path of a hooded figure bearing a flame gun.

  For a moment, the man simply stared at her, eyes wide with shock. He was lean and wiry beneath his robes, with a pale face and startling red beard. He frowned, and then blinked, and fumbled with his weapon. It was just like the one she’d encountered during the ambush, and she knew instantly if he managed to arm it, she’d be disintegrated by the strange, rippling flame.