The words were knives, shredding what was left of my nerves. ‘Don’t you dare hurt her.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, at least not yet. We’re not often in a position to take mere mortals whole.’
I didn’t even want to guess what that meant. ‘I’m coming over. Then we’ll settle this, just you and me.’
‘We’re leaving,’ Luther Vileheart said. ‘It’s too late. You’re too late. If only you’d insisted on keeping her with you. Why did you leave her, anyway? Why give her up so easily? Just think about that, Ben Harvester, when you’re mourning your loss.’
The line clicked dead, and in the silence a thousand accusing voices crowded around me. She was my responsibility – sick or not, I should have stayed, and whatever happened to her now would be down to me.
Aching all over, I dragged myself down the stairwell to the street, expecting to see a mocking told-you-so message on the wall across the way, but the wall remained blank.
A 394 bus was approaching the stop outside the park. Its route would be a slow round-about haul to Angel but it would get me there faster than I could walk, and at Angel I could catch the tube. The driver gave me a weary look as I touched my pass to the Oyster reader, then set off suddenly, spinning me halfway towards the back. I fell onto a seat and stared blindly out the window while a recorded female voice spoke the name of each stop.
The smell of Vileheart’s touch still clung to my fingers. The poison had been slowly and surely administered and its side effects were still churning away in me. For Mum’s sake, I had to find a way through it, ignore the aches and pains and show her – show the enemy – what I could do.
The bus jerked to a stop at Geffrye Museum. I’d been in fixes before, I’d called for help without knowing it, and Lu and Mr October had answered. ‘You rang,’ they’d said mysteriously, my distress signals having been logged by dispatch. So why weren’t they answering now?
Where were they?
Darkness had closed over the streets by the time I left the underground at Belsize Park. I stumbled down the hill and along Downside Crescent, retracing the route the limo had taken this afternoon.
Luther Vileheart’s security gate was closed, the property sealed up like a fortress. I paced the block from end to end, looking for another way in, but the walls were as tall as the maze’s, too high to scale. Still, I had a strong sense of the house standing empty on the other side. If Mum were inside, I’d know, I’d feel her there. But the silence was absolute, and the little hope I’d come here with was fading. I had only one choice now, only one place to go.
Fifteen minutes later I was back at Angel, stumbling along Upper Street, half-blinded by headlights and fighting my way through the crowds. Outside the York pub a mob of shoppers blundered straight through me, shouldering me aside into a group of drinkers who stood under a pall of cigarette smoke. The one I collided with, a man with thug’s eyes and clenched teeth, cursed and pushed me away.
‘Watch your step, mate,’ he grumbled, and the others leered as if they knew the kind of trouble I was in and found it amusing.
I turned onto Camden Passage, my heart racing so violently I thought it would burst. The Saturday trinket stalls were still busy, the casual shoppers drifting between them casting their eyes over jewellery, art and obscure, out of print books. Barrel organ music swelled as I moved aside, keeping my back to the entrance, awaiting my moment. I couldn’t go through until sure that no one would see.
A man with a baby strapped to his back glanced my way as he ambled past. A trio of goth girls followed him, not seeing me, and a young couple with two squabbling kids pointed at the barrel organist’s monkey to turn the children’s attention from their argument. The marmoset monkey ran excitedly in and around the crowd, offering its bowler hat for change.
Here was my chance. It had to be now, while the monkey was centre-stage. Scanning the stalls one more time – no one even vaguely aware of me – I backed into the shade and felt behind me for the opening in the bricks.
The opening wasn’t there.
I’d entered here so often I should be able to find my way blindfolded by now. I’d miscalculated, I’d felt in the wrong place, that was all.
I tried again, skimming my fingers across the rough surface, left a fraction, right a fraction. Still nothing. Forgetting the stalls and their visitors, I turned to face the wall, feeling with both flattened hands for the spot where the gap should be.
It wasn’t there. It should be, it always had been before, but it wasn’t there now.
The crack had sealed itself up. Why? Because I’d been suspended from duty? Was this how it would be until they took me back . . . if they ever took me back? Just now, that seemed a very big if indeed.
‘Let me in,’ I pleaded, panicking now, pounding the walls. ‘Please let me in. . . Please. I need your help!’
I sank to my knees, twisted around and sat on the cold, damp ground, looking up through glazed eyes. The faces around the stalls were little more than shapes in the dark, but quite a few of those shapes were staring. Others hurried away, ignoring me, as city dwellers generally hurry from drunks and homeless folk slumped in shop doorways and alleys.
‘Please. . .’
‘Must be mad,’ someone murmured. ‘Kid’s talking to a brick wall.’
Another passer-by tossed a coin at my feet, taking pity on the poor, destitute, crazy kid he’d taken me for. At that moment, I didn’t feel too far away from being that crazy kid, either.
I couldn’t stay but I didn’t know where else to go. At least here I had a chance to catch Mr October or other staff coming or going, but that would only draw attention and I’d already risked giving the Ministry’s location away. These people at the stalls would be curious now. I had to move on.
Log jams of buses crawled along Upper Street, brakes whining, engines radiating steamy heat. Lu might emerge from the traffic at any time with Mr October and Becky in tow, or perhaps Sukie would find me first, tracing my screaming thoughts through the hustle bustle. But none of them were anywhere to be seen.
The nose-to-tail bus queues rolled on. I was watching in a daze, hardly seeing the sleepy-eyed passengers crammed inside, when it hit me; I suddenly understood what I’d been missing – something so obvious I couldn’t believe I’d overlooked it all the way here.
The unnamed dead were absent. The sunken-eyed lost souls on their never-ending journeys across town simply weren’t there. Come to think of it, they hadn’t been on the underground either, not on the busy platforms or the overloaded trains between here and Belsize Park. I was so used to seeing them wherever I went I took them for granted now.
So where had they gone all of a sudden?
A quiet voice tugged at my thoughts, trying to tell me something important. I hurried on, covering my ears, listening harder. It was Sukie’s voice, a memory of something she’d said during the lockdown, the night they gave me my marching orders.
It’s like when the magic goes. . .
That had to be it. The magic was dying. It must have started the moment Luther Vileheart offered me the cactus from his brown paper carrier. He’d brought me one gift and taken away another – the gift which had opened the Ministry’s doors to me in the first place.
I wouldn’t die without it. I’d be like anyone else. But without it I couldn’t see well enough to help anyone, not even myself. Without it I couldn’t help Mum.
I took off down Duncan Street. If demons were coiled inside the shadows down there I’d never know it. If there were newly-departeds around the next corner I’d pass by without ever noticing them. Their world, the world alongside this one, had vanished. It had made itself invisible, and I was running on empty to find it again, without a clue where to start looking.
I was out there all alone in the dark.
Late afternoon rolled into night. Touring the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes by bus or train, I began to appreciate how the unnamed must feel on their travels. The journey had no beginning, no end, only a hopeless rush towa
rds nowhere.
I needed to be where newly-departeds would most likely be, not under dripping bridges or on cold park benches, but where they could be found in numbers. Wherever they were, the Ministry’s field teams would be too. But without Mr October and Lu to guide me, these places weren’t easily found. The care homes would never let me inside, and there were places inside hospitals I couldn’t go to alone.
A & E at the Whittington off Highgate Hill was as far as I got. I waited in a stuffy corridor, watching medical staff dash around carrying clipboards and supplies. An ambulance crew with deflated faces rolled in a trolley on which a covered body lay with drips and tubes attached. A muscly forearm poked out from the sheet they’d draped over the passenger. I didn’t need special senses to know he was dead on arrival, but I saw nothing of his ghost or any Ministry agents in attendance. Another trolley brought a drunk man who held a bloodstained white patch to one eye and cursed in a thick slurry voice at the crew trying to help him.
Before long the chemical smells and the echoes of voices and metallic utensils made me queasy. I was starting away when a smudge of red hair left a side room along the corridor and made for the hospital exit. I only caught the man’s face for a second, but I was sure it was Rusty, the field team leader. Passing the open doorway he’d just left, I saw a portly nurse tugging a sheet over the face of a white-haired old lady in the bed.
‘Rusty!’ I called, hurrying after him. We hadn’t crossed paths often – he’d been in Stratford on Bad Saturday and at HQ during the lockdown – but he would know me and I might persuade him to call in. ‘Rusty, hold on!’
Outside, a misty rain prickled my face. An SUV sped from its parking spot, lifting spray from the ground as it passed. That must be Rusty’s team, heading to the next call on their list. I gave chase to the junction, but the vehicle didn’t slow and its blacked-out windows stayed shut. Its tail lights moved into traffic and disappeared down the hill.
I kept walking the way it had gone, shivering inside my jacket. My face grew numb in the icy rain and my lips were burning. I walked six or seven blocks before losing count, continuing on in a trance.
The rain stiffened. Lights streamed along the gutter. I stopped at a street corner, lost, without a clue where I was. And I knew as I stood there, freezing and trembling, that Vileheart’s plan was almost complete. I could feel Mum drifting away.
Nothing hurt more profoundly, he’d said in the comic, than hope given and then snatched away. It could destroy a person’s faith and without faith I couldn’t see anything, the entry to Pandemonium House would stay sealed and the Ministry wouldn’t come racing in like cavalry to the rescue. I could stand here all night without seeing Lu’s face among the traffic.
The night spun out. I wandered from street to street, blind in the driving rain, sometimes ducking inside shop doorways for shelter, holding myself against the cold and shaking. In one unlit doorway something stirred at my feet, and I jumped back, remembering the bundle on the beach of bones in Abhorra, the entity taking shape. But the man at my feet was elderly, rank smelling and wrapped in damp blankets. He looked up through the dark, lungs wheezing.
‘Help me, son,’ the homeless guy said. The sound and smell of him told me he didn’t have long. I could stand at the roadside and flag someone down, but the longer I spent with him the less chance I had of tracing Mum. The effort of speaking seemed to drain him, and he rolled over into an immediate sleep while I took off in the rain, not looking back.
The sickness churned through my insides as I followed one unfamiliar street to the next. The city had become strange and cold and alien, as if another city with different architecture and different thoroughfares had overtaken it. There were no landmarks above the rooftops, no London Eye, no BT Tower. Everything hung behind a grey curtain, lost at sea. The rain fell less heavily now, but I was moving through clouds.
I travelled another hour, maybe two, before I turned another corner onto more familiar ground. Through the sheeting rain I spotted a face I knew – an unfriendly, even monstrous face, but one I was glad to see all the same. It was the red and black face of the dragon clinging to the wall above the Max Orient restaurant in Camden.
I could’ve cried. After circling the city for hours in search of something I’d never find, I’d somehow landed on Camden High Street, a fifteen minute walk from the Vileheart residence where I’d begun. I had nothing left, no gas in the tank, but at least from here I could make it home, and from home I would start over again.
Heading for the lock, past the brightly coloured boots and goth skulls on the walls above the Cold Steel tattoo parlour, I had a feeling that even these streets were subtly different, altered in ways I didn’t understand. Perhaps it was their emptiness. The freezing rain had driven everyone indoors and the world had gone into hiding.
A bus surged through a puddle, soaking my jeans. Cold cramps tore at my legs, and every step felt like my last. At the Regent’s Canal bridge I came to a standstill, needing to rest but afraid to stop. I could seize up completely and freeze to death if I stayed long.
Watching the raindrops ripple across the black water, I realised I could walk straight home from here along the waterside, or I could leave the canal at Islington to camp outside the Ministry’s wall until someone turned up. At this hour, in this weather, there wouldn’t be many people around to witness the comings and goings.
I was about to move on when someone patted my shoulder. I turned to see three boys about my age but stockier, their mischievous eyes peering out from the hoods of their coats.
The taller of the three was the one who’d turned me around. His jaw rolled like a camel’s around a wad of chewing gum. Behind him, the other two exchanged a look that reminded me of the Ferguson twins in 8C – a dark secret passing between them.
‘Mate, can you help us out?’ said the taller kid, who I guessed was their leader. ‘We’re trying to get home but we’re broke. Can you lend us a quid?’
‘Sorry, I don’t have anything,’ I said.
‘Are you sure? Why don’t you check?’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘Never said you was. You might be mistaken, though.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, turning away. ‘I’ve got to get home too.’
I knew what was coming but I couldn’t run and I didn’t get far. I’d taken only two paces when the leader darted around in front of me and the others clamped my arms from behind.
‘Hold him,’ the leader said.
‘We’re holding him, innit? Check his clothes.’
‘I’m checking.’
Raiding my jeans’ pockets front and back, the leader came away empty-handed except for my Oyster pass, which he tossed over the bridge in disgust.
‘And his jacket,’ said the one holding my right arm.
‘I’m checking that too. Shaddap. He ain’t got nothin’,’ the tall kid spat.
‘Told you,’ I said.
‘Shaddap you,’ he said.
‘Them trainers look all right, though,’ said the one on my left. ‘We could have them.’
‘Get him down,’ the leader said, then whispered close to my face, ‘Don’t try nothin’ or we’ll mess you up.’
They lowered me to the cold ground, yanking my arms up behind me, jolting my shoulders. If I’d been able to move I wouldn’t have put up much of a fight. The strength for fighting had left me a long time ago. I’d lost so much in the city tonight, and the city hadn’t finished with me yet.
The leader began to untie my laces, smacking his lips around the gum.
‘Hey you! Yeah, you!’
The shout snapped out of the dark like a firecracker. There was a sound of booted feet slapping through puddles, approaching from the lock side of the bridge.
‘Get off him! Leave him alone!’
Startled, the muggers dropped me at once. The back of my head whacked the ground as they took off towards the dragon, and I lay there with the rain drumming my face. For several seconds I floated away, then fou
ght my way back again as the boots slowed to a scrape nearby. A small figure, much smaller than it had sounded, knelt over me, easing me up to a sitting position.
‘Ben?’ A girl’s voice, a whisper. ‘You’re Ben Harvester, right? From Mr October’s team. I thought it was you.’
She wiped matted hair from her brow and watched me with big dark eyes. It took me a long moment to place her. ‘You’ve had a bad night, I can tell,’ said Kate Stone.
‘A bad day. A bad week.’
‘Here, let me help.’
She re-tied my laces, then hooked a hand under my arm and got me to my feet. She wasn’t tall, the top of her head barely reaching my chin, but her strength was surprising.
‘Where did you come from?’ I said.
‘Other side of the lock. We had a 1663 around there not five minutes ago. I’m on my way home from the shift. I live over there. . .’ She pointed past the dragon in the direction the muggers had fled. ‘Along Arlington Road. Can you walk, do you think?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Looks like you’ve been to hell and back. What happened?’
‘Long story.’
‘I’ve got time to hear it. If you like, you could come to my mum and dad’s. You could have a hot bath and we’d fix you something to eat, give you dry clothes and get you home.’
‘Thanks, but I need. . . I need to find Mr October. My mum’s in real trouble and I need—’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘The worst kind there is.’
I told her about it as she supported me from the bridge towards the lock, and she listened intently, sighing and nodding. The story came out in a muddle and I was raving before I finished, but she seemed to get the general idea.
‘This is dreadful,’ Kate said. ‘We have to call it in.’
‘That’s all I want.’
‘Leave it to me.’
We turned onto empty Camden Lock Village, where a bronze lion statue spread its great paws on the ground before it and a row of brightly painted half-scooter chairs overlooked the water, their seated back ends butting up against the low wall in front of them as if they’d been frozen halfway through the journey inside it.
The Great and Dangerous Page 16