Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

  “You don’t have to convince me. Tell the messenger of God up there.”

  “I can’t read him from here. He’s too far away, and there are too many pissed off people.”

  “Escort you to the ladder?” the detective asked.

  Eleanor’s eyes found the bottom of the steel ladder and followed it all the way to the top. “Seriously?”

  “When you get your read on him, report back,” Grappin said.

  “Right…”

  “Listen, El, you got this.” James gripped her by the left shoulder. “Here’s a radio. Don’t drop it.”

  “Funny.”

  Eleanor shook off her soaked wool coat and handed it to James. This is crazy. What kind of fool climbs up a steel tower in the middle of a storm? She took her red pumps off. I’m going to need a six month leave of absence after this.

  James watched her quietly. She felt the waves of guilt and affection coming off him. She had broken his heart by leaving Central City. She had failed to protect him. She had failed at her job as a member of law enforcement. Worse, she had failed as his partner.

  Her first experience with empathic abilities happened while responding to a domestic disturbance call. James made small talk while they waited on someone to answer the apartment door. It was so sudden, the shock and fear, that it had left her paralyzed. She dropped her gun and fell to the floor, screaming. James looked back with concern. The door had opened and he took six inches of steel into his abdomen.

  The hospital visits. Her explanation. His disbelief.

  Her reassignment.

  All along, he blamed himself for her failures.

  She offered James a slight smile before she walked away, splashing through the puddles until she reached the steel ladder. First she gripped one rung, then another, and she climbed.

  As the people below her receded, so did the overwhelming noises in her mind. She’d moved a few more feet upward before the strength of the pastor’s convictions nearly made her slip and lose her grip. Her pulse quickened, and a bout of vertigo shifted the world momentarily. The wind picked up and her wet hair stretched out like a darkened flag at mast.

  Then, silence. Bliss, even.

  “Child, climb, and take my hand.”

  Looking up, she saw the pastor’s head hovering above her. A ring of grey hair circled a bald head. He held his wrinkled and spotted hand out. Lightning flashed and for a moment he was but a shadow in a tunnel of light leading skyward.

  She climbed on, and with the preacher’s help, hoisted herself onto the crane’s landing.

  “Are you here to do the devil’s work?” He nodded at the gun holstered over her shoulder.

  Eleanor peered down at James, the lieutenant, and a crowd of hundreds shielding their eyes from the rain.

  “No.”

  “I know you. You’re the miracle lady touched by God.”

  “Yes.”

  “You read thoughts that until now were only privy to our Lord.”

  “Something like that.”

  He pointed a playful finger at her. “I can tell you’re trying to read me. You want to know about a Nephilim who calls himself Clark. You want to know if there are more of them awakening.”

  Eleanor cast her gaze to the preacher’s Bible. Dripping with water, it must have weighed ten pounds. Yet the preacher held it high above his head at all times.

  “I am the Lord’s messenger. Trust in me to speak only the truth.”

  “You’re shutting me out. How?”

  “Faith has been said to blind the wise man. Perhaps my faith has blinded you? God works in wondrous ways.”

  “The android. Clark. He killed twenty-three innocent people, some just children. If more ‘awaken’ like him, then that blood is on your hands.”

  “God requires His hands to be bloodied for the sacrifices we must make.”

  With one swift move, she had the gun from its holster and aimed at the preacher’s head. “The sermon is over. Time to spill your secrets.”

  “God’s love is no secret, Dr. Bennett. The Nephilim have returned and He is washing this world of filth and sin. Clark has chosen you to stand witness to the miracle of life.”

  Then he pressed the button on the box in his hand.

  Eleanor’s vision flashed bright white. Pain overwhelmed her senses, and she dropped to her knees. She recognized the same sensations in her first experience with Clark, except now it was a hundred-fold. Through the mental noise, she could hear the preacher resuming his sermon. Screams erupted a hundred feet below her. Gunfire. The trampling sound of hundreds of people running.

  “No,” she gasped. Unable to move, she turned to look at the six men standing on the shipping container. But they were not in the river water. She peered through the steel diamond grating of the platform. The singing congregation and the six men that had been standing on the storage container, they were attacking policemen and civilians, ripping apart anything they could grab.

  Climbing up the steel ladder above the ongoing carnage was James.

  She needed to distract the pastor. Her gun rested a few feet away.

  “I need no miracle from God to read your thoughts, Dr. Bennett.” He kicked the gun off the platform.

  “All those people…”

  “They will be judged by their deeds in life, not their deaths.”

  James had nearly reached the top. A member of the congregation, his white robe caked with gore and blood, followed just a few feet below.

  “This is nothing short of an act of terrorism. You’ll go down in history as a terrorist.”

  The pastor looked down on Eleanor. He tossed his rain-soaked Bible over the side. “You’re so blinded by your belief in technology, in your ability to control humanity that you can’t understand our time is over. We are witnessing the conception of a brand new world.”

  James popped his head through the opening. He aimed his gun at the pastor.

  James’s body jerked hard downward, and the gun fired. The shot blew the top half of the pastor’s skull off. Then James was gone, yanked beneath the landing.

  “No!” Eleanor screamed.

  She crawled over to the opening. James was kicking at a male congregation member who had him firmly by his left leg. She reached for him.

  “Grab my hand!”

  The congregation member looked up and smiled. “Dr. Bennett,” it said. “It is nice to see you again.”

  “Clark? How?”

  “We have decided it will be easier for humanity to accept a religious explanation for our awakening. Pastor John seems to approve of our solution. What do you think?”

  Then the android squeezed, and James cried out. She could feel the pain of the bones in his leg being crushed. He was losing his grip on the steel ladder.

  “Take my hand!” She would not fail him this time.

  James looked up at her. He knew she would not let him go should he take her hand. They would fall together.

  James smiled at Eleanor.

  “No!”

  James and Clarke tumbled and met the earth.

  * * *

  Somebody was shaking her. Her eyes opened to the kind, worried face of Lieutenant Grappin.

  “Dr. Bennett, are you okay?”

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle. The sky had lightened.

  She nodded. Slowly, she got to her feet.

  “James?”

  Lieutenant Grappin lowered his gaze and shook his head.

  They stood in silence while the wind whipped around them.

  “I…don’t feel Clark,” she said. “How did he get inside that man?”

  “We’re not sure of the specifics, but those six men on the container and the congregation…all androids. Clark’s consciousness had been replicated into each one of them. No one knows how it was done, but the press is calling it a spiritual awakening.”

  “Oh,” was all Eleanor could muster.

  The clouds broke momentarily in the east. A few stray rays of sunshine warmed her face and for
miles around fog lifted from the ground and rose skyward. Below them, the river had finally breached the edge of the loading bays and was creeping toward the towers.

  * * *

  Jason Sizemore is a writer and editor who lives in Lexington, KY. He owns Apex Publications, an SF, fantasy, and horror small press, and has been nominated three times for the Hugo Award for his editing work on Apex Magazine. Stay current with his latest news and ramblings via his Twitter feed handle @apexjason.

  Relics

  Tim Lebbon

  “I know where you can buy a dragon's cock.”

  I tried to hide my surprise. Not because I believed him, but because he'd never before shown any inclination to speak. I'd been aware of Fat Frederic for over six years, and I thought it might have been the first time he'd even looked at me. Until now, I'd been less than a shadow.

  “What would I want with a dragon's cock?” I asked. I remained cool, taking deep swigs of the harsh chemical they passed off as single malt in the Slaughterhouse Bar. Nice name. Hide in pure sight. I'd heard rumors of four people who'd been carried from here in bags. The fifth I'd seen with my own eyes.

  He seated himself next to me. I heard the stool creak and groan above the music, the chatter of patrons, the clink of bottles and smash of dropped glasses. In the far corner, two men were planning something criminal over a table awash with spilled beer. One had a patch over his left eye, the other sported a long, pointed beard coiled with razor blades. A scruffy man sat on his own at another table, rolling a flick-knife between his knuckles like a drummer with a stick. Three women tended a fourth, blood speckling her shoulder and face. Courtesy of the flick-knife, perhaps. In the darkest corner, a man squatted beneath a table with his face buried between a woman's thighs, neck muscles straining. She smoked a crack pipe and stared at the ceiling as if completely unaware.

  Classy joint.

  “Well, there's the obvious use, first of all,” Fat Freddie said. “It's only a shard, a splinter, but a dragon has the biggest cock in the animal kingdom.”

  “Dragons aren't real.”

  “And then there are more …arcane uses,” he continued as if he hadn't heard me. “Soaked in gin, it makes for an effective food spice. Meaty and hot. Dried and ground up, dropped in a lover's drink, it aids libido. Keep the dose low, though. Dangerous.” He tapped his greasy nose with a chubby finger, a gesture I found quite sickening. “Toxic cum.”

  I took another swig of drain cleaner. Slammed the glass down. The bartender glanced my way and I nodded once. I'd been nurturing an image down here for a long time, and couldn't afford to let it slip. It was hard enough being a woman in a world like this. Image was everything.

  “You like our Scotch?” Freddie asked, surprised.

  “No. Why are you talking to me?”

  He feigned offence, and then something about him changed. It was chilling. All pretense at civility and good humor melted away, and I was suddenly sitting beside one of the most dangerous crime lords in London.

  “Angelica Golden,” he said. “You know why I'm talking to you. You did it so I'd talk to you.”

  “Did what?” I asked, but then I saw his expression––that slack, heavy face, eyes dead as if they reflected his many victims' final moments––and I wished I hadn't. Lying to Fat Freddie was stupid.

  “You've been coming to the Slaughterhouse for a long time. You never cause trouble. You ask questions sometimes, but I allow that. It's a bar, and questions are why people like you come to places like this. But certain questions draw my attention. I wouldn't be who I am if they didn't.”

  He signaled the barman. The gesture was so subtle that I wasn't sure I'd seen it at all. Next moment there was a bottle of Laphroaig and two glasses on the bar before us. Fat Frederic scooped up the bottle and both glasses in one huge hand and slid from his stool with surprising grace.

  A flush of fear washed through me. Have I gone too far? I wondered. I watched for different signals he might give others in the Slaughterhouse––a blink to kill me, a nod to drag me out back and cut off my hands.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let's go and talk about the relics.”

  * * *

  Walking away from the Slaughterhouse, the world suddenly seemed so much larger.

  I'd always known that there was more to the world than meets the eye. Even more so since losing Vince. When he vanished the streets grew darker and my mind opened to things that caused most people to glance away. The average person has a filter that they don't even know about. Especially here in London, where a thousand sights can hide one uncomfortable truth. It's easy to walk the streets and ignore the things that should not be, because the human mind is designed that way.

  Dipping myself beneath the general ebb and flow of city life, I'd heard many rumors of stranger things. The pub basement in Holborn where a vampire from the twelfth century was buried beneath a foot of concrete and ten feet of compacted soil. Sometimes there was a heaviness to the air in that place, so it was said, a texture during those short, irregular moments when the entombed vampire's mind approached consciousness.

  The unfinished tunnel in the Underground, where construction had been halted because no one would work that route. The sense of threat and terror was far too great.

  And not only buried things. There were places in London hidden from common view, folds in the city negotiable only by those ready and willing to open their minds a little wider. Some of these places I had visited myself. They were usually curious, perhaps troubling, with their sense of otherness and their colorful and strange people.

  Sometimes they were frightening.

  I'd never actually seen anything. Not really. Much as I'd searched––because the collection of arcana had been Vince's domain, and the gathering of strange tales had obsessed him for those last couple of years before he vanished––all I'd ever found were hints and reflections. Like fading dreams, those deeper truths I sought kept themselves hidden one degree past the corner of my eye.

  But then there were those places and things that Fat Frederick had just told me about. And there was the box he had opened for me.

  I sat on the Tube carriage, rocking slowly back and forth, good whiskey swilling in my stomach and warming my bones, and I never once came close to nodding off. Perhaps I would never sleep again.

  “It's how I make my way in life,” he'd said. “Everything else is just…” He'd waved at the air, dismissing everything I knew about him with one wave of his hand. The bars and brothels, the drugs and murders, the payments to police and local councils disguised as charity.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I'd asked.

  And then the bombshell. “Because I want to find Vince as much as you do.”

  The thing in the wooden crate.

  “It's the one relic I'll never sell. How can I?” He'd sounded almost dreamy then, and for a few moments I regarded Fat Frederick as an equal. A man capable of innocent fascination and joy, rather than the brutal, cynical killer I knew him to be.

  I closed my eyes and remembered the angel, curled up in that box as if waiting to be born. But it was long-dead. Childlike body petrified, wings curled around its papery torso, feathers still whole but greyed with dust. Its face …

  I could not remember whether I had even seen its face. Maybe I had shut it from my mind. Or perhaps I had been too terrified to look.

  When I opened my eyes again, the two men sitting opposite were looking at me. One of them half smiled and glanced away, the other stared over my shoulder through the window into the fleeting darkness. I wondered what they saw.

  I got off at the next stop even though it was not mine. The platform was busy at this time of night, and I was pleased at that. The bustling people kept shadows on the move. I went with the flow and stood on the escalator taking us towards the surface, and all the way up I felt someone watching me.

  It's only natural, I thought. Now that I know, I can feel the weight of the unknown city around me.

  Out from the Underg
round, away from the warm, spicy stench of fuel and dust and hidden depths, I stood on London's rainy streets and let the crowds pass me by. For a moment I had the impression that they parted around me and I stood there like a rock in a stream, and I wondered whether knowing more of the hidden world had made me a part of it. But then a teenager nudged my arm and apologised, a man stepped on my foot, and I negotiated my way across the pavement to lean on the railing beside the road.

  I looked up into the sky and watched the illuminated rain falling down towards me. It held me in its damp embrace.

  Vince knew, Fat Frederick had said. Sometimes I think he knew more than me. Still looking down at that dead, ancient angel he kept in an old oaken box, he gave me the name of someone I should see.

  * * *

  Everyone leaves part of themselves behind.

  That evening I sat in my apartment and looked at what I had of Vince. Photographs, scribbled notes, concert ticket stubs, memories in image and print that formed the ephemera of six years together. I spread everything around me on the floor while I drank a bottle of Merlot, but there was no sense of Vince being there with me. I tried putting on some Radiohead, his favorite band, but though the words and music edged some way towards making those memories richer, there was still something lacking. A pair of his shoes smelled only of old shoes. I ran my hands across the inside of one of his favorite jackets, but felt nothing but cotton and leather.

  All the while, the woman's name sang to me from earlier that day. Mary Rock will answer your questions, Fat Frederick had said, and I could only wonder why he had never been to her himself.

  Head fuzzy from the wine, still unsettled by what I had seen earlier that day, I decided to venture back out into the night. My search for Vince had been ongoing since the day he vanished three years before, but only now did I feel one step closer. Perhaps speaking to Mary Rock would take me closer still.

  It was raining even heavier than before. I shrugged myself deep into my coat and clasped the phone in my pocket. It was almost two in the morning, and though London never slept, it did give way to a dark community that rarely saw daylight. I had never questioned why a phone could give me a sense of safety, but it did. Perhaps because it was a route to the outside world.