Streets of Shadows

by Tom Piccirilli

  Taxis buzzed the streets, looking for trade. Other cars kerb-crawled, occupants shrouded by night. The rain enclosed me, but I kept my head up and my eyes open, searching for any shadows that moved the wrong way. I knew how to protect myself, but that didn't mean that I relished the chance to use that knowledge.

  It was a two mile walk to the address that Fat Frederick had given me, and I decided to do it all on foot. A taxi seemed too impersonal. I would use the time to clear my head, and to think through what had happened and how things had settled where they were now. I had always felt like a piece of flotsam bobbing on the whims on London's tides, and after tonight that sensation was even stronger.

  The city watched my progress with calm, satisfied eyes.

  I often daydreamed about feeling Vince's gaze upon me. I was convinced that he was still alive, though there was no evidence at all to support that. His friends, his sister Mel, his mother living in Australia, had all long-since given up hope. That said more about them than Vince, although there was no doubting his troubled history and the terrible way he'd treated his family in the past. But I loved him now as much as I did that night he vanished, and I wanted him back.

  Just popping down Asbo's for a bottle of wine, he'd called. Asbo was what we called the local Asda's supermarket on account of its general clientele. I was in the bath and had heard him opening the front door, and I'd shouted, Get some Jelly Babies. Those were the last words I said to him.

  The bath was cold by the time I'd started to worry.

  I moved along a street that bustled during the day but which was now all but silent. Restaurants and bars were closed up, some of them glowing faintly from low-level lighting. A few still sported neon signs in their windows. Some had doors protected by grilles or heavy metal rollers, others chanced their luck. Rain splashed on the pavement and made the reflections of streetlights come alive. It swilled along the gutters, pooling around drains blocked with litter and dog shit. A car sat on flattened tyres. A homeless man huddled in a doorway beneath torn cardboard boxes. I could just see his shoes, and for a shocking instant I imagined them attached to something horned, scaled, inhuman.

  I slowed my pace and a growl came from beneath the boxes. I hoped it was his dog.

  I hurried on, taking the phone from my pocket and glancing at the locked screen. It had become habit, almost a nervous twitch. I still expected to see a message form Vince waiting for me one day.

  Three shadows moved towards me along the pavement. They were talking, animated, at ease with the dark. I moved to the edge of the pavement, my coat brushing against parked vehicles. The men's voices lowered only a little as we passed, and one of them said, “Evening.”

  I nodded and moved on, glancing back several times to make sure they had not stopped and were staring back at me, ready to give chase.

  Damn it, Angie! I thought. I was never usually this nervous. And I hated the fact that the more I found out, the more scared I became. This was my city. I'd lived here my whole life, and I'd always suspected it had strange depths and hidden secrets. Knowing that for sure should not change the way I was.

  But the angel, it's papery skin, dusty feathers...

  “It's all just old dead things!” I said, my voice startling me. I hadn't realized how quiet it was.

  I entered a residential area. The streets were darker and even more deserted. I saw a couple of city foxes trotting across the road ahead of me, and the sight of them gave me comfort. They were jittery creatures, and if there was anything at all wrong with the night they would be in hiding.

  There were a few lights on in houses. Some were upstairs, some down. I passed one window where the curtains were wide open and a man sat watching TV with the lights on. He held a can of beer in one hand and ate from a takeaway carton with the other. I watched for a moment, then turned away. He was in his own world, as was I.

  I paused a little longer outside another bay window, looking across the small front garden at the gap between curtains. The lighting inside was more subdued, but I could still see the couple fucking. The man sat on the sofa and the woman rode him with her back to me, leaning forward so they could kiss, offering me a frank look at that glimmering, wet place where they joined. She pounded onto him as if angry. His hands grasped her buttocks.

  I had not made love to anyone since Vince had disappeared. I suddenly felt like an intruder, spying on this couple as they indulged in something so private and intimate. Perhaps the city was watching me like this all the time.

  It took an hour to reach Mary Rock's address. I was surprised when I arrived, and I had to check a couple of times that I'd come to the right place. I programmed the postcode into my phone and it confirmed that I was on the correct street.

  The houses were large, probably a million pounds-plus, but there was a uniformity to them that surprised me. Detached, the eight houses along the street differed only in the designs of their gardens and the choices of window dressings. I'd expected a supplier of relics, someone who dealt with Fat Frederick, to live somewhere more distinct, and at the same time hidden away. An old warehouse in the docklands, perhaps, converted to open-plan apartments and with hidden basements. Or a deconsecrated church, converted into living accommodation.

  Now that I was here, I wasn't sure what to do. It was four in the morning. The rain had lessened, and soon dawn would sheen the east. There were already more vehicles on the roads than there had been before. The city was stirring.

  My uncertainty was settled when the front door of the house opened and a tall, thin woman walked along the path that curved across the front garden. She was black, graceful, perhaps fifty years old, and she walked with her hands in her pockets. So casual. Reaching the low front gate, she pulled it open without a sound.

  “Angelica,” she said. “Frederick told me to expect you. You look cold. Please, come in, I've already put some coffee on.”

  Mary Rock seemed so normal.

  That should have made me turn and run.

  * * *

  Inside, the house was warm and pleasant, well-appointed and with a homely feel. Its ground floor was taken with an open hallway from which a wide staircase curved upwards, a comfortable living room smelling of scented candles, and a couple of other rooms I did not see.

  “Please, take a seat,” Mary said, pointing at a wide leather sofa. “I'll pop through to get coffee. How do you take it?”

  “White, no sugar. Did Vince sit here?” I was looking at the sofa. I could imagine him there, and in my minds eye he was grinning up at me with that I've-done-something-stupid lopsided smiled of his that I hated to love.

  “Oh yes, many times,” she said. I watched her pass through a set of double doors. She wore jeans and a heavy jumper, walked barefoot, and carried herself with an alluring grace. She almost seemed to float.

  I followed, deciding not to sit.

  The doors opened into a big kitchen with a dining area attached. Half of the kitchen was given over to a comfortable corner sofa, the rest was all chrome and shine, modern and expensive. I saw machines whose function I didn't even know. Mary had a proper coffee machine, and she worked it as I watched.

  “Oh, okay,” she said, noticing me. “We'll be going downstairs, anyway.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “You came to see, didn't you?”

  She didn't ask what I had come to see, nor did she give a clue. But I nodded mutely, watching as she made coffee and steamed milk. Our fingers brushed as I took the mug from her, and she was staring into my eyes.

  “Vince was such a nice young man,” she said. “So proper and …old-fashioned.”

  I snorted. “Really?”

  “That's who I saw,” she said, smiling and shrugging. “Everyone is different away from home. Come on. Are you ready?”

  I don't know, I thought, suddenly panicked. Am I ready? For what? What is she going to show me? Fat Frederick took me to see a dead angel, but she …

  She was royalty to Fat Frederick's butler. It wasn't the hous
e or the obvious wealth, because that could be feigned. It was in her manner and the way she bore herself. There was a weight to her gaze that had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with knowledge.

  I was suddenly more afraid of this woman than I had been of anyone in my life.

  “Yes,” I said. “I'm ready.”

  I followed her through the kitchen, past the sofa and into a lobby area. A door led into the garden, and another seemed to be a closet. She opened the third, smaller door, flicked a switch on the wall, and beyond her I saw a stone staircase leading down.

  “Vince was one of my best hunters,” she said, holding the door open. A waft of secret smells breathed up from the basements.

  “Is,” I said.

  “I'm sorry?”

  “Is one of your best. He's not dead.”

  “Oh.” She tilted her head. “It's sweet that you believe that.” She started down the staircase, and I followed.

  A sense of time immediately enfolded me––the must of ages in my nose, dense shadows that seemed heavy and ancient. If the house above us was relatively new and pristine, this basement area was altogether older. The past hid down here, and I was an intruder.

  “So he hunted for relics for you?” I asked. “The things that Fat Frederick deals in?”

  “Oh, did he show you his angel?”

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  “Bless him.” She spoke like a mother talking about her child.

  “It was …amazing.”

  “It's dead.”

  I was watching my footing on the stone steps. They were worn concave by centuries of use, and the idea of who had walked here before filled the air with ghosts.

  “Dead?”

  “Through here.” The lighting was poor, spread weakly from a couple of bare bulbs swathed in dust and spider webbing. She walked ahead of me and I had to hurry to keep up. I had the sudden sense that I could get lost down there, and the thought of wandering in the darkness, hands held out before me, sent a chill down my back.

  “Aren't all the relics from dead things? That's what they are, surely. Fossils. All that's left of…” I trailed off.

  “Do you really think that?”

  “I…” I wasn't sure what I thought.

  “It's dark in here,” she said. “It prefers it like that. Follow me, I'll give you something to help you see.”

  Mary Rock took my hand. It was unexpected and intimate, and I squeezed without even thinking about it. She squeezed back, this woman who might have been the most dangerous person I'd ever met, giving me comfort.

  Darkness breathed us in as she closed a door. And there was something in there with us.

  Mary held something against my face. “Put them on,” she whispered. “Keep your eyes closed, and only open them when I say.”

  Glasses. Goggles of some sort. She let go and I used both hands to secure the strap around the back of my head, keeping my eyes closed as instructed. My heart thumped. I could smell something strange, a living scent that was unlike anything I had ever smelled before.

  I wanted to turn and run, flee that place and keep running all day and night, out of London and into the countryside where perhaps I might find somewhere to hide, shed everything I was discovering, and live out my days in blissful ignorance.

  “Open your eyes,” Mary Rock whispered. She had a voice demanding to be obeyed.

  I looked, and saw, and my whole world grew wider and darker than I had ever believed possible.

  “My retirement,” Mary Rock said beside me. “My future. One day I'll figure out how to kill it, and then …I'll start to harvest.”

  Thin limbs, as if from malnutrition, but I thought not.

  “Vince was one of those who helped bring it in.”

  An elongated head, large eyes, elfin ears.

  “In fact, he tracked it down. Ealing. Down beneath the city.”

  The worn stubs of broken wings.

  “There's a whole world down there. Sometimes I fear that's where he's gone.”

  A fairy, I thought. She has a fairy down here, alive, breathing, giving off warmth and a stench like …like …

  “I have to leave,” I said, and that was when the manacled, chained, wretched thing lifted its head and looked right at me.

  * * *

  I was surprised she let me go. Walking toward the front door, Mary Rock now at my back, I expected the impact at any moment. A heavy object against my skull, a blade between my shoulder blades.

  “I want Vince back,” she said as I reached the front door.

  “So do I.” My voice shook. Everything I knew had been shaken. The world beyond the door was a wider, stranger place.

  “If anyone can find him, it's you.”

  I turned, she smiled, but it did not touch her eyes. Coolness came off her in waves. I thought back to when she had squeezed my hand, but could not recall feeling any warmth at all.

  I opened the front door and stepped out of her house backwards, still looking at her, trying to find something else to say. But what else could I say?

  You have a fairy prisoner in your basement.

  By the time I reached the street I was running.

  * * *

  Something followed me home.

  The streets were busier now, and it was almost seven in the morning. Residential streets hummed with passing cars, early morning deliveries, and children hustling towards their pre-school clubs. With so many people on the streets, I did not feel any safer.

  As I walked, I tried to connect Vince with the amazing things I had found out, tried to imagine him hunting things like that creature in Mary Rock's basement through the shadowy places and forgotten buildings of this great, mysterious city. And as I remembered his warmth, his love, the look in his eye as he came in from one of his supposed late-night rehearsal sessions with his band––

  Something brushed past me, just out of sight. I span around, ready to face anything, and instead there was only empty pavement. I was in front of a cafe filled with people having an early morning fry-up and tea, and several of them sitting at a window table stared at me. No one smiled.

  I hurried on. I could feel attention upon me, a prickling on my neck, a cool tingle down my back. Traffic growled and tooted, people shouted, motorcycles grumbled, and in all that noise I still heard one whispered word:

  Angie.

  Only Vince called me Angie, and only when he wanted to piss me off. My name was Angelica, and that was what I liked.

  I turned a full circle again, scanning the street and looking up to the rooftops. A shape shivered behind a window, shaking rapidly just out of sight. A shadow flitted from one roof to another, leaping along a ridge with the sun behind it. Looking into the rising sun, shielding my eyes, I could not quite make out what it was.

  Maybe because of what I knew, I could sense so much more.

  Or perhaps whatever was out there knew that I knew, and that was why it followed me. Stalking. Hunting. Letting me know that with the knowledge I now carried I might never be alone again.

  I raised my hand for a taxi. It slowed, then sped up again as if the driver didn't like the look of me.

  I glanced in a shop window to see if I was crying or bloodied, and standing behind me I saw the reflection of a face I knew.

  It turned quickly, gasping, “Vince!” and ready to embrace the man I loved. He'd lied to me for the six years of our relationship, but I was more than ready to forgive him. He had deceived me, perhaps believing that I was nowhere near ready to know what he knew. I'd prove him wrong. I'd tell him about Fat Frederick's dead angel and Mary Rock's barely-living fairy, and Vince would see my manic, ecstatic acceptance of this greater new world.

  But the man standing behind me was not Vince. I didn't know who he was, or what, but he stood so close that I would have smelled his breath, if he had any.

  He examined me. I have never been so thoroughly analysed. He tilted his head to one side and looked me up and down, and I could feel his gaze brushing my heart
.

  “Don't hurt me,” I whispered. All awareness of my surroundings was gone. I had no thought of help. Somewhere very far away I could hear traffic and see the vague, ghostly shapes of passing pedestrians, but in reality there was only him and me. His face was …forgettable. Even as I blinked I lost track, and saw him anew each time my eyes reopened. “Please don't hurt me.”

  He grinned. I was certain I would not forget that, even as his face faded from memory. I would never forget so many teeth.

  Then the man leaned forward and smelled me, filling himself with my scent, before turning and losing himself in the crowd.

  I did not even see him go.

  I ran, like a scared little girl in a fairytale, all the way home.

  * * *

  The thing that sniffed me is still out there, and it knows me. I cannot let it scare me off.

  I'm going to find Vince. My determination grows, and a desperate, deep part of me wishes he'd shared this part of his life so that we could have lived it together. That's a big part of the reason I want to be with him once more. Because I love him, yes.

  But also because I want us to share the adventure.

  * * *

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling horror and fantasy writer from South Wales. He’s had almost thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. His most recent releases include the apocalyptic Coldbrook, Alien: Out of the Shadows, Into the Void: Dawn of the Jedi (Star Wars), and the Toxic City trilogy from Pyr in the USA. Future novels include The Silence (Titan UK/USA) and the thriller Endure. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards.