Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  As they descended they lost much of the light, until they were faced at the base with the low gloomy dip of the tiled passage which would lead them under the river to the Isle of Dogs.

  The hundred-year-old tunnel had originally been built to take workers across to the West India Docks. Now, with the resurgence of London’s docklands, it was once again in full use. As Rose ran between children and pushchairs her breath formed in clouds before her. She knew that they could not fire at her down here for fear of hitting too many other pedestrians. In the straight narrow tunnel there was nowhere to go but forward. She looked behind her as she ran. Robert seemed to be falling back. Dag and Reese were slowly gaining, their pounding boots filling the tunnel with echoes.

  Ahead lay the circular shaft of the north tunnel entrance. Rose reached it just as the liftman was closing the steel gate of the elevator. Alarmed, he watched on his wall monitor as the skinheads approached, allowed Rose and Robert to slip inside, then firmly sealed the door. ‘Bloody hooligans,’ he said, nodding at the screen. ‘We get ’em down here all the time. Got no respect for decent people.’

  ‘They’ll be waiting for us at the top,’ gasped Rose. ‘They tried to mug my friend and me.’

  ‘Oh, did they indeed?’ He eyed Robert carefully, wrinkling his nose. ‘Well, we’ll soon settle their game.’

  The liftman removed a telephone receiver from a box on the wall and spoke into it. Moments later, two policemen appeared on the monitor, waiting at the top of the shaft.

  ‘Looks like it’s going to be our lucky day after all,’ said Rose, resting her head against the vibrating wooden wall of the lift. Robert glared glumly back, looking as if he’d just been fished out of the Sargasso Sea.

  ‘You must forgive my friend,’ she said to the liftman. ‘He works down the drains.’

  ‘Reckon you may have to bring his bath night forward,’ said the little man as he brought the elevator to a gentle halt.

  Chapter 26

  Freewheeling

  Robert sat at his desk and finished tapping as many details as he could remember from the first notebook out onto the screen of his computer. He then loaded the information into the file marked Newgate on his disc. The office was silent and empty. Skinner had presumably packed his skis the day before and headed off for the pleasures of the piste. Robert sat back in his chair and lit his last cigarette.

  His eerie, sleepless night, compounded by the dash beneath the river, had removed the reality from the day, lending a bizarre quality to the smallest details. God, how he regretted having handed Zalian the book without first taking photocopies. He walked over to the window. Today the gargoyles seemed so much more commonplace, squatting against the cold bright sky. He peered down. The street was filled with Christmas shoppers laden with carrier bags, briskly tacking from store to store. With surprise he realized that the wire he had spotted attached to the neck of one of the gargoyles was not a telephone cable at all, but part of a run. He turned hastily from the window. It was no use. He knew now that his curiosity would not allow him to drop the subject. He punched out Rose’s number. She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Did I disturb you?’

  ‘No, I was just going out for something to eat. There’s a doner kebab out there somewhere with my name on it. You all freshened up?’

  ‘Yeah. How do you feel about what’s happening to us?’ Robert tried to make the question sound casual.

  ‘I’m having a little trouble with it, if that’s what you mean. Either we go the whole way, or we pull out right here and now.’

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel. I mean, we could be dealing with a bunch of psychos.’ He drew deeply on the cigarette, filling his lungs with cool smoke. ‘But somehow I don’t think so.’

  There was a brief moment of hesitation on the other end of the line. ‘In that case I vote we laugh in the face of danger and go back up. The question is—how? Zalian didn’t go out of his way to arrange another meeting.’

  Robert ground out the stub of his cigarette and peered gloomily into the empty Marlboro packet. ‘If he wants the book badly enough, he’ll engineer a meeting. Besides, we can work it out for ourselves.’ He glanced at his watch. 1.15. ‘You want to discuss this somewhere?’

  ‘I’ll skip the Greek delicacies and meet you for coffee.’

  ‘Deal.’

  They arranged to meet at Patisserie Valerie in Soho’s Old Compton Street in an hour’s time. Robert rang off. He fingered the empty cigarette box with a sigh and rose to his feet.

  As he headed for the tobacconist, he found himself staring up at the tops of the buildings on either side of the road. It seemed hard to believe that so many people had been thundering and swinging and leaping across them just a few hours earlier. He watched the faces of the men and women who passed him. Not one of them ever looked higher than face level. Most people preferred to stare at the pavement as they hurried by, lost in a mental vacuum created by their haste. Yet because of the varied eras of their construction there remained a hundred different types of rooftop, no matter how drably similar the buildings then became at street level. Gambrel and mansard, pitched and hipped, they created a mountainous landscape of stone and slate that remained undetected by the city’s own unwary inhabitants.

  It was strange, but even when he stopped and stared hard at the buildings around him he failed to pick out the cables running between them which constituted permanent runs. He knew they were there, constructed of transparent nylon that simply reflected the colour of the sky.

  Later, he would suggest heading towards the Strand with Rose, and together they could look for the cables that he knew must crisscross the broad street like spiderwebbing all the way down to the Aldwych.

  He was slipping between the poles of a scaffolding construction in St Anne’s Court, lost in thought, when a shout attracted his attention. Then an old woman screamed, a high-pitched shriek like a startled bird. He turned his head to see her plastic shopping bag fall to one side, tins and packets tumbling into the road as she pointed upwards. Following her raised arm, he found himself looking directly overhead through the metal maze of scaffolding as it suddenly parted with a deafening clanging and ringing, clamps and rivets bouncing in all directions, and a huge steel wheelbarrow cartwheeled towards him on its way down to earth. He threw himself forward, miraculously staying on his feet long enough for several leaping strides as the sounds behind him turned into a continuous roar.

  When the noise had stopped and the dust had settled, he could see that the wheelbarrow, loaded with cement, had fallen several storeys, smashing its way through planks and pipework to land exactly where he had been standing. As a crowd began to gather, he pulled himself to his feet and pushed away behind their backs, darting into a nearby record store just as people began to gather in doorways.

  Leaning against a record rack, he fought to keep his body from shaking, focusing his eyes instead on the cover of the nearest album. Slowly he released a grim chuckle. It was a BBC Radiophonic Workshop effects record—Sounds of Death and Disaster.

  —

  ‘I told you smoking was bad for your health.’

  ‘If you’d been there you’d know that it was no accident.’ Robert stirred his tea irritably and looked up at Rose, who had selected a huge cream slice from the plate before her and was now biting into it, smearing her face.

  ‘Was anybody hurt?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I didn’t stick around. The thing fell four floors and landed right where I’d been standing.’

  ‘I guess they drew a bead on you by aiming for the ears.’

  ‘Isn’t it kind of disgusting to top off a kebab with a cream slice?’

  ‘I was going to have the strawberry flan. You know, I think we should find Zalian before somebody else takes a pot shot at you. Or me.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’ Robert lit a cigarette from the stub of his old one.

  ‘Do you have to do that while I’m eating?’

  �
�I was nearly killed a few minutes ago; I think I’m entitled to a cigarette.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be too hard to find him. I have the list of stations.’

  ‘Where?’

  Rose tapped the side of her head and smiled. ‘We still have our line-belts. Plus, we might be able to work out the location of their headquarters.’

  ‘If we can stay alive until tonight. Perhaps we should go up right away.’

  ‘And risk running into whoever it was that wanted to play Bounce the Wheelbarrow off Robert’s Head? Zalian’s enemies must be desperate to get you if they’re attacking in daylight.’

  ‘Listen, my office is just around the corner. We can load all the details you can still remember from the first notebook into my computer file. At least then we’ll have a hard copy.’

  ‘Have you had a chance to look in the second yet? Has it got the information Zalian’s after?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s the same as the first, full of cryptic symbols and codes. It’s also been immersed in coffee grounds, which hasn’t helped the legibility much. You know, if your memory is half as good as you say it is, you may have retained enough information to get us back up to Zalian in one piece.’

  Rose considered for a moment, wiping the last flakes of pastry from her lips.

  ‘I may not be word perfect, but I’ll try to recall as much as I can.’ She rose from the table and threw down some money for the bill. ‘Let’s go.’

  —

  Before them, the screen glowed green in the gloomy third-floor office.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ Rose grabbed Robert’s arm. ‘There was another list as well as the stations. Let me see…there was Lud and New, Cripple, Moor and Alders….No, forget it. They’re of no use.’

  ‘Why not? What is it?’ Robert swung his chair away from the screen.

  ‘They’re the names of the seven gates of London which were built into the wall surrounding the city. Trouble is, I don’t know where they were located. Anyway, they were all demolished over a couple of hundred years ago. There was also something about “No. 1, London”.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  Rose gave him the airy look she reserved for casually imparting extraordinary pieces of information. ‘It used to be that if you posted a letter to “No. 1, London”, it reached the Duke of Wellington. He used to live in Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, which was the first large house you came to entering London from the west. It’s a museum now. I guess Zalian must have built a station on the roof. Although I have a feeling that some of the information in the notebook was just historical research that Charlotte was planning to use as background material.’

  ‘Great, that makes our job even harder.’

  ‘Let me type the information in as I remember it. If only you hadn’t hogged the damned book the whole time I’d have had a chance to memorize more than just the first few pages.’

  ‘How was I supposed to know about your brilliant memory?’ complained Robert. ‘You should have told me earlier.’

  ‘Just try to be a little more constructive. Where would Zalian be most likely to build his headquarters?’

  Robert sat in silence for a minute, then leaned forward and tapped the screen.

  ‘Well, the Roofworld has strong associations with mythology and the planets, especially the sun and moon.’

  ‘Horses.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They could be on the roof of a stable, or any place which has horse-brasses hanging on the wall.’

  Robert stared at Rose. ‘How do you figure that out?’

  ‘Horse-brasses usually represent the sun and the moon,’ said Rose airily. ‘They were always worn on the martingales of London cart-horses to represent the gods of the two planets.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Rose, it’s got to be something simpler than that.’ Robert shook his head. ‘No, you’re definitely coming out of left field there. How about the roof of the Planetarium?’

  Rose looked at him and sighed loudly. ‘You disappoint me, Robbo. So obvious. Besides, the Planetarium is just a steep dome. It’s too exposed. It would be unthinkable that they’d manage to hide out anywhere up there.’

  ‘All the more reason for them to do so. It’s worth checking out. Grab your coat and hat.’

  ‘OK, but I promise you, I’m not going to leave my worries on the doorstep.’

  Together they headed for Baker Street.

  —

  Meanwhile, Ian Hargreave was going through an identical exercise at his computer terminal, ‘freewheeling’ his information in random word strings, hoping to complete a logic-jump that would set his thinking in a new direction. He had added on to his earlier Icarus file, rechristening it Anubis for reasons that he himself did not fully understand. There was something Egyptian about the style of each execution—that’s right, he felt sure that they were executions rather than murders, but to what practical purpose?

  Pausing to light yet another cigarette, he loaded the names and functions of a variety of Roman, Greek and Egyptian deities onto the disc. Then he added anything he could think of that might open a new avenue of thought: zodiac signs, secret societies, Missing Persons statistics, even zoological descriptions of wildfowl. Finally he booted the file into his privately secured and coded Freewheel program and sat back in his chair to watch the results unscroll.

  UNLOCKING FREEWHEEL

  There was a pause while the computer analyzed the information before adding to it. Then the familiar green lettering began to tack across the screen.

  YOUR REF/   SECRET SOCIETIES

  SEF/       RELIGIOUS ORDERS

  CHIVALRIC BROTHERHOODS

  FREEMASONS

  SHRINERS

  ORDER OF THE EASTERN STAR

  ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN

  ORDER OF BUILDERS

  ORDER OF JOB’S DAUGHTERS

  MYSTIC ORDER OF VEILED PROPHETS OF THE ENCHANTED REALM

  With a snort, Hargreave reached forward and stopped the screen before it continued to run through the endless number of secret societies that existed around the country. He positioned the cursor beside ‘FREEMASONS’ and pressed ‘Return’. Instantly the screen scrolled down new information.

  YOUR REF/   FREEMASONS

  NON-CHRISTIAN ORGANIZATION

  WORLD’S LARGEST SECRET SOCIETY BELIEFS

  *THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME BEING

  *THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

  THREE MAJOR DEGREES

  *ENTERED APPRENTICE

  *FELLOW OF THE CRAFT

  *MASTER MASON

  GENERALLY REGARDED AS A SYSTEM OF UNFAIR PRIVILEGE, FREEMASONRY HAS FREQUENTLY ADOPTED AN ANTI-CLERIC STANCE AND IS BANNED IN THE FOLLOWING COUNTRIES:

  *EGYPT/USSR/​HUNGARY/SPAIN/​POLAND/CHINA/​PORTUGAL/INDONESIA (More to follow)

  Great. The computer was now making value judgements. It would be telling him to quit smoking next. Hargreave halted the readout and suggested that it should search amongst similar groups which held ritual practices. The screen rolled blank, the memory banks sorting through an unimaginable network of information. Beyond the door of his office the occasional face peered through at him, concerned. Sod them, thought Hargreave. At least he was applying his imagination to the problem. They weren’t coming up with anything at all. His attention was drawn back to the screen. Type began to appear once more.

  YOUR REF/    SIMILAR SOCIAL STRUCTURES

  *MARDI GRAS KREWES

  RITUAL SECRET ORDERS

  CELEBRATING CARNIVAL

  DERIV/CARNEM LEVARE = LATER, CARNELEVARE = ‘FAREWELL TO FLESH’

  *MARDI GRAS DERIV/‘MARDI GROS’ = ‘FAT TUESDAY’

  ORIG/ROMAN CUSTOM OF

  ATONEMENT CORRUPTED INTO

  LEWDNESS, VIOLENCE, MURDER

  CURRENT STATUS/HARMLESS

  RITUAL CELEBRATION

  MYTHOLOGY/RITE INITIATED BY

  EVANDER, SON OF HERMES

  HERMES = ANUBIS

  Hargreave swore
beneath his breath and slapped his hand against the monitor in frustration. It was there, all of it, right in front of his eyes. Why the hell could he not make a connection with the violence it was causing in the modern world? He drew hard on the stub of his cigarette and ground it out. There was a secret society afoot, all right, something that ran parallel to the Masons and the Mardi Gras krewes, something that shared a common root with societies all over the country, perhaps all over the world. But it wasn’t Christian. He looked back at the screen.

  Mardi Gras celebrated the pleasures of the flesh before the commencement of Lent. Likewise, the doctrine of the Freemasons had often angered the church. But the rituals connected with both had grown harmless in recent years, had become too well-known. So, what else was left? Satanic societies? Covens? Their mumbo-jumbo rituals seemed to pale into harmlessness compared with what he was facing here.

  Hargreave looked back at the flickering emerald ciphers on the screen. The dark side of the city was slowly revealing itself. Perhaps it had been there for many years, perhaps it was only forming now. One thing was certain. It was far deadlier than any of them had imagined. Deadlier, perhaps, than they could imagine.

  Chapter 27

  Planetarium

  Rose stamped her boots on the pavement. Her toes were freezing. She reached into her padded jacket and pulled her rainbow scarf tighter. ‘See anything yet?’

  ‘No, the roof looks completely sealed and seamless. It’s just a dome. There’s a ledge running around it, but it’s barely wide enough to stand on. Here, your turn.’ Robert climbed down from the upturned wooden fruit box. The hectic Marylebone Road traffic charged and slowed all around them. Vast coaches, their engines idling, sat by the side of the road waiting to discharge strings of tourists for Madame Tussauds. Above them, visited only by pigeons, the bright green dome of the London Planetarium rose, a model planet perched at its apex.

  ‘There don’t seem to be any openings, or added structures to the roof,’ Rose called down. ‘I think we’re barking up the wrong…’ Just then, a slim oblong segment of the dome rose from its base a few inches and out from beneath it slipped the sullen-faced girl they had seen with Zalian the previous night. She was dressed in a grey jumpsuit and seemed unaware that anyone was watching her as she strapped on a small backpack, pushed the rectangular metal sheet closed and reached into the suit for her belt-line.