Mr. October tore out the sheet and brought it to the desk, spreading it out beside the typewriter.
“There,” he said. “The latest list.”
I had to strain to see in the candlelight. A column of names ran from top to bottom of the page, each with some kind of coded reference number.
Mr. October ran a hand back through his hair, then tapped the page near the top of the list.
“The names and addresses speak for themselves. These are the soon-departed, the ones who’re about to die.”
“About to?” I looked at him, openmouthed.
“Some may have an hour or two if they’re lucky, but more likely it’ll be a matter of minutes or even seconds.”
I clasped my hands behind my head, nursing a throbbing pain. “But there’s nothing you can do to stop it . . . because it’s written.”
“Precisely. Their numbers are up. We can’t interfere in any way, and we never have long to prepare.”
“My Aunt Carrie’s name was on a list like this, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s how you knew, the first time we met. You knew before the family did because you had the list before she’d even gone.”
“Yes.”
“And the same thing with Marilyn Jasper last night. You had her name before we went to the roof, before we even heard the crash.”
“Yes.”
I fell into the chair at the desk, letting it all sink in. Candlelight played across the typewriter’s keys, orange and white.
“So what do the reference numbers mean?”
“They describe the exact cause and nature of death. Here, you see . . .” He leaned over the sheet, tracing each record with a forefinger. “Here’s reference 5821, the same as Marilyn. Car crash caused by a drunk driver. And this one, 8847, means natural causes: nonspecific. There are three of those here. Very sad, but not as sad as 10176 — run over by an ambulance while returning from a hospital appointment. The patient had just received scan test results after six months of treatment and the prognosis was good.”
“God, that’s unlucky.”
“No, it’s written. It’s not about luck. And here’s another, 43765 — we don’t see many of these. Man packages himself up in a cardboard box and mails himself to his fiancée as a surprise birthday present. Fiancée opens it carelessly with a pair of scissors . . . very unpleasant.”
“How did he put the stamps on the box?”
Mr. October shrugged. “It doesn’t say.”
We fell silent a moment out of respect for the soon-departed.
Then Mr. October said, “Now here’s what we do. We have to record these details on the cards, two copies of each, one for our files and one for the field.”
“The field?”
“That would be me, or any other operative doing what I do. Have you used a typewriter before?”
I shook my head no.
“Then I’ll explain,” he said, and took me through it step-by-step: what the various parts were called and what they did, which key or lever to press for which function. The black roller thing was a platen. The single red key was for tabs. The two linked keys on the left were for caps and caps lock.
He rolled the first card into the machine.
“Type it exactly as you see it,” he said. “Any mistakes and you’ll have to start over. Never file a card until you’re a hundred percent certain it’s accurate, otherwise all bets are off. If the wrong name goes to records, it gets very messy. The telegraph never makes a mistake, but clerks have been known to.”
“And where do they come from, these names?” I said.
Mr. October shook his head, a faraway look in his eyes. “Only the Overseers know that.”
It gave me a chill to sit there, preparing to add the first name to the first card. But when I hit the first key — nothing happened at all.
“Leverage,” Mr. October said. “Elbow grease. You’ll get a feel for it with practice.”
After mistyping the first card three times, I began to get the hang of it, and the fourth attempt looked passable. I offered it to Mr. October, who compared it to the printed list before giving me an approving nod.
“Fine. Now the rest.”
A few minutes later we had two piles of typed cards on the desk, and I was warming to the typewriter’s click-clack sound and the ping of its return carriage bell. Mr. October pocketed one set of cards and handed me the other.
“Whenever you’re alone here, this is what you’ll do,” he said. “Monitor the lists as they arrive, add the names and numbers to the cards, then file one set of cards only. The second set is for me, or for dispatch if I’m away. At other times you’ll maintain the telegraph — oil, dry lubricant, and User’s Quick-Start Guide are all on the shelf. Can you do that?”
“Think so,” I said.
But he saw that I still had doubts.
“Something wrong?”
“It’s just the thought of sitting here knowing every time the telegraph makes a sound it means someone’s about to . . . about to die.”
“I know.” He ruffled my hair. “It’s never easy. It isn’t supposed to be.”
As we left the room, the telegraph woke again, chugging away behind us. Mr. October shook his head ruefully and closed the door on it, leading me away up the hall.
Next he took me to the records office. The sight of it stole my breath. The space was impossibly huge, far too big for the building to contain it. White walls rose up as far as the eye could see, floor after floor stacked to the heights with towering filing cabinets. A spiral staircase connected the many levels, and on each floor workers in dark blue overalls perched on rolling stepladders as tall as the tallest cabinets. They moved from one cabinet to another, opening drawers, filing cards, then rolling along to the next.
“Like drones,” I said.
Mr. October smiled.
If the place had a ceiling, I couldn’t see it. All I could see in the rafters, miles above, was a mass of slowly swirling white mist with tiny winged creatures, possibly bats, circling through it. The room seemed to shimmer as I looked, as if everything inside it was constantly moving.
“It’s a living thing,” Mr. October explained. “The room is actually alive. The names we keep here go back through eternity. There’s a record for everyone who ever lived. And new names are being added all the time, so it can never be still — it’s always evolving and expanding.”
“Amazing. From the outside you’d never expect anything like this.”
“Some of us call it the infinite room, even though officially it’s ‘records.’”
He set off across the white marble floor, heading for a blocky gray rectangular shape in the distance.
“The room’s expanding so fast,” Mr. October said, “you’ll find it takes ten seconds longer to walk back than to walk where we’re going. Soon we’ll need transportation to cross it. And new floors are being added every day.”
We went on, surrounded by the echoes of opening and closing cabinets, rolling ladders, and the endless groaning wind, louder here than elsewhere in the building.
Closer to the far side of the room, I could see where we were heading. A small booth, jammed between two skyscraper cabinets, was occupied by a round-faced elderly woman with a perm and pince-nez spectacles. A thick ledger lay open on the counter in front of her, and her plump fingers held a pencil at the ready. Some of the drones, having filed their cards, were coming down the ladders and lining up at her booth for more. For each in turn, she reached under the counter and brought out a new stack of cards, then recorded the batch in her ledger.
The workers lowered their heads respectfully as Mr. October approached, but the woman looked far from pleased to see him, screwing up her face as if she tasted something bitter. Nearer to the booth I noticed her hair and clothing were covered with cobwebs. A multitude of spiders flitted about her, weaving with impunity. I guessed she hadn’t left the booth in some time.
“Afternoon, Miss Webster,” Mr. October said brightly. “More s
oon-departeds for your books. Ben, please give Miss Webster the cards.”
I slid them across the counter. Miss Webster glared at them through her thick lenses, her eyes large and owl-like.
“Meet Ben Harvester,” Mr. October said. “Our newest recruit and a rare talent. You’ll see much more of him from now on.”
“Hmm,” she murmured. “That’s more work for me, then, isn’t it? Welcome, young man.”
She sounded so disdainful, I looked the other way, saying nothing.
“So I suppose you’ll be out in the field together,” Miss Webster said. “All right for some. I haven’t seen daylight in thirty-six years.”
“Nothing we do would be possible without you,” Mr. October reassured her.
“Fiddlesticks.” She leaned over the counter, signaling the first worker in the queue. “Next!”
“Well, enjoy your day,” Mr. October said.
“What’s to enjoy? They’re all the same.”
“Nice meeting you,” I said as we started away. “By the way, you’ve got spiders in your hair.”
“I know,” she said tiredly, waving us off with the back of her hand. She must’ve heard it many times before.
“Absolutely hates her job,” Mr. October said when we were out of earshot. “But that’s understandable. It’s thankless work and very long hours. Whereas the workers, the drones, don’t even think of it. They’re paper chasers and pencil pushers who don’t know anything else. Be glad, Ben, you won’t go through life like one of them.”
We crossed the vast records room, arriving at the exit some time later. I didn’t count the steps we took and I couldn’t be sure the room had grown while we’d been inside. But when I looked up, the mist seemed slightly higher than before and the flying creatures even tinier, like specks of dust.
Before the afternoon’s salvage began, Mr. October took me to the dispatch room, where in the future I’d bring the second set of cards if he wasn’t there to collect them.
The cramped room had ten partitioned desks shoehorned together with two officers seated at each. They wore crisp tan uniforms and bulky headphone sets that must’ve weighed several pounds apiece, and they chattered away like telemarketers into desktop microphones, reading from the stacks of cards in front of them.
“5963 in NW5.”
“Do you read me? That’s SE6, repeat SE6. 8847.”
“11763 in WC1. Urgent. 11763.”
None of them paid us any attention. When Mr. October tried to introduce me, two of the staff adjusted their headsets to listen, but they didn’t react and quickly went back to work.
“They’ll know you next time,” Mr. October said, eyeing a muted TV monitor on one wall. “Don’t take it personally if they seem to ignore you. They’re always this busy. They take calls from all over the city.”
The TV was showing news footage. Two buses had collided on Blackfriars Road, and text scrolled across the bottom of the screen describing the damage: twelve injured passengers, one driver in critical condition.
Mr. October checked his pockets for the duplicate cards and showed me the first.
“See here,” he said. “7696. Bus crash fatality.”
“7696!” a dispatch girl called from the back of the room. “London Bridge Hospital!”
“I’m on it,” Mr. October said. “That’s us, Ben. Let’s get there before Cadaverus’s agents do.”
For our afternoon rounds, Mr. October wore the old man’s body in the rumpled white suit as he always did for delicate occasions. We visited the hospital first.
By the time we arrived, the bus driver was in the intensive care unit and his ghost was pacing the waiting area like an expectant father. Mr. October whispered briefly with the receptionist, an elfin woman with white streaks running through her jet-black hair, then he took me aside.
“It’s all clear. The Lords of Sundown have agents in every hospital — there’s always a wealth of strandeds and newly-departeds in places like this — but we have our own here too. The receptionist is one of ours. She says none of Cadaverus’s crew have shown up yet. Keep a lookout while I deal with the driver. He knows what’s happened, but he doesn’t know where to go from here.”
While Mr. October spoke to the man in a consultation room across the corridor, I watched the comings and goings of hospital staff, patients, and visitors. If the enemy were as good at disguise as Mr. October said, they could be anywhere. A porter went by, pushing a gurney. A team of nurses followed. A man in a wheelchair with one leg in a cast rolled himself out of an elevator.
A blinding white light flashed behind the consultation room door. The receptionist winked at me and touched a finger to her lips, and I knew then that the driver was gone.
The rest of the afternoon was a whistle-stop tour. After the hospital we had a natural causes at a Putney Vale shopping center, then another at a nursing home in Richmond. Both were elderly and well mannered and knew it had been coming for some time.
The man at the nursing home was sitting in a chair by his bedside, staring thoughtfully at his lifeless body under the sheets. Hearing us enter the room, he took to his feet and looked at us calmly.
“Ah, it’s you,” he said.
“Samuel Garner?” Mr. October said.
“Yes. I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been tired for so long.”
“That’s fine,” I said, hoping I wasn’t speaking out of turn. “You can rest now.”
He gave a sigh of relief. “At last.”
Later, we headed north for a 3618 in Wood Green. A forty-four-year-old man named Howard Burke had taken a tumble while performing a bit of DIY tile repair on his roof. The fall hadn’t killed him, but the inflatable children’s wading pool in the garden where he landed had — 3618 meant drowning.
Then another natural causes at a tapas restaurant opposite Tufnell Park Tube station. After that, close to Highgate Cemetery, we found the ambulance victim, the 10176.
Bob Fletcher, 38, had been struck while crossing the street by an ambulance racing to answer an emergency call. Death had been instantaneous. Fletcher was livid. The scene had already been cleared, his body driven away, and now he sat by the roadside with a girl in a stylish black suit who was doing her best to console him.
“It’s not fair,” Fletcher was saying. “My appointment with the specialist was such great news, everything I wanted to hear, and then that idiot came out of nowhere — I didn’t have a chance. Look at me now — cuts and bruises, dislocated shoulder, and bloody invisible too! I’ll sue, that’s what. But who’ll pick up my kids from school? Who’ll tell my wife? She’s expecting me home. I just called to say put the kettle on, we’ve got something to celebrate. . . .”
He hung his head. The girl at his side stroked his hand. Her tan face was fixed and serious, her black hair short-cropped and spiky.
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“Who is she?” I asked Mr. October. “And how can she see him?”
“This is how they operate,” he said. “This is how subtle they are. It’s why we have to keep up this pace. She’s one of them, one of Cadaverus’s cronies.”
He marched straight to them, addressing the girl in a voice that snapped like a whip.
“You. Hey, you. Scat!”
She looked up in alarm, let go of Fletcher’s hand, and scrambled to her feet, facing Mr. October with an expression somewhere between fear and contempt.
“No, you scat,” she hissed. “We were here first.”
Mr. October drew a breath, as deep a breath as his body would allow, and as he leveled his walking stick, a strange animal sound crept from his throat.
“Shallaleiken fsood man-pareth,” he said. “Ark fnaark manpareth malakayenisti!”
It wasn’t like any language I knew and I had no idea what it meant, but it obviously meant something to her. The girl tottered back several steps, rocking on her feet as if she’d been punched. Her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites. A tremor ran through her, causing her arms to shake
violently. She began to shrink into herself, sagging inside her suit.
There was an explosion of dark light, the air turning black where she’d been standing, and then she vanished completely. In her place was a feral gray and black cat, teeth bared and back arched. It took one poisonous look at Mr. October before shooting off down the hill.
Mr. October took a step forward, flipped his stick neatly from right hand to left, then flashed out his free arm as if hurling a stone.
A ball of orange-yellow flame leapt from his fingertips and trundled down the street, gathering speed after the cat. At the end of the block, the cat scaled a high trellis fence and dropped wailing to the other side. The fireball burst against the stone wall below it, scattering smaller balls of flame every which way. A smell of burning cinders crept up the street.
Mr. October leaned on his walking stick, watching the smoke clear.
“What the heck did I just see?” Bob Fletcher demanded. “I mean, what was that and who are you people?”
“Friends,” Mr. October said, helping Fletcher’s ghost to his feet. The effort of doing that took something out of him, and he took a moment to catch his breath. “Yes, friends. Unlike the rapscallion you were just talking to.”
“You’re lucky we got here,” I said.
“Lucky? You must be joking. How lucky is it to get run over by an ambulance? What did you do to that girl?”
Mr. October wiped his brow. “That was no girl. That was a shape-shifting agent of darkness.”
“Nonsense.” Fletcher paced the sidewalk, fuming, seemingly unaware of his oddly jutting dislocated shoulder. “Stuff and nonsense. She tried to help, couldn’t you see? An agent of what? Get away. You’re insane.”
“This will be tricky,” Mr. October told me. “He’s angry and confused and convinced a great injustice has been done, the very qualities — or rather, weaknesses — the enemy look for in a target. They’ll be back with reinforcements if we tarry too long.”
“What can we do?”
“Let me think.”
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