by Paul Cornell
Files of maps and index cards were kept under other floor slabs, on great spindles that were eased out from underneath through a spinning action. The initial heave took some doing, but there was a knack to it, rather like that of pulling on a bell rope. Chartres could send the stacks flying towards the ceiling with a ratcheting sound, and also stop them, at a touch of his elbow.
Each of the five members of the team had a place at the round stone table in the centre of the meeting chamber. The table top was etched so that each position had two fine diagonal lines leading to it. The table had been made smooth by use, shaped by the hands of Chartres’s predecessors.
The floor was made of the same granite, and remained rougher than the table surface. The same pattern was inscribed under the table as was on it. Every chair was different, made of old oak, fashioned in Rennes, specially to suit the body shape of each team member. The journey to Brittany on the Eurostar, to be measured and complimented on one’s posture, and fed fine wine and cheese by those who knew of the debt the world owed to these fine upholders of tradition, was one of the perks of the job. Nobody would ever even mention money in connection to any of this. Similarly, new members were first prepared with the right words and gestures made over them in this building, then taken deep under the earth, for a ceremonial procession through some picturesque caverns that was, with typical melodrama, called ‘the ordeal’, before being baptised in the river of gold and silver, and thus given the Sight. There, words were said over them in Latin. Chartres knew the linguistic meaning, but not the significance. That had been lost. The Sight was what made them special. The ceremonial pouring of a handful of water into their mouths and noses gave them a sort of vague sixth sense, a slight difference in how they saw the world. More importantly, that gave them the ability to see what they were doing when they used word and gesture to do miraculous things within London. The great book that stood in the barrow made the process look a lot worse than it was. It called the whole ceremony, ridiculously, ‘the drowning’. The progress down there took so long that Chartres was glad he’d only ever presided over the blessing of one such newcomer. The Sight these days seemed a pale thing compared to what their predecessors had described. Chartres put that nagging thought from his mind now. Perhaps it was just that in this modern age, there was less for the Sighted to see.
For most of its existence, which stretched back, under various names, over at least a thousand years, the Continuing Projects Team had assembled in this meeting chamber on one evening each week. In the last six months, they had taken to meeting every night, but obviously that situation wouldn’t persist.
The team was not chosen by a human being, but by a protocol. When any member of the team died, usually of old age, the protocol was read out, which produced a name, in letters on small stone tiles, taken from a bag, and a location. The chair of the team (since 1968 Chartres himself) then set off to find that person, who always turned out to be from the same field of expertise as the former member. Then there would follow a somewhat difficult conversation, mitigated by an excellent lunch, whereupon the chosen one always, it was said, turned out to be interested in taking up the post. They always turned out to be people of the right sort, with accents, manners and modes of dress that allowed them access to the corridors of power. Chartres knew from his reading that centuries ago the bag had been given to a commoner, for them to pick the tiles, that some of his predecessors had said that those who held the bag influenced the identity of the candidate. That didn’t seem to be a problem, though. The current system was working out excellently. Like so many things the team used, someone might once have known how that protocol worked. But theirs was no longer to reason why. The interior mechanics of the ways of the world were often great mysteries, and their business was no different.
The five members of the team represented the five foundations of civilization: academia, law, government, the media and the Church. The longest-serving member was always the chair, who, as a partner in the firm, had to at least pass muster as a professional architect. Apart from him, the current team included: Patrick Kennet-Fotherington, LLB, a criminal defence lawyer from a firm in Chancery Lane; Felicity Saunders, the permanent secretary at the Home Office; Adam Fletcher, senior producer of current affairs at the BBC; and Rev. Michael Watson, chaplain of King’s College, London.
The team also regularly consulted with people on the ground, in the various London institutions, who knew the truth about what they did tangentially, in smaller or larger doses depending on their prestige or position. They had a particularly useful connection in Scotland Yard. Chartres had shown the officer in question, one Rebecca Lofthouse, whom he regarded as a friend, around the meeting chamber. He had demonstrated their equipment and operational approaches to her. She had kept visiting, here or even at his home in Golders Green, bringing leads to anything inexplicable from her own line of work. She seemed to prefer to do it in person, not wanting a paper trail. She was, he suspected, hoping to glimpse something of the unseen world. It was a pity that since she was not a member of the team, he couldn’t gift her with the Sight.
He sat down at the table in the meeting chamber and laid out his pens and notepad, as he always did. Before the others arrived, he used the Lud Vanes to check on how everything was ticking over. The Diana Prime felt like it was pumped impossibly high, while only yesterday all had seemed fine. He next tried the Vanes over a map and found the DP was hitting the Apollo Prime head-on at the Eye . . . whatever all that actually meant.
What it amounted to was that there would be mummified cats whispering up chimneys tonight. There would be telephone calls from the dead. There would be fatal collisions between long-lost twins driving the same model of car. This sort of thing had been happening quite often lately. It was irritating. Never before had they had to sort out so many inconveniences at once. At this time last year, the biggest problem had concerned the Wetherspoons chain buying up another old pub, renaming and redeveloping it, and even that had been a simple matter of balancing things based on the standard layout of the new building. Until very recently, the ‘terrible things’ that were supposed to be ‘out there in the dark’, if they existed at all, had stayed there. (The majority of the team had always said they believed such things to be metaphors for the consequences of bad civic planning.) But perhaps now that was changing. It would have been enough to make any lesser man slightly worried. Chartres now put the Vanes away, and as the others arrived, he made sure to look calm and methodical. He called the meeting to order, and they sat down at their designated places round the table.
As he looked at the steady, wry faces of his team, a little amazed that they were back here yet again tonight, Chartres blinked at a sudden mental image: a surgeon, with hands wobbling, something going wrong in the middle of the operation, blood spilling on the stone of the table. They were his hands and his shakiness. He even saw the table split in two.
He managed a smile. What was he thinking? There was no credible record of anyone ever having any sort of foreknowledge about events in London. Whatever was going on, they could deal with it. He called for order again, just for form’s sake. But, as he did so, there was a sudden sound from outside. A muffled crash and then childish laughter. Sniggering arrogance. For the third night in a row, youths were hanging about in the courtyard between the skyscrapers. ‘Penny for the guy’, that would be their latest excuse. Security hadn’t so far been able to apprehend anyone.
Chartres sighed. ‘Let’s look at London tonight, shall we?’ He went over to the wall and inclined his head slightly. The light changed as the lantern/window in the dome above moved into the correct position. Chartres moved his hands into a pleading shape to match with the new angle, as he had so many times before, and vast shadows flapped across the walls as something huge and real settled across the room.
An instant later, it was laid out on the stone table, the greatest privilege his team enjoyed: the entirety of the two cities of London and Westminster, and all the surrounding
boroughs of Greater London, wrapped round the river, and standing solid on the stone. This display was produced by a ‘rare visual protocol’. The records gave no indication of what ‘rare’ meant, but the vision portrayed the real thing, the actual place, at this very moment. Chartres, or any of them, could reach down with a finger, and make the buildings grow huge around them, and pass right through them. They could only observe, however, using this protocol, not make anything happen.
At this hour, the city was illuminated only by the lights of the buildings themselves, rather than by the small representation of the sun that would have been visible on the wall of the chamber for any daytime scene. The brake lights of tiny vehicles glowed on the streets. Tiny aircraft, stacked in spirals above Heathrow and Gatwick and London City airport, blinked red and green, while orbiting sublimely through the heads of the team. The entire vision was full of movement. It didn’t display artefacts of artificial vision, flares and wobbles, like a camera view would. Instead, it felt actual, alive.
Chartres flicked the air with his finger, and now they could see the grid displayed across the buildings. It was an indication of potentialities, of where things might happen. It was a mesh of white lines, as was used in modelling buildings. In an area where only the normal laws of physics applied, it would be flat, the lines evenly spaced. In the midst of the sort of extreme architectural problems that sometimes concerned the team, it could be warped into extraordinary shapes. Nevertheless, it was still vaguely based on natural geography. Therefore, looking only at the grid, one would still have been able to tell where the Thames was, where the smaller rivers ran and the basic shape of the hills and valleys and underground features. Population density tugged on it too, presumably because more people meant more buildings.
As the grid appeared this time, he felt the others react at the same moment he did. The grid was horribly stretched, like some enormous weight was pushing down on it. Everything was leaning towards one particular point. ‘It’s like a whole new borough has moved into place,’ Chartres said, trying to sound merely interested. ‘Outside the map, but . . . influencing it.’
‘That’s not possible,’ said Saunders calmly.
‘Of course. You’re right, obviously.’ He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. It was absurd, but he was actually getting nervous. He recalled his nightmare. What had the man said? Something about the opposite of the placebo effect, that if you believe something bad will happen . . . he saw again his vision of the broken table, and the blood. He pulled himself together. ‘Let’s see what’s at ground zero, shall we?’ He made a tapping gesture in the air, and London reared up at them again, and they were standing in a street in what turned out to be Paddington, in the early evening dark.
People nearby were none the wiser about the team’s presence. They swarmed like ants between the station, the snack bars, the rows of cheap lodgings, the gleaming monoliths of the big hotels. There were full litter bins, and piles of discarded cardboard outside cut-price electronics shops. There was a feeling of pleasurable expectation in the air. It would soon be Christmas.
‘We’ll approach the epicentre slowly,’ Chartres said, ignoring a man selling chestnuts as he walked through him. ‘If this is a real effect, and not some error in the model, we’ll need to do something about it.’ And who better placed for that than the five of them, the quiet hands upon the rudders, from all five branches of the establishment? Chartres calmed himself. There was nothing London’s hidden architects could not look into, define or fix.
They came to the central point where most pressure was being put on the grid. It was a pub at the corner of two enormous traffic thoroughfares. The pub itself was one of those deeply British concoctions whose facade reminded one of so many cultural reference points: the keel of a man-of-war; a music-hall bill poster; a decorative cash register. So many signifiers, each one of them pointing to another golden thread of British life. To look at a pub, to look at any building, was to see meaning made flesh. This pub was cut off from any neighbours, the buildings behind it having been demolished. There was a wire fence round the brownfield site, and a sign announcing construction. In the sky above it, the grid was being tugged down in ominous, heavy arcs. Something huge was waiting for them inside.
Like they owned the place, like they were really physically in this street, they marched in through the wall.
They found themselves in what could still be called a parlour. It contained photographs and items on the wall that genuinely belonged to the history of this building, rather than having been chosen by some design office at the brewery because of their carefully meaningless eccentricity. Deep russet wallpaper, the gold highlights faded to black with old smoke. Somebody’s trumpet with dents in it. The floor was swept clean, but the boards were old, and in places nails had come away, and there would be a creaking noise near the burnished golden-green rail running along the bottom of the bar.
The pub was mostly filled with office workers, young men and women in suits, who had seized every table after having got out of work early for the weekend. They were still coming in, shrugging water off shoulders, folding umbrellas, pushing their way towards the bar. Chartres noted Eastern European construction workers, an Indian man and his wife eating either a very late lunch or an early dinner.
Chartres’s people split up, moved as phantoms between the customers. It was Watson who first noticed something unusual. He called them over to where he was studying a photograph on a wall. It was of some explorers, sometime at the turn of the previous century. They looked happy and shaven, with piles of provisions and equipment on the dog sleds behind them, every inch the sons of Empire about to set off into the wilderness. Watson put his finger on the picture.
‘Watson,’ he said, touching the chest of one man. The name was indeed written in longhand, in faded ink, under the picture together with all the other names. He slid his finger down diagonally to the left. ‘Fletcher.’ Across the middle row to the right. ‘Chartres.’ Up diagonally to the left. ‘Kennet-Fotherington.’ Then down diagonally to the bottom. ‘Saunders.’ He turned to look at them and met their astonished gazes. Under the picture was written one word, in the same longhand.
History.
‘Does it mean us?’ whispered Fletcher.
Chartres felt a knot in his stomach. ‘This isn’t about architecture,’ he said. ‘This is enemy action.’ He headed back into the middle of the pub and the others followed. He was about to say something else, to try and find the words to calm his rising panic—
But then he bumped into someone. The man’s glass went flying. It hit the ground and shattered. The man spun and stared at him in shock. Chartres looked round and saw everyone in the pub was staring at them. They looked afraid, terrified. They started to yell, to scream, to back away.
‘They’re seeing us as ghosts . . . as the sort of things we prevent!’ yelled Fletcher.
‘The protocol,’ said Saunders. ‘It’s been . . . What’s that word?’
‘Hacked,’ said Chartres. ‘The protocol’s been hacked.’ He didn’t like the way the fear was building all around them. They were now contributing to what they had always previously merely observed. Where was all this fear coming from? It was like there was a reservoir of it lurking somewhere underneath everything, something that they had never dealt with.
History.
Chartres made a quick series of gestures, half expecting them to fail . . .
But they didn’t. They were out of the pub instantly, and thankfully standing above London once again, looking down at it. In the same moment, they saw the grid burst upwards from that pub, like a trampoline being released. It was their being there that had set it off. Ripples raced out from it in concentric circles. Those ripples hit other waves within the grid and rebounded, set up interference patterns that bounced off the nearby buildings. There would be worse things out there tonight. Poltergeists and terrible ironies and bedroom visitors. But now . . . now all clearly motivated by an enemy. It was like a t
une suddenly appearing out of white noise. Or maybe it was a voice.
This had never happened before. Or it had been happening for a long time and they had failed to notice. Chartres waved his arms. He kept waving and waving until they were higher and higher above the city, watching as the ripples and pulses within the grid resolved themselves into lines of coincidence and impossibility flashing outwards in a great star shape, building with every interaction . . .
‘That’s impossible,’ said Kennet-Fotherington. ‘Energy declines; it doesn’t increase!’
‘Oh,’ said Watson, ‘science. I had been thinking maybe one day we should employ a scientist.’
‘Our enemy is pushing the wheel,’ said Chartres, ‘somehow adding energy to this. Whatever “energy” means in this case.’
He dropped his hands and they were back in the meeting chamber. They stood round the stone table.
‘Do you think that photo in that pub is really there?’ asked Saunders.
‘I suspect,’ said Chartres, ‘that it’s only there in this model of ours. Our enemy, whatever it is, has placed it there, as a sign that they have interfered, with this, and with who knows how many other protocols of ours.’
They stood silently, horrified by those implications. There came a noise from outside: that same high laughter. Chartres went to the intercom and called security. There was no answer. He turned back to the others. ‘I had a dream—’ he began.
Something slammed against the door.
Everyone stopped and looked in that direction. The impact came again, the door bulging inwards.
‘My God,’ said Fletcher.
They backed into the chamber, looking around for something to help them. Chartres stared at the door. He knew now that this had all been part of a plan, that whatever was out there, it wasn’t children or criminals. Could the door hold?
The door burst off its hinges and fell into the room. Through the doorway strode a figure. It seemed to grow as it came, its feet treading imperiously on holy ground. It was only half formed. There were parts of it he couldn’t see. It demanded something of him, wanting to be filled in. He tried to stop himself from filling in those details, because they were too terrible.