Personal Demons

by Christopher Fowler

  London is an old, old woman, heartsick and tired. Her aches have now grown into a solid instant pain, nagging and unrelieved. To have survived the poverty, the misery, the riots, the ravages of sickness and disaster, to have outlived the numbing terrors of the bombs – and for what? To see the city's heart torn out and cast aside, to see her body desecrated and her soul destroyed. She has always fought back, but now her fighting days are at an end, and the battle is all but lost.

  There is little that is truly Christian about London. Hawksmoor's churches have long been noted for the strange profanity of their design, but there are many acknowledgements of other gods. The building of Bush House will never be completed. If you walk through the western colonnade which connects the Strand to the Aldwych, you'll see that one of the building's columns has an incomplete capital in order to comply to an old adage: 'Perfection is an attribute of Allah; Impiety to achieve perfection.'

  Jonathan had to support the drawer of the plans chest on his bent knee in order to remove the architectural layouts without damaging them. They appeared to have been drawn in the nineteen thirties and poorly updated in the late fifties. Presumably there were earlier versions stored somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where. The paper was fine and brittle, carelessly stored beside a radiator for too many years. He gently laid the plan to one side for photocopying, and noticed the scrap of map wedged beneath it. It was old, certainly early nineteenth century. His finger traced a path across botanical gardens in faded emerald ink, through the fields of Kensington, over meadows and market gardens to the straggling canalways and riverbanks of North London. He loved maps. To be perched dizzyingly high in the clouds from the cartographer's viewpoint, peering down across a metropolis that is trapped forever in a single moment…

  'Are you going to be much longer with that?' A listless secretary clumped past. There was a vague, unfocussed hatred in her eyes, a suspicion of age, of gender, of everyone and everything. Jonathan so often saw it in the eyes of the young. He reluctantly closed the drawer and rose. He could spend all day here, sifting through the blueprints of the past, but Marrick would have a heart attack. As soon as his copies were ready he folded them into his case and stepped back into the penetrating rain.

  He found the drawing at his local library, in a book on Edwardian London. An attenuated young lady in a peach-coloured gown with a fur collar was alighting from a carriage on the arm of her evening-suited beau. In his free hand, the man held a top hat and a pair of white gloves. Rain glossed the street. The restaurant before them was a shimmering wall of light. Great chandeliers sparkled above the elegant dining lounge. The maitre d' stood beneath a silvered canopy awaiting the new arrivals. A copperplate sign was illuminated by rows of dazzling bulbs: La Belle Epoque. Of course. The place was world-renowned. Jonathan pored over every detail. You could even see the snuffer beside the entrance. It all looked so – what was the word? Swanky. An Americanism, of course, but quite old and entirely appropriate. He savoured the picture, longed to tear it out and hide it inside his overcoat. Instead he rose and returned to his cold flat above the fishmongers in the high street, to pass the evening in his books and his dreams.

  'Piece of piss,' said Marrick, wiping a chunk of bread around his plate and popping it in his mouth. 'Between the end of Aiko's lease and Dasako's application for listed building status, I bunged an offer in to them. Two hundred and sixty K.'

  They were having lunch several weeks later in a vast and deafening Wardour Street restaurant. Marrick hated the food but ate here because it was fashionable. The hard wooden seats were designed to discourage lingerers, and Jonathan had to shift awkwardly about to stop his legs from going numb. 'I don't understand,' he said as the appalling truth sank in. 'Why would they have accepted such a bid?'

  'Because they can't build a restaurant there any more. No fucking planning permission. Modern laws require safety exits, and they ain't got any.'

  'I'm sure I saw an alleyway at the side of the building. Couldn't they have applied to make use of that?'

  'Could have done if it was theirs, old fruit, but it's not. It belongs to the building next door, my little auction-purchase. Their bloke contacted me and tried to get the right-of-way signed over.'

  'And what happened?' asked Jonathan, dreading the answer.

  'I told him to fuck off, obviously.'

  'But surely they can appeal?'

  Marrick looked at him suspiciously and seemed about to speak, then changed his mind. 'No,' he said finally, raising his glass and draining it. 'They can't appeal. How can they build exits when the only other properties bordering theirs are mine? Anyway, the deal's already going through. Their hands are tied good and proper. They'll find some other dump to tart up. I'll have all three buildings down within a month, crash, bang, bosh, clear the space and flog it off as office units. I feel like celebrating. Let's get another bottle of this, if we can find a fucking waiter.'

  It made perfect sense, of course. He'd seen it on the map, but had chosen to ignore an obvious truth; the three properties were worth more knocked flat and sold in newly arranged packages of landspace. The packages could be tailored to suit modern business requirements. London's existing old buildings found it difficult to incorporate the conduits that were required to carry computer cables.

  In Jonathan's mind the golden windows of La Belle Epoque dimmed, the glittering crystalline structure dismantled itself and disappeared into the night, leaving behind a deep, dirty pool of shadow. He could not bring himself to hate Marrick; he was merely disappointed that the past had been cheated out of a chance to return.

  The spirit of London sinks from a powerful roar of flame to a single glowing ember, and soon that too will be extinguished. For cities, like people, must eventually grow old and die. Even a city as ancient as this…

  Scotland Yard, named after the palace where the kings of Scotland lodged when visiting London, is founded on the site of an unsolved murder. Mutilated portions of a woman's body were secreted on the building site in the 1880s, and the officers of the CID were never able to discover the identity of the murderer or his victim.

  Jonathan turned on the desk light and tilted back the green glass shade, then unfolded the photostat across the cleared surface of his desk. Marrick was planning to inspect the vacated premises with him tomorrow. After that it was simply a matter of sorting out the paperwork and waiting for the demolition order to be cleared. He withdrew a magnifying glass and checked each of the rooms and staircases in turn. Something about the map bothered him. Or rather, something about the way it matched the experience of actually visiting the property. He checked the specifications of each of the buildings against the photographs he had taken, but the anomaly eluded him. Why couldn't he see it? Something was wrong, something at the heart of the land itself. He removed his reading glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. Perhaps the answer would come to him tomorrow. He refolded the map, switched off the desk-lamp and wearily headed for bed.'

  I don't know why they had to turn the fucking lights off,' moaned Marrick as he and Jonathan passed beneath the cracked AIKO sign and entered the ground floor of the building. 'Look at it out there, ten in the morning and you'd think it was fucking midnight. Did you bring a torch?'

  'Yes. The main staircase is to the rear of this room.' Jonathan clicked on the flashlight and raised its beam. The showroom had been stripped to a few piles of mildewed carpet tiles and some battered old shelf units. It smelled bad – damp and sickly. From far above them came the drone of heavy rain and the warble of sheltering pigeons. They reached the foot of the stairs and started up.

  'I wanna make sure they cleared everything out. Barney couldn't get here this morning, his wife's sick or something.' Barney was an ex-bouncer and former prison warden whose aggressive temperament perfectly qualified him for his position as Marrick's site manager. Unpleasant things happened in Marrick's company that Jonathan did not know about, that he could not allow himself to discover. Not if he wanted to keep his job and his
sanity.

  Although Marrick was young, he was considerably overweight; the stairs were already defeating him. He reached the second-floor landing and looked up through the centre of the stairwell, catching his breath. 'You can check out the top two floors, Jon, make sure we ain't got any squatters in. Fucking hell, it stinks in here.'

  Jonathan stopped on the staircase and stared out of the rain-streaked window into the centre of the block, where the backs of the buildings met.

  Rooms. Something odd about the rooms. He studied the brick walls of the courtyard formed by the other properties. He felt as if he had a cold coming on. Getting his jacket so wet hadn't helped matters. He should have bought himself a new umbrella. He sneezed hard, wiped his nose on a tissue. Spots of dark blood, a crimson constellation. He looked from the window again. The bricks. That's what it was. The bricks to the right of the window. They were in the wrong place. There should have been an empty space there. It was marked on the map, but not there from the window.

  There was one room too many.

  'Adrian, come and look at this a minute.' He beckoned Marrick down and pointed from the glass. 'There shouldn't be another room in the centre-well. The old wall to the right, do you see?'

  'Yeah, so?'

  'It's not on the plans.'

  'Why would that be?'

  The brickwork was ancient, and the spaces between the blackened bricks were filled with bedraggled weeds. Near the top of the wall was a tiny window less than a foot long. There was no glass in it, just a single iron bar running across the gap. Jonathan frowned, trying to understand. 'The 1933 plans were drawn over much older ones, but when they traced the new buildings in, they didn't add the existing layout.'

  'So what was there before?'

  'I don't know. The original drawings have been lost, misfiled somewhere.'

  Marrick looked at him as if he was going senile. 'I'm not following you, Jon.'

  'There was another building already here at the centre of the site, or at least part of one. A very old one. Look at the bricks. There must be an entrance to it.'

  'Wait, before you go off on a fucking treasure hunt, how about we finish what we came here to do?'

  'This building has been cleared.' Jonathan scrubbed his fist across the filthy pane.

  'We have to find a way into that room.'

  'Why?' It was useless to assume that Marrick had a natural sense of curiosity, so Jonathan appealed to his greed. 'It could have been sealed off for years. There might be something of value in there.'

  'If there was, it was probably nicked years ago. Someone's bound to have been in there already.'

  'I think that's unlikely. There's no immediate access, and it looks like it belongs to part of another building. It's hard to even see.'

  'Hmm. You have a point there.' They both started looking for a doorway. There was nothing on any of the landings, or on the second floor. At the bottom of the stairs they found a door leading to a basement, but it was locked and there was no key. Marrick picked up a chunk of discarded pipe and smashed at the lock until the damp wood around it splintered and fell away.

  'Fucking hell! What died?' Marrick waved a hand in front of his nose. 'Shine your torch down there. These steps look rotten.' The beam rippled back at them. The whole of the basement was under an inch of filthy water. On the far side was an arched passage. Jonathan instinctively knew that this was the way to the room at the centre of the building. He'd seen this type of layout in old architectural books. 'We have to go over there.' He pointed at the arch.

  'You're joking. These shoes cost a fucking fortune. I'm not going down there.'

  Jonathan's torch caught a stack of planks piled under the stairs. It was a simple matter to lay them like duckboards across the basement. The ceiling was low, and Marrick swore spectacularly as he banged his head. They arrived at the far side of the room, and Jonathan reached out to touch the heavy oak door set before them. He could hear running water. The torch illuminated the source through a crack in the wood; a brick channel filled with sluggishly moving liquid, cut through an arched tunnel that led off to an iron grate in the wall. 'The Fleet,' said Jonathan excitedly, 'it's a tributary of the Fleet.'

  'What the fuck is that, a river?'

  'Certainly a river. It was used as a rubbish dump for centuries. Runs from Hampstead down to Holborn and right across London.'

  'What do you mean "runs"? It's still there?'

  'It was finally channelled underground at the end of the eighteenth century, but the main part is still used as a sewer. There's a whole network of tributaries attached to it, and this looks like one of them. A lot of basements used to have access to the city's sewer system.' Marrick had lost interest. He pulled at the edge of the door, and it shifted inwards.

  'Doesn't look like it's being used any more,' said Jonathan. 'The water's clean.' He shone his torch further along the channel and found another, much smaller door. This one was painted black and studded with iron bolts. 'That has to be the way to the centre-well.'

  They carefully stepped across the open water-pipe and examined the door. It was set two feet from the ground, presumably to keep the area behind it dry and avoid the danger of flooding.

  'It's locked. I wonder who has the key.'

  Marrick dug about in his pocket and produced a handful of loose Yales. 'Take your pick, there's these and dozens more of the bastards back in the office.' But all of them proved too small to fit the lock.

  'The mechanism will probably need oiling, anyway,' said Jonathan. 'We wouldn't be able to shift it by ourselves, not if it's been shut for years.' They resolved to come back down on Monday morning.

  London was once settled much lower in the ground. Layers were added; strata of gravel and stone and tarmacadam, layers of bones, the residue of corpses stricken by pestilence and firestorm, three decades of cholera victims, the sickly paupers from debtors' jails and workhouses, the silent majority of the city. Denied a voice in life, how they longed to speak and be heard.

  The first tunnel under the Thames was a private enterprise built by Marc Brunel and opened, after considerable loss of life, in 1843. Within fifteen weeks, a million pedestrians had paid a penny each to walk through it, but the novelty wore off fast, and for the next decade the gloomy arched passageways underneath the river became the favoured haunt of thieves and prostitutes.

  Jonathan was unable to find a key which would fit, so Marrick asked his foreman Barney to take the door off its hinges. Barney did so that Friday morning, following Marrick's instructions not to go inside. Marrick, who fancied himself as a bit of an Indiana Jones, was determined to retain that privilege for himself. Later on in the afternoon, as the biggest storm of the autumn broke over their heads, Jonathan accompanied his employer back to the cellar, and they crossed the sewage channel to the door in the wall.

  Barney had set the square iron panel to one side. Marrick assumed proprietorial charge of the flashlight, and now wielding a crowbar in his other fist, shone his beam ahead into a rubble-filled corridor. Jonathan followed him through, pausing beside a crumpled sheet of newspaper, The Daily Sketch, May 18th, 1949. He rose, disappointed, hoping to find something older. At least it was dry in here. They had to be under the centre-well of the buildings now. The room he had seen would be above them at the end of the passage and to the right.

  'I don't know why I'm fucking wasting my time down here. I should never have let you talk me into this.' Marrick picked his way across the littered floor, leaving Jonathan to fend for himself in the dark. From far above them came the distant rumble of thunder, like masonry being emptied into a skip. Jonathan listened to his boss's muttered complaints, knowing that the merest sliver of hope would drive him forward. 'You never know what we might find,' he said. 'There, at the end, where you just pointed the torch. What is that?'

  Twisted curlicues of iron hung from the ceiling. A number of sections had rusted through, and lay on the floor like giant fruit-rinds. Marrick cast the beam upwards. 'Looks like part of a stai
rcase,' said Jonathan.

  'Not like any fucking staircase I've ever seen. You reckon this room of yours is above here?'

  'There's nowhere else it could be.' He raised his eyes to the stained plaster ceiling and saw the slightly protuberant square of plaster in the corner of the passage. It was half the size of the first door, but large enough for a man to climb through. 'There's your door,' he said excitedly. 'There should be an iron ring set flat in the front section, buried under the plaster.'

  'How could you know that?' Marrick stopped and stared back at him through the glare of the torch beam. 'You haven't been down here before.'

  'I've read about these things. It's a relic room. Lots of wealthy old houses used to have them. You built a special room, just a small one, and sealed a treasured possession inside, and built the rest of the house around it.'

  'Then what?'

  'Then nothing. You sealed the room up from the outside and forgot all about it, and the building would have good luck all of its life. It was a pagan thing. By giving up something precious you appeased the household gods. The old Roman habits died hard. Not all Londoners were Christians, you know.'

  Marrick's eyes glittered in the gloom. 'So you reckon there's something really valuable in there?'

  'There could be, I don't know. They tucked away all sorts of belongings. Gold candlesticks, silver and pewter plate, chalices, they were all popular sacrifices.'

  'Reading all them books of yours finally paid off, eh?' Marrick thumped the ceiling square with the end of his crowbar. The plaster coating that covered it sounded thin. A few more thumps rained wafer-fine pieces on to his shoulders. It only took a few minutes to reveal the edges of the door. When he shone the torch back up, they could both see it; a dirty iron ring, recessed into the square. 'Give me a hand here,' said Marrick, thrusting the torch at him. 'Hold that steady.' His fingers followed the outline of the ring and dug around it, pulling it down toward him. As he brought his weight to bear on it, the door grudgingly opened downwards in a shower of plaster fragments.