London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  But how could London feel like anything to him? There wasn’t any intel to base that reaction on. What . . . had he developed his own Spidey sense?

  But, yeah, that was where it was definitely taking him. Every new turn he had taken in this car had taken him further out into commuter land, heading through all the lost suburban byways and rat-runs. If he kept going, he’d soon hit the M25, and then he could just keep on going, right down to the coast, maybe get a ferry—

  No, no, no! Why?

  Did someone’s unconsciousness really function like this? He’d seen movies where someone found themselves acting kind of weird, and it turned out to be about some psychological tic they hadn’t recognized in themselves. That sort of stuff had always seemed like bullshit to him; he knew himself too well, but maybe there was something he could point to underneath this urge. It was as if he was now directly feeling something that had always been out there somewhere, but always previously as an abstract entity, a crushing weight of judgement and prejudice and arrogance. Except it was in a specific place now, here in London instead of all around him.

  Was this a moment he’d talk about in the future, saying, ‘And then a little voice said to me . . .’? Because this thing was pretty bloody concrete, more of a big foghorn than a little voice.

  He had wanted to talk to someone, he realized. He’d wanted, ever since Quill appeared in the service station, to convince someone of . . . of what? His innocence? But he wasn’t innocent. He wanted to tell his story . . . only, since he’d woken up in that car, it had felt as if the thing was already starting to be left behind him now, was instead . . . enormous, implacable, not to be bargained with.

  Okay, so, let’s get this straight: leaving London now would be tantamount to running away. It would make him look guilty of something. It would deprive him of the kudos derived from the successful op. And it would also stop him cashing in on his endgame. He’d prepared that for an emergency exit, and then left it hidden, back in London. He would be leaving all that behind if he ran now. And, though his training and his inclination made running very much part of his world, he fucking hated doing it.

  He forced himself to breathe more easily. None of this is either/or, Tone. How about a middle way? Call in sick tomorrow, maybe go to see a doctor, figure out if this feeling was . . . fuck . . . brain damage or something. Or maybe an optician thing? He looked around carefully, and then stared into the dark distance. Nothing out there struck him as weird . . . but how could you tell?

  So, okay, Tony, how about you get some more data and then make a genuine decision? He started the engine and set off again, making deliberate decisions about which turns he took now, watching himself, undercover, in his own head. At every turn he took, he still felt that urge to head away from London. He went east instead and started feeling it more precisely, now he was looking for it, almost as an actual pressure on his left shoulder. He passed through increasingly rural countryside, forests and parks. He was now in what used to be called Truncheon Valley, where the needs of the Met, house prices and salaries all conspired to produce a belt of police officers’ homes. He saw a sign saying Biggin Hill, and turned right on a whim . . . and there it went, London was right behind him now, making him relax more with every mile.

  This was a pretty bloody clear message, wasn’t it? The sense of threat would recede completely if he went in this direction for a while. So maybe this was just himself letting go of the tension, simply relaxing with the therapy of a long drive? Because, come on, he’d seen enough shit outside London, too; it wasn’t as if the city had a monopoly on oppression. He pulled the car to a halt, made a three-point turn, and headed back the other way.

  He felt it coming, ahead of him, after only a minute.

  Fuck.

  So he turned again, fled again. He passed a sign beside a bit of parkland that said Westerham Heights: Greater London’s Highest Point. He turned at the junction, parked up, the only car on the gravel, and cautiously made his way on foot along a path between the trees, the only sound nearby being the night wind sighing through the branches. He had to get his eyeballs on to this thing, find out if he could see it as well as feel it, once he was looking at it directly.

  He felt it hidden now by the rise ahead of him. Something demanding. Something threatening. Like an enormous . . . audience. He went through a gate and crested the hill, and the wind was suddenly buffeting him directly, the sound of it turbulent in his ears. He was on the side of downlands, facing north towards London. To the north-west there lay Biggin Hill airport, the lit-up lines of the runway, and to the north the lights of London itself illuminated the clouds. But that was just what his eyes were telling him. Underneath that there was much more. So much that he dropped onto the grass, although it was wet with dew that would soon become frost.

  There was something in the sky above Biggin Hill. Something he could see that transcended mere sight.

  He stared at it, shocked. It was right on the edge of vision and . . . and of hearing . . . a dream of vapour trails and the bursts of ack-ack guns firing – he could hear them clearly – and beautiful parachutes and aircraft shapes spinning and interlacing in airborne fights that meant . . . everything.

  It meant everything to that great weight out there. But not to him. It – this force he’d been feeling – was trying to tell him how he should feel the importance of whatever was up there. That was a familiar feeling, he suddenly realized, and something he always felt being forced on him. It was something he didn’t quite own naturally, but was meant to. Something he was missing. It was especially beautiful when seen like this, a feeling of longing and purity and of enjoying sadness. It was stamped in the sky, and it wouldn’t fade. Or, at least, not for a long time. A shared thing that he didn’t share. And then he found he hated it, even though he also wanted terribly to have it. Or something instead of it that was his very own. That would be the best thing; it would be so easy to lie back and join in with it. He felt that the great weight beyond it was made up of that particular sensation. There was something real underneath it all that made him ache even more. He stared ahead, amazed at these specific thoughts, which were being put in his head by what he was now seeing. He wasn’t in control of his emotions right now, he realized. This power in London, whatever it was, was doing this to him somehow.

  He himself was so nearly nothing, compared to the size of that power. He looked away from the ache in the sky, and towards London beyond. He could see strange things there, too. Or feel rather than see. He felt he had an extra sense hovering between all the others, which he didn’t yet understand enough, which needed fine tuning. He saw, or felt, lots of tiny individual meanings there in London. They added up to that enormous feeling emanating from the city itself. And it was just from the metropolis, and nowhere else. Costain looked to his left and right. There were other towns nearby, including Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells somewhere behind him. But from them there came nothing, not even faintly. This was purely a London thing.

  Costain considered it for a while, this London thing: this British thing that had been poured into London and solidified there. He found he wanted to apologize to it. But he also wanted it to apologize to him.

  He would never before have imagined a London thing. If he was experiencing a psychotic episode, something the drugs had done to his brain over the years . . . that’d be about everything he saw and felt, wouldn’t it? Not this one, precise thing. Yeah, he knew a threat when he saw one. And this was real.

  He sat there for a while longer, letting himself relax, feeling no threat in the woods around him, only beauty in the downlands beyond, but he looked every now and then at where the bad stuff – if it was bad stuff – was. And it was only there. What was over Biggin Hill was like a question posed in the sky. It was a constellation in a suddenly genuine astrology, perhaps significant to him, perhaps not – not good or bad, just real.

  For a while, he’d thought he was in on a successful operation, that finally he had something to celebrate. I
nstead he’d found this.

  It was what it was. And he had to face it.

  Okay, then.

  After a while, he got to his feet, went back to his car, and headed back into London.

  Quill had three more pints with Harry. He gradually started to tune out the running commentary from Harry’s dad. The more he drank, the more he accepted what was in front of him. Maybe he could even use it. ‘Harry,’ he said finally, ‘are you jealous of me?’

  ‘Don’t give him the satisfaction,’ said Dad.

  ‘What?’ laughed Harry. ‘You’ve done so well ’cos you’re a better copper, Jimmy. I know that. When it comes to getting on, I’m a lazy sod. But I see you putting the work in.’

  ‘He made you say that! You do all this to hurt yourself! And he loves it when you do, you pathetic little twat!’

  Quill steeled himself. ‘To some extent, that’s true, but it’s also just because of how the dice rolled. You’re a fucking amazing DS, Harry. If you went off to do something else, using those same skills, you’d be way ahead of me.’

  ‘Patronizing bastard.’ That had been Harry himself, with just the tiniest twitch of a smile – which his dad didn’t share.

  ‘But the dice did roll that way, and you’re my mate. You’re going to be my DS again at some point. I don’t want to think of you gnashing your teeth.’

  Dad burst forth with a tirade of insults, but Quill wasn’t listening. He was watching Harry instead. He wanted to see if his laying down the law could make Harry rebel against this thing, if Harry’s disciplined side could make this other bastard vanish.

  ‘That’s good to hear, Jimmy,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’ But, though he gave Quill his most sardonic grin . . . his dad remained.

  Quill finally left the pub at closing time, and fended off Harry’s suggestion of finding a cab with him. This encounter was going to be just a weird drunk ghost story, wasn’t it? Something he’d tell people after he’d retired: ‘There was this one odd night when . . .’

  He staggered a bit as he headed back round the corner, stepping on and off the suburban pavement, going back towards the blaze of lights outside the Losley house. He should call home: Love, it turns out ghosts are real. Don’t have nightmares. It’ll never happen again. But he was still feeling weird and, now he was out in the open, he could still feel the sort of sensation he’d had with Harry’s dad sitting there. That coldness, it was everywhere. As if there was a dead dad lurking in a lot of these houses. And . . . above him, and under him. That was too worrying to think about. And that feeling was especially strong, hugely strong . . . right ahead of him.

  He had to stop as soon as he saw the Losley house.

  He stared at it. He had to look away, and then look back. But he knew what he was seeing was real.

  EIGHT

  Quill was surprised that Costain was the first to arrive at the all-night cafe on Willesden High Road. ‘I hadn’t gone home,’ Quill admitted.

  ‘Why?’

  Quill just shook his head. This was going to be the hardest bit. He had been drinking black coffee ferociously, and now he couldn’t quite tell the difference between drunk, buzzed, and this new weird stuff. But he knew what he was after. He remembered that feeling that had passed among them when he’d touched the soil, and now he needed to find out if the other three were seeing stuff, too, and get them to admit it. They might think they’d been drugged or something, and maybe they had been, but if they were all seeing the same thing . . .

  ‘Listen—’ he began.

  ‘You can frigging see it too!’ a voice interrupted. They looked up to see Sefton marching in. He dropped into a chair beside them, and stared at them challengingly. ‘Don’t tell me you frigging can’t, because I’ve had my head full of this frigging stuff!’

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Quill reprimanded him, quickly and gently.

  ‘Sorry, guv . . . sir.’ Sefton looked so suddenly lost again that Quill almost felt sorry he’d said it. He’d quite liked that sudden show of fierceness from the quiet one.

  Costain looked between them, and gave in. ‘All right, I can see it, too. What is it?’

  They looked up at the sound of someone else entering, very quietly. Ross walked unsteadily towards them, and sat down beside them. She looked as if she didn’t know what to say.

  ‘We’re seeing it, too,’ said Costain quickly.

  Ross bit her lip and looked away. ‘I went to the psychiatric hospital,’ she confessed. ‘There was . . . a lot of . . .’

  They sat there awkwardly, as she kept a distance between herself and them. They waited for her to finish that sentence. But she didn’t.

  ‘You’re not going mad,’ said Quill. ‘This is real.’

  ‘Oh, that makes it so much better,’ said Ross sarcastically.

  ‘I’ll ignore that remark, but I don’t want to hear anything like that again – from any of you.’

  Ross looked up, shocked, as if she’d been slapped. But the others were looking almost relieved. And now so was she. There was a time for informality, which was most of the time, and there was a time for this.

  ‘Guv,’ they all concurred, grateful to him while resenting it too. He didn’t want to keep handling them like that, but it’d do for right now.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he began.

  They stood in front of the Losley house, but Sefton couldn’t make himself look at it for too long. His thoughts flicked back to Joe in the pub where he’d quickly led him after the incident in the street.

  ‘What was that?’ Joe had said. ‘What happened to you there?’

  ‘Just . . . some kind of fit, I suppose. I ought to get myself checked out . . .’

  ‘Is it still going on?’

  Sefton had glanced over to where there was something spindly standing at the bottom of the stairs. And then he’d known he had to get away. Away from things like that, and from where there were so many people, all of whom seemed to be contributing to the weirdness. It had been like the way he felt normally about the general public, but pumped up to eleven. They made him want to hide. He had asked for Joe’s number, written it on a beermat, and got out of there. He’d still been able to feel huge things moving about outside that relatively modern bar. So this wasn’t all about ancient stuff. He’d edged his way through the people on the pavement, feeling all their expectations and fears, not individually as in telepathy or something, but as one great terrifying mass; feeling what might be looming in the distance. He hadn’t questioned this feeling, because he wasn’t able to. This wasn’t some medical condition; he was in the middle of a new reality. The phone call from Quill had come as a relief. He’d known from the DI’s tone of voice that he was feeling it too.

  The crime scene didn’t look like a normal house any longer. It was a haunted negative of a building, with black windows that were looking into Sefton, challenging him, making him think that, at any second, he’d glimpse something terrible up there. It was entirely different from the buildings on either side of it. ‘The witch’s house,’ he said. And this time he wasn’t making jokes about fairytales.

  ‘Right,’ said Quill, ‘so let’s—’

  But Ross had already set off across the road, heading straight for the front door.

  Ross hardly registered showing her pass to the uniform on the doorstep. She had to be first in, had to be in control of this. But, as she walked into the hall of the Losley house, her courage failed her. Rich tapestries hung where the windows should be. The thin carpet was replaced by fur rugs. The writing and the diagrams were still on the walls, but now they shone. There was something chitinous about the colours of the walls, the filthy carapace of a giant insect. As they came in behind her, Ross saw the other three stop and react to it, too. The new forensics shift was making its way through all this, none the wiser, not seeing what was all around them.

  Ross felt her comrades draw closer. They had unconsciously formed a square now, their backs to each othe
r, each of them looking in one of the directions trouble might come from, braced like coppers, with legs apart and weight tilted backwards; Ross found that she was doing the same, while the room swirled with horror around them.

  The stairs, right in front of her, were particularly challenging. It was as if you could see underneath the stairwell and yet up it at the same time. The up-and-down pattern of the stairs seemed to be overlaid on the surface of your eyes. But it was still contained within a discrete space. It was like a Picasso painting of a stairway.

  It took her a moment to see what was now perched on top of the newel post at the far end of the banister. Not a skull any more, but an entire child’s head. Its neck was like an automaton’s, skin hanging around a spinal column which looked to have been screwed into the wood. It had golden curls like a cherub, and bright blue eyes looking straight at them. It blinked, as if it was surprised.

  ‘Oh,’ it said, ‘you can see me.’ And then it started to yell, louder and louder. ‘Strangers! Strangers!’

  Ross didn’t want to acknowledge it. She didn’t want it to be real. She looked back at the others. They didn’t seem to want it to be real either. It was as if they were still in a dream. The forensics team had already started looking at them questioningly. They obviously couldn’t hear the child shouting. Ross took the lead again, and headed up the stairs. She had to do it through sheer physical memory because, if she looked, she couldn’t see where her feet were going. It occurred to her that getting down again would be even harder.

  Sefton was looking all around him as they went, letting it soak in. This felt different to what he’d encountered in the street, and had been aware of ever since. The green thing . . . Jack . . . just . . . was . . . grown out of something naturally. And that way had felt the same for just about everything he’d felt the distant presence of. This was more like that old bloke who’d stepped out of Jack’s way. This was . . . deliberate, something that someone had made. It was like his mum had always said, that there was another world underneath ours. Someone – the suspect Mora Losley – seemed to have been taking advantage of it.