by Paul Cornell
They carefully made it onto the upper landing, and stared around them at what was now a polluted palace, medievally regal, adorned with deep furs and tapestries. There was nobody up here, or in the loft either, from the sound of it. The ladder that led up was now glowing in a low light coming from above. Ross made to go up it, but Quill stopped her, and he went up first.
The loft was even more extraordinary. The beams of the ceiling overhead were brilliantly polished, but also stained with time. They now looked like ancient ribs of wood. The roof was alive with a suffused light, like the sparks in a bonfire, as if the smoke of generations was up here. The room was now lined with previously unperceived chests and chairs and other pieces of furniture. The pile of soil was glittering, twitching with stringy golden light, like scribbled lines of writing or of music. Sefton couldn’t look at it, because it confused his eyes. But he still found himself wanting to get to grips with it, for that would be the only way you could cope. It was only frightening because he didn’t know enough. This stuff had been . . . hiding. It was a language of hidden things and of people . . . people like Mora Losley.
Costain was also gazing around, sizing the place up. Too much to cope with. He’d made a deal with himself about that as he’d headed back into the city and only seen more and more mad shit. He knew what the boundaries were, and what the way out was, so he was in. It was more the case that there was just too much evidence here, meaning it was the opposite of Goodfellow . . . oh! ‘This is where all the Goodfellow juice was,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t see certain things about Rob’s life, ’cos they were . . . hidden from us, literally.’
‘And now we’re wallowing in it,’ muttered Quill.
‘Trouble is, we can’t show it to anyone else.’
‘Maybe we should get other coppers to touch that soil?’
‘That Scene of Crime Officer said she had, and she was her usual cynical self. I don’t think she was seeing this.’
‘So what’s so special about us?’
Costain saw that Ross reacted to that, with a sharp little look of fear. But she kept her silence. He turned, as they all did, at a sudden noise from the darkness over against the far wall. A noise and a movement in the shadows, only a small movement. A rat? No . . .
A black cat came stepping cautiously towards them. It had rough, matted hair, stained with something sticky and dark. Its eyes were green, and they seemed bigger than a cat’s eyes ever should be. It was also looking at them in a way which didn’t seem to be how cats normally looked at things.
‘What’s happened?’ it said. It had an extraordinarily upper-class accent, like some radio announcer from the past.
They stared at it.
‘What are you doing here?’ it went on.
They continued to stare at it. Costain couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He was struggling just to stop himself from running. What was stopping him was the thought that that would be seen as a terrified rout, a shaming of himself, and putting a target on his back as he went. And the fact that what had sent him running was merely a cat.
‘Wait here,’ said the cat. ‘I’ll get her.’ It scampered back through the hole it had emerged from.
Costain heard what sounded like enormous, distant doors opening, the sound echoing down impossible corridors. Where had it gone anyway? To the house next door? No, they’d seen who lived next door. There was nothing beyond this attic. But there’d been nothing inside this attic either, the first time.
And then there was a different kind of distant echo. It was the sound of something moving. Something disturbing the air. Something moving back along that hole towards them. And the smell that started coming out of the hole, before it—
It was coming. Costain realized, and he sensed the others recognize with him the horrible, terminal mistake they had all made. The end of the horror movie was here now, and they were the victims. They had assumed this house was empty, when all the time . . . she was still at home.
Fast footsteps now, marching along, echoing from out of that small darkness. The darkness got bigger, changed shape . . . unfolded itself until it fitted neatly into the entire corner.
Costain took a step back, as he looked to Quill for guidance. The others were doing the same. There were fellow coppers downstairs, loads of them to provide a world of back-up. But they wouldn’t be able to see this.
Quill knew he was hesitating, and hesitating terribly. He was thinking that, actually, no matter what this was, he wanted to see it, he wanted to get line of sight on a suspect, make a positive identification. But that was just copper arrogance, wasn’t it, that whatever you knew about you could deal with? Was he about to get his team killed? Through lack of intel . . . a staggering lack of intel. Through him getting pissed. They should get out of here now, ’cos they were blown, exposed. He started to say that—
But suddenly there was a door there. A real door forming out of nothing. It glistened red. The door that he had spotted over there only as a transitory glimpse before. It now stayed there, silent, for a moment, then it swung slowly open.
And something impossible yet also obviously the woman called Mora Losley stepped into the room. But she didn’t look like that photo of her. She wasn’t like anything Quill had ever seen. She was wearing her real face now.
They all cried out. Just like that. They cried out like children at the sight of her.
Quill thought she looked older than it was possible for anyone to be. The skin of her face and arms was blackened as if she was bruised all over, where blotches of blood had flowed together. She was almost bald, with only tiny wisps of hair. Her skin was wrinkled as much as any human skin could be. Every angle of her jutted, every bone seemed mis-set. Her lips were cracked. Her teeth were pointed. Animating all that was simple power. Muscles like pistons. Fingers that looked strong enough to pull flesh from bone. Fingers that pinched together in the air. And yet there was something sickly sweet about her, too, a sense of . . . familiarity. She was like something terrible found in a comfortable old library, and it felt like a horrible lure, that sense of comfort – the rosy apple of the past. Her eyes were milky and bitter, but also sullen and hurt like a teenager’s.
The cat had come back out too, staying behind her.
She took two precise steps towards them, like a dinosaur in an old film. She didn’t seem to be in any pain from all those lesions and sores. Instead, she pushed the pain outwards all around her, so as to make everyone else feel it. Her shadow, Quill realized, made the floor steam, killed something in the rugs with every step, contributed to the fug rising to the ceiling. The smell hit him then: cut grass made into compost, polish and sewerage, wine on the edge of becoming vinegar.
She was eyeing at them, considering them. They had surprised her, he understood, for she wasn’t used to being seen.
To his own surprise, he found his voice. ‘Are you Mora Losley?’
She looked at him as if it was astonishing and humiliating to hear her name coming from him. She laughed, and it was a witch’s laugh. Not like witches did in children’s television. That was only a distant, safe memory of this. Her laugh sounded like small bones caught in an old throat. As if she was on the verge of choking, only she wasn’t feeling the threat of that – only you were. ‘You touched the soil,’ she said, as if she’d just worked it out. ‘My mistress’ blessed soil. I will now have to clean it. And you have a “protocol” on you. It’s reacted.’ She sounded like a profoundly deaf person, and the shape of her mouth was doing violence to the words. Whatever ‘protocol’ meant, she was holding it at arm’s length, as if the word was as unfamiliar to her as it was to Quill. Her accent was strange. It sounded very London, but not from anywhere that Quill could pin down. There was something almost American about it, except America was new, and this was . . . old beyond old. ‘You have the Sight now.’ Quill was about to try to frame a question about what that meant in terms of them seeing stuff, when her eyes narrowed. ‘I know you.’
Quill looked over his
shoulder to see who she was looking at.
Lisa Ross had met her gaze, seeming extraordinarily calm now. Calm because she looked to have finally encountered the thing she most feared. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We’ve met.’
NINE
TEN YEARS AGO
Mike the chauffeur would always drop Lisa Toshack home from school. They were friends. He took the responsibility of looking after her seriously. He was always standing by the car at the school gates, glancing around as if trouble might arrive from any direction. He seemed more worried about that possibility every day. He then drove her what would be less than a twenty-minute walk back to her dad Alfred’s house on the corner of a tree-lined street in Bermondsey. On the way, Mike would tell her which, if either, of her parents was at home. Mum was often out socializing with the girls, and Dad’s job as head of the family textile-import business meant he kept varying hours, spending a lot of time at Uncle Rob’s. Uncle Rob was his right-hand man, and his house was where most of the serious work seemed to get done. Lisa had long ago got the idea that there was something different about their business. There would be sudden laughter at family dinners about people doing favours for them, not because they were looking for a favour back but because of who the family were. They were powerful, it seemed: Lisa’s friends didn’t have families like that, she’d started to realize, but she was offhandedly okay with it. Quite proud of it, really. She was the girl with the weird eye, but her friends liked that, and nobody got at her for it, though maybe they would have done if it wasn’t for her family. Its members seemed to do good things. The staff seemed happy to work for them.
Today Mike had told her that her dad was currently at home, but when she went inside the house, there was a weird silence. ‘Dad?’ she called. ‘Astrella?’ No reply. She went upstairs to change, looking forward to afternoon telly.
On the landing she heard a noise. A groan of floorboards and straining rope. There it was again: a noise in her home she’d never heard before. She followed it to the door of Dad’s office.
The door was standing open just a little. Sunshine fell as a square of light across it, from the big green and orange window along the hall. There was a smell of old carpet in the air. She saw, as she approached, an odd shape standing inside the office – a too-tall shape. She got close enough to see through the gap—
—and then she was running into the room, towards her dad, who was hanging from the light fitting, his neck in a noose, his head framed in a halo provided by the ceiling rose. She needed to get up there, to get him down as soon as possible. She had the urge to pull on his body, but she mustn’t. She looked round and round the room for something to stand on, to reach up to him, but there was nothing that didn’t seem a mile away.
There had been no chair under him.
She finally spotted his office chair, tucked in under his desk; she grabbed it, rushed it over, leaped on top of it. There was no expression on his face, but he had a livid bruise on his temple. He was making no sound. His head was tilted to the right. His mouth was a little open.
She ripped her fingers undoing the knot. She ripped them but she got it open. The nearest knife was in the kitchen, and there was no time, no time . . . oh God, had she made the right decision, or had she killed him? ‘Dad, I’ll call a doctor. Dad, talk to me, say something. Dad, say something. Dad, I’m getting you down. Dad—!’
His body tumbled to the ground in a way which nothing with life in it could ever fall. Blood pooled around him and she saw, for the first time, that he had a wound in his side.
She fell down beside him and put her hands on his face, with some idea about doing first aid, but he was cold, and she shook him, trying to make him wake up and he wouldn’t, and she started to scream.
‘Suicide,’ said Uncle Rob. ‘I’d never have expected that of Alfred. Leaving a wife and child, too. What sort of a bastard runs away like that?’
In the next few weeks, one of the great surprises for Lisa Toshack, as she was still called then, was the anger directed at her father. Even her mum, amidst her grief, railed against him. Lisa felt shocked, didn’t know where to look when people started on like that. Everybody seemed to join in with it, but she herself couldn’t. Though she was doing the big gestures, though she was dressing in black all the time now, she still felt that she wasn’t grieving properly, because now that seemed to involve getting angry at her dad, and she couldn’t be. She felt angry, yes, but not at him.
She was angry because of what she kept saying, and nobody was listening to.
‘It wasn’t a suicide.’
‘That’s lovely of you to say, but . . . he had a couple of goes before he hanged himself.’ There had been a wound between his ribs, a bloody knife found in an office drawer. A knife she could have used on the rope. He also seemed to have slammed his head against the wall, where there was now a dent.
‘It wasn’t a suicide.’
‘Love, please . . . don’t.’
‘It wasn’t a suicide.’
Silence as the rest of the family all looked at each other.
She asked to be allowed to say a few words at the funeral. She stood there under the gaze of all those hard-faced friends of the family in their dry-cleaned, big-shouldered suits. Now she dressed in black lace and gloves, just a touch beyond conventional mourning wear. The vicar let her come forward to the coffin while several of the wives, blonde and orange, too many cigarettes, wearing short skirts even here, wailed as if in competition.
She looked at the massed ranks of the family, and saw the hierarchical web of responsibility and fear that had placed everyone in every pew exactly where they should be, involving no work for the ushers. The weight of that web led directly to Rob Toshack, sitting there at the innermost end of the front right-hand pew, with now no awkward counterweight of a senior brother positioned beside him. He certainly looked as if he had something extra on his mind now, but she was sure it was the extra power he had assumed.
She looked him in the eye. ‘It wasn’t a suicide,’ she said again.
She left it at that and walked back to sit beside her terrified mother.
Rob caught her on the landing, during the wake. It was an expensive affair, with an Irish folk band, and everyone from Bermondsey and beyond coming in to pay their respects. It was an all-day drinking binge, and Lisa had intended to spend most of it in what had become her room now that Rob had insisted her mother move into what had become the new home and headquarters of the firm. Her dad’s house had been sold.
His outstretched palm slapped onto the wallpaper just by her face. There was the continuous roar of the party below, but here they were alone. He carried a glass of whisky, but hadn’t drunk from it.
She looked carefully back at him.
‘Alfred,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t have wanted you doing this.’
‘Yes, he—’
‘Shut up. Just for once . . . Oh, no!’ He grabbed her as she shifted, swung her against the wall, and stuck his knuckles into her throat. He put the glass down on the top rail of the stairs. ‘Alf and Maureen always kept you apart from the details. Even though, by the end, there wasn’t fucking much to keep you from. Apart maybe from any one of the big bastards who might have come after us. But now we’re safe. Now we have a chance to make this better. Now we’re going to grow. And you’re part of this family, so you’re part of that, too.’
She shook her head, pulled herself away from him.
He punched her in the stomach.
He hauled her upright while she was still coughing.
‘From now on you will be silent, and you will be polite, and you will do what you’re told. And you will shut up about my brother’s suicide.’
She slid down the wall as he retrieved his whisky. She couldn’t remain silent, looking at his face, because she knew for certain now. She was brave in the way only a teenager could be. Brave and stupid and immortal: she knew all those things about herself. And still she said it, ‘What if I don’t?’
He look
ed hard at her, and she was ready for him to attack her again. But then that hard look became calculating, as if a new idea had occurred to him. ‘Then you’ll see,’ he said. ‘You’ll be the first to see.’
She’d half expected him to come back that night – to come back later, when he was drunk. So she built a mountain of furniture against her bedroom door. Stupid teenage reaction. She felt a terrible weight attached to that word now. She had to behave older now. For Dad. To make things right about Dad. Her lace gloves and shawls and the make-up had become her special thing, her way of protesting within the family, so that the very sight of her would remind them.
She stepped back from the mountain she’d built, wondering what sort of ‘older’ she had to be now, asking herself what she could actually do.
She went to bed thinking about it. She fell asleep. And then, sometime in the early hours, she was awake again. Or she thought she was. An extraordinary smell had suffused the room. It smelt like some kind of memory. Like old books and spilled beer and dead flowers left in churches.
Someone was standing at the end of the bed. ‘There she is,’ said a high, strange voice, ‘the disobedient child.’
She tried to react, tried to cry out or slam herself back against the wall, but the woman made a simple gesture, and she found she couldn’t. She could only look at what was in front of her. The woman looked as if she’d been cut out of the picture Lisa was seeing through her eyes, then stuck back awkwardly into the same space again. There seemed to be special effects around her. The room behind her looked oddly unreal, as if it was just a photograph.
The woman remained in shadow. But she had in her hands held in front of her . . . a copy of a London telephone directory.
Lisa tried to move but she couldn’t. If she tried really hard . . . her hand moved really slowly . . . and the woman was coming towards her in a blur.