London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘Some dead posh bloke. I could read you his Wiki.’

  ‘What he is now is a well proper ghost,’ said Costain. He sounded to be putting some hope in the simplicity of the statement. Sefton looked to the others. They didn’t look quite so burdened. He hadn’t yet got to the point of this exercise but, along the way, the familiar nature of some of these ‘hauntings’ seemed to be doing the team good. That was kind of awkward, given what he’d particularly wanted to tell them. Even Quill was now looking more engaged.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘maybe there are categories we could sort this stuff into . . .’

  ‘Ghosts, witches, objects, like the ships . . .’ suggested Ross.

  Sefton hesitated. Right now he didn’t want to tell them that he thought it was more complicated than that. But he had to reach the end of his demonstration. ‘Let’s get to the final stop on my list,’ he said.

  It was getting close to 7 p.m. by the time Sefton led them into Berkeley Square. The pavements were still busy with office workers going off to the pub, tourists heading between sandwich bars and coffee shops. The little park in the middle had a few remaining parents with pushchairs and owners of small dogs, or the homeless combing the bins that by now were full of the remains of the day.

  ‘Number 50, Berkeley Square,’ said Sefton, as they arrived at the address. The ground floor contained the shopfront of Clanfields, a dealer in rare books, with a window that looked warm and inviting and modern. They all looked up together. The upper floor radiated darkness. ‘According to all the books, this is the most haunted building in London.’

  Costain watched Quill summon the manager of the shop and, albeit with a bit of initial weariness, manage to summon up his usual rough-diamond character to talk to her. He looked relieved to be throwing his weight around again. Costain knew how that went, but these days he wondered if merely pretending to be someone other than the cringing savage that was surely inside everyone was bad in itself, yet another contribution to whatever complex of burdens was taking him to Hell. Everything for him was now about that. Everything had to be.

  The manager had been about to close up for the evening, and was understandably concerned at having a detective inspector on the premises. ‘It’s the sort of thing I hope we can do without a warrant,’ explained Quill. ‘Nobody in your firm is under suspicion of anything. But, unfortunately, I can’t tell you much beyond that.’

  He asked her if they’d heard anything strange from the upstairs floor, and it was immediately obvious he’d touched a nerve.

  ‘You’re interested in . . . all that?’

  Costain felt stupidly offended by her tone. The weight he felt on his shoulders, that they all did – to these ordinary people it was merely ‘all that’. But he recognized the direction his thoughts were going, and made himself stop thinking badly of her. Every thought, every moment . . . how much would it take to scrub him clean? Or would he one day be able to put a bullet through the head of that smiling man and get out of jail free? Or was that a bad thought, too?

  ‘Purely professionally, ma’am.’

  She made a sour face. ‘Every few days, someone comes in asking about it. We’re a bit fed up with it, to be honest, and none of us believes in it. Except, you know, whenever we hear a bang or a crash from the stockroom or the office, we say “That’s just the ghosts.”’

  She led them up a narrow unpainted flight of stairs, a sudden contrast to the shop below. It got quickly colder as they climbed, and Costain found himself thinking of the warm comfort of that pub. He put that unworthy idea out of his head, too. Every thought, every moment . . . But it was going to take more than that, wasn’t it? Some holy ceremony, some great deed of repentance – or just making right everything he’d done. But how could he do that, when so much of it was lost in the past, beyond altering? He wasn’t used to shit like this slopping around inside his head. He hoped that it wasn’t showing on his face. That was the last bit of front he had left.

  They came out onto a landing with bare boards, an open door that showed a tiny office beyond, two closed doors leading to the stockrooms further back. ‘This is where it’s all supposed to happen,’ she said. Even with all of them up here beside her, she looked eager to retreat. Their vague interest was making her believe far more than she normally liked.

  ‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Costain, carefully doing another good deed.

  They waited until she’d gone back downstairs, then they took a quick look round the small office, waiting for Sefton to give them some cue about what to expect, but he remained silent, as if he was waiting to play a gag on them. There was a faint sense of unworldliness about this place, and Costain wouldn’t have wanted to work up here alone. Especially with the desk facing the grubby window and your back to the door. But there was a confidence about the team now, and Costain had to admit this had been a good idea of Sefton’s, whatever his eventual plan was. They’d become a little more familiar with the enemy, and all they were going to find here was another floating spectre, or probably a whole bunch of them. But that would be okay, for it looked like ‘ghosts’ were the shallow end, and a long way from Losley.

  Sefton headed over to the door into the stockroom. He gently opened it, then looked inside. ‘I think it’s worse in here,’ he called back. Costain went in along with the others.

  They were standing in what had once been a bedroom: plaster curlicues in the corners of the ceiling; an elegant bare window, now dingy, and dark outside. Bare boards. Another door led to what might still be a bathroom. This room was full of boxes, carefully stacked piles of them arranged in rows, with delivery forms in cellophane attached. There was a tall glass-fronted bookcase that contained what must be duplicate stock or books too precious to be displayed downstairs. Also there was a side table on which sat still more books, paperwork lying beside them, a Stanley knife having just hacked open a new delivery.

  ‘All dark and brooding on the outside,’ said Quill, ‘but nothing evident in here.’

  ‘Just the potential for something,’ said Sefton. ‘That makes sense, too. The building itself has a reputation, so from outside it’s kind of a “ghost” too.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Ross.

  They all turned to look, and Costain was the first to realize what the woman was seeing. The room had got significantly darker, but without the lights dimming. It was as if the darkness had moved in from every corner. He felt his pulse increase, his breathing grow faster. Bit of a white-knuckle ride coming up, then. Okay. It was as if he’d stepped into an open doorway with light behind him, and was, for some reason, pausing there. He wanted to run. I will not run. He controlled himself. His fear suddenly seemed as artificial as this darkness was. It wasn’t coming from inside . . . Oh fuck.

  He could feel it. Something enormous was approaching from all directions at once. Its shadow had fallen across the house. The Sight seemed to be turning a dial in his head, up and up and up. ‘This is not the shallow end,’ he said. ‘This isn’t like what we saw before. This is bigger than Losley, than anything else we’ve yet seen . . .’ Bigger than what that smiling bastard lets us see of him. Or maybe this is him!

  ‘No,’ said Sefton. ‘Wait a sec. This isn’t what it looks like.’

  Costain looked to Quill, who nodded back at him, visibly sweating. So now Costain had his orders: now he had to stay if he was going to keep on being the good little boy. The four of them, as one, took a step closer to each other.

  ‘An experiment,’ said Sefton. ‘This might make it a bit easier.’ He went over to the table, grabbed a marker pen, and on the polished floorboards drew a wobbly circle surrounding the others. Then he stepped back inside it.

  ‘What’s that about?’ said Quill.

  ‘In what I’ve read online, any sort of circle is protection.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Costain. ‘Great.’

  ‘I think . . . you might have to be prepared to believe in it.’

  ‘Now you tell us.’

  There was a
sudden noise from around their feet. They all looked down. The ink circle was sparking and hissing. And now Costain became aware that it was significantly lighter inside it. They shuffled closer together. ‘Now I believe in it,’ he said.

  ‘As long as it isn’t broken,’ said Sefton.

  The darkness became solid around them. It became a warm, close thing, like being pressed up against some enormous animal. Costain slowly lost the ability to see anything elsewhere in the room. He had to look at the others to check he hadn’t gone blind. Normal evening was contained only in this circle. A smell wafted through the air. He’d smelt it before, he realized, and now he really started to feel afraid. He looked over to where the door to the stairs should be. All he would have to do now was run six paces—

  He stopped himself. No!

  The smell was the same one he had smelt during those moments of horror and falling in Losley’s attic. It was like the most terrible nostalgia, something that connected your brain to somewhere outside time; as if something inside you knew an awful truth that your memory didn’t. It was that place you sometimes went in dreams, when you then awoke thankful to be back in . . . he now hesitated to think of it as the real world. Because, somewhere inside him, he was desperately hoping there was a real world elsewhere that he might one day get back to. ‘So,’ he said to Sefton, ‘you knew that ghosts were real . . . and you led us to the “most haunted building in London”. What’s up with that?’

  ‘I didn’t . . . I don’t think it’s—!’ What Costain most of all didn’t like was that Sefton seemed completely wrong-footed by this experience now. Whatever he’d expected to happen, this was obviously a long way from it.

  There was a low noise from the ink circle, a static hiss that was slowly rising in pitch.

  ‘I think the circle’s melting,’ said Ross. ‘Do you think it’s melting?’

  ‘Experiment over,’ said Quill. ‘Can you get us out of here?’

  Sefton seemed to panic for a second, then he bent back to the floor. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m going to draw a circle intersecting this one, and then another, and we’ll slowly head towards the door—’ And then he shouted in surprise and jumped back – as the pen rolled away into the dark and was lost. He held up his hands and Costain could see the burns on the tips of his fingers. ‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect this.’

  ‘What was the plan?’ asked Quill, whose voice had become very precise. All pretence had left him. That realization chilled Costain too.

  ‘I thought it’d be hard to take, a lot more so than the tourist ghosts. Because that’s what all the books say about it, that there’s a terrible sense of fear. But the most important thing about this place is . . . it’s not true.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s like that bus that had never crashed, like one of Ross’ ships that actually sank in the bloody Mediterranean! I followed everything back. I looked up all the details. This place is just a chain of people making up stories, all of them based on what the last one said. And some of them are actually, you know, just stories! Fiction set in other places, then retold about here, made up by writers! From 1871, there was one about a maid having suffered a fit here, and so a bloke stayed in the room and saw the same stuff, only that was the plot of a story in a magazine three years earlier. This is where a new bride was going to live, but she left her husband at the altar, and he was left mad and wandering. Or a rich man kept this place empty only so that he could visit it, lock up the caretakers, and do something evil. Or this was where a lunatic brother was kept, and fed just through a hole. And none of it – none of this shit – is true! The “most haunted house in London” doesn’t present a single item of evidence.’ He sounded to be arguing with the darkness itself. ‘And, absolutely, there’s no proof that anyone ever conducted a sacrifice here. So, if it’s one thing or another—’

  ‘This,’ interjected Ross, ‘is what Losley meant by remembered.’

  ‘Exactly . . . and so are the tourist ghosts. But this is the extreme case, the one I was leading you to to show you, the one case that tests the rule. ’Cos it’s not true.’

  ‘Stop believing it’s real, then,’ said Quill. ‘Wish it away.’

  For a moment, Costain was sure he could. He visualized the darkness as not being there. When he went undercover, he always felt he was absolutely in charge of what he believed about himself, could project that persona to other people, acting a part and making them believe it. But . . . now it felt that he wasn’t in charge of every part of himself, because part of him – the part that he knew had done bad shit in the past – had been judged and found wanting. He kept scrambling to make up for that flaw. And that flaw put a hole in everything he tried to do through exuding confidence alone. Every time he said something funny, there was now that thought undercutting it: am I hurting anybody? It felt as if he couldn’t take a single step without hurting someone. Or, at least, the person he was right now couldn’t. And he didn’t yet know how to be anyone else. That flaw meant that . . . he found he couldn’t project anything of himself, couldn’t make the world around him believe anything. So he couldn’t make this darkness go.

  None of them could.

  ‘We didn’t believe it when we came in here,’ he said. ‘Or we thought it’d be easy. If it was as easy as that, we’d be fine.’

  They heard a noise in the darkness, and they all fell silent. And there it was again. A footstep on the stairs.

  ‘Sometime in the 1870s,’ said Sefton, ‘and this is just what a short story from the 1930s says, there were these . . . these two penniless sailors who’d heard all the previous stories, only they were too poor to care, and they—’

  The footstep again, closer now. That door they couldn’t see would soon open.

  ‘—they broke in here, ’cos it was empty, and they stayed the night. They lit a fire. They fell asleep. And one of them woke up and he heard—’

  Another step.

  ‘That’s what he heard: something on the stairs. But, of us, it was just me that knew that. So you don’t need to know about this to experience it, so apparitions aren’t about what the people who see them believe—’

  ‘You should have told us all this,’ said Quill, ‘before we entered.’

  ‘Would that have made a difference?’ whispered Ross.

  The sound of the door opening. Something stepped slowly towards them. It felt huge, but not focused in one place. Instead, it seemed to be all around them. Costain could sense it trying the air around the circle, pushing at it, trying his eyes too at the same time, testing his skin, trying to find any way in. Costain’s eyes strained to discern it in the absolute darkness. But it felt like it was all darkness at once, unknown and unknowable. Was this the smiling man? How would he react if it was him? Was the man coming for him now?

  ‘As long as the circle isn’t broken,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re fine. Believe that, ’cos it’s true. We can stand here all night if we have—’

  Their phone text alerts all went off.

  They all jumped simultaneously at the sudden noise. Costain let out a relieved breath. The tension was broken. Whoever that was was from their world, from the world of forms to fill out and warrant cards and cups of tea. It was probably the news about the DNA searches they’d been waiting for. It was like a torch they could hold up against the dark. Something modern. He took out his phone and defiantly hit the text from an unfamiliar number. He expected to see a proud announcement of success, of hope he could use to hold off this dark, even to hold up the screen and yell at whatever it was that they were closing in on it.

  He stared at what the text actually said:

  Any communication breaks the circle.

  Costain looked down on hearing a sudden noise, and the others looked too. The circle had roared into a sudden, consuming flame.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Sefton.

  The circle evaporated. The darkness rushed in.

  Costain ran.

  Behind him, he could
hear shouting. He didn’t make it to the door.

  As the darkness swept over him, Sefton bellowed in despair and threw himself flat. And then there was silence . . .

  He waited. He raised his head slightly. He saw that his hand had landed across what remained of the circle. An ache in his palm told him that he’d snuffed out the fire on a small section of the ink line. And so he was still connected to it. Careful to keep his hand where it was, he looked around. Beside him, still as statues, caught in the act of shouting, stood Ross and Quill. Halfway across the room was Costain, frozen in mid-sprint. That was what had happened to the two sailors. One had run, the other had stayed, and been driven out of his mind to the point where he’d thrown himself out of the window.

  As Sefton watched, he saw a tiny movement of Costain’s arm. Time was still going, then. Sefton was just experiencing it a lot more quickly than the others. Nothing special about me. Must be because I’m still touching the circle. They’ve been caught by whatever this is. He moved his hand a little, and saw the edge of it. He slid his knee up, until it was touching the line too. Then he lifted his hand quickly, ready to slam it down again. Still fine. He put one foot down on the ink by his knee, and managed to stand. Okay. He looked out into the darkness that had infested every inch of the space, like a darkened theatre around a bare stage set. The most haunted house in London. And he himself had led them here. Costain had been right about that: Arrogance. You start to take a bit of charge of your life, and you go mad with it. You’re not used to it. The Sight was now worked up to a pitch inside his head, pulsing out of everything around him. The darkness had bloody texted them! Had that been his fault, had him saying it made it happen? No, otherwise they could have believed their way out of it. It was the mass of opinion that mattered, he was sure of that now, unless you were one of those people who could surf that with words and gestures – or something like Losley’s lord, whose opinion seemed to matter more than other people’s. Oh, very British.

  But not many people in London right now would know about the details concerning this place . . . Oh. It must be the memories of the dead, too. Somehow. That would suggest they were somehow still around, lingering in an . . . afterlife. But he didn’t want to credit that, because it went against everything he believed in, and what he believed was even more important now. Perhaps the dead also existed only as some sort of reservoir of memory held around London. He remembered the rising fear among his team as he’d told his story. It was as if they’d summoned something here, by using the Sight, in a chain reaction between what they expected and what collective opinion said about this place, and what they could see, which had then reached a moment when it went off the scale and kind of . . . shorted them out. If he hadn’t been touching the last bit of the circle, what would have happened to all of them? People vanish in London all the time. With his fumbling ‘experiment’, he’d brought them to the edge of that. So he had to get them out of it. How?