London Falling

by Paul Cornell

  ‘Daddy!’ screamed Jessica.

  ‘Wait,’ said Losley, as Quill took a step forward. ‘This is to keep you there.’ She let go of the noose, but kept the knife where it was. She made a gesture with her free hand as if she was pulling the world into her, the remains of the flesh of her fist sucking on the air.

  Ross felt the result as much as she saw it. Something was rushing into Losley from all directions. She could see the images now: all the different versions of Losley, the visions from the front of the newspapers, the haunting photographs, they were smashing into her, plastering themselves over her, putting flesh back onto her bones new, skin forming out of newsprint, muscle from the three colours of television.

  ‘Is that her getting her power back?’ whispered Costain.

  ‘I think it’s her cashing her last cheque,’ said Sefton. ‘She’s leaning on being remembered, taking it all at once.’

  Losley’s newly healed eye looked balefully at them. Unreal because it looked black and white. She put her free hand into a bag at her hip, and threw a handful of soil over her left shoulder. Ross, impossibly, heard it land on mid-air. She wondered how much of this those people leaning out from their flats were seeing. Losley stepped back off the wall.

  ‘No!’ shouted Quill.

  But she was still standing there. In mid-air. On a trail of soil that stretched out into the gap between the buildings. She took another step backwards. ‘I must continue to do as I have always done,’ she said. ‘I will have to kill Milo Faranchi, even though he is on my team, even though he is beloved by me. You see, I said I would now kill every scorer. Such are rules. We all have to make sacrifices.’ She continued to move backwards, higher into the air, her hand tightening again on the noose around the child’s neck. ‘A blow to her head, a wound to her side, one quick swing of the rope. The threefold death. An even better sacrifice. Especially with her father here to watch.’

  Quill bellowed something incoherent at her. Costain had taken up a firing position on the wall. But Ross couldn’t see how he was going to get a chance at a clear shot.

  ‘I’ve made sure I have enough left,’ she said. ‘I have my soil on me. I have these people remembering me . . . oh, look at them, how they’re remembering me now! I have enough to do this!’ And she spat out a sudden noise that could easily do the work of a gesture. A very London noise.

  Ross pulled the knife from her pocket as the noise burst past her. Her knife split the noise. The noise hit the others. It hit Quill and Costain, and even Sefton, who was starting to turn it away as it hit, and it broke them from their bodies. She saw their personalities fall, screaming, endlessly through the infinite depth of the housing block, pulled by the gravity of something beyond London. She saw their bodies collapse where they stood, their souls blasted out of them. But she could still see a connection, still see that they would return if she did something quickly. She saw how this happened between time, as all the watching public just started to react, but would never understand every moment of it.

  Her knife had split the noise.

  Losley stared at the knife. Losley stared past it, towards her.

  Ross became very sad and very sure. It was just her now. She had only moments left to save the others. She could feel the heat starting to blaze from their bodies behind her. She could hear the sound of their falling. In moments their bodies would explode into blood.

  She jumped up onto the wall. She stepped out onto the soil bridge.

  She didn’t look down. She knew there was a long fall beneath her, but that didn’t matter. Losley held the child before her as a shield as Ross got close to her. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. She jerked suddenly as if about to drop the child or to stab it or hit it.

  Ross slashed out.

  Jessica yelled in terror.

  The rope around the child’s neck parted and fell into the dark below. Ross looked Losley in the eye, wrong eye to wrong eye. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is my knife for freeing fathers.’

  Losley lashed back with her own knife. Ross caught it with her blade, sending the blow swinging aside. Losley screamed in defiance, and turned that swing into a long, downwards, sacrificial stab—

  Ross cut Losley in her side. She cut her on her brow. That blow set the witch swaying on the spot, with blood flying from her, spattering all down the child held in one arm. Losley was still trying to deliver her own killing blow. ‘If I die or I flee,’ she yelled, ‘this bridge will collapse and you will fall, and the child too!’

  ‘I know,’ said Ross. And slashed her across her neck.

  Losley tried to keep the blood in. She tried and nearly succeeded.

  Ross’ sudden punch caved in her nose.

  The witch vanished. The soil dropped away from under her feet. And from under Ross’ feet. And the child screamed in mid-air.

  Ross grabbed the child. They fell.

  Quill slammed back into his body and hit the wall of the balcony—

  Just as Ross fell, with Jessica in her arms.

  Costain and Sefton were there a moment later. The small clinging mass of two bodies plummeted to the ground far below. Quill rushed for the stairs. Costain and Sefton ran immediately after him.

  Quill shoved his way through the crowd that was gathering around a bundle lying in the dark, torches casting light over the wet grass. There she was, there was Ross, lying flat on her back with a bush crushed underneath her. Her eyes were closed, one leg projected at the wrong angle. It took a moment for Quill to find what else he was looking for. Something was screaming. It wasn’t Ross screaming. It was what she still held tight in her arms. What had landed on top of her.

  Quill pulled Jessica from hands that would loose her only to him. She was screaming for her daddy. Quill felt horribly, distantly, that that wasn’t him. He looked back towards Ross.

  Fumbling, Costain had found her pulse. ‘She’s alive!’

  ‘We called an ambulance,’ said a woman. ‘She just . . . threw herself off.’

  ‘No she didn’t,’ said Quill, frustrated to the point of anger at what these bloody people hadn’t seen. Suddenly, from all the flats around them, the crowd noise on radios and televisions became very loud indeed.

  ‘Something’s happening at the Boleyn Ground,’ said Sefton.

  Mora Losley had run to where she felt most safe. She was dying. And soon. But she still knew how to save herself.

  She threw herself off the wave as it entered the West Ham stadium. She found herself stumbling forward onto the blessed pitch, the floodlights washing over her. Blood was pouring from her wounds, and she couldn’t stop it now. Meanwhile the match was continuing. But now she was on the sacred turf! Her blood was mingling with it. In a moment, power would surely come to her. She started heading into the midst of the West Ham team, and there he was, Milo Faranchi, stopping now, slowly turning to stare in horror at her approach. She waved the dagger at him, so sadly. But it had to be. She had to do what she had always done. The dagger would have to make do until the power came.

  She was suddenly aware of the crowd all staring at her, of shouts and screams going up, in a roar louder than she had ever heard, even here, and on the screens there still were images that spoke of the children she had boiled, of her glorious sacrifices. It was as if this moment was made only of her. She thought absently of the coincidence in where that girl’s blows had fallen, without apparent intent on her part. Or had it merely been coincidence? That thought was worrying. Mora increased her speed, marching determinedly towards Faranchi. His team mates parted like sheep before her—

  She was attacked from behind.

  Her face hit the turf, she sprawled on the ground, the knife bounced away from her. She lay there, shocked, her face and fingers pressed in that beloved soil. She tried to take power from it. But she found there was . . . nothing!

  She had been severed from it. She had been betrayed.

  Or . . . sacrificed?

  She looked up as what turned out to be the steward who’d tackled her grab
bed her once more, manhandling her, started hauling her up. She raked his face with her fingernails. He cried out and fell back, but then another two were on her, trying to restrain her. Both were wearing the club badge, and she hesitated at the sight of it.

  She looked past them, saw the entire stadium. And she stopped her struggling in astonishment. From every direction, spectators were fighting their way onto the pitch, a great concert of them bursting over the barricades. The stewards couldn’t stop them, and then they came at her, too. They were roaring now, enough to drown out the tannoy. They were fast converging on her, hundreds of them, converging on the centre spot where she stood. She spun slowly in the circle, feeling the mob all looking at her and, for the first time, taking nothing from it. ‘Don’t you understand?!’ she screamed. ‘I did it all for you! I’m on your side!’

  Being remembered had turned out to be a two-edged sword.

  The mob rushed in. She threw the stewards down. She picked a direction. She started to hopelessly hobble away.

  The fittest men reached her first. One struck her round the shoulders, and while she was scratching at him, another grappled her around the waist. She could hear screaming now, the screaming of women, coming in on the next wave, women howling for her blood. Something heavy struck her round the head. She spun away, towards the beloved floodlights and the blank dark sky—

  She encountered a second attack, from the other way. Hands grabbed at her, from every direction. What hair she had left was wrenched out. They yelled in triumph that they’d got some of her hair. Feet lunged into the backs of her knees. Childish blows rained on her back, delivered by those who ran forward and then fearfully back again, just to say they’d got her. Long nails raked her face, and tried to get into her eyes and tug her ears.

  She hadn’t expected the knife. She felt a final weakness flood into her, in a terrible instant, as its blade entered the existing wound in her side. A large hard man and his mates pierced the wound again, and then again, their blades through her ribs, catching on the organs inside her. They were shouting obscenities, rage on their faces, calling out things about kids – when their words were recognizable at all. For every one of them she wounded and flung away, the rest of them grew more shrill, more ecstatic. Their blood on her hands was everything they had seen in their dreams for weeks, and now, she realized, they had found a release for all that fear, all that hatred. She had made herself the thing they hated. And now they had her. And, just for once, just for once, she heard the actual words, hissed through clenched teeth: they were going to give it back, give someone what they deserved.

  A large hand got the back of her head and twisted it and forced it down into the mud. She writhed, she spluttered, sucking mud down into her lungs. She felt something tighten around her throat. A belt. Thin leather. Too tight.

  She saw now why this had to be like this. But she was not willing. But that didn’t matter. What a terrible thought. Three blows to the head, three wounds to the side, three suffocating attacks on her throat. The threefold death three times. She was to be a great sacrifice.

  Still a victim! Still!

  She wrenched herself up, and felt all her limbs held, and her body being hacked at. If there was rescue, it was far beyond this crowd that spun around her, around and around, and every one of them reaching in to add to her punishment. Fists punched at her face. Blood covered her vision. An eye exploded. Her ribcage burst open. She tried to twist away. Just an animal now. But every part of her was being pulled. Her intestines, she was dimly aware still, were being hauled out, beautiful silver-peppery in the gold and green light.

  Hands plunged in. Hands got hold of her heart. And she had one last thought, which was that she knew where she was going. And who would be waiting for her there. And she thought she saw him – in the last moment she could still see – standing there apart from the crowd and smiling.

  And then the mob ripped her fucking heart out.

  The wave burst from the stadium. Ripples raced out from it in concentric circles. The ripples hit other waves and rebounded, set up interference patterns that bounced off the nearby buildings. They rushed invisibly, instantly, to the very boundaries of the crooked circle of the conjoined cities of Greater London. And then it reflected back to the centre again. And burst out again fivefold, in five directions, forming the great knot of something being pulled suddenly tight.

  The smiling man exulted in it. He stood at all the places in London where he could stand, and watched as the wheel of his ambition turned a full circle on this dark winter day, towards what he had in store for London. And he found it good, my son.

  He held the pieces of Mora Losley in his hands. Because in the moment of her death he had arranged for her good work to continue. For the image and the fear of her to imprint themselves on everyone.

  He scattered the notions of what she was into the hidden rivers under London. She was swept underground, through the caves where the remains of older civilizations were built upon, each city standing on the shoulders of some older giant. She passed along the back of St Thomas’ hospital, and under Elephant and Castle, alongside New Kent Road, and then she was lost amid that plummet into the modernity of all the new sewers, and he felt the roar of despair in her—

  —and then the sense of accomplishment as she emerged again, part of the pattern, to splash upon the mud of the old rookery of Jacob’s Island, where they used to hang the pirates, and there she became the last victim lost in that murk.

  And so she was watermarked into the hearts of men.

  Ghosts of her would appear this very night, and often, as the stories would spread, and people would look out for her and believe. At her houses, and at the West Ham ground, she had done great service in life, also in the moment of her death, and now she would continue to turn the wheel for him afterwards, in his own borough. ‘No rest for the wicked,’ he declared.

  And then he washed his hands of her.

  Quill was feeling totally useless as the paramedics got Ross into the back of the ambulance, gazing into her unconscious face as they got the collar on – the three of them looking down at her, helpless but horribly caring. He felt sick at what he was hearing from the radio, and from the police reports coming out of Upton Park. He kept holding the child who was a stranger to him, as the ambulance drove away, feeling that he was frightening her with how blank his face must be compared to whatever she was so desperately needing. He wanted to hand her on to someone else, but he couldn’t, and he felt guilty even at the thought. He saw how Sefton and Costain were standing about uselessly too. A copper thought saved him: they had done what they set out to do. Well, they had achieved Objectives one to three and seven, anyway. He felt ridiculously proud of his team, of what each of the other three had done to get them here. And proud of Ross, at the end: her sacrifice. For a moment, he thought that this must be what it was like to be a father.

  And then, suddenly, he knew what it was like to be a father. That thought came crashing down on him, as if it was released out of the sky. Because there was no longer a will in this reality to block it.

  And he fell to his knees under the weight of it. And he stared into Jessica’s face. And he knew exactly who she was.

  Terry and Julie Franks, at home in Brockley, suddenly looked over to where Charlie aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven sat watching television, because Terry and Julie had kind of felt the children would take themselves off to bed when they were ready. The kids had adapted a little already to how their parents were now. They were starting to deal with the shock, starting to accept the awkward, desperate trying-to-care they’d been offered as simply how things were now, part of the hugeness that had happened to them. Terry and Julie had been doing their best, buying them loads of stuff, because they felt they had to do the right thing. They had neighbours to fend off, too, people who they’d never realized were their neighbours until the TV crews started showing up.

  It had been like one of those dreams where you’re called on to be an expe
rt, only you’re really not.

  But now there was suddenly this great lump of pain and history within their bodies.

  They now knocked over furniture to get to those three children, because suddenly they needed to hold them so much.

  When she was born, James Quill had put his enormous rough fingertips on the side of his little daughter Jessica’s red face, and felt how incredibly soft she was. She’d smelt like a butcher’s shop. A good butcher’s shop. He had put his nose in her hair so many times in the last year and a bit. She would hand him things when he was sitting beside her, as if he was just a convenient keeping-things-handy thing. Or she would just leave things falling in the air, expecting him to catch them.

  She could drive him to fury because she was stubborn, exactly as her mother was, and would raise her voice higher and higher until she was screaming at him. And he could never be fully angry back, because he was her world, and that world should never be completely angry at the little one inside it. And that wasn’t something he had to try to be or not to be; it was just what he was.

  And Jessica and Sarah . . . that smaller, shaking her head violently, putting her hands over her eyes, putting her arms over her head, impossible to get into her pyjamas, louder, small-explosion version of the woman he loved. A little clone of her. Them looking at each other, the little one not knowing a thing about love, as if Mummy and Daddy were her friends, and everyone in the world was like this, not understanding the way Sarah looked at her.