Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  Julian stood beside him and Rob saw him shiver. “This is what happens to ghosts in London. The lions on the surface hunt them and collect their ghost electricity. That power is siphoned down here, to the control crystals on top of the sarcophagus.”

  Rob looked up and saw glowing crystals, orbited by twisting letters made of light.

  “The crystals control the dead thing in the sarcophagus. It’s the largest spell focus Britain has ever seen, for the largest spell ritual ever performed. The power from the sarcophagus goes back up to the surface and is transmitted out across London, where it holds Edward Denton’s plague ritual at bay.”

  “And the sarcophagus’s containment system is failing,” Evelyn said. She hurried past Rob and bent over a control console near the sarcophagus. “The wizard is drawing power from the containment system itself.”

  “What happens if it goes?” Rob asked. “I thought the thing inside it was dead.”

  Evelyn’s face was tight with fear. “It won’t stay dead.”

  “Those runes around the control crystals must be the wizard’s spell,” Julian said. Rob tracked his gaze back up to the glowing crystals and the unreadable, twisting letters. “It’s how he’s hooked into the facility. It’s a direct link to his thoughts, I believe.”

  “Can you shut it off somehow?” Rob asked.

  “Nothing’s responding,” Evelyn said from the control console.

  “Hah, look at that,” Jessica said. She had a pair of pink glasses on and stared up at the crystals. “It really is ghost electricity.”

  “I believe you are correct, Miss Jessica,” Mr Shell said.

  Jessica lifted her glasses up and gave Evelyn a superior look. “Geez lady, is that the best you could come up with?”

  Two spots of colour appeared on Evelyn’s cheeks. “I’ll have you know –”

  The lights dipped out and an electric whine, like a turbine powering up, pricked at Rob’s ears. Then a wave of dizzy blackness swept over him. The world tipped away and when his vision cleared he was on the floor, his cheek pressed to the metal grating. His fur was covered in frost and he felt like a hand with claws made of ice had dragged itself across his back.

  “The fuck?” He pushed himself up to his knees. His fur crackled as frost fell away from it.

  “It’s getting out.” Evelyn’s self-control was crumbling. She looked terrified. “We have to stop the wizard. This will be worse than the plagues, worse than everything.”

  Rob turned at a half-heard sound and found himself looking at a man who wasn’t there. He could see the shape of a man, but it wasn’t inhabited by a man. The shape was described in the air by what he realised was writing, as if someone had scribbled all over a man-shaped surface that Rob couldn’t see.

  The shape raised one hand and pointed at Rob. It said, “Down.”

  The floor was made of grated panels. One flew upward with a loud crash of metal. He glimpsed a long, sinuous shape and smooth green scales. It lashed around him and yanked him back through the hole in the floor.

  He fell.

  He plunged downwards with the thing wrapped tight around him, tighter, pinning his arms against his side, crushing his ribs, growing tighter still.

  He saw two black, empty eyes and long, poison-drenched fangs.

  “Rob!” Julian ran towards the hole, fumbling at his shoulder bag.

  Alice was beside him in a blink. She grabbed his upper arm and brought him to a dead stop. “Do you want to vanish too?”

  “Let go of me, damn it!” He pulled his gauntlet from his bag and started strapping it on.

  “Julian, what is that?”

  He glanced up from his gauntlet, then looked again. A silhouette formed of script, written on a shape that wasn’t there, stood a few paces away.

  His breath caught. “The wizard left a daemon behind.”

  The daemon studied him with eyes that were an absence. Julian felt the powerful intellect that had created it beating at the edges of his mind. The daemon turned its gaze to Alice and lifted a hand to point at her.

  “Up.”

  Smoke poured up from beneath the floor. It spiralled together, solidifying and darkening.

  Julian swore and tried to get his gauntlet on faster. “Alice, watch it, it’s a –”

  The smoke coalesced into Yadrim. Blood oozed down his face from a sigil burned into his forehead. He lunged at Alice. She caught his wrists but his strength bent her onto her back foot. Yadrim’s ridged face twisted into a monstrous smile as he forced her knees to bend.

  Julian pulled the strap of his gauntlet tight. He took aim at Yadrim, but he couldn’t hit him without hitting Alice as well.

  Another wave of blackness rolled out of the sarcophagus. Julian struggled through it and used his training to pull his thoughts back together. He shot a glance at the black metal coffin, afraid of what he’d see. Cold mist spread outwards from it. He could see the cracks appearing in the machine’s containment systems. He could feel the terrible consciousness stirring within.

  The mind-suffocating wave had affected both Alice and Yadrim, but Alice recovered first. She snarled, shifted her weight and threw Yadrim through the air. Shadowy wings flared out from beneath his arms and he righted himself in time to land on his toes.

  Julian raised his left hand. Energy crackled in his palm.

  Alice screamed and threw herself after Yadrim, right into Julian’s line of fire. The battle-frenzy had taken her. He’d seen vampires like this and knew nothing short of a kill would bring her back to herself. The two of them pulled and clawed at each other. A kick from Yadrim sent Alice flying down the corridor towards the surface lift and he followed so fast Julian couldn’t see him move.

  He took a step to follow, to try and help her, and jumped when he realised the daemon stood right next to him. He had forgotten it – it had the drop on him.

  “Consume.”

  More shapes rose from the floor. They were pale, translucent things, jelly-like and fluid. They spread rippling tentacles to grip the floor and sprouted eye stalks to look around.

  Julian blasted one of them. It exploded in a shower of clear goop and he grabbed his nose as the stench assaulted him. More bubbled from the floor and he blasted another one.

  “I believe I can deal with this nuisance,” Mr Shell said. He clunked forward. Tasers appeared from within his shell and the two weapons began swivelling and firing. Jessica cheered.

  The daemon raised a hand and pointed at Mr Shell. Julian tried to blast it but before he could strike, a wave of force hit the daemon, wrapped around it and crystallised it in place. Julian swung around to see Evelyn standing there with a device like a small flame-thrower in her hands. “What did you do?”

  “I’ve time-locked it,” she said. “Help me tie down the containment system. We’re all dead if it collapses.”

  Cold mist floated around their ankles. It should have simply fallen through to the levels below, but instead it sent out probing tendrils. When it found warm flesh, it thickened and grew even colder.

  Julian frowned at the mist, his mind racing. He looked up at the glyphs floating around the control crystals. He looked at the sarcophagus and its failing containment systems. He sensed the dead, deadly thing inside. All pieces of a puzzle, a puzzle that would kill millions if he didn’t find a way to a solution.

  “Julian? Come on!”

  He turned to Jessica, who stayed close while Mr Shell kept a circle clear of goopy tentacles around them. “May I see your mesmeric device?”

  “Huh?” she said. “What for?”

  He held out his hand. “Please.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t see what good it is now.” She pulled her flashlight out and tossed it to him.

  Julian spoke a word and it came apart in mid-air, like an assembly diagram. Jessica squawked in indignation.

  “Yes, I see,” he said. “You have a psychic lens and a flux crystal.” The flashlight snapped back together and Jessica snatched it out of the air, checking it su
spiciously. Julian spoke another word and the much larger flux crystal on his gauntlet detached with a snap. “Use this instead.”

  Jessica took it and said, “What am I supposed to –?” He knew from her glance at up at the shining glyphs that she’d worked it out. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s a direct link to his mind,” Julian said.

  “But it didn’t work on you. Will it work on him?”

  “It will distract him, at least,” Julian said. “He’ll stop draining the facility’s power. It might buy Evelyn the time she needs to restore containment.”

  “What are you going to do?” Evelyn asked.

  Julian turned to face the sarcophagus, squared his shoulders and tried to suppress the terror tightening his chest. “I’m going to hold that back.”

  Mr Beak worked for height in the smoggy London air.

  He could click his veracity lenses into place and see the web of power that spread out from Trafalgar Square. He could also see it faltering as a new thread grew brighter.

  All across London, old, dark magic stirred. In Spitalfields, banks of the dead began to claw at the foundations of the markets. At the end of an Underground train platform in Elephant & Castle Station, whispers hissed through the old stonework. Mist gathered at the Blackheath end of Greenwich Park and dead hands dug towards the Piccadilly Line tunnel between Knightsbridge and South Kensington. The dead stirred in closed churchyards and sealed vaults. Black, feverish death brought old bones and dried-out flesh back to something very unlike life. It became just conscious enough to reach out towards the warmth of the living.

  Mr Beak allowed himself to feel his fear since no one was watching. He followed the thickening cord of power towards the river.

  Something was happening on Tower Bridge.

  Chapter 30 – Friday Night

  Fiona stood on top of one of the two walkways that stretched between the towers of Tower Bridge. Her every step rattled on the metal roof. No railing stood between her and the long drop to the Thames and Fiona was reluctant to approach the edge.

  Savraith had no such hesitation. He dragged her close.

  He faced out across the river, to the west, and raised his right hand, fingers splayed wide. The writing on his skin moved. She was reminded of someone flicking through a book looking for a particular chapter or passage. Savraith’s eyes were closed and she could see there was even writing on his eyelids.

  His left hand was clamped hard around Fiona’s wrist.

  The arc of power from Trafalgar Square was a thick, pulsing cord she could not ignore. She had no basis for comparison, but to her it felt strong enough to rip a person apart. Savraith’s face was a mask of concentration. The muscles of his jaw rippled and clenched and his lips twitched with half-spoken words.

  Out over the river, level with them but a good hundred metres out, space collapsed into a point. A puncture in the fabric of space formed and a blazing white and yellow aura of light surrounded it. It had to be visible all the way along the Thames River. She could imagine people stopping to watch as they walked along the river bank. She could picture them crowding the railings of their cruise boats.

  She knew without being told that the point would open when Savraith had used her like a compass to find what he was looking for. A way back to her true home, if he was telling the truth.

  Her self, she had to believe.

  Rob and his attacker bounced and crashed their way down into the lowest levels of the Trafalgar facility. They rebounded off pipes filled with below-zero liquids, tore through vine-like clusters of electrical cables and finally shattered a surface of old, powdery cement.

  They came to a halt in a room stacked with crates from different decades and all points of the globe. Rob felt his attacker’s grip slacken. He twisted and managed to clamp his jaws around his assailant’s thick tube of a body. He bit deep and tasted blood.

  His attacker hissed in pain and tossed him loose with a flick of its serpentine body. Rob rolled and came to his feet. His battle-rage was up and he wanted nothing more than to fight, to hunt, to kill.

  But a proper view of his attacker made him pause.

  The creature was a frightening meld of human and snake. Its upper body widened into shoulders from which hung arms and hands that would have been human if not for their scaled skin. Its head was that of a snake and its eyes were dead. A bleeding symbol was cut into its forehead.

  Rob snarled and threw himself at it. The creature changed. Its arms vanished into its side. Its body coiled and then it snapped out, twice, so fast even Rob barely saw it. He felt two blooms of red-hot pain on his arm and shoulder and his vision went blurry.

  “Ah fuck,” he said, but the words came out as mush.

  The creature’s snake body changed. Shoulders bulged out below its head and arms tore away from its sides. Its tail divided into legs and its snout flattened into a human nose. In moments it was in the shape of a man, lean and swift, bronze-skinned and naked. The symbol on his brow bled across his face.

  Rob felt like vomiting.

  The man spoke, but Rob didn’t recognise the language. The man trembled, his face twisted into a mask of pain. His hands closed into fists and pressed against his brow on either side of the bleeding mark.

  He changed again, but this time he changed in a way Rob knew only too well. He grew upwards, his skin darkened with fur, his hands sharpened to claws. He became the biggest werewolf Rob had ever seen.

  As big as Rob himself, in fact.

  The werewolf howled. Rob, his body fighting hard against the venom burning in his flesh, drew deep on the rage inside him, pushed himself to his feet and met the werewolf’s attack.

  Julian knelt in the crackling frost, closed his eyes and, one thing at a time, blocked the world from his awareness.

  He was aware of the automaton tortoise, Mr Shell, at his back and zapping any of the goop creatures that tried to come close to him. He cleared that away. He could hear Evelyn Hargrave tapping desperately at the controls, trying to regain some authority over the facility. He screened her out. He knew Jessica sat on the floor near to him, also covered by Mr Shell, while she pulled apart her mesmeric device and tried to adapt it for the larger flux crystal from his gauntlet. He blanked her.

  Just him and the sarcophagus and the presence within it.

  The sarcophagus was a great, hungry void to his senses and it was much like the contents of the crate he and Rob had shipped to Paris. He attuned himself to it even as he resisted the black vortex.

  He began to discern what lay within.

  He saw the bindings first, the chains Doctor Hargrave had wrapped around his spell focus decades ago and the locks with which he had fastened them shut. Locks of matter, time, thought, gravity, dream, energy, death and more. Two of the locks were already broken.

  A third lock snapped.

  A wave of blackness rocked him and clouded all his senses. He felt cold and mortality and ancient time. He felt a consciousness, dead but not dead, stirring to thought and emotion and intent.

  The familiarity of it sent a bolt of terror down his spine. His legs shook beneath him and his hands spasmed where they rested on his thighs. He couldn’t think for a second.

  Assert control, he thought. Discipline yourself.

  Still shaking, he focused. He glared at the heart of the void and the thing waking within it. He marshalled his abilities and prepared to try to bind a being that could annihilate him in a heartbeat.

  A footstep clicked on the floor beside him.

  He had screened out the physical world and the battles being fought there. This sound came from where his mind saw and acted. He turned and looked up.

  Jacob Mandellan stood beside him, hands in the pockets of his suit trousers and a smile on his face as he looked down at Julian.

  “Looks like a fucker of a situation you’ve got yourself in here,” Jacob said.

  The point of twisted space imploded. Fiona felt it pull the space around it sharply inwards, then shove it a
way as light flowered out from the central point. The shimmering auras around it plunged through yellow and into a deep red colour.

  “I’ve found it,” Savraith said.

  Fiona didn’t hear him. She leaned forward and stretched out with all her senses. She needed to know what lay through the opening portal. She needed to see.

  Rob landed in a pool of glowing sludge. His legs shot out beneath him and he crashed to his knees, spitting and swearing. He was waist-deep in a thick, blue-white liquid that glowed from within.

  It was probably radioactive, the way his night was going.

  He thought at first that the goo was oozing down a nearby wall, but then he noticed that it was flowing upwards. He realised it stank of chaos. It smelled like the weird, off scent he’d caught from the Cult of the Star-Shaped Eye when he took his wrist-chain off. It reeked like the tentacle creatures that had attacked them in the motorway stop.

  The goo bulged around his legs and formed tentacles, arms and hooked hands, all of which clutched at him. Rob roared and surged towards the nearest raised surface. He had almost made it there when the other werewolf landed in front of him.

  Rob stumbled back, swiping at the grasping sludge on his legs while keeping his eyes on the werewolf. Rob was battered, bleeding and still fighting off the burning venom in his veins. He was slowed and his senses were dulled. The other werewolf – Rob had become convinced his name was Chadang without knowing how he knew – had a few bruises at most.

  “Fight!” Chadang said.

  “What, you speak English now?” Rob asked.

  “You have tasted my flesh. I have tasted yours. We understand each other.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Rob jumped. He caught hold of a pipe as thick as his waist that passed through the chamber three metres up. The goo tried to pinch his legs as he pulled free, but its contact with the pool below was broken and it no longer had any strength to it.

  Chadang turned halfway into a snake again. He darted upwards, using handholds along the wall to guide himself, landed on the pipe and shifted back into his werewolf shape.