Blue Angel

by Phil Williams

  Holly called to Rimes, who was clattering about in a corner, “Do you have a dog?”

  The doctor went still. Her voice came out uncertainly. “No.”

  Holly huffed. There was another bark.

  Like hell she was going to sit here and be lied to. She stomped outside. Along the rickety porch and round the side. The hedges and trees thickly encroached on the building; a few more years and the roots might drag the doctor into the mud. If they were lucky. Holly continued past a tangle of brambles.

  “Mrs Barton! Hold on!” Rimes’ voice came behind her.

  Holly flashed her a glance. Rimes waved a bony hand, half-hidden around the corner of her house, not daring to come closer. Her white lab coat was splattered with a violet liquid. Holly raised her eyebrows, waiting for an excuse or an explanation.

  “I don’t think – that is –” Rimes was struggling. “Darren thought –”

  “What Darren thought about what I should or shouldn’t know is beyond immaterial,” Holly said. Quite calmly, she thought. She continued and Rimes rustled through the leaves after her.

  There was a shed, nearly five foot high, the open front barred with a grid of metal. Something growled within. Holly walked towards it; no dog her arse. The hut shook as the animal jumped out of the shadows, crashing against the bars. Holly shrieked, a hand at her heart. The thing dropped back before doubling its efforts, hurling its weight against the fencing, big slobbering jaws snapping. The wooden slats barely shuddered, suggesting the innocent-looking hut was reinforced.

  Its eyes were alive, glowing red and flickering. Smoke poured from its jowls, its ears, even from spots across its skin, like it was on fire under its ragged, charcoal fur.

  Holly flinched again as it threw a paw. Three-inch claws lashed out between the bars. It bared its teeth as it dropped back.

  “A helluvian hound,” Rimes explained, apologetically.

  “Why?” Holly demanded. The dog snarled and bit again, and Holly saw fire in its throat. “Why is it here?”

  “Our security measures –”

  “My daughter is in there! She’s supposed to be safe and this is out here? This monster?”

  Rimes made defeated whimpering sounds. A fast movement drew Holly back to the hut. The creature had disappeared back into the shadows, flickers of smoke lingering where it had been. The growls sounded far away. This opening led to a larger domain. “What else is down there?”

  “Just that,” Rimes said. “One dog.”

  “How? Who built this?”

  “The hut...” Rimes cleared her throat. “Darren. And the others. The tunnel was left from the war.”

  Holly imagined Darren up here, covered in sweat and dirt as he put together an impenetrable dog crate. Was it because she’d never let him have a dog of his own? “How much time did he spend here?”

  “Oh…” Rimes’ voice was quiet, regretful. “Not much. The men brought supplies, occasional samples. Mostly they grouped together in town. Without me.”

  The doctor was careful to make that point. She clearly knew there’d been friction about her, in the Barton household. Holly sighed at the dumb simplicity of Darren’s deceit. He’d wanted to hang out drinking and fighting, like most uncivilised males. It just fumbled him into an unholy underworld. “Why are all these things under Ordshaw?”

  Rimes gave her a nervous look.

  “Who built those tunnels? Where does it come from?”

  Again, Rimes looked uncertain. She smiled awkwardly and said, “The helluvian hound has more in common with a lizard than a canine; possibly it has reptilian ancestry. My speciality is the flora, though. Adapted to survive without sunlight. Some of the strains – the plant life – there’s nothing like it in the UK. One plant – its closest relative is found on a little-known Pacific island.”

  Holly raised an eyebrow. “So it’s not just Ordshaw?”

  “Maybe.” Rimes shrugged. “If not, it’s a secret elsewhere, too.”

  Of course. Likely there were countless remarkable, otherworldly phenomenon, institutionally hidden by organisations oblivious to each other’s existence. And secrets upon secrets because husbands thought their wives couldn’t handle the truth.

  A phone rang inside.

  Out here in the woods with a fire-breathing dog, it seemed almost surreal. It rang again. The chime of an old phone bell. And again. Rimes didn’t move, looking terrified, and needed Holly’s intervention as a trigger. “Shouldn’t we answer that?”

  The fear of pursuit made it easier to traverse Ordshaw’s traffic. Pranging the bike or breaking the Highway Code no longer concerned Pax. She had to get out of the open, into the (supposed) safety Rolarn claimed was waiting in Broadplain Plaza. Broadplain was where Letty said his hideout was, wasn’t it? She’d said she’d call someone, and used his name earlier, so this was all good, Pax told herself. Never mind that he hadn’t relaxed his grip on his gun and was completely stand-offish in his manner.

  Pax tried not to think beyond following road signs. Only once she was safe, and reunited with Letty, would she let herself worry about other Fae. Or the fact that the Ministry had almost snared her. Or that the Blue Angel’s slug-like emissary could have killed her. Or that the encounter with Sam Ward had raised questions about Apothel – the one man who might’ve known what she herself was going through, labelled as mad. And then there was also the question of the trouble Casaria was in. And, worst of all, the physical response she’d had when the Blue Angel had caught her out. The same feeling she’d woken with, when the building had been quaking on the other side of Ordshaw. The same feeling, she considered, as when the monster had shocked her, under the city.

  All that could wait. It had to wait, while she focused on the signs pointing towards Broadplain. She weaved between slow-moving vans on a four-lane road, skirted the south side of Old Ordshaw, passing cobbled lanes, and finally left the glass skyscrapers of Central Ordshaw for the concrete squares of Broadplain, a commercial district that had been poorly preserved over the years.

  Broadplain Plaza was impossible to miss. The shopping centre was a windowless eyesore that spanned three streets with variously sized cubes and walkways. Its single defining feature was its name, hanging on one wall in giant metal letters that must have once stood as proud, angular white monoliths. They were now greening relics, cracked but too sad for even weeds to come near. The outward-facing shopfronts added to that tired image, mostly boarded up, but the area was still busy with people milling through the plaza doors carrying overstuffed carrier bags.

  Pax kept her head down, passing spiked security camera poles, to ride into the covered multi-storey car park. After hiding the scooter in a corner, she followed Rolarn’s instructions through the building, the fairy appearing out of nowhere to tell her to turn left or right, then disappearing again.

  Pax continued on autopilot, trying to suppress the feeling that something was seriously wrong with her. She followed a path overlooking scores of stores. The complex space of the fluorescent-lit halls, tiered walkways and distant ceilings with mossy skylights made the individual shops seem like minor glitches in an otherwise abandoned labyrinth. The shoppers were eerily quiet as they filled the complex. A group watching TVs through an electronics shop window did so silently. Pax frowned. Were they gathering around some breaking news?

  It was time, now. They had arrived and she had to admit that when she’d faced that blue screen she hadn’t had a simple panicking spasm. It wasn’t just the screen somehow attacking her, either. Something had happened, she’d felt it happen.

  “This way,” Rolarn said, near a turning.

  Pax said, “There’s something going on. Can you go check it out?”

  “Mm.”

  “Mm no, or mm yes?”

  He didn’t clarify. Which made it a no.

  “Christ.” Pax took out Rimes’ phone, to find the answer herself.

  “You want to keep stopping,” Rolarn warned her, “we’re gonna have a problem.”

 
For someone supposedly there to help, he was determined to make life difficult. He also still had that gun out. Pax risked activating the phone anyway, figuring he was, after all, sent to save her. There was no internet connection. Predictable, inside this concrete temple. There was one bar of phone signal, at least, so she said, “I’ve gotta make a call.”

  “You tell anyone where you are, we’re gonna have a big problem. Human.” Rolarn made the last word bite, his attitude feeding into Pax’s instinctive dislike.

  She gave him a careful look. Rolarn had on a faded yellow shirt, collar open and crumpled, half-untucked from loose beige trousers. His gut hung over his belt and his head folded into his neck, with a bad comb-over and an unhappy, impatient scowl up top. Pax concluded, “You look like a shit lawyer. A tiny shit lawyer.”

  “With a gun.”

  “Congratulations. Listen, I’m not gonna give away your home, but I need to make a call.” Pax thumbed through the contacts on Rimes phone. Five names. There had to be someone with the number for the telegraph station, so she could get in touch with Barton and the others. Apothel, well he was dead; Darren, his phone was dead; Ministry, go to hell; Rik, missing. That left Ruth. No home number. Great. Pax called Ruth and spoke to Rolarn as it rang. “You can relax. You’re mates with Letty, right?”

  “Letty doesn’t have mates.”

  “Are you associates?”

  “Mandy?” A mature woman answered the phone. “What’s wrong?”

  “Not Mandy,” Pax said. “I’ve got her phone, have you got her home number?”

  There was an awkward silence. Ruth said, “How did you get her phone?”

  “Found it in Asda, in Long Culdon,” Pax lied. “Please, if you give me her number I can return the phone.”

  Another wary pause. “Hold on.” The woman shuffled about briefly, but gave Pax the number. When she had finished, Ruth said, “Before you go, give me a moment. You be polite with Mandy, you hear? She’s been through a lot. It’d be better she lost her phone than had another episode.”

  Thank you, Ruth, for making things more complicated. “Episode of what?”

  “Just be gentle,” Ruth said. “Good day.”

  She hung up. Pax chose to ignore that detail as she dialled the new number. As the phone rang again, she asked Rolarn, “You know what that thing was, back in the chapel?”

  “No.”

  “It came out of the wall.”

  No response. There was a better analogy than shit lawyer, Pax imagined. Beat-up church janitor? Sexually-confused shoe salesman?

  “Hello?” Rimes answered, a cautious whisper.

  “Dr Rimes,” Pax said. “Can I –”

  “Pax?” Holly cut in, wrenching the phone off the doctor. “Pax, is that you? Did you know there’s a monster dog on our doorstep?”

  Ah. The strange noises, the security system. Pax was happy she’d left that behind. “Yeah. Holly, I...” Pax paused, not sure how to describe the feelings she’d had. I’m concerned something’s happened because I can feel the minotaur in me? At best it’d make them worry. And saying it would make it real.

  “Are you okay?” Holly asked. “I was thinking, we haven’t even contacted your family, surely we should? Somehow?”

  “If you want to make a bad day worse.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing,” Pax said. “No, it’s fine. Look...” She slowed down, dreading the answer. “Has there been anything else in the news? Another incident?”

  “Hmm?” Holly said. “Not that I’ve noticed. Why?”

  “Do me a favour and keep your eyes on it? I’ve got a bad feeling, but I’ve got to keep moving right now.”

  “I’ve had a bad feeling since Friday, it’s understandable.”

  “Yeah. This is worse.” Pax paused. “Another thing, Holly. Can you put something to Rimes and your husband? Ask them if those blue screens have ever done anything more than communicate.”

  “Like what, play the bassoon?”

  “Like if anything’s come out of them.”

  “What sort of things are likely to have come out of them?”

  “Just…” Pax realised she couldn’t describe the sludge creature any more easily than she could describe her internal strife. “Maybe they were moving glo around, like Grace guessed. Maybe they can move other things. Crazy as it sounds.”

  “I see,” Holly replied, slowly. “You know, I was thinking about the tunnels themselves, personally. Who built them?”

  Rolarn hovered a little closer to Pax, his scowl hinting at her to finish. Pax scrunched her nose at him, hinting that he give her a damn second.

  Holly continued, “It took twenty years to construct the Central Line, after the war, and fourteen for the K&S Line, earlier. The chap who designed the K&S Line, Frank Trellis, started on another line, too, but nothing on the scale that we saw. He ran out of funding – probably fell out of favour with the royal family.”

  No, these were not details worth riling the fairy over. “Holly, can we do this when I get back?”

  “I do have a point,” Holly said. “How could you hide the resources required for such a thing? I’m looking at these monster dogs and thinking of these secrets, and thinking it must’ve all been concealed very long ago, to be that well hidden.”

  “The Sunken City has concrete and brickwork, and electric lighting –”

  “One thing you’ve made painfully clear,” Holly said, “is that ignorance is our biggest enemy here. The means to create all this have clearly stayed hidden, whatever they are, and must be something worth finding, don’t you think? It could be anything. Dwarf gold-miners, giant worms?”

  “We saw a giant worm,” Pax said, wishing it wasn’t true. “Anyway, we’ll ask the Blue Angel the rest of these questions when we find it, won’t we? I need to go.”

  “Where exactly are you?”

  Rolarn’s face grew grimmer, so Pax said, “Someplace safe. I’m done with the chapel, nothing to report yet, but I’m with another fairy. Rolarn.”

  “Roland?”

  “Rolarn. Not as fun as he sounds. Take care, Holly – let me know if anything hits the news.”

  “Certainly. It’ll –”

  Pax hung up and raised her eyebrows at the fairy. “Was that so hard?”

  He turned away without comment and floated towards a corner. Dragging her heels, Pax followed him, into a wide dead end where half the lights weren’t working. The shopfronts here had been partly painted over to hide stacked rubbish. The single surviving shop, on the floor below, boasted crystals, dragon statues, and no customers. The far wall hosted three tiers of store space hidden behind whitewashed boards. One massive, forgotten department store. This, she sensed, was their destination.

  Pax narrowed her eyes at the ghostly outline of its long-removed name.

  “Where once was a Debenhams,” she said, “now there are Fae?”

  Rolarn reacted blandly. “See the entrance?”

  There was a door-shaped crack in the emulsion ahead. No sign of a lock or handle. It looked like no one had been through it in years. As Rolarn hovered ahead, Pax watched him uneasily. She wished Letty was there, to offer some kind of reassurance this place was safe. But he’d saved her, hadn’t he? These Fae were the help they needed...

  15

  Sam shone a torch over the rough markings on the ‘chapel’ walls, crisscrossing one another with grooves so deep the lines looked black. There were only the barest hints of plaster left between the gashes. Apothel must have done it possessed by a wild energy, using an axe, or a spade, or a hammer and chisel.

  Now she realised exactly where she was, Sam recalled the Ripton Chapel was well known in the MEE; its rabid markings were all the argument the Ministry needed when anyone entertained thoughts that Apothel had been underutilised as an asset. The man was not in full control of his mind. Whatever he had written, these walls proved he disagreed with it himself.

  It gave Sam a chill. Even with the field agents coming and going, taking ph
otos, running their different scanning devices, the place was grimly lifeless. The word left on the rear wall stood as a sinister, singular epitaph.

  Sam couldn’t recall it being mentioned in any of the files about Apothel, or the stories she had heard about this place. Had whoever sealed up the chapel neglected to record it? A nonsense word to some, no doubt, but painfully relevant, now.

  Grugulochs.

  The sound Malcolm Joseph had heard when the Sunken City shook his home.

  By the time Letty circled back to the Ripton Chapel, the road out front was packed with vehicles. A dented grey Transit van, two dirty Astras and a little Hyundai. The dilapidated, nondescript cars of the Ministry might have looked like civilian vehicles if they weren’t parked by an abandoned building surrounded by men in suits.

  Letty watched from the steeple of a church two blocks away, where only a finely targeted faeometer would pick her out. Tucking her knees up under her chin, pistol in hand, she wouldn’t be averse to bleeding the lot of them if they’d hurt Pax. Even if the lummox had the gall to grab her like that.

  Letty checked her phone again. No updates from Rolarn, but he might be on the move.

  She watched some goons exit the chapel in white plastic suits, like the place was toxic. The one in front tore off his outfit and tossed it to a waiting attendant. He was tall, ginger-haired, and carried himself like he was in charge. Behind him was the lady who’d rumbled them. A humourless-looking bitch, all right angles. She was talking. Ginger didn’t answer back, apparently not as high-ranking as he wanted to be.

  Their discussion was cut short by the return of Agent Landon, the Ministry’s chief ape. He took about a million years longer than necessary to straighten his car against the curb, with the crowd watching, before he got out and Ginger barked some angry words at him. Landon replied huffily. Letty could imagine the conversation perfectly: