Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  Chase shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of someone who dresses in white all the time?” he reasoned. “I mean, think about it. He’s a vampire. He drinks blood. I can’t even eat a bowl of pasta without ruining a good T-shirt,”

  We hared a left, slamming me across the car and making the tyres squeal and smoke.

  “Whatever it is, it won’t be good,” Chase continued. “Cabal should stop it. Forbid the parade to go ahead, but they won’t, of course.”

  I nodded. “No of course not. If they did, it would just look as though they agreed with the running sentiment in the streets that the vampires are responsible. They wouldn’t risk being seen as prejudice. They won’t implicate themselves or choose a side in this argument.”

  “At least not until it’s clear which side is winning,” Chase murmured. “Ah, good old Cabal, they haven’t changed much since my day.” He glanced in his mirrors. “If we cross two over here, we can cut right down to the castle, it’s faster.”

  “Cross two what?” I was confused. “There are no left turns here.” I glanced out of my window. We were passing another small fenced-in public park. “Ah, I see,” I said quietly.

  I double checked that my seatbelt was locked as Chase swerved the car around again, mounting the pavement on my side this time, and leaving the road altogether. The car screeched at high speed through the gate in the fence, plunging us off the road and into the bumpy shadows of municipal public gardens.

  The Ferrari shuddered and bucked beneath us. We mowed over several carefully planted flowerbeds in the darkness, shredding winter-pansies in droves. It was a low slung car, not designed for off-road rallying, and I heard soil and roots scraping the undercarriage, beating against the chassis like a crazed drumbeat. Trees and a play area swing set loomed out of the darkness, sketchy and caught in the bouncing headlights. Chase whirled around them, bouncing out of the other side of the park and dropping off the high kerb onto the new road on the far side in a shower of sparks and a blare of horns and screeching brakes from other, panicked drivers.

  “See?” he said grinning. “Shortcut!”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the situation. It was mainly pure adrenalin. “Oh my God, Cloves is going to fucking murder you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he tutted. “My darling Vee would never do such a thing. She’s an absolute pussycat.”

  “Chase, she did do such a thing. She shot you dead in the chest remember?”

  He considered this a moment. “Well… fair play. But I’m sure she’s mellowed with age since then.”

  We passed a large square in the city. I glimpsed Carfax tower, giving me a vague inkling of whereabouts we were. The square was already packed end to end with people. I couldn’t tell if they were here for the show or here to stop it. We passed them too quickly. But I did see live coverage of the parade itself, which hadn’t reached this part of town yet. It was being broadcast across a huge datascreen hanging on the second storey of a shopping arcade in the Square. Evidently, up in St Giles, the procession had already begun and was in full swing. It really did look like a Halloween extravaganza. There were floats, decorated in black, white and red, covered in shimmering and shining ribbons, flashing crimson, and atop which vampires, every one of them dressed in their circus harlequin costumes and ruffs, grinning out from behind and shimmering eye-masks, performed stunts and acrobatics. I saw several ribbon-dancers, twirling upside down on long crimson swathes of fabric attached to towering poles fixed atop the slow-moving floats. There were vampire jugglers marching alongside the vehicles in twos and threes, their diamond patterned outfits sparkling against their white vampire skin. They threw skittles in the air with inhuman height and speed. Their projectiles electrically lighting up in neon greens and reds, funhouse colours. They flashed in the air.

  “Did I just see vampires on stilts?” Chase asked, as the square fell out of sight, and we weaved our way back down perilously narrow back streets, with ancient Oxford stone whipping by on both sides.

  I nodded. “You did. I saw a fire-breather too.”

  “I’m actually a bit gutted we’re missing this,” he admitted, a little sulkily.

  It occurred to me that the clownish appearance of our ‘demon’, the tattered ruff, the rumpled and ragged billowing outfit, it matched what all the vampires in the parade were wearing. It had clearly been through wear and tear, hanging off the back of a dead vampire, forced by its ghoul-master to walk continually through bright sunshine and basically cooking itself slowly, but still. It was clear that Dove had made this ghoul from one of Sanctum’s own staff, raiding his own stable to commit the greatest vampire sin and create his monstrosity. That was why it was dressed like an ancient clown.

  The sky above us suddenly erupted with fireworks, orange and red, crackling and popping, deafening and playful. Their reflected light lit up the bonnet of the Ferrari in shimmers. We could hear, far off, the distant boom of carnival music.

  “I didn’t spot Dove,” I said.

  “Oh, he’ll probably be being carried along on a litter, sitting in a golden throne and throwing bead necklaces to the crowds,” my companion said. “What do you know about St George’s crypt then?”

  I knew a fair bit about most of my city, I had to admit. When the entirety of your world is reduced by a large wall to just one town, it seemed strange to me for people not to take an interest. There wasn’t anywhere else to take an interest in, after all. The city was all we had.

  “I know that most of the original castle was destroyed in the civil war,” I told him, as the streetlights whipped past. It was full dark now. There was no denying, Halloween was upon us. “There’s only really the tower left that’s original, a place I’ve seen far more of than I’d like recently. The castle was a prison after that for a hell of a long time, and a grim one at that, before it closed and became a hotel instead. These days it’s a tourist attraction that no one cares about.”

  “The tower is called St Georges,” I told the cheery zombie. “The crypt just gets tied in with that name. It was part of a chapel that stood there once, it received a dedication to St George way back when, 1070-something I think.” I shrugged against my seatbelt. “The chapel up above was moved later on, somewhere else in the castle. It’s gone now, destroyed by the prison and then the hotel, but the crypt is underground and out of the way, so it survived. I think we will still be able to access it from the tower base.”

  “It’s a good job that business about vampires not being able to enter holy ground is a load of old hokum,” Chase pointed out, finally slowing the car, as the sounds of the parade faded further behind us. We had turned another corner and the hill of Castle Mound, kingdom of the homeless folk, and the black, unlit tower of the castle itself now peeped between the more modern sloping rooftops. “Considering that your vampire boytoy might be in there somewhere. Hate to think of him sizzling away like bacon on a skillet.”

  “He’s not my boytoy,” I said.

  “Man-toy then, whatever.” Chase rolled his eyes. “Vampire-with-benefits.”

  I ignored his rambling. I really hoped that something was down there. If we’d guessed wrong, if we’d jumped to the wrong conclusions, then we were driving to a dead end. There would be no time left to develop a plan B. Behind us, in the fireworks, music, and mingled shouts of support and anger, all boiling together, something truly terrible was going to happen.

  Chapter 30

  We left the car outside of the ticket-booth, steaming slightly, and headed inside through the visitors’ centre. It was dark, abandoned and locked up for the night. This didn’t really prove any impediment to us as it only took Chase a few moments to pick the lock, and no alarms went off within. Everybody was no doubt at the festival. Dove’s hatemongering and campaign of fear-spreading had ensured that almost everyone in the city had at least some kind of a reason to be out on the streets tonight.

  If any break-and-enter alarm went off, it was a silent one. It’s possible that police were being al
erted right now that we had broken in. It was equally possible that there simply wasn’t an alarm. Who was going to break into an empty castle ruin in the middle of the night anyway? Guerrilla tourists?

  I fished my slim torch out of my pocket and lit the floor as we picked our way stealthily through the gift shop, under the doors which once led to the tours of the castle and prison, and into the dark ruined mustiness of the castle proper.

  “Last time I was here, I had a run in with burnt-molasses-face,” I told Chase, whispering by default due to the darkness and the quiet. “So keep your eyes open.”

  Chase had pulled out a gun, some kind of large, military grade firearm. I couldn’t have named it if I tried. “Do you want a gun?” he offered politely. “I have more.”

  “I don’t like guns,” I replied, as we passed through the stony, packed earth archway that led up to the tower. This time instead of ascending, we ducked through a low-lintelled archway and headed instead for a set of steps leading down into deeper darkness.

  “Well, I don’t like insanely strong, giggling, vampire clown-ghouls biting my face off,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “But each to their own, just thought I’d offer. You could just stick it in your back pocket.”

  I led the way down the staircase, which turned tightly several times, making me feel as though we were corkscrewing down into the earth. “If I did that, I’d probably just shoot my own arse off,” I told Chase, as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “Here it is.”

  We had been spilled out into St George’s crypt. I shone my flashlight around, bouncing the beam off the vaulted roof of black, decorative stone, flitting it between the pillars that rose up from the dirt floor below like angular tree-trunks to meet the curved ceiling.

  There were notches cut into each of the stone pillars, on which sat dim, flickering candles. They weren’t real of course. Plastic and electric LED props which had been down here for the last thirty years. They must have had a long battery-life, as few members of the public ever bothered coming down here anymore.

  “I thought it would be bigger,” Chase said, stepping into the low room, running his fingers around the rough walls. The bricks were almost black and slightly glossy with damp. “And there would be a tomb, you know, like in Indiana Jones and the Holy Moley. Some kind of knight sleeping under a shield or something. This looks more like an empty wine cellar.”

  “Dedicated to,” I clarified. “Not last-resting-place of. I doubt there’s ever been a saint down here.” My voice was echoey in the darkness. It smelled musty here, and it was freezing cold. “Plenty of sinners though. Hey, did you know they used to have ghost hunters come here? Back in the day? Filming those hunting-for-the-supernatural TV shows.”

  “Huh,” Chase grunted with mild interest as we picked our way through the sunken tomb. “Paranormal television shows. Little clicking EVP and catching dust-motes on night vision cams, calling them orbs. What a load of old hokum-pocus. We should be grateful that the end of the world wiped out some television formats.”

  I sniffed, shrugging. “I quite like them,” I said, walking quietly around the pillars. It was a little like being in a cramped underground church. “You can still find them on the DataStream archives. A lot of people thought this place was probably haunted.”

  “A dim and creepy crypt in an ancient castle adjoined to a prison where hundreds died, haunted?” Chase grinned in the dark, looking like a pale ghost himself. “Fancy that. Do you believe in the spirit world, Phoebe Harkness?”

  I shone my torch in his face, causing him to squint, but not to stop grinning. “I am talking to a zombie,” I reminded him. “One made by science, admittedly… weird science. I’m not sure what I believe any more. I find I’m constantly reassessing my beliefs.”

  “Spoken like a true scientist. Personally, I don’t,” he told me in light tones. “I’ve died and come back. I was dead for quite some time.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember a spirit world, no pearly gates or fiery pits. Just nothing.”

  I moved the beam off his face, reducing him to a shadow in the darkness. “People stopped looking for ghosts when we discovered that GOs were real. Humanity had quite enough on its plate adjusting to the new world order without bringing religion and spirits into it. Vampires, Tribals, Bonewalkers. All very real, all different from us and muddled in our human subconscious by generations and generations of urban myths, misleading fairy tales and legends. Even now, we’re still trying to separate the facts of what we think we know about them, from what we actually know.”

  “Vampires don’t turn into bats, werewolves are not allergic to silver,” Chase nodded in agreement. “And some zombies…” He came around a pillar, hugging it with one arm like a demented Fred Astaire swinging around a lamp-post. “…don’t rot. Fresh as a spring rain.”

  “Angels and demons though,” I inspected the dirt floor. I was looking for any signs of disturbance, any evidence that someone had been here recently. “This thing running around stealing children had me half-convinced, and the visions of the girl in white… But no. It’s a ghoul, a vampire one, forced to walk around in daylight to do its master’s bidding, which accounts for the barbecue complexion. I can explain it. Finally.”

  “That’s important to you, isn’t it?” he questioned. “Being able to explain things.”

  I gave him a little smile. “It’s what I do.”

  “Explain the girl then? Winking in and out of existence. At the bridge, at the library.”

  “I can’t,” I grudgingly admitted. “Not yet. But I will.”

  “And the Bonewalkers? Maybe the most elusive of all GOs, certainly the least fashion-conscious, they all seem to shop at Gap-for-Nazgul.”

  I didn’t know the answer to that either. The Bonewalkers didn’t correspond with much of pre-war legends. We didn’t know how they did what they did. Or more importantly, why. They didn’t speak. They just made us walls and kept us alive, rearranging the city at their whim and helping us to thrive in the new world.

  “I don’t trust them,” I said quietly. “That’s all I got for your ‘faceless ones’. For now, anyway. Are you helping me look, or what?”

  Chase nodded and set off to explore another corner of the shadowy crypt. There were no rats down here at least. There weren’t even spiderwebs. I supposed there was nothing for the spiders to eat.

  “If I was a secret door to a defunct installation,” I heard his voice echo back thoughtfully in the gloom. “Where would I be? Maybe one of these candlesticks is a secret lever.”

  “This isn’t Scooby Doo.” I rolled my eyes, wondering vaguely how on earth he could see anything. I was the only one of us with a torch. When I thought he wasn’t looking, I quickly tested a candlestick. It was just a candlestick. Ah well, worth a try.

  I felt like we were wasting time, stumbling around down here while up above, the parade would be progressing south. They would have reached the southern end of St Giles by now, near to the Ashmolean Museum, I was sure of it. They would be leaving the vampire district soon and headed into the historical heart of the city.

  At the deepest part of the crypt, furthest from the stairs, the wall was stacked almost floor to ceiling with skulls, set neatly and morbidly in rows on shelves cut directly into the stonework. My torchlight rolled over them, making the bone gleam.

  “Well, this is grim,” I noted. “Like the catacombs under Rome or Paris. Walls of bones.”

  I don’t spook easily. I’ve never understood people who get fluttery around skeletons and skulls. It’s not like we don’t all have one behind our own face. But people can be averse to being reminded of their own mortality, and nothing in the world reminds you of your finite status on this earth quite as effectively as a skull. One day, it’s empty sockets and fixed grin seem to assure you, you will be me. It’s somehow worse that it’s always grinning while saying this, as though in on some cosmic joke the living fail to grasp.

  I narrowed my eyes, peering thoughtfully at the skulls. I didn’t remember r
eading anywhere about there being anything like this in the crypt of St George. Catacombs were essentially polite and well-mannered mass-graves. This was supposed to be a single resting place, not a group love-in.

  “Chase,” I beckoned for him to join me and he padded over, silent in the dark. “This isn’t right.”

  He looked at the macabre tableaux. “Okay now, we’re getting into some Scooby-Doo territory, admit it. If I get through this night without playing the xylophone on a ribcage using a femur, sue me.”

  “No, I mean… it’s window dressing. It’s fake. The skulls and bones are real enough, but they shouldn’t be here.” I reached out to lift one of the skulls directly in front of me, hooking two fingers into the eye-sockets. “It’s like camouflage,”

  To my surprise, the skull didn’t lift off the shelf as I’d expected. It was fixed to the stone, but something under my fingers audibly clicked, and there was a low rumble. Snatching my hand back, as a little dust fell in the vibrations from the arched roof above, we both stepped back. A section of the wall, shelves, skulls and all, moved back slowly, recessing into the earth, before sliding smoothly to the left, disappearing behind the rest, and revealing a flat, very modern-looking, brushed steel door, completely featureless. There was a keypad embedded into the wall next to it.

  We both stared at it.

  “Jinkies,” I breathed.

  The door opened smoothly when I punched in the code Chase had translated from the medical bracelet, sliding open soundlessly to reveal a plain, brightly-lit elevator.

  I let out a grateful breath I had been superstitiously holding. The code worked, which means we were in the right place. Thank god. We didn’t have time to be anywhere else.

  The elevator was large, like a hospital lift, big enough to fit several stretchers in. The bright, flat light stung our eyes after the near blackness of the crypt, now illuminated and stark behind us.