by John Luxton
“Sexual arousal to the point of death during a black magic orgy does not sound very mainstream to me,” said the detective.
“Afterwards they close the working and go to church. The effects of the face-full of white powder they ingested the previous night plus their other exertions are then successfully ameliorated by Diazepam, black coffee, and the power of prayer.”
“Are you suggesting that they were in the congregation at the Russian Orthodox Church this morning?” said Detective Z recalling the trio of Bentleys with blacked-out windows that he had earlier seen parked across from the church.
“I am, and I am also suggesting that there will be others,” I said with a shrug.
Detective got to his feet.
“An interesting story, to be sure, but I must be getting back to some real police work in the real world.”
“Wait,” I said. “There is more.”
“Some other time perhaps,” he said turning to leave.
“It’s Lorna,” I called out softly to him.
That stopped him.
“You know she is trapped in a parallel world created by the Blake Organisation as part of their twisted plan of utter dominance in all spheres?” I said.
He looked like he might punch me.
“Walk, from the north side, to the centre of Waterloo Bridge at sunset tonight.”
I clapped the stunned looking Detective Z on the shoulder and strode off across the park, not caring about the muddy grass and the horseshit.
“I will be in touch,” were my parting words.
Chapter 4
LORNA Z
Lorna knew that time was a spiral and that one day a moment would arrive when she could simply step sideways and find herself back in the world she had left far behind when she had crossed that metaphorical bridge at midnight all those years ago, in order to help a friend who was in danger. Her action had put her in danger too, and as is so often the case, she had suffered the consequences.
Now as she stood on the penthouse balcony of the Ice Tower, looking westwards and watching the city burning and hearing the frenzied voice of the reporter blaring from the television set behind her in the apartment, she wondered how much worse things would get. In the beta world she now inhabited large swathes of London had been burning for several weeks, whole areas of once prosperous and law-abiding suburbia had recently been declared no-go zones by the police, as paramilitary protesters were becoming increasingly organized and resourced until they had claimed the streets for themselves.
And yet amazingly she had just that day found an old book in a nearby junk shop, simply titled: Utopias. The writings of several dozen hope-filled dreamers collected in one chunky volume had caught her attention, and as she paid for the book she had joked with the elderly gent behind the counter, that in an age where people had stopped writing about imaginary dystopias because the social order was unraveling so fast as to render their creation nugatory – it was a miracle that a book filled with visions of these positive imaginary worlds was permitted to exist at all.
He had given her a sideways look and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. Saying, “Read it and weep,” before adding, “It’s from my own collection.”
She shivered from the cold breeze that came off the river and turned away from the red-rimmed horizon before going back into the apartment to switch off the television; not wanting to hear about the reports of violence and looting for a moment longer. Once inside she slid the glass doors shut, drew the curtains and settled down on the sofa to read her book.
After twenty minutes she put it aside and slipped into a light sleep. Lorna was an adept at the technique of lucid dreaming and this time, as many times before, she allowed her dream-self to explore the unfolding narrative of JoKanu. A prescient and synchronistic element of the self, retrieved from the lost highway connecting trans-dimensional worlds, and able travel between multiple dimensions in his craft. An all-seeing eye painted on the prow and his hawk circling high above, picking out the ebb and flow of good and evil and guiding Lorna safely between the parallel worlds that quantum physics now argues are the prima material of the universe. Of course JoKanu had always known this, as had Lorna. They did not seek or require any validation from guys in white coats.
Operating through the senses of her dream avatar she found herself out in mid-stream, on a rising tide. The Thames was far beneath the windows of the Ice Tower but it also flowed in her meta-memory: from source to ocean and from ocean to source, a ceaseless turning of tide and time. And on the absolute margins of her consciousness she felt the synchronistic snapping of synapses and the balancing of trans-hemispheric neuron pathways, as JoKanu and his hologram familiars harvested golden data and channeled it to Lorna Z.
The Lorna Z: a sleeper in the realm of the Brotherhood of the Serpent, late of the Parish of Mortlake. Lorna Z: fervid opponent of the shadow parasites who were spawned from the Cult, bleeding the life force from the good and the true, replacing those civilizing aspirations with a dark meanness, a cruel intervention that split the one world into alpha and beta, and now ruled the beta world with a deranged psychopathy. Now known simply as the Blake Oranisation and with their own army of sentinels and Stasi – creeping around the corner, stealing in the night through the neighborhood, searching for Lorna Z and her kind; holding Lorna a captive in their inverted world – and slowly circling her hiding place, implacably hunting her down, a process which, for all her alliances and powers, she was unable to circumvent.
Lorna awoke with a start, on a low table at her side was the book she had been reading prior to falling asleep. It had a plain parchment-colored binding and as she opened it on the title page she saw a scrawled signature, the book had been signed by its editor. As she flicked through the pages she caught a glimpse of underlined text and backtracked to find the location. The highlighted section was a song lyric that had somehow been included in the collection – the song detailed a meeting between two lovers at sunset by Waterloo Bridge. Just the one line was underlined. In that moment Lorna had strong feeling of epiphany and leapt to her feet in order to act upon it.
Chapter 5
THE VIOLET HOUR
Detective Z was late. He had become tied-up in his role of organizing the investigation; real police work as he had called it. But his meeting with Darren Sprawl had played on his mind. Firstly because of his own hunch that the victim was of Russian origin and secondly because he had scanned the police’s own intra net to discover that another young woman had shown up dead and unclothed in Stratford, East London. Again with no signs of violence about her person – and again leading to the investigating officer’s rather feeble conclusion: that drugs may have been involved. These two facts gave some credence to Darren Sprawl’s ravings. For what else could they be? Reasoned the detective who had always relied on procedural police work, plain and simple.
Detective Z had cordoned off the memory of those lost days when Lorna had first disappeared; they were too painful to revisit. When he had returned to the police force after his ‘breakdown’, he had simply thrown himself into the day-to-day activity of his job and never really put his head above the parapet; content to be a foot soldier – fighting crime and punching the clock.
He dimly recalled the character in Old Mortlake that Sprawl had referred to – a crazy old man called Alan, painting the railings around the churchyard; he too had alluded to a sinister and shadowy oranisation. But those were troubled times for the detective when his mind became untethered as his grief for the loss of Lorna swept away his very reason.
Detective Z was resentful of the encroachment of the past into the present. And yet a persistent feeling lurked just beyond the grasp of his conscious mind, like an alarm bell ringing far far away. Therefore at five PM he suddenly threw his skepticism aside and took the underground to Embankment Station, walked along the Strand and turned onto Waterloo Bridge just as the streetlights began to glow and the passing vehicles turn on their headlights. He quickened his pace
but there seemed to be the whole world and his brother pressing in a frantic throng along every available yard of the footpath. By the time he approached the centre of the bridge it was almost dark, the last rays of the sun were glinting on the tops of the very tallest buildings.
Studying the crowd, there was no one who resembled Lorna and so he pressed on towards the centre of the bridge, all the time wondering if he was walking into a trap but clear in his mind that if there was any possibility of finding Lorna, here in the dusk, above the Thames, that he would come to this spot every night for the rest of his life if necessary.
He wished he had asked Darren Sprawl some proper questions. In fact the detective was more than a little ashamed of himself – Detective forgets to ask vital questions – it did not sound too good; now realizing that he had been too wrapped up in himself to even take the man seriously, and yet here he was, on Waterloo Bridge at sunset, just as instructed by the enigmatic Mister Sprawl. He stopped walking suddenly and someone bumped him from behind, the detective did not apologize as his attention was elsewhere – there was a woman in a blue anorak on the opposite side of the road – he could not see her face but she moved in a way that was familiar to him. With an increasing sense of urgency he looked for a break in the long line of cars and buses; he needed to cross quickly because she was walking away – towards the South Bank. By now the sky was deep violet and only to the west was there any luminescence from the departing sun, the preponderance of light was now man-made. He spotted a chance and stepped off the pavement and immediately had to leap back as a cyclist almost mowed him down – shouting ‘idiot’ as he veered and then sped away. A hand grabbed his shoulder and he turned around, savagely reacting to the intrusion.
“Can I suggest you cross the road using the pedestrian crossing, sir?”
It was a uniformed policeman of all things – obviously thinking Detective Z was a moronic tourist with no understanding of basic safety protocols.
In one smooth movement Detective Z shrugged off the restraining hand, pulled out his ID and spoke firmly to the concerned but misguided young man.
“I am following a suspect; I need you to stop the traffic for fifteen seconds so I can cross the road. Can you do that for me?” asked the Detective quickly.
The PC nodded and obliged by holding up both arms and flagging down the approaching London Bus – he followed the detective to the centre of the road who then repeated the process for the traffic going the other direction.
“That’s all for now, constable – thank you for your help,” said Detective Z, and began to weave his way through the crowd in pursuit of the blue anorak.
Chapter 6
THE VERTICAL ABYSS
High in the spiral vortices of the gyre three men were seated around a mirrored table; they were drinking shots of green absinthe from ice thimbles. Today the London weather had delivered a thick band of low cloud that shrouded the city far below them. From the eerie they usually enjoyed a clear view of the western skyscape that was on this occasion denied to the human ants far below - however the raptors were in turn unable to watch the activities of their prey in real time and instead had to rely on the concave power of the table’s mirrored surface that caught and delivered the flash and glint of the spectral energies that they sought to capture, enslave or extinguish at whim.
Eddie Brocade, Simon Magus and another, set aside their glasses and studied the mirror – it was cloudy. Brocade sighed and took a Faberge snuffbox from his pocket and after taking a generous pinch passed it anticlockwise around the table. Before the cloud had interrupted their view they had been watching a flock of starlings – tens of thousands of the tiny denizens of the western skies had flocked together at dusk and were inscribing a pattern, many patterns – pivoting around an invisible and seemingly fluid point, gathering and then banking and plunging again and again until the trio of watchers were quite dizzy, but it was here that their collective interest lay, because the birds were in the grip of the gyre – a field of energies that formed and marked a point of ingress - a portal to the Mauve Zone.
After a while it had become obvious that the axis around which the flock were inscribing elliptical circuits was the spire of a church; a ruined chapel on a scrap of waste ground in one of those abandoned and hidden corners of west London that inexplicably exist – overgrown and neglected for decades, seemingly invisible to councils and developers alike.
Brocade spoke.
“I’m guessing the police are too dumb to reach any of our people who were at last nights working.”
He turned to the man on his right and in doing so showed his handsome profile – his good looks only slightly marred by the flicker of a tick that afflicted his right eyelid.
“What do you think, Sergei?”
This was not his companions real name but was a standing joke between them that stemmed from the eponymously named Sergei being no Einstein – but perhaps being an Eisenstien: Sergei Eisenstien being the director of many classics of the Russian cinema such as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘Battleship Potemkin’; and this man, having once directed a couple of pornographic films back in his home city of St Petersburg, wishing to make his mark as a serious film-maker. This was a convolution too far for anyone and everyone except Brocade, who delighted in this circuitous nickname.
‘Sergei’ was slow to answer. He had watched many episodes of ‘the Sweeney’ and believed that he knew the capabilities and mind-set of the Metropolitan Police Force as well as any man. He set aside the snuffbox and quickly licked his thin lips, a lizard tongue darting out in a nanosecond – a freeze frame would have shown it to be forked at the tip, having undergone some surgical modification several years earlier.
“Who knows? – especially if we got a squealer in the pigpen. Check it out, Brocade; you are supposed to be the enforcer around here.”
At this point the so-far-silent Simon Magus stood up and reached for his cane, constructed of some dark hardwood with a brass dragon’s head for a grip. He swung round and brought the stick down across Sergei’s skull and then continued to rain blows down until the man’s scalp and face were a bloody mess. The first strike knocked him unconscious and so there was no attempt to fend off the onslaught, which continued until Eddie Brocade stepped between them and caught the bloodied cane in mid swing.
“It’s enough,” he said quietly.
Above this tableau was a cathedral of glass – a vaulted atrium that soared in deep penetration of the sky – now packed with a million tiny pinpricks of stellar light, but neither man looked upwards.
“Fucking incompetent Russian piece of shit,” said Simon Magus as he walked away from his handiwork. “Get the fuck rid of him. And bring me someone who knows about this Z girl and her sorry father.”
“Okay, boss,” said Brocade whilst checking his jacket for blood spatter.
Chapter 7
DEBRIS AND WHITE POWDER
Some boys from a nearby council estate found the body three days later. This time a black girl whose good looks were impossible to verify as the rats had been at her. Detective Z felt nauseous when he got to the scene and was shown the corpse; the stink of death on the breeze, swirling through the long grass and bushes, the tainted molecules lodging in his nostrils.
It was a wilderness behind an abandoned smelting works somewhere in the arse-end of Paddington, where she had fetched up. Across the road stood a Victorian gothic church – also derelict. There was a dilapidated security fence, that would deter nobody and beyond he could see that the heavy studded church doors were ajar.
Again he had been on the scene first, before the heavy hitters arrived, just him and a couple of uniformed constables. The meeting with Daren Sprawl had somehow provided him with a completely new frame of reference; one that he was admittedly unwilling to adopt, but nevertheless was now stubbornly redirecting his investigative intuition. He looked up at the church spire; slates were smashed or missing but it still looked impressive against the leaden west London sky. A few
starlings were gathered on the high metal cross right at the top. He crossed the road, climbed through a hole in the fence and pushed the door wide.
The last few days had been hell for Detective Z. I was late and I missed her - these were the words that were branded into his consciousness since his tardy arrival at Waterloo Bridge and his frantic attempts to locate Lorna, all without success. And yet he was sure that she had been there, only yards away perhaps. Since then he felt within himself the awakening of a most unfamiliar emotion: hope.
The pews were gone, slabs of wire mesh replaced the stained glass windows, even sections of the parquet floor were stripped-out to be repurposed in a fancy villa along Ladbroke Grove. But the centre of the floor area was free from debris and there a dusting of white powder attracted the detective’s attention. In one place there was a pattern – a little like the designs that the baristas etched into the froth of his morning flat-white coffee. He took out his phone and fired off a couple of photos of the design. Then he took a little of the dust on his finger – it was fine white powder that clung to the dampness of his palm. He took some on the blade of his penknife and placed it into a clear plastic evidence bag. Then he left the church and made his way back to the place where the woman’s body still lay.
Over the next week the investigations dragged on – the women’s’ identities remained unknown and toxicology tests proved inconclusive; the unspoken imperative of the Chief Superintendent seemed be to limit any talk of a serial killer on the loose in the capital which might find its way into the press. Detective Z did not in fact return to Waterloo Bridge and he sank into a strange enervated depression that he hid from all around him, in case they might think that his ‘old trouble’ had returned.
And so it was only on his day off, when returning home from the supermarket and reaching into the pocket of his overcoat to get his keys, that his chilled fingers encountered an unfamiliar object. Pulling it out, he stared at the yellow plastic item – it was a computer memory stick but not one that he had ever seen before.
