A few yards off stood a man, short, white, bald, in a faded green parka with ratty fake-fur trim. A laminated card hung from a lanyard around his neck. He held an SLR camera, its lens pointed to where an arm punched upward through the crowd, wielding a police baton. The baton fell, and I heard a thump, then more screams. The photographer had barely lowered his camera when someone lunged at him—another cop with a baton.
I watched as the crank sizzled in my brain and everything around me began to slow. The photographer’s mouth gaped wider and wider as he fell, but no sound came out. His hands opened and the camera floated into the air, as though he’d released a black bird.
With dreamy slowness, the photographer rolled onto his side. The policeman loomed above him, baton raised. The camera dropped onto the grass a few feet from where I stood, its lens pointed skyward. The photographer covered his head with his arms as the baton came down on his skull with a dull crack.
Someone shouted. The four old women stopped to look back, then with shrill voices raced toward the cop. As they surrounded him, I snatched up the camera and darted through the crowd, which had begun to scatter. It was a long time before I slowed to a walk and glanced behind me for signs of pursuit.
No one appeared to have taken any notice of me. The demonstration had broken up so swiftly that it scarcely seemed as though it had ever happened. The Nazis in their distinctive white shirts and brown pants were gone, along with almost everyone else. A pair of mounted police officers made slow figure eights around the monument, circling those who remained, like cowboys rounding up cattle. Onlookers stood at a safe distance, along with several TV crews, recording the riot’s aftermath on mobiles and videocams.
Two police helicopters hovered above the monument as a police van drove across the grass, lights flashing, and stopped near a group of policemen who stood in a half circle, staring at something on the ground. A woman hopped out of the van, followed by two white-suited figures, and all three walked to join the others.
Out of nowhere, a small black shape appeared and swooped above them, low enough that the woman looked up in alarm. Another drone, I thought; then saw it was a bird, a crow or raven that abruptly banked and headed in my direction before veering off into the trees, where I lost sight of it.
Chapter 32
The bird had disappeared into a thick stand of ancient yew trees, which seemed as good a place as any for me to sit and absorb what had just happened. I trudged toward it, passing a group of weary demonstrators dragging their battered placards in the mud. They tossed them into a waist-high pile of discarded signs and kept going.
Here, near the outskirts of the park, several groups had set up makeshift information booths. Defenders of Albion, Mothers Against Fascism, Free Speech Legal Defense Council, England First! I searched for Svarlight’s telltale red oak leaf with no luck. I’d long since given up on looking for Tindra or Tommy, along with any hope of finding a stolen book in the wreckage of a nationalist rally. I might be wasted, but I wasn’t that wasted.
I had a camera again. It seemed like a good time to cut my losses.
I sank onto the cold dirt beneath the yews. A huge limb hung so close to the ground that its branches formed an impenetrable curtain of black-green dotted with crimson berries. I crawled till I was out of sight of any passersby and shut my eyes, counting my heartbeats until they seemed normal for someone wired on crank and a flood of adrenaline. Minutes passed before I opened my eyes, exhaled, and allowed myself to relax. My back ached, my head. The split on my lower lip felt hot, skin stretched like that of an overripe plum. I found some Kleenex in my bag and did my best to clean my face.
From outside the park echoed the thrum of traffic, louder than it had been earlier. It must have been rush hour. Two young boys walked past, kicking at the gravel path and laughing, shadow puppets behind the yew’s green-and-black scrim. When they were gone, I reached beneath my jacket and pulled out the camera.
It was an older Nikon F2, late 1970s, with a bayonet-mount lens, its frayed leather strap wound with electrical tape. A white label on the back bore a printed name and address in Barnes: a professional photog’s rig. The lens cap hung from an elastic band secured behind the focus ring. I checked to make sure the lens hadn’t been damaged in the fall. It was heavier than my old Konica, a more expensive camera than I ever would have bought for myself.
I carefully peeled off the address label, took off the lens cap again, stared through the viewfinder, then wound the exposed film onto the take-up spool. I popped open the back of the camera and removed the film roll. I stuck the address label back on the protective casing, wiped it all off with another piece of tissue so there’d be no fingerprints, and tossed it into the shadows. If someone ever found it, maybe they’d return it to its owner. I’d have to wait until I had access to a closet before I could load the camera with my own black-and-white Tri-X.
I looked through the viewfinder again, playing with the focus, gently touched the shutter release waiting to be triggered. I felt as I had lying beside Quinn, not exactly safe but suspended, the city beyond the curtain of yew branches as distant and unreal as the images I’d glimpsed in The Book of Lamps and Banners. The grief that had infected me since giving away my Konica faded, replaced by a familiar sense of urgency and yearning.
I recalled when I’d seen that raven arrow above the police van, the woman followed by two white-clad figures, the line of cops staring at something on the ground in front of them. A body. I could have shot it. I might even have been able to capture the moment when it was transformed from a man or woman into something beautiful and terrifying, eyes reflecting a sky no longer seen, mouth open to gasp or cry out or whisper a secret never to be told. I ran my fingers across the focus ring, pressed and released the shutter release, then carefully placed the Nikon in my bag.
I knelt to gaze out through the branches at the park. Afternoon had waned to early evening. The air smelled acrid, but I didn’t catch any whiff of tear gas. The helicopters were gone, also the Metro Police van. The demonstration might as well have happened a thousand miles away. It was as if the city had fought to suppress the sudden outbreak of a virus, and won. London was vast: it could seemingly swallow hundreds of rioters, leaving no trace save footprints in the mud and a few bloody faces. The rest would be dealt with in courts and prison cells and, perhaps, the morgue.
My shadowy refuge grew darker as the temperature dropped. My headache had become a solid brick of pain. I was badly dehydrated, sweating despite being chilled. The speed still sparked in my brain like a fistful of firecrackers, but it had been hours since I’d had a drink.
To ease the craving, I got out the copy of Dead Girls and opened to the leaf from The Book of Lamps and Banners. I was wary of touching it, of even looking at it for too long—whenever I did, it seemed as though the images had rearranged themselves. I knew this wasn’t the case, but there was something about the brilliant pigments and grotesque figures that defied any attempt to impose order upon them.
In the Bolt, I’d been absorbed by the tiny illustrations—the monstrous tentacled woman, the severed head that turned into a moon. Now what seized my attention was the way the images were arranged on the page, a pattern that reminded me of the intricate arrangement of frames in a graphic novel, or the schematic in a set of blueprints that showed where the wiring would be in a high-rise.
I could make no sense of it. Yet there was undeniably order on the page. The same colors and motifs repeated themselves in varied combinations. The sinuous appendages no longer resembled tentacles, but letters. What I had taken for random stipples of scarlet or indigo were in fact a kind of punctuation.
Dizzy, I raised my head, and in the shifting world of branches and sky read the same grammar. There was meaning in the yew’s needles; meaning in a contrail’s scrawl, in the tattoos on a passing girl’s arm, and the logo on a jogger’s sweatpants.
Tindra was right. The Book of Lamps and Banners was a code, a secret language composed of colors and shadow
s and chimerical creatures. The page was an attempt to capture the transient beauty and strangeness of the world around me. Like Tindra’s app, the images had the subliminal power to change the way one saw the world.
I felt a rush as potent as a line of uncut cocaine, followed by a wave of nausea. The scene in front of me shivered into an unintelligible mass: I had a flash of the raw terror I’d experienced when I looked at Ludus Mentis. Gasping, I lashed out at an unseen attacker.
My fist struck the tree, hard enough that the pain brought me back. I caught my breath and recalled Tindra’s avid expression when she first told me about her app.
A mirror…When he looked into it, he couldn’t look away…You see how it all ties in? The way we’re all sucked in by this?
Yet what happens when the mirror doesn’t reflect your own face, but the void behind it? I looked down at the page from The Book of Lamps and Banners.
It’s all there, not a line missing. I’ll be able to complete writing a code that was begun thousands of years ago.
But the book wasn’t intact, so neither was Ludus Mentis. The app’s incomplete code was worse than meaningless: it provoked a neurological response that unraveled one’s consciousness, reducing the world to a primal soup of fear and rage.
I quickly closed Dead Girls, entombing the papyrus sheet inside it, and stared at the book’s cover, my night shot of a bunch of kids staring at something that lurked in the darkness, just out of sight. A moment in time, ephemeral as the cigarette smoke rising above the kids’ heads.
And yet I had captured it on a piece of cellulose coated with gelatin and silver. Human figures, most of them now dead, immortalized through an alchemy of light, silver, salt.
Ludus Mentis wasn’t the only portal to the past. Whatever meaning that fleeting moment on the Bowery had held, I had put it there.
Chapter 33
I stuffed Dead Girls into my bag and stood. I had the hollowed-out feeling that follows a long acid trip, a sense that my singed neurons were slowly regenerating. I was ready for a drink, maybe even an early dinner. I checked the burner to see if Quinn had texted me. Nothing. Trying not to panic, I popped three ibuprofen and stepped out from beneath the trees.
The sun hung just above the horizon, turning the hazy air rose pink. I zipped up my leather jacket, started to walk. The park was nearly deserted, though I saw a few stragglers carrying protest signs under their arms. I wondered if Lyla and Gryffin had been arrested. I couldn’t imagine they’d found Tindra or Tommy, though I’d have no way of knowing if they had.
I felt a pang, thinking of Tindra as she cradled her fierce-looking dog as though it was a stuffed animal. It was a good-sized Staffordshire terrier, well trained and capable of bringing down someone my size. Who could have killed it, and how? Poisoning didn’t make sense—Tindra would never have let it eat something unfamiliar.
And, despite what Lyla believed, the dog didn’t look like it had been poisoned. When I was ten, a friend’s dog, a bad-tempered bullmastiff who’d once killed a German shepherd by snapping its neck, had been killed—rat poison in a chunk of meat. I’d been with my friend when she discovered the writhing mastiff in the woods. The dog had snapped at her viciously and mindlessly as a snake—an agonizing death.
Yet in the video Tommy had texted to his sister, Bunny appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Surely if the dog had been shot or stabbed, Tommy would have noticed and texted that to Lyla. So yeah, maybe poison.
But how do you poison a big, well-trained attack dog walking beside its owner in a large, crowded park? Where was the dog’s corpse now?
And where was Tindra?
My thoughts outran my steps as I stared distractedly at the ground, kicking at gravel. I hoped I’d find an exit from the park soon. I had no clue how to get back to the Underground. When I looked up, the rosy haze had darkened to bloodred fog: a toxic magic hour, the few passersby ghostly shapes that flickered in and out of sight.
I kept walking. After a short while, I saw three boys crouched around something on the gravel. A fourth boy stood above them, poking the object with a stick. I drew closer, and he glanced at me. His friends scrambled to their feet.
“It was just here,” one said.
A small dead bird lay on the path. It looked like a sparrow, tiny legs straight as matchsticks, claws curled as though grasping an invisible perch. There was a tiny depression in its breast.
“It’s the fog,” explained the boy with the stick. “Makes ’em sick.” He tossed the stick into the shadows, and he and his friends hurried off.
I stared down at the little corpse, then used the steel toe of my boot to nudge the sparrow onto its side, so that it gazed at me with one poppy-seed eye.
I resumed walking. The greasy haze made my face feel as though it had been smeared with Vaseline. Two women in park uniforms ignored me as they passed, speaking loudly into their mobiles. When the fog swallowed them, I paused beside an overflowing trash bin.
Something glinted amid the foil wrappers and takeaway containers on the ground. I bent to see a dart with a red feather at one end, like a tiny powder puff. Straightening, I prodded it with my boot. I’d seen something like this before.
I shook my head: I needed to stay focused. Tindra, dead dog, dead bird, the book, the app, Quinn, a drink…the only one of these things that mattered to me now was Quinn.
And a drink. And maybe another bump. I reached into my pocket for the crank, and froze.
Two white guys in red Svarlight hoodies were headed toward me on the path, hands in their pockets. I shoved the bag of crank back in my pocket and called out to them.
“Hey, are they still around?”
They halted. Young, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, their cheeks raw with windburn. The older of the two regarded me cautiously. “Who?”
I pointed at his sweatshirt. “Svarlight.”
“Oh, yeah.” His companion gestured at some benches a short distance away. “You’ll just catch them, they’re getting ready to go home.”
“Thanks,” I said, and they left.
I stared at a heavyset gray-haired woman perched on one bench, spooning food from a takeaway container. If I hadn’t looked up, I would have walked right past her. Above her dangled a limp plastic banner, held aloft by two plastic rods. It was emblazoned with a scarlet oak leaf and lightning bolt. A large tote bag at her feet displayed the same logo. A few feet away, three young men stood talking to a burly middle-aged white guy with a long, braided salt-and-pepper beard. He wore dark work pants, work boots, a fleece-lined black denim jacket.
The wind tugged the jacket open, revealing a Svarlight T-shirt. One of the young men wore the same T-shirt. Another sported a Defenders of Albion knit cap. The third, dressed in a plain white windbreaker, waved a CD at the bearded man.
“Been looking for this for weeks! What happened to the download?”
The bearded man shrugged. As I approached he gave me a nod, turning to resume his conversation.
“That was only up there for a week,” he explained. He sounded Swedish. “Read the small print. Are you on the mailing list? We send out a list of new downloads every Sunday night. Freya tweets them, too. When she remembers.”
“You’re lucky I remember your dinner,” the woman on the bench called. She looked at the young man and added, “There’s two songs on that CD weren’t on the download. That’s your reward for buying it.”
Like the bearded man, she sounded Swedish. The others all seemed to be Brits. They nodded amiably as I joined them.
“A lot quieter now,” the Defender of Albion said, smiling.
I glanced at the woman’s tote bag, trying to discern its contents.
“Come take a look if you want,” the woman, Freya, said.
She finished whatever was in the takeaway box, dabbed her chin with a paper napkin, then hauled the tote onto the bench, scooting over to make room for me. “Sit,” she urged.
I did. Her long hair was more silver than gray and loosely braided, her face sun
weathered and deeply lined. Her blue eyes were so pale they almost looked white, making her appear blind. Her loose cotton dress hung almost to her ankles. She had big hands, the knuckles swollen from work or arthritis. No rings. No coat, only a popcorn-knit wool sweater that looked handmade. For an instant I met those eerie pale eyes and saw a glint of fear, or maybe just exhaustion.
“Help yourself.”
She pointed at the tote and stood, yawning, then walked over to the bearded man, leaving me alone on the bench.
Chapter 34
The tote held dozens of CDs, a few Svarlight T-shirts, a stack of brochures held together with a rubber band. I removed one of the brochures:
Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen
It was illustrated with photos of men marching in formation, clad in black trousers, white shirts, black ties. Each man carried a green flag with an arrow at its center. There were a few lines of Swedish text, a URL, phone numbers. I glanced up and saw the gray-haired woman watching me.
“You may have that,” she called.
I muttered thanks and dropped the brochure back into the tote, then began sorting through the CDs, all packaged in illustrated cardboard sleeves. Bands with names like Jötunn’s Egg, Bloodwinter, Den Sorgen. The artwork ran to photos of moody rural landscapes and pine forests under a clouded moon, or woodblock prints from nineteenth-century volumes of Teutonic folktales. The Wild Hunt was a popular motif, along with archaic farm implements and snow. The back of each album bore the same lightning-bolt-and-oak-leaf logo.
Svarlight wasn’t a political fringe group, but a music label. I picked up a Bloodwinter CD.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 15
