The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Bashed up all the plaster? Carted it off-site? Burnt the gear?”

  “Yes, yes, and what the hell, yes. Anything the matter?”

  She ignored the worry pulling at her brain. “No. It’s all good.”

  *

  Mike wondered whether he ought to tell Maidah what had really happened to the clothes they’d found.

  He knew what he ought to have done. But he loved a mystery, had done ever since he was a kid watching cartoons, when all you had to do was fix up a cunning trap and pull the rubber mask off the villain after they got caught. Plus, the costumes were in decent nick, all things considered. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble over them. Only something well made, out of good materials, would hold up as well as those robes had.

  Then there was the wand. Or was it a staff? He didn’t know; he supposed it could be either, but as soon as he saw it he knew he wanted to find out what it was.

  So instead of burning it all, he’d taken it home with him. A few minutes on Google would tell him what they were, or so he thought. If they turned out to be valuable, well, lucky day. He could just see himself on the Antiques Roadshow, modest in his victory. “Found them in a skip, during a house clearance. Good job I pulled them out, eh? How much did you say they’re worth?”

  But Google was not being kind to him. He hadn’t the least idea what the things were.

  “Hey, Mike?” It was the main gaffer, the one who could speak a little Polish. Not that the clearance team couldn’t understand English, goodness gracious no, perish the thought. After all, if they couldn’t understand English then they couldn’t understand the health and safety lecture they’d been given, and that would never do.

  “Please tell me you haven’t bust that frosted fucking glass.”

  “No, Mike. You want to come take a look?”

  It was the exterior that had him worried. Mike took one look and swore.

  “We’ve got our own little Banksy, have we?”

  It was graffiti, quite well executed, Mike had to admit. The froth on the attack dog’s lips and teeth, the glaring eyes, the whip-thin body, all indicated an art school graduate who, in his spare time, was a bit of a cunt. The dog leapt from the corner of the main entrance, away from the door and across the wall.

  “When did the little bastard have the time to do it, that’s what I want to know. I mean, it wasn’t here when we set up this morning, was it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I bloody thought. So whoever the cheeky fucker is, he had to do it while we were in the building. In fact, he had to do it while your crew was working in the saloon bar, which means if they’d just looked up, they’d probably have seen him. Bastard! Okay, clean it off, would you? I don’t want the PM team to find out about this. We’ve got a decent chance of getting the rebuild as well as the clearance, and I don’t want them thinking we can’t even keep one lousy tagger off the site.”

  *

  The train rocked, sending its sardine-packed commuters swaying. Not that Maidah would have noticed if a bomb went off. Her attention was fixed on her Metro, the free paper.

  Police have no suspects in Angell Street killing, she read.

  The body was discovered after police and paramedics were called to Angell Street, following reports of a woman’s collapse. Despite the best efforts of the Ambulance Service, the woman could not be revived. The area around the building site where she was found has been sealed off, pending a forensic examination…

  “Oh shit.”

  Dare she check her mobile? There was bound to be a dozen calls at least, not counting anything the police might be sending her. No, better to call first; Mike might have news.

  “Did you see…”

  “I was there when the cops showed up,” he interrupted. “Yeah, it’s a bloody nightmare.”

  “There when the cops showed? What were you doing that late at night?”

  “Checking up on a couple things. Listen, I’ll send you the gory details over email, okay? But don’t get too worked up, it’s not as bad as it looks. The cops say they’ll need the site for a couple days, that’s all. We were nearly done anyway, so this won’t put a huge dent in our schedule. You should be able to go ahead with the tender on time. It’s just a bad break.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Dunno. Just some kid. Looks like someone gave her a good bashing then dragged her off where it’s quiet, you know? I’ll send you the deets later, okay?”

  Mike rang off. Maidah stared out of the window, collecting her thoughts.

  The passing landscape had become her familiar routine. When she first arrived in London she made a game of spotting the changes, the new graffiti, building works going up. Now it was soothing white noise, flowing past.

  The massive coiled hound, its red eyes gleaming, was new to her. It lurked near the tunnel entrance, posed in such a way that it seemed to be staring at the train as it went by. Real artistry, she thought. Pity it was wasted on something so bloody trivial.

  The train passed through the tunnel, and the hound vanished out of sight.

  *

  Mike was glad Maidah hadn’t tried to pry, else he’d have difficulty explaining why he’d been poking around after hours. Truth to tell, he’d been trying to confirm a suspicion. He’d come armed with a bunch of photos, hoping to match them to the reality on site.

  The inspiration, ironically, had come from Maidah. “We’ll have the conspiracy nuts in here, the ghost hunters, Christ alone knows what.” That’s what she’d said, and he’d let it pass, forgetting it, until he started banging his head against the Google wall trying to find out more about the costumes. Then it occurred to him to wonder why she was worried about ghost hunters, and before long he was poking around in the wilder recesses of Google, where the nutters gathered.

  That took him to Ghostquester.co.uk, and from there he was in.

  Back in the 1900s, he discovered, there’d been a split between one bunch of occult nerds from another, and the other bunch followed a bloke named Crowley. They set up what they called temples all over the place, and more often than not they closed down again soon after because they couldn’t be buggered to pay the rent. But the one set up at Angell Street had been different, because that had been backed by a fellow named Nuttall, and Nuttall had money, as well as being one of Crowley’s best buddies. So they were able to fix the place up just as they liked it, and what was more, they left a record. Ghostquester had all the pictures on its site, showing the pub – known back then as The Hound, though Nuttall and his mates called it The Shuck, he wasn’t sure why, and Ghostquester didn’t say – in all its former glory. Including, incidentally, those famous frosted glass panes, not that he was about to tell Maidah that. If he did, he’d have to explain how he knew, and he suspected that would lead to some unpleasant complications.

  If only because the same picture that proved the glass’ history also had Nuttall, Crowley and all in their very best priestly robes, with Crowley holding the staff-thing. It was a Thyrsus, according to his research. Something to do with fertility, apparently. Or more accurately, something to do with big dicks, since that seemed to be what Crowley, and more especially Nuttall, was into.

  Maidah must have known something about this, or she wouldn’t have made the connection. No wonder she hadn’t wanted it advertised. Occult nerds, gay or not, and high-end gastropubs did not mix, even in this tatty bit of London town.

  Coffee in hand, he went to check the site. His team couldn’t do much, but at least he could show willing. He had to avoid the police tape, but the bloke in charge knew who he was so he didn’t have much difficulty getting past.

  He stopped before he got to the door. The gaffer had done as he asked. The tag had been completely removed. In fact, more completely than Mike would have expected; he’d worried that there’d be some damage to the brickwork, but it came up without a trace left behind.

  But now there was a new one, and it was right next to where the forensics blokes were working.

  The
black hound’s gaping jaws seemed to be laughing at him. Cobalt, acidic liquid dripped from its mouth, little smoking stains carefully painted in at ground level, just about where the girl’s body had been found.

  “Bollocks,” he said to himself. The tagger had come back.

  Was it worth mentioning to the coppers? Mike hesitated. He still didn’t want Maidah to know too much about what had been going on, but if he told the cops then it was bound to come out about the other tag. It was the one thing he hadn’t taken a photo of; he’d recorded everything else he’d found, including the plaster room before it had been given the bash, on his smartphone, but the graffiti hadn’t seemed worth the bother.

  No, he decided. Better to keep shtum.

  *

  Maidah had been in some peculiar meetings but, when she reeled out after four hours, she acknowledged that one took the prize. It was in fact the Gold Standard, against which all future peculiar meetings should be compared.

  Hughes had been on top form, oiling his way through it all. It was clear he was edging into the Angell Street project, though it had never been his to begin with and he had a workload that would kill a horse, so why so eager? But eager he undoubtedly was.

  It wasn’t even as if it was a top priority. Sure, it had been lean times, but not for the last twelve months. If anything the firm was running at capacity, and had half a dozen other jobs with much more profile, and profit, than the Angell Street refurb. But no, it was all about having an experienced hand at the helm, very important client, couldn’t afford to muck it up.

  The other seniors sat there like stones. One of them, Angelo, was as pale as a ghost, and he was the one who usually weighed in when Hughes was talking crap. It was like someone had shot him before the meeting, and he was sitting there bleeding out, too polite to say anything about it.

  So now the job was Hughes’.

  “No hard feelings, Maidah,” he said after the meeting. “I’ll keep you on as my junior. It won’t be the same as running the job yourself, but you’ll get good exposure.”

  Which was short for you’ll get all the donkeywork I don’t want to deal with, and you’ll deal with the council too, because those fuckers bore the pants off me.

  Maidah sat in her chair, head whirling. She had to put all her files on the server for Hughes, and she did, one after the other.

  Her bench-mate was on a smoke break. His monitor showed some kind of YouTube crap. Very bad idea: if the seniors saw it he’d be due for a wigging. It was on loop, but the sound was off.

  She glanced it out of the corner of her eye. Attention caught, she studied it. No, not YouTube but some other site, she wasn’t sure what. The hound drawn on the screen seemed familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Long, and lean, and hungry, with eyes as crazy as a full moon, and behind it, something … something large.

  The screen went blank.

  “The hell?”

  But it stayed blank, no matter what she did, and when her bench-mate came back it was time to call the IT blokes, because his box had completely fried. The fuss that followed drove the hound out of her mind.

  *

  Second death at Angell Street, dangerous animal to blame?

  Police are asking people to be on the lookout for a dangerous animal, possibly an escaped dog, after a second death at Angell Street. The body of Laura Taylor, 17, was discovered Monday at a building site. The police have since confirmed that a second victim was found unresponsive, not far from the first scene, just before midnight yesterday. A spokesman for the force said that a detailed forensic examination of the second scene is taking place…

  *

  “Christ, mate, you look like death.”

  Mike didn’t respond. Not even coffee was going to save him.

  He hardly ever dreamed. The only time he remembered dreaming was just before he went travelling; he never liked flying, so the night before his mind kept itself busy showing him all the wonderful ways the plane might crash. Other than that, though, he slept like a log, and didn’t remember anything about it the next day.

  Not this time.

  He’d been walking down Angell Street, only it wasn’t the Angell Street he knew. It was more crowded, for a start, and there weren’t any cars. In fact, at one point he saw a rag and bone man with an actual horse and cart, something he hadn’t seen in thirty years living in London.

  The people didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at them. He was afraid of what he might see in their faces.

  There was no sound in his dream. Not at first.

  As he got closer and closer to the Shuck, he could hear it baying.

  It was a hungry sound, an angry sound, and it got closer and closer with each step. He tried to stop walking towards it, only to discover that no matter what he wanted his legs had different ideas. Each step was a step closer to destruction, and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop.

  The baying was at its loudest when he woke up.

  “You ever have one of those nights?”

  The gaffer nodded. “Every Saturday morning. Coppers been to see you yet?”

  “Yeah, they got me this morning. You ever see a dog round here?”

  “Naw, not unless it’s the fucker’s dog. Speaking of, he left another one.”

  “Shit.”

  “I would get the blokes in, but…” The gaffer’s embarrassment was written on his face.

  “What?”

  “Well, they won’t do it, Mike.”

  “What do you mean, won’t do it? They won’t clean it off? Why not?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno, mate. I thought it was money, so I put some cash out, but it was no doings. They don’t want to touch it.”

  Mike sighed. It was all they needed. Maidah was due for a site visit this morning.

  “Is it somewhere visible?”

  “Back entrance.”

  “Fine. I’ll make sure the PM people don’t see it, and you make sure you get some blokes in who don’t go girly when the big, mean tagger puts his mark on our building, okay?”

  After that build-up he had to see it, so while the gaffer returned to his business Mike went to the back entrance to get a look.

  It had an oily, smirking look to it, as though it were sneaking home after a night’s debauch, pissing on the garbage bins and shagging all the ladies. That face, though, it would never win friends. Those jaws, with their jagged teeth, that azure tongue lolling. It would always be hungry. It would never stop.

  Mike shivered.

  “Goose over my grave.”

  *

  “I had to see it for myself,” said Maidah, as she poked her head inside the hidden room.

  Mike and his team had been thorough. Every least bit of plaster had been smashed and removed. The little window, for so long sealed away, threw a small amount of light into what was otherwise a featureless brick storage room.

  Maidah’s nose wrinkled. “Was that smell here before?”

  Mike didn’t answer. He wasn’t at all happy about the smell. When they’d started the job, it hadn’t been there, he’d swear to it. If anything, the rooms below stairs had been positively fresh, compared to the fug up top. Now there was an acrid, unpleasant something hanging in the air, and each day it grew stronger. At first he’d thought it was something to do with the forensics blokes, who’d been working just outside that small window. Maybe some chemical or other, but it had been days since the forensics blokes had packed up and, if anything, the smell was stronger.

  “Anyway, glad to see everything’s progressing. You’ll probably need to speak to Malcolm Hughes at some point; he likes to poke his nose in after the hard work’s done, but I wouldn’t worry about him. All he’ll want is to be reassured everything’s going well.” She looked at him. “It is, right?”

  He couldn’t hide it.

  “Bollocks. What’s the problem?”

  Which led to an unhappy Mike taking Maidah back upstairs, but just as he thought he was about to make the Big Reveal he was stunned to discover that t
he graffiti had vanished.

  “Okay. So what am I not seeing?”

  Mike touched the wall – and snatched his hand away. It had to be his imagination, couldn’t be anything else, but it was as if the bricks had stung his fingers, somehow.

  “Look, I don’t pretend to understand…”

  Mike interrupted her. “What do you know about a bloke named Nuttall?”

  That caught her out, and he knew it. “So you do know something. What is it?”

  “I don’t know if I should be telling tales…”

  She saw the look on his face. “Right. But this goes nowhere else, you understand? I don’t know a lot about Nuttall, but I do know he was an architect, and he had a bit of a reputation. Lots of big-money jobs, more than you’d expect even if he was any good, and I don’t know that he was all that clever, really. But he still collected one hell of a payday while he was living, and when he died a rival firm bought up all his papers, notebooks, the lot. That rival firm was taken over in its turn, and after a while, we obtained the Nuttall stuff when we bought out the practice that bought out, and so on.

  “I’ve never seen any of those papers. I don’t even know why we keep them, the stuff’s massively out of date, and I don’t think even ten buildings Nuttall worked on still stand. Even if they did, it’s not as if he was Sir George Gilbert Scott, you know? Nobody remembers Nuttall’s work these days, except us.”

  “And the blokes on Ghostquester?”

  “I don’t know what that is – but yes, Nuttall had a reputation. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know this was one of his jobs. We’d have loonies crawling out from under every rock in London.”

  “Can you get me into that collection?” asked Mike.

  “No bloody way.” He despaired, and she unbent a little. “There’s no chance I can get you in to see those papers, but I can have a look, if you like. After all, it might be important.” She wondered what Hughes would say if she came out with something critical, something that added big bucks to the project. She had no idea what that might be but for the sake of an hour or two looking around in the archives, why not? Couldn’t hurt, and might help. “So what am I searching for?”