The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON)

by Johnson, Maureen

  “I like that show,” I said. “I watched it a lot at home.”

  “—and they were preparing a roast chicken. That segment aired from fourteen minutes after ten until seventeen minutes after ten. Somewhere in the middle of the segment, Charlie instructs Sam to go to the basement to get some nuts and crisps. So here’s what that tells us: at some point shortly after 10:03, Sam goes to the basement for the first time. There is no cross on the floor. The cooking segment was running both when he went down and when he came back up, so we know that the second trip to the basement occurs between 10:14 and 10:17, and at that point, the cross has appeared.”

  “You memorized all this?”

  “Yes. Anyway, at this point, something happens. The glass is broken, something Sam claims he didn’t do. This suggests agitation on the part of—whatever he claims was down here. Sam yells for Charlie, and Charlie comes down. Charlie finds Sam in distress over this cross and presumably some flying glass. And Sam said Charlie got down on the floor to wipe away the cross.”

  Stephen got on his knees in the middle of the floor.

  “So Charlie is on his knees. He’s cleaning the floor. What’s a cross? It’s a burial marker. X marks the spot. Maybe whatever it was was marking where it was buried? And the flowers—flowers also mark graves. She just said the flowers down here were also moved, maybe to indicate the site…maybe it attacked because Charlie was interfering with his gravesite?”

  While Stephen worked that out, I walked over to the wall that butted against Artillery Lane, where the crack met the outside of the building. There were shelving units all along that wall, full of glasses and boxes of snacks. I tried to look between the shelves to see the wall, but they were too full. I started to remove the items.

  “What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

  “The crack. I’m trying to see if it comes down this wall.”

  Stephen got up and helped me move the boxes and glasses away, and together we moved the metal unit away from the wall. Funny, I was certain what I would find there, and yet I was shocked to actually see it. The crack came from the ceiling, from street level, and extended to about midway down the wall, snaking along the mortar that bound the brick wall of the basement.

  “It doesn’t go to the floor,” he said. “So presumably whatever escaped from here, if anything did in fact escape, came from whatever is beyond this wall, under the street.”

  “Weird to think of things being buried under the street,” I said.

  “There are so many bodies around here. Over sixty-eight thousand of them over by Spitalfields alone. It’s not just a question of there being a body. There’s always a body around in London. I think it’s more of a change of state issue. Maybe there was always some lingering presence here, but the explosion at Wexford woke it? Upset it? Shook it in some way? And it reacted violently to the disruption? Anyone will be upset by a nearby explosion.”

  “So you think it was just pissed off?”

  “Pissed off ghosts are called poltergeists in the common vernacular, and they do some very bad things.”

  I felt a lecture coming on and turned away for a second.

  “Stephen,” I said.

  “The thing we need to remember—”

  “Stephen.” I tugged on his arm to make him turn and look.

  The figure was in the doorway. I say “the figure” because I couldn’t quite tell if it was a man or a woman or what age it was. It was a bundle of cloth, of watery features and gray air. I could tell where the eyes were supposed to be, but there were just deep spaces with no center. It rocked back and forth, as if moved by a breeze.

  “Hello,” Stephen said.

  The figure moved forward a few feet, and not by any method that resembled walking. It just moved and continued quaking at us from a slightly closer location.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” Stephen said. “Can you understand us? Please indicate if you can understand us.”

  The figure remained exactly as it was.

  “I take that as a no,” Stephen said, mostly to me. “And I think—”

  Our new friend took this moment to respond. It made a noise. It didn’t speak or cry, but made a low, aching moan—a moan it refused to stop making.

  “I think we can be reasonably sure your hypothesis was correct,” Stephen said, over the noise. “There was something down here.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  We were frozen against the shelving units, and I got the impression that this thing, whatever it was, had no intention of letting us out. It was unhappy, and presumably the last time it became unhappy it bashed a man’s head in with a hammer.

  “I think we should be very careful,” Stephen said.

  “You think?”

  “I also think that I might be right about this particular entity not liking things moved around. If this is a Bedlam patient, it might suffer from some sort of OCD, or just a desire to have a consistent environment. Order and consistency—”

  “It’s upset.”

  “It appears upset, yes. But I think it is also listening. Are you listening to us? Can you understand.”

  The moan remained consistent.

  “Right,” Stephen said. “Well. I suppose it’s trying to communicate in its own way.”

  “It communicates with hammers.”

  “Yes. It does.”

  “Which means I have to take care of it.”

  “I told you,” he said, “you don’t have to do anything.”

  “We have to get out of this basement. And it killed someone.”

  “We don’t know that. But it is very likely.”

  “And it might kill someone else. I can’t not do this.”

  “But I’m saying—”

  I stopped listening. I was in the unusual position of holding all the cards. I had to decide what to do, and only I could do it. And I was going to do it. I had faced frightening things before and had been powerless. But not this time. I extended my arm and stepped toward the figure. It moaned and quaked a bit more, but it didn’t approach or retreat.

  For a fleeting moment, I wondered what would happen if it didn’t work—if whatever had been in me had simply gone away, and I was about to paw at a very temperamental creature who did its talking with tools and angry flailing. But as soon as I put my hand out, I knew. First my hand warmed and seemed to stick to the figure. It stopped quaking. I closed my eyes and felt a gentle falling. The thing and I, we were one now and tumbling together through some unknown landscape. And then, with a mild shock sort of like static electricity, the connection was broken, the smell of flowers was in the air, and the thing was gone.

  15

  EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST STEPS AWAY FROM WEXFORD, Stephen thought it might be a good idea to take me back to the flat to decompress and debrief. I was fine with that. I don’t know how he drove since he was giving me the side-eye the entire time. I guess it was one thing seeing me do my new party trick from a distance or by accident, and it was another thing entirely to see it up close, being used deliberately. I killed a ghost. With my hand.

  That was awesome.

  “You did the right thing,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Not going to vomit?”

  “I’m completely fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure? You seem a bit manic.”

  “Look,” I said, turning to him, “I’m fine. I was right. You didn’t believe me, but I was right.”

  “If I didn’t believe you, would I have gone to the trouble of arranging an interview at the hospital? That wasn’t exactly easy. Are you sure you feel all right?”

  “Are you going to stop asking me that?”

  “I’ll stop when I think I’ve got the real answer,” he said.

  “Oh. Fine then. No. I feel like death.”

  “Do you?” he said, almost eagerly.

  “No. I feel great.”

  I leaned back in the seat and
drummed my fingers on the window and tried to look like a cop. I made cop faces at the cars passing by—hard, long stares. Sometimes I’d give them a little nod, as if to say, “You’re doing all right, law-abiding citizen.” I liked being right, and I liked being powerful, and I liked the way I felt right now.

  “When we get back to the flat, let me explain to Callum and Boo what’s happened.”

  “You always want to do all the talking,” I replied.

  “Because it is my job. I am in charge. And I was trying not to get us both caught out today. It’s a crime to impersonate a police officer.”

  “I mean in general. Even Callum says…”

  Stephen jerked his head in my direction, and I knew I had overstepped. This is what happens when I feel too good. I talk and talk and talk and eventually I start saying things that are supposed to be in the secret file, the things other people told you that you were supposed to keep to yourself and then…boop! Out they come.

  “Callum says what?”

  “That you’re…serious,” I said. “About your job.”

  “Of course I’m serious about my job.”

  “That’s what he says,” I replied.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning…you can tell them. And something I never understood…how does it work, you being a police officer, but not a police officer, or—”

  There was every chance that Stephen knew I was trying to switch topics. He definitely wanted to know what Callum had said. But I understood Stephen enough now to know that he could always be relied on to talk about procedures and how things worked. He would be compelled to answer me.

  “Technically,” he said, “I am a sworn police officer. I’m just not assigned to any particular station or role, at least not as far as the Met is concerned. I went through the training. I did five weeks at Hendon, another four months or so at Bethnal Green, then in-person training out of Charing Cross police station, then back to Hendon. It took about eight months. On the side, I was given some bespoke training at the MI5 training academy, most of it on how to get into places where security clearance is needed. Oh, and management. They had me do some management training. All in all, it took about a year, but I’m still learning, every day. A lot of these jobs, they train you, but you really learn by doing it. Normal constables train with experienced people, but no one does my job. I have Thorpe, I suppose.”

  “He’s scary,” I said.

  “He has to be like that. You can’t let your emotions get in the way of what you need to do, and you can’t have too much of a personality, at least on show. But he’s all right. Every time I’ve needed something from him, he’s been there. And, frankly, I don’t think he knows what to make of us. Must have been a shock to get us as an assignment. He might be relieved if it all falls apart. He can go back to finding terrorists or whatever he did before.”

  “I guess that is kind of crazy,” I said. “He doesn’t have the sight. He just has to take your word for it that there are ghosts and that you’re getting rid of them?”

  “Basically. Now, what did Callum say?”

  “Nothing,” I said. He didn’t press the matter.

  The flat had the sour smell of day-old garbage. Some effort had been made to pick up the place. Dirty containers had been bagged up and left to ripen in the kitchen. In addition to that scent was a sharp, familiar fragrance that made me wildly hungry.

  “Look who it is!” Callum said. He was on the sofa, eating something from a bowl. Presumably this was the source of the good smell. God, I was starving. Taking out the ghosts clearly took something out of me. Boo was walking around the room in a pair of yoga shorts, flexing and pivoting on her newly freed leg. She spun around when Callum spoke.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to see me, right? I have my leg back!”

  “How does it feel?”

  “Ready to kick something,” she said. “Still itches. And I think it might’ve shrunk? That can happen, you know. The muscles lose tone.”

  “Looks the same size to me.”

  “Does it?”

  She bent over and examined her leg for a moment. I would have been freezing in those shorts. The flat was hardly warm. But English people are hearty.

  “What is that?” I asked Callum. “It smells amazing.”

  “Jerk goat,” he said. “Made by my mum last night.”

  “Can I try it?”

  “This is the real thing. My mum’s from Kingston. This is a family recipe.”

  “I can’t eat that,” Boo said. “And I can eat almost anything.”

  “I can eat anything,” I said.

  “Not joking,” Callum said. “This stuff would actually kill you.”

  “I’m hard to kill.”

  “If you like.” He held the bowl out to me. “But I’m warning you. Be careful.”

  The meat in the bowl was gray and cooked to soft pieces. I held the bowl up to my nose and inhaled the delicious, prickly aroma of things that were on the high end of the Scoville scale. My eyes watered very gently from the pepper oils. Spicy food and I have a close relationship—an obsessive one, in fact. If it’s spicy, I want it. I want to sweat and shake and go half blind from the searing pain…which, now that I put it that way, seems really suggestive. But spicy stuff is addictive. That’s a known fact of science. I shoveled in three forkfuls one right after the other. And then, after riding through the sweats and shakes, had another. Callum burst out laughing.

  “Clearly you are fine,” Stephen said.

  “Why wouldn’t she be?” Boo asked.

  Boo had been eyeing Stephen for about a minute now. I noticed it through the waves of delicious pain. Considering how large and luminous and heavily lined her eyes were, it was remarkable how she had mastered the subtle stare. I’d only learned to see it because she had applied it to me for about a week straight when we first met.

  “We need to talk to you about where we’ve been this morning,” Stephen said.

  And so, he told them. His account was all right. I would have added a lot more description and detail.

  “One morning,” Callum finally said. “We were gone for one morning and this happens?”

  “It wasn’t planned that way. We went to the hospital, and then we stopped into the pub on the way back to Wexford. It all happened quite quickly, and Rory handled it very well.”

  “Boom boom,” I said to Callum, hoping that would bring some light to the room, but he didn’t react. Boo flexed her long purple nails.

  “So this will look good to Thorpe,” Callum said. “At least we have that. They’ll reward us with great riches. Or, maybe, a new sofa from IKEA.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Stephen said.

  “Why not?” Boo asked.

  “Well, this might cause him more problems. The case against Sam Worth is fairly damning, between the forensics and the confession. It’s going to be difficult for them to make this one go away, especially with a grieving family. They can’t say that there was a ghost going around beating people’s brains in with a hammer, so Sam Worth has to be set free. Someone has to be seen to pay, just like in the Ripper case.”

  “So Sam goes down for it?” Boo said. “It’s not right.”

  “We can only do our job. We leave it to other agencies to do the rest.”

  “But that’s not right,” Boo said. “He didn’t do it.”

  “But he confessed,” Stephen said. “And the forensics back up his confession. Even he would rather think he did it than admit to himself that some terrible unseen thing was in the room.”

  “So he just stays in prison?” Boo said.

  “Again, that’s beyond our scope. But there’s something else that isn’t. On the night of the attack, the floor of the bathroom cracked open. Rory also found a crack—”

  “I know about this,” Callum said.

  “And he told me,” Boo added. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all got together to tell each other things?”

  “Right,” Steph
en said, sidestepping this. “Well, the crack is also present in the basement wall of the Royal Gunpowder. It’s now a safe working assumption that the crack is in some way connected to both the woman Rory saw in the bathroom and the murder in the pub. So we should find out exactly how far this crack extends. To that end…all around London, there are GPS stations, used to track location. Mobile phone towers are also GPS stations. Aside from being location trackers, they can monitor the movement of the earth to a very high and precise degree. They’re used to monitor earthquake damage now. We could potentially use that information to determine the size and location of the crack. Once we know that, we can deal with the question of precisely what it’s done.”

  “Can we access that information?” Callum asked.

  “We can ask Thorpe about it,” Stephen replied. “I can get that process started. In the meantime, you and Boo should cover the area, working in hundred-yard circles. Canvas everything. Check streets, go into shops, access as many basement levels as you can. I’ll see if we can’t get you both some British Gas uniforms right away.”

  “I can also check with the Tube engineers to see if there are any broken substructures in the Liverpool Street area,” Callum said.

  “Good.”

  “I can get into Wexford,” Boo added. “Come for a visit, have a look around.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  All three of them looked over. While I realized I was not a member of the squad, I certainly felt like I was entitled to be a part of whatever happened next. I think Callum was about to say something along those lines, because he nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen reached over and smoothly picked up the car keys.

  “You should probably get back,” he said. “You’ve been gone most of the day.”

  Boo and Callum exchanged a look. Stephen was already moving toward the door. I took the hint and pulled myself off of the broken-down sofa.