The door swung open.
Mason stepped into the dark vault.
An alchemical globe burned a pale sickly green on the far wall. It didn’t light the room so much as it contaminated it. There was a card table in the very centre of the room, all around it the floor was inlaid with fine gold wires that formed sigils. The sigils prevented scrying eyes. The green pallor clung to the row upon row of shelves that lined the walls of the room. There were eight other pedestals, each covered with a velvet cloth, and protected by their own gold wire glyphs. The intent of each glyph was very different because the threat posed by each of the hidden relics was very different. It wasn’t just that someone might scry the truth of them and see what was hidden away down here, it was that the artefacts themselves might call to the unsuspecting and fashion their own escape. These treasures were volatile. Mason walked a careful path through the middle of them, careful not to tread within any of the gold patterns. He didn’t want to break the protections.
Once on the other side, he set about searching the shelves there. He knew what he was looking for, and he knew where his father had stored it. Some of the shelves were stacked with what appeared to be a haphazard collection of books, some side-on with their spines out, others laid flat and piled high. Other shelves were filled with small casket-like boxes with brass hinges. He walked across those shelves, and ran his fingers along the line of small caskets, his finger leaving a scar in the dust. The corners of the small boxes were each protected by the same tarnished metal plates. Nothing was labelled. It didn’t need to be. Mason knew the contents of the room down to the very smallest thing, and knew its place. He found what he was looking for and lifted down the wooden box. He carried it reverentially toward the table in the middle of the room and didn’t slip the latch until he set it down on the green baize.
Placing his hands carefully on either side of the brass latch, Mason opened the box. Inside, it was lined with red velvet. There were two compartments in it. One for the gas cylinder and one for the pistol. It wasn’t actually a gun, not in anything approaching the traditional sense of flintlocks or percussion pistols. The handle was brass with mahogany inlay, much like the grip of a fine pistol, the differences were around the muzzle and firing mechanism. There was a glass tube and within it a finer glass tube shaped like a bell jar, with fine brass wires running through it. Mason recognised the much thicker glass of the inner tube as a Hittorf-Crookes variation. It was really quite ingenious. On either side of the glass tube were a series of metal gears and levers that were moved by pulling down on the trigger. Holding it flat, he could just see the end of the Ruhmcorff coil responsible for generating the mild electrostatic pulse that travelled through the frame in place of a bullet. The words Blondel Distillator were engraved into the side of the barrel.
He took it out of the box carefully and slotted the cylinder into place.
There was a sharp shunt of air as the vacuum seal was punctured and the gun became live.
The Distillator was the brainchild of a second-rate scientist, Joackim Blondel, but its story was much older and more convoluted than that. By rights it ought to have been called the Röntgen Distillator, given that it owed its existence to the Prussian physicist. But it was Blondel that turned it into a weapon. The reactions Blondel harnessed to fuel the Distillator were little more than side effects of Wilhlem Röntgen’s work into cathode rays.
The chamberlain handled the pistol with exaggerated care as slipped it into the holster hidden beneath his topcoat.
Röntgen’s initial tests had liquefied the marrow of bones while imprinting their image so that all that remained was a blackened shape burned into the laboratory’s white wall. It had horrified the scientist and almost caused him to cease his work. Blondel had moved quickly to take advantage of his master’s cast-offs. It never ceased to fascinate Mason how some men could find death in the most benign discovery. And that is what the Distillator was, death found in the remnants of a world-changing laboratory experiment.
He closed the small casket and returned it to its place on the shelves.
Armed, he went back upstairs.
East of Eden
Chapter Forty
The wolf, McCreedy, followed the devil with his silver-tipped cane through the labyrinth of London’s low quarter. The streets were an olfactory hell for the shapeshifter. Everything was rank or ripe or rife. There was still an hour or so until the fish market and the flower market and the meat market opened, but already the traders were getting their stalls set up, constructing the bones of their business out of wooden scaffold and wax-coated cloths. Wooden crates stacked up at the sides of the yards, attracting the attention of the neighbourhood’s felines. It didn’t take a refined nose to realise the boxes were stuffed with the rotting remnants of yesterday’s catch.
The wolf moved slowly, clinging to the shadows. The man had no such qualms about being seen and walked down the very centre of the street whistling a melancholic tune to himself as he went. Every so often he spun on his heel and flourished the cane as though going en garde. The wolf prowled silently behind him, a ghost. There were few people beyond the traders and none of them had eyes for the wolf. Those that saw it no doubt thought it nothing more than a stray wolf-hound or other big dog run wild.
On the corner of Billingsgate, the man dipped his top hat toward a flower girl bustling towards the market stalls and the wolf heard his sharp intake of breath and could feel the shiver as his nostrils flared to better smell her. The girl, who couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, flinched, rearing back a step and almost dropped her basket of freshly cut flowers. As the man leaned away, the nearest of the flowers wilted, its petals browning and withering as its stem curled.
The worn-out soles of her shoes slapped the cobbles, echoing her fear, as she half-walked half-ran the last few steps to the stall.
Not that a wooden table offered any protection, the wolf thought.
No, what saved her was the simple fact that she was not the woman he was looking for. The man walked with a purpose away from her, sniffing at the muggy air twice before changing direction and stalking away.
The wolf emerged from the shadows.
McCreedy had no choice but to reveal himself if he wanted to follow the man.
She locked eyes with the wolf and rather than panic the sight calmed her. He heard the rhythm of her heartbeat slowing against her ribs and the dub-dub dub-dub of the blood slow in her veins. She held his gaze until the wolf snarled, baring its jowls and yellow-stained teeth, then as she dropped her head, McCreedy ran on, chasing the man into another street.
Not that the wolf could have lost the man’s trail.
It reeked of angelic blood.
Chapter Forty-One
Nathaniel Seth caught the angel’s scent and started to run.
The homunculus could sense the angel on so many different levels. She was wrong. She didn’t belong in this place any more than it did. That wrongness sent out ripples through the dirt and stones of the cobbled street. It sent shivers running through the red brick of the terraces and the iron of the railings. Those shivers caused the rust to flake and fall away from the iron spikes like desiccated red tears. The rusted tears dusted the cobbles transforming into blood as the first fat raindrops began to fall. In minutes the streets ran red with blood in Nathaniel Seth’s wake. The homunculus savoured the tears of the city. It would make the angel weep, it promised itself. It would make ’God’s little girl scream and bleed and then it would use her blood to open the Ald Gate.
That was so typical of the people in this place; they came within touching distance of the old powers but didn’t grasp what truly existed right beneath their noses. They called it Aldgate, meaning they sensed its purpose even if they didn’t understand, just as they sensed the purpose of the charred cross and the raven’s court, the white city, the black friars and the Lime House, though they believe the lime refers to the kilns along Commercial Road where in truth the Lime House is anothe
r gateway—though here the dead are taken, coated in lime and buried within the walls to help their mortal flesh decompose so that their souls might make the journey over to the waiting room on the other side unencumbered.
The Ald Gate was different though, like the Catamine Stair, it had a place in this world and a place out of it. It was one of the cores, unchanging wherever it was: a fixed point within a universe in constant flux. The gate itself older than time, at least as it was measured by the children of the city. It needed to open the Ald Gate if it wanted to ascend. But, conversely, it already knew that it would open the Ald Gate because it had already been in there, inside Heaven. It had torn the angels out of that place. Now, all it needed was to close the circle, to finish the slaughter, and it would open the way …
Its head filled with a montage of images and memories flashing deleteriously across its mind’s eye, and in all of them it knew its place. It was the serpent. The snake. The homunculus ran its tongue over parched lips. Even as it touched the flaking skin it forked, flicking up at the air as it tasted the angel’s proximity.
She was close.
There was something else though.
Another scent. Hungry. Wild. Wrong. Its nostrils flared, aroused by the danger of its hunter.
This was going to be fun.
It rapped the tip of its wolf’s head cane three times sharply off the cobblestones at its feet, and on the third the wood fell away leaving a silver blade shining wickedly in the moonlight. The rainfall thickened, muffling the sound of its footsteps. It tossed its head back and inhaled, savouring her fear and its hunter’s hunger.
”Soon,” the homunculus intoned.
And then it saw the angel. Far from some radiant being, its aura had dimmed as this place leeched into its soul, diminishing it. For a moment the homunculus knew fear of its own. The angel had to die with enough of the godhead intact. The link to its father was vital. Without it, without that umbilical join to the divine, the gate wouldn’t open and no amount of blood would be enough. The angel cast a fretful glance back over her shoulder. There was blood on her lips and blood on her hands. This wasn’t innocence. The homunculus started moving faster, the run a full sprint, body low, the blade held out before it.
What had happened?
It reached out with its mind, but it was impossible to fasten on to any but the most immediate and painful of the angel’s memories, and compared with being wrenched out of Heaven and cast down onto the piss-stinking streets of Whitechapel, whatever else it had suffered was irrelevant.
It hit the angel full on, and rammed the silver tip of the blade in between her ribs. With a single, brutal thrust it forced it up into the cavity where both of her hearts faltered. The angel didn’t scream. Instead her life arced out like fire, gloriously illuminating the shadows where her wings would have been. The flames crackled and burned, forming each immaculate feather as they burned brighter and more desperately. For a full minute the dying angel was incandescent, the alleyway ablaze. The shadows thickened, turning blacker than black behind the burning angel as fire turned its watchers night blind. The flames licked out at the buildings on either side, scorching the red brick.
She writhed, trapped on the end of the homunculus’s blade as it thrust the silver in deeper, until Nathaniel Seth’s hand was buried inside the angel up to the wrist, slick with the blood of the angel. And the deeper he thrust, the more damage he did, the fiercer she burned.
Until she burned out.
The angel fell away from it, slumping to the floor, eviscerated.
The homunculus looked down at it, a mixture of pity and revulsion in its dark eyes, and then it knelt, crouching over the corpse.
Chapter Forty-Two
McCreedy couldn’t see what the man was doing.
Not without getting closer.
He slunk forward.
The air was filled with the smell of blood.
Hackles high, the wolf lowered its snout to the rain-slick cobbles and padded forward, sniffing with every cautious step. Hunger compelled it. The blood was an irresistible draw. The smell was overpowering. It filled its flaring nostrils and engulfed its mind. All the wolf could think about was the kill, and inside it McCreedy wrestled for purchase as the wolf-aspect threatened to completely overwhelm his personality. It was primal. Visceral. Every step closer brought it another inch closer to drowning him out completely.
And then both wolf and man saw the man for what he was.
There was nothing gentlemanly about the killer as he dipped his hands into the dead girl, taking the blood and smearing it across his face. That wasn’t enough. Moving with sick dexterity he stripped naked, throwing aside his topcoat and suit with desperate haste, then, naked, massaged her blood into his torso and legs. Kneeling again and again he soaked his hands in her blood and then smeared it across his flesh, working it into his cock and buttocks and growing hard at his own bloody touch. He worked the blood all the way up to his neck.
Something happened to its skin beneath the blood.
The wolf could smell the change.
It reeked of corruption.
The wolf’s eyes were sharper and better adjusted to the night than McCreedy’s human ones. It saw details he could never have seen. It saw the rain washing away the blood, and it saw what was left beneath.
McCreedy wrestled with the revelation, unable to believe it wasn’t the wolf’s hunger that transformed the man in to meat. The wolf shook its head, trying to dislodge the hunger-delirium.
But …
The blood seared through the man’s flesh, eating away at it until it was reduced down to blood-slicked sinew and streaks of fat wrapped around the musculature and McCreedy’s wolfen eyes could see he was no man at all. His hair came out in clumps, leaving clotted scars in his scalp. The runnels bubbled with blood, his and the angel’s.
He rubbed more of the angel’s blood into the wounds, rubbing them raw as his fingers forced them wider.
The rain sizzled against his bare flesh.
Even this far away, the wolf could feel the heat burning off the daemon’s grotesque anatomy as more and more of it was exposed by the sluicing rain. This wasn’t the daemon’s flesh, McCreedy realised, gripped by the horror of the transformation. The daemon was whatever remained underneath the meat suit. Was this what others saw when he changed? No … No … It was nothing like that, McCreedy shook his wolf head. This was … inhuman. The daemon had crawled inside a human corpse and wore its skin like some hideous cloak. It was nothing like harnessing the Anafanta. The wolf moved closer. The daemon was cleansing itself. It wasn’t changing, it wasn’t connecting with the beast within—it was the beast.
Naked and in all of its glory, the daemon cast the gutted angel aside and walked toward the white chapel itself. It walked up the marble steps toward the door, and reached out with its blood-soaked hands …
Chapter Forty-Three
Free of its guise as Nathaniel Seth, the homunculus climbed the six steps to the door of the white chapel. The angel’s blood filmed across the wet surfaces of its eyes, and through the veil of red it saw the truth. Layered over the wooden door of the church it saw a second, much older, portal: the Ald Gate. Even to its divine-enhanced sight the gate was little more than a transparency, its crumbling stone arch little more than an elemental ghost that clung to this place with the tenacity of desperation. After all, in this modern world, who believed? Who had faith?
It pushed its hands, palms out flat, against the door and commanded it to open as he leaned his weight against both ghost and wood. It knew the words. Every creature that had been cast out of paradise knew the words. They were like a mocking nursery rhyme meant to remind them of their sins and failings. It started to sing them now, its voice coarse, the menace behind the incantation plain to any that might have overheard.
”Knock knock,” the homunculus said, belabouring the delivery like some second rate music hall performer.
The wood stretched and groaned beneath its bloody hands, the
seams working away from around the iron bolts driven through it.
”Little pig, little pig,” the homunculus goaded, pushing harder. Rough splinters dug into its palms, mixing its blood with the angel’s. ”Let me come in. I’ll huff and I’ll puff …”
The door buckled against its thick iron hinges.
The ghost shivered beneath his palms, sending a thrill all the way down to the daemon’s withered little heart.
”I’m coming home, Father,” it called, shouting to the devil, to the gods, to the night and the sky. ”I’m coming home!”
The earth beneath its feet trembled.
Rebelled against his presence.
And the ghost of the Ald Gate began to solidify. It felt it before it saw it. The bands of black iron thickened against its palms. It felt the curls of ivy and the thorns of the white rose stems becoming real beneath its hands. Its heart raced. The blood pounded against its temples and behind its eyes causing its vision to twist. The daemon couldn’t trust its eyes. It inhaled sharply.
”Open the fucking door, daddy dearest,” it bellowed, pounding on the door with the full force if its’ clenched fists. The wood shivered, the black iron clanged. It beat the door again and again. ”What’s the matter? Are you frightened? Is that it? Do I scare you, Father? Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you … oh, it’s the blood isn’t it? You can smell the blood of all your prettier children. I would say sorry but you told us never to lie. Now open the damned door, I’m coming home whether you like it or not.”
London Macabre Page 14
