London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

Cain walked deeper into what was left of Eden. The daemon was surrounded on all sides by death. Uriel had slaughtered every living thing. All of these magnificent, impossible creatures, all of these long-forgotten creations, animals long since extinct outside of the Garden, lay dead and rotting, returning to the dust from whence they came. It wasn’t just the fauna, Uriel’s madness had spread into the flora as well. Cain snapped a fruit off a low hanging branch, and bit into the lush green-red skin of the apple. It was rotten to the core and filled with bloated, lifeless maggots. The daemon didn’t care. It chewed and swallowed each mouth down hungrily. There was still wisdom in the rotten fruit. It was just that the nature of that wisdom had changed.

  More than ever, the fruit and the knowledge it contained, were forbidden.

  The God Particle II

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Fabian Stark’s consciousness scattered to the four winds and beyond, infusing every molecule and microbe. This is death, he thought, a transfer of energy, a slip from one state to another. It was not so terrible, not for the few seconds when he could cling on to one plane of existence or another, but in the infinities between it was terrifying. He glimpsed snatches of those other places, but never for long enough for them to gain any kind of substance in his mind.

  But what he saw …

  What he saw shifted his understanding of everything.

  In one London he saw the dancing dead parading through the wide curve of Regents Street, in another he saw a flash of sunlight, a lone soldier in a uniform he didn’t recognise walking down the platform of Waterloo, a cigarette burning down between his lips, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. The hands in front of ceramic clock face ticked on to the eleventh hour. Screams haunted the air. Blood fell from the iron rafters. No, not blood, Stark realised, petals. Poppies. Before he could grasp all of the features of the Tommy’s face the soldier slipped into darkness and he was left looking at the petals as they hardened into something else entirely and death rained down from the sky. All around him buildings began to collapse and burn and then they were gone and he was scattered again, his tenuous grip on this place ripped away. The guns, the bombs, children and women in the street, battered and bloody as they picked through the rubble, surely this was Pandemonium? But it wasn’t, Stark knew, it was London, his London, not today, not tomorrow, but one day. He was witnessing fragments of the future. The city was immortal. Its inhabitants were not.

  The suffering of it tore at his soul.

  He saw countless moments, all of them crushing together into a single incoherent ”now.” Together all of these other streets and different future London’s lost their identity in the dizzying rush of time, fear, need and desire, becoming all the more overwhelming for the intensity of it. The past joined with the future London’s. He witnessed the dead being thrown into the river and the streets burning again, but this time the houses were so old there was nothing to stop the conflagration as it ripped through the heart of the city. He saw catastrophe after catastrophe. He saw his city dying over and over.

  Giant ravens cast long shadows over the streets. No, he realised, they weren’t giant birds, each raven was actually composed of hundreds of ravens flocking tightly, wheeling and spiralling over the rooftops of St. Paul’s and south bank to the Tower. He was witnessing the day the ravens left the tower, he knew, and he knew the implications of what that. It would be the day London fell. The birds weren’t the only things in the sky; an immense dirigible hove into view. Ropes dangled down from the balloon, tethering it to what appeared to be a flying schooner. Actually, Stark realised, it looked like the Greyfriar’s Ghost. He wondered if some oblique city’s version of Simon Labauve were piloting it through these treacherous skies. And if he were, how much like the Simon Labauve he knew would this one be? He stared at the schooner as it sailed majestically toward the duelling birds, scattering the constructs to the four winds. The dirigible gathering up a head of wind was more than just an impressive sight, it was a glimpse of a future that could never be. This fascinated Stark, proof of his hypothesis that every conceivable eventually was played out somewhere across the oblique cities of London. What possible resonances could there be back in Mother London? If the Greyfriar’s Ghost crashed out of the skies here would that herald her sinking beneath the waves somewhere out beyond Chatham or were these futures truly independent?

  And then, as though seeing the great city from above a thousand, a million, two, ten million points of light spread out beneath him like geoglyphs. Each spidered out into the darkest reaches and furthest corners of London. A dark ribbon meandered through the heart of the lights. The Thames. One of the only truly dark places left in the entire city. Every other space seemed to be filled by row after row of regimented lights. What did the lights mean? Were the blazing beacons of the Londoners’ souls? Was that what he was seeing here? Surely there were too many lights? Had he somehow slipped forward into another tomorrow?

  Before he could dwell on his speculations, the vision fractured and instead of a great battle in the skies he saw rats, thousands upon thousands of them streaming into the Thames, crawling over each other in a writhing mass of black as they swelled up out of the sewers and filled the river. In seconds the ripples on the water’s surface were replaced by the eddies of sleek-bodied rats rushing out toward the sea.

  And even as the rats fused into a single bloated whole, behind them, above them, he saw flames and chased them as they filled the sky. The Crystal Palace was burning. But even as he willed his consciousness toward the glass structure, like the rats before it the Palace’s frame buckled and twisted and the steel frame buckled. The glass heated to fracturing and fused into the monstrous silhouette of a crook-backed man.

  Fabian Stark struggled to make sense of what he saw.

  The metal and glass man-shadow appeared to straighten, and then veins of light strobed across his vision and he saw two giants locked in battle, the other seemingly made from stone. Had the vision somehow become allegorical? Metaphorical? Or was it still quite literal? Did the future hold this Goliath duel? Golem versus golem? He felt his consciousness being dragged toward the constructs but even as he felt himself merging with the great monstrosities the vision fractured again and this time he saw a woman, adoration in her eyes, watching her lover die and die and die again, over and over as though he were witnessing some sort of time-lapsed vision. Lines etched deeper and deeper into her face as age had its way with her, but the look of love never waned. He felt her hands against his cheek. He felt her lips kiss his and then her hand came down to close his eyes. He felt himself being dragged away from whatever anchored him to the tragedy even as he recognised the woman. How could he not know her? She was the face of the nation. She was his queen. She was Victoria. But she wasn’t. The differences were subtle and fleeting as she aged before his eyes. The lines in her face might have been the same, the poise and the disdain, but instead of strength in her eyes there was only the rank madness of grief. And if she was his queen, or a variation of her, then the eyes he borrowed in this new death must have been those of her beloved Albert.

  Her pain was all consuming.

  The dead Prince Consort opened his eyes again, knowing another death was only a heartbeat away, in time to hear Victoria swear to turn Heaven and Hell upside down to bring him back, and then he was torn away from that place, spinning, places, times, slipping away from him, until there was nothing substantial left in his universe, and then he saw the man, Nathaniel Seth, sneaking away from the British Museum. He clutched a stone tablet to his chest, on it the key that unlocked the door to the Catamine Stair. The entire night scene was cast in black and white, the only splash of colour the flower girl’s blood on his hands. Stark knew then, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Brethren’s emissary was working at the behest of this other Victoria.

  She would batter down the very gates of Hell to find her dead love’s essence and bring it back.

  He didn’t know how he knew. He didn’t know why the grieving qu
een chose to start her search in Hell of all places? But the one thing he was sure of was that was where she began looking. The knowledge seemed to flower inside his mind … no, it was more akin to his consciousness flowering within the knowledge, the god-like particles that had once been Fabian Stark swelling to fill the spaces between all of these seemingly unconnected events and finding the threads of cause and effect that had unravelled around them.

  It was only then that he grasped the truth: he truly was like God in this place. He wasn’t merely being pulled and pushed into seeing what he needed to see, he was steering the visions. He could just as easy have taken his consciousness to the laboratories of Copernicus or Kepler or to the Florentine study of Leonardo or Flamell’s house in Paris or the court of Alexander to witness Maria the Jewess’s genius transmute lead to gold. If he had so desired he could have sent his consciousness out across the continents to seek out Ostanes the Persian and Geber and Nagarjuna and Zhang Guo the Elder so that he might learn the answers to so many of the questions he had about their work. What would he have given to see Gilles de Rais? Or George Ripley or Agrippa? Dee? Ashmole? Pons? Starkey?

  He was nothing more than a disciple. While he wrestled with his understanding of the world, time, the nature of the oblique cities that brushed up against his own London, and so much more that they had already discovered, they could have offered him guidance. They could have shown him the way. Every eventuality of history—of every possible history—was happening somewhere, which meant it was available to him. He could guide his mind there without so much as a second thought. But instead of seeking out any one of those great minds he had come here, to the Queen’s bed chamber in time to see her beloved Albert die again and again and …

  That was it.

  That was what was wrong with this. The Prince Consort was dead, but like any man he could only die once. Yet Stark saw those final moments again and again and there was no denying the truth—Victoria aged brutally. The creases of the years carved deeper and deeper into her stern face. Shadows gathered around her eyes. Her hair greyed. But what did that mean? That she had succeeded? That she somehow brought Albert back again and again only for him to leave her while she sat that same desperate vigil?

  No, no, no, he realised, cursing his own stupidity. He wasn’t thinking properly. He had seen everything he needed to see to work out the truth. His mind had taken him through all of those thin veils that masked off one London from another. The key was all of those other London’s. She wasn’t bringing her lover back from the dead, she was snatching him from all of those other Victoria’s in all of those other London’s. And once he was returned to her the bitterest irony was that the same ailments that had taken him from her before claimed him again.

  Was that why she had used Seth to prize open the Kruptos Door? Had she given up on ever finding an Albert hale enough to see out their last few years together and turned her attention over to clawing that first soul back from Death itself?

  But why was she so sure he was in Hell?

  And even then, why not go through the door in her own London? Why send Nathaniel Seth into his London?

  That was what Stark didn’t understand.

  Wouldn’t it have been easier to rob her own museum in her own place and time?

  That she hadn’t meant there had to be a reason.

  Was there only one Hell? Could it be as simple as that? With all of these permutations of the city and the city could it be that there was but a single Heaven and a single Hell? Just like there was one God, one Devil? If that were so, by logical extension wouldn’t that mean that Stark’s London was the First City? Mother London, so to speak?

  Or did the shift from plane to plane imbue Seth with some sort of talent he otherwise would have been without? Some latent gift that came to life as he crossed into the Prime Material? After all, the natural laws surely only applied to something from within that plane of existence didn’t they?

  Or was it just that the woman’s grief was absolute?

  He had looked into her eyes. He ought to have been able to read them, but the fact that the Queen had been watching incarnation after incarnation of her husband die while he gazed up at her rendered anything he read in them unreliable at best.

  But sitting vigil while her lover died a thousand grim deaths would certainly be enough to drive Victoria mad. How many times had she sat through this same moment or ones just like it in the decades since Albert—her Albert—had died? Ten? Fifty? How many other London’s were there? How many other Albert’s for her to find?

  With all of those truths before him, Stark realised the only question that really mattered then was: to what lengths would a mad woman go to get her lover back? And not any ”mad woman” but rather the Queen of this Sceptred Isle? Her Imperial Majesty, Empress of India? Grandmother of Europe? A woman to whom the collective voice world did not dare say ”no.”

  Surely then there could only be one answer, and that was: any.

  Including, Stark knew, tearing open the Kruptos Door and letting loose the hounds of hell. It might not have been her intention to free the Meringias, but he was in no doubt that she was behind the daemon’s escape.

  He couldn’t help but wonder what else had her meddling released.

  And then, even as he wrestled with the plague of doubts those questions had released, a single image coalesced in front of him: a mask sculpted from a sheet of ice. It was perfect. Every plane smooth, every crease so deeply ingrained he could feel its age and the life that it had taken to score that mark into the ice, and in those crystal blue eyes the utter madness of obsession.

  The face was unmistakably Victoria’s.

  The Ice Queen.

  And then the mask shattered into a million fragments that refracted and reflected the light in a kaleidoscope of hues, each one taking a tiny piece of Fabian Stark with it as it exploded across the city and the city and the city … scattering him once again.

  The Conclave

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Brannigan Locke couldn’t sleep.

  None of the residents of 111, Grays Inn Road could. It had been a hellish day and a night, and there was still the day to come, when they would all be stretched beyond the point of exhaustion and forced to walk into the Conclave of the Villain Kings on the banks of the Thames.

  Heavy fists beat at the outside door, bringing him out of his reverie. Locke looked at his watch. It was four in the morning. It could only be McCreedy returning. He didn’t wait for Mason to answer the door. He bolted up out of his chair and ran down the stairs to the ground floor taking them three and four risers at a time. He threw the door open.

  The giant was slumped against the doorframe. Two of the bronze lions stood guard over him just as they had the woman when she had turned up at their door. Locke didn’t understand the role the lions were playing, nor why they had awoken, and he rather suspected the longer it was a mystery the happier he would be. McCreedy looked like a stray dog that had taken one hell of a beating before finally being kicked into submission by its brutal master. The fire in his eyes had gone out. The big man looked up at Locke and simply shook his head, then held up a hand. Locke took it and helped him stand.

  ”What in God’s name happened to you?”

  McCreedy shuddered violently, the mere utterance of the word ”God” enough to send convulsions coursing through him. He reached out for the doorframe to steady himself. ”You don’t want to know.” He was soaked to the skin, his hair plastered to his scalp. Behind him the rain sheeted down, bouncing off the cobbles three and four inches after it hit the ground. A fork of lightning split the morning dark. A full seven seconds later the thunder followed.

  ”Here, let me help you,” Locke slipped an arm around McCreedy’s shoulder and took the big man’s weight. He winced visibly as the climbed the stairs.

  Millington was waiting at the top, as was Carruthers, who wore a bandage over his eyes, and clutched the bannister white-knuckle tight. ”Good to see you back, old
man,” said Millington, reaching out a hand to help Locke as they reached the landing. ”It feels like all hell’s been breaking loose tonight.”

  ”You don’t know the half of it,” McCreedy grunted, letting Locke lead him through to the Smoking Room. He sank down into the high backed leather Chesterfield armchair and closed his eyes. The leather sighed beneath his weight. ”Mason, be a good man. Brandy and make it a bloody large one while you’re about it. Christ. I need a smoke.”

  Millington pulled a silver cigar case out of the inside pocket of his jacket, and opened it. There were a variety of smokes inside the tin. He picked a thick, hand-rolled Cuban leaf and sliced the end off before he handed it to McCreedy. McCreedy lit a taper from the open fire and sucked on the cigar butt hard, drawing the thick smoke into his lungs as the tip flared red.

  Mason appeared in the room carrying a silver tray. There was a crystal decanter and brandy glass on it. He set the tray down beside the big man, bowed slightly to excuse himself and left.

  He didn’t say another word for a full ten minutes. First he dressed, then poured himself a second and then a third glass of brandy and smoked the cigar down to almost nothing.

  ”Better,” he said with a contented sigh.

  ”So what is the other half of it?” Millington asked, coming to sit in his own chair. Each of the gentlemen had their own place in the room, just as they had their own place within the hierarchy of the club itself.

  McCreedy leaned forward in his seat, chewing on the thick butt of the cigar, and clasped his hands together. ”God is dead,” he delivered the line with all of the gravitas it deserved but it still sounded preposterous. ”The whole thing, the dead girls in Whitechapel, they are fallen angels, and the thing that killed them,” McCreedy looked up then, his eyes suddenly blazing, ”is old. Older than everything in this place. I think the daemon is the essence of Cain.” He held up his hand to stave off interruption. ”I know. I know it sounds stupid. I don’t know how to explain it. I went looking for Napier. His scent led me to the doors of the Brethren’s den in Liberty of Norton Folgate, but before I had to make the choice of breaking in to rescue him or not he walked out obviously unmolested. That was when I saw Cain. I decided to follow him. He walked to Aldgate and then up to Whitechapel. He didn’t smell right. There was something … brimstone … The man was hunting. His victims aren’t random.” He let that sink in, weighing his words. What he was going to say next was impossible, irrational, he knew, but of anyone in the world the men listening to him were the only ones who would accept his explanation as the truth without question. Well, the only ones not incarcerated in one of the city’s many sanatoriums for their own well-being. ”It’s no coincidence that both of the dead women were angels,” McCreedy shook his head. He took a deep swallow and refilled the glass. ”He could have taken any number of normal women, rich, poor, pretty, plain, but he ignored them. He smelled the angel on the air and that was the only game he was interested in. That’s the only way I can describe it. It looked like any one of us. It could have been Dorian, Fabian, even you Millington. Top hat, great coat and well polished leather shoes, the monster was utterly unremarkable … but like everything else, that’s a lie. It was completely remarkable. I just couldn’t see it. Not at first. Not until it found its quarry. I couldn’t help her. I should have tried …” his voice trailed off. It was hard. He wasn’t used to failing. ”It … not he. It. It tore her apart and then bathed in her blood.”